Historical revisionism before the French courts / Part one: 1979-1983
(Paper presented at the fifth International Revisionist Conference, September 1983)
To Ditlieb Felderer
Over a span of four years my publisher, Pierre Guillaume, his friends and I faced considerable difficulties because of our shared opinion on the myth of the gas chambers and the genocide of the Jews.
Among those difficulties was first and foremost judicial repression, repression that has not yet ended. During those four years of struggle we were, so to speak, like swimmers struggling against the current. At times we were so weak, compared with our opponents, that we ought to have abandoned the struggle. We were suffocating. We could no longer go on. We felt our situation was as hopeless – to quote Céline – as that of a swimmer wanting to swim up Niagara Falls.
We were attacked in the courts by some imposing forces. Perhaps we should have adopted a purely defensive attitude. Instead, thinking that the best defence was to attack, we counterattacked. We sued those who were suing us. Sometimes we worsened our situation by statements or initiatives that caused us new trouble.
I’m going to talk today only about the three main proceedings against us: a civil suit and two criminal actions. The civil suit was brought against me for the “personal injury” that it claimed I’d caused by an alleged “falsification of history”. The first of the other two cases, for criminal libel, was instituted against my publisher and me by Léon Poliakov. The last was against me on grounds of racial defamation and incitement of racial hatred because of a sixty-word sentence I’d pronounced on Radio Europe-1 on December 17, 1980.
The most important of these cases was the civil suit: it touched on the basic question, a taboo question: that of the reality or not of the gas chambers and of the Jewish genocide. The corollary question was: Is Faurisson, who maintains that it’s a question here of one and the same historical lie, himself a liar, a forger and a falsifier?
The senior judges’ response to this question was quite clear and admits of no misunderstanding.
Never, and I mean never, has any court found against me for falsifying history or for anything close to that, and, in the end, in its decision of April 26, 1983, the court of appeal in Paris emphasised the seriousness of my research into the problem of the gas chambers. Directly because of the seriousness of my research it held as follows:
The value of the findings defended by Mr Faurisson is therefore [my emphasis] a matter to be left solely to the experts, the historians and the public
Gitta Sereny Honeyman, who attended the trials, dared to write and has continued to insist that I was “convicted for falsifying history”.* That is a cold lie.
I shall speak at length about the civil suit, which lasted four years and finally ended on April 26, 1983 in the first chamber of the court of appeal in Paris. In effect it found against me for “personal injury”, but not at all in the sense wished by my opponents. Far from considering me a falsifier or a liar, the court of appeal wrote this about me:
No-one, as things stand, can rule that he has lied…
I’ll soon be putting those words back into their context. Meanwhile, I dedicate them to Gitta Sereny Honeyman, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Georges Wellers, Léon Poliakov and a few other French and foreign exterminationists; I think they’d be happy if a French court could say as much about them. It’s not I who had the idea of asking a court to hand down a decision on a matter of history; it’s they and their powerful friends who took that initiative. It’s normal that those people should reap the fruits of what they sowed. For four years they did their utmost to have a court declare that I was lying and, at the end of four years, three senior judges, in a manner of speaking, responded: “You complain about this professor. You say that he’s wronged you. Very well! He has wronged you, and that’s why we’re ruling against him. He’s wronged you in every way you may claim, but certainly not by lying. He’s everything that you say he is but, on the question of the gas chambers, he’s certainly neither a liar nor a falsifier. He’s a serious researcher. Our judgment is: ‘the value of the findings defended by Mr Faurisson is therefore a matter to be left solely to the experts, the historians and the public.'”
The outcome of these three trials was paradoxical: each time the courts ruled against me, and my opponents obtained the right to have published, at my expense, as is usual in such cases, the texts of the judgments; however, those texts have never been published, except for one lower court and one appeal court decision – and published, as it happened, at their own expense – not without serious falsifications on the points that didn’t meet their expectations. Each time their victories have been but Pyrrhic victories.
* New Statesman, July 17, 1981, p. 16-19, “The Judgment of History”: “Long standing notions about academic freedom have been challenged by this month’s conviction of a French writer for ‘falsifying history'”, Gitta Sereny Honeyman reports. “Two Paris Courts found Robert Faurisson (…) guilty of libel, provocation to hate, incitement to murder, and falsification of history. (…) falsification of history” (p. 16). “The 17-page judgment which finds that he ‘falsified history'” (p. 19). See also Searchlight, vol. X, 1981, “Revisionism – The Myths and the Lies”: “As an MRAP spokesman put it, ‘It is a simple fact that the Holocaust happened and that Faurisson is a falsifier of history’. The court agreed (…)” (p. 12).
I. The civil case
1. What my accusers said
My accusers consisted of nine organisations. The first was the LICRA (International league against racism and anti-semitism), presided over by Mr Jean Pierre-Bloch. The second was the MRAP (Movement against racism and for friendship among peoples), presided over by Mr Pierre Paraf. Among the seven other organisations were, notably, the Association of deportees of Auschwitz and the camps of Upper Silesia, presided over by Mrs Marie-Elisa Cohen, and the Association of the sons and daughters of Jews deported from France, presided over by Mr Serge Klarsfeld. The initiative of this case was taken and retained by the LICRA. Mr Jean Pierre-Bloch made a personal affair of it and the LICRA, according to a statement by its president, invested considerable sums in the marathon proceedings. To take just one example: the LICRA, no doubt noting that its friends in France and elsewhere were unable to provide it with proof of the existence of gas chambers, had sent its three best lawyers, under the aegis of Robert Badinter, to Poland and Jerusalem. But the three pilgrims returned from their pilgrimage without the sought-for proof. Robert Badinter pleaded against me in the original trial; soon afterwards he became Francois Mitterand’s minister of justice. From that time on we could hear his voice only through various representatives of the public prosecutor’s office in our various trials. Robert Badinter showed a feverish hostility toward us.
According to my accusers I was a forger, a falsifier and a liar; I had used a clever falsification mechanism; I had falsified translations; I had denatured historical facts; I had dismissed documents that contradicted my thesis; I had used misleading technical arguments. However, all those accusations remained as vague as they were peremptory. On two points alone were my accusers relatively precise. According to them, I had:
- purposely truncated the texts of witness accounts, including that of Johann Paul Kremer (the professor of medicine who had been temporarily mobilised as a physician at the Auschwitz camp);
- omitted without serious justification a certain number of proofs previously acknowledged by national and international courts.
2. The trial court’s ruling
On July 8, 1981 the court in Paris handed down its decision. It found me liable for “personal injury.” The issue was whether I had caused harm as the result of a falsification of history. The term “falsification of history” doesn’t exist in French law, but the court could have adopted that lexical invention of the LICRA’s. It did not do so, apart from saying that it needn’t try to determine whether what I’d written, particularly in Le Monde (December 29, 1978 and January 16, 1979), constituted a falsification of history. Thus on the essential point of their accusation my opponents did not obtain satisfaction.
Nonetheless, they could be satisfied with the rest of the decision. The judges said that, in a kind of intellectual game, I had amused myself denying everything. In this game of systematic negation I’d shown myself to be an academic of a culpable nonchalance. Moreover, the court deemed that I’d been lacking in caution, objective circumspection and intellectual neutrality in that I had, in an irresponsible manner, dealt too soon with a too recent, too sorrowful, too sensitive historical problem. I should have waited for time to do its work and calm things down. Lastly, the court gave me an even more curious rebuke. It didn’t go so far as to say I’d been guilty of justifying war crimes or inciting racial hatred, but it said that I’d let others – it didn’t name any of them – use my revisionist argument with a view to justify war crimes or incite racial hatred. The court even specified that I’d done so
with a remarkable nonchalance but with a clear conscience.
For my part, I admit that I don’t quite grasp how one can reconcile “a remarkable nonchalance” with “a clear conscience”, especially when it’s a matter not of falling into sin oneself but of abetting unknown persons to fall into a sin into which one has not fallen oneself.
[This ruling, drafted by Mr Pierre Drai, therefore created a new type of civil wrong (and not criminal offence) in France: the indirect apology of war crimes and the indirect incitement to racial hatred through a remarkable nonchalance accompanied by a clear conscience.]
I take the liberty of thinking that had such judges believed they could detect in me, rather than a slightly diabolical soul, the tangible proof of any lie or falsification, they’d have hastened to show that proof, to emphasise it and condemn it in terms comprehensible for all.
[There exists in France a venerable law journal, the Recueil Dalloz-Sirey. In it one will always find the texts of the most interesting court decisions, reproduced with scrupulous exactitude, and any time a cut is made in a text the fact is carefully signalled. A commentary comes after each text. These commentaries are normally characterised by a certain gravity proper to the legal world. In my case, the venerable journal innovated: several times and in the most cynical way it seriously denatured the text of the July 8, 1981 decision; as for the commentary, it appeared under the name of the Paris lawyer Bernard Edelman. These words from a friend of Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s are indeed the most insulting I have ever read about myself. It’s simple: for Bernard Edelman, that decision proved that Faurisson practised the “method of the absolute lie”: “he lied to everybody”. — We are suing the Recueil Dalloz-Sirey‘s managing editor.]
3. The unfolding of the case in the court of appeal
I decided to appeal against the ruling of July 8, 1981. Eighteen months later the case was argued in the first chamber of the court of appeal in Paris.
The courtroom in which our case was to unfold was the very same where Marshal Pétain had been tried in first and final instance, with no appeal possible. Just after the war, at the time when I was a student at the Sorbonne, I’d come there to attend a few of the so-called trials of “collaborators”. I felt no sympathy for the collaborators (and I’d been raised in the hatred of Germany). But, little by little, I was astonished at the kind of justice the court claimed to apply to them. I shall not expand on this point. I haven’t the time to go into detail on what took place in that impressive room on December 13 and 14, 1982.
There was a striking contrast between our lawyers and those of our opponents. I had two lawyers: Éric Delcroix, reputed to be of the political right, and Yvon Chotard, a personal friend of Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit and reputed to be of the left. A third lawyer, Francois Berthout, represented the seven persons who had courageously come beside me as “voluntary third-party appearers”; of those persons, all of the left, two were of Jewish origin; two of the seven belonged to the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research). This point has always troubled Gitta Sereny, who wrote:
What is unusual about Faurisson is that he has managed to obtain serious assistance from the Left. (op. cit., p. 16)
Another point, which was really secondary, also disturbed that lady. Here it is:
At the Paris courthouse, Faurisson and Co. were surrounded by young, eager, and even attractive acolytes. (ibid., p. 17)
The lawyers for the opposing side (I shall recall that there were nine organisations in coalition) offered the spectacle of a crowd of black robes topped by manifestly anxious faces. They’d submitted written pleadings of great mediocrity and they must have sensed it. At our end, we’d submitted pleadings four times longer than usual and solidly structured. We also provided the court with my Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire and a video-cassette on “The Problem of the Gas Chambers”. Whilst civil procedure in France is essentially written and the principals are not, as a rule, entitled to speak, I had asked to be heard and questioned. Unfortunately, the court would not see fit either to view the video-cassette or to question me. For four years we’d had the time to take the measure of the opposing side’s extreme historical and scientific weakness. In order to make that weakness show we’d been inspired to say and repeat again that what we expected from them was merely:
- that they present to the judges one proof, one single proof of the existence of one single homicidal gas chamber;
- that they provide one example, one single example of falsification on my part.
We above all didn’t want an alleged abundance of proofs or examples. We awaited just one proof and one example. This demand came back again and again like a leitmotiv: “One single proof, one single example.” The lawyers for the opposing side were paralysed by it. They knew that the judges were also waiting for that single proof, that single example. All the rest was going to appear like emptiness and hot air. With their necks craned, the three judges of the court awaited the single proof, the single example. Our lawyers waited. We waited. The spectators waited for the single proof and the single example. Such waiting over two afternoons had a devastating effect. Simone Veil’s son, barrister for one of the nine organisations, was overwhelmed and spent most of his time in his oral pleading quoting extracts from my writings; one might have thought he was pleading for me. A succession of other barristers came reeling off words without conviction. A lone one amongst managed to construct his argument: Mr Immerglik. It was as follows: “In Germany, there is no pity for people like Faurisson; they’re struck physically as they deserve and that way they’re eliminated; strike Faurisson, eliminate him.” Then came the turn of Bernard Jouanneau, who was the LICRA’s leading light in the absence of Robert Badinter. During the Poliakov trial, Jouanneau had turned towards me and cried out: “Mr Faurisson, you haunt my nights!” Before the court of appeal he began his pleading in these terms:
Faurisson! Ah! Faurisson again! At home my children ask: “But when are you going to quit talking about Faurisson?”
Mr Jouanneau was to talk for two hours. People were waiting for the proof and the example. He didn’t even try to propose an example of falsification. As for the proof of the existence of one single gas chamber, he presented several, but adding each time in a plaintive tone: “Yes. I know. You’ll tell me that this is not really proof”. The end of his pleading was to mark that day with a dramatic or melodramatic note. Mr Jouanneau, overwhelmed, lowered his voice more and more; he gave the impression he was going to burst into tears; that’s in effect what happened; his last sentence was:
In any case, this is the end of the Faurisson affair for me.
Leaving the courtroom, he broke down sobbing on a colleague’s shoulder. They had to have his wife come. At that moment I recalled what we’d said in our 44-page brief: we’d described beforehand the tragedy of the LICRA lawyers. At the beginning those people believed they were going off on a crusade against the impious. They were sure of the goodness of their cause. They were convinced that the proofs and the witness accounts would arrive in droves. Little by little, they found themselves all alone, in “open country”, with a pile of worthless papers, translations that their own friends had falsified, photographs proving nothing, unsubstantial written testimonies and not one single witness ready to come testify about the gas chambers’ existence, not even Filip Müller, author of a book entitled, in its French edition, “Three years in a gas chamber at Auschwitz” (English version: Eyewitness Auschwitz, Stein and Day, New York 1979, XIV-180 pages).
The Prosecutor, Mrs Flipo, requested two months to prepare her case. She was representing the head of her ministry, Robert Badinter. She made her case on February 15, 1983. Foregoing any attempt at argumentation, Mrs Flipo let herself wax lyrical in her exposition. She evoked the canonisation of Father Kolbe, Willy Brandt’s falling to his knees in Warsaw and, to conclude, quoted Élie Wiesel. Here is her peroration:
Élie Wiesel, who, with Samuel Pisar, was the youngest survivor of the camps, has written: “After night and dawn, the day breaks: the dead look for open hearts, which will welcome them and be their messengers.”
And Mrs Flipo, turning to the judges, added, to finish:
Let us be those messengers.
The court also requested two months to render its decision.
4. The court of appeal’s decision (April 26, 1983)
On April 26, 1983 the first chamber of the Paris court of appeal handed down its decision. It upheld the lower court’s ruling, but in so doing it amended the grounds for finding against me to such an extent that I’d be happy to lose in that way ten times at the LICRA’s behest. I shall not go into the decision’s details. My publisher, Pierre Guillaume, has just released a brochure entitled Épilogue judiciaire de l’affaire Faurisson. Therein may be found the complete text of the decision along with an annotated analysis of its ten essential sections: five sections are for and five sections are against the revisionist thesis, as the judges understood and interpreted it.
• Five paragraphs in favour of the revisionist thesis
The lower court had posited the existence of the gas chambers as a sort of implicit reality, not asking itself for a single instant about the credit to be accorded to the testimonies of those who claimed the gas chambers had existed. The court of appeal proceeds in another way entirely. In effect, it puts to itself not only the question whether the gas chambers existed but also that of the value to be attributed to the many testimonies to their existence.
It starts with a sacrilegious sentence. Employing a formulation suggesting doubt and the conditional tense, the court writes:
Mr Faurisson’s research has addressed the existence of the gas chambers which, if the many testimonies are to be believed, would seemto have been used during the Second World War to put to death systematically a portion of the persons deported by the German authorities. (my emphasis)
The LICRA accused me of having addressed the question of the gas chambers with, at the least, nonchalance, a culpable nonchalance that it claimed to demonstrate. The court answered:
Confining ourselves for the time being to the historical problem that Mr Faurisson has wished to raise, it is fitting to note that the accusations of nonchalance made against him are lacking in pertinence and are not sufficiently established. (my emphasis)
I shall recall here that the LICRA and the eight other organisations had had four years to try to establish their accusations, including that of culpable nonchalance. They rebuked me, besides, for having neither a logical approach nor any argumentation. The court answers that I have a logical approach and that I have an argumentation. On an initial impulse it goes so far as to write that I have a “scientific” argumentation; then, changing its mind and thinking perhaps that it lacks the competence to qualify my argumentation as so, it makes a handwritten correction on the typed page and, prudently, says that Mr Faurisson has “an argumentation – that he deems – to be of scientific nature”; but further on, as we shall see, the word “scientific” will in a sense be restored to me by way of implication. For the moment, the court says:
Mr Faurisson’s logical approach consists in attempting to demonstrate, by an argumentation – that he deems – to be of scientific nature, that the existence of the gas chambers, as usually described since 1945, runs into an absolute impossibility…
The court specifies – and this specification is a weighty one – that this is an absolute impossibility
that would be sufficient by itself to invalidate all the existing testimonies or, at the very least, to render them suspect. (my emphasis)
I suppose the court has its mind here on the impossibility of a physical/chemical nature that I’ve often pointed out in my writings, but one should be aware that the case for the non-existence of the gas chambers is grounded, including as concerns myself, in a vast set of factors of all kinds, and not solely in an argument of physical/chemical nature.
The LICRA was asking the court to condemn my method and my arguments. Here again, the court refuses to do so and declares:
It is not for the court to rule on the legitimacy of such a method or on the import of the arguments expounded by Mr Faurisson.
As for the so important question of the testimonies, the LICRA had stated that I had, by nonchalance or negligence, dismissed those testimonies or deliberately chosen to ignore them. To that the court replies:
Nor is it permissible to state, in view of the nature of the studies in which he has engaged, that [Mr Faurisson] has dismissed the testimonies by nonchalance or negligence, or deliberately chosen to ignore them.
In plain language, this means that I’ve studied those testimonies and that, if I have dismissed them, it is for good reasons that emerged at the conclusion of the studies in which I engaged.
Now we come to the central point: that of lying. The LICRA called me a liar all the time. In particular, it called me a liar when I said I’d studied the documents for more than fourteen years and consulted research institutes like the CDJC (Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation) in Paris and a number of other institutes or personalities during that whole period. The LICRA was right to make its accusation of lying on that point. In effect, if French law does not allow the judiciary to sit as judges of historical truth, it nonetheless authorises them to decide whether or not a researcher has really taken, in his research, due care to inform himself. If, for the judges, Faurisson had not taken due care to inform himself as he claimed to have done, Faurisson could therefore be declared a false researcher and liar, which is to say, ultimately, a forger. The other side had had four years to prove I was a liar on that essential point. At the end of four years the court of appeal makes its assessment. Speaking of the present state of the situation and the attempts made to prove that Faurisson is a liar, the court notes:
Moreover, no-one, as things stand, can rule that he has lied when he enumerates the many documents that he claims to have studied and the institutes where he supposedly made inquiries for more than fourteen years.
Then, the court comes to the logical conclusion of all that it has just said and its words fall like a guillotine blade for the LICRA, for the eight other organisations and for all those who presumed to say that the problem of the gas chambers was not an issue and who considered my writings to be a matter only for the courts. Here is that sentence in the form of a conclusion:
The value of the findings defended by Mr Faurisson is therefore a matter to be left solely to the experts, the historians and the public.
And here we see exactly what the exterminationists of the whole world want to avoid at any price. On no account do they wish to see the problem of the gas chambers, and above all the problem of the alleged witness accounts, become a topic that experts and historians would debate. And above all that, it’s absolutely imperative for them that the public not be advised of this problem and then freely debate it.
I don’t think it necessary to insist any further on the historic importance of that last sentence of the appeal court ruling. After it, all the rest of the decision can only be of lesser importance. I shall, however, tarry over the details a bit.
• Five paragraphs against Robert Faurisson
Those three senior French judges could hardly go any further. They would have created a scandal had they, following what would have been the logical path, dismissed the claim of the all-powerful LICRA (an organisation to which President François Mitterrand and minister of justice Robert Badinter belong, as do various personalities of all the influential circles). Therefore the question for them became how to uphold the lower court’s ruling against Faurisson.
It is obvious, for someone in the habit of making logical and grammatical analyses of French texts, that the three judges sweated blood and water to construct the rest of their decision. I should like to point out the laborious character of their style and their thinking. I’ve rarely read so pathetic a paper written by a student. I haven’t the time to show those curiosities and cannot even show the text’s arguments and the replies I would make to them. Once again, I refer to the brochure entitled Épilogue judiciaire…. I shall only provide a few elements here.
The judges fault me for not confining myself to what they call my “critical work” on the gas chambers and the witness accounts; this work had, according to them, a “scientific character”: at least, that is what can be deduced from a sentence where they rebuke me for “assertions that no longer exhibit any scientific character and amount to pure polemic”. However, they give no example of such assertions. They reproach me for having written: “the alleged massacres in gas chambers and the alleged genocide are one and the same lie.” They don’t say that it’s false. At no moment do they tell me: “You are perhaps right on the gas chambers and the witness accounts, but you are wrong on the genocide.” They know that the genocide and the gas chambers are in as close a relation as a specific crime can be with the specific weapon that has made that crime possible; they doubtless see quite well that it’s hard to continue claiming that a specific crime (genocide) took place if the specific weapon (the magical gas chamber) is shown not to have existed. What these worthy judges reproach me for is having summed up my thoughts in the form of what they call a “slogan”. According to them, a slogan was something improper. A slogan, for them, is out of place here. What stings in the matter is that this slogan was fabricated both by a journalist of the Matin de Paris and by our three senior judges. In effect, the brevity of that set of nineteen words is explained as follows: in 1978 I wrote the Matin de Paris, for publication, a letter whose first sentence was long and argued, comprising 65 words. The journalist had reproduced that sentence in lopping off the whole end of it. Then came the judges who, finding the sentence with its end removed, in their turn lopped off its whole beginning. So it was that 65 words became 19 words and a long, argued sentence took on the brief and slightly crude character of a slogan. In reality, I tend to sum up my thoughts in a longer form, trying to lend them historical weight thanks to certain words making reference to history; so it is that I write:
The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie.
A historical lie is not to be confused with a common lie. It’s a lie where there are necessarily a laughably small number of liars or impostors compared with the masses of dupes or victims who are needed for it to have a lasting existence.
The court says that I seek, on every occasion, to mitigate the criminal character of the deportation and that, in this spirit, I quibble, but, as one can read in the Épilogue judiciaire (see Appendix III), the examples the court gives prove above all that it still hasn’t read me attentively and that its knowledge of certain historical subjects is a bit vague.
Finally, the court proceeds with a whole slew of sentimental rebukes. It says I’ve never had a word to say to show my respect for the victims of the persecutions and deportations. The court is wrong; I have, several times, shown my respect for that category of the Germans’ victims and it so happens that I have twice used, precisely, the word “respect”. I must say that, unlike those judges, I’ve thought I ought to show my respect for all the categories of victims, including the victims of persecutions and deportations carried out by the Allies, and also where it’s a question of victims of the great historical lie and imposture.
The court says that my “revisionism may… appear… as an attempt at general… rehabilitation of Nazism”. I see here only speculations. If I understand correctly, I am not a Nazi, but it could be, for the court, that behind me looms the shadow-of-the-shadow of a Nazi.
Having described me thus, that is, as someone likely to frighten small children, the court draws a whole series of conclusions as arbitrary as their starting point; it paints an ever darker picture of me; I become a quasi diabolical creature; this is what the lower court already insinuated.
The court states that “being this way”, that is, the way it presents me as being, I am equally hurtful to the survivors and offensive towards the dead; because of me (shadow of a Nazi and a sort of devil), the public finds itself incited to disregard their sufferings, if not call them into doubt (the court continues to have on its mind the sufferings of only a single portion of those who suffered, by the tens of millions, during the war).
In its final sentence the court tugs so strongly at the heart strings that, without wanting to, it creates a moment of humour. It writes:
[the positions taken by Faurisson] are obviously, as the lower court correctly noted, of such a kind as to provoke passionate reactions of aggressiveness against all those who thus find themselves implicitly accused of lying and imposture.
I shall explain these words of the court. In the first part of its ruling, it had indeed seen that it was after serious work that I’d concluded that the gas chambers were a lie and the alleged witnesses impostors. It had had to admit I had a right to speak in that way of a lie and an imposture. But, in the second part, what worries the court is that it realises a lie implies the existence of liars and an imposture implies the existence of impostors. And this, the court thinks, is something grave. There are going to be people who feel targeted. Faurisson is decidedly a disquieting individual. Let’s punish him!
My voluntary appearers and I accepted the punishment, i.e. the finding of “personal injury”, and did not wish to go to the court of cassation. However, I deplore the fact that the lower court and the court of appeal never had the courage to examine what we, on our side, called the trickery of the LICRA (trickery regarding texts, photographs, translations). And then, it would have been instructive if the court answered the following question: “If it is true that Mr Faurisson is not a falsifier and if, in order to demonstrate that the gas chambers never existed, he has for four years (from 1979 to 1983) used arguments and documents without rendering himself guilty of nonchalance, negligence, deliberate ignorance, bad faith or lying, can the judges of the court tell us how, in their opinion, those who, at their end, maintain that the gas chambers did exist, have worked for nearly forty years (1945-1983)? Where do those people, who lecture to others, stand as regards nonchalance, negligence, deliberate ignorance, bad faith, lying and, as they say, falsification of history?” The court did not answer that question.
5. The opposing side’s file was huge and empty
The appeal court judges must have been aware of the way in which our opponents composed their file. These people had inordinately pushed back the time limits for submitting documents. First they had filed utterly mediocre documents, then disparate ones with translations that, more often than not, were falsified.
• Falsified translations, suspect stories
We had pointed out those falsifications to judge Pierre Drai, who was in charge of the pre-trial stage.
Pierre Drai, despite his hostility towards us, had been bound to request of the LICRA translations done by approved experts. I specify here that the experts chosen by the LICRA did hardly better and that, in particular, one of them, Mr Victor Borten, would be exposed to ridicule before the judges by one of my lawyers for the rare silliness of his analyses. It was he, notably, who had at length explained that the word Leichenkeller could not have existed in the German language and that it was a term from the famous secret language of the SS, a word used only, he added, from 1942 to early 1945, to designate a homicidal gas chamber. We’d had to explain to this expert that the word already existed in the great Grimm dictionary of 1886 and that, still in our day, in West Berlin, the crematorium in Ruheleben has Leichenkeller, that is, cold rooms situated below ground and designed to preserve 500 bodies. The other expert, Mrs Magaly Heesch, translated, for example, Absetzgrube, which means “disposal pit”, with the phrase “corpse pit”. Finding the following sentence in a letter from Heinrich Himmler to the statistician Richard Korherr on the subject of the Jews: Es wurden durchgeschleust durch die Lager im Generalgouvernment (“They were transiting through the camps of the General Government”), instead of translating durchgeschleust with “screened” or “transiting through”, she translated this word, deemed to belong to a coded language, with “secretly conveyed” (with homicidal intent, of course).
The LICRA had submitted, all in a jumble, a confession by Gerstein, Filip Müller’s book and even Martin Gray’s For Those I Loved. I shall point out here, in passing, that the ghostwriter for fraudster Martin Gray is called Max Gallo and that Max Gallo, who completely made up the episode of the gas chamber at Treblinka, has become Francois Mitterrand’s official spokesman.
• The argument of the SS’s secret language: “Sonderaktion”, “Final solution”
The LICRA incessantly brought up the secret character of the SS’s language: a language to be read with a key; a key that, apparently, the LICRA possessed. The LICRA didn’t fear contradictions: according to it, and depending on the needs of its case, at one moment the secret language of the SS fooled no-one and was a perfectly open secret, at another that language was a secret that defied the cleverest of people, except the LICRA; and at yet another (it’s not really known why) the language of the SS no longer bothered with any code or “over-code”, becoming, it seems, clear, transparent and cynical. The LICRA was playing things by ear: according to it, at one moment everybody knew, at another nobody could know, and at still another all concerned gave each other the cue to pretend to know nothing but to indicate at the same time, by a wink of the eye, that they knew very well.
The LICRA set much store by the word Sonderaktion (“special action” or “special operation”). For it, this word was an SS term of the “Top Secret” category. It’s indeed true that its meaning, like that of most words, is variable; nevertheless, that meaning varies not in the absolute but in a context. For example, Sonderaktion could designate any military or police action outside of the military or police routine. It applied then to a special operation scheduled to last a certain time that could result, for example, in arrests, followed or not by internment, execution or simple questioning. It is false to say that the word or action that Sonderaktion designated was necessarily secret. On June 25, 1942 64 Jews were arrested by the Germans in the Orléans region. This was a Sonderaktion, says Serge Klarsfeld (French edition of his “Memorial to the Jews deported from France”, 1978, p. 62). Then those Jews were deported but the Germans avoided, in general, the word “deportation” and the phrase “transportation to the East”. We possess documents where it’s said that “deportation” must be avoided because it “called to mind too directly the expulsions to Siberia of the Tsars’ era” (Doc. RF-1215), as must “transportation to the East” in order “to avoid any conflict with the action in progress concerning French workers for Germany” (Doc. RF-1219). But sometimes, despite the recommendations, the use of those words or phrases persisted in the documents. In his personal diary Dr Johann-Paul Kremer used the expression “Sonderaktion aus Holland“, which meant “special action originating from Holland” (and not “special mission” as I said in my article “Confessions of SS Men who were at Auschwitz”). It’s true that Sonderaktion could serve as a euphemism but not to the point of signifying “extermination” or “gassings”! The same goes for Sonderbehandlung (“special treatment”); for example, in the famous “Korherr reports” this word meant “Aussiedlung“, which indeed fits a forced transplanting (letter from Dr Richard Korherr to Der Spiegel no. 31/1977, p.12).
The LICRA had also used against us the hackneyed argument of the “final solution”, a euphemism, it said, for “extermination”. I shall not dwell on this nonsense. The final solution of the Jewish problem implied the extermination of the Jews no more than the final solution of the problem of the Palestinians or of the unemployment problem implies exterminating the Palestinians or the unemployed. A final solution can be favourable, despite all the possible travails endured in order to achieve it. In this regard I owe thanks to a Belgian friend, Pierre Moreau, whom some of us know for his revisionist erudition, for a precious bit of information. Émile Vandervelde, president of the Belgian workers party, was very favourable to the Zionist socialists. In 1929 he published a book entitled Le Pays d’Israel: un marxiste en Palestine (éditions Rieder, Paris, 262 p.). On page 184 he writes that he believes with all the ardour of his socialist convictions “in favorable final solutions” for the Jews of Palestine. The following year a German translation was published under the title of Schaffendes Palästina. Der jüdische Auftbau heute und morgen, von einem Sozialisten (Carl Reisner Verlag, Dresden 1930, 240 p.). On page 174 of that translation the plural “favorable final solutions” has become, in German, a singular and thus one sees: “eine günstige Endloesung“. Let’s specify here that the final solution (“Endlösung“) on which the Belgian author mused was an understanding between the sons of Israel and the sons of Ishmael; he added that the final solution ought not to be the “subjecting of the Arab population to new forces of domination and exploitation”.
• The testimony of Johann Paul Kremer (he had retracted his confessions)
The LICRA rebuked me for having “deliberately truncated certain testimonies such as that of Johann Paul Kremer”. I shall not return to this subject. I’ve already dealt with it in my 1980 paper, published in the Journal of Historical Review under the title Confessions of SS Men who were at Auschwitz (JHR, vol. 2 [1981], no. 2, p. 103-136). I demonstrated that it was, on the contrary, the Poliakovs, the Wellers and the Klarsfelds who had seriously denatured the original text of Johann Paul Kremer’s personal notebooks in order to make him say that Auschwitz was an extermination camp with gas chambers. I likewise demonstrated the absurdity of the purported confessions obtained by Polish-Stalinist military justice.
I said that professor Kremer had confirmed before the tribunal in Münster (Westphalia) in 1960 the confession that communist examining magistrate Jan Sehn (of Jewish origin?) had obtained from him in 1947 and that at the Frankfurt Trial (1963-1965) he’d been summoned as a prosecution witness against his compatriots. What I did not yet know in 1980 and what I’ve learnt since is the reason why the unfortunate man, having returned to his city of Münster after ten years’ imprisonment in Poland (1947-1957), had been before a German court. I discovered this reason while reading, in its French version, the Anthologie d’Auschwitz (blue) (volume 1, part 1, Warsaw 1969, p. 239 to 261): it is that after his return to Münster in 1957 Kremer began to protest against the treatment he’d undergone by Polish justice and, in the words used by the Polish communists themselves in the Anthologie:
[by his protestations and his request to regain his professorship, Kremer attracted the attention] of certain circles and certain persons who made him appear once more before the courts (p. 239).
Kremer, in effect, had complained that in Poland “only hatred had had a say in matters” (p. 240). Better still, we learn, thanks to that communist publication, that when back in Münster Kremer had retracted his confessions. In the pious communist jargon this is described as follows:
[Kremer] disputed the explanations that he had supplied during the investigation in Cracow and that had been read to him [in court in Münster] (p. 242).
Most degrading as regards the judges in Münster is the complacency with which they heard the explanations given by Jan Sehn, come from Cracow. The communist account of that session deserves to be read. It should be cited in full. In Cracow in 1947 Kremer had had no choice. It was necessary for him to confess. The most astonishing thing is that Jan Sehn ended up saying so himself before the German judges. For him Kremer, from the start, hadn’t had the right to plead not guilty. Jan Sehn says with a fine thoughtlessness:
A plea of not guilty would have been incompatible with what the accused had written [in his personal diary] (p. 246).
In other words, the communist Jan Sehn had decided that Kremer’s personal diary was written in a sort of coded language to which he, Jan Sehn, possessed the key. The prisoner Kremer could only bow before the ukase of examining magistrate Jan Sehn. In my 1980 talk I said, in conclusion, regarding the drama of Johann Paul Kremer:
I often think of that old man. I think sometimes also of his tormentors.
It’s occurred to me to think of him still more often since I got confirmation of the tragedy that professor Johann Paul Kremer lived through. His Polish and German tormentors took advantage of him to the end. Kremer was used like a puppet. He came to the Frankfurt trial to make a forced appearance. In his own words, he’d experienced “a dilemma that is not simple for human understanding”. Let’s listen to his final statement at the Münster trial in 1960: let me know whether it seems that of an abominable criminal who’d participated in horrible homicidal gassings or rather that of an unfortunate academic, a sort of inoffensive old bachelor who found himself caught, like so many Germans in the past and still today, in a tragic situation where it’s necessary to confess or pretend to confess to vile crimes which, in reality, were never committed. Let’s listen to Kremer and, through his words, to the voice of so many humiliated, insulted and tortured Germans:
If, according to human criteria, I have carried out something evil, I can only beseech you to take into consideration my age and my tragic fate. I have cognisance of no offence in the legal and criminal sense. I entrust to the supreme judge of all the task of resolving a dilemma that is not simple for human understanding.
Professor Kremer, in the end, was not as deft and prudent as was his colleague professor Wilhelm Pfannenstiel in the Gerstein case. Pfannenstiel, a father of five, was able to secure himself a good career thanks to confessions of an extreme vagueness.
• The gas chamber of Struthof-Natzweiler (Alsace) (currently closed to visitors)
The LICRA accused me of having “dismissed without serious justification a certain amount of evidence previously accepted by national and international courts”. In order to prove this it requested that the file composed by French military justice for the trial of the guards at Struthof-Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace be admitted to the proceedings.
However, the file was to provide proof that there’d been no homicidal gas chamber at Struthof but only a small enclosure that had, originally, been a refrigeration chamber. Later it was made into a gas chamber for the training of young recruits in the use of gas masks. Professor Bickenbach had taken advantage of the presence of this chamber’s to test an antidote to phosgene gas. Indeed, the Germans had learnt that the Allies, from late 1942, were stockpiling large quantities of phosgene gas in North Africa and they feared a bombing of German cities with it. The professor had made tests with an antidote (urotropine) first on himself and then on some camp detainees who, it is said, volunteered to participate in exchange for rewards in the form of food or cigarettes. There resulted either two or three accidental deaths, after hospitalisation, and not four as we mistakenly wrote in our court submissions. Within that space, camp commandant Josef Kramer (not to be confused with Dr Johann-Paul Kremer) is supposed to have gassed detainees with mysterious salts which, mixed with water, killed in a minute. The ineptitude of Josef Kramer’s two contradictory confessions can, for its part, be explained by the cruelties to which he’d been subjected by his British guards. Those men had, for example, shut him up for a whole night in a refrigeration chamber (perhaps because he’d specifically said that the alleged homicidal gas chamber at Struthof had first been a refrigeration chamber). Those cruelties were reported with a certain relish by a member of the French resistance who was at the scene, the physician J.-L. Fréjafon, in his book Bergen-Belsen (preface by Louis-Martin Chauffier, Librairie Valois, 1945, XV-103 pages, page 22).
In the same military justice case file there was an expert report by Dr René Fabre, dean of the Paris faculty of pharmacology. That file has disappeared but, thanks to another document, we know that Dr Fabre had been charged with determining whether the bodies found at the anatomy institute in Strasbourg and said to be those of people “gassed” at Struthof bore any traces of poison. His expert report’s finding had been negative. There was no trace of hydrocyanic acid either in the bodies, in the scrapings obtained from the alleged homicidal gas chamber’s walls or in the bits of plaster (kept in jars “W” and “X”).
I shall call to mind that, in a more general manner, hundreds of inquiries into the German concentration camps must have been made. One can say with certainty that none of those inquiries comprised
– either a complete expert report proving that such or such enclosure christened “homicidal gas chamber” was actually a homicidal gas chamber;
– or a post mortem proving that such or such body was that of a person killed by a gas or any other substance.
Today the alleged homicidal gas chamber of Struthof can no longer be visited. A small sign lets tourists believe that a visit can be made on request. This is false. The French are now ashamed of their national gas chamber, still, however, classified as a “historic monument”.
• The manuscripts miraculously discovered at Auschwitz (the Internationale sung in the gas chamber)
Another of the LICRA’s arguments was, of course, made up of testimonies. It invoked, in particular, the famous written accounts discovered at Auschwitz-Birkenau thanks to miraculous excavations, and I do say: miraculous. Some people are perhaps familiar with the photo of the hole where the Poles say they found the recipient containing the manuscript of one Salmen Lewenthal. Around that hole there’s not a trace of digging! The excavators had just come right upon the spot where there was something to discover! Let’s salute here a miracle of exterminationist dowsing (see Hefte von Auschwitz, special issue (I), Handschriften von Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos, Verlag Staatliches Auschwitz-Museum, 1972, 220 p., p. 135, first photo).
The best known of these testimonies is that of the “unknown author’s manuscript”. The original text is in Yiddish in Hebrew characters. It was published in German by the Poles (p. 118-128 of the aforementioned publication). The LICRA took good care not to reveal that Yiddish edition. It produced excerpts in Polish with French translation. The translator had notably chosen a passage where the action unfolded in the Birkenau gas chamber (!). We don’t know where the witness was in order to be able, afterwards, to describe this scene: The victims are packed in the gas chamber. Quite suddenly, a young Polish girl, naked like all those there, gives an address to the assembly of victims as well as to the Jews of the special commando in charge of putting them all to death. This inflamed and patriotic address ends with the words:
Down with the barbarism of Hitler’s Germany! Long live Poland!
Then the Polish girl turns towards the Jews of the special commando. She doesn’t rail against them; on the contrary, she urges them to survive so as to bear witness later on to the victims’ courage and avenge them. Then comes an interesting scene. The Poles go down on their knees. The text says they recite “a prayer with an air that made a great impression”. Upon whom the LICRA’s text doesn’t say. The original text said: “on all”. Then the Poles rise all together in the gas chamber where, apparently, space was not lacking, since it was possible to kneel and then stand up again as they’d done. All together they sing in chorus the Polish national anthem and the Jews, for their part, at the same time sing the Hativkah.* (I’d like to offer a suggestion to the authorities at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles or to those at the future Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington: could they reconstruct that scene, complete with sound accompaniment, so that everyone can see the beauty and truthfulness of it all?) Here the LICRA had cut its text with a three-dot ellipsis in square brackets. And, according to the LICRA, the text went on as follows:
While they were singing, the Red Cross car arrived; the gas was thrown into the chamber and they all breathed their last in song and ecstasy, dreaming of brotherhood and a better world.
The narrator doesn’t reveal how he was able to read the victims’ minds and know their dreams. As for the LICRA, if it had cut the text, it was because it contained an awkward specification. Here is that specification as the Auschwitz Museum edition gives it (p. 121): the two anthems were sung at the same time; the “lyrical tones” of the two anthems had blended into a whole; then, the Poles and the Jews, all together, had intoned the Internationale! This is what Soviet aesthetics calls, I think, “socialist realism”. We owe the discovery and deciphering of the “unknown author’s manuscript” to Professor Bernard Mark, director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. In 1962 his co-religionist Michel Borwicz, having become a French citizen after the war, wrote in the Revue d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale that Professor Mark was a forger of texts (January, 1962, p. 93). Bernard Mark’s fakes continue to be published and sold. In 1982 his widow published in France a book entitled Des Voix dans la nuit (Plon, Paris, 362 p.). The famous “unknown author” this time has lost his anonymity and is now called Leib Langfus. This book is teeming with lies. The French press nevertheless greeted it as a collection of glaringly truthful witness accounts (Gilles Lambert in Le Figaro, November 13-14, 1982, p. 25; Pierre Pachet in La Quinzaine littéraire, December 16, 1982, p. 25; Éric Roussel in Le Monde, November 26, 1982, p. 23). The preface is signed by Élie Wiesel.
* Compare with the Czechoslovaks described by Filip Müller: “[In the gas chamber] they sang first the Czechoslovak anthem and then the Hebrew song ‘Hatikva'” (Eyewitness Auschwitz, Stein and Day, New York 1979, XIV-180 p.; p. 110),
• The testimony of a survivor of the Sonderkommandos (at the moment of the gassings, the squad, shut up in the coke stores (!), were unable to see anything)
The LICRA searched for a survivor of the famous Sonderkommandos. There was indeed Filip Müller, living in Mannheim (West Germany) at 31 Hochuferstrasse. The LICRA had, by unanimous vote, awarded him the Bernard Lecache prize for his book “Three Years in a Gas Chamber at Auschwitz” (French title). Inexplicably, F. Müller made no deposition, either written or oral, for the LICRA.
Just at the last moment, with the fateful date drawing quite near, i.e. the deadline for filing trial documents, the LICRA submitted a meagre text of about two pages: the deposition, made before a notary on September 29, 1980, of one Alter Szmul Fajnzylberg, a pensioner living in Paris at 37 Avenue Jean Jaurès. For me, this was an old acquaintance. In 1972, in the special issue of the Hefte von Auschwitz that I cite above, the Poles had published (p. 32-71) in German the deposition made by this communist militant in a Polish court on April 13, 1945. At the time his name was Stanislas Jankowski. The former café waiter, a Jew, atheist and communist, had been a member of the International Brigades in Spain. At the end of the civil war he was interned by the French in the camps at Gurs and Saint-Cyprien. He then worked for the Germans in the occupied zone. He was arrested by the French police and interned at Drancy and Compiègne. He was deported to Auschwitz, arriving there on March 27, 1942. He left Auschwitz with the majority of the deportees, under the supervision of the Germans, on January 18, 1945. He then took flight. Such is his story, at least.
Thus Jankowski, alias Fajnzylberg, was to remain at Auschwitz for nearly three years. Until October 1942 he was employed as a carpenter, which had been his original profession. He also spent five weeks in the camp hospital. From November 1942 to June 1943 he was employed in the crematorium building of Auschwitz-I known as Krema I. From July 1942 until January 17, 1945 he was employed in the building at Birkenau known as Krema V.
Thus we have here a rare bird: one of those famous members of the Sonderkommandos.* His experience was lengthy, since it had lasted more than two years in that terrible role. We know that, according to one legend, it was the Jews themselves who were forced by the SS to receive the victims, have them disrobe, make them enter the gas chamber and lock them inside. Then the SS poured in the gas in a process about which there’s never been the least agreement amongst the narrators of the gas chamber saga. Finally, the members of the Sonderkommando came and re-opened the door or doors, and what followed is well known. Another legend has it that the SS regularly liquidated – every three months, it seems – the members of the Sonderkommando. What’s interesting in the case of the witness finally chosen by the LICRA is his implicit acknowledgement that he never actually saw a gassing operation. In effect, he tells us, each time the Germans wanted to gas people, they took care to shut up the members of the Sonderkommando in the coke store before the victims’ arrival. In Krema I of Auschwitz, the members of the Sonderkommando were shut up in the little coke store and in Krema V at Birkenau in the big coke store of that large Krema. In other words, for more than two years this rare bird of ours (the best witness the LICRA was able to find anywhere) spent a whole part of his detention in a coke store beside a pile of coke. Then, he tells us, the SS men, who had done this so as to conceal the crime, re-opened the coke store door so that Fajnzylberg and his mates could attend to the bodies in the gas chamber.
The Germans were never idle. According to our man, the Germans gassed two million persons in that way in two years in the crematoria and “bunkers” of Birkenau. In July 1944 they supposedly killed an average of 18,000 Hungarian Jews per day. I assume that to burn about 18,000 bodies it took, at the rate of 40 kilograms of coke per body, 720,000 kilograms of coke per day, which mustn’t have left much room in the coke stores for shutting up Fajnzylberg and his mates. Indeed, how many of them could there be to attend to 18,000 bodies?
In 1980 Jankowski-Fajnzylberg repeated that story of confinement in the coke stores. But, between 1945 and 1980, his memory must have improved. In effect, in 1980 he added a specification that one is surprised he hadn’t have given in 1945. Once, one day in Krema V, he was able to see, he states,
the introduction of the gas by an SS-man who poured the contents of a round black metal can, about 12 to 15 centimetres in diameter and about 25 centimetres high, into a kind of little chimney or tube that extended a few dozen centimetres out from the gas chamber roof. The SS man wore a gas mask. He immediately closed up the opening through which he had poured the can’s contents.
There is only one misfortune for this witness: according to the legend, there was no gas chamber at Krema V, but two small enclosures and a corridor, which makes a set of three small gas chambers. As for the gas, the version accredited today is that it was poured through fanlights situated below the roof, which an SS man accessed from the outside by ladder, each time.
* As Mark Weber of the Institute of Historical Review has told me, the proper English translation should probably be “Special Detail”, in fact “refuse collectors”. Kremas II and III in Birkenau had a Müllverbrennungsofen (“furnace for burning refuse”). The men of the Sonderkommandos were in charge of collecting and burning, at the same time, the rubbish and the corpses. Filip Müller was nothing more than a sort of refuse collector.
II. The criminal action instituted by Poliakov (the Gerstein and Baron von Otter case)
On page 119 of my Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire I’d mentioned Léon Poliakov among those who’d manipulated the original text of professor Johann Paul Kremer’s notebooks. Having on my mind the extraordinary manipulations and fabrications of texts in which the same Poliakov had indulged, beginning with the confessions of Kurt Gerstein (of which Paul Rassinier had given us only a few examples), I’d written:
Aware of the gravity of my accusation, I state that I am in a position to prove that Léon Poliakov is a manipulator of texts and even a forger of texts.
I thought, when writing those words, that I risked being sued for defamation. In effect, defamation must be well distinguished from lying or slander. To defame is to damage someone’s reputation. One may rightfully defame a man by saying something unpleasant about him that is a verifiable fact. I thought that Poliakov would not sue. He was, of course, the first to know how he’d fabricated and manipulated the Gerstein texts. However, Poliakov did sue. Subsequent events led me to think that, if he did so, it was under acute pressure from friends who gave him assurances that a way out of the fix would be found for him.
French law provides the possibility, rarely availed of, to present an “offer of proof” within ten days from the lodging of such an action. In under ten days I presented an offer of proof: it was a simple chart showing, on the one hand, the texts that Gerstein was said to have written and, on the other, the incredible manipulations and fabrications that Poliakov had drawn from those texts, over the years, from 1951 to 1979. These were material facts ; no retort was possible.
French law accords the accuser five days to respond to an offer of proof. I was to note, without surprise, that Poliakov proposed no response to my offer of proof within the time prescribed. It was then that Poliakov and his friends devised a stratagem that, still today, leaves me in admiration. They knew that in the 17th correctional chamber in Paris (presided over by Émile Cabié) it’s always good to plead victimhood of anti-semitism. It seems that, up till these last few years, that court handed down convictions for anti-semitism as other courts hand down convictions for drink-driving. Poliakov was going to play that card with the help of his crony Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who came to the witness box to denounce me as a life-long anti-semite. Poliakov had fabricated, at his end, a nearly illegible photocopy of a Gerstein text to prove that it had been very hard for him to decipher that text: hence his conjectures and possible errors, he said.
But now I’ll come to the stratagem itself.
The lawyers asserted that the man I had wanted to attack was not Poliakov but rather, through him, Gerstein himself! However, Gerstein was a saint! Witnesses coming from the Netherlands, Switzerland or Sweden would testify to this. Poliakov’s lawyers had decided to organise their entire defence around this point: Kurt Gerstein had really existed; he was a spy for God; his testimony troubles Mr Faurisson; Mr Faurisson is a slanderer of Gerstein through the person of a great upstanding man: Mr Léon Poliakov, former director of studies at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research).
So it was that in the course of that strange trial our disputes over texts would take on the appearance of trifles compared with the parade of witnesses, like Baron von Otter, coming in to say they’d known Gerstein during the war and that he’d told them appalling stories about the German concentration camps. My lawyer believed he could deal with this expedient with a shrug of the shoulders. For him, the judges couldn’t be dupes of the manoeuvre. Baron von Otter and the other witnesses were not specialists of Poliakov’s texts and, consequently, my lawyer didn’t want to put the least question to the witnesses, not even these: “Have you an idea of what is at issue here? Do you know what Mr Faurisson reproaches Mr Poliakov for? Do you know that the person of Gerstein is not at issue and does not interest us here? Do you consider that you have competency regarding the different versions Mr Poliakov has given of the different confessions of Gerstein?” Insist though I might, my lawyer didn’t want to come out of his silence. It must be said in his defence that he knew quite well what the case’s specific subject was – the texts of Gerstein and Poliakov – and knew almost nothing about Gerstein, Pfannenstiel, the Belzec camp and Baron von Otter. Had I been entitled to speak, here is how I’d have proceeded to fight the opposing side at their own game. I would first have told each of the witnesses that I believed in his sincerity. Yes, each of them could have met Gerstein during the war. Yes, Gerstein had told them terrible accounts. But had those people taken those accounts seriously? I say no, they hadn’t. If those people had taken those absolutely sensational revelations seriously, they would have reported them either, in Baron von Otter’s case, to his superiors in Stockholm or, in the cases of the other witnesses, to their resistance movements. However, it seems well established today that no-one was able to show a report of that kind, either – as I tend to think – because those reports had never been written, or else because they had been written but were not presentable, since Gerstein was described in them as the author of accounts utterly impossible to believe. Moreover, we possess no document, no writings by Kurt Gerstein on Belzec alleged to have been given to any person from the neutral countries or the resistance movements. Yet Gerstein had travelled a good deal during the war in Germany and abroad and there was nothing to stop him from dictating a report or posting a letter, even an anonymous one.
I have a hypothesis to suggest regarding von Otter and the others.
For me, during the war they cannot have believed the outrageous tales recounted by Gerstein for a quite simple reason – those outrageous tales were not believable. They were and remain totally grotesque for anyone who reads them with a minimum of attention. But, after the war, von Otter and the others probably began to believe what they’d heard from Gerstein. I imagine that, in the hysterical atmosphere that accompanied what’s called the discovery of the alleged extermination camps, Baron von Otter was seized for a moment by retrospective dread. He recalled that SS man and his wild stories. Von Otter must have said to himself that he’d behaved unpardonably badly towards Gerstein. And it’s for this reason that he set out in quest of Kurt Gerstein after the war and, from 1945, caught in his game, set himself up, whether he liked it or not, as the defender of Saint Gerstein. In my view Göran von Otter must suffer from what I call the Sean McBride complex. During the war Sean McBride, founder of Amnesty International, hadn’t wanted to believe the stories of horror but, after the war, he began to believe them all the more strongly as he had at first been sceptical. In Le Monde of February 13, 1982, page 2, under the title “Avertissement”, Sean McBride wrote:
In the midst of the Second World War, I maintained very friendly relations with the American Ambassador to Ireland, David Gray, a close friend of Roosevelt. One day I saw him looking perplexed. “I’ve received from the State Department”, he told me, “some disturbing documents that report a policy of extermination carried out by the Nazis in camps specially fitted out for that purpose”. I looked at the papers he had with him and, what is obviously the most atrocious thing, I must admit, is that they did not appear very convincing. The steps I took to obtain greater accuracy, then to alert public opinion, ran into indifference and scepticism. That has remained fundamental for me: the most monstrous genocide in human history had been able to unfold for five years in the most total ignorance.
Let it be said in passing that Sean McBride’s last sentence testifies to blindness: how can McBride believe that, if the most monstrous genocide in human history had been able to unfold over five years on a continental scale, it could, precisely, have gone unnoticed? McBride ought to read the story of the elephant in the house as Arthur R. Butz told it to us in his talk last year (“Context and Perspective in the Holocaust Controversy“). McBride imagines that he was lacking in clear-sightedness during the war and that his eyes opened after the war, whereas what actually happened is the opposite: during the war he’d been free in his judgment and therefore clear-sighted, whilst after the war his judgment was no longer able to resist the pressure of the most fantastic propaganda humanity has ever known. It’s somewhat in the same manner that, after the war, some Nazi generals or dignitaries slapped their foreheads – and beat their breasts – and thought: “Now I see clearly, my eyes are open, my ears are unstopped. Now it’s been explained to me I understand what Himmler had said in Posen, and Hitler in Berlin”.
For my part, I don’t call the sincerity of Hans Frank, Baldur von Schirach, SS General Karl Wolff into doubt, nor that of Baron von Otter or Sean McBride. As concerns Albert Speer, I hope people will allow me to be a bit more sceptical. One detail about him: a South African Jewish organisation had obtained his collaboration in its successful efforts to have the brochure Did Six Million Really Die? banned in South Africa. In the brochure produced as a retort to the brochure, Six Million Did Die; The Truth Shall Prevail (Arthur Suzman and Denis Diamond, second edition, Johannesburg 1978, XII-138 p.), one finds the facsimile of the original affidavit in German signed by Speer (p. 109-112) with, at the end, this declaration:
Meine Hauptschuld sehe ich immer noch in der Billigung des Judenverfolgungen und der Morde an Millionen von ihnen. (I still see my principal guilt in my approval of the persecution of the Jews and in the murder of millions of them.)
That is what Albert Speer wrote on June 15, 1977; but in a book that appeared two years later (Technik und Mocht, Bechtle Verlag, Munich 1979, reprinted in a paperback edition by Ullstein Verlag in 1981, 184 p.), he reproduced that affidavit (p. 73-75) with a footnote after the word “Billigung” (approval) reading:
Billigung durch Wegsehen, nicht durch Kenntois eines Befehls oder der Durchfuehrung. Das erstere ist so schwerwiegend wie das zweite. (Approval by looking away, not by knowledge of an order [of extermination] and its carrying out. The former is as grave as the latter.)
Speer spoke in his Spandau Diary of his propensity for self-accusation (“meine Selbstbezichtigungen“, Spandauer Tagebücher, Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 432).
One may say that this propensity is rather widespread in what Heinrich Härtle has called the Germany of “national-masochism” (Klütter Blätter, December 1982, p. 28, “‘Holocaust’ und kein Ende“).
In the Poliakov trial the judges themselves were led to believe, according to their own words, that “the testimony of Gerstein on the functioning of the Nazi camps is crucial”. That’s a sentence that would be hard to understand for anyone at all familiar with the Gerstein affair. Starting from there, and in the face of the parade of four witnesses, what weight could our technical demonstration on Poliakov’s manipulations and fabrications carry? Still, we had on our side an excellent witness [Henri Roques] who is currently preparing a thesis on the different confessions of Gerstein and who’d been able to prove, texts in hand, that Poliakov was a forger and a manipulator. A waste of effort. I was found liable for defamation; the judgment was to be published, at my expense; however, it hasn’t been published, and I think Poliakov will never demand its publication. That judgment contains, in effect, passages that would be awkward for a former director of research at the CNRS. It’s known that Poliakov, observing that, with Gerstein, the gas chamber at Belzec had an area of 25 square metres for from 700 to 800 persons (which means 28 to 32 persons standing in each square metre), had coolly deleted the figure of 25 square metres to replace it with that of 93 square metres; in the ruling it’s said that it “is not explained how Mr Poliakov can fix the area of the gas chamber at 93 square meters”. The court goes so far as to say: “There is an error here that could well be wrongful.” It adds: “Other errors may have been committed” and, finally, it says that “Mr Poliakov may, on some details, have breached the standards of scientific rigour”. But, for the court, all that was annoying without being grave and I didn’t have the right to speak of Mr Poliakov as I had done. In effect, what counted in the eyes of the court was that Mr Poliakov
had been moved by a passionate and legitimate desire to inform the public about a period, and particularly tragic facts of contemporary history.
Put another way, the court ruled in his favour by virtue of his “good faith”.
The Poliakov case went to the court of appeal and to the court of cassation with no further result. For reasons of health I wasn’t able to attend the hearings. The texts of the respective decisions are quite brief and prove that the two judicial instances did not in the least take up the examination of the case again in the sense in which it should have been presented, that is, in a purely technical sense and in the following form: “Here, on the one hand, is what we read in the texts of Gerstein and here, on the other hand, is what Poliakov claims to have read therein; how are these differences explained? And how, furthermore, can one explain that Poliakov himself for nearly thirty years has dared to present, in forms so different, texts that are supposed to be identical?”
I await with curiosity the reaction of Mr Poliakov and his friends when the thesis I mentioned earlier is defended and then published. The researcher in question [Henri Roques] has made some quite interesting discoveries about Gerstein’s writings. I advise the amateurs to write nothing about Gerstein before the publication of that thesis, which will be very technical. The Gerstein affair appears more and more like a story of a madman. The story of Gerstein’s confessions is most difficult to untangle, even without account taken of the dishonest reproductions.
III. The criminal action for my sixty-word summary
In the midst of the civil case that I’ve discussed at length there occurred some weighty events for Pierre Guillaume, his friends and myself. For four years our opponents conducted a series of operations (physical and other) against us that were all the more trying for our health and nerves as we had, so to speak, no means to retort. The press, especially, overflowed with a barely conceivable flood of hatred. It was repetitive hysteria. Noam Chomsky had intervened in the affair, albeit in quite an anodyne way. Jean Pierre-Bloch, president of the LICRA, on 16 December 1980 talked about it on the airwaves of Radio Europe 1. He was welcomed by his friend Ivan Levaï, host of the programme “Explain yourself…” From the very start Jean Pierre-Bloch set about attacking us violently. He declared that the case was costing the LICRA considerable sums. He claimed that I, for my part, was being paid by colonel Qaddafi and that my writings were being translated into all the world’s languages, and that he had on his desk Chinese translations of them! He called me, of course, a forger. Ivan Levaï, at his end, said that the help Chomsky had brought me was “a kiss for the leper”; “Noam Chomsky”, he explained, “grandson of a rabbi and Jewish himself, had wanted to ‘kiss his own death'”. Thanks to the skilful manoeuvring of my publisher, Pierre Guillaume, I got the possibility to appear the next day on the same programme on the same station. Ivan Levaï, over-excited, constantly cut me off. It’s then that I took a grave decision: since for once I had the right to speak for a few minutes, I decided to use the time to pronounce a sixty-word sentence that I’d had for a long time in my head and that summed up the substance of my thoughts on this whole question of the gas chambers and the genocide.
If I’ve studied the question of the gas chambers so much, it’s obviously not due to a morbid curiosity about the subject. The gas chamber, the magical gas chamber, is the keystone of a huge structure: the lie of the Holocaust. If I interested myself in this keystone, it’s because it was the best point at which to attack that huge edifice. I believe I can say that now, people in the scientific milieu, hardly believe in the gas chambers any longer. I’m thinking here of historians like Raul Hilberg and not of individuals like Élie Wiesel. To borrow a turn of phrase of Céline’s in 1950, upon reading Paul Rassinier’s Lies of Ulysses, “The gas chamber was everything! It allowed EVERYTHING!” (see, in Le Bulletin Célinien, fourth quarter 1982, p. 5-6, my piece “Céline devant le mensonge du siècle (suite)“). Today, the keystone of the Holocaust is cracking and, in consequence, the huge structure is in danger. The gas chamber is the crime weapon; the genocide is the crime; the two form one and the same historical lie; if there’s a lie, one must say who the beneficiaries and who the victims are; in our times everything quickly becomes a matter of money and of politics; therefore, if this lie has opened the way for a political-financial swindle, one must say so, and also say what swindle.
It doesn’t take long to realise that the Holocaust affair is utilised mainly by the State of Israel; it is the founding myth of that state and the number one weapon in its propaganda arsenal; I do not reproach that country for this; I’m making an observation here. I am not so naive as to forget that all states are founded in part on crimes, blood, expropriation, injustice, might, myth and lies. Here I’m designating the founding myth of the State of Israel; this doesn’t mean to say that I am hostile to that state or its citizens. Conversely, I am observing the evil that this big lie does to the German people and that it has allowed to be done to the Palestinian people; and I am indeed bound to observe that Germany, amputated of a third of her territory, cut in two, occupied by four armies, has leaders who, apparently, are obliged to practise Realpolitik: so it is that the voices of West Germany’s leaders echo the voice of their liberators of the West and the voices of East Germany’s leaders echo the voice of their liberators of the East. This is what I wanted to sum up in my sixty-word sentence which, on the radio, I prefaced with the following warning:
Attention! None of these words is inspired by any political sympathy or antipathy!
Here is the sentence that, since then, I’ve so often heard read out in the courts, in extreme silence and attention:
The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie that has opened the way for a gigantic political-financial swindle, the principal beneficiaries of which are the State of Israel and international Zionism and the principal victims of which are the German people – but not their leaders – and the entire Palestinian people.
I knew beforehand that this sentence would be the object of all sorts of misunderstanding, sincere or feigned. In any case, I know which part of it is the most sacrilegious and most terrible to hear: it’s the part where I distinguish between the German people from the bulk of their leaders. Obviously I opened a Pandora’s box there. Many newspapers censored the four words “but not its leaders“. Gitta Sereny did this by cutting my sentence at that point and replacing the words with an ellipsis. I suppose that, having got to that point, if she’s a Catholic, she must have crossed herself (see the aforementioned article from the New Statesman, p. 17).
The financial swindle was never at the origin of the big lie. The big lie might not have had that outgrowth, but it so happens that it did have it and that I particularly take aim here at the Zionist Nahum Goldmann and the Israeli David Ben Gurion. I defy any honest man to keep his composure while reading the book in which Goldmann tells how he managed to extort from a paralysed Adenauer the tremendous reparations under the so-called Luxembourg Agreement (see Nouvel-Observateur, no. 624, October 25-29, 1976, p. 120 ff.). This is racketeering in the grand style; it’s the pinnacle of cheat’s poker, all on a backdrop of prefabricated sentimentality.*
The secondary beneficiaries of all this business are the set of winners of the Second World War; in effect, if the Germans’ homicidal gas chambers didn’t exist, the “war crime” par excellence might be that of the gigantic crematorium for live bodies at Dresden, or Hiroshima, or Katyn.
Among the secondary victims are the Vatican and the International Committee of the Red Cross, both accused by the exterminationists of not having seen and spoken out against the gas chambers and the genocide; as regards secondary victims, it is fitting to underscore the fact that young Jews are, in their way, also victims of this dark and aberrant religion of the Holocaust.
The LICRA, the MRAP and the Association of former deportees of Auschwitz, after hearing that sentence, lodged a claim for racial defamation (which is not very serious) and a claim for incitement to racial hatred (which is serious).
I was not able to attend the lower court trial in the same 17th correctional chamber (presiding judge: Mr Cabié). People have described for me the loathsome atmosphere in which it took place. Here I must pay special tribute to Claude Karnoouh and Jacob Assous, both treated as renegades by their fellow Jews. Both went considerably further than Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit in their support for the revisionist case. C. Karnoouh, a member of the CNRS, spoke in court of the “revolution” in historical research brought on by the revisionist discoveries, and J. Assous declared, for his part, that now he no longer believed either in the gas chambers or the genocide. Some unpleasant scenes occurred.
As for the court, it handed down a decision that will remain in the annals of French justice. I was found guilty on the two counts of racial defamation and incitement to racial hatred, and twice on each count, for it was a dual case (on the one hand the LICRA and on the other the MRAP and the Auschwitz association). I was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, suspended (which was not serious), and a fine (which is commonplace), ordered to pay for the text of the ruling’s publication in the press (which is mere ritual), but also – a fact unprecedented in France – to pay for a reading of it on radio and television at peak time. The cost would have come to the astronomical (for me) sum of 3,600,000 francs. To its honour one French newspaper reacted quite strongly against this avalanche of trials, convictions, fines and damages orders: it was the leftist daily Libération. Most other media outlets, no doubt ill at ease having to report such news, concealed the fact that the court had instituted a new punishment: those very costly readings of a legal decision on radio and television.
During the appeal I was able to attend the trial and explain myself. An unexpected thing happened: the court upheld the suspended sentence of three months’ imprisonment but did away with the ground of incitement to racial hatred; above all, it eliminated all the measures regarding forced publication, even in the press; I think it realised that the newspapers, radio and television had already made enough fuss over the courts’ rulings against me.
For the first time in those years of struggle, I believed I’d found a little breathing room. Thus, by that decision of June 23, 1982 I learned that I wouldn’t have to pay 3,600,000 francs. It was ten months later, on April 26, 1983, that I had more good news: the decision in the civil case, which held: “No-one, as things stand, can rule that he is lying (…).” Doubtless in the two trials, as in the Poliakov trial, the rulings were against me, but it must be admitted that these rulings were becoming considerably lighter.
* On August 18, 1981 the same Nahum Goldmann declared, in regard to the “compensations” paid to Israel:
Those are astronomical sums from the point of view of Jewish history and were very important for the development of Israel. The Israel of today would have been impossible without the German reparations. (“Profil: Nahum Goldmann”, an interview of Nahum Goldmann by J. F. Chauvel, broadcast by French television network 1 from 10:00 to 10:52 pm on 18 August 1981.)
IV. A few events on the margins of the three trials
In the course of the years 1981, 1982 and 1983 the legal decisions against me steadily became notably lighter, to the point of causing disarray in the ranks of the LICRA and the exterminationists. The first chamber of the court of appeal had almost ended up saying: “The revisionists are right in denying the gas chambers’ existence and in refusing to accord any value to the testimonies to the contrary.” Confining myself strictly to what the court held on April 26, 1983, I believe I can say that the ruling, considered authoritative, has made possible at least two advances:
- It seems no longer permissible in France to call us, as was done on all sides for over four years, liars, forgers, falsifiers, or to accuse us of bad faith, nonchalance, negligence and deliberate ignorance;
- It seems henceforth permissible, on the basis of revisionist works, to say that the Germans’ homicidal gas chambers had no existence in reality and to be suspicious of all the testimonies given over a forty-year period that run contrary to such a statement; however, these opinions running contrary to the official truth may he expressed on condition of showing, even better than I have done, respect for the victims of the persecutions and deportations, and on condition of taking care, greater care than I have exercised, not to appear offensive or hurtful to anyone.
I don’t know to what factors to attribute this favourable evolution in the French courts. I would gladly believe we are indebted for it partly to the political action of Menachem Begin as it’s been perceived in France and in the world. There are also the crises of collective delirium that the press and the public authorities have unleashed or allowed to be unleashed in France as regards the showing of the docudrama Holocaust, the bomb attack against the synagogue in the rue Copernic, the bomb attack on a Jewish restaurant in the rue des Rosiers, the Maurice Papon affair, the Klaus Barbie affair or the affair of the Hitler diaries. As suggested by Dominique Jamet, editorial writer with the Quotidien de Paris (a daily that nonetheless tends to see anti-semites nearly everywhere), the French may have ended up after all this with the impression that the Zionists were trying to “cash blank cheques on the Holocaust”.
But on the precise subject of the gas chambers and the genocide there is in France an obvious confusion in peoples’ minds with respect to the official doctrine. This has expressed itself in the following few instances:
• Pierre Vidal-Naquet publishes “Un Eichmann de papier”; I publish my Réponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet
In 1980 Pierre Vidal-Naquet had the ineptitude to attack me in an amateurish essay entitled “A Paper Eichmann” (Esprit, September 1980, p. 8-52, with an addendum by Pitch Bloch, p. 53-56; all reprinted with some changes and additions in the same author’s book Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent, Petite Collection Maspero, Paris 1981, 302 p., p. 193-289). I answered in my Réponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet – [Reply to a Paper Historian] (second edition, expanded, La Vieille Taupe, Paris 1982, 96 p.). Any question of polemics aside, it’s interesting to note how far Vidal-Naquet was forced to go in his concessions to historical revisionism: on the diary of Anne Frank, whose authenticity he no longer accepts; on the confessions extorted from the Nazis; on Pery Broad; on the Nuremberg trial; on the false testimonies and impostures concerning the subject of the gas chambers, etc.
• Georges Wellers publishes Les Chambres à gaz ont existé
In 1981 Georges Wellers published his Les Chambres à gaz ont existé / Des documents, des témoignages, des chiffres (Gallimard, Paris, 229 p.). This book has been very helpful to our cause, first by its title and then by its content. It is devoted to Auschwitz. The author didn’t dare include a single photo of the gas chamber that can be visited at Auschwitz-I, nor any photo of the ruins of gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau or of the various reconstructions and models at the Auschwitz museum. On the other hand, he did reproduce the aerial photos published by Brugioni and Poirier which, if they prove anything, it’s indeed the impossibility of the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. Wellers provided only photos of crematoria building plans. He didn’t dare produce a single one of the many existing photos of the crematoria themselves. He truncated texts. I always recommend his book to those who believe the gas chambers existed.
• Even at Le Monde Juif exterminationism is beating a retreat
Georges Wellers aggravated his case in the following year. In the face of the revisionists’ progress he seems to have had a panicked reaction. He started beating a retreat in a sudden and disconcerting way. In the review that he manages he wrote the preface to a long, drawn out study whose argument, utterly unexpected, was as follows: after looking over the drawings for Kremas IV and V at Auschwitz-Birkenau and after looking over the physical reconstructions we can make on the basis of the ruins, it’s indeed necessary to bow to the facts: those structures were never designed or built otherwise than as common crematoria and not to house homicidal gas chambers. Nonetheless, as there are testimonies saying those buildings were used for gassing and then cremating thousands of people, one must believe that afterwards the Germans proceeded with transformations; however, says the author, it has to be admitted that all this exudes hasty improvisation and handiwork on the part of the Germans (Le Monde Juif, no. 107, July-September 1982, “Les ‘Krematorien’ IV et V de Birkenau et leurs chambres à gaz, construction et fonctionnement”, by Jean-Claude Pressac, p. 91-131). It’s in this study that it emerges that the only mentions or the only physical vestiges of gas chambers found at Auschwitz concern disinfestation gas chambers.
• 21 April 1982: the exterminationists establish an “Association for the search for evidence of gassings”
Nothing shows the evolution of the situation better than the fact that I’m about to relate now. One will recall the famous declaration by the 34 historians in Le Monde of February 21, 1979. Vidal-Naquet and Poliakov had taken the initiative for it. In that declaration it was said that the genocide was a self-evident truth and that one must not ask oneself (sic) how such a mass murder had been technically possible:
One must not ask oneself how, technically, such a mass murder was possible. It was technically possible since it took place. Such is the necessary point of departure for any historical inquiry on this subject. It is our job simply to recall that truth: there is not, there cannot be, any debate on the existence of the gas chambers.
It was this memorable declaration, coming from 34 historians (of whom only one, Léon Poliakov, was a specialist of the period concerned), that Lucy S. Davidowicz thought “could well serve as a guide to American historians” (Keith Stimely, “A Note From the Editor, Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1984, p. 6).
For his part, Vidal-Naquet has personally placed himself in contradiction with that statement three times. First, by inviting the signatories to set to work on the question of the gas chambers; he was to do this, unintentionally and naively, in the aforementioned book Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent, which came off the presses in January 1981. On page 196 one may read:
A good number of historians signed the declaration published in Le Monde on February 21, 1979; very few have set to work, one of the rare exceptions being F. Delpech.
Then he went into contradiction with himself by publishing “Un Eichmann de papier”. But, above all, he attained the summit of contradiction on April 21, 1982. On that day a strange entity filed its articles of association at the prefecture of police in Paris: the ASSAG (“Association for the study of killings by gas under the National-Socialist regime”). This association assigned itself the purpose, in its own words, of:
searching for and verifying data supplying evidence of the use of poison gasses by the authorities of the National Socialist regime in Europe to kill the [sic] persons of various nationalities; contributing to the publication of this evidence; establishing to this end all useful contacts on the national and international level [particularly with the international working group run by Hermann Langbein].
Among the members of this association are Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Georges Wellers, Bernard Jouanneau, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Germaine Tillion, the head of staff of the veterans ministry, an official of the ministry of culture, a former official of the interior ministry, the director of the government service for publication of general documentation (la Documentation française) and a few other celebrities. The association’s president is a Mrs Postel-Vinay. The ASSAG will be dissolved once it has finished its work. The latest information suggests that it’s become a sort of underground organisation; it is trying to hide; if someone asks her about its work, Mrs Postel-Vinay replies that the ASSAG “is in the reflection stage”.
• A big official anti-revisionist exhibition; a revisionist leaflet denounces the fakes it contains; plans to continue it are cancelled
At the same time the veterans ministry set up an event trumpeted as its response to the “trivialisation of Nazism”. This expression, which seems to have been launched by Simone Veil, first has the following meaning: people today tend to make of Nazism a banal phenomenon by minimising its horrors, which supposedly were without precedent in the history of mankind. But the expression is also used in order to avoid the word négation (i.e., denial of the Holocaust). In 1981 Alain Finkielkraut published an attack on revisionism entitled L’Avenir d une négation (I am unable to talk about this book; I don’t understand Mr Finkielkraut’s language).
The vast and costly operation mounted by the veterans ministry and, in particular, by one Miss Jacobs, was an exhibition on the wartime deportation. Set up on the Place du Trocadéro in Paris opposite the Eiffel Tower, it was scheduled to tour, afterwards, all the big cities of France. I visited the exhibition attentively, noting the sophisticated resources it had at its disposal. I discovered some fine fakes in it. With Pierre Guillaume I wrote a leaflet in which those fakes were described. Only a few copies were to be distributed (covertly, because of the police presence). The result was not long in coming. When it closed, the exhibition was transferred to a city in the west of the country (the ministry hadn’t had time to cancel the plans already made); after that, the costly exhibition definitively disappeared from the circuit. It has probably been stowed away in the veterans ministry’s furniture storerooms. Miss Jacobs responds officially that the exhibition is undergoing adjustments; the date for the completion of those adjustments is not foreseeable, she adds.
• An international symposium at the Sorbonne oriented against revisionism ends on an acknowledgement of failure
The anti-revisionist offensive was to reach its height with the international symposium on “Nazi Germany and the extermination of the Jews” held at the Sorbonne, under the aegis of the University of Paris, the school of advanced studies in social sciences (EHESS) and… the Fondation du judaïsme, from June 29 to July 2, 1982. Vidal-Naquet, professor of ancient history at the EHESS, was the kingpin of the event. It was presided over by Raymond Aron and Francois Furet, both of Jewish origin as were Vidal-Naquet himself and a good part of the participants. I asked to take part in this symposium or to attend on condition, if necessary, of not speaking. Furet refused me even that silent presence because he’d read some of our writings, knew that I denied the existence of the crematoria (sic) and because I was considered an impostor by the scholarly community. Try as I might to impress on him that the best way to expose an impostor was to let him come explain himself in public, Furet maintained his refusal. R. Aron, though a man of no little subtlety, responded: “You understand, there are some truths that are established for always.”
The gathering was held in an astonishing setting of police measures and frisking, at the entrance, of attendees by youths from the Fondation du judaïsme. Parking was prohibited along the pavements of the Sorbonne. In spite of all this, Pierre Guillaume and I managed to make a brief incursion into the hall, time enough to hand out a few copies of my Réponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet (a little book that had just come out), including one for the interested party himself, who thought I was dead. The guards went through several days haunted by fear of a possible appearance of those whom they called the “Faurissonians”. The symposium, as we were to learn through various channels, turned into a fiasco and a dispute. First there came the picturesque split between “intentionalists” and “functionalists” of the final solution; this phenomenon of historians transforming into metaphysicians proved the state of decay of the exterminationist thesis. Vidal-Naquet was insulted and called a “Faurissonian” – supreme affront –, for having written “Un Eichmann de Papier”. Raymond Aron and Francois Furet, who, at bottom, knew nothing about the history of the alleged genocide, steadily discovered that the exterminationist thesis rested in large part on speculations and assumptions rather than on historically established facts. It was planned that, in order to give it greater media resonance, the symposium would be followed by a press conference. Vidal-Naquet did not appear at it. Professors Furet and Aron were alone in holding this conference which, with their consent, we were able to have audio recorded by an Australian friend. From this it emerged that the two professors had just discovered that, “despite the most erudite research”, it hadn’t been possible to find an order from Hitler to exterminate the Jews. Better still, Raymond Aron declared: “In the conduct [of the extermination] no personal activity of Hitler has been found”. Asked about the actions brought against Faurisson, the two professors answered that in their own personal opinion they were absurd, Raymond Aron beginning a sentence as follows:
I find it absurd that Jewish organisations should [hesitation], … [inaudible]
The context leads one to think that the missing words were “bring legal actions” or some such terms. The two professors even risked stating that it seemed Vidal-Naquet himself was perhaps averse to those actions. However, Vidal-Naquet had, in fact, from 1979 to 1982 played the role of a prosecutor or political commissar in all my cases.
“Generous ministerial subsidies” were allocated for the symposium’s organisation and for the publication, by Gallimard, of a thick scholarly book (see Bulletin du Centre de Recherches et d’études historiques de la seconde guerre mondiale, Brussels, no. 12, December 1982, p. 8-9 – article by José Gotovich). But the book has yet to be released.
• Two interviews with Raul Hilberg show his disarray
Before that symposium French journalist Guy Sitbon, of Jewish origin, the Nouvel-Observateur‘s permanent correspondent in the United States, had had an interview with Raul Hilberg. I’d like to see that interview published in English. Guy Sitbon works for the weekly that, in 1979, attacked me the most strongly, but this had been the opportunity for me to enter into contact with certain journalists from the Nouvel-Observateur and, in particular, with its managing editor, Jean Daniel; I had an exchange of letters with the latter which, I think, aroused his indignation, distressed him and instructed him. In his interview with Hilberg, Sitbon didn’t spare the historian and, on the question of the gas chambers, it may be said that Sitbon put Hilberg’s back to the wall. It’s since that interview that the French have been able to realise that Hilberg has no argument in favour of the gas chambers’ existence. At least, he was obviously not in a position, in my view, to provide Sitbon with a single one (Le Nouvel-Observateur, Le Document de la semaine, “Les Archives de l’horreur”, interview with Raul Hilberg, July 3-9, 1982, p. 70-73, 75-76). In passing, Hilberg said with regard to the revisionists:
I would say that, in a way, Faurisson and others, without wanting to, have rendered us a service. They’ve raised questions that have had the effect of making historians engage in new research. They’ve obliged historians to gather more information, re-examine documents and go further in the understanding of what took place (page 71).
Another interview with Hilberg is interesting, but to a lesser degree because the interviewer was not so well acquainted with the subject as Guy Sitbon. See, all the same: Newsday (Long Island, New York), February 23, 1983, page II/3, “The Holocaust in Perspective”, by George DeWan, with this passage on the genocide:
But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organised centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus there came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.
Of course, it would be appreciated if Raul Hilberg now rewrote his book on the destruction of the European Jews in light of the new vision he gives us there. The “step by step” would be interesting to examine, notably the “step” that apparently saw German bureaucrats decide on the construction of the gas chambers, which, being physical realities, would, in order to be designed, built and put into operation, have needed innovative technical studies, aerial view drawings, detailed plans, purely technical coordination among engineers, architects, physicians specialised in toxicology and military men, not to mention the authorisations of delivery of material in wartime, the work or inspection assignments, an enormous budget, an agreement with the German railways, with the factories producing coke, with the company Topf und Söhne, with the DEGESCH, DEGUSSA and a number of other chemical firms, and all this, of course, with draconian measures to assure the secrecy of preparatory works on the gas chambers (which is, perhaps, not at all impossible) and the secrecy of their operation (which is formidably difficult) as well as, in the event of military defeat followed by the enemy’s opening of all the archives, the disappearance of the least trace of the most tremendous crime of all time (which is humanly impossible). Hilberg has some work ahead of him, if only on the gas chamber “step”; he ought to suspend all other research in favour of that research.
• Signs of progress of historical revisionism in France
Edgar Morin, sociologist with a wide reputation and of Jewish origin, wrote the following sentence in his book Pour sortir du XXe siècle (Fernand Nathan, Paris 1981, p. 192):
It is important, in my opinion, to re-verify the gas chamber in the Nazi camps.
That singular form of “the gas chamber” has some importance. Edgar Morin has done specialised studies of the phenomenon of rumours. If he speaks of “the gas chamber” it’s because, for him, it is a question of the gas chamber as a (possible) mental representation.
August von Kageneck is Paris correspondent of Die Welt. In his appearances on French television he is not soft on the Nazis. However, in January 1983 he published in Le Quotidien de Paris (January 22, 1983, p. 4) an article entitled “The revisionist danger”, writing:
“Revisionists” are making their appearance and putting into doubt the criminal character of the Nazi regime […]. For them, there was no plan of extermination for the Jews; their tragedy (if tragedy there was, for the death camps are an invention of the Jews) was the consequence of the war imposed upon Germany. – Such arguments are dangerous, for they contain a kernel of truth […]. It would therefore be wise to examine seriously certain of these arguments and separate the wheat from the chaff.
On April 27, 1983, for the first time, I suppose, an Arabic language magazine of good bearing published a very carefully done interview, with photos of a real American gas chamber, a fumigation chamber at Auschwitz and the fake gas chamber at Auschwitz-I under the title:
Professor Faurisson: “The Nazi gas chambers and the genocide of the Jews: historical lie” (Kol Al Arab, no. 35 (April 27, 1983), p. 47-53.
On June 15, 1983 Le Monde, on page 10, reported that, on the occasion of Klaus Barbie’s extradition, Monsignor Albert Decourtray, archbishop of Lyon, denounced
the powerful and disquieting contemporary trend of trivialising Nazism, to which Christians cannot consent.
Revisionism has recently made its entrance in a history manual for students preparing for the baccalauréat exam. It is, of course, denounced as a danger. Here are the terms used:
The impossible forgetting. – Nearly forty years after the liberation of the camps by the Allies, the “revisionists” continue to deny the genocide and seek to rehabilitate the Nazis, despite the numerous testimonies, documents and historical works attesting to its truth. It is therefore fitting to recall forcefully that the Nazi leaders did indeed order, organise and have their men carry out the Holocaust from 1941 onwards. As early as 1942 the whole world had at its disposal information on the extermination underway. The Germans knew: “One mustn’t believe those who claim they did not know”, declared Dr Frank at the Nuremberg trial. The neutral countries, the Red Cross, the Churches, the Vatican, the Allies knew, but the “terrible secret” was suppressed until the Liberation (Histoire, for final year secondary school classes, ABC Editions, 1983, p. 36).
Sometimes the journalists seem to feel discomfort about using the expression “gas chambers”. André Wurmser, in the communist party’s newspaper L’Humanité (“Grandes manœuvres”, May 3, 1983, p. 1), refers to “the crematoria and the torture chambers”.
A significant phenomenon on what is called the far right (which represents about 2% of the French electorate) is its recent emerging from the reserve and fear in which it long remained. A quality weekly like Rivarol has ended up talking about the revisionists, even making some interesting revelations. In an article entitled “La vérité au compte-gouttes” (The truth one drop at a time), the eminent critic Robert Poulet writes:
I know leading historians, specialists of the period 1933-1945, who say they find it “impossible at present to say what [they] really think, because it would not be accepted by the public, even the most cultivated”. They have decided “to prepare the public gradually” for an evolution whose outcome they do not expect – beyond the lies and prejudices that fill the newspapers and the libraries – until many years hence. (Rivarol, 25 February 1983, p. 11)
Jacques Benoist-Méchin, recently deceased, wrote a monumental Histoire de l’armée allemande; in 1966 he’d published the sixth volume, which stopped at September 3, 1939. Rivarol, just after his death, ran a piece by barrister Charles Filippi revealing why Benoist-Méchin had interrupted his work at that date. Here is the answer he’d given in writing to his friend Filippi:
It’s that, for the first time in history, a point has been reached where one can no longer write history without making oneself the accomplice of an enormous lie […] Maurice Bardèche was imprisoned for having denounced the Nuremberg mascarade. Thirty-five years later it was Professor Faurisson who was not only made the object of public loathing but was also even deprived of his teaching position [here Benoist-Méchin is in error] for not accepting the sole authorised version of the camps and the gas chambers. That’s the explanation for my silence. (Rivarol, “Les Raisons d’un silence”, February 11, 1983, p. 9)
Was the late Jacques Benoist-Méchin too pessimistic?
A French historian, brave but highly cautious, has just published in Le Figaro (July 8, 1983, p. 2) a deft review of Serge Klarsfeld’s recent book on Vichy and the Jews (Vichy-Auschwitz, Fayard, Paris, 544 p.). He subtly unmasks Klarsfeld as an “avenger” who tries to pass himself off as a historian and whose publisher does not shrink from photographic manipulation, “bookshop subterfuge”. This historian, who himself has in the past happened to commit grave errors along exterminationist lines, is Henri Amouroux, author of a remarkable series, not yet finished, entitled La Grande histoire des Français sous l’occupation (published by Robert Laffont). But Klarsfeld himself at times follows the revisionist example and begins a rough verification of what he publishes. In Vichy-Auschwitz he took it into his head to acknowledge that the photos alleged to show the Jews penned up in the Vélodrome d’hiver in Paris in 1942 (photos seen throughout the world and featured in many books and museums) in actual fact showed “collaborators” of the Germans penned up in the Vélodrome d’hiver in 1944! It remains for Klarsfeld to stop cropping the photographs from Drancy to make them appear pathetic. Above all it remains for him, perhaps, to bring back to life all the Jews he presented as dead in his Mémorial de la déportation des juifs de France without seriously ascertaining whether they were dead.
Even the duettists Michael R. Marrus of the University of Toronto and Robert O. Paxton of Columbia University, both specialists in contemporary French history, are moving in a revisionist direction; their recent study on “The Nazis and the Jews in occupied Western Europe, 1940-1944” (Journal of Modern History, University of Chicago, no. 54, December 1982, p. 687-714) leaves the impression that the purported desire to exterminate the Jews was a relative failure. They recognise that in France, a country so long occupied by the Germans, only about a fifth of the Jews (French, foreign, stateless, indeterminate) were deported, which implies that the other approximately four fifths were not: odd result of an alleged desire for systematic extermination. That said, their study still brims over with war propaganda fabrications. For example, if, on page 714, they write that on October 24, 1944
the death factory in Poland had only days left to function
this can only be an allusion to Himmler’s order to put an end to the extermination of the Jews by gassing: a purely mythical order dated, with precision, November 22 (or November 25), 1944. Historians have long known that that order can never have been given (see the well-known thesis of Olga Wormser-Migot, Le Système concentrationnaire nazi, 1933-1945, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1968, p. 13).
A certain courage is starting to show itself in France. The most spectacular fact in this regard is not lacking in picturesqueness. The magazine Lui, a French equivalent of Playboy, which, amidst sprightly articles and photos of nudes, is in the habit of presenting interviews with political personalities on weighty topics, has just published a remarkable one with Léon Degrelle who, as those familiar with his writings would expect, found evocative phrases to express his scepticism, if not his utter non-belief, concerning the gas chambers (Lui, no. 233, June 1983, p. 73-78).
This courage is contagious. In a substantially different field, Klaus Barbie’s barrister, Jacques Vergès, instead of playing the usual lawyers’ game in vogue since the 1944-45 Liberation, i.e. consistently steering clear of any prickly facts, has pointed out that his client is in prison by virtue of a law that doesn’t exist in France; in effect never, it seems, has the French parliament voted a law on the so-called crimes “against humanity”; there therefore exist no sentencing guidelines and Barbie is in prison only on account of crimes that he’s said to have committed “against humanity”. It seems that one of the milieus most touched by historical revisionism’s still modest influence is that of the lawyers and judges in Paris and Lyon.
• Simone Veil’s growing disquiet: for her, there are no witnesses and no evidence of the gas chambers because the Nazis did away with all of them and all of it
Simone Veil shows a growing disquiet in the face of what she calls the “trivialisation of Nazism”. Two weeks after the Paris court of appeal’s decision of April 26, 1983, France-Soir magazine ran an interview with her (May 7, 1983, p. 47); the title was “Simone Veil’s warning about the Hitler diaries: ‘There’s a risk of trivialising the genocide'”. Here’s how she linked my civil case to the Hitler diaries affair. The connection of the ideas is not too clear but the person’s disquiet is, all the same, still quite apparent:
What strikes me today is the paradox of the situation: a diary attributed to Hitler is brought out with big publicity and lots of money without, it seems, any great precautions taken to be sure of its authenticity but, at the same time, in the course of proceedings against Faurisson for having denied the existence of the gas chambers, those who bring the action are required to produce formal proof of the reality of the gas chambers. However, everybody knows that the Nazis destroyed those gas chambers and systematically eliminated the witnesses.
I shall make a few remarks about this reaction of hers to the civil case:
- “Everybody knows” is not a serious argument;
- It is paradoxical that Simone Veil, trained as a judge, should be surprised at an accuser’s being asked to try to supply proof for his accusation;
- The lawyers for the opposing side, amongst whom was a son of Mrs Veil, had maintained for four years that there was a mass of proof and an abundance of testimonies on the gas chambers’ existence; according to a statement by Mr Jean Pierre-Bloch, “the best lawyers” of the LICRA, “Messrs Jouanneau, Badinter and Marc Lévy”, had been sent to Poland and Jerusalem to gather such evidence; the court of first instance and the court of appeal had been inundated with a flood of documents; the opposing side had requested and obtained the forwarding, from the directorate of French military justice, of an enormous dossier: that of one of the Natzweiler-Struthof trials; we’d demonstrated the fallacious character of that alleged evidence and those alleged testimonies; would Simone Veil perhaps be implicitly admitting that we are right?
- Simone Veil’s way out of the problem posed by this absence of evidence and witnesses is illusory; it consists, in effect, in substituting one accusation with no proof for another accusation with no proof, for where is the evidence that the Germans destroyed those gas chambers and systematically did away with the witnesses?
- One would be curious to know what Mrs Veil thinks now about the premises presented today as gas chambers (“in their original state” or even in a state of ruins) and what credit she accords to the countless written or oral testimonies, beginning with Filip Müller’s Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, which has won, by unanimous vote, the LICRA’s “Bernard Lecache” award;
- Finally, and above all, if there is neither evidence, nor testimonies, what do we have before us?
Conclusion
The foreseeable future – It is dark for the exterminationists
and especially for Élie Wiesel
To the extent that one can predict the future of a phenomenon in full transformation, I’d say that the future of the revisionist phenomenon will depend in great part on the international political situation and, in particular, on the situation in the Near East. The State of Israel is obliged to find a way of dealing with the accelerated cracking of its founding myth. We don’t yet know whether parts of the Arab-Islamic world are going to espouse the discoveries of historical revisionism. It’s certain that, in western countries, the noise made around the Holocaust will go on escalating. Still more billions are going to be spent in attempts to damp the revisionist murmur. Scalded by the failure of the attempt at legal repression in France, the Holocaust lobby will hesitate to use that weapon again in a direct way. What’s to be expected is rather an uninterrupted series of Hollywood output of all kinds. I personally await with curiosity the construction of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. How are those people going to try to make us believe in the gas chambers? For them, France has been a terrain for manoeuvres and a testing ground; they’ve suffered serious reversals on all points. To take but this example, if the Memorial authorities decide to show visitors any document, any photo claiming to establish the existence of a single homicidal gas chamber, it will be easy to expose the trickery with a single leaflet. They will be bound to beat a retreat on that point as did those who, in Paris, with lots of money and a hundred sponsors in official quarters, were forced to abandon their big exhibition [launched at the Place de Trocadéro in April 1982].
We in France have undergone trial by fire and the revisionist case has proved its solidity, but one mustn’t conceal the negative side of the account: the wearing down of nerves and health, the losses of money and the considerable loss of time required to carry on with our research. For two years at least the gas chambers, as Dr Butz says, have been “overkilled”. For two years I’ve been forced to waste my time. I no longer feel any intellectual curiosity on the subject. I’d like to turn my attention to the following question: “How many Jews died at the hands of the Germans during the last war?” I would undertake that inquiry on other bases than those that, up to now, have generally been used, in particular by Paul Rassinier and Walter N. Sanning.
Lastly, we’ll try to find the means to publish three books in translation: Dr Butz’s Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which worries Vidal-Naquet very much; Dr Wilhelm Stäglich’s The Auschwitz Myth and, finally, our Gerstein specialist’s doctoral thesis. Proof of the difficulties we encounter is illustrated by the fact that Dr Butz’s book should already have been published five years ago, and Dr Stäglich’s three years ago.
In France 1983-1984 will not be dull: an important meeting will take place between Élie Wiesel and François Mitterrand who, together and probably with Max Gallo, will likely mount a vast operation of exterminationist propaganda. Wiesel comes onto television nearly every Sunday to talk to the French. It would seem that the revisionists never left his thoughts. In 1982 he published in French the book Paroles d’étranger (Seuil, Paris, 192 p.). On pages 23, 91-94, and 103, he uses the following terms to talk about the revisionists:
indecent pamphleteers with morally deranged minds; [authors of] pamphlets; pseudo-historians; those hateful and fractious persons; it is enough to make one take leave of one’s senses; this whole affair is matter of insanity; vulgarity; disgusting ugliness; indecent accusers…
Élie Wiesel has settled into a role that he won’t be relinquishing any time soon: that of professional witness. Applied to this man, the word “witness” is to be taken in a particular sense. The witnesses he claims to have met are also of a particular sort. In the same book he evokes Babi-Yar, that place where the Germans shot Soviets, Jewish or non-Jewish. For him, Babi-Yar is above all a shrine of the Jewish martyrdom. There, the earth itself, he assures us, was able to protest against the shedding of Jewish blood. So it is that he proceeds to write:
Later, I learned from a witness that [after a mass execution of Jews], for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted out (p. 86).
Wiesel didn’t let those words slip whilst hallucinating a moment. They were first either typewritten or put down in longhand in a text that was then set in print for proofreading, doubtless more than once, and finally published. Such is the Chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust chosen by Mr Jimmy Carter.
Élie Wiesel, if I may be allowed to use a familiar expression, is suffering from an awful thorn in his foot: the revisionist thorn. He’s tried by every means to get rid of it. He hasn’t succeeded. He doesn’t see how he’ll be able to get rid of it – sees less and less how, in fact. In this respect he’s like the revisionists who don’t see at all how Élie Wiesel will get rid of the revisionist thorn, either.
In conclusion, what’s important and what will remain of the events of these last four years (1979-1983) is not the vagaries of justice, the questions of rights and law; what was at stake was not the law but history. (What can be written on the subject? How to write it? Who has the right to do so? What evidence and what witness accounts can be used?) Our opponents were just as aware of this fact as we were. It was they who chose the venues of the discussion. Ever since their position was first subjected to dispute, they’ve stubbornly rejected the idea of holding of a debate on the controversy over this point of history in the public forum, as is usually done in such a case. They’ve refused any face to face encounter. They’ve even purely and simply refused discussions with their opponents of a private nature and on a civil footing. They haven’t wanted to defend their position before challengers who would have forced them to answer questions and to take, with no dodging, responsibility for their answers or their non-answers.
So it was that the debate found itself brought before the courts. It was the exterminationists who took that initiative. Not we. They sought a venue where the game was, with certainty, fixed beforehand. We had no other choice but to fight on that field, firstly because we were literally bound to do so through the legal system itself and also because we were denied any other encounter. We bowed before force, whatever our wish for another outcome may have been. We had to fight and fight we did. The result is there: on our opponents’ own ground and with the weapons of their choosing, we carried the day. This victory is to be credited not so much to case law as to historiography, and historians will remember the manner in which this historical controversy was debated and how it found its conclusion.
If the exterminationists haven’t been able to win the day and if they haven’t been able to get rid of the revisionists in a situation where they enjoyed all the advantages, how will things turn out for them in the debate that is now, progressively, going to open in public view and in full light of day?
Appendices
1. My lawyers’ tactic
In the civil action brought against me for “personal injury” for an alleged “falsification of history,” I was defended by two barristers of differing opinions: Éric Delcroix, a man of the right, and Yvon Chotard, a man of the left and friend of Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit. I owe them a great deal. Both had to face grave difficulties as soon as they took up my defence.
In first instance, I left the choice of system of defence to them. They had at their disposal my Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’Histoire as well as a certain number of technical and scientific studies I’d written in reply to our opponents’ arguments. Éric Delcroix’s tactic consisted in using that documentation, with which he had become familiar, so as to defend the following idea: a court has no jurisdiction in historical matters. Yvon Chotard didn’t want to debate about technique but, simply, develop the following argument: even if Professor Faurisson is wrong, the court must protect his right to free expression.
For the appeal, I asked my two lawyers to take a more aggressive position and draw inspiration from the following sentence:
Professor Faurisson says that gas chambers and genocide did not exist for the good and simple reason that gas chambers and genocide did not exist.
Éric Delcroix said he agreed but Yvon Chotard refused: I think he wasn’t sure of my honesty and that, by dint of hearing my opponents call me a forger, he was wondering whether I was one. He went so far as to send me a study, written by himself, of the diary of Professor Johann-Paul Kremer, the man who for several weeks had been a physician at Auschwitz. In that study, he concluded that Kremer had witnessed gassings! I returned his study to him after having corrected it. Following long discussions and, in part, thanks to arguments found by Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit in support of my interpretation, Yvon Chotard made his conversion. The result of this complete about-turn was an important one. Indeed, Yvon Chotard started developing the revisionist thesis with such conviction before the court of appeal that a lawyer for the opposing side, Mr Rappaport, couldn’t help showing his surprise when beginning his pleading with the words:
You’ve changed a great deal, Mr Chotard, since the last time; you have really changed a great deal!
The appeal judges thus grasped that in the lower court trial Yvon Chotard had shown his scepticism with regard to the revisionist thesis but that, with time, he’d become convinced of the validity of that thesis.
I likewise owe many thanks to the lawyer of the publisher La Vieille Taupe, François Berthout who, for his part, was fully convinced of the soundness of the revisionist case, and knew how to show it, not without humour, in his pleading.
2. The voluntary third-party appearance of Pierre Guillaume and his friends of “La Vieille Taupe” and the support I’ve found beyond France
In France I was confronting such a powerful coalition of diverse interests that, without Pierre Guillaume and his friends, I would have been crushed. Amongst his friends I am especially indebted to Serge Thion, Jacob Assous, Denis Authier, Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Maurice Di Scuillo, Jean-Luc Redlinski, Gabor Tamas Rittersporn, Claude Karnoouh, Jean-Louis Tristani, José Benhamou, Marc R.; to my former students Cécile D., Dominique M., Jean-Pierre C., and to a good number of other French people whose names I cannot disclose. Abroad, I am particularly indebted to my Dutch, Belgian, German and Austrian friends. In Australia, I’ve found two significant sources of support in John Bennett and William Skyvington. In the United States, I owe a great deal to Dr Arthur Butz and Mark Weber, not to forget, of course, other members of the Institute for Historical Review. It was Mark Weber who took the initiative of drawing up the following petition which, in 1979, was quickly to garner 600 signatures:
DR ROBERT FAURISSON HAS SERVED AS A RESPECTED PROFESSOR OF TWENTIETH CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE AND DOCUMENT CRITICISM FOR OVER FOUR YEARS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LYON-2 IN FRANCE. SINCE 1974 HE HAS BEEN CONDUCTING EXTENSIVE INDEPENDENT RESEARCH INTO THE “HOLOCAUST” QUESTION.
SINCE HE BEGAN MAKING HIS FINDINGS PUBLIC, PROFESSOR FAURISSON HAS BEEN SUBJECT TO A VICIOUS CAMPAIGN OF HARASSMENT, INTIMIDATION, SLANDER AND PHYSICAL VIOLENCE IN A CRUDE ATTEMPT TO SILENCE HIM. FEARFUL OFFICIALS HAVE EVEN TRIED TO STOP HIM FROM FURTHER RESEARCH BY DENYING HIM ACCESS TO PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES.
WE STRONGLY PROTEST AGAINST THESE EFFORTS TO DEPRIVE PROFESSOR FAURISSON OF HIS FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND EXPRESSION, AND WE CONDEMN THE SHAMEFUL CAMPAIGN TO SILENCE HIM.
WE STRONGLY SUPPORT PROFESSOR FAURISSON’S JUST RIGHT OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND WE DEMAND THAT UNIVERSITY AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO ENSURE HIS SAFETY AND THE FREE EXERCISE OF HIS LEGAL RIGHTS.
Dr Noam Chomsky signed that petition. Subsequently, he took up my defence without letting himself be swayed otherwise, and this despite his disagreement with the revisionist thesis.
3. Key Excerpt* from the April 26, 1983 decision of the Paris court of appeal: French citizens henceforth have the right to deny the existence of the alleged gas chambers
“… Mr Faurisson’s research has addressed the existence of the gas chambers which, if the many testimonies are to be believed, would seem to have been used during the Second World War to put to death systematically some of the persons deported by the German authorities.;
Confining ourselves for the time being to the historical problem that Mr Faurisson has wished to raise, it is fitting to note that the accusations of nonchalance made against him are lacking in pertinence and are not sufficiently proved; in fact, Mr Faurisson’s logical approach consists in attempting to demonstrate, by an argumentation [that he deems to be]** of scientific nature, that the existence of the gas chambers, as usually described since 1945, runs into an absolute impossibility, which would be sufficient by itself to invalidate all of the existing testimonies or, at least, to render them suspect;
… it is not for the court to rule on the legitimacy of such a method or on the import of the arguments put forth by Mr Faurisson, nor is it any more permissible for the court, in view of the nature of the research in which he has engaged, to state that Faurisson has dismissed the testimonies by nonchalance or negligence, or deliberately chosen to ignore them;
… moreover, no-one, as things stand, can rule that he has lied when he enumerates the many documents that he claims to have studied and the institutes where he supposedly made inquiries for more than fourteen years;
… The value of the findings defended by Mr Faurisson is therefore a matter to be left solely to the experts, the historians and the public.;…”
* The full text may be found in J. Aitken, Épilogue judiciaire de l’affaire Faurisson [Judicial Epilogue to the Faurisson Affair], La Vieille Taupe, Paris 1983, pages 12-13.
** The words in brackets were a handwritten addition to the original printed text.