Robert Faurisson at the second Zündel trial in Toronto (1988) – Part 2/4

Extract from the transcripts as edited by Barbara Kulaszka, “Did Six Million Really Die?” Report of the Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel – 1988, p. 624-662.

April 13, 1988 (continued)

Faurisson had been so surprised when he read this quote that he had checked with Dr. Robert John, a member of the Institute for Historical Review who attended the conference, to make sure Hilberg had actually said it. John had also been extremely surprised by Hilberg’s statement. (30-8159)

“I don’t call that history,” said Faurisson, “I call that metaphysics… I don’t know any bureaucrat practising his job like that. What does it mean, ‘an incredible meeting of minds‘? People… know of no plan. Nothing is organized. Do you imagine a bureaucracy, especially in a country like Germany? In the army? And everywhere? People would act by what?… by mind-reading… I don’t believe that, of course, but I see in what situation is Hilberg, in what situation are all those exterminationists. They don’t find anything. So, they do like historian[s] did in the last centuries, they replace that by metaphysics. There is no proof. If you would ask Mr. Hilberg, ‘But what proof did you have of a meeting of minds?, of mind-reading?’, he would say, ‘You know that [there] couldn’t be any proof.'” (30-8159, 8160)

Christie turned to the subject of the Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) of 1948. Faurisson was familiar with the report and its contents. In the entire files of the Red Cross published before the war was finished, said Faurisson, there was no mention made of gas chambers. After the war, there was one mention made of a gas chamber at Ravensbrück on page 96 of the book entitled The Work of the ICRC for Civilian Detainees in German Concentration Camps from 1939 to 1945, Geneva, 1975, where the Red Cross delegate wrote:

As I left the camp, I almost asked Suhrens [commandant of the camp] to show me the gas chamber and crematorium, but did not. Some time later, in May, I met a woman clad in rags in a Berlin street. On her back she bore the concentration camp sign, a large X. She told me she had come on foot from Ravensbrück (about 100 km) and that the camp had been liberated by the Russians. She was an Austrian who had been put in the camp, she said, merely because she had a Jewish husband. As she stormed about “those SS swine”, I asked her to tell me where the crematorium and the gas chamber had been. “Under the big square”, she answered.

A historian specializing in Ravensbrück, Germaine Tillion, claimed in her 1973 book, Ravensbrück, that there was a gas chamber in the camp. Faurisson pointed out that there was no indication on the plan of Ravensbrück of a ‘gas chamber’ and today no one claimed that Ravensbrück had a gas chamber. (30-8163)

To Faurisson’s knowledge, the Red Cross never published any reports about the atrocities suffered by the Germans at the end of the war or about the deportations of the Germans from the east or about the treatment of German prisoners of war during the war. Faurisson found the last omission surprising “because I know one case of eighty German soldiers shot by the French Resistance on the 1st of September, 1944, near the town of Annecy… and I know that the Red Cross endeavoured to try to avoid this execution, so I suppose that there is a report about that, but not a published report.” (30-8164)

Faurisson had been able to obtain the actual report of the Red Cross delegate who visited Auschwitz in September of 1944. The delegate was Dr. Rossel. Faurisson attempted to ask him questions by way of questionnaire, but Rossel did not want to talk. The report was edited before publication in the ICRC reports. (30-8165 to 8167)

The Red Cross made no distinction between inmates of the concentration camps who were political detainees and those who were common criminals; to the Red Cross, they were all “persecutees.” (30-8167)

Faurisson had also investigated the International Tracing Service (ITS) at Arolsen, West Germany. The ITS, said Faurisson, was under the surveillance of ten governments, among them France, Great Britain, the United States and Israel. It was now very difficult to get into Arolsen to do any research. Since about 1978 Arolsen had been basically closed to the historical researcher. (30-8168)

Prior to that, in 1977, the then Director of the ITS, Albert de Cocatrix, published a paper entitled “The Number of Victims of the National Socialist Persecutions” at a conference in Vienna. This paper stated quite clearly Cocatrix’s belief in the gas chambers and the genocide, but indicated that it dealt only with the number of people who died and were registered. The people who were gassed were allegedly not registered. The number of deaths for Auschwitz was given at 50,000. In Faurisson’s opinion, the paper was valuable in giving an idea of how many people actually died in the camp. (30-8168 to 8171)

After this conference, said Faurisson, the ITS decided to close itself to the researcher. He could no longer obtain its annual report which was very valuable not only for its statistics but for its description of German documents. Up until 1978, there was a historical section at the ITS where one could go and work. That too had been closed. Today, to work in Arolsen, Faurisson would have to obtain the permission of his government. Some historians had gained access and credited Arolsen with information they had obtained. (30-8171)

Christie turned to the subject of the Hans Frank diary and asked Faurisson to explain the diary’s significance. “Hans Frank was governor of Poland,” said Faurisson, “He was arrested by the American, and he gave to the American his own diary. In fact, personal diary and official diary, something like 11,500 pages, I think, and he was very proud of it. He was tortured by two American soldiers, tried to commit suicide.” Faurisson had obtained this information from Rupert Butler’s Legions of Death. (30-8172)

Faurisson continued: “And then, in the Nuremberg trial, he was asked if he considered himself as guilty or not, and he said not guilty, and then they brought in[to] the International Military Tribunal, Rudolf Hoess, who testified, and Hans Frank was absolutely overwhelmed. He believed what Hoess said about Auschwitz, about those millions of people killed… It was a shock for himself, and he believed it, and he said Germany is guilty for one thousand years. But this man said ‘I never heard about any extermination, extermination camp’, and Auschwitz was very close to the Government-General of Poland… It was in Upper Silesia… something like 50 km…” (30-8172, 8173)

The significance of the Hans Frank diary, said Faurisson, was that, in Frank’s opinion, “there was nothing in these 11,500 pages which could be against him, but when he heard the testimony of Hoess… he said that he was overwhelmed and that he was ashamed of the words that he has used against the Jews, some strong words, because he didn’t mean it. It’s like every military people or in the propaganda. You use very strong words against your enemy, and that’s the case of Hans Frank, who was condemned to death and hanged. And I don’t think that we can say for one minute that there is something in those 11,500 pages which are a proof, any proof, of an extermination programme. Even we know that Hans Frank heard about Belzec, rumours about Belzec, and he says, ‘I went on the spot to try to see what was true or not’, and he says that on the spot he found Jews working there… but nothing like an extermination… if there had been anything about an extermination, we would have the proof of an extermination. We wouldn’t have a dispute between intentionalists and functionalists.” (30-8173, 8174)

What was Faurisson’s opinion of the Wannsee Conference protocol?, asked Christie. Faurisson replied that since his expertise was text and document criticism and not forensic analysis of paper and ink, etc., he proceeded on the assumption that the document was genuine. His opinion was that it might be genuine, but in any event, he did not find anything in the protocol which proved extermination. (30-8175)

Faurisson quoted the paragraph of the protocol which set out what was supposedly decided at Wannsee on January 20, 1942:

Under proper direction, the Jews shall now, in the course of the final solution, be taken to the East and put to work in a suitable way. In big labour columns, with separation of the sexes, the Jews capable of work will be conducted to these areas, building roads whereby undoubtedly a large part will be lost through natural decrease. The total remnant that finally in any case will remain, since this is undoubtedly the part with the strongest resistance, will have to be treated accordingly, since the latter, representing a natural selection, is to be regarded, upon release, as the nucleus of a new Jewish revival. (See the experience of history.)

This meant, said Faurisson, that the Jews would be taken to eastern Poland or Russia where they would be exploited for German industry and armaments. As in any prison, the sexes would be separated. The work would be terrible; there would be losses through natural decrease, and only the strong would survive. (30-8176, 8177)

It was the last sentence which was said to have the “terrible significance,” said Faurisson. In his opinion, it signified that there would be a release, a liberation, of the remnant of the Jews who were to be regarded and treated as the best. It was an idea, said Faurisson, “which is at the same time National Socialist, Zionist, and in a certain way, it’s stoic and Christian; the idea that if the people suffer very much, they will be better. And that’s why the word used there is ‘Jewish revival’, which is, in German, Aufbau… It’s the title of a famous Jewish newspaper today in New York, ‘Revival’.” (30-8178)

In Faurisson’s opinion, since the Stuttgart Conference these words no longer constituted a plan of extermination in the minds of functionalists. The Wannsee protocol was now seen as a decision to send the Jews to the east, an idea found constantly among the Germans. Hitler, in his confidential table talks, said things like: “‘Those filthy Jews, after the war, I want them to get away and to go… to Madagascar… or any other place.'” (30-8178)

Many historians had not translated the words “upon release” or the words “see the experience of history.” The translation of the document done for the International Military Tribunal by the Americans (IMT vol. 5) did not include the words “upon release,” nor did it use three dots to indicate that part of the original was not translated. The words had been completely suppressed. (30-8179)

What, asked Christie, did Faurisson think of the theory regarding the ‘nod of Adolf Hitler’? Faurisson replied that this theory meant that “Hitler didn’t sign anything, didn’t even express an order orally… but [gave] a nod…” (30-8179)

How effective would a nod be in moving trains and ordering people’s executions?, asked Christie. “Or anything,” agreed Faurisson, “If even I wanted to give any order – Please bring me some water – if I [did it with] simply a nod, I [don’t] see [how] other people will understand. Society is not like that. The army is not like that. But I find normal that those historian who first didn’t find any written order decided to say, ‘Oh, but Hitler gave an oral order’. Then they saw that it was difficult to say that also, so the third stage is, and the last one, I think, is the nod of Hitler, and we have even worse than that. We have in Browning, in Dr. Browning’s book, the idea that Frank anticipated the nod of Hitler. He received signals. I don’t understand what it means.” (30-8180)

Christie asked Faurisson for his opinion on the use of euphemisms. Faurisson testified that a word like Sonderbehandlung which meant “special treatment” meant different things according to context. It might mean execution, but it could also mean exactly the opposite: “For instance,” said Faurisson, “the young Jew who, in November 1938 murdered a German diplomat in Paris, his name was Grynzpan… when the Germans came to France, they caught Grynzpan. He was the man who had killed this German, and the consequence had been after the famous ‘Crystal Night’, when the German[s], exasperated, did this kind of pogrom against the Jews. So, Grynzpan was somebody important. He survived all the war. He was in the concentration camp, and he had the right to a Sonderbehandlung which means… special treatment and ample food.” (30-8181,8182)

Euphemisms meant, in fact, much more terrible things than they seemed to say, said Faurisson, but to go as far as to say that a word meant “extermination” or “gassing,” which was such a grave accusation, then the historian must have proof. There was nothing which gave historians the right to make such accusations. (30-8182, 8183)

Faurisson found it extraordinary that Dr. Browning, who had written a book about the extermination of the Jews, had never visited a concentration camp or gone to see the alleged gas chambers in Auschwitz, or Majdanek, or Stutthof, or Hartheim. Raul Hilberg had also never been to the camps, except once for a ceremony. Every time Faurisson asked a historian ‘Have you seen the place? Please describe it for me?’, he received the answer, ‘Oh, no, we have testimonies.’ (30-8183, 8184)

“Of course,” said Faurisson, “we have testimony of everything, even of this gas chamber in Ravensbrück, and three people have been condemned to death for this gas chamber of Ravensbrück, which never existed. And Bruno Tesch and [Karl] Weinbacher, they were condemned to death because they were the people [who] fabricated Zyklon… The British said, you could not ignore that Zyklon was used to kill people.” (30-8183, 8184)

In books such as Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas (National Socialist Mass Killings with Poison Gas), the proof given of gassings was a photograph of a box of Zyklon B. Imagine, said Faurisson, if the Germans had won the war and if they had done the same things as the International Military Tribunal did at Nuremberg. They would have said to the Americans, ‘You were asphyxiating people using gas chambers. The proof? See those cans of DDT.’ It was exactly the same thing. (30-8184)

This reliance on testimonies was brought home to Faurisson from the beginning of his research in 1964. The first day he went to the Centre of Jewish Documentation in Paris that year, he asked to see a photograph of a gas chamber. He was told the archive had many books about the gas chambers (which was false, said Faurisson) and many testimonies and confessions. Continued Faurisson, “I said, yes, but I’m looking for a photo, not two, one. He said, ‘But we have testimonies.’ I said, ‘No, I want a photo’, and then he asked a lady… Mrs. Imbert. He said, ‘This gentleman wants a photo of a gas chamber’, and the lady automatically said, ‘We have testimonies’, and he said, ‘No, no, not testimony. He want[s] a photo’. ‘Okay, sit down’, and I waited for sixty minutes, and what they brought to me was, for example, the false gas chamber of Dachau, things like that.” (30-8184, 8185)

In Faurisson’s opinion, on the subject of gas chambers, “We must be material, especially about something so obscure, so difficult to understand…” (30-8185)

Faurisson had also researched the subject of gas vans, although not to the extent that he had researched gas chambers. In all of his work, he had never found one photo of an alleged homicidal gas van, nor any technical plans or documents. When he was sued in France for falsifying history, the Jewish organizations arrayed against him attempted to prove the gas van with “two poor little drawings. I remember the name of the inmate supposed to have make this drawing. His name was Falborsky, and it was absolutely the drawing of a little boy, with a pipe going like this. I asked for something serious…” Faurisson found it typical that Browning published in his book Fateful Months the photograph of an alleged gas van but had no proof that it was such. We should have had, said Faurisson, photographs of the underneath, the inside of and the outside of the van with technical reports. But there was nothing. (30-8186, 8187)

Faurisson believed that it was the vans used for disinfection by the German army that had given birth to the myth of homicidal gas vans. In support of this, Faurisson produced a document from the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg, West Germany. The first page of this German-language document said:

Secret Command Matter. Folder of Pictures. Introduced weapons and equipment. Motor Vehicle Equipment, Communication Equipment, Optical Equipment, Gas Protection Equipment.

The second page of the document contained a photograph of a motor vehicle, and the following words:

Secret Command Matter. Sheet no. G31.

Personnel Detoxication Truck. (Motor Vehicle 92)

Application: Detoxication of personnel and of the heavy gas clothing of the fog units.

Technical Data: Chassis – for 3-ton truck

Hot water preparation using a water turbulence brake, powered by vehicle engine, having a capacity of 44,000 kcal/hr. for heating the detoxication tub for heavy gas clothes and for shower water for two shower baths.

Water stock carried along: 800 litres. Filling of the water bin by electric floater pump. Gross weight: 9,300 kg.

The second page also contained the photograph of a heavy motorized truck, and the following caption:

Secret Command Matter. Sheet Number G32.

Clothes Detoxication Truck 93 (Motor Vehicle 93/1)

Application: Allocated to the troop detoxication companies (Tek) for the detoxication of uniforms, leather gear and gas masks using hot air and water steam.

Technical Data: Chassis for 3-ton truck Steam of 0.2 atmosphere UE – 50 kg./hr. Air of 120 degrees centigrade – 3,600 cubic metres/hr.

Two chambers for 30 uniforms each with 2 cubic metre content.

Duration of detoxication: 1-1/2 hours for uniforms (combined steam, hot air process); 12 hours for leather gear (Hot air process) Gross Weight: 9,700 kg.

The third page of the document contained a photograph of another heavy mechanized truck and the following description:

Secret Command Matter. Sheet No. G33.

Clothes Detoxication Truck (Motor Vehicle 93/2)

Application: Allocated to the troop detoxication companies (Tek) for the detoxication of uniforms, leather gear and gas masks using hot air.

Technical Data: Chassis – 4-1/2 ton truck – Bussing Air of 100 degrees Centigrade, 4,000 cubic metres/hr.

1 chamber for 40 uniforms Duration of detoxication: 4 hours for uniforms using hot, fresh and environment air in alternate operation.

(30-8208, 8209; Bundesarchiv gas van documents filed as Exhibit 129 at 31-8523)

Faurisson testified that it was very difficult to detect the origin of any myth, but he believed that the modern German army detoxication vans could make people think that perhaps they were sometimes used to kill Jews or others. He noted that the photograph of the alleged gas van published by Browning in his book Fateful Months had only the simple caption:

Gas Van (2 pictures), taken by Polish photographer after the liberation. – Yad Vashem Archives.

He pointed out further that the documents concerning the detoxication trucks were all marked ‘secret’. (30-8209, 8210; Photograph of Gas Van from book Fateful Months filed as Exhibit 130 at 31-8524, 8525)

Faurisson turned to the subject of Auschwitz and Majdanek and began by quoting Browning’s testimony to the court concerning the camps. Browning admitted that he had never been to Auschwitz, which Faurisson termed the “capital” of the extermination. He was wrong, said Faurisson, when he said that the gas chambers in Auschwitz had been destroyed. The physical evidence was in Auschwitz for the millions of tourists visiting the camp who were shown Krema I and who were told this was a genuine gas chamber in which some 800 people were gassed at a time in about 65 square metres. In fact, said Faurisson, it was never a gas chamber. According to plans which Faurisson found in the Auschwitz Museum, it was a morgue. In June of 1943, the morgue was changed into an air shelter used for surgical operations. The SS hospital was twenty metres away and the room was required in case of bombing. The Germans partitioned it into four or five small rooms with the doors placed in a typical air raid shelter zigzag pattern to block the draft caused by bomb explosions. What visitors to Auschwitz saw today was something else again, said Faurisson. The Poles had removed the inside walls to make it one room again and tourists were told that it had been a gas chamber. Faurisson pointed out that one of the doors of this alleged “gas chamber” had a glass pane which could have been broken quite simply; that would have ended any gassing attempt. ((30-8213, 8214, 8215)

Browning had also testified that Majdanek was the only place where there were original gas chambers. This contradicted his other testimony in which he maintained that the Germans had destroyed the evidence. Faurisson had inspected Majdanek and what was put forward as the gas chambers were in fact disinfection chambers. Immediately after the war, it was the shower room at Majdanek that was represented to be the gas chamber: “I suppose,” said Faurisson, “that they realized that this shower room could not have been a gas chamber for a simple reason. You have windows beginning at this high, I mean the half of my body, so now the disinfection gas chamber[s] are described as gas chamber[s] for killing the people.” The first accusation of the exterminationists made without proof, said Faurisson, was that the Germans gassed people in those places. The second accusation without proof was that the Germans destroyed those places. (30-8215 to 8217)

In Birkenau today the ruins of Kremas II and III were still there but nearly nothing remained of Kremas IV and V. Faurisson did not know who destroyed them. The Auschwitz Museum claimed that the Germans destroyed them just before the Russians arrived. Said Faurisson: “I can only tell you that if I had to destroy proofs of a crime, I wouldn’t proceed as they are supposed to have proceeded because you see very well that dynamite has been put into a kind of sealer and the blocks of cement went like this and went like that. So underneath, you could find any proof if there were any of a gassing facility.” (30-8218)

The Poles at the Auschwitz Museum, said Faurisson, had very naively tried to figure out how the gassings took place and had prepared models of the process which were on public display. These models, in Faurisson’s opinion, showed very easily that it was totally impossible that there were gas chambers in Birkenau. (30-8217)

People were supposed to have arrived in groups of 2,000 and been taken into an underground place called Leichenkeller 2, where they undressed. Then they were supposed to have been gassed in the adjoining Leichenkeller 1 using Zyklon B. After the gassing, the 2,000 bodies had to be taken up to the crematories on the ground floor. There were fifteen ovens to cremate the 2,000 gassed people, and it was impossible, said Faurisson, to cremate more than fifteen people in an hour and a half: “… it means that one hour and a half after, you have still 1,985 people to burn.” One would need another place to put the bodies as there were more people waiting to be gassed: “How could you do it… when you know what is Zyklon B, without being a chemist at all, when you know that it is a gas, an acid which sticks everywhere and especially in the bodies. You cannot get rid of it like that.” (30-8218 to 8221)

Faurisson was the first person to publish the plans for Kremas II and III at Birkenau. He had found small photos of the plans in a binder at the Auschwitz Museum in 1975. Faurisson related the story of how he obtained the plans: he had visited the camp that year and noticed that the crematory retorts in the alleged gas chamber had no soot in them. Faurisson asked a high official at the museum whether the crematories were genuine and was told that they were. When Faurisson pointed out there was no soot in them, the official admitted they were reconstructed. Faurisson said that they must necessarily have used a plan for the reconstruction and demanded to see it. As a result, he was allowed to look at the archives and found the plans, which he asked for. Since he was a professor at the Sorbonne at the time, the museum provided him with copies. (30-8219, 8220)

Faurisson referred to Browning’s testimony where Browning indicated that he had visited no camps in Poland; had visited several camps in Austria, Germany and France simply to see what kind of memorial they had; and had neither conducted nor looked at scientific tests of a gas chamber. Said Faurisson: “… a historian, a specialist of the extermination shouldn’t go like that as if it was a holy place. He must go with a scientific spirit. He must try to see what it is. I cannot understand that this man, who has been on-the-spot, who saw those gas chambers there, didn’t say, ‘I should try to investigate at least a little bit’.” In Faurisson’s opinion, Browning should also have been interested in the aerial photographs of Auschwitz released by the CIA. (30-8222, 8223, 8244)

For a long time, said Faurisson, it was claimed that there were gas chambers in Germany and Austria in such places as Dachau, Mauthausen, Hartheim and Struthof-Natzweiler. In the 1983 book National Socialist Mass Killings with Poison Gas, this was still maintained. (30-8224, 8225)

Browning also testified that he had not seen any affidavits to the effect that there were gas chambers in Dachau. But there were such affidavits, said Faurisson. For instance: “… at the International Military Tribunal in 1945 – 1946, Dr. Blaha, director of a Czechoslovakian hospital, swore on the 9th of January, 1946, that there was a gas chamber in Dachau, that it was achieved in 1944, that he examined himself the victims, he made descriptions, talked about golden teeth, said that the insane were gassed and said that he, himself, for this, received his order from an SS called Dr. Rascher…” This affidavit was number PS-3249, found in the IMT “Blue Series”, volume 32, pages 56-64. (30-8226)

Browning had mentioned Filip Müller as a witness of the gassings. Müller had testified at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt which went from 1963 to 1965. Faurisson testified that he had never succeeded in getting the trial transcript, but had studied a book written about the trial by Hermann Langbein who was a survivor of Auschwitz. Langbein wrote that Müller had accused a man named Stark of involvement in the gassings at Auschwitz I but it was proved later that Stark had never been there at the time. As a result of this false accusation, the defence lawyer said that the testimony of Müller could be false from A to Z . (30-8227 to 8229)

Filip Müller in fact never wrote his book, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, said Faurisson. It was written by a man named Helmut Freitag: “It’s a kind of novel with a quantity of what I called stupid story and sex orgies. It’s what I call Nazism of sex shop,” he said. This was the book which contained the story of the bucket jumping around with muscles in it and the story of the naked young girls who wanted to kick him out of the gas chamber. It also had the story of the singing in the gas chamber of the Czechoslovakian hymn and the Jewish Hatikvah, which Faurisson indicated was a fraud, in that it was plagiarized from the book Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, by Miklos Nyiszli. This had been demonstrated clearly by Carlo Mattogno in his book, Plagiarism of Filip Müller. (30-8229, 8232)

Browning testified that the statements of Gerstein were corroborated by a Professor Pfannenstiel. Faurisson testified that Pfannenstiel was in the disinfection business and had trouble after the war. He was put in jail, but in a trial made “a kind of confession” saying that he did not collaborate with Gerstein although he still used the word gas chamber. However, in the files of Paul Rassinier, Faurisson found a letter dated August 3, 1963 from Pfannenstiel in which he told Rassinier that what Gerstein had said was gossip. (30-8233 to 8235)

What Gerstein said, testified Faurisson, was also totally impossible: “For example, when he says in Belzec, you had 700 to 800 people in 25 square metre, 45 cubic metres, and he says that twice. Make the calculation. It means twenty-eight to thirty-two people in one square metre with one metre 80 high… And it’s so embarrassing that it’s quite common that the historian, not the case of Dr. Browning, historian like Leon Poliakov – French, Martin Gilbert – English, changed totally the numbers. Instead of putting 25, they put 93, and they suppress the 45 cubic metres because if… they had kept 45 cubic metres, the 93… square metres would have given a room of half a metre so it was impossible, so they suppressed that. They suppressed many, many things. Poliakov did that. And they are… historians.” (30-8235, 8236)

With respect to Browning’s testimony generally, Faurisson said: “I would say that Dr. Browning doesn’t take into account what I call the other side of the story. The other side is what the revisionist[s] have written. He said that he had read Butz and of course this pamphlet. And I maintain that this pamphlet is quite a gook book. Quite a good publication and prophetic, I said, for 1974. [Browning] should have tried to consult the defence counsels of the accused. He is always talking about the Germans. Why didn’t he at least once try to ask his advice to any counsel? For instance, he could have written, as I did, to Dr. Servatius who was the defence lawyer of Eichmann and in the Nuremberg trial, he had been also a defence lawyer. Very interesting… I ask him how is it that you didn’t ask any question about the gas chamber and he said because we decided not to get into that but to say that Eichmann had nothing to do with it. And it’s classical in all those trials, the defence lawyer cannot defend something which looks impossible. It looks impossible to say that the gas chamber did not exist so the tactic of those people, and I can bring proof of that, was not to get into that. Exactly as in the witchcraft trial, when the people were accused of having [met] the devil, they wouldn’t say, ‘Your Honour, the best proof that I have not met the devil is that the devil does not exist’; it would have been the end. No. The tactic was to say, ‘Oh, yes, the devil was there on the top of the hill. Myself, I was down [at the bottom]… and in Auschwitz it’s exactly the same thing.” The accused would admit the existence of the gas chambers, but deny their involvement with them. (30-8236 to 8238)

Faurisson testified that he was familiar with the work of Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, who published the book The Auschwitz Myth in 1979. Stäglich had been stationed in Auschwitz in an anti-aircraft battalion for three months, and in 1974 wrote that he did not believe the story of Auschwitz. For writing his book, Stäglich, who was a judge, had his doctorate stripped from him under a law enacted by Hitler which was still in force in West Germany. (30-8238)

In his book Stäglich had dealt with the subject of Richard Baer, the third and last commandant of Auschwitz, the first being Hoess and the second being Liebehenschel. No confessions were obtained from the last two commandants. Baer died in prison shortly before the beginning of the Auschwitz trial in obscure circumstances. The medical report did not exclude suspicious circumstances. Stäglich wrote that Baer had refused to say that gas chambers existed. The Auschwitz trial began only after Baer’s death. (30-8239, 8243, 8244)

Faurisson had also studied the subject of the financial reparations made by West Germany with respect to the Holocaust. In 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany under Dr. Konrad Adenauer signed a treaty with the state of Israel providing for reparation payments. It was known as the Luxembourg Treaty because the Jews did not want to sign it on German soil, so it was signed in Luxembourg. Under this treaty, reparations were paid to Israel and to the Jews in the Diaspora. According to Raul Hilberg, these payments would be made beyond the year 2000. This meant, said Faurisson, that “a young man in Germany today pays for that.”^[6]  

Faurisson produced a document published by the German Information Center, 410 Park Ave., New York, in May, 1985, entitled Focus On dealing with “Restitution in Germany” and quoted from a portion headed “Indemnification for Persecution of Persons”:

The BEG laws compensate those persecuted for political, racial, religious, or ideological reasons – people who suffered physical injury or loss of freedom, property, income, professional and financial advancement as a result of that persecution. In addition to racial and political victims of the Third Reich, the law includes compensation for artists and scholars whose works disagreed with Nazi tenets. It also provides compensation for people who were persecuted merely because they were related to or friendly with victims of the Nazis. Finally, it guarantees assistance to the survivors of the deceased victims.

The BEG legislation extends far beyond the responsibilities assumed by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany in the Transitional Treaty and in the Luxembourg Agreement. Of 4,393,365 claims submitted under this legislation, between October 1, 1953 and December 31, 1983, 4,390,049 or 99.9 percent had been settled by January 1, 1984. Up to this date, payments equaling DM 56.2 billion had been made. Approximately 40 percent of those receiving compensation live in Israel, 20 percent reside in the Federal Republic of Germany and 40 percent live in other countries. (Focus On filed as Exhibit 131 at 31-8525, 8526)

Faurisson turned to the subject of the New York Times article on Majdanek, of August 30, 1944, introduced by Browning, said Faurisson, “to show that Richard Harwood was a liar…” Faurisson pointed out that the article claimed that 1.5 million people were killed in Majdanek in three years. Hilberg, however, in both editions of The Destruction of the European Jews, gave the figure of 50,000 Jews killed at the camp. Hilberg didn’t mention others being killed. Said Faurisson: “And I say that this is a kind of rectification done by a historian, Raul Hilberg. We must be careful with what a journalist says, because all this is [is] a report by a journalist of what he was told on the spot… He talks about the shoes in Majdanek. I have been in Majdanek myself… We can see in Majdanek a quantity of shoes, but we do not have any conclusion to take from that because in Majdanek, there was a firm making shoes and also in many camps, all the things [which] had been used were recuperated everywhere in Europe and especially in the camps. So we don’t have any conclusion to draw from the fact that we have heaps of shoes or hair, glasses or anything.” (30-8255, 8257, 8258)

The journalist had stated:

After inspection of Maidanek, I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.

This was a perfect example, said Faurisson, of what people are ready to believe. It was a naive admittance by this journalist. Browning had admitted that there were some things wrong in the story, such as the fact that Zyklon B operates better in dry conditions [than wet, as claimed by the journalist.] (30-8258, 8259) With respect to crematories, Lawrence had written:

Each furnace held five bodies at a time.

We were told it took fifteen minutes to fill each furnace and about ten to twelve minutes for the bodies to burn.

This, said Faurisson, “is preposterous, totally impossible… this article… is pure propaganda from the beginning to the end. My comment of what Dr. Browning did is that I am surprised that a historian would use such a story. It’s pure propaganda and even Soviet propaganda. This is admitted, I think, by Mr. Browning at the end.” Faurisson was surprised that Browning finished his testimony with “an article of the New York Times, by somebody who is a member of one of the country fighting against Germany making this report, which is pure propaganda, normal propaganda in time of wars, but after the war the propaganda should stop and we should check. We should work.” (30-8259, 8260)

Faurisson next began an analysis and criticism of the book Six Million Did Die, which had been written specifically to refute the allegations in Did Six Million Really Die?. The title, said Faurisson, said 6 million died, but Raul Hilberg said 5.1 million died, and Reitlinger said it was something like 4.4 million. If the two latter persons were right, it meant that the title Six Million Did Die was wrong. (30-8261)

Throughout the book, said Faurisson, it was claimed that there was an order from Hitler and a plan to exterminate the Jews. On page 27, the book called “astounding” David Irving’s contention in Hitler’s War that Hitler did not order the liquidation of the European Jews and repeatedly forbade it. Faurisson pointed out that what Crown Attorney Pearson called “the historical community” now accepted that Hitler did not give an order for the extermination of the Jews. The book mentioned the alleged Himmler order to stop the killing of the Jews in 1944. This order, said Faurisson, never existed. On pages 23, 35, 37, 38, 58, 59, 81, 85, 87, 93 of the book, as examples, were mentions of a plan to exterminate the Jews. The words used were: “deliberate matter, a purpose, objective to eliminate the Jewish race, plans were made, deliberation, programme, policy, carried out, deliberately, intentionally and methodically, policy to exterminate, plan of extermination, planned by logical destruction, deliberate extermination, etc.” This alleged plan, said Faurisson, never existed; he pointed out that the evidence the book used was “automatic. Testimony. It’s always testimony.” (30-8261 to 8263)

Faurisson turned to Six Million Did Die‘s treatment of the Dachau gas chamber. On page xii of the book, the authors Suzman and Diamond had written:

In particular, the reports of two of the investigating groups provide a detailed description of the Dachau gas chamber – the very existence of which Harwood denies.

On pages 116 and 117 of the book, Suzman and Diamond summarized the findings of a South African Parliamentary report entitled Report on Conditions in Concentration Camps in Germany; Illustrated by Photographs (published by Authority); printed by Cape Times Limited, Cape Town, 1945. Faurisson read from page 117:

The investigators next visited the crematorium. During 1944 the number of deaths had been 4,884 whereas the total for the first four months of 1945 was shown to be 13,000. The daily death roll still stood at about 125.

The Report then describes, in the following terms, the gas chamber, which bore the inscription Brausebad (Shower bath) above the entrance:

“The gas chamber, about 20 feet by 20 feet, bears all the characteristics of an ordinary communal shower room with about fifty shower sprays in the roof, cement ceiling and cement floor. But there is not the usual ventilation, and the sprays squirted poison gas. One noticed that the doors, as well as the small window, were rubber-lined and that there was a conveniently situated glass-covered peephole to enable the controller to see when the gas could be turned off. From the lethal chamber a door leads to the crematorium. We inspected the elaborate controls and gas pipes leading into the chamber.

Behind the crematorium there was an execution place for those who had to die by rifle fire; and there were ample signs that this place had been in frequent use.”

On page 122 of Six Million Did Die, the authors included a photograph of a pile of bodies in a room with the caption:

Victims of the Dachau gas chamber lie piled to the ceiling in the crematorium.

On page 127 of the book, Suzman and Diamond quoted the findings concerning Dachau found in the Report of the Joint Committee Representing the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America (reproduced in IMT volume 37 as document 159-L, at pages 605-626), an extract of which Faurisson read to the court:

The Joint Committee then proceeded to the “infamous concentration camp at Dachau”, a distinguishing feature of which was the gas chamber, which is described in the following terms:

“The gas chamber was located in the centre of a large room in the crematory building. It was built of concrete. Its dimensions were about 20 by 20 feet and the ceiling was some 10 feet in height. In two opposite walls of the chamber were airtight doors through which condemned prisoners could be taken into the chamber for execution and removed after execution. The supply of gas into the chamber was controlled by means of two valves on one of the outer walls, and beneath the valves was a small glass-covered peep-hole through which the operator could watch the victims die. The gas was let into the chamber through pipes terminating in perforated brass fixtures set into the ceiling. The chamber was of size sufficient to execute probably a hundred men at one time.

The room in which the gas chamber stood was flanked on both ends by ware-rooms in which the bodies were placed after execution to await cremation. The size of each room was approximately 30 by 50 feet. At the time we visited the camp these ware-rooms were piled high with dead bodies. In one of the rooms the bodies were thrown in an irregular heap. In the other room they were neatly stacked like cordwood. The irregular pile of bodies was perhaps 10 feet high, covering most of the floor space. All of them were naked.

It was quite evident that the daily death rate at Dachau, by execution and otherwise, far exceeded the daily capacity of the crematory to dispose of the bodies. The stench indicated that some of them had been there for several days…”

Faurisson testified that he had been to Dachau and visited the alleged ‘gas chamber’ and crematory. While there, he took a photograph of a sign situated on a moveable stand inside the so-called ‘gas chamber’. The sign said: “Gas Chamber Disguised As A Shower Room – Never Used.” He had been told that today the sign said: “[Gas Chamber] Disguised As A Shower Room – Never Used As A Gas Chamber.” (30-8268)

Faurisson entered into a correspondence with the authorities at the Dachau Museum, Mrs. Ruth Jakusch and Mrs. Barbara Distel, and also with the International Committee of the Former Inmates of Dachau in Brussels, asking them this question: “I said, why do you call this place a ‘gas chamber’ and what is the story of this ‘gas chamber’? And the story that we have to accept is this: The German began the construction of this place, called ‘gas chamber’, in 1942, but in 1945, they had not finished this little room because the inmates forbid them to finish their construction, so it is a gas chamber which is not finished and that’s why it has not been used… And my question was, ‘How could you say that this is a gas chamber… which is supposed not to be finished? What is lacking? Tell me what we need to have a gas chamber finished and could you show me an expert report because myself I do not understand.’ But the tourists they do not do that and the photographers, because we have many films in which we see the false gas chambers … but they take off the mobile board and they made their photo of this place.”

Faurisson believed there was never any gas chamber in Dachau and the room now represented as such had simply been a shower room as the inscription above the door indicated. (30-8269 to 8272) Suzman and Diamond’s caption under the photograph of the pile of bodies – “Victims of the Dachau gas chamber lie piled to the ceiling in the crematorium” – was therefore false since no one was gassed at Dachau. In Faurisson’s opinion, this was a seriously misleading statement. (30-8269, 8270)

Faurisson pointed out that some 1,500 Dachau inmates died while in the hands of the American liberators in 1945, while the total number of deaths in the camp in 1943 was 1,100. (30-8270)

Faurisson turned next to pages xiii and xiv of Six Million Did Die, in which the authors expressed appreciation to various people for their help in writing the book. Among the names were Professor Raul Hilberg, Dr. Nahum Goldmann (President of the World Jewish Congress) and Dr. A. Rückerl (of the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen at Ludwigsburg) who was in charge of the investigation of Nazi war crimes in Germany.

Said Faurisson, “… I remember that when I brought this book to Ernst Zündel, in 1985, he was very surprised. He said how is it that there are so many, I think, big shots, big names against a booklet which is supposed to be so poor and he wanted to make a photocopy of this book. I said no, don’t do it. It’s trash. You don’t need it but he did it. What I mean is that we have so many big names who took the responsibility of publishing this book, saying 6 million, saying an order, saying a plan, saying Anne Frank diary is authentic, saying there was a gas chamber and gassings in Dachau…” (30-8274)

April 14, 1988

Faurisson produced and filed with the court a true copy of a plan of a crematorium in Birkenau, which according to a letter of 29 November 1977, sent to him by the Auschwitz Museum, was Plan Number 934 of 27 January 1942, negative 6228. Faurisson had received the plan in 1976 or perhaps even in 1975. (30-8283 to 8285; Plan of Crematorium in Birkenau filed as Exhibit 123 at 30-8285)

He also produced and filed with the court a true copy of a plan of Krema II in Birkenau, which Faurisson had been the first person to publish. Showing this plan to the jury, Faurisson explained how the alleged gassing procedure took place. The victims, said Faurisson, allegedly entered a room designated as Leichenkeller II on the plan (meaning in English ‘a cellar for cadavers’) for the purpose of undressing. They were then supposed to go through a small corridor into Leichenkeller I where they were gassed. Then the people of the Sonderkommando would take the bodies out and put them on an elevator to bring them up to a room which contained five crematory ovens, each of which had three retorts (openings in which to place the body). (30-8286 to 8288; Plan of Krema II in Birkenau filed as Exhibit 124 at 30-8296)

Faurisson discussed the plans with Zündel in 1979 in Los Angeles at the first convention of the Institute for Historical Review. Faurisson told him that prior to the discovery of this plan, it was not known that the real name of the two underground rooms was Leichenkeller. (30-8287, 8289)

Faurisson pointed out that there were many material impossibilities with this alleged gassing theory. According to the building plan, the Leichenkeller was 7 metres wide and 30 metres long, yet 2,000 people were supposed to have entered it at one time to be gassed. How often they were supposed to have entered was never set out precisely: “… when they say, for instance, that there were 10,000 people killed by day or gassed by day, you must divide that, perhaps, with the other crematoriums. It’s very difficult to say.” Neither Raul Hilberg nor other historians were precise about this point. However, the Auschwitz Museum claimed the number of 2,000 in its publications. Said Faurisson: “And Hoess, in his confessions, said without locating really the place where it was supposed to happen, said that the gas chamber could accommodate 3,000 people but never had more than 2,000.” (30-8290 to 8292)

There were fifteen retorts in Krema II and if 2,000 people were gassed, said Faurisson, and it took one hour and a half to burn one body, then it meant that after an hour and a half a maximum of fifteen bodies had been cremated, leaving 1,985 bodies to be burned. Faurisson had calculated that it would have taken about eight days and eight nights to burn all 2,000 bodies. During this time, he asked, where would they have put the bodies so that the next batch of victims could be gassed? (30-8292)

Hoess had said that the crew of the Sonderkommando went into the gas chamber immediately after the gassing and the switching off of the ventilation to take the bodies out. He described them as performing this job negligently, even smoking and eating as they did it. Faurisson had studied the technicalities of Zyklon B, however, and found that it was very difficult to ventilate since, according to its manufacturer, it adhered strongly to surfaces. This could be found in Nuremberg document NI-9098. Said Faurisson: “It’s a very dangerous gas, so I don’t see how some people could enter this place without gas mask because they were eating or smoking and how they could have dragged out all those bodies.” (30-8293, 8294)

Faurisson told Zündel that he believed Leichenkeller I and II were classical morgues. They were there because of the typhus in Auschwitz, especially in the summer of 1942. Krema II and the other crematories at Birkenau were built in early 1943. Faurisson had found proof that the Auschwitz authorities asked for the construction of the crematories. The contracting firm answered in twelve days indicating that they were ready to build them. The plans were not hidden by the Germans; in Auschwitz, they were in fact very proud of the buildings.

Faurisson had also found at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz plans of a Leichenkeller in the camp of Sachsenhausen which could hold 200 bodies. He believed this was “rather common because a crematorium must have as much places as possible in case of epidemics or catastrophe.” (30-8295, 8296)

Faurisson produced a second plan showing Krema III at Birkenau which he had obtained at the Auschwitz Museum in either 1975 or 1976. The plan was more detailed in its depiction of the ovens than the first plan. Krema III was the mirror image of Krema II, and had one chimney 7 metres high above the roof. (30-8297, 8298; Plan of Krema III filed as Exhibit 125 at 30-8300)

These plans had been published by other people since Faurisson first published them in August of 1979. One of the plans was on display in Pavilion No. 4 at Auschwitz but was difficult to see. Prior to that time, however, Faurisson testified he had never seen the plans published anywhere, and that, indeed, he had had some difficulty obtaining them: “… the difficult thing [at] the Auschwitz Museum is that there is no real classification of the archives and you must ask some things specific and it’s very difficult sometimes to open a document because they say they have to ask permission or they are going to answer a letter or etc.” (30-8298 to 8300)

Zündel had an interest in the plans and he and Faurisson decided they would try to get more information specifically about the crematories. (30-8301)

Faurisson next produced two plans of the camp at Birkenau. The first plan came from the book KL Auschwitz, Photographic Documents, published in Warsaw in 1980 by the Krajawa Agencja Wydawnicza; the second plan came from the book The Auschwitz Album, by Serge Klarsfeld and Jean-Claude Pressac, published in France in 1983 and two American editions in the early eighties. (30-8302; Two plans of Birkenau filed as Exhibit 126 at 30-8306)

Faurisson testified that the photographs contained in The Auschwitz Album gave a “good idea” of what happened to people as they arrived by train at Birkenau. Using the plan of the camp to point out the locations to the jury, Faurisson explained that he believed the prisoners were separated upon arrival into two groups: men in one group and women and children in the other. After separation, the group of women and children moved off to the left onto a road which passed between Kremas II and III which led to the large sauna building at the top of the camp for delousing. The men took a road to the right which also led to the sauna and which passed between Kremas IV and V. Faurisson could not answer why the two groups would take different routes, but he speculated that it was because there were different entrances into the sauna and it would maintain separation of the groups from the beginning. There had never been any allegation that the sauna building was used for gassing. (30-8303, 8304)

There were no photographs of any people going into Kremas II or III in The Auschwitz Album. What photographs there were showed the women and children proceeding on their way past the crematories. To make the reader believe that the people were in fact stopped at the crematories to be gassed and burned, the authors had played a “trick” on the reader, said Faurisson, by eliminating from the plan of Birkenau in two places the road that led from the crematories to the sauna building. All the plans of Birkenau which the Poles published showed the road, such as the plan of Birkenau published in the KL Auschwitz book. Faurisson had compared this plan with other plans of Birkenau shown to him by Mr. Tadeusz Iwaszko, the director of the archives at Auschwitz Museum. All of them were the same. In his opinion, the plan in KL Auschwitz reflected what had been the real layout of the roads at Birkenau. (30-8304 to 8309)

Faurisson testified that the authors had played other tricks with the plan. Said Faurisson: “For example, this place on some, at least, Polish original plans… is designated as a sport place, a place where the inmates would play soccer and there you had the hospital with something like seventeen barracks. To hide this fact, they put in the French edition… Secteur Hôpital. They write it down there on the left of the plan. In fact they should have said that it was a soccer field and it’s strange that in those places, Krematorium II and Krematorium III, people were supposed to be gassed by thousands and thousands quite close to a soccer field and quite close to a hospital.” (30-8307)

Faurisson returned to an analysis of the book Six Million Did Die. Faurisson pointed out that the Foreword to a book with this title was written by Dr. Nahum Goldmann, President of the World Jewish Congress, yet Goldmann did not say “6 million” Jews died. Instead, he referred to “millions of Jews.” (30-8310)

On page 5 of the book, the authors listed the “spurious attack” on the authenticity of the Anne Frank diary as one of the falsehoods contained in Did Six Million Really Die?. Faurisson indicated that Six Million Did Die was written in 1978 and that since 1980, with the forensic results of the Wiesbaden examination, “… we may have serious reason to doubt about the authenticity [of] the diary of Anne Frank. So those attack[s] were perhaps not spurious… I think that the people who doubted… the authenticity of the diary of Anne Frank were right.” Faurisson pointed to the sample of Frank’s handwriting on page 15 of the book and testified that he believed the adult-like writing to be that of her father. (30-8310, 8311)

On page 16 of Six Million Did Die, the authors quoted from the book Under Two Dictators by Margarete Buber where she said at page 208:

In the winter of 1941-2 the extermination of prisoners by gas began in Ravensbrueck.

Faurisson testified that no reputable historian today maintained that there were gas chambers at Ravensbrück. Raul Hilberg did not mention any gas chambers at that camp. But Suzman and Diamond had quoted Buber’s statement as if it was the truth, said Faurisson, to give “… a kind of notion there were [gas] chambers in Ravensbrück. The reader of Six Million Did Die can only conclude that there were gas chambers in Ravensbrück, which is wrong.” (30-8313, 8314)

Faurisson had examined Buber’s book and found a clear indication that she herself knew that there were no gas chambers at the camp. This passage was never referred to in Six Million Did Die. On page 304 of her book she had written:

I don’t know to this day whether there was a gas chamber in Ravensbrueck or whether the women had been despatched in the mobile gas chambers which were available for such purposes.

Suzman and Diamond had also criticised Richard Harwood for his “usual technique of selective quotation” by allegedly distorting a quote of Colin Cross to support his contention that it was unlikely that the Germans would have conveyed millions of Jews around Europe at the height of the war. Faurisson did not agree with this criticism: “Harwood was quite right to quote Colin Cross as he did. It was not a selective quotation. Of course when… I quote an exterminationist, I take sometimes one sentence, two sentence[s] and I don’t say every time, ‘But you must know that this man believed in the extermination of the Jews’… If I quote, for instance, Raul Hilberg, I am not going to say, ‘But remember, Raul Hilberg himself believed in the extermination of the Jews’. I’m not going to do that every time.” (30-8318, 8319)

On pages 18 and 19 of Six Million Did Die, the authors referred to the film, “Nazi Concentration Camps,” shown at the Nuremberg trial and films of German atrocities shown at the Eichmann trial. Two photographs from Belsen concentration camp, one of them showing a bulldozer pushing a pile of bodies, and the other showing Germans throwing bodies into a mass grave, were reproduced.

Faurisson testified that at Nuremberg, the film “had a terrible impact on the accused. We know that by the psychologist of the prison. His name was Gilbert and this film was projected on the 29th of November 1945. My remark is only this one: in fact, we know that this film had something like 80,000 feet and they took for the Nuremberg trial only 6,000… We know that by the document PS-2430, Exhibit U.S.A. 79.” (30-8319, 8320)

Faurisson also commented on the two Belsen photographs reproduced in the book: “This photo and the other one underneath are horrible photos showing Jews of Bergen-Belsen at the liberation. We see a Caterpillar pushing bodies and we see SS women throwing bodies into a grave… What is wrong is that the reader, I mean the layman is going… to think that the German[s]… were every day throwing bodies like that, pushing them with Caterpillar cynically, but if the photo had not been cut on the top, we would see that the driver of the Caterpillar is a British soldier… [At] the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, the British took out of the graves many bodies to count them and then they were re-put into graves. And there were also many bodies like that not in graves… so, they had to put them together into graves.” The photograph of the SS women with the bodies was taken after the liberation of the camp, said Faurisson, when the British forced the women to handle the bodies. There was no indication in the book, however, that these were the circumstances under which the photographs were taken. (30-8320 to 8322)

Faurisson had read Dr. Russell Barton’s report on his experiences at the liberation of Belsen, and believed it to be true. The photographs of Belsen in Six Million Did Die might be proof to a layman reader, said Faurisson, that the extermination plan constantly alleged by the book was actually true. “I know,” he said, “that … at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, when the people saw all those horrible photos, it’s a fact that they thought, ‘Oh, there we are, we have a proof that Hitler exterminated the people.'” (30-8321, 8322)

On page 21 of Six Million Did Die, the authors wrote the following about Raul Rassinier under the heading “Use of Spurious Authorities”:

The principal authority relied upon by Harwood is Paul Rassinier.

Rassinier, though originally a member of the French Resistance and a one-time inmate of a concentration camp, subsequently published various booklets in which he contended, inter alia, that the Nazi “Final Solution” did not mean the extermination of European Jewry and cynically suggested that the use of gas chambers and the systematic extermination of prisoners was only the work of “one or two foolish Nazi zealots and concentration camp administrators anxious to please them”.

In 1964 M. Bernard Lecache, the Director of Le Droit de Vivre, the organ of the International League Against Racialism and Anti-Semitism, published an article alleging that Rassinier had made common cause with the neo-Nazis.

Rassinier instituted an action for defamation. The Court held that the defendant had proved that Rassinier had in fact “made common cause with his now neo-Nazis friends”, dismissed the claim and ordered Rassinier to bear the costs.

Said Faurisson: “My comment about that is that Paul Rassinier, yes, sued those people. He… had been a deportee, a real resister in France. He had been arrested by the Gestapo, had been tortured, had been deported to Buchenwald and to Dora, and he came back in an awful state of health, and he decided to write a book about his experience… [I]n his book, he talks, I think very eloquently, about the horror of those concentration camps, but at the same time, he says even if you suffer so much, you have no right to lie and we must make a distinction between truth and lie in what happened in those camps. He said that we should not do as Ulysses, the hero of Homer, who suffered very much..[W]hen he came back home, instead of telling what he had suffered… he multiplied them and he said extraordinary stories. Paul Rassinier said we must try to be accurate… [R]ight at the beginning, he had a doubt about the gas chambers. Only doubts at the beginning. And more and more he discovered that there were testimonies about the gas chamber in Buchenwald where he had been. He gave the name, he gave the text and he said this is not true and he had doubt for the other camps and for the other testimonies. So that’s why at the beginning he said that maybe one or two foolish Nazi zealot concentration camp administrators anxious to please them used gas chamber. That was a hypothesis at the beginning. It is quite true that he sued those who treated him as Nazi and it is true that he lost his suit and he had to pay,… but what does it mean? What does it prove? He was accused of doing the job of the Nazi, of being for the Nazi, but myself, thirty years after, I have been accused of being for the Nazis and the best proof for the people was I did not believe in the gas chamber and there was even one judgment where it was said that although I could be right about the gas chamber, I… could appear as somebody who had sympathy for the Nazis, which is absolutely not my case. But it is systematic. Everyone who has doubts about the gas chambers or the extermination is considered a Nazi and the fact that he lost a lawsuit doesn’t mean anything for me.” (30-8323 to 8325)

On page 21 of Six Million Did Die, the authors had written:

Apart from a host of obscure pamphleteers who find no place in any recognised bibliography on the subject, Harwood quotes as authoritative, the thoroughly discredited Senator Joseph McCarthy, one Harry Elmer Barnes, the translator of Rassinier, and such like.

Faurisson testified that he did not understand why Suzman and Diamond referred to Barnes as “one Harry Elmer Barnes.” Barnes, said Faurisson, was a very well known American historian who had an international reputation. The sentence indicated that the authors despised Barnes: “… I think that nobody would like to find his name after ‘the thoroughly discredited Senator Joseph McCarthy’…” (30-8326 to 8328)

To verify that Barnes was a prestigious historian, Faurisson read an article which appeared on his death, in the August 28, 1968 edition of the New York Times. In Faurisson’s opinion, Barnes was “a very courageous man and… the end of his life was very difficult because he made a scene. He became revisionist which is very grave.” ((30-8330 to 8336)

In “The Public Stake in Revisionism,” an article published in Rampart Journal (summer of 1967), page 36, Barnes had written:

An attempt to make a competent, objective and truthful investigation of the extermination question is now regarded as far more objectionable and deplorable than Professor Bemis viewed charging Roosevelt with war responsibility. It is surely the most precarious venture that an historian or demographer could undertake today.

Faurisson testified that he had recently heard that revisionism could be considered the big intellectual adventure of the end of the twentieth century and he was pleased that Barnes had used the word ‘venture’ to describe it. (30-8336)

Page 22 of Six Million Did Die dealt with the book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Dr. Arthur Butz:

Butz offers the following peculiar comment on Harwood’s booklet: “It is quite good in convincing power, although it has some weak points”, a comment which reflects as much on Butz himself as it does on Harwood.

Faurisson agreed with Butz’s opinion of the booklet: “It’s quite good in convincing power because it brings so many good arguments, so many things which… were new at that time and that’s why I say that this book, I mean this Did Six Million Really Die? was really prophetic in 1974…” Faurisson noted that Suzman and Diamond were “very prudent” in their attempt to criticize Butz. He continued: “The man and his book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, are so remarkable that it is extremely difficult to attack Butz. Even in France, Pierre Vidal-Naquet said about my work that it was really nothing, but that Butz was very dangerous… What is important is the fact that those two people [Suzman and Diamond] tried to criticize Butz, but what they say is [materially] inconsistent. There is nothing in it. Words but no arguments, no reason and I would like to give an idea of what is Butz, in fact. Is it possible?”^[7]  

Faurisson testified that he knew Butz personally and had seen him in the company of Zündel in 1979 in Los Angeles, where both Butz and Faurisson had given lectures. Faurisson remembered that Zündel attended every lecture at the conference. Faurisson and Zündel had discussed Butz’s book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which had been published in 1975 and which Faurisson knew Zündel had read and understood. (30-8337 to 8340)

Faurisson testified that on page 29 of Six Million Did Die, the Nuremberg trials were presented as being fair. To Faurisson, another opinion was “quite possible, especially when we [look at] Article 19 and 21 of this International Military Tribunal. Article 19: ‘The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence’. Article 21: ‘The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge, but shall take judicial notice thereof.’ I would say about that that… the International Military Tribunal didn’t even try to prove the existence of any gas chamber. There was a kind of implicit judicial notice of the existence of the gas chamber. And it says, ‘The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge’, which is really difficult to define – what is ‘common knowledge’. And there was no appeal and the documents were chosen by the prosecution. I wouldn’t have liked to be judged by such [a] tribunal.” (30-8348, 8349)

On page 31 of Six Million Did Die, Faurisson read a portion of a chapter dealing with torture in the Nuremberg trials:

Harwood further alleges that the spurious testimony in support of the myth of the Six Million was invariably given by former German officers who had been subjected to torture or assured of leniency. (p. 13, col. 1)

These scurrilous allegations are repudiated by two Counsel of great eminence, intimately involved in the Nuremberg Trial, namely Lord Shawcross, then Attorney-General for Great Britain and Chief Counsel for the Prosecution for the United Kingdom, and The Lord Elwyn-Jones, the present Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and one of the Counsel for the Prosecution for the United Kingdom.

Said Faurisson: “My comment is [that] I am not surprised that prosecutors would repudiate that there were tortures. They were, as it is said naively, there intimately involved in the Nuremberg trial… in my opinion, it is clear that there were tortures and I would like to give the name of the people that I think were tortured. Those people are Franz Ziereis… commandant of Mauthausen, and we know by [the] official report of Hans Marsalek… that he was interrogated during something like six hours having in his body three bullets and he died… [This] is what is called the confession of Franz Ziereis. This is not the torture in the general meaning of the word, but this is a kind of torture and even in the Mauthausen Museum today we have a photo showing Franz Ziereis, on a kind of bed, people are around him and there was an American general, I think his name was Seibel… who was present and other people… I would give Rudolf Hoess, Hans Fritzsche, Josef Kramer…”

With respect to Josef Kramer, Faurisson testified that a French doctor, Dr. Fréjafon, in a book on Bergen-Belsen, stated that Kramer was beaten by the British and put into a refrigeration room for a night. Faurisson was not surprised that Kramer said there was no gas chamber in his first affidavit but said there was in his second affidavit. Faurisson testified this statement related to Auschwitz and to Struthof-Natzweiler. For the latter camp, Kramer gave two totally different ‘confessions’ regarding the alleged gassings. Faurisson had found these documents in the archives of the French military police in Paris. (30-8351, 8352)

Fritz Sauckel (the German labour minister) was threatened with his family of about ten children being turned over to the Soviets, said Faurisson.^[8] Julius Streicher had complained before the International Military Tribunal about the way he had been treated, and the tortures, but this was later stricken from the record of the Tribunal by its own decision. His complaints were only known today because they were reported in an article which appeared at the time in The Times, a British newspaper.^[9] (30-8352, 8353)

Faurisson pointed out various places in Six Million Did Die where it alleged a “Nazi policy of extermination” (p. 31); “Mass murder – millions put to death in cold blood as a deliberate matter of State policy” (p. 35); “The evidence presented at the Nuremberg trial relating to the planned extermination of European Jewry” (p. 35): all of which allegations were made without proof. Today, said Faurisson, there was a dispute about whether there was a plan and more and more historians now believed that there was no plan. (30-8353, 8354)

On page 36 of Six Million Did Die, the authors reproduced parts of United States prosecutor Robert Jackson’s opening address in the Nuremberg trial, in which he alleged:

“The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jews was so methodically and thoroughly pursued, that despite the German defeat and Nazi prostration this Nazi aim largely has succeeded… As the German frontiers were expanded by war, so the campaign against the Jews expanded. The Nazi plan never was limited to extermination in Germany; always it contemplated extinguishing the Jew in Europe and often in the world…”

Again, testified Faurisson, there was no proof for the allegation of a plan. Nowhere in the book did the authors, Suzman and Diamond, indicate that the views expressed by Jackson and others at that time were no longer universally held by historians. (30-8355, 8356, 8360)

On page 38 of the book, the authors quoted the judgment of the International Military Tribunal given on October 1, 1946, where the Tribunal found:

“… In the summer of 1941, however, plans were made for the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question in all of Europe. This ‘final solution’ meant the extermination of the Jews, which early in 1939 Hitler had threatened would be one of the consequences of an outbreak of war, and a special section in the Gestapo under Adolf Eichmann, as head of Section B4 of the Gestapo, was formed to carry out the policy.”

Faurisson testified that this statement was “totally wrong. There is absolutely no proof of that and I don’t think that I have ever seen a historian even say exactly this kind of accusation that the German said we are going to ask Eichmann to exterminate the Jews and for that, we are going to create a special section…” (30-8361)

On page 39, the authors again quoted the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Stroop Report:

“The planned and systematic character of the Jewish persecutions is best illustrated by the original report of SS Brigadier-General Stroop, who was in charge of the destruction of the Ghetto in Warsaw, which took place in 1943…”

In his report entitled “The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists”, Stroop recorded that his action had eliminated “a proved total of 56,065 people. To that we have to add the number of those killed through blasting, fire, etc., which cannot be counted.”

Stroop never said this, said Faurisson, and even Raul Hilberg, on page 326 of The Destruction of the European Jews, said that 56,065 Jews surrendered. He did not say “eliminated” which in the context given in the Nuremberg judgment meant killed or executed. (30-8362)

On page 39, the authors of the book referred to the German engineer Hermann Graebe. Faurisson indicated that Graebe was quoted often; he had testified on about 147 occasions. “… [We] have every reason to think that Hermann Graebe was a false witness,” said Faurisson, “and, discovered by the German justice as a false witness, [was] sued for false testimony. He left Germany and went to San Francisco and never accepted to go back to Germany to answer to the accusations of the German justice.” Faurisson was sorry that he had not brought his files on Graebe, but indicated that he had not expected he would have to deal with the book Six Million Did Die. (30-8362, 8363)

Faurisson returned to Six Million Did Die and read from page 39 where the authors reproduced a portion of Auschwitz Commandant Hoess’s testimony:

“We had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit to work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work…”

Said Faurisson: “I would like to make a remark about children of tender years were invariably exterminated. This is… simply false. We have many proof that children even were born in Auschwitz…” (30-8364) As proof, Faurisson produced the book Anthology, published by the International Committee of Auschwitz in Poland in 1969 and read his translation of an extract from a report by a midwife in Auschwitz [Vol. II, Pt. 2, p. 159 to 169 of the French edition]:

I worked under these conditions for two years day and night without somebody to replace me… The women gave childbirth on the heating pipes. I delivered in this manner more than 3,000 babies. In spite of the dreadful dirtiness, the vermin and the rats, in spite of the infectious diseases and other horrors beyond description, extraordinary things occurred there which are unbelievable but true. One day, the camp doctor asked me to submit a report to him concerning the infections attracted by the pregnant women, the mortality against mothers and infants, sucklings. I reported to him that I had not one single case of death either with the mothers or newborn babies. The camp doctor looked at me with incredulous eyes and informed me that even in the best maternal wards in Germany, they could not boast of such results. His eyes were full of rage and hatred. Why indeed had there been no mortality at all? Perhaps because the organisms were destroyed to such an extent that they constituted a sterilized, a barren substance for the microbes.

The Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau [Calendar of Auschwitz] published by the Auschwitz Museum^[10], indicated that children born in the camp were listed and given numbers. These children were Jews and gypsies. There was an association in the United States called the Candles Association for the twins of Auschwitz. In 1982, there were about 108 members. There were also medical studies on what the Auschwitz Museum called the children of Auschwitz, meaning both children born in the camp and people who were children when they came to the camp. (30-8366, 8367)

On page 31 of Anthology there were results of psychiatric examinations of persons born or interned as children in Nazi concentration camps. On page 48 the book stated:

The most advanced symptoms were observed with the children who had spent more than two or even three years at Auschwitz.

Faurisson pointed out that on the end pages of Six Million Did Die was a photograph of children at Auschwitz who had not been killed: “… it’s a rather well known photograph because it’s from a film taken by the Soviet[s] and the Poles at… the liberation of Auschwitz on the 27th of January, 1945. And we see those children getting out of the camp and there we are. It’s [a contradiction] with[in] the content of the book itself. Of course, it’s terrible to keep children in a concentration camp. Why would you put children in a concentration camp?…In my opinion, it’s because the German did, as so many people on earth, when they decided to put, for instance, the Jews in…concentration camps, they put the parents and also the children and we have children which are very well known today who were in those camps and especially in Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. We know, for instance, that at the end of the war in Buchenwald, there is a book about those children, something like 1,000 Jewish children were in Buchenwald coming from Auschwitz.” (30-8367, 8368)

Suzman and Diamond nowhere qualified the statement in their book that children of tender years were invariably exterminated. At the time they published the book, the Soviet film of the children in Auschwitz was shown to tourists visiting the Auschwitz Museum. Faurisson himself had seen it. (30-8369)

Faurisson indicated that shortly before the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviets, the Germans moved most of the prisoners to the west on the 18th of January, 1945. They left behind about 8,500 people: those who were too sick or feeble and who were not able to go by foot to the west. The photograph of the children in Auschwitz, taken upon liberation on January 27, 1945, showed some of those left behind. Suzman and Diamond did not identify the photograph of the children as being children liberated from Auschwitz; the caption simply said “Liberation.” This was important, said Faurisson, because the reader, having been previously informed by the authors that in Auschwitz all children were exterminated, would think that this must be a photograph of some other camp, like Buchenwald. (30-8371 to 8373)

On page 41, Suzman and Diamond listed various trials by Allied military tribunals which involved, they alleged, the systematic mass killing of Jews. Faurisson noted that one of these trials was the “Zyklon B Case” (held before the British Military Court at Nuremberg March 1 – 8, 1946). Suzman and Diamond wrote concerning this case:

The whole gassing procedure at Auschwitz was described in detail by German eye-witnesses.

Two of the three accused were sentenced to death and hanged.

Faurisson testified that the two accused who were hanged were Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher; both of these men had denied that they knew anything about the use of Zyklon B to kill people. The court nevertheless held that they could not ignore that Zyklon B was used to kill people and the two men were hanged. In Faurisson’s opinion, the gassing procedure was not described in detail by the German eyewitnesses as alleged by Suzman and Diamond. He continued: “I think that in any of those trial, we found at any time witnesses, German or not German, to say that there were gassings, and even in Buchenwald and in Dachau…” (30-8374 to 8376)

A second trial listed was that of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, held before the Supreme National Military Tribunal of Poland, March 11 – 29, 1947 (vol. VII, case no. 38, pp. 11-26), in which, Suzman and Diamond alleged at page 42:

The charges included responsibility for the death, inter alia, of about 300,000 registered camp inmates and about 4 million people, mainly Jews, brought to the camp from different European countries to be killed upon their arrival and therefore not included in the register of the camp inmates.

Faurisson testified that Hoess was hanged in April of 1947 but the text of his “confessions” was not published for eleven years thereafter, in the book Commandant of Auschwitz. It was strange, said Faurisson, that the Germans would wait eleven years to publish this document after receiving it from the Poles. Furthermore, the figures of 4 million and 300,000 given by Suzman and Diamond as the number of deaths at Auschwitz were, in Faurisson’s opinion, “fantastic exaggerations” which no historian would support today. (30-8377)

The authors mentioned Raul Hilberg many times in the book, said Faurisson. Hilberg published in the 1961 edition of his book that 1 million Jews died in Auschwitz. Nowhere in Six Million Did Die did the authors inform the reader that the Nuremberg figures of 4 million and 300,000 had subsequently been corrected by persons such as Hilberg. (30-8378 to 8382)

On page 44 of Six Million Did Die, the authors dealt with the British libel case of Dering v. Uris. Faurisson read an excerpt to the jury:

Striking confirmation of the inhumane medical experiments carried out upon Jewish inmates of Auschwitz was afforded by a Civil Case, Dering vs. Uris and Others, which came before the Queen’s Bench Division in England in April 1964 before Mr. Justice Lawton and a jury. The Plaintiff alleged that he had been libelled in the book Exodus by Leon Uris by a statement relating to certain medical experiments alleged to have been performed by the Plaintiff upon inmates of Auschwitz.

The jury awarded the Plaintiff a ha’penny damages.

In the course of the case, evidence was given by numerous witnesses, male and female, of ghastly sterilisation operations which had been performed upon them. These experiments had been recorded in detail in a theatre register of surgical operations which was put in evidence at the trial – a mute witness of the atrocities.

Mr. Justice Lawton commenced his summing up to the Jury with the following remarks:

“You and I have sat in this court now for three and a half weeks and we have had to listen to evidence revealing one, and it is only one, facet of what future generations will probably come to describe as the greatest crime that has ever been committed. I have been a student of history all my life, and I cannot think of any crime that begins to compare with the crime of Auschwitz.”

In a Foreword to Auschwitz in England, Lord Denning writes:

“While the trial was in progress, many thought: ‘All this is too horrible. Let us turn over this page of history and forget it.’ Yet the truth should be made known, if only to show how at one time a civilised country reverted to barbarism, and thus remind us of the perils that are not far away.”

Said Faurisson: “My comment would be this one. I have read in the 1960s the book Auschwitz in England. If my memory is good, Dering… was a surgeon in Auschwitz. He was actually not a German but a Pole, and he was accused by Uris of having operated without anaesthesia, on 17,000 women. This was the precise accusation which is not reported there. It should be. And Dering lodged a complaint against Uris, and if I remember, the trial was on the Queen’s Bench 7…” (30-8384)

Faurisson testified that they managed to obtain from the Auschwitz Museum the register of the surgical operations. The Germans had put everything in writing, and the surgical operations were marked in Latin; for example, many operations had the notation casus explorativus, meaning that it was an operation to try to find what was wrong. The register contained the name of the inmate, his number, the date, and the signature of the surgeon. We had to realize, said Faurisson, that when there was one natural death in Auschwitz, twenty-one signatures were required on various documents. When there was an unnatural death, such as a suicide, more than thirty signatures were required. This information could be found in the Anthology of Auschwitz published by the International Committee of Auschwitz. Without the Auschwitz register, said Faurisson, Dering would never have been able to defend himself against the charges. (30-8384, 8385, 8389)

The accusation dropped from 17,000 improper procedures to 130, then to perhaps five people who had been operated on in an improper way. “They discovered,” said Faurisson, “that those operations had not been done without anaesthesia, but with a kind of anaesthesia [which] was recent at that time… Rachi anaesthesia… It is a partial anaesthesia.” Faurisson obtained this information from the book written about the trial, Auschwitz in England, by two British lawyers. (30-8386)

In the end, it was found that Dering had been perhaps wrong for one or two people, and he won the suit. The jury awarded Dering a halfpenny in damages but the judge ordered that Dering pay the costs of the entire trial. Dering said at the end, ‘My honour is saved, but financially I am ruined’. He died about two years later of cancer. (30-8387)

Leon Uris subsequently wrote his book QB 7 (Queen’s Bench 7), a “kind of theatre play about the trial itself,” said Faurisson. Uris invented the story of the son of Dering (but not using Dering’s name) attending the trial of his father and being ashamed to discover what kind of father he had. (30-8387)

The case was interesting, said Faurisson, because it was clear that, at the beginning, everyone was ready to believe that it was possible to do such things to 17,000 people in Auschwitz. Faurisson noted that nowhere in Six Million Did Die was information given about the specific accusation against Dering or the evidence at the trial. (30-8388)

On page 44 of Six Million Did Die the authors wrote the following about the trial of Franz Stangl:

On 22nd December 1970, Franz Stangl, the notorious Kommandant of Sobibor (March 1942 – September 1942) and of Treblinka (September 1942 – August 1943) was sentenced by a German Court at Dusseldorf to life imprisonment for co-responsibility in the murder of some 900,000 men, women and children (mainly Jews), inmates of Treblinka, one of the largest of the Nazi extermination camps established in occupied Poland.

After the war, Stangl escaped by way of Rome to Syria and then to Brazil. Largely as a result of the efforts of Simon Wiesenthal, he was captured in Brazil in 1967 and extradited to Germany. (See Gitta Sereny, Into that Darkness, 1974).

Faurisson testified that he had been in contact with Gitta Sereny, author of the book Into that Darkness, an “extremely vague” account of Treblinka. Faurisson asked her why she had never asked Stangl any questions about the gas chambers in Treblinka, such as their location and who operated them. She replied to Faurisson that she ‘didn’t think of it’. (30-8389, 8390)

Suzman and Diamond also mentioned the Majdanek trial, which lasted five years and determined that instead of 1.5 million people dying there, some 50,000 had. (30-8390)

On page 47 of Six Million Did Die, the authors dealt with the Eichmann trial:

It is significant that the facts of the extermination were at no time disputed by Eichmann’s Counsel who chose not to cross-examine the witnesses on this aspect of the case.

Indeed, on the Holocaust witnesses, Dr. Servatius said he had not put any questions to them for “in general lines there was no reason to doubt the description put forward by them. Their suffering was too sacred for me to attack them.”

Said Faurisson: “And that’s what… I keep repeating, that those people are not really cross-examined on, for example, the procedures of gassing, because the lawyers… do not want to seem to attack the witnesses.” (30-8391)^[11]  

On page 49 of Six Million Did Die, the authors wrote:

Eichmann, at his trial admitted that on 20th January 1942, 15 high ranking Nazis (including Eichmann himself) assembled at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, where ways and means of implementing the so-called “Final Solution” (“Endloesung”) were decided upon, after different methods of extermination had been debated. This fateful Wannsee Conference was the central event in the history of the “Final Solution.”

Faurisson testified that there was nothing in the Wannsee Conference protocol which indicated that different methods of extermination were debated. If there had been, said Faurisson, there would not be the debate which existed today between the intentionalists and the functionalists. (30-8393, 8394)

On page 57 of Six Million Did Die, under the heading ‘Authoritative Modern Historians,’ Suzman and Diamond quoted historian John Toland:

… Konrad Morgen, an assistant SS Judge and among the few knowledgeable and reliable living German witnesses of the tragedy who extensively investigated most of the killing camps at the height of the operation, estimates that six million Jews were executed.

Faurisson expressed his skepticism about ‘authoritative modern historians’. In his opinion, there were no such historians and the idea of authority seemed to him to be dangerous. In his research, he did not want to be obedient to any authority. (30-8395)

With respect to Konrad Morgen, Faurisson testified that before the International Military Tribunal in 1946, Morgen testified that the gassings took place in Monowitz, the third camp in the Auschwitz camp complex. The first two camps were Auschwitz I and Birkenau (sometimes called Auschwitz II). Morgen did not say this once, but six or nine times. This was a total impossibility, said Faurisson. But by the early 1960s at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, Morgen came back as a witness and testified that the gassings took place in Birkenau. As a result, Faurisson did not regard Morgen as an authoritative, knowledgeable or reliable witness. (30-8395, 8396)

On page 58 of Six Million Did Die Suzman and Diamond quoted a number of allegedly authoritative historians:

William Carr… in his book A History of Germany 1815-1945 (London, 1969), writes: “… With cold-blooded deliberation several million Jews, men, women and children, from all parts of occupied Europe, were murdered in the short space of three years to gratify the crude racialist delusions of a handful of ignorant fanatics.” (p. 385)

Marshall Dill, Jnr., the American historian, in his book, Germany: A Modern History (University of Michigan Press, 1961) writes: “… The most tragic and virulent part of Himmler’s work was the almost incredible drive to exterminate the entire Jewish people, a programme lightly described as ‘the final settlement of the Jewish question.”…

A.J.P. Taylor… in his book From Sarajevo to Potsdam (London, 1965) writes: “… Now the Germans had some millions of Jews in their power, and they could not simply be turned out. They could only be exterminated. This policy was now adopted with every refinement of civilised skill.”

What these authors stated then, said Faurisson, would now be contested by many historians. (30-8397, 8398)

On page 60 of Six Million Did Die, Suzman and Diamond listed German historian Ernst Nolte as being among “other recognised modern historians and reputable writers” who dealt with the history of the Third Reich. In the past year and a half, said Faurisson, Nolte had moved towards the revisionist position to what Faurisson termed “ersatz revisionism.” Nolte still believed in the gas chambers but took the position that the extermination was comparable to atrocities practised by the Communists. Nolte also did not believe in a plan of extermination. He was totally a functionalist. As a result, he was now in trouble and his car had been recently bombed in Berlin. Many historians in Germany protested against the bombing, saying that what Nolte had said was no reason to bomb his car. In a book published in France in 1987 by René Schwark, it was alleged that Nolte was under Faurisson’s “malevolent influence.” (30-8399, 8400)

Faurisson testified that Raul Hilberg, with his belief in an ‘incredible meeting of minds’, was also now in the camp of the functionalists. It was possible, said Faurisson, that the only intentionalist left was the historian Eberhard Jäckel. (30-8401)

On page 63 of Six Million Did Die, the authors quoted Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments in the Third Reich. Faurisson testified that Speer had been in a good position during the war to know if millions were murdered because he was the top person responsible for the concentration camps, higher even than Oswald Pohl. In a letter he wrote in 1977 Speer said:

Therefore, I for my person, have in the Nuremberg Trial, confessed to the collective responsibility and I am also maintaining this today still. I still see my main guilt in my having approved of the persecution of the Jews and of the murder of millions of them.

But Faurisson discovered that two years after writing this letter, Speer published a book entitled Technik und Macht in which he explained what he meant by this passage:

My approbation through looking the other way, not through knowledge of an order or its execution. The first is as grave as the second.

Said Faurisson: “… what he is telling us there is that, in fact, he didn’t know. He didn’t know… any order of an execution of the Jews and any order of the execution of this order. Nothing. And I remind you that in Nuremberg, Speer pleaded not guilty and every German pleaded not guilty.” (30-8403)

In Faurisson’s opinion, it was “totally impossible” that Speer would not have known about the execution of 6 million people if it had been going on. Said Faurisson: “In the execution of millions of people, in the middle of Europe, during two or three years, when you see this scope, all that is fantastic. How could this… not have been noticed, and especially by Albert Speer who knew what were the trains, the necessity of coal, of wood, of any economical necessity, and he was interested [in] the work of the inmates… I’ve seen myself extraordinary documents about the economical interests of concentration camps. Do you know that even if we had not the slightest trace of a concentration camp, we should be able, by the economical document[s], to reconstitute what was this camp? I take only one example, the necessity to have some coal, to have coal to heat the place. You need… to sign papers, to ask for coal, ask permission during the war. The economy was like that. So you had to describe your place and to say not only the three dimensions but the part that had to be heated. This, for example, should be subtracted. So we have many, many documents of that kind, and this is the Germany of Albert Speer. Extraordinary organized.” (30-8404)

On page 26 of Six Million Did Die, Suzman and Diamond reproduced the Joint Allied Declaration of December 17, 1942:

The attention of the Governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the United States of America, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Yugoslavia, and of the French National Committee has been drawn to numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe.

In Poland which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labour camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.

The above mentioned Governments and the French National Committee condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination. They declare that such events can only strengthen the resolve of all freedom loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny. They re-affirm their solemn resolution to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end.

Faurisson noted that the declaration used vague and classical terms such as “mass execution,” “bloody cruelties,” “assignment in labour camps,” etc., as well as “extermination.” But the real extermination, said Faurisson, would have been systematic with a system, with gas chambers, and the Allies were looking for information on the gas chambers. (30-8405, 8406)

In Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1943, vol. 1, page 416, was an exchange of telegrams between the Secretary of State of the United States and the Ambassador in the Soviet Union in August of 1943 regarding the text of the “Declaration on German Crimes in Poland” which was to be released simultaneously by the Allied governments. Part of the proposed text read:

…. Some children are killed on the spot, others are separated from their parents and either sent to Germany to be brought up as Germans or sold to German settlers or despatched with the women and old men to concentration camps, where they are now being systematically put to death in gas chambers.

The declaration was to be published in those words, when, suddenly, said Faurisson, the Secretary of State sent another telegram, saying:

At the suggestion of the British Government which says there is insufficient evidence to justify the statement regarding execution in gas chambers, it has been agreed to eliminate the last phrase in paragraph 2 of the “Declaration on German Crimes in Poland” beginning “where” and ending “chambers” thus making the second paragraph end with “concentration camps”. Please inform the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the change in text.

Said Faurisson: “A very interesting problem for the historian is this problem: what did the Allies, what did the Jewish organization[s], [know] of this alleged extermination during the war? It’s very interesting, but a very vast topic. And I know three books which are essential for this topic. The first one is [by] Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret; the second one is [by] Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, and the third one, David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews...” (30-8407)

Germany during the war, said Faurisson, was an “almost transparent country. Because all… secret code, codes of the SS, codes of the railway, code of the army, were very quickly deciphered, and even when they changed, it was once more deciphered, and we know, by the information received through those code, we know that there were massacres of Jews in Poland, and in Russia, but there is nothing in the German communications about gas chambers. Nothing.” Nor was there anything in the communications about sending Jews to Auschwitz for extermination. (30-8408)

On page 79 of Six Million Did Die, Suzman and Diamond dealt with the address to the Nuremberg Tribunal by prosecutor Major Walsh:

Turning to the concentration camps, Major Walsh referred to the millions of Jews murdered in these camps by mass shooting, gas, poison, starvation and other means. In this connection he referred to an official Polish report on the Auschwitz Concentration Camp dated 31st May, 1945 (Document L-161) according to which during July 1944 Jews were killed at the rate of 12,000 daily. He further offered in evidence an official Polish Government Commission report dealing with Treblinka (Document 3311-PS) which reports that the erection of Camp Treblinka B was “aimed at the complete destruction of the Jewish population in Poland”. The report describes graphically the procedure for the extermination in the following terms:

“All victims had to strip off their clothes and shoes, which were collected afterwards, whereupon all of them, women and children first, were driven into the death chambers. Those too slow or too weak to move quickly were driven in by rifle butts, by whipping and kicking, often by Sauer himself. Many slipped and fell; the next victims pressed forward and stumbled over them. Small children were simply thrown inside. After being filled up to capacity, the chambers were hermetically closed and steam was let in. In a few minutes all was over. The Jewish menial workers had to remove the bodies from the platform and to bury them in mass graves. By and by, as new transports arrived, the cemetery grew, extending in the Eastern direction.”

 

[End Part 2/4]

Part 3

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Notes

[6] Legislation passed subsequently to fulfill the treaty obligations was called the “Federal Law for the Compensation of the Victims of National Socialist Persecution “(Bundesentschädigungsgesetz, or BEG).
[7] The trial judge ruled, in the absence of the jury, that Faurisson would not be allowed to give evidence on the thesis presented by Butz in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.. (30-8347)
[8] Testimony of Fritz Sauckel, IMT “Blue Series”, 30 May, 1946, p. 64. See Hilberg’s testimony, supra, for quoted portions.
[9] “Streicher Opens His Case,” Times (London), 27 April 1946. See Hilberg’s testimony, supra, for quoted portions.
[10] Danuta Czech, ed. Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau, Hefte von Auschwitz (Auschwitz Museum, 1959).
[11] Faurisson was not allowed to give testimony that the first time he had seen witnesses of Auschwitz cross-examined about the alleged gas chambers was in the first Zündel trial in 1985. “He won’t do it”, ruled Judge Ron Thomas. No reasons were given for the ruling. (30-8391 to 8393)