The Gas Chambers: Truth or Lie? Interview with Robert Faurisson

Interview of Robert Faurisson with Antonio Pitamitz published in Storia Illustrata, Milan, August 1979, no. 261.

[The author extensively annotated his French text for publication in Serge Thion’s Vérité Historique ou Vérité Politique? (Paris, La Vieille Taupe, 1980), and made some further corrections in 1997 for the edition in his own Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998), vol. I, p. 155-194. The present English translation, which includes all notes and corrections, has not previously been published. – ed., August 30, 2021]

Storia Illustrata: Mr Faurisson, for some time now in France – and not only in France – you have found yourself at the centre of a bitter controversy resulting from certain statements of yours on the subject of what is still one of the most sombre pages of the history of the Second World War. We are speaking of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. In particular, one of your statements seems as forthright as it is incredible. Is it true that you deny the gas chambers ever existed?

Robert Faurisson: That is correct. I say, in effect, that those famous homicidal “gas chambers” are nothing but a wartime canard. This invention of wartime propaganda is comparable to the legends of the First World War that were spread about “Teutonic barbarity”. Already then, the Germans were accused of perfectly imaginary crimes: Belgian children having their hands cut off, crucified Canadians, corpses turned into soap [1]. The Germans, doubtless, did not refrain from putting out similar stories about the French.

The German concentration camps did exist, but everyone knows that they were not an original German creation. Crematory ovens also existed in some of those camps, but incineration is no worse and no more criminal than burial. The crematory ovens even constituted progress from the health standpoint in places where there was risk of epidemic. Typhus brought its ravages to all of wartime Europe. Most of the corpses shown so conveniently in photos are manifestly corpses of typhus victims. Those photos illustrate the fact that internees – and sometimes guards as well – died of typhus. They prove nothing else. To insist on the fact that the Germans at times used crematory ovens is not particularly honest. Those who do so count on the repulsion or dull disquiet felt by people accustomed to burial and not to incineration. Imagine a people in Oceania accustomed to burning its dead; tell them that we bury ours and you will appear something of a savage. Perhaps they will even suspect you of burying people “more or less alive”.

There is a display of utter dishonesty when the autoclaves in the camps that were, in reality, meant for the disinfestation of clothing by gas are shown, in the same manner, as homicidal “gas chambers”. This accusation, never clearly formulated, has now been abandoned, but certain museums or certain books still presume to show us the photo of one of those autoclaves, at Dachau, with an American soldier standing in front of it perusing … the timetable for “gassings” [2].

Another form of gassing really did exist in the German camps: that consisting in the fumigation of buildings to destroy vermin. It was for this purpose that the famous insecticide Zyklon B, around which a fantastic legend has been built, was used. Zyklon B, the licence for which dates from 1922 [3], is still used today, notably for disinfecting furniture, barracks, silos, ships, but also for the destruction of foxes in their burrows, or pests of all kinds [4]. It is quite dangerous to handle for, as the letter B indicates, it contains Blausaure, i.e. “blue” acid or hydrocyanic acid, also called prussic acid. It is worth noting, by the way, that the Soviets, misunderstanding the significance of this letter, accused the Germans of having killed detainees with Zyklon A and Zyklon B [5]! [Correction of 1997: there existed different categories of Zyklon, designated by the letters A, B, C, D. Thus the Soviets were right to speak of “Zyklon A”.]

But let us turn to the alleged homicidal “gas chambers”. Until 1960 I still believed in the reality of those slaughterhouses for humans where, with industrial procedures, the Germans had killed their prisoners in industrial quantities. Then I learned that certain authors regarded the reality of those “gas chambers” as questionable: amongst them, Paul Rassinier, who had been deported to Buchenwald and then to Dora. Those authors came to be seen as a group of historians called “revisionists”. I studied their arguments. Of course, I also studied the arguments of the official historians. The latter believed in the reality of the exterminations in the “gas chambers”. They are, if you will, the “exterminationists” [6]. For many years I carefully assessed the arguments of both. I visited Auschwitz, Majdanek and Struthof. I searched, in vain, for a single person capable of telling me: “I was interned in such or such camp and I saw there, with my own eyes, a building that was unquestionably a gas chamber”. I read many books and documents. For years I studied the archives of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) in Paris. It should go without saying that I took a particular interest in the so-called “war crimes” trials. I gave very special attention to what were presented as “confessions” by SS men or any other Germans. I am not going to list here the names of all the specialists whom I consulted. A curious thing, for that matter: quite often it took just a few minutes of conversation for the “specialists” in question to come out and say: “You know, I’m not a specialist on gas chambers”. And something even more curious: there exists to this day no book nor even any article from the “exterminationist” school on the “gas chambers”. I know that perhaps some titles might be cited but those titles are deceptive [7]. In reality, in the impressive mountain of writings devoted to the German camps, there is nothing on their intrinsically wicked originality: the “gas chambers”! No exterminationist has written about the “gas chambers”. The most one can say is that Georges Wellers, of the CDJC, has sought to tackle the subject in a plea for the partial veracity of the Gerstein document as concerns the “gas chamber” of Belzec [8].

On the other hand, the revisionists have written a good deal about those “gas chambers”, to say either that their existence is doubtful or that it is frankly impossible. My personal opinion corresponds to the latter assertion. The existence of the “gas chambers” is utterly impossible. My reasons are, first, those that the revisionists have accumulated in their publications. Then there are those that I myself have found and that I should call material – basely and dumbly material.

I thought it necessary to begin at the beginning. You know that, in general, one takes a long time to realise that a task ought to have been begun at the beginning. I realised that we all spoke of “gas chambers” as if we clearly knew the meaning of those words. Among all those who utter sentences, speeches or judgments in which the expression “gas chamber” appears, how many actually know what they are talking about? I quickly noted that many people were committing an error of the grossest kind. They pictured a “gas chamber” as something basically like a simple bedroom into which domestic gas is conveyed under the door. They forgot that an execution by gas was, by definition, profoundly different from a mere suicidal or accidental asphyxiation. In the case of an execution, one must carefully eliminate all risk of malaise, poisoning or death for the executioner and those around him, risks to be eliminated before, during and after the execution. The technical difficulties that this implies are considerable. I wanted to know how, for example, farmed minks were gassed, how foxes’ burrows were gassed, how in the U.S. a condemned man was executed by gassing. I found that in the very great majority of cases hydrocyanic acid was used. However, that was precisely what the Germans had used to fumigate their barracks, and it was with that gas that they were alleged to have killed groups or indeed crowds of human beings. I therefore studied this gas. I wanted to know about its use in Germany and in France. I consulted the government rules on the use of this highly toxic product. I had the good fortune of discovering some documents on Zyklon B and hydrocyanic acid in the German industrial archives gathered together by the Allies at Nuremberg.

Then I closely reread certain testimonies, certain confessions or certain judgments of Allied or German courts on the killing of detainees with Zyklon B. And there I got a shock. You in turn are going to get that shock. I will first read you the testimony or confession of Rudolf Höss [9]. Then I will tell you some results of my investigation, purely physical, on hydrocyanic acid and Zyklon B. (Bear in mind that R. Höss was one of the three successive commandants of Auschwitz; all three were captured and interrogated by the Allies. Only Höss left a “confession”, for which we are indebted to his Polish jailers.)

In this confession, the description of gassing is remarkably brief and vague, but it must be noted that all the others who have claimed to have been present at this sort of operation are also vague and brief (with, in addition, all sorts of contradictions on certain points). Höss writes: “Half an hour after the release of the gas, the door would be opened and the ventilator turned on. The squad immediately began removing the bodies” [10]. I call your attention to the word “immediately”; in German: sofort. Höss then adds that the squad in charge of handling and removing 2,000 bodies from the “gas chamber” to the crematory ovens did so while “eating and smoking”; therefore, if I understand correctly, without wearing gas masks. This description clashes with simple common sense. It implies that it would be possible to enter, without any precaution, an enclosure saturated with hydrocyanic acid and handle (barehanded?) 2,000 cyanided corpses in which there probably remained lethal gas. There would undoubtedly still be gas in their hair (which was supposedly shaven off after the operation), in their mucous and also in air pockets among the heaped bodies. What kind of super-powerful ventilator is able to make so much gas floating in the air or trapped here and there instantly disappear? Even if such a ventilator existed, there would indeed have been need of a test to confirm that all the hydrocyanic acid was gone and then signal that the ventilator had actually performed its function and that it was safe to go ahead. However, it is abundantly clear from Höss’s description that we are dealing with a magical ventilator acting instantaneously and with such perfection that there was no cause for any fear, no need of any check.

What simple common sense suggests is now fully confirmed by the technical documents pertaining to Zyklon B and its use [11]. In order to fumigate a barrack, the Germans were obliged to take a great many precautions: a specially qualified team whose members were admitted only after a long course with the Zyklon B manufacturer; very important material, particularly the “J” filter (the strongest of all); evacuation of the surrounding barracks; posting of multilingual warnings with the skull and crossbones symbol; meticulous examination of the site to be fumigated in order to detect and seal any fissures; stopping up of chimneys or ducts, removal of keys from doors. The cans of Zyklon B were opened inside the barrack. When the gas had supposedly killed the vermin, then began the most delicate part of the operation: the airing out. Sentries were stationed at a certain distance from the doors and windows, their backs to the wind; they had to prevent, from afar, anyone from approaching. The team, in gas masks, would then enter the building, opening the windows and unstopping the chimneys and fissures. When they had finished with one floor of a building they had to go outside, remove their masks and stay in the open air for ten minutes. Then they put their masks back on, re-entered and went up to the next floor. Once this job was completed a wait of twenty hours was necessary. Actually, because Zyklon B was “difficult to ventilate, since it adheres to surfaces”, only a very long natural airing out could get rid of it. This was the case, at least, for spaces of large volume like barracks, with or without an upper floor, for when Zyklon B was used in an autoclave (volume: 10 cubic meters), it was still ventilated. When the twenty hours had elapsed, the team re-entered in their masks, stopped up the openings, then, if possible, brought the temperature of the premises to 15° C. Then they exited, to return after one hour, again in their masks. Then they checked, using an indicator test paper (which would turn blue in the presence of hydrocyanic acid), whether the place was again inhabitable. Thus, an enclosure that had been gassed was not accessible without a gas mask until a minimum of twenty-one hours had elapsed. French legislation on the use of hydrocyanic acid sets the minimum at twenty-four hours [12].

It thus becomes apparent that in the absence of a magical ventilator, capable of instantly expelling a gas that is “difficult to ventilate, as it adheres to surfaces”, the “slaughterhouse for humans” called “gas chamber” would have been inaccessible for close to twenty-four hours. Its walls, floor, ceiling would have retained, over all that time, discreet volumes of a gas that was highly poisonous for humans. And what about the bodies? They could only have been permeated with gas in the same way as the cushions, mattresses and blankets whose treatment is discussed in the same technical documents on the use of Zyklon B stating that they had to be taken outside and beaten for an hour in dry weather and for two hours in damp weather. Afterwards they were piled together and, if the test paper turned blue, beaten again.

As hydrocyanic acid is both inflammable and explosive, how could it have been used in close proximity to crematory ovens? How could men have entered the “gas chamber” while smoking?

And I have not yet spoken of the mass of technical and physical impossibilities that one discovers, in addition, on visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau to examine the location and dimensions of the supposed “gas chambers”. Besides, as a snooper in the Polish Auschwitz museum archives may unearth, those enclosures were in reality nothing more than “cold rooms” (morgues), typically characteristic in both their design and their dimensions. Thus the supposed “gas chamber” of Krema-II at Birkenau, of which only the ruins can be seen, was actually a cold room, built below ground level (for protection from the summer heat) and measuring 30 metres in length and 7 metres in width (2 metres for a body plus 3 metres for the movement of trolleys plus 2 metres for another body). The door, the clearances, the little lift (which measured only 2.10 by 1.35 metres) going up to the crematory chamber were all of Lilliputian dimensions compared with what Höss’s account lets the reader suppose [13]. According to Höss, the “gas chamber” regularly contained 2,000 standing victims, but could have held 3,000. Imagine that: three thousand persons in 210 square metres. In other words, to make a comparison, 286 standing in a room measuring 5 by 4 metres! And don’t let anyone come and tell us that the Germans, before leaving, blew up “gas chambers” and crematory ovens to conceal the traces of their crimes. When one wishes to erase all traces of a necessarily quite sophisticated installation, it is thoroughly dismantled from end to end so as not to leave the least bit of incriminating evidence. Destruction by explosives would have been naïve: in such case it would have sufficed to remove the concrete blocks to uncover this or that tell-tale remnant. And the Poles of the present-day Auschwitz museum have gathered together just such remnants of the “Kremas” (that is, structures comprising crematoria and supposed “gas chambers”). However, all of these pieces shown to tourists attest to the existence of crematory ovens and of nothing else [14]. If it was the Germans who dynamited those installations – as an army in retreat often does – it was precisely because those installations concealed nothing suspicious. At Majdanek, on the other hand, they left intact installations which, after the war, were christened with the name “gas chambers”.

In the United States the first execution by gassing took place on 8 February 1924 in the prison of Carson City, Nevada. Two hours after the execution, traces of poison gas were still detected in the prison yard. The warden, Mr Dickerson, declared that, as concerned the condemned man, this method of execution was certainly the most humane employed thus far. But he added that he would reject it because of the danger it posed to the witnesses [15]. Just recently, on 22 October 1979, prisoner Jesse Bishop was gassed in that prison.

The Americans seem to have perfected their gas chambers in 1936-1938. This type of execution is necessarily quite complicated [16]. Note that the Americans gas only one prisoner at a time (they have had gas chambers fitted with two seats for the execution of two brothers). And that prisoner is totally immobilised. He is poisoned by the hydrocyanic acid (precisely: by the dropping of sodium cyanide pellets into a vessel containing sulfuric acid and distilled water, which results in a release of hydrocyanic acid). In about 40 seconds the prisoner dozes off, and in a few minutes he dies. Apparently, this gas causes no pain. As in the case of Zyklon B, it is the gas’s evacuation that will pose problems. A natural airing out for 24 hours is not possible here: the layout of the premises would not allow it without exposing the guards and inmates to very grave danger. How then, must one proceed, given that this gas is difficult to remove by ventilation? The solution is to transform the hydrocyanic acid into a salt to be flushed away with water. The ammonia will serve as base in the chemical reaction required. When the hydrocyanic acid has disappeared, at least nearly completely, a certain alerting substance will notify the attending physician and his aides on the other side of the glass panel. That substance is phenolphthalein, held in cups placed at various points in the chamber, which turns purple when there is no more acid in the air. A system of adjustable ventilators blows the ammonia fumes towards an exhaust hood. The physician and his aides enter the chamber in gas masks and rubber gloves. The physician tousles the dead man’s hair to get rid of any residual hydrocyanic acid. Only a full hour afterwards can the guards enter the chamber. Before then, the body and the chamber will have been washed and the residual gas expelled via a chimney stack rising high above the prison. When during an execution there is risk of exposure for the guards posted in watchtowers, they are ordered to come down. I shall not go into the requirements for a complete hermetic sealing of the gas chamber: airlocks, “Herculite” panes of great thickness, vacuum system, mercury valves etc.

A gassing is not something to be improvised. Had the Germans decided to gas millions of persons, they would have had to develop some formidable machinery. There would have been need of a general order (which has never been found), instructions, studies, purchase orders, and plans – which have never been seen. Meetings of experts would have been necessary: architects, chemists, physicians, specialists in a wide range of technical fields. Disbursements and allocations of funds would have been required, operations which, in a state like the Third Reich, would have left manifold traces (we know, for example, to the nearest pfennig the cost of the Auschwitz kennel and of the laurel trees ordered from nurseries). Assignment orders would have been needed. Auschwitz and Birkenau would not have become camps with so much coming and going that the best way to prevent the frequent escapes of detainees was to tattoo a registration number on their arm [17]. Civilian employees, including engineers, would not have been permitted to mingle with the detainees. The Germans there would not have been allowed to go away on leave or receive visits of family members. Above all, prisoners who had served their sentences would not have been released, free to return to their respective countries. This fact, long kept secret by the historians, was revealed some years ago in an article by Louis De Jong, Director of the NIOD (Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) in Amsterdam [18].

Moreover, the recent publication in the United States of a number of wartime Allied aerial photographs of Auschwitz [19] deals the coup de grâce to this extermination legend: even in the summer of 1944, at the height of the influx of the Hungarian Jews, no pyre of bodies or crowd of people near the crematoria is to be noted (but an open gate and a well laid garden are), no suspect smoke (although the crematoria smoke stacks supposedly spewed, day and night, smoke and flames visible for several kilometres).

I conclude here with what I should call the criterion of false testimony regarding the “gas chambers”. I have noticed that all of these testimonies, vague and discordant as they may be on the rest, concur on at least one point: the team in charge of removing the bodies from the “gas chambers” entered the enclosure either “immediately” or “shortly after” the victims’ death. I say that this point, in itself, constitutes the touchstone of the false testimony, for there we have a total physical impossibility. If you meet someone who believes in the reality of the “gas chambers”, ask him how, in his opinion, the bodies could be removed to make room for the next batch of victims.

S.I.:  How can you make such a statement after all that’s been said and written over 35 years? After all the accounts of the camp survivors, after the trials of the war criminals, after Nuremberg? Upon what evidence and upon what documents do you base your statement?

R.F.: Many historical errors have lasted more than thirty-five years.

What certain “survivors” have recounted constitutes testimonies, among other testimonies. Testimonies are not proof. Those of the “war criminals’” trials must be viewed with particular reservation. Unless I am mistaken, not a single witness in thirty-five years has ever been prosecuted for perjury, a fact that amounts to the granting of an exorbitant guarantee to anyone wishing to testify on “war crimes”. It also explains how courts could “establish” the existence of “gas chambers” in places in Germany where it has, in the end, been acknowledged that there were never any: for example, in the entire Reich of 1937.

The judgments handed down at Nuremberg have only a relative value. The vanquished were judged by the victors, without the least possibility of lodging an appeal. Articles 19 and 21 of the charter of that political tribunal cynically gave it the right to dispense with solid evidence; they even authorised recourse to hearsay [20]. All the other “war crimes” trials, as a result, drew inspiration from the precedents of Nuremberg. The courts trying cases of sorcerers and witches through the centuries had proceeded in like manner.

There have existed, at least on the face of things, evidence and testimonies of gassing at Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen. Professors, priests, Catholics, Jews, Communists have attested to the existence of “gas chambers” in those camps and to the use of gas for killing detainees. To take but one example, Mgr Piguet, Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, wrote that Polish priests went to the “gas chambers” of Dachau [21]. However, it is acknowledged today that no-one was ever gassed at Dachau [22].

Better still: men who were in charge of certain camps confessed to the existence and operation of homicidal “gas chambers” in places where historians have since had to acknowledge that there was never any such thing [23]. For Ravensbrück, the commandant (Suhren), his second in command (Schwarzhuber) and the camp physician (Dr Treite) all confessed to the existence of a “gas chamber” and even described, in a vague way, its operation. They were executed or committed suicide. Same scenario for Mauthausen commandant Ziereis, also said to have made such confessions on his deathbed in 1945 [24]. It should not be thought that the confessions of the men in charge at Ravensbrück were extorted by the Russians or the Poles, for it was the British or French legal apparatus that obtained them. An aggravating circumstance: they obtained them several years after the war. What needed to be done was done in order that, right up to the end, until 1950, a man like Schwarzhuber should collaborate with his interrogators, his examining magistrates or his trial judges.

Today there are no longer any serious historians to claim that people were gassed in a camp anywhere in the pre-1938 Reich: only certain camps situated in post-war Poland are concerned. The 19^th of August 1960 constitutes an important date in the history of the myth of the “gas chambers”. On that day the newspaper Die Zeit published a letter that it entitled “No gassing at Dachau” [25]. Given the content of that letter, its title ought to have been, in order to be completely honest, “No gassing anywhere in the Old Reich” (Germany within its 1937 frontiers). The letter was from Dr Martin Broszat, director since 1972 of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. Dr Broszat is an ardent anti-Nazi. He is one of the exterminationist historians. He believes in the authenticity of Rudolf Höss’s “confessions”, which he published in 1958 but with serious truncations in the passages where Höss, doubtless in order to follow the suggestions of his Polish jailers, had exaggerated “a bit much” [26]. In brief, Dr Broszat had to admit on that date in 1960 that no gassing had ever occurred in the whole of the 1937 Reich. He added, using an awkward expression, that there had only been gassing above all (?) at certain chosen places in Poland, amongst which Auschwitz [27]. And, as far as I know, all the official historians have ended up admitting this fact along with Dr Broszat. I deplore the fact that Dr Broszat wrote no more than a letter on the subject. A scholarly paper, with detailed explanations, was in order. An explanation was needed as to how the evidence, testimonies and confessions considered unimpeachable until then had suddenly lost all their value. It is now nearly 20 years that we’ve been waiting for Dr Broszat’s explanations [28]. They would be of great value for determining whether the evidence, testimonies and confessions that we possess on the gassings of Auschwitz or Treblinka are worth more than the evidence, testimonies and confessions that we possess on the false gassings of Buchenwald or Ravensbrück [29]. Meanwhile, it is extremely curious that the evidence gathered, especially, by the French, British and American tribunals should suddenly have lost all value, whilst the evidence on the same subject in the possession, especially, of the Polish and Soviet tribunals should keep all its value!

In 1968, the “gas chamber” of Mauthausen (in Austria) was, in its turn, to be declared mere legend by an “exterminationist” historian: Olga Wormser-Migot. See, in her thesis on the Nazi concentration camp system, the section entitled “The problem of the gas chambers” [30]. And note the wording of that title for, by the admission of the exterminationist historians themselves, there is indeed a “problem of the gas chambers”.

On the subject of false confessions, I one day asked historian Joseph Billig (of the CDJC) how he might, for his part, explain them. Billig had belonged to the French delegation at the Nuremberg trial. I give you his reply. They were, in his words, “psychotic phenomena”! For my part, I have an explanation to offer for those alleged “psychotic phenomena” as well as for the “schizoid apathy” of Höss on the day of his deposition before at Nuremberg: Höss had been tortured by his English captors [31]. He had been “interrogated with a riding crop and alcohol”. Likewise at the so-called “Dachau” trials, the Americans – as revealed in particular by the Van Roden commission of inquiry (US Senate) – had abominably tortured other German accused [32].

But torture is most often pointless. Efficient methods of intimidation are numerous. The formidable, universal reprobation brought to bear on the accused Nazis retains nearly all its strength still today. When “anathema explodes in a religious unanimity worthy of the great mediaeval communities” there is nothing to do but bow before it, especially if the lawyers join in and assert that concessions are needed. I remember my own hatred of the Germans during the war and just after the war’s end: an incandescent hatred that I believed to be my own and which, with the hindsight of time, I was to realise had been infused into me. My hatred came to me from the English radio, Hollywood propaganda and Stalinist press. I would have been merciless to any German who had told me that he’d been a guard in one of the camps but had seen none of the massacres that everyone was talking about then. Had I been his examining magistrate I’d have considered it my duty to “have him confess”.

For thirty-five years the drama of this type of German defendants has been comparable to that of the “sorcerers” and “witches” of the Middle Ages. Let’s try to imagine the mad courage it would have taken for one of those alleged witches to dare to say in court: “The best proof that I have not had any dealings with the Devil is, quite simply, that the Devil does not exist”. Most of the time, those alleged witches could not believe the acts of which they were accused, but they shared or affected to share their judges-accusers’ belief in the Devil. Likewise Walter Dürrfeld, an engineer who had been at Auschwitz, initially told his judges that he personally had never suspected the existence of “gas chambers” in his camp; then, rallying to the belief of the day, he declared in court his personal indignation at “this brand of infamy for the German people” [33].

The witch would try to use deceit with her judges, just as the Germans, still today at the “Majdanek” trial in Düsseldorf, try to use deceit with theirs. For example, the witch might admit that the Devil had been there on such or such a day, but that he was at the top of a hill whilst she herself had remained at the foot of the hill. Likewise, a German defendant will strive to show that he himself had nothing to do with the “gas chambers”. Sometimes he goes so far as to say that he helped push people into the “gas chamber” or even that he was made to pour a substance through a hatch in the roof on pain of execution should he disobey [34]. He will often give the impression of obfuscating the matter. His accusers think: “Here’s another one trying to pull it off. They’re extraordinary, these Germans! They practically never saw or heard anything!” The truth is that, in effect, they neither saw nor knew anything about what the prosecution wants them to say as concerns gassing [35]. Any blame for their ways of obfuscating should be directed at us, the accusers, and not at them who are caught up in the only system of defence that we leave them. The lawyers have a weighty responsibility in the adoption of this system. I speak here of those who know or suspect that they are confronted with an enormous lie. They prefer not to raise this question, either in their own interest or in that of their client. Eichmann’s lawyer at the trial in Jerusalem did not believe in the existence of the “gas chambers” but, nonetheless, was careful to avoid touching on the problem [35]. One cannot rebuke him for it. I understand that the court’s charter allowed disqualification of the defence lawyer should there occur an incident described by the term “intolerable”, or an approximate one. An old lawyers’ technique, necessitated at times by the needs of the defence, is to argue the likely rather than the true. The true is sometimes too difficult to get across in the judges’ minds. The defence will settle for the likely. One example demonstrates this well. It is recounted by Albert Naud, the lawyer representing Lucien Léger, whom the entire French press presented as the certain perpetrator of an abominable crime. Lucien Léger protested his innocence. He chose Naud as his lawyer. The latter went to see him in prison. He told him: “Léger, let’s be serious! If you want me as your lawyer, we’re going to plead guilty.” A done deal. Léger’s head was saved. A few years later Naud became convinced that Léger was innocent. He was terribly cross with himself for having made him plead guilty. He did all in his power to obtain a review of the trial [37]. Too late. He died. And Léger, if he is innocent, will doubtless pay till the end of his days for the abominable attitude of the press and his lawyer’s blindness.

A lawcourt has no capacity to determine the historical truth. Even historians have, quite often, the utmost trouble in distinguishing the true from the false on a point of history. The independence of judges is necessarily very relative. Judges, like everyone, read newspapers. They get their information, in part, from the radio or television. Magazines and books offer them, as to all of us, “documents” or “photographs” of Nazi atrocities. Unless they’ve had special training in the critical appraisal of this kind of documents or photographs, they will fall into the crudest traps of media-orchestrated propaganda. Furthermore, judges are concerned with ensuring respect for public order, public morals and certain standards, usages and even beliefs of public life. All this, not to mention the concern of preserving their name from vilification in the press, can only lead them to judgments in matters of “war crimes” that the historian, for his part, is not bound to adopt.

The justice system has judged itself. Not once in this kind of trial has it even envisaged commissioning a forensic examination of what is called “the crime weapon”. A knife, a rope, a revolver, when suspected of having served as instruments of a crime, are all examined forensically, and there it is a matter of objects with nothing mysterious about them. Yet in the case of the “gas chambers” there has not been one single forensic study in thirty-five years! There is indeed talk of an examination made by the Soviets but we know what their standards are worth and, in any event, the text of the report seems to have remained secret.

For a year and a half, at the Frankfurt trial of 1963-65, a German court heard the so-called “Auschwitz guards case” without ordering any forensic examination of the crime weapon. Ditto for the Majdanek trial in Düsseldorf and, just after the war, for the Struthof trial in France. This absence of examination is all the more inexcusable in that not one judge, not one prosecutor, not one lawyer could claim to have any knowledge from experience of the nature or functioning of those extraordinary slaughterhouses for humans. At Struthof and Majdanek those “gas chambers” are, however, presented as being in their original state: thus it would suffice to examine the “crime weapon” on the spot. At Auschwitz things are less clear: in the main camp (Auschwitz I) tourists are left believing that the “gas chamber” is authentic, but if the museum authorities are pressed with questions they retreat and speak of “reconstruction” (which, by the way, is nothing but an arrant lie, easily provable as such by certain archive documents); at the Birkenau annex (Auschwitz II) only the ruins of the “gas chambers” are shown or, still less, only spaces of ground supposedly occupied in the past by “gas chambers”. But even there, forensic examinations are perfectly possible. For an archaeologist even a few meagre clues are sometimes enough to know the nature and purpose of a site that has been uninhabited for centuries. To give you an idea of the complaisance shown by the defence lawyers at the Frankfurt trial, going along in advance with the accusation, I should tell you that one of them even had his photograph taken by the press while lifting open a hatch (sic!) on the roof of the alleged “gas chamber” at Auschwitz I [38]. Ten years after the trial I asked that lawyer what had allowed him to consider the building in question to be a “gas chamber”. His written reply was more than evasive. It resembled the reply given to me by the authorities of the Dachau Museum. I asked them in writing what documents they relied on to state that a certain room in the camp was an unfinished “gas chamber”. In effect, I was surprised that an unfinished room could be decreed as destined to become, once finished, something that no-one had ever seen. One day I shall publish my correspondence with those authorities as well as with those in charge of the International Dachau Committee in Brussels.

You ask me on what evidence and on what documents I base my statement that the “gas chambers” never existed. I believe that I have already fully answered the question. I should add that a good part of that evidence and those documents are… those of the accusation [39]. It suffices to re-read closely the accusation’s texts in order to realise that they lead to the opposite of the result sought. The basic texts are contained in the forty-two volumes of the big Nuremberg trial, the fifteen volumes of the American trials, the nineteen volumes published thus far by the University of Amsterdam, the stenographic transcripts of the Eichmann trial, the various minutes of interrogations, the works of Hilberg, Reitlinger, Adler, Langbein, Olga Wormser-Migot, the Encyclopedia judaica, the Memorial by Klarsfeld (very interesting for its lists of false gassing victims), the publications of various institutes. I have, above all, worked very much at the CDJC of Paris. I was ousted from there early in 1978 on the initiative, in particular, of Georges Wellers, because the conclusions I’d reached about the “gas chambers” and the “genocide” had become known. The CDJC is a semi-public body: it receives public money. Nonetheless, it arrogates itself the right to kick out those who do not think as required. And it says so!

S.I.:  You go so far as to deny Hitler’s deliberate intention to exterminate the Jews. And recently also – during a debate on Italian Swiss television – you have said: “Hitler never had a single person killed for merely being Jewish.” What exactly do you mean by this sentence, from which it is inferable, by the way, that Hitler did have Jews killed?

R.F.: I say exactly this: “Never did Hitler order or allow that anyone should be killed on account of his race or his religion”. This sentence is perhaps shocking for some but I believe it is true. Hitler was anti-Jewish and racist.

His racism, incidentally, did not stop him from harbouring admiration for the Arabs and the Indians. He was against colonialism. On 7 February 1945 he said to his close collaborators: [“The white races did, of course, give some things to the natives, and they were the worst gifts that they could possibly have made, those plagues of our own modern world – materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism and syphilis. For the rest, since these peoples possessed qualities of their own which were superior to anything we could offer them, they have remained essentially unchanged. […] One solitary success must be conceded to the colonisers: everywhere they have succeeded in arousing hatred [40].”] [Correction of 1997: The passage in square brackets is from the book Hitler’s Political Testament, described in note 40. However, on reflection, this book seems to me to be a forgery for which François Genoud, recently deceased, may be responsible. British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper states in his long preface that the text is indubitably authentic. In my opinion he is mistaken.]

Hitler became anti-Jewish only relatively late. Before saying and repeating that the Jews were “the great masters of the lie” [41], he had been rather favourable towards them. He wrote in Mein Kampf: “The fact that they had, as I believed, been persecuted [on account of their beliefs] sometimes almost turned my distaste of unfavourable remarks about them into horror.”

Personally, I don’t know Hitler well at all, and he interests me no more than does Napoleon Bonaparte. If Hitler went into delirium, then I do not see why we ourselves should go into delirium on the subject of Hitler. Let’s seek to talk about him with the sang-froid that one generally maintains when talking about Amenophis Akhenaten. There was an inexpiable war between Hitler and the Jews. Obviously each blames the other for this conflict. In the person of Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organisation (and, later, first president of the State of Israel), the international Jewish community declared war on Germany on 5 September 1939 [42]. Previously, from 1933, the international Jewish community had manifested its hostility with measures for economic boycott of Nazi Germany [43]. It goes without saying that if it acted thus it was in retaliation against the measures taken by Hitler against the German Jews. This deadly spiral was to lead, on both sides, to a world war. Hitler said: “The Jews and their Allies want our annihilation, but it is they who will be annihilated”, whilst the Allies and the Jews said: “Hitler and the Nazis and their allies want our annihilation, but it is they who will be annihilated.” Thus did the two camps, throughout the war, inebriate themselves with bellicose and fanatical proclamations. The enemy became a beast whose throat must be cut. Consider, in the same way, the words of the Marseillaise: Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons! (“Let an impure blood flood our furrows!”)

That said, the Allies who waged a pitiless war against the Nazis and who, thirty-five years afterwards, still carry on a kind of “hunt for Nazis”, have never gone so far as to decide: “A National Socialist, by the mere fact of belonging to the National Socialist party, is to be killed, whether man, woman, child, or aged person.” Similarly, it may be said that Hitler, despite all the acts he accumulated against the Jews, never decreed: “Every Jew is to be killed”, nor: “A Jew, for the sole and simple reason that he’s a Jew, is to be killed.”. Of course, in the case of reprisals against “partisans” or “terrorists”, when the Germans selected their hostages for execution, it was better to be neither a Jew, nor a Communist, nor an imprisoned criminal; but this was a well-known effect of hostage-taking as practised everywhere and in every era.

Hitler had a portion of the European Jews interned, but to intern does not mean to exterminate. There was neither “genocide” nor “holocaust”. Any concentration camp is a woeful place or a horror, be it a German, Russian, French, American, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese or Cuban camp. There are of course degrees in that woefulness or horror, and it is certain that in times of war, famine, epidemic, a concentration camp becomes still more horrible. But nothing in the case with which we are dealing here allows us to say that there were extermination camps, i.e. camps in which people were put to be killed.

The “exterminationists” claim that in the summer of 1941 Hitler gave the order to exterminate the Jews. But no-one has ever seen that order. In contrast, there exist both certain statements by Hitler and measures taken by his armies that imply that such an order cannot have been given. On 24 July 1942, in his close circle, Hitler, recalling that the Jews had declared war on him through the intermediary of Chaim Weizmann, says that after the war he will destroy their towns one after the other; he specifies: “… if the Jewish dregs did not decamp and emigrate to Madagascar or some other national Jewish homeland [44]”. For my part, I should like to know how this “remark in conversation” can be reconciled with an order of extermination given once and for all a year before. Even in July 1944, on the eastern front where German soldiers were waging a fierce struggle against the partisans (Jews or non-Jews, Russians or Communists, Ukrainians etc.,) the army gave the most draconian orders that no soldier should take part in any abuse of the civilian population, Jews included. Otherwise, it would mean court-martial [45]. Hitler called for a merciless struggle in the fight, especially against the partisans, including, if necessary, against the women and children mingled in with the partisans, or apparently accomplices of the partisans. He obviously did not shrink from the practice of taking hostages (nor, incidentally, did the Allies). But he did not go beyond that. The day our media decide to break certain taboos and devote to the Allies’ “war crimes” a thousandth of the time that they devote to the “war crimes” of the defeated there will be some astonishment among the naive. The “crimes” of Hitler will then assume their proper proportions in a historical perspective. We are told a bit about Dresden and Katyn, it’s true. I say that Dresden and Katyn are not really very much compared with the deportations that we inflicted on the millions of Germans of the East. It’s true that it was not a matter of “deportations” but of … “displacements”. And I wonder whether the champions, all categories, among the various “war criminals” were not the British with the handing over of their Russian detainees to the Soviets [46].

S.I.:  What is your conception and what is your definition of genocide?

R.F.: I call “genocide” the act of killing people on account of their race. Hitler did not commit “genocide” any more than did Napoleon, Stalin, Churchill or Mao. Roosevelt interned American citizens of Japanese origin in concentration camps. That was not “genocide” either.

Hitler treated Jewish civilians as representatives of a belligerent enemy minority. It is, unfortunately, commonplace to treat civilians of that kind as dangerous or virtually dangerous. In line with good war logic, Hitler would have been led to intern all the Jews who came under his dominion. He did not do so, far from it; this was not, doubtless, for any humanitarian reasons but on grounds of practicality. In certain places in Europe he made his enemies wear a distinctive sign: the Jewish star (from September 1941 in Germany and from June 1942 in the northern zone of France). Wearers of the star could not move about freely and at all hours. They were like prisoners of war on conditional release. Hitler was concerned perhaps less with the Jewish question than with ensuring the safety of the German soldier. The average German trooper would have been incapable of distinguishing Jews from non-Jews. That sign designated them. The Jews were suspected of being able to pass on information (many of them spoke German) and to engage in espionage, arms trafficking, terrorism and black-marketeering. All contact between the Jew and the German soldier was to be prevented. For example, in the Paris metro Jews wearing the star were allowed solely on the last of the five carriages, and the German soldier must not enter that carriage [47]. I am not a specialist on these questions and may be mistaken but I believe this kind of measure was dictated as much by considerations of military security as by any wish to humiliate. In places where there were strong concentrations of Jews impossible to keep under real surveillance, unless through the intermediary of a Jewish police force, the Germans feared what was, incidentally, to happen in the Warsaw ghetto where, suddenly, just behind the front, in April 1943, an insurrection took place. [Correction of 1997: There was not, in this case, an insurrection but rather a reaction of groups of youths against a German police operation. See R. Faurisson, The Warsaw Ghetto in April-May 1943 – uprising or police operation?, 28 April 1993.] With stupefaction, the Germans discovered then that the Jews had built 700 blockhouses [48]. They put down that insurrection and transferred the survivors to transit camps, labour camps and concentration camps. The Jews experienced a tragedy there. I know it is sometimes argued that children aged from 6 to 15 could not constitute a danger and should not have been made to wear the star. But to stay in the framework of this military logic, there exist today enough accounts and memoirs by Jews telling us how in childhood they engaged in all sorts of illicit activities or resistance against the Germans.

One ought to look closely into what is real and what is mythological in the representation made of Jews letting themselves be slaughtered like sheep. Did the non-Jews resist as much as is said? Did the Jews resist as little as is said? What falsifies, in part, the givens of the problem is the fact that many of our judgments are based on a presupposition: that of the “genocide” of the Jews. It goes without saying that if an intention of “genocide” had existed, then the rebuke of cowardice which, apparently, young Israelis bring against their fathers might be understandable. But if, as the revisionists state, the “genocide” is but a legend, then the rebuke of cowardice no longer has much basis.

S.I.:  If there was no deliberate intention of genocide on Hitler’s part, then why Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and the other extermination camps? They existed, they were a reality. Not only Jews went there and died, but also “politicals”, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, that is, all those “different ones” whom Nazi racism condemned. Why then were those camps established, to what purpose?

R.F.: A camp can only be qualified as an “extermination” camp if people are exterminated there. It’s so true that, according to the nomenclature created by the official historians, only the camps allegedly equipped with one or more “gas chambers” are called “extermination” camps. Those camps never existed. The horrible typhus epidemic at Bergen-Belsen did not transform that camp (in large part without barbed wire) into an extermination camp. Those dead are not the result of a crime, unless it’s a crime due to war and to human folly. The Allies share with the Germans a heavy responsibility for the frightful chaos in which Europe, its cities, its roads, its refugee or internee camps found themselves at the end of the war. The Allies diffused an abundance of photographs showing the mass graves of Bergen-Belsen. However, thousands of internees died of typhus after the entry of the British into Bergen-Belsen. The British succeeded no more than the Germans before them in stemming that terrible epidemic. Would it be honest to treat them as criminals?

The first Nazi concentration camps were conceived for the internment and re-education (sic!) of Hitler’s political opponents. The propaganda asserted that these camps, open to numerous visits, constituted progress over prisons where the common criminal languished. Jews could land there, but as Communists, Social Democrats etc. The Jews were put in concentration camps by virtue of being Jewish only during the war, above all from 1942 onward. Those among them who had been interned in 1938 in reprisal for the assassination of von Rath by a Jew were for the most part freed after a few months.

Before the war Hitler had attempted, with a certain success, to cause an exodus of the Jews. He wished to see the creation of a Jewish national homeland outside Europe. The “Madagaskar Projekt” was conceived as the project for a Jewish homeland under German responsibility [49]. It foresaw large marsh drainage works as a matter of priority, a banking system etc. The war prevented the project’s realisation [50]. Too many ships would have been required. Little Germany – look at a map of the world – was engaged with Japan and some allies in a formidable struggle against giants. For her, the principal concern was to win the war. Find a solution to the Jewish problem was an accessory matter – a solution at last, a “definitive solution”, a “final solution”, an “overall solution” to a problem which, in a certain way, was as old as the Jewish people themselves [51]. This solution, because of the war, was basically to be their “removal to the East” in camps.

Auschwitz was first and foremost a large industrial complex in Upper Silesia made up of three main camps and thirty-nine sub-camps spread over an entire region. The mining, industrial and agricultural activities, the research conducted, were considerable: coal mines (some of which were held by French capital), petrochemicals, armaments, explosives, synthetic petrol and rubber, livestock raising, fish farming etc. At Auschwitz there were free labourers as well as internees, convicts serving life sentences as well as those interned for a limited time. In Auschwitz-II camp (Birkenau) there was the appalling spectacle of numerous persons unfit for work and simply languishing there; among them, the gypsies whom, apart from some exceptions, the Germans seem not to have put to work. A number of gypsy children were born at Auschwitz [52]. It seems that only nomadic gypsies were interned, apparently not for racial reasons but because of their nomadism and “potential delinquency”. I recall that in France even members of the resistance came to look askance at the gypsies, suspecting them of espionage, passing information and black marketeering [53]. It would be interesting to determine how many bands of gypsies continued to wander throughout Europe during the war. As for the homosexuals, likened to delinquents, they were, like many other delinquents, either removed from prison to the camps to work or sent there directly; German law, like that of many countries in that era, punished homosexuality. As for the Slavs, those who were in the camps were by no means there because they were Slavs but as political internees, prisoners of war etc., just as some Frenchmen were. At Auschwitz there were even British prisoners of war captured at Tobruk.

The Germans’ essential concern, as from 1942, was to put all those internees to work (with the exception of persons unfit for work and, it seems, the gypsies) in order to win the war. At Auschwitz there were even trade training courses for boys aged from 12 to 15, in bricklaying, for example [54]. The Germans in charge of deporting foreigners to the camps insisted on obtaining, as much as possible, persons “fit for work”. The foreign governments, for their part, insisted that families should not be separated and, therefore, that their aged and children join the convoys. Neither the Jews nor the others were in the least aware of leaving for any extermination whatsoever, if I am to judge by testimonies like that of Georges Wellers in L’Étoile jaune à l’heure de Vichy [55]. They were right. That massacre was, happily, nothing but a war canard. Besides, it is difficult to conceive how Germany, dramatically short of locomotives, rolling stock, coal, qualified personnel and soldiers, could have put together such a system of convoys for slaughterhouses. Those convoys, I remind you, seem to have had priority even over the war materiel convoys [56]. Manpower, above all skilled labour, was what preoccupied the Germans most.

S.I.:  You are specialised in the critical appraisal of texts, but you have made this problem your preferred “field” of “historical research”. Why? What do you mean when you state that there is a “conspiracy of silence” on the problem of the gas chambers and the extermination of the Jews? Why should there be a conspiracy of silence, and on the part of whom?

R.F.: For me, the critical appraisal of texts and documents aims at establishing the degree of authenticity and veracity of what one reads. There is an effort to distinguish between the true and the false, meaning and absence of meaning etc. I suppose it was practically inevitable that the care involved would lead me to the detection of certain historical falsehoods and, in particular, to the detection of what, in a few years, will appear to every historian as a monumental falsehood.

The conspiracy of silence around revisionist works makes it so that they are for the most part samizdat [57]. As for the authors who manage to break through the wall of silence, they are maligned as “Nazis”, a treatment that gets them confined to a ghetto. The methods used against non-conformist historians and individuals range from the purely criminal to lawsuits and prosecutions with, to boot, the doings of informal police spies and informers. All sorts of lobbies are creating or seeking to create an atmosphere of terror. I know a thing or two about this. I can no longer teach at the university. My life has become difficult. I have clashed with some extremely powerful interests. There are young people who support me. The light will emerge. Some Jews are with me; they too want to speak out against the lies and the persecution.

I believe less in conspiracies than in the strength of conformity. The winners of the last war needed to make us believe in the intrinsic ignominy of the defeated. Soviets and Westerners, divided by everything else, had found good ground for agreement there. Hollywood and the Stalinist propaganda apparatus united their efforts. What a fracas of propaganda! The main beneficiaries of the operation have perhaps been the State of Israel and international Zionism. The main victims have been the German people – but not their leaders – and the Palestinian people. But today there is discord in the air. Zionists and Poles are already presenting quite divergent versions of Auschwitz.

S.I.: You challenge a very large part of the methods that the “official” historians have applied in this area of historical research. In your opinion, this chapter of 20^th century history has not been written as it ought to be. Why? And why would the historians have done things in this way?

R.F.: The official historians have been wanting in their obligations. They have not observed the routine methods of historical criticism in this matter. They have followed the general current, the current imposed by the media. They have let themselves be absorbed by the system. An official historian like the university professor Hellmut Diwald will run into awful trouble if he merely risks writing a sentence to say that the “genocide”, despite the abundant literature devoted to it, is a matter which, in the sicmain, “is not yet well elucidated”. Under the pressure of German Jewish organisations, the second edition of his Geschichte der Deutschen (“History of the Germans”) has been “recast and improved” (sic!) where necessary.

The courage of Paul Rassinier consisted precisely in having applied the routine methods of historical criticism. In a way he said to his accusers: “Show me your proof”, “Does your document provide guarantees of authenticity?”, “Are you sure that this expression, this sentence actually have the meaning you ascribe to them?”, “Where do your figures come from?”, “How has it been possible to establish that statistic?”, “Where does this photo caption come from?”, “Who tells me that this old woman and this child whom I see in this photo are ‘on the way to the gas chambers’?”, “Does this heap of shoes signify that people were gassed in this camp or rather that many of the camp’s detainees were employed, precisely, in making shoes?”, “Where is the manuscript of this extraordinary testimony that ought to exist in just one form and which I see published in the most contradictory forms, including by one same historian?”

Paul Rassinier, modest professor of history and geography, gave a remarkable lesson of clear-sightedness and probity to his eminent colleagues of the University. Genuine revolutionary, genuine resistance member, genuine deportee, this man loved the truth as it must be loved: fiercely and above all else. He denounced what he called “the lie of Ulysses”. Ulysses, as we know, experienced a hundred trials in his exile but, once back home, he told of a thousand. We know that man is quite hard put not to make up stories. He is often partial to extraordinary tales of hunting, fishing, love, money. But he especially delights in atrocity stories.

The American Arthur R. Butz has written a book on The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. This book causes disarray among the exterminationists. The demonstration is inexorable. The German translation has recently been nearly banned in Germany by placement on the list of “books dangerous for youth” [58].

The German Wilhelm Stäglich has published Der Auschwitz Mythos (English version: Auschwitz : a judge looks at the evidence). The Swedish group Jewish Information announces a work entitled Auschwitz Exit. Other Jews have produced revisionist works: J. G. Burg, in Germany, for example. And just recently, the extreme left journal La Guerre Sociale has published a study entitled “From the exploitation in the camps to the exploitation of the camps” [59]. In Britain, the United States, Germany (where the persecution of revisionists is merciless), Australia, Belgium, Spain, France, a bit everywhere in the world, voices are being raised to ask that an absurd war propaganda finally be abandoned.

I even know – but cannot give their names here – some official historians who are awakening from the nightmare. Perhaps they are going to decide to give up the delights of what the revisionist historian David Irving calls “incest among historians”. This evocative expression illustrates the practice consisting in voluptuously dwelling on what other historians have affirmed and not refreshing the subject except by subtle one-upmanship. One has to have attended a conference of historians on Nazism to possess an idea of this. What a strange communion in the respect of a taboo! And the surveillance! And the sense of being surveilled! Woe to him who would disrupt the expiatory ceremony with an observation deviating from the official line! Boos and censorship [60].

S.I.: Are you anti-semitic? How do you judge Nazism?

R.F.: I am not anti-semitic. One must try not to see anti-semites everywhere. The Jews who speak out against the imposture of the “genocide” are like the Catholics who say there is an imposture of Fatima (where, allegedly, thousands of witnesses saw the sun dance). The truth, or the search for it, ought not to be considered anti-semitic.

Nazism was, effectively, the dictatorship of a Führer. It died with its Führer on 30 April 1945. My enemy is defeated. Do not expect me to spit on his corpse. As a man, I object to the German people’s defamation by having crimes without precedent in man’s history ascribed to them. And I especially object to the German people’s having been so well “re-educated” that they are the first to believe in those crimes and defame themselves to such a point, even more than their leaders ask them to do. As an observer, I note that Adenauer, Brandt and Schmidt recite the lesson given by the Western victors whilst their counterparts in East Germany recite the lesson given by the Eastern victors. That is Realpolitik, I suppose.

S.I.: You deny also that the number of victims – six million – is credible. But even if there were fewer victims, would that at all change the fact that there was a genocide? And, indeed, no matter the number of victims?

R.F.: Six million people: that is the population of a country like Switzerland. No-one at the Nuremberg trial had the least ability to substantiate such an extravagant figure. It was on the morning of 14 December 1945 that American prosecutor Dodd attempted to accredit this figure by means of a reading of an affidavit from the witness Höttl. In the afternoon of the same day Dodd was forced to pull back upon the intervention of defence barrister Kauffmann, quite decided on requesting the appearance of that witness so that he might ask him to account for the figure. The sad fact is that the press and the historians adopted that figure as though the tribunal itself had believed it [61]. [Correction of 1997: The tribunal did indeed endorse the figure of six million (see IMT, I, p. 252-253, 292), attributing it to Eichmann, whereas it is a matter of an estimate attributed by Wilhelm Höttl to his comrade Eichmann.]

My estimate is as follows: 1 / the number of Jews exterminated by the Nazis (or of “victims of genocide”) amounts, happily, to zero. 2 / the number of Europeans killed by acts of war (acts of war that were often atrocious) may be in the order of 40 million; amongst them, that of European Jews may be in the order of one million but, more likely, several hundred thousand not counting those Jews fighting in Allied military uniform. I insist on the fact that this is an estimate of mine without actual scientific character. On the other hand, I have rather good reasons for thinking that the figure of dead at Auschwitz (Jews and non-Jews) amounts to around 50,000 (fifty-thousand) and not 4 million as had long been claimed before some, including the Munich Institute of Contemporary History, settled for the figure of one million. As for the number of dead in all the German concentration camps from 1933-34 to 1945, I think it must have been 200,000 or, at the most, 360,000. One day I shall cite my sources but today I say that, with the help of computers, the real number of dead could doubtless be known quickly. Numerous authorities kept files on the persons who were deported, and they left numerous traces.

S.I.: Do you realise that you might be contributing to a kind of “rehabilitation” of Nazism?

R.F.: Is it rehabilitating Nero to say we possess no proof that he set fire to Rome? What we should be concerned with rehabilitating or re-establishing is the truth, at least when we’re able to do so. It is not the historian’s duty to worry about the interests of Peter or Paul. The important thing for me is to bring my contribution to a truthful history of the Second World War. If a former Nazi came up to me and said that the alleged “gas chambers” and the alleged “genocide” of the Jews made up one and the same historical lie, I should agree with him just as if he’d told me that two and two were four. It would go no further than that, and I should leave him to his political ideas.

Neo-Nazism is, to a large extent, an invention of the media, which also sell us a certain sex-shop Nazism. It’s like the alleged “Odessa File” or the Nazi colonies in South America. Or the chronic re-apparitions of Hitler or Bormann. Money is made with these inventions. In Germany, I believe that those whom their political opponents describe as “neo-Nazis” make up 0.7% of the electorate. We’re living in phantasmagoria, a sort of Nazism without Nazis. On this I refer you to Gilbert Comte’s pertinent analyses in Le Monde of 29-30 May 1979. Nothing being gratuitous in this world, it goes without saying that the deconstruction of this delirium reveals a complex play of interests, passions, conflicts on a global scale. The State of Israel has a vital interest in maintaining this phantasmagoria, which contributed not a little to its creation in 1948. Even a State like France has an interest in masking the reality of a pack of conflicts through maintaining, in the minds of all, vigilance against the worst enemy that there is: the famous vile beast of Nazism, a beast that died thirty-five years ago and at whose expense we are still allowed to let off steam. Hence these perpetual expiatory ceremonies, these condemnations to the eternal flames, this need of vengeance, of punishment, of denunciation with no limit of time, place or person.

S.I.: Don’t you think that to address the problem of the Jewish genocide in this manner is a way to discredit the memory upon which is principally based the widespread conviction that anti-semitism is the worst of all the racisms practised during the 20^th century? A discredited memory is, indeed, useless.

R.F.: Anti-semitism is not the worst of all racisms, but a good way of having us believe so is, precisely, to have us believe in the “genocide” of the Jews. The Zionists have gone too far. Those who had wanted to reject the principle of “financial reparations” paid by Germany in the name, in particular, of “genocide” ought to have been heeded. Unfortunately Ben Gurion for the State of Israel and Nahum Goldmann, for both the State of Israel and the Diaspora, wanted to draw a gigantic financial profit from the affair. Adenauer went along with it. That gives the imposture of the “genocide” an even more untoward colouring. Read the stupefying interview of Nahum Goldmann in number 624 of Le Nouvel Observateur (25-29 October 1976) [62]: rarely has a man been seen so amazed and happy at having made good a splendid politico-financial operation.

S.I.: In the course of the controversy with all those who dispute your argument, you have also stated that a good part of what the public knows is merely legend, and that this legend has been made possible thanks to an “indiscriminate” utilisation of the mass media. What exactly do you mean by this? [Correction of 1997: here the Italian journalist attributes to me a word, “indiscriminate”, that is not in my vocabulary.]

R.F.: This is a grave and fascinating point. The media’s responsibility in all this business is a crushing one. For thirty-five years, on the five continents, this legend of “genocide” and “gas chambers” has been presented as truth. Billions of people have been taken in. It’s staggering. What a lesson for those who believe in the quality of diverging and conflicting information! It has taken the heroic struggle of a few individuals, a few non-conformist spirits for the screen of official truth to crack. I could write a long study on the way in which the French newspapers and television go about stifling this information. The courts, along with the public authorities as a whole, help them do so. Today journalists fear that, in the near future, a database of news may be instated, with items being fed into it after a sorting that they themselves will hardly have the means to control. I have a bit of advice for them. If they want to know how they risk being fooled, let them reflect on the past and, for some of them, on their own past. To know how lying may be done one day, let them note how the finest lie of all time has been guarded with jealous care. When Louis XIV lied his lies scarcely travelled beyond a few provinces. Today lies can take on truly Hollywoodian dimensions. A “docudrama” like Holocaust is the crowning of an edifice. It was not conceivable in the years just following the war, full of hatred as they were. Thirty years and more of intoxication were needed for it. A drug as strong as Holocaust could be administered only to minds already long imbued with other drugs of the same kind and that spontaneously demanded still more virulent drugs.

But the overdose has also produced salutary effects by the very spectacle of our degradation that we’ve seen. It’s been possible to note some sound reactions. Here I’m thinking in particular of the altogether remarkable reaction by the “free Jew” Michel Rachline in the Figaro of 3 March 1979.

The non-existence of the “gas chambers” and of the “genocide” is good news. Man, although capable of all horrors, has not been capable of those. And better: millions of people presented to us as accomplices of a monstrous crime or as cowards or liars were, after all, decent folk. I have already said that the Jews accused by their children of having behaved like sheep led to the slaughter by the Germans do not deserve that accusation. I shall add that the accused at Nuremberg and at a thousand other trials were telling the truth when they stated to their judges-accusers that they knew nothing about those appalling massacres. The Vatican and the Red Cross were telling the truth when they pitifully confessed the same ignorance. The Americans, the British, the Swiss, the Swedes and all those peoples or governments whom extremist Jews today rebuke for having stood by idly while, apparently, the Nazi slaughterhouses operated need no longer behave like repentant culprits. The most contemptible result of this gigantic imposture was, and will still remain for some time, this bad conscience that the extremist Jews have created among so many peoples, and particularly in the German people. I should above all not want to give the impression that I am in the least seeking to make an apology for Nazism. Indeed, I believe I’m capable of offering a harsh analysis of that kind of ideology. I shall not present that analysis so long as the false Nazism with which the exterminationists keep drubbing us has not been denounced by all the official historians. Those people, in attacking a Nazism that never existed, give the impression of being incapable of attacking the reality of what Nazism was. They make me think of those who represent Evil in the form of the Devil with grills, stakes and ovens. In reality Evil, as we well know, exists in the systems of life that man has created for himself. So long as mere mythical forms of evil are attacked, evil will thrive. Our society is disoriented. In the middle of the 20^th century it has reinvented the Devil. It is combating an imaginary enemy. It has better things to do. An effort at analysis is called for. Let’s open our eyes and see what the media have made of us. That which the power in place seeks to mask – let’s unmask it. In all areas.

Notes

The original Italian publication included no notes. The notes below, for the most part, accompanied the French text presented in Vérité historique ou vérité politique?, Paris, La Vieille Taupe, 1980, p. 171-212. It will be noted that the discussion continued in the columns of Storia Illustrata until December 1979.

[1] This absurd legend (consult an anatomist, a chemist, any kind of specialist on the matter) was revived, but without great success, with respect to the Second World War. Gitta Sereny makes mention of it in her book Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London, Andre Deutsch, 1974, 380 p.). She says in a footnote on page 141: “The universally accepted story that the corpses were used to make soap and fertiliser is finally refuted by the generally very reliable Ludwigsburg Central Authority for Investigation into Nazi Crimes.” She adds: “The authority has found after considerable research that only one experiment was made, with ‘a few corpses from a concentration camp. When it proved impractical, the idea was apparently abandoned.’” The authority that she cites is the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltangen zur Aufklärung NS-Verbrechen. It operates at Ludwigsburg under the direction of public prosecutor Adalbert Rückerl, a convinced exterminationist. It would be interesting to see evidence of that “only one experiment”. Most of the time, when a big lie is revealed, the liars or their sympathisers say that there was just a mistake, and then put forth a little lie. I suppose that the “one experiment” could be one of these little lies.

In the Journal of Historical Review of summer 1980, Ditlieb Felderer makes some interesting remarks about “human soap”. He writes: “Immediately after liberation, in Polticeni, a Romanian town, the district rabbi ordered all soaps to be collected which had the letters RIF written on them. With much weeping and wailing, while the rabbi muttered his kaddish prayer, the soaps were then buried in a cemetery. The news report about this incident was later published in the Polish press, and was picked up in books such as F. C. Weiskopf’s Elend und Grösse unserer Tage, 1950. The letters RIF actually stand for Reichsstelle fur Industrielle Fettsversorgung, a German Government outlet which oversaw the production of soap and detergent products. These letters were, however, twisted by the exterminationists to mean ‘Pure Jewish Fat’ (Rein Judisches Fett).” The JHR article was previously published in Auschwitz Exit, Täby, Sweden, Ditlieb Felderer, 1980.

According to Pierre Joffroy, “bars of Jewish soap” are today to be found buried in the Jewish cemetery at Haifa, Israel. Indeed, Pierre Joffroy, in a 1956 article about Anne Frank, wrote:

these four bars of “Jewish soap” manufactured from corpses in the extermination camps and which, found in Germany in 1948, were wrapped in a shroud and piously buried in accordance with ritual in a corner of the Haifa cemetery (Paris-Match, no. 395, 3 November 1956, p. 93).

In 1943, representatives of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (founded in Moscow in 1942) toured the United States to raise political, and – above all – material, aid from the USA for the USSR. In two months they raised more than $2,000,000. Big meetings were held in many American cities. “At each of the meetings, (Salomon) Mikhoels showed the public a bar of soap made out of Jewish flesh, and taken from a concentration camp” (Gérard Israël, Jid/Les Juifs en URSS, Paris, Jean-Claude Lattès, 1971, p. 203). I thank Mr Mark Weber of Arlington, Virginia for supplying me with this information.

[2] See this US Army photo which has become known throughout the world and which Arthur R. Butz reproduces on page 470 of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Chicago, Theses and Dissertations Press, 2003.

[3] “[… ] für die Degesch vom 20. Juni 1922 ab vom Reichspatentamt patentiert” (Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Amsterdam, University Press, vol. XIII [1975], p. 137).

[4] “Un gaz contre les renards”, Le Quotidien de Paris, 2 September 1977. See also the hunting magazine Le Saint-Hubert, April 1979, p. 180-181, “Méthodes de réduction de la population vulpine”.

[5] I cannot at present prove what I state. I discovered this point in the archives of the CDJC in Paris, to which I have been refused admittance since January 1978 on account of my opinions regarding history.

[6] This expression seems to have been created by the Swedish research group based in Täby headed by Ditlieb Felderer. See note 1 above.

[7] Among these deceptive titles may be cited Pierre-Serge Choumoff’s Les Chambres à gaz de Mauthausen, Amicale des Déportés et Familles de Disparus du Camp de Concentration de Mauthausen, 31 Boulevard Saint-Germain 75005 Paris, 1971, 96 p.

[8] Georges Wellers, “La ‘Solution Finale de la Question Juive’ et la mythomanie néo-nazie”, Le Monde Juif no. 86 April-June 1977, p. 41-84. Translated into English, this article bears the title “Reply to the Neo-Nazi Falsification of Historical Facts Concerning the Holocaust”; it is reproduced on pages 105-162 of a book published in 1978 by the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York: The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania, xviii-215 p.

[9] The Auschwitz camp had three successive commandants: Rüdolf Höss, Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer. The first was interrogated by the British, then by the Poles, who executed him; the second was executed by the Poles; the third died suddenly in prison when the famous “Auschwitz Trial” at Frankfurt (1963-65) was in preparation. On their own, the Poles seem to have interrogated and tried 617 persons (Nazis or Nazi allies) in connection with Auschwitz. This figure is given by Hermann Langbein on page 993 of Der Auschwitz Prozess (Europa Verlag, Vienna, 1965, 2 vols). For their part the French, the British and the Americans often interrogated or tried former Auschwitz guards. It is surprising that from the enormous mass of interrogations and trials there has emerged such a derisory volume of information on the alleged massacres in “gas chambers”. To my knowledge there has never been mention of “confessions” made nor even of any information given about “gas chambers” by Liebehenschel or Baer. The true “Auschwitz gas chambers trial” was – as can never be repeated enough – that of the architects Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl in Vienna in 1972. That trial, launched by Simon Wiesenthal and presented as a sensational affair, was very soon to become a fiasco for the prosecution. The two men, charged with having “built and repaired the gigantic gas chambers and crematory ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau”, were apparently able to demonstrate, as technicians, that although they had indeed built the crematory ovens or caused them to be built, there was no chance of their having drawn building plans for “gas chambers” but only plans for the morgues abutting those crematory ovens. The two architects were acquitted.

[10] Kommandant in Auschwitz / Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen von Rudolf Höss, introduction and commentary by Martin Broszat, Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958. It is on page 166 of this book, in the fragment of the confession that Höss is said to have drafted in November 1946, that the following passage appears: “Eine halbe Stunde nach den Einwurf des Gasses wurde die Tür geöffnet und die Entlüftungsanlage eingeschaltet. Es wurde sofort mit dem Herausziehen der Leichen begonnen.” (Half an hour after the gas had been thrown in, the door was opened and the ventilating apparatus switched on. The removal of the bodies was begun immediately.) And on page 126, in the fragment dated February 1947, it is said that the squad in charge of removing the bodies from the “gas chambers” did their work “with a dull indifference” (“mit einer stumpfer Gleichmütigkeit”) “as though it were a matter of any everyday chore” (“als wenn es irgend etwas Alltäglisches wäre”). Höss is supposed to have added: “Beim Leichenschleppen assen Sie oder rauchten.” That is: “While dragging out the bodies they ate or smoked.” With Höss, moreover, they did not stop eating. They would eat as they removed the bodies from the chambers, when extracting the gold teeth, when shearing the hair, when dragging their burden to the pits or the ovens. Höss even adds this outrageous remark: “At the pits they would keep the fire going, they would pour the accumulated molten fat [on the bodies], they would poke about in the mountains of burning bodies to let the air enter.” Höss does not say how the fat managed not to be burnt itself (bodies were not being roasted on spits like chickens but charred in heaps piled up on the ground or on pyres). He does not tell us how the men could approach those formidable pyres to collect the streams of fat (!), nor how they could get close enough to poke about in those mountains of bodies to let the air enter. The absurdity of this “pouring of accumulated fat” (“das Übergiessen des angesammelten Fettes”) is, moreover, such that the French translator of the book presented by Martin Broszat very discreetly omitted to translate those five German words (Rudolf Höss, Le Commandant d’Auschwitz parle, translated from the German by Constantin de Grunwald, Paris, Julliard, 1959, printing of 15 March 1970, p. 212).

Filip Müller has written Sonderbehandlung, translated as Eyewitness Auschwitz / Three Years in the Gas Chambers, New York, Stein & Day, 1979, xiv-180 p. From page 132 to 142 he accumulates the most astonishing stories about boiling human fat running like water, fat collecting pans, sizzling fat scooped out with buckets on a long curved rod and poured all over the pit, the SS guard Moll flinging live babies into the boiling human fat etc.

[11] For the various trials generally called “Nuremberg trials” the Americans perused many technical documents regarding Zyklon B. Had they read those documents carefully, and if they had – as I have done myself – continued their research in certain technical works in the possession of the Library of Congress in Washington, they would have realised the incredible number of technical impossibilities contained in all the testimonies according to which the Germans had used Zyklon B to kill human beings in “gas chambers”. I shall devote elsewhere a study to the four documents which, in my opinion, completely annihilate the “gas chambers” legend. Those four documents are, first, two documents recorded by the Americans for the Nuremberg trials, then two technical studies signed by Gerhard Peters that may be consulted at the aforementioned library. I shall recall that Gerhard Peters was, during the war, temporary director of the firm DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Schädlingsbekämpfung, “German company for pest control”), which managed, in particular, the distribution of Zyklon B. After the war Gerhard Peters was to be brought before the courts several times by his compatriots: during the war he had never, said he, heard of any homicidal use of Zyklon B.

– Nuremberg documents (documents NI, i.e. “Nuremberg, Industrialists”):

NI-9098, recorded only on 25 July 1947: a brochure entitled Acht Vorträge aus dem Arbeitgebiet der Degesch (Eight lectures on aspects of Degesch’s field of operation) and printed in 1942 for private use. At the end of this brochure, page 47, there is a descriptive table with data on each of the eight gases made by the firm. At point no. 7 of the description are these words on Zyklon B: “Lüftbarkeit: wegen starken Haftvermögens des Gases an Oberflächen erschwert und langwierig” (Ventilation Properties: complicated and long to ventilate since the gas adheres strongly to surfaces);

NI-9912, recorded only on 21 August 1947: a notice poster entitled Richtlinien fur die Anwendung von Blausäure (Zyklon) zur Ungeziefervertilgung (Entwesung) (Directives for the use of Prussic Acid [Zyklon] for the destruction of vermin [Disinfestation]). This document is of capital importance. Better than any other it shows the degree to which the handling of Zyklon B can only be done by trained personnel. The time required for the product to destroy vermin ranges from 6 hours in warm weather to 32 hours on cold days. The normal duration is 16 hours. This long duration is explained undoubtedly by the composition of Zyklon. Zyklon is prussic acid, or hydrocyanic acid, absorbed in granules of diatomite. The gas is released slowly due to the nature of the granules. This slowness is such that one can hardly understand how the Germans could have chosen Zyklon to liquidate crowds of human beings. It would have been far easier to use hydrocyanic acid in liquid form. They had at their disposal significant quantities of this acid in the laboratories of the IG-Farben plant at Auschwitz, where they manufactured synthetic rubber. It is from document NI-9912 that I draw the information on the use of Zyklon B for the fumigation of barracks, the duration of the necessary aeration (at least 21 hours) etc.

Documents at the Library of Congress: two technical studies written by Gerhard Peters and published in Sammlung Chemischer & Chemisch-technischer Vorträge, the former in 1933 in Neue Folge Heft 20, the latter in Neue Folge Heft 47a in 1942 (journal published by Ferdinand Enke, Stuttgart). Here are their titles, followed by the Library of Congress reference:

“Blausäure zur Schädlingsbekämpfung” (QDI, S2, n.f., hft 20, 1933, 75 p.)

“Die hochwirksamen Gase und Dämpfe in der Schädlingsbekämpfung” (QDI, S2, n.f., hft 47a, 1942, 143 p.) In passing one may appreciate the fact that this journal published in Germany in the middle of the war arrived even during the war at the Library of Congress in Washington! The 1942 issue was registered there on … 1 April 1944!

[12] The French regulations on the use of hydrocyanic acid are as draconian as the German; cf. decree 50-1290 of 18 October 1950, Ministère de la Santé publique.

[13] The plan that enables me to give these dimensions to the nearest centimetre is found in the archives of the State Museum of Oswiecim (Auschwitz). The reference number of the plan photo is Neg. 519. The plans of Kremas IV and V are even more interesting than those of Kremas II and III. They prove, in effect, that the three rooms improperly described as “gas chambers” were inoffensive rooms, with ordinary doors and windows. The only way for the SS men to “throw the Zyklon” into these rooms “from the outside” would have been to request their victims, crowded in their hundreds or thousands in a space of 237 square metres, to be so good as to open the windows so that they might “throw in the Zyklon”, after which the victims would have carefully closed the windows and then refrained from shattering the window panes until death ensued. It is quite understandable that the Polish Communists should be so discreet about these plans, preferring to evoke Höss’s “confessions” without providing many topographical illustrations.

[14] These interesting vestiges of the Kremas can be seen behind a large window of the rear room which, in exhibition block no. 4, is devoted to the Kremas.

[15] These details of the first execution by poison gas were published in the Brussels daily Le Soir on 9 February 1974; under the heading “50 years ago” it offered a reproduction of its article of 9 February 1924.

[16] The summary that I give here of an execution by hydrocyanic acid is drawn from the results of an inquiry that an American lawyer kindly conducted for me at six penitentiaries and at a firm that produced gas chambers. The six penitentiaries were those of San Quentin, California; Jefferson City, Missouri; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Raleigh, North Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland; and Florence, Arizona. The firm is Eaton Metal Products Company of Denver, Colorado. Naturally enough, there are variations in the method of execution from one penitentiary to another. I have personally obtained authorisation to visit one of these gas chambers. The Gas Chamber Procedure Check Sheet reveals the fact that the simple preparation of the chamber for an execution demands two eight-hour days’ work of two employees. Once the chamber is ready, the operation itself consists of 47 steps. The sheet in question is not nearly sufficient to give an idea of the complexity of the tasks, for it bears merely a list of operations. For instance: the last operation is identified as “Empty Chamber (Body Removed)”. However, those words mean as follows: the physician and his two assistants, having waited for the prescribed time, enter the room wearing gas masks and rubber aprons and gloves; the physician tousles the dead man’s hair to rid it of traces of hydrocyanic acid; the assistants carefully wash the body with a hose; they must in particular wash the mouth and all the other apertures; they must not omit to wash the bends of the elbows and the knees. Just the sight of one of these little gas chambers made for the killing of a single man is enough to make the structures of stone, wood and plaster presented as former German “gas chambers” look ridiculous. If an American gas chamber is made exclusively of steel and glass it is for reasons of good sense and, more specifically, for technical reasons. The first reason is that the acid tends to adhere to surfaces, even to penetrate them, and therefore any material prone to such effect must be avoided. The second reason is that when the ventilators empty the air from the chamber there is a risk of implosion; hence the remarkable thickness of the cubicle’s steel and glass. It goes without saying that the very heavy steel door can be closed only with a handwheel.

[17] The Polish Communists themselves acknowledge that the purpose of tattooing was to make escape more difficult (and to facilitate identification of captured fugitives); see Contribution à l’histoire du KL-Auschwitz, Auschwitz State Museum, 1968, p. 16 and 99.

[18] Louis De Jong in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, 1969, Heft 1, p. 1-16: “Die Niederlande und Auschwitz”. Sensitive to the delicate nature of this kind of revelations, the journal’s director, H. Rothfels, explains in a foreword (Vorbemerkung) the reason that led him to publish the study. It is that Louis De Jong, not being German, would be all the less suspected of seeking to justify National Socialism since, on the contrary, he had as director of an official institute like that of Amsterdam given all desirable pledges of seriousness. This foreword gives an idea of the situation in which German historians find themselves: there are certain truths that they cannot speak without exposing themselves to suspicion of engaging in Nazi apologetics. One must also note that Mr De Jong is even less suspect because of his Jewish origin.

[19] These aerial photographs have been revealed to the general public by Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirer in a brochure entitled The Holocaust Revisited (Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service, Washington; ST 79-10001, 19 pages). The two authors offer an interesting example of blindness. They attempt at all costs to adapt what the material reality of the photos tells them to square with what they believe they know of the reality of Auschwitz thanks to three exterminationist books. There is a spectacular contradiction between the photos and the commentaries that they have thus been led to append to them.

[20] Article 19 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal states: “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence […].”

Article 21 states: “The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof […].”

[21] Prison et déportation, Paris, Spes, 1947, p. 77.

[22] The alleged “gas chamber” of Dachau today bears the following inscription in five languages (German, English, French, Italian, Russian):

Gaskammer getarnt als “Brausebad” – war nicht in Betrieb;

Gas chamber disguised as a “shower room” – never used;

Chambre à gaz “chambre de douche” camouflée – ne fut jamais utilisée.

[23] See “Réflexions sur 1’étude de la deportation” by Germaine Tillion, in the special July 1954 edition of the Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale entitled “Le Système concentrationnaire allemand 1940-1944”. See pages 16, 17, 20, 21, 24, 26 and, especially, note 2 on p. 17, note 2 on p. 18 and note 1 on p. 20.

[24] “Paris. Storey” Nuremberg Document PS-3870: statement under oath of the policeman Hans Marsalek. The conditions under which Ziereis had, according to this policeman, admitted the existence and operation of a “gas chamber” at Mauthausen are worth some reflection. They show the “interrogation” to have been a pure and simple torture session lasting from six to eight hours until Ziereis died. The policeman himself says that he had conducted the commandant’s interrogation for six to eight hours during the night of 22-23 May 1945. He says that Ziereis was gravely wounded, that three bullets had gone through his body and that he knew he was going to die. Today at the Mauthausen museum there is a photo taken by flash showing Ziereis still alive, an inmate seated nearby listening to him; there are other persons at the dying man’s bedside: perhaps General Seibel, commander of the 11^th American armoured division, and the former inmates’ physician, the deportee Dr Koszeinski, were there, as the policeman states. That a general of a division and a professional physician should have admitted to participating in this torture session says much on the mentality of those who consider that they have a “Nazi” in their hands: a “Nazi” is not a man but a sort of evil beast. It is like that, one may be sure, that all the camp commandants were regarded. We must not be surprised. There is no wonder about the “confessions” that they made or are said to have made. Most of these “confessions” are “Depositions Under Oath” or “Statements” written in English, signed by an Allied officer, who adds: “I hereby certify that I have accurately translated this deposition from English into German to the said deponent [here the name of the German interrogatee is inserted] and that he fully agrees the contents thereof.” See documents D-746(a), D-749(b) etc.

[25] “Keine Vergasung in Dachau” (No Gassing in Dachau), letter by Dr Martin Broszat, Die Zeit, 19 August 1960, p. 16. In the US edition, 26 August 1960, p. 14.

[26] See the book I cite in note 10 above (Kommandant in Auschwitz / Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen von Rudolf Höss). Dr Martin Broszat explains in note 1 on page 167 why he does not give the next part of Höss’s text. He says that, in that part, Höss gives “completely erroneous data” (“völlig abwegige Angaben”) which he terms information “that definitely cannot be taken seriously” (“müssen diese Mitteilungen als gänzlich unzuverlässig gelten”). Dr Broszat gives an example of these aberrations, but takes care to choose the least aberrant of them. It so happens that, fifteen years after the publication of his book, the Poles, in their turn, gave what is commonly called the text of Höss’s confession. And it is here, really, that it becomes apparent that under Höss’s pen the “aberrations” became manifold. To have some idea of this, one may refer to KL-Auschwitz in den Augen der SS (Auschwitz concentration camp as seen by the SS), Verlag des Staatlichen Auschwitz-Museums, Cracow, 1973, p. l35-136. Dr Broszat has been disqualified in the eyes of all serious historians by the publication of “Höss’s confession” that he produced. With just a bit of care and honesty, he ought to have concluded that this confession, in its self-accusatory parts, is but a heap of absurdities and aberrations that can only have been dictated to Höss by his Polish Stalinist jailers.

[27] The expression employed by Dr Broszat is “above all” (“vor allem”). This use of an awkward expression seems to me to have been determined by the wish not to pronounce himself on the authenticity of the “gas chambers” located neither in Poland nor in the Old Reich; such is the case of Mauthausen, in Austria, and of Struthof, in Alsace.

[28] As a result of a phenomenon common in this area, Dr Broszat may have given the impression of more or less retracting his courageous statements of 19 August 1960. He has written or allowed to be written by members of his Munich institute letters or articles asking whether he reconsiders the terms of his letter to Die Zeit. In reality, looking closely at the texts, one especially gets the impression that Dr Broszat makes certain concessions of pure form. To judge of this, the reader may refer to the following texts:

Reply of Frau Dr S. Noller, 26 October 1967, to the Paris-Match journalist Pierre Joffroy. This reply is published in part in the book by Pierre-Serge Choumoff (Les Chambres à gaz de Mauthausen, p. 73-74) cited in note 7 above.

Preface by Dr Broszat to a study of April 1976 by Frau Dr Ino Arndt and Dr Wolfgang Scheffler in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte entitled: “Organisierter Massenmord an Juden in NS-Vernichtungslagern” (Organized mass murder of Jews in Nazi extermination camps), p. 105-135; foreword: p. 105-112).

Reply of Frau Dr Ino Arndt, 25 November 1977, to Professor Egon G. L. Rieder. This reply was published by MUT-Verlag, January 1979 (address: 3901 Asendorfen, Germany).

[29] On Treblinka, as well as on Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno, see NS-Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse by Adalbert Rückerl, Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, original edition December 1977. Adalbert Rückerl and the exterminationists are not lucky with Treblinka, where they say there were “gas chambers”. Many books give details about these; however, all their authors forget Nuremberg document PS-3311, according to which the alleged mass killing in that camp was done by suffocation in steam-filled chambers! (cf. TMI vol. III, p. 567-568.)

[30] Le Système concentrationnaire nazi (1933-1945), thesis, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968, p. 541-544.

[31] Höss had been tortured. It is from the Poles themselves that we know this. They authorised him to say so in his confession. There may have been several grounds for this authorisation by examining magistrate Jan Sehn. Since Höss was generous with praise for his kind Cracow jailers, it may well be that Sehn wished to give the idea that, if Höss had previously talked nonsense in his depositions to the British, it was because he was under the duress of torture whereas, this time, in his Cracow prison, he was expressing himself quite freely. In his “readiness” to confess everything to his British torturers, Höss had gone so far as to speak of the “extermination” camp of … “Wolzek near Lublin”; however, “Wolzek” has never existed either near Lublin or anywhere else in Poland. Höss still cited that mythical camp in document NO-1210 of 14 March 1946, then in document PS-3868 of 5 April 1946 and again in document NI-034 of 20 May 1946. Some have proposed that, in this terribly embarrassing “Wolzek”, we should see Belzec, which is absurd, since in document PS-3868 Höss specifies that there were “three other extermination camps in the General Government: Belzekx [sic], Treblinka, and Wolzek” (“drei weitere Vernichtungslager in Generalgouvernment: Belzekx, Treblinka und Wolzek”). This absurd solution has been imposed by the “bible” of the exterminationists’ research that is The Holocaust / The Nuremberg Evidence (Part One: Documents), edited by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Yivo Institute in New York, 1976 (cf. p. 544). An even less acceptable solution has been proposed by prosecutor Adalbert Rückerl in note 5 on pages 37-38 of the book I cite above in note 29. This jurist has no hesitation in saying that Wolzek is … Sobibor! It would take an endless effort to cite all the aberrations contained in the papers that British military justice had Höss sign. To take just one other example here, Höss situates at Treblinka an installation for gassing in vans that he will later situate at Chelmno! The British had him say “Treblinka” (NO-1210 and PS-3868) whereas the Poles had him say “Culmhof” (NO-4498B); however, the distance between Treblinka, which is to the east of Warsaw, and Kulmhof (or Culmhof or Chelmno-on-Ner), which is to the north-west of Warsaw, is nearly 250 km as the crow flies. Thus Jan Sehn authorised his prisoner to enlighten us on the way in which he had been treated before benefitting from the so enviable hospitality of Cracow prison. The British seriously battered him, Höss says, to the point where he had to sign minutes whose contents were unknown to him. He begins by writing this in his confession to the Poles: “Es würde mir übel zugesetzt durch die Field-Security-Police” (I was badly treated by the Field Security Police). And he adds: “Unter schlagenden Beweisen kam meine erste Vernehmung zustande. Was in dem Protokoll drin steht, weiss ich nicht, obwohl ich es unterschrieben habe. Doch Alkohol und Peitsche waren auch für mich zuviel.” (My first interrogation took place under duress. I do not know what was recorded in the statement, even though I signed it. The alternating alcohol and whip were too much, even for me.) Höss adds also that, after being transferred some days later to Mindenan der Weser and the main interrogation centre in the British zone, he was subjected to even more brutal treatment by the English prosecutor, a major (“Dort wurde mir noch mehr zugesetz durch den 1. englischen Staatsanwalt; einem Major.”). He says that the prison regime matched the major’s attitude. For three weeks he could not wash or shave. For three weeks he was kept in handcuffs! Transferred to the Nuremberg jail, his stay there had the effect of a sanatorium cure: an ideal time in comparison with what he had experienced. But the interrogations, conducted exclusively by Jews, were terrible, from a point of view not physical but rather psychological. His interrogators left him in no doubt as to the fate that awaited him, especially in eastern Europe. Transferred to Poland, he experienced anew some terrible trials, but suddenly the prosecutor appeared and henceforth Höss was treated with surprising decency and accommodation (“anständig und entgegenkommend”). All these details may be found on pages 143-147 of Kommandant in Auschwitz (see note 10 above). What Höss does not mention is the result of these physical and mental tortures endured before his handing over to the Poles. On 5 April 1946, i.e. ten days prior to his appearance before the Nuremberg tribunal, a stupefying affidavit was extorted from him, which he had signed even though it was not in his mother tongue but … in English! This is document PS-3868. In court, on 15 April 1946, American prosecutor Amen read out the text of the affidavit in Höss’s presence. The statement that he had signed produced a sensation. As for Höss himself, he struck everyone by his “apathy” (sic). His answers were for the most part limited to a “yes” when Colonel Amen asked him whether everything he was reading was accurate. This “apathy” was described by observers as “schizoid” or with similar words. Those observers – all of them quite hostile to Höss – had no idea how much the adjective “schizoid”, which they saw as insulting, was in fact accurate and reflected a terrible reality, for Höss was in an altered state: he was “two men at the same time”, torn, dazed, cut in two or nearly so – actually “schizoid” as a man may be who has been tortured physically and psychologically and who, as he said in his confession, wondered what on earth he was doing before this formidable tribunal. The reader ought to see the text of the dialogue between colonel Amen and the accused Höss dated 15 April 1946 in IMT volume XI p. 396 ff.).

[32] On the subject of the tortures systematically inflicted by the Americans on their German prisoners, the reader is referred to the index of Arthur Butz’s book (The Hoax of the Twentieth Century) for the passages concerning judges Gordon Simpson and Charles F. Wennersturm. I also recommend one of the finest books ever written in favour of human rights: Sir Reginald Paget’s Manstein, His Campaign and his Trial (London, Collins, 1951), with an astonishing preface by Lord (Maurice) Hankey. On page 109 Sir Reginald mentions that the American commission of inquiry (Simpson, Van Roden, Laurenzen) had “reported among other things that of the 139 cases they had investigated 137 [German soldiers and officers] had had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation team”.

[33] Dr Dürrfeld was the temporary director of the Auschwitz Buna factory. Document NI-034 has Höss say that Dürrfeld was aware of the gassing of human beings at Birkenau and that he spoke of it with colleagues. However, in document NI-11046, Dürrfeld replies: “It is a sorry fact that I heard of (these gassings) first through the radio and through the newspaper reports. I must say that it is a brand of infamy for the German people, that I must say.” See also document NI-9542, for Otto Ambros, or document NI-11631, for Kurt Rosenbaum. Well placed to know what was happening at Auschwitz, these two men confirm that they had never known anything about “gassings”. Certain former inmates have also had the courage to write that they never saw a “gas chamber” at Auschwitz or Birkenau, although they found themselves near the place where, at the time, those “chambers” were supposedly located. This is the case of Benedikt Kautsky, the Austrian Social Democrat of Jewish origin. He spent seven years in concentration camps. His mother died at Birkenau on 8 December 1944 aged over 80. In Teufel und Verdammte (Vienna, Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1948; English translation: Devils and the Damned, London, Brown, Watson, 1960) he writes (p. 316) that he, personally, had not seen those “gas chambers” in the camp. However, this does not prevent him, afterwards, from indulging in a sort of description of what he had not seen! He does so on the word of those “who saw”.

[34] I allude here to certain of the accused at the Frankfurt Trial (1963-1965), a trial of which Hermann Langbein purports to give an account in his Der Auschwitz Prozess; see note 9 above. According to this, Franz Hofmann employed the phrase “help to push”, curiously using the plural: “haben wir […] mitgeschoben” (p. 241). Hans Stark is said to have helped a male nurse pour gas through an opening in the “gas chamber” roof; but Stark is confused, very vague, and the presiding judge gives, above all, the impression of having Stark recite a text (p. 439).

[35] Volume 42, the last volume of transcripts of proceedings at the big Nuremberg trial, deserves the greatest attention. It opens with the very long – 153 pages – document PS-862. This is a report by British colonel Airey Neave, who had been put in charge of summarising a host of investigations carried out in the Allies’ prisoner of war camps. His report contains what is related in the document “Politische Leiter 54” (Vol. 42, p. 348): the 26,674 former political leaders interrogated stated that it was only after the capitulation in May 1945 that they first heard of an extermination of Jews in places called (by the Allies) “extermination camps”. (“Sie von einer Vernichtung von Juden in sog. Vernichtungslagern erst nach der Kapitulation im Mai 1945 Kenntnis erhielten.”)

[36] In private correspondence with me, Dr Robert Servatius, who was a defence lawyer at the IMT (1945-1946) and who defended Adolf Eichmarm at the “Jerusalem trial” (1961), has written of “alleged gassing” and of “persons allegedly gassed (“der behaupteten Vergasung”, letter of 22 February 1975; “der in Auschwitz angeblich vergasten Personen”, previous letter dated 21 June 1974). The famous barrister sums up in one sentence the reason why German lawyers are careful not to raise the question of the “gas chambers” in court: it seems, he says, that for the defence counsel the problem of the gas chambers’ existence has faded into the background as compared with the question of their clients’ participation in the alleged gassings (“Anscheinend ist die Frage der Existenz von Gaskammern für die Verteidiger züruckgetreten, gegenüber der Frage der Beteiligung ihrer Mandaten an der behaupteten Vergasung”). The point could hardly be put better. Then, in reply to a question of mine about Eichmann, Servatius specified that Eichmann had stated (to whom? the letter is not clear on this point) that he had never seen a gas chamber nor had ever had knowledge of any reports on the subject (“Eichmann hat erklärt, dass er niemals eine Gaskammer gesehen habe oder dass ihm darüber berichtet worden sei”, letter of 22 February 1975.) The stenographic transcripts of the trial (which may be consulted in several languages at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaire in Paris) prove that Eichmann had apparently known nothing about those “gas chambers” apart from what he, in prison, had read in Höss’s “confession” (cf. session of 19 April 1961, JI-MJ to 02-RM).

[37] Albert Naud, visibly moved, would make that impromptu declaration on French state television (Antenne 2, “L’huile sur le feu”, programme of Philippe Bouvard, October 1976).

[38] This accommodating lawyer was Anton Reiners, of Frankfurt.

[39] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1961 and 1967; Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, 2^nd edition, London, Vallentine-Mitchell, 1968; H. G. Adler, Der Verwaltete Mensch, Tübingen, Mohr (Siebeck), 1974; Hermann Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz, Vienna, Europa Verlag, 1974; Olga Wormser-Migot, Le Système concentrationaire nazie (1933-1945), Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968; Serge Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France, Paris, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, 1978.

[40] Excerpt from what the Germans call the “Bormann Diaries” (“Bormann Vermercke”). The final part of these “Bormann Diaries” has been published in French under the title Le Testament politique de Hitler (Political Testament of Adolf Hitler), translation and preface by Francois Genoud, Paris, Arthème Fayard, 1959, p. 71-72.

[41] “Dass sie deshalb [wegen ihrer Konfession] verfolgt worden waren, wie ich glaubte, liess manchmal meine Abneigung gegenüber ungünstigen Äusserungen über sie fast zum Abscheu warden” (Mein Kampf, Munich, Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1942, p. 55). “Die grossen Meister der Lüge” (the great masters of the lie) is a phrase of Schopenhauer’s, reprised by Hitler (p. 253 of Mein Kampf, ibid.).

[42] Declaration published in the Jewish Chronicle, London, 8 September 1939, p. 1.

[43] Daily Express, London, 24 March 1933, p. 1.

[44] “Nach Beendigung des Krieges werde er [Hitler] sich rigoros auf den Standpunkt stellen, dass er Stadt für Stadt zusammenschlage, wenn nicht die Drecksjuden rauskämen und nach Madagaskar oder einem sonstigen jüdischen Nationalstaat abwanderten” (“After the war was over, he [Hitler] would rigorously adopt the standpoint that he would demolish town after town if the Jewish dregs did not decamp and emigrate to Madagascar or some other national Jewish homeland”; Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche in Führerhauptquartier 1941-1942, Percy Ernst Schramm […], Stuttgart, 1963, p. 471.

[45] Texts and facts abound to prove that the German authorities forbade and punished these excesses, even when the victims might be Jewish. I shall cite but one text and two facts. The text is of General von Roques dated 29 July 1944, on the Russian front (document NOKW-1620). As for the facts, they are reported in document NOKW-501. The first fact: in the spring of 1944, in Budapest, a lieutenant killed a Jewess who wanted to report him for having, together with some of his men, robbed her of belongings. A German military tribunal sentenced him to death and he was shot, whilst a few of his men and non-commissioned officers were sentenced to long prison terms. The second fact: near Rostov, USSR, two soldiers were sentenced to death by a German military tribunal (and executed?) for having killed the lone Jewish inhabitant of a village. These examples and several other facts of the same kind are found in the 42^nd and final volume of the IMT transcripts. Unfortunately, this volume is practically ignored by all. It is notably ignored by the judges who take the liberty of invoking “what was established at Nuremberg” but do not take sufficient care to re-read the documents produced by the victors putting the vanquished on trial. The historian can take the liberty of this casualness all the less as he knows that the same conquerors committed two very grave injustices:

1 – they themselves conducted the selection of all documents, allowing no participation by the defence in the process;

2 – they conducted a selection from that selection in preparing the 42 volumes, excluding many of the pieces produced by the defence.

One thing that must be realised is that even today – 35 years after the war – the Allies still keep secret a formidable quantity of documents from which, one may think, they have already drawn everything that, in their eyes, might stigmatise Germany. Can one imagine the Himalaya of “war crimes” that, with such procedures, could be tried by an “international military tribunal” made up of vanquished judging their victors? But, to return to the question of “excesses” or of “war crimes”, I should suggest that the German army, particularly the SS corps, was fearsomely tough both in combat and in police measures taken owing to the partisan war, but that it was, in a certain way, less fearsome for non-combatant civilians than many other armies. The more an army is disciplined and kept in line, the less, in principle, the civilian populations will have to fear excesses of any kind. From this standpoint, bands of partisans, whatever sympathy one may feel for the cause they are said to defend, are nearly always dreaded by the civilian population.

[46] This was described as “Operation Keelhaul”. See Julius Epstein, Operation Keelhaul, Devin-Adair, 1973; Nikolai Tolstoy, The Secret Betrayal 1944-1947, Scribners, 1977; Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Theses and Dissertations Press, 2003, p. 298-299. The term “keelhaul” is a graphic one; this English verb means “ to inflict the punishment of the wet keel on someone, or to haul him from one side to the other of the ship having him pass under the keel”.

[47] I shall mention that in the same period, and without any military necessity, racial segregation regarding Blacks (a practice sometimes denounced in French “collaborationist” newspapers) reigned amongst our American and South African allies.

[48] Speech made at Posen on 6 October 1943, published on page 169 of Discours secrets de Heinrich Himmler (Paris, Gallimard, 1978). This is the French translation of Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen, Propyläen Verlag, 1974. This book, and particularly its French edition, should be approached with caution.

[49] The text of the “Madagaskar Projekt” is little known. It can, however, be found at the CDJC in Paris. It bears Israeli police reference number 172 (General Headquarters, 6^th bureau). It seems that this document was brought to light only in 1961 on the occasion of the Eichmann trial. It is composed of a letter by Theodor Dannecker, dated 15 August 1940 and addressed to legation secretary Rademacher, and of the report itself which appears to be, moreover, a draft neither signed nor dated. The CDJC reference number is DXII-172.

[50] See Rademacher’s letter to ambassador Bielfeld of 10 February 1942 (document NG-5770).

[51] “Total Solution” (“Gesamtlösung”) and “Final Solution” (“Endlösung”) are the two interchangeable terms used by Göring in his famous letter of 31 July 1941 to Reinhard Heydrich. The exterminationists have expatiated interminably on this very short letter (document PS-710) and, in particular, on these two words of Göring’s. They have speculated all the more on this text as they – at least certain among them – have cynically amputated the first half of the first sentence where there was a clear and precise explanation of the sense to be ascribed to the words. These two words, which in fact are but one, imply emigration or evacuation (“Auswanderung oder Evakuierung”). Gerald Reitlinger takes the liberty of quoting in full the little letter, while placing, at the very beginning, three suspension points. His reader thus sees that the beginning of the sentence he is about to read is missing and is led to think that there is surely nothing important in the absent fragment! It is difficult to act more dishonestly than Reitlinger! (See Gerald Reitlinger, Die Endlösung, The Final Solution, translated from English into German by J. W. Brugel, 4^th edition revised and corrected, Berlin, Colloquium Verlag, 1961, p. 92.) The text is found, unamputated, on page 12 of Wilhelm Stäglich’s remarkable work Der Auschwitz Mythos / Legende oder Wirklichkeit?, Tübingen, Grabert Verlag, 1979. Wilhelm Stäglich is the former Hamburg judge who since 1973 has suffered incessant persecution because of his revisionist convictions.

[52] Mention is made of these births in the “calendar” of the Hefte von Auschwitz (Auschwitz notebooks), published by the State Museum of Oswiecim (Auschwitz), in particular in books 7 and 8. The Germans kept a register of all births, including Jewish births. They kept registers of everything. Every surgical operation, for example, was noted, with the name of the inmate, his registration number, the operation’s purpose and result (in Latin), the date, the surgeon’s signature. At the crematoria, the extraction of a gold tooth from a body was the subject of a detailed report (Meldung). This last point, by itself, renders absurd the legend of mass slaughters with pulling of gold teeth on a quasi-industrial scale.

[53] I have personally made a thorough inquiry into the summary executions carried out by the resistance in a small region of France; I had the surprise to note that the gypsy communities paid a heavy toll in dead, not as a result of actions by the Germans but of those of the resistance. This inquiry cannot at present be published in France.

[54] On the existence of a vocational school for bricklayers see, for example, the testimony of Franz Hofmann in Hermann Langbein’s Der Auschwitz Prozess, p. 236. On the teams of apprentices (Lehrlings-Kommandos), see the testimony of detainee Curt Posener in document NI-9808.

[55] Georges Wellers, L’Etoile jaune à l’heure de Vichy / De Drancy à Auschwitz, Paris, Fayard, 1973, p. v, 4, 5 and 7.

[56] The distance from Drancy, outside Paris, to Auschwitz (1,250 km) was usually covered in two days.

[57] I can only refer the reader here to the cases of Maurice Bardèche, Paul Rassinier, Manfred Roeder, Thies Christophersen, Wilhelm Stäglich, J. G. Burg (a Jew), Hellmut Diwald, Udo Walendy, Arthur R. Butz and to my own. Nothing is lacking: prison, physical violence, fines, arson, careers shattered, incredible court decisions, pure slander, forced exile. Not one association defending the freedom of expression, not one single group of writers has raised the least protest against the Springer publishing group’s stupefying methods in regard to either David Irving or the university professor Hellmut Diwald. In the ongoing competition among persecutors, Germany is unquestionably in first place, with France in second. South Africa is not far behind.

[58] This decision dates from 17 May 1979 (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften, Entscheidung [ruling] no. 2765). The expert selected was prosecutor Adalbert Rückerl. The latter was both judge and party, since he happens to have devoted his life and certain of his writings to defending an argument (that of the Jews’ extermination) which Arthur Butz, like myself, considers to be erroneous. The text of this ruling is 55 pages long. Within a few years it will doubtless appear as a monument of historical incompetence. The presiding judge was Rudolf Stefen. Professor Konrad Jentsch represented art (Kunst); the writer Bernhard Ohsam, literature; Gunther Roland, the teaching profession (Lehrerschaft); the prelate Dr Hermann, the Churches.

[59] La Guerre Sociale, no. 3, June 1979, p. 9-31. In charge of publication: J. Benhamou.

[60] This was my case on 29 January 1978 at the national symposium on “Churches and Christians in France during the Second World War”.

[61] Among the 42 columns of the (truncated) accounts of proceedings at Nuremberg, see vol. III, p. 568-569, and document PS-2738 (affidavit of Wilhelm Höttl).

[62] Pages 120-122, 125, 128, 136, 141, 149, 157, under the title “Nahum Goldmann: au nom d’Israël”, Nahum Goldmann says that those colossal reparations “constitute an extraordinary innovation in international law”. They were contrary to the German constitution. He dictated his conditions to Adenauer in 1950. He obtained 80 billion marks, i.e. 10 to 14 times the amount initially hoped for. He says: “Without the German reparations […], Israel would not have the half of its present infrastructure [1976]: all the trains in Israel are German, the boats are German, as well as the electricity, a big part of industry … to say nothing of the individual pensions paid to the survivors […]. In certain years, the amounts of money that Israel received from Germany exceeded the amount collected by international Jewry by two or three times.” Of course the young German taxpayer of 1979, who has nothing to do with the war of 1939-1945, pays his share.

[Addition of 1985: According to Raul Hilberg, the German government has calculated that its obligations entail payment of monetary reparations until beyond the year 2000 (Documents of Destruction, Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1971, xii-243 p.; p. 241-242). N. Goldmann in 1981 was to term the sums involved “astronomical” (television programme “Profil : Nahum Goldmann”, Antenne-2, 18 August 1981, 10 pm).

However, one may consider that the Holocaust myth is less important by its financial fallout than by the political and moral benefit thus far derived from it. Quite anxious in the face of historical revisionism’s progress, Professor W. D. Rubenstein, of Deakin University (Australia), wrote in 1979: “[…] were the Holocaust shown to be a hoax, the number one weapon in Israel’s propaganda arsenal disappears” (Nation Review, 21 June 1979, p. 639). The Israeli professor Saul Friedländer, for his part, would declare in 1980: “The Revisionist school of historians, those who say the Holocaust never existed, that it is a Jewish invention, are more worrying than countries’ political positions”(Australian Jewish News, 3 October 1980, p. 13). It will be noted that Professor Friedländer gives here his own definition of the revisionist historians. It would be more accurate to say that, for them, the Holocaust of the Jews is an invention of the war propaganda of the Allies taken as a whole. There is no “Jewish plot to extort money”. There was, after the war, a general belief in an extermination of the Jews that various entities, each in its own fashion, sought to exploit. Besides, any State is founded on more or less mythical beliefs.

As of 31 December 1980 West Germany had paid reparations to 4,344,378 victims or successors of victims who could be geographically divided approximately as follows: 40% in Israel, 20% in West Germany and 20% in the rest of the world (Canadian Jewish News, 11 December 1981, p. 4). There are Jewish communities (as registered by the World Jewish Congress) in 63 countries around the globe and associations of former Auschwitz inmates in 25 countries.]