Above is a photo of Free Speech Champion Robert Faurisson who refuses
 to remain silent despite years of persecution, including physical assaults by Jewish terrorists.

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Professor
Robert Faurisson


INTRODUCTION TO
ÉCRITS RÉVISIONNISTES (1974-1998)
translated from the French by S. Mundi
(The french text)

Four volumes (2,082 pages), first released in 1999

Since that date numerous important developments have confirmed and strengthened Faurisson’s conclusions. For instance, the late Jean-Claude Pressac’s going so far as to acknowledge that the official history of the wartime deportation and camps was simply “rotten” and bound “for the rubbish bins of history” (an admission which, although made in 1995 by that one-time protégé of the Klarsfeld couple, was revealed only in 2000 by French historian Valérie Igounet, as will be seen in the present selected writings); also, the American lawyer Don Heddesheimer’s exposure of the origin of the mythical “six million” number, which goes at least as far back as the year 1900. 

[Editor’s note in Just Who Is Robert Faurisson? Selected Writings and Commentaries on "the Holocaust", Historical Review Press, 2010]

In Memoriam

Custom would have it that, at the opening of these Ecrits Révisionnistes, I thank, without distinction, all those who have come to my aid, by their research or otherwise, in the achievement of this work.

Defying this custom, I shall refrain here from naming any living persons, and mention only the dead.

At a time when to identify a revisionist by name is, in a way, to denounce him to the police or the media mob and so run him the risk of loss of livelihood, searches and seizures at his house and fines or imprisonment, it will, I trust, be readily understood that I cannot, in good conscience, dedicate the present volume to any of those who may, while living, deserve the public expression of my gratitude or admiration.

From amongst the cohort of the dead who are marked with the revisionist brand I shall cite but a few of those under whose inspiration I have, over a quarter of a century, lived the revisionist adventure, and to whom I wish to voice my posthumous recognition: Jean Norton Cru (for the First World War), Paul Rassinier, Maurice Bardèche, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Albert Paraz, and François Duprat (assassinated). To that list I shall add the Frenchmen Jean Beaufret, Jean Genet, and Michel de Boüard, the Austrian Franz Scheidl, the German Hellmut Diwald and the American James Morgan Read *, the first historian in the world to wonder aloud about the reality of the alleged Nazi gas chambers, and this as early as May 1945, at the same time, for that matter — a pure chance meeting of great minds — as the Englishman George Orwell.

I also dedicate these pages to another German, Reinhold Elstner, who in Munich on the 25th of April 1995 burned himself to death as a protest against "the Niagara of lies" poured upon his people; the police there, acting under orders, subsequently confiscated the bouquets of flowers laid at the site of this sacrifice and proceeded to arrest those who, by that gesture of compassion, had tried to manifest their own anguish.

At the risk of being misunderstood by some, I dedicate these Ecrits Révisionnistes as well to those amongst the Second World War’s blood-soaked victors who, like Churchill, Eisenhower, or de Gaulle, refused, both during and after the battle, to lend credence by even a single word to the atrocious, degrading, insolent hoax of the alleged extermination of the Jews and the alleged Nazi gas chambers.

Finally, I hope that the present work may be accepted as having been written in the name of remembrance: not a selective or tribal one but a universal, comprehensive remembrance: in memoriam omnium. May it also be read as a homage to the true sufferings of all the victims of the 1939-45 war, whether they belonged to the camp of the victors, ever the objects of accolade, or to that of the vanquished, unceasingly humiliated and slandered for the past half century!

_____________________________

* James Morgan Read, author of Atrocity Propaganda 1914-1919 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1941, xv-319 p.), expressed his doubts on the subject in “Trials for War Criminals”, The Christian Century [Chicago], May 30, 1945, p. 651-653 where he wrote: “One illustration of what is needed in the way of impartial investigation into atrocity charges is provided by the account of death chambers in the German camps. Many of these camps were obviously fighting typhus epidemics and using fumigation chambers to delouse the prisoners as a preventive measure. The question is, How many of these chambers represented genuine efforts to kill lice, and how many of them were flimsy excuses or even undisguised efforts to kill people? Court trials could establish such facts beyond reasonable doubt” (p. 652). J. M. Read was to finish his career as president of Wilmington College in Wilmington, Delaware. He died on February 11, 1985.

***

INTRODUCTION TO

ÉCRITS RÉVISIONNISTES (1974-1998)

The following is the remark not of a revisionist but rather of an anti-revisionist:

“Holocaust denier”, “revisionist”, “negationist”: everyone knows what these words of reprimand mean. Exclusion from civilised humanity. A man fallen prey to such suspicions is finished. His civic life is destroyed, his scientific reputation ruined.

And he went on to add:

A debate ought to be held on the state of public opinion in a country where to brand a renowned scholar with the dreaded accusation of denial of Auschwitz is enough to destroy him morally, in the space of a second (1).

AGAINST THE LAW

The present four-volume work cannot be sold openly in my country, France. It is issued and distributed privately.

In France, it is forbidden to question the Shoah.

In application of a law on the “freedom of the press” enacted on July 13, 1990, the Shoah, in its three hypostases – the alleged genocide of the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers, and the alleged figure of six million Jewish victims of the Second World War – has become unquestionable, on pain of imprisonment of from one month to one year, a fine of from 2,000 to 300,000 francs (305 to 45,800 euros), orders to pay considerable damages, and still other sanctions. More precisely, this law forbids the questioning of the reality of one or more “crimes against humanity” as defined in 1945 and punished in 1946 by the judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, a court established exclusively by the victors exclusively to judge the vanquished.

Of course, debates and controversies about the Shoah – also called the “Holocaust” – remain authorised but only within the confines traced by the official dogma. Controversies or debates that might lead to a challenging of the Shoah story as a whole, or of a part of it, or indeed mere remarks that might raise doubts, are forbidden. Let us repeat: in the matter at hand, even doubt is proscribed, and punished.

In France, the idea of such a law, of Israeli inspiration (2), had been formulated for the first time in 1986 by a certain number of historians of Jewish origin, amongst whom Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Georges Wellers, and François Bédarida, gathered round Chief Rabbi René-Samuel Sirat (3). The law was passed in 1990 on the initiative of former prime minister Laurent Fabius, a member of the Socialist government and president of the National Assembly, himself a Jewish militant of the Jewish cause. At the same period (May 1990), a desecration of graves in the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras, in Provence, had given rise to a media exploitation that nullified all inclination on the part of opposition Assembly members and senators to mount any effective resistance to the bill. In Paris, about two hundred thousand marchers, a host of Israeli flags borne high, demonstrated against “the resurgence of the horrid beast”. Notre Dame’s great bell tolled, as for a particularly tragic or significant event in the history of the French nation. Once the law had been put on the statute books (appearing in the Journal officiel on the 14th of July, the national holiday: in the same issue, incidentally, as P. Vidal-Naquet’s appointment to the Order of the Légion d’honneur), the Carpentras outrage was mentioned only, if at all, with a certain distance, as a mere reminder. Only the “Fabius-Gayssot” Act remained.

Under pressure from national and international Jewish organisations, other countries have since adopted, each in its turn, laws forbidding all questioning of the Shoah, after the Israeli and French examples. Such has been the case for Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and Lithuania. Still other Western countries (particularly Canada and the United Kingdom) have promised the Jewish organisations, more or less expressly, that they will follow suit. But, in reality, such a law, of specific nature, is not indispensable for the hunting down of historical revisionism. In France, as elsewhere, the practice has often been to prosecute questioners of the Shoah under other laws; according to the needs of a given case, recourse is had to laws against racism or antisemitism, the defamation of living persons, insulting the memory of the dead, attempting to justify crimes, the spreading of false news, and – a source of cash indemnities for plaintiffs – personal injury.

In France, the police and the judiciary rigorously ensure the protection thus accorded to an official version of Second World War history. According to this rabbinical version, the major event of the conflict was the Shoah, in other words the physical extermination of the Jews that the Germans are said to have carried out from 1941-1942 to 1944-1945 (lacking any document with which to assign a precise time span to the event – and for good reason, since it is a matter of fiction – the official historians propose only dates that are as divergent as they are approximate).

PARTICULAR NATURE OF THIS BOOK:

A REVISIONIST CHRONICLE

From 1974 to this day I have had to fight so many legal battles that I have been unable to find time enough to compose the specific summing-up that one is entitled to expect from a professor who, over so many years, has devoted his efforts to one point, and one point alone, of the history of the Second World War: the “Holocaust” or the Shoah.

Year after year, an avalanche of trials, entailing the gravest consequences, has thwarted my plans to publish such a work. Apart from my own cases, I have had to devote a good part of my time to the defence, in their respective courts, of other revisionists both in France and abroad. Still today, as I write this introduction, two cases are being brought against me (one in the Netherlands, the other in France) while I must intervene, directly or indirectly, in proceedings pending against revisionists in Switzerland, Canada, and Australia. For want of time, I have had to refuse my aid to others, notably two Japanese revisionists.

Throughout the world, our adversaries’ tactic is the same: go to court in order to paralyse revisionists’ research work, if not to have them sentenced to prison terms or ordered to pay fines or damages. For those convicted, imprisonment will mean a halt to all revisionist activity, whereas those ordered to pay large sums will be compelled to set off on a feverish pursuit of money, goaded by the threats of bailiffs, “writs of seizure”, “notices to third parties”, and the freezing of bank accounts. From this simple point of view, my life over the past quarter of a century has been difficult; it still is and, in all likelihood, will remain so.

Let us add that, to make matters worse, my conception of research has never been that of the “paper” professor or historian. I consider it indispensable to see the terrain for myself: either the terrain of the material investigation or the terrain where the adversary is gathered. I should not be entitled to talk about the camps of Dachau, Majdanek, Auschwitz, or Treblinka without first having visited them in order to examine the grounds, buildings and people there. I should not listen to accounts of antirevisionist actions (demonstrations, conferences, symposia, trials) without having attended them, or else delegated and instructed an observer for the mission, a practice that is not without risk but which enables one to get information from a good source. I have friends and associates produce countless letters and statements. I run to the battlements at every occasion. To cite but one example, I believe that I may rightly say that, if the impressive international “Holocaust” conference organised in Oxford in 1988 by the late billionaire Robert Maxwell (also known as “Bob the Liar”) aborted so pitifully, on the admission of its very instigator (4), it was thanks to an operation that I personally led on the spot with the help of a female French revisionist who lacked neither courage, nor daring, nor ingenuity: her action alone was certainly worth several books. But will the producers of books galore understand what I say here?

To the hours and days thus spent preparing either court cases or those various sporadic actions should be added the hours and days lost in hospital, recovering from the effects of an exhausting struggle or from the consequences of physical attacks carried out by Jewish militia groups (in France armed militias are strictly prohibited, except for the Jewish community).

Finally, I have had to stimulate, direct, or coordinate, in France and abroad, numerous activities or works of a revisionist nature, brace those whose strength has faltered, provide for the continuance of action, answer requests, warn against provocations, errors, driftings off course, and above all combat ill-conceived accommodations since, for some revisionists, the temptation is great, in such a struggle, to seek a compromise with the opponent and, sometimes, even to back down. Examples of war-weary revisionists who have sunk to public contrition are, sad to say, not wanting. I shall not cast the first stone at them. I know from experience that discouragement is liable to befall each of us because the contest is so uneven: our means are laughable; those of our opponents, boundless.

Making a virtue of necessity, the present collection is thus a mere selection of notes, articles, essays, prefaces, interviews, and critiques drafted between 1974 and 1998 and shown here in chronological order of writing or publication. The reader will perhaps get the impression of a disparate whole, tarnished by a good deal of repetition. I beg his forbearance. At least this very diversity will enable him to follow the revisionist adventure day by day in its vicissitudes. As for the repetition, I take some comfort in thinking that, after all, I have perhaps not repeated myself enough, for there persist today so many misconceptions as to the exact nature of revisionism.

HISTORICAL REVISIONISM

Revisionism is a matter of method and not an ideology.

It demands, for all research, a return to the starting point, an examination followed by re-examination, rereading and rewriting, evaluation followed by re-evaluation, reorientation, revision, recasting; it is, in spirit, the contrary of ideology. It does not deny but aims to affirm with more exactitude. Revisionists are not “deniers” or “negationists” (the latter word, being the neologism adopted by revisionism’s adversaries in France, has yet to pass into English dictionaries); they endeavour to seek and to find things where, it seemed, there was nothing more to seek or find.

Revisionism can be carried out in a hundred activities of every-day life and in a hundred fields of historical, scientific, or literary research. It does not necessarily call established ideas into question, but it often leads to qualifying them somewhat. It seeks to untangle the true from the false. History is, in essence, revisionistic; ideology is its enemy. Since ideology is never so strong as in time of war or conflict, and since it then churns out falsehood in abundance for propaganda needs, the historian working in that area will be well advised to redouble his vigilance: probing deep into the “truths” of which he has been reminded so often, he will doubtless realise that, when a war has led to tens of millions of deaths, the first victim of all will have been the ascertainable truth: a truth that must be sought out and re-established.

The official history of the Second World War comprises a bit of truth mixed in with a great deal of falsehood.

THE OFFICIAL HISTORY: A BIT OF TRUTH MIXED IN WITH A GREAT DEAL OF FALSEHOOD

ITS SUCCESSIVE RETRACTIONS IN THE FACE OF REVISIONIST ADVANCES

It is accurate to say that National-Socialist Germany built concentration camps; she did so after – and at the same time as – a good number of other countries, all of which were convinced that their camps would be more humane than prison. Hitler saw in them what Napoléon III had thought he saw in the creation of penal colonies: progress for Man. But it is false to maintain that Germany ever created “extermination camps” (an expression fashioned by the Allies).

It is accurate to say that the Germans manufactured gas-powered vans / (Gaswagen). But it is false to say that they ever built homicidal gas vans (if a single one of such things had ever existed, it would be on display at the automobile museum or at one of the various “Holocaust” museums, if only in the form of a scientifically valid sketch).

It is accurate to say that the Germans employed Zyklon (made from a base of hydrocyanic acid and in use since 1922) to safeguard the health, by disinfection, of large numbers of civilians, troops, prisoners, and internees. But they never used Zyklon in order to kill anyone, let alone to put to death throngs of human beings at once; because of the draconian precautions for the use of hydrogen cyanide gas, the gassing of inmates as it is alleged to have been done at Auschwitz and other camps would, besides, have been fundamentally impossible. I explain this point at length in the body of the present work.

It is accurate to say that the Germans envisaged a “final solution of the Jewish question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage). But the solution was a territorial one (territoriale Endlösung der Judenfrage) and not a murderous one; it was a project to induce or, if necessary, to force the Jews to leave Germany and her European sphere of influence, thereafter to establish, in accord with the Zionists, a Jewish national home, in Madagascar or elsewhere. Many Zionists collaborated with National-Socialist Germany with a view towards such a solution.

It is accurate to say that a gathering of German officials was held at a villa in Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin, on January 20, 1942, to discuss the Jewish question. But the subject of their discussions was the forced emigration or deportation of the Jews, as well as the future creation of a specific Jewish territorial entity, not a programme of physical extermination.

It is accurate to say that some German concentration camps had crematoria with which to incinerate corpses. But their purpose was to combat epidemics, not to incinerate, as some have dared assert, living human beings along with corpses (5).

It is accurate to say that many Jews experienced the hardships of war, of internment, deportation, the detention camps, the concentration camps, the forced labour camps, the ghettos; that there were, for various reasons, summary executions of Jews, that Jews were the object of reprisals and even massacres, for there are no wars without massacres. But it is equally true that all of these sufferings were also the lot of many other nations or communities during the war and, in particular, of the Germans and their Allies (the hardships of the ghetto aside, for the ghetto is first and foremost a specific creation of the Jews themselves (6)); it is above all most plausible, for whoever is not afflicted with a hemiplegic memory and who seeks to acquaint himself with both sides of Second World War history (both the side that is always shown and the side almost always hidden), that the hardships of the vanquished during the war and afterwards were, in number and in nature, greater than those of the Jews and the victors, especially as regards deportations.

It is false that there ever existed, as some have long dared state, any order whatever, given by Hitler or any of his associates, to exterminate the Jews. During the war, German soldiers and officers were convicted by their own courts martial, and sometimes shot, for having killed Jews.

It is a good thing that the exterminationists (that is, those who believe in the extermination of the Jews) have ended up growing weary to the point where they acknowledge that no trace of any plan, instruction, or document relating to a policy of physical extermination of the Jews has ever been found and that, by the same token, they have at last admitted that no trace of any budget for such an undertaking, or of an entity in charge of running such a project, has been found either.

It is a good thing that the exterminationists have at last conceded to the revisionists that the judges at the Nuremberg trial (1945-1946) accepted as true certain pure inventions, such as the stories of soap produced from Jewish fat, of the lampshades made of human skin, of the “shrunken heads”, and of gassings at Dachau; and it is an especially good thing that the exterminationists have finally recognised that the most spectacular, the most terrifying, the most significant part of that trial (i.e. the session of April 15, 1946, in the course of which a former commandant of the Auschwitz camp, Rudolf Höss, was seen and heard to confess openly that, in his camp, millions of Jews had been gassed), was merely the fruit of the tortures inflicted on him. That confession, presented for so many years and in so many historical works as the number 1 “proof” of the genocide of the Jews, is now consigned to oblivion, at least as far as historians are concerned.

It is fortunate that the exterminationist historians have finally acknowledged that SS officer Kurt Gerstein’s famous testimony, an essential feature in their arguments, is devoid of value; it is loathsome that the French University revoked the revisionist Henri Roques's doctorate, earned for having demonstrated that fact in 1985.

It is pitiful that Raul Hilberg, the pope of exterminationism, ventured to write, in the first edition of his The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), that there had been two orders from Hitler to exterminate the Jews, then to declare later, as of 1983, that the extermination had come about of its own, without any order or plan but by way of “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading” on the part of the far-flung German bureaucracy. So it was that R. Hilberg replaced a gratuitous assertion with a magical explanation: telepathy.

It is a good thing that the exterminationists have finally (or very nearly) come to abandon, in practice, the charge, based on “testimonies”, according to which there existed execution gas chambers at the camps of Ravensbrück, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Hartheim, Struthof-Natzweiler, Stutthof-Danzig, Bergen-Belsen…

It is a good thing that the most visited gas chamber in the world – that of Auschwitz-I – has at last (in January 1995) been recognised for what it is: in a word, a fabrication. It is fortunate that it has at last been admitted that “EVERYTHING IN IT IS FALSE”, and I personally delight in knowing that a historian of the official Establishment has been able to write: “In the late 1970s, Robert Faurisson exploited these falsifications all the better as the [Auschwitz] museum administration balked at acknowledging them (7)”. I delight all the more as the French courts, in their iniquity, had convicted me for basically saying just that.

It is a good thing that, in the same article, the same historian has revealed that such an eminent figure in the Jewish world as Théo Klein sees in that “gas chamber” only an “artifice”.

It is also a good thing that, again in the same article, the same historian has revealed, first, that the Auschwitz museum authorities are conscious of having deceived millions of visitors (five hundred thousand per year in the early nineties), and second, that they will nevertheless continue to deceive their visitors in future for, as the museum's assistant director puts it: “It [i.e. telling the truth about this ‘gas chamber’] is too complicated. We'll see to it later on (8)”.

It is fortunate that in 1996 two historians of Jewish origin, the Canadian Robert Jan van Pelt and the American Debórah Dwork, finally denounced some of the enormous fakeries of the Auschwitz camp-museum and the cynicism with which visitors were being duped there (9).

It is, on the other hand, unconscionable that UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation) should maintain its patronage (as it has done since 1979) of a site like Auschwitz, whose centre harbours, in its fake “gas chamber” (to say nothing of other enormous falsifications), an imposture now avowed as such; UNESCO (based in Paris and headed by Federico Mayor) has no right to use the membership dues of constituent countries to endorse a vast swindle so incompatible with the interests of “education”, “science”, and “culture”.

It is fortunate that Jean-Claude Pressac, after having been praised to the skies, has fallen into discredit. Propelled by the Klarsfeld couple, this pharmacist thought it wise to seek out a half-way position between those who believed in the gas chambers and those who did not. For him, in a sense, the woman being examined was neither pregnant nor unpregnant but half-pregnant and even, with time, less and less pregnant. An author of writings that were supposed to be on the Nazi gas chambers but in which not one comprehensive photograph or drawing of a single one of those chemical slaughterhouses was to be found, the pitiful scribbler would, on May 9, 1995 in the XVIIth chamber of the Paris correctional court, go on to give a demonstration of his total inability to answer the presiding judge's questions as to what, concretely, one such mass-murder machine might actually have been. Three years later, he has been reduced to writing: “Thus, according to the statements of former members of the Sonderkommando, it is reckoned with firm certainty that a film on homicidal gassings was shot by the SS at Birkenau. Why should it not be found by chance [at some future date] in the attic or cellar of a former SS man?” (10)

It is fortunate that “the gas chamber” in ruins, constituting a part of Krematorium II of Birkenau (Auschwitz-II), can above all serve to show “in vivo” and “de visu” that there never was a “Holocaust”, either in this camp or in any other. In effect, according both to a German defendant’s statements under examination and the aerial photographs “retouched” by the Allies, the roof of this gas chamber would seem to have had four special openings (about ten inches square, it was specified) for the pouring in of the Zyklon. But, as anyone at the site may note, none of those four openings ever existed. Auschwitz being the capital of the “Holocaust”, and this ruined crematorium being at the core of the purported process for exterminating Jews at Auschwitz, I was able to say, in 1994 (and the turn of phrase seems to have made some progress in people’s minds): “No holes, no ‘Holocaust’.”

It is equally fortunate that a plethora of “testimonies”, according to which those gassings had happened, have thus ended up being invalidated and it is, by the same token, extremely deplorable that so many Germans, tried by their victorious opponents, were convicted, and some of them even put to death, for crimes that they could not have committed.

It is a good thing that, in the light of trials resembling so many judicial masquerades, the exterminationists themselves voice doubts as to the validity of many testimonies; these testimonies’ defective nature would appear yet more clearly if the trouble were ever taken to order a legal inspection of the supposed weapon of the supposed crime. But, in the course of a thousand trials concerning Auschwitz or other camps, no court has ordered any such inquiry (the lone exception, very little known, being that carried out at Struthof-Natzweiler in Alsace, the results of which were kept hidden until I myself revealed them). It was nonetheless known that a good number of testimonies or confessions needed to be verified and measured up against the material facts and that, in the absence of those two conditions, they were worthless as evidence.

It is fortunate that the official history has revised downwards – often in considerable proportions – the supposed number of victims. It took more than forty years of revisionist pressure for the Jewish authorities and those of the Auschwitz museum to remove the nineteen plaques which, in nineteen different languages, announced that the number of victims there had been four million. It then took five years of internal bickering for agreement to be reached on the new figure of one and a half million, a figure which, in turn, was very quickly challenged by exterminationist authors; J.-C. Pressac, S. Klarsfeld’s protégé, now proposes, for his part, no greater a number than 600,000 to 800,000 Jewish and non-Jewish victims over the whole period of the Auschwitz complex’s existence. It is a pity that this quest for the true figure is not followed through to attain the likely figure of 150,000 persons, victims, mainly, of epidemics in the nearly forty camps there. It is deplorable that, in the schools of France, the film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) in which the Auschwitz death toll is put at nine million, continues to be screened; in that film are perpetuated the myths of the “soap made from the bodies”, the lampshades of human skin, and the streaks traced by victims’ fingernails in the concrete walls of the gas chambers; it proclaims that “nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary barracks”!

It was a good thing that in 1988 Arno Mayer, a Princeton University professor of Jewish origin, should suddenly write: “Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable” (10a); but why should it have been affirmed for so long that the sources were countless and trustworthy, and why should such scorn have been poured on the revisionists who, from 1950 onwards, had written what Arno Mayer discovered in 1988?

It was a particularly good thing that in 1996 the French historian Jacques Baynac, who had made a speciality, in Le Monde and elsewhere, of labelling the revisionists as forgers, should finally acknowledge that there was, in the end, no evidence of the gas chambers’ existence. It was, he made clear, “as painful to say as it is to hear” (11). Perhaps, in certain circumstances, the truth is, for certain persons, “as painful to say as it is to hear” but, for revisionists, the truth is as pleasant to say as it is to hear.

Lastly, it is fortunate that the exterminationists have allowed themselves to undermine the third and last component of the Shoah trinity: the figure of six million Jewish deaths. It seems that this number was first put forth (12) by Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel (1903-1956); established in Slovakia, this rabbi was the main contriver of the Auschwitz lie based on the alleged testimonies of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler; he organised intensive “information campaigns” aimed at the Allies, Switzerland, and the Vatican. In a letter of May 31, 1944 (i.e. nearly a full year before the war’s end in Europe), he did not shrink from writing: “Till now six times a million Jews from Europe and Russia have been destroyed (13).”

This figure of six million was to be found elsewhere as well before the war’s end in the writings of the Soviet Jew Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967), perhaps the most hateful propagandist of the Second World War (14). In 1979 it was suddenly termed “symbolic” (that is, false) by the exterminationist Martin Broszat during the trial of a German revisionist. In 1961, Raul Hilberg, that most prestigious of conventional historians, estimated the number of Jewish deaths to have been 5.1 million. In 1953, another of those historians, Gerald Reitlinger, had put forth a figure of between 4.2 and 4.6 million. But, in fact, no historian of that school has ever offered figures based on the results of any investigation; it has always been a matter of each one’s own more or less educated guess. The revisionist Paul Rassinier, for his part, proposed the figure of “about one million” Jewish deaths but did so, as he pointed out, on the basis of numbers furnished by the opposing faction; thus his figure was also a product of guesswork. The truth is that many European Jews perished, and many survived. With modern methods of calculation it should be possible to determine what, in either case, is meant by “many”. But the three sources from which the necessary information might be got are, in practice, either forbidden to independent researchers or of limited access:

– first, the enormous body of documentation gathered by the International Tracing Service (ITS) of Bad Arolsen, Germany, which is answerable to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Switzerland; access to this centre is jealously guarded by a panel of ten States, one of which is Israel;

– second, documents in the possession of Poland and Russia and of which only a part has been made accessible: death registries of certain camps, cremation registries, etc.;

– finally, the names of millions of Jewish survivors who have received or are still receiving financial indemnities or reparations, either in Israel or in dozens of countries represented by the World Jewish Congress in New York. The mere enumeration of these names would serve to show the extent to which a community so often said to have been “exterminated” was not exterminated at all.

Fifty-two years after the war, the State of Israel still put the official number of “Holocaust survivors” in the world at around nine hundred thousand (the actual figures given were: between 834,000 and 960,000) (15). According to a reckoning made by the Swedish statistician Carl O. Nordling, to whom I submitted that Israeli government evaluation, it is possible, with the postulate of the existence of nine hundred thousand “survivors” in 1997, to conclude that there were, at the end of the war in Europe in 1945, slightly more than three million “survivors”. Still today, “survivors’” organisations proliferate under the most diverse names; they group together veteran Jewish “résistants” as well as former children of Auschwitz (that is, Jewish children born in that camp or interned there with their parents at a very early age), former Jewish forced labourers or, more simply, one-time clandestine Jews or Jewish fugitives. Millions of beneficiaries of “miracles” no longer constitute a “miracle” but are rather the products of a natural phenomenon. The American press reports fairly often on moving reunions of family members, “Holocaust” survivors all, each of whom was, we are assured, convinced hitherto that “the entire family” had been lost.

To sum up, in spite of the dogma and the laws, the pursuit of the historical truth about the Second World War in general and about the Shoah in particular has made headway in recent years, but the general public are kept in the dark about this; they would be stunned to learn that many of their firmest beliefs had, from the early 1980s onwards, been relegated by the most orthodox historians to the rank of popular legend. It could, from this point of view, be said that there existed two structures of the “Holocaust” idea: on the one hand, that of the public at large and, on the other hand, that of the conventional historians; the first would seem to be unshakeable, the second threatened with imminent collapse, to judge by the number of hasty repairs being made to it.

The orthodox historians’ concessions to the revisionists have, year after year – and especially since 1979 – been so many and of such quality that the latter today find themselves at a dead end. They no longer have anything of substance to say on the very subject of the “Holocaust”. They have handed the baton to the film-makers, novelists, and theatre people. Even the museographers are at a loss. At Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum the “decision” has been taken not to offer “any physical representation of the gas chambers” to public view (according to the statement that the museum’s scientific director, Michael Berenbaum, made before me and four witnesses in August 1994; he is the author of a guidebook of over 200 pages in which, in effect, no physical representation of the gas chambers appears, not even one of the miserable and fallacious mock-up displayed for visitors to his museum (16)). The public there are forbidden to take photographs. Claude Lanzmann, maker of Shoah, a film remarkable for its utter lack of historical or scientific content, today no longer has any recourse but to pontificate in deploring the fact that “the revisionists occupy the whole terrain” (17). As for Elie Wiesel, he calls on all to show discretion; he requests that we no longer try to see at close quarters or to imagine what, according to him, happened in the gas chambers: “Let the gas chambers remain closed to prying eyes, and to imagination” (18). The “Holocaust” historians have turned into theoreticians, philosophers, “thinkers”. The squabbles amongst them, between “intentionalists” and “functionalists”, or between supporters and adversaries of a thesis such as Daniel Goldhagen’s on the near-innate propensity of Germans to descend into antisemitism and racist crime, ought not to conceal from view the indigence of their specifically historical work.

REVISIONISM’S SUCCESSES AND FAILURES

In 1998, an appraisal of the revisionist enterprise could be briefly put as follows: a sparkling success on the historical and scientific front (where our opponents capitulated in 1996) but a failure on the front of communication (our opponents have sealed off all access to the media except, for the time being, the Internet).

In the 1980s and at the beginning of the 90s, antirevisionist authors had attempted to cross swords with the revisionists on the terrain of historical science. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Nadine Fresco, Georges Wellers, Adalbert Rückerl, Hermann Langbein, Eugen Kogon, Arno Mayer, Serge Klarsfeld, each in turn tried to have the media believe that answers to the revisionists’ material or documentary arguments had been found. Even Michael Berenbaum, even the Holocaust Memorial Museum, in 1993 and early 1994, wanted to pick up the gauntlet I had thrown down and try to show just a single Nazi gas chamber, just a single proof – of their own choosing – that there had been a genocide of the Jews. But their failures were so stinging that thereafter they had progressively to abandon the fight on that turf. Quite recently, in 1998, M. Berenbaum has indeed published (with Abraham J. Peck) a fat book entitled The Holocaust and History (19) but in it, precisely, far from studying what he calls the “Holocaust” on the historical level (A. Mayer’s express purpose in his 1988 work), he instead unintentionally shows us that the “Holocaust” is one thing and “History” quite another. The work, moreover, is quasi-immaterial, presenting neither photographs, nor drawings, nor the least attempt to represent physically any reality whatever. Only the dust jacket offers a view of… a heap of shoes. These are reputed to possess a certain graphic eloquence, as at the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum where they tell us, supposedly: “We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.” The book is merely a compilation of fifty-five contributions written and published under the watchful eye of Rabbi Berenbaum: in it even Raul Hilberg, even Yehuda Bauer, even Franciszek Piper abandon the idea of any real effort at scientific research, and the anathema is pronounced against Arno Mayer who, in the recent past, has tried to put the “Holocaust” back into the realm of history (20). The irrational has won out in the face of attempts at rationalisation. E. Wiesel, C. Lanzmann, Steven Spielberg (with a film, Schindler’s List, inspired by a novel), have in the end triumphed over those in their own camp who used to try to prove the “Holocaust”.

In future years hindsight will let it be observed that it was in September 1996 that the death knell sounded for the hopes of those who had wanted to combat revisionism on historical and scientific grounds. The two long articles then put out by the antirevisionist historian J. Baynac in a Swiss daily definitively closed the chapter of attempts at rational reply to the revisionists’ arguments (21).

In the mid- and late 1970s, I offered my own contribution to the development of revisionism; I discovered and formulated what has since come to be known as the physical and chemical argument, that is, the physical and chemical reasons why the alleged Nazi gas chambers were quite simply inconceivable. At the time, I commended myself for having brought forth into the world a decisive argument which, until then, had never been expounded either by a German chemist (Germany is not short of chemists) or an American engineer (the United States has engineers who, given the forbidding complexities involved in the making of an American penitentiary’s gas chamber, ought to have realised that the alleged Nazi gas chambers were, because of certain physical and chemical realities, impossible to produce). If, at that period, amidst the fracas triggered by my discovery, a clairvoyant had predicted that, twenty years on, in about 1994 or 1996, my adversaries, after many attempts to show that I was wrong, would, as J. Baynac has done, resign themselves to acknowledging that, in the end, there existed not the least evidence with which to prove the reality of a single Nazi gas chamber, I should surely have rejoiced. And I should perhaps have concluded that the myth of the “Holocaust” could never survive such a direct hit, that the media would then quit the employ of the Great Lie and that, quite naturally, the antirevisionist repression would disintegrate all by itself.

In so reckoning I should have committed an error both of diagnosis and of prognosis.

For superstitious belief lives of another spirit than that of science. It makes its own way in the world. The province of religion, of ideology, of illusion, of the media, and of fictional cinema can evolve at a certain remove from scientific realities. Even Voltaire never succeeded in “crushing the vile foe”. It might thus be said that, like Voltaire denouncing the absurdities of the Hebraic fables, the revisionists are doomed, despite their work’s scientific nature, never to carry the day against the wild imaginings of the Synagogue, while the Synagogue, for its part, will never succeed in stifling the voices of the revisionists. The “Holocaust” and “Shoah-Business” propaganda will continue to flourish. Today it remains for the revisionists to show how this belief, this myth came to be born, to grow, and to flourish before, perhaps, disappearing to make way, one day, not for reason but rather for other beliefs and other myths.

How are men deceived, and why do they deceive themselves so readily?

“HOLOCAUST” PROPAGANDA:

SHOWING THE DEAD AND TELLING OF KILLED,

SHOWING CREMATORIA AND TELLING

OF GAS CHAMBERS

It is by means of the manipulation of images that the masses are most easily fooled. From April 1945, British and American journalists, upon the opening of the German concentration camps, hurried to photograph and film true horrors that were later made, if it may be said thus, into horrors truer than life. In the familiar language dear to people of the press, a “put-up” job was done; we were served with some “Timisoara” before its time (22). On the one hand, we were shown real dead bodies as well as real crematoria and, on the other hand, thanks to some misleading comments and a cinematic staging, a deft artifice was effected, something I describe by a phrase that may perhaps serve as a device to unmask all these impostures:

We were led to take the dead for killed and crematoria for mass-execution gas chambers.

One might feel inclined to add: “…and a sow’s ear for a silk purse”.

Thus was born the confusion, still so widespread today, between, on the one hand, the crematoria, which actually existed (but not at Bergen-Belsen) for the incineration of corpses and, on the other hand, the Nazi gas chambers that allegedly served to kill whole crowds of men and women but which, in reality, never existed nor could have existed.

The myth of the Nazi gas chambers and their association with the crematoria originated, in its media form, in the press pictures of and comments on a camp – that of Bergen-Belsen – which, by the very admission of the orthodox historians, possessed neither mass-execution gas chambers nor even simple crematoria.

“GAS CHAMBERS” THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN SEEN, NEVER BEEN SHOWN

In March 1992, at a press conference in Stockholm, I put forth a challenge to the audience of newspaper and television reporters. That challenge was stated in the nine words: “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber”.

The next day, the journalists’ reports on the conference indeed appeared but they passed over in silence its essential object: precisely that challenge. They had looked for photographs of those gas chambers and had found none.

Billions of people over this past half-century assume (or imagine) that they have seen Nazi gas chambers in books or in documentary films. Many are convinced of having, at least once in their lives, come across the photograph of such a gas chamber. Some have visited Auschwitz or other camps and heard the guides announce that a given structure was a gas chamber. They have been told that they have before their eyes, as the case may be, a gas chamber “in its original state” or “a reconstruction” (this latter expression implying that said reconstruction is faithful, that it conforms to the original). Sometimes, they are led to behold remains called “ruins of a gas chamber” (23). Yet, in all such cases, they have been deceived or, better, have deceived themselves. This phenomenon is easily explained. Too many people imagine that a gas chamber amounts to a mere room with gas inside: this reveals confusion between an execution gassing and a suicidal or accidental one. An execution gassing, such as those carried out in some United States prisons for the putting to death of one man, is necessarily a highly complicated task for, in this case, care must be taken to kill only the condemned without causing an accident, and without putting one’s own life, or that of one’s associates, in danger, especially in the final phase, that is, at the moment when the room must be entered in order to handle a contaminated corpse and remove it. Of this, the greater part of museum visitors, as well as most readers, film-goers, and even most historians are obviously unaware. Those in charge of the museums, for their part, take advantage of this general unawareness. For a successful Nazi gas chamber exhibit, they need only display to the good public’s gaze a space of gloomy aspect, for example a morgue’s cold room, a shower-room (preferably located below ground), an air-raid shelter (with a peephole in its door), and the trick will work. The tricksters can manage with less: it suffices to show a mere door, wall, or roof of a purported “gas chamber”. The cleverest of them will get by with still less: they will show a bundle of hair, a mound of shoes, a pile of eyeglasses and claim that these are the only traces or remains to have been found of the “gassed”; naturally, they will avoid pointing out that, during the war and the blockade, in a Europe fallen prey to general shortages and penury, vast “recovery” and “recycling” schemes were set up to reclaim all convertible materials, including hair, which was used, for example, in textiles.

THE “HOLOCAUST” WITNESSES:

UNVERIFIED TESTIMONIES

A similar confusion reigns with respect to the witnesses. We are presented with bands of witnesses to the genocide of the Jews. Whether orally or in writing, these witnesses claim to assert that Germany carried out a plan for the general extermination of the Jews of Europe. In reality, these witnesses can only attest to such facts as the Jews’ deportation, their internment in detention camps, concentration camps or forced labour camps, and even, in some cases, the functioning of crematoria. The Jews were to so great a degree not doomed to extermination or to end up in mass-execution gas chambers that each one of these countless survivors or escapees, far from constituting, as some would have us believe, “living proof of the genocide”, is, on the contrary, living proof that there was no genocide. As has been seen above, at war’s end the number of Jewish “survivors” of the “Holocaust” probably exceeded three million.

For the camp of Auschwitz alone, a considerable list may be made of former Jewish inmates who have borne witness in public, orally or in writing, on television, in books, in the law courts. Amongst the best known I shall mention:

Odette Abadie, Louise Alcan, Esther Alicigüzel, Jehuda Bacon, Charles Baron, Bruno Baum, Charles-Sigismond Bendel, Paul Bendel, Maurice Benroubi, Henri Bily, Ada Bimko, Suzanne Birnbaum, Eva Brewster, Henry Bulawko, Robert Clary, Jehiel Dinour alias K. Tzetnik, Szlama Dragan, Fania Fénelon, Arnold Friedman, Philip Friedman, Michel Gelber, Israël Gutman, Dr Hafner, Henry Heller, Benny Hochman, Régine Jacubert, Wanda Jakubowska, Stanislas Jankowski alias Alter Fajnzylberg, Simone Kadouch-Lagrange, Raya Kagan, Rudolf Kauer, Marc Klein, Ruth Klüger, Guy Kohen, Erich Kulka, Simon Laks, Hermann Langbein, Leo Laufer, Sonia Letwinska, Renée Louria, Henryk Mandelbaum, Françoise Maous, Mel Mermelstein, Ernest Morgan, Filip Müller, Flora Neumann, Anna Novac, Myklos Nyiszli, David Olère, Dounia Ourisson, Dov Paisikovic, Gisella Perl, Samuel Pisar, Macha Ravine-Speter, Jérôme Scorin, Georges Snyders, Henri Sonnenbluck, Jacques Stroumsa, David Szmulewski, Henri Tajchner, Henryk Tauber, Sima Vaïsman, Simone Veil née Jacob, Rudolf Vrba, Robert Weil, Georges Wellers…

I shall also mention the resounding case of one late arrival, the clarinettist Binjamin Wilkomirski. It is not very clear why, but this false witness was publicly exposed after a three-year spell of glory that had seen him honoured with the US National Jewish Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain, the Mémoire de la Shoah prize in France, and an impressive series of dithyrambic articles in the press world-wide. His purported autobiography of a child deported to Majdanek and to Auschwitz (?) had been released by Suhrkampf (Frankfurt) in 1995 under the title: Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kinderheit, 1939 bis 1948 (in English, Fragments: memories of a wartime childhood (24)). Then, at the end of an investigation, Jewish author Daniel Ganzfried revealed that Binjamin Wilkomirski, alias Bruno Doessekker, born Bruno Grosjean, had indeed had some experience of Auschwitz and Majdanek but only after the war, as a tourist (25). In 1995 the Australian Donald Watt had himself deceived the great English language media with his alleged testimony telling of life as a “stoker” in crematoria II and III at Auschwitz-Birkenau (26). Between September and November 1998, there was organised in Germany and France a vast media operation around the sudden “revelations” of Dr Hans-Wilhelm Münch, one-time SS physician at Auschwitz. The vein is decidedly bountiful.

Primo Levi, for his part, tends still today to be presented to us as a reliable witness. It will be seen further on in this work that his reputation as such was perhaps deserved in 1947, with the publication of his book Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man). Unhappily, P. Levi conducted himself somewhat unworthily afterwards. E. Wiesel remains the undisputed “star false witness” of the “Holocaust”. In his autobiographical account Night he does not mention the “gas chambers”; for him, the Germans threw the Jews into blazing pits; as late as June 2, 1987, at the Klaus Barbie trial in Lyon, he testified under oath that he had “seen, in a little wood, somewhere in [Auschwitz] Birkenau, SS men throwing live children into the flames”. In the present work, it will be remarked how the translator and editor of the German version of Night resuscitated the “gas chambers” in E. Wiesel’s account of Auschwitz. In France, Fred Sedel would in 1990 proceed in like manner while re-editing a book that had appeared in 1963, putting “chambres à gaz” where, twenty-seven years earlier, he had mentioned only “fours crématoires” (27).

In the same class of “pious frauds” may be put the testimonies of some non-Jews, in particular that of General André Rogerie who, strengthened by the support that Georges Wellers lent him, introduced himself in 1988 as a “Holocaust witness” who had “beheld the Shoah at Birkenau” (28) whereas, in the original 1946 edition of his memoirs Vivre, c’est vaincre he had written only of having heard talk of “gas chambers” (29). In the very camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau our hero’s lot was a privileged one. He lodged in the “bosses’ ” (30) barracks and enjoyed a “royally cushy position” of which he “has fond memories” (31). He ate pancakes with jam and played bridge (32). Of course, he wrote, “not only merry events take place [in the camp]” (33) but, on leaving Birkenau, he had this thought: “Unlike many others, I have been better off here than anywhere else (34).”

Samuel Gringauz had got through the war in the ghetto of Kaunas, Lithuania. In 1950, that is, at a time when it was still possible to speak fairly freely on the subject, he was to make an appraisal of the literature thus far produced by the survivors of the “great Jewish catastrophe”. In it he deplored the transgressions to which their “hyperhistorical complex” was then giving rise, writing:

The hyperhistorical complex may be described as judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric. It concentrates historical relevance on Jewish problems of local events under the aspect of personal experience. This is the reason why most of the memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilletante [sic] philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumours, bias, partisan attacks and apologies (35).

One can only concur with this judgment, dating from 1950, which could be applied perfectly well today to a Claude Lanzmann or an Elie Wiesel. For the latter’s “hyperhistorical complex”, for the “judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric” character of his writings, one may refer to the two recent autobiographical volumes published under the title Tous les fleuves vont à la mer, Mémoires 1 et 2 (All Rivers Run to the Sea). In so doing, one may also realise that, far from having been exterminated, the Rumano-Hungarian Jewish community of the little town of Sighet in all likelihood survived its deportation, notably to Auschwitz in May and June of 1944, in great numbers. Himself a native of Sighet, E. Wiesel endured the fate of his fellow townsmen. After the war, he journeyed to various places in the world where, thanks to a succession of “miracles”, he was to come across an amazing number of relatives, friends, old acquaintances, and others from Sighet who had survived Auschwitz or the “Holocaust”.

A GLANCE AT SOME OTHER MYSTIFICATIONS

OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Just as perplexed as today’s generation, those of the future will ask themselves identical questions about a number of Second World War myths besides that of the Nazi gas chambers: apart from the “Jewish soap”, the tanned human skins, the “shrunken heads”, and the “gas vans” mentioned above, let us cite those of the insane medical experiments attributed to Dr Mengele, Adolf Hitler’s orders to undertake the extermination of the Jews, the order given by Heinrich Himmler to halt said extermination, the extermination of the Jews by means of electricity, steam, quicklime, crematoria, burning pits, vacuum pumps; let us cite as well the purported extermination of Gypsies and homosexuals, and the alleged gassing of the mentally infirm.

Those future generations will wonder about many other subjects: the massacres on the Eastern front as related in certain writings, and in writing only, at the Nuremberg trial by professional false witness Hermann Gräbe; the now avowed impostures like the book signed by Hermann Rauschning entitled Hitler Speaks (36), which in fact was written chiefly by the Hungarian Jew Imre Révész, alias Emery Reves, but was used extensively at Nuremberg as though it were authentic; the alleged plan to test an atomic bomb near Auschwitz in order to eliminate Jews, also brought up at Nuremberg; the absurd “confessions” extorted from German prisoners; the reputed diary of Anne Frank; the young boy in the Warsaw ghetto shown as going to his death whereas he most likely emigrated to New York after the war; and various false memoirs, false stories, false testimonies, false attributions whose true nature would, with a minimum of care, have been easy to ascertain.

But future generations will probably be astonished most of all by the myth that was instituted and hallowed by the Nuremberg trial (and, to a lesser degree, by the Tokyo trial): that of the intrinsic barbarity of the vanquished and the intrinsic virtue of the victors who, as becomes apparent upon a close look at the facts, themselves committed acts of horror that were far more striking, both in quantity and in quality, than those perpetrated by the vanquished.

A UNIVERSAL BUTCHERY

At a time when one might be led to believe that only the Jews really suffered during the Second World War and only the Germans behaved like veritable criminals, an impartial examination into the true sufferings of all peoples and the veritable crimes of all belligerents seems overdue.

Whether “just” or “unjust”, every war is a butchery – indeed, notwithstanding the heroism of countless soldiers, a competition in butchery; at the end of it, the winner turns out to have been nothing more than a good butcher, and the loser a less good butcher. It is thus that, when hostilities have ceased, the victor should perhaps be entitled to give the vanquished a lesson in butchery but certainly not in Right and Justice. Yet that is what happened in the Nuremberg trial (1945-1946), when the four big winners, acting in their own names and in the name of the nineteen victorious entities (not counting the World Jewish Congress, which enjoyed the status of amicus curiae or “friend of the court”), had the cynicism to inflict such a treatment on a beaten country reduced to total impotence. According to Nahum Goldmann, president both of the World Jewish Congress and of the World Zionist Organisation, the idea of a trial was the brainchild of a few Jews (37). As for the role played by Jews in the actual proceedings at Nuremberg, it was considerable. The American delegation, which ran the entire business, was made up largely of “remigrants”, that is, of Jews who, after having quit Germany in the thirties to emigrate to America, were returning to Germany. G. M. Gilbert, the famous psychologist and author of Nuremberg Diary (1947), was a Jew who, working behind the scenes with the American prosecutors, did not miss the chance to practise psychological torture on the German defendants. Airey Neave, a member of the British delegation, remarked, in a book prefaced by Lord Justice Birkett, one of the panel of Nuremberg judges, that many of the American examiners were German-born and that all were Jewish (38).

For reasons on which I shall expand in the present work, the Nuremberg trial can be regarded as this century’s crime of all crimes. Its consequences have proved tragic. It accorded the status of truth to an extravagant volume of lies, calumnies, and injustices that have, in turn, over the years served to justify all kinds of wickedness: in particular Bolshevik and Zionist expansionism at the expense of peoples of Europe, Asia, and of Palestine. But, as the judges of Nuremberg, first and foremost, found Germany guilty of having unilaterally plotted and instigated the Second World War, it is by examining this last point that we must begin.

FOUR GIANTS AND THREE DWARFS:

WHO WANTED WAR?

History being first of all a matter of geography, let us contemplate a planisphere of the year 1939 on whose surface a single colour would cover four huge aggregates: Great Britain and her empire of a fifth of the Earth and on which “the sun never set”, France and her own vast colonial empire, the United States and its vassals, and, finally, the impressive empire of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Another colour would mark the modest Germany within her pre-war borders, the meagre Italy and her little colonial empire, and finally Japan, whose armies at the time occupied territory in China. We shall leave aside the countries that were later to join ranks, at least provisionally, with one or the other of these two belligerent blocs.

The contrast between the areas the two groups would respectively fill is striking; and so is the contrast between their natural, industrial, and commercial resources. Of course, by the end of the thirties, Germany and Japan were starting – as the post-war years were to prove – to shake off their yokes and to build an economy and an army capable of disquieting those bigger and stronger than themselves. Of course, the Germans and the Japanese were to deploy an uncommon measure of energy and, in the first years of the war, carve out their short-lived empires. But, all things considered, Germany, Italy, and Japan were, so to speak, as mere dwarfs beside the four giants that were the British, French, American, and Soviet empires.

Who will be led to believe that in the late thirties the three dwarfs were seeking deliberately, as was maintained at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, to provoke a new world war? Better still: who will believe for an instant that, in the general butchery that ensued, the first of these three dwarfs (Germany) was guilty of all crimes imaginable while the next (Japan) came up a distant second and the third (Italy), which changed sides in September 1943, committed no really reprehensible acts? Who will accept the notion that the four giants did not, to use the Nuremberg terminology, commit any “crimes against peace”, any “war crimes”, nor any “crimes against humanity” which, after 1945, would have warranted trial by an international tribunal?

It is nevertheless easy to show, with solid proof, that the winners, in six years of war and in a few years afterwards, accumulated, in their massacres of prisoners of war and of civilians, in gigantic deportations, in systematic looting, and in summary or “judicial” executions more horrors than the losers. Katyn forest, the Gulag, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the deportation of between twelve and fifteen million Germans (from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia) in horrible conditions, the handing over of millions of Europeans to the Soviet Moloch, the bloodiest purge ever to sweep the continent: was all of that really too small a matter for a tribunal to judge? In this century, no army has killed as many children as the US Air Force in Europe, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Central America, yet no international authority has held it to account for these slaughters, which the “boys” are always ready to carry out once again anywhere in the world, for such is their “job” (39).

DID THE FRENCH WANT WAR?

“Cursed be war!” reads the inscription on the war memorial in the small town of Gentioux in the French département of Creuse. That on the monument in Saint-Martin-d'Estréaux, in the Loire département, is longer but its “assessment” of the war lets forth the same cry (40). In France, the lists of the 1914-1918 war dead in our churches and on our monuments are heart-rending. Today no-one, at bottom, is able to say for exactly what reason the youth of France (just as, on its side, the youth of Germany) was thus mown down.

On the same memorials in our towns and villages there are sometimes found, in markedly smaller numbers, the names of young Frenchmen killed or gone missing during the campaign of 1939-1940: they numbered about 87,000. Occasionally one also finds those of civilian victims; the Anglo-Americans alone killed some 67,000 with their bombardments in France. There may even be, to round out the list, the names of a few members of the Résistance who died in their beds well after the war. Almost nowhere and never to be found are the names of French victims of the “Big Purge” (probably fourteen thousand, and not thirty thousand or, as is sometimes claimed, one hundred and five thousand) in which the Jews, the Communists, and the last-minute Gaullists played an essential role. With rare exceptions the names of soldiers of the colonial troops who “died for France” are also lacking, since they were not natives of the towns in question.

For France, the two world wars constituted a disaster: the first, especially by the sheer volume of human losses, the second by its character of a civil war that has persisted to this day.

When reflecting on these lists of First World War dead, when completing them with the names of those gone missing in action, when remembering the whole battalions of men with their faces destroyed, and of the many other wounded, often maimed or crippled for life, when taking stock of the material damage of all sorts, when thinking of the families devastated by those losses, of the prisoners, of those “shot for desertion”, of the suicides provoked by so many hardships, when remembering also the twenty-five million deaths caused in America and Europe from 1918 by the epidemic of a viral illness wrongly called “Spanish influenza”, brought into France, at least in part, by the American troops (41), can one not understand the pre-1939-1945 pacifists and supporters of “Munich” as well as the Pétainists of 1940? What right today has anyone to speak blithely of “cowardice”, either in regard to the Munich accords of September 29th and 30th, 1938, or to the armistice signed at Rethondes in Picardy on June 22, 1940? Could the Frenchmen who, in those times, still bore the physical and mental scars of the 1914-1918 holocaust and its aftermath – a veritable holocaust, in effect, that – could they, in the late 1930s, consider it a moral obligation to hurl themselves straight into a new slaughter? And, after the signing of an armistice that, however harsh, was by no means shameful, where was the dishonour in seeking an understanding with the opponent, not in order to wage war but to make peace?

DID THE GERMANS WANT WAR?

“Hitler [was] born at Versailles”: that sentence serves as the title of a work by the late Léon Degrelle. The 1919 Versailles Diktat – for it was not really a treaty – was so harsh and dishonourable for the defeated nation that the American senate refused to recognise or adopt it (November 20, 1919); thenceforth, little by little, it was discredited. It dismembered Germany, submitted her to a cruel military occupation, starved her. In particular, it obliged the defeated nation to cede to the newly created State of Poland the regions of Posen, Silesia, and part of West Prussia. The four hundred and forty articles of the “Treaty of peace between the Allied and associated powers and Germany” (together with its annexes) signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919 constituted, along with the related treaties (Trianon, Saint-Germain, Sèvres), a monumental iniquity which, if anything, only the fury of a recently ended war can explain. “It is easy enough to find fault with the Germans for not having respected Versailles. Their duty of honour as Germans was, first, to get round it and then to tear it up, just as that of the French was to maintain it (42).”

Twenty years after that crushing humiliation, Hitler would wish to recover some of the territory given to Poland, just as France, after her defeat in 1870, had wished to recover Alsace and a part of Lorraine.

Unless he elects to speak rather flippantly, no historian is in a position to say who in fact is mainly to blame for a world-wide conflict; thus it will be wise not to make Hitler bear the exclusive responsibility for the 1939-1945 war under the pretext that, on the 1st of September 1939, he went to war against Poland. On the other hand, the attempt to justify the entry into war, two days later, of Great Britain and France by their need, in the name of a treaty, to come to the aid of Poland seems rather unfounded since, two weeks afterwards, the USSR in its turn invaded Poland and occupied a good part of her territory, without prompting any military reaction on the part of the Allies.

World-wide conflicts resemble tremendous natural disasters that cannot accurately be predicted even if, sometimes, one feels them coming. It is only after the fact that they can be explained, laboriously and, too often, not without recourse to hoardings of bad faith in the form of mutual accusations of negligence, blindness, ill will, or irresponsibility.

It can nonetheless be remarked that in Germany in the late thirties, the pro-war camp urging military action against the Western powers was, to all intents and purposes, non-existent; the Germans envisaged only a “push towards the East” (Drang nach Osten). On the other hand, in the West, the anti-German hawks were powerful. The “coterie de guerre” wanted a “democratic crusade”, and got it.

Amongst these new crusaders figured, with a few noteworthy exceptions, the whole of American and European organised Jewry.

WINSTON CHURCHILL AND THE BRITISH

AS MASTERS OF WAR PROPAGANDA

During the First World War, the British had cynically exploited all the resources of propaganda based on wholly fictitious atrocity stories. During the Second World War they remained true to form.

Severity reigns today with regard to the policy of “appeasement” adopted by Neville Chamberlain in dealing with the Germans, as opposed to the high esteem in which people hold, or pretend to hold, Winston Churchill for his determination in continuing the war. It is not yet certain that history, with time, will uphold this judgement. Successive discoveries concerning Churchill’s personality and wartime role bring up questions about some perhaps rather doubtful motives of that determination, along with questions about the fruits of his policies. At least Chamberlain had foreseen that even a British victory would entail disaster for his country, her empire, and for other victors as well. Churchill did not see this, or did not know how to see it. He promised “blood, toil, tears, and sweat”, to be followed by victory. He did not anticipate the bitter morrow of victory: the hastened disappearance of the empire he held so dear and the handing over of nearly half of Europe to Communist imperialism.

At a conference of his some years ago, David Irving, a Churchill biographer, showed the illusory character of the motives to which Churchill was successively led to refer, first in order to drive his countrymen to war, then to keep them in it. The business, if one may so term it, was carried out in four phases.

In the initial phase, Churchill assured the British that it was their obligation to go to the aid of a Poland fallen victim to Hitler’s aggression but, two weeks into the war, this motive was nullified by the Soviet Union’s aggression against the same ally.

In the next phase, he explained to his fellow subjects that they must carry on with the war in order to safeguard the British empire; he rejected Germany’s repeated peace proposals; in May 1941 he had the German peace emissary Rudolf Hess locked up; and, whereas Germany desired to see the British empire maintained, he chose to conclude an alliance with the worst possible enemy of that empire: the American Franklin Roosevelt. The second motive was thus nullified in its turn.

In a third phase, Churchill told the British that they were duty-bound to fight for Democracy, including its most paradoxical variant: the Soviet Socialist one; he held that a second European front needed to be opened in order to relieve the strain on Stalin. This, of course, meant aiding a dictatorship that had assaulted Poland on September 17, 1939 and was preparing a new conquest of that country.

As late as just a month before the end of hostilities in Europe on May 8, 1945, British propaganda was generally lacking in coherence, while many British and American soldiers were aghast at discovering the degree to which their aviation had ravaged Germany.

It was then that suddenly, in April 1945, there occurred a miracle that enabled Churchill to find his fourth motive, the right one: the discovery of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp prompted him to assert that, if Britain had fought so hard, wreaking and enduring so much havoc over nearly six years, it was for no less a cause than that of civilisation itself. Assuredly, he had already held forth before his countrymen on more than one occasion, and in customary high-flown language, on Britain as the cradle of a civilisation now imperilled by the Teutonic hordes (the “Huns”, as he called them), but these oratorical devices no longer offered much yield. The godsend was that discovery in April 1945 of a pestilence-ravaged camp: a boon for Churchill and for British propaganda.

AT BERGEN-BELSEN, THE BRITISH INTRODUCE

THE “NAZI CRIME” REALITY SHOWS (APRIL 1945)

Situated near Hannover, Bergen-Belsen had at first been a camp for wounded German soldiers. In 1943 a detention camp was established there for European Jews who were set to be exchanged for German civilians held by the Allies. In the middle of the war, Jews were transferred from that camp to Switzerland or, via Turkey, even to Palestine (yet another proof, as may be pointed out in passing, of the absence of any physical extermination programme).

Until the end of 1944, inmates’ living conditions at Bergen-Belsen were about normal: then, with a convoy of deportees brought from regions in the East facing the imminent Soviet onslaught, there arrived epidemics of dysentery, cholera, and exanthematic typhus. The disaster thus caused was aggravated by the Anglo-American bombing raids that severely hampered deliveries of medicine, food, and – the coup de grâce – of water. The convoys of new arrivals from the East no longer took just two or three days to reach the camp but rather one or two weeks; because of Allied air bombardment and gunnery, they could advance only at night; as a result, upon arriving the convoys contained only dead and dying, or exhausted men and women quite unfit to confront such epidemics. On the 1st of March 1945, camp commandant Josef Kramer sent a letter to General Richard Glücks, chief of concentration camp administration, in which he described this “catastrophe” in his own words, ending: “I implore your help in overcoming this situation (43).”

Germany, on her last legs, could no longer deal with the influx of her own eastern refugees arriving by the millions. She could no longer manage to supply her army with weapons and ammunition, or her population with food. Finally, she could no longer remedy the tragic living conditions in camps where even guards were dying of typhus. Himmler authorised certain Wehrmacht officers to get into contact with the British and warn them that they were approaching, in their advance, a frightful den of infection: Bergen-Belsen. Negotiations followed. A wide truce area was declared around the camp, and British and German soldiers decided, by mutual consent, to share the tasks of surveillance.

But the sight they discovered and the unbearable odour of decomposing bodies and of barracks and tents flooded with excrement soon had the British feeling indignant. They came to believe, or were allowed to believe, that the SS had deliberately chosen to kill the inmates or let them die. And, despite their best efforts, the British were unable to curb the terrible mortality rate.

Then, like a swarm of vultures, journalists swooped down on the camp, filming and photographing every possible horror. They also proceeded to arrange certain scenes of their own making: a famous one, shown in the film Nuit et Brouillard, is that of a bulldozer pushing corpses into a ditch. Many viewers have been led to believe that they are watching “German bulldozers” (44). They have not noticed that the bulldozer (only one) is driven by a British soldier who, doubtless after a body count, is pushing the corpses into a great trench dug after the camp’s liberation.

As late as 1978, a Jewish publication was to show that bulldozer, but not without shrewdly beheading the driver in such a way as to hide his British Army beret (45). The Jew Sydney Lewis Bernstein, London head of the Home Office cinema section, called on Alfred Hitchcock to make a film on these “Nazi atrocities”. Hitchcock accepted, but, in the end, only fragments of his film were made public, probably because the complete version contained assertions that might cast doubt on its authenticity (46).

Still, on the whole, the “shock of Bergen-Belsen” constituted a huge success for the Allies’ propaganda. It was from the moment of this media exploit that the world at large learned not to see what it had before its eyes: it was shown either dead or dying camp inmates, but was led by the commentary to think that the persons whose images it was seeing were either killed, murdered, or exterminated, or else walking corpses condemned to die as victims of planned killing, murder, or extermination. Thus, as has been seen above, it was on the basis of the ghastly state of things in a camp that possessed neither crematoria nor – in the assessment of the conventional historians themselves – the least homicidal gas chamber, that there came to be built the overall myth of the presence and use, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, of “gas chambers” coupled with crematoria.

In that camp, amongst the most famous epidemic casualties were Anne Frank and her sister Margot who, for nearly forty years, were commonly and persistently said to have been gassed at Auschwitz (whence they had in fact been brought) or killed at Bergen-Belsen; today, it is generally conceded that they died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February-March 1945.

The “shock of Bergen-Belsen” was very quickly imitated by the Americans who, turning to Hollywood, shot a series of motion pictures on the liberation of the German camps; they made a selection of their filmings (six thousand feet of film from a total of eighty thousand) which, on November 29, 1945, was projected at the Nuremberg trial. Everyone, including most of the accused, found it quite disturbing. Some of the latter sensed the trickery but it was too late: the great lie’s bulldozer had been set in motion. It is still running today. The viewers of all of the many horror films on the “Nazi camps” have, over time, been conditioned by the choice of images and the commentary. A section of wall, a heap of shoes, a smokestack: it has taken no more than these for the public to believe that they have been shown a chemical slaughterhouse.

Fifty-two years after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp, Maurice Druon, secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie française, would testify at the trial of Maurice Papon, accused of “collaboration” in the “Final Solution”. Here is an excerpt from his deposition mentioning gas chambers at that camp (which, as all historians today acknowledge, had none), the famous bulldozer, and the “hair shorn from the dead to help make some ersatz or other”:

When speaking today of the camps, one has in one’s eyes, and the jurors present have in their eyes those horrid images that the films and the screens offered and offer us; and it is quite right to do so [i.e., to show them], and they ought to be re-shown in all upper sixth forms, each year. But those images, of the gas chambers, of the mounds of hair shorn from the dead to help make some ersatz or other, of those children playing amongst the corpses, and of those bodies so great in number that they had to be pushed into a ditch by a bulldozer, and of those troops of skeletons, staggering and haggard, in striped pyjamas, with death in their eyes, those images, and I hereby bear witness, I was, in my modest capacity as information officer, one of the twenty Allied officers to “view” them first, when the uncut footage, as it is called, arrived just after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the English. But that was in the spring of 1945. Until then, no-one knew. – We must not judge with our trained eyes [sic] of today, but with our blind eyes of yesterday (47).

M. Druon, in reality, had “trained eyes” yesterday and has “blind eyes” today. More than fifty years of propaganda have made him definitively blind. But already during the war, were not he and his uncle Joseph Kessel, both Jewish, blinded by their hatred of the German soldiers when they wrote the atrocious Chant des Partisans (“Killers by bullet and by knife, kill quickly!”)?

THE AMERICANS AND THE SOVIETS

GO ONE UP ON THE BRITISH

At least, in 1951, a Jewish author like Hannah Arendt had the honesty to write: “It is of some importance to realise that all pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops marched in. […] The condition of the camps was a result of the war events during the final months: Himmler had ordered the evacuation of all extermination camps in the East, the German camps were consequently vastly overcrowded, and he was no longer in a position to assure the food supply in Germany (48)”. Let us recall once more that the expression “extermination camps” is a creation of Allied war propaganda.

Dwight Eisenhower thus followed Churchill’s lead and set about building, on an American scale, such a propaganda edifice, based on atrocity stories, that soon everything and anything ended up being allowed, as much in regard to the vanquished as to the simple, factual truth. In alleged exposés on the German camps there were added to the true horrors, as I have said, horrors truer than life. Eliminated were the photographs or film segments showing inmates with beaming faces like that of Marcel Paul (49), or those in relatively good health despite the severe shortages or epidemics, or, as at Dachau, the healthy Hungarian Jewish mothers, their babes-in-arms sucking at feeding bottles. There remain only the sickly, the wasted, the human rags who were actually just as much the victims of the Allies as of the Germans, for the former, with their carpet-bombing of the whole of Germany and their systematic aerial gunning of civilians – even of farm workers in the fields – had brought about an apocalypse in the heart of Europe.

Respect for the truth will oblige one to remark that neither Churchill, nor Eisenhower, nor Harry Truman, nor Charles de Gaulle was impertinent enough to lend credence to the tales of chemical slaughterhouses; they left that job to their propaganda bureaux and to the judges of their military tribunals. Appalling tortures were inflicted on the Germans who, in the eyes of the Allies, were guilty of all of those “crimes”; reprisals were carried out against German prisoners and civilians. As late as 1951 German men and women were being hanged (still in the eighties, the Soviets were to shoot German or German-affiliated “war criminals”). British and American soldiers, at first quite taken aback at the sight both of the German cities reduced to ashes and of their inhabitants turned into cave-dwellers, could go home with peace of mind. Churchill and Eisenhower were there to vouch for the Truth: the Allied forces had brought down Evil; they embodied Good; there was to be a programme of “re-education” for the defeated people, including the burning of their bad books by the millions. All told, the Great Slaughter had come to a happy ending, and had been carried on for the right purpose. Such was the fraud made holy by the Nuremberg show-trial.

A FRAUD AT LAST DENOUNCED IN 1995

It took no less than fifty years for a historian, Annette Wieviorka, and a filmmaker, William Karel, to reveal to general audiences, in a documentary entitled Contre l’oubli (“Against Forgetting”), the 1945 American and Soviet stagings and fabrications carried out in the context of the liberation of the camps in East and West.

A. Wieviorka, a French Jewess, and W. Karel, an Israeli who has lived in France since 1985, have manifestly been influenced by the French revisionist school. Although quite hostile towards the latter, they have nonetheless admitted that the time has at last come to denounce some of the exterminationist propaganda’s most glaring fictions. On this subject one may refer either to an article by the journalist Philippe Cusin (50) or, especially, to another article that Béatrice Bocard prepared for the repeat broadcast of Contre l’Oubli on Antenne 2, a piece whose title alone says a great deal: “The Shoah, from reality to the shows. The indecent stagings by the liberators in the face of the deportees’ accounts (51).” In it she wrote:

With only slight exaggeration, it might be said that the liberation of the concentration camps introduced the reality shows […]. The first signs of the spectacle-centred society that television channels like CNN would make commonplace fifty years later were already there, with attempts to outdo [one another] at indecency, at voyeurism, and with recourse to staging […]. The least infirm of the survivors were made to repeat their script before the cameras: “I was deported because I was Jewish”, says one of them. Once, twice […]. Not to be left behind by the American “show”, the Soviets, who had done nothing at the time of the Auschwitz camp’s liberation, shot a “fake liberation” a few weeks afterwards, with Polish extras enthusiastically greeting the soldiers… “William Karel is the first to have dissected these false images which we had always been told, until quite recently, were genuine”, says Annette Wieviorka. How had it been possible to accept them? “People are not in the habit of questioning images as they question texts”, the historian explains. “The example of the mass graves at Timisoara is not too distant.”

It goes without saying that, in this article by B. Bocard, the manipulations were presented as being offensive… for the deportees. As for the Germans, German soldiers and civilians had denounced this sort of fakery as early as 1945 but, instead of being believed, they were accused of Nazism or antisemitism.

THE JEWISH ORGANISATIONS’ PATENT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS PROPAGANDA

From its origins in 1941 up to today, the propaganda that has evolved around the “genocide” and the “gas chambers” has essentially been the product of Jewish organisations. Consequently the general public have, little by little, acquired the conviction that there existed during the war a programme of physical extermination carried out by the Germans, targeting, above all, the Jews, and that the “gas chambers” were in some way reserved for them (including those of the “Sonderkommando”, whose supposed job was to lead their fellow Jews to the slaughter). Nowadays, the countless “Holocaust museums” constitute a Jewish monopoly and a Hebrew word, “Shoah” (catastrophe), has more and more frequently come to designate this purported genocide. Whatever their part in the making of the myth and in its success, the Allies have played but a supporting role, and always under various Jewish organisations’ pressure. Nonetheless, the Soviet case may have been different: Moscow’s fabrication of an “Auschwitz” in which the fate of the Jews was not particularly emphasised may have been born of the need for propaganda to be directed less towards the populations behind the Iron Curtain than towards Western “progressives”.

And the mere fact that today there are Jewish voices being raised to ask that there be less talk of the “gas chambers” has not induced Jewish community leaders to tone down the “Holocaust” or Shoah propaganda. Put simply, from the standpoint of Jewish historians these incredible “gas chambers” have become somewhat burdensome for them in their propagation of the Shoah faith.

A French political personality has said that the Nazi gas chambers are a detail of Second World War history. Yet, in their respective writings on that war, Eisenhower, Churchill, and de Gaulle apparently deemed those chemical slaughterhouses to be even less than a detail, since they did not pen a single word about them. A similar discretion can be noted on the part of the historian René Rémond, who was a prominent member first of the French Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (Committee on the History of the Second World War), then of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (Institute of the History of Present Times): in two of his works where one might expect to read the words “gas chambers”, one can in fact find no such thing. The American historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen speaks of those chambers as an “epiphenomenon”. In the 84,000-word French version of the Nuremberg judgement, only 520 extremely vague words are devoted to them, a portion amounting to 0.62% of the text.

For a revisionist, the gas chambers are less than a detail because they quite simply never existed, but the gas chamber myth is much more than a detail: it is the cornerstone of a huge structure of beliefs of all sorts that the law forbids us to question.

“Gas chambers or not, what does it matter?” This question may at times be heard, tinged with scepticism. It bothers Pierre Vidal-Naquet, for whom the abandonment of the gas chambers would be a “surrender in open country” (52). One can only agree with him. In effect, on the matter of the gas chambers’ existence or non-existence hinges the question of whether the Germans are to be presented as arrant criminals, or instead, the Jews as arrant liars (or confidence men). In the former case, the Germans, in the space of three or four years, will have killed industrial proportions of poor unarmed victims by industrial means whereas, in the latter, the Jews, for more than half a century, will have peddled a lie of historic dimensions.

In 1976 the American Arthur Robert Butz published his book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century; I for my part published in Le Monde of December 29, 1978 and January 16, 1979 two texts on “the rumour of Auschwitz” and, at the very start of that same year of 1979, Wilhelm Stäglich published Der Auschwitz Mythos. Voicing the grave Jewish worries in the face of the emergence of revisionist writings, the Zionist W. D. Rubinstein, professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, wrote at the time:

[…] were the Holocaust shown to be a hoax, the number one weapon in Israel’s propaganda armoury disappears (53).

Repeating himself some time later, he declared:

[…] the fact that if the Holocaust can be shown to be a “Zionist myth”, the strongest of all weapons in Israel’s propaganda armoury collapses (54).

Eight years afterwards, as if to echo those statements, a barrister for the LICRA (Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme) wrote:

If [it is true that] the gas chambers existed, then Nazi barbarity has no equal. If not, the Jews will have lied and antisemitism will thus be justified. Those are the stakes in the debate (55).

In Ernst Zündel’s phrase, “the ‘Holocaust’ is Israel’s sword and shield.”

The stakes are thus not merely historical but also political. And the political stakes present a paradox: the “Holocaust” myth serves, in the first place, to condemn German National Socialism, and then all forms of nationalism or of national idea except the Israeli and Zionist variant, which that myth, conversely, reinforces.

The stakes are just as much financial, as one may realise when considering that, at least since the “reparations” agreement signed at Luxembourg in 1952, German taxpayers have paid “astronomical” sums (as Nahum Goldmann put it) to the whole Jewish population of the State of Israel and to the Diaspora, and that they are to continue to pay for the crimes of the Shoah imputed to them until at least the year 2030. The “Shoah Business”, denounced even by a Pierre Vidal-Naquet, is indissociable from the Shoah.

Today, the bluff of the Shoah legitimises a world-wide racket. To begin with, a growing number of either rich or poor countries, including France, find themselves facing claims made by billionaire Edgar Bronfman’s World Jewish Congress and by vastly wealthy American Jewish organisations for new “reimbursements” or new “reparations” in the form of mountains of gold and money. The countries of Europe, starting with Switzerland, are not the only ones targeted. For the time being a well-established mafia is operating in four main directions (there are sure to be others in future): the “Nazi gold”, pre-war era Jewish assets, Jewish art collections, and insurance policies then taken out by Jews. The chief targets are States themselves, banks, museums, auction houses, and insurance firms. The legislature of the American State of New Jersey, under pressure from Jewish organisations, has already taken measures to impose a boycott of Swiss banking institutions.

This is only the start. The only real argument brought to bear by the blackmailers can be put in one word: Shoah. Not one government, not one bank, not one insurance company dare retort that the matter at hand is one of myth and that there is no question of its paying for a crime that was not committed. The Swiss, also under pressure from Jewish organisations, were at first naive enough to think that it would suffice to pass a law forbidding any questioning of the Shoah; but no sooner had they enacted their new legislation than Bronfman showed them his bill. They then offered considerable amounts: a wasted effort. Bronfman, “angry”, let it be known that it would take infinitely more to satisfy him. “My experience with the Swiss”, he remarked, “is that unless you hold their feet very close to the fire, they don’t take you seriously (56).”

As for the moral wrong done to Germany in particular and to non-Jews in general by the propagation of the “Holocaust” faith, it is incalculable. The Jewish organisations incessantly repeat their accusations against a Germany supposedly guilty of a “genocide” of the Jews, and against Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Stalin, Pope Pius XII, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the neutral countries, and still other countries, all guilty, apparently, of having let Germany commit that “genocide” and, consequently, themselves also liable for financial “reparations”.

JEWISH ORGANISATIONS IMPOSE

AN APOSTLES’ CREED OF THE “HOLOCAUST”

My book, as will be seen, deals little with the “Jewish question”.

If, over so long a period, I doggedly pursued this historical inquiry without giving much thought to the “Jewish question” as such, it was because, to my mind, the latter was of only secondary importance. Were I to dwell on it I might risk being thrown off the essential course: for I was seeking, first and foremost, to determine, respectively, the real and the mythical components in the story of the so-called “Holocaust” or Shoah; it was therefore far more important for me to establish the actual facts than to try to uncover the responsibilities.

And yet, in spite of myself, two things made me forgo this reticence: the attitude of numerous Jews towards my work and the aggressive manner in which they served notice on me to state my position on the subject that grips so many of them: the “Jewish question”.

When, in the early 1960s, I approached what Olga Wormser-Migot was to call in her 1968 doctoral thesis “the problem of the gas chambers”, I knew beforehand what sort of consequences such an undertaking might bring about. Paul Rassinier’s example was there to warn me that I could expect grave repercussions. I nonetheless decided to go ahead with it, to keep within the framework of research of a wholly scientific nature, and to publish my results. I also chose to leave to the potential adversary any responsibility for recourse to coercion, or perhaps even physical violence, should the matter ever escape from the confines of academic controversy.

And that was precisely what was to happen. To use a metaphor, I could say that the frail door behind which I drafted my revisionist writings abruptly gave way, one day, to the pushing and shoving of a loud mob of protesters. I was bound then to remark that, in their entirety or quasi-entirety, these troublemakers were sons and daughters of Israel. “The Jews” had barged into my life. I suddenly found them to be not as I had known them previously, that is, as individuals to be distinguished one from the other, but as mutually inseparable elements of a group particularly united in hatred and, to use their own word, in “anger”. Frenzied and frothy-mouthed, in a tone at once moaning and threatening, they came to trumpet in my ears that my work outraged them, that my conclusions were false, and that I must imperatively show allegiance to their own version of the history of the Second World War. This kosher version places “the Jews” at the centre of that war as its victims “second to none”, whereas in fact the conflict caused probably close to forty million deaths. For them, their slaughter is unique in world history. I was warned that unless I complied I should see my career ruined. Soon afterwards I was to be brought to court. Then, by way of the media, the Grand Sanhedrin made up of the priests, doctors, and other worthies of Jewish Law enforcement launched a virulent campaign against me, advocating hatred and violence. I shall not dwell on the insults, physical assaults and court cases that have been its interminable aftermath.

The heads of these organisations readily call me a “Nazi”, which I am not. As comparisons go, “Palestinian” seems more befitting in view of my standing with them, for they have treated me like one, and I have come to believe that the Jews in their Diaspora behave towards those who displease them much as their brethren can be seen to behave in Palestine. My writings are, in a sense, the stones of my Intifada. Frankly speaking, I find no essential difference between the behaviour of Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem Zionist leaders and that of Jewish leaders in Paris or New York: the same harshness, the same spirit of conquest and domination, the same insistence on privileges, all against a constant background of blackmail, of pressure accompanied by complaints and moaning. Such is the case in today’s world. Has it been different in other times? Were the Jewish people as unhappy in past centuries as they tend to claim? Have they suffered as much from wars, foreign and civil, as have other human communities? Have they experienced as much hardship and misery? Have they really borne no responsibility for the hostile reactions of which they so readily complain? On this point, Bernard Lazare wrote:

If this hostility, even repugnance, had been brought to bear on the Jews only at one time and in one country, it would be easy to explain the limited causes of such anger; but this race has been, on the contrary, faced with the hatred of all the peoples amongst whom it has settled. Therefore, since the Jews’ foes have belonged to the most diverse races, races inhabiting lands quite distant from one another, living under different laws and governed by opposing principles, having neither the same ways nor customs, and, animated by various ways of thinking, being unable to judge all things in the same manner, the general causes of antisemitism must always have lain in Israel itself and not amongst those who have fought against it.

This is not to assert that the Jews’ persecutors have always had right on their side, nor that they have not resorted to all the excesses which keen hatred may carry with it, but merely to postulate that – at least some of the time – the Jews have brought their ills upon themselves (57).

B. Lazare, who was not in the least hostile to his co-religionists – quite the opposite, in fact – had the frankness to recall, in several passages in his book, how skilful the Jews had been, all throughout their history (and thus as far back as Greco-Roman antiquity), in obtaining privileges. He noted that, amongst those of the poor who converted to Judaism, many “were attracted by the privileges granted to the Jews (58).”

I trust that here I shall be allowed a remark in confidence.

In my capacity as an erstwhile Latinist, a defendant prosecuted in court by Jewish organisations, a university professor prevented from giving his lectures by Jewish demonstrations and, finally, as an author forbidden to publish because of certain Chief Rabbinate decisions that have been ratified by the French Republic, it has occurred to me that I may compare my experiences with those of some illustrious predecessors. It is thus that my thoughts turn to the Roman aristocrat Lucius Flaccus. In 59 BC, Cicero had occasion to defend him, notably against his Jewish accusers; the description of the influence, power, and methods of the Jews in Rome that the brilliant orator then gave in the praetorium leads me to think that, if he were to come back to this world, in the late twentieth century, to defend a revisionist, he would not, as it were, have to change one word on that subject in the text of his pleadings known as Pro Flacco.

Having taught at the Sorbonne, my thoughts also turn to my predecessor Henri Labroue, author of a work entitled Voltaire antijuif. Late in 1942, in the middle of the German occupation, a time when we are expected to believe that the Jews and their supporters remained as discreet as possible, he had to abandon his lectures on the history of Judaism. Let us quote present day Sorbonne luminary André Kaspi: “A chair of the history of Judaism was created at the Sorbonne as from the autumn term of 1942 and bestowed on Henri Labroue. The first lectures gave rise to displays of hostility and to incidents that led to the programme’s cancellation (59).”

But today, dozens of great authors of world literature, including Shakespeare, Voltaire, Hugo, and Zola (Captain Dreyfus’s famous partisan also wrote L’Argent), would find themselves in court, sued and prosecuted by Jewish organisations. Amongst the great names in French politics, even the Socialist and pacifist Jean Jaurès would be in the dock of disgrace.

Such considerations might earn me the label “antisemitic” or “anti-Jewish”. I reject those epithets, which I see as trite insults. I wish no harm on any Jew. On the other hand, I find the behaviour of most of the associations, organisations, and pressure groups that claim to represent Jewish interests or “Jewish remembrance” to be loathsome.

The heads of those various associations, organisations, or groups obviously have the greatest difficulty in understanding that one may act out of simple intellectual curiosity. If I myself have devoted a good part of my life to revisionism, first in the field of literary studies, then in that of historical research, I have done so not in the least as a result of some invidious calculation, or in the service of an anti-Jewish plot, but in heeding an impulse as natural as that which makes the birds sing and the leaves grow, and makes men in the darkness strive after light.

HISTORICAL SCIENCE’S

NATURAL RESISTANCE TO THIS CREED

I could have followed the example set by some other revisionists and proffered surrender, shown repentance, retracted certain statements; another means of escape: I might have sought contentment in discreetly devising clever and convoluted manoeuvres. Not only did I decide, in the late 1970s, to resist openly and in the public forum but I also pledged to myself not to play the opponent’s game. I resolved to change nothing in my own behaviour and to let the hotheads get hotter by the day, if they so chose. Amongst the Jews, I would listen only to those who, especially brave, dared to take up my defence, if only for the space of a season (60).

Jewish organisations as a whole call those who do not adopt their own conception of Second World War history “antisemites”. This is understandable, for the act of going so far as to say, as I do here and now, that they are amongst those most to blame for the peddling of a gigantic myth may well seem to be inspired by antisemitism. But, in reality, I only draw the obvious conclusions of a historical inquiry that appears to have been quite a serious one since, despite plaintiffs’ and prosecutors’ feverish research, no court has ever found in it a trace of shallowness, negligence, deliberate ignorance, or falsehood.

Moreover, I fail to see why I, for my part, ought to show respect towards groups of persons who have never shown the least respect for my research work, my publications, or my personal, family, or professional life. I do not attack these bodies for their religious convictions or for their attachment to the State of Israel. All human groups revel in phantasmagoria. Consequently, each of them is free to offer itself a more or less real, more or less imaginary picture of its history. But that conception is not to be forced on others. Yet, the Jewish organisations force theirs on us, a practice in itself unacceptable, and all the more so when the portrayal is manifestly wrong. And I know of no other group in France that has succeeded in making, of an article of its own religious faith (that of the Shoah), an article of the law of the Republic; that, with the assent of the interior ministry, enjoys the exorbitant privilege of operating its own armed militias; and, finally, that can decree that university teachers who displease it shall no longer have the right to work, either in France or abroad (see especially the case of Bernard Notin).

FOR A REVISIONISM WITH GUSTO

The revisionists in fact know neither master nor disciple. They make up a heterogeneous troop. They are loath to unite with one another, a trait carrying as many benefits as disadvantages. Their individualism makes them unsuited to concerted action; on the other hand, the police have proved unable to infiltrate such a disparate whole and to keep it under surveillance; they cannot work their way up the channels of the revisionist structure, since there simply is no such thing. These individuals feel free to improvise, each according to his aptitudes or tastes, revisionist activities that may take the most diverse forms. The quality of the work undertaken reflects this disparity and it must be acknowledged that the results are irregular. From this point of view, one can say that much still remains to be done. The mere amateur is shoulder to shoulder with the scholar, as is the man of action with the researcher in his archives. I shall not mention any names here, for fear of cataloguing anyone (61).

As concerns the manner in which the revisionist struggle is to be led, it goes without saying that the revisionists are divided between supporters and opponents of a sort of political realism. Most of them consider that, given the strength of the taboo, they had better proceed by oblique paths and thus avoid direct clashes with the guardians of orthodoxy. For these revisionists, it is clumsy and ill-advised to state, for example, that the “Holocaust” is a myth; it is, they hold, more worthwhile to imply that the “Holocaust” did indeed take place but not in the generally acknowledged proportions. Keen on strategy or tactics, they seek to leave Jewish sensibilities unruffled and will suggest, wrongly, that the legendary portion of the “Holocaust” story is above all the work of the Communists or the Western Allies, but not of the Jews, or if so, only very little. Have not apprentice revisionists been seen to engage in the deceptive fudge that consists in presenting the Jews as victims, like all the rest, of a kind of universal false credence? According to this view, the Jews would have been made, as by some immanent force, to believe in the genocide and the gas chambers while still being driven, doubtless by the same force, to demand yet more and more money in reparations for fictitious hardships (62). A wandering Jew who has just come over to the revisionist camp will be fêted by these revisionists as though he were the true genius and saviour of the cause. If he claims as his own, and clumsily, his non-Jewish predecessors’ finds regarding Auschwitz, the newcomer will be hailed as the guiding light of scientific thought.

I accept certain forms of this political realism but on condition that it not be accompanied by arrogance. There is no superiority, either intellectual or moral, in deeming that the end justifies the means and that it is sometimes simply necessary to borrow the adversary’s weapons of dissembling and lying. My personal preference is for a revisionism with gusto and without too many compromises; that shows its colours; that marches straight towards its goal – alone, if need be; that does not let the enemy off lightly. Besides, a good long experience of revisionist struggle has led me to think that the best strategy, the best tactic may consist in a series of frontal attacks; the opponent has not expected them: he imagined that no-one would ever dare defy him in such a way; he discovers that he no longer inspires fear; he is discountenanced.

A CONFLICT WITHOUT END

The revisionists have on more than one occasion proposed to their adversaries the holding of a public debate on the questions of the genocide, the six million, and the gas chambers. The Jewish organisations have always shied away. It is thus proved that they will not accept it. Even the Catholic Church today allows a form of dialogue with atheists but the Synagogue, for its part, will never forget the offence it has suffered (63) and so resolve itself to running the risk of any such dialogue with the revisionists. Moreover, too many political, financial, and moral interests are at stake for the heads of either the State of Israel or the Diaspora to agree to launch a fair debate on the kosher version of Second World War history.

Therefore, the test of strength will go on. I see no end to it. The conflict we are observing between “exterminationism” and “revisionism”, that is, between, on the one hand, a fixed, official history and, on the other hand, a critical, scientific, secular history, is but one in the list relating the endless struggle that faith and reason, or belief and science, have been carrying on in human societies for thousands of years. The faith in the “Holocaust” or Shoah is an integral part of a religion, the Hebraic religion, of which, on a close look, the phantasmagoria of the “Holocaust” plainly appear to be a mere emanation. A religion has never been seen to cave in under the blows of reason, and we are not on the eve of seeing the Jewish religion vanish along with one of its most lively components. According to present-day interpretations, that religion is either fifteen hundred or three thousand years old, if not four thousand. It is not clear why those living in the year 2000 should enjoy the privilege of looking on at the demise of a religion so deeply rooted in the ages.

It can sometimes be heard that the “Holocaust” or Shoah myth might some day fade away, as Stalinist Communism foundered not long ago, or as the Zionist myth and the State of Israel will founder one day soon. But those who say so are likening unlike things. Communism and Zionism stand on unsteady ground; both presuppose largely illusory high aspirations in Man: general absence of selfishness, equal sharing amongst all, the sense of sacrifice, labour for the common good; their emblems have been the hammer, the sickle, and the kolkhoz for the former, and the sword, the plough, and the kibbutz for the latter. The Jewish religion, for its part, beneath the complex outward appearance provided by the masora and the pilpul, does not indulge in such flights of fancy; it aims low to aim straight; it relies on the real; beneath the cover of Talmudic extravagance and intellectual or verbal wizardry, one may see that it is above all hand-in-glove with money, King Dollar, the Golden Calf, and the allurements of consumerism. Who can believe that those “values” will soon be losing their power? And besides, why should the winding up of the State of Israel bring in its wake any evil consequences for the myth of the “Holocaust”? On the contrary, the millions of Jews thus forced to settle or resettle in the rich countries of the West would not miss the chance to bewail a “Second Holocaust” and, once again and still more forcefully, would blame the whole world for the new ordeal visited upon the Jewish people, who would then have to be “compensated”.

In the end, the Jewish religion – and this is seen only too well in the tales of the “Holocaust” – is anchored in that perhaps deepest zone of Man: fear. There lies its strength. There lies its chance for survival, despite all the hazards and despite the battering that its myths have taken at the hands of historical revisionism. By exploiting fear, the practitioners of Judaism win at every try.

I subscribe to the statement of the French sociologist and historian Serge Thion (64) for whom “historical revisionism, which over the past twenty-five years has won all the intellectual battles, loses the ideological war every day. Revisionism runs up against the irrational, against a quasi-religious way of thinking, against the refusal to take into account anything originating from a non-Jewish sphere; we are in the presence of a sort of lay theology whose world-wide high priest is Elie Wiesel, ordained by the award of a Nobel prize”.

THE FUTURE BETWEEN REPRESSION

AND THE INTERNET

Newcomers to revisionism must take care not to harbour illusions. Their task will be hard. Will it be less so than it was for Paul Rassinier and his immediate successors? Will the repression be less fierce?

Personally, I rather doubt it. Yet, in the wider world, changes in the political balance and in communication techniques will perhaps give minorities a chance to be more widely heard than they have been in the recent past. Thanks to the Internet, it will perhaps be easier for revisionists to foil censorship, and the sources of historical material will doubtless become more accessible.

The fact remains that at this century’s and millennium’s close, Man is bidden to undergo the strange experience of a world where books, newspapers, radio, and television are ever more tightly controlled by the masters of finance or by the thought-police whereas, in parallel and at increasing speed, new means of communication are being developed which, at least in part, elude those forces’ dominion. One might see it as a world of two distinct profiles, one stiffening and ageing, the other, in the insolence of youth, looking keenly to the future. The same contrast can be noted in historical research, at least in the sector that is under thought-police surveillance: on one side, the official historians, who bring out countless works on the “Holocaust” or Shoah, isolating themselves within the realm of religious belief or of hair-splitting argument while, on the other side, independent minds strive to follow only the precepts of reason and science; thanks to the latter, free historical research is today displaying an impressive vitality, notably on the Internet.

The upholders of an official history, protected and guaranteed by the law, will be forever doomed to find before them the questioners of their ordained truth. The former, long established, have the wealth and the power; the latter, a veritable future.

A WORSENING REPRESSION

If there is one point on which the present work can convey as much information to revisionists as to anti-revisionists, it is that of the repression endured by the former at the hands of the latter.

Each revisionist has a good account of what it has cost him to speak out on a taboo subject, but he is not always aware of what his fellows in other countries have been enduring at the same time. The anti-revisionists, at their end, systematically minimise the extent of their repressive actions; they have in mind solely their own torments, comparable to those of Torquemada and the Grand Inquisitors: they are obliged to flog, ever to flog; their arms grow weary, they feel cramps coming on, they suffer, they groan; they find that, if there are any who deserve pity, it is the executioners; they cover their eyes and plug up their ears to avoid seeing or hearing any of their victims. At times they are even surprised, perhaps in good faith, when shown the list of names of revisionists whose personal, family, or professional lives they have succeeded in dashing, or of those whom they have ruined, or caused to be heavily sanctioned by fines or imprisonment, or to be gravely injured, or to have acid sprayed in their faces, or killed, or driven to suicide, while, conversely, there cannot be shown a single instance of a revisionist’s having touched even a hair on the head of any of his opponents.

It must be said that the press takes it upon itself to conceal, as much as possible, the various effects of this widespread repression. On this score the French daily Le Monde has made a speciality, as will be seen, of keeping silent on certain abominations which, if their victims had been Jewish anti-revisionists à la Vidal-Naquet, would have prompted protest marches and demonstrations all throughout the world.

The very best that can be expected from the apostles of the Shoah is, most likely, a warning against some excesses of anti-revisionism that might damage the good reputation of the Jews and the sacred cause of their creed.

In the latest batch of repressive measures taken against revisionists may be noted (beginning with France) the dismissal by the education ministry of Michel Adam from his post as history teacher in a middle school in Brittany; at fifty-seven, with five dependent children, he now finds himself utterly without resources, receiving, for the moment, not even state income support (“RMI”). As for Vincent Reynouard, also dismissed from his state sector teaching job, he was on November 10, 1998 sentenced by a court in Saint-Nazaire to three months’ imprisonment and a fine of ten thousand francs for having distributed the "Rudolf Report". Aged twenty-nine, V. Reynouard is married with three small children, and he and his wife are destitute. Pastor Roger Parmentier has been expelled from the Socialist Party for having come to the aid of Roger Garaudy in the latter’s recent court case, while Jean-Marie Le Pen, for his part, has been indicted, in both France and Germany, for an innocuous statement on “the detail” of the gas chambers.

In Barcelona on November 16 the bookseller Pedro Varela was convicted of “denial of the Holocaust” and “incitement to racial hatred” in his writings, at the behest of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, SOS-Racismo España, the city’s two Jewish communities, and the Spanish Liberal Jewish Movement; he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and ordered to pay a fine of 720,000 pesetas (about 4,300 euros) as well as heavy court costs. The stock of his bookshop (20,972 volumes and hundreds of audio and video cassettes) is to be destroyed… by fire. His shop had previously been the target of violent aggression, including arson attacks; on several occasions he and his female employee had been assaulted. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is today apparently trying to have his doctorate in history, awarded over ten years ago, revoked (65).

In Germany, more and more revisionist writings are being seized and burned. Gary Lauck (an American citizen extradited to Germany by Denmark), Günter Deckert, and Udo Walendy still languish in prison and can consider themselves lucky if their terms are not prolonged on the least pretext. After serving a one-year sentence, Erhard Kemper, of Münster, finding himself under threat of new, harsher sentences that would probably have kept him locked up for the rest of his life, has had to go underground. Other Germans and Austrians live in exile.

In Canada, the plight of Ernst Zündel and his friends continues before one of the ad hoc tribunals, called “tribunals of the human rights commissions”, which blithely flout the defendant’s basic rights; it is, for example, forbidden to argue that what one has written concurs with the verifiable facts; these “tribunals” do not care about the truth; they are interested only in knowing whether what has been written upsets certain persons! Other special commissions, attached to the Canadian Intelligence Service, try cases of revisionists in closed session, on the basis of a file that is not shown to the defendant. In 1999, Ottawa is to pass an anti-revisionist law authorizing the police to make house searches in order to seize books and other materials that might, according to them, serve to spread revisionism; the bill stipulates that the regular courts are to bring their procedures into line with those of the ad hoc commissions, and thus shall no longer allow the accused to base his defence on the fact that what he has written is the truth (66).

Jewish groups around the world are bringing forth numerous initiatives for the adoption of specific anti-revisionist laws. At a recent conference in Salonica, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers called for the introduction of such a law in Greece and let it be known that it would be holding conferences of the same sort in more than twenty other countries (67).

THE DUTY OF RESISTANCE

Whatever storms and vicissitudes may arise now or in future, the revisionist historian must hold firm. To the cult of tribal remembrance built on fear, vengeance, and greed, he will prefer the stubborn search for exactitude. In this manner he will, albeit perhaps unwittingly, do justice to the true sufferings of all victims of the Second World War. And, from this viewpoint, it is he who will refuse to make any distinction between them on the basis of race, religion, or community. Above all else, he will reject the supreme imposture that put the crowning touch to that conflict: the sham of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and of the thousand other proceedings since the war in which, still today, the victor, without in the least having to answer for his own crimes, has assumed the right to prosecute and condemn the vanquished.

Contrary to the romantic vision of the aristocratic author François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), the historian is hardly “commissioned to avenge peoples”, and still less to avenge a people claiming to be God’s own.

On whatever subject, the historian in general and the revisionist historian in particular have no other job than to determine the accuracy of what is said. That job is basic and obvious, but also – as experience teaches – perilous.

Robert Faurisson

3 December 1998


(The french text)

* * *

Notes

(1) The words of Karl Schlögel, writing in defence of Gabor Tamas Rittersporn, accused by Maxime Leo (“Holocaust-Leugner im Berliner Centre Marc Bloch”, Berliner Zeitung, February 12, 1998) of having lent his support to the cause of Robert Faurisson’s freedom of speech in 1980 (“Eine Jagdpartie. Wie man einen Wissenschaftler ruiniert”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 18, 1998, p. 42).

(2) “In July 1981, the Knesset passed a law that prohibited the denial of the Holocaust: ‘The publication, in writing or orally, of work that denies the acts committed during the period of the Nazi rule, which are crimes against the Jewish people or crimes against humanity, or that downplays their dimensions with the intention of defending those who committed these crimes or of expressing support for or identification with them is liable to five years’ imprisonment.’ A proposal to impose ten years’ imprisonment was not accepted. Thus the extermination of the Jews was no longer a subject for the historians; it was almost as if it had been uprooted from history itself and had become a national doctrine of truth, protected by law, somewhat similar in legal status to religious faith. Indeed, in one way the Holocaust has even a higher status than religion: the maximum punishment for ‘crass injury’ to religious sensibilities or tradition – including, presumably, any denial of God’s existence – is one year in prison” (Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York, Hill and Wang, 1993, p. 464).

(3) Bulletin quotidien d’informations de l’Agence télégraphique juive, June 2, 1986, p. 1, 3.

(4) See Robert Maxwell, “J’accuse”, Sunday Mirror (of which he was the proprietor), July 17, 1988, p. 2.

(5) The “Jewish babies [were] thrown – alive – into the crematoria” (Pierre Weill, director of the French public opinion poll institute SOFRES, in his article “L’anniversaire impossible”, Le Nouvel Observateur, February 9, 1995, p. 53).

(6) “Moreover, it is worthwhile […] to stress that the ghetto is historically a Jewish invention” (Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif, Paris, Stock, 1976, p. 83-84); see also Pierre-André Taguieff, “L’identité juive et ses fantasmes”, L’Express, January 20-26, 1989, p. 65.

(7) Eric Conan, “Auschwitz: la mémoire du mal”, L’Express, January 19-25, 1995, p. 68.

(8) Ibid. In 1992, that is, long after “the late 1970s”, David Cole, a young Californian revisionist of Jewish origin, presented himself as the discoverer of the “gas chamber” falsifications at Auschwitz-I. In a mediocre video, he showed, on the one hand, the museum guides’ version (according to which the gas chamber was genuine) and, on the other hand, that of Franciszek Piper, a member of the museum administration (for whom this gas chamber was “very similar” to the original). There was nothing new in that. The trouble was that D. Cole and his friends exaggerated greatly – to put it mildly – in afterwards proceeding to claim that F. Piper had acknowledged that there had been a “fraud”. In effect, there had been a fraud but unhappily Cole had not been able to unmask it, because he was too ill acquainted with the body of revisionist work. He could have definitively confounded Piper by showing him, on film, the original blueprints that I had discovered in 1975-1976 and published “in the late 1970s”. Therein it is plain to see that today’s alleged “gas chamber” is the result of a certain number of makeovers of the premises carried out after the war. For instance, the ceiling’s four alleged “holes for the pouring in of the Zyklon B” were effected – quite crudely and clumsily – after the war: the steel reinforcement cables in the concrete were broken by the Polish Communists and remain today as they were left then.

(9) R. J. van Pelt and D. Dwork, Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present, London, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 363-364, 367, 369.

(10) J.-C. Pressac, “Enquête sur les chambres à gaz”, in Auschwitz, la Solution finale, Paris, Collections de L’Histoire no. 3, October 1998, p. 41.
(10a) Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History, New York, Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 362.

(11) Jacques Baynac in Le Nouveau Quotidien (Lausanne), September 2, 1996, p. 16 and September 3, 1996, p. 14; see, beforehand, Jacques Baynac and Nadine Fresco, “Comment s’en débarrasser ?” (How to get rid of them? – i.e. the revisionists), Le Monde, June 18, 1987, p. 2.

(12) It has sometimes been held that the six million figure originated in a newspaper article published in… 1919, under the signature of Martin H. Glynn, former governor of New York: “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!” (The American Hebrew, October 31, 1919). The said M. H. Glynn therein launched an appeal for contributions to help six million European Jews who, he wrote, were being subjected to starvation and persecution and were thus experiencing a “holocaust”, a “crucifixion”. The word “holocaust” with the meaning of “disaster” is attested in English as early as the 17th century; here, in 1919, it designated the consequences of a famine described as an impending disaster. In 1894, Bernard Lazare applied the word to the massacres of Jews: “… from time to time, kings, noblemen, or the urban rich offered their slaves a holocaust of Jews […] the Jews were offered in holocaust” (L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes, Paris, L. Chailley, 1894, re-edited Paris, La Vieille Taupe, 1985, p. 67, 71).

(13) Lucy S. Davidowicz, in the compilation entitled A Holocaust Reader, New York, Behrman House, 1976, p. 327; the book consists of letters translated from the Hebrew and published in New York in 1960 under the title Min hametzar.

(14) For this discovery I am indebted to the German Joachim Hoffmann; in Stalins Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945 (Stalin’s War of Destruction), Munich, Verlag für Wehrwissenschaften, 2nd edition,1995, p. 161 and n. 42 on p. 169, he points out that Ilya Ehrenburg gave that figure in an article in the Soviet War News of January 4, 1945 headlined: “Once again – Remember!” While trying to verify this point at London’s Imperial War Museum, I found nothing under that date; on the other hand, I did find the text mentioned by J. Hoffmann under another heading and another date: “Remember, Remember, Remember”, in the December 22, 1944 issue, p. 4-5. Ought one to conclude that Soviet War News was published in various forms?

(15) See “Holocaust Survivors”, Adina Mishkoff, Administrative Assistant, AMCHA, Jerusalem, August 13, 1997 (figures supplied by the Israeli prime minister’s office).

(16) The image of the miserable and fallacious mock-up (with its purported openings in the roof for the Zyklon, which, as may easily be remarked today, never existed, and with its allegedly perforated pillars which, as can also be seen today, were solid) is reproduced in another guidebook published in 1995; see Jeshajahu Weinburg and Rina Elieli, The Holocaust Museum in Washington, New York, Rizzoli, p. 126-127. On the other hand, this second guidebook does not show what in M. Berenbaum’s document was presented as the exhibit par excellence to prove the reality of the gassings: an alleged gas chamber door at Majdanek.

(17) Le Nouvel Observateur, September 30, 1993, p. 96.

(18) All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, volume I, New York, Knopf, 1995, p. 74.

(19) The Holocaust and History, The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined, ed. by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington) in Bloomington and Indianapolis (Indiana), by Indiana University Press, 1998, xv-836 p.; 55 contributions.

(20) Ibid., p. 15.

(21) See above, in the section "Revisionism's successes and failures".

(22) On the subject of Timisoara, see, in the present work, vol. III, p. 1141-1150, my study of the book by Michel Castex, Un Mensonge gros comme le siècle. Roumanie, histoire d’une manipulation (A Lie as Big as the Century…), Paris, Albin Michel, 1990.

(23) The purported model of a crematorium with its “gas chamber” on display at the National Museum of Auschwitz, and that at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, are so cursory in design as precisely regards the “gas chamber”, and at such variance with the remains that may be examined on site at Auschwitz-Birkenau, that it is laughably simple to prove that these two models are purely fanciful; see above, note 16.

(24) New York, Schocken, 1996 [translator’s note].

(25) See Weltwoche (Zurich), August 27 and September 3, 1998; Nicolas Weil, “La mémoire suspectée de Binjamin Wilkomirski”, Le Monde, October 23, 1998, p. V.

(26) Donald Watt, Stoker: the story of an Australian soldier who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995.

(27) I.e., crematoria; Fred Sedel, Habiter les ténèbres (Living in the Gloom), Paris-Geneva, La Palatine, 1963 and Paris, A.-M. Métaillié, 1990.

(28) Vivre, c’est vaincre (To Live is to Win), Maulévrier, Maine-et-Loire (France), 1988, is presented as having been written in 1945 and printed in the third quarter of 1946. In 1988, it was republished with fanfare by Héraut-Editions, with, on the cover, a blurb strip reading “J’ai été témoin de l’Holocauste” (I was witness to the Holocaust). It was in the Figaro of May 15, 1996 (p. 2) that General Rogerie was to declare he had “beheld the Shoah at Birkenau”. The extremely succinct description of the “gas chambers” and of the ovens with which he was supplied conflicts with today’s accepted version: his “witness” had told him of gas entering the chambers from shower heads, and of electric ovens (p. 75).

(29) A. Rogerie, Vivre, c’est vaincre, p. 70, 85.

(30) “Caïds”, ibid., p. 82.

(31) “Planque royale”, “je garde de bons souvenirs”, ibid., p. 83.

(32) Ibid., p. 84.

(33) Ibid.

(34) “A l’encontre de bien d’autres, j’y ai été moins malheureux que partout ailleurs”, ibid., p. 87.

(35) Samuel Gringauz, “Some Methodological Problems in the Study of the Ghetto”, in Jewish Social Studies / A Quarterly Journal Devoted to Contemporary and Historical Aspects of Jewish Life, Volume XII, edited for The Conference on Jewish Relations, New York, 1950, p. 65-72; p. 65.

(36) London, T. Butterworth ltd.,1939 [translator’s note].

(37) Op. cit., p. 148-149.

(38) They Have Their Exits, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1953, p. 172.

(39) The two words in inverted commas appear as “boys” and “job” in the original [translator’s note].

(40) From a text of about two hundred and fifty words one may especially retain the following: “More than twelve million dead! As many individuals thus to go unborn! Still more maimed, wounded, widowed and orphaned! Countless billions in assorted destructions. Scandalous fortunes made from human misery. The innocent before firing squads. The guilty honoured. A horrid life for the disinherited. The frightful price to pay”. Further on it reads: “The spirit of Nations must be improved by improving that of individuals with an enriched and widely expanded instruction. The people must know how to read. And above all to grasp the importance of what they read”. The text ends: “Cursed be war. And its perpetrators!”

(41) See Christiane Gallus, “Une pandémie qui a fait trois fois plus de victimes que la guerre de 1914-1918” (A pandemic that claimed three times as many victims as the war of 1914-1918), Le Monde, December 31, 1997, p. 17.

(42) Pierre Kaufmann, “Le danger allemand” (The German Danger), Le Monde, February 8, 1947.

(43) See Mark Weber, “Bergen-Belsen Camp: The Suppressed Story”, The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1995, p. 23-30.

(44) Such was the case, for instance, of Bartley C. Crum in his book Behind the Silken Curtain, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1947, p. 114.

(45) Arthur Suzman and Denis Diamond, Six Million Did Die. The Truth Shall Prevail, Johannesburg, South African Board of Jewish Deputies, 1978, 2nd edition, p. 18.

(46) A. Hitchcock, born in 1899, was already known in 1945. For his macabre or morbid tastes, his art of “manipulating the public”, and the strange fascination brought to bear on his mind by gas, one may read Bruno Villien, Hitchcock, Paris, Colonna, 1982, p. 9-10.

(47) Le Figaro, October 24, 1997, p. 10.

(48) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1951, p. 446, n. 138.

(49) A famous French Communist résistant, M. Paul, much like General Rogerie, had a rather “good war” in the camps [translator’s note].

(50) Le Figaro, January 16, 1995, p. 29.

(51) “La Shoah, de la réalité aux shows. Face aux récits des déportés, l’indécente mise en scène de leurs libérateurs”, Libération, December 18, 1995, p. 41.

(52) “Capituler en rase campagne”: Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Le secret partagé”, Le Nouvel Observateur, September 21, 1984, p. 80.

(53) Letter appearing in Nation Review (Australia), June 21, 1979, p. 639.

(54) “The Left, the Right, and the Jews”, Quadrant (Australia), September 1979, p. 27.

(55) Bernard Jouanneau, La Croix, September 23, 1987, p. 2.

(56) Globe and Mail (Toronto), June 2, 1998, p. A1, 15. Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, is the North American emperor of alcohol and pornography. He is head of the Seagram’s group and owner of Universal Studios in Hollywood. A group of American politicians have recently voted him the first ever “Silver Sewer” award, notably for his reality shows with fellow Jew Jerry Springer featuring “pregnant strippers, teenage prostitutes fighting with pimps, or undertakers having sex with corpses” (Financial Times, March 21-22, 1998, p. 2).

(57) B. Lazare, L’Antisémitisme…, op. cit., opening page of first chapter.

(58) Ibid., p. 27.

(59) A. Kaspi, Les Juifs pendant l’Occupation (The Jews during the Occupation), revised edition, Paris, Le Seuil, 1997 [1991], p. 109, n. 27.

(60) I sometimes hear it said that there is greater risk for a Jew than for a non-Jew in professing revisionist views. The facts disprove this assertion. Not one Jew has been convicted or held liable in court for revisionism, not even Roger-Guy Dommergue (Polacco de Menasce) who, for years, has generated the most vehement writings against the lies of those whom he calls his “fellow creatures” (congénères). No-one as yet has ventured to have either the Pleven (1972) or the Fabius-Gayssot Act (1990) applied against him. Nonetheless the case of the young American revisionist David Cole deserves to be recalled, for it shows to what degree of violence certain Jewish organisations can resort in order to silence Jews who have sided with the revisionist cause.

(61) An independent researcher, who nonetheless does not publicly identify himself as a partisan, can contribute indirectly to revisionism by the mere quality of his work. I shall mention one name here, that of Jean Plantin, director of a biannual publication whose title alone indicates its erudite character: Akribeia is Greek for “exactitude”, “painstaking care”, and has given French the learned word “acribie” (quality of the scholar who works with extreme care). Akribeia, 45/3, Route de Vourles, 69230 Saint-Genis-Laval, France.

(62) See the pertinent analysis by Guillermo Coletti, “The Taming of Holocaust Revisionism”, distributed on the Internet (November 13, 1998) by the Anti-Censorship News Agency; electronic address: anti_censor@hotmail.com.

(63) “Forgetting is not our main virtue” (the words of the president of the “board of deputies” [consistoire] of the Toulouse Jewish community, as cited in Le Figaro, October 9, 1997, p. 10).

(64) S. Thion is, in particular, the author of a revisionist work bearing the eloquent title Une Allumette sur la banquise (A Match to the Ice Floe). A revisionist book, even if its contents seem like dynamite, perhaps gives off, all told, no more light and heat than a match struck “in the polar night, [and] put to the ice floe of frozen ideas” (p. 90).

(65) See “Un libraire espagnol condamné pour ‘apologie de génocide’” (A Spanish Bookseller Convicted of “Justification of Genocide”), Le Monde, November 19, 1998, p. 3; also, an article by Emmanuel Ratier in his periodical Faits & Documents (Facts & Documents), Paris, issue of December 1, 1998, p. 12.

(66) See “Crackdown on hate materials planned”, National Post (Canada), November 25, 1998.

(67) See Athens News, June 28, 1998, p. 1.

 

 

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Other material by Robert Faurisson:

• Introduction to Écrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998)
  
  
• Elie Wiesel - A Prominent False Witness
  
  
• The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum - A Challenge
  
  
• How Many Deaths at Auschwitz?
  
  
• How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Hoess
  
  
• Paying Tribute to Jewish Power  - 'Ah, How Sweet It Is To Be Jewish ...'
  
  
• Faurisson about Rami in jail
  
  
• Ahmed Rami's interview with Robert Faurisson 1.
  
  
• Ahmed Rami's interview with Robert Faurisson 2.
  
  
• From a video with Faurisson
  
  
• Recording in Stockholm, May 22, 1993
  
  
• Lecture about a book written by Swedish "academic" Peter Englund 1993
  
  
• "Genocide By Telepathy", Hilberg Explains
  
  
• Talk given in Stockholm on December 4th, 1992
  
  
  

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