Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 15: 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 which severely hampered deliveries of medicine, food, and the coup de grâce of water. The convoys of new arrivals from the East no longer took only 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 1st 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 its last legs, could no longer deal with the influx of its own eastern refugees arriving by the millions. It could no longer manage to supply its army with weapons and ammunition, or its population with food. Finally, it 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. Negotiations followed. A wide truce area was declared around Bergen-Belsen, and British and German soldiers decided, by mutual consent, to share the task of camp surveillance.

But the sight which 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 to 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 camps 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 which might cast doubt on its authenticity(46).

But, 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 whom it had before its eyes were either killed, murdered, or exterminated, or else walking corpses condemned to die as victims of killing, murder, or extermination. Thus, as has been seen above, it was on the basis of the ghastly state of things in a camp which 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, among 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 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 29 November 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 lies 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 extract of 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 ones eyes, and the jurors present have in their eyes those horrid images which the films and the screens offered and offer to 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 among 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 of 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!)?