Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 4: 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; it 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 NapoléonIII had thought he saw in the creation of penal colonies: progress for Man. But it is false to hold that she 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 sketch of scientific value).

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 at 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 (territorialeEndlösung der Judenfrage) and not a murderous one; it was a project to induce or, if necessary, to force the Jews to leave Germany and its 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 20 January 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 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 they 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 (the side which 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 concerns 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 a body responsible for 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 story of soap produced from Jewish fat, that of the lampshades made of human skin, that of the shrunken heads, and that of the 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 15 April 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 no.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 the famous testimony of SS officer Kurt Gerstein, an element essential to their arguments, is devoid of value; it is loathsome that the French University revoked the revisionist Henri Roques 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, that is to say, 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 a trick (artifice).

It is also a good thing that, 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 put it: [Telling the truth about this gas chamber] is too complicated. Well 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 such as 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 in order 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 which 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, that pitiful scribbler would, on 9 May 1995 in the XVIIth chamber of the Paris correctional court, go on to give a demonstration of his total inability to reply to 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 KrematoriumII 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 defendants 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 notice, none of those four openings ever existed. Auschwitz being the capital of the Holocaust, and this ruined crematorium being at the core of the extermination process of the 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 which 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.Klarsfelds 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 complexs 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 Mist) in which the Auschwitz death toll is put at nine million, continues to be projected; 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; but why should one for so long have affirmed that the sources were countless and trustworthy, and why should one have poured scorn on the revisionists who from 1950 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 the 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 element 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 31 May 1944 (i.e. nearly a full year before the wars 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 wars 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 offered any figures based on the results of an investigation; it has always been a matter of each ones 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 Arolsen-Waldeck, 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 at all exterminated.

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 computation 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 is kept in the dark about this; it would be stunned to learn that many of its firmest beliefs had, from the early nineteen-eighties 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 yieldings to the revisionists on the part of the orthodox historians have, year after year and especially since 1979 been so numerous 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 Washingtons 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 which the museum's scientific director, Michael Berenbaum, made before me and four witnesses in August 1994; he is the author of a guidebook of more than 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 among 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.