by Dr. Robert Faurisson
Did the "Holocaust" of the European Jews really occur? Is it
true that during the Second World War, the Germans ordered, planned and
carried out a policy of physical destruction of the European Jews? More
specifically, did they design, build and use execution gas chambers for
that purpose? Did they cause the deaths of millions of Jews in that manner?
To these questions, the majority of writers say yes; they believe in the
"Holocaust" of the European Jews. We shall call these writers
"exterminationists" because they defend the thesis of the physical
extermination of the Jews. To these same questions, other writers say no;
these writers are called "revisionists" but it goes without saying
that the revisionists do not dispute the fact that, during a world conflict
which caused 40 to 50 million deaths, many Jews (the approximate number
remains to be determined) died.
Who is right? The exterminationists or the revisionists?
For the layman, there are, in principle, three main ways of forming a personal
opinion on a historical controversy.
The first way consists in reading the writings of both sides but in this
specific case that would require much time and revisionist literature is
often difficult to obtain.
The second way is to attend a public debate between the two sides: the
orthodox side (the exterminationists) and the heterodox side (the revisionists).
Unfortunately, the exterminationists have always refused the public debate
proposed to them by the revisionists and which the revisionists continue
to propose. In certain countries such as France and Austria, the supporters
of the exterminationist thesis have recently gone so far as to obtain special
laws that punish revisionists with heavy prison terms and fines for "contesting"
the existence of the "Holocaust" and the execution gas chambers.
Fortunately, there remains a third way of forming an opinion on this controversy,
that of reading the transcript of a trial where the two sides found themselves
face to face before a judge and jury. In the case which concerns us, that
is what happened twice, in 1985 and 1988, in actions brought against the
revisionist Ernst Zündel in Toronto by exterminationist members of
a Jewish organization.
This remarkable book by Barbara Kulaszka rests upon the transcripts of
the 1988 trial. It will enable the layman to obtain a precise idea of the
historical controversy surrounding the Jewish "Holocaust" and
to form an opinion for himself. I must, however, express a reservation
and issue a warning to the reader: a courtroom is not an appropriate place
for a historical debate. A trial has its own formal rules of procedure
and it is very limited as to time; freedom of expression is not total since
one of the parties is seeking to obtain a condemnation as the other party
is trying to avoid that condemnation. Finally, a judge and jury, even if
they listen to experts, have neither the competence nor the means required
to settle a point of history.
I participated in the preliminary hearing of Ernst Zündel in 1984,
in the first Zündel trial in 1985 (quashed on procedural and substantive
grounds), and, finally, in the second Zündel trial in 1988. I published
a complete account of the case in The Journal of Historical Review, Winter
1988-1989, pp. 417-431 in an article entitled "The Zündel Trials
(1985-1988)". I take the liberty of referring the reader to it but
I would also wish to quote here a passage from the article and to comment
on it in the light of what has happened since 1988. This passage deals
essentially with my own discovery in the 1970s of the chemical impossibility
of the Auschwitz execution gassings and the confirmation of that impossibility
by Fred Leuchter. I wrote then:
For my part, I appeared as an expert witness for nearly six days. I concentrated
particularly on my investigations of the American gas chambers. I recalled
that Zyklon B is essentially hydrocyanic acid and that it is with this
gas that certain American penitentiaries execute those who have been condemned
to death.
In 1945 the Allies should have asked specialists on American gas chambers
to examine the buildings, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, which were supposed
to have been used to gas millions of people. Since 1977, I have had the
following idea: when one deals with a vast historical problem like that
of the reality or the legend of the Holocaust, one must strive to get to
the core of the problem. In this case the central problem is Auschwitz
and the core of that problem is a space of 275 square metres: the 65 square
metres of the "gas chamber" of crematorium I at Auschwitz and,
at Birkenau, the 210 square metres of the "gas chamber" of crematorium
II. In 1988, my idea remained the same: let us have expert studies of those
275 square metres and we will have an answer to the vast problem of the
Holocaust! I showed the jury my photos of the gas chamber at the Maryland
State Penitentiary in Baltimore as well as my plans for the Auschwitz gas
chambers and I underlined the physical and chemical impossibilities of
the latter ones.
A Sensational Turn of Events: The Leuchter Report
Ernst Zündel, in possession of the correspondence I had exchanged
in 1977-78 with the six American penitentiaries outfitted with gas chambers,
gave attorney Barbara Kulaszka the job of getting in touch with the chief
wardens of those penitentiaries in order to see if one of them would agree
to appear in court to explain how a real gas chamber operates. Bill Armontrout,
chief warden of the penitentiary at Jefferson City (Missouri), agreed to
testify and in doing so pointed out that no one in the USA was more knowledgeable
about the functioning of gas chambers than Fred A. Leuchter, an engineer
from Boston. I went to visit Leuchter on February 3 and 4, 1988. I found
that he had never asked himself any questions about the "gas chambers"
in the German camps. He had simply believed in their existence. After I
began to show him my files, he became aware of the chemical and physical
impossibility of the German "gassings" and he agreed to examine
our documents in Toronto.
After that, at Zündel's expense, he left for Poland with a secretary
(his wife), a draftsman, a video-cameraman and an interpreter. He came
back and drew up a 192 page report (including appendices). He also brought
back 32 samples taken, on the one hand, from the crematories of Auschwitz
and Birkenau at the site of the homicidal "gassings" and, on
the other hand, in a disinfection gas chamber at Birkenau. His conclusion
was simple: there had never been any homicidal gassings at Auschwitz, Birkenau,
or Majdanek.
On April 20 and 21, 1988, Fred Leuchter appeared on the witness stand in
the Toronto courtroom. He told the story of his investigation and presented
his conclusions. I am convinced that during those two days I was an eyewitness
to the death of the gas chamber myth, a myth which, in my opinion, had
entered its death throes at the Sorbonne colloquium on "Nazi Germany
and the Extermination of the Jews" (June 29 to July 2, 1982), where
the organizers themselves began to grasp that there was no proof of the
existence of the gas chambers.
In the Toronto courtroom emotions were intense, in particular among the
friends of Sabina Citron. Ernst Zündel's friends were also moved,
but for a different reason: they were witnessing the veil of the great
swindle being torn away. As for me, I felt both relief and melancholy:
relief because a thesis that I had defended for so many years was at last
fully confirmed, and melancholy because I had fathered the idea in the
first place. I had even, with the clumsiness of a man of letters, presented
physical, chemical, topographical and architectural arguments which I now
saw summed up by a scientist who was astonishingly precise and thorough.
Would people one day remember the skepticism I had encountered, even from
other Revisionists? Just before Fred Leuchter, Bill Armontrout had been
on the witness stand, where he confirmed, in every detail, what I had said
to the jury about the extreme difficulties of a homicidal gassing (not
to be confused with a suicidal or accidental gassing). Ken Wilson, a specialist
in aerial photographs, had shown that the homicidal "gas chambers"
of Auschwitz and Birkenau did not have gas evacuation chimneys, which would
have been indispensable. He also showed that I had been right in accusing
Serge Klarsfeld and Jean-Claude Pressac of falsifying the map of Birkenau
in The Auschwitz Album (Seuil Publishers, 1983, p. 42). Those authors,
in order to make the reader believe that groups of Jewish women and children
surprised by the photographer between crematories II and III could not
go any farther and were thus going to end up in the "gas chambers"
and those crematories, had simply eliminated from the map the path which,
in reality, led up to the "Zentralsauna," a large shower facility
(located beyond the zone of the crematories), where those women and children
were actually going.
James Roth, director of a laboratory in Massachusetts, then testified on
the analysis of the 32 samples, the origin of which he was unaware of:
all the samples taken in the homicidal "gas chambers" contained
a quantity of cyanide which was either unmeasurable or infinitesimal, while
the sample from the disinfection gas chamber, taken for comparison's sake,
contained an enormous amount of cyanide (the infinitesimal quantity detected
in the former case can be explained by the fact that the supposed homicidal
gas chambers were in fact morgues for preserving bodies; such morgues could
have been occasionally disinfected with Zyklon B). (pp. 428 430)
That happened in 1988. Four years later, the Leuchter Report was confirmed
by three other reports: first, that of the Krakow Forensic Institute; then,
that of the German Germar Rudolf, and finally, that of the Austrian Walter
Lüftl. The most stunning of these three reports is the one from Krakow.
It had been pressed for by the authorities at the Auschwitz State Museum
in the hope that it would disprove the Leuchter Report's conclusions. The
opposite happened and despite embarrassed explanations to try to minimize
the meaning of their own tests, the authors of the Krakow report indeed
confirmed - involuntarily - that Fred Leuchter was right. As a result,
the exterminationists prefer to treat the report of the Krakow Forensic
Institute with silence.
In 1989, the pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac published, under the aegis
of New York's Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, an enormous book entitled Auschwitz:
Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. I rendered an account of that
exterminationist attempt in The Journal of Historical Review in 1991 [Spring
1991, pp. 25-66 and Summer, 1991, pp. 133-175]. I showed there that "the
exterminationist mountain" in labour had brought forth "a revisionist
mouse." The occasion gave me the opportunity to emphasize again what
I call "one of the 20th century's great paradoxes": that millions
of people, stupefied by incessant media propaganda, believe in the Nazi
gas chambers without ever having seen one, without having the slightest
idea of what this allegedly fantastic weapon was, without any ability to
describe its shape and operation. The Nazi gas chamber is alleged to have
physically existed; yet no one can provide us with a representation of
it! This gas chamber is immaterial and magical. Nobody, and above all,
not J.C. Pressac in his work with the misleading title, has been able in
a half-century to provide us with a photograph, a blueprint or a model.
The rare attempts in that direction have ended in failure. In their works,
such men as Poliakov, Wellers, Hilberg or Pressac have not dared - and
for a good reason - to reproduce a complete photograph of the alleged "gas
chambers" which tourists can visit in certain concentration camps.
Nor do they reproduce the large mock-up which tourists can see at the Auschwitz
Museum's Block 4, for they know that this is but a grotesque trick. Thus,
the challenge I have made to the adepts of the "Holocaust" religion
for decades remains the same: "I will be prepared to believe in the
Nazi gas chamber, the central pillar of the 'Holocaust' religion, on the
day you can describe 'a single one of those gas chambers' to me."
Sometimes I add: "But you are unable to do so. Those chemical slaughterhouses
where, according to you, one could have entered with impunity to retrieve
millions of bodies out of an ocean of hydrocyanic acid were a physical
and chemical impossibility. One cannot describe or draw the alleged homicidal
gas chamber of Auschwitz as one cannot describe or draw a square circle
or a circular square."
Our age believes itself to be skeptical, believing only that which it sees.
It claims to be the age of television. Yet it believes in a material thing
of which it does not have the least material representation and never has
a book, a movie or the television provided us with an image of this material
thing. The best way to deceive the masses is by suggestion which entails
auto-suggestion. Television cannot show or describe a Nazi gas chamber
but it suggests the idea; for example, it shows a building and the commentary
asserts: "Building containing a gas chamber"; or it settles for
showing us a simple shower sprinkler and like Pavlovian dogs we are conditioned,
lo and behold, "to see" a "gas chamber." Other times,
our pity will be aroused over some "hair of the gassed", "suitcases
of the gassed", "baby carriages of the gassed infants."
Thus do we go from suggestion to auto-suggestion.
The myth of the gassing of civilians in enclosed places dates back to 1916;
already, at that time, the Germans, Austrians or the Bulgarians were accused
of gassing Serbian men, women and children. After the war, this myth was
quickly overshadowed by the myth of the Belgian children having their hands
crushed by uhlans; it vanished only to reappear twenty years later. This
time the victims were no longer Serbs but Jews. And it is this myth, absurd
and painful, that at the end of the 20th century is persistently imposed
upon us.
In centuries past, people believed, likewise, in the devil, in his physical
shape, in his pales and tenterhooks, in his shouts and in his smells. Tribunals,
chaired by judges who reckoned themselves intelligent and enlightened,
posited in principle (judicial notice!) that such was true, so obviously
true that demonstrating it was unwarranted. Yet it was false. Smack in
the middle of the 20th century, devilry came back and judges who thought
themselves more intelligent and more enlightened than their predecessors
of centuries past, posited in principle (judicial notice anew!) that the
devilish Nazi gas chambers had indeed existed. In Toronto in 1988, Judge
Ron Thomas took "judicial notice" of the "Holocaust"
notwithstanding that this was the very issue at the core of the trial where
the matter was one of determining whether Ernst Zündel was spreading
false news or not when he distributed a piece of revisionist literature
entitled Did Six Million Really Die?.
I was a witness to Ernst Zündel's judicial and extra-judicial calvary.
This man is a heroic figure of our time. He honours the German people of
whom he was born. He honours Canada where he came to settle. But Germany
and Canada, without reason, work against him at the instigation of the
leaders of the world Jewish community. It is a disgrace. As historian David
Irving said so well: "The Jewish community have to examine their consciences.
They have been propagating something that isn't true." (The Jewish
Chronicle, London, 23 June 1989).
Under a simple exterior, Ernst Zündel has a visionary's depth. This
peasant of Swabian origin, this artist, this businessman, casts a penetrating
gaze on history, society, politics, institutions and men. In my article
on his trials which I have already referred to, my conclusion had been
the following:
Ernst Zündel had promised that his trial would be "the trial
of the Nuremberg Trial" or "the Stalingrad of the Exterminationists."
The unfolding of those two long trials proved him right, even though the
jury, "instructed" by the judge to consider the Holocaust as
an established fact "which no reasonable person can doubt," finally
found him guilty. Zündel has already won. It remains for him to make
it known to Canada and to the entire world. The media blackout of the 1988
trial was almost complete. Jewish organizations campaigned vigorously for
such a blackout, and even went so far as to say that they did not want
an impartial account of the trial. They did not want any account of it
at all. The paradox is that the only publication which reported relatively
honestly about the trial was the Canadian Jewish News.
Ernst Zündel and the Leuchter report have left a profound mark on
history; both will be remembered for many years to come.
Today I would add that to me Ernst Zündel's fate appears both more
tragic and more enviable than in 1988. It is even more tragic because I
fear that the leaders of the world Jewish community will not leave any
respite to a man of this breadth, able not only to discern what he calls
truth, freedom and justice but also to struggle with so much skill and
courage for that truth, that freedom and that justice. In a general way,
I am pessimistic for the future of revisionists. But I am optimistic for
the future of revisionism: the work initiated by Paul Rassinier and crowned
by the brilliant work of the American Arthur Robert Butz, The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century, has known, thanks to Ernst Zündel, such a great
expansion that no obstacle will be able to impede its course. And it is
in this sense that, notwithstanding everything, one can envy the fate of
Ernst Zündel.
Robert Faurisson, August, 1992