S

Over the twenty-odd years which separate us from these short writings of 1978-1979, Faurisson has been impelled to broaden his historical publication in assorted works, studies and articles published in several languages. It goes without saying that, on such or such a point, he may have had occasion to revise the three texts offered here in English. For example, in the German word "Vergasungskeller", he would today see rather a "gassing cellar", that is, a basement room which housed the equipment for the disinfecting fumigation (even though, as he points out, this question of meaning can still not be decided with certainty, and will go unresolved for as long as researchers remain in the dark about which part of crematorium II of Auschwitz-Birkenau this precise compartment actually matches).

But, apart from these minor points, the body of the three texts has retained its full worth and, reread more than twenty years on, it presents itself as the summing up, in extremely compact form, of what Faurisson and other revisionists in his wake have been able to publish on the "problem of the gas chambers" and on certain essential aspects of the alleged "Holocaust" of the Jews.

Finally, it may be said in passing, those who are well acquainted with the revisionism dossier will have noticed that there were, unhappily, instances in the 1990s where purported discoveries were trumpeted by other revisionists, but which were already to be found in these three pieces by Robert Faurisson from 1978-1979. The case of a discovery allegedly made by the young Jewish-American revisionist David Cole in particular comes to mind in this regard. In 1992, this latter was to make quite some fuss over the fact that a young female Polish guide, while showing tourists the Auschwitz I "gas chamber", declared it to be "in its original state" whereas, for his part, a museum official stated that the room visited was "very similar" to the original one. Yet, in his letter published on 16 January 1979 and, afterwards, distributed in English by a friend of Cole's, Faurisson had already pointed out that contradiction (see the text's first paragraph and first footnote). Let us add, moreover, that the room was not at all "very similar" to an original "gas chamber": its exposition as such amounted to an outright hoax, as a certain number of persons in authority were eventually to admit, among whom, in 1994, the assistant director of the museum (see the article by Eric Conan, "Auschwitz : la mémoire du mal", L'Express, 19 January 1995, p. 68).

It is thus with a certain sense of satisfaction that we at last make available in a legitimate English version these three letters from the late 70s whose content is essential to a sound understanding of the present-day "Holocaust" revisionist adventure.

*******

Robert FAURISSON

"The Problem of the Gas Chambers [1]" or "The Rumour of Auschwitz"

No one questions the use of crematoria in certain German camps. The mere frequency of epidemics throughout Europe at war demanded the cremation, for example, of the bodies of typhus victims (see photographs).

It is the existence of "gas chambers", veritable slaughterhouses for humans, which is called into question. Since 1945, the questioning has been growing. The mass media are aware of this fact.

In 1945, the official historiography affirmed that the "gas chambers" had been used in the former (pre-1938) Reich as well as in Austria, in Alsace as well as in Poland. Fifteen years later, in 1960, it revised its judgement: "gas chambers" had operated, "first and foremost" (?), only in Poland [2]. This drastic revision of 1960 reduced to naught a thousand "testimonies", a thousand "proofs" of alleged gassings at Oranienburg, at Buchenwald, at Bergen-Belsen, at Dachau, at Ravensbrück, at Mauthausen. Appearing before British or French judicial bodies, the heads of Ravensbrück camp (Suhren, Schwarzhuber, Dr Treite) had admitted the existence of a "gas chamber" whose functioning they had even, in a vague manner, described. A comparable scenario had been acted out by Ziereis, of Mauthausen, or by Kramer, of Struthof. After the deaths of the condemned men, it was discovered that those gassings had never taken place. Flimsiness of testimonies and confessions!

The "gas chambers" of Poland — as will surely be admitted in time — had no more reality about them. It is to the Polish and Soviet judicial bodies that we owe most of our information on them (see, for instance, the horrifying confession of R. Höss: Commandant of Auschwitz).

Today's visitor to Auschwitz or Majdanek discovers, in the way of "gas chambers", facilities in which any gassings would have spelt catastrophe for the gassers and their entourage. A collective execution by gas, supposing that it were practicable, could not at all be likened either to a suicidal or to an accidental gassing. In order to gas a single convict at a time, with his wrists and ankles shackled, the Americans employ a special gas [hydrogen cyanide] within a small space, from which, after its use, it is extracted and subsequently neutralised. So then, how could two thousand people (and even three thousand) be held in an enclosure of 210 square metres (!), at Auschwitz, for example, to have a common and powerful insecticide called Zyklon B poured onto them (!); finally, just after the victims' death, how could a team be sent, without gas masks, into that place saturated with hydrogen cyanide, in order to remove the corpses infused with cyanide? Some too little-known documents [3] show, moreover: 1) That the structure in question, which the Germans are said to have blown up shortly before their departure, was nothing but a typical morgue (Leichenkeller), built underground (to protect it from the warmth of the air) and fitted with a single small door for entry and exit; 2) That the Zyklon B could not be evacuated by a rapid ventilation and that it needed at least twenty-one hours to evaporate. Whereas thousands of documents on the Auschwitz crematoria (including invoices precise to the last Pfennig) are in our possession, neither a directive to build, nor a study, nor an order of material, nor a blueprint, nor a bill, nor any photograph is attested as regards the "gas chambers", which, we are told, adjoined those crematoria. At a hundred trials (Jerusalem, Frankfurt, etc.), no evidence has been produced.

"I was at Auschwitz. There were no 'gas chambers' there." Those who dare bear witness on behalf of the accused by pronouncing that sentence are hardly listened to. They are prosecuted. Still in 1978, anyone in Germany who speaks out in favour of Thies Christophersen, author of Die Auschwitz-Lüge ("The Auschwitz Lie"), risks a conviction for "offending the memory of the dead".

After the war, the International Red Cross (which had investigated "the rumour of Auschwitz") [4], the Vatican (which had been quite well informed about Poland), the Nazis, the collabos, all declared, along with many others: "The 'gas chambers'? We did not know." But how can one know of things which have not existed?

Nazism is dead and gone, together with its Führer. There remains today the truth. Let us dare to tell it publicly. The non-existence of the "gas chambers" is good news for humanity. Good news which it would be wrong to keep hidden any longer [5].

Until 1960, I believed in the reality of those gigantic massacres in “gas chambers”. Then, upon reading Paul Rassinier, a wartime résistant and deportee who had written Le Mensonge d’Ulysse, I began to have doubts. After fourteen years of personal reflexion, then four years of sustained research, I became certain, as have twenty other revisionist authors, that I had before me a historical lie. I have visited and revisited Auschwitz and Birkenau where the authorities exhibit a "reconstituted gas chamber 1” together with remains said to be those of "crematoria with gas chambers". At Struthof (Alsace) and at Majdanek (Poland), I have examined the buildings presented as "gas chambers in their original state". I have analysed thousands of documents, particularly at the Paris Centre de documentation juive contemporaine: archives, transcripts, photographs, written testimonies. I have tirelessly pursued specialists and historians with my questions. I have tried to find, but in vain, a single deportee who could prove to me that he had really seen, with his own eyes, a "gas chamber". I especially did not want an illusory abundance of evidence; I was willing to settle for one proof, one single proof. I have never found that proof. What I have found, on the contrary, is much false evidence, worthy of the witchcraft trials, dishonouring the judges who have admitted it. And then I have found silence, embarrassment, hostility, leading in the end to slander, insults, physical blows.

The retorts recently prompted by my brief piece on "The Rumour of Auschwitz" are those which I have read more than once in eighteen years of research. I do not call into question the sincerity of their authors, but I will say that they are teeming with errors long since pointed out by the likes of Rassinier, Scheidl and Butz.

For example, in the letter of 29 January 1943 (bearing the regular mention "Secret") which is quoted to me, Vergasung does not signify "gassing", but rather "carburetion". Vergasungskeller designates the room, below ground, in which the "gaseous" mixture which fed the crematory oven was prepared. This oven and others like it were supplied by the firm Topf & Sons, of Erfurt (Doc. NO-4473).

Begasung designated the gassing of clothing in autoclaves. If the gas used was Zyklon B - "B [lausäure] preparation" that is, Prussic acid or hydrogen cyanide - then "blue gas chambers" were mentioned. Nothing to do with the purported "slaughterhouse-gas chambers"!

The Diary of physician Johann Paul Kremer must be cited correctly. It will thus be seen that, if he speaks of the horrors of Auschwitz, it is in allusion to the horrors of the typhus epidemic of September-October 1942. On 3 October he was to write: "At Auschwitz, whole streets have been annihilated by typhus." He himself would contract what is called "the Auschwitz disease". Germans died of it. The sorting of the sick and the well was the "selection", or one of the forms of "special action", carried out by doctors. This sorting was done either inside the buildings or outdoors. Never did Kremer write that Auschwitz was a Vernichtungslager, i.e. in the terminology invented by the Allies after the war, an "extermination camp" (by which is to be understood: a camp equipped with a "gas chamber"). In reality, he wrote: "It is not for nothing that Auschwitz is called the annihilation camp (das Lager der Vernichtung)." In the etymological sense of the word, typhus annihilates those whom it strikes. Another serious translation error: under the date of 2 September 1942, Kremer's manuscript reads: "At three a.m. today I was, for the first time, in attendance during a special action outdoors." Historians and judges traditionally suppress the word "outdoors" (draussen) to have Kremer appear to say that the action in question took place in a "gas chamber". Finally, the horrid scenes before the "last Bunker" (i.e. in the yard of Bunker 11) are executions of the condemned, executions which the physician was obliged to attend. Among the condemned were to be found three women who had arrived in a convoy from Holland: they were shot 2.

The "Krema" buildings of Birkenau were perfectly visible 3 to all. A good number of plans and photographs prove this, and they prove as well the thorough material impossibility that these "Kremas" could have contained "gas chambers".

If, as regards Auschwitz, someone quotes to me, yet another time, confessions, memoirs, or miraculously unearthed manuscripts (with which I am already acquainted), I shall ask to be shown in what way the imprecise precision of their information differs from the imprecise precision of the information in all the documents which led the Allied military tribunals to rule that there were "gas chambers" where, in the end, it has since been acknowledged that there were none: for example, in the whole of the former Reich!

In my article I cited the industrial documents NI-9098 and 9912. One should read these before countering what I say with the "testimonies" of Pery Broad and R. Höss or (why not?) the "confessions" made by J. P. Kremer after the war. These documents establish that Zyklon B was not in the category of gasses considered susceptible to ventilation; its makers had to agree that it was "difficult to remove by ventilation since it sticks to surfaces". For the carrying out of a chemical test proving the disappearance of the gas from its confines, a room infused with cyanide by Zyklon B fumigation can be entered only by someone wearing a gas mask fitted with a "J" filter – the very strongest – after approximately twenty hours 4. Mattresses and blankets must be beaten in the open air for between one and two hours. Nevertheless, Höss wrote 5: "Half an hour after the start of gassing, the door was opened and the ventilation device turned on. Immediately [the team] began removing the bodies." Immediately (sofort)! And he goes on to add that this team, assigned to handle two thousand cyanide-infused corpses, entered the place (which was still full of gas, was it not?) and took them out "eating and smoking [as they went about it]", that is, if I understand rightly, without any gas masks. This is impossible. All the testimonies, as vague or conflicting as they may be about the rest 6, agree at least on this point: the squad opened the chamber, either immediately or "shortly following" the victims' demise. I say that this point, in itself, makes up the touchstone of the false testimony.

In Alsace, the Struthof camp's "gas chamber" is interesting to visit. The confession of Joseph Kramer can be read on the spot. It was through a "hole" (sic) that Kramer used to pour a “certain quantity of hydrogen cyanide salts", then, "a certain quantity of water", a mixture giving off a gas which killed in about one minute. The "hole" which is seen today was made in so sloppy a manner, with a chisel, that four faience tiles were broken. Kramer used a "funnel with a tap". I see neither how he could keep the gas from spattering back out of this crude hole, nor how he could thus willingly allow that gas, leaving the chimney, to spread towards the windows of his own house. Moving on to an adjacent room, I should like to have an explanation of this business of the corpses preserved by Professor Hirt in "vats of formalin" which are, in fact, nothing other than vats for sauerkraut and potatoes, with simple, non-airtight wooden lids.

The most commonplace weapon, if suspected of having killed or wounded someone, is subjected to forensic examination. It will be noted with some surprise that these prodigious criminal weapons that are the “gas chambers” have never been subjected to any official examination (whether legal, scientific, or archaeological) whose report may be examined 7.

If, to the general misfortune, the Germans had won the war, I suppose that their concentration camps would have been presented to us as re-education camps. By contesting that presentation of the facts, I should doubtless have found myself accused of being an objective ally of “Judeo-Marxism”. I am neither objectively nor subjectively a Judeo-Marxist or a neo-Nazi. I feel admiration for those Frenchmen who courageously struggled against Nazism. They defended the right cause. If today I state that the “gas chambers” did not exist, it is because the difficult duty to be truthful obliges me to say so.

[In accordance with the law of 29 July 1881, we hereby publish Mr Faurisson’s text. Any response directed against him or his statements would in its turn offer him a new right of reply.

Nonetheless, we do not consider the case opened by Darquier de Pellepoix’s declarations to be closed.] *

* Louis Darquier de Pellepoix (1897-1980) was head of the Vichy government's Commissariat général des affaires juives ("General Office for Jewish Affairs") from May 1942 to February 1944. With the advent of "Liberation" and the subsequent Épuration (purge), he fled to Spain, where he lived until his death. In 1978, some French journalists, besieged with letters from Professor Faurisson and sensing that an "affaire Faurisson", which had been lying quiet like live coals since July 1974, threatened eventually to flare up, decided to make a firebreak. One Philippe Ganier-Raymond, a journalist and part-time swindler (previously held liable by a Paris court, with the aid of Faurisson, for literary fraud concerning a text written by Céline), got in on the act. In October of 1978, in the weekly L'Express, he published an alleged interview with Darquier de Pellepoix in which the latter was quoted as stating that at Auschwitz only lice had been gassed. Thanks to this subterfuge, Faurisson ended up seeming, a few weeks afterwards, like the twin of a wartime collaborator. [S. Mundi.]

“Right to Reply” letter of 26 February 1979, refused publication by Le Monde, regarding pieces appearing in its editions of 21 February 1979 (p. 23) and 23 February 1979 (p. 40).

In a long declaration, thirty-four French historians have recently let us know that it is of course "natural" to ask oneself all sorts of questions about the Second World War, but that, nonetheless, "there is not, there cannot be, any debate on the existence of the gas chambers".

For my part, I remark that there is a debate on the existence or the non-existence of the "gas chambers", and believe that this debate is a legitimate one. It has for a long time pitted a few specialists of the school of revisionist historians against a few specialists of the official history. This debate opened, in a way, in 1960 when Dr Martin Broszat, representing the very official Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, had to make a huge concession to the revisionist Paul Rassinier: he was obliged to acknowledge that in spite of an alleged over-abundance of evidence, documents, testimonies and confessions (all of them reliable), there had never existed a single "gas chamber" in any of the concentration camps in the former Reich. In 1968, the discussion was revived, on the official side, by Olga Wormser-Migot who, in the face of a veritable storm of protest, dared to speak, in her thesis, of what she then termed "the problem of the gas chambers". Since 1974, this debate has little by little become a public one in Western Europe and in the English-speaking world at large (including, just recently, Australia!). The French press can no longer ignore this, lest it practise a form of censorship.

This debate is already richly instructive. An attentive reader of Le Monde will have learned much just from a perusal of the 21 February 1979 issue, where a whole page was exclusively devoted to a rendering of the official history's arguments. To begin, the reader will have learned that, in certain camps, fake "gas chambers" are presented to "pilgrims and tourists" (the only pity is that he is not told the names of those camps). Then, he will have learned that the figure for Auschwitz of three million dead is "surely an exaggeration", news which will have come as a surprise if he recalls that the official figure is four million. He will have noted that, in places where the German archives are declared to be "silent" 1, there is a tendency to interpret them. He will have seen that, where Third Reich documents are "apparently innocuous", they are interpreted to the point, for example, of saying that "to treat accordingly" signifies… "to gas". He will have noted that the orders of Himmler either to build or to destroy the "gas chambers" are not in the least precise, the fact being that such orders apparently never existed. He will have learned that the "document" of the SS engineer Gerstein is deemed "unquestionable", not in its entirety but "for the most part". With still a bit of attention, he will have noted that, according to the passages of the document which those in charge care to quote to him, there were from 700 to 800 persons in a "gas chamber" whose area was about 25 square metres, with a ceiling of 1.8 metres, which gives us from 28 to 32 persons standing in the space of each square metre! In the list of the thirty-four historians, he will perhaps have noticed that there is but a single specialist of the history of the camps. In the bibliography list, he will have twice come across the name of Olga Wormser-Migot for secondary works but not for her thesis, doubtless considered dangerous; and he will not have found any book or any article devoted to the "gas chambers", for the good reason that, on the official side, there are none, either in French or in any foreign language (in this regard, beware of certain deceptive titles!).

The Le Monde reader is told of an account of the "final solution to the Jewish problem" dated 20 January 1942. One may well wonder why the text of this account is not called by its name, as is normally the case: "Wannsee Protocol". I observe that, for some time, it has been realised that these strange minutes (for the word "Protocol" is a misnomer) are full of oddities and that they lack any guaranty of genuineness. They were typed on ordinary paper, with no indication of place or date of edition, no indication of point of origin, no official letterhead, no reference, no signature. That said, I think that the meeting of 20 January 1942 did take place and that it dealt with "the solution, at last, of the Jewish problem", which is to say that, as their emigration to Madagascar had been made impossible by the war, it was decided to expel the Jewish populations to the East of Europe.

Whoever bases any accusation at all on the Gerstein "document" (PS-1553) shows, by so doing, proof of an inability to find a solid argument in favour of the "gas chambers'" existence. Not even the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal cared to exploit this text which had emerged from its archives. Other tribunals, it is true, have been content to use it. The confession by R. Höss is worth no more. I shall not go back over the matter of this "admission" drafted under the surveillance of his Polish and Soviet jailers. The least effort of analysis shows its fabricated nature; on this point I refer the reader to the works of Paul Rassinier and, in particular, to his study of the Eichmann trial (Le Véritable Procès Eichmann). As for Kremer's diary, written during the war, it is genuine, but certain meanings are abusively coaxed out of some passages, or indeed the text is twisted in order to have us think that Kremer is speaking of the horrors of the "gas chambers" where, in reality, he describes the horrors of a typhus epidemic. After the war Kremer, indeed, did confess what he was led to confess, in accordance with all the stereotypes of the confession specialists. I am rebuked for having hidden this confession. I have not hidden it. I have expressly mentioned the existence of these "admissions". I have not analysed the text because, quite simply, my opponents have felicitously refrained from presenting it to me as evidence of the existence of "gas chambers" at Auschwitz! When Kremer speaks of three women being shot, I am willing to believe him. It could happen, I think, that a convoy of 1,710 persons contain three who were to be shot on arrival, at Auschwitz. But when Kremer, after the war, tells us that the incident involved women who had refused to enter the "gas chamber", I believe none of it. I need only go back to what he claimed to have seen of an alleged gassing operation, observed from his car. Kremer is among those people according to whom the reopening of the "gas chamber" was carried out "a moment" after the victims' death 2. I have already shown that this is a material impossibility. And then, I note that, in an attempt to explain a confession, Kremer's, another confession is relied upon, that (as chance would have it) of Höss. The disturbing point is that these two confessions, both obtained by Polish military justice, contradict one another much more than they uphold one another. One should take a close look at their respective descriptions both of the victims and the surroundings, and of the executioners and the mode of execution.

I do not understand the reply made in regard to Zyklon B. Used in a "gas chamber", it would have stuck to the ceiling, to the floor, to the four walls and would have perfused the victims’ bodies and their mucous for at least twenty hours. The members of the Sonderkommando (in fact, the crematorium team) charged with the task, it is said, of taking the bodies out of the “gas chamber” half an hour after the pouring in (?) of the Zyklon B, would have been instantly asphyxiated. And the Germans could hardly have scoffed at that, for the job would thus not have been done and no new batch of victims could have been brought to the spot.

One must not confuse a suicidal or accidental asphyxiation with an execution by gassing. In the latter case, those carrying out the job must avoid the least risk. Thus, the Americans, in order to gas a single prisoner at a time, use a complicated procedure in a small and hermetically sealed space. All movements are begun on the outside. The condemned man has his wrists and ankles bound and his head immobilised. After his death, the gas is extracted and neutralised and the guards must wait more than an hour before entering the little enclosure. A “gas chamber” is not a bedroom.

For four years I have expressed the wish to debate publicly, with anyone whom the other side may care to name, “the problem of the gas chambers”. I am answered with court writs. But the witchcraft trials, like the witch-hunts, never proved anything. I know of a way to move the debate forward. Instead of repeating ad nauseam that there exists an overabundance of evidence to prove the existence of the "gas chambers" (let us be reminded of what this supposed overabundance was worth for the former Reich's — mythical — "gas chambers"), I suggest, in order to begin at the beginning, that my adversaries provide me with a proof, one single clear-cut proof of the actual existence of a "gas chamber", of a single "gas chamber". Then we shall examine that "proof" together, in public.

[1] The phrase is that of Olga Wormser-Migot (Le Système concentrationnaire nazi, thesis published by the Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).

[2] “Keine Vergassung in Dachau”, by Dr Martin Broszat, director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich (Die Zeit, 19 August 1960, p. 16).

[3] On the one hand, photos from the Auschwitz Museum (negatives 519 and 6228), and, on the other hand, papers from the Nuremberg trial (NI-9098 and NI-9912).

[4] See The Work of the ICRC for Civilian Detainees in German Concentration Camps from 1939-1945, International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva, 1975 [French edition 1946] reproducing in part (I have a copy of the full confidential text) document No. 9925: “Visit by an ICRC delegate to the Commandant of Auschwitz Camp (September 1944)”, p. 76-77 [French edition, p. 91-92]. A crucial sentence of this document was deftly truncated of three words in the book by Marc Hillel, Les Archives de l'espoir ("The Archives of Hope"), Fayard, 1977, p. 257, and the most important sentence ("The inmates themselves said nothing [about a gas chamber]”) was simply left out.

[5] Among the score of authors who refute the existence of the "gas chambers", I shall cite Paul Rassinier, wartime deportee (Le Véritable Procès Eichmann, les Sept Couleurs, 1962, distributed by Maurice Bardèche, 5, rue Rataud, 75005 Paris) and, especially, the American A. R. Butz for his remarkable book on The Hoax of the 20th Century, 1976, distributed by the Historical Review Press, 23 Ellerker Gardens, Richmond, Surrey TWJO 6AA, (U.K.).

1 Presented to tourists as being in its original state.

2 Auschwitz vu par les SS, Museum of Oswiecim edition, 1974, p. 238, n. 85 [the English edition, KL Auschwitz seen by the SS, had been published in 1972.]

3 A football pitch "was located beside the Birkenau crematoria" (Tadeus Borowski, in the words of H. Langbein, Hommes et femmes à Auschwitz, Fayard, 1975, p. 129) [German edition: Menschen in Auschwitz, Vienna, Europa Verlag, 1972.]

4 French regulations concerning the use of hydrogen cyanide are as draconian as the German: see the Ministry of Public Health decree no. 50-1290 of 18 October 1950.

5 Kommandant in Auschwitz, Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1958, p. 126 and 166

6 Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, University Press Amsterdam, t. XIII (1975), p. 134-135.

7 The general gullibility is easily satisfied: it is enough to show us a door fitted with a peephole and catch-bolted and there we have it: a “gas chamber”!

1 The fact that some deportees were not registered at Auschwitz, as could well be expected, does not signify that those deportees disappeared or that they were “gassed”. For more details on this point, see S. Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France , Paris, 1978, p. 10 and 12.

2 Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, University Press Amsterdam, tome XVII (1977), p. 20.

Did not such a conclusion amount to surrender on the part of L. Poliakov, P. Vidal-Naquet and the other signatories?

These three pieces are a landmark in the history of revisionism. Yet, although their existence is, assuredly, known of abroad, they seem not to have been published in any language besides French, except in English and German, and then only partially and with serious flaws in translation.

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Robert FAURISSON

"The Problem of the Gas Chambers [1]" or "The Rumour of Auschwitz"