3 March 1999
My
Answers to Shawn Johnson and her classmates
Question
1: While writing, do you think of the reader's opinions?
Answer:
I try my best not to think of the reader's opinions on the matter which I am
addressing. I try to avoid frivolity, negligence, deliberate ignorance,
and lies. I try to be exact. I try not to lay accusations against anyone unless
I have hard facts and real evidence. If someone accuses on the one hand, Nazi
Germany of having built and used mass-execution
gas chambers and, on the other hand, Great Britain, the
United States, Soviet Russia, the Vatican, and the International Committee of the Red Cross of having turned a blind eye to
such a gigantic crime perpetrated
over such a length of time, he must be able to bring proof, or at least such
things as he considers to be proof and which I should have the right to look at
and discuss. Otherwise, it is a defamation, a slander, a calumny.
Question
2: What inspired you to start your revisionist work?
--
One day I read a book by Paul Rassinier, Le
Mensonge d'Ulysse ("The
Lie of Ulysses") published in 1950. P. Rassinier had been a leftist, a Résistant,
then an inmate at the Buchenwald and Dora camps in Germany. When he returned
home from those concentration camps, he was surprised to read
"testimonies" about execution gas chambers in Buchenwald. He began an
investigation. He discovered that those "testimonies" were
nothing but the fruit of gossip. Later on, he found that such was also
the case as concerned Dachau and many other camps including Auschwitz. The
meaning behind the title of his first book is this: many people tend to behave
like Homer's hero in that, having endured a hundred
ordeals, they are inclined to talk of their thousand
ordeals, and, with the passing of time, may actually come to believe the stories
that they repeat year after year.
On 19 August 1960, in the German weekly
Die Zeit , there appeared a letter from a Dr Martin Broszat, member of the
Institute of Contemporary History
in Munich and believer in the German mass-execution gas chambers. In his letter
he finally admitted that there had been no such gas chambers either in
Buchenwald, Dachau, or Bergen-Belsen. I was very surprised, since I remembered
that, in a film projected at the Nuremberg trial on 29 November 1945, the whole
world had been shown something that was presented as such a gas chamber in Dachau,
and had been told of its functioning as such.
Question
3: If the Holocaust had happened to Christians instead of to Jews, would you feel the same way about it?
-- If by the word
"Holocaust" you mean that Nazi Germany 1) had a policy
of physically exterminating the Jews, 2) used execution gas chambers to that
purpose, and 3) that the overall result of this policy, taking in deaths by
natural causes within or without concentration camps,
was a total of 6,000,000 dead, I say that there was no "Holocaust". If
by the word "Holocaust" you mean that the Jewish communities of Europe
suffered considerable hardship and loss of life during the second world war, I
lament such sufferings (though they did not -- and by far -- amount to 6,000,000
dead) just as I lament those endured throughout that horrible conflict by
Christians, atheists, Buddhists, Shintoists, and all others: perhaps as many as
40,000,000 people were killed. The allied bombing raids on Dresden (February
1945) amounted to a real "Holocaust" (the incineration of an entire
city would seem to bear a closer correspondence to the traditional, liturgical
sense of the word that we are discussing here), as did the atomic attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The most dreadful deportations were those of the 12-15
million German civilians, chased from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe
in 1945-1946.
Just or unjust, every war is a butchery, despite the heroism of countless
soldiers and ordinary citizens; at
the end of it, the victor turns out simply to have been
the better, the more efficient of two butchers. 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, as
happened in the Nuremberg trial, the Tokyo trial, and still
today, 54 years after the war, in so-called "war criminals"
cases.
In September 1983, at the end of my visit to the Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Los Angeles, I met Rabbi Marvin Hier; in the guest book I wrote something
like: "I feel a deep respect for the TRUE sufferings of ALL
the victims of World War II".
Question
4: If there were no gassings, how can one account for the residue of gas
found at the camps?
-- Zyklon B (hydrocyanic
acid) had been used since 1922, and is in fact still in
use today (although under a different name), for purposes of fumigation,
disinfestation, and delousing. In a chamber specially equipped for
disinfestation one will normally note blue residues (hydrocyanic acid is also
known as "blue acid", and the chambers to which you allude were
sometimes called "blue chambers"). Precisely what is so interesting is
that at Auschwitz-Birkenau, for example, in the rooms used for disinfestation,
you will still note today such blue residues, whereas in the spaces purportedly
used day in and day out for
mass-gassings, for the gassing to death of so many thousands of Jews, you will
note no such residues. In 1988 an American called Fred Leuchter, specialist in
the field of judicial executions in the US (notably in the use of gas chambers
employing hydrocyanic acid), visited Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek (Poland),
accompanied by several assistants. He inspected, on the one hand, the
disinfestation gas chambers and, on the other hand, the places which are
presented as execution gas chambers. He took samples which he had analysed by a
laboratory upon returning to the US. The conclusion of his report was that there
had been no execution gas chambers in those camps. In 1991 the German chemist
Germar Rudolf, after visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau, in his own report came to
the same conclusion. As for me, I
was the first (in the 70s) to state that the "Nazi gas chambers" were
impossible for chemical reasons. If you are interested, I can expand a bit on
this point which, after all, concerns an essential subject and is assuredly not
a "point of detail" of second world war history. Have you ever asked
yourself what such a gas chamber -- a building in which whole crowds of people
were put to death -- can have been?
Or how one could operate it without gassing oneself in the process? While
entering an ocean of hydrocyanic acid after the gassing, in order to remove the
corpses, how would one avoid being overcome? And, since hydrocyanic acid can
poison through the skin on simple contact, would it not be impossible to handle
the poisoned corpses without poisoning oneself? Have you any idea what an
American penitentiary gas chamber,
used for killing just a single individual, is like? Also, are you sure that you
have made the necessary distinction between the crematoria (especially good and
useful devices to have at a time of terrible typhus epidemics, as at Auschwitz),
the disinfestation gas chambers (indispensable in the face of such epidemics),
and the purported mass-execution gas chambers which, needless to say, would have
been abominable? When presented with images of dreadfully emaciated bodies, have
you ever thought that they may have been the remains of victims of such
epidemics? Beware not to take the crematoria for execution gas chambers, and the
dead for murdered!
My
Comments
I appreciate the open-mindedness of Americans. In France, once I had
expressed my observations on what you term the "Holocaust", I soon was
no longer able to teach at my University. I used especially to lecture in
"Analysis of Texts and Documents (Literature, History,
Media)" but one day my tenure was revoked without any justification being
given. Between 1978 and 1993 I was physically attacked ten times
and on at least one occasion was nearly killed. Since 1981 I have been
prosecuted and convicted at least 12 times, having enormous fines to pay as a
result. In France and in many other countries there are special laws -- like the
1981 Israeli law -- which forbid challenges to the "Holocaust" story.
Quite a few Revisionists have been, or are now, in jail, particularly in Germany
where, incidentally, three US citizens have at one time or another been locked
up for revisionism: one is currently serving a five-year prison sentence there,
partly for revisionism and partly for his political beliefs, which happen to be
National-Socialist.
Did you know that after the war
the first historian to have the intuition
that the "Nazi gas chambers" had perhaps
not existed was the American James Morgan Read? If you wish I can send you a
copy of an article which he had published in the 30 May 1945 issue (p. 651-653)
of the Chicago weekly The Christian
Century , under the title "Trials for War Criminals"?
Also, did you know that in their respective war memoirs which, taken
together, amount to over 7,000 printed pages, general-presidents Dwight
Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle and prime minister Winston Churchill,
despite plainly showing their hostility towards the Germans, never once
mentioned either a physical extermination of the Jews or the "Nazi gas
chambers"? Why, would you reckon, is this so?
Best wishes,
R. Faurisson
N.B.
Perhaps you would be interested in reading two short articles which I have
published in The Journal of Historical
Review (JHR):
--
"The Mechanics of
Gassing" (JHR ,
Spring 1980, p. 23-30);
If you are interested I can also explain my challenge: "Show me or
draw me a Nazi gas chamber", and the aphorism "No holes, no «Holocaust»".