- Robert FAURISSON
- 16 June 1998
Discovery and "Rediscovery"
A discovery that I made in 1979 of certain accounts of Auschwitz which had appeared in Pravda in February 1945, and which I have mentioned perhaps ten
times since the early 1980s in books, articles or conferences in French,
English, German, Spanish, and Italian, has recently been presented in the
monthly Smith's Report as a
sensational and quite recent finding. Its subject is the Soviet
"observations" published in the 2 February 1945 edition of Pravda.
Smith's Report (June 1998, pp.
1, 3, 7)
An
up-to-the-minute example of how CODOH is spreading the latest word in
Holocaust-busting research to other leading revisionists is given by the
teamwork of the able scholar Samuel Crowell and David Irving. Crowell
unearthed, translated from the Russian, and supplied notes and commentary to
the first account ever published by the "liberators" of Auschwitz: a
Soviet journalist's mendacious account of how the Nazi extermination
"factory" really worked. Reading it makes plain why we hear so
little about the liberation of Auschwitz: Pravda correspondent Boris Polevoi
described a conveyor belt which dropped inmates into a flaming pit! Fans of
David Irving will be pleased to know that the industrious author and tireless
researcher has become increasingly proficient in the painstakingly acquired
HTML coding language and was able, more or less unaided, to
"translate" the Pravda article Crowell had translated from the
Russian into the computerese necessary to post it on the Website. [page 1]
In London, England [sic]
revisionist historian David Irving posts to his Website the first dispatch from
the "liberated" Auschwitz—it appeared in Pravda in 1945—as translated and with commentary by CODOH-affiliated
scholar Samuel Crowell. [page 3]
CODOH
stands for Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. For years Bradley Smith
and his team at CODOH have been making an important
contribution to the development of revisionism in American universities. We
return to Smith's Report.
- AUSCHWITZ:
- THE
FIRST REPORT!
On February 2, 1945 Pravda, organ of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, published an article briefly describing
what Red Army troops had found on overrunning the Nazi slave labor camp at
Auschwitz. The article, the first public revelation of the site's existence, is
surprising for what it does not mention.
[Translated and annotated by "Samuel Crowell" (nom-de-plume),
May 8, 1998]
THE ARGUMENT between revisionists and non-revisionists is that the record
of Nazi atrocities, though no doubt based in fact, contains significant amounts
of fiction. Whether fact or fiction, any atrocity claim should be placed in its
proper historical context so that the researcher can understand either how the
facts came to be known or how the fiction evolved in the popular mind.
The first press reporting on the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is therefore
bound to be of interest to historians, regardless of how they regard the
Auschwitz claims. The following article, by Boris Polevoi, was originally
published on Friday, February 2, 1945, in the Soviet national paper Pravda, less than a week after the camp had been liberated (January
27,1945), and a full three months before the official Soviet report on Auschwitz
(May 6,1945), known by the Exhibit-Number assigned to it at the International
Military Tribunal (IMT) as USSR-08.
What is most striking about this press report is that it is totally at
variance with the version of Auschwitz that we have come to know, substituting
the traditional atrocity record with another, completely imaginary one. That the
first non-anonymous observer at the Auschwitz camp could be so far from the
current narrative speaks not only to the inaccuracy of this initial report, but
also to the artifice of all subsequent ones.
(A
photocopy of the Pravda article in translation as it appears on David Irving's Website,
together with comments and footnotes by Samuel Crowell, is available for your
donation. 6 pp.) [page 7 of Smith's
Report]
The
Journal of Historical Review (July-August 1997, pp. 14-15, 19)
I had published this "news" most recently less than a year
before in The Journal of Historical Review.
It was in an article entitled: "Auschwitz, Facts and Legend"
(July-August 1997, pp. 14-19) which was the translation of a piece first
published in French and Spanish on 11 January 1995. The part of it devoted to
the Pravda article of 2 February 1945
(and also to those of Pravda of 1st
February and of an American paper
which quickly echoed the Soviet press) bore the heading "The Quandary of
the Soviet Liberators". It read:
Soviet forces occupied Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. What they found
there was so contrary to what had been spread by propaganda that one may
imagine they were left with mouths agape. Alone in its organization and in its
sanitary facilities, so modern in the eyes of the Soviets, the camp was the
complete opposite of an "extermination camp." Consequently, for
several days the leading Soviet daily Pravda
remained silent, and, for the moment, no Allied commission of inquiry was
invited to determine, on the spot, the truth of Auschwitz. On the 1st of
February, Pravda broke its silence,
but only to put the following words in the mouth of a single prisoner:
"The Hitlerites killed the children and the ill by means of gas, as well
as the men and women who were unfit for work. They cremated the cadavers in
special furnaces. There were twelve of these furnaces in the camp."
The
official Soviet paper added that the number of deaths was reckoned at
"thousands and thousands" (not millions). The next day, Pravda's
chief reporter, Jewish journalist Boris Polevoï, affirmed that the main method
used by the Germans to exterminate their victims was...electricity: "[They
utilized] an electric conveyor belt on which hundreds of persons could be
electrocuted simultaneously; the dead bodies would then fall on to a belt driven
slowly by a chain and in this way move on into a blast furnace."
Soviet
propaganda was in disarray, and in its newsreels could show only the dead or
dying whom the Germans had left behind in their retreat. And, as contemporary
newsreels of the camp's liberation reveal, there were also numerous live
children, as well as adults in good health. Jewish propaganda then came to the
aid of Soviet propaganda.
In a footnote (p. 19) I added:
Report
by B. Polevoi, Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4. I first learned of this article while
doing research in the National Archives, Suitland (Maryland) branch, when I
came across a brief report from the Washington
[DC] Daily News of Feb. 2, 1945, pp.
2, 35 ("Ageless, Sexless Ghosts Rescued from Murder Mill," United
Press dispatch by Henry Shapiro in Moscow), which was based, more or less, on
the Pravda article.
The story of that discovery
I first learned of this Pravda
article of 2 February 1945 in September 1979, whilst working on the case of Otto
Moll, the SS man in charge of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria. It was in the
prosecutor's file that I found the Washington
Daily News article. Upon returning to France I did some research in Pravda's
issues of 27 January 1945 (the date of Auschwitz's "liberation") and
the following days, and found but two relevant pieces in the Pravdas
of 1 and 2 February, respectively.
A Russian émigré in Paris called Nicolas Trouchkine translated these
articles into French for me; I later had his translations verified by Gabor
Tamas Rittersporn, a Russian-educated French citizen of Jewish-Hungarian origin.
As I have pointed out above, I mentioned and commented
on the 1945 articles on a number of occasions throughout the 80s. In 1986, at a
meeting in Germany, Udo Walendy asked me to send him the Pravda articles. He read Russian and intended to publish them in
translation, which he did in the following year; see "Die sowietischen
Entdeckungen in Auschwitz am 27. 1. 1945" (Historische Tatsache Nr 31 [October 1987], pp. 4-32). He forgot to
credit me with having discovered both the Soviet and American articles
concerned.
Dr Myro J. Dragan, MD
At the origin of the alleged 1998 discovery we have, according
to David Irving (Focal Point, 1998 on
the Net), the "Polish Historical Society", headed by an American of
Polish-Ukranian origin, Dr Myro J. Dragan, MD of Stamford, Connecticut, who is
apparently its sole member. D. Irving writes: "The Polish Historical
Society is credited with re-discovering this article."
This reminds me of how, in June 1996, Dr Dragan
"rediscovered" what I had been saying for many years about another
subject: that the four alleged 25 x 25 cm. (9 7/8 in.)
openings in the roof of the Krematorium II gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau
never existed. In September 1994, at a convention of the Institute for
Historical Review, I had summed up my conclusions in the quip: "No holes,
no «Holocaust»."
As for Dr Dragan, he had announced his so-called discovery in an essay of
June 1996 entitled "The Case of Missing Zyklon B Inlets / Two most
venerable icons of Holocaustianity debunked". For further information
concerning Dr Dragan and his work one may contact Ernst Zündel in Toronto.