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From: dgannon@techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
Subject: Re: Question about anti-Revisionism film ("Never Forget")
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This should answer your question(s) about the film starring Leonard Nimoy,
entitled "Never Forget":
In _The Journal of Historical Review_ Vol. 11, #2 (Summer 1991):
REVIEWS: "A Forgettable, But Survivable, Hatchet Job on IHR"
(Or, "Never Forget -- Witness for the Defense")
NEVER FORGET. Produced by Robert Radnitz. Directed by Joseph Sargent.
Turner Pictures, Inc. 1991. 2 hours.
Reviewed by Tom Marcellus
_Never Forget_, Turner Broadcasting's version of the "Mel
Mermelstein story," which hit the airwaves nationwide via the TNT cable
network on the evening of April 8, 1991 -- and in at least seven
airings during the week that followed -- was a pretty forgettable
effort. The drama fell far short of both poetry and truth.
Nevertheless, _Never Forget_ did serve as a timely reminder to many --
and an introduction to many more -- that there is a Revisionist
movement, and an Institute for Historical Review, which challenge a
version of the Second World War, and its sacrosanct "Holocaust," that
until the appearance of _Never Forget_ were presented as uncontested
truth on America's most influential mass medium.
As _Never Forget_ begins, this disclaimer rolls across the screen:
**********
While certain scenes are adapted from incidents in the lives of the
Mermelstein family and other individuals, all legal proceedings
portrayed are based on actual transcripts and documents.
**********
Like much that follows in the docudrama, these words are
deceptive. In fact _Never Forget_ materially falsifies testimony and
court proceedings, as well as fracturing history and truth in fact and
in spirit from start to finish.
The story of the Mermelstein affair has been truncated, partly to
keep production costs down (ergo, no Auschwitz stage sets) but also to
represent the judicial notice taken by Judge Thomas Johnson that "Jews
were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland in
1944" as a signal legal and historical victory which effectively ended
the lawsuit. Thus, viewers are spared the dull story of the nearly
four years of legal maneuvering which followed, by which Mermelstein
and his lawyers sought to destroy IHR, and thus Historical Revisionism,
in America.
The Mel Mermelstein of _Never Forget_, as played by Leonard Nimoy
of _Star Trek_ notoriety, is a prosperous businessman, happy family
man, and pillar of the community, not the man whom a Los Angeles Jewish
newspaper, quoting "members of the Jewish community" and a "close
friend" of Mermelstein, described as "a difficult moody man" and "his
own worst enemy" ("Mermelstein, Hailed As a Hero, Stood Virtually Alone
During Holocaust Trial," _Israel Today_, August 2, 1985, pp 6, 18).
His wife Jane, as played by Blythe Danner, is nothing less than a
transplanted Southern belle, while his three sons and one daughter make
a convincingly half-Jewish, all-American brood (for reasons which are
obscure, daughter Edie is presented in _Never Forget_ as a 12-year-old,
rather than the high-school graduate she actually was at the time).
When he receives a letter from the Institute challenging him to,
in effect, put up or shut up following his public challenge to lead
IHR's Editorial Advisory board to the exact spot at which he witnessed
"the actual gassings of men, women, and little children in gas chambers
disguised as shower rooms," Mermelstein-Nimoy's earlier bravado seems
to crumble. But he is nonetheless determined to call IHR's bluff by
providing proof that yes, Jews were gassed at Auschwitz, and thus claim
the $50,000 reward which had been offered, withdrawn when nobody
complied with the stated rules of evidence (those of American criminal
courts), and then offered again to Mermelstein (without authorization
from IHR's Board of Directors) by Director David McCalden, writing
under the name "Lewis Brandon."
Mermelstein-Nimoy calls first on the Los Angeles office of the
Anti-Defamation League, then on the Simon Wiesenthal Center for
professional advice and legal help in getting the best of the
Institute. But both groups turn him away, assuring him that although
the IHR is composed of "professional liars and haters," he is likely
to cause American Jewry more harm than good by giving them a public
forum. Besides, both groups have busy schedules (Rabbi Hier's
Wiesenthal Center alone is on the trail of 400 "Nazi war criminals"!).
Mermelstein-Nimoy goes away dispirited, sadder if not wiser, still
resolved to confront and beat IHR.
These scenes have a double meaning for the perceptive Revisionist,
and the second meaning is by no means deleterious. Most readers of
these pages should take heart from the glad tidings that Holocaust
Revisionism "is cropping up every place," according to Rabbi Hier of
the SWC, who also notes that "we see this sort of thing all the time,"
and "[the IHR] is the largest racist and anti-Semitic group in the
country . . . well-funded, spread out all over the country, with
newspapers, radio and television outlets . . . just the tip of the
iceberg." (Elsewhere in the movie, IHR is referred to in no less
flattering terms: as part of "an empire of hate -- connected, well-
funded," and a group of "liars and bullies," whose books "you find when
you look under rocks.")
Still, the obsessive (he's embarrassed even his eldest son with
his fixation on Auschwitz) Mermelstein-Nimoy is not about to give up.
He draws up a list of 16 lawyers whom he contacts one by one, all of
whom also turn him down. Through all this, the hero is given spiritual
sustenance by visits to his homemade Holocaust museum, where he
reminisces in view of the old shoes, artifacts made from barbed wire,
cakes of soap, pictures and other memorabilia he has accumulated over
the years.
Then wife Jane has an idea: why not contact William Cox, a
Gentile lawyer who has done business with Mermelstein in the past but
curiously was not on his list of potential attorneys. Cox, who is
portrayed by Dabney Coleman as the very stereotype of the "lovable
curmudgeon" into which TV alchemy can always be counted on to transform
ideologically acceptable cranks, ultimately accepts, after the required
drama of furst turning Mermelstein-Nimoy down and then waking him up
at 2 a.m. to say he'll take the case, supposedly PRO BONO, i.e.,
without fee. And although Cox doesn't know "how much these liars and
bullies are willing to pour into the case," after communing with
himself among the paraphernalia of his Holocaust museum Mermelstein-
Nimoy courageously decides to go ahead with the task of making everyone
remember the last words he ever heard from his father, the plea to son
Mel to "never forget" (oddly enough, Mermelstein seems to have
forgotten these words when writing his allegedly autobiographical _By
Bread Alone_ -- they appear nowhere therein).
On December 18, 1980, Cox writes IHR to tell the Institute of his
client's acceptance of the reward offer, enclosing Mermelstein-Nimoy's
"evidence" of gassing -- a sworn statement in which he details his
witnessing his mother and three sisters enter an Auschwitz "gas
chamber," and a list of other alleged witnesses to bolster his story.
A ploy is hit on by which IHR will be sued for breach of contract
if it does not respond within thirty days, and Mermelstein-Nimoy sweats
out the waiting period, dogging his family, Cox, and bemused letter
carriers to make sure that the all-important IHR response (which in any
case would be addressed to Cox) has NOT come. It doesn't (not by the
Cox-Mermelstein deadline, anyway), and it's off to the courts.
What does come to Mermelstein-Nimoy's home through the mail in
this deceitful drama, however, is some "hair of a gassed Jewish victim"
and "pure Jewish fat" (a piece of soap). The clear implication of this
emotive scene (Mermelstein's young daughter opens the envelope and
shrieks in terror) is that the "haters and deniers" have violated the
sanctity of Mermelstein's hearth and home with something base and
obscene. That the Germans made soap neither from Jews nor anyone else
during the war, and that there would be no way to distinguish the hair
of a "gassed" concentration inmate from that of a "survivor," since the
Germans customarily deloused the shorn hair of inmates, are facts lost
on television audiences, most of whom must think: "What despicable
monsters these Revisionists must be!"
By now Mermelstein-Nimoy is reeling from the (imaginary) onslaught
of the "bigots." His family is buckling too: the kids (except for his
adoring daughter) haven't been supportive enough, and even his wife is
dubious about pursuing the case against the Institute. By now the
television Mermelsteins are convinced they're dealing with the whole
phantasmagoria of "extremists" and "terrorists," and that their very
property and lives may be in danger.
There are other reverses as Mermelstein-Nimoy begins to search for
other "eyewitnesses" to corroborate his story. His first choice, an
old woman of evidently long-standing acquaintance, comes unglued at the
mention of Auschwitz: the Gestapo still has the habit of dropping in
on her in the dead of night (he doesn't find a better "eyewitness" in
the drama, although in real life Mermelstein offered Miklos Nyiszli,
dead for some thirty years, to back up his reward claim).
There are still more pressures on Mermelstein-Nimoy. His pallet
manufacturing business begins to suffer because he can't remember
delivery promises, so consumed he is by his obsession with the case.
Next, an anonymous miscreant throws a dead pig on his doorstep, and
Mermelstein-Nimoy receives an anonymous phone call one night to inform
him that his business is on fire (after Mermelstein-Nimoy and son race
to the pallet company, the call proves to be a false alarm).
Nerves wearing thin, Mermelstein-Nimoy and Cox infiltrate a
meeting of the "National Legion of Patriots," at which the speaker
(conveniently at that very moment) is in the middle of a harangue about
the myth of the Holocaust. Mermelstein-Nimoy, enraged by what is in
fact a pretty fair summation of the basic Revisionist case, tries to
shout him down. Cox wrestles him out of the meeting as the audience,
faces red with bulging veins and contorted with hate, scream insults
and slurs -- it's a far trek from _Star Trek_ for the poker-faced icon
who was Mr. Spock.
Then it's on to the IHR's first deposition of Mermelstein-Nimoy,
in which he is sworn to answer questions from the Institute fully and
truthfully. This is of course represented as a sadistic ordeal, with
both IHR's counsel, Richard Fusilier, and this reviewer (both of us
named) harassing Mel with cruel questions about his experiences at
Auschwitz. To show how sneaky IHR's director is, I am chastised for
smuggling a microcassette recorder into the deposition in my jacket
pocket, which Mel discovers -- a real feat since microcassette
recorders were not even on the market at that time. (And I cannot let
it pass that the actor who played me was plump, gray-haired, 25 years
too old, and decidedly uglier than me -- a personal insult for which
I'll forgive Mel if he will only let us alone.)
After the harrowing ordeal of the exhausting deposition (the
plaintiff was suffered the indignity of having to answer hard questions
about his concentration-camp experiences), Mermelstein-Nimoy confesses
to his family that he might lose the case because of Fusilier's tricky
questions or because, at a key moment, he might forget or get crossed
up on some tiny detail about the gas chambers. But finally there comes
the great and historic day in the courtroom of Judge Thomas Johnson,
who after hearing a heart-rending witness-stand account of
Mermelstein's personal experiences at Auschwitz, and his promise to his
father "never to forget," takes judicial notice that the Holocaust is a
fact not subject to reasonable dispute. Much joy and celebration. The
End (of this docudrama, anyway).
If the viewer has remained awake through this dishwater-dull,
soap-operatic nonsense, he or she may be interested in an accounting of
what was actually true and what was demonstrably false in _Never
Forget_. In fact, a lengthy list of material distortions and
falsehoods, as well as lesser violations of the truth made in hopes of
livening up the turgid Melodrama -- could be compiled. Here are just a
few of them:
- The drama represents the initial letter sent to Mermelstein as part
of a deliberate IHR plot to harass the "survivor." In fact the letter
re-opening the reward offer was undertaken entirely on the initiative
of the late David McCalden, then director of IHR, who consulted neither
the Institute's board nor its founder. (The announcement that the
$50,000 reward offer for proof of gassings at Auschwitz had officially
expired was made at the Second International Revisionist Conference.
The full and detailed story of the reward offer is told in the booklet
_Worldwide Growth and Impact of Holocaust Revisionism_, which is still
available from IHR.) McCalden was shortly discharged, after subsequent
incidents gave further evidence of irresponsibility, and even
hostility, to the interests of IHR.
All the same, in regard to the initial letter to Mermelstein,
_Never Forget_ veers, briefly and unexpectedly, toward something of the
truth, as opposed to his counsels' representations at the time and
subsequently. In his *actual* letter of December 18, 1980, Cox
represented that the way in which the evidence submitted to claim the
reward would be judged was still undecided, suggesting that the
proceeding be televised and then voted on by the TV audience.
Thereafter, Mermelstein, Cox, and their successors swore ignorance of
any other proposed method of judgement -- *including the specification
that IHR would choose the judges -- despite the fact that a sheet of
rules including IHR's choice of the judges was routinely sent with
every reward application.* _Never Forget_, however, has Cox speaking
dismissively of the Institute's "kangaroo court," and not tailoring his
case to a jury of couch potatoes; and Cox makes quite clear in the
drama that his strategy is based on luring IHR into the courts.
- Never in any of his depositions has Mermelstein ever referred to
"gassed" hair, "Jewish fat" or a dead pig being delivered to his home.
In fact, the closest such incident this reviewer can recall was the
depositing of a dead pig, owned up to one Irv Rubin, on the porch of a
Jew who'd run afoul of Rubin through his alleged sympathies for the
Palestinians, about five years ago. Rubin, chief of the terroristic
Jewish Defense League, once stated on Los Angeles television that
"Mermelstein is one of our financial supporters," although Mel denies
supporting the JDL or ever meeting Rubin.
- The reviewer has never heard of a "National Legion of Patriots," nor
is there any record of Mel ever crashing any meeting at which Holocaust
Revisionism was being promoted. Out of exemplary fairness, however,
IHR did invide William Cox to speak briefly at the Third International
Revisionist Conference held in Los Angeles in November of 1981. Cox
appeared, said his piece (chastising the audience for attending a
conference sponsored by a group with such anti-Semitic views), and was
treated politely.
- The claim put in Nimoy-Mermelstein's mouth during his deposition,
that his brother, like his father, was "worked to death" in the coal
mines of the Auschwitz sub-camp at Jaworzno, is a fabrication of the
docudrama. In the actual deposition Mermelstein says nothing of the
circumstances of his brother's alleged death; elsewhere, Mermelstein
has claimed that his brother was shot for refusing to take part in an
evacuation march (which to the German guards could only have been
tantamount to an escape attempt). A small thing, perhaps, but an
irrefutable indication of the liberties _Never Forget_ has taken with
the legal record -- and perhaps a sign of Mermelstein's continuing
inclination to alter his stories, or at least acquiesce in errors made
by others (during the deposition in question, Mermelstein claimed his
father died "of torture, hunger, and also because of inability to see
his son suffer and being beaten and tortured," but in an article which
appeared in the _Los Angeles Herald-Examiner_ on February 15, 1981,
reporter Timothy Carlson quoted Mermelstein as saying that he had seen
his *father* as well as his mother and sisters led off to the gas
chambers. And there is solid evidence for *other* Mermelstein versions
of his father's death.)
- There is no record of Mel ever receiving a crank call that his
business had been set aflame. However, on the night of July 4, 1984
the office and warehouse of the Institute for Historical Review was
totally destroyed by arson, a crime that the authorities have never
seriously investigated and which set the IHR back by years and some
$400,000.
- Whatever were the difficulties Mermelstein had in recruiting an
attorney at the outset (and they seem overdrawn to say the least),
there has been no shortage of free legal help through most of his ten-
year crusade against IHR and Revisionism: there has been a legion of
top-flight lawyers at his beck and call. He has enjoyed important
support from important segmants of the Jewish community (despite his
initial dismissal by those influential Jewish groups he first turned to
for help). Nor has the judiciary of Los Angeles County and the press
been anything except extremely supportive of him. The alleged "facts"
dramatized in the film are directly contradicted by the actual record.
It was IHR that was almost unable to file a timely answer to
Mermelstein's original complaint in 1980 because no lawyer, even noted
"civil rights" advocates in the area, would touch the case.
Fortunately, one attorney was found, Richard Fusilier, who agreed to
represent the IHR because no other attorney in the state of California
would take its case.
- In real life Mermelstein is not precisely the normal personality
portrayed by Leonard Nimoy. Nowhere in the film is there any mention
of the fact that he had been under psychiatric care long before IHR,
and the emotional distress its actions allegedly caused him, intruded
into his supposedly well-balanced mind and life.
- The drama portrays Mermelstein as a cooperative witness willing, if
not eager, to answer Fusilier's questions honestly and completely
during the first deposition. _Never Forget_ also depicts Mermelstein-
Nimoy as finally breaking down into heart-wrenching sobs when the
attorney's probing questions become just too much for an Auschwitz
"survivor" and "eyewitness" to his mother and sisters' "gassing" to
bear. But what in fact took place at that deposition (I was present)
was that Mermelstein proved a most elusive respondent: often he seemed
unwilling to give a straight answer to even the simplest questions,
misunderstanding them, waxing broadly philosophical, forgetting
inconvenient details, duelling back and forth with Fusilier and all in
all leading IHR's lawyer on a merry chase. At no time during the
entire deposition did Mermelstein shed a single tear. On the contrary,
he struck me as hostile, combative, and evasive throughout the entire
deposition.
- At the dramatic conclusion of _Never Forget_, Mermelstein-Nimoy
takes the witness stand during the crucial hearing at which Judge
Johnson ruled on Mermelstein's request for judicial notice that Jews
were gassed at Auschwitz during the summer of 1944. The docudrama has
Mermelstein touchingly recount the story of his promise to his father
to "never forget," whereupon Judge Johnson makes his historic ruling
and the movie ends reminding viewers that the fight against bigotry
and racism goes on. But of the drama's initial assurance that "all
legal proceedings portrayed [have been] based on actual transcripts and
documents" to the contrary, Mermelstein neither took the stand at that
hearing nor gave any testimony whatsoever -- the entire scene is pure
invention, devised to provide something of an emotional catharsis to
what remains a weak, and for the millions undoubtedly soporific, made-
for-television movie.
What has been the likely impact of this film on IHR and
Revisionism? To be sure, every trick in the smearer's arsenal has been
employed (subject to budget limitations, of course). Old hands at
Revisionism will immediately note the old trick of ascribing to their
enemies that which the Holocaust lobbyists, themselves, are guilty of,
thereby turning the truth right over onto its head. Reversed is the
fundamental fact that the purpose of Historical Revisionism is not to
hector the Mel Mermelsteins and similar blustering Holocaust small-fry
but to challenge the mighty, the entrenched establishments and
interests which profit from historical falsehood. IHR's only goal,
and its only weapon of self-defense, is "to bring history into accord
with the facts." In the longer view, Mermelstein and his allies will
appear simply as pawns of those much larger and more sinister entities.
That is why, despite _Never Forget_'s portrayal of Mermelstein as
a sympathetic underdog, it is not the Exterminationists who have
trouble recruiting lawyers or raising funds to exist, or who are
subjected to continuous barrages of threats, intimidation, assaults,
arsons, and even cold-blooded murder. Nor, despite the docudrama's
dark murmurings of IHR well-connectedness and far-flung resources, do
real-life Revisionists encounter the least bit of objectivity, let
alone sympathy, towards their concerns in the press or the
entertainment media -- in contrast to the automatic acceptance that
even the wooliest and most mean-spirited "survivor" accusations win
from these industries.
Above and beyond the Auschwitz lie itself, this is the Big Lie of
_Never Forget_ -- the whopper that the Revisionists are somehow
politically powerful, shrewd, bigoted, sadistic and well-connected,
while the Exterminationists are weak, innocent, and morally upright.
Not to worry, though. _Never Forget_'s liberties with fact are so
multifarious that it must fall of its own weight in the eyes of anyone
with the slightest knowledge of the facts of the case. Even Gloria
Allred, LA law's far-left, fervidly Zionist, cartoonishly "feminist"
firebrand, whose firm took over Mermelstein's case from Cox, angrily
denounced the film as "historically inaccurate," adding her own brand
of Revisionism to the stew.
And now comes the glimmer of truth, the blinding flash of the
obvious, as the great American political thinker Lawrence Dennis would
have put it. Clearly, the intended purpose of trying to slam, smear
and isolate the Revisionists is counterbalanced by two quite unintended
messages to the viewer: 1) Historical Revisionism is strong and
growing, and 2) the embattled but still mighty IHR is leading this
movement, which is of the gravest concern to the Establishment.
---End of article---
Article 4403 of alt.revisionism:
Xref: oneb soc.history:17582 alt.censorship:13661 alt.activism:28456 alt.revisionism:4403 alt.discrimination:9420 alt.conspiracy:20526 alt.politics.correct:5723 alt.journalism.criticism:985 talk.politics.misc:96201 talk.politics.mideast:35119
Path: oneb!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!utcsri!utnut!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!techbook.com!techbook.com!not-for-mail
From: dgannon@techbook.techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
Newsgroups: soc.history,alt.censorship,alt.activism,alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.correct,alt.journalism.criticism,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.mideast
Subject: "A Brief Introduction to Holocaust Revisionism", by Prof. Arthur Butz
Date: 2 Oct 1993 22:16:53 -0700
Organization: TECHbooks - Public Access
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From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 11, Number 2 (Summer 1991):
A Brief Introduction
to Holocaust Revisionism
ARTHUR R. BUTZ
Dr. Arthur R. Butz is an associate professor of electrical engineering
at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is also the author of
a major Revisionist study of the alleged Holocaust, _The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century_, as well as a member of the IHR _Journal_'s editorial
advisory committee. Earlier this year, as Revisionist attempts to spark
open debate on the Holocaust ignited controversy at Northwestern, Butz once
again found himself in the center of the storm. (For more on this,
including the key role played by IHR media project director Bradley Smith,
see the May and July 1991 issues of the _IHR Newsletter_.) At the height
of the controversy, Butz presented his view of the Holocaust story in a
succinct essay that appeared in the school paper, _The Daily Northwestern_,
May 13, 1991, under the title "A Short Introduction to the Study of
Holocaust Revisionism." Here is the complete text of his piece, which
includes a correction of an error that appeared in the Daily Northwestern
version:
I see three principal reasons for the widespread but erroneous belief in
the legend of millions of Jews killed by the Germans during World War II:
U.S. and British troops found horrible piles of corpses in the West German
camps they captured in 1945 (e.g. Dachau and Belsen); there are no longer
large communities of Jews in Poland; and historians generally support the
legend.
During both world wars, Germany was forced to fight typhus, carried by
lice in the constant traffic with the East. That is why all accounts of
entry into the German concentration camps speak of shaving of hair and
showering and other delousing procedures, such as treatment of quarters
with the pesticide Zyklon. That was also the main reason for a high death
rate in the camps, and for the crematoria that existed in all.
When Germany collapsed in chaos, then of course all such defenses
ceased, and typhus and other diseases became rampant in the camps, which
quartered mainly political prisoners, ordinary criminals, homosexuals,
conscientious objectors and Jews conscripted for labor. Hence the horrible
scenes, which however had nothing to do with "extermination" or any
deliberate policy. Moreover, the West German camps involved were not the
alleged "extermination camps," which were all in Poland (e.g. Auschwitz and
Treblinka) and which were all evacuated or shut down before capture by the
Soviets, who found no such scenes.
The "Final Solution" spoken of in the German documents was a program
of evacuation, resettlement and deportation of Jews with the ultimate
objective of expulsion from Europe. During the war Jews of various
nationalities were being moved east, as one stage in this Final Solution.
The legend claims that the motion was mainly for extermination purposes.
The great majority of the millions allegedly exterminated were East
European - not German or West European - Jews. For that reason study of
the problem via population statistics has been difficult to impossible, but
it is a fact that there are no longer large communities of Jews in Poland.
However, the Germans were only one of several parties involved in moving
Jews around. The Soviets deported virtually all of the Jews of eastern
Poland to their interior in 1940. After the war, with Polish and other
Jews pouring out of the East into occupied West Germany, the Zionists moved
large numbers to Palestine, and the United States and other countries
absorbed many Jews, in most cases under conditions making impossible a
numerical accounting. Moreover, the Polish borders were changed
drastically at the end of the war; the country was literally moved west.
Historians generally support the legend, but there are precedents for
nearly incomprehensible blindness on the part of scholars. For example,
throughout the Middle Ages even the Pope's political enemies conceded his
false claim that the 4th century Emperor Constantine had ceded rule of the
west to the Pope, although all knew very well that Constantine had been
succeeded by more emperors. Near unanimity among the academics is
especially suspect when there exist great political pressures; in some
countries, Holocaust Revisionists have been prosecuted.
It is easy to show that the extermination legend merits skepticism.
Even the casual reader of the Holocaust literature knows that during the
war virtually nobody acted as though it were happening. Thus it is common
to berate the Vatican, the Red Cross and the Allies (especially the
intelligence agencies) for their ignorance and inaction, and to explain
that the Jews generally did not resist deportation because they did not
know what was in store for them. If you add all this up you have the
strange claim that for almost three years German trains, operating on a
continental scale in densely civilized regions of Europe, were regularly
and systematically moving millions of Jews to their deaths, and nobody
noticed except for a few of our Jewish leaders who were making public
"extermination" claims.
On closer examination even those few Jewish leaders were not acting as
though it were happening. Ordinary communications between the occupied and
neutral countries were open, and they were in contact with the Jews whom
the Germans were deporting, who thus could not have been in ignorance of
"extermination" if those claims had any validity.
This incredible ignorance must also be attributed to Hans Oster's
department in German military intelligence, correctly labeled "the
veritable general staff of the opposition to Hitler" in a recent review.
What we are offered in evidence was gathered after the war, in trials.
The evidence is almost all oral testimony and "confessions." Without the
evidence of these trials there would be no significant evidence of
"extermination." One must pause and ponder this carefully. Were trials
needed to determine that the Battle of Waterloo happened? The bombings of
Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The slaughter in Cambodia? Yet
this three-year program, of continental scope, claiming millions of
victims, requires trials to argue its reality. I am not arguing that the
trials were illegal or unfair; I am arguing that such historical logic as
the legend rests on must not be countenanced. Such events cannot happen
without generating commensurate and contemporaneous evidence for their
reality, just as a great forest fire cannot take place without producing
smoke. One may as well believe that New York City was burned down, if
confessions to the deed can be produced.
Detailed consideration of the specific evidence put forward in support
of the legend has been a focus of the Revisionist literature and cannot be
undertaken here, but I shall mention one point. The claim of the legend is
that there were no technical means provided for the specific task of
extermination, and that means originally provided for other purposes did
double duty in improvised arrangements. Thus the Jews were allegedly
gassed with the pesticide Zyklon, and their corpses disappeared into the
crematoria along with the deaths from "ordinary" causes (the ashes or other
remains of millions of victims never having been found). Surely any
thoughtful person must be skeptical.
[end of article]
[Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box
1306, Torrance, CA 90505, USA. Subscription rate: $40 per year, domestic.
$50 per year, foreign.]
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From: dgannon@techbook.techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
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Subject: Prof. Faurisson Responds to J.-C. Pressac's Ludicrous Book [Part 2]
Date: 2 Oct 1993 22:19:30 -0700
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Summary: This concludes the article.
From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 11, Number 2 (Summer 1991):
AUSCHWITZ: TECHNIQUE & OPERATION OF THE GAS CHAMBERS
Or,
Improvised Gas Chambers & Casual Gassings at Auschwitz & Birkenau,
According to J.-C. Pressac (1989)
Part II
ROBERT FAURISSON
In 1983, Klarsfeld and Pressac published a French version of the
_Auschwitz Album_ (published by Seuil).^8 Pressac drew up a misleading plan
of Birkenau (p. 43) on which, in particular, he obscured the surroundings
of the large Birkenau crematories. Specifically, he concealed from his
readers that, immediately next to Krema III, there was a SPORTPLATZ
(playing field) which served as a soccer pitch for the inmates, and that
right next to the Sportplatz there was a large hospital area. These simple
topographical specifications (about which Pressac is rather discreet in his
large book) render absurd the thesis that the crematoria were supposedly
the culmination of a horrible extermination process accompanied by cries,
fire, flames and the smell of burning flesh. Can you imagine teams of
soccer players and crowds of spectators at the various matches, just a few
steps away from those horrors?
Pressac is careless when he challenges the Revisionists to prove that
in the central camp the swimming pool was used by the inmates. I will let
a former Auschwitz prisoner answer for me. He was a professor in the
Faculty of Medicine at the University of Strasbourg who, while affirming in
a rather vague way the homicidal gassings at Auschwitz, was just as willing
to write about the distractions available to the inmates:
On Sunday afternoons, there were soccer, basketball and WATER
POLO matches [my emphasis] to the ardent cheers of the spectators:
people need very little to distract them from the dangers that
threatened them! The SS administration allowed regular amusements for
the prisoners, even on weekdays. A movie theater showed Nazi
newsreels and sentimental films and a very popular cabaret gave
presentations often attended by the SS authorities. Finally, there
was a very creditable orchestra, made up originally only of Polish
musicians and replaced later by a new, high-quality group made up of
musicians of all nationalities, mostly Jews (Marc Klein, _Observations
et reflexions sur les camps de concentration nazis_, taken from the
journal _Etudes germaniques_ (No. 3, 1946), 1948, p. 31).
I could cite many other examples of such activities, but I shall
refrain from doing so, because where human beings are so "concentrated,"
life becomes unbearable in spite of all; promiscuity, epidemics, the
struggle to live and to gain individual advantage make such an existence
frightful, especially in time of war. But we must not add false horrors to
the real horrors. Furthermore, the camps run by the Soviets, including the
ones they "liberated" in Germany before filling them again with their
political adversaries (beginning with the National Socialists), were even
more horrible, according to the statements of people like Margaret
Buber-Neumann, who experienced them both.
Pressac entitles one of his chapters "Auschwitz According to the
Revisionists. Photographic Exhibition of the Famous Holiday Camp, KL
Auschwitz" (p. 507). The irony and the slanderous insinuation here conceal
his embarrassment at reproducing photographs which are not consistent with
the various kinds of horrors supposedly found in the camp. He tries to
cast suspicion on certain of these photographs by pointing out that they
come from "Revisionist sources." He is obviously unaware that many of
them are from the album kept by Durrfeld, an engineer who was one of the
leading executives in the factories at Auschwitz. The file reference "DUE"
(for DUERRFELD) ought to have alerted him: the Durrfeld trial is
well-known to historians of Auschwitz, but apparently not to our
pharmacist-turned-amateur-historian.
Involuntary Contributions to Revisionism
Here and there throughout the text, one finds information (very often
in the form of photographic documents) which tends to reinforce the
position of the Revisionists. Here are some samples:
- The story of one Rablin, a prisoner employed in disinfecting with Zyklon
B, proves just how dangerous this terrible gas was to use. Rablin, only
slightly exposed to the gas, was hospitalized and took two months to
recover (p. 25); it is paradoxical that the Germans tried to cure of gas
poisoning a man whom, the story goes, they should have killed with
precisely that gas;
- The deposition of inmate Joseph Odi describes the procedure for using
Zyklon B in the disinfestation gas chambers, a procedure that has often
been described by the Revisionists and that shows the dangers of the
operation. Although suitable for clothing, this method would not work with
human beings. Above all, the witness reveals that the cases containing the
cans of Zyklon B were stored in the THEATERGEBAUDE (theater building) and
that transporting it from there to the gas disinfection gas chambers was
done with a Health Service vehicle standing by. The Revisionists know all
this, but it is interesting to see Pressac's book reminding us of two
points which should help clear both the Carmelites of Auschwitz and the Red
Cross of the charges too often made against them. Today the Carmelites are
reproached with occupying a place in which the Germans are supposed to have
warehoused gas used to kill human beings. In reality, the gas was used to
kill lice and thereby to protect human health. The Red Cross vehicle was
there to protect against the accidents that were always possible with
Zyklon B. It played no role in murder; it, too, was there to safeguard
men's health (p. 41); it is noteworthy that J. Odi is precise when he talks
about the disinfection gas chambers and very vague on the subject of the
homicidal gas chambers; besides, he believes that men were gassed in the
disinfection gas chambers!;
- The beautiful photograph showing an impressive complex of eight
disinfestation gas chambers in that part of the Birkenau camp traditionally
called "the Gypsy camp" (ENTWESUNGSANLAGE ZIGEUNERLAGER) contradicts the
thesis that the Germans intended to exterminate the Gypsies (p. 63);
- An astonishing photo taken in the ZENTRAL SAUNA shows a group of naked
inmates, apparently in good health, carrying their shoes from a vast shower
room (50 shower heads) to the "drying room" on the "clean" side of the
disinfection area (Trockenraum, reine Seite): an unthinkable scene in an
"extermination camp" (p. 80; see Part I, p. 26 in _The Journal of
Historical Review_, Spring 1991.)
- One photograph shows some inmates in their striped uniforms employed in
disinfecting clothing in front of a battery of three autoclaves; here the
disinfection is done by steam; elsewhere, it may be done by warm air, with
Zyklon B, or even with other gases; the true concern of the Germans was to
exterminate vermin, not men, by any and all means (p. 82). Enough can
never be said about their obsessive fear of typhus; "there were in fact
about 25 Zyklon-B delousing chambers of different sizes operating in the
camp" (p. 550), and a great number of disinfection chambers that operated
in other ways, without using gas;
- A sheet of operating instructions for coke-fired incineration furnaces
points out that the furnace fire bars must be cleaned of clinker and the
cinders removed every evening; these ovens, Pressac tells us, could only
operate 12 out of every 24 hours, not 24 hours a day as claimed by the
believers in the extermination myth (p. 136, 224, 227);
- To replace Krema I, the Germans had considered constructing a "new
Krema," to be built a short distance from its predecessor, near the SS
hospital and the Kommandantur. Pressac acknowledges that this "new Krema"
had no homicidal gas chamber. He says that the construction was finally
transferred to Birkenau and that Krema II and Krema III at Birkenau were,
in effect, replicas of what had originally been planned for Auschwitz I;
the plan remained the same. As a result, Krema II and III were designed
without homicidal gas chambers (p. 33, 140-143);
- Page 143 is particularly interesting. Pressac sees only inoffensive
Leichenkeller in this plan, but when the same plan serves for the
construction of the Birkenau Krema, here he arbitrarily dubs the
Leichenkeller either "disrobing rooms" for the victims, or "homicidal gas
chambers." As a matter of fact, the existence of this plan proves that in
the minds of the Germans and, in particular, of Walter Dejaco, Krema II and
III at Birkenau, simply replications of the Kremas that had originally
been intended to be near the Kommandantur and the SS hospital in the main
Auschwitz camp, could not have had any homicidal purpose (this is confirmed
on page 200, where we read that Krema II and III were "designed without
homicidal gas chambers");
- A surprising photograph, dating probably from May 1945, proves that the
roof of Krema I was used as a dance floor, decorated with a red star and
hammer and sickle as well as the Polish and Russian flags; people, says
Pressac, danced on the roof of the "gas chamber"; I suggest that, if at
that time anyone had given credence to the myth of the gassings, such a
profanation would not have been permitted. Some months after the
liberation of Auschwitz, evidently, the myth of the gas chambers had not
yet taken the form in which we know it today (p. 149);
- Pressac reproduces a whole series of documents from the Weimar archives
relating to engineer Kurt Prufer, responsible for the design and
construction of the "Topf & Sons" ovens; Prufer was arrested, imprisoned,
and interrogated after the war; nothing, in either his papers or his
interrogations, provided the slightest proof of the existence of homicidal
gas chambers in the crematoria (p. 93, 94, 191, and 371); if the documents
that Pressac used contained so many criminal traces, Kurt Prufer and other
members of the firm's staff could have been easily broken down;
- On 12 August 1942, Commandant Hoess distributed 40 copies of a
SONDERBEFEHL (special order) drafted as follows:
A case of indisposition with slight symptoms of poisoning by
hydrocyanic gas which occurred today makes it necessary to warn all
those participating in the gassings (Vergasungen) and all other SS
members that in particular on opening rooms used for gassing SS not
wearing masks must wait at least five hours and keep at a distance of
at least 15 meters from the chamber. In addition, particular
attention should be paid to the wind direction. - The gas being used
at present contains less odorous warning agent and is therefore
especially dangerous. - The SS garrison doctor declines all
responsibility for any accident that should occur in the case where
these directives have not been complied with by the SS members (p.
201).
The word used to designate the disinfection gassings is Vergasungen. The
above directive confirms what the Revisionists have constantly said about
the danger of using Zyklon B. If at Auschwitz incessant and massive
gassing operations had been carried out, especially under such conditions
as we have been told, accidents involving the SS personnel would have been
innumerable. Neither the camp commandant, nor the chief medical officer
responsible for the garrison, nor the other doctors, nor the SS would
have tolerated such accidents (p. 201); and if we must look at it from the
point of view of the legend, the "homicidal gassings" could not have gone
off normally inasmuch as the Jewish personnel would not have been able to
accomplish the task of entering a cyanide-treated space to drag out
thousands of cyanide-impregnated corpses; and the criminal enterprise would
immediately have ground to a halt for lack of personnel to carry it through
successfully;^9
- A telex dated 18 December 1942 reveals that during the month of December
the work of both the inmates and the free civilian laborers had to be
interrupted several times for delousing and disinfestation (Entlausung
und Entwesung). The camp had to be isolated, and civilian workers had not
been able to leave for six months. A period of leave from 23 December
1942 to 4 January 1943 was therefore essential (p. 210);
- In the archives of the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, there is an
album of 397 photos, taken by the Germans themselves during the war, which
show construction at Auschwitz, including that of the crematoria. This is
the most important information in Pressac's book. It is outrageous that
this album has been kept hidden for so long, and that the publication of
the photographs is being done in driblets, so to speak, as was the case
with the photos from the _Auschwitz Album_. The album of which I speak is
the _Bauleitung Album_ (the Construction Office album). The photographs
therein confirm that Auschwitz was a prison or internment camp with nothing
out of the ordinary about it. Pressac acknowledges that all the inmates
we see at work appear to be as healthy as the civilian workers (p. 331,
339). Is he perhaps concealing from us photographs from this album which
would give us a clearer idea of what went on at Auschwitz, or which would
correct what we think we know about each room of the large Kremas and about
the changes eventually made in those rooms?;
- Regarding a time sheet indicating the make-up of a crew constructing a
chimney for Krema IV or V, Pressac comments that "the composition of the
gang employed is typical, with 12 civilians and 20 prisoners working as
bricklayer's laborers" (p. 412); so there was no possibility of secrets on
that side either;
- One plan proves that the Germans planned to construct an enormous
hospital sector covering all of the section of Birkenau known as "Mexico."
Pressac says this fact is "a real godsend for the Revisionists." He admits
that "there is an INCOMPATIBILITY [his capitals] in the creation of a
health camp a few hundred yards from four Krematorien where, according to
official history, people were exterminated on a arge scale" (p. 512). And
his commentary continues in the same direction. We await his parry. It
does not come. Pressac's embarrassment is plain to see. He thinks perhaps
he can manage to get out of the difficulty by saying that we ought not to
underestimate the capacity for "doublethink" of the SS hierarchy, which
blindly executed orders even when they were totally contradictory. I note
that, as I said above (p. 133), Pressac is silent about the existence, near
the crematoria, of a large hospital area containing 18 barracks^10; more
important, in his large book he persists in concealing the existence of
this hospital area. A site plan dated 21 June 1944 shows that the Germans
planned to construct, alongside the Birkenau railroad ramp, a total of six
vegetable halls, each with a capacity of 930 cubic meters in size - a
curious initiative in an "extermination camp" (p. 533-534).
The Bankruptcy, According to Pressac,
of Traditional History
Pressac draws up a bankruptcy report: no one before him has been able
to prove the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz and
Birkenau. He recognizes that the historians, the judges, the Soviets,
the Poles, the arraigners of the "war criminals" as well as the accusers
of the Revisionists have accumulated false proofs and worthless arguments
(the Revisionists, too, are supposed to have failed in their endeavors).
He writes at the end of his study, just before the appendices:
This study already demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of the
traditional history (and hence also of the methods and criticisms of
the Revisionists), a history based for the most part on testimonies,
assembled according to the mood of the moment, truncated to fit an
arbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of uneven
value and without any connection with one another (p. 264).
The celebrated work of Eugene Aroneanu, which has for so long been a
sort of Exterminationist bible (_Camps de concentration_, preface by
Jacques Billiet, director of France's War Crimes Information Service,
Office francais d'edition, 1946), he calls "an historical monstrosity,"
"an incoherent and self-contradictory whole" (p. 15). On the post-war
trials, he writes that "the tons of Zyklon B ordered by the camps were
attributed to homicidal use without any verification." And, as I mentioned
above (Part I, p. 38 in _The Journal of Historical Review_, Spring 1991),
he makes the following remark, which will likely upset his Exterminationist
friends:
By far the greater part [of Zyklon B] (over 95 per cent) was destined
for delousing (effects and buildings) while only a very small quantity
(less than 5 per cent) had been used for homicidal gassings (Ibidem).
He is of the opinion that the American-conducted trial of Bruno
Tesch, one of the officials of the Degesch company and thus responsible
for the production of Zyklon B, was a "masquerade"; the court was not
concerned with the technical question, merely with the verbal testimony of
one of his employees. In 1946, Pressac writes, simple malicious gossip
could easily lead to someone being hanged. That was the case with Bruno
Tesch (and, I should add, with his associate, K. Weinbacher) (p. 16-17);
see in this regard the revealing article by William B. Lindsey, "Zyklon B,
Auschwitz and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch," _The Journal of Historical
Review_, Autumn 1983, p. 261-303.
The Soviet film _Chronicles of the Liberation of the Camp_, 1945 shows
a gas-tight door as belonging to a homicidal gas chamber; in view of its
location, says Pressac, it was a door to a disinfection gas chamber (p.
41). Further on, he talks about the work of the Soviet Commission of
Inquiry as a "completely put-up job" and an "'historic' [sic] montage" (p.
46); the unfortunate thing is that the Nuremberg Tribunal "took judicial
notice" of that work in the name of Article 21 of its charter.
At Birkenau, the vast hall of the Zentral Sauna, where the inmates
disrobed (Auskleideraum) before showering, possessed an impressive number
of tubular radiators. The Poles removed those radiators because, according
to Pressac, this concern for the comfort of the inmates conflicts, in the
minds of present-day visitors, with the location of the ruins of Krema IV
and its "gas chambers," only 100 meters away (p. 78). He might have added
that the Poles had dealt in the same manner with the "arrest cells" in
Block 11, which the tourists visit in great numbers. I'm the one who
called Pressac's attention to this mania of the Poles for removing heating
apparatuses, whether for their own use or to give a crueler impression of
the conditions under which the inmates are supposed to have lived.
At the Nuremberg Trial, a perfectly ordinary German document dealing
with the crematory ovens was presented as proof of the extermination.
Pressac sees there an example of "the stupid way in which the documents of
the defeated were 'evaluated' by a tribunal of the victors" (p. 106).
A certain reconstruction by the Poles after the war is "far from being
a faithful reproduction of the original state" because of its exaggerations
and its simplifications (p. 108).
The fact, according to Pressac, that at a given time in 1942 the
Germans used 2 to 3 per cent of the Zyklon B for murder and 97 or 98 per
cent for disinfection "totally invalidates" the interpretation of certain
documents by "the traditional historians" (p. 188).
Sometimes naming him and sometimes not, Pressac underscores the errors
or the deceptions of Georges Wellers. The latter's argument based on the
ventilation system of the Leichenkeller is, for Pressac, contradicted and
indeed completely demolished by the facts (p. 289). Wellers' "quite
erroneous" and "quite unfounded" interpretation deceived the lawyers of
LICRA (the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism) who
pleaded against Faurisson (p. 355). In citing transcriptions of eyewitness
testimony, Wellers has made cuts when those testimonies contain
improbabilities, without any indication to the reader that he has done so
(p. 479). The plan he gave of Auschwitz (_Les Chambres a gaz ant
existe/Des documents, des temoignages, des chiffres_, Gallimard, 1981, p.
12-13) is of "a very mediocre quality as regards many details," although
Pressac doesn't go so far as to use the word "falsification" (p. 165-166).
What is striking is that this was the plan which hung for all to see in the
courtroom at the Frankfurt trial and which Hermann Langbein reproduced in
his book about that trial (_Der Auschwitz Prozess, Eine Dokumentation_,
Frankfurt, Europaische Verlaganstalt, 1965, p. 932-933 [not 930-931 as
Pressac mistakenly indicates]).
The supposed camouflage around Krema II and III is, according to
Pressac, a product of the imagination of the "traditional historians" (p.
341).
Jan Sehn, the Polish investigative magistrate who prepared the trials
of Rudolf Hoess and of many other SS men, "made a change" in a German
document while reproducing it as a copy allegedly identical to the original
(p. 454). Nevertheless, Pressac is careful not to be too harsh with this
investigative magistrate, to whom we owe a hundred lies about Auschwitz
- to name one, the lie of the "nearly 60,000 persons in 24 hours" gassed
at Birkenau (Jan Sehn, _Le Camp de concentration d'Oswiecim-Brzezinka_,
Wydawnictwo Prawnicze, Warsaw, 1961, page 132). It is also to Sehn that we
owe the "gigantic ditches" in the open air (as many as eight?) where, "in
August 1944, the figure of 24,000 incinerations per day was attained" (with
or without the crematoria?) (Ibid., page 148). However, the aerial photos
taken by the Allies on 25 August 1944 show absolutely nothing of the kind
(D. Brugioni and R. Poirier, _The Holocaust Revisited_, Washington, CIA,
February 1979, pages 9-11).
In 1981 I was brought to trial in Paris by the LICRA and many other
organizations. The principal lawyer for the LICRA was Maitre Bernard
Jouanneau. From the pages Pressac devotes to this trial and to this lawyer
it is evident that the author believes that many of the documents which
they used against me do not, in reality, prove the existence of the
homicidal gas chambers in the least. Not one of the eyewitness testimonies
that Maitre Jouanneau introduced had any real value. As for the technical
arguments offered by Jouanneau, all of them were worthless, and sometimes
"disastrous." Lastly, the lawyer outrageously abused the theory according
to which the Germans, to hide their crime, used a "code" or "camouflage"
(p. 554-556).
Pressac's inconsistencies have their amusing aspects. He remarks on
the dishonesty or incompetence of the Exterminationists but, at the same
time, wants at all costs to save the Exterminationist theory. Thus he is
reduced to flattering his friends for qualities that supposedly make up for
their faults. And when he flatters, he doesn't do it by halves - he
bootlicks: Maitre Jouanneau's demonstration was based on a mass of errors
but it was . . . "superb" (p. 556).
Manipulation of Testimonies
In a work that professes to be technical, one ought first to describe
the scene of the crime, then examine the weapon used in the crime and the
material proofs of the crime, in order, finally, to review the testimonies.
Pressac, who has no understanding of method, opens all of his chapters with
... the testimonies. It must be said that this is a way of clouding the
reader's normal capacity for judgment, since these "testimonies" posit the
existence of the homicidal gas chambers as a basic principle.
The quality of the testimonies that Pressac invokes is pitiful.
Sometimes he acknowledges that himself, but he often seeks to save these
testimonies from discredit, by means of the most oversubtle devices.
Rudolf Hoess is presumed to have written _Commandant at Auschwitz_ and
Miklos Nyiszli supposedly wrote _Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account of
Mengele's Infamous Death Camp_, two testimonies offered as essential.
Hoess lived for several years at Auschwitz, and Nyiszli supposedly lived
there for six months as an inmate. But what these two "witnesses" write,
for example, about the ventilation of the homicidal gas chambers,
constitutes, according to Pressac, an enormous technical error. On this
point they told the opposite of "the truth" (p. 16).
Alter Fajnzylberg, Filip Muller and Rudolf Hoess affirm things that
are "practically impossible," or "not corresponding to the facts," that
"cast a doubt," are "wrong," "contrary to reality," "unlikely" (p. 126-12
7). The "errors" committed by Hoess "throughout his autobiography" have an
explanation which Pressac brandishes proudly and emphasizes in bold-face
type: HE WAS PRESENT, WITHOUT SEEING (p. 128). But, if that is the case,
he wasn't a witness! How could he be present and not see? How can one be
the commandant of an "extermination camp" and not see the instrument of
"exterminating" at least a million (?) people? How was this commandant
able to stress the dangers of Zyklon in 1942 (see above, p. 137-138) and
then in 1946 decree that the dangers were non-existent (see below, p.
172-173, note 9)?
As for the eyewitness testimony, so often invoked, of SS man Pery
Broad, the form and the tone of it, Pressac tells us, "sound false."
Broad's writings, which we owe to the Poles, cannot be sincere. They are
"colored by a rather too flagrant Polish patriotism." The Broad manuscript
is not known. It has all been "slightly" reworked by the Poles (his
quotation marks around "slightly" imply that the rework was not slight!).
But what does it matter, asks Pressac: despite the discrepancies between
the various witnesses, some homicidal gassings did take place in Krema I -
that is an established fact (p. 128). "Established"? By whom? By what?
He does not say.
The testimony of Szlamy Dragon elicits the following commentary:
This is physically impossible [...]. I do not think that this
witness was intentionally misleading, but he was following the
tendency to exaggerate which seems to have been the general rule at
the time of the liberation and which is what gave rise to the figure
of 4 million victims for K.L. Auschwitz, a figure now considered to be
pure propaganda. It should be divided by four to get close to reality
(p. 171).
In 1972, at the Dejaco/Ertl trial, witness Dragon showed "total
confusion" (p. 172; see Part I, p. 60, in _The Journal of Historical
Review_, Spring 1991).
The testimonies of Pery Broad, of Rudolf Hoess, Dr. Johann-Paul
Kremer, and of SS man Holblinger (which Pressac writes as Hoblinger) on the
several BUNKER are subject to reservations expressed in the following
terms: "entirely imaginary," "physically impossible," "impossible to
situate this scene" (p. 174).
The testimony of Nyiszli would be valid providing ... that his figures
be divided by four - but not always. Pressac speaks of Nyiszli's "number
four," and says that his figures are "worrying" (p. 179).
In 1980, a great fuss was made about Filip Muller's book, _Trois ans
dans une chambre a gaz d'Auschwitz_ (Three Years in a Gas Chamber at
Auschwitz), foreword by Claude Lanzmann, ed. Pygmalion/G. Watelet. [The
English version, _Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in a Gas Chamber at
Auschwitz_, New York, Stein and Day, 1979, is somewhat different than the
French edition.] In France Jean Pierre-Bloch awarded the book the LICRA
prize. Filip Muller was one of the star witnesses at the Auschwitz trial
(1963-1965), and in the film Shoah. In reality, he was a mythomaniac,
which even Pressac realizes, for he writes:
[in his book, Muller] has accumulated errors, thus making his account
historically dubious. The best approach is to read it as a novel
based on true history (p. 181).
If the members of the Sonderkommando affirm that 5 or 7 or 12 bodies
were burned in a single muffle of a crematory oven at one time, Pressac
suggests that this is an exaggeration, and that probably only three bodies
at a time could have been incinerated, and skinny ones at that (p. 229).
He says that today's tourist, "after a silent prayer" (sic!) in front of
Krema I, must surely realize that "We find here the famous multiplying
factor of four used by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli" (p. 483).
At Auschwitz visitors can see in the former "Block 4" a model that
professes to show a Krema in the midst of a gassing. This reconstruction,
it must be said, inadvertently demonstrates the physical impossibilities of
the homicidal gassings, in particular the cramped premises and the
congestion that would have resulted from the first "gassing." Add to that
the fact that documents which have subsequently come to light, especially
the aerial photos taken by the Allies in 1943/44 and published in 1979,
underscore the "faults" of this model. Of small import to Pressac, who
sees in the reconstruction the "powerful evocation of a mass gassing" (p.
378).
Beginning on p. 459, the author attempts to save from disaster the
absurd _War Refugee Board Report_ of November 1944, sometimes known as the
_Protocols of Auschwitz_. Just the criticisms of it that Pressac himself
is obliged to make totally discredit this mendacious work, which is due
largely to Rudolf Vrba, today a professor of pharmacology at a university
in Vancouver (see Robert Faurisson, "The Zundel Trials (1985 and 1988),"
_The Journal of Historical Review_, Winter 1988-1989, p. 420-421).
The drawings of one David Olere are in favor with Pressac, who knew
the artist personally, but these drawings, altogether grotesque, seem
inspired chiefly by a sort of sex-shop anti-Nazism. Pressac considers
them "masterpieces of authenticity" (p. 554) but ... he has reservations
as to their documentary worth and about the sincerity of the witness (p.
493-497, 554-556). Playing the prude, he goes so far as to refrain from
reproducing certain drawings (p. 498). This same David Olere asserts that
the SS made sausages they called "Kremawurst" (crematorium sausages) out
of human flesh (p. 554). His memory suffers from a certain "deterioration"
(p. 493), and he is subject to what Pressac calls the "KREMATORIUM
DELIRIUM" (p. 556).
The author's favorite witness is the Jewish shoemaker Henryk Tauber.
But this witness, too, tends to use "the famous multiplying factor of
four" (p. 483). HE HAS NEVER SEEN A GASSING BUT EITHER HE WAS TOLD ABOUT
IT (Ibid.) or else he has seen the bodies of those whom he calls gassed
(page 489). One day, through a window, he saw an SS man pouring Zyklon B
into a gas chamber (p. 494). If over so many years he saw nothing more
than that, it was because during the gassing operations the SS
systematically locked up the members of the Sonderkommando in ... the coke
store. This is also Alter Fajnzylberg's explanation. The SS wanted to
conceal the existence of the gassings but not the existence of the people
gassed!
Tauber tells the story of a Jew named Lejb. One day, the Germans hung
Lejb, hands tied behind his back, from an iron bar above the firing
hearths, for an hour. Then, after untying his hands and feet, they threw
him into a cold crematorium furnace. Gasoline was poured into the lower
ash bin and lit. The flames reached the muffle in which Lejb was trapped.
A few minutes later, they opened the door of the furnace. The condemned
man came running out, covered with burns. Next, he was ordered to run
round the yard shouting that he was a thief. Finally, he was forced to
climb the barbed wire fence, where he was killed with a gunshot!
Tauber speaks also of an open-air pit filled with human fat. The fat
ran from the corpses into a separate reservoir, dug in the ground. This
fat was poured over the corpses to accelerate their combustion. One day,
the SS men threw a man into the boiling fat, then pulled him out, still
alive, and shot him. "The next day, the corpse was brought back to the
crematorium, where it was incinerated in a pit [!]" (p. 494).
Tauber says that around 2,500 bodies a day were incinerated in a
single crematorium. Here is Pressac's commentary:
This figure is unrealistic (and it is connected with the
propaganda of the immediate post-war period), [...]. Here we find
almost the famous multiplication factor of four, of which Dr. Miklos
Nyiszli made such abundant and lamentable use in his book that his
credibility was long contested. Henryk Tauber is far from being the
only witness to say in substance "I don't know the number of dead" or
"I think it was so many" and then coolly say one or two sentences
later, that after due consideration, we do arrive at the (standard)
figure of 4 million victims in all. This type of imposed falsehood
has to be excused, I would stress, because of the political climate of
the period 1945-1950 (p. 494).^11
In just one passage on page 498, Pressac, to qualify the assertions of
his favorite witness, uses the words "dubious," "incorrect" (twice), "not
certain," "[made up] story," and "pure myth." And if at the end of his
testimony Tauber is so weak and so vague about Krema IV and V, no one can
reproach him for this, says Pressac, who supposes that the witness "must
have been exhausted by the end of his deposition" (p. 502).
In short, all these witnesses seem to be suffering greatly, just like
David Olere, from what pharmacist Pressac calls Krematorium delirium (p.
556).
Pressac has no criterion for distinguishing the true and the false
witness from one another. His witnesses can pile up the worst errors or
the worst insanities, yet they will find favor in our man's eyes the moment
he decides to make authentic witnesses out of them.
A witness meticulously describes the room called a gas chamber, and
sees three pillars when there were really four: Pressac tells us it's
because he didn't go clear to the end of the room. The same witness
speaks of an entrance door and an exit door, when there was only one door
to the room, with no other exit: this error, Pressac says, can be
explained by the route taken by that witness during his visit (!). The
witness talks about ten cremation ovens when there were five (each with
three muffles): Pressac says that's because "probably he had not walked
the entire length of the oven room but instead remained at the west
entrance." The number of victims that the witness gives is incredible:
that, Pressac reassures us, is because here it's a question of an "inflated
number" given by an SS man who served as the witness's guide; or there,
it's an "SS propaganda figure" (p. 239).
If a witness sketches the crematory room while forgetting to note the
presence of rails, Pressac says that since the rails served no purpose, the
witness's "visual memory did not retain them" (p. 229). Let the same
witness commit four grave material errors, and it's because "the visual
memories of a survivor deteriorate with time" (p. 493). If this witness
adds imaginary details to his sketch, no matter: it was done "to make it
better" (Ibid.).
Throughout his book, Pressac does his utmost to discover excuses for
the innumerable "errors" of his witnesses, errors in the location, the
color, the material, the form, the distance, the number of whatever is
being discussed.
But his favorite explanation is that all these "errors" are the fault
of the SS and "the usual SS exaggeration" (p. 108), and that, if in their
confessions taken by the Allies, the SS confessed to enormities, it was as
due to "professional pride" (p. 161).
Thanks to this method, Pressac's witnesses, Jewish or otherwise, win
incessantly, while the SS men can only lose every time.
Pressac's Involuntary Drollery Apropos M. Nyiszli
At this point I would like to return to a case already mentioned, that
of Dr. Nyiszli. One of the best known false testimonies in the
concentration camp literature, next to Martin Gray's _For Those I Loved_,
is that of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli: _Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account of
Mengele's Infamous Death Camp_, translated and adapted from the Hungarian
by Tibere Kremer (New York: Fell Publishing Co., 1960).
Paul Rassinier often denounced this forgery (see _The Holocaust Story
and the Lies of Ulysses_ (Costa Mesa, CA: The Institute for Historical
Review, 1988, p. 244-250), as has Carlo Mattogno. Neither the
_Encyclopaedia Judaica_ (1971), nor the recent _Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust_ (1990), mentions Nyiszli's book, which has long been
discredited.
Nevertheless, at the recent trial of the Revisionist Michel Konen at
Meaux, Hubert Heilbronn, president of the Lazare Bank, had the effrontery
to mention only one testimony in support of the existence of the Auschwitz
gas chambers: that of Miklos Nyiszli (_Le Figaro_, 6 July 1990, p. 8).
Pressac, too, resuscitates Nyiszli. But I think it's fair to say that
in so doing he has, in his comments on Nyiszli's testimony, inadvertently
written two exceedingly funny pages (p. 474-475). I'll let the reader be
the judge.
Miklos Nyiszli, a Jew, allegedly lived for six months in a Birkenau
crematorium serving as an assistant to Dr. Josef Mengele in the dissection
room. Pressac selects from Nyiszli's book only Chapter VII, in which this
witness supposedly describes a gassing operation in Krema II. At first
Pressac affirms that this description is "entirely accurate, EXCEPT for
certain FIGURES which are very WRONG indeed [Pressac's capitals]" (p. 473).
Next, he comments on the text, and here one realizes that, even for a
Pressac, almost all the data in Nyiszli's book, whether numbers or physical
details, are erroneous.
The witness declares that the gas chamber was 500 feet (150 meters)
long; but, Pressac says, a plan (which this writer discovered and which is
borne out by the building's ruins) shows that the length of the room under
discussion could not have exceeded 100 feet (30 meters). How to explain?
It's simple, says Pressac: the witness told the truth, but he used a
multiplier of five.
The witness states that the undressing room was 200 yards (about 200
meters) long; well, says Pressac, everything shows that room measured 50
yards (around 50 meters) in length. For here, according to Pressac,
Nyiszli has used a multiplier of four.
Since the average of the various multipliers is four, Pressac, proud
of his discovery, gets to talking in his book, whether regarding Nyiszli or
other affirmations and testimonies, of the "famous multiplying factor of
four" (see p. 483, 494).
Accordingly, following our pharmacist, if we wish to find the real
figures, it behooves as we read to divide all the numbers by four.
As for me, I should say that by that reckoning, every false witness
would be in the clear. Supposing a "witness" states that in six months
(the duration of Nyiszli's stay in Auschwitz) he saw four men who were all
7 meters tall and 200 years old. We can assume that anybody would dismiss
such a witness. Anybody but Pressac, who, applying the rule of the famous
divisor of four, would say: this witness is telling the truth: he saw
*one* man, who was *1.75 meters* tall and *50 years* old.
But Pressac's gymnastics don't end here. I have made a critical
review of his comments on the Nyiszli testimony only regarding the short
passage that Nyiszli has written on the gassings. Here we have, on the
one hand, the multipliers Pressac says Nyiszli used; and, on the other
hand, a sampling of Pressac's comments regarding such and such a fact,
physical reality, or figure reported by Nyiszli (p. 474-475):
- PRESSAC'S COMMENTS ON NYISZLI'S COEFFICIENTS:
1. Nyiszli, says Pressac, has divided by 2.
2. Nyiszli, says Pressac, has multiplied by 3; by 5; by 4; by 2.5;
by 6.7; by 4; by 4; by 2.5; by 4; by 2 to 3.
- PRESSAC'S EVALUATIONS OF NYISZLI'S STATEMENTS:
Wrong
Wrong
Wrong
Wrong
Wrong and deliberately misleading [...]. Whom is Dr. Nyiszli trying
to mislead and why?
Lack of familiarity with the premises
"War story" pure and simple
Pure invention
Legend
. . . (and let us add that, when the witness talks about "concrete,"
we must read "wood"; when he talks about "chlorine," we must read
"hydrocyanic acid").
Pressac's conclusion is delectable. He proudly entitles it "The
Multiplier." Here Pressac, far from dismissing his witness for his
exaggerations and fables, discovers in the use of the multiplier 4 (the
average of the various figures is 3.8) the sign that Dr. Nyiszli, for all
his not being scientific and rigorous, is manifestly an academic who bears
the stamp of intellectual training of the most serious kind. He writes:
The average of the different multipliers is almost exactly
four.^12 If we apply this to the official total of 4 million victims
we arrive at a figure much closer to reality: 1 million. This
calculation is by no means scientific but it shows that DOCTOR
NYISZLI, a respected ACADEMIC, TRAINED IN GERMANY, multiplied the
figures by FOUR when describing the interior of Krematorium II and
when speaking of the number of persons or victims (p. 475).
In short, Pressac understands that the "credibility" of Nyiszli's book
has been "long contested" (p. 494); that was due to "the famous
multiplication factor of four of which Dr. Miklos Nyiszli made such
abundant and lamentable use" (Ibid.). But fortunately Pressac has arrived;
he has discovered the key needed by anyone reading Nyiszli's book and,
thanks to that key, everything is deciphered. There is no longer any
reason to challenge the credibility of an honorable academic, educated in
Germany. Pressac has saved Nyiszli.
But the reader, on seeing any figure at all from the pen of this
astonishing witness, can never know whether the number is to be considered
exact, or whether it is necessary to multiply it or divide it, and if so,
by exactly how much.
"Faurisson and His Clique" (p. 12)
I shall forgo counting the number of times that Pressac attacks the
Revisionists in general and me in particular. Mark Weber writes:
Pressac does not seem to be a psychologically sound person. For
example, he confesses that he "nearly" killed himself in the Auschwitz
main camp in October 1979 (p. 537). His relationship with Dr.
Faurisson and French Revisionist publisher Pierre Guillaume - to which
he devotes several pages - changed from a kind of admiration to bitter
personal animosity. He cites nothing about Faurisson's treatment of
him that would justify such visceral enmity, even granting the
intensity of his disagreement about the Holocaust issue. The
emotional and even vicious nature of Pressac's furious hostility
towards Faurisson suggests an insecure and unstable personality
("Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers," _The
Journal of Historical Review_, Summer 1990, p. 231-237).
Here I must provide an explanation. Pressac has a specific reason for
not liking me: in the early 1980s, I was led to show him to the door of
the home of Pierre Guillaume (where he had come to see us once more without
announcing his arrival beforehand). That is the kind of humiliation which
is not forgotten, especially by someone who, afflicted with a sense of
inferiority, seeks approval, fishes for compliments, offers his services
insistently and wishes to be taken seriously. Pressac ended up exhausting
my patience. His obsequiousness, his mental confusion, his panicky fears,
his horror of clarity and of unequivocal positions, his propensity to lie
and to cheat made his visits more and more undesirable. He makes no
allusion to that humiliating episode in his book; on the contrary, he
states that in March or April 1981 he took the initiative and "broke
completely with Faurisson" (p. 554). That is quite simply false. He was
ushered to the door, and, I must say, in no uncertain terms.
Jean-Claude Pressac was an admirer of Hitler, of Degrelle and of
militaria. He had a bust of Hitler in his home, in a place of honor, and,
fearing our reaction at the time of a visit to his home, had forewarned
Guillaume and myself about it, not without some apprehension. He had
dreamt of writing a novel showing the victory of his hero and the triumph
of National Socialism (see, in this regard, p. 541). He had been educated
at the military academy of La Fleche and, according to Guillaume, himself a
former student at that establishment, had in 1959 received a reprimand from
the school's administration due to a sketch of Nazi inspiration that he had
displayed at the time of a school celebration. He said that he was a
supporter of Pierre Sidos, a French far-rightist. The extreme right, or
what is called that, has, side by side with strong personalities (as in the
case of Leon Degrelle), poor wretches who admire force since they are weak.
Such was the fact with Pressac who, moreover, had certain medical problems
which, I must say, increased my pity for him.
Guillaume devoted several pages to Pressac in his book _Droit et
histoire_ (La Vieille Taupe, 1986, p. 118-125). I recommend reading those
pages, which are both lively and penetrating.
Before meeting us, Pressac believed in the gas chambers. I showed him
my documentation. He was staggered by it, and recognized his error.
Believing he knew how to read the plans that I had discovered in the
archives of the Auschwitz Museum, he offered us his services.
Half-serious, half-mocking, we took to calling him "Schliemann," from the
name of the discoverer of the ruins of Troy. Pressac had a peculiar habit:
at each encounter, his first words were: "I've blown it." He "blew it" -
he made a mistake - repeatedly. Easily influenced, easily anguished, he
perpetually changed his opinion on details and each time adopted the most
peremptory tone in articulating his thesis of the day. Another of his
eccentricities: as soon as the simplest question put him in a quandary
(and his life was a perpetual quandary), he would answer: "Yes/No." Not:
"Yes and no" but, in a single breath: "Yes/No." And it was impossible for
him to clarify his answer, which served him as a refuge, as with a child
caught being naughty. He had the irritating habit of pretending, from one
minute to the next, that he hadn't said what he had just said. I invited
him accordingly to record our conversations with a tape recorder to avoid
misunderstandings. With childish fear, offering no explanation, he refused
to be recorded.
But he no longer believed in the gas chambers. He began to feel
called to be a Revisionist; wishing it is not enough, however. My life and
that of Pierre Guillaume became more and more difficult. Pressac grew
frantic. The cumulative effects of the trials and of the attacks of all
sorts, the progressive deterioration of my physical health, our financial
problems, a general atmosphere of doom (it should be recalled here what
happened at the time of the blast on the "Rue Copernic," much worse than
that of the "Carpentras cemetery"^13) left our neophyte more and more
feverish and hesitant. He pleaded with me to give up so dangerous an
enterprise. For his part, he began to take his distance from us. "Jewish
friends" had made him understand that there were limits to skepticism which
could not be transgressed (p. 548). Upon reading the plans of Auschwitz
and Birkenau that I had furnished him in abundance, he saw well enough that
the gassings were impossible. But, you never know, he began to say,
perhaps there really did take place here and there a few small homicidal
gassings, discreet, furtive, improvised: what he called "casual," or
"itty-bitty," gassings.
Before his first departure for Auschwitz, following our meeting, he
had asked me what research he could undertake there for me. I had told him
that I was interested in the question of the cremations: the officially
recorded number of the bodies incinerated; status of persons cremated
(inmates/guards/German soldiers and officers and members of their
families); number of employees assigned to cremation of corpses and to the
incinerations in the rubbish ovens; the duration of the cremations; time
cards, etc.). I thought, as a matter of fact, that those numbers alone
would be enough to demonstrate the impossibility of the stupendous number
of cremations that would have been required by the gassing of hundreds of
thousands of victims, over and above the cremations necessitated by the
ravages of the epidemics in the camp.
On his return from Auschwitz, Pressac told me with an air of
embarrassment that he had not found the time to occupy himself with the
question that interested me. He had had too much work to do, and then, he
added, a young Polish girl had taken a great deal of his time: innocent
boasting by the timid.
Before his second journey to Auschwitz, he asked me the same question
and I gave him the same answer. Upon his return, he again stated that he
had not had the time to undertake the necessary research. Let me note here
parenthetically that in his large book Pressac continues to evade my
questions (see, below, Appendix 2, "How Many Cremations a Day in Krema
II?," p. 166-167).
Pressac wound up by telling us that he no longer wanted to take sides
between the Revisionists and the Exterminationists. He said he wished to
have relations with both camps and to content himself with purely technical
work. I encouraged him in that path and, in a dedication the text of which
he reports (p. 554) but the context of which he distorts, I urged him to
seek, to discover, to be cold, impartial and materialistic. But that was
too much to ask of him. Finding that he was unable to buckle down to
methodical and austere work that would have let him put a bit of order into
his thoughts, I sent him on his way. I had introduced him to the study of
the supposed gas chamber at Struthof (Alsace). Later on, he published,
under the auspices of Serge Klarsfeld, a small book in English - poor and
confused - on the subject. I see that, in his large book, he treats the
subject anew. But he takes care not to reveal a discovery I had made
virtually in his presence when, at the Palace of Justice in Paris, together
with Pierre Guillaume and Maitre Eric Delcroix, we examined the archives of
the "Struthof trial," archives provided at LICRA's request by the
headquarters, in Paris, of the Gendarmerie and Justice Militaire. In those
archives I found a document revealing that in December 1945 Professor Rene
Fabre, Dean of the faculty of pharmacy at the University of Paris, had
signed an expert report of the greatest interest. The professor had
successively examined the scrapings done around the chimney of the alleged
homicidal gas chamber and, in the public hospital of Strasbourg, the
well-preserved corpses of the persons supposedly gassed. His finding in
both cases was negative: there was no trace of gassing.
In reality, that particular gas chamber, which was only relatively
air-tight, had served chiefly for the training of German army recruits in
the wearing of gas masks; in that case, the gas presented nowhere near the
same danger as hydrocyanic acid (Zyklon B). Pressac had been happy to be
able to demonstrate that for us. He had gone to take some photos of a
training session in a French army gas chamber not far from Paris. I have a
set of those photographs.
Three Little Secrets of Jean-Claude Pressac
A legend that is dear to the heart of Elie Wiesel, Filip Muller and
Georges Wellers maintains that the Germans dug gigantic pits at Birkenau in
which they burned thousands of bodies in the open air. I had drawn
Pressac's attention to the fact that the Birkenau camp was located in an
area of vast marshes alongside a tributary of the Vistula River and that
despite their drainage work there, the water table continued of necessity
to rise to just a short distance below ground level^14. It was difficult,
therefore, to imagine such pits being dug, and I added that in any case it
must have been complicated to burn corpses in pits due to the lack of
oxygen. Then Pressac, whom I was always advising to get physical
verification, dug a small hole in his garden and tried to incinerate the
body of a rabbit. He never succeeded. When we visited the site of his
"incineration ditch," he was full of quips about the myth of the
"incineration ditches" at Birkenau, and the tale of the rabbit became for
us a standing joke.
Visitors to Struthof can see, on the one hand, the Natzweiler camp
itself, with its crematorium and, far from the camp, a small building
containing the supposed homicidal gas chamber. Pressac pointed out to me
that, IF THEY HAD DECIDED TO LIE ABOUT NATZWEILER AS THEY HAD LIED ABOUT
AUSCHWITZ (sic), they could have made people believe there was a homicidal
gas chamber in the crematorium. To prove it, he made up for me a sort of
false plan of that building, based on the true plan that we had discovered
in the archives of the Gendarmerie and the justice Militaire. I still have
that false plan, drawn by Pressac and bearing his explanatory notes. He
doesn't breathe a word of this little job in his large book.
I also have, by Pressac, a two-volume study which he entitled
_Auschwitz, architecture paisible_ (Auschwitz, Peaceful Architecture). It
concerns Krema IV and V. It is extremely disordered and has never been
published. My copy is marked No. 2. The dedication page is laughable:
Pressac, offering his services to all comers, launches into flattery
addressed to certain Exterminationists as well as certain Revisionists. I
come in for my share of these compliments, which are laid on too thick to
be sincere.
A Few Borrowings and A Few Lies
In his shorter studies, as in his big book, Pressac has plundered my
work outrageously. He is indebted to me for a large part of the plans,
documents and photographs that he has published; the reminder comprises,
most of the time, plans, documents, and photographs from the same source or
of an identical character. Only the photos from the Bauleitung Album,
which is in the possession of the Israelis, are an original contribution.
The baseness of Pressac's attacks on me, his deceptions and lies in
the presentation of certain facts, would oblige me to correct far too many
of his allegations than I am able to here. I am described as a coward, too
afraid, "of course," to appear at my trial (p. 554); but he knows I was
seriously ill at the time. He says that one day, in 1982, he telephoned me
and found me a "human wreck"; he writes: "I was shocked and disgusted to
find [Faurisson] had reached rock bottom, dragging his family down with
him" (p. 558). It is true that in 1981 and 1982 I believed I had reached
the depths of physical, moral and financial distress, and that my wife and
children shared that distress with me; I did not for all that speak of my
"martyrdom" (Ibid.) and I do not see what is "shocking" and "disgusting"
about my fighting as I did to the limit of my strength. I frightened
Pressac. I had always frightened him by my fierceness in defending myself
and by my refusal to bow my head.
He ventures to write:
Confronted with the new evidence, Faurisson and Guillaume had a
moment of indecision, seeing the possibility of throwing in the sponge
and officially declaring that it did appear that some homicidal
gassings had taken place at Birkenau (p. 554).
Here, he lies and he knows that he lies, at least as regards me. He
never presented me with the slightest proof of what he called the "casual
gassings"; and I personally have never considered the possibility of a
retraction of any kind.^15
Pressac knows that the trials that were forced on me and that brought
me condemnations unprecedented in the contemporary history of France were
nothing but stage productions, and that the documents with which they tried
to crush me were valueless. He knows it and he says it, whether
explicitly, as when he alludes to the role of Maitre Jouanneau, the LICRA
lawyer, or implicitly, when he happens to analyze a "proof' used against
"Faurisson" at the time of a trial and admits that said "proof" does not
possess the value attributed to it in the slightest (p. 49, 554-556).
Questions Evaded
Pressac has evaded a good twenty essential questions of a technical
nature which have been posed by the Revisionists. I shall cite only a few
of them:
- Krema I: How can one explain the presence of a homicidal gas chamber
using Zyklon B (an explosive gas) that opened onto a room where six
crematory ovens were in operation, sometimes reaching temperatures of
800 degrees? How could the supposed gas chamber have had a fragile
door, one fitted with glass and without a bolt and which, opening as
it did to the inside, would have been blocked by heaps of corpses?
How could the daily ventilation process have been carried out just
twenty meters away from the windows of the SS hospital?
- Krema II and III: Since it would appear that the victims came in
batches of 2,000[^16] persons, and it took an hour and a half to
incinerate one body in each of the 15 muffles, at the end of this
period of time there would still have remained 1,985 bodies to
incinerate. Where were they stored in the meantime? How could the
ventilation be done from the floor to the ceiling (Zyklon is lighter
than air) when everything was set up for ventilation in the opposite
direction? Where did they store the bodies of those who, day in and
day out, died of natural causes? In general, how do we reconcile the
scanty dimensions of the premises (the little elevator!) with the
immensity of the massacres to be carried out there?
- Krema IV and V: What were coal stoves doing in the gas chambers?
- Where were the crowds waiting to enter the crematoria able to gather,
considering that the aerial photos taken by the Allies never show even
the slightest trace of such crowds; and that the area around the
crematoria, far from having been trampled by any crowds, was occupied
by well-laid-out gardens?
- How is it that the gas slaughterhouses would be located right in the
middle of such a variety of other facilities, which, in striking
contrast to killing centers, include: a soccer field, hospital
buildings, decantation basins, and buildings for showering and
disinfection?
- Where are the countless scientific, technical and medical documents
which prove that before, during and after the creation and operation
of those chemical slaughterhouses (unprecedented in the history of
science and technology) the Germans supposedly prepared, constructed,
and surveyed those pharaonic undertakings for the terrible purpose
alleged, at a time when circumstances required people to get written
authorizations and submit detailed budgets to get even a screw or a
brick or a kilo of coal?
Deliberate Omissions
It will be remembered that the only task I assigned to Pressac was
that regarding documents relevant to the cremations (see above, page
153-154). Neither at the time of his first sojourn at Auschwitz, nor
during his second stay, it appears, had he been able to find time to study
the matter. Now that his book has appeared, his continued silence on this
point is striking.
One will note that he is very careful not to say that such documents
do not exist. He knows all too well that they do exist. He prefers to
avoid talking about them. Why does he conceal from his readers the
existence of a host of documents which prove that a record was made of each
cremation?^17 In the case of teeth extracted from a corpse before its
cremation, the usual German attention to detail went so far as to demand
the completion of a printed form, with the heading "Dental Station of the
Auschwitz Camp," supplying the date of cremation, the complete identity
of the internee, his registration number, the number of teeth (right,
left, upper, lower), etc. (see _Contribution a l'histoire d'Auschwitz_,
Auschwitz Museum, 1968, the photograph of the document between pages 80 and
81).
Why does Pressac not mention this type of document, or a single one of
the documents required by the Auschwitz chancellery on the death of anyone,
with twenty or so signatures for deaths from natural causes and about
thirty signatures for deaths from non-natural causes (Dr. Tadeusz Paczula,
former prisoner, "The Organization and Administration of the Camp Hospital
in the Concentration Camp Auschwitz I," International Auschwitz Committee,
[Blue] _Anthology_, Vol. II, Part I, Warsaw, 1969, p. 45)?
Why does he not make the slightest mention of the "death registers" in
which the Germans collected, with a separate page for each decedent, all
information relevant to each death? The Revisionists had pointed out the
existence of two or three volumes of those TOTENBUCHER, or STERBEBUCHER, in
the Auschwitz Museum, and of forty or so in Moscow: all of them,
naturally, inaccessible to independent researchers. It was only under
pressure from the Revisionists, notably at the time of the Zundel trial in
Toronto in 1988, that the decision was made in 1989 to reveal the existence
of the registers to the general public. Pressac was unlucky. His book, IN
WHICH HE CONCEALS THE EXISTENCE OF THE REGISTERS, was no sooner finished
than the Soviet Union revealed that, for its part, it retained a large
number - but not all - of these precious documents, which strike a lethal
blow to the extermination legend. Pressac, by failing to mention that
there were also two or three of these death registers in the archives of
the Auschwitz Museum - to which he had free access - lied by omission.
Regarding the amount of coke necessary for the cremations and
incinerations, Pressac's vagueness is such that I find it suspect (see
microfilm 12,012 mentioned on page 87, the table on page 224, and the
remarks on page 227). It is evident that the consumption of coke was
certainly ridiculously low in comparison to the amount that would have been
required for the gigantic cremations spoken of by the legend, but Pressac
has so muddled everything that it is not possible to get a precise idea of
it. It is probable that each muffle burned no more than an average of 6 or
7 bodies each day, like the oil-fired furnaces at Buchenwald (p. 106), and
it is plain that the German document of 28 June 1943 indicating an
incineration capacity of 4,756 bodies a day for Auschwitz (with the ovens
operating 12 hours each day) is unacceptable. Moreover, Pressac does not
hesitate to justify a figure just as extravagant (340 for Krema I, 1,440
for Krema II, 1,440 for Krema III, 768 for Krema IV and 768 for Krema V)
and, by a method dear to him, he puts these exaggerations down to the
"bragging" of the SS men, who, at any rate in similar instances, must have
"multiplied the real figures by a factor of 2 to 5" (p. 110).
But his most unforgivable lie by omission concerns the DAILY ACTIVITY
of the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria. The reader who has just finished
his book may believe that the five crematoria were devoted to the cremation
of ... people who had been gassed. Day after day, however, these
crematoria received the bodies of victims of various epidemics, of persons
who had died of natural causes, of inmates, guards, soldiers, civilians.
And if, for example, Krema I was near the SS hospital, that was, in the
first place, to cremate the SS dead. Dr. Popiersch, the chief surgeon,
died of typhus and was cremated at Auschwitz. The same was true of the
wife of SS man Caesar, who was in charge of agricultural work, and of Alma
Rose, the German Jewess who conducted the women's orchestra of the Birkenau
camp and, if we are to believe Fania Fenelon, was accorded an extraordinary
funeral (Fania Fenelon, _Playing for Time_, New York, Atheneum, 1977, p.
208). Pressac never tells us how the normal activity of the crematoria
could be combined each day with the activities surrounding the alleged
gassings: transport to the morgues, storage of the bodies, cremation,
collection of ashes, transferral to urns, dispatch of the urns, etc.
Conclusion
In 1982, I reviewed Pressac's study on Krema IV and V at Birkenau. I
entitled that review:
The Myth of the "Gas Chambers" Enters Its Death Agony
To this review, which I wrote in 1990, I could give the following
title:
The Death of the "Gas Chamber" Myth
In the media, this myth manages to survive somehow or other; in
academic or scientific circles, it is dead. Our "suburban pharmacist," as
Vidal-Naquet calls him, had offered himself as a savior; his magic potions,
in 1982, aggravated the patient's condition; and in 1989, that is, seven
years later, they have finished him off.
I know Revisionists who, confronting a thesis so disastrous for
Exterminationism, wonder whether Pressac could be one of their own, and
working undercover, have hoodwinked the Klarsfelds. I don't believe that
in the least. Pressac is a neophyte, an autodidact, an innocent crossed
with a fox. His personality is unstable; he is inconsistent, a weathercock
that turns with every wind. He argues illogically and does not know how to
express himself either in speech or writing - a deficiency that would be
merely annoying in the exposition of a coherent thesis, but which here,
with an incoherent and hybrid thesis, becomes absolutely catastrophic.
Pressac isn't wearing any mask; it is his real face which we find
disconcerting. For their part, the Klarsfelds lack discernment; they are
even blind. They find it "normal" that, in certain cases, persons who
displease the Jewish community should be killed or seriously injured
(_Radio J_, 17 September 1989, Agence France Press, 1:36PM; _La Lettre
telegraphique Juive_, 18 September, p. 1; _Le Monde_, 19 September, p. 14).
The anguish of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld at the rise of Revisionism -
despite their awareness that it has access neither to money nor to the
public forum - is causing them to lose their judgement and their
self-control. To the Klarsfelds, all means seem justified; every
assistance is welcome; any media operation can serve. Pressac, driven away
by Faurisson, dismissed by Wellers, went on to offer his services to the
Klarsfelds. He was hired. This tedious tome must have cost them plenty.
But, if friends of the Klarsfelds paid for it dearly in money, its results
will cost them even more, which will be fatal for the Exterminationists and
providential for the Revisionists.
In 1979, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Leon Poliakov proclaimed, with
thirty-two other French historians, that it was unnecessary to ask
questions about the technique and the operation of the homicidal gas
chambers. They stated precisely:
It is not necessary to ask how, technically, such a mass murder
was possible. It was possible technically since it took place. That
is the necessary point of departure for any historical inquiry on this
subject. It is our function simply to recall that truth: there is
not, there cannot be any debate about the existence of the gas
chambers (_Le Monde_, 21 February 1979, p. 23).
In my "Response to a Paper Historian" (_The Journal of Historical
Review_, Spring 1986, p. 24), I spoke of the silliness of that declaration,
and I added:
[...] The text in _Le Monde_ had been conceived to ward off a
very pressing problem. In the confusion that was provoked by my
article on "The Rumor of Auschwitz" [_Le Monde_, 29 December 1978, p.
8], Vidal-Naquet and Poliakov hastily drew up a manifesto, and then
took it some signers, saying to them: "We say there cannot be any
debate, but it is very clear that you must not pay any attention to
that phrase and that you all have to get busy replying to Faurisson."
That is how Vidal-Naquet ingenuously puts it on page 196 of [_Les
Juifs, la memoire et le present_, Maspero, 1981] when he writes: "A
good number of historians signed the declaration published in _Le
Monde_ on 21 February 1979, but very few got busy, one of the rare
exceptions being F[rancois] Delpech."
Vidal-Naquet, Poliakov, and the other survivors of the "declaration"
of the thirty-four historians have thus had to wait ten years (1979-1989)
to see appear at last an attempt at refutation of my _Le Monde_ article on
"The Rumor of Auschwitz." Had my article been based on mere foolishness,
its refutation wouldn't have required so long a time, nor so voluminous
and, as we have established, so feeble a response as that made by Pressac.
Pressac has put his name to a masterpiece of inanity. His
intellectual capacities did not permit the hope of anything better. His
propensity for deception and for manipulating documents, already so
remarkable in his presentation of the _Auschwitz Album_ (Le Seuil, 1983) is
here confirmed.^18
But the pharmacist from La Ville du Bois is only a miserable wretch.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet and the Klarsfelds are cut from a different cloth.
These are people who had time enough to determine just how
empty-headed their "suburban pharmacist" was. They used him
nonetheless. But could they have found better? In any case they have
brought discredit on their cause. Now they are burdened with this
monstrous book, totally unusable, and nothing to be done about it. Let any
journalist in search of a scoop ask them, as did Richard Bernstein of the
_New York Times_, to point out a single page or a single photograph in this
wearisome tome which rebuts the Revisionists: Vidal-Naquet and the
Klarsfelds will be unable to offer anything at all.
I see hardly anyone but the Revisionists showing interest in Pressac
and his masterwork, and then only as scientists would do, musing over a
phenomenon of teratology, a monster. The "Holocaust" religion has
certainly given birth to more than one monstrosity; Jean-Claude Pressac's
misshapen work is one example.
In his paper presented at IHR's Fourth International Revisionist
Conference in 1982 ("Context and Perspective in the 'Holocaust'
Controversy," reproduced as "Supplement B" in recent editions of _The Hoax
of the Twentieth Century_, p. 335-369), Arthur Butz put the Revisionists on
guard against one danger: that of wasting their time in idle technical
discussions that make us fail to see the forest for the trees. If we
become preoccupied with such details as Zyklon B or crematory ovens, we may
end up forgetting the essential point, which is that an extermination so
gigantic would have left behind a superabundance of physical and
documentary proofs, not merely infinitesimal traces of domestic tinkering
and puttering. Our adversaries, Butz added, will seek to enmesh us in
cabalistic discussions since, on the level of establishing basic facts,
they know they've already lost. As Butz also pointed out, however, a
Revisionist must nonetheless show himself capable of confronting the
cabalists right down to trifling details. Whatever the ground chosen, the
defenders of the "Holocaust" thesis must realize that all avenues of escape
are closed to them. It is thus that they find themselves today in a total
impasse. Their gang plank to safety - Pressac's book - is made of rotted
wood.
The Jewish community has had some bad shepherds. It should have
jettisoned the dogma of the Auschwitz gas chamber a decade ago. In
December 1978, _Le Monde_ published, at the same time as my article on "The
Rumor of Auschwitz," several articles which were supposed to refute me. I
think that certain French academics, of Jewish origin, immediately
perceived that a grave event had just occurred: in a few lines, I had just
reminded them, like previous Revisionists, that the emperor was wearing no
clothes. Confronted with this, a group of Establishment historians
endeavored, in vain, to pretend the contrary. On 16 January 1979, _Le
Monde_ published my "right of response." That would have been a fitting
time, I think, for the Franco-Jewish academics to have urgently prepared a
"declaration of historians" stating that there could and must be a debate
on the existence or nonexistence of the Auschwitz gas chambers.
Fate decided otherwise. On 21 February 1979, then, appeared the
"declaration" drawn up by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Leon Poliakov. By it the
Exterminationists ratified their ruin. Ten years later, with this book by
Jean-Claude Pressac, they are reaping the fruits of their blindness. They
appear to me to have been inspired by an altogether too narrow conception
of their self-interest. They ought to have looked farther ahead, to have
given thought to their obligations as historians and to the interest, truly
understood, of the Jewish community. Then, instead of dogging the heretics
with press campaigns, physical attacks, and the police and the courts;
instead of staging one incestuous colloquium after another; instead of
churning out an endless stream of bad books (Pressac's being the worst),
they ought to have opened their minds and hearts to discussion and
reflection. They would have done well to have done some work. The
Revisionists have been at work. It's a pity the Exterminationists haven't
followed their lead.^19
APPENDIX I
Pressac Versus the Leuchter Report
At the end of 1988, Serge Klarsfeld published, in _Jour J/La Lettre
telegraphique juive_, a study by Pressac of the Leuchter Report. The title
was: "Les carences et les incoherences du "Rapport Leuchter" ("The
Deficiencies and Inconsistencies of the "Leuchter Report").
"Deficiencies" and "Inconsistencies": Pressac is a master there! The
sole proof he could find of homicidal gassings in Krema I he owes to ...
this report (see Part I, p. 34, in _The Journal of Historical Review_,
Spring 1991)! His study, plainly hurried, blends emotive reflections about
Fred Leuchter with an exposition on the Auschwitz gassings, a summary on
the Auschwitz crematory ovens, and a final discussion on Majdanek. On
Auschwitz, he repeats what I call his theory of "molecules with homing
devices" (see Part I, p. 38-39 in _The Journal of Historical Review_), a
theory which tries to explain the absence, so embarrassing for Pressac, of
ferric-ferro-cyanide stains there where so many human beings were
supposedly gassed.
About Majdanek, I believe it's not too much to say that Pressac does
not believe in the existence of homicidal gas chambers in this camp. He
writes:
Lacking any precise technical study, those gas chambers remain poorly
known (p. vii);
The use of [such places] as homicidal gas chambers with HCN appears
difficult and remains risky [...]; the technique would seem possible,
but an actual use is risky (p. viii); [There were some] modifications
after 1945 [which give a] false impression (p. ix);
a regrettable confusion during the 1950s results in the shower room
often being presented as a homicidal gas chamber (with toxic gas
thought to be dispersed through shower heads)^20 (Ibid.);
The use of this place for homicidal purposes is only conceivable under
two conditions: the removal of a fanlight that could have been broken
by the victims and the addition of a mechanical ventilator (Ibid.);^21
the homicidal function which the author [Pressac] cannot presently
discuss (Ibid.);
the deputy director of the Museum told the author [Pressac] that this
gas chamber had very, very seldom been used, which really means that
it had not been used at all. That fiction is maintained in order not
to shock popular belief which wants it that way [...] (Ibid.);
etc.
In his big book, Pressac manifests the same skepticism. He considers
that no one has yet undertaken a "serious study" of the Majdanek gas
chambers (p. 184). Writing of Auschwitz, he lets slip a remark that
implies that Majdanek was perhaps not really "criminal" (p. 218).
Denouncing the methods of the "officials of the Majdanek Museum," he
writes:
I am sorry to say, and I am not the only one in the West, that
the Majdanek homicidal and/or delousing gas chambers are still waiting
for a true historian, which is mildly upsetting in view of the fact
that the camp fell into the hands of the Russians intact in 1944 (p.
555).
On page 557, a photograph shows the exterior of one of the
"disinfection gas chambers thought to be a homicidal gas chamber." The
photograph comes from Maitre Jouanneau, attorney for LICRA, who was duped,
Pressac tells us, by the camp authorities (the lawyer used this photograph
before the Paris court to prove that Faurisson was a falsifier denying the
historical evidence).
APPENDIX II
How Many Cremations a Day at Krema II?
How many cremations, on the average, were there per day in the five
three-muffle crematory ovens of Krema II?
To that question, Pressac ought to give one answer and one answer
only, but instead he gives at least five, ranging from 288 a day to 1,500 a
day.
- First answer: 960 or 288 or 720! Those three contradictory answers
all appear on page 110 where, speaking of a German document dated 28
June 1943 which indicates 1,440 cremations per day, he says that this
"official" number, even if reduced by a third (which would be 960
cremations), is barely credible; and he adds that, given the SS
penchant for boasting, it is better in general to divide their numbers
by "a factor of from two to five" to obtain the truth in such matters.
So that would give us a minimum of 288 cremations and a maximum of 720
cremations.
- Second answer: 752! This emerges from page 183, where Pressac writes
that the Krema in question "functioned as a homicidal gas chamber and
incineration installation from 15th March 1943, before its officially
coming into service on 31st March, to 27th November 1944, annihilating
a total of approximately 400,000 people, most of them Jewish women,
children and old men." Pressac does not justify any of his
statements. We don't know why he claims that this Krema operated in a
homicidal manner before 31 March, nor why he declares the final date
of operation to have been 27 November 1944, unless because the
self-taught Pressac takes at face value the legend that on 26 November
1944 Himmler ordered the slaughter stopped. No matter. Let us take
him at his word. From 15 March 1943 to 27 November 1944, there
elapsed 624 days, a figure that must be reduced to 532 if we take into
account that, because of a repair of its chimney, Krema II is supposed
to have halted operations for three months, from May through July of
1943 (p. 227). Over a period of 532 days there would thus have been
400,000 cremations, or 752 per day.
- Third answer: a "practical 'throughput' being closer to 1,000." That
is what the author says on page 470 when he judges that the figure of
2,000 cremations that was given by the witness, Dr. Bendel, cannot be
accepted (see p. 334).
- Fourth answer: "between 1,000 to 1,500." That is what the author
says on page 475 regarding an estimate by Dr. Nyiszli.
- Fifth response: nearly 625. This is derived from page 494, where the
author indicates that the number of bodies cremated, according to the
witness Henryk Tauber, was about 2,500 per day, concerning which
figure he writes: "Here we find the famous multiplication factor of
four [of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli]."
In sum, Pressac gives completely divergent answers in this matter; his
estimates of the cremations per day in Krema II, in ascending order, are as
follows:
288, 625, 720, 752, 960, 1,000, and between 1,000 and 1,500.
This Krema had 15 muffles, and the crematory ovens, Pressac admits,
functioned only 12 hours a day. For each muffle, therefore, the number per
day would have been, respectively, 19, 42, 48, 50, 64, and from 67 to 100.
These figures, varying from 19 to 100 per day, would represent performances
beyond the capabilities of our most modern crematoria. They are all the
more unacceptable when we consider that Pressac is counting only the
corpses of those who are supposed to have been "gassed," to which must be
added the cremations of bodies of the inmates, guards, and soldiers who
died every day of various causes, especially when typhus was raging in the
camp.
APPENDIX III
Pressac's Tricks in the _Auschwitz Album_
In 1983, Pressac and Klarsfeld jointly published a French edition of
what is called the _Auschwitz Album_ (translated from English by Guy
Casaril, Editions du Seuil, 1983, 224 p.). It was a collection of 189
extremely interesting photos, taken in 1944 by a German from the
photographic staff of the Auschwitz camp - possibly Ernst Hoffmann. No
one, whether Exterminationist or Revisionist, has contested the
authenticity or the veracity of these photographs, which were taken at the
time of the mass arrivals of Hungarian Jews in 1944. These photographs
supply a providential confirmation of the Revisionist thesis, and it is
shocking that we had to wait until the early 1980's to see all of them
published. Serge Klarsfeld, embarrassed by what they revealed, could offer
but a single parry in response: fabricating a moving account of the
pretended discovery of the album by a certain Lili Meier.
Klarsfeld and Pressac went to even greater lengths for the French
edition of this album. In a twenty-page typed analysis which I completed
in December 1983, but did not publish at that time for lack of money, I
described their subterfuges. I showed that in the French edition, which I
compared with the two original editions published in the United States^22,
Pressac had drastically changed the original order of the album's sections,
an order which had reflected a logical sequence of events for the newly
arrived inmates of the Birkenau camp. In place of that order, our man had
substituted an arrangement which would give one to understand that most of
the people pictured would end up dying in the mysterious homicidal gas
chambers. He also changed the number of photographs in each section and
proceeded to switch photographs from one section to another! He removed
one group of photos and then, to restore the original number of sections,
he made use of the same caption from the original twice, but gave it two
different translations. I wrote:
Without breathing a word of it to the reader, Jean-Claude Pressac
acted like a pharmacist who would surreptitiously change the contents
of his bottles, change their number, and switch their labels, not to
mention committing two forgeries in the process (p. 7).
But the most spectacular of his manipulations was to be found on pages
42 and 43 of the _Album_. Under the title "The Trickeries of the
_Auschwitz Album_," I circulated a short piece devoted to that deceit. I
did not fail to send a copy of it to Editions du Seuil. Here is what our
pharmacist had devised: in order to try to make us believe that the route
taken by certain groups of deportees (women and children) ended at Krema II
and III and therefore, according to him, in the homicidal gas chambers, he
had provided, on page 42 of the _Album_, a plan of Birkenau from which he
had made a careful deletion to prevent the reader from seeing that in
reality these groups of deportees actually passed between the two Krema,
staying on the road leading to the large shower and disinfection center
called the Zentral Sauna until their arrival there. Caught red-handed,
Pressac followed a policy of silence for the next six years (1983-1989).
To those who had read my article and stubbornly demanded an explanation
from him, even to the point of telephoning him, his answer was to feign
ignorance: he claimed he knew nothing of my article. Now, with the
publication of his big book, he is forced to provide an explanation; by
doing so he just makes his case worse.
The plan in which he deceptively made a cut in the route to the
Zentral Sauna is reproduced on page 421 of his big book. On pages 514 and
515, he tries to explain. He begins by saying that in 1983 he had easily
been able to answer my criticism "in an article whose publication was not
deemed necessary." He does not reveal to us who decided not to publish it,
and why. I suggest that Pressac's answer was quite simply judged dreadful.
If I allow myself that suggestion, it is because the response that he
finally consents to give us in 1989 in his big book is pathetic and PROVES
HIS TRICKERY. Pressac answers in effect that, in order to draw the plan
for which I reproached him, he had used "as a BASIS [emphasis added]" (p.
515) an authentic plan: plan 3764 (p. 514). I don't doubt it: he did
take that "as a basis" and ADDED to it lines representing the avenues in
and around the camp, but taking great care to ... truncate the route
leading to the Zentral Sauna, in order to make us believe that the Jewish
women and children who took that route could go no farther than the
crematoria. The deletion is flagrant. The subterfuge is obvious.
But there's more. In the original version of the _Auschwitz Album_,
the American edition, there was a photograph which may be described as
follows: in the foreground, a group of four elderly Jews, three men and a
woman, are plainly having an altercation, while in the background,
indifferent to the scene, a scattered few German soldiers, wearing garrison
caps, are walking by. This is photograph 109. Pressac, deciding to make
this photograph "speak," moves it to the 189th and last place in the
sequence, where it is supposed to mark the acme of the extermination
horror. And here, in his usual jargon, is the explanation of the
photograph:
That photo is unique, terrible, and to be added to the file on
the extermination of the Jews as evidence for the prosecution [...].
The footpath down which this woman is refusing to go ends at the door
of [Krema] V, leading to the disrobing room and the gas chambers. If
the three men who are dragging her do not seem to suspect the fate
that awaits them, she knows that the building which she is turning
away from, that red brick building with its black roof and its two 16
meter-high chimneys, has become the negation of life and stinks of
death (_Auschwitz Album_, p. 204).
In my 1983 article (p. 9), I observed:
All that pathos cannot blind us to this: there is no footpath,
and we can't predict the direction this or that person might take;
[Pressac] tells us nothing about the presence and the indifference, or
inattention, of the German soldiers; how could the woman know that she
is going to be gassed and the men not know that they are going to be
gassed? Finally and above all, IT IS PLAIN TO SEE THAT THE WOMAN IS
TRYING NEITHER TO GET AWAY FROM THE MAN ON THE RIGHT NOR TO RESIST
HIM: SHE IS CLASPING HIS HAND IN HER OWN LEFT HAND.
On page 421 of his big book of 1989, the subject of this review,
Pressac has altered his commentary on the photograph, writing:
As for the woman's attitude, it could simply be that she, with no
illusions about what is to happen and having seen the SS photographer,
suddenly turned away, saying in effect "I don't want that [bastard of
an] SS to photograph me!" Such a reaction would not be surprising,
for some of the Jewish children, less polite and more spontaneous than
their parents, instinctively feeling that the SS wished them no good,
pulled faces at the photographers.
In other words, for one story Pressac substitutes another, and his
entire interpretation of the _Auschwitz Album_ collapses, since the
photograph deemed to represent the acme of horror has been reduced,
according to our manipulator himself, to showing us an old woman who ...
doesn't want her picture taken!
Pressac reproaches me for not saying that the scene takes place near
Krema V. As a matter of fact I did say so, since I quoted his mention of
that. And I find it interesting that there is nothing secret about the
place: as in many other photographs, both in that album and in his large
work, we see small groups of Jews, Germans and civilian workers all
peaceably rubbing elbows with each other.
Pressac leaves unanswered in _Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of
the Gas Chambers_ all the other rebukes of his trickery I addressed to him
in 1983 apropos the _Auschwitz Album_. He thus compels me to repeat my
accusations today.
APPENDIX IV
The Truncated Testimony of Hanna Reitsch
Pressac takes note of the testimony of the German air ace, Hanna (and
not Hannah) Reitsch (1912-1979) as though it were evidence of the existence
of the gas chambers (p. 486). In reality, Hanna Reitsch, at the end of
1944, saw an Allied pamphlet that mentioned gas chambers; she didn't
believe it. AFTER the war, she came to believe it. By the end of her
life, she no longer believed; Pressac is either ignorant, or pretends not
to know, of this last development. The details of the case are
interesting.
In October 1944, Peter Riedel, an aviator friend of Miss Reitsch, who
was then working in the German Embassy in Stockholm, received an Allied
propaganda pamphlet which touched on the gas chambers. Deeply affected, he
brought it up to Hanna Reitsch at the "Aviation House" in Berlin. The
latter, furious, told him that it was obviously a war propaganda
fabrication comparable to the enemy propaganda lies about the Germans
during World War I. Riedel urged her to speak to Heinrich Himmler about
it. She went to see Himmler, who leafed through the brochure without
registering the slightest emotion. He asked her: "And you believe this,
Frau Hanna?" She told him no, but added that countering it was imperative.
Himmler told her she was right.
Pressac specifies that the English version of Hanna Reitsch's memoirs
(_Fliegen-mein Leben_) stops there, but remarks that in the French version
the text continues: "A few days later, the information was denied in one
of the main German newspapers. I learned from Peter Riedel that the same
denial had appeared in a Swedish newspaper. It was only after 1945 that I
found out, and with what horror, that Himmler had lied to me, and that the
awful news was true."
If Pressac had pursued his investigation a little further, and
especially if he had read Gerd Honsik's _Freispruch fur Hitler? 36
ungehorte Zeugen wider die Gaskammer_ (Acquittal for Hitler? 36 Unheard
Witnesses Testify Against the Gas Chambers) (Burgenlandischer Kulturverband
Wien, Postfach 11, 1142 Vienna, 1988), he could have discovered that (p.
132-138):
1. Himmler also said to Reitsch concerning that Allied accusation:
"That [the gassing accusation] is the rope they'll hang us with if
we lose"^23;
2. Hanna Reitsch had so far returned to her good sense that at the
end of life she supported the efforts of the Revisionists and, in
particular, those of an Austrian (whom she called "the courageous Friedl
Rainer") "against all the terrible atrocity lies" (letter dated 15
September 1977, reproduced by Gerd Honsik on p. 138 of his book).
According to David Irving, the State of Israel is holding the
manuscript of Himmler's memoirs. If that is true, why is this document
being shielded from the curiosity of historians and researchers?
Notes
8. See Appendix III, p. 167-171.
9. This order from Hoess likewise confirms what I have said about the
Hoess "confessions" (interview in _Storia Illustrata_, reprinted in
Serge Thion, _Verite historique ou verite politique?_, La Vieille
Taupe, 1980, p. 203, note 10). Hoess "confessed" that the members of
the Sonderkommando entered the "gas chambers" immediately after the
"gassing" and pulled out the bodies, eating and smoking all the while
- in other words, without wearing gas masks, something which would
have been absolutely impossible. On 2 April 1946, in his jail cell at
Nuremberg, Hoess gave the following answers to his American
interrogator, S. Jaari:
Q: But was it not quite dangerous work for these inmates to go into
these chambers and work among the bodies and among the gas fumes?
A: No.
Q: Did they wear gas masks?
A: They had some, but they did not need them, as nothing ever
happened. (John Mendelsohn, editor, _The Holocaust_, 1982 vol. 12,
page 113; _Pretrial Interrogation of R. Hoess_, 2 April 1946, page 17)
The order of 12 August 1942, signed by Hoess and showing the
considerable danger of a gassing operation, demonstrates that Hoess,
when he was interrogated by the Americans four years later at the
Nuremberg jail, gave some rather clumsy answers; he had been broken,
as I have also been able to show, by his initial jailers and
interrogators: certain Jews from British military security who
tortured him before sending him to Nuremberg. Hoess feared more than
anything being turned over to the Polish Communists (see Robert
Faurisson, "How the British Obtained the Confession of Rudolf Hoess,
Commandant of Auschwitz," _The Journal of Historical Review_, Winter
1986-87, p. 389-403).
10. Hospitals continued to exist in German cities, but to a large extent
they were "evacuated" to the countryside where they took the form of
medical barracks on the model of th