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Following are two articles:
1. A review of Pierre Vidal-Naquet's "new" anti-Revisionist book,
_Assassins of Memory_, which is composed of old, thoroughly-refuted
material and
2. "Response to a Paper Historian", a meticulous 56-point article first
published in 1982 (in French) by Professor Robert Faurisson. This
article devastatingly refutes Vidal-Naquet's lies and distortions today
just as it did over a decade ago.
The second article, "Response to a Paper Historian", serves also as a
scorching response to Ken McVay, Danny Keren, et al. It neatly refutes a
great quantity of the propaganda they constantly re-post. Their "undeniable
evidence" has been refuted, most of it for quite some time now. Their
continuing to post and re-post the same lies does not make the lies any more
true. That they claim their "evidence" has never been refuted is yet
another manifestation of their BIG LIE technique.
Faurisson's article has been publicly known and readily available for
quite some time (since 1982). That the "Tellers of Official Truth" pretend
it does not exist -- and deliberately suppress it -- points to the glaringly
obvious: something is amiss, to put it lightly.
"THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THY NEIGHBORS." Let the
silence be broken! This is not a trifling matter. "Do unto others as you
would have them do unto you."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
>From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
Anti-Revisionist Work Takes Aim at Faurisson
CROSSING SWORDS IN FRANCE ON THE HOLOCAUST ISSUE
_Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust_, by Pierre
Vidal-Naquet. Translated and with a foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992. Hardcover. 205 (+ xxvi) pages. Notes.
Index. ISBN: 0-231-07458-1.
Reviewed by Mark Weber
In no country has Holocaust revisionism gained greater ground than in
France. Most of the blame or credit for this belongs to one man: Dr.
Robert Faurisson. A victim of numerous costly legal battles, ten physical
attacks (one of them nearly fatal), and an unrelenting media smear campaign,
this specialist of French literature and text and document analysis has had
a profound impact solely because of the solidity and persuasiveness of his
arguments -- arguments bolstered with an astonishing mountain of documents
and compiled in years of meticulous research in archives in at least four
countries.
In the years since he first presented his arguments in two articles
published in the influential Paris daily _Le Monde_ (December 29, 1978, and
January 16, 1979), few efforts have been made to confront the substance of
his arguments. This book by French Jewish scholar Vidal-Naquet is the most
serious try at it.
This is not a new work. It is a collection of four essays that
appeared first in France in 1980, 1981, 1985, 1987, and as a newspaper
article in _Le Monde_ in April 1981. The fact that this largely outdated
work has been pressed into urgent service in 1992 -- with considerable
applause from America's intellectual establishment -- suggests a feeling of
urgency on the part of the powers that be in dealing with the revisionists.
[Photograph captioned, "Pierre Vidal-Naquet"]
_Assassins of Memory_ has been given the most prestigious and
flattering treatment that a book can receive in this country: a laudatory
front page review (along with Lipstadt's _Denying the Holocaust_) in the
nationally-distributed _New York Times Book Review_ (July 11, 1993). And
yet, the appearance of this book is no cause for rejoicing, as psychiatrist
Walter Reich complains in his _Times_ review. "...The Holocaust deniers,"
he writes, "have grown ever more successful in having their arguments
presented -- and heard with receptivity and respect -- in high school
classrooms, on college campuses and on television talk shows."
This unhappy mood verging on despair is further manifest in what is
probably the most remarkable and interesting portion of this book: the 1992
foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman, a professor of French literature at Boston
University. In five pages of Mehlman's foreword, one can find these words
about either his friend, Vidal-Naquet, or about his friend's work:
A tone between rage and pessimism...disenchanted...bizarrely
pessimistic...aberrant...most intriguing [meant pejoratively]...
forced...camp of the dogmatists...dispirited...oddly dispirited
pseudo-conclusion...dispirited...depressing...refusal of open debate
...having written a book about (and against) arguments which he claims
to regard as beneath consideration...stridency and insult...a venting
of outrage...his declaration in _Le Monde_ [Feb. 23, 1972] seems both
like a closing of establishment ranks and an a priori refusal of
discussion...
For years now, Vidal-Naquet has been the Nemesis of Faurisson, even
testifying against him in court. While he has repeatedly claimed that he
does not believe that Faurisson should be brought to trial because of his
views, he has belied this by his actions. In an English-language interview
broadcast on American radio in mid-December 1992, Vidal-Naquet said that he
opposes laws that criminalize revisionism, but also stated: "I hate
Faurisson. If I could, I would kill him personally."
French officials have bestowed numerous honors on Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
His appointment to the Legion d'honneur was announced in the July 14
(Bastille day) 1990 issue of France's official gazette of laws (_Journal
officiel de la Republique francaise_). In the same issue of the _Journal
officiel_ also appeared the text of a remarkable law specifically designed
to criminalize "denial" of the Holocaust, a statute that can rightly be
called the "Lex Faurissonia."
The core of this book is the first essay; its title, "A Paper
Eichmann," refers to Professor Faurisson. Unless the reader pays close
attention to footnotes, he might not realize that Faurisson had already
replied in scrupulous detail to Vidal-Naquet's points in a lengthy essay
published in France in 1982. This reply is mentioned here in just four
footnotes, and no mention whatsoever is made of the 52-page English-language
version, "Response to a Paper Historian" (a reference to Vidal-Naquet),
which appeared in the Spring 1986 issue of this _Journal_.
In his "Response," Faurisson has done a magnificent job of answering
every one of Vidal-Naquet's pertinent points and arguments. In his 56-point
reply, Faurisson sought to leave no stone unturned. Reading this
devastating counter-attack, it is not difficult to understand Vidal-Naquet's
reluctance to let people know of its existence. (It would, of course, be
redundant and impossible to duplicate here what Faurisson has already
written: the reader interested in a scrupulous revisionist response to the
specific points and charges made in this book is referred to the Spring 1986
_Journal_, pp. 21-72.)
For years the "party line" on dealing with revisionists was simply to
ignore them. Confronted with the continued progress of revisionism, this
tactic has given way to a campaign of misrepresentation, vilification,
censorship, fines and violence. So clever and deceitful are the Holocaust
revisionists (so the argument goes), that the public is unable to see
through their specious arguments. Therefore, they must be attacked AD
HOMINEM and never permitted an opportunity to respond.
In his preface, Vidal-Naquet accordingly insists that: "One can and
should enter into a discussion concerning the 'revisionists'...but one
should not enter into debate with the 'revisionists'." Faurisson, in his
essay, "My Life as a Revisionist" (published in the Spring 1989 issue of
this _Journal_), provides a tart reply to this comment. After taking note
of some of Vidal-Naquet's reluctant but significant concessions to truth
(pp. 53-55), Faurisson wrote:
To draw an analogy from sports, Vidal-Naquet thinks he is better than
Faurisson at tennis; not only that, he claims that Faurisson cheats at
tennis. Should the latter suggest a match, before a referee and in
public, Vidal-Naquet would respond that he would certainly like to
play, but only on the condition that there be no opponent. He would
ask the judge to declare him the winner in advance; the public's job
would simply be to confirm the decision.
In the opening sentence of his chapter "Theses on Revisionism,"
Vidal-Naquet writes: "I shall call 'revisionism' the doctrine according to
which the genocide practiced by Nazi Germany against Jews and Gypsies did
not exist..." This definition is dangerously ambiguous because he provides
no definition of genocide. Every serious revisionist -- including Faurisson
-- readily acknowledges that European Jews were victims of a cruel and harsh
policy -- one that could well be described as genocidal, but one not
essentially different than the treatment many other peoples have endured
through the ages.
A mistake that strikes closer to home is Vidal-Naquet's assertion that
"In the United States, revisionism is above all the speciality of a
Californian group, W.A. Carto's Liberty Lobby." (p. 90). Similarly untrue
is Vidal-Naquet's assertion (p. 184) that "Carto finances the _Journal of
Historical Review_."
This book's silly title is typical of the Holocaust literature of our
day, even this supposedly serious work. It suggests that revisionists are
intellectual criminals who are murdering the sacred "memory" of Holocaust
survivors. Implicit here is the notion that it is a sin, a sacrilege, to
question the "memory" of (Jewish) "martyrs."
Well, does this include the now-discredited "memory" of the five
witnesses in the Demjanjuk trial who, under oath, identified John Demjanjuk
as a mass murderer at Treblinka? Who are the "assassins" of those
"memories"? And who "assassinated" the "memories" of those who talk about
soap bars made from Jewish corpses?
Or what about the "memory" of the prominent former Auschwitz inmate
Rudolf Vrba? In sworn testimony in the 1985 trial in Toronto of Ernst
Zundel, Vrba calculated, based on personal observation, that at
Auschwitz-Birkenau during a 25-month period (April 1942 to April 1944), the
Germans had "gassed" 1,765,000 Jews, including 150,000 from France. Later,
under rigorous questioning, this impostor admitted to having resorted to
"poetic license" in making these claims. (See Faurisson's essay, "The
Zundel Trial," Winter 1988-89 _Journal_, pp. 420-421.)
Similarly, who is guilty of "assassinating" the "memory" of those who
once claimed to have witnessed mass killings by electrocution at Belzec and
Auschwitz? And who "assassinated" the "memory" of those who once recounted
executions at Treblinka in "steam chambers"?
Although Vidal-Naquet vows, in his preface, that "I have nothing to
reply to them [revisionists] and will not do so," a good portion of this
book is devoted precisely to that purpose. He also makes a few grudging
concessions to revisionist arguments. He writes (p. 97) that
there was no gas chamber functioning at Dachau, that _The Diary of Anne
Frank_, as it has been published in various languages, raises problems
of coherence if not of authenticity, [and that]...Krema I, that of the
Auschwitz [main] camp, was reconstructed after the war by the Poles.
In recent years, every serious anti-revisionist has been obliged to make
concession after concession to the revisionists in order to salvage what he
believes is the core of the Holocaust story.
In the two _Le Monde_ articles mentioned earlier, Faurisson insisted on
the physical and chemical impossibilities of the "Nazi gas chambers." An
alarmed French intellectual establishment responded to these articles with a
statement -- co-authored by Vidal-Naquet and signed by 34 scholars -- that
will certainly be long remembered as one of most shameful in that country's
intellectual history. The declaration (published in _Le Monde_, Feb. 21,
1979, and cited by Mehlman in his foreword to this book), concludes with the
words:
The question of how TECHNICALLY such a mass murder was possible should
not be raised. It was technically possible because it occurred. This
is the necessary starting point for all historical investigation on the
subject. It has fallen to us to recall that point with due simplicity:
there is not nor can there be a debate over the existence of the gas
chambers.
It has proven necessary for the defenders of the Holocaust story to
ignore even this injunction. Anti-revisionist researchers such as
Jean-Claude Pressac have devoted considerable time and energy to an effort
to show precisely "how technically such a mass murder was possible."
Another early retort to Faurisson was an article in _Le Monde_,
fittingly headlined "An Abundance of Evidence," that claimed that proofs of
execution gas chambers are plentiful. As Mehlman notes, even leading
Holocaust historians must now admit that there is no such "abundance" --
merely tortured interpretations of documentary evidence. Even once widely
quoted "testimonies" of "survivors" and famed postwar "confessions" of
German officials are being abandoned. As Mehlman goes on to inform the
reader, even Princeton University professor Arno Mayer (himself Jewish) in
his 1989 book, _Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The "Final Solution" in
History_, acknowledged that "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are
at once rare and unreliable," and that more Jews perished at Auschwitz as
victims of disease than were put to death -- a view at odds with the
"official" Auschwitz extermination story.
This book concludes with words of doubt: "Will truth have the last
word? How one would like to be sure of it..." With sadness, Mehlman aptly
comments on a striking contrast of moods:
Whereas Vidal-Naquet is left dispirited at the end of this volume as to
the future prospects of truth, Zola's great slogan has fallen --
diabolically -- into the adversary camp. "Historical truth is on the
march," writes Faurisson, and "one is hard put to see who might stop
it."
[end of first article of two]
___________________________________________________________________________
>From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Volume 7, Number 1 (Spring 1986):
Response to a Paper Historian
ROBERT FAURISSON
Introduction
Pierre Vidal-Naquet is professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales (School of Higher Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris and has
been a very determined adversary of mine. He has attacked me in the
academic and journalistic worlds and even in the courts. Along with Leon
Poliakov, he is the author of a declaration, published in _Le Monde_ on
February 21, 1979, p. 23, which was signed by 34 historians:
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.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet is also the author of a long article entitled "Un
Eichmann de papier" ("A Paper Eichmann") which was directed against me. I
responded to that article with my own "Reponse a un historien de papier"
("Response to a Paper Historian"). The article by Vidal-Naquet first
appeared in the review _Esprit_ (No. 45, September, 1980, pp. 8-52), and
later in a new form, with additions, in a book entitled _Les Juifs, la
memoire et le present_ (Maspero, 1980, pp. 195-282).
My response first appeared in a short book entitled _Reponse A Pierre
Vidal-Naquet_ (La Vieille Taupe Publishers, 1982) and later in a second,
expanded edition, in December 1982. It appears here for the first time in
English.
An abridgement of the Vidal-Naquet article has been published in
English (_Democracy_, April 1981, pp. 67-95) but I have not checked to see
whether that translation is faithful to the original. Vidal-Naquet is very
hard-hitting and even insulting, but his article is interesting and even
unique: For the first and last time an Exterminationist has tried to answer
the arguments of a Revisionist. When the Revisionist replied to the
Exterminationist, the latter abandoned the discussion and retreated into
silence. Vidal-Naquet no longer talks about gas chambers.
In France there have been two other attempts to answer the
Revisionists' arguments, but they were so weak that they fell of their own
weight. The first was by Nadine Fresco ("Les Redresseurs de morts" [The
Revisers of the Dead], _Les Temps Modernes_, No. 407, June 1980, pp.
2150-2211) and the second by Georges Wellers (_Les Chambres a gaz ont
existe_ [The Gas Chambers Existed], Paris, Gallimard, 1981).
After being burned in the French venture, the Exterminationists have
preferred not to cross swords with the Revisionists. Two recent examples
illustrate this: First, the collective undertaking directed by Eugen Kogon,
Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Ruckerl (_NS-Massentotungen durch Giftgas_
[NS Mass Killings with Poison Gas], Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1983);
then, Raul Hilberg's _The Destruction of the European Jews_, revised and
definitive edition (New York/London: Holmes and Meier, 1985). In neither
book are the names of the Revisionists mentioned, or their publications or
arguments. For a book to be considered scholarly, however, it must treat
both sides of the issue at hand; present the arguments of the opposing side;
furnish bibliographical information that would let the reader consult the
original sources, all the sources; and finally, it must answer the opposing
party if it can.
One of the most notable differences between the Exterminationists and
the Revisionists is that while Revisionists spend most of their time
mentioning and examining the arguments of the other side, Exterminationists
maintain a policy of ostracism against their opponents.
Let us imagine for a moment a layman who would like to know who is
right -- those who claim that there was a genocide carried out against the
Jews by using homicidal gas chambers, or those who claim that this is an
historical lie. Such a layman would like to attend a debate between
representatives of those two theses, but he cannot. The Exterminationists
refuse all proposals for debate that the Revisionists offer them. In place
of attending such a debate, this layman might want to read publications in
which each side tries to answer the arguments of the other. But he cannot
do that either, because while the Revisionists do discuss the opposing
arguments, the Exterminationists either turn a deaf ear or reply with
insults.
There is only one way to satisfy to some extent our layman's desires;
that is to have him first read Vidal-Naquet's "A Paper Eichmann" and then my
own "Response to a Paper Historian." Failing that, "Response to a Paper
Historian" offers an introduction to a debate between an Exterminationist
and a Revisionist that is unprecedented, both in its scope and its detail.
___________________________________________________________________________
The historian cannot avoid spending a good part of his life in paper.
He goes through documents; he collects them; he compares archives and
written documents of all kinds. But at the same time the historian must not
neglect the material aspect of the facts; therefore he must also transform
himself at times into an on-site inspector: an archeologist, a physicist, a
chemist, an explorer. Visiting a place, he looks at it, searches through
it, measures it, photographs it; he touches it with his fingers. He
transforms himself sometimes into a police investigator. He carries out
physical reconstructions or, when that is impossible, he carefully
reconstructs things in his mind. He needs to have his feet on the ground.
It is very good for him to inform himself, from the documents, about
democracy in Rome; but it is wise to go to the spot in Rome to see what a
small area was occupied by the Forum, the focal point of that democracy.
His illusions take flight; so much the worse! Reality replaces them; so
much the better!
When he deals with the Ancient World, which is his speciality, Pierre
Vidal-Naquet, I suppose, is not content with documents only, but also
investigates sites. On the other hand, when that historian calls himself an
historian of the "gas chambers," he goes around and around in documents and
abstractions. Settled comfortably far above us in a half-philosophical,
half-religious empyrean, he writes about other writings and does not even
take the effort to reflect on what he writes.
That is why I call him a Paper Historian.
Beginning with the first paper he wrote on the question of the "gas
chambers," we discover two striking examples of that dangerous mind-set. We
recall that _Le Monde_ on 21 February 1979 (p. 23) had published a text
entitled "The Nazi Policy of Extermination: A Declaration by Historians."
That text was written by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Leon Poliakov and signed by
thirty-four historians without any competence on that subject.
To begin with, the _Le Monde_ text reproduced an extract from the
"confession" of SS-man Kurt Gerstein. The extract was intended to persuade
us that it contained an "indisputable" and "striking" testimony about the
Nazi "gas chambers." In halting French, Gerstein had, we are told, written:
"The naked men [in the gas chambers] are standing up at [sic] the feet of
the others. Seven hundred to eight hundred in 25 square meters, in 45 cubic
meters; the doors are closed." Any reader alert to reality would conclude:
28 to 32 men standing on one square meter -- that is physically impossible;
the admissibility of that strange testimony is at least questionable. But
settled in their common philosophical-religious empyrean, our thirty-four
scatter-brains did not see what leaped to the eye of the layman.
Here again is the triumphant (and also silly and empty) conclusion of
our paper historians' manifesto:
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.
Tautology? A double redundancy? Pure silliness? How to describe such
a pearl of wisdom? Remember well the last phrase: "There is not, there
cannot be, any debate about the existence of the gas chambers."
In good logic, Vidal-Naquet would not have had, nineteen months later,
to publish in _Esprit_ a long article on the subject; an article that he
expected me to honor with a response (_Les Juifs, la memoire et le present_
[The Jews, Memory, and the Present], Paris: Maspero, 1980, p. 280). Here
is the explanation: 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," Vidal-Naquet and Poliakov hastily drew up a
manifesto, and then took it to some signers, saying to them: "We say there
cannot be any debate, but it is very clear that you must not pay 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..._)
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. Delpech.
As to the argumentation which was hidden behind this silliness, I leave
to others the job of answering. I will let Claude Guillon and Yves le
Bonniec speak (_Suicide, mode d'emploi_ [Instruction Manual for Suicide],
Alain Moreau, 1982):
We are quite prepared for our part to consider any method of
elimination, including gas chambers. It is possible that the technical
arguments of Faurisson will be shown to be without value. Having said
that, it is inevitable to ask oneself how technically the gas chambers
function, that is to say simply whether they existed or did not exist.
Such is the obligatory course of every historical inquiry. If by
chance no one can be found to show how a single gas chamber was able to
function, from that we would deduce that no one could have been
asphyxiated (p. 205).
That remark of the two authors is preceded by the following:
After Rassinier (whose estimation of the gas chambers is more
reserved), Faurisson is interesting for having, at the same time that
he claims to denounce a forty-year-old lie, revealed numerous lies, and
having aroused among his opponents one of the most formidable
productions of new lies of the decade. The official historians
themselves recognize that today people still visit a gas chamber, where
there never was one, which ought not, according to them, to diminish at
all the influence of other "historical" truths. (op. cit., pp. 204-205)
Claude Guillon and Yves le Bonniec use here a key argument of the
Revisionists against the Exterminationist thesis. Vidal-Naquet does not
breathe a word of that in his innumerable writings and interventions in
court.
I want to speak of what I call the "drastic revision" of 19 August
1960. On that day, the Hamburg weekly _Die Zeit_, which subscribes to the
victors' "Holocaust" story, published a letter, a simple letter from Dr.
Martin Broszat of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. In that
letter, which was simply entitled, "No Gassing at Dachau," he conceded to
us, or rather, he finally conceded to historical truth, that there had never
been any homicidal gassing in the Old Reich (Germany within its 1937
frontiers). Since 1960, that is to say for 22 years, we have awaited the
rigorously documented study which would let us see why it had been suddenly
necessary to stop believing in the "gassings" at Dachau, Bergen-Belsen,
Buchenwald, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck, and Neuengamme, while at
the same time continuing to believe in the "gassings" in the camps located
in communist Poland. Do we not have at our disposal for all the camps an
indiscriminate mass of "proofs," of "testimonies," of "confessions"? Have
they not executed or driven to suicide the officials of camps where,
finally, it is revealed, as if by the working of the Holy Spirit, that there
had never been a homicidal "gas chamber"? But no more of this candor: If
Dr. Broszat, since 1972 the director of his institute, has never dwelt on
those questions, it is because he knows perfectly well that in showing the
inanity of the "proofs," the "testimonies," and the "confessions" relating
to the camps located in the Old Reich, he would demolish simultaneously the
"proofs," the "testimonies," the "confessions" relative to the camps in
communist Poland. That is so because for an honest observer all those
"proofs," all those "testimonies," and all those "confessions" are worth
nothing. They are really of interest only to sociologists specializing in
the study of mechanisms of belief.
I now come to the article by Vidal-Naquet. I am going to follow it
step by step at the risk of appearing disjointed or of repeating myself,
because his entire article is confused.
1. From page 195 to page 208, Vidal-Naquet piles up generalities and
digressions which do not seem to me to have great relevance to the subject.
RESPONSE: No response.
2. From page 208 to page 210, Vidal-Naquet talks about the _Secret
Speeches_ of Himmler (_Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden 1933-1945 und andere
Ansprachen_ [Heinrich Himmler: Secret Speeches 1933-1945 and Other Talks],
ed. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson, Berlin: Propylaen, 1974), about
the statistician R. Korherr, and about the word SONDERBEHANDLUNG (special
treatment). He insinuates, but without great conviction, that a passage
from those speeches shows a will to carry out "genocide" against the Jews,
and that Sonderbehandlung is a code word for extermination.
RESPONSE: I would first like to make a remark about the seductive title,
_Secret Speeches_. Those speeches were not at all secret! In this regard,
I note a marked tendency among the Exterminationists to fool the ordinary
reader with tendentious titles. So it was that Serge Klarsfeld's _Memorial
to the Deportation of the Jews from France_ is only a list of the Jews who
embarked on the trains for deportation. There is no question here of a list
of the dead, as they would often have us believe, especially when they go to
deposit these lists at a funeral monument near Jerusalem. Georges Wellers
himself, in his hatred for Vichy, goes so far as to entitle one of his books
_L'Etoile jaune a l'heure de Vichy_ (The Yellow Star in the Vichy Era)
although the Vichy government always successfully opposed the wearing of the
yellow star in its zone. Vidal-Naquet, himself, does not know what tone is
proper to take about Himmler's remarks. He speaks of his "direct or nearly
totally direct language." Here he believes he sees him "at maximum
frankness," even though he adds that "a description of the real process
would be a thousand times more traumatic." There's the rub -- Vidal-Naquet
proclaims that he has found in Himmler what the Exterminationist historians
have sought in vain since 1945: either an order or a simple instruction
verifying a decision to exterminate the Jews. But at the very moment that
he presents to us the result of his search, he looks sulkily at what he has
found: The language of Himmler is "direct or nearly totally direct," there
is no "description of the real process." (Dare we ask if that "description
of the real process" happens to exist only in Vidal-Naquet's head?) But
that's not all. Vidal-Naquet adds another puzzle to the puzzle. He is
astonished at a "toning down" by Himmler; that devil Himmler was facing a
"well-informed" audience! Why, then, this "indirect or nearly totally
indirect" language? Then, suddenly, enveloping himself in an analysis more
and more abstract and autistic, Vidal-Naquet believes he has discovered that
Himmler "codes," and even "supercodes," what he had in his mind.
Vidal-Naquet deciphers this alleged "code" with supreme speed and ease; he
decodes on first reading, off the top of his head. He decrees, without the
least proof, that Sonderbehandlung is a codeword and, in our presence, he
decodes it instantaneously: That word means "extermination." But things
get really complicated when our analyst, seized by a sudden scruple, adds as
a footnote a remark very likely to mislead a reader who no longer knows
whether Himmler is "direct or nearly totally direct"; whether he "is at
maximum frankness" or is being secretive; whether he "codes" or whether he
"supercodes": "Of course Sonderbehandling could also have a perfectly
benign meaning."
The reality was the following: Sonderbehandlung could have a whole
series of meanings, from the most serious to the most benign. The context
should instruct the reader. The primary meaning seems to be medical, and
one will find, for example: "Sonderbehandlung: Quarantanelager (quarantine
camp)." On the other hand, in document PS-502, the same word means
explicitly "executions." Sonderbehandlung was also applied to the favored
treatment enjoyed in captivity by high officials. See what defendant
Kaltenbrunner says about it at the International Military Tribunal at
Nuremberg (French edition, Volume XI, pp. 347-348):
In those two deluxe hotels [for special treatment] were lodged
some of the best people such as M. Poncet, M. Herriot, etc. They
received rations triple those normal for a diplomat; that is to say,
nine times the wartime rations of a German. Every day each received a
bottle of champagne; they corresponded freely with their families, they
could receive parcels from their families left behind in France. These
internees received frequent visits, and we would inquire about all
their desires. That is what we called "SPECIAL TREATMENT."
Arrivals and departures were noted in the reports of the daily
population of each camp. Among the departures might be noted the dead, the
"S.B." (Sonderbehandlung), the freed (people forget that many of the
concentration-camp inmates could leave Auschwitz after completing a sentence
of several months), and those transferred. They would have us believe that
the "S.B." were those condemned to "gassing." There were, however, "S.B."
in the camps that had no gas chambers, even according to the
Exterminationists. These "S.B." must have been, in all probability,
internees assigned to other camps for some reason (Bergen-Belsen for health;
Bergen-Belsen for categories of Jews to be exchanged with the Allies;
Ravensbruck for women; Dachau for priests; Theresienstadt for old people,
etc.). The "transferred" category, properly speaking, was made up of people
assigned to a particular job either in the camp, or in a distant camp.
We find, in the travel authorizations, telegrams from the WVHA (the SS
Economic and Administrative Main Office) allowing trucks to pick up material
either for Sonderbehandlung or for Desinfektion (disinfection); these two
words being used interchangeably. It was a matter, more precisely, of going
to Dessau to obtain quantities of Zyklon B in order to disinfect the
Auschwitz camp, where typhus was prevalent (radio message of 22 July 1942
addressed to the Auschwitz camp under signature of General Gluecks [Raul
Hilberg, _Documents of Destruction_, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971, p.
220]). In one and the same book (_Sachso_, by the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen
Society, Minuit-Plon, 1982) the expression "special treatment" is applied on
page 99 to the act of marking in blue pencil on the left breast of a bearer
of lice, and on page 327 it is applied to an execution.
When we seek an expression which can take account of all these meanings
at the same time, we ask ourselves what would be most suitable for
Sonderbehandlung: would it not be to isolate? One finds that meaning in
GESONDERTE UNTERBRINGUNG (isolated stay), an expression often applied to
arrivals.
The fact remains that although Sonderbehandlung could occasionally mean
to execute, we know very well that Himmler, after receiving the work of his
statistician Korherr, told the latter that in a certain passage of his
report he ought to replace the word Sonderbehandlung with TRANSPORTIERUNG
(transport).
Long after the war, Korherr protested against the interpretation of
Sonderbehandlung as meaning massacre. In _Der Spiegel_ of 25 July 1977,
cited by Dr. Wilhelm Staglich on page 391 of _Der Auschwitz Mythos_ (The
Auschwitz Myth) (Tubingen: Grabert Verlag, 1979), he wrote:
The statement according to which I supposedly was able to
establish that more than a million Jews could have died in the camps of
the General Government in Poland and of the territories of the
Wartheland from the results of a special treatment (Sonderbehandlung)
is absolutely incorrect. It is necessary for me to protest against the
use of the verb TO DIE in this context.
Korherr goes on to say that Sonderbehandlung was supposed to mean
Ansiedlung (displacement).
The context is really the last concern of someone like Vidal-Naquet. I
willingly concede to him that on page 169 of the German edition
(_Geheimreden..._), Himmler says this to his audience (6 October 1943):
We came up against the question: What about the women and
children? In this case as well I decided on a very clear solution.
That is, I did not feel justified in exterminating the men -- in other
words, to kill or allow to be killed -- while allowing the children to
grow up into avengers against our sons and grandsons. The difficult
decision had to be made to let this people disappear from the earth.
(op. cit., p. 169)
If we end the quotation here, as Vidal-Naquet does, Himmler assumes the
proportions of a General Turreau intent on killing men, women, and children
and making of the Vendee (during the French Revolution) a great cemetery.
However, the continuation is curious and makes clear that Himmler has
indulged in a bit of braggadocio. He goes on to say that in his conduct of
the anti-partisan struggle he was able to spare the German officers and
soldiers a double danger:
That of becoming too hardened, of becoming heartless and of no
longer respecting human life, or of becoming too weak and of losing
one's head to the point of having a nervous breakdown -- the path
between Scylla and Charybdis is terribly narrow. (p. 170)
But how then, one may ask, did Himmler's men in fact proceed? The
answer is found in many pages of his so-called _Secret Speeches_, and in
particular on pages 201 and 203.
Two months after the speech mentioned above, Himmler returned to the
subject (16 December 1943). Again, it is the partisan war that he is
talking about, a war carried out as savagely on one side as on the other.
He says:
Wherever I was forced to take action in a village against
partisans and against Jewish commissars -- I'm saying this to this
circle, as meant exclusively for this circle -- as a basic rule I also
gave the order to have the women and children of these partisans and
commissars killed as well. I would be a weakling and a criminal
against our descendants if I were to allow the hate-filled sons of the
sub-humans wiped out by us in the struggle between humans and
sub-humans to grow up. Believe me: It's not easy to give such an
order, and not as simple to carry out as it is to think through
correctly its consequences and put them into words in a meeting hall.
But we must always recognize just how naturally basic and primitive is
the racial struggle in which we find ourselves. (p. 201)
More interesting yet is the speech Himmler gave five months later to a
number of generals at Sonthofen (24 May 1944). Here we find less than ever
the "genocide" we might fear. Himmler declared:
Regarding the Jewish women and children, I did not consider myself
justified in allowing the children to grow up into avengers who would
then kill our fathers and our grandchildren. I would have regarded
that as cowardly. Therefore, the issue was dealt with
uncompromisingly. Nevertheless, right now -- and this is unique in
this war -- we are first bringing 100,000 male Jews from Hungary, and
later another 100,000, with whom we are building underground factories,
into concentration camps. None of them, though, will come into any
contact at all with the German people. (p. 203)
The Germans were haunted by the possibility that uprisings like that of the
Warsaw ghetto would recur behind their lines. Concerning the fear of seeing
happen at Budapest what had taken place in Warsaw, we can read _Ich, Adolf
Eichmann_ (I, Adolf Eichmann), published by Dr. Rudolf Aschenhauer (Druffel
Verlag, 1980), page 33.
3. On page 211, Vidal-Naquet, reciting the history of the "extermination,"
talks about "the halt to the extermination of the Jews on Himmler's order at
the end of October 1944."
RESPONSE: That order never existed and I challenge Vidal-Naquet to produce
it for us. Just as there existed no order by Hitler or by Himmler or by
anyone to start the extermination of the Jews, so also was there no order by
anyone to stop an extermination which had not occurred.
4. In a footnote on page 212, Vidal-Naquet asserts, "I see no reason to
doubt the existence of the gas chambers at Ravensbruck, Struthof, and
Mauthausen."
RESPONSE: With regard to Ravensbruck, Vidal-Naquet refers us to the book by
Germaine Tillion (_Ravensbruck_, Paris: Le Seuil, 1973), which contains a
plan of the camp. The location of the alleged "gas chambers" is not even
noted! Nowhere else is there either the slightest plan or the slightest
physical trace. This is a strictly metaphysical "gas chamber. "
Regarding Struthof, I was the first to publicize the condition of the
premises, guaranteed to be "in original condition." I proved that the
"gasser" would have been the first to gas himself with his mysterious gas
(see the two contradictory confessions by Josef Kramer about the "gassings"
at Struthof camp in Alsace.) Vidal-Naquet does not resolve the technical
puzzle; besides, nothing that is technical interests him.
With regard to Mauthausen, things are even simpler. The handles that
open and close the pipes bringing the alleged gas into the shower are within
reach of the victims! That is what is clearly evident from a normal photo.
The photo exhibited at the recent display about the deportation which was
held on the Esplanade of the Trocadero in Paris (April-May of 1982) showed
it not quite as well. The handles were cropped out.
5. On page 212, in footnote 23, Vidal-Naquet confesses that there exists on
the subject of the concentration camps "a sub-literature which represents a
really vile kind of appeal to consumerism and sadism." He adds: "All that
is dependent on hallucination and propaganda must be eliminated." On these
bases he denounces Christian Bernadac, Silvain Reiner, Jean-Francois
Steiner, and V. Grossman. He admits having fallen "into the trap set by
Steiner's _Treblinka_ (Fayard, 1966)."
RESPONSE: Very well, but that hardly moves us forward. What would be
instructive for the reader would be to know why Vidal-Naquet fell into such
a trap and how he got out of it. He insults Bernadac without our knowing
exactly why, and he touts Nyiszli, leaving us none the wiser as to his
motives. He proceeds by ukases. He decrees that one narrative is credible
and that another one is not. He devotes himself to none of the analyses
that the Revisionists carry out. When a Rassinier asserts to us that the
best-seller, _Doctor at Auschwitz_, by Nyiszli, is only a "rascally trick,"
it is after a long analysis and an inquiry of the most serious kind.
Rassinier arms us for future reading, leaving it to our judgment as mature
adults to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Vidal-Naquet disarms us.
In his presence we are like children who, each time a new work appears,
await the judgment which will fall from the mouth of their father -- a
father at the same time peremptory and fallible. What does he think of
Martin Gray who, to write _Au nom de tous les miens_ (published in English
as _For Those I Loved_), took as his ghost-writer a purveyor of moral
lessons named Max Gallo who helped Gray, in cooperation with the Center for
Contemporary Jewish Documentation, to fabricate his deportation to
Treblinka? Does he sense an odor of authenticity in the rubbish piled up by
Filip Muller in _Trois ans dans une chambre a gaz, a Auschwitz_ (Three Years
in a Gas Chamber at Auschwitz) (Pygmalion/Gerald Watalet, 1980), a book
launched with a great fuss by Claude Lanzmann [director of the documentary
_Shoah_, 1985) and by _Le Nouvel Observateur_, a book which drew tears from
the actor Francois Perrier who came to talk about it on television?
What does he think about Constantin Simonov on _Maidanek_ (Editions
sociales, 1946)? How does he judge a hundred other works, either histories
or first-person accounts, where we find over and over again the same
cliches, the same inventions, the same foul smells, the same physical
impossibilities as in the works that he denounces as false? What does he
think of Fania Fenelon as she expresses herself on what she experienced at
Auschwitz (which is not without interest) and as she tries to make us
believe in the existence of the gas chambers (which she did not see)? What
does he think of the quite recent _Sachso_, in which the Association of
Former Inmates of Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen had the effrontery to tell us
that the camp had a homicidal "gas chamber," when for nearly a quarter of a
century it has been accepted by authorities in Exterminationist history that
the place never had any such installation? What does he think, in that
regard, of the way in which faith is transformed into "science"?
6. On pages 212-213, Vidal-Naquet concedes to us that the theologian
Charles Hauter, who was deported to Buchenwald, "never saw a gas chamber"
and "is deranged on that subject." He quotes him:
The machinery for extermination literally abounded. To be
accomplished quickly, extermination demanded a special kind of
industrialization. The gas chambers answered that need in quite
different ways. Some of them, of a refined style, were supported by
pillars of a porous material, inside of which the gas formed, then
passed through the walls. Others were of a simpler structure, but all
were sumptuous in appearance. It was easy to see that the architects
had conceived them with pleasure, planning them for a long time,
drawing on all of their esthetic resources. They were the only parts
of the camp constructed with love.
RESPONSE: I do not see why Vidal-Naquet takes exception to that testimony.
It is neither worse nor better than everything else to be read under the
rubric of "gas chambers" at Buchenwald, Auschwitz or elsewhere. By what
right does Vidal-Naquet assert that the theologian never saw any gas
chambers, and that he "is deranged on that subject"? The answer is simple
and disarming, like reasoning in the Vidal-Naquet style, and must be
formulated as follows: "The theologian did not see gas chambers at
Buchenwald because it offends the official truth on the question, the
official truth admitted by tacit and secret consent among the establishment
historians, according to whom, definitively, Buchenwald had no gas chamber."
In other words, to remain faithful to the tautological, redundant, and
autistic reasonings of a Vidal-Naquet, here is what one would have to say to
Charles Hauter: "It is not necessary to ask oneself how, technically, such
a mass murder was possible at Buchenwald. It was impossible technically
since it did not take 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
non-existence of the gas chambers at Buchenwald."
7. On page 213, Vidal-Naquet concedes, "The number of six million Jews
killed, which comes from Nuremberg, has nothing sacred or definitive about
it, and many historians arrive at a slightly lower number." "So it is," he
adds in a footnote, "that R. Hilberg arrives at a total of 5,100,000
victims."
RESPONSE: This remark of Vidal-Naquet jibes with what Dr. Broszat finally
declared before a court in Frankfurt: "The six million is a symbolic
number." I am surprised that Vidal-Naquet does not quote a more convincing
argument in support of his thesis than the total proposed by Raul Hilberg.
Gerald Reitlinger himself, on page 546 of his _The Final Solution_ (London:
Sphere Books Ltd., 1971), presents a "Summary of Extermination Estimates
(Revised 1966)." His table gives us a choice between a minimum of 4,204,000
and a maximum of 4,575,000 Jewish dead. Still, he takes great care to add
that it is a matter of totals based on conjectures. Vidal-Naquet ought to
inform us that all such totals are based on pure conjectures. After 37
years, with the electronic means that we possess, the approximate number of
Jewish victims ought long since to have been established, but it sadly
happens that the Exterminationists do not wish to establish it. When a
regime like that in France has kept secret its own figures for over ten
years now, it is hiding them for fear of Jewish reaction, and, as we shall
see farther on, Vidal-Naquet has taken part personally in this refusal to
communicate a bit of information which inevitably would embarrass the liars
and jugglers of numbers.
8. On pages 213 and 214, Vidal-Naquet writes of Klarsfeld: "In the same
way, Klarsfeld, by the thorough work which characterizes his _Memorial_, has
decreased by more than 40,000 the number usually given for the deportation
of Jews from France (from 100,000 to a little more than 76,000)."
RESPONSE: I have already said what I thought of Klarsfeld's book. The
content is worthy of a photograph which appears on the cover. The photo is
cropped in order to appear pitiful: The smiling persons have disappeared.
One can find the photo in its complete form on page 188. Second distortion:
On page 28, Klarsfeld leads us to believe that General Kohl was in favor of
the physical destruction of the Jews, when it was a question of a
destruction of their influence, "like that of the political churches." The
words omitted are: "Er zeigte sich auch als Gegner der politischen Kirchen"
("He showed himself to be also an enemy of the political churches.") This
very serious distortion of a text from [SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Theodor]
Dannecker originates with Josef Billig, followed by Georges Wellers,
followed by Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton. Each one has replaced
the missing phrase with an ellipsis, the typographical sign of an omission.
Each therefore could say, "here finally is proof of the decision to
exterminate. The only proof, to tell the truth." With Klarsfeld the
distortion is all the more conscious since, before publishing his
_Memorial_, he had published _Die Endlosung der Judenfrage in Frankreich_
(The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in France) (Paris: Center for
Contemporary Jewish Documentation, 1977) for the German courts that were to
try [Kurt] Lischka. In that work it was impossible to conjure up those
three periods (ellipsis) all of a sudden in the middle of a letter by
Dannecker (page 36). I can cite a third attempt at trickery on Klarsfeld's
part on page 245 of his _Memorial_, in regard to the diary of Dr.
Johann-Paul Kremer: see my _Memoire en defense_, p. 125.
There is something infinitely more serious, however. In order to
determine the number of the dead among the 76,000 Jews deported from France,
Klarsfeld used an astonishing procedure: He declared DEAD all those who had
not taken the trouble to go declare themselves ALIVE to the Ministry of
Veterans by the deadline of 31 December 1945! And that at a time when that
step was neither obligatory nor official. Truth obliges me to note that
Klarsfeld did go to Belgium to find out whether it would be possible to
gather there more names of survivors. The majority of Jews deported from
France were foreigners. I do not think they had a great longing to return
to a country which had turned them over to the Germans.
Klarsfeld has not troubled to find out how many Jews deported from
France, then liberated, migrated to Palestine, the United States, South
Africa, Argentina, etc. He has had no scruple about counting as dead all
those who, after returning to France, presented themselves, without being
asked to do so, at the door of the Ministry of Veterans after 31 December
1945. One could say a great deal about his _Memorial_, about the appendix
to _Memorial_, or about the thousands of "gassed persons" made up out of
whole cloth by the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris,
according to Klarsfeld's own statement.
Vidal-Naquet says that the number usually given for Jews deported from
France was 100,000 and that Klarsfeld reduced that to a little more than
76,000, thus bringing about a revision of about 40,000 (?). There is an
error there. The number usually given was 120,000 and not 100,000, and the
revision is therefore about 44,000. According to Klarsfeld, in 1939 France
had about 300,000 Jews (French, foreign, stateless) out of its 39 million
inhabitants (see his page 606). From that we conclude that three quarters
of the Jews settled in France were not deported; a strange phenomenon to
reconcile with a supposed policy of "extermination." A phenomenon still
stranger in Bulgaria and in pre-war Romania or in Denmark or Finland. A
phenomenon all the stranger when we think of all of the associations
throughout the world which include survivors of the "Holocaust" who, like
Simon Wiesenthal himself, went from death camp to death camp without Hitler
ever killing them.
The "Wannsee Protocol," which I do not feel has any value, for reasons
that I do not have time to give here, is considered authentic by the
Exterminationists. For this reason, I point out that the transcript notes
865,000 Jews for France in 1941. From that we would have to conclude that
not even one tenth of the Jews of France were deported.
9. On page 214, in footnote 28, Vidal-Naquet writes:
Faurisson declares (_Verite..._, pp. 98, 115) inaccessible the
findings of the Committee for the History of the (Second) World War on
the total number of non-racial deportees. They can be checked very
simply in J.P. Azema, _De Munich a la Liberation_ (From Munich to the
Liberation, 1979), p. 189: 63,000 deportees, of whom 41,000 were
members of the resistance, an estimate obviously lower than those which
were formerly accepted.
RESPONSE: I have never limited my criticism to the fact that the Committee
hid from us "the total number of non-racial deportees." I had always
reproached it for hiding from us the total number of true deportees: racial
or non-racial. One will note that my criticism remains as valid today as
yesterday, and that neither the Committee, nor Azema, nor Vidal-Naquet dares
to reveal to us the number of racial deportees. I am going to do it for
them: THE NUMBER WHICH THEY HAVE HIDDEN FROM US FOR NINE YEARS IS 28,162.
(For the non-racial, it is exactly 63,085). Obviously that number -- 28,162
Jews -- is terribly embarrassing for the Exterminationists. It was obtained
at the end of an investigation which lasted twenty years. How to reconcile
it with the number from Klarsfeld: about 76,000? Here is a good subject
for our Exterminationists to reflect on. Must we assume that the Committee
worked scientifically and that it assigned the characteristic of Jewishness
to those for whom that characteristic meant deportation? Must we believe
that Klarsfeld for his part counted as Jews all the Jews, whether they had
been deported for that characteristic or for another such as resistance,
sabotage, spying, black market, common-law crime? I don't know anything
about it. I pose the question and I would certainly like some
clarification. Let our people play their violins in unison!
Vidal-Naquet talks about 63,000 deportees, including 41,000 resistants,
as an "estimate obviously lower than those formerly accepted." I find him a
little bit shifty. He ought to be more precise and recall for us that at
the main Nuremberg trial, the number of deportees from France was officially
250,000 (IMT, Vol. VI, p. 325), which, we might note in passing, gives us an
idea of the seriousness of that tribunal which called itself "military" and
"international" when it was only a judicial masquerade. It was neither
military (with the exception of the judge from the USSR) nor was it
international but inter-Allied, with the victors alone cynically judging the
vanquished on the basis of a statute which contained judicial abominations
like Articles 19 and 21.
10. On pages 214 and 215 Vidal-Naquet writes, "It is quite simply a
shameless lie to compare the Nazi camps with the camps created by a
perfectly scandalous decision of the Roosevelt administration to house
Americans of Japanese origin (Faurisson, in _Verite..._, p. 189)."
RESPONSE: In fact, I wrote, "I describe 'genocide' as the act of killing
men because of their race. Hitler no more committed 'genocide' than did
Napoleon, Stalin, Churchill or Mao. Roosevelt interned American citizens of
Japanese race in concentration camps. That was not 'genocide'." Let people
reread my sentences. Where is there a comparison of the German camps and
the American camps? Where is the "shameless lie" on my part? If I had had
to compare them with anything, it would have been to say that in any case it
would probably be better to live in a concentration camp run by a wealthy
nation like the United States in 1941 rather than by a nation like Germany
where shortages of all sorts were rampant. Azema, already quoted, wrote in
footnote 2 of page 189, in regard to the mortality rate in the German camps:
"During the last weeks, the epidemics reached an endemic stage, and the last
transfers were particularly deadly."
Having said that, concentration camps are a modern invention that we
owe not to the British in their war against the Boers, but to the Americans
during their Civil War, and I think that the horrors of Andersonville^1 must
have been as bad as the horrors of the English, German, Russian, or French
camps. Let us recall modestly in what conditions, right after the war, we
put many of our German prisoners of war, and for those who have a short
memory, let us recall that the Americans demanded the return from France of
the Germans whom they had given to us, and that the transfer operation had
the name "Operation Skinny"; an operation involving those who had nothing
more than skin on their bones.
11. On page 215 Vidal-Naquet wrote: "...it is the job of historians to
take historical facts out of the hands of ideologues who exploit them. In
the case of the genocide of the Jews, it is obvious that one of the Jewish
ideologies, Zionism, exploits that great massacre in a way that is sometimes
scandalous."
RESPONSE: Very well. But when I say that, people cry anti-Semitism and
have me heavily sentenced by the French judicial apparatus: 360 million old
French francs in fines, three months suspended prison sentence, and not one
colleague to express his astonishment at the sentencing of a professor with
but a single income. The only parties whom I accuse in this enormous lie
about the "gas chambers" and about "genocide" are international Zionism and
the State of Israel. To be exact, I accuse them of being the principal
beneficiaries of it.
12. Vidal-Naquet spoke, on page 216, about the "demonstration made by
Faurisson that the _Diary of Anne Frank_ is, if not a 'literary hoax,' at
least a doctored document." Then comes the following commentary: "On the
scale of the history of the Nazi genocide, that change removes one comma."
RESPONSE: Here is what is troubling. The same Faurisson who finds himself
treated on nearly every page as an inveterate liar and as a complete
falsifier supposedly has the analytical qualities necessary to detect a
doctored document where millions of readers saw a work of a staggering
authenticity, which all by itself has supposedly done more good for the
Exterminationist cause than have the six million dead. Are there two
Faurissons? Does he thus divide himself from one suddenly into two? If
that is the case, we must be shown how. Very many readers are going to
think that, after all, he has used one and same method (textual, pragmatic,
in accord with the facts) to distinguish the true and the false in every
instance.
13. On page 216, in footnote 30, Vidal-Naquet writes: "You will find in
her article [that of Nadine Fresco, "Les Redresseurs de morts," op. cit.] an
excellent analysis of the methods of revisionist history."
RESPONSE: In that long article, loquacious and, as has been said,
"ridiculing in tone," I have found no trace of any analysis whatsoever. I
was named 150 times. I believe that I had the right to reply. I therefore
sent the journal a text for that purpose. _Les Temps Modernes_ let me know
that there was no question of publishing it since I denied the existence of
the "gas chambers" (oral response).^2
14. On page 220, Vidal-Naquet reproaches the American Revisionist Dr.
Austin App for having written: "The Third Reich wanted the emigration of
the Jews, not their liquidation. If it had wanted to liquidate them, there
would not be 500,000 survivors of the concentration camps in Israel [an
imaginary number, Vidal-Naquet says] being paid German indemnities for
imaginary persecutions."
RESPONSE: In volume 14 of the _Encyclopaedia Judaica_, in the article on
"Reparations, German," it is said that on 12 March 1951, Moshe Sharett, in
support of the demand for financial reparations from Germany, pointed out
the necessity of absorbing 500,000 victims of Nazism into the land of
Israel. Twenty-seven years later, in _Le Monde_ of 3 November 1978, page
10, we read this: "An important part of the Israeli people escaped from the
holocaust and is a living witness to the genocide committed by the Nazi
beast," declares a communique of the Israeli embassy in Paris. Thirty-five
years after the war, in _L'Agence Telegraphique Juive_ of 9 December 1980,
under the title "Le Parti des survivants" ("The Party of the Survivors"), we
read: "There are between 200,000 and 500,000 survivors of the Holocaust in
Israel. They are from 45 to 75 years old, says Tuvia Friedmann."
15. On page 221, Vidal-Naquet reproaches the Revisionists for asking proof
from those who claim that the "gas chambers" and the "genocide" really
existed. He does so in the following terms: "For here we are obliged,
finally, to prove what happened to us. We, who since 1945, know, here we
are occupied with being demonstrative, eloquent, with using the weapons of
rhetoric, with entering into the world of what the Greeks called Peitho,
Persuasion, which they made into a goddess who is not ours. Do you really
understand what that means?"
RESPONSE: It seems normal to me for a historian to prove what he alleges
and it seems to me abnormal to consider oneself dispensed from furnishing
one's proofs. We note in the passage a confession which is quite
considerable; that up to the present the Exterminationists PROVED nothing
because they KNEW! Such is indeed the reproach that we always made against
them. On the question of the "gas chambers" and the "genocide," the
Exterminationists have contented themselves with a sort of intuitive
knowledge; infused, metaphysical, religious, elusive. They were convinced
that that would be enough. Ah well, that is no longer quite enough.
16. On page 222, in note 41, Vidal-Naquet writes that Faurisson and Thion
have dared to maintain that no expert report on a gas chamber has ever been
done. He says: "That is false; I have in front of me the translation of an
expert report carried out at Cracow in June 1945 on the ventilation openings
of the Birkenau gas chamber (Crematorium No. 2), on 25 kilograms of women's
hair, and on the metallic objects found in the hair. This report which
uses, Georges Wellers tells me, the classic methodology, reveals compounds
of hydrogen cyanide in the material."
RESPONSE: I am familiar with the expert reports ordered by examining
magistrate Jan Sehn and carried out by the laboratory located on Copernicus
Street in Cracow. THEY ARE NOT REPORTS ESTABLISHING SPECIFICALLY THAT SUCH
AND SUCH A BUILDING WAS A HOMICIDAL GAS CHAMBER. I ask why they did not
make that elementary investigation (which, besides, is still possible
today). What Vidal-Naquet calls or lists as the "gas chamber" of
Crematorium No. 2 was a "Leichenkeller," that is to say, an ordinary morgue;
half buried to protect it from the heat, in a cul-de-sac, 30 meters by 7
meters in size, with support pillars in the middle. I know the ventilation
system in great detail. A morgue has to be disinfected. For this they used
Zyklon B, an insecticide invented in 1917, and still used all over today.
Zyklon B is an absorbent of hydrocyanic acid on an inert, porous base --
diatomaceous earth -- which slowly releases gaseous hydrocyanic acid on
contact with the air. It is therefore normal that an expert report turn up
traces of that acid. As regards the hair, I recall that, during the war,
hair was gathered in all of the barbershops in Europe. In factories or in
the camps, it was used to make carpets, shag material, insoles for boots,
etc. The camps were crammed with materials for recycling, which are
explained today to tourists as all coming from the personal effects of
victims. I personally have a series of documents which prove that part of
the hair displayed in the National Museum at Auschwitz came in fact from a
carpet and shag factory located at Kietrz, about 90 kilometers as the crow
flies from Auschwitz. Traces of hydrocyanic acid were found in them, which
again was very normal.
I renew here my repeated request that finally, 37 years after the end
of the war, someone order an expert report on every place (either in its
original condition, or in ruins) that is said to be a homicidal gas chamber.
Let them begin with Struthof after, if necessary, a rereading of the
Simonin, Fourcade Piedelievre report and, especially, of the unlocatable
report of the toxicologist Professor Rene Fabre.
17. On page 223, Vidal-Naquet writes: "Faurisson contents himself with
stewing...about 'the miraculously rediscovered manuscripts,' the
inauthenticity of which he does not even try to demonstrate."
RESPONSE: In my _Memoire en defense_, which appeared after the present book
of Vidal-Naquet, I prove the inauthenticity of those manuscripts. I do it
on pages 232 to 236, in the chapter entitled _The Trickeries of the LICRA
and All the Others_. I advise Vidal-Naquet to read, further, the special
issue of the _Hefte von Auschwitz_, Special Issue 1, "Handschriften von
Mitgliedern des Sonderkommandos" (Manuscripts by Members of the Special
Commandos) (Auschwitz State Museum Publishing Company, 1972). In the
preface he will see on pages 5 and 17, not without surprise, to what extent
the Poles chided the first publisher of those manuscripts because of his
changes and manipulations. That publisher was none other than the
illustrious Professor Bernard Mark, director of the Institute for Jewish
History at Warsaw, who was denounced as a falsifier by the Polish Jew Michel
Borwicz in the _Revue d'histoire de la Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale_, January
1962, page 93.
18. On the same page 223, Vidal-Naquet reproaches me for having included
_The Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto_, by Emmanuel Ringelblum, among the
"false, apocryphal, or suspect" works.
RESPONSE: Let us decide about this simply by the way in which the book is
introduced! I have in front of me: Emmanuel Ringelblum, _Chronique du
Ghetto de Varsovie_ (French version by Leon Poliakov from the adaptation by
Jacob Sloan [Paris: Robert Laffont, 1978]). On page 7, the note by the
translator begins as follows:
At the request of the editor, I have followed for this version of
the _Chronicle_ of Emmanuel Ringelblum the abridgment by Mr. Jacob
Sloan, published in the United States in 1958 by McGraw-Hill Book
Company, Inc. I have nevertheless taken care to collate this text with
the original edition in Yiddish, published in 1952 by the Institute for
Jewish History in Warsaw [...] The Warsaw edition presents GAPS
MOTIVATED PRINCIPALLY BY THE PLACE AND DATE OF PUBLICATION.
Unfortunately, neither Mr. Jacob Sloan nor myself have been able to
familiarize ourselves with the ORIGINAL TEXT OF THE MANUSCRIPT
PRESERVED IN WARSAW. [emphasis added]
Must I recall here -- last but not least -- that the Institute's
director, whose name Leon Poliakov does not give, was the forger Bernard
Mark?
19. On page 224, Vidal-Naquet comes back to a quotation from Himmler and
talks about "coded language," then quotes Goebbels who, in his _Diary_, on
13 May 1943, wrote: "There is therefore no other recourse left for modern
nations except to exterminate the Jews..."
RESPONSE: As regards Himmler, I refer back to my paragraph 2, above. As
regards what is "decoded," I would say, "Enough talk about decoding!" As
regards Goebbels, I would say that wartime phraseology is always the same;
it is always a question of exterminating the enemy to the last man. Look at
the words of our "Marseillaise." I look likewise at the examples quoted by
Dr. Wilhelm Staglich in _Der Auschwitz Mythos_ (The Auschwitz Myth) pages
82-85; statements by Vansittart, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Zionist officials, etc.
Even a Jewish intellectual like Julien Benda, who claimed that he was a
rationalist, wrote as follows on page 153 of _Un Regulier dans le siecle_
(Paris [trans. Gallimard]: 1938):
For my part, I maintain that by their morality the modern Germans
are collectively one of the plagues of the world, and if I had only to
press a button to exterminate them entirely, I would do it on the spot,
even if I had perhaps to cry about any good people who would die in the
process.
That said, Goebbels repeats, on several occasions in his _Diary_, "The Jews
must be chased from Europe." At the time he spoke, on 7 May 1943, they had
not even been chased from Berlin, and at the time of "liberation," in May
1945, the surprising discovery was made that there still existed in Berlin
at least one Jewish day-nursery and a home for old Jews. As for Europe in
general, it contained millions of Jews.
20. On page 224, Vidal-Naquet wrote that it is "a little surprising [...]
that NO SS leader denied the existence of the gas chambers."
RESPONSE: That is quite simply false. In the transcripts of the trials we
observe quite often the obstinacy camp officials displayed in not wanting to
accept the "evidence." See, in my _Memoire en defense_, on page 45, what
Germaine Tillion dares to write about the commandant of Ravensbruck:
Commandant Suhren was naturally interrogated on several occasions
on the subject of the gas chamber. He began by denying its existence,
then he admitted it, but said that it was outside of his control and
maintained that position in spite of the evidence to the contrary. "I
estimate," he said (in the course of the interrogation of 8 December
1949), "the number of women gassed at Ravensbruck at about 1,500."
It is now recognized that there was never a gas chamber in that camp,
where, furthermore, the location of the astonishing "gas chamber" has never
been given! The same obstinacy was shown by Josef Kramer in regard to
Auschwitz. He said in his first deposition that he had heard the
allegations of former prisoners from Auschwitz according to which a gas
chamber was supposed to be located there, adding that that was entirely
false. In a later deposition, however, he said that there was ONE gas
chamber but that it was under the authority of Hoss (_Trial of Josef Kramer
and Forty-four Others_ [edited by Raymond Phillips, London: William Hodge
and Co.] pp. 731 and 738).
Regarding the same Josef Kramer, the French military court outdid
itself in the matter of the alleged homicidal "gas chamber" at Struthof. It
extorted from him two totally contradictory confessions as to the conduct of
the gassing operation (Celle, on 26 July 1945 and Luneburg on 6 December
1945). If Richard Baer, in the course of an interrogation in about 1962 or
1963, had admitted the existence of "gas chambers" at Auschwitz, where he
was commandant, there is no doubt that in the course of the Frankfurt trial
the prosecution would have used it against his 22 accomplices, who were so
stubborn and vague on the subject.
I repeat here that it is impossible to scoff at a taboo. One comes to
terms with it, as all the German lawyers have done by counseling their
clients to deny nothing about the matter; to let the prosecution say what it
wished and to content themselves with affirming that, as regards themselves,
they had nothing to do with so foul an affair.
Thus in the Renaissance witchcraft trials, the witch did not go so far
as to say, "the best proof that I did not meet the devil is that the devil
does not exist." She would have appeared diabolic. She used subterfuges.
The devil without a doubt was there. There was loud noise some distance
away. "But that was at the top of the hill, and I was at the bottom. "
Not one of the defendants at the main Nuremberg Tribunal had known
about the "gas chambers" and the "genocide" -- not even Frank, the former
governor of Poland, who was overcome by the worst Christian repentance; not
even Speer, the most "collaborative" with his judges and with his
conquerors. Speer was later to publish, at the request of his Jewish
friends, a text in which he said that he held himself responsible...for his
blindness! He, the minister of armaments, having, all things considered,
supreme control over the activity of the concentration camps, had not SEEN
any formidable human slaughterhouses, needing thousands of tons of coal for
the incineration of the bodies of the victims of genocide, which operated,
it would seem, night and day! Speer has been rewarded for his goodwill.
Millions of copies of his books have been sold with the proviso that "after
the withholding of taxes, he made a fifty-fifty split with Jewish
organizations, notably French ones." (Remarks made to French television at
the time of the appearance of his first book.)
In Volume 42 of the transcripts and documents of the International
Military Tribunal, one discovers document PS-862. It informs us that, of
the 26,674 former political leaders interrogated, not one had heard talk
about the "extermination" of the Jews or about the "extermination camps"
before the surrender in May 1945. Can it be imagined that the power of the
taboo is such that thirty-six years after the war, a French professor who
dares to deny the "genocide" and the "gas chambers" see simself condemned to
three months suspended prison sentence and to 360 millions of old French
francs in fines and publication expenses? And then in order to deny that
those horrors existed, it is still necessary to be entangled for years with
the question from the technical point of view. The common people, the
Germans and their conquerors, scientists and laymen alike, all have a
tendency to imagine when one talks to them about homicidal "gassing" that it
was a very simple operation. After that, go on to deny that such and such a
shower, such and such a concrete building was used for "gassing"! You
think, "How will I procede to show that that commonplace operation did not
take place in the building that they show me?" And you keep quiet. And
your silence passes for agreement. About you they say triumphantly: "You
see! He did not deny it!"
21. On page 225, Vidal-Naquet writes that my technical considerations on
the American gas chambers, where one sees that it is very difficult to kill
a single human being, do not at all prove that it would be impossible to
carry out mass gassings. He adds that "the operation of gassings, like that
of eating, can be carried out in vastly different conditions. "
RESPONSE: I understand nothing of that reasoning, of those abstractions,
and of those allusions. It seems to me that, if it is dangerous to gas one
man, it must be still more dangerous to gas masses of men. I must reveal
here that the LICRA [International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism
--ed.], on 4 February 1981, consulted with the top toxicologist in France,
Mr. Louis Truffert, in a completely fallacious and abstruse letter, to ask
him if it were as difficult to ventilate a place gassed with Zyklon. Mr.
Truffert then made a response which went rather in the direction expected by
the LICRA. Unfortunately for them, I know Mr. Truffert, whom I have never
yet talked to about my thesis about the non-existence of the Nazi "gas
chambers," but with whom I have had a very long discussion on hydrocyanic
acid. In company with my publisher, Pierre Guillaume, I went to see Mr.
Truffert again, but this time I showed him the plans for Auschwitz, and in
particular the "reconstruction" (sic) of a "gassing" which is located in
Block 4 of the Auschwitz Museum. Please believe that the reaction of Mr.
Truffert was instantaneous. He immediately exclaimed about the
impossibility of a homicidal gassing operation in such conditions. It is
that which he wanted to confirm for us in a letter of 3 April 1981, a copy
of which was to be received by the LICRA. Here is the passage which
directly concerns the question:
Nevertheless, the observation that I made [in my response to the
LICRA], concerning the possibility of going into a room containing
bodies poisoned with hydrocyanic acid without a gas mask, involves the
case of a gas chamber at ground level, opening to the fresh air, and it
is evident that important reservations must be made in the case of
underground installations. Such a situation would require a very large
ventilation apparatus and draconian precautions in order to avoid
pollution likely to be caused by accidents.
Could Vidal-Naquet be more precise about how I have used an "arsenal"
that is not technical, but "pseudo-technical"? Is the consulting of six
American penitentiary officials insufficient, and is Vidal-Naquet in a
position to make suggestions of a scientific order to the Americans to bring
about a remarkable simplification of the gassing process in their
penitentiaries?
22. On page 225, Vidal-Naquet reproaches me for translating "Vergasung" as
"gassing" when I translate "Keine Vergasung in Dachau" (Dr. Broszat) and as
"carburation" when, in a document from January 1943, I encounter
"Vergasungskeller," a word which Raul Hilberg is careful not to quote.
RESPONSE: It is all a matter of context! "Vergasung" can have still other
meanings besides. Applied to a battle narrative about the gas war in 1918,
it can be translated as "gassing." It can also be a question of
non-homicidal gassing. For example, in a radio message of 22 July 1942
addressed to the Auschwitz camp, over the signature of General Glucks, we
read, "I hereby give authorization for one five-ton truck to make the
round-trip journey from Auschwitz to Dessau [the place where Zyklon B was
distributed] and back in order to pick up gas intended for the gassing of
the camp, in order to fight the epidemic which has broken out." The German
text says "Gas fur Vergasung": gas intended for gassing. Finally, at
Dachau, the building which contained the disinfection gas chambers was
called the "Vergasungsgebaude."
23. On page 225, Vidal-Naquet reproaches me for not devoting a line to the
Einsatzgruppen, nor to Babi-Yar.
RESPONSE: Those were not my subjects. Similar police operations and
similar places of execution existed among the enemy fought by the Germans on
the Russian front. Euthanasia or medical experiments are likewise unrelated
to the subject. On those two last points, I have the impression that people
have made up an awful lot. I know researchers who are interested in all
these supplementary subjects. Let us await their conclusions.
24. On page 225, Vidal-Naquet reproaches me for saying that numerous gypsy
children were born at Auschwitz, without saying what became of them. He
adds that they were exterminated.
RESPONSE: I quoted my sources: _Hefte von Auschwitz_ (The Auschwitz
Notebooks). If those children had been the victims of a Herod-like massacre
at the time of their birth, _Auschwitz Notebooks_ would not have failed to
inform us in regard to each of them. I suppose that some of the children
died, and that some of them survived and were found in the long line of
children in good health whom the Soviets filmed at the time of liberation of
the camp. I recall that bands of Gypsies continued to wend their way
through Europe during the war (see _Nord_, by Celine). Vidal-Naquet asserts
to us that those children were exterminated. Where does he get that
information?
25. On page 226, Vidal-Naquet writes: "[Faurisson] maintains that in
France it was the Resistance which made the Gypsies disappear."
RESPONSE: In reality, I wrote on page 192 of _Verite..._: "I recall that
in France even the Resistance could see the Gypsies in a bad light and
suspect them of espionage, informing, and black-marketeering." One of my
footnotes refers to the following text: "I have personally made a detailed
inquiry about the summary executions carried out by the Resistance in a
small region of France. I was surprised to discover the Gypsy communities
had paid a heavy tribute in dead; not at the hands of the Germans, but at
the hands of the Resistance." Where, in fact, did Vidal-Naquet get the idea
that the Gypsies have disappeared?
26. On page 227, in a footnote, Vidal-Naquet is pleased to recall a
sentence which I have repeated for some years and that I am going to repeat
here one more time: "I have searched, but in vain, for one single former
deportee capable of proving to me that he had really seen a gas chamber with
his own eyes."
RESPONSE: Vidal-Naquet does not propose any name to me; neither that of
Martin Gray, nor that of Filip Muller (with whom I have asked television
personality Bernard Volker to be good enough to confront me), nor Maurice
Benroubi (discovered by _L'Express_), nor Yehuda Bauer or one of his friends
(whom I said I was prepared to meet on Israeli television), nor Elie Wiesel,
nor Samuel Pisar, nor Simone Veil, nor Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, nor
Louise Alcan, nor Fania Fenelon, nor Dr. Bendel. In two years of research,
the LICRA and its colleagues have been able to find for me only Mr. Alter
Fajnzylberg, known as Jankowski. From him they obtained a very short
deposition given to Mr. Attal, a notary in Paris. I was delighted at the
prospect of meeting the latter in court. In his place, there came a very
repetitive spokesman.
27. On page 228, Vidal-Naquet quotes "some documents on Auschwitz and on
Treblinka (spelled Trembinki) which served as the basis for an American
publication in November of 1944, attributed to the 'Executive Office of the
War Refugee Board.'" He states: "There is nothing there that is not in
accord in its essentials with either the documents of the members of the
Sonderkommando or the testimonies of the SS leaders."
RESPONSE: I did not notice that in the document from the War Refugee Board
it was a question of Treblinka or of Trembinki. It dealt particularly with
Auschwitz, and to some extent with Maidanek (where they do not mention the
existence of "gas chambers"). It is curious that that document was not used
in the main Nuremberg trial, where one page of fantastic statistics was
simply reproduced from it (Document L-022).
As regards Auschwitz, that document is so little in agreement with the
physical realities that it was sufficient for Dr. Wilhelm Staglich, in his
work mentioned above, to juxtapose two photographs: on the one hand, the
plan from photographic plate number 12 (=reality), and on the other hand,
the plan from photographic plate number 13 (=War Refugee Board fiction).
The fabrication by the War Refugee Board is obvious. I recall it was
in that document, published by the Roosevelt entourage, and among others, by
the famous Morgenthau, that Katyn is attributed to the Germans (p. 11 of the
"Polish Major's Report").
As regards "gassings," they were carried out, according to an anonymous
Polish officer, by a spray from "hydrogen cyanide bombs" (page 13 of the
English text)! This report had quite a suspicious and interesting history,
very well revealed by Butz and by Staglich. It is sufficient to find in
their indexes the names of the presumed authors of the first report: Rudolf
Vrba and Alfred Wetzler. We also find an interesting study by Staglich in
the journal _Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart_ (Tubingen: Grabert
Verlag, 1981/I) pp. 9-13.
I note that the alleged plan of the sites appears on page 15 of the
American version and that it did not appear in the French version _Les Camps
d'extermination allemands d'Auschwitz et Birkenau_ (The German Extermination
Camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau) (Office Francais d'Edition, 2nd quarter of
1945).
28. On page 228, Vidal-Naquet dares to call on the "confessions" of Kurt
Gerstein, which he says have been confirmed by Professor Pfannenstiel
himself, who is supposed to have gone to find Rassinier in Paris in order to
talk to him about them.
RESPONSE: In the different and seriously contradictory versions of the
"confessions" of Gerstein, the incongruities, the stupidities, the
nonsensical things (see above the 28 to 32 persons per square meter) are so
numerous that one cannot believe that the Gerstein argument is still used.
Leon Poliakov has inundated us with these different versions of what
Vidal-Naquet himself had been obliged to recognize as some "faulty
mistakes." This is a beautiful euphemism!
A thesis is presently being prepared which will expose the Gerstein
"confessions" and what Leon Poliakov has made of them.^3 In her 1968
thesis, Olga Wormser-Migot was prudent enough to write on page 426: "For
our part we have difficulty in accepting the complete authenticity of the
confession of Kurt Gerstein or the veracity of all its elements." As to
what Dr. Pfannenstiel declared on several occasions to the German courts,
here it is: 1) he treats Gerstein almost as a liar on several points; 2)
he is extremely vague about the "gassing" which he is supposed to have
witnessed one day side by side with Gerstein; a "gassing" with a Diesel
engine, which is a curious way of gassing when we know the small amount of
deadly carbon monoxide furnished by a system very rich in carbon dioxide.
Pfannenstiel is supposed to have gone to find Rassinier in Paris? That
is very often said, but I know nothing about it since the visitor refused to
give his name. It could be. How many times has a Nazi, bound by his
"confessions" and compensated for them, served the good Exterminationist
cause on command in respect to a Revisionist or hardened Nazi? When Dr.
Johann-Paul Kremer came back from his long detention in Poland and wished to
begin speaking again, the German courts gave him to understand that it was
in his interest to keep quiet. He kept quiet. They re-employed him as a
witness for the prosecution at the Frankfurt trial (1963-65) but always with
that extraordinary discretion of the German judges about the actual conduct
of the "gassings." I was able to become acquainted with a short
correspondence between Rassinier and Pfannenstiel. I propose to publish it
one day in order to show how Pfannenstiel sought to evade Rassinier's simple
technical questions.
It is, furthermore, necessary to be clear on Belzec. Gerstein said
that they "gassed" there; but there exist other theses quite as believable
(or unbelievable), and I do not see how our establishment historians have
been able to eliminate them in favor of the Gerstein thesis. According to
Jan Karski, the Jews were killed with quicklime. According to the _New York
Times_ of 12 February 1944, page 6, the Jews were electrocuted. According
to Dr. Stefan Szende, they proceeded in a quite sophisticated fashion: The
same platform which electrocuted the Jews was raised from the water, then
made red hot, and the Jews incinerated. Karski is today a professor at
Georgetown University in Washington. In 1944 he published _Story of a
Secret State_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.; Cambridge: The Riverside
Press, 1944). Here is what is to be read on pages 349-351 of Karski's book:
...I know that many people will not believe me, will not be able
to believe me, will think I exaggerate or invent. But I saw it and it
is not exaggerated or invented. I have no other proofs, no
photographs. All I can say is that I saw it and that it is the truth.
The floors of the car containing the Jews had been covered with a
thick, white powder. It was quicklime. Quicklime is simply unslaked
lime or calcium oxide that has been dehydrated. Anyone who has seen
cement being mixed knows what occurs when water is poured on lime. The
mixture bubbles and steams as the powder combines with the water,
generating a large amount of heat.
Here the lime served a double purpose in the Nazi economy of
brutality. The moist flesh coming in contact with the lime is rapidly
dehydrated and burned. The occupants of the cars would be literally
burned to death before long, the flesh eaten from their bones. Thus,
the Jews would "die in agony," fulfilling the promise Himmler had
issued "in accord with the will of the Fuehrer," in Warsaw in 1942.
Secondly, the lime would prevent decomposing bodies from spreading
disease. It was efficient and inexpensive -- a perfectly chosen agent
for their purposes.
It took three hours to fill up the entire train by repetitions of
this procedure. It was twilight when the forty-six (I counted them)
cars were packed. From one end to the other the train, with its
quivering cargo of flesh, seemed to throb, vibrate, rock, and jump as
if bewitched. There would be a strangely uniform momentary lull and
then, again, the train would begin to moan and sob, wail and howl.
Inside the camp a few score dead bodies remained and a few in the final
throes of death. German policemen walked around at leisure with
smoking guns, pumping bullets into anything that by a moan or motion
betrayed an excess of vitality. Soon not a single one was left alive.
In the now quiet camp the only sounds were the inhuman screams that
were echoes from the moving train. Then these, too, ceased. All that
was now left was the stench of excrement and rotting straw and a queer,
sickening, acidulous odor which, I thought, may have come from the
quantities of blood that had been let, and with which the ground was
stained. As I listened to the dwindling outcries from the train, I
thought of the destination toward which it was speeding. My informants
had minutely described the entire journey. The train would travel
about eighty miles and finally come to a halt in an empty barren field.
Then nothing at all would happen. The train would stand stock-still,
patiently waiting while death penetrated into every corner of its
interior. This would take from two to four days.
When quicklime, asphyxiation, and injuries had silenced every
outcry, a group of men would appear. They would be young, strong Jews,
assigned to the task of cleaning out these cars until their own turn to
be in them would arrive. Under a strong guard they would unseal the
cars and expel the heaps of decomposing bodies. The mounds of flesh
that they piled up would then be burned and the remnants buried in a
single huge hole. The cleaning, burning, and buriad would consume one
or two full days. The entire process of disposal would take, then,
from three to six days. During this period the camp would have
recruited new victims. The train would return and the whole cycle
would be repeated from the beginning.
Let us however go on to Dr. Szende. The first edition of his book
appeared in Sweden under the title _Den Siste Juden fran Polen_ (The Last
Jew From Poland) (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Forlang, 1944). The second
edition appeared in Switzerland as _Der letzte Jude aus Poland_ (Zurich:
Europe Verlag, 1945). The third edition appeared in Great Britain as _The
Promise Hitler Kept_ (London: Victor Gollancz). The fourth appeared in the
United States of America with the same title (New York: Roy Publishers,
1945). I am reproducing here a short passage from page 161 of the American
edition:
When trainloads of naked Jews arrived at Belzec, they were herded
into a great hall capable of holding several thousand people. This
hall had no windows and its flooring was of metal. Once the Jews were
all inside, the floor of this hall sank like a lift into a great tank
of water which lay below it until the Jews were up to their waists in
water. Then a powerful electric current was sent into the metal
flooring and within a few seconds all the Jews, thousands at a time,
were dead. The metal flooring then rose again and the water drained
away. The corpses of the slaughtered Jews were now heaped all over the
floor. A different current was then switched on and the metal flooring
rapidly became red hot, so that the corpses were incinerated as in a
crematorium and only ash was left.
The floor was tipped up and the ashes slid out into prepared
receptacles. The smoke of the process was carried away by great
factory chimneys. That was the whole procedure. As soon as it was
accomplished, it could start up again. New batches of Jews were
constantly being driven into the tunnels. The individual trains
brought between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews at a time, and there were days on
which the Belzec line saw between twenty and thirty such trains arrive.
Modern industrial and engineering technique in Nazi hands
triumphed over all difficulties. The problem of how to slaughter
millions of people rapidly and effectively was solved.
The underground slaughter-house spread a terrible stench around
the neighborhood, and sometimes whole districts were covered with the
foul-smelling smoke from the burning human bodies.
This narrative, which Dr. Stefan Szende is supposed to have gotten from
one Adolf Folkman, is crazy, but less crazy and more coherent than the
"confessions" of Kurt Gerstein, which, let it be said in passing, are found
to be in serious contradiction with the "truth" about Treblinka, such as it
was established at the main Nuremberg trial. At Treblinka, with all due
deference to Gerstein, the Jews were not gassed, but were scalded (see, for
the racy details, document PS-3311).
Here again I ask Vidal-Naquet: Which story to believe? And why this
one rather than that one?
29. On page 223, Vidal-Naquet writes that there are some more than doubtful
"testimonies" in which an SS man, like Pery Broad, for example, seems to
have adopted entirely the language of the victors. He adds that the memoir
of Pery Broad on Auschwitz was drawn up for the English (the last three
words are underlined by Vidal-Naquet himself).
RESPONSE: I know of few forgeries as obvious as the memoir of Pery Broad.
Vidal-Naquet seems in agreement with me in seeing a forgery there, but he
draws no conclusion from that. This forgery is English and at the same time
of a workmanship and a tone that are perfectly Stalinesque, to the point of
caricature. I say this to respond to the naive people who claim, contrary
to all proof and to every investigation, that no torturing was done in the
Allied prisons, and who add: "Look at how much agreement there is between
the confessions collected in the West and those collected in the East." I
point out in passing that in the lawsuit which was brought against me by the
LICRA and eight other associations, the Pery Broad memoir was placed in
evidence as an exhibit. They must really be in trouble if they have to
present that kind of "proof" of the existence of the gas chambers!
30. On pages 232 and 233, Vidal-Naquet talks about Hoss, the first of the
commandants of Auschwitz. He recognizes that it is perhaps true that Hoss's
English captors beat him on several occasions. He says that he was
"likewise maltreated by his Polish guards at the beginning of his
incarceration in Cracow." He says that Hoss could not have known the exact
number of his victims and that "all the speculations made by Hoss on the
subject of the numbers of victims are useless." He recognizes that Hoss
gave absurd figures regarding the numbers of Romanian and Bulgarian Jews.
He says, in return, that Faurisson is wrong to "make a great fuss on the
subject of an error, repeated on several occasions, which in the testimonies
collected by the English has him talking about the imaginary camp of 'Wolzek
near Lublin' (probably a confusion and reduplication with Belzec and
Maidanek)."
RESPONSE: Vidal-Naquet makes many concessions here. I dare say that a fair
number of them come from his reading of my writings. But I admire the way
that everything is minimized here! An outsider could believe that the
speculations made on the numbers given by Hoss come from Faurisson. Nothing
of the kind! As to that affair of the Romanian and Bulgarian Jews, it is
very serious. I point it out in order to show how Dr. Broszat mutilated the
text of Hoss's diary in order to remove certain blunders.
As to the camp of Wolzek, which in reality never existed, it cannot
result from a confusion with Belzec, since Hoss mentions the two camps side
by side. Nor is it a question of a "recopied error," but of a SECOND ERROR.
One looks forward to a complete judgment on the personality of Hoss and
on the degree of authenticity which one can attribute to the writings of a
man tortured by everyone, committing enormous errors, either about numbers
or places; whose writings, published in German eleven years after his
hanging by the Communists, were seriously tampered with.
31. On pages 234-236, Vidal-Naquet attempts, without great conviction, it
seems to me, to defend the principle of a trial like the main Nuremberg
trial, or, in the case of Eichmann, that in Jerusalem. In order to know
what was said at the Jerusalem trial, he refers particularly to the book
entitled _Eichmann par Eichmann_ (Eichmann by Eichmann).
RESPONSE: It is clever not to seek to defend the indefensible, especially
when, like Vidal-Naquet, one voluntarily relies on humanitarian good
conscience. I hope for his sake that he will never find himself in the
defendant's dock with a representative from his conquerors on the judges'
bench, someone who, of course, will have armed himself beforehand with all
the moral justifications in the world for judging the vanquished.
I recommend the reading of these three pages for their mealy-mouthed
tone: "That the material gathered at Nuremberg is not always of very good
quality is certain [etc.]." As to using the compilation by Pierre Joffroy
in order to know what was said at the Jerusalem trial, that shows an
astonishing laxity. Vidal-Naquet could have consulted the transcripts of
the trial at the Paris Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation. He
entertains us with the following quotation: "Eichmann, in prison or at his
trial, referred often to the works of Leon Poliakov as an authority and the
best source about events." For my part, I can indeed believe it. Eichmann,
in his cell, was fed like a Christmas goose. He ended up no longer knowing
what he had heard, what he had seen, what he had read. Here, for example,
is a very important passage from his interrogation by the Israeli government
commissioner regarding the "gas chambers" directly from Transcripts, J1-MJ
at 02-RM:
THE COMMISSIONER: Did you talk with Hoss about the number of Jews
who were exterminated at Auschwitz?
EICHMANN: No, never. He told me that he had built new buildings
and that he could put to death ten thousand Jews each day. I do
remember something like that. I do not know whether I am only
imagining that today, but I do not believe I am imagining it. I cannot
recall exactly when and how he told me that and the location where he
told me. Perhaps I read it and perhaps I am now imagining that what I
had read I heard from him. That is also possible.
32. On pages 236-244, Vidal-Naquet talks about Paul Rassinier.
COMMENTARY: He does so with a great deal of confusion. He clutches
especially at what he calls the "fantastic calculations" by Paul Rassinier
regarding the number of Jewish losses. It seems to me that in the matter of
"fantastic calculations" and of cock-and-bull stories, no one could surpass
our Exterminationists. We have seen from the foregoing that on these points
Vidal-Naquet has made a fair number of concessions, and that it seldom
happens, to tell the truth, that he leaves his rarefied atmosphere to set
his feet on our earth for a moment. But he loses his temper when Rassinier
uses statistics that come from a Russian Jew: David Bergelson. According
to the latter, the Red Army was able to save a very large number of Jews at
the time of the entry of the Germans into the Soviet Union in 1941.
Vidal-Naquet says that source is worthless. For this he gives us two
reasons, and I am personally completely in agreement with Vidal-Naquet on
one of them, as to how David Bergelson could have known those numbers as
early as 5 December 1942; but Vidal-Naquet will not allow me to use the same
reasoning when I challenge a mass of numbers given hot and heavy immediately
after the war by the Exterminationists. And what is there to say about the
numbers of those supposedly massacred that the Polish resistance or Zionist
groups in Geneva and Bern dared to give in the midst of the war?
Vidal-Naquet gives another reason for challenging Bergelson, and this
time he makes himself hard to understand. He writes: "D. Bergelson was a
writer who was a member of a Jewish committee created by the Soviet
authorities for the purpose of making propaganda addressed precisely to
American Jews. After the war, in 1952, his mission accomplished, he was
shot." Let us reread each of those words slowly! What reproach can one
make to this Bergelson? Was it a crime to be part of such a Jewish
committee? Was it a crime to tell American Jews that a number of their
fellow Jews in Russia had died? What does this "mission accomplished," so
long after the war, mean, and does Vidal-Naquet find that the Stalin courts
and police did good work by shooting that Jew, at the very moment of the
famous "doctors' plot"? No. Vidal-Naquet is certainly engaged in hiding
part of the truth from us. We are going to have to tell it for him.
In 1977, Georges Wellers did not hide the truth in _Le Monde Juif_
(April-June, page 65), when he told us that David Bergelson was part of an
ad hoc Jewish committee created in the USSR at the end of 1941 and charged
by the government with winning the sympathies and the financial support of
American Jews for Russia in the war. In other words, Bergelson exaggerated
the number of Jews in order to obtain more money. So it happens that, when
confronted with many of the Exterminationist statistics, I think of what I
call the "Bergelson complex. "
Was it a sort of "Bergelson complex" which was suffered by those
comedic showmen of relics who, like Salomon Mikhoels from the Jewish
Anti-Fascist Committee formed in Moscow, made a tour of American cities and
showed the public a cake of soap allegedly made from the fat of Jews, and
allegedly brought from a concentration camp? The sums of money brought in
by those tours were important, as noted by Gerald Israel in _Jid/Les Juifs
en URSS_ (Yid/The Jews in the USSR) (Editions Speciales/Jean-Claude Lattes,
1971).
33. On pages 246-247, Vidal-Naquet writes: "It is perfectly evident that
Faurisson has not read the text that he mentions." He says that in regard
to the declaration of war on Hitler's Germany by Chaim Weizmann, a
declaration for which I gave as reference _The Jewish Chronicle_ of 8
September 1939, page 1. He adds that this declaration of war "is made up."
Finally he adds that Chaim Weizmann was not the president of the World
Jewish Congress.
RESPONSE: That is true. I give Vidal-Naquet credit. Chaim Weizmann was
the president, not of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), but of the World
Zionist Organization (WZO). After the war he was to become the first
president of the State of Israel. In 1939 and for some years before, Jews
and Zionists were active in pushing the West into a crusade against Hitler.
Even before the date on which the British and the French entered into a war
against Germany, Chaim Weizmann had taken the initiative of writing, on the
date of 29 August 1939, to the British Prime Minister in order to assure him
of the support of the Jewish Agency for the cause of the democracies. He
wrote: "The Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the
democracies."
Furthermore, a declaration made on 8 September 1939 at Jerusalem by the
Jewish Agency assured the British that, despite the White Book of 1939, the
Yishuv of Palestine would be loyal and would struggle for the victory of the
British Empire. _The Times_ of 6 September 1939 headlined it exactly:
"Jews To Fight Against Nazi Germany," while in New York _The New York
Times_, on page 9, headlined: "Jews Stand by Britain."
Curiously, Vidal-Naquet seeks to minimize the importance of Weizmann's
act, while underlining that the latter expressed himself only in the name of
the Jewish Agency. I will not be treacherous enough here to insist on the
various motives which could have moved the Zionists themselves, some of whom
had maintained contacts with Hitler's Germany. Zionism and Nazism had some
points of agreement. I will simply say that rightly or wrongly Weizmann
intended to speak in the name of the world Jewish community, and that it was
indeed in that way that his initiative against Hitler was received by the
whole world.
In the _Encyclopaedia Judaica_, published in Jerusalem in 1971, we read
in the article on Weizmann: "When World War II broke out, Weizmann
immediately promised the British government all possible aid by the Jewish
population in Palestine AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE OUTSIDE." (emphasis added)
John Toland, in his _Adolf Hitler_ (Doubleday, 1976, page 574), reports
this, which would merit verification at the source: [regarding Chamberlain]
"(Later, according to Ambassador Kennedy, he said that the 'Americans and
the world Jews had forced him into the war.')"
Having said that, let no one accuse me of having made the Jews
responsible for the Second World War. I have never been able to determine
who was responsible for any war.
34. On page 248, Vidal-Naquet points out a page of mine "which ought to be
included as part of an anthology of filth." (!) I had written (see page
190 of _Verite..._):
Where there were large concentrations of Jews impossible to watch
over carefully except through the intermediary of a Jewish police
force, the Germans feared that which was to take place elsewhere, in
the Warsaw ghetto, where suddenly, just behind the front in April of
1943, an insurrection took place. The Germans were amazed to discover
that the Jews had built 700 blockhouses. They put down the
insurrection and transferred the survivors to transit camps, work
camps, and concentration camps. The Jews there lived through a
tragedy.
RESPONSE: For Vidal-Naquet, the "filth" would rest in the fact that my
informant here supposedly is Himmler, and that I had taken good care to hide
my source. He says that "any reference to a note has charitably
disappeared." I do not understand what he means by "charitable
disappearance of a footnote reference." Actually, as the result of a
typographical error, the number 48, which was to have appeared after the
word "Blockhaus," was dropped. But note 48 shows up in its proper place,
and reads as follows: "Speech given at Poznan on October 6, 1943, page 169
of the _Discours Secrets_ of Heinrich Himmler (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).
This is the French translation of _Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere
Ansprachen_ (Propylaen Verlag, 1974). That work is to be used with caution,
especially its French translation." So where is the "filth"?
35. On page 249, Vidal-Naquet reproaches me for having written that the
Warsaw ghetto insurrection took place just behind the front, in April 1943.
He says that the front was then very far away, more than a thousand
kilometers distant.
RESPONSE: Vidal-Naquet here confuses the "front" with the "front line."
The front line was located perhaps more than one thousand kilometers away,
but the Russian front (as we say, the German front, the Pacific front, etc.)
really began at the Pripet Marshes.
36. On pages 249-250, Vidal-Naquet reproaches me for not giving more
details on that insurrection, and begins to talk again about "[my] master,
Himmler."
RESPONSE: I do not have to spend time on what was not my subject. I left
the subject of the ghetto and what Himmler has said about it with the
following sentence: "The Jews there lived through a tragedy."
37. On pages 250-251, we think that Vidal-Naquet is finally going to come
to the subject itself, that is to say, the homicidal "gas chambers." In
fact, he talks about one document in German (a commonplace travel order), in
which we read: "One hundred twenty-five men and 684 women and children have
been subjected to special treatment (sonderbehandelt wurden)." He asks,
"Will he dare say that those persons were taken to a rest camp?"
RESPONSE: I note that Vidal-Naquet does not dare to say that those people
were gassed. I note that he comes back to "Sonderbehandlung." On the one
hand, I believe that I have already answered that question; on the other
hand, I note that in the same convoy 406 men and 190 women were put to work.
For the men it is specified that the work was in the Buna factories; for the
women, it is not specified. The other men, women, and children, therefore,
benefited from special treatment; they did not have to work. This is what
can explain why, at the time of the liberation of Auschwitz, so many men,
women, and especially children were found very much alive among those
"incapable" of marching and taking part in the evacuation -- along with, of
course, the sick and the dead. In the calendar from the _Hefte von
Auschwitz_ (1961, Volume IV, p. 81) the writers had no fear about stating
quietly that the 125 men and the 684 women and children were all gassed.
Elsewhere, the same calendar considers two convoys which left Drancy on 4
and 6 March 1943 to have been gassed. But Serge Klarsfeld, in his
_Memorial_ (p. 110, pp. 386-389), rectifies the "mistake" -- those two
convoys went to Maidanek and he found the survivors.
38. On page 251, in note 86, Vidal-Naquet makes a very brief allusion to
the famous aerial photos of Auschwitz recently revealed by the CIA. We talk
about them on page 319 of _Verite_. He says that "it seems in fact that one
photo taken on 25 August 1944 shows the process [of extermination] in
action."
RESPONSE: With the photo in front of us Vidal-Naquet would never dare claim
such a thing. That photo, like all the photos from Brugioni and Poirier,
issues a stinging reproof to the whole Exterminationist legend. The two
Americans themselves, quite crestfallen, are obliged to write on page 11:
"Although survivors recalled that smoke and flame emanated continually from
the crematoria chimneys and was (sic) visible for miles, the photography we
examined gave no positive proof of this." The two authors add in a
footnote: "The imagery examined from records of the extermination period
include (sic) 4 April, 26 June, 26 July, 25 August, and 13 September 1944."
Personally, I would permit myself to add here that in a letter which
can be consulted in the National Archives in Washington (letter of Robert G.
Poirier to Professor David Wyman on 6 March 1979), it is said that there
were as many as 32 aerial missions over Auschwitz from 27 December 1943 to
14 January 1945. Since it happens, on the other hand, that I possess copies
of the intelligence reports of the OSS (ancestor of the CIA) about the
region, as well as certain technical commentaries on the photos, I can state
here that the knowledge that the Allies had about Auschwitz was
astonishingly precise. Had there taken place at Auschwitz or in its region
anything at all that resembled enormous massacres on an industrial scale,
there is no doubt that the Allies would have revealed it immediately. The
official announcement of such massacres would have been a stupendous
psychological weapon whose destructive effect the Nazis would not have been
able to counteract. It is clear that if the Allies refused to believe the
allegations of the Zionists of Geneva or of Bern, or those of the Polish
Resistance it is because they knew, just as did the Vatican and the
International Red Cross, that to stick to the facts, and not to the
malicious wartime gossip, there was in reality neither an extermination nor
a holocaust.
39. On pages 251 and 252, Vidal-Naquet writes: "Auschwitz was, they [Butz,
Faurisson, Thion] all tell us again and again, a great industrial center,
specializing in the production of synthetic rubber. But no one has ever
explained to us why babies had to go there, and no one has told us what
became of those babies. The complete inability of the 'revisionists' to
tell us what became of those who were not registered in the camp and whose
names nevertheless appear on the lists of the convoys is proof of the lying
character of their statements."
RESPONSE: In the beginning, the Germans wanted to intern in their camps
only those from 16 or 18 to 55 years of age who were capable of working.
They supposedly dispensed with persons unable to work. Why, nevertheless,
did they, little by little, deport those incapable of working -- even
babies?
There are several reasons for this. The first is the insistence of the
governmental authorities of the occupied countries on not having families
dislocated. The religious authorities especially protested against breaking
up families, and the fact that some children were turned over to houses of
correction, to homes, to foster parents, etc. Georges Wellers in _L'Etoile
jaune..._ (op. cit.) shows very clearly that no one imagined that he was
leaving Drancy for an extermination center (see pp. 4, 5, 233 et seq., 254
about the "grouping of families"). Indeed some people, allowed to live at
Drancy in idleness, said that all in all, it was better to go to the East
where their lot would doubtless be difficult, but less depressing. To the
children they explained that they were leaving for the mythical country of
Pitchipoi. Among those who left, there were even some "volunteers."
Sometimes they allowed families to vote on the question of whether to
take their children with them or to leave them in France (C. Levy and Paul
Tillard, _Le Grand Rafle du velodrome d'hiver_ [The Great Round-up at the
Velodrome d'hiver], Robert Laffont, quoted by Georges Wellers in _Le Monde
Juif_, July/September 1980, p. 109).
A section of Auschwitz-II was called the family camp, and there remain
on the walls of the areas virtually never visited by tourists numerous
drawings or paintings made by the children. What became of the babies? We
know, at least for a part of them, through inquiries carried out twenty
years after the war by the Poles, the results of which have been partially
gathered in the volumes of the blue _Anthology_ of Auschwitz (copy typed in
French, in English...). This _Anthology_ is very seldom read. On the
subject which interests us here, I would recommend particularly, but not
exclusively, Volume II, third part, pp. 31-114: "Results of the Psychiatric
Examinations of Persons Born or Interned During Their Infancy in the Nazi
Concentration Camps." This study, published in Polish in 1966, was
translated into French in 1969. I quote here the French edition.
In the same volume, we can read an article on "The Examinations of the
'Children of Auschwitz'" (pp. 18-30). We find there sentences such as
these: "The children examined up to the present were eight years old at the
time of Liberation. Most of them were less than five years old when they
were interned" (p. 18); "The youngest children had their numbers tattooed on
their legs. As they grew, the number became unreadable" (p. 25); "The
examinations and the studies continue. They are finding [written in 1965]
more and more of the children of Auschwitz'" (p. 30).
People often reproach Laval for having strongly insisted to the Germans
that they deport the children. The reproach is unjust. Laval in fact
wrote: "I have in particular succeeded in not having the children separated
from their parents" (_Memoire en reponse a l'acte d'accusation_ [Memoir in
Response to the Bill of Indictment]), 1945. This is because, like the
religious authorities, he did not want families to be broken up. Henri
Amouroux (_La Grand Histoire des Francais sous l'occupation_ [The Great
History of the French Under the Occupation], Volume 5: "Les passions et les
haines," page 333, note 3) reports this reflection made by Laval to Jean
Jardin: "I have just come from a terrible meeting [with Oberg]. They want
to leave the children with us. I said to them, "It is not customary for us
to separate children from their parents.'"
Certain authors claim, in contrast to Georges Wellers, that the Central
Consistory, for example, "knew" from 1942 that the deportees were destined
for extermination. They give as proof a text which one can read on page 207
of Klarsfeld's _Memorial_, something that the latter has entitled "The
Vehement and Lucid Protest of the Central Consistory" (25 August 1942). I
have some doubts about the authenticity of that document. Excluded from the
Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, under threat of physical force
by its director, M. Meram, I have had to ask someone to go to verify the
original text for me (references CCXIII-15 and CDLXXII-89). Here is the
response that I received: "Alleged duplicate which is in fact a sheet of
onion-skin paper, without a letterhead, without a signature and bearing only
the date of 25 August 1942."
There were other causes for the deportation of children: for example,
the systematic clearing of the ghettos, or systematic expulsion (see the
examples of Warsaw or Budapest).
In the blue _Auschwitz Anthology_, we can read the report of a Polish
midwife who, as part of her thirty-eight year career, had, in the course of
two years spent at Auschwitz-Birkenau, delivered the babies of 3,000 Jewish
and non-Jewish women; and that was done, she said, with an exceptionally
high rate of success (Warsaw, 1969, Vol. II, 2nd part, pp. 159-169:
"Rapport d'une accoucheuse d'Auschwitz" [Report of a Midwife at Auschwitz],
S. Leszczynska, translated from an article that appeared in 1965 in the
medical review _Przeglad Lekarski_).
40. On page 252, in note 88, Vidal-Naquet writes: "Pierre Guillaume,
questioned by me on that subject [where did those not registered in the camp
go?] answered that those persons were transferred to the station at Kielce.
Why?"
RESPONSE: He meant Kosel (120 kilometers from Auschwitz) and not Kielce.
Pierre Guillaume was alluding to a fact that Klarsfeld reports on page 12 of
his _Memorial_. Klarsfeld recalls the astonishing method used in Paris by
the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation and at Auschwitz by the
National Museum of Auschwitz in order to determine the number of persons
gassed. For example, when it was discovered that a convoy that had left
France did not seem to have reached Auschwitz, both places calmly deduced
that the convoy did reach Auschwitz, but that it had been completely gassed
there!
So it is that a convoy of 3,056 persons was counted as gassed, when in
fact it had stopped at Kosel and not at Auschwitz. As we have already seen
above, they assumed the same for convoys numbers 50 and 51, which instead of
proceeding to Auschwitz made their way to Maidanek. The same for convoy
number 73 which went to Kaunas and Reval. In short, there, and again
elsewhere, they invented mass gassings. But the irony of the affair is that
Klarsfeld, who rectifies these errors, commits still worse errors in
counting as dead the persons who did not return to France before 31 December
1945 to declare themselves alive.
41. On page 253, Vidal-Naquet writes that Faurisson "triumphantly publishes
the photo of Simone Veil, who was thought to have been gassed, but is still
alive. The reason for that error is extremely simple [etc.]."
RESPONSE: I would certainly not contradict Vidal-Naquet. The reason for
that "error" could not be more simple. As Vidal-Naquet tells it, "The camp
archives, incomplete, no longer include the names of the women who were
registered [for work]." The Exterminationists, then, completed those
archives, "decoded" their incompleteness, and made them speak; they made
them say one more time: Here is the proof that all the women of such and
such a convoy were gassed. The case of Simone Veil is far from being an
exception. It shows, thanks only to the celebrity of the lady in question,
the incredible dishonesty of all of these statistics about the gassed or the
dead.
42. On page 255, Vidal-Naquet allows a digression about poetry. To borrow
his own expression, that "is obviously absurd." I am even less inclined to
pause here since it would get us away from our subject.
43. On pages 255-261, Vidal-Naquet tries to "code" in order then to
"decode" the diary of Dr. Johann-Paul Kremer.
RESPONSE: I would say first, one more time: Enough decoding! I would then
add that Vidal-Naquet wrote these pages before the publication of my
_Memoire en defense_ which deals in large part with the diary in question.
The reader of that _Memoire_ will find there, I think, an answer to the
questions and the criticism of Vidal-Naquet.
44. On page 261, in note 102, Vidal-Naquet talks about a report by a
delegate of the Red Cross concerning his visit to Auschwitz.
RESPONSE: Vidal-Naquet probably did not expect that I would return in my
_Memoire en defense_ to that report which had been mentioned on page 115 of
_Verite_. For each reader who would like to form for himself an idea of
Vidal-Naquet's scrupulousness in reading a text, I advise careful reading of
pages 241 to 247 of my _Memoire_. He will find there, on the one hand, an
analysis of the essential passage of the delegate's report, and on the other
hand, an enumeration of the procedures by which either private persons or
organizations have distorted that document, which is very embarrassing to
the Exterminationists. Vidal-Naquet is to be added to the list of private
persons who distort the meaning of the text, without going so far, it is
true, as a Marc Hillel (see p. 255 of _Les Archives de l'espoir_ [Archives
of Hope], Fayard, 1977, vi + 261pp).
45. On page 268, in note 113, Vidal-Naquet talks about John Bennett, an
Australian leftist, secretary of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties
(the equivalent, in some sense, of the American Civil Liberties Union), a
convinced Revisionist, who is struggling calmly and courageously, in my
opinion, against the Exterminationist lie. Vidal-Naquet talks about "the
campaign which has led to his being excluded from the Victorian Council for
Civil Liberties," and his drawing near to the far right. Vidal-Naquet says
that he gets his information from Charles Sowerwine, of Melbourne.
RESPONSE: I have in front of me _Your Rights_, which is the publication of
the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties. It is the 1982 edition. I
certify that John Bennett appears there (with his photo) as its secretary
"since the founding of the association in 1966." I learn further that John
Bennett had just been named president of the Australian Civil Liberties
Union.
46. On page 269, Vidal-Naquet refers to "the hype surrounding Holocaust,
the last stage in the transformation of Auschwitz into merchandise. "
COMMENTARY: The intellectuals have cleared the way for the merchants.
Auschwitz, a place of suffering, has been transformed into a sort of
Disneyland with, further, a Hilton in Cracow for tourists. We in France are
awaiting the arrival of a new Wiesenthal film: _Genocide_.
47. On pages 273 and 279, Vidal-Naquet relies on Pitch Bloch, a chemical
engineer, for the job of answering me about the chapter on Zyklon B.
COMMENTARY: The course given by Pitch Bloch on Zyklon B smells terribly of
improvisation, and I could not advise this chemical engineer too strongly to
refer to the studies and to the works of G. Peters on the question,
especially those which are mentioned on page 204 of _Verite_. I would
advise him likewise to read _Blausauregaskammern zur Fleckfieberabwehr_
(Hydrocyanic Acid Gas Chambers for the Prevention of Typhus) by Dr. Franz
Puntigam, Dr. Hermann Breymesser, and engineer Erich Bernfus (official
publication of the Reich Ministry of Labor [Berlin, 1943]). At no point
does Bloch explain to us how, at Struthof, Josef Kramer would not himself
have been the first to have been asphyxiated while "pouring out crystals of
a gas about which he could have said nothing except that with a little
excess water that gas killed in ONE minute." I wrote that salt and water
can not give off such a gas. Bloch replies shrewdly that "salt" (note the
quotation marks) and water can produce a gas. Let us leave him to his
subtleties and let him be good enough to answer the question which is asked,
which is: Let someone give me the name of the salt, with or without the
quotation marks, which, on contact with water, releases an acid the toxicity
of which would be higher than that of hydrocyanic acid!
I recall here that the hydrocyanic acid used in American gas chambers
puts the condemned person to sleep in approximately forty seconds and kills
him in several minutes (Caryl Chessman in 14 minutes, I believe). While I
discuss the foolish testimony of Hoss regarding "gassings" at Birkenau,
Bloch contents himself with "correcting" the surface area of the alleged
"gas chamber" (in reality, a morgue called a Leichenkeller), stating that
they put 2,000 persons in 236.78 square meters, and not in only 210 square
meters.
Sorry. The plan shows very clearly that the dimensions of the INTERIOR
of the room, including the support pillars, were 7 meters by 30 meters = 210
square meters. Bloch does not even outline a solution to the famous
mystery: How the members of the Sonderkommando could, without a single gas
mask, enter immediately a room full of 2,000 bodies just poisoned by cyanide
gas, since we know of the strict precautions taken by the Americans before
going into a small gas chamber and touching the body there even slightly.
Bloch creates a diversion by talking about "the testimony of R. Vrba and F.
Wetzler." I have already dealt with that above, in paragraph 27. But this
time Bloch runs out of luck. Vidal-Naquet cites that testimony according to
the remarks by Georges Wellers, who had used a French version from the
Office Francais d'Edition, 2nd quarter of 1945.
Bloch himself quotes for us the same document according to quite
another source that he gives us in note 7 on his page 276; CIM, 1944. He
thereby offers us, altogether unwillingly, the occasion for a treat, a
comparison of the edition of 1944 with that of 1945. We notice then that,
as usual in these stories concerning "testimonies" about the "gas chambers,"
they have grossly manipulated the text. I do not have the time to stop for
that here. Nor do I have time to show how Georges Wellers in _Les Chambres
a gaz ont existe_ mutilated the quotations from the same document while
using ellipses in parentheses where the "testimony" was too strong a brew
(p. 115). I leave it to readers interested in the mechanisms of forgeries
to go there to see it at close hand.
I will content myself with one example. According to this testimony,
and according to the plan that is found in the American version (but not in
the French version, as I said in paragraph 27 above), the "gas chamber"
with 2,000 bodies and the crematory ovens are located on the same level:
that of the ground. Therefore the bodies would have been transported from
the "gas chamber" to the crematory ovens without using an elevator. In the
real plan of the rooms, however, the multiple photographs, the visible
ruins, ALL prove to us that the room with the ovens was located above ground
and that the alleged "gas chamber," in reality a morgue, was located below
ground. According to the "witness" invoked by Vidal-Naquet and Bloch, the
transferral of the bodies took place either on "flat-hand trucks" (1944
version), or on "flat-bed trucks" (1945 version)!!!
Bloch also does not tell us where they put the 2,000 bodies before
burning them. That would have required an immense place, which appears
nowhere, either in the real plans, or in the fictional plans (like the War
Refugee Board Report), or today at the site. But since Mr. Bloch believed
that he ought to cite for us a "testimony" which now becomes very
embarrassing, permit me to cite another one of equally striking veracity;
that of Zofia Kossak (_Du fond de l'abime, Seigneur_ [From the Depths of the
Abyss, O Lord], translated from the Polish, Albin Michel: 1951):
There was no water; therefore, where were the showers? Above the
doors were some narrow, oblong windows. Behind the window panes,
German uniforms and faces are waiting, emotionless, but strangely evil
and hostile. Have they all entered? ... The door closes with a crash.
That was not an ordinary door; it was a double door, impervious to gas
... A SHRILL RINGING SOUND, AND IMMEDIATELY, THROUGH SOME OPENINGS IN
THE FLOOR, THE GAS BEGAN TO RISE [emphasis added]. From an exterior
balcony which overlooked the door, the SS men observed with curiosity
the agony, the terror, the spasms of the condemned. This was a
spectacle that those sadists would never tire of. They contemplated it
with the same pleasure several times each day. They noted the
convulsions, the contortions, the particularly unusual postures. They
had the time. The agony would last from ten to fifteen minutes.
Certain ones died immediately, but others took a longer time. It
depended on the dosage of the gas. When it happened that the
crematorium office was economizing, the martyrdom took longer. At
length, no one in the room stirred. FIVE HUNDRED [emphasis added]
women and children lay in a disorderly heap. Their dead eyes, wide
with fear, stared up at the ceiling. --NEW RINGING SOUND [emphasis
added]. Powerful ventilators drove out the gas. The "Sonderkommando"
appeared in masks and opened the door located opposite the entrance.
There was a ramp there, HAND TRUCKS [emphasis added]. The team loaded
them with bodies, quickly, quickly. Others were waiting. And then the
dead were able to come to life again. The gas in such doses stuns, it
does not kill. It happened many a time that the victims loaded on the
last round came to on the hand carts ... the hand carts GOT DOWN
[emphasis added] the ramp and UNLOADED DIRECTLY INTO THE OVEN [emphasis
added]... --The annihilation of five hundred human beings has taken no
more than AN HOUR AND A QUARTER [emphasis added]. Except for a handful
of ashes [500 bodies of women and children would leave behind at least
a ton of ashes --author's note] there would remain no other trace. The
following group crossed the threshold of the bath. Chattering, the
little girl held her mother's hand, and without interrupting her ditty,
she crossed the threshold... (pp. 127-128).
To see, in a general way, the incredible contradictions between the
witnesses in a single trial, regarding the manner in which Zyklon was
introduced into the alleged "gas chamber," one could read the
unintentionally humorous summary made by a German court which, for once,
lingered for a short time on the technical aspects of the "gassings" (see
_Justiz und NS-Verbrechen_ [Justice and NS-Crimes], Amsterdam: University
Press, 1975, Volume XIII, the case of Dr. Gerhard Peters, p. 134 or 415
b-5).
48. On pages 280-289, Vidal-Naquet continues with an "Appendix II." There
he mentions and criticizes briefly my _Memoire en defense_ which had just
appeared (fourth quarter of 1980). He says that I had "not devoted a single
line to trying to respond to the dismantling" that he, Vidal-Naquet, had
done to Faurisson's lies. Vidal-Naquet adds that by various details of
editing of _Memoire_ (correction of all too evident errors), it is evident
to him, Vidal-Naquet, that Faurisson was nevertheless familiar with his
text. He gives only one example of a correction for which I should
allegedly be indebted to him. That example relates to the translation of
the German "darniederliegen" used by Dr. Johann-Paul Kremer.
RESPONSE: On page 20 of my _Memoire_, I say to my readers that the
translation into French by the Poles was "annihilated," when the original
German text said "liegen [...] darnieder," which meant there, "were sick in
bed." My editor has been able to prove clearly to Vidal-Naquet that I was
not at all indebted to him for that detail since my translation was done
prior to the article by Vidal-Naquet. In a letter that he sent in response
to my publisher, Vidal-Naquet has indeed been willing to agree with that.
49. On page 280, Vidal-Naquet writes:
[I have shown that] not ONE SINGLE TIME in [the Kremer diary] did
the "special actions" in which the doctor participated have any
connection whatsoever with the struggle against typhus. Faurisson is
incapable, for good reason, of producing a single argument, a single
response on this point. I have said it before and I repeat it now; his
interpretation is a forgery, in the full meaning of the term.
RESPONSE: On 5 September 1942, Dr. Kremer was present at a special action
at the WOMEN'S HOSPITAL and he adds, in parentheses, "Musulmans [sic]."
That term was applied to sick persons who had reached the last stage of
consumption. Then, on 7 October 1942, Dr. Kremer writes: "I was present at
the ninth special action (people from outside and Musulman women)." How
could Vidal-Naquet claim that the condition of those male and female
"Musulmans" had no connection with the formidable epidemic of typhus which
ravaged both the camp and the city, causing deaths among the camp inmates as
well as among the German soldiers and their families?
50. On page 281, in note 3, Vidal-Naquet recalls briefly, and as if it went
without saying, that "special action" was the "code word for gassing."
RESPONSE: Once again, enough decoding!
51. In the same passage, Vidal-Naquet writes: "A falsehood that has been
changed without informing the reader remains of course a falsehood," and he
remarks that in _Verite..._, on pages 109-110, I defined "special action" as
being "the sorting out of the sick and healthy," while later on, in my
_Memoire_, on page 34, "the special action" becomes, in addition, the
cleaning of the railway cars, either third-class coaches or especially
freight cars, in which newly detained persons had just arrived."
RESPONSE: It is sufficient to go back to my text in order to see that the
accusation by Vidal-Naquet is based on a bad reading. In fact, in
_Verite..._ on pages 109-110, I defined the sorting out of the sick and the
well as "ONE of the forms of the doctor's 'special action.'"
52. On page 286, Vidal-Naquet writes: "Faurisson has been banned neither
from the library nor from the public archives." He recalls that the
personnel of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris
"after some years of forbearance" have refused to serve me and that to him
that "seemed quite normal" since I questioned the Center "in its fundamental
activity, that of remembering the crime" (sic). Vidal-Naquet adds that the
Center is a "private foundation."
RESPONSE: The staff of the Center, or at least a part of the staff, is paid
by the French taxpayer. For some months the staff increased its
provocations so that I could no longer come to work at the Center. I was
driven away by the director in person, Mr. Meram, who threatened me with
physical assault if I tried to return. Thereupon, I received from Georges
Wellers a letter in which he informed me of his refusal to let me have
access to the library and the archives; all done in the name of the noblest
ideals. In doing that, he was, he said, "sure of finding himself in the
noblest traditions of this country, where freedom and the respect for human
dignity are indissoluble" (27 April 1978).
I have likewise been driven away from an institute in Paris and from a
research center and library in Vienna. I state explicitly that in spite of
what he supposedly declared to a French journalist, Mr. Simon Wiesenthal has
never forcibly shown me to the door of his home. To the contrary, he
received me with a very Viennese courtesy. It is true that at the time he
did not know my opinion about the "gas chambers"!
But, in fact, does the Vatican Library refuse access to agnostics? I
note that, if I am prosecuted like a criminal in the courts by a swarm of
organizations, it is likewise done in the name of the noblest ideals; they
are not harming the freedoms of thought and expression -- they are
protecting them!
53. On page 286, Vidal-Naquet writes: "I myself claim, and I prove, that
Faurisson, outside of the very limited case of the _Diary of Anne Frank_, is
not seeking truth but falsehood."
QUESTION: How can that be reconciled in the same man?
54. On the same page, in note 12, Vidal-Naquet obviously does not know what
to say in response to the forty pages (pages 181 to 222 of _Memoire en
defense_) which I devote to the "drastic revision of 1960." I recall there
how the "gas chambers" of the Old Reich went, so to speak, down the chute,
and I amuse myself collecting "strikingly true testimonies about the
non-existent gassings, for example, at Buchenwald and Dachau." Here is how
Vidal-Naquet gets rid of the thorn. He writes:
In order to be complete, I would say that [in Faurisson's new
book] there is a file about the imaginary or non-functioning gas
chambers in the camps in the West, Buchenwald, Dachau. But all that is
so badly analyzed historically that even that documentation is usable
only with difficulty.
RESPONSE: There is no analysis on my part, either historical or otherwise.
I content myself above all with a simple enumeration of the false
testimonies. The enumeration in and of itself speaks volumes. In it we can
read, between the lines, the famous question which no one has yet answered:
"What difference do you see between the 'testimonies' about Buchenwald or
Dachau and the 'testimonies' about Auschwitz or Belzec?" Had I wanted to do
an analysis of each of the false testimonies that I cite, I am sure that my
analysis would have been of a biblical simplicity. Let us take a short
example. Here is a false testimony about Dachau. It is from Fernand
Grenier and I quote it on page 218 of my _Memoire en defense_. First I
shall give the text and then I shall analyze it.
TEXT OF THE FALSE TESTIMONY
To the side of the four crematory ovens which never stopped
working there was a room: some showers with sprinkler heads in the
ceiling. In the preceding year [1944] they had given a towel and a
piece of soap to 120 children, from 8 to 14 years of age. They were
quite happy when they went inside. The doors were closed.
Asphyxiating gas came out of the showers. Ten minutes later, death had
killed these innocents whom the crematory ovens reduced to ashes an
hour later.
ANALYSIS OF THE FALSE TESTIMONY
Since it is admitted that nobody was ever gassed in Dachau, the false
witness Fernand Grenier has totally made up:
(1) The four crematory ovens which never stopped working;
(2) The room with the false showers and shower heads;
(3) The year in which the event took place (in contrast to many witnesses,
he does not go so far as to give the month, the day, and the hour);
(4) The children;
(5) The number of those children;
(6) The ages of those children;
(7) The 120 towels and pieces of soap;
(8) The complete joy of the children on entering;
(9) The closing of the doors (in the plural);
(10) The asphyxiating gasses;
(11) The 10 minutes it took for death to occur;
(12) The record time for the cremation of 120 children's bodies in four
ovens -- only one hour, when today, with more modern means than those
of 1944, four ovens of the kind that function at Pere-Lachaise
Cemetery in Paris would need 225 hours, or about nine days (45 minutes
per body without antibiotics; if not, 50 to 60 minutes per body).
My analysis will stop here. To continue would serve no other purpose
than to measure the candor of all who believe that such stories are not made
up.
With regard to false testimony, I would be happy if Vidal-Naquet would
give me his opinion on _Sachso_ (op. cit.). There, on numerous occasions,
the "gas chamber" of that camp is discussed, although it was located 30
kilometers from Berlin; that is to say, in the Old Reich, where, as we have
known officially since the drastic revision of 1960, there was no homicidal
gassing.
In 1968, Olga Wormser-Migot, in her thesis on _Le Systeme
concentrationnaire nazi 1932-1945_ (The Nazi Concentration Camp System
1932-1945) wrote in note 2 on page 541, in the midst of a chapter
significantly entitled, "The Problem of the Gas Chambers," that the
Oranienburg "gas chamber" appeared to her to be "on the order of myth."
In _Sachso_, which is presented as a collective work, the authors
reproduce for us two photos of Soviet origin tending to support the
existence of a homicidal gas chamber. One does not see in them the least
bit of the alleged "gas chamber." The first caption reads as follows:
One of the butchers of the camp, Paul Sakowski, in the presence
of an officer of the Soviet Commission of inquiry, repeats in 1945 the
movements which released death into the gas chamber.
The second caption reads as follows:
To the left of the heavy, armored, and air-tight door to the
execution room he activates the lever which seals all the ventilation
openings. Then, with a slap of his palm on a hammer, he breaks the
ampule of Zyklon B, the deadly vapors of which spread throughout the
interior.
But it is interesting to know that Zyklon B, invented in 1917 (the license
dates from 1922) and still currently in use today throughout the world,
never existed in ampules. Zyklon B is hydrocyanic acid absorbed into an
inert porous base -- diatomaceous earth, for example. The funny thing about
the plan of the camp which they have drawn is that it very clearly says
"Industrie Hof (sic)/Crematory/Gas Chamber/Execution Chamber," but all that
is accompanied by an arrow pointing toward the open, so that it is
impossible to distinguish the shape, the proportions, or the location of the
"gas chamber."
I would likewise hope that Vidal-Naquet will tell us his feelings about
the "Exhibition on the Deportation, 1933-1945" which took place in late
April and early May of 1982 on the Place du Trocadero in Paris. On 30
April, in a "Supplement to the Quarterly Review _Les A mis de Paul
Rassinier_, No. 1, June, 1982," I wrote an article about it which ends as
follows:
In a general way, the 1982 exhibition marks an interesting
evolution of the myth of the homicidal gas chambers. The fragments
they show us of the alleged homicidal gas chambers are smaller and
smaller. They are tending toward the infinitesimal, toward zero,
toward nothing. Many gas chambers are no longer shown at all! They
content themselves with showing us the building which is supposed to
have contained them.
I add, under the heading "N.B.," the book by Georges Wellers,
entitled _Les Chambres a gaz ont existe_ (Gallimard, 1981), containing
12 photographs; not one shows a homicidal gas chamber.
I know several academic historians who no longer believe in the Nazi
"gas chambers." They have confided that to me but dare not state it
publicly. They feel the time has come to abandon the pious lie, but they
don't know how to go about it.
To them I suggest a trick devised by one of my lawyers, who, after
having believed firmly in the academic dogma, suddenly realized that he had
been deceived. The means he devised in order not to appear to have changed
his mind too much is as follows:
He described the "gas chambers" as "metaphorical." No doubt those
horrors had not really taken place, but they conveyed very well all the real
horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, and all in all they were a faithful
image of the sufferings of the deportees and a moving representation of what
some suffering minds really believed they knew. After all, the figure of 6
million Jews dead has become a "symbolic number," EINE SYMBOLISCHE ZAHL,
since 3 May 1979 in a court in Frankfurt (case 50 Js 12 828/78 919 Ls,
against Erwin Schonborn) where Dr. Broszat, once again, testified as an
expert witness, based on his position as director of the Institute for
Contemporary History in Munich. The alleged gas chambers are
"metaphorical," the alleged number of 6 million dead "symbolic."
All that remains is to find an adjective of the same kind for the
alleged "genocide."
55. On page 288, Vidal-Naquet assures us that my "freedom of expression,
subject to existing laws, has never been threatened."
RESPONSE: His "subject to" is something to be relished. Vidal-Naquet has
respect for law -- for the law, for example, which, as a result of my having
stood up for my idea about the "gas chambers" and the "genocide," led to my
being condemned to a suspended sentence of three months in prison and to 360
million old francs in various fines plus the expenses of publicizing the
decision. I have against me a pack of organizations and a mob of lawyers. I
have been crushed by the debts from all those trials. I no longer have the
right to teach. I have been attacked and physically beaten on several
occasions. I have been the object of real lynching attempts. My health has
become such that I had to be hospitalized three times in one year, for one
month each time. My family life is completely upset. One of my children
has had to give up his studies because of the name he bears. I am insulted
in the French and international press as no one else, to the best of my
knowledge, has ever been. The right to reply is almost systematically
refused to me since a judge declared that to put "gas chamber" in quotes is
to cast a slur upon some kind of holy thing. The Council of State has
declared that there is nothing "materially inexact" in declaring me to be an
academic who has never published anything in his life! The administrative
court of the departement of the Seine has never investigated a complaint I
made in January 1975. I have encountered serious problems when I've had to
find a lawyer. All of them have avoided the job. One of them was expelled
from the MRAP [Movement against Racism and for Peace between Peoples] for
having had the audacity to defend not my ideas, but my right to freedom of
expression. A portion of my books was destroyed in the warehouse. A unit
of the Jewish Defense Organization called for an attack against us in a hall
of "La Libre Pensee" ("Free Thought") and smashed 12,000 francs worth of
property.
One night at 9:30 p.m. a sheriff's officer came on behalf of the MRAP
to seize a video-cassette which the Jewish Defense Organization had just
seized. We are the objects of never-ending threats. The vigilantes
flourish in Paris, as in the provinces. Because of all this my wife has
been sick for four years and lives in constant fear.
We have had some of our furniture repossessed while awaiting the
possible seizure of a house that I have not yet completed paying for
(purchased for 105,000 francs in 1968); our car has been seized, and most of
my salary (my sole source of income) taken.
I have paid for all my research, and related travel expenses, out of my
own pocket. When, for once, I won a court case (against Le Matin de Paris,
which had written that I had received a reprimand for anti-Semitic remarks
at the lycee in Clermont-Ferrand), the judge -- Mme. Simone Rozes -- did not
want to publicize the decision because of the special character of the
case."
Dr. Marc Aron, the president of the consultative committee of the
Jewish organizations in Lyon, declared one day that I would never again
teach in Lyon, and organized demonstrations on the premises of my university
by persons from outside the university. My case was the subject of
administrative inquiry. The rector concluded it as follows: "Professor
Faurisson is unassailable; he has not committed any professional error."
That meant nothing, nor did the moving support of my students, nor the
qualities which I seem to have shown up to that time ("Very brilliant
professor; very original researcher; exceptional personality"). Not one of
my colleagues came to my defense. Some of them went so far as to write to
the president (socialist) of my university to assure him of their support
against the black sheep. I have the letters. There are 25 of them.
I was warned by the Disciplinary Council to disappear from circulation.
They assured me that, since the Council was constituted as it was, the
opinion of the rector was of no importance. As a result of this pressure, I
asked for a position teaching in the correspondence division. There they
told me that they would have nothing to do with me, and that anyway my
belonging to Group A of Higher Education prevented me from being used.
As regards my union, the SNESup (a leftist union) did not delay in
showing me the door without letting me be heard in any way. I belonged to
the SNES and to the SNESup for more than 20 years.
I won't mention the threatening letters, the anonymous telephone calls,
the times that I was spat upon, the minor problems. I must admit that I
feel like a hunted animal, and that I have often wanted to be done with my
life. I do not know whether I will survive much longer what is happening to
me and to my loved ones. But I feel myself torn by the duty to struggle
against such horrible lies and so much cowardice.
If I must struggle in this way, with the bit between my teeth, it is
also for all those who have supported me up to now. First, those of the
Vieille Taupe publishing house, and then all those strangers in the United
States, Great Britain, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden,
Italy, Australia, and other places as well, who collect protests and
manifestos.
56. On page 288, Vidal-Naquet writes:
Noam Chomsky, in a letter of 6 December 1980 to Jean-Pierre Faye,
retracted, if not his text (appearing as a preface to my _Memoire en
defense_), then at least the use which had been made of it, without his
agreement, as the preface to a book by Robert Faurisson.
RESPONSE: That is quite simply false.
That letter was written, but its content has been seriously
misrepresented.
One comment by way of conclusion:
Vidal-Naquet spreads the idea, even in court, that he is convinced that
I am an anti-Semite.
I will share a secret with you. When I hear talk about the Jewish
question, I fall asleep. I understand that such indifference on this matter
might offend the people who see anti-Semites everywhere, as others see Jews
everywhere -- but I demand the right to be indifferent on that point and on
several others.
NOTES
1. In section 10 I wrote: "(...) concentration camps are a modern
invention that we owe not to the British in their war against the
Boers, but to the Americans during their Civil War" and I went on to
mention "the horrors of Andersonville." Recently Mr. Mitchell A.
Abidor (from Brooklyn, NY), reading the French version, noticed my
mistake and reminded me that Andersonville had not been a
"concentration camp" but a camp for prisoners of war. He is right. I
should have mentioned instead Mark Weber's article: "The Civil War
Concentration Camps," _Journal of Historical Review_, Summer 1981, p.
137-153 in which we read inter alia:
In addition to camps for captured soldiers, the North also
established concentration camps for civilian populations
considered hostile to the Federal government. Union General
Thomas Ewing issued his infamous Order Number 11 in August 1863,
whereby large numbers of civilians in Missouri were relocated into
what were called "posts."
In _Plain Speaking_, "An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman,"
the former president tells what happened:
Everybody, almost the entire population of Jackson
County and Vernon and Cass and Bates counties, all of them
were depopulated, and the people had to stay in posts.
They called them posts, but what they were, they were
concentration camps. And most of the people were moved in
such a hurry that they had to leave all their goods and their
chattels in their houses. Then the Federal soldiers came in
and took everything that was left and set fire to the houses.
That didn't go down very well with the people in these
parts; putting people in concentration camps in particular
didn't. (pp. 78-79)
President Truman's grandmother loaded what belongings she
could into an oxcart and, with six of her children, among them the
President's mother, made the journey to a "post" in Kansas City.
Martha Ellen Truman vividly remembered that trek until she died at
the age of 94 [p. 143].
2. In my introduction and in Section 13 of my "Response...," I mentioned
Ms. Nadine Fresco and her attempt to answer the Revisionists'
arguments. Recently, in December 1985, she was quoted by Michael May
in an article against the Revisionists: "Denying the holocaust/The
background, methods and motives of the 'revisionists,'" _Index on
Censorship_ (London), December, 1985, p. 29-33. Below is what Michael
May said against me and what I answered him.
Nadine Fresco in her admirable article "The Denial of the
Dead" (_Dissent_, Fall, 1981) relates the following discovery
about perhaps the most meticulous and dedicated of the
'revisionists', Robert Faurisson, in his treatment of the diary of
the Auschwitz doctor Kremer, an important document.
'In his letter to _Le Monde_ on January 16, 1979,
Faurisson cites the diary that Johann-Paul Kremer, SS doctor,
kept during his tenure at Auschwitz. Kremer recounts, on
October 18, 1942 that, for the eleventh time, he was present
at a "special action" (Sonderaktion). Faurisson, who can't
be had and who, like no one else, knows how to decipher a
text, decides that this "special action", which the
exterminationists [the deniers' name for the established
historians] insist on taking for a mass gassing, refers very
simply to the executions of those condemned to death. He
writes, "Among those condemned are three women who arrived in
a convoy from Holland; they are shot". This sentence is
accompanied by a very impressive note that indicates the
seriousness of Faurisson's work. The note consists of a
biographical reference: "'Auschwitz as Seen by the SS',
published by the Museum of Oswiecim [the Polish name for
Auschwitz], 1974, p. 238, note 85".
'Can one imagine a more scrupulous concern for
reference, precision, and scientific rigor? But then perhaps
Faurisson thinks it would be rather surprising if readers of
_Le Monde_ had access to such a book, published so far from
France and behind the Iron Curtain. Unfortunately for
Faurisson, I have the book. And note 85 on page 238, which
reports the official transcript of Kremer's testimony in
1947, indeed indicates that three Dutch women were shot on
that day. But the text of the note to which Faurisson refers
reads: "At the time of the special action which I described
in my diary on October 18, 1942, three Dutch women REFUSED TO
ENTER THE GAS CHAMBER [emphasis mine] and pleaded for their
lives. They were young women, in good health, but despite
this their prayer was not granted and the SS who participated
in the action shot them on the spot."'
So there were gas chambers and people were put in them -- and
Faurisson relies on the very testimony which shows this. But he
conceals all mention of gas chambers. The truth is not his
goal...
At the time of the Faurisson affair, thirty-four of France's
leading historians issued a declaration in _Le Monde_ attesting to
the historical truth of the Holocaust and protesting the Nazi
attempt to erase the past. They concluded:
'Everyone is free to interpret a phenomenon like the
Hitlerite genocide according to his own philosophy. Everyone
is free to compare it with other enterprises of murder
committed earlier, at the same time, later. Everyone is free
to offer such or such kind of explanation; everyone is free,
to the limit, to imagine or to dream that these monstrous
deeds did not take place. Unfortunately they did take place
and no one can deny their existence without committing an
outrage on the truth. It is not necessary to ask how
technically such a mass murder was possible. It was
technically possible, seeing that it took place. That is the
required point of departure of every historical inquiry on
this subject. This truth it behooves us to remember in
simple terms: there is not and there cannot be a debate
about the existence of the gas chambers.' (_Le Monde_, Feb
21, 1979)
Letter to the Editor, _Index on Censorship_ (for publication)
Subject: Michael May, "Denying the Holocaust" (_Index on Censorship_,
December 1985, pp. 29-33)
My name is Robert Faurisson. I am a professor at the
University of Lyon-2, in France. I have said and I still maintain
that there was never a single homicidal gas chamber in the German
concentration camps prior to or during World War II. I have
arrived at that conclusion, as have many Revisionists, at the end
of a very long investigation and I have expressed that conclusion
in books, articles, and one videotape presentation. In my
response to Michael May's article, I will refer only to two books:
Serge Thion, _Verite historique ou verite politique?_ (Le dossier
de l'Affaire Faurisson, La question des chambres a gaz), Paris, La
Vieille Taupe Publishing Co., April 1980, 352 pages; Robert
Faurisson, _Memoire en defense contre ceux qui m'accusent de
falsifier l'Histoire_ (La question des chambres a gaz), with a
preface by Noam Chomsky, same publisher, November 1980, xx-iv +
280 pages.
Michael May, on the other hand, believes that the gas
chambers did exist. In his article he mentions a French woman,
Madame Nadine Fresco, who has fought vigorously against the
Revisionist thesis and, in particular, against my own publications
in _Le Monde_ ("Le probleme des chambres a gaz/La rumeur
d'Auschwitz," 29 December 1978, p. 8, and "Une lettre de M.
Faurisson," 16 January 1979, p. 13) as well as against Serge
Thion's book.
Nadine Fresco criticized us in a fierce and mocking way in a
long article in _Les Temps Modernes_ (the magazine of Jean-Paul
Sartre and of Claude Lanzmann, famous later as the director of the
film _Shoah_). Her article was entitled: "Les redresseurs de
morts/Chambres a gaz: la bonne nouvelle/Comment on revise
l'histoire" (_Les Temps Modernes_, June 1980, pp. 2150-2211).
Michael May does not refer to that article but rather to an
English text: "The Denial of the Dead" (_Dissent_, Fall 1981),
which, judging from the excerpt that he has cited, could be either
a translation or an adaptation of the _Temps Modernes_ article.
He describes that article as "admirable," especially since Ms.
Fresco supposedly shows what kind of trick I used to hide from _Le
Monde_'s readers the existence of an "important document": the
testimony of Professor Johann-Paul Kremer about the gassings at
Auschwitz.
Unfortunately for Nadine Fresco and Michael May, I, far from
having hidden that testimony from anyone, have often mentioned it
and, noting the interest that has been shown in it by those who
sued me for "falsification of history," have devoted numerous
pages to it for some time. Here I will limit myself to listing
only the five occasions on which I talked about that testimony, a
date approximately one year before Nadine Fresco in _Dissent_, in
spite of so many warnings, went on to repeat and to persist in her
initial serious mistake.
Here are the five dates on which I talked about the testimony
that Johann-Paul Kremer made to his Polish Communist jailers:
(1) On 16 January 1979, in the same letter to _Le Monde_ in which
Ms. Fresco said that I had concealed Kremer's testimony from
my readers, I expressly mentioned "'the testimony' (in
quotes) after the war by J.-P. Kremer" and the context
clearly shows that it was testimony about the alleged
gassings (that letter is reproduced in my _Memoire_, pp.
84-88);
(2) On 26 February 1979, in a text sent to _Le Monde_ in
connection with my "right to reply" to Georges Wellers, I
referred to the testimony and its content (that text is
reproduced in my _Memoire_, pp. 96-100);
(3) In April of 1980 Serge Thion announced on page 338 of his
book that I was soon going to publish a _Memoire_ in which I
would deal, among other items, with the question of Kremer's
testimony;
(4) In June of 1980 Nadine Fresco published her article in _Les
Temps Modernes_; it mentioned me 150 times. In accordance
with my legal "right of reply," I sent a response to her
article. In it I pointed out, among other items, that it was
wrong for Ms. Fresco, repeating Georges Wellers's error, to
reproach me for having been silent about the testimony of
J.-P. Kremer; I told her that _Le Monde_ had refused to
publish my response to Wellers and I made it clear that I was
soon going to publish a _Memoire_ in which I would once more
talk about J.-P. Kremer (a photograph of _Le Monde_'s refusal
letter is included in my _Memoire_, p. 101);
(5) In November of 1980 the _Memoire_ that had twice been
announced to Ms. Fresco appeared; in it I reproduced in
facsimile 20 pages of the Communist publication in whose
footnotes are found fragments of Kremer's confession. And I
had no trouble in showing the vagueness and the absurdity of
that testimony, which is also quite typical of Stalinist
trials.
I will therefore make the following remarks about that whole
affair and about Michael May's article:
(1) It is astonishing that I have been accused in this way of
hiding something that I had myself taken the initiative to
point out. Georges Wellers was the first one to make this
false accusation. The others have only repeated what he
said. They have been, first of all, the group of nine
organizations which sued me; then Nadine Fresco, and today
Michael May. They have not been able to respond to the
scholarly arguments of the revisionists and instead have
leaped at the first accusation that occurred to them. And,
lacking anything better to say, they have persisted in their
error;
(2) Those who defend the thesis about the existence of the gas
chambers are amateurish. We have an example of that
amateurishness in Nadine Fresco: in my letter to _Le Monde_
I said that three women coming from the Netherlands had been
shot rather than gassed at Auschwitz; as my source I gave a
classic book, a special issue of the _Hefte von Auschwitz_
(Auschwitz Notebooks) published by the very official State
Museum of Auschwitz; this special issue was also in French,
and I gave the exact citation in the French version. What
did Ms. Fresco do about that? She deduced from it that this
was a trick on my part and that, having done that, I counted
on the fact that no reader of _Le Monde_ would take the
trouble to verify the reference to a work "published so far
from France and behind the Iron Curtain." Could Ms. Fresco
find anyone who, writing as a specialist about Auschwitz,
would be unaware of the existence of the _Hefte von
Auschwitz_?
(3) Do we know of very many Communist-conducted trials that have
NOT had confessions by the accused?
(4) Michael May wrote his article in a publication called _Index
on Censorship_. I therefore supposed that he is opposed to
censorship. In this whole affair there have been two
examples of censorship: first by _Le Monde_, then by _Les
Temps Modernes_. In both cases they prevented me from
reminding the public that I had indeed mentioned the Kremer
testimony and that I even knew the subject very well. The
result was that Nadine Fresco thought she could repeat a
baseless accusation that is today coming back to haunt her.
Therefore, it seems that it is, at least sometimes, unwise to
censor things.
(5) Michael May ends his article with the final excerpt from the
declaration by 34 French historians who, in February 1979,
published a text protesting against my denial of the
existence of the gas chambers. He talks about "thirty-four
of France's leading historians." He fails to mention that
not one of those historians, except Leon Poliakov, was a
specialist in the period under consideration; they included
Egyptologists, Hellenists, specialists in the 16th or the
18th centuries, specialists in the study of customs or of
societies, etc. In France today people still laugh at that
declaration which seems to please Michael May; here is how it
concluded:
"It is not necessary to ask how technically such a
mass murder was possible. It was technically possible,
seeing that it took place. That is the required point
of departure of every inquiry on this subject. This
truth it behooves us to remember in simple terms: there
is not and there cannot be a debate about the existence
of the gas chambers" (_Le Monde_, 21 February 1979, p.
23).
This kind of reasoning is an example of a rhetorical
construction known as "tautology." And it raises three questions:
Apart from the alleged mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, what
other mass murder in history could a historian research without
having to ask himself how "technically" it was carried out?
You say that there CANNOT be any debate about the existence
of the gas chambers; does that mean that if there is actually such
a debate it is necessary to forbid it -- for example, by means of
censorship or law suits?
Supposing for a moment that the gas chambers were actually
nothing more than a wartime rumor turned into an historic lie.
Should we call it that or cover it up? In this case what, in your
opinion, should a scholar do?
3. In section 28 I wrote: "A thesis is presently being prepared which
will expose the Gerstein 'confessions' and what Leon Poliakov has made
of them." The viva voce of this thesis was on 15 June 1985. Its
author, Mr. Henri Roques, received his Ph.D. (doctorat d'Universite)
with distinction from the University of Nantes. This long and very
technical thesis will be mimeographed in February, 1986. The
conclusions are humiliating for Leon Poliakov. Quite recently, in
November 1985, Carlo Mattogno published _Il Rapporto Gerstein: Anatomia
di un Falso/Il "campo di sterminio" di Belzec_ (The Gerstein Report:
Anatomy of a Fraud/The Extermination Camp at Belzec), ed. Sentinella
d'Italia (Via Buonarotti 4, Monfalcone, Italy), 243 p., 15,000 lire.
His findings are the same as Dr. Roques' findings.*
*See Robert Hall's review in this month's _Journal_.
[end of second article of two]
[Reprinted from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box 4296, Torrance,
CA 90510, USA. Subscriptions: $40 per year (domestic).]
This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
___________________________________________________________
| |
| For 300-9600 bps (3 lines w/V.32) call: (503) 232-5783 |
| For 14400 bps (2 lines w/V.32bis) call: (503) 232-6566 |
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Sysop: Maynard "the Main Nerd"
[end of file]
The following was a joint response to the parts of the file above Gannon
managed to post to UseNet:
Newsgroups: alt.censorship,alt.conspiracy,alt.revisionism,misc.headlines,soc.college,soc.history,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.mideast
From: kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca (Ken Mcvay)
Subject: "BLASTED TO BITS?" A Response to Gannon's Latest Assault...
Summary: Mr. Gannon, having proven himself inept at posting to the net,
proves equally inept at providing factual evidence to support
his dishonest contentions regarding the Holocaust
References: <9401171257.A8063wk@banished.com>
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac
Keywords: Gannon,Faurisson,Weber
Message-ID: <1994Jan18.085809.16239@oneb.almanac.bc.ca>
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 94 08:58:09 GMT
...."blasted to bits"...
To fully grasp the meaning of this, Mr. Gannon's latest subject, we
must consider the context.
It is indisputable: Mr. Gannon is far from being an expert on
matters relating to the Holocaust. He does, however, serve rather
well at his principle avocation, which is transcribing these articles
and sending them to UseNet.
But, like the proverbial parrot, demanding his cracker, Dan does not
understand. On the rare occasions where he has deigned to "educate"
us, he has succeeded only in demonstrating his near-total ignorance.
Examples of his inability to deal with historic reality abound, and
those unfamiliar with his hoof-in-mouth approach to the subject may
wish to avail themselves of them. Ken McVay's Holocaust archives
contain a particularly grand example - a file named 'gannon.gas,'
which may be readily obtained by sending a message to listserv
@oneb.almanac.bc.ca which includes the command GET HOLOCAUST/B-CPU
GANNON.GAS.
You see, Dan craves attention. He puts his subject lines in caps; he
posts to newsgroups that have nothing to do with his subject matter,
like soc.college and talk.politics.misc; and he encourages this
attention by making use of emotive language whenever possible.
We, the people to whom Dan addresses this so-called "scorching
response," are offended and embarrassed by such puerility.
We take our research and our work on the Holocaust seriously. We take it
seriously not only because we desire more than a cursory knowledge of
this period of history; we take it seriously because it is an event in
history which saw millions of people lose their lives - anything less
than serious dedication demeans their memory.
If Mr. Gannon wishes to discuss any part of the history of the
Holocaust, honestly and openly, with the aim of discovering the truth,
we will be more than happy to educate him on nearly any topic he
chooses.
But when Mr. Gannon announces smugly, to anyone who will listen and
many who would rather not, that he has "blasted" the "experts" to "bits"...as
if deaths are toys and Usenet a tool for one-upsmanship on the
playground at recess...then he should not be surprised when he is
regarded as utterly beneath contempt.
It is interesting to note that Mr. Gannon, who recently responded to
charges that he often reposted articles within days of previous
postings by denying the practice, now offers us, for the _third_ time
in as many days, a "review" by Mark Weber.*
It is also interesting to ponder, since the greater part of Mr.
Gannon's 18-part diatribe failed to reach the net, whether he will
repeat his practice of reposting the entire bloated series all over
again... 18 articles, posted to anywhere from five to thirteen
newsgroups, to join the 3-6 which already made it off his system -
not just once, but thrice.
* [Note that Mr. Gannon has already provided an answer to our
speculation by re-publishing six parts of his 18-part tome to
soc.history, alt.revisionism and elsewhere. Parts 4,7,12,15,17, and 18
have been duplicated there, and will undoubtedly show up in Mr. Gannon's
other haunts as well. Perhaps he would rather we didn't have the entire
article to consider, since he seems unwilling, or incapable, of
producing it.]
Perhaps Mr. Gannon will finally manage to unseat Mr. Argic as
UseNet's number one volume poster - the thought of the two of them
battling it out for the Number One spot on the Top 25 Posters list is
chilling. (Mr. Argic has already launched his first salvo in
alt.revisionism, where he added Mr. "Gannonian" to his Subject:
line.)
In his introduction, Mr. Gannon offers:
The second article, "Response to a Paper Historian", serves also
as a scorching response to Ken McVay, Danny Keren, et al. It
neatly refutes a great quantity of the propaganda constantly
re-post. Their "undeniable evidence" has been refuted, most of
it for quite some time now. Their continuing to post and re-post
the same lies makes the lies no more true. That they claim their
"evidence" has never been refuted is yet another manifestation of
their BIG LIE technique.
"Devastating." "Scorching." Really, Dan. We'll examine what little you have
provided here, and see what 'devastation' we can identify...
"THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THY NEIGHBORS." Let
the silence be broken! This is not a trifling matter. "Do unto
others as you would have them do unto you."
Coming from a man who lies with such consistancy (an allegation which is
easily proven by examination of a few of Mr. Gannon's past lies - those who
wish to satisfy themselves in this regard are invited to send a message to
listserve@oneb.almanac.bc.ca with the command GET HOLOCAUST/B-CPU LIAR as
the body of the message), it certainly _isn't_ a "trifling matter." Lying,
as Gannon demonstrates often, is his stock in trade. Given his remark above,
one can only assume that Gannon wants everyone to lie to him as well... and
he is surely gratified, as his Nazi friends do so with great regularity.
>From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
[Gannon's contemptuous reprint of Weber's "review" deleted - once is more
than enough when it comes to Mr. Weber, who has been identified as the
go-between between German paleonazis and North American nazi-wannabees - see
the IHR FAQ for Mr. Weber's background and politics]
In his preface, Vidal-Naquet accordingly insists that: "One can
and should enter into a discussion concerning the
'revisionists'...but one should not enter into debate with the
'revisionists'." Faurisson, in his essay, "My Life as a
Revisionist" (published in the Spring 1989 issue of this
_Journal_), provides a tart reply to this comment. After taking
note of some of Vidal-Naquet's reluctant but significant
concessions to truth (pp. 53-55), Faurisson wrote:
To draw an analogy from sports, Vidal-Naquet thinks he is better
than Faurisson at tennis;
This is one horrid analogy, but it does tell us a great deal about Mr.
Gannon, and the way he views the world. Holocaust-denial is not a
tennis match, where two sides attempt to score points by collecting
evidence. It's not a game, where one side is "better than" the other.
The simple fact is that Holocaust-denial is a lie. Those who say that
the Holocaust never occurred are lying, or, if one feels quite
charitable, are mistaken. When Mr. Gannon asserts that no-one was gassed
at the death camps, he is lying.
The simple fact is that it _did_ occur. There are literally tons of
captured documents which attest the reality. There are thousands of
eyewitnesses still living. The corpses are still buried; the
instruments of death are still there. There is simply no doubt.
To say that the Holocaust never occurred is on a par with stating that
the earth is flat and that Australia does not exist. Vidal-Naquet is
correct: the core facts of the Holocaust are indisputable and
therefore undebateable.
If Mr. Gannon or anyone else would like to be educated as to those
facts, we are happy to take on the job by discussing with him the
facts which historians know to be true. But the relationship will be
that of a teacher to a student, not of tennis players. Do not for
_one_second_ believe that Holocaust-denial and its refutation is
comparable to a game, the outcome of which is in doubt.
>Subject: "HOLOCAUST EXPERTS" BLASTED TO BITS! [4/18]
>Vidal-Naquet, himself, does not know what tone is
>proper to take about Himmler's remarks. He speaks of his "direct or nearly
>totally direct language." Here he believes he sees him "at maximum
>frankness," even though he adds that "a description of the real process
>would be a thousand times more traumatic." There's the rub -- Vidal-Naquet
>proclaims that he has found in Himmler what the Exterminationist historians
>have sought in vain since 1945: either an order or a simple instruction
>verifying a decision to exterminate the Jews. But at the very moment that
>he presents to us the result of his search, he looks sulkily at what he has
>found: The language of Himmler is "direct or nearly totally direct," there
>is no "description of the real process." (Dare we ask if that "description
>of the real process" happens to exist only in Vidal-Naquet's head?)
"Sulkily"? Since we don't have the third article in Dan's series, we
can't know what it is that Vidal-Naquet is calling "direct or nearly
totally direct." Perhaps it is the following speech, which Himmler
delivered on October 4th, 1943...
>I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among
>ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly and yet we will never
>speak of it publicly...I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the
>extermination [Ausrottung] of the Jewish race. It is one of the things
>it is easy to talk about. "The Jewish race is being exterminated," says
>one party member, it is quite clear, it is in our programme--elimination
>of the Jews; are we are doing it, exterminating them. And then they
>come, eighty million worthy Germans and each one has his decent Jews.Of
>course, the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of
>those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been
>through it. Most of you must know what it means when a hundred corpses
>are lying side by side or five hundred or a thousand. To have stuck it
>out and at the same time--apart from exceptions caused by human
>weakness--to have remained decent men, that is what has made us hard.
It is difficult to understand how someone could be "sulky"
that Himmler is not being _explicit_ enough. Himmler requires no
annotation.
>Then, suddenly, enveloping himself in an analysis more
>and more abstract and autistic, Vidal-Naquet believes he has discovered that
>Himmler "codes," and even "supercodes," what he had in his mind.
>Vidal-Naquet deciphers this alleged "code" with supreme speed and ease; he
>decodes on first reading, off the top of his head. He decrees, without the
>least proof, that Sonderbehandlung is a codeword and, in our presence, he
>decodes it instantaneously: That word means "extermination."
How convenient. Faurisson, unhappy at a translation which refutes his
hopeless contention, simply provides us with one more to his liking.
Perhaps this memo from Gestapo headquarters, of June 15, 1944, will
set the record straight:
[Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals -
Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Off., 1949-1953, Vol. IV, p. 1166]
In amending my directive of June 20 1944, I request that those
people subject to special treatment be sent to a crematorium to
be cremated if possible.
If that isn't clear enough, we direct Mr. Faurisson's attention to this
letter, from SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Truehe to Reich security office,
room 2D3A....
[Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression - Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Office,
1946, Vol. I, p. 1001]
A transport of Jews, which has to be treated in a special way,
arrives weekly at the office of the commandant of the Security
Police and the Security Service of white Ruthenia. The three
S-vans which are there are not sufficient for that purpose. I
request assignment of another S-van (five tons). At the same
time I request the shipment of twenty gas hoses for the three
S-vans on hand since the ones on hand are leaky already.
The travel authorization to bring Zyklon-B for "special treatment"
does not mention Jews; neither does it call it Zyklon-B, only material
for special treatment. However, there is no question that it refers
to Zyklon-B, even the deniers admit it. They just claim "special
treatment" here means delousing. Of course, no logical or
connotational explanation is given...
We should also mention that Commandant Ho"ss (Auschwitz) noted that
the firm of Tesch could hardly have misunderstood the use to which
their deadly product was to be put, since they sold him enough to
exterminate two million people. How much Zyklon-B was he talking
about? Between Tesch/Stabenow and Degesch supplied Auschwitz with TWO
AND THREE-QUARTER TONS A MONTH. One might ask one's students just how
many roaches one might exterminate with nearly three tons of cyanide
gas available each and every month... perhaps Mr. Gannon will
enlighten us.
>I willingly concede to him that on page 169 of the German edition
>(_Geheimreden..._), Himmler says this to his audience (6 October 1943):
> We came up against the question: What about the women and
> children? In this case as well I decided on a very clear solution.
> That is, I did not feel justified in exterminating the men -- in other
> words, to kill or allow to be killed -- while allowing the children to
> grow up into avengers against our sons and grandsons. The difficult
> decision had to be made to let this people disappear from the earth.
> (op. cit., p. 169)
He concedes that Himmler told his men to wipe Jews off the earth, man,
woman, and child? And yet he fails to find anything "verifying a
decision to exterminate the Jews"?
Does anyone detect the contradiction here?
>If we end the quotation here, as Vidal-Naquet does, Himmler assumes the
>proportions of a General Turreau intent on killing men, women, and children
>and making of the Vendee (during the French Revolution) a great cemetery.
>However, the continuation is curious and makes clear that Himmler has
>indulged in a bit of braggadocio.
"A bit of braggadocio"?! Insanity!
> Two months after the speech mentioned above, Himmler returned to the
> subject (16 December 1943). Again, it is the partisan war that he is
>talking about, a war carried out as savagely on one side as on the other.
> He says:
> Wherever I was forced to take action in a village against
> partisans and against Jewish commissars -- I'm saying this to this
> circle, as meant exclusively for this circle -- as a basic rule I also
> gave the order to have the women and children of these partisans and
> commissars killed as well. I would be a weakling and a criminal
> against our descendants if I were to allow the hate-filled sons of the
> sub-humans wiped out by us in the struggle between humans and
> sub-humans to grow up. Believe me: It's not easy to give such an
> order, and not as simple to carry out as it is to think through
>[Continued in next message.]
Oh, please do continue. We wouldn't want to miss his interpretation
of the rest of Himmler's speech. I'm anxious to hear he you can
explain away this monster's wiping out women and children so that they
don't grow up into "sub-humans." I'm sure it's all a big
misunderstanding, right? Unfortunately, we must skip over the next
two messages, as Mr. Gannon seems unable to produce more than a few
fragmented parts, scattered hither and yon.
>Subject: "HOLOCAUST EXPERTS" BLASTED TO BITS! [7/18]
>12. Vidal-Naquet spoke, on page 216, about the "demonstration made by
>Faurisson that the _Diary of Anne Frank_ is, if not a 'literary hoax,' at
>least a doctored document." Then comes the following commentary: "On the
>scale of the history of the Nazi genocide, that change removes one comma."
>RESPONSE: Here is what is troubling. The same Faurisson who finds himself
>treated on nearly every page as an inveterate liar and as a complete
>falsifier supposedly has the analytical qualities necessary to detect a
>doctored document...
We are unfamiliar with this work of Vidal-Naquet, and so do not know
whether he was truly deceived by Faurisson's falsifications regarding
the diary, or whether he is here being misquoted by Faurisson. In any
case, the diary's authenticity has been verified by various
unimpeachable sources, including the Government of the Netherlands.
We recommend "The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition" to those
wishing to explore this subject further.
>What Vidal-Naquet calls or lists as the "gas chamber" of
>Crematorium No. 2 was a "Leichenkeller," that is to say, an ordinary morgue;
>half buried to protect it from the heat, in a cul-de-sac, 30 meters by 7
>meters in size, with support pillars in the middle. I know the ventilation
>system in great detail. A morgue has to be disinfected.
Thank you very much for posting this, Mr. Gannon! Dr. Keren has
stated on numerous occasions that Holocaust-deniers used to claim that
the Leichenkeller was a morgue, but we've never seen that claim
actually presented until this moment!
Mr. Faurisson here assumes that his readers are unaware of how
hydrocyanic gas works. This gas, released by Zyklon-B, works only as
quickly as it can be absorbed into the blood through the respiratory
system. On human beings and all warm-blooded creatures, it works
quite well. On lice, not nearly as well (this fact becomes important
for some other Holocaust-denier claims). And for anaerobic organisms,
like bacteria and viri, it works not at all. Zyklon-B is useless for
disinfection. Faurisson knows this. Dan Gannon knows this... and,
yes, even Mark Weber knows this...
...and the Nazis knew this, of course, so naturally they would not use that
particular chemical in a morgue. Faurisson probably knew it, too, but he
never lets the truth get in the way of what he's trying to assert.
We thank Mr. Gannon for this clear demonstration of a lie used by
Holocaust-deniers in the past.
(Please note that Faurisson used the word "disinfect." In later years,
Holocaust-deniers will try to claim that what they meant all along was
"disinfeSt," the killing of insects. Gannon's neatly undercut that claim.
Really, Mr. Gannon, you _must_ stop citing articles from 1982!)
>I personally have a series of documents which prove that part of
>the hair displayed in the National Museum at Auschwitz came in fact from a
>carpet and shag factory located at Kietrz, about 90 kilometers as the crow
>flies from Auschwitz. Traces of hydrocyanic acid were found in them, which
>again was very normal.
Is that so! We'd like to hear how hydrocyanic compounds could be found in
the hair of people who haven't been exposed to hydrocyanic gas.
Unfortunately, Faurisson is loathe to explain.
>Subject: "HOLOCAUST EXPERTS" BLASTED TO BITS! [12/18]
>37. On pages 250-251, we think that Vidal-Naquet is finally going to come
>to the subject itself, that is to say, the homicidal "gas chambers." In
>fact, he talks about one document in German (a commonplace travel order), in
>which we read: "One hundred twenty-five men and 684 women and children have
>been subjected to special treatment (sonderbehandelt wurden)." He asks,
>"Will he dare say that those persons were taken to a rest camp?"
>RESPONSE: I note that Vidal-Naquet does not dare to say that those people
>were gassed. I note that he comes back to "Sonderbehandlung." On the one
>hand, I believe that I have already answered that question; on the other
>hand, I note that in the same convoy 406 men and 190 women were put to work.
>For the men it is specified that the work was in the Buna factories; for the
>women, it is not specified. The other men, women, and children, therefore,
>benefited from special treatment; they did not have to work.
They certainly didn't! Most of them went directly to the gas chambers - of
all the victims, Jewish and otherwise, who passed through Auschwitz, only
405,000 of them were "selected" as "fit to work," registered, and tattooed.
Of those, 65,000 survived. The fate of the million+ who were _not_
registered, or considered fit to work, were simply and brutally
exterminated.
>Subject: "HOLOCAUST EXPERTS" BLASTED TO BITS! [15/18]
>50. On page 281, in note 3, Vidal-Naquet recalls briefly, and as if it went
>without saying, that "special action" was the "code word for gassing."
>RESPONSE: Once again, enough decoding!
Interesting technique, Mr. Faurisson. First you ignore literally tons of
documentary evidence relating to the meaning of "special treatment/action,"
and claim it meant something it clearly did not, and then you carry on your
mocking use of "decoding" as if its mere useage would lend it credence.
>51. In the same passage, Vidal-Naquet writes: "A falsehood that has been
>changed without informing the reader remains of course a falsehood," and he
>remarks that in _Verite..._, on pages 109-110, I defined "special action" as
>being "the sorting out of the sick and healthy," while later on, in my
>_Memoire_, on page 34, "the special action" becomes, in addition, the
>cleaning of the railway cars, either third-class coaches or especially
>freight cars, in which newly detained persons had just arrived."
>RESPONSE: It is sufficient to go back to my text in order to see that the
>accusation by Vidal-Naquet is based on a bad reading. In fact, in
>_Verite..._ on pages 109-110, I defined the sorting out of the sick and the
>well as "ONE of the forms of the doctor's 'special action.'"
[The two "special treatment" quotes again? _Faurisson_ "defined" the
selection process to suit his agenda, and assumed we'd all fall in line?
Phooey!]
>Subject: "HOLOCAUST EXPERTS" BLASTED TO BITS! [16/18]
>One comment by way of conclusion:
> Vidal-Naquet spreads the idea, even in court, that he is convinced that
>I am an anti-Semite.
> I will share a secret with you. When I hear talk about the Jewish
>question, I fall asleep. I understand that such indifference on this matter
>might offend the people who see anti-Semites everywhere, as others see Jews
>everywhere -- but I demand the right to be indifferent on that point and on
>several others.
Dr. Faurisson wrote this? Dr. _Robert_ Faurisson?
He can't be serious. No one who's read anything of his could possibly
be expected to believe that he is not anti-Semitic. And that discussions
of anti-Semitism bore him, that he takes no interest in such things? Ha.
On the contrary, he seems to have a fixation with demonstrating that
Jews are subhuman. For example, in his book _Diary of Anne Frank_,
he writes (pp. 61-63):
>We feel that another forceful reason why the Anne Frank diary cannot be
>entirely dismissed as a fictitious story is its preoccupation with the
>anus and excrements, a trait typical of many Jews. Pornography and
>excretal fantasies have always fascinated many of them and they have
>therefore also been the greatest exploiters of these things. ... Jewish
>writings have been infused with stories about the reproductive and
>excremental functions. ... Although we cannot dismiss the argument that
>these excremental preoccupations are mere fancies on the part of the
>author or authors there are good reasons to believe the stories are
>genuine and are in part reflecting some of the foremost intellectual
>thought of the occupants. Even if they were invented they nevertheless
>splendidly depict the anal complex, of an ancient, cultural people.
>Subject: "HOLOCAUST EXPERTS" BLASTED TO BITS! [18/18]
It is nearly impossible to analyze footnotes without the accompanying text,
but one stands out by virtue of its unbelievable chutzpah:
> (5) Michael May ends his article with the final excerpt from the
> declaration by 34 French historians who, in February 1979,
> published a text protesting against my denial of the
> existence of the gas chambers. He talks about "thirty-four
> of France's leading historians." He fails to mention that
> not one of those historians, except Leon Poliakov, was a
> specialist in the period under consideration; they included
> Egyptologists, Hellenists, specialists in the 16th or the
> 18th centuries, specialists in the study of customs or of
> societies, etc.
It is important to remember that the author, Monsieur Faurisson himself,
does not possess _any_ formal recognization of a history education. He
earned the "Dr." in his title as a professor of _literature_, and was once
described by the New York Times as having "no particular prominence on the
French intellectual or academic scene." (Lipstadt, 16)
Well, we've examined Mr. Gannon's "scorching" response, and have yet
to find anything even close to "warm." Perhaps Mr. Gannon would better
direct his attention to the questions from McVay and Keren, which he's
avoided "scorching" these many months, or to repudiating Adolf Hitler
and the Nazi Party, which he has thus far refused to do, even though
he claims he's "not a Nazi."
We thank Mr. Gannon for his efforts, even if he has failed to publish
his entire series - they have served, once again, to clearly
demonstrate his duplicity, not to mention his contempt for the net.
kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca Ken McVay
dzk@cs.brown.edu Danny Keren
k044477@kzoo.edu Jamie McCarthy
[Followups, something Mr. Gannon appears not to understand, have been
directed to alt.revisionism]
--
/^\__/^\ The Old Frog's Almanac
/ @ @ \ A Salute to That Old Frog Himse'f, Ryugen Fisher
( ) Ladysmith, British Columbia, Canada
\ ~~~~ /
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