Introduction to ÉCRITS RÉVISIONNISTES

"Holocaust denier", "revisionist", "negationist": everyone knows what these words of reprimand mean. Exclusion from civilised humanity. A man fallen prey to such suspicions is finished. His civic life is destroyed, his scientific reputation ruined."

And he went on to add:

"A debate ought to be held on the state of public opinion in a country where to brand a renowned scholar with the dreaded accusation of denial of Auschwitz is enough to destroy him morally, in the space of a second (1)."

Against the law

Of course, debates and controversies about the Shoah - also called the "Holocaust" - remain authorised but only within the confines traced by the official dogma. Controversies or debates which might lead to a challenging of the Shoah story as a whole, or of a part of it, or simply to raise doubt, are forbidden. Let us repeat: in the matter at hand, even doubt is proscribed, and punished.

In France, the idea of such a law, of Israeli inspiration (2), had been formulated for the first time in 1986 by a certain number of historians of Jewish origin, among whom Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Georges Wellers, and François Bédarida, gathered round Chief Rabbi René-Samuel Sirat (3). The law was passed in 1990 on the initiative of former prime minister Laurent Fabius, then a member of the Socialist government, president of the National Assembly, and himself a Jewish militant of the Jewish cause. At the same period (May 1990), a desecration of graves in the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras, in Provence, had given rise to a media exploitation which nullified all inclination on the part of opposition MPs and senators to mount any effective resistance to the bill. In Paris, about two hundred thousand marchers, with a host of Israeli flags borne high, demonstrated against "the resurgence of the horrid beast". Notre Dame's great bell tolled as for a particularly tragic or significant event in the history of France. Once the law had been put on the statute books (appearing in the Journal officiel on the 14th of July, the national holiday: in the same issue, incidentally, as P. Vidal-Naquet's nomination to the Order of the Légion d'honneur), the Carpentras outrage was mentioned only, if at all, with a certain distance, as a mere reminder. Only the "Fabius-Gayssot" Act remained.

Under pressure from national and international Jewish organisations, other countries have since adopted, each in its turn, laws forbidding all questioning of the Shoah, after the Israeli and French examples. Such has been the case for Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and Lithuania. Still other Western countries (particularly Canada and the United Kingdom) have promised the Jewish organisations, more or less expressly, that they will follow suit. But, in reality, such a law, of specific nature, is not indispensable for the hunting down of historical revisionism. In France, as elsewhere, the practice has often been to prosecute questioners of the Shoah under other laws; according to the needs of a given case, recourse is had to laws on racism or antisemitism, the defamation of living persons, insulting the memory of the dead, attempting to justify crimes, spreading false news, and - a source of cash indemnities for the plaintiffs - personal injury.

In France, the police and the judiciary rigorously ensure the protection thus accorded to an official version of second world war history. According to this rabbinical version, the major event of the conflict was the Shoah, in other words the physical extermination of the Jews which the Germans are said to have carried out from 1941-1942 to 1944-1945 (lacking any document with which to assign a precise time span to the event - and for good reason, as it is a matter of fiction - the official historians propose only dates which are as divergent as they are approximate).

Particular nature of this book: a revisionist chronicle

From 1974 to this day, I have had to fight so many legal battles that I have been unable to find time enough to compose the specific summing-up which one is entitled to expect from a professor who, over so many years, has devoted his efforts to one point, and one point alone, of the history of the second world war: the "Holocaust" or the Shoah.

Year after year, an avalanche of trials, entailing the gravest consequences, has thwarted my plans to publish such a work. Apart from my own cases, I have had to consecrate a good part of my time to the defence, before their respective courts, of other revisionists in France and abroad.  Still today, as I write this introduction, two cases are being brought against me (one in the Netherlands, the other in France) while I must intervene, directly or indirectly, in proceedings pending against revisionists living in Switzerland, Canada, and Australia respectively. For want of time, I have had to refuse my aid to others, notably two Japanese revisionists.

Throughout the world, our adversaries' tactic is the same: go to court in order to paralyse revisionists' research work, if not to have them sentenced to prison terms or ordered to pay fines or damages. For those convicted, imprisonment will mean a halt to all revisionist activity, whereas those ordered to pay large sums will be compelled to set off on a feverish pursuit of money, goaded by the threats of bailiffs, "writs of seizure", "notices to third parties", and the freezing of bank accounts.  From this simple point of view, my life over the past quarter of a century has been difficult; it still is and, in all probability, will remain so.

Let us add that, to make matters worse, my conception of research has never been that of the "paper" professor or historian. I consider it indispensable to see the terrain for myself: either the terrain of the material investigation or the terrain where the adversary is assembled. I should not be entitled to talk about the camps of Dachau, Majdanek, Auschwitz, or Treblinka without first having visited them in order to examine the buildings and the people there. I should not listen to accounts of antirevisionist actions (demonstrations, conferences, symposia, trials) without having attended them, or else delegated and instructed an observer for the mission, a practice which is not without risk but which enables one to get information from a good source. I have friends and associates produce countless letters and statements. I run to the battlements at every occasion. To cite but one example, I believe that I may rightly say that, if the impressive international "Holocaust" conference organised in Oxford in 1988 by the late billionaire Robert Maxwell (also known as "Bob the Liar") aborted so pitifully, on the admission of its very instigator (4), it was thanks to an operation which I personally led on the spot with the help of a female French revisionist who lacked neither courage, nor daring, nor ingenuity: her action alone was certainly worth several books. But will the producers of books galore understand what I say there?  To the hours and days thus spent preparing either court cases or those various sporadic actions should be added the hours and days lost in hospital, recovering from the effects of an exhausting struggle or from the consequences of physical attacks carried out by Jewish militia groups (in France armed militias are strictly prohibited, except for the Jewish community).

Finally, I have had to stimulate, direct, or coordinate, in France and abroad, numerous activities or works of a revisionist nature, brace those whose strength has faltered, provide for the continuance of action, answer requests, warn against provocations, errors, driftings off course, and above all combat ill-conceived accommodations since, for some revisionists, the temptation is great, in such a struggle, to seek a compromise with the adversary and, sometimes, even to back down. Examples of war-weary revisionists who have sunk to public contrition are, sad to say, not wanting. I shall not cast the first stone at them. I know from experience that discouragement is liable to befall each of us because the contest is so uneven: our means are laughable; those of our opponents, boundless.

Making a virtue of necessity, the present collection is thus a mere selection of notes, articles, essays, prefaces, interviews, and critiques which I drafted between 1974 and 1998 and which are shown here in chronological order of writing or publication. The reader will perhaps get the impression of a disparate whole, tarnished by a good deal of repetition. I beg his forbearance. At least this very diversity will enable him to follow the revisionist adventure day by day in its vicissitudes. As for the repetition, I take some comfort in thinking that, after all, I have perhaps not repeated myself enough, for there persist today so many misconceptions as to the exact nature of revisionism.

Historical revisionism

It demands, for all research, a return to the starting point, an examination followed by re-examination, rereading and rewriting, evaluation followed by revaluation, reorientation, revision, recasting; it is, in spirit, the contrary of ideology. It does not deny but aims to affirm with more exactitude. Revisionists are not "deniers" or "negationists" (the latter word, being the neologism adopted by revisionism's adversaries in France, has yet to pass into English dictionaries); they endeavour to seek and to find things where, it seemed, there was nothing more to seek or find.

Revisionism can be carried out in a hundred activities of every-day life and in a hundred fields of historical, scientific, or literary research. It does not necessarily call established ideas into question but often leads to qualifying them somewhat. It seeks to untangle the true from the false. History is, in essence, revisionistic; ideology is its enemy. Since ideology is never so strong as in time of war or conflict, and since it then churns out falsehood in abundance for propaganda needs, the historian working in that area will be well advised to redouble his vigilance: probing deep into the "truths" of which he has been reminded so often, he will doubtless realise that, when a war has led to tens of millions of deaths, the first victim of all will have been the ascertainable truth: a truth which must be sought out and re-established.

The official history of the Second World War comprises a bit of truth mixed in with a great deal of falsehood.

Its successive retractions in the face of revisionist advances

•    It is accurate to say that National-Socialist Germany built concentration camps; it did so after - and at the same time as - a good number of other countries, all of which were convinced that their camps would be more humane than prison. Hitler saw in them what Napoléon III had thought he saw in the creation of penal colonies: progress for Man. But it is false to hold that she ever created "extermination camps" (an expression fashioned by the Allies).
•    It is accurate to say  that the Germans manufactured gas-powered vans (Gaswagen). But it is false to say that they ever built homicidal gas vans (if a single one of such things had ever existed, it would be on display at the Automobile museum or at one of the various "Holocaust" museums, if only in the form of a sketch of scientific value).
•    It is accurate to say that the Germans employed Zyklon (made from a base of hydrocyanic acid and in use since 1922) to safeguard the health, by disinfection, of large numbers of civilians, troops, prisoners, and internees. But they never used Zyklon in order to kill anyone, let alone to put to death throngs of human beings at once; because of the draconian precautions for the use of hydrogen cyanide gas, the gassing of inmates as it is alleged to have been done at Auschwitz and at other camps would, besides, have been fundamentally impossible. I explain this point at length in the body of the present work.
•    It is accurate to say that the Germans envisaged a "final solution of the Jewish question" (Endlösung der Judenfrage). But the solution was a territorial one (territoriale Endlösung der Judenfrage) and not a murderous one; it was a project to induce or, if necessary, to force the Jews to leave Germany and its European sphere of influence, thereafter to establish, in accord with the Zionists, a Jewish national home, in Madagascar or elsewhere. Many Zionists collaborated with National-Socialist Germany with a view towards such a solution.
•    It is accurate to say that a gathering of German officials was held at a villa in Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin, on 20 January 1942, to discuss the Jewish question. But the subject of their discussions was the forced emigration or deportation of the Jews, as well as the future creation of a specific Jewish territorial entity, not a programme of physical extermination.
•    It is accurate to say that some German concentration camps had crematoria with which to incinerate corpses.  But  their purpose was to combat epidemics, not to incinerate, as some have dared assert, living beings along with corpses (5).
•    It is accurate to say that many Jews experienced the hardships of war, of internment, deportation, the detention camps, the concentration camps, the forced labour camps, the ghettos; that there were, for various reasons, summary executions of Jews, that they were the object of reprisals and even massacres, for there are no wars without massacres. But it is equally true that all of these sufferings were also the lot of many other nations or communities during the war and, in particular, of the Germans and their Allies (the hardships of the ghetto aside, for the ghetto is first and foremost a specific creation of the Jews themselves (6)); it is above all most plausible, for whoever is not afflicted with a hemiplegic memory and who seeks to acquaint himself with both sides of Second World War history (the side which is always shown and the side almost always hidden), that the hardships of the vanquished during the war and afterwards were, in number and in nature, greater than those of the Jews and the victors, especially as concerns deportations.
•    It is false that there ever existed, as some have long dared state, any order whatever, given by Hitler or any of his associates, to exterminate the Jews. During the war, German soldiers and officers were convicted by their own courts martial, and sometimes shot, for having killed Jews.
•    It is a good thing that the exterminationists (that is, those who believe in the extermination of the Jews) have ended up growing weary to the point where they acknowledge that no trace of any plan, instruction, or document relating to a policy of physical extermination of the Jews has ever been found and that, by the same token, they have at last admitted that no trace of any budget for such an undertaking, or of a body responsible for running such a project, has been found either.
•     It is a good thing that the exterminationists have at last conceded to the revisionists that the judges at the Nuremberg trial (1945-1946) accepted as true certain pure inventions, such as the story of soap produced from Jewish fat, that of the lampshades made of human skin, that of the "shrunken heads", and that of the gassings at Dachau; and it is an especially good thing that the exterminationists have finally recognised that the most spectacular, the most terrifying, the most significant part of that trial (i.e. the session of 15 April 1946 in the course of which a former commandant of the Auschwitz camp, Rudolf Höss, was seen and heard to confess openly that, in his camp, millions of Jews had been gassed), was merely the fruit of the tortures inflicted on him. That confession, presented for so many years and in so many historical works as the No. 1 "proof" of the genocide of the Jews, is now consigned to oblivion, at least as far as historians are concerned.
•     It is fortunate that the exterminationist historians have finally acknowledged that the famous testimony of SS officer Kurt Gerstein, an element essential to their arguments, is devoid of value; it is loathsome that the French University revoked the revisionist Henri Roque's doctorate, earned for having demonstrated that fact in 1985.
•    It is pitiful that Raul Hilberg, the pope of exterminationism, ventured to write, in the first edition of his  The Destruction of the European Jews (1961) that there had been two orders from Hitler to exterminate the Jews, then to declare later, as of 1983, that the extermination had come about of its own, without any order or plan but by way of "an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading" on the part of the far flung German bureaucracy. So it was that R. Hilberg replaced a gratuitous assertion with a magical explanation: telepathy.
•     It is a good thing that the exterminationists have finally (or very nearly) come to abandon, in practice, the charge, based on "testimonies", according to which there existed execution gas chambers at the camps of Ravensbrück, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Hartheim, Struthof-Natzweiler, Stutthof-Danzig, Bergen-Belsen
•     It is a good thing that the most visited gas chamber in the world - that of Auschwitz-I - has at last (in January 1995) been recognised for what it is, that is to say, a fabrication.
•    It is fortunate that it has at last been admitted that "EVERYTHING IN IT IS FALSE", and I personally delight in knowing that a historian of the official Establishment has been able to write: "In the late 1970s, Robert Faurisson exploited these falsifications all the better as the [Auschwitz] museum administration balked at acknowledging them (7)". I delight all the more as the French courts, in their iniquity, had convicted me for basically saying just that.
•    It is a good thing that, in the same article, the same historian has revealed that such an eminent figure in the Jewish world as Théo Klein sees in that "gas chamber" only a "trick" ("artifice").
•    It is also a good thing that, in the same article, the same historian has revealed, first, that the Auschwitz museum authorities are conscious of having deceived millions of visitors (five hundred thousand per year in the early nineties), and second, that they will nevertheless continue to deceive their visitors in future for, as the museum's assistant director put it: "[Telling the truth about this 'gas chamber'] is too complicated. Well see to it later on (8)".
•    It is fortunate that in 1996 two historians of Jewish origin, the Canadian Robert Jan van Pelt and the American Debórah Dwork, finally denounced some of the enormous fakeries of the Auschwitz camp-museum and the cynicism with which visitors were being duped there (9).
•    It is, on the other hand, unconscionable that UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation) should maintain its patronage (as it has done since 1979) of a site such as Auschwitz, whose centre harbours, in its fake "gas chamber" (to say nothing of other enormous falsifications) an imposture now avowed as such; UNESCO (based in Paris and headed by Federico Mayor) has no right to use the membership dues of  constituent countries in order to endorse a vast swindle so incompatible with the interests of "education", "science", and "culture".
•    It is fortunate that Jean-Claude Pressac, after having been praised to the skies, has fallen into discredit. Propelled by the Klarsfeld couple, this pharmacist thought it wise to seek out a half-way position between those who believed in the gas chambers and those who did not. For him, in a sense, the woman being examined was neither pregnant nor unpregnant but half-pregnant and even, with time, less and less pregnant. An author of writings which were supposed to be on the Nazi gas chambers but in which not one comprehensive photograph or drawing of a single one of those chemical slaughterhouses was to be found, that pitiful scribbler would, on 9 May 1995 in the XVIIth chamber of the Paris correctional court, go on to give a demonstration of his total inability to reply to the presiding judge's questions as to what, concretely, one such mass-murder machine might actually have been. Three years later, he has been reduced to writing: "Thus, according to the statements of former members of the Sonderkommando, it is reckoned with firm certainty that a film on homicidal gassings was shot by the SS at Birkenau. Why should it not be found by chance [at some future date] in the attic or cellar of a former SS man?" (10)
•    It_is_fortunate that "the gas chamber" in ruins, constituting a part of Krematorium II of Birkenau (Auschwitz-II), can above all serve to show "in vivo" and "de visu" that there never was a "Holocaust", either in this camp or in any other. In effect, according both to a German defendant's statements under examination and the aerial photographs "retouched" by the Allies, the roof of this gas chamber would seem to have had four special openings (about ten inches square, it was specified), for the pouring in of the Zyklon. But, as anyone at the site may notice, none of those four openings ever existed. Auschwitz being the capital of the "Holocaust", and this ruined crematorium being at the core of the extermination process of the Jews at Auschwitz, I was able to say, in 1994 (and the turn of phrase seems to have made some progress in people's minds): "No holes, no 'Holocaust'."
•    It  is equally fortunate that a plethora of "testimonies", according to which those gassings had happened, have thus ended up being invalidated and it is, by the same token, extremely deplorable that so many Germans, tried by their victorious opponents, were convicted and some of them, even put to death for crimes which they could not have committed.
•    It is a good thing that, in the light of trials resembling so many judicial masquerades, the exterminationists themselves voice doubts as to the validity of many testimonies; these testimonies' defective nature would appear yet more clearly if the trouble were ever taken to order a legal inspection of the supposed weapon of the supposed crime. But, in the course of a thousand trials concerning Auschwitz or other camps, no court has ordered any such inquiry (the lone exception, very little known, being that carried out at Struthof-Natzweiler in Alsace, the results of which were kept hidden until I myself revealed them). It was nonetheless known that a good number of testimonies or confessions needed to be verified and measured up against the material facts and that, in the absence of those two conditions, they were worthless as evidence.
•    It is fortunate that the official history has revised downwards - often in considerable proportions - the supposed number of victims. It took more than forty years of revisionist pressure for the Jewish authorities and those of the Auschwitz museum to remove the nineteen plaques which, in nineteen different languages, announced that the number of victims there had been four million. It then took five years of internal bickering for agreement to be reached on the new figure of one and a half million, a figure which, in turn, was very quickly challenged by exterminationist authors; J.-C. Pressac, S. Klarsfeld's protégé, now proposes, for his part, no greater a number than 600,000 to 800,000 Jewish and non-Jewish victims over the whole period of the Auschwitz complex's existence. It is a pity that this quest for the true figure is not followed through to attain the likely figure of 150,000 persons, victims, mainly, of epidemics in the nearly forty camps there. It is deplorable that, in the schools of France, the film Nuit et Brouillard ("Night and Mist") in which the Auschwitz death toll is put at nine million, continues to be projected; in that film are perpetuated the myths of the "soap made from the bodies", the lampshades of human skin, and the streaks traced by victims' fingernails in the concrete walls of the gas chambers; it proclaims that "nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary barracks"!
•    It was a good thing that in 1988 Arno Mayer, a Princeton University professor of Jewish origin, should suddenly write: "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable"; but why should one for so long have affirmed that the sources were countless and trustworthy, and why should one have poured scorn on the revisionists who from 1950 had written what Arno Mayer discovered in 1988?
•    It was a particularly good thing that in 1996 the French historian Jacques Baynac, who had made a speciality, in Le Monde and elsewhere, of labelling the revisionists as forgers, should finally acknowledge that there was, in the end, no evidence of the gas chambers' existence. It was, he made clear, "as painful to say as it is to hear" (11). Perhaps, in certain circumstances, the truth is, for certain persons, "as painful to say as it is to hear" but, for the revisionists, the truth is as pleasant to say as it is to hear.
•    Lastly, it is fortunate that the exterminationists have allowed themselves to undermine the third and last element of the Shoah trinity: the figure of six million Jewish deaths. It seems that this number was first put forth (12) by Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel (1903-1956); established in Slovakia, this rabbi was the main contriver of the Auschwitz lie based on the alleged testimonies of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler; he organised intensive "information campaigns" aimed at the Allies, Switzerland, and the Vatican. In a letter of 31 May 1944 (i.e. nearly a full year before the war's end in Europe, he did not shrink from writing: "Till now six times a million Jews from Europe and Russia have been destroyed (13)."

• first, the enormous body of documentation gathered by the International Tracing Service (ITS) of Arolsen-Waldeck, Germany, which is answerable to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Switzerland; access to this centre is jealously guarded by a panel of ten states, one of which is Israel;
• second, documents in the possession of Poland and Russia and of which only a part has been made accessible: death registries of certain camps, cremation registries, etc.;
• finally, the names of millions of Jewish survivors who have received or are still receiving financial indemnities or reparations, either in Israel or in dozens of countries represented by the World Jewish Congress in New York. The mere enumeration of these names would serve to show the extent to which a community so often said to have been "exterminated" was not at all exterminated.

To sum up, in spite of the dogma and the laws, the pursuit of the historical truth about the second world war in general and about the Shoah in particular has made headway in recent years, but the general public is kept in the dark about this; it would be stunned to learn that many of its firmest beliefs had, from the early nineteen-eighties onwards, been relegated by the most orthodox historians to the rank of popular legend. It could, from this point of view, be said that there existed two structures of the "Holocaust" idea: on the one hand, that of the public at large and, on the other hand, that of the conventional historians; the first would seem to be unshakeable, the second threatened with imminent collapse, to judge by the number of hasty repairs being made to it.

The yieldings to the revisionists on the part of the orthodox historians have, year after year - and especially since 1979 -  been so numerous and of such quality that the latter today find themselves at a dead end. They no longer have anything of substance to say on the very subject of the "Holocaust". They have handed the baton to the film-makers, novelists, and theatre people. Even the museographers are at a loss. At Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum the "decision" has been taken not to offer "any physical representation of the gas chambers" to public view (according to the statement which the museum's scientific director, Michael Berenbaum, made before me and four witnesses in August 1994; he is the author of a guidebook of more than 200 pages in which, in effect, no physical representation of the gas chambers appears, not even one of the miserable and fallacious mock-up displayed for visitors to his museum (16)). The public there are forbidden to take photographs. Claude Lanzmann, maker of Shoah, a film remarkable for its utter lack of historical or scientific content, today no longer has any recourse but to pontificate in deploring the fact that "the revisionists occupy the whole terrain" (17). As for Elie Wiesel, he calls on all to show discretion; he requests that we no longer try to see at close quarters or to imagine what, according to him, happened in the gas chambers: "Let the gas chambers remain closed to prying eyes, and to imagination" (18). The "Holocaust" historians have turned into theoreticians, philosophers, "thinkers". The squabbles among them, between "intentionalists" and "functionalists", or between supporters and adversaries of a thesis such as Daniel Goldhagen's on the near-innate propensity of Germans to descend into antisemitism and racist crime ought not to conceal from view the indigence of their specifically historical work.

Revisionism's successes and failures

In the 1980s and at the beginning of the 90s, antirevisionist authors had attempted to cross swords with the revisionists on the terrain of historical science. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Nadine Fresco, Georges Wellers, Adalbert Rückerl, Hermann Langbein, Eugen Kogon, Arno Mayer, Serge Klarsfeld, each in turn tried to have the media believe that answers to the revisionists' material or documentary arguments had been found. Even Michael Berenbaum, even the Holocaust Memorial Museum, in 1993 and in early 1994, wanted to pick up the gauntlet which I had thrown down and try to show just a single Nazi gas chamber, just a single proof - of their own choosing - that there had been a genocide of the Jews. But their failures were so stinging that thereafter they had progressively to abandon the fight on that turf. Quite recently, in 1998, M. Berenbaum has indeed published (with Abraham J. Peck) a fat book entitled The Holocaust and History (19) but in it, precisely, far from studying what he calls the "Holocaust" on the historical level (A. Mayer's express purpose in his 1988 work) he instead unintentionally shows us that  the "Holocaust" is one thing and "History" quite another. The work, moreover, is quasi-immaterial, presenting neither photographs, nor drawings, nor the least attempt to represent physically any reality whatever. Only the dust jacket offers a view of a heap of shoes. These are reputed to possess a certain graphic eloquence, as at the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum where they tell us, supposedly: "We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses." The book is merely a compilation of fifty-five contributions written and published under the watchful eye of Rabbi Berenbaum: in it even Raul Hilberg, even Yehuda Bauer, even Franciszek Piper abandon the idea of any real effort at scientific research, and the anathema is pronounced against Arno Mayer  who, in the recent past, has tried to put the "Holocaust" back into the realm of history (20). The irrational has won out in the face of attempts at rationalisation. E. Wiesel, C. Lanzmann, Steven Spielberg (with a film, Schindler's List, inspired by a novel), have in the end triumphed over those in their own camp who used to try to prove the "Holocaust".

In future years hindsight will let it be observed that it was in September 1996 that the death knell sounded for the hopes of those who had wanted to combat revisionism on historical and scientific grounds. The two long articles then put out by the antirevisionist historian J. Baynac in a Swiss daily definitively closed the chapter of attempts at a rational response to the revisionists' arguments (21).

In the mid- and late 1970s, I offered my own contribution to the development of revisionism; I discovered and formulated what has since come to be known as the physical and chemical argument, that is, the physical and chemical reasons why the alleged Nazi gas chambers were quite simply inconceivable. At the time, I commended myself for having brought forth into the world a decisive argument which, until then, had never been expounded either by a German chemist (Germany is not short of chemists) or an American engineer (the United States has engineers who, given the forbidding complexities involved in the making of an American penitentiary's gas chamber, ought to have realised that the alleged Nazi gas chambers were, because of certain physical and chemical realities, impossible to produce). If, at that period, amidst the fracas prompted by my discovery, a clairvoyant had predicted that, twenty years on, in about 1994 or 1996, my adversaries, after many attempts to show that I was wrong, would, as J. Baynac has done, resign themselves to acknowledging that, in the end, there existed not the least evidence with which to prove the reality of a single Nazi gas chamber, I should surely have rejoiced. And I should perhaps have concluded that the myth of the "Holocaust" could never survive such a direct hit, that the media would then quit the employ of the Great Lie and that, quite naturally, the antirevisionist repression would disintegrate all by itself.

In so reckoning I should have committed an error both of diagnosis and of prognosis. For superstitious belief lives of another spirit than that of science. It makes its own way in the world. The province of religion, of ideology, of illusion, of the media, and of fictional cinema can evolve at a certain remove from scientific realities. Even Voltaire never succeeded in "crushing the vile foe". It might thus be said that, like Voltaire denouncing the absurdities of the Hebraic tales, the revisionists are doomed, despite their work's scientific nature, never to carry the day against the wild imaginings of the Synagogue, while the Synagogue, for its part, will never succeed in stifling the voices of the revisionists. The "Holocaust" and "Shoah-Business" propaganda will continue to flourish. Today it remains for the revisionists to show how this belief, this myth came to be born, to grow, and to flourish before, perhaps, disappearing to make way, one day, not for reason but for other beliefs and other myths.

How are men deceived, and why do they deceive themselves so readily?

"Holocaust" propaganda: showing the dead and telling of killed, showing crematoria and telling of gas chambers

We were led to take the dead for killed and crematoria for mass-execution gas chambers.

One might feel inclined to add: "and a sow's ear for a silk purse".

Thus was born the confusion, still so widespread today, between, on the one hand, the crematoria, which actually existed (but not at Bergen-Belsen) for the incineration of corpses and, on the other hand, the Nazi gas chambers which allegedly served to kill whole crowds of men and women but which, in reality, never existed nor could have existed.

The myth of the Nazi gas chambers and their association with the crematoria originated, in its media form, in the press pictures of and comments on a camp - that of Bergen-Belsen - which, by the very admission of the orthodox historians, possessed neither mass-execution gas chambers nor even simple crematoria.

"Gas chambers" which have never been seen, never been shown

The next day, the journalists' reports on the conference indeed appeared but they passed over in silence its essential object: precisely that challenge. They had looked for photographs and had found none.

Billions of people over this past half-century assume (or imagine) that they have seen Nazi gas chambers in books or in  documentary films. Many are convinced of having, at least once in their lives, come across the photograph of such a gas chamber. Some have visited Auschwitz or other camps where the guides have announced to them that a given structure was  a gas chamber. They have been told that they have before their eyes, as the case may be, a gas chamber "in its original state" or "a reconstruction" (this latter expression implying that said reconstruction is faithful, that it conforms to the original). Sometimes, they are led to view remains said to be "ruins of a gas chamber" (23). Yet, in all such cases, they have been deceived or, better, have deceived themselves. This phenomenon is easily explained. Too many people imagine that a gas chamber amounts to a mere room with gas inside: this reveals confusion between an execution gassing and a suicidal or accidental one. An execution gassing, such as those carried out in some United States prisons for the killing of one man, is necessarily a highly complicated task for, in this case, care must be taken to kill only the condemned without causing an accident, and without putting one's own life, or that of one's associates, in danger, especially in the final phase, that is, at the moment when the room must be entered in order to handle a contaminated corpse and remove it. Of this, the greater part of museum visitors, as well as most readers, film-goers, and even most historians are obviously unaware. Those in charge of the museums, for their part, take advantage of this general unawareness. For a successful Nazi gas chamber exhibit, they need only display to the good public's gaze a space of gloomy aspect, a morgue's cold room, a shower-room (preferably located below ground), an air-raid shelter (with a peephole in its door), and the trick will work. The tricksters can manage with less: it suffices to show a mere door, wall, or roof of a purported  "gas chamber". The wisest ones will get by with still less: they will show a bundle of hair, a mound of shoes, a pile of eyeglasses and claim that these are the only traces or remains to have been found of the "gassed"; naturally, they will avoid pointing out that, during the war and the blockade, in a Europe fallen prey to general shortages and penury, vast "recovery" and "recycling" schemes were set up to reclaim all convertible materials, including hair, which was used, for example, in textiles.

The "holocaust" witnesses: unverified testimonies

For the camp of Auschwitz alone, a considerable list may be made of former Jewish inmates who have borne witness in public, orally or in writing, on television, in books, in the law courts. Among the best known I shall mention:

Odette Abadie, Louise Alcan, Esther Alicigüzel, Jehuda Bacon, Charles Baron, Bruno Baum, Charles-Sigismond Bendel, Paul Bendel, Maurice Benroubi, Henri Bily, Ada Bimko, Suzanne Birnbaum, Eva Brewster, Henry Bulawko, Robert Clary, Jehiel Dinour alias K. Tzetnik, Szlama Dragan, Fania Fénelon, Arnold Friedman, Philip Friedman, Michel Gelber, Israël Gutman, Dr Hafner, Henry Heller, Benny Hochman, Régine Jacubert, Wanda Jakubowska, Stanislas Jankowski alias Alter Fajnzylberg, Simone Kadouch-Lagrange, Raya Kagan, Rudolf Kauer, Marc Klein, Ruth Klüger, Guy Kohen, Erich Kulka, Simon Laks, Hermann Langbein, Leo Laufer, Sonia Letwinska, Renée Louria, Henryk Mandelbaum, Françoise Maous, Mel Mermelstein, Ernest Morgan, Filip Müller, Flora Neumann, Anna Novac, Myklos Nyiszli, David Olère, Dounia Ourisson, Dov Paisikovic, Gisella Perl, Samuel Pisar, Macha Ravine-Speter, Jérôme Scorin, Georges Snyders, Henri Sonnenbluck, Jacques Stroumsa, David Szmulewski, Henri Tajchner, Henryk Tauber, Sima Vaïsman, Simone Veil née Jacob,  Rudolf Vrba, Robert Weil,  Georges Wellers

I shall also mention the resounding case of one late arrival, the clarinettist Binjamin Wilkomirski. It is not very clear why, but this false witness was publicly exposed after a three-year spell of glory which had seen him honoured with the US National Jewish Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain, the Mémoire de la Shoah prize in France, and an impressive series of dithyrambic articles in the press world-wide. His purported autobiography of a child deported to Majdanek and to Auschwitz (?) had been released by Suhrkampf in 1995 under the title: Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kinderheit, 1939 bis 1948 (in English, Fragments: memories of a wartime childhood (24)). At the end of his investigation, Jewish author Daniel Ganzfried revealed that Binjamin Wilkomirski, alias Bruno Doessekker, born Bruno Grosjean, had indeed had some experience of Auschwitz and Majdanek but only after the war, as a tourist (25). In 1995 the Australian Donald Watt had himself deceived the great English language media with his alleged testimony telling of life as a "stoker" in crematoria II and III at Auschwitz-Birkenau (26). Between September and November 1998, there was organised in Germany and France a vast media operation around the sudden "revelations" of Dr Hans-Wilhelm Münch, one-time SS physician at Auschwitz. The vein is decidedly bountiful..

Primo Levi, for his part, tends still today to be presented to us as a reliable witness. It will be seen further on in this work that his reputation as such was perhaps deserved in 1947, with the publication of his book Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man). Unhappily, P. Levi conducted himself somewhat unworthily afterwards. E. Wiesel remains the undisputed "star false witness" of the "Holocaust". In his autobiographical account Night he does not mention the "gas chambers"; for him, the Germans threw the Jews into blazing pits; as late as 2 June 1987, at the Klaus Barbie trial in Lyon, he testified under oath that he had "seen, in a little wood, somewhere in [Auschwitz] Birkenau, SS men throwing live children into the flames". In the present work, it will be remarked how the translator and editor of the German version of Night resuscitated the "gas chambers" in  E. Wiesel's account of Auschwitz. In France, Fred Sedel would in 1990 proceed in like manner whilst re-editing a book which had appeared in 1963, putting "chambres à gaz" where, twenty-seven years earlier, he had mentioned only "fours crématoires" (27).

In the same boat of "pious lies" may be put the testimonies of some non-Jews, in particular that of General André Rogerie who, strengthened by the support which Georges Wellers lent him, introduced himself in 1988 as a "Holocaust witness" who had "beheld the Shoah at Birkenau" (28) whereas, in the original 1946 edition of his memoirs Vivre, c'est vaincre he had written  only of having heard talk of "gas chambers" (29). In the very camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau our hero's lot was a privileged one. He lodged in the "bosses' " (30) barracks and enjoyed a "royally cushy position" of which he "has fond remembrances" (31). He ate pancakes with jam and played bridge (32). Of course, he wrote, "not only merry events take place [in the camp]" (33) but, on leaving Birkenau, he had this thought: "Unlike many others, I have been better off here than anywhere else (34)."

Samuel Gringauz had got through the war in the ghetto of Kaunas, Lithuania. In 1950, that is, at a time when it was still possible to speak somewhat freely on the subject, he was to make an appraisal of the literature thus far produced by the survivors of the "great Jewish catastrophe". In it he deplored the trespasses to which their "hyperhistorical complex" was then giving rise, writing:

The hyperhistorical complex may be described as judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric. It concentrates historical relevance on Jewish problems of local events under the aspect of personal experience. This is the reason why most of the memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilletante [sic] philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks and apologies (35).

One can only assent to this judgement, dating from 1950, which could be perfectly applied today to a Claude Lanzmann or an Elie Wiesel. For the latter's "hyperhistorical complex", for the "judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric" character of his writings, one may refer to his two recent autobiographical volumes published under the title Tous les fleuves vont à la mer, Mémoires 1 et 2 (All Rivers Run to the Sea). In so doing, one may also realise that, far from having been exterminated, the Rumano-Hungarian Jewish community of the little town of Sighet in all likelihood survived its deportation, notably to Auschwitz in May and June of 1944, in great numbers. Himself a native of Sighet, E. Wiesel endured the fate of his fellow townsmen. After the war, he journeyed to various places in the world where, thanks to a succession of "miracles", he would come upon an amazing number of relatives, friends, old acquaintances, and others from Sighet who had survived Auschwitz or the "Holocaust".
 
 

Notes