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4. JHR Volume 8

The Myth of the Extermination of the Jews: Part II

CARLO MATTOGNO

1. Birth and Development of Revisionism

National Socialist policy in the matter of Jewish emigration, pursued officially until the beginning of February 1942, thus posed a question that really was “throbbing,” to use again the adjective employed by Poliakov.

If it was true that exterminating the Jews “conformed to the fundamental objective of National Socialism” [1]; if it was true that it was not “the coming to a head of an unforeseeable explosion of violence, or of a betrayal of trust by subordinates, but the fruit of an ideology of death and of an organic design” [2]; if it was true that “according to Hitler, among the ends that had to be achieved thanks to the war, the general extermination of the Jews had a very important place, to the realization of which the German government would devote a large part of its forces,” [3] for what mysterious reason did Adolf Hitler deprive himself of at least a million victims by allowing them to emigrate?

It was thus inevitable that so atrocious an accusation, based essentially on “third and fourth hand accounts,” on “the game of psychological deductions,” knowing that “all these could offer was fragile and speculative,” and on “fragmentary and sometimes hypothetical answers,” be placed in doubt.

In the immediate post-war period and in the following years severe criticisms were formulated in regard to the trials of those who were called “Nazi war criminals” — in particular, the Nuremberg trials [4] — and concerning the behavior of the Allies during the war. [5]

The first to raise doubt about the reality of the “extermination” of the Jews was the Frenchman, Paul Rassinier, [6] who is justly considered to be the precursor of present-day Revisionism. His work was taken up and carried on by other researchers who have produced a rich Revisionist literature, the most important works of which are

• Auschwitz ou le grand alibi (Auschwitz or the Great Alibi), Le Prolétaire, bimonthly of the Communist Party International, 1960.
• Geschichte der Verfehmung Deutschlands (History of the Outlawing of Germany) by Franz Scheidl, Vienna, published by the author, 1967.
• The Myth of the Six Million, Anonymous, The Noontide Press, Costa Mesa, California 1969.
• The Big Lie: Six Million Murdered Jews, by The Historical Research Unity, Fyshwick ACT Unity Printers and Publishers, 1970.
• Die Auschwitz-Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie), by Thies Christophersen, Kritik-Verlag, Mohrkirch, West Germany, 1973.
• The Six Million Swindle, by Austin J. App, Boniface Press, Takoma Park, Maryland, 1973.
• Hexen Ein-Mal-Eins einer Lüge (Witches' Multiplication Table of a Lie), by Emil Aretz, Verlag Hohe Warte — Franz von Bebenburg, 1973.
• Did Six Million Really Die?, by Richard Harwood, Historical Review Press, Brighton, Sussex, England, 1974.
• The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Arthur R. Butz, The Noontide Press, Costa Mesa, California, 1977.
• Robert Faurisson wrote his article “The Problem of the Gas Chambers” (Défense de Occident, No. 158, June 1978) and in Le Monde (29 December 1978) published “The Problem of the Gas Chambers, or the Rumor of Auschwitz,” followed by a text, making use of the right to reply, 16 January 1979.
• The excellent study Der Auschwitz Mythos: Legende oder Wirklichkeit? (The Auschwitz Myth: Legend or Reality?), by Wilhelm Stäglich, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, California, 1986.
• The Six Million Reconsidered, by the Committee for Truth in History, The Noontide Press, Costa Mesa, California, 1977.
• El Mito de los 6 Millones: El Fraude de los Judios Asesinados por Hitler (The Myth of the Six Million: The Fraud of the Jews Murdered by Hitler), by J. Bochaca, Ediciones BAU, S.P. Barcelona, 1974.
• Anne Frank’s Diary: A Hoax by Ditlieb Felderer, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, California, 1979.
• Holocaust, hoe tang nog? (Holocaust, How Much Longer?) Haro Boekdienst, Antwerpen. [7]

In 1979, at Northrup University in Los Angeles, the first Revisionist Conference was held, organized by the Institute for Historical Review, which, since spring 1980, has published the important quarterly The Journal of Historical Review with the collaboration of the most significant Revisionist historians around the World. This has contributed further to making Historical Revisionism an irrefutable reality, and an unstoppable intellectual movement. Indeed the Revisionist theses are attracting ever more defenders.

Since 1980, and up to the present, several works have been published, notably in France, in the wake of the Faurisson affair. Besides numerous articles appearing in The Journal of Historical Review, we draw attention to:

• Auschwitz Exit (Vol. I), by Ditlieb Felderer, Täby, Sweden; 1980.
• 1981 Revisionist Bibliography: A Select Bibliography of Revisionist Books Dealing with the Two World Wars and Their Aftermaths, compiled and annotated by Keith Stimely, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, California, 1980.
• Vor dem Tribunal der Sieger: Gesetzlose Justiz in Nürnberg (Before the Victors' Tribunal: Lawless Justice in Nuremberg), by Hildegarde Fritzsche, K. W. Schütz Kg, Preussisch- Oldendorf, West Germany, 1981.
• Auschwitz im IG-Farben Prozess: Holocaustdokumente? (Auschwitz in the IG Farben Trial: Holocaust Documents?), edited by Udo Walendy, Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho/Weser, West Germany, 1981.
• Holocaust nun unterirdisch? (Holocaust Now Subterranean?), Historische Tatsachen (Historical Facts), No. 9, Vlotho/Weser, 1981.
• Kenntnismängel der Alliierten (The Allies' Defective Knowledge), Historische Tatsachen No. 11, 1982.
• Adolf Eichmann und die “Skelettsammlung des Ahnenerbe e.V." (Adolf Eichmann and the “Skeleton Collection of the Ancestral Heritage Association") Historische Tatsachen No. 16, 1983.
• Einsatzgruppen im Verbande des Heeres (Operations Groups in the Structure of the Army), Historische Tatsachen No. 16 and No. 17, 1983.
• Alliierte Kriegspropaganda 1914-1919 (Allied War Propaganda, 1914-1919), Hist. Tatsachen No. 22, 1985.
• Ich suchte-und hand die Wahrheit (I Sought-and Found the Truth), Robert Faurisson. Kritik, No. 58, Kritik-Verlag, Mohrkirch. 1982
• The 'Holocaust': 120 Questions and Answers, Charles E. Weber, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, 1983.
• Nazi Gassing a Myth? IHR Special Report, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, 1983.
• The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, Walter N. Sanning, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, 1983.
• Le grands truquages de l'histoire (The Great Frauds of History), by Hervé Le Goff, Editions Jacques Grancher, Paris, 1983. Includes a study of the Anne Frank diary imposture. [8]
• The Man Who Invented “Genocide", James J. Martin, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, 1984.
• "Massentötungen” oder Desinformation? ("Mass Killings” or Disinformation?), by Ingrid Weckert, Historische Tatsaehen No. 24, 1985.
• Macht + Prozesse = “Wahrheit"? (Power + Trial = “Truth"?), Historische Tatsachen No. 25, 1985.
• Amtliche Lügen stratfrei, Bürgerzweifel kriminell (Official Lies Unpenalized, Citizens' Doubts Criminal), Historische Tatsachen No. 29, 1985.
• Die Befreiung von Auschwitz 1945 (The Liberation of Auschwitz 1945), Historische Tatsachen No. 31, 1987.
• Die Farce des sowjetischen Kommissionsberichtes vom 7. Mai 1945 (The Farce of the Soviet Commission Report of 7 May 1945), Historische Tatsachen No. 33, 1988. All the Historische Tatsachen cited, except for No. 24, are by Udo Walendy.
• Dachau … Buchenwald … Belsen, etc. Z.L. Smith, Antwerp, Vrij Historisch Onderzoek (Free Historical Research), 1984.
• Het Dagboek van Anne Frank: een Vervalsing (The Diary of Anne Frank A Falsification), Robert Faurisson, Antwerp: Vrij Historisch Onderzoek 1985.
• Worldwide Growth and Impact of “Holocaust” Revisionism. IHR Special Report, Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, 1985.
• L'onestà polemica del Signor Vidal-Naquet. A proposito dell'edizione italiana di un suo libro (The Honest Polemic of Mr. Vidal-Naquet, on the Italian edition of one of his books), Cesare Saletta, Sala Bolognese, 1985.
• Droit et Histoire (Law and History), Pierre Guillaume, La Vieille Taupe, Paris, 1986.
• We add the most siginificant works on the Faurisson affair
• Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire. La question des chambres à gaz (Defense Memorandum against Those Who Accuse Me of Falsifying History. The Question of the Gas Chambers), Robert Faurisson, La Vieille Taupe, 1980. A work of exceptional value.
• Vérité historique ou vérité politique ? Le dossier de l'affaire Faurisson. La question des chambres à gaz (Historical Truth, or Political Truth? The Faurisson Affair File: The Question of the Gas Chambers) Serge Thion, La Vieille Taupe, 1980.
• L'Affaire Faurisson (The Faurisson Affair), Le Lutteur de classe, November 1961.
• Intolérable Intolérance (Intolerable Intolerance). Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Eric Delcroix, Claude Karnoouh, Vincent Monteil and Jean-Louis Tristani. Editions de la Différence, 1981.
• L'Incroyable Affaire Faurisson (The Incredible Faurisson Affair), Les petits supplements au Guide des droits des victimes, No. 1, La Vieille Taupe, 1982.
• Réponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Reply to Pierre Vidal-Naquet), Robert Faurisson. Second enlarged edition, 1962, published by the author. La Vieille Taupe, 1982.
• L'Affaire Faurisson (The Faurisson Affair), by Marie-Paule Mémy. Memorandum of D.U.T., University of Bordeaux III, Option Journalism 1982-1983.
• Epilogue judiciaire de l'Affaire Faurisson (Judiciary Epilogue to the Faurisson Affair), La Vieille Taupe, 1983.
• Il caso Faurisson (The Faurisson Case), Andrea Chersi, Castenedolo, 1983. Published by the author. [9]

In January 1985 the first number of the Spanish Revisionist review, Revision was published in Alicante.

Since the spring of 1987 the important review Annales d'histoire révisionniste has been published in France.

We call attention also to the Revisionist journal Taboe. Revisionistisch tijdschrift voor kritisch en wetenschappelijk onderzoek (Tabu, Revisionist periodical for critical and scientific research), Antwerp, Belgium.

Lastly, may we be permitted to mention our own studies:

Published by Sentinella d'Italia, Monfalcone:

• Il rapporto Gerstein. Anatomia di un falso (The Gerstein Report Anatomy of a Fraud), 1982.
• La Risiera di San Sabba: un falso grossolano (The ricery of San Sabba: A Gross Hoax), 1985. Published by La Sfinge, Parma
• Wellers e i “gasati” di Auschwitz (Wellers and the “Gassed” of Auschwitz), 1987.
• Auschwitz: due false testimonianze (Auschwitz: Two False Testimonies), 1986.
• Auschwitz: un caso di plagio (Auschwitz: A Case of Plagarism), 1986.

Further:

• Auschwitz: le confessioni di Rudolf Höss (Auschwitz: The False Confessions of Rudolf Höss), 1987.
• Come si falsifica la storia: Georges Wellers e le “camere a gas” di Belzec (How History is Falsified: Georges Wellers and the “Gas Chambers” at Belzec). To be published.
• Medico ad Auschwitz. Anatomia di un falso. La balsa testimonianza di Miklos Nyiszli (Doctor in Auschwitz: Anatomy of a Fraud: The False Testimony of Miklos Nyiszli). To be published. [10]

This vast literature is of unequal value and ranges from superficial and often inexact declarations — rightly criticized by the Exterminationist historians, as Revisionists call those who maintain the reality of the “Extermination” of the Jews — to methodical and profound research.

This literature has aroused reactions of diverse types. [11]

On the literary plane, a number of highly passionate writings seek to discredit the Revisionists, be it by personal defamation, be it by distorting their theses in order to hold them up to ridicule, be it by trying to make Revisionism appear as an integral part of “an international neo-Nazi movement,” that is to say, of a resurgence of Nazi anti-Semitism, as is implied expressly by Robert Kempner. [12]

This attempt appears clearly in the titles that occur most frequently in this literature:

• “Criticism of the Publicity of the Anti-Semitic Extreme Right"; [13]
• “A Look at Neo-Nazi Literature"; [14]
• “The Final Solution and Neo-Nazi Mythomania"; [15]
• “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the Recent Neo-Nazi literature.” [16]

Among the most virulent articles, we point out

• “La politica dello struzzo” (Ostrich Politics), Augusto Segre, La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, January-March 1979.
• “La distruzione della ragione” (The Destruction of Reason), Giuseppe Laras, La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, August- September 1973.
• “Le camere a gas sono esistite!” (The Gas Chambers Existed!), reply by Enzo Collotti to Robert Faurisson. Storia Illustrata No. 262, September 1979. (See on this subject Faurisson Replies to Collotti, Storia Illustrata No. 263, October 1979).

Stefano Levi delta Torre dedicated a paragraph to Revisionism in the article “New Forms of Jew-phobia” that is included in the section “Anti-Semitism Today.” [17]

In reality, the accusation is baseless, and is clearly intended as propaganda. The credentials of the man who is considered to be the founder of Revisionism, Paul Rassinier, leave no doubt in that regard: socialist, resistant, arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943, tortured for eleven days, deported to Buchenwald, then to Dora, in which camps he spent 19 months, 95 per cent invalided as a result of his deportation, bearer of the Vermilion Medal of French Gratitude (Médaille Vermeil de la Reáonnaissance Française) and of the Rosette de la Résistance.” In France, the legacy of Rassinier has been assumed by elements of the Left, beginning with the group that manages the publishing house La Vieille Taupe (The Old Mole). [18]

Other Exterminationist writers, while displaying all the emotion invariably engendered by an expression of doubt in regard to the “extermination” of the Jews, try to place themselves on the plane of objective criticism. Among the most significant, we call attention to:

• “Lies About the Holocaust,” Lucy Dawidowicz, Commentary, December, 1980.
• “Les redresseurs de morts.” [Translator’s note: Here the Exterminationist indulges herself archly in a "Jeu de mots" or, more simply, a pun on “redresseurs de torts” -"righters of wrongs") Chambres à gas: la bonne nouvelle. Comme on revise l'histoire. (The Redressers of the Dead. Gas Chambers: The Good News: How History is Revised) by Nadine Fresco. Les Temps Modernes, No. 707, June 1980. The author undertakes to show the historiographic methods of Revisionism.
• Les chambres à gaz ont existé. Des documents, des témoignages, des chimes (The Gas Chambers Did Exist Documents, Testimonies, Numbers), Georges Wellers. Editions Gallimard, 1981. A work directed against Robert Faurisson.
• La Solution Finale et la mythomanie neo-nazie (The Final Solution and Neo-Nazi Mythomania), Georges Wellers. Published by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, 1979. A work directed against Paul Rassinier.
• Six Million Did Die, Arthur Suzman and Denis Diamond. Johannesburg, 1978. A work directed against Richard Harwood and Arthur Butz.
• “Un Eichmann de papier: Anatomie d'un mensonge” (A Paper Eichmann: Anatomy of a Lie), Pierre Vidal-Naquet in Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent (Jews, Memory, and the Present), Paris, 1981. Study directed against Robert Faurisson.
• “Tesi sul revisionismo” (Theses on Revisionism), Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Rivista di Storia Contemporanea, Loescher, Turin, January, 1983. A general article against Revisionism.
• Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas (National Socialist Mass Killings by Poison Gas), by Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, Adalbert Rückerl and others. Frankfurt-am- Main, 1983. A collective work of 24 historians aimed at refuting, indirectly, the whole of Revisionist historiography.
• “A propos d'une thèse de doctorat 'explosive' sur le rapport Gerstein” (An “Explosive” Doctoral Thesis on the Gerstein Report), Georges Wellers. Le Monde Juif, No. 121, January- March 1986. An article directed against Henri Roques. [19]

Some attempts to affirm the Exterminationist “truth” have had the opposite effect. Particularly interesting in this respect are:

• The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex, Dino A. Brugioni and Robert G. Poirier. Central Intelligence Agency, Washington D.C., U.S. Department of Commerce, National Technical Information Service, February 1979. A work in which aerial photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau taken by the U.S. Air Force in 1944, are published, these demolish the myth of the immense exterminations that were supposed to have been perpetrated in these camps in 1944.
• "Les Krematorien IV et V de Birkenau et leurs chambres à gaz" (Crematories IV and V of Birkenau and Their Gas Chambers), Jean-Claude Pressac, Le Monde Juif No. 107, July- September 1982. See the account given by Robert Faurisson "Le mythe des chambres à gaz entre en agonie," (The Myth of the Gas Chambers Enters Its Death-Phase), reply to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, second enlarged edition, La Vieille Taupe, 1982.
• The Auschwitz Album. After an album discovered by Lili Meier, survivor of the concentration camp. Text by Peter Hellman. See the analysis by Robert Faurisson, “Les Tricheries de l'Album d'Auschwitz” (The Trickeries of The Auschwitz Album), typed text, unpublished, 1983.

But the reactions of the opponents of Revisionism are not restricted to the literary plane. The lawsuits brought against Revisionists — to the end of obtaining official condemnation by the courts of the adversary theses — attest to the inability of the official historians to refute the Revisionist arguments seriously and convincingly.

Certain affairs. such as those of Christophersen, of Faurisson. and of Felderer have become unhappily celebrated. [20]

Of doleful renown, too, is the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften, a national agency for the examination and censoring of texts held to “put youth in jeopardy” in the Federal Republic of Germany, a simple method for the exercise of legal control over Revisionist literature, whose works are put on this index regularly! (Index für jugendgefährdende Schriften). [21]

The case of Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich attests to the blind intolerance practiced against those who, relying on sober documentation, deny the “extermination of the Jews.” In November 1982, the Council of Deans of the Georg-August University of Göttingen, where he had obtained his Doctorate in Law in 1951, proceeded to revoke his doctor’s title for having written the excellent Der Auschwitz Mythos which, in the opinion of this not exactly objective Council, made Wilhelm Stäglich “unworthy of the title of Doctor.” [22]

Recently, Henri Roques — the case is unique in French university history — has seen the confirmation of his doctoral thesis on the confessions of Kurt Gerstein, [23] which unleashed an entire polemic [24] but remains unchallenged by any serious refutation, annulled because of presumed administrative irregularities. [25]

2. Revisionist Criticism

It would be difficult to summarize the results of Revisionist criticism in a few pages. Besides, we are concerned here not so much with presenting the results of Revisionist research than Revisionism’s reason for being, and its methodology, and that is why we devote this chapter to explaining the reasons why, in our opinion, it is necessary to doubt the reality of the “extermination” of the Jews. :

At the time of the Nuremberg trial, the English public prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, in his speech for the prosecution of 26 July 1946, accused the Germans of having killed more than six million Jews “in the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Oranienburg.” [1]

Each one of these “gas chambers,” naturally, had its “eye- witnesses.”

Abbé Georges Hénocque described that of Buchenwald as follows:

I felt reassured and, opening the iron door, I found myself in the famous gas chamber.

The room could have been about five meters square, with a height of three and a half meters. Seventeen sprinkler heads fastened and placed at regular intervals in the ceiling. Looking at them revealed nothing of their murderous function. They resembled harmless water dispensers. The deportees employed in the crematorium forewarned me: in a touch of irony, each victim, on entering this room, was given a towel, and a minuscule bit of soap. These unfortunates believed they were going into the shower. Then the heavy iron door, bordered with a kind of rubber seal a half-centimeter thick, designed to prevent the entry of the least bit of air, was closed on them.

On the inside, the walls were smooth, without fissures, as though varnished. On the outside, one noticed, on the side of the door lintel, four buttons, placed one under the other; one red, one yellow, one green, one white.

Yet, one detail worried me: I could not understand how the gas could descend from the sprinkler outlets to the floor. The room in which I found myself was skirted by a corridor. I went into it and there I saw an enormous pipe that my two arms could not encompass completely, which was covered with rubber to a thickness of about one centimeter.

On the side, a handle that one turned from left to right released the gas. Under strong pressure, it descended to the floor, so that none of the victims could escape what the Germans called “the slow and sweet death.”

Below the spot where the pipe formed an elbow to enter the asphyxiation chamber, there were the same buttons as on the outside door red, green, yellow, and white, which served evidently to measure the descent of the gas. Everything was really put together and organized scientifically. The evil genius could not have done better. I went back into the gas chamber to try to find the crematory room. [2]

SS-Obersturmbannführer Kaindl, former commandant of the Oranienburgdachsenhausen camp, declared before a Soviet military tribunal:

Toward mid-March 1943, I installed a gas chamber as a means for mass extermination.

Public Prosecutor On your own initiative?

Kaindl: Partly, yes, the existing installations no longer sufficed for the projected extermination. I held a conference in which the head doctor, Baumkötter, took part. He told me that the use of a poison gas, such as prussic acid, in rooms prepared for that purpose produced instant death.

That is why I considered the installation of gas chambers to be in order, and also because it was more humane, for mass killings. [3]

On the subject of the Dachau camp, Dr. Franz Blaha, in a sworn statement, affirmed:

There were numerous executions by gas, executions by firearms, and by injections, in the camp. The gas chamber was finished in 1944, and I called Dr. Rascher to examine the first victim. Of the eight or nine persons in the chamber, three were still alive; the others seemed to be dead. Their eyes were red and their faces bloated. Numerous detainees were subsquently killed in the same manner. [4]

On 19 August 1960, the German newspaper Die Zeit, under the headline “No Gassings in Dachau,” published a letter by Dr. Martin Broszat of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, in which he declared:

Neither at Dachau, nor at Bergen-Belsen, nor at Buchenwald, were Jews or other detainees gassed. The gas chamber at Dachau was never completely finished, nor put “into service.”

And further:

The mass extermination of Jews by gassing began in 1941-1942, and took place exclusively in a few locations chosen for that purpose and provided with corresponding technical installations, above all in the occupied Polish territories (but nowhere in the Old Reich): at Auschwitz-Birkenau, at Sobibor on the Bug, at Treblinka, Chelmno, and Belzec. [5]

The reservations expressed in this letter were made explicit by Dr. Broszat in the “Preliminary Note” to the article by Ino Arndt and Wolfgang Scheffler in Organisierter Massenmord an Juden in national-sozialistischen Vernichtungslagern (Organized Mass Murder of Jews in National Socialist Extermination Camps):

As we have pointed out already, the extermination of Jews in the institutional sense (accomplishment of the program of the “final solution") by means of gassing installations took place exclusively in the aforementioned camps in the occupied Polish territories[6]. In turn, in the concentration camps generally, there were indeed crematories (for the cremation of the detainees who died en masse or were killed during the war) but no gassing installations. However, where that was the case [the alleged presence of gas chambers] (Ravensbrück, Natzweiler, Mauthausen) they did not serve for the extermination of Jews in the sense of the “final solution” program. They served rather to ease the “work” of the execution commandos, which until now consisted in shooting the detainees, killing them by injections of phenol, and by other methods.[7]

Simon Wiesenthal confirms that “there were no extermination camps on German soil.” [8]

In conclusion, neither at Buchenwald, nor at Oranienburg- Sachsenhausen, were there “gas chambers,” while the alleged “gas chamber” at Dachau was never used, [9] as can be read also in the official publication on this camp:

The “gas chamber” at Dachau was never put into service. Only the dead were put into the crematory for cremation, never any living being for “gassing.” [10]

Or further:

As we have said already, Dachau in the last year had its own gas chamber. But its “showers” were never used. [11]

Consequently, the “eyewitness testimonies” of those who pretended to have seen “gas chambers” in these camps, or to have taken part in the “gassings” there, are false.

That state of affairs should have moved any serious historian to undertake a critical review of all sources concerning the “extermination” of the Jews, but nothing of the kind happened. [12]

The question that Robert Faurisson asks is more than legitimate:

Why are the “proofs,” the “certainties,” and “testimonies” gathered about the camps that, geographically, are close to us, suddenly without value, while the “proofs,” “certainties,” and the “testimonies” collected about the camps in Poland remain true? [13]

The question appears yet more legitimate when one considers what Gerald Reitlinger, who is an Exterminationist, writes about the evidence relating to the Polish “extermination camps":

The greater part of the documentation on the death camps in Poland, for example, has been gathered by commissions inquiry of the Polish government, and by the Central Commission for Jewish History in Poland, by interrogating the physically able survivors who rarely were educated men.

Moreover, the Eastern European Jew is by nature a rhetorician, he loves to express himself in florid comparisons. While one witness declared that the victims coming from the far west arrived at the death camp in sleeping cars, he probably wanted to say they came in passenger coaches, not in cattle cars. At times their imagination went beyond all credibility, as when the food smugglers of the ghetto were described as men of gigantic stature, with pockets that went from the neck to the ankles. Even readers who do not suffer from racial prejudices may find it a bit too thick to be able to digest the details of the monstrous assassinations and are led to cry “credat Judaeus Apella [Translator’s note: “Let the Jew Apella believe it,"] and to relegate these recitals among the fables. Basically, the readers have the right to think that it is a case of “Oriental” witnesses, for whom numbers are nothing but rhetorical elements. Even their names, Sunschein, Zylberdukaten, (silver ducats), Rothbalsam (red balsam), Salamander — seem drawn from the imagination. [14]

In regard to the working method of the inquiry commissions and to the Testimonies” they gathered, Reitlinger states explicitly:

One cannot but agree with R.T. Paget, K.C., member of the House of Commons, when he says that the researches undertaken by the Polish Government commission after the war are of mediocre probatory value. They consists, in effect, essentially of detached descriptions, by isolated persons, very rarely confirmed by other sources. [15]

The “proof” of the existence of the “gas chambers” in the so-called “extermination camps” in the East thus consist almost exclusively of extremely suspect “eyewitness testimonies” whose truthfulness is upheld a priori by the historians who maintain the reality of the “extermination” of the Jews, and the intentional lack of critical spirit is the essential characteristic of their historiographic method.

The analysis of such “proofs” and their mutual contradictions, however, should lead Exterminationist historians to employ greater prudence.

The study of the genesis of the myth of the “extermination” of the Jews, at Treblinka, at Sobibor, and at Belzec, for example, is very revealing in this regard. One of the first “eyewitness testimonies” about Treblinka — the report sent 15 November 1942 by the clandestine organization of the Warsaw ghetto to the Polish government-in-exile in London — describes the “extermination” of the Jews in the camp as being carried out by water vapor (steam)!

In March 1942 — this report reads — the Germans began the construction of the new camp of Treblinka B — on the edge of Treblinka A — which was finished at the end of April 1942. Toward the first half of September it comprised two “death houses.” The “house of death No. 2” was of masonry, about 40 meters long and 15 meters wide. According to the story of one eyewitness, it contained ten rooms arranged along the two sides of a corridor that traversed the whole building. Pipes through which the steam passed were installed in these rooms. The “house of death No. 1” consisted of three rooms and one boiler. The report continues:

Inside the furnace-room is a large boiler for the production of steam, and with the help of pipes that run through the death rooms, which are provided with an appropriate number of holes, the superheated steam is injected into the interior of the rooms.

The “victims” were put into the rooms mentioned above, and killed by the steam:

In that manner the execution rooms are filled completely, then the doors are closed hermetically, and the long asphyxiation of the victims, by the steam coming out of the numerous holes in the pipes, begins. At the start, screams come from inside; they die down slowly, after 15 minutes the execution is completed. [16]

This story was taken up and raised to the rank of official truth by the Central Commission for Investigation of German crimes in Poland, which accused the former governor, Hans Frank, of having ordered the installation of an “extermination camp” at Treblinka for the massive elimination of the Jews “in steam-filled rooms.” [17]

The myth of the “carbon monoxide gas chambers” [18] was later imposed and still constitutes the official truth in regard to the three “extermination camps” of the East.

What happened is simple: the “steam chambers” of the 15 November 1942 report were simply turned into “gas chambers"!

Thus the “eyewitness” Yankel Wiernik wrote that at Treblinka Jews were killed in two buildings, one large, with ten “gas chambers,” the other small, with three “gas chambers,” [19] exactly as in the two “death houses” with ten and three “steam rooms” of the report cited above. The very arrangement of the rooms in the new buildings is drawn entirely from the report of 15 November 1942: ten chambers arranged along the two sides of a corridor that traversed the whole building. [20]

That this “eyewitness” may be little worthy of credence can already be deduced from what he affirms: in each “gas chamber,” measuring about “150 square feet” (i.e., about 14 square meters), about 1,000 to 1,200 persons were packed, [21] i.e., to a density of 71 to 85 persons per square meter!

We are, then, in the presence of one of those “eyewitnesses” for whom, as Gerald Reitlinger, put it, “numbers are merely rhetorical devices.”

In 1946 the “gas chambers” of Sobibor were described thus:

At first glance, one had the impression of entering a bathroom like any other faucets for hot and cold water, wash basins … once everyone had entered, the doors close heavily. A black heavy substance issues in spirals from the holes made in the ceiling. One hears horrible shrieks that, however, do not last long, as they are transformed into smothered and suffocated breathing, then into final convulsions. It is related that mothers covered their babies' corpses with their bodies.

The warden of the “bathroom” observed the whole train of events through a hole in the ceiling. Everything is over in a quarter of an hour. The floor opens, and the cadavers fall into carts waiting below which, when they are full, quickly depart. All is organized according to the most modern German technology. Outside, the bodies are laid out in a certain order and sprayed with gasoline, then set on fire. [22]

The “eyewitness” Zelda Metz furnished the following description:

Thereupon they went into the barracks where they cut the women’s hair, then into the bathroom, that is to say, the gas chamber. They were asphyxiated by chlorine. After 15 minutes they were all asphyxiated. Through a skylight it was verified that all were dead. Then the floor opened automatically. The cadavers fell into a railroad car that ran through the gas chamber and carried the cadavers to the ovens. [23]

But, from 1947 the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland opted for murder “by combustion gas produced by motors: in the ceiling were openings connected by pipes with openings situated in adjoining buildings, which produced the CO gas with which the victims were suffocated,” [24] thus recognizing that the “testimonies” mentioned above were false. But that did not keep Zelda Metz from presenting herself as a prosecution witness at the trial of the former Sobibor guards Hubert Gomerski and Johan Klier [25] on 23 August 1950, in the course of which the public prosecutor declared specifically that “executions by motor-exhaust gas had taken place.” [26]

The “eyewitness testimonies” about Belzec are even more instructive.

The first myth about the “extermination of the Jews” was born 8 April 1942, only three weeks after the opening of the camp: “The victims were assembled in a shack that had a metallic plate as its floor through which was passed an electric current that killed the Jews instantly.” [27]

A similar story appeared in the Kronika oswiecimska nieznanego autora (Auschwitz Chronicle by an Unknown Author) that was supposed to have been dug up on the grounds of the old Auschwitz camp: “At Belzec the Jews were electrocuted.” [28]

A report dated 10 July 1942 arrived in London in November of that year. [29] Published December 1st in the Polish Fortnightly Review, it describes the “extermination of the Jews” at Belzec in this way:

After unloading, the men go to a barracks on the right, the women to a barracks situated on the left, where they strip, ostensibly in readiness for a bath. After they have undressed both groups go to a third barracks where there is an electrified plate, where the executions are carried out. [30]

A variant of the myth substitutes water for the metallic plate: “The Jews were killed by passing an electric current through the water in which they were immersed.” [31]

The version of execution on a metallic plate reappeared in a report of November 1942:

The victims are ordered to strip naked — to have a bath, ostensibly — and are then led to a barrack with a metal plate for flooring. The door is then locked, electric current passes through the victims and their death is almost instantaneous. [32]

In the report of the Polish government in exile in London, dated 10 December 1942, one reads, among other things:

At first, the executions were carried out by means of shooting; subsequently, however, it is reported that the Germans applied new methods, such as poison gas, by means of which the Jewish population was exterminated in Chelm, or electrocution, for which a camp was organized in Belzec, where, in the course of March and April 1942, the Jews from the provinces of Lublin, Lwow and Kielce to the number of tens of thousands were exterminated. [33]

The story was repeated 19 December 1942 in a declaration by the “Inter-Allied Information Committee":

Actual data concerning the fate of the deportees is not at hand, but the news is available — irrefutable news — that places of execution have been organized at Chelm and Belzec, where those who survive shootings are murdered en masse by means of electrocution and lethal gas. [34]

A report 1 November 1943 thus described the “Hell of Belzec":

The Jews who were sent to Belzec were ordered to undress as though to take a bath. They were in fact led into a bathing facility that could hold several hundred people. But there they were killed en masse by electric current.[35]

In 1944 the myth was enriched: a new version bringing together the metallic plate and the water themes was elaborated. On 12 February 1944 the New York Times published the following recital of “a young Polish Jew” on the “extermination factory” at Beljec (the New York Times' spelling):

The Jews were forced naked on to a metallic platform operated like a hydraulic elevator, which lowered them into a huge vat filled with water to the victims' necks, he declared. They were electrocuted by current through the water. The elevator then lifted the bodies to a crematorium above, the youth said. The source of this narrative is “individuals who escaped after actually being taken inside the factory.” [36]

It came, therefore, from “eyewitnesses.”

This new form of the myth was taken up in 1945 by Stefan Szende. The transports of Jews “entered by a tunnel into the underground spaces of the execution place.” The “extermination technique” described by Szende is lifted, at the least, from science fiction.

When trainloads of naked Jews arrived they were herded into a great hall capable of holding several thousand people. This hall has 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 then 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. [37]

Another version of the myth mentions an “electric oven” (!) as the instrument of execution:

Then they went into a third barrack that held an electric oven. It is in that barrack that the executions took place. [38]

In 1945 the first version of the myth was raised to the rank of official truth as far as the Belzec “extermination camp” was concerned. It was accepted in the report of the Polish government and read by the Soviet representative of the prosecution, L.N. Smirnov, at the 19 December 1945 hearing of the Nuremberg trial:

In the same report, in the last chapter, on page 136 of the book of documents we find a declaration on the fact that the camp at Beldjitze [39] was constructed in 1940; however, the special electrical equipment for mass extermination of people was installed in 1942. Under the pretext of having them take a bath the people were constrained to undress completely, and pushed into a building the floor of which was electrified; there they were killed. [40]

The myth of the “extermination” of Jews at Belzec by electricity was not the only one [regarding Belzec] to circulate in the course of the Second World War.

The “eyewitness” Jan Karski, who claims to have visited this camp in the uniform of the Estonian Guard, describes a somewhat singular “extermination” procedure:

The Jews were loaded in boxcars the floors of which were covered with quicklime. When the loading was complete, the train departed for an uninhabited area 80 miles from Belzec, where it remained unopened until all the Jews were dead through the corrosive action of the lime and suffocation. [41]

Despite the detailed “eyewitness testimonies” to which we are referred, the myth of the carbon monoxide “gas chamber” has also been imposed definitively as official truth about Belzec. This myth, which has received the official sanction of the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland [42] appeared suddenly in 1946, in the collection Dokumenty i Materialy. [43]

The new version is based on the “eyewitness testimony” of Rudolf Reder, [44] testimony that is in large part a plagiarism of the famous Gerstein Report. [45]

The “eyewitness testimony” of Kurt Gerstein, SS-Obersturmführer, on the “extermination camp” of Belzec is a typical instance of the absence of a critical spirit, and of the bad faith of official historians when they choose their “evidence.”

In our study The Gerstein Report: Anatomy of a Fraud, we pointed out 103 absurdities, internal and external contradictions, historical falsifications, contradictions of the official historiography, hyperbolic exaggerations, and improbabilities, so that one cannot accord the least credibility to this “eyewitness testimony.”

But that does not trouble in any way the official historians, who declared almost unanimously:

The veracity of the Gerstein Report is in no doubt today. [46]

The objective plausibility of all the essential details of the report is not in question.[47]

The official historians justify the false testimonies — that they themselves recognize as such-about Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, in maintaining that during the war there was precise knowledge only of the existence of “extermination,” but not of its concrete modalities and techniques. Pierre Vidal-Naquet writes on this subject:

In the flood of information that came out of the occupied territories, there was the true, the less true, and the false. Of the general sense of what was happening, there was no doubt. In regard to the methods, there was often cause to hesitate between the one and the other.

He admits also that there were “fantasies and myths” but declares that these did not exist by themselves, but rather as “a shadow cast by reality, as an extension of reality.” [48]

This argumentation is an excellent application of the methodological principle “the conclusion precedes the proofs,” which Pierre Vidal-Naquet attributes to the Revisionist historians. [49]

Indeed we encounter again, mutatis mutandis, Robert Faurisson’s question as to why the “eyewitness testimonies” to the “steam rooms” of Treblinka, to the “chlorine gas,” and to the “cellars” of Sobibor, and to the “extermination” of the Jews by electricity or by death-trains at Belzec, suddenly are held to be false, while the “eyewitness testimonies” to the “gas chambers” are considered true?

It is important to emphasize that we are dealing here with “eyewitness testimonies” strictly equivalent in their credibility (or, more exactly, in their “incredibility") and completely contradictory as to their content, so that it is only when the existence of the “gas chambers” is postulated a priori — the conclusion precedes the proof — that one can speak of “fantasies” and “myths” that are “like a shadow cast by reality.”

For the rest, to touch again on the measure of that “reality,” it is enough to study the genesis of the myth of the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz.

That myth was imposed very late in the day, and that is surprising, since the largest of all the places of execution, the death-factory of Auschwitz-Birkenau, succeeded in keeping its secret until the summer of 1944. [50]

The reports of the Slovakian Jews (Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba) who escaped from Auschwitz 7 April [51] circulated in July 1944, reports that were published in the United States by the War Refugee Board in November of the same year, with two other reports, [52] one by two Jews who escaped from Auschwitz on 27 May (Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin), the other by a “Polish commander” who is not otherwise identified.

The most important of these so-called “official reports of Auschwitz,” that of Alfred Wetzler, is visibly false: this one presents a plan and a description of Crematoria I and II (II and III, according to the offical numerical designation) that are in fact completely invented, as is seen by a simple comparison with the original plan. He states that in the “oven room” there were “nine ovens, each with four openings” placed around a high smokestack, which also is false in regard to the number as well as to the arrangement of the ovens; since in Crematoria II and III there were in fact five ovens each, having three openings, arranged lengthwise, one beside the other. [53]

The “gas chamber,” according to Wetzler, was on the surface, since Wetzler tells us that the SS whose job it was to introduce the gas, clamber onto the roof, which, too, is wholly false, as the mortuary chamber I, the so-called “gas chamber” was, in fact, underground. [54]

Besides, again according to Wetzler, a track led from the 'gas chamber' to the oven room,” [55] which also is false, in view of the fact that the oven room was on the ground level. [56]

But none of this hinders the official historians in presenting this report as though it were true. The case of Georges Wellers is typical, since he uses, stupidly, Alfred Wetzler’s false description in two works in which the correct original plan of Crematorium II in Birkenau is reproduced. [57] But that is not all. He tries painfully to minimize the very grave contradictions in the “eyewitness report” of Alfred Wetzler, writing:

That some witnesses have committed errors of detail in their various descriptions is understandable. It is thus that Wetzler speaks of three openings in the ceiling of the gas chamber; in fact it had four. [58]

And that is all. It can thus be deduced that certain Exterminationist historians are not guilty of an excess of zeal in their reading of the texts.

Before receiving its official codification in the “confessions” of Rudolf Höss, the myth of the “gas chambers” at Auschwitz had known other vicissitudes as to the locale, the technique, and the period of the “extermination.”

At the Nuremberg trial, in the course of the hearing on 8 August 1946, Sturmbannführer Georg Konrad Morgen described, in abundant detail, “the installations of the 'extermination camp' of Monowitz":

Then the trucks left. They did not go to the Auschwitz concentration camp, but in another direction, to the Monowitz extermination camp, which was some kilometers distant. This extermination camp consisted of a series of crematoria not recognizable as such from the outside. They could be mistaken for large bath installations. Even the detainees knew it. These crematoria were surrounded by barbed wire and were tended on the inside by the Jewish working groups already mentioned.

And further:

The Monowitz extermination camp was set apart from the concentration camp. It was situated in a vast industrial zone and was not recognizable as such Chimneys smoked all across the horizon. The camp itself was guarded on the outside by a detachment of Balts, Estonians, Lithuanians, and by Ukrainians. The entire procedure was almost entirely in the hands of the detainees themselves, who were supervised only from time to time by a subordinate officer (Unterführer). The execution itself was carried out by another Unterführer who released the gas into that place. [59]

In reality, Monowitz, like the thirty-nine Auschwitz subcamps, never had a “gas chamber.” [60]

As concerns the technique of “extermination,” a report dated 8 April 1943 listed the following methods of murder, in addition to “gas chambers” and execution by weapons.

[… ]

(b) Electric chambers: these rooms had metallic wall linings; the victims were led inside, then the hightension was switched on;

(c) the system of the so-called pneumatic hammer; this was a system of special rooms in which the “hammer” came down from the ceiling, and the victims were killed by means of a special installation under high pneumatic pressure. [61]

As Martin Gilbert comments, these two methods were “pure fantasy.” [62] On 2 February 1945 Pravda published an article on Auschwitz in which the following method of “extermination” was described:

The most elaborate apparatus was an electric conveyor belt on which hundreds of persons could be electrocuted simultaneously, then moved on into furnaces. [62a]

In 1945, the version of “gassing” by sham shower baths was affirmed by the most ingenious perjurers, who echoed this story. At the Belsen trial, Dr. Ada Bimko described the sprinklers, the two “pipes,” and the “huge metal containers containing gas” of the Birkenau “gas chambers” that this “eyewitness” professed to have visited personally. [63]

How these false witnesses imagined that the “gassings” had taken place can be seen clearly in the following recital by Sofia Schafranov to whom a Sonderkommando (special command) detainee is supposed to have recounted the following:

A shower bath was simulated to the victims, and although they knew beforehand what kind of shower it was, they were given towels and a bit of soap; after that they were made to undress, and were pushed into low cement rooms, hermetically sealed. From faucets set in the ceiling there came a poison gas instead of water. [64]

That story was repeated at the 1949 Degesch trial: one witness had heard talk that “at Birkenau the gas was introduced by fake showers.” But just as Dr. Heli, inventor of Zyklon B. as well as Dr. Ra, [65] a physician, declared that the “gassing” technique described by the witness was impossible, so the court rejected as false the story in question

The court does not doubt the inexactness of the hypothesis according to which the gas was drawn from the can of Zyklon by means of a small tube and introduced into the gas chambers so that it is no longer necessary to do the experiment asked for by one of the accused. [66]

But that did not prevent Vincenzo and Luigi Pappalettera from making the following commentary — evidently inspired by what had been maintained at Nuremberg [67] — on the photograph of the “gas chamber” at Mauthausen:

In the showers the prisoners were drenched, not with water, but with murderous gas that spurted from little holes. [68]

Mixing these myths with those relating to Sobibor and to Belzec, Leo Laptos, who had worked as a pharmacist in Birkenau, recounted that:

The gas chambers were equipped like bathrooms where people went under pretext of taking a shower, but instead of water, it was gas that came from the conduits, and the floor tipped so that the cadavers fell on to a conveyer belt that transported them into the crematory. [69]

No less fanciful was the recital of a female detainee at Auschwitz at the Degesch trial, according to which a gas, called “rotten gas” by the detainees was gathered by a “rotten gas group” in the swampy areas and was used at Birkenau for “exterminating.” [70]

Lastly, on the subject of the time-period of the “extermination,” Dr. Reszö Kastner reported a message from Bratislava, according to which the “SS were on the point of repairing and refurbishing the gas chambers at the crematories of Auschwitz, which were out of use since autumn of 1943.” [71] In a declaration made under oath in 1945, he stated precisely:

A communique stated that at Auschwitz they were working feverishly on the restoration of the gas chambers and the crematories, which had not been in use for months, [72]

while the official historiography indicated no halt in the activity of the “gas chambers” and the crematory ovens [73] during the period in question, which is why in the 1961 edition of the Kastner report the aforementioned passage has been suppressed. [74]

Even more instructive is the study of the development of the myth of the “gas chambers” at Auschwitz, the present form of which derives from the “technical survey” of the “extermination camp” made by the Soviets in February-March 1945.

The Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry into German Crimes at Auschwitz “established” that more than four million persons were murdered in this camp, [75] a number that “makes one laugh,” according to Reitlinger. [76] The fashion in which the Soviet Commission arrived at that figure makes one laugh even more! It declares:

In Crematorium No. I, which existed for 24 months, one could burn 9,000 cadavers per month, which give a total of 216,000 for the whole duration of its existence. The numbers corresponding to the other crematoria are:

• Crematorium No. II, 19 months, 90,000 cadavers per month, total: 1,710,000
• Crematorium No. III, 18 months, 90,000 cadavers per month, total: 1,620,000
• Crematorium No. IV, 17 months, 45,000 cadavers per month, total: 765,000
• Crematorium No. V, 18 months, 45,000 cadavers per month, total: 810,000

The total capacity of the five crematoria was 279,000 cadavers per month, for a total of 5,121,000 cadavers for the whole duration of their existence. Given, on the one hand, that the Germans burned a great number of cadavers on wood pyres, and, on the other, that the crematoria did not always work at full capacity, the Soviet “technical commission” “established” at just four million the number of the “murdered"! [77]

This calculation is false, if only for the reason that the maximum capacity of 270,000 cremations per month for the four Birkenau crematoria, or 9,000 per day, is about nine times greater than the actual capacity! [78] The Soviet “technical commission,” moreover, “established” that in the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz the gas Zyklon A had been employed, although this had not been used since the 1920s. [79]

The case of Katyn shows clearly the value that can be given the conclusions of the various Soviet “Commissions of Inquiry": the Soviet commission that investigated the Katyn massacre-committed by the Russians, as everyone knows — “established” on the basis of “more than a hundred witnesses,” “medico-legal surveys,” and “documents and elements of proof,” that those responsible for the butchery were the Germans. [80]

The Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland “established” at first, as we have shown, that the Jews in Treblinka were killed in “steam chambers,” and in Belzec by “electricity"; then it “established” that they were poisoned by carbon monoxide gas in “gas chambers” — which is amply sufficient to demonstrate the reliability of that commission.

In regard to the Auschwitz camp, it “established” the incineration capacity of the four Birkenau crematoria as 12,000 cadavers in 24 hours.[81] That is impossible.

Jan Sehn, examining magistrate and member of the General Commission of Inquiry into the Hitlerian Crimes in Poland, reduces that to 8,000.[82] That figure has been taken up by a 1979 publication of the Auschwitz Museum, [83] even though a 1961 publication of the same museum alludes to a German document that would make 4,416 cadavers appear to be a maximum capacity. [84]

Topping off the speculation about the numbers, Jan Sehn does not fear to assert:

The very detailed documents gathered by the Extraordinary Soviet State Commission, as well as by the General Commission of Inquiry into Hitlerian Crimes in Poland, prove that the Outputs of the Birkenau gas chambers was close to 60,000 persons in 24 hours. [85]

Eugen Kogon more modestly contents himself with a maximum daily production of 34,000. [86]

Beginning in 1945, there is a proliferation of “eyewitnesses” to the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz; what Georges Wellers calls “an abundance of proofs.” [87]

Let us examine briefly the value of these “proofs.” In regard to the activity of the crematoria at Birkenau — five, according to Ada Bimko, [88] six, according to Robert Lévy, [89] eight, according to Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier [90] — here is what appears in the notes Rudolf Höss is supposed to have set down in Cracow:

After a very short time, Crematorium III (IV) was out of commission and it never was used again. [91]

Pery Broad stated exactly the contrary:

The four crematoria worked at full steam. But soon, after continuous overloading, the ovens broke down, and only Crematorium III (IV) continued to smoke. [92]

Dov Paisikovic, who affirmed he was a member of the Sonderkommando from “May 1944 until the evacuation in January 1945” contradicts them both:

The crematories were so solidly constructed that throughout this whole time I had no knowledge of any failure either of the ovens or of the crematories as a whole. [93]

These “eyewitnesses,” in turn, are contradicted by the Polish Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, which declared that in August 1944:

The crematoria were closed, and thenceforward the corpses were burnt only in pits. [94]

Contradicting all these testimonies, the Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau (Chronicle of Events in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp) does not show the least mishap in the functioning of the four crematories in Birkenau until 7 October 1944 when, because of the revolt of the Sonderkommando, Crematorium IV was burned. [95]

In regard to the Crematoria II and III at Birkenau, Alfred Wetzler declares they had 36 ovens which each “could take three normal corpses at once,” which took “an hour and a half” to be “completely burned.” That represented “a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies” for each crematorium. [96]

For Dov Paisikovic the ovens were 15 in number and the cadavers took about “four minutes [!] to be consumed,” so that there was a cremation capacity of 6,000 cadavers in 24 hours. [97]

Miklos Nyiszli affirms that the cadavers were put “by threes” into each of the 15 ovens and “cremated in twenty minutes” which meant “several thousand people could be cremated in a single day.” [98]

Dr. Bendel maintains there were 16 ovens, “but with a cremation capacity of about two thousand cadavers in 24 hours.” [99]

Rudolf Höss was initially made to confess that the crematories in question had 10 ovens that could incinerate 4,000 cadavers in 24 hours. [100]

The “gas chambers” of Crematoria II and III — which Alfred Wetzler places on the ground level, the others underground — were 10 meters long for Dr. Bendel, [101] and 200 meters long for Nyiszli. [102]

As to the number of Auschwitz victims proffered by the diverse “witnesses,” Georges Wellers writes that they vary between 8 million and 1½ million, i.e., in the proportion of 5.3 to 1. [103]

As will already have been seen in this necessary summary examination, there is well and truly “an abundance of proofs,” but it turns out that these proofs are false and contradictory.

There are also objective proofs that are no less embarrassing to the official historiography.

The “Auschwitz Protocols” (see above) reached the War Refugee Board in June 1944. [104]

Since 4 April, American planes had overflown and photographed Auschwitz. In the course of the mission of 26 June, the IG-Farben industrial complex, Auschwitz, and Birkenau were photographed. On the 25 August 1944 mission, photographs were taken that clearly showed the Auschwitz camp and the Birkenau Crematoria II and III.

Thus, when on 13 September 1944 the Americans staged an air raid against the IG-Farben complex, they knew the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp well;

On that occasion, two bombs fell on Birkenau, accidentally; one of them hit the railway spur that led to the crematoria. [105]

What better occasion to destroy the sadly notorious “death factory” of Birkenau?

Yet nothing of the kind was done. Why, then was Auschwitz not bombed?[106] The only answer to that “disquieting questions” can be the following:

Analyses of the aerial photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau showed that this camp was not concealing any horrible “secret” and, consequently, the crematoria were judged not to be worth a single bomb.

It is not by chance that the abovementioned photographs [107] were not published until 1979 (!) with explanatory texts by the CIA ad usum Delphini. (Translator’s note: “in Delphic style,” i.e. obscurely formulated.)

Not only did these photographs show nothing of the existence of “extermination” processes at Auschwitz, but they gave the lie categorically to an essential aspect, that of the cremation pits. The origin of this myth, taken up ultimately by diverse “eyewitnesses,” with contradictions that are not without importance, can be attributed directly to the “Auschwitz Protocols.”

One reads, in particular, in the report drawn up by Mordowicz and Rosin, that in May 1944, during the influx of Hungarian Jews, that the crematories could not manage the incineration of the cadavers of those who had been gassed, large pits, 30 meters long by 15 meters wide, were dug in the Birkenwald ("birch forest") adjoining Birkenau ("birch meadow") where the bodies were burned day and night. [108]

According to the “eyewitness” Miklos Nyiszli, from the two crematory pits, each 50 meters long and 6 meters wide, located in a birch forest 500 -600 meters from Crematory V, there rose a “thick twisting spiral of smoke” that was “visible from any point in the KZ” and “at every hour of the day and night.” Nyiszli declared that “by day it covered the sky above Birkenau with a thick cloud.” [109]

Even more emphatically, Pery Broad asserts that:

In the environs of Birkenau there were about ten large incineration centers in which 200 to 1,000 persons at a time were burned on wood pyres. The light of these fires was still visible at a radius of at least 30 kilometers. [110]

The cremation pits, at first placed exclusively in the “birch forest” by the “eyewitnesses,” thereafter moved mysteriously into the courtyard of Crematorium V.

The Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland “established” that between May and August 1944:

Six huge pits were dug beside Crematorium V, and old pits were opened near the gas plant in the wood, and corpses burnt in them continuously. When operations were in full swing in August,1944, the number of corpses burnt daily rose to 24,000. [111]

Pery Broad, according to whom, during that period, “only Crematorium III (IV) still smoked,” locates the cremation pits exactly “in the rear courtyard of Crematorium IV.” [112]

To sum up, between May and August 1944, Birkenau was claimed to be a fiery hell whose flames devoured up to 25,000 cadavers a day, and whose smoke covered the sky of Auschwitz-Birkenau in thick clouds.

Now, the aerial photographs of June 26th and of August 25th, 1944, reveal absolutely nothing of the presence of these enormous cremation pits; moreover, they show not the slightest trace of smoke, not from the phantom wood pyres, and not from the crematory smokestacks.

The most important source of the official “truth” on Auschwitz is notoriously the “confessions” of Rudolf Höss, the veracity of which are accepted uncritically and dogmatically by the official historians.

In his “autobiography” Höss writes of his first interrogation by the English:

At my first interrogation, evidence was obtained by beating me. I do not know what is in the record, although I signed it. Alcohol and the whip were too much for me. [113]

Martin Broszat remarks in a note:

This refers to a police report of 8 typed pages that Höss signed on 14, March 1946 at 2:30 (Nuremberg Document No. 1210). As far as the content is concerned, it does not differ notably on any point from what Höss declared or wrote at Nuremberg or at Cracow. [114]

Rudolf Höss’s first confession, which served as a model for all the others, therefore, was invented by the English interrogators. To be convinced of that, without a shadow of a doubt, a quick glance of the document in question will suffice. Höss “confesses” to have been called to Berlin in June 1941 by Himmler, who let him know that the Fuhrer had ordered “the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe,” that is to say, “the total extermination of all the Jews in Europe,” as he had been made to “acknowledge” in the declaration made under oath on 5 April l946. [115] This is false not only because, as we have shown, the “final solution” meant at that time the deportation of the Jews to Madagascar, but also contradicts chronologically a cardinal element of the official historiography, as Gerald Reitlinger revealed with great embarrassment. Reitlinger eliminated the contradiction by dating the alleged summons of Höss to Berlin, and the supposed order by the Fuhrer, a year later. [116]

In June 1941, Höss’s “confession” continues, there were three extermination camps in the General Government Wolzek, Belzec, and Tublinka (sic). But the first never existed, while the second, and the third (Treblinka) became operational — according to the official historiography in March and in July 1942, respectively. [117] Höss confesses also to having visited the camp at Treblinka in the spring of 1942 and to have been present there at a gassing precedure, which is altogether impossible, since the construction of the camp began on June 1st, while the first gassing there was supposed to have been carried out on 23 July 1942. [118]

In the sworn statement of 5 April 1946 that supposed visit took place in 1941, when the Treblinka camp was not yet in existence. But this is not all. The camp commandant reported to Höss that in the course of the preceding six months he had “gassed” 80,000 persons, which meant that the “gassings” had begun in the autumn of 1941, i.e., several months before the camp had been built!

According to PS-3868, the commandant of Treblinka “had principally to occupy himself with the liquidation of all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto"; but the deportation of these Jews to Treblinka did not begin until 22 July 1942.

The English investigators, who had a very approximate knowledge even in regard to Auschwitz, made Höss “confess” that the first two crematoria of Birkenau were finished in 1942, which is false, [119] each one having five double ovens, which is equally false, [120] which could incinerate 2,000 cadavers in 12 hours, just as false, [121] that the two other crematoria were finished six months later, which is false, [122] each with four ovens, which is yet again false. [123] Höss was forced to say three million persons were murdered at Auschwitz, two and half million of them in the “gas chambers.” [124] But in his “autobiography” in Cracow, Rudolf Höss “confesses":

I consider in any case that the number of two and a half million is excessive. Even at Auschwitz the possibilities for extermination were limited. [125]

Subsequently, before the Polish Supreme Court, he reduced the number to 1,135,000. [126] In his sworn declaration of 5 April 1946 and of 20 May l946, [127] Höss repeats the “confession” of Document NO-1210 in stating that a half-million persons died of hunger and sickness, a number that surpassed greatly the number of the registered detainees. [128]

The English investigators finally shifted to May 1945 the chimerical order by Himmler, which is supposed to have ended the “gassings,” [129] thereby contradicting the similarly contradictory notion of the official historiography. Extradited to Poland, Rudolf Höss continued to make the same kind of “confessions.”

The Poles (on the basis of the documents seized at Auschwitz) revised and corrected the 14 March 1946 “confession” drawn up by the English interrogators, developing it into the “autobiography” proper, and into the appendix captioned “Final solution ( … )” that constitutes the official “truth” about Auschwitz.

It is only too easy to imagine by what means these “confessions” were extracted from Rudolf Höss: it is enough to recall the methods of the great Moscow trials that forced the accused to make the desired “confessions.”

The climate of the cold war set in; the Poles permitted Höss to describe the treatment he had suffered under “bourgeous” justice:

After several days, I was led to Minden-on-Weser, the “British Zone” interrogation center. There I suffered even more brutal treatment at the hands of the military prosecutor, an English major. The regime of the prison in which I was locked up corresponded to his attitude. After three weeks I was suddenly taken to the barber who shaved me and cut my hair. I was permitted also to wash myself; this was the first time since my arrest that my handcuffs were taken off.

From Minden Höss was taken to Nuremberg:

The conditions of my stay were excellent in every respect. We had a large library at our disposal, and I could employ all my time in reading. But the interrogations ready were very painful. I was not tortured physcially, but the moral pressure was very hard to endure. I can hold no grudge against my judges: they all were Jews. They were the kind of Jews who wanted to know everythung that had torn me psychologically. They let no doubt remain about the fate that awaited us. [130]

It is easy to imagine of what the psychological pressures on Rudolf Höss consisted. Here is an example drawn from the vast repertory of the great Moscow trials:

The hostages provide the essential ingredient of the moral tortures. Here is one, for instance, very simple, and which will remain invisible to the foreign journalists admitted to the courtroom: the accused is shown a film depicting refined tortures; it is murmured to him that such will be the fate of his wife, or of his granddaughter, if … [131]

Let us not believe that the “civilized” Occident has recoiled from similar methods. The American Investigation Commission, composed of Judges van Roden and Simpson, who were sent to Germany in 1948 to investigate the irregularities committed by the American Military Tribunal at Dachau — which had tried 1,500 Germans and condemned 420 to death [132] ascertained that the accused had been subjected to physical and psychological tortures of all kinds, to force them to make the desired “confessions.”

Thus, in 137 of the 139 cases examined, the accused, in the course of their interrogation, had been kicked in the testicles, and left with incurable injuries. [133]

But there is no reason to be surprised by this: it is part of the logic of the trials of those who are called “Nazi War Criminals.” The guiding principle was set forth frankly by the U.S. Attorney General, Robert H. Jackson, at the Nuremberg trial session of 26 July 1946:

The Allies are technically still in a state of war with Germany even though the political and the military institutions of the enemy have collapsed. As a military tribunal this court represents a continuation of the war effort of the allied nations. [134]

In conclusion, to doubt the historic reality of the “extermination” of the Jews not only is legitimate, it is a duty, because it is a duty to seek historical truth

by submitting testimonies, documents, and data systematically to examination by critical methods that no one would dream of challenging if they were applied to no matter what other historical problem, because it is on these methods, and on nothing else, that historical research bases its scientific character. [135]

… not by accepting any document or “eye witness testimony” whatsoever uncritically and with preconceived notions, as the official historians do regularly.

Notes

Part 1

Part 2

Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 261-302.