Letters to the Editor
Not 'Reconstruction' But Falsification
In the Sept.-Dec. 1999 Journal, page 13, the caption to the photograph of the “gas chamber” at the Auschwitz main camp, shown to many hundreds of thousands of tourists over the years, tells readers that this “is actually a postwar reconstruction.” (Similarly, on page 67 of this same Journal issue, readers are told that this “alleged gas chamber … is not in its original state.")
This is, or could be, misleading because it implies that this room might be a faithful “reconstruction” of an original wartime homicidal “gas chamber.”
Over the years, “exterminationists” have called this a “reconstruction” because they have wanted to suggest that it is faithful to the original. For example, in a 1992 video entitled “David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper,” the Auschwitz State Museum senior curator said that today’s Auschwitz main camp “gas chamber” was “very similar” to the original one. Piper was lying: it was not “very similar,” but rather crudely falsified.
David Cole, the young Jewish-American researcher who conducted the interview, could himself have immediately demonstrated this by showing Piper the authentic original blueprints that I discovered in 1976 and published in 1979.
For more than 20 years, I have repeatedly demonstrated that this “reconstructed” Auschwitz main camp “gas chamber” is really a falsification. I made this point most recently in the article “The 'Gas Chamber' of Auschwitz I,” published in this very same Sept.-Dec. 1999 Journal issue (pp. 12-13). In that article I quoted two anti-revisionist historians who themselves have used the terms “false,” “falsifications,” “falsified” and “falsifying” in describing this “gas chamber.”
More than 25 years ago, in a letter of October 11, 1975, to the famous writer André Malraux, I wrote:
“I have just returned from Poland. I visited, Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. There the 'museographical frenzy' [a term used by French-Jewish historian Olga Wormser-Migot], in the matter of 'reconstructed' gas chambers, reaches proportions that I would have to describe as stunning if I were still subject to surprise at the base crassness that Man can invent when he lies.”
Robert Faurisson
Vichy, France
Outstanding Work
Please accept my thanks for the documentation and source references you provided last year for a letter I sent to the Journal of Forensic Sciences in regard to a psychoanalytical study of Hitler based, in part, on the spurious reminiscences of Hermann Rauschning. As you know, this collection of invented quotations and events, which was accepted as evidence by the Nuremberg Tribunal, has been proven to be the concoctions of a disaffected National Socialist Party member. Unfortunately, though, this fraudulent document [published in the US under the title The Voice of Destruction] is often still cited as an authentic historical source.
A recent Journal item refers to “Opole, in southern Poland.” Your readers may be interested to know that until the massive ethnic cleansing of eastern Germany in 1945-46, this Silesian city of Oppeln was as German as Berlin or Leipzig. Over the years the IHR has courageously upheld the memory of this terrible episode of the Second World War, certainly its greatest war crime. It is ironic indeed that this unprecedented mass expulsion of twelve million human beings — most of them women and children — is eradicated from our collective memory, while the distorted history of another people is relentlessly pounded into us. Today even standard reference works misleadingly refer to such formerly German cities as Stettin, Breslau and Danzig as having been “returned” to the Poles after “liberation” from the Germans.
As the IHR has repeatedly pointed out, history does have fundamental implications for the future. Russo-Germans are being resettled in northern East Prussia, the Königsberg cathedral is being rebuilt, and twice the Russian government has offered to sell this region back to Germany. According to a recent poll, one-third of Poles living in eastern German lands expressed approval of a restoration of German suzerainty.
Allow me to congratulate the Journal on consistently outstanding work. Your articles (really, our articles) are practically unique.
Eric Rachut, M.D.
Moody, Texas