In tribute to Professor Ben Zion Dinur (1884-1973), founder of Yad Vashem in 1953, forced to resign in 1959 for having preferred scientific History to Jewish Memory (as explained in my article in French of June 15, 2006)
For
the most commonplace murder the judicial authority, happily enough, is never
satisfied with “testimonies” but demands, before anything else, a forensic
examination; to this purpose, the technical
service of the police examines both the crime scene and the murder weapon
while, for their part, the forensic
police put to laboratory analysis all physical elements liable to enlighten
the investigators. It is afterwards, in light of the forensic examination
and an analysis of the facts as materially established, that one may knowledgeably
seek to gauge the value of certain witnesses’ accounts. Personally, for over
half a century I have wanted to know what the formidable “murder weapon” that
was the Nazi gas chamber looked like; I expected to see a technical illustration
of that weapon and an explanation of its use. I noted that in some former
German concentration camps, since turned into theme parks, visitors were shown
a room said to be a “Nazi gas chamber” but, curiously, not the least scientific
evidence could be supplied to support that assertion, no results of any forensic
examination. In the early 1960s, on my first visit to the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (CDJC) in Paris, my
only question to those in charge had been: “Can you show me a photo of a Nazi
gas chamber?” They were unable to do so. Ditto at the Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington in 1994, and in a good number of other places. The general public
may be fooled with photos like that of the American politicians “visiting the
Dachau gas chamber” but no longer will anyone venture to employ the same procedure
when dealing with a researcher who knows his subject.
After several years of research
consisting in visits, readings, meetings with experts – for example, those of
the central laboratory of the Paris police, rue de Dantzig in the 15th
arrondissement or, in the United States – right from the beginning of my
investigation into the execution gas chambers of certain penitentiaries – I had
accumulated a considerable amount of information 1) on German gas chambers for disinfestation
using Zyklon B, a product whose main component was hydrocyanic acid, 2) on
American gas chambers for the execution of a single prisoner, also by means of hydrocyanic
acid. However, at the same period, I was obliged to admit that I still did not
know how, technically, those supposed Nazi gas chambers, used day and night to exterminate,
at Auschwitz for instance, hundreds or thousands of people at a time, could have
been made and could have worked. I did not succeed in finding anyone, in France
or abroad, to explain to me how the gassers and their helpers could have handled
the corpses without mortally contaminating themselves (hydrocyanic acid
penetrates the skin and stays there, whereas with airing out, forced
ventilation and still other means, it can be removed from clothes, shorn hair,
metallic objects or other things). According to a text that was presented as a
confession of Rudolf Höss, one of the three successive commandants of
Auschwitz, I remained puzzled and no one could explain the mysteries to me. For
example, how had the members of a Sonderkommando
or “special squad”, once the victims’ screaming stopped and a ventilation
device was turned on, been able to enter “sofort”
(immediately) what would have been a sea of hydrogen cyanide, and that while
eating and smoking, in other words, without even wearing a gas mask? Zyklon B
consisted of hydrocyanic acid on an inert porous base. Invented in 1922 and patented
in late 1926, it had the disadvantage of being explosive, ignitable by the
slightest spark, even from static electricity. To use it as we are told it was
used for the Auschwitz-I “gas chamber”, in proximity to a crematory oven heating
up, would have been sheer madness. It was I who, ultimately, discovered the building
plans of the crematorium at Auschwitz-I and those of crematoria II,III, IV and
V at Birkenau. They had been kept hidden since the end of the war. I found them
on March
19, 1976 in the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum. Thus
I can state, in knowledge of the facts, that it would have been impossible to make
2,000 persons – as asserted by R. Höss in the account he gave at Nuremberg on
April 15, 1946 – enter a space of 210 square metres (where, incidentally,
assuming it were possible after all, there would hardly have been any need of gas
to kill them, for they would simply have died of asphyxiation due to a rapid
depletion of oxygen). Never could the men of the Sonderkommando have set about, with all their might, the cyclopean
task of disentangling, in an atmosphere full of hydrocyanic acid, so many bodies
from one another and dragging each to a small lift connecting to the upper
floor and the oven room. I had learnt that, for a team of exterminators
carrying out the simple disinfestation of a house with Zyklon B, any physical effort was strictly prohibited,
since it would have accelerated the men’s breathing and so prevented the gas
mask filters from serving their purpose. The rules specified that at the end of
a building’s disinfestation, when it was time to open the windows to air out
the premises, one must not persist in trying to open a window that offered
resistance but instead go and open the others. (To those who claim, without any
evidence, that the Germans destroyed all their gas chambers, I retort: “In that
case, draw me the things which, according to you, the Germans destroyed”.)
The stunning
conclusion of this research: in nearly seventy years, neither the International
Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg (1945-1946) nor any of the numerous other
courts which have had to try cases of alleged crimes committed using gas
chambers (or gas vans) has ordered a single forensic examination. Better still:
at the “Auschwitz Trial” in Frankfurt, running from December 20, 1963 to August
20, 1965, an inspection of certain points of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was
held from December 14 to 16, 1964; one of the judges, Hotz, participated along
with four prosecutors; however, it appears that the five men dispensed with any
detailed inspection of the places where so many criminal gassings, followed by so
many cremations, were said to have occurred. How can it be? A huge show trial
had focused, twenty years after the war, on Auschwitz, capital of the greatest
crime in world history, and the judges-accusers made not the faintest effort to
inquire as to how such mass murder was first conceived, then perpetrated – and
all over a period of years? Never has anyone been able to provide me with a
copy of forensic examinations of the “crime of Auschwitz”. I have been
smothered with testimonies, stories, confessions, history books of which I have
imposed on myself the most scrupulous reading but, all told, only to discover
vague accounts defying the laws of physics or chemistry. One forensic
examination, and one only, would have sufficed.
The crematoria of Auschwitz or Birkenau
had at most, as I discovered in certain documents hidden since 1945, rooms called
Leichenhalle or Leichenkeller (depositories, at ground level or semi-interred, for
bodies) perfectly typical in their size and, above all, in their ventilation
system. In 1982 I also discovered that there had been a forensic examination of
the alleged gas chamber of the Struthof camp in Alsace, which I had visited in
1974 and which had looked to me a crude fake; I was later to learn that it was,
in part, the product of work carried out after the war by a firm in the town of
Saint-Michel-sur-Meurthe. Entrusted to Professor René Fabre, dean of the college
of pharmacy in Paris, the examination concluded, as of December 1, 1945, on the
absence of any trace whatsoever of hydrocyanic acid either 1) in the exhaust
chimney of the alleged gas chamber and the scrapings taken from them (X jars
and Y jars) or 2) in the corpses of the alleged Struthof gassing victims found
in Strasbourg civil hospital. René Fabre’s
report has disappeared from the French military justice archives but we know its findings thanks
to a paper in the file signed by three physicians who took part in the study: Drs
Simonin, Piedelièvre and Fourcade (“Whether
‘Holocaust by gas’ or ‘Holocaust by bullets’: no physical or forensic
evidence!”). The three were chagrined at the result reached by
Fabre but they had still been honest and scrupulous enough to report it.
Meanwhile, I had had to wait until
1978-1979 for the daily Le Monde to publish two
texts in which I demonstrated that the alleged Nazi gas
chambers were technically impossible. On February 21, 1979, the same newspaper
printed a “declaration”
signed by 34 historians retorting to me: “One must not ask oneself how, technically, such a mass murder was
possible; it was technically possible, since it happened”. This fine bit of
academic asininity was but an escape hatch allowing its authors to shirk their
duty and refuse any response to my arguments, which were mainly of a physical,
chemical and architectural order, but also documentary and historiographical.
However, since that date, a multitude of authors – historians, journalists –
have certainly tried to defend the thesis of the supposed Nazi gas chambers’
existence and operation but none has been able to answer my request, repeated a
hundred times: “Show me or draw me a
Nazi gas chamber!” Still recently, a big book of quite scholarly appearance
has been devoted to the alleged Nazi mass murders by poison gas, but in it
there is not to be found a single
representation of a gas chamber, not one technical illustration, not the shadow
of a concrete reply to my challenge. It is the second edition, revised and
corrected – released in 2012 –, of a book first published in 2011: Neue
Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas / Historische
Bedeutung, Technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, Berlin,
Metropol Verlag, xxxiv + 446 pages,
particularly dense. The principal authors are Günter Morsch and Bertrand Perz,
with the collaboration of Astrid Ley. To these three names should be added about
thirty others including, for example, Brigitte Bailer, Jean-Yves Camus, Barbara
Distel, Richard J. Evans and Robert Jan van Pelt. The title means: “New studies
on the National Socialist mass murders by poison gas / Historical significance,
technical evolution and revisionist denial”. But how can one devise the study
of a lethal weapon’s technical evolution without providing a single technical
illustration of that weapon? How can one respond to “revisionist denial”
without taking up its main challenge, which amounts to saying that the
essential weapon of the alleged crime is obviously, quite simply, impossible to
design and depict when one is aware, for example, of the unavoidable
complication of an American gas chamber for the execution of a lone person?
For, in an execution gassing, the difficulty lies not so much in killing another
without killing oneself as in going, after the execution, to take a cyanide-infused
body out of its seat and out of the chamber, without causing risk to anyone: a
difficulty which, as has been noted, the Germans and the Sonderkommando members, for their part, apparently surmounted thousands
of times every day. Let us repeat: to kill a crowd of people in a room with
hydrocyanic acid is dangerous but not impossible; to enter the room afterwards,
even with a gas mask, amid a host of cyanide-infused corpses and then proceed
to extricate and carry them, in the course of a few hours, so as to make way
for a new gassing of the same proportion, is in the domain of the impossible. The
reader will have understood: serial mass gassings are just another silly story (as Yehuda
Bauer has admitted in regard to what is abundantly said about “Wannsee”)
of the same kind as those about “Jewish soap”, “lampshades of human skin”,
extermination of the Jewish detainees at Treblinka by steam (official Nuremberg
document PS-3311), their extermination at Auschwitz by electricity and in blast
furnaces (the Soviet press in early February 1945), or, near Belzec, by
quicklime (Jan Karski). There is an endless list of nonsensical tales in the
manner of Elie
Wiesel or Father Patrick
Desbois, about “geysers of blood”, or a hand emerging from a
mass grave to grab a shovel, or systematic extermination under quilts or
pillows (“the Holocaust by suffocation”!). My own writings are not ignored in
this big book, since my name appears 33 times (and not only 12, as the index may
lead one to believe). “Mr Faurisson, you haunt my nights!” exclaimed in 1981, in
a Paris courtroom, Bernard Jouanneau, lawyer and friend of Robert Badinter.
Another time, in 1982, the same Jouanneau was to burst into sobs upon suddenly
realising that the evidence of the existence of Nazi gas chambers he had just
offered to the first chamber of the Paris court of appeal (presiding judge:
François Grégoire) “was not worth very much” (his own words, in a moment of
touching sincerity). I think I have also revealed to Raul Hilberg (an American
Jew) and to Robert Jan van Pelt (a Canadian Jew, his successor as historian of
“the Holocaust”) how they have failed, each at his end, in their offers of proof.
It is especially R. J. van Pelt who in the book in question takes charge of
giving me a reply. His lines of penance (p. 343-354), which are pathetic, are
essentially based on the writings of Jean-Claude Pressac, but van Pelt avoids
disclosing that their author disowned them on June 15, 1995 (a month after his
appearance in the XVIIth chamber of the Paris correctional court,
where barrister Eric Delcroix, aided by my information, had subjected him to
outright humiliation). Pressac went so far as to admit that the present version, “though triumphant”,
of the official history of the extermination of the Jews was “rotten” with too
many lies and doomed to “the wastebin of history” (quoted in my analysis of
May 5, 2000 entitled “Valérie
Igounet: ‘Histoire du négationnisme en France’”). But has not van
Pelt himself admitted – in December 2009 – that the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp,
where millions of pilgrims have gone on organised visits, contains, so to
speak, no “physical evidence” of what we “know” (sic) about “the Holocaust” (“A
case for letting nature take back Auschwitz”, Toronto Star, December 27, 2009)? Among
historians, the myth of the Nazi gas chambers is on its last legs. Instead of
trying to keep it alive artificially with the persistent clamour, spectacles, advertising,
repression, threats, blackmail, it would be better simply to bury it, as the
State of Israel finally decided to do with the body-corpse of Ariel Sharon.
In
conclusion, if there is a fact on which we revisionists ought to call the
attention of the layman, is it not this tacit agreement of all French or
foreign judicial systems never to demand, for 70 years, any criminological inspection
of the murder weapon, that is, an unprecedented weapon that enabled the killing,
in industrial proportions, of millions of victims? With one exception, that of
Struthof, for which, as if by intent, a forensic examination produced a
completely negative finding: no gas chambers, no gassed.
At bottom, all judicial systems have
followed the example of the instance called International Military Tribunal
which, in 1945-1946, assumed the right, as a court of “justice” set up by the winners
of the recent war, to try its own vanquished. Its organiser, the American
prosecutor Jackson, had declared with a fine cynicism: “As a military tribunal,
this Court is a continuation of the war effort of the Allied nations”, IMT,
vol. XIX, p 398 – 26 July 1946). Articles 19 and 21 of its Charter read: “The
Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence [...]. The Tribunal
shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial
notice thereof”. Thus did allegations advanced without any proof by Allied
propaganda receive the formal endorsement of a strictly Allied – and not “international”
– tribunal. Better still, in accordance with the next and closing sentence of
Article 21, a whole series of reports drafted by the winners on crimes imputed
by themselves to the defeated were to be automatically received as authentic
evidence, and no one would be allowed to challenge them! Such were the effects
of that Tribunal’s “judicial notice”. And forty-five years afterwards there was
to be something even more abhorrent in the domain of law: in France, “homeland
of human rights”, Laurent Fabius and his people got a Socialist-Communist
majority in Parliament to pass (and to have published in the Journal
Officiel de la République Française on July 14, 1990, for the 201st
anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, bastion of the privilege-based
regime of another time) a law forbidding, on pain of fine and imprisonment, any
dispute (in whatsoever manner – including ironic expressions, as case law was
to specify) of the reality of those crimes committed especially against Jews, a
reality, however, never described or established by any technical or forensic
police service. (On this point one will be wary of old Polish examinations attesting
the existence of traces of hydrogen cyanide in hair or in metal objects – all
disinfected –, or of an examination
undertaken at quite a late date – around 1990 – in an attempt to reply
to the “Leuchter
Report” of 1988; that study, done by the Jan Sehn Institute
in Cracow, proved embarrassing for the Poles and valuable for the
revisionists). And I shall not expand here on the saga, in Vienna, of the
forensic examination by Gerhard Jagschitz, or that by Walter Lüftl; the reader
may look up those two names in my Ecrits révisionnistes in order to
have an idea of the behaviour of certain Austrian judges who, seized with
daring, ordered an examination and then, taking fright, capitulated. The name
of a certain captain Fribourg, of the French army, and his “beginning of a
study” of the alleged Dachau gas chamber may also be found.
The lie of the Nazi gas chambers
will go down one day in history as one of the most fabulous impostures of all
time. This lie has developed slowly, without plot or conspiracy, and without
the general public’s becoming aware of it. If the good people have been so
badly taken in, it has in a way been with their consent and cooperation. They
have believed, then wanted to believe, then in the end wanted to have others believe and are
now legally bound to believe. All
this has happened in the same way as when a government wants to launch a
peaceful population into a military campaign. Such a government has no need of
either plot or conspiracy. Making a show of its sentiments of goodness, it will
appeal, thanks to the servility of a “free press”, to notions of rights, of justice
and of virtue precisely because it is about to violate cynically rights,
justice and virtue. The people will start believing the government, then go
along with it and, finally, run with it. Year in, year out, they will find
themselves at war, armed from head to foot. And they will readily fight “the evil
beast”, against which anything goes, starting with the right to lie and hate,
then to plunder, rape, kill by hanging and, supreme reward, the right of their
establishment to write the history of it all as it sees fit. Spontaneously they
will get into the habit of hating, lying, marching in step. And those who try
to make them see reason will no longer be anything but “expert liars, gangsters
of history”, diabolical “Nazis” quite simply. The lesson has been learnt well.
But now it is going to have to be unlearnt, reviewed, corrected. We are at the
dawn of the year 2015. Let’s draw up the death certificate of the historical
lie of the magical Nazi gas chambers. In a return to respect for accuracy in
history, let’s promise ourselves that this gigantic imposture will be “the very
last”. Until the next one, of course. For – let’s take care not to forget it –
Céline, who, as early as 1950, denounced “the magical gas chamber” and stated: “It
was everything, the gas chamber. It allowed EVERYTHING!”, added nevertheless:
“They’ll have to find something else, oh! my mind’s at rest”. In 1932, in
Journey to the End of the Night, he warned: “The frenzy of lying and
believing is catching like the itch”. Frailty of man! Where can he have got this
facility, then this ardour to believe in a diabolical weapon that he is not
even allowed to see? To aim straight, one must aim low. So then, let’s aim low!
Let’s not have recourse to mass psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology or any
other science! I wonder whether a simple point of vocabulary (in French with
the curious expression “chambre à gaz”,
in English with “gas chamber”, in German with “Gaskammer” and in other languages as well) would explain the ease
and appetite with which such a story has been swallowed. It so happens that the
French term “chambre à gaz” is based
on that of “chambre à coucher” (bedroom).
To name the instrument that administers death, a combination of words that
implicitly evoke rest and sleep has been chosen. Why, then, rack one’s brains
wondering what that instrument looked like and how it worked? A gas chamber, in
the minds of the simple, is simple: it must be like a bedroom or any room, but
with gas inside. A man is put in it; some time later, the individual is found
dead and it only remains to take away the body; as for the gas, it has dissipated.
There is no need to undertake a scientific investigation: proof of a gassing is
not to be sought in a forensic examination, for testimonies will suffice. After
all, hadn’t the Germans already distinguished themselves during the First World
War by their use of poison gas? One of
the most brazen lies in history, the alleged Nazi gas chambers, of course originated
in hatred and in the inveterate habit of lying but it has thrived on naivety. In perfectly good faith, the good people
were outraged at that “Nazi horror”. In doing so, they lent a hand to a
gigantic slander, a criminal lie of worldwide proportions. Sancta simplicitas! Blessed ingenuousness! Historians are beginning
to show dissent against this mix of lies and candour, whilst the third post-war
generation manifests annoyance at the continuing indoctrination. And the
Internet is there. The conditions for a reawakening of minds seem to exist. The
Jews, as a whole, and the Israelis would have been well advised to listen to
the founder of Yad Vashem, Prof. Ben Zion Dinur, born Dinaburg. Some Jews, such
as Josef Ginzburg (aka Joseph G. Burg), Gilad Atzmon and Paul Eisen have done
so. They deserve our esteem. But, at this moment, our thoughts must go first to
the sizeable cohort of revisionists humiliated, insulted, scorned, beaten,
driven to ruin, suicide, sentenced to imprisonment and sometimes even forced
into dishonour. And to begin with, our thoughts must go to the very first of
them: the Frenchmen Maurice Bardèche, author of Nuremberg
or the Promised Land (1948), and Paul Rassinier, author
of Le
Mensonge d’Ulysse (1950, published in English under the title The Holocaust Story and the
Lies of Ulysses).
Practical conclusion: from now on, each
time an opponent of revisionism takes the liberty of invoking another testimony
in support of the existence of the alleged Nazi gas chambers, let’s ask him to show
us instead a forensic study of the murder weapon, the weapon of the crime of
all crimes. Each time, on site at Auschwitz-I, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Struthof
or elsewhere, that a guide has the nerve to state: “This place is (or: was) a
gas chamber in which the Nazis killed Jews”, let’s demand, instead of testimonies,
proof, one proof only (forensic proof supplied by the appropriate police
services), in support of that accusation. To end, in the face of the judges who
try us, let’s launch the question: “What right has anyone to threaten with the
scourge of the law a person who refuses to believe in the existence of a
prodigious weapon which, in seventy years, no one has ever been able to
describe or show, not even with an explanatory drawing?” There can be no right
to convict a man who asked the French University how exactly such
slaughterhouses were designed and how they functioned, and to whom thirty-four
members of that university pitifully replied with the asinine words quoted
above: “One must not ask oneself how, technically, such a mass murder was
possible; it was technically possible, since it happened”.
One proof, finally,
or... let the imposters keep quiet!
Supplement No. 1: To end, “the killer question!”
If the
innocuous body depositories of the crematoria were indeed turned respectively
into undressing rooms in one place and gas chambers in another, where was it
possible, day by day, to store the bodies of those who had died of natural
causes? Let someone show me that area, either on the spot or in the building
plans that were kept hidden until I myself discovered them! Where were the
bodies put when, particularly, typhus epidemics were wreaking havoc among the
detainees, the Polish and German civilians, the German soldiers and doctors in
the hospital facilities reserved either for inmates or for soldiers (such as,
for example, the SS Revier, situated a
few paces away from the Auschwitz-I crematorium)? Let’s recall that those
depositories could be of three kinds: 1) for bodies not yet placed in coffins;
2) for bodies in coffins; 3) for infected bodies (with reinforced isolation of
the room), which was the case in the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg camp. Will
someone have us believe that, equipped as they were with an undressing room and
a gas chamber, those “Nazi” crematoria simply lacked any body depositories? Crematoria without depositories? Only in
the realm of fiction!
Supplement 2: The alleged homicidal gas chamber of Auschwitz-I
(“Everything in it is false”, as Eric Conan ended up admitting)
Below,
the first photo is that of the door of a genuine gas chamber for the execution of one person alone by
hydrocyanic acid (HCN). This is an American gas chamber built according to the
technique developed in the 1930s and ’40s. I examined it in September 1979 at
Baltimore penitentiary. For more photos and all pertinent explanations (in
French), see http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.fr/1980/02/chambre-gaz-du-penitencier-de-baltimore.html.
The
next two photos show one of the doors of an alleged gas chamber for the killing of a crowd of people with
the same gas. This is the “gas chamber” of Auschwitz-I (main camp), thus far visited
by millions of tourists. The door opens inwards, which constitutes an absurdity
since the corpses strewn about on the floor inside would have prevented it from
opening. The same door, closed, reveals two more absurdities, since gas would
have escaped through both the keyhole and the easily breakable glass pane, thus
reaching the nearby SS infirmary. In 1995 the orthodox
historian Eric Conan wrote that I was right about the impressive set of “falsifications”
I had discovered in 1975-1976. Numerous others have, in the past, denounced these
falsifications. WHY ARE THEY STILL PASSED OVER IN SILENCE TODAY?
These
three photos thus invite the comparison of a door of a real execution gas
chamber (located in Baltimore) on the one hand, with a door, shown first open
and then closed, of an alleged execution gas chamber (located at Auschwitz-I)
on the other.
A real
execution gas chamber door is of steel, like all the rest of the construction,
and its pane is of Herculite glass. To avoid letting the hydrocyanic acid erode
the door joints and so, eventually, escape and spread outside, a vacuum must be
created in the chamber. But creating a vacuum can cause a general collapse.
Hence the extreme and indispensable robustness of the whole. The American
humanitarians who advocated execution by gas (instead of execution by shooting,
hanging or electricity, considered too cruel) imagined that nothing would be simpler
than the use of gas. They were to be disenchanted. It took American engineers
seven years (1917-1924) to develop their first homicidal gas chamber. And the
first execution, in 1924 in Carson City (Nevada), nearly resulted in disaster
from the significant presence of lethal gas in the prison corridors after the
death of the condemned man.
Finally,
a series of twelve photos showing real execution gas chambers (in the United States)
with their doors and, at the bottom, four photos showing the doors of a false
gas chamber (at Auschwitz).
