In the United States a Jewish Professor Takes the Revisionist Path

Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History by Arno J. Mayer, New York: Pantheon, 1988, Hb., 492 pages, $27.95, ISBN 0-394-57154-1.

Reviewed by Robert Faurisson, “In the United States a Jewish Professor Takes the Revisionist Path” The Journal of Historical Review, Volume Nine, Number Three, Fall, 1989, p. 375-379 (slightly modified on December 15, 2010)

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In May 1989, Newsweek described a “storm over a new book” devoted to “the extermination of the Jews” during the Second World War (issue of May 15, p. 64-65 [Europe edition p. 57]). The book is Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s Friend

Its author, Arno J. Mayer, was born in 1926 into a Jewish family in Luxembourg. He is a professor of European history at Princeton University. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, in his 1987 book Les Assassins de la Mémoire (Editions de la Découverte), called Mayer his “colleague and friend” (page 203, note 21) and mentioned his name nine times. For example, he wrote: “I owe very much to Arno J. Mayer, whom I warmly thank” (page 216, note 12). He said that he had read the manuscript of a book that Mayer was going to publish in 1988, probably bearing the title The Final Solution in History.

It seems that in 1982 the American professor infuriated an Israeli colleague during an international conference at the Sorbonne presided over by François Furet and Raymond Aron (29 June to 2 July). At that time Mayer undoubtedly had the courage to express some reservations about the dogma of the Holocaust and the gas chambers.

In any event, Mayer’s own conference paper did not appear in the book L’Allemagne nazie et le génocide juif, (Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1985, 607 pages) that was published three years later and was supposed to contain the results of that conference. We were thus kept in ignorance of Mayer’s thesis from 1982 to 1988.

According to the author, he submitted the penultimate draft of his entire manuscript, except for the prologue, to three of the leading people in the field of Jewish history: Raul Hilberg (United States), Hans Mommsen (West Germany), and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (France) (see page xiv). On the cover of Mayer’s book one can read the following appreciation of the book: “The most important effort ever made by a historian to think critically about the unthinkable (Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris).”

Sources for the Gas Chambers Are Rare and Unreliable

Arno J. Mayer says that he believes there was a policy to exterminate the Jews and that the homicidal gas chambers were a reality, but at the same time he writes pages of text and makes observations with which many revisionists would agree. Furthermore, in his bibliography he even mentions two revisionist works: The Lie of Ulysses by Paul Rassinier (in the edition published by La Vieille Taupe in Paris in 1979), as well as Arthur Butz’s masterly study, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

According to Mayer there is no trace of any plan for the extermination of the Jews and, as regards the gas chambers, he includes, in his chapter on Auschwitz, the following sentence, which is quite astonishing coming from a friend of Pierre Vidal-Naquet: “Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable” (p. 362). He adds:

Most of what is known (on this subject) is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity (pages 362-363).

There is no better way of saying that people must be suspicious of the so-called statements, confessions, and eye-witness accounts that the exterminationists so shamelessly make use of.

Then the author adds, regarding the above-mentioned sources: “there is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources” (p. 363). One would like to see Arno J. Mayer review some of these contradictions, ambiguities and errors; no doubt he is thinking about the “sources” that the same exterminationists have used for more than forty years.

He mentions the “gassings” at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka but those references are fleeting and are swept up in a flood of considerations foreign to the subject.

Generally speaking, throughout the book the central subject, the supposed genocide of the Jews (here called “Judeocide”) and the supposed gas chambers, is buried under a mass of digressions on such things as the anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages and Hitler’s campaign in Russia. This is what professors complaisantly call the study of the context; I would prefer a study of the text or, in other words, of the subject.

More Dead from Natural than Unnatural Causes

Mayer also takes the revisionist path when he insistently emphasizes the ravages caused in the Jewish communities of the East and in the concentration camps by typhus epidemics. People too often forget that one of the most important motives for the Germans when they created the ghettos was their fear of seeing typhus spread almost everywhere in that part of the world, which was already suffering from war. Even as he is vague on the subject of the supposed “gassings,” Mayer is precise and detailed on typhus. During the period from 1942 to 1945 –  in other words at the very time when, according to exterminationist historians, the fantastic “gassings” supposedly took place – he estimates (unfortunately without furnishing any figures) that more Jews were killed by so-called natural causes (starvation, disease, sickness and overwork) than by “unnatural” causes (executions of all kinds). He specifically says that this was true “certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall” (p. 365). That remark has not gone unnoticed and it has provided fuel for a lively controversy.

Elsewhere, Mayer interprets, then eliminates one by one all the documents or arguments which up until now have been used to make people believe that the Germans practiced a policy of exterminating the Jews (the Göring-to-Heydrich letter of July 1941, the Wannsee Conference transcript, the conduct of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, Himmler’s speeches at Posen in October 1943, etc.).

Things that have been presented to us as definitely established facts are often described by Mayer as being uncertain or untrustworthy. The numbers and the statistics, which have finally achieved, in a sense, an official, sacred character, are greeted by Mayer with great mistrust.

Differentiating between, on the one hand, Jewish “memory” – not to say Jewish legend or mythology – and, on the other hand, “history,” Mayer deplores the existence of a cult of memory which, with the distortions that it imposes on historical reality, has become “too sectarian” (p. 16). Memory, he thinks, tends to “rigidify” while history calls for “revision” (p. 18). Historians today have “the urgent task of thinking, critically, about the unthinkable” (p. 363).

Two Suggestions for the Future

Regarding the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Mayer writes:

The Soviet archives may well yield significant clues and evidence when they are opened. In addition, excavations at the killing sites and in their immediate environs may also bring forth new information (Ibid.).

I would remind the reader that those are two revisionist ideas for which I have personally fought. Early in 1988, during the second trial of Ernst Zündel in Toronto, I was able, working through defence attorney Doug Christie, to get one of the prosecution experts, Charles Biedermann, to confirm that the Auschwitz “death registers,” left intact by the Germans, are in fact to be found, for the most part, in Moscow.

The scandal is that these registers are being kept hidden in the same way as the few volumes that remain at the Auschwitz Museum are concealed. The Americans, British, French, Germans, and Israelis cooperate in hiding these documents and even refuse to reveal how many names are contained in the several registers at the Auschwitz Museum, photocopies of which are in the possession of the International Tracing Service at Arolsen (an organ of the International Committee of the Red Cross located in West Germany, but under the strict surveillance of the Allies and of the Israelis for fear of an intrusion by revisionist researchers). Would Mayer agree in demanding the opening of the “secret file”?

As regards excavations, here again the revisionists have taken the initiative in spite of prohibitions against it. I refer to that in my preface to the “Leuchter Report,” named after the American engineer who studied the so-called homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek ("The End of a Myth", Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1988, p. 376-380).

In February 1989, in Los Angeles, during the 9th International Conference of our Institute for Historical Review, Fred Leuchter asked for the creation of an international commission of inquiry into the homicidal gas chambers supposedly used by the Germans. Would Mayer break with his exterminationist colleagues by responding to the “Leuchter Report” with something other than an embarrassed silence or a hoax of the kind resorted to by Serge Klarsfeld and his disciples? What does Mayer think about an international commission of experts?

Progress in Ten Years

Ten years ago, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Léon Poliakov took the initiative in drawing up a public statement directed against me which said that, because of the abundance and reliability of the evidence, “there is not, there cannot be any debate about the existence of the gas chambers” (Le Monde, 21 February 1979, p. 23). Among the 34 signatories of that declaration were Philippe Ariès, Fernand Braudel, Pierre Chaunu, François Furet, Jacques Le Goff and Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie. But René Rémond refused to sign it.

We had to wait until 1988 for an established historian like Arno Mayer to say, in his chapter on Auschwitz, that sources for the study of the gas chambers, far from being abundant and reliable, as people asserted, are only rare and unreliable. This is just a single example of the significant progress that Historical Revisionism has made in the scholarly community.

The Jewish professor from Princeton is going to learn the cost of scrutinizing the taboo of the century. He has done so with the greatest caution, without being aggressive or provocative, but he has already unleashed, along with some favourable reactions in the American press, some real attacks. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen of Harvard, in an article entitled “False Witness,” accuses Mayer of falsification, distortion, revisionism, and of having “produced a mockery of memory and history” (The New Republic, 17 April 1989, p. 39-44).

That sounds familiar. Fortunately for Professor Mayer, he lives in the United States and not in France, like Faurisson, in Sweden, like Felderer, or in Germany, like Stäglich [1].

May 24, 1989
(slightly modified on December 15, 2010)

[1] Mayer’s book, more than 500 pages long, does not contain a single footnote. Also, many of his quotations can only be verified by personal research on the part of the reader. At the beginning of 1981, Arno J. Mayer was still so hostile towards revisionism that he wrote:

Regrettably, Faurisson’s new book [Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire, 1980] has an unconscionable preface by Noam Chomsky that is being used to legitimate Faurisson as a bona fide scholar of the Holocaust. As an unqualified civil libertarian Chomsky claims – disingenuously – that he has not read the book he is prefacing! (Democracy, April 1981, p. 68).

The End of a Myth: Foreword to the "Leuchter Report"

Fred A. Leuchter, 45, is an engineer living near Boston who has specialised in the design of execution hardware used in prisons throughout the United States. One of his major projects was the design of a new gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri.

In January of 1988, I was in Toronto, Canada, assisting in the defence of Mr Ernst Zündel, a German-Canadian who was on trial for spreading false news by publishing Did Six Million Really Die?, a booklet which challenged the prevailing view that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II, primarily through the use of gas chambers using hydrocyanic gas (Zyklon B gas).

Ernst Zündel had been previously tried on the same charge in 1985. The trial lasted seven weeks and ended with a conviction and a sentence of fifteen months' imprisonment. In January 1987, the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned the judgment because of grave errors in law and ordered that a new trial be held. The retrial began on January 18, 1988 and at the time of this writing is still proceeding.

My initial conversations with Fred Leuchter took place in Boston on the 3rd and 4th of February, 1988. I was impressed with the conciseness of his answers to my questions and by his ability to explain every detail of gassing procedures. He confirmed to me the particularly dangerous nature of an execution by hydrocyanic gas.

Executions using this gas were carried out for the first time in the United States in 1924, but as late as 1988 major difficulties still existed in the construction of execution gas chambers, including the problem of leakage. I noticed that Fred Leuchter did not question the standard notion of the Holocaust.

After my return from Boston to Toronto and after I had reported to Ernst Zündel on my discussions with Fred Leuchter, Mr Zündel decided to ask the latter to prepare an expert opinion on the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek.

Mr Leuchter accepted the assignment after a weekend in Toronto reviewing wartime aerial photographs of the camps, plans of the crematoria and alleged gas chambers, documents on Zyklon B and slides taken of the sites in the 1970's by the Swedish researcher Ditlieb Felderer.

On February 25, 1988, Mr Leuchter left for Poland together with his wife Carolyn, his draughtsman Howard Miller, cinematographer Jurgen Neumann, and Polish language interpreter, Tijudar Rudolph. They returned eight days later on March 3rd.

Upon return, Fred Leuchter wrote his report of 192 pages including appendices. His conclusions were clear: the evidence was overwhelming that there were no execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek and that the alleged gas chambers at these sites could not have been, then or now, utilised or seriously considered to function as execution gas chambers.

On the 20th and 21st of April, 1988, he stood in the witness stand in Toronto. At first, he replied to the questions put to him by Mr Zündel's defence lawyer, Douglas H. Christie, the latter assisted by Keltie Zubko and Barbara Kulaszka. Mr Leuchter then faced cross-examination by the Crown Prosecutor, John Pearson, an official who had been assisted throughout the trial by another Crown Attorney, a law clerk and frequent consultations with Jewish advisors sitting immediately behind him in the courtroom.

The examination and cross-examination took place in the presence of a judge and an eleven-member jury. In the courtroom the atmosphere was one of extreme tension. I was sitting beside a number of revisionist experts, including Dr William Lindsey, chief research chemist for Dupont Corporation before his retirement in 1985. Everyone in the courtroom, regardless of his or her own personal viewpoints on the topic under examination, was acutely aware, I think, of participating in a historical event. The myth of the gas chambers was ending.

The previous day, the director of the Missouri State Penitentiary, Bill Armontrout, had given testimony explaining the procedures and practical operation of a cyanide gas chamber. For every attentive listener it was revealed that if it was so difficult to execute a single person in this manner, then the alleged execution of hundreds of thousands of persons by the Germans using Zyklon B would equal the problem of trying to square the circle.

Following Fred Leuchter on the witness stand came Dr James Roth, Ph.D. (Cornell University), Manager of Alpha Analytical Laboratories in Ashland, Massachusetts. Dr Roth reported on the analysis of samples taken from the walls, floors, ceilings and other structures inside the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz I and Birkenau. These tests revealed either no detection of traces of cyanide or extremely low levels. The only exception was the control sample number 32 taken from Delousing Facility Number 1 at Birkenau. These results were produced in the form of a graph in Appendix I of the Report and displayed to the jury on an overhead projector. the difference in detected cyanide between the delousing facility on one hand and the alleged gas chambers on the other, was spectacular. The extremely low levels of cyanide found in some crematoria was likely, in my opinion, to have resulted from disinfection of the premises during the war.

I think I was the first to point out that all studies of alleged German execution gas chambers using Zyklon B should commence with a study of the American execution gas chambers. As early as 1977, with the help of an American friend, Eugene C. Brugger, a lawyer in New York, I began an inquiry in this area. During this research, I obtained information from six American penitentiaries, those of San Quentin, California; Jefferson City, Missouri; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Raleigh, North Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland and Florence, Arizona. I was compelled to conclude at that time that only an expert in American gas chamber technology could finally determine whether the alleged German execution gas chambers were capable of having been used as described in Holocaust literature.

During the next several years, my articles on German gas chambers always referred to the American gas chambers. These articles included "La Rumeur d'Auschwitz ou Le Problème des chambres à gaz" (The Rumour of Auschwitz or the Problem of the Gas Chambers; see http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.com/2009/09/three-letters-from-professor-faurisson.html), published on the 29th of December, 1978 in the French daily Le Monde, and a long interview published in August 1979 in the Italian periodical Storia Illustrata. I visited the gas chamber in Baltimore in September 1979 and obtained eight photographs of the chamber and additional documentation. Then, during a meeting held in New York under the chairmanship of Fritz Berg, I showed the "Gas Chamber Procedure Check Sheet" of the Baltimore penitentiary and discussed its implications. In 1980, in the first issue of the newly-created Journal of Historical review, I published an article entitled "The Mechanics of Gassing", in which I described in some detail the gas chamber procedures used in the United States. In the same year, I published, in Serge Thion's Vérité Historique ou Vérité Politique?, the eight photographs of the Baltimore gas chamber (see http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.com/1980/02/chambre-gaz-du-penitencier-de-baltimore.html). My video entitled Le Problème des chambres à gaz (The Problem of the Gas Chambers), made in 1981, began with an analysis of the American gas chambers. In 1983, I prepared for the Institute for Historical Review, Los Angeles, a book in English on the Holocaust controversy which was to include, for the first time, a list of the questions put to the penitentiary wardens and their answers. The book, however, was never published: on July 4, 1984, American Independence Day, the archives of the Institute were destroyed by arson. That fire, for all intents and purposes, destroyed the financial viability of the Institute and a number of projects, including that of my book, were abandoned.

The Holocaust has appeared to be a subject of enormous proportions. But this "giant", as Dr Arthur Butz has pointed out in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, is a giant with feet of clay. To see the feet of clay, one need only go to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland. In the words of Dr Wilhelm Stäglich, "the extermination thesis stands or falls with the allegation that Auschwitz was a 'death factory'." And for me, the whole mystery of Auschwitz is, in turn, concentrated on the 65 square metres of the alleged gas chamber of Auschwitz I and on the 210 square metres of an alleged gas chamber of Birkenau. These 275 square metres should have been forensically examined immediately after the war by the Allies, but no such examination was ever carried out then or since. The Polish examining magistrate, Jan Sehn, ordered some forensic examinations at Auschwitz but not of the alleged execution gas chambers themselves.

Research by revisionists has shown that the places alleged to have been execution gas chambers could not have been used for such a purpose. Ditlieb Felderer published photographs indicating the flimsy construction of vents and doors to the gas chambers and the lack of Prussian blue stains on the walls. I myself had discovered, on March 19, 1976, in the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum (archives which are well-guarded by the Communist officials), the plans of these alleged gas chambers and was the first to publish them in various books and articles (see http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.com/2010/09/look-back-at-my-discovery-on-march-19.html). Those plans were also shown at the first convention of the Institute for Historical Review in Los Angeles in 1979, when Mr Zündel was present. In reality, these alleged gas chambers had been mortuaries or, as indicated on the plans, "Leichenhalle" for Krema I (later transformed into an air-raid shelter) and "Leichenkeller" for Krema II.

Nevertheless, in order to obtain an entirely scientific confirmation of what simple common sense compelled us to see and what revisionist research work and documents had revealed, it was necessary to look for an American gas chamber specialist. I desperately tried to find such a specialist, but frankly, I had little hope of finding a man who was not only an expert in gas chamber technology, but also one courageous enough to carry out such an investigation in a Communist country and to publish the results if ever they confirmed revisionist conclusions. Fortunately, I was wrong.

Fred Leuchter was this specialist. He went to Poland, conducted the forensic examination, wrote his report and testified in a Canadian court on behalf of Mr Zündel. In so doing, he has quietly entered history.

Fred Leuchter is a modest but quietly determined man who speaks precisely. He would be an excellent professor and has the real gift of making people understand the intricacies of any difficult problem. When I asked him whether or not he was afraid of any dangerous consequences, he replied, "A fact is a fact." Upon reading the Leuchter Report, David Irving, the famous British historian, said on April 22nd, 1988 during his testimony in Toronto that it was a "shattering" document which would become essential for any future historian writing on the Second World War.

Without Ernst Zündel, almost nothing of what has now transpired would have been conceivable. He sacrifices everything in his search for historical accuracy and lives under difficult conditions, facing influential and powerful enemies. The pressure on him is permanent and takes the most unexpected and, sometimes, the most vicious forms. But he has a strong personality and charisma. He knows how to analyze any given situation, to evaluate the ratio of forces, to turn adversity into advantage. From all parts of the world he attracts and mobilises competent people. He is a profound man, a genius who combines common sense with a keen understanding of people and situations.

He may once again go to prison for his research and beliefs or be threatened with deportation. All that is possible. Anything may happen when there is an intellectual crisis and a realignment of historical concepts of such a dimension. Revisionism is the great intellectual adventure at the end of this century. Whatever happens, Ernst Zündel is already the victor. He is the pacifist-activist who has achieved this victory through the powers of reason and persuasion.

Toronto, April 23, 1988 

P.S. Ernst Zündel was found guilty by the jury on May 11, 1988 of knowingly spreading false news about the Holocaust. He was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment and was granted bail after signing a gag order, promising not to write or speak about the "Holocaust" until the end of his appeal proceedings. He thus joined Galileo.

P.S.S. The Supreme Court of Canada, on August 27, 1992, overturned the conviction of Ernst Zündel and declared the law under which he was dragged through the courts of Canada for nine years unconstitutional. Canada has refused to apologise to Ernst Zündel for his ordeal, and has turned down his request for compensation for his legal costs etc.


[article first published in The Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1988]