On
May 13, 1988, Ernst Zündel was sentenced by Judge Ronald Thomas of the District
Court of Ontario, in Toronto, to nine months in prison for having distributed a
Revisionist booklet that is now 14 years old: Did Six Million Really Die?
Ernst
Zündel lives in Toronto where, up until a few years ago, he worked as a graphic
artist and advertising man. He is now 49 years old. A native of Germany, he has
kept his German citizenship. His life has known serious upsets from the day
when, in about 1981, he began to distribute Did Six Million Really Die?,
a Revisionist booklet by Richard Harwood. The booklet was first published in
1974 in Great Britain where, a year later, it was the focus of a lengthy
controversy in the literary journal Books and Bookmen. At the
instigation of the Jewish community of South Africa, it was later banned in
that country.
In
Canada, during an earlier trial in 1985, Zündel had been sentenced to 15 months
in prison. That sentence was thrown out in 1987. A new trial began on January
18, 1988. I participated in the preparations for it and in the unfolding of
those judicial proceedings. I devoted thousands of hours to the defense of
Ernst Zündel.
François
Duprat: A Precursor
In
1967, François Duprat published an article on "The Mystery of the Gas
Chambers" (Défense de l'Occident, June 1967, pp. 30-33). He later
became interested in the Harwood booklet and became actively involved in its
distribution. On March 18, 1978, he was killed by assassins armed with weapons
too complex not to belong to an intelligence service. Responsibility for the
assassination was claimed by a "Remembrance Commando" and by a
"Jewish Revolutionary Group" (Le Monde, March 23, 1978, p. 7).
Patrice Chairoff had published Duprat's home address in the Dossier
Néo-Nazisme. He justified the assassination in the pages of Le Monde
(April 26, 1978, p. 9) by citing the victim's Revisionism: "François
Duprat is responsible. There are some responsibilities that kill." In Le
Droit de vivre, the publication of the LICRA (International League Against
Racism and Anti-Semitism), Jean Pierre-Bloch expressed an ambiguous position:
he criticized the crime but, at the same time, he let it be understood that he
had no pity for those who, inspired by the victim, would start out on the
Revisionist path (Le Monde, May 7-8, 1978).
Pierre
Viansson-Ponté
Eight
months before Duprat's assassination, journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté had
launched a virulent attack against the Harwood pamphlet. His chronicle was
entitled: "Le Mensonge" (The Lie), (Le Monde, July 17-18,
1978, p. 13). It was reprinted with an approving commentary in Le Droit de
vivre. Six months after the assassination, Viansson-Ponté took up the
attack once more in "Le Mensonge" (suite) (The Lie-Continued) (Le
Monde, September 34, 1978, p.9). He passed over the assassination of Duprat
in silence, made public the names and home towns of three Revisionist readers,
and called for legal repression against Revisionism.
Sabina
Citron Versus Ernst Zündel
In
1984, Sabina Citron, head of the Holocaust Remembrance Association, stirred up
violent demonstrations against Ernst Zündel in Canada. An attack was made on
Zündel's home. The Canadian postal service, treating Revisionism the way it
treats pornography, refused him all service and all right to receive mail.
Zündel only recovered his postal rights after a year of judicial procedures. In
the meantime, his business has failed. At the instigation of Sabina Citron, the
Attorney General of Ontario filed a complaint against Zündel for publishing a
"false statement, tale or news." The charge was based on the
following reasoning: the defendant had abused his right to freedom of
expression; by distributing the Harwood pamphlet, he was spreading information
that he knew was false; in fact, he could not fail to be aware that the
"genocide of the Jews" and the "gas chambers" were an
established fact. Zündel was also charged with publishing an allegedly
"false" letter, which he had written himself.
The
First Trial (1985)
The
first trial lasted seven weeks. The jury found Zündel not guilty regarding the
letter he had himself written but guilty of distributing the Harwood booklet.
He was sentenced by Judge Hugh Locke to 15 months in prison. The German
consulate in Toronto confiscated his passport and the West German government
prepared a deportation action against him. In Germany itself, West German
authorities had already carried out a series of large-scale police raids on the
houses of all his German correspondents. In 1987, the United States forbade him
entry to its territory. But in spite of all that, Zündel had won a media
victory: day after day, for seven weeks, the entire English- speaking Canadian
media covered the trial, with its spectacular revelations. The public learned
that the Revisionists had first class documentation and arguments, while the exterminationists were in desperate straits.
Their
Expert: Raul Hilberg
The
prosecution expert in the first trial was Raul Hilberg, an American professor
of Jewish descent and author of the standard reference work, The Destruction
of the European Jews (1961), which Paul Rassinier discussed in Le Drame
des Juifs européens (The Drama of the European Jews). Hilberg began his
testimony by explaining, without interruption, his theory about the
extermination of the Jews. He was then cross-examined by Zündel's lawyer,
Douglas Christie, who was assisted by Keltie Zubko and myself. Right from the
start it was clear that Hilberg, who was the world's leading authority on the
Holocaust, had never examined a single concentration camp, not even Auschwitz.
He had still not examined any camp in 1985 when he announced the imminent
appearance of a new edition of his main work in three volumes, revised,
corrected and augmented. Although he did visit Auschwitz in 1979 for a single
day as part of a ceremonial appearance, he did not bother to examine either the
buildings or the archives. In his entire life he has never seen a "gas
chamber," either in its original condition or in ruins. (For a historian,
even ruins can tell tales). On the stand he was forced to admit that there had
never been a plan, a central organization, a budget or supervision for what he
called the policy of the extermination of the Jews. He also had to admit that
since 1945 the Allies have never carried out an expert study of "the
weapon of the crime," that is to say of a homicidal gas chamber. No
autopsy report has established that even one inmate was ever killed by poison
gas.
Hilberg
said that Hitler gave orders for the extermination of the Jews, and that
Himmler gave an order to halt the extermination on November 25, 1944 (such
detail!). But Hilberg could not produce these orders. The defense asked him if
he still maintained the existence of the Hitler orders in the new edition of
his book. He dared to answer yes. He thereby lied and even committed perjury.
In the new edition of his work (with a preface dated September 1984), Hilberg
systematically deleted any mention of an order by Hitler. (In this regard, see
the review by Christopher Browning, "The Revised Hilberg," Simon
Wiesenthal Center Annual, 1986, p. 294). When he was asked by the defense
to explain how the Germans had been able to carry out an undertaking as
enormous as the extermination of millions of Jews without any kind of plan,
without any central agency, without any blueprint or budget, Hilberg replied
that in the various Nazi agencies there had been "an incredible meeting of
minds, a consensus mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy".
Witness
Arnold Friedman
The
prosecution counted on the testimony of "survivors." These
"survivors" were chosen with care. They were supposed to testify that
they had seen, with their own eyes, preparations for and the carrying out of
homicidal gassings. Since the war, in a series of trials like those at
Nuremberg (1945-1946), Jerusalem (1961), or Frankfurt (1963-65), such witnesses
have never been lacking. However, as I have often noted, no lawyer for the
defense had ever had the courage or the competence necessary to cross-examine
these witnesses on the gassings themselves.
For
the first time, in Toronto in 1985, one lawyer, Douglas Christie, dared to ask
for explanations. He did it with the help of topographical maps and building
plans as well as scholarly documentation on both the properties of the gases
supposedly used and also on the capacities for cremation, whether carried out
in crematory ovens or on pyres. Not one of these witnesses stood the test, and
especially not Arnold Friedman. Despairing of his case, he ended by confessing
that he had indeed been at Auschwitz-Birkenau (where he never had to work
except once, unloading potatoes), but that, as regards gassings, he had relied
on what others had told him.
Witness
Rudolf Vrba
Witness
Rudolf Vrba was internationally known. A Slovak Jew imprisoned at Auschwitz and
at Birkenau, he said that he had escaped from the camp in April 1944 with Fred
Wetzler. After getting back to Slovakia, he dictated a report about Auschwitz
and Birkenau, and on their crematories and "gas chambers".
With
help from Jewish organizations in Slovakia, Hungary and Switzerland, his report
reached Washington, where it served as the basis for the U.S. Government's
famous "War Refugee Board Report", published in November 1944. Since
then every Allied organization charged with the prosecution of "war
crimes" and every Allied prosecutor in a trial of "war
criminals" has had available this official version of the history of those
camps.
Vrba
later became a British citizen and published his autobiography under the title
of I Cannot Forgive. This book published in 1964, was actually written
by Alan Bestic, who, in his preface, testified to the "considerable care
[by Rudolf Vrba] for each detail" and to the "meticulous and almost
fanatic respect he revealed for accuracy." On November 30, 1964, Vrba
testified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Then he settled in Canada and
became a Canadian citizen. He has been featured in various films about
Auschwitz, particularly Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. Everything went well
for him until the day at the Zündel trial in 1985 when he was cross-examined
mercilessly. He was then shown to be an impostor. It was revealed that he had
completely made up the number and location of the "gas chambers" and
the crematories in his famous 1944 report. His 1964 book opened with a
purported January 1943 visit by Himmler to Birkenau to inaugurate a new
crematorium with "gas chamber." Actually, the last visit by Himmler
to Auschwitz took place in July of 1942, and in January 1943 the first of the
new crematories was still far from finished. Thanks, apparently, to some special
gift of memory (that he called "special mnemonic principles" or
"special mnemonical method") and to a real talent for being
everywhere at once, Vrba had calculated that in the space of 25 months (April
1942 to April 1944) the Germans had "gassed" 1,765,000 Jews at
Birkenau alone, including 150,000 Jews from France. But in 1978, Serge
Klarsfeld, in his Memorial to the Deportation of the Jews from France,
had been forced to conclude that, for the entire length of the war, the Germans
had deported a total of 75,721 Jews from France to all their concentration
camps. The gravest aspect of this is that the figure of 1,765,000 Jews
"gassed" at Birkenau had also been used in a document (L-022) at the
main Nuremberg trial. Attacked on all sides by Zündel's lawyer, the impostor
had no other recourse than to invoke, in Latin, the "licentia
poetarum," or "poetic license," in other words, the right to
engage in fiction. His book has just been published in France (1987); this
edition is presented as a book by "Rudolf Vrba with Alan Bestic." It
no longer includes the enthusiastic preface by Alan Bestic, and the short
introduction by Emile Copfermann notes that "with the approval of Rudolf
Vrba the two appendices from the English edition have been removed."
Nothing is said about the fact that those two appendices had also caused Vrba
serious problems in 1985 at the Toronto trial.
The Second
Zündel Trial (1988)
In
January 1987, a five-judge appeals court decided to throw out the 1985 verdict
against Ernst Zündel for some very basic reasons: Judge Hugh Locke had not
allowed the defense any influence in the jury selection process and the jury
had been misled by the judge on the very meaning of the trial. As for me, I
have attended many trials in my life, including some carried out in France
during the period of the "Purge" at the end of and after World War II.
Never have I encountered a judge so partial, autocratic and violent as Judge
Hugh Locke. Anglo-Saxon law offers many more guarantees than French law but it
only takes one man to pervert the best of systems. Judge Locke was such a man.
The
second trial began on January 18, 1988, under the direction of Judge Ronald Thomas,
who is a friend, it seems, of Judge Locke. Judge Thomas was often angry and was
frankly hostile to the defense, but he had more finesse than his predecessor.
The ruling by the five-judge appeal court also inhibited him somewhat. Judge
Hugh Locke had imposed numerous restrictions on free expression by the
witnesses and experts for the defense. For example, he forbade me to use any of
the photos I had taken at Auschwitz. I had no right to use arguments of a
chemical, cartographical, or architectural nature (even though I had been the
first person in the world to publish the plans for the Auschwitz and Birkenau
crematories). I was not allowed to talk about either the American gas chambers
or the aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Even the
testimony of the eminent chemist William Lindsey was cut short. Judge Ronald
Thomas did allow the defense more freedom, but at the outset of the trial, he
made a decision, at the request of the prosecution, that would tie the hands of
the jury.
Judge Thomas's Judicial
Notice
In
Anglo-Saxon law, everything must be proved except for certain absolutely
indisputable evidence ("The capital of Great Britain is London,"
"day follows night"... ) The judge can take "judicial
notice" of that kind of evidence at the request of one or the other of the
contending parties; Prosecuting
Attorney John Pearson asked the judge to take judicial notice of the Holocaust.
That term then has to be defined. It is likely that, had it not been for the
intervention of the defense, the judge could have defined the Holocaust as it
might have been defined in 1945-1946. At that time, the "genocide of the
Jews" (the word "Holocaust" was not used) could have been
defined as "the ordered and planned destruction of six million Jews, in
particular by the use of gas chambers".
The
problem for the prosecution was that the defense advised the judge that, since
1945-1946, there have been profound changes in the understanding of
exterminationist historians about the extermination of the Jews. First of all,
they no longer talk about an extermination but about an attempted
extermination. They have also finally admitted that "in spite of the most
erudite [sic] research" (Raymond Aron, Sorbonne colloquium, July 2, 1982), no
one has found any trace of an order to exterminate the Jews. More recently,
there has been a dispute between the "intentionalists" and the
"functionalists." Both agree that they have no proof of any intent to
exterminate, but "intentionalist" historians nevertheless believe
that one must assume the existence of that intent, while
"functionalist" historians believe that the extermination was the
result of individual initiatives, localized and anarchic: in a sense, the
activity created the organization! Finally, the figure of six million was
declared to be "symbolic" and there have been many disagreements
about the "problem of the gas chambers".
Obviously
surprised by this flood of information, Judge Ronald Thomas decided to be
prudent and, after a delay for reflection, decided on the following definition;
the Holocaust, he said, was "the extermination and/or mass-murder of
Jews" by National Socialism. His definition is remarkable for more than
one reason. We no longer find any trace of an extermination order, or a plan,
or "gas chambers," or six million Jews or even millions of Jews. This
definition is so void of all substance that it no longer corresponds to
anything real. One cannot understand the meaning of "mass-murder of
Jews." (The judge carefully avoided saying "of the Jews".) This
strange definition is itself a sign of the progress achieved by historical
revisionism since 1945.
Raul Hilberg
Refuses to Appear Again
One
misfortune awaited Prosecutor John Pearson: Raul Hilberg, in spite of repeated
requests, refused to appear again. The defense, having heard rumors of an
exchange of correspondence between Pearson and Hilberg, demanded and got the
publication of the letters they exchanged and in particular of a
"confidential" letter by Hilberg which did not hide the fact that he
had some bitter memories of his cross-examination in 1985. He feared being
questioned again by Douglas Christie on the same points. To quote the exact
words of his confidential letter, Hilberg wrote that he feared "every attempt
to entrap me by pointing out any seeming contradiction, however trivial the
subject might be, between my earlier testimony and an answer that I might give
in 1988." In fact as I have already mentioned, Hilberg had committed
perjury and he may have feared being charged with that crime.
Christopher
Browning, Prosecution Witness
In
place of Hilberg there came his friend Christopher Browning, an American
professor who specializes in the Holocaust. Admitted as an expert witness (and
paid for several days at the rate of $150 per hour by the Canadian taxpayer),
Browning tried to prove that the Harwood pamphlet was a tissue of lies and that
the attempt to exterminate the Jews was a scientifically established fact He
had cause to regret the experience. During cross-examination, the defense used
his own arguments to destroy him. In the course of those days, people saw the
tall and naive professor, who had strutted while he stood testifying, seated,
shrunken in size, behind the witness stand like a schoolboy caught in a
mistake. With a faint and submissive voice, he ended up acknowledging that the
trial had definitely taught him something about historical research.
Following
the example of Raul Hilberg, Browning had not examined any concentration camps.
He had not visited any facility with "gas chambers." He had never
thought of asking for an expert study of the "weapon of the crime."
In his writings he had made much of homicidal "gas vans," but he was
not able to refer to any authentic photograph, any plan, any technical study,
or any expert study. He was not aware that German words like
"Gaswagen," "Spezialwagen," "Entlausungswagen"
(delousing van) could have perfectly innocent meanings. His technical
understanding was nil. He had never examined the wartime aerial reconnaissance
photos of Auschwitz. He was unaware of all the tortures undergone by Germans,
such as Rudolf Hoss, who had spoken of gassings. He knew nothing of the doubts
expressed about some of Himmler's speeches or about the Goebbels diary.
A
great follower of the trials of war criminals, Browning had only questioned the
prosecutors, never the defense lawyers. His ignorance of the transcript of the
Nuremberg trial was disconcerting. He had not even read what Hans Frank, former
Governor General of Poland, had said before the Nuremberg tribunal about his
"diary" and about "the extermination of the Jews." That was
inexcusable! As a matter of fact, Browning claimed to have found irrefutable
proof of the existence of a policy of exterminating the Jews in the Frank
diary. He had discovered one incriminating sentence. He did not know that Frank
had given the Tribunal an explanation of that kind of sentence, chosen
beforehand from the hundreds of thousands of sentences in a personnel and
administrative journal of 11,560 pages. Furthermore, Frank had spontaneously
turned over his "diary" to the Americans when they came to arrest
him. The sincerity of the former Governor General is so obvious to anyone who
reads his deposition that Christopher Browning, invited to hear the content,
did not raise the least objection. One last humiliation awaited him.
For
the sake of his thesis, he invoked a passage from the well-known
"protocol" of the Wannsee conference (20 January 1942). He had made
his own translation of the passage, a translation that was seriously in error.
At that point, his thesis collapsed. Finally, his own personal explanation of a
"policy of the extermination of the Jews" was the same as Hilberg's.
Everything was explained by the "nod" of Adolf Hitler. In other
words, the Fuhrer of the German people did not need to give any written or even
spoken order for the extermination of the Jews. It was enough for him to give a
"nod" at the beginning of the operation and, for the rest, a series
of "signals". And that was understood!
Charles
Biedermann
The
other expert called by the prosecution (who had taken the stand before Browning)
was Charles Biedermann, a Swiss citizen, a delegate of the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and, most importantly, the director of the
International Tracing Service (ITS) in Arolsen, West Germany. The ITS has an
unbelievable wealth of information about the fate of individual victims of
National Socialism and, in particular, of former concentration camp inmates. I
believe that it is at Arolsen that one could determine the real number of Jews
who died during the war. The prosecution did not benefit from this experts
testimony. On the contrary, the defense scored numerous points on
cross-examination. Biedermann recognized that the ICRC had never found any
proof of the existence of homicidal gas chambers in the German camps. The visit
by one of its delegates to Auschwitz in September 1944 had done no more than
conclude the existence of a rumor on that subject. To his embarrassment, the
expert was obliged to admit that he was wrong in attributing to the National
Socialists the expression "extermination camps". He had not noticed
that this was a term coined by the Allies.
Biedermann
said that he was not familiar with the ICRC reports on the atrocities undergone
by the Germans just before and just after the end of the war. In particular, he
knew nothing about the terrible treatment of many German prisoners. It would
seem that the ICRC had nothing about the massive deportations of German
minorities from the east, nothing on the horrors of the total collapse of
Germany at the very end of the war, nothing about summary executions and, in
particular, the massacre by rifle, machine gun, shovels and pickaxes, of 520
German soldiers and officers who had surrendered to the Americans at Dachau on
April 29, 1945 (even though Victor Maurer, ICRC delegate, was apparently
there).
The
International Tracing Service included among those "persecuted" by
the Nazis even indisputably criminal prisoners in the concentration camps. He
relied on the information supplied by a Communist organization, the
"Auschwitz State Museum." Beginning in 1978, in order to prevent all
Revisionist research, the International Tracing Service closed its doors to
historians and researchers, except for those bearing a special authorization
from one of the ten governments (including that of Israel) which oversee the
activity of the International Tracing Service. Henceforth the Tracing Service
was forbidden to calculate and publish, as it had done until then, statistical
evaluations of the number of dead in the various camps. The annual activity
reports could no longer be made available to the public, except for their first
third, which had been of no interest to researchers.
Biedermann
confirmed a news story that had filtered out in 1964 at the Frankfurt trial: at
the time of liberation of Auschwitz, the Soviets and the Poles had discovered
the death register of that complex of 39 camps and sub-camps. The register
consisted of 38 or 39 volumes. The Soviets keep 36 or 37 of those volumes in
Moscow while the Poles keep two or three other volumes at the "Auschwitz
State Museum," a copy of which they have furnished to the International
Tracing Service in Arolsen. But neither the Soviets nor the Poles nor the
International Tracing Service authorize research in these volumes. Biedermann
did not even want to reveal the number of dead counted in the two or three
volumes of which the ITS has a copy. It is clear that, if the content of the
death register of Auschwitz were made public, it would be the end of the myth
of the millions of deaths in the camp.
No
"Survivor" Witnesses for the Prosecution
The
judge asked the prosecutor whether he would call any "survivors" to the
witness stand. The prosecutor answered no. The experience of 1985 had been too
embarrassing. The cross examination had been devastating. It is regrettable
that at the trial of Klaus Barbie in France in 1987 and at the trial of John
Demjanjuk in Israel in 1987-1988, no defense lawyer has followed Douglas
Christie's example in the first Zündel trial (1985): Christie had shown that by
carefully questioning witnesses about the gassing process itself, one could
destroy the very foundation of the "extermination camp" myth.
The
Witnesses and Experts for the Defense
Most
of the witnesses and experts for the defense were as precise and concrete as
people like Hilberg or Browning had been imprecise and metaphysical. The Swede
Ditlieb Felderer showed about 380 slides of Auschwitz and of the other camps in
Poland. The American, Mark Weber, whose knowledge of the documents is
impressive, engaged in clarifications of several aspects of the Holocaust, in
particular the Einsatzgruppen.* The German Tjudar Rudolph dealt with the Lodz
ghetto and visits by the ICRC delegates at the end of 1941 to Auschwitz,
Majdanek and other camps.
Thies
Christophersen had been in charge of an agricultural research enterprise in the
Auschwitz region in 1944. He visited the Birkenau camp several times to
requisition personnel there and never noticed the horrors usually described. On
the witness stand he repeated point by point what he had written about the
camp, starting in 1973 with a 19-page report (Kritik, No. 23, p.
14-32). The Austrian-born Canadian Maria Van Herwaarden was interned at
Birkenau starting in 1942. She saw nothing, either close up or from a distance,
that resembled mass murder, although she confirmed that many of the inmates had
died of typhus. The American Bradley Smith, a member of a "Committee for
Open Debate on the Holocaust," spoke about his experience in more than 100
question-and-answer interviews on American radio and television on the
Holocaust issue.
The
Austrian Emil Lachout commented on the famous "Muller Document,"
which, since December 1987, has thrown the Austrian authorities into disarray.
The document, dated October 1, 1948, revealed that even then, Allied
commissions of inquiry had already rejected the stories of homicidal
"gassings" in a whole series of camps, including Dachau, Ravensbrück,
Struthof (Natzweiler), Stutthof (Danzig), Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen
(Austria). The document specifically confirms that confessions of Germans had
been extorted by torture and that testimonies by former inmates were false.
Dr.
Russell Barton recounted his horrified discovery of the camp at Bergen-Belsen
at the time of liberation. Until that moment he had believed in a deliberate
program of extermination. Then he noted the fact that, in an apocalyptic
Germany, the piles of corpses and the walking skeletons were the result of the
frightful conditions of an overcrowded camp, ravaged by epidemics, and almost
entirely deprived of medicine, food, and water because of Allied bombings.
The
German Udo Walendy outlined the many forgeries he had discovered, in wartime
atrocity photographs and other documents, either altered or forged by a team
headed by a British propagandist called Sefton Delmer. J.G. Burg, a Jew who
lives in Munich, told of his experiences in the war and confirmed that there
had never been any policy for the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.
Academics
like the Chinese professor Dr. K.T. Fann, a Marxist, and Dr. Gary Botting, who
lost his teaching position at Red Deer College (Alberta) as a result of
testifying at the Zündel trial in 1985, testified that the Harwood booklet was
essentially a work of opinion, and hence not subject to legal prohibition. Jürgen
Neumann, a close associate and friend of Zündel, testified as to Zündel's state
of minds when the booklet first was published. Ernst Neilsen testified on the
obstacles he encountered at the University of Toronto to open research on the
Holocaust. Ivan Lagacé, director of the crematory at Calgary, demonstrated the
practical impossibility of the numbers alleged by Hilberg to have been cremated
at Auschwitz.
For
my part, I appeared as an expert witness for nearly six days. I concentrated
particularly on my investigations of the American gas chambers. I recalled that
Zyklon B is essentially hydrocyanic acid and that it is with this gas that
certain American penitentiaries execute those who have been condemned to death.
In
1945 the Allies should have asked specialists on American gas chambers to
examine the buildings, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, which were supposed to have
been used to gas millions of people. Since 1977, I have had the following idea:
when one deals with a vast historical problem like that of the reality or the
legend of the Holocaust, one must strive to get to the core of the problem; in
this case the central problem is Auschwitz and the core of that problem is a
space of 275 square meters: the 65 square meters of the "gas chamber"
of crematorium I at Auschwitz and, at Birkenau, the 210 square meters of the
"gas chamber" of crematorium II. In 1988, my idea remained the same:
let us have expert studies of those 275 square meters and we will have an
answer to the vast problem of the Holocaust! I showed the jury my photos of the
gas chamber at the Maryland State Penitentiary in Baltimore as well as my plans
for the Auschwitz gas chambers and I underlined the physical and chemical
impossibilities of the latter ones.
A
Sensational Turn of Events: The Leuchter Report
Ernst
Zündel, in possession of the correspondence I had exchanged in 1977-78 with the
six American penitentiaries outfitted with gas chambers, gave attorney Barbara
Kulaszka the job of getting in touch with the chief wardens of those
penitentiaries in order to see if one of them would agree to appear in court to
explain how a real gas chamber operates. Bill Armontrout, chief warden of the
penitentiary at Jefferson City (Missouri), agreed to testify and in doing so
pointed out that no one in the USA was more knowledgeable about the functioning
of gas chambers than Fred A. Leuchter, an engineer from Boston. I went to visit
Leuchter on February 3 and 4, 1988. I found that he had never asked himself any
questions about the "gas chambers" in the German camps. He had simply
believed in their existence. After I began to show him my files, he became
aware of the chemical and physical impossibility of the German
"gassings" and he agreed to examine our documents in Toronto.
After
that, at Zündel's expense, he left for Poland with a secretary (his wife), a
draftsman, a video-cameraman and an interpreter. He came back and drew up a
192-page report (including appendices). He also brought back 32 samples taken,
on the one hand, from the crematories of Auschwitz and Birkenau at the site of
the homicidal "gassings" and, on the other hand, in a disinfection
gas chamber at Birkenau. His conclusion was simple: there had never been any
homicidal gassings at Auschwitz, Birkenau, or Majdanek.
On
April 20 and 21, 1988, Fred Leuchter appeared on the witness stand in the Toronto
courtroom. He told the story of his investigation and presented his
conclusions. I am convinced that during those two days I was an eyewitness to
the death of the gas chamber myth, a myth which, in my opinion, had entered its
dead throes at the Sorbonne colloquium on "Nazi Germany and the
Extermination of the Jews" (June 29 to July 2, 1982), where the organizers
themselves began to grasp that there was no proof of the existence of the gas
chambers.
In
the Toronto courtroom emotions were intense, in particular among the friends of
Sabina Citron. Ernst Zündel's friends were also moved, but for a different
reason: they were witnessing the veil of the great swindle being torn away. As
for me, I felt both relief and melancholy: relief because a thesis that I had
defended for so many years was at last fully confirmed, and melancholy because
I had fathered the idea in the first place. I had even, with the clumsiness of
a man of letters, presented physical, chemical, topographical and architectural
arguments which I now saw summed up by a scientist who was astonishingly
precise and thorough.
Would
people one day remember the skepticism I had encountered, even from other
revisionists? Just before Fred Leuchter, Bill Armontrout had been on the
witness stand, where he confirmed, in every detail, what I had said to the jury
about the extreme difficulties of a homicidal gassing (not to be confused with
a suicidal or accidental gassing). Ken Wilson, a specialist in aerial
photographs, had shown that the homicidal "gas chambers" of Auschwitz
and Birkenau did not have gas evacuation chimneys, which would have been
indispensible. He also showed that I had been right in accusing Serge Klarsfeld
and Jean-Claude Pressac of falsifying the map of Birkenau in the Auschwitz
Album (Seuil Publishers, 1983, p. 42). Those authors, in order to make the
reader believe that groups of Jewish women and children surprised by the
photographer between crematories II and III could not go any farther and were
thus going to end up in the "gas chambers" and those crematories, had
simply eliminated from the map the path which. in reality. let up to the
"Zentralsauna," a large shower facility (located beyond the zone of
the crematories), where those women and children were actually going.
James
Roth, director of a laboratory in Massachusetts, then testified on the analysis
of the 32 samples, the origin of which he was unaware of: all the samples taken
in the homicidal "gas chambers" contained a quantity of cyanide which
was either unmeasurable or infinitesimal, while the sample from the
disinfection gas chamber, taken for comparison's sake, contained an enormous
amount of cyanide (the infinitesimal quantity detected in the former case can
be explained by the fact that the supposed homicidal gas chambers were in fact
morgues for preserving bodies; such morgues could have been occasionally
disinfected with Zyklon B).
David Irving
The
British historian David Irving enjoys great prestige. Zündel thought of asking
him to testify, but there was a problem: Irving was only partly a Revisionist.
The thesis that he defended, for example, in Hitler's War (New York, The
Viking Press, 1977) can be summed up as follows: Hitler never gave an order for
the extermination of the Jews; at least up to the end of 1943 he was kept in
ignorance of that extermination; only Himmler and a group of about 70 or so
persons were aware of it; in October 1944 Himmler, who wanted to get into the
good graces of the Allies, gave an order to cease the extermination of the
Jews.
I
had met Irving in Los Angeles in September of 1983 at the annual convention of
the Institute for Historical Review, where I challenged him by asking several
questions about proof to support his thesis. Then I published an article
entitled "A Challenge to David Irving" in The Journal of
Historical Review (Winter 1984, p. 289-305, and Spring 1985, p. 8 and
122). I tried to convince this brilliant historian that logically he could no
longer be satisfied with a semi-Revisionist position. To begin with, I
challenged him to produce Himmler's order to stop the extermination, an order
which never actually existed. Later on, I learned from various sources that
Irving was undergoing a change that moved him in the direction of Revisionism.
In
1988, Zündel became convinced that the British historian was only waiting for a
decisive event to take a final step in our direction. After arriving in
Toronto, David Irving discovered in rapid succession the Leuchter report and an
impressive number of documents that Zündel, his friends and I had accumulated
over the course of several years. The last reservations or the last
misunderstandings melted away in the course of a meeting. He agreed to testify
on the stand. In the opinion of those who were present at the two trials (1985
and 1988), no single testimony, except that of Fred Leuchter, caused such a
sensation. For more than three days, David Irving, engaging in a sort of public
confession, took back all that he had said about the extermination of the Jews
and without reservation adopted the Revisionist position. With courage and
honesty, he showed how an historian can be brought to revise profoundly his
views on the history of the Second World War.
The
Zündel Story
Ernst
Zündel had promised that his trial would be "the trial of the Nuremberg
Trial" or "the Stalingrad of the 'exterminationists'". The
unfolding of those two long trials proved him right, even though the jury,
"instructed" by the judge to consider the Holocaust as an established
fact "which no reasonable person can doubt," finally found him
guilty. Zündel has already won. It remains for him to make it known to Canada
and to the entire world. The media black-out of the 1988 trial was almost complete.
Jewish organizations campaigned vigorously for such a blackout, and even went
so far as to say that they did not want an impartial account of the trial. They
did not want any account of it at all. The paradox is that the only publication
which reported relatively honestly about the trial was The Canadian Jewish
News. Ernst Zündel and the Leuchter report have left a profound mark on
history; both will be remembered for many years to come.
* Weber
also clarified the meaning of the term "Final Solution" (emigration or
deportation, but never extermination of Jews): the testimony of Judge Konrad
Morgen; the tortures of Rudolf Höss and Oswald Pohl; the true history of
revisionism; and the concessions made year after year by the exterminationists
to the Revisionist viewpoint.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
First published in The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89 (Vol. 8,
No. 4), pages 417-431.
