Early in 1974 I decided
to send a letter, on the stationery of the Sorbonne (where I was teaching at
the time), to a number of historians and specialists around the world. Here is
the text:
May I take the liberty of asking you your feelings, your personal feelings,
with regard to a particularly delicate point of contemporary history: do Hitler’s
gas chambers seem to you to have been a myth or a reality? Would you perhaps be so kind as to specify in your answer what credence, in your
opinion, should be lent to the “Gerstein report”, the confession of R. Höss, the testimony of Nyiszli (should one say Nyiszli-Kremer?) and, in a general
way, to what has been written from that point of view on Auschwitz, on Zyklon B gas , on the initials “N.N.” (“Nacht
und Nebel” or “Nomen Nescio”?) and on the phrase “final solution”? Has your opinion as to the possibility of
the existence of those gas chambers changed since 1945, or is it the same today
as it was twenty-nine years ago?
Up to now I have been unable to find any photographs of gas chambers that appear
to afford any guarantee of authenticity. Neither the Paris Centre de documentation
juive nor the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte has been able to supply me
with any. Would you, for your part, know of any photographs to add to the dossier
on this question?
My thanks in advance for your reply and, perhaps, your help.
Amongst those to
whom I addressed my letter was a Dr Kubovy, director of a Jewish documentation
centre in Tel Aviv. But little did I know that Dr Kubovy was deceased. His
heirs turned my letter over to the daily newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth, which published it in truncated form on May 26, 1974. In France, the weekly Tribune juive, in its
issue of June 14, echoed the matter. Then the satirical weekly Canard enchaîné did likewise on July 17. The Sorbonne authorities denounced my “allegations” and I
was later expelled from my University teachers’ union.
For three years
the media followed a policy of silence. But during those three years, whilst carrying
on my research work, I continued sending to Le Monde and to a few other publications a stream of
letters on the problem of the gas chambers and the genocide.
It was then that Le
Monde decided to go on the offensive against historical revisionism. Its
journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté devoted a venomous article to the French
version of Richard Harwood’s booklet Did Six Million Really Die? (“Le Mensonge” [The Lie], July 17/18, 1977,
page 13). I thereupon redoubled my efforts and bombarded Le Monde with letters. In
August 1977 the magazine Historia published a letter of mine
in which I spoke of “the imposture of the genocide”. In June 1978 an extreme right monthly, Défense de l’Occident, directed by
Maurice Bardèche, author of Nuremberg ou la Terre promise (Nuremberg or the Promised Land, 1948) and of Nuremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs
(Nuremberg II or the Counterfeiters, 1950), published an essay that I had
entitled “The Problem of the Gas Chambers”.
The pressure
mounted. Pierre Viansson-Ponté went on the attack again, advocating legal
action against the revisionists (“Le Mensonge – suite” or “The Lie – continued”, Le
Monde, 3/4 September 1978, page 9). On October 28 the magazine L’Express
published a resounding interview with Louis Darquier de Pellepoix,
former Vichy commissioner for Jewish matters exiled in Spain. He was supposed
to have stated: “I am going to tell you what really happened at Auschwitz.
There was gassing. Yes, it’s true. But it was lice that were gassed” (page
173). There is ample reason to think that the interview in question was only the
product of a montage by a discredited journalist Philippe Ganier-Raymond, a man
previously held liable in court, due to my intervention, for faking texts signed
Louis-Ferdinand Celine. It is likely that certain circles in France, disquieted on learning that a University professor was engaged in such intense activity to make his
revisionist arguments public, had decided to set a counter-fire in
order to be able afterwards to present R. Faurisson as following in the
footsteps of the “Nazi” Darquier de Pellepoix. The newspaper Le Matin de Paris in its turn mounted a provocation, accusing me
directly and by name (November 16, 1978, page 17). All the media, in unison, unleashed themselves. The indignation against the heretic assumed such proportions
that a Jewish journalist and some Jewish organisations went so far as to
suggest using violence against the professor that I then was, teaching at Lyon
University 2. On November 20 I was twice physically assaulted. The press, in its
manner, reported the facts.
In France there
exists, at least in principle, something known as the “right of reply”. By
virtue of this right any person named or designated in a newspaper can demand,
under certain precise conditions, the publication of a “text by way of right of
reply”. So it was that Le Monde
was compelled to publish a text at the end of which I slipped in the following
sentences:
I await a public
debate on a subject that is manifestly being avoided: that of the “gas chambers”.
I ask Le Monde, as I have been requesting it to do for four years, to
publish at last my two pages on “The Rumour of Auschwitz”. The moment has come.
The time is ripe.
Obviously readers would
not have understood the refusal of their newspaper to publish the two pages in
question. It may be said that Le
Monde, in the end, had been caught in its own trap. For years it
had treated a revisionist member of the teaching profession with either calumny
or silence. Now it was obliged, against its will, to let that professor express
himself. Therefore on December 29, 1978 Le Monde published “The Rumour of Auschwitz”, not without accompanying my piece with an
impressive set of others uniformly hostile to revisionism – which automatically
afforded me a new right of reply. On January 16, 1979 the paper published my second
text under the title of “A Letter from Mr Faurisson”. The controversy was to go on for a long time afterwards,
but without my being granted the least opportunity to reply to the innumerable
incriminations of which I became the object.
But what was later
to be called “the negationist surge” had been released (Courrier international, January
13, 1994, page 38).
In France the
blaze of controversy was thus ignited in 1974; then it quickly burnt itself out, at
least in appearance, but it was smouldering beneath the ashes. Why did it flare up once
more in 1978 with such virulence, never to die out since?
One may imagine
several reasons for this, reasons pertaining as much to the action of revisionists in France
and in the world as to the anti-revisionists’ reaction.
For my part, I
would advance a hypothesis: it was from the moment that I had used material
argumentation (grounded in physical, chemical, topographical and architectural
considerations) that the opposing side felt itself truly in peril. In my letter
of 1974 to Dr Kubovy and numerous other historians and scholars, my argumentation,
implicit, remained historical in nature. On the other hand, in the letters that
I sent to Le Monde and, in particular, in my article on “The Problem of
the Gas Chambers or the Rumour of Auschwitz”, I was engaging the fight on a
more solid terrain. Having recourse:
I left the shifting
landscape of history for the firmer one of science. It is for this reason, it
seems to me, that my opponents lost their footing and, in something of a panic,
thereafter responded by manifestations of collective schizophrenia and by incessant manoeuvres of diversion and intimidation, thus showing that they
wanted at all costs to avoid the risks of a debate that – not without reason – they
felt was lost in advance.
February 28, 1994
