"The Gas Chambers: Truth or Lie?" Interview with Robert Faurisson published in Storia Illustrata, Milan, August 1979

Introduction by Peter Rushton, Assistant Editor of H&D, January 2022

Robert Faurisson died on 21st October 2018, moments after returning to his home in Vichy from his final conference organised by Heritage and Destiny in his birthplace of Shepperton, England (which he hadn’t seen since infancy).

Having begun his academic career as a specialist in the close analysis of literary texts, Professor Faurisson became the world’s leading revisionist scholar of what is generally termed ‘the Holocaust’. He summarised his findings in a sixty-word French sentence, which translates into English as:
“The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which has permitted a gigantic political and financial swindle whose main beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism and whose main victims are the German people – but not their leaders – and the Palestinian people in their entirety.”

“That sentence,” he declared 38 years on, “needs no changes.”

Robert Faurisson was not a man for vague rhetorical gestures: he was dedicated to historical “exactitude”, a term he preferred to the less precise and perhaps unattainable concept expressed by ‘truth’. So the statement above (which he first made in a French radio interview in December 1980, more than a year after the interview below) was rooted in two decades of detailed research, both documentary and physical; in archives around the world and at the alleged death camps themselves.

For decades Professor Faurisson was relentlessly pursued by French courts, after a special law was introduced to criminalise his work. Even at the hour of his death, several prosecutions were still ongoing in Paris and Vichy courtrooms. The search for historical exactitude continues, and in 2022 those engaged in that search stand on Robert Faurisson’s shoulders, in the manner variously attributed to Sir Isaac Newton and to the 12th century scholar Bernard of Chartres, who was said “to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”

We are fortunate that Professor Faurisson’s closest colleagues have maintained a blog containing many of his writings, a blog which they occasionally update with new translations and transcriptions. One such recent English translation is the important and comprehensive interview that we reprint below. While it is available at the Faurisson blog, this is inaccessible from some countries without a VPN, so we have published it here for convenient reference.

The limitations of the interview format account for the large volume of information contained in the footnotes, where he seeks to develop a good number of points not within the scope of the questions posed. Thus the whole perhaps amounts to what he, already a pariah in France at the time, would have put in an article for a widely distributed publication, intending to present the general argument as it stood then, in pre-Zündel/Leuchter/Rudolf times.

Gas Chambers: Truth or Lie?

Interview of Robert Faurisson with Antonio Pitamitz published in Storia Illustrata, Milan, August 1979, no. 261.

[The author extensively annotated his French text for publication in Serge Thion’s Vérité Historique ou Vérité Politique? (Paris, La Vieille Taupe, 1980), and made some further corrections in 1997 for the edition in his own Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998), vol. I, p. 155-194. The present English translation, which includes all notes and corrections, has not previously been published. The original Italian publication included no notes. The notes below, for the most part, accompanied the French text presented in Vérité historique ou vérité politique?, Paris, La Vieille Taupe, 1980, p. 171-212. It will be noted that the discussion continued in the columns of Storia Illustrata until December 1979. – ed., August 30, 2021.]

Storia Illustrata: Mr Faurisson, for some time now in France – and not only in France – you have found yourself at the centre of a bitter controversy resulting from certain statements of yours on the subject of what is still one of the most sombre pages of the history of the Second World War. We are speaking of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. In particular, one of your statements seems as forthright as it is incredible. Is it true that you deny the gas chambers ever existed?

Robert Faurisson: That is correct. I say, in effect, that those famous homicidal “gas chambers” are nothing but a wartime canard. This invention of wartime propaganda is comparable to the legends of the First World War that were spread about “Teutonic barbarity”. Already then, the Germans were accused of perfectly imaginary crimes: Belgian children having their hands cut off, crucified Canadians, corpses turned into soap¹. The Germans, doubtless, did not refrain from putting out similar stories about the French.

The German concentration camps did exist, but everyone knows that they were not an original German creation. Crematory ovens also existed in some of those camps, but incineration is no worse and no more criminal than burial. The crematory ovens even constituted progress from the health standpoint in places where there was risk of epidemic. Typhus brought its ravages to all of wartime Europe. Most of the corpses shown so conveniently in photos are manifestly corpses of typhus victims. Those photos illustrate the fact that internees – and sometimes guards as well – died of typhus. They prove nothing else. To insist on the fact that the Germans at times used crematory ovens is not particularly honest. Those who do so count on the repulsion or dull disquiet felt by people accustomed to burial and not to incineration. Imagine a people in Oceania accustomed to burning its dead; tell them that we bury ours and you will appear something of a savage. Perhaps they will even suspect you of burying people “more or less alive”.

This notorious photo shows an American soldier inspecting the purported ‘gas chamber’ at Dachau. The original caption to this photo dishonestly stated: “These chambers were a part of the annihilation system at Dachau.”

There is a display of utter dishonesty when the autoclaves in the camps that were, in reality, meant for the disinfestation of clothing by gas are shown, in the same manner, as homicidal “gas chambers”. This accusation, never clearly formulated, has now been abandoned, but certain museums or certain books still presume to show us the photo of one of those autoclaves, at Dachau, with an American soldier standing in front of it perusing … the timetable for “gassings”².

Another form of gassing really did exist in the German camps: that consisting in the fumigation of buildings to destroy vermin. It was for this purpose that the famous insecticide Zyklon B, around which a fantastic legend has been built, was used. Zyklon B, the licence for which dates from 1922³, is still used today, notably for disinfecting furniture, barracks, silos, ships, but also for the destruction of foxes in their burrows, or pests of all kinds⁴. It is quite dangerous to handle for, as the letter B indicates, it contains Blausaure, i.e. “blue” acid or hydrocyanic acid, also called prussic acid. It is worth noting, by the way, that the Soviets, misunderstanding the significance of this letter, accused the Germans of having killed detainees with Zyklon A and Zyklon B⁵! [Correction of 1997: there existed different categories of Zyklon, designated by the letters A, B, C, D. Thus the Soviets were right to speak of “Zyklon A”.]

But let us turn to the alleged homicidal “gas chambers”. Until 1960 I still believed in the reality of those slaughterhouses for humans where, with industrial procedures, the Germans had killed their prisoners in industrial quantities. Then I learned that certain authors regarded the reality of those “gas chambers” as questionable: amongst them, Paul Rassinier, who had been deported to Buchenwald and then to Dora. Those authors came to be seen as a group of historians called “revisionists”. I studied their arguments. Of course, I also studied the arguments of the official historians. The latter believed in the reality of the exterminations in the “gas chambers”. They are, if you will, the “exterminationists”⁶. For many years I carefully assessed the arguments of both. I visited Auschwitz, Majdanek and Struthof. I searched, in vain, for a single person capable of telling me: “I was interned in such or such camp and I saw there, with my own eyes, a building that was unquestionably a gas chamber”. I read many books and documents. For years I studied the archives of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) in Paris. It should go without saying that I took a particular interest in the so-called “war crimes” trials. I gave very special attention to what were presented as “confessions” by SS men or any other Germans. I am not going to list here the names of all the specialists whom I consulted. A curious thing, for that matter: quite often it took just a few minutes of conversation for the “specialists” in question to come out and say: “You know, I’m not a specialist on gas chambers”. And something even more curious: there exists to this day no book nor even any article from the “exterminationist” school on the “gas chambers”. I know that perhaps some titles might be cited but those titles are deceptive⁷. In reality, in the impressive mountain of writings devoted to the German camps, there is nothing on their intrinsically wicked originality: the “gas chambers”! No exterminationist has written about the “gas chambers”. The most one can say is that Georges Wellers, of the CDJC, has sought to tackle the subject in a plea for the partial veracity of the Gerstein document as concerns the “gas chamber” of Belzec⁸.

***Paul Rassinier, French socialist résistant, deportee in the Buchenwald and Dora camps and one of the earliest revisionist critics of the ‘Holocaust’ story.***

On the other hand, the revisionists have written a good deal about those “gas chambers”, to say either that their existence is doubtful or that it is frankly impossible. My personal opinion corresponds to the latter assertion. The existence of the “gas chambers” is utterly impossible. My reasons are, first, those that the revisionists have accumulated in their publications. Then there are those that I myself have found and that I should call material – basely and dumbly material.

I thought it necessary to begin at the beginning. You know that, in general, one takes a long time to realise that a task ought to have been begun at the beginning. I realised that we all spoke of “gas chambers” as if we clearly knew the meaning of those words. Among all those who utter sentences, speeches or judgments in which the expression “gas chamber” appears, how many actually know what they are talking about? I quickly noted that many people were committing an error of the grossest kind. They pictured a “gas chamber” as something basically like a simple bedroom into which domestic gas is conveyed under the door. They forgot that an execution by gas was, by definition, profoundly different from a mere suicidal or accidental asphyxiation. In the case of an execution, one must carefully eliminate all risk of malaise, poisoning or death for the executioner and those around him, risks to be eliminated before, during and after the execution. The technical difficulties that this implies are considerable. I wanted to know how, for example, farmed minks were gassed, how foxes’ burrows were gassed, how in the U.S. a condemned man was executed by gassing. I found that in the very great majority of cases hydrocyanic acid was used. However, that was precisely what the Germans had used to fumigate their barracks, and it was with that gas that they were alleged to have killed groups or indeed crowds of human beings. I therefore studied this gas. I wanted to know about its use in Germany and in France. I consulted the government rules on the use of this highly toxic product. I had the good fortune of discovering some documents on Zyklon B and hydrocyanic acid in the German industrial archives gathered together by the Allies at Nuremberg.

Then I closely reread certain testimonies, certain confessions or certain judgments of Allied or German courts on the killing of detainees with Zyklon B. And there I got a shock. You in turn are going to get that shock. I will first read you the testimony or confession of Rudolf Höss⁹. Then I will tell you some results of my investigation, purely physical, on hydrocyanic acid and Zyklon B. (Bear in mind that R. Höss was one of the three successive commandants of Auschwitz; all three were captured and interrogated by the Allies. Only Höss left a “confession”, for which we are indebted to his Polish jailers.)

In this confession, the description of gassing is remarkably brief and vague, but it must be noted that all the others who have claimed to have been present at this sort of operation are also vague and brief (with, in addition, all sorts of contradictions on certain points). Höss writes: “Half an hour after the release of the gas, the door would be opened and the ventilator turned on. The squad immediately began removing the bodies”¹⁰. I call your attention to the word “immediately”; in German: sofort. Höss then adds that the squad in charge of handling and removing 2,000 bodies from the “gas chamber” to the crematory ovens did so while “eating and smoking”; therefore, if I understand correctly, without wearing gas masks. This description clashes with simple common sense. It implies that it would be possible to enter, without any precaution, an enclosure saturated with hydrocyanic acid and handle (barehanded?) 2,000 cyanided corpses in which there probably remained lethal gas. There would undoubtedly still be gas in their hair (which was supposedly shaven off after the operation), in their mucous and also in air pockets among the heaped bodies. What kind of super-powerful ventilator is able to make so much gas floating in the air or trapped here and there instantly disappear? Even if such a ventilator existed, there would indeed have been need of a test to confirm that all the hydrocyanic acid was gone and then signal that the ventilator had actually performed its function and that it was safe to go ahead. However, it is abundantly clear from Höss’s description that we are dealing with a magical ventilator acting instantaneously and with such perfection that there was no cause for any fear, no need of any check.

What simple common sense suggests is now fully confirmed by the technical documents pertaining to Zyklon B and its use¹¹. In order to fumigate a barrack, the Germans were obliged to take a great many precautions: a specially qualified team whose members were admitted only after a long course with the Zyklon B manufacturer; very important material, particularly the “J” filter (the strongest of all); evacuation of the surrounding barracks; posting of multilingual warnings with the skull and crossbones symbol; meticulous examination of the site to be fumigated in order to detect and seal any fissures; stopping up of chimneys or ducts, removal of keys from doors. The cans of Zyklon B were opened inside the barrack. When the gas had supposedly killed the vermin, then began the most delicate part of the operation: the airing out. Sentries were stationed at a certain distance from the doors and windows, their backs to the wind; they had to prevent, from afar, anyone from approaching. The team, in gas masks, would then enter the building, opening the windows and unstopping the chimneys and fissures. When they had finished with one floor of a building they had to go outside, remove their masks and stay in the open air for ten minutes. Then they put their masks back on, re-entered and went up to the next floor. Once this job was completed a wait of twenty hours was necessary. Actually, because Zyklon B was “difficult to ventilate, since it adheres to surfaces”, only a very long natural airing out could get rid of it. This was the case, at least, for spaces of large volume like barracks, with or without an upper floor, for when Zyklon B was used in an autoclave (volume: 10 cubic meters), it was still ventilated. When the twenty hours had elapsed, the team re-entered in their masks, stopped up the openings, then, if possible, brought the temperature of the premises to 15° C. Then they exited, to return after one hour, again in their masks. Then they checked, using an indicator test paper (which would turn blue in the presence of hydrocyanic acid), whether the place was again inhabitable. Thus, an enclosure that had been gassed was not accessible without a gas mask until a minimum of twenty-one hours had elapsed. French legislation on the use of hydrocyanic acid sets the minimum at twenty-four hours¹².

It thus becomes apparent that in the absence of a magical ventilator, capable of instantly expelling a gas that is “difficult to ventilate, as it adheres to surfaces”, the “slaughterhouse for humans” called “gas chamber” would have been inaccessible for close to twenty-four hours. Its walls, floor, ceiling would have retained, over all that time, discreet volumes of a gas that was highly poisonous for humans. And what about the bodies? They could only have been permeated with gas in the same way as the cushions, mattresses and blankets whose treatment is discussed in the same technical documents on the use of Zyklon B stating that they had to be taken outside and beaten for an hour in dry weather and for two hours in damp weather. Afterwards they were piled together and, if the test paper turned blue, beaten again.

As hydrocyanic acid is both inflammable and explosive, how could it have been used in close proximity to crematory ovens? How could men have entered the “gas chamber” while smoking?

***The Auschwitz ‘gas chamber’ shown to tourists: now admitted to be a ‘reconstruction’***

And I have not yet spoken of the mass of technical and physical impossibilities that one discovers, in addition, on visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau to examine the location and dimensions of the supposed “gas chambers”. Besides, as a snooper in the Polish Auschwitz museum archives may unearth, those enclosures were in reality nothing more than “cold rooms” (morgues), typically characteristic in both their design and their dimensions. Thus the supposed “gas chamber” of Krema-II at Birkenau, of which only the ruins can be seen, was actually a cold room, built below ground level (for protection from the summer heat) and measuring 30 metres in length and 7 metres in width (2 metres for a body plus 3 metres for the movement of trolleys plus 2 metres for another body). The door, the clearances, the little lift (which measured only 2.10 by 1.35 metres) going up to the crematory chamber were all of Lilliputian dimensions compared with what Höss’s account lets the reader suppose¹³. According to Höss, the “gas chamber” regularly contained 2,000 standing victims, but could have held 3,000. Imagine that: three thousand persons in 210 square metres. In other words, to make a comparison, 286 standing in a room measuring 5 by 4 metres! And don’t let anyone come and tell us that the Germans, before leaving, blew up “gas chambers” and crematory ovens to conceal the traces of their crimes. When one wishes to erase all traces of a necessarily quite sophisticated installation, it is thoroughly dismantled from end to end so as not to leave the least bit of incriminating evidence. Destruction by explosives would have been naïve: in such case it would have sufficed to remove the concrete blocks to uncover this or that tell-tale remnant. And the Poles of the present-day Auschwitz museum have gathered together just such remnants of the “Kremas” (that is, structures comprising crematoria and supposed “gas chambers”). However, all of these pieces shown to tourists attest to the existence of crematory ovens and of nothing else¹⁴. If it was the Germans who dynamited those installations – as an army in retreat often does – it was precisely because those installations concealed nothing suspicious. At Majdanek, on the other hand, they left intact installations which, after the war, were christened with the name “gas chambers”.

In the United States the first execution by gassing took place on 8 February 1924 in the prison of Carson City, Nevada. Two hours after the execution, traces of poison gas were still detected in the prison yard. The warden, Mr Dickerson, declared that, as concerned the condemned man, this method of execution was certainly the most humane employed thus far. But he added that he would reject it because of the danger it posed to the witnesses¹⁵. Just recently, on 22 October 1979, prisoner Jesse Bishop was gassed in that prison.

The Americans seem to have perfected their gas chambers in 1936-1938. This type of execution is necessarily quite complicated¹⁶. Note that the Americans gas only one prisoner at a time (they have had gas chambers fitted with two seats for the execution of two brothers). And that prisoner is totally immobilised. He is poisoned by the hydrocyanic acid (precisely: by the dropping of sodium cyanide pellets into a vessel containing sulfuric acid and distilled water, which results in a release of hydrocyanic acid). In about 40 seconds the prisoner dozes off, and in a few minutes he dies. Apparently, this gas causes no pain. As in the case of Zyklon B, it is the gas’s evacuation that will pose problems. A natural airing out for 24 hours is not possible here: the layout of the premises would not allow it without exposing the guards and inmates to very grave danger. How then, must one proceed, given that this gas is difficult to remove by ventilation? The solution is to transform the hydrocyanic acid into a salt to be flushed away with water. The ammonia will serve as base in the chemical reaction required. When the hydrocyanic acid has disappeared, at least nearly completely, a certain alerting substance will notify the attending physician and his aides on the other side of the glass panel. That substance is phenolphthalein, held in cups placed at various points in the chamber, which turns purple when there is no more acid in the air. A system of adjustable ventilators blows the ammonia fumes towards an exhaust hood. The physician and his aides enter the chamber in gas masks and rubber gloves. The physician tousles the dead man’s hair to get rid of any residual hydrocyanic acid. Only a full hour afterwards can the guards enter the chamber. Before then, the body and the chamber will have been washed and the residual gas expelled via a chimney stack rising high above the prison. When during an execution there is risk of exposure for the guards posted in watchtowers, they are ordered to come down. I shall not go into the requirements for a complete hermetic sealing of the gas chamber: airlocks, “Herculite” panes of great thickness, vacuum system, mercury valves etc.

A gassing is not something to be improvised. Had the Germans decided to gas millions of persons, they would have had to develop some formidable machinery. There would have been need of a general order (which has never been found), instructions, studies, purchase orders, and plans – which have never been seen. Meetings of experts would have been necessary: architects, chemists, physicians, specialists in a wide range of technical fields. Disbursements and allocations of funds would have been required, operations which, in a state like the Third Reich, would have left manifold traces (we know, for example, to the nearest pfennig the cost of the Auschwitz kennel and of the laurel trees ordered from nurseries). Assignment orders would have been needed. Auschwitz and Birkenau would not have become camps with so much coming and going that the best way to prevent the frequent escapes of detainees was to tattoo a registration number on their arm¹⁷. Civilian employees, including engineers, would not have been permitted to mingle with the detainees. The Germans there would not have been allowed to go away on leave or receive visits of family members. Above all, prisoners who had served their sentences would not have been released, free to return to their respective countries. This fact, long kept secret by the historians, was revealed some years ago in an article by Louis De Jong, Director of the NIOD (Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) in Amsterdam¹⁸.

Moreover, the recent publication in the United States of a number of wartime Allied aerial photographs of Auschwitz¹⁹ deals the coup de grâce to this extermination legend: even in the summer of 1944, at the height of the influx of the Hungarian Jews, no pyre of bodies or crowd of people near the crematoria is to be noted (but an open gate and a well laid garden are), no suspect smoke (although the crematoria smoke stacks supposedly spewed, day and night, smoke and flames visible for several kilometres).

I conclude here with what I should call the criterion of false testimony regarding the “gas chambers”. I have noticed that all of these testimonies, vague and discordant as they may be on the rest, concur on at least one point: the team in charge of removing the bodies from the “gas chambers” entered the enclosure either “immediately” or “shortly after” the victims’ death. I say that this point, in itself, constitutes the touchstone of the false testimony, for there we have a total physical impossibility. If you meet someone who believes in the reality of the “gas chambers”, ask him how, in his opinion, the bodies could be removed to make room for the next batch of victims.

S.I.: How can you make such a statement after all that’s been said and written over 35 years? After all the accounts of the camp survivors, after the trials of the war criminals, after Nuremberg? Upon what evidence and upon what documents do you base your statement?

R.F.: Many historical errors have lasted more than thirty-five years.

What certain “survivors” have recounted constitutes testimonies, among other testimonies. Testimonies are not proof. Those of the “war criminals’” trials must be viewed with particular reservation. Unless I am mistaken, not a single witness in thirty-five years has ever been prosecuted for perjury, a fact that amounts to the granting of an exorbitant guarantee to anyone wishing to testify on “war crimes”. It also explains how courts could “establish” the existence of “gas chambers” in places in Germany where it has, in the end, been acknowledged that there were never any: for example, in the entire Reich of 1937.

The judgments handed down at Nuremberg have only a relative value. The vanquished were judged by the victors, without the least possibility of lodging an appeal. Articles 19 and 21 of the charter of that political tribunal cynically gave it the right to dispense with solid evidence; they even authorised recourse to hearsay²⁰. All the other “war crimes” trials, as a result, drew inspiration from the precedents of Nuremberg. The courts trying cases of sorcerers and witches through the centuries had proceeded in like manner.

There have existed, at least on the face of things, evidence and testimonies of gassing at Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen. Professors, priests, Catholics, Jews, Communists have attested to the existence of “gas chambers” in those camps and to the use of gas for killing detainees. To take but one example, Mgr Piguet, Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, wrote that Polish priests went to the “gas chambers” of Dachau²¹. However, it is acknowledged today that no-one was ever gassed at Dachau²².

Better still: men who were in charge of certain camps confessed to the existence and operation of homicidal “gas chambers” in places where historians have since had to acknowledge that there was never any such thing²³. For Ravensbrück, the commandant (Suhren), his second in command (Schwarzhuber) and the camp physician (Dr Treite) all confessed to the existence of a “gas chamber” and even described, in a vague way, its operation. They were executed or committed suicide. Same scenario for Mauthausen commandant Ziereis, also said to have made such confessions on his deathbed in 1945²⁴. It should not be thought that the confessions of the men in charge at Ravensbrück were extorted by the Russians or the Poles, for it was the British or French legal apparatus that obtained them. An aggravating circumstance: they obtained them several years after the war. What needed to be done was done in order that, right up to the end, until 1950, a man like Schwarzhuber should collaborate with his interrogators, his examining magistrates or his trial judges.

Today there are no longer any serious historians to claim that people were gassed in a camp anywhere in the pre-1938 Reich: only certain camps situated in post-war Poland are concerned. The 19th of August 1960 constitutes an important date in the history of the myth of the “gas chambers”. On that day the newspaper Die Zeit published a letter that it entitled “No gassing at Dachau”²⁵. Given the content of that letter, its title ought to have been, in order to be completely honest, “No gassing anywhere in the Old Reich” (Germany within its 1937 frontiers). The letter was from Dr Martin Broszat, director since 1972 of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. Dr Broszat is an ardent anti-Nazi. He is one of the exterminationist historians. He believes in the authenticity of Rudolf Höss’s “confessions”, which he published in 1958 but with serious truncations in the passages where Höss, doubtless in order to follow the suggestions of his Polish jailers, had exaggerated “a bit much”²⁶. In brief, Dr Broszat had to admit on that date in 1960 that no gassing had ever occurred in the whole of the 1937 Reich. He added, using an awkward expression, that there had only been gassing above all (?) at certain chosen places in Poland, amongst which Auschwitz²⁷. And, as far as I know, all the official historians have ended up admitting this fact along with Dr Broszat. I deplore the fact that Dr Broszat wrote no more than a letter on the subject. A scholarly paper, with detailed explanations, was in order. An explanation was needed as to how the evidence, testimonies and confessions considered unimpeachable until then had suddenly lost all their value. It is now nearly 20 years that we’ve been waiting for Dr Broszat’s explanations²⁸. They would be of great value for determining whether the evidence, testimonies and confessions that we possess on the gassings of Auschwitz or Treblinka are worth more than the evidence, testimonies and confessions that we possess on the false gassings of Buchenwald or Ravensbrück²⁹. Meanwhile, it is extremely curious that the evidence gathered, especially, by the French, British and American tribunals should suddenly have lost all value, whilst the evidence on the same subject in the possession, especially, of the Polish and Soviet tribunals should keep all its value!

In 1968, the “gas chamber” of Mauthausen (in Austria) was, in its turn, to be declared mere legend by an “exterminationist” historian: Olga Wormser-Migot. See, in her thesis on the Nazi concentration camp system, the section entitled “The problem of the gas chambers”³⁰. And note the wording of that title for, by the admission of the exterminationist historians themselves, there is indeed a “problem of the gas chambers”.

On the subject of false confessions, I one day asked historian Joseph Billig (of the CDJC) how he might, for his part, explain them. Billig had belonged to the French delegation at the Nuremberg trial. I give you his reply. They were, in his words, “psychotic phenomena”! For my part, I have an explanation to offer for those alleged “psychotic phenomena” as well as for the “schizoid apathy” of Höss on the day of his deposition before at Nuremberg: Höss had been tortured by his English captors³¹. He had been “interrogated with a riding crop and alcohol”. Likewise at the so-called “Dachau” trials, the Americans – as revealed in particular by the Van Roden commission of inquiry (US Senate) – had abominably tortured other German accused³².

***Torture of German prisoners was a regular occurrence, especially by Americans but also in the British interrogation centre at Bad Nenndorf, some of whose victims are seen above.***

But torture is most often pointless. Efficient methods of intimidation are numerous. The formidable, universal reprobation brought to bear on the accused Nazis retains nearly all its strength still today. When “anathema explodes in a religious unanimity worthy of the great mediaeval communities” there is nothing to do but bow before it, especially if the lawyers join in and assert that concessions are needed. I remember my own hatred of the Germans during the war and just after the war’s end: an incandescent hatred that I believed to be my own and which, with the hindsight of time, I was to realise had been infused into me. My hatred came to me from the English radio, Hollywood propaganda and Stalinist press. I would have been merciless to any German who had told me that he’d been a guard in one of the camps but had seen none of the massacres that everyone was talking about then. Had I been his examining magistrate I’d have considered it my duty to “have him confess”.

For thirty-five years the drama of this type of German defendants has been comparable to that of the “sorcerers” and “witches” of the Middle Ages. Let’s try to imagine the mad courage it would have taken for one of those alleged witches to dare to say in court: “The best proof that I have not had any dealings with the Devil is, quite simply, that the Devil does not exist”. Most of the time, those alleged witches could not believe the acts of which they were accused, but they shared or affected to share their judges-accusers’ belief in the Devil. Likewise Walter Dürrfeld, an engineer who had been at Auschwitz, initially told his judges that he personally had never suspected the existence of “gas chambers” in his camp; then, rallying to the belief of the day, he declared in court his personal indignation at “this brand of infamy for the German people”³³.

The witch would try to use deceit with her judges, just as the Germans, still today at the “Majdanek” trial in Düsseldorf, try to use deceit with theirs. For example, the witch might admit that the Devil had been there on such or such a day, but that he was at the top of a hill whilst she herself had remained at the foot of the hill. Likewise, a German defendant will strive to show that he himself had nothing to do with the “gas chambers”. Sometimes he goes so far as to say that he helped push people into the “gas chamber” or even that he was made to pour a substance through a hatch in the roof on pain of execution should he disobey³⁴. He will often give the impression of obfuscating the matter. His accusers think: “Here’s another one trying to pull it off. They’re extraordinary, these Germans! They practically never saw or heard anything!” The truth is that, in effect, they neither saw nor knew anything about what the prosecution wants them to say as concerns gassing³⁵. Any blame for their ways of obfuscating should be directed at us, the accusers, and not at them who are caught up in the only system of defence that we leave them. The lawyers have a weighty responsibility in the adoption of this system. I speak here of those who know or suspect that they are confronted with an enormous lie. They prefer not to raise this question, either in their own interest or in that of their client. Eichmann’s lawyer at the trial in Jerusalem did not believe in the existence of the “gas chambers” but, nonetheless, was careful to avoid touching on the problem³⁶. One cannot rebuke him for it. I understand that the court’s charter allowed disqualification of the defence lawyer should there occur an incident described by the term “intolerable”, or an approximate one. An old lawyers’ technique, necessitated at times by the needs of the defence, is to argue the likely rather than the true. The true is sometimes too difficult to get across in the judges’ minds. The defence will settle for the likely. One example demonstrates this well. It is recounted by Albert Naud, the lawyer representing Lucien Léger, whom the entire French press presented as the certain perpetrator of an abominable crime. Lucien Léger protested his innocence. He chose Naud as his lawyer. The latter went to see him in prison. He told him: “Léger, let’s be serious! If you want me as your lawyer, we’re going to plead guilty.” A done deal. Léger’s head was saved. A few years later Naud became convinced that Léger was innocent. He was terribly cross with himself for having made him plead guilty. He did all in his power to obtain a review of the trial³⁷. Too late. He died. And Léger, if he is innocent, will doubtless pay till the end of his days for the abominable attitude of the press and his lawyer’s blindness.

A lawcourt has no capacity to determine the historical truth. Even historians have, quite often, the utmost trouble in distinguishing the true from the false on a point of history. The independence of judges is necessarily very relative. Judges, like everyone, read newspapers. They get their information, in part, from the radio or television. Magazines and books offer them, as to all of us, “documents” or “photographs” of Nazi atrocities. Unless they’ve had special training in the critical appraisal of this kind of documents or photographs, they will fall into the crudest traps of media-orchestrated propaganda. Furthermore, judges are concerned with ensuring respect for public order, public morals and certain standards, usages and even beliefs of public life. All this, not to mention the concern of preserving their name from vilification in the press, can only lead them to judgments in matters of “war crimes” that the historian, for his part, is not bound to adopt.

The justice system has judged itself. Not once in this kind of trial has it even envisaged commissioning a forensic examination of what is called “the crime weapon”. A knife, a rope, a revolver, when suspected of having served as instruments of a crime, are all examined forensically, and there it is a matter of objects with nothing mysterious about them. Yet in the case of the “gas chambers” there has not been one single forensic study in thirty-five years! There is indeed talk of an examination made by the Soviets but we know what their standards are worth and, in any event, the text of the report seems to have remained secret.

Soviet prosecutor, Lieutenant General Roman Rudenko with his team at the first Nuremberg Trial. In a sickening irony, Rudenko himself then took charge of a KGB camp where at least 12,000 prisoners died from malnutrition and disease. ‘Holocaust’ historians prefer not to dwell on the fact that so much of their ‘evidence’ comes from the likes of Rudenko and fellow Russian Communists.

For a year and a half, at the Frankfurt trial of 1963-65, a German court heard the so-called “Auschwitz guards case” without ordering any forensic examination of the crime weapon. Ditto for the Majdanek trial in Düsseldorf and, just after the war, for the Struthof trial in France. This absence of examination is all the more inexcusable in that not one judge, not one prosecutor, not one lawyer could claim to have any knowledge from experience of the nature or functioning of those extraordinary slaughterhouses for humans. At Struthof and Majdanek those “gas chambers” are, however, presented as being in their original state: thus it would suffice to examine the “crime weapon” on the spot. At Auschwitz things are less clear: in the main camp (Auschwitz I) tourists are left believing that the “gas chamber” is authentic, but if the museum authorities are pressed with questions they retreat and speak of “reconstruction” (which, by the way, is nothing but an arrant lie, easily provable as such by certain archive documents); at the Birkenau annex (Auschwitz II) only the ruins of the “gas chambers” are shown or, still less, only spaces of ground supposedly occupied in the past by “gas chambers”. But even there, forensic examinations are perfectly possible. For an archaeologist even a few meagre clues are sometimes enough to know the nature and purpose of a site that has been uninhabited for centuries. To give you an idea of the complaisance shown by the defence lawyers at the Frankfurt trial, going along in advance with the accusation, I should tell you that one of them even had his photograph taken by the press while lifting open a hatch (sic!) on the roof of the alleged “gas chamber” at Auschwitz I³⁸. Ten years after the trial I asked that lawyer what had allowed him to consider the building in question to be a “gas chamber”. His written reply was more than evasive. It resembled the reply given to me by the authorities of the Dachau Museum. I asked them in writing what documents they relied on to state that a certain room in the camp was an unfinished “gas chamber”. In effect, I was surprised that an unfinished room could be decreed as destined to become, once finished, something that no-one had ever seen. One day I shall publish my correspondence with those authorities as well as with those in charge of the International Dachau Committee in Brussels.

You ask me on what evidence and on what documents I base my statement that the “gas chambers” never existed. I believe that I have already fully answered the question. I should add that a good part of that evidence and those documents are… those of the accusation³⁹. It suffices to re-read closely the accusation’s texts in order to realise that they lead to the opposite of the result sought. The basic texts are contained in the forty-two volumes of the big Nuremberg trial, the fifteen volumes of the American trials, the nineteen volumes published thus far by the University of Amsterdam, the stenographic transcripts of the Eichmann trial, the various minutes of interrogations, the works of Hilberg, Reitlinger, Adler, Langbein, Olga Wormser-Migot, the Encyclopedia judaica, the Memorial by Klarsfeld (very interesting for its lists of false gassing victims), the publications of various institutes. I have, above all, worked very much at the CDJC of Paris. I was ousted from there early in 1978 on the initiative, in particular, of Georges Wellers, because the conclusions I’d reached about the “gas chambers” and the “genocide” had become known. The CDJC is a semi-public body: it receives public money. Nonetheless, it arrogates itself the right to kick out those who do not think as required. And it says so!

S.I.: You go so far as to deny Hitler’s deliberate intention to exterminate the Jews. And recently also – during a debate on Italian Swiss television – you have said: “Hitler never had a single person killed for merely being Jewish.” What exactly do you mean by this sentence, from which it is inferable, by the way, that Hitler did have Jews killed?

R.F.: I say exactly this: “Never did Hitler order or allow that anyone should be killed on account of his race or his religion”. This sentence is perhaps shocking for some but I believe it is true. Hitler was anti-Jewish and racist.

His racism, incidentally, did not stop him from harbouring admiration for the Arabs and the Indians. He was against colonialism. On 7 February 1945 he said to his close collaborators: [“The white races did, of course, give some things to the natives, and they were the worst gifts that they could possibly have made, those plagues of our own modern world – materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism and syphilis. For the rest, since these peoples possessed qualities of their own which were superior to anything we could offer them, they have remained essentially unchanged. […] One solitary success must be conceded to the colonisers: everywhere they have succeeded in arousing hatred⁴⁰.”] [Correction of 1997: The passage in square brackets is from the book Hitler’s Political Testament, described in note 40. However, on reflection, this book seems to me to be a forgery for which François Genoud, recently deceased, may be responsible. British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper states in his long preface that the text is indubitably authentic. In my opinion he is mistaken.] [H&D note of January 2022: It is this passing reference by Prof. Faurisson that led to the investigations contained in Peter Rushton’s essay published on this site – The Hitler-Bormann Testament: Truth or Lie? – an essay which relies on analysis of certain documents that were not available during Faurisson’s lifetime.]

Hitler became anti-Jewish only relatively late. Before saying and repeating that the Jews were “the great masters of the lie”⁴¹, he had been rather favourable towards them. He wrote in Mein Kampf: “The fact that they had, as I believed, been persecuted [on account of their beliefs] sometimes almost turned my distaste of unfavourable remarks about them into horror.”

Personally, I don’t know Hitler well at all, and he interests me no more than does Napoleon Bonaparte. If Hitler went into delirium, then I do not see why we ourselves should go into delirium on the subject of Hitler. Let’s seek to talk about him with the sang-froid that one generally maintains when talking about Amenophis Akhenaten. There was an inexpiable war between Hitler and the Jews. Obviously each blames the other for this conflict. In the person of Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organisation (and, later, first president of the State of Israel), the international Jewish community declared war on Germany on 5 September 1939⁴². Previously, from 1933, the international Jewish community had manifested its hostility with measures for economic boycott of Nazi Germany⁴³. It goes without saying that if it acted thus it was in retaliation against the measures taken by Hitler against the German Jews. This deadly spiral was to lead, on both sides, to a world war. Hitler said: “The Jews and their Allies want our annihilation, but it is they who will be annihilated”, whilst the Allies and the Jews said: “Hitler and the Nazis and their allies want our annihilation, but it is they who will be annihilated.” Thus did the two camps, throughout the war, inebriate themselves with bellicose and fanatical proclamations. The enemy became a beast whose throat must be cut. Consider, in the same way, the words of the Marseillaise: Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons! (“Let an impure blood flood our furrows!”)

That said, the Allies who waged a pitiless war against the Nazis and who, thirty-five years afterwards, still carry on a kind of “hunt for Nazis”, have never gone so far as to decide: “A National Socialist, by the mere fact of belonging to the National Socialist party, is to be killed, whether man, woman, child, or aged person.” Similarly, it may be said that Hitler, despite all the acts he accumulated against the Jews, never decreed: “Every Jew is to be killed”, nor: “A Jew, for the sole and simple reason that he’s a Jew, is to be killed.”. Of course, in the case of reprisals against “partisans” or “terrorists”, when the Germans selected their hostages for execution, it was better to be neither a Jew, nor a Communist, nor an imprisoned criminal; but this was a well-known effect of hostage-taking as practised everywhere and in every era.

Hitler had a portion of the European Jews interned, but to intern does not mean to exterminate. There was neither “genocide” nor “holocaust”. Any concentration camp is a woeful place or a horror, be it a German, Russian, French, American, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese or Cuban camp. There are of course degrees in that woefulness or horror, and it is certain that in times of war, famine, epidemic, a concentration camp becomes still more horrible. But nothing in the case with which we are dealing here allows us to say that there were extermination camps, i.e. camps in which people were put to be killed.

The “exterminationists” claim that in the summer of 1941 Hitler gave the order to exterminate the Jews. But no-one has ever seen that order. In contrast, there exist both certain statements by Hitler and measures taken by his armies that imply that such an order cannot have been given. On 24 July 1942, in his close circle, Hitler, recalling that the Jews had declared war on him through the intermediary of Chaim Weizmann, says that after the war he will destroy their towns one after the other; he specifies: “… if the Jewish dregs did not decamp and emigrate to Madagascar or some other national Jewish homeland⁴⁴”. For my part, I should like to know how this “remark in conversation” can be reconciled with an order of extermination given once and for all a year before. Even in July 1944, on the eastern front where German soldiers were waging a fierce struggle against the partisans (Jews or non-Jews, Russians or Communists, Ukrainians etc.,) the army gave the most draconian orders that no soldier should take part in any abuse of the civilian population, Jews included. Otherwise, it would mean court-martial⁴⁵. Hitler called for a merciless struggle in the fight, especially against the partisans, including, if necessary, against the women and children mingled in with the partisans, or apparently accomplices of the partisans. He obviously did not shrink from the practice of taking hostages (nor, incidentally, did the Allies). But he did not go beyond that. The day our media decide to break certain taboos and devote to the Allies’ “war crimes” a thousandth of the time that they devote to the “war crimes” of the defeated there will be some astonishment among the naive. The “crimes” of Hitler will then assume their proper proportions in a historical perspective. We are told a bit about Dresden and Katyn, it’s true. I say that Dresden and Katyn are not really very much compared with the deportations that we inflicted on the millions of Germans of the East. It’s true that it was not a matter of “deportations” but of … “displacements”. And I wonder whether the champions, all categories, among the various “war criminals” were not the British with the handing over of their Russian detainees to the Soviets⁴⁶.

S.I.: What is your conception and what is your definition of genocide?

R.F.: I call “genocide” the act of killing people on account of their race. Hitler did not commit “genocide” any more than did Napoleon, Stalin, Churchill or Mao. Roosevelt interned American citizens of Japanese origin in concentration camps. That was not “genocide” either.

Hitler treated Jewish civilians as representatives of a belligerent enemy minority. It is, unfortunately, commonplace to treat civilians of that kind as dangerous or virtually dangerous. In line with good war logic, Hitler would have been led to intern all the Jews who came under his dominion. He did not do so, far from it; this was not, doubtless, for any humanitarian reasons but on grounds of practicality. In certain places in Europe he made his enemies wear a distinctive sign: the Jewish star (from September 1941 in Germany and from June 1942 in the northern zone of France). Wearers of the star could not move about freely and at all hours. They were like prisoners of war on conditional release. Hitler was concerned perhaps less with the Jewish question than with ensuring the safety of the German soldier. The average German trooper would have been incapable of distinguishing Jews from non-Jews. That sign designated them. The Jews were suspected of being able to pass on information (many of them spoke German) and to engage in espionage, arms trafficking, terrorism and black-marketeering. All contact between the Jew and the German soldier was to be prevented. For example, in the Paris metro Jews wearing the star were allowed solely on the last of the five carriages, and the German soldier must not enter that carriage⁴⁷. I am not a specialist on these questions and may be mistaken but I believe this kind of measure was dictated as much by considerations of military security as by any wish to humiliate. In places where there were strong concentrations of Jews impossible to keep under real surveillance, unless through the intermediary of a Jewish police force, the Germans feared what was, incidentally, to happen in the Warsaw ghetto where, suddenly, just behind the front, in April 1943, an insurrection took place. [Correction of 1997: There was not, in this case, an insurrection but rather a reaction of groups of youths against a German police operation. See R. Faurisson, The Warsaw Ghetto in April-May 1943 – uprising or police operation?, 28 April 1993.] With stupefaction, the Germans discovered then that the Jews had built 700 blockhouses⁴⁸. They put down that insurrection and transferred the survivors to transit camps, labour camps and concentration camps. The Jews experienced a tragedy there. I know it is sometimes argued that children aged from 6 to 15 could not constitute a danger and should not have been made to wear the star. But to stay in the framework of this military logic, there exist today enough accounts and memoirs by Jews telling us how in childhood they engaged in all sorts of illicit activities or resistance against the Germans.

One ought to look closely into what is real and what is mythological in the representation made of Jews letting themselves be slaughtered like sheep. Did the non-Jews resist as much as is said? Did the Jews resist as little as is said? What falsifies, in part, the givens of the problem is the fact that many of our judgments are based on a presupposition: that of the “genocide” of the Jews. It goes without saying that if an intention of “genocide” had existed, then the rebuke of cowardice which, apparently, young Israelis bring against their fathers might be understandable. But if, as the revisionists state, the “genocide” is but a legend, then the rebuke of cowardice no longer has much basis.

**Abba Kovner (back row, center) with fellow members of a Jewish partisan organisation in Vilna – one of many such in German-occupied territory during the Second World War**

S.I.: If there was no deliberate intention of genocide on Hitler’s part, then why Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and the other extermination camps? They existed, they were a reality. Not only Jews went there and died, but also “politicals”, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, that is, all those “different ones” whom Nazi racism condemned. Why then were those camps established, to what purpose?

R.F.: A camp can only be qualified as an “extermination” camp if people are exterminated there. It’s so true that, according to the nomenclature created by the official historians, only the camps allegedly equipped with one or more “gas chambers” are called “extermination” camps. Those camps never existed. The horrible typhus epidemic at Bergen-Belsen did not transform that camp (in large part without barbed wire) into an extermination camp. Those dead are not the result of a crime, unless it’s a crime due to war and to human folly. The Allies share with the Germans a heavy responsibility for the frightful chaos in which Europe, its cities, its roads, its refugee or internee camps found themselves at the end of the war. The Allies diffused an abundance of photographs showing the mass graves of Bergen-Belsen. However, thousands of internees died of typhus after the entry of the British into Bergen-Belsen. The British succeeded no more than the Germans before them in stemming that terrible epidemic. Would it be honest to treat them as criminals?

The first Nazi concentration camps were conceived for the internment and re-education (sic!) of Hitler’s political opponents. The propaganda asserted that these camps, open to numerous visits, constituted progress over prisons where the common criminal languished. Jews could land there, but as Communists, Social Democrats etc. The Jews were put in concentration camps by virtue of being Jewish only during the war, above all from 1942 onward. Those among them who had been interned in 1938 in reprisal for the assassination of von Rath by a Jew were for the most part freed after a few months.

Before the war Hitler had attempted, with a certain success, to cause an exodus of the Jews. He wished to see the creation of a Jewish national homeland outside Europe. The “Madagaskar Projekt” was conceived as the project for a Jewish homeland under German responsibility⁴⁹. It foresaw large marsh drainage works as a matter of priority, a banking system etc. The war prevented the project’s realisation⁵⁰. Too many ships would have been required. Little Germany – look at a map of the world – was engaged with Japan and some allies in a formidable struggle against giants. For her, the principal concern was to win the war. Find a solution to the Jewish problem was an accessory matter – a solution at last, a “definitive solution”, a “final solution”, an “overall solution” to a problem which, in a certain way, was as old as the Jewish people themselves⁵¹. This solution, because of the war, was basically to be their “removal to the East” in camps.

Auschwitz was first and foremost a large industrial complex in Upper Silesia made up of three main camps and thirty-nine sub-camps spread over an entire region. The mining, industrial and agricultural activities, the research conducted, were considerable: coal mines (some of which were held by French capital), petrochemicals, armaments, explosives, synthetic petrol and rubber, livestock raising, fish farming etc. At Auschwitz there were free labourers as well as internees, convicts serving life sentences as well as those interned for a limited time. In Auschwitz-II camp (Birkenau) there was the appalling spectacle of numerous persons unfit for work and simply languishing there; among them, the gypsies whom, apart from some exceptions, the Germans seem not to have put to work. A number of gypsy children were born at Auschwitz⁵². It seems that only nomadic gypsies were interned, apparently not for racial reasons but because of their nomadism and “potential delinquency”. I recall that in France even members of the resistance came to look askance at the gypsies, suspecting them of espionage, passing information and black marketeering⁵³. It would be interesting to determine how many bands of gypsies continued to wander throughout Europe during the war. As for the homosexuals, likened to delinquents, they were, like many other delinquents, either removed from prison to the camps to work or sent there directly; German law, like that of many countries in that era, punished homosexuality. As for the Slavs, those who were in the camps were by no means there because they were Slavs but as political internees, prisoners of war etc., just as some Frenchmen were. At Auschwitz there were even British prisoners of war captured at Tobruk.

***IG Farben’s Buna factory was an important part of the Auschwitz complex – the entire internment process was focused on production, not extermination***.

The Germans’ essential concern, as from 1942, was to put all those internees to work (with the exception of persons unfit for work and, it seems, the gypsies) in order to win the war. At Auschwitz there were even trade training courses for boys aged from 12 to 15, in bricklaying, for example⁵⁴. The Germans in charge of deporting foreigners to the camps insisted on obtaining, as much as possible, persons “fit for work”. The foreign governments, for their part, insisted that families should not be separated and, therefore, that their aged and children join the convoys. Neither the Jews nor the others were in the least aware of leaving for any extermination whatsoever, if I am to judge by testimonies like that of Georges Wellers in L’Étoile jaune à l’heure de Vichy⁵⁵. They were right. That massacre was, happily, nothing but a war canard. Besides, it is difficult to conceive how Germany, dramatically short of locomotives, rolling stock, coal, qualified personnel and soldiers, could have put together such a system of convoys for slaughterhouses. Those convoys, I remind you, seem to have had priority even over the war materiel convoys⁵⁶. Manpower, above all skilled labour, was what preoccupied the Germans most.

S.I.: You are specialised in the critical appraisal of texts, but you have made this problem your preferred “field” of “historical research”. Why? What do you mean when you state that there is a “conspiracy of silence” on the problem of the gas chambers and the extermination of the Jews? Why should there be a conspiracy of silence, and on the part of whom?

R.F.: For me, the critical appraisal of texts and documents aims at establishing the degree of authenticity and veracity of what one reads. There is an effort to distinguish between the true and the false, meaning and absence of meaning etc. I suppose it was practically inevitable that the care involved would lead me to the detection of certain historical falsehoods and, in particular, to the detection of what, in a few years, will appear to every historian as a monumental falsehood.

The conspiracy of silence around revisionist works makes it so that they are for the most part samizdat⁵⁷. As for the authors who manage to break through the wall of silence, they are maligned as “Nazis”, a treatment that gets them confined to a ghetto. The methods used against non-conformist historians and individuals range from the purely criminal to lawsuits and prosecutions with, to boot, the doings of informal police spies and informers. All sorts of lobbies are creating or seeking to create an atmosphere of terror. I know a thing or two about this. I can no longer teach at the university. My life has become difficult. I have clashed with some extremely powerful interests. There are young people who support me. The light will emerge. Some Jews are with me; they too want to speak out against the lies and the persecution.

I believe less in conspiracies than in the strength of conformity. The winners of the last war needed to make us believe in the intrinsic ignominy of the defeated. Soviets and Westerners, divided by everything else, had found good ground for agreement there. Hollywood and the Stalinist propaganda apparatus united their efforts. What a fracas of propaganda! The main beneficiaries of the operation have perhaps been the State of Israel and international Zionism. The main victims have been the German people – but not their leaders – and the Palestinian people. But today there is discord in the air. Zionists and Poles are already presenting quite divergent versions of Auschwitz.

S.I.: You challenge a very large part of the methods that the “official” historians have applied in this area of historical research. In your opinion, this chapter of 20th century history has not been written as it ought to be. Why? And why would the historians have done things in this way?

R.F.: The official historians have been wanting in their obligations. They have not observed the routine methods of historical criticism in this matter. They have followed the general current, the current imposed by the media. They have let themselves be absorbed by the system. An official historian like the university professor Hellmut Diwald will run into awful trouble if he merely risks writing a sentence to say that the “genocide”, despite the abundant literature devoted to it, is a matter which, in the sicmain, “is not yet well elucidated”. Under the pressure of German Jewish organisations, the second edition of his Geschichte der Deutschen (“History of the Germans”) has been “recast and improved” (sic!) where necessary.

The courage of Paul Rassinier consisted precisely in having applied the routine methods of historical criticism. In a way he said to his accusers: “Show me your proof”, “Does your document provide guarantees of authenticity?”, “Are you sure that this expression, this sentence actually have the meaning you ascribe to them?”, “Where do your figures come from?”, “How has it been possible to establish that statistic?”, “Where does this photo caption come from?”, “Who tells me that this old woman and this child whom I see in this photo are ‘on the way to the gas chambers’?”, “Does this heap of shoes signify that people were gassed in this camp or rather that many of the camp’s detainees were employed, precisely, in making shoes?”, “Where is the manuscript of this extraordinary testimony that ought to exist in just one form and which I see published in the most contradictory forms, including by one same historian?”

Paul Rassinier, modest professor of history and geography, gave a remarkable lesson of clear-sightedness and probity to his eminent colleagues of the University. Genuine revolutionary, genuine resistance member, genuine deportee, this man loved the truth as it must be loved: fiercely and above all else. He denounced what he called “the lie of Ulysses”. Ulysses, as we know, experienced a hundred trials in his exile but, once back home, he told of a thousand. We know that man is quite hard put not to make up stories. He is often partial to extraordinary tales of hunting, fishing, love, money. But he especially delights in atrocity stories.

The American Arthur R. Butz has written a book on The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. This book causes disarray among the exterminationists. The demonstration is inexorable. The German translation has recently been nearly banned in Germany by placement on the list of “books dangerous for youth”⁵⁸.

***Ursula Haverbeck – prosecuted on many occasions and jailed for expressing her views on Holocaust history – with the important revisionist text by German judge Wilhelm Stäglich***

The German Wilhelm Stäglich has published Der Auschwitz Mythos (English version: Auschwitz : a judge looks at the evidence). The Swedish group Jewish Information announces a work entitled Auschwitz Exit. Other Jews have produced revisionist works: J. G. Burg, in Germany, for example. And just recently, the extreme left journal La Guerre Sociale has published a study entitled “From the exploitation in the camps to the exploitation of the camps”⁵⁹. In Britain, the United States, Germany (where the persecution of revisionists is merciless), Australia, Belgium, Spain, France, a bit everywhere in the world, voices are being raised to ask that an absurd war propaganda finally be abandoned.

I even know – but cannot give their names here – some official historians who are awakening from the nightmare. Perhaps they are going to decide to give up the delights of what the revisionist historian David Irving calls “incest among historians”. This evocative expression illustrates the practice consisting in voluptuously dwelling on what other historians have affirmed and not refreshing the subject except by subtle one-upmanship. One has to have attended a conference of historians on Nazism to possess an idea of this. What a strange communion in the respect of a taboo! And the surveillance! And the sense of being surveilled! Woe to him who would disrupt the expiatory ceremony with an observation deviating from the official line! Boos and censorship⁶⁰.

S.I.: Are you anti-semitic? How do you judge Nazism?

R.F.: I am not anti-semitic. One must try not to see anti-semites everywhere. The Jews who speak out against the imposture of the “genocide” are like the Catholics who say there is an imposture of Fatima (where, allegedly, thousands of witnesses saw the sun dance). The truth, or the search for it, ought not to be considered anti-semitic.

Nazism was, effectively, the dictatorship of a Führer. It died with its Führer on 30 April 1945. My enemy is defeated. Do not expect me to spit on his corpse. As a man, I object to the German people’s defamation by having crimes without precedent in man’s history ascribed to them. And I especially object to the German people’s having been so well “re-educated” that they are the first to believe in those crimes and defame themselves to such a point, even more than their leaders ask them to do. As an observer, I note that Adenauer, Brandt and Schmidt recite the lesson given by the Western victors whilst their counterparts in East Germany recite the lesson given by the Eastern victors. That is Realpolitik, I suppose.

S.I.: You deny also that the number of victims – six million – is credible. But even if there were fewer victims, would that at all change the fact that there was a genocide? And, indeed, no matter the number of victims?

R.F.: Six million people: that is the population of a country like Switzerland. No-one at the Nuremberg trial had the least ability to substantiate such an extravagant figure. It was on the morning of 14 December 1945 that American prosecutor Dodd attempted to accredit this figure by means of a reading of an affidavit from the witness Höttl. In the afternoon of the same day Dodd was forced to pull back upon the intervention of defence barrister Kauffmann, quite decided on requesting the appearance of that witness so that he might ask him to account for the figure. The sad fact is that the press and the historians adopted that figure as though the tribunal itself had believed it⁶¹. [Correction of 1997: The tribunal did indeed endorse the figure of six million (see IMT, I, p. 252-253, 292), attributing it to Eichmann, whereas it is a matter of an estimate attributed by Wilhelm Höttl to his comrade Eichmann.]

My estimate is as follows: 1 / the number of Jews exterminated by the Nazis (or of “victims of genocide”) amounts, happily, to zero. 2 / the number of Europeans killed by acts of war (acts of war that were often atrocious) may be in the order of 40 million; amongst them, that of European Jews may be in the order of one million but, more likely, several hundred thousand not counting those Jews fighting in Allied military uniform. I insist on the fact that this is an estimate of mine without actual scientific character. On the other hand, I have rather good reasons for thinking that the figure of dead at Auschwitz (Jews and non-Jews) amounts to around 50,000 (fifty-thousand) and not 4 million as had long been claimed before some, including the Munich Institute of Contemporary History, settled for the figure of one million. As for the number of dead in all the German concentration camps from 1933-34 to 1945, I think it must have been 200,000 or, at the most, 360,000. One day I shall cite my sources but today I say that, with the help of computers, the real number of dead could doubtless be known quickly. Numerous authorities kept files on the persons who were deported, and they left numerous traces.

S.I.: Do you realise that you might be contributing to a kind of “rehabilitation” of Nazism?

R.F.: Is it rehabilitating Nero to say we possess no proof that he set fire to Rome? What we should be concerned with rehabilitating or re-establishing is the truth, at least when we’re able to do so. It is not the historian’s duty to worry about the interests of Peter or Paul. The important thing for me is to bring my contribution to a truthful history of the Second World War. If a former Nazi came up to me and said that the alleged “gas chambers” and the alleged “genocide” of the Jews made up one and the same historical lie, I should agree with him just as if he’d told me that two and two were four. It would go no further than that, and I should leave him to his political ideas.

Neo-Nazism is, to a large extent, an invention of the media, which also sell us a certain sex-shop Nazism. It’s like the alleged “Odessa File” or the Nazi colonies in South America. Or the chronic re-apparitions of Hitler or Bormann. Money is made with these inventions. In Germany, I believe that those whom their political opponents describe as “neo-Nazis” make up 0.7% of the electorate. We’re living in phantasmagoria, a sort of Nazism without Nazis. On this I refer you to Gilbert Comte’s pertinent analyses in Le Monde of 29-30 May 1979. Nothing being gratuitous in this world, it goes without saying that the deconstruction of this delirium reveals a complex play of interests, passions, conflicts on a global scale. The State of Israel has a vital interest in maintaining this phantasmagoria, which contributed not a little to its creation in 1948. Even a State like France has an interest in masking the reality of a pack of conflicts through maintaining, in the minds of all, vigilance against the worst enemy that there is: the famous vile beast of Nazism, a beast that died thirty-five years ago and at whose expense we are still allowed to let off steam. Hence these perpetual expiatory ceremonies, these condemnations to the eternal flames, this need of vengeance, of punishment, of denunciation with no limit of time, place or person.

***This vast ‘Holocaust memorial’ planned for London is the latest of many intended to take this period outside history and give it an unchallengeable, quasi-religious status.***

S.I.: Don’t you think that to address the problem of the Jewish genocide in this manner is a way to discredit the memory upon which is principally based the widespread conviction that anti-semitism is the worst of all the racisms practised during the 20th century? A discredited memory is, indeed, useless.

R.F.: Anti-semitism is not the worst of all racisms, but a good way of having us believe so is, precisely, to have us believe in the “genocide” of the Jews. The Zionists have gone too far. Those who had wanted to reject the principle of “financial reparations” paid by Germany in the name, in particular, of “genocide” ought to have been heeded. Unfortunately Ben Gurion for the State of Israel and Nahum Goldmann, for both the State of Israel and the Diaspora, wanted to draw a gigantic financial profit from the affair. Adenauer went along with it. That gives the imposture of the “genocide” an even more untoward colouring. Read the stupefying interview of Nahum Goldmann in number 624 of Le Nouvel Observateur (25-29 October 1976)⁶²: rarely has a man been seen so amazed and happy at having made good a splendid politico-financial operation.

**Robert Faurisson with Lady Michèle Renouf after a trial hearing in Paris, 2006**

S.I.: In the course of the controversy with all those who dispute your argument, you have also stated that a good part of what the public knows is merely legend, and that this legend has been made possible thanks to an “indiscriminate” utilisation of the mass media. What exactly do you mean by this? [Correction of 1997: here the Italian journalist attributes to me a word, “indiscriminate”, that is not in my vocabulary.]

R.F.: This is a grave and fascinating point. The media’s responsibility in all this business is a crushing one. For thirty-five years, on the five continents, this legend of “genocide” and “gas chambers” has been presented as truth. Billions of people have been taken in. It’s staggering. What a lesson for those who believe in the quality of diverging and conflicting information! It has taken the heroic struggle of a few individuals, a few non-conformist spirits for the screen of official truth to crack. I could write a long study on the way in which the French newspapers and television go about stifling this information. The courts, along with the public authorities as a whole, help them do so. Today journalists fear that, in the near future, a database of news may be instated, with items being fed into it after a sorting that they themselves will hardly have the means to control. I have a bit of advice for them. If they want to know how they risk being fooled, let them reflect on the past and, for some of them, on their own past. To know how lying may be done one day, let them note how the finest lie of all time has been guarded with jealous care. When Louis XIV lied his lies scarcely travelled beyond a few provinces. Today lies can take on truly Hollywoodian dimensions. A “docudrama” like Holocaust is the crowning of an edifice. It was not conceivable in the years just following the war, full of hatred as they were. Thirty years and more of intoxication were needed for it. A drug as strong as Holocaust could be administered only to minds already long imbued with other drugs of the same kind and that spontaneously demanded still more virulent drugs.

But the overdose has also produced salutary effects by the very spectacle of our degradation that we’ve seen. It’s been possible to note some sound reactions. Here I’m thinking in particular of the altogether remarkable reaction by the “free Jew” Michel Rachline in the Figaro of 3 March 1979.

The non-existence of the “gas chambers” and of the “genocide” is good news. Man, although capable of all horrors, has not been capable of those. And better: millions of people presented to us as accomplices of a monstrous crime or as cowards or liars were, after all, decent folk. I have already said that the Jews accused by their children of having behaved like sheep led to the slaughter by the Germans do not deserve that accusation. I shall add that the accused at Nuremberg and at a thousand other trials were telling the truth when they stated to their judges-accusers that they knew nothing about those appalling massacres. The Vatican and the Red Cross were telling the truth when they pitifully confessed the same ignorance. The Americans, the British, the Swiss, the Swedes and all those peoples or governments whom extremist Jews today rebuke for having stood by idly while, apparently, the Nazi slaughterhouses operated need no longer behave like repentant culprits. The most contemptible result of this gigantic imposture was, and will still remain for some time, this bad conscience that the extremist Jews have created among so many peoples, and particularly in the German people. I should above all not want to give the impression that I am in the least seeking to make an apology for Nazism. Indeed, I believe I’m capable of offering a harsh analysis of that kind of ideology. I shall not present that analysis so long as the false Nazism with which the exterminationists keep drubbing us has not been denounced by all the official historians. Those people, in attacking a Nazism that never existed, give the impression of being incapable of attacking the reality of what Nazism was. They make me think of those who represent Evil in the form of the Devil with grills, stakes and ovens. In reality Evil, as we well know, exists in the systems of life that man has created for himself. So long as mere mythical forms of evil are attacked, evil will thrive. Our society is disoriented. In the middle of the 20th century it has reinvented the Devil. It is combating an imaginary enemy. It has better things to do. An effort at analysis is called for. Let’s open our eyes and see what the media have made of us. That which the power in place seeks to mask – let’s unmask it. In all areas.

Auschwitz, France, gas chambers, Italy, Zyklon B

“The Gas Chambers: Truth or Lie?” Interview with Robert Faurisson published in Storia Illustrata, Milan, August 1979

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Gas Chambers: Truth or Lie?

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