Robert Faurisson on David Cole: Three Pieces

Here are three pieces in which I deal with the matter of David Cole’s activities concerning the Auschwitz-I "gas chamber": first, a letter addressed to him and Bradley Smith on January 9, 1993; then, a footnote from the Introduction to my Ecrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), December 3, 1998; finally, an extract from the May 8, 2000 presentation of my three letters to Le Monde (December 1978-January 1979).

With regard to Cole’s recent statements on the supposed gas chamber at the Struthof-Natzweiler camp I shall soon produce a brief text.

* * *

Robert FAURISSON, January 9, 1993

Letter to Bradley Smith and David Cole on the "gas chamber" in Auschwitz-I*

Dear friends,

In the Smith's Report # 12 (Nov.-Dec. 1992), you present as a sensational piece of news the fact that Franciszek Piper, Director of Research at the Auschwitz State Museum, admitted on camera to David Cole that the "gas chamber" of Auschwitz I was "reconstructed". You add that Robert Faurisson had been denied access to the Museum's archives. Many errors!

I would be pleased if, in the Smith's Report and everywhere else, you could correct all this.

It was in 1975 that R. Faurisson succeeded in having a man in charge at the Auschwitz State Museum, Jan Machalek, admit that this so-called "gas chamber" was not "genuine" (in German: echt) but "reconstructed" (in German: rekonstruiert). Consequently, Faurisson asked: "Reconstructed according to the original plan?" and Machalek replied "yes". Therefore, coming back to Auschwitz in 1976, Faurisson asked Tadeusz Iwaszko, Director of the archives, whether Machalek had been right or not in saying that the so-called "gas chamber" was "reconstructed according to an original plan". And Iwaszko replied "Yes".

So Faurisson asked to have access to this plan and, generally speaking, to plans and documents related to the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematories. Iwaszko, reluctantly, handed over to Faurisson, who had presented himself as someone teaching in the Sorbonne (which was true), some volumes, mostly in Polish, of the Rudolf Höss judicial inquiry and trial. Those volumes contained tiny photos. Very quickly Faurisson found some 30 interesting photos. Among them were photos of two different plans of the Auschwitz-I crematory today supposed to have contained a homicidal "gas chamber". It was easy to see what that room had in fact been:

State 1: From 1940 to 1943, a Leichenhalle (a cold storage room for bodies, with a washroom, etc.); 

State 2: From June 1944 to January 1945, a Luftschützbunker für SS-Revier mit einem Operationsraum (an air-raid shelter for the SS-hospital with an operating room). 

The Leichenhalle was a dead-end room: there was no door on the S/E side.

The Luftschützbunker was a room with an opening on the S/E side: a typical anteroom with two doors and, inside, there were typical partition walls in zig-zag as in any air-raid shelter.

Therefore, if the Poles had "reconstructed" anything, it would have been either state 1 or state 2. In fact, they invented a state 3 (a mixture of state 1 and state 2) and they baptized it Gaskammer(gas chamber). They destroyed the partition walls and they kept the anteroom with the two doors. It was absolutely necessary for the lie's sake to make tourists believe that the "victims" entered the "gas chamber" by this anteroom – recently, D. Cole has told me that the people who run the Auschwitz Museum have changed the story but this is of no importance here – instead of from the room with the ovens. There lies the fraud: the Poles havedestroyed the partition walls of state 1 and kept the anteroom of state 2! It must be clear that the Auschwitz Museum's ordinary guides are of course lying when they tell the tourists that the room is a genuine "gas chamber" or when, more prudently, they simply lead them to believe that. But those in charge at the Museum have also been lying, since 1975 and not 1992, in claiming that this room is a "reconstructed gas chamber".

Be careful: when you say to your readers that F. Piper has admitted that the "gas chamber" is "reconstructed", you in a way corroborate the story of the "gas chamber"! Your readers may think: "OK, the gas chamber is no longer in its original form but, anyway, here we had, at the time of the Germans, a real gas chamber." I know that the title of your article contains the word "fraud". It reads: "Director of Research at Auschwitz State Museum Admits on Camera that Auschwitz 'Gas Chamber' is a Fraud!" But this is misleading since F. Piper only said "reconstructed" (implying "honestly reconstructed", which is the contrary of a "fraud").

Secondly, you don't bring forth any evidence of a "fraud", which is a pity since I had shown the evidence of this fraud in 1979.

Let me remind you what I have been repeating for thirteen years in my books, articles, audio and video cassettes, conferences and even in court. In 1979, I published the story in the Italian monthly Storia Illustrata (August 1979 issue) where one could for the first time find photos of the two plans of Krema I (p. 28) and of the plan of Krema II in Birkenau (p. 33). I showed all this at our first IHR convention in September 1979 in Los Angeles and then at a conference in New York. I recounted the details of the Machalek story when I testified in court at the first Zündel trial in 1985. I told there how I had managed to make Machalek confess what he actually confessed. And remember the models of Krema I and Krema II at Zündel's house for the second Zündel trial in 1988! They were built according to the plans I had managed to find, order and buy at the Auschwitz Museum: quite an adventure, believe me.

Of course, at that time, I could not get Machalek or Iwaszko on camera but I did not need a camera since I had the best possible proof of the fraud (and not an "admission" – a quite false one – of a "reconstruction"). And since 1979, the Auschwitz Museum has never published a denial of what they know I have been saying all over the world. This is another kind of proof.

I hope you will understand my position. I feel disappointed to see that what I have discovered and so often made public is sometimes not perceived even by revisionists. As for very recent revisionists, they, of course, as we say in French, have a tendency to break down open doors. I perhaps made the same kind of mistake with A. Butz and D. Felderer. I wish you a Happy New Year.

January 9, 1993

* Text slightly amended by GN, on line at http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.it/1993/01/letter-to-bradley-smith-and-david-cole.html

Introduction to Ecrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), December 3, 1998, note 8:

http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.it/1998/12/introduction-to-ecrits-revisionnistes.html

[8]  Ibid. In 1992, that is, long after “the late 1970s”, David Cole, a young Californian revisionist of Jewish origin, presented himself as the discoverer of the “gas chamber” falsifications at Auschwitz-I. In a mediocre video he showed, on the one hand, the museum guides’ version (according to which the gas chamber was genuine) and, on the other hand, that of Franciszek Piper, a member of the museum administration (for whom this gas chamber was “very similar” to the original). There was nothing new in that. The trouble was that D. Cole and his friends exaggerated greatly – to put it mildly – in afterwards proceeding to claim that F. Piper had acknowledged that there had been a “fraud”. In effect, there had been a fraud but unhappily Cole had not been able to unmask it, because he was too ill acquainted with the body of revisionist work. He could have definitively confounded Piper by showing him, during the video recording, the original blueprints that I had discovered in 1975-1976 and published “in the late 1970s”. Therein it is plain to see that today’s alleged “gas chamber” is the result of a certain number of makeovers of the premises carried out after the war. For instance, the ceiling’s four alleged “holes for the pouring in of the Zyklon B” were effected – quite crudely and clumsily – after the war: the steel reinforcement cables in the concrete were broken by the Polish Communists and remain today as they were left then.

Presentation of three letters to Le Monde (1978-1979), May 8, 2000:

http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.it/2009/09/three-letters-from-professor-faurisson.html

Finally, it may be said in passing, those who are well acquainted with the revisionism dossier will have noticed that there were, unhappily, instances in the 1990s where purported discoveries were trumpeted by other revisionists, but which were in fact things already to be found in these three pieces by Robert Faurisson from 1978-1979. In this regard the case of a discovery allegedly made by the young Jewish-American revisionist David Cole comes especially to mind. In 1992, Cole was to make quite some fuss over the fact that a young female Polish guide, while showing tourists the Auschwitz I “gas chamber”, declared it to be “in its original state” whereas, for his part, a museum official stated that the room visited was “very similar” to the original one. Yet, in his letter published on January 16, 1979 and, afterwards, distributed in English by a friend of Cole's, Faurisson had already pointed out that contradiction (see the text's first paragraph and first footnote). Let us add, moreover, that the room was not at all “very similar” to an original “gas chamber": its exposition as such amounted to an outright hoax, as a certain number of persons in authority were eventually to admit, among whom, in 1994, the assistant director of the museum (see the article by Eric Conan, "Auschwitz : la mémoire du mal", L'Express, January 19, 1995, p. 68).