Engineer Fröhlich arrested in Vienna

On Saturday, June 21, [2003] chemical engineer (Dipl. Ing.) Wolfgang Fröhlich, 51, was arrested in Vienna, Austria, and taken to prison. His trial could last two days, as the public prosecutor wishes, or as long as two or three weeks, as his attorney, Dr. Herbert Schaller, hopes.

For seven years, Fröhlich had sent to jurists, members of parliament, politicians and journalists, thousands of copies of his writings, in which he says that the alleged wartime Nazi extermination gas chambers are, as he put it, a lie. Remarkably, he suffered no real legal consequences. Then, following the publication in 2001 of his 368-page file, Die Gaskammer Lüge (“The Gas Chamber Lie”), the authorities decided to arrest him. But he went into hiding, and the police apparently made no serious effort to find him.

Fröhlich’s arrest on June 21 may, perhaps, be connected with a statement in Vienna two days earlier by Rudolph Giuliani. On June 19 the former mayor of New York, speaking as a US government representative, told participants at a two-day Conference on Anti-Semitism, held in Vienna by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), that Revisionism should be stopped. In an article published a day earlier in The New York Times, “How Europe Can Stop the Hate,” he said, referring to officials of the European states: “Making sure their citizens have an honest understanding of the Holocaust is vital, as revisionist viewpoints put us at risk of a repetition of race-based genocide.” On June 16 and 17, President George W. Bush criticized “revisionist history” and “revisionist historians” for expressing doubts about the official version of the US war against Iraq.

In a way, Ernst Zündel and Wolfgang Fröhlich may be the first revisionist victims of Bush and Giuliani.

In January 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, manipulated by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., his Treasury Secretary, created the War Refugee Board (WRB), which fabricated its infamous report on the “German extermination camps—Auschwitz and Birkenau.” In September 2001, President George W. Bush, manipulated by Paul Wolfowitz, his Deputy Defense Secretary, created the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which fabricated untrue reports about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The OSP is headed by Abram Shulsky. The OSP individuals who are responsible for the WMD reports call themselves “the Cabal” (from “cabala”). (This has been acknowledged by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker, May 12, 2003, and by Jacques Isnard in Le Monde, June 7, 2003, p. 7.)

Similar lies. Similar liars. Similar beneficiaries. Similar victims.

Therefore, it seems, a similar Revisionism is needed.

Note: On June 17, [2003] the French daily Le Monde published an ironic front-page article entitled (in French): “Saddam was evil, therefore he had prohibited weapons.” To Le Monde I sent a one-sentence letter, meant for publication: “Hitler was evil, therefore he had gas chambers and gas vans.” My brief letter was not published.

Written on June 23, 2003.

Editor’s Note:

Wolfgang Fröhlich was sentenced to three years imprisonment, of which two years were suspended. This was followed by another conviction for the same kind of “crime” in 2008, which added another 6½ years to his sentence.