Impact and Future of Holocaust Revisionism

Robert Faurisson

The following is the remark, not of a revisionist, but rather by an anti-revisionist:[1]

“Holocaust denier,” “revisionist,” “negationist”: everyone knows what such an accusation means. It effectively means exclusion from civilized humanity. Anyone who is suspected of this is finished. His public life is destroyed, his academic reputation ruined.

And he went on to add:

One day people will have to discuss the state of public affairs in a country where to brand a renowned scholar as a Holocaust denier (by hitting him with the ‘Auschwitz Lie’ club [die Keule der Auschwitz-Lüge]) is enough to destroy him morally, in an instant.

Against the Law

Writings such as this essay cannot be sold openly in my country. They must be published and distributed privately.

In France, it is forbidden to question the Shoah – also called the “Holocaust.”

A law on the “freedom of the press” enacted on July 13, 1990, makes it a crime to question the Shoah, in its three hypostases: the alleged genocide of the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers, and the alleged figure of six million Jewish victims of the Second World War. Violators are subject to a prison term ranging from one month to one year, a fine of 2,000 to 300,000 francs ($333 to $50,000), an order to pay considerable damages, and other sanctions. More precisely, this law makes it a crime to question (“contester”) the reality of any of the “crimes against humanity” as defined in 1945 and punished in 1946 by the judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, a court established exclusively by the victors exclusively to judge the vanquished.

Debates and controversies about the Shoah are, of course, still permitted, but only within the limits set by the official dogma. Controversies or debates that might lead to a challenging of the Shoah story as a whole, or of a part of it, or simply to raise doubt, are forbidden. To repeat: on this issue, even doubt is proscribed, and punished.

“Who knocked it down?,” asks a Rabbi about the “Myth of the gas chambers” facade. “Faurisson,” is the reply. Drawing by French artist Françoise Pichard (“Chard”).

In France, the impetus for such a law (which is of Israeli inspiration),[2] came in 1986 from several historians of Jewish origin, including Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Georges Wellers, and François Bédarida, together with Chief Rabbi René-Samuel Sirat.[3] The law was enacted in 1990 on the initiative of former prime minister Laurent Fabius, then a member of the Socialist government, president of the National Assembly, and himself a Jewish militant of the Jewish cause. During this same period (May 1990), a desecration of graves in the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras, in Provence, had given rise to a media furor that nullified any inclination on the part of opposition lawmakers to mount any effective resistance to the bill. In Paris some 200,000 marchers, with a host of Israeli flags borne high, demonstrated against “the resurgence of the horrid beast.” Notre Dame’s great bell tolled as for a particularly tragic or significant event in the history of France. Once the law was on the statute books (promulgated in the Journal officiel on the 14th of July, the national holiday: the same issue, incidentally, that announced Vidal-Naquet’s nomination to the Order of the Légion d’honneur), the Carpentras outrage was mentioned only, if at all, with a certain distance, as a mere reminder. Only the “Fabius-Gayssot” Act remained.

Under pressure from national and international Jewish organizations, and following the Israeli and French examples, other countries similarly adopted laws forbidding any questioning of the Shoah. Such has been the case for Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain and Lithuania. In practice, such specific laws are not absolutely necessary to combat and suppress historical revisionism. In France, as elsewhere, the practice has often been to prosecute questioners of the Shoah under other laws, according to the needs of a given case, on the basis of laws against racism or anti-Semitism, defaming living persons, insulting the memory of the dead, attempting to justify crimes, or spreading false news, and – a source of cash indemnities for the plaintiffs – using personal injury statutes.

In France the police and the judiciary rigorously ensure the protection thus accorded to an official version of Second World War history. According to this rabbinical version, the major event of the conflict was the Shoah, in other words the physical extermination of the Jews that the Germans are said to have carried out from 1941–1942 to 1944–1945. (Lacking any document with which to assign a precise time span to the event – and for good reason, as it is a matter of fiction – the official historians propose only dates that are as divergent as they are approximate.)

A Revisionist Chronicle

Since 1974 I have had to fight so many legal battles that I’ve been unable to find time to compose the systematic exposition that one is entitled to expect from a professor who, over so many years, has devoted his efforts to a single aspect of Second World War history: the “Holocaust” or the Shoah.

Year after year, an avalanche of trials, entailing the gravest consequences, has thwarted my plans to publish such a work. Apart from my own cases, I have had to devote considerable time and effort to the defense, before their respective courts, of other revisionists in France and abroad. Today, as I write these words, two cases are being brought against me, one in the Netherlands, the other in France, while I must also intervene, directly or indirectly, in proceedings pending against revisionists in Switzerland, Canada, and Australia. For lack of time, I have had to decline helping others, notably two Japanese revisionists.

For decades this room in the crematory building at the Auschwitz I main camp has been shown to many hundreds of thousands of tourists as an execution “gas chamber” in its “original state.” It is now authoritatively acknowledged that this “gas chamber” is actually a fraudulent postwar reconstruction.

Around the world, our adversaries’ tactic is the same: use courts to paralyze the work of the revisionists, if not to sentence them to prison terms or to order them to pay fines or damages. For those convicted, imprisonment means a halt to all revisionist activity, while those ordered to pay large sums are compelled to set off on a feverish pursuit of money, goaded by threats of bailiffs, “writs of seizure,” “notices to third parties,” and freezing of bank accounts. For this reason alone, my life over the past quarter of a century has been difficult. It still is and, in all probability, will remain so.

To make matters worse, my idea of research has never been that of the “paper” professor or historian. I consider it indispensable to see the terrain for myself: either the terrain of the forensic investigation, or the terrain where the adversary is deployed. I wouldn’t be entitled to talk about the camps of Dachau, Majdanek, Auschwitz or Treblinka without first having visiting them to examine for myself the buildings and the people there. I won’t talk about anti-revisionist activities, such as demonstrations, conferences, symposia, and trials, without having attended them, or at least delegating an instructed observer to the events – a practice that is not without risk, but which enables one to obtain information from a good source. I have friends and associates produce countless letters and statements. Whenever possible, I go myself to the ramparts. To cite but one example: the impressive international “Holocaust” conference organized in Oxford in 1988 by the late billionaire Robert Maxwell (also known as “Bob the Liar”). I believe I can justifiably say that it aborted so pitifully (as Maxwell himself admitted),[4] thanks to an operation on the spot that I personally organized – with the help of a female French revisionist who lacked neither courage, nor daring, nor ingenuity: her activism alone was certainly worth several books.

To the hours and days thus spent preparing court cases or various sporadic actions should be added the hours and days lost in hospital, recovering from the effects of an exhausting struggle or from the consequences of physical attacks carried out by militant Jewish groups. (In France armed militias are strictly prohibited, except for the Jewish community.)[5]

Finally, I have had to encourage, direct, or coordinate, in France and abroad, numerous activities or works of a revisionist nature, shore up those whose strength has faltered, provide for the continuance of action, answer requests, warn against provocations, errors, digressions from the goal, and, above all combat ill-conceived accommodations given that, for some revisionists, there is a great temptation in such a struggle to seek compromise with the adversary and, sometimes, even to back down. Examples of war-weary revisionists who have sunk to public contrition are, sad to say, not lacking. I shall not cast a stone at them, though. I know from experience that discouragement is liable to befall each of us because the contest is so unequal: our resources are laughable, while those of our opponents are immense.

Historical Revisionism

Revisionism is a matter of method and not an ideology.

It demands, in all research, a return to the starting point, an examination followed by re-examination, re-reading and rewriting, evaluation followed by revaluation, reorientation, revision, recasting. It is, in spirit, the contrary of ideology. It does not deny, but instead aims to affirm with greater exactitude. Revisionists are not “deniers” (or, to use the French expression, “negationists”). Rather, they endeavor to seek and to find things where, it seemed, there was nothing more to seek or find.

In this drawing French cartoonist “Chard” (Françoise Pichard) underscores the remarkable fact that the most notorious “gas chamber” at Auschwitz-Birkenau has no openings through which deadly Zyklon could have been introduced. For decades it has been claimed that Zyklon B pellets were poured into Birkenau's Krema II “gas chamber” through four holes in the roof. (See, for example, Y. Gutman & M. Berenbaum, “Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp,” 1994, p. 167.) However, and as any observant visitor at the site can readily determine for himself, there are no holes or openings in this roof (which is now largely in ruins). On the basis of this fact alone, a central pillar of the Holocaust extermination story is discredited. As revisionist scholar Robert Faurisson has succinctly put it on numerous occasions, “No Holes, No 'Holocaust'!”

Revisionism can be carried out in a hundred activities of everyday life and in a hundred fields of historical, scientific, or literary research. It does not necessarily call established ideas into question, but often leads to qualifying them somewhat. It seeks to untangle the true from the false. History is, in essence, revisionist; ideology is its enemy. Because ideology is strongest during times of war or conflict, and because it then churns out falsehood in abundance for propaganda needs, the historian working in that area is well advised to redouble his vigilance. In probing deep into the “truths” of which he has been reminded so often, he will doubtless realize that, when a war has led to tens of millions of deaths, the very first victim is the ascertainable truth: a truth that must be sought out and re-established.

The official history of the Second World War comprises a bit of truth mixed with a great deal of falsehood.

Official history: Its Retreats in the Face of Revisionist Advances

It is accurate to say that National Socialist Germany built concentration camps; it did so after, and at the same time as, a good number of other countries, all of which were convinced that their camps would be more humane than prison. Hitler saw in them what Napoléon III had thought he saw in the creation of penal colonies: progress for humanity. But it is false to hold that Germany ever established “extermination camps” (an expression invented by the Allies).

It is accurate to say that the Germans manufactured gas-powered vehicles (Gaswagen). But it is false to say that they ever built homicidal gas vans (if a single one of these had ever existed, it would be on display at an automobile museum, or at one of the various “Holocaust” museums, at least in the form of a drawing of scientific value).

Raul Hilberg

It is accurate to say that the Germans employed Zyklon (made from a base of hydrocyanic acid and in use since 1922) to safeguard, by disinfestation, the health of large numbers of civilians, troops, prisoners, and internees. But they never used Zyklon to kill anyone, let alone to put to death throngs of human beings at once. In light of the draconian precautions for the use of hydrogen cyanide gas, the gassing of inmates as allegedly carried out at Auschwitz and at other camps would have been fundamentally impossible.[6]

It is accurate to say that the Germans envisaged a “final solution of the Jewish question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage). But this solution was a territorial one (eine territoriale Endlösung der Judenfrage), and not a murderous one. It was a project to induce or, if necessary, to force the Jews to leave Germany and its European sphere of influence, thereafter to establish, in accord with the Zionists, a Jewish national home, in Madagascar or elsewhere. With a view toward such a solution, many Zionists collaborated with National Socialist Germany.[7]

It is accurate to say that a gathering of German officials was held at a villa in Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin, on January 20, 1942, to discuss the Jewish question. But the subject of their discussions was the forced emigration or deportation of the Jews, as well as the future creation of a specific Jewish territorial entity, not a program of physical extermination.

It is accurate to say that some German concentration camps had crematories to incinerate corpses. But their purpose was to combat epidemics, not to incinerate, as some have dared assert, living human beings along with corpses.[8]

It is accurate to say that many Jews experienced the hardships of war, of internment, deportation, the detention camps, the concentration camps, the forced labor camps, the ghettos; that there were, for various reasons, summary executions of Jews, that they were the victims of reprisals and even massacres (for there are no wars without massacres). But it is equally true that all of these sufferings were also the lot of many other nations or communities during the war and, in particular, of the Germans and their allies (the hardships of the ghetto aside, for the ghetto is first and foremost a specific creation of the Jews themselves).[9] It is above all most plausible, for anyone who is not afflicted with a hemiplegic memory, and who seeks to acquaint himself with both sides of Second World War history (that is, the side that is always shown, as well as the side almost always hidden), that the sufferings of the vanquished during the war and afterwards were, in number and in nature, greater than those of the Jews and the victors, especially as concerns deportations.

It is false that there ever existed, as some have long dared to assert, any order whatever, given by Hitler or any of his associates, to exterminate the Jews. During the war, German soldiers and officers were convicted by their own courts martial, and sometimes shot, for having killed Jews.

It is good thing that the exterminationists (that is, those who believe in the extermination of the Jews) have grown weary to the point that they now acknowledge that no trace of any plan, instruction, or document relating to a policy of physical extermination of the Jews has ever been found and that, similarly, they have at last admitted that no trace of any budget for such an undertaking, or of a body responsible for running such a project, has been found.

It is good thing that the exterminationists have at last conceded to the revisionists that the judges at the Nuremberg trial (1945–1946) accepted as true certain pure inventions, such as the stories of soap produced from Jewish fat, of lampshades made of human skin, of “shrunken heads,” and of homicidal gassings at Dachau.

It is an especially good thing that the exterminationists have finally recognized that the most spectacular, the most terrifying, the most significant part of that trial – that is, the session of April 15, 1946, in the course of which a former commandant of the Auschwitz camp, Rudolf Höss, testified openly that, in his camp, millions of Jews had been gassed – was merely the product of the tortures inflicted on him. His “confession,” presented for so many years and in so many historical works as the Number One “proof” of the genocide of the Jews, is now consigned to oblivion, at least as far as historians are concerned.[10]

It is fortunate that exterminationist historians have finally acknowledged that the famous testimony of SS officer Kurt Gerstein, an essential element of their case, is devoid of value. It is loathsome that the French University revoked the revisionist Henri Roques’ doctorate, earned for having demonstrated that fact in 1985.[11]

It is pitiful that Raul Hilberg, the “pope” of exterminationism, ventured to write, in the first, 1961 edition of his study, The Destruction of the European Jews, that there were two orders by Hitler to exterminate the Jews, and then later to declare, in 1983, that the extermination had come about on its own, without any order or plan, but rather through “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus – mind reading by a far-flung [German] bureaucracy.” So it was that Hilberg replaced a gratuitous assertion with a magical explanation: telepathy.[12]

It is good thing that the exterminationists have, in effect, finally (or very nearly) abandoned the charge, based on “testimonies,” according to which there were execution gas chambers at the camps of Ravensbrück, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Hartheim, Struthof-Natzweiler, Stutthof-Danzig, Bergen-Belsen …[13]

It is good thing that the most-visited “gas chamber” in the world – that of Auschwitz I – has at last (in a January 1995 article) been recognized for what it is – a fabrication. It is fortunate that it has at last been admitted that “Everything in it is false.” I personally delight in knowing that an Establishment historian has written: “In the late 1970s, Robert Faurisson exploited these falsifications all the better as the [Auschwitz] museum administration balked at acknowledging them.”[14] I delight all the more given that the French courts, in their iniquity, convicted me for basically saying just that.

It is good thing that, in that same 1995 article, this same historian revealed that such a figure in the Jewish world as eminent as Théo Klein sees in that “gas chamber” only a “trick” (“artifice”).

It is also a good thing that, in that same article, this same historian revealed, first, that the Auschwitz Museum authorities are conscious of having deceived millions of visitors (500,000 yearly in the early 1990s), and second, that they will nevertheless continue to deceive their visitors, for, as the Museum’s assistant director put it: “[Telling the truth about this ‘gas chamber’] is too complicated. We’ll see to it later on.”[15]

It is fortunate that in 1996 two historians of Jewish origin, the Canadian Robert Jan van Pelt and the American Debórah Dwork, finally denounced some of the enormous fakeries of the Auschwitz camp-museum, and the cynicism with which visitors were being duped there.[16]

It is, on the other hand, unconscionable that UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) should maintain its patronage (as it has done since 1979) of a site such as Auschwitz, whose center upholds, in its fake “gas chamber” (to say nothing of other enormous falsifications), an imposture now avowed as such. UNESCO (based in Paris and headed by Federico Mayor) has no right to use the dues of the member countries to sanction such a vast swindle, one so incompatible with the interests of “education,” “science,” and “culture.”

It is fortunate that Jean-Claude Pressac, after having been praised to the skies, has fallen into discredit. Promoted by the Klarsfeld couple, this French pharmacist thought it wise to stake out a half-way position between those who believed in the gas chambers and those who did not. For him, in a sense, the woman in question was neither pregnant nor unpregnant, but rather half-pregnant and even, with time, less and less pregnant. An author of writings that were supposed to be about the Nazi gas chambers, but in which not one comprehensive photograph or drawing of a single one of those chemical slaughterhouses was to be found, this pitiful scribbler would, in a Paris court on May 9, 1995, go on to give a demonstration of his total inability to reply to the presiding judge’s questions as to what, concretely, such a mass murder machine might actually have been.[17]

It is fortunate that, although in ruins, “the gas chamber” of Krematorium II in Birkenau (Auschwitz II), plainly shows that there never was a “Holocaust” in this camp. According both to a German defendant’s statements under interrogation, as well as 1944 aerial photographs “retouched” by the Allies, the roof of this gas chamber seems to have had four special openings (about ten inches square, it was specified), through which Zyklon was poured in. But as anyone at the site can observe for himself, none of those four openings ever existed. Given that Auschwitz is the capital of the “Holocaust,” and that this ruined crematory is at the core of the alleged extermination process of the Jews at Auschwitz, in 1994 I said (and this phrase seems since to have caught on): “No holes, no ‘Holocaust’.”

It is equally fortunate that a plethora of “testimonies” that supposedly confirm these homicidal gassings have thus been invalidated. By the same token, it is extremely deplorable that so many Germans were tried and convicted by their victorious adversaries for crimes they could not have committed, some even being put to death.

It is good thing that, in the light of trials resembling so many judicial masquerades, the exterminationists themselves voice doubts as to the validity of numerous testimonies. The defective nature of these testimonies would have been much more obvious if one had taken the trouble to carry out a expert examination of the supposed weapon of the alleged crime. But in the course of hundreds of trials concerning Auschwitz or other camps, no court ordered any such inquiry. (The one exception, very little known, was carried out at Struthof-Natzweiler in Alsace, the results of which were kept hidden until I revealed them.) It was nonetheless known that a good number of testimonies or confessions needed to be verified and checked against the material facts and that, in the absence of those two conditions, they were worthless as evidence.

It is fortunate that official history has revised downwards – often quite drastically – the supposed number of victims. It was only after more than 40 years of revisionist pressure that Jewish authorities and those of the Auschwitz State Museum removed the 19 plaques that, in 19 different languages, announced that the number of victims there had been four million. It then took five years of internal bickering for agreement to be reached on the new figure of one and a half million, a figure that, in turn, was very quickly challenged by exterminationist authors. Jean-Claude Pressac, Serge Klarsfeld’s protégé, has more recently proposed a figure of 600,000 to 800,000 Jewish and non-Jewish victims during the entire period of the Auschwitz complex’s existence.[18] It is a pity that this quest for the true figure is not followed through to reach the likely figure of 150,000 persons – most of them victims of epidemics – in the nearly 40 camps of the Auschwitz complex. It is deplorable that the film “Nuit et Brouillard” (“Night and Fog”), in which the Auschwitz death toll is put at nine million, continues to be shown in French schools. This film perpetuates the myths of “soap made from the bodies,” or lampshades of human skin, and of scratches made by fingernails of dying victims on the concrete walls of the gas chambers. The film even proclaims that “nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary barracks”!

It was a good thing that Arno Mayer, a Princeton University professor of Jewish origin, wrote in 1988: “Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.”[19] But why was it affirmed for so many years that the sources were countless and trustworthy? And why was scorn poured on the revisionists who, since 1950, had written what Arno Mayer affirmed in 1988?

It was a particularly good thing that the French historian Jacques Baynac, who had made a speciality, in Le Monde and elsewhere, of labeling the revisionists as forgers, should finally acknowledge in 1996 that there was, after all, no evidence of the existence of homicidal gas chambers. It was, he made clear, “as painful to say as it is to hear.”[20] Perhaps, for certain persons, and in certain circumstances, the truth is “as painful to say as it is to hear.” For revisionists, though, the truth is as pleasant to say as it is to hear.

Lastly, it is fortunate that the exterminationists have allowed themselves to undermine the third and last element of the Shoah trinity: the figure of six million Jewish deaths.[21] It seems that this figure was first put forth by Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel (1903–1956). Based in Slovakia, this rabbi was the main inventor of the Auschwitz lie based on the alleged testimonies of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler. He organized intensive “information campaigns” aimed at the Allies, at Switzerland, and at the Vatican. In a letter of May 31, 1944 (that is, nearly a full year before the war’s end in Europe), he did not shrink from writing: “Till now six times a million Jews from Europe and Russia have been destroyed.”[22]

This six million figure was also published before the end of the war in the writings of the Soviet Jew Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), perhaps the most hateful propagandist of the Second World War.[23] In 1979 the six million figure was suddenly termed “symbolic” (that is, false) by the exterminationist Martin Broszat during the trial of a German revisionist. In 1961, Raul Hilberg, that most prestigious of conventional historians, estimated the number of Jewish wartime deaths to have been 5.1 million. In 1953, another of those historians, Gerald Reitlinger, put forth a figure of between 4.2 and 4.6 million. In fact, though, no historian of that school has offered any figures based on the results of an investigation. It has always been a matter of each one’s own more or less educated guess. The revisionist Paul Rassinier, for his part, proposed the figure of “about one million” Jewish deaths. As he pointed out, though, he did so on the basis of numbers furnished by the opposing side. His figure was thus also a product of guesswork.

The truth is that many European Jews perished, and many survived. With modern calculation methods it should be possible to determine what, in each case, is meant by “many.” However, the three sources from which the necessary information might be obtained are, in practice, either forbidden to independent researchers or are accessible only with great limitation:

• First, the enormous body of documentation gathered by the International Tracing Service (ITS) of Arolsen-Waldeck, Germany, which is answerable to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Switzerland. Access to this center is very limited – closely guarded by a ten-nation board, of which Israel is a member.
• Second, documents held in Poland and Russia, including death registries of certain camps, cremation registries, and so forth. Only a portion of these documents is accessible.
• Finally, the names of the millions of Jewish survivors – in Israel or in dozens of countries represented by the World Jewish Congress in New York – who have received, or are still receiving, financial indemnities or reparations. Merely listing these names would show the extent to which communities that so often have been said to be “exterminated” in fact were not at all exterminated.

Even 52 years after the end of the war, the State of Israel put the official number of “Holocaust” “survivors” around the world at some 900,000. (More precisely, it gave figures of between 834,000 and 960,000.)[24] According to a computation made by the Swedish statistician Carl O. Nordling, to whom I submitted that Israeli government evaluation, it is possible, postulating the existence of 900,000 “survivors” in 1997, to conclude that there were, at the end of the war in Europe in 1945, slightly more than three million “survivors.” Even today, a diverse range of organizations or associations of “survivors” flourish around the world. These include associations of veteran Jewish “résistants,” of former children of Auschwitz (that is, Jewish children born in that camp or interned there with their parents at a very early age), of former Jewish forced laborers, and, more simply, formerly clandestine Jews or Jewish fugitives. Millions of beneficiaries of “miracles” no longer constitute a “miracle,” but are rather the result of a natural phenomenon. The American press has reported fairly often on moving reunions of family members, “Holocaust” survivors all, each of whom, we are assured, was at one time convinced that his or her “entire family” had been lost.

To sum up, in spite of the dogma and the laws, the pursuit of the historical truth about the Second World War in general, and about the Shoah in particular, has made headway in recent years, but the general public is kept in the dark about this. It would be stunned to learn that, since the early 1980s, establishment historians have relegated many of the most firmly held popular beliefs to the rank of legend. From this point of view, one can say that there are two levels of “the Holocaust”: on the one hand, that of the public at large and, on the other, that of the conformist historians. The first seems to be unshakable, while the second (to judge by the number of hasty repairs being made to it), seems on the verge of collapse.

Year by year (and especially since 1979), the concessions made to the revisionists by the “orthodox” historians have been so numerous and of such quality that today the latter find themselves at a dead end. No longer having anything of substance to say about the “Holocaust,” they have handed the baton to the filmmakers, novelists, and theater people. Even the museum people are at a loss. At the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the “decision” has been made not to offer for public viewing “any physical representation of the gas chambers.” (This is according to a statement made to me, and in the presence of four witnesses in August 1994, by the Museum’s Research Director, Michael Berenbaum. He is the author of a guide book of more than 200 pages in which, in effect, no physical representation of gas chambers appears, not even one of the miserable and fallacious mock-up on display for Museum visitors.)[25] The public is forbidden to take photographs there. Claude Lanzmann, maker of “Shoah,” a film remarkable for its utter lack of historical or scientific content, today no longer has any recourse but to pontificate in deploring the fact that “the revisionists occupy the whole terrain.”[26] As for Elie Wiesel, he calls on everyone to show discretion. He requests that we no longer try to closely examine, or even to imagine what happened in the gas chambers: “Let the gas chambers remain closed to prying eyes, and to imagination.”[27] The “Holocaust” historians have turned into theoreticians, philosophers, and “thinkers.” The squabbles among them, between “intentionalists” and “functionalists,” or between supporters and adversaries of a thesis such as Daniel Goldhagen’s on the near-innate propensity of Germans to descend into anti-Semitism and racist crime, ought not to conceal from view the poverty of their historical work.

Revisionism’s Successes and Failures

In 1998, an appraisal of the revisionist enterprise could be briefly put as follows: a sparkling success on the historical and scholarly front (where our opponents capitulated in 1996), but a failure on the public relations front. (Our adversaries have closed off all access to the media except, for the time being, the Internet.)

In the 1980s and early 1990s, anti-revisionist authors attempted to cross swords with the revisionists on the field of historical scholarship. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Nadine Fresco, Georges Wellers, Adalbert Rückerl, Hermann Langbein, Eugen Kogon, Arno Mayer, and Serge Klarsfeld, each in turn tried to persuade the media that answers had been found to the revisionists’ material or documentary arguments. Even Michael Berenbaum, even the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, in 1993 and in early 1994, wanted to pick up the gauntlet I had thrown down, and try to show just a single Nazi gas chamber, just a single proof – of their own choosing – that there had been a genocide of the Jews. But their failures were so stinging that thereafter they abandoned, ever more progressively, the fight on that turf. More recently, in 1998, appeared a thick book by Michael Berenbaum (together with Abraham J. Peck) entitled The Holocaust and History.[28] But far from examining, on the level of historical scholarship, what the authors call the “Holocaust,” instead they unintentionally show that the “Holocaust” is one thing, and “History” quite another. The work, moreover, is quasi-immaterial, presenting neither photographs, nor drawings, nor the least attempt to represent physically any reality whatever. Only the dust jacket offers a view of a heap of shoes. Reputedly possessing a certain graphic eloquence, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum they supposedly tell us: “We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.” This book is merely a compilation of 55 contributions written and published under the watchful eye of Rabbi Berenbaum: in it even Raul Hilberg, even Yehuda Bauer, even Franciszek Piper, abandon any real effort at scholarly research, while at the same time anathema is pronounced against Arno Mayer who, in his 1988 study, tried to put the “Holocaust” back into the realm of history.[29] The irrational has prevailed against attempts at rationalization. Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg (in his film, “Schindler’s List,” inspired by a novel), have in the end triumphed over those in their own camp who once tried to prove the “Holocaust.”

In future years it will be seen in hindsight that in September 1996 the death knell sounded for the hopes of those who wanted to combat revisionism on historical and scholarly grounds. The two long articles in a Swiss daily paper written by the anti-revisionist historian Jacques Baynac definitively closed the book on attempts at a rational response to revisionist arguments.

In the mid- and late 1970s, I offered my own contribution to the development of revisionism. I discovered and formulated what has since come to be known as the physical and chemical argument, that is, the physical and chemical reasons why the alleged Nazi gas chambers were quite simply inconceivable. At the time, I commended myself for having presented to the world a decisive argument that had never before been expounded either by a German chemist or an American engineer. (Germany is not short of chemists, and the United States has engineers who, given the forbidding complexities involved in making and operating an American penitentiary gas chamber, ought to have realized that, because of certain physical and chemical realities, the alleged Nazi gas chambers could not possibly have operated as claimed.)

If, during that period, amidst the fracas prompted by my discovery, a clairvoyant had predicted that, 20 years later, my adversaries, after many attempts to show that I was wrong, would (as Baynac did in 1996) resign themselves to acknowledging that, after all, there existed not the least evidence with which to prove the reality of a single Nazi gas chamber, I certainly would have rejoiced. I might have also concluded that the myth of the “Holocaust” could never survive such a direct hit, that the media would then quit propagating the Great Lie and that, quite naturally, the legal repression of revisionists would end by itself.

In so reckoning I would have committed an error both of diagnosis and of prognosis.

For the spirit of superstitious belief is different than that of science. It makes its own way in the world. The realm of religion, of ideology, of illusion, of the media, and of fictional cinema can develop at a certain remove from scientific realities. Even Voltaire never succeeded in “crushing the vile foe.” One may therefore say that, like Voltaire denouncing the absurdities of the Hebraic tales, the revisionists – in spite of the scholarly character of their work – are doomed never to carry the day against the wild imaginings of the Synagogue, while the Synagogue, for its part, will never succeed in stifling the voices of the revisionists. The “Holocaust” and “Shoah business” propaganda will continue to flourish. It still remains for revisionists to show how this belief, this myth was born, grew and flourished before, perhaps, one day disappearing to make way, not for reason but for other beliefs and other myths.

How are men deceived, and why do they deceive themselves so readily?

‘Holocaust’ Propaganda

The masses are most easily fooled through manipulation of images. With the liberation of the German concentration camps in April 1945, British and American journalists rushed to photograph and film true horrors that were then, one may say, made into truer than life horrors. In the language dear to media people, the public was presented with a “put-up” job.[30] On the one hand, we were shown real dead bodies as well as real crematories, and, on the other hand, thanks to some misleading comments and a cinematic staging, a deft artifice was effected. I describe this fraud with a phrase that may serve to help unmask all such impostures: We were led to take the dead for killed, and crematories for execution gas chambers.

Thus was born the confusion, still so widespread today, between, on the one hand, the crematories, which actually existed (but not at Bergen-Belsen) for the incineration of corpses and, on the other hand, the Nazi gas chambers allegedly used to kill whole crowds of men and women, but which, in reality, never existed nor could have existed.

The myth of the Nazi gas chambers and their association with the crematories originated, in its media form, in the press and newsreel photographs and media commentary from the Bergen-Belsen camp – which, orthodox historians now admit, possessed neither mass-execution gas chambers nor even simple crematories.

‘Gas Chambers’ That Have Never Been Seen or Shown

At a news conference in Stockholm in March 1992, I issued a challenge to the audience of newspaper and television reporters. That challenge was made in the nine words: “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber.”

The next day, the journalists’ reports on the news conference indeed appeared, but they passed over in silence its essential object: precisely that challenge. They had looked for photographs and had found none.

Billions of people over this past half-century assume (or imagine) that they have seen images of Nazi gas chambers in books or in documentary films. Many are convinced that, at least once in their lives, they’ve come across a photograph of a Nazi gas chamber. Some have visited Auschwitz or another camp where guides told them that this or that structure was a gas chamber. Such visitors are told that before their eyes is (as the case may be) a gas chamber “in its original state” or “a reconstruction” of an original gas chamber. (This latter expression implies that the “reconstruction” is faithful, that it conforms to the “original.”) Sometimes visitors are shown remains of what they are told are “ruins of a gas chamber.”[31] Yet, in all such cases, they have been deceived or, better, have deceived themselves. This phenomenon is easily explained.

Many people imagine that a homicidal gas chamber is merely a room with poison gas inside. This reveals confusion between an execution gassing, and a suicidal or accidental one. An execution gassing, such as those of individuals in some United States prisons, is unavoidably a very complicated undertaking. In such a case, care must be taken to kill only the condemned prisoner without causing an accident, and without putting one’s own life, or that of one’s associates, in danger, especially in the final phase, that is, when the chamber must be entered to remove the contaminated corpse. Most “Holocaust” museum visitors, readers, film-goers, and even most historians, are obviously unaware of any of this. Those in charge of “Holocaust” museums exploit this lack of awareness. For an effective Nazi gas chamber exhibit, they need only show the credulous public a gloomy space or room, a cold morgue room, a shower room (preferably located below ground), or an air raid shelter (with a peephole in its door), and the trick will work. The tricksters can manage with even less that this: it’s enough merely to show a door, a wall, or a roof of a purported “gas chamber.” The most clever ones will get by with just a bundle of hair, a pile of shoes, or a heap of eyeglasses, while claiming that these are the only traces or remains left of the “gassed” victims. Naturally, they will refrain from mentioning that, during the war and the blockade, in a Europe beset with general shortages and penury, vast “recovery” and “recycling” programs were organized to reclaim all recoverable materials, including hair, which was used, for example, in textile products.

The ‘Holocaust’ Witnesses: Unverified Testimonies

A similar confusion reigns with respect to the witnesses. We are presented with bands of witnesses to the genocide of the Jews. Whether orally or in writing, these witnesses claim to assert that Germany carried out a plan for the overall extermination of the Jews of Europe. In reality, these witnesses can truthfully attest only to such facts as the Jews’ deportation, their internment in detention camps, concentration camps or forced labor camps, and even, in some cases, the functioning of crematories. The Jews were to so great a degree not doomed to extermination, or to end up in mass-execution gas chambers, that each one of these countless survivors or escapees, far from constituting, as some would have us believe, a “living proof of the genocide,” is, on the contrary, a living proof that there was no genocide. As has been seen above, at war’s end the number of Jewish “survivors” of the “Holocaust” probably exceeded three million.

For Auschwitz alone, a lengthy list may be made of former Jewish inmates who have borne witness – in public, orally or in writing, on television, in books, in the law courts – to “the extermination of the Jews” in the camp.[32]

I shall also mention the resounding case of a late arrival – the Swiss clarinettist Binjamin Wilkomirski. It is not clear why, but this false witness was publicly exposed after a three-year spell of glory during which he was honored with the US National Jewish Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain, the Mémoire de la Shoah prize in France, and an impressive series of dithyrambic articles in the press worldwide. His purported autobiography, in which he relates being deported as a child to Majdanek and to Auschwitz (?), was originally published in Germany in 1995. It appeared in English under the title Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.[33] Jewish author Daniel Ganzfried concluded, on the basis of his investigation, that Binjamin Wilkomirski, alias Bruno Doessekker, born Bruno Grosjean, indeed had some experience of Auschwitz and Majdanek, but only after the war, as a tourist.[34] In 1995 the Australian Donald Watt successfully deceived much of the English-language media with a memoir that told of his alleged life as a crematory “stoker” at Auschwitz-Birkenau.[35] Between September and November 1998, a vast media operation was organized in Germany and France based on the sudden “revelations” of Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Münch, one-time SS physician at Auschwitz. The vein is decidedly bountiful.

Primo Levi is still generally treated as a reliable witness. While this reputation was perhaps deserved in 1947, with the publication of his book Se questo è un uomo (published in the US under the title Survival in Auschwitz), Levi later conducted himself rather unworthily. Elie Wiesel remains the undisputed “star false witness” of the “Holocaust.” In his autobiographical account Night he does not mention “gas chambers.” For him, the Germans threw Jews into blazing pits. (As recently as June 2, 1987, he testified under oath at the Klaus Barbie trial in Lyon that he had “seen, in a little wood, somewhere in [Auschwitz] Birkenau, SS men throwing live children into the flames.” (The translator and editor of the German version of Night resuscitated the “gas chambers” in Wiesel’s account of Auschwitz. In France, Fred Sedel in 1990 similarly proceeded in re-editing a book that had appeared in 1963, putting “chambres à gaz” [“gas chamber”] where, 27 years earlier, he had mentioned only “fours crématoires” [“crematory ovens”].)[36]

In this same boat of “pious lies” one may also include the testimonies of some non-Jews, in particular that of General André Rogerie. In the original 1946 edition of his memoir, Vivre, c’est vaincre, he wrote only of having heard talk of “gas chambers.” But fortified by support from Georges Wellers, he presented himself in 1988 as a “Holocaust witness” who had “beheld the Shoah at Birkenau.”[37] As he himself has related, his lot as a prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was a privileged one. He lodged in the barracks of the “bosses” and enjoyed a “royally cushy position” of which he “has fond remembrances.” He ate pancakes with jam and played bridge. Of course, he wrote, “not only merry events take place [in the camp].” Still, upon leaving Birkenau he had this thought: “Unlike many others, I have been better off here than anywhere else.”[38]

Samuel Gringauz got through the war in the ghetto of Kaunas, Lithuania. In 1950 – that is, at a time when it was still possible to speak somewhat freely on the subject – he gave an appraisal of the literature thus far produced by the survivors of the “great Jewish catastrophe.” Deploring the trespasses to which their “hyper-historical complex” was then giving rise, he wrote:[39]

The hyper-historical complex may be described as judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric. It concentrates historical relevance on Jewish problems of local events under the aspect of personal experience. This is the reason why most of the memoirs and reports are full of preposterous verbosity, graphomanic exaggeration, dramatic effects, overestimated self-inflation, dilletante [sic] philosophizing, would-be lyricism, unchecked rumors, bias, partisan attacks and apologies.

One can only assent to this judgment, which could perfectly well apply today to a Claude Lanzmann or an Elie Wiesel. For the latter’s “hyper-historical complex,” for the “judeocentric, lococentric and egocentric” character of his writings, one may refer to Wiesel’s two recent volumes of memoirs, published in the US under the titles All Rivers Run to the Sea, and, And the Sea is Never Full. In so doing, one may also realize that, far from having been exterminated, a great many of the members of the Jewish community of the little Romanian-Hungarian town of Sighet in all likelihood survived deportation, notably to Auschwitz in May and June of 1944, and internment. Himself a native of Sighet, Wiesel endured the fate of his fellow townspeople. In journeys to various places around the world after the war, he came upon an amazing number of relatives, friends, old acquaintances, and others from Sighet who, thanks to a succession of “miracles,” had survived Auschwitz or the “Holocaust.”

Elie Wiesel

Some Other Second World War Fables

Just as perplexed as today’s generation, those of the future will ask themselves identical questions about a number of Second World War myths besides that of the Nazi gas chambers: in addition to the stories already mentioned of “Jewish soap,” tanned human skins, “shrunken heads,” and “gas vans,” one may also cite the stories of the insane medical experiments attributed to Dr. Mengele, Adolf Hitler’s orders to exterminate the Jews, Heinrich Himmler’s order to halt said extermination, and the mass killings of Jews by electricity, steam, quicklime, crematories, burning pits, and vacuum pumps. Let us also cite the purported exterminations of Gypsies and homosexuals, and the alleged gassings of the mentally ill. Future generations will also wonder about many other subjects: the massacres on the Eastern front as related in certain writings, and in writing only, at the Nuremberg trial by the professional false witness Hermann Gräbe; such now-acknowledged impostures as the book supposedly by Hermann Rauschning, which in fact was written chiefly by the Hungarian Jew Imre Révész, alias Emery Reves, but used extensively at the Nuremberg trial as though it were authentic;[40] the mass killing of Jews near Auschwitz with an experimental atomic bomb, a claim also brought up at the Nuremberg trial;[41] the absurd “confessions” extorted from German prisoners; the reputed diary of Anne Frank; the young boy in the Warsaw ghetto shown as going to his death, whereas he most likely emigrated to New York after the war;[42] along with various false memoirs, false stories, false testimonies, and false attributions, the true natures of which would, with a minimum of effort, have been easy to ascertain.

But those future generations will probably be astonished most of all by the myth that was instituted and hallowed by the Nuremberg trial (and, to a lesser degree, by the Tokyo trial): that of the intrinsic barbarity of the vanquished and the intrinsic virtue of the victors who, as becomes apparent upon a close look at the facts, themselves committed acts of horror that were far more striking, both in quantity and in quality, than those perpetrated by the vanquished.

A Universal Butchery

At a time when one might be led to believe that only the Jews really suffered during the Second World War, and that only the Germans behaved like veritable criminals, an impartial examination into the true sufferings of all peoples and the real crimes of all belligerents seems overdue.

The German defendants at the “International Military Tribunal,” which met November 1945 to October 1946 in Nuremberg. Here Alfred Jodl, standing, delivers his final plea to the Tribunal.

Whether “just” or “unjust,” every war is a butchery – indeed, notwithstanding the heroism of countless soldiers, a competition in butchery. At the end of it, the winner turns out to have been nothing more than a good butcher, and the loser a bad butcher. So when hostilities have ceased, the victor may perhaps be entitled to give the vanquished a lesson in butchery, but certainly not in Right and Justice. Yet that is just what happened in the great Nuremberg trial of 1945–1946, when the four big winners, acting in their own names and in the name of the 19 victorious entities (not counting the World Jewish Congress, which enjoyed the status of amicus curiae or “friend of the court”), had the cynicism to inflict such a treatment on a beaten nation reduced to total impotence.

According to Nahum Goldmann, President of both the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization, the idea of such a trial was the brainchild of a few Jews.[43] As for the role played by Jews in the actual proceedings at Nuremberg, it was considerable. The American delegation, which ran the entire business, was made up largely of “re-emigrants,” that is, of Jews who migrated in the 1930s from Germany to America, and then returned to Germany after the war. Gustave M. Gilbert, the famous psychologist and author of Nuremberg Diary (1947), was a Jew who, working behind the scenes with the American prosecutors, did not miss the chance to practice psychological torture on the German defendants. Airey Neave, a member of the British delegation, remarked, in a book prefaced by Lord Justice Birkett, one of the panel of judges, that many of the American examiners were German-born, and all were Jewish.[44]

For reasons I deal with in detail in my Écrits révisionnistes collection, the Nuremberg trial can be regarded as this century’s crime of all crimes. Its consequences have proven tragic. It accorded the status of truth to an extravagant volume of lies, calumnies, and injustices that over the years have served to justify all kinds of wickedness: in particular Bolshevik and Zionist expansionism at the expense of nations in Europe and Asia, and of Palestine. Given, however, that the Nuremberg judges found Germany guilty, first and foremost, of having unilaterally plotted and instigated the Second World War, we must begin by first examining this point.

Four Giants and Three Dwarfs: Who Wanted War?

Because history is primarily a matter of geography, let us consider a desktop globe of the year 1939 on whose surface a single color would cover four immense aggregates: Great Britain and her empire of a fifth of the Earth, and upon which “the sun never set,” France and her own vast colonial empire, the United States and its vassals, and, finally, the impressive empire of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Then, another color would mark the modest Germany within her pre-war borders, the meager Italy and her little colonial empire, and finally Japan, whose armies at the time occupied territory in China. (We shall not consider here the countries that were later to join the ranks, at least provisionally, of one or the other of these two belligerent blocs.)

The contrast between the geographical areas covered by these two groups is striking, as is the contrast between their natural, industrial, and commercial resources. Of course, by the end of the 1930s, Germany and Japan were starting – as the postwar years further proved – to shake off their yokes, and to build an economy and an army capable of disquieting the bigger and stronger powers. And, of course, the Germans and the Japanese, during the first years of the war, deployed an uncommon measure of energy and succeeded in carving out their short-lived empires. But, all things considered, Germany, Italy, and Japan were mere dwarfs, so to speak, beside the four giants that were the British, French, American, and Soviet empires.

Who today can seriously believe – as was maintained at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials – that during the late 1930s these three dwarfs deliberately sought to provoke a new world war? Better still: who today can believe for an instant that, during the general slaughter that ensued, the first of these three dwarfs (Germany) was guilty of every imaginable crime, while the next (Japan) came a distant second, and the third (Italy), which changed sides in September 1943, committed no really reprehensible acts? Who today can accept the notion that the four giants did not, to use the Nuremberg terminology, commit any “crimes against peace,” any “war crimes,” or any “crimes against humanity” that, after 1945, would have warranted judgment by an international tribunal?

It is nevertheless easy to show, with solid proof, that the winners, in six years of war and in a few years afterwards, accumulated, in their massacres of prisoners of war and of civilians, in massive deportations, in systematic looting, and in summary or “judicial” executions, more horrors than the losers. Katyn forest, the Gulag, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the expulsion, under horrible conditions, of 12 to 15 million Germans (from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia), the handing over of millions of Europeans to the Soviet moloch, the bloodiest purge ever to sweep the continent: was all of that really too small a matter for review by an international tribunal? During this past century, no military force has killed as many children – in Europe, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Central America – as the US air force. And yet no international authority has held it to account for these slaughters, which the “boys” have always been ready to carry out anywhere in the world, for such is their “job.”[45]

Did the French Want War?

“Cursed be war!” reads the inscription on the war memorial in the small French town of Gentioux. In the town of Saint-Martin-d’Estréaux, the inscription on the memorial is lengthier, but its “assessment” of the war sends forth the same cry.[46] The lists, in churches and on monuments throughout France, of the dead from the 1914–1918 war are heart-rending. Today no one is really able to say for just what reason the youth of France (just as, on its side, the youth of Germany) were thus mown down.

On some of these same memorials in our towns and villages one can also find, though in markedly smaller numbers, the names of young Frenchmen killed or missing during the campaign of 1939–1940: about 87,000 altogether. Occasionally one also finds lists of civilian victims. During the war years, the British and Americans alone killed some 67,000 in their air attacks on France. Occasionally, to round out the list, one can sometimes find the names of a few Résistance members who died in their beds well after the war. Almost never can one find the names of French victims of the “Great Purge” of 1944–1947 – probably 14,000, and not 30,000 or, as is sometimes claimed, 105,000 – in which Jews, Communists, and last-minute Gaullists played an essential role. With rare exceptions the names of the colonial troops who “died for France” are also missing, because they were not natives of the French towns.

For France, the two world wars constituted a disaster: the first, especially because of the sheer volume of human losses, and the second because of its character as a civil war that has persisted to this day.

When reflecting on these lists of First World War dead, including those “missing in action,” when remembering the whole battalions of men who survived with ruined faces, of those wounded, maimed, and crippled for life, when taking stock of the destructions of all sorts, when thinking of the families devastated by these losses, of the prisoners, of those “shot for desertion,” of the suicides provoked by so much suffering, when remembering as well the 25 million deaths in America and Europe in 1918 from the epidemic of a viral illness wrongly called “Spanish influenza” (brought into France, at least in part, by American troops),[47] can one not understand the pre-1939–1945 pacifists and supporters of “Munich,” as well as the Pétainists of 1940? What right today has anyone to speak blithely of “cowardice,” either with regard to the Munich accords of September 29 and 30, 1938, or to the armistice signed at Rethondes in Picardy on June 22, 1940? Could the Frenchmen who, in the late 1930s, still bore the physical and emotional scars of the 1914–1918 holocaust (a veritable one), and its aftermath, consider it a moral obligation to hurl themselves straight into a new slaughter? And, after the signing of an armistice that, however harsh, was by no means shameful, where was the dishonor in seeking an understanding with the adversary, not in order to wage war but to make peace?

Did the Germans Want War?

“Hitler [was] born at Versailles”: that sentence serves as the title of a work by the late Léon Degrelle.[48] The 1919 Versailles Diktat – for it was not really a treaty – was so harsh and dishonorable for the defeated nation that the American Senate refused to recognize or adopt it (November 20, 1919). And in the years that followed, it was ever more discredited. It dismembered Germany, submitted it to a cruel military occupation, and starved it. In particular, it obliged the defeated nation to cede to the newly created state of Poland the regions of Posen, Upper Silesia, and part of West Prussia. The 440 articles of the “Treaty of Peace Between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany” (together with its annexes) signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919, constituted, along with the related treaties (Trianon, Saint-Germain, Sèvres), a monumental iniquity which, if anything, only the fury of a recently ended war can explain. As one French writer has put it: “It is easy enough to find fault with the Germans for not having respected Versailles. Their duty of honor as Germans was, first, to get round it, and then to tear it up, just as that of the French was to maintain it.”[49]

Twenty years after that crushing humiliation, Hitler sought to recover some of the territory turned over to Poland, just as France, after its defeat in 1870, sought to recover Alsace and a part of Lorraine.

Unless he chooses to speak flippantly, no historian is in a position to state who in fact is mainly to blame for a worldwide conflict. It is thus wise not to ascribe to Hitler exclusive responsibility for the 1939–1945 war under the pretext that, on the 1st of September 1939, he went to war against Poland. On the other hand, the attempt to justify the entry into war of Britain and France, two days later, against Germany on the basis of a pledge to come to the aid of Poland seems rather unfounded given that, two weeks later (September 17, 1939), the USSR invaded Poland and occupied a good part of its territory, without prompting any military reaction on the part of Britain or France.

Worldwide conflicts resemble tremendous natural disasters in that they cannot accurately be predicted, even if one can sometimes feel them coming. Only after the fact can they be explained, laboriously and, too often, affected by reserves of bad faith in the form of mutual accusations of negligence, blindness, ill will, or irresponsibility. All the same one can note that in Germany during the late 1930s, the pro-war camp, that is, those who urged military action against the western powers was, to all intents and purposes, non-existent. The Germans envisaged only a “push to the East” (Drang nach Osten). On the other hand, in Britain, France and the United States, the anti-German hawks were powerful. The “war party” wanted a “democratic crusade,” and got it. Among these new crusaders figured, with a few noteworthy exceptions, the whole of American and European organized Jewry.

Churchill and the British as Masters of War Propaganda

During the First World War, the British cynically exploited all the resources of propaganda based on wholly fictitious atrocity stories.[50] During the Second World War they remained true to form.

Today people widely condemn Neville Chamberlain for his policy of “appeasement” in dealing with the Germans, whereas people hold, or pretend to hold, Winston Churchill in high esteem for his determination to carry on war against Germany. It is not yet certain that history, with time, will uphold this judgment. New discoveries concerning Churchill’s personality and wartime role raise questions about the dubious justifications for that determination, along with questions about the fruits of his policies. At least Chamberlain had foreseen that even a British victory would entail disaster for his country, her empire, and for other victors as well. Churchill did not see this, or did not know how to see it. He promised “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” to be followed by victory. He did not anticipate the bitter morrow of victory: the hastened disappearance of the empire he held dear, and the handing over of nearly half of Europe to Communist imperialism.

During an address given several years ago, David Irving, Churchill’s biographer, showed the illusory nature of the justifications given by Churchill, first, to launch his countrymen into the war, and then to keep them in it. The business, if one may so term it, was carried out in four phases.

In the initial phase, Churchill assured the British that it was their obligation to go to the aid of a Poland that had fallen victim to Hitler’s aggression but, two weeks into the war, this motive was nullified by the Soviet Union’s aggression against the same ally.

In the next phase, he explained to his countrymen that they must carry on the war in order to safeguard the British empire. He rejected Germany’s repeated peace proposals, and in May 1941 he had the peace emissary Rudolf Hess incarcerated. Whereas Germany wanted to preserve and maintain the British empire, he chose to conclude an alliance with the empire’s worst possible enemy: the American Franklin Roosevelt. Thus the second motive was then nullified.

In a third phase, Churchill told the British that they were duty-bound to fight for Democracy, including its most paradoxical variety: the Soviet Socialist. He held that a second European front must be opened to relieve the burden on Stalin. This of course meant aiding a dictatorship that had assaulted Poland on September 17, 1939, and which was preparing a new conquest of that country.

As late as one month before the end of hostilities in Europe (May 8, 1945), British propaganda was generally lacking in coherence, while many British and American soldiers were appalled to learn the extent to which their bombers had ravaged Germany.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, American President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference in Soviet Crimea, February 1945.

It was then that suddenly, in April 1945, there occurred a miracle that enabled Churchill to find his fourth, and really good motive: the discovery of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp prompted him to assert that, Britain’s difficult fight over nearly six years, wreaking and enduring so much havoc, was for no less a cause than that of civilization itself. To be sure, on more than one occasion he had already spoken to his countrymen, in his customarily high-flown rhetoric, about Britain as the cradle of a civilization threatened by the Teutonic hordes (the “Huns,” as he called them), but these oratorical devices no longer worked so well. The godsend was the discovery in April 1945 of a pestilence-ravaged camp: a boon for Churchill and for British propaganda.

At Bergen-Belsen, the British Introduce the ‘Nazi Crime’ Media Spectacle

Situated near Hannover, Bergen-Belsen was originally established as a camp for wounded soldiers. In 1943 it became a detention center for European Jews who were to be exchanged for German civilians held by the Allies. In the middle of the war, Jews were transferred from that camp to Switzerland or, by way of Turkey, even to Palestine (yet another proof, as may be pointed out in passing, of the absence of an extermination program).

Until the end of 1944, conditions for inmates at Bergen-Belsen were about normal: then, along with a convoy of deportees brought from regions in the East facing the imminent Soviet onslaught, there arrived epidemics of dysentery, cholera, and exanthematic typhus. The resulting disaster was aggravated by the Anglo-American bombing raids that severely hampered deliveries of medicine, food, and – most devastating of all – water. The rail transports of Jews from the East no longer took just two or three days to reach the camp, but rather one or two weeks. Because of Allied air bombardment and strafing, the trains could proceed only at night. As a result, the trains arrived containing only dead and dying, or exhausted men and women unfit to withstand such epidemics. On March 1st, 1945, camp commandant Josef Kramer sent a letter to General Richard Glücks, chief of concentration camp administration, in which he described this “catastrophe” in detail, concluding with the plea: “I implore your help in overcoming this situation.”[51]

Germany, on its last legs, could no longer deal with the influx of its own eastern refugees arriving by the millions. It could no longer manage to supply its army with weapons and ammunition, or its population with food. Finally, it could no longer remedy the tragic conditions in camps where even guards were dying of typhus. Himmler authorized Wehrmacht officers to establish contact with the British to warn them that they were approaching, in their advance, a frightful den of infection. Negotiations followed. A wide truce area was declared around Bergen-Belsen, and British and German soldiers decided, by mutual consent, to share the task of camp surveillance.

But what they found in the camp, including barracks and tents flooded with excrement, and the unbearable odor of decomposing bodies, quickly had the British feeling indignant. They came to believe, or were allowed to believe, that the SS had deliberately chosen to kill the inmates or to let them die. And, despite their own best efforts, the British were unable to curb the terrible mortality rate.

Then, like a swarm of vultures, journalists swooped down on the camp, filming and photographing every possible horror. They also proceeded to arrange certain scenes of their own making: a famous one, shown for example in the film “Night and Fog,” is that of a bulldozer pushing corpses into a large pit. Many viewers have been led to believe that they are seeing “German bulldozers.”[52] They didn’t notice that the bulldozer (just one) is driven by a British soldier who, doubtless after a body count, is pushing the corpses into a large trench that had been dug after the camp’s liberation. The Jew Sydney Lewis Bernstein, London head of the Home Office cinema section, called on Alfred Hitchcock to make a film on these “Nazi atrocities.” Hitchcock accepted, but, in the end, only fragments of his film were made public, probably because the complete version contained assertions that might cast doubt on its authenticity.[53]

On the whole, the “shock of Bergen-Belsen” was a great success for Allied propaganda. In every possible way, the media exploited it to show dead and dying camp inmates to the world at large, but while at the same time leading viewers, through commentary, to think that these inmates had been killed, murdered, or exterminated, or else were walking corpses condemned to perish as victims of killing, murder, or extermination. Thus, on the basis of the ghastly conditions in a camp that, as already noted, had neither crematories nor (as conventional historians acknowledge) any homicidal gas chamber, was built the general myth of the existence and use, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, of “gas chambers” coupled with crematories.

Among the most famous casualties of epidemics in that camp were Anne Frank and her sister Margot who, for nearly 40 years, were widely and persistently said to have been gassed at Auschwitz (from where, in fact, they had been brought), or killed at Bergen-Belsen. Today, it is generally conceded that they died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in February–March 1945.

The “shock of Bergen-Belsen” was very quickly imitated by the Americans who, turning to Hollywood, shot a series of motion pictures on the liberation of the German camps. After editing the extensive footage (6,000 feet of film, of a total of 80,000), they produced a film that was shown on November 29, 1945, at the Nuremberg trial. Everyone, including most of the defendants, found it quite disturbing. A few of the defendants sensed the deceit, but it was too late: the great lie’s bulldozer had been set in motion. It is still running today. The viewers of all the many horror films on the “Nazi camps” have, over time, been conditioned by the choice of images and the commentary. A section of wall, a heap of shoes, a smokestack: it has taken no more than these for the public to believe that they have seen a chemical slaughterhouse.

Fifty-two years after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp, Maurice Druon, secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie française, testified at the trial of Maurice Papon, accused of “collaboration” in the “Final Solution.” Here is an extract of his deposition mentioning gas chambers at that camp (which, as all historians today acknowledge, had none), the famous bulldozer, and the “hair shorn from the dead to help make some ersatz or other”:[54]

When speaking today of the camps, one has in one’s eyes, and the jurors present have in their eyes, those horrid images that the films and the screens offered and offer to us; and it is quite right to do so [that is, to show them], and they ought to be re-shown each year to every secondary school graduating class. But those images, of the gas chambers, of the mounds of hair shorn from the dead to help make some ersatz or other, of those children playing among the corpses, and of those bodies so great in number that they had to be pushed into a pit by a bulldozer, and of those troops of skeletons, staggering and haggard, in striped pajamas, with death in their eyes, those images, and I hereby bear witness, I was, in my modest capacity of information officer, one of the 20 Allied officers to “view” them first, when the uncut footage, as it is called, arrived just after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the English. But that was in the spring of 1945. Until then, no one knew. – We must not judge with our trained eyes [sic] of today, but with our blind eyes of yesterday.

Maurice Druon, in reality, had “trained eyes” yesterday and has “blind eyes” today. More than 50 years of propaganda have blinded him. But already during the war, were not he and his uncle Joseph Kessel, both Jewish, blinded by their hatred of the German soldiers when they wrote the atrocious “Partisans’ Song,” which includes the exhortation “Killers by bullet and by knife, kill quickly!”?

The Americans and the Soviets Outdo the British

In 1951, anyway, the Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt had the honesty to write:[55]

It is of some importance to realize that all pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops marched in … The condition of the camps was a result of the war events during the final months: Himmler had ordered the evacuation of all extermination camps in the East, the German camps were consequently vastly overcrowded, and he was no longer in a position to assure the food supply in Germany.

Let us once more recall that the expression “extermination camps” is a creation of Allied war propaganda.

Eisenhower thus followed Churchill’s lead and set about building, on an American scale, such a propaganda edifice, based on atrocity stories, that soon everything and anything came to be allowed, as much in regard to the vanquished as to the simple, factual truth. In news reports about the German camps there were added to the true horrors, as I have said, horrors truer than life. Eliminated were the photographs or film segments showing inmates with beaming faces, such as that of Marcel Paul,[56] or those in relatively good health despite the severe shortages or epidemics, or, as at Dachau, the healthy Hungarian Jewish mothers with their babes-in-arms. Instead, the public was only shown images of the sickly, the wasted, the human rags, who were actually just as much victims of the Allies as of the Germans, for the former, with their carpet-bombing of the whole of Germany and their systematic aerial strafing of civilians – even of farm workers in the fields – had brought about an apocalypse in the heart of Europe.

These Hungarian Jewish mothers with their babies were photograph ed at Dachau on May 1, 1945, two days after the liberation of the camp. The official US Army caption reports that these Jewish babies were born during the final months of German control of the camp. (US Army photo SC 205488.)

Respect for the truth will oblige one to remark that neither Churchill, nor Eisenhower, nor Truman, nor de Gaulle was impudent enough to lend credence to the tales of chemical slaughterhouses. They left that job to their propaganda specialists and to the judges of their military tribunals. Appalling tortures were inflicted on the Germans who, in the eyes of the Allies, were guilty of all of those “crimes.” Reprisals were carried out against German prisoners and civilians. As late as 1951 German men and women were being hanged. (Even in the 1980s, the Soviets were still shooting German or German-allied “war criminals.”) British and American soldiers, at first quite taken aback at the sight both of the German cities reduced to rubble, and of their inhabitants turned into cave-dwellers, could return home with peace of mind. Churchill and Eisenhower were there to vouch for the Truth: the Allied forces had brought down Evil; they embodied Good; there was to be a program of “re-education” for the defeated Germans, including the burning by the millions of their bad books. All told, the Great Slaughter had come to a happy ending, and had been carried out for a righteous cause. Such was the fraud made holy by the Nuremberg show-trial.

A Fraud at Last Denounced in 1995

It took no less than 50 years for a historian, Annette Wieviorka, and a filmmaker, William Karel, to reveal to the general public, in a documentary entitled Contre l’oubli (“Against Forgetting”), the 1945 American and Soviet stagings and fabrications carried out in the context of the liberation of the camps in East and West.

Wieviorka, a French Jew, and Karel, an Israeli who has lived in France since 1985, have manifestly been influenced by the French revisionist school. Although quite hostile toward the latter, they have nonetheless admitted that the time has at last come to denounce some of the exterminationist propaganda’s most glaring fictions. On this subject one may refer either to an article by the journalist Philippe Cusin[57] or, especially, to another article that Béatrice Bocard prepared for the repeat broadcast of “Against Forgetting” on Antenne 2 television, a piece whose title alone says a great deal: “The Shoah, from reality to the spectacle. The indecent stagings by the liberators in the face of the deportees’ accounts.”[58] In it Bocard wrote:

With only slight exaggeration, it might be said that the liberation of the concentration camps introduced the reality shows … The first signs of the genre of spectacles that television channels like CNN were to make commonplace 50 years later were already there, with attempts to outdo [one another] at indecency, at voyeurism, and with recourse to staging … The least infirm of the survivors were made to repeat their script before the cameras: “I was deported because I was Jewish,” says one of them. Once, twice … Not to be outdone by the American “show,” the Soviets, who had done nothing at the time of the Auschwitz camp’s liberation, shot a “fake liberation” a few weeks afterwards, with Polish extras enthusiastically greeting the soldiers … “William Karel is the first to have dissected these false images that we had always been told, until quite recently, were genuine,” says Annette Wieviorka. How had it been possible to accept them? “People are not in the habit of questioning images as they question texts,” the historian explains. “The example of the [purported] mass graves at Timosoara [Romania, December 1989] is not too distant.”

It goes without saying that, in this article by Bocard, the manipulations were presented as being offensive … for the internees. Some German soldiers and civilians denounced this sort of fakery as early as 1945 but, instead of being believed, they were accused of Nazism or anti-Semitism.

The Jewish Organizations’ Responsibility for This Propaganda

From its origins in 1941 up to the present, the propaganda that has evolved around the “genocide” and the “gas chambers” has essentially been the product of Jewish organizations. As a result, the general public has gradually become convinced that the Germans carried out a wartime program of physical extermination directed, above all, at the Jews, and that the “gas chambers” were in some way reserved exclusively for them (including for the Jewish “Sonderkommando” members whose supposed job was to lead their fellow Jews to the slaughter). Nowadays, the countless “Holocaust museums” constitute a Jewish monopoly, and a Hebrew word, “Shoah” (“catastrophe”), is used ever more often to designate this purported genocide. Whatever their part in the making of the myth and in its success, the western Allies played only a supporting role, and always under pressure from various Jewish organizations. (The Soviet case may have been different: Moscow’s fabrication of an “Auschwitz” in which the fate of the Jews was not particularly emphasized may have been born of the need for a propaganda to be directed less toward the peoples behind the Iron Curtain than toward Western “progressives.”)

The fact that today some Jewish voices are being raised to ask that there be less talk of the “gas chambers” has not induced Jewish community leaders to tone down the “Holocaust” or Shoah propaganda. From the standpoint of Jewish historians these incredible “gas chambers” have, to put it simply, become somewhat burdensome in propagating the Shoah religion.

A French political figure, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has said that the Nazi gas chambers are a detail of Second World War history. Yet, in their respective writings on that war, Eisenhower, Churchill, and de Gaulle apparently regarded those chemical slaughterhouses as even less than a detail, given that they did not mention a word of them. A similar discretion can be noted on the part of the historian René Rémond, who was a prominent member first of the French Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (Committee on the History of the Second World War), then of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (Institute of Contemporary History): in two of his works where one might expect to read the words “gas chambers,” one finds no such thing. The American historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen speaks of Nazi gas chambers as an “epiphenomenon.” In the 84,000-word French version of the Nuremberg judgment, only 520 extremely vague words are devoted to them, a portion amounting to 0.62 percent of the text.[59]

For a revisionist, the gas chambers are less than a detail because they quite simply never existed. But the gas chamber myth is much more than a detail: it is the cornerstone of a huge structure of beliefs of all sorts that the law forbids us to question.

“Gas chambers or not, what does it matter?” This question may at times be heard, tinged with skepticism. It bothers Pierre Vidal-Naquet, for whom the abandonment of the gas chambers would be a “surrender in open country.”[60] One can only agree with him. On the matter of the gas chambers’ existence or non-existence hinges, in effect, the question of whether the Germans are to be regarded as arrant criminals, or instead, the Jews as arrant liars (or confidence men). In the former case, the Germans, in the space of three or four years, killed industrial proportions of poor unarmed victims by industrial means whereas, in the latter, the Jews, for more than half a century, peddled a lie of historic dimensions.

In 1976 the American Arthur Robert Butz, published his book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. In the newspaper Le Monde of December 29, 1978, and January 16, 1979, I published two texts on “the rumor of Auschwitz,” and, at the very start of that same year of 1979, Wilhelm Stäglich published Der Auschwitz Mythos. Voicing the grave Jewish worries in the face of the emergence of revisionist writings, the Zionist William D. Rubinstein, professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, wrote at the time: “… Were the Holocaust shown to be a hoax, the number one weapon in Israel’s propaganda armory disappears.”[61] Some time later he similarly declared: “… The fact that if the Holocaust can be shown to be a ‘Zionist myth,’ the strongest of all weapons in Israel’s propaganda armory collapses.”[62]

Eight years later, as if to echo those statements, a lawyer for the “International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism” (LICRA) wrote:[63]

If [it is true that] the gas chambers existed, then Nazi barbarity has no equal. If not, the Jews will have lied and anti-Semitism will thus be justified. Those are the stakes in the debate.

In Ernst Zündel’s phrase, “the ‘Holocaust’ is Israel’s sword and shield.”

The stakes are thus not merely historical but also political. And the political stakes present a paradox: the “Holocaust” myth serves, in the first place, to condemn German National Socialism, and secondarily all forms of nationalism or of the national idea – except the Israeli and Zionist variety, which the myth, on the contrary, reinforces.

The stakes are just as much financial, as one may realize when considering that, at least since the “reparations” agreement signed at Luxembourg in 1952, German taxpayers have paid “astronomical” sums (as Nahum Goldmann put it) to the Jewish population of the State of Israel as well as outside (in the Diaspora), and that they are to continue to pay for the crimes of the Shoah imputed to them until at least the year 2030. The “Shoah Business,” denounced even by a Pierre Vidal-Naquet, is inseparable from the Shoah.

Today, the bluff of the Shoah legitimizes a worldwide racket. In the first place, a growing number of either rich or poor countries, including France, find themselves facing claims made by billionaire Edgar Bronfman’s World Jewish Congress, and by immensely wealthy American Jewish organizations, for new “reimbursements” or new “reparations” in the form of mountains of gold and money. The countries of Europe, starting with Switzerland, are not the only ones targeted. For the moment a well-established “mafia” concentrates on four main issues (there will certainly be others in future): “Nazi gold,” Jewish assets, Jewish art collections, and insurance policies taken out by Jews. The chief targets are governments, banks, museums, auction houses, and insurance firms. The New Jersey legislature, under pressure from Jewish organizations, took measures to impose a boycott of Swiss banking institutions. This is but the beginning. The only real argument brought to bear by the blackmailers can be put in one word: Shoah. Not one government, not one bank, not one insurance company dare retort that the matter at hand is one of myth, and that there is no question of its paying for a crime that was not committed. The Swiss, also under pressure from Jewish organizations, were at first so naive as to think that it would be enough to enact a law forbidding any questioning of the Shoah. But no sooner had they enacted this new legislation than Bronfman presented them his bill. They then offered considerable amounts: a wasted effort. An “angry” Bronfman let it be known that it would take infinitely more to satisfy him. “My experience with the Swiss,” he remarked, “is that unless you hold their feet very close to the fire, they don’t take you seriously.”[64]

As for the moral wrong done to Germany in particular and to non-Jews in general by the propagation of the “Holocaust” faith, it is incalculable. Incessantly the Jewish organizations repeat their accusations, not only against a Germany supposedly guilty of a “genocide” of the Jews, but also against Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Stalin, Pope Pius XII, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the neutral countries, and still other countries, all guilty, supposedly, of having permitted Germany to commit this “genocide” and, consequently, themselves likewise liable for financial “reparations.”

Jewish Organizations Impose a ‘Holocaust’ Creed

My writings have dealt little with the “Jewish question.” If, over so long a period, I doggedly pursued this historical inquiry without giving much thought to the “Jewish question” as such, it was because, to my mind, the latter was of only secondary importance. Were I to dwell on it I might risk being thrown off the essential course: for I was seeking, first and foremost, to determine, respectively, the real and the mythical components in the story of the so-called “Holocaust” or Shoah. It was therefore far more important for me to establish the actual facts than to try to uncover the responsibilities.

And yet, in spite of myself, two things made me abandon this reticence: the attitude of numerous Jews toward my work, and the aggressive manner in which they served notice on me to state my position regarding the subject that grips so many of them: the “Jewish question.”

When, in the early 1960s, I approached what Olga Wormser-Migot was to call in her 1968 doctoral thesis “the problem of the gas chambers,” I knew beforehand what sort of consequences such an undertaking might generate. Paul Rassinier’s example was there to warn me that I could expect grave repercussions. I nonetheless decided to go ahead with it, to keep within the framework of research of an entirely scholarly nature, and to publish my results. I also chose to leave to the potential adversary any responsibility for recourse to coercion or perhaps even physical violence should the matter ever go beyond the confines of academic controversy.

And that is precisely what happened. Using a metaphor, I could say that the frail door behind which I drafted my revisionist writings one day abruptly gave way to the pushing and shoving of a loud mob of protesters. I was bound then to remark that, in their entirety or quasi-entirety, these troublemakers were sons and daughters of Israel. “The Jews” had barged into my life. I suddenly found them to be not as I had known them hitherto, that is, as individuals to be distinguished one from the other, but as mutually inseparable elements of a group especially united in hatred and, to use their own word, in “anger.” Frenzied and frothy-mouthed, in a tone at once moaning and threatening, they came to trumpet in my ears that my work outraged them, that my conclusions were false, and that I must imperatively show allegiance to their version of Second World War history. This kosher version of history put “the Jews” at the center of that war as its victims “second to none,” while in fact the conflict caused probably close to 40 million deaths. For Jews, their slaughter is unique in world history. I was warned that unless I complied my career would be ruined. Soon afterwards I was brought to court. Then, by way of the media, the Grand Sanhedrin made up of the priests, doctors, and other worthies of Jewish Law enforcement launched a virulent campaign against me, advocating hatred and violence. I shall not dwell here on the insults, physical assaults, and court cases that have been its interminable aftermath.[65]

Paul Rassinier

The leaders of these Jewish organizations readily call me a “Nazi,” which I am not. As comparisons go, “Palestinian” seems more befitting in view of my standing with them, for they have treated me like one, and I have come to believe that the Jews in their Diaspora behave toward those who displease them much as their brethren behave in Palestine. My writings are, in a sense, the stones of my Intifada. Frankly speaking, I find no essential difference between the behavior of the Zionist leaders of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, and that of the Jewish leaders in Paris or New York: the same harshness, the same spirit of conquest and domination, the same insistence on privileges, all against a constant background of blackmail, of pressure accompanied by complaints and moaning. Such is the case in today’s world. Was it different in the past? Were the Jewish people as unhappy in past centuries as they tend to claim? Have they suffered as much from wars, foreign and civil, as have other human communities? Have they experienced as much hardship and misery? Have they really had no responsibility for the hostile reactions of which they are so quick to complain? On this point, Bernard Lazare wrote:[66]

If this hostility, even repugnance, had been brought to bear on the Jews only at one time and in one country, it would be easy to explain the limited causes of such anger; but this race has been, on the contrary, faced with the hatred of all the peoples among whom it has settled. Therefore, because the Jews’ foes have belonged to the most diverse races – races inhabiting lands quite distant from one another, living under different laws and governed by opposing principles, having neither the same ways nor customs, and, animated by various ways of thinking, being unable to judge all things in the same manner – the general causes of anti-Semitism must always have lain in Israel itself, and not amongst those who have fought against it.
This is not to assert that the Jews’ persecutors have always had right on their side, nor that they have not resorted to all the excesses that may accompany ardent hatred, but merely to postulate that – at least some of the time – the Jews have brought their ills upon themselves.

Lazare was not in the least hostile to his co-religionists – quite the opposite, in fact. He had the frankness to recall, in several passages in his book, how skilful the Jews had been, throughout their history (and thus as far back as Greco-Roman antiquity), in obtaining privileges. He noted that, among those of the poor who converted to Judaism, many “were attracted by the privileges granted to the Jews.”[67]

I trust that I may be permitted here a personal digression.

In my capacity as an erstwhile Latinist, as a defendant prosecuted in court by Jewish organizations, as a university professor prevented from giving his lectures by Jewish demonstrations, and, finally, as an author forbidden to publish because of certain Chief Rabbinate decisions that have been ratified by the French Republic, it has occurred to me that I may compare my experiences with those of some illustrious predecessors. It is thus that my thoughts turn to the Roman aristocrat Lucius Flaccus. In 59 BC Cicero had occasion to defend him, notably against his Jewish accusers. The description of the influence, power, and methods of the Jews in Rome that the brilliant orator then gave in the praetorium leads me to think that, if he were to return to this world, in the late twentieth century, to defend a revisionist, he would not, as it were, have to change one word on that subject in the text of his plea (which is known as Pro Flacco).

Having taught at the Sorbonne, my thoughts also turn to my predecessor Henri Labroue, author of a work entitled Voltaire antijuif. Late in 1942, in the middle of the German occupation, a time when we are expected to believe that the Jews and their supporters were as discreet as possible, he had to abandon his lectures on the history of Judaism. In the words of the present-day Sorbonne luminary André Kaspi: “A chair of the history of Judaism was created at the Sorbonne beginning with the fall term of 1942, and held by Henri Labroue. The first courses provoked hostile demonstrations and incidents that led to the course’s cancellation.”[68]

Today, dozens of great authors of world literature, including Shakespeare, Voltaire, Hugo, and Zola (the partisan of Captain Dreyfus also wrote “L’Argent”), would find themselves in court, sued and prosecuted by Jewish organizations. Among the great names in French politics, even the Socialist and pacifist Jean Jaurès would be in the dock of disgrace.

Such considerations might earn me the label “anti-Semitic” or “anti-Jewish.” I reject those epithets, which I see as trite insults. I wish no harm to any Jew. At the same time, I regard as loathsome the behavior of most of the associations, organizations, and pressure groups that claim to represent Jewish interests or “Jewish remembrance.”

The leaders of those associations, organizations, or groups obviously have the greatest difficulty in understanding that one may act out of simple intellectual curiosity. I have devoted a good part of my life to revisionism, first in the field of literary studies, then in that of historical research, not at all as a result of some invidious calculation, or in the service of an anti-Jewish plot, but in heeding an impulse as natural as that which makes the birds sing and the leaves grow, and which makes men in the darkness strive after light.

Historical Science’s Natural Resistance to this Creed

I could have followed the example set by some other revisionists by proffering my surrender, showing repentance, and retracting certain statements. As another avenue of escape, I might have sought contentment in discreetly devising clever and convoluted maneuvers. Not only did I decide, in the late 1970s, to resist openly and in the public forum, but I also pledged to myself not to play the adversary’s game. I resolved to change nothing in my own behavior, and to let the hotheads get hotter by the day, if they so chose. Among the Jews, I would listen only to those who, especially brave, dared to take up my defense, if only for the duration of a season.[69]

On the whole, Jewish organizations brand as “anti-Semites” those who do not adopt their own conception of Second World War history. This is understandable, for the act of going so far as to say, as I do here and now, that these organizations are among those most to blame for the peddling of a gigantic myth, may well seem to be inspired by anti-Semitism. But, in reality, I only draw obvious conclusions from a historical inquiry that seems to have been quite a serious one given that, in spite of the feverish research of plaintiffs and prosecutors, no court has ever found in it a trace of shallowness, negligence, deliberate ignorance, or falsehood.

Moreover, I fail to see why I, for my part, ought to show respect toward groups of persons who have never shown the least respect for my research work, my publications, or my personal, family, or professional life. I do not attack these bodies for their religious convictions or for their attachment to the State of Israel. All human groups revel in phantasmagoria. Consequently, each is free to offer itself a more or less real, or more or less imaginary, view of its own history. But this conception is not to be forced on others. Yet, the Jewish organizations force theirs on us, a practice that is in itself unacceptable, and all the more so given that this portrayal is manifestly wrong. And I know of no other group in France that has succeeded in making, of an article of its own religious faith (that of the Shoah), an article of the law of the Republic – a group that, with the assent of the Interior Ministry, enjoys the exorbitant privilege of operating its own armed militias; and, finally, which can decree that university teachers who displease it shall no longer have the right to work, either in France or abroad.[70]

For a Forthright Revisionism

The revisionists in fact know neither master nor disciple. They make up a heterogeneous group. They are loath to unite with one another, a trait that brings as many benefits as drawbacks. Their individualism makes them unsuited for concerted action. At the same time, the police are unable to infiltrate such a disparate group and keep it under surveillance; they cannot work their way up the channels of the revisionist structure because there simply is no such thing. These individuals feel free to improvise, each according to his aptitudes or tastes, revisionist activities that may take the most diverse forms. The quality of the work undertaken reflects this disparity, and it must be acknowledged that the results are uneven. From this point of view, one can say that much still remains to be done. The mere amateur is shoulder to shoulder with the scholar, as is the man of action with the researcher in his archives. I shall not mention any names here, for fear of labeling anyone.[71]

Regarding the manner in which the revisionist struggle is to be waged, it goes without saying that the revisionists are divided between supporters and opponents of a kind of political realism. Most of them consider that, given the strength of the taboo, they had better proceed indirectly, thereby avoiding direct clashes with the guardians of orthodoxy. For these revisionists, it is clumsy and ill-advised to state, for example, that the “Holocaust” is a myth. They believe that is more worthwhile to imply that the “Holocaust” did indeed take place, but not to the generally acknowledged extent. Keen on strategy or tactics, they seek to leave Jewish sensibilities unruffled and will suggest, wrongly, that the legendary portion of the “Holocaust” story is above all the work of the Communists or the western Allies, but not of the Jews, or if so, only very little. New revisionists have particularly been inclined to engage in this deceitful fudge, which involves presenting the Jews as victims, like everyone else, of a kind of universal false creed. According to this view, the Jews have been driven, as if by some immanent force, to believe in the genocide and the gas chambers while also being driven, doubtless by the same force, to demand ever more money in reparations for fictitious hardships.[72] A wandering Jew who has just gone over to the revisionist camp will be welcomed by these revisionists as a great genius and savior of the cause. If he appropriates as his own (and even clumsily), findings about Auschwitz of his non-Jewish predecessors’, the newcomer is also hailed as a guiding light of scholarship.

I accept certain forms of such political realism, but on condition that it not be done with arrogance. There is no superiority, either intellectual or moral, in deeming that the end justifies the means, and that it is sometimes simply necessary to borrow the adversary’s weapons of dissembling and lying. My personal preference is for a forthright revisionism, a revisionism without hang-ups or too many compromises; one that shows its colors; that marches straight toward its goal; alone, if need be; that does not let the enemy off lightly. Besides, long experience in the revisionist struggle has led me to think that the best strategy, the best tactic may be a series of frontal attacks; the adversary does not expect them: he imagines that no one would ever dare defy him in such a way; he discovers that he no longer inspires fear; he is disconcerted.

A Conflict Without End

On more than one occasion revisionists have proposed to their adversaries the holding of a public debate on the questions of the genocide, the six million, and the gas chambers. Jewish organizations have always shied away from this. This proves that they will not accept it. Even the Catholic Church today allows a form of dialogue with atheists. The “Synagogue,” though, will never forget the offense it has suffered,[73] nor will it run the risk of engaging in such a dialogue with the revisionists. Moreover, too many political, financial, and moral interests are at stake for the leaders of either the State of Israel or of Jewry in the Diaspora to agree to launch a fair debate on the kosher version of Second World War history.

Therefore, the test of strength will continue. I see no end to it. This conflict between “exterminationism” and “revisionism,” that is, between, on the one hand, a fixed, official history and, on the other hand, a critical, scholarly, secular history, is but one of many in the endless struggles between faith and reason, between belief and science, in human societies for thousands of years. The “Holocaust” or Shoah creed is an integral part of a religion, the Hebraic religion, of which, upon closer examination, the “Holocaust” phantasmagoria plainly appears to be merely one expression. No religion has ever collapsed under the weight of reason, and we are not about to witness the disappearance of the Jewish religion, together with one of its most vital components. That religion, it is currently estimated, is at least 1500 or 3,000 years old, if not 4,000. There is no special reason why those living in the year 2000 should have the privilege of witnessing the demise of a religion so deeply rooted in the ages.

Some say that one day the “Holocaust” or Shoah myth will fade away, just as Stalinist Communism foundered not long ago, or as the Zionist myth and the State of Israel will founder one day. But those who say so are likening unlike things. Communism and Zionism stand on shaky ground; both presuppose largely illusory high aspirations in Man: general absence of selfishness, equal sharing among all, a sense of sacrifice, labor for the common good; their emblems have been, for the former, the hammer, the sickle, and the kolkhoz [collective farm], and, for the latter, the sword, the plough, and the kibbutz. The Jewish religion, for its part, beneath the complex outward appearance provided by the Masora and the pilpul, does not indulge in such flights of fancy. It aims low to aim straight. It relies on the real. Underneath the cover of Talmudic extravagance and intellectual or verbal wizardry, one may see that it is above all hand-in-glove with money, King Dollar, the Golden Calf, and the allurements of consumerism. Who can believe that these “values” will soon lose their power? And besides, why should the demise of the State of Israel bring in its wake dire consequences for the myth of the “Holocaust”? On the contrary, the millions of Jews thus forced to settle or resettle in the rich countries of the West would not miss the chance to bewail a “Second Holocaust” and, once again and even more forcefully, would blame the entire world for the new ordeal visited upon the Jewish people, who would then have to be “compensated.”

In the end, the Jewish religion – and one sees this only too well in the tales of the “Holocaust” – is anchored in that perhaps deepest zone of Man: fear. Therein lies its strength. Therein lies its chance for survival, despite all the hazards and despite the battering that its myths have taken at the hands of historical revisionism. By exploiting fear, the practitioners of Judaism win every time.

I agree with French sociologist and historian Serge Thion,[74] who observes that whereas historical revisionism has won all the intellectual battles over the past 25 years, it loses the ideological war every day. Revisionism runs up against the irrational, against a quasi-religious way of thinking, against the refusal to take into account anything that originates from a non-Jewish sphere. We are in the presence of a sort of secular theology whose worldwide high priest is Elie Wiesel, ordained by the award of a Nobel prize.

The Future Between Repression and the Internet

Newcomers to revisionism must take care not to harbor illusions. Their task will be hard. Will it be less so than it was for Paul Rassinier and his immediate successors? Will the repression be less fierce?

Personally, I rather doubt it. Yet, in the world at large, changes in the political balance and in communication technology will perhaps give minorities an opportunity to be more widely heard than they have been in the recent past. Thanks to the Internet, it will perhaps be easier for revisionists to foil censorship, and historical information will doubtless become more accessible.

The fact remains that at the close of a century and a millennium, humanity is strangely experiencing a world in which books, newspapers, radio, and television are ever more tightly controlled by the masters of finance or by the thought police, while at the same time, in parallel and at increasing speed, new means of communication are being developed which, at least in part, elude those forces’ dominion. One might see it as a world of two distinct profiles, one stiffening and ageing, and another, in the insolence of youth, looking keenly to the future. The same contrast can be seen in historical research, at least in the sector that is under thought police surveillance: on one side, the official historians, who bring out countless works on the “Holocaust” or Shoah, isolating themselves within the realm of religious belief or of hair-splitting argument while, on the other side, independent minds strive to follow only the precepts of reason and science. Thanks to the latter, free historical research is today showing an impressive vitality, notably on the Internet.

The upholders of an official history, protected and guaranteed by the law, will be forever doomed to confront the questioners of their ordained truth. The former, long established, have the wealth and the power; the latter, a real future.

A Worsening Repression

If there is one point on which revisionist writings can convey as much information to revisionists as to anti-revisionists, it is that of the repression endured by the former at the hands of the latter.

Nearly every revisionist can provide a good account of what it has cost him to speak out on a taboo subject, but he is not always aware of what his colleagues in other countries have had to endure. The anti-revisionists, for their part, systematically minimize the extent of their repressive actions. They are mindful only of their own torments, which one may compare to those suffered by Torquemada and the Grand Inquisitors: they are obliged to flog, ever to flog; their arms grow weary, they feel cramps coming on, they suffer, they groan; they find that, if there are any who deserve pity, it is the executioners; they cover their eyes and plug up their ears to avoid seeing and hearing any of their victims. At times they are even surprised, perhaps in good faith, when shown a list of revisionists whose personal, family, or professional lives they have succeeded in dashing, or of those whom they have ruined, or caused to be heavily sanctioned by fines or imprisonment, or to be gravely injured, or to have acid sprayed in their faces, or killed, or driven to suicide, while, conversely, there is not even a single instance of a revisionist touching even a hair on the head of one of his adversaries.

It must be said that the media tries, as much as possible, to conceal the effects of this widespread repression. On this score the French daily Le Monde has made a speciality of keeping silent about abominations that, if their victims had been Jewish anti-revisionists (such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet), would have prompted protest marches and demonstrations around the world. In this regard, the most that one can expect from the apostles of the Shoah is a warning against some excesses of anti-revisionism because these might damage the good reputation of the Jews and the sacred cause of their creed.

Among the recent batch of repressive measures taken against revisionists one may note (beginning with France) the dismissal by the education ministry of Michel Adam from his post as history teacher in a middle school in Brittany; at 57, with five dependent children, he now finds himself utterly without resources, receiving, for the moment, not even public assistance (“rmi”). As for Vincent Reynouard, also dismissed from his state sector teaching job, he was on November 10, 1998, sentenced by a court in Saint-Nazaire to three months’ imprisonment and a fine of 10,000 francs for having distributed the Rudolf Report. Aged 29, Reynouard is married with three small children, and he and his wife are destitute. Pastor Roger Parmentier has been expelled from the Socialist Party for having come to the aid of Roger Garaudy in the latter’s recent court case, while Jean-Marie Le Pen, for his part, has been indicted, in both France and Germany, for an innocuous statement on “the detail” of the gas chambers.[75]

In Barcelona on November 16, 1998, the bookseller Pedro Varela was convicted – at the behest of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, SOS-Racismo España, the city’s two Jewish communities, and the Spanish Liberal Jewish Movement – of “denial of the Holocaust” and “incitement to racial hatred” in his writings. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and ordered to pay a fine of 720,000 pesetas (about $5,000), as well as heavy court costs. The stock of his book shop (20,972 volumes and hundreds of audio and video cassettes) is to be destroyed by fire. His shop had previously been the target of violent aggression, including arson attacks. On several occasions he and his female employee had been assaulted.[76]

In Germany, more and more revisionist writings are being seized and burned. Gary Lauck (an American citizen extradited to Germany by Denmark), Günter Deckert, and Udo Walendy still languish in prison and can consider themselves lucky if their terms are not prolonged on the least pretext. After serving a one-year sentence, Erhard Kemper, of Münster, finding himself under threat of new, harsher sentences that would probably have kept him locked up for the rest of his life, has had to go underground. Other Germans and Austrians live in exile.

In Canada, the plight of Ernst Zündel and his friends continues before “Human Rights Commission” tribunals – ad hoc courts that blithely flout the defendant’s basic rights. It is, for example, forbidden to argue that what one has written concurs with the verifiable facts. Openly declaring that “truth is no defense,” these tribunals are only interested in knowing whether the defendants’ writing upsets certain persons. Other special commissions, attached to the Canadian Intelligence Service, try cases of revisionists in closed session, on the basis of a file that is not shown to the defendant.[77]

Jewish groups around the world continue to push for the enactment of new and more repressive anti-revisionist laws. At a 1998 conference in Salonica, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists called for the introduction of such laws in countries that have not yet adopted them, and let it be known that it would be holding similar meetings in more than 20 countries to lobby for new or more severe anti-revisionist laws.[78]

The Duty of Resistance

Whatever storms and vicissitudes may arise now or in future, the revisionist historian must hold firm. To the cult of tribal remembrance built on fear, vengeance and greed, he will prefer the stubborn search for exactitude. In this way he will, albeit perhaps unwittingly, do justice to the true sufferings of all victims of the Second World War. And, from this viewpoint, it is the revisionist who refuses to make a distinction among victims on the basis of race, religion, or community. Above all, he will reject the supreme imposture that gave the crowning touch to that conflict: that of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and of the thousand other proceedings since the war in which, even today, the victor, without in the least having to answer for his own crimes, has assumed the right to prosecute and condemn the vanquished.

Contrary to the romantic vision of the aristocratic author Chateaubriand (1768–1848), the historian is hardly “commissioned to avenge peoples,” and still less so to avenge one that claims to be God’s own.

On whatever subject, the historian in general and the revisionist historian in particular have no other mission than to determine the accuracy of what is said. That mission is basic and obvious, but also – as experience teaches – perilous.

Notes