Jean-Claude Pressac and Revisionism

When Jean-Claude Pressac suddenly died at the early age of 59 on the 23^rd of July 2003, I was deeply moved. I had never met him personally; however, on account of his important role in the 'Holocaust' controversy, I had been involved with him since 1991, when I began my own research into the subject. Like other revisionists, I was challenged by his ideas. Of all the champions of tales of Jewish exterminations and homicidal gas chambers, Pressac, together with the long dead Jewish-English historian Gerald Reitlinger, was the only one whom I could regard with any degree of respect.

Jean-Claude Pressac

Pressac was a pharmacist by profession, and like nearly all writers who support the 'Holocaust' tale he had no formal training as a historian. This is true of most of those who subscribe to the official version of the fate of the Jews during the Second World War, as well as most revisionists. Pressac was not Jewish and he stood on the right politically.

In his youth, Pressac read a novel by the French author Robert Merle entitled La mort est mon métier (Death is My Profession). This was a gruesome tale about Rudolf Höß, the first commandant of Auschwitz, and had strong emotional impact on the impressionable child. For the rest of his life, Pressac was haunted by the thought of Auschwitz. At some point in his adult life he began to have doubts about the accuracy of official horror stories concerning 'extermination camps,' however, and so began to investigate revisionism.

He made the acquaintance of Robert Faurisson, Pierre Guillaume and other French revisionists, whom he assisted for some time. The collaboration with Faurisson ended in personal animosity, which characterized all their subsequent relations. Pressac then rejected revisionism and set out to disprove its arguments. His willingness to engage revisionists in open debate distinguished him from orthodox 'Holocaust' historians such as Raul Hilberg, Leon Poliakov or Lucy Dawidowicz, who categorically refused to consider scientific objections to the official version of 'Holocaust.' Thanks to his earlier collaborations, Pressac was intimately familiar with revisionist arguments, which he realized could be refuted only by proving the technical feasibility of alleged exterminations of Jews in homicidal gas chambers. This became the precise goal that he set for himself.

During his collaboration with Faurisson, Pressac had visited Auschwitz several times and gained the trust of the staff of the Auschwitz Museum. He was allowed admittance to the archives, where he examined and copied a great many documents and construction plans.

He soon became one of the best-informed authorities on the subject of Auschwitz. In the eyes of the defenders of orthodox lore, he was the ideal person to scientifically refute Revisionist views. Since the late 1970s revisionism had made tremendous progress, thanks to the investigations of Arthur Butz,[2] Wilhelm Stäglich,[3] Robert Faurisson,[4] Henri Roques,[5] and other researchers[6]. The 'Holocaust' profiteers and other defenders were greatly upset. In addition, in the Spring of 1988, the Leuchter reporter was released.

Looking for someone who could refute Leuchter, the opponents of revisionism settled on Pressac. Late in 1988 he published an article identifying several weak points in the Leuchter article, although his arguments also contained mistakes.[7]

The article was impressive for two reasons. In the first place, it proved that Pressac was undeniably talented and well informed. On the basis of construction plans, without having visited Majdanek concentration camp, he undertook an incisive analysis of its alleged homicidal gas chambers. According to official views, Jews had been murdered there primarily with Zyklon B and to a smaller extent with carbon monoxide. Pressac proved indisputably that, because of camp design and construction alone, Zyklon B could not have been used to commit murder. He continued to argue that homicidal gassings were committed using carbon monoxide, however.

Ten years later Carlo Mattogno, in his book on Majdanek,[8] which he co-published with me, relegated the carbon monoxide theory to the realm of legend alongside Zyklon B. With his article on Majdanek, Pressac opened to debate a central point of orthodox 'Holocaust' concepts. He also showed that the supporters of Jewish annihilation theory were as annoyed with him as were the revisionists.

I do not know whether the 'Nazi Hunters' Serge and Beate Klarsfeld initially contacted the maverick researcher or whether he first approached them. At any rate, collaboration now came about. The Klarsfelds provided Pressac with the necessary financial support to produce a book, which was supposed to squelch revisionism for all time, by scientifically proving beyond all doubt that exterminations of Jews really took place in the fabled gas chambers of Auschwitz.

By the end of 1989 Jean-Claude Pressac's Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers was finally completed and published in English by the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation in New York. The French version was never published. The work, massive in its size and tremendous in its scope, was never available from book dealers, but was privately distributed by Pressac himself. It did not deliver what its title promised. The mammoth work did indeed provide a tremendous amount of information about Auschwitz; but the new information did not concern the technique and functioning of the alleged homicidal gas chambers.

Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers is a truly exceptional and puzzling book, a treasure trove of unpublished wartime German documents, which give new insight into numerous heretofore unknown aspects of camp history. There can be no doubt as to its scientific significance.

The Klarsfelds had paid Pressac to prove the reality of Jewish exterminations in gas chambers, but this is not what he did. To the contrary: As far as the 'death factory' myth was concerned, Technique and Operation represented an interception and touchdown for the revisionist side.

Pressac was honest enough to concede that he had discovered no actual documentary evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers. Instead, he presented his readers with “39 criminal traces” which, in their entirety, were supposed to abolish all rational doubt about homicidal gassings. These “traces” were goof-ups by the SS, especially the Central Building Administration. Despite strict orders to leave behind no documentary evidence of homicidal gassings, according to Pressac, they had been unable to avoid having indirect references to such crimes make their way into the written record. As evidence of this, he referred to an order for 'gastight doors' as a “criminal trace,” because to his mind a gastight door could be used for only one thing: homicidal gas chambers.

The fact that Pressac, in order to 'prove' the reality of mass gassings on a gigantic scale (at this time he was still speaking of a million to a million and a half victims at Auschwitz) was forced to resort to such flimsy evidence, speaks volumes about the shaky foundations on which was constructed the orthodox concept of Auschwitz. If mass exterminations in gas chambers had really taken place, they would have left behind so much evidence that resorting to “criminal traces” would have been superfluous. Faurisson hit the bull's-eye when he called the book a “stroke of good fortune for the revisionists and a catastrophe for the exterminationists.” In a superb review, he used biting irony to totally demolish Pressac's arguments for the existence of gas chambers.[9]

In contrast to practically all orthodox 'Holocaust' writers, Pressac possessed enough of the scientific spirit to reject unquestioning acceptance of the statements of Auschwitz 'gas chamber witnesses.' In Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, however, he neglected to take logical consequences into consideration. He picked and caviled at eyewitness testimony, pointing out inaccuracies here and contradictions there, but ultimately treated most testimony as credible. In most cases he was content to arbitrarily reduce the numbers of victims claimed.

It is impossible to determine what criteria Pressac used to judge the credibility of 'gas chamber witnesses.' In one instance he included without commentary a long extract from a book by a mentally disturbed man named Moshe Maurice Garbaz who claimed that an excavation unit dug, in a single night, a mass grave measuring 50 to 60 meters long by 20 to 30 meters wide and one and a half meters deep.[10] He lauded as “95% credible” a report by the Polish Jewish shoemaker Henryk Tauber, who described such things as prisoners in a large pit being basted with boiling human fat. Tauber also related that, as allied airplanes neared, the members of a cremation unit stuffed more than the usual number of bodies in the furnace muffles, causing huge fires to shoot out of the chimneys in an attempt to call attention to mass murders in progress.[11] Pressac also included the notorious 'Franke-Griksch Report,' one of the most flagrant falsifications in all 'Holocaust' literature. This report, allegedly written by SS Col. Alfred Franke-Griksch on the occasion of his visit to Auschwitz on 4^th May of 1943, describes the ramp at Birkenau, which was not built until a whole year later.[12]

Pressac's tendency to 'correct' eyewitness reports not only did not improve the credulity of orthodox historiography, it made it shakier. One example: Pressac doubted the authenticity of the statement of Rudolf Höß in which he stated that in June of 1941 he had been informed by Heinrich Himmler of the secret planned extermination of Jews and given the task of setting up extermination facilities. Höß stated that at the time of this meeting with Himmler there were three extermination camps: Treblinka, Belzec and “Wolzek.” Since Belzec was not completed until March of 1942 and Treblinka until July of 1942, and since there was never any such camp as “Wolzek,” the entire story collapses. Pressac should have concluded from this and other obvious impossibilities that Höß was an unreliable witness whose statements were a priori suspect. After all, Pressac was aware that Höß had been tortured for three days by a British team headed by the Jewish sergeant Bernard Clarke.[13] Höß' subsequent statements to Polish Stalinists were also made under coercion. Pressac, however, concluded that Höß had merely confused the dates and had actually received Himmler's order in the summer of 1942. This version also collapsed very quickly. How could 'extermination camps' have been constructed before orders went out to exterminate Jews? According to 'Holocaust' literature, Chelmo had begun operations around the end of 1941 and Belzec in March of 1942. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, exterminations are said to have begun in the spring of 1942 in two farmhouses, which had been converted to homicidal gas chambers. The problem is: this was before the crematoria were built. How could mass murders have been already underway in the farmhouses that were allegedly converted into gas chambers? It is obvious that orders from the highest authority would have been required for the construction of these alleged extermination facilities. It is equally obvious that orders for mass murder would have been required before the facilities began committing such atrocities. Thus, Pressac's new version was no more convincing than the old; it merely added to the confusion.

This is not the end of his inconsistencies, however. Pressac had studied the blueprints of the crematories carefully and had arrived at the same conclusions as the revisionists, namely that the crematories were constructed for normal sanitary purposes with no criminal intent. He decided that it was not until later that the administration of Auschwitz decided to convert them into 'death factories' by converting the existing morgues into homicidal gas chambers.

Apparently this theory is still prevalent in official 'Holocaust' literature. Raul Hilberg includes it in his book[14] in spite if its obvious illogicality. The first problem with the theory is that there is not a shred of documentary or scientific evidence to support farmhouse conversions. Even more significant than the lack of documentation is the following consideration: if in the summer of 1942 Himmler had entrusted Höß with organizing exterminations of Jews at Auschwitz and had also chosen Auschwitz as the location for future morgues for the planned crematories at Birkenau, why did the Auschwitz Central Construction Office not design the crematories as extermination facilities from the beginning? Why did they wait until they were already completed and then make necessary alterations by primitive manual means? One must be exceedingly naïve to believe such nonsense.

Is it possible that Pressac did not notice the obvious impossibilities that he was perpetuating? And what demon possessed him when he wrote that 97 to 98 percent of Zyklon B was indeed used to exterminate lice at Auschwitz and only 2 to 3 percent for exterminating Jews; yet Höß and consorts, when ordering Zyklon B to combat lice, pretended that they were using the poison to murder Jews? In his own words: [15]

Pressac certainly blundered with his description of gassings in Crematories IV and V, which according to him took place as follows:[16] an SS man climbed onto the roof over the gas chamber in order to drop Zyklon B granules through holes that had been made for this purpose. He used a ladder to do this. Since the openings were far apart and the SS man could carry only a limited amount of Zyklon B, he had to climb down after each insertion and get more Zyklon B.

Then he would climb up the ladder again. Altogether this SS man had to climb up and down the ladder a total of 18 times. The men assigned to this task began complaining about the “circus act.” They demanded that changes be made to the gas chamber in order to rationalize the process of mass murder. The camp leadership then agreed to increase the size of the holes by 10 centimeters but rejected the idea of altering the gas chamber because, in Pressac's, words:

Whatever possessed Pressac, a trained and gifted scientist (among other things, an excellent draftsman and photographer), to put such claptrap down on paper? Could it have been, in the final analysis, intended as irony? Was Pressac subtly exposing exterminationist theory to ridicule by demonstrating the absurdities inherent in official depictions of homicidal gassings? Perhaps this question will remain forever unanswered. At any rate, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers was totally useless as a weapon against revisionism. For this reason the media ignored it whereas revisionists studied it closely.

It was a different story four years later, in September 1993, when Pressac's second and last book appeared, Les crématoires d'Auschwitz. La machinerie du meurtre de masse[17] (The Crematories of Auschwitz: Machinery of Mass Murder). This time, publication was accompanied by a noisy and well-orchestrated propaganda campaign coming from Frankfurt. The media were delirious with enthusiasm, tirelessly repeating that revisionism had been vanquished for all time. Even before release of the German translation in the spring of 1994,[18] the 'free press' of the 'freest state in German history' joined the howling chorus of triumph west of the Rhine. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on October 14, 1993, Joseph Haniman announced:

Any observant reader could see that this was not the case. Pressac's new work was anything but a scientific study, as it contained no references whatsoever to scientific literature on the subject. The 'Holocaust' propagandists were undeterred by such minor details, however. One of the most primitive of these, Eberhard Jäckel, blathered in Die Zeit for March 18, 1994:

The “anti-Semitic liars” responded with a book entitled Auschiwitz: Nakte Fakten (Auschwitz: Bare Facts), in which “Manfred Köhler” (Germar Rudolf), Serge Thion, Robert Faurisson and Carlo Mattogno uprooted Pressac's arguments point by point.[19] Neither Pressac nor Mr. Eberhard Jäckel responded to the rebuttal.

In comparison with Pressacs's first book, his second (which was about a tenth as long) was a scientific step backward. There was at least a trace of the critical spirit glimmering through Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, despite all the inanities, but there was hardly anything in Les crématoires d'Auschwitz that could be called critical. In his introduction, Pressac promises us that this time, he will not rely solely on eyewitness reports to prove that mass murders took place, since these are “always unreliable.” This time, he assures us, his arguments will be bolstered by documents. Unfortunately he promptly forgot his promise. Every time he described a gassing, he 'documented' it with an eyewitness report!

The “39 criminal traces” of Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers have shrunk to a quarter of the original number in Les crématoires d'Auschwitz. As Faurisson masterfully points out in his review, this means that Pressac “had now found harmless explanations for 30 details which four years earlier had seemed evidence of frightful atrocities.” As replacement for the disappearing “traces” Pressac now introduced “definitive proof” of the existence of homicidal gas chambers. This consisted of a letter dated 2 March 1943 from the Topf company, addressed to the Central Building Administration at Auschwitz. The letter, concerning an order for “10 indicators of hydrogen cyanide residue” for Crematory II, initiated a lively discussion among revisionists. Robert Faurisson, “Werner Rademacher” (Walter Lüftl) and Carlo Mattogno provided differing explanations for the letter, but all agreed that it did not provide evidence of homicidal gassings.[20]

Les crématoires d'Auschwitz strongly ressembles a novel. As a framework for narration, Pressac used documents, which had recently been discovered in Moscow's Central Archives for Collections of Historical Documents. He relates the story of how an engineer named Kurt Prüfer “with pretended concern” determines that a warranty for an oven has expired. Then the author describes how the SS personnel stationed at Auschwitz are mobilized for combat duty at the front and cancel their requisitions “with noisy protestations of disappointment” which “barely disguise their cowardly general relief.” Next he describes how Oswald Pohl, after observing sick gypsy children at Auschwitz, “cursed the day” that he made the acquaintance of Heinrich Himmler. The obvious question for the serious researcher: how could Pressac have possibly known all that?

This kind of narration has very little in common with scientific research. Pressac then goes on to commit particularly grave scientific sins with statements concerning the capacities of the crematories, which he grossly overstates for reasons that are all too clear. At the end of his critique of Pressac,[21] Carlo Mattogno vividly describes the dilemma in which the French scientist found himself, along with the entire 'Holocaust' elite:

The fact that Pressac had challenged the revisionists on their own turf and in effect given them the choice of weapons was unacceptable to many followers of orthodox 'Holocaust' lore. The Jewish-French movie producer Claude Lanzmann commented angrily that he preferred “the tears of the barber of Treblinka” to Pressac's gas testers. In “Barber of Treblinka,” Lanzmann refers to Abraham Bomba, a character in his melodramatic film Shoa. Between sobs, Bomba describes how, preparatory to every gassing, he, along with sixteen other barbers, was obliged to shear the hair of seventy naked women sitting in a gas chamber which measured four meters square.[22] Lanzmann was right: the 'Holocaust' can survive only as myth and melodrama. Any attempt to prove it scientifically must end in catastrophe for true believers.

Another reason why exterminationists were horrified with Pressac's second book was because he massively reduced the number of Auschwitz victims. In the French version he mentions a total of 775,000 to 800,000 victims; in the German version, 630,000 to 710,000 (still an exaggeration of around 400 percent.) At that time the Auschwitz museum was no longer claiming four million, but rather one and a half million. With this reduction in numbers by the worldwide leading 'Auschwitz expert,' the number of six million 'Holocaust victims' was less defensible than ever. For this reason, Pressac fell into disgrace. After the brief storm of propaganda that accompanied publication of Les crématoires d'Auschwitz died down, his name quickly disappeared from the headlines. At the defamation trial Irving versus Lipstadt, which took place in London in 2000, Lipstadt called as expert witness, not Pressac, but rather the Dutch Jew Robert Jan van Pelt, who was clearly less informed than Pressac.[23]

According to his interview, Pressac had planned to publish a book on the Topf & Sons factory of Erfurt, which had been responsible for the construction of the crematories at Auschwitz. This will not happen now. However, the restless interloper between exterminationism and revisionism did leave behind an article following Les crématoires d'Auschwitz, as well as an interview. They are both challenging.

In 1995, an article by Pressac dealing with the “pure extermination camps” Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec appeared in the French magazine Historama.[24] In contrast to official historiography, according to which these camps were supposed to have been designed exclusively for exterminating Jews, Pressac believed they were originally established as transit and delousing camps. He pointed out that, according to eyewitnesses, three adjacent barracks had originally been built in Belzec. The first barracks had served as a waiting room, the second as a bathhouse, and the third as homicidal gas chamber. The gas chamber was said to have contained three ovens. Pressac logically argued that it would have been pointless to build bathhouses in a facility designed for mass murder: why bathe your victims before killing them? Furthermore, he pointed out, ovens would not function in a chamber designed for carbon monoxide. Eyewitnesses had stated that Treblinka contained a furnace room with water boiler to produce steam in addition to the 'suffocating chambers.' Pressac pointed out that the only explanation for this was that “between the end of 1941 until middle of 1942 in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, three steam delousing facilities were constructed.” He went on to explain:

Subsequently, as Pressac wrote in the article, the delousing facilities were converted to extermination facilities, that is to say homicidal gas chambers. It is unclear whether he actually believed this or simply made a tactical concession in order to have his article published. At any rate, his revelation that the “eastern extermination camps” had been constructed as transit and delousing facilities shook official 'Holocaust' lore to the core.

In June of 1995, Pressac granted an interview to Valérie Igounet, which, along with post-interview changes as stipulated by Pressac, was not released until 2000.[25] In this interview, Pressac drastically reduced the number of victims as postulated by the official historiography for 'extermination camps' with the exception of Auschwitz:

Pressac based his numbers not on documents, but rather on private computations of the capacity of the 'extermination facilities,' which were not explained in the interview. Since the existence of these 'extermination facilities' is unproven and we would not know, even if they had existed, to what extent they were used, Pressac's figures have no scientific value whatsoever. In the case of Majdanek, the only one of these camps for which documentary evidence is available, Pressac's figures are more than double the real number of victims, since we can tell from existing documents that around 42,300 persons died in Majdanek camp.[26] But still, based on the lowest of his estimates, he has reduced the total number of victims of the five camps to 510,000, which is just one quarter of the official number. For the keepers of the official 'Holocaust' grail, this must have set off all kinds of alarm bells. It got even worse, however. In his interview with Igounet, Pressac said things, which must have made the blood run cold in the veins of the exterminationists:[27]

No revisionist could have expressed it better! Serge and Beate Klarsfeld thought they had found an invaluable asset in Jean-Claude Pressac in the struggle against “anti-Semitic liars.” After falling out with Faurisson, he had become a specialist on Auschwitz and turned his back on revisionism. They provided him massive financial backing to produce a book which was intended as a springboard against revisionism, but which produced a colossal backfire instead. Pressac, a chaotic and inconstant spirit, had too much self-respect to allow himself to be dominated by the Klarsfelds and their clique. By his constant reductions of the number of victims, his critiques of eyewitness accounts, and his treading on the core belief of orthodox 'Holocaust' lore, he caused immense damage to everyone who tried to hitch him to their wagon. As the premier champion of Jewish genocide and gas chamber theories, he entered into a debate about the scientific feasibility of the 'Holocaust' as suggested by the revisionists. He did this without first obtaining the necessary scientific and technical armor plating, and the discussion turned into a debacle for orthodox historiography. Facts are lethal enemies of the 'Shoa' legend, and every discussion of scientific details of the alleged genocide is a step further into the abyss for followers of the politically correct version of history. It is now too late to turn the rudder about. Since the exterminationists presented Pressac to the world as a genius who checkmated the revisionists with scientific evidence, it is no longer possible for them to hide behind the argument of the 34 French historians that “the Holocaust was scientifically possible because it happened, and no further discussion is allowed.”

No doubt the Klarsfelds rue the day that they were taken in by Faurisson's rogue student. We revisionists, on the other hand, have every reason to wish that Jean-Claude Pressac may rest in peace.

Notes

Translated from German by James M. Damon.