Letters

(All letters are subject to editing at the whim of this editor, particularly for length, but also for curse words, gratuitous insults and a perverse desire to keep things focused. Those letters which are sent on disk have a substantially better chance of being reproduced here without error than those which are sent the good old fashioned way. Those of you who have good reason to not want your name to appear with your letter, please say so in writing.)

Robert Faurisson: in this open letter, ‘THE RESULT OF MY TRIAL, Thank you Mr. Jerry Levis Pressac!,” we find the French courts doing what they can, again, to comply with the wishes of the Holocaust lobby. Stalinism for the 1990s.

13 June 1995. For having written and published a Response a Jean-Claude Pressac sur le probleme des chambres a gaz, I was sued by the public prosecutor in Paris and by two organizations of former inmates. The trial was held in Paris on May 9. The prosecutor asked for a non-suspended jail sentence of three months. The Jewish lawyer for the two organizations asked for a nonsuspended jail sentence, financial damages, and he also wanted my own lawyer, Eric Delcroix, to be sued because he shared my criminal and repugnant revisionist views.

We had forced Pressac to come and testify. His testimony was, for him, a major disaster. The three judges, who in the past had been so hostile to revisionism in other trials, looked flabbergasted by Pressac. Extremely nervous and agitated, he resembled [the American comic actor] Jerry Lewis. He was totally unable to answer the questions put to him by the judges who insisted on getting at least one proof of the existence of one “gas chamber” in Auschwitz. At one point, Pressac felt so obviously desperate that he dared to shout that [American expert on execution hardware] Leuchter himself had confessed to the existence of “gas chambers” in a report!!!

Today, June 13, 1995, the judges came down with their decision.

They could not abstain from finding me guilty of violating the antirevisionist law of July 13, 1990, but the sentence is exceptionally mild. For me a 15 000 F fine ($3 000) and for Henri Roques, who had not published but distributed my booklet, a 10 000 F fine. The two organizations got 1 F each! (As usual in such cases, we also have to pay jointly 4 000 F to the Jewish lawyer.) No publication of the judgment was ordered. Nevertheless, I forced publication of the judgment in three newspapers at my own expense.

I am afraid our adversaries might appeal that sentence. In France, appeal is automatically permitted as soon as asked. We’ll know in ten days time.

Meanwhile, thank you, Mr. Jerry Lewis Pressac!

Lou Rollins: There may be a simple reason why, as James P. Hogan asked (SR23), Martha Gellhorn could report on “gas chambers” in September 1944 when revisionists claim the myth wasn't established until after the war.

According to John S. Conway (“The First Report About Auschwitz,” The Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, Vol. I, 1984), The Verba-Wetzler Report on Auschwitz was delivered by a courier of the Czechoslovak underground to the Czechoslovak Minister to Switzerland in Bern on June 19 and 20, 1944. Says Conway, “It was immediately sent to the World Jewish Congress in Geneva and to the Swiss press, which published extensive extracts.” (p. 144)

Thus, “extensive extracts” from the Vrba-Wetzler Report had already been published in Europe by late June of 1944.

In re-reading the (hearsay) description of gassing in the Gellhorn article, I noted that, in its account, all 1200 of the Dutch Jews deported to Poland were gassed.

In other words, there was no “selection,” as is normally claimed in “descriptions” of the “gassing procedure.”

So, in this respect at least, this is not a “description of gas chambers operating just as have been claimed,” as Mr. Hogan claims.

In this regard, it is interesting to note that, while the Vrba-Wetzler Report did refer to “selection … prior to gassing,” it claimed that only about 10 percent of male and 5 percent of female deportees were registered in the camp, and the rest immediately exterminated, (see pp 138-139 of the Conway article cited above).

With such an insignificant role attributed to “selection” in the Vrba-Wetzler Report, the Report may yet have inspired the gassing story recounted by Gellhorn, in which there was no selection at all.

In any case, the fact that Gellhom’s gassing story claims that all 1200 Dutch Jews deported to Poland wereimmediately gassed, is a good reason for questioning its reliability.

In “Appendix C: Deportation of Dutch Jews,” in Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Arthur Butz years ago published statistics on numbers of Dutch Jews deported in various convoys, along with statistics on the number of males registered at the Birkenau men’s camp, during the period between the 16th of July and the 19th of August, 1942. (The registration records for women are lost.) As Butz says, a comparison of the two sets of statistics “contradicts the claim that a majority, or even a significant number, of [Dutch] Jews were immediately gassed on arrival at Auschwitz.

Thus, for example, a convoy of 1135 Dutch Jews, including 663 men, arrived at Auschwitz between the evening of the 16th of July and the morning of the 17th of July, 1942. Of the 663 men in the convoy, 601 were registered in the Birkenau men’s camp.

So, based on such evidence as is available (incidentally, the statistics for the numbers of Dutch Jews deported come from the Netherlands Red Cross) it seems farfetched to claim that all 1200 Dutch Jews in a convoy deported to Auschwitz would have actually been gassed on arrival.

As I’ve already said, this detail of the Gellhorn gassing story is a good reason to question its credibility.

David Cole. It’s highly likely that 87 Jews were gassed at Struthof but revisionists do not appear to want to examine the evidence for it.

In my article in SR 23 I tried to present as compelling a case as I could for the execution by gas of 87 Jews at the Struthof camp in 1943.1 felt that this case could be made the way revisionists always insist that such cases must be made: without a dependence on anecdotal evidence, like eyewitnesses or post-war confessions. Indeed, such things are available to bolster the Struthof gas chamber case, but I purposely chose not to rely on them because I felt that the case could be made the “revisionist” way—with documents and physical evidence.

As I wrote in my article, there are documents aplenty covering the request for Dr. Hirt’s skull collection, the approval and facilitation of the collection, the request by Dr. Hirt for gassing material, the work report in the “gaskammer” following Dr. Hirt’s request, the transfer of 87 Jews from Auschwitz to Struthof (which was not a Jewish internment camp), and the exit “by death” of every single one of these Jews. Then there are the documents covering the attempted destruction of those bodies as the Allies approached in 1944, and the bodies themselves, some still identifiable via their circumcised members and Auschwitz tattoos as being Jews from Auschwitz—one of these corpses was even identified by name from his tattoo; Menachem Taffel, a Jew from Berlin.

(All of the documents discussed in my SR23 article have been reproduced in Jean-Claude Pressac’s The Struthof Album, published by the Klarsfeld Foundation. Listing page numbers here would be too lengthy. The book is almost entirely documents and pictures.)

Carlos Porter’s letter in SR23 is the first attempt to answer my contention that there were homicidal gassings at Struthof. He does not critique any of the plethora of documents I mentioned—my timeline of events (1943: Hirt requests skulls—skull collection approved = Jews assembled at Auschwitz = Jews sent to Struthof, to be accommodated for a “short period” = Hirt requests materials for gassings = Struthof works department does work on the “gaskammer” = Jews arrive at Struthof = all Jews die at the same time = bodies shipped to Strasbourg Institute of Anatomy = 1944: Dr. Brandt is informed that the corpses have yet to be defleshed = Standartenfuhrer Sievers asks what to do next in fear that the Allies will find the bodies = it is decided that the collection will be “dissolved” = Allies arrive to find several still fleshed bodies)?

Porter ignores all that. His response is that after the war Commandant Kramer gave a weak “confessions.” This, apparently, is enough to negate all that documentary evidence! I wholeheartedly agree that the Allies botched the post-war investigation into what happened to the Jews of Europe. Physical evidence was destroyed, confessions were coerced, the “official story” was desired more than the truth, and defendants with valuable information were sometimes tortured (usually in order to obtain the “official version, not the truth), and then these people were executed, depriving future historians of the ability to re-question these important figures after the emotions of the war had died down. But we mustn’t use botched Allied procedures as an excuse to dismiss all charges of wrongdoing against the nazi government or against individual nazis.

If Kramer’s interrogation was mishandled, that alone doesn’t mean that he was innocent of the charges (I’m reminded of a recent case in LA where a convicted murderer was released because his confession had been obtained illegally by the police. Yet it is now believed that this man was still guilty, even though his confessionwas justifiably tossed out. There was still enough evidence to get a conviction).

If Kramer wasn’t too forthcoming about his role in the gassings, can we blame him, seeing the position he was in? We have created a classic double-bind regarding confessions; if a Nazi tells all in great detail, yapping nonstop like a Chatty' Cathy doll (Hoess et al), we say that this is evidence of a fake confession. Yet now Kramer’s obfuscation and reluctance to talk is seen in the same way. We’ve created a scenario whereby there is no possible response from a nazi that is not scoffed at as being part of an Allied conspiracy. For my part, I can understand why Kramer wouldn’t want to bare his soul about gassing Jews, but all the same I find his “confession” a weak piece of evidence—and if that was all there was to the Struthof gassing allegations, I’d consider such allegations unproved. Yet we have so much more! We have enough documentary evidence that we can make the case independent of Kramer’s testimony.

Saying that Kramer’s testimony is unsatisfactory does not by itself negate all the other evidence. In the case of Struthof, Pressac, in his The Struthof Album, has met the burden of proof that we revisionists are always carping about. He’s published documents and photos of physical evidence to make his case. Now the burden is on us if we think that any of his evidence is false. The burden is on Porter if he feels that Pressac has published false documents. I’d be open to any comments from Porter to this end.

I’ve often said ‘scratch any revisionist’ hard enough and you’ll find an 'exterminationist' underneath just crying to get out.” Some of Porter’s comments seem to me to be proof of this. He condemns the “human skull” story simply because it was in Shirer’s book. I just don’t see the logic of this argument at all. Nor do I understand why Porter criticizes Pressac’s “Auschwitz crematorium” book. I was talking about Struthof, not Auschwitz. Porter writes “I am not impressed by J.C. Pressac or the quotation of odd phrases like gasraum, gaskammer, Material zur Vergasung, etc., because J.C. Pressac’s whole book on the crematories at Auschwitz is based on deliberate mistranslations of terms just like these.”

But it’s not Pressac who uses terms like “material zur Vergassing,” it is Doctor August Hirt who uses this phrase in his damning letter of July 14, 1943. Porter should concern himself with what Hirt was talking about. Forget Pressac, forget me. This is about August Hirt. Why was he asking for materials for gassing regarding his “collection”? This is not about Pressac’s “crematorium” book.

Porter asks “if the 'skull collection' is supposed to be a reality, then why doesn’t somebody dig up the documents (or the skulls) and show them to us.” I truly wondered if Porter had really read my article. What did I talk about if not the documents and the bodies? I did what he asked, before he asked it!

I’m encountering a frighteningly familiar “exterminationist” argument from many revisionists who have taken exception to my Struthof article. These folks dismiss the Struthof gas chamber by simply saying that the idea of a “mad doctor” collecting human skulls is “irrational” or “unreal.” “The Germans just wouldn’t do something like that” is a phrase I hear time and again. This sounds strikingly like those exterminationists who say that the idea of torture or faked confessions sounds unreal because “the Allies just wouldn’t do that.”

I’ve spent a great deal of time during the past 5 years detailing various examples of Allied wrongdoing. But need I remind any of you that the Nazis had a racist state? That they ruthlessly killed men, women and children just because of their race, religion or nationality? That they were so fanatical about their racial world view that they saw even Jewish children as enemies to be imprisoned? That various nazi doctors abused concentration camp inmates for medical experiments? In an environment where even a cut-rate hack hatemonger like Streicher could become a gauleiter, there should be no surprise that there were abuses aplenty.

Don’t talk to me about Nazi “character.’ It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Hirt’s “Jewish-Bolshevik skull collection” could have been seen as a dynamite idea. I think that if there’s any one area in which the exterminationists have met their burden of proof, it’s in the documentation of the Nazi obsession with racial “science.”

Daniel Desjardins. The editor needs to clean up his act with regard to acknowledging and publishing readers letters, particularly when they have been solicited.

You solicited and encouraged responses to the Faurisson/Cole controversy on Struthof. Hence the letter you received from me dated March 28. My opinion is that it lends something very significant to the discussion, particularly since I went to the trouble to obtain the professional viewpoint of a forensic medical examiner re. the behavior and toxicity of CN radicals in morgue-kept body tissues and blood. But it appears you do not intend to run it.

If you agree with the United Negro College Fund slogan that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste,” you might consider the possibility that it is a terrible thing to waste the efforts of your readership in its desire to contribute to SR. You would do well to become known as being inclusive rather than exclusive. Diversity is the thing these days, Brad, at least in theory, and it would lend Smith’s Report a certain “Je ne sais pas quoi” to get on board.

(I’ve gotten many such letters over the years, all of them deserved. Now that CODOH is going on line for good, I expect some of these problems to clear up as I will have a place for everything I find worthwhile—Ed.)