Major French Magazine Acknowledges Auschwitz Gas Chamber Fraud

One of France’s most influential and reputable magazines, L’Express, now acknowledges that “everything is false” about the Auschwitz “gas chamber” that for decades has been shown to tens of thousands of tourists yearly.

“Auschwitz: The Memory of Evil,” a lengthy article by journalist and historian Eric Conan, a dedicated anti-revisionist, appears in the January 19–25, 1995, issue, pages 54–73 (and in the Jan. 26 international edition). L’Express is a liberal large-circulation weekly news magazine, similar in format to Time or Newsweek.

L’Express also reports that, after a five-year battle among the “experts,” Polish president Lech Walesa has decided that the new, revised number of dead to be inscribed on the Birkenau monument will be 1,500,000. (For years the monument proclaimed 4,000,000 Auschwitz deaths.)

Generally speaking, writes Conan, there have been many obvious falsifications in the Auschwitz and Birkenau camp sites. Stefan Wilkanowicz, vice-president of the International Committee of the Polish government’s Auschwitz State Museum (and director of an influential Polish Catholic periodical), says:

The biggest blunders have been rectified but the principal discussions are never-ending and far from being settled. I can even say that essential debates, distressing, sometimes unexpected, are only beginning.

About the famous “gas chamber” in the Auschwitz I camp, Conan writes:

In 1948, when the Museum was created, Crematory I was reconstructed in a supposed original state. Everything in it is false [Tout y est faux]: the dimensions of the gas chamber, the locations of the doors, the openings for pouring in Zyklon B, the ovens (rebuilt according to the recollections of some survivors), the height of the chimney. At the end of the 70s, Robert Faurisson exploited those falsifications all the better because at that time the Museum officials balked at admitting them. An American revisionist [David Cole] has just shot a video in the gas chamber (still presented as authentic): one may see him questioning the visitors with his “revelations” [Emphasis added.]

In spite of this, Conan goes on to report, there are no plans to alter anything there. With regard to the famous “gas chamber,” a staff member of the Museum directors’ office, Krystyna Oleksy, says: “For the time being we are going to leave it in the present state, and not give any specifics to the visitors. It is too complicated. We’ll see later on.”

Victory for Revisionism

This feature article in a leading French magazine is a great victory for Holocaust revisionism. On a key point, L’Express now acknowledges, the revisionists have been right all along.

In fact, the magazine concedes a point that revisionists have been legally penalized for making. Dr. Robert Faurisson, Europe’s foremost revisionist scholar, was heavily fined after repeating it on numerous occasions during his “thought crime” trials in France. (Will the French government now prosecute L’Express magazine and journalist Conan for their revisionist Holocaust views?)

In May 1992 a German court fined David Irving 10,000 marks (about $6,000) for publicly saying what L’Express now openly admits. (See: “Irving Fined $6,000 in German ‘Gas Chamber’ Trial,” IHR Newsletter, July–Aug. 1992, pp. 3–4.)

The court punished the British historian because he had told a Munich meeting in April 1990 that the structure in Auschwitz that has been portrayed for decades to tourists as an extermination gas chamber is a phony reconstruction (“Attrappe”), just like the one at Dachau.

Irving was found guilty of thus “disparaging the memory of the dead,” a crime in Germany that effectively applies only to Jewish victims. In the case the Judge refused to consider any of the evidence presented by Irving’s attorneys, including a plea to permit Dr. Franciszek Piper, Senior Curator and archives director of the Auschwitz State Musueum, to testify in the case.

Faurisson’s Comment

Dr. Faurisson comments on Conan’s article:

Clearly, the Auschwitz propagandists are at a loss. Oleksy’s statement is an important vindication of the revisionist position. Every visitor of the Auschwitz “gas chamber” should confront the guides (or, if possible, Museum officials) with these sentences by Oleksy.

During a September 1992 interview with American revisionist David Cole, Auschwitz Museum Curator Piper said, “so now this gas chamber [at Auschwitz I] is very similar to this one which existed in 1941–1942.”

As Conan knows, already in 1976 I demonstrated the falsehood of this entire story by questioning Museum official Jan Machalek, and by finding in the Auschwitz Museum files original plans clearly showing that, in fact, the alleged “gas chamber” was, between October 7, 1941, and August 31, 1943, a room with a single entrance where dead bodies awaiting cremation were stored.

If Museum officials now wish to rebuild the room as it was during the war, they will have to fill in the south-east doorway. After doing so, though, they would no longer be able to explain how the alleged victims entered the “gas chamber” for gassing. I do not think the officials would dare contend that the victims entered by way of the door of the ovens room.

For details on these points, see what I published in Serge Thion’s 1980 book Vérité historique ou vérité politique? La question des chambres à gaz, pp. 316–317. I have also repeatedly mentioned the story of that “reconstructed” gas chamber in The Journal of Historical Review (see, for instance, Winter 1981 issue, p. 335), as well as during the 1985 and 1988 Zündel trials in Toronto (see, for instance, 1985 Trial, Transcript, pp. 2364–2366). Even as early as 1968, Olga Wormser-Migot wrote in her book Le Système concentrationnaire nazi (p. 157) that the Auschwitz I camp was “without a gas chamber.” In 1985, Raul Hilberg stated under oath during the first Zündel trial in Toronto (Transcript, p. 774), and Pierre Vidal-Naquet wrote in L’Allemagne nazie et le génocide juif (pp. 510, 516, n. 94), what Franciszek Piper said to Cole in 1992. Jean-Claude Pressac told the same story in his 1989 book, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (pp. 108, 123, 133).

In his L’Express article, Conan mentions Jean-Claude Pressac’s 1993 book, Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz. Among the fantastic number of “dossiers” and articles recently published in French newspapers and magazines in connection with the 50th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, this article may perhaps be the only one to mention that book. Pressac’s ambivalence has become an embarrassment for the “exterminationists.” For instance, his estimate in Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz (1993) of total Auschwitz deaths was 775,000 (rounded up to 800,000), and in the 1994 German edition he further reduced this to between 630,000 and 710,000 (of whom, he asserts, 470,000 to 550,000 were “gassed” Jews).