Robert Faurisson Corrects the Record on Piper Interview

When Robert Faurisson received the advertising marerials for the videotape “David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper,” he was somewhat dismayed to find that they did not give credit to the decades of work that revisionist scholars and researchers had done on the Auschwitz “gas chambers,” and that our advertising materials could be read in a way that implied that the video presented important new historical information that was previously unknown. Those observations suggested to Professor Faurisson that he should write the following letter.

In Smith's Report #12 (Nov.-Dec. 1992) you published an article entitled “Director at Auschwitz State Museum Admits on Camera that Auschwitz 'Gas Chamber' is a Fraud!” (pp. 1-2). You describe David Cole as being the first revisionist who managed, thanks to a kind of trick, to step into the office of an important member of the Auschwitz State Museum, that of Dr. Franciszek Piper, senior curator and Director of Archives. David Cole is supposed to extracted from this man an admission that the “gas chamber” of Auschwitz Krema I, visited by so many tourists, is a “fraud.”

In fact, according to your own text, Dr. Piper admitted only that this “gas chamber” was “reconstructed,” which could mean “reconstructed as it was originally.” However, Dr. Piper does not use the word “fraud.”

Now, if David Cole had recalled my own experiences during 1975/1976 with two curators of the Auschwitz Museum, he would have been able to get on camera the truth from the horse's mouth, Dr. Piper himself. The so-called “reconstruction” is in fact a “fraud,” since the “gas chamber” that you visit today has definitely not been “reconstructed as it was originally.”

Contrary to what you say, I was never “denied access to the Museum's archives.” It is true that until 1975 it was perhaps impossible for any revisionist to have access to the archives. But I managed to gain access. I have recounted the story many times, especially at the first Zuendel trial in Toronto (see Transcript, Vol. XI, pp. 2364 -2366, February 4th, 1985).

I got Jan Machalek, a curator at the Museum, to admit that Krema I was a “reconstruction.”

I asked: “According to the original plans?”

He replied: “Yes.”

So I asked to see those plans. And this is how Tadeusz Iwaszko, the predecessor of Dr. Piper, came to give me access (reluctantly) to some documents, among which I found the original plans of Krema I.

Imagine if David Cole had presented those plans to Dr. Piper! Piper would either have had to evade questions about them or admit that the room had not been “reconstructed” as it was “originally.” It would have been a sensational piece of video to be able to watch the face of Dr. Piper while he looked at the plans.

I published those plans in Storia Illustrata (August 1979, p. 28) and displayed them at many conferences, especially at the first IHR Conference in 1979 in Los Angeles. With those plans Ernst Zuendel was able to make models of the crematories for his second trial in 1988. Those plans show perfectly well that the premises visited by tourists and touted as the Auschwitz main-camp gas chamber never were originally as you see them today. It is those plans that are the proof of the “fraud.”

I was the first person to publish the plans of the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria (which were supposed to have contained homicidal gas chambers). I was the first to demonstrate, considering the way the rooms looked together with the documents about Zyklon B I had found, the impossible engineering and chemical problems of such “gas chambers.”

I do not want to criticize you or David Cole too severely. You are performing valuable work. But we have to be exact, fair, and as you say yourself, impeccable. The David Cole video interview with Dr. Piper CONFIRMS what Faurisson and Ditlieb Felderer have proved by other means and spoken about many times!

And I would like to remind your readers of the extraordinary research work carried out at Auschwitz by Ditlieb Felderer. He was the only materialist revisionist I ever met.

(I asked Faurisson what he meant by a “materialist” revisionist.)

I mean that Ditlieb… examined very carefully the premises of the camps, the topography, the water levels (important for the myth of the… [mass burial]… pits in Birkenau), the age of the trees, or dendrochronology (important for Treblinka), the buildings, the doors, the windows, the chimneys, the ventilation, the “sauna,” “Canada,” the soccer field, the hospital, the kitchens, the fumigation gas chambers, etc.

Ditlieb Felderer knew Auschwitz and Birkenau better than I know the city where I live. We must remember him, and we must remember the extraordinary work he did.