The Confessions of Kurt Gerstein

The Confessions of Kurt Gerstein, by Henri Roques, Paperback (June 1989), Inst for Historical Review; ISBN: 0939484277; Our Price: $7.50. Availability: This title usually ships within 4-6 weeks… Amazon.com Sales Rank: 332,621

[email protected]
From Michael Mills,
Canberra, Australia,
March 31, 1998

A thorough analysis of a key document of World War 2

This book was originally a doctoral thesis presented by the author to the University of Nantes in France in 1985. Although the thesis was accepted by the university and the doctoral degree granted, the French Government intervened and ordered withdrawal of the degree.

The thesis was a work of textual criticism rather than historical analysis. The topic was the series of “confessions” written by the SS-officer Kurt Gerstein in April-May 1945 and given to officers of the French army. The confessions contain what is claimed to be an eye-witness account of the gassing of some 6700 Jews at the Belzec camp in August 1942; for this reason they are considered a key document in relation to the history of the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War, and are quoted in almost all major works on that topic.

The author identifies six different texts of the confessions, including one discovered by him in Church archives in Germany. The aim of his thesis is to determine the authenticity of each of the texts, and the degree of their veracity. He determines that three of the texts are authentic, having definitely been written by Gerstein, and the other three are inauthentic; of the inauthentic texts, two appear to have been composed by the French interrogators of Gerstein on the basis of his authentic confessions, and the source of the third is unknown.

The author considers that this third “inauthentic” confession, which is quite widely quoted in historical works, was produced in order to reinforce the credibility of the confessions by omitting a number of incredible details contained in the authentic texts, for example the claim that the total number of people gassed by the Germans amounted to 25 million. The author analyses the use made of the confessions in major historical works. He finds that in many cases the inauthentic versions have been quoted, or that where an authentic version has been used, it is quoted incompletely or actually in a distorted form. In cases where an incomplete or distorted quotation was used, the effect was to remove fantastic elements in the confessions which cast doubt on their credibility.

As an example, Gerstein stated in his description of the gassing that 750 people were crammed into a gas-chamber with a floor-area of 25 square metres, or 30 persons per square metre, a clearly impossible figure. The author shows that one historian using Gerstein's confessions arbitrarily incresed the floor area to 93 square metres (= 8 persons per square metre), while another historian arbitrarily reduced the number of victims to 175 (= 7 persons per square metre). The author considers these to be examples of misuse of the confessions in order to support a particular historical theory.

With regard to the veracity of the confessions, the author identifies in the different texts a minimum of 29 features considered by him to be impossible or highly improbable. On the basis of this the author considers that the confessions do not merit the high historical value that has been placed on them by traditional historians. This is clearly a “revisionist” work in the sense that the author casts doubt on the veracity of a key historical document of the Second World War. Nevertheless, he states emphatically that his conclusions in relation to the Gerstein confessions cannot be interpreted as disproving the accepted accounts of the mass-gassing of Jews. It is up to the reader to make a judgement as to the validity of the author's arguments. In my view he has presented a well-argued and reasonable case.

A reader, February 8, 1997:

Warning!

This is an antisemitic Holocaust denial book. This is a Holocaust denial book published by a well known antisemitic group called the “Institute for Historical Research.” Think twice before you buy this book and help to fund this orgainization. In addition to being offensive, the book is poorly written and edited. Don't demean the memory of six million victims!

Review (and “warning”) originally posted on Amazon.com on 12/27/98, here with slight changes in formatting.