The Second Leuchter Report

FOREWORD

Fred A. Leuchter is a 46-year old engineer who lives in Boston. He is a specialist in planning and building execution facilities for American penitentiaries. One of his achievements was the modernization of the execution gas chamber in the penitentiary at Jefferson City, Missouri.

Ernst Zündel is a 50-year-old German who lives in Toronto, where he had a brilliant career as a graphic artist and advertising man, until he was boycotted because of his Revisionist opinions. Since then, he has spent almost all his time struggling against lies about the “Holocaust” I have helped him in this struggle, especially during the two trials which a Canadian Jewish organization initiated against him in 1985 and 1988.

Zündel's first trial lasted seven weeks and ended with his being sentenced to 15 months in prison for “publication of false news.” The verdict was thrown out on appeal because of serious errors made by District Court Judge Hugh Locke.

The second trial lasted four months. This time Ernst Zündel was sentenced to nine months in prison by District Court Judge Ron Thomas. This second verdict, too, may eventually be successfully appealed on the same grounds.

In 1988, Ernst Zündel asked Fred Leuchter to visit Poland to examine “the alleged execution gas chambers” in the three concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. The conclusion of the first Leuchter Report was quite clear: no such gas chambers ever existed in those three places

In 1989, he asked Leuchter to visit West Germany and Austria to examine “the alleged execution gas chambers” at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim Castle. The conclusion of the second report, as you will read below, is just as clear: no such gas chambers ever existed in those three places.

People have called Revisionism “the great intellectual adventure of the late twentieth century.” That adventure really began shortly after the Second World War with the publication of the works of Maurice Bardéche and Paul Rassinier. It continued in 1976 with a masterful work The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Dr. Arthur Butz of the United States, and in 1979 with the publication in Germany of Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich's book, Der Auschwitz Mythos, and the creation of the Institute for Historical Review in Los Angeles.

During the 1980's, thanks in particular to the activities of Ernst Zündel, Revisionism worldwide has developed to such an extent that future historians will probably speak of Revisionism before and after Zündel. In a way, these politically motivated trials – which are a disgrace to Canada – will change everything. Zündel promised in 1985 that his trial, even if he were to lose, would put the Nuremberg Trial on trial, and that the slanderers of Germany would meet their “Stalingrad” there. He was right.

Before Ernst Zündel

Before Ernst Zündel, Germany's accusers never gave a thought to proving the existence of the “gas chambers.” They treated their existence as “proven.”

According to Exterminationist Serge Klarsfeld:

It is clear that during the years after 1945 the technical aspects of the gas chambers were a subject that was neglected since no one imagined that someday we would have to prove their existence. (Le Monde Juif, January-March, 1987, p. 1)

At the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and the Frankfurt trial as well as at many other famous trials, including the Klaus Barbie trial in 1987, there was no attempt to prove this horrible accusation, which has so long weighed on the vanquished German nation. These judicial travesties were similar to the witchcraft trials, in which the accused and their defense lawyers did not question the existence of the Devil and his supernatural doings. In these modern witchcraft trials, it has been taboo to question the existence of “the gas chambers” and their supernatural accomplishments, which defy all laws of physics and chemistry.

Even Klaus Barbie's French defense attorney, Jacques Vergés, in spite of his courage, refrained from asking for even the slightest proof of the existence of the “gas chambers” to which Klaus Barbie allegedly sent the Jewish children from their refuge in the town of Izieu, near Lyons.

In all these trials of so-called “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity,” the supposedly civilized nations have ignored the elementary rules of criminal law for nearly a half century.

To understand what I mean, let us take, for example, a crime committed in France. Let's suppose that in this case there is a weapon, a body, and a killer (or presumed killer). Normally the French court would demand four routine reports:

1. A report of on-site forensic examination of the body and any suspect item;
2. A technical study of the weapon used to commit the crime;
3. An autopsy report on the victim, showing how and by what means if death occurred;
4. A report on the reenactment or simulation of the crime, in the presence of the accused, at the scene of the crime.

Even if the defendant has confessed, the judges never decide that further investigations need not be carried out; a confession, to have much judicial value, must be verified and confirmed.

In nearly half a century, however, no one has ever met these elementary standards, in a case which involves not just an ordinary crime perpetrated by a single person with an ordinary weapon (whether blade or bullet), but a supposedly unprecedented crime committed against millions of people with an extraordinary weapon that no judge had ever seen before: a “super gas chamber” for thousands of victims, a virtual mass-production chemical slaughterhouse!

The first trials of Germans accused of having used “gas chambers” or “gas vans” to kill people began in 1943 in the Soviet Union (trials of Kharkov and Krasnodar). They continue to this day, especially in Israel with the Demjanjuk trial. Today, after 47 years of such trials we still do not have:

1. A single on-site forensic examination of “gassed” bodies or “gas chambers” or “gas vans”;
2. A single expert report concluding that a given room or a given van was used for homicidal gassing;
3. A single autopsy report concluding that the victim had been killed by any type of poison gas;
4. A single report on the re-enactment or simulation of a gassing operation, using the thousands of victims claimed and the steps taken, and taking into account the dangerous chemicals involved.

In the course of the trial concerning the Struthof-Natzweiler camp, in Alsace, an expert study was in fact made of the “gas chamber” and of the “gassed” bodies (kept at the civilian hospital in Strasbourg), but in each case, Professor René Fabre, a toxicologist, found no traces of gas. As regards Dachau, there was in fact a kind of expert report carried out by Captain Fribourg, of the French army, but although the report concluded that it would be necessary to examine the room provisionally called the “gas chamber,” no such examination was carried out.

During his preliminary investigation in the trial of Rudolf Höss and other Auschwitz officials, examining magistrate Jan Sehn ordered the Institute for Forensic Examination, Copernic Street, Krakow, to test six zinc closures allegedly obtained from ventilation openings said to have been part of the “gas chamber” of Krematorium II in Birkenau, and also 25.5 Kilos of hair with metallic items in them. Traces of hydrocyanic acid and its compounds were found (expert reports by Dr. Jan Z. Robel, dated December 15, 1945).

There is nothing out of the ordinary in this. The Germans made frequent use of hydrocyanic acid, in the form of Zyklon B for the disinfection of premises, clothing, and personal effects. In Poland, as well as throughout wartime Europe, hair was collected, even in commercial barber shops, for use in clothing (after it was disinfected). What is paradoxical is that, despite having a forensic institute at its disposal, it appears that the Polish justice system never undertook basic, thorough research into the rooms alleged to be “execution gas chambers.” (See R. Faurisson, “Response to a Paper Historian,” The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1986, p. 37)

On-site visits by the courts took place during certain trials, notably the Frankfurt trial (1963-65). The scandal is that parts of the Auschwitz camp were viewed by the visiting official party, but not the supposed “gas chambers,” in spite of the fact that they were there, either in their original condition (as claimed to this day by Polish Communist officials and publications) or in ruins from which much could be determined (see Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, The Auschwitz Myth, Institute for Historical Review, 1986).

A reenactment, which is by definition a simulation, would have been easy to carry out at Birkenau. It would have immediately shown the foolishness of the gassing accusations. Filmmakers sometimes shoot Hollywood-style “docudramas” at Birkenau, claiming to re-create the arrival of the Jewish convoys on the ramp at Birkenau, near the two crematory buildings that were each supposed to contain (1) a changing room where the victims would take off their clothes; (2) a homicidal gas chamber; (3) a room containing five crematory ovens with three retorts each. We are told that each group of victims numbered some 2,000 people and there were several such groups burned each day in each crematory. We can see from the size of the buildings and the arrangement of the surrounding areas that any re-enactment would immediately result in fantastic bottlenecks. The overcrowding at the crematories would be spectacular. Decomposing, rotting bodies would pile up all over the areas Assuming that it took one and a half.hours (the average funeral industry time) to incinerate one body, it follows that after one and a half hours had passed we would find ourselves with the original 2,000 bodies minus the 15 that had been burned, still leaving 1,985 bodies with no place for storage before burning! The “machinery of death” would break down with the first gassing. It would take eight days and eight nights to incinerate 2,000 bodies, assuming continuous operation of the crematoriums. According to cremation experts and crematory operating manuals, however, no crematory can operate continuously, day and night.

Let's talk about the witnesses who testified at these trials. In all of them, persons have come forward to offer themselves as living witnesses to the “Holocaust” and to the “gas chambers.” How did they, according to their own stories, escape the gas chambers? The answer was very simple: every one of them had benefited from a miracle. As each survivor passed through one so-called “death camp” after another, he considered his life a sum of miracles. The members of the “Sonderkommandos” broke all records. According to their stories, the Germans usually gassed the personnel of these units every three months, which means that two years spent at Auschwitz and Birkenau would mean a total of seven or eight consecutive miracles for those champions at surviving. Only rarely have the lawyers or judges at such trials dared to betray their surprise at so many miracles.

The Olympic champion of gas chamber survivors, Filip Müller, the immortal author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, had some problems with this question at the Frankfurt trial, but he found the perfect answer: he disdainfully explained that the story about the regular liquidation of the “Sonderkommando” was merely a legend. The extent to which the general public, historians, and judges let themselves be bamboozled by these supposed witnesses to the “Holocaust” is disturbing.

Simone Veil, former French Minister and head of the European Parliament, often offers herself as a living witness to, and as living proof of, the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz. If she is living proof of anything, it is that the Germans did not exterminate the Jews at Auschwitz. Simone Veil, her mother and one of her sisters were always together: at Drancy (a French transit camp), at Auschwitz, at Bobrek (a sub-camp of Auschwitz), and at Bergen-Belsen. In the last camp they contracted typhus, usually considered a deadly disease at that time. Veil's mother died there. Like her two daughters, she too had survived Auschwitz. Another daughter survived Ravensbruck.

Personally, I do not consider anyone a “eyewitness” unless he or she successfully passes the test of being cross-examined about the physical aspects of the facts which he or she reports.

Please read what I say here carefully: in no trial has a supposed witness to the “gassings” been cross-examined about the physical aspects of the gassing he said he had seen or participated in. Even in the trial of Tesch and Weinbacher, sentenced to death and executed for having made or sold Zyklon B. prosecution witness Charles Sigismund Bendel on whose testimony the two were largely condemned, did not undergo such a cross-examination (see William Lindsey, “Zyklon B. Auschwitz and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch,” The Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1983, pp. 10-23). As a matter of principle and as a defense tactic, lawyers for the accused have avoided the taboo of the “gas chambers” by limiting themselves to saying that, while gas chambers existed, their clients did not gas anyone.

After Ernst Zündel

With the arrival of Ernst Zündel the veil of trickery was torn asunder. Zündel had the daring not to let himself be intimidated. He showed that indeed, the emperor had no clothes. He confounded the rascals with his direct, no-nonsense approach. Consequently, the prosecution's experts and witnesses suffered a severe defeat at his trial. And Ernst Zündel, moving to the counter-offensive, taught historians and judges a superb lesson. He showed them what they ought to have done all along. They should have, in a sense, begun with the beginning, which, as we all know, is sometimes very difficult to do. Trying first and foremost to establish what had taken place physically, Ernst Zündel, at his own expense, sent a U.S. expert on execution gas chambers, along with his team, to Poland. This expert, Fred Leuchter, took samples from the ground, the walls, and the floors of the alleged gas chambers and then had them analyzed by an American laboratory.

I have described elsewhere how the experts and witnesses for the prosecution were routed during the 1985 and 1988 Toronto trials [see Robert Faurisson, “The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988),” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89, pp. 417-431). I am not going to return to that subject. I would only like to make it clear that this is not simply my subjective judgment. The proof that I am telling the truth is that, at the 1988 trial, Exterminationism's number one expert, Raul Hilberg, the “pope” of the Holocaust Legend, refused to testify again, since he still had painful memories of his defeat in 1985 at the hands of Zündel's defense attorney, Douglas Christie. He said as much in a letter to Prosecutor John Pearson, a letter which was supposed to have remained confidential but which the defense learned of and caused to be made public. Nor did Dr. Rudolf Vrba, and other star witnesses of the 1985 triaL return for the 1988 trial either. Prosecutor Pearson, asked by Judge Ron Thomas whether any “surviviors” would testify, had to respond pitifully (I was present) that at this time they would not.

Out of my pity for them, I will not refer here (as I have already done in the above-mentioned article) to the statements made in 1988 by Red Cross representative Charles Biedermann, an apparently honest and intelligent man who nevertheless frequently gave evasive and misleading answers, and by Professor Christopher Browning, who gave a distressing display of what an American university professor can be like: an ignoramus of boundless naiveté, a lover of money and a man without scruples. In him, we had a university professor who accepted $150 an hour from the Canadian taxpayer to come to Toronto to crush a man – Ernst Zündel – because of an opinion and to help throw him in prison: the crime of this man was that he had published in Canada a 14-year-old essay which had been freely distributed in Great Britain and in Browning's own country.

To me, one of the principal results of the first Leuchter Report was just that it made one simple fact strikingly clear: that no forensic expert study of the “weapon” used to carry out the “Holocaust” crime had previously been done. Since his report was made public, in April of 1988, Leuchter has not found a single person, including those who have shown their anger about his findings, who could refute his report with any other report that had previously been drawn up. As regards those who would criticise some parts of the Leuchter Report, I invite them to make their own investigation and get their own laboratory reports.

There still remains one solution outlined by Fred Leuchter himself in his paper given in Los Angeles in February 1989 during the Ninth International Conference of the Institute for Historical Review: the establishment of an international committee of experts on the problem of the gas chambers. As early as 1982, French historian Henri Amouroux, with whom I had discussed my research, confided to me that he hoped for such a solution. He told me in so many words that what he wanted was an “international” commission, “definitely not a national” commission, since the French seem incapable of any open-mindedness on the question of the gas chambers.

The Polish authorities, unless they develop a sudden appetite for glasnost, will oppose with all their strength any inquiry of that kind, just as they oppose all normal access to the archives of the State Museum of Auschwitz, especially to the death registers (Totenbücher), left behind by the Germans, which would give us an idea of the real number of those who died at Auschwitz and the cause of their deaths. In 1987, Tadeusz Iwaszko, the director of the Archives in the Auschwitz Museum, told French journalist Michel Folco (in the presence of pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac, one of Serge Klarsfeld's friends) that, “If we were to carry out excavations that did not uncover any proof of the existence of the gas chambers, the Jews would accuse us other Poles of having suppressed the evidence.” [Note: On August 8, 1989, Ernst Zündel wrote to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, informing him that he had received confirmation of the capture of the Auschwitz death registers by the Soviet Union from the cross-examination of Red Cross delegate Charles Biedermann. He requested access to the registers and suggested that it would be a gesture of good will if the registers were released. In what was perhaps a happy coincidence, the Soviet Union released the register one and a half months later.]

The Second Leuchter Report

It is likely that the first Leuchter Report will for a long time remain the last word about the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. As a pioneering effort, it has opened a particularly fertile field of research for others to follow and expand upon.

The second Leuchter Report, 1989, is also a pioneering work, this time on the question of the alleged gas chambers at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim.

I did not accompany Leuchter and his team to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek, but I had thought since 1977 that the American gas chambers which use cyanide gas had to be studied to know the absurdity of the alleged German gas chambers which allegedly used Zyklon B, an insecticide whose base is hydrocyanic acid. I hoped, without really believing it, that some day an expert on the American gas chambers would visit Auschwitz and carry out the kind of physical and chemical study that ought to have been carried out by any honest judicial or historical inquiry.

In 1979, at the time of the first international conference of the Institute for Historical Review, I myself mentioned that idea to several people, especially to Ernst Zündel. In the years that followed, I abandoned all hope. I must say that even among some Revisionists I did not find very much interest in my idea. Perhaps it appeared too bold or too unrealistic. But Ernst Zündel abandoned neither the idea, nor the hope of succeeding. In the preface to the first Leuchter Report, I told how, thanks to Ernst Zündel and to Canadian attorney Barbara Kulaszka, I was able to meet Fred Leuchter in Boston, and how the expedition to Poland was organized.

For the expedition into West Germany and Austria, I was part of the Leuchter team In the report that you are about to read, Fred Leuchter gives us all the important information about the members of that team and about the nature and result of his mission.

1. Dachau

From 1945 to 1960, Allied propaganda and the Allied courts told us that homicidal gas chambers had been used at Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim. Apparently, there was no lack of evidence, of witnesses and of confessions to that fact

They especially emphasized the Dachau “gas chamber” and its victims.. American propaganda was so fulminant that, if there is any country in the world today where the “gassings” at Dachau are considered to be as well proven as the existence of the pyramids in Egypt, it is the U.S.A.

One of the decisive days at the Nuremberg show trial was that on which the prosecution exhibited a film about the German concentration camps. The ultimate horror came with a view of the “gas chamber” at Dachau. The narrator explained the functioning of the machinery which supposedly gassed “probably a hundred men at one time.” We cannot overemphasize how much that film on “Nazi Concentration Camps” – 6,000 feet selected from the 80,000 feet that had been shot – captured and influenced the popular imagination, including most of the German defendants.

It is likely that the two events which helped most to stir up public opinion against the vanquished Germans were, first, the showing of that film, and second, the sort of public confession of Rudolf Höss, “the Commandant of Auschwitz” made before the tribunal. Today we know that his confession was “dictated.” The substance of it flowed from the sick imagination of a British Jew who was one of the men who tortured Höss after his capture (see R. Faurisson, “How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Höss,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter, 1986-1987, p. 389-403).

But the story of the Dachau “gassings” was also made up out of thin air. We had to wait until 1960 for the liars to admit it.

On August 19, 1960, in Die Zeit, the notorious Martin Broszat admitted that there had never been any homicidal gassings at Dachau. Two years earlier this same historian, to his everlasting shame, had published the “confession” of Rudolf Höss, supposedly written in prison after Höss was turned over to the Polish Communists by the British. In so doing, he had presented it as genuine and trustworthy, yet these “confessions” were essentially the same confessions obtained by the British, and were nothing more than a re-organized and expanded version of the British inventions, with a bit of a Polish flavor added! (In 1972, Martin Broszat became the director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.)

Today, every visitor to the “gas chamber” at Dachau can read on a mobile panel the following statement in five languages:

“GAS CHAMBER – disguised as a 'shower room' – never used as a gas chamber.”

Since the panel is mobile, the film makers who sensationalize evil, as well as other professional liars, can roll it out of view and film or photograph the room from all angles while persisting in saying that it was a gas chamber that was actually used to gas prisoners.

I am amazed at the cynicism of the officials of the Dachau Museum and the naiveté of the museum's visitors. The words on the panel are not based on reality. In 1980, in my Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire (1980, pp. 197-222), I think I illustrated this point. I recounted how I completely embarrassed Barbara Distel, the director of the Museum, and the late Dr. Guerisse, then president of the International Dachau Committee, headquartered in Brussels, by asking them why they called this room a “gas chamber.” When people asked these two how it came to pass that the Germans did not find the time to finish this little “gas chamber” that they began in 1942, they said that the prisoners employed to construct it either sabotaged it or refused to work on it.

But how could the prisoners, unable to have seen something that had never existed anywhere in the world (a gas chamber for 100 people at a time), know from the outset of their work that once the work was completed, they would have constructed a homicidal gas chamber? Do we have here yet another miracle, one of divination and mental telepathy? Did successive prisoner work details pass on the word about this for three years? Would the Germans have given the prisoners an ultra-secret mission, to construct a lethal gas chamber for Dachau inmates, without being concerned about their carrying it out?

Furthermore, how did Barbara Distel and Dr. Guerisse know that the room was an uncompleted gas chamber? Can they explain – to us what needs to be added to the “uncompleted” little gas chamber in order to complete it? Where did they get their technical information? Do they have building plans for “gas chambers” in their archives? Have they already seen some “completed” gas chambers? Where and when?

At the time of our visit to Dachau on April 9, 1989, Fred Leuchter, Mark Weber and I were videotaped by cameraman Eugen Ernst, first in the “gas chamber,” and then, after leaving its on a sort of parade ground outside. It was on this parade ground that we decided to record our comments about the visit. The tourists who had just visited the room saw us and some stopped and listened. Fred Leuchter was able to make his report in peace, except for one not too serious incident provoked by one tourist who aggressively asked me it we doubted the reality of the “gas chamber.”

When it was time for historian Mark Weber and myself to comment on camera about our visit and observations, the tourists began to gather. Some of them betrayed a little nervousness. We could have interrupted our report and continued it somewhere else in the camp, but I decided to remain where we were and try to exploit the situation. After all, we had there in front of us the best possible audience: all of them had just “seen a gas chamber” and they later would probably tell their friends: “No one can deny the existence of the gas chambers; I saw one myself at Dachau.” I therefore engaged in an improvised debate with the visitors. I made it a point to say that they had not visited a gas chamber at all but merely a room to which Mrs. Distel, director of the Museum, had given that designation. In so doing, she had made a serious allegation for which she offered no proof (the few photos and documents hung in a room next to the alleged gas chamber proved nothing at all). But who dared to ask her for any proofs? Apparently no one. I warned the tourists not to be tempted to go and tell their family circle that they had seen a gas chamber at Dachau. In reality, they had seen nothing of the kind. In the midst of my presentation I let them know that, as far as we Revisionists are concerned, there had been no homicidal gas chambers anywhere, including Auschwitz, nor had there been any German policy to exterminate the Jews.

The whole thing began to look like a sort of 1960's-style “happening.” Some visitors reacted angrily, others agreed with us. All of them appeared either indignant or interested. One young German thought that I deserved to be thrown into prison for such statements. The most hostile ones resorted to the usual evasion: “Gas chambers or not, it doesn't make any difference.” This is an argument which I, as a Frenchman, particularly enjoyed, since in France Jean-Marie Le Pen had been severely condemned by the courts, in response to complaints by Jewish groups, for having said exactly the same thing.

The magical “gas chamber” is the central pillar of the new Holocaust religion. It is not the Revisionists, but rather the adherents of the new religion who make such a fuss about the “gas chambers.” Consequently, we must ask them for some explanation of their attachment to these myths. Of course, they must cling to the gas chamber, for without a specific and systematic means of destruction, it becomes impossible to prove the existence of a specific and systematic programe for the destruction of the Jews. Without the “gas chamber,” there is no “genocide.”

Camera man Eugen Ernst was able to tape a good part of this “happening,” which allowed me to give my first public presentation in Germany about the taboo of the “gas chambers” and the “genocide” claim, right across from the fake gas chamber of Dachau, one of the most important shrines of the Holocaust cult.

2. Mauthausen

The minuscule gas chamber at Mauthausen has never been defended by very many of the Holocaust faithful. It is indefensible. In nearly a half century, only two people have really tried to make us believe in it: Hans Marsalek of Austria and Pierre-Serge Choumoff of France. In their various publications they wisely refrain from showing a real photo of the interior of the room. The reason is simple: the room looks like nothing more than a simple shower room and one can see nothing that would lead one to think that it was a homicidal gas chamber with all the equipment which in such a case would have been indispensable. Marsalek and Choumoff usually don't show any photo; very rarely they will show an exterior photo of one of its two doors (two doors to a gas chamber, a fact that would definitely double the problems of keeping the chamber air-tight); or, sometimes, they allow the reader to vaguely see a small part of the interior.

At the time of my first visit to Mauthausen in 1978, I asked two officials of the museum, particularly the director, a former Spanish inmate, why amongst all the postcards of the camp that were on sale to tourists there was not a single one showing the so-called gas chamber. The answer was: “That would be too cruel.” That is a rather surprising answer when you remember that all the concentration camp museums, including the one at Mauthausen, are reminiscent of the “chambers of horrors” that can be seen at country fairs and exhibitions, and when you realize that a sort of “sex-shop anti-Nazism” is one of the most flourishing commodities in “Shoah Business.”

During that same visit, I also wanted to know why they did not display, either in the “gas chamber” itself or in the museum, any document or any expert report proving that what looked like a shower room was in fact a homicidal gas chamber. The camp's director dared to reply that the text of such an expert report was in fact on display in the “gas chamber” itself. That was not true. Forced to acknowledge that, he then told me about an expert report that could be found in Linz, but he gave no further details about it. It is clear that, if there were any such expert report, it would be reprinted in all the works devoted to Mauthausen and that it would be mentioned in all the “Holocaust” bibliographies.

During our inspection of Mauthausen on April 10, 1989, an incident took place involving the camp authorities.. We visited the place at an early hour in the morning to allow Fred Leuchter to take his samples without too much risk. No sooner had he finished his task (which caused a great deal of noise) than some groups of visitors began to go through the “gas chamber.” They were mostly children from schools which indoctrinate them systematically to feel shame and hatred for what previous generations of Germans and Austrians supposedly did during the war (Austria is the chosen home of the malevolent Simon Wiesenthal). The guides, either museum officials or teachers, talked at Iength about the “gas chamber” and how it worked, giving the usual, typical explanations found in popular “Holocaust literature,” that contradicted each other on many points.

Without any previous agreement between both of us, Mark Weber and I, under the watchful eye of Eugen Ernst's rolling camera, began to ask questions of the museum tour guide, who seemed to be the highest ranking on the scene. After being at first very sure of himself, the poor man, bombarded with questions, finally had to admit that no one knew very much about how that “gas chamber” had worked. It appeared that over the years the story had taken extremely varied forms. They had given visitors three successive contradictory versions of the gassing procedure:

Version No. 1 –

The gas came from the ceiling through shower heads (still in existence): that version, the official told us, was abandoned when people noticed that, considering the low ceiling, the victims could have simply put their hands over the shower heads to block them up and prevent the spread of the gas;

Version No. 2 –

The gas came in from the ceiling and was vented at the time of the airing-out process through a sort of chimney opening, still in existence, located on the west side: the official was not able to tell us why that version of the story also had to be abandoned;

Version No. 3 –

The gas came through a thin, perforated pipe located on the east wall, about 80 centimeters above the ground. That is, it came from the part of the room diametrically opposite to where it had been in Version No. 2. There is no longer any trace of that pipe, or even of the opening through which it supposedly came from the adjacent room, where the gas was generated. The adjacent room is completely empty and contains nothing that gives any hint of what it had been used for.

All of that was already troubling, but perhaps the most troubling thing was that the whole explanation given on a metal plaque inside the gas chamber was that of Version No. 2. I mentioned that to the official, who explained that the text of the plaque was a mistake and that the procedure described there was no longer the right one.

I observed that Version No. 3, the one currently considered to be authentic, had the problem of being, physically, extremely unlikely. Since it was located 80 centimeters above the ground, the perforated pipe, even if it had been partially embedded in the wall to resist the pressure of the bodies inside, would have been blocked up by the bodies of the victims jammed into the gas chamber. How would the gas have spread itself normally in the “gas chamber” so as to kill all the victims throughout the room's entirety? The offical finally said that he was not a scientist and that his explanation was that given in the book written by… Hans Marsalek.

A few minutes after the museum tour guide left, two police officers appeared and ordered us to stop all filming. They informed us that we could photograph all of Mauthausen except… the “gas chamber” and the crematory oven! However, there was no announcement advising tourists of that. In any event, thousands of visitors have photographed the two places without any warnings from the camp authorities.

At Mauthausen, I had the feeling that the camp authorities lived in something of a siege mentality. They appeared to be haunted by the progress of Revisionism in Austria and by the Revisionist work of people like Emil Lachout, Gerd Honsik and Walter Ochensberger. (In passing, I would like to pay hommage to the memory of another Austrian, Franz Scheidl. In the 1960's, at his own expense, he published a whole series of studies bearing the general title Geschichte der Verfemung Deutschlands [History of the Defaming of Germany]. It has remained largely unknown, even to many Revisionists).

3. Hartheim Castle

Hartheim Castle can be seen from a great distance, sitting as it does in the middle of a plain. For an area that allegedly served as a place to carry out the most secret of crimes, it is quite impossible to hide. The castle was, before and after the war, a sort of asylum. It still is today. Hartheim Castle contains a small, inoffensive-looking room that makes one wonder why the practitioners of the Big Lie decide to call it a homicidal “gas chamber.” It is one of the most insulting and most baffling inventions of the Holocaust” religion. Today I can see only one use for it: to those who mock the religious superstitions of the past as if our era were more enlightened and more intelligent than in past centuries, I would gladly say:

Go visit the “gas chamber” at Hartheim Castle and then come tell me whether you feel humiliated to be treated like imbeciles by people who dare to say that it was once a gas chamber.

I do not know of any publication that reproduces a photo of this minuscule “gas chamber.” It was identified as such by Hans Marsalek, in the English version of the confession that he supposedly took from Franz Ziereis, Commandant at Mauthausen, regarding the:

… large gassing establishment where, in Ziereis’ estimate, between 1 and 1.5 million people were killed (!).

The Revisionist Intifada

The current disarray of the defenders of the “Holocaust” has its curious effects. Up to the end of the 1970's, they believed that in Auschwitz, Birkenau and other camps located in Poland they had “solid proof” of the existence of the “gas chambers” and therefore of the “genocide” of the Jews. Up until that time they went so far as to say that there were some exaggerations and that the camps located outside present-day Poland probably or certainly did not have any gas chambers. Beginning with the start of the 1980's, under the pressure of Revisionist writings, the “gas chambers” in Poland and in particular those at Auschwitz and Birkenau seemed more and more doubtful. This then produced a reaction motivated by fear. In a movement comparable to that of religious or political fundamentalism, the Exterminationists called for a return to the original faith and doctrine. They “re-established” the gas chambers that had been abandoned. They set out to reaffirm that there had indeed been “gas chambers” at Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck, Neuengamme, Struthof-Natzweiler, and perhaps even at Dachau. I refer here to the book by Adalbert Rückerl, Hermann Langbein, Eugen Kogon and 21 other writers: NS-Massentötungen durch Giftgas (Fischer Verlag, 1983).

As regards Mauthausen, some people, including Claude Lanzmann and Yehuda Bauer, went so far as to retract the story. In 1982, Bauer clearly wrote that “no gassings took place at Mauthausen.” Lanzmann was just as clear. In 1986, during a bitter debate about the Roques affair on Europe 1 (a French radio network), he corrected cabinet member Michel Noir, who had mentioned the Mauthausen “gas chamber.” Lanzmann firmly contradicted the Minister on this score: never had there been a gas chamber in that camp. But all of that did not prevent our two fellows from stating later on that there had indeed been a “gas chamber” at Mauthausen! (For Bauer's retraction, see pages 33-34 of the absurd book published in Vienna in 1989, by the Dokumentations-Archiv des österreichischen Widerstandes under the title Das Lachout-“Dokument,” Anatomie einer Fälschung. As regards Lanzmann's retraction, read his letter published in Le Monde Juif, July-September 1986, p. 97). All those retractions, sudden changes of direction and constantly shifting explanations add up to one further proof that the “gas chamber” and the “genocide” are nothing more than a myth. A myth constantly mutates under the influence of the dominant opinions and the necessities of the moment.

The Exterminationists of today have only two refuges left them, two points where they hope to be able to anchor their faith: the “gas van” and “Treblinka.”

As regards the first point, I can tell them that the Frenchman Pierre Marais will soon publish a book entitled Le problème des camions à gaz (The Problem of the Gas Vans). On the second point, I can tell them that they are going to lose “Treblinka” as they have already lost “Auschwitz.”

The promoters of the Holocaust, for the foreseeable future, will keep their money, their power, their capacity to produce films, to stage ceremonies, to build museums, but those films and ceremonies and museums will be more and more devoid of meaning. They will be able still to find more and more ways of repressing the Revisionists through physical attacks, press campaigns, the passing of special laws and even murder. Fifty years after the war they will continue to prosecute all those they call “war criminals” in show trials. The Revisionists will reply to them with historical and forensic studies, scholarly and technical books. Those books and those studies will be our stones, in this our intellectual Intifada.

The Jews will have a choice: they can either follow the example of the rare few among them who have been courageous and honorable enough to denounce the Big Lie, or they can support the melodramatic activities of people like Elie Wiesel and Samuel Pisar and the shameful witch hunts carried out by people like Simon Wiesenthal, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld and the O.S.I. in the United States.

David Irving, who rallied to the support of the Revisionist position in 1988, recently said:

The Jewish community have to examine their consciences. They have been propagating something that isn't true.” (The Jewish Chronicle, London, 23 June 1989).

I couldn't have said it better.

– Dr. Robert Faurisson

July, 1990