What I Believe, What I Don't, and Why

By Bradley R. Smith ∙ January 1, 1997

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I understand perfectly well that the Hitlerian regime was anti-Semitic and persecuted Jews and others. I understand many peoples, European Jews among them, experienced unfathomable tragedies in Europe during World War II.

Nevertheless, I no longer believe the German State pursued a plan to kill all Jews or used homicidal “gassing chambers” for mass murder.

The reasons I no longer believe either story are that no physical remains of authentic homicidal gassing chambers exist today, and there are no war-time generated documents which prove they ever did. I believe the gas chamber story to be a grotesque hoax.

For half a century the gas chambers have been at the heart of the holocaust story. The two are absolutely inseparable. No gas chambers, no holocaust. That's the equation. That's the reasoning behind the charge some revisionists make that the holocaust is a hoax. That position is not a denial of German war crimes in the concentration camps, as many critics try to make it out to be. Such a position would indicate either great ignorance or bias, which is exactly why the term “denier” is used without qualification to include those questioners who are neither ignorant nor biased. It is a gross distortion of the revisionist position.

While it is true that the Germans were criminally responsible for the death of a large number of their slave labor prisoners, much eyewitness testimony about German atrocities against Jews and others is demonstrably false. It's wrong to bear false witness against others — most of us were taught to understand this when we were children. False testimony against anyone, including Germans, together with those who promote it, should be exposed to the light of public scrutiny.

The attempt to identify every call for open discussion about the gas chamber controversy with anti-Jewish sentiment is juvenile. Those who protest that it is more important to be sensitive to “survivors” than truthful about the historical record represent a world view that has no place in Western culture.

I'm willing to be convinced I'm wrong about any or all of this. I'm willing to be convinced it is hateful to weigh the evidence for and against gas chambers. I'm willing to consider the possibility that the press and our intellectual elites are justified in their efforts to suppress open discussion about the gas chambers. I'm even willing to discuss the idea that intellectual freedom corrupts public discourse when it involves the gas chamber controversy.

I'm not willing to go away, however. I don't know why, but I'm not willing.

  • Bradley R. Smith

    Bradley R. Smith was born in Los Angeles on February 18, 1930. At 18 he joined the army and in 1951 served with the infantry in Korea where he was twice wounded. After three decades of a variety of professional activities, it suddenly hit him: In 1979 he read a leaflet by Professor Robert Faurisson, "The Problem of the Gas Chambers." Then, Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century did it for him. He understood from the beginning that he would address the censorship, the suppression of independent thought, the taboo against publishing and debating revisionist arguments—not the arguments themselves. That has remained his position. In 1989, Smith founded Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) dedicated to defending free speech and free inquiry into the Holocaust question. He handed over CODOH's helm in late 2014. He passed away on his 86th birthday, February 18, 2016. Read a series of obituaries here.

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