The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

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From: dgannon@techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
Subject: Re: Question about anti-Revisionism film ("Never Forget")
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This should answer your question(s) about the film starring Leonard Nimoy,
entitled "Never Forget":



In _The Journal of Historical Review_ Vol. 11, #2 (Summer 1991):
 
   
       REVIEWS:  "A Forgettable, But Survivable, Hatchet Job on IHR"
              (Or, "Never Forget -- Witness for the Defense")
 
 
NEVER FORGET.  Produced by Robert Radnitz.  Directed by Joseph Sargent.
Turner Pictures, Inc. 1991.  2 hours.
 
                        Reviewed by Tom Marcellus
 
 
     _Never Forget_, Turner Broadcasting's version of the "Mel
Mermelstein story," which hit the airwaves nationwide via the TNT cable
network on the evening of April 8, 1991 -- and in at least seven
airings during the week that followed -- was a pretty forgettable
effort.  The drama fell far short of both poetry and truth.
Nevertheless, _Never Forget_ did serve as a timely reminder to many --
and an introduction to many more -- that there is a Revisionist
movement, and an Institute for Historical Review, which challenge a
version of the Second World War, and its sacrosanct "Holocaust," that
until the appearance of _Never Forget_ were presented as uncontested
truth on America's most influential mass medium.
 
     As _Never Forget_ begins, this disclaimer rolls across the screen:
 
**********
  While certain scenes are adapted from incidents in the lives of the
Mermelstein family and other individuals, all legal proceedings
portrayed are based on actual transcripts and documents.
**********
 
     Like much that follows in the docudrama, these words are
deceptive.  In fact _Never Forget_ materially falsifies testimony and
court proceedings, as well as fracturing history and truth in fact and
in spirit from start to finish.
 
     The story of the Mermelstein affair has been truncated, partly to
keep production costs down (ergo, no Auschwitz stage sets) but also to
represent the judicial notice taken by Judge Thomas Johnson that "Jews
were gassed to death at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland in
1944" as a signal legal and historical victory which effectively ended
the lawsuit.  Thus, viewers are spared the dull story of the nearly
four years of legal maneuvering which followed, by which Mermelstein
and his lawyers sought to destroy IHR, and thus Historical Revisionism,
in America.
 
     The Mel Mermelstein of _Never Forget_, as played by Leonard Nimoy
of _Star Trek_ notoriety, is a prosperous businessman, happy family
man, and pillar of the community, not the man whom a Los Angeles Jewish
newspaper, quoting "members of the Jewish community" and a "close
friend" of Mermelstein, described as "a difficult moody man" and "his
own worst enemy" ("Mermelstein, Hailed As a Hero, Stood Virtually Alone
During Holocaust Trial," _Israel Today_, August 2, 1985, pp 6, 18).
His wife Jane, as played by Blythe Danner, is nothing less than a
transplanted Southern belle, while his three sons and one daughter make
a convincingly half-Jewish, all-American brood (for reasons which are
obscure, daughter Edie is presented in _Never Forget_ as a 12-year-old,
rather than the high-school graduate she actually was at the time).
 
     When he receives a letter from the Institute challenging him to,
in effect, put up or shut up following his public challenge to lead
IHR's Editorial Advisory board to the exact spot at which he witnessed
"the actual gassings of men, women, and little children in gas chambers
disguised as shower rooms," Mermelstein-Nimoy's earlier bravado seems
to crumble.  But he is nonetheless determined to call IHR's bluff by
providing proof that yes, Jews were gassed at Auschwitz, and thus claim
the $50,000 reward which had been offered, withdrawn when nobody
complied with the stated rules of evidence (those of American criminal
courts), and then offered again to Mermelstein (without authorization
from IHR's Board of Directors) by Director David McCalden, writing
under the name "Lewis Brandon."
 
     Mermelstein-Nimoy calls first on the Los Angeles office of the
Anti-Defamation League, then on the Simon Wiesenthal Center for
professional advice and legal help in getting the best of the
Institute.  But both groups turn him away, assuring him that although
the IHR is composed of "professional liars and haters," he is likely
to cause American Jewry more harm than good by giving them a public
forum.  Besides, both groups have busy schedules (Rabbi Hier's
Wiesenthal Center alone is on the trail of 400 "Nazi war criminals"!).
Mermelstein-Nimoy goes away dispirited, sadder if not wiser, still
resolved to confront and beat IHR.
 
     These scenes have a double meaning for the perceptive Revisionist,
and the second meaning is by no means deleterious.  Most readers of
these pages should take heart from the glad tidings that Holocaust
Revisionism "is cropping up every place," according to Rabbi Hier of
the SWC, who also notes that "we see this sort of thing all the time,"
and "[the IHR] is the largest racist and anti-Semitic group in the
country . . . well-funded, spread out all over the country, with
newspapers, radio and television outlets . . . just the tip of the
iceberg."  (Elsewhere in the movie, IHR is referred to in no less
flattering terms:  as part of "an empire of hate -- connected, well-
funded," and a group of "liars and bullies," whose books "you find when
you look under rocks.")
 
     Still, the obsessive (he's embarrassed even his eldest son with
his fixation on Auschwitz) Mermelstein-Nimoy is not about to give up.
He draws up a list of 16 lawyers whom he contacts one by one, all of
whom also turn him down.  Through all this, the hero is given spiritual
sustenance by visits to his homemade Holocaust museum, where he
reminisces in view of the old shoes, artifacts made from barbed wire,
cakes of soap, pictures and other memorabilia he has accumulated over
the years.
 
     Then wife Jane has an idea:  why not contact William Cox, a
Gentile lawyer who has done business with Mermelstein in the past but
curiously was not on his list of potential attorneys.  Cox, who is
portrayed by Dabney Coleman as the very stereotype of the "lovable
curmudgeon" into which TV alchemy can always be counted on to transform
ideologically acceptable cranks, ultimately accepts, after the required
drama of furst turning Mermelstein-Nimoy down and then waking him up
at 2 a.m. to say he'll take the case, supposedly PRO BONO, i.e.,
without fee.  And although Cox doesn't know "how much these liars and
bullies are willing to pour into the case," after communing with
himself among the paraphernalia of his Holocaust museum Mermelstein-
Nimoy courageously decides to go ahead with the task of making everyone
remember the last words he ever heard from his father, the plea to son
Mel to "never forget" (oddly enough, Mermelstein seems to have
forgotten these words when writing his allegedly autobiographical _By
Bread Alone_ -- they appear nowhere therein).
 
     On December 18, 1980, Cox writes IHR to tell the Institute of his
client's acceptance of the reward offer, enclosing Mermelstein-Nimoy's
"evidence" of gassing -- a sworn statement in which he details his
witnessing his mother and three sisters enter an Auschwitz "gas
chamber," and a list of other alleged witnesses to bolster his story.
 
     A ploy is hit on by which IHR will be sued for breach of contract
if it does not respond within thirty days, and Mermelstein-Nimoy sweats
out the waiting period, dogging his family, Cox, and bemused letter
carriers to make sure that the all-important IHR response (which in any
case would be addressed to Cox) has NOT come.  It doesn't (not by the
Cox-Mermelstein deadline, anyway), and it's off to the courts.
 
     What does come to Mermelstein-Nimoy's home through the mail in
this deceitful drama, however, is some "hair of a gassed Jewish victim"
and "pure Jewish fat" (a piece of soap).  The clear implication of this
emotive scene (Mermelstein's young daughter opens the envelope and
shrieks in terror) is that the "haters and deniers" have violated the
sanctity of Mermelstein's hearth and home with something base and
obscene.  That the Germans made soap neither from Jews nor anyone else
during the war, and that there would be no way to distinguish the hair
of a "gassed" concentration inmate from that of a "survivor," since the
Germans customarily deloused the shorn hair of inmates, are facts lost
on television audiences, most of whom must think:  "What despicable
monsters these Revisionists must be!"
 
     By now Mermelstein-Nimoy is reeling from the (imaginary) onslaught
of the "bigots."  His family is buckling too:  the kids (except for his
adoring daughter) haven't been supportive enough, and even his wife is
dubious about pursuing the case against the Institute.  By now the
television Mermelsteins are convinced they're dealing with the whole
phantasmagoria of "extremists" and "terrorists," and that their very
property and lives may be in danger.
 
     There are other reverses as Mermelstein-Nimoy begins to search for
other "eyewitnesses" to corroborate his story.  His first choice, an
old woman of evidently long-standing acquaintance, comes unglued at the
mention of Auschwitz:  the Gestapo still has the habit of dropping in
on her in the dead of night (he doesn't find a better "eyewitness" in
the drama, although in real life Mermelstein offered Miklos Nyiszli,
dead for some thirty years, to back up his reward claim).
 
     There are still more pressures on Mermelstein-Nimoy.  His pallet
manufacturing business begins to suffer because he can't remember
delivery promises, so consumed he is by his obsession with the case.
Next, an anonymous miscreant throws a dead pig on his doorstep, and
Mermelstein-Nimoy receives an anonymous phone call one night to inform
him that his business is on fire (after Mermelstein-Nimoy and son race
to the pallet company, the call proves to be a false alarm).
 
     Nerves wearing thin, Mermelstein-Nimoy and Cox infiltrate a
meeting of the "National Legion of Patriots," at which the speaker
(conveniently at that very moment) is in the middle of a harangue about
the myth of the Holocaust.  Mermelstein-Nimoy, enraged by what is in
fact a pretty fair summation of the basic Revisionist case, tries to
shout him down.  Cox wrestles him out of the meeting as the audience,
faces red with bulging veins and contorted with hate, scream insults
and slurs -- it's a far trek from _Star Trek_ for the poker-faced icon
who was Mr. Spock.
 
     Then it's on to the IHR's first deposition of Mermelstein-Nimoy,
in which he is sworn to answer questions from the Institute fully and
truthfully.  This is of course represented as a sadistic ordeal, with
both IHR's counsel, Richard Fusilier, and this reviewer (both of us
named) harassing Mel with cruel questions about his experiences at
Auschwitz.  To show how sneaky IHR's director is, I am chastised for
smuggling a microcassette recorder into the deposition in my jacket
pocket, which Mel discovers -- a real feat since microcassette
recorders were not even on the market at that time.  (And I cannot let
it pass that the actor who played me was plump, gray-haired, 25 years
too old, and decidedly uglier than me -- a personal insult for which
I'll forgive Mel if he will only let us alone.)
 
     After the harrowing ordeal of the exhausting deposition (the
plaintiff was suffered the indignity of having to answer hard questions
about his concentration-camp experiences), Mermelstein-Nimoy confesses
to his family that he might lose the case because of Fusilier's tricky
questions or because, at a key moment, he might forget or get crossed
up on some tiny detail about the gas chambers.  But finally there comes
the great and historic day in the courtroom of Judge Thomas Johnson,
who after hearing a heart-rending witness-stand account of
Mermelstein's personal experiences at Auschwitz, and his promise to his
father "never to forget," takes judicial notice that the Holocaust is a
fact not subject to reasonable dispute.  Much joy and celebration.  The
End (of this docudrama, anyway).
 
     If the viewer has remained awake through this dishwater-dull,
soap-operatic nonsense, he or she may be interested in an accounting of
what was actually true and what was demonstrably false in _Never
Forget_.  In fact, a lengthy list of material distortions and
falsehoods, as well as lesser violations of the truth made in hopes of
livening up the turgid Melodrama -- could be compiled.  Here are just a
few of them:
 
-  The drama represents the initial letter sent to Mermelstein as part
of a deliberate IHR plot to harass the "survivor."  In fact the letter
re-opening the reward offer was undertaken entirely on the initiative
of the late David McCalden, then director of IHR, who consulted neither
the Institute's board nor its founder.  (The announcement that the
$50,000 reward offer for proof of gassings at Auschwitz had officially
expired was made at the Second International Revisionist Conference.
The full and detailed story of the reward offer is told in the booklet
_Worldwide Growth and Impact of Holocaust Revisionism_, which is still
available from IHR.)  McCalden was shortly discharged, after subsequent
incidents gave further evidence of irresponsibility, and even
hostility, to the interests of IHR.
 
     All the same, in regard to the initial letter to Mermelstein,
_Never Forget_ veers, briefly and unexpectedly, toward something of the
truth, as opposed to his counsels' representations at the time and
subsequently.  In his *actual* letter of December 18, 1980, Cox
represented that the way in which the evidence submitted to claim the
reward would be judged was still undecided, suggesting that the
proceeding be televised and then voted on by the TV audience.
Thereafter, Mermelstein, Cox, and their successors swore ignorance of
any other proposed method of judgement -- *including the specification
that IHR would choose the judges -- despite the fact that a sheet of
rules including IHR's choice of the judges was routinely sent with
every reward application.*  _Never Forget_, however, has Cox speaking
dismissively of the Institute's "kangaroo court," and not tailoring his
case to a jury of couch potatoes; and Cox makes quite clear in the
drama that his strategy is based on luring IHR into the courts.
 
-  Never in any of his depositions has Mermelstein ever referred to
"gassed" hair, "Jewish fat" or a dead pig being delivered to his home.
In fact, the closest such incident this reviewer can recall was the
depositing of a dead pig, owned up to one Irv Rubin, on the porch of a
Jew who'd run afoul of Rubin through his alleged sympathies for the
Palestinians, about five years ago.  Rubin, chief of the terroristic
Jewish Defense League, once stated on Los Angeles television that
"Mermelstein is one of our financial supporters," although Mel denies
supporting the JDL or ever meeting Rubin.
 
-  The reviewer has never heard of a "National Legion of Patriots," nor
is there any record of Mel ever crashing any meeting at which Holocaust
Revisionism was being promoted.  Out of exemplary fairness, however,
IHR did invide William Cox to speak briefly at the Third International
Revisionist Conference held in Los Angeles in November of 1981.  Cox
appeared, said his piece (chastising the audience for attending a
conference sponsored by a group with such anti-Semitic views), and was
treated politely.
 
-  The claim put in Nimoy-Mermelstein's mouth during his deposition,
that his brother, like his father, was "worked to death" in the coal
mines of the Auschwitz sub-camp at Jaworzno, is a fabrication of the
docudrama.  In the actual deposition Mermelstein says nothing of the
circumstances of his brother's alleged death; elsewhere, Mermelstein
has claimed that his brother was shot for refusing to take part in an
evacuation march (which to the German guards could only have been
tantamount to an escape attempt).  A small thing, perhaps, but an
irrefutable indication of the liberties _Never Forget_ has taken with
the legal record -- and perhaps a sign of Mermelstein's continuing
inclination to alter his stories, or at least acquiesce in errors made
by others (during the deposition in question, Mermelstein claimed his
father died "of torture, hunger, and also because of inability to see
his son suffer and being beaten and tortured," but in an article which
appeared in the _Los Angeles Herald-Examiner_ on February 15, 1981,
reporter Timothy Carlson quoted Mermelstein as saying that he had seen
his *father* as well as his mother and sisters led off to the gas
chambers.  And there is solid evidence for *other* Mermelstein versions
of his father's death.)
 
-  There is no record of Mel ever receiving a crank call that his
business had been set aflame.  However, on the night of July 4, 1984
the office and warehouse of the Institute for Historical Review was
totally destroyed by arson, a crime that the authorities have never
seriously investigated and which set the IHR back by years and some
$400,000.
 
-  Whatever were the difficulties Mermelstein had in recruiting an
attorney at the outset (and they seem overdrawn to say the least),
there has been no shortage of free legal help through most of his ten-
year crusade against IHR and Revisionism:  there has been a legion of
top-flight lawyers at his beck and call.  He has enjoyed important
support from important segmants of the Jewish community (despite his
initial dismissal by those influential Jewish groups he first turned to
for help).  Nor has the judiciary of Los Angeles County and the press
been anything except extremely supportive of him.  The alleged "facts"
dramatized in the film are directly contradicted by the actual record.
It was IHR that was almost unable to file a timely answer to
Mermelstein's original complaint in 1980 because no lawyer, even noted
"civil rights" advocates in the area, would touch the case.
Fortunately, one attorney was found, Richard Fusilier, who agreed to
represent the IHR because no other attorney in the state of California
would take its case.
 
-  In real life Mermelstein is not precisely the normal personality
portrayed by Leonard Nimoy.  Nowhere in the film is there any mention
of the fact that he had been under psychiatric care long before IHR,
and the emotional distress its actions allegedly caused him, intruded
into his supposedly well-balanced mind and life.
 
-  The drama portrays Mermelstein as a cooperative witness willing, if
not eager, to answer Fusilier's questions honestly and completely
during the first deposition.  _Never Forget_ also depicts Mermelstein-
Nimoy as finally breaking down into heart-wrenching sobs when the
attorney's probing questions become just too much for an Auschwitz
"survivor" and "eyewitness" to his mother and sisters' "gassing" to
bear.  But what in fact took place at that deposition (I was present)
was that Mermelstein proved a most elusive respondent:  often he seemed
unwilling to give a straight answer to even the simplest questions,
misunderstanding them, waxing broadly philosophical, forgetting
inconvenient details, duelling back and forth with Fusilier and all in
all leading IHR's lawyer on a merry chase.  At no time during the
entire deposition did Mermelstein shed a single tear.  On the contrary,
he struck me as hostile, combative, and evasive throughout the entire
deposition.
 
-  At the dramatic conclusion of _Never Forget_, Mermelstein-Nimoy
takes the witness stand during the crucial hearing at which Judge
Johnson ruled on Mermelstein's request for judicial notice that Jews
were gassed at Auschwitz during the summer of 1944.  The docudrama has
Mermelstein touchingly recount the story of his promise to his father
to "never forget," whereupon Judge Johnson makes his historic ruling
and the movie ends reminding viewers that the fight against bigotry
and racism goes on.  But of the drama's initial assurance that "all
legal proceedings portrayed [have been] based on actual transcripts and
documents" to the contrary, Mermelstein neither took the stand at that
hearing nor gave any testimony whatsoever -- the entire scene is pure
invention, devised to provide something of an emotional catharsis to
what remains a weak, and for the millions undoubtedly soporific, made-
for-television movie.
 
     What has been the likely impact of this film on IHR and
Revisionism?  To be sure, every trick in the smearer's arsenal has been
employed (subject to budget limitations, of course).  Old hands at
Revisionism will immediately note the old trick of ascribing to their
enemies that which the Holocaust lobbyists, themselves, are guilty of,
thereby turning the truth right over onto its head.  Reversed is the
fundamental fact that the purpose of Historical Revisionism is not to
hector the Mel Mermelsteins and similar blustering Holocaust small-fry
but to challenge the mighty, the entrenched establishments and
interests which profit from historical falsehood.  IHR's only goal,
and its only weapon of self-defense, is "to bring history into accord
with the facts."  In the longer view, Mermelstein and his allies will
appear simply as pawns of those much larger and more sinister entities.
 
     That is why, despite _Never Forget_'s portrayal of Mermelstein as
a sympathetic underdog, it is not the Exterminationists who have
trouble recruiting lawyers or raising funds to exist, or who are
subjected to continuous barrages of threats, intimidation, assaults,
arsons, and even cold-blooded murder.  Nor, despite the docudrama's
dark murmurings of IHR well-connectedness and far-flung resources, do
real-life Revisionists encounter the least bit of objectivity, let
alone sympathy, towards their concerns in the press or the
entertainment media -- in contrast to the automatic acceptance that
even the wooliest and most mean-spirited "survivor" accusations win
from these industries.
 
     Above and beyond the Auschwitz lie itself, this is the Big Lie of
_Never Forget_ -- the whopper that the Revisionists are somehow
politically powerful, shrewd, bigoted, sadistic and well-connected,
while the Exterminationists are weak, innocent, and morally upright.
 
     Not to worry, though.  _Never Forget_'s liberties with fact are so
multifarious that it must fall of its own weight in the eyes of anyone
with the slightest knowledge of the facts of the case.  Even Gloria
Allred, LA law's far-left, fervidly Zionist, cartoonishly "feminist"
firebrand, whose firm took over Mermelstein's case from Cox, angrily
denounced the film as "historically inaccurate," adding her own brand
of Revisionism to the stew.
 
     And now comes the glimmer of truth, the blinding flash of the
obvious, as the great American political thinker Lawrence Dennis would
have put it.  Clearly, the intended purpose of trying to slam, smear
and isolate the Revisionists is counterbalanced by two quite unintended
messages to the viewer:  1) Historical Revisionism is strong and
growing, and 2) the embattled but still mighty IHR is leading this
movement, which is of the gravest concern to the Establishment.
 
---End of article---
 
Article 4403 of alt.revisionism:
Xref: oneb soc.history:17582 alt.censorship:13661 alt.activism:28456 alt.revisionism:4403 alt.discrimination:9420 alt.conspiracy:20526 alt.politics.correct:5723 alt.journalism.criticism:985 talk.politics.misc:96201 talk.politics.mideast:35119
Path: oneb!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!utcsri!utnut!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!techbook.com!techbook.com!not-for-mail
From: dgannon@techbook.techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
Newsgroups: soc.history,alt.censorship,alt.activism,alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.correct,alt.journalism.criticism,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.mideast
Subject: "A Brief Introduction to Holocaust Revisionism", by Prof. Arthur Butz
Date: 2 Oct 1993 22:16:53 -0700
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From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 11, Number 2 (Summer 1991):


                          A Brief Introduction
                        to Holocaust Revisionism

                             ARTHUR R. BUTZ


     Dr. Arthur R. Butz is an associate professor of electrical engineering
at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.  He is also the author of
a major Revisionist study of the alleged Holocaust, _The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century_, as well as a member of the IHR _Journal_'s editorial
advisory committee.  Earlier this year, as Revisionist attempts to spark
open debate on the Holocaust ignited controversy at Northwestern, Butz once
again found himself in the center of the storm.  (For more on this,
including the key role played by IHR media project director Bradley Smith,
see the May and July 1991 issues of the _IHR Newsletter_.)  At the height
of the controversy, Butz presented his view of the Holocaust story in a
succinct essay that appeared in the school paper, _The Daily Northwestern_,
May 13, 1991, under the title "A Short Introduction to the Study of
Holocaust Revisionism."  Here is the complete text of his piece, which
includes a correction of an error that appeared in the Daily Northwestern
version:


I see three principal reasons for the widespread but erroneous belief in
the legend of millions of Jews killed by the Germans during World War II:
U.S. and British troops found horrible piles of corpses in the West German
camps they captured in 1945 (e.g. Dachau and Belsen); there are no longer
large communities of Jews in Poland; and historians generally support the
legend.

     During both world wars, Germany was forced to fight typhus, carried by
lice in the constant traffic with the East.  That is why all accounts of
entry into the German concentration camps speak of shaving of hair and
showering and other delousing procedures, such as treatment of quarters
with the pesticide Zyklon.  That was also the main reason for a high death
rate in the camps, and for the crematoria that existed in all.

     When Germany collapsed in chaos, then of course all such defenses
ceased, and typhus and other diseases became rampant in the camps, which
quartered mainly political prisoners, ordinary criminals, homosexuals,
conscientious objectors and Jews conscripted for labor.  Hence the horrible
scenes, which however had nothing to do with "extermination" or any
deliberate policy.  Moreover, the West German camps involved were not the
alleged "extermination camps," which were all in Poland (e.g. Auschwitz and
Treblinka) and which were all evacuated or shut down before capture by the
Soviets, who found no such scenes.

     The "Final Solution" spoken of in the German documents was a program
of evacuation, resettlement and deportation of Jews with the ultimate
objective of expulsion from Europe.  During the war Jews of various
nationalities were being moved east, as one stage in this Final Solution.
The legend claims that the motion was mainly for extermination purposes.

     The great majority of the millions allegedly exterminated were East
European - not German or West European - Jews.  For that reason study of
the problem via population statistics has been difficult to impossible, but
it is a fact that there are no longer large communities of Jews in Poland.
However, the Germans were only one of several parties involved in moving
Jews around.  The Soviets deported virtually all of the Jews of eastern
Poland to their interior in 1940.  After the war, with Polish and other
Jews pouring out of the East into occupied West Germany, the Zionists moved
large numbers to Palestine, and the United States and other countries
absorbed many Jews, in most cases under conditions making impossible a
numerical accounting.  Moreover, the Polish borders were changed
drastically at the end of the war; the country was literally moved west.

     Historians generally support the legend, but there are precedents for
nearly incomprehensible blindness on the part of scholars.  For example,
throughout the Middle Ages even the Pope's political enemies conceded his
false claim that the 4th century Emperor Constantine had ceded rule of the
west to the Pope, although all knew very well that Constantine had been
succeeded by more emperors.  Near unanimity among the academics is
especially suspect when there exist great political pressures; in some
countries, Holocaust Revisionists have been prosecuted.

     It is easy to show that the extermination legend merits skepticism.
Even the casual reader of the Holocaust literature knows that during the
war virtually nobody acted as though it were happening.  Thus it is common
to berate the Vatican, the Red Cross and the Allies (especially the
intelligence agencies) for their ignorance and inaction, and to explain
that the Jews generally did not resist deportation because they did not
know what was in store for them.  If you add all this up you have the
strange claim that for almost three years German trains, operating on a
continental scale in densely civilized regions of Europe, were regularly
and systematically moving millions of Jews to their deaths, and nobody
noticed except for a few of our Jewish leaders who were making public
"extermination" claims.

     On closer examination even those few Jewish leaders were not acting as
though it were happening.  Ordinary communications between the occupied and
neutral countries were open, and they were in contact with the Jews whom
the Germans were deporting, who thus could not have been in ignorance of
"extermination" if those claims had any validity.

     This incredible ignorance must also be attributed to Hans Oster's
department in German military intelligence, correctly labeled "the
veritable general staff of the opposition to Hitler" in a recent review.

     What we are offered in evidence was gathered after the war, in trials.
The evidence is almost all oral testimony and "confessions."  Without the
evidence of these trials there would be no significant evidence of
"extermination."  One must pause and ponder this carefully.  Were trials
needed to determine that the Battle of Waterloo happened?  The bombings of
Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  The slaughter in Cambodia?  Yet
this three-year program, of continental scope, claiming millions of
victims, requires trials to argue its reality.  I am not arguing that the
trials were illegal or unfair; I am arguing that such historical logic as
the legend rests on must not be countenanced.  Such events cannot happen
without generating commensurate and contemporaneous evidence for their
reality, just as a great forest fire cannot take place without producing
smoke.  One may as well believe that New York City was burned down, if
confessions to the deed can be produced.

     Detailed consideration of the specific evidence put forward in support
of the legend has been a focus of the Revisionist literature and cannot be
undertaken here, but I shall mention one point.  The claim of the legend is
that there were no technical means provided for the specific task of
extermination, and that means originally provided for other purposes did
double duty in improvised arrangements.  Thus the Jews were allegedly
gassed with the pesticide Zyklon, and their corpses disappeared into the
crematoria along with the deaths from "ordinary" causes (the ashes or other
remains of millions of victims never having been found).  Surely any
thoughtful person must be skeptical.


[end of article]


[Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box
1306, Torrance, CA 90505, USA.  Subscription rate: $40 per year, domestic.
$50 per year, foreign.]


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Article 4404 of alt.revisionism:
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From: dgannon@techbook.techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
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Subject: Prof. Faurisson Responds to J.-C. Pressac's Ludicrous Book [Part 2]
Date: 2 Oct 1993 22:19:30 -0700
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Summary: This concludes the article.



From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 11, Number 2 (Summer 1991):



          AUSCHWITZ: TECHNIQUE & OPERATION OF THE GAS CHAMBERS
                                  Or,
   Improvised Gas Chambers & Casual Gassings at Auschwitz & Birkenau,
                   According to J.-C. Pressac (1989)

                                Part II
 
                            ROBERT FAURISSON



     In 1983, Klarsfeld and Pressac published a French version of the
_Auschwitz Album_ (published by Seuil).^8  Pressac drew up a misleading plan
of Birkenau (p. 43) on which, in particular, he obscured the surroundings
of the large Birkenau crematories.  Specifically, he concealed from his
readers that, immediately next to Krema III, there was a SPORTPLATZ
(playing field) which served as a soccer pitch for the inmates, and that
right next to the Sportplatz there was a large hospital area.  These simple
topographical specifications (about which Pressac is rather discreet in his
large book) render absurd the thesis that the crematoria were supposedly
the culmination of a horrible extermination process accompanied by cries,
fire, flames and the smell of burning flesh.  Can you imagine teams of
soccer players and crowds of spectators at the various matches, just a few
steps away from those horrors?

     Pressac is careless when he challenges the Revisionists to prove that
in the central camp the swimming pool was used by the inmates.  I will let
a former Auschwitz prisoner answer for me.  He was a professor in the
Faculty of Medicine at the University of Strasbourg who, while affirming in
a rather vague way the homicidal gassings at Auschwitz, was just as willing
to write about the distractions available to the inmates:


          On Sunday afternoons, there were soccer, basketball and WATER
     POLO matches [my emphasis] to the ardent cheers of the spectators:
     people need very little to distract them from the dangers that
     threatened them!  The SS administration allowed regular amusements for
     the prisoners, even on weekdays.  A movie theater showed Nazi
     newsreels and sentimental films and a very popular cabaret gave
     presentations often attended by the SS authorities.  Finally, there
     was a very creditable orchestra, made up originally only of Polish
     musicians and replaced later by a new, high-quality group made up of
     musicians of all nationalities, mostly Jews (Marc Klein, _Observations
     et reflexions sur les camps de concentration nazis_, taken from the
     journal _Etudes germaniques_ (No. 3, 1946), 1948, p. 31).


     I could cite many other examples of such activities, but I shall
refrain from doing so, because where human beings are so "concentrated,"
life becomes unbearable in spite of all; promiscuity, epidemics, the
struggle to live and to gain individual advantage make such an existence
frightful, especially in time of war.  But we must not add false horrors to
the real horrors.  Furthermore, the camps run by the Soviets, including the
ones they "liberated" in Germany before filling them again with their
political adversaries (beginning with the National Socialists), were even
more horrible, according to the statements of people like Margaret
Buber-Neumann, who experienced them both.

     Pressac entitles one of his chapters "Auschwitz According to the
Revisionists.  Photographic Exhibition of the Famous Holiday Camp, KL
Auschwitz" (p. 507).  The irony and the slanderous insinuation here conceal
his embarrassment at reproducing photographs which are not consistent with
the various  kinds  of  horrors supposedly found in the camp.  He tries to
cast suspicion on certain of these photographs by pointing out that they
come from  "Revisionist sources."  He is obviously unaware that many of
them are from the album kept by Durrfeld, an engineer who was one of the
leading executives in the factories at Auschwitz.  The file reference "DUE"
(for DUERRFELD) ought to have alerted him:  the Durrfeld trial is
well-known to historians of Auschwitz, but apparently not to our
pharmacist-turned-amateur-historian.


                Involuntary Contributions to Revisionism

     Here and there throughout the text, one finds information (very often
in the form of photographic documents) which tends to reinforce the
position of the Revisionists.  Here are some samples:


- The story of one Rablin, a prisoner employed in disinfecting with Zyklon
B, proves just how dangerous this terrible gas was to use. Rablin, only
slightly exposed to the gas, was hospitalized and took two months to
recover (p. 25); it is paradoxical that the Germans tried to cure of gas
poisoning a man whom, the story goes, they should have killed with
precisely that gas;

- The deposition of inmate Joseph Odi describes the procedure for using
Zyklon B in the disinfestation gas chambers, a procedure that has often
been described by the  Revisionists and that shows the dangers of the
operation.  Although suitable for clothing, this method would not work with
human beings.  Above all, the witness reveals that the cases containing the
cans of Zyklon B were stored in the THEATERGEBAUDE (theater building) and
that transporting it from there to the gas disinfection gas chambers was
done with a Health Service vehicle standing by.  The Revisionists know all
this, but it is interesting to see Pressac's book reminding us of two
points which should help clear both the Carmelites of Auschwitz and the Red
Cross of the charges too often made against them.  Today the Carmelites are
reproached with occupying a place in which the Germans are supposed to have
warehoused gas used to kill human beings.  In reality, the gas was used to
kill lice and thereby to protect human health.  The Red Cross vehicle was
there to protect against the accidents that were always possible with
Zyklon B.  It played no role in murder; it, too, was there to safeguard
men's health (p. 41); it is noteworthy that J. Odi is precise when he talks
about the disinfection gas chambers and very vague on the subject of the
homicidal gas chambers; besides, he believes that men were gassed in the
disinfection gas chambers!;

- The beautiful photograph showing an impressive complex of eight
disinfestation gas chambers in that part of the Birkenau camp traditionally
called "the Gypsy camp" (ENTWESUNGSANLAGE ZIGEUNERLAGER) contradicts the
thesis that the Germans intended to exterminate the Gypsies (p. 63);

- An astonishing photo taken in the ZENTRAL SAUNA shows a group of naked
inmates, apparently in good health, carrying their shoes from a vast shower
room  (50 shower heads) to the "drying room" on the "clean" side of the
disinfection area (Trockenraum, reine Seite):  an unthinkable scene in an
"extermination camp" (p. 80; see Part I, p. 26 in _The Journal of
Historical Review_, Spring 1991.)

- One photograph shows some inmates in their striped uniforms employed in
disinfecting clothing in front of a battery of three autoclaves; here the
disinfection is done by steam; elsewhere, it may be done by warm air, with
Zyklon B, or even with other gases; the true concern of the Germans was to
exterminate vermin, not men, by any and all means (p. 82).  Enough can
never be said about their obsessive fear of typhus; "there were in fact
about 25 Zyklon-B delousing chambers of different sizes operating in the
camp" (p. 550), and a great number of disinfection chambers that operated
in other ways, without using gas;

- A sheet of operating instructions for coke-fired incineration furnaces
points out that the furnace fire bars must be cleaned of clinker and the
cinders removed every evening; these ovens, Pressac tells us, could only
operate 12 out of every 24 hours, not 24 hours a day as claimed by the
believers in the extermination myth (p. 136, 224, 227);

- To replace Krema I, the Germans had considered constructing a "new
Krema," to be built a short distance from its predecessor, near the SS
hospital and the Kommandantur.  Pressac acknowledges that this "new Krema"
had no homicidal gas chamber.  He says that the construction was finally
transferred to Birkenau and that Krema II and Krema III at Birkenau were,
in effect, replicas of what had originally been planned for Auschwitz I;
the plan remained the same.  As a result, Krema II and III were designed
without homicidal gas chambers (p. 33, 140-143);

- Page 143 is particularly interesting.  Pressac sees only inoffensive
Leichenkeller in this plan, but when the same plan serves for the
construction of the Birkenau Krema, here he arbitrarily dubs the
Leichenkeller either "disrobing  rooms" for the victims, or "homicidal gas
chambers."  As a matter of fact, the existence of this plan proves that in
the minds of the Germans and, in particular, of Walter Dejaco, Krema II and
III at Birkenau, simply replications  of the Kremas that had originally
been intended to be near the Kommandantur and the SS hospital in the main
Auschwitz camp, could not have had any homicidal purpose (this is confirmed
on page 200, where we read that Krema II and III were "designed without
homicidal gas chambers");

- A surprising photograph, dating probably from May 1945, proves that the
roof of Krema I was used as a dance floor, decorated with a red star and
hammer and sickle as well as the Polish and Russian flags; people, says
Pressac, danced on the roof of the "gas chamber"; I suggest that, if at
that time anyone had given credence to the myth of the gassings, such a
profanation would not have been permitted.  Some months after the
liberation of Auschwitz, evidently, the myth of the gas chambers had not
yet taken the form in which we know it today (p. 149);

- Pressac reproduces a whole series of documents from the Weimar archives
relating to engineer Kurt Prufer, responsible for the design and
construction of the "Topf & Sons" ovens; Prufer was arrested, imprisoned,
and interrogated after the war;  nothing, in either his papers or his
interrogations, provided the slightest proof of the existence of homicidal
gas chambers in the crematoria (p. 93, 94, 191, and 371); if the documents
that Pressac used contained so many criminal traces, Kurt Prufer and other
members of the firm's staff could have been easily broken down;

- On 12 August 1942, Commandant Hoess distributed 40 copies of a
SONDERBEFEHL (special order) drafted as follows:


     A case of indisposition with slight symptoms of poisoning by
     hydrocyanic gas which occurred today makes it necessary to warn all
     those participating in the gassings (Vergasungen) and all other SS
     members that in particular on opening rooms used for gassing SS not
     wearing masks must wait at least five hours and keep at a distance of
     at least 15 meters from the chamber.  In addition, particular
     attention should be paid to the wind direction. - The  gas being used
     at present contains less odorous warning agent and is therefore
     especially dangerous. - The SS garrison doctor declines all
     responsibility for any accident that should occur in the case where
     these directives have not been complied with by the SS members (p.
     201).


The word used to designate the disinfection gassings is Vergasungen.  The
above directive confirms what the Revisionists have constantly said about
the danger of using Zyklon B.  If at Auschwitz incessant and massive
gassing operations had been carried out, especially under such conditions
as we have been told, accidents involving the SS personnel would have been
innumerable.  Neither the camp commandant, nor the chief medical officer
responsible for  the garrison, nor the other doctors, nor the SS would
have tolerated such accidents (p. 201); and if we must look at it from the
point of view of the legend, the "homicidal  gassings" could not have gone
off normally inasmuch as the Jewish personnel would not have been able to
accomplish the task of entering a cyanide-treated space to drag out
thousands of cyanide-impregnated corpses; and the criminal enterprise would
immediately have ground to a halt for lack of personnel to carry it through
successfully;^9

- A telex dated 18 December 1942 reveals that during the month of December
the work of both the inmates and the free civilian laborers had to be
interrupted several times for delousing and disinfestation (Entlausung
und Entwesung).  The camp had to be isolated, and civilian workers had not
been able to leave for six months.  A period of leave from 23 December
1942 to 4 January 1943 was therefore essential (p. 210);

- In the archives of the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, there is an
album of 397 photos, taken by the Germans themselves during the war, which
show construction at Auschwitz, including that of the crematoria.  This is
the most important information in Pressac's book.  It is outrageous that
this album has been kept hidden for so long, and that the publication of
the photographs is being done in driblets, so to speak, as was the case
with the photos from the _Auschwitz Album_.  The album of which I speak is
the _Bauleitung Album_ (the Construction Office album).  The photographs
therein confirm that Auschwitz was a prison or internment camp with nothing
out of the ordinary about it.  Pressac acknowledges that all the inmates
we see at work appear to be as healthy as the civilian workers (p. 331,
339).  Is he perhaps concealing from us photographs from this album which
would give us a clearer idea of what went on at Auschwitz, or which would
correct what we think we know about each room of the large Kremas and about
the changes eventually made in those rooms?;

- Regarding a time sheet indicating the make-up of a crew constructing a
chimney for Krema IV or V, Pressac comments that "the composition of the
gang employed is typical, with 12 civilians and 20 prisoners working as
bricklayer's laborers" (p. 412); so there was no possibility of secrets on
that side either;

- One plan proves that the Germans planned to construct an enormous
hospital sector covering all of the section of Birkenau known as "Mexico."
Pressac says this fact is "a real godsend for the Revisionists."  He admits
that "there is an INCOMPATIBILITY [his capitals] in the creation of a
health camp a few hundred yards from four Krematorien where, according to
official history, people were exterminated on a  arge scale" (p. 512).  And
his commentary continues in the same direction.  We await his parry.  It
does not come.  Pressac's embarrassment is plain to see.  He thinks perhaps
he can manage to get out of the difficulty by saying that we ought not to
underestimate the capacity for "doublethink" of the SS hierarchy, which
blindly executed orders even when they were totally contradictory.  I note
that, as I said above (p. 133), Pressac is silent about the existence, near
the crematoria, of a large hospital area containing 18 barracks^10; more
important, in his large book he persists in concealing the existence of
this hospital area.  A site plan dated 21 June 1944 shows that the Germans
planned to construct, alongside the Birkenau railroad ramp, a total of six
vegetable halls, each with a capacity of 930 cubic meters in size - a
curious initiative in an "extermination camp" (p. 533-534).


                 The Bankruptcy, According to Pressac,
                         of Traditional History

     Pressac draws up a bankruptcy report:  no one before him has been able
to prove the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz and
Birkenau.  He recognizes that the historians, the judges,  the Soviets,
the Poles, the arraigners of the "war criminals" as well as the accusers
of the Revisionists have accumulated false proofs and worthless arguments
(the Revisionists, too, are supposed to have failed in their endeavors).
He writes at the end of his study, just before the appendices:


     This study already demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of the
     traditional history (and hence also of the methods and criticisms of
     the Revisionists), a history based for the most part on testimonies,
     assembled according to the mood of the moment, truncated to fit an
     arbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of uneven
     value and without any connection with one another (p. 264).


     The celebrated work of Eugene Aroneanu, which has for so long been a
sort of Exterminationist bible (_Camps de concentration_, preface by
Jacques Billiet, director of France's War Crimes Information Service,
Office francais d'edition, 1946), he calls "an historical monstrosity,"
"an incoherent and self-contradictory whole" (p. 15).  On the post-war
trials, he writes that "the tons of Zyklon B ordered by the camps were
attributed to homicidal use without any verification."  And, as I mentioned
above (Part I, p. 38 in _The Journal of Historical Review_, Spring 1991),
he makes the following remark, which will likely upset his Exterminationist
friends:


     By far the greater part [of Zyklon B] (over 95 per cent) was destined
     for delousing (effects and buildings) while only a very small quantity
     (less than 5 per cent) had been used for homicidal gassings (Ibidem).


     He is of the opinion that the American-conducted trial of Bruno
Tesch, one of the officials of the Degesch company and thus responsible
for the production of Zyklon B, was a "masquerade"; the court was not
concerned with the technical question, merely with the verbal testimony of
one of his employees.  In 1946, Pressac writes, simple malicious gossip
could easily lead to someone being hanged.  That was the case with Bruno
Tesch (and, I should add, with his associate, K. Weinbacher) (p. 16-17);
see in this regard the revealing article by William B. Lindsey, "Zyklon B,
Auschwitz and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch," _The Journal of Historical
Review_, Autumn 1983, p. 261-303.

     The Soviet film _Chronicles of the Liberation of the Camp_, 1945 shows
a gas-tight door as belonging to a homicidal gas chamber; in view of its
location, says Pressac, it was a door to a disinfection gas chamber (p.
41).  Further on, he talks about the work of the Soviet Commission of
Inquiry as a "completely put-up job" and an "'historic' [sic] montage" (p.
46); the unfortunate thing is that the Nuremberg Tribunal "took judicial
notice" of that work in the name of Article 21 of its charter.

     At Birkenau, the vast hall of the Zentral Sauna, where the inmates
disrobed (Auskleideraum) before showering, possessed an impressive number
of tubular radiators.  The Poles removed those radiators because, according
to Pressac, this concern for the comfort of the inmates conflicts, in the
minds of present-day visitors, with the location of the ruins of Krema IV
and its "gas chambers," only 100 meters away (p. 78).  He might have added
that the Poles had dealt in the same manner with the "arrest cells" in
Block 11, which the tourists visit in great numbers.  I'm the one who
called Pressac's attention to this mania of the Poles for removing heating
apparatuses, whether for their own use or to give a crueler impression of
the conditions under which the inmates are supposed to have lived.

     At the Nuremberg Trial, a perfectly ordinary German document dealing
with the crematory ovens was presented as proof of the extermination.
Pressac sees there an example of "the stupid way in which the documents of
the defeated were 'evaluated' by a tribunal of the victors" (p. 106).

     A certain reconstruction by the Poles after the war is "far from being
a faithful reproduction of the original state" because of its exaggerations
and its simplifications (p. 108).

     The fact, according to Pressac, that at a given time in 1942 the
Germans used 2 to 3 per cent of the Zyklon B for murder and 97 or 98 per
cent for disinfection "totally invalidates"  the interpretation of certain
documents by "the traditional historians" (p. 188).

     Sometimes naming him and sometimes not, Pressac underscores the errors
or the deceptions of Georges Wellers.  The latter's argument based on the
ventilation system of the Leichenkeller is, for Pressac, contradicted and
indeed completely demolished by the facts (p. 289).  Wellers' "quite
erroneous" and "quite unfounded" interpretation deceived the lawyers of
LICRA (the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism) who
pleaded against Faurisson (p. 355).  In citing transcriptions of eyewitness
testimony, Wellers has made cuts when those testimonies contain
improbabilities, without any indication to the reader that he has done so
(p. 479).  The plan he gave of Auschwitz (_Les Chambres a gaz ant
existe/Des documents, des temoignages, des chiffres_, Gallimard, 1981, p.
12-13) is of "a very mediocre quality as regards many details," although
Pressac doesn't go so far as to use the word "falsification" (p. 165-166).
What is striking is that this was the plan which hung for all to see in the
courtroom at the Frankfurt trial and which Hermann Langbein reproduced in
his book about that trial (_Der Auschwitz Prozess, Eine Dokumentation_,
Frankfurt, Europaische Verlaganstalt, 1965, p. 932-933 [not 930-931 as
Pressac mistakenly indicates]).

     The supposed camouflage around Krema II and III is, according to
Pressac, a product of the imagination of the "traditional historians" (p.
341).

     Jan Sehn, the Polish investigative magistrate who prepared the trials
of Rudolf Hoess and of many other SS men, "made a change" in a German
document while reproducing it as a copy allegedly identical to the original
(p. 454).  Nevertheless, Pressac is careful not to be too harsh with this
investigative magistrate, to whom we  owe a hundred lies about Auschwitz
- to name one, the lie of the "nearly 60,000 persons in 24 hours" gassed
at Birkenau (Jan Sehn, _Le Camp de concentration d'Oswiecim-Brzezinka_,
Wydawnictwo Prawnicze, Warsaw, 1961, page 132).  It is also to Sehn that we
owe the "gigantic ditches" in the open air (as many as eight?) where, "in
August 1944, the figure of 24,000 incinerations per day was attained" (with
or without the crematoria?)  (Ibid., page 148).  However, the aerial photos
taken by the Allies on 25 August 1944 show absolutely nothing of the kind
(D. Brugioni and R. Poirier, _The Holocaust Revisited_, Washington, CIA,
February 1979, pages 9-11).

     In 1981 I was brought to trial in Paris by the LICRA and many other
organizations.  The principal lawyer for the LICRA was Maitre Bernard
Jouanneau.  From the pages Pressac devotes to this trial and to this lawyer
it is evident that the author believes that many of the documents which
they used against me do not, in reality, prove the existence of the
homicidal gas chambers in the least.  Not one of the eyewitness testimonies
that Maitre Jouanneau introduced had any real value.  As for the technical
arguments offered by Jouanneau, all of them were worthless, and sometimes
"disastrous."  Lastly, the lawyer outrageously abused the theory according
to which the Germans, to hide their crime, used a "code" or "camouflage"
(p. 554-556).

     Pressac's inconsistencies have their amusing aspects.  He remarks on
the dishonesty or incompetence of the Exterminationists but, at the same
time, wants at all costs to save the Exterminationist theory.  Thus he is
reduced to flattering his friends for qualities that supposedly make up for
their faults.  And when he flatters, he doesn't do it by halves - he
bootlicks:  Maitre Jouanneau's demonstration was based on a mass of errors
but it was . . . "superb" (p. 556).


                      Manipulation of Testimonies

     In a work that professes to be technical, one ought first to describe
the scene of the crime, then examine the weapon used in the crime and the
material proofs of the crime, in order, finally, to review the testimonies.
Pressac, who has no understanding of method, opens all of his chapters with
... the testimonies.  It must be said that this is a way of clouding the
reader's normal capacity for judgment, since these "testimonies" posit the
existence of the homicidal gas chambers as a basic principle.

     The quality of the testimonies that Pressac invokes is pitiful.
Sometimes he acknowledges that himself, but he often seeks to save these
testimonies from discredit, by means of the most oversubtle devices.

     Rudolf Hoess is presumed to have written _Commandant at Auschwitz_ and
Miklos Nyiszli supposedly wrote _Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account of
Mengele's Infamous Death Camp_, two testimonies offered as essential.
Hoess lived for  several years at Auschwitz, and Nyiszli supposedly lived
there for six months as an inmate.  But what these two "witnesses" write,
for example, about the ventilation of the homicidal gas chambers,
constitutes, according to Pressac, an enormous technical error.  On this
point they told the opposite of "the truth" (p. 16).

     Alter Fajnzylberg, Filip Muller and Rudolf Hoess affirm things that
are "practically impossible," or "not corresponding to the facts," that
"cast a doubt," are "wrong," "contrary to reality," "unlikely" (p. 126-12
7).  The "errors" committed by Hoess "throughout his autobiography" have an
explanation which Pressac brandishes proudly and emphasizes in bold-face
type:  HE WAS PRESENT, WITHOUT SEEING (p. 128).  But, if that is the case,
he wasn't a witness!  How could he be present and not see?  How can one be
the commandant of an "extermination camp" and not see the instrument of
"exterminating" at least a million (?) people?  How was this commandant
able to stress the dangers of Zyklon in 1942 (see above, p. 137-138) and
then in 1946 decree that the dangers were non-existent (see below, p.
172-173, note 9)?

     As for the eyewitness testimony, so often invoked, of SS man Pery
Broad, the form and the tone of it, Pressac tells us, "sound false."
Broad's writings, which we owe to the Poles, cannot be sincere.  They are
"colored by a rather too flagrant Polish patriotism."  The Broad manuscript
is not known.  It has all been "slightly" reworked by the  Poles (his
quotation marks around "slightly" imply that the rework was not slight!).
But what does it matter, asks Pressac:  despite the discrepancies between
the various witnesses, some homicidal gassings did take place in Krema I -
that is an established fact (p. 128).  "Established"?  By whom?  By what?
He does not say.

     The testimony of Szlamy Dragon elicits the following commentary:


          This is physically impossible [...].  I do not think that this
     witness was intentionally misleading, but he was following the
     tendency to exaggerate which seems to have been the general rule at
     the time of the liberation and which is what gave rise to the figure
     of 4 million victims for K.L. Auschwitz, a figure now considered to be
     pure propaganda.  It should be divided by four to get close to reality
     (p. 171).


     In 1972, at the Dejaco/Ertl trial, witness Dragon showed "total
confusion" (p. 172; see Part I, p. 60, in _The Journal of Historical
Review_, Spring 1991).

     The testimonies of Pery Broad, of Rudolf Hoess, Dr. Johann-Paul
Kremer, and of SS man Holblinger (which Pressac writes as Hoblinger) on the
several BUNKER are subject to reservations expressed in the following
terms:  "entirely imaginary," "physically impossible," "impossible to
situate this scene" (p. 174).

     The testimony of Nyiszli would be valid providing ... that his figures
be divided by four - but not always.  Pressac speaks of Nyiszli's "number
four," and says that his figures are "worrying" (p. 179).

     In 1980, a great fuss was made about Filip Muller's book, _Trois ans
dans une chambre a gaz d'Auschwitz_ (Three Years in a Gas Chamber at
Auschwitz), foreword by Claude Lanzmann, ed. Pygmalion/G. Watelet.  [The
English version, _Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in a Gas Chamber at
Auschwitz_, New York, Stein and Day, 1979, is somewhat different than the
French edition.]  In France Jean Pierre-Bloch awarded the book the LICRA
prize.  Filip Muller was one of the star witnesses at the Auschwitz trial
(1963-1965), and in the film Shoah.  In reality, he was a mythomaniac,
which even Pressac realizes, for he writes:


     [in his book, Muller] has accumulated errors, thus making his account
     historically dubious.  The best approach is to read it as a novel
     based on true history (p. 181).


     If the members of the Sonderkommando affirm that 5 or 7 or 12 bodies
were burned in a single muffle of a crematory oven at one time, Pressac
suggests that this is an exaggeration, and that probably only three bodies
at a time could have been incinerated, and skinny ones at that (p. 229).
He says that today's tourist, "after a silent prayer" (sic!) in front of
Krema I, must surely realize that "We find here the famous multiplying
factor of four used by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli" (p. 483).

     At Auschwitz visitors can see in the former "Block 4" a model that
professes to show a Krema in the midst of a gassing.  This reconstruction,
it must be said, inadvertently demonstrates the physical impossibilities of
the homicidal gassings, in particular the cramped premises and the
congestion that would have resulted from the first "gassing."  Add to that
the fact that documents which have subsequently come to light, especially
the aerial photos taken by the Allies in 1943/44 and published in 1979,
underscore the "faults" of this model.  Of small import to Pressac, who
sees in the reconstruction the "powerful evocation of a mass gassing"  (p.
378).

     Beginning on p. 459, the author attempts to save from disaster the
absurd _War Refugee Board Report_ of November 1944, sometimes known as the
_Protocols of Auschwitz_.  Just the criticisms of it that Pressac himself
is obliged to make totally discredit this mendacious work, which is due
largely to Rudolf Vrba, today a professor of pharmacology at a university
in Vancouver (see Robert Faurisson, "The Zundel Trials (1985 and 1988),"
_The Journal of Historical Review_, Winter 1988-1989, p. 420-421).

     The drawings of one David Olere are in favor with Pressac, who knew
the artist personally, but these drawings, altogether grotesque, seem
inspired chiefly by a sort of sex-shop anti-Nazism.  Pressac considers
them "masterpieces of authenticity" (p. 554) but ... he has reservations
as to their documentary worth and about the sincerity of the witness (p.
493-497, 554-556).  Playing the prude, he goes so far as to refrain from
reproducing certain drawings (p. 498).  This same David Olere asserts that
the SS made sausages they called "Kremawurst" (crematorium sausages) out
of human flesh (p. 554).  His memory suffers from a certain "deterioration"
(p. 493), and he is subject to what Pressac calls the "KREMATORIUM
DELIRIUM" (p. 556).

     The author's favorite witness is the Jewish shoemaker Henryk Tauber.
But this witness, too, tends to use "the  famous multiplying factor of
four" (p. 483).  HE HAS NEVER SEEN A GASSING BUT EITHER HE WAS TOLD ABOUT
IT (Ibid.) or else he has seen the bodies of those whom he calls gassed
(page 489).  One day, through a window, he saw an SS man pouring Zyklon B
into a gas chamber (p. 494).  If over  so  many years  he saw  nothing more
than that, it was because during the gassing operations the SS
systematically locked up the members of the Sonderkommando in ... the coke
store.  This is also Alter Fajnzylberg's explanation.  The SS wanted to
conceal the existence of the gassings but not the existence of the people
gassed!

     Tauber tells the story of a Jew named Lejb.  One day, the Germans hung
Lejb, hands tied behind his back, from an iron bar above the firing
hearths, for an hour.  Then, after untying his hands and feet, they threw
him into a cold crematorium furnace.  Gasoline was poured into the lower
ash bin and lit.  The flames reached the muffle in which Lejb was trapped.
A few minutes later, they opened the door of the furnace.  The condemned
man came running out, covered with burns.  Next, he was ordered to run
round the yard shouting that he was a thief.  Finally, he was forced to
climb the barbed wire fence, where he was killed with a gunshot!

     Tauber speaks also of an open-air pit filled with human fat.  The fat
ran from the corpses into a separate reservoir, dug in the ground.  This
fat was poured over the corpses to accelerate their combustion.  One day,
the SS men threw a man into the boiling fat, then pulled him out, still
alive, and shot him.  "The next day, the corpse was brought back to the
crematorium, where it was incinerated in a pit [!]" (p. 494).

     Tauber says that around 2,500 bodies a day were incinerated in a
single crematorium.  Here is Pressac's commentary:


          This figure is unrealistic (and it is connected with the
     propaganda of the immediate post-war period), [...].  Here we find
     almost the famous multiplication factor of four, of which Dr. Miklos
     Nyiszli made such abundant and lamentable use in his book that his
     credibility was long contested.  Henryk Tauber is far from being the
     only witness to say in substance "I don't know the number of dead" or
     "I think it was so many" and then coolly say one or two sentences
     later, that after due consideration, we do arrive at the (standard)
     figure of 4 million victims in all.  This type of imposed falsehood
     has to be excused, I would stress, because of the political climate of
     the period 1945-1950 (p. 494).^11


     In just one passage on page 498, Pressac, to qualify the assertions of
his favorite witness, uses the words "dubious," "incorrect" (twice), "not
certain," "[made up] story," and "pure myth."  And if at the end of his
testimony Tauber is so weak and so vague about Krema IV and V, no one can
reproach him for this, says Pressac, who supposes that the witness "must
have been exhausted by the end of his deposition" (p. 502).

     In short, all these witnesses seem to be suffering greatly, just like
David Olere, from what pharmacist Pressac calls Krematorium delirium (p.
556).

     Pressac has no criterion for distinguishing the true and the false
witness from one another.  His witnesses can pile up the worst errors or
the worst insanities, yet they will find favor in our man's eyes the moment
he decides to make authentic witnesses out of them.

     A witness meticulously describes the room called a gas chamber, and
sees three pillars when there were really four:  Pressac tells us it's
because he didn't go clear to the end of  the room.  The same witness
speaks of an entrance door and an exit door, when there was only one door
to the room, with no other exit:  this error, Pressac says, can be
explained by the route taken by that witness during  his visit (!).  The
witness talks about ten cremation ovens when there were five (each with
three muffles):  Pressac says that's because "probably he had not walked
the entire length of the oven room but instead remained  at the west
entrance."  The number of victims that the witness gives is incredible:
that, Pressac reassures us, is because here it's a question of an "inflated
number" given by an SS man who served as the witness's guide; or there,
it's an "SS propaganda figure" (p. 239).

     If a witness sketches the crematory room while forgetting to note the
presence of rails, Pressac says that since the rails served no purpose, the
witness's "visual memory did not retain them" (p. 229).  Let the same
witness commit four grave material errors, and it's because "the visual
memories of a survivor deteriorate with time" (p. 493).  If this witness
adds imaginary details to his sketch, no matter:  it was done "to make it
better" (Ibid.).

     Throughout his book, Pressac does his utmost to discover excuses for
the innumerable "errors" of his witnesses, errors in the location, the
color, the material, the form, the distance, the number of whatever is
being discussed.

     But his favorite explanation is that all these "errors" are the fault
of the SS and "the usual SS exaggeration" (p. 108), and that, if in their
confessions taken by the Allies, the SS confessed to enormities, it was as
due to "professional pride" (p. 161).

     Thanks to this method, Pressac's witnesses, Jewish or otherwise, win
incessantly, while the SS men can only lose every time.


           Pressac's Involuntary Drollery Apropos M. Nyiszli

     At this point I would like to return to a case already mentioned, that
of Dr. Nyiszli.  One of the best known false testimonies in the
concentration camp literature, next to Martin Gray's _For Those I Loved_,
is that of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli:  _Auschwitz:  An Eyewitness Account of
Mengele's Infamous Death Camp_, translated and adapted from the Hungarian
by Tibere Kremer (New York:  Fell Publishing Co., 1960).

     Paul Rassinier often denounced this forgery (see _The Holocaust Story
and the Lies of Ulysses_ (Costa Mesa, CA:  The Institute for Historical
Review, 1988, p. 244-250), as has Carlo Mattogno.  Neither the
_Encyclopaedia Judaica_ (1971), nor the recent _Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust_ (1990), mentions Nyiszli's book, which has long been
discredited.

     Nevertheless, at the recent trial of the Revisionist Michel Konen at
Meaux, Hubert Heilbronn, president of the Lazare Bank, had the effrontery
to mention only one testimony in support of the existence of the Auschwitz
gas chambers:  that of Miklos Nyiszli (_Le Figaro_, 6 July 1990, p. 8).

     Pressac, too, resuscitates Nyiszli.  But I think it's fair to say that
in so doing he has, in his comments on Nyiszli's testimony, inadvertently
written two exceedingly funny pages (p. 474-475).  I'll let the reader be
the judge.

     Miklos Nyiszli, a Jew, allegedly lived for six months in a Birkenau
crematorium serving as an assistant to Dr. Josef Mengele in the dissection
room.  Pressac selects from Nyiszli's book only Chapter VII, in which this
witness supposedly describes a gassing operation in Krema II.  At first
Pressac affirms that this description is "entirely accurate, EXCEPT for
certain FIGURES which are very WRONG indeed [Pressac's capitals]" (p. 473).
Next, he comments on the text, and here one realizes that, even for a
Pressac, almost all the data in Nyiszli's book, whether numbers or physical
details, are erroneous.

     The witness declares that the gas chamber was 500 feet (150 meters)
long; but, Pressac says, a plan (which this writer discovered and which is
borne out by the building's ruins) shows that the length of the room under
discussion could not have exceeded 100 feet (30 meters).  How to explain?
It's simple, says Pressac:  the witness told the truth, but he used a
multiplier of five.

     The witness states that the undressing room was 200 yards (about 200
meters) long; well, says Pressac, everything shows that room measured 50
yards (around 50 meters) in length.  For here, according to Pressac,
Nyiszli has used a multiplier of four.

     Since the average of the various multipliers is four, Pressac, proud
of his discovery, gets to talking in his book, whether regarding Nyiszli or
other affirmations and testimonies, of the "famous multiplying factor of
four" (see p. 483, 494).

     Accordingly, following our pharmacist, if we wish to find the real
figures, it behooves as we read to divide all the numbers by four.

     As for me, I should say that by that reckoning, every false witness
would be in the clear.  Supposing a "witness" states that in six months
(the duration of Nyiszli's stay in Auschwitz) he saw four men who were all
7 meters tall and 200 years old.  We can assume that anybody would dismiss
such a witness.  Anybody but Pressac, who, applying the rule of the famous
divisor of four, would say:  this witness is telling the truth:  he saw
*one* man, who was *1.75 meters* tall and *50 years* old.

     But Pressac's gymnastics don't end here.  I have made a critical
review of his comments on the Nyiszli testimony only regarding the short
passage that Nyiszli has written on the gassings.  Here we have,  on the
one hand, the multipliers Pressac says Nyiszli used; and, on the other
hand, a sampling of Pressac's comments regarding such and such a fact,
physical reality, or figure reported by Nyiszli (p. 474-475):


- PRESSAC'S COMMENTS ON NYISZLI'S COEFFICIENTS:

     1.   Nyiszli, says Pressac, has divided by 2.

     2.   Nyiszli, says Pressac, has multiplied by 3; by 5; by 4; by 2.5;
          by 6.7; by 4; by 4; by 2.5; by 4; by 2 to 3.


- PRESSAC'S EVALUATIONS OF NYISZLI'S STATEMENTS:

     Wrong
     Wrong
     Wrong
     Wrong
     Wrong and deliberately misleading [...].  Whom is Dr. Nyiszli trying
       to mislead and why?
     Lack of familiarity with the premises
     "War story" pure and simple
     Pure invention
     Legend


     . . . (and let us add that, when the witness talks about "concrete,"
we must read "wood"; when he talks about "chlorine," we must read
"hydrocyanic acid").

     Pressac's conclusion is delectable.  He proudly entitles it "The
Multiplier."  Here Pressac, far from dismissing his witness for his
exaggerations and fables, discovers in the use of the multiplier 4 (the
average of the various figures is 3.8) the sign that Dr. Nyiszli, for all
his not being scientific and rigorous, is manifestly an academic who bears
the stamp of intellectual training of the most serious kind.  He writes:


          The average of the different multipliers is almost exactly
     four.^12  If we apply this to the official total of 4 million victims
     we arrive at a figure much closer to reality:  1 million.  This
     calculation is by no means scientific but it shows that DOCTOR
     NYISZLI, a respected ACADEMIC, TRAINED IN GERMANY, multiplied the
     figures by FOUR when describing the interior of Krematorium II and
     when speaking of the number of persons or victims (p. 475).


     In short, Pressac understands that the "credibility" of Nyiszli's book
has been "long contested" (p. 494); that was due to "the famous
multiplication factor of four of which Dr. Miklos Nyiszli made such
abundant and lamentable use" (Ibid.).  But fortunately Pressac has arrived;
he has discovered the key needed by anyone reading Nyiszli's book and,
thanks to that key, everything is deciphered.  There is no longer any
reason to challenge the credibility of an honorable academic, educated in
Germany.  Pressac has saved Nyiszli.

     But the reader, on seeing any figure at all from the pen of this
astonishing witness, can never know whether the number is to be  considered
exact, or whether it is necessary to multiply it or divide it, and if so,
by exactly how much.


                   "Faurisson and His Clique" (p. 12)

     I shall forgo counting the number of times that Pressac attacks the
Revisionists in general and me in particular.  Mark Weber writes:


          Pressac does not seem to be a psychologically sound person.  For
     example, he confesses that he "nearly" killed himself in the Auschwitz
     main camp in October 1979 (p. 537).  His relationship with Dr.
     Faurisson and French Revisionist publisher Pierre Guillaume - to which
     he devotes several pages - changed from a kind of admiration to bitter
     personal animosity.  He cites nothing about Faurisson's treatment of
     him that would justify such visceral enmity, even granting the
     intensity of his disagreement about the Holocaust issue.  The
     emotional and even vicious nature of Pressac's furious hostility
     towards Faurisson suggests an insecure and unstable personality
     ("Auschwitz:  Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers," _The
     Journal of Historical Review_, Summer 1990, p. 231-237).


     Here I must provide an explanation.  Pressac has a specific reason for
not liking me:  in the early 1980s, I was led to show him to the door of
the home of Pierre Guillaume (where he had come to see us once more without
announcing his arrival beforehand).  That is the kind of humiliation which
is not forgotten, especially by someone who, afflicted with a sense of
inferiority, seeks approval, fishes  for compliments, offers his services
insistently and wishes to be taken seriously.  Pressac ended up exhausting
my patience.  His obsequiousness, his mental confusion, his panicky fears,
his horror of clarity and of unequivocal positions, his propensity to lie
and to cheat made his visits more and  more undesirable.  He makes no
allusion to that humiliating episode in his book; on the contrary, he
states that in March or April 1981 he took the initiative and "broke
completely with Faurisson" (p. 554).  That is quite simply false.  He was
ushered to the door, and, I must say, in no uncertain terms.

     Jean-Claude Pressac was an admirer of Hitler, of Degrelle and of
militaria.  He had a bust of Hitler in his home, in a place of honor, and,
fearing our reaction at the time of a visit to his home, had forewarned
Guillaume and myself about it, not without some apprehension.  He had
dreamt of writing a novel showing the victory of his hero and the triumph
of National Socialism (see, in this regard, p. 541).  He had been educated
at the military academy of La Fleche and, according to Guillaume, himself a
former student at that establishment, had in 1959 received a reprimand from
the school's administration due to a sketch of Nazi inspiration that he had
displayed at the time of a school celebration.  He said that he was a
supporter of Pierre Sidos, a French far-rightist.  The extreme right, or
what is called that, has, side by side with strong personalities (as in the
case of Leon Degrelle), poor wretches who admire force since they are weak.
Such was the fact with Pressac who, moreover, had certain medical problems
which, I must say, increased my pity for him.

     Guillaume devoted several pages to Pressac in his book _Droit et
histoire_ (La Vieille Taupe, 1986, p. 118-125).  I recommend reading those
pages, which are both lively and penetrating.

     Before meeting us, Pressac believed in the gas chambers.  I showed him
my documentation.  He was staggered by it, and recognized his error.
Believing he knew how to read the plans that I had discovered in the
archives of the Auschwitz Museum, he offered us his services.
Half-serious, half-mocking, we took to calling him "Schliemann," from the
name of the discoverer of the ruins of Troy.  Pressac had a peculiar habit:
at each encounter, his first words were:  "I've blown it."  He "blew it" -
he made a mistake - repeatedly.  Easily influenced, easily anguished, he
perpetually changed his opinion on details and each time adopted the most
peremptory tone in articulating his thesis of the day.  Another of his
eccentricities:  as soon as the simplest question put him in a quandary
(and his life was a perpetual quandary), he would answer:  "Yes/No."  Not:
"Yes and no" but, in a single breath:  "Yes/No."  And it was impossible for
him to clarify his answer, which served him as a refuge, as with a child
caught being naughty.  He had the irritating habit of pretending, from one
minute to the next, that he hadn't said what he had just said.  I invited
him accordingly to record our conversations with a tape recorder to avoid
misunderstandings.  With childish fear, offering no explanation, he refused
to be recorded.

     But he no longer believed in the gas chambers.  He began to feel
called to be a Revisionist; wishing it is not enough, however.  My life and
that of Pierre Guillaume became more and more difficult. Pressac grew
frantic.   The cumulative effects of the trials and of the attacks  of all
sorts, the progressive deterioration of my physical health, our financial
problems, a general atmosphere of doom (it should be recalled here what
happened at the time of the blast on the "Rue Copernic," much worse than
that of the "Carpentras cemetery"^13) left our neophyte more and more
feverish and hesitant.  He pleaded with me to give up so dangerous an
enterprise.  For his part, he began to take his distance from us.  "Jewish
friends" had made him understand that there were limits to skepticism which
could not be transgressed (p. 548).  Upon reading the plans of Auschwitz
and Birkenau that I had furnished him in abundance, he saw well enough that
the gassings were impossible.  But, you never know, he began to say,
perhaps there really did take place here and there a few small homicidal
gassings, discreet, furtive, improvised:  what he called "casual," or
"itty-bitty," gassings.

     Before his first departure for Auschwitz, following our meeting, he
had asked me what research he could undertake there for me.  I had told him
that I was interested in the question of the cremations:  the officially
recorded number of the bodies incinerated; status of persons cremated
(inmates/guards/German soldiers and officers and members of their
families); number of employees assigned to cremation of corpses and to the
incinerations in the rubbish ovens; the duration of the cremations; time
cards, etc.).  I thought, as a matter of fact, that those numbers alone
would be enough to demonstrate the impossibility of the stupendous number
of cremations that would have been required by the gassing of hundreds of
thousands of victims, over and above the cremations necessitated by the
ravages of the epidemics in the camp.

     On his return from Auschwitz, Pressac told me with an air of
embarrassment that he had not found the time to occupy himself with the
question that interested me.  He had had too much work to do, and then, he
added, a young Polish girl had taken a great deal of his time:  innocent
boasting by the timid.

     Before his second journey to Auschwitz, he asked me the same question
and I gave him the same answer.  Upon his return, he again stated that he
had not had the time to undertake the necessary research.  Let me note here
parenthetically that in his large book Pressac continues to evade my
questions (see, below, Appendix 2, "How Many Cremations a Day in Krema
II?," p. 166-167).

     Pressac wound up by telling us that he no longer wanted to take sides
between the Revisionists and the Exterminationists.  He said he wished to
have relations with both camps and to content himself with purely technical
work.  I encouraged him in that path and, in a dedication the text of which
he reports (p. 554) but the context of which he distorts, I urged him to
seek, to discover, to be cold, impartial and materialistic.  But that was
too much to ask of him.  Finding that he was unable to buckle down to
methodical and austere work that would have let him put a bit of order into
his thoughts, I sent him on his way.  I had introduced him to the study of
the supposed gas chamber at Struthof (Alsace).  Later on, he published,
under the auspices of Serge Klarsfeld, a small book in English - poor and
confused - on the subject.  I see that, in his large book, he treats the
subject anew.  But he takes care not to reveal a discovery I had made
virtually in his presence when, at the Palace of Justice in Paris, together
with Pierre Guillaume and Maitre Eric Delcroix, we examined the archives of
the "Struthof trial," archives provided at LICRA's request by the
headquarters, in Paris, of the Gendarmerie and Justice Militaire.  In those
archives I found a document revealing that in December 1945 Professor Rene
Fabre, Dean of the faculty of pharmacy at the University of Paris, had
signed an expert report of the greatest interest.  The professor had
successively examined the scrapings done around the chimney of the alleged
homicidal gas chamber and, in the public hospital of Strasbourg, the
well-preserved corpses of the persons supposedly gassed.  His finding in
both cases was negative:  there was no trace of gassing.

     In reality, that particular gas chamber, which was only relatively
air-tight, had served chiefly for the training of German army recruits in
the wearing of gas masks; in that case, the gas presented nowhere near the
same danger as hydrocyanic acid (Zyklon B).  Pressac had been happy to be
able to demonstrate that for us.  He had gone to take some photos of a
training session in a French army gas chamber not far from Paris.  I have a
set of those photographs.


              Three Little Secrets of Jean-Claude Pressac

     A legend that is dear to the heart of Elie Wiesel, Filip Muller and
Georges Wellers maintains that the Germans dug gigantic pits at Birkenau in
which they burned thousands of bodies in the open air.  I had drawn
Pressac's attention to the fact that the Birkenau camp was located in an
area of vast marshes alongside a tributary of the Vistula River and that
despite their drainage work there, the water table continued of necessity
to rise to just a short distance below ground level^14.  It was difficult,
therefore, to imagine such pits being dug, and I added that in any case it
must have been complicated to burn corpses in pits due to the lack of
oxygen.  Then Pressac, whom I was always advising to get physical
verification, dug a small hole in his garden and tried to incinerate the
body of a rabbit.  He never succeeded.  When we visited the site of his
"incineration ditch," he was full of quips about the myth of the
"incineration ditches" at Birkenau, and the tale of the rabbit became for
us a standing joke.

     Visitors to Struthof can see, on the one hand, the Natzweiler camp
itself, with its crematorium and, far from the camp, a small building
containing the supposed homicidal gas chamber.  Pressac pointed out to me
that, IF THEY HAD DECIDED TO LIE ABOUT NATZWEILER AS THEY HAD LIED ABOUT
AUSCHWITZ (sic), they could have made people believe there was a homicidal
gas chamber in the crematorium.  To prove it, he made up for me a sort of
false plan of that building, based on the true plan that we had discovered
in the archives of the Gendarmerie and the justice Militaire.  I still have
that false plan, drawn by Pressac and bearing his explanatory notes.  He
doesn't breathe a word of this little job in his large book.

     I also have, by Pressac, a two-volume study which he entitled
_Auschwitz, architecture paisible_  (Auschwitz, Peaceful Architecture).  It
concerns Krema IV and V.  It is extremely disordered and has never been
published.  My copy is marked No. 2.  The dedication page is laughable:
Pressac, offering his services to all comers, launches into flattery
addressed to certain Exterminationists as well as certain Revisionists.  I
come in for my share of these compliments, which are laid on too thick to
be sincere.


                    A Few Borrowings and A Few Lies

     In his shorter studies, as in his big book, Pressac has plundered my
work outrageously.  He is indebted to me for a large part of the plans,
documents and photographs that he has published; the reminder comprises,
most of the time, plans, documents, and photographs from the same source or
of an identical character.  Only the photos from the Bauleitung Album,
which is in the possession of the Israelis, are an original contribution.

     The baseness of Pressac's attacks on me, his deceptions and lies in
the presentation of certain facts, would oblige me to correct far too many
of his allegations than I am able to here.  I am described as a coward, too
afraid, "of course," to appear at my trial (p. 554); but he knows I was
seriously ill at the time.  He says that one day, in 1982, he telephoned me
and found me a "human wreck"; he writes:  "I was shocked and disgusted to
find [Faurisson] had reached rock bottom, dragging his family down with
him" (p. 558).  It is true that in 1981 and 1982 I believed I had reached
the depths of physical, moral and financial distress, and that my wife and
children shared that distress with me; I did not for all that speak of my
"martyrdom" (Ibid.) and I do not see what is "shocking" and "disgusting"
about my fighting as I did to the limit of my strength.  I frightened
Pressac.  I had always frightened him by my fierceness in defending myself
and by my refusal to bow my head.

He ventures to write:


          Confronted with the new evidence, Faurisson and Guillaume had a
     moment of indecision, seeing the possibility of throwing in the sponge
     and officially declaring that it did appear that some homicidal
     gassings had taken place at Birkenau (p. 554).


     Here, he lies and he knows that he lies, at least as regards me.  He
never presented me with the slightest proof of what he called the "casual
gassings"; and I personally have never considered the possibility of a
retraction of any kind.^15

     Pressac knows that the trials that were forced on me and that brought
me condemnations unprecedented in the contemporary history of France were
nothing but stage productions, and that the documents with which they tried
to crush me were valueless.  He knows it and he says it, whether
explicitly, as when he alludes to the role of Maitre Jouanneau, the LICRA
lawyer, or implicitly, when he happens to analyze a "proof' used against
"Faurisson" at the time of a trial and admits that said "proof" does not
possess the value attributed to it in the slightest (p. 49, 554-556).


                            Questions Evaded

     Pressac has evaded a good twenty essential questions of a technical
nature which have been posed by the Revisionists.  I shall cite only a few
of them:


   - Krema I:  How can one explain the presence of a homicidal gas chamber
     using Zyklon B (an explosive gas) that opened onto a room where six
     crematory ovens were in operation, sometimes reaching temperatures of
     800 degrees?  How could the supposed gas chamber have had a fragile
     door, one fitted with glass and without a bolt and which, opening as
     it did to the inside, would have been blocked by heaps of corpses?
     How could the daily ventilation process have been carried out just
     twenty meters away from the windows of the SS hospital?

   - Krema II and III:  Since it would appear that the victims came in
     batches of 2,000[^16] persons, and it took an hour and a half to
     incinerate one body in each of the 15 muffles, at the end of this
     period of time there would still have remained 1,985 bodies to
     incinerate.  Where were they stored in the meantime?  How could the
     ventilation be done from the floor to the ceiling (Zyklon is lighter
     than air) when everything was set up for ventilation in the opposite
     direction?  Where did they store the bodies of those who, day in and
     day out, died of natural causes?  In general, how do we reconcile the
     scanty dimensions of the premises (the little elevator!) with the
     immensity of the massacres to be carried out there?

   - Krema IV and V:  What were coal stoves doing in the gas chambers?

   - Where were the crowds waiting to enter the crematoria able to gather,
     considering that the aerial photos taken by the Allies never show even
     the slightest trace of such crowds; and that the area around the
     crematoria, far from having been trampled by any crowds, was occupied
     by well-laid-out gardens?

   - How is it that the gas slaughterhouses would be located right in the
     middle of such a variety of other facilities, which, in striking
     contrast to killing centers, include:  a soccer field, hospital
     buildings, decantation basins, and buildings for showering and
     disinfection?

   - Where are the countless scientific, technical and medical documents
     which prove that before, during and after the creation and operation
     of those chemical slaughterhouses (unprecedented in the history of
     science and technology) the Germans supposedly prepared, constructed,
     and surveyed those pharaonic undertakings for the terrible purpose
     alleged, at a time when circumstances required people to get written
     authorizations and submit detailed budgets to get even a screw or a
     brick or a kilo of coal?


                          Deliberate Omissions

     It will be remembered that the only task I assigned to Pressac was
that regarding documents relevant to the cremations (see above, page
153-154).  Neither at the time of his first sojourn at Auschwitz, nor
during his second stay, it appears, had he been able to find time to study
the matter.  Now that his book has appeared, his continued silence on this
point is striking.

     One will note that he is very careful not to say that such documents
do not exist.  He knows all too well that they do exist.  He prefers to
avoid talking about them.  Why does he conceal from his readers the
existence of a host of documents which prove that a record was made of each
cremation?^17  In the case of teeth extracted from a corpse before its
cremation, the usual German attention to detail went so far as to demand
the completion of a printed form, with the heading "Dental Station of the
Auschwitz Camp," supplying the date of cremation, the complete identity
of the internee, his registration number, the number of teeth (right,
left, upper, lower), etc.  (see _Contribution a l'histoire d'Auschwitz_,
Auschwitz Museum, 1968, the photograph of the document between pages 80 and
81).

     Why does Pressac not mention this type of document, or a single one of
the documents required by the Auschwitz chancellery on the death of anyone,
with twenty or so signatures for deaths from natural causes and about
thirty signatures for deaths from non-natural causes (Dr. Tadeusz Paczula,
former prisoner, "The Organization and Administration of the Camp Hospital
in the Concentration Camp Auschwitz I," International Auschwitz Committee,
[Blue] _Anthology_, Vol. II, Part I, Warsaw, 1969, p. 45)?

     Why does he not make the slightest mention of the "death registers" in
which the Germans collected, with a separate page for each decedent, all
information relevant to each death?  The Revisionists had pointed out the
existence of two or three volumes of those TOTENBUCHER, or STERBEBUCHER, in
the Auschwitz Museum, and of forty or so in Moscow:  all of them,
naturally, inaccessible to independent researchers.  It was only under
pressure from the Revisionists, notably at the time of the Zundel trial in
Toronto in 1988, that the decision was made in 1989 to reveal the existence
of the registers to the general public.  Pressac was unlucky.  His book, IN
WHICH HE CONCEALS THE EXISTENCE OF THE REGISTERS, was no sooner finished
than the Soviet Union revealed that, for its part, it retained  a large
number - but not all - of these precious documents, which  strike a lethal
blow to the extermination legend.  Pressac, by failing to mention that
there were also two or three of these death registers in the archives of
the Auschwitz Museum - to which he had free access - lied by omission.

     Regarding the amount of coke necessary for the cremations and
incinerations, Pressac's vagueness is such that I find it suspect (see
microfilm 12,012 mentioned on page 87, the table on page 224, and the
remarks on page 227).  It is evident that the consumption of coke was
certainly ridiculously low in comparison to the amount that would have been
required for the gigantic cremations spoken of by the legend, but Pressac
has so muddled everything that it is not possible to get a precise idea of
it.  It is probable that each muffle burned no more than an average of 6 or
7 bodies each day, like the oil-fired furnaces at Buchenwald (p. 106), and
it is plain that the German document of 28 June 1943 indicating an
incineration capacity of 4,756 bodies a day for Auschwitz (with the ovens
operating 12 hours each day) is unacceptable.  Moreover, Pressac does not
hesitate to justify a figure just as extravagant (340 for Krema I, 1,440
for Krema II, 1,440 for Krema III, 768 for Krema IV and 768 for Krema V)
and, by a method dear to him, he puts these exaggerations down to the
"bragging" of the SS men, who, at any rate in similar instances, must have
"multiplied the real figures by a factor of 2 to 5" (p. 110).

     But his most unforgivable lie by omission concerns the DAILY ACTIVITY
of the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria.  The reader who has just finished
his book may believe that the five crematoria were devoted to the cremation
of ... people who had been gassed.  Day after day, however, these
crematoria received the bodies of victims of various epidemics, of persons
who had died of natural causes, of inmates, guards, soldiers, civilians.
And if, for example, Krema I was near the SS hospital, that was, in the
first place, to cremate the SS dead.  Dr. Popiersch, the chief surgeon,
died of typhus and was cremated at Auschwitz.  The same was true of the
wife of SS man Caesar, who was in charge of agricultural work, and of Alma
Rose, the German Jewess who conducted the women's orchestra of the Birkenau
camp and, if we are to believe Fania Fenelon, was accorded an extraordinary
funeral (Fania Fenelon, _Playing for Time_, New York, Atheneum, 1977, p.
208).  Pressac never tells us how the normal activity of the crematoria
could be combined each day with the activities surrounding the alleged
gassings:  transport to the morgues, storage of the bodies, cremation,
collection of ashes, transferral to urns, dispatch of the urns, etc.


                               Conclusion

     In 1982, I reviewed Pressac's study on Krema IV and V at Birkenau.  I
entitled that review:

          The Myth of the "Gas Chambers" Enters Its Death Agony

     To this review, which I wrote in 1990, I could give the following
title:


                  The Death of the "Gas Chamber" Myth

     In the media, this myth manages to survive somehow or other; in
academic or scientific circles, it is dead.  Our "suburban pharmacist," as
Vidal-Naquet calls him, had offered himself as a savior; his magic potions,
in 1982, aggravated the patient's condition; and in 1989, that is, seven
years later, they have finished him off.

     I know Revisionists who, confronting a thesis so disastrous for
Exterminationism, wonder whether Pressac could be one of their own, and
working undercover, have hoodwinked the Klarsfelds.  I don't believe that
in the least.  Pressac is a neophyte, an autodidact, an innocent crossed
with a fox.  His personality is unstable; he is inconsistent, a weathercock
that turns with every wind.  He argues illogically and does not know how to
express himself either in speech or writing - a deficiency that would be
merely annoying in the exposition of a coherent thesis, but which here,
with an incoherent and hybrid thesis, becomes absolutely catastrophic.
Pressac isn't wearing any mask; it is his real face which we find
disconcerting.  For their part, the Klarsfelds lack discernment; they are
even blind.  They find it "normal" that, in certain cases, persons who
displease the Jewish community should be killed or seriously injured
(_Radio J_, 17 September 1989, Agence France Press, 1:36PM; _La Lettre
telegraphique Juive_, 18 September, p. 1; _Le Monde_, 19 September, p. 14).
The anguish of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld at the rise of Revisionism -
despite their awareness that it has access neither to money nor to the
public forum - is causing them to lose their judgement and their
self-control.  To the Klarsfelds, all means seem justified; every
assistance is welcome; any media operation can serve.  Pressac, driven away
by Faurisson, dismissed by Wellers, went on to offer his services to the
Klarsfelds.  He was hired.  This tedious tome must have cost them plenty.
But, if friends of the Klarsfelds paid for it dearly in money, its results
will cost them even more, which will be fatal for the Exterminationists and
providential for the Revisionists.

     In 1979, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Leon Poliakov proclaimed, with
thirty-two other French historians, that it was unnecessary to ask
questions about the technique and the operation of the homicidal gas
chambers.  They stated precisely:


          It is not necessary to ask how, technically, such a mass murder
     was possible.  It was possible technically since it took place.  That
     is the necessary point of departure for any historical inquiry on this
     subject.  It is our function simply to recall that truth:  there is
     not, there cannot be any debate about the existence of the gas
     chambers (_Le Monde_, 21 February 1979, p. 23).


     In my "Response to a Paper Historian" (_The Journal of Historical
Review_, Spring 1986, p. 24), I spoke of the silliness of that declaration,
and I added:


          [...] The text in _Le Monde_ had been conceived to ward off a
     very pressing problem.  In the confusion that was provoked by my
     article on "The Rumor of Auschwitz" [_Le Monde_, 29 December 1978, p.
     8], Vidal-Naquet and Poliakov hastily drew up a manifesto, and then
     took it some signers, saying to them:  "We say there cannot be any
     debate, but it is very clear that you must not pay any attention to
     that phrase and that you all have to get busy replying to Faurisson."
     That is how Vidal-Naquet ingenuously puts it on page 196 of [_Les
     Juifs, la memoire et le present_, Maspero, 1981] when he writes:  "A
     good number of historians signed the declaration published in _Le
     Monde_ on 21 February 1979, but very few got busy, one of the rare
     exceptions being F[rancois] Delpech."


     Vidal-Naquet, Poliakov, and the other survivors of the "declaration"
of the thirty-four historians have thus had to wait ten years (1979-1989)
to see appear at last an attempt at refutation of my _Le Monde_ article on
"The Rumor of Auschwitz."  Had my article been based on mere foolishness,
its refutation wouldn't have required so long a time, nor so voluminous
and, as we have established, so feeble a response as that made by Pressac.

     Pressac has put his name to a masterpiece of inanity.  His
intellectual capacities did not permit the hope of anything better.  His
propensity for deception and for manipulating documents, already so
remarkable in his presentation of the _Auschwitz Album_ (Le Seuil, 1983) is
here confirmed.^18

     But the pharmacist from La Ville du Bois is only a miserable wretch.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet and the Klarsfelds are cut from a different cloth.

     These are people who had time enough to determine just how
empty-headed their "suburban pharmacist" was.    They used  him
nonetheless.  But could they have found better?  In any case they have
brought discredit on their cause.  Now they are burdened with this
monstrous book, totally unusable, and nothing to be done about it.  Let any
journalist in search of a scoop ask them, as did Richard Bernstein of the
_New York Times_, to point out a single page or a single photograph in this
wearisome tome which rebuts the Revisionists:  Vidal-Naquet and the
Klarsfelds will be unable to offer anything at all.

     I see hardly anyone but the Revisionists showing interest in Pressac
and his masterwork, and then only as scientists would do, musing over a
phenomenon of teratology, a monster.  The "Holocaust" religion has
certainly given birth to more than one monstrosity; Jean-Claude Pressac's
misshapen work is one example.

     In his paper presented at IHR's Fourth International Revisionist
Conference in 1982 ("Context and Perspective in the 'Holocaust'
Controversy," reproduced as "Supplement B" in recent editions of _The Hoax
of the Twentieth Century_, p. 335-369), Arthur Butz put the Revisionists on
guard against one danger:  that of wasting their time in idle technical
discussions that make us fail to see the forest for the trees.  If we
become preoccupied with such details as Zyklon B or crematory ovens, we may
end up forgetting the essential point, which is that an extermination so
gigantic would have left behind a superabundance of physical and
documentary proofs, not merely infinitesimal traces of domestic tinkering
and puttering.  Our adversaries, Butz added, will seek to enmesh us in
cabalistic discussions since, on the level of establishing basic facts,
they know they've already lost.  As Butz also pointed out, however, a
Revisionist must nonetheless show himself capable of confronting the
cabalists right down to trifling details.  Whatever the ground chosen, the
defenders of the "Holocaust" thesis must realize that all avenues of escape
are closed to them.  It is thus that they find themselves today in a total
impasse.  Their gang plank to safety - Pressac's book - is made of rotted
wood.

     The Jewish community has had some bad shepherds.  It should have
jettisoned the dogma of the Auschwitz gas chamber a decade ago.  In
December 1978, _Le Monde_ published, at the same time as my article on "The
Rumor of Auschwitz," several articles which were supposed to refute me.  I
think that certain French academics, of Jewish origin, immediately
perceived that a grave event had just occurred:  in a few lines, I had just
reminded them, like previous Revisionists, that the emperor was wearing no
clothes.  Confronted with this, a group of Establishment historians
endeavored, in vain, to pretend the contrary.  On 16 January 1979, _Le
Monde_ published my "right of response."  That would have been a fitting
time, I think, for the Franco-Jewish academics to have urgently prepared a
"declaration of historians" stating that there could and must be a debate
on the existence or nonexistence of the Auschwitz gas chambers.

     Fate decided otherwise.  On 21 February 1979, then, appeared the
"declaration" drawn up by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Leon Poliakov.  By it the
Exterminationists ratified their ruin.  Ten years later, with this book by
Jean-Claude Pressac, they are reaping the fruits of their blindness.  They
appear to me to have been inspired by an altogether too narrow conception
of their self-interest.  They ought to have looked farther ahead, to have
given thought to their obligations as historians and to the interest, truly
understood, of the Jewish community.  Then, instead of dogging the heretics
with press campaigns, physical attacks, and the police and the courts;
instead of staging one incestuous colloquium after another; instead of
churning out an endless stream of  bad books (Pressac's being the worst),
they ought to have opened their minds and hearts to discussion and
reflection.  They would have done well to have done some work.  The
Revisionists have been at work.  It's a pity the Exterminationists haven't
followed their lead.^19


                               APPENDIX I

                   Pressac Versus the Leuchter Report

     At the end of 1988, Serge Klarsfeld published, in _Jour J/La Lettre
telegraphique juive_, a study by Pressac of the Leuchter Report.  The title
was:  "Les carences et les incoherences du "Rapport Leuchter" ("The
Deficiencies and Inconsistencies of the "Leuchter Report").

     "Deficiencies" and "Inconsistencies":  Pressac is a master there!  The
sole proof he could find of homicidal gassings in Krema I he owes to ...
this report (see Part I, p. 34, in _The Journal of Historical Review_,
Spring 1991)!  His study, plainly hurried, blends emotive reflections about
Fred Leuchter with an exposition on the Auschwitz gassings, a summary on
the Auschwitz crematory ovens, and a final discussion on Majdanek.  On
Auschwitz, he repeats what I call his theory of "molecules with homing
devices" (see Part I, p. 38-39 in _The Journal of Historical Review_), a
theory which tries to explain the absence, so embarrassing for Pressac, of
ferric-ferro-cyanide stains there where so many human beings were
supposedly gassed.

     About Majdanek, I believe it's not too much to say that Pressac does
not believe in the existence of homicidal gas chambers in this camp.  He
writes:


     Lacking any precise technical study, those gas chambers remain poorly
     known (p. vii);

     The use of [such places] as homicidal gas chambers with HCN appears
     difficult and remains risky [...]; the technique would seem possible,
     but an actual use is risky (p. viii); [There were some] modifications
     after 1945 [which give a] false impression (p. ix);

     a regrettable confusion during the 1950s results in the shower room
     often being presented as a homicidal gas chamber (with toxic gas
     thought to be dispersed through shower heads)^20 (Ibid.);

     The use of this place for homicidal purposes is only conceivable under
     two conditions:  the removal of a fanlight that could have been broken
     by the victims and the addition of a mechanical ventilator (Ibid.);^21

     the homicidal function which the author [Pressac] cannot presently
     discuss (Ibid.);

     the deputy director of the Museum told the author [Pressac] that this
     gas chamber had very, very seldom been used, which really means that
     it had not been used at all.  That fiction is maintained in order not
     to shock popular belief which wants it that way [...] (Ibid.);

     etc.


     In his big book, Pressac manifests the same skepticism.  He considers
that no one has yet undertaken a "serious  study" of the Majdanek gas
chambers (p.  184).  Writing of Auschwitz, he lets slip a remark that
implies that Majdanek was perhaps not really "criminal" (p. 218).
Denouncing the methods of the "officials of the Majdanek Museum," he
writes:


          I am sorry to say, and I am not the only one in the West, that
     the Majdanek homicidal and/or delousing gas chambers are still waiting
     for a true historian, which is mildly upsetting in view of the fact
     that the camp fell into the hands of the Russians intact in 1944 (p.
     555).


     On page 557, a photograph shows the exterior of one of the
"disinfection gas chambers thought to be a homicidal gas chamber."  The
photograph comes from Maitre Jouanneau, attorney for LICRA, who was duped,
Pressac tells us, by the camp authorities (the lawyer used this photograph
before the Paris court to prove that Faurisson was a falsifier denying the
historical evidence).


                              APPENDIX II

                 How Many Cremations a Day at Krema II?

     How many cremations, on the average, were there per day in the five
three-muffle crematory ovens of Krema II?

     To that question, Pressac ought to give one answer and one answer
only, but instead he gives at least five, ranging from 288 a day to 1,500 a
day.


   - First answer:  960 or 288 or 720!  Those three contradictory answers
     all appear on page 110 where, speaking of a German document dated 28
     June 1943 which indicates 1,440 cremations per day, he says that this
     "official" number, even if reduced by a third (which would be 960
     cremations), is barely credible; and he adds that, given the SS
     penchant for boasting, it is better in general to divide their numbers
     by "a factor of from two to five" to obtain the truth in such matters.
     So that would give us a minimum of 288 cremations and a maximum of 720
     cremations.

   - Second answer:  752!  This emerges from page 183, where Pressac writes
     that the Krema in question "functioned as a homicidal gas chamber and
     incineration installation from 15th March 1943, before its officially
     coming into service on 31st March, to 27th November 1944, annihilating
     a total of approximately 400,000 people, most of them Jewish women,
     children and old men."  Pressac does not justify any of his
     statements.  We don't know why he claims that this Krema operated in a
     homicidal manner before 31 March, nor why he declares the final date
     of operation to have been 27 November 1944, unless because the
     self-taught Pressac takes at face value the legend that on 26 November
     1944 Himmler ordered the slaughter stopped.  No matter.  Let us take
     him at his word.  From 15 March 1943 to 27 November 1944, there
     elapsed 624 days, a figure that must be reduced to 532 if we take into
     account that, because of a repair of its chimney, Krema II is supposed
     to have halted operations for three months, from May through July of
     1943 (p. 227).  Over a period of 532 days there would thus have been
     400,000 cremations, or 752 per day.

   - Third answer:  a "practical 'throughput' being closer to 1,000."  That
     is what the author says on page 470 when he judges that the figure of
     2,000 cremations that was given by the witness, Dr. Bendel, cannot be
     accepted (see p. 334).

   - Fourth answer:  "between 1,000 to 1,500."  That is what the author
     says on page 475 regarding an estimate by Dr. Nyiszli.

   - Fifth response:  nearly 625.  This is derived from page 494, where the
     author indicates that the number of bodies cremated, according to the
     witness Henryk Tauber, was about 2,500 per day, concerning which
     figure he writes:  "Here we find the famous multiplication factor of
     four [of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli]."

     In sum, Pressac gives completely divergent answers in this matter; his
estimates of the cremations per day in Krema II, in ascending order, are as
follows:

288, 625, 720, 752, 960, 1,000, and between 1,000 and 1,500.

     This Krema had 15 muffles, and the crematory ovens, Pressac admits,
functioned only 12 hours a day.  For each muffle, therefore, the number per
day would have been, respectively, 19, 42, 48, 50, 64, and from 67 to 100.
These figures, varying from 19 to 100 per day, would represent performances
beyond the capabilities of our most modern crematoria.  They are all the
more unacceptable when we consider that Pressac is counting only the
corpses of those who are supposed to have been "gassed," to which must be
added the cremations of bodies of the inmates, guards, and soldiers who
died every day of various causes, especially when typhus was raging in the
camp.


                              APPENDIX III

               Pressac's Tricks in the _Auschwitz Album_

     In 1983, Pressac and Klarsfeld jointly published a French edition of
what is called the _Auschwitz Album_ (translated from English by Guy
Casaril, Editions du Seuil, 1983, 224 p.).  It was a collection of 189
extremely interesting photos, taken in 1944 by a German from the
photographic staff of the Auschwitz camp - possibly Ernst Hoffmann.  No
one, whether Exterminationist  or  Revisionist, has contested the
authenticity or the veracity of these photographs, which were taken at the
time of the mass arrivals of Hungarian Jews in 1944.  These photographs
supply a providential confirmation of the Revisionist thesis, and it is
shocking that we had to wait until the early 1980's to see all of them
published. Serge Klarsfeld, embarrassed by what they revealed, could offer
but a single parry in response:  fabricating a moving account of the
pretended discovery of the album by a certain Lili Meier.

     Klarsfeld and Pressac went to even greater lengths for the French
edition of this album.  In a twenty-page typed analysis which I completed
in December 1983, but did not publish at that time for lack of money, I
described their subterfuges.  I showed that in the French edition, which I
compared with the two original editions published in the United States^22,
Pressac had drastically changed the original order of the album's sections,
an order which had reflected a logical sequence of events for the newly
arrived inmates of the Birkenau camp.  In place of that order, our man had
substituted an arrangement which would give one to understand that most of
the people pictured would end up dying in the mysterious homicidal gas
chambers.  He also changed the number of photographs in each section and
proceeded to switch photographs from one section to another!  He removed
one group of photos and then, to restore the original number of sections,
he made use of the same caption from the original twice, but gave it two
different translations.  I wrote:


          Without breathing a word of it to the reader, Jean-Claude Pressac
     acted like a pharmacist who would surreptitiously change the contents
     of his bottles, change their number, and switch their labels, not to
     mention committing two forgeries in the process (p. 7).


     But the most spectacular of his manipulations was to be found on pages
42 and 43 of the _Album_.  Under the title "The Trickeries of the
_Auschwitz Album_," I circulated a short piece devoted to that deceit.  I
did not fail to send a copy of it to Editions du Seuil.  Here is what our
pharmacist had devised:  in order to try to make us believe that the route
taken by certain groups of deportees (women and children) ended at Krema II
and III and therefore, according to him, in the homicidal gas chambers, he
had provided, on page 42 of the _Album_, a plan of Birkenau from which he
had made a careful deletion to prevent the reader from seeing that in
reality these groups of deportees actually passed between the two Krema,
staying on the road leading to the large shower and disinfection center
called the Zentral Sauna until their arrival there. Caught red-handed,
Pressac followed a policy of silence for the next six years (1983-1989).
To those who had read my article and stubbornly demanded an explanation
from him, even to the point of telephoning him, his answer was to feign
ignorance:  he claimed he knew nothing of my article.  Now, with the
publication of his big book, he is forced to provide an explanation; by
doing so he just makes his case worse.

     The plan in which he deceptively made a cut in the route to the
Zentral Sauna is reproduced on page 421 of his big  book.  On pages 514 and
515, he tries to explain.  He begins by saying that in 1983 he had easily
been able to answer my criticism "in an article whose publication was not
deemed necessary."  He does not reveal to us who decided not to publish it,
and why.  I suggest that Pressac's answer was quite simply judged dreadful.
If I allow myself that suggestion, it is because the response that he
finally consents to give us in 1989 in his big book is pathetic and PROVES
HIS TRICKERY.  Pressac answers in effect that, in order to draw the plan
for which I reproached him, he had used "as a BASIS [emphasis added]" (p.
515) an authentic plan:  plan 3764 (p. 514).  I don't doubt it:  he did
take that "as a basis" and ADDED to it lines representing the avenues in
and around the camp, but taking great care to ... truncate the route
leading to the Zentral Sauna, in order to make us believe that the Jewish
women and children who took that route could go no farther than the
crematoria.  The deletion is flagrant.  The subterfuge is obvious.

     But there's more.  In  the original version of the _Auschwitz Album_,
the American edition, there was a photograph which may be described as
follows:  in the foreground, a group of four elderly Jews, three men and a
woman, are plainly having an altercation, while in the background,
indifferent to the scene, a scattered few German soldiers, wearing garrison
caps, are walking by.  This is photograph 109.   Pressac, deciding to make
this photograph "speak," moves it to the 189th and last place in the
sequence, where it is supposed to mark the acme of the extermination
horror.  And here, in his usual jargon, is the explanation of the
photograph:


          That photo is unique, terrible, and to be added to the file on
     the extermination of the Jews as evidence for the  prosecution [...].
     The footpath down which this woman is refusing to go ends at the door
     of [Krema] V, leading to the disrobing room and the gas chambers.  If
     the three men who are dragging her do not seem to suspect the fate
     that awaits them, she knows that the building which she is turning
     away from, that red brick building with its black roof and its two 16
     meter-high chimneys, has become the negation of life and stinks of
     death (_Auschwitz Album_, p. 204).


     In my 1983 article (p. 9), I observed:


          All that pathos cannot blind us to this:  there is no footpath,
     and we can't predict the direction this or that person might take;
     [Pressac] tells us nothing about the presence and the indifference, or
     inattention, of the German soldiers; how could the woman know that she
     is going to be gassed and the men not know that they are going to be
     gassed?  Finally and above all, IT IS PLAIN TO SEE THAT THE WOMAN IS
     TRYING NEITHER TO GET AWAY FROM THE MAN ON THE RIGHT NOR TO RESIST
     HIM:  SHE IS CLASPING HIS HAND IN HER OWN LEFT HAND.


     On page 421 of his big book of 1989, the subject of this review,
Pressac has altered his commentary on the photograph, writing:


          As for the woman's attitude, it could simply be that she, with no
     illusions about what is to happen and having seen the SS photographer,
     suddenly turned away, saying in effect "I don't want that [bastard of
     an] SS to photograph me!"  Such a reaction would not be surprising,
     for some of the Jewish children, less polite and more spontaneous than
     their parents, instinctively feeling that the SS wished them no good,
     pulled faces at the photographers.


     In other words, for one story Pressac substitutes another, and his
entire interpretation of the _Auschwitz Album_ collapses, since the
photograph deemed to represent the acme of horror has been reduced,
according to our manipulator himself, to showing us an old woman who ...
doesn't want her picture taken!

     Pressac reproaches me for not saying that the scene takes place near
Krema V.  As a matter of fact I did say so, since I quoted his mention of
that.  And I find it interesting that there is nothing secret about the
place:  as in many other photographs, both in that album and in his large
work, we see small groups of Jews, Germans and civilian workers all
peaceably rubbing elbows with each other.

     Pressac leaves unanswered in _Auschwitz:  Technique and Operation of
the Gas Chambers_ all the other rebukes of his trickery I addressed to him
in 1983 apropos the _Auschwitz Album_.  He thus compels me to repeat my
accusations today.


                              APPENDIX IV

                The Truncated Testimony of Hanna Reitsch

     Pressac takes note of the testimony of the German air ace, Hanna (and
not Hannah) Reitsch (1912-1979) as though it were evidence of the existence
of the gas chambers (p. 486).  In reality, Hanna Reitsch, at the end of
1944, saw an Allied pamphlet that mentioned gas chambers; she didn't
believe it.  AFTER the war, she came to believe it.  By the end of her
life, she no longer believed; Pressac is either ignorant, or pretends not
to know, of this last development.  The details of the case are
interesting.

     In October 1944, Peter Riedel, an aviator friend of Miss Reitsch, who
was then working in the German Embassy in Stockholm, received an Allied
propaganda pamphlet which touched on the gas chambers.  Deeply affected, he
brought it up to Hanna Reitsch at the "Aviation House" in Berlin.  The
latter, furious, told him that it was obviously a war propaganda
fabrication comparable to the enemy propaganda lies about the Germans
during World War I.  Riedel urged her to speak to Heinrich  Himmler about
it.  She went to see Himmler, who leafed through the brochure without
registering the slightest emotion.  He asked her:  "And you believe this,
Frau Hanna?"  She told him no, but added that countering it was imperative.
Himmler told her she was right.

     Pressac specifies that the English version of Hanna Reitsch's memoirs
(_Fliegen-mein Leben_) stops there, but remarks that in the French version
the text continues:  "A few days later, the information was denied in one
of the main German newspapers.  I learned from Peter Riedel that the same
denial had appeared in a Swedish newspaper.  It was only after 1945 that I
found out, and with what horror, that Himmler had lied to me, and that the
awful news was true."

     If Pressac had pursued his investigation a little further, and
especially if he had read Gerd Honsik's _Freispruch fur Hitler?  36
ungehorte Zeugen wider die Gaskammer_ (Acquittal for Hitler?  36 Unheard
Witnesses Testify Against the Gas Chambers) (Burgenlandischer Kulturverband
Wien, Postfach 11, 1142 Vienna, 1988), he could have discovered that (p.
132-138):


     1.  Himmler also said to Reitsch concerning that Allied accusation:
         "That [the gassing accusation] is the rope they'll hang us with if
         we lose"^23;

     2.  Hanna Reitsch had so far returned to her good sense that at the
end of life she supported the efforts of the Revisionists and, in
particular, those of an Austrian (whom she called "the courageous Friedl
Rainer") "against all the terrible atrocity lies" (letter dated 15
September 1977, reproduced by Gerd Honsik on p. 138 of his book).


     According to David Irving, the State of Israel is holding the
manuscript of Himmler's memoirs.  If that is true, why is this document
being shielded from the curiosity of historians and researchers?


                                 Notes

8.   See Appendix III, p. 167-171.

9.   This order from Hoess likewise confirms what I have said about the
     Hoess "confessions" (interview in _Storia Illustrata_, reprinted in
     Serge Thion, _Verite historique ou verite politique?_, La Vieille
     Taupe, 1980, p. 203, note 10).  Hoess "confessed" that the members of
     the Sonderkommando entered the "gas chambers" immediately after the
     "gassing" and pulled out the bodies, eating and smoking all the while
     - in other words, without wearing gas masks, something which would
     have been absolutely impossible.  On 2 April 1946, in his jail cell at
     Nuremberg, Hoess gave the following answers to his American
     interrogator, S. Jaari:

     Q:  But was it not quite dangerous work for these inmates to go into
     these chambers and work among the bodies and among the gas fumes?

     A:  No.

     Q:  Did they wear gas masks?

     A:  They had some, but they did not need them, as nothing ever
     happened.  (John Mendelsohn, editor, _The Holocaust_, 1982 vol. 12,
     page 113; _Pretrial Interrogation of R. Hoess_, 2 April 1946, page 17)

          The order of 12 August 1942, signed by Hoess and showing the
     considerable danger of a gassing operation, demonstrates that Hoess,
     when he was interrogated by the Americans four years later at the
     Nuremberg jail, gave some rather clumsy answers; he had been broken,
     as I have also been able to show, by his initial jailers and
     interrogators:  certain Jews from British military security who
     tortured him before sending him to Nuremberg.  Hoess feared more than
     anything being turned over to the Polish Communists (see Robert
     Faurisson, "How the British Obtained the Confession of Rudolf Hoess,
     Commandant of Auschwitz," _The Journal of Historical Review_, Winter
     1986-87, p. 389-403).

10.  Hospitals continued to exist in German cities, but to a large extent
     they were "evacuated" to the countryside where they took the form of
     medical barracks on the model of those that were built in the
     concentration camps.  On page 513 Pressac reproduces a plan of a
     hospital barracks at Auschwitz, giving as his source the Center for
     Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris.  In fact this is just
     another of the many documents he owes to me:  it comes from the U.S.
     National Archives and bears the Nuremberg file number NO-4470.

11.  The shame is that during the immediate postwar period this type of
     "imposed falsehood," or imposture, became law in the exact sense of
     the word; and today, once again, it carries the force of law for the
     French courts by virtue of the anti-Revisionist provisions of the
     Fabius-Gayssot law promulgated, under the signature of Francois
     Mitterrand, in the _Journal officiel de la Republique francaise_ on
     July 14, 1990.

12.  Here Pressac forgets that according to Pressac, Nyiszli has also used
     divisors!  And what is the meaning of "almost exactly"?  Lending his
     imprimatur to Pressac's number-cooking, Vidal-Naquet writes:  "The
     fact that today it can be stated that the statistics given in so
     important a testimony must be divided by four is a scholarly finding
     that we would be very wrong dismiss.  One doesn't diminish the crimes
     of the Nazis by rejecting false figures.  The question of the exact
     number of victims is not essential.  Arno Mayer says this, repeats it,
     and on this point I can only agree with him."  (From Vidal-Naquet's
     preface to the French edition of Arno Mayer's _Why Did the Heavens Not
     Darken?:  La "Solution finale" dans l'histoire_, ed. La Decouverte,
     1990, p. viii-ix).

13.  On the night of 3 October 1980 an explosion in front of a synagogue on
     the Rue de Copernic in Paris killed three persons and wounded a dozen
     more.  On 9 May 1990 graves in a Jewish cemetery at Carpentras in the
     south of France were violated in a particularly lurid manner.

          The French "far right" was accused of having perpetrated both
     attacks.  In each instance it was at length admitted that the
     rightists were blameless.  In the Rue Copernic case, it is universally
     conceded that the attack was carried out by a member of a Palestinian
     faction.  As to the Carpentras incident, numerous articles, even in
     the Jewish press, have subsequently described how the affair was
     distorted and blown out of proportion; all agree that the graves were
     desecrated, not by rightists, but by politically indifferent youths or
     by Jewish families desirous of "teaching a lesson" to the liberal Jews
     of Carpentras (the most serious violation was that of the corpse and
     grave of a Jew who had married a Catholic).

14.  It was due precisely to the proximity of the water table that the
     Leichenkeller of Krema II and III, instead of being completely
     underground beneath the crematory room proper, were only half below
     ground, adjacent to the crematory room.

15.  Nevertheless, I can reveal here for the first time that at the end of
     1978 I considered abandoning all further efforts at publication when I
     witnessed the ferocity with which the entire press, the academy and
     the courts denied me so much as the right to carry on a normal life.
     The Conseil d'Etat went so far as to declare, in October 1978, that I
     was a university professor with no publications to his credit, and
     that I had even confessed as much!  My isolation was complete.  The
     situation has changed a lot since those heroic days ...

16.  This is the figure of the "traditional historians," as Pressac calls
     them; Pressac himself gives no clear indications on the matter.

17.  "The shift boss (Vorarbeiter) wrote in a notebook the number of
     corpses incinerated per charge and the head of the Kommando
     (Kommandofuhrer), an SS man, checked these entries" (the testimony of
     Henryk Tauber, according to Pressac, p. 495).

18.  The book opens with an impressive list of patrons, beginning with "the
     Commission of the European Communities; the Socialist Group of the
     European Parliament; Mrs. Simone Veil, former President of the
     European Parliament" (p. 8), as well as political figures such as
     Jacques Delors.

19.  See Appendix III, p. 167-171.

20.  As we have remarked, Pressac's book constitutes a godsend for the
     Revisionists.  The latter have already produced several reviews, and
     are working on more:

        - Mark Weber, "_Auschwitz:  Technique and Operation of the Gas
     Chambers_, by Jean-Claude Pressac," _The Journal of Historical Review_,
     Summer 1990, p. 231-237;

        - Jack Wikoff, "_Auschwitz:  Technique and Operation of the Gas
     Chambers, by Jean-Claude Pressac_," _Remarks_ (P.O. Box 234, Aurora,
     NY 13026), p. 1-9;

        - Carlo Mattogno, "Jean-Claude Pressac and the War Refugee Board,"
     _The Journal of Historical Review_, Winter 1990-91, p. 461-485;

        - Enrique Aynat Eknes, "Neither Trace Nor Proof:  The Seven
     Auschwitz "Gassing" Sites," see this issue of _The Journal of
     Historical Review_, p. 177.

          The magazine _Instauration_ has announced its intention to
     publish an article on the Pressac book.  I suppose that eventually
     Fritz Berg will publish his ideas.  Berg is the author of three
     important technical studies, all published in _The Journal of
     Historical Review_:  "The Diesel Gas Chambers:  Myth Within a Myth"
     (Spring 1984, p. 15-46); "The German Delousing Chambers" (Spring 1986,
     p. 73-94); "Typhus and the Jews" (Winter 1988-89, p. 480-481).  It is
     thanks to Berg's savoir-faire that I was able to get a copy of
     Pressac's book in January 1990.

21.  Which, in plain English, means that this place could not have been a
     homicidal gas chamber since it did have a fanlight and since it lacked
     ventilation of any kind.

22.  1)  _The Auschwitz Album / Lili Jacob's Album_, edited by Serge
     Klarsfeld, mimeographed, distributed, "free of charge, to more than
     1,000 libraries and Jewish organizations" [S. Klarsfeld, August 5,
     1980].  2)  _The Auschwitz Album / A Book Based upon an Album
     Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, Lili Meier_, text by
     Peter Hellman, New York, Random House, 1981.

23.  Compare the report of Norbert Masur, an official of the Swedish branch
     of the World Jewish Congress, who met Himmler on 21 April 1945, a few
     days before the end of the war.  They had a long conversation.
     Heinrich Himmler told Masur:  "In order to contain the epidemics, we
     were forced to build crematoria where we could burn the corpses of
     countless people who passed away because of these diseases [typhus].
     And now, they want to put a noose around our necks"  (Norbert Masur,
     "My Meeting with Henirich Himmler," _Moment_ [a Jewish monthly
     magazine published in Boston], December 1985, page 51, which is a
     partial translation from the Swedish book _Ein Jude Talar med Himmler_
     [A Jew Talks with Himmler], Stockholm, Albert Bonniers Vorlag, 1945).


[end of article]


[Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box
1306, Torrance, CA 90505, USA.  Subscription rate: $40 per year, domestic.
$50 per year, foreign.]


     This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
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Public Access UNIX and Internet at (503) 220-0636 (1200/2400, N81)


Article 4752 of alt.revisionism:
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From: dgannon@kelly.techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
Newsgroups: soc.history,alt.censorship,alt.activism,alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.correct,alt.journalism.criticism,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.mideast
Subject: The Myth of the "Gassing" of the Serbs in the First World War
Date: 24 Oct 1993 04:25:17 -0700
Organization: TECHbooks - Public Access
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From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 11, Number 2 (Summer 1991):


                  A Request for Additional Information
                  on the Myth of the "Gassing" of the
                      Serbs in the First World War

                            ROBERT FAURISSON


     The myth of the "gassing" of the Jews during the Second World War is
only a recurrence--or a recycling--of a myth from the First World War:  that
of the "gassing" of Serbs by the Germans, the Austrians, and the Bulgarians.

    On March 22, 1916, the _London Daily Telegaph_ printed, on its page 7,
the following article:

___________________________________________________________________________

                          ATROCITIES IN SERBIA
                            700,000 VICTIMS

     ROME, Monday (6:45 p.m.).

     The Governments of the Allies have secured evidence and documents,
which will shortly be published, proving that Austria and Bulgaria have been
guilty of horrible crimes in Serbia, where the massacres committed were
worse than those perpetrated by Turkey in Armenia.

     The Italian government has today published the testimony of two Italian
prisoners who escaped from Austria through Serbia, and took refuge in
Romania.  What these two prisoners saw and learned, however, was nothing
compared with the evidence supplied by the Serbians themselves, and
communicated by M. Pasitch to the Italian Government and to the Pope.
According to reliable information, the victims of the Austrians and
Bulgarians exceeded 700,000.  Whole districts, with towns and villages, have
been depopulated by massacres.  Women, children, and old men were shut up in
the churches by the Austrians, and either stabbed with the bayonet or
suffocated by means of asphyxiating gas.  In one church in Belgrade 3,000
women, children, and old men were thus suffocated.

     Serbian refugees, not on oath, have stated that they were present at a
distribution of bombs and machines for producing asphyxiating gas to the
Bulgarians by the Germans and Austrians, who instructed the former how to
utilize these instruments to exterminate the Serbian population.  The
Bulgarians used this method at Nish, Pirot, Prizrend and Negotin, the
inhabitants of which places died of suffocation.  Similar means were
employed by the Austrians in several parts of Montenegro.
___________________________________________________________________________


     On June 25, 1942 the same newspaper went on to publish, on its page 5,
a comparable article under the following title:


                 GERMANS MURDER 700,000 JEWS IN POLAND
                        TRAVELLING GAS CHAMBERS


     During the First World War, Bernhard Guttmann was "correspondent and
contributor to the _Frankfurter Zeitung_."  On November 20, 1917 he met in
Berlin with Richard von Kuhlmann, state secretary in the Foreign Office.  R.
von Kuhlmann informed Guttmann of his pessimism as to the progress and the
outcome of the war.  He complained of the behavior of the Bulgarians, who
were allied to Germany and Austria:


     [State Secretary von Kuhlmann] reported how the Serbs are being
     "finished off" by them [the Bulgarians] with bureaucratic dispatch;
     they are brought, ostensibly to be cleaned, to delousing stations and
     eliminated with gas [_Schattenriss einer Generation_ (1888-1919),
     Stuttgart:  K.F. Kohler Verlag, 1950, p. 145-146].


     I am seeking help from _JHR_ readers able to provide additional
information on this myth from the First World War, particularly in the form
of research into contemporary press reports.  Information might also be
sought from the cultural services of Yugoslavia's embassies, consulates,
and other agencies.

[end of article]


[Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box
1306, Torrance, CA 90505, USA.  Subscription rate: $40 per year, domestic.
$50 per year, foreign.]


     This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.


                    Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
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-Dan Gannon

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Public Access UNIX and Internet at (503) 220-0636 (1200/2400, N81)


From oneb!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!destroyer!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!techbook.com!techbook.com!not-for-mail Sun Oct 17 20:08:33 PDT 1993
Article: 4604 of alt.revisionism
Xref: oneb soc.history:18214 alt.censorship:14180 alt.activism:29235 alt.revisionism:4604 alt.discrimination:10073 alt.conspiracy:21323 alt.politics.correct:6224 alt.journalism.criticism:1064 talk.politics.misc:97886 talk.politics.mideast:35852
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From: dgannon@techbook.techbook.com (Dan Gannon)
Newsgroups: soc.history,alt.censorship,alt.activism,alt.revisionism,alt.discrimination,alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.correct,alt.journalism.criticism,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.mideast
Subject: Neither Trace Nor Proof:  The Seven Auschwitz "Gassing" Sites
Date: 16 Oct 1993 02:37:11 -0700
Organization: TECHbooks - Public Access
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Summary: Response by Enrique Aynat to J.-C. Pressac's grotesque book.



>From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 11, Number 2 (Summer 1991):


                        Neither Trace Nor Proof:
                  The Seven Auschwitz "Gassing" Sites
                    According to Jean-Claude Pressac


                             ENRIQUE AYNAT
                        Translated by Tom Kerr



     The French author Jean-Claude Pressac has written a monumental
work--564 pages in large format, with hundreds of photographs, plans,
sketches, drawings and reproduced documents---on the creation, utilization
and destruction of seven Auschwitz-Birkenau installations which supposedly
once housed execution gas chambers.

     J.C. Pressac carried out an exhaustive on-site investigation.  During
the course of fifteen visits between 1979 and 1987, he spent some three
months in Oswiecim (the present name of Auschwitz).  He had complete freedom
of research in the State Museum of Auschwitz, as well as the full
collaboration of the museum authorities, in particular that of the chief
archivist, Tadeusz Iwaszko, to whom his book is dedicated.  Pressac further
obtained the support of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, who wrote the
introduction to his book and who conducted research for him in the archives
of the USSR and the German Democratic Republic.

     Pressac's book is ostensibly a "scientific rebuttal of those who deny
the gas chambers" (p. 12) and is in effect directed against the
Revisionists, whom he describes as "maniacs who spend their lives trying to
demonstrate that something never existed" (p. 16).  Despite his pretensions
to cold objectivity, the author's animosity towards the Revisionists is in
constant evidence throughout the book.  He goes so far as to assert that the
judicial actions brought against Revisionists, which he himself admits
"smacked of witchhunting" (p. 556), are the only "defensive option open to
the people who felt they were being 'attacked' by Faurisson's thesis" (p.
556).

     The present piece does not pretend to be an exhaustive critique of
Pressac's voluminous work; that would require a book of the same dimensions.
This article will deal briefly with the supposed execution gas chambers
which, according to Pressac, were to be found in seven distinct locations in
Auschwitz-Birkenau (Crematoria I, II, III, IV and V, and Bunkers 1 and 2)
and which he claims killed a million Jews.  My article focusses in
particular on Pressac's arguments concerning the "technique" and "operation"
of the gas chambers, which are precisely the aspects that figure in the
title of his work.

     In fine, the aim of my article has been to ascertain whether or not
Pressac's book provides anything at all with which to shore up the faltering
thesis that there were execution gas chambers at Auschwitz.  We must
emphasize the great importance of the French author's work in this
connection, since if the answer to the above question is no, it would be
clear that, 44 years after the war, and after examination of all available
documentation, there exists no single solid or valid piece of evidence
establishing the reality of any such homicidal installations.


                      Crematorium I of Auschwitz

     Crematorium I was installed for the purpose of incinerating the corpses
of inmates who died of natural causes, a matter, therefore, of a sanitary
installation.  According to the official thesis, at the end of 1941 the
mortuary of this crematorium was transformed into an execution gas chamber.

     Pressac acknowledges that there are very few German documents relating
to Crematorium I and that none of them provides any formal proof of
homicidal gassings in its mortuary.  So that "as evidence to establish the
reality of homicidal gassing there remain only the testimonies of the
participants" (p. 123).

     The testimonies selected by Pressac to prove the existence of a
homicidal gas chamber in Crematorium I are as follows:


     a)  Alter Fajnzylberg, a former prisoner at Auschwitz and a member of
the Sonderkommando (a group of prisoners charged with transporting and
incinerating the corpses).

     In his statement made in 1945, after the liberation of Auschwitz by the
Soviets, this witness made no allusion to a gas chamber.  According to
Fajnzylberg, the place where it was supposedly to be found was a "mortuary"
(Leichenhalle) which in fact served for storing corpses and also on occasion
for the execution of prisoners by means of firearms.  Moreover, in the brief
text reproduced by Pressac (p.124), there are two gross errors relating to
the dimensions of the place and the capacity of the crematory ovens.  These
errors, as the French author himself admits, demonstrate "the general
tendency to exaggerate at that time (in the years 1945-50)" (p. 126).

     In a new statement made before a notary in 1980, Fajnzylberg declared
that he "saw" a gassing in the Leichenhalle of the crematorium, even though
a bit further on he contradicts himself by admitting that he and his
companions had been locked up in a coke bunker (pp. 124-125).  In this
declaration, Fajnzylberg repeated exactly the same dimensions for the gas
chamber that he had given in 1945, which for Pressac is "a proof of the
sincerity and authenticity of his statements" (p. 126).


     b)  Filip Muller, former prisoner of Auschwitz and member of the
Sonderkommando.

     In the brief commentary that Pressac devotes to Muller's testimony (pp.
126-127), the supposed gas chamber is not even mentioned.  Instead, what
merits the author's attention is the statement of the witness regarding the
cross-section of the crematorium chimney.  Reading Pressac's text, we derive
the following:

     -F. Muller stated that the chimney was circular in cross-section.

     -The German documents indicate that the chimney was square in
     cross-section.

     -Despite that, F. Muller "is a valuable witness" (p. 127).


     Most important to emphasize, however, are the opinions that Pressac
himself holds with regard to F. Muller:


     -"Filip Muller is an important witness, but in choosing to describe
     material and precise facts in a book and in 1979 (1st German edition)
     he has accumulated errors, thus making his account historically
     dubious.  The best approach is to read it as a novel based on true
     history" (p. 181).

     -". . . Filip Muller's account was recorded too late and included
     involuntary errors and embellishments, and perhaps even lies . . ." (p.
     380).


     After taking the foregoing into account, I find it incomprehensible
that Pressac should have presented this witness "as evidence to establish
the reality of homicidal gassing."


     c) Rudolf Hoess, the first commander of Auschwitz.

     In the memoirs written during his captivity in Poland, R. Hoess stated
that he had been present at the gassing of 900 Russian war prisoners in the
mortuary of Crematorium 1.  Hoess explains that "while the trucks were
unloading, a number of holes were made in the stone and concrete walls of
the morgue."^1  These details seem "unlikely" to Pressac (p. 127).
Actually, to maintain that it was possible to put 900 people in the 78.2
square meters of the gas chamber and that holes for introducing poison gas
were drilled at top speed through the 10-to-15-centimeter-thick concrete
walls while the victims were getting off the trucks goes beyond rationality.
But Pressac attempts to justify Hoess's statement in the following manner:


     Hoess participated in the "special actions" strictly in accordance with
     the almost insurmountable tasks imposed by the exponential growth of
     his camp, thus not allowing his conscience to dwell on the moral
     questions.  HE WAS PRESENT, WITHOUT SEEING.  In the author's opinion,
     this attitude explains the involuntary errors found throughout his
     autobiography (p. 128, emphasis in the original).


     Against Pressac's attempted justification, we may advance the following
objections:


     -Hoess himself stated in his memoirs that:


     the prisoners were killed by means of gas in the cells of block 11.  I
     was present at the scene, protected by a gas mask.  So great was the
     crowding in the cells that the gas had hardly entered before the
     victims died.  A brief half-smothered scream and it was all over.  I
     was perhaps too moved by this first sight of killing with gas to become
     clearly and fully aware of what I was seeing.  On the other hand, I
     remember WITH THE GREATEST EXACTNESS the way in which, a bit later, the
     nine hundred Russians were killed with gas [in Crematorium 1]^2
     (emphasis added).


     -Elsewhere in his memoirs, R. Hoess repeats 900 as the number of
Russians gassed.^3

     -No less untenable is the thesis that R. Hoess was so occupied with the
tasks deriving from expansion of the camp that he lost his capacity for
observation.  Hoess himself says that it would be:


     . . . a mistake to imagine that taking part in this extermination, with
     everything that it involved, was accepted as an ordinary happening,
     like any other.  With very few exceptions, all those who took part in
     it, and I most of all, came away with indelible impressions and plenty
     of material for reflection.^4


     Furthermore, exterminating Jews was the most important of all the tasks
entrusted to R. Hoess, and it could scarcely take second place to work
proceeding from expansion of the camp.  As a matter of fact, it was Himmler
in person who had given him the order:  "It is you who will take over the
task.  It is a tough and painful job that awaits you:  put your whole being
into it and the difficulties that present themselves will be as nothing."^5

     Consequently, Pressac's justification of Hoess's testimony, teeming as
it is with these incongruities, is just not convincing.

     In any event, the important thing here is that Pressac offers, as proof
of the existence of a homicidal gas chamber in Crematorium I, testimony
containing at least two obvious falsehoods.  In the last analysis, it should
suffice to point out that if R. Hoess was in reality present "without
seeing," why is he presented as a witness?


     d)  Pery Broad, former member of the SS garrison of Auschwitz.

     Pressac acknowledges that the testimony of this one-time SS member
"raises problems yet to be solved" (p. 128).  Specifically, "the form and
tone of his declaration sound false.  His writings can not be the faithful
reflection of the thoughts of an SS man and indeed reading them gives the
impression that they were written by a former prisoner" (p. 128).  It is
Pressac's opinion that Pery Broad's declaration "has been 'slightly'
reworked by the Poles" (p. 128, quotation marks in the original).  Should
any doubts remain, Pressac later on hammers home the point:


          "HISTORICALLY, THIS ACCOUNT IS NOT EXPLOITABLE IN ITS PRESENT
     VERSION [...]  After assessing its reliability, no conscientious
     historian will be able to use it unless and until the 'declaration' has
     been stripped of the Polish influence, or in other words until the
     original is published" (p. 162, emphasis in the original).


     Why Pressac, the above reservation notwithstanding, has offered this
testimony as proof of the existence of a homicidal gas chamber, remains to
this writer an enigma.

     To sum up, Pressac acknowledges that there is no documentary evidence
to establish a homicidal gassing in the supposed gas chamber of Crematorium
I of Auschwitz.  In lieu of that, the French author provides the testimonies
of four witnesses.  These testimonies, however, all either show "the general
tendency to exaggerate at that time" (A. Fajnzylberg); include "involuntary
errors and embellishments, and perhaps even lies" (F. Muller); come from
someone who "was present, without seeing" (R. Hoess); or "have been
'slightly' reworked by the Poles" so that they are not serviceable in their
present version (P. Broad).

     The conclusion follows that, insofar as concerns the sources provided
by Pressac, the existence of a homicidal gas chamber in Crematorium I of
Auschwitz must be considered historically unfounded.

     Lastly, Pressac offers the results of the chemical analysis of samples
taken by the American engineer Fred Leuchter^6 in the supposed gas chamber
of Crematorium I as proof of the practice of homicidal gassings (p. 133).
Leuchter had found in 6 of the 7 samples a trace presence of cyanide.^7  To
be sure, our author ought to have pointed out that the report of the
American engineer categorically denies the existence of any execution gas
chamber either in Crematorium I of Auschwitz or in the four crematoria of
Birkenau.  The most important thing to be emphasized, however, is that
Leuchter took one of his samples in an area that had been a washroom, which
had never been part of the supposed gas chamber, and was separated from it
by a gas-tight door.  The partition wall that separated the washroom from
the supposed gas chamber was eliminated by the Poles after the war.  The
analysis of this sample reveals a presence of cyanide comparable to that of
most of the other samples.  In short, the amount of cyanide found in a
sample taken from a place that had never served as a gas chamber was similar
to that detected in the samples taken from the supposed gas chamber.  If the
mortuary had really been a gas chamber, cyanide ought to have been detected
in the samples taken from there, and by the same token nothing should have
been detected in the sample obtained from the former washroom; or rather a
minute amount of cyanide should have been found in the former washroom (from
contingent disinfestation with hydrocyanic acid) and a much larger quantity
in the gas chamber.  What proves to be inexplicable from the
Exterminationist point of view is the finding of similar amounts of cyanide
in both places.

     Therefore, and contrary to what Pressac tells us, the results of the
Leuchter report constitute solid evidence of the nonexistence of a gas
chamber in Crematorium I of Auschwitz.


                                Bunker 1

     As Pressac himself acknowledges, there remain no ruins, and neither
documents nor plans of this supposed installation with its homicidal gas
chamber.  Consequently, the "information that has reached us on this
provisional installation is scanty and based only on the testimonies of the
few survivors" (p. 162).

     Pressac cites six testimonies.  Four of them come from former prisoners
(Szlam Dragon, Maurice Benroubi, Milton Buki and Moshe Garbarz) and two from
members of the SS (Pery Broad and Rudolf Hoess).

     Let us first look at the description of the supposed homicidal
installation given us by the witnesses.


     a)  S. Dragon:  "a small brick house divided into just two parts and
able to contain altogether 2,000 naked persons.  These rooms each had one
entrance door and a small window" (p. 161).


     b)  P. Broad:  according to Pressac, P. Broad never described Bunker 1
(p. 165).


     c)  M. Benroubi:  "There were two big concrete blocks [the buildings
known as 'Bunker 1'--Pressac's note] at least 20 m. wide and perhaps as many
long [...]  One morning, the doors of the Bunkers, as they called them, were
open.  I noticed that there were shower heads and along the wall clothes
hooks"  (p. 162).

     Further on he indicates that the "Bunker was a brick-built house, with
the windows filled in" (p. 163).


     d)  M. Buki:  the Bunker was "a brick farmhouse" (p.  163).  The lethal
gas was introduced through "a little chimney" (p. 164).


     e)  M. Garbarz:  "a sort of barn closed on three sides, identical to
those where our farmers keep the hay" (p. 164).


     f)  R. Hoess:  "All the rooms--there were five in all--were filled at
the same time; the airtight doors were locked with a key, and the contents
of the cans of gas were put in through the skylights.

     "At the end of half an hour, the doors were opened--there were two in
each room--and the dead were removed and taken to the ditches."^8

     Bunker 1 could hold 800 persons.^9


     Contradictions abound in these testimonies.  Thus, regarding its
exterior aspect, Bunker 1 was:


     -"a small brick house" (S. Dragon)

     -"two [?] big concrete blocks" (M. Benroubi)

     -"a sort of barn closed on three sides" (M. Garbarz).


And as for its capacity, it had room for:


     -2,000 persons (S. Dragon)

     -800 persons (R. Hoess).


The lethal agent was introduced:


     -through "a small window" in every gas chamber, according to S. Dragon,
     even though the plan of this installation made on the basis of his
     testimony has two windows in each chamber (p. 161).

     -through a little chimney" (M. Buki).


Bunker 1 had:


     -two gas chambers (S. Dragon)

     -five gas chambers (R. Hoess).


The gas chambers had:


     -one door each (S. Dragon)

     -two doors each (R. Hoess).


     Pressac concludes by affirming that the purpose of Bunker 1, "the
extermination of human beings by gassing, cannot be called into question, if
only because of the constant repetition of an identical process in the
accounts of former prisoners, unless like certain Revisionists of bad faith
we claim that the witnesses were all lying, including the SS" (p. 165).

     This conclusion can not be defended.  In the first place, the
testimonies of the former prisoners all share a great vagueness.  We can
scarcely speak of "an identical process" when Pressac himself admits that it
"is impossible to make a synthesis of all these accounts" (p. 165).
Secondly, the Revisionists do not say that the witnesses lie in every case.
It is enough for them to observe that some testimonies, like that of P.
Broad (as Pressac himself acknowledges), have been "'slightly' reworked by
the Poles."

     In short, as authority for the existence and functioning of a gas
chamber in Bunker 1, Pressac provides only six testimonies.  These
testimonies are generally very vague, and when by exception they are
specific on some point or another, contradictions arise.  Ergo, based on the
sources provided by Pressac, it is not possible in the case of Bunker 1 to
maintain the historic reality of any execution gas chambers.


                                Bunker 2

     According to the official thesis, Bunker 2 was a farmhouse in which a
number of homicidal gas chambers had been installed.  It was in operation
from the summer of 1942 until the spring of 1943.  In the summer of 1944 it
was again put into operation in order to assist in the extermination of
the Hungarian Jews.

     Pressac cites the following testimonies in his treatment of Bunker 2:


     a)  Szlam Dragon, considered the principal witness by the French
author.

     In 1945 Dragon described Bunker 2 as "a cottage covered with thatch,
its windows bricked in [...]  The interior of the cottage was divided into
four parts by partition walls running across it, one of which could contain
1,200 naked people, the second 700, the third 400 and the fourth 200 to 250"
(p. 171).

     Two items in the testimony, the interior division and the capacity, are
demolished by Pressac himself.  With regard to the number of rooms, the
French author exhibits a reconstruction of Bunker 2 based on the actual
ruins which clearly shows EIGHT of these rooms (pp. 174 and 175).  With
reference to the number of persons put into the Bunker, from 2,500 to 2,550,
Pressac reckons that a physically impossible density of 28 persons per
square meter (Bunker 2 had an area of 90 square meters) and thus believes
that the witness was following "the tendency to exaggerate which seems to
have been the general rule at the time of the liberation" (p. 171).

     Nonetheless, 27 years later, in 1972, S. Dragon again testified in a
celebrated trial against two former SS men, and his declaration was so
disordered (he confused the Bunker with a crematorium) that the session had
to be interrupted.  Pressac justifies this by saying that the "intervening
time had done its work, a blessing for the witness, a disaster for justice
and for History.  I have added this anecdote to show the irreplaceable value
of early testimony.  Afterwards, witnesses constantly go over the same
story, altering it as the years go by" (p. 172).

     In short, Pressac finds it easy to justify the errors, falsehoods and
absurdities of the testimonies.  If the latter are from the immediate
postwar period, they demonstrate "the tendency to exaggerate" characteristic
of that era; but if they were given many years later, it turns out that time
has altered the memory of the witnesses.  Moreover, it is not to be
understood that Pressac is alluding to the "irreplaceable value of early
testimony" when he has just said that it suffers from a "tendency to
exaggerate."


     b) Pery Broad.

     Even though Pressac had made clear that the account of this former
member of the SS "is not exploitable in its present version" (p. 162), he
does not hesitate to "exploit it" now and again.


     c) Rudolf Hoess.

     There is only one reference in the memoirs of R. Hoess to Bunker 2:
"Bunker 2 was the larger and could hold about 1200 people" (p. 174).  This
information is refuted by Pressac himself when he says that the stated
capacity corresponded to 13 persons per square meter, "a physically
impossible density" (p. 174).


     d)  Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor deported to Auschwitz.

     Dr. Nyiszli's declaration makes reference to the functioning of Bunker
2 in its final stage, during the summer of 1944.  In contradiction to all
the other testimonies, Dr. Nyiszli affirms that there were no gas chambers
in Bunker 2, but rather a dressing room where the people who were going to
be shot and incinerated in an adjacent trench could leave their clothes (p.
177).  Despite that, Pressac acknowledges the "validity" of Dr. Nyiszli's
account (p. 179).


     e) David Olere, former prisoner of Auschwitz.

     Pressac reproduces a sketch by D. Olere showing the operation of Bunker
2 as a gas chamber in the summer of 1944.

     Pressac admits that the little hill that appears in the sketch is
fictitious and was introduced by the witness "for artistic reasons only" (p.
178).  One notices as well that although this is supposedly a summer scene,
the SS men are wearing overcoats.  Nonetheless, for our author the scene is
"of such remarkable precision as to be almost as good as a photograph" (p.
178).

     We need to call attention to a contradiction that Pressac falls into
here:  the scene sketched by D. Olere, which represents, so to speak, the
prolegomenon to a homicidal gassing, is of photographic fidelity; at the
same time, Dr. Nyiszli's description, which is contemporaneous with that of
Olere and yet reflects a totally different extermination procedure, is also
valid.


     f) Filip Muller.

     Here it will suffice to reiterate Pressac's opinion of this witness:
"Filip Muller is an important witness, but in choosing to describe material
and precise facts in a book and in 1979 (1st German edition) he has
accumulated errors, thus making his account historically dubious" (p. 181).

     Conclusion:  as in the two previous cases, it is not possible to
establish historically the existence of a homicidal gas installation at
Bunker 2 on the basis of the testimonies provided by author Pressac.


                   Crematoria II and III of Birkenau

     The official thesis holds that an execution gas chamber was in
operation in Crematorium II from March of 1943 until November of 1944, and
that in Crematorium III, the former's twin, there was likewise a homicidal
gas chamber, which operated from June of 1943 to November of 1944.
According to Pressac, around 750,000 Jews, three fourths of the victims of
Auschwitz, were murdered and cremated in these two installations.

     The initial plan for one of these crematoria was laid out in November
of 1941.  A normal crematorium, with no criminal implications, was
contemplated (p. 183).  Later, the Germans presumably made the decision to
construct two of these crematoria, but to modify them for criminal purposes
by converting one of their underground mortuaries (Leichenkeller 2) into a
dressing room where the victims would disrobe, and the other (Leichenkeller
1) into an execution gas chamber (p. 184).  This decision was supposedly
made at the end of June of 1942.  According to Pressac:


     30th June 1942 marks a turning point in the history of Birkenau, for
     while there may have been some extermination of Jews before this, it
     was on an ad hoc and totally improvised basis, whereas henceforth it
     was to be carried out on an industrial basis (p. 184).


     And yet the true "turning point" in the history of Auschwitz surely
came about a year before that, on the 29th of July of 1941, when R. Hoess,
the first commander of Auschwitz, supposedly received the order to
exterminate the Jews.^10  Contrary to what Pressac says, the extermination
of the Jews was not carried out in a makeshift way before June of 1942.
Quite the contrary, after receiving the order to exterminate the Jews, R.
Hoess immediately set about planning the procedure to be followed together
with a high SS functionary and specialist on the Jewish question, Adolf
Eichmann.  Hoess had anticipated that "multitudes," "considerable masses"
and "massive convoys" of Jews would be annihilated in Auschwitz.  It was
agreed that a farmhouse near Birkenau (Bunker 1) would be "especially
appropriate for the purpose in question."^11  A little later Hoess sent
Himmler "a detailed plan of the site and an exact description of the
projected installations."^12  Himmler gave this his approval.^13  All of
this, according to the context, occurred between August and November of
1941.

     So we have the Germans on the one hand making preparations to
annihilate great masses of Jews in an installation specifically got ready
for the purpose (Bunker 1) and on the other hand designing a large
crematorium without criminal intent.  Pressac's thesis thus brings us to the
paradox that on June 30, 1942 the Germans decided to change over from a
"makeshift" extermination, which they were carrying out in an installation
specially set up for mass killing, to an "industrial" extermination that
they would carry out in crematoria conceived with no criminal purpose.

     Pressac's thesis leads, moreover, to another paradox.  It is known that
the Germans built crematoria to incinerate corpses and thereby avoid the
less hygienic burial process, which could facilitate the spread of
epidemics.  Yet they envisioned burial for the victims of Bunker 1.^14
Thus, the Germans had planned on a crematorium to incinerate the
comparatively small number of prisoners who died of natural causes, and at
the same time they omitted this hygienic measure for the presumably much
larger number of corpses which would result from the extermination by poison
gas.

     On the other hand, Crematoria II and III had been planned with three
basement mortuaries (Leichenkeller) each, in which the dead were kept prior
to cremation.  Pressac assumes these mortuaries were employed as follows:


          a) Leichenkeller 3 was to be the reception morgue, where the
     prison numbers of the corpses would be recorded;

          b) Leichenkeller 2 was to be temporary storage for newly arrived
     and recorded corpses awaiting cremation (delay of 3 or 4 days);

          c) Leichenkeller 1 was to take corpses several days old, beginning
     to decompose and thus requiring the room to be well ventilated, to be
     incinerated as soon as possible (p. 284).


     Pressac maintains that the crematoria were later modified for criminal
purposes.  As has already been indicated, the basement morgues were
converted, one into a dressing room (Leichenkeller 2) and another into a
homicidal gas chamber (Leichenkeller 1).  Leichenkeller 3 disappeared.  So,
according to the French author's thesis, the crematoria needed mortuaries
for storing corpses until cremation only when they had to be concerned about
natural deaths in the camp; and on the other hand, they didn't need them
when they had to contend with the much greater number of corpses "produced"
by the gas chamber.  In other words, following Pressac, cremation was a slow
process when it involved prisoners who died of natural causes, since space
was lacking to store the corpses prior to cremation; and yet it was a
super-fast process in the case of extermination, because then, despite a
much larger number of corpses, there was no need to store them.  Let us now
take a look at the extermination process that was supposedly carried out in
these crematoria.

     The first thing that gives surprise is the scant space Pressac allots
to this matter, since, according to the title of his work ("Technique and
Operation of the Gas Chambers"), it ought to have received a much more
extensive treatment.  Of the 196 pages which Pressac devotes to the study of
Crematoria I and II, there is less than half a page of text ("The use of the
Krematorien for the 'resettlement' of Jews unfit for work," p. 253) and a
page of drawings (p. 258) focussing specifically on the method of
extermination.

     Pressac indicates that the extermination proceeded in groups of 1,000
to 1,500 people at a time (p. 253).  However, all the testimonies reproduced
by the author cite much higher figures:  3,000 according to R. Hoess^15 and
M. Nyiszli (p. 473), 2,500 according to H. Tauber (p. 494) and 2,000
according to C. S. Bendel (pp. 469 and 471).  Pressac does not tell us on
what sources he bases his own figures, so that they must be considered mere
suppositions.  And since he is making suppositions, why pick a figure of
1,000 to 1,500?  Why couldn't it be 500?  Or 100?  Or any other number?

     According to the French author, the route followed by the victims
within the crematorium was as follows:  first they entered the dressing
room, where they disrobed.  Then they passed through a little vestibule and
entered the gas chamber.  Once the 1,000 or 1,500 persons were within the
210 square meters of the gas chamber, then came the introduction of the
lethal agent, Zyklon B (an insecticide composed of hydrocyanic acid) through
four holes in the roof.  The amount of Zyklon B introduced was 40 times the
lethal dose per person.  In five minutes at most, the victims were dead (p.
253).  Immediately thereafter the ventilation began:


          The air extraction system was then switched on for at least 20 to
     30 minutes, for there was a great deal of poisoned air still in the
     chamber, the amount absorbed by the victims being minimal.  The
     gas-tight door was then unbolted and opened, and the work of extracting
     the corpses began immediately (p. 253).


     Elsewhere Pressac states that after "15 minutes of ventilation the air
in the room would be completely renewed" (p. 16).

     It is my opinion that, on the contrary, not only would the supposed gas
chamber be full of hydrocyanic acid even after 20 or 30 minutes of
ventilation, but that even the structure itself presented such difficulties
for carrying out mass homicidal gassings on a habitual basis, that the
actual practice of such an operation would certainly have ended
disastrously, for the following reasons:


-The ventilation system of the supposed gas chamber was in reality
appropriate for a mortuary that needed to be aired out in order to eliminate
the bad odor produced by the decomposition of the corpses.  But as Pressac
acknowledges, the system was not the most appropriate for ventilating a gas
chamber:


          The ventilation system of Leichenkeller 1 had initially been
     DESIGNED FOR A MORGUE, with the fresh air entering near the ceiling and
     the cold unhealthy air being drawn out near the floor.  Its use as a
     gas chamber really required the reverse situation, with the fresh air
     coming in near the floor and warm air saturated with hydrocyanic acid
     being drawn out near the ceiling (p. 224, emphasis in the original).


     This system presented yet another difficulty.  The poison gas had to
exit through holes, located just above the floor, which led to a
"ventilation conduit" (Entluftungskanal).  These holes were small according
to the testimony of H. Tauber, former member of the Sonderkommando (p. 484).
Given the crowding that existed in the gas chamber, with from 1,000 to 1,500
people in 210 square meters of space, the welter of corpses brought about by
the gassing might easily have obstructed these little holes, so that the
ventilation would have become difficult or impossible.

     These two problems could easily have been avoided had the Germans
merely reversed the intake and exhaust airflow when they converted the
morgue into a gas chamber.


-Leichenkeller 1 and 2 were each equipped with a ventilation system powered
by electric motors.  Leichenkeller 2--the "dressing room"--with a volume of
902.7 cubic meters, was equipped with a 7.5 horsepower motor; Leichenkeller
1--the alleged gas chamber--with a volume of 506 cubic meters, had a 3.5
horsepower motor (pp. 286, 360 and 361).  From this it follows that the
dressing room had a ventilation system that was, actually as well as
proportionately, faster and more powerful than that of the gas chamber.
This situation would have been normal for morgues (or mortuaries), from
which the odor of the decomposing bodies has to be removed.  Leichenkeller
2, the larger of the two mortuaries, would have been equipped with a larger
motor.  What is not logical is that the Germans should have installed a
faster and more powerful ventilation system in the dressing room, where it
wouldn't have been strictly necessary, rather than in the gas chamber, where
it would have been essential to eliminate rapidly--in 20 or 30 minutes--all
traces of hydrocyanic acid in order to enable the removal of the bodies.
Comparing the power of the two motors thus gives a strong indication that
the Germans did not convert Leichenkeller 1 into a gas chamber.


-Ventilation of the gas chamber within 15, 20, or 30 minutes is highly
improbable.  Pressac cites the testimony of a former prisoner of Auschwitz,
A. Rablin, who participated in delousing with Zyklon B.  This was done in an
improvised gas chamber located in Block 3 of Auschwitz.  The delousing
chamber was approximately 300 cubic meters in volume and was equipped with
an exhaust fan and seven windows for ventilation.  The concentration of
hydrocyanic acid used in the delousing process was from 0.05 to 0.1 per
cent.  Under these conditions the ventilation lasted two hours (p. 25).

     Let us compare these circumstances with those of the supposed homicidal
gas chamber of Crematoria II and III.  In this case the area was larger,
some 506 cubic meters, and the ventilation system, as we have seen,
functioned in a way that was the opposite of what would have been desirable.
The vents for exhausting the toxic agent were next to the floor, so that
they could be partially or totally obstructed by the hodgepodge of corpses.
There were no windows in the place.  The concentration of hydrocyanic acid
employed was 1 per cent (p.18), ten to twenty times stronger than that used
in the delousing process.

     The above comparison thus gives rise to another anomaly:  the delousing
chamber, of smaller volume, with an exhaust fan and seven windows, and
contending with a far weaker concentration of hydrocyanic acid, presumably
required more time to be ventilated than the supposed homicidal gas chamber,
which was larger, which had an inadequate ventilation system, which lacked
windows and which used a far higher concentration of hydrocyanic acid.


-The nature of the presumed toxic agent, Zyklon B, would have involved a
grave problem when the time came to remove the corpses.

     Zyklon B consists of pure hydrocyanic acid in liquid form, chemically
stabilized and absorbed into a porous and inert base, generally in the form
of disks or small cubes of wood pulp.^16

     The hydrocyanic acid evaporates from the porous base, its rate of
evaporation varying under different conditions of temperature and humidity.
The process is a relatively slow one.  Exposure times for Zyklon B vary
greatly.  Its manufacturers have established a minimum of two hours and a
maximum of 72.^17  Because of the possibility that the inert base containing
the Zyklon may go on emitting hydrocyanic acid even after many hours of
exposure, the manufacturers insist that the tins (Zyklon is marketed in
tins) and all traces of base must be removed before the treated area can be
reoccupied.^18

     Therefore, on opening the door of the gas chamber to remove the dead
bodies, an operation that was carried out approximately 20 minutes (p. 16)
or 30 minutes (p. 253) after the introduction of the Zyklon B, the base
would go on emanating hydrocyanic acid, thereby contaminating the rest of
the building.  And if the Germans had wished to avoid this situation by
removing the disks or little cubes of wood immediately after opening the
door, they would have faced two more problems.  In the first place, the
jumble of corpses, from 5 to 7 bodies per square meter according to
Pressac's estimate, would make access to the scattered residues very
difficult.  And in the second place, the porous base of the Zyklon B, which
was supposedly thrown into the interior of four columns of wire mesh, could
not be removed after the gassing anyway.  Pressac's own reconstruction of
one of these mesh columns includes no opening through which to extract the
base (p. 487).


-After removal of the corpses from the gas chamber, the next procedure was
hauling them to the crematory room for incineration.  Given that
Leichenkeller 1 was below ground and the ovens were at ground level, a
freight elevator had been installed.  According to Pressac, at first a
provisional elevator with a capacity of three or four corpses was used.
Later the workers used a permanent elevator, capable of lifting 10 or 15
bodies at a time (p. 253).  From that we may infer that in order to take
1,000 or 1,500 corpses up to the ovens with the provisional freight
elevator, 67 to 100 trips would be required.  If we consider hypothetically
that the process of loading, ascending, and unloading the corpses and taking
the freight elevator back down took five minutes, it would have required a
half day's incessant labor to get all the corpses to the ovens.  In any
case, it is evident that the work of hoisting so many bodies in such a small
freight elevator would have been most cumbersome, and that the Germans could
easily have avoided such a nuisance by building the gas chamber at ground
level.  Besides, building a gas chamber below ground was harder work and
more expense.  The excavation and construction took place in marshy ground,
requiring that the floor, ceiling and walls all be waterproofed with a
material which was both scarce and costly during the war.

     Thus we are confronted by a train of evidence that gives very strong
support to the hypothesis that the Germans not only designed Leichenkeller 1
as a mortuary, but also constructed it and used it as for just that purpose.


Conclusions:

-The results that follow from Pressac's thesis are neither logical nor
credible.  According to the French author, the Germans designed Crematoria
II and III with no criminal intent, even though they were later converted to
carry out mass extermination.  This criminal transformation was indeed
peculiar, in that no modification was made in the ventilation system of the
mortuary, although it was anything but adequate for a gas chamber.  In spite
of this, and notwithstanding that the Germans had conceived other
installations expressly for extermination purposes, Crematoria II and III
were used to annihilate and incinerate 750,000 Jews, three quarters of the
alleged victims of Auschwitz.


-Several indications reinforce our hypothesis that not only was
Leichenkeller 1 conceived as a mortuary--which even Pressac admits--but that
it was also constructed as such, and in a form that would have made its
utilization as a homicidal gas chamber difficult, if not impossible.

     The procedure for the ongoing mass extermination of human beings in
Crematoria II and III, as described by Pressac, would have been
impracticable.


                    Crematoria IV and V of Birkenau

     Crematoria IV and V were twins.  According to Pressac, three or four
homicidal gas chambers functioned in each of them.  Crematorium IV went into
service in March of 1943 and operated until October of 1944, when it was set
on fire during a prisoner revolt.  Crematorium V was in operation from April
of 1943 to January of 1945 (p. 379).

     Unlike Crematoria II and III, Crematoria IV and V "were designed as
criminal instruments," although "modifications introduced in the course of
their construction and operation made their operating sequence absurd" (p.
447).  This is an astonishing revelation.  Accepting it would result in the
following paradox:  Crematoria II and III were designed with no criminal
aim, although modifications introduced during the course of their
construction made them both into such efficient human slaughterhouses that
they annihilated three quarters of the victims of Auschwitz.  On the other
hand, Crematoria IV and V were designed as criminal instruments, although
the modifications introduced during the course of their construction
transformed their sequence of operations into an absurdity.  In other words,
the architects and technicians of Auschwitz were simultaneously very stupid
and very clever.  Very clever when they transformed ordinary crematoria into
prodigious instruments of mass extermination, and very stupid when they made
alterations in facilities expressly for mass slaughter, rendering them
unusable.

     Moreover, if--as Pressac points out--the procedure followed in these
crematoriums was "irrational and ridiculous," and if the "natural
ventilation was badly oriented and dangerous," and if the introduction of
the poison "resembled a circus act" (p. 386), then it is not difficult to
imagine that the extermination process would have been, of necessity, a
disaster.

     The annihilation was carried out in groups of 2,400 people at a time
(p. 384).  Pressac does not explain why in these crematoria, with gas
chambers 240 square meters in area and a crematory oven with eight muffle
furnaces, the operation proceeded in groups of 2,400 people, whereas in
Crematoria II and III, with gas chambers of similar dimensions (210 square
meters) and practically twice the cremation capacity (15 muffle furnaces),
it was carried out in groups of 1,000 to 1,500 victims.

     According to Pressac, the extermination process followed this sequence:
the Jews entered into a large hall and disrobed; once undressed, the 2,400
victims were directed to the three gas chambers, into which they were packed
until there were 10 persons to each square meter.

     According to the testimony of a survivor, Dr. Bendel, the process was
somewhat different.  The victims disrobed outside the crematorium and
entered the large hall (for what purpose?).  Later they turned and went back
the way they had come and were directed to the gas chambers.  The 2,400
victims traversed the narrow passageway between the large hall and the gas
chambers amidst an "indescribable chaos," since they had a premonition of
"the death that awaited them" (p. 470).

     Once the victims were in the gas chambers and the doors locked, the SS
men flung in Zyklon B through windows that were reached with a stepladder.
The SS on duty would open the window with one hand and throw in the contents
of the tin with the other, which, in  Pressac's words, constituted a "circus
act."  This operation had to be repeated six times for each gas chamber,
since each one had six windows (p. 386).  Notwithstanding that the
installations were conceived for criminal purposes, no such devices as the
wire-mesh columns of Crematoria II and III had been provided.

     About 30 minutes after the Zyklon B was dropped in, the doors were
opened, Pressac says, for ventilation (p. 384).  Inexplicably, these gas
chambers had only natural ventilation (p. 16), which means that they ought
to have been aired out for a period of at least 10 hours.^19  Nevertheless,
the removal of the corpses followed immediately, since, according to Dr.
Bendel's testimony, they were still warm (p. 470).

     Under these conditions, however, a catastrophe would have taken place.
30 minutes after the Zyklon B had been thrown in, there would still have
been a high concentration of hydrocyanic acid in the gas chambers.  On an
average, the amount of Zyklon B that the Germans employed was 40 times the
fatal human dosage (p. 18).  Accordingly, when the Sonderkommando opened the
door to remove the dead bodies, dispersion of the hydrocyanic acid and
contamination of the entire building would have occurred inevitably.  In
short, under the stated conditions the extermination process in Crematoria
IV and V would have been impossible.

     Furthermore, Pressac points out that the delousing chambers of
Auschwitz and Birkenau, which also functioned with Zyklon B, had at least
one fan for ventilation (pp. 24, 25, 27, 31, 41 and 53), making it even more
incomprehensible that the SS failed to equip the gas chambers of Crematoria
IV and V with the same.

     As if it didn't matter, although natural ventilation was all that was
available, in their construction the Germans had taken no account of the
prevailing winds, so that, as Pressac acknowledges, ventilation "was slow
and inefficient, with the attendant risk of contaminating the rooms giving
onto the vestibule if there should be a sudden gust of wind from the west"
(p. 386).


     From all the foregoing, two conclusions may be drawn:


-Pressac's thesis that the SS made so many clumsy mistakes in designing and
constructing these crematoriums that the extermination process became absurd
and ridiculous lacks credibility.  The evidence indicates, on the contrary,
that the Germans did not design these installations for a criminal purpose
and did not provide them with gas chambers of any kind.

-The habitual mass extermination of human beings in Crematoria IV and V, as
Pressac presents it, would have proven completely impracticable.


                The Cremation Capacity of the Crematoria

     On the momentous question of the cremation of the corpses, Pressac
states the following:


          The real throughput of a type II/III Krematorium was from 1,000 to
     1,100 corpses per 24 hours and the maximum for a type IV/V was about
     500 a day.  The total capacity for the four Krematorien was therefore
     about 3,000 a day (P. 244).


     Pressac indicates no source as a basis for his estimate, which is
purely hypothetical.  To begin with, the figures given by the French author
can not be reconciled with those of all the testimonies cited in his work.
Thus, according to Dr. Bendel, the daily incineration capacity of Crematoria
II and III was 2,000 corpses each, with a corresponding figure of 1,000 each
for Crematoria IV and V (p. 469); for Dr. Nyiszli, the total capacity of all
the crematoria together was 20,000 corpses per day (p. 474); for H. Tauber,
the capacity of Crematorium II was 2,500 per day (p. 494); according to the
War Refugee Board report (a secret report on Auschwitz drafted in 1944), the
four crematoria were able to consume 6,000 bodies a day (p. 461); according
to a report ascribed to SS officer Franke-Gricksch, who visited Auschwitz in
1943, the total capacity was 10,000 corpses a day (p. 238).

     Pressac's estimate does not square with the data given in a document of
the "Headquarters Construction Office" (Zentralbauleitung) of the Auschwitz
SS, which establishes the capacity of the crematoria as follows:


     Crematoria II and III:  1,440 corpses each in 24 hours

     Crematoria IV and V:  768 corpses each in 24 hours (p. 247).


     Pressac's estimate is likewise irreconcilable with the "revision" which
he himself makes in the document cited.  According to the author, the figure
in this document "had no basis in practice, and probably has to be divided
by two or three to arrive at the true figure" (p. 244).  This means that a
crematorium of type II-III would have had an incineration capacity of 480 to
720 corpses in 24 hours and one of type IV-V a capacity of 256 to 384.

     One conclusion which can be drawn from the above is that the cremation
figures reflected in the testimonies, as well as those in the
Zentralbauleitung document, strike Pressac as greatly exaggerated.  He has
thus estimated a hypothetical cremation capacity which, as we shall see,
bears no relationship to the capacity which can be inferred from evidence he
himself publishes in his work.

     From documents published by Pressac, we derive an incineration capacity
that is greatly reduced and assuredly much closer to the true figure.  Thus,
a German document which provides operating instructions for the crematory
ovens indicates that the  corpses had to be inserted in the individual
cremation chambers or muffles "one after another" (hintereinander) (p. 136).
This detail is in explicit contradiction to those testimonies which affirm
that several corpses were put into a muffle furnace at the same time, with
the number varying between three and twelve.

     Another German document, which tabulates the consumption of coke by the
crematory ovens, starts from the assumption that they operate twelve hours
per day (p. 224), in disagreement with various testimonies stating that
they functioned continuously, without interruption.

     Pressac also reproduces a patent, registered in 1953, of an oven made
by the Topf company--the same one that made the ovens of Auschwitz--which
incorporated "much of the experience gained by Topf in the concentration
camps" (p. 105).  The estimated time for incinerating a body in this oven
was from 30 to 45 minutes (p. 105).^20

     If we assume, then, that the Birkenau ovens were as fast as that of the
1953 patent, that the corpses were incinerated one after another and not
several at a time, and that the ovens operated twelve hours a day, we get
the following result:


-Crematoria II and III (with 15 muffles each) could have incinerated from
128 to 360 corpses a day.

-Crematoria IV and V (with 8 muffles each) could have incinerated from 128
to 192 corpses a day.

-In total, the Birkenau crematoria could have incinerated 736 to 1,104
corpses per day.


     Therefore, by use of the information which Pressac himself has
provided, we arrive at an estimate of the capacity of the Birkenau
crematoria which is three or four times inferior to that indicated by the
French author.

     Pressac also publishes data on the capacity of certain crematory ovens
constructed by the Topf company and installed in other concentration camps.
Thus, in the Buchenwald crematory, an average of six or seven corpses per
muffle were incinerated each day (p. 106).  At Gusen (a subsidiary camp of
Mauthausen), according to prisoner notes, 600 corpses were incinerated in
twelve days, which means an average of 25 corpses per muffle furnace per day
(p. 110).

     Pressac acknowledges that these ovens and those of Birkenau "must have
had roughly the same performance," since they "were virtually identical as
regards design and construction" (p. 110).  In consequence, if we apply the
Buchenwald and Gusen references to the four crematoria of Birkenau, which
had a total of 46 muffle furnaces, we arrive at a capacity of 322 corpses
per day according to the Buchenwald ratio and of 1,150 according to that of
Gusen.  Figures, therefore, that are also much lower than those given by
Pressac.

     It is necessary to bear in mind that the incineration capacity was
further limited due to breakdowns.  Crematorium II was out of service for
two or three months in the second half of 1943 for various repairs.
Crematorium IV was soon closed for good, and Crematorium V operated only
intermittently (p. 247).

     Moreover, there are indications that at least during certain periods of
time the Birkenau crematoria operated at low capacity.  For example, Pressac
states that, according to German documents, the coke consumption of the
crematoria from April to October of 1943 was only a third or fourth of what
one would expect if they had been operating at full capacity twelve hours
per day (pp. 224-227).

     In short, the cremation capacity given by Pressac:


     -is reconcilable neither with the testimonies of former prisoners nor
     with the information contained in available German documents;

     -is arbitrary, inasmuch as he cites no reference in its support;

     -and, finally, is highly exaggerated, since all the evidence points
     strongly in the direction of a substantially lower cremation capacity.


                         The "Indirect" Proofs

     At the end of his investigation, Pressac is forced to acknowledge the
lack of proof of the existence of homicidal gas chambers in the Birkenau
crematoria.  Nevertheless, he says, that in:


     the absence of any "direct," i.e. palpable, indisputable and evident
     proof (lacking so far as we know at present) such as a photograph of
     people killed by a toxic gas in an enclosed space that can be perfectly
     located and identified, or of a label on a Krematorium drawing of a
     "Gaskammer um Juden zu vergiften/gas chamber for poisoning Jews," an
     "indirect" proof may suffice and be valid (p. 429).


     And so, after having done research for some years in the principal
archives--to which access was generously given him--and after having
examined hundreds of documents, photographs and plans, Pressac admits to not
having encountered a single "palpable, indisputable and evident" proof--that
is to say, a real proof--of the existence of homicidal gas chambers in the
crematoria of Birkenau.  In other words, Pressac--and with him, all the
Exterminationist authors--has been unable up to now, 44 years after the war,
to find one single proof of the criminal character of installations which
supposedly brought about the destruction of hundreds of thousands of people
during a 21-month period of operation (the greatest crime in history);
installations whose design and construction gave rise to an enormous amount
of documentation.  This is a fact of great significance.

     Nevertheless, Pressac reckons that in the absence of real proof, an
"indirect" proof may suffice.  His argument is invalid, for with "indirect
proofs" it would be possible to prove the existence of almost anything.  Let
us imagine, for example, the case of someone who intended to demonstrate
that centaurs really existed in antiquity.  Naturally it would not be
possible for him to present any real proof, such as a skeleton or fossil
remains, but he would still be able to argue that the artistic
representations of centaurs found in archaeological excavations in Greece,
Cyprus and Italy constituted an "indirect" proof of their existence.

     Let us examine Pressac's "indirect" proofs of the homicidal gas
chambers:


          In the final analysis, there remain only the various items of
     correspondence and official documents of German origin.  Through the
     "slips" that can be found in them, they form a convincing body of
     presumptive evidence and clearly indicate the presence in the four
     Birkenau Krematorien (II, III, IV and V) of gas chambers using a
     prussic acid disinfestation agent sold under the name of "Zyclon-B"
     (p. 429, emphasis in the original).


     Or rather, in the final analysis, the "indirect proofs" would seem to
be--according to Pressac--lapses committed by the civilian workers who built
the crematoria (a dozen civil firms participated in their construction) and
by SS personnel when they drafted their notes and documents.  In other
words, both the civilian workers and technicians and the SS knew the real,
homicidal purpose of the crematoria, but had reached a tacit agreement to
omit all "criminal" references in their correspondence and documents in
order to keep up appearances (for whom?).  The Germans from time to time,
however, committed indiscretions, mentioning in their letters and on their
worksheets such things as "gas-tight doors," "gas detectors" and "basement
disrobing rooms."  Still, the Germans were prudent even in their lapses, for
though they could use the term "Auskleidekeller" for the place where the
victims supposedly disrobed, on the other hand they did not have "the
courage, or perhaps the desire or the occasion to write that Leichenkeller 1
was a gas chamber" (p. 434).

     Let's turn now to enumerating the different expressions found in the
German documents and which, according to Pressac, constitute "indirect"
proofs or, as he also likes to call them, "criminal traces" of the existence
of homicidal gas chambers.


     a) In Crematoria II and III.


-"Vergasungskeller/gassing cellar" ("trace" No. 1, p. 432).  The German word
"Vergasung" has several meanings, such as "gasification" or "carburetion."
I do not know which of these would be applicable in this context.  Neither
do I know the exact location of the place.  Contrary to what Pressac
believes, there is no document that expressly establishes that the
Vergasungskeller is Leichenkeller 1.

-"10 Gasprufer/gas detectors" ("trace" No. 2, p. 432).  Pressac himself
allows a non-sinister interpretation:  they could have served to detect
gases produced by the combustion in the ovens, such as carbon monoxide or
carbon dioxide (p. 371).

-"Auskleideraum/undressing room" and "Auskleidekeller/undressing cellar"
("traces" Nos. 4, 5, 10 and 12; pp. 432, 434 and 438).  Why do these terms
necessarily have to be given a criminal interpretation?  They could refer to
the place in which clothes were removed from the corpses.

-"Gastur 100/192 fur Leichenkeller 1/gas door 100 by 192 for underground
morgue 1" ("traces" No. 6 and 11, pp. 434 and 438).  The document is dated 6
March 1943.  However, in a plan of the crematorium of a later date, No. 2197
of 19 March of the same year (p. 311), the door of Leichenkeller 1 has the
dimensions of 1.90 x 1.90 meters.  How is this discrepancy to be explained?

-"4 Drahtnetzeinschiebvorrichtung/4 wire mesh introduction devices" and "4
Holzblenden/4 wooden covers" ("traces" Nos. 8 and 9, p. 436).  Supposedly
they served for the introduction of the Zyklon B, although according to the
German document they were to be found in Leichenkeller 2 and not in the gas
chamber, as one would expect.  This was an "error" according to Pressac.

-"Criminal traces" connected with "gastight doors" (Gasdichteture) and
accessories for the latter (Nos. 3, 7, 13, 14 and 15; pp. 432, 436, 438 and
439).  Pressac thinks that a gastight door necessarily has a criminal
connotation.  However, these doors could have been installed, for example,
to prevent the stench coming from the decomposing corpses from going clear
through the whole crematorium.  Pressac himself makes mention of the
existence of hermetic doors in a crematorium without sinister implications.
These doors were in Crematoria IV and V, in an area that was intended to
isolate the crematory room from the mortuary.^21

-"14 Brausen/14 showers" ("trace" No. 16, p. 439).  As ordinary showers,
their presence would not have a criminal character, so Pressac claims that
they were dummy showers, installed for the purpose of fooling the victims,
who believed that they were entering into the gas chamber to take a shower.
The French author considers that the presence of these showers TOGETHER WITH
a gastight door is the definitive proof of the existence of a homicidal gas
chamber.  However, Pressac does not prove that the showers were actually
sham.  Besides, the installation of showers could have been
counterproductive in effect, inasmuch as the victims might have asked
themselves what was the need of a gastight door in a room in which they were
simply going to take a shower.

-One German document speaks of Leichenkeller 1 as having to be "preheated"
(vorgewarmt) and of an installation for that purpose ("traces" Nos. 30 and
31, p. 454).  Pressac affirms, with reason, that the preheating of the
Leichenkeller can not be reconciled with the existence of a "cold room"
created to retard the decomposition of the corpses.  The preheating,
according to Pressac, would have been for the purpose of speeding up the
evaporation of hydrocyanic acid.

     At present I am unable to give an explanation of these "traces," but I
do wish to point out that the document in question refers to a letter from
Prufer, the engineer who designed the ovens, in which he suggested
preheating the room.  This letter has disappeared.  It is curious that a
civilian, a cremation expert, should have given the SS a suggestion on how
to make a gassing more effective.  In any case, Pressac must know that this
system of preheating was never put into practice (p. 227).


     b) In Crematoria IV and V.


-"betonieren im Gasskammer [sic]/concrete in gas chamber" ("traces" Nos. 19
and 21, pp. 446 and 447).

     The document is a civilian employee's work slip and is dated 2 March
1943.  The following day the same worker notes:  "level and flatten in both
rooms" (planieren und stampfen in beiden Kammern), and on 4 March:
"concrete and finish the floor in both rooms and anteroom" (Fussboden
betonieren und reiben in beiden Kammern u. Vorraum).^22  According to
Pressac, the worker was referring by these "Kammern" to the rooms at the
extreme west of Crematorium IV, that is, to the gas chambers.  From that we
deduce that either the "Gasskammer" was not in either of those two rooms or
that it was concreted twice.  Moreover, a later document suggests that in
the two rooms where the gas chambers were supposedly to be found, there were
"installations for water" (Wasserinstallations).^23

-The rest of the "criminal traces" (Nos. 17, 18, 20 and 22 to 29; pp.
443-454) are references to gastight doors and windows and accessories for
them.  In this regard, see my prior comments on the gastight doors.


     c) Other "traces."


-"Beschlage fur gasdichte Tur/fitting for gas-tight door" ("trace" No. 32,
p. 456).

     Use unknown. See comments on gastight doors.

-"1 Schlussel fur Gaskammer/1 key for gas chamber" ("trace" No. 33, p. 456).

     According to Pressac, this is a dubious type of "trace."  The ordering
of this item, the author says, is "incomprehensible with our present state
of knowledge."

-"Die Beschlage zu 1 Tur mit Rahmen, luftdicht mit Spion fur Gaskammer/The
fittings for 1 door with frame, air-tight with peephole for gas chamber"
("trace" No. 34, p. 456).

     According to Pressac, this order has nothing to do with the Birkenau
crematoria, but was intended for one of the delousing chambers.

     It is important to emphasize that Pressac has presented the documents
he cites out of context.  In my opinion, in order satisfactorily to explain
the commonplace character of these "criminal traces," meticulous study of
ALL the documents relating to the construction of the crematoria is
essential.  It is very possible that with a wider perspective we should then
obtain an answer to the questions raised by these "traces."  An isolated
knife can be a criminal weapon, but a knife together with a spoon and fork
is simply a place setting.

     Pressac concludes this fundamental part of his work as follows:


          Summarizing, a study of the files concerning the construction of
     the four Birkenau Krematorien reveals 39 (THIRTY NINE) "slips" or
     "criminal traces" of different sorts, the majority of which constitute
     material proof of the intention to make certain rooms IN THE FOUR
     KREMATORIEN "Gasdichte" or gas-tight.  The incompatibility between a
     gas-tight door and 14 shower heads indirectly proves the use of one of
     these rooms as a HOMICIDAL GAS CHAMBER (p. 456, capitals in the
     original).


     As Pressac acknowledges, the majority of the "criminal traces" only
demonstrate the Germans' intention to make certain parts of the crematoria
airtight.  This fact, by itself, proves nothing.  Nor do the rest of the
"traces," by themselves, prove the criminal character of the crematoria.  It
is only the combination of two or more of these "traces" that lets Pressac
say that they "indirectly" prove the utilization of homicidal gas chambers.

     The fact is that after his monumental investigation into these
crematoria, which supposedly exterminated around a million persons over a
period of nearly two years, crematoria the design and construction of which
left behind hundreds of plans, notes, records of meetings, contracts, work
orders, bills and photographs--in short, an immense documentation--Pressac
can present not a single proof of their criminal nature.  In the last
analysis, the French author can only allege a presumed incompatibility
between a gastight door and 14 supposedly fake showerheads that, according
to him, would prove--even though only "indirectly"--the existence of gas
chambers.

     In sum, Pressac's work not only fails to refute the Revisionist thesis,
as he intended, but on the contrary makes clear how very justified are the
criticism and skepticism of the Revisionists with regard to the supposed
homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz.


                                 Notes

1.   Hoess, Rudolf:  _Yo, comandante de Auschwitz_ (Autobiografia) (I,
     Commandant of Auschwitz [Autobiography]) (Muchnik, Barcelona, 1979, p.
     148.

2.   Rudolf Hoess, op. cit., pp. 147-148.

3.   Hoess, op. cit., p. 193.

4.   Hoess, op. cit., p. 155.

5.   Hoess, op. cit., p. 190.

6.   Fred A. Leuchter, _An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas
     Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek-Poland_ (Boston:  Fred A.
     Leuchter Associates, 1988).  Unpublished in the complete version, which
     is the one cited.

7.   Fred A. Leuchter, op. cit., p. 35 (my own numbering).

8.   Hoess, op. cit., p. 194.

9.   Hoess, op. cit., p. 191.

10.  Czech, Danuta:  _Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager
     Auschwitz-Birkenau_ (Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989), pp. 106f.

11.  Hoess:  op. cit., p. 191.

12.  Hoess:  op. cit., p. 192.

13.  Ibid.

14.  Hoess:  op. cit., p. 191.

15.  Hoess:  op. cit., p. 200.

16.  Degesch:  _Zyklon for Pest Control_ (Frankfurt am Main), p. 11.

17.  Degesch:  op. cit., p. 17.

18.  "It is imperative that not a single tin be left about!" (Degesch:  op.
     cit., p. 21).

19.  Degesch:  op. cit., p. 21.

20.  I accept this with reservations.  During the '60s, cremation of a
     cadaver took 50 to 80 minutes (_Gran Enciclopedia del Mundo_, Durvan,
     Bilbao 1966, article "Incineration," vol. 10, p. 852).

21.  Pressac, Jean-Claude:  Les 'Krematorien' IV et V de Birkenau et leurs
     chambres a gaz.  Construction et fonctionnement, "Le Monde Juif"
     (Paris), No. 107 (1982), pp. 119-120.

22.  Pressac:  loc. cit., p. 111.

23.  Pressac:  loc. cit., p. 118.


[end of article]


[Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box
1306, Torrance, CA 90505, USA.  Subscription rate: $40 per year, domestic.
$50 per year, foreign.]

___________________________________________________________________________

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From oneb!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!utcsri!utnut!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!caen!zip.eecs.umich.edu!umn.edu!msus1.msus.edu!TIGGER.STCLOUD.MSUS.EDU!HERMANN Sat Jan 29 20:28:49 PST 1994

>From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 11, Number 2 (Summer 1991):



          AUSCHWITZ: TECHNIQUE & OPERATION OF THE GAS CHAMBERS
                                  Or,
   Improvised Gas Chambers & Casual Gassings at Auschwitz & Birkenau,
                   According to J.-C. Pressac (1989)

                                Part II
 
                            ROBERT FAURISSON



     In 1983, Klarsfeld and Pressac published a French version of the
_Auschwitz Album_ (published by Seuil).^8  Pressac drew up a misleading plan
of Birkenau (p. 43) on which, in particular, he obscured the surroundings
of the large Birkenau crematories.  Specifically, he concealed from his
readers that, immediately next to Krema III, there was a SPORTPLATZ
(playing field) which served as a soccer pitch for the inmates, and that
right next to the Sportplatz there was a large hospital area.  These simple
topographical specifications (about which Pressac is rather discreet in his
large book) render absurd the thesis that the crematoria were supposedly
the culmination of a horrible extermination process accompanied by cries,
fire, flames and the smell of burning flesh.  Can you imagine teams of
soccer players and crowds of spectators at the various matches, just a few
steps away from those horrors?

     Pressac is careless when he challenges the Revisionists to prove that
in the central camp the swimming pool was used by the inmates.  I will let
a former Auschwitz prisoner answer for me.  He was a professor in the
Faculty of Medicine at the University of Strasbourg who, while affirming in
a rather vague way the homicidal gassings at Auschwitz, was just as willing
to write about the distractions available to the inmates:


          On Sunday afternoons, there were soccer, basketball and WATER
     POLO matches [my emphasis] to the ardent cheers of the spectators:
     people need very little to distract them from the dangers that
     threatened them!  The SS administration allowed regular amusements for
     the prisoners, even on weekdays.  A movie theater showed Nazi
     newsreels and sentimental films and a very popular cabaret gave
     presentations often attended by the SS authorities.  Finally, there
     was a very creditable orchestra, made up originally only of Polish
     musicians and replaced later by a new, high-quality group made up of
     musicians of all nationalities, mostly Jews (Marc Klein, _Observations
     et reflexions sur les camps de concentration nazis_, taken from the
     journal _Etudes germaniques_ (No. 3, 1946), 1948, p. 31).


     I could cite many other examples of such activities, but I shall
refrain from doing so, because where human beings are so "concentrated,"
life becomes unbearable in spite of all; promiscuity, epidemics, the
struggle to live and to gain individual advantage make such an existence
frightful, especially in time of war.  But we must not add false horrors to
the real horrors.  Furthermore, the camps run by the Soviets, including the
ones they "liberated" in Germany before filling them again with their
political adversaries (beginning with the National Socialists), were even
more horrible, according to the statements of people like Margaret
Buber-Neumann, who experienced them both.

     Pressac entitles one of his chapters "Auschwitz According to the
Revisionists.  Photographic Exhibition of the Famous Holiday Camp, KL
Auschwitz" (p. 507).  The irony and the slanderous insinuation here conceal
his embarrassment at reproducing photographs which are not consistent with
the various  kinds  of  horrors supposedly found in the camp.  He tries to
cast suspicion on certain of these photographs by pointing out that they
come from  "Revisionist sources."  He is obviously unaware that many of
them are from the album kept by Durrfeld, an engineer who was one of the
leading executives in the factories at Auschwitz.  The file reference "DUE"
(for DUERRFELD) ought to have alerted him:  the Durrfeld trial is
well-known to historians of Auschwitz, but apparently not to our
pharmacist-turned-amateur-historian.


                Involuntary Contributions to Revisionism

     Here and there throughout the text, one finds information (very often
in the form of photographic documents) which tends to reinforce the
position of the Revisionists.  Here are some samples:


- The story of one Rablin, a prisoner employed in disinfecting with Zyklon
B, proves just how dangerous this terrible gas was to use. Rablin, only
slightly exposed to the gas, was hospitalized and took two months to
recover (p. 25); it is paradoxical that the Germans tried to cure of gas
poisoning a man whom, the story goes, they should have killed with
precisely that gas;

- The deposition of inmate Joseph Odi describes the procedure for using
Zyklon B in the disinfestation gas chambers, a procedure that has often
been described by the  Revisionists and that shows the dangers of the
operation.  Although suitable for clothing, this method would not work with
human beings.  Above all, the witness reveals that the cases containing the
cans of Zyklon B were stored in the THEATERGEBAUDE (theater building) and
that transporting it from there to the gas disinfection gas chambers was
done with a Health Service vehicle standing by.  The Revisionists know all
this, but it is interesting to see Pressac's book reminding us of two
points which should help clear both the Carmelites of Auschwitz and the Red
Cross of the charges too often made against them.  Today the Carmelites are
reproached with occupying a place in which the Germans are supposed to have
warehoused gas used to kill human beings.  In reality, the gas was used to
kill lice and thereby to protect human health.  The Red Cross vehicle was
there to protect against the accidents that were always possible with
Zyklon B.  It played no role in murder; it, too, was there to safeguard
men's health (p. 41); it is noteworthy that J. Odi is precise when he talks
about the disinfection gas chambers and very vague on the subject of the
homicidal gas chambers; besides, he believes that men were gassed in the
disinfection gas chambers!;

- The beautiful photograph showing an impressive complex of eight
disinfestation gas chambers in that part of the Birkenau camp traditionally
called "the Gypsy camp" (ENTWESUNGSANLAGE ZIGEUNERLAGER) contradicts the
thesis that the Germans intended to exterminate the Gypsies (p. 63);

- An astonishing photo taken in the ZENTRAL SAUNA shows a group of naked
inmates, apparently in good health, carrying their shoes from a vast shower
room  (50 shower heads) to the "drying room" on the "clean" side of the
disinfection area (Trockenraum, reine Seite):  an unthinkable scene in an
"extermination camp" (p. 80; see Part I, p. 26 in _The Journal of
Historical Review_, Spring 1991.)

- One photograph shows some inmates in their striped uniforms employed in
disinfecting clothing in front of a battery of three autoclaves; here the
disinfection is done by steam; elsewhere, it may be done by warm air, with
Zyklon B, or even with other gases; the true concern of the Germans was to
exterminate vermin, not men, by any and all means (p. 82).  Enough can
never be said about their obsessive fear of typhus; "there were in fact
about 25 Zyklon-B delousing chambers of different sizes operating in the
camp" (p. 550), and a great number of disinfection chambers that operated
in other ways, without using gas;

- A sheet of operating instructions for coke-fired incineration furnaces
points out that the furnace fire bars must be cleaned of clinker and the
cinders removed every evening; these ovens, Pressac tells us, could only
operate 12 out of every 24 hours, not 24 hours a day as claimed by the
believers in the extermination myth (p. 136, 224, 227);

- To replace Krema I, the Germans had considered constructing a "new
Krema," to be built a short distance from its predecessor, near the SS
hospital and the Kommandantur.  Pressac acknowledges that this "new Krema"
had no homicidal gas chamber.  He says that the construction was finally
transferred to Birkenau and that Krema II and Krema III at Birkenau were,
in effect, replicas of what had originally been planned for Auschwitz I;
the plan remained the same.  As a result, Krema II and III were designed
without homicidal gas chambers (p. 33, 140-143);

- Page 143 is particularly interesting.  Pressac sees only inoffensive
Leichenkeller in this plan, but when the same plan serves for the
construction of the Birkenau Krema, here he arbitrarily dubs the
Leichenkeller either "disrobing  rooms" for the victims, or "homicidal gas
chambers."  As a matter of fact, the existence of this plan proves that in
the minds of the Germans and, in particular, of Walter Dejaco, Krema II and
III at Birkenau, simply replications  of the Kremas that had originally
been intended to be near the Kommandantur and the SS hospital in the main
Auschwitz camp, could not have had any homicidal purpose (this is confirmed
on page 200, where we read that Krema II and III were "designed without
homicidal gas chambers");

- A surprising photograph, dating probably from May 1945, proves that the
roof of Krema I was used as a dance floor, decorated with a red star and
hammer and sickle as well as the Polish and Russian flags; people, says
Pressac, danced on the roof of the "gas chamber"; I suggest that, if at
that time anyone had given credence to the myth of the gassings, such a
profanation would not have been permitted.  Some months after the
liberation of Auschwitz, evidently, the myth of the gas chambers had not
yet taken the form in which we know it today (p. 149);

- Pressac reproduces a whole series of documents from the Weimar archives
relating to engineer Kurt Prufer, responsible for the design and
construction of the "Topf & Sons" ovens; Prufer was arrested, imprisoned,
and interrogated after the war;  nothing, in either his papers or his
interrogations, provided the slightest proof of the existence of homicidal
gas chambers in the crematoria (p. 93, 94, 191, and 371); if the documents
that Pressac used contained so many criminal traces, Kurt Prufer and other
members of the firm's staff could have been easily broken down;

- On 12 August 1942, Commandant Hoess distributed 40 copies of a
SONDERBEFEHL (special order) drafted as follows:


     A case of indisposition with slight symptoms of poisoning by
     hydrocyanic gas which occurred today makes it necessary to warn all
     those participating in the gassings (Vergasungen) and all other SS
     members that in particular on opening rooms used for gassing SS not
     wearing masks must wait at least five hours and keep at a distance of
     at least 15 meters from the chamber.  In addition, particular
     attention should be paid to the wind direction. - The  gas being used
     at present contains less odorous warning agent and is therefore
     especially dangerous. - The SS garrison doctor declines all
     responsibility for any accident that should occur in the case where
     these directives have not been complied with by the SS members (p.
     201).


The word used to designate the disinfection gassings is Vergasungen.  The
above directive confirms what the Revisionists have constantly said about
the danger of using Zyklon B.  If at Auschwitz incessant and massive
gassing operations had been carried out, especially under such conditions
as we have been told, accidents involving the SS personnel would have been
innumerable.  Neither the camp commandant, nor the chief medical officer
responsible for  the garrison, nor the other doctors, nor the SS would
have tolerated such accidents (p. 201); and if we must look at it from the
point of view of the legend, the "homicidal  gassings" could not have gone
off normally inasmuch as the Jewish personnel would not have been able to
accomplish the task of entering a cyanide-treated space to drag out
thousands of cyanide-impregnated corpses; and the criminal enterprise would
immediately have ground to a halt for lack of personnel to carry it through
successfully;^9

- A telex dated 18 December 1942 reveals that during the month of December
the work of both the inmates and the free civilian laborers had to be
interrupted several times for delousing and disinfestation (Entlausung
und Entwesung).  The camp had to be isolated, and civilian workers had not
been able to leave for six months.  A period of leave from 23 December
1942 to 4 January 1943 was therefore essential (p. 210);

- In the archives of the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, there is an
album of 397 photos, taken by the Germans themselves during the war, which
show construction at Auschwitz, including that of the crematoria.  This is
the most important information in Pressac's book.  It is outrageous that
this album has been kept hidden for so long, and that the publication of
the photographs is being done in driblets, so to speak, as was the case
with the photos from the _Auschwitz Album_.  The album of which I speak is
the _Bauleitung Album_ (the Construction Office album).  The photographs
therein confirm that Auschwitz was a prison or internment camp with nothing
out of the ordinary about it.  Pressac acknowledges that all the inmates
we see at work appear to be as healthy as the civilian workers (p. 331,
339).  Is he perhaps concealing from us photographs from this album which
would give us a clearer idea of what went on at Auschwitz, or which would
correct what we think we know about each room of the large Kremas and about
the changes eventually made in those rooms?;

- Regarding a time sheet indicating the make-up of a crew constructing a
chimney for Krema IV or V, Pressac comments that "the composition of the
gang employed is typical, with 12 civilians and 20 prisoners working as
bricklayer's laborers" (p. 412); so there was no possibility of secrets on
that side either;

- One plan proves that the Germans planned to construct an enormous
hospital sector covering all of the section of Birkenau known as "Mexico."
Pressac says this fact is "a real godsend for the Revisionists."  He admits
that "there is an INCOMPATIBILITY [his capitals] in the creation of a
health camp a few hundred yards from four Krematorien where, according to
official history, people were exterminated on a  arge scale" (p. 512).  And
his commentary continues in the same direction.  We await his parry.  It
does not come.  Pressac's embarrassment is plain to see.  He thinks perhaps
he can manage to get out of the difficulty by saying that we ought not to
underestimate the capacity for "doublethink" of the SS hierarchy, which
blindly executed orders even when they were totally contradictory.  I note
that, as I said above (p. 133), Pressac is silent about the existence, near
the crematoria, of a large hospital area containing 18 barracks^10; more
important, in his large book he persists in concealing the existence of
this hospital area.  A site plan dated 21 June 1944 shows that the Germans
planned to construct, alongside the Birkenau railroad ramp, a total of six
vegetable halls, each with a capacity of 930 cubic meters in size - a
curious initiative in an "extermination camp" (p. 533-534).


                 The Bankruptcy, According to Pressac,
                         of Traditional History

     Pressac draws up a bankruptcy report:  no one before him has been able
to prove the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz and
Birkenau.  He recognizes that the historians, the judges,  the Soviets,
the Poles, the arraigners of the "war criminals" as well as the accusers
of the Revisionists have accumulated false proofs and worthless arguments
(the Revisionists, too, are supposed to have failed in their endeavors).
He writes at the end of his study, just before the appendices:


     This study already demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of the
     traditional history (and hence also of the methods and criticisms of
     the Revisionists), a history based for the most part on testimonies,
     assembled according to the mood of the moment, truncated to fit an
     arbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of uneven
     value and without any connection with one another (p. 264).


     The celebrated work of Eugene Aroneanu, which has for so long been a
sort of Exterminationist bible (_Camps de concentration_, preface by
Jacques Billiet, director of France's War Crimes Information Service,
Office francais d'edition, 1946), he calls "an historical monstrosity,"
"an incoherent and self-contradictory whole" (p. 15).  On the post-war
trials, he writes that "the tons of Zyklon B ordered by the camps were
attributed to homicidal use without any verification."  And, as I mentioned
above (Part I, p. 38 in _The Journal of Historical Review_, Spring 1991),
he makes the following remark, which will likely upset his Exterminationist
friends:


     By far the greater part [of Zyklon B] (over 95 per cent) was destined
     for delousing (effects and buildings) while only a very small quantity
     (less than 5 per cent) had been used for homicidal gassings (Ibidem).


     He is of the opinion that the American-conducted trial of Bruno
Tesch, one of the officials of the Degesch company and thus responsible
for the production of Zyklon B, was a "masquerade"; the court was not
concerned with the technical question, merely with the verbal testimony of
one of his employees.  In 1946, Pressac writes, simple malicious gossip
could easily lead to someone being hanged.  That was the case with Bruno
Tesch (and, I should add, with his associate, K. Weinbacher) (p. 16-17);
see in this regard the revealing article by William B. Lindsey, "Zyklon B,
Auschwitz and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch," _The Journal of Historical
Review_, Autumn 1983, p. 261-303.

     The Soviet film _Chronicles of the Liberation of the Camp_, 1945 shows
a gas-tight door as belonging to a homicidal gas chamber; in view of its
location, says Pressac, it was a door to a disinfection gas chamber (p.
41).  Further on, he talks about the work of the Soviet Commission of
Inquiry as a "completely put-up job" and an "'historic' [sic] montage" (p.
46); the unfortunate thing is that the Nuremberg Tribunal "took judicial
notice" of that work in the name of Article 21 of its charter.

     At Birkenau, the vast hall of the Zentral Sauna, where the inmates
disrobed (Auskleideraum) before showering, possessed an impressive number
of tubular radiators.  The Poles removed those radiators because, according
to Pressac, this concern for the comfort of the inmates conflicts, in the
minds of present-day visitors, with the location of the ruins of Krema IV
and its "gas chambers," only 100 meters away (p. 78).  He might have added
that the Poles had dealt in the same manner with the "arrest cells" in
Block 11, which the tourists visit in great numbers.  I'm the one who
called Pressac's attention to this mania of the Poles for removing heating
apparatuses, whether for their own use or to give a crueler impression of
the conditions under which the inmates are supposed to have lived.

     At the Nuremberg Trial, a perfectly ordinary German document dealing
with the crematory ovens was presented as proof of the extermination.
Pressac sees there an example of "the stupid way in which the documents of
the defeated were 'evaluated' by a tribunal of the victors" (p. 106).

     A certain reconstruction by the Poles after the war is "far from being
a faithful reproduction of the original state" because of its exaggerations
and its simplifications (p. 108).

     The fact, according to Pressac, that at a given time in 1942 the
Germans used 2 to 3 per cent of the Zyklon B for murder and 97 or 98 per
cent for disinfection "totally invalidates"  the interpretation of certain
documents by "the traditional historians" (p. 188).

     Sometimes naming him and sometimes not, Pressac underscores the errors
or the deceptions of Georges Wellers.  The latter's argument based on the
ventilation system of the Leichenkeller is, for Pressac, contradicted and
indeed completely demolished by the facts (p. 289).  Wellers' "quite
erroneous" and "quite unfounded" interpretation deceived the lawyers of
LICRA (the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism) who
pleaded against Faurisson (p. 355).  In citing transcriptions of eyewitness
testimony, Wellers has made cuts when those testimonies contain
improbabilities, without any indication to the reader that he has done so
(p. 479).  The plan he gave of Auschwitz (_Les Chambres a gaz ant
existe/Des documents, des temoignages, des chiffres_, Gallimard, 1981, p.
12-13) is of "a very mediocre quality as regards many details," although
Pressac doesn't go so far as to use the word "falsification" (p. 165-166).
What is striking is that this was the plan which hung for all to see in the
courtroom at the Frankfurt trial and which Hermann Langbein reproduced in
his book about that trial (_Der Auschwitz Prozess, Eine Dokumentation_,
Frankfurt, Europaische Verlaganstalt, 1965, p. 932-933 [not 930-931 as
Pressac mistakenly indicates]).

     The supposed camouflage around Krema II and III is, according to
Pressac, a product of the imagination of the "traditional historians" (p.
341).

     Jan Sehn, the Polish investigative magistrate who prepared the trials
of Rudolf Hoess and of many other SS men, "made a change" in a German
document while reproducing it as a copy allegedly identical to the original
(p. 454).  Nevertheless, Pressac is careful not to be too harsh with this
investigative magistrate, to whom we  owe a hundred lies about Auschwitz
- to name one, the lie of the "nearly 60,000 persons in 24 hours" gassed
at Birkenau (Jan Sehn, _Le Camp de concentration d'Oswiecim-Brzezinka_,
Wydawnictwo Prawnicze, Warsaw, 1961, page 132).  It is also to Sehn that we
owe the "gigantic ditches" in the open air (as many as eight?) where, "in
August 1944, the figure of 24,000 incinerations per day was attained" (with
or without the crematoria?)  (Ibid., page 148).  However, the aerial photos
taken by the Allies on 25 August 1944 show absolutely nothing of the kind
(D. Brugioni and R. Poirier, _The Holocaust Revisited_, Washington, CIA,
February 1979, pages 9-11).

     In 1981 I was brought to trial in Paris by the LICRA and many other
organizations.  The principal lawyer for the LICRA was Maitre Bernard
Jouanneau.  From the pages Pressac devotes to this trial and to this lawyer
it is evident that the author believes that many of the documents which
they used against me do not, in reality, prove the existence of the
homicidal gas chambers in the least.  Not one of the eyewitness testimonies
that Maitre Jouanneau introduced had any real value.  As for the technical
arguments offered by Jouanneau, all of them were worthless, and sometimes
"disastrous."  Lastly, the lawyer outrageously abused the theory according
to which the Germans, to hide their crime, used a "code" or "camouflage"
(p. 554-556).

     Pressac's inconsistencies have their amusing aspects.  He remarks on
the dishonesty or incompetence of the Exterminationists but, at the same
time, wants at all costs to save the Exterminationist theory.  Thus he is
reduced to flattering his friends for qualities that supposedly make up for
their faults.  And when he flatters, he doesn't do it by halves - he
bootlicks:  Maitre Jouanneau's demonstration was based on a mass of errors
but it was . . . "superb" (p. 556).


                      Manipulation of Testimonies

     In a work that professes to be technical, one ought first to describe
the scene of the crime, then examine the weapon used in the crime and the
material proofs of the crime, in order, finally, to review the testimonies.
Pressac, who has no understanding of method, opens all of his chapters with
... the testimonies.  It must be said that this is a way of clouding the
reader's normal capacity for judgment, since these "testimonies" posit the
existence of the homicidal gas chambers as a basic principle.

     The quality of the testimonies that Pressac invokes is pitiful.
Sometimes he acknowledges that himself, but he often seeks to save these
testimonies from discredit, by means of the most oversubtle devices.

     Rudolf Hoess is presumed to have written _Commandant at Auschwitz_ and
Miklos Nyiszli supposedly wrote _Auschwitz: An Eyewitness Account of
Mengele's Infamous Death Camp_, two testimonies offered as essential.
Hoess lived for  several years at Auschwitz, and Nyiszli supposedly lived
there for six months as an inmate.  But what these two "witnesses" write,
for example, about the ventilation of the homicidal gas chambers,
constitutes, according to Pressac, an enormous technical error.  On this
point they told the opposite of "the truth" (p. 16).

     Alter Fajnzylberg, Filip Muller and Rudolf Hoess affirm things that
are "practically impossible," or "not corresponding to the facts," that
"cast a doubt," are "wrong," "contrary to reality," "unlikely" (p. 126-12
7).  The "errors" committed by Hoess "throughout his autobiography" have an
explanation which Pressac brandishes proudly and emphasizes in bold-face
type:  HE WAS PRESENT, WITHOUT SEEING (p. 128).  But, if that is the case,
he wasn't a witness!  How could he be present and not see?  How can one be
the commandant of an "extermination camp" and not see the instrument of
"exterminating" at least a million (?) people?  How was this commandant
able to stress the dangers of Zyklon in 1942 (see above, p. 137-138) and
then in 1946 decree that the dangers were non-existent (see below, p.
172-173, note 9)?

     As for the eyewitness testimony, so often invoked, of SS man Pery
Broad, the form and the tone of it, Pressac tells us, "sound false."
Broad's writings, which we owe to the Poles, cannot be sincere.  They are
"colored by a rather too flagrant Polish patriotism."  The Broad manuscript
is not known.  It has all been "slightly" reworked by the  Poles (his
quotation marks around "slightly" imply that the rework was not slight!).
But what does it matter, asks Pressac:  despite the discrepancies between
the various witnesses, some homicidal gassings did take place in Krema I -
that is an established fact (p. 128).  "Established"?  By whom?  By what?
He does not say.

     The testimony of Szlamy Dragon elicits the following commentary:


          This is physically impossible [...].  I do not think that this
     witness was intentionally misleading, but he was following the
     tendency to exaggerate which seems to have been the general rule at
     the time of the liberation and which is what gave rise to the figure
     of 4 million victims for K.L. Auschwitz, a figure now considered to be
     pure propaganda.  It should be divided by four to get close to reality
     (p. 171).


     In 1972, at the Dejaco/Ertl trial, witness Dragon showed "total
confusion" (p. 172; see Part I, p. 60, in _The Journal of Historical
Review_, Spring 1991).

     The testimonies of Pery Broad, of Rudolf Hoess, Dr. Johann-Paul
Kremer, and of SS man Holblinger (which Pressac writes as Hoblinger) on the
several BUNKER are subject to reservations expressed in the following
terms:  "entirely imaginary," "physically impossible," "impossible to
situate this scene" (p. 174).

     The testimony of Nyiszli would be valid providing ... that his figures
be divided by four - but not always.  Pressac speaks of Nyiszli's "number
four," and says that his figures are "worrying" (p. 179).

     In 1980, a great fuss was made about Filip Muller's book, _Trois ans
dans une chambre a gaz d'Auschwitz_ (Three Years in a Gas Chamber at
Auschwitz), foreword by Claude Lanzmann, ed. Pygmalion/G. Watelet.  [The
English version, _Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in a Gas Chamber at
Auschwitz_, New York, Stein and Day, 1979, is somewhat different than the
French edition.]  In France Jean Pierre-Bloch awarded the book the LICRA
prize.  Filip Muller was one of the star witnesses at the Auschwitz trial
(1963-1965), and in the film Shoah.  In reality, he was a mythomaniac,
which even Pressac realizes, for he writes:


     [in his book, Muller] has accumulated errors, thus making his account
     historically dubious.  The best approach is to read it as a novel
     based on true history (p. 181).


     If the members of the Sonderkommando affirm that 5 or 7 or 12 bodies
were burned in a single muffle of a crematory oven at one time, Pressac
suggests that this is an exaggeration, and that probably only three bodies
at a time could have been incinerated, and skinny ones at that (p. 229).
He says that today's tourist, "after a silent prayer" (sic!) in front of
Krema I, must surely realize that "We find here the famous multiplying
factor of four used by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli" (p. 483).

     At Auschwitz visitors can see in the former "Block 4" a model that
professes to show a Krema in the midst of a gassing.  This reconstruction,
it must be said, inadvertently demonstrates the physical impossibilities of
the homicidal gassings, in particular the cramped premises and the
congestion that would have resulted from the first "gassing."  Add to that
the fact that documents which have subsequently come to light, especially
the aerial photos taken by the Allies in 1943/44 and published in 1979,
underscore the "faults" of this model.  Of small import to Pressac, who
sees in the reconstruction the "powerful evocation of a mass gassing"  (p.
378).

     Beginning on p. 459, the author attempts to save from disaster the
absurd _War Refugee Board Report_ of November 1944, sometimes known as the
_Protocols of Auschwitz_.  Just the criticisms of it that Pressac himself
is obliged to make totally discredit this mendacious work, which is due
largely to Rudolf Vrba, today a professor of pharmacology at a university
in Vancouver (see Robert Faurisson, "The Zundel Trials (1985 and 1988),"
_The Journal of Historical Review_, Winter 1988-1989, p. 420-421).

     The drawings of one David Olere are in favor with Pressac, who knew
the artist personally, but these drawings, altogether grotesque, seem
inspired chiefly by a sort of sex-shop anti-Nazism.  Pressac considers
them "masterpieces of authenticity" (p. 554) but ... he has reservations
as to their documentary worth and about the sincerity of the witness (p.
493-497, 554-556).  Playing the prude, he goes so far as to refrain from
reproducing certain drawings (p. 498).  This same David Olere asserts that
the SS made sausages they called "Kremawurst" (crematorium sausages) out
of human flesh (p. 554).  His memory suffers from a certain "deterioration"
(p. 493), and he is subject to what Pressac calls the "KREMATORIUM
DELIRIUM" (p. 556).

     The author's favorite witness is the Jewish shoemaker Henryk Tauber.
But this witness, too, tends to use "the  famous multiplying factor of
four" (p. 483).  HE HAS NEVER SEEN A GASSING BUT EITHER HE WAS TOLD ABOUT
IT (Ibid.) or else he has seen the bodies of those whom he calls gassed
(page 489).  One day, through a window, he saw an SS man pouring Zyklon B
into a gas chamber (p. 494).  If over  so  many years  he saw  nothing more
than that, it was because during the gassing operations the SS
systematically locked up the members of the Sonderkommando in ... the coke
store.  This is also Alter Fajnzylberg's explanation.  The SS wanted to
conceal the existence of the gassings but not the existence of the people
gassed!

     Tauber tells the story of a Jew named Lejb.  One day, the Germans hung
Lejb, hands tied behind his back, from an iron bar above the firing
hearths, for an hour.  Then, after untying his hands and feet, they threw
him into a cold crematorium furnace.  Gasoline was poured into the lower
ash bin and lit.  The flames reached the muffle in which Lejb was trapped.
A few minutes later, they opened the door of the furnace.  The condemned
man came running out, covered with burns.  Next, he was ordered to run
round the yard shouting that he was a thief.  Finally, he was forced to
climb the barbed wire fence, where he was killed with a gunshot!

     Tauber speaks also of an open-air pit filled with human fat.  The fat
ran from the corpses into a separate reservoir, dug in the ground.  This
fat was poured over the corpses to accelerate their combustion.  One day,
the SS men threw a man into the boiling fat, then pulled him out, still
alive, and shot him.  "The next day, the corpse was brought back to the
crematorium, where it was incinerated in a pit [!]" (p. 494).

     Tauber says that around 2,500 bodies a day were incinerated in a
single crematorium.  Here is Pressac's commentary:


          This figure is unrealistic (and it is connected with the
     propaganda of the immediate post-war period), [...].  Here we find
     almost the famous multiplication factor of four, of which Dr. Miklos
     Nyiszli made such abundant and lamentable use in his book that his
     credibility was long contested.  Henryk Tauber is far from being the
     only witness to say in substance "I don't know the number of dead" or
     "I think it was so many" and then coolly say one or two sentences
     later, that after due consideration, we do arrive at the (standard)
     figure of 4 million victims in all.  This type of imposed falsehood
     has to be excused, I would stress, because of the political climate of
     the period 1945-1950 (p. 494).^11


     In just one passage on page 498, Pressac, to qualify the assertions of
his favorite witness, uses the words "dubious," "incorrect" (twice), "not
certain," "[made up] story," and "pure myth."  And if at the end of his
testimony Tauber is so weak and so vague about Krema IV and V, no one can
reproach him for this, says Pressac, who supposes that the witness "must
have been exhausted by the end of his deposition" (p. 502).

     In short, all these witnesses seem to be suffering greatly, just like
David Olere, from what pharmacist Pressac calls Krematorium delirium (p.
556).

     Pressac has no criterion for distinguishing the true and the false
witness from one another.  His witnesses can pile up the worst errors or
the worst insanities, yet they will find favor in our man's eyes the moment
he decides to make authentic witnesses out of them.

     A witness meticulously describes the room called a gas chamber, and
sees three pillars when there were really four:  Pressac tells us it's
because he didn't go clear to the end of  the room.  The same witness
speaks of an entrance door and an exit door, when there was only one door
to the room, with no other exit:  this error, Pressac says, can be
explained by the route taken by that witness during  his visit (!).  The
witness talks about ten cremation ovens when there were five (each with
three muffles):  Pressac says that's because "probably he had not walked
the entire length of the oven room but instead remained  at the west
entrance."  The number of victims that the witness gives is incredible:
that, Pressac reassures us, is because here it's a question of an "inflated
number" given by an SS man who served as the witness's guide; or there,
it's an "SS propaganda figure" (p. 239).

     If a witness sketches the crematory room while forgetting to note the
presence of rails, Pressac says that since the rails served no purpose, the
witness's "visual memory did not retain them" (p. 229).  Let the same
witness commit four grave material errors, and it's because "the visual
memories of a survivor deteriorate with time" (p. 493).  If this witness
adds imaginary details to his sketch, no matter:  it was done "to make it
better" (Ibid.).

     Throughout his book, Pressac does his utmost to discover excuses for
the innumerable "errors" of his witnesses, errors in the location, the
color, the material, the form, the distance, the number of whatever is
being discussed.

     But his favorite explanation is that all these "errors" are the fault
of the SS and "the usual SS exaggeration" (p. 108), and that, if in their
confessions taken by the Allies, the SS confessed to enormities, it was as
due to "professional pride" (p. 161).

     Thanks to this method, Pressac's witnesses, Jewish or otherwise, win
incessantly, while the SS men can only lose every time.


           Pressac's Involuntary Drollery Apropos M. Nyiszli

     At this point I would like to return to a case already mentioned, that
of Dr. Nyiszli.  One of the best known false testimonies in the
concentration camp literature, next to Martin Gray's _For Those I Loved_,
is that of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli:  _Auschwitz:  An Eyewitness Account of
Mengele's Infamous Death Camp_, translated and adapted from the Hungarian
by Tibere Kremer (New York:  Fell Publishing Co., 1960).

     Paul Rassinier often denounced this forgery (see _The Holocaust Story
and the Lies of Ulysses_ (Costa Mesa, CA:  The Institute for Historical
Review, 1988, p. 244-250), as has Carlo Mattogno.  Neither the
_Encyclopaedia Judaica_ (1971), nor the recent _Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust_ (1990), mentions Nyiszli's book, which has long been
discredited.

     Nevertheless, at the recent trial of the Revisionist Michel Konen at
Meaux, Hubert Heilbronn, president of the Lazare Bank, had the effrontery
to mention only one testimony in support of the existence of the Auschwitz
gas chambers:  that of Miklos Nyiszli (_Le Figaro_, 6 July 1990, p. 8).

     Pressac, too, resuscitates Nyiszli.  But I think it's fair to say that
in so doing he has, in his comments on Nyiszli's testimony, inadvertently
written two exceedingly funny pages (p. 474-475).  I'll let the reader be
the judge.

     Miklos Nyiszli, a Jew, allegedly lived for six months in a Birkenau
crematorium serving as an assistant to Dr. Josef Mengele in the dissection
room.  Pressac selects from Nyiszli's book only Chapter VII, in which this
witness supposedly describes a gassing operation in Krema II.  At first
Pressac affirms that this description is "entirely accurate, EXCEPT for
certain FIGURES which are very WRONG indeed [Pressac's capitals]" (p. 473).
Next, he comments on the text, and here one realizes that, even for a
Pressac, almost all the data in Nyiszli's book, whether numbers or physical
details, are erroneous.

     The witness declares that the gas chamber was 500 feet (150 meters)
long; but, Pressac says, a plan (which this writer discovered and which is
borne out by the building's ruins) shows that the length of the room under
discussion could not have exceeded 100 feet (30 meters).  How to explain?
It's simple, says Pressac:  the witness told the truth, but he used a
multiplier of five.

     The witness states that the undressing room was 200 yards (about 200
meters) long; well, says Pressac, everything shows that room measured 50
yards (around 50 meters) in length.  For here, according to Pressac,
Nyiszli has used a multiplier of four.

     Since the average of the various multipliers is four, Pressac, proud
of his discovery, gets to talking in his book, whether regarding Nyiszli or
other affirmations and testimonies, of the "famous multiplying factor of
four" (see p. 483, 494).

     Accordingly, following our pharmacist, if we wish to find the real
figures, it behooves as we read to divide all the numbers by four.

     As for me, I should say that by that reckoning, every false witness
would be in the clear.  Supposing a "witness" states that in six months
(the duration of Nyiszli's stay in Auschwitz) he saw four men who were all
7 meters tall and 200 years old.  We can assume that anybody would dismiss
such a witness.  Anybody but Pressac, who, applying the rule of the famous
divisor of four, would say:  this witness is telling the truth:  he saw
*one* man, who was *1.75 meters* tall and *50 years* old.

     But Pressac's gymnastics don't end here.  I have made a critical
review of his comments on the Nyiszli testimony only regarding the short
passage that Nyiszli has written on the gassings.  Here we have,  on the
one hand, the multipliers Pressac says Nyiszli used; and, on the other
hand, a sampling of Pressac's comments regarding such and such a fact,
physical reality, or figure reported by Nyiszli (p. 474-475):


- PRESSAC'S COMMENTS ON NYISZLI'S COEFFICIENTS:

     1.   Nyiszli, says Pressac, has divided by 2.

     2.   Nyiszli, says Pressac, has multiplied by 3; by 5; by 4; by 2.5;
          by 6.7; by 4; by 4; by 2.5; by 4; by 2 to 3.


- PRESSAC'S EVALUATIONS OF NYISZLI'S STATEMENTS:

     Wrong
     Wrong
     Wrong
     Wrong
     Wrong and deliberately misleading [...].  Whom is Dr. Nyiszli trying
       to mislead and why?
     Lack of familiarity with the premises
     "War story" pure and simple
     Pure invention
     Legend


     . . . (and let us add that, when the witness talks about "concrete,"
we must read "wood"; when he talks about "chlorine," we must read
"hydrocyanic acid").

     Pressac's conclusion is delectable.  He proudly entitles it "The
Multiplier."  Here Pressac, far from dismissing his witness for his
exaggerations and fables, discovers in the use of the multiplier 4 (the
average of the various figures is 3.8) the sign that Dr. Nyiszli, for all
his not being scientific and rigorous, is manifestly an academic who bears
the stamp of intellectual training of the most serious kind.  He writes:


          The average of the different multipliers is almost exactly
     four.^12  If we apply this to the official total of 4 million victims
     we arrive at a figure much closer to reality:  1 million.  This
     calculation is by no means scientific but it shows that DOCTOR
     NYISZLI, a respected ACADEMIC, TRAINED IN GERMANY, multiplied the
     figures by FOUR when describing the interior of Krematorium II and
     when speaking of the number of persons or victims (p. 475).


     In short, Pressac understands that the "credibility" of Nyiszli's book
has been "long contested" (p. 494); that was due to "the famous
multiplication factor of four of which Dr. Miklos Nyiszli made such
abundant and lamentable use" (Ibid.).  But fortunately Pressac has arrived;
he has discovered the key needed by anyone reading Nyiszli's book and,
thanks to that key, everything is deciphered.  There is no longer any
reason to challenge the credibility of an honorable academic, educated in
Germany.  Pressac has saved Nyiszli.

     But the reader, on seeing any figure at all from the pen of this
astonishing witness, can never know whether the number is to be  considered
exact, or whether it is necessary to multiply it or divide it, and if so,
by exactly how much.


                   "Faurisson and His Clique" (p. 12)

     I shall forgo counting the number of times that Pressac attacks the
Revisionists in general and me in particular.  Mark Weber writes:


          Pressac does not seem to be a psychologically sound person.  For
     example, he confesses that he "nearly" killed himself in the Auschwitz
     main camp in October 1979 (p. 537).  His relationship with Dr.
     Faurisson and French Revisionist publisher Pierre Guillaume - to which
     he devotes several pages - changed from a kind of admiration to bitter
     personal animosity.  He cites nothing about Faurisson's treatment of
     him that would justify such visceral enmity, even granting the
     intensity of his disagreement about the Holocaust issue.  The
     emotional and even vicious nature of Pressac's furious hostility
     towards Faurisson suggests an insecure and unstable personality
     ("Auschwitz:  Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers," _The
     Journal of Historical Review_, Summer 1990, p. 231-237).


     Here I must provide an explanation.  Pressac has a specific reason for
not liking me:  in the early 1980s, I was led to show him to the door of
the home of Pierre Guillaume (where he had come to see us once more without
announcing his arrival beforehand).  That is the kind of humiliation which
is not forgotten, especially by someone who, afflicted with a sense of
inferiority, seeks approval, fishes  for compliments, offers his services
insistently and wishes to be taken seriously.  Pressac ended up exhausting
my patience.  His obsequiousness, his mental confusion, his panicky fears,
his horror of clarity and of unequivocal positions, his propensity to lie
and to cheat made his visits more and  more undesirable.  He makes no
allusion to that humiliating episode in his book; on the contrary, he
states that in March or April 1981 he took the initiative and "broke
completely with Faurisson" (p. 554).  That is quite simply false.  He was
ushered to the door, and, I must say, in no uncertain terms.

     Jean-Claude Pressac was an admirer of Hitler, of Degrelle and of
militaria.  He had a bust of Hitler in his home, in a place of honor, and,
fearing our reaction at the time of a visit to his home, had forewarned
Guillaume and myself about it, not without some apprehension.  He had
dreamt of writing a novel showing the victory of his hero and the triumph
of National Socialism (see, in this regard, p. 541).  He had been educated
at the military academy of La Fleche and, according to Guillaume, himself a
former student at that establishment, had in 1959 received a reprimand from
the school's administration due to a sketch of Nazi inspiration that he had
displayed at the time of a school celebration.  He said that he was a
supporter of Pierre Sidos, a French far-rightist.  The extreme right, or
what is called that, has, side by side with strong personalities (as in the
case of Leon Degrelle), poor wretches who admire force since they are weak.
Such was the fact with Pressac who, moreover, had certain medical problems
which, I must say, increased my pity for him.

     Guillaume devoted several pages to Pressac in his book _Droit et
histoire_ (La Vieille Taupe, 1986, p. 118-125).  I recommend reading those
pages, which are both lively and penetrating.

     Before meeting us, Pressac believed in the gas chambers.  I showed him
my documentation.  He was staggered by it, and recognized his error.
Believing he knew how to read the plans that I had discovered in the
archives of the Auschwitz Museum, he offered us his services.
Half-serious, half-mocking, we took to calling him "Schliemann," from the
name of the discoverer of the ruins of Troy.  Pressac had a peculiar habit:
at each encounter, his first words were:  "I've blown it."  He "blew it" -
he made a mistake - repeatedly.  Easily influenced, easily anguished, he
perpetually changed his opinion on details and each time adopted the most
peremptory tone in articulating his thesis of the day.  Another of his
eccentricities:  as soon as the simplest question put him in a quandary
(and his life was a perpetual quandary), he would answer:  "Yes/No."  Not:
"Yes and no" but, in a single breath:  "Yes/No."  And it was impossible for
him to clarify his answer, which served him as a refuge, as with a child
caught being naughty.  He had the irritating habit of pretending, from one
minute to the next, that he hadn't said what he had just said.  I invited
him accordingly to record our conversations with a tape recorder to avoid
misunderstandings.  With childish fear, offering no explanation, he refused
to be recorded.

     But he no longer believed in the gas chambers.  He began to feel
called to be a Revisionist; wishing it is not enough, however.  My life and
that of Pierre Guillaume became more and more difficult. Pressac grew
frantic.   The cumulative effects of the trials and of the attacks  of all
sorts, the progressive deterioration of my physical health, our financial
problems, a general atmosphere of doom (it should be recalled here what
happened at the time of the blast on the "Rue Copernic," much worse than
that of the "Carpentras cemetery"^13) left our neophyte more and more
feverish and hesitant.  He pleaded with me to give up so dangerous an
enterprise.  For his part, he began to take his distance from us.  "Jewish
friends" had made him understand that there were limits to skepticism which
could not be transgressed (p. 548).  Upon reading the plans of Auschwitz
and Birkenau that I had furnished him in abundance, he saw well enough that
the gassings were impossible.  But, you never know, he began to say,
perhaps there really did take place here and there a few small homicidal
gassings, discreet, furtive, improvised:  what he called "casual," or
"itty-bitty," gassings.

     Before his first departure for Auschwitz, following our meeting, he
had asked me what research he could undertake there for me.  I had told him
that I was interested in the question of the cremations:  the officially
recorded number of the bodies incinerated; status of persons cremated
(inmates/guards/German soldiers and officers and members of their
families); number of employees assigned to cremation of corpses and to the
incinerations in the rubbish ovens; the duration of the cremations; time
cards, etc.).  I thought, as a matter of fact, that those numbers alone
would be enough to demonstrate the impossibility of the stupendous number
of cremations that would have been required by the gassing of hundreds of
thousands of victims, over and above the cremations necessitated by the
ravages of the epidemics in the camp.

     On his return from Auschwitz, Pressac told me with an air of
embarrassment that he had not found the time to occupy himself with the
question that interested me.  He had had too much work to do, and then, he
added, a young Polish girl had taken a great deal of his time:  innocent
boasting by the timid.

     Before his second journey to Auschwitz, he asked me the same question
and I gave him the same answer.  Upon his return, he again stated that he
had not had the time to undertake the necessary research.  Let me note here
parenthetically that in his large book Pressac continues to evade my
questions (see, below, Appendix 2, "How Many Cremations a Day in Krema
II?," p. 166-167).

     Pressac wound up by telling us that he no longer wanted to take sides
between the Revisionists and the Exterminationists.  He said he wished to
have relations with both camps and to content himself with purely technical
work.  I encouraged him in that path and, in a dedication the text of which
he reports (p. 554) but the context of which he distorts, I urged him to
seek, to discover, to be cold, impartial and materialistic.  But that was
too much to ask of him.  Finding that he was unable to buckle down to
methodical and austere work that would have let him put a bit of order into
his thoughts, I sent him on his way.  I had introduced him to the study of
the supposed gas chamber at Struthof (Alsace).  Later on, he published,
under the auspices of Serge Klarsfeld, a small book in English - poor and
confused - on the subject.  I see that, in his large book, he treats the
subject anew.  But he takes care not to reveal a discovery I had made
virtually in his presence when, at the Palace of Justice in Paris, together
with Pierre Guillaume and Maitre Eric Delcroix, we examined the archives of
the "Struthof trial," archives provided at LICRA's request by the
headquarters, in Paris, of the Gendarmerie and Justice Militaire.  In those
archives I found a document revealing that in December 1945 Professor Rene
Fabre, Dean of the faculty of pharmacy at the University of Paris, had
signed an expert report of the greatest interest.  The professor had
successively examined the scrapings done around the chimney of the alleged
homicidal gas chamber and, in the public hospital of Strasbourg, the
well-preserved corpses of the persons supposedly gassed.  His finding in
both cases was negative:  there was no trace of gassing.

     In reality, that particular gas chamber, which was only relatively
air-tight, had served chiefly for the training of German army recruits in
the wearing of gas masks; in that case, the gas presented nowhere near the
same danger as hydrocyanic acid (Zyklon B).  Pressac had been happy to be
able to demonstrate that for us.  He had gone to take some photos of a
training session in a French army gas chamber not far from Paris.  I have a
set of those photographs.


              Three Little Secrets of Jean-Claude Pressac

     A legend that is dear to the heart of Elie Wiesel, Filip Muller and
Georges Wellers maintains that the Germans dug gigantic pits at Birkenau in
which they burned thousands of bodies in the open air.  I had drawn
Pressac's attention to the fact that the Birkenau camp was located in an
area of vast marshes alongside a tributary of the Vistula River and that
despite their drainage work there, the water table continued of necessity
to rise to just a short distance below ground level^14.  It was difficult,
therefore, to imagine such pits being dug, and I added that in any case it
must have been complicated to burn corpses in pits due to the lack of
oxygen.  Then Pressac, whom I was always advising to get physical
verification, dug a small hole in his garden and tried to incinerate the
body of a rabbit.  He never succeeded.  When we visited the site of his
"incineration ditch," he was full of quips about the myth of the
"incineration ditches" at Birkenau, and the tale of the rabbit became for
us a standing joke.

     Visitors to Struthof can see, on the one hand, the Natzweiler camp
itself, with its crematorium and, far from the camp, a small building
containing the supposed homicidal gas chamber.  Pressac pointed out to me
that, IF THEY HAD DECIDED TO LIE ABOUT NATZWEILER AS THEY HAD LIED ABOUT
AUSCHWITZ (sic), they could have made people believe there was a homicidal
gas chamber in the crematorium.  To prove it, he made up for me a sort of
false plan of that building, based on the true plan that we had discovered
in the archives of the Gendarmerie and the justice Militaire.  I still have
that false plan, drawn by Pressac and bearing his explanatory notes.  He
doesn't breathe a word of this little job in his large book.

     I also have, by Pressac, a two-volume study which he entitled
_Auschwitz, architecture paisible_  (Auschwitz, Peaceful Architecture).  It
concerns Krema IV and V.  It is extremely disordered and has never been
published.  My copy is marked No. 2.  The dedication page is laughable:
Pressac, offering his services to all comers, launches into flattery
addressed to certain Exterminationists as well as certain Revisionists.  I
come in for my share of these compliments, which are laid on too thick to
be sincere.


                    A Few Borrowings and A Few Lies

     In his shorter studies, as in his big book, Pressac has plundered my
work outrageously.  He is indebted to me for a large part of the plans,
documents and photographs that he has published; the reminder comprises,
most of the time, plans, documents, and photographs from the same source or
of an identical character.  Only the photos from the Bauleitung Album,
which is in the possession of the Israelis, are an original contribution.

     The baseness of Pressac's attacks on me, his deceptions and lies in
the presentation of certain facts, would oblige me to correct far too many
of his allegations than I am able to here.  I am described as a coward, too
afraid, "of course," to appear at my trial (p. 554); but he knows I was
seriously ill at the time.  He says that one day, in 1982, he telephoned me
and found me a "human wreck"; he writes:  "I was shocked and disgusted to
find [Faurisson] had reached rock bottom, dragging his family down with
him" (p. 558).  It is true that in 1981 and 1982 I believed I had reached
the depths of physical, moral and financial distress, and that my wife and
children shared that distress with me; I did not for all that speak of my
"martyrdom" (Ibid.) and I do not see what is "shocking" and "disgusting"
about my fighting as I did to the limit of my strength.  I frightened
Pressac.  I had always frightened him by my fierceness in defending myself
and by my refusal to bow my head.

He ventures to write:


          Confronted with the new evidence, Faurisson and Guillaume had a
     moment of indecision, seeing the possibility of throwing in the sponge
     and officially declaring that it did appear that some homicidal
     gassings had taken place at Birkenau (p. 554).


     Here, he lies and he knows that he lies, at least as regards me.  He
never presented me with the slightest proof of what he called the "casual
gassings"; and I personally have never considered the possibility of a
retraction of any kind.^15

     Pressac knows that the trials that were forced on me and that brought
me condemnations unprecedented in the contemporary history of France were
nothing but stage productions, and that the documents with which they tried
to crush me were valueless.  He knows it and he says it, whether
explicitly, as when he alludes to the role of Maitre Jouanneau, the LICRA
lawyer, or implicitly, when he happens to analyze a "proof' used against
"Faurisson" at the time of a trial and admits that said "proof" does not
possess the value attributed to it in the slightest (p. 49, 554-556).


                            Questions Evaded

     Pressac has evaded a good twenty essential questions of a technical
nature which have been posed by the Revisionists.  I shall cite only a few
of them:


   - Krema I:  How can one explain the presence of a homicidal gas chamber
     using Zyklon B (an explosive gas) that opened onto a room where six
     crematory ovens were in operation, sometimes reaching temperatures of
     800 degrees?  How could the supposed gas chamber have had a fragile
     door, one fitted with glass and without a bolt and which, opening as
     it did to the inside, would have been blocked by heaps of corpses?
     How could the daily ventilation process have been carried out just
     twenty meters away from the windows of the SS hospital?

   - Krema II and III:  Since it would appear that the victims came in
     batches of 2,000[^16] persons, and it took an hour and a half to
     incinerate one body in each of the 15 muffles, at the end of this
     period of time there would still have remained 1,985 bodies to
     incinerate.  Where were they stored in the meantime?  How could the
     ventilation be done from the floor to the ceiling (Zyklon is lighter
     than air) when everything was set up for ventilation in the opposite
     direction?  Where did they store the bodies of those who, day in and
     day out, died of natural causes?  In general, how do we reconcile the
     scanty dimensions of the premises (the little elevator!) with the
     immensity of the massacres to be carried out there?

   - Krema IV and V:  What were coal stoves doing in the gas chambers?

   - Where were the crowds waiting to enter the crematoria able to gather,
     considering that the aerial photos taken by the Allies never show even
     the slightest trace of such crowds; and that the area around the
     crematoria, far from having been trampled by any crowds, was occupied
     by well-laid-out gardens?

   - How is it that the gas slaughterhouses would be located right in the
     middle of such a variety of other facilities, which, in striking
     contrast to killing centers, include:  a soccer field, hospital
     buildings, decantation basins, and buildings for showering and
     disinfection?

   - Where are the countless scientific, technical and medical documents
     which prove that before, during and after the creation and operation
     of those chemical slaughterhouses (unprecedented in the history of
     science and technology) the Germans supposedly prepared, constructed,
     and surveyed those pharaonic undertakings for the terrible purpose
     alleged, at a time when circumstances required people to get written
     authorizations and submit detailed budgets to get even a screw or a
     brick or a kilo of coal?


                          Deliberate Omissions

     It will be remembered that the only task I assigned to Pressac was
that regarding documents relevant to the cremations (see above, page
153-154).  Neither at the time of his first sojourn at Auschwitz, nor
during his second stay, it appears, had he been able to find time to study
the matter.  Now that his book has appeared, his continued silence on this
point is striking.

     One will note that he is very careful not to say that such documents
do not exist.  He knows all too well that they do exist.  He prefers to
avoid talking about them.  Why does he conceal from his readers the
existence of a host of documents which prove that a record was made of each
cremation?^17  In the case of teeth extracted from a corpse before its
cremation, the usual German attention to detail went so far as to demand
the completion of a printed form, with the heading "Dental Station of the
Auschwitz Camp," supplying the date of cremation, the complete identity
of the internee, his registration number, the number of teeth (right,
left, upper, lower), etc.  (see _Contribution a l'histoire d'Auschwitz_,
Auschwitz Museum, 1968, the photograph of the document between pages 80 and
81).

     Why does Pressac not mention this type of document, or a single one of
the documents required by the Auschwitz chancellery on the death of anyone,
with twenty or so signatures for deaths from natural causes and about
thirty signatures for deaths from non-natural causes (Dr. Tadeusz Paczula,
former prisoner, "The Organization and Administration of the Camp Hospital
in the Concentration Camp Auschwitz I," International Auschwitz Committee,
[Blue] _Anthology_, Vol. II, Part I, Warsaw, 1969, p. 45)?

     Why does he not make the slightest mention of the "death registers" in
which the Germans collected, with a separate page for each decedent, all
information relevant to each death?  The Revisionists had pointed out the
existence of two or three volumes of those TOTENBUCHER, or STERBEBUCHER, in
the Auschwitz Museum, and of forty or so in Moscow:  all of them,
naturally, inaccessible to independent researchers.  It was only under
pressure from the Revisionists, notably at the time of the Zundel trial in
Toronto in 1988, that the decision was made in 1989 to reveal the existence
of the registers to the general public.  Pressac was unlucky.  His book, IN
WHICH HE CONCEALS THE EXISTENCE OF THE REGISTERS, was no sooner finished
than the Soviet Union revealed that, for its part, it retained  a large
number - but not all - of these precious documents, which  strike a lethal
blow to the extermination legend.  Pressac, by failing to mention that
there were also two or three of these death registers in the archives of
the Auschwitz Museum - to which he had free access - lied by omission.

     Regarding the amount of coke necessary for the cremations and
incinerations, Pressac's vagueness is such that I find it suspect (see
microfilm 12,012 mentioned on page 87, the table on page 224, and the
remarks on page 227).  It is evident that the consumption of coke was
certainly ridiculously low in comparison to the amount that would have been
required for the gigantic cremations spoken of by the legend, but Pressac
has so muddled everything that it is not possible to get a precise idea of
it.  It is probable that each muffle burned no more than an average of 6 or
7 bodies each day, like the oil-fired furnaces at Buchenwald (p. 106), and
it is plain that the German document of 28 June 1943 indicating an
incineration capacity of 4,756 bodies a day for Auschwitz (with the ovens
operating 12 hours each day) is unacceptable.  Moreover, Pressac does not
hesitate to justify a figure just as extravagant (340 for Krema I, 1,440
for Krema II, 1,440 for Krema III, 768 for Krema IV and 768 for Krema V)
and, by a method dear to him, he puts these exaggerations down to the
"bragging" of the SS men, who, at any rate in similar instances, must have
"multiplied the real figures by a factor of 2 to 5" (p. 110).

     But his most unforgivable lie by omission concerns the DAILY ACTIVITY
of the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria.  The reader who has just finished
his book may believe that the five crematoria were devoted to the cremation
of ... people who had been gassed.  Day after day, however, these
crematoria received the bodies of victims of various epidemics, of persons
who had died of natural causes, of inmates, guards, soldiers, civilians.
And if, for example, Krema I was near the SS hospital, that was, in the
first place, to cremate the SS dead.  Dr. Popiersch, the chief surgeon,
died of typhus and was cremated at Auschwitz.  The same was true of the
wife of SS man Caesar, who was in charge of agricultural work, and of Alma
Rose, the German Jewess who conducted the women's orchestra of the Birkenau
camp and, if we are to believe Fania Fenelon, was accorded an extraordinary
funeral (Fania Fenelon, _Playing for Time_, New York, Atheneum, 1977, p.
208).  Pressac never tells us how the normal activity of the crematoria
could be combined each day with the activities surrounding the alleged
gassings:  transport to the morgues, storage of the bodies, cremation,
collection of ashes, transferral to urns, dispatch of the urns, etc.


                               Conclusion

     In 1982, I reviewed Pressac's study on Krema IV and V at Birkenau.  I
entitled that review:

          The Myth of the "Gas Chambers" Enters Its Death Agony

     To this review, which I wrote in 1990, I could give the following
title:


                  The Death of the "Gas Chamber" Myth

     In the media, this myth manages to survive somehow or other; in
academic or scientific circles, it is dead.  Our "suburban pharmacist," as
Vidal-Naquet calls him, had offered himself as a savior; his magic potions,
in 1982, aggravated the patient's condition; and in 1989, that is, seven
years later, they have finished him off.

     I know Revisionists who, confronting a thesis so disastrous for
Exterminationism, wonder whether Pressac could be one of their own, and
working undercover, have hoodwinked the Klarsfelds.  I don't believe that
in the least.  Pressac is a neophyte, an autodidact, an innocent crossed
with a fox.  His personality is unstable; he is inconsistent, a weathercock
that turns with every wind.  He argues illogically and does not know how to
express himself either in speech or writing - a deficiency that would be
merely annoying in the exposition of a coherent thesis, but which here,
with an incoherent and hybrid thesis, becomes absolutely catastrophic.
Pressac isn't wearing any mask; it is his real face which we find
disconcerting.  For their part, the Klarsfelds lack discernment; they are
even blind.  They find it "normal" that, in certain cases, persons who
displease the Jewish community should be killed or seriously injured
(_Radio J_, 17 September 1989, Agence France Press, 1:36PM; _La Lettre
telegraphique Juive_, 18 September, p. 1; _Le Monde_, 19 September, p. 14).
The anguish of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld at the rise of Revisionism -
despite their awareness that it has access neither to money nor to the
public forum - is causing them to lose their judgement and their
self-control.  To the Klarsfelds, all means seem justified; every
assistance is welcome; any media operation can serve.  Pressac, driven away
by Faurisson, dismissed by Wellers, went on to offer his services to the
Klarsfelds.  He was hired.  This tedious tome must have cost them plenty.
But, if friends of the Klarsfelds paid for it dearly in money, its results
will cost them even more, which will be fatal for the Exterminationists and
providential for the Revisionists.

     In 1979, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Leon Poliakov proclaimed, with
thirty-two other French historians, that it was unnecessary to ask
questions about the technique and the operation of the homicidal gas
chambers.  They stated precisely:


          It is not necessary to ask how, technically, such a mass murder
     was possible.  It was possible technically since it took place.  That
     is the necessary point of departure for any historical inquiry on this
     subject.  It is our function simply to recall that truth:  there is
     not, there cannot be any debate about the existence of the gas
     chambers (_Le Monde_, 21 February 1979, p. 23).


     In my "Response to a Paper Historian" (_The Journal of Historical
Review_, Spring 1986, p. 24), I spoke of the silliness of that declaration,
and I added:


          [...] The text in _Le Monde_ had been conceived to ward off a
     very pressing problem.  In the confusion that was provoked by my
     article on "The Rumor of Auschwitz" [_Le Monde_, 29 December 1978, p.
     8], Vidal-Naquet and Poliakov hastily drew up a manifesto, and then
     took it some signers, saying to them:  "We say there cannot be any
     debate, but it is very clear that you must not pay any attention to
     that phrase and that you all have to get busy replying to Faurisson."
     That is how Vidal-Naquet ingenuously puts it on page 196 of [_Les
     Juifs, la memoire et le present_, Maspero, 1981] when he writes:  "A
     good number of historians signed the declaration published in _Le
     Monde_ on 21 February 1979, but very few got busy, one of the rare
     exceptions being F[rancois] Delpech."


     Vidal-Naquet, Poliakov, and the other survivors of the "declaration"
of the thirty-four historians have thus had to wait ten years (1979-1989)
to see appear at last an attempt at refutation of my _Le Monde_ article on
"The Rumor of Auschwitz."  Had my article been based on mere foolishness,
its refutation wouldn't have required so long a time, nor so voluminous
and, as we have established, so feeble a response as that made by Pressac.

     Pressac has put his name to a masterpiece of inanity.  His
intellectual capacities did not permit the hope of anything better.  His
propensity for deception and for manipulating documents, already so
remarkable in his presentation of the _Auschwitz Album_ (Le Seuil, 1983) is
here confirmed.^18

     But the pharmacist from La Ville du Bois is only a miserable wretch.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet and the Klarsfelds are cut from a different cloth.

     These are people who had time enough to determine just how
empty-headed their "suburban pharmacist" was.    They used  him
nonetheless.  But could they have found better?  In any case they have
brought discredit on their cause.  Now they are burdened with this
monstrous book, totally unusable, and nothing to be done about it.  Let any
journalist in search of a scoop ask them, as did Richard Bernstein of the
_New York Times_, to point out a single page or a single photograph in this
wearisome tome which rebuts the Revisionists:  Vidal-Naquet and the
Klarsfelds will be unable to offer anything at all.

     I see hardly anyone but the Revisionists showing interest in Pressac
and his masterwork, and then only as scientists would do, musing over a
phenomenon of teratology, a monster.  The "Holocaust" religion has
certainly given birth to more than one monstrosity; Jean-Claude Pressac's
misshapen work is one example.

     In his paper presented at IHR's Fourth International Revisionist
Conference in 1982 ("Context and Perspective in the 'Holocaust'
Controversy," reproduced as "Supplement B" in recent editions of _The Hoax
of the Twentieth Century_, p. 335-369), Arthur Butz put the Revisionists on
guard against one danger:  that of wasting their time in idle technical
discussions that make us fail to see the forest for the trees.  If we
become preoccupied with such details as Zyklon B or crematory ovens, we may
end up forgetting the essential point, which is that an extermination so
gigantic would have left behind a superabundance of physical and
documentary proofs, not merely infinitesimal traces of domestic tinkering
and puttering.  Our adversaries, Butz added, will seek to enmesh us in
cabalistic discussions since, on the level of establishing basic facts,
they know they've already lost.  As Butz also pointed out, however, a
Revisionist must nonetheless show himself capable of confronting the
cabalists right down to trifling details.  Whatever the ground chosen, the
defenders of the "Holocaust" thesis must realize that all avenues of escape
are closed to them.  It is thus that they find themselves today in a total
impasse.  Their gang plank to safety - Pressac's book - is made of rotted
wood.

     The Jewish community has had some bad shepherds.  It should have
jettisoned the dogma of the Auschwitz gas chamber a decade ago.  In
December 1978, _Le Monde_ published, at the same time as my article on "The
Rumor of Auschwitz," several articles which were supposed to refute me.  I
think that certain French academics, of Jewish origin, immediately
perceived that a grave event had just occurred:  in a few lines, I had just
reminded them, like previous Revisionists, that the emperor was wearing no
clothes.  Confronted with this, a group of Establishment historians
endeavored, in vain, to pretend the contrary.  On 16 January 1979, _Le
Monde_ published my "right of response."  That would have been a fitting
time, I think, for the Franco-Jewish academics to have urgently prepared a
"declaration of historians" stating that there could and must be a debate
on the existence or nonexistence of the Auschwitz gas chambers.

     Fate decided otherwise.  On 21 February 1979, then, appeared the
"declaration" drawn up by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Leon Poliakov.  By it the
Exterminationists ratified their ruin.  Ten years later, with this book by
Jean-Claude Pressac, they are reaping the fruits of their blindness.  They
appear to me to have been inspired by an altogether too narrow conception
of their self-interest.  They ought to have looked farther ahead, to have
given thought to their obligations as historians and to the interest, truly
understood, of the Jewish community.  Then, instead of dogging the heretics
with press campaigns, physical attacks, and the police and the courts;
instead of staging one incestuous colloquium after another; instead of
churning out an endless stream of  bad books (Pressac's being the worst),
they ought to have opened their minds and hearts to discussion and
reflection.  They would have done well to have done some work.  The
Revisionists have been at work.  It's a pity the Exterminationists haven't
followed their lead.^19


                               APPENDIX I

                   Pressac Versus the Leuchter Report

     At the end of 1988, Serge Klarsfeld published, in _Jour J/La Lettre
telegraphique juive_, a study by Pressac of the Leuchter Report.  The title
was:  "Les carences et les incoherences du "Rapport Leuchter" ("The
Deficiencies and Inconsistencies of the "Leuchter Report").

     "Deficiencies" and "Inconsistencies":  Pressac is a master there!  The
sole proof he could find of homicidal gassings in Krema I he owes to ...
this report (see Part I, p. 34, in _The Journal of Historical Review_,
Spring 1991)!  His study, plainly hurried, blends emotive reflections about
Fred Leuchter with an exposition on the Auschwitz gassings, a summary on
the Auschwitz crematory ovens, and a final discussion on Majdanek.  On
Auschwitz, he repeats what I call his theory of "molecules with homing
devices" (see Part I, p. 38-39 in _The Journal of Historical Review_), a
theory which tries to explain the absence, so embarrassing for Pressac, of
ferric-ferro-cyanide stains there where so many human beings were
supposedly gassed.

     About Majdanek, I believe it's not too much to say that Pressac does
not believe in the existence of homicidal gas chambers in this camp.  He
writes:


     Lacking any precise technical study, those gas chambers remain poorly
     known (p. vii);

     The use of [such places] as homicidal gas chambers with HCN appears
     difficult and remains risky [...]; the technique would seem possible,
     but an actual use is risky (p. viii); [There were some] modifications
     after 1945 [which give a] false impression (p. ix);

     a regrettable confusion during the 1950s results in the shower room
     often being presented as a homicidal gas chamber (with toxic gas
     thought to be dispersed through shower heads)^20 (Ibid.);

     The use of this place for homicidal purposes is only conceivable under
     two conditions:  the removal of a fanlight that could have been broken
     by the victims and the addition of a mechanical ventilator (Ibid.);^21

     the homicidal function which the author [Pressac] cannot presently
     discuss (Ibid.);

     the deputy director of the Museum told the author [Pressac] that this
     gas chamber had very, very seldom been used, which really means that
     it had not been used at all.  That fiction is maintained in order not
     to shock popular belief which wants it that way [...] (Ibid.);

     etc.


     In his big book, Pressac manifests the same skepticism.  He considers
that no one has yet undertaken a "serious  study" of the Majdanek gas
chambers (p.  184).  Writing of Auschwitz, he lets slip a remark that
implies that Majdanek was perhaps not really "criminal" (p. 218).
Denouncing the methods of the "officials of the Majdanek Museum," he
writes:


          I am sorry to say, and I am not the only one in the West, that
     the Majdanek homicidal and/or delousing gas chambers are still waiting
     for a true historian, which is mildly upsetting in view of the fact
     that the camp fell into the hands of the Russians intact in 1944 (p.
     555).


     On page 557, a photograph shows the exterior of one of the
"disinfection gas chambers thought to be a homicidal gas chamber."  The
photograph comes from Maitre Jouanneau, attorney for LICRA, who was duped,
Pressac tells us, by the camp authorities (the lawyer used this photograph
before the Paris court to prove that Faurisson was a falsifier denying the
historical evidence).


                              APPENDIX II

                 How Many Cremations a Day at Krema II?

     How many cremations, on the average, were there per day in the five
three-muffle crematory ovens of Krema II?

     To that question, Pressac ought to give one answer and one answer
only, but instead he gives at least five, ranging from 288 a day to 1,500 a
day.


   - First answer:  960 or 288 or 720!  Those three contradictory answers
     all appear on page 110 where, speaking of a German document dated 28
     June 1943 which indicates 1,440 cremations per day, he says that this
     "official" number, even if reduced by a third (which would be 960
     cremations), is barely credible; and he adds that, given the SS
     penchant for boasting, it is better in general to divide their numbers
     by "a factor of from two to five" to obtain the truth in such matters.
     So that would give us a minimum of 288 cremations and a maximum of 720
     cremations.

   - Second answer:  752!  This emerges from page 183, where Pressac writes
     that the Krema in question "functioned as a homicidal gas chamber and
     incineration installation from 15th March 1943, before its officially
     coming into service on 31st March, to 27th November 1944, annihilating
     a total of approximately 400,000 people, most of them Jewish women,
     children and old men."  Pressac does not justify any of his
     statements.  We don't know why he claims that this Krema operated in a
     homicidal manner before 31 March, nor why he declares the final date
     of operation to have been 27 November 1944, unless because the
     self-taught Pressac takes at face value the legend that on 26 November
     1944 Himmler ordered the slaughter stopped.  No matter.  Let us take
     him at his word.  From 15 March 1943 to 27 November 1944, there
     elapsed 624 days, a figure that must be reduced to 532 if we take into
     account that, because of a repair of its chimney, Krema II is supposed
     to have halted operations for three months, from May through July of
     1943 (p. 227).  Over a period of 532 days there would thus have been
     400,000 cremations, or 752 per day.

   - Third answer:  a "practical 'throughput' being closer to 1,000."  That
     is what the author says on page 470 when he judges that the figure of
     2,000 cremations that was given by the witness, Dr. Bendel, cannot be
     accepted (see p. 334).

   - Fourth answer:  "between 1,000 to 1,500."  That is what the author
     says on page 475 regarding an estimate by Dr. Nyiszli.

   - Fifth response:  nearly 625.  This is derived from page 494, where the
     author indicates that the number of bodies cremated, according to the
     witness Henryk Tauber, was about 2,500 per day, concerning which
     figure he writes:  "Here we find the famous multiplication factor of
     four [of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli]."

     In sum, Pressac gives completely divergent answers in this matter; his
estimates of the cremations per day in Krema II, in ascending order, are as
follows:

288, 625, 720, 752, 960, 1,000, and between 1,000 and 1,500.

     This Krema had 15 muffles, and the crematory ovens, Pressac admits,
functioned only 12 hours a day.  For each muffle, therefore, the number per
day would have been, respectively, 19, 42, 48, 50, 64, and from 67 to 100.
These figures, varying from 19 to 100 per day, would represent performances
beyond the capabilities of our most modern crematoria.  They are all the
more unacceptable when we consider that Pressac is counting only the
corpses of those who are supposed to have been "gassed," to which must be
added the cremations of bodies of the inmates, guards, and soldiers who
died every day of various causes, especially when typhus was raging in the
camp.


                              APPENDIX III

               Pressac's Tricks in the _Auschwitz Album_

     In 1983, Pressac and Klarsfeld jointly published a French edition of
what is called the _Auschwitz Album_ (translated from English by Guy
Casaril, Editions du Seuil, 1983, 224 p.).  It was a collection of 189
extremely interesting photos, taken in 1944 by a German from the
photographic staff of the Auschwitz camp - possibly Ernst Hoffmann.  No
one, whether Exterminationist  or  Revisionist, has contested the
authenticity or the veracity of these photographs, which were taken at the
time of the mass arrivals of Hungarian Jews in 1944.  These photographs
supply a providential confirmation of the Revisionist thesis, and it is
shocking that we had to wait until the early 1980's to see all of them
published. Serge Klarsfeld, embarrassed by what they revealed, could offer
but a single parry in response:  fabricating a moving account of the
pretended discovery of the album by a certain Lili Meier.

     Klarsfeld and Pressac went to even greater lengths for the French
edition of this album.  In a twenty-page typed analysis which I completed
in December 1983, but did not publish at that time for lack of money, I
described their subterfuges.  I showed that in the French edition, which I
compared with the two original editions published in the United States^22,
Pressac had drastically changed the original order of the album's sections,
an order which had reflected a logical sequence of events for the newly
arrived inmates of the Birkenau camp.  In place of that order, our man had
substituted an arrangement which would give one to understand that most of
the people pictured would end up dying in the mysterious homicidal gas
chambers.  He also changed the number of photographs in each section and
proceeded to switch photographs from one section to another!  He removed
one group of photos and then, to restore the original number of sections,
he made use of the same caption from the original twice, but gave it two
different translations.  I wrote:


          Without breathing a word of it to the reader, Jean-Claude Pressac
     acted like a pharmacist who would surreptitiously change the contents
     of his bottles, change their number, and switch their labels, not to
     mention committing two forgeries in the process (p. 7).


     But the most spectacular of his manipulations was to be found on pages
42 and 43 of the _Album_.  Under the title "The Trickeries of the
_Auschwitz Album_," I circulated a short piece devoted to that deceit.  I
did not fail to send a copy of it to Editions du Seuil.  Here is what our
pharmacist had devised:  in order to try to make us believe that the route
taken by certain groups of deportees (women and children) ended at Krema II
and III and therefore, according to him, in the homicidal gas chambers, he
had provided, on page 42 of the _Album_, a plan of Birkenau from which he
had made a careful deletion to prevent the reader from seeing that in
reality these groups of deportees actually passed between the two Krema,
staying on the road leading to the large shower and disinfection center
called the Zentral Sauna until their arrival there. Caught red-handed,
Pressac followed a policy of silence for the next six years (1983-1989).
To those who had read my article and stubbornly demanded an explanation
from him, even to the point of telephoning him, his answer was to feign
ignorance:  he claimed he knew nothing of my article.  Now, with the
publication of his big book, he is forced to provide an explanation; by
doing so he just makes his case worse.

     The plan in which he deceptively made a cut in the route to the
Zentral Sauna is reproduced on page 421 of his big  book.  On pages 514 and
515, he tries to explain.  He begins by saying that in 1983 he had easily
been able to answer my criticism "in an article whose publication was not
deemed necessary."  He does not reveal to us who decided not to publish it,
and why.  I suggest that Pressac's answer was quite simply judged dreadful.
If I allow myself that suggestion, it is because the response that he
finally consents to give us in 1989 in his big book is pathetic and PROVES
HIS TRICKERY.  Pressac answers in effect that, in order to draw the plan
for which I reproached him, he had used "as a BASIS [emphasis added]" (p.
515) an authentic plan:  plan 3764 (p. 514).  I don't doubt it:  he did
take that "as a basis" and ADDED to it lines representing the avenues in
and around the camp, but taking great care to ... truncate the route
leading to the Zentral Sauna, in order to make us believe that the Jewish
women and children who took that route could go no farther than the
crematoria.  The deletion is flagrant.  The subterfuge is obvious.

     But there's more.  In  the original version of the _Auschwitz Album_,
the American edition, there was a photograph which may be described as
follows:  in the foreground, a group of four elderly Jews, three men and a
woman, are plainly having an altercation, while in the background,
indifferent to the scene, a scattered few German soldiers, wearing garrison
caps, are walking by.  This is photograph 109.   Pressac, deciding to make
this photograph "speak," moves it to the 189th and last place in the
sequence, where it is supposed to mark the acme of the extermination
horror.  And here, in his usual jargon, is the explanation of the
photograph:


          That photo is unique, terrible, and to be added to the file on
     the extermination of the Jews as evidence for the  prosecution [...].
     The footpath down which this woman is refusing to go ends at the door
     of [Krema] V, leading to the disrobing room and the gas chambers.  If
     the three men who are dragging her do not seem to suspect the fate
     that awaits them, she knows that the building which she is turning
     away from, that red brick building with its black roof and its two 16
     meter-high chimneys, has become the negation of life and stinks of
     death (_Auschwitz Album_, p. 204).


     In my 1983 article (p. 9), I observed:


          All that pathos cannot blind us to this:  there is no footpath,
     and we can't predict the direction this or that person might take;
     [Pressac] tells us nothing about the presence and the indifference, or
     inattention, of the German soldiers; how could the woman know that she
     is going to be gassed and the men not know that they are going to be
     gassed?  Finally and above all, IT IS PLAIN TO SEE THAT THE WOMAN IS
     TRYING NEITHER TO GET AWAY FROM THE MAN ON THE RIGHT NOR TO RESIST
     HIM:  SHE IS CLASPING HIS HAND IN HER OWN LEFT HAND.


     On page 421 of his big book of 1989, the subject of this review,
Pressac has altered his commentary on the photograph, writing:


          As for the woman's attitude, it could simply be that she, with no
     illusions about what is to happen and having seen the SS photographer,
     suddenly turned away, saying in effect "I don't want that [bastard of
     an] SS to photograph me!"  Such a reaction would not be surprising,
     for some of the Jewish children, less polite and more spontaneous than
     their parents, instinctively feeling that the SS wished them no good,
     pulled faces at the photographers.


     In other words, for one story Pressac substitutes another, and his
entire interpretation of the _Auschwitz Album_ collapses, since the
photograph deemed to represent the acme of horror has been reduced,
according to our manipulator himself, to showing us an old woman who ...
doesn't want her picture taken!

     Pressac reproaches me for not saying that the scene takes place near
Krema V.  As a matter of fact I did say so, since I quoted his mention of
that.  And I find it interesting that there is nothing secret about the
place:  as in many other photographs, both in that album and in his large
work, we see small groups of Jews, Germans and civilian workers all
peaceably rubbing elbows with each other.

     Pressac leaves unanswered in _Auschwitz:  Technique and Operation of
the Gas Chambers_ all the other rebukes of his trickery I addressed to him
in 1983 apropos the _Auschwitz Album_.  He thus compels me to repeat my
accusations today.


                              APPENDIX IV

                The Truncated Testimony of Hanna Reitsch

     Pressac takes note of the testimony of the German air ace, Hanna (and
not Hannah) Reitsch (1912-1979) as though it were evidence of the existence
of the gas chambers (p. 486).  In reality, Hanna Reitsch, at the end of
1944, saw an Allied pamphlet that mentioned gas chambers; she didn't
believe it.  AFTER the war, she came to believe it.  By the end of her
life, she no longer believed; Pressac is either ignorant, or pretends not
to know, of this last development.  The details of the case are
interesting.

     In October 1944, Peter Riedel, an aviator friend of Miss Reitsch, who
was then working in the German Embassy in Stockholm, received an Allied
propaganda pamphlet which touched on the gas chambers.  Deeply affected, he
brought it up to Hanna Reitsch at the "Aviation House" in Berlin.  The
latter, furious, told him that it was obviously a war propaganda
fabrication comparable to the enemy propaganda lies about the Germans
during World War I.  Riedel urged her to speak to Heinrich  Himmler about
it.  She went to see Himmler, who leafed through the brochure without
registering the slightest emotion.  He asked her:  "And you believe this,
Frau Hanna?"  She told him no, but added that countering it was imperative.
Himmler told her she was right.

     Pressac specifies that the English version of Hanna Reitsch's memoirs
(_Fliegen-mein Leben_) stops there, but remarks that in the French version
the text continues:  "A few days later, the information was denied in one
of the main German newspapers.  I learned from Peter Riedel that the same
denial had appeared in a Swedish newspaper.  It was only after 1945 that I
found out, and with what horror, that Himmler had lied to me, and that the
awful news was true."

     If Pressac had pursued his investigation a little further, and
especially if he had read Gerd Honsik's _Freispruch fur Hitler?  36
ungehorte Zeugen wider die Gaskammer_ (Acquittal for Hitler?  36 Unheard
Witnesses Testify Against the Gas Chambers) (Burgenlandischer Kulturverband
Wien, Postfach 11, 1142 Vienna, 1988), he could have discovered that (p.
132-138):


     1.  Himmler also said to Reitsch concerning that Allied accusation:
         "That [the gassing accusation] is the rope they'll hang us with if
         we lose"^23;

     2.  Hanna Reitsch had so far returned to her good sense that at the
end of life she supported the efforts of the Revisionists and, in
particular, those of an Austrian (whom she called "the courageous Friedl
Rainer") "against all the terrible atrocity lies" (letter dated 15
September 1977, reproduced by Gerd Honsik on p. 138 of his book).


     According to David Irving, the State of Israel is holding the
manuscript of Himmler's memoirs.  If that is true, why is this document
being shielded from the curiosity of historians and researchers?


                                 Notes

8.   See Appendix III, p. 167-171.

9.   This order from Hoess likewise confirms what I have said about the
     Hoess "confessions" (interview in _Storia Illustrata_, reprinted in
     Serge Thion, _Verite historique ou verite politique?_, La Vieille
     Taupe, 1980, p. 203, note 10).  Hoess "confessed" that the members of
     the Sonderkommando entered the "gas chambers" immediately after the
     "gassing" and pulled out the bodies, eating and smoking all the while
     - in other words, without wearing gas masks, something which would
     have been absolutely impossible.  On 2 April 1946, in his jail cell at
     Nuremberg, Hoess gave the following answers to his American
     interrogator, S. Jaari:

     Q:  But was it not quite dangerous work for these inmates to go into
     these chambers and work among the bodies and among the gas fumes?

     A:  No.

     Q:  Did they wear gas masks?

     A:  They had some, but they did not need them, as nothing ever
     happened.  (John Mendelsohn, editor, _The Holocaust_, 1982 vol. 12,
     page 113; _Pretrial Interrogation of R. Hoess_, 2 April 1946, page 17)

          The order of 12 August 1942, signed by Hoess and showing the
     considerable danger of a gassing operation, demonstrates that Hoess,
     when he was interrogated by the Americans four years later at the
     Nuremberg jail, gave some rather clumsy answers; he had been broken,
     as I have also been able to show, by his initial jailers and
     interrogators:  certain Jews from British military security who
     tortured him before sending him to Nuremberg.  Hoess feared more than
     anything being turned over to the Polish Communists (see Robert
     Faurisson, "How the British Obtained the Confession of Rudolf Hoess,
     Commandant of Auschwitz," _The Journal of Historical Review_, Winter
     1986-87, p. 389-403).

10.  Hospitals continued to exist in German cities, but to a large extent
     they were "evacuated" to the countryside where they took the form of
     medical barracks on the model of those that were built in the
     concentration camps.  On page 513 Pressac reproduces a plan of a
     hospital barracks at Auschwitz, giving as his source the Center for
     Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris.  In fact this is just
     another of the many documents he owes to me:  it comes from the U.S.
     National Archives and bears the Nuremberg file number NO-4470.

11.  The shame is that during the immediate postwar period this type of
     "imposed falsehood," or imposture, became law in the exact sense of
     the word; and today, once again, it carries the force of law for the
     French courts by virtue of the anti-Revisionist provisions of the
     Fabius-Gayssot law promulgated, under the signature of Francois
     Mitterrand, in the _Journal officiel de la Republique francaise_ on
     July 14, 1990.

12.  Here Pressac forgets that according to Pressac, Nyiszli has also used
     divisors!  And what is the meaning of "almost exactly"?  Lending his
     imprimatur to Pressac's number-cooking, Vidal-Naquet writes:  "The
     fact that today it can be stated that the statistics given in so
     important a testimony must be divided by four is a scholarly finding
     that we would be very wrong dismiss.  One doesn't diminish the crimes
     of the Nazis by rejecting false figures.  The question of the exact
     number of victims is not essential.  Arno Mayer says this, repeats it,
     and on this point I can only agree with him."  (From Vidal-Naquet's
     preface to the French edition of Arno Mayer's _Why Did the Heavens Not
     Darken?:  La "Solution finale" dans l'histoire_, ed. La Decouverte,
     1990, p. viii-ix).

13.  On the night of 3 October 1980 an explosion in front of a synagogue on
     the Rue de Copernic in Paris killed three persons and wounded a dozen
     more.  On 9 May 1990 graves in a Jewish cemetery at Carpentras in the
     south of France were violated in a particularly lurid manner.

          The French "far right" was accused of having perpetrated both
     attacks.  In each instance it was at length admitted that the
     rightists were blameless.  In the Rue Copernic case, it is universally
     conceded that the attack was carried out by a member of a Palestinian
     faction.  As to the Carpentras incident, numerous articles, even in
     the Jewish press, have subsequently described how the affair was
     distorted and blown out of proportion; all agree that the graves were
     desecrated, not by rightists, but by politically indifferent youths or
     by Jewish families desirous of "teaching a lesson" to the liberal Jews
     of Carpentras (the most serious violation was that of the corpse and
     grave of a Jew who had married a Catholic).

14.  It was due precisely to the proximity of the water table that the
     Leichenkeller of Krema II and III, instead of being completely
     underground beneath the crematory room proper, were only half below
     ground, adjacent to the crematory room.

15.  Nevertheless, I can reveal here for the first time that at the end of
     1978 I considered abandoning all further efforts at publication when I
     witnessed the ferocity with which the entire press, the academy and
     the courts denied me so much as the right to carry on a normal life.
     The Conseil d'Etat went so far as to declare, in October 1978, that I
     was a university professor with no publications to his credit, and
     that I had even confessed as much!  My isolation was complete.  The
     situation has changed a lot since those heroic days ...

16.  This is the figure of the "traditional historians," as Pressac calls
     them; Pressac himself gives no clear indications on the matter.

17.  "The shift boss (Vorarbeiter) wrote in a notebook the number of
     corpses incinerated per charge and the head of the Kommando
     (Kommandofuhrer), an SS man, checked these entries" (the testimony of
     Henryk Tauber, according to Pressac, p. 495).

18.  The book opens with an impressive list of patrons, beginning with "the
     Commission of the European Communities; the Socialist Group of the
     European Parliament; Mrs. Simone Veil, former President of the
     European Parliament" (p. 8), as well as political figures such as
     Jacques Delors.

19.  See Appendix III, p. 167-171.

20.  As we have remarked, Pressac's book constitutes a godsend for the
     Revisionists.  The latter have already produced several reviews, and
     are working on more:

        - Mark Weber, "_Auschwitz:  Technique and Operation of the Gas
     Chambers_, by Jean-Claude Pressac," _The Journal of Historical Review_,
     Summer 1990, p. 231-237;

        - Jack Wikoff, "_Auschwitz:  Technique and Operation of the Gas
     Chambers, by Jean-Claude Pressac_," _Remarks_ (P.O. Box 234, Aurora,
     NY 13026), p. 1-9;

        - Carlo Mattogno, "Jean-Claude Pressac and the War Refugee Board,"
     _The Journal of Historical Review_, Winter 1990-91, p. 461-485;

        - Enrique Aynat Eknes, "Neither Trace Nor Proof:  The Seven
     Auschwitz "Gassing" Sites," see this issue of _The Journal of
     Historical Review_, p. 177.

          The magazine _Instauration_ has announced its intention to
     publish an article on the Pressac book.  I suppose that eventually
     Fritz Berg will publish his ideas.  Berg is the author of three
     important technical studies, all published in _The Journal of
     Historical Review_:  "The Diesel Gas Chambers:  Myth Within a Myth"
     (Spring 1984, p. 15-46); "The German Delousing Chambers" (Spring 1986,
     p. 73-94); "Typhus and the Jews" (Winter 1988-89, p. 480-481).  It is
     thanks to Berg's savoir-faire that I was able to get a copy of
     Pressac's book in January 1990.

21.  Which, in plain English, means that this place could not have been a
     homicidal gas chamber since it did have a fanlight and since it lacked
     ventilation of any kind.

22.  1)  _The Auschwitz Album / Lili Jacob's Album_, edited by Serge
     Klarsfeld, mimeographed, distributed, "free of charge, to more than
     1,000 libraries and Jewish organizations" [S. Klarsfeld, August 5,
     1980].  2)  _The Auschwitz Album / A Book Based upon an Album
     Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, Lili Meier_, text by
     Peter Hellman, New York, Random House, 1981.

23.  Compare the report of Norbert Masur, an official of the Swedish branch
     of the World Jewish Congress, who met Himmler on 21 April 1945, a few
     days before the end of the war.  They had a long conversation.
     Heinrich Himmler told Masur:  "In order to contain the epidemics, we
     were forced to build crematoria where we could burn the corpses of
     countless people who passed away because of these diseases [typhus].
     And now, they want to put a noose around our necks"  (Norbert Masur,
     "My Meeting with Henirich Himmler," _Moment_ [a Jewish monthly
     magazine published in Boston], December 1985, page 51, which is a
     partial translation from the Swedish book _Ein Jude Talar med Himmler_
     [A Jew Talks with Himmler], Stockholm, Albert Bonniers Vorlag, 1945).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transcription courtesy of Dan Gannon

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Posted by HERMANN



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