See the DVDs shocking the nation:
When the Darkness Falls: The Racially Divided States of America
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Making Criminals of Christians
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The Line in the Sand: America's Forgotten Borders
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The Persecution of Revisionists: The Holocaust Unveiled
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Zionist War Crimes: The Case for the Prosecution
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Judea Declares War: A Critical Look at WWII
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Understanding Anti-Semitism: Why Do Some People Dislike Jews?
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Rep. Paul Findley Dares to Speak Out: A 22-Year Veteran Congressman Exposes Israel's Lobby
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Ritual Murder Revisited: The Hidden Cult
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Human Sacrifice among the Fanatical Hasidic Jews and Other Cults from Ancient Times to the Present
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Slave Trade in the World Today
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The Whole Story of Zionist Conspiracy
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Michael Collins Piper Live Radio 7-8 PM EST
Politically Incorrect Cartoons
Paul Grubach's Writings on the Holocaust, Etc.
South African/ Zimbabwean Headlines
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(This website is hosted by the above, and supports both Free Speech and America.)
Interview with Professor Robert Faurisson at the Guest
House of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Hello Professor Faurisson, and thank you for granting me this interview.
Hello. It’s I who thank you for your willingness to put questions.
Professor, may I ask what your reasons were for deciding to take part in
this conference in Tehran on the Holocaust on December 11th and 12th, 2006?
It’s because I know of no other country, no place where a conference on this
subject could welcome me. Even in the United States the holding of such a
conference would be risky; to begin with, upon arrival on American territory any
foreign revisionist could well find himself being sent straight back to where
he’d come from. In France, any similar gathering would be out of the question. I
don’t see a single European country that would tolerate a public conference or
debate on the “Holocaust”. In Germany, your country, the prohibition of any form
of revisionism is draconian. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are merciless.
Furthermore, it may be that in other parts of the world some countries are
indifferent to the matter. Thus it was an altogether unexpected bit of luck that
Iran should offer to host an international seminar on the “Holocaust” that, for
once, would be open to all comers. It was not actually a revisionist conference
but, as indicated by the title (“Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision”), a new
look at the “Holocaust” from a comprehensive viewpoint and not a biased or
fragmentary one. I didn’t think this could come about in my lifetime.
What goal have you been looking to achieve in coming here?
I want to make public what the mainstream media of the Western world stubbornly
conceal. When those media speak of revisionists, it’s to insult us or ascribe to
us ideas that we’ve never expressed. For example, they readily assert that the
revisionists are people who claim the German concentration camps never existed.
That’s putting sheer nonsense in our mouths. Unhappily the nonsensical
assertion, amongst the French in any case, is widespread. On this score, the
French in general have the idea that the revisionists are lunatics who go so far
as to deny the obvious and this is why, coining a barbarism, they call us
“négationnistes” (“denialists”).
Have you the impression, at the end of this gathering, that you’ve
achieved your goal?
In part. The world has been able to note that we exist and that we can conduct
ourselves peaceably and courteously with people who don’t share our convictions.
Time was wanting for any real debate. And then I suppose the media will relate
virtually nothing of the content of our papers. They’ll keep silent about our
arguments and discoveries. To obtain a real debate we’ll need a new conference,
on condition that our opponents don’t shy away from taking part. I must say
that, for an instant, I was able to have the beginnings of a public
confrontation with a professor who was hostile to revisionism, and that this
confrontation turned dramatically to our advantage. I’ll tell you about it a bit
later on, if you like.
Most gladly.
There’ve been, above all, the echoes made by this conference throughout the
world. It has provoked vehement protests, starting yesterday in Washington with
a statement by White House spokesman Sean McCormack denouncing an Iranian regime
that “perversely seeks to call the historical fact of those [Nazi] atrocities
into question and provide a platform for hatred”. Then it was in Brasilia that a
government had its say in the matter with an official protest. Then in England.
Then, at the UN, Kofi Annan gave tongue. The Vatican as well. According to all
these authorities, there are no grounds for asking oneself questions about the
“Holocaust” of the Jews. The “Holocaust” took place and that’s that.
But I’ve promised you that example of the beginnings of a public confrontation.
Here it is. That match of yesterday pitted me against an Iranian professor from
Shiraz University, who also teaches at the University of the State of Washington
(USA); his name is Gholam Vatandoust. At one point in his presentation he dared
to say that the “Holocaust” was “fully documented”, that is, wholly confirmed by
valid documentation. Then, after his talk, when the audience was able to put
questions, I asked this professor to name me a document, and I insisted on the
fact that I didn’t care to hear about a set of documents; I wanted just one. He
started answering by saying how Churchill, in his memoirs, had denounced the
Nazi atrocities. I pointed out that never had Churchill mentioned the “gas
chambers” and that such was the case as well with Eisenhower, de Gaulle and
others of their stature. I reminded him that what I was waiting for was the
designation of a document. I had him note that Winston Churchill, in the remarks
alluded to, was a politician expressing his sentiments. However, I was not
looking to know anyone’s sentiments, be they even those of a personality like
Churchill. At that point, the Iranian professor believed he’d come up with
another argument. He told me it would be enough to accompany him to the American
National Archives, where I should find documents. This wasn’t an answer since,
again, I was demanding to hear of but one document. Just then the situation
reminded me of the story of the angler and the big fish. An angler boasts of
recently making an extraordinary haul, a truly miraculous catch, and, when I ask
to see the fish, retorts: “How’s that? Are you calling my word into doubt? If
you’re a doubting Thomas and won’t grant me your trust, I can show you the place
where I caught that fish.” Obviously my reply will be that the place doesn’t
interest me: the fish does. Let him show me it! Thus, “Show me or draw me a Nazi
gas chamber!” That’s what I’ve been asking for ages.
I told this professor that I was familiar with those National Archives. I’d even
consulted them at three different places: in Washington proper, then, not far
from there, in Suitland and at the opulent installation of College Park. In
short, I was getting no answer to my request. The man made three more vague
attempts, all equally futile, and part of the audience, noticing how decidedly
unable he was to respond, interrupted the verbal jousting with laughter and
applause. This morning I had the occasion to meet him. I found much humbler than
yesterday and he exhibited a lively curiosity about an argument that he seemed
to be just discovering. We exchanged addresses and perhaps our discussion will
continue. I also had two brief talks in private with one of the six anti-Zionist
rabbis who’d come to take part in the proceedings: he was from Britain and
appeared surprised but not shocked by the findings of revisionist research.
Finally, I had a short and cordial exchange with an Austrian chief rabbi.
It seems that another participant, Viktor Nadein-Rayevsky of the Russian Academy
of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations, said at
some point: “Faurisson demands documents, but some very important events have
occurred which haven’t left any documents. In these cases, no document can be
produced.” I’d like to know what these “very important events” can be to which
no document attests!
I think he was talking about the Khmer Rouge.
Perhaps. But then, I’m very sorry! We possess a large number of documents or
alleged documents on the subject. I’ll recall here the meaning of the term
“document”. In general, a document is something written, but it may also be a
material object. “Document” comes from a Latin verb signifying “that which
tells, which teaches you something”. A knife on a table, a chair, a room, a
building can all have the value of a document. It is altogether normal that, for
example, a great mind such as Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889), who, for us
French, is the founder of scientific history, should have adopted a motto like
“No documents, no history”.
I’ve just given you the example of two speakers who disputed what the
revisionists have concluded after completing their research work. I insist on
this. People are quick to call us “négateurs” (at least the word is French) or
“négationnistes” (a lapse into barbarism). These two words mean that
revisionists are persons who deny obvious facts. They would seem, in a way, to
be inspired by the Devil. As in Goethe’s phrase, we revisionists would be
partisans of “the spirit that ever denies”, wouldn’t we? In reality, we deny
nothing at all; simply, after completing our research work, we challenge certain
affirmations and come forth with our own findings. Galileo “denied” nothing but,
at the end of his labours, he stated that a certain idea, generally admitted,
was wrong and that another idea was right.
Can you sum up the substance of your own contribution to the conference?
My talk was on “the victories of revisionism”, in other words the concessions
that the antirevisionists have over the years been forced to make to us. I
recommend that people consult the text itself, which I entitled simply “The
Victories of Revisionism” and in which I provide a selection of twenty instances
of such victories. They run from 1950 to 2004, and some of them are quite
dramatic. Unfortunately the general public know nothing of it all because we
have no access to the media.
An example, if you please, of these victories?
I could cite the case of Jean-Claude Pressac. For years, that protégé of the
Klarsfeld couple had presumed to state he’d discovered proof of the “Nazi gas
chambers” existence. A book of his, in 1993-1994, was laden with praise
throughout the big media. In 1994 I replied with a booklet that earned me new
criminal proceedings. Happily, I got Pressac subpoenaed to appear at the trial.
This was in May 1995, in Paris. His collapse under examination was spectacular.
He never got back up again. To her credit, Valérie Igounet, a French historian
hostile to revisionism, reproduced in her 2000 book Histoire du négationnisme en
France a sort of act of surrender signed by Pressac. The latter, in effect, had
ended up admitting that the dossier on the German concentration camps was
“rotten” — his word, that — with too many lies. He even added that a
definitively “rotten” dossier had been got up around wartime suffering that was
all too real and — in his own phrase — that dossier was “bound for the rubbish
bins of history”.
Surprising! What became of Pressac?
His Jewish friends, of course, disowned him. He died in 2003, aged 59. The
media’s silence was total. Pressac is one of the host of people who have proved
unable to take up the challenge I launched back in the 1970s. At that time I’d
demonstrated how the case for the existence of the alleged Nazi gas chambers ran
into some radical impossibilities. The Leuchter Report and the Rudolf Report,
not to mention a few other reports or views expressed by men of science,
subsequently confirmed my demonstration.
Here, in Tehran, you began your talk with a word of warning about the
photographs said to be of Nazi atrocities. Why?
Because people’s minds are steeped in them. In the business of lying propaganda
nothing’s more simple and effective than the use of photographs. You don’t even
need any complicated montages. It’s enough to show images of the sick, the dying
or the dead and, in relation to these, speak of the killed, the murdered or the
slaughtered. Ordinary decent folk will be taken in. They’ll feel revulsion,
indignation, anger. They’ll no longer see what’s in front of them (the dead) but
only what’s been put into their minds (the killed). They’ll become fixated on
it. They won’t take time to think things over. In the area of false massacres
the procedure stays unchanged. The alleged massacres at Auschwitz are, from this
point of view, comparable, relatively speaking, to all the alleged massacres
that may be conveniently blamed on the defeated side of any conflict, be it at
Andersonville (alleged extermination camp of the American Civil War), Timosoara
(Romania) or Kuwait City. Corpses of women and children will do the trick
especially well.
It’s the procedure that, in 1945, was resorted to by the Americans and the
British, on the one hand, and by the Soviets on the other hand. Teams of
photographers or cameramen enter such or such German camp at the moment of its
liberation. The first step is to have everything photographed or filmed. The
second is to set aside for later use, after selection, only the most pitiful or
revolting images, notably from the hospital barracks or their vicinity; pains
will particularly have been taken to get images of the typhus-sufferers,
veritable walking skeletons. The third step is to prepare commentary that will
lead the public to believe the German commandants and guards had purposely
reduced those poor wretches to such a state, as they were quite simply carrying
out a policy of physical extermination of the detainees. Exceptions aside, the
photographs of some very large groups of healthy-looking inmates, jubilant at
being freed, will be hidden away. It will not be revealed that, in these camps,
there could well exist for the benefit or use of the inmates, as was the case at
Auschwitz, vast kitchens and all sorts of sanitary, medical, dental or surgical
facilities, bakeries, post offices, workshops, places for artistic or musical
recreation whose mere presence renders implausible, at the least, the existence
of any intent whatsoever on the part of the Germans to exterminate those
inmates. On the contrary, with the propagandists, a scalpel will fraudulently be
shown as proof that people were killed or tortured; a disinfection gas chamber
will become proof that people, and not vermin, were gassed; a can of Zyklon-B, a
disinfection or anti-infestation substance (Entseuchung, Entwesung) that was,
accordingly, used to preserve lives against certain deadly diseases or
epidemics, will become proof that the Germans employed it to suppress human
life. The real horrors of all those camps were the overcrowding, the close
quarters and the violence incidental to detention in such circumstances (“men
are like apples: the more they’re heaped on top of each other, the more they
rot”), the prison violence, the hunger, the harsh weather, the diseases, the
epidemics. Revisionist author and activist Paul Rassinier told of all this very
well indeed. Thus, at times, many inmates were going through hell.
You brought up, in particular, the British propaganda about Bergen-Belsen…
Yes. Winston Churchill’s compatriots achieved quite some feat there. It’s what I
call the “Bergen-Belsen bulldozer job”. In April 1945, that camp, overcrowded,
ravaged by epidemics coming from the East, famished, deprived of water in recent
days due to the Anglo-American bombing raids, had become a veritable den of
infection. For this reason the Germans sent out a delegation to Montgomery’s
approaching troops to warn them of the state of things there (and probably of
the risks for everyone, including the civilian population, should the internees
all be immediately released without any screening). The British agreed to
cooperate with the Wehrmacht, but not with the SS, in order to attempt to remedy
the situation. Then they saw fit to open the numerous common graves, count the
bodies and finally, pile those bodies into great, deep ditches. To push all the
corpses towards the ditches they used a bulldozer. In a film shot on site we are
shown the bulldozer in action. A selection of these images has been passed on to
posterity, notably thanks to the documentary (documendaciary?) Night and Fog
(1955). Millions of viewers have believed that here they’ve seen proof of the
Germans’ killing their captives, day after day, on an industrial scale. Very
rare indeed must be those who’ve been able to make out that the bulldozer driver
is a British soldier and not a German soldier. In 1978 a book published in South
Africa with the aim of thwarting any revision of the “Holocaust” presented a
still photo of the bulldozer and the bodies but not without “cutting off” the
driver’s head: the obvious intent was to have us believe the driver was German.
Moreover, with time, in the minds of some, amongst whom Maurice Druon of the
Académie française, “that” bulldozer, in the singular, has, of course, become
“those” bulldozers. One could go on and on listing the very crudest procedures
of this propaganda rooted in atrocity stories. Thus it is that we’re cunningly
shown piles of shoes and eyeglasses or heaps of hair as if they were evidence
that the people they came from were gassed; here the propagandists are sure to
avoid reminding us that, in a Europe subjected to blockade and reduced to
general penury, nothing was thrown away: everything was recovered and recycled,
including hair, which served a particular purpose in the textile industry. There
were countless workshops recycling leather, glass, metal or wood, both in the
camps and in the towns and villages. The “suitcase job” is also worth noting. A
very well-known photograph shows us, at Auschwitz, suitcases carefully stacked
and presented as the pieces of luggage on which each doomed owner had taken the
trouble to write his or her name and address before being sent to the gas
chamber. However, a close look shows that the names and addresses are all
written in the same hand and with the same white substance. Consequently, here
it is a question, in reality, of a task performed at the entrance of every
detention centre: new prisoners’ belongings are tagged and registered by the
prison clerks. Thus had Marcel Bloch-Dassault, long after the war, been able to
receive from Germany the wallet confiscated from him upon entry at Buchenwald.
One evening he could be seen, on French television, exhibiting that wallet,
opening it and taking out the four-leaf clover that was in it at his arrival in
the camp. That said, there’s no doubt the German authorities must have drawn
from the vast stores and confiscated effects to distribute some of them to the
civilian population ravaged by the bombings and deprived of everything.
Wasn’t it at Bergen-Belsen that Anne Frank and her sister Margot died?
Yes, in late February or early March of 1945. They died of typhus. Still long
after the war the official truth had it that that they’d been gassed at
Auschwitz, a camp where they effectively spent some time before their transfer
to Bergen-Belsen. Their fate makes them deserving of pity. But a good deal more
pitiable still was the fate of the German civilian populations killed or burned
alive by the Anglo-American bomber squadrons. A German man had the idea, after
the war, to consult a book with the register of those killed in the bombing of
the city of Würzburg in the night of March 24, 1945 alone; in that list of more
than 5,000 he noted, I think, 128 women or girls bearing the Christian name Anne
or a closely associated one. There’s hardly much talk of those women or girls
systematically killed solely for being German, is there?
Do you think that the National Socialist regime committed crimes against
the European Jews?
That regime did not pursue, with regard to the Jews, any criminal policy. That
said, some crimes were indeed committed, especially in wartime, and they were
what are generally called “excesses”. Crimes of this kind were either against
Jews as individuals or against Jews taken in groups, for instance, in the course
of a military operation or indeed during reprisals. Still, if one looks closely,
nothing should distinguish those crimes from the odious acts that the victors
perpetrated against, for example, Germans or Japanese. I am now going to insist
on a fact that’s important and that even the revisionists don’t exploit enough.
We have proof, we’ve had it ever since the Nuremberg trial, that soldiers,
officers and functionaries, tried by the military tribunals or courts martial of
the Third Reich, were, during the war, sentenced to death and executed for the
murder of a single Jewish man or woman. One day in the Ukrainian town of Marinka,
the mayor, who happened to be a “Volksdeutscher”, an ethnic German, and who had
been appointed mayor probably because he spoke German, killed a local Jewess.
Brought before a military tribunal, he was condemned to death and shot. I’ll
come back to his case.
We have the example of a young German lieutenant in Budapest who, upon entering
a Jewish woman’s house with his men, saw a radio set — forbidden to Jews — and
wanted to take it away, along with some jewellery. With the woman threatening to
go to the police, he ended up killing her. Court-martialled, he was sentenced to
death and executed. As for the soldiers who’d accompanied him, they were given
heavy prison terms.
Were they from the Wehrmacht or the SS?
They were from an air-defence unit. But, you know, this distinction made between
the Wehrmacht and the SS is valid in certain cases and not at all so in others.
For example, when in military action, they were on the same footing. But anyhow,
if there had existed any order whatsoever to kill all the Jews simply because
they were Jews, the Reich authorities wouldn’t have gone and shot someone who,
breeching discipline, had killed a Jew or a Jewess.
According to you, are these few examples sufficient evidence for one to
say that the whole Wehrmacht and the whole SS conducted themselves in such a
manner?
Can a German order to kill the Jews — and I am saying to kill — have existed?
It’s ruled out if I can, as I’m doing here, present you with even just a single
case of a German military tribunal trying and condemning to death a single
person, then having that person executed for the murder of a single Jew. I
haven’t been speaking of “sufficient evidence” but of evidence. A piece of
evidence is an element that one may take into consideration in order, at the end
of proceedings, to hand down a decision. The judge has before him a set of
evidence or testimonies and he draws his conclusions therefrom. Let’s begin at
the beginning, that is with cases like those I’ve brought up here or with the
one, which comes to mind just now, of a Luftwaffe man who, in southern France,
was sentenced to death for “excesses” against a Jewish woman.
I personally experienced the German occupation. In 1939 I was ten years old and
in 1945, when the Germans left France, I was fifteen.
Where did you live?
First, up until July 1943, in Marseille, then in Paris. Never ever could
someone, catching sight of a Jew, have picked up a weapon and killed him with
impunity. The consequences for the murderer would have been extremely grave.
It so happens that, since 1957, I’ve lived in Vichy. One night in August 1941 a
little bomb went off in front of the gate of the synagogue, without injuring
anyone. The culprits were found the next day: they were a certain number of
young Doriotistes, French supporters of collaboration with Germany in the fight
against “Judeo-Bolshevism”. They were quickly tried and convicted. I’ve found
the text of the court decision. And, thanks to someone who, during the war, was
in the police, I’ve learnt that one of the young participants in the “attack”, a
“pupille de la nation”, that is, the son of a serviceman who died in the First
World War, was so badly beaten inside Vichy police station that he subsequently
died. Never during the entire war could a Frenchman have allowed himself to
strike a Jew in the street. A Jew as such was of course considered by the State
as a potentially dangerous citizen. He was living under a sort of probation. He
might have good reason to keep on his guard. His movements and rights were
subject to severe restrictions, but there was no lack of Jews who, all during
the German occupation, continued to go about their business in plain view of
everyone, even running their shops or practicing their trades. Still in Vichy,
Marshall and Mrs Pétain’s regular chemist was a Jew by the name of Maurice
Benhamou, and the kosher butcher’s in the rue Bardiaux seems to have stayed open
throughout the Occupation. In May 1944 in Lyon an American bombing raid left a
number of people dead. Amongst the services held for these victims was an
ecumenical ceremony led by the Cardinal-Archbishop, with an imam and a rabbi by
his side. But this does not, of course, cancel out the fact that in Vichy, Lyon
and in all the rest of the country the Jews could experience deportation, and
either return or not return afterwards.
Here you’re speaking of France?
Yes, of France under the Occupation.
And in the East, do you think things were the same?
If you have any specific cases, do present them. You’re German. I should readily
invite any German to read an extraordinary document on the day-to-day life,
during the whole war, of certain Jews in the very heart of the Third Reich. It’s
the memoirs of Victor Klemperer. I possess all three versions: German, French
and English. I like to compare the different versions of a book. In the case at
hand, the most interesting version is the French one; instead of stopping at
June 1945, it continues on to December of that year and contains a letter of
January 1947 in which the author, quite obviously under the influence of the
propaganda that had been about since the war’s end, piles up lies and
exaggerations on what he’d really lived through and which he’d so accurately
described, day after day, in his memoirs proper.
Victor Klemperer, a Dresden Jew, is married to an Aryan woman. Very anti-Nazi,
he recounts his torments. I’ll tell you the summit of those torments: being
Jewish, he had to wear the Jewish star in public and he did a grand total of
eight days in prison, in June 1941, for having broken the Civil Defense rules
after curfew. He spent the eight days in the cells of Dresden police
headquarters, where, he tells us, he was treated quite correctly. In his book he
constantly stresses how the Germans he’s met on the tram, in the street, at the
grocer’s, far indeed from ill-treating him or coming across antagonistic, have
by and large shown themselves to be considerate and helpful. Vogel the grocer
keeps coffee, a precious commodity at the time, aside for him. Civil servants
are agreeable and polite. “Passers-by sympathized with the star bearers”. He has
several “favourable experiences with the star […] There is no doubt that the
people feel the persecution of the Jews to be a sin”. That said, he takes
delight in Germany’s military disasters and in the bombing raids and is sad to
note that it seems impossible to shatter the civilians’ morale. These memoirs
(at least 5,000 typewritten pages) amount to a scathing refutation of Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen’s thesis claiming that “ordinary Germans”, by their
anti-Semitism, contributed to what is called “the Holocaust”.
You talk there of France, of Germany, but if one goes further eastward,
it’s Poland, the general government, and then, in regard to that country and
Russia, the “Einsatzgrupen” have to be discussed. What do you say here?
It’s above all in Russia that those police units operated. The war in the East
was a savage one. The Soviet State had not signed on to the Geneva and Hague
conventions and the Germans found themselves up against a partisan war. At the
Soviet end there were no rights, no law. Thus could the Germans, when there’d
been a group of partisans in a village, be led to destroy everything in it, even
if there were women and children. German soldiers’ safety was the paramount
concern. With Germany at war, what German wife, what father or mother would have
agreed that a husband or son should be liable to be killed by an individual in
civilian dress shooting from behind, then slipping away? In such moments there
inevitably came about instances of military savagery, acts as are displayed in
similar circumstances by all the armies of the world.
Coming back to my personal experience in France, I was able to see at work first
the French soldier, then the German soldier, the Italian soldier, and, finally,
the Canadian soldier, the British soldier and the American soldier. I, who,
during the war, was so anti-German, must admit that I only ever saw extremely
correct Germans; I can even mention some startling cases. When, afterwards, I
saw the Americans arrive, I thought it was wonderful. Sure enough, many of them
were likeable and well-behaved but there were also, amongst the American
soldiers, NCOs and officers, some real louts. And then, on another score, I was
especially distressed on seeing the horrors of the Big Purge. But here I’m
getting off the subject.
You wanted to talk about the “Kommissarbefehl,” the “Einsatzgruppen,” and
Babi Yar.
Yes, three parts of one same subject. We’re told that there existed a “Kommissarbefehl,”
described as an order to kill systematically the Soviet political commissars who
oversaw the troops, and here the occasion is seized to add that the
“Einsatzgruppen’s” task was to kill the Jews. It’s false. First of all, there
never existed any “Kommissarbefehl” as such. Some historians have acquired a
habit of designating by this term a set of documents concerning the sorting of
prisoners or of certain civilians just behind the front. The Einsatzgruppen,
established at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, were assigned the job of this
sorting. On the immense Russian front, they were a mere 3,000 (three thousand),
drivers and clerks included. At the outset of the military campaign, they were
given rigorous instructions. People should read these instructions. They amount
to saying that, as the rules of war are unknown to the Soviets, a strict sorting
of prisoners will be in order. Certain captives will have to be executed
forthwith because they are not soldiers but fanaticised political commissars who
cannot be left in prisoner-of-war camps; others will perhaps be useful to
Germany. One document, labelled USSR-014 at the Nuremberg trial, spells out
eight categories of suspect persons who must, after sorting, be separated (Aussonderung)
from the military or civilian prisoners. It’s interesting to note that the Jews
are mentioned in eighth (and last) place; it’s specified in this order of
October 29, 1941, that only a category of Jews is concerned. I quote: “8) Soviet
Russian and Jewish intellectuals, insofar as they are professional
revolutionaries or political activists, authors, editors, Komintern officials
etc.”. With their customary dishonesty, the officials in charge of summarising
the documents presumed to write that “those affected” “are above all Soviet
commissars and other leading personalities, also Jews and members of the
intelligentsia”; in their résumé they go so far as to write of “directives… for
the ‘purging’ by special commandos of the prisoner-of-war camps”, whereas, let
me repeat, for this document, it’s a matter of “sorting”. When the troops
advance and take a town, the Einsatzgruppen, a kind of military police in the
field, will have to try to check the identity of prisoners and civilians. This
doesn’t mean that these people are going to be killed. Only some of them will be
slated for execution. On the other side, with the Communists, no bones were made
about executions. Therefore in first place came the political commissars.
Neither here nor elsewhere did there exist any order to kill the Jews.
Then, if I understand you correctly, these instructions didn’t specify
that all the political commissars were to be executed, even though the said
commissars were mentioned first.
That’s right. Often, it seems, those commissars were Jews; however, even in
their case, there was a sorting to be carried out. But you’ll understand well
enough that, in practice, this meant there were prisoners that one had the
right, in effect, to execute in contravention of the laws of war. Also, as
you’re perhaps aware, the German military commanders did not want to act like
the Red Army and, in the end, refused to follow through with the harshest
provisions of the orders in question.
As for Babi Yar, no material investigation of the type carried out at Katyn
during the war has been made there; nothing has surfaced to support the accounts
generally heard on the subject, which seem implausible. I’ll come back to Babi
Yar.
You wanted to add something about that town in the Ukraine, Marinka.
Yes, but first, at risk of surprising you, I give you notice that for a brief
moment we’re going to leave the realm of history for that of fiction. Here is
the drama that I imagine.
The German mayor of Marinka, recently sentenced to death for killing a Jewish
woman, is going to be shot by firing squad. He is in a prison cell awaiting
execution. It is night. He is in the throes of death. Just now, a man appears at
the cell door and addresses him as follows: “You are a German whom German
soldiers, in a short while, are going to shoot because you’ve killed a Jewess.
However, be advised that, in a few years’ time, Germany will have been
flattened. Her conquerors will prove ruthless. They’ll make a clean sweep of
everything you’ve learnt and believed. They’ll make up a lie-ridden history of
this war. They’ll impose the winners’ version. This new official historical
truth, forced upon Germany and propagated nearly everywhere else in the world as
well, will be that, during this war, Germans had every licence to do what you’ve
done. Yes, its promoters will go so far as to claim that the Germans spent the
better part of their time hunting down, torturing and slaughtering the Jews.
They’ll state that Hitler had given the order to murder all the European Jews.
They’ll add that, in order to succeed in a task of such colossal proportions,
he’d had weapons of mass destruction built, weapons so diabolical that after the
war not a trace will be found of them. Television sets, still so rare today in
1942, will be in every home; morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night, year
in year out, they’ll be spreading this universal neo-truth that will be taught
in the primary and secondary schools, the universities and even in the
catechism, to your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A bit
everywhere monuments will be put up and ceremonies instituted in honor of the
new religion. The few who dare to dispute this dogma will be taken to court,
thrown into prison, outlawed from society. And do you know who the most fervent
apostles of this new creed will be, a creed of what will be called ‘the
Holocaust of the Jews’? Don’t go searching! It will be the Germans themselves.
In the very firing squad that’s going to shoot you there are perhaps some men
who’ll survive the war and who, once they’ve got back home, will start believing
the lie of ‘the Holocaust’. In any case, their children, their grandchildren and
their great-grandchildren will believe it.” The mayor of Marinka will receive
this message as an overwhelming shock. Indeed, he’ll go out of his mind as a
result, and it’s a madman that they’ll be leading to the stake.
Such is the tragedy I imagine. I see in it the story line of a stage play or
film to be made. This tragedy is that of Germany, whose very soul has been
harried to death with the “Holocaust”.
Let’s leave fiction and come back to history. I’d like to dwell a little on the
case of Babi Yar. Currently, certain Jewish organisations, sensing that the myth
of the gas chambers is taking in water all around, are trying a diversion,
asking us to turn our attention away from the alleged gas chambers and gas vans
and towards the “Einsatzgruppen”. This is, for example, what a French Jewish
personality like Jacques Attali has recently done in writing “The vast majority
of Jews slain were killed by the individual weapons of German soldiers and
policemen, between 1940 and 1942, and not by the death-works that were put into
place afterwards”. Employing a brand new phrase, these Jews call this the “Shoah
by bullets”! This “Shoah by bullets” is now summoned to replace the “Shoah by
gas”.
And so it is that we’re being served up again with the “Babi Yar massacre”. At
the Nuremberg trial, the place name “Babi Yar” (in fact, the name of a ravine
outside Kiev) didn’t come up, but a certain document simply reported, in one
sentence, that the Germans in Kiev, which they’d recently taken, had, following
a spate of arson attacks blamed on NKVD agents, arrested, in a reprisal measure,
all the city’s Jews, then, on the 29th and 30th of September 1941, had
apparently transported a number of them in the direction of the locality known
as Babi Yar to execute, in the end — take note of this figure: marvel at the
precision — no fewer than 33,771! The document is neither dated nor signed. It’s
one of a set selected by a lieutenant Walter Rothschild of London. In itself,
what this sentence relates is implausible. The real massacre of Katyn,
perpetrated by the NKVD and later imputed to the Germans, had left about 4,400
men — formally attested — dead, in over two months (March-April 1940). By
comparison, in the Babi Yar massacre there would thus, in two days, have been
nearly eight times more victims than at Katyn in two months. Such a fantastic
butchery would have left countless traces and the surroundings themselves would
have been turned upside down, if only by the efforts made in the forbidding task
of mass burial, and then, as some will tell us, of unearthing followed by
open-air cremations. However, the aerial photographs of the time show no signs
of any such thing and no material evidence of this huge crime is available.
These days, in the Ukraine, there’s a Roman Catholic priest who’s been getting a
lot of attention, father Patrick Desbois, a Frenchman and great friend of the
Jews. His specialty consists in traveling the length and breadth of the land in
search of “mass Jewish graves”. He has the good Ukrainian peasants of a given
area informed that he’ll soon be calling at such or such locale and that he
intends to garner testimonies about the slaughters of Jews by the Germans during
the war. It’s wholly in the inhabitants’ interest to be able to boast that the
environs actually possess such mass graves over which, afterwards, may be
erected monuments that may in turn attract the odd foreign tourist. The
“witnesses” get together and prepare a story. The priest then pays his visit and
has his photograph taken with the country-folk as they point towards some spot
or other. One may, to begin with, be astonished at the age of certain witnesses
photographed thus far: they are quite plainly below the necessary age, which
would normally be about 80. But there’s something more astonishing still: these
supposed mass graves will not be dug open; no disinterment or any material
verification will be carried out, all under the admirable pretence that the
Jewish religion prohibits the touching of Jewish corpses; however, it’s enough
to look in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1978) at the entry “Autopsies [plural] and
Dissection [singular]” to see that there is no such prohibition at all. Only at
a single location, Busk outside Lvov, have fifteen common graves been dug open,
but none of the skeletons found there were examined and the sites were all
covered over with a thick layer of concrete, meaning no authentication will be
very possible in future! A curious way of respecting a body in accordance with
Jewish law! The historian will thus have to be satisfied with what father
Desbois, a clever man, tells us the witnesses told him. Hence, unverified
numbers of unfound and not shown victims will be added up and, at the end, we
shall be told that the Ukraine contains so many mass graves with so many Jewish
victims. And all this under the seal of the respective representatives of the
Roman Catholic Church, the “Yahad-in-Unum” association and “Zaka”, a group
presenting itself as “dedicated individuals determined […] to accord the proper
respect for the dead in accordance with Jewish law, heritage and tradition”. As
at Auschwitz, tourism will stand some chance of thriving.
One question. You speak of “Shoah by bullets” and of documents. I myself
think I recall seeing documents showing maps with sketches of coffins
accompanied by the number of Jews executed at the spots thus indicated.
Apparently, these would be documents of the SS or the Einsatzgruppen sent from
the Russian front to Berlin. They would show how many Jews had been killed by
Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D. Is this not evidence? What’s your view here?
I know those documents and, in particular, the one with the coffins and the
figures. It was the American author Arthur R. Butz who first dealt with them in
a critical manner, in 1976, in his remarkable work The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century. Too often it’s a question of suspect, unsigned documents, coming from
Soviet sources. The one that you’re speaking of makes me think of the aerial
photos of Auschwitz, published in 1979 by Brugioni and Poirier, two former CIA
men. In these photos one can make out the Auschwitz crematoria with a naïve
indication bearing the words “Gas Chamber[s]”. Here, on the sketches of coffins,
an anonymous hand has written figures supposedly representing the totals of Jews
slain. There’s no indication of any sources that might make possible a
verification of the figures’ origins.
Have you noted how each time a common grave is discovered in Russia and trouble
is taken to make an examination it’s found that it contains victims of Stalin
and not of Hitler?
Finally, it’s a good idea, in any case, to be circumspect as concerns the
evaluations sent by military men to superiors in Berlin.
One might say that, caught up in the war, the Germans who had to send
reports to Berlin hadn’t the leisure to draw up, as in peacetime, impeccable
reports with all the necessary signatures on them.
That’s merely a hypothesis on your part, for countless German documents of that
era show they remained quite meticulous indeed.
A hypothesis, so be it, but isn’t it asking a bit too much, insisting on
perfect evidence, which perhaps has never existed?
When there is no evidence to hand, one refrains from making accusations. One’s
entitled to say “Rumour has it…” or “It seems plausible that…”, but not to go
any further. To sum up here, I’d say that, as concerns the great massacres of
Jews imputed to the Einsatzgruppen, I’m waiting for criminal investigations to
be carried out, like those that were made for Katyn. And don’t let anyone come
and tell us the corpses all went up in smoke! Even if those mounds of bodies had
been burnt in the open air, that would have called for quite unlikely quantities
of wood or fuel, and, what’s more, traces would be easy to find, if only in the
form of teeth or bone fragments. Still today, bones of men of Napoleon’s army
are found from time to time in Russia.
But what do you make of the trials and the clues that demonstrate the
crime and allow a judgment to be made?
Clues are but apparent signs that simply render the existence of a thing
probable. They’re what Jean-Claude Pressac, that friend of the Klarsfeld couple,
called in his big American book “beginnings of proof” or “traces”. Let’s be wary
of people who’ve got the idea that by adding a quarter-proof to a quarter-proof
plus a half-truth, you obtain one proof. That practice was, it seems, employed
in certain witchcraft trials of centuries past and it’s what was done in a
number of court proceedings in the 20th century, especially against those
modern-day sorcerers known as the satanic “Nazi war criminals”.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that these days there are trials
where real proof cannot be produced but where clues suffice to try the accused.
Quite right. In France, for example, the judges can even invoke what they call
their “innermost conviction”. A judge can do that, but not the historian. How
many times has it been discovered, with the passing of time, that a judicial
error was committed at some moment or other? In the particular instance of the
gigantic case brought against Germany, I ask that no one be content with his or
her “innermost conviction”. I demand proof, one single piece of actual proof. I
note that the accusing historians like Poliakov and Hilberg, and a fair number
of others, have wound up acknowledging that there is no proof. You’re well aware
that Raul Hilberg, at first (in 1961), had the nerve to write that Hitler had
given two orders to exterminate the Jews. He added that this extermination had
been carefully organized from top to bottom within the chain of command.
However, in 1983, under the revisionists’ pressure, he had to admit (and later,
in 1985 at the first Zündel trial in Toronto, confirmed under oath) that there
hadn’t been, after all, either an order, a plan or a budget. Then he fell back
on the most pitiful of explanations: according to his new analysis, all had been
done without an order and without a plan through “an incredible meeting of
minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy”, the bureaucracy of
the Third Reich. I call that “invoking the workings of the (Jewish) Holy
Spirit”.
May I give you still another point?
Naturally.
Personally, something that really struck me, speaking of false proof, was that
solemn session at the UN, where American Defence Secretary Colin Powell was seen
claiming to demonstrate the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I
can assure you that the revisionist I am perceived at the very instant that it
was all a sham. Glaringly obvious. We laugh about it today but it’s disquieting
that no one, there at the UN, should have risen to cry out his indignation and
proclaim before the whole assembly: “I raise a solemn protest against this stunt
of Mr Powell’s, who takes us for fools. We all know that, in the phial he’s
brandishing, there’s surely nothing but some harmless liquid; here we’re just
being served a cinematic ploy. We all know as well that, in the photographs
projected on the screen, nothing but innocuous buildings have been shown, and
that it’s laughable to write, again up on the screen, that those structures
house weapons of mass destruction.” It’s quite precisely the same put-up job
that in 1979 Brugioni and Poirier, those ex-CIA men, went in for when, showing
us crematoria, they presumed to tell us those buildings housed weapons of mass
destruction called “gas chambers”. Same sort of inscriptions, same crude lies.
To pick up on a question that I’ve already put, do you think the German
National Socialist regime committed injustices towards the Jews?
You said “crimes” and here you say “injustices”. I don’t know how to qualify the
measures that Germany was led to take regarding people whom, not without reason,
she held to be hostile or potentially dangerous. Any nation at war may be led to
take measures that will certainly be cruel for the families affected. If,
tomorrow, war broke out between France and Italy, it’s obvious that the French
government would intern or put under house arrest all Italians residing in
France and that the Italians would act likewise with respect to the Frenchmen
who happened to be in Italy.
So then, for you, Germany was at war with those whom one calls “the Jews”.
Yes, she was at war with “the Jews” just as “the Jews” were at war with Germany.
And if we take things to their logical conclusion when observed from a military
viewpoint, at bottom, the totality of those potentially dangerous persons could
have been put in concentration camps or kept under house arrest. But their
numbers were such that it wasn’t practicable. Germany therefore decided to take
measures which, as the war intensified, grew progressively harsher. Let’s take
the example of the compulsory wearing of the star, from a certain moment and in
certain parts of German-occupied Europe (in the southern zone of France, the
Jews didn’t have to wear the star).
This measure amounted to placing the Jews under probationary supervision. But do
note that it’s less cruel and far less of an exaction than locking families away
in camps as the Germans did in certain cases and as the Americans and Canadians
themselves did, not only with the Japanese on their territory, which was normal,
but also with Americans and Canadians of Japanese origin. As for the reason why
the Germans decided to implement the wearing of the star, it was above all with
a view to ensure the German soldier’s safety. Many Jews belonged to groups of
those whom the Allies called Résistants and whom the Germans, for their part,
called terrorists. You can well imagine that the German soldiers weren’t going
to look hard and close at other pedestrians in the street in an attempt to see
whether they were walking near possibly dangerous individuals. That star warned
them. In Paris, in the underground, where each train was made up of five
carriages, the star-wearers had to get on the fifth carriage, in which the
German soldiers weren’t allowed to ride.
According to you, was this treatment of the Jews just? Couldn’t it be
argued that in France or Germany the Jews were well assimilated and that, for
example, the links between the Jews of Paris and those of New York were, anyhow,
not very strong?
It’s not a matter, strictly speaking, of a moral question but of military
necessity. From a moral viewpoint I can tell you that the treatment of the Jews
in Germany shortly before the war, at the time of Kristallnacht, seems to me
unworthy, even though I understand the exasperation that the Germans could feel
in the face of the growing number of Jewish provocations, the Jewish
organisations’ ceaseless calls for a crusade against the New Germany and, most
notably, the assassination in Paris of vom Rath, the embassy counsellor, by the
Jew Grynszpan. Just as unworthy, in my eyes, was the fact that Goering should
impose on the Jews a fine of a billion marks for the damage then caused. But,
you know, “to judge is to compare” and, as concerns horrors of all kinds visited
on minorities, no nation has the right to dispense lessons to others. As I’ve
had occasion to say, every war is a butchery; the winner is a good butcher and
the loser, a less good one; thus, at the end of a war, the winner may give the
loser lessons in butchery but he’s not entitled to mete out lessons in rights,
justice and virtue to him. Yet that is indeed what, at Nuremberg, the winners of
the Second World War did to the losers, in proceedings of a rare hypocrisy.
But you do agree, after all, with the principle that international justice
must be able to punish war crimes and, as it’s said today, “crimes against
humanity”?
As a principle I’ll agree readily enough; but see how, in practice, it’s almost
always, at the end of any war, the loser that this justice finds guilty. It’s a
revolting spectacle, this hunting party of prosecutors and judges in black
robes, all grouped around soldiers crushed by defeat who now see their
conquerors parading about in a courtroom. The American army, although the
bloodiest of all armies, never has any explaining to do before the international
community. To come back to the Second World War, how can one allow that those
who made alliance with Stalin should be able to address the least rebuke to
those who made alliance with Hitler? Let’s suppose, taking up the usual
comparison, that Stalin was the plague and Hitler, cholera; I don’t see how
those who have, in reality, chosen the plague, can find fault with others for
having, in reality, chosen cholera. What right had the French general Leclerc,
who was more or less in American uniform, on May 8, 1945, when Germany had
surrendered, to have a group of twelve or thirteen prisoners taken out of a
hospital and shot without trial just for being in a more or less German uniform?
Let’s point out that it was mainly from horror or fear of Soviet-style communism
that so many young Frenchmen had signed up with either the Milice or the German
army.
Do you justify the nature of the reprisals carried out by the German army
in France?
Let’s talk about the bomb attacks and assassinations in France against the
German occupation forces or French partisans of Collaboration. A large number of
Germans died or were injured as a result of such attacks. There were also many
acts of destruction against the means of transport and communication — for
example telephone cables — , army barracks and depots, crop harvests; there were
weapons trafficking operations, espionage for the Allies, aid to deserters,
escape networks, there was the Communist propaganda calling for ever more bomb
and sniper attacks. What could the German army officers in charge do? At first
they had either the culprits themselves or hostages shot by firing squad. Then,
they realised that the French population, on the whole, both strongly
disapproved of the murders of German soldiers and felt considerable indignation
at the reprisals made by the occupation forces. The Germans risked alienating
this population. Thus, from a certain point, they preferred, in numerous
instances, to apply deportation instead of execution. Towards the end, what with
the big increase in Résistance attacks in the wake of the Allied landings in
Normandy, they turned again to shootings, carrying out a large number of them.
In France, the total number of persons shot by sentence of a German military
tribunal or court martial seems to be situated, for the entire duration of the
war, between 4,520 and 4,540, and not, as was stated at the Nuremberg trial, at
29,660. The Communists have long endorsed far greater figures: they haven’t
shrunk from presenting their party as “the Party of the 75,000 firing squad
victims”; for his part, Communist chief Maurice Thorez dared to tell Stalin, on
November 18, 1947: “In France during the war, 350,000 Communists were shot by
the Germans” (in the review Communisme, summer 1996, p. 47). In France, the
number of Communists shot by firing squad was, in reality, a few hundred. When,
in 1945, French troops occupied their part of Germany, they didn’t find
themselves confronted with any armed, organised resistance bent on killing
French soldiers. Otherwise they would have behaved as mercilessly as their army
had done at the time of the Ruhr valley occupation or in its actions against
“the rebels” in Madagascar, Indochina or Algeria. I have in mind a poster that
was put up all over one German city in the French zone, showing the corpses
photographed in a concentration camp and stating that any person caught removing
it would be condemned to death! From the moment a country becomes the occupying
power in another territory, it will be inclined to instate a reign of terror
there if those being occupied rebel, and especially if they take up weapons to
do so.
Going on to quite another question, today in Germany, in the trials for
disputing the Holocaust, the judges, in accordance with the law, warn both the
accused and his lawyer telling them: “The Holocaust is common knowledge. It’s an
established fact. You haven’t the right to dispute it, nor even to try to prove
your good faith or to justify yourself by spelling out the reasons why you don’t
believe in the reality of the genocide of the Jews and the Nazi gas chambers”.
What do you think of this?
This “common knowledge” argument stems from Article 21 of the Charter of the
Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, which states: “The Tribunal shall not
require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice
thereof”. It’s outrageous. What, here, does “common knowledge” mean? Facts of
“common knowledge” for whom? According to what criteria does the Nuremberg
Tribunal decide that such or such a fact is of “common knowledge” while some
other fact isn’t? The answer is it’s the Tribunal that, without giving its
reasons, arbitrarily pronounces that such or such a fact is of “common
knowledge”, and grants itself permission to make its assessments in this regard
without adducing any relevant evidence. Pre-emptively, from the very start it
forbids anyone to remind it that in proper justice all must be proved. As there
exists no instance of appeal, here we have a court that grants itself full power
to violate the duties of the judge. It’s in the secrecy of their deliberations,
without consulting anyone, that these judges choose such or such a “fact” and
decree that it need not be proved. The procedure is a cynical one.
In regard to revisionism, I’ve had dealings with people of the judiciary in
France, England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and English-speaking Canada. I
delight in hearing them all use a complicated and pretentious language to
express the simplest and clumsiest ideas. So it was that at Nuremberg the
judges, at bottom, decreed: “It’s like this because this is how it is”, or else:
“This is how it is because we’ve decided that it should be so”. But Article 21
of that strange Tribunal’s Charter has an even bigger surprise in store for us
in its next sentence, and here the very peak of cynicism is attained. Listen to
this: “[The Tribunal] shall also take judicial notice of official governmental
documents and reports of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of
the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of
war crimes, and of records and findings of military or other Tribunals of any of
the United Nations”, that is, any of the States that happen to be the declared
enemies of the accused. Here’s what amounts to saying: “On these matters the
prosecution is automatically right and the defence need only hold its tongue”.
Hence one will not be surprised at the fact, for example, that the document of
Soviet origin concluding that the Katyn massacre was a German crime (with 11,000
victims, it was stated!) should have been considered right from the start as
being “of probative value”. The German barristers Stahmer and Laternser, who
wanted to challenge it, found themselves being shut up by a reminder of the
magical Article 21 given all at once by the Soviet prosecutor, by presiding
judge Lawrence, and — the extreme of the extreme — by Soviet judge Nikitchenko
acting as if he himself were a prosecutor.
But, Professor Faurisson, if, in Germany, it’s said that the Holocaust is
“offenkundig”, and so of common knowledge, this is because our libraries are
cram-full of books on the subject. This being the case, how can one not agree
that it’s “common knowledge”?
Those masses of books all take up, with some variations, one and the same
argument, that of Germany’s conquerors. It’s the law of the victor here that’s
being applied in the land of the vanquished. If one looks closely, one sees that
this argument is not at all proved, and even that there exists a quantity of
evidence to prove it wrong. For the historian, “common knowledge” doesn’t
constitute either argument or evidence. It used to be common knowledge that the
Sun revolved around the Earth; it used to be common knowledge that Nero burned
Rome; it used to be common knowledge that witches existed. In 1914 it was common
knowledge for the Allies that the Huns were cutting off Belgian children’s
hands. It has, in a more recent past, — if only by virtue of a decree from the
Nuremberg judges — been common knowledge that the Katyn massacre was carried out
by the Germans.
So then, as you see it, Raul Hilberg and his like are either lying or
stupid.
Not necessarily. It may be that they more or less believe what they relate. This
is what I tried to explain during our conference when, at the start of my talk,
I spoke of a “historical lie”. This lie sets itself apart from the ordinary lie
in that, developing over a long period of time, it becomes, historically, a sort
of standard truth. People then sincerely believe what they call truth and which,
at its origin, is but a lie. These people err more by way of conformism,
laziness and lack of intellectual curiosity than by way of dishonesty. These
faults are to be put down to Man’s imperfect nature. We can’t spend our
existence verifying everything: that would be too burdensome. Hence we often
prefer to swallow, eyes closed, a product advertised as wholesome and genuine
whereas, in fact, it’s doctored.
Do you mean they might well be “men of good will”?
In order to answer, I’d have to be able to probe their hearts and entrails. I
don’t know how much honest conviction there may be in any particular one of
them. On the other hand, what I do know is that there exists ordinarily in life
something called the “white lie”, that is, the lie people allow themselves to
tell “for the cause”. That cause may happen to be a political or religious one,
or it may serve the interests of a group, a professional body or certain
individuals. In such cases, people take leeway as concerns the exactness of
facts or figures and they may even end up finding themselves tailoring testimony
to circumstances. The permanent care of exactitude is quite a constriction. I
believe, moreover, in the force of fear as well as in the need for comfort. That
force and that need dictate a good part of our behaviour. That said, amongst
those who argue the case for “the Holocaust” there are some brazen liars. The
revisionists have caught them in the act a thousand times. Simon Wiesenthal and
Elie Wiesel are superb false witnesses.
And then there are the bluster merchants. Take the Austro-American Jew Raul
Hilberg, whom I’ve already spoken to you about. It’s worthwhile to come back to
his case and bring up some more specific points. He is Number One amongst the
historians who propagate the extermination myth. Hilberg commenced his research
on the alleged “destruction of the European Jews” in 1948. He published his book
in 1961. On page 177 thereof, he didn’t shrink from affirming that there had
been two orders from Hitler to exterminate the Jews. The first order, given in
the spring of 1941, instructed his men, apparently, to go and kill the Jews on
the spot, in Soviet territory, and, soon afterwards (no date specified), the
second order was, apparently, to transport all the other Jews of Europe to
extermination camps. But Hilberg mentioned no sources, no documents, no
designation of those orders and no precise dates. However, no one stood up to
challenge his statements and all the historians seem to have agreed to consider
Raul Hilberg a first-rate historian. He’s simply Number One amongst the
historians who defend a certain official truth that’s imposed on us.
How do you account for the fact that, subsequently, Raul Hilberg should
have had a change of heart and abandoned his 1961 explanation?
The big revisionist offensive was in the late 1970s. Clearly Hilberg was jolted
by it and, in 1982, he told the French weekly Nouvel Observateur: “In a certain
way, Faurisson and others, without wanting to, did us a favour. They raised
questions which had the effect of engaging historians in new research. They have
obliged us to once again collect information, to re-examine documents and to go
deeper into the understanding of what took place”. What we didn’t know at the
time was that Hilberg, shaken by the advent of the revisionists, had gone back
to work again and was revising his old argument, with its two alleged orders
from Hitler, from top to bottom.
In 1983, in a talk at a conference in New York, he suddenly presented his new
thesis, an altogether strange one that ought to have disqualified him forever in
the eyes of the historical community. According to the new line, there hadn’t in
fact been, for the immense enterprise of destroying an entire people on a whole
continent, any order, plan or budget but merely a kind of tacit understanding, a
spontaneous plot of German bureaucrats! Hilberg’s words then were exactly the
following: “But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in
advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there
was no budget for destructive measures. [Those measures] were taken step by
step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out,
but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung
bureaucracy”. You’ll have noticed that he specifies “no budget”; it’s a response
to a point that I personally had brought up. I’d said that, as nothing is done
without money, above all in wartime, someone had to show me what huge sum had
indeed been allocated to the alleged campaign of mass destruction of the Jews of
Europe. You see how Hilberg, in fact, dodges the questions and comes up with a
staggering “explanation”. All in all, for him, the whole presumed vast criminal
operation was carried out… by the workings of the Holy Spirit or through some
phenomenon of spontaneous generation. He himself speaks of an “incredible
meeting of minds” amongst countless bureaucrats; let it be asked in passing: if
it is “incredible”; that is, unbelievable, how can people be required to believe
it, on pain of fine and imprisonment? And what is thought transmission if not a
paranormal phenomenon, something in which one should be still less obliged to
believe?
The day in Toronto when Raul Hilberg confirmed under oath that that was how he
accounted for “the destruction of the European Jews” we had a good laugh round
the big table where Ernst Zündel welcomed us each evening as we returned from
court. I for my part remember coming out with this: “We’re entering a new epoch.
From now on, whenever I need the salt and pepper or the water pitcher, I’ll no
longer even have to say so. We’ll use the ‘incredible meeting of minds’ and
‘consensus-mind reading’. After all, if the German bureaucrats, reputedly the
most thick-headed of all, practised that system, why should we do without it?”
In the new edition of his work, which was at press at the very moment the trial
was going on, Hilberg didn’t use those stupefying phrases but he did resort to
their equivalents in convoluted and academic form, writing: “In the final
analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and
commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance
and synchronization”. And all that, he specifies, without leaving any written
trace!
Mr. Faurisson, according to you, how many Jews died, all told, during the
Second World War due to actions of the Germans? How many, amongst those, in the
concentration camps? In which camps, exactly? How many through the use of gas
chambers or gas vans?
No Jew was killed in any execution gas chamber or gas van. Here it’s a question
of weapons of mass destruction of which no trace has ever been found and of
which no one has been able to provide a technical description. There is no
possibility that the alleged gas chambers shown, here and there, to tourists can
ever have been actual gas chambers. I shall not here be returning to that
subject, with which I have so often dealt, and I note that the opposing side
stubbornly persist in their refusal to provide us with a technical and
scientific study of the presumed crime weapon. As for the total number of Jews
of Europe who died during the war due to actions of the Germans, that’s not yet
possible to determine, and this is so, to a large extent, because of the
scandalous conduct of the wartime Allies and the State of Israel, who stand
close guard over the enormous mass of archives stored in Germany, at Bad Arolsen,
by the International Tracing Service (ITS). From time to time, it’s heard that
these archives are at last going to be opened to researchers. Jewish or Zionist
organisations claim to demand such an opening. Don’t believe any of it. I’ve
devoted quite a lot of attention to the matter and can tell you that, if those
archives were completely opened up to all researchers without restriction, it
would spell catastrophe for the upholders of the “Holocaust” argument. It would
be revealed how carefully the Third Reich authorities recorded data about every
camp detainee’s ¬— Jewish or non-Jewish — arrival, departure, hospitalisations
if any, successive jobs, transfers from one camp to another and, in the event,
decease. And then there’d be access to the precise number of cremations done at
each crematorium as well as the number of Jewish “survivors”, that is of those
millions of miraculously spared inmates who, after the war, spread throughout
the world, many of them forming the original population of the State of Israel.
In the late 1970s revisionists began getting interested in those archives: at
the time there existed, on the premises of the ITS, a “historical section” (Historische
Abteilung). In 1978 the authorities suddenly closed it. For my part, I ask that
it be reopened, with permission given to all researchers to consult the totality
of the material.
But you’ve just asked about the number of Jews who died due to actions of the
Germans. No one, for the time being, is able to say. To begin with, it would be
necessary to set apart those who died of natural causes from those who died as a
consequence of actions on the part of either the Germans or the Allies. Be that
as it may, I have observations to make on the considerable number of Jews who
survived the war and who are in themselves as many clues to suggest that there
cannot have been a policy of killing all the Jews. In the Israeli daily Haaretz
of April 18, 2004, correspondent Amiram Barkat had an article entitled “U.S.
court to discuss question of who is a Holocaust survivor”; it told of how two
Jewish demographics experts who’d had the job of reckoning the number of Jewish
survivors still alive in 2004 had arrived, respectively, at the figures of
687,900 and 1,092,000. The difference is explained by the second expert’s
inclusion of the Jewish population of North Africa, Syria and Lebanon,
territories occupied for a certain time either by the Germans and Italians or by
the forces of the Vichy government. I’ll refer here therefore only to the lower
figure and point out that 687,900 European Jews having experienced the German
occupation and still alive nearly sixty years on imply that, just after the war,
the number of Jewish survivors must necessarily have amounted to several million
(probably 3,250,000). What sort of alleged extermination policy can there have
been if millions of survivors or miraculously spared targets were left alive in
its wake? At that period, Europeans were amazed at the influx to their countries
of Jews who, they’d been told, had disappeared forever. The camps for displaced
persons were full of them. We have at our disposal a great many photographs
showing, in particular, Jewish youngsters arriving by train from Central Europe
or housed in countless children’s homes. Their physical appearance was identical
to that of children of non-Jewish populations of the time. As far as France is
concerned, we know that, of a Jewish population of about 350,000, around 75,700
Jews, foreigners for the most part, were deported, but we’re not told how many
survived. The figure we’re sometimes given — 2,500 out of 75,721 — results from
numerous tricks that I haven’t the time to list right now but I’ve explained
them elsewhere. If you want an idea of how large and lively the French Jewish
community was on the morrow of the war I recommend you look in a certain
yearbook entitled L’Annuaire du judaïsme. The 1952 edition describes, in 415
pages, the situation of French and world Jewry. Believe me, it’s instructive. By
itself, the number of Jewish associations listed, with telephone numbers and
addresses, is staggering. And behold the flood today of books, memoirs,
testimonies of “miraculous” Jewish survivors, not to mention the applications
for indemnity or compensation.
But in Germany they never quit repeating the figure of six million Jews either
gone missing or killed; it’s neither five nor seven but always six.
Even as conformist a historian as Martin Broszat long ago admitted that it was a
“symbolic” figure, that is a mythical one. I’ll add that it’s part of the
general Jewish symbology. Read the study, published in 2003, by Don Heddesheimer:
The First Holocaust. The author demonstrates, with newspaper reproductions to
back it up, that from the year 1900 — but it might be possible to go back still
further — the American Jewish press was already launching the slogan “Six
million European Jews are dying”. He provides examples from 1900, 1919, 1920,
1926, 1938, 1940. In Jewish circles it had become a leitmotiv. In Jerusalem, the
specialists at the Yad Vashem Memorial set out, years ago, to establish a list
of the names of the six million Jews who died in the “Holocaust”. They have
barely reached three million but on the basis, in good part, of simple
unverified declarations emanating from unverified sources and processed in such
a way that one and the same person can be recorded as having died several times,
even, it seems, as many as ten times. On this subject I recommend certain
studies published in the French-language review Dubitando, produced in Holland,
whose contents can be downloaded at http://www.aaargh.com.mx/fran/revu/dubitando.
But, according to you, of what size may the number of Jews be whose deaths were
imputable to the Germans or their allies?
There again, I’ll refer you to the Suchdienst or International Tracing Service
located at Bad Arolsen, to which non-approved historians have been barred entry
since 1978.
Fair enough, but give us a figure as concerns the dead of Auschwitz.
Of the outrageous figures, the best known is that of four million but there have
been, even officially, rather higher ones. The Nuremberg tribunal decided on
four million; it’s the figure that was inscribed on the commemorative stones at
Auschwitz-Birkenau and which stayed there till 1990. Suddenly it was removed
and, in 1995, after five years of dithering, that of a million and a half was
put in its place after being chosen by Lech Walesa, then president of the Polish
Republic. But those in charge of the Museum there and the official historians or
researchers reduced it anew to 1,100,000, then progressively to 800,000, to a
bit more than 600,000 and, finally, in 2002, to 510,000 (Fritjof Meyer).
Personally I reckon that the total number of dead, Jewish and non-Jewish, for
the entire duration of Auschwitz’s use by the Germans (May 1940-January 1945)
must have reached the level — a considerable one — of 125,000 in the thirty-nine
camps of that vast complex; those deaths are to be put down, above all, to the
typhus epidemics whose devastating effects spread even to the ranks of the
Germans there and, in particular, to the medical personnel (striking, for
example, two head physicians: Drs Popiersch and Schwela). I base this estimate
on the data in the Sterbebücher and a few other documents. The total of deaths
registered therein is 80,010 but, considering that a known number of
Sterbebücher are missing, I suppose this total must be put at around 125,000. As
for the figure of 74,000 that’s sometimes proposed, it seems to me to have
arisen from a journalistic error.
You mention physicians at Auschwitz. What have you to say on the subject
of Dr Mengele?
I’ve looked into his case. I don’t believe I’m wrong in stating that Josef
Mengele was probably one of the most slandered men of his era. In all
likelihood, he deserved the reputation, which he had amongst his fellow citizens
of Günzburg, of “ein Kavalier”. I’ve had a look through his manuscripts
(unpublished), which show a man steeped in Greco-Roman culture, very keen on
science and curious about everything. He didn’t hide it from his close
acquaintances that the gassing stories were pure invention. During a posthumous
show-trial of Mengele held in Jerusalem before the world’s television cameras,
his “victims” came forth to impute the worst atrocities to him: according to
them, he used to pin gouged-out human eyeballs on the walls of his office, or
pour acid into the eyes of his “guinea pigs” to see whether it made them turn
from black to blue. There’s hardly a class of things, real or imagined, that
lends itself as readily to nonsensical jabber as that of medical monstrosities,
especially when they can be blamed on a white-coated “Herr Doktor”. Here it’s
easy to have the layman believe any atrocity story at all. On this score, I
highly recommend a book by two British lawyers about the Dering case (Mavis Hill
& L. Norman Williams, Auschwitz in England / A Record of a Libel Action, London,
MacGibbon and Kee, 1965). In his 1959 book Exodus, the Jew Leon Uris had the
gall to write that, from the beginning of his internment at Auschwitz, the
Polish surgeon Wladislaw Alexander Dering (spelt Dehring by Uris) had carried
out “seventeen thousand surgical experiments without anaesthesia” on women. Note
that figure, along with the word “experiments”. After the war, Dr Dering had
settled in England, then had practised in Somalia and, finally, went back to
England where he received an O.B.E., comparable to our Légion d’Honneur in
France.
From April 13 to May 6, 1964 there ran the trial in London of Dering’s libel
suit against Uris and his publisher. During the proceedings, an extraordinary
quantity of lies were to be exposed thanks, especially, to the discovery of the
records of surgical operations performed in Block 21 of Auschwitz where Dr.
Dering had worked. The defendants were driven progressively to reduce the number
of dreadful operations imputed to the retired surgeon. Also, the women became
“men and women” and the figure seventeen thousand was dropped and replaced by “a
very large number”, then “a figure between one hundred and two hundred” and, at
the end, it seems the defense settled for the case of three women identified
only by their Christian names. What’s more, it had to be acknowledged that the
operations had been done not without anesthesia but with rachidian (spinal
column) anesthesia, and a renowned English anesthetist testified that in his
view Dr. Dering had been right to choose that type. A dramatic moment arose when
Dr. Dering was able to prove the surgical records had been falsified by their
Polish custodians starting from a certain page for August 1943, a date when he
was no longer performing operations and was no longer in Block 21. The Germans
at Auschwitz had scrupulously kept those records, partly in Latin, and with, I
recall, the occasional mention of a “casus explorativus”, the term applied to
surgical tasks performed “in order to see”. Dr. Dering was to win his case and
be awarded damages of one farthing — a quarter of an old penny! The judge then
ruled peremptorily that the physician, although he’d been abominably libeled,
would have to bear court costs, which were considerable, and denied him leave to
appeal. All due to the fact that, throughout the whole trial, the shadow of
Auschwitz and the “gas chambers”, constantly evoked — even by the judge — had
never ceased to cast itself on the plaintiff. If I recall correctly Dering was
to declare: “Here I am ruined, but I’ve saved my honor,” and it seems he died
not long afterwards.
Some people will ask you the following question: “But where did all those
Jews go, those who you say weren’t exterminated?”
My answer is: “To Palestine and fifty other countries throughout the world, of
which I can give you the list”. A good many of the nearly six million Jews who
today inhabit the State of Israel are “survivors” or descendants of “survivors”
of what they call “the Holocaust”. Besides, when Steven Spielberg decided to
launch his vast project of gathering together fifty thousand survivors’
“testimonies” he sent his interviewers to about fifty countries of the world;
that’s the number of countries to which those Jews scattered after the war.
Some participants at the conference held that, when the Wehrmacht started
its offensive in the East, many Jews fled or were transported towards the Soviet
Union; what are your thoughts on this?
That’s quite correct, but it’s still hard to reckon the number of those Jews who
settled, for example, in Uzbekistan (Tashkent, Samarkand), Tajikistan or
elsewhere, perhaps even in the Jewish autonomous region of Birobijan.
How do you account for the fact that almost all the former concentration
camp inmates state they can attest to the reality of the gas chambers there?
They’re repeating a rumour that allows them to grant themselves, with no
inconvenience, the status of heroes or miraculous survivors. They generally do
so risk-free since there’s very little chance that anyone will put their backs
to the wall and ask for explanations. During one of my trials, a super-excited
Jew came up to me at the courtroom entrance shouting and showing me his
Auschwitz registration tattoo. “How dare you say the gas chambers didn’t
exist?”, he said. “I’m a witness to their existence.” I looked him in the eye
and told him: “Describe a gas chamber for me.” Losing his composure, he
answered: “If I’d seen one I wouldn’t be here to talk to you about it.” I then
pointed out that, like all the Jews who’d returned from Auschwitz, he was rather
a witness to there never having been a policy amongst the Germans of physically
exterminating the Jews, since there he was, very much alive. I’ll remind you
that in 1985 at the first Zündel trial, in Toronto, we had the rare chance to
cross-examine the Number One Jewish witness to the “Holocaust”, a certain Rudolf
Vrba. Look up the trial transcripts to see how that arrogant individual was in
the end put to rout and how he had to confess that, in his book on Auschwitz,
reputed to be so exact and meticulous, he’d resorted to “poetic licence”:
“licentia poetarum” as he let fly, in Latin.
According to you, what happened to the Jews selected on what’s called “the
Auschwitz (or Birkenau) ramp”?
The men were put on one side and the women and children on the other. In
separate columns, either on foot or, for some, in lorries, they all went off to
the Sauna where they showered and were disinfected. Photos, well-known ones,
from what’s called The Auschwitz Album attest to these arrivals on the ramp.
It’s in this sector that a football ground (“Sportplatz”) was located, and the
newly arrived inmates could see it just beside the ramp; there was a volleyball
court and there were also a great number of hospital barracks, at one side for
the women, at the other for the men. It’s in this same sector that two big
crematoria stood flanked by little gardens and visible from all around; also,
large settling tanks for wastewater, shower and disinfection installations, vast
storehouses for personal belongings which, as at the entrance to any prison or
any camp, were confiscated from the newcomers.
What do you make of the speech given by Adolf Hitler at the Kroll Opera
House in Berlin on January 30, 1939? He said then — these were his words — : “If
international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in
plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the
Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the
contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.”
In that pre-war speech there is positively no question of a physical
extermination of the Jews. To those who were blowing on the embers and desired
with all their hearts a crusade against Germany, Hitler was saying in his way:
“Don’t harbour any illusions: if you succeed in triggering a war, it’s not we
who’ll be annihilated but our Communist and Jewish enemies”. I’ll refer you to
the analysis that the late Wilhelm Stäglich made of that declaration in Der
Auschwitz Mythos. Dr Stäglich also dealt with Heinrich Himmler’s speeches at
Posen, in 1943, speeches to which people in certain quarters have tagged on the
attention-grabbing adjective “secret”; before and during the war, and up to the
very last months, Himmler tried everything he could to convince the Allies to
take the Jews, whom they seemed to find so marvellous, into their own countries.
Therefore, contrary to what other historians say, for you that speech of
Hitler’s doesn’t constitute proof that he wanted to annihilate the Jews.
Obviously not. And you’ll no longer find, I believe, any historians who hold
that it does.
And what do you say about Adolf Hitler’s political testament? In it can be
read, for instance:
“But nor have I left any doubt that if the nations of Europe are once more to be
treated only as collections of stocks and shares of these international
conspirators in money and finance, then those who carry the real guilt for the
murderous struggle, this people will also be held responsible: the Jews [das
Judentum]! I have further left no one in doubt that this time it will not be
only millions of children of Europeans of the Aryan peoples who will starve to
death, not only millions of grown men who will suffer death, and not only
hundreds of thousands of women and children who will be burned and bombed to
death in the cities, without those who are really responsible also having to
atone for their crime, even if by more humane means [wenn auch durch humanere
Mittel]”.
By “more humane means” didn’t Hitler mean “the gas chambers”?
Pure speculation! Hitler signed that text on April 29, 1945, that is the eve of
his suicide (let’s note in passing that, according to the Vulgate, the “gas
chambers” had no longer been operating since late November 1944). He had before
him the appalling spectacle of a country laid to waste and its men, women and
children being systematically torched with phosphorous. He promises those behind
this inhuman war that they’ll have to atone for their crime but not, all the
same, through the horrible and barbarous means that the Allies were using. The
pinnacle of horror is to go and burn people alive. It was the British leaders,
Churchill at their head, who, as of 1940-1941, decided that from then on war
would be waged systematically on the German civilians and who, to that purpose,
undertook the production of heavy bomber aircraft designed to destroy the German
cities. Until then, military men strictly limited themselves to making war
against other military men and, when they did happen to kill civilians, they put
the case, rightly or wrongly, that it was as a consequence — a regrettable one —
of military action (for example, during a tactical bombardment). The British
gentlemen were innovators in the art of war: on the one hand, they elected to
slaughter German civilians systematically in order to make the opposing military
leaders give in and, on the other hand, they went about stirring up and
maintaining the cowards’ war, that of snipers or “Résistants”, against German
soldiers. There might have been some courage in blowing oneself up with a bomb
to kill some of the enemy in the process but there was hardly any in the sniper
who acted under cover and then fled the scene, thus wittingly setting off bloody
reprisals against numerous innocent people. Soviet savagery and American
brutality then joined in. From Hitler’s point of view, the unnatural alliance of
the City’s and Wall Street’s capitalism with Muscovite Communism had been sealed
in the deliberate holocaust of the German people; the Ark of the Covenant
between those two opposites united the Jews of the whole world, so powerful and
influential particularly in the financial spheres of the English-speaking
countries, in the media and in the international Communist movement. The German
historian Ernst Nolte had already offered me that argument of the “more humane
means” being evidence of the gas chambers’ existence. It goes to show how
destitute of real evidence such historians are.
Doesn’t the report of the Berlin-Wannsee conference prove the existence of
a plan to exterminate the Jews?
Not in the least. Undated, unsigned, bearing no stamp of any bureau, this piece
has the look of a draft report telling of a meeting held on January 20, 1942 in
the Berlin suburbs. Nowhere is it a question of killing or exterminating the
Jews but, for those Jews able to work, of evacuation eastwards for them to be
put to work, whilst those aged 65 and over were to be sent to Theresienstadt, in
Bohemia. There appears several times in this document the expression “final
solution of the Jewish question in Europe”, which is sometimes shortened to
“final solution of the Jewish question” or to “final solution” or even, quite
simply, to “solution”. The original phrase, in its complete form, was “a final
territorial solution of the Jewish question” (understood: the Jewish question in
Europe). A certain Martin Luther, under-secretary of State in the German foreign
office, employed that phrase on page 4 of his famous memorandum of August 21,
1942. That adjective “territorial” means that the question will have to be
settled by finding the Jews a territory of their own; any other solution would
be inadequate. For if, for example, after the war, the Jews became free again in
Europe, they would soon, as history shows, manage to regain their power and
influence there; whereas, in the event of a transfer for good somewhere outside
Europe, those who’d survived the hardships entailed would make up an elite
capable of forming the germinal cell of a Jewish renewal. It’s silly to talk
here of an extermination project. Even Yehuda Bauer, professor at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, ended up, in 1992, denouncing “the silly story of
Wannsee”. He stated: “The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story
that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at”.
Some claim that the number of Jews killed by the Germans doesn’t matter.
Whether it’s a question of six million, two million or 500,000, the crime
remains enormous.
The remark is a common one. In my judgment I’ve already answered it, in
substance, by showing you that Germany never had a policy of exterminating the
Jews. That said, figures matter, and sometimes they even matter greatly. First
of all, there’s an important difference between dying and being killed. Then,
it’s far more grave an act to kill a mass of people than one person alone.
Finally, the difference between six million and 500,000 being 5,500,000, there
you have, in any case, 5,500,000 persons who, instead of having died or been
killed, turn out to be well and truly alive. Still, when a modest-sized
community can claim that six million of its members have been methodically done
away with (six million being the equivalent of the population of a country like
Switzerland), it will obtain, most assuredly, more compassion from the rest of
the world than if it only invokes the figure of 500,000 dead or killed. With six
million dead or killed it can demand and obtain a good deal more moral
understanding, financial compensation, assorted powers and privileges. For a
small people, the ability to boast of being a millionaire six times over in dead
or murdered opens up the chance to demand and garner, with no great difficulty,
billions in hard cash. A Shoah estimated at six million victims is the guarantee
of a “Shoah business” that will bear fruit proportionately. By this I don’t mean
that lies have been told and exaggerations made in order to make money or
acquire privileges. Lies have been told and the subsequent success of the lies
has been turned to good account.
Are you of the opinion that Germany has contracted a moral responsibility
towards Israel and the Jews, a responsibility that must also be borne in the
form of financial reparations?
I am rather of the opinion of the American author Arthur Robert Butz, the Number
One revisionist. The text of his masterly book, The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century, ends with this comment on the colossal German “reparations”: “… it then
develops that Israel owes Germany a lot of money, because the proposed
justification for the reparations has been invalidated”. It is worth noting that
the German version of the book is, on this point, rather different and,
unhappily, less clear-cut.
In your view, do the Jews who survived the Second World War deserve
financial compensation?
All the true victims of that atrocious conflict and its aftermath deserve
respect, consideration and indemnity; amongst the victims I should mention, in
particular, the Germans — but not their leaders — and the entire Palestinian
people.
Are you an anti-Semite, that is an enemy of the Jews?
You mean anti-Jewish. No, I don’t consider myself anti-Jewish as I don’t wish
the Jews any ill. I don’t wish for anyone to touch a hair on their head, if only
so as not to have to hear them yell still more loudly. What I do want, on the
other hand, is for them not to do me any harm; nor to others. I want the
deafening drumming of their holocaustic propaganda to end, drumming behind which
one can all too often make out the drum rolls leading up to new wars. There are
none so whining and warlike as that Jewish, Zionist and neo-con nomenklatura
which never quits demanding censorship, repression, wars and crusades in the
name of the “Holocaust”, that is in the name of an especially degrading lie.
Are you a racist?
No.
What future do you wish for “the Holocaust”?
If by that word are meant, all together, the alleged policy of physical
extermination of the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers and the alleged Six
Million, I wish that abominable slander a speedy end in the rubbish bins of
history. As an academic, I want it to be possible to write on the Second World
War without having to dread the effects of special laws put on the books at the
behest of the Jewish nomenklatura. Hitler died more than sixty years ago and it
remains “streng verboten” to write “on” Hitler; one may write only “against”
Hitler. This is either childishness or else treating people like children. I
wish to see us all entitled to write about him just as we’re allowed to do with
Napoleon, Churchill or Stalin.
Have you a word to say in conclusion?
My conclusion is that we are here in Tehran the day after a conference, held on
December 11th and 12th of 2006, dealing with “the Holocaust”. That conference
was truly international. We’d have liked to see and hear Raul Hilberg and Norman
Finkelstein. The latter says the revisionists are “crackpots”, lunatics. If he’d
come here, I’d have asked him quite politely in what respect I personally
deserved that epithet, and I’d also have inquired as to what writings of ours he
might in fact have read before pronouncing such a judgment on revisionist
authors. The conference ended with the forming of a “Holocaust” research group,
with an Iranian, Dr Ramin, as its president and, provisionally, five members: an
Australian, a Briton, a Dane, a Frenchman and a Swiss. The year 2006 will go
down in history, not just the history of Iran but that of the whole world as
well. Iran, this amazing country, will have had the heroism, in one and the same
year, to say no, first to American imperialism, then to the “Holocaust”
crusaders. I won’t hide it from you that this heroism scares me. Perhaps
President Ahmadinejad will in future have to pay dearly for his temerity.
Were you able to have a word with him?
Yes, we talked for a few minutes face to face, amidst a lot of other conference
participants. I expressed my admiration for his courage, along with our
gratitude for this astonishing seminar, open to all, revisionists and
non-revisionists alike. To me, the one whom the world press depicts as a
dangerous fanatic appeared, both in his closing speech and in our brief
conversation, to be a man of refined spirit, sincere and soft-spoken. And
besides, you know he’s never said that the State of Israel must be “wiped off
the map”, but he has thought it enough to adopt a phrase of the late Ayatollah
Khomeini, in whose view the Zionist State would one day be erased from the chart
of time and history. He’s expressed the opinion that in the Middle East Zionism
is bound to disappear just as Communism did in Russia. He wishes to see all the
communities in Palestine, including the Jewish community, find their respective
places one again. Hence that delegation of six rabbis at the conference, wearing
a sort of badge with the message that they were Jews but not Zionists. As I’ve
told you, I myself conversed and got on quite well with two of those rabbis. One
of them said to me, in the presence of a witness: “I ask your forgiveness for
what ‘they’ have done to you, if it’s at all forgivable”. To which I replied
“Let’s stay united”, meaning we should make a united stand against those who,
holding all the power, abuse that excess of power.
You’ve paid dearly for this revisionist struggle that you’ve been waging
since, at least, 1974.
Yes, I’ve paid dearly but less so than other revisionists. I’m talking not only
about the physical assaults that I’ve had to endure and the hospitalisations but
also of the avalanche of court cases and, sometimes, their scandalous outcome.
I’m well placed to know that with regard to a revisionist, as formerly with
regard to sorcerers or witches, the judges, apart from a few exceptions, no
longer recognise any moral principles, any laws, any rights. As for the media,
they’ve heaped onto my name an extravagant load of abuse, insults, slanders. In
over thirty years they’ve never spontaneously offered me the chance to present
my defence. With but one exception: in December 1980, on the radio, I had the
time to utter a sixty-word sentence summing up the findings of my research, but
the axe came down in the form of a lawsuit and judgment against me precisely
because of that sentence. It’s a disgrace that, from 1974 to the present day,
journalists have been able to say my name a hundred thousand times to brand me
as a “gangster of history” without a single one of them ever asking me for an
interview, if only to hear me talk for a few minutes in my defence. No less
distressing is the general silence of my colleagues, French academics and
intellectuals who otherwise are so quick to proclaim their desire to defend the
freedom of inquiry. The American Noam Chomsky has, on one occasion, spoken up in
favour of my right to freedom of expression but, since then, he’s only ever
spoken of revisionists as of “crackpots”. The only people in France to take the
risk of defending me have been, besides my lawyer (and his friends), Pierre
Guillaume, Serge Thion, Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (and their friends, amongst
whom the courageous Jacob Assous). But I have no right to complain if I compare
my lot with that of so many other revisionists, to begin with the heroic Ernst
Zündel and a good number of other Germans or Austrians who either have
experienced long years of imprisonment or will be imprisoned in future. In
Sweden, the ever-steadfast Ahmed Rami has himself also tasted prison life. And
then we were saved by the Internet. Maybe I’ve been lucky. I shouldn’t say the
same for my wife and children.
Will you agree to let this interview be published?
Yes, on condition that you submit the text to me and that, if need be, I may
make corrections and additions, either on my own initiative or at your request.
Then we’re agreed. I thank you.
Danke sehr. And, addressing myself to your country, I’ll add: “Armes
Deutschland!” [Poor Germany!].
Leider. [Unhappily]
Leider.
THE END
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