An interview with Professor Robert Faurisson at the Guest House of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Tehran, December 13, 2006.
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 Defence 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 sympathised 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 Generalgouvernement, 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 honour 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 speciality consists in travelling 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 unshown 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 organised 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 defence 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 anaesthesia but with rachidian (spinal column) anaesthesia, and a renowned English anaesthetist 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 libelled, 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 honour”, 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 Bolshevisation 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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