Nadine Fresco:
The Denial of the Dead
On the Faurisson Affair"
Dissent, fall 1981 © Nadine Fresco, 1981
Reproduction interdite sauf pour usage personnel - No reproduction except for personal use only

This text is a revised and abridged version of my article "Les Redresseurs de Morts" that appeared in Les Temps Modernes in June 1980.

Had he been able to attend the meeting of the First Civil Court on June 1, 1981, at the Palais de Justice in Paris, Hitler would undoubtedly have been overjoyed. Close to 40 years after the masterful --albeit incomplete-- realization of his attempt to annihilate the life of the Jews, there were new zealots at work to annihilate the death of the Jews. In effect, the court was called upon to pass judgment on works of a new evangelist (literally, bearer of good news), Robert Faurisson.1 Faurisson had first been heard from two and a half years earlier with an article in Le Monde that concluded with the following words: "The nonexistence of 'gas chambers' is good news for poor humanity. Good news that it would be wrong to keep hidden any longer."

Who was this new evangelist? An associate professor at the University of Lyon when the affair began, Faurisson had previously been a teacher of literature at a girls' high school. At the time --we will return to it-- the good news with respect to the gas chambers was already waiting, as it were, in the anteroom of his mind.. But his first article, published in 1961, was about literature. It caused a little stir when the journal Bizarre offered its readers an article, at first anonymous, entitled "Has One Read Rimbaud?"² Writing about one of Rimbaud's sonnets, Faurisson demonstrated to a skeptical literary world that if Verlaine and François Coppée had already "gotten wind of a mystification" on the part of the adolescent poet, only he, Faurisson, had finally "arrived... at the simple and complete elucidation of an enigma that [now in 1961] has lasted 89 years." The sonnet, he affirmed, "has no sense if it is not an erotic one" and rests entirely on a "mystification." Mystification. Let us keep the word in mind.. I would not hesitate to say that it is the indispensable conceptual key for those wishing to understand Faurisson's thought.

It took another ten years for a repeat performance. 1972: the appearance of Faurisson's doctoral thesis, entitled "Has One Read Lautréamont?"³ There is a decided need of eyeglasses in France. The thesis begins with the following words:

A hundred years. The mystification will have lasted a hundred years. In the space of one century, Isidore Ducasse [alias Lautréamont] succeeded in mystifying some of the greatest names in literature, criticism, and scholarship, both in France and beyond. There is no example, it seems, of a literary mystification so serious and long-lived.

Faurisson's obsession with demystification is his calling card. On page 13 of the catalog published in January 1978 by the Department of Literature and Classical and Modem Civilization of the University of Lyon-2, one finds the following: "Robert Faurisson, associate professor of 20th-century French literature. Specialization: criticism of texts and documents, investigation of meaning and counter-meaning, of the true and the false." This Mr. Faurisson is an expert in the investigation of truth and falsehood. What a noble enterprise has directed him these many years, over numerous and difficult paths.. But literature was soon to appear too narrow a field for Faurisson's demystifying fever.

If I have taken this somewhat unusual detour, via Lautréamont and Rimbaud, en route to the good news about the gas chambers, it is because there, already, we can see the two panels that form the theoretical diptych of Faurisson's thought. On the one hand, received ideas, prejudices, conformity, dupes, the establishment. But also mystifications and counterfeiters. On the other hand, simplicity and common sense. And also detection, scouring, demystification.

On December 28, 1918, Le Monde finally published the good news that the evangelist was burning to offer poor humanity. Two months earlier, Faurisson had addressed a circular to several newspapers that began with these words:

I hope that some of the statements recently attributed to Louis Darquier de Pellepoix by the journalist Philippe Ganier-Raymond will finally lead to the public's discovery that the alleged massacres in the "gas chambers" and the alleged "genocide" comprise one and the same lie, unfortunately endorsed until now by the official history (that of the victors) and by the colossal power of the communication media.⁴

"I definitely find that they're talking about us too much at the moment," a friend said to me about that time, adding, "that's never a good thing." This "us," which included me, meant "us Jews." And in fact, in France, ever since October 1978, on the radio, in the newspapers, on television, everything seemed to be about us. All this had begun with the interview with Darquier published in l'Express,⁵ to which Faurisson alluded.

Darquier had been general commissioner of Jewish Affairs from May 1942 to February 1944 and had personally overseen the successful operation tactfully called "Spring Breeze," better known as "Rafle [Roundup] du Velodrome d'Hiver." Despite his advanced age, Darquier had lost none of his anti-Semitic vitality. He explained that the only thing gassed in Auschwitz was the lice. "After the war, the Jews fabricated thousands of falsehoods," by which "they intoxicated the entire world."

This interview caused quite an uproar and, for some time, the French talked about the collaborators and those who were given amnesty, about Touvier, Leguay, Bousquet. They pitied, in retrospect, the fate of the unfortunate Jews handed over to the Nazis by a few bad men. And Petain's ashes that were, it appears, finally to have been transferred to Douaumont, site of heavy combat during the First World War, remained discreetly piled in their little corner.

And when the three state-controlled TV channels refused to acquire the American series Holocaust, the unrest caused by the Darquier interview brought a reconsideration of this decision by the Second Channel. For the next 15 days, France lived with the biweekly tale of the genocide. The paradox was that this broadcast went a long way toward appeasing consciences. What was projected on French screens was indubitably sad, but it all happened, thank God, far from us. One could, thus, comfortably begin again to pity the Jews and condemn the Nazis. Neither of them was French. Everything was back in order.

It was during that period, some time between Darquier and the Holocaust series, that Faurisson entered the public scene. Rewarded for his perseverance, he saw his text finally published in Le Monde under the title "'The Problem of the Gas Chambers' or 'The Rumor of Auschwitz.'" The readers of Maurice Bardèche's magazine Défence de l'Occident [Defense of the West] had already been privileged, as of June, to read the complete version of this document.⁶ Faurisson's defenders explain that he had no choice but to appear under the banner of Bardèche because no one else would publish the text. It seems to me that, on the contrary, there is always a choice between seeing oneself published by fascists and not being published at all. Conscious of the fact that the circulation of this extreme right-wing magazine was rather limited, Faurisson was careful to send his text to a number of important people, appending the following supplement:

Conclusions (from thirty years of research) of revisionist authors: (1) Hitler's "gas chambers" never existed. (2) The "genocides" (or the "attempted genocides") of the Jews never took place; clearly, Hitler never ordered (nor permitted) that someone be killed for racial or religious reasons. (3) The alleged "gas chambers" and the alleged "genocide" are one and the same lie. (4) This lie , essentially of Zionist origin, permitted a gigantic politico-financial swindle whose principal beneficiary is the State of Israel. (5) The principal victims of this lie and swindle are the Germans and Palestinians. (6) The tremendous power of the media has, until now, assured the success of the lie and prohibited the freedom of expression of those denouncing the lie. (7) The supporters of the lie now know that it is about to be uncovered; they distort the meaning and nature of revisionist research; they call "resurgence of nazism" or "falsification of history" what is only a just return to the concern for historical truth.⁷

Circulars, articles, supplements.... Faurisson finally had an audience. But the reward had its flip side. Once public, such revelations could hardly avoid calling forth immediate reactions. At Lyons, there were displays of antipathy and Faurisson was lightly molested by Jewish students. Consequently, the president of the university chose to suspend his classes.

The reaction attested to a partisan sensibility that appeared unusual in a place traditionally devoted to the calm and respect that the evangelist thought he had every right to expect. Since that calm seemed decidedly difficult to regain, the unfortunate professor was compelled, in May 1979, to request of the secretary of education a transfer to teaching correspondence courses. The transfer was duly accorded, undoubtedly with the hope that such a measure would, little by little, help people forget the turmoil caused by the indelicacy and ingratitude with which the results of almost 20 years of work had been met.

With a moving sobriety, Robert Faurisson described those 20 years in a letter published in Le Monde on January 16, 1979:

Up until 1960, I believed in the reality of these tremendous massacres in the "gas chambers." Then, upon reading Paul Rassinier, ex-deportee of the Resistance and author of Le Mensonge d'Ulysse [The Lie of Ulysse], I began to have doubts. After fourteen years of persona! reflections, then four years of assiduous research, I became convinced, like twenty other revisionist authors, that I was confronting a historical lie.... In vain I searched for a single deportee capable of proving that he had actually seen, with his own eyes, a "gas chambers".... I would have been satisfied with even the slightest proof. That proof I never found. What I found instead were many false proofs, worthy of a witch trial.

* May 1979: a tract circulates in Paris, entitled "Are the Gas Chambers Indispensable to Our Happiness?" and signed by "persons without qualifies." In the middle of this tract, a sentence: "Professor Faurisson is a man alone." June 1979: a faction of the ultraleft, La Guerre Sociale [The Social War], prints a poster-tract with the headline "Who is the Jew?" One will have already guessed that the Jew today is none other than Robert Faurisson. April 1980: La Vieille Taupe [The Old Mole], a publishing house recently founded by another militant of the ultraleft, Pierre Guillaume, publishes a book by Serge Thion, Vérité historique ou vérité politique? Le dossier de l'affaire Faurisson. La question des chambres à gaz [Historical Truth or Political Truth? The File of the Faurisson Affair. The Question of the Gas Chambers].⁸ On page 2 Thion writes,

One can certainly say that Mr. Faurisson is a man of the right and, to be even more precise, a sort of right-wing anarchist. Nevertheless, one must also remember that until the beginning of this affair, many of his students and colleagues took him to be a man of the left. He is, by all standards, a man alone.

Robert Faurisson or the loneliness of the long-distance investigator.... In France, then --and the particularity is not without interest-- it is a segment of the ultraleft that generously comes to the rescue of the solitary, oppressed new Jew. And since so generous a movement would hardly wish to be hindered by borders, a petition soon circulates in American universities that "claims for Faurisson the right to continue his research without impediment."9 Supporter of civil rights and free speech, and a friend of Serge Thion, Noam Chomsky signs this petition with, if I may say so, his eyes closed.

Poor Chomsky, innocent victim of a quasi-Pavlovian automatism. Someone mentions "rights"; he signs. Someone says "freedom of speech"; he signs. He goes even further with the famous preface (which is not really a preface, although it strangely resembles one) to Faurisson's book Mémoire en défense [A Memoir in Defense].¹⁰ The press seized on the event,¹¹ and I leave to others the delicate pleasure of pinpointing the ambiguities and contradictions that run through Chomsky's comments about the preface. But it is important to emphasize that the Faurisson affair is not an issue of legal rights. Faurisson's right to teach was not withdrawn. His books have not been the object of either seizure or censure. He has not been denied access to public libraries or archives. The suit against him is a private litigation.

If the Faurisson affair did not become a rights issue in France, it was for the simple reason that it wasn't one. And this explains how reviewers here could have seen Chomsky's defense of Faurisson's rights as irrelevant-- or as implying that, in Chomsky's opinion, Faurisson's work had a legitimate claim on public and scholarly attention. Chomsky wrote in a style that is as classic as it is regrettable, attacking "the durable impact of Stalinism and doctrines of a Leninist variety, the strange Dadaist character of certain currents of intellectual life in post-war France,"¹² and describing the "hysteria and irrationality" of the "totalitarian involvements of the French intelligentsia,"¹³ and "the contempt for facts" that characterizes "French intellectual discussions."¹⁴ There was a lamentable debate about all this, a strangely chauvinistic exchange, as ridiculous on the one side as on the other, between Chomsky-- who, breaking with his usual pattern, praised the traditions of American support for civil liberties --and some Gallic cocks defending their homeland!

Clearly unable to acknowledge that he has made a mistake, Chomsky chooses to confuse everything with such remarks as these: (1) "In one of my books, Peace in the Middle East, published in 1974, I wrote that it [the Holocaust] was the most fantastic explosion of insanity in human history."¹⁵ And (2) "I don't know enough about his [Faurisson's] work to determine if what he is claiming is accurate or not.[l6]

Recall that what Faurisson "claims" is very simply that the "explosion" did not occur. Chomsky, who does not know if what Faurisson says is the case, explains elsewhere "we don't want people to have religious or dogmatic beliefs about the existence of the Holocaust; we want them to know the facts. Personally I believe that the gas chambers existed."¹⁷ You, Noam Chomsky, believe in the existence of the gas chambers: but is this mere opinion or respect (the opposite of contempt) for facts? Imagine what someone like Chomsky, for example, would have to say about such... rationality.

Wishing to teach the intolerant French a lesson, Chomsky incessantly refers them to their own classics,¹⁸ specifically to Voltaire. I cannot help but be annoyed (in a manner entirely irrational) by the fact that in this Faurisson affair, which, admittedly, has a little something to do with anti-Semitism--except for those with the piercing eyes of old moles¹⁹-- Chomsky chooses as a model someone who in 1745 wrote about the Jews: "You will not find in them anything but an ignorant and barbarous people who have for a long time combined the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition."²⁰ Of course, Voltaire added, "One should not, however, burn them." But this last suggestion "within such a context has the effect of a kind of stylistic coda."²¹

What appears absolute in Chomsky's political thinking is contempt. What is relative is the object of this contempt. 1980: in his preface to Mémoire en défense, Chomsky writes,

I have frequently signed petitions that, in fact, were very extreme, in favor of Russian dissidents whose points of view were absolutely abhorrent, for instance, supporters of American slaughter exactly at the time it was ravaging Indochina, or of a politics favoring nuclear war, or of a religious chauvinism reminiscent of the Middle Ages. No one ever raised an objection. If someone had, I would have regarded him with the same contempt that those who denounce the petition in favor of Faurisson's civil rights deserve, and for the same reasons.²²

* 1972: in an article entitled "The Fallacy of Richard Herrnstein's IQ," Chomsky wrote,

Imagine a psychologist in Hitler's Germany who thought he could show that Jews had a genetically determined tendency toward usury (like squirrels bred to collect too many nuts) or a drive toward anti-social conspiracy and domination, and so on. If he were criticized for even undertaking these studies, could he merely respond that "a neutral commentator... would have to say that the case is simply not settled" and that the "fundamental issue" is "whether inquiry shall (again) be shut off because someone thinks society is best left in ignorance?" I think not. Rather, I think that such a response would have been met with justifiable contempt. At best he could claim that he is faced with a conflict of values. On the one hand, there is the alleged scientific importance of determining whether, in fact, Jews have a genetically determined tendency toward usury and domination (as might conceivably be the case). On the other, there is the likelihood that even opening this question and regarding it as a subject for scientific inquiry would provide ammunition for Goebbels and Rosenberg and their henchmen. Were this hypothetical psychologist to disregard the likely social consequences of his research (or even his undertaking of research) under existing social conditions, he would fully deserve the contempt of decent people. Of course, scientific curiosity should be encouraged (though fallacious argument and investigation of silly questions should not), but it is not an absolute value.²³

Replace the psychologist by Faurisson, the genetically determined tendency toward usury by the enormous politico-financial swindle that the lie about the alleged "gas chambers" represents.²⁴ In your opinion, Noam Chomsky, who in the end deserves the contempt of decent people?

Poor Chomsky, blinded by the short-sightedness of others. So old and short-sighted the mole; so strangely short-sighted Serge Thion, Pierre Guillaume, La Guerre Sociale, & Co. that they were unable to see of what Robert Faurisson's alleged solitude really consisted.

* June 1978: Robert Faurisson, on University of Lyon stationery and "in my position as Associate Professor at the University of Lyon-2," has an article published in German by the Deutscher Arbeitskreis [the German Work Group] --a neo-Nazi faction-- an article entitled "There Were No Gas Chambers."²⁵ By way of introduction, this group reminds its readers that this eminent university professor is to be numbered among the many revisionists who neutrally devote themselves to historical truth, while "German Zionists and Jews" (sic), panic-stricken before the inexorable march of the truth, attempt in vain to perpetuate the abominable myths of crimes imputed to the Nazis.

* September 1979: at Northrup University, near Los Angeles, the first Revisionist Convention, sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), is held.²⁶ Speakers include some of the stars of revisionist science: Austin App (editor of The Voice of German Americans, and author of several pamphlets of high moral tone such as Can Christianity survive when the Jews control the media and the money?, also Kosher Food Racket Exposed, and The Six Million Swindle --all on the booklists of Liberty Bell Publications, publishers of Nazi books); Udo Walendy (who was a member of the Executive Committee of the NPD, the German neo-Nazi party); Arthur Butz (author of the reference work of revisionist thought, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,²⁷ which was first published by the Historical Review Press in Richmond, England, the publishing house of the English fascist party, the National Front²⁸). And then, surprise of surprises, a man climbs to the rostrum to great applause to give a scientific lecture on "The Mechanics of Gassing."²⁹ It is the new Jew, the lonely, flouted outsider, the hero of a segment of the French ultraleft: Robert Faurisson.

* September 14, 1979: Before returning to his studies in France, Faurisson, whom Chomsky characterizes as a "relatively apolitical liberal,"³⁰ makes a short visit to the East Coast to give a lecture at the headquarters of the National Alliance (the American neo-Nazi party) outside of Washington. This visit is mentioned in the bulletin of the National Alliance, which usually is reserved for party members but, with a little wiliness, can be had....³¹

The National Alliance was founded and is directed by William Pierce, former member of the American Nazi party and translator into English of a brochure entitled Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin.³² The National Alliance publishes the monthly National Vanguard, whose "purpose is to propagate the fundamental truths of race and natural order,"³³ and which, in its booklist, refers to Mein Kampf as the "story of Germany's struggle for freedom and the philosophy behind it." Faurisson the outsider, Faurisson the apolitical man, now turns out to be a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Journal of Historical Review and lecturer for the Nazis. But I have confidence that the rhetorical talents of Serge Thion (and of Chomsky?) will find novel ways of defending the solitude and apoliticism of the "respected professor of 20-century French literature and document criticism."³⁴

III 

On the first page of Spotlight (a publication of the Liberty Lobby) of September 24, 1979, dedicated to the revisionist convention, an advertisement announces the book Debunking the Genocide Myth by Paul Rassinier.35 The advertisement goes on to describe the author as

a socialist, pacifist, anti-Nazi,, pro-Jewish [sic] historian and geographer [who] was captured in late 1943 and interned by the Nazis because of his activities with the French Resistance. After the war, however, Rassinier could not conscientiously justify by his own experience the horror stories of many of his fellow concentration camp inmates. So he set out on the thankless task of discovering what was true and what was false.

Rassinier's work is of primary importance for those who want to understand the functioning and subtleties of revisionist thinking. There is not an author in the pack who does not recognize and acknowledge him as a father.

Returning from Buchenwald and Dora where he had been interned for 19 months, Rassinier immediately set to work denouncing --in Passage de la ligne [Crossing the Line], Le Mensonge d'Ulysse [The Lie of Ulysses], Ulysse trahi par les siens [Ulysses Betrayed By His Own]³⁶-- the behavior of the Communist prisoners, to whom the SS had delegated some power inside the camp. He concludes, with a rather dubious logic, that those responsible for the atrocities and deaths were not, therefore, the Nazis but the Communists. He severely criticizes certain inexact accounts by prisoners and deduces from these that, if there were exaggerations or even inventions with reference to the gas chambers at Dachau, the same might be true of other accounts. "My opinion about the gas chambers? There were some, although not so many as is thought. There were also exterminations by this method, although not so many as is claimed."³⁷ In any case, there is no proof. And if some day the German archives were to reveal documents--

ordering the construction of gas chambers for any other purpose than extermination --one never knows, with this terrible scientific genius of the Germans-- one would have to admit that their utilization in certain cases was the result of one or two madmen among the SS....³⁸

The welcome accorded Rassinier's ideas, at the end of the war, was not the warmest. Some, however, like Maurice Bardèche (already!), who became his publisher, were overjoyed. In the view of this confirmed fascist, the testimony of a member of the Resistance and a prisoner was of inestimable value. Bardèche published Rassinier's Le véritable procès Eichmann ou les vainqueurs incorrigibles [The Actual Eichmann Trial, or the Incorrigible Victors], in which the author wrote that "there is almost nothing [written about war crimes] except the two admirable books by Maurice Bardèche, Nüremberg ou la Terre Promise [Nüremberg or the Promised Land] and Nüremberg II ou les Faux Monnayeurs [Nüremberg II or the Counterfeiters]."³⁹ Rassinier, renewing his confidence in his fascist publisher, gave him his new manuscript entitled Le Drame des juifs européens [The Drama of the European Jews], which appeared in 1964. Here, Rassinier explains that

they [the Jews] are not today a race so much as a type of life and of aspiration, and it is not a racial problem that they pose but --as the state of Israel proves only too well-- an economic and social one... they intend to establish a commercial empire that, as was already indicated, would cover the entire world.⁴⁰

La Vieille Taupe, which had until then only published a few brochures, transformed itself into a publishing house in order to reprint Rassinier's works: Le Mensonge d'Ulysse [The Lie of Ulysses] in 1979 and Ulysse trahi par les siens [Ulysses Betrayed By His Own] in early 1980. Four months later, Thion's book Vérité... appeared.⁴¹

The revisionists loudly call for "a debate about historical technique." They ask that efforts be made to "expands the sources" and "to publicize the results of studies, without, however, giving them a character of official truth." How respectably such things are said .... Serge Thion, who expresses himself in this way, indeed concludes his book most judiciously by reproducing an article about Faurisson by Georges Wellers, director of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (Paris), that had appeared in Le Monde on February 21, 1979. Thion generously characterizes this text, entitled "Un roman inspiré" [An Inspired Fiction], as "a document of great importance."⁴² But let us not misunderstand this generosity. What wins Georges Wellers such critical honors is not what he says in the article but, rather, the fact that he "finally opens up a discussion of a scientific nature between two historical schools."

For the first time [continues Thion] a specialist of the official school [read: "the exterminationists"⁴³] publicly confronts the arguments of the school called revisionist.... For the first time, a historian shows himself dissatisfied with a teleological argument ("where does this lead?"), a political argument ("an apology for nazism") or even a sentimental argument ("outrage to the memory of the dead"). The debate is raised to the lever of a historical discussion.

One finally breathes the free and invigorating air of orderly battles, far from subterranean plots and subjectivities encumbered by affect. People confront each other with arms worthy of the highest demands of a faultless deontology. But I would wager that Georges Wellers was flabbergasted when he saw what Thion had made of his text. It was, in fact, explicitly and exclusively an analysis of the methods employed by Faurisson and a denunciation of the flagrant dishonesty that he represented. But, as we just witnessed, this categorical refutation of a method has miraculously been transformed, by the rigorously deontological pen of Thion, into a discussion of an argument. Hoping no doubt to have established the official recognition of the revisionist school, Thion adds, prophetically and somewhat menacingly perhaps, "Nothing and no one will be able to evade much longer the debate that we hope will be carried on with the greatest calm possible."

We are thus told of the existence of a revisionist school anxious to open discussions of a scientific nature. But the very expression "revisionist school" makes no sense. One cannot claim to be motivated solely by the need for a scientific deontology and at the same time devote oneself explicitly and entirely to the task of denunciation. One cannot pretend to establish a science whose only ethic is suspicion, where distrust is the only certitude. If one scans the list of books and articles published by the revisionist school, one discovers there one example after another of Faurisson's painful obsession with falsehood, masked by "that insistence on the love of truth that characterizes all the falsifiers"⁴⁴ --The Lie of Auschwitz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, The Six Million Swindle, The Actual Eichmann Trial, The Myth of Auschwitz, The Truth for Germany, etc., etc., not to omit Thion's Historical Truth or Political Truth, which explicitly picks up the title that Rassinier had used in 1961 for a series of lectures.

IV 

Several revisionist authors preface their writings with autobiographical comments that are strangely similar. One certainty emerges: a person is not born a revisionist; he becomes one.45 On the first page of his Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Arthur Butz writes:

In common with virtually all Americans who have had their opinions formed since the end of World War II, I had, until not very long ego, assumed that Germany had given the world a particularly murderous outburst during World War II. This view has ruled Western opinion since 1945 and earlier, and I was no exception in accepting the essentials of it.

In his turn, Serge Thion writes about his escape from the herd of dupes: "The general populace undoubtedly believes as I believed for a long time that we possess a vast number of documents and verifiable information on the politics of Nazi extermination."⁴⁶ Clearly, such is not the case. One, therefore, asks questions. And "all this converges toward a set of doubts that includes, yet goes beyond, the single question of the gas chambers."

How do these doubts work? In his letter to Le Monde on January 16, 1979, Faurisson cites the diary that Johann-Paul Kremer, SS doctor, kept during his tenure at Auschwitz. Kremer recounts, on October 18, 1942 that, for the eleventh time, he was present at a "special action" (Sonderaktion). Faurisson, who can't be had and who, like no one else, knows how to decipher a text, decides that this "special action," which the exterminationists insist on taking for a mass gassing, refers very simply to the executions of those condemned to death. Condemned by whom, when, why? It makes no difference. He writes, "Among the condemned are three women who arrived in a convoy from Holland; they are shot." This sentence is accompanied by a very impressive note that indicates the seriousness of Faurisson's work. The note consists of a biographical reference: "'Auschwitz as Seen by the SS,' published by the Museum of Oswiecim [the Polish name for Auschwitz], 1974, p. 238, note 85."

Can one imagine a more scrupulous concern for reference, precision, and scientific rigor? But then perhaps Faurisson thinks it would be rather surprising if readers of Le Monde had access to such a book, published so far from France and behind the Iron Curtain. Unfortunately for Faurisson, I have the book. And note 85 on page 238, which reports the official transcript of Kremer's testimony in 1947, indeed indicates that three Dutch women were shot on that day. But the text of the note to which Faurisson refers reads: "At the time of the special action which I described in my diary on October 18, 1942, three Dutch women refused to enter the gas chamber [emphasis mine] and pleaded for their lives. They were young women, in good health, but despite this their prayer was not granted and the SS who participated in the action shot them on the spot." The times are decidedly difficult and it is surely with great reluctance that these evangelists find themselves compelled to tamper with facts in order to carry on their worldwide conversion.⁴⁷

The fundamental rule of revisionist argumentation is very simple: any evidence of massive extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers is unacceptable. First with respect to the Nazis. Faurisson announced some time ego what was to constitute the credo of his doctrine: "Hitler never ordered (nor permitted) that someone be killed because of race or religion."⁴⁸ If this incontestably audacious claim seems not to bother either American, English, or German revisionists, it did provoke grumblings among some of Faurisson's defenders in France. Pierre Guillaume, head of La Vieille Taupe Publishers, in a letter sent to the newspaper Libération and not printed --but, fortunately, included in Thion's book-- discusses the torments that he as well as his friends experienced because of Faurisson's famous statement.

I met Professor Faurisson at the end of November. I found a man desperate and on the verge of withdrawing into a paranoid delirium --a reaction that was, however, altogether understandable. I also found a man who thoroughly knew his subject (200 kilos of documents, representing the analysis of several tons of texts) and whose works were of the same general persuasion as, but went much further than, those of La Vieille Taupe.... As my own character was not strong enough for the task (I myself was on the verge of breaking)-- it became vital for the development of the situation to gain support and, thus, to obtain everyone's agreement on a unified statement, with neither concessions nor second thoughts. This statement had, therefore, to integrate the famous sentence that seemed to render Faurisson indefensible: "Hitler never ordered the execution of a single Jew solely because of the fact that he was a Jew." [I would have the future archivists of revisionism note that the formulation, as Guillaume puts it, differs from the original credo; it specifically lacks the words "or permitted," which Faurisson seemed to insist upon.] The statement held that Faurisson's claim was, strictly speaking, true even though Hitler could not have cared less about what actually happened to the Jews. This done, I proved in practice that I was ready to follow Faurisson to the end.... Feeling thus supported, Faurisson began to eat normally and his paranoid symptoms disappeared completely.⁴⁹

Admit that it would have been a shame to lose such a text.

Why, then, did the Nazis build gas chambers? At Auschwitz, as Darquier explained, only lice had been gassed; it was a question of getting rid of the vermin. Himmler himself said as much when, on April 24, 1943, he explained to the SS officers that

it is the same with anti-Semitism as with delousing. To remove lice has nothing to do with a world view. It is a question of cleanliness. In the same way exactly, anti-Semitism did not constitute for us a question of a world view. It is a question of cleanliness.⁵⁰

I do not know if Himmler would have understood Faurisson, but Faurisson understood Himmler. He demonstrates that

it is utter dishonesty to present... as homicidal "gas chambers" sterilizers that were actually intended to disinfect clothing with gas.... Another form of gassing in fact existed in the German camps; it is the gassing of buildings to exterminate the vermin. There one used the famous Zyklon B about which such a fantastic myth has been constructed.⁵¹

Unfortunately for the Nazis, the rumors about the treatment of the Jews deported to Poland were already circulating in Germany, clearly without foundation. An ordinance of November 9, 1942 announced by the Chancellery decreed that "in order to counter the development of rumors about this subject... the following commentaries are provided as information about the actual situation...."⁵² The Nazis, it would seem, were already at this period worried about combating "the rumor of Auschwitz" that Faurisson so firmly denounces today. The ordinance continued:

The total... elimination of millions of Jews established in the European economic area is a forced imperative in the struggle that is being waged by the German people to assure its very existence. Beginning with the territories of the Reich and moving on to the other European countries involved in the Final Solution, the Jews are transported to the East, to large camps --in part still to be built-- where they are either assigned to work or sent farther East.

Faurisson, who has understood the Nazi mentality as well as that of the pseudo-victims, does not believe that the Germans felt any need to camouflage their language and has decided that for the Nazis, as for him, a spade is a spade. He certainly does not think that the expression "sent farther East" could be a euphemism of the Amtssprache, the administrative language used by the Nazis in their direction of the Final Solution. But what does Faurisson understand the exact meaning of "the Final Solution" to be? He most assuredly has a precise idea about this place "farther East" where the Jews disappeared. Armed with the "simple good sense" that he shares with Thion, Faurisson takes the texts "for what they are" and the Nazis at their very word. He knows that, different from Americans, Communists, Jews, etc., the Nazis did not lie. How does he know this? Never mind.. The revisionists, who are experts in distinguishing the true from the false, do not believe for a moment that the Germans had recourse to an administrative language intended to camouflage their enterprise of extermination.

Contrary to Faurisson, Himmler believed that the Nazis needed to camouflage what they were doing. Thus, when the statistician Korherr, in his report to Himmler in the spring of 1943, uses the expression Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) to speak of the million and a half Jews already durchgeschleust (processed --literally: passed through the rocks) in the camps, Himmler responds:

I find this report very good as regards documentation for the future, that is to say, as camouflage. At present, it [the report] should be neither published nor communicated. The essential thing for me is, now as before, that. . . as many Jews as is humanly possible be transported to the East.⁵³

But Himmler states precisely that one should not speak of Sonderbehandlung, and that the term should be replaced by the word Transportierung (transport).

A few months later, it was this same Himmler's turn to learn a lesson in camouflage from General Pohl, chief of the WVHA (the central economic and administrative office of the SS), concerning the camp at Sobibor. Up to that point Sobibor had been referred to in the correspondence as a Durchgangslager (transit camp). Sobibor was located only 3 km. from the Bug River, which formed the farthest Eastern border of the territories occupied by the Nazis. To where, therefore, could the Jews coming from this camp "transits"? Himmler then writes to Pohl to propose that the camp at Sobibor be henceforth called a Konzentrationslager (concentration camp). But, in a letter dated July IS, 1943, the chief of the central office, on which all the Nazi camps were dependent, responds that they must continue to designate Sobibor a transit camp.⁵⁴

With the very words used by the Nazis themselves, let us now return to our Faurisson analysis of the texts. The Endlösung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish question) is therefore only a cleansing operation on a European scale. As many Jews as can be found in a region are put into railroad cars and transported Eastward for Evakuierung (evacuation), Aussiedlung (displacement), or Umsiedlung (resettlement). After which the region is declared judenrein gemacht (cleansed of Jews) or judenfrei (free of Jews)-- a successful "Bereinigung der Judenfrage" (clean-up of the Jewish question). Since the vermin may offer some resistance to this salutary enterprise, the operation must be effected with rücksichloser Härte (relentless severity). The areas are, thereby, henceforth clean. But not yet the Jews. For it is known that, unfortunately, their transport to the East did not always occur under the most hygienic conditions. And so, from the moment of their arrival the majority among them were directed to the Badanstalten (bathhouses). The irrefutable proof that this was in order that they might take a shower, and not to asphyxiate them with gas, is that the areas intended for this action clearly displayed the signs "Wasch u. Disinfektionsräume (wash & disinfection rooms)". It was all simply a matter of getting rid of the vermin. Everything, then, accords perfectly: evacuation, cleansing, and transport farther East.

V 

One can easily imagine, I think, that if documents dating from the war years reveal so little proof of the extermination of Jews by the Nazis, then documents originating after the German capitulation are hardly likely to reenforce the already tenuous position of the exterminationists. Nüremberg ou la Terre Promise [Nüremberg or the Promised Land] was written by Bardèche in 1948. Every revisionist owes it to himself to go back to this critical analysis and radical condemnation of an unjust trial --perpetrated on the vanquished by the victors-- whose aim was the greatest profit for the "amateurs of the promised land."

The rumors of the alleged genocide of the Jews that circulated in Europe and the United States during the last years of the war constituted the principal evidence in the case for the prosecution. Nüremberg and the other war-crimes trials that have taken place since then are, therefore, according to Faurisson, in every way akin to the infamous witch trials of the Middle Ages. Once free of the so-called evidence extorted from the vanquished, only that advanced by the alleged victims remains. And it is unnecessary to say what one should think of that. When one is committed to the method routinely used by Faurisson, one sees quite easily what can be expected of the depositions of such people. It is without a doubt for this reason that Faurisson has, until now at least, neglected to examine the testimony of the survivors.

There are a great many things that Faurisson doesn't bother with. He never mentions, for example, the depositions taken during the various trials from the survivors of the Sonderkommandos (special commandos), who were responsible for emptying the gas chambers, transporting the corpses to the crematoria and burning them, and cleaning the gas chambers for the next operation. A former member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, among others, recounted how he had actually seen with his own eyes a gas chamber. His name: Dov Paisikovic. But ( 1) he was Jewish and thus had every interest in accusing the Nazis of imaginary crimes; (2) after the war, he emigrated to Israel, the country par excellence of the hoax of the 20th century; (3) he has since died and Faurisson is thus unable to meet with him; (4) the detailed description he gave of the functioning of the gas chambers was part of his deposition of October 17, 1963 at the Auschwitz trial --and we know what we should think of Nüremberg and subsequent trials.55

The basic rule of revisionist argumentation is that all evidence of extermination) is by definition inadmissible. A document dating from the war is inadmissible because it dates from the war. A document dating from immediately after the war is inadmissible because it dates from those years. The deposition of a Nazi at his trial is inadmissible because it is a deposition from a trial. This is a principle applicable to all the Nazis who were tried. If, as is the case, not one of them denied the existence of gas chambers, it is not because the gas chambers existed (a feeble exterminationist thought), but because the witnesses believed that if they assisted the victors, the judges would reward them with clemency. As for the testimonies and depositions of some hundreds of Jews who pretended to be survivors of the genocide, they are inadmissible because given by people who could only be instigators or, at best, accomplices in the rumor that led to the swindle from which they benefited.

VI 

In his Wit and Its Relations to the Unconscious,56 Freud recounts an old story: A borrows a copper caldron from B; when he returns it, B complains that the caldron has a large hole that renders it useless. A defends himself thus: first, I returned the caldron in good condition; second, it already had a hole when I borrowed it; third, I really never borrowed the caldron from B. Let us see how the genocide is nothing but a Talmudic story about a caldron. The story consists of these elements: First, it is the Jews who are the cause of the Second World War. They were, in fact, the first to declare war on Germany. How do I know this? First of all, from Hitler who always spoke the truth, whom I must understand literally, and who prophesied with great clairvoyance in his speech of January 30, 1939 that "If international Jewry succeeds in precipitating a world war, the result will hardly be a bolshevization of Europe and a victory for Judaism but the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe."⁵⁷

But I also know it from Faurisson and Rassinier. Faurisson explains that "in the person of Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Jewish Congress,⁵⁸ and future first president of the state of Israel, the international Jewish community declared war on Germany on September 5, 1939"⁵⁹ Rassinier, undoubtedly more aware of the labyrinthine ways of politics, explains the entire affair at length in a book that appeared in 1967 entitled Les responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale [Those Responsible for the Second World War].⁶⁰ I am surprised that Serge Thion, who in his book is so quick to give moral lessons to professional historians, omitted mentioning this book by Rassinier in his bibliography of revisionist literature-- which, he says, "is almost inaccessible in France for various reasons."⁶¹ Thion writes that "it will be necessary, one day, to rehabilitate Rassinier." It would be especially regrettable if, on that day, the books neglected by Thion were not included. Rassinier is an author unjustly "reduced to being published by the extreme right" --he, too, then-- and who "wrote before his time."⁶² Here is a sample of what Rassinier wrote before the time was ripe. In Les responsables de la seconde guerre mondiale, he explains how the Jews organized the war against Germany:

A Democrat, President Roosevelt was also a freemason and, consequently, his relations with the Jewish world were numerous and intimate. His entourage was Jewish, at least the greatest number of his most important advisers. Morgenthau, his Secretary of Treasury, was Jewish; his most influential advisers, Baruch and Weizmann, were too. Cordell Hull of the State Department is married to a Jew.... From the moment of his election, President Roosevelt accepted --first tacitly, then more openly-- all the postulates of the Jewish policies. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that he was very ill and that his sickness made him dependent on his wife who was, even more fiercely than he, devoted to the cause of the Jews....⁶³

As for the Nazis,

they found it entirely normal to view the Jews as foreigners in Germany since they behaved like foreigners. Noting that this doctrine [the Nazi doctrine] would help extricate a people of 70 million from their financial market, all the Jews of the world, instead of seeking a compromise, which was easily attainable given the fact that Hitler sought one, enflamed the argument by declaring themselves . . . in a state of war, not only with Nazi ideology-- which would have been perfectly legitimate and would, at worst, have generated only an academic discussion --but with Germany, which implied a military intervention.⁶⁴

The Jews declared war on Hitler. What would you have done in his place? He was not, after all, going to turn the other cheek. And so he defended himself.

* Second part of the caldron story: War is war, but nothing more. The Nazis are not guilty of the crime of which the pseudo-victims accuse them. As Butz explains, he dedicates his book (The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, see Note ²⁷) to proving the hoax, that is, to a demonstration of what did not happen. This is the crux of the revisionist program: to prove that something did not take place, that a crime was not committed. The gas chambers were pan of the propaganda of war. Proof: Himmler, according to Butz, sensing the wind change, had made contact a little before the end of the war with a representative of the World Jewish Congress.⁶⁵ And Himmler explained to him that to stop the typhus epidemic in the camps, the Nazis had been obliged to burn a large number of corpses, for which reason they had constructed the crematoria. It was this that caused the confusion about the gas chambers. But Himrnler committed "suicide" in a British prison. This was particularly unfortunate since, if he had been able to appear before the judges, he would clearly have told the truth-- a Nazi, like a revisionist, always speaks the truth. Arthur R. Butz's book would then have been unnecessary; Himmler himself would have proven the hoax. But the demands of politics made it inconvenient that he be heard by the court. He therefore commited "suicide." Caldron or not, one will say what one wants; reasoning like that one does not find just anywhere.

The first two phases of the story of genocide in the image of a caldron are, then, (1) the Jews are responsible for the horrors they impute to the Nazis, and (2) these horrors never existed. But the punchline, the moment one laughs, is (3) the Jews, who pretend to be the victims, are actually the victors. On the basis of this colossal lie about "gas chambers" and "genocide," they succeeded in their incredible swindle, the greatest of all time. Make an accounting of the millions of marks paid by the Germans, in the name of reparations, for the millions of Jews who were not exterminated. As a swindle, it's not a bad one. But for the hoax to work, to hit pay dirt, so to speak, it is absolutely necessary that the true victors continue to pass for the victims. Hence the need for an organization of universal scope, propaganda... and so on.

The revisionists' real difficulty was to prove this void, this lie, this absence of the dead. The first of them, Rassinier, with a scholarly mixture of quotations, calculations, reasoning, deductions, cross-checking, collations , etc. challenged the estimate of the number of victims arrived at by the exterminationists. Instead, he offered figures that the reader is all the more easily able to accept for not having understood any of the scholarly mix that produced them.⁶⁶ His conclusions: some industrial gassings plus the horrors of war-- altogether around a million Jewish victims. Robert Faurisson, who has the obvious advantage of working at the end of a century that increasingly resembles a computer, arrives at more scientific conclusions:

My view is the following: (1) the number of Jews exterminated by the Nazis (or victims of "genocide") is, happily, equal to zero.... I have rather good reasons to think that the number of deaths at Auschwitz (Jews and non-Jews) was around 50,000.... As for the number of deaths at all the concentration camps from 1933-34 to 1945,, I think it had to be 200,000 or at most 360,000. Some day, I will cite my sources but I contend today that if we employed computers, we would without a doubt soon know the real number of deaths.⁶⁷

In Le Drame des juifs européens, Rassinier had denounced the dishonesty of Hilberg, Poliakov, and other Zionist agents who used all their Talmudic resources to arrive at the convenient and sacred number of six million. And now he quotes abundantly from an article in the journal American Mercury. (A curious documentary point: the address of this journal is the same as that of the Institute for Historical Review, organizing body of the Revisionist Congresses.)⁶⁸

If it is true, as the American Mercury claims, that the international Zionist movement refuses to participate in a census of the world's Jewish population --what an admission!-- thereby rendering it impossible, I can hardly see how else one could discover the truth.⁶⁹

The chapter immediately following these lines, very naturally, is entitled "'The Jewish Migration' or 'The Wandering Jew'" and begins with these words: "To better understand the movement of the European Jewish population between 1933 and 1945, a rapid historical overview of Jewish migration on a worldwide scale seems to me indispensable: in short, the history of 'The Wandering Jew.'" To understand what happened to the alleged victims of the Second World War, one must go back, as Rassinier does, to the 18th century B.C. A wanderer, perhaps, but with "the agility of the merchant by calling" --and Rassinier goes on:

Today [his book appeared in 1964] it is, to speak in metaphors, the gold in Fort Knox that is eyed. If the operation succeeded --it would suffice for the American arm of the international Zionist movement to exert pressure on Wall Street for it to be so-- the Israeli port of registry of the Diaspora would become not only the commercial Center of the Atlantic world but, with oil being the energy source par excellence of its development and Jewish control of it being totally assured from the Middle East to Texas, also the command post of all is industry .... then ... the appelation "the Chosen People" to which the Jews lay claim would take on all its significance⁷⁰

Is it the author of these lines that Thion hopes to rehabilitate?

Rassinier had understood everything: to find who profited from the crime that was not committed, one had clearly to search in the camp of the alleged victims and prove the gigantic plot that is at the base of such a swindle.

But how to prove this? These Jews who dare to pretend to be dead and demand reparation are in truth alive. But feigning to be dead, they are innumerable --that is, one cannot: count them. They no longer wear the yellow star, thus it is difficult to spot them at a glance. Faurisson clearly explains that the Jews with the star

were like paroled prisoners. Hitler was concerned perhaps less with the Jewish question than with ensuring the security of the German soldier. The German soldier would otherwise have been unable to distinguish the Jews from the non-Jews. This sign designated them for him.... I know that sometimes one thinks that six- to fifteen-year-old children could not constitute a danger and that they should not have been subjected to wearing the star. But within the context of this military logic, there exist enough accounts and memoirs [how now? should one believe these?] where the Jews tell us that from earliest childhood they participated in all kinds of illicit activity or resistance against the Germans.⁷¹

But after 1945, the wearing of the star was discontinued. How then to recognize the Jews? How count them? The proof that they are not dead, as the good sense of Rassinier, Faurisson, Thion, and Co. would have it, is that they arc alive. But how demonstrate this? They move all the time, they are behind the Iron Curtain, they disguise themselves as common Americans, they change their names. Pages 327-28 of Thion's book provides the astounding and incontestable proof that the alleged dead arc still alive.

Page 327: the little boy from tire Warsaw ghetto, with his overly large cap, his frightened look, his arms raised before the German machine guns --how he caused the dupes to cry.... But rejoice; this little boy who, according to the exterminationist myth, was supposed to have died in a gas chamber in Treblinka, Faurisson explains, is today a very rich man living in the suburbs of London. Faurisson obtained this good news he is so eager to communicate to us from the Jewish Chronicle of August 11, 1978. There is nothing so striking to the imagination as to note at the end of a book on historical truth that a poor young Jew alleged to be dead is in fact alive and rich.

Page 328: same scenario. This time, the photograph is of Simone Veil. Faurisson writes,

Let us take as an example convoy #71 which arrived at Auschwitz on April 16, 1944. All the women in this convoy, we are told, were gassed on the very day of their arrival. Among them figured the name of a certain Simone Jacob, born on June 13, 1927 in Nice. Now this young woman actually returned to France; by marriage she became Simone Veil and she today presides over the European Parliament.

Again one who was supposed to have been gassed is found to be alive --and rich too. That already makes two survivors. Draw your own conclusions.

VII 

In these troubled times, when one is no longer very clear about who is on the left (or right) of whom, a new pastime has emerged for the happy few who award themselves and others political marks whose common character the discerning reader will not fail to notice. Thus Thion about Faurisson: "a kind of anarchist of the right"72; Chomsky about Thion: "a libertarian socialist scholar"⁷³; Jan Myrdal about Faurisson: "an anarchist of the liberal right"⁷⁴; Noam Chomsky about Noam Chomsky: "a kind of libertarian anarcho-syndicalist"⁷⁵; Chomsky about Faurisson: "a kind of relatively apolitical liberal"⁷⁶; and, finally, lest but not least (too bad for the Dadaist-Stalinist amalgam that many will not fail to notice), David McCalden, alias Lewis Brandon, editor of the Journal of Historical Review: "I'm a detached cynic, a libertarian with a small 'l.'"⁷⁷

And then at the far end of the left --in France at least-- there are the theoreticians, the hard and pure revolutionaries, the earthly representatives of a faultless rationalism: an ultraleft in the process of decomposition, abandoning for a time interfamilial anathemas and curiously trying to recompose itself on the basis of Faurisson's theories.⁷⁸ During the demonstration that followed the bombing in front of the synagogue on the rue Copernic in Paris (October 3, 1980), a tract was distributed signed by diverse factions of this fragmented ultraleft --The Social War, The Young Mole (sic), The Friends of Potlach, The Commune Group of Kronstadt, and so forth. The following passages from the tract entitled "Our Kingdom is a Prison" speak for themselves:

It is the constant need of our class societies to propose to the oppressed populations false enemies, fabricated horrors in place of the true ones.... Enough of anti-Semitism.. Enough of anti-fascism. The one and the other are the "socialism of imbeciles".... The deportation and concentration of millions of people are not limited to an infernal idea of the Nazis; it has to do above all with the lack of manpower needed by the war machine that made it [war] a necessity.... The deportees who did not return are dead because of the war.... the only revolutionary attitude possible.... is the subversion of all war propaganda.... We will, perhaps, never possess "scientific" proof of the nonexistence of the Hitler "gas chambers."

The purists of the Communist Program, the French disciples of Amadeo Bordiga were the first to introduce in France the peculiar revolutionary idea of Auschwitz ou le grand alibi [Auschwitz or the Grand Alibi].⁷⁹

The demystifying madness of Faurisson could not, perhaps, find a better ally than the rationalist madness of these deep minds who take Marx at face value. Hegel is turned on his head; henceforth only the rational is real. A capitalist phenomenon among others, nazism --according to a strict Marxist theory-- would hardly want to exterminate a human group that represents so much manpower. Marxism cannot account for extermination. To preserve Marxism, then, it is necessary that the extermination not have occurred; therefore, it did not. Q.E.D. The rest, the alleged gas chambers, are only "the keystone of a politico-religious fabrication," an "official and vengeful" delirium,⁸⁰ composed of taboos and myths.. And "the refusal of intellectual taboos"⁸¹ is sacred to Thion, Guillaume, and the others. Faced with the exterminationist Vulgate and the ensemble of traditional ideas that encumber contemporary thought, these people are skeptics just as others are believers. "Systematic doubt, pushed to its extreme, has become healthy and legitimate."⁸²

But we have not finished seeking the reasons that (in our world and in their minds) push certain people --among them a good number of Jews-- to persist in this business of "demystification," in this need to claim that the millions who disappeared are alive, this need tirelessly to denounce the trickery of others, this need to dedicate themselves to the peculiar role of deniers of the dead.

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