A Brief History Of Revisionism 

Serge Thion (2006)

Tehran Conference - December 11-12, 2006

From the First to the Second World War “Revisionist”, in the sense it carries today, pertains to what actually happened in the Nazi concentration camps, but the term comes from the First World War and it did not then have at all the same meaning. It designated those who thought that the Treaty of Versailles was fundamentally wrong and unfair, and that it would engender all kinds of
catastrophes. This is a position which all sorts of critical minds took, people who did not necessarily share the same opinions, but who agreed on the idea that this treaty, right from its signing, was bad and that, therefore, it was necessary to revise it. Whence came the term “revisionists”, which was invented by their opponents, the supporters of the Treaty. It is known that this treaty, largely inspired by the American President Wilson, was based on the so-called “right of peoples to self-determination,” a right which was recognized for some but strongly denied for others, especially the colonial peoples, and this led in the end to a vast redrawing of the central empires that had lost the war: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The British, French and Russian
empires remained intact, in defiance of this so-called right to self-determination, which did not apply to enslaved peoples. Others, like the Kurdish people, were abruptly freed by the collapse of the empire; they suddenly appeared and just as quickly disappeared; they were quickly brought under the colonial yoke, for example, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq, which were not granted the rights which had been promised to rally peoples to the cause of fighting against the central empires. This is, in brief, the tragedy of T. E. Lawrence, a British officer known as Lawrence of Arabia, who took very badly the betrayal by London of the promises of political independence which he had been induced to make to the Arabs.

“Revisionist” meant then a critic of the political formula, which put an end to the
Great War and its attendant horrors. This criticism was contagious. It went inevitably so far as to call into question the reasons for the outbreak of the war. The victors—who will be surprised at this?—explained that it was all the fault of the vanquished. The revisionists were indignant at such a simplification which bordered on being a lie. An abundant literature came out of this effort at elucidation, and it is still today a topic of discussion and controversy.

Others, leaving behind the questioning of the past, concentrated their attention on what had been war propaganda pushed to new extremes. The press, teeming at the time, launched itself, on both sides, into operations for large-scale patriotic lies, and, while being well paid underhandedly by the governments, it produced all sorts of myths, which were all concocted by the information agencies. This collective blindness had a strong impact on the testimonies which have been published. Indeed, during and after the war, war stories were published by the thousands, each more heroic than the last. Among the critics, we must give a special place to Jean-Norton Cru, who undertook to pass the most important of these testimonies through the mill of critical analysis, considering them coldly as stories whose authenticity needed to be proved. He retained three hundred of
them, which is more than a representative sample: “I plowed deeply a very small field” (Témoins [Witnesses], 1929, 727 pages).

The controversy was huge. It had the advantage of legitimizing the undertaking
which consisted of screening the testimonies of combatants while refusing patriotism and nationalism as criteria for judging the reality [of their stories]. This lesson will not be lost, even if the Second World War would overwhelm public opinion in waves of nationalism and media distortion. New heights of pure propaganda were reached on this occasion.

We can trace in the 20’s and in almost every belligerent country the emergence of
a revisionist trend which I will not analyze here because it would take a long time. But it is worth noting that in the United States this shift of opinion obtained great enough force, that President Wilson was unable to get the Treaty of Versailles ratified by a Congress that refused to endorse political gymnastics which conflicted with the growing isolationism. In the American revisionist movement, we must give a special place to a young historian who throughout his life would play a role in the critical reflection on contemporary history. This was Harry Elmer Barnes who was going to give to revisionist research a surprising dynamism. Between 1920 and 1930, he wrote no less than fifteen books, several of which fully delved into the question of German guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. Up to then, public opinion, worked over by a biased press, was convinced that Germany alone had wanted to set, and did set, in motion this interminable war. By rummaging through the archives, Barnes showed that this was a historical lie
produced by skilled propaganda agencies and that it was possible, after the event, to dissolve this lie and, in sum, to proceed to a revision of history. In this sense, revisionism is not only the routine activity of the historian who wants to reconsider this or that issue, left in a certain state by his predecessors, and who intends to add to or modify their position on it, but it is also a political intervention in a world where powers clash with great propaganda shots before, or instead of, going on to exchange great cannon shots. In this war of words, which goes on unabated—see your newspapers—the revisionist has values higher than that of the war between nations, or between classes, or between religious cosmologies; he believes there is a truth in social, political, economic facts
which can be approached through work done according to the historical method. 

We live in a world of secrets. Not, as the facile caricature which is made of it, in a world of plots (conspiracy theories), but of secrets. The state apparatus is that which imposes all sorts of secrets on all sorts of documents, and which protects these secrets during longer and longer periods. It took almost 60 years for the map of Europe that Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt had under their eyes at Yalta to come out of the archives, along with the big pencil strokes which they drew on it when dividing Europe up like vulgar brigands dividing up booty. The extraordinary cynicism of which this hidden away map is evidence was obviously a “secret” justifying all the revisionists. Incidentally, it was a “conspiracy” against the freedom of peoples and an attempt at enslavement which it is hard to view as being in any way morally superior to that of Hitler.

To make a leap in time, we may recall that Mr. Bush Jr., known as Dubya, has
decreed since 2001-2002 that the archives of his presidency will be closed to consultation for no less than half a century, which assures him a quiet later life. Similarly, he had “reclassified”, that is, made secret, scads of documents that had previously been declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, and this constituted a great leap backward. Mr. Bush Jr. therefore justifies in advance all the revisionist undertakings which seek to disclose the real reasons for his country’s involvement in Middle Eastern wars, a country that did not think of this for a moment before his coming to the White House, as the most dubiously elected of all American presidents. And let us not talk of September 11, an event which is still immersed in a deep mystery due to the willingness of the American power to hide what it knows or what it thinks it knows about this
extraordinary event.

We see from these few brief examples that revisionism is a political necessity for
the minds of all those who do not want to be enlisted as puppets in support of this or that faulty or disastrous policy.

The revisionists, with Barnes at their head (he was translated into French in
1930), were attacking the official version of an important event. Hostilities started against them immediately. They were denounced as traitors or as German agents. Pressures were exerted on the printers and publishers. One of them, for example, Alcide Ebray, author of a book with a very clear title: La Paix malpropre (Versailles) [The Dirty Peace (Versailles)], published in 1924, prudently chose an editor in Milan. He justifies himself to his readers thus: “I first owe a word to the reader to explain why I did not publish this book in France. The reason is that it aims to work towards the reconciliation of the warring parties of the Great War by showing the truth in a totally objective manner, and most French editors remain reluctant to publish books inspired by such a purpose. Even if they approved the tenor and purpose of these books, they fear to put themselves in opposition to the current version of the events, and to offend the feeling of the majority
who want to know only this version.” Those who had academic positions found
themselves threatened and sometimes driven away. Condemned by the mainstream press, they saw themselves reduced to being able to express themselves only in restricted circles.

This is a situation that revisonists today well know, and it has even worsened. At
the time, it was not a matter of Jews and their power. It was rather just the official mask behind which those in power believed it necessary to hide. This situation, it too, has not changed one iota in the Western countries, which claim to be free. Revisionists, perhaps without doing it intentionally, make clear that this claim is an illusion, and their troubles´stem from that.

What one knew in the post-war period.

The lot of the Jews in the Third Reich was hardly known before and during the
war. Before the war, Berlin had proposed to the other powers that they accept the Jews whom the new Nazi policy was urging to leave. At the Evian Conference in 1938, these same powers purely and simply refused to allow masses of Jewish immigrants to enter them. The Germans had even negotiated directly with the Zionists settled in Palestine and had entered into an agreement with them called a “transfer” (Ha’avara). 60,000 German Jews were thus able to emigrate to Palestine, and if their number was not higher, it was because the English were afraid of the Palestinians’ reactions to this menacing influx.

The policy of Nazi Germany was therefore well known. It bore the name “Final
Solution” which meant the expulsion of the Jews, according to a tradition that had begun at the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. One can judge this policy criminal, but it in no way implied the death of anyone at all. Similarly, the existence and the functioning of the concentration camps were known to the international public. These camps served the purpose of collecting together those that the new regime, installed in 1933, considered politically hostile, primarily the communists and the Social Democrats. Internees spent months or years in them and were then released. Their accounts told of order, hard work, and hygiene. People were not dying in them, certainly many fewer than in the Soviet camps, because from them too information filtered out, albeit with much more difficulty.

The French also had established concentration camps to lock up the Spanish Republicans who were fleeing repression after Franco’s victory. There too the lives of the prisoners were very hard, but the administration did not seek to kill the internees.

During the war, information filtered out of the camps. In the areas of assembly set
aside for Jews by the Germans, Jewish political groups mixed this often unverifiable information with crazy rumors which were circulating and produced synthetic accounts which managed to reach elsewhere, by all sorts of channels; some reached London, some Geneva, and some Tel Aviv, where was located the Zionist leadership. In London, this information had little success. The British authorities saw therein only the rebound of the lies which they had aimed at Germany by means of the radio. At Washington also, they recognized the constitutive elements of war propaganda. So far as the Jewish leaders are
concerned, they also, alerted by their experience of the First World War, refused to believe the reports which reached them. The chronicle of all this scepticism has been made by Walter Laqueur in a surprising book, The Terrible Secret (1980). In fact, it never enters for a moment into the mind of this former intelligence agent, that the recipients of these reports had been right to see in them the result of an intense propaganda campaign carried out by small groups of Jews, in general ultra-Zionists, or by the Allies’ “black propaganda,” and that later political leaders were going to mount these propaganda themes for the sake of mere political expediency. In light of what we know today, it is clear that the scepticism was very well founded. Laqueur and the Zionists today see it as an incomprehensible error because they remain still prisoners of their ideological framework. It is in the end the black propaganda that has become the “historical truth” which one imposes on us today.
 
The living conditions in the camps changed greatly when the war broke out. The
Americans, for their part, hurried to intern a good part of the Germans, Italians and Japanese who had settled on their soil, some of whom had been there for a very long time. The Japanese opened camps for “white” prisoners of war where living conditions were such that many died. The Germans opened up new camps reserved for prisoners of war (stalag) where conditions were decent. The war would cause the living conditions of prisoners everywhere to deteriorate, especially in the last months. The camps of Germany, subjected to continual bombardment, became hospices where food deprivation and disease wreaked havoc on a massive scale. The reputation of the camps was forged at that time. 

Those who survived and were able to return to their country of origin recounted
especially the nightmare of the last few months, the reduction of the rations to almost nothing, the epidemics, and the disorganization which they obviously blamed on those who ran the camps, and who, inundated [with prisoners] from all directions, let a deadly mess develop.

One understands the resentment and hatred harbored by these unfortunates: they had lost half of their body weight, their health and their comrades in detention. They flooded the newspapers, and were supported by political organizations who saw in the depiction of these sufferings a windfall to be fully exploited. Then books, films, radio programs, and theatre groups went on to exploit this fund of genuine pain while mixing it also with extended, expanded, and multiplied memories of the actions of the Resistance.

In the last weeks of the German occupation in France, between the Allied landings of June 6, 1944 and the German retreat of the following months, the Resistance, made up of numerous small scattered groups, suddenly received into its membership a huge number of opportunists who, no longer having anything to fear from the routed Germans, thought they had everything to gain by being in the new regime which was going to be installed.

The genuine resistants were drowned by this influx of ambitions, settlings of accounts, small crimes and great collective acts of violence. The political benefit was certain. Then, all these braggarts sought to be officially recognized as “authentic” resistants. We saw, for example, François Mitterrand have to wait until 1981 and his coming to power to succeed in getting registered as a resistant group the small organization to which he belonged during the war and which distinguished itself by no action of any kind....

It was then into this murky milieu, into this stampede toward the political troughs,
that the deportees who had left the concentration camps in Germany and Poland arrived, exhausted, sick, mere ghosts of themselves. Those who talked saw their words distorted by the press. Those who realized that they were being manipulated locked themselves up in silence. The gap was too wide between the atrocious world which they had just left and the carefreeness and joy of living which seized the populations freed from the war and the weight of the occupation. The majority of them remained silent. Certainly some Jews had been deported. Many had gone into hiding. Most of those who had been caught by
the Nazi machine were foreigners, refugees who had come into France before the war.

The camps, like all places where there is no organized system of information,
buzzed with rumors. The deportees who spoke to journalists after their return necessarily mixed the story of their personal experience with the many rumors with which they had been showered for months or years. Journalists amplified or “embellished” (there is no word for “adding to the horror of something”) these stories, driven by an “anti-kraut” ideology which was extremely violent and was thoroughly exploited by the communists to justify all the political usurpations which they made during this period of unrest.

The portrayal of what happened in the camps was from the beginning a
composite. The Germans had obviously become demonic. They had invented all kinds of machines to kill people. For example, electrical swimming pools: people entered into the water and a single button allowed them to be electrocuted. Or the adaptation of blast furnaces: a conveyor belt carried the victims up and then dumped them into the burning mouth of the blast furnace. That image coincided fairly well with that of ancient Moloch, described by some novelists of the last century (Flaubert, among others), where a bronze statue, heated to white-hotness, swallowed the propitiatory victims. It was in this way that
the myths were modernized: they tell the same story but change the decor, in order to seem more credible.

All these stories were accepted as true, either in the newspapers or in the
“affidavits”, that is, the testimonies taken by Allied investigative tribunals which were responsible for “judging” the vanquished. The investigators did not seek to verify; that was not their function. They recorded; and then the prosecutors, often enough German Jewish refugees to the United States and enrolled in the American army, made their choice. They retained such and such an affidavit (or a copy of a copy of a re-transcription of some words more or less solicited) and rejected another, which did not seem to them useful in their work of condemning the political and military personnel of the Third Reich, who were presumed guilty and practically condemned in advance. The Nuremberg trial, by whatever angle one approaches it, was a sinister farce. Jurists have not failed to say that, in their view, it was a monstrous production. The politicians had need of it, the
Soviets more than all the others: it was going to justify their occupation of central Europe, which would last, one recalls, not much less than a half-century. 

It was necessary that the basis for anti-Nazism be made of concrete in order to support the construction of “brother regimes”.

After the war, the Allies emptied the camps and had to deal with the problem of
millions of “displaced persons.” And they filled the camps again, but with Germans,
civilian and military officials, who were allegedly “Nazis” because they had been
inscribed on the records of the party, something which was mandatory for public
officials. Without any pretext for war, one made these new prisoners die in the camps by the hundreds of thousands, from starvation and work. The victors showed that in inhumanity they had succeeded in surpassing the vanquished, but this story has, essentially, remained hidden up to today.

The Role of Rassinier and the Image of the Camps Constructed by the Communists
Paul Rassinier was too young to have taken part, like his father, in the Great War.
He was a teacher, and was a communist until about 1932. As a result of disagreement with the party, he was expelled and switched to the Socialist Party, in the ranks of the opposition, adopting a resolutely pacifist line to which he was faithful for the rest of his life. His was a “fundamental” pacifism, a total refusal of war: this generation had experienced the First World War and the terrible human carnage it had inflicted. One cannot imagine today the force and the depth of this pacifism, which motivated, for example, the writer Jean Giono, and earned him several periods of imprisonment.

During the war Rassinier, refusing to participate in violent actions but determined
to fight against the German occupation, worked at fabricating false documents for those, mostly Jews, who were in Switzerland. Denounced, he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps in Germany, at Buchenwald and at Dora.

Although considered an enemy by the communists, he managed to survive and returned to France, an invalid, sick for the rest of his life, and unable to remain standing for more than a few minutes.

Faced with the flood of literature illustrating the official version of what happened
in the camps, he resolved to deliver his own testimony (1949) and analyze those of his contemporaries who told in their own way about life in the camps. He was inspired by the great example of John Norton Cru, who had developed a critical device for distinguishing quickly the real from the false in war testimonies. He therein committed a sort of crime whose consequences were going to be unforeseeable. He created, by this step, what we call revisionism. Certainly, some other authors had expressed their disbelief, but they were part of a right which had strongly approved the German policy during the war and they lacked serenity and objectivity. Rassinier, having come out from the camps and buttressed by his past as a militant socialist, was far more threatening to the ideological interests of those in power (Christian Democrats, Socialists and Communists). They
directed their heavy artillery at him. Expulsion from the Socialist Party, press campaigns, endless trials over minor points, ... his ostracism progressed little by little, as it always does.

But Rassinier had identified one of the main causes behind the horror of life in the
camps: he pointed out the role of political prisoners in camp administration: they relieved the SS of the burden of much of the decision-making. While the SS confined themselves to supervision, the political prisoners, mostly communists, used their administrative power to settle accounts and to eliminate their opponents, especially social democrats, Trotskyites and other non-communist leftists. So, backed by sound arguments and supported by many former deportees, Rassinier led a historiographical guerilla war against the huge communist propaganda machine. The Soviets controlled people’s minds
and manufactured testimonies by the shovelful, like that of Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz; they also controlled the sites. By around 1948, the camps had been emptied.

The “Nazi” prisoners had been deported to Siberia. Those responsible for propaganda and agitation (agit-prop) saw the advantage they might draw from the camps: at the cost of some repair work and reconstruction, they built what was not obvious from the pictures taken during the liberation: the extermination sites. Some theatrical amateurs came to do the staging. When the show was fully ready, they began to invite former deportees who, in most cases, did not recognize the sites but felt compelled to replace the old images which they had kept with those before them, and which were incontestable. For the Soviets, the camps were like a fishhook thrown over the Iron Curtain to go catch some
allies, not only among the communists, but especially among people on the right, or those in Christian circles, who had been protected in the camps by the communist organization.

It was necessary to recruit either political allies or spies. The camps were a place
organized for such recruitment.
 
Rassinier, in going forward with his investigation to demythologize what
happened in the camps, ran into the Iron Curtain. It was impossible for people like him, who had become fiercely anti-communist, to go to the sites in Poland. He bitterly realized that nothing was verifiable in the testimonies which continued to arrive from there. Trials took place in the east. Books were published. Rassinier expressed doubts, particularly about the gas chambers, but failed to reach a conclusion.

It was at the end of the fifties. The opening of the camps took place only fifteen
years earlier. One thing was certain: the division of Europe and the start of the cold war had prevented the establishment of a true revisionist movement like the one which had followed the First World War. The political, intellectual, and artistic worlds, just freed from the propaganda of the anti-Nazi war, found themselves enlisted in the cold war and summoned to work for one side or the other: the geographical Iron Curtain was transposed to each country in the form of a political-ideological clash that froze and kept intact what had been the war propaganda of the years 1940-45. No return, no critical thinking, no re-evaluation, no revision was permitted because the Allied victory of 1945 became the foundation for the legitimacy of the new military occupations, the USSR in
the east, the USA in the west. The CIA frenetically recruited intellectuals to make
magazines, books, and newspapers. Raymond Aron received suitcases full of dollars. The Communists were inciting herds of “committed” militants who were to try to occupy all areas and to ostracize others disdainfully. Sartre believed that the anti-communists were “dogs.” Those who doubted, who asked questions, like Rassinier and a few handfuls of others were to be crushed and placed on the sidelines. They were trapped between these two heavy millstones. They became what one would later call dissidents.

Then there came an unexpected event which changed the game. Led gruffly by
the pseudo-socialist Ben Gurion, the Jewish state, still tottering, had bungled its entry into the complicated Middle East. Ben Gurion was looking for a way to ensure the survival of his rump state in which he could hardly believe himself. He resolved to have Eichmann picked up, a former senior Nazi official in charge of the logistics for the Jewish deportations, who lived more or less hidden in Argentina. 

The trial that followed in 1961-62 would reveal itself to be an extraordinary machine for blaming everyone: the Jews in the first place, who were not Zionist enough, the Europeans, who had not stopped the rise of Nazism, and the Americans who had not saved the Jews. It is a theme that still runs
around, as is evidenced by some recent television broadcasts. This gigantic blamemachine now operates on a global scale.

It was at this point that Rassinier and the revisionists saw their opponent change.
While they were trying to dismantle a staging and the founding myths issuing from the Soviet apparatus, they found themselves facing a quite similar propaganda device, but issuing from the Zionist state, which was in large part, by the way, a carbon copy of the communist regimes. Rassinier was unable to travel to Jerusalem to attend the Eichmann trial, and he had to be content to follow it from a distance. But he dissected it with particular care. These trials of former Nazis, which took place in Israel, or in communist Poland, or in the Soviet Union, but also in Western Europe (one thinks of that of the socalled “Guards at Auschwitz,” in Frankfurt in 1963, which Rassinier was forbidden to attend) were open windows on the past. Some notables (acteurs) from the time of the war were there. They spoke or did not speak. Some documents were produced, while others were missing, to be sure. The whole thing was flawed, with many occultations, but it is
important to keep in mind that at that time no historian focused on this period. 

Those who wrote books, the Poliakovs, the Reitlingers, the Hilbergs, were not professional historians; they did nothing but exploit, in an improvised manner, the ultra-selective archives, that the Nuremberg prosecutors had chosen to get the Nazi leaders condemned, or that the Israeli prosecutors had brought to the trial in Jerusalem. That has nothing to do with the work of an historian: it is not his job to inform a court or to play the role of judge.

Like Don Quixote, Rassinier, in the dismal physical condition that was due to his
deportation, bestrid his charger and set off for battle. His book on the Eichmann trial was going to make him directly confront the Jewish organizations which made the insupportable claim that they represented the Jews, past, present and future. 

In that they followed the principles of action introduced in the 20’s and 30’s by Lecache and others who had established the LICA to protect the Jewish assassin of the former Ukrainian leader, Simon Petlioura, falsely accused of having organized a pogrom during the civil war in Ukraine. Having managed to get the murderer absolved, LICA believed itself authorized to defend Jews no matter what they may have done, and with complete impunity. Blackmail and lies became the favorite weapons of these hotheads, who soon rallied to the cause of Zionist colonialism.

Rassinier found himself alone facing this howling pack. He stood his ground, fought, lost and won trials, which were designed - it is always the same strategy - to exhaust him, physically and financially. Persecution by prosecution, said the excellent Zündel. In all cases, a person, once accused and prosecuted, quickly becomes an object of social ostracism. It makes little difference whether he wins or loses, after ten years of proceedings. The destructive effect is the same. For supposedly Jewish organizations, the result is of little importance. Whether they win or lose, they put on themselves a halo of virtue and try to extort a little money from their victims. Or if not, the political organizations behind them provide subsidies. In the profession of “justice-bringer” (justicier), there is no unemployment.

The Jews Take Over from the Communists

Already during the war, a certain Isaac Schneerson had established a Center for
Contemporary Jewish Documentation. He had begun at Grenoble, under the Italian
occupation, collecting documents on the persecutions which struck the Jews in occupied Europe. After the Liberation, this center was set up in Paris. In its monthly magazine, Le Monde juif (The Jewish World), it made an intense propaganda campaign for the admission of Jews into Palestine. The English tried to stop an immigration, which would lead to the conflagration of 1948. From the beginning, in 1945, the Jewish activists, distant descendants of a family of more or less mystical (hassidic) rabbis in Germany, mix very closely together the propaganda of revenge against Germans and the urgency of the Zionist battle. For them, it is clear that the survivors, and they are very numerous (3,500,000) [Le Monde juif, n°7, March 1947, p. 19.], ought to go build the Jewish state in Palestine, in which the indigenous people, a few bandits living in tents, have no importance.

For them, at that time, the issue of responsibility for what was at that moment
called: “the extermination of the Jews” remained open: “When, where, and how had the physical extermination of the Jews under the German occupation been decided on by the Hitlerians? At what point were Hitler’s angry tirades and threats transformed into practical decisions and administrative orders? A year after the Nuremberg verdict, and despite the enormous documentation heaped up there, we can not even give a specific answer to this question” [Le Monde juif, n° 12, September 1947, p. 3.]. The sentence is striking: a half-century later, after all the work of so many people, it is still quite impossible to answer this question. Only revisionists can explain why: we did not find a trace of the practical decisions and the administrative orders that would necessarily have determined the financing and the details of the extermination because, quite simply, there was no decision to exterminate. Some bombastic words, some blustering, nothing more. The German administration, which does not skimp on using paper and keeping copies, all with cascades of signatures, could
not have done anything without its bureaucratic habits. If a staff member commanded the purchase of a light bulb for Auschwitz, we have the order in triplicate, the invoice and the receipt acknowledging the delivery of the bulb. It is thus that the archives speak, and they say nothing of a decision to kill millions of people.

In 1948, the director of Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, Isaac
Schneerson took stock: “We have two enemies: forgetfulness and penury. Forgetfulness which threatens to invade the remembrance (souvenir), the piety, the lesson of the events.

[He has not yet found the keyword: “memory” (mémoire) which will thereafter be added to all their concoctions.] Penury of means which threatens to prevent us from taking, as far as is necessary and as we want, the possession and the constant presence of the pledges and the guarantees of this remembrance (souvenir), this piety, and this lesson” [3 Le Monde juif, n° 13, November 1948. Publication was suspended from October 1947 to November 1948].

The Jewish state would thereafter provide the means.

The program was thus outlined. Promote remembrance, (the subjectivity of
witnesses must always prevail over the work of historians who, at that time, had not yet addressed the question because they were afraid of the dictatorship of the survivors), piety (that is, paralysis of all critical thought about the Zionist policy), and the lesson (that is, political blackmail towards all political forces whatsoever; they are accused of having failed to prevent the extermination of the Jews, and are therefore disqualified to tell Jews what they ought to do. This simple mechanism always runs at full power).

At the time when the major rhetorical articulations, which we have just seen arise
in embryonic form, were being put into place, the political weight of the Jews is weak.

Certainly, political propaganda is in full swing; the Zionist emissaries can steer the
French Ministry of the Interior (Jules Moch) in the case of the Exodus, but the time of their full powers in central Europe has just passed. Stalin, who had supported the creation of Israel, believing it would represent an ally against the English, quickly becomes disillusioned. The Communists realize that they have paid too much, that they have given too much room to their Jewish elements and that these have taken the opportunity to settle their accounts, to take their revenge, and to discreetly support a Zionism seeking a Western alliance. The reversal occurs in the 50’s: in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia purges remove Jews from the front of the stage. In the communist parties of Western Europe, like the French Communist Party, Jews are even begged not to seek leading positions. 

Meanwhile, Ben-Gurion feverishly prepares a military alliance that will lead to the Anglo-French-Israeli War of 1956 and the invasion of the Sinai.

In the operation of the vast propaganda machine in which the former
concentration camps are summarized, the Jews’ role and place are erased. The plaques at Auschwitz mention “four million dead” with no details about those who were the 4 million people. Indeed, it would have been very difficult to specify what composed this figure which is as imaginary as it is stupefying.

Rassinier, discreetly supported by people who were on the German side during
the war, had every reason to continue an anti-communist combat: for him, the renovated camps, the manufactured witnesses, all that, along with the denial of the existence of the Gulags, showed that it was a large Soviet operation intended to justify the amputation from Germany of some of its territories in the East, and the occupation of the center of Europe (including a part of Austria). As an internationalist and pacifist, Rassinier had to wage war against this huge system of oppression which used historical lies against Germans as a guarantee of its anti-fascist legitimacy.

As we said earlier, the Eichmann trial was going to change the game. Rassinier
saw his communist adversaries replaced by Jewish adversaries, whom he had hitherto neglected. These would resume the Soviet staging in full. They gradually obtained ownership of the sites through various subterfuges. They retained the “witnesses” who, as if by a miracle, were overwhelmingly Jews who had been communists but who smelled the scent of new sources of recognition, funding and career. Imperceptively, the postconcentration camp apparatus (the camp management, the archives, some international institutions “representating” the former deportees, the research institutes, the publishing houses) passed from the hands of Soviet communist officials to those of Jewish-Zionist “volunteers,” who were sometimes the same people. The collapse of the USSR accelerated the molt.

American Isolationism and the Role of Barnes

We left the American revisionists on the eve of World War II. They saw, like very
one else, the arrival of this conflict and saw those around Franklin Roosevelt, who were working to bring about the entry of the United States into the war. One knows that the vast majority of the American people rejected the intervention of their country in the war that had started, while President Roosevelt did everything possible to prepare this intervention. It took Pearl Harbor in December 1941, so that public opinion finally consented to enter the war. Doubts immediately began to hang over this affair. It is suspected that President Roosevelt was informed [of Japanese plans] and did not warn the Navy of the attack by the Japanese planes. 

Others go further, suspecting the president of having provoked the attack. The White House formed a commission of inquiry whose report contained embarrassing revelations scattered in the footnotes. But the logic of war and its ideological needs, in the press as in Hollywood, prevailed, aided by a sense of solidarity with the soldiers engaged in combat, first in the Pacific and then in Europe.

Meanwhile, the revisionists set themselves to work. As early as 1947-48, despite
the fact that many of the sources were closed to them and the archives rarely opened, they were able to present some conclusions what were damning for the power in place in Washington (Roosevelt, and then Truman). Charles Tansill, George Morgenstern,[George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor - The Story of the Secret War, New York, Devin-Adair, 1947, 425 pages.] Charles Austin Beard, William Chamberlin, and Harry Elmer Barnes published some extremely well documented books, despite all the obstacles put in their way. In fact, and again this was not something concerning the Jewish question, one sees that to call into question the legitimacy of the major strategic decisions of the state entailed threats, repression, attacks on one’s professional life from those in power, and not just from those with political power. Publishers refused to produce the books, which came out at small publishers without means. 

The press became venomous when it did not impose the law of silence.

There was no Treaty of Versailles. And besides, there is still no peace signed with
Germany ... These authors who for the most part had positions in the academic world focused on the intricacies of the policy of the United States. They showed the duplicity of Roosevelt and the war party. They were followed by a wave of new revisionist historians who devoted themselves to understanding the global conflict as a whole, and thus to analyzing the policy of Chancellor Hitler, which became difficult to grasp under the heap of works of propaganda, of articles from a fanatic press and of lobbies committed to the destruction of Germany and its industrial power. I will not go into the details of the works of A.J.P. Taylor, David Hoggan, the always very active Barnes, Austin App, and Paul Rassinier, who was introduced into the United States and first translated by Barnes himself.

Revisionism acquired at that time an ability to verify almost all the information
that came from the belligerents and the centres of power involved in the Second World War. This capacity was less great with regard to Japan, for linguistic reasons no doubt, and the USSR, which remained as closed as a safe. It was under the constant pressure of revisionists that the official history began to evolve. This pressure became more concrete with the foundation in California of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), created in 1979 by Willis Carto and enlivened by a lively and hyperactive Briton, David McCalden.

Arthur Butz had just published his brilliant contribution, The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century, and the Frenchman Robert Faurisson appeared in the first conferences of the IHR. Barnes died in 1968.

Here is how the ferocious opponent of revisionism, Deborah Lipstadt, summed up
in 1994 the contribution of one of the pioneers of Holocaust revisionism, the Germanborn American, Austin App:
* The policy of the Nazis with regard to the “Jewish problem” was deportation, not extermination. The proof of this is that if Germany had opted for a total extermination, there would be no survivors.
* No Jew was gassed in the German camps nor without doubt at Auschwitz. The
crematoria were designed to incinerate those who died a natural death.
* The Jews who disappeared during the Second World War were mostly in the Soviet area, not under German control.
* The majority of Jews who were executed by the Nazis were executed with good cause: they were subversive agents, spies and criminals.
* If there were any merit to the Holocaust claim, Israel ought to have opened its archives to historians. The Zionists have chosen to maintain the myth by treating as “anti-Semitic” everyone who called it into question.
* What they call “proofs” of the annihilation of the six million are only distorted
quotations attributed to Nazis or Nazi documents.
* That it falls to the accusers to provide proofs of the existence of such a crime. App affirms that it is Germany which is forced to prove that the figure of 6 million is false. This argument rests on the assertion by App and his likes, that the reparations paid by Germany to Israel are based on the figure of six million. He always talks about it as a “Zionist scam.”
* Jewish historians and the others may have great differences in their calculation of the number of victims. App draws from this the argument that these figures are not based on anything [Denying the Holocaust, pp. 99-100].

The Precursors

We must put Arthur Butz among those who truly paved the way for Holocaust
revisionism as it exists today. The title of his book, which first appeared in England in 1976, is very clear: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which the French translation renders as: La Mystification du XXe siècle. It analyses the main issues of what it describes as a large-scale propaganda operation related to the war: the Nuremberg Trial, a sort of grand theater that has very little to do with justice but which clarifies the wellsprings of the Allies’ action, the camps, their industrial role and the high probability that the Allies, wanting to know about what was happening in the factories, took aerial photographs of Auschwitz and its region. He wrote it in 1975. Four years later, by a curious coincidence, the CIA actually published photographs taken in 1944 during aerial overflights of
Auschwitz. These pictures showed precisely that there was no suspicious activity around the buildings that the exterminationist vulgate called “gas chambers”, and which are actually morgues equipped with crematory ovens. In an interesting ideological reversal, supporters of the official thesis saw therein proof that something horrible was going on.

But any sensible person can see that it is impossible to use these photos to support a massive extermination, particularly that of the Jews deported from Hungary, of whom it is said that 20,000 perished daily at Auschwitz. This absolute inpossibility was foreseen by Arthur Butz through a complex series of deductions: he had applied to documents that were within the reach of everyone a logical and synthetic spirit inherent in the scientific and technical approach.

Butz used as his documentary source (corpus) the works of the Nuremberg Trial
such as they were published immediately after the trial in 42 volumes which retraced the debates and the documents submitted to the International Military Tribunal, which in fact was only an inter-Allied organism, expressing the point of view of the victors. Thereafter, for nearly 50 years, the supporters of the official thesis have contented themselves with this very restricted collection of materials, which were carefully selected by the prosecutors. The defense had a right only to documents chosen for it by the prosecution!

Reitlinger, Poliakov, and Hilberg in his initial writings, had shown no curiosity and no critical thought. It fell to the revisionist Carlos Porter to analyze the process by which the Nuremberg documents were produced, especially that for the testimonies, the so-called “affidavits” in judicial jargon, and thus it was he who let it be known that the greater part of the testimonies have no value, for they were transmitted in breach of the elementary rules of ordinary justice. Today, however, these elements have become totally inaccessible to researchers and are perhaps lost forever in basements, in Holland, on the pretext there is no money to classify them. Without going as far as the internal criticism of Porter, Butz had analysed the contents and had judged them to be either inconsistent or false. In any case, after his passage, the official version resembled a field of ruins.

Others went to work on the same subject, but with different methods. One of the
little recognized pioneers was called Ditlieb Felderer, who was born into a family of
Austrian Jews, but converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He was led to study the treatment of members of his sect at the hands of the Nazis, and then became interested in Auschwitz in the 70’s and made many inquiries at the place. After examining carefully the sites, and taking thousands of photos (which were confiscated by the Swedish police), he quickly realized that the official history was just a bunch of stories and legends that could not satisfy a reasonable mind. 

He was then living in Sweden and he published dozens of small tracts intitled Bible Researcher - Revisionist History, which strove to clear up the concrete problems which arose from the contradiction between what he saw, with his eyes, with ruler in hand, and what was said in the books of the “witnesses” and in the documents published by the State Museum established at Auschwitz by the Polish
communist authorities. Felderer read Polish just as well as German. He wrote in Swedish as in English, and worked alone between Poland and Sweden, publishing his pamphlets with the help of a mimeograph, and always lacking the money which would have allowed him to extend his investigations.

He says also that he was the first to have revealed the existence of a pool and a
theater in the camps of Auschwitz, that he was the first to show that the doors of Crematory I were fake, that the building is a Soviet fabrication, with its fake chimney, the first to denounce the mystifications of Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, and so on.

He also remarkably analyzed the phenomenon of the fundamentalist Christians in the United States, who are hyperzionists and are working to destroy Arabic civilization for the benefit of Jews. He also coined the term “exterminationist theory” to describe the official position. Very early, he raised the question of the “openings” that would have existed in the roofs of the mortuaries adjacent to crematory furnaces, where the SS, according to a handful of so-called witnesses, poured the deadly gas, which were supposed to kill up to 2000 people at a time. 

He writes (Revisionnist History no. 153): “The lids and openings, on top of what purports, according to the Auschwitz authorities, to be the roof of a ‘gas chamber,’ are shrouded in mystery, contradiction, secrecy and confusion.”
 
It is now 27 years later. This observation still holds true. Ditlieb Felderer was then
arrested in Sweden, documents were confiscated: he was put in prison. Upon release, he left the country and abandoned his pioneering work. To this man who was crushed by repression, we would like here to pay tribute for his lucidity and his clairvoyance.

There was another person at this same time, who started to remount the paths
which Rassinier had been the first to blaze. High school teacher in Vichy, then instructor at the University of Paris, Robert Faurisson had forged a specialty: the critical study of documents, of their internal logic, and of their meaning, independent, he said, of the context and of the biography of their authors. He had a method, which some students called the “Ajax method” (from the name of a product for washing dishes), and he had applied it to some of the famous poets of French literature. His defense of his thesis in 1972 had aroused controversy, going so far as to generate a report in Le Monde, which was quite unusual for a simple university ceremony.

Faurisson had had his eyes opened by Paul Rassinier, and, like everyone else,
wanted to undertake a critical reading of the 42 volumes of the Nuremberg Tribunal, and especially of the documents which they contained. While he was progressing step by step through the jungle of these documents, he tried to interview the experts and the survivors in order to be enlighted on several crucial points. He agreed with Butz that Auschwitz was at the heart of the issue of the supposed extermination of the Jews, and that the gas chamber was the heart of Auschwitz. Having explored and analysed all the documents then available, he went to Auschwitz where the Swede Felderer worked beside him.

Faurisson sought precise and measurable facts, which are consistent with the laws of physics, not more or less romanticized interpretations as are found in great numbers in the testimonies; most of the few testimonies produced in the trials, such as the Nuremberg Trial and the other Allied tribunals which followed it, and the so-called trial of the guards at Auschwitz, which took place in Frankfurt in 1963, contain little else but romantized interpretations.

Having pointed out to the Museum staff that the gas chamber at Auschwitz
presented some inexplicable anomalies, he got this admission: “... reconstructed.” He obtained much more: plans dating from the time of the construction of the crematories, plans which had been left there by the camp administration’s Department of Construction. Indeed, one realized that all the archives of this service had been preserved, and that they had not been destroyed as is commonly said in the newspapers. Half of the 160,000 documents from this service were at Auschwitz in Poland. A few years later, we were going to find the rest of them in the Soviet archives in Moscow. When an official of the SS chose to change a light bulb that had burned out somewhere in the camps, we found the slip with the order for a bulb, the bill for its purchase and delivery, as well as
an entry in an account book noting the changing of the bulb. None of those 160,000 documents mentioned any massacre or any massive gassing of human beings.

The plans thus obtained proved revealing. Other plans were obtained by an
amateur researcher who had approached Faurisson and then published them in a big book which the Jewish financiers who had commissioned it held out of the book market (J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers....).
 
The Outburst of the Faurisson Affair in France

At the end of 1978, Professor Faurisson who then taught at the University of Lyon
2 succeeds in getting into the big French newspaper Le Monde a small article which claimed that the story of the gas chambers at Auschwitz smacked of myth and that this was easy to demonstrate. It ended by saying that this was good news and should be made public. The uproar was immediate. One saw the Jewish organizations, then the journalists, and then the politicians, right up to the President of the Republic, rebelling against the notion that what was called “the Holocaust”, after an American television broadcast so titled, would be of a mythological nature. All these people who knew nothing about the matter, who had never opened the records, who had no competence as historians, protested against the fact that one of their beliefs had been so badly mistreated.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a specialist in ancient Greece, and the son of Jews deported by the Germans, met with 34 historians, of whom only one was more or less a specialist of the Nazi period, to declare that one was not entitled to raise the problem of the gas chambers’ existence since they had existed! This incredible mental shortcircuit would entail various consequences, the most notable being the suit soon brought in Paris against Professor Faurisson by various Jewish organizations.

Initially, it seems that these organizations, all more or less Zionist, thought that
there was a negligible number of revisionists and that it would be easy to crush them under the weight of the documents. They sent delegations to Poland (still communist) and to Israel to gather the pieces that would overwhelm Faurisson. 

They brought in fact mountains of paper, but the analysis of them by Faurisson and his defense team showed that they contained virtually no reliable information on the gas chambers. Quite the contrary, Faurisson took the counter-offensive and gave birth to his challenge to the prosecutors to give evidence, a single proof of the existence of such “magic” gas chambers. The term “magic” is from the pen of the great French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

The judges, in the first instance, condemned Faurisson because he had given pain
to certain Jews and had not excused himself for it. On appeal, Faurisson eliminated one by one the positions of the Jewish organizations, whose competence and knowledge had long since reached their limits. The court found him guilty, but not without saying that Faurisson’s work was serious and that it was necessary to leave to the public and the specialists the task (lit. “care”) of judging it. Once again, he was convicted for lack of reverence towards the Jewish dead.

In terms of public opinion, the damage was considerable. Among the Jewish
organizations, the guardians of the “memory,” that is, of a story made for political
purposes, panic buzzed. It was clear that it would be impossible to beat Faurisson and the revisionists in a public debate. Certainly, the representatives of the official view avoided public debate, but the risk was there that one would start nevertheless. They then began to intrigue to get a law which would prevent this public debate. After several attempts, they managed to attain their ends, with the Gayssot Act, which was promulgated on July 13, 1990 and killed freedom of expression in France. This law obliged judges to condemn everyone who disputed the existence of a crime condemned at Nuremberg! This iniquitous tribunal, these arbitrary procedures, this fabricated condemnation, they all became untouchable articles of faith and law. The opposition (then on the right, led by Chirac) voted against it but did not dare submit the text of the law to the Constitutional
Council which would surely have dismissed it as a judicial monstrosity. In France, this test of constitutionality is optional. The right did not want to run the risk of crossing the Zionists.

The consequences of the Gayssot Act were terrible: freedom of expression began
to wither. Books which had been written could no longer be published. One ceased to write them. The little debate which had existed disappeared entirely. A reverential fear spread everywhere, especially in schools where teachers were forced to tell an official story in the form of a catechism which convinced only conformists. The media chickened out. A lead blanket settled over them little by little. The Holocaust propagandists continued to attack the gagged revisionists. 

An avalanche of books collapsed on them, without their being able to show publicly that they were worthless. New heights of stupidity were attained with the interminable film, Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann, who had decided to not show or use documents, but to rely solely on “witnesses” whom he had taken care to pay, without telling this to the spectators. Rare were the minds, devoid of all sense of reverence, which could see in this film a new comic masterpiece, in the vein of
the Marx brothers.

The Gayssot Act would spread across Europe. Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, and
the Netherlands would equip themselves with similar devices, ones more specifically tailored to revisionism than that in Germany, which has in its Civil Code the famous article 130, which punishes “incitement of the people” to ... no one knows what; but there it is the job of the judge to decide and punish, with up to five years in prison, “inciters” who have no right to speak in court. That one can juxtapose the word “justice” with these inquisitorial proceedings is a disgrace.

Developments in North America

Harry Elmer Barnes was a hard worker and a cultivated man. He had discovered
that a French author, Paul Rassinier, had made innovative analyses concerning
Nuremberg and the Eichmann Trial. That was no easy feat in an US intellectual world which is generally closed to and derogatory about non-American thinkers. 

Not only did Barnes read Rassinier, but he began to translate The Drama of the European Jews. He could not find a publisher for the translation, completed in 1965. He made forty copies of it and distributed them to those close to him. It was only ten years later that a miniscule publishing house (Stepping Stones), which had been established for this very purpose, was able to publish the book, a few months before the coming out of Butz’s book. These events reflected a growing awareness. A new generation of revisionists was being born.

A seasoned veteran of American extreme right-wing publishing, Willis Carto, whose financial affairs were quite shady, set up in 1978 an Institute of Historical Review,
whose directorship was taken over by a flamboyant and controversial Briton, David McCalden (who also used the name Brandon Lewis). Soon, the highpoint of the Institute’s activities was its annual conference. It took on from the outset an international character. Indeed, at the first conference held in September 1979 at Northrop University, several Europeans (Faurisson, Walendy, Felderer, etc.) took part. A quarterly journal (The Journal of Historical Review) and a publishing house (Noontide Press) would allow the putting into circulation the main works produced by revisionists all around the world.
 
We have seen that there was no revisionist organization: just a collection of dissimilar individuals, working alone, who found there not only a means to compare their ideas and results, but also, quite simply, an audience that permitted the making of books and articles.

This machine for producing detailed studies as well as reflections on American
history (for example, on Pearl Harbor) and the more general issue of the Second World War World ran smoothly for many years, until about 1990. McCalden was dead, and his successors came into conflict with Carto because of diversion of funds, which should have fallen into the coffers of the Institute and which was diverted by Carto to himself.

The quarrels, the interminable trials that ensued, had an irremediable effect on the activities of the Institute. The magazine became monthly but lighter, and stopped appearing in 2002. It stopped making books, and the conferences disappeared. The Institute is somewhat vegetating under the leadership of Mark Weber, who 
igh fever had taken hold of Canada. A young Swabian farmer
named Ernst Zündel, who was born in 1939, had emigrated to Canada where he had established himself as a graphic artist in 1958. Here, realizing how black the image of Germany was, he was smitten by the idea of giving it an image that conformed more to reality and which was more acceptable to himself. He found a revisionist booklet written by an English university instructor, who was inspired by the work of Paul Rassinier: Richard Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die? He undertook to circulate this booklet. It would create unprecedented turmoil. The Jewish organizations decided to crush what they described immediately as a “resurgence” of traditional anti-Semitism. It is true that Zündel, in the course of his political education in Canada, had a dialogue with some supporters of Nazism and with some anti-Semites such as Adrien Arcand and had been at their school. 

But he remained a completely conventional German nationalist. Since 1977, he had established a huge machine to edit revisionist brochures and to get them circulated around the world. On his lists there were, in West Germany, 2239 prosecutors, 300 judges, 400 historians, 6200 jounalists, and so on... He was prosecuted for “spreading false news” under an old English law which was still inscribed in Canada’s criminal code, and a large trial was held in 1985.

Always with a great sense for staging and aided by a big financial influx from his
supporters, he launched an appeal in all directions to gather competent people to assist him with list of issues to be addressed at the trial, whose preliminary session was held in June 1984. On the accusatory side was Raul Hilberg, a professor of political science, undoubtedly the one among the exterminationists, who had really worked on the documentation, and on the revisionist side there was Professor Faurisson. The whole trial was animated by the duel, direct or through the lawyers, between these two workaholics.

Cornered and trapped, Hilberg had to confess pathetically that he knew of no proof of the existence of the gas chambers. It was a defeat plain for all to see. The heavy artillery of Ditlieb Felderer, backed up by his 27 long visits to Auschwitz, left no hope to a man who had spent three hours there, once in his life, for a commemoration. Of the 30,000 photographs taken by Felderer, none could be shown to the court.

But the most dramatic thing was the collapse of the No. 1 witness in the history of the gas chambers, a Czech Jew named Vrba. An escapee from Auschwitz during the war, he made a report which had made its way clandestinely to Washington where it was officially published as the first document which explained and analyzed how the mass gassing worked (World Refugee Board Report). It is also on this unverified document that the prosecution at Nuremberg had relied. But Vrba was still alive and teaching in a Canadian university. Under the rapid-fire of the ruthless Faurisson, relieved at times by the brilliant lawyer Doug Christie, Vrba retreated and acknowledged his complete rout.

He had to admit that he had witnessed nothing at all, that he had reported rumors and hear-say, that his testimony and his autobiographical book were not documents of history, but stories more or less fabricated with literary methods which were contrary to the work of the historian. He claimed the benefit of “poetic licence.” He left with his tail between his legs; a great witness had just disappeared. One will better measure the importance of this fact by recalling that the number of “witnesses” of the alleged gassings does not exceed the fingers of two hands. Vrba was the most eminent, the most guaranteed among them, having been published by the United States Government. The dismay in the accusatory parties of the trial was significant. Similarly Hilberg, the expert, had to agree
that he was unable to justify most of his statements about the decision he attributed to the Nazi leaders, to proceed to the extermination of the Jews, without exchanging among themselves either a word or a signature at the bottom of a paper.

Despite, or perhaps because of the dominance of the defense, Zündel was
sentenced to fifteen months in prison for distributing news that he was supposed to have known as false!

He appealed. We have a long summary of the trial published in 1988 by one of
Zündel’s lawyers [Barbara Kullaszka, ed., Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel - 1988, Toronto, Samisdat, 1992. One can say that revisionism had accumulated there all its demonstrative capacity]. One found again the great protagonists, Felderer, Faurisson, Leuchter, but also Professor Christopher Browning on whom Hilberg, unwilling to be slaughtered again, dumped all responsibilities, Mark Weber of the IHR, and David Irving, the renowned British historian (now in prison in Austria). Zündel obtained from the Supreme Court of Canada that it declare the law on false information contrary to the Canadian constitution. To keep things brief, the judge of the Appeals Court decided that the Holocaust was an established fact (judicial notice), which did not tolerate being called into question! It was no longer possible to discuss on a level playing field (lit. “with equal arms”).

This was the last time that the confrontation between the revisionists and the
supporters of the official Holocaust thesis was possible, despite the reticence of the court.

In view of the devastation produced by the public exposure of the revisionists’ criticisms, the experiment was abandoned. Increasingly, repression, pure and simple, replaced confrontation or even its mere possibility. (Revisionists were not invited to participate in Irving’s legal action against Lipstadt). But these large trials had the virtue of underscoring the dominant character of the revisionist thesis. The opposing arguments and the convictions had to rely on elements foreign to historical proof, on the supposed intentions of the revisionists, or on accessory and minor legal reasons.

This second trial opened a new path into the exploration of the past of the
concentration camps. Having investigated the penitentiary gas chambers of the United States, Robert Faurisson got hold of a technical expert from these facilities in the person of Fred Leuchter. He had him come to Toronto, and with Zündel who financed the trip, he sent him to do an appraisal in situ of the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau and of a few other camps in Poland. Leuchter examined the scene, took a few samples from the existing brick walls and upon his return had an analysis made of them by a construction laboratory, without saying from where the samples came. His report concluded that it was absolutely impossibile that there had been massive and repeated gassings in the premises in question.

Since the judge was not prepared to listen to reason, it was mostly on public
opinion that the Leuchter report made a strong impression. It circulated a great deal and drew many desperate reactions among Zionists engaged in the crusade against revisionism (which they had bizarrely renamed “denial,” a word which corresponded to nothing).

While the pharmacist Pressac, who at the time was supported by the Klarsfeld
clan which specialises in the “hunt for Nazis,” was trying to find arguments that looked scientific, Klarsfeld mounted in the United States a vast operation to attack the respectability of Leuchter, who had made the mistake of presenting himself as an “engineer”. Now, according to a peculiar law of the State of Massachusetts, only a third of the engineers operating in that state had the legal right to claim to be such, and this was not the case for Leuchter. This insignificant loophole was used to compel Leuchter to sign a statement recognizing that he had “usurped” this title; it was also used to make a campaign among his customers so that he should lose his livelihood, to push his wife to
divorce and to ruin him in every way. Today, twenty years later, Leuchter is reduced to driving school buses. Jewish revenge is not an empty word.

Leuchter’s expertise undoubtedly suffered from some minor imperfections; it was
this same expertise which the chemistry student Germar Rudolf in Germany later wanted to recapture. He resumed the same procedure of observation and the taking of samples from the walls of the so-called gas chambers, those that the legend assigns to the mass murders, and those of the premises used at the time for the disinfecting of clothing. The two would have used Zyklon B as the active agent, and its usage creates visible blue deposits, of what is called “Prussian blue.” Germar Rudolf wrote for a German court a report which would ruin his life as a future chemical engineer and force him into exile.

He is currently in prison in Germany and is facing a lengthy trial that will inevitably
condemn him to five additional years in prison. The idea of Professor Faurisson has cost dearly those who have had the courage to put it into implementation, but it brought about the latest blow to the myth, in the eyes of many people who demanded scientific proofs.

The German court was careful not to demand a second opinion which would have made ridiculous its attitude of saying that the Holocaust is indisputable.

Rudolf lost his job and soon had to flee to England, where he established a
publishing house for the revisionist works and a quarterly magazine, in German. He lived there quite discreetly until some German newspapers found him. He then left for the United States, where he founded another publishing house and relaunched the site VHO [http://vho.org which houses also the site of AAARGH : http://vho.org/aaargh which as a result of a judicial decision is filtered in France by some of the largest providers of access to the internet.], originally created by a Belgian revisionist, Siegfried Verbeke. Soon, G. Rudolf engendered a considerable volume of activity, with major publications in English and German. The contributions of German writers, often engineers, have multiplied. G. Rudolf had asked for political refugee status. It was, of course, inconceivable that the
American authorities acknowledge that Germany, their faithful servant, exercised a dictatorship over the views of its citizens. A cabal was started; quickly apprehended, he was sent to Germany where he faces at least 5 years in prison. 

But observers have noted that the publications continue, on a slightly slower pace. A team has replaced him, and this police operation was unable to prevent access to and the putting on line of a rich documentation on the internet.

Zündel had shown a remarkable ability to put together independent researchers,
lawyers, and advisors, as well as finances and material organisation, from the huge house that he owned in Toronto. He therefore became a target, not only of the courts, which banned him from using the mail and put him in jail, but also of the press, which became gradually unanimous in slandering him, and finally of the brutish Zionists, who attacked him several times, sent him parcel bombs (with the complicity of the secret services) and even straightout set fire to his house. New instances of interminable judicial harassment made him decide to move to the United States where he joined his wife, Ingrid Rimland, who established in 1996 the Zundelsite on the Internet. He thought he had found shelter, and at the moment when he was considering a withdrawal from the active fight, he was
seized and sent to Canada in a jiffy. The American judges in charge of the affair had to bow to one of those monstrosities that characterize Anglo-Saxon law: executive privilege, which may violate any laws without having to justify itself! It shut the mouth of the judge without an explanation! Those who think that the United States is the Far West are absolutely right. Those in power can ignore all laws, and even, as just seen with Bush II, make laws that organize and justify their whims. If one made a map of the civilized countries, the United States would not figure on it.

For almost two years, Zündel has fought to get his human rights recognized in
Canada, in the face of the secret services which have not needed to justify their ukases, and finally he has been deported to Germany, where again they are preparing an interminable trial against him. Germany has this peculiarity: arguments made by the defense can be used by the prosecutor to incriminate him. In other words, the fact that one tries to defend oneself in a trial about opinion is in itself a cause for condemnation.

Those who are silent get slightly shorter sentences than those who believe that they ought to justify themselves to the court. German lawyers have learned their craft by reading Orwell, 1984! One of the lawyers, Mr. Schaller, from Vienna, told us that he expected a sentence of 15 years!

In France

The Gayssot Act, often called the “gayssotine,” has sterilized research in France.
Academics have launched some students on dangerous paths, and they have produced anti-revisionist theses that are turgid, poorly done, and full of circumvolutions. They must avoid obstacles and substantive discussions. This leads to perfectly ridiculous books, which bear the traces of censorship like scars.

The difficulty for revisionism’s opponents comes from the prominent role played
from the start of the 80’s by a small group which came from the far-left: La Vieille
Taupe, heir of radical political traditions, which were Marxist and libertarian at the same time. One could not, without falling into the grotesque, accuse these people of anti-Semitism, the essential weapon for refusing to participate in dialogue and discussion. La Vieille Taupe reissued Rassinier and has published Faurisson’s texts, thereby enabling him to penetrate all sorts of political and intellectual milieux. 

Parisian intellectuals were at first afraid, then they had need of time in order to gather behind a few Jewish writers who spread the rumor that they had “refuted” the revisionist works.

Repression eventually smothered everything: bookstores where we sold
“culpable” books, the publishers, the small magazines. For a year, every week, groups of Jews demonstrated against the bookstore of La Vieille Taupe, attacking the windows with petanque balls, or by putting through a hole in the woodwork a stinking liquid impossible to dissipate. This effort to prevent speaking, thinking, and writing had the support of the authorities, the police as well as the politicians. Revisionism in Europe was sentenced to asphyxia, when the internet arrived. Since 1996 revisionist sites have emerged in Sweden, in the United States and in France. Some people had to become self-taught and learned on their own these new techniques of expression, which were immediately assailed by all those who want to impose their censorship on these issues. (See the documentary annex).

The battle was epic. It lasted several years, but revisionist positions have well
withstood the shock and survived. The attacks and insults have become more rare, for a few years. This survival, what does it mean? That in the last ten years the internet has become a normal place and mode of expression. Admittedly, at most, half of the population is on the net. But freedom of expression is something relative, and it is everywhere an object of struggle and demands. Revisionism has found there a mode of expression that has defeated attempts at censorship.

There are at present six major revisionist sites that offer tens of thousands of
pages of documents accessible to everyone:
– That of the IHR (ihr.org), which is devoted mainly to recent events but which
has the Archives of its Journal of Historical Review where revisionist research was first expressed. It is a valuable asset that serves as a basis for future research.
– That of CODOH (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust - codoh.com)
created and recently renewed by the American Bradley Smith, a colorful character, a libertarian and dilettant, who has often managed to get revisionist ads printed in college newspapers, thereby sowing panic in the huge Jewish organizations in charge of maintaining the Zionist dictatorship over academic circles (Hillel organizations).
– That of the VHO (http://www.vho.org/). Led until his arrest in 2005 by Germar
Rudolf, it continues its existence at a somewhat slower pace. It offers a wide range of articles especially in German. The German justice system has been able to lay its hands on him, but the site is still available for German readers.
– The Zundelsite, created and led by Ingrid Rimland, in the United States.
Zündel’s wife announced that she was putting the site on hold.
(http://www.Zundelsite.org ). The new texts are all linked to the trial of Zündel held in Mannheim, which has lasted for more than a year.
– Radio-Islam, created by a Moroccan who lives in exile in Sweden, Ahmed
Rami. (http://www.Radioislam.net) Rami, a former officer, knows all the tricks of war. He survived everything: prison, press campaigns, governmental denunciations, interminable police investigations. Unafraid, he inspires the site of radio-Islam that has a large quantity of revisionist documents in several languages.
– L’AAARGH (Association des anciens amateurs de récits de guerre et
d’holocauste—Association of Former Lovers of War and Holocaust Stories) is first and foremost a French site, which aims to put online all the revisionist works that exist. It has pursued this same aim in a dozen languages, with unequal results. The Zionists have tried their best, on several occasions, to shut it down, but it has resisted all their manoeuvres and today presents the greatest assemblage of texts available on the internet.

Towards the end of the 90’s, the Israeli government determined that revisionism
was one of its principal enemies, and it was necessary to make every effort to eradicate it.

It sent emissaries to many countries to call for the establishment of laws which would entirely prohibit its expression. The result of these backstage manoeuvres was the holding in Stockholm in January 2000 of an international conference that was the starting point of a vast eradication campaign. Governments, in a brouhaha of convictions and reprobations, pledged to combat what they called denial (négationnisme), that is, to demonize the revisionists. Of grand gestures and big words, there were lots. Then, once back home, the prime ministers thought of other things. They had satisfied the great Zionist Moloch. In France, for example, with great élan, the Minister of Education Jack Lang got translated and printed a small brochure made by Swedish Jews, and announced that it would be distributed to all school children (several million). A few months later, he
announced the production of 100,000 copies, which were sent to the schools. In the end, these ridiculous pamphlets remained in the cupboards, and we heard no more about them.

When Israel calls for sanctions on an international level, that creates a stir, which then subsides. Thus, on the first of November 2005, Israel obtained that the United Nations General Assembly condemn, farcically (unanimous decision, in 2 minutes, without a vote), the so-called “denial” (“négationnisme”). It is just another big sword-thrust into water, which will have no practical consequences, except to make revisionists laugh a lot: they are accustomed to this kind of spectacle.

Israel gradually reveals itself to be a paper tiger. Look at how severely the
Zionists broke their teeth in Lebanon, in this summer of 2006.... Fiercer, more effective, more consistent in their hatred and their desire to destroy all civil liberties are the Zionist groups implanted locally in the major European countries and in America (the United States, Canada, Argentina, and others). By a policy of infiltration of government circles and the press, they managed to gain acceptance of laws and regulations which impose Zionist views and demonize criticism of Israeli policy and its innumerable crimes.

Caught by the throat, the politicians and rulers yield to blackmail and accept corruption. The so-called democratic regimes offer easy targets for the manoeuvres of the Jewish lobbies, which are well organized and never seem short of money.

The situation now is mixed. In Europe, public opinion has long been aware of the
horror of the Israeli practices, but the governments are susceptible to blackmail and corruption, which are the major instruments of Zionist domination, along with the assassination.

In the course of his work, Professor Faurisson came up with a formula of
admirable simplicity. Recalling the official version, which presents the vast “gas
chambers” of Birkenau as equipped with chimneys on the roof where some alleged SS spilled Zyklon B pellets, he saw with his own eyes that these roof tiles, which are still there and which one can examine, show no holes corresponding to these chimneys. He summed up the situation with this sentence: “Pas de trous [dans le toit], pas d’Holocauste,” which sounds better in English: No Holes, No Holocaust

In response to this challenge, one has seen swarming at Auschwitz-Birkenau a
large part of the declared opponents of revisionism, in the vain hope of finding these holes. This is a purely material problem that resists mythology ...

In the Middle East

Since the 80’s, Ernest Zündel had appealed to political leaders of the Middle East
to realize that this legend of the Holocaust was a heavy stone hanging from their necks.

But it was not enough to send letters. It was withoout a doubt necessary to have contacts with and to talk with the officials, something which Zündel was unable to do. In 1996, from its inception, the site of the AAARGH established a link between the alleged Holocaust and the situation in Palestine, but the internet was still in its infancy.

In an unexpected manner it became possible to establish a link among all these
issues. Former leader of the French Communist Party, humanist, religious, and a convert to Islam, Roger Garaudy took up again the revisionist argument in a small book that criticized the Israeli myths. As for this book, no publisher wanted it, and it was La Vieille Taupe, which produced its first printing, which would trigger a huge scandal: all the press denounced in unison him who did not respect the law of silence, aimed at revisionists.

The scandal took on national proportions when Garaudy received the support of his old friend, the abbot Pierre, certainly the most popular man in France because of his great humanitarian campaigns for housing for the poor. The scandal and the virtuous indignation of a press devoid of arguments assured the book an enormous distribution, despite the obstacles to its sale. It was necessary to reprint tens of thousands of copies of it. Revisionism had become a regular topic of conversation. 

Major magazines had headlines such as: The victory of revisionism ...

Immediately the specialists of censorship were activated. There was a trial at the
end of which Garaudy was of course sentenced to a heavy fine. He appealed and the fine was maintained. But more importantly, in late 1996, he was invited to do a tour of the Middle East. His book was immediately translated in Morocco, Egypt and Lebanon. The production runs were enormous. He gave lectures, was received by the highest authorities, and succeeded above all in doing what was beyond the revisionists’ expectations: to inscribe criticism of the Holocaust legend in the minds of tens of millions of the inhabitants of the Middle East.

Today, ten years after his triumphant tour, revisionism is established everywhere
and is known by everyone in the Middle East. Maybe in a vague and imprecise way
because people have learned about it mostly from summary, very short articles in the press, written by journalists who do not have a complete grasp of the documentation.

Some Muslim intellectuals, who eye recognition in the intellectual circles of Paris,
London or Washington, have been very hesitant. They would have preferred that we not talk about these things because they believe that the solution to the Palestinian problem is above all to please the Jews, in general, and especially the Jewish intellectuals who hold power in the Western media. This illusion is slowly dissipating. It received a decisive blow when the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who has clearly adopted the revisionist point of view which he has without doubt met on the internet, raised the essential questions: did the events really happen as the Westerners say? If so, why should the Palestinians bear the consequences? And in any case, why put the revisionists in prison? Why ban the research which would settle these matters? The Iranian president has made use of what is common to us all: good sense. He has contributed to freedom of speech. He swept away the reticences of the opportunists who hope to have careers in the West by crawling at the feet of the potentates of the press.

Much remains to be done. If one wants the citizens of Muslim countries to
appropriate the work done by the revisionists, and to do such work themselves, they must have access, in their own languages, to the principal works that exist in the European languages. The distribution will be done with books and with the internet. It is therefore necessary to translate and to get things translated. This should be a consequence of this conference which one hopes will not be an unique event with no tomorrow.

November 24, 2006

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