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), [1] 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

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1 / Le Monde juif, n°7, March 1947, p. 19.
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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.[2] 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] 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

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2 / Le Monde juif, n° 12, September 1947, p. 3.
3 / Le Monde juif, n° 13, November 1948. Publication was suspended from October 1947 to November 1948. I t could be resumed without doubt because of money given by the new Jewish state, created in May 1948.
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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 [4], 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.

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4 / George Morgenstern, Pearl Harbor - The Story of the Secret War, New York, Devin-Adair, 1947, 425 pages.
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* 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 annih ilation 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.[5]


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

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5 / Denying the Holocaust, pp. 99-100.
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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 theGermans, 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.

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 is moreover a very competent historian.

Meanwhile, a high 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.[6] 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

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6 / 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.
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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 [7] originally created by a Belgian revisionist, Siegfried Verbeke. Soon, G. Rudolf engendered a considerable volume of activity, with major publications in English and

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7 / 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.
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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 (www.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 - www.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 - http://www.aaargh.com.mx/fran/fran.html) 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 internationa l 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 (una nimous 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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