See Part 1/2
In 1983, Klarsfeld and Pressac published a French version of the
Auschwitz Album (published by Le Seuil). (8) Pressac drew
up a misleading plan of Birkenau (p. 43) on which, in particular,
he obscured the surroundings of the large Birkenau crematories.
Specifically, he concealed from his readers that, immediately
next to Krema III, there was a SPORTPLATZ (playing field) which
served as a soccer pitch for the inmates, and that right next
to the Sportplatz there was a large hospital area. These simple
topographical specifications (about which Pressac is rather discreet
in his large book) render absurd the thesis that the crematoria
were supposedly the culmination of a horrible extermination process
accompanied by cries, fire, flames and the smell of burning flesh.
Can you imagine teams of soccer players and crowds of spectators
at the various matches, just a few steps away from those horrors?
Pressac is careless when he challenges the Revisionists to prove
that in the central camp the swimming pool was used by the inmates.
I will let a former Auschwitz prisoner answer for me. He was a
professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Strasbourg
who, while affirming in a rather vague way the homicidal gassings
at Auschwitz, was just as willing to write about the distractions
available to the inmates:
On Sunday afternoons, there were soccer, basketball and water
polo matches [my emphasis] to the ardent cheers of the spectators:people
need very little to distract them from the dangers thatthreatened
them! The SS administration allowed regular amusements forthe
prisoners, even on weekdays. A movie theater showed Nazinewsreels
and sentimental films and a very popular cabaret gavepresentations
often attended by the SS authorities. Finally, therewas a very
creditable orchestra, made up originally only of Polishmusicians
and replaced later by a new, high-quality group made up ofmusicians
of all nationalities, mostly Jews (Marc Klein, "Observations
et réflexions sur les camps de concentration nazis",
taken from the journal Etudes germaniques (No. 3, 1946),
1948, p. 31).
I could cite many other examples of such activities, but I shall
refrain from doing so, because where human beings are so "concentrated,"
life becomes unbearable in spite of all; promiscuity, epidemics,
the struggle to live and to gain individual advantage make such
an existence frightful, especially in time of war. But we must
not add false horrors to the real horrors. Furthermore, the camps
run by the Soviets, including the ones they "liberated"
in Germany before filling them again with their political adversaries
(beginning with the National Socialists), were even more horrible,
according to the statements of people like Margaret Buber-Neumann,
who experienced them both.
Pressac entitles one of his chapters "Auschwitz According
to the Revisionists. Photographic Exhibition of the Famous Holiday
Camp, KL Auschwitz" (p. 507). The irony and the slanderous
insinuation here conceal his embarrassment at reproducing photographs
which are not consistent with the various kinds of horrors supposedly
found in the camp. He tries to cast suspicion on certain of these
photographs by pointing out that they come from "Revisionist
sources." He is obviously unaware that many of them are from
the album kept by Dürrfeld, an engineer who was one of the
leading executives in the factories at Auschwitz. The file reference
"DUE" (for DUERRFELD) ought to have alerted him: the
Dürrfeld trial is well-known to historians of Auschwitz,
but apparently not to our pharmacist-turned-amateur-historian.
Involontary Contributions to Revisionism
Here and there throughout the text, one finds information
(very often in the form of photographic documents) which tends
to reinforce the position of the Revisionists. Here are some samples:
The Bankruptcy, According to Pressac, of Traditional History
Pressac draws up a bankruptcy report: no one before him has
been able to prove the existence of homicidal gas chambers at
Auschwitz and Birkenau. He recognizes that the historians, the
judges, the Soviets, the Poles, the arraigners of the "war
criminals" as well as the accusers of the Revisionists have
accumulated false proofs and worthless arguments (the Revisionists,
too, are supposed to have failed in their endeavors). He writes
at the end of his study, just before the appendices:
This study already demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of thetraditional history (and hence also of the methods and criticisms ofthe Revisionists), a history based for the most part on testimonies,assembled according to the mood of the moment, truncated to fit anarbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of unevenvalue and without any connection with one another (p. 264).
The celebrated work of Eugene Aroneanu, which has for so long been a sort of Exterminationist bible (Camps de concentration, preface by Jacques Billiet, director of France's War Crimes Information Service, Office francais d'édition, 1946), he calls "an historical monstrosity," "an incoherent and self-contradictory whole" (p. 15). On the post-war trials, he writes that "the tons of Zyklon B ordered by the camps were attributed to homicidal use without any verification." And, as I mentioned above (Part I, p. 38 in The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1991), he makes the following remark, which will likely upset his Exterminationist friends:
By far the greater part [of Zyklon B] (over 95 per cent) was destined for delousing (effects and buildings) while only a very small quantity (less than 5 per cent) had been used for homicidal gassings (Ibidem).
He is of the opinion that the American-conducted trial of Bruno
Tesch, one of the officials of the Degesch company and thus responsible
for the production of Zyklon B, was a "masquerade";
the court was not concerned with the technical question, merely
with the verbal testimony of one of his employees. In 1946, Pressac
writes, simple malicious gossip could easily lead to someone being
hanged. That was the case with Bruno Tesch (and, I should add,
with his associate, K. Weinbacher) (p. 16-17); see in this regard
the revealing article by William B. Lindsey, "Zyklon B, Auschwitz
and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch," The Journal of Historical
Review, Autumn 1983, p. 261-303.
The Soviet film Chronicles of the Liberation of the Camp,
1945 shows a gas-tight door as belonging to a homicidal gas chamber;
in view of its location, says Pressac, it was a door to a disinfection
gas chamber (p. 41). Further on, he talks about the work of the
Soviet Commission of Inquiry as a "completely put-up job"
and an "'historic' [sic] montage" (p. 46); the unfortunate
thing is that the Nuremberg Tribunal "took judicial notice"
of that work in the name of Article 21 of its charter.
At Birkenau, the vast hall of the Zentral Sauna, where the inmates
disrobed (Auskleideraum) before showering, possessed an impressive
number of tubular radiators. The Poles removed those radiators
because, according to Pressac, this concern for the comfort of
the inmates conflicts, in the minds of present-day visitors, with
the location of the ruins of Krema IV and its "gas chambers,"
only 100 meters away (p. 78). He might have added that the Poles
had dealt in the same manner with the "arrest cells"
in Block 11, which the tourists visit in great numbers. I'm the
one who called Pressac's attention to this mania of the Poles
for removing heating apparatuses, whether for their own use or
to give a crueler impression of the conditions under which the
inmates are supposed to have lived.
At the Nuremberg Trial, a perfectly ordinary German document dealing
with the crematory ovens was presented as proof of the extermination.
Pressac sees there an example of "the stupid way in which
the documents of the defeated were 'evaluated' by a tribunal of
the victors" (p. 106).
A certain reconstruction by the Poles after the war is "far
from being a faithful reproduction of the original state"
because of its exaggerations and its simplifications (p. 108).
The fact, according to Pressac, that at a given time in 1942 the
Germans used 2 to 3 per cent of the Zyklon B for murder and 97
or 98 per cent for disinfection "totally invalidates"
the interpretation of certain documents by "the traditional
historians" (p. 188).
Sometimes naming him and sometimes not, Pressac underscores the
errors or the deceptions of Georges Wellers. The latter's argument
based on the ventilation system of the Leichenkeller is, for Pressac,
contradicted and indeed completely demolished by the facts (p.
289). Wellers' "quite erroneous" and "quite unfounded"
interpretation deceived the lawyers of LICRA (the International
League against Racism and Anti-Semitism) who pleaded against Faurisson
(p. 355). In citing transcriptions of eyewitness testimony, Wellers
has made cuts when those testimonies contain improbabilities,
without any indication to the reader that he has done so (p. 479).
The plan he gave of Auschwitz (Les Chambres à gaz ant
existé/Des documents, des témoignages, des chiffres,
Gallimard, 1981, p. 12-13) is of "a very mediocre quality
as regards many details," although Pressac doesn't go so
far as to use the word "falsification" (p. 165-166).
What is striking is that this was the plan which hung for all
to see in the courtroom at the Frankfurt trial and which Hermann
Langbein reproduced in his book about that trial (Der Auschwitz
Prozess, Eine Dokumentation, Frankfurt, Europaische Verlaganstalt,
1965, p. 932-933 [not 930-931 as Pressac mistakenly indicates]).
The supposed camouflage around Krema II and III is, according
to Pressac, a product of the imagination of the "traditional
historians" (p. 341).
Jan Sehn, the Polish investigative magistrate who prepared the
trials of Rudolf Höss and of many other SS men, "made
a change" in a German document while reproducing it as a
copy allegedly identical to the original (p. 454). Nevertheless,
Pressac is careful not to be too harsh with this investigative
magistrate, to whom we owe a hundred lies about Auschwitz - to
name one, the lie of the "nearly 60,000 persons in 24 hours"
gassed at Birkenau (Jan Sehn, Le Camp de concentration d'Oswiecim-Brzezinka,
Wydawnictwo Prawnicze, Warsaw, 1961, page 132). It is also to
Sehn that we owe the "gigantic ditches" in the open
air (as many as eight?) where, "in August 1944, the figure
of 24,000 incinerations per day was attained" (with or without
the crematoria?) (Ibid., page 148). However, the aerial
photos taken by the Allies on 25 August 1944 show absolutely nothing
of the kind (D. Brugioni and R. Poirier, The Holocaust Revisited,
Washington, CIA, February 1979, pages 9-11).
In 1981 I was brought to trial in Paris by the LICRA and many
other organizations. The principal lawyer for the LICRA was Maitre
Bernard Jouanneau. From the pages Pressac devotes to this trial
and to this lawyer it is evident that the author believes that
many of the documents which they used against me do not, in reality,
prove the existence of the homicidal gas chambers in the least.
Not one of the eyewitness testimonies that Maitre Jouanneau introduced
had any real value. As for the technical arguments offered by
Jouanneau, all of them were worthless, and sometimes "disastrous."
Lastly, the lawyer outrageously abused the theory according to
which the Germans, to hide their crime, used a "code"
or "camouflage" (p. 554-556).
Pressac's inconsistencies have their amusing aspects. He remarks
on the dishonesty or incompetence of the Exterminationists but,
at the same time, wants at all costs to save the Exterminationist
theory. Thus he is reduced to flattering his friends for qualities
that supposedly make up for their faults. And when he flatters,
he doesn't do it by halves - he bootlicks: Maitre Jouanneau's
demonstration was based on a mass of errors but it was... "superb"
(p. 556).
Manipulation of Testimonies
In a work that professes to be technical, one ought first
to describe the scene of the crime, then examine the weapon used
in the crime and the material proofs of the crime, in order, finally,
to review the testimonies. Pressac, who has no understanding of
method, opens all of his chapters with... the testimonies. It
must be said that this is a way of clouding the reader's normal
capacity for judgment, since these "testimonies" posit
the existence of the homicidal gas chambers as a basic principle.
The quality of the testimonies that Pressac invokes is pitiful.
Sometimes he acknowledges that himself, but he often seeks to
save these testimonies from discredit, by means of the most oversubtle
devices.
Rudolf Höss is presumed to have written Commandant at
Auschwitz and Miklos Nyiszli supposedly wrote Auschwitz:
An Eyewitness Account of Mengele's Infamous Death Camp, two
testimonies offered as essential. Höss lived for several
years at Auschwitz, and Nyiszli supposedly lived there for six
months as an inmate. But what these two "witnesses"
write, for example, about the ventilation of the homicidal gas
chambers, constitutes, according to Pressac, an enormous technical
error. On this point they told the opposite of "the truth"
(p. 16).
Alter Fajnzylberg, Filip Müller and Rudolf Höss affirm
things that are "practically impossible," or "not
corresponding to the facts," that "cast a doubt,"
are "wrong," "contrary to reality," "unlikely"
(p. 126-12 7). The "errors" committed by Höss "throughout
his autobiography" have an explanation which Pressac brandishes
proudly and emphasizes in bold-face type: HE WAS PRESENT, WITHOUT
SEEING (p. 128). But, if that is the case, he wasn't a witness!
How could he be present and not see? How can one be the commandant
of an "extermination camp" and not see the instrument
of "exterminating" at least a million (?) people? How
was this commandant able to stress the dangers of Zyklon in 1942
(see above, p. 137-138) and then in 1946 decree that the dangers
were non-existent (see below, p. 172-173, note 9)?
As for the eyewitness testimony, so often invoked, of SS man Pery
Broad, the form and the tone of it, Pressac tells us, "sound
false." Broad's writings, which we owe to the Poles, cannot
be sincere. They are "colored by a rather too flagrant Polish
patriotism." The Broad manuscript is not known. It has all
been "slightly" reworked by the Poles (his quotation
marks around "slightly" imply that the rework was not
slight!). But what does it matter, asks Pressac: despite the discrepancies
between the various witnesses, some homicidal gassings did take
place in Krema I - that is an established fact (p. 128). "Established"?
By whom? By what? He does not say.
The testimony of Szlamy Dragon elicits the following commentary:
This is physically impossible [...]. I do not think that thiswitness was intentionally misleading, but he was following thetendency to exaggerate which seems to have been the general rule atthe time of the liberation and which is what gave rise to the figureof 4 million victims for K.L. Auschwitz, a figure now considered to bepure propaganda. It should be divided by four to get close to reality(p. 171).
In 1972, at the Dejaco/Ertl trial, witness Dragon showed "total confusion" (p. 172; see Part I, p. 60, in The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1991).
The testimonies of Pery Broad, of Rudolf Höss, Dr. Johann-Paul
Kremer, and of SS man Holblinger (which Pressac writes as Hoblinger)
on the several BUNKER are subject to reservations expressed in
the following terms: "entirely imaginary," "physically
impossible," "impossible to situate this scene"
(p. 174).
The testimony of Nyiszli would be valid providing ... that his
figures be divided by four - but not always. Pressac speaks of
Nyiszli's "number four," and says that his figures are
"worrying" (p. 179).
In 1980, a great fuss was made about Filip Müller's book,
Trois ans dans une chambre à gaz d'Auschwitz (Three
Years in a Gas Chamber at Auschwitz), foreword by Claude Lanzmann,
ed. Pygmalion/G. Watelet. [The English version, Eyewitness
Auschwitz: Three Years in a Gas Chamber at Auschwitz, New
York, Stein and Day, 1979, is somewhat different than the French
edition.] In France Jean Pierre-Bloch awarded the book the LICRA
prize. Filip Müller was one of the star witnesses at the
Auschwitz trial (1963-1965), and in the film Shoah. In
reality, he was a mythomaniac, which even Pressac realizes, for
he writes:
[in his book, Müller] has accumulated errors, thus making his accounthistorically dubious. The best approach is to read it as a novel based on true history (p. 181).
If the members of the Sonderkommando affirm that 5 or 7 or
12 bodies were burned in a single muffle of a crematory oven at
one time, Pressac suggests that this is an exaggeration, and that
probably only three bodies at a time could have been incinerated,
and skinny ones at that (p. 229). He says that today's tourist,
"after a silent prayer" (sic!) in front of Krema
I, must surely realize that "We find here the famous multiplying
factor of four used by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli" (p. 483).
At Auschwitz visitors can see in the former "Block 4"
a model that professes to show a Krema in the midst of a gassing.
This reconstruction, it must be said, inadvertently demonstrates
the physical impossibilities of the homicidal gassings, in particular
the cramped premises and the congestion that would have resulted
from the first "gassing." Add to that the fact that
documents which have subsequently come to light, especially the
aerial photos taken by the Allies in 1943/44 and published in
1979, underscore the "faults" of this model. Of small
import to Pressac, who sees in the reconstruction the "powerful
evocation of a mass gassing" (p. 378).
Beginning on p. 459, the author attempts to save from disaster
the absurd War Refugee Board Report of November 1944, sometimes
known as the Protocols of Auschwitz. Just the criticisms
of it that Pressac himself is obliged to make totally discredit
this mendacious work, which is due largely to Rudolf Vrba, today
a professor of pharmacology at a university in Vancouver (see
Robert Faurisson, "The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988),"
The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-1989, p.
420-421).
The drawings of one David Olere are in favor with Pressac, who
knew the artist personally, but these drawings, altogether grotesque,
seem inspired chiefly by a sort of sex-shop anti-Nazism. Pressac
considers them "masterpieces of authenticity" (p. 554)
but ... he has reservations as to their documentary worth and
about the sincerity of the witness (p. 493-497, 554-556). Playing
the prude, he goes so far as to refrain from reproducing certain
drawings (p. 498). This same David Olere asserts that the SS made
sausages they called "Kremawurst" (crematorium sausages)
out of human flesh (p. 554). His memory suffers from a certain
"deterioration" (p. 493), and he is subject to what
Pressac calls the "KREMATORIUM DELIRIUM" (p. 556).
The author's favorite witness is the Jewish shoemaker Henryk Tauber.
But this witness, too, tends to use "the famous multiplying
factor of four" (p. 483). HE HAS NEVER SEEN A GASSING BUT
EITHER HE WAS TOLD ABOUT IT (Ibid.) or else he has seen the bodies
of those whom he calls gassed (page 489). One day, through a window,
he saw an SS man pouring Zyklon B into a gas chamber (p. 494).
If over so many years he saw nothing more than that, it was because
during the gassing operations the SS systematically locked up
the members of the Sonderkommando in ... the coke store. This
is also Alter Fajnzylberg's explanation. The SS wanted to conceal
the existence of the gassings but not the existence of the people
gassed!
Tauber tells the story of a Jew named Lejb. One day, the Germans
hung Lejb, hands tied behind his back, from an iron bar above
the firing hearths, for an hour. Then, after untying his hands
and feet, they threw him into a cold crematorium furnace. Gasoline
was poured into the lower ash bin and lit. The flames reached
the muffle in which Lejb was trapped. A few minutes later, they
opened the door of the furnace. The condemned man came running
out, covered with burns. Next, he was ordered to run round the
yard shouting that he was a thief. Finally, he was forced to climb
the barbed wire fence, where he was killed with a gunshot!
Tauber speaks also of an open-air pit filled with human fat. The
fat ran from the corpses into a separate reservoir, dug in the
ground. This fat was poured over the corpses to accelerate their
combustion. One day, the SS men threw a man into the boiling fat,
then pulled him out, still alive, and shot him. "The next
day, the corpse was brought back to the crematorium, where it
was incinerated in a pit [!]" (p. 494).
Tauber says that around 2,500 bodies a day were incinerated in
a single crematorium. Here is Pressac's commentary:
This figure is unrealistic (and it is connected with thepropaganda of the immediate post-war period), [...]. Here we findalmost the famous multiplication factor of four, of which Dr. Miklos Nyiszli made such abundant and lamentable use in his book that hiscredibility was long contested. Henryk Tauber is far from being the only witness to say in substance "I don't know the number of dead" or "I think it was so many" and then coolly say one or two sentences later, that after due consideration, we do arrive at the (standard) figure of 4 million victims in all. This type of imposed falsehoodhas to be excused, I would stress, because of the political climate ofthe period 1945-1950 (p. 494). (11)
In just one passage on page 498, Pressac, to qualify the assertions
of his favorite witness, uses the words "dubious," "incorrect"
(twice), "not certain," "[made up] story,"
and "pure myth." And if at the end of his testimony
Tauber is so weak and so vague about Krema IV and V, no one can
reproach him for this, says Pressac, who supposes that the witness
"must have been exhausted by the end of his deposition"
(p. 502).
In short, all these witnesses seem to be suffering greatly, just
like David Olere, from what pharmacist Pressac calls Krematorium
delirium (p. 556).
Pressac has no criterion for distinguishing the true and the false
witness from one another. His witnesses can pile up the worst
errors or the worst insanities, yet they will find favor in our
man's eyes the moment he decides to make authentic witnesses out
of them.
A witness meticulously describes the room called a gas chamber,
and sees three pillars when there were really four: Pressac tells
us it's because he didn't go clear to the end of the room. The
same witness speaks of an entrance door and an exit door, when
there was only one door to the room, with no other exit: this
error, Pressac says, can be explained by the route taken by that
witness during his visit (!). The witness talks about ten cremation
ovens when there were five (each with three muffles): Pressac
says that's because "probably he had not walked the entire
length of the oven room but instead remained at the west entrance."
The number of victims that the witness gives is incredible: that,
Pressac reassures us, is because here it's a question of an "inflated
number" given by an SS man who served as the witness's guide;
or there, it's an "SS propaganda figure" (p. 239).
If a witness sketches the crematory room while forgetting to note
the presence of rails, Pressac says that since the rails served
no purpose, the witness's "visual memory did not retain them"
(p. 229). Let the same witness commit four grave material errors,
and it's because "the visual memories of a survivor deteriorate
with time" (p. 493). If this witness adds imaginary details
to his sketch, no matter: it was done "to make it better"
(Ibid.).
Throughout his book, Pressac does his utmost to discover excuses
for the innumerable "errors" of his witnesses, errors
in the location, the color, the material, the form, the distance,
the number of whatever is being discussed.
But his favorite explanation is that all these "errors"
are the fault of the SS and "the usual SS exaggeration"
(p. 108), and that, if in their confessions taken by the Allies,
the SS confessed to enormities, it was as due to "professional
pride" (p. 161).
Thanks to this method, Pressac's witnesses, Jewish or otherwise,
win incessantly, while the SS men can only lose every time.
Pressac's Involuntary Drollery Apropos M. Nyiszli
At this point I would like to return to a case already mentioned,
that of Dr. Nyiszli. One of the best known false testimonies in
the concentration camp literature, next to Martin Gray's For
Those I Loved, is that of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli: Auschwitz:
An Eyewitness Account of Mengele's Infamous Death Camp, translated
and adapted from the Hungarian by Tibere Kremer (New York: Fell
Publishing Co., 1960).
Paul Rassinier often denounced this forgery (see The Holocaust
Story and the Lies of Ulysses (Costa Mesa, CA: The Institute
for Historical Review, 1988, p. 244-250), as has Carlo Mattogno.
Neither the Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971), nor the recent
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990), mentions Nyiszli's
book, which has long been discredited.
Nevertheless, at the recent trial of the Revisionist Michel Konen
at Meaux, Hubert Heilbronn, president of the Lazare Bank, had
the effrontery to mention only one testimony in support of the
existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers: that of Miklos Nyiszli
(Le Figaro, 6 July 1990, p. 8).
Pressac, too, resuscitates Nyiszli. But I think it's fair to say
that in so doing he has, in his comments on Nyiszli's testimony,
inadvertently written two exceedingly funny pages (p. 474-475).
I'll let the reader be the judge.
Miklos Nyiszli, a Jew, allegedly lived for six months in a Birkenau
crematorium serving as an assistant to Dr. Josef Mengele in the
dissection room. Pressac selects from Nyiszli's book only Chapter
VII, in which this witness supposedly describes a gassing operation
in Krema II. At first Pressac affirms that this description is
"entirely accurate, EXCEPT for certain FIGURES which are
very WRONG indeed [Pressac's capitals]" (p. 473). Next, he
comments on the text, and here one realizes that, even for a Pressac,
almost all the data in Nyiszli's book, whether numbers or physical
details, are erroneous.
The witness declares that the gas chamber was 500 feet (150 meters)
long; but, Pressac says, a plan (which this writer discovered
and which is borne out by the building's ruins) shows that the
length of the room under discussion could not have exceeded 100
feet (30 meters). How to explain? It's simple, says Pressac: the
witness told the truth, but he used a multiplier of five.
The witness states that the undressing room was 200 yards (about
200 meters) long; well, says Pressac, everything shows that room
measured 50 yards (around 50 meters) in length. For here, according
to Pressac, Nyiszli has used a multiplier of four.
Since the average of the various multipliers is four, Pressac,
proud of his discovery, gets to talking in his book, whether regarding
Nyiszli or other affirmations and testimonies, of the "famous
multiplying factor of four" (see p. 483, 494).
Accordingly, following our pharmacist, if we wish to find the
real figures, it behooves as we read to divide all the numbers
by four.
As for me, I should say that by that reckoning, every false witness
would be in the clear. Supposing a "witness" states
that in six months (the duration of Nyiszli's stay in Auschwitz)
he saw four men who were all 7 meters tall and 200 years old.
We can assume that anybody would dismiss such a witness. Anybody
but Pressac, who, applying the rule of the famous divisor of four,
would say: this witness is telling the truth: he saw *one* man,
who was *1.75 meters* tall and *50 years* old.
But Pressac's gymnastics don't end here. I have made a critical
review of his comments on the Nyiszli testimony only regarding
the short passage that Nyiszli has written on the gassings. Here
we have, on the one hand, the multipliers Pressac says Nyiszli
used; and, on the other hand, a sampling of Pressac's comments
regarding such and such a fact, physical reality, or figure reported
by Nyiszli (p. 474-475):
- PRESSAC'S COMMENTS ON NYISZLI'S COEFFICIENTS:
1. Nyiszli, says Pressac, has divided by 2.
2. Nyiszli, says Pressac, has multiplied by 3; by 5; by 4; by 2.5; by 6.7; by 4; by 4; by 2.5; by 4; by 2 to 3.
- PRESSAC'S EVALUATIONS OF NYISZLI'S STATEMENTS:
Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong and deliberately misleading [...]. Whom is Dr. Nyiszli trying to mislead and why? Lack of familiarity with the premises"War story" pure and simple Pure invention Legend ... (and let us add that, when the witness talks about "concrete," we must read "wood"; when he talks about "chlorine," we must read "hydrocyanic acid").
Pressac's conclusion is delectable. He proudly entitles it "The Multiplier." Here Pressac, far from dismissing his witness for his exaggerations and fables, discovers in the use of the multiplier 4 (the average of the various figures is 3.8) the sign that Dr. Nyiszli, for all his not being scientific and rigorous, is manifestly an academic who bears the stamp of intellectual training of the most serious kind. He writes:
The average of the different multipliers is almost exactly four. (12) If we apply this to the official total of 4 million victims we arrive at a figure much closer to reality: 1 million. This calculation is by no means scientific but it shows that DOCTOR NYISZLI, a respected ACADEMIC, TRAINED IN GERMANY, multiplied the figures by FOUR when describing the interior of Krematorium II and when speaking of the number of persons or victims (p. 475).
In short, Pressac understands that the "credibility"
of Nyiszli's book has been "long contested" (p. 494);
that was due to "the famous multiplication factor of four
of which Dr. Miklos Nyiszli made such abundant and lamentable
use" (Ibid.). But fortunately Pressac has arrived;
he has discovered the key needed by anyone reading Nyiszli's book
and, thanks to that key, everything is deciphered. There is no
longer any reason to challenge the credibility of an honorable
academic, educated in Germany. Pressac has saved Nyiszli.
But the reader, on seeing any figure at all from the pen of this
astonishing witness, can never know whether the number is to be
considered exact, or whether it is necessary to multiply it or
divide it, and if so, by exactly how much.
"Faurisson and His Clique" (p. 12)
I shall forgo counting the number of times that Pressac attacks
the Revisionists in general and me in particular. Mark Weber writes:
Pressac does not seem to be a psychologically sound person. For example, he confesses that he "nearly" killed himself in the Auschwitz main camp in October 1979 (p. 537). His relationship with Dr. Faurisson and French Revisionist publisher Pierre Guillaume -- to whichhe devotes several pages -- changed from a kind of admiration to bitter personal animosity. He cites nothing about Faurisson's treatment of him that would justify such visceral enmity, even granting the intensity of his disagreement about the Holocaust issue. The emotional and even vicious nature of Pressac's furious hostility towards Faurisson suggests an insecure and unstable personality ("Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers," The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1990, p. 231-237).
Here I must provide an explanation. Pressac has a specific
reason for not liking me: in the early 1980s, I was led to show
him to the door of the home of Pierre Guillaume (where he had
come to see us once more without announcing his arrival beforehand).
That is the kind of humiliation which is not forgotten, especially
by someone who, afflicted with a sense of inferiority, seeks approval,
fishes for compliments, offers his services insistently and wishes
to be taken seriously. Pressac ended up exhausting my patience.
His obsequiousness, his mental confusion, his panicky fears, his
horror of clarity and of unequivocal positions, his propensity
to lie and to cheat made his visits more and more undesirable.
He makes no allusion to that humiliating episode in his book;
on the contrary, he states that in March or April 1981 he took
the initiative and "broke completely with Faurisson"
(p. 554). That is quite simply false. He was ushered to the door,
and, I must say, in no uncertain terms.
Jean-Claude Pressac was an admirer of Hitler, of Degrelle and
of militaria. He had a bust of Hitler in his home, in a place
of honor, and, fearing our reaction at the time of a visit to
his home, had forewarned Guillaume and myself about it, not without
some apprehension. He had dreamt of writing a novel showing the
victory of his hero and the triumph of National Socialism (see,
in this regard, p. 541). He had been educated at the military
academy of La Fleche and, according to Guillaume, himself a former
student at that establishment, had in 1959 received a reprimand
from the school's administration due to a sketch of Nazi inspiration
that he had displayed at the time of a school celebration. He
said that he was a supporter of Pierre Sidos, a French far-rightist.
The extreme right, or what is called that, has, side by side with
strong personalities (as in the case of Leon Degrelle), poor wretches
who admire force since they are weak. Such was the fact with Pressac
who, moreover, had certain medical problems which, I must say,
increased my pity for him.
Guillaume devoted several pages to Pressac in his book Droit
et histoire (La Vieille Taupe, 1986, p. 118-125). I recommend
reading those pages, which are both lively and penetrating.
Before meeting us, Pressac believed in the gas chambers. I showed
him my documentation. He was staggered by it, and recognized his
error. Believing he knew how to read the plans that I had discovered
in the archives of the Auschwitz Museum, he offered us his services.
Half-serious, half-mocking, we took to calling him "Schliemann,"
from the name of the discoverer of the ruins of Troy. Pressac
had a peculiar habit: at each encounter, his first words were:
"I've blown it." He "blew it" -- he made a
mistake -- repeatedly. Easily influenced, easily anguished, he
perpetually changed his opinion on details and each time adopted
the most peremptory tone in articulating his thesis of the day.
Another of his eccentricities: as soon as the simplest question
put him in a quandary (and his life was a perpetual quandary),
he would answer: "Yes/No." Not: "Yes and no"
but, in a single breath: "Yes/No." And it was impossible
for him to clarify his answer, which served him as a refuge, as
with a child caught being naughty. He had the irritating habit
of pretending, from one minute to the next, that he hadn't said
what he had just said. I invited him accordingly to record our
conversations with a tape recorder to avoid misunderstandings.
With childish fear, offering no explanation, he refused to be
recorded.
But he no longer believed in the gas chambers. He began to feel
called to be a Revisionist; wishing it is not enough, however.
My life and that of Pierre Guillaume became more and more difficult.
Pressac grew frantic. The cumulative effects of the trials and
of the attacks of all sorts, the progressive deterioration of
my physical health, our financial problems, a general atmosphere
of doom (it should be recalled here what happened at the time
of the blast on the "Rue Copernic," much worse than
that of the "Carpentras cemetery" (13) left our neophyte
more and more feverish and hesitant. He pleaded with me to give
up so dangerous an enterprise. For his part, he began to take
his distance from us. "Jewish friends" had made him
understand that there were limits to skepticism which could not
be transgressed (p. 548). Upon reading the plans of Auschwitz
and Birkenau that I had furnished him in abundance, he saw well
enough that the gassings were impossible. But, you never know,
he began to say, perhaps there really did take place here and
there a few small homicidal gassings, discreet, furtive, improvised:
what he called "casual," or "itty-bitty,"
gassings.
Before his first departure for Auschwitz, following our meeting,
he had asked me what research he could undertake there for me.
I had told him that I was interested in the question of the cremations:
the officially recorded number of the bodies incinerated; status
of persons cremated (inmates/guards/German soldiers and officers
and members of their families); number of employees assigned to
cremation of corpses and to the incinerations in the rubbish ovens;
the duration of the cremations; time cards, etc.). I thought,
as a matter of fact, that those numbers alone would be enough
to demonstrate the impossibility of the stupendous number of cremations
that would have been required by the gassing of hundreds of thousands
of victims, over and above the cremations necessitated by the
ravages of the epidemics in the camp.
On his return from Auschwitz, Pressac told me with an air of embarrassment
that he had not found the time to occupy himself with the question
that interested me. He had had too much work to do, and then,
he added, a young Polish girl had taken a great deal of his time:
innocent boasting by the timid.
Before his second journey to Auschwitz, he asked me the same question
and I gave him the same answer. Upon his return, he again stated
that he had not had the time to undertake the necessary research.
Let me note here parenthetically that in his large book Pressac
continues to evade my questions (see, below, Appendix 2, "How
Many Cremations a Day in Krema II?," p. 166-167).
Pressac wound up by telling us that he no longer wanted to take
sides between the Revisionists and the Exterminationists. He said
he wished to have relations with both camps and to content himself
with purely technical work. I encouraged him in that path and,
in a dedication the text of which he reports (p. 554) but the
context of which he distorts, I urged him to seek, to discover,
to be cold, impartial and materialistic. But that was too much
to ask of him. Finding that he was unable to buckle down to methodical
and austere work that would have let him put a bit of order into
his thoughts, I sent him on his way. I had introduced him to the
study of the supposed gas chamber at Struthof (Alsace). Later
on, he published, under the auspices of Serge Klarsfeld, a small
book in English - poor and confused - on the subject. I see that,
in his large book, he treats the subject anew. But he takes care
not to reveal a discovery I had made virtually in his presence
when, at the Palace of Justice in Paris, together with Pierre
Guillaume and Maitre Eric Delcroix, we examined the archives of
the "Struthof trial," archives provided at LICRA's request
by the headquarters, in Paris, of the Gendarmerie and Justice
Militaire. In those archives I found a document revealing that
in December 1945 Professor Rene Fabre, Dean of the faculty of
pharmacy at the University of Paris, had signed an expert report
of the greatest interest. The professor had successively examined
the scrapings done around the chimney of the alleged homicidal
gas chamber and, in the public hospital of Strasbourg, the well-preserved
corpses of the persons supposedly gassed. His finding in both
cases was negative: there was no trace of gassing.
In reality, that particular gas chamber, which was only relatively
air-tight, had served chiefly for the training of German army
recruits in the wearing of gas masks; in that case, the gas presented
nowhere near the same danger as hydrocyanic acid (Zyklon B). Pressac
had been happy to be able to demonstrate that for us. He had gone
to take some photos of a training session in a French army gas
chamber not far from Paris. I have a set of those photographs.
Three Little Secrets of Jean-Claude Pressac
A legend that is dear to the heart of Elie Wiesel, Filip Müller
and Georges Wellers maintains that the Germans dug gigantic pits
at Birkenau in which they burned thousands of bodies in the open
air. I had drawn Pressac's attention to the fact that the Birkenau
camp was located in an area of vast marshes alongside a tributary
of the Vistula River and that despite their drainage work there,
the water table continued of necessity to rise to just a short
distance below ground level (14). It was difficult, therefore,
to imagine such pits being dug, and I added that in any case it
must have been complicated to burn corpses in pits due to the
lack of oxygen. Then Pressac, whom I was always advising to get
physical verification, dug a small hole in his garden and tried
to incinerate the body of a rabbit. He never succeeded. When we
visited the site of his "incineration ditch," he was
full of quips about the myth of the "incineration ditches"
at Birkenau, and the tale of the rabbit became for us a standing
joke.
Visitors to Struthof can see, on the one hand, the Natzweiler
camp itself, with its crematorium and, far from the camp, a small
building containing the supposed homicidal gas chamber. Pressac
pointed out to me that, IF THEY HAD DECIDED TO LIE ABOUT NATZWEILER
AS THEY HAD LIED ABOUT AUSCHWITZ (sic), they could have made people
believe there was a homicidal gas chamber in the crematorium.
To prove it, he made up for me a sort of false plan of that building,
based on the true plan that we had discovered in the archives
of the Gendarmerie and the justice Militaire. I still have that
false plan, drawn by Pressac and bearing his explanatory notes.
He doesn't breathe a word of this little job in his large book.
I also have, by Pressac, a two-volume study which he entitled
Auschwitz, architecture paisible (Auschwitz, Peaceful Architecture).
It concerns Krema IV and V. It is extremely disordered and has
never been published. My copy is marked No. 2. The dedication
page is laughable: Pressac, offering his services to all comers,
launches into flattery addressed to certain Exterminationists
as well as certain Revisionists. I come in for my share of these
compliments, which are laid on too thick to be sincere.
A Few Borrowings and A Few Lies
In his shorter studies, as in his big book, Pressac has plundered
my work outrageously. He is indebted to me for a large part of
the plans, documents and photographs that he has published; the
reminder comprises, most of the time, plans, documents, and photographs
from the same source or of an identical character. Only the photos
from the Bauleitung Album, which is in the possession of
the Israelis, are an original contribution.
The baseness of Pressac's attacks on me, his deceptions and lies
in the presentation of certain facts, would oblige me to correct
far too many of his allegations than I am able to here. I am described
as a coward, too afraid, "of course," to appear at my
trial (p. 554); but he knows I was seriously ill at the time.
He says that one day, in 1982, he telephoned me and found me a
"human wreck"; he writes: "I was shocked and disgusted
to find [Faurisson] had reached rock bottom, dragging his family
down with him" (p. 558). It is true that in 1981 and 1982
I believed I had reached the depths of physical, moral and financial
distress, and that my wife and children shared that distress with
me; I did not for all that speak of my "martyrdom" (Ibid.)
and I do not see what is "shocking" and "disgusting"
about my fighting as I did to the limit of my strength. I frightened
Pressac. I had always frightened him by my fierceness in defending
myself and by my refusal to bow my head.
He ventures to write:
Confronted with the new evidence, Faurisson and Guillaume had amoment of indecision, seeing the possibility of throwing in the spongeand officially declaring that it did appear that some homicidalgassings had taken place at Birkenau (p. 554).
Here, he lies and he knows that he lies, at least as regards
me. He never presented me with the slightest proof of what he
called the "casual gassings"; and I personally have
never considered the possibility of a retraction of any kind.
(15) Pressac knows that the trials that were forced on me and
that brought me condemnations unprecedented in the contemporary
history of France were nothing but stage productions, and that
the documents with which they tried to crush me were valueless.
He knows it and he says it, whether explicitly, as when he alludes
to the role of Maitre Jouanneau, the LICRA lawyer, or implicitly,
when he happens to analyze a "proof" used against "Faurisson"
at the time of a trial and admits that said "proof"
does not possess the value attributed to it in the slightest (p.
49, 554-556).
Questions Evaded
Pressac has evaded a good twenty essential questions of a
technical nature which have been posed by the Revisionists. I
shall cite only a few of them:
Deliberate Omissions
It will be remembered that the only task I assigned to Pressac
was that regarding documents relevant to the cremations (see above,
page 153-154). Neither at the time of his first sojourn at Auschwitz,
nor during his second stay, it appears, had he been able to find
time to study the matter. Now that his book has appeared, his
continued silence on this point is striking.
One will note that he is very careful not to say that such documents
do not exist. He knows all too well that they do exist. He prefers
to avoid talking about them. Why does he conceal from his readers
the existence of a host of documents which prove that a record
was made of each cremation? (17) In the case of teeth extracted
from a corpse before its cremation, the usual German attention
to detail went so far as to demand the completion of a printed
form, with the heading "Dental Station of the Auschwitz Camp,"
supplying the date of cremation, the complete identity of the
internee, his registration number, the number of teeth (right,
left, upper, lower), etc. (see Contribution à l'histoire
d'Auschwitz, Auschwitz Museum, 1968, the photograph of the
document between pages 80 and 81).
Why does Pressac not mention this type of document, or a single
one of the documents required by the Auschwitz chancellery on
the death of anyone, with twenty or so signatures for deaths from
natural causes and about thirty signatures for deaths from non-natural
causes (Dr. Tadeusz Paczula, former prisoner, "The Organization
and Administration of the Camp Hospital in the Concentration Camp
Auschwitz I," International Auschwitz Committee, [Blue] Anthology,
Vol. II, Part I, Warsaw, 1969, p. 45)?
Why does he not make the slightest mention of the "death
registers" in which the Germans collected, with a separate
page for each decedent, all information relevant to each death?
The Revisionists had pointed out the existence of two or three
volumes of those TOTENBUCHER, or STERBEBUCHER, in the Auschwitz
Museum, and of forty or so in Moscow: all of them, naturally,
inaccessible to independent researchers. It was only under pressure
from the Revisionists, notably at the time of the Zündel
trial in Toronto in 1988, that the decision was made in 1989 to
reveal the existence of the registers to the general public. Pressac
was unlucky. His book, IN WHICH HE CONCEALS THE EXISTENCE OF THE
REGISTERS, was no sooner finished than the Soviet Union revealed
that, for its part, it retained a large number - but not all -
of these precious documents, which strike a lethal blow to the
extermination legend. Pressac, by failing to mention that there
were also two or three of these death registers in the archives
of the Auschwitz Museum -- to which he had free access -- lied
by omission.
Regarding the amount of coke necessary for the cremations and
incinerations, Pressac's vagueness is such that I find it suspect
(see microfilm 12,012 mentioned on page 87, the table on page
224, and the remarks on page 227). It is evident that the consumption
of coke was certainly ridiculously low in comparison to the amount
that would have been required for the gigantic cremations spoken
of by the legend, but Pressac has so muddled everything that it
is not possible to get a precise idea of it. It is probable that
each muffle burned no more than an average of 6 or 7 bodies each
day, like the oil-fired furnaces at Buchenwald (p. 106), and it
is plain that the German document of 28 June 1943 indicating an
incineration capacity of 4,756 bodies a day for Auschwitz (with
the ovens operating 12 hours each day) is unacceptable. Moreover,
Pressac does not hesitate to justify a figure just as extravagant
(340 for Krema I, 1,440 for Krema II, 1,440 for Krema III, 768
for Krema IV and 768 for Krema V) and, by a method dear to him,
he puts these exaggerations down to the "bragging" of
the SS men, who, at any rate in similar instances, must have "multiplied
the real figures by a factor of 2 to 5" (p. 110).
But his most unforgivable lie by omission concerns the DAILY ACTIVITY
of the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria. The reader who has just
finished his book may believe that the five crematoria were devoted
to the cremation of ... people who had been gassed. Day after
day, however, these crematoria received the bodies of victims
of various epidemics, of persons who had died of natural causes,
of inmates, guards, soldiers, civilians. And if, for example,
Krema I was near the SS hospital, that was, in the first place,
to cremate the SS dead. Dr. Popiersch, the chief surgeon, died
of typhus and was cremated at Auschwitz. The same was true of
the wife of SS man Caesar, who was in charge of agricultural work,
and of Alma Rose, the German Jewess who conducted the women's
orchestra of the Birkenau camp and, if we are to believe Fania
Fenelon, was accorded an extraordinary funeral (Fania Fenelon,
_Playing for Time_, New York, Atheneum, 1977, p. 208). Pressac
never tells us how the normal activity of the crematoria could
be combined each day with the activities surrounding the alleged
gassings: transport to the morgues, storage of the bodies, cremation,
collection of ashes, transferral to urns, dispatch of the urns,
etc.
Conclusion
In 1982, I reviewed Pressac's study on Krema IV and V at Birkenau.
I entitled that review: The Myth of the "Gas Chambers"
Enters Its Death Agony. To this review, which I wrote in 1990,
I could give the following title: The Death of the "Gas
Chamber" Myth.
In the media, this myth manages to survive somehow or other; in
academic or scientific circles, it is dead. Our "suburban
pharmacist," as Vidal-Naquet calls him, had offered himself
as a savior; his magic potions, in 1982, aggravated the patient's
condition; and in 1989, that is, seven years later, they have
finished him off.
I know Revisionists who, confronting a thesis so disastrous for
Exterminationism, wonder whether Pressac could be one of their
own, and working undercover, have hoodwinked the Klarsfelds. I
don't believe that in the least. Pressac is a neophyte, an autodidact,
an innocent crossed with a fox. His personality is unstable; he
is inconsistent, a weathercock that turns with every wind. He
argues illogically and does not know how to express himself either
in speech or writing - a deficiency that would be merely annoying
in the exposition of a coherent thesis, but which here, with an
incoherent and hybrid thesis, becomes absolutely catastrophic.
Pressac isn't wearing any mask; it is his real face which we find
disconcerting. For their part, the Klarsfelds lack discernment;
they are even blind. They find it "normal" that, in
certain cases, persons who displease the Jewish community should
be killed or seriously injured (Radio J, 17 September 1989,
Agence France Press, 1:36PM; La Lettre télégraphique
Juive, 18 September, p. 1; Le Monde, 19 September,
p. 14). The anguish of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld at the rise of
Revisionism -- despite their awareness that it has access neither
to money nor to the public forum -- is causing them to lose their
judgement and their self-control. To the Klarsfelds, all means
seem justified; every assistance is welcome; any media operation
can serve. Pressac, driven away by Faurisson, dismissed by Wellers,
went on to offer his services to the Klarsfelds. He was hired.
This tedious tome must have cost them plenty. But, if friends
of the Klarsfelds paid for it dearly in money, its results will
cost them even more, which will be fatal for the Exterminationists
and providential for the Revisionists.
In 1979, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Léon Poliakov proclaimed,
with thirty-two other French historians, that it was unnecessary
to ask questions about the technique and the operation of the
homicidal gas chambers. They stated precisely:
It is not necessary to ask how, technically, such a mass murderwas possible. It was possible technically since it took place. Thatis the necessary point of departure for any historical inquiry on thissubject. It is our function simply to recall that truth: there isnot, there cannot be any debate about the existence of the gaschambers (Le Monde, 21 February 1979, p. 23).
In my "Response to a Paper Historian" (The Journal
of Historical Review, Spring 1986, p. 24), I spoke of the
silliness of that declaration, and I added:
[...] The text in Le Monde had been conceived to ward off
avery pressing problem. In the confusion that was provoked by
myarticle on "The Rumor of Auschwitz" [Le Monde,
29 December 1978, p.8], Vidal-Naquet and Poliakov hastily drew
up a manifesto, and then took it some signers, saying to them:
"We say there cannot be any debate, but it is very clear
that you must not pay any attention to that phrase and that you
all have to get busy replying to Faurisson."That is how Vidal-Naquet
ingenuously puts it on page 196 of [Les Juifs, la mémoire
et le présent, Maspero, 1981] when he writes: "Agood
number of historians signed the declaration published in Le
Monde on 21 February 1979, but very few got busy, one of the
rare exceptions being F[rancois] Delpech."
Vidal-Naquet, Poliakov, and the other survivors of the "declaration"
of the thirty-four historians have thus had to wait ten years
(1979-1989) to see appear at last an attempt at refutation of
my Le Monde article on "The Rumor of Auschwitz."
Had my article been based on mere foolishness, its refutation
wouldn't have required so long a time, nor so voluminous and,
as we have established, so feeble a response as that made by Pressac.
Pressac has put his name to a masterpiece of inanity. His intellectual
capacities did not permit the hope of anything better. His propensity
for deception and for manipulating documents, already so remarkable
in his presentation of the Auschwitz Album (Le Seuil, 1983)
is here confirmed. (18)
But the pharmacist from La Ville du Bois is only a miserable wretch.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet and the Klarsfelds are cut from a different
cloth.
These are people who had time enough to determine just how empty-headed
their "suburban pharmacist" was. They used him nonetheless.
But could they have found better? In any case they have brought
discredit on their cause. Now they are burdened with this monstrous
book, totally unusable, and nothing to be done about it. Let any
journalist in search of a scoop ask them, as did Richard Bernstein
of the New York Times, to point out a single page or a
single photograph in this wearisome tome which rebuts the Revisionists:
Vidal-Naquet and the Klarsfelds will be unable to offer anything
at all.
I see hardly anyone but the Revisionists showing interest in Pressac
and his masterwork, and then only as scientists would do, musing
over a phenomenon of teratology, a monster. The "Holocaust"
religion has certainly given birth to more than one monstrosity;
Jean-Claude Pressac's misshapen work is one example.
In his paper presented at IHR's Fourth International Revisionist
Conference in 1982 ("Context and Perspective in the 'Holocaust'
Controversy," reproduced as "Supplement B" in recent
editions of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, p. 335-369),
Arthur Butz put the Revisionists on guard against one danger:
that of wasting their time in idle technical discussions that
make us fail to see the forest for the trees. If we become preoccupied
with such details as Zyklon B or crematory ovens, we may end up
forgetting the essential point, which is that an extermination
so gigantic would have left behind a superabundance of physical
and documentary proofs, not merely infinitesimal traces of domestic
tinkering and puttering. Our adversaries, Butz added, will seek
to enmesh us in cabalistic discussions since, on the level of
establishing basic facts, they know they've already lost. As Butz
also pointed out, however, a Revisionist must nonetheless show
himself capable of confronting the cabalists right down to trifling
details. Whatever the ground chosen, the defenders of the "Holocaust"
thesis must realize that all avenues of escape are closed to them.
It is thus that they find themselves today in a total impasse.
Their gang plank to safety -- Pressac's book -- is made of rotted
wood.
The Jewish community has had some bad shepherds. It should have
jettisoned the dogma of the Auschwitz gas chamber a decade ago.
In December 1978, Le Monde published, at the same time
as my article on "The Rumor of Auschwitz," several articles
which were supposed to refute me. I think that certain French
academics, of Jewish origin, immediately perceived that a grave
event had just occurred: in a few lines, I had just reminded them,
like previous Revisionists, that the emperor was wearing no clothes.
Confronted with this, a group of Establishment historians endeavored,
in vain, to pretend the contrary. On 16 January 1979, Le Monde
published my "right of response." That would have been
a fitting time, I think, for the Franco-Jewish academics to have
urgently prepared a "declaration of historians" stating
that there could and must be a debate on the existence or nonexistence
of the Auschwitz gas chambers.
Fate decided otherwise. On 21 February 1979, then, appeared the
"declaration" drawn up by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Leon
Poliakov. By it the Exterminationists ratified their ruin. Ten
years later, with this book by Jean-Claude Pressac, they are reaping
the fruits of their blindness. They appear to me to have been
inspired by an altogether too narrow conception of their self-interest.
They ought to have looked farther ahead, to have given thought
to their obligations as historians and to the interest, truly
understood, of the Jewish community. Then, instead of dogging
the heretics with press campaigns, physical attacks, and the police
and the courts; instead of staging one incestuous colloquium after
another; instead of churning out an endless stream of bad books
(Pressac's being the worst), they ought to have opened their minds
and hearts to discussion and reflection. They would have done
well to have done some work. The Revisionists have been at work.
It's a pity the Exterminationists haven't followed their lead.
(19)
At the end of 1988, Serge Klarsfeld published, in Jour J/La
Lettre télégraphique juive, a study by Pressac
of the Leuchter Report. The title was: "Les carences et les
incohérences du "Rapport Leuchter" ("The
Deficiencies and Inconsistencies of the "Leuchter Report").
"Deficiencies" and "Inconsistencies": Pressac
is a master there! The sole proof he could find of homicidal gassings
in Krema I he owes to ... this report (see Part I, p. 34, in The
Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1991)! His study, plainly
hurried, blends emotive reflections about Fred Leuchter with an
exposition on the Auschwitz gassings, a summary on the Auschwitz
crematory ovens, and a final discussion on Majdanek. On Auschwitz,
he repeats what I call his theory of "molecules with homing
devices" (see Part I, p. 38-39 in The Journal of Historical
Review), a theory which tries to explain the absence, so embarrassing
for Pressac, of ferric-ferro-cyanide stains there where so many
human beings were supposedly gassed.
About Majdanek, I believe it's not too much to say that Pressac
does not believe in the existence of homicidal gas chambers in
this camp. He writes:
Lacking any precise technical study, those gas chambers remain
poorly known (p. vii);
The use of [such places] as homicidal gas chambers with HCN appears
difficult and remains risky [...]; the technique would seem possible,
but an actual use is risky (p. viii); [There were some] modifications
after 1945 [which give a] false impression (p. ix);
a regrettable confusion during the 1950s results in the shower
roomoften being presented as a homicidal gas chamber (with toxic
gasthought to be dispersed through shower heads) (20) (Ibid.);
The use of this place for homicidal purposes is only conceivable
undertwo conditions: the removal of a fanlight that could have
been brokenby the victims and the addition of a mechanical ventilator
(Ibid.); (21)
the homicidal function which the author [Pressac] cannot presentlydiscuss
(Ibid.);
the deputy director of the Museum told the author [Pressac] that
thisgas chamber had very, very seldom been used, which really
means thatit had not been used at all. That fiction is maintained
in order notto shock popular belief which wants it that way [...]
(Ibid.); etc.
In his big book, Pressac manifests the same skepticism. He considers
that no one has yet undertaken a "serious study" of
the Majdanek gas chambers (p. 184). Writing of Auschwitz, he lets
slip a remark that implies that Majdanek was perhaps not really
"criminal" (p. 218). Denouncing the methods of the "officials
of the Majdanek Museum," he writes:
I am sorry to say, and I am not the only one in the West, that
the Majdanek homicidal and/or delousing gas chambers are still
waiting for a true historian, which is mildly upsetting in view
of the fact that the camp fell into the hands of the Russians
intact in 1944 (p.555).
On page 557, a photograph shows the exterior of one of the "disinfection
gas chambers thought to be a homicidal gas chamber." The
photograph comes from Maitre Jouanneau, attorney for LICRA, who
was duped, Pressac tells us, by the camp authorities (the lawyer
used this photograph before the Paris court to prove that Faurisson
was a falsifier denying the historical evidence).
How many cremations, on the average, were there per day in the
five three-muffle crematory ovens of Krema II?
To that question, Pressac ought to give one answer and one answer
only, but instead he gives at least five, ranging from 288 a day
to 1,500 a day.
This Krema had 15 muffles, and the crematory ovens, Pressac
admits, functioned only 12 hours a day. For each muffle, therefore,
the number per day would have been, respectively, 19, 42, 48,
50, 64, and from 67 to 100. These figures, varying from 19 to
100 per day, would represent performances beyond the capabilities
of our most modern crematoria. They are all the more unacceptable
when we consider that Pressac is counting only the corpses of
those who are supposed to have been "gassed," to which
must be added the cremations of bodies of the inmates, guards,
and soldiers who died every day of various causes, especially
when typhus was raging in the camp.
In 1983, Pressac and Klarsfeld jointly published a French edition
of what is called the Auschwitz Album (translated from
English by Guy Casaril, Editions du Seuil, 1983, 224 p.). It was
a collection of 189 extremely interesting photos, taken in 1944
by a German from the photographic staff of the Auschwitz camp
-- possibly Ernst Hoffmann. No one, whether Exterminationist or
Revisionist, has contested the authenticity or the veracity of
these photographs, which were taken at the time of the mass arrivals
of Hungarian Jews in 1944. These photographs supply a providential
confirmation of the Revisionist thesis, and it is shocking that
we had to wait until the early 1980's to see all of them published.
Serge Klarsfeld, embarrassed by what they revealed, could offer
but a single parry in response: fabricating a moving account of
the pretended discovery of the album by a certain Lili Meier.
Klarsfeld and Pressac went to even greater lengths for the French
edition of this album. In a twenty-page typed analysis which I
completed in December 1983, but did not publish at that time for
lack of money, I described their subterfuges. I showed that in
the French edition, which I compared with the two original editions
published in the United States (22), Pressac had drastically changed
the original order of the album's sections, an order which had
reflected a logical sequence of events for the newly arrived inmates
of the Birkenau camp. In place of that order, our man had substituted
an arrangement which would give one to understand that most of
the people pictured would end up dying in the mysterious homicidal
gas chambers. He also changed the number of photographs in each
section and proceeded to switch photographs from one section to
another! He removed one group of photos and then, to restore the
original number of sections, he made use of the same caption from
the original twice, but gave it two different translations. I
wrote:
Without breathing a word of it to the reader, Jean-Claude Pressa
cacted like a pharmacist who would surreptitiously change the
contents of his bottles, change their number, and switch their
labels, not to mention committing two forgeries in the process
(p. 7).
But the most spectacular of his manipulations was to be found
on pages 42 and 43 of the Album. Under the title "The
Trickeries of the Auschwitz Album," I circulated a
short piece devoted to that deceit. I did not fail to send a copy
of it to Editions du Seuil. Here is what our pharmacist had devised:
in order to try to make us believe that the route taken by certain
groups of deportees (women and children) ended at Krema II and
III and therefore, according to him, in the homicidal gas chambers,
he had provided, on page 42 of the Album, a plan of Birkenau
from which he had made a careful deletion to prevent the reader
from seeing that in reality these groups of deportees actually
passed between the two Krema, staying on the road leading to the
large shower and disinfection center called the Zentral Sauna
until their arrival there. Caught red-handed, Pressac followed
a policy of silence for the next six years (1983-1989). To those
who had read my article and stubbornly demanded an explanation
from him, even to the point of telephoning him, his answer was
to feign ignorance: he claimed he knew nothing of my article.
Now, with the publication of his big book, he is forced to provide
an explanation; by doing so he just makes his case worse.
The plan in which he deceptively made a cut in the route to the
Zentral Sauna is reproduced on page 421 of his big book. On pages
514 and 515, he tries to explain. He begins by saying that in
1983 he had easily been able to answer my criticism "in an
article whose publication was not deemed necessary." He does
not reveal to us who decided not to publish it, and why. I suggest
that Pressac's answer was quite simply judged dreadful. If I allow
myself that suggestion, it is because the response that he finally
consents to give us in 1989 in his big book is pathetic and PROVES
HIS TRICKERY. Pressac answers in effect that, in order to draw
the plan for which I reproached him, he had used "as a BASIS
[emphasis added]" (p. 515) an authentic plan: plan 3764 (p.
514). I don't doubt it: he did take that "as a basis"
and ADDED to it lines representing the avenues in and around the
camp, but taking great care to ... truncate the route leading
to the Zentral Sauna, in order to make us believe that the Jewish
women and children who took that route could go no farther than
the crematoria. The deletion is flagrant. The subterfuge is obvious.
But there's more. In the original version of the Auschwitz
Album, the American edition, there was a photograph which
may be described as follows: in the foreground, a group of four
elderly Jews, three men and a woman, are plainly having an altercation,
while in the background, indifferent to the scene, a scattered
few German soldiers, wearing garrison caps, are walking by. This
is photograph 109. Pressac, deciding to make this photograph "speak,"
moves it to the 189th and last place in the sequence, where it
is supposed to mark the acme of the extermination horror. And
here, in his usual jargon, is the explanation of the photograph:
That photo is unique, terrible, and to be added to the file onthe
extermination of the Jews as evidence for the prosecution [...].The
footpath down which this woman is refusing to go ends at the doorof
[Krema] V, leading to the disrobing room and the gas chambers.
Ifthe three men who are dragging her do not seem to suspect the
fatethat awaits them, she knows that the building which she is
turningaway from, that red brick building with its black roof
and its two 16 meter-high chimneys, has become the negation of
life and stinks ofdeath (Auschwitz Album, p. 204).
In my 1983 article (p. 9), I observed:
All that pathos cannot blind us to this: there is no footpath,and we can't predict the direction this or that person might take; [Pressac] tells us nothing about the presence and the indifference, or inattention, of the German soldiers; how could the woman know that sheis going to be gassed and the men not know that they are going to begassed? Finally and above all, IT IS PLAIN TO SEE THAT THE WOMAN IS TRYING NEITHER TO GET AWAY FROM THE MAN ON THE RIGHT NOR TO RESIST HIM: SHE IS CLASPING HIS HAND IN HER OWN LEFT HAND.
On page 421 of his big book of 1989, the subject of this review,
Pressac has altered his commentary on the photograph, writing:
As for the woman's attitude, it could simply be that she, with noillusions about what is to happen and having seen the SS photographer,suddenly turned away, saying in effect "I don't want that [bastard ofan] SS to photograph me!" Such a reaction would not be surprising,for some of the Jewish children, less polite and more spontaneous thantheir parents, instinctively feeling that the SS wished them no good,pulled faces at the photographers.
In other words, for one story Pressac substitutes another,
and his entire interpretation of the Auschwitz Album collapses,
since the photograph deemed to represent the acme of horror has
been reduced, according to our manipulator himself, to showing
us an old woman who ... doesn't want her picture taken!
Pressac reproaches me for not saying that the scene takes place
near Krema V. As a matter of fact I did say so, since I quoted
his mention of that. And I find it interesting that there is nothing
secret about the place: as in many other photographs, both in
that album and in his large work, we see small groups of Jews,
Germans and civilian workers all peaceably rubbing elbows with
each other.
Pressac leaves unanswered in Auschwitz: Technique and Operation
of the Gas Chambers all the other rebukes of his trickery
I addressed to him in 1983 apropos the Auschwitz Album.
He thus compels me to repeat my accusations today.
Pressac takes note of the testimony of the German air ace, Hanna
(and not Hannah) Reitsch (1912-1979) as though it were evidence
of the existence of the gas chambers (p. 486). In reality, Hanna
Reitsch, at the end of 1944, saw an Allied pamphlet that mentioned
gas chambers; she didn't believe it. AFTER the war, she came to
believe it. By the end of her life, she no longer believed; Pressac
is either ignorant, or pretends not to know, of this last development.
The details of the case are interesting.
In October 1944, Peter Riedel, an aviator friend of Miss Reitsch,
who was then working in the German Embassy in Stockholm, received
an Allied propaganda pamphlet which touched on the gas chambers.
Deeply affected, he brought it up to Hanna Reitsch at the "Aviation
House" in Berlin. The latter, furious, told him that it was
obviously a war propaganda fabrication comparable to the enemy
propaganda lies about the Germans during World War I. Riedel urged
her to speak to Heinrich Himmler about it. She went to see Himmler,
who leafed through the brochure without registering the slightest
emotion. He asked her: "And you believe this, Frau Hanna?"
She told him no, but added that countering it was imperative.
Himmler told her she was right.
Pressac specifies that the English version of Hanna Reitsch's
memoirs (Fliegen --mein Leben) stops there, but remarks
that in the French version the text continues: "A few days
later, the information was denied in one of the main German newspapers.
I learned from Peter Riedel that the same denial had appeared
in a Swedish newspaper. It was only after 1945 that I found out,
and with what horror, that Himmler had lied to me, and that the
awful news was true."
If Pressac had pursued his investigation a little further, and
especially if he had read Gerd Honsik's Freispruch für
Hitler? 36 ungehorte Zeugen wider die Gaskammer (Acquittal
for Hitler? 36 Unheard Witnesses Testify Against the Gas Chambers)
(Burgenländischer Kulturverband Wien, Postfach 11, 1142 Vienna,
1988), he could have discovered that (p. 132-138):
8. See Appendix III, p. 167-171.
9. This order from Höss likewise confirms what I have said
about theHöss "confessions" (interview in Storia
Illustrata, in Serge Thion, Vérité historique
ou vérité politique?, La VieilleTaupe, 1980,
p. 203, note 10). Höss "confessed" that the members
of the Sonderkommando entered the "gas chambers" immediately
after the"gassing" and pulled out the bodies, eating
and smoking all the while- in other words, without wearing gas
masks, something which wouldhave been absolutely impossible. On
2 April 1946, in his jail cell atNuremberg, Höss gave the
following answers to his Americaninterrogator, S. Jaari:
Q: But was it not quite dangerous work for these inmates to go intot hese chambers and work among the bodies and among the gas fumes?
A: No.
Q: Did they wear gas masks?
A: They had some, but they did not need them, as nothing ever happened. (John Mendelsohn, editor, The Holocaust, 1982 vol. 12,page 113; Pretrial Interrogation of R. Höss, 2 April 1946, page 17)
The order of 12 August 1942, signed by Höss and showing
thec onsiderable danger of a gassing operation, demonstrates that
Höss,when he was interrogated by the Americans four years
later at theNuremberg jail, gave some rather clumsy answers; he
had been broken,as I have also been able to show, by his initial
jailers and interrogators: certain Jews from British military
security who tortured him before sending him to Nuremberg. Höss
feared more than anything being turned over to the Polish Communists
(see RobertFaurisson, "How the British Obtained the Confession
of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz," The Journal
of Historical Review, Winter1986-87, p. 389-403).
10. Hospitals continued to exist in German cities, but to a large
extentthey were "evacuated" to the countryside where
they took the form ofmedical barracks on the model of those that
were built in theconcentration camps. On page 513 Pressac reproduces
a plan of a hospital barracks at Auschwitz, giving as his source
the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris. In
fact this is just another of the many documents he owes to me:
it comes from the U.S. National Archives and bears the Nuremberg
file number NO-4470.
11. The shame is that during the immediate postwar period this
type of "imposed falsehood," or imposture, became law
in the exact sense of the word; and today, once again, it carries
the force of law for the French courts by virtue of the anti-Revisionist
provisions of the Fabius-Gayssot act promulgated, under the signature
of Francois Mitterrand, in the Journal officiel de la République
francaise on July 14, 1990.
12. Here Pressac forgets that according to Pressac, Nyiszli has
also useddivisors! And what is the meaning of "almost exactly"?
Lending his imprimatur to Pressac's number-cooking, Vidal-Naquet
writes: "The fact that today it can be stated that the statistics
given in so important a testimony must be divided by four is a
scholarly finding that we would be very wrong dismiss. One doesn't
diminish the crimesof the Nazis by rejecting false figures. The
question of the exact number of victims is not essential. Arno
Mayer says this, repeats it, and on this point I can only agree
with him." (From Vidal-Naquet's preface to the French edition
of Arno Mayer's Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: La "Solution
finale" dans l'histoire, ed. La Decouverte,1990, p. viii-ix).
13. On the night of 3 October 1980 an explosion in front of a
synagogue on the Rue Copernic in Paris killed three persons and
wounded a dozen more. On 9 May 1990 graves in a Jewish cemetery
at Carpentras in the south of France were violated in a particularly
lurid manner.
The French "far right" was accused of having perpetrated
both attacks. In each instance it was at length admitted that
the rightists were blameless. In the Rue Copernic case, it is
universally conceded that the attack was carried out by a member
of a Palestinian faction. As to the Carpentras incident, numerous
articles, even in the Jewish press, have subsequently described
how the affair was distorted and blown out of proportion; all
agree that the graves were desecrated, not by rightists, but by
politically indifferent youths or by Jewish families desirous
of "teaching a lesson" to the liberal Jews of Carpentras
(the most serious violation was that of the corpse and grave of
a Jew who had married a Catholic).
14. It was due precisely to the proximity of the water table that
the Leichenkeller of Krema II and III, instead of being completely
underground beneath the crematory room proper, were only half
below ground, adjacent to the crematory room.
15. Nevertheless, I can reveal here for the first time that at
the end of 1978 I considered abandoning all further efforts at
publication when I witnessed the ferocity with which the entire
press, the academy and the courts denied me so much as the right
to carry on a normal life. The Conseil d'Etat went so far as to
declare, in October 1978, that I was a university professor with
no publications to his credit, and that I had even confessed as
much! My isolation was complete. The situation has changed a lot
since those heroic days ...
16. This is the figure of the "traditional historians,"
as Pressac calls them; Pressac himself gives no clear indications
on the matter.
17. "The shift boss (Vorarbeiter) wrote in a notebook the
number of corpses incinerated per charge and the head of the Kommando
(Kommandofuhrer), an SS man, checked these entries" (the
testimony of Henryk Tauber, according to Pressac, p. 495).
18. The book opens with an impressive list of patrons, beginning
with "the Commission of the European Communities; the Socialist
Group of theEuropean Parliament; Mrs. Simone Veil, former President
of the European Parliament" (p. 8), as well as political
figures such as Jacques Delors.
19. See Appendix III, p. 167-171.
20. As we have remarked, Pressac's book constitutes a godsend
for the Revisionists. The latter have already produced several
reviews, and are working on more:
The magazine Instauration has announced its intention
to publish an article on the Pressac book. I suppose that eventually
Fritz Berg will publish his ideas. Berg is the author of thre
eimportant technical studies, all published in The Journal
of Historical Review: "The Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth
Within a Myth" (Spring 1984, p. 15-46); "The German
Delousing Chambers" (Spring 1986, p. 73-94); "Typhus
and the Jews" (Winter 1988-89, p. 480-481). It is thanks
to Berg's savoir-faire that I was able to get a copy of Pressac's
book in January 1990.
21. Which, in plain English, means that this place could not have
been a homicidal gas chamber since it did have a fan light and
since it lacked ventilation of any kind.
22. 1) The Auschwitz Album/ Lili Jacob's Album, edited
by Serge Klarsfeld, mimeographed, distributed, "free of charge,
to more than1,000 libraries and Jewish organizations" [S.
Klarsfeld, August 5,1980]. 2) The Auschwitz Album / A Book
Based upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor,
Lili Meier, text by Peter Hellman, New York, Random House,
1981.
23. Compare the report of Norbert Masur, an official of the Swedish
branch of the World Jewish Congress, who met Himmler on 21 April
1945, a few days before the end of the war. They had a long conversation.
Heinrich Himmler told Masur: "In order to contain the epidemics,
we were forced to build crematoria where we could burn the corpses
of countless people who passed away because of these diseases
[typhus]. And now, they want to put a noose around our necks"
(Norbert Masur,"My Meeting with Henirich Himmler," Moment
[a Jewish monthly magazine published in Boston], December
1985, page 51, which is a partial translation from the Swedish
book Ein Jude Talar med Himmler [A Jew Talks with Himmler],
Stockholm, Albert Bonniers Vorlag, 1945).
[end of article]
================================
This article was scanned, long time ago, by the System Operator
of the "Banished CPU" computer bulletin board system,
which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 11, Number 1, Spring
1991, p. 25-66 and vol. 11, 2, Summer 1991, p. 133-175 : Translated
by T. J. O'Keefe.
Original document: Auschwitz : Technique and Operation
of the Gas Chambers ou: Bricolage et «gazouillage»
à Auschwitz et à Birkenau selon J.-C. Pressac, Revue
d'Histoire Révisionniste, numéro 3, nov. 1990-janvier
1991, p. 65-154.
First displayed on aaargh: 2 April 2001.
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