On 20 August 1996, Professor Gerald Fleming, Emeritus Reader
in German at
the University of Surrey, England, had a bone to pick with us
[=Adelaide Institute]. Here is his letter.
Dear Dr Töben
My attention has been drawn by colleagues to 'Internet' information
emanating from the Adelaide Institute, under the date and time
referred
07/15/96 17:30:00. I quote from the item in question:
Swiss historian Jurgen Graf and Italian expert Carlo Mattogno
visited the
once-secret Moscow archives. Their findings put to shame the work
of the
British Professor Gerald Fleming [and the French pharmacist Jean
Claude
Pressac]
Since the comment in question is not only absurd and scurrilous
but
teetering on the brink of being libellous, I am giving you some
factual
information regarding my archival research sessions in Moscow
(and other)
State Archives:
(i) I have worked in Russian State Depositories for seven years,
several
weeks on each occasion.
(ii) I have seen and examined all relevant Auschwitz documents
and
photocopied large numbers of these.
(iii) My reports and publications relating to my archival sessions
in
Russian Archives are well known.
(iv) The expression "put to shame", referring to my
work, as compared with
the recent visits by two named western revisionist writers, is
inappropriately false and unacceptably polemical.
(v) Should such or similar comment reappear on Internet under
the heading
Adelaide Institute, I shall take action to protect my academic
interests and
factual historic position. The western revisionist writers named
by you will
be informed of the 'Internet' comment as here described.
Finally. also for your information, it is I who was the first
Western
academic historian and researcher who gained access to these important
collections of World War 2 files of German origin and important,
previously
closed materials closely related to these files, all in Russian
State
depositories.
Finally I note that you enter a caveat in Adelaide Institute The
Intellectual Adventure of the 20th Century, where you say: "if
I offend
because I am politically incorrect.then I claim it as my right,
under the
free speech principle, to say these things." -- The words
"put to shame the
work of" are not politically incorrect, they are downright
malevolent and
quite unworthy of any serious scholar. Let me say, that in 37
years of
University work I have not come up against such nonsense before,
and I will
not allow it to pass again.
With regard to your comment about privileged free speech, I cannot
easily
put out of my mind Dr Goebbels' taunt:
It will always remain the best joke made by the democratic system,
that it
provided its deadly enemies with the means of destroying it. Quite
so!
Sincerely
Gerald Fleming
OUR REPLY OF 30 August 1996
Dear Dr Fleming
The tone of your 20 August letter indicates to me that you have
been getting
away with huffing and puffing and bluffing for a long time.
I refer specifically to the nonsense you espoused in the film
Blueprints of
Genocide ( See: Adelaide Institute newsletter, No 27). As
a credible
historian, I would suggest, your time is up for one simple reason:
Over
these past 37 years you set out to prove that homicidal gassings
took place
at Auschwitz concentration camp. According to Sir Karl Popper,
a reasonable
person can prove anything. The scientific method, however, sets
out to
falsify hypotheses.
We know, of course, that anyone who attempts to approach the homicidal
gassing hypothesis in such a way is immediately branded by you,
et al, as
Holocaust denier, or worst, as an antisemite indulging in hate-talk.
What you have been doing in your research is attempting to maintain
the
ideology-religion of the Holocaust. The pain you may justifiably
feel when
reading our Web site may rest to a large degree on the fact, as
Charles
Morgan put it:
The effect of superficial education among western peoples has
been to make
them gullible by the terror of being gulled.
Bearing in mind that it is still not criminal in our western democracies
(except in Germany and France, et al,) to demonstrate the falsity
of premises,
let me conclude by quoting Professor Robert Faurisson:
The Nazi gas chamber is alleged to have physically existed; yet
no-one can
provide us with a representation of it. This gas chamber is immaterial
and
magical.one cannot describe or draw the alleged homicidal gas
chamber of
Auschwitz as one cannot describe or draw a square circle or a
circular
square.
Most sincerely
Fredrick Töben
PS: I shall be placing our correspondence on our Web site.
AN EXPERT TAKES PROFESSOR FLEMING TO TASK
When we received Professor Fleming's letter, we asked Professor
Robert
Faurisson for a comment. Here is his response of 30 September
1996:
Gerald Fleming, emeritus reader
in German, University of Surrey (GB) is, if I may say so, a KGB
novelist. He is more a novelist than an historian. He was appreciated
by the Soviet authorities and the Soviet publications. Even recently,
after the Soviet Union disappeared, he kept paying tribute to
the outstanding talent of the Red Army in interrogating German
prisoners and extracting from them the desired confessions that
the American Army had not been able to obtain.
In 1984, in a review of his book: Hitler and the Final Solution,
a subservient journalist had to concede:
"His sometimes flamboyant writing and the structure of his
book as a kind of thriller will annoy some historians" (The
New York Times, December 28, 1984, p. c-23).
According to a Jewish fellow, "His book has been favourably
reviewed in Riga and Moscow publications, and he believed that
Soviet authorities would grant him permission for a visit to the
Red Army archives", he said. (The Jewish
Chronicle, October 12, 1984, p.4).
Hitler and the Final Solution ( University of California,
1984) is a translation from his Hitler und die Endlösung
( Munich, Limes Verlag, 1982). The book was supposed to answer
David Irving's challenge for a single document showing that Hitler
knew before the end of 1943 that there was an extermination of
the Jews going on. Of course, Fleming was unable to provide such
a document. So he should have refrained from presenting his book
as an answer to such question, and he should have avoided writing
that D. Irving's thesis ( that there was no Hitler order to liquidate
the European Jews) amounted to "eine Fiktion" (p.37,
footnote 56).
It was a nonsense to write a book about the existence of a document
that could not be found and shown. But Fleming thought he could
bring us another document, perhaps as sensational, a document
proving that there was an extermination program of the Jews by
the Nazis. This is how he dared to publish A Resettlement Action
Report, now nearly forgotten but revealed at that time --
1982 - as an extraordinary discovery. It was a fraud. Even a layman,
not intoxicated by the Holocaust propaganda, could have seen at
first glance that this so-called Report with no date and no signature
was full of preposterous details about Auschwitz.
Anyone interested in the matter should read an excellent analysis
written by a young Canadian revisionist, Brian A Renk; see The
Franke-Gricksch A Resettlement Action Report: Anatomy of a Fabrication,
Journal of Historical
Review, Fall 1991, p.261-279.)
Readers who wish to get, as quickly and as soon as possible, an
idea of G. Fleming as an historian could look at some photos in
his book. On one and the same page appear two photos coming from
the Archiv des [Kommunist] Polnischen Justiz-ministeriums. One
is supposed to show a Gaswagen to asphyxiate people and the other
one two German prisoners holding Zyklon B cans as they were supposed
to do when they asphyxiated inmates in Majdanek. In fact, the
Gaswagen is an ordinary Magirus truck with nothing suspicious
about it and the prisoners ( obviously afraid) are holding Zyklon
B cans which were used for disinfestation.
In 1993, the media trumpeted all over the world that Fleming had
discovered in the Soviet files the proof that execution gas chambers
had been built and used in Auschwitz. He wrote a long and sensational
article under the title Engineers of Death ( See The
New York Times, July 18, 1993, p. E19; see also Protokolle
des Todes, Der Spiegel, 40/1993 [4 October 1993], pp.151,
156, 158, 160, 162).
In fact, Fleming had not found any such document but only minutes
of the Soviet military police interrogation of four German engineers
who had, during the war, participated in the building of Auschwitz-Birkenau
crematories for Topf and Shne company and who, after the war,
were still working in the same company in Erfurt.
The American army had interrogated these engineers and had released
them. When Erfurt was handed over to the Soviet Army, the Soviets
arrested the engineers, questioned them and.got the confessions
they expected.
The most important of those engineers were Fritz Sander and Kurt
Prüfer. The first died from a heart attack right at the beginning
of his interrogation. The second died from a cerebral haemorrhage
in 1952; we have a photo of K. Prüfer when he was a free
man and a photo of the same when he was in the Soviets' hands;
the difference speaks volumes and I would say that K. Prüfer's
face photographed by the Soviets is terrifying (See: Der Spiegel,
p.160)
The confessions were extremely vague and in the style of; I heard
I was told I saw from the outside (Ja, ich sah die Gaskammer -
von aussen) (Der Spiegel, same page). And it happens that
the very rare precise responses do not fit with the details of
the story as given today, nor with what we can see today in Auschwitz.
For instance, one of the confessed said: In der Decke (of the
Krema II "gas chamber") waren quadratische Öffnungen
(25 by 25 zentimeter) (Der Spiegel p.162. The trouble is
that even today you can see that not one square opening exists
in the ceiling. [This fact gave rise to Faurisson's now famous
quip: No Holes, no Holocaust!. Ed.]
In 1994, G. Fleming was the author with the collaboration of architect
Robert Jan van Pelt of the film [Auschwitz] Blueprints of Genocide.
(BBC, May 9, 1994). The climax in this film was reached with a
document introduced
by the following words:
"It says very clearly, You will be able to kill and you will be able to burn simultaneously in this building"(Crematorium II).
But, first, in the film the document
is surreptitiously shown and in such a way that nobody can see
the German words. Second, the document in fact does not say anything
of that kind. It is a simple Aktenvermerk of January 29,
1943, aboutelectricity supply. It has not even the very common
Secret stamp. In reality, it mentions Verbrennung mit gleichzeitiger
Sonderbehandlung which means cremation with simultaneous special
treatment. Note that the swindlers translated special treatment
into to kill and that they went so far as to change the word order
putting first to kill and
afterwards to burn. The German text, even with such a translation,
could never have designated a criminal activity consisting first
in gassing people and, afterwards, burning the bodies of the gassed
people. The word "Sonderbehandlung could mean, by its place
in the phrase, anything except to kill because this special treatment
was simultaneous with burning.
It is obvious that, if Fleming and Van Pelt had discovered any
German text which says very clearly what the Holocaust historians
had been trying to find for such a long time, that very text would
have been published, shown and commented on in every newspaper,
film, book and Holocaust Museum. R. Hilberg, E. Wiesel, S. Wiesenthal,
S. Klarsfeld would have celebrated the discovery of the century.
Instead, they did not say one word.
At the end of that film, G. Fleming totally misquoted what the
German engineers had confessed to the Soviets. This film contains
nothing on the technique and operation of the Nazi gas chambers
and there is nothing about the alleged quadratische Offnungen
in the roof of the Krema II gas chamber.
On January 28, 1995, Jan Taylor announced in The Sydney Morning
Herald that Van Pelt was due to construct a computer model
of the [Auschwitz] camp. We are still waiting for the result.
I. for one, would be interested to see if
he dares to show the four special openings in the roof of that
gas chamber through which, we are told, the Zyklon B pellets were
dumped.
People interested in the transcript of [Auschwitz] Blueprints
of Genocide have the choice between the British and the American
versions. The British version gives a text adapted from the programme
transmitted on 9 May 1994; the German document appears on p.20
with a deceitful comment in English (1). The American transcript
is more faithful although we are told: This transcript has not
been proof-read against the videotape. (2)
Therefore, G. Fleming is in fact not only a KGB novelist; he is
a fraud.
Footnotes
(1) Horizon, Blueprints of Genocide, Text adapted from the programme
transmitted 9 May 1994, 26 pages + 6 pages. See Mariette Jackson,
Acting Publishing Manager, Broadcasting Support Service, 252 Western
Avenue, London
W3 6XJ UK.
(2) Nova Show # 2204. Air Date: February 7, 1995, 8 pages ( 2
columns), WGBH Educational Foundation. Journal Graphics, Box 2222
, South Easton, MA 02375 (USA).
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Adelaide Institute Newsletter 50, December 1996, p. 23-25. Visible
on Adelaide Institute
Website. A French version has been printed in Ecrits révisionnistes,
IV, p. 1800-1803 in 1999.
First displayed on aaargh: 12 April 2001.
This text has been displayed on the Net, and forwarded to you
as a tool for educational purpose, further research, on a non
commercial and fair use basis, by the International Secretariat
of the Association des Anciens Amateurs de Recits de Guerres et
d'Holocaustes (AAARGH). The E-mail of the Secretariat is <[email protected].
Mail can be sent at PO Box 81475, Chicago, IL 60681-0475, USA..
We see the act of displaying a written document on Internet as
the equivalent to displaying it on the shelves of a public library.
It costs us a modicum of labor and money. The only benefit accrues
to the reader who, we surmise, thinks by himself. A reader looks
for a document on the Web at his or her own risks. As for the
author, there is no reason to suppose that he or she shares any
responsibilty for other writings displayed on this Site. Because
laws enforcing a specific censorship on some historical question
apply in various countries (Germany, France, Israel, Switzerland,
Canada, and others) we do not ask their permission from authors
living in thoses places: they wouldn't have the freedom to consent.
We believe we are protected by the Human Rights Charter:
ARTICLE 19. <Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.>The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, in Paris.