8 October 1997 (Beginning of Papon's trial)
Samuel Crowell was kind enough to phone me recently when he heard
that I seemed to disagree with his views on the air-raid shelter
doors (see Smith's Report, September 1997, p.1, 3-4). We
had a long conversation. I told him that, as long as he is explaining
at length what was a German air-raid shelter and the door of such
a shelter, I totally agree with him, since this is exactly what
I had myself discovered in the 70s and what Fritz Berg also studied
in the 80s. The last time I mentioned the matter in English was,
I suppose, in 1991. At that time I wrote in an article about J.-C.
Pressac:
"A gas-tight door is a Gastür or gasdichte Tür. English speakers use `gas-proof door' as well as `gas-tight door'; this type of door can be used for delousing gas chambers or for airlocks (for example, airlocks in an oven-room or in an air-raid shelter) . [...] In a bombing attack, the door to an air-raid shelter is supposed to guard against two effects, among others, caused by exploding bombs: suction of the oxygen out of the shelter and penetration of CO into the same shelter (Journal of Historical Review, Spring, 1991, p.49, 65)."
In order to give us an idea of what those air-raid shelter doors
could look like, Crowell presents us with some German advertisements.
I had already some advertisements coming from F. Berg and also,
which is perhaps more interesting, six or seven photos of such
a door in the cellar of a German house in 1939-1940 (in Karlsruhe).
I informed Crowell I was ready to send him copies of those photos.
I disagree with Crowell when he says that the presence of such
a door is the proof that the room equipped with it was necessarily
an air-raid shelter. I took the example of Majdanek that he had
himself mentioned. I had visited the place in 1975 and noticed
that the Germans had used such doors for the disinfestation gas
chambers. I even remember that, apparently, they had put into
the peep-hole of one of those doors a thermometer in order to
control the temperature of the room which was heated up by a stove
situated in another little room and connected to the gas chamber
itself by a large pipe. I suppose that, once the temperature was
appropriate, a device would stop any contact with the stove room.
For Crowell, this place, he told me, was logically an air-raid
shelter above ground. He added that the Germans had many such
shelters underground but also above ground. I asked him if he
had seen the place. He said he had not visited Majdanek. I told
him that, if he had seen the place, he would have noticed that
the building was not made of concrete. (In fact, it was made of
bricks, with a wooden roof, crumbled in July 1944 when the Soviets
arrived). I added that J.-C. Pressac himself had to admit that
the place was a "disinfestation gas chamber" (Auschwitz:
Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, 1989, p. 555,
557). The photo given by J. -C. Pressac, with the reconstructed
wooden roof, speaks volumes: the place could never have been an
air-raid shelter!
Another disagreement: Crowell says that J.-C. Pressac "is
a man of integrity and honor" and, as an example of such
integrity and honor, he mentions that the man was fair enough
to say that nobody had yet explained why on the crumbled roof
of the so-called gas chamber of Krema II we had only two openings
for Zyklon B instead of the four introduction points mentioned
in the `Holocaust' literature. But J.-C. Pressac committed here
a damned lie, in fact, there are zero such openings and the two
holes he alludes to, considering their place and their shape,
could never have been `introduction points' for Zyklon B! If such
points had existed, even two instead of four, imagine the fuss
in the media and in every book about Auschwitz. In fact, as I
said to Crowell, we should go back to my quip: "No holes,
no `Holocaust'" (that we could as well write: "No
holes, no `Holocau$t'").
In Washington, on April 21, 1993, Mark Weber and I denounced the
"Gas Chamber Door Fraudulently Portrayed at US Holocaust
Museum" (JHR, September-October 1993, p.39). We said
it was a casting of the door, in Majdanek, of a disinfestation
gas chamber, even according to Pressac. It would be a mistake
for Crowell to say 1) that the fraud was discovered only in 1997;
2) that the door was that of a place to consider as an air-raid
shelter.
Finally, Crowell told me on the phone, if I am not mistaken, that
the German word `Gaskammer' could mean `Gasschützkammer'.
This is more interesting but I do not know if he is right. After
our phone conversation, I perused his 29-page essay on the whole
matter, dated April 30, 1997. I had had no time yet to read it.
I found it interesting for the reason I give in the first paragraph
of this very letter.
R Faurisson
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Extracted from The Adelaide Institute Newsletter (on-line)
nr 66, dec. 1997. Since that time, Crowell's essay has been remoulkded
into a more comprhensive work, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock
Holmes, An Attempt at a Literary Analysis of the Holocaust Gassing
Claim, which has undergone several revisions. It is found
on the CODOH website.
First displayed on aaargh: 17 April 2001.
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