Statement of Purpose

Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust (CODOH)
CODOH was founded to encourage intellectual freedom with respect to the Holocaust. CODOH is not a membership organization and is not affiliated with any political party or political group.

 

It is not the purpose of CODOH to prove "the Holocaust never happened," or that European Jews did not suffer a catastrophe during the Hitlerian regime. Those who try to convince you it is want to muddy the waters. While we no longer believe the gas chamber stories (we used to very much believe them) or the "genocide" theory, we remain open to being convinced we are wrong.

I understand perfectly well that the Hitlerian regime was anti-Semitic and persecuted Jews and others. I understand many peoples, European Jews among them, experienced unfathomable tragedies in Europe during World War II.

Nevertheless, I no longer believe the German State pursued a plan to kill all Jews or used homicidal "gassing chambers" for mass murder.

The reasons I no longer believe either story are that no physical remains of authentic homicidal gassing chambers exist today, and there are no war-time generated documents which prove they ever did. I believe the gas chamber story to be a grotesque hoax.

For half a century the gas chambers have been at the heart of the holocaust story. In the literature, the two have been absolutely inseparable.

 

It's tempting to say:

"No gas chambers, no Holocaust."

I have said it myself. But too often it can be--has been--misleading, particularly to those who are just becoming acquainted with revisionist theory. It's misleading because it suggests that, if there were no gas chambers--and there were not--the Jews of Europe did not suffer a tragedy at the hands of the Hitlerian regime. They did.

While it is true that the Germans were criminally responsible for the death of a large number of their slave labor prisoners, much eyewitness testimony about German atrocities against Jews and others is demonstrably false. It's wrong to bear false witness against others--most of us were taught to understand this when we were children. False testimony against anyone, including Germans, together with those who promote it, should be exposed to the light of public scrutiny.

The attempt to identify every call for open discussion about the gas chamber controversy with anti-Jewish sentiment is juvenile. Those who protest that it is more important to be sensitive to "survivors" than truthful about the historical record represent a world view that has no place in Western culture.

I'm willing to be convinced I'm wrong about any or all of this. I'm willing to be convinced it is hateful to weigh the evidence for and against gas chambers. I'm willing to consider the possibility that the press and our intellectual elites are justified in their efforts to suppress open discussion about the gas chambers. I'm even willing to discuss the idea that intellectual freedom corrupts public discourse when it involves the gas chamber controversy.

I'm not willing to go away, however. I don't know why, but I'm not willing.

 

Back to Contents

 

 

 

 

The Holocaust Controversy - The Case for Open Debate

The Contemporary Issue
NO SUBJECT ENRAGES campus Thought Police more than Holocaust Revisionism. We debate every other great historical issue as a matter of course, but influential pressure groups with private agendas have made the Holocaust story an exception.

 

Elitist dogma manipulated by special interest groups corrupts everything in academia. Students should be encouraged to investigate the Holocaust story the same way they are encouraged to investigate every other historical event. This isn't a radical point of view.

 

The premises for it were worked out centuries ago during a little something called the Enlightenment.
 

 

The Historical Issue
REVISIONISTS AGREE with establishment historians that the German National Socialist State singled out the Jewish people for special and cruel treatment. In addition to viewing Jews in the framework of traditional anti-Semitism, the Nazis also saw them as being an influential force behind international Communism. During the Second World War, Jews were considered to be enemies of the State and a potential danger to the war effort, much like the Japanese were viewed in this country.

 

Consequently, Jews were stripped of their rights, forced to live in ghettos, conscripted for labor, deprived of their property, deported from the country of their birth and otherwise mistreated. Many tragically perished in the maelstrom.

Revisionists part company with establishment historians in that Revisionists deny that the German State had a policy to exterminate the Jewish people (or anyone else) by putting them to death in gas chambers or by killing them through abuse or neglect.

 

Revisionists also maintain that the figure of 6 million Jewish deaths is an irresponsible exaggeration, and that no execution gas chambers existed in any camp in Europe which was under German control. Fumigation gas chambers did exist to delouse clothing and equipment to prevent disease at the camps. It is very likely that it was from this life-saving procedure that the myth of extermination gas chambers emerged.

Revisionists generally hold that the Allied governments decided to carry their wartime "black propaganda" of German monstrosity over into the postwar period. This was done for essentially three reasons. First, they felt it necessary to continue to justify the great sacrifices that were made in fighting two world wars. A second reason was that they wanted to divert attention from and to justify their own particularly brutal crimes against humanity which, apart from Soviet atrocities, involved massive incendiary bombings of the civilian populations of German and Japanese cities.

 

The third and perhaps most important reason was that they needed justification for the postwar arrangements which, among other things, involved the annexation of large parts of Germany into Poland. These territories were not disputed borderlands but included huge parts of Germany proper. The millions of Germans living in these regions were to be dispossessed of their property and brutally expelled from their homelands. Many hundreds of thousands were to perish in the process.

 

A similar fate was to befall the Sudeten Germans.

During the war, and in the postwar era as well, Zionist organizations joined with the Allied Governments and became deeply involved in creating and promulgating anti-German hate propaganda. There is little doubt that their purpose was to drum up world sympathy and political and financial support for Jewish causes, especially for the formation of the State of Israel.

 

Today, while the political benefits of the Holocaust story have largely dissipated for the others, the story still plays an important role in the ambitions of Zionists and other organizations in the Jewish community. It is the leaders of these political and propaganda organizations who continue to work to sustain the orthodox Holocaust legend and the myth of German monstrosity during the Second World War.

Those who would claim that these interpretations are anti-Jewish are reading into them something which simply is not there. Revisionists do not claim that Jewish leaders or organizations did anything in the war and postwar era that the Allied Governments themselves did not do.

For those who believe that the Nuremberg Trials revealed the truth about German war crimes, it is a bracing shock to discover that the then Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone, described the Nuremberg court as "a high grade lynching party for Germans."
 

 

The Photographs
WE'VE ALL SEEN "The Photographs." Endlessly. Newsreel photos taken by US and British photographers at the liberation of the German camps, and especially the awful scenes at Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. These films are typically presented in a way in which it is either stated or implied that the scenes resulted from deliberate policies on the part of the Germans.

The photographs are real. The uses to which they have been put are base.

There was no German policy at any of those camps to deliberately kill the internees. In the last months of the war, while Soviet armies were advancing on Germany from the east, the British and US air arms were destroying every major city in Germany with saturation bombing. Transportation, the food distribution system and medical and sanitation services all broke down. That was the purpose of the Allied bombing, which has been described as the most barbarous form of warfare in Europe since the Mongol invasions.

Millions of refugees fleeing the Soviet armies were pouring into Germany. The camps still under German control were overwhelmed with internees from the east. By early 1945 the inmate population was swept by malnutrition and by epidemics of typhus, typhoid, dysentery and chronic diarrhea. Even the mortuary systems broke down. When the press entered the camps with British and US soldiers, they found the results of all that. They took "The Photographs."

Still, at camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen tens of thousands of relatively healthy internees were liberated. They were there in the camps when "The Photographs" were taken. There are newsreels of these internees walking through the camps streets laughing and talking. Others picture exuberant internees throwing their caps in the air and cheering their liberators.

 

It is only natural to ask why you haven't seen those particular films and photos while you've seen the others scores and even hundreds of times.

 

Documents
SPOKESMEN FOR THE HOLOCAUST LOBBY like to assure us that there are "tons" of captured German documents which prove the Jewish genocide. When challenged on this, however, they can produce only a handful of documents, the authenticity or interpretation of which is always highly questionable.

 

If pressed for reliable documentation, the Lobby will then reverse itself and claim that the Germans destroyed all the relevant documents to hide their evil deeds, or it will make the absurd claim that the Germans used a simplistic code language or whispered verbal orders for mass murders into each others' ears.

With regard to the alleged genocide of the European Jews, all available documentation indicates that there was no order for it, no plan, no budget, no weapon (that is, no so-called execution gas chamber) and no victim (that is, not a single autopsied body at any camp has been shown to have been gassed).
 

 

Eyewitness Testimony
AS DOCUMENTARY "PROOFS" for the mass murder of the European Jews fall by the wayside, Holocaust historians depend increasingly on "eyewitness" testimonies to support their theories. Many of these testimonies are ludicrously unreliable. History is filled with stories of masses of people claiming to be eyewitnesses to everything from witchcraft to flying saucers.

During and after the war there were "eyewitnesses" to mass murder in gas chambers at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and other camps in Germany proper. Today, virtually all recognized scholars dismiss this eyewitness testimony as false, and agree that there were no extermination gas chambers in any camp in Germany proper.

Establishment historians, however, still claim that extermination gas chambers existed at Auschwitz and at other camps in Poland. The eyewitness testimony and the evidence for this claim is, in reality, qualitatively no different (from) the false testimony and evidence for the alleged gas chambers at the camps in Germany proper.

During the war crimes trials many "eye witnesses" testified that Germans made soap out of human fat and lamp shades from human skin. Allied prosecutors even produced evidence to support these charges. For decades, highly respected scholars at the most prestigious universities in the Western world sanctioned these stories, leading us to believe that they were "irrefutable truths."

 

But, with time, many such stories have become untenable, and in May 1990 Yehuda Bauer, director of Holocaust studies at Hebrew University in Tel Aviv, admitted that: "The Nazis never made soap from Jews. . ." (quoted in "The Jerusalem Post," International Edition, 5 May 1990, p. 6). This is only one recent example where an "irrefutable" Holocaust "truth" has been exposed as a monstrous lie.

With regard to confessions by Germans at war crimes trials, it is now well documented that many were obtained through coercion, intimidation and even physical torture.
 

 

Auschwitz
BRITISH HISTORIAN David Irving, perhaps the most widely read historian writer in English, has called the Auschwitz death-camp story a "sinking ship" and states that there were "no gas chambers at Auschwitz. . . "

The Auschwitz State Museum has recently revised its half-century old claim that 4 million humans were murdered there. The Museum now says maybe it was 1 million. But what proof does the Museum provide to document the 1 million figure? None. The Communist propagandists who manage the museum have put on display piles of hair, boots and eyeglasses, etc. While such displays are effective propaganda devices, they are worthless as historical documentation for "gassings" or a program of "extermination."

Meanwhile, Revisionists want to know where those three million souls have been for the last 45 years. Were they part of the fabled Six Million?

Those who promote the Holocaust story complain that "the whole world" was indifferent to the genocide which allegedly was occurring in German-occupied Europe. When asked why this was the case the promoters usually respond by saying that it was due to some great moral flaw in the nature of Western man. At other times they make the absurd claim that people did not realize the enormity of what was happening. It is true that the world responded with indifference.

 

How else should people have responded to that which they did not believe, and which for them was a non-event?

It is certain that if there had been "killing factories" in Poland murdering millions of civilians, then the Red Cross, the Pope, humanitarian agencies, the Allied governments, neutral governments, and prominent figures such as Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Eisenhower and many others would have known about it and would have often and unambiguously mentioned it, and condemned it.

 

They didn't!

 

The promoters admit that only a tiny group of individuals believed the story at the timeãmany of whom were connected with Jewish propaganda agencies. The rise of the Holocaust story reads more like the success story of a PR campaign than anything else.

Winston Churchill wrote the six volumes of his monumental work, "The Second World War," without mentioning a program of mass-murder and genocide. Maybe it slipped his mind. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his memoir "Crusade in Europe," also failed to mention gas chambers. Was the weapon used to murder millions of Jews unworthy of a passing reference?

 

Was our future President being insensitive to Jews?

 

Political Correctness and Holocaust Revisionism
MANY PEOPLE, when they first hear Holocaust Revisionist arguments, find themselves bewildered. The arguments appear to make sense, but "How is it possible?" The whole world believes the Holocaust story. It's just not plausible that so great a conspiracy to suppress the truth could have functioned for half a century.

To understand how it could very well have happened, one needs only to reflect on the intellectual and political orthodoxies of medieval Europe, or those of Nazi Germany or the Communist-bloc countries. In all of these societies the great majority of scholars were caught up in the existing political culture. Committed to a prevailing ideology and its interpretation of reality, these scholars and intellectuals felt it was their right, and even their duty, to protect every aspect of that ideology. They did so by oppressing the evil dissidents who expressed "offensive" or "dangerous" ideas. In every one of these societies, scholars became Thought Police.

 

In our own society, in the debate over the question of political correctness, there are those who deliberately attempt to trivialize the issue. They claim that there is no real problem with freedom of speech on our campuses, and that all that is involved with PC (political correctness) are a few rules which would defend minorities from those who would hurt their feelings.

 

There is, of course, a deeper and more serious aspect to the problem. On American campuses today there is a wide range of ideas and viewpoints that are forbidden to be discussed openly. Even obvious facts and realities, when they are politically unacceptable, are denied and suppressed. One can learn much about the psychology and methodology of Thought Police by watching how they react when just one of their taboos is broken and Holocaust Revisionism is given a public forum.

First they express outrage that such offensive and dangerous ideas were allowed to be expressed publicly. They avoid answering or debating these ideas, claiming that to do so would give them a forum and legitimacy.

 

Then they make vicious personal attacks against the Revisionist heretic, calling him dirty political names such as "anti-Semite," "racist," or "Neo-Nazi," and they even suggest that he is a potential mass murderer. They publicly accuse the Revisionist of lying, but they don't allow the heretic to hear the specific charge against him or to face his accusers so that he can answer this slander.

The Holocausters accuse Revisionists of being hate-filled people who are promoting a doctrine of hatred. But Revisionism is a scholarly process, not a doctrine or an ideology. If the Holocaust promoters really want to expose hatred, they should take a second look at their own doctrines, and a long look at themselves in a mirror.

Anyone on campus who invites a Revisionist to speak is himself attacked as being insensitive. When a Revisionist does speak on campus, he is oftentimes shouted down and threatened. Campus libraries and bookstores face intimidation when they consider handling Holocaust revisionist materials. All this goes on while the majority of faculty and university administrators sit dumbly by, allowing political activists to determine what can be said and what can be read on their campus.

Next, the Thought Police set out to destroy the transgressor professionally and financially by "getting" him at his job or concocting a lawsuit against him. The courts are sometimes used to attack Revisionism. The Holocausters often deceptively claim that Revisionist scholarship has been proven false during a trial. The fact is that Revisionist arguments have never been evaluated or judged by the courts.

Finally, the Thought Police try to "straighten out" that segment of academia or the media that allowed the Revisionists a forum in the first place.

It can be an instructive intellectual exercise to identify taboo subjects, other than Holocaust Revisionism, which would evoke comparable responses from Thought Police on our campuses.

Recently, some administrators in academia have held that university administrations should take actions to rid the campus of ideas which are disruptive to the university. This is a very dangerous position for administrators to take. It is an open invitation to tyranny. It means that any militant group with "troops at the ready" can rid the campus of ideas it opposes and then impose its own orthodoxy.

 

The cowardly administrator finds it much easier and safer to rid the campus of controversial ideas than to face down a group of screaming and snarling militants. But it is the duty of university administrators to insure that the university remains a free marketplace of ideas.

 

When ideas cause disruptions, it is the disrupters who must be subdued, not the ideas.
 

 

Conclusion
THE INFLUENCE OF HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM is growing steadily both here and abroad. In the United States, Revisionism was launched in earnest in 1977 with the publication of the book "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century" by Arthur R. Butz. Professor Butz teaches electrical engineering and computer sciences at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Those who take up the Revisionist cause represent a wide spectrum of political and philosophical positions. They are certainly not the scoundrels, liars and demons the Holocaust Lobby tries to make them out to be.

The fact is, there are no demons in the real world. People are at their worst when they begin to see their opponents as an embodiment of evil, and then begin to demonize them. You can do anything you want to a demon.

That logic will not succeed.

 

Back to Contents

 

 

 

 

The 'Problem of the Gas Chambers'
by Robert Faurisson

The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence.
Article 19 of the Statutes of the International Military Tribunal
(in reality: the Inter-allied Military Tribunal) at Nuremberg

The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge, but shall take judicial notice thereof.
Article 21 of the Statutes

No one, not even those individuals who regard the Third Reich with nostalgia, denies the existence of concentration camps under Hitler. Everyone also recognizes that certain camps were equipped with crematory ovens: instead of being buried, the corpses were reduced to ashes.

 

The repeated occurrence of epidemics made cremation necessary, especially for those who had died of typhus (see the photos of mass graves at Belsen et cetera). What is disputed by numerous French, British, American, and German authors is the existence of "extermination camps." This expression is used by historiographers to refer to those camps that were supposed to have been equipped with "gas chambers."

 

Allegedly, these "gas chambers" were different from American gas chambers in that they were used to kill hundreds of men, women, and children at a time. Because the victims were chosen because of their race or religion, this is referred to as "genocide." The poison employed in this "genocide" is said to have been Zyklon B (a pesticide based upon prussic or hydrocyanic acid).

Those who contest the "genocide" claim and the existence of the "gas chambers" are called Revisionists. Their argument runs approximately as follows:

It suffices for both of these problems ("genocide" and "gas chambers") to apply the customary methods of historical criticism, to see that one is confronted here by two myths that are inseparable. The criminal intentions that are attributed to Hitler have never been proven. As far as the weapon for this crime is concerned, no one has actually seen it. Here one is confronted by an extraordinarily successful war and hate propaganda campaign.

 

History is full of frauds of this kind, beginning with their religious fables of sorcery and witchcraft. What distinguishes our times from earlier epochs is the frightening power of the media and the propaganda ad nauseam which is made for what must be called "the hoax of the twentieth century." Let him beware who, after 30 years, gets the idea to expose this hoax.

 

He will learn depending upon the situation through imprisonment, fines, assaults and insults. His career can be shattered or endangered. He will be denounced as a Nazi. Either his thesis will be ignored, or else it will be distorted. No country will be more unrelentingly ruthless toward him than Germany. ¹

Today however, the silence is about to be broken about those men who have dared to write responsibly that Hitler's "gas chambers" (including those of Auschwitz and Majdanek) are only a historical lie. That is a great advance.

But what insults and distortions an Exterminationist historian such as Georges Wellers allowed himself when, more than ten years after Paul Rassinier's death, he decided to expose the minutest part of the arguments of this ex-inmate of a concentration camp who had had the courage to reveal the lie of the "gas chambers" in his writings!

The best way in which a historian may inform himself regarding the actual claims of the disciples of Paul Rassinier is to refer to the work of American professor Dr. Arthur R. Butz entitled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. ²

For my part, I take the liberty of making only a few observations specifically for serious research-oriented historians.

I call their attention to a paradox. Although the "gas chambers" are, in the view of the official historians, absolutely central to a picture of the Nazi concentration camp system (and furthermore, as proof for the totally perverse and devilish character of the German concentration camps in comparison to all previous and more recent concentration camps it ought to be meticulously shown how the Nazis proceeded to invent, construct, and operate these fearsome human slaughterhouses), one must be thoroughly astonished that in the impressive bibliography of the concentration camp literature there is not a single book, not a single brochure, not a single article, on the "gas chambers" themselves.

 

One must not be misled by some very promising titles; rather one must ascertain the contents of these writings for oneself. I regard as "official historical writing" those publications which are written about the concentration camps by institutions or foundations that are partly or wholly financed from public funds, such as, for example, in France, the Comité d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Committee for the History of the Second World War) and the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaire (Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center), and in Germany (Munich), the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History).

One must wait until page 541 of the thesis by Olga Wormser-Migot on the system of Nazi concentration camps, before one finds a passage about the "gas chambers."

 

However, for the reader there are still three other surprises:

1. The passage in question covers only three pages.

2. It carries the title: "The Problem of the Gas Chambers."

3. The "problem" consists of trying to determine whether the "gas chambers" at Ravensbrück (Germany) and Mauthausen (Austria) really existed; the author comes to the conclusion that they did not exist; however she does not examine here the "problem" of the "gas chambers" of Auschwitz or any of the other camps, probably because in her mind they do not present a "problem." [on page 157 of her book she says that Auschwitz I had no gas chamber.]

At this point, the reader probably wants to know why an analysis that concludes that "gas chambers" did not exist in certain camps is suddenly discontinued as soon as, for example, Auschwitz is discussed.

 

Why, on one hand, is the critical spirit awakened, and then, on the other hand, is it allowed to collapse into lethargy? After all, as far as the "gas chamber" of Ravensbrück is concerned, we have many points of "evidence" and "undeniable eyewitness accounts," beginning with repeated and extensive eyewitness accounts by Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier or Germaine Tillion.

It gets even better. Several years after the war, before both British and French tribunals, the camp officials of Ravensbrück (Suhren, Schwarzhuber and Treite) repeatedly confessed to the existence of a "gas chamber" in their camp. They even vaguely described its operation. Eventually, those who did not commit suicide were executed because of this alleged "gas chamber."

 

The same "confessions" were given prior to their deaths by Ziereis for Mauthausen (Austria) and by Kramer for Struthof-Natzweiler (Alsace).

Today, one can see the alleged "gas chamber" of Struthof-Natzweiler and in the same place one can also read the unbelievable "confession" of Kramer. This "gas chamber," which is designated as an "historical monument," is a complete fraud. The slightest amount of critical spirit will be sufficient to convince oneself that a gassing in this small room, without any sealing whatsoever, would have been a catastrophe for the executioner as well as for the people in the vicinity. In order to make this "gas chamber" (which is guaranteed to be "in its original condition") believable, someone has gone so for as to clumsily knock a hole into the thin wall with a chisel, and thereby break four tiles.

 

The hole was so arranged that Josef Kramer would have dumped through it the mysterious "salts" (about which he could give no further details and which, when mixed with a little water, killed within one minute!). How could salts and water make such a gas? How could Kramer have prevented the gas from coming back out the hole? How could he see his victims from a hole which would have let him see no more than half the room? How did he ventilate the room before opening the rudimentary door, made from rough-cut lumber?

 

Perhaps one must ask the civil engineering firm in Saint-Michel sur-Meurthe (Vosges), which after the war altered the place which today is presented to visitors "in its original condition"?

Even long after the war, prelates, university professors, and some ordinary citizens gave eyewitness descriptions regarding the terrible reality of the "gas chambers" of Buchenwald and Dachau.

 

With regard to Buchenwald, the "gas chamber" gradually disappeared from the minds of the people who had previously maintained that there was one in this camp.

 

Dachau
With regard to Dachau, the situation is different. After it had been firmly established for example by His Eminence Bishop Piguet, the bishop of Clermont-Ferrand that the "gas chamber" had been especially useful in gassing Polish priests,3 eventually the following official explanation came to pass:

This gas chamber, whose construction had been started in 1942, was still not completed in 1945 when the camp was liberated. No one could have been gassed in it.

The little room, which visitors are told is a "gas chamber," is in reality completely harmless and, while all sorts of construction plans are available for "Baracke X" (the crematorium and vicinity), one cannot determine upon what basis or technical explanation one can claim that this structure is an "unfinished gas chamber."

 

Broszat
No official historical institute has done more than the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich to make the myth of the "gas chambers" believable. Since 1972 its director has been Dr. Martin Broszat.

 

As a member of this Institute since 1955, Dr. Broszat became famous as a result of his (partial!) publication in 1958 of the confessions that Rudolf Höss (former Commandant of Auschwitz) is supposed to have written in a communist prison before he was hanged. However, on 19 August 1960, this historian had to tell his amazed countrymen that there had never been mass gassings in the entire Old Reich (Germany's 1937 frontiers), but rather, only in a small number of selected places, especially in occupied Poland, including Auschwitz and Birkenau but not Majdanek. This startling news was given in a simple letter to the editor which was published in the weekly magazine Die Zeit (19 August 1960, page 16).

 

The title was quite misleading and restrictive: Keine Vergasung in Dachau (No Gassing at Dachau) instead of Keine Massenvergasung im Altreich (No Mass Gassing in the Old Reich).4 In order to support this contention, Dr. Broszat provided not the slightest piece of evidence. Today [1978], eighteen years after his letter, neither he nor any of his colleagues has provided the slightest explanation for this affirmation.

 

It would be highly interesting to learn:

1. How does Dr. Broszat know that "gas chambers" in the Old Reich were frauds?

2. How does he know that the "gas chambers" in Poland are genuine?

3. Why do the "proofs," the "certainties," and the "eyewitness accounts" concerning the concentration camps in the west suddenly have no value, while the "proofs," "certainties," and "eyewitness accounts" concerning the camps in Poland Communist territory still remain true?

As if by some tacit agreement, not a single recognized historian has raised these questions. How often in the "history of history" has one relied upon the claims of a single historian? ⁵

 

Polish Camps
Let us now examine the "gas chambers" in Poland.

For proof that the "gas chambers" in Belzec or Treblinka really existed, one is asked to rely essentially upon the statement of Kurt Gerstein. This document from a member of the SS, who allegedly committed suicide in 1945 in the prison of Cherche-Midi in Paris, abounds with so many absurdities that in the eyes of historians it has for a long time already been thoroughly discredited.⁶ Furthermore, this statement has never been made public, not even in the documents of the Nuremberg tribunal, except in an unusable form (with truncations, falsifications, and rewritings). The actual document has never been available with its absurd appendices (French "draft" or the "supplements" in German).

Regarding Majdanek, a visit to the actual site is absolutely necessary. It is even more convincing than a visit to Struthof-Natzweiler, if that is possible. Over this question I will publish additional information.

With regard to Auschwitz and Birkenau, one must rely essentially on the "Memoirs" ⁷ of Rudolf Höss, which were prepared under the supervision of his Polish captors. At the actual site, one can only find a "reconstructed" room (Auschwitz I) and ruins (Auschwitz II or Birkenau).

An execution with gas has nothing to do with a suicidal or accidental suffocation. In the case of an execution, the executioner and his team must not be exposed to the slightest danger. For their executions, the Americans employ hydrocyanic acid in a sophisticated way, and that only in a small, hermetically-sealed chamber. Afterwards, the gas is exhausted from the chamber and neutralized.

For this reason, one must ask how, for example in the case of Auschwitz II or Birkenau, one could bring 2,000 people into a room measuring 210 square meters in area, and then in this highly crowded situation throw in the very strong pesticide Zyklon B, and then immediately after the deaths of the victims let a work crew without any gas masks enter the room in order to take out the bodies which had been thoroughly saturated with cyanide.

Two documents⁸ from the German industrial archives which were registered by the Americans at Nuremberg tell us that the Zyklon B had a strong tendency to adhere to surfaces and could not be removed from an ordinary room with a strong ventilator, but only by natural aeration for almost 24 hours.

 

Additional documents may be found only at the site in the Auschwitz Museum archives, which were never described elsewhere, but which show that this room of 210 square meters, which is today in a dilapidated condition, was only a very simple mortuary, which (in order to protect it against heat) had been located underground, and which was provided with only a single door which served as both an entrance and an exit. ⁹

Concerning the crematoria of Auschwitz, there is just as there is generally for the entire camp an overabundance of documents and invoices down to the last penny.

 

However, concerning the "gas chambers" there is nothing: no contract for construction, not even a study, nor an order for materials, nor a plan, nor an invoice, nor even a photograph. In a hundred war crimes trials, nothing of the sort was ever produced.

 

Christophersen

"I was in Auschwitz and I can assure you that there was no 'gas chamber' there." Only seldom does one hear defense witnesses with enough courage to pronounce this statement. They are persecuted in the courts. 10 Still today, everyone in Germany takes the risk that, if they give an eyewitness account in favor of Thies Christophersen (who wrote The Auschwitz Lie), they will be punished for '"defaming the memory of the deceased." ¹¹

Immediately after the war, the Germans, the International Red Cross and the Vatican (which was otherwise so expert as to whatever happened in Poland), as well as many others, declared in an embarrassed tone: "The 'gas chambers' we knew nothing about them!" Yes but I would put the question this way: "Can one know about things which did not even happen?"

There was not a single "gas chamber" in even one of the German concentration camps; that is the truth. The nonexistence of "gas chambers" should be regarded as welcome news; to hide this news in the future would be an injustice. Just as there is no attack upon a religion if one portrays "Fatima" as a fraud, the announcement that the "gas chambers" are an historical lie is no attack upon concentration camp survivors.

 

One is merely doing one's duty being truthful.

 

Conclusions
After 30 years of research, revisionist authors have reached the following conclusions:

1. The Hitler "gas chambers" never existed.

2. The "genocide" (or "attempted genocide") of the Jews never took place. In other words: Hitler never gave an order nor permission that anyone should be killed because of his race or religion.

3. The alleged "gas chambers" and the alleged "genocide" are one and the same lie.

4. This lie, which is largely of Zionist origin, has made an enormous political and financial fraud possible, whose principal beneficiary is the state of Israel.

5. The principal victims of this fraud are the German people (but not the German rulers) and the entire Palestinian people.

6. The enormous power of the official information services has, thus far, had the effect of ensuring the success of the lie and of censoring the freedom of expression of those who have denounced the lie.

7. The participants in this lie know that its days are numbered. They distort the purpose and nature of the Revisionist research. They label as "resurgence of Nazism" or as "falsification of history" what is only a thoughtful and justified concern for historical truth.

 

Supplement
Two publications and an official intervention by the author:

1. 1. A letter to Historama, Paris, November 1975, page 10, on the expression "N.N." Originally, these initials never meant Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog), but Nomen nescio (Anonymous). ln practice it meant that certain inmates would not be permitted to receive or send mail.

2. Segments of a letter to Historia, Paris, August 1977, page 132: "The Imposture of Genocide."

3. On 29 January 1978 at the Colloque National de Lyon sur Eglises et Chrétiens de France dans la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (National Convention in Lyon on Churches and Christians of France during the Second World War) an intervention concerning the imposture of the "gas chambers" (see Rivarol, Paris, 16 February 1978, page 5).

 

Notes

1. Regarding the great number of vicious and insulting articles, there is a study by Hermann Langbein which appeared in Le Monde Juif (The Jewish World), April/June 1975. The title is "Coup d'oeil sur la littérature néo-nazie," ("A Glimpse at Neo-Nazi Literature"), pages 8­20. Hermann Langbein was an inmate in Auschwitz. He testified at countless trials. He holds an important position in the circles of former concentration camp inmates. One of his most recent works is entitled: Hommes et Femmes à Auschwitz (Men and Women of Auschwitz), Paris, Fayard, 1975, VIII-529 pages (Translated from Menschen in Auschwitz, Vienna, 1974.) Not one of the 30 chapters, not one of the 268 sections of this book is devoted to the "gas chambers"! Rather, one constantly sees expressions such as "selection for the gas chambers" etc. There is also a study by Georges Wellers which appeared in Le Monde Juif (op. cit.) April/June 1977. The title is "La 'Solution finale', de la question juive et la mythomanie néo-nazie" ("The "Final Solution" and Neo-Nazi Mythomania,"), pages 41­84. There is also a study by Ino Arndt and Wolfgang Scheffler in Viertelsjahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Quarterly Review for Contemporary History), which is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. The Institute's director is currently Dr. Martin Broszat. This study was published in the issue of April 1976. The title is: "Organisierter Massenmord an Juden in NS-Vernichtungslagern" (Organized Mass-Murder of Jews in Nazi Extermination Camps), pages 105­135.
2. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1979.
3. Prison et Déportation (Prison and Deportation). Paris: Spes; 1947; page 77.
4. Broszat's letter is reproduced in facsimile (with its English translation) in The Journal of Historical Review, May/June 1993, page 12.
5. The famed Simon Wiesenthal has also admitted that "there were no extermination camps on German soil" in a letter to the editor of Books and Bookmen, page 5, April 1975. Although he later wrote in a letter dated 12 May 1986 to Professor John George of Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma, that he "could never have said such a thing," Wiesenthal reconfirmed his earlier statement in a letter to the editor published on page 14 of the European editor of Stars and Stripes dated 24 January 1993. This letter is reproduced in facsimile in The Journal for Historical Review, May/June 1993, page 10.
6. See the opinion expressed by the forensic pathologist as it is reported by the Exterminationist Pierre Joffroy in his book about Kurt Gerstein: L'Espion de Dieu/La Passion de Kurt Gerstein (The Spy of God/The Passion of Kurt Gerstein), Paris, Grasset, 1969, page 262.
7. Kommandant in Auschwitz/Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen (Commandant of Auschwitz/Autobiographical Memoirs) by Rudolf Höss, Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,1958,184p; introduction and commentary by Dr. Martin Broszat. Concerning "gassing," see pages 126 and 166. The entry of the work crew into the "gas chamber" is supposed to happen "sofort" ("immediately") as it is written on page 166.
8. These two extensive documents which are of great importance were apparently not used at the trials of Gerhard Peters, former director of Degesch. They were registered as documents NI-9098 and NI-9912. They irrevocably reduce to nothing the "eyewitness testimony" of Höss regarding the "gas chambers."
9. Photographs Neg. 6228 and following.
10. Case of Wilhelm Stäglich, for example. See Stäglich in the Index Nominum of Butz's book (op. cit.).
11. Die Auschwitz-Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie), #23 of Kritik (2341 Kälberhagen, Post Mohrkirch, West Germany), 1974. This booklet was followed by Der Auschwitz-Betrug/Das Echo auf die Auschwitz-Lüge (The Auschwitz Fraud/The Echo of the Auschwitz Lie.).

Back to Contents

 

 

 

 

Auschwitz - Myths and facts
by Mark Weber

Nearly everyone has heard of Auschwitz, the German wartime concentration camp where many prisoners -- most of them Jewish -- were reportedly exterminated, especially in gas chambers. Auschwitz is widely regarded as the most terrible Nazi extermination center.

 

The camp's horrific reputation cannot, however, be reconciled with the facts.
 

 

Scholars challenge Holocaust story
Astonishing as it may seem, more and more historians and engineers have been challenging the widely accepted Auschwitz story. These "revisionist" scholars do not dispute the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to the camp, or that many died there, particularly of typhus and other diseases.

 

But the compelling evidence they present shows that Auschwitz was not an extermination center and that the story of mass killings in "gas chambers" is a myth.
 

 

The Auschwitz camps
The Auschwitz camp complex was set up in 1940 in what is now south-central Poland. Large numbers of Jews were deported there between 1942 and mid-1944.

The main camp was known as Auschwitz I. Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was supposedly the main extermination center, and Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, was a large industrial center where gasoline was produced from coal. In addition there were dozens of smaller satellite camps devoted to the war economy.

 

Four million victims?
At the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, the Allies charged that the Germans exterminated four million people at Auschwitz. This figure, which was invented by the Soviets, was uncritically accepted for many years. It often appeared in major American newspapers and magazines, for example. (note 1)

Today no reputable historian, not even those who generally accept the extermination story, believes this figure. Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer said in 1989 that it is time to finally acknowledge the familiar four million figure is a deliberate myth. In July 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland, along with Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, suddenly announced that altogether perhaps one million people (both Jews and non-Jews) died there.

 

Neither institution would say how many of these people were killed, nor were any estimates given of the numbers of those supposedly gassed. (note 2) One prominent Holocaust historian, Gerald Reitlinger, has estimated that perhaps 700,000 or so Jews perished at Auschwitz. More recently, Holocaust historian Jean-Claude Pressac has estimated that about 800,000 persons - of whom 630,000 were Jewish - perished at Auschwitz.

 

While even such lower figures are incorrect, they show how the Auschwitz story has changed drastically over the years. (note 3)

 

Bizarre tales
At one time it was seriously claimed that Jews were systematically electrocuted at Auschwitz. American newspapers, citing a Soviet eyewitness report from liberated Auschwitz, told readers in February 1945 that the methodical Germans had killed Jews there using an "electric conveyor belt on which hundreds of persons could be electrocuted simultaneously [and] then moved on into furnaces.

 

They were burned almost instantly, producing fertilizer for nearby cabbage fields." (note 4)

And at the Nuremberg Tribunal, chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson charged that the Germans used a "newly invented" device to instantaneously "vaporize" 20,000 Jews near Auschwitz "in such a way that there was no trace left of them." (note 5) No reputable historian now accepts either of these fanciful tales.
 

 

The Höss 'confession'
A key Holocaust document is the "confession" of former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss of April 5, 1946, which was submitted by the U.S. prosecution at the main Nuremberg trial. (note 6)

Although it is still widely cited as solid proof for the Auschwitz extermination story, it is actually a false statement that was obtained by torture.

Many years after the war, British military intelligence sergeant Bernard Clarke described how he and five other British soldiers tortured the former commandant to obtain his "confession." Höss himself privately explained his ordeal in these words: "Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and half million Jews. I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not." (note 7)

Even historians who generally accept the Holocaust extermination story now acknowledge that many of the specific statements made in the Höss "affidavit" are simply not true. For one thing, no serious scholar now claims that anything like two and a half or three million people perished in Auschwitz.

The Höss "affidavit" further alleges that Jews were already being exterminated by gas in the summer of 1941 at three other camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Wolzek. The "Wolzek" camp mentioned by Höss is a total invention. No such camp existed, and the name is no longer mentioned in Holocaust literature.

 

Moreover, the story these days by those who believe in the Holocaust legend is that gassings of Jews did not begin at Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Belzec until sometime in 1942.

 

No documentary evidence
Many thousands of secret German documents dealing with Auschwitz were confiscated after the war by the Allies. Not a single one refers to a policy or program of extermination.

 

In fact, the extermination story cannot be reconciled with the documentary evidence.

 

Many Jewish inmates unable to work
For example, it is often claimed that all Jews at Auschwitz who were unable to work were immediately killed. Jews who were too old, young, sick, or weak were supposedly gassed on arrival, and only those who could be worked to death were temporarily kept alive.

But the evidence shows that, in fact, a very high percentage of the Jewish inmates were not able to work, and were nevertheless not killed. For example, an internal German telex message dated Sept. 4, 1943, from the chief of the Labor Allocation department of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), reported that of 25,000 Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, only 3,581 were able to work, and that all of the remaining Jewish inmates -- some 21,500, or about 86 percent -- were unable to work. (note 8)

This is also confirmed in a secret report dated April 5, 1944, on "security measures in Auschwitz" by Oswald Pohl, head of the SS concentration camp system, to SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

 

Pohl reported that there was a total of 67,000 inmates in the entire Auschwitz camp complex, of whom 18,000 were hospitalized or disabled. In the Auschwitz II camp (Birkenau), supposedly the main extermination center, there were 36,000 inmates, mostly female, of whom "approximately 15,000 are unable to work." (note 9)

These two documents simply cannot be reconciled with the Auschwitz extermination story.

The evidence shows that Auschwitz-Birkenau was established primarily as a camp for Jews who were not able to work, including the sick and elderly, as well as for those who were temporarily awaiting assignment to other camps. That's the considered view of Dr. Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, who also says that this was the reason for the unusually high death rate there. (note 10)

Princeton University history professor Arno Mayer, who is Jewish, acknowledges in a recent book about the "final solution" that more Jews perished at Auschwitz as a result of typhus and other "natural" causes than were executed. (note 11)

 

Anne Frank
Perhaps the best known Auschwitz inmate was Anne Frank, who is known around the world for her famous diary. But few people know that thousands of Jews, including Anne and her father, Otto Frank, "survived" Auschwitz.

The 15-year-old girl and her father were deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz in September 1944. Several weeks later, in the face of the advancing Soviet army, Anne was evacuated along with many other Jews to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where she died of typhus in March 1945.

Her father came down with typhus in Auschwitz and was sent to the camp hospital to recover. He was one of thousands of sick and feeble Jews who were left behind when the Germans abandoned the camp in January 1945, shortly before it was overrun by the Soviets. He died in Switzerland in 1980.

If the German policy had been to kill Anne Frank and her father, they would not have survived Auschwitz.

 

Their fate, tragic though it was, cannot be reconciled with the extermination story.

 

Allied propaganda
The Auschwitz gassing story is based in large part on the hearsay statements of former Jewish inmates who did not personally see any evidence of extermination. Their beliefs are understandable, because rumors about gassings at Auschwitz were widespread.

Allied planes dropped large numbers of LEAFLETS , written in Polish and German, on Auschwitz and the surrounding areas which claimed that people were being gassed in the camp.

 

The Auschwitz gassing story, which was an important part of the Allied wartime propaganda effort, was also broadcast to Europe by Allied radio stations. (note 12)

 

Survivor testimony
Former inmates have confirmed that they saw no evidence of extermination at Auschwitz.

An Austrian woman, Maria Vanherwaarden, testified about her camp experiences in a Toronto District Court in March 1988. She was interned in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 for having sexual relations with a Polish forced laborer. On the train trip to the camp, a Gypsy woman told her and the others that they would all be gassed at Auschwitz.

Upon arrival, Maria and the other women were ordered to undress and go into a large concrete room without windows to take a shower. The terrified women were sure that they were about to die. But then, instead of gas, water came out of the shower heads.

Auschwitz was no vacation center, Maria confirmed. She witnessed the death of many fellow inmates by disease, particularly typhus, and quite a few committed suicide. But she saw no evidence at all of mass killings, gassings, or of any extermination program. (note 13)

A Jewish woman named Marika Frank arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau from Hungary in July 1944, when 25,000 Jews were supposedly gassed and cremated daily. She likewise testified after the war that she heard and saw nothing of "gas chambers" during the time she was interned there.

 

She heard the gassing stories only later. (note 14)

 

Inmates released
Auschwitz internees who had served their sentences were released and returned to their home countries.

 

If Auschwitz had actually been a top secret extermination center, the Germans would certainly not have released inmates who "knew" what was happening in the camp. (note 15)
 

 

Himmler orders death rate reduced
In response to the deaths of many inmates due to disease, especially typhus, the German authorities responsible for the camps ordered firm counter-measures.

The head of the SS camp administration office sent a directive dated Dec. 28, 1942, to Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. It sharply criticized the high death rate of inmates due to disease, and ordered that "camp physicians must use all means at their disposal to significantly reduce the death rate in the various camps."

 

Furthermore, it ordered:

The camp doctors must supervise more often than in the past the nutrition of the prisoners and, in cooperation with the administration, submit improvement recommendations to the camp commandants . . . The camp doctors are to see to it that the working conditions at the various labor places are improved as much as possible.

Finally, the directive stressed that "the Reichsfhrer SS [Heinrich Himmler] has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced." (note 16)
 

 

German camp regulations
Official German camp regulations make clear that Auschwitz was not an extermination center. They ordered: (note 17)

New arrivals in the camp are to be given a thorough medical examination, and if there is any doubt [about their health], they must be sent to quarantine for observation.

Prisoners who report sick must be examined that same day by the camp physician. If necessary, the physician must transfer the prisoners to a hospital for professional treatment.

The camp physician must regularly inspect the kitchen regarding the preparation of the food and the quality of the food supply. Any deficiencies that may arise must be reported to the camp commandant.

Special care should be given in the treatment of accidents, in order not to impair the full productivity of the prisoners.

Prisoners who are to be released or transfered must first be brought before the camp physician for medical examination.

 

Telltale aerial photos
Detailed aerial reconnaissance photographs taken of Auschwitz-Birkenau on several random days in 1944 (during the height of the alleged extermination period there) were made public by the CIA in 1979.

 

These photos show no trace of piles of corpses, smoking crematory chimneys or masses of Jews awaiting death, things that have been repeatedly alleged, and all of which would have been clearly visible if Auschwitz had been the extermination center it is said to have been. (note 18)

 

Absurd cremation claims
Cremation specialists have confirmed that thousands of corpses could not possibly have been cremated every day throughout the spring and summer of 1944 at Auschwitz, as commonly alleged.

For example, Mr. Ivan Lagace, manager of a large crematory in Calgary, Canada, testified in court in April 1988 that the Auschwitz cremation story is technically impossible.

 

The allegation that 10,000 or even 20,000 corpses were burned every day at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 in crematories and open pits is simply "preposterous" and "beyond the realm of reality," he declared under oath. (note 19)

 

Gassing expert refutes extermination story
America's leading gas chamber expert, Boston engineer Fred A. Leuchter, carefully examined the supposed "gas chambers" in Poland and concluded that the Auschwitz gassing story is absurd and technically impossible.

Leuchter is the foremost specialist on the design and installation of gas chambers used in the United States to execute convicted criminals. For example, he designed a gas chamber facility for the Missouri state penitentiary.

In February 1988 he carried out a detailed onsite examination of the "gas chambers" at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek in Poland, which are either still standing or only partially in ruins. In sworn testimony to a Toronto court and in a technical report, Leuchter described every aspect of his investigation.

He concluded by emphatically declaring that the alleged gassing facilities could not possibly have been used to kill people. Among other things, he pointed out that the so-called "gas chambers" were not properly sealed or vented to kill human beings without also killing German camp personnel. (note 20)

Dr. William B. Lindsey, a research chemist employed for 33 years by the Dupont Corporation, likewise testified in a 1985 court case that the Auschwitz gassing story is technically impossible.

 

Based on a careful on-site examination of the "gas chambers" at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, and on his years of experience, he declared:

"I have come to the conclusion that no one was willfully or purposefully killed with Zyklon B [hydrocyanic acid gas] in this manner. I consider it absolutely impossible." (note 21)

 

Notes

1. Nuremberg document 008-USSR. IMT blue series, Vol. 39, pp. 241, 261.; NC and A red series, vol. 1, p. 35.; C.L. Sulzberger, "Oswiecim Killings Placed at 4,000,000," New York Times, May 8, 1945, and, New York Times, Jan. 31, 1986, p. A4.
2. Y. Bauer, "Fighting the Distortions," Jerusalem Post (Israel), Sept. 22, 1989; "Auschwitz Deaths Reduced to a Million," Daily Telegraph (London), July 17, 1990; "Poland Reduces Auschwitz Death Toll Estimate to 1 Million," The Washington Times, July 17, 1990.
3. G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution (1971); J.-C. Pressac, Le Cr¦matoires d'Auschwitz: La Machinerie du meurtre de mass (Paris: CNRS, 1993). On Pressac's estimates, see: L'Express (France), Sept. 30, 1993, p. 33.
4. Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945, pp. 2, 35. (United Press dispatch from Moscow).
5. IMT blue series, Vol. 16, p. 529-530. (June 21, 1946).
6. Nuremberg document 3868-PS (USA-819). IMT blue series, Vol. 33, pp. 275-279.
7. Rupert Butler, Legions of Death (England: 1983), pp. 235; R. Faurisson, The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87, pp. 389-403.
8. Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw, German document No. 128, in: H. Eschwege, ed., Kennzeichen J (East Berlin: 1966), p. 264.
9. Nuremberg document NO-021. NMT green series, Vol. 5. pp. 384-385.
10. Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Costa Mesa, Calif.), p. 124.
11. Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The 'Final Solution' in History (Pantheon, 1989), p. 365.
12. Nuremberg document NI-11696. NMT green series, Vol. 8, p. 606.
13. Testimony in Toronto District Court, March 28, 1988. Toronto Star, March 29, 1988, p. A2.
14. Sylvia Rothchild, ed., Voices from the Holocaust (New York: 1981), pp. 188-191.
15. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (Boston: 1981), p. 169.
16. Nuremberg document PS-2171, Annex 2. NC&A red series, Vol. 4, pp. 833-834.
17. "Rules and Regulations for the Concentration Camps." Anthology, Inhuman Medicine, Vol. 1, Part 1 (Warsaw: International Auschwitz Committee, 1970), pp. 149-151.; S. Paskuly, ed., Death Dealer: the Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz (Buffalo: 1992), pp. 216-217.
18. Dino A. Brugioni and Robert C. Poirier, The Holocaust Revisited (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1979).
19. Canadian Jewish News (Toronto), April 14, 1988, p. 6.
20. The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek (Toronto: 1988). Available for $17.00, postpaid, from the IHR.
21. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Feb. 12, 1985, p. M3

Summary

The Auschwitz extermination story originated as wartime propaganda. Now, more than 40 years after the end of the Second World War, it is time to take another, more objective look at this highly polemicized chapter of history. The Auschwitz legend is the core of the Holocaust story. If hundreds of thousands of Jews were not systematically killed there, as alleged, one of the great myths of our time collapses.

Artificially maintaining the hatreds and passions of the past prevents genuine reconciliation and lasting peace. Revisionism promotes historical awareness and international understanding. That is why the work of the Institute for Historical Review is so important and deserves your support.

 

Back to Contents

 

 

 

 

The Liberation of the Camps: Facts vs. Lies
by Theodore J. O'Keefe

Nothing has been more effective in establishing the authenticity of the Holocaust story in the minds of Americans than the terrible scenes US troops discovered when they entered German concentration camps at the close of World War II.

At Dachau, Buchenwald, Dora, Mauthausen, and other work and detention camps, horrified US infantrymen encountered heaps of dead and dying inmates, emaciated and diseased. Survivors told them hair-raising stories of torture and slaughter, and backed up their claims by showing the GIs crematory ovens, alleged execution gas chambers, supposed implements of torture, and even shrunken heads and lampshades, gloves, and handbags purportedly made from skin flayed from dead inmates.

US government authorities, mindful that many Americans who remembered the atrocity stories fed them during World War I still doubted the Allied propaganda directed against the Hitler regime, resolved to "document" what the GIs had found in the camps. Prominent newsmen and politicians were flown in to see the harrowing evidence, while the US Army Signal Corps filmed and photographed the scenes for posterity.

 

Famous journalist Edward R. Murrow reported, in tones of horror, but no longer of disbelief, what he had been told and shown, and Dachau and Buchenwald were branded on the hearts and minds of the American populace as names of infamy unmatched in the sad and bloody history of this planet.

For Americans, what was "discovered" at the camps -- the dead and the diseased, the terrible stories of the inmates, all the props of torture and terror -- became the basis not simply of a transitory propaganda campaign but of the conviction that, yes, it was true: the Germans did exterminate six million Jews, most of them in lethal gas chambers.

What the GIs found was used, by way of films that were mandatory viewing for the vanquished populace of Germany, to "re-educate" the German people by destroying their national pride and their will to a united, independent national state, imposing in their place overwhelming feelings of collective guilt and political impotence.

 

And when the testimony, and the verdict, of the Nuremberg Tribunal incorporated most, if not all, of the horror stories Americans were told about Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places captured by the US Army, the Holocaust could pass for one of the most documented, one of the most authenticated, one of the most proven historical episodes in the human record.

 

A Different Reality
But it is known today that, very soon after the liberation of the camps, American authorities were aware that the real story of the camps was quite different from the one in which they were coaching military public information officers, government spokesmen, politicians, journalists, and other mouthpieces.

When American and British forces overran western and central Germany in the spring of 1945, they were followed by troops charged with discovering and securing any evidence of German war crimes.

Among them was Dr. Charles Larson, one of America's leading forensic pathologists, who was assigned to the US Army's Judge Advocate General's Department. As part of a US War Crimes Investigation Team, Dr. Larson performed autopsies at Dachau and some twenty other German camps, examining on some days more than 100 corpses. After his grim work at Dachau, he was questioned for three days by US Army prosecutors.

Dr. Larson's findings? In an 1980 newspaper interview he said: "What we've heard is that six million Jews were exterminated. Part of that is a hoax." And what part was the hoax?

 

Dr. Larson, who told his biographer that to his knowledge he "was the only forensic pathologist on duty in the entire European Theater" of Allied military operations, confirmed that "never was a case of poison gas uncovered."

 

Typhus, Not Poison Gas
If not by gassing, how did the unfortunate victims at Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen perish? Were they tortured to death or deliberately starved? The answers to these questions are known as well.

As Dr. Larson and other Allied medical men discovered, the chief cause of death at Dachau, Belsen and the other camps was disease, above all typhus, an old and terrible scourge of mankind that until recently flourished in places where populations were crowded together in circumstances where public health measures were unknown or had broken down. Such was the case in the overcrowded internment camps in Germany at war's end, where, despite such measures as systematic delousing, quarantine of the sick and cremation of the dead, the virtual collapse of Germany's food, transport, and public health systems led to catastrophe.

Perhaps the most authoritative statement of the facts as to typhus and mortality in the camps has been made by Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, who was with US forces in Germany in 1945.

 

Dr. Gordon reported in 1948 that,

"The outbreaks in concentration camps and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus infection encountered in Germany."

Dr. Gordon summarized the causes for the outbreaks as follows:

Germany in the spring months of April and May [1945] was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity travelling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them ...

Germany was in chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the spread of the disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution was poor, housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere lacking. Still more important, a shifting of populations was occurring such as few countries and few times have experienced.

Dr. Gordon's findings are corroborated by Dr. Russell Barton, today a psychiatrist of international repute, who entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student in 1945. Barton, who volunteered to care for the diseased survivors, testified under sworn oath in a Toronto courtroom in 1985 that,

"Thousands of prisoners who died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of diseases."

Dr. Barton further testified that on entering the camp he had credited stories of deliberate starvation but decided such stories were untrue after inspecting the well equipped kitchens and the meticulously maintained ledgers, dating back to 1942, of food cooked and dispensed each day.

Despite noisily publicized claims and widespread popular notions to the contrary, no researcher has been able to document a German policy of extermination through starvation in the German camps.

 

No 'Human Skin' Lampshades
What of the ghoulish stories of concentration camp inmates skinned for their tattoos, flayed to make lampshades and handbags, or other artifacts? What of the innumerable "torture racks," "meathooks," whipping posts, gallows, and other tools of torment and death that are reported to have abounded at every German camp?

 

These allegations, and even more grotesque ones proffered by Soviet prosecutors, found their way into the record at Nuremberg.

The lampshade and tattooed-skin charges were made against Ilse Koch, dubbed by journalists the "Bitch of Buchenwald," who was reported to have furnished her house with objects manufactured from the tanned hides of luckless inmates.

But General Lucius Clay, military governor of the US zone of occupied Germany, who reviewed her case in 1948, told his superiors in Washington:

"There is no convincing evidence that she [Ilse Koch] selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed skins or that she possessed any articles made of human skin."

In an interview General Clay gave years later, he stated about the material for the infamous lampshades:

"Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial."

Ilse Koch hanged herself in a German jail in 1967.

It would be tedious to itemize and refute the thousands of bizarre claims as to Nazi atrocities. That there were instances of German cruelty, however, is clear from the testimony of Dr. Konrad Morgen, a legal investigator attached to the Reich Criminal Police, whose statements on the witness stand at Nuremberg have never been challenged by proponents of the Jewish Holocaust story. Dr. Morgen informed the court that he had been given full authority by Heinrich Himmler, commander of Hitler's SS and the dread Gestapo, to enter any German concentration camp and investigate instances of cruelty and corruption on the part of camp personnel.

As he explained in sworn testimony at Nuremberg, Dr. Morgen investigated 800 such cases, resulting in more than 200 convictions. Punishments included the death penalty for the worst offenders, including Hermann Florstedt, commandant of Lublin (Majdanek), and Karl Koch (Ilse's husband), commandant of Buchenwald.

While German camp commandants in certain cases did inflict physical punishment, such acts had to be approved by authorities in Berlin, and it was required that a camp physician first certify the good health of the prisoner to be disciplined, and then be on hand at the actual beating.

 

After all, throughout most of the war the camps were important centers of industrial activity. The good health and morale of the prisoners was critical to the German war effort, as is evidenced in a January 1943 order issued by SS General Richard Glücks, chief of the office that supervised the concentration camps.

 

It held the camp commanders,

"personally responsible for exhausting every possibility to preserve the physical strength of the detainees."

 

Camp Survivors: Merely Victims?
US Army investigators, working at Buchenwald and other camps, quickly ascertained what was common knowledge among veteran inmates: that the worst offenders, the cruelest denizens of the camps, were not the guards but the prisoners themselves.

 

Common criminals of the same stripe as those who populate US prisons today committed many villainies, particularly when they held positions of authority, and fanatical Communists, highly organized to combat their many political enemies among the inmates, eliminated their foes with Stalinist ruthlessness.

Two US Army investigators at Buchenwald, Egon W. Fleck and Edward A. Tenenbaum, carefully investigated circumstances in the camp before its liberation.

 

In a detailed report submitted to their superiors, they revealed, in the words of Alfred Toombs, their commander, who wrote a preface to the report,

"how the prisoners themselves organized a deadly terror within the Nazi terror."

Fleck and Tenenbaum described the power exercised by criminals and Communists as follows:

The trusties, who in time became almost exclusively Communist Germans, had the power of life and death over all other inmates. They could sentence a man or a group to almost certain death ... The Communist trusties were directly responsible for a large part of the brutalities at Buchenwald.

Colonel Donald B. Robinson, chief historian of the American military government in Germany, summarized the Fleck-Tenenbaum report in an article published in an American magazine shortly after the war. Colonel Robinson wrote succinctly of the American investigators' findings: "It appeared that the prisoners who agreed with the Communists ate; those who didn't starved to death."

Additional corroboration of inmate brutality has been provided by Ellis E. Spackman, who, as Chief of Counter-Intelligence Arrests and Detentions for the US Seventh Army, was involved in the liberation of Dachau.

 

Spackman, later a professor of history at San Bernardino Valley College in California, wrote in 1966 that at Dachau,

"the prisoners were the actual instruments that inflicted the barbarities on their fellow prisoners."

'Gas Chambers'
In December 1944 US Army officers Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel Edward J. Gully inspected the German concentration camp at Struthof-Natzweiler in Alsace. They submitted their findings to their superiors at the headquarters of the US 6th Army Group, which subsequently forwarded their report to the US War Crimes Division.

 

While, significantly, the full text of their report has never been published, it has been revealed, by a historian supportive of Holocaust claims, that the two investigators were careful to characterize equipment exhibited to them by French informants as a "so-called lethal gas chamber," and to claim it was "allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber."

Both the careful phraseology of the Natzweiler report, and its effective suppression, stand in stark contrast to the credulity, the confusion, and the blaring publicity that accompanied official reports of alleged gas chambers at Dachau. At first, a US Army photo depicting a GI gazing at a steel door marked with a skull and crossbones and the German words for: "Caution! Gas! Mortal danger! Don't open!," was identified as showing the murder weapon.

Later, however, it was evidently decided that the apparatus in question was merely a standard delousing chamber for clothing, and another alleged gas chamber, this one cunningly disguised as a shower room, was exhibited to American congressmen and journalists as the site where thousands breathed their last.

 

While there exist numerous reports in the press as to the operation of this second "gas chamber," no official report by trained Army investigators has yet surfaced to reconcile such problems as the function of the shower heads: Were they "dummies," or did lethal cyanide gas stream through them?

 

(Each theory has appreciable support in journalistic and historiographical literature.)

As with Dachau, so with Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and the other camps liberated by the Allies in western Germany. There was no end of propaganda about "gas chambers," "gas ovens," and the like, but so far not a single detailed description of the murder weapon and its function, not a single report of the kind that is mandatory for the successful prosecution of any assault or murder case in America at that time and today, has come to light.

Furthermore, a number of Holocaust authorities have now publicly decreed that there were no gassings, no extermination camps in Germany after all. (We are now told that "gassing" and "extermination" camps were located exclusively in what is now Poland, in areas captured by the Soviet Red Army and made off-limits to western investigators.)

Dr. Martin Broszat of the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History, which is funded by the German government, stated categorically in a 1960 letter to the German weekly Die Zeit: "Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed." Professional "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal stated in 1975 and again in 1993 that "there were no extermination camps on German soil."

Dachau "gas chamber" No. 2, which was once presented to a stunned and grieving world as a weapon that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, is now described in the brochure issued to tourists at the modern Dachau "memorial site" in these words:

"This gas chamber, camouflaged as a shower room, was not used."

 

The Propaganda Intensifies
More than 50 years after American troops entered Dachau, Buchenwald and other German camps, and trained American investigators established the facts as to what had gone on in them, the government in Washington, the entertainment media in Hollywood, and the print media in New York continue to churn out millions of words and images annually on the horrors of the camps and the infamy of the Holocaust.

 

Despite the fact that, with the exception of the defeated Confederacy, no enemy of America has ever so suffered so complete and devastating defeat as did Germany in 1945, the mass media and the politicians and bureaucrats behave as if Hitler, his troops, and his concentration camps continue to exist in an eternal present, and our opinion makers continue to distort, through ignorance or malice, the facts about the camps.

 

Time for the Truth
It is time that the government and the professional historians reveal the facts about Dachau, Buchenwald and the other camps. It is time they let the American public know how the inmates died, and how they didn't die.

 

It is time that the claims of mass murder by gassing are clarified and investigated in the same manner as any other claims of murder. It is time that the free ride certain groups have enjoyed as the result of unchallenged Holocaust claims be terminated, just as it is time to end the scapegoating of other groups, including Germans, eastern Europeans, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the wartime leadership of America and Britain, either for their alleged role in the Holocaust or their supposed failure to stop it.

Above all, it is time that the citizens of this great Republic have the facts about the camps, facts they have a right to know, a right that is fundamental to the exercise of their authority and their will in the governance of their country. As citizens and as taxpayers, Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, of all faiths, have a basic right and an overriding interest in determining the facts of incidents that are deemed by those in positions of power to be significant in determining America's foreign and educational policy, as well as its selection of past events to be memorialized in our civic life.

Today the alleged facts of the Holocaust are at issue all over the civilized world. The truth will be decided only by recourse to the facts, in the public forum: not by concealing the facts, denying the truth, stonewalling reality.

 

The truth will out, and it is time the government of this country, and governments and international bodies throughout the world, make public the evidence of what actually transpired in the German concentration camps in the years 1933-1945, so that we may put paid to the lies, without fear or favor, and carry out the work of reconciliation and renewal that is and must be the granite foundation of mutual tolerance between peoples and of a peace based on justice.

 

Summary
The conclusions of the early US Army investigations as to the truth about the wartime German concentration camps have since been corroborated by all subsequent investigators and can be summarized:

1. The harrowing scenes of dead and dying inmates were not the result of a German policy of "extermination," but rather the result of epidemics of typhus and other disease brought about largely by the effects of Allied aerial attacks.

2. Stories of Nazi super-criminals and sadists who turned Jews and others into handbags and lampshades for their private profit or amusement were sick lies or diseased fantasies; indeed, the German authorities punished corruption and cruelty on the part of camp commanders and guards.

3. On the other hand, portrayals of the newly liberated inmates as saints and martyrs of Hitlerism were quite often very far from the truth; indeed, most of the brutalities inflicted on camp detainees were the work of their fellow prisoners, in contravention of German policy and German orders.

4. The alleged homicidal showers and gas chambers were used either for bathing camp inmates or delousing their clothes; the claim that they were used to murder Jews or other human beings is a contemptible fabrication. Orthodox historians and professional "Nazi-hunters" have quietly dropped claims that inmates were gassed at Dachau, Buchenwald and other camps in Germany. They continue, however, to keep silent regarding the lies about Dachau and Buchenwald, as well as to evade an open discussion of the evidence for homicidal gassing at Auschwitz and the other camps captured by the Soviets.

Back to Contents