Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYWith regard to the final solution, even a research ban could be justified,albeit only by way of a thought experiment: Assuming that notAuschwitz but Treblinka were the general symbol of the final solution,because it really had been a pure extermination camp in which millionsof individuals had perished without that a single eyewitness had beenable to testify about the actual circumstances and without that any traceshad been left behind after intensive destruction. In view of such mattersof fact, science would most likely have agreed to a research ban, whichwould have been nothing else but an imperative of elementary reverence.But precisely this thought experiment cannot be applied to Auschwitzas a specific camp. Auschwitz-Birkenau was not a pure exterminationcamp either, and it was not located in a hidden spot in an uninhabitedarea. It was located in the midst of an industrial region, and since itnever reached its [intended] last extension, civil laborers had been employedthere constantly. Numerous inmates survived, and indeed, someinmates were even released. In one of the earliest accounts aboutAuschwitz, for instance, the book by Emil de Martini Vier MillionenTote klagen an [Four Million Deads Accuse] (1948), the author expresslystates that he was released in 1943. Up to this date over and overagain comparable witness accounts have appeared which diverge fromone another in no rare cases. 9 For a major part, the buildings of thecamp are still extant {p. 13}, among them to a considerable degree alsothe five crematoria. Hence Auschwitz can and must be a subject of science;a research ban would be unjustifiable. Revisions of scientific resultsand elucidation are basically legitimate. The only question iswhether a revisionism is justified, that is to say a systematic effort of anentire school to draw a divergent overall picture, and whether such revisionism,if it were acceptable in principle, had to set its own limits orcould be forced to stay within limits.While constant revisions are the daily bread in all fields of science,solid “revisionisms” evolve regularly when a particular view about anemotional topic seems to have gained unrestricted dominance. This situationis most likely given when big decisions have been made in politics,especially when a war has ended with the total victory of one side.After the end of the U.S. Civil War, for example, the concept of slaveliberation predominated undisputedly in historiography as well, but aftera few decades a revisionism came into existence anyway, which demandedto do justice to the ideas and protagonists of the vanquished269