Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYunregistered Jews who died in the gas chambers amounts to 470,000 to550,000, to which have to be added the death cases of registered Jewishand non-Jewish {p. 19} inmates as well as some 35,000 Soviet prisonersof war, gypsies and others, resulting in a total of 631,000 to711,000. 19 From this it can be concluded that the division by four canbasically by applied to the total number as well, and Pressac could hardlycontradict if someone claimed that the total victim number is closerto one and a half than to six million. So far no one has yet contested thatPressac belongs to the “established literature”; frequently even a leadingrole is assigned to him.It is thus beyond doubt that the established science has performedsubstantial revisions to hitherto widespread findings and opinions whichhad also been accepted by historians.A “revisionism” therefore would have to move in a profoundly differentdimension; it would not have to criticize and scrutinize singlefacts, be they ever so important, but instead it would have to come tothe allegation that the mass murder in gas chambers are an “etiological[causative] legend,” no different than the reports about mass killingswith electricity, hot steam, or unslaked lime. In conjunction with this itis not necessary to accuse someone of “lying” or deliberately creating amyth; nothing would in principle be more understandable than that themost diverging attempts at explanation would evolve when confrontedwith such a tremendous and terrifying event, the traceless disappearanceof so many individuals after a “selection.”{p. 20} The specific question is whether the contributions by variousauthors united in the anthology Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte can allbe classified as such a revisionism and whether one is permitted to assignto these contributions, which then would have to be called “treatises,”a scientific nature.First of all it has to be emphasized once more that “scientific nature”does not equate “correctness,” but merely the striving for correctness,which can be recognized by simple formal criteria: the argumentativeway of explaining, the verifiable reference to other and opposing analysesand results, and the absence of coarse and all too emotional polemics.These criteria are almost consistently fulfilled insofar as numerousfootnotes can be found in most contributions, which by no means referprimarily to works by other revisionists and which, by drawing on literatureof the 19th century about problems of disinfection and poisoning,273