Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYaccount, which he has repeatedly explained since 1977 and which hehas expanded to a total negation. For he gained a very similar impressionduring his first visit to Auschwitz as Conan expresses it today: theimpression that “something is wrong” and that the museum administrationis guilty of forgery. This first impression, which initially only led todoubts, he advanced to a kind of inflexible dogmatism later on. But onewould have to concede that there are indeed quite a number {p. 31} ofunresolved questions with regard to Auschwitz (both as the specificcamp as well as the symbol) and that the attempt has to be made to resolvethem in a scientific way. And hence a rule should be applicable tohim, which could be called, with a grain of salt, a law of the formationof scientific schools of thought: precisely the pioneers of a new andmuch opposed point of view tend to intellectually ossify and to developa peculiar kind of dogmatism. They then form a pole or an extremewithin their own school, which itself is a pole or an extreme within thescientific field at large. But they keep their place within the scientificspectrum.In the case of Faurisson, however, the clarity of this allocation iscompromised by the fact that he is obviously motivated by extra-scientificmotives, e.g. by his aversion against the – in his view – existingand unjustified instrumentalization of the final solution by the Zionistsin favor of the State of Israel and just as much by his intention to cometo the defense of the German people against unjustified accusations andclaims. But one has to merely read the book by Deborah Lipstadt in orderto recognize that at least some representatives of the orthodox pointof view are not primarily guided by the will to determine or defend thetruth about a historical event, but that they predominantly want to defendthe legitimacy of the State of Israel and Germany’s moral obligation“to admit all who seek refuge in her borders.” 26 But when the questionof the legitimacy of Israel’s existence {p. 32} is raised, then thishas to be decided by other criteria, and the admission or non-admissionof all those seeking refuge in Germany is a question of current Germanpolitics and of general principles which are also independent of the finalsolution. The entanglement of scientific and political motives is inevitablefor a topic as sensitive as the final solution, and neither Faurissonnor Lipstadt or Benz can be blamed for this. I therefore plead to alsogrant the contributions by Rudolf and Faurisson in the [book] Grundlagenzur Zeitgeschichte the attribute “scientific.”280