Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORY{p. 33} Precisely this concession permits the established school toscore a decisive victory over revisionism. Two fundamental allegationsare made in the [book] Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte, which will keephaving an effect beneath the level of published opinion and which willperchance assume threatening dimensions, if they are covered up byprohibition and punishment instead of verifying them and to submit theresult to the audience. The first thesis, originally from Faurisson andhere taken over by Rudolf and Ball, is that no holes for introductionshafts existed, and the second is Ingrid Weckert’s account about astatement that she claims an Israeli clerk of the Yad Vashem Institutemade to her in July 1985: we have known already for a long time thatno extermination camp Treblinka ever existed …, the real problemabout Treblinka are the witness statements (pp. 210 f.). 27 Both claimscan easily be verified. If they can be refuted (which I deem very likely),then the revisionists will be deeply discredited and will be silent at leastfor awhile.In the end I underscore once more that a scientific opinion can turnout to be entirely incorrect, although it is likely as a rule that at leastparts or moments will be accepted into the synthesis of the next generation.I also do not want to give rise to doubts that in my view the methodicalapproach of the revisionists is grossly one-sided and insofarinadmissible: by devaluating the witness accounts to an extreme extent{p. 34} and by criticizing documents excessively, they undermine theessential foundation of the historic science, which frequently has onlytwo or three witness statements or documents at its disposal and whichtherefore has to accept their consistency as proof. And by not taking theideology of Hitler and National Socialism seriously, indeed by believingto merely hear war-related “patter on either side,” 28 the revisionistsobstruct their own view on this century, which was shaped by ideologicalconflicts, and just like their opponents they do not perceive the basicfact of the first part of this period: that up to 1945 two systems confrontedeach other which characterized each other mutually as “criminal”29 and which claimed for themselves to “cleanse” and “heal” theworld. A historian of ideologies cannot be a revisionist in the sense ofFaurisson and Rudolf.But I can perhaps pick up and carry on a warning by WolfgangScheffler, who stated during the aforementioned symposium that hecautions “against exaggerations of the number of those murdered inAuschwitz-Birkenau.” 30 I warn against an overestimation of the gas281