AUSCHWITZ: PLAIN FACTS - Holocaust Handbooks

26 Germar Rudolf (ed.), Auschwitz: Plain Facts1.3. The HistoriansEberhard Jäckel, Professor of Contemporary History in Stuttgart, SouthwestGermany, is one of the most widely-known European specialists on theHolocaust. He wrote a review of the German edition of Pressac’s book, whichappeared shortly thereafter, under the heading “Die Maschinerie des Massenmordes”(The Machinery of Mass Murder), in the German weekly Die Zeit onMarch 18, 1994. In the review he said:“It has angered a few readers that he [Pressac] has described all thiswith the unfeeling precision of a heating technician. For every assertion hehas a letter or a quote from the records of the construction office. What iseven more aggravating is that he gives the impression that he is the onewho discovered the evidence. In fact, the method of operation has beenknown for a long time, though without the technical details, and moreoverit is questionable whether they were developed in the way he describes.[…] He has been researching for ten years but he has not become a soundhistorian. His book is through and through technical, limited to a singlemode, one might say benighted. Nevertheless, it is useful for just that reason.The usefulness is not so much that there is now a completely irrefutableproof for the existence of the gas chambers. […] It is useful that Pressachas refuted the anti-Semitic deniers with their own technical arguments.One waits in suspense to see what they will think of next. But sincethey are not interested in the truth, but only in the seeming justification oftheir prejudices, not even Pressac will convince them. The greatest usefulnessof the book lies in this, that we can now understand the operation inits technical details.”Thus the opinion of the Holocaust court historians did not deviate markedlyfrom that of the media. They are of one viewpoint in their evaluation ofPressac as the technical-scientific wonder weapon against the “evil” revisionists,but there are discrepancies with respect to the evaluation of Pressac’sworking methods. Jäckel is angry that Pressac pretends that he alone has discoveredthe wheel. Indeed, most of the work had already been done by others,including not only the established historians and hobby-historians but also byrevisionists such as Faurisson – something Jäckel omitted to mention.The response from the German official Institute for Contemporary Historywhen asked to make a comment on my expert report was revealing: 11“The Institute for Contemporary History will make no comment on thisexpert report. In our opinion, it is useless to go in detail into the diverse attemptsof the revisionist side to dispute the mass gassings in Auschwitz.The fact of these gassings is obvious and has only recently been reconfirmedby the records of the construction office of the Waffen SS and police11 H. Auerbach, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, letter of Dec. 21, 1993, to G. Herzogenrath-Amelung.