AUSCHWITZ: PLAIN FACTS - Holocaust Handbooks

50 Germar Rudolf (ed.), Auschwitz: Plain Factsthat both the decision for and the execution of the “Judeocide” (a new termthat has yet to gain wide acceptance) were shrouded in “absolute secrecy,” ofwhich we might say that it still hasn’t been pierced.But why did the archives lie dormant? “Because an important current ofJewish memory refused any rational approach to the Final Solution, whichwas deemed an ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unthinkable’ event.” One would prefer, ofcourse, a more straightforward denunciation, naming names and citing references,but at L’Express prudence prevails. The idyllic situation at the archiveswas disturbed by the “literature of denial,” which set about picking out the errors“logically numerous in witness testimonies or in the postwar Soviet textsthat made Auschwitz a theme of ideological propaganda.” The fine sleuths atL’Express haven’t noticed that every single assertion by Pressac regardinghomicidal gas chambers is based directly on these very Soviet and Polishtexts. But then one can’t demand too much of journalists. It is Pressac who issupposed have personally discovered that “the technological history of the FinalSolution still remains to be written.” It is impossible for a well-bred journalist,as they prefer them at L’Express, to recognize that the father of thisbrilliant “discovery” (in France) is none other than Professor Robert Faurisson.After all, it wouldn’t do to acknowledge that from that discovery on,every advance in this area owes something to him. 21In his 1989 book – published in New York by the Klarsfelds – Pressacboasted that, on the basis of his work in the archives in Poland and Germany(50,000 documents), he was solving the riddle in its entirety. Now, he says,the 80,000 documents from the Soviets will tell us more. However, the 1989work – of 564 large-size pages – was far more comprehensive, and dealt withmany more subjects. Had the journalists done their homework, they wouldhave recognized that Pressac’s 1993 book is much more limited in scope, andis much more circumspect, indeed diffident, in its assertions than the 1989work.After having explained the book’s stupefying discovery – that the administrationadministered, that the Central Construction Office made plans and requestedestimates and invoices – the subtle analysts of L’Express assert thatPressac “found proof of the organization of the killing.” There’s the trick.Pressac swims in a sea of ambiguities. He does not positively state that he hasfound “proofs,” but rather traces, or clues, which are almost as good as proof.Journalists can’t afford to indulge in such subtlety, and Pressac makes no protestagainst their distortions. As in a child’s game, he seems to say: “I didn’tsay it. He did.” Pressac is always able, faced with real criticism, to take refugeworld of Parisian literary criticism is well known: “No one is better served then by oneself –but it shouldn’t show.”21 The most basic principles of the history of ideas, as taught at Sorbonne University, have tobe destroyed. Thus is the intellectual honor of the bedaristic followers.