AUSCHWITZ: PLAIN FACTS - Holocaust Handbooks

Serge Thion, History by Night or in Fog? 55Then comes Raul Hilberg. After being grilled on the stand during the firstZündel trial at Toronto, in 1985, this professor of political science has learnedto be more cautious. 30 He laments that Pressac isn’t really a historian, that hisis not the “the last word on the subject.” He complains that “important researchis still necessary,” that “considerable research is still needed,” that “theGerman sources should be studied further,” and that there is still a lot of workto do. One wonders what this fellow’s been up to since he began his study ofthis subject in 1948.But Hilberg says something very embarrassing: an extermination order byHitler has already been missing; now an extermination order by Himmler islikewise nowhere to be found. Höss and Himmler did not even meet “duringthe crucial period.” What now? Is it Höss who decided everything by himself?Or was he in the dark as well? An extermination order by Höss to his subordinatescannot be found either. Another mystery. Perhaps we should ask Vidal-Naquet.But the best, as usual, comes from Claude Lanzmann. He’s a raw fundamentalist,dazed, totally inaccessible to the least reasoning, but with an animal’sintuition. He showed this intuition in making the movie Shoah, in whichhe abandoned all (or nearly all) reference to the documents. He knows thedocuments. He doesn’t know what they really mean, but he has a photographicmemory and rightly says that all the documents cited by Pressac werealready known. Lanzmann defends his work as a movie maker in almost Celinianterms: art should create emotions, nothing else. (“I prefer the tears ofthe Treblinka barber to Pressac’s document on the gas detectors”). Lanzmannis very modern; he likes to hit below the belt, crying to avoid thinking, toyingwith the macabre. Pressac’s material “drives out emotion, suffering, death,” hesays. Lanzmann tramples on Vidal-Naquet, who licked his boots for years:“The sad thing is that a historian, his being doubtless threatened by thetruth, the force, the evidence of the testimonies, does not hesitate to endorsethis perversity [Pressac’s book]. A historian abdicates before apharmacist […]”Lanzmann smelled a rat in Pressac. He understands much better than themedia and academic crowd, which rushed to embrace Pressac in the hope offinishing off revisionism, that“Faurisson is the only one this convert wants to talk to. To be listenedto by him [Faurisson], he [Pressac] must speak his language, make histhought processes his own, accept his method, produce the crucial evidence,the ultima ratio, that will convince his former master. […] In orderto refute the revisionists’ arguments, one must give them legitimacy, and30 Although the media routinely calls Hilberg a “historian,” that is not his profession. He, too,is another “amateur.”