AUSCHWITZ: PLAIN FACTS - Holocaust Handbooks

Robert Faurisson, Reply to Jean-Claude Pressac on the Problem of the Gas Chambers 67written testimonies which are always liable to error and, in addition, areshrinking in number with the passage of time” (p. 1-2).We shall see that this is nothing but bluster and that the body of the bookis, quite to the contrary, replete with confusions, incoherencies and approximations;recourse to witnesses is a constant practice whenever the author dealswith alleged killings by gas. Even on the matter of the crematory ovens hiswords are desultory and often obscure.In judging such a work, the very simplest of criteria should be applied: ifthe author offers a photograph or a drawing of a Nazi gas chamber, we shallhear him out; otherwise we shall not. Pressac, who is a good photographer, agood draughtsman and probably a good model builder, has carefully avoidedthe test of truth that would have consisted in proposing a graphic or materialrepresentation of one of those prodigious chemical slaughterhouses. Consequently,one really ought not to dwell on this product of a muddled brain. Formy part, however, I shall nonetheless do so in order to let the reader gauge thecatastrophe that this book constitutes for the partisans of the exterminationisttheory.Proceeding in five steps, I shall bring up, one after the other, the obviousfacts that the author has not been able to ignore, the realities he has passedover in silence, the devices he has borrowed from other “Holocaust” historians,deceits of his own creation and, finally, his novelistic ramblings.To close, I shall restate the proposal of the American Fred Leuchter andsuggest to our adversaries that they set up an international commission of expertsthat should examine on site, at Auschwitz and Birkenau, the weaponused in of one of the most atrocious crimes allegedly known to history; in thisway the structures and facilities where hundreds of thousands of Jews (millions,it used to be said) 15 were killed with hydrogen cyanide gas would be putto forensic investigation.For historians who like to think that they have at last undertaken a scientificstudy of Auschwitz, there is no longer any reason to refuse such an investigation.15 Cf., for example, the statement “Auschwitz, where more than five million men, women andchildren perished, of whom 90% were Jews” (“Manifestation du souvenir à Paris devant leMémorial du martyr juif inconnu” [Remembrance ceremony in Paris at the Memorial to theUnknown Jewish Martyr], Le Monde, April 20, 1978). According to this statement in LeMonde, therefore, over four and a half million Jews perished in the Auschwitz and Birkenaucamps alone!