THE RUDOLF REPORT

5. AUSCHWITZthem. [172] An American revisionist [88] has shot a video in the gas chamber,still presented as authentic: one may see him questioning the visitorswith his ‘revelations’. […] For the moment, things remain as they are,and the visitors are not told anything. This is too complicated. One shallsee later what to do.” (Emphases added.)According to the inflection: they were lying, they are lying, theywill be lying…In view of this unrealistic ‘reconstructions’ carried out after thewar, the Jewish-American professor of architecture Robert van Pelt,who actually is only a professor for cultural history, in co-operationwith the Jewish-Canadian Holocaust historian Deborah Dwork, arrivesat the following, no less unequivocal conclusions: 173“The architecture designed to enact the metamorphosis fromMensch to Untermensch was intact when the Soviets liberated the campin 1945. All traces of it were removed subsequently. The guidebook forsale in the bookstore does not mention the building [crematorium I] atall. Perhaps the men and women who created the museum could not reconcileits implications with their ideology of a resistance: an ideologythat denied total victimization. Perhaps it was simply a question of resourcesand the need for tourist services. Whether for doctrinal or practicalreasons, the destruction of the original arrangement within the presentvisitor reception center is a postwar obfuscation and a loss.There have been additions to the camp the Russians found in 1945as well as deletions, and the suppression of the prisoner reception site ismatched by the reconstruction of crematorium I just outside the northeastperimeter of the present museum camp. With its chimney and its gaschamber, the crematorium functions as the solemn conclusion for toursthrough the camp. Visitors are not told that the crematorium they see islargely a postwar reconstruction.When Auschwitz was transformed into a museum after the war, thedecision was taken to concentrate the history of the whole complex intoone of its component parts. The infamous crematoria where the massmurders had taken place lay in ruins in Birkenau, two miles away. Thecommittee felt that a crematorium was required at the end of the memorialjourney, and crematorium I was reconstructed to speak for the historyof the incinerators at Birkenau. This program usurpation was ratherdetailed. A chimney, the ultimate symbol of Birkenau, was re-created;172 See Serge Thion (ed.), op. cit. (note 33), pp. 316f.; R. Faurisson, “The Gas Chambers…”, op.cit. (note 35), p. 335.173 Op. cit. (note 92), pp. 363f.85