Holocaust Revisionism And its Political Consequences

Jürgen Graf, January 2001, in Tehran exile

14. A brief historical survey of holocaust Revisionism

1950: Former French resistance fighter and inmate of the Buchenwald concentration camp Paul Rassinier publishes Le Mensonge d'Ulysse in which he states that there were no gas chambers at Buchenwald. Rassinier thinks that gas chambers undoubtedly had existed in some of the other camps but that the number of gassing victims had been relatively small.

1964: In Le Drame des Juifs europeens, Rassinier calls the gas chamber and Jewish extermination story the "most macabre lie of all times" and demonstrates the impossibility of the six million figure.

1967: Paul Rassinier, the father of revisionism, dies.

1972: Richard Harwood, Did Six million really die? Although not perfect, this brochure, which is quite successful, contains many cogent arguments against the traditional holocaust story.

1976: Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. This book, which marks a great leap forward for revisionism, is to become a classic, although it is not easy to read. Butz, a professor of electronic engineering, brilliantly demonstrates that the Allies could not possibly have been unaware of a mass extermination in the German sphere of influence. Had they known of such an extermination, they would have reacted to stop it. But they did not do anything, because they knew the claims of the Jewish organisations were just war propaganda.

1978: Wilhelm Staeglich, Der Auschwitz Mythos. Staeglich, a German judge, masterfully analyses the foundations of the orthodox Auschwitz claims and demonstrates their hollowness. In the last chapter, he dissects the infamous Auschwitz trial which was held in Frankfurt from 1963 to 1965 and shows how the German judicial system violated all norms of legal ethics to "prove" the alleged mass murder of Jews at Auschwitz.

1979: French revisionist professor Robert Faurisson publishes several articles in which he points out the technical impossibilities of the Auschwitz gassing story. From now on, the emphasis of revisionist research will be on the technical aspects.

1980: French revisionist Serge Thion publishes Verite historique ou verite politique?, a very important book about revisionism and the Faurisson affair.

1982: Faurisson, Reponse a Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Responding to the purely emotional anti-revisionist outpours of French Jewish scholar Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Faurisson shows that the enemies of revisionism have no serious arguments.

1983: German-American revisionist Walter Sanning publishes The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, which is exclusively based upon Jewish and allied sources and still is the most serious study of Jewish population losses during World War Two. Sanning comes to the conclusion that about 1,3 million Jews died during the War, but that less than half of these losses can be attributed to the German policy: more than half of the Jewish war victims died as soldiers at the front or during Soviet deportations.

1984: Terrorists burn down the Institute for Historical Review in California.

1985: First Zundel trial in Toronto, Canada. German citizen Ernst Zuendel goes on trial for spreading the Harwood book Did Six Million really die? As there is no anti-revisionist law in Canada, the court applies an obscure English law from the Middle Ages which forbids "spreading false news". Although Zundel is sentenced to 15 months in jail, the trial is a disaster for the adherents of the holocaust story, as several first-class experts are allowed to present their arguments against the alleged extermination of the Jews. The two star witnesses of the prosecution, Prof. Raul Hilberg and former Jewish Auschwitz inmate Rudolf Vrba, are mercilessly cross-examined by Zundel's lawyer Douglas Christie. Hilberg shows himself to be hopelessly incompetent, while Vrba is unmasked as an impudent liar.

1986: The "Roques affair" in France. Henri Roques submits a doctoral thesis about the Gerstein report. The "confessions" of SS officer Kurt Gerstein are considered to be the best proof for the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the Belzec camp. Roques shows in his thesis that there are no less than six contradictory versions of this report, and that all of them are full of absurdities. The media unleash a hateful smear campaign against the university of Nantes which had accepted Roques' thesis. Following protests from Jewish organisations and Israel, Roques is finally stripped of his doctor title. In Switzerland, schoolteacher Mariette Paschoud, who had endorsed Roques, loses her job after a media smear campaign.

1988: Second Zuendel trial in Toronto. Zuendel's punishment is reduced to 9 months (four years later, in 1992, he will be acquitted by the Canadian supreme court, and the law which served to condemn him will be declared unconstitutional.) During the trial, US execution expert Fred Leuchter, who has constructed gas chambers used to execute criminals in some American states, goes to Poland with a small group of helpers to inspect the "gas chambers" at Auschwitz I, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. In a subsequent report, he concludes that these rooms could not have served as homicidal gas chambers for technical and chemical reasons. Despite undeniable flaws, the Leuchter report deals a devastating blow to the holocaust story because it greatly enhances the popularity of revisionism and because the result of Leuchter's finding will later be confirmed by Germar Rudolf in a much more scientific study.

1990: France enacts the scandalous Gayssot law against revisionism. This law forbids the questioning of any "crime against humanity" defined as such by the Nuremberg tribunal. It will subsequently serve as a basis for anti-revisionist persecution in France.

1993: First version of Germar Rudolf's expertise about the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. In this masterly study, Rudolf demonstrates that the "gas chambers" were never exposed to the insecticide Zyklon B purportedly used to exterminate Jews.

French historian Jean-Claude Pressac publishes Les crematoires d'Auschwitz which the media hail as the definite refutation of revisionism. But as Pressac is unable to adduce even the slightest documentary evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers, his book only underlines the weakness of the holocaust story - quite apart from the fact that Pressac makes numerous startling concessions to the revisionists.

1994: Choosing the pen-name "Ernst Gauss" in the vain hope to protect himself from legal persecution, Germar Rudolf edits Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (Foundations of contemporary history). This scientific anthology contains a series of articles written by different revisionst scholars about various aspects of the holocaust. The book is soon forbidden in Germany, and Rudolf goes into exile to avoid being sent to jail.

Even before the publication of Grundlagen, the German regime, reacting to the growing influence of revisionism, drastically sharpens the anti-revisionist law.

Pierre Marais, Les camions a gas en question. In an excellent study, French automobile constructor Marais demonstrates that the "homicidal gas vans" allegedly used by the German to kill Jews at the Chelmno camp and in Russia never existed.

Juergen Graf, Auschwitz. Taetergestaendnisse und Augenzeugen des Holocaust. The first collection of eyewitness reports about the alleged gassings at Auschwitz reveals the absurdity of these accounts.

1995: The "anti-racism law", which mainly serves as an instrument to suppress revisionism, is enacted in Switzerland.

Carlo Mattogno, Robert Faurisson, Serge Thion and Germar Rudolf extensively refute Pressac's book Les Crematoires d'Auschwitz, which had been the last serious attempt to prove the existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers, in their response Auschwitz. Nackte Fakten ("Auschwitz. Naked facts").

1996: The Garaudy affair in France. World-famous French philosopher Roger Garaudy, who has earlier converted to Islam, cautiously endorses Holocaust revisionism in his book Les mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne. Although the revisionist chapter of the book is rather mediocre, the Garaudy affair creates havoc among the French Jews and is a tremendous success for the revisionists.

From his British exile, Germar Rudolf starts publishing his Vierteljahreshefte fuer freie Geschichtsforschung ("Quarterly for free historical research"), a high-quality revisionist journal.

Anti-revisionist French historian Jacques Baynac concedes in two long articles in the Swiss newspaper Le Nouveau Cotidien that there are no proofs for the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.

1998: Juergen Graf and Carlo Mattogno, KL Majdanek. Eine historische und technische Studie. The first scientific book about the Majdanek concentration camp proves that there were no homicidal gas chambers at that camp, that the alleged mass shooting of Jewish prisoners did not take place and that about 42.500 people died at Majdanek.

2000: An enlarged and updated English version of Grundlagen is published by Germar Rudolf under the title Dissecting the Holocaust.

In London, revisionist historian David Irving loses his court case against Jewish anti-revisionist writer Deborah Lipstadt whom he had sued for libel, but efficiently demolishes Jewish holocaust historian Robert van Pelt, D. Lipstadt's witness number one.

Australian engineer Richard Krege conducts his ground radar investigation at Belzec and Treblinka. The results, which will prove the non-existence of the alleged huge mass graves at both camps, will be published in 2001 and administer the coup de grace to the Belzec and Treblinka swindle.

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