Supplements

Supplement 1: The International Holocaust Controversy

Presented orally at the 1979 conference of the Institute for Historical Review. This is a slightly edited version of the paper as published in the

Journal of Historical Review, vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 1980, pp. 5-22.

Some of you may be accustomed to hearing of me speak on the subject that I call "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century," the legend of the physical extermination of millions of Jews, usually six million, by the government of National Socialist Germany during the Second World War. On several occasions, I have met with interested groups and given them what amounts to an oral synopsis of many of the arguments in my book.

Today I will cover different ground; I shall not concentrate on the hoax itself, but on the development of the international controversy surrounding the hoax. I have several reasons for this choice of subjects, and probably the most obvious is the fact that this is after all an advanced group of well-informed persons, many or most of whom are familiar with the relevant English language literature, and Dr. Faurisson is here to show you some things about the hoax you probably have not seen yet.[478] Another subject only partially known to most here is the development of the international controversy. Indeed, many "well informed" Americans are not aware that there has been a very loud international Holocaust controversy recently, because they are forced to get most of their information on world developments from the U.S. press, which sometimes gives readers the impression that Butz is the only author who has rejected or challenged central claims of the extermination legend.

There are important perspectives to be gained by viewing the controversy on an international scale. Permit me to say a few more words motivating the present focus on the controversy surrounding the hoax rather that the hoax itself.

A Simple Subject

One of my dilemmas is that, by writing a whole book on the hoax, I may have suggested something that I did not wish to suggest, because there is an important point that I should perhaps have stressed. I wrote on page 24, but did not stress, the important point that

"There are many considerations supporting this view, and some are so simple that they may surprise the reader even further. The simplest valid reason for being skeptical about the extermination claim is also the simplest conceivable reason: at the end of the war, they were still there."

The dilemma I am delineating is that, by generating much verbiage on this subject, I may give some the impression that it is a complex one. Therefore let me state emphatically that the great verbiage is required not because the subject is complicated but because public opinion has become distorted by the media's generation of many times that verbiage, generated over several decades, with the consequence that unusual and elaborate therapy is required. However, it is very important that this select group not lose sight of the fact that the subject is quite simple and that only a cultural illness has made the great efforts of revisionists necessary.

The elements in an effective exposé of the hoax are not many. The principal points are as follows:

1. The Jews were singled out for special persecution by Nazi Germany. Many were deprived of their property, conscripted for labor, or deported east during the war. The German documents do not speak of exterminations. The term "Final Solution" (Endlösung) meant the expulsion of the Jews from Europe, and the deportations to the east were a step toward that objective.

2. Documents published by the International Red Cross and the Vatican do not harmonize with the extermination claims, and the very well informed wartime Pope, Pius XII, is often castigated for not speaking up against exterminations of Jews.

3. Partially on account of general wartime conditions and partially as a consequence of the German measures against the Jews (e.g. crowding into ghettos), a large number of Jews perished, but nothing near six million.

4. Published population statistics are quite meaningless, mainly because almost all of the Jews involved in the problem were East European (e.g. two or three million Polish Jews), but also because in the USA there has been no reliable count - the census does not treat this and the concept "Jew" was not admitted into the official records when a very large number entered the U.S. after the war. To the extent that a significant number of Jews might seem to be missing from some region they occupied before the war, they can to the best of our knowledge be accounted for in terms of the massive and well known postwar movements of Jews to the U.S., Palestine, and other lands, and also in terms of their simply remaining in the Soviet Union where the Germans had put them, according to the German documents.

5. The evidence for the extermination allegations depends crucially on trials, such as the Nuremberg trials, held before courts that were for political reasons constrained to accept the basic truth of such allegations. Thus, to many relevant defendants it seemed that the only possible defense strategy was to deny not the exterminations but only their personal responsibility for them (e.g. Ernst Kaltenbrunner or Adolf Eichmann).

6. The horrible scenes found in the German camps in 1945 were the result of the total collapse - in the context of the total collapse of German industry and transport - of all German countermeasures against diseases, mainly typhus, that had plagued all German camps throughout the war. These German countermeasures had included periodic showers of all inmates and also extensive and periodic use of insecticides, such as Zyklon B, for disinfestation purposes.

7. Concentration camp inmates were an important source of labor for the hard pressed wartime German economy, and the high death rate that prevailed in the camps throughout the war was considered "catastrophic" by the Germans (Chapter 4, p. 160). As a result of the high death rate, about 350,000 or perhaps 400,000 inmates died in the German camps during the war, some minority of that number being Jews.[479]

8. There were crematoria in all of the camps for the disposal of the bodies of people who died there.

9. The camps in Germany are not even claimed to have been "extermination camps," except in occasional publications of a frankly sensationalistic nature. The so-called "extermination camps," such as Auschwitz, were all in Poland and were captured by the Soviet troops after having been evacuated in an orderly fashion by the Germans. The Russians found no horrible scenes comparable to those we later found in Germany and no evidence of exterminations.

10. The "gas chambers" are fictitious, and the best the bearers of the legend can do to argue their existence is to advance the ludicrous claim that the Zyklon did double duty in exterminating Jews as well as lice or to misrepresent a shower or even an ordinary room as a "gas chamber." Another tactic is to confuse the concept of a "gas oven." All crematorium ovens are "gas ovens."

That is the basic structure of the hoax.

Why a "Hoax"?

At this point, it is convenient to remark on the title I chose for my book. In the controversy, one of the things that jolted some, even some who were otherwise favorably impressed by the book, was my use of the term "hoax" to describe the received legend. Some felt that, whatever the truth of the legend, the term was not adequate or appropriate to the situation. Such a trivializing concept, it was thought, should not be applied to a legend that lives on the vast scale of the Holocaust - it struck some as comparable to criticizing Handel's Messiah as a "ditty."

Let me assure you that the choice of "hoax" was calculated and that today I am even more convinced that it was a felicitous choice, for the reason that the thing really is trivial. The term "hoax" suggests something cheap and crude, and that is precisely what I wish to suggest. A term such as "myth," although correct and sometimes used by me, does not convey this important description of the nature of the evidence supporting the extermination claim.

The uncomfortable reaction to the term "hoax" merely reflects the nature of the great popular delusion on this subject. At one time, some of the people who are addressing you here, such as Dr. Faurisson and myself, shared not only the popular belief in the truth of the legend but also the popular impression that its truth was beyond question - "as established as the Great Pyramid," as I wrote. However, at some point we undertook an investigation and discovered, remarkably quickly, that beneath the legend's face of granite there stood feet of clay.

It is this focus on the feet of clay, which revisionists have seen in the historical record, that creates a great psychological distance between the revisionists and even many intelligent people, and sometimes causes revisionists to appear to be crusaders of some sort. Those who have not seen the feet of clay cannot have the degree of certainty that seems to accompany revisionists. I believe that perhaps this contrast between the apparent dignity of the received legend and the reality of its crude and contemptible foundations is the key point that must be developed in the psychological reorientation of people whom you wish to inform. Once such a psychological reorientation is accomplished, the rest is routine. The jolt that the word "hoax" causes is a calculated initial step in this reorientation.

A Societal Problem

Another reason for the wish to focus on the controversy here is that it represents a distinct problem. That is, there is an historical problem, treated in my book, and there is also the problem of the societal status of the legend, the subject of my talk today. The former, the historical problem, is relatively simple in comparison to the latter, or perhaps I should say that I do not feel that I understand the societal status of the hoax nearly as well as I understand the hoax itself. However, a couple of obvious features can be safely noted. For one thing, it is a case of media induced hysteria. For another, the political interests involved are not dead and gone, like those of World War I, but are as contemporary as tomorrow's headlines, for Israel is always in trouble and will be in trouble as long as it exists as a Jewish state.

This has put historical scholarship into a dreadful situation, which can be seen more clearly, if we consider the manner, in which knowledge is almost always diffused in the "hard" sciences. There it is almost always the case that trained specialists, with appropriate credentials as professionals in the scientific area involved, make the initial revelations of new knowledge. These revelations are normally made first to colleagues and are formulated in the esoteric language of the specialty. Then, over some period of time, the new knowledge filters to general society, with the terms, in which it is described, undergoing in the process gradual simplification and popularization.

That is clearly not what has been happening in this "Holocaust" area. The non-specialist who has seen the feet of clay cannot get his most urgent and elementary questions answered by consulting the scholarly journals, for the simple reason that the societal and political conditions I have referred to have frightened the scholars away, and that is essentially the cultural illness I referred to earlier. It is not so much that the historians have had the wrong answers - they have not even confronted the questions, and the number of persons outside of the historical profession, to whom that fact is painfully obvious, is as least literal myriads today. Imagine such a situation holding in physics.

Now one can understand the curiosity that so disturbs many persons that this is "a field completely dominated by non-historians," as I wrote in Chapter 7 (p. 263). Although the remark is no longer entirely true, it is still largely the case that the people who have drawn the obvious conclusions from the feet of clay and have publicized their conclusions do not have backgrounds as historians - mine is in engineering. I am the first to concede that this is a sorry situation, but the situation would be even more sorry, if nobody were asking questions about the so-called Holocaust. We can and should take considerable comfort from the fact that we have retained the cultural vitality to carry on here despite the default of the historians.

Another facet of this is the fact that, the normal channels for the flow of knowledge having been blocked, leadership in disseminating the revisionist view of the Final Solution has fallen to publications with special ideological orientations. For example The Spotlight in the U.S. and the National Zeitung in Germany are weekly newspapers that do not claim to be scholarly, but again we should take comfort from the fact that somebody has been beating the drum, for such widely read publications do nevertheless create pressures on the historians that make it more difficult for them to continue avoiding this subject.

They also serve to inform the general public, and here we should take note of the requirements of historical revisionism, because I may be misunderstood by some here and it may appear from my remarks that I am claiming that ideally such matters should be confined to scholarly journals and that the general public should not be bothered with them. I intend no such meaning, but it is true that there must be a distinction between the matters treated by scholars and those treated by the popular press.

The general public does not have the faculties or temperaments to treat knowledge in the ways of the specialists, so one must be prepared to accept something else for such purposes, and here it is useful to distinguish between an intolerable and a tolerable popular outlook. It would, for example, be intolerable if the populace believe the world to be flat. However, I suppose that for all practical purposes a belief that it is spherical would be tolerable and that a concern for the macro and micro deviations from sphericity can be left to the relevant specialists.

A comparable situation holds in this "Holocaust" area, and most of the publications that have been propagating the revisionist viewpoint on the "Six Million" have been doing a reasonably good job, both in terms of informing their readerships, given the noted constraints imposed by them, and in terms of generating pressures on the historians who might prefer to avoid the subject.

Development of the Controversy

Before the early Seventies, there was only a relatively minor amount of publicly expressed questioning of the Holocaust legend. The most significant literature was the work of the former Buchenwald inmate and French Resistance member Paul Rassinier, who died in 1967. However, in reflection of the fact that there existed little interest in the subject, English translations of the Rassinier books were not published until very recently, i.e. in the past four years.

Around 1972 or 1973, there was an international development, by its nature not noticed at the time, that remains fundamentally mysterious. What I am referring to is the fact that a number of persons in several countries, virtually simultaneously and completely independently of each other (in fact each was not even aware of the existence of the others) resolved to question the received legend in the manner that was appropriate to his own situation and to publish his conclusions. Thies Christophersen's booklet Die Auschwitz Lüge, based on his recollections of his own stay near Auschwitz during the war and with an Introduction by Manfred Roeder, was published in Germany in 1973, and it was soon followed there by Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich's short article in the monthly Nation Europa, also based on his recollections of his wartime assignment near Auschwitz. The year 1973 also saw the appearance in the U.S. of Dr. Austin J. App's booklet The Six Million Swindle.

Richard Harwood's booklet Did Six Million Really Die? was published in Britain in the spring of 1974, and later in the same year there was the uproar at the Sorbonne over a letter by Dr. Robert Faurisson, so both were at work on this subject in 1973, if not earlier. My work commenced in 1972, and my book was published in Britain in the spring of 1976 and in German translation a year later.

In this review, I have not mentioned every relevant publication, and no value judgments should be made purely from the inclusion or exclusion of anything from the list. The purpose here is not to offer a bibliography or a critique but to discuss the development of the controversy.

These developments of the early and mid-Seventies initiated reactions and a controversy that still shows no sign of subsiding, as I think you are aware. In Germany, Roeder was successfully prosecuted for his Introduction to the Christophersen booklet,[480] and Stäglich was punished with a five year, twenty percent reduction of his pension as a retired judge.[481] These acts of officially enforced censorship did not daunt any of these persons. A new version of the Christophersen booklet was issued with an Introduction by Stäglich substituted for Roeder's. Stäglich has recently published his fine book Der Auschwitz Mythos through the Grabert-Verlag, and he has also co-published a shorter work with Udo Walendy. The so-called liberal establishment in Germany has been in a dither over this lone courageous man, and it has been openly asked in its press "is it really so difficult to get this old and neo-Nazi?"[482]

Events unfolded differently in Britain, indeed in such a manner as to clearly suggest that questioning of the holy Six Million was not much longer to be restricted to an underground of any sort. In an astonishing development, the now famous Harwood booklet was favorably reviewed by the well known author Colin Wilson in the November 1974 issue of the influential monthly Books and Bookman. A furious controversy, which lasted about six months, ensued in the "Letters" section of this magazine. I have elsewhere criticized the Harwood booklet and pointed out some serious errors in it.[483] However, it also has its virtues and has been effective in stimulating questions, cerebration, and discussion of its formerly taboo subject. It was banned in South Africa in 1976[484] and effectively banned in West Germany in its German translation in late 1978.

The Institute of Jewish Affairs in London published its quite vacuous article on my book in the November-December 1976 issue of its magazine Patterns of Prejudice. Around the same time, there began at Northwestern University an uproar over my book that soon resulted in national and even international publicity. There was a long story in the New York Times, but the story misreported the title of the book as Fabrication of Hoax.[485] I shall say a few more words about the fuss at Northwestern later.

In April 1977, I wrote to the magazine Index on Censorship (headquartered in London and affiliated with Amnesty International) to report to them the many acts of official censorship in this area, such as the events in Germany and South Africa. Index has assumed the responsibility of merely reporting instances of censorship, usually without further comment. They replied to me in May 1977 that they "will put the question of whether or not to take it up to our editorial board." On my trip to Europe in the summer of 1977, I visited their headquarters and was told the editorial board had not yet deliberated on the matter. I have heard no further word from them, and I intend to write to them again soon to report new instances of censorship, which were not long in coming, for I was forbidden from speaking in Munich on September 3, 1977.[486]

Another development of 1977 was the commencement of the English language publishing operations of Ditlieb Felderer's excellent group in Sweden.[487]

March 1978 brought the tragedy of the assassination of the French historian François Duprat, allegedly by an Auschwitz "remembrance commando," for the offense of having denied the Six Million.[488]

Spring 1978 saw the U.S. airing of NBC's eight hour Holocaust monstrosity with all the preliminary and post hoopla. The inanities and hysterics were repeated in Britain later in 1978 and in several European countries early in 1979. In Germany, the airing of Holocaust was perfectly timed to influence the Bundestag's decision not to permit a statute of limitations to go into effect for "war crimes." I criticized Holocaust elsewhere, and I shall not waste words on it here.[489] I understand that it is to be shown again soon.

In the summer of 1978, the Noontide Press edition of some of Rassinier's writings appeared.[490] A year later, Historical Review Press issued its English translation of Rassinier's Eichmann book.[491]

Late 1978 brought a significant escalation of the controversy in all senses. In October 1978, the German publisher Propyläen issued Prof. Hellmut Diwald's massive Geschichte der Deutschen (History of the Germans). Propyläen is an old firm, now owned by Axel Springer, which specializes in publishing books written by scholars but for an intelligent lay readership. On two pages, Diwald said some things very much in harmony with things revisionists of the "Final Solution" have said, and of course the clamor of the Establishment's spokesmen was deafening. Golo Mann wrote that "these two pages [...] are the most monstrous that I have had to read in a German book since 1945,"[492] and the publisher responded to the clamor by stopping the sale of the first edition and substituting a new edition with the two offending pages hastily rewritten - in a style I am assured is not Diwald's - in order to conform to the usual line. Axel Springer further promised publicly, in words I cannot imagine coming from a U.S. publisher under any circumstances, that this was only the beginning of the rewriting of the book and that by fall 1979 the book would be "not recognizable."[493]

The original two pages that Diwald had published were not particularly significant in themselves; relatively little was said. There are, however, two points of major significance to note. First, Diwald does not lack credentials as an historian. He is a history professor at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen and has been well known in the historical profession since taking his doctorate under the German-Jewish historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps more than two decades ago. Second, the fact of the panic rewriting of the two pages, as a result of public pressure, definitively established points that should be made when people ask such questions as "why do even the Germans concede the reality of the six million murders?" or "why do the historians concede them?" The market in ideas in this area is not a free one. Throughout the world, there are at least informal and unofficial barriers to free expression and discussion.

In some countries, especially in Germany, there are also formal and legally enforced barriers. That fact has already been noted here, but late 1978 saw the initiation in Germany of a great new wave of repression. In that country there exists the concept of "youth-menacing media" (jugendgefährdende Medien). It is something like the "X rating" concept in the USA, except that its application is supervised by the government and not almost entirely restricted to pornography. In theory, the law is supposed to prevent only the availability of things to youth, but when non-pornographic matter goes on the list, the practical effect is to ban it, for the law specifies that listed literature may not be advertised or sold to private parties by mail. It can still be sold in bookstores, subject to certain restrictions, but with the exception of the Diwald book the literature that has been discussed here had never been stocked by regular bookstores in Germany anyway.

Late 1978 marked the beginning of an obviously systematic campaign in West Germany to put much of the literature I have told you about on the list of youth-menacing literature. The first was the German translation of the Harwood booklet, and the German translation of my book, entitled Der Jahrhundertbetrug, went onto the list in May 1979.[494] There is also a move against the Stäglich book that is too recent to discuss further here. Such developments in the official area in Germany, together with developments in the unofficial area, such as the Diwald affair, answer conclusively the question of why even Germans concede the reality of the "exterminations." The system that we set up there after the Second World War gives them no other choice.

Almost simultaneously with these events in Germany, things were happening in France. In late October 1978, l'Express, a magazine comparable to Newsweek, published an interview with Louis Darquier de Péllepoix, who had been commissioner for Jewish affairs in the Vichy government during the German occupation and who has lived in Spain since the war. Darquier's generally unrepentant attitude - plus his claim that the only creatures gassed at Auschwitz had been lice - set off a French uproar virtually coincident with the one around Diwald on the other side of the Rhine. Most significantly for our interests, the spotlight then turned on Robert Faurisson, who was then teaching at the University of Lyon-2 and who had been almost forgotten since the relatively minor flap when he was at the Sorbonne in 1974. The disorders on the part of some of the students led to Faurisson's suspension from his teaching duties, a suspension that is still in effect, but another result of all their attention to Faurisson's supposedly outrageous views was that Le Monde, the French equivalent of the New York Times, saw itself obligated, much against its wishes, to give him space in which to express these views. It is true that Le Monde gave the other side much more space, but an important barrier had been broken, at least in France, and I am told that today there are a lot of questions being openly asked in that country whose expression would have been inconceivable only a year ago.[495]

As a consequence of the publicity in France, Faurisson was able to participate in a three hour debate on Italian-language Swiss television on April 17, 1979. I am told that the program generated enormous interest, that most impartial observers thought Faurisson had won the debate, and that the whole thing was rebroadcast on May 6. As a result of the television debate, a long interview with Faurisson was published in the August 1979 and following issues of the Italian magazine Storia Illustrata; this interview is by far the most instructive material on the Holocaust subject to be published, to date, in an "Establishment" magazine or newspaper.[496]

At the height of the Diwald and Faurisson controversies in Europe, another one broke out in Australia. John Bennett, a Melbourne civil liberties lawyer, had sent copies of my book to several Melbourne academics, together with a memo by him summarizing what seemed to him to be some of the principal arguments in support of the thesis of the book, and inviting critical comment (I understand that to date, despite the publicity there, almost no such comment had been forthcoming). Neither the memo nor anything else Bennett had written on the subject had been intended for publication, but one weekly newspaper got a copy of the memo somehow and published it, igniting a controversy that lasted several months.[497]

In these controversies, the guardians of the legend have said very little of intellectual content. It has, with only rare exceptions, been all name-calling - "anti-Semitic," "neo-Nazi," etc. So here are a few people who have lived well up to or into middle age without it ever having occurred to anybody to call them such things and who are now so belatedly assaulted with these political cuss words just because they asked questions about the Six Million.

There was another important development early in 1979 and it came, oddly, from the CIA. Two photointerpreters released their study of some aerial reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz that the U.S. made in 1944, when Auschwitz was of strategic interest as an oil target. Despite the publicity and even an historian's claims that the photographs provided some sort of evidence of exterminations, there was no such evidence in the photographs.[498] What was to be found in the photographs was on crucial points exactly what was predicted in my book, where it was shown in Chapter 5 that such photographs must exist, although I had not seen them.[499]

Negative Reactions in Academia

I have suggested that the negative reactions to revisionists of the Final Solution have been on the whole emotional, and I made no distinction between reactions of professional scholars and laymen. This was no oversight. I am sad to report that to an extent that stunned me the reactions of very many scholars have been what one might have expected from a hyperemotional Jewish grandmother. In the early stages of the public reactions to my book, one Prof. Wolfe of New York University made a fool of himself by writing to the New York Times that Northwestern University should bring me up on charges of "academic incompetence" and "moral turpitude" for authoring and publishing the book whose title, he reported in his letter, was "Fabrication of a Hoax." Clearly he had seen the New York Times story about the book, which reported an incorrect title, and he had not seen the book itself.[500]

That was an extreme case, but it is still true that scholars who should know better have made a lot of noises while saying almost nothing of substance. In all of the professorial criticism of my book at Northwestern, the only point of historical weight that was raised against it, and that reached me, was that the published population statistics are in conflict with my claims. That fact is mentioned and discussed in the first chapter of my book (p. 187).

The History Department at Northwestern supposedly undertook to sponsor a series of lectures entitled "Dimensions of the Holocaust," but then the Chairman of the Department gave the show away in his introductory remarks by thanking the Hillel Foundation for rounding up the speakers for the affair. The University shortly later published the lectures in a booklet that is presumably still available.

There was another instructive development at Northwestern. There was published in the student newspaper a full page advertisement, sponsored by the Hillel Foundation and bearing a statement of "condemnation" signed by about half of the faculty.[501] There is no need to reproduce the text here. The statement mentioned "the murder of over eleven million people, among them six million Jews, by Nazi Germany," and I think the most interesting feature of this is not the six million Jews but the five million or more others, who seem to have been added to the propaganda both rather recently and rather arbitrarily, although it is said that so-called "Nazi-hunter" Simon Wiesenthal has used the figure for some time.[502]

There is apparently some specific propaganda point served by the five million Gentiles. Wiesenthal claims that "one of the biggest mistakes made on the side of the Jews" has been to emphasize only the six million Jews and not the others, with the result that Jews "lost many friends." I must confess that I do not see the point at all, but apparently it has been decided to toss the five million Gentiles into the propaganda on at least selected occasions.

To return to the statement of condemnation that was signed by so many faculty members at Northwestern, there is clearly something graver involved here than mere conformity to a doctrine or established myth, for it is a certainty that the vast majority of the signers had never heard of the five million goyim until they were confronted with the statement to sign. Their subscription was therefore not based on mere unquestioning acceptance of a familiar historical claim. It was based on considerations even more baleful to an academic environment. I will not explore the point further here, but it is easy to get the dismal impression that many would have signed almost anything related to the controversy, provided the Hillel Foundation wished it signed.

It is dismaying to report such behavior on the part of those to whom society has entrusted the custody of its affairs of the intellect. However, there are at least some indications that it is being realized that a more serious treatment of my book, if only to attempt to discredit it, is required. It has recently been said that "Butz might succeed in delivering ammunition to more 'revisionists' of the Final Solution. Here lies the danger. Butz should be unmasked, not ignored."[503]

Conclusions

You can see the gist of the conclusions I am going to draw from this account of the development of the controversy. What I have described to you has been a process, whereby a thesis has emerged from the underground, to which it had been assigned both on account of political pressures and on account of its seeming implausibility (given the decades of propaganda), into the light of day where it is being discussed and argued in establishment publications throughout the world. It is still a minority thesis, but the trend in favor of revisionists is obvious to anybody who is not willfully blind.

Revisionists of the Final Solution, a handful of lone individuals of meager resources, have been successful far beyond their expectations - at least I did not expect things to unfold to rapidly - and this cannot be explained entirely in terms of the quality of their efforts. It can only be explained in terms of society's being receptive to such views at this point in history. The development that I have outlined here has now gone so far that I now believe it is almost irrelevant what I and my present revisionist colleagues do, or what happens to us.

To see the reason for this, one need only return to one of my earliest points: this is a simple subject. The almost universal delusions have existed not because of the complexities of the subject but because of political factors in Western society. A corollary of the simplicity of the hoax is that it only need be questioned and discussed, in a context free of intimidation and hysteria, for the psychological reorientation spoken of earlier to be accomplished, the shattering of the delusions following in due course. That point has for all practical purposes been reached or soon will be reached.

I shall make an observation that may seem harsh. Revisionists of the Holocaust have been, to put it bluntly, victims of multifarious persecution. You know only a part of it - the part that appears in the newspapers, such as the book bannings in Germany or Faurisson's suspension at the University of Lyon-2. The other part, the more personal part, is at most only hinted at in the newspapers, is generally not known to you, and we shall not bother you with details of such painful things, but let me assure you they exist. I therefore am fully cognizant that it is harsh of me to make this observation: we should greet the fact of the persecutions, for they are symptomatic of success, and even the victims should be as elated over them as is psychologically possible in the grim personal circumstances they are in.

Sometimes it is said that the revisionist Holocaust thesis is comparable to claiming that the world is flat, but note that nobody bothers the flat earth people. It is not rough to go up against the whole world with no chance of winning, but it is very rough to go up against it with some chance of winning. That is what revisionists of the Final Solution did, and that is the reason for the persecutions, but the persecutions are too late and in vain, for as I just noted: it is almost irrelevant at this point what happens to today's Holocaust revisionists. The present inertia of the controversy has the weight to bring down the hoax even without their personal participation and deliver these mendacious and pernicious years into the trash can of shattered hoaxes.

Notes

[478] | Robert Faurisson, "Extensive Research on the 'Gas Chambers' at Auschwitz", audio tape, 90 min., Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review. Published as: "The Mechanics of Gassing," The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1980, p. 23-30.
[479] | The figure is for deaths of people who had been registered as camp inmates, in written records of which enough have survived to permit the estimate. The legend asserts that the "exterminated" millions were not entered in such records. See the report, "The Number of Victims of the National Socialist Persecution," available from the International Tracing Service, D-3548 Arolsen, Germany. The remark should not be misinterpreted as a claim that the number of Jews who perished was some minority of 350,000. Many more died outside of the concentration camps, from diseases in ghettos, in occasional pogroms, and in other commonplace and uncommonplace ways. The number is not known.
[480] | Jewish Chronicle (London), February 27, 1976, p. 3; Patterns of Prejudice (London), January-February 1977, p. 12.
[481] | Nation Europa (Coburg), August 1975, p. 39.
[482] | Die Zeit, May 25, 1979, p. 5.
[483] | Voice of German Americans (New York), March 1978.
[484] | Patterns of Prejudice, September-October 1977, p. 19.
[485] | New York Times, January 28, 1977, p. A10.
[486] | Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 2, 1977, p. 13; September 3-4, 1977, p. 13f.
[487] | Bible Researcher, Marknadvsvagen 289, 2 tr, S-183 Taby, Sweden.
[488] | Le Monde, March 19-20, 1978, p. 24; March 23, 1978, p. 7.
[489] | Spotlight (Washington), May 8, 1978.
[490] | Rassinier (1978).
[491] | Rassinier (1979).
[492] | Der Spiegel, December 4, 1978, p. 14f.
[493] | Der Spiegel, April 9, 1979, p. 232ff; National Zeitung (Munich), February 16, 1979, p. 6.
[494] | Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 16, 1979, p. 23; New York Times, May 22, 1979, p. A13.
[495] | Le Monde, November 22, 1978, p. 42; December 16, 1978, p. 12; December 29, 1978, p. 8; January 10, 1979, p. 11; January 16, 1979, p. 13; February 3, 1979, p. 10; February 21, 1979, p. 23; March 8, 1979, p. 31.
[496] | English translation published as R. Faurisson, "The gas chambers: Truth or lie?", Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1981, p. 319-373.
[497] | National Times, February 10; February 24; The Age, February 15; February 16; March 3; March 15; March 17; March 22; March 23; March 24; March 28; April 6; April 14; May 8; Nation Review, May 24; May 31; June 28; Weekend Australian, May 26-27. All 1979.
[498] | Washington Post, February 23, 1979, p. A1; New York Times, February 24, 1979, p. 2; March 6, 1979, p. A16.
[499] | Brugioni and Poirier.
[500] | New York Times, February 4, 1977, p. A22.
[501] | Daily Northwestern, March 30, 1977, p. 5.
[502] | Chicago Daily News, November 12-13, 1977; Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1979, part 9, p. 4; Los Angeles Times Calendar, May 13, 1979, p. 2; New York Times, May 28, 1979, p. D7.
[503] | Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, April 1979, p. 264.

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