    A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel
    By Robert Faurisson
    From: ssbro14_88

    ELIE WIESEL won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is generally
    accepted as a witness to the Jewish "Holocaust," and, more
    specifically, as a witness to the legendary Nazi extermination gas
    chambers. The Paris daily Le Monde emphasized at the time that Wiesel
    was awarded the Nobel Prize because: (note 1)

    These last years have seen, in the name of so-called "historical
    revisionism," the elaboration of theses, especially in France,
    questioning the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and, perhaps
    beyond that, of the genocide of the Jews itself.

    But in what respect is Elie Wiesel a witness to the alleged gas
    chambers? By what right does he ask us to believe in that means of
    extermination? In an autobiographical book that supposedly describes
    his experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he nowhere mentions the
    gas chambers. (note 2) He does indeed say that the Germans executed
    Jews, but .... by fire; by throwing them alive into flaming ditches,
    before the very eyes of the deportees! No less than that!

    Here Wiesel the false witness had some bad luck. Forced to choose
    from among several Allied war propaganda lies, he chose to defend the
    fire lie instead of the boiling water, gassing, or electrocution
    lies. In 1956, when he published his testimony in Yiddish, the fire
    lie was still alive in certain circles. This lie is the origin of the
    term Holocaust. Today there is no longer a single historian who
    believes that Jews were burned alive. The myths of the boiling water
    and of electrocution have also disappeared. Only the gas remains.

    The gassing lie was spread by the Americans. (note 3) The lie that
    Jews were killed by boiling water or steam (specifically at
    Treblinka) was spread by the Poles. (note 4) The electrocution lie
    was spread by the Soviets.n (note 5)

    The fire lie is of undetermined origin. It is in a sense as old as
    war propaganda or hate propaganda. In his memoir, Night, which is a
    version of his earlier Yiddish testimony, Wiesel reports that at
    Auschwitz there was one flaming ditch for the adults and another one
    for babies. He writes: (note 6)

    Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch, gigantic flames.
    They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered
    its load -- little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it -- saw it with my
    own eyes ... Those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I
    could not sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my eyes.)

    A little farther on there was another ditch with gigantic flames
    where the victims suffered "slow agony in the flames." Wiesel's
    column was led by the Germans to within "three steps" of the ditch,
    then to "two steps." "Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn
    to the left and made to go into a barracks."

    An exceptional witness himself, Wiesel assures us of his having met
    other exceptional witnesses. Regarding Babi Yar, a place in Ukraine
    where the Germans executed Soviet citizens, among them Jews, Wiesel
    wrote: (note 7)

    Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground
    never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of
    blood spurted from it.

    These words did not slip from their author in a moment of frenzy:
    first, he wrote them, then some unspecified number of times (but at
    least once) he had to reread them in the proofs; finally, his words
    were translated into various languages, as is everything this author
    writes.

    That Wiesel personally survived, was, of course, the result of a
    miracle. He says that: (note 8)

    In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths each day. I
    was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?

    In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the "gratuitous lie"
    with regard to the German concentration camps. She wrote: (note 9)

    Those persons [who gratuitously lie] are, to tell the truth, much
    more numerous than people generally suppose, and a subject like that
    of the concentration camp world -- well designed, alas, to stimulate
    sado-masochistic imaginings -- offered them an exceptional field of
    action. We have known numerous mentally damaged persons, half
    swindlers and half fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation; we
    have known others of them -- authentic deportees -- whose sick minds
    strove to go even beyond the monstrosities that they had seen or that
    people said had happened to them. There have been publishers to print
    some of their imaginings, and more or less official compilations to
    use them, but publishers and compilers are absolutely inexcusable,
    since the most elementary inquiry would have been enough to reveal
    the imposture.

    Tillion lacked the courage to give examples and names. But that is
    usually the case. People agree that there are false gas chambers that
    tourists and pilgrims are encouraged to visit, but they do not tell
    us where. They agree that there are false "eyewitnesses," but in
    general they name only Martin Gray, the well-known swindler, at whose
    request Max Gallo, with full knowledge of what he was doing,
    fabricated the bestseller For Those I Loved.

    Jean-François Steiner is sometimes named as well. His bestselling
    novel Treblinka (1966) was presented as a work of which the accuracy
    of every detail was guaranteed by oral or written testimony. In
    reality it was a fabrication attributable, at least in part, to the
    novelist Gilles Perrault. (note 10) Marek Halter, for his part,
    published his La Mémoire d'Abraham in 1983; as he often does on
    radio, he talked there about his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto.
    However, if we are to believe an article by Nicolas Beau that is
    quite favorable to Halter, (note 11) little Marek, about three years
    old, and his mother left Warsaw not in 1941 but in October of 1939,
    before the establishment of the ghetto there by the Germans. Halter's
    book is supposed to have been actually written by a ghost writer,
    Jean-Noël Gurgan.

    Filip Müller is the author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in
    the Gas Chambers, (note 12) which won the 1980 prize of the
    International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA). This
    nauseous best-seller is actually the work of a German ghost writer,
    Helmut Freitag, who did not hesitate to engage in plagiarism. (note
    13) The source of the plagiarism is Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness
    Account, another best-seller made up out of whole cloth and
    attributed to Miklos Nyiszli. (note 14)

    Thus a whole series of works presented as authentic documents turns
    out to be merely compilations attributable to various ghost writers:
    Max Gallo, Gilles Perrault, Jean-Noël Gurgan (?), and Helmut Freitag,
    among others.

    We would like to know what Germaine Tillion thinks about Elie Wiesel
    today. With him the lie is certainly not gratuitous. Wiesel claims to
    be full of love for humanity. However, he does not refrain from an
    appeal to hatred. In his opinion: (note 15)

    "Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate --
    healthy, virile hate -- for what the German personifies and for what
    persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the
    dead."

    At the beginning of 1986, 83 deputies of the German Bundestag took
    the initiative of proposing Wiesel for the Nobel Peace Prize. This
    would be, they said, "a great encouragement to all who are active in
    the process of reconciliation." (note 16) That is what might be
    called "going from National Socialism to national masochism."

    Jimmy Carter needed a historian to preside over the President's
    Commission on the Holocaust. As Dr. Arthur Butz said so well, he
    chose not a historian but a "histrion": Elie Wiesel. Even the
    newspaper Le Monde, in the article mentioned above, was obliged to
    refer to the histrionic trait that certain persons deplore in Wiesel:

    Naturally, even among those who approve of the struggle of this
    American Jewish writer, who was discovered by the Catholic François
    Mauriac, some reproach him for having too much of a tendency to
    change the Jewish sadness into "morbidity" or to become the high
    priest of a "planned management of the Holocaust."

    As Jewish writer Leon A. Jick has written: "The devastating
    barb, 'There is no business like SHOAH-business' is, sad to say, a
    recognizable truth." (note 17)

    Elie Wiesel issues alarmed and inflammatory appeals against
    Revisionist authors. He senses that things are getting out of hand.
    It is going to become more and more difficult for him to maintain the
    mad belief that the Jews were exterminated or were subjected to a
    policy of extermination, especially in so-called gas chambers. Serge
    Klarsfeld has admitted that real proofs of the existence of the gas
    chambers have still not yet been published. He promises proofs. (note
    18)

    On the scholarly plane, the gas chamber myth is finished. To tell the
    truth, that myth breathed its last breath several years ago at the
    Sorbonne colloquium in Paris (June 29-July 2, 1982), at which Raymond
    Aron and François Furet presided. What remains is to make this news
    known to the general public. However, for Elie Wiesel it is of the
    highest importance to conceal that news. Thus all the fuss in the
    media, which is going to increase: the more the journalists talk, the
    more the historians keep quiet.

    But there are historians who dare to raise their voices against the
    lies and the hatred. That is the case with Michel de Boüard, wartime
    member of the Resistance, deportee to Mauthausen, member of the
    Committee for the History of the Second World War from 1945 to 1981,
    and a member of the Institut de France. In a poignant interview in
    1986, he courageously acknowledged that in 1954 he had vouched for
    the existence of a gas chamber at Mauthausen where, it finally turns
    out, there never was one. (note 19)

    The respect owed to the sufferings of all the victims of the Second
    World War, and, in particular, to the sufferings of the deportees,
    demands on the part of historians a return to the proven and time-
    honored methods of historical criticism.

    Notes
    October 17, 1986. Front page.
    There is one single allusion, extremely vague and fleeting, on pages
    78-79: Wiesel, who very much likes to have conversations with God,
    says to Him: "But these men here, whom You have betrayed, whom You
    have allowed to be tortured, butchered, gassed, burned, what do they
    do? They pray before you!" (Night, New York, Discus/Avon Books, 1969,
    p. 79). In his preface to that same book, François Mauriac
    mentioned "the gas chamber and the crematory" (p. 8). The four
    crucial pages of "testimony" by Elie Wiesel are reproduced in
    facsimile in: Pierre Guillaume, Droit et Histoire (La Vieille Taupe,
    1986), pp. 147-150. In the German-language edition of Night (Die
    Nacht zu begraben, Elischa [Ullstein, 1962]), on 14 occasions the
    word "crematory" or "crematories" has been falsely given
    as "Gaskammer" ("gas chamber[s]"). In January of 1945, in
    anticipation of a Russian takeover, the Germans were evacuating
    Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, a young teenager at the time, was
    hospitalized in Birkenau (the "extermination camp") after surgery on
    an infected foot. His doctor had recommended two weeks of rest and
    good food but, before his foot healed, the Russian takeover became
    imminent. Hospital patients were considered unfit for the long trip
    to the camps in Germany and Elie thus could have remained at Birkenau
    to await the Russians. Although his father had permission to stay
    with him as a hospital patient or orderly, father and son talked it
    over and decided to move out with the Germans. (See Night, p. 93. See
    also D. Calder, The Sunday Sun [Toronto, Canada], May 31, 1987, p.
    C4.)
    See the US War Refugee Board Report, German Extermination Camps:
    Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC), November 1944.
    See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293). Published in the IMT "blue
    series," Vol. 32, pp. 153-158.
    See the report in Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4, and the UP report in
    the Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 2.
    Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43, 44, 79, 93.
    Paroles d'étranger (Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 86.
    "Author, Teacher, Witness," Time magazine, March 18, 1985, p. 79.
    "Le Système concentrationnaire allemand [1940-1944]," Revue
    d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, July 1954, p. 18, n. 2.
    Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p. 5.
    Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19.
    Published by Stein and Day (New York). Paperback edition of 1984.
    (xii + 180 pages.) With a foreword by Yehuda Bauer of the Institute
    of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
    Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: un caso di plagio, Parma (Italy): 1986.
    See also: C. Mattogno, "Auschwitz: A Case of Plagiarism," The Journal
    of Historical Review, Spring 1990, pp. 5-24.
    Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published by Fawcett Crest (New
    York).
    Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: "Appointment with Hate"), New York:
    Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New York: Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178.
    The Week in Germany (published in New York by the German government
    in Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2.
    "The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American Public," Yad
    Vashem Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p. 316.
    VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37.
    Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6.

    Summary
    Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to the
    alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night,
    he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have
    witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all
    historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most absurd stories of
    other "eyewitnesses." He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons
    sent to their deaths each day in Buchenwald.

    When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the
    choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners,"
    or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the
    two decided to leave with their German captors.

    It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for the genuine
    sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians
    return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the
    testimony of the Holocaust "eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous
    scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance.