    Robert FAURISSON
    6 April 2006

    Grave Error by Robert Fisk on the Subject of Victor Klemperer’s Diary

    Robert Fisk is the journalist of The Independent (London) who has made
    rather a name for himself with his many reports on the current situation
    of the Palestinians, whom he bravely describes as victims of their
    country’s invasion and occupation by the Jewish Army. His courage has
    earned him enemies. Is it in order to disarm those enemies that, from
    time to time, he stridently takes up the cause of the religion of the
    “Jewish Holocaust” and heads off to war against the revisionists?

    Just recently, on April 1st, he wrote an article entitled “A lesson from
    the Holocaust for us all. This account fills one with rage that anyone
    could deny the reality of the Jewish genocide” (Independent, p. 35).

    The “account” in question is the book compiled from the testimony of the
    German Jew Victor Klemperer on the period from 1933 to 1945. V.
    Klemperer (1881-1960) was the cousin of orchestral conductor Otto
    Klemperer. He lived in Dresden until the atrocious bombing raids of
    February 1945, and then in Western Germany. After the war, he went back
    to Dresden where he resumed his teaching of Romance languages and
    enrolled in the Communist Party, perhaps out of opportunism or
    necessity. As far as political convictions were concerned, he, like many
    Jews of his time, rejected Zionism and held Hitler to be a promoter of
    that Jewish ideology. What has been published of his 5,000 pages of
    diary, with, unhappily, many cuts, is gripping. Actually, his testimony
    is a black mark on those who assiduously tend the “Holocaust” myth.

    Robert Fisk portrays V. Klemperer as an “infinitely heroic” man up
    against the cruelty of the Dresden Gestapo. However, V. Klemperer never
    showed any heroism. If, in 1941, he spent 192 hours in a cell at Dresden
    police headquarters, it was merely for … failure to respect the blackout
    ordered by the civil defence authorities! Besides, according to his own
    words, the personnel there showed themselves on the whole to be kind,
    polite and good-humoured and, when the prisoner complained of being
    bored, he was supplied with pencil and paper as requested. On returning
    to his rooms at the “Jews House” of Dresden, he was, he wrote, “feted a
    little as a kind of martyr”. Till the end the National Socialist State
    kept on disbursing his university professor’s pension. Fisk evokes his
    hero’s “compassion”, in a certain set of circumstances, for three German
    soldiers lost in a forest towards the very end of the war. However, if
    there are aspects of his diary that the reader will find striking, these
    are, on the contrary, V. Klemperer’s egocentrism, judeocentrism,
    callousness at times, his desire for vengeance against the Jews’ enemies
    and his disgust at seeing the German people decidedly set to go on
    fighting to the end, even after the bombing of Dresden. Nonetheless he
    is indeed obliged to admit that, on the whole, the German population
    showed a capacity for consideration towards the wearer of the yellow
    star, on many occasions with the most touching thoughtfulness. To such a
    degree that his memoirs, published in German in 1995, English in 1998
    and French in 2000, bluntly refute the argument maintained by American
    author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
    Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), which aims to confirm the
    German people’s intrinsically perverse and anti-Jewish character. Even
    Martin Chalmers, who prefaced the Klemperer book’s English edition, took
    it upon himself to make that remark. Klemperer wrote: “There is no doubt
    that the people feel the persecution of the Jews to be a sin” (“Fraglos
    empfindet das Volk die Judenverfolgung als Sünde”, note of October 4,
    1941). He related an abundance of anecdotes or “real little facts” along
    the same lines, all in the everyday life of a Jew in the midst of
    Hitler’s Germany.

    As regards the “Jewish genocide”, Fisk offers us the “Six Million
    murdered Jews” as an established truth. On the subject of Auschwitz, he
    specifies that Klemperer had heard about it “as early as March 1942,
    although he did not realise the scale of the mass murders there until
    the closing months of the war”. In reality, Klemperer, like many others,
    had taken note of rumours about Auschwitz at various times during the
    war but it was only after the end of the conflict and under the Soviet
    occupation that a certain “Doctor Kussy” was to tell him “appalling
    things about Auschwitz” and, notably, the gassing of “all those without
    strength” and of “all wearers of eyeglasses” (note of September 24,
    1945; the English version goes no further than June 1945).

    Concerning “gassings”, Klemperer had, during the war, noted only the
    following remark: “People have long been saying that many of the
    evacuees don’t even arrive in Poland alive. They were being gassed in
    cattle trucks during the journey, and the truck then stopped on the line
    by an already-dug mass grave” (note of February 27, 1943), a piece of
    “information” that was only one amidst so many other inventions of the
    war propaganda coming from anti-German quarters.

    No revisionist disputes the fact that many hardships were inflicted on
    the Jews by National Socialist Germany and her allies. Those hardships
    grew heavier as the conflict itself grew heavier. But since “to judge is
    to compare”, it is important to compare the measures taken against the
    Jews with those that the Allies, during and after the war, inflicted on
    their opponents, their prisoners, on the defeated populations, on the
    minorities that they deemed hostile or dangerous. From this point of
    view, the assessment remains to be drawn. In any case, the V.
    Klemperer’s lot was enviable when seen against what tens of millions of
    civilians and soldiers of both sides had to endure, at least from 1939
    to 1950.

    Robert Fisk has wanted to show us his faith in “the Holocaust” and, for
    that purpose, has chosen to invoke the testimony of Victor Klemperer. In
    doing so, he has committed a grave historical error, for the diary kept
    by the German Jew V. Klemperer throughout the entire Nazi period proves
    most plainly that the Third Reich never followed a policy of
    extermination of the Jews. The National Socialists treated the Jews
    first as an undesirable minority, then as a hostile and dangerous group
    in wartime. They planned a “territorial final solution of the Jewish
    question”. They never stopped offering to hand over all of their own
    Jews to the Allies. With the coming of war, they took a great number of
    police, surveillance, prohibition or confiscation measures. They put
    many Jews to forced labour. They deported others and interned them in
    concentration camps. Still other Jews were, in a way, treated like
    prisoners on probation. Such was the case of V. Klemperer, who was free
    to move about, in and around Dresden, amidst the German population, but
    only within the strict conditions decreed by the regulations in force.

    In Los Angeles in 2002, at a conference of the Institute for Historical
    Review, I had the occasion to give a talk on the proceedings and
    punishment carried out by the authorities of the Third Reich,
    particularly the military ones, in the cases of crimes committed against
    Jews. During that talk, I brought up, in passing, V. Klemperer’s diary.
    Upon getting wind of the matter, R. Fisk strongly protested against what
    seemed to him an invention on my part and I recall having had to
    substantiate what I had said. Today, I note that he wants to show us
    that he has read V. Klemperer’s diary. I am afraid he may have gone over
    it hastily and suggest therefore that he re-read closely the whole of
    the work, either in its German version in eight little volumes (Berlin,
    Aufbau Taschenbuch, 1999), or in its English version in two big volumes
    and 1,120 pages (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson Paperback, 1998). He
    will thus learn much about the myth of the “Holocaust” and be better
    informed about the revisionists, including President Ahmadinejad, whom
    he sharply — and altogether wrongly — attacks in his article.

    Just for the period from September 12, 1931 to July 17, 1945, the typed
    manuscript of notes taken by Victor Klemperer amounts to 5,000 pages,
    according to the Sächsischer Landtag Bibliothek (Library of the Land
    Parliament of Saxony) in Dresden.

    German edition: Tagebücher, herausgegeben von Walter Nowojski unter
    Mitarbeit von Hadwig Klemperer, Berlin, Aufbau-Verlag, 1995. Edition
    consulted: that published in 8 paperback volumes (1,800 pages) by ATV,
    1999, covering the period from June 14, 1933 to June 10, 1945.

    English edition: A Diary of the Nazi Years, translated by Martin
    Chalmers, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London & Random House, New York, 1998.
    Edition consulted: that published in 2 volumes (1,120 pages in small
    print), by The Modern Library, New York, 1999, covering the same period
    as the German edition.

    French edition: Journal, translated by Ghislain Riccardi, Paris, Seuil,
    2000. In two volumes (1,851 pages) covering the same period as the
    aforementioned editions as well as that from June 17 to December 31,
    1945, and containing, in an appendix, a letter dated January 6, 1947.
    Translated by Michèle Küntz-Tailleur and Jean Tailleur, this supplement
    is interesting for the light that it throws both on the period in
    question and on the author.