    A Prominent False Witness

    By Dr. Robert Faurisson

    These last years have seen, in the name of so-called "historical
    revisionism," the elaboration of these, 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. [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. [3] The lie that Jews were
    killed by boiling water or steam (specifically at Treblinka) was spread
    by the Poles. [4] The electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets. [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: [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: [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: [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 there each time.

    Why?

    In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the "gratuitous lie"
    with regard to the German concentration camps. She wrote: [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. [10] Marika Halter, for his part, published his 'La Memoir
    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, [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', [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. [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. [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: [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." [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." [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. [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.
    [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.

    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.

    Notes

    1. Le Monde, October 17, 1986. Front page.

    2. 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." 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.)

    3. See the US War Refugee Board Report, German Extermination Camps:
       Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC), November 1944.

    4. See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293). Published in the IMT "blue
       series," Vol. 32, pp. 153-158.

    5. 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.

    6. Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43, 44, 79, 93.

    7. Paroles d’étranger (Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 86.

    8. "Author, Teacher, Witness," Time magazine, March 18, 1985, p. 79.

    9. "Le Système concentrationnaire allemand [1940-1944]," Revue
       d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, July 1954, p. 18, n. 2.

    10. Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p. 5.

    11. Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19.

    12. 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.

    13. 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.

    14. Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published by Fawcett Crest (New
       York).

    15. Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: "Appointment with Hate"), New York:
       Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New York: Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178.

    16. The Week in Germany (published in New York by the German government
       in Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2.

    17. "The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American Public," Yad
       Vashem Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p. 316.

    18. VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37.

    19. Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6. #2002

       from http://www.davidduke.com:

       The last time I met him was at his home in Vichy in the
       summer of 2002. He is bespectacled, bicycle-riding former
       widely-respected professor of comparative literature who has suffered
       immensely by following his conscience on Jewish supremacism.

       This quiet intellectual has been badly beaten , spat-at,
       even doused with acid for his academic truth-telling. But he keeps on
       undaunted, even into advanced age. As I asked in another article, why
       unstopping coverage and spectacles about the alleged holocaust of Jews
       and deafening silence about the Bolshevik Holocaust in Russia and
       Eastern Europe? Maybe Dr. Faurisson’s article can help answer that
       question, for the Holocaust may be far more about a propaganda show for
       Israel’s benefit than the historical truth. The only way for you to make
       a considered evaluation of these important events is to read both sides.

       Wiesel also says in his books that he spent his last few months in the
       Auschwitz hospital while he was dutifully nursed back to health by the
       Nazis. Doesn’t that seem strange that the Nazis in the midst of "trying
       to eradicate all Jews" at the supposed greatest facility of mass murder
       in the world would put a sick Jew in the hospital for months to mend a
       hurt foot? Something doesn’t fit. Either the Nazis were trying to care
       for and nurse to health sick Jews at Auschwitz or they were trying to
       exterminate them. The two premises or mutally incompatible. See
       Questions on the Holocaust in my book Jewish Supremacism.