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.