1. "La politique hitlérienne d'extermination. Une déclaration d'historiens."
2. The texts published by Esprit in September 1980 dealt with Cambodia as well as with Auschwitz. At stake was the possibility of linking a totalitarian system and a practice of murder. I refer the reader to the issue, specifically to the responses of P. Thibaud and S. Thion.
3. Translation by Jeffrey Mehlman.
4. Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Culture (New York, Random House, 1978); the phrase in quotation marks is taken from Marshal Sahlins's admirable review of the book in the New York Review of Books, November 23, 1978. Note that Harris would account not only for the masculine supremacy but for the Oedipus complex (pp. 57-66).
5. W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). A review by Rodney Needham, "Chewing on the Cannibals," may be found in the Times Literary Supplement of January 25, 1980; the February, March, and April issues returned on numerous occasions to the alleged debate. Marshall Sahlins had already said what he had to say in the New York Review of Books of March 22, 1979.
6. New York Review of Books, March 22, 1979, p. 47.
7. Auschwitz ou le grand alibi, p. 5. The italicized passages are underlined by the authors. This document was republished by its authors at the beginning of 1979, after the scandal provoked by Darquier de Pellepoix's statement to the effect that the only victims gassed at Auschwitz were lice (Express, October 28, 1978). A new preface clarified the position held at the time by the "Bordiguistes." I quote from the Vieille Taupe edition, and it is insofar as it expresses the Vieille Taupe position that the brochure interests me in this context.
8. Ibid., pp. 6-7.
9. Ibid., p. 9.
10. For the history of Joë l Brand's mission, see the (quite personal) testimony of André Biss, Un million de Juifs à sauver (Paris: Grasset, 1966) and the analysis by Y. Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), pp. 94-155.
11. Auschwitz ou le grand alibi, p. 11.
12. Serge Thion, ed., Vérité historique ou vérité politique? (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980), p. 139. Future references to this work will be under the title Vérité.
13. Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (sixth edition, 1979); Ulysse trahi par les siens, Complément au Mensonge d'Ulysse, a new and considerably enlarged edition.
14. One has to be unable to read in order to write, as has J.-G. Cohn-Bendit (Libération, March 5, 1979, and Vérité, p. 133): "The mass murder occurred, something which neither Rassinier nor Faurisson call into question."
15. On this virtual polycracy of totalitarian systems, we at last have in French the crucial work of F. Neumann, Béhémoth: Structure et pratique du national-socialisme (Paris: Payot, 1987). It has taken forty-four years, and sixteen to translate Martin Broszat's L'Etat hitlérien (Paris: Fayard, 1986), which insists - perhaps excessively - on such polycracy.
16. Speech delivered at Posen before the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter on October 6, 1943; Himmler, Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen (Frankfurt, Berlin, and Vienna: Propyläen Verlag, 1974), p. 169. The edition is introduced by J.C. Fest and edited by B.F. Smith and A.F. Peterson.
17. Ibid., p. 201.
18. Materials on the Korheer report may be found in G. Wellers's excellent booklet, La Solution finale et la Mythomanie néo-nazie, edited by B. Klarsfeld and S. Klarsfeld (Paris, 1978), pp. 41-84.
19. One is embarassed to have to recall this fact in the face of Rassinier's (and then Thion's, p. 164) denials. For published details, see the document signed personally by Himmler on January 6, 1942 (instructions for executions) in Eichmann par Eichmann, edited by P. Joffroy and K. Königseder (Paris: Grasset, 1970), pp. 257-258. As a matter of course, documents from Auschwitz combine two categories of death, "natural death" and S.B. (Sonderbehandlung): cf. Dokumenty i Materialy z czasów okupacji niemeckiej w Polsce, I, Obozy (Lodz: N. Blumenthal, 1946), p. 118. Sonderbehandlung could also have a perfectly benign sense.
20. J.-P. Faye, Théorie du récit: Introduction aux "Langages totalitaires", (Paris: Hermann, 1972); Langages totalitaires, (Paris: Hermann, 1972).
21. "Mauthausen," Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 15-16 (July-September 1954):41-80.
22. This was a principal point of the declaration by historians published in Le Monde (February 21, 1979), which I initiated and composed along with Léon Poliakov. A similar objective motivated the articles by O. Wormser-Migot (Le Monde, December 29, 1979) and F. Delpech (Le Monde, March 8, 1979, and "La persécution nazie et l'attitude de Vichy," Historiens et Géographes 273 [May-June 1979]:591-635).
23. There were gas chambers which were not put into service, whatever certain deportees and investigators may claim: such was the case for Dachau. I see no reason to doubt the existence of those of Ravensbrück, Struthof and Mauthausen. Concerning the last named camp, P. S. Choumoff's demonstration, Les Chambres à gaz de Mauthausen (Paris: Amicale des déportés de Mauthausen, 1978), convincingly refutes the few pages on the subject by O. Wormser-Migot (Le système concentrationnaire nazi, pp. 541-544) and has effectively convinced historians such as P. Renouvin and J.-B. Duroselle. (This study has subsequently been continued by the same author in two articles in Le Monde juif 122/123 [April-June and July-September 1986]; the retraction of Michel de Boüard - an author who, in the study mentioned in n. 21, had spoken of a gas chamber at Mauthausen - which appeared in Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, have not yet taken the form of a demonstration.) Concerning Ravensbrück, see G. Tillion, Ravensbrück (Paris: Seuil, 1973).
24. Everyone can fill in what I have sketched here. The names of Christian Bernadac, Sylvain Reiner, and Jean-François Steiner come immediately to mind. See Cynthia Haft's beautiful article, "Ecrire la déportation: Le sensationnel, avilissement du tragique" in Le Monde, February 25, 1972, and the conclusion of her book, The Theme of Nazi Concentration Camps in French Literature (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973), pp. 190-191. See also R. Errerra, "La déportation comme best-seller" in Esprit (December 1969): 918-921. I myself have denounced one of the most infamous of such falsifications, Sylvain Reiner's Et la terre sera pure (Paris: Fayard, 1969; see Le nouvel observateur, December 8, 1969), and contributed, along with Roger Errerra, to the banning of that book for its pirating of Médecin à Auschwitz by M. Nyiszli. On the other hand I fell into the trap laid by J.-F. Steiner's Treblinka (Paris: Fayard, 1966); cf. my article in Le Monde, May 2, 1966, whose substance I do not retract.
25. C. Hauter, "Réflexion d'un rescapé" in De l'Université aux camps de concentration: Témoignages strasbourgeois (Paris: Belles-Lettres, 1954), pp. 525-526.
26. V. Grossmann, L'enfer de Treblinka (Grenoble and Paris: Arthaud, 1945, repr. 1966); for a serious study, cf. A. Ruckert, NS Vernichtungslager in Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse (Munich: DTV, 1979) or A. Donat, The Death Camp Treblinka (New York: The Holocaust Library, 1979); I know only through the public praise it has received from R. Hilberg Y. Arad's book, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
27. R. Hilberg arrives at a figure of 5,100,000 victims; see the concluding charts in The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), p. 767.
28. S. Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France, (Paris: Ed. Klarsfeld, 1978). A supplement has been published subsequently. This work is based for the most part on German police records; it calls for a number of rectifications, and will certainly call for others in the future, but it constitutes a good starting point. For a more recent treatment, cf. G. Wellers, Le Monde Juif (July-September 1980): 75-101.
29. Faurisson (Vérité) presents the numerical results of the investigation of the Comité d'histoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale concerning the total number of racial or nonracial deportees as inaccessible. Concerning the latter category, their total number may be found in J.-P. Azéma, De Munich à la Libération (Paris: Seuil, 1979), p. 189: 63,000 deportees, of which 41,000 were members of the Resistance. Returning full steam in a brochure written to answer me (cf. infra, no. 81), Faurisson (p. 31) gave the estimated figure of the Comité pour les Juifs: 28,162. Having consulted the Bulletin du Comité d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 205 (May-June 1973), 206 (July-August 1973), 208 (November-December 1973) and 212 (August-September 1974), the committee realized that it had arrived at an absurd figure. One more hoax, then.
30. There are not only ideologues. Nazi persecution is occasionally exploited by run of the mill con men; cf., for example, C. Lipsky, L'Affaire (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1977), pp. 53 and 76. This administrator of "Le Patrimoine foncier," a crooked firm, compares himself to Tristan Bernard saying after his arrest: "Until now we have lived in fear; now we shall live in hope."
31. Thion (Vérité, p 341) has given only a very incomplete list of this literature. For a listing of such publications, see my "Theses on Revisionism" in Assassins of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). I still consider N. Fresco's devastating article, "Les redresseurs de mort" (Les temps modernes, June 1980, pp. 2150-2211) a study that I had read in manuscript before writing my own, to offer an excellent ironic perspective on the phenomenon of revisionism.
32. For the case of The Diary of Anne Franck, cf. "Theses on Revisionism", n. 94.
33. G. T. Rittersporn, "Staline en 1938: apogée du verbe et défaite politique," Libre 6 (1979):99-164, in which references to other works of the author, who was a sponsor of the publication of Thion's book, may be found.
34. G. Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Random House, 1969); J. Kolko and G. Kolko, The limits of Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).
35. It is bitterly grotesque to read the commentaries the line has received from Faurisson in person (Vérité, p. 91), S. Thion: "a sentence which is at the least maladroit, since it is ambiguous" (p. 72), or P. Guillaume, the man who was to cure Faurisson of his paranoid symptoms: "a sentence which is strictly true, even if Hitler did not in practice give a damn about what happened to the Jews" (p. 139).
36. In Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (pp. 170-171), Rassinier nevertheless admitted the plausible existence of a few gas chambers, perhaps due to "one or two madmen in the SS" and to "one or two concentration camp bureaucracies eager to please them," or vice versa.
37. Preface to T. Christophersen, Le Mensonge d'Auschwitz (Paris: FANE, 1973), p. 8.
38. Concerning these works, cf. infra.
39. A. R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, 4th ed. (Torrance, Calif.: Noontide Press, 1979), pp. 245-248. It goes without saying that if the Talmud contains imaginary statistics, such is the case for all ancient literatures.
40. See Spotlight, September 24, 1979, and concerning the congress, the previously mentioned article by N. Fresco. At present such congresses take place annually and their proceedings may be read in successive issues of the Journal of Historical Review; cf. also Assassins of Memory, p. 138.
41. Journal of Historical Review 1:57. I have slightly abridged the text.
42. Faurisson writes (Vérité, p. 111) and Thion confirms (p. 38, n. 21) that no expert evaluation of a gas chamber has been performed. This is false: I have before me an expert analysis performed at Cracow in June 1945 concerning the ventilation openings of the gas chamber at Birkenau (Crematorium No. 2), twenty-five kilograms of female hair, and metallic objects found in that hair. The analysis - which makes use, I am told by G. Wellers, of classical methods - revealed compounds of hydrogenated cyanide in that material. To which response will be made by invoking the trial of Marie Besnard, a famous case of alleged poisoning, and the Stalinist cast of Poland in 1945.
43. These key documents are four in number and were collected and published in a German translation (the originals are in Yiddish and, in one case, French) in Hefte von Auschwitz (Editions of the Museum of Oswiecim, Sonderheft, 1, 1973(. There are also several other cases of testimony by survivors of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, such as that of D. Paisikovic, reprinted in L. Poliakov, Auschwitz (Paris: Julliard, 1964), pp. 159-171. The most detailed case of such testimony is that of Filip Müller, Sonderbehandlung (Munich, 1979), which has been incompletely and imprecisely translated into French (I am told by Claude Lanzmann) as Trois ans dans une chambre à gaz à Auschwitz (Pygmalion, 1980), with a preface by Lanzmann that makes the necessary comparisons. Lanzmann's film Shoah (1985) allowed the survivors to speak. In his Mémoire en défense (cf. infra, n. 103), Faurisson, for his part, has attempted to disqualify these texts (pp. 232-236).
44. See J. Kermisch's meticulous study, "Mutilated Version of Ringelblum's Notes," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 8 (1953):289-301.
45. Geheimreden, p. 201.
46. Goebbels Diary, edited by L. P. Lochner (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948), p. 377.
47. Concerning this case, see L. Poliakov, Bréviaire de la haine (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1979), pp. 209-218. Concerning Stangl and several others, see, for example, Choumoff, Mauthausen, pp. 36-37, and G. Sereny's detailed account, Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).
48. Gypsy members of the Wehrmacht arrived at Auschwitz wearing their decorations; cf. for example H. Langbein, Hommes et Femmes à Auschwitz, translated by D. Meunier (Paris: Fayard, 1975), p. 27; in general, see D. Kenrick and G. Puxon, The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies (London: Sussex University Press, 1972), pp. 59-184.
49. "I have analyzed thousands of documents. . . . I have tirelessly pursued specialists and historians with my questions. I have searched - but in vain - for a single former deportee capable of proving to me that he had seen a gas chamber with his own eyes" (Le Monde, January 16, 1979, and Vérité, p. 61).
50. Cf. Wellers, Mythomanie, pp. 14-15.
51. Thion offers (p. 345) a bibliography of the polemic; add the clarification by L. Poliakov and P. Vidal-Naquet (Le Monde, March 8, 1979) and a final series of documents presented by G. Wellers, "Encore sur le 'témoignage Gerstein,'" Le Monde Juif, January-March 1980, pp, 23-35 (minutes of the interrogation of Gerstein before a French military court). Rassinier recounts the visit he received from a Nazi witness of the extermination at Belzec in Le Drame des Juifs européens (Paris: Sept Couleurs, 1964), pp. 79-91. The absolutely certain identification of that visitor as Pfannenstiel is established by Wellers (Mythomanie, pp. 32-35); see as well, concerning his deposition, S. Friedlander, Kurt Gerstein (Castermann, 1964), p. 112. A "diplomatic" edition of the report composed by Gerstein in French is found at the end of P. Joffroy, L'Espion de Dieu: La passion de Kurt Gerstein (Paris: Grasset, 1969). Since these lines were written, the polemic around Kurt Gerstein has resurfaced. In Nantes on June 15, 1985, an old student of Faurisson's, Henri Roques, defended a doctoral thesis on the value of the Gerstein file. The text of this thesis, along with a particularly dishonest introduction, may be found in A. Chelain's volume, Fault-il fusiller Henri Roques? (Paris: Ogmios Diffusion, 1986). The jury was composed of members of dubious competence: J.-C. Rivière, J.-P. Allard (a medievalist), and a historian of Hitlerian leaning, P. Zind. Following a scandal, the thesis defense was annulled on July 3, 1986. The press accorded the affair copious coverage in May and June 1986. For a good critical account, see G. Wellers, Le Monde juif, January-March 1986, pp. 1-18. The most remarkable feature of the thesis was its failure to study the testimony of Professor Pfannenstiel.
52. I have discovered Rassinier's publications dutifully listed in a Polish bibliography devoted to the German camps.
53. L'insurrection du ghetto de Varsovie, coll. "Archives" (Paris: Julliard, 1966).
54. The comparison was unfortunate since Bukharin recognized practically nothing except his political defeat; those who were actually judged publicly, moreover, were only a minority. Certain others among them, such as Krestinsky or Kostov, retracted their confessions.
55. D. Sperber, Le Symbolisme en général (Paris: Hermann, 1974).
56. It may be found, translated into French, in the anthology Auschwitz vu par les SS (Oswiecim Museum, 1974), pp. 141-209.
57. Rudolf Hoess, "Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess," in K.L. Auschwitz Seen by the S.S. (Oswiecim Museum, 1974), pp. 33-137.
58. L. Poliakov, ed., Le Procès de Jérusalem (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1963), p. 118.
59. I have not seen Hoess's manuscript, but H. Langbein maintains (Le Monde juif, 78, April-June 1975, p. 10) that there are photocopies of it in Vienna and Munich and that, contrary to what the "revisionists" have written, the text "is in a regular handwriting and is perfectly legible." Rassinier makes one of his habitual blunders concerning this text: "Its authentification can only be attempted by experienced specialists, such as those working on Egyptian palimpsests" (Drame, p. 44). (A palimpsest is a medieval manuscript written over an earlier obliterated manuscript.) I should say that the few pages by Hoess I have seen in photocopy entirely confirm Langbein's judgment: the perfectly legible handwriting of Hoess is that of an honest functionary; see the reproduction of Hoess's text on the final solution in Bieuletyn Glownej Komisji badania zbrodni Hitlerowskich w. Polsce 13 (1960):86-120. I owe this document, as well as a number of other Polish documents, to my friend B. Bravo. I have also received several photographs of the same manuscript from the Oswiecim Museum.
60. Testimony and interrogations of Hoess in Procès de Nuremberg, vol. 11, pp. 408-433.
61. The Polish edition of the crucial fragment of the Hoess memoirs (Auschwitz vu par les SS, pp. 35-142) contains numerous critical remarks.
62. This is but an example of the numerous errors and absurdities to be found in Rassinier. I will not burden these pages with them (except, below, concerning demography), but I have composed a small anthology of them for my personal use.
63. The technical rules in question are those of the Anglo-Saxon procedure and are far more rigorous than those in use on the European continent. To write that the article "cynically authorized the use of forgeries" (Faurisson, Vérité, p. 71) is ridiculous.
64. Beyond the forty-two volumes of the official record, which I do not claim to have read, the bibliography is huge; for the juridical apsects, M. Merle, Le procès de Nuremberg et le Châtiment des criminels de guerre, preface by H. Donnedieu de Vabres (Paris, 1949); H. Donnedieu de Vabres, "Le Procès de Nuremberg," Revue de science criminelle et de droit comparé, 1947, pp. 171-183; for a German retrospective view, G. E. Gründler and A. von Manikowsky, Nuremberg ou la justice des vainqueurs, translated by H. Lugert (Laffont, 1969); a Soviet account is given by A. Poltorak, Le Procès de Nuremberg, translated by H. Lusternik (Moscow: Editions du Progrès, 1969); a convenient synthesis by L. Poliakov, Le Procès de Nuremberg (Julliard, 1971); see as well, since then, R. Errera, "Nuremberg: le droit et l'histoire (1945-1985)," in L'Allemagne nazie et le génocide juif (Paris: Gallimard and Seuil, 1985), pp. 447-463. The offensive against the trials, from a Nazi perspective was launched by M. Bardèche, Nuremberg ou la Terre promise (Sept Couleurs, 1948).
65. Cf. Merle, Procès, pp. 123-124.
66. The most lucid overall evaluation remains that of Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1963). The most extreme "revisionisit" point of view is given by Rassinier, Le Véritable Procès Eichmann ou les Vainqueurs incorrigibles (Sept Couleurs, 1962), a book it is impossible to take seriously.
67. Eichmann par Eichmann, p. 110, a text which I have verified by consulting the German original; it corresponds quite precisely to what Hoess says, but his interlocutor is Himmler (Commandant d'Auschwitz, p. 261); see also Hoess's declaration at Nuremberg, vol. 11, p. 410.
68. Combats pour l'histoire (Paris: Armand Collin, 1953), pp. 107-113.
69. My only personal contact with Rassinier was limited, in 1959, if I recall correctly, to a courteous exchange of letters on the subject of activities of the Maurice-Audin Committee (against torture) during the Algerian war. I knew nothing at the time of his work; I note this fact to observe that Rassinier, throughout his shifts, remained an anticolonialist.
70. H. Coston, Dictionnaire de la politique française (Paris, 1972), 11:560 (information supplied by E. Escobar, whom I thank).
71. Introductory note to Le Mensonge d'Ulysse (1979).
72. Les Responsables de la Seconde Guerre mondial (Nouvelles Editions latines, 1967), p. 191; the book contains some remarkable considerations on the Jewish influences that perverted Roosevelt and on the good reasons Hitler had to persecute men who themselves admitted that "they were foreigners in Germany" (p. 114).
73. An amusing detail: Leon Poliakov has told me that the translation of his book was used in 1954 by L'Unità in its campaign against the rearmament of Germany.
74. Lenifying interpretations of the Korherr report have been advanced (Butz, The Hoax, p. 113). The most serious objection is that the figure for the inhabitants of the Theresienstadt ghetto is combined with that for Jews subjected to "special treatment." But do not all such military statistics deal with the dead and the wounded? It should nonetheless not be forgotten that the Korherr report concludes that the Jewish population in Europe, between 1937 and the end of March 1943, diminished by four and a half million individuals, a figure that included emigration.
75. His method has been well analyzed by Wellers, Mythomanie, pp. 38-39, whose argument I develop and specify here.
76. The "revisionists" all use the same sources. The same article by D. Bergelson is quoted by R. Harwood, "Did Six Million Really Die?" translated from the English, Historical Review Press (1977?):7; he adds a declaration by an American Jew in 1946.
77. At least that is how I understand the cryptic indications of Drame, p. 218. Perhaps one is to understand between 1947 and 1963.
78. Le Véritable Procès Eichmann, pp. 111-112.
79. Etre un peuple en diaspora (Paris: Maspero, 1975), pp. 10-11.
80. Preface to R. Marienstras, Etre un peuple en diaspora, pp. ii, iii; Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent, I:111-112.
81. I have made an effort to verify it: the declaration of war is more than novelistic. In the Jewish Chronicle of September 8, 1939, one finds: 1) a letter from Chaim Weizmann, dated August 29, and thus prior to the war, in his function as president of the Jewish Agency, which assures the British Prime Minister of the Jewish Agency's support for the cause of democracy: "The Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies"; 2) a declaration made at Jerusalem by the Jewish Agency assuring the British that --despite the White Book of 1939-- the Yishuv in Palestine would remain loyal and would fight for the victory of the British Empire. It is quite clear that Faurisson has not read the text he refers to. He has acknowledged as much since then (Réponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet, 2d ed. [Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1982], p. 49), but has then gone on to repeat without significant change his argument or to base it on other equally representative "declarations of war," such as this headline of the Daily Express of March 24, 1933: "Judea Declares War on Germany" (from a tract given to me by Gilbert Brunet).
82. All this is dearly quite mythical; on the real process of the relations between the Zionist movement and Hitler's Germany, see E. Ben Elissar, La Diplomatie du Ille Reich et les Juifs, 1933-1939 (Paris: Julliard, 1969).
83. It is unfortunate that Faurisson did not list all the military measures that preceded and followed the yellow star, such as the decree published in Germany on May 15, 1942, which forbade Jews from owning domestic pets: dogs, cats, and birds (Procès de Jerusalem, p. 169). But it was no doubt a matter of preventing them from using carrier pigeons.
84. Geheimreden, p. 169.
85. See, for example (Vérité, p. 175), concerning Hoess's description of gassings: "One began to remove the corpses immediately"; note the word "immediately," in German: sofort.
86. Dokumenty i Materialy I, p. 110.
87. New testimony has just appeared, which entirely confirms all the rest: written in 1945 and confirmed in 1986, it comes from a non Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz from April 15,1944 to January 18,1945, General Andre Rogerie, recently deceased. See Le Monde juif, no. 125, January-March 1987, pp. 3-14 (annotated by G. Wellers). l made the mistake, in the first edition of this text, of seeking support in aerial photos recently released by the CIA (Le Monde juif, no. 97, January March 1980, p. 11); Georges Wellers is right to recall that on the days those photos were taken (June 26, August 25, September 13, 1944) no Jewish convoy arrived at Auschwitz; concerning the selection process, Rousseau, Intact aux yeux du monde (Paris: Hachette, 1987), pp. 114-115.
88. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), pp. 13- 30; among much other testimony, see as well Marc Klein, in the anthology De l'université aux camps de concentration: Témoignages strasbourgeois, 2d ed. (Belles-Lettres, 1954), pp. 430-431.
89. Pierre Guillaume, whom I questioned on this matter, answered that these people were transferred at the station in Kielce, or rather, l was later told, in Kosel, 120 kilometers from Auschwitz. But why?
90. Hans Laternser, Die andere Seite im Auschwitz-Prozess 1963-1965: Reden eines Verteidigers (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1966), pp. 185-186.
91. The elements of the case, including the articles published in Le Monde on December 29,1978, January 16, and February 21,1979, are to be found in Vérité, pp. 63, 106, 109-110, 332-334; La Vieille Taupe announces (Vérité, p. 338, n. 3) the forthcoming publication of a Faurisson text (intended for his legal defense in a lawsuit brought by LICRA) under a sensational title: Vous avez dit Kremer: un exemple de supercherie historique; see this volume, chapter 2.
92. The German text was published in Hefte von Auschwitz, 13 (1971), pp. 5-117, with an introduction and notes by J. Rawicz; a French translation appears in the anthology Auschwitz vu par les SS, pp. 211-299.
93. My demonstration takes up and develops the one sketched by G. Wellers (Vérité, pp. 332-334) and, following him, N. Fresco, "Les redresseurs de morts."
94. R. Faurisson, A-t-on lu Rimbaud?, followed by L'Affaire Rimbaud (La Bibliotheque volante, July 1971), p. 4.
95. I have occasionally corrected the Polish translation in order to remain closer to the text.
96. Frauenkonzentrationlager: a concentration camp for women, in other words: Birkenau; the context shows that the "Muslims" referred to are women.
97. "Nothing allows one to say that the 'special actions' crudely recounted in the diary seized on the person of the Auschwitz surgeon . . . were gassings" (Vérité, p. 63).
98. The translation in the Polish edition quoted by Wellers said: "It is not for nothing that Auschwitz is called the extermination camp."
99. The translation by the Oswiecim Museum, from this point of view. is irreproachable.
100. Vérité, pp. 109-110. Faurisson refers in a note to Auschwitz vu par les SS, p. 238, n. 85.
101. This practice did not in any way exclude other forms of murder, specifically injections of phenol; on the (assuredly considerable) role of typhus as a cause of death at Auschwitz, see A. Fiederkiewicz, "Le Typhus exanthématique et les Epouillages au camp des hommes a Birkenau; Contribution a l'histoire du K. L. Auschwitz," in Problèmes choisis de l'histoire du K.L. Auschwitz (Auschwitz Museum, 1978), pp. 237-265.
102. Minutes of the interrogation of Kremer at Cracow, July 30,1947, German text: Hefte von Auschwitz, 13 (1971), p. 113, n. 69.
103. The book, which has since been published by Faurisson, Mémoire en défense, contributes nothing requiring me to change my evaluation. Instead of a falsification of a few lines, we have a falsification of almost 280 pages.
104. Cf. Butz, The Hoax, pp. 113-144 and passim. Faurisson, in Vérité, p. 105; on the September 1944 visit by representatives of the CICR to the Auschwitz commandant, cf. Documents sur l'activité du CICR en faveur des civils détenus dans les camps de concentration en Allemagne (1939-1945), 3d ed. (Geneva, 1947). A British agent in the Teschen camp tried, through intermediaries, to obtain information as to what was being said of gas chamber-shower rooms. He was unsuccessful: the representatives themselves appear not to have asked any direct questions: "We have the impression that the mystery is kept quite secret."
105. Concerning the outrage of lawyer Manfred Roeder at the fact that his "truth" had been received by swine, cf. Mensonge d'Auschwitz, pp. 30-36.
106. Hesiod, Theogony, pp. 27-29; cf. M. Detienne, Les Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (Paris: Maspero, 1967).
107. P. Gibert, La Bible a la naissance de l'histoire (Paris: Fayard, 1979).
108. Cf. Claude Lefort, "L'Ere de l'idéologie," Encyclopaedia universalis, "Organum," 17 (1973), pp. 75-93.
109. Problèmes choisis de l'histoire du K.L. Auschwitz, p. 53.
110. New York, 1946.
111. Joseph Reinach Historien: Révision de l'histoire de l'affaire Dreyfus, pref. Ch. Maurras (Paris: Editions A. Savaète, 1905).
112. H. Dutrait-Crozon, Précis de l'affaire Dreyfus avec un répertoire analytique (Nouvelle Librairie rationale, 1909); the third edition, published in Paris in 1938, contains an appendix concerning Schwartzkoppen, from which I have taken my quotation. It is regrettable that Philippe Aries, in his beautiful autobiography, Un historien du dimanche (Paris: Seuil, 1980), did not tell us anything of the influence of this book on Action Française circles.
113. Ulysse trahi, pp. 82-120.
114. This quotation is from a letter by J. Bennett in the Melbourne Herald of October 26, 1979, p. 19; other texts by Bennett include one in The Age (March 15, 1979). On the issue of historical truth, a biting response from a specialist, John Foster, was published in The Age, March 23, 1979.
115. I quote a typewritten memorandum dated April 12, 1979 and bearing the same title as Butz's book. Thion refers to a first draft of this memorandum, which was published in the National Times of Melbourne, on February 10, 1979. From my Melbourne colleague Charles Sowerwine, whom I thank, I have received a whole file of letters and press clippings on the John Bennett case and the campaign that led to his exclusion from the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties and to his rapprochement with the extreme right.
116. The final sentence of "Sorcellerie, Sottise, ou Revolution mentale," Annales ESC 3 (1948):9-15; for an elaboration, cf. R. Mandrou, Magistrats et Sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1968; reprt. Seuil, 1980).
117. I took a public position on the matter at the et le spectacle," Esprit, April 1979, pp. 119-121.
118. Indeed it was.
119. The decision by the Conseil d'Etat of October 20, 1978, which I have before me, does not allow any decisive clarification of the matter.
120. La Clé des Chimères et Autres Chimères de Nerval (Paris: Pauvert, 1976).

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