Robert Faurisson

Robert Faurisson ( 1929 ) is a French literature professor specializing in documentary criticism, a scholar of the Holocaust, who generated a great controversy with letters sent to the French newspaper “Le Monde”, and later a book (1979). that challenged the existence of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps and the genocide of Jews and other groups during World War II .

In 1990, with the passage of the Gayssot Act against Holocaust denial, Faurisson was prosecuted and fined. And, in 1991, he was expelled from his academic position. ¹ In 1996, the conviction was upheld by the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations . ²

Biography

Faurisson has said that during and after World War II , and like most of the French at the time, he had anti-German sentiments and that it was after reading the works of the former deported communist Paul Rassinier (The Lie of Ulysses) ³ and the far right Maurice Bardèche when he became interested in the French revisionist theses. Then a fundamental fact caught his attention and made him wonder about the question of Nazi gas chambers. It was the letter of Martin Broszat, director of the Institute for Contemporary History of Munich, published on 19 August 1960 in the German magazine “Die Zeit” (page 16). In this, the author affirmed that no mass murder by gas was perpetrated neither the Dachau camp, nor in any concentration camp located on the German territory. As such, he denied the numerous testimonies and publications that had sustained such crimes at the Nuremberg Trial and later, Robert Faurisson was deeply intrigued. This fact led him to take an interest in the subject of the gas chambers and started his investigations on the system of Nazi concentration camps.

As Faurisson declared himself to be non-partisan or more centered, his circle of friends in his revisionist struggle covered a wide range of leftists from Ultras such as Pierre Guillaume and Serge Thion, former communist Roger Garaudy to right-wingers such as the American Ernst Zündel , the Swedish Ditlieb Felderer and pro- Palestinian militant anti-Zionists such as the Moroccan Ahmed Rami . Robert Faurisson has a great admiration for the American author Arthur Butz, PhD, whom he considers as the most brilliant revisionist author today for his masterpiece “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century”. ⁴

In 1979, Faurisson was removed from his teaching in Literature with a specialty in document criticism at the University of Lyon . The reason given officially was that the Dean could not guarantee his personal security since its revisionist positions provoked constant hostile manifestations and aggressions coming mainly from French Jewish activist organizations. From 1979 to 1990, he was seconded to a post at the National Tele-Teaching Center (CNTE) later re-named the National Center for Distance Learning (CNED).

The 16 of September 1989 Faurisson was brutally beaten by three radical Jewish group ” Fils de la juive mémoire “ ( “Sons of Jewish Memory”). ⁵ This group claimed responsibility for the attack, and in a statement said: ” Professor Faurisson is the first, but it will not be the last. We have warned those who deny the Shoah. ” ^{6 7 8}

Prominent personalities and organizations in France, along with the country’s most influential newspaper, Le Monde , condemned the attack. However, the pro-Israeli French Jew and “Nazi hunter” Serge Klarsfeld justified the crime: “Someone who has provoked the Jewish community for years, should expect this sort of thing …” “You can not insult the Memory of the victims without receiving the consequences . “” ^{6 7 8}

Although the September 1989 attack on Faurisson was the most brutal, it was neither the first nor the last. Between November 1978 and May 1993, he was physically assaulted on ten different occasions. ⁹In Stockholm , Faurisson was physically assaulted twice. The first attack was on 17 March 1992, and the second on 22 May 1993, both received media coverage and were widely reported in the Swedish press. The attack on Faurisson in Paris on 30 May 1993 was reported in Libération , (Paris), 1 June 1993.

In 2006, Faurisson again faced judicial charges, on 11 July , charged with denying the Holocaust in an interview with Iranian TV ” Sahar 1 ” in February 2005. With the ruling against him, on 3 October 2006, Gave him a three-month probation sentence and a fine of € 7,500 for this offense. ¹⁰ In December 2006, Faurisson gave an interview to the International Holocaust Review Conference , sponsored by the Iranian government. ¹¹ He repeated his denialist theories about gas chambers ¹² and said that for the past 32 years, he has been waiting for someone to show him just one of those cameras. ¹³

A “fundamental discovery”: the Nazi plans of the crematoria of Auschwitz

Faurisson claims to have discovered in 1976 ¹⁴ the plans of the Auschwitz crematoria in the archives of the camp museum. According to him, these plans had been isolated from the public by the Russian army and the Polish authorities. ” For good reason, ” said the Professor , ” they denied the Holocaust .” However, their finding was not corroborated by independent witnesses, nor was it convincingly clarified why the evidence of the “concealment” allegedly carried out by the Russian and Polish authorities was not simply destroyed. However, it is true that the plans of the gas chambers of Auschwitz are hidden from the public and that it is impossible to request a photograph or drawing of the gas chambers, even in the Holocaust memorials.

According to Faurisson, certain rooms that can be seen in the drawings correspond to the cameras accepted by the historiography like “gas chambers of Auschwitz”; For him- these facilities are technically unsuitable for the criminal use of massive gassing and, therefore, argues that it is impossible for such facilities to correspond to gas chambers.

However; In fact, Crematorium II and III (built with the same design) were initially planned as a mortuary, with crematorium ovens attached. ¹⁵ In principle, the finding of facilities for the cremation of bodies, which used to accompany the deposits of corpses, do not prove “per se”, the existence of gas chambers. In addition, according to Faurisson, after interviewing with gas chamber specialists in the United States, the use of gassing by hydrocyanic acid is extremely complex even if it is to execute a single inmate, so it is doubtful to use it as a weapon of mass extermination.

It was not until 1943 (January-June) that, in order to increase the gassing capacity of the Auschwitz Complex (Crematorium I facilities were clearly insufficient), the necessary modifications were made to convert the Crematories II, III, and then IV and V In mass extermination chambers.

Therefore, even accepting the truth of the finding of the planes by Faurisson at the time and place he asserts, he is in all likelihood mistaken in asserting that they are planes of the gas chambers; In any case, the plans of the crematoria when they belonged to corpses (in fact, the word ” Leichenkeller ” which Faurisson cites effectively means “corpse deposit”).

The only medium that was published at that time was the Spanish tabloid magazine ” Interviú ” in 1979 ¹⁶ with an openly hostile article titled “R. Faurisson, defender of Hitler:” The gas chambers are a lie. ”

Another set of arguments that the denialists often argue is the “Leuchter Report”, which tries to “scientifically prove” that people with Zyklon-B at Auschwitz were not murdered through allegations such as the discrepancy in the levels of hydrocyanide compounds, Explosive properties of Zyklon B, the toxicity that would make its handling impossible for executioners, etc.

It must be said that the collection of evidence by Leuchter and collaborators was not carried out in a scientifically verified way, and that the statements contained in the “Leuchter Report” also do not withstand serious analysis. ¹⁷ On the other hand, despite the assertions of his followers, Leuchter is not an engineer (ironically, is one of the few graduates in History with those who have the revisionists, particularly in art history) and has had problems of judicial character make False statements about their competencies. ¹⁸

Returning to Faurisson, the French professor blames the Jewish lobby for the “emptiness” of his investigations, as well as for the setbacks he has suffered in the social or judicial staff he suffers (in fact, according to him, he won a trial against The magazine “Interviu” itself for this matter, but the compensation that was agreed upon was very low because the judge was Jewish (“I won my case but the amount of damages was ridiculous” (the presiding Judge was a Jewess by the name of Simone Rozès “).

Books

• At-on lu Rimbaud? , 1961.
• At-on well lu Lautréamont? 1972
• La Clé des Chimères et autres chimères de Nerval , 1977
• Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire , La Vieille Taupe , 1980.
• Reponse to Pierre Vidal-Naquet , La Vieille taupe, 1982, ISBN 2-903279-04-7
• «Chronique sèche de l’Épuration - Exécutions sommaires dans quels communes de Charente limousine», Revue d’Histoire révisionniste 4, feb-abr 1991.
• Reply to Jean-Claude Pressac , edited AAARGH , 1993
• Écrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) , 4 v. Édition privée hors commerce, 1999.
• Écrits révisionnistes (1999-2004) , 5 vol . Édition privée hors commerce, 2005.
• Het «Dagboek» van Anne Frank: een kritische benadering , in collaboration with Siegfried Verbeke .
• Le révisionnisme de Pie XII , 2009

Notes and references