The main shortcoming of legal restraints is that they transform the deniers into martyrs on the altar of freedom of speech. This, to some measure, has happened to Faurisson, who in March 1991 was convicted of proclaiming the Holocaust a “lie of history.” The same court that found him guilty denounced the law under which he was tried and convicted.28 The free-speech controversy can obscure the deniers’ antisemitism and turn the hate monger into a victim.29 A recent National Public Radio report on controlling neofascist activities in Europe took exactly this approach toward Faurisson’s conviction. Rather than dwell on what he has said and done, it focused on his loss of freedom of speech.30 When the publisher of the Austrian magazine Halt was convicted of “neo-Nazi activities” for his Holocaust-denial statements, Spotlight published the news under a headline that read, NO FREE SPEECH.31 A disturbing reversal of the free-speech argument has recently been used by deniers to penalize those who oppose them. In 1984 David McCalden, the former director of the IHR, contracted to rent exhibit space at the California Library Association’s annual conference. The subject of his exhibit was the Holocaust “hoax.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) protested to both city and association officials. The Wiesenthal Center rented a room near McCalden’s exhibit space to set up its own exhibit, and the AJC threatened to conduct demonstrations outside the hotel in which the meeting was to be held. When the association cancelled McCalden’s contract he sued the Wiesenthal Center and the AJC, arguing that they had conspired to deprive him of his constitutional rights to free speech. Though the court dismissed his complaint, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision in 1992. The case constitutes the first time that the First Amendment has been used to attempt to still the voices of those who oppose Nazi bigotry.32
Another legal maneuver has been adopted by a growing number of countries. They have barred entry rights to known deniers. David Irving, for example, has been barred from Germany, Austria, Italy, and Canada. Australia is apparently also considering barring him.33
Others have argued that the best tactic is just to ignore the deniers because what they crave is publicity, and attacks on them provide it. I have encountered this view repeatedly while writing this book. I have been asked if I am giving them what they want and enhancing their credibility by deigning to respond to them. Deny them what they so desperately desire and need, and, critics claim, they will wither on the vine. It is true that publicity is what the deniers need to survive, hence their media-sensitive tactics—such as ads in college papers, challenges to debate “exterminationists,” pseudoscientific reports, and truth tours of death-camp sites. I once was an ardent advocate of ignoring them. In fact, when I first began this book I was beset by the fear that I would inadvertently enhance their credibility by responding to their fantasies. But having immersed myself in their activities for too long a time, I am now convinced that ignoring them is no longer an option. The time to hope that of their own accord they will blow away like the dust is gone. Too many of my students have come to me and asked, “How do we know there really were gas chambers?” “Was the Diary of Anne Frank a hoax?” “Are there actual documents attesting to a Nazi plan to annihilate the Jews?” Some of these students are aware that their questions have been informed by deniers. Others are not; they just know that they have heard these charges and are troubled by them.
Not ignoring the deniers does not mean engaging them in discussion or debate. In fact, it means not doing that. We cannot debate them for two reasons, one strategic and the other tactical. As we have repeatedly seen, the deniers long to be considered the “other” side. Engaging them in discussion makes them exactly that. Second, they are contemptuous of the very tools that shape any honest debate: truth and reason. Debating them would be like trying to nail a glob of jelly to the wall.
Though we cannot directly engage them, there is something we can do. Those who care not just about Jewish history or the history of the Holocaust but about truth in all its forms, must function as canaries in the mine once did, to guard against the spread of noxious fumes. We must vigilantly stand watch against an increasingly nimble enemy. But unlike the canary, we must not sit silently by waiting to expire so that others will be warned of the danger. When we witness assaults on truth, our response must be strong, though neither polemical nor emotional. We must educate the broader public and academe about this threat and its historical and ideological roots. We must expose these people for what they are.
The effort will not be pleasant. Those who take on this task will sometimes feel—as I often did in the course of writing this work—as if they are being forced to prove what they know to be fact. Those of us who make scholarship our vocation and avocation dream of spending our time charting new paths, opening new vistas, and offering new perspectives on some aspect of the truth. We seek to discover, not to defend. We did not train in our respective fields in order to stand like watchmen and women on the Rhine. Yet this is what we must do. We do so in order to expose falsehood and hate. We will remain ever vigilant so that the most precious tools of our trade and our society—truth and reason—can prevail. The still, small voices of millions cry out to us from the ground demanding that we do no less.
APPENDIX
Twisting the Truth
Zyklon-B, the Gas Chambers, and the Diary of Anne Frank
Some may find that I have already accorded antisemitic slander parading as a scientific theory far too much space—that I have taken people like Butz, Faurisson, Leuchter, and their associates too seriously. Nonetheless, after a number of years of working in this field, I am aware of how these pseudoscientific attacks on history obfuscate and obscure the truth. Most people do not believe the deniers’ claims but are at a loss as to how to address their charges. Some, fearful that the deniers’ findings have a measure of legitimacy, respond by seeking alternative explanations.
Consequently I devote this section to three of the charges most frequently made by Holocaust deniers, citing a variety of documentary and technical proofs that demolish any semblance of credibility they might be accorded. I do so with some reluctance, lest it appear that I believe that serious consideration must be given these people’s claims. I do, however, believe that even a cursory perusal of the relevant sections of these documents will demonstrate the deceitful quality of the deniers’ claims. I hope it will also demonstrate, as much of this book is intended to do, that it is Goebbels’s theory of the “big lie” that the deniers are emulating.
Zyklon-B: A Fire-Breathing Dragon
Deniers, led by Faruisson, argue that Zyklon-B (prussic acid) was totally inappropriate for use as a homicidal agent. As proof they cite a document prepared for the war crimes trials summarizing the manufacturer’s instructions for the safe use of Zyklon-B as a fumigant.1 The guidelines stipulated that a room in which prussic acid had been used to destroy vermin had to be ventilated for twenty hours before reentry. Deniers argue that this demolishes all the “testimonies” on the use of Zyklon-B to kill human beings, asking how bodies could have been removed from the gas chambers shortly after execution if the room could not be safely entered for twenty hours? Not surprisingly the deniers ignored significant and well-known facts that demonstrate the fallacy of their claims.
The instructions cited were for use in a room or a private home—not gas-tight areas such as those in the death camps—full of furniture, household goods, bedding, carpeting, and the like. They stipulated how windows were to be sealed, keyholes taped, and chimneys covered. After fumigation, gas would be trapped in all sorts of nooks and crannies. Consequently mattresses, pillows, upholstered furniture, and similar items had to be shaken or beaten for at least an hour in the open air. The homicidal gas chambers were of an entirely different nature. They were empty of any items except a small number of phony shower heads and dead bodies. The floors and ceilings were made of bare concrete. A powerful ventilation system especially designed for the gas chambers had been installed. In this open and unencumbe
red setting it served as an extremely efficient means of extracting the gas. Each of the crematoria was equipped with such a system, something the normal home or business area would never have.2 Moreover, according to both former prisoners and SS personnel, the Sonderkommandos, the inmates who carried out the bodies, wore gas masks.3
This argument about the extreme toxicity of Zyklon-B is designed to foster the conclusion that the gas posed too great a danger to SS personnel to be safely used. However, Faurisson and Leuchter also assert that it was used in the delousing chambers on clothes. (It is unclear how they could have concluded that it could be safely used in the delousing chambers but was too toxic to be used in homicidal gas chambers.)
Leuchter found traces of cyanide in rooms that Auschwitz officials described as killing chambers but that deniers claim were morgues. In an attempt to explain why residues of the gas would have been found in a room that supposedly served as a morgue, Faurisson and Leuchter explained that the morgues were disinfected with Zyklon-B, hence the residue.4 This thesis is illogical: Disinfection is carried out with a bactericide, not an insecticide, particularly one so powerful as Zyklon-B.
Moreover, there is an internal contradiction in the deniers’ own argument. They have asserted that Zyklon-B could be safely used under only the strictest of conditions and that twenty hours had to elapse before a facility in which it had been used could be entered. Yet they would have us believe that in order to clean a morgue, something that needed to be done on a regular basis, the SS would, instead of employing something as common and effective as bleach, choose this highly toxic substance that needed, according to the deniers’ own calculations, stringent arrangements for safe use.5
Pressac observed that Faurisson presented prussic acid as “dragon breathing fire, scarcely to be approached and with clawed feet clinging strongly to the ground even when dead.” The apocalyptic picture bore little relationship to actual practice. If hydrogen cyanide were as Faurisson would have us believe it was, the staff of Degesch, the German company that produced it, “would long have been unemployed.”6
The Gas Chambers: “One Proof—Just One Proof”
Deniers, led by Faurisson, repeatedly call for “one proof . . . one single proof” of the existence of homicidal gas chambers.7 They dismiss the reliability of all human testimony, whether it came from the SS, surviving inmates, or Sonderkommando members. They do so despite the fact that regarding the general details of gassings, the testimony of all the parties tends to corroborate each other.8 Pressac’s monumental study of the gas chambers is, in essence, a response to this demand for documentary proof. Pressac’s sensitivity to Faurisson’s demand for documents may be rooted in the fact that he almost was lured into denial and it was his own archival investigation which proved to him that Faurisson was consciously ignoring unequivocal evidence of homicidal gas chambers. On a trip to Auschwitz shortly after he met Faurisson, he was shown a series of documents that constituted far more than “the one single proof” upon which deniers insisted. On subsequent visits he discovered additional documents, some of which were previously unpublished. Since the publication of his book in 1989, he has spent time in former Soviet archives and has uncovered additional documents that demonstrate the absolute falsehood of the deniers’ claims that there is no material or documentary proof of gas chambers.
The next few pages contain a brief summary of Pressac’s extensive findings. Those who have found the deniers’ claims about gas chambers the least bit troubling should have their doubts set aside. Those who have never been persuaded in the least by this assault on the truth will find the documents overwhelming proof of the degree to which the deniers distort history and lie about the evidence. These documents include work orders, supply requisitions, time sheets, engineering instructions, invoices, and completion reports. All clearly indicate that the gas chambers were to be used for nothing but homicidal gassings. The company contracted to design and install the execution chambers was Topf and Sons. Much of the documentation comes from reports they, their subcontractors, and civilian employees submitted to the SS. They generally made it appear as if they were building morgues. But they slipped up often enough to provide us with detailed documentation of the construction and installation of homicidal killing units.
• An inventory of equipment installed in Crematorium III called for the installation of one gas door and fourteen showers. These two items were absolutely incompatible one with the other. A gas-tight door could only be used for a gas chamber. Why would a room that functioned as a shower room need a gas-tight door?9
• Pressac, not content with this simple proof that this was not a shower room, calculated the area covered by a single shower head. He used the genuine shower installations in the reception building as a guideline. On the basis of this calculation, Crematorium III, which had a floor space of 210 square meters, should have had at least 115 shower heads, not fourteen.10
• On the inventory drawings, the water pipes are not connected to the showers themselves. Were these genuine showers the water pipes would have been connected.
• In certain gas chambers the wooden bases to which the shower heads were attached are still visible in the ruins of the building.11 A functioning shower head would not have been connected to a wooden base.
• In a letter of January 29, 1943, SS Captain Bischoff, head of the Auschwitz Waffen-SS and Police Central Construction Management, wrote to an SS major general in Berlin regarding the progress of work on Crematorium II. In his letter he referred to Vergasungskeller (gassing cellar).12 Butz and Faurisson tried to reinterpret the term Vergasung.13 Butz’s explanation was that it meant gas generation. Faurisson argued that it meant carburetion and that Vergasungskeller designated the room in the basement “where the ‘gaseous’ mixture to fuel the crematorium furnace was prepared.”14 There are fundamental problems with this explanation. Not only is there a significant amount of documentation which refers to gassing but, more importantly, the gas chambers were coke fired and did not use gas generation.15
• Pressac found a time sheet in which a civilian worker had written that a room in the western part of Crematorium IV was a “Gasskammer” (gas chamber). Faurisson, in need of proof that this was something other than what it said, suggested that these were “disinfection gas chambers.” How he reached this conclusion, especially when he had determined that Vergasungskeller meant “gas generation,” was left unexplained.16
• On February 13, 1943, an order was placed by the Waffen-SS and Police Central Construction Management for twelve gasdichten Türen (gas-tight doors) for Crematoria IV and V.17, 1* According to the files in the Auschwitz Museum the work on this order was completed on the 25th of February. On February 28, according to the daily time sheets submitted by the civilian contractors, the gastight shutters were fitted (Gasdichtefenster versetzten) and installed.18 A time sheet of March 2, 1943, submitted by the same firm for work conducted on Crematorium IV, contained the following entry: “concrete floor in gas chamber.” The information on this work order and these two time sheets, when analyzed as a whole, indicate that on March 2, 1943, civilian employees of a German firm officially designated a room in Crematorium IV as a “gas chamber.”19 It made absolute sense for them to do so because two days earlier they had installed “gastight shutters” in the same room.20
• A telegram of February 26, 1943, sent by an SS second lieutenant to one of the firms involved in the construction of the gas chambers, requested the immediate dispatch of “ten gas detectors.” The detectors were to be used to check the efficiency of the ventilation system in the gas chamber.21
• In a book containing the record of work carried out by the metal workshops for the construction and the maintenance of Birkenau Crematorium II, there is an order dated March 5, 1943, requesting the making of “one handle for a gas [tight] door.”22
• In a letter of March 6, 1943, a civilian employee working on the construction of Crematorium II referred to modifying the air extraction system o
f “Auskleidekeller [undressing cellar] II”. A normal morgue would have no use for such a facility.23 During March 1943 there were at least four additional references to “Auskleidekeller.” It is telling that civilians who, according to the deniers, had been brought to Birkenau in January 1943 to work on “underground morgues” repeatedly referred not to morgues but to the ventilation of the “undressing cellars.”24
• In the same letter the employee asked about the possibility of preheating the areas that would be used as the gas chamber. But a morgue should not be preheated. It should be kept cool. However, if the room were to function as a gas chamber, then the warmer the temperature the faster the Zyklon-B pellets would vaporize.25
• A letter dated March 31, 1943, signed by SS Major Bischoff, contained a reference to an order of March 6, 1943, for a “gas [tight] door” for Crematorium II. It was to be fitted with a rubberized sealing strip and a peephole for inspection. Why would a morgue or a disinfection chamber need a peephole? It certainly was not necessary in order to watch cadavers or lice. There were also references in the Crematorium III work orders for gastight doors and for iron bars and fittings for gastight doors. The deniers, still clinging to their “morgue” theory, claimed that morgues needed gastight doors to prevent odors and infectious germs from spreading. They also claimed the doors were necessary because the morgues were disinfected with Zyklon-B. This is a charge that, as indicated above, contradicts basic science, since Zyklon-B is an insecticide and not a disinfectant. This argument still leaves them scrambling for an explanation of why fourteen shower heads, none of which were connected to a plumbing system, were necessary for a morgue.26
• The inventory of Crematorium II, prepared when the civil firm had completed the conversions on it, contained references to it being fitted with a Gastür and a Gasdichtetür (gastight door).
Denying the Holocaust Page 29