But, Professor Faurisson, if, in Germany, it’s said that the Holocaust is “offenkundig”, and so of common knowledge, this is because our libraries are cram-full of books on the subject. This being the case, how can one not agree that it’s “common knowledge”?

Those masses of books all take up, with some variations, one and the same argument, that of Germany’s conquerors. It’s the law of the victor here that’s being applied in the land of the vanquished. If one looks closely, one sees that this argument is not at all proved, and even that there exists a quantity of evidence to prove it wrong. For the historian, “common knowledge” doesn’t constitute either argument or evidence. It used to be common knowledge that the Sun revolved around the Earth; it used to be common knowledge that Nero burned Rome; it used to be common knowledge that witches existed. In 1914 it was common knowledge for the Allies that the Huns were cutting off Belgian children’s hands. It has, in a more recent past, — if only by virtue of a decree from the Nuremberg judges — been common knowledge that the Katyn massacre was carried out by the Germans.

So then, as you see it, Raul Hilberg and his like are either lying or stupid.

Not necessarily. It may be that they more or less believe what they relate. This is what I tried to explain during our conference when, at the start of my talk, I spoke of a “historical lie”. This lie sets itself apart from the ordinary lie in that, developing over a long period of time, it becomes, historically, a sort of standard truth. People then sincerely believe what they call truth and which, at its origin, is but a lie. These people err more by way of conformism, laziness and lack of intellectual curiosity than by way of dishonesty. These faults are to be put down to Man’s imperfect nature. We can’t spend our existence verifying everything: that would be too burdensome. Hence we often prefer to swallow, eyes closed, a product advertised as wholesome and genuine whereas, in fact, it’s doctored.

Do you mean they might well be “men of good will”?

In order to answer, I’d have to be able to probe their hearts and entrails. I don’t know how much honest conviction there may be in any particular one of them. On the other hand, what I do know is that there exists ordinarily in life something called the “white lie”, that is, the lie people allow themselves to tell “for the cause”. That cause may happen to be a political or religious one, or it may serve the interests of a group, a professional body or certain individuals. In such cases, people take leeway as concerns the exactness of facts or figures and they may even end up finding themselves tailoring testimony to circumstances. The permanent care of exactitude is quite a constriction. I believe, moreover, in the force of fear as well as in the need for comfort. That force and that need dictate a good part of our behaviour. That said, amongst those who argue the case for “the Holocaust” there are some brazen liars. The revisionists have caught them in the act a thousand times. Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel are superb false witnesses.

And then there are the bluster merchants. Take the Austro-American Jew Raul Hilberg, whom I’ve already spoken to you about. It’s worthwhile to come back to his case and bring up some more specific points. He is Number One amongst the historians who propagate the extermination myth. Hilberg commenced his research on the alleged “destruction of the European Jews” in 1948. He published his book in 1961. On page 177 thereof, he didn’t shrink from affirming that there had been two orders from Hitler to exterminate the Jews. The first order, given in the spring of 1941, instructed his men, apparently, to go and kill the Jews on the spot, in Soviet territory, and, soon afterwards (no date specified), the second order was, apparently, to transport all the other Jews of Europe to extermination camps. But Hilberg mentioned no sources, no documents, no designation of those orders and no precise dates. However, no one stood up to challenge his statements and all the historians seem to have agreed to consider Raul Hilberg a first-rate historian. He’s simply Number One amongst the historians who defend a certain official truth that’s imposed on us.

How do you account for the fact that, subsequently, Raul Hilberg should have had a change of heart and abandoned his 1961 explanation?

The big revisionist offensive was in the late 1970s. Clearly Hilberg was jolted by it and, in 1982, he told the French weekly Nouvel Observateur: “In a certain way, Faurisson and others, without wanting to, did us a favour. They raised questions which had the effect of engaging historians in new research. They have obliged us to once again collect information, to re-examine documents and to go deeper into the understanding of what took place”. What we didn’t know at the time was that Hilberg, shaken by the advent of the revisionists, had gone back to work again and was revising his old argument, with its two alleged orders from Hitler, from top to bottom.

In 1983, in a talk at a conference in New York, he suddenly presented his new thesis, an altogether strange one that ought to have disqualified him forever in the eyes of the historical community. According to the new line, there hadn’t in fact been, for the immense enterprise of destroying an entire people on a whole continent, any order, plan or budget but merely a kind of tacit understanding, a spontaneous plot of German bureaucrats! Hilberg’s words then were exactly the following: “But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. [Those measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy”. You’ll have noticed that he specifies “no budget”; it’s a response to a point that I personally had brought up. I’d said that, as nothing is done without money, above all in wartime, someone had to show me what huge sum had indeed been allocated to the alleged campaign of mass destruction of the Jews of Europe. You see how Hilberg, in fact, dodges the questions and comes up with a staggering “explanation”. All in all, for him, the whole presumed vast criminal operation was carried out… by the workings of the Holy Spirit or through some phenomenon of spontaneous generation. He himself speaks of an “incredible meeting of minds” amongst countless bureaucrats; let it be asked in passing: if it is “incredible”; that is, unbelievable, how can people be required to believe it, on pain of fine and imprisonment? And what is thought transmission if not a paranormal phenomenon, something in which one should be still less obliged to believe?

The day in Toronto when Raul Hilberg confirmed under oath that that was how he accounted for “the destruction of the European Jews” we had a good laugh round the big table where Ernst Zündel welcomed us each evening as we returned from court. I for my part remember coming out with this: “We’re entering a new epoch. From now on, whenever I need the salt and pepper or the water pitcher, I’ll no longer even have to say so. We’ll use the ‘incredible meeting of minds’ and ‘consensus-mind reading’. After all, if the German bureaucrats, reputedly the most thick-headed of all, practised that system, why should we do without it?”

In the new edition of his work, which was at press at the very moment the trial was going on, Hilberg didn’t use those stupefying phrases but he did resort to their equivalents in convoluted and academic form, writing: “In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization”. And all that, he specifies, without leaving any written trace!

Mr Faurisson, according to you, how many Jews died, all told, during the Second World War due to actions of the Germans? How many, amongst those, in the concentration camps? In which camps, exactly? How many through the use of gas chambers or gas vans?

No Jew was killed in any execution gas chamber or gas van. Here it’s a question of weapons of mass destruction of which no trace has ever been found and of which no one has been able to provide a technical description. There is no possibility that the alleged gas chambers shown, here and there, to tourists can ever have been actual gas chambers. I shall not here be returning to that subject, with which I have so often dealt, and I note that the opposing side stubbornly persist in their refusal to provide us with a technical and scientific study of the presumed crime weapon. As for the total number of Jews of Europe who died during the war due to actions of the Germans, that’s not yet possible to determine, and this is so, to a large extent, because of the scandalous conduct of the wartime Allies and the State of Israel, who stand close guard over the enormous mass of archives stored in Germany, at Bad Arolsen, by the International Tracing Service (ITS). From time to time, it’s heard that these archives are at last going to be opened to researchers. Jewish or Zionist organisations claim to demand such an opening. Don’t believe any of it. I’ve devoted quite a lot of attention to the matter and can tell you that, if those archives were completely opened up to all researchers without restriction, it would spell catastrophe for the upholders of the “Holocaust” argument. It would be revealed how carefully the Third Reich authorities recorded data about every camp detainee’s — Jewish or non-Jewish — arrival, departure, hospitalisations if any, successive jobs, transfers from one camp to another and, in the event, decease. And then there’d be access to the precise number of cremations done at each crematorium as well as the number of Jewish “survivors”, that is of those millions of miraculously spared inmates who, after the war, spread throughout the world, many of them forming the original population of the State of Israel. In the late 1970s revisionists began getting interested in those archives: at the time there existed, on the premises of the ITS, a “historical section” (Historische Abteilung). In 1978 the authorities suddenly closed it. For my part, I ask that it be reopened, with permission given to all researchers to consult the totality of the material.

But you’ve just asked about the number of Jews who died due to actions of the Germans. No one, for the time being, is able to say. To begin with, it would be necessary to set apart those who died of natural causes from those who died as a consequence of actions on the part of either the Germans or the Allies. Be that as it may, I have observations to make on the considerable number of Jews who survived the war and who are in themselves as many clues to suggest that there cannot have been a policy of killing all the Jews. In the Israeli daily Haaretz of April 18, 2004, correspondent Amiram Barkat had an article entitled “U.S. court to discuss question of who is a Holocaust survivor”; it told of how two Jewish demographics experts who’d had the job of reckoning the number of Jewish survivors still alive in 2004 had arrived, respectively, at the figures of 687,900 and 1,092,000. The difference is explained by the second expert’s inclusion of the Jewish population of North Africa, Syria and Lebanon, territories occupied for a certain time either by the Germans and Italians or by the forces of the Vichy government. I’ll refer here therefore only to the lower figure and point out that 687,900 European Jews having experienced the German occupation and still alive nearly sixty years on imply that, just after the war, the number of Jewish survivors must necessarily have amounted to several million (probably 3,250,000). What sort of alleged extermination policy can there have been if millions of survivors or miraculously spared targets were left alive in its wake? At that period, Europeans were amazed at the influx to their countries of Jews who, they’d been told, had disappeared forever. The camps for displaced persons were full of them. We have at our disposal a great many photographs showing, in particular, Jewish youngsters arriving by train from Central Europe or housed in countless children’s homes. Their physical appearance was identical to that of children of non-Jewish populations of the time. As far as France is concerned, we know that, of a Jewish population of about 350,000, around 75,700 Jews, foreigners for the most part, were deported, but we’re not told how many survived. The figure we’re sometimes given — 2,500 out of 75,721 — results from numerous tricks that I haven’t the time to list right now but I’ve explained them elsewhere. If you want an idea of how large and lively the French Jewish community was on the morrow of the war I recommend you look in a certain yearbook entitled L’Annuaire du judaïsme. The 1952 edition describes, in 415 pages, the situation of French and world Jewry. Believe me, it’s instructive. By itself, the number of Jewish associations listed, with telephone numbers and addresses, is staggering. And behold the flood today of books, memoirs, testimonies of “miraculous” Jewish survivors, not to mention the applications for indemnity or compensation.

But in Germany they never quit repeating the figure of six million Jews either gone missing or killed; it’s neither five nor seven but always six.

Even as conformist a historian as Martin Broszat long ago admitted that it was a “symbolic” figure, that is a mythical one. I’ll add that it’s part of the general Jewish symbology. Read the study, published in 2003, by Don Heddesheimer: The First Holocaust. The author demonstrates, with newspaper reproductions to back it up, that from the year 1900 — but it might be possible to go back still further — the American Jewish press was already launching the slogan “Six million European Jews are dying”. He provides examples from 1900, 1919, 1920, 1926, 1938, 1940. In Jewish circles it had become a leitmotiv. In Jerusalem, the specialists at the Yad Vashem Memorial set out, years ago, to establish a list of the names of the six million Jews who died in the “Holocaust”. They have barely reached three million but on the basis, in good part, of simple unverified declarations emanating from unverified sources and processed in such a way that one and the same person can be recorded as having died several times, even, it seems, as many as ten times. On this subject I recommend certain studies published in the French-language review Dubitando, produced in Holland, whose contents can be downloaded at http://www.aaargh.com.mx/fran/revu/dubitando.

But, according to you, of what size may the number of Jews be whose deaths were imputable to the Germans or their allies?

There again, I’ll refer you to the Suchdienst or International Tracing Service located at Bad Arolsen, to which non-approved historians have been barred entry since 1978.

Fair enough, but give us a figure as concerns the dead of Auschwitz.

Of the outrageous figures, the best known is that of four million but there have been, even officially, rather higher ones. The Nuremberg tribunal decided on four million; it’s the figure that was inscribed on the commemorative stones at Auschwitz-Birkenau and which stayed there till 1990. Suddenly it was removed and, in 1995, after five years of dithering, that of a million and a half was put in its place after being chosen by Lech Walesa, then president of the Polish Republic. But those in charge of the Museum there and the official historians or researchers reduced it anew to 1,100,000, then progressively to 800,000, to a bit more than 600,000 and, finally, in 2002, to 510,000 (Fritjof Meyer). Personally I reckon that the total number of dead, Jewish and non-Jewish, for the entire duration of Auschwitz’s use by the Germans (May 1940-January 1945) must have reached the level — a considerable one — of 125,000 in the thirty-nine camps of that vast complex; those deaths are to be put down, above all, to the typhus epidemics whose devastating effects spread even to the ranks of the Germans there and, in particular, to the medical personnel (striking, for example, two head physicians: Drs Popiersch and Schwela). I base this estimate on the data in the Sterbebücher and a few other documents. The total of deaths registered therein is 80,010 but, considering that a known number of Sterbebücher are missing, I suppose this total must be put at around 125,000. As for the figure of 74,000 that’s sometimes proposed, it seems to me to have arisen from a journalistic error.

You mention physicians at Auschwitz. What have you to say on the subject of Dr Mengele?

I’ve looked into his case. I don’t believe I’m wrong in stating that Josef Mengele was probably one of the most slandered men of his era. In all likelihood, he deserved the reputation, which he had amongst his fellow citizens of Günzburg, of “ein Kavalier”. I’ve had a look through his manuscripts (unpublished), which show a man steeped in Greco-Roman culture, very keen on science and curious about everything. He didn’t hide it from his close acquaintances that the gassing stories were pure invention. During a posthumous show-trial of Mengele held in Jerusalem before the world’s television cameras, his “victims” came forth to impute the worst atrocities to him: according to them, he used to pin gouged-out human eyeballs on the walls of his office, or pour acid into the eyes of his “guinea pigs” to see whether it made them turn from black to blue. There’s hardly a class of things, real or imagined, that lends itself as readily to nonsensical jabber as that of medical monstrosities, especially when they can be blamed on a white-coated “Herr Doktor”. Here it’s easy to have the layman believe any atrocity story at all. On this score, I highly recommend a book by two British lawyers about the Dering case (Mavis Hill & L. Norman Williams, Auschwitz in England / A Record of a Libel Action, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1965). In his 1959 book Exodus, the Jew Leon Uris had the gall to write that, from the beginning of his internment at Auschwitz, the Polish surgeon Wladislaw Alexander Dering (spelt Dehring by Uris) had carried out “seventeen thousand surgical experiments without anaesthesia” on women. Note that figure, along with the word “experiments”. After the war, Dr Dering had settled in England, then had practised in Somalia and, finally, went back to England where he received an O.B.E., comparable to our Légion d’Honneur in France.

From April 13 to May 6, 1964 there ran the trial in London of Dering’s libel suit against Uris and his publisher. During the proceedings, an extraordinary quantity of lies were to be exposed thanks, especially, to the discovery of the records of surgical operations performed in Block 21 of Auschwitz where Dr Dering had worked. The defendants were driven progressively to reduce the number of dreadful operations imputed to the retired surgeon. Also, the women became “men and women” and the figure seventeen thousand was dropped and replaced by “a very large number”, then “a figure between one hundred and two hundred” and, at the end, it seems the defence settled for the case of three women identified only by their Christian names. What’s more, it had to be acknowledged that the operations had been done not without anaesthesia but with rachidian (spinal column) anaesthesia, and a renowned English anaesthetist testified that in his view Dr Dering had been right to choose that type. A dramatic moment arose when Dr Dering was able to prove the surgical records had been falsified by their Polish custodians starting from a certain page for August 1943, a date when he was no longer performing operations and was no longer in Block 21. The Germans at Auschwitz had scrupulously kept those records, partly in Latin, and with, I recall, the occasional mention of a “casus explorativus”, the term applied to surgical tasks performed “in order to see”. Dr Dering was to win his case and be awarded damages of one farthing — a quarter of an old penny! The judge then ruled peremptorily that the physician, although he’d been abominably libelled, would have to bear court costs, which were considerable, and denied him leave to appeal. All due to the fact that, throughout the whole trial, the shadow of Auschwitz and the “gas chambers”, constantly evoked — even by the judge — had never ceased to cast itself on the plaintiff. If I recall correctly Dering was to declare: “Here I am ruined, but I’ve saved my honour”, and it seems he died not long afterwards.

Some people will ask you the following question: “But where did all those Jews go, those who you say weren’t exterminated?”

My answer is: “To Palestine and fifty other countries throughout the world, of which I can give you the list”. A good many of the nearly six million Jews who today inhabit the State of Israel are “survivors” or descendants of “survivors” of what they call “the Holocaust”. Besides, when Steven Spielberg decided to launch his vast project of gathering together fifty thousand survivors’ “testimonies” he sent his interviewers to about fifty countries of the world; that’s the number of countries to which those Jews scattered after the war.