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Iran. Faurisson. Interview (Tehran, December 13, 2006)
Interview with Professor Robert Faurisson at the Guest House of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Some participants at the conference held that, when the Wehrmacht started
its offensive in the East, many Jews fled or were transported towards the
Soviet Union; what are your thoughts on this?
That’s quite correct, but it’s still hard to reckon the number of those
Jews who settled, for example, in Uzbekistan (Tashkent, Samarkand),
Tajikistan or elsewhere, perhaps even in the Jewish autonomous region of
Birobijan.
How do you account for the fact that almost all the former concentration
camp inmates state they can attest to the reality of the gas chambers
there?
They’re repeating a rumour that allows them to grant themselves, with no
inconvenience, the status of heroes or miraculous survivors. They
generally do so risk-free since there’s very little chance that anyone
will put their backs to the wall and ask for explanations. During one of
my trials, a super-excited Jew came up to me at the courtroom entrance
shouting and showing me his Auschwitz registration tattoo. “How dare you
say the gas chambers didn’t exist?”, he said. “I’m a witness to their
existence.” I looked him in the eye and told him: “Describe a gas chamber
for me.” Losing his composure, he answered: “If I’d seen one I wouldn’t be
here to talk to you about it.” I then pointed out that, like all the Jews
who’d returned from Auschwitz, he was rather a witness to there never
having been a policy amongst the Germans of physically exterminating the
Jews, since there he was, very much alive. I’ll remind you that in 1985 at
the first Zündel trial, in Toronto, we had the rare chance to
cross-examine the Number One Jewish witness to the “Holocaust”, a certain
Rudolf Vrba. Look up the trial transcripts to see how that arrogant
individual was in the end put to rout and how he had to confess that, in
his book on Auschwitz, reputed to be so exact and meticulous, he’d
resorted to “poetic licence”: “licentia poetarum” as he let fly, in Latin.
According to you, what happened to the Jews selected on what’s called “the
Auschwitz (or Birkenau) ramp”?
The men were put on one side and the women and children on the other. In
separate columns, either on foot or, for some, in lorries, they all went
off to the Sauna where they showered and were disinfected. Photos,
well-known ones, from what’s called The Auschwitz Album attest to these
arrivals on the ramp. It’s in this sector that a football ground
(“Sportplatz”) was located, and the newly arrived inmates could see it
just beside the ramp; there was a volleyball court and there were also a
great number of hospital barracks, at one side for the women, at the other
for the men. It’s in this same sector that two big crematoria stood
flanked by little gardens and visible from all around; also, large
settling tanks for wastewater, shower and disinfection installations, vast
storehouses for personal belongings which, as at the entrance to any
prison or any camp, were confiscated from the newcomers.
What do you make of the speech given by Adolf Hitler at the Kroll Opera
House in Berlin on January 30, 1939? He said then — these were his words —
: “If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed
once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence
will be not the Bolshevisation of the world and therewith a victory of
Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe”.
In that pre-war speech there is positively no question of a physical
extermination of the Jews. To those who were blowing on the embers and
desired with all their hearts a crusade against Germany, Hitler was saying
in his way: “Don’t harbour any illusions: if you succeed in triggering a
war, it’s not we who’ll be annihilated but our Communist and Jewish
enemies”. I’ll refer you to the analysis that the late Wilhelm Stäglich
made of that declaration in Der Auschwitz Mythos. Dr Stäglich also dealt
with Heinrich Himmler’s speeches at Posen, in 1943, speeches to which
people in certain quarters have tagged on the attention-grabbing adjective
“secret”; before and during the war, and up to the very last months,
Himmler tried everything he could to convince the Allies to take the Jews,
whom they seemed to find so marvellous, into their own countries.
Therefore, contrary to what other historians say, for you that speech of
Hitler’s doesn’t constitute proof that he wanted to annihilate the Jews.
Obviously not. And you’ll no longer find, I believe, any historians who
hold that it does.
And what do you say about Adolf Hitler’s political testament? In it can be
read, for instance:
“But nor have I left any doubt that if the nations of Europe are once more
to be treated only as collections of stocks and shares of these
international conspirators in money and finance, then those who carry the
real guilt for the murderous struggle, this people will also be held
responsible: the Jews [das Judentum]! I have further left no one in doubt
that this time it will not be only millions of children of Europeans of
the Aryan peoples who will starve to death, not only millions of grown men
who will suffer death, and not only hundreds of thousands of women and
children who will be burned and bombed to death in the cities, without
those who are really responsible also having to atone for their crime,
even if by more humane means [wenn auch durch humanere Mittel]”.
By “more humane means” didn’t Hitler mean “the gas chambers”?
Pure speculation! Hitler signed that text on April 29, 1945, that is the
eve of his suicide (let’s note in passing that, according to the Vulgate,
the “gas chambers” had no longer been operating since late November 1944).
He had before him the appalling spectacle of a country laid to waste and
its men, women and children being systematically torched with phosphorous.
He promises those behind this inhuman war that they’ll have to atone for
their crime but not, all the same, through the horrible and barbarous
means that the Allies were using. The pinnacle of horror is to go and burn
people alive. It was the British leaders, Churchill at their head, who, as
of 1940-1941, decided that from then on war would be waged systematically
on the German civilians and who, to that purpose, undertook the production
of heavy bomber aircraft designed to destroy the German cities. Until then,
military men strictly limited themselves to making war against other
military men and, when they did happen to kill civilians, they put the
case, rightly or wrongly, that it was as a consequence — a regrettable one
— of military action (for example, during a tactical bombardment). The
British gentlemen were innovators in the art of war: on the one hand, they
elected to slaughter German civilians systematically in order to make the
opposing military leaders give in and, on the other hand, they went about
stirring up and maintaining the cowards’ war, that of snipers or “Résistants”,
against German soldiers. There might have been some courage in blowing
oneself up with a bomb to kill some of the enemy in the process but there
was hardly any in the sniper who acted under cover and then fled the scene,
thus wittingly setting off bloody reprisals against numerous innocent
people. Soviet savagery and American brutality then joined in. From
Hitler’s point of view, the unnatural alliance of the City’s and Wall
Street’s capitalism with Muscovite Communism had been sealed in the
deliberate holocaust of the German people; the Ark of the Covenant between
those two opposites united the Jews of the whole world, so powerful and
influential particularly in the financial spheres of the English-speaking
countries, in the media and in the international Communist movement. The
German historian Ernst Nolte had already offered me that argument of the
“more humane means” being evidence of the gas chambers’ existence. It goes
to show how destitute of real evidence such historians are.
Doesn’t the report of the Berlin-Wannsee conference prove the existence of
a plan to exterminate the Jews?
Not in the least. Undated, unsigned, bearing no stamp of any bureau, this
piece has the look of a draft report telling of a meeting held on January
20, 1942 in the Berlin suburbs. Nowhere is it a question of killing or
exterminating the Jews but, for those Jews able to work, of evacuation
eastwards for them to be put to work, whilst those aged 65 and over were
to be sent to Theresienstadt, in Bohemia. There appears several times in
this document the expression “final solution of the Jewish question in
Europe”, which is sometimes shortened to “final solution of the Jewish
question” or to “final solution” or even, quite simply, to “solution”. The
original phrase, in its complete form, was “a final territorial solution
of the Jewish question” (understood: the Jewish question in Europe). A
certain Martin Luther, under-secretary of State in the German foreign
office, employed that phrase on page 4 of his famous memorandum of August
21, 1942. That adjective “territorial” means that the question will have
to be settled by finding the Jews a territory of their own; any other
solution would be inadequate. For if, for example, after the war, the Jews
became free again in Europe, they would soon, as history shows, manage to
regain their power and influence there; whereas, in the event of a
transfer for good somewhere outside Europe, those who’d survived the
hardships entailed would make up an elite capable of forming the germinal
cell of a Jewish renewal. It’s silly to talk here of an extermination
project. Even Yehuda Bauer, professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
ended up, in 1992, denouncing “the silly story of Wannsee”. He stated:
“The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at
Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at”.
Some claim that the number of Jews killed by the Germans doesn’t matter.
Whether it’s a question of six million, two million or 500,000, the crime
remains enormous.
The remark is a common one. In my judgment I’ve already answered it, in
substance, by showing you that Germany never had a policy of exterminating
the Jews. That said, figures matter, and sometimes they even matter
greatly. First of all, there’s an important difference between dying and
being killed. Then, it’s far more grave an act to kill a mass of people
than one person alone. Finally, the difference between six million and
500,000 being 5,500,000, there you have, in any case, 5,500,000 persons
who, instead of having died or been killed, turn out to be well and truly
alive. Still, when a modest-sized community can claim that six million of
its members have been methodically done away with (six million being the
equivalent of the population of a country like Switzerland), it will
obtain, most assuredly, more compassion from the rest of the world than if
it only invokes the figure of 500,000 dead or killed. With six million
dead or killed it can demand and obtain a good deal more moral
understanding, financial compensation, assorted powers and privileges. For
a small people, the ability to boast of being a millionaire six times over
in dead or murdered opens up the chance to demand and garner, with no
great difficulty, billions in hard cash. A Shoah estimated at six million
victims is the guarantee of a “Shoah business” that will bear fruit
proportionately. By this I don’t mean that lies have been told and
exaggerations made in order to make money or acquire privileges. Lies have
been told and the subsequent success of the lies has been turned to good
account.
Are you of the opinion that Germany has contracted a moral responsibility
towards Israel and the Jews, a responsibility that must also be borne in
the form of financial reparations?
I am rather of the opinion of the American author Arthur Robert Butz, the
Number One revisionist. The text of his masterly book, The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century, ends with this comment on the colossal German “reparations”:
“… it then develops that Israel owes Germany a lot of money, because the
proposed justification for the reparations has been invalidated”. It is
worth noting that the German version of the book is, on this point, rather
different and, unhappily, less clear-cut.
In your view, do the Jews who survived the Second World War deserve
financial compensation?
All the true victims of that atrocious conflict and its aftermath deserve
respect, consideration and indemnity; amongst the victims I should mention,
in particular, the Germans — but not their leaders — and the entire
Palestinian people.
Are you an anti-Semite, that is an enemy of the Jews?
You mean anti-Jewish. No, I don’t consider myself anti-Jewish as I don’t
wish the Jews any ill. I don’t wish for anyone to touch a hair on their
head, if only so as not to have to hear them yell still more loudly. What
I do want, on the other hand, is for them not to do me any harm; nor to
others. I want the deafening drumming of their holocaustic propaganda to
end, drumming behind which one can all too often make out the drum rolls
leading up to new wars. There are none so whining and warlike as that
Jewish, Zionist and neo-con nomenklatura which never quits demanding
censorship, repression, wars and crusades in the name of the “Holocaust”,
that is in the name of an especially degrading lie.
Are you a racist?
No.
What future do you wish for “the Holocaust”?
If by that word are meant, all together, the alleged policy of physical
extermination of the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers and the alleged
Six Million, I wish that abominable slander a speedy end in the rubbish
bins of history. As an academic, I want it to be possible to write on the
Second World War without having to dread the effects of special laws put
on the books at the behest of the Jewish nomenklatura. Hitler died more
than sixty years ago and it remains “streng verboten” to write “on”
Hitler; one may write only “against” Hitler. This is either childishness
or else treating people like children. I wish to see us all entitled to
write about him just as we’re allowed to do with Napoleon, Churchill or
Stalin.
Have you a word to say in conclusion?
My conclusion is that we are here in Tehran the day after a conference,
held on December 11th and 12th of 2006, dealing with “the Holocaust”. That
conference was truly international. We’d have liked to see and hear Raul
Hilberg and Norman Finkelstein. The latter says the revisionists are “crackpots”,
lunatics. If he’d come here, I’d have asked him quite politely in what
respect I personally deserved that epithet, and I’d also have inquired as
to what writings of ours he might in fact have read before pronouncing
such a judgment on revisionist authors. The conference ended with the
forming of a “Holocaust” research group, with an Iranian, Dr Ramin, as its
president and, provisionally, five members: an Australian, a Briton, a
Dane, a Frenchman and a Swiss. The year 2006 will go down in history, not
just the history of Iran but that of the whole world as well. Iran, this
amazing country, will have had the heroism, in one and the same year, to
say no, first to American imperialism, then to the “Holocaust” crusaders.
I won’t hide it from you that this heroism scares me. Perhaps President
Ahmadinejad will in future have to pay dearly for his temerity.
Were you able to have a word with him?
Yes, we talked for a few minutes face to face, amidst a lot of other
conference participants. I expressed my admiration for his courage, along
with our gratitude for this astonishing seminar, open to all, revisionists
and non-revisionists alike. To me, the one whom the world press depicts as
a dangerous fanatic appeared, both in his closing speech and in our brief
conversation, to be a man of refined spirit, sincere and soft-spoken. And
besides, you know he’s never said that the State of Israel must be “wiped
off the map”, but he has thought it enough to adopt a phrase of the late
Ayatollah Khomeini, in whose view the Zionist State would one day be
erased from the chart of time and history. He’s expressed the opinion that
in the Middle East Zionism is bound to disappear just as Communism did in
Russia. He wishes to see all the communities in Palestine, including the
Jewish community, find their respective places one again. Hence that
delegation of six rabbis at the conference, wearing a sort of badge with
the message that they were Jews but not Zionists. As I’ve told you, I
myself conversed and got on quite well with two of those rabbis. One of
them said to me, in the presence of a witness: “I ask your forgiveness for
what ‘they’ have done to you, if it’s at all forgivable”. To which I
replied “Let’s stay united”, meaning we should make a united stand against
those who, holding all the power, abuse that excess of power.
You’ve paid dearly for this revisionist struggle that you’ve been waging
since, at least, 1974.
Yes, I’ve paid dearly but less so than other revisionists. I’m talking not
only about the physical assaults that I’ve had to endure and the
hospitalisations but also of the avalanche of court cases and, sometimes,
their scandalous outcome. I’m well placed to know that with regard to a
revisionist, as formerly with regard to sorcerers or witches, the judges,
apart from a few exceptions, no longer recognise any moral principles, any
laws, any rights. As for the media, they’ve heaped onto my name an
extravagant load of abuse, insults, slanders. In over thirty years they’ve
never spontaneously offered me the chance to present my defence. With but
one exception: in December 1980, on the radio, I had the time to utter a
sixty-word sentence summing up the findings of my research, but the axe
came down in the form of a lawsuit and judgment against me precisely
because of that sentence. It’s a disgrace that, from 1974 to the present
day, journalists have been able to say my name a hundred thousand times to
brand me as a “gangster of history” without a single one of them ever
asking me for an interview, if only to hear me talk for a few minutes in
my defence. No less distressing is the general silence of my colleagues,
French academics and intellectuals who otherwise are so quick to proclaim
their desire to defend the freedom of inquiry. The American Noam Chomsky
has, on one occasion, spoken up in favour of my right to freedom of
expression but, since then, he’s only ever spoken of revisionists as of “crackpots”.
The only people in France to take the risk of defending me have been,
besides my lawyer (and his friends), Pierre Guillaume, Serge Thion,
Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (and their friends, amongst whom the courageous
Jacob Assous). But I have no right to complain if I compare my lot with
that of so many other revisionists, to begin with the heroic Ernst Zündel
and a good number of other Germans or Austrians who either have
experienced long years of imprisonment or will be imprisoned in future. In
Sweden, the ever-steadfast Ahmed Rami has himself also tasted prison life.
And then we were saved by the Internet. Maybe I’ve been lucky. I shouldn’t
say the same for my wife and children.
Will you agree to let this interview be published?
Yes, on condition that you submit the text to me and that, if need be, I
may make corrections and additions, either on my own initiative or at your
request.
Then we’re agreed. I thank you.
Danke sehr. And, addressing myself to your country, I’ll add: “Armes
Deutschland!” [Poor Germany!].
Leider. [Unhappily]
Leider.
THE END
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