Raul
Hilberg, the most prestigious of the authors who defend the case for the
physical extermination of Jews by the Germans during the Second World War,
began his investigation of the subject in 1948.
In 1961,
after more than a dozen years’ labour, he published The Destruction of the
European Jews. In this work, he presents “the destruction of the European
Jews” as a vast undertaking ordered by Hitler in person who, he says, gave two
orders to that effect; then various German administrative, police and military
bodies, in abidance with those orders, coordinated their efforts duly to
prepare, organise, monitor and carry out that vast criminal undertaking.
In 1976
there appeared a work by the most prestigious of the revisionist authors: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. In it Arthur R. Butz, who teaches at Northwestern
University near Chicago, shows that the alleged extermination of the Jews is a
swindle.
In
1978-1979 I published two articles in the prominent daily Le Monde
demonstrating that the alleged Nazi gas chambers could not have existed, and
this for reasons essentially physical and chemical in nature [1]. Those pieces caused something of a stir.
In France, Raymond Aron and François Furet announced that an international
gathering of specialists would be held to demonstrate to the world that the
extermination of Jews and the Nazi gas chambers had really existed. Amongst the
specialists would be Raul Hilberg.
Shortly
before the start of the conference, Guy Sitbon, permanent US correspondent for
the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, had a lengthy interview with Hilberg [2]. The latter said some astonishing things,
basically amounting to an admission that, with regard to the destruction of the
European Jews and the Nazi gas chambers, there were not really any documents
but only testimonies that “concur, just about”. Although Hilberg, of course,
maintained his general argument, his explanations were radically different from
those that he had given till then. It is obvious that the revisionist argument had
something to do with this change. Besides, the interviewee conceded as much,
even if only reluctantly, in stating:
I will say that, in a certain way, Faurisson and others, without wanting
to, have done us a favour. They have raised questions that have the effect of
engaging historians in new research. They have obliged us once again to collect
information, to re-examine documents and to go further into the comprehension
of what took place. [3]
The
international gathering took place behind closed doors at the Sorbonne from
June 29 to July 2, 1982. A press conference giving an account of the discussions
and conclusions was expected. It was then that, to the general surprise, only
Raymond Aron and François Furet appeared, declaring, on the one hand, that “despite
the most erudite research” it had not been possible to find any order from
Hitler for the extermination of the Jews, and, on the other hand, that taking
the revisionists to court was like conducting a witch-hunt. NOT ONE WORD WAS
UTTERED ABOUT THE GAS CHAMBERS.
Seven
months later, in New York, before an audience of nearly 2,700 at Avery Fischer
Hall, Hilberg summed up his new argument: the entire German policy of physical
destruction of the Jews was to be explained by… thought transmission. If no
document attesting to that criminal policy was to be found, this was because no
such document existed. The entire German bureaucratic machinery had, for years,
operated by thought transmission or telepathy. He put it in these words:
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. They [these 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 [4].
Let us
note again those final words: “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind
reading by a far-flung bureaucracy” [5].
On January
16, 1985 Hilberg confirmed those words and that explanation at Ernst Zündel’s
trial in Toronto. He did so under oath during his cross-examination by Zündel’s
barrister, Douglas Christie, whom I was assisting [6].
That same
year the “revised and definitive” edition of his book appeared. In it, he did
not use the expression “consensus-mind reading” but wrote:
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 [7].
He spoke
of “countless decision makers in a far-flung bureaucratic machine” without “a
basic plan”. He evoked “written directives not published”, “oral directives and
authorisations”, and “basic understandings of officials resulting in decisions
not requiring orders or explanations”. There had been “no one agency”, and “no
single organisation directed or coordinated the entire process”. He concluded
that the destruction of the Jews was “the work of a far-flung administrative
machine” and that "no special agency was created and no special budget was
devised to destroy the Jews of Europe. Each organisation was to play a specific
role in the process, and each was to find the means to carry out its task”, he
concluded [8].
For me,
this is tantamount to explaining by the workings of the Holy Spirit something
that was allegedly a formidable criminal undertaking of industrial proportions,
carried out particularly with a weapon (a chemical slaughterhouse employing an
insecticide for the killing of human beings) designed and created through a
phenomenon of spontaneous generation.
I refuse
to believe the unbelievable. I refuse to believe in what Hilberg himself calls
“an incredible meeting of minds”. I refuse to believe in thought transmission
or telepathy, just as I refuse to believe in the workings of the Holy Spirit
and in spontaneous generation. I reject any historical argument, any system of
historical explanation, that relies on such nonsense. Raul Hilberg is not a
historian.
On
November 23, 1978 the French historian René Rémond stated to me: “As far as the
[Nazi] gas chambers are concerned, I am ready to follow you; as for the
genocide, I have the deep conviction that Nazism in itself is sufficiently
perverse for that genocide to have been part of its intentions and actions, but
I acknowledge that I have no scientific proof of that genocide.”
That is
indeed the least one may say when one cares about the historical truth.
September 1, 1988
Notes
[1] “‘Le problème des chambres à
gaz’ ou ‘la rumeur d’Auschwitz’”, Le Monde, December 29, 1978, and “Une
lettre de M. Faurisson”, Le Monde, January 16, 1979, reprinted in R.
Faurisson, Écrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), produced in four volumes
in 1999; vol. 1, p. 122-124, 131-134.
[2] “Les Archives de l'horreur”, Le
Nouvel Observateur, July 3-9, 1982, p. 70-73, 75-77.
[3] Ibid., p. 71, A.
[4] Quoted in George De Wan, “The
Holocaust in Perspective”, Newsday (Long Island, New York), February 23,
1983, p. II/3.
[5] In the American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language, “mind reading” is defined as “the faculty
of discerning another’s thoughts through extrasensory means of communication;
telepathy”.
[6] Hilberg’s testimony on January
16, 1985 (Toronto): trial transcript, p. 846-848.
[7] Raul Hilberg, The
Destruction of the European Jews (New York, Holmes and Meier, 1985, 3
vols.), p. 55.
[8] Ibid., p. 53-55, 62.
