- Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is
generally accepted as a witness to the Jewish "Holocaust," and,
more specifically, as a witness to the legendary Nazi extermination gas
chambers. The Paris daily Le Monde emphasized at the time that Wiesel was
awarded the Nobel Prize because: [1]
-
- These last years have seen, in the name of so-called
"historical revisionism," the elaboration of these, especially
in France, questioning the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and, perhaps
beyond that, of the genocide of the Jews itself.
-
- But in what respect is Elie Wiesel a witness to the alleged
gas chambers? By what right does he ask us to believe in that means of
extermination? In an autobiographical book that supposedly describes his
experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he nowhere mentions the gas chambers.
[2] He does indeed say that the Germans executed Jews, but ... by fire;
by throwing them alive into flaming ditches, before the very eyes of the
deportees! No less than that!
-
- Here Wiesel the false witness had some bad luck. Forced
to choose from among several Allied war propaganda lies, he chose to defend
the fire lie instead of the boiling water, gassing, or electrocution lies.
In 1956, when he published his testimony in Yiddish, the fire lie was still
alive in certain circles. This lie is the origin of the term Holocaust.
Today, there is no longer a single historian who believes that Jews were
burned alive. The myths of the boiling water and of electrocution have
also disappeared. Only the gas remains.
-
- The gassing lie was spread by the Americans. [3] The
lie that Jews were killed by boiling water or steam (specifically at Treblinka)
was spread by the Poles. [4] The electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets.
[5]
-
- The fire lie is of undetermined origin. It is, in a sense,
as old as war propaganda or hate propaganda. In his memoir, Night, which
is a version of his earlier Yiddish testimony, Wiesel reports that at Auschwitz
there was one flaming ditch for the adults and another one for babies.
He writes: [6]
-
- "Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch,
gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit
and delivered its load -- little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it -- saw
it with my own eyes ... Those children in the flames. (Is it surprising
that I could not sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my eyes.)"
-
- "A little farther on there was another ditch with
gigantic flames where the victims suffered "slow agony in the flames."
Wiesel's column was led by the Germans to within "three steps"
of the ditch, then to "two steps." "Two steps from the pit
we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks."
-
- An exceptional witness himself, Wiesel assures us of
his having met other exceptional witnesses. Regarding Babi Yar, a place
in Ukraine where the Germans executed Soviet citizens, among them Jews,
Wiesel wrote: [7]
-
- "Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after
month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time,
geysers of blood spurted from it."
-
- These words did not slip from their author in a moment
of frenzy: first, he wrote them, then some unspecified number of times
(but at least once) he had to reread them in the proofs; finally, his words
were translated into various languages, as is everything this author writes.
-
- That Wiesel personally survived, was, of course, the
result of a miracle. He says that: [8]
-
- "In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their
deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate."
They stopped there each time. Why?
-
- In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the
"gratuitous lie" with regard to the German concentration camps.
She wrote: [9]
-
- "Those persons [who gratuitously lie] are, to tell
the truth, much more numerous than people generally suppose, and a subject
like that of the concentration camp world -- well designed, alas, to stimulate
sado-masochistic imaginings -- offered them an exceptional field of action.
We have known numerous mentally damaged persons, half swindlers and half
fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation; we have known others of
them -- authentic deportees -- whose sick minds strove to go even beyond
the monstrosities that they had seen or that people said had happened to
them. There have been publishers to print some of their imaginings, and
more or less official compilations to use them, but publishers and compilers
are absolutely inexcusable, since the most elementary inquiry would have
been enough to reveal the imposture."
-
- Tillion lacked the courage to give examples and names.
But that is usually the case. People agree that there are false gas chambers
that tourists and pilgrims are encouraged to visit, but they do not tell
us where. They agree that there are false "eyewitnesses," but
in general they name only Martin Gray, the well-known swindler, at whose
request Max Gallo, with full knowledge of what he was doing, fabricated
the bestseller For Those I Loved.
-
- Jean-François Steiner is sometimes named as well.
His bestselling novel Treblinka (1966) was presented as a work of which
the accuracy of every detail was guaranteed by oral or written testimony.
In reality, it was a fabrication attributable, at least in part, to the
novelist Gilles Perrault. [10] Marek Halter, for his part, published his
La Mémoire d'Abraham in 1983; as he often does on radio, he talked
there about his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. However, if we are to
believe an article by Nicolas Beau that is quite favorable to Halter, [11]
little Marek, about three years old, and his mother left Warsaw not in
1941 but in October of 1939, before the establishment of the ghetto there
by the Germans. Halter's book is supposed to have been actually written
by a ghost writer, Jean-Noël Gurgan.
-
- Filip Müller is the author of Eyewitness Auschwitz:
Three Years in the Gas Chambers, [12] which won the 1980 prize of the International
League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA). This nauseous best-seller
is actually the work of a German ghost writer, Helmut Freitag, who did
not hesitate to engage in plagiarism. [13] The source of the plagiarism
is Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, another best-seller made up
out of whole cloth and attributed to Miklos Nyiszli. [14]
-
- Thus, a whole series of works presented as authentic
documents turns out to be merely compilations attributable to various ghost
writers: Max Gallo, Gilles Perrault, Jean-Noël Gurgan (?), and Helmut
Freitag, among others.
-
- We would like to know what Germaine Tillion thinks about
Elie Wiesel today. With him the lie is certainly not gratuitous. Wiesel
claims to be full of love for humanity. However, he does not refrain from
an appeal to hatred. In his opinion: [15]
-
- "Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart
a zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate -- for what the German personifies
and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal
of the dead."
-
- At the beginning of 1986, 83 deputies of the German Bundestag
took the initiative of proposing Wiesel for the Nobel Peace Prize. This
would be, they said, "a great encouragement to all who are active
in the process of reconciliation." [16] That is what might be called
"going from National Socialism to national masochism."
-
- Jimmy Carter needed a historian to preside over the President's
Commission on the Holocaust. As Dr. Arthur Butz said so well, he chose
not a historian but a "histrion": Elie Wiesel. Even the newspaper
Le Monde, in the article mentioned above, was obliged to refer to the histrionic
trait that certain persons deplore in Wiesel:
-
- "Naturally, even among those who approve of the
struggle of this American Jewish writer, who was discovered by the Catholic
François Mauriac, some reproach him for having too much of a tendency
to change the Jewish sadness into "morbidity" or to become the
high priest of a "planned management of the Holocaust."
-
- As Jewish writer Leon A. Jick has written: "The
devastating barb, 'There is no business like SHOAH-business' is, sad to
say, a recognizable truth." [17]
-
- Elie Wiesel issues alarmed and inflammatory appeals against
Revisionist authors. He senses that things are getting out of hand. It
is going to become more and more difficult for him to maintain the mad
belief that the Jews were exterminated or were subjected to a policy of
extermination, especially in so-called gas chambers. Serge Klarsfeld has
admitted that real proofs of the existence of the gas chambers have still
not yet been published. He promises proofs. [18]
-
- On the scholarly plane, the gas chamber myth is finished.
To tell the truth, that myth breathed its last breath several years ago
at the Sorbonne colloquium in Paris (June 29-July 2, 1982), at which Raymond
Aron and François Furet presided. What remains is to make this news
known to the general public. However, for Elie Wiesel it is of the highest
importance to conceal that news. Thus all the fuss in the media, which
is going to increase: the more the journalists talk, the more the historians
keep quiet.
-
- But there are historians who dare to raise their voices
against the lies and the hatred. That is the case with Michel de Boüard,
wartime member of the Resistance, deportee to Mauthausen, member of the
Committee for the History of the Second World War from 1945 to 1981, and
a member of the Institut de France. In a poignant interview in 1986, he
courageously acknowledged that in 1954 he had vouched for the existence
of a gas chamber at Mauthausen where, it finally turns out, there never
was one. [19]
-
- The respect owed to the sufferings of all the victims
of the Second World War, and, in particular, to the sufferings of the deportees,
demands on the part of historians a return to the proven and time-honored
methods of historical criticism.
-
- Summary
-
- Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses
to the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night,
he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have witnessed
Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all historians. Wiesel
gives credence to the most absurd stories of other "eyewitnesses."
He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to their deaths each
day in Buchenwald.
-
- When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners,
had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners,"
or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators,"
the two decided to leave with their German captors.
-
- It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for
the genuine sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians
return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the testimony
of the Holocaust "eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous scrutiny
rather than unquestioning acceptance.
-
- Notes
-
- 1. Le Monde, October 17, 1986. Front page.
- 2. There is one single allusion, extremely vague and
fleeting, on pages
- 78-79: Wiesel, who very much likes to have conversations
with God, says to Him:
- "But these men here, whom You have betrayed, whom
You have allowed to be
- tortured, butchered, gassed, burned, what do they do?
They pray before you!" (Night,
- New York, Discus/Avon Books, 1969, p. 79). In his preface
to that same book,
- François Mauriac mentioned "the gas chamber
and the crematory" (p. 8). The four
- crucial pages of "testimony" by Elie Wiesel
are reproduced in facsimile in:
- Pierre Guillaume, Droit et Histoire (La Vieille Taupe,
1986), pp. 147-150. In
- the German-language edition of Night (Die Nacht zu begraben,
Elischa [Ullstein,
- 1962]), on 14 occasions the word "crematory"
or "crematories" has been
- falsely given as "Gaskammer" ("gas chamber[s]").
In January of 1945, in anticipation
- of a Russian takeover, the Germans were evacuating Auschwitz.
Elie Wiesel, a
- young teenager at the time, was hospitalized in Birkenau
(the "extermination
- camp") after surgery on an infected foot. His doctor
had recommended two weeks
- of rest and good food but, before his foot healed, the
Russian takeover became
- imminent. Hospital patients were considered unfit for
the long trip to the
- camps in Germany and Elie thus could have remained at
Birkenau to await the
- Russians. Although his father had permission to stay
with him as a hospital
- patient or orderly, father and son talked it over and
decided to move out with the
- Germans. (See Night, p. 93. See also D. Calder, The Sunday
Sun [Toronto,
- Canada], May 31, 1987, p. C4.)
- 3. See the US War Refugee Board Report, German Extermination
Camps:
- Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC), November 1944.
- 4. See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293). Published
in the IMT "blue
- series," Vol. 32, pp. 153-158.
- 5. See the report in Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4, and
the UP report in the
- Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 2.
- 6. Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43, 44,
79, 93.
- 7. Paroles d'étranger (Editions du Seuil, 1982),
p. 86.
- 8. "Author, Teacher, Witness," Time magazine,
March 18, 1985, p. 79.
- 9. "Le Système concentrationnaire allemand
[1940-1944]," Revue d'histoire de
- la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, July 1954, p. 18,
n. 2.
- 10. Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p. 5.
- 11. Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19.
- 12. Published by Stein and Day (New York). Paperback
edition of 1984. (xii +
- 180 pages.) With a foreword by Yehuda Bauer of the Institute
of Contemporary
- Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
- 13. Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: un caso di plagio, Parma
(Italy): 1986. See
- also: C. Mattogno, "Auschwitz: A Case of Plagiarism,"
The Journal of Historical
- Review, Spring 1990, pp. 5-24.
- 14. Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published by
Fawcett Crest (New
- York).
- 15. Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: "Appointment
with Hate"), New York:
- Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New York: Avon, 1968,
pp. 177-178.
- 16. The Week in Germany (published in New York by the
German government in
- Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2.
- 17. "The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the
American Public," Yad Vashem
- Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p. 316.
- 18. VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37.
- 19. Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6.
- #2002
-
- http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/wiesel.shtml
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