- In honor of World War II revisionist historian Dr. Robert
Faurisson's 79th birthday, January 25, 2008, we are publishing
this interview conducted in Tehran, December 13, 2006 by a German
citizen, immediately after Iran's revisionist conference had concluded.
-
- In spite of some bitter disputes we have had in the past
with Dr. Faurisson (any friendship which cannot weather such disputes it
not a true friendship), and the fact that we continue to disagree with
some of his ideas and conclusions, Robert Faurisson is undoubtedly one
of the bravest men it has been our privilege to know.
-
- The sacrifices he has made, both in his career as a university
professor, and in his personal life, have been so enormous they would have
driven a lesser man to madness or recantation and surrender. In addition
to losing his professorship and being saddled with huge court fines, he
has been repeatedly physically assaulted, culminating in a brutal attack
in 1989 that required his hospitalization.
-
- Robert would not want to be regarded as a martyr, but
the fact is, he is indeed a martyr to freedom of speech and inquiry. Nobel
prizes go to obscure campaigners for human rights in Third World countries,
while under the very nose of the Nobel committee is Faurisson of France.
His courageous campaign and the rights of revisionists, mean nothing to
the West that otherwise is so pompous in its moralizing lectures to the
Muslim world, on the need for "democracy and freedom of expression."
What they mean by that slogan is freedom for the dominion of Zionism, Judaism
and its offshoot religion for gentiles, Holocaustianity, and jail -- or
worse -- for all who dissent.
-
- Dr. Faurisson is currently being prosecuted by the government
of France for having spoken at the Tehran revisionist conference. He has
been repeatedly prosecuted and fined in the past for his revisionist books
and essays. Meanwhile, Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, Georges Thiel, Wolfgang
Frohlich and incredibly, Sylvia Stolz, Mr. Zundel's defense attorney, are
all either serving prison terms or have been sentenced to prison in Europe
for blaspheming the Holy People's Holy Auschwitz Gas Chamber relic. Attorney
Stolz's "crime" was offering too vigorous a defense of Zundel
during his trial in Germany! This is beyond absurd. Even Lewis Carrol and
his Alice would be lost in this Kafkaesque nightmare world, wherein the
supposedly oh-so cool agnostics of hip, liberated Europe, who have cast
off God, fall prostrate in abject obeisance to the false gods of Judaism
and Zionism. -- Hoffman
-
- Interviewer: Hello Professor Faurisson, and thank
you for granting me this interview.
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Hello. It's I who thank you for your willingness
to put questions.
-
- Interviewer: Professor, may I ask what your reasons
were for deciding to take part in this conference in Tehran on the Holocaust
on December 11th and 12th, 2006?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: It's because I know of no other country,
no place where a conference on this subject could welcome me. Even in the
United States the holding of such a conference would be risky; to begin
with, upon arrival on American territory any foreign revisionist could
well find himself being sent straight back to where he'd come from. In
France, any similar gathering would be out of the question. I don't see
a single European country that would tolerate a public conference or debate
on the "Holocaust". In Germany, your country, the prohibition
of any form of revisionism is draconian. Canada, Australia and New Zealand
are merciless.
-
- Furthermore, it may be that in other parts of the world
some countries are indifferent to the matter. Thus it was an altogether
unexpected bit of luck that Iran should offer to host an international
seminar on the "Holocaust" that, for once, would be open to all
comers. It was not actually a revisionist conference but, as indicated
by the title ("Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision")?, a new
look at the "Holocaust" from a comprehensive viewpoint and not
a biased or fragmentary one. I didn't think this could come about in my
lifetime.
-
- Interviewer: What goal have you been looking to
achieve in coming here?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: I want to make public what the mainstream
media of the Western world stubbornly conceal. When those media speak of
revisionists, it's to insult us or ascribe to us ideas that we've never
expressed. For example, they readily assert that the revisionists are people
who claim the German concentration camps never existed. That's putting
sheer nonsense in our mouths. Unhappily the nonsensical assertion, amongst
the French in any case, is widespread. On this score, the French in general
have the idea that the revisionists are lunatics who go so far as to deny
the obvious and this is why, coining a barbarism, they call us "négationnistes"
("denialists")?.
-
- Interviewer: Have you the impression, at the end
of this gathering, that you've achieved your goal?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: In part. The world has been able
to note that we exist and that we can conduct ourselves peaceably and courteously
with people who don't share our convictions. Time was wanting for any real
debate. And then I suppose the media will relate virtually nothing of the
content of our papers. They'll keep silent about our arguments and discoveries.
To obtain a real debate we'll need a new conference, on condition that
our opponents don't shy away from taking part. I must say that, for an
instant, I was able to have the beginnings of a public confrontation with
a professor who was hostile to revisionism, and that this confrontation
turned dramatically to our advantage. I'll tell you about it a bit later
on, if you like.
-
- Interviewer: Most gladly.
-
- Dr. Faurisson: There've been, above all, the echoes made
by this conference throughout the world. It has provoked vehement protests,
starting yesterday in Washington with a statement by White House spokesman
Sean McCormack denouncing an Iranian regime that "perversely seeks
to call the historical fact of those [Nazi]? atrocities into question and
provide a platform for hatred". Then it was in Brasilia that a government
had its say in the matter with an official protest. Then in England. Then,
at the UN, Kofi Annan gave tongue. The Vatican as well. According to all
these authorities, there are no grounds for asking oneself questions about
the "Holocaust" of the Jews. The "Holocaust" took place
and that's that.
-
- But I've promised you that example of the beginnings
of a public confrontation. Here it is. That match of yesterday pitted me
against an Iranian professor from Shiraz University, who also teaches at
the University of the State of Washington (USA)?; his name is Gholam Vatandoust.
At one point in his presentation he dared to say that the "Holocaust"
was "fully documented", that is, wholly confirmed by valid documentation.
Then, after his talk, when the audience was able to put questions, I asked
this professor to name me a document, and I insisted on the fact that I
didn't care to hear about a set of documents; I wanted just one. He started
answering by saying how Churchill, in his memoirs, had denounced the Nazi
atrocities. I pointed out that never had Churchill mentioned the "gas
chambers" and that such was the case as well with Eisenhower, de Gaulle
and others of their stature. I reminded him that what I was waiting for
was the designation of a document. I had him note that Winston Churchill,
in the remarks alluded to, was a politician expressing his sentiments.
However, I was not looking to know anyone's sentiments, be they even those
of a personality like Churchill.
-
- At that point, the Iranian professor believed he'd come
up with another argument. He told me it would be enough to accompany him
to the American National Archives, where I should find documents. This
wasn't an answer since, again, I was demanding to hear of but one document.
Just then the situation reminded me of the story of the angler and the
big fish. An angler boasts of recently making an extraordinary haul, a
truly miraculous catch, and, when I ask to see the fish, retorts: "How's
that? Are you calling my word into doubt? If you're a doubting Thomas and
won't grant me your trust, I can show you the place where I caught that
fish." Obviously my reply will be that the place doesn't interest
me: the fish does. Let him show me it! Thus, "Show me or draw me a
Nazi gas chamber!" That's what I've been asking for ages.
-
- I told this professor that I was familiar with those
National Archives. I'd even consulted them at three different places: in
Washington proper, then, not far from there, in Suitland and at the opulent
installation of College Park. In short, I was getting no answer to my request.
The man made three more vague attempts, all equally futile, and part of
the audience, noticing how decidedly unable he was to respond, interrupted
the verbal jousting with laughter and applause. This morning I had the
occasion to meet him. I found much humbler than yesterday and he exhibited
a lively curiosity about an argument that he seemed to be just discovering.
We exchanged addresses and perhaps our discussion will continue. I also
had two brief talks in private with one of the six anti-Zionist rabbis
who'd come to take part in the proceedings: he was from Britain and appeared
surprised but not shocked by the findings of revisionist research. Finally,
I had a short and cordial exchange with an Austrian chief rabbi.
-
- It seems that another participant, Viktor Nadein-Rayevsky
of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International
Relations, said at some point: "Faurisson demands documents, but some
very important events have occurred which haven't left any documents. In
these cases, no document can be produced." I'd like to know what these
"very important events" can be to which no document attests!
-
- Interviewer: I think he was talking about the Khmer
Rouge.
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Perhaps. But then, I'm very sorry! We
possess a large number of documents or alleged documents on the subject.
I'll recall here the meaning of the term "document". In general,
a document is something written, but it may also be a material object.
"Document" comes from a Latin verb signifying "that which
tells, which teaches you something". A knife on a table, a chair,
a room, a building can all have the value of a document. It is altogether
normal that, for example, a great mind such as Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889)?,
who, for us French, is the founder of scientific history, should have adopted
a motto like "No documents, no history".
-
- I've just given you the example of two speakers who disputed
what the revisionists have concluded after completing their research work.
I insist on this. People are quick to call us "négateurs"
(at least the word is French)? or "négationnistes" (a
lapse into barbarism)?. These two words mean that revisionists are persons
who deny obvious facts. They would seem, in a way, to be inspired by the
Devil. As in Goethe's phrase, we revisionists would be partisans of "the
spirit that ever denies", wouldn't we? In reality, we deny nothing
at all; simply, after completing our research work, we challenge certain
affirmations and come forth with our own findings. Galileo "denied"
nothing but, at the end of his labours, he stated that a certain idea,
generally admitted, was wrong and that another idea was right.
-
- Interviewer: Can you sum up the substance of your
own contribution to the conference?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: My talk was on "the victories
of revisionism", in other words the concessions that the antirevisionists
have over the years been forced to make to us. I recommend that people
consult the text itself, which I entitled simply "The Victories of
Revisionism" and in which I provide a selection of twenty instances
of such victories. They run from 1950 to 2004, and some of them are quite
dramatic. Unfortunately the general public know nothing of it all because
we have no access to the media.
-
- Interviewer: An example, if you please, of these
victories?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: I could cite the case of Jean-Claude
Pressac. For years, that protégé of the Klarsfeld couple
had presumed to state he'd discovered proof of the "Nazi gas chambers'"
existence. A book of his, in 1993-1994, was laden with praise throughout
the big media. In 1994 I replied with a booklet that earned me new criminal
proceedings. Happily I got Pressac subpoenaed to appear at the trial. This
was in May 1995, in Paris. His collapse under examination was spectacular.
He never got back up again. To her credit, Valérie Igounet, a French
historian hostile to revisionism, reproduced in her 2000 book Histoire
du négationnisme en France a sort of act of surrender signed by
Pressac. The latter, in effect, had ended up admitting that the dossier
on the German concentration camps was "rotten" - his word, that
- with too many lies. He even added that a definitively "rotten"
dossier had been got up around wartime suffering that was all too real
and - in his own phrase - that dossier was "bound for the rubbish
bins of history".
-
- Interviewer: Surprising! What became of Pressac?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: His Jewish friends, of course, disowned
him. He died in 2003, aged 59. The media's silence was total. Pressac is
one of the host of people who have proved unable to take up the challenge
I launched back in the 1970s. At that time I'd demonstrated how the case
for the existence of the alleged Nazi gas chambers ran into some radical
impossibilities. The Leuchter Report and the Rudolf Report, not to mention
a few other reports or views expressed by men of science, subsequently
confirmed my demonstration.
-
- Interviewer: Here, in Tehran, you began your talk
with a word of warning about the photographs said to be of Nazi atrocities.
Why?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Because people's minds are steeped in
them. In the business of lying propaganda nothing's more simple and effective
than the use of photographs. You don't even need any complicated montages.
It's enough to show images of the sick, the dying or the dead and, in relation
to these, speak of the killed, the murdered or the slaughtered. Ordinary
decent folk will be taken in. They'll feel revulsion, indignation, anger.
-
- They'll no longer see what's in front of them (the dead)?
but only what's been put into their minds (the killed)?. They'll become
fixated on it. They won't take time to think things over. In the area of
false massacres the procedure stays unchanged. The alleged massacres at
Auschwitz are, from this point of view, comparable, relatively speaking,
to all the alleged massacres that may be conveniently blamed on the defeated
side of any conflict, be it at Andersonville (alleged extermination camp
of the American Civil War)?, Timosoara (Romania)? or Kuwait City. Corpses
of women and children will do the trick especially well.
-
- It's the procedure that, in 1945, was resorted to by
the Americans and the British, on the one hand, and by the Soviets on the
other hand. Teams of photographers or cameramen enter such or such German
camp at the moment of its liberation. The first step is to have everything
photographed or filmed. The second is to set aside for later use, after
selection, only the most pitiful or revolting images, notably from the
hospital barracks or their vicinity; pains will particularly have been
taken to get images of the typhus-sufferers, veritable walking skeletons.
The third step is to prepare commentary that will lead the public to believe
the German commandants and guards had purposely reduced those poor wretches
to such a state, as they were quite simply carrying out a policy of physical
extermination of the detainees. Exceptions aside, the photographs of some
very large groups of healthy-looking inmates, jubilant at being freed,
will be hidden away.
-
- It will not be revealed that, in these camps, there could
well exist for the benefit or use of the inmates, as was the case at Auschwitz,
vast kitchens and all sorts of sanitary, medical, dental or surgical facilities,
bakeries, post offices, workshops, places for artistic or musical recreation
whose mere presence renders implausible, at the least, the existence of
any intent whatsoever on the part of the Germans to exterminate those inmates.
On the contrary, with the propagandists, a scalpel will fraudulently be
shown as proof that people were killed or tortured; a disinfection gas
chamber will become proof that people, and not vermin, were gassed; a can
of Zyklon-B, a disinfection or anti-infestation substance (Entseuchung,
Entwesung)? that was, accordingly, used to preserve lives against certain
deadly diseases or epidemics, will become proof that the Germans employed
it to suppress human life. The real horrors of all those camps were the
overcrowding, the close quarters and the violence incidental to detention
in such circumstances ("men are like apples: the more they're heaped
on top of each other, the more they rot")?, the prison violence, the
hunger, the harsh weather, the diseases, the epidemics. Revisionist author
and activist Paul Rassinier told of all this very well indeed. Thus, at
times, many inmates were going through hell.
-
- Interviewer: You brought up, in particular, the
British propaganda about Bergen-Belsen
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Yes. Winston Churchill's compatriots achieved
quite some feat there. It's what I call the "Bergen-Belsen bulldozer
job". In April 1945, that camp, overcrowded, ravaged by epidemics
coming from the East, famished, deprived of water in recent days due to
the Anglo-American bombing raids, had become a veritable den of infection.
For this reason the Germans sent out a delegation to Montgomery's approaching
troops to warn them of the state of things there (and probably of the risks
for everyone, including the civilian population, should the internees all
be immediately released without any screening)?. The British agreed to
cooperate with the Wehrmacht, but not with the SS, in order to attempt
to remedy the situation. Then they saw fit to open the numerous common
graves, count the bodies and finally, pile those bodies into great, deep
ditches. To push all the corpses towards the ditches they used a bulldozer.
In a film shot on site we are shown the bulldozer in action.
-
- A selection of these images has been passed on to posterity,
notably thanks to the documentary (documendaciary?)? Night and Fog (1955)?.
Millions of viewers have believed that here they've seen proof of the Germans'
killing their captives, day after day, on an industrial scale. Very rare
indeed must be those who've been able to make out that the bulldozer driver
is a British soldier and not a German soldier. In 1978 a book published
in South Africa with the aim of thwarting any revision of the "Holocaust"
presented a still photo of the bulldozer and the bodies but not without
"cutting off" the driver's head: the obvious intent was to have
us believe the driver was German.
-
- Moreover, with time, in the minds of some, amongst whom
Maurice Druon of the Académie française, "that"
bulldozer, in the singular, has, of course, become "those" bulldozers.
One could go on and on listing the very crudest procedures of this propaganda
rooted in atrocity stories. Thus it is that we're cunningly shown piles
of shoes and eyeglasses or heaps of hair as if they were evidence that
the people they came from were gassed; here the propagandists are sure
to avoid reminding us that, in a Europe subjected to blockade and reduced
to general penury, nothing was thrown away: everything was recovered and
recycled, including hair, which served a particular purpose in the textile
industry. There were countless workshops recycling leather, glass, metal
or wood, both in the camps and in the towns and villages. The "suitcase
job" is also worth noting. A very well-known photograph shows us,
at Auschwitz, suitcases carefully stacked and presented as the pieces of
luggage on which each doomed owner had taken the trouble to write his or
her name and address before being sent to the gas chamber. However, a close
look shows that the names and addresses are all written in the same hand
and with the same white substance.
-
- Consequently, here it is a question, in reality, of a
task performed at the entrance of every detention centre: new prisoners'
belongings are tagged and registered by the prison clerks. Thus had Marcel
Bloch-Dassault, long after the war, been able to receive from Germany the
wallet confiscated from him upon entry at Buchenwald. One evening he could
be seen, on French television, exhibiting that wallet, opening it and taking
out the four-leaf clover that was in it at his arrival in the camp. That
said, there's no doubt the German authorities must have drawn from the
vast stores and confiscated effects to distribute some of them to the civilian
population ravaged by the bombings and deprived of everything.
-
- Interviewer: Wasn't it at Bergen-Belsen that Anne
Frank and her sister Margot died?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Yes, in late February or early March
of 1945. They died of typhus. Still long after the war the official truth
had it that that they'd been gassed at Auschwitz, a camp where they effectively
spent some time before their transfer to Bergen-Belsen. Their fate makes
them deserving of pity. But a good deal more pitiable still was the fate
of the German civilian populations killed or burned alive by the Anglo-American
bomber squadrons. A German man had the idea, after the war, to consult
a book with the register of those killed in the bombing of the city of
Würzburg in the night of March 24, 1945 alone; in that list of more
than 5,000 he noted, I think, 128 women or girls bearing the Christian
name Anne or a closely associated one. There's hardly much talk of those
women or girls systematically killed solely for being German, is there?
-
- Interviewer: Do you think that the National Socialist
regime committed crimes against the European Jews?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: That regime did not pursue, with regard
to the Jews, any criminal policy. That said, some crimes were indeed committed,
especially in wartime, and they were what are generally called "excesses".
Crimes of this kind were either against Jews as individuals or against
Jews taken in groups, for instance, in the course of a military operation
or indeed during reprisals. Still, if one looks closely, nothing should
distinguish those crimes from the odious acts that the victors perpetrated
against, for example, Germans or Japanese. I am now going to insist on
a fact that's important and that even the revisionists don't exploit enough.
-
- We have proof, we've had it ever since the Nuremberg
trial, that soldiers, officers and functionaries, tried by the military
tribunals or courts martial of the Third Reich, were, during the war, sentenced
to death and executed for the murder of a single Jewish man or woman. One
day in the Ukrainian town of Marinka, the mayor, who happened to be a "Volksdeutscher",
an ethnic German, and who had been appointed mayor probably because he
spoke German, killed a local Jewess. Brought before a military tribunal,
he was condemned to death and shot. I'll come back to his case.
-
- We have the example of a young German lieutenant in Budapest
who, upon entering a Jewish woman's house with his men, saw a radio set
- forbidden to Jews - and wanted to take it away, along with some jewellery.
With the woman threatening to go to the police, he ended up killing her.
Court-martialled, he was sentenced to death and executed. As for the soldiers
who'd accompanied him, they were given heavy prison terms.
-
- Interviewer: Were they from the Wehrmacht or the
SS?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: They were from an air-defense unit. But,
you know, this distinction made between the Wehrmacht and the SS is valid
in certain cases and not at all so in others. For example, when in military
action, they were on the same footing. But anyhow, if there had existed
any order whatsoever to kill all the Jews simply because they were Jews,
the Reich authorities wouldn't have gone and shot someone who, breeching
discipline, had killed a Jew or a Jewess.
-
- Interviewer: According to you, are these few examples
sufficient evidence for one to say that the whole Wehrmacht and the whole
SS conducted themselves in such a manner?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Can a German order to kill the Jews -
and I am saying to kill - have existed? It's ruled out if I can, as I'm
doing here, present you with even just a single case of a German military
tribunal trying and condemning to death a single person, then having that
person executed for the murder of a single Jew. I haven't been speaking
of "sufficient evidence" but of evidence. A piece of evidence
is an element that one may take into consideration in order, at the end
of proceedings, to hand down a decision. The judge has before him a set
of evidence or testimonies and he draws his conclusions therefrom. Let's
begin at the beginning, that is with cases like those I've brought up here
or with the one, which comes to mind just now, of a Luftwaffe man who,
in southern France, was sentenced to death for "excesses" against
a Jewish woman.
-
- I personally experienced the German occupation. In 1939
I was ten years old and in 1945, when the Germans left France, I was fifteen.
-
- Interviewer: Where did you live?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: First, up until July 1943, in Marseille,
then in Paris. Never ever could someone, catching sight of a Jew, have
picked up a weapon and killed him with impunity. The consequences for the
murderer would have been extremely grave.
-
- It so happens that, since 1957, I've lived in Vichy.
One night in August 1941 a little bomb went off in front of the gate of
the synagogue, without injuring anyone. The culprits were found the next
day: they were a certain number of young Doriotistes, French supporters
of collaboration with Germany in the fight against "Judeo-Bolshevism".
They were quickly tried and convicted. I've found the text of the court
decision. And, thanks to someone who, during the war, was in the police,
I've learnt that one of the young participants in the "attack",
a "pupille de la nation", that is, the son of a serviceman who
died in the First World War, was so badly beaten inside Vichy police station
that he subsequently died. Never during the entire war could a Frenchman
have allowed himself to strike a Jew in the street.
-
- A Jew as such was of course considered by the State as
a potentially dangerous citizen. He was living under a sort of probation.
He might have good reason to keep on his guard. His movements and rights
were subject to severe restrictions, but there was no lack of Jews who,
all during the German occupation, continued to go about their business
in plain view of everyone, even running their shops or practicing their
trades. Still in Vichy, Marshall and Mrs Pétain's regular chemist
was a Jew by the name of Maurice Benhamou, and the kosher butcher's in
the rue Bardiaux seems to have stayed open throughout the Occupation. In
May 1944 in Lyon an American bombing raid left a number of people dead.
Amongst the services held for these victims was an ecumenical ceremony
led by the Cardinal-Archbishop, with an imam and a rabbi by his side. But
this does not, of course, cancel out the fact that in Vichy, Lyon and in
all the rest of the country the Jews could experience deportation, and
either return or not return afterwards.
-
- Interviewer: Here you're speaking of France?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Yes, of France under the Occupation.
-
- Interviewer: And in the East, do you think things
were the same?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: If you have any specific cases, do present
them. You're German. I should readily invite any German to read an extraordinary
document on the day-to-day life, during the whole war, of certain Jews
in the very heart of the Third Reich. It's the memoirs of Victor Klemperer.
I possess all three versions: German, French and English. I like to compare
the different versions of a book. In the case at hand, the most interesting
version is the French one; instead of stopping at June 1945, it continues
on to December of that year and contains a letter of January 1947 in which
the author, quite obviously under the influence of the propaganda that
had been about since the war's end, piles up lies and exaggerations on
what he'd really lived through and which he'd so accurately described,
day after day, in his memoirs proper.
-
- Victor Klemperer, a Dresden Jew, is married to an Aryan
woman. Very anti-Nazi, he recounts his torments. I'll tell you the summit
of those torments: being Jewish, he had to wear the Jewish star in public
and he did a grand total of eight days in prison, in June 1941, for having
broken the Civil Defence rules after curfew. He spent the eight days in
the cells of Dresden police headquarters, where, he tells us, he was treated
quite correctly. In his book he constantly stresses how the Germans he's
met on the tram, in the street, at the grocer's, far indeed from ill-treating
him or coming across antagonistic, have by and large shown themselves to
be considerate and helpful. Vogel the grocer keeps coffee, a precious commodity
at the time, aside for him. Civil servants are agreeable and polite. "Passers-by
sympathised with the star bearers". He has several "favourable
experiences with the star []?
-
- There is no doubt that the people feel the persecution
of the Jews to be a sin". That said, he takes delight in Germany's
military disasters and in the bombing raids and is sad to note that it
seems impossible to shatter the civilians' morale. These memoirs (at least
5,000 typewritten pages)? amount to a scathing refutation of Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen's thesis claiming that "ordinary Germans", by their
anti-Semitism, contributed to what is called "the Holocaust".
-
- Interviewer: You talk there of France, of Germany,
but if one goes further eastward, it's Poland, the Generalgouvernement,
and then, in regard to that country and Russia, the "Einsatzgrupen"
have to be discussed. What do you say here?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: It's above all in Russia that those
police units operated. The war in the East was a savage one. The Soviet
State had not signed on to the Geneva and Hague conventions and the Germans
found themselves up against a partisan war. At the Soviet end there were
no rights, no law. Thus could the Germans, when there'd been a group of
partisans in a village, be led to destroy everything in it, even if there
were women and children. German soldiers' safety was the paramount concern.
With Germany at war, what German wife, what father or mother would have
agreed that a husband or son should be liable to be killed by an individual
in civilian dress shooting from behind, then slipping away? In such moments
there inevitably came about instances of military savagery, acts as are
displayed in similar circumstances by all the armies of the world.
-
- Coming back to my personal experience in France, I was
able to see at work first the French soldier, then the German soldier,
the Italian soldier, and, finally, the Canadian soldier, the British soldier
and the American soldier. I, who, during the war, was so anti-German, must
admit that I only ever saw extremely correct Germans; I can even mention
some startling cases. When, afterwards, I saw the Americans arrive, I thought
it was wonderful. Sure enough, many of them were likeable and well-behaved
but there were also, amongst the American soldiers, NCOs and officers,
some real louts. And then, on another score, I was especially distressed
on seeing the horrors of the Big Purge. But here I'm getting off the subject.
-
- Interviewer: You wanted to talk about the "Kommissarbefehl",
the "Einsatzgruppen" and Babi Yar.
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Yes, three parts of one same subject.
We're told that there existed a "Kommissarbefehl", described
as an order to kill systematically the Soviet political commissars who
oversaw the troops, and here the occasion is seized to add that the "Einsatzgruppen's"
task was to kill the Jews. It's false. First of all, there never existed
any "Kommissarbefehl" as such. Some historians have acquired
a habit of designating by this term a set of documents concerning the sorting
of prisoners or of certain civilians just behind the front. The Einsatzgruppen,
established at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, were assigned the job
of this sorting. On the immense Russian front, they were a mere 3,000 (three
thousand)?, drivers and clerks included. At the outset of the military
campaign, they were given rigorous instructions. People should read these
instructions. They amount to saying that, as the rules of war are unknown
to the Soviets, a strict sorting of prisoners will be in order. Certain
captives will have to be executed forthwith because they are not soldiers
but fanaticised political commissars who cannot be left in prisoner-of-war
camps; others will perhaps be useful to Germany. One document, labelled
USSR-014 at the Nuremberg trial, spells out eight categories of suspect
persons who must, after sorting, be separated (Aussonderung)? from the
military or civilian prisoners.
-
- It's interesting to note that the Jews are mentioned
in eighth (and last)? place; it's specified in this order of October 29,
1941, that only a category of Jews is concerned. I quote: "8)? Soviet
Russian and Jewish intellectuals, insofar as they are professional revolutionaries
or political activists, authors, editors, Komintern officials etc.".
With their customary dishonesty, the officials in charge of summarising
the documents presumed to write that "those affected" "are
above all Soviet commissars and other leading personalities,
also Jews and members of the intelligentsia"; in their résumé
they go so far as to write of "directives for the 'purging' by special
commandos of the prisoner-of-war camps", whereas, let me repeat, for
this document, it's a matter of "sorting". When the troops advance
and take a town, the Einsatzgruppen, a kind of military police in the field,
will have to try to check the identity of prisoners and civilians. This
doesn't mean that these people are going to be killed. Only some of them
will be slated for execution. On the other side, with the Communists, no
bones were made about executions. Therefore in first place came the political
commissars. Neither here nor elsewhere did there exist any order to kill
the Jews.
-
- Interviewer: Then, if I understand you correctly,
these instructions didn't specify that all the political commissars were
to be executed, even though the said commissars were mentioned first.
-
- Dr. Faurisson: That's right. Often, it seems, those
commissars were Jews; however, even in their case, there was a sorting
to be carried out. But you'll understand well enough that, in practice,
this meant there were prisoners that one had the right, in effect, to execute
in contravention of the laws of war. Also, as you're perhaps aware, the
German military commanders did not want to act like the Red Army and, in
the end, refused to follow through with the harshest provisions of the
orders in question.
-
- As for Babi Yar, no material investigation of the type
carried out at Katyn during the war has been made there; nothing has surfaced
to support the accounts generally heard on the subject, which seem implausible.
I'll come back to Babi Yar.
-
- Interviewer: You wanted to add something about that
town in the Ukraine, Marinka.
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Yes, but first, at risk of surprising
you, I give you notice that for a brief moment we're going to leave the
realm of history for that of fiction. Here is the drama that I imagine.
-
- The German mayor of Marinka, recently sentenced to death
for killing a Jewish woman, is going to be shot by firing squad. He is
in a prison cell awaiting execution. It is night. He is in the throes of
death. Just now, a man appears at the cell door and addresses him as follows:
"You are a German whom German soldiers, in a short while, are going
to shoot because you've killed a Jewess. However, be advised that, in a
few years' time, Germany will have been flattened. Her conquerors will
prove ruthless. They'll make a clean sweep of everything you've learnt
and believed. They'll make up a lie-ridden history of this war. They'll
impose the winners' version. This new official historical truth, forced
upon Germany and propagated nearly everywhere else in the world as well,
will be that, during this war, Germans had every licence to do what you've
done. Yes, its promoters will go so far as to claim that the Germans spent
the better part of their time hunting down, torturing and slaughtering
the Jews. They'll state that Hitler had given the order to murder all the
European Jews.
-
- They'll add that, in order to succeed in a task of such
colossal proportions, he'd had weapons of mass destruction built, weapons
so diabolical that after the war not a trace will be found of them. Television
sets, still so rare today in 1942, will be in every home; morning, noon,
afternoon, evening and night, year in year out, they'll be spreading this
universal neo-truth that will be taught in the primary and secondary schools,
the universities and even in the catechism, to your children, grandchildren
and great-grandchildren. A bit everywhere monuments will be put up and
ceremonies instituted in honour of the new religion. The few who dare to
dispute this dogma will be taken to court, thrown into prison, outlawed
from society. And do you know who the most fervent apostles of this new
creed will be, a creed of what will be called 'the Holocaust of the Jews'?
Don't go searching! It will be the Germans themselves.
-
- In the very firing squad that's going to shoot you there
are perhaps some men who'll survive the war and who, once they've got back
home, will start believing the lie of 'the Holocaust'. In any case, their
children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren will believe
it." The mayor of Marinka will receive this message as an overwhelming
shock. Indeed, he'll go out of his mind as a result, and it's a madman
that they'll be leading to the stake.
-
- Such is the tragedy I imagine. I see in it the story
line of a stage play or film to be made. This tragedy is that of Germany,
whose very soul has been harried to death with the "Holocaust".
-
- Let's leave fiction and come back to history. I'd like
to dwell a little on the case of Babi Yar. Currently, certain Jewish organisations,
sensing that the myth of the gas chambers is taking in water all around,
are trying a diversion, asking us to turn our attention away from the alleged
gas chambers and gas vans and towards the "Einsatzgruppen". This
is, for example, what a French Jewish personality like Jacques Attali has
recently done in writing "The vast majority of Jews slain were killed
by the individual weapons of German soldiers and policemen, between 1940
and 1942, and not by the death-works that were put into place afterwards".
Employing a brand new phrase, these Jews call this the "Shoah by bullets"!
This "Shoah by bullets" is now summoned to replace the "Shoah
by gas".
-
- And so it is that we're being served up again with the
"Babi Yar massacre". At the Nuremberg trial, the place name "Babi
Yar" (in fact, the name of a ravine outside Kiev)? didn't come up,
but a certain document simply reported, in one sentence, that the Germans
in Kiev, which they'd recently taken, had, following a spate of arson attacks
blamed on NKVD agents, arrested, in a reprisal measure, all the city's
Jews, then, on the 29th and 30th of September 1941, had apparently transported
a number of them in the direction of the locality known as Babi Yar to
execute, in the end - take note of this figure: marvel at the precision
- no fewer than 33,771! The document is neither dated nor signed.
-
- It's one of a set selected by a lieutenant Walter Rothschild
of London. In itself, what this sentence relates is implausible. The real
massacre of Katyn, perpetrated by the NKVD and later imputed to the Germans,
had left about 4,400 men - formally attested - dead, in over two months
(March-April 1940)?. By comparison, in the Babi Yar massacre there would
thus, in two days, have been nearly eight times more victims than at Katyn
in two months. Such a fantastic butchery would have left countless traces
and the surroundings themselves would have been turned upside down, if
only by the efforts made in the forbidding task of mass burial, and then,
as some will tell us, of unearthing followed by open-air cremations.
-
- However, the aerial photographs of the time show no signs
of any such thing and no material evidence of this huge crime is available.
These days, in the Ukraine, there's a Roman Catholic priest who's been
getting a lot of attention, father Patrick Desbois, a Frenchman and great
friend of the Jews. His speciality consists in travelling the length and
breadth of the land in search of "mass Jewish graves". He has
the good Ukrainian peasants of a given area informed that he'll soon be
calling at such or such locale and that he intends to garner testimonies
about the slaughters of Jews by the Germans during the war. It's wholly
in the inhabitants' interest to be able to boast that the environs actually
possess such mass graves over which, afterwards, may be erected monuments
that may in turn attract the odd foreign tourist. The "witnesses"
get together and prepare a story. The priest then pays his visit and has
his photograph taken with the country-folk as they point towards some spot
or other. One may, to begin with, be astonished at the age of certain witnesses
photographed thus far: they are quite plainly below the necessary age,
which would normally be about 80.
-
- But there's something more astonishing still: these supposed
mass graves will not be dug open; no disinterment or any material verification
will be carried out, all under the admirable pretence that the Jewish religion
prohibits the touching of Jewish corpses; however, it's enough to look
in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1978)? at the entry "Autopsies [plural]?
and Dissection [singular]?" to see that there is no such prohibition
at all. Only at a single location, Busk outside Lvov, have fifteen common
graves been dug open, but none of the skeletons found there were examined
and the sites were all covered over with a thick layer of concrete, meaning
no authentication will be very possible in future! A curious way of respecting
a body in accordance with Jewish law! The historian will thus have to be
satisfied with what father Desbois, a clever man, tells us the witnesses
told him. Hence, unverified numbers of unfound and unshown victims will
be added up and, at the end, we shall be told that the Ukraine contains
so many mass graves with so many Jewish victims.
-
- And all this under the seal of the respective representatives
of the Roman Catholic Church, the "Yahad-in-Unum" association
and "Zaka", a group presenting itself as "dedicated individuals
determined []? to accord the proper respect for the dead in accordance
with Jewish law, heritage and tradition". As at Auschwitz, tourism
will stand some chance of thriving.
-
- Interviewer: One question. You speak of "Shoah
by bullets" and of documents. I myself think I recall seeing documents
showing maps with sketches of coffins accompanied by the number of Jews
executed at the spots thus indicated. Apparently, these would be documents
of the SS or the Einsatzgruppen sent from the Russian front to Berlin.
They would show how many Jews had been killed by Einsatzgruppen A, B, C
and D. Is this not evidence? What's your view here?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: I know those documents and, in particular,
the one with the coffins and the figures. It was the American author Arthur
R. Butz who first dealt with them in a critical manner, in 1976, in his
remarkable work The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Too often it's a question
of suspect, unsigned documents, coming from Soviet sources. The one that
you're speaking of makes me think of the aerial photos of Auschwitz, published
in 1979 by Brugioni and Poirier, two former CIA men. In these photos one
can make out the Auschwitz crematoria with a naïve indication bearing
the words "Gas Chamber[s]?". Here, on the sketches of coffins,
an anonymous hand has written figures supposedly representing the totals
of Jews slain. There's no indication of any sources that might make possible
a verification of the figures' origins.
-
- Have you noted how each time a common grave is discovered
in Russia and trouble is taken to make an examination, it's found that
it contains victims of Stalin and not of Hitler?
-
- Finally, it's a good idea, in any case, to be circumspect
as concerns the evaluations sent by military men to superiors in Berlin.
- One might say that, caught up in the war, the Germans
who had to send reports to Berlin hadn't the leisure to draw up, as in
peacetime, impeccable reports with all the necessary signatures on them.
-
- Interviewer: That's merely a hypothesis on your
part, for countless German documents of that era show they remained quite
meticulous indeed.
-
- Dr. Faurisson: A hypothesis, so be it, but isn't
it asking a bit too much, insisting on perfect evidence, which perhaps
has never existed?
-
- When there is no evidence to hand, one refrains from
making accusations. One's entitled to say "Rumour has it" or
"It seems plausible that", but not to go any further. To sum
up here, I'd say that, as concerns the great massacres of Jews imputed
to the Einsatzgruppen, I'm waiting for criminal investigations to be carried
out, like those that were made for Katyn. And don't let anyone come and
tell us the corpses all went up in smoke! Even if those mounds of bodies
had been burnt in the open air, that would have called for quite unlikely
quantities of wood or fuel, and, what's more, traces would be easy to find,
if only in the form of teeth or bone fragments. Still today, bones of men
of Napoleon's army are found from time to time in Russia.
-
- Interviewer: But what do you make of the trials
and the clues that demonstrate the crime and allow a judgment to be made?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Clues are but apparent signs that simply
render the existence of a thing probable. They're what Jean-Claude Pressac,
that friend of the Klarsfeld couple, called in his big American book "beginnings
of proof" or "traces". Let's be wary of people who've got
the idea that by adding a quarter-proof to a quarter-proof plus a half-truth,
you obtain one proof. That practice was, it seems, employed in certain
witchcraft trials of centuries past and it's what was done in a number
of court proceedings in the 20th century, especially against those modern-day
sorcerers known as the satanic "Nazi war criminals".
-
- Interviewer: That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying
that these days there are trials where real proof cannot be produced but
where clues suffice to try the accused.
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Quite right. In France, for example,
the judges can even invoke what they call their "innermost conviction".
A judge can do that, but not the historian. How many times has it been
discovered, with the passing of time, that a judicial error was committed
at some moment or other? In the particular instance of the gigantic case
brought against Germany, I ask that no one be content with his or her "innermost
conviction". I demand proof, one single piece of actual proof. I note
that the accusing historians like Poliakov and Hilberg, and a fair number
of others, have wound up acknowledging that there is no proof. You're well
aware that Raul Hilberg, at first (in 1961)?, had the nerve to write that
Hitler had given two orders to exterminate the Jews.
-
- He added that this extermination had been carefully organised
from top to bottom within the chain of command. However, in 1983, under
the revisionists' pressure, he had to admit (and later, in 1985 at the
first Zündel trial in Toronto, confirmed under oath)? that there hadn't
been, after all, either an order, a plan or a budget. Then he fell back
on the most pitiful of explanations: according to his new analysis, all
had been done without an order and without a plan through "an incredible
meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy",
the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. I call that "invoking the workings
of the (Jewish)? Holy Spirit".
-
- May I give you still another point?
-
- Interviewer: Naturally.
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Personally, something that really struck
me, speaking of false proof, was that solemn session at the UN, where American
Defence Secretary Colin Powell was seen claiming to demonstrate the existence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I can assure you that the revisionist
I am perceived at the very instant that it was all a sham. Glaringly obvious.
We laugh about it today but it's disquieting that no one, there at the
UN, should have risen to cry out his indignation and proclaim before the
whole assembly: "I raise a solemn protest against this stunt of Mr
Powell's, who takes us for fools.
-
- We all know that, in the phial he's brandishing, there's
surely nothing but some harmless liquid; here we're just being served a
cinematic ploy. We all know as well that, in the photographs projected
on the screen, nothing but innocuous buildings have been shown, and that
it's laughable to write, again up on the screen, that those structures
house weapons of mass destruction." It's quite precisely the same
put-up job that in 1979 Brugioni and Poirier, those ex-CIA men, went in
for when, showing us crematoria, they presumed to tell us those buildings
housed weapons of mass destruction called "gas chambers". Same
sort of inscriptions, same crude lies.
-
- Interviewer: To pick up on a question that I've
already put, do you think the German National Socialist regime committed
injustices towards the Jews?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: You said "crimes" and here
you say "injustices". I don't know how to qualify the measures
that Germany was led to take regarding people whom, not without reason,
she held to be hostile or potentially dangerous. Any nation at war may
be led to take measures that will certainly be cruel for the families affected.
If, tomorrow, war broke out between France and Italy, it's obvious that
the French government would intern or put under house arrest all Italians
residing in France and that the Italians would act likewise with respect
to the Frenchmen who happened to be in Italy.
-
- Interviewer: So then, for you, Germany was at war
with those whom one calls "the Jews".
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Yes, she was at war with "the
Jews" just as "the Jews" were at war with Germany.
-
- And if we take things to their logical conclusion when
observed from a military viewpoint, at bottom, the totality of those potentially
dangerous persons could have been put in concentration camps or kept under
house arrest. But their numbers were such that it wasn't practicable. Germany
therefore decided to take measures which, as the war intensified, grew
progressively harsher. Let's take the example of the compulsory wearing
of the star, from a certain moment and in certain parts of German-occupied
Europe (in the southern zone of France, the Jews didn't have to wear the
star)?.
-
- This measure amounted to placing the Jews under probationary
supervision. But do note that it's less cruel and far less of an exaction
than locking families away in camps as the Germans did in certain cases
and as the Americans and Canadians themselves did, not only with the Japanese
on their territory, which was normal, but also with Americans and Canadians
of Japanese origin. As for the reason why the Germans decided to implement
the wearing of the star, it was above all with a view to ensure the German
soldier's safety.
-
- Many Jews belonged to groups of those whom the Allies
called Résistants and whom the Germans, for their part, called terrorists.
You can well imagine that the German soldiers weren't going to look hard
and close at other pedestrians in the street in an attempt to see whether
they were walking near possibly dangerous individuals. That star warned
them. In Paris, in the underground, where each train was made up of five
carriages, the star-wearers had to get on the fifth carriage, in which
the German soldiers weren't allowed to ride.
-
- Interviewer: According to you, was this treatment
of the Jews just? Couldn't it be argued that in France or Germany the Jews
were well assimilated and that, for example, the links between the Jews
of Paris and those of New York were, anyhow, not very strong?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: It's not a matter, strictly speaking,
of a moral question but of military necessity. From a moral viewpoint I
can tell you that the treatment of the Jews in Germany shortly before the
war, at the time of Kristallnacht, seems to me unworthy, even though I
understand the exasperation that the Germans could feel in the face of
the growing number of Jewish provocations, the Jewish organisations' ceaseless
calls for a crusade against the New Germany and, most notably, the assassination
in Paris of vom Rath, the embassy counsellor, by the Jew Grynszpan. Just
as unworthy, in my eyes, was the fact that Goering should impose on the
Jews a fine of a billion marks for the damage then caused. But, you know,
"to judge is to compare" and, as concerns horrors of all kinds
visited on minorities, no nation has the right to dispense lessons to others.
As
-
- I've had occasion to say, every war is a butchery; the
winner is a good butcher and the loser, a less good one; thus, at the end
of a war, the winner may give the loser lessons in butchery but he's not
entitled to mete out lessons in rights, justice and virtue to him. Yet
that is indeed what, at Nuremberg, the winners of the Second World War
did to the losers, in proceedings of a rare hypocrisy.
-
- Interviewer: But you do agree, after all, with the
principle that international justice must be able to punish war crimes
and, as it's said today, "crimes against humanity"?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: As a principle I'll agree readily
enough; but see how, in practice, it's almost always, at the end of any
war, the loser that this justice finds guilty. It's a revolting spectacle,
this hunting party of prosecutors and judges in black robes, all grouped
around soldiers crushed by defeat who now see their conquerors parading
about in a courtroom. The American army, although the bloodiest of all
armies, never has any explaining to do before the international community.
To come back to the Second World War, how can one allow that those who
made alliance with Stalin should be able to address the least rebuke to
those who made alliance with Hitler?
-
- Let's suppose, taking up the usual comparison, that Stalin
was the plague and Hitler, cholera; I don't see how those who have, in
reality, chosen the plague, can find fault with others for having, in reality,
chosen cholera. What right had the French general Leclerc, who was more
or less in American uniform, on May 8, 1945, when Germany had surrendered,
to have a group of twelve or thirteen prisoners taken out of a hospital
and shot without trial just for being in a more or less German uniform?
Let's point out that it was mainly from horror or fear of Soviet-style
communism that so many young Frenchmen had signed up with either the Milice
or the German army.
-
- Interviewer: Do you justify the nature of the reprisals
carried out by the German army in France?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: Let's talk about the bomb attacks
and assassinations in France against the German occupation forces or French
partisans of Collaboration. A large number of Germans died or were injured
as a result of such attacks. There were also many acts of destruction against
the means of transport and communication - for example telephone cables
- , army barracks and depots, crop harvests; there were weapons trafficking
operations, espionage for the Allies, aid to deserters, escape networks,
there was the Communist propaganda calling for ever more bomb and sniper
attacks. What could the German army officers in charge do? At first they
had either the culprits themselves or hostages shot by firing squad. Then,
they realised that the French population, on the whole, both strongly disapproved
of the murders of German soldiers and felt considerable indignation at
the reprisals made by the occupation forces. The Germans risked alienating
this population.
-
- Thus, from a certain point, they preferred, in numerous
instances, to apply deportation instead of execution. Towards the end,
what with the big increase in Résistance attacks in the wake of
the Allied landings in Normandy, they turned again to shootings, carrying
out a large number of them. In France, the total number of persons shot
by sentence of a German military tribunal or court martial seems to be
situated, for the entire duration of the war, between 4,520 and 4,540,
and not, as was stated at the Nuremberg trial, at 29,660. The Communists
have long endorsed far greater figures: they haven't shrunk from presenting
their party as "the Party of the 75,000 firing squad victims";
for his part, Communist chief Maurice Thorez dared to tell Stalin, on November
18, 1947: "In France during the war, 350,000 Communists were shot
by the Germans" (in the review Communisme, summer 1996, p. 47)?.
-
- In France, the number of Communists shot by firing squad
was, in reality, a few hundred. When, in 1945, French troops occupied their
part of Germany, they didn't find themselves confronted with any armed,
organised resistance bent on killing French soldiers. Otherwise they would
have behaved as mercilessly as their army had done at the time of the Ruhr
valley occupation or in its actions against "the rebels" in Madagascar,
Indochina or Algeria. I have in mind a poster that was put up all over
one German city in the French zone, showing the corpses photographed in
a concentration camp and stating that any person caught removing it would
be condemned to death! From the moment a country becomes the occupying
power in another territory, it will be inclined to instate a reign of terror
there if those being occupied rebel, and especially if they take up weapons
to do so.
-
- Interviewer: Going on to quite another question,
today in Germany, in the trials for disputing the Holocaust, the judges,
in accordance with the law, warn both the accused and his lawyer telling
them: "The Holocaust is common knowledge. It's an established fact.
You haven't the right to dispute it, nor even to try to prove your good
faith or to justify yourself by spelling out the reasons why you don't
believe in the reality of the genocide of the Jews and the Nazi gas chambers".
What do you think of this?
-
- Dr. Faurisson: This "common knowledge"
argument stems from Article 21 of the Charter of the Nuremberg International
Military Tribunal, which states: "The Tribunal shall not require proof
of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof".
It's outrageous. What, here, does "common knowledge" mean? Facts
of "common knowledge" for whom? According to what criteria does
the Nuremberg Tribunal decide that such or such a fact is of "common
knowledge" while some other fact isn't? The answer is it's the Tribunal
that, without giving its reasons, arbitrarily pronounces that such or such
a fact is of "common knowledge", and grants itself permission
to make its assessments in this regard without adducing any relevant evidence.
Pre-emptively, from the very start it forbids anyone to remind it that
in proper justice all must be proved.
-
- As there exists no instance of appeal, here we have a
court that grants itself full power to violate the duties of the judge.
It's in the secrecy of their deliberations, without consulting anyone,
that these judges choose such or such a "fact" and decree that
it need not be proved. The procedure is a cynical one.
-
- In regard to revisionism, I've had dealings with people
of the judiciary in France, England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and
English-speaking Canada. I delight in hearing them all use a complicated
and pretentious language to express the simplest and clumsiest ideas. So
it was that at Nuremberg the judges, at bottom, decreed: "It's like
this because this is how it is", or else: "This is how it is
because we've decided that it should be so".
-
- But Article 21 of that strange Tribunal's Charter has
an even bigger surprise in store for us in its next sentence, and here
the very peak of cynicism is attained. Listen to this: "[The Tribunal]?
shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and
reports of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of the
committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation
of war crimes, and of records and findings of military or other Tribunals
of any of the United Nations", that is, any of the States that happen
to be the declared enemies of the accused. Here's what amounts to saying:
"On these matters the prosecution is automatically right and the defence
need only hold its tongue".
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