[Editor's Note: The text of this article was first published by Robert Faurisson in the Journal of Historical Review in 1988. I added the emphasis of bold, italics, and underlined words to his text. The photos and embedded videos were also added to the text to augment the information being presented. We've all been misled to believe, through intentional propagation of a deception by organized Jewry, that millions of Jewish people were gassed to death during World War II and their bodies burned in crematoriums in Nazi concentration camps. It's simply not true. The 1988 Leuchter Report, written by an expert engineer on execution gas chambers, Fred Leuchter, proved definitively and conclusively that there were no homocidal gas chambers in any of the Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Treblinka. The notorious Zyklon B pellets were used in the camps to disinfect clothing of the prisoners to rid the clothing of lice which carried the deadly Typhus disease organisms which killed untold thousands of camp prisoners towards the end of the war when railroad supply routes into the camps were bombed out and prevented food and medicine supplies being delivered. The piles of bodies seen in photographs are people who had died of typhus infection and/or starvation in the final months of the war, and not from being gassed to death in non-existent 'gas chambers.' There was no order from Himmler or Hitler or any other top Nazi to exterminate Jews in Nazi concentration camps. The use of the term "Final Solution" referred to the Third Reich's intention to remove Jews from German soil by expulsion, not for their genocidal extermination, as claimed by Organized Jewry. Recognizing that we've been duped by a massive Zionist propaganda hoax does not automatically make one pro-Nazi or apologists for the misery and destruction wrought by Nazis during World War II. However, the German civilian populations was badly mistreated by the allies during the war (firebombing of civilian targets in high population cities like Dresden, resulting in the fiery death of far more people than had died in Nazi concentration camps) and after the war when Eisenhower allowed nearly 2 million German soldiers to die of starvation and lack of medical care in allied concentration camps The rape of German women by occupying Russian troops was equally barbaric and evil. ...Ken Adachi.]
By Dr. Robert Faurisson
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/The-Zundel-Trials-1985-and-1988.shtml#top
First Published in The Journal of Historical Review1988
The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988) By Dr. Robert Faurisson (May 18, 2016)
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The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988)
From The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89 (Vol. 8, No. 4), pages 417-431.
http://ihr.org/jhr/v08/v08p417_Faurisson.html
[The year was 1988 at time of writing...Ed.]
On May 13, 1988, Ernst Zündel was sentenced by Judge Ronald Thomas of the District Court of Ontario, in Toronto, to nine months in prison for having distributed a Revisionist booklet that is now 14 years old: Did Six Million Really Die?
Ernst Zündel lives in Toronto where, up until a few years ago, he worked as a graphic artist and advertising man. He isnow 49 years old. A native of Germany, he has kept his German citizenship.
His life has known serious upsets from the day when, in about 1981, he began to distribute
Did Six Million Really Die?, a Revisionist booklet by Richard Harwood.
The booklet was first published in 1974 in Great Britain where, a year later, it was the focus of a lengthy controversy in the literary journal
Books and Bookmen. At the instigation of the Jewish community of South Africa, it was later banned in that country.
In Canada, during an earlier trial in 1985, Zündel had been sentenced to 15 months in prison. That sentence was thrown out in 1987. A new trial began on January 18, 1988. I participated in the preparations for it and in the unfolding of those judicial proceedings. I devoted thousands of hours to the defense of Ernst Zündel.
François Duprat: A Precursor
On 1967, François Duprat published an article on "The Mystery of the Gas Chambers" (Défense de l'Occident, June 1967, pp. 30-33). He later became interested in the Harwood booklet and became actively involved in its distribution. On March 18, 1978, Duprat [38 years old] was killed by assassins armed with weapons too complex not to belong to an intelligence service
[car bomb exploded while driving with his wife, Jeanine, who survived the blast but was paralyzed from the waist down. Duprat was the number 2 man in Jean-Marie Le Pen's FN nationalist party at the time of his murder and was alone among France's nationalists in 1967 in defending the Palestinians against Israeli aggression...Ed.].
Responsibility for the assassination was claimed by a "Remembrance Commando" and by a "Jewish Revolutionary Group" (Le Monde, March 23, 1978, p. 7). Patrice Chairoff had published Duprat's home address in the Dossier Néo-Nazisme.
He justified the assassination in the pages of Le Monde (April 26, 1978, p. 9) by citing the victim's Revisionism:
"François Duprat is responsible. There are some responsibilities that kill."
In Le Droit de vivre, the publication of the LICRA (International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), Jean Pierre-Bloch expressed an ambiguous position: he criticized the crime but, at the same time, he let it be understood that he had no pity for those who, inspired by the victim, would start out on the Revisionist path (Le Monde, May 7-8, 1978).
Pierre Viansson-Ponté
Eight months before Duprat's assassination, journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté had launched a virulent attack against the Harwood pamphlet. His chronicle was entitled: "Le Mensonge" (The Lie), (Le Monde, July 17-18, 1978, p. 13). It was reprinted with an approving commentary in Le Droit de vivre. Six months after the assassination, Viansson-Ponté took up the attack once more in "Le Mensonge" (suite) (The Lie-Continued) (Le Monde, September 34, 1978, p.9). He passed over the assassination of Duprat in silence, made public the names and home towns of three Revisionist readers, and called for legal repression against Revisionism.
Sabina Citron Versus Ernst Zündel
In 1984, Sabina Citron, head of the
Holocaust Remembrance Association, stirred up violent demonstrations against Ernst Zündel in Canada. An attack was made on Zündel's home. The
Canadian postal service, treating Revisionism the way it treats pornography,
refused him all service and all right to receive mail. Zündel only recovered his postal rights
after a year of judicial procedures. In the meantime, his business has failed. At the instigation of Sabina Citron, the Attorney General of Ontario filed a complaint against Zündel for publishing a "false statement, tale or news." The charge was based on the following reasoning: t
he defendant had abused his right to freedom of expression; by distributing the Harwood pamphlet, he was spreading information that he knew was false; in fact, he could not fail to be aware that the "genocide of the Jews" and the "gas chambers"
were an established fact. Zündel was also charged with publishing an allegedly "false" letter,
which he had written himself.
The First Trial (1985)
The first trial lasted seven weeks. The jury found Zündel not guilty regarding the letter he had himself written but guilty of distributing the Harwood booklet. He was sentenced by Judge Hugh Locke to 15 months in prison. The German consulate in Toronto confiscated his passport and the West German government prepared a deportation action against him. In Germany itself, West German authorities had already carried out a series of large-scale police raids on the houses of all his German correspondents [mail order customers who bought his books...Ed.].
In 1987, the United States forbade him entry to its territory. But in spite of all that, Zündel had won a media victory: day after day, for seven weeks, the entire English- speaking Canadian media covered the trial, with its spectacular revelations. The public learned that the Revisionists had first class documentation and arguments, while the Exterminationists were in desperate straits.
Their Expert: Raul Hilberg
The prosecution expert in the first trial was Raul Hilberg [right], an American professor of Jewish descent and author of the standard reference work, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), which Paul Rassinier discussed in Le Drame des Juifs européens (The Drama of the European Jews). Hilberg began his testimony by explaining, without interruption, his theory about the extermination of the Jews.
He was then cross-examined by Zündel's lawyer, Douglas Christie [left], who was assisted by Keltie Zubko and myself. Right from the start it was clear that Hilberg, who was the world's leading authority on the Holocaust, had never examined a single concentration camp, not even Auschwitz. He had still not examined any camp in 1985 when he announced the imminent appearance of a new edition of his main work in three volumes, revised, corrected and augmented.
Although he did visit Auschwitz in 1979 for a single day as part of a ceremonial appearance, he did not bother to examine either the buildings or the archives. In his entire life he has never seen a "gas chamber," either in its original condition or in ruins. (For a historian, even ruins can tell tales). On the stand he was forced to admit that there had never been a plan, a central organization, a budget or supervision for what he called the policy of the extermination of the Jews. He also had to admit that since 1945 the Allies have never carried out an expert study of "the weapon of the crime," that is to say of a homicidal gas chamber. No autopsy eport has established that even one inmate was ever killed by poison gas.
Hilberg said that Hitler gave orders for the extermination of the Jews, and that Himmler gave an order to halt the extermination on November 25, 1944 (such detail!). But Hilberg could not produce these orders. The defense asked him if he still maintained the existence of the Hitler orders in the new edition of his book. He dared to answer "yes." He thereby lied and even committed perjury. In the new edition of his work (with a preface dated September 1984), Hilberg systematically deleted any mention of an order by Hitler. (In this regard, see the review by Christopher Browning, "The Revised Hilberg," Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, 1986, p. 294). When he was asked by the defense to explain how the Germans had been able to carry out an undertaking as enormous as the extermination of millions of Jews without any kind of plan, without any central agency, without any blueprint or budget, Hilberg replied that in the various Nazi agencies there had been "an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy."
Witness Arnold Friedman
The prosecution counted on the testimony of "survivors." These "survivors" were chosen with care. They were supposed to testify that they had seen, with their own eyes, preparations for and the carrying out of homicidal gassings. Since the war, in a series of trials like those at Nuremberg (1945-46), Jerusalem (1961), or Frankfurt (1963-65), such witnesses have never been lacking. However, as I have often noted, no lawyer for the defense had ever had the courage or the competence necessary to cross-examine these witnesses on the gassings themselves.
For the first time, in Toronto in 1985, one lawyer, Douglas Christie, dared to ask for explanations. He did it with the help of topographical maps and building plans as well as scholarly documentation on both the properties of the gases supposedly used and also on the capacities for cremation, whether carried out in crematory ovens or on pyres. Not one of these witnesses stood the test, and especially not Arnold Friedman. Despairing of his case, he ended by confessing that he had indeed been at Auschwitz-Birkenau (where he never had to work except once, unloading potatoes), but that, as regards gassings, he had relied on what others had told him.
Witness Rudolf Vrba
Witness Rudolf Vrba was internationally known. A Slovak Jew imprisoned at Auschwitz and at Birkenau, he said that he had escaped from the camp in April 1944 with Fred Wetzler. After getting back to Slovakia, he dictated a report about Auschwitz and Birkenau, and on their crematories and "gas chambers."
With help from Jewish organizations in Slovakia, Hungary and Switzerland, his report reached Washington, where it served as the basis for the U.S. Government's famous "War Refugee Board Report," published in November 1944. Since then, every Allied organization charged with the prosecution of "war crimes" and every Allied prosecutor in a trial of "war criminals" has had available this official version of the history of those camps.
Vrba later became a British citizen and published his autobiography under the title of
I Cannot Forgive. This book published in 1964, was actually written by Alan Bestic, who, in his preface, testified to the "considerable care [by Rudolf Vrba] for each detail" and to the "meticulous and almost fanatic respect he revealed for accuracy." On November 30, 1964, Vrba testified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Then he settled in Canada and became a Canadian citizen. He has been featured in various films about Auschwitz, particularly
Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. Everything went well for him until the day at the Zündel trial in 1985 when he was cross-examined mercilessly. He was then shown to be
an impostor. It was revealed that he had completely made up the number and location of the "gas chambers" and the crematories in his famous 1944 report. His 1964 book opened with a purported
January 1943 visit by Himmler to Birkenau to inaugurate a new crematorium with "gas chamber."
Actually, the last visit by Himmler to Auschwitz took place in
July of 1942, and in January 1943 the first of the new crematories was still far from finished. Thanks, apparently, to some special gift of memory (that he called "special mnemonic principles" or "special mnemonical method") and to a real talent for being everywhere at once, Vrba had calculated that in the space of 25 months (April 1942 to April 1944) the Germans had "gassed"
1,765,000 [one million, seven hundred and sixty five thousand] Jews at Birkenau alone,
including 150,000 Jews from France. But in 1978,
Serge Klarsfeld [right], in his
Memorial to the Deportation of the Jews from France,
had been forced to conclude that, for the entire length of the war,
the Germans had deported a total of 75,721 Jews from France to all their concentration camps.
The gravest aspect of this is that the figure of 1,765,000 Jews "gassed" at Birkenau had also been used in a document (L-022) at the main Nuremberg trial. Attacked on all sides by Zündel's lawyer, the impostor had no other recourse than to invoke, in Latin, the "licentia poetarum," or "poetic license," in other words, the right to engage in
fiction. His book has just been published in France (1987); this edition is presented as a book by "Rudolf Vrba with Alan Bestic." It no longer includes the enthusiastic preface by Alan Bestic, and the short introduction by Emile Copfermann notes that "with the approval of Rudolf Vrba, the two appendices from the English edition
have been removed." Nothing is said about the fact that those two appendices had also caused Vrba serious problems in 1985 at the Toronto trial.
In January 1987, a five-judge appeals court decided to throw out the 1985 verdict against Ernst Zündel for some very basic reasons:
Judge Hugh Locke [photo above] had not allowed the defense any influence in the jury selection process and the jury had been misled by the judge on the very meaning of the trial. As for me, I have attended many trials in my life, including some carried out in France during the period of the "Purge" at the end and after World War II. Never have I encountered a judge so
partial,
autocratic and
violent as Judge Hugh Locke. Anglo-Saxon law offers many more guarantees than French law, but it only takes one man to pervert the best of systems. Judge Locke was such a man.
The second trial began on January 18, 1988, under the direction of
Judge Ronald Thomas [right], who is a friend, it seems, of Judge Locke. Judge Thomas was often angry and was frankly hostile to the defense, but he had more finesse than his predecessor.
The ruling by the five-judge appeal court also inhibited him somewhat. Judge Hugh Locke had imposed numerous restrictions on free expression by the witnesses and experts for the defense. For example, he forbade me to use any of the photos I had taken at Auschwitz. I had no right to use arguments of a chemical, cartographical, or architectural nature (even though I had been the first person in the world to publish the plans for the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematories). I was not allowed to talk about either the American gas chambers or the aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Even the testimony of the eminent chemist William Lindsey was cut short. Judge Ronald Thomas did allow the defense more freedom, but at the outset of the trial, he made a decision, at the request of the prosecution, that would tie the hands of the jury.
In Anglo-Saxon law, everything must be proved except for certain absolutely indisputable evidence ("The capital of Great Britain is London," "day follows
night"... ) The judge can take "judicial notice" of that kind of evidence at the request of one or the other of the contending parties;
Prosecuting Attorney John Pearson [right] asked the judge to take judicial notice of the Holocaust. That term then has to be defined. It is likely that, had it not been for the intervention of the defense, the judge could have defined the Holocaust as it might have been defined in 1945-46. At that time, the "genocide of the Jews" (the word "Holocaust" was not used) could have been defined as "the ordered and planned destruction of six million Jews, in particular by the use of gas chambers."
The problem for the prosecution was that the defense advised the judge that, since 1945-46, there have been profound changes in the understanding of Exterminationist historians about the extermination of the Jews. First of all, they no longer talk about an extermination, but about an
attempted extermination. They have also finally admitted that "in spite of the most scholarly research" (
Raymond Aron [left], Sorbonne Convention, 2 July 1982),
no one has found any trace of an order to exterminate the Jews.
More recently, there has been a dispute between the "intentionalists" and the "functionalists." Both agree that they have no proof of any intent to exterminate, but "intentionalist" historians nevertheless believe that one must assume the existence of that intent, while "functionalist" historians believe that the extermination was the result of individual initiatives, localized and anarchic: in a sense, the activity created the organization! Finally, the figure of six million was declared to be "symbolic" and there have been many disagreements about the "problem of the gas chambers."
Obviously surprised by this flood of information, Judge Ronald Thomas decided to be prudent and, after a delay for reflection, decided on the following definition; the Holocaust, he said, was "the extermination and/or mass-murder of Jews" by National Socialism. His definition is remarkable for more than one reason.
We no longer find any trace of an extermination order, or
a plan, or
"gas chambers," or
six million Jews or
even millions of Jews. This definition is so void of all substance that it no longer corresponds to anything real. One cannot understand the meaning of "mass-murder of Jews." (The judge carefully avoided saying "of the Jews".) This strange definition is itself a sign of the progress achieved by Historical Revisionism since 1945.
One misfortune awaited Prosecutor John Pearson: Raul Hilberg, in spite of repeated requests, refused to appear again. The defense, having heard rumors of an exchange of correspondence between Pearson and Hilberg, demanded and got the publication of the letters they exchanged and in particular of a "confidential" letter by Hilberg which did not hide the fact that he had some bitter memories of his cross-examination in 1985. He feared being questioned again by Douglas Christie on the same points. To quote the exact words of his confidential letter, Hilberg wrote that he feared "every attempt to entrap me by pointing out any seeming contradiction, however trivial the subject might be, between my earlier testimony and an answer that I might give in 1988." In fact as I have already mentioned, Hilberg had committed perjury and he may have feared being charged with that crime.
In place of Hilberg there came his friend Christopher Browning, an American professor who specializes in the Holocaust. Admitted as an expert witness (and paid for several days at the rate of $150 per hour by the Canadian taxpayer), Browning tried to prove that the Harwood pamphlet was a tissue of lies and that the attempt to exterminate the Jews was a scientifically established fact. He had cause to regret the experience. During cross-examination, the defense used his own arguments to destroy him. In the course of those days, people saw the tall and naive professor, who had strutted while he stood testifying, seated, shrunken in size, behind the witness stand like a schoolboy caught in a mistake. With a faint and submissive voice, he ended up acknowledging that the trial had definitely taught him something about historical research.
Following the example of Raul Hilberg, Browning had not examined any concentration camps. He had not visited any facility with "gas chambers." He had never thought of asking for an expert study of the "weapon of the crime." In his writings he had made much of homicidal "gas vans," but he was not able to refer to any authentic photograph, any plan, any technical study, or any expert study. He was not aware that German words like "Gaswagen," "Spezialwagen," "Entlausungswagen" (delousing van) could have perfectly innocent meanings. His technical understanding was nil. He had never examined the wartime aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz. He was unaware of all the tortures undergone by Germans, such as Rudolf Hoss, who had spoken of gassings. He knew nothing of the doubts expressed about some of Himmler's speeches or about the Goebbels diary.
A great follower of the trials of war criminals, Browning had only questioned the prosecutors, never the defense lawyers. His ignorance of the transcript of the Nuremberg trial was disconcerting. He had not even read what Hans Frank, former Governor General of Poland, had said before the Nuremberg tribunal about his "diary" and about "the extermination of the Jews." That was inexcusable! As a matter of fact, Browning claimed to have found irrefutable proof of the existence of a policy of exterminating the Jews in the Frank diary. He had discovered one incriminating sentence. He did not know that Frank had given the Tribunal an explanation of that kind of sentence, chosen beforehand from the hundreds of thousands of sentences in a personnel and administrative journal of 11,560 pages. Furthermore, Frank had spontaneously turned over his "diary" to the Americans when they came to arrest him. The sincerity of the former Governor General is so obvious to anyone who reads his deposition that Christopher Browning, invited to hear the content, did not raise the least objection. One last humiliation awaited him.
For the sake of his thesis, he invoked a passage from the well-known "protocol" of the Wannsee conference (20 January 1942). He had made his own translation of the passage, a translation that was seriously in error. At that point, his thesis collapsed. Finally, his own personal explanation of a "policy of the extermination of the Jews" was the same as Hilberg's. Everything was explained by the "nod" of Adolf Hitler. In other words, the Fuhrer of the German people did not need to give any written or even spoken order for the extermination of the Jews. It was enough for him to give a "nod" at the beginning of the operation and, for the rest, a series of "signals." And that was understood!
The other expert called by the prosecution (who had taken the stand before Browning) was Charles Biedermann, a Swiss citizen, a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and, most importantly, the director of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Arolsen, West Germany. The ITS has an unbelievable wealth of information about the fate of individual victims of National Socialism and, in particular, of former concentration camp inmates. I believe that it is at Arolsen that one could determine the real number of Jews who died during the war. The prosecution did not benefit from this expert's testimony. On the contrary, the defense scored numerous points on cross-examination. Biedermann recognized that the ICRC had never found any proof of the existence of homicidal gas chambers in the German camps. The visit by one of its delegates to Auschwitz in September 1944 had done no more than conclude the existence of a rumor on that subject. To his embarrassment, the expert was obliged to admit that he was wrong in attributing to the National Socialists the expression "extermination camps." He had not noticed that this was a term coined by the Allies.
Biedermann said that he was not familiar with the ICRC reports on the atrocities undergone by the Germans just before and just after the end of the war. In particular, he knew nothing about the terrible treatment of many German prisoners. It would seem that the ICRC had nothing about the massive deportations of German minorities from the east, nothing on the horrors of the total collapse of Germany at the very end of the war, nothing about summary executions and, in particular, the massacre by rifle, machine gun, shovels and pickaxes, of 520 German soldiers and officers who had surrendered to the Americans at Dachau on April 29, 1945 (even though Victor Maurer, ICRC delegate, was apparently there).
The International Tracing Service included among those "persecuted" by the Nazis even indisputably criminal prisoners in the concentration camps. He relied on the information supplied by a Communist organization, the "Auschwitz State Museum." Beginning in 1978, in order to prevent all Revisionist research, the International Tracing Service closed its doors to historians and researchers, except for those bearing a special authorization from one of the ten governments (including that of Israel) which oversee the activity of the International Tracing Service. Henceforth the Tracing Service was forbidden to calculate and publish, as it had done until then, statistical evaluations of the number of dead in the various camps. The annual activity reports could no longer be made available to the public, except for their first third, which had been of no interest to researchers.
Biedermann confirmed a news story that had filtered out in 1964 at the Frankfurt trial: at the time of liberation of Auschwitz, the Soviets and the Poles had discovered the death register of that complex of 39 camps and sub-camps. The register consisted of 38 or 39 volumes. The Soviets keep 36 or 37 of those volumes in Moscow while the Poles keep two or three other volumes at the "Auschwitz State Museum," a copy of which they have furnished to the International Tracing Service in Arolsen. But neither the Soviets nor the Poles nor the International Tracing Service authorize research in these volumes. Biedermann did not even want to reveal the number of dead counted in the two or three volumes of which the ITS has a copy. It is clear that, if the content of the death register of Auschwitz were made public, it would be the end of the myth of the millions of deaths in the camp.
No 'Survivor' Witnesses for the Prosecution
The judge asked the prosecutor if he would call any "survivors" to the witness stand. The prosecutor answered "no." The experience of 1985 had been too embarrassing. The cross examination had been devastating. It is regrettable that at the trial of Klaus Barbie in France in 1987 and at the trial of John Demjanjuk in Israel in 1987-1988, no defense lawyer has followed Douglas Christie's example in the first Zündel trial (1985): Christie had shown that by carefully questioning witnesses about the gassing process itself, one could destroy the very foundation of the "extermination camp" myth.
The Witnesses and Experts for the Defense
Most of the witnesses and experts for the defense were as precise and concrete as people like Hilberg or Browning had been imprecise and metaphysical. The Swede Ditlieb Felderer showed about 380 slides of Auschwitz and of the other camps in Poland. The American, Mark Weber, whose knowledge of the documents is impressive, engaged in clarifications of several aspects of the Holocaust, in particular the Einsatzgruppen.* The German Tjudar Rudolph dealt with the Lodz ghetto and visits by the ICRC delegates at the end of 1941 to Auschwitz, Majdanek and other camps.
Thies Christophersen had been in charge of an agricultural research enterprise in the Auschwitz region in 1944. He visited the Birkenau camp several times to requisition personnel there and never noticed the horrors usually described. On the witness stand he repeated point by point what he had written about the camp, starting in 1973 with a 19-page report (Kritik, Nr. 23, pp. 14-32). The Austrian-born Canadian Maria Van Herwaarden was interned at Birkenau starting in 1942. She saw nothing, either close up or from a distance, that resembled mass murder, although she confirmed that many of the inmates had died of typhus. The American Bradley Smith, a member of a "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust," spoke about his experience in more than 100 question-and-answer interviews on American radio and television on the Holocaust issue.
The Austrian Emil Lachout commented on the famous "Muller Document," which, since December 1987, has thrown the Austrian authorities into disarray. The document, dated October 1, 1948, revealed that even then, Allied commissions of inquiry had already rejected the stories of homicidal "gassings" in a whole series of camps, including Dachau, Ravensbrück, Struthof (Natzweiler), Stutthof (Danzig), Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen (Austria).
The document specifically confirms that confessions of Germans had been extorted by torture and that testimonies by former inmates were false.
Dr. Russell Barton [right] recounted his horrified discovery of the camp at Bergen-Belsen at the time of liberation. Until that moment he had believed in a deliberate program of extermination. Then he noted the fact that, in an apocalyptic Germany, the piles of corpses and the walking skeletons were the result of the frightful conditions of an overcrowded camp, ravaged by epidemics, and almost entirely deprived of medicine, food, and water because of Allied bombings.