Holocaust On Trial

THE HOLOCAUST ON TRIAL
The Holocaust
on Trial
The Second Trial against Ernst Zündel 1988
By Ernst Zündel
Castle Hill Publishers

P.O. Box 231, Dallastown, PA 17313, USA
May 2022
Ernst Zündel:
The Holocaust on Trial: The Second Trial against Ernst Zündel 1988
Revised second edition
Dallastown, Pennsylvania: CASTLE HILL PUBLISHERS
PO Box 231, Dallastown, PA 17313, USA
May 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59148-303-8 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-59148-287-1 (paperback)
Published by CASTLE HILL PUBLISHERS

Manufactured worldwide
© by Ernst Zündel
Distribution:
Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 231
Dallastown, PA 17313, USA
https://castlehill.shop
Set in Times New Roman
Editorial Remarks: In Chapters Two through Ten of this book, the reader will
often encounter paragraphs consisting of a speaker’s name, a colon, and a
quotation without quote marks. For example:
Biedermann: Various experts were consulted.
These paragraphs are taken verbatim, or very nearly so, from the official trial
transcripts. Occasionally, minor changes have been made in the cases of
speakers whose native language was not English. Thus, when this style is
used, a direct quotation may always be assumed.
Furthermore, all such quotations are complete. If only part of a speaker’s
courtroom remark is reported, then either quotation marks or paraphrase is
used. In the example above, had Biedermann actually spoken three sentences,
only one of which was reported, the rendering would have been:
“Various experts were consulted,” said Biedermann.
E. ZÜNDEL ∙ THE HOLOCAUST ON TRIAL 5
Table of Contents
Page
Foreword to the 2022 Edition ........................................................................ 7
Post Scriptum .......................................................................................... 20
Introduction ................................................................................................... 21
Chapter 1: Inquisition in Toronto ............................................................... 27
Chapter 2: A Paper Witness ........................................................................ 47
Chapter 3: Professor Browning ................................................................... 75
Chapter 4: Return to Auschwitz – and Belsen ......................................... 111
Chapter 5: Mark Weber and Others ......................................................... 147
Chapter 6: What Is Truth? ........................................................................ 189
Chapter 7: Professor Faurisson ................................................................. 221
Chapter 8: Fred Leuchter and His Report ............................................... 273
Chapter 9: David Irving ............................................................................. 307
Chapter 10: Summation, Verdict, Aftermath ........................................... 343
First Day of Christie’s Summation ........................................................... 343
Second Day of Christie’s Summation ....................................................... 352
Pearson’s Summation................................................................................ 359
Thomas’s Charge to the Jury .................................................................... 366
The Jury Begins Its Deliberations ............................................................. 373
The Jury Is Re-Charged by Thomas ......................................................... 376
A Verdict Is Rendered .............................................................................. 378
Thomas Gives His Reasons for Sentence. ................................................ 383
Thomas Sentences Zündel ........................................................................ 384
Christie Lists Grounds for Appeal ............................................................ 385
Reception of the Verdict ........................................................................... 386
Canadian Civil Liberties, Update .............................................................. 390
Other News Pertaining to the Case ........................................................... 392
Chapter 11: Epilogue .................................................................................. 397
Index of Names ............................................................................................ 407
Foreword to the 2022 Edition
Ernst Zündel was a dear friend of mine. Some may say that this puts me into
bad company, but I don’t care, because only those who did not know Ernst
personally could ever claim that he was bad company. In fact, whoever judges
people as “bad” without knowing them must be considered “bad company.”
Let me tell my story on how I got to know Ernst.
In the mid-1980s, while I was studying chemistry at Bonn University in
what was then West Germany, my mother gave me as a birthday gift a new
edition of a booklet whose title translates to Coming to Terms with the Past,
written by the Swiss political scientist Dr. Armin Mohler,1 the first edition of
which had been published in 1968. At that time, I was very interested in Ger-
man history and its distortion as well as its abuse for political purposes. This
interest never completely subsided, although I had other priorities towards the
end of my university studies. This changed, however, after my final exams at
the end of 1988, when I again had free mental capacities to turn to my hobby:
reading books on history, politics, sociology, etc. Just at that time, Mohler’s
book appeared in a completely revised new version, and I certainly had to get
a copy.2
In the context of the present book, it is of particular interest that, in this
new edition of 1989, Mohler deals at one point with the so-called Leuchter
Report. This is an expert report by the U.S. American Fred Leuchter, prepared
in 1988 for the second Zündel Trial at Zündel’s initiative. At that time, Leuch-
ter was considered the only U.S. expert on the design, manufacture, and
maintenance of execution devices. As Mohler reported in his book, Leuchter
had come to the conclusion in his expert report that those rooms inside certain
1
Armin Mohler, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Seewald, Stuttgart 1968; idem., Vergangenheits-
bewältigung oder wie man den Krieg nochmals verliert, Sinus-Verlag, Krefeld 1980.
2
Armin Mohler, Der Nasenring: Im Dickicht der Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Heitz & Höffkes,
Essen 1989.
8 E. ZÜNDEL ∙ THE HOLOCAUST ON TRIAL
buildings at the Auschwitz and Majdanek Camps that according to the ortho-
dox dogma are said to have served as homicidal gas chambers, could not have
served as such. For me, as a young chemist, it was particularly impressive that
Leuchter used as one of his arguments that no chemical traces of the poison
gas could be found in the walls of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz,
which according to many witnesses had been used there for mass murder.
Concerning the details of my further career in this matter I may refer the
inclined reader to other writings.3 Important in the context of the present book
is only that Mohler’s book caused me to order an English edition of this
Leuchter Report as issued by British historian David Irving. In spite of some
obvious weaknesses in the report’s contents, which I discovered when careful-
ly reading and translating it to German, this booklet was impressive enough to
throw me off my track, since up to this point I had believed in the undeniable
veracity of the orthodox Holocaust narrative. I began to ponder Leuchter’s
various statements and claims but came to no tangible conclusion. Research
alone, I soon realized, could remove my doubts and answer my many ques-
tions.
A few months after my first reading of the Leuchter Report, I decided to
somehow find out if anyone else besides me – chemists, physicists, engineers
– was racking their brains over the subject. Towards the end of 1989, I even
sent a letter to Ernst Zündel in this connection. This step was not easy for me
at that time, because I was uncomfortable with the thought of contacting
someone who was apparently what the public calls a “Nazi.” Today I can only
smile at my Pavlovian reflex back then, because in the meantime, mainstream
media foist the same insult upon me.
In my letter to Ernst Zündel, I asked him to inform me about the names and
contact addresses of persons who were already active in research, especially
concerning the chemical questions. I hoped to be able to join this research
which surely must have been already in progress.
My disappointment was great when I received the message back from
Ernst Zündel that I was the first chemist to contact him and offer his help in
this matter. Well, I had not exactly offered him my help, but rather asked for
names and addresses of experts I wanted to help. As a freshly graduated
chemist who had just completed his compulsory military service, I hardly saw
myself in a position to do research myself. So I shelved the whole project for
the time being.
This changed towards the end of 1990, when I started working on my PhD
thesis in theoretical crystallography at the Max-Planck Institute for Solid State
Research in Stuttgart. Admittedly, this activity did not offer me any opportuni-
ty to contribute to research on the topic of “Auschwitz.” However, I had not
3
See e.g., G. Rudolf, Hunting Germar Rudolf, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016.
only moved to Stuttgart to prepare my PhD thesis, but also because I had fall-
en in love with a girl who happened to live down there…
As fate would have it, this young love broke up shortly after I moved to
Stuttgart. My broken heart couldn’t stand it in my lonely room in the evenings
and on weekends, so I looked for distraction… and found it in forensic re-
search on red-hot historical questions.
Let no one say that women don’t rule the world!
I first met Ernst Zündel towards the end of 1991, when he was present in
Germany for his first German trial. I vividly remember walking with Ernst
across the fields of Leinfelden near Stuttgart discussing all sorts of things. I
think we immediately took a liking to each other. One of the topics we dis-
cussed at that time was my own expert report on the gas chambers of Ausch-
witz. It was in its final stages at the time, and Ernst Zündel was interested in
acquiring the copyrights to it. At that time, however, I had certain reservations
about finding my report in such a controversial context, so I gratefully de-
clined his offer.
It was not until the year 2000 that I had the opportunity to meet Ernst Zün-
del again: as a refugee in the United States. The scale and scope of my com-
mitment to critical historiography had put me on a head-on collision course
with all the powers that be in Germany. Accordingly, they were all after me
like the devil after the poor soul. So, at the end of 1999, I left for the U.S.,
where I was taken in like a son by Dr. Robert and Elda Countess near Hunts-
ville, Alabama.
Then one foggy day in late 2000, I drove with Dr. Bob to Tennessee, where
we were allowed to visit Ernst and his wife, Ingrid Zündel-Rimland, in their
new home in the Smoky Mountains. In subsequent years I met Ernst occasion-
ally during revisionist conventions or private gatherings of mutuals acquaint-
ances, but a closer relationship never developed.
That changed only in the fall of 2007 – when we spent a few months on the
same floor in the same wing of Mannheim Prison. At that time, we had both
just gone through the trauma of a deportation from the U.S. and a show trial
before a German kangaroo court. (To be precise, Ernst had endured two such
trials: first in Canada, then another one in Germany. More on that later.)
On that memorable afternoon, I did my weight training in my prison cell
with self-made weights as usual (ten milk cartons each in an undershirt tied at
the bottom). I had heard from one of the guards that Ernst was to be trans-
ferred that day from the investigative-custody wing to the penitentiary ward,
to which I had been transferred only a few weeks earlier. Although my cell
door should have been closed, the guards were kind enough to leave my door
open (preferential treatment for good behavior) so that I could go into the
hallway – which I hardly ever did, because one could find essentially only the
following unattractive things there: dirt, noise and criminals ☺.
I was doing my triceps exercises when the door opened and Ernst stood in
the doorway, grinning broadly. What a reunion! After so many months of
hardships and degradation, finally someone who could be fully trusted, who
understood me completely, who had been through the same exact ordeal – and
even worse! In the following two or three months, we managed to talk for
many hours a day in our “free time” – unlocked cell doors between 5:30 pm
and 9:30 pm. Either we sat together in (mostly) his cell, or we walked up and
down the hallway and talked pretty much about anything and everything.
Several weeks later, I was moved to another prison wing, so from then on
we only met occasionally during our courtyard time; but after so many weeks
of talking for hours on end almost every single day, we had run out of topics a
bit anyway, so this was not necessarily a great loss.
Actually, it should not have happened that the two of us met in prison. In
our files, it was written in bold red letters: “Separation of perpetrators!” The
spatial separation of accomplices normally only exists during pre-trial deten-
tion, so that the perpetrators (or suspects) cannot coordinate their testimony.
But in our case files, it was clearly stated that there was no evidence whatso-
ever that the two of us had ever done anything together, let alone committed
any crime. Accordingly, we had never been charged with anything together.
Why, then, was there a need to “separate the perpetrators”, and that while we
were already in penal custody after the trial was over and the sentence had
come into force?
Well, in our case they want to prevent us from reinforcing each other’s
views at all costs. Let me remind you: There are no political prisoners in Ger-
many; nobody is imprisoned because of their views; everybody is allowed to
form their opinions freely and to express them. Unless…
Of course, the many drug dealers in prison were never in danger of rein-
forcing each other’s views, which is why no effort is made to separate them.
Accordingly, there is no place in Germany where it is easier to get drugs than
in German prisons. Almost every second prisoner can help you out with that…
When Germany’s largest tabloid Bild found out in January 2008 that Ernst
and I were in the same prison exchanging our thoughts, the local Mannheim
edition of Bild published a prominent article about us. It was a scandal, they
claimed, that we two bad boys could talk to each other in prison! They don’t
even want to let us talk to each other in prison…
I took advantage of this opportunity and applied for a transfer to a different
prison, citing “public interest.” The application was quickly approved, and so
I was transferred to Rottenburg near Stuttgart towards the end of February
2008. My real motivation for the transfer was, of course, not “public interest”
or my mental salvation, but rather my family: I wanted to be as close as possi-
ble to the home of my children from my first marriage so that they could visit
me on a regular basis. Since all the essentials had been said between Ernst and
me, the Bild article came in handy.
The last time I saw Ernst was in the summer of 2011. I just had received
my immigration visa to the United States and was preparing my final depar-
ture from Europe. A week before I left, I drove down into the Black Forest to
meet Ernst one last time in his parental hometown. He was in the midst of
renovating his centuries-old parental home. I spent two days with him, spend-
ing the night in one of his bedrooms. We talked about what had transpired af-
ter we both had been released from prison (I had been out since July 2009, he
since March 2010), and what our future plans were. I told him about my con-
tinuing commitment to revisionism, and that I was working hard on issuing
many more volumes to my prestigious series Holocaust Handbooks (see the
end of this book). He was pleased.
Particularly the many weeks we spent together in prison have enabled me
to get to know the true, elemental Ernst. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll just say
that, apart from his immediate family, there is no one who got to know Ernst
better than I did. When you have stood together under the communal shower
week after week in prison, you know one another.
So who is Ernst Zündel?
Ernst was very popular among the prisoners because he was always polite
to everyone and always ready to help. 70-80% of the prison inmates in Ger-
many are foreigners – Turks, Kurds, Poles, Russians, Arabs, Africans. All of
them could come to Ernst, pour out their heart to him, get advice from him,
and could count on his help. That was Ernst: friendly, peaceful, warm-hearted,
helpful, a good listener, and even under the worst circumstances always ready
to crack a joke and raise others’ morale. He was especially popular among
law-enforcement officials because of his kindness, courtesy, and excellent
manners.
There is only one thing I hold against Zündel: “Do as I say, not as I do” is
not a convincing argument when it comes to a healthy lifestyle. If Ernst could
be called a fanatic about one thing, it was about healthy eating – but more in
spirit than in deed. He could ramble on for hours about healthy diets and food
items, but when it came to the actual act of eating, his bathroom scale was not
happy with him…
Whoever hears something about Ernst Zündel in the mass media, from the
judiciary, from politicians or “opinion leaders” admittedly gets a completely
different, in some ways an opposite impression of him. For decades, he has
been portrayed by his enemies as a hatemonger and inciter of the masses. The
distorted picture these people paint of Ernst could hardly be more grotesque.
The truth is that Ernst was not a hatemonger and inciter of the masses, but
that the powers that persecuted him incited the whole world against him and
his kind. Hence, they’ve got the cart before the horse!
Wherever and whenever the reader encounters slander of Ernst Zündel, he
should keep in mind the following wisdom, coined by my late fatherly friend
Dr. Robert Countess, God rest his soul:
Truth is hate in the eyes of those who hate the truth.

And that’s the truth!
***
Thirty-three years have passed since the Second Zündel Trial ended. Many of
the key players have since passed away, among them Ernst Zündel himself
(†2017) and his spiritus rector Prof. Dr. Robert Faurisson (†2018), who was
the mastermind behind the defense in these trials, as well as Zündel’s defense
counsels Douglas Christie (†2013) and Barbara Kulaszka (†2017). Neverthe-
less, these historic trials keep having an impact as if they had happened just
yesterday.
While the First Zündel Trial of 1985 was extensively covered by the Cana-
dian news media, and to a much-lesser extent also by the U.S. media, the sec-
ond trial, although much-less-covered by the mass media, had a much-larger
impact internationally, mainly due to the Leuchter Report as the first inde-
pendent forensic research performed on the Auschwitz and Majdanek Camps.4
One reason for the Leuchter Report’s initial success was that it was en-
dorsed on the witness stand by the British best-selling historian David Irving,
who a year later even issued his own glossy edition of that report featuring his
own introduction. Subsequent to his endorsing the Leuchter Report, however,
David Irving lost many of his book contracts, to no small degree as a result of
Jewish pressure groups bullying publishers worldwide to take Irving’s books
off their lists and to refuse to take on any of his new books.
Unwilling to take this censorship lying down, Irving fought back by suing
one of the greatest among the bullies, Deborah Lipstadt, for libel. Although
Irving lost the ensuing civil lawsuit in 2000,5 it brought revisionism again into
the spotlight of the media and fueled interest in revisionism among many who
had either never heard of it or who considered it a mere fringe occurrence.
After David Irving’s defeat in court, the Holocaust orthodoxy declared to-
tal victory over Holocaust revisionism. What they didn’t understand – or were
hiding from public view – was the fact that David Irving had never published
anything about the Holocaust. He even prided himself in never having read a
single book about it, revisionist books included. In other words: although Da-
vid Irving had endorsed the Leuchter Report, he was anything but an expert in
Holocaust studies, let alone a Holocaust revisionist. Hence, targeting him had
very little to do with targeting Holocaust revisionism, if anything. Victory
4
This report was followed by three more reports authored either by Fred Leuchter alone or together
with Robert Faurisson. A collection of all four reports – the first of which with numerous explain-
ing and correcting footnotes as well as an update by myself – is currently available in its 5th edi-
tion: Fred A. Leuchter, Robert Faurisson, Germar Rudolf, The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edition
(5th ed., Uckfield, UK: Castle Hill Publishers, 2017).
5
See Don D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case
(London: Granta Books 2001); Deborah E. Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with Da-
vid Irving (New York: Ecco, 2005)
over Irving was therefore even less than a Pyrrhic victory; it was a knockout
in a match of shadow boxing. It left Holocaust revisionism completely un-
scathed, except, of course, among those disposed to view it otherwise.6
Revisionism was on a steep ascent already when the First Zündel Trial
took place in 1985, but its initial rise was neither a result of this trial, nor was
its epicenter located in North America. During the Second Zündel Trial, Prof.
Dr. Robert Faurisson briefly mentioned the astonishing dedication to meticu-
lous analysis and extreme accuracy displayed by Italian scholar Carlo Mat-
togno (see p. 251 in the present book). At that point in time, Mattogno had
authored only a little more than a handful of studies on Holocaust-related top-
ics, the first of which had appeared roughly around the time the First Zündel
Trial took place.7 Mattogno’s productivity really took off once he had teamed
up with two other scholars who had recently joined the ranks of revisionism as
a direct result of the Second Zündel Trial: The multi-lingual Swiss Jürgen
Graf who enabled Mattogno to visit multiple archives in various Eastern Eu-
ropean countries, and German scientist Germar Rudolf, whose bilingual pub-
lishing activities made Mattogno’s works accessible to the German-speaking
world, and later also – and far more importantly so – to the English-speaking
world. This synergetic cooperation gave Mattogno access to the source mate-
rial he needed to write his studies, and to the audiences required as incentive
to keep going. Hence, during the next three decades, Mattogno turned into a
revisionist one-man powerhouse producing more material than all the other
revisionist authors taken together.8
***
Without any doubt, the Second Zündel Trial was the peak of Ernst Zündel’s
public impact, although strictly legally speaking, it was not its climax. That
came only on August 27, 1992, when the Canadian Supreme Court overturned
Ernst Zündel’s conviction and declared the law unconstitutional under which
he had been dragged through Canada’s courts since 1985. It was a late, but re-
sounding, total victory for Ernst Zündel.
Liberated from legal threats, Ernst Zündel subsequently went on a PR
campaign trying to bring the good news of revisionism to the masses. He de-
scribes this himself in Chapter 11, which was originally written in 1993 for
the first German edition of the present book, and which has been added to this
new English edition. What happened later, however, Ernst Zündel could not
write into his 1993 Epilogue, so I may summarize it here.
6
For this, see the analysis by Carlo Mattogno, The Real Case for Auschwitz: Robert van Pelt’s Evi-
dence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed (3rd ed., Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2019).
7
La Risiera di San Sabba: Un falso grossolano (Monfalcone: Sentinella d’Italia, 1985).
8
For a current list of avaibale studies by Mattogno in both English and German, see the author’s
book list at https://castlehill.shop/author/carlo-mattogno/.
Zündel’s PR campaign enraged cer-

tain groups who of lobbyists, after hav-
ing unsuccessfully tried to misuse Can-
ada’s penal law to stifle a free debate,
followed two very different tactical
routes to silence Ernst Zündel for ever.
The first route consisted of attempts
at assassination. In the spring of 1995,
Ernst Zündel’s home in Toronto be-
came the target of violent demonstra-
tions. Flyers posted throughout Toronto
called for violence against him. On
April 4, 1995, Zündel received a pack-
age containing an anonymous bomb
threat, accompanied by a mousetrap
loaded with razor blades. On May 7,
1995, Zündel’s home was the victim of
an arson attack. The damage was about
$400,000. On May 20, 1995, Zündel Fire damage to Zündel’s house after
finally received a package containing a the arson attack of May 7, 1995.
bomb, but Ernst had a sixth sense be-
cause the sender of the bomb made him skeptical. The police explosives squad
eventually defused the bomb by remote detonation in a quarry near Toronto. If
the bomb had exploded in Zündel’s apartment, it would have devastated the
entire house and likewise severely damaged the surrounding houses.
In none of these crimes against Ernst Zündel was there ever a conviction of
those guilty. On the contrary, on August 5, 1995, the Canadian Minister of
Citizenship and Immigration notified Ernst Zündel that he, the victim of state
and private violence, had been classified as a “security risk” to Canada. This
decision was upheld by the Canadian Supreme Court on April 30, 1998.
The second route was the creation of extra-judicial governmental decrees
that ban “offensive” speech. The usual enemies of free speech successfully
lobbied to have this Orwellian “Human Rights Act” implemented, which was
to be enforced by a “Human Rights Commission.” This Commission, which is
not composed of members of the legal profession but essentially of “political-
ly correct” laymen, can by decree, after a hearing in which the prosecutors are
also the judges, ban, among other things, all material “likely to expose persons
to hatred or contempt.”
Although the Commission has no powers to send defendants to prison, dis-
regarding its decision gives the Commission the power to initiate legal pro-
ceedings against the defendant for disregarding a government decision, which
in the end can result in heavy fines and even prison terms by the regular court
system.
Furthermore, in a fundamental decision, the Commission has stated that in-

tent is not a prerequisite for an offense, and that the truth or a reasonable be-
lief in the truth of a statement is not a defense for spreading views that could
lead to hatred or contempt. In other words, not bound by legal standards of
penal courts, this Commission does not have to consider any kind of argument
presented by the defense regarding the factual content of an offending public
statement. After all, whether a statement is true or not has no impact on
whether it can offend a minority, which is the only thing that matters to this
Commission.
Truth is no defense.
Add to this the frightening fact that any costs incurred by any such pro-
ceedings always have to be paid by those getting in the crosshairs of the
Commission, even if the defendants ultimately win their case. Anyone becom-
ing the target of this Commission will quickly realize the unwinnable situation
they are in, and the vast majority of them will willingly roll over and confess
to avoid major financial damage.
Consequently, any defendant is totally at the mercy of the political whims
of the Commission’s decision-making members. It is, therefore, the perfect
Stalinist law for suppressing unpopular views.
Such a farcical kangaroo framework guarantees that everyone in Canada
harboring views that may be considered “offensive” to minority groups gets
intimidated right from the start – provided that minority group is considered
“offendable” by the powers that be – meaning that “Nazis,” white suprema-
cists, white nationalists, revisionists, anti-Semites, anti-Zionists, anti-alphabet
soup-ists, and similar “offending” groups are not eligible, although they all are
a minority. In fact, the Human-Rights Commission’s primary mission is to
keep such minority groups an extreme minority by allowing the extra-legal
persecution of their perceived adherents and members.
Attempts to have this extra-legal system destroying free speech in Canada
declared unconstitutional by the Canadian Supreme Court were ultimately un-
successful, despite harsh criticism from the mass media.
In 1996, Zündel became one of the first targets of this Human Rights
Commission for allegedly inciting to hatred because of Ingrid Rimland’s high-
ly controversial website “www.Zundelsite.org,” which was very popular in the
early years of the still-uncensored Internet. Any evidence Zündel introduced
in his defense was found by the Commission to be “irrelevant” because “truth
is no defense.” On May 25, 1998, the Commission found him guilty of incit-
ing hatred with Ingrid Rimland’s website.9 Zündel was ordered to delete his
website and to stop making public statements about the Holocaust.
9
Although Ernst Zündel never had control over the website and never directly contributed to it, he
was held liable for it anyway, since he had apparently agreed to his name and personal history be-
ing used for advertising.
Although that website had never

been operated by Ernst himself, but
rather by his lady-friend Ingrid Rim-
land from the U.S. since the late
1990s, Zündel was nevertheless or-
dered to shut down this website and
cease and desist from all public state-
ments on the Holocaust. Needless to
say, he refused to comply. Hence,
Zündel was dragged in front of a
“proper” Canadian court again, this
time with no way of defending himself The arrested Ernst Zündel upon his ar-
rival in Toronto, February 19, 2003.
against the charge of having defied the
order of a government authority.
Sick and tired of the shenanigans against him, he left Canada in early 2000
for good – or so he thought – after marrying his lady-friend Ingrid Rimland
and moving to the U.S. in the process, while at the same time retiring from re-
visionism and focusing on creating artwork instead.
That wasn’t the end of his ordeal, however, because the never-forget, nev-
er-forgive faction was out for blood. When there was a legal slip-up in Ernst’s
attempt at receiving permanent legal residency in the U.S. – he missed an ap-
pointment for an interview – the U.S. authorities, who refuse to deport tens of
millions of illegal immigrants to the U.S. (because they belong to privileged
minority groups) were quick to arrest the legal immigrant Ernst Zündel on
February 5, 2003 and deported him back to Canada twelve days later. Since by
then his status as a permanent legal resident had expired in Canada, the Cana-
dian authorities treated him like a terrorist under the new post-9/11 legislation,
put him in solitary confinement in a high-security prison, and declared him a
risk to Canada’s national security after conducting a non-public (meaning se-
cret) hearing where the Canadian government did not have to disclose any of
their “evidence.” All attempts to challenge this secret evidence and to chal-
lenge these kangaroo-style proceedings failed to stay his eventual deportation.
On March 1, 2005, Zündel was deported to his native Germany. As justifi-
cation, Canadian authorities claimed that Zündel was a security risk because
he had been associating with individuals and groups allegedly inclined to use
violence, and because his views destabilized the government of Germany, an
important ally of Canada.
There, the German government arrested him as he stepped out of the air-
plane, and eventually put him on trial for his more than ten years of dissemi-
nating German-language writings and Internet content that was “denying the
Holocaust.” The ensuing trial lasted almost a year and a half. The German
penal law is rigged to the point that it allows judges to deny defendants the
right to introduce any evidence proving their point of view, ban defense coun-
selors from filing any motion to introduce any such evidence, and bar lawyers
from saying anything in the courtroom – and all this is exactly what Judge
Meinerzhagen of the Mannheim District Court did during these proceedings,
which were only slightly milder in character than Stalinist show trials.
Meinerzhagen ultimately even arrested one of Ernst Zündel’s lawyers – the
courageous Sylvia Stolz – for not complying with these muzzling mandates.
Stolz and another one of Zündel’s defense lawyers, Horst Mahler, were later
charged and also sentenced as a result of their defense activities.10 Ernst Zün-
del was finally sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, and to pile insult upon
injury, the German court moreover refused to recognize Ernst’s two-year soli-
tary confinement in Canada as time served, because his imprisonment there al-
legedly had nothing to do with the offenses for which he was being punished
in Germany...
On March 1, 2010, Ernst Zündel was finally released from prison. Having
been sentenced for two or more offenses in Germany with an aggregate prison
term of five or more years, he was declared non-admissible to the U.S. for the
rest of his life.
Separated from his wife, who could not join him in Germany due to threats
of prosecution by German authorities, Ernst Zündel died all alone on August
5, 2017, at his Black-Forest parental home in Bad Wildbad, Germany.
Incidentally, after Zündel’s deportation, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled
that the secret court proceedings against him were unlawful…
***
The present book, compiled, edited and written by Ernst Zündel himself after
the conclusion of his second Canadian trial, was originally published under
the pen name of Robert . The use of this ruse was necessary, because when
Zündel was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment at the end of this trial, he
was released on bail pending his appeal only, after he had agreed not to write
or speak about the Holocaust and related subjects (see p. 385). Creating the
present book, whose first edition appeared in 1990, most have taken at least a
year, so it is safe to assume that, after Ernst Zündel’s conviction and release
on bail, he did not let grass grow under his feet, but in spite of his bail condi-
tion went right back to work and created and published the present book. As
we can see, defiance is one main character trait of revisionists.
Even though I had cooperated with the Zündels back in 2010/2011 to re-
publish the German edition of the present book, for which they granted Castle
Hill Publishers the copyright,11 they never revealed to me that the entire book
had actually been written by Ernst himself. I found out about it only recently
10
Mahler’s activities went far beyond purely procedural defense through the dissemination of his
own writings. He received a total of about 12 years in prison in several proceedings. Sylvia Stolz
received 3½ years’ imprisonment for her confrontational defense tactics.
11
Der Holocaust vor Gericht (2nd ed., Uckfield, Castle Hill Publishers, 2011/2015)
from a French revisionist who had been approached in 1989 to publish a

French translation of this book (which never came to pass).
This being so, I decided to put the actual author’s name on the book, be-
cause Ernst Zündel deserves to have the book chronicling the pinnacle of his
struggle bear his name, and because concealing from the public the identity of
the real author of this book is no longer necessary. While using pen names to
protect any revisionist’s privacy and safety in the face of worldwide persecu-
tion and prosecution is fully legitimate and justifiable, there is no need for pri-
vacy and safety for him anymore, after he and his wife have passed away. I
know that, by using his name as the author for this new edition, some readers
will read the words written in this book more cautiously as those of a biased
party, and maybe that is only fair. In the end, the proof is in the pudding, not
in an author’s name or identity. If you, dear reader, are positively or negative-
ly prejudiced toward what is being laid out in this book solely because of the
identity of the author, please don’t blame it on the author!
***
It should be pointed out that a much-more-comprehensive, published record of
the Second Zündel Trial is available, namely Barbara Kulaszka’s “Did Six
Million Really Die?”: Excerpts from the Court Transcript of the Canadian
“False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel, 1988.12 While the present book has a to-
tal of some 160,000 words (not counting this foreword), Kulaszka’s tome has
almost 440,000 words, again not counting my foreword to it, and it is exclu-
sively about the Second Zündel Trial, while the present book’s introduction
and first two chapters summarize Zündel’s case in general and the First Zün-
del Trial in particular. Hence, the reader looking for a comprehensive record
of what transpired during the Second Zündel Trial is best advised to consult
Kulaszka’s 500-page letter-size, double-column tome in small print, which is
strictly limited to quoting verbatim from the trial transcript or summarizing
sections of it, while those looking for a more-concise, easier-to-read summary
of the entire Zündel Case with a focus on the Second Zündel Trial are proba-
bly best served by the present study.
When reading the present book, please be aware that more than three dec-
ades have passed since the Second Zündel Trial – three decades of progress in
research which would invite correcting quite a few of the statements made
during the Second Zündel Trial. Since the present book is a historical record
of a historic trial, I have refrained from updating any of it in light of later re-
search and discoveries. Its text is the same as it was when first published in
1989/1990 – save for a few corrected typos and adjusted spellings of proper
names.
12
First published in 1992, it is now available in a new, 2019 edition by Castle Hill Publishers.
In 1988, the body of English-language revisionist literature was rather lim-

ited. Apart from Arthur Butz’s Hoax of the Twentieth Century,13 Wilhelm
Stäglich’s The Auschwitz Myth14 and Walter Sanning’s The Dissolution,15
there was not much anyone could have called upon. That has changed drasti-
cally, not least due to the series Holocaust Handbooks which was launched in
the Year 2000, and which now encompasses 50 volumes, 45 of which have
been published as I write these lines; the other five are in some stage of writ-
ing, editing or translation.
When reading about any particular topic in the present book, the reader
should keep in mind that our knowledge has progressed, and that it is advisa-
ble to consult the pertinent volume of the Holocaust Handbooks for any topic
you would like to learn more about. For instance, they include a monograph
dedicated exclusively to Leuchter’s various expert reports (Vol. 16). Key wit-
nesses mentioned during the Second Zündel Trial, such as Rudolf Höss, Mi-
klos Nyiszli, Kurt Gerstein and Rudolf Reder, Filip Müller, Henryk Tauber as
well as Szlama Dragon, have their own dedicated monographs (Vols. 35, 37,
43-45). Each so-called extermination camp has its own monograph (Vols. 4, 5,
8, 9, 19, 23, 28), with one of them – Auschwitz – being dealt with in multiple
specialized studies (Vols. 2, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20-22, 24, 33, 34, 36, 38,
40-42, 44-48), including one scrutinizing the 30 most-important witness ac-
counts (Vol. 36). There are monographs on Zyklon B, its (claimed) use in al-
leged homicidal gas and delousing chambers and the traces it may have left
behind (Vols. 2, 16), on cremation technology (Vol. 24), on air-photo evi-
dence (Vol. 27), on the Einsatzgruppen (Vol. 39) and on the elusive gas vans
(Vol. 26). These were all topics covered to some degree during the Second
Zündel Trial, as you will find out. To learn more about these books, just turn
to the final pages of the present study, or visit www.HolocaustHandbooks.com.
This is not a sales pitch for these books, because almost all of them are availa-
ble as e-book downloads free of charge! Hence, you need neither spend mon-
ey nor identify yourself when downloading them. Of course, they are also
available as printed copies both as softcover and hardcover editions.
Germar Rudolf,
Red Lion, PA
January 17, 2022
13
First published in 1975; now available in its 5th ed. (Uckfield, Castle Hill Publishers, 2015)
14
First published in 1986; now available in its 3rd ed. with the title Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the
Evidence (Uckfield, Castle Hill Publishers, 2015)
15
First published in 1983; now available in its 2nd ed. (Uckfield, Castle Hill Publishers, 2015)
Post Scriptum
The original edition of this book contained numerous illustrations from Ernst
Zündel’s collection. Most of these photos were destroyed when Ernst Zündel’s
Canadian home was firebombed on May 7, 1995. Some photos of his collec-
tion survived, though, and Ernst gave electronic scans of all of them to me
when I visited him in his parental home in 2011 shortly before I left Germany
in order to emigrate to the U.S. I have published a number of these photos,
plus many photos documenting the result of the arson attack against Ernst’s
Canadian home, in the appendix of the new edition of Kulaszka’s “Did Six
Million Really Die?”.
Introduction
J ust about everyone has heard that Adolf Hitler’s National-Socialist regime
exterminated six million Jews during the Second World War.
What is not well known is that, for some years now, a small but persis-
tent group of people who call themselves “revisionists” has been disputing the
seemingly indisputable. They insist that the Holocaust – the systematic exter-
mination of six million Jews, most of them in gas chambers – is a myth. These
people don’t get much media attention, and, when they do, are usually dis-
missed as cranks or anti-Semites.
Canada’s best-known and most-flamboyant revisionist is a gregarious and
determined immigrant from Germany’s Black Forest region named Ernst
Zündel. For publishing a slim booklet titled Did Six Million Really Die?, he
was twice put on trial and convicted on a charge of spreading “false news.”
Regardless of what one might think of Zündel and his views, much of the
evidence presented by his witnesses and defense team in the Toronto “Holo-
caust trial” of 1988 cannot be dismissed out of hand. The purpose of this book
is to give it the fair hearing it deserves.
This book tells the story of Zündel’s 1988 trial – an event that raises dis-
turbing questions about our understanding of what is perhaps the most emo-
tionally-charged chapter of history, and about the proper limits to free speech
in a democratic society.
It is important to understand that those who reject the Holocaust story do
not dispute that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps
and ghettos, or that many Jews were killed during the Second World War.
Every serious revisionist acknowledges that Europe’s Jews suffered a catas-
trophe during the Hitler years. They were ruthlessly uprooted, taken from their
homes, and herded into horribly overcrowded ghettos and miserable concen-
tration camps, where many of them perished. Their property and their rights
were taken away.
While conceding all of this, the men and women who testified on Zündel’s
behalf gave their reasons for rejecting the idea that there was a German pro-
gram to exterminate Europe’s Jews, and for disbelieving the stories about
mass killings in gas chambers.
For example, America’s leading expert on execution gas chambers, a Bos-
ton engineer named Fred Leuchter, testified on April 20 and 21, 1988 about
his detailed on-site investigation of the “gassing facilities” at Auschwitz I,
Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and Majdanek (Looblin) – supposedly three of Hit-
ler’s most-notorious extermination centers. Leuchter told the court that the al-
leged “gas chambers” at these camps could not possibly have been used for
any such purpose as to kill people.
Leuchter and a second witness, Ivan Lagacé, also stated that the crematoria
at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek could never have been able to dispose
of anything like the number of bodies alleged in the standard Holocaust litera-
ture. Lagacé operates the state-of-the-art crematoria used by Calgary, Canada.
Professor Robert Faurisson, the leading French revisionist historian, wrote
of Leuchter’s meticulous testimony: “I am convinced that during those two
days I was an eyewitness to the death of the gas-chamber myth.”16
And best-selling British historian David Irving called Leuchter’s technical
report on his investigation a “shattering” document which hardened his grow-
ing conviction that portions of the orthodox Holocaust story are subject to
grave doubt.17
Some students of the two Zündel trials are more interested in their implica-
tions for freedom of speech. This became a lively issue in Canada in 1970,
when the Parliament, ignoring warnings from many leading editors and pub-
lishers, enacted a new section of the Criminal Code which makes it an indict-
able offense to “promote hatred against any identifiable group.”
Identifiable groups, as it turned out, do not include allegedly “secure”
groups such as whites, Christians, Anglo-Saxons and Germans. The result,
which was foreseen by heads wiser than those prevailing in Ottawa, has been
the creation of two classes of Canadian citizens, with widely differing rights.
This development resembles what was brought about by “Affirmative Action”
or racial-quota rulings by courts in the United States.
Actually, Zündel was never prosecuted under the “group-hatred” act,
though other Canadians have been. Those interested in putting him out of
business resorted instead to an obscure and anachronistic section of the Crimi-
nal Code which states, “Everyone who willfully publishes a statement, tale or
news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mis-
chief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offense and is liable to im-
prisonment for two years.”
16
Rivarol, May 27, 1988.
17
See page 318.
The “false news” which Zündel was charged with publishing was a 28-
page revisionist booklet called Did Six Million Really Die? Authored by an
Englishman, Richard Verrall, under the pen name of Richard E. Harwood, it
first appeared in Britain in 1974 and subsequently enjoyed a large under-
ground circulation and numerous translations. Zündel’s Canadian edition add-
ed four pages of introductory and concluding remarks by himself.
The Harwood pamphlet is an early and hastily written revisionist work
containing a number of fairly obvious mistakes. To Sabina Citron, an activist
with the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, bringing a private
complaint against it as “false news” seemed like the surest means of prevail-
ing against Zündel. Bringing charges under the “group hatred” act requires the
consent of the provincial attorney general, which was not forthcoming, quite
possibly because Harwood contains nothing “hateful.”
The origin of the “false news” law is an old English crime called De Scan-
dalis Magnatum, which first appeared in the statute books in 1275 and wasn’t
abolished by English lawmakers until 1888. In the Thirteenth Century, great
nobles felt they were being slandered by peasants who went around reciting
scurrilous ballads and rhymes. Although this was the only outlet the common
man had to protest his fate, the nobility viewed it as intolerable. When Cana-
da’s existing criminal code was enacted in 1892, the crime of “false news”
somehow slipped into the lawbooks.18
Prosecutions under this holdover from feudal times have been extremely
rare. In 1907, a merchant in Alberta of American origin was indicted for
claiming in an advertisement that Canada was unfriendly to his former coun-
trymen. That was obviously a wicked lie, the jury reasoned, and convicted
him. In 1951 and 1970, prosecutions under Section 177 (then Section 166) re-
sulted in acquittals.)19
Citron brought her private complaint against Zündel on November 18,
1983. The Province of Ontario, under constant prodding by Jewish groups,
later took over the case.
What followed, in early 1985, was widely called the Great Holocaust Trial.
Though Zündel was convicted and sentenced to 15 months in prison, he pro-
claimed a victory of sorts, which the Canadian media grudgingly conceded.
His 22 defense witnesses, including half a dozen leading revisionists, suc-
ceeded in bringing scholarly criticism of the Holocaust to an audience of mil-
lions. Canada’s reporters and their editors and publishers, bound by traditional
standards of fairness and legal restrictions on coverage of a trial in progress,
described the revisionist testimony each day with relative accuracy. When the
trial finally ended, Canadian Jews erupted with volleys of scathing abuse for
18
Hate Propaganda, Working Paper 50 of the Law Reform Commission of Canada, Ottawa, 1986,
p. 29.
19
Ibid., p. 13.
the nation’s news media. They had, it was said, given “a parade of kooks from
around the world” a serious hearing they did not deserve.
The full implications of this orchestrated denunciation, which quickly blos-
somed into media-haranguing conferences and “workshops,” did not become
obvious until January 1987, when a five-judge panel of the Ontario Court of
Appeal (the Supreme Court of Ontario), citing errors of law committed during
the first Zündel trial, overturned his conviction. After the Supreme Court of
Canada upheld the panel’s decision, a retrial was ordered by Ontario Attorney
General Ian Scott. At this point, most of Canada’s major Jewish organizations
began reminding the media of their alleged sins in the 1985 trial. They de-
manded that the “kooks” and “hate-mongers” not be given a second hearing.
Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants would not be able to
bear the “trauma” of seeing more headlines that questioned some of their tes-
timony and travails.
The second Zündel trial, in early 1988, received substantially less publicity
than the first. Jewish “sensitivities” were permitted to count for more than the
right of other citizens to be informed. The censors prevailed.
Editors, challenged by angry letters and phone calls to explain their “negli-
gence,” fell back on the stock argument that the Zündel case was “news only
the first time around.” The record clearly shows otherwise. The revisionist tes-
timony in the second trial, much of it by new witnesses, was even more unset-
tling than that offered in the first. Further, the editors’ own past comments re-
garding the extraordinary pressure to which they had been subjected could not
be retracted.
Those who believe in selective freedom of speech had it both ways. Zündel
was prosecuted at their instigation, yet the general press was nearly silent, and
only the Canadian Jewish News covered the story in detail. Only Jews were
able to avoid being kept in the dark. So much for the concern for “traumatized
Jewish survivors.”
Reconvicted and resentenced, Zündel proclaimed another victory. Though
censorship kept many Canadians from hearing about the often-stunning testi-
mony on his behalf, the transcript of the trial remained as a permanent public
record.
After the trial, Fred Leuchter made two simple observations which suggest
that Zündel had reason to celebrate. A major argument against Zündel’s pros-
ecution had been the question of how anyone could presume to know that he
published the Harwood pamphlet “knowing” it to be false. Is it possible for
anyone, judge or jury, to look inside a man’s mind? The forensic investigation
of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, made with a five-person team utilizing
the appropriate physical, chemical and biological knowledge, was undertaken
entirely at Zündel’s instigation and expense. Had Zündel actually doubted his
own claim that the gas-chamber story is mistaken, would he have dreamed of
hiring America’s foremost authority on gas chambers – a man firmly con-
vinced of the standard Holocaust story when he began – to test the reality of
the gassings? Leuchter marveled at Zündel’s sincerity and self-assurance in
hiring him, and at the bad faith of a judge and jury who, to the end, refused to
concede Zündel’s true motives.
Leuchter’s second point was his reply to a revisionist who had asked him:
“Can’t the other side hire its ‘own’ engineer to study the alleged gassing sites
and make an opposite set of declarations under oath?” Leuchter’s reply was
instantaneous: “Any engineer who would do such a thing would be commit-
ting professional suicide.”
The laws of physics and chemistry are not suspended for Germans, not
even Nazi Germans. This point has been made before by revisionists, among
whom engineers are prominent, in refuting such fables as Elie Wiesel’s “gey-
sers of blood” rising over Jewish mass graves.20 It was made by Leuchter with
regard to the gas chambers. Nature is of a piece, and the gassing stories simply
don’t fit.
Canada today is a nation at a crossroads. Powerful elites have decreed that
a lengthening list of books, magazines and pamphlets dealing with a widening
range of political, religious and historical topics must be made inaccessible to
ordinary citizens. This censorship comes at a time when the nation faces un-
precedented decisions concerning its political, economic and cultural future.
One decision confronting Canadians is whether or not the Holocaust
should play a central role in their public life. As in the United States, Holo-
caust study, ceremony and worship are on a phenomenal upswing, with semi-
official liturgies actively promoted by government agencies and private corpo-
rations alike. In his book Propaganda, the French social philosopher Jacques
Ellul warned of the contaminating impact which action can have on know-
ledge and belief:21
“Action makes propaganda’s effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience
to propaganda can never go back. He is now obliged to believe in that propa-
ganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justifica-
tion and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust,
which would be intolerable. He is obliged to continue to advance in the direc-
tion indicated by propaganda, for action demands more action.”
Thoughtful revisionists have asked: Can a governor or mayor or chief execu-
tive officer who has wept in public about “the gassings” on nine occasions ev-
er go back on his belief?
20
In The Jews of Silence (1966, page 48), Wiesel wrote, in all seriousness, that at Babi Yar, near Ki-
ev in the Ukraine, “Eyewitnesses say that for months after the killings the ground continued to
spurt geysers of blood.” He was still saying it in Paroles d’étranger (1982, page 86): “For month
after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted
from it.”
21
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda, Vintage, New York, 1973, p. 29.
Ellul would be doubtful. Activity, he said, carried to a certain point, makes

belief superfluous.
Canada today is a land where most expressions of Holocaust revisionism
have been banned. The censors are unwilling to meet the dissidents in appro-
priate forums on anything like even ground. Rather than addressing the prob-
lems raised by the Leuchters and Lagacés, the Faurissons and Irvings, they
have forced revisionism into a costly legal battle for survival.
Toronto publisher Ernst Zündel has been and remains the focus of this ex-
traordinary Canadian fight, which may be a harbinger for the United States.
His second appeal is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court of Ontario
between September 18 and 20, 1989. After that, the case will almost certainly
proceed to the Supreme Court of Canada.22
One thing is certain. However the lawyers and judges may decide the Zün-
del case and the case of revisionism, the engineers, technicians and allied his-
torians will feel free to withhold support, and to convene a “court” of their
own.
22
Zündel lost this appeal, but won in Canada’s highest court, the Supreme Court in Ottawa, on Au-
gust 27, 1992. Cf. the Epilogue.
Chapter 1: Inquisition in Toronto
arly in the Sixteenth Century, a conflict known as the “Battle of the
E Books” raged across Germany. In one camp was Johann Reuchlin, a

devout Catholic, prominent European humanist, and pioneer in the
Christian study of Hebrew, who believed that the Talmud and other Jewish
books should not be burned by Christian scholars, who often scarcely knew
their contents. Opposing Reuchlin was the Dominican Order, and Johann Pfef-
ferkorn, a Jewish convert to Christianity.
In 1513, several great European universities declared themselves against
Reuchlin, and the Dominican inquisitor began heresy proceedings at Mainz.
Condemnation appeared certain, which would have caused Reuchlin’s own
book Defensio contra Calumniatores to be burned. Fortunately, the city’s
archbishop intervened in his behalf, and then, in 1516, a papal commission
backed Reuchlin overwhelmingly against his so-called “obscurantist” foes.
Our own century has not been spared from recurrent waves of book-bur-
ning, perhaps most-notably in Germany after May 1945.23 In the Soviet zone
of occupation, an “index” was published in 1946 containing about 14,000 pro-
scribed books and other publications. To this list were added about 5,000 titles
in 1947, and another 10,000 in 1948. Only a small minority of the destroyed
titles were National Socialist in orientation. No less verboten were popular
German histories from the Nineteenth Century and a wide range of other ma-
terial. The widespread sacking of German libraries, private as well as public,
was part of a larger program which called for the uprooting of existing Ger-
man institutions, many of them centuries old, from historical societies to stu-
dent fraternities and rabbit-breeding clubs. This program was carried out al-
most as fanatically by the Western Allies as by the Soviets, with the justifica-
23
In a sense, the worst destruction came earlier. For example, during the night of an Allied fire-
bombing raid on Leipzig, about 1.5 million manuscripts were consumed. Before World War II,
Leipzig was home to more than 400 firms which published books and/or music. Only about 10
percent of these companies survived the ruin of war and the rule of Communism. Since 1409,
Leipzig has been a university city; since the early 1800s, it had been the center of the German
book trade.
tion that about 95 percent of Germans had supported Hitler at one time or an-
other.
“Deutschland im Jahre Null” was an expression heard throughout Central
Europe just after the war. Germany in Year Zero. Overnight, the ancestor wor-
ship and historical-mindedness which had dominated Germany for 12 years
was replaced by a society systematically cut off from most links to its past.
Innumerable monuments were dynamited, sculptures were smashed and paint-
ings burned, many of them long predating Hitler’s accession to power in 1933.
In late 1946, Victor Gollancz would write in the Manchester Guardian:
“The book famine in Germany is horrible. It is said that if a bookseller
showed in his window a book about some obscure Indochinese dialect… a
queue would form up for it almost as long as the bread queues I saw in
Dusseldorf.”
The books burned throughout Germany in the late 1940s have, with certain
exceptions, never been replaced. In other words, the spirit of book-burning
still prevails. Only the stimulus is gone.24 Happily, the Black Forest town of
Pforzheim, birthplace of Johann Reuchlin, venerated protector of scorned
books, has produced another son to battle the inquisitors.
Ernst Zündel was born just outside the “City of Gold” on April 24, 1939, in
an old stone cottage which has remained in his family since almost the time of
Reuchlin. The oldest house in the valley, it has long attracted wandering art-
ists. But there were no artists in the Zündels’ valley during the spring of 1945,
as the front of battle swept relentlessly across Baden. Many of Zündel’s earli-
est memories are of bombing raids and strafings. He recalls the “endless dron-
ing” of Allied planes on their way to Nuremberg, Munich, and Stuttgart, and
the thunder of artillery coming ever closer. As elderly German soldiers
streamed past their house, Zündel’s mother gathered her then five young chil-
dren, and goats, chickens, and rabbits, and retreated to a nearby woods. Peek-
ing through the foliage, the children saw French units pursuing Germans pass
swiftly by. And soon, the war was over.
A bit earlier, however, came a night (February 23-24) which Zündel will
never forget, when “golden” Pforzheim was firebombed and consumed by a
fiery cyclone. Though the Zündels’ house lay 12 miles distant, the sky above
was brilliantly illuminated, and huge neighboring conifers bent toward the city
center as if in a gale wind. The Pforzheim firestorm was sucking oxygen to-
ward itself from throughout the surrounding countryside. Zündel, not yet six,
24
Zündel was mistaken here. In Germany, there is still an institution that watches over media in the
public domain called Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (Federal Monitoring Agen-
cy for Youth-Endangering Media). In addition to all kinds of trash, it also places political and his-
torical works that do not comply with the guidelines established after 1945 on the Index. There is
also confiscation and destruction of unpopular political and historical books by German court or-
ders. Editor’s note.
watched mystified as millions of leaves and branches were sucked violently

skyward, with a howl and a roar.
A report from the War Department in Washington, dated October 1945,
describes the night of July 27-28, 1943 in Hamburg, but it could have been
describing Pforzheim or a hundred other German cities:25
“High explosives and ‘air mines’ destroyed houses, creating craters in
streets and courtyards, ruining lighting and the power supply… and opening
the gas and water mains… At the same time incendiary bombs started fires
which spread particularly in thickly inhabited parts of town in a very short
time. Thus in several minutes whole blocks were on fire and streets made im-
passable by flames. The heat increased rapidly and produced a wind which
soon was of the power and strength of a typhoon. This typhoon first moved in-
to the direction of the fires, later spreading in all directions. In the public
squares and parks it broke trees, and burning branches shot through the air.
Trees of all sizes were uprooted. The ‘firestorm’ broke down doors of houses
and later the flames crept into the doorways and corridors. The ‘firestorm’
looked like a blizzard of red snowflakes. More scientifically, a firestorm is a
mass of fresh air which breaks into burning areas to replace the superheated
rising air!”
Between ten and twenty thousand died in Pforzheim that night, a little city of
fewer than a hundred thousand with almost no heavy industry, which, since
the 1700s, has been the center of the German jewelry and watchmaking indus-
try.
The War Department’s report on Hamburg suggests how many in Pforz-
heim must have died: “Literally hundreds of people were seen leaving shelters
after the heat became intense. They ran across the street and were seen to col-
lapse very slowly like people who were utterly exhausted. They could not get
up.”26 Melita Maschmann offers other hints, in her recollections of Darm-
stadt’s firebombing in August 1944, which killed 15,000:27
“There was not a house anywhere in the street which had not turned into a
blazing fire-brand. Above the sea of flames, a glowing cyclone raged over the
town; and whenever it caught the bodies of people in flight, it shriveled them
in a second to the size of a child, and the next day they lay all over the streets,
hardly burnt, but like mummified children.”28
25
United States Strategic Bombing Survey (ed.), The Effect of Bombing on Health and Medical
Care in Germany, Morale Division, War Department, Washington, 1945, p. 20.
26
Ibid., p. 19
27
Melita Maschmann, “Under the Bombing,” in History of the Second World War, Part 79, 1972
edition, p. 2209.
28
Not everyone died so quickly. At a meeting held in Jüterbog, Germany, in December 1943, medi-
cal experts analyzed the leading causes of death from the great incendiary raids on Hamburg:
1. Causes of death from external injury:
a. Burial under rubble and debris and injury from flying fragments.
The day after Pforzheim’s destruction, Ernst Zündel’s mother, a Red Cross
worker, was called in to help. She returned “a changed woman for all the hor-
ror she had seen,” as Zündel has stated on a recording recalling his early
days.29 “A lovely town we knew so well” had been reduced to utter ruins and
rubble.
Then came the surrender, with rapes and looting everywhere. There was
needless cruelty even to children and animals. Zündel’s father, who had
served with the medical corps on the Russian Front, experienced horrific pri-
vation in an American POW camp in Darmstadt. For four weeks, at one point,
the men lived in the open without shelter, subsisting on worms and bugs.
Many of the troops in Zündel’s area were Moroccans, Algerians, and other
French colonials, whose rapacity slackened a bit after they fought an open bat-
tle with the white French officers and had their guns confiscated. The first
edict of the occupation government called for all radios to be delivered to a
central point, from whence they were sent to France as booty. Later edicts
demanded all gold watches, all guns, all cameras – on pain of death. It was a
major crime to photograph or otherwise record Allied misdeeds.
Germany at the time was under a revised type of the Morgenthau Plan,
which called for mass starvation as one means of (postwar) subjugation. For a
time, the French ration coupons allowed only 850 calories of food per day,
compared to the minimum 2,000 calories recommended by the United Nations
today, and the 1,750 calories prescribed for inmates at Dachau and other Ger-
man concentration camps. The French authorities demanded all of the seed
potatoes in southwest Germany, and the farmers had to comply. It meant con-
stant hunger for growing children, along with the massive sores and diseases
brought by protein deficiency. “We all looked like kids from Bangladesh and
Biafra,” says Zündel.29
Zündel’s father returned home at last, a thoroughly broken man. Like mil-
lions of other German men, he would never again have the inner strength to
b. Secondary injuries through explosions (drowning, scalding, chemical burns, poisoning from
by-products of exploded bombs).
c. Burns.
d. Tetanus secondary to burns where no serum was given prophylactically.
2. Causes of death from internal injury:
a. Carbon monoxide poisoning in air raid shelters…
b. Effect of heat through conduction and radiation in the presence of very high temperatures.
c. Overheating over a prolonged period of time through temperatures which, normally, can be
tolerated for short periods only.
d. Dust inhalation; blocking of the upper respiratory passages and in-halation with damage to
the small bronchi and alveoli.
e. Carbon monoxide poisoning from bursting gas mains.
f. Sudden heart death through fright and exhaustion in cardiac patients.
g. Blast injuries in which external injuries may be absent or which may be masked by external
injuries.
29
The Life Story of Ernst Zündel, audio cassette tape, Samisdat, Toronto, 1979.
simply tell “his side” of things to his own children, but would watch listlessly
as they brought home stories of German diabolism.
Young Zündel sketched and drew on every scrap of paper he could find.
His obvious artistic skill soon carried him to the aptitude-testing center in
Pforzheim, where a battery of exams produced the verdict: “Universally tal-
ented, can do anything.” But a college education or fine-art training was out of
the question in postwar Germany, so Zündel, at the age of 14, became an ap-
prentice in the commercial art business, receiving $1 a week for 48 hours of
work. After three years of this, he graduated to a regular position and a decent
salary, but soon left for Osnabrück in northern Germany, where opportunities
were better. Only then did he learn to speak high German, for his Swabian
dialect was incomprehensible to the people of Lower Saxony.
This was a time of great optimism, when the English-speaking countries of
the world – Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, South Africa – were
looking only for white immigrants, and European newspapers were filled with
attractive offers. The Canadian brochures reminded Zündel of the Black For-
est. Better still, there was no military draft in Canada, and Zündel, like his fa-
ther, was then, as he remains today, a pacifist. Within three months of arriv-
ing, he was granted landed-immigrant status, and soon was putting down roots
in Toronto, a remarkably genteel city at that time, filled with kind, helpful
people. Zündel’s homesickness quickly faded. He flourished in the graphic
arts business, and met Janick, a French-Canadian redhead who became his
wife. With their sons Pierre and Hans, they would be a thoroughly trilingual
family.
Subsequently, during nine years of residence in Montreal, Zündel formed a
friendship with Adrien Arcand, an elderly gentleman who taught him to stop
apologizing for being German. With his fluent German, and his huge library
of old German books, Arcand – once “Canada’s Hitler” to some – persuaded
Zündel that German sins were exaggerated, and, furthermore, had developed
quite naturally from earlier sins committed against Germans – sins of which
Zündel had heard scarcely a word.
“It was a French-Canadian who turned me into a German,” says Zündel.29
Aware of his limitations, Zündel enrolled in courses at Montreal’s Sir
George William University (now Concordia), travelled extensively in foreign
lands, and forced himself to became a first-rate public speaker.
By the late 1960s, Zündel was a familiar figure in Canadian politics, run-
ning for the leadership of the dominant Liberal Party at the unheard-of age of
28, and doing remarkably well. He spoke for the rising “third force” in Cana-
dian society – recent European immigrants who were neither British nor
French in origin. This position made him very acceptable to the mass media,
and he was invited to speak everywhere. Less-agreeable for some was a sec-
ond political cause: ending the media’s defamation of Germans, which seemed
to increase as 1945 receded into the distant past.
As the 1970s dawned, Ernst Zündel was a Canadian success story, a hand-
some family man, now back in Toronto, active in political and cultural affairs,
with a large commercial-art studio and a fistful of prestigious contracts. He
had also sold more than 700 of his own paintings to buyers around the world,
and won coveted awards in both fine and commercial art. Yet the rising tide of
German defamation kept him dissatisfied. To Zündel, it constituted “mental
genocide,” although the media seldom addressed this subject nearest to his
heart.
Looking to Russia, Zündel thought he saw a solution: the movement of the
samisdat or “underground” publishers, who brought truth to the people in
spite of establishment barriers. So Samisdat Publishers Ltd. was founded in
Toronto, and soon its first book was rolling off the press. This was Auschwitz:
Truth or Lie?, the English translation of a work by Thies Christophersen, a
German agronomist who was stationed at the enormous complex of camps
during most of 1944. Christophersen had heard rumors of people being burned
in pits – though never of gas chambers – so he set out on his bicycle to inves-
tigate. His access to Birkenau and the other Auschwitz camps was unhindered,
but the most-sinister thing he found was the crematory ovens, which were
needed to handle the high death rate from disease.
The Auschwitz book was one man’s sincere testimony – nothing more, but
nothing less. Yet many were quick to brand Christophersen, and others like
him, as shameless liars, without pausing to listen. Such people immediately
discount the word of a German when it conflicts, or seems to conflict, with the
word of a Jew. As Zündel has said, “The roots of prejudice are deep indeed
and they are not always fed by differences in skin color.” Given the former
reputation of the Germanic peoples for honesty, which made a byword of the
Franks, Zündel felt they should have a chance to tell their side of things, and
be heard.
Samisdat’s founder was a man in a hurry, and soon turned primarily from
books to brochures, newsletters, radio talk shows and the like. Tens of thou-
sands of audio cassette tapes on political and historical topics were mailed free
of charge to influential figures in dozens of countries. Little of this material
had scholarly pretensions; most was polemical in nature, deliberately pitched
to meet a propaganda onslaught from the other side. The Elie Wiesels and
Raul Hilbergs never apologize for the obscene movies, inventive comic books,
and lurid novellas which flourish on their side of the Holocaust fence. Zündel
saw no reason to apologize for the much-tamer ways in which he exploited
Holocaust fever.
In 1978, the TV miniseries “Holocaust” was broadcast throughout North
America. Its appearance was a turning point for Zündel and many others, a
perceived “escalation in the utter mendacity and viciousness of Jewish por-
trayals of the behavior of the German people,” as Michael A. Hoffman II has
said. Zündel answered “Holocaust” by founding Concerned Parents of Ger-
man Descent, an activist group which grabbed the attention of Canada’s media
and, more-importantly in Hoffman’s eyes, allowed those German-Canadians
“who actually did the picketing and endured the threats of JDL [Jewish De-
fense League] terrorists [to take] their first tentative steps toward reclaiming
their humanity and self-pride.”30
In 1981, Zündel’s extensive mailings of literature to West Germany pan-
icked the Bonn government into raiding some 2,000 of his supporters’ homes,
seizing his German bank account, and charging him with the dissemination of
“hate propaganda.” Though the District Court of Stuttgart finally declared him
innocent in August 1982, and ordered the state to pay all court costs and return
all frozen assets, the hysteria generated by the legal stigmatization and at-
tendant media character assassination helped to abort Zündel’s attempt at dia-
logue with thoughtful Canadian Jews.
“Hysteria” is not too-strong a word. On May 3 1, 1981, a mob of fifteen
hundred angry Jews gathered in front-of Zündel’s home and business at 206
Carlton Street. For two hours, they blocked all traffic on a major Toronto
thoroughfare, and threatened to ransack “Zündelhaus.” At about this same
time, a devastating boycott of Zündel’s advertising and commercial-art busi-
nesses was launched, though both were independent of Samisdat.
With the West German charges pending, and the boycott grinding him
down, Zündel suffered a third blow in November of 1981. Holocaust activist
Sabina Citron persuaded Canada’s postal minister, Andre Ouellet, to strip
Samisdat of its right to send and receive mail. Not until December 1982, after
a year of exhausting and expensive judicial jousting, would this lifeline be re-
stored.
While this was happening, pressure was brought on the Canadian customs
service to begin seizing at the American border a wide range of imported
books and journals offering unpopular views of history, politics, and religion.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, keeping pace with the times, grabbed 25
copies of a revisionist history book assigned to students at Alberta’s Red Deer
College. Professor Gary Botting had given his class The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century, Dr. Arthur Butz’s heterodox best seller which affirms the reality of
Nazi mass deportations, concentration camps and crematoria, but vigorously
denies both the “gas chambers” and the existence of a policy to exterminate
Jews. Botting was no Nazi-lover. His father had died at Belsen, but he wanted
his students exposed to dissenting points of view. The Butz books were
pulped.
In 1983, Zündel and cinematographer Jurgen Neumann expanded their
video work, most-notably with a series of tapes in which leading Holocaust
revisionists were closely questioned about their findings.
30
Michael A. Hoffman II, The Great Holocaust Trial, Institute for Historical Review, Torrance, Ca-
lif., 1985, p. 25 (3rd ed., Wiswell Ruffin House, Dresden, NY, 1995).
Meanwhile, a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Company named

Steve Peabody was reading the 1981 Samisdat pamphlet Did Six Million Real-
ly Die? As noted in the Introduction, this early work of Holocaust revisionism,
first published in Britain in 1974, is marred by a significant number of errors,
most of them minor, which no contemporary Holocaust revisionist would de-
fend. Peabody approached Sabina Citron with the booklet, and suggested she
take Zündel to court over it. In November of 1983, Citron filed a private com-
plaint against Zündel under Section 177 of the Canadian Criminal Code.
An initial hearing took place on December 28. This was the first of several
occasions when Zündel and his colleagues had to battle their way into a To-
ronto court of law past screaming, punching, kicking and spitting hooligans
from the Jewish “Defense” League, or JDL. On this day, the mob, unencum-
bered by police, actually continued its assault inside the courthouse. Zündel
and an aide were knocked to the ground in the fracas. That evening, Canadians
watched incredulously as the national TV news showed the aide being kicked
on the ground by several JDLers. A voice could be heard crying, “He’s kick-
ing a Jew! He’s kicking a Jew!” but the reporter made no attempt to clarify the
situation.
Had the Toronto police shielded Zündel and his team, these repeated as-
saults would never have happened. They stopped only when the Zündelists
bought hard hats and learned to move in public like a phalanx.
Zündel’s main preliminary hearing took place in June 1984. The defense
team’s biggest gun was Professor Robert Faurisson, the leader of French revi-
sionism. His opposite number was Professor Raul Hilberg, a political scientist
and author of the 1,274-page The Destruction of the European Jews. On hand
were reporters from around the world, drawn, in some instances, by Zündel’s
intense and imaginative publicity. Also present were revisionist scholars from
nearly a dozen countries, who, in the words of Michael A. Hoffman II, trans-
formed Zündel’s “warren-like” Victorian home into “a tiny university of for-
bidden thoughts and suppressed information.”31
Another controversial Canadian also had a preliminary hearing in the
summer of 1984. This was James Keegstra, a (former) mayor, (former) history
teacher, lay preacher and crack mechanic who stood accused of “inciting
group hatred” for having taught a generation of high-school students both
sides of the “Jewish problem” (and the Golden Rule to guide them).32 Zündel
and a colleague travelled to Alberta and were impressed by the courtroom per-
formance of Keegstra’s attorney, Douglas Christie, and by the careful legal re-
search of his assistant, Keltie Zubko. Within a few months, Christie, a leader
31
Ibid., p. 41.
32
Keegstra was convicted in 1985, but on June 6, 1988, the Alberta Court of Appeal overturned the
verdict. See page 392.
in the cause of Western Canada separatism, would be leading the Zündel de-
fense effort as well.
The Great Holocaust Trial began on Monday, January 7, 1985, arguably a
red-letter day in North American legal and political history. Some called it
“Canada’s trial of the century,” partly because of the attendant publicity, but
more essentially because, as Douglas Christie said, “There is more at stake
here than has been at stake in any other trial, probably in Canada’s history.”
Christie would tell the jurors in his summation address, about 50 days later:
“You 12 people have more power in your hands for good or evil than any oth-
er 12 people I’ve ever met… A clear answer from you… will put an end to a
process which, if it continues, will lead us to the destruction of all freedom in
society.”33
Most members of Canada’s Jewish community expected a walkover. They
received the first of many jolts as early as January 11, when Auschwitz survi-
vor Arnold Friedman’s testimony crumbled to dust before the first intense
questioning he had ever experienced.
Under oath, Friedman had told Crown Attorney Peter Griffiths34 some un-
likely stories: that “fourteen-foot flames” shot from crematoria chimneys, that
smoke and the stench of burning human flesh hung heavily over the camp
sometimes for weeks on end, that one could tell whether skinny Polish or fat
Hungarian Jews were being burned by the color of the smoke and flames com-
ing from the chimneys. Christie confronted Friedman with the patent for the
Auschwitz crematoria, designed by the company Topf and Sons of Erfurt,
which showed them to be, like all other modern cremation facilities, incapable
of giving off flames, smoke or odors. He showed him encyclopedia articles
from the last century which stated there was no smell and no smoke emitted
from crematory chimneys even then.
As his story eroded under cross-examination, Friedman finally admitted to
Christie: “Yes, there could have [been another explanation than gassing]. If I
had listened to you at the time when I was listening to other people [in the
camp], I might have listened to you. But at the time I listened to them.”
The prosecution’s other supposed “eyewitnesses to gassings” – Ignatz
Fulop, Chester Tomaszewski, Dennis Urstein and Henry Leader – proved
equally wavering under cross-examination. Even the most-resolute Holocaust
survivor, Rudolf Vrba, today a professor in British Columbia, backed down in
the end.
Vrba testified that he spent two years in the Majdanek and Auschwitz Con-
centration Camps before escaping with Fred Wetzler in April 1944, and mak-
ing his way to the Jewish Council of Slovakia. Upon arrival, said Vrba, he dic-
33
Douglas Christie, in: Daryl Reside (Hg.), The Zündel Trial and Free Speech, Citizens for Foreign
Aid Reform (C-FAR), Canadian Issues Series, No. 13, Toronto, 1985, p. 9.
34
The terms “Crown” and “prosecution” are synonymous.
tated a report which served as the foundation for the Allies’ famous “War
Refugee Board Report,” published in November 1944. Twenty years later,
Vrba testified at the Auschwitz Trial held in Frankfurt, West Germany, and
published an autobiography, ghostwritten by Alan Bestic, titled I Cannot For-
give. Bestic added a preface, under his own byline, in which he praised Vrba’s
“considerable care for each detail” and his “meticulous and almost fanatic re-
spect for accuracy.” It is fair to say that, for more than four decades, Vrba’s
graphic accounts of mass gassings served as a cornerstone of the “extermina-
tionist” position.
In a recent essay, revisionist Robert Faurisson suggested that Vrba’s image
was built on sand:16
“Everything went well for this witness until the day when, in 1985, at the
Zündel trial, he was cross-examined mercilessly. He was then shown to be an
impostor. It was revealed that, in his 1944 report, he had completely made up
the number and location of the ‘gas chambers’ and the crematories… Thanks,
it would appear, to some special memory techniques and to a real gift for being
everywhere at once, Vrba had calculated that in the space of 24 months (from
April 1942 to April 1944) the Germans at Birkenau alone [i.e., Auschwitz II]
had ‘gassed’ 1,765,000 Jews, including 150,000 Jews from France. But in
1978, Serge Klarsfeld, in his [book] 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 con-
centration camps. The most-serious thing is that the number of 1,765,000 Jews
‘gassed’ at Birkenau had been used in a document (L-022) at the Nuremberg
trial. Attacked on all sides by Zündel’s lawyer, the impostor had no other re-
course 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
French; it is presented as a book by ‘Rudolf Vrba with Alan Bestic’; it no
longer includes the enthusiastic preface by Alan Bestic; the short introduction
by Emile Copfermann says that ‘with the approval of Rudolf Vrba the two ap-
pendices 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.”
The prosecution’s star witness at the Great Holocaust Trial, as at the prelimi-
nary hearing, was Raul Hilberg. Guided by Crown counsel Peter Griffiths, the
University of Vermont professor described a number of errors in the Harwood
pamphlet. His own weak spot emerged under cross-examination. Hilberg de-
scribes himself as an “interpreter of documents” rather than a “forensic inves-
tigator,” which translates to the reality that he waited until 1979 to take his
first brief guided tour of a German concentration camp – that is, 18 years after
the publication of his “definitive” study of the Holocaust. As revisionists see
it, the problem with many of Hilberg’s “interpretations” is that they project a
preordained thesis onto ambiguous material which looks very different when
viewed in the light of basic forensic research conducted at the alleged exter-
mination sites.
Hilberg’s book repeatedly mentions SS officer Kurt Gerstein as an im-
portant witness to the “gassings.” Yet, as Christie brought out during cross-
examination, Gerstein’s “confessions,” taken as a whole, are quite insane.
Hilberg picks and chooses those portions which seem most credible, but never
informs his readers of the editing job.
Pressed for scientific evidence of any kind about gas chambers anywhere
in Nazi-occupied territory, Hilberg replied candidly, “I’m at a loss.” Robert
Faurisson articulated a revisionist response to Hilberg’s evidence in Toronto:16
“He was forced to admit that for what he called the policy of the extermina-
tion of the Jews there was neither a plan, nor a central organization, nor a
budget, nor supervision. He also had to admit that since 1945 the Allies had
not carried out any expert study of ‘the weapon of the crime,’ suggesting the
existence of a homicidal gas chamber. No autopsy report had established that
even one prisoner had been killed by poison gas. Hilberg stated that Hitler had
given orders for the extermination of the Jews and that Himmler, on November
25, 1944… had given the order to cease the extermination, but Hilberg could
not produce those orders. The defense asked him if, in the new edition of his
book, he maintained the existence of those orders from Hitler.”
Hilberg was evasive. “I am not saying that I have to correct this statement,” he
replied. Yet, as Faurisson points out, he did correct it:35
“In that new edition (with a preface dated September 1984) Hilberg system-
atically removed any mention of an order by Hitler (see in this regard the re-
view 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, lacking any kind of plan, had been able to carry out a gigan-
tic undertaking like the extermination of millions of Jews, Hilberg replied that
in the various Nazi activities there had been ‘an incredible meeting of minds, a
consensus, mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.’”
As February 1985 began, the Zündel defense team called Faurisson as its first
witness. He was handicapped by Judge Hugh Locke’s refusal to let him pre-
sent slides, models, maps and photographs of Auschwitz, or even to make ar-
guments of a chemical, cartographical or architectural nature, for, like most
leading revisionists, Faurisson had devoted countless hours to the physical
study of the Holocaust, thereby exposing myriad apparent contradictions and
impossibilities in the “exterminationist” thesis. Twenty-five years of research
had convinced him that no homicidal gas chamber ever existed in any German
camp. The only scientific analysis of a purported gas chamber performed after
the war was made by a French doctor who tested corpses from the Stutthof-
35
See in this context the review by Christopher Browning, “The Revised Hilberg”, Simon Wiesen-
thal Center Annual, 1986, S. 294.
Natzweiler Concentration Camp in Alsace, and took wall-scrapings. He found

no evidence of gas, and his report later disappeared from the French archives.
Faurisson has calculated that between 200,000 and 350,000 Jews died in all
the German camps, most during the final months of Allied bombing raids, ep-
idemics and Axis collapse. The shootings by the National-Socialist Einsatz-
gruppen or “task forces” in the Soviet Union were another matter. Faurisson
had not yet studied them in detail, and would not hazard an opinion as to total
fatalities. But he was prepared to call Nuremberg a great “witchcraft trial,”
where, as in medieval times, witches sometimes admitted to witchery because
they had no choice. Given his own dreadful experiences as an anti-Nazi pro-
fessor in France who had dared to doubt the Holocaust, he could understand:
“It is not surprising that a Nazi officer would sing whatever tune his captors
demanded if the alternative was having his wife and children sent to Russia [as
was often threatened]… Many people who talk about torture don’t know what
it is. I know very well how people could have been under pressure. I have nev-
er worn a German uniform, I have never killed anybody, yet my life is impos-
sible… The lives of revisionists and their families are made unlivable by those
who refuse to allow history to be questioned.”
“A Nazi is a man,” said Faurisson, “a communist is a man, a Jew is a man, and
I am a man.” But he had not been treated like one. Years of vilification had
sorely tempted him to give up the fight. He confessed that there were times
when he wished he had never heard of the Holocaust.
Altogether, 22 witnesses testified in Zündel’s behalf in 1985. Several of the
more-important ones – Dr. Russell Barton, Dr. Gary Botting, Thies Chris-
tophersen, Ditlieb Felderer and Udo Walendy, as well as Dr. Faurisson – testi-
fied again at the 1988 Zündel trial, and will be covered in the following chap-
ters. Others, no less important, like Dr. William B. Lindsey, a senior research
chemist with Du Pont, made points which were reinforced in 1988 by the tes-
timony of new witnesses like Fred Leuchter and the analytic chemist Dr.
James Roth.36
On February 25, 1985, Christie gave the jury a spirited summation, which
asked how anyone could presume to look inside Zündel’s head and know, as
Section 177 requires, that he “willfully” lied about the Holocaust. Taking the
argument a step further, Christie asked whether it is not possible “for people
to disagree and be free to disagree when they themselves are not absolutely
certain they’re right.”
In 25 years of active writing, Zündel had never advocated violence of any
kind as a solution. Yes, he had once said in a 1981 newsletter that justice is
dispensed “out of the barrel of a gun,” but he was paraphrasing without attrib-
36
Portions of the 1985 testimony are summarized in Michael A. Hoffman II’s book The Great Hol-
ocaust Trial (note 30), notably on pages 50 to 78.
ution Chairman Mao – who was eulogized in the Canadian Parliament upon
his death.
Christie’s address sparkled in places:
“To everything in life there are two sides,” he said, “and many more quite
often, and nobody, no matter how well-informed or how expert, has all truth,
or ever will.”
“If you can’t have freedom to disagree, then there’s either violence, or
there is silence, neither of which is traditional in our country, neither of which
is necessary in the future.”
“Violence is the end of the road for official truth.”
“There is a power in this land,” said Christie, “that doesn’t want you to
think about the Holocaust, doesn’t want anybody out here to think about it,”
and has determined that those asking the wrong questions “will be prosecuted
and publicly humiliated.”
“How do you think change occurs in society? Do you think the whole of
society [at once] decides, ‘Oh, we were wrong about the world being flat’…
Ask Galileo how difficult that was. He was a heretic; his views were totally
contrary to 99 percent of the population. But who was right?”
“No witness for the Crown needs fear for his job, his security, for his fami-
ly, but is that true for the defense?… I can tell you that prices are being
paid… With the right decision from you, that fear will be diminished.”
Speaking of “victor’s justice” in a total war, Christie wondered, “Can we
now look back with a little less passion, a little less contempt for our adver-
saries?” No one – not Harwood, not Zündel, nor any of the defense witnesses
– was saying the Jews hadn’t suffered. “They suffered terribly, unjustifiably…
If one Jewish person died, it’s a crime. If one person, no matter whether he
was Jewish or not died, it’s a crime. But that is not the issue.”
Must one never doubt the words of a Jewish “survivor”? Even Rudolf
Vrba, declared Christie, “is not God.” But when all the key questions were
asked, what did one customarily get for answers? “Hysteria, emotion, and ap-
peals to emotions, justified as they are. But if we are dealing with facts, let’s
stick to facts.”
“Ninety percent of the quotations in the [Harwood] book are proven and
accepted. Ten percent are unproven. That’s all.”
“People want the right to ask these questions, and there are some people
who don’t want anyone to have the right to broadcast what they find, and I
would consider that, I suggest you should, a very suspicious situation. When
any group of people wants to silence an individual, you’d better ask why.”
“If this booklet is right, as the accused says it is, it should be freely heard
and freely thought about and freely criticized. If it is not, why fear it?”
“Let freedom solve the problem of any hatred or intolerance, or else by
suppression the human spirit, which seeks truth and seeks the ultimate truth of
God, will become crippled by its fears to speak its deepest feelings.”
“This court was not designed to be a place where the affairs of the world
are debated, but [a place] where individual conduct is inquired into.”
“When you have finished your deliberations,” Christie cautioned the jury,
“in all probability your country will be made different, for as long as you and I
will live, by the decision that you will make here about the most-serious issues
that confront any citizen in a free society.”37
All this eloquence was futile because Judge Hugh Locke’s charge to the ju-
ry was the last thing they heard before retiring, and he told them, in effect, to
ignore most of what Christie had said. The Zündel trial had nothing to do with
freedom of expression. Their verdict would have no bearing on the future
course of Canadian society, but only on the fate of one man.
On February 28, 1985, Zündel was convicted of violating Section 177 of
the Criminal Code. The Canadian Association for Free Expression (CAFE)
dubbed this “Black Thursday” in Canada’s history, observing in their spring
bulletin, “One man’s hate is the next man’s strong opinion. Often, when mi-
norities complain about ‘hate literature,’ they are merely smearing material
that is critical of themselves.”38
Judge Locke’s sentence would not be pronounced until March 25. In this
interval, Canadian society witnessed an eruption of raw invective like it has
rarely seen. As Kirk Makin, who covered the trial honestly for the Toronto
Globe and Mail, would later report, the angry outbursts had actually begun
back on January 7, “hours after the first stories about the trial appeared…
Their most-persistent complaint was that the trial was being carried at all.”39
The Canadian media kept the lid on this abuse for nearly eight weeks. To
what degree their coverage of the trial was compromised by foreknowledge of
what was coming will never be known. Certainly, there are clues. Jeffrey
Dvorkin, a senior news editor with the CBC, said he knew of one reporter
with a large Toronto daily who was taken off the Zündel trial after telling his
editors that the accused might be “on to something.” Dvorkin also related that
the CBC had broadcast 13 “sympathetic” pieces about the Holocaust (cursing
Dr. Mengele, crying over Raoul Wallenberg, and exploiting other familiar an-
gles) during the trial period, thereby placing Zündel’s defense witnesses “into
context.”40 (At neither Zündel trial was the jury sequestered or asked to refrain
from watching television. Doing so would “insult their intelligence,” asserted
Judge Ron Thomas at the second trial.)
The dam burst even as the Zündel verdict was read. As one contemporary
account had it:41
37
Christie’s 1985 summation to the jury are available in the published court transcript: G. Rudolf
(ed.), The First Zündel Trial: The Court Transcript of the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst
Zündel, 1985; Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2020, pp. 727-745.
38
CAFE Quarterly, Spring 1985.
39
Columbia Journalism Review, July-August 1985, pp. 14-16.
40
The Canadian Jewish News, May 9, 1985, p. 4.
41
Instauration, May 1985, pp. 18-19.
“The Toronto press in January and February was a miracle of fairness. But a
different tone entirely had gripped it by March 3. Gone were the neutral recita-
tions of the courtroom reporters. In their place came dozens of splenetic col-
umns, damning Zündel as ‘insane… sick… mad… misfit… infecting…
plague… hateful… poison… gang… garbage… obsessed maniacs, twisted
by hate, defeat and guilt.’
The March 4 headlines showed vividly where Canada is headed. One story
told of a special journalism conference addressed by Julian Sher, a CBC pro-
ducer who authored a radio documentary on Zündel. ‘If the courts gave Zündel
a platform,’ said Sher, ‘the media gave him a bullhorn.’ In such cases, he con-
tinued, the ‘basic rules of fairness’ do not apply: ‘We don’t always have to
give two sides to something that doesn’t have two sides.’”42
Kirk Makin recalls what happened when, following the trial, a delegation of
Jewish leaders met with top Globe and Mail editors to discuss the coverage.
“City Editor Colin MacKenzie promised to insure ‘fair and balanced cover-
age’ in all such trials. ‘That’s what we’re afraid of’ was the delegation lead-
er’s response.”43 A short while later, at a Jewish “media workshop” in Ottawa,
MacKenzie was grilled intensely and induced to promise that his paper would
be “a hell of a lot more sensitive in the future.”44
Crown Attorney Peter Griffiths seemed to be under the influence of Jewish
rage when, in a brief submission to the court on March 25, he argued that
Zündel’s defense had put Canadian Jewry through the kind of ordeal that
“rape victims” normally endure. Judge Locke took the argument a step further
as he handed down a sentence of 15 months in prison and three years’ proba-
tion, by asserting that the sentence reflected the outrage felt by all Canadians.
Locke’s sentence also forbade Zündel to speak about the Holocaust for the
entire duration. A Globe and Mail editorial on March 27 called this “a stun-
ning judicial gag of a Canadian resident. It prohibits a man from expressing
any public opinion about the Second World War, among many other topics
that might be ‘indirectly related’ to the Holocaust… Griffiths says false
speech – not free speech – is the issue. There is no free speech without the
possibility of false speech.” The editorial might have added that Zündel was
probably the first Canadian ever sentenced to prison for having the wrong
opinion.
Zündel had arrived at his sentencing bearing a 12-foot cross labelled
“Freedom of Speech.” The scene was watched on television by a majority of
Canadians, and made a lasting, unsettling impression on many. On this and
42
Sher was hired by the Canadian Broadcasting Company despite – or because of – a long record of
writing for Marxist publications. Ironically, he once contributed to a movement to clear the Cam-
bodian Communist dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime of allegations of genocide
against their own people.
43
Columbia Journalism Review, July-August 1985, pp. 14-16.
44
The Canadian Jewish News, May 9, 1985, p. 4. For the author’s view on the growing abuse of the
word “sensitive,” see note 81 on p. 144.
several other occasions, Zündel’s genius for publicity had even his worst en-
emies intrigued.
But Judge Locke was mistaken in his claim that all Canadians wanted
Zündel sentenced. During the spring of 1985, the nation’s radio and TV call-in
shows were overwhelmed with expressions of heartfelt support for the pub-
lisher. The letters section of the liberal Vancouver Sun bore equally clear wit-
ness to the outrage felt by many well-informed citizens. Peter Worthington,
esteemed columnist for the Toronto Financial Post, was one of many promi-
nent journalists who took up the cry:45
“[What] happened to Winston Smith in the novel 1984 happened to Ernst
Zündel in 1985… Zündel has been transformed… into… the symbol on
which to vent collective hate… The issue is freedom to believe, speak, think
and has nothing to do with ‘truth,’ because whoever rules, whoever writes the
histories, determines truth…”
The Canadian Bar Association, defying pressure from B’nai B’rith, would, a
year later, invite Douglas Christie to address its annual convention. In No-
vember 1985, 200 young liberals attending a Free Speech forum in British Co-
lumbia listened raptly to Christie’s presentation, and gave him a loud ovation.
The U.S. State Department’s influential directory Country Reports on Human
Rights Practices for 1985 would cite the Zündel and Keegstra cases under the
Freedom of Speech heading. And Zündel certainly met Amnesty Internation-
al’s definition of a “prisoner of conscience,” as someone detained “for their
beliefs, provided they have neither used nor advocated violence.”
Clearly, Locke was dead wrong about the general Canadian and interna-
tional mood. Just as clearly, Peter Griffiths had correctly assessed a wide-
spread feeling of Jewish rage. In the wake of Zündel’s conviction, at least sev-
eral Jewish commentators set themselves up for potential “hate” charges – as-
suming there is ever a renewed climate of ethnic even-handedness:
Barbara Amiel, a nationally-known columnist for Maclean’s magazine,
asked in the April 15 issue: “What of Zündel the man?… What must it have
been like for Zündel, a German child growing up at the end of the Second
World War, with every radio station, newspaper, and history book telling him
he came from a race of hideous, bloody murderers? The fact is that he did.”
Henri G. Francq, in his book Hitler’s Holocaust, implied that Zündel’s
mother had washed him with soap made from the fat of murdered Jews.46
The Zündel defense team tried to overlook such abuse and focus on the
staggering task at hand: preparing an appeal. This involved purchasing a very
expensive but very rough trial transcript of some 5,000 pages; checking it for
major errors; sending the partly corrected copies on to the various witnesses,
who spotted less-obvious stenographic errors in their own testimony; and
45
The Toronto Financial Post, August 30, 1986, p. 9.
46
Henri G. Francq, Hitler’s Holocaust, New Star Books, Vancouver, 1986, p. 245.
combing all these twice-corrected pages line-by-line for appeal material. Out
of this exhausting process emerged a document called the Appellant’s Factum,
which stated the facts of the case and Zündel’s grounds for appeal. These
grounds were developed by comparing the evidence of judicial misconduct
contained in the transcript with the higher standards found in Canadian case
law.
The Zündelists worked a miracle. The transcript, in its original form, was
marred by thousands of errors of omission, commission, spelling, pagination
and grammar. Frequently it was nonsensical. “An appeal judge,” said Zündel
at the time, “would have to be a mind-reader to determine what was really said
during the trial.” From this colossal mess would finally emerge 23 bound vol-
umes of meticulously corrected transcript, plus 64 or 65 specially compiled
and bound volumes containing all the legal precedents or “authorities” on
which the Zündel appeal would rely, plus the Factum.
For purposes of argument, the Factum arranged the numerous grounds of
appeal into eight basic categories:
1. Charter of Rights.
2. Challenge for Cause.
3. Improper Admission of Evidence.
4. Improper Exclusion of Evidence.
5. Judicial Bias.
6. Misdirection of the Jury on the Facts.
7. Misdirection of the Jury on the Law.
8. Inconsistent Verdicts.
The first appeal category argued that the “false news” law (Section 177) is an
unreasonable limit on freedom of speech as guaranteed by the 1982 Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The second category argued that adverse publicity had potentially biased
prospective jurors, for which reason defense counsel should have been permit-
ted to question them closely and exclude some.
The third and fourth categories argued that Judge Locke had allowed much
hearsay and other improper evidence to be admitted by the prosecution, while
wrongly excluding models, photos, books in German, and other materials
which the defendant had sought to introduce as contributing to the formation
of his honest beliefs.
The fifth category listed 116 instances of Judge Locke’s allegedly unfair
behavior.
The sixth and seventh categories described how Judge Locke, in his charge
to the jury and elsewhere, allegedly misrepresented both trial testimony (the
facts of the case), and the relevant Canadian law.
The eighth category noted that Zündel had been convicted on one charge,
publishing Did Six Million Really Die?, while being acquitted by the same ju-
ry on a second, similar charge, writing and publishing a four-page pamphlet

called The West, War and Islam, which complained about the manipulation of
Western opinion against the Islamic world.
Many specific points in the Factum are of interest. For example, Point No.
19 states, “The only evidence from which the Crown asked the jury to specu-
late and to infer dishonesty was an expression by the accused of qualified ad-
miration for Adolf Hitler, and qualified political opinions. The qualifications
made by the accused in his evidence were ignored by the Crown in his address
to the Jury.”
Point No. 20 observes, “The Defense exhibited all the source material from
which the stated references in Did Six Million Really Die? were derived, and
these were accepted by the Crown as 90 percent accurate.”
Point No. 37 notes, “The Learned Trial Judge refused to allow the original
complainant [Sabina Citron] [to] be called for cross-examination, nor ques-
tions [to] be asked relating to her, though she testified at the preliminary
[hearing].”
Point No. 83 argues that Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights
and Freedoms allows freedom of “expression,” not freedom of “true expres-
sion, beneficial to the public interest.”
Point No. 266 states, “No one was shown to have been injured in any way
nor was any racial or social damage evidenced before the court.”
Point No. 272 goes further, protesting, “there is actually no evidence that
anyone read Did Six Million Really Die? before the charge was brought.”
A special five-judge panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal – the province’s
supreme court – heard the appeal between September 22 and 26, 1986. Ordi-
narily, three judges would hear such a case. It was quickly apparent that these
judges were more cautious than Hugh Locke, of whom Robert Faurisson has
written: “I have attended many trials in my life, including some carried out in
France during the period of the ‘Purge’ after World War II. Never have I en-
countered a judge so partial, autocratic and violent as Judge Hugh Locke. An-
glo-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.”16 The
Appeal Court judges often shook their heads in distaste as Douglas Christie
recalled Locke’s transgressions of the law. The prosecution, for its part,
stressed the argument that by “absolutely” protecting free speech one “trivial-
izes” it, and denies Jews their dignity.
Late in the week, the judges abruptly asked Chief Prosecutor Douglas Hunt
to cite the specific passages in the Harwood pamphlet which the Crown re-
garded as false, something Judge Locke had never done. The list which
emerged the next morning consisted primarily of quibbles over interpretation,
with an interspersing of undoubtedly erroneous facts.
In his closing argument, Christie reminded the appeal judges that the
Crown had produced no evidence of Zündel’s “guilty mind” (i.e., that he knew
he was lying), but had inflamed the jury by suggesting that Zündel’s acquittal
could lead to another Holocaust.
On January 23, 1987, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled unanimously and
forcefully that Zündel had been deprived of his rights in 1985. Their 125-page
decision charged Judge Locke with four major errors: permitting a potentially
biased jury selection; excluding vital defense evidence; allowing improper
prosecution evidence; committing numerous errors of law. Sadly, the judges
did not find Canada’s “false news” law to be at variance with Section 2(b) of
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Essentially, Hugh Locke was faulted on Categories 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the
Factum list. The Court of Appeal elected to pass over Christie’s arguments in
Category 6, which cut to the evidential heart of Holocaust revisionism.
“This is incredible, unbelievable,” said Helen Smolack of the Canadian
Holocaust Remembrance Association upon hearing of the reversal. “[Zündel]
was given a fair trial and every consideration.”
Ontario’s new attorney general, Ian Scott, now had three options: drop the
case; start preparing a new trial; or appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada for
a review of the appellate court’s finding. Scott chose to appeal. On April 7, the
Supreme Court reviewed the case, and on June 4 it upheld the reversal. Within
hours of this decision, Scott called for a second Zündel trial. Almost as quick-
ly, warning flags appeared suggesting that this could prove to be a semi-secret
trial. Scott himself told assembled reporters that the success of the second trial
would depend partly on whether Zündel was given another public forum,
which in turn would depend on them. “It will,” he said, “be up to you people,
who are the press, to determine to what extent he will be given publicity. I am
quite confident that in the usual way, the press will do the right thing.”47
Suddenly, Canada’s prospects for freedom depended to an unhealthy de-
gree on the integrity of a few individuals – Canada’s leading news editors.
Preparing for the worst, Zündel appealed for “censorship-busters” to come
join him in Toronto. “Wanted Most Urgently!” cried his newsletter:
“Competent verbal translators or interpreters, preferably with courtroom
experience… A competent offset printer, willing to work nights on our Holo-
caust Trial Newspaper.
A computer typesetter and operator, to work nights on the newspaper, as
well as on the setting and laser-printing of handbills, flyers…
Experienced video and still photographers to film our demonstrations and
court appearances.
Drivers, watchmen, bodyguards, demonstrators, leaflet distributors, sand-
wich board advertisers, cooks, dishwashers, food servers; people willing to run
errands and do shopping; house cleaners, maintenance people, etc.
47
Cited in Instauration, Oct. 1987, p. 29.
Researchers familiar with libraries’ data retrieval procedures, the use of ref-
erence materials, and the photocopying and collating of same…
Activities coordinators who are skilled at motivating people of diverse eth-
nic backgrounds.”
The revisionist teamwork of 1985 would need to be redoubled in the trial
scheduled to begin on January 4, 1988. Zündel also appealed for potential
courtroom witnesses in many areas: experts in morgues, cremations and exe-
cutions; veterans of both sides in World War II, and civilian witnesses of the
conflict; persons familiar with delousing procedures using poison gas; and so
on. Zündel compared himself to “a field commander in a war who must beg
for sufficient troops and supplies to win a forthcoming battle.”
“My victories can only be in direct proportion to my means of achieving
them. The benefits we shall all receive from the Second Great Holocaust Trial
will be in direct proportion to the money available for this trial…
[If cases like this are lost] all beliefs, all creeds, all parties and all individu-
als will be subordinated to the dogma of the Holocaust… There will be no
middle ground, no neutrality… As Orwell prophesied in 1984, it will not suf-
fice to keep silent: everyone will be required to pay loud lip-service.”
As 1987 waned, “Zündelhaus” on Carlton Street seemed a quiet place to pass-
ersby. Yet appearances deceived. From across North America and beyond,
“censorship-busters” were arriving in force, sacrificing time and money in
hopes of meeting the demands which the new year would bring.
Chapter 2: A Paper Witness
T he District Court of Ontario’s busy docket caused opening day in the

second Zündel trial to be delayed until January 18. Anxiety gripped
both parties to the conflict, as no one could be certain whether the Ca-
nadian media would impose a news blackout, settle for a brownout, or, just
possibly, defy the pressures brought by the major Jewish organizations and
give Zündel the same level of coverage as in 1985.
Ken MacQueen of the Southam News caught the mood of the moment in a
feature article which was reprinted widely throughout Canada. “By the morn-
ing of January 19,” he began, “the reviews will be in. A bulky, balding man
named Ernst Zündel will learn whether he has succeeded one more time in
grabbing the nation’s attention.”
MacQueen then gave a one-sided account of the Canadian media’s conduct
three years earlier:48
“There were no gas chambers in Nazi Germany, the media’s reports from
the trial said. There were swimming pools and dances. There were well-
equipped kitchens in the camps. The guards were respectful and Jewish wom-
en had fun…
During much of the seven-week trial in 1985, casual readers or television
viewers could be forgiven for thinking their history teachers had deceived
them:
‘Auschwitz called fake,’ said one Toronto Sun headline, ‘Nazi camp had
‘pool, ballroom.’”
These few sentences deserve careful scrutiny because virtually the same carp-
ing words have appeared in countless Canadian books and articles during the
past several years. The implication is always that these particular reports and
headlines (pools, dances, ballrooms, etc.) were among the most-threatening to
48
Calgary Herald, Jan. 8, 1988, p. A5.
the established view of German policy toward the Jews. Revisionists insist
that the reality is just the opposite. These reports were precisely the least dam-
aging – or, indeed, the most useful – which is why they are cited again and
again. They seem too “far out” to be plausible, and thus play directly into the
hands of those calling revisionists “kooks.”
The truth, say the revisionists, is that such recreational facilities did exist in
the vast and highly diverse Auschwitz complex of camps. A more-important
truth is that such sensational evidence constituted a minute part of the revi-
sionist testimony in both Zündel trials, and that the media, from the beginning,
chose to play it up out of all proportion. Having done so in their initial news
reports, they later compounded the distortion by focusing on these particular
headlines in most of their post-trial summaries.
This is how “straw men” are created, step by step, and the worst of it is that
new reporters coming to cover such a story later will often have no idea of the
distortions which preceded them. One might instructively compare the never-
ending, almost gleeful media references to the “Auschwitz swimming pool” to
the virtually complete coverup of Fred Leuchter’s revolutionary scientific re-
search on the alleged gassing sites.
Not all of Ken MacQueen’s account of the coming trial was so slanted. At
one point, he quoted the Toronto Globe and Mail’s legal-affairs reporter Kirk
Makin offering “no apologies” for his extensive trial coverage in 1985:48
“We used to get a lot of people then and now saying, ‘Why couldn’t you
call him a Nazi? Why couldn’t you just put in a paragraph under those ridicu-
lous assertions [to say] six million were killed in concentration camps between
1941 and 1945 to set the record straight?’
‘They don’t seem to understand,’ says Makin, ‘that the trial was about
whether the record was straight or not. That was the whole issue.’”
Saying this took courage because many prominent Canadian Jews tried to nar-
row the focus of the Zündel case to the issue of free speech, while others
deemed it “outrageous” that both the court and the media seemed to place “the
Holocaust itself” on trial. Makin was the most important reporter at the first
trial, and he disagreed.
The historical record also loomed large throughout the second trial, but in
1988 Zündel did not succeed in “grabbing the nation’s attention” – not all of
it, in any case. The trial schedule played directly into the censors’ hands, with
dull procedural matters occupying the first two weeks, and the excitement
picking up only slowly as the prosecution witnesses appeared. It was six
weeks, counting breaks, before Defense Counsel Christie made his opening
address to the jury on March 1, and it was late April before the most-dramatic
evidence was heard.
By mid-February, reporters like Beth Graham were purveying the quasi-
official “word” on the second Zündel trial. “Zündel’s soapbox has shrunk”
read her headline of February 19, over an article filled with the self-serving
remarks of leading Canadian newsmen.49 Geoffrey Stevens, managing editor
of the Toronto Globe and Mail, insisted: “We’re deliberately playing it down
because we don’t think it has much news value.” Ray Timson, executive edi-
tor of the Tomson Toronto Star, noted: “It was a unique trial the first time
around… But the judge took the steam out this time right at the beginning by
[giving ‘judicial notice’ that] there was a Holocaust.”50 John Owen, chief
news editor for CBC’s national TV news, promised: “Certainly if there’s
something quite boldly dramatic, we’ll be there.” The story, he said, had be-
come a “regional” one. As for John Downing, editor of the low-brow Toronto
Sun, he contented himself with calling Zündel “garbage,” and saying, “I des-
pise the man intensely. He’s a kook.”
At about this time, on February 14, Columnist Doug Collins of Vancou-
ver’s North Shore News, feeling starved for information, complained that the
second Zündel trial was being played down and gave the real reason: Jewish
pressure on the media. This caused a Professor Werner Cohn to lay a com-
plaint of anti-Semitism with the Press Council of Vancouver, British Colum-
bia. Collins answered by recalling something Ken MacQueen had written in
the Southam News article mentioned earlier: “Leading members of the Jewish
community have visited major Toronto news outlets to implore them to cover
the [new] trial differently.” From the MacQueen article, Collins also cited
Jewish leader Alan Shefman’s admonition: “This is an extraordinary story and
may in fact merit very extraordinary coverage.”
“He didn’t mean it should get more coverage,” explained Collins, who also
referred his readers to a Canadian Jewish News article dated January 7 for a
candid account of the Jewish pressure campaign.
Professor Cohn wrote to the major news editors in Toronto and asked them
point-blank if indeed Jewish pressure had caused them to play down Round
Two of Zündel. No, no, they quickly assured him, all those Jewish delegations
had absolutely nothing to do with their subsequent decisions concerning cov-
erage of Zündel. Professor Cohn waved these assurances in Collins’s face as a
sort of “proof.”51
The Zündel media circus of 1985 played for seven weeks. That of 1988
lasted only a day or two, to be replaced by a drawn-out media sideshow. There
was, in fact, relatively little news to report in January, as the opposing coun-
sels filled the air with sundry motions and submissions.
On January 29, Judge Ron Thomas made several important rulings. Most
notably, he agreed to take “judicial notice” of the Holocaust, that is, to instruct
the jury (after its empanelment) that no “reasonable” person could dispute the
49
The Standard (St. Catharines, Ont.), Feb. 19, 1988, p. 5.
50
For an explanation of “judicial notice,” see the fifth paragraph following.
51
North Shore News (North Vancouver, B.C.), March 27, 1988.
Nazi mass killings of Jews. In Anglo-Saxon law, everything must be proved

except for certain evidence, normally in the nature of “day follows night” or
“Ottawa is the capital of Canada,” of which one party has asked the judge to
take “judicial notice.” Such notice had been taken of the Holocaust once be-
fore, in a Los Angeles courtroom, and Judge Thomas acceded to Crown At-
torney John Pearson’s request. Yet, as Robert Faurisson has noted, the term
“Holocaust” had first to be defined:16
“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 yet
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 idea that extermina-
tionist historians themselves have about the extermination of the Jews. First of
all, they no longer talk about an extermination but an attempted extermination.
Then, they have finally admitted that… no one could find any trace of an or-
der to exterminate the Jews… Finally, the figure of six million was declared
to be ‘symbolic’ and there have been many disagreements on the ‘problem of
the gas chambers.’
Judge Ron Thomas… decided to be prudent and, after a delay for reflec-
tion, decided on the following definition: the Holocaust was ‘the extermination
and/or murder of a mass of Jews’ by National Socialism… 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.”
What effect the taking of “judicial notice” had on the trial proceedings and the
verdict is a question still much debated. As we have seen, newspaper execu-
tive Ray Timson used it as an excuse to reduce trial coverage, claiming “the
judge took the steam out this time” by affirming the Holocaust’s reality. On
the other hand, John F. Burns noted in the New York Times (March 30),
“[T]here had been hopes that the scope for Mr. Zündel’s witnesses would be
limited [by ‘judicial notice’]. But recent weeks have seen a procession of
Zündel sympathizers, many of them Americans, taking the stand in an effort
to show that Mr. Zündel might reasonably have doubted the truth of the geno-
cide.”52 After the trial, Harold Levy observed in the Toronto Star, “Although
he had instructed the jury to take notice that the Holocaust had in fact oc-
curred, Thomas permitted Christie to call contrary evidence in a bid to estab-
lish Zündel’s belief that the facts he published were true.”53 Irwin Cotler, a
McGill University law professor, felt “judicial notice” had made a difference,
by removing the 1985 defense argument that the Holocaust was a debatable
52
New York Times, Mar. 30, 1988, p. A12.
53
Toronto Star, May 14,1988, p. D5.
issue. “The result,” he said, “was that Zündel was on trial, not the Holo-
caust.”54
Both Zündel and Christie were privately of the opinion that the judicial no-
tice ruling had almost certainly dealt their case a lethal blow. So were most
careful observers on the other side. One consequence was that the level of ten-
sion in and around the courtroom dropped precipitously. No longer did several
uniformed policemen routinely accompany the accused in the vicinity of the
courthouse.
Christie, pinning his hopes on a better dispensation during the appeal,
wished to end the costly, exhausting fight. But Zündel convinced his counsel
to stay the course for several reasons:
– He wanted to “do the rest for history” by getting important revisionist tes-
timony onto the official record, which would not be possible during a short
appeal proceeding.
– He felt that a speedy surrender would send the wrong message to the appel-
late judges, who might underestimate the determination of the accused and
others like him.
– He wished to provide other North American dissidents with a positive,
consistently aggressive model which they might follow.
While battling on, Zündel and Christie were careful never to let their true as-
sessment of the situation be known until the trial was over. Their own morale
was self-sustaining; that of some supporters was an unknown factor.
As mentioned before, Judge Thomas made several important rulings on
January 29. In addition to agreeing to take “judicial notice” of the Holocaust,
he (1) permitted Professor Raul Hilberg’s testimony from the 1985 trial to be
read to the jury in its entirety in 1988; (2) allowed the prosecution to introduce
several controversial pieces of evidence pertaining to Zündel’s alleged politi-
cal beliefs; (3) disallowed one other such bit of evidence; (4) tentatively disal-
lowed the showing of the 1945 Allied propaganda film “Nazi Concentration
Camps”; and (5) allowed the defense to challenge potential jurors on matters
of ethnic and political bias.
Taking these rulings individually, the Hilberg matter arose because the pro-
fessor declined all entreaties to testify again. He gave two reasons: his busy
teaching and writing schedule, and his reluctance to again be cross-examined
by Douglas Christie, who, he was certain, would exploit every opportunity to
show differences between his testimony in the two trials. As a non-Canadian,
Hilberg could not be compelled to appear. The Crown, short on witnesses,
asked for permission to read Hilberg’s entire 1985 testimony to the jury. The
defense argued unsuccessfully against this, citing examples of what it consid-
ered perjury on Hilberg’s part.
54
Toronto Star, May 21, 1988, p. D6.
The Crown likewise prevailed, with one exception, in the matter of intro-
ducing extraneous pieces of evidence from Zündel’s past as a presumed means
of getting at his motivations for publishing the Harwood pamphlet in or
around 1980. This evidence fell into two categories: expressions of qualified
support for Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, intended to suggest that he
would lie in order to rehabilitate them; expressions of belief in Nazi UFO ba-
ses, intended to show that he would play fast and loose with the facts in order
to get publicity.
On one point there was no debate. Zündel’s early-1970s UFO booklet had
indeed won him an enormous, if often amused, audience. Repeated printings
sold out quickly, and the author was given plenty of air time around the coun-
try, which he used to get across a wider pro-German message.
By introducing this old personal baggage, John Pearson sought to give the
jury a look into Zündel’s mind, although his own opening remarks to the jury
contained the admission, “Of course it is impossible to look directly into a
man’s mind to determine what he truly believes.” Judge Thomas had to re-
peatedly warn the jurors that Zündel was on trial solely for publishing alleged
“false news” in Did Six Million Really Die?, and not for any past embrace of
National-Socialist beliefs or UFO theories.
Writing in the magazine Elder Statesman, Columnist Doug Collins defend-
ed Zündel’s right to admire Hitler, and asked:55
“But so what? Pierre Trudeau was an open admirer of that famous killer
Mao Tse-tung,56 and kissed Castro in Cuba.
If Zündel had been an open admirer of Stalin and had denied that Stalin
killed millions, there would have been no trial, no matter what complaints
were laid! But if there had been a trial, the courtroom would have been packed
with journalists and academics anxious to speak for freedom of speech.”
A typical jury does not contain 12 or even one member with the logic and
even-handedness of Doug Collins, and some observers feel that Zündel was
wounded mortally here, notwithstanding the endless admonitions of both
Thomas and Pearson that “Zündel is not being prosecuted for his beliefs or his
opinions.” For, as Pearson also insisted, Zündel had published the Harwood
pamphlet “knowing it was false, to foster and protect his belief that Adolf Hit-
ler was right.”
An analogous legal situation may be described:
1. Communist-leaning opinions are protected.57
55
Elder Statesman, Oct. 1987.
56
In 1971, the International Security Subcommittee of the United States Senate published a report
called The Human Cost of Communism in China. It estimated that between 34.3 million and 62.5
million Chinese lost their lives directly because of the Maoist regime. The waves of killings con-
tinued until shortly before Henry Kissinger’s celebrated “friendship visits” to Peking. The recent
killing of 20 Jews in Red China would probably have precluded the Kissinger visits.
2. It is argued in the courts that a communist or communist-sympathizer will

necessarily tell historical lies to “foster and protect” his opinions.
3. Telling such historical lies is an indictable offense.
To its credit, the New York Times (March 30) spared its readers all the hypoc-
risy and said that Canada was putting Zündel on trial for his beliefs.
The defense prevailed in Judge Thomas’s other rulings.
The 1945 U.S. Army movie “Nazi Concentration Camps,” shown to the ju-
ry in 1985, was disallowed tentatively (and later altogether). This was only
fair, as the scenes of piles of emaciated corpses being bulldozed into pits by
the liberators were in fact entirely consistent with the thesis of the Harwood
pamphlet, which, far from denying their occurrence, went to great lengths to
show how Allied propaganda had misrepresented the causes and nature of all
the horror. Judge Thomas readily conceded that the jury might speculate wild-
ly about what they were seeing, perhaps concluding that these were “gassing”
victims (exactly as 1940s audiences had done).
Judge Thomas also granted the defense its wish to question potential jurors
closely about their bias toward Germans, their membership in groups like
B’nai B’rith, and the like.
On Monday morning, February 1, this questioning, known as “challenge
for cause,” began, and the first two jurors were eventually chosen. Nine more
were picked in the afternoon, and the final juror was selected Tuesday morn-
ing, February 2. In the process, more than 40 potential jurors were questioned.
After a few other legal matters were cleared up, Judge Thomas asked the
registrar to call in the jury. He explained their duties to them, and then let John
Pearson make his opening remarks. Pearson observed that “in this case the
Crown must prove four things beyond a reasonable doubt before a conviction
can be entered,” namely:
1. That Ernst Zündel published the pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die?
2. That the pamphlet “contains assertions of fact rulings rather than opinion.”
3. That these assertions of fact are false “and that Ernst Zündel knew them to
be false when he published the pamphlet.”
4. That these false assertions “are likely to cause injury or mischief to the
public interest in racial and social tolerance.”
The following morning, February 3, Judge Thomas gave the jury “judicial no-
tice” of the Holocaust. The Crown then called its first witness, Sergeant John
Luby of the Toronto police, who spent the rest of the day exhaustively review-
57
The Canadian Communist Party’s Progress Books recently published a work by Douglas Tottle
called Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, which
argues that there was no deliberate famine in the Ukraine in 1933. Ukrainian-Canadians have ap-
parently not attempted to ban that book, but Canadian Jews and others have campaigned to ban a
contrary work by Ukrainian writer Yuri Chumatski titled Why is One Holocaust Worth More than
Others?
ing two booklets and one audio tape. These were introduced in hopes of con-
vincing the jury that Zündel had a political motive for lying about the Holo-
caust before he published Harwood. The defense later argued that this tactic
was an illicit exploitation of political prejudices.
Thursday, February 4 was devoted largely to procedural matters, the cross-
examination of Sergeant Luby, and very brief appearances by two other
Crown witnesses testifying in connection with Sergeant Luby’s materials.
Late in the day, the judge explained to the jury the “unusual” procedure to be
followed with regard to Raul Hilberg, and allowed Pearson to start reading
aloud the professor’s 1985 testimony. This wearisome procedure continued all
day Friday and Monday, ending only on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 9.
Since the prosecution called only two important new witnesses in 1988, the
high points of Hilberg’s “rerun” testimony deserve to be considered.
Under questioning by Crown Attorney Peter Griffiths, Hilberg said he be-
gan to study the Holocaust in 1948, and “believed myself to be alone.” He lat-
er learned that Leon Poliakov in France and Gerald Reitlinger in England had
already commenced their own work.
Hilberg disputed Harwood’s statement that “there is not a single document
in existence which proves that the Germans intended to, or carried out, the de-
liberate murder of Jews”: “My interpretation of German records is that there
are, indeed, hundreds of documents dealing with death-dealing operations di-
rectly, and reporting upon them, and giving figures and details.”
It is true, said Hilberg, that the term “Final Solution” is an old one which
did once mean emigration, “and it did not mean killing until 1941.”
Griffiths quoted from the Harwood pamphlet: “Moreover, the majority of
witnesses [at Nuremberg] were also Jews.” (“Also” because the text had just
stated that “not even 10 percent of the Americans employed at the Nuremberg
courts were actually Americans by birth.”) Griffiths asked Hilberg: “Were the
majority of witnesses identified as Jews?”
“No, not at all,” said Hilberg. “In no sense do they stand out in my mind as
being a majority.”
Griffiths quoted Harwood: “No living, authentic eyewitness of these gas-
sings has ever been produced and validated.”
“I would say there were a fair number of witnesses,” said Hilberg. “Not a
huge number, a fair number.”
Hilberg strongly disputed Harwood’s Jewish demographics. “How do we
know how many [Polish Jews] did escape to the Soviet Union?” Hilberg asked
at one point. “We do not know this directly. We have no figures from the
USSR. We have only the data gathered after the war and of those of the Jews
who were able to escape who made it back.” Jews, said Hilberg, were “given
the opportunity to go back,” although those who did so rarely stayed in Po-
land.
Hilberg cited the report of SS Officer Jürgen Stroop, which said that
310,000 Warsaw Ghetto Jews were transported to Treblinka in 1942, which,
in Hilberg’s words, was a “pure killing facility.”
Griffiths asked Hilberg “what role… railroad schedules have played in
your study of this matter?” A “very important” one, came the reply, because,
“although there aren’t very many of these railroad schedules, they indicate a
great deal” about the German strategy in locating camps near Jewish popula-
tion centers. “These railway schedules make clear that the transportees, the
deportees, had to be counted for the simple reason that payment had to be
made for each one.”
Asked to characterize the methodology used by revisionist pioneer Paul
Rassinier, Hilberg said, “in one word… fabrication.” His figures “came out of
thin air.” Rassinier had notoriously once given an “estimate” of 896,892 Jew-
ish wartime dead which he attributed to Hilberg, when no number remotely
similar had ever been given. Hilberg’s actual estimate is about 5,100,000.
Asked “how extensive would be the academic body examining the Holo-
caust,” Hilberg estimated “several dozen… highly trained researchers,” with
the largest group “probably, by now” in West Germany.
The final question asked during the examination-in-chief was “Are you a
member of any conspiracy or hoax to falsify the scope and tragic proportions
of the annihilation [of the Jews]?” After Hilberg answered no, it was time for
Douglas Christie to begin his cross-examination. Griffith’s questioning occu-
pies just over a hundred pages in the trial transcript; Christie’s consumes near-
ly 650 pages.
Asked if he had ever visited various Nazi camps, Hilberg explained that in
1979 (i.e., 18 years after his major Holocaust book first appeared) he had
spent a day at Auschwitz and Treblinka. In an understatement, he observed,
“If you are going to show me building plans, photographs, diagrams, I do not
have the same competence as I would with documents expressed in words.”
Christie then cross-examined Hilberg for some time on the Warsaw Ghetto
and the so-called “Stroop Report” (Document 1061 PS at Nuremberg). Chris-
tie likened the Nazi liquidation of the ghetto to other brutal episodes of armies
putting down guerrillas under the rules of warfare. Hilberg noted the extreme-
ly one-sided casualty figures, and Christie responded that after the capitulation
of Germany there were warnings that 50 Germans would be shot for every
(occupying) American soldier shot. Hilberg said he was unfamiliar with the
matter.
Christie and Hilberg argued about the meanings of the German word ver-
nichten. Hilberg insisted it was “not ambiguous” but meant “annihilate,” while
Christie built a case for “eliminate,” the translation favored at Nuremberg.
They then disputed over whether “liquidate” can rightly be used to imply “re-
locate.”
Hilberg: By “liquidate” I mean the physical removal of everything in this

ghetto. Not just people, but the enterprises, the machinery of these enterprises.
Everything.
Christie: So relocating everything is what you mean by “liquidating the
ghetto.”
Hilberg: Machines were to be saved. Skilled labourers, to some extent,
were initially to be saved. Everybody else was to be annihilated.
Christie: Annihilated.
Hilberg: Yes.
Christie: The word you read from the report was “relocated” – right?
Hilberg: That’s correct. Yes, that is the correct –
Christie: Now, that doesn’t say, it doesn’t indicate an intention to annihi-
late, to me. Does it to you?
Hilberg: Yes. That is the difference between us, you see, because I have
read thousands of German documents and you haven’t.
Christie: Sure. And you have the view that to relocate, in the German lan-
guage, is to annihilate.
Hilberg: No. No.
Christie: No?
Hilberg: It means to relocate in certain contexts.
Christie: And you alone know the context?
“I am not alone in knowing the context,” said Hilberg.
After thrashing around further on the meaning and implications of the
Stroop Report, Christie and Hilberg turned to the question of whether an order
ever existed to exterminate the Jews. Christie quoted from Hilberg’s book to
the effect that two Hitler orders existed. Hilberg explained that these orders
were oral and that all we have are their “reflections” in the words and deeds of
others: “No one knows the exact wording.” The spring 1941 order, as reflect-
ed by Alfred Jodl, said “annihilate Jewish-Bolshevik commissars,” with a hy-
phen present to the best of Hilberg’s recollection.
Christie: And you interpret that to mean annihilate Jewish people and Bol-
shevik commissars. Right?
Hilberg: Correct.
It is a very complex problem, conceded the professor.
Christie put to Hilberg an article called “The Holocaust in Perspective,”
which featured him, as a panelist, fielding a question from an audience. There,
Hilberg had spoken of “not so much a plan [of extermination] being carried
out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus, mind reading by a far-
flung bureaucracy.”
“I said that,” noted Hilberg. “I said nothing about any order not existing.”
“You said it was an incredible meeting of minds,” repeated Christie.
Hilberg: Yes.
Christie: Does that imply the existence of an order?
Hilberg: It does not exclude the existence of an order.

Christie: A consensus, mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy. Does that
imply the existence of an order to you?
Hilberg: If an order is given orally and passed on, and especially if word-
ing is couched in such a way that the order-giver relies on the understanding
of the subordinate, then it does become important for those subordinates to
understand, indeed, and to have the same understanding of what was expected.
And this is what I said.
Christie: Was there an order or wasn’t there?
Hilberg: I believe that there was a Hitler order.
Christie read from Hilberg’s book: “Shortly after the mobile operations had
begun in the occupied Soviet territories, Hitler handed down his second or-
der.” He then asked the author, “Now, where is his second order?”
Hilberg: The problem with that particular order is the same as it is with the
first. It is oral.
Christie: It is oral?
Hilberg: And there are people who say, no, it was not one order at all. It
was a series of orders that were given to various people at various times. This
is a matter for dispute and for argument among historians and for this purpose
one has meetings and second editions of books, too.
Christie: I see. So you have to correct that statement in your second edi-
tion, right?
“No,” said Hilberg, “I am not saying that I have to correct this statement.”
Christie: This statement does not appear to be qualified with the words you
added here today – this is a matter of opinion and subject to dispute and others
may disagree with it. It states, “Hitler handed down his second order.” No
qualifying words. Right?
Hilberg: No, there is no qualifying word there.
Pressed by Christie to produce the second Hitler order, Hilberg explained
that “certain matters can be shown up to a point and not beyond.”
Christie: Can you show any evidence of the existence of a second Hitler
order at all, and if so, what is it?
“I don’t say that everything I expressed in this book I retain,” said Hilberg.
“I am entitled to change my mind about something I do.”
Christie: And is Mr. Harwood also entitled to change his mind?
Hilberg: He may change his mind, but I am talking about what I thought
then to have been a pivotal Hitler directive as stated by Göring to Heydrich on
July 31st, 1941.
Christie suggested that the Göring letter talked only about Jewish resettle-
ment in the East.
“Well,” said Hilberg, “the term ‘resettlement’ became the word used
throughout the correspondence in World War II in German records to refer to
the process of deporting people to killing centers.”
A bit later, Christie quoted to Hilberg from an interview he had given to Le

Nouvelle Observateur: “I would say that in a certain way Faurisson and oth-
ers… have rendered us a good service. They have come up with questions
which have the effect of engaging the historians in fresh research work. The
historians are obliged to come forward with more information to scrutinize the
documents once again, and to go much further in the understanding of what
has really happened.”
Some revisionists had insulted him, said Hilberg, but Faurisson “once
wrote me a very nice letter.”
Recalling Paul Rassinier’s great error in citing a Hilberg figure of 896,892
Jewish wartime dead, Christie asked: “You think he was trying to distort
things?” “Yes,” said Hilberg.
Christie asked if Jews entering the United States during and after World
War II were counted as such. No, said Hilberg.
Later, Christie asked Hilberg how he knew that all the Polish Jews surviv-
ing in the Soviet Union returned to Poland after the war.
Hilberg: We do know something about the Jewish population in the Soviet
Union from subsequent census data of the Soviet Union.
Christie: Do all Soviet Jews announce themselves to be Jews?
“Well,” said Hilberg, “that’s an interesting question and much debated.”
He conceded the complexity of the issue.
Christie raised the problem of Hilberg’s extensive reliance on the wild
postwar statements of SS Officer Kurt Gerstein. Hilberg conceded that some
of the things Gerstein said about Auschwitz and Belzec were “pure nonsense,”
but stressed that he had selected only Gerstein’s rational remarks. As an ex-
ample of Gerstein’s craziness, Christie mentioned his claim that, in the gas
chambers, 800 people would sometimes be packed into an area of five-by-five
meters. “Well,” said Hilberg, “I have made the calculation and it is amazing
how many people can be squeezed in…”
Hilberg later emphasized that the Germans never made a count at the point
where people entered the gas chambers. He also stressed that other witnesses
to the Belzec gassings had “testified repeatedly” at trials during the 1960s.
Christie mentioned Gerstein’s claim of people being put in boilers into which
compressed air was forced, and Hilberg conceded “it is a far-out statement.”
Next, Christie raised the subject of camp commandants like Rudolf Höss of
Auschwitz and Franz Ziereis of Mauthausen, who were tortured during inter-
rogations. Hilberg noted that according to one account Ziereis had been shot
while trying to escape and said that whether or not he should have been inter-
rogated as he lay dying “is essentially a medical question.” Christie noted the
allegation of Ziereis that a million or more people had been killed in the Cas-
tle Hartheim near Linz, Austria, and asked Hilberg if he believed it. A few
were gassed there, he replied: that had been confirmed “over and over and
over.” Hartheim was one of six euthanasia stations where “an estimated
80,000” were killed.
Such wild numbers were not rare, suggested Christie, nor was the torture
which elicited them, nor the documents describing the torture. “Torture of
whom, by whom?” asked Hilberg, so Christie started giving names of promi-
nent German victims, all of whom Hilberg agreed he recognized, though the
allegations of torture were unknown to him. He said he would be happy to
look at the documents.
Christie suggested that excessive reliance on documents alone could be
construed as “scholasticism” rather than “empiricism,” and asked Hilberg:
“Do you know of one scientific report that substantiates that any single place
was used as a gas chamber, just one? If so, please name it.”
Asked to define his terms, Christie said, “[B]y scientific report, I mean a
report conducted by anyone who purported to be a scientist and who examined
physical evidence.”
“To prove what?” demanded Hilberg, before saying: “I am really at a loss.
I am very seldom at such a loss, but –”
Pressed regarding physical evidence, Hilberg said: “I can only state that
there have been aerial photographs that were analyzed. Perhaps that is not
your definition of science. There have been contemporaneous documents
about the lethality of the gas that was employed.” There were reports about
the safe use of gas masks and so on.
“Is that the end of your answer?” asked Christie.
“If you want me to reflect on the matter,” said Hilberg, “I can certainly
conjure up… other examples, but I am still at a loss to really understand your
question.”
Anticipating the Leuchter Report of three years later, Christie observed, “I
suggest… it is quite possible to determine if hydrocyanic acid in gas has come
in contact with stone or brick or mortar or substances on walls.” Hilberg said
he knew of no such study.
Christie: Now, isn’t it true, sir, that Professor Rene Fabre, toxicologist, in
1945, was asked to examine the corpses of people allegedly gassed at Stut-
thof-Natzweiler, five kilometers from Strasbourg in Alsace-Lorraine, and to
scrape things from the van and the alleged chambers itself where [Josef] Kra-
mer was supposed to have gassed people, and that the results of that report are
that there was no poison evident in his analysis?
Hilberg: I am not at all familiar with this report.
Christie then asked if any postwar autopsies were made on corpses any-
where to show evidence of gassing. No, said Hilberg.
Christie mentioned reports of Jewish “extermination” in Germany from as
early as 1933. Hilberg said this was “a form of rhetoric,” not “false news.”
Christie noted that Harlan Fiske Stone, chief justice of the United States,
had called the Nuremberg trials a “high-grade lynching party.” Hilberg called
Stone “old-fashioned,” but conceded the trials had “caused, in the legal com-
munity, much discussion.”
The outbreak of war and Germany’s defeat were needed to make the
charges of “crimes against humanity” stick, said Hilberg. “[T]he victim had to
belong, by nationality, to one of the nations at war with Germany or… he had
to be killed on the soil of one of the nations at war with Germany.”
Christie asked Hilberg if he was familiar with the Simpson – van Roden
Commission, which investigated the torture of Germans at the Dachau trials.
American judge Edward L. van Roden had noted, “All but two of the Ger-
mans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles be-
yond repair.” These findings were widely reported in early 1949, but Hilberg
was not familiar with them.
Christie had Hilberg look at a section of the Harwood pamphlet titled
“‘Confessions’ Under Torture,” and challenged, “Tell me… one statement
there that is false.” Hilberg said he lacked the knowledge to reply.
Christie: I put it to you that every single statement on that page is true. Do
you deny that?
Hilberg: Maybe. Maybe not.
Christie: Previously you said it was fanciful?
Hilberg: It seems to me to be fanciful still.
Pressed for evidence of “one single lie” in the section, Hilberg could give
none. He later suggested that the Nuremberg trials were “conducted in an en-
tirely different atmosphere” from earlier trials like Dachau and Malmedy.
Christie: Would you agree that many famous people of the era of the Nu-
remberg war trials regarded them as a travesty of justice?
Hilberg: How many is many? Two, three?
Later, Christie showed him the book Doenitz at Nuremberg: A Reapprais-
al, containing signed statements to that effect from scores of American and
world leaders. “Is this a new book?” asked Hilberg of the well-known volume,
edited by H. Keith Thompson and published in 1976.
Some of Hilberg’s answers suggested strongly that information derived
from sources other than official documents was, in his eyes, inadequate. Con-
fronted on this by Christie, he denied it. Christie asked Hilberg if, at Nurem-
berg, to his knowledge, certain defendants had been threatened with being
turned over to the Soviets if they “did not say certain things to the interroga-
tors.” Hilberg had not heard of this, but volunteered the opinion, “It’s an open
question whether this is a permissible or impermissible technique.”
Charles F. Wennerstrum, the presiding American judge at a Nuremberg tri-
al of German generals, had complained loudly of the “unwholesome” and
“vindictive” proceedings. For example, he told the Chicago Tribune how the
prosecution had sought to introduce excerpts from documents without making
the whole available to the defense. Hilberg “completely sympathized” with
this particular complaint, but added that “the business of… [Wennerstrum’s]
saying that they [the prosecution] are Jews… and things like this, does not
speak of a judicious temperament.”
Hilberg would not agree that the number of four million dead at Ausch-
witz, cited by the Soviets, “is a propagandistic number. It could be incompe-
tence.” It could be they “did not count adequately.”
Christie suggested that objective observers could not get to the Eastern
camps, which is why they and they alone were still called “extermination”
sites. Hilberg disputed this, saying the West had captured “the bulk” of the
German records, but he also observed, “I know of no Western investigators
early on in Auschwitz, or any of [the eastern camps].”
Christie: Would you agree with me that all of the Allied observations of
concentration camps in the West could not produce the evidence of a single
gas chamber as such at all?
“Well,” said Hilberg, “I do think I excepted Natzweiler and another camp,
since they were both in Allied hands, and they used very small chambers with
which to eliminate, kill small numbers of people.”
The adversaries then spent some time going through the various statements
of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who was hanged after being
allowed to write a dubious memoir. Christie suggested at one point that Hil-
berg used Höss’s statements only “insofar as they confirmed what you be-
lieved.” “No,” said Hilberg emphatically. “Insofar as they confirmed other in-
formation or were confirmed by other information.”
Asked how many people could be gassed in one room at Auschwitz at a
single time, Hilberg seemed to recall the estimate of 1,400. But he disputed
estimates of up to 60,000 victims daily for the entire camp, saying “the daily
maximum capacity was probably under 20,000.” As for burning bodies in the
five new crematoria in 1942-43, he stood by his book, which spoke of a ca-
pacity of “about 12,000 bodies a day.”
Christie raised the subject of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas
Chambers, by Filip Müller, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. He described to Hil-
berg various episodes in the book and suggested they were “novelistic,” pla-
giarized from other Holocaust books, and so on. “I have been through this
book page-by-page,” said Hilberg, “and I am hard put to find any error… in
this book. It is remarkable.”
Christie read to Hilberg a sequence about Müller standing inside a gas
chamber among the victims as they all discussed their impending doom. Hil-
berg insisted, “I cannot imagine such a passage being invented.”
Christie also read to Hilberg a passage from his own book which stated,
“Most of the Birkenau [Auschwitz II] arrivals saw great flames belching from
the chimneys…”
Do you still believe that is true, Christie wondered. When Hilberg said yes,
Christie noted that “cremation chimneys do not belch flame,” and would soon
be destroyed if they did. Hilberg cited Elie Wiesel as one who had seen the
belching flames.
Christie turned to a well-known memorandum written by Dr. Martin Lu-
ther of the German Foreign Ministry and dated August 21, 1942, and read the
last paragraph: “The intended deportations are a further step forward on the
way of the total solution and are in respect to other countries (Hungary) very
important. The deportation to the Government General is a temporary meas-
ure. The Jews will be moved on further to the occupied eastern territories as
soon as the technical conditions for it are given. I therefore request approval
for the continuation of the negotiations and measures under these terms and
according to the arrangements made. Signed Luther.”
Hilberg described this as a “recapitulation” of past German policy, a “his-
tory”: “One aspect of this history was the temporary lodging of Jews from
Germany in ghettos in Poland until such time as gas chambers were erected in
order to receive them for gassing.” Hilberg also explained: “It turns out that
relocation across the border, meaning the border of the Government General
and the Eastern territories, was a euphemism for Belzec and Treblinka, which
were on that border.”
Christie mentioned a survey of 26,674 statements made by political leaders
in Germany after the war, in which they all denied having any wartime know-
ledge of any extermination camps. Hilberg dismissed this as “a defense docu-
ment for [Nazi leaders], essentially.”58
When Christie pressed Hilberg on whether portions of the Nuremberg tran-
script had been expunged, the latter admitted this was allowed, “if, at the re-
quest of the president of the tribunal, they were deemed to be entirely irrele-
vant.” Christie then showed Hilberg the transcript for April 26, 1946, where
Justice Robert H. Jackson asked that defendant Julius Streicher’s testimony
regarding his torture be expunged from the record, and his motion was grant-
ed.59
Christie returned to the problem of a Hitler order. Hilberg insisted,
“[T]here is mention of a Hitler order in documents.”
Christie: There are testimonies of the people
58
Soon after the German surrender, 26,674 interned German political leaders were questioned about
their knowledge of a Jewish extermination program, and each denied knowing anything.
59
In one excised section, Streicher described being thrown naked into a cell for four days, where “I
was burned, I was thrown on the floor, and an iron chain was put upon me. I had to kiss the feet of
Negroes who spit into my face. Two colored men and a white officer spit into my mouth, and
when I didn’t open it anymore, they opened it with a wooden stick, and when I asked for water, I
was led to the latrine and I was ordered to drink from there.” In another erased section, Streicher
asked people in the courtroom not to laugh when he asked for questions to be repeated. “I can’t
help it,” he said, that, in the prison at Freising, he was beaten so badly “that I have lost 40 percent
of my hearing capacity.”
Hilberg: No, no, no. There are documents. I repeat, there are documents.
Even in the Wannsee Conference you will find reference to that. “I, myself,
translated the Wannsee Conference,” said Hilberg, “and it is in there.”
Christie: And we have gone through that before, but having gone through
it, it does not include a reference to extermination at all.
Hilberg: It includes a reference insofar as Heydrich speaks of the evolution
of the policy arriving at the Final Solution and makes specific reference to
Hitler in that connection.
Christie: I see. So the reference to Hitler and the Final Solution is what you
mean.
“It was not a deep, dark secret that there was reference to a Final Solution,”
said Christie, “because it was referred to by Luther, and it was defined in
terms other than you would define it.”
Granted, said Hilberg, there was “a good deal of haziness” in the minds of
some German officials regarding the intended fate of the Jews, “even after
March 1942.”
Christie returned to the section of Harwood titled “‘Confessions’ Under
Torture,” asking Hilberg if he could identify “just one simple statement there”
which he says is false.
Hilberg focused on the next-to-last paragraph:
“The ‘American’ investigators responsible [for interrogation at the Dachau
trials] (and who later functioned as the prosecution in the trials) were: Lt.-Col.
Burton F. Ellis (chief of the War Crimes Committee) and his assistants, Capt.
Raphael Shumacker, Lt. Robert E. Byrne, Lt. William R. Perl, Mr. Morris El-
lowitz, Mr. Harry Thon, and Mr. Kirschbaum. The legal adviser of the court
was Col. A.H. Rosenfeld. The reader will immediately appreciate from their
names that the majority of these people were ‘biased on racial grounds’ in the
words of Justice Wennerstrum – that is, were Jewish, and therefore should
never have been involved in any such investigation.”
“Is that a mistaken belief,” asked Christie, “or is that a false statement?”
Hilberg: I think it is a false statement, of course.
“You say he [Wennerstrum] was wrong or mistaken or lying,” said Chris-
tie.
Hilberg: Yes.
Christie: However, he did say that?
Hilberg: No doubt. I testified to that before.
Christie: So you are not saying that is a false statement at all.
“No doubt,” said Christie, “Wennerstrum believed that, and he was there.”
Hilberg: Whatever he believed, he said that.
Christie: Yes, he did say these words.
Hilberg: Yes.
Christie: So you’d say that Wennerstrum is wrong and you shouldn’t quote
Wennerstrum when he is wrong. Is that right?
Hilberg: I would say that Wennerstrum is wrong and, therefore, I cannot
agree that this is correct in content.
Christie: I see. But there is no doubt about the fact that Wennerstrum said
that.
Hilberg: No doubt.
“I don’t think this is simply a matter of opinion,” said Hilberg. “It is a fac-
tual question as to whether these people were or were not Jews.”
After more thrashing around on the issue, Hilberg suddenly said: “Why
don’t I concede your point?”
Christie: What point?
Hilberg: The point that this [section] is completely correct, in every re-
spect.
Christie: Thank you. Can you see anything else on that page that is false at
all?
“No,” said Hilberg.
Christie mentioned Harwood’s description of Olga Lengyel’s Five Chim-
neys: The Story of Auschwitz as being “wild fantasies,” given her estimates of
17,280 cremations and 8,000 pit-burnings “per 24-hour shift.” A half hour,
Lengyel had written, was “all the time it took to reduce human flesh to ashes.”
“She did include, obviously, hearsay,” said Hilberg.
Shortly after, Christie thanked Hilberg and Peter Griffiths briefly re-exa-
mined the prosecution witness. His first question was “Have you ever seen
any German [or] other document to make you change your opinion as to the
fact of the Holocaust?”
“None whatsoever,” said Hilberg.
Griffiths asked if there was “anything, since your first edition in 1961, that
has offered any further corroboration [of the Gerstein statements]?”
“Oh, yes,” said Hilberg. In the 1960s, the West German government had
“attempted to find every single surviving member of the German guard forc-
es” at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, and “each one of these people was
questioned. A record was made of what they said, and I have been through all
of these records.”
Griffiths closed by asking whether Hilberg had non-scientific reports about
“what happened in the gas chambers.” Hilberg said yes, and Griffiths asked,
“What German sources do you have describing what happened?”
Hilberg: There is correspondence pertaining to the construction of gas
chambers. Furthermore – and again I speak of documentation – there is an ex-
tensive correspondence about the delivery of gas, sometimes labelled “materi-
als for handling the Jewish problem,” and this is just a sample of the materials
on which one relies in forming the total picture of what happened.
The defense was surely eager to hear what came next, but Griffiths said ab-
ruptly: “Thank you, Doctor. I have no further questions.”
Everyone in the courtroom in 1988 sighed with relief as the 1985 testimo-
ny finally ended. Judge Ron Thomas then summarized the recent correspond-
ence between John Pearson and Hilberg, in which the latter repeatedly de-
clined to reappear. The judge noted that Hilberg had particularly recommend-
ed as a replacement Professor Christopher Browning of the Department of
History, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington.
Browning would appear the entire following week, but the remainder of
this week – it was now about 4:00 on Tuesday, February 9 – would be devoted
to the testimony of Charles Biedermann, a handsome 37-year-old Swiss living
in Arolsen, West Germany, where he is director of the International Tracing
Service. The ITS is an agency which, under the Bonn Agreement of 1955, was
established under the management and administration of the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva, of which Biedermann is a
delegate. It has four mandates: the collection, the assembly, the keeping and
the evaluation of documents of former persecutees of the German National-
Socialist regime. These documents actually belong to the 10 governments
which constitute the ITS’s supervisory body, including the United States,
West Germany and Israel.
The Bonn Agreement of 1955 provides that only the former persecutees
themselves, their legal successors, and accredited representatives of the 10
signatory governments, shall have access to this vast collection of documents.
This permits them to make claims for pension and other benefits. Each inquiry
goes first to a central data file containing about 44 million bits of information
on 14 million people.
The prosecution’s reason for calling Biedermann was its allegation that the
Harwood pamphlet seriously misrepresented the position of the ICRC with re-
gard to the Holocaust.
For some time, the opposing counsels questioned Biedermann voir dire –
that is, with the jury absent – so that Judge Thomas could reach a decision
concerning the areas to which he should restrict his “expert” testimony.60
Among the facts which Pearson elicited through his questioning were the fol-
lowing. The ICRC’s first visit to Auschwitz came in September 1944, but the
delegate was permitted to see little at Auschwitz I, the Main Camp, and noth-
ing at the Birkenau Camp (Auschwitz II). The ICRC never entered any of the
major alleged extermination camps, and freely examined certain concentration
60
Under Canadian law, a witness recognized by the Court as an “expert” in a given field is legally
entitled to state his opinions concerning matters in that field. Such opinion testimony would oth-
erwise be excluded as “hearsay.” During the 1988 Zündel trial, the following witnesses were rec-
ognized as experts by Judge Thomas: for the Crown – Hilberg, Biedermann, and Browning; for
the defense – Barton, Fann, Weber, Botting, Lagacé, Walendy, Faurisson, Wilson, Leuchter, Roth,
Irving.
camps only during the last month of the war. The ICRC distinction between
“concentration” and “extermination” camps is based on the fact that people
sent to the latter were not registered upon arrival.
Christie, cross-examining voir dire, asked, “Would it be correct to say that
the ICRC found no evidence during the war to verify the existence of extermi-
nation camps?”
Biedermann noted that the ICRC “writes down officially only things that it
has been able to verify and to see. In that respect, we do not have evidence.”
But, he added, “for example, the delegate that [went to Auschwitz in 1944]
mentioned in his subsequent report to the ICRC that one of the representatives
of the inmates had asked him whether he knew anything about the shower
rooms. That was an indication that was given to him but he, himself, had not
seen it. [That is] the only information that we have – that we had at all at the
time.”
“The important issue here,” submitted Pearson to Judge Thomas, “is why is
Mr. Biedermann’s evidence being tendered?”
“Is it to attest to the truth of the records of the [ICRC]? I respectfully sub-
mit, no. He is here to testify that the [ICRC] does not have records which sup-
port the assertions of fact in the pamphlet. He’s been authorized by the ICRC
to come here. He is the best person to come here because he is the custodian of
the records that the pamphlet purports to rely on for the purposes of showing
that those records support its thesis. In my respectful submission, he can come
here and say “Our records don’t say that. Our records couldn’t say that be-
cause we don’t have records about the extermination camps except railway
records indicating that people went to these camps by railway transport,” and
then there is no more records for them after that.”
“The Crown’s position,” Pearson stressed, is that “whether what those records
say is true or not… is irrelevant for our purposes.”
“Do you intend to go any further than that with this witness?” asked the
judge.
“This witness is not a historian,” said Pearson, so he would stick to the
records of the ICRC.
By the time these matters were resolved and the jury called in it was past
3:00 on Wednesday, February 10.
Pearson put to Biedermann a number of what he called misleading phrases
from Harwood – for example, where he quoted the revisionist Thies Chris-
tophersen: “There were no secrets at Auschwitz. In September 1944 a com-
mission of the International Red Cross came to the camp for an inspection.
They were particularly interested in the camp at Birkenau, though we also had
many inspections at Raisko.”61
61
The Auschwitz satellite camp where Christophersen was stationed.
Yes, agreed Biedermann, the ICRC was very much interested in Birkenau,
but “because they did not get to go inside, there are no records.”
Again, Pearson read from Harwood: “The Red Cross Report, examined be-
low, demonstrates conclusively that throughout the war the camps were well
administered. The working inmates received a daily ration even throughout
1943 and 1944 of not less than 2,750 calories, which was more than double
the average civilian ration in occupied Germany in the years after 1945.”
Yes, said Biedermann, ICRC records show that some German camps were
well administered throughout the war – namely, the POW camps. They do not
show that the concentration camps were well administered. As for daily ra-
tions, “I can only state that in reports from visits to these camps, the calorie in-
take was certainly important, so it would have been done. However, the sec-
ond part with regard to comparison to the average civilian, that type of com-
parison would not have been done.”
Regarding parcels, Biedermann noted that POWs could receive these
throughout the war “because their names were known,” while civilian detain-
ees generally could not. He observed that the ICRC, from 1939 on, tried to
“contact the people who did not enjoy the protection of the Geneva Conven-
tion,” and that only in February 1945 did the SS announce its willingness to
talk about the matter.
On the last page of his pamphlet, Harwood says that “another neutral Swiss
source, Die Tat of Zürich (Jan. 19, 1955), in a survey of all Second World
War casualties based on figures of the International Red Cross, put the ‘Loss
of victims of persecution because of politics, race or religion who died in pris-
ons and concentration camps between 1939 and 1945’ at 300,000, not all of
whom were Jews, and this figure seems the most accurate assessment.”
Pearson had Biedermann read from the source, which indicated that its es-
timate of 300,000 referred simply to Germans who had died, “including Ger-
man Jews.” Also, there was no reference made to the ICRC.
If some of Pearson’s questions brought out Harwood’s carelessness (or re-
liance on careless secondary sources), some of Christie’s revealed Bieder-
mann’s ignorance.
Christie asked if he had “any German documents that during the war used
the term that you have used, namely extermination camp or Vernich-
tungslager.” Biedermann said, “I have something in my head that I cannot
prove right at the moment.” During the next court recess, he called Europe,
and when Christie put the question to him again the answer was “No.”
Christie asked if the ICRC was “impartial during the war,” and Bieder-
mann quickly said yes. “Was it concerned about investigation of atrocities?”
Yes.
Why then, asked Christie, did it “refuse the invitation of the German Red
Cross” to investigate the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers by the So-
viets, or to witness the exhumation of the bodies? This was news to Bieder-
mann.
The ITS director was aware that Serge Klarsfeld had been allowed to do
research among his documents (and he denied access to a request by Robert
Faurisson). Yet it was news to him that, in Christie’s words, “[Klarsfeld] dis-
covered, from looking at the records in Arolsen, that whole convoys of alleged
gassed Jews had in fact never existed.”
Christie asked Biedermann if he knew that 15 million Germans were dis-
placed from their ancestral homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere
after the war. Biedermann was clearly confused by the reference.
Biedermann: Yes, I am aware of that. But I’m not aware of the figure, but
large numbers were captured, yes.
Christie: Did the Red Cross ever investigate these?
Biedermann: I explained earlier Russia – Russia did not ratify the Third
Convention.
Christie: Not in Russia but I’m talking about when they became displaced
back to West Germany from those places.
Biedermann: The individual articles of the [Geneva] Convention or the
Hague Convention are not all known to me in detail. I do not want to give an-
swers that can’t be checked but there is a war law and one of them – one of
them is how to treat prisoners of war. What I can quote from that, for exam-
ple, is that officers cannot be forced to work whereas soldiers can. –
“Excuse me,” said Christie, “I’m only referring to displaced persons, not
soldiers.”
Christie suggested to Biedermann that “at times the [ICRC] comes under a
form of political pressure to maintain its image; would you agree?”
“No,” said Biedermann.
As an example, Christie cited the large ICRC report of 1948, when “war
crimes against the Germans were known to the delegates but not reported be-
cause it would be very unpopular to do so. Do you have any knowledge of
that?”
Biedermann was terribly (or conveniently) confused again. He assumed
Christie must be complaining about Allied bombings which had kept Red
Cross parcels from reaching concentration-camp inmates! Apparently realiz-
ing how wide of the mark this was, he said helplessly: “I do not know what
you mean, crimes.”
Christie cited to him an ICRC volume published in 1975,62 which included
excerpts from the report of the delegate (Victor Maurer) present at Dachau be-
tween April 27 and May 2, 1945. It mentioned the mythical “Dachau gas
62
The Work of the JCRC for Civilian Detainees in German Concentration Camps from 1939 to
1945.
chamber” but overlooked the murder on April 29 of more than 500 German
guards, machine-gunned to death by American GIs.
“That is not known to me,” said the high Red Cross official.
Christie showed Biedermann a copy of Howard A. Buechner’s Dachau:
The Hour of the Avenger, and, in it, a picture of a surrendering German carry-
ing the Red Cross flag.
Biedermann mentioned that the rector of the University of Geneva had
been selected – as a “neutral /third party,” an “outsider” – to inspect the
ICRC’s archives and “revise” Red Cross history for the years 1933 to 1945.
Christie: Let me suggest to you that the ICRC is concerned that it doesn’t
get itself in a position of being accused of not doing enough and being too
sympathetic to the National-Socialist regime in its earlier [1948] three volume
report. Isn’t that right?
Again, Biedermann was massively confused, answering: “To my know-
ledge, it’s just the other way around. The ICRC has been attacked on numer-
ous occasions for not having done enough, specifically for the civilian perse-
cutees in the concentration camps and that is one of the reasons, among many
others, that we want to show that we have done all that we could have done at
the time.”
Christie, who might have wondered if he was interrogating a Boy Scout,
said: “I suggest to you that the accusations that you have mentioned are being
made by the World Jewish Congress and that’s why you want to answer those
accusations with a new report rather than end up in the position of someone
like Kurt Waldheim. Isn’t that true?”
Christie’s earlier diplomacy was used against him here by Biedermann:
“You have said yourself that the ICRC is neutral.”
Biedermann continued, “If we are attacked, then we are obliged to find out
the complete truth and we make efforts to do this. Wherever the accusations
come from, that is of no importance.”
“Let me suggest,” said Christie, “that there was probably clearer know-
ledge in 1948 as to what was done than there is in 1988. Wouldn’t you
agree?”
“No,” said Biedermann.
Christie: I suggest to you that in 1988 there’s more pressure on the ICRC
because of more desire to emphasize the Holocaust than there was in 1948.
And that is the pressure to correct the 1948 Reports. Isn’t that true?”
“I cannot exclude that,” said Biedermann, but he then explained how historical
revisionism is an inevitable and universal process.
In Biedermann’s last moments on the stand, Christie mentioned in passing
the B’nai B’rith, got a bewildered response, and asked, “You don’t know what
the B’nai B’rith is?”
Biedermann: No.
Christie: Do you know what the World Jewish Congress is?
Biedermann: Yes, I’ve heard about it.

Christie: I suggest to you that they make representations to the Internation-
al Committee of the Red Cross from time to time.
Biedermann: You mean visits?
Christie: Representations. I mean by that conversations in which they tell
you what they think of your organization.
Biedermann said he would learn of such remarks only if they pertained to
his bailiwick, the ITS.
If ignorance was one recurring tendency in Biedermann’s testimony, com-
placency and secretiveness were arguably two others.
Christie hauled out a two-volume work called the Gedenkbuch, prepared
with the assistance of the ITS. He chose a page at random and noted that every
name on it was followed by the German words for “missing” and “unknown.”
And so it went on the next page, and the page after that.
Christie: Quite a few pages, would you agree?
Biedermann: Yes.
Christie: All right. What efforts were made by the [ITS] to check those
names with Soviet authorities?
Biedermann: We have not checked that with Soviet authorities.
Christie: What efforts have been made to check that information, for ex-
ample, with the Department of Vital Statistics of any province in Canada?
“We did not have that order, that mandate,” explained Biedermann. The
book was a project of a government agency in West Germany, and he could
not say whom they had checked with.
Christie: Have you checked at any time your records of deceased persons
with any registries of other countries such as the Soviet Union, the United
States or Canada?
That would be the duty of the various national Red Cross societies, ex-
plained Biedermann.
Later, Biedermann noted that the ITS had the individual death documents
from Dachau and Buchenwald but had “not estimated figures.”
Christie: Those lists were made during the war?
Biedermann: That is correct.
Christie: So those figures you can be reasonably sure of?
Biedermann: Yes, that’s correct.
Christie: And those figures have been established on the basis of German
camp records?
Biedermann: I have never talked about figures. I only said that we have the
deaths but we have not counted them.
Christie: But you have a total record?
Biedermann: That’s what I said, yes.
Christie: Why haven’t you counted them?
“We have other work to do,” said Biedermann. He explained that the doc-
uments from Dachau alone “would fill a whole hall. It would exceed our ca-
pacity and our financial means to go through all the archives and compile. The
time used up for processing one single application, because of a lack of funds
and personnel, is seven-and-a-half months… In the interest of the former per-
secutees, we have to put that [counting] on the back burner.”
Earlier, Biedermann had mentioned how a court in Düsseldorf, West Ger-
many had declared that 900,000 died at Treblinka. Christie, logically, wished
to know “what evidence, if any, was provided to establish” that number.
Biedermann: Various experts were consulted.
Christie: U-hmm. Do you have transportation lists to that camp at all?
Biedermann: Yes, one, definitely.
Christie: How many names are on that list?
Biedermann: I can’t say.
Christie: How many pages is the list?
Biedermann: I can’t say.
Christie: Why can’t you say?
Biedermann: [There] are 70 kilometers of documents, weighing about four
tons, sheet by sheet. Much more than four tons. It’s completely impossible to
give information about individual documents here.
Christie: Well, I am not asking you about 70 kilometers or four tons. What
I asked you for was one transportation list, am I –
Judge Thomas: I don’t think that the witness should be invited to answer a
question like that.
Christie: If he’s telling me one list is 70 kilometers long, weighs four tons,
he can maybe tell me that, but I have a
Judge Thomas: I think you know better than to ask questions like that. We
aren’t here to have an interesting dialogue between you and the witness. He’s
here to answer questions.
Christie: Well, I’m asking them.
Judge Thomas: Under my direction you are.
Biedermann finally explained that he had never seen the Treblinka list
himself (it was a “detour” transport from Auschwitz) but had no reason to
doubt his colleague who had used it.
“Why shouldn’t historians be allowed to look at those [lists]?” asked Chris-
tie.
Biedermann: Because the 10 governments [who signed the 1955 Bonn
Agreement] have decided that.
“I gather the archives are not being in any way computerized,” suggested
Christie later.
“Two well-known firms” had come to survey the problem, said Bieder-
mann. “They had to throw in the towel because the central name file alone has
more than 44 million entries63 that [could not just be] fed into a computer ac-
cording to an alphabetical system because we have an alphabetic-phonetic
system. For example, ‘Sch,’ ‘Sz’ and ‘S’ is one letter so [a name] could come
up in different ways.” Computerizing would take 10 years, said Biedermann,
and the ITS decided to do without it, except for things like accounting.
The ITS has copies of only three of the 39 or 40 German “death books” of
Auschwitz. The originals are all in Moscow. When Christie asked Biedermann
if he had tried to get the rest, the answer was positive for a change: “We’re
negotiating at the moment.”
But the matter of the Auschwitz death books also suggested a secretive
side of the International Tracing Service.
Christie asked if outsiders could examine the three death-book copies held
by the ITS. No, said Biedermann.
How many names were in each book? Biedermann chose not to make an
estimate.
Christie wondered what would happen if and when Moscow released for
inspection the other death books: “If the counting of inmates, or research of
that kind, is too expensive, you would recommend that the archives be availa-
ble to historical researchers, would you?”
Biedermann: I don’t understand the question.
Christie: Well, the only obstacle to historical research that I understand ex-
ists is the limits placed on the use of records by the [ICRC].
“No,” said Biedermann, “you have misunderstood me.” There’s the 1955
agreement.
Christie: Yes, okay. The Bonn Agreement prevents anyone else from find-
ing out what’s up in those records?
Biedermann: The Bonn Agreement formulated in a positive way that the
archives are only to be evaluated in the interests of the former persecutees
themselves or their successors. That’s the phrase used.
Later, Biedermann stated emphatically; “[T]he ICRC was given the defi-
nite instruction not to establish… to draw up statistics”; and again, “I have the
clear order not to draw up statistics.”
Christie inquired whether a defense attorney would be allowed to check the
ITS records.
Biedermann: [I]f he comes to us by way of one of the 10 governments
which are combined in the Internal Commission, then that is possible.
Christie: And at any time that the Israeli government wants access, they are
allowed.
Biedermann: Such applications are checked by us. If there is a justified in-
terest, they will be granted.
63
I.e., 44 million bits of information on 14 million people, according to Biedermann’s previous tes-
timony.
Christie: Well, if the Israeli government wants access, isn’t it automatically

entitled?
It could “make application,” said Biedermann.
Christie: Do you know of any such request from Israel being denied?
“It is not known to me,” said Biedermann.
Christie asked about the semi-secret annual report of the ITS. Biedermann
confirmed that, since 1979, the second and third (of three) parts of the report
are no longer available to the public.
The ICRC itself can be secretive too, as Christie elicited: “I suggest, wit-
ness, the only way we could determine if the published portion [of a dele-
gate’s report] is the complete report would be to see the original as filed.”
Biedermann: That’s correct.
But isn’t the full report confidential? asked Christie.
Christie: And delegates are not allowed to reveal the contents of their re-
ports to the public?
Christie: Except through the ICRC’s official publications?
Christie: And in fact, it will be a serious breach of duty if a delegate other-
wise revealed the contents of this report?
An alarm sounded in the courtroom.
The ever-ready Christie quipped, “I don’t know whether to take that as an
omen, Your Honour.”
Judge Thomas: I assure you I didn’t orchestrate that.
Christie: I could have understood it if you had, Your Honor.
At one time, it seems, the ICRC was itself kept in the dark. “Wouldn’t you
agree,” asked Christie, “that if exterminations were going on of unregistered
inmates in camps, that the International Red Cross had many contacts in occu-
pied Europe to find out?”
Biedermann: We have always tried to do that but we have never received
any confirmations at that time.
Christie: Was there any indication by the Red Cross from all its reports that
gas chambers were being used during the war?
Biedermann: No, not to my knowledge.
“Well,” said Christie, “if the ICRC had received information about exter-
mination of Jews in gas chambers, they most certainly would have passed that
along to the Jewish organizations with whom they were dealing, would they
not?”
“I can’t answer that,” said Biedermann.
Not everything about the ITS is secret. “It’s my understanding,” said Chris-
tie, “that Arolsen has been used for [historical research] by some people.”
Certainly, said Biedermann.

But when Christie later suggested that access is based on a researcher’s
presumed intentions, Biedermann denied it.
Much of Christie’s cross-examination involved putting to Biedermann quo-
tations from the Harwood pamphlet which were attributed to Red Cross publi-
cations, and having Biedermann confirm that the quotes were indeed correct.
When it was time for Pearson to re-examine, he had Biedermann show how
quite a few of these accurate quotes ended with ellipses (… ), and that what
came in place of the dots in the original text often served to qualify the parts
Harwood had quoted.
“That’s correct” and “I can’t say” were two answers often on Charles
Biedermann’s lips. But Douglas Christie sometimes had a problem when he
heard the latter. Did “I can’t say” connote ignorance, complacency or secre-
tiveness on the part of the witness and his agency? Each of these traits charac-
terized much of the Biedermann testimony.
Professor Robert Faurisson’s bad experience with the ITS led him, in Riva-
rol, to portray its policies somewhat differently than Biedermann:16
“Beginning in 1978, in order to prevent all revisionist research, the Interna-
tional Tracing Service closed its doors to historians and researchers, except for
those bearing a special authorization from one of the 10 governments (includ-
ing that of Israel) which oversee the activity of the International Tracing Ser-
vice; Henceforth it was forbidden to the Tracing Service to draw up, as it had
done until then, statistical evaluations of the number of dead in the various
camps. The previous annual activity reports could no longer be communicated
to the public except for their first third, which did not have anything of interest
for the researchers.”
Faurisson noted that the ITS has “an unbelievable wealth of information” on
the fates of victims of National Socialism, and concluded, “I believe that it is
at Arolsen that one could, if one wished, determine the real number of Jews
who died during the war.”
Chapter 3: Professor Browning
T he prosecution’s most-important witness, Dr. Christopher Browning,

took the stand on Monday morning, February 15. John Pearson and
Douglas Christie questioned the lanky, brunet history professor from
Pacific Lutheran University during a voir dire (with the jury absent) session to
allow Judge Thomas to determine his expert qualifications and the extent of
admissible testimony.
Pearson quickly elicited that Browning, 43, had studied the Holocaust for
17 years, and written two major books on the subject: The Final Solution and
the German Foreign Office (1978) and Fateful Months: Essays on the Emer-
gence of the Final Solution (1985). In addition, said the witness, a 24-volume
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,64 now being prepared in Israel, would include
a volume on National-Socialist policy toward the Jews, which he would edit
and largely write.
Christie questioned Browning more-intensively. “Do you take the posi-
tion,” he asked, “that all the claims about the Holocaust are true?”
When Browning said no, Christie asked how one could determine the
boundary between established fact and legitimate differences of interpretation.
“I believe it’s an established historical fact that there was a Nazi policy to
exterminate the Jews,” said Browning. “I think it is a legitimate academic de-
bate as to whether it was around five million or six million victims.”
Christie: What qualifies you to give an opinion as to the limits of what is a
legitimate academic debate?
My work as a professional historian, said Browning, where there are “rules
as to what provides evidence to make certain kinds of statements.”
People differed on where to draw the line, but “my understanding of the
[Harwood] pamphlet is that… in terms of everything I have seen and studied,
64
The encyclopedia, eventually published, consists of four volumes: Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclo-
pedia of the Holocaust, MacMillan, New York 1990. Editor’s note.
[it] is well beyond any disputed area of where that line would be drawn.”
“Having seen a great deal of evidence,” said Browning, and “having worked
with many historians in the field… I think I have a good sense of where the
effort is being made to find out all that we can…”
Historians work with four kinds of evidence, said Browning: documents,
eyewitness testimonies, physical, and circumstantial.
Concerning postwar trial evidence, Christie asked, “Are you sure that…
there were no compulsions of violence against [the accused witnesses]?”
Browning: I am aware of no compulsion being applied against these peo-
ple.
“Have you examined any of the concentration camps?” asked Christie.
“I think,” said Browning, “[that this is] a historical field where the physical
evidence is the least-satisfactory kind of evidence we have…”
Christie asked about the present status of the mainstream historians’ debate
on the Holocaust.
“The debate,” said Browning, “is over whether the policy emerged, in a
sense came together, in 1941. I don’t think either denies that at some point
there was a policy.”
Christie: You surely aren’t going to come to this court with a document de-
claring a policy, are you?
No, said Browning, but the language used and the subsequent events made
it “clear that [extermination] is the rational interpretation” of the documents.
Christie: You don’t reject material out of hand from anybody?
Browning: I’m always interested in receiving new evidence in the form of
new documents I haven’t seen… and physical evidence, if such were prof-
fered. Yes, the rest of my life I will spend looking for more evidence.
“In my view,” ruled Judge Thomas, “the Crown is entitled to call Dr.
Browning to testify as an expert, to give opinion evidence on the question of
the policy of the National-Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler towards the Jews of
Europe.”
The jury returned, and Thomas cautioned that the evidence of an “expert
witness” includes allowable opinion and hearsay. “[As with] any other wit-
ness,” he said, “you can accept, at a later stage, when you come to your delib-
erations, whatever amount of the testimony you wish – all, some or none.”
The weight to be attached to it “will be for you and you alone [to decide].”
“At my request,” Pearson asked Browning, “did you review [the Harwood]
pamphlet?”
Yes, said Browning, and the two spent the remainder of Monday going
over eight of the serious inaccuracies which Browning said he had found in
Did Six Million Really Die?
The first of these was Harwood’s assertion that those German Jews who
emigrated prior to 1939 all took a “sizable proportion” of their assets with
them. Browning disputed this by briefly describing the “series of measures”

taken by the National Socialists “to deprive the Jews of their property.”
Second on Browning’s list of Harwood mistakes was the claim that send-
ing Europe’s Jews to Madagascar was “a main plank of the National-Socialist
party platform before 1933,” that the French terminated negotiations on the
plan in 1940, and that a “national homeland for the Jews” had been envi-
sioned.
“The first time… a Nazi leader mentioned Madagascar is 1938,” said
Browning. The plan would have been imposed on the French, whose colony
Madagascar was. And the island would have become a “kind of extra-large
concentration camp,” under SS surveillance, so that no one could leave. The
idea was dropped as British control of the seas continued.
A third misrepresentation of Harwood’s, said Browning, was his treatment
of a discussion held on April 17, 1943 between Hitler and Miklos Horthy, the
Hungarian leader. Hitler had requested the release of 100,000 Hungarian Jews
to help build German planes. According to Harwood, “This took place at a
time when, supposedly, the Germans were already seeking to exterminate the
Jews, but Hitler’s request clearly demonstrates the priority aim of expanding
his labor force.”
Browning pointed out that, during the discussion, Hitler had called the
Jews “parasites,” who would foist Bolshevism on Europe. The solution had
been found in Poland. There the Jews who would not or could not work “had
to perish.” Hitler’s “priority aim” for the Jews, said Browning, was clearly not
labor but extermination.
Fourth on Browning’s list was Harwood’s assertion that Joseph Goebbels,
in early 1942, had favored dealing with the Jews by concentrating them “in
the east” or sending them to Madagascar, and had so indicated in a memoran-
dum dated March 7. What Harwood referred to, said Browning, were the so-
called “Goebbels Diaries,” in which the entry of March 27 spoke of the Jewish
evacuation eastward being “pretty barbaric,” and leading to the eventual liqui-
dation of perhaps 60 percent of Polish Jewry. “If we did not fight the Jews,”
Goebbels had written, “they would destroy us.” The horrible judgment was
“fully deserved by them” for having “brought on a new world war.”
A fifth misrepresentation of Harwood’s, said Browning, was his muddling
and distortion of Jewish population statistics in Europe during the thirties and
forties. Browning described three studies which the Germans themselves had
made in this area. They suggested, against Harwood, that the killing of six
million Jews was within the Nazis’ grasp.
In the summer of 1940, the German Foreign Office sought to know the
number of Jews in Europe, in connection with the Madagascar Plan. A Profes-
sor Burgdorfer made estimates of 9.8 to 10.7 million.
Also in the summer of 1940, the SS, again thinking of Madagascar, calcu-
lated that about 4 million Jews were then under German control, which did not
yet extend to eastern Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and some other im-
portant areas.
Finally, at the time of the Wannsee Conference, in January 1942, an esti-
mate of 11 million Jews in Europe was produced, though Browning found
“some clear errors” there, which caused the number to be “inflated.”
“In my opinion,” said Browning, “[Harwood] continually overestimates the
number of Jews who had emigrated [from Europe] and he subtracts that from
a beginning number that is too low because it doesn’t include Russia and thus
comes out with a figure that is not realistic.”
Fault Number Six on Browning’s list was Harwood’s assertion that “the
first accusations against the Germans of the mass murder of Jews in wartime
Europe was made by the Polish Jew Rafael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe, published in New York in 1943… His book claimed that
the Nazis had destroyed millions of Jews, perhaps as many as six million.”
Pearson took Browning to page 307 of the Lemkin book, where it states
that 3.03 million Jews had then died, of whom 1.7 million were murdered.
Pearson then asked Browning if he knew of an accusation prior to Lem-
kin’s.
Yes, said Browning, the Joint Allied Declaration of December 17, 1942,
which accused the Germans of a “coldblooded extermination” of the European
Jews. It was read in the British House of Commons, and mentioned in a foot-
note by Lemkin himself.
A seventh misrepresentation by Harwood, said Browning, involved the
several reports of SS Officer Kurt Gerstein, who, shortly before his death in
1945, described exterminations at Belzec and Treblinka. Harwood had indi-
cated that Gerstein had “absolutely no credibility,” said Browning, but, to
support that position, had stated two matters incorrectly. He had said that Ger-
stein’s sister was congenitally insane, and that Wilhelm Dibelius, the Evangel-
ical bishop of Berlin, had “denounced [Gerstein’s] memoranda as untrustwor-
thy.” By going to the source which Harwood himself had indicated, said
Browning, one found that it was Gerstein’s sister-in-law who was insane, and
that Dibelius had called Gerstein reliable and trustworthy.
The eighth alleged Harwood failing discussed was the claim that “there is
not a single document in existence which proves that the Germans intended to,
or carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews.”
“What documents would you point to?” asked Pearson.
One, said Browning, would be an excerpt, dated December 16, 1941, from
the official diaries of Hans Frank, the German Governor General in occupied
Poland. Frank had written that the Germans “sacrificed our best blood for the
preservation of Europe,” so it would not be right “if the pack of Jews were to
survive the war… They must go. I have initiated negotiation for the purpose
of having them pushed off to the east. In January a major conference will take
place in Berlin on this question, to which I shall send State Secretary Dr.
Buehler.”
“We must destroy the Jews, wherever we find them,” Frank continued, “in
order to maintain the entire structure of the Reich.”
The conference referred to was that held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee
on January 20, 1942, said Browning, which, “in my opinion… is the point at
which the ministerial bureaucracy… in Berlin [was] initiated into the plan for
the physical extermination of the European Jews.”
It was almost 5:00, so the jury was excused. Judge Thomas asked Pearson
if any Holocaust survivors would be testifying for the Crown.
No, said Pearson, Browning would be the last prosecution witness.65
On Tuesday, February 16, Pearson resumed his examination-in-chief of
Browning, reminding the witness of Harwood’s assertion about “not a single
document” proving the Germans murdered or intended to murder Jews, and of
his own testimony about the Hans Frank diary and the Wannsee Conference
protocol.
Pearson: What, in your opinion, was the state of Nazi policy towards the
Jews at the conclusion of the Wannsee Conference?
By then, said Browning, “the plan to murder the European Jews had taken
form.”
Pearson: And what were the sequence of events that followed the Wannsee
Conference?
To back up a bit, said Browning, “two extermination camps were being
constructed in the fall of 1941.” Chelmno and Auschwitz even performed
some gassings shortly before the Wannsee Conference. Belzec was opened
March 1942, Sobibor in May, and Treblinka in July. “By the end of 1942,
most of Polish Jewry had been killed.”
Pearson returned to the Hans Frank diary, and had Browning read from the
entry of December 9, 1942, where the Governor General of Poland bemoaned
the labor shortage due to the continuing loss of Jews.
Then Pearson turned to a third document, the long speech which Heinrich
Himmler delivered to leaders of the SS, in Posen on October 4, 1943. Brown-
ing was asked to read from the section titled by Himmler “Jewish Evacua-
tion,” and by the translators of the National Archives “The Clearing Out of the
Jews.”
“Most of you,” said Himmler, “must know what it means when 100 corps-
es are lying side by side, or 500 or 1000. To have stuck it out, and at the same
time… to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard.”
Pearson then read from Harwood: “Attempts to find ‘veiled allusions’ to
genocide in speeches like that of Himmler… at Posen in 1943 are… quite
hopeless.”
65
Two survivors did testify, however, in behalf of Ernst Zündel.
“Where is the speech now?” asked Pearson.

A sound recording exists, said Browning, with the original at the Bun-
desarchiv in Koblenz, West Germany.
Pearson turned next to Harwood’s treatment of the Einsatzgruppen, or
German “action groups,” in the occupied Soviet Union, which, for Browning,
constituted a ninth misrepresentation.
The Harwood pamphlet calls attention to the 1947 indictment at Nurem-
berg, which alleges that the four Einsatzgruppen killed not less than one mil-
lion Jews in the Soviet Union, because they were Jews. For Harwood, this was
“a kind of ‘Six Million’ in miniature,” since proven to be “the most enormous
exaggeration and falsification.”
Harwood also notes Gerald Reitlinger’s handling of the subject: “[Reit-
linger] considers Hitler’s order of July 1941 for the liquidation of the Com-
munist commissars, and he concludes that this was accompanied by a verbal
order from Hitler for the Einsatzgruppen to liquidate all Soviet Jews. If this
assumption is based on anything at all, it is probably the worthless Wisliceny
statement…”
Browning said in reply that “the historians that I have read, plus the docu-
mentation I have seen, would indicate that the number one million is the min-
imum.” As for Reitlinger, his chapter on the subject “does not refer at any
time to the Wisliceny statement.”66 Reitlinger, “like other historians, relies
primarily on a series of documents that we refer to as the Einsatzgruppen Re-
ports.” These were produced in Berlin from information sent from the field.
The numbers of executions were tallied and compiled, and then circulated to
SS leaders.
Pearson had Browning read from excerpts of several of these reports, in-
cluding the so-called “Stahlecker Report,” produced by Einsatzgruppe A
Commander Franz Stahlecker as a summary of his actions during mid-1941.
Reported executions ran into the tens and hundreds of thousands.
Pearson returned to a sentence from Harwood: “It is worth repeating that
these casualties were inflicted during savage partisan warfare on the Eastern
front, and that Soviet terrorists claim to have killed five times that number of
German troops.”
In rebuttal, Pearson had Browning describe the comparatively small losses
which the Germans themselves reported during this period of mass execution
of Jews and partisans.
Following a brief recess, Browning took up Item 10 in his critique of Har-
wood, the pamphlet’s “terribly troubling” account of the Warsaw Ghetto up-
rising, which not only understated the Jewish deaths, but “[imputed] that the
Jews were the aggressor” and that the Nazis had acted in self-defense. The de-
66
SS Captain Dieter Wisliceny gave a now-famous affidavit which described “written orders” to ex-
terminate the Jews and mentioned the figure of “six million.”
portations from the ghetto had not been “peaceful” prior to the uprising, as
Harwood stated: the Germans themselves had reported thousands of Jewish
fatalities from shooting wounds.
A relatively minor complaint of Browning’s concerned Harwood’s possi-
bly misleading use of a quote from historian Colin Cross: “In his recent book
Adolf Hitler [wrote Harwood] (London, 1973), Colin Cross, who brings more
intelligence than is usual to many problems of this period, observes astutely
that ‘The shuffling of millions of Jews around Europe and murdering them, in
a time of desperate war emergency, was useless from any rational point of
view’ (p. 307). Quite so, and at this point we may well question the likelihood
of this irrationalism, and whether it was even possible.”
Pearson had Browning read the sentences in Cross’s book which followed
the one quoted by Harwood: “Hitler believed it was a cleansing operation and
an act of ‘retribution.’ In reality he showed how far superstition could still
count in high politics of the twentieth century.”
Browning also read from a page where Cross likened the psychology be-
hind the “impersonal” killing of the gas chambers to that of “mass terroristic
bombing: the airmen who started the Hamburg fire storms did so impersonal-
ly; they would have found it repugnant had they been required to throw men,
women and children into fire with their bare hands.”
Item 12 on Browning’s list of errors was Harwood’s dismissal of Adolf
Eichmann. “Before his illegal kidnapping by the Israelis in May 1960,” wrote
Harwood, “and the attendant blaze of international publicity, few people had
ever heard of him. He was indeed a relatively unimportant person…”
Well, said Browning, Harwood refers continually to a book by Gerald
Reitlinger which appeared well before 1960 – and that book refers continually
to Eichmann. The latter, said Browning, “is clearly a very central figure [in
the Holocaust] and was known to be” before 1960. It was Eichmann who co-
ordinated the deportation of Europe’s Jews to the German camps.
Pearson read again from Harwood: “Strangely enough, the alleged ‘mem-
oirs’ of Adolf Eichmann suddenly appeared at the time of his abduction to Is-
rael. They were… supposed to have been given by Eichmann to a journalist
in the Argentine shortly before his capture – an amazing coincidence.”
Eichmann’s interviewer, said Browning, was a former SS man named Sas-
sen. “It isn’t coincidence because it was in fact Sassen’s attempt to peddle his
material to publishers [which partly] alerted the Israeli police to the fact that
Eichmann was alive, and thus helped to lead to his capture.”
Pearson: Now, what kind of record does Eichmann’s testimony provide the
historian?
It is, said Browning, “the most-extensive testimony of any one single individ-
ual involved in the Holocaust.” Eichmann had given about five “accounts
of his actions during this period.”
1. The materials collected in Argentina by Sassen.

2. The police interrogation in Jerusalem.
3. The memoirs which Eichmann wrote in his Jerusalem cell.
4. His courtroom testimony in Jerusalem.
5. Some handwritten notes which Eichmann gave to his attorney, Dr. Servati-
us.
“In every account that [Eichmann] gives,” said Browning, “he states that he
was called into the office of Reinhard Heydrich and… told flat out it was the
order of the Fuehrer that all the Jews of Europe were to be physically extermi-
nated.”
Eichmann also told about visiting various killing sites and writing the pro-
tocol of the Wannsee Conference. “What really upset Eichmann,” said Brown-
ing, were the accusations made against him in the memoirs of Rudolf Höss,
commandant of Auschwitz. Höss charged Eichmann with involvement in the
decision to build gas chambers at Auschwitz and other initiatives for which
Eichmann refused to take any responsibility.
Browning’s thirteenth complaint against Harwood was the latter’s assertion
that no Jewish Holocaust survivors had ever come forward to admit that they
had belonged to one of the “special detachments” or Sonderkommandos alleg-
edly charged with handling the gassing victims, both before and after the
deed.
The truth, said Browning, was that a Jew named Filip Müller had written
Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, “in which he de-
scribed in great detail his experiences” as one of the people “that emptied the
bodies out of the gas chambers, that worked in the gas chambers themselves.”
Browning also named two other such Jews: Rudolf Reder, “who indeed testi-
fied that he had taken bodies out of the gas chambers at Belzec,” and a man
named Podchlebnik, who said he did something similar at Chelmno.
Furthermore, said Browning, a larger number of people had claimed to
have “witnessed the gassings,” including “some 18 or so from Chelmno.”
Pearson repeated a statement of Harwood’s: “However, no living authentic
eyewitnesses of these gassings have ever been produced.”
Christie corrected him: “Produced and validated.”
“Yes,” agreed Judge Thomas.
“We’ll break it into two parts,” said Pearson.
The “validation,” Browning suggested, came in the courtroom testimony of
various survivors and camp guards.
The fourteenth and final alleged error in Harwood which Browning high-
lighted was the assertion that postwar Western observers were not permitted to
examine the camps in the Soviet zone of occupation, for which reason the al-
legations of extermination gradually shifted from well-known places like Da-
chau and Buchenwald to the less-known camps in Poland.
Browning offered one instance in rebuttal. A small group of Western

newsmen had been allowed to tour Majdanek, which was captured intact by
the Soviets, on August 27, 1944. Among them was Reporter William Law-
rence of the New York Times, who produced a Page-One story (dated August
30) with the sub-heading “Victims put at 1,500,000 in Huge Death Factory.”
Browning read Lawrence’s article to the jury. It described his visit to a site,
the forest at Krempitski, where “the authorities estimate there are more than
300,000 bodies.” Lawrence told of Germans executing up to 20,000 prisoners
a day at Majdanek, and burning their bodies in 10 to 12 minutes. Sometimes,
the victims were thrown in alive.
The Germans’ motive? According to the New York Times, not only to ex-
terminate but “as a means of obtaining clothing for the German people.”
Lawrence concluded: “I have been present at numerous atrocity investiga-
tions in the Soviet Union, but never have been confronted with such complete
evidence, clearly establishing every allegation made by those investigating the
German crimes. After inspection of Majdanek, I am now prepared to believe
any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.”
Browning neglected to inform the jury that leading “exterminationists” like
Raul Hilberg now allege that only about 50,000 Jews died at Majdanek over
several years. Yet he went out of his way to clarify that “both the Russians
and [Lawrence] are quite mistaken about the bathing of people who are going
to be gassed.”
Christie began his cross-examination by asking Browning if it troubled his
conscience to be testifying voluntarily at a trial which would be unconstitu-
tional in the United States.
No, said the American, he was satisfied that Canada “guaranteed due pro-
cess to a defendant.”
Browning serves on the advisory board of a journal called The Simon Wie-
senthal Center Annual. He rejected Christie’s suggestions that it is essentially
a political rather than an academic publication.
Christie asked Browning if he knew of “any greater restitution ever paid in
history” than West Germany’s to Israel. The professor answered that he
thought it “very likely” that the restitution paid after the Franco-Prussian War
approximated it, in terms of current purchasing power.
Christie asked Browning about Hilberg’s changed position on the existence
of a Hitler order for extermination, and he read aloud from Browning’s article
“The Revised Hilberg”: “In the new edition, all references in the text to a Hit-
ler decision or Hitler order for the Final Solution have been systematically ex-
cised.”
Certainly Hilberg had altered his position here, said Browning. “That’s
why one issues revised and new editions.”
Speaking for himself, Browning said, “I have… proposed that we have to
look at it in terms of a series of signals or incitements, that these are not nec-
essarily explicit, exact, precise orders, but a conveying to subordinates of his

[Hitler’s] hope that they will now move on to a newer stage or to do some-
thing more radical… a rather amorphous process.”
Christie suggested that Browning had never himself investigated any con-
centration camp or scientifically examined any alleged gas chamber.
Browning confirmed both suggestions.
In your evidence, said Christie, you often say “Nazis this” and “Nazis
that,” but, in your writings, it is more often “the Germans.”
Browning agreed that “you cannot talk about the Holocaust unless you cer-
tainly are looking at Germany, and not just Nazis.”
Christie asked if Browning agreed that the Holocaust was “unprecedented
and incomparable.”
Browning said he was “always hesitant to use [such] terms” for events
which were both unique and also comparable to others. He cited the massacre
of Armenians in Turkey, and the “auto-genocide” in Cambodia.67
Browning said of the Holocaust, “there were gassings, there were shoot-
ings, and there were deaths from the living conditions in which people were
held.”
But, he added under Christie’s questioning, he could not produce a docu-
ment which ordered the commencing or cessation of gassings; nor an organi-
zational plan or blueprint for the operation; nor any budget reports pertaining
to it. There were, however, “some documents relating to the expenses of de-
portation” and “to the property collected.”
Christie asked if there were “any expert reports [establishing] the use of ei-
ther a gas van or a gas chamber” for lethal purposes.
Browning mentioned Albert Widmann, a chemist with the Criminal Tech-
nical Institute, who said he was asked in the fall of 1939 to test carbon monox-
ide as a gassing agent for the euthanasia program.
“I’m interested in relation to the so-called extermination camps,” said
Christie.
We have eyewitness testimony, said Browning, that a chemist with the
Criminal Technical Institute measured carbon-monoxide levels inside a gas
van which was destined for Chelmno. The van was also tested with 40 Soviet
POWs inside, with lethal results. “I have not seen a written report about that
test.”
Under German law, said Browning, “I am not allowed to [state] the last
names” of those who testified that they witnessed these events. The court pro-
ceedings at Hanover showed the testimony of a Helmut H. and a Theodore L.
67
Both of which are now quite fashionable to mention. Just as fashionably, Browning overlooked
the vastly larger twentieth century killings in China and the Soviet Union, although he later noted
the (increasingly stylish) Ukrainian forced famine.
Christie pressed Browning about whether these men had actually testified
in a courtroom.
“These were the pretrial statements,” said Browning. He was not certain
whether they had actually testified in court.
“Can you tell me,” asked Christie, “if there’s any autopsy report of anyone
in any concentration camp… killed by Zyklon-B?”
Not to my knowledge, said Browning.
“Can you name one such witness [to gassings] who maintained this testi-
mony under cross-examination in a trial?” asked Christie.
“I presume,” said Browning, that Filip Müller at the Auschwitz trial and
Rudolf Reder at the Eichmann trial would have been cross-examined.
Christie mentioned the “sworn affidavits” after the war “to the effect that
thousands of people were gassed [at Dachau],” and asked, “Do you think
that’s credible?”
Browning said he had done no research on Dachau.
Christie put it to Browning that the British prosecutor at Nuremberg had al-
leged there were gassings at Dachau, Buchenwald and Oranienburg.
Well, said Browning, “there were many different charges” made at Nu-
remberg.
Christie: Have you undertaken or do you know anyone else who has under-
taken any tests as to authenticity of any of the documents you referred to in
your evidence earlier today?
Browning said he had held “many” of “the originals” in his hand, but knew
of no scientific tests as to the age of paper and so on.
Who signed the Wannsee protocol? asked Christie.
It was unsigned, said Browning, but a cover letter had Reinhard Heydrich’s
signature.
Are you aware, asked Christie, of the bad conditions endured by Adolf
Eichmann during his long interrogation?
Browning seemed uninformed, so Christie mentioned the days-long ses-
sions with the lights always on and Eichmann never knowing the time of day,
and his confusion on the stand about whether he had read something or was
remembering it.
Browning did not take the suggestions, so Christie turned to the subject of
scholarly credentials.
Browning agreed that an academic education was not a necessity for doing
solid research on the Holocaust. He also noted that Raul Hilberg, self-trained
in the subject, had had difficulty getting his “exterminationist” classic, The
Destruction of the European Jews, published as recently as 1961.
Following a short recess, and with the jury absent, Pearson objected to
Christie’s opening suggestion to Browning that a trial like Zündel’s would be
impossible in the United States. He especially objected because Christie had
argued the Zündel case before the Ontario Court of Appeal, and heard its pan-
el of judges state that freedom of speech was not absolute even in the U.S.
Christie agreed that American courts have not held freedom of speech to be
an absolute value, but said “there’s no Section 177 in American law of which I
am aware.” Harwood had been published there, but never prosecuted. His
main aim, said Christie, was to determine Browning’s “conscience” about tes-
tifying in such a case.
Pearson asked Judge Thomas to again instruct the jury that “freedom of
expression is not an issue in this case.”
Not now, said Thomas.
The jury returned, and Christie asked Browning if it “ever occurred to you
that the subject of the Holocaust is very useful politically to the state of Isra-
el?”
“It is not my field of expertise,” said Browning, but he thought some Israe-
lis were using the Holocaust politically. “I don’t like to see it used that way.”
Hadn’t the Holocaust become big business? asked Christie.
That was not a motivating force in his case, explained Browning. The Hol-
ocaust boom had started in the mid-seventies. “I got into this in 1971… The
advice of my professor was you can certainly go and do that as a graduate stu-
dent on a doctoral dissertation, but you should be aware there is no profes-
sional future in it.”
As a half-German, said Browning with some heat, he “resented” Christie’s
suggestions that he was somehow anti-German.
Christie asked Browning if he felt a Hitler order for extermination had oc-
curred.
“In the spring of 1941,” said Browning, “there were what I would call sig-
nals or incitements to those around him that he wished to have prepared
measures that would lead to the murder of Jews in Russia.”
Christie: There was a specific order for the killing of Jewish Bolshevik
commissars, wasn’t there?
Yes, said Browning, although the words used to designate the target may
have been slightly different.
Christie then returned to Hilberg’s treatment of the subject. Hadn’t Brown-
ing’s article “The Revised Hilberg” stated, “In [Hilberg’s] new edition, deci-
sions were not made and orders were not given”?
Yes, said Browning, “to indicate… that he’s trying to express what hap-
pened in a different kind of vocabulary.”
“Hilberg,” said Browning, “does not believe that this is a premeditated ac-
tion. As he is saying, [the] thinking converged in 1941.” Consequently, one
could not have had a “master plan or a blueprint” prior to that time.
Christie asked Browning if he would agree that Hilberg, between his two
editions, “made a significant change of interpretation concerning the decision-
making process and the role of Adolf Hitler there.”
Yes, said Browning, “compared with other changes… it is the biggest

change he made in the book.” Yet the chronology remained the same. “He still
sees the Final Solution as coming about in two phases, a decision-making pro-
cess in the spring [of 1941] for Russia and another in the summer [for Eu-
rope]…”
Christie mentioned Browning’s complaint against Harwood’s use of the
Colin Cross quote, and asked, “Harwood doesn’t say Colin Cross agrees with
his thesis, does he?”
Browning: I rather got the impression of that from the paragraph, yes.
Christie insisted that Harwood had used quotation marks and a page refer-
ence correctly, and Browning conceded that, “it may, indeed, be a proper
point that you are making.”
Christie later suggested that the Holocaust had helped to justify the West-
ern alliance with the Soviets, who “enslaved” so many countries.
Browning rejected the idea that the Holocaust was “a factor in the [war]
decisions that were made at that time.”
Wasn’t there the possibility of a “separate peace” between Britain and
Germany? asked Christie. Weren’t there indications of a German willingness
to negotiate a peace in the West?
Browning seemed unfamiliar with the subject.
“Do you agree,” asked Christie, “that if Raul Hilberg testified, at the time
[in 1985] when he had already [revised] his book, that he had not changed his
position from his first to his second book, that that wouldn’t be very honest?”
“It would depend upon what degree of change one was talking about,” said
Browning. Christie promised to pursue the matter, and the court was ad-
journed.
The case resumed on Wednesday, February 17, with Christie asking
Browning to agree with him that the Harwood pamphlet did not deny the de-
portation of Jews to concentration camps and ghettos, the Einsatzgruppen kill-
ings, and so on, but in fact denied three things: that anything like six million
Jews were killed, that an extermination plan or policy existed, and that homi-
cidal gas chambers were used in the killings.
Browning did not fully accept this suggestion. Harwood, he said, had de-
nied not only the existence of a plan to kill Jews but also the act of “deliberate
murder.” There were “no documents,” Harwood had said, to suggest that “the
Germans intended to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of the Jews.”
The “plan to murder” and the murder itself were “two different matters,”
agreed Judge Thomas.
Christie reiterated: the extermination plan was denied, the method of gas-
sing was denied, and the six million figure was denied. “But,” he said, “I sug-
gest the Einsatzgruppen are referred to because of numbers?”
Yes, said Browning, but “I would say that a very major element of the
Holocaust is denied in the pamphlet by the way in which the Einsatzgruppen’s
activities are represented, and I would say that is a very major departure be-
tween my view and theirs.”
Right, said Christie, but “you do not have one single evidence or proof that
any of those [Einsatzgruppen] documents were authenticated [scientifically]
do you?”
“I do not know,” said Browning, “if [such tests] have been done,” but the
reports were used in court cases where attorneys could presumably “cross-
examine and ask questions of that nature.” Browning admitted, however, that
he knew only “secondary sources” in this field.
Christie asked Browning if the “nod theory” was an idea of his – or, more
precisely, the words “it only took a nod from Adolf Hitler.”
“I did indeed coin the phrase,” said Browning.
Christie: So, Professor Browning, those [the Wannsee Conference protocol
and the Hans Frank diary entries] are the two most striking proofs of the [ex-
termination] plan; would that be fair?
Browning: Yes.
Christie: And there is no proof of a budget that you know of?
Browning: No.
And, said Christie, “no proof of a control mechanism except perhaps eu-
phemism” guided by “discretion” and “some intuition”?
“I infer,” said Browning, “that at some time in July [1941] they [Himmler
and Heydrich] were indeed convinced of what Hitler wanted from them, that
they then proceeded to act along a number of lines, and that the results of that
one can see at many different levels.”
“In terms of when and how the decisions were taken,” said Browning, “I
have only stated there are different possible interpretations, because the evi-
dence is not precise and, indeed, reasonable people can differ on this.”
Christie: Well, you say “when” or “how,” but I suggest to you that a rea-
sonable person can also disagree with you [about] if such a decision was taken
or communicated?
Browning: Indeed, Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen have argued that
there really wasn’t a Hitler decision, that it was a matter of local initiatives
that kind of snowballed into a major extermination program. Yes, even in that,
I would say one can reasonably differ.
But, said Christie, “you would not allow reasonable men to differ on
whether there were any actual gassings or not?”
Yes, said Browning, if their evidence “seemed persuasive.” But Harwood
works by “[denying] the existence of evidence that I have seen.”
Christie returned to Hilberg’s 1985 testimony concerning the existence or
not of a Hitler order, and put to Browning this exchange:
Question: In your opinion, was there an order of Adolf Hitler for the ex-
termination of the Jews?
Answer: That is my opinion, my conclusion.
Question: Well, yesterday, I think you told us you were very sure there was
an order?
Answer: Yes.
Pearson asked Christie to read a bit further.
Question: Is it a specific order?
Answer: Well, that is, of course, another matter. The form of the order,
said Hilberg, was a subject much debated.
Christie then cited Hilberg’s reference to the Holocaust, on another occa-
sion, as “not so much… a plan being carried out but an incredible meeting of
minds, a consensus, mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”
Browning said that he himself would focus less than Hilberg on “an almost
autonomous bureaucratic process,” and more on “the kind of initiatives and
signals coming from Hitler that were understood by those under him to be or-
ders.” Hilberg’s phrase “mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy” was, Brow-
ning suggested, “a metaphor,” a “figure of speech to indicate that it didn’t take
a major conference.”
“I would agree,” said Browning, “that documents can be read in different
ways,” but Harwood tended to “not even acknowledge the existence” of vari-
ous documents.
Christie returned to the diary of Hans Frank, and asked Browning if he had
been fair to quote a few brief excerpts “as evidence of [Frank’s] understanding
and intention.”
“Frank’s intentions and understanding changed back and forth a great
deal,” said Browning. He was a “very vacillating character,” a “volatile per-
sonality,” who swang between a pragmatic and a radical approach to the Jews.
Browning suggested that the excerpts he had read were “a fair representation
of what [Frank] thought” on those particular days.
The two men spent some time discussing Hans Frank, and the differences
among various portions of his diary, his testimony at the Nuremberg trial, and
other postwar statements prior to his execution. Browning noted that he had
not read the Frank transcript from Nuremberg, but had read “much” of the 43-
volume diary of 11 or 12,000 pages.
The chief point of contention was what Frank knew about the alleged poli-
cy of extermination and when he knew it. Christie found it remarkable that the
governor general of Poland could testify on April 18, 1946: “When, in 1944, I
got the first details from the foreign press about the things which were going
on, my first… remark was ‘Now, we know.’” (Browning had testified that
most Polish Jews were killed as early as 1942.)
“I think,” said Browning, “we’re confusing intimate knowledge of the
death camps and [knowledge of] a general policy of extermination.” Browning
felt that Frank had known about the latter previously.
Christie emphasized Frank’s honesty and his sense of moral responsibility.
Rather than destroy his diary, or portions of it, he had voluntarily given it all
to the American Army officer who arrested him. Later, he complained that the
prosecution at Nuremberg was misrepresenting his diary and taking things out
of context.
Browning recalled that, at Nuremberg, Frank “both talked in extravagant
terms about his guilt and… alternately denied it.”
“I put it to you,” said Christie, “that he, like a lot of the Nuremberg ac-
cused,” was convinced of his guilt in part by “extra-judicial” means.
Browning said he knew nothing of torture at Nuremberg.
Some of the Nuremberg defendants had alleged torture, suggested Christie,
but their complaints were stricken from the record, and “we know about them
because they were reported in the press.”
“I have seen a reference to that,” said Browning, but “I have not looked in-
to that.”
Christie: Anything that tended to show the, perhaps, innocence of the ac-
cused, you tend to disregard; isn’t that right?
Browning said he placed a greater weight on statements made by the ac-
cused at a time when their own guilt or innocence was not being established,
because, of course, “they have a highly vested interest.”
“You don’t think the prosecution witnesses at Nuremberg had any vested
interests?” asked Christie. “You believe those, but you disbelieve the de-
fense?”
“I would not make a blanket statement,” said Browning.
A while later, Browning noted that “at many occasions, Frank stands for
what might be called a moderate policy” of enlisting Polish cooperation. At
other times, he was radical.
There was a guerilla war going on, said Christie, with little or no distinc-
tion made between German soldiers and civilians.
Yes, said Browning, but mainly in the latter part of the war, whereas
Frank’s radical statements were mainly toward the beginning.
Christie suggested there was fierce Polish resistance even in 1940, so
Browning promised to bring, the next day, the minutes of a May 1940 meeting
of the German occupation government, so they could check the context to-
gether.68
Christie suggested again that “the Wannsee Protocol actually describes a
formula for exploiting Jewish labor in the East, as it says it is.”
Browning disagreed.
Christie asked about crematoria, and Browning stated that “most of the
disposal of bodies did not take place in a crematorium. Often, the camps…
used burning in pits.”
Well, said Christie, that is why the 1944 aerial reconnaissance photographs
of Auschwitz are so important. In none of them does one find a trace of smoke
68
For what Browning found, see page 94.
from the alleged burning pits nor even from the crematoria, which were “sup-
posed to be belching smoke.”
Browning: One would have to look at the dates of the photos and would
have to note the arrival [dates] of transports. After a break for lunch, Christie
read some more of Hilberg’s 1985 testimony about a Hitler order.
Question: So you’d have to correct that statement [claiming there was a
Hitler order] in your second edition, right?
Answer: No, I’m not saying that I have to correct this statement but there
are corrections in the second edition, of course.
Christie then read to Browning a sentence from his article “The Revised
Hilberg”: “In the new edition, all references in the text to a Hitler decision or
Hitler order for the Final Solution have been systematically excised…”
“It wouldn’t be correct to say that there was no correction… would it?”
asked Christie.
“It would depend,” said Browning, “upon how Professor Hilberg under-
stood the questions that you asked.”
Christie: Wouldn’t it have been more honest to say what you said, namely
that in the new edition, all references in the text to a Hitler decision or order
for the Final Solution have been systematically excised? That would be the
truth, wouldn’t it?
“It would have been,” said Browning. “If he had said such, it would have
agreed with what I said here. I don’t know what was in his mind” at the time.
But, added Browning, “[Hilberg] goes on [in his revised book] to add after
that that Hitler is very much at the center of it and that his wishes, desires,
comments in a sense help to crystallize this.”
Christie: I suggest to you, sir, that an author with the knowledge that Dr.
Hilberg possesses three months before his book is released probably knows
what’s in his second edition, right?
The book “certainly would have been in manuscript form,” said Browning,
“probably beyond that.”
“Let me suggest,” said Christie, “that it’s very important in this whole dis-
cussion just what Hitler knew or didn’t know because we’re talking about a
dictatorship, where the dictator is supposed to make the plans. Isn’t that a fair
statement?”
Browning: No, I don’t think we have said that he makes the plans. I have
argued that he, in a sense, gives the signal for the sense of direction and that
others respond to that by drawing up plans.
Isn’t it fair to say, asked Christie, that the Harwood thesis is “supported by
the fact that you can’t point to a decision of the dictator”?
Certainly, said Browning, the lack of any definite information had been
used to advance that kind of argument. “We cannot point to a particular meet-
ing or particular words. We do not know those.” One gets into “probabilities”
where the question of a Hitler order is concerned.
When the allegation is so grave, asked Christie, shouldn’t a reasonable per-

son demand “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”?
Well, said Browning, the documentation is much-more-extensive when it
comes to the extermination as opposed to the Hitler order. There one is able to
go “beyond reasonable doubt.”
Browning explained how Hilberg had gone through a vast amount of “very
obscure” documents from German organizations at different levels, and “what
he sees, time and again, is a capacity of officials to operate without an explicit
order” – “lots of initiatives, lots of receptivity.” Browning had himself used
the word “self-propelled” to “express Hilberg’s study of those many kinds of
activities.”
Christie suggested that the German term “Final Solution” did not always
mean extermination, and Browning agreed.
Christie: Could you tell us how the SS or people supposedly implementing
this plan would be able to discern the difference in meaning when one word is
supposedly endowed with two meanings in much the same operation – that is,
deportation to the East – without a dictionary?
“I would say,” replied Browning, “that they would get their meaning from
the political context.”
Christie: Okay. So, these people are supposedly endowed with a political
perception that doesn’t require written explanations and at one time the word
can mean just emigration and another time it supposedly means extermination.
Am I understanding you correctly?
Browning: The term does change its meaning.
Christie: But we don’t have documents to explain the meaning change in
any literal form to help all these people understand it.
Browning: There is not a vocabulary code sheet sent out to say such-and-
such now means something else.
Browning suggested that an example would make things clearer. In Serbia,
in the fall of 1941, the Germans were contending with guerrillas. “As the par-
tisan war increased, they asked [Berlin] for reinforcements. They were told
this was not possible, use draconic terror instead, and so the retaliation then
becomes something to set an example that will deter anyone else and they
begin shooting more people.”
About a hundred hostages were eventually shot for every German killed
outside the conventions of land warfare. Soon this ratio could not be met, and
the Germans began executing instead the “totally expendable” Jewish popula-
tion, which was already incarcerated.
Later, Browning mentioned a gas van being sent to occupied Yugoslavia,
and Christie asked him: “Do you have any knowledge of gas vans for delous-
ing used by German troops and used in various ways in the times we are
speaking about? Disinfection vans for clothing, to kill lice?”
Browning said he presumed such things existed, but had never seen any
plan for any kind of gas van.
Christie: I suggest if you go to Dachau, you can see the [delousing] cham-
bers used and they have a hot-air-vent system and a number of other things.
“I was in Dachau,” said Browning, but don’t recall seeing those things.
Christie: You’ve done extensive research for your Serbian article through
the Yugoslav Military Archives; is that right?
Yes, said Browning, but “most of the documentation comes from other
sources.”
Well, said Christie, Tito and his Communist partisans became the govern-
ment of Yugoslavia. “Do you suspect he might have been a little bit biased
and maybe a little bit forceful in the way those records were kept and creat-
ed?”
“I don’t know,” said Browning, “that any of the material I got in Belgrade
was essential.”
Browning had never seen a plan for a gas van, so Christie asked if he had
seen a photograph of the interior of one.
No, said Browning.
Christie: You put a photo in one of your books.
Browning: That is an exterior photo. That is a photo [which] the Poles, I
believe, sent to Yad Vashem [the Israeli Holocaust memorial center]. I don’t
know for a fact it is a gas van. It is one they labelled as a gas van.
Christie: You put it out as a gas van, isn’t that true?
Browning: It is in the book.
Christie mentioned an article of Browning which summarizes “seven dif-
ferent versions” of when, how, and by whom the alleged extermination deci-
sion was made. The historians concerned ranged from Lucy Dawidowicz to
David Irving. Browning described the former’s position as being that Hitler
knew by at least the mid-1920s that he wanted to kill the Jews, and the latter’s
as being that “Hitler made no decision and was unaware.”
Well, said Browning, everything comes back not to “the decision-making
process at the top,” for which we have only “scanty documentation,” but to
“the documentation of the implementation,” where “we have had much more
to deal with.”
Christie: Let me put it to you that you are jumping into a grey area in the
middle because there’s nothing at the top and you don’t even look at the bot-
tom, which is the concentration camps where you say these things are sup-
posed to have occurred.
“There is not much to look at,” said Browning, in the extermination camps
in Poland.
Christie: Well, there’s a lot to look at, sir, in Auschwitz and you’ve never
been there.
Nor to Majdanek, added Browning, because “the testimonies with which I

have worked have seemed eminently plausible to me.”
Christie read from an article of Browning in response to the respected his-
torian Martin Broszat. “Broszat,” wrote Browning, “is disturbed by the ab-
sence of any reference in post-war interrogations [and] surviving diaries by
close associates like Göring, Ribbentrop, Frank or Goebbels to a specific ver-
bal order by Hitler for total extermination.”
So, said Christie, the Goebbels and Frank diaries do not, in Broszat’s
judgment, refer to a Hitler order.
Correct, said Browning, but “I tried to assemble some evidence [in my ar-
ticle] to show that it wasn’t quite as lacking as [Broszat] had concluded.”
The remaining minutes of the day’s testimony were devoted to Browning’s
first criticism of Harwood. Christie sought to show that Browning did not real-
ly know what proportion of their property the emigrating German Jews were
able to take with them in the 1930s. After some discussion of the German
government’s limitations and the Jews’ 12 ways around them (as listed by
Hilberg), Browning admitted, “I do not know the proportion.”
The following morning, Thursday, February 18, Christie requested a mis-
trial. He alleged that the court translator, Helga Haines, had been seen discuss-
ing the case in front of two jury members in the cafeteria. Haines denied it.
Judge Thomas thanked Christie for bringing the matter to his attention, but
ruled that without stronger evidence of an impropriety, he could not grant the
motion.
Shortly before noon, Christopher Browning took the stand for his fourth
day of testimony. Christie began by asking him, with regard to the Hans Frank
diaries, what he had found to be the context of the harsh statements made in
about May 1940.
Browning asked to correct his previous testimony. Partisan activity and the
threat of the same had in fact been “one cause” given by Frank and the Ger-
mans for their actions at the time.
In reply to that, said Christie, he wished to suggest that “as early as 1939,
there was intense violence against… the Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans] in
the Polish areas,” which was “widely reported… as the reason for the German
invasion itself.”
Browning: That certainly was part of the German propaganda.
Browning acknowledged “at least one major incident in one town.”
Christie: Well, let me suggest to you there is something called the White
Book. Are you familiar with that?
Browning: I’ve heard the title.
Christie: Yes, and it is a series of purported documents, isn’t it?
Browning: Relating to the outbreak of the war.
Christie: Yes, and it explains with cases, names, dates and circumstances
what the Germans at least alleged was done to [ethnic Germans] in Polish ter-
ritories, doesn’t it?
“Yes,” said Browning. “Those allegations were made.”
Christie: And do you recall looking at the White Book allegations?
Browning: I have not looked at the White Book.
“Would you agree,” asked Christie, “that you should look at all evidence,
even what you call ‘German propaganda,’ to determine if it might have a bear-
ing on [Hans] Frank’s state of mind when he wrote what you say was a state-
ment about exterminating the Jews? Would you say that would be right for a
historian to do?
“I am always engaged in the process of seeking new evidence,” said
Browning.
Christie: How did you manage to decide that was German propaganda
without ever seeing that book, sir?
Browning: On the basis of secondary literature.
“Could I show you the primary literature, the published documents?” asked
Christie. “Would you recognize them?”
“No,” said Browning, “I have not seen this before.”
Weren’t the White Books intended to explain to the German people why
Poland was being invaded? asked Christie.
I assume so, said Browning.
Christie: As a historian, your purpose being to, perhaps, hear both sides of
an argument, maybe even report on both sides of a dispute, like why nations
go to war, wouldn’t you think that looking at the German White Book, which
purports to explain the German reason for going to war, would be an im-
portant thing for a historian to do in order to have balance in his perception of
the problem?69
“It is a document among many,” said Browning.
Well, said Christie, “Do you know of any other German document than the
White Book which puts forward the German official reason for going into Po-
land?”
More-useful, said Browning, would be unofficial German documents
which revealed the decision-making process without trying to justify it.
Christie: Wouldn’t you say, sir, that the whole Nuremberg trials was an of-
ficial position for the Allies, and perhaps the propaganda label might apply to
it as well?
I’m not able to answer that, said Browning.
69
Lately, the word seems to have gone out that the historian’s and the educator’s duty is to not hear
both sides of one conflict – that involving National-Socialist Germany. Individuals who have
bucked this informal edict have been reprimanded in public with the warning that there is nothing
on the other side to understand, and humiliated with the suggestion that perhaps they belong to
“the other side” if they question this new dogma of an existential and causative vacuum.
Christie mentioned “a source that was incorporated into the official ideas
expressed at Nuremberg,” namely the War Refugee Board report based on
Rudolf Vrba, which claimed that 150,000 French Jews were gassed at Ausch-
witz between April 1942 and April 1944. He asked Browning if it disturbed
him as an historian that Serge Klarsfeld had recently shown that only about
75,000 French Jews were ever deported.
No, said Browning, in spite of Nuremberg, the Vrba account never had the
“halo of official stamp.” He agreed that “the figure for French Jews has been
reduced by one-half.”
“You’re wrong,” said Christie. Klarsfeld never said all of the 75,000
French Jewish deportees had been gassed or even died.70
I stand corrected, said Browning.
Christie directed Browning’s attention to the first sentence in Harwood’s
introduction: “In the following chapters the author has, he believes, brought
together irrefutable evidence…” [Emphasis added here.]
Browning agreed with Christie that Harwood was “stating his opinion.”
“Yes,” said Christie, “and he’s talking about the whole of the following
chapters, isn’t he?”
Browning agreed that it was “chapters” plural. He also agreed that expres-
sions like “… the author has, he believes…” appeared in his own work and
that of every historian.
“Let me suggest,” said Christie, that “you yourself write basically opinions
substantiated by pieces of evidence.”
True, said Browning, but there are “different degrees of certainty” regard-
ing evidence. He mentioned a document he had shown earlier and noted, “I
don’t think we look at that and say that is a matter of interpretation…”
Christie: Sir, didn’t you just use the words “I don’t think”?
Browning: I used the words “I don’t think.”
Christie: Because you are again expressing your opinion, sir.
Browning: I was expressing my opinion.
Christie: And I am not objecting to that, but what I’m saying is when you
are stating things as facts, often and maybe all the time, unless you have per-
sonal experience, you must concede that what you even stated as a fact in his-
tory, it remains your opinion.
“I think,” said Browning, “there are differing degrees of probability.”
“Again… your best opinion, right?”, aked Christie.
Yes, said Browning.
Christie: And I put it to you that in your formulation of various opinions on
history, you yourself ignore some of the evidence because you call some of it
70
Nor did he say that all the dead succumbed at Auschwitz, nor that they died during the particular
two-year period alleged.
propaganda? I’ll never read all the relevant evidence, said Browning, “because
every question leads to another.”
Asked about the dubious testimony of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf
Höss, Browning stated: “When I look at the testimony of an individual, I ask a
number of questions about it. Is it corroborated by documentary evidence? Is
it corroborated by eyewitness evidence? Is it internally consistent? Is it plausi-
ble? Is it self-interested? There is a whole range of questions that one asks…”
And, he added, one may accept part of a testimony and reject the rest.
Christie: Do you know that in his memoirs [meaning Höss] is allowed to
write about torture by the British when he’s in Polish hands. You know that?
Browning: He does not write about Polish torture when he is in Polish
hands.
Christie: No, that’s what we call diplomacy, isn’t it?
“What do you think of eyewitnesses like [Rudolf] Vrba?” asked Christie.
“Do you regard him as credible?”
Yes, said Browning, “insofar as [he is] corroborated by” other eyewitness-
es.
Christie mentioned the wartime aerial photos of Auschwitz, and Browning
conceded that the only one he ever saw was on a museum wall in Israel.
Christie and Browning discussed the four kinds of historical evidence that
the latter had mentioned earlier. Browning noted, “I don’t start with the [con-
clusion] and then seek out the evidence. No, I don’t believe that is the se-
quence.”
Christie: I’m suggesting to you that, actually, you’ve done that on a num-
ber of points, and I’ll make a specific reference so we don’t get off into the
wild blue yonder. I suggest to you that you’ve never, for example, in all your
research, gone and talked to a defense counsel for any of those people charged
to see what their side of the story might be. Isn’t that true?
Browning: I never talked to a defense counsel.
Christie: But you will certainly have talked to prosecutors in the [West
German] Central Office and authorities for the prosecution in Germany, ha-
ven’t you?
Browning: I have met them, yes.
Christie: And you have derived documents from them, haven’t you?
Browning: I have derived documents, yes.
Christie: Have you ever asked the defense counsel for any documents?
Browning: No, I have not.
“Frequently,” said Christie, “I noticed you referred to testimony… in your
work.” Are you sure, he asked, “that in the cases you cite that you’ve exam-
ined the cross-examination of those witnesses to see if they maintained their
stories under cross-examination?”
Keep in mind, said Browning, that trial transcripts are not available in
these European cases. “I attempt to look at the judgment, which will summa-
rize the evidence given…”
“Don’t you ‘know,” asked Christie, “of trials in Germany where when the
witnesses didn’t give satisfactory testimony they were arrested and charged
themselves,” such as the Frankfurt trials?
Browning said he knew nothing of such events.
Isn’t physical evidence important? asked Christie.
Yes, it’s one kind, said Browning.
“I put it to you,” said Christie, “that [aerial photos of Auschwitz] were tak-
en on over 30 occasions in 1944.”
Browning said he had not realized the number was nearly so high.
“Are you aware,” asked Christie, “of all the survivor [accounts] of smoke
and flame shooting out from chimneys and crematoria?”
Yes, said Browning.
Christie: You realize that those aerial photographs totally deny, by their ex-
istence, the stories of the people who allege smoke from the crematoria chim-
neys shooting with flames or any smoke coming from those chimneys?
Browning: I do not know that.
Christie: You don’t know. Do you have a curiosity about those matters?
Browning: It would be another avenue to pursue.
“Isn’t it true,” asked Christie, “that your references [earlier] to the Frank
diaries [represent] a very, very small portion of all the available information
about Hans Frank?”
Yes, said Browning. “Anybody who is writing about Hans Frank will be
making selections.”
And at Nuremberg, asked Christie, wasn’t it the prosecution “who had con-
trol of all the German documents and decided who got what”?
Browning said he did not know.
Christie read to Browning a part of Hans Frank’s “last recorded words,”
spoken to the Nuremberg Tribunal on August 31, 1946: “There is still one
statement of mine which I must rectify. On the witness stand I said that a
thousand years would not suffice to erase the guilt brought upon our people
because of Hitler’s conduct of this war. Every possible guilt incurred by our
nation has already been completely wiped out today, not only by the conduct
of our wartime enemies toward our nation and its soldiers, which has been
carefully kept out of this trial, but also by the tremendous mass crimes of the
most frightful sort, which, as I have now learned, have been, and still are, be-
ing committed against Germans by Russians, Poles, Czechs, especially in East
Prussia… Who will ever judge these crimes against the German people? I end
my final statement in the sure hope that from all the horrors of the war… a
peace may perhaps still arise in whose blessings even our nation may be able
to participate, but it is God’s eternal justice in which I hope our people will be
secure and to which alone I trustfully submit.”
Well, said Browning, Frank must still have accepted the reality of massive
wartime German atrocities, “or what were [the massive postwar Allied atroci-
ties] being balanced against?”
After a lunch break, Christie noted the religious character of Frank’s “last
utterance.”
Browning agreed that Frank had said “I do not wish to leave any hidden
guilt.”
Christie then observed that Frank did not “indicate knowledge of [any] ex-
termination program.”
Jews are not mentioned either, said Browning. “He isn’t specific.”
Christie briefly addressed Browning’s contention that the Madagascar Plan
for Jewish emigration was not a “main plank” of the National-Socialist plat-
form prior to 1933.
Browning said he had seen some reference to a pamphlet advocating Mad-
agascar from this early period, but he stood by what he had said.
Perhaps, said Christie, this was only a “misunderstanding… of what you
mean by main plank.”
“Main” is another “relative term,” agreed Browning. Browning later men-
tioned the Goebbels diaries entry of March 27, 1942 as evidence for the “de-
velopment of the second phase” of the Holocaust (involving non-Soviet Jews),
so Christie asked if Browning knew how the diaries had come to light.
“I do not know,” said Browning, “that different sections have been found
in different places.”
Yes, said Christie, “typewritten pages found by a junk dealer” and others
after the war.
Christie suggested that Holocaust orthodoxy was “a form of conspiracy
theory,” because “without a plan to exterminate… you [could hardly] have
these things happening by accident.” So it was really a “secret plan and I say
to you that’s a conspiracy theory.”
When Browning disagreed, Christie asked him to name “any other event in
history” with so great an effect where so much evidence was missing.
Well, said Browning, “I think we know much less about” events like Cam-
bodia, Stalin’s purges, and the induced famine in the Ukraine.
“Do you have any evidence of a million bodies?” asked Christie.
They were all burned, said Browning.
Then why, asked Christie, do we not find evidence in the literature of the
vast amounts of coal needed?
Browning: Most of the bodies were burned in pits. I have not seen docu-
ments referring to fuel.
Christie: No. I suggest to you that we don’t have documents either which
indicate [why] the large volumes that would be required of this gas Zyklon-B
to exterminate the millions of people were the same volumes that were sent to
places like Oranienburg and other German concentration camps, where no gas
chambers existed.
Oranienburg could have shipped the gas on to other camps, said Browning.
Christie asked Browning if he would believe the testimony of someone like
Kurt Gerstein, “who told you 25 million people [were gassed] and clothes
[were] piled seven stories high.”
Browning said he did not believe he had ever cited Gerstein, but “given
what I know has transpired in the last trial with Hilberg… if I used it, I would
be careful to qualify it.”
Christie: But it wouldn’t be fair or intellectually honest to leave out those
parts from the reader when presenting that so-called eyewitness to the public
for their assessment, would it?
“If, as in this case,” said Browning, “it has become a matter of controversy,
historians certainly should address the issue.”
Returning to Harwood’s mention of the Goebbels diaries, Christie suggest-
ed, “So, he edited in a way you would regard as dishonest. He edited it in a
way that supports his argument but it ignores some other evidence that should
have been included. Would that be fair?”
Absolutely, said Browning. He cites the March 7 entry, but ignores March
27, which says that “about 60 percent of [the Jews] will have to be liquidat-
ed.”
That’s in the context of their being evacuated eastward under harsh condi-
tions, said Christie. “There’s nothing there that refers to an extermination.”
“I would not [put] the passive tone on it that you [do],” said Browning. “I
think the statement implies, as I read it, a much-more-definite activity.”
“Isn’t it true,” asked Christie, “that one year later Goebbels delivered a
speech” in which he still said, “If one day a Jewish state is created on some
territory [et cetera]…”?
It would depend, said Browning, on whom he was addressing, and that sort
of thing.
Christie then addressed the problem of the diaries’ authenticity. They had
passed through various hands, and revisionists had noted the simplicity of in-
tercollating pages with a typewriter. The original edition even contained a
stamp which said the U.S. government “neither warrants nor disclaims the au-
thenticity of this manuscript.”
Browning was unaware of the matter.
Christie turned next to Harwood’s handling of Jewish population statistics.
The exchanges which followed mirrored the complexity of the subject, with
the last one suggesting their nature:
Browning had cited Gerald Reitlinger against Harwood on the question of
Jewish emigration from Poland. Christie noted that Harwood said “an estimat-
ed 500,000 [Jews] emigrated prior to the outbreak of war,” while Reitlinger
said 700,000 left “pre-war Poland,” and asked Browning if Harwood’s

500,000 was not in fact “a low figure from that reading.”
“No,” explained Browning. “Prior to the outbreak of war is a temporal
term. Pre-war Poland is a geographical term to indicate which boundaries we
are speaking of.”
Christie: Would you agree with me that a legitimate confusion could arise
if a person took pre-war Poland to mean a temporal description rather than a
geographic description?
“I don’t think it’s that confusing,” said Browning.
Christie cited Browning’s opinion, given in a 1987 lecture, that “History is
probably the most inexact of the social sciences.” He then suggested that with
a subject as complex as the Holocaust, “you’re dealing with inferences, suspi-
cions, probabilities and estimates, and [all of that], in essence, is opinion.”
“History includes those,” said Browning, “but I would not say that is the
total.”
The trial resumed on Friday, February 19. Christie reminded Browning of a
question he had asked him during Monday morning’s brief cross-examination
on his professional qualifications. The question was who he regarded as au-
thorities in the field of historical methodology. Browning had named Fritz
Stern and E.H. Carr.
Christie produced a copy of Carr’s What Is History? and ascertained that
Browning was familiar with it.
He then read from page 23, where Carr says, “Study the historian before
you begin to study the facts… What bees he has in his bonnet.”
Christie suggested that “perhaps the majority of your work is published by
sources that may have an ax to grind,” but Browning rejected the suggestion.
Christie returned to Carr: “When you read a work of history, always listen
for the buzzing. If you can detect none, then either you are tone deaf or your
historian is a dull dog.”
That’s what it says, agreed Browning.
Christie (reading): The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmon-
ger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inac-
cessible ocean and what the historian captures will depend partly on chance,
but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he
chooses to use. These two factors can, of course, be determined by the kind of
fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he
wants.
I said yesterday that writing history involves selection, noted Browning,
but putting facts to the right kinds of tests precludes inventing them.
Christie turned to page 29 of Carr, and read: “As any working historian
knows, if he stops to reflect on what he is doing as he thinks and writes, the
historian is engaged in a continuous process of molding his facts to his inter-
pretation and his interpretation to his facts. It is impossible to assign primacy

to one over the other.”
“I suggest, sir,” said Christie, “that is a correct interpretation of what really
honestly goes on when a historian tries to get meaning out of this immense sea
of facts which he has to select from. Isn’t that true?”
“I would not phrase it [to say] molding facts to his interpretation,” said
Browning.
Christie mentioned Hilberg’s testimony on the Gerstein statements, and
Browning conceded, “I certainly became much more highly sensitized to the
Gerstein report through reading that.”
Christie then suggested that “one of the major areas that perhaps you and
Dr. Hilberg have not explored is to test the credibility of what you have called
the consistent eyewitness reports with the physical possibilities of accomplish-
ing those statements by examining the scenes where those crimes were sup-
posed to have occurred. If there is an area which is lacking in your work, it is
on-site inspection of those places. Would you agree?”
Browning: I have already said I have not done on-site inspection. I also
noted that, at most of these places, there is no physical evidence left to inspect.
Christie: Well, that is your statement without having looked, though, isn’t
it?
“That is correct,” said Browning. “I have not gone to the camps.”
Having read the Harwood pamphlet and Dr. Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century, said Christie, “would you agree… that the revisionist
view of [the Holocaust] looks more at the physical evidence… of these
camps, and tries to apply… scientific analysis to the eyewitness testimony to
see if those things are physically possible?”
Browning said he agreed at least that revisionism paid more attention to the
physical evidence.
Christie suggested to Browning that, in all his evidence, the Einsatzgrup-
pen reports were the only wartime documents which cited numbers of execut-
ed Jews.
“Those are the ones that state numbers of executed Jews,” said Browning.
So, suggested Christie, those reports would be your “only clear evidence of
what appears to be total falsehood” in Harwood.
The other evidence implied or referred to an extermination plan, said
Browning. Yes, said Christie, and “those do not articulate anything to do with
specific dead Jewish people?”
“That is correct,” said Browning.
Asked by Christie to “get to the nub” of what is false in Harwood’s treat-
ment of the Einsatzgruppen reports, Browning said, “The essence is that he is
dismissing as a popular myth the fact that many hundreds of thousands of
Jews were shot in Russia.”
Harwood estimated 100,000, said Christie. He suggested to Browning,

“[Y]ou ignored [Harwood’s] sources on this point and didn’t check them at
all.”
“I did check the documents,” said Browning, though not R.T. Paget’s book
on the trial of General von Manstein.
“You really should have,” said Christie. “I suggest to you, sir, that the only
place those documents that you brought out have ever been tested in a court of
law, according to vaguely similar rules to ours, in the history of the world,
where the victors were not the judges and German lawyers weren’t the de-
fenders, was in the case of von Manstein… isn’t that true?”
“There were many post-war German trials,” said Browning.
Christie: Yes. But for the first time in history in the Manstein trial, chal-
lenge and checking of those reports you have put forward was done. Do you
know that?
“I think the Einsatzgruppen reports are valid,” said Browning.
Christie held up Paget and said, “This is a book by a defense counsel, one
of the people you haven’t consulted so far. Right?”
Browning: I have not consulted Mr. Paget.
Christie: Or any other defense lawyers in these cases I am aware of; isn’t
that true?
Browning: That’s true.
“Have you read any books by defense counsel?” asked Christie.
“Not that I know of,” said Browning.
Christie read from Paget’s critique of the Einsatzgruppen reports, which
gave his various reasons for finding the numbers allegedly executed during
short time spans to be far beyond the realm of possibility. “In one instance,”
wrote Paget, “we were able to check their figures. The SD [security police]
claimed they had killed 10,000 [Jews] in Simferopol during November and
December [1941]. They reported Simferopol clear of Jews. By a series of
cross-checks, we were able to establish that the execution of the Jews in Sim-
feropol had taken place on a single day, 16 November. Only one company of
SD were in Simferopol. The place of execution was 15 kilometers from the
town. The numbers involved could not have been more than about 300. These
300 were probably not exclusively Jews… The Simferopol incident received a
good deal of publicity… As a result, we received a large number of letters
and were able to call several witnesses who had been billeted with Jewish
families and also spoke with the… synagogue and a Jewish market… It was
indeed clear that the Jewish community had continued to function quite open-
ly in Simferopol and although several of our witnesses had heard rumors
about an SD excess committed against Jews in Simferopol, it certainly ap-
peared that that Jewish community was unaware of any special danger.”
Paget and his staff found many contradictions in the Einsatzgruppen re-
ports and concluded that “at least one zero would [probably] have to be
knocked off the total [extermination] claim.”
Knock a zero off a million and you get 100,000, said Christie, “so appar-
ently Harwood believes Paget” rather than the Einsatzgruppen reports.
“Apparently,” said Browning.
So, said Christie, if anyone doubts Harwood or his source Paget, they can
“find out where the trial records are” and do some “primary research.”
Christie turned to the subject of gas vans, and Browning stressed that the
correspondence he had seen on the matter “gives no basis for assuming these
are for fumigation.”
Christie returned to Harwood’s assertion that “no living, authentic eyewit-
nesses to these gassings has ever been produced and validated.”
What is meant by validated? asked Browning. “I am not aware of an insti-
tution that hands out a wall plaque that validates you as a… witness,” but
there were judicial proceedings.
Christie asked about Filip Müller’s testimony at the Auschwitz Trial in
Frankfurt, and Browning conceded he did not know if Müller had been cross-
examined, or whether the testimony he had read was in fact a pretrial deposi-
tion.
“What about any other authentic living witnesses?” asked Christie. “Has
anyone been cross-examined, tested?”
Browning mentioned a number of postwar trials and said, “That there was
no cross-examination in all of that I would find inconceivable.”
Then Browning recalled the 1987 Jerusalem trial of John Demjanjuk, and
said he believed Demjanjuk’s attorney “did cross-examine quite vigorously
the eyewitnesses there from Treblinka.”
Perhaps so, said Christie, but what were they cross-examined about?
“Cross-examined as to was this the man,” said Browning.
Exactly, said Christie, who then suggested that “you know and I know”
that defense attorneys in Holocaust cases never endanger their clients’ chances
by cross-examining survivors with regard to the reality of the gas chambers
per se. The belief is too “sacred” to permit that.
“Well, just a moment,” said Judge Thomas. “We don’t know what went on
in that trial.” The witness, he continued, was in no position “to comment on
what would be a wise or prudent tactic by a defense counsel in a trial in an-
other part of the world.”
Christie mentioned the months-long interrogation of Adolf Eichmann, with
the light often burning 24 hours a day, and asked Browning, “Are you aware
that he was told that, “if you cooperate, you will be given a fair trial and a de-
fense lawyer?”
Browning suggested suicide was a risk, and said, “I do not know of any
such statement to him.”
Christie then asked Browning about Richard Baer, the last commandant of
Auschwitz, who was arrested in December 1960 and died before the case
came to trial.
Browning said he was unaware that Baer had “adamantly refused to con-
firm the existence of gas chambers at the camp he had once administered” or
that an autopsy found that “the ingestion of an odorless, non-corrosive poison
cannot be ruled out when he died in custody.”
Christie turned next to the case of an SS officer named Walter who testi-
fied at the Auschwitz Trial in the 1960s and “was set free only after he [cor-
rected] his testimony” to bring it in line with the “exterminationist” thesis.
Browning did not know of it.
After a break, Christie asked Browning some questions about the Joint Al-
lied Declaration of December 17, 1942. In particular, he found it curious that
this allegation of a German extermination policy contained no mention of gas
chambers.
“As best I know,” said Browning, “the Allies were extremely worried
about making allegations that would seem incredible, and they were extraor-
dinarily cautious in using anything to [do] with the Holocaust as part of prop-
aganda. That is why it took a number of months between the summer and De-
cember of 1942 to reach an agreement even to make a declaration that there
was [an extermination policy].”
Christie: You agree that the British Intelligence investigations between the
Declaration date and a later date of August 30th, 1943 determined that there
were no gas chambers?
Browning: I do not know of that.
On that date, explained Christie, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull tele-
grammed the Soviet ambassador, “There is insufficient evidence to justify the
statement [in a declaration on German crimes in Poland] regarding extermina-
tions in gas chambers.” The British government had, said Hull, urged deleting
all such references.
Browning interpreted this as an Allied fear of repeating the propaganda ex-
cesses of World War I, when atrocity stories could not always be backed up
with facts.
Christie: How do you know that the British government hadn’t actually
made an investigation through overflights, through spies who were in eastern
Europe? How do you know that they weren’t aware that their position… was
false?
Clearly, said Browning, “they had originally included gas chambers in the
[August 1943] document.” They were being very cautious.
Christie asked Browning how many Jews he would estimate had been
gassed by August 1943.
Roughly two million, said Browning.
Christie: You mean to tell us two million were “done to death” by August
‘43 and the British Intelligence, capable as they are, didn’t know about it and
urged the American government not to mention it because there was insuffi-
cient evidence?
The Allies, said Browning, had, after World War I, established a “policy of
complete credibility.”
Christie asked Browning, “Would it surprise you that [at] Ravensbrück
[concentration camp], three Germans were executed or committed suicide be-
fore execution because they were accused of operating gas chambers?”
Browning was unacquainted with the case.
Concerning Kurt Gerstein, Christie asked, “Are you aware that he alleges
that all the people in those three camps [Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka] were
gassed with one old Diesel motor in each camp?”
“I remember at least,” said Browning, “[that] he refers to the Diesel motor
at Belzec that had great difficulties starting.”
Christie: Are you aware of the fact that Diesel motors don’t produce car-
bon monoxide in sufficient portions to kill people?
“I’m not a chemist,” said Browning, “and I do not have a scientific basis
for replying to that.”
Gerstein made his wild statements, said Browning, while in a “highly
traumatized” condition.
Christie: In four [Gerstein statements] it is said that in Auschwitz millions
of children were killed with arsenic acid held under their noses?
“That, I don’t know of,” said Browning.
Christie asked Browning who he regarded as “corroboration” for Ger-
stein’s statements.
Browning gave several names, including the Belzec survivor Rudolf Reder.
Christie suggested that Reder had plagiarized Gerstein’s accounts of
Belzec, and “wrote even more-exaggerated things than Gerstein.”
Browning said the Reder testimony he had seen “did not seem exaggerat-
ed.”
Christie suggested that when Harwood said “no single document” proves
the existence of a German extermination plan he meant one document alone.
Browning declined to accept Christie’s semantics, but said that Himmler’s
Posen speech was “the document that states it most explicitly.”
Christie suggested that some had questioned the authenticity of both the
transcript and the recording, and that Browning should hear the latter for him-
self.
“It would,” said Browning, “certainly be something that would be on a fu-
ture agenda.”
Christie asked Browning how many eyewitnesses to gassing he would say
had been “produced and validated.”
“I do not have a particular number,” said Browning, but he gave some

names from the two camps whose court cases he had examined in detail –
Belzec and Chelmno.
Have you examined the effect of any cross-examination on them? asked
Christie.
No, said Browning, but, as an historian, one could study eyewitness reports
by subjecting them to other kinds of checks for reliability and plausibility.
Browning volunteered his opinion that “the Oberhauser testimony [on
Belzec] was very cautious.”
Christie elicited from Browning that Oberhauser was an accused person
who was convicted and “given, I believe, a short sentence, but it was counted
in terms of pre-trial arrest as having been served and… he was released.”
Christie then elicited that Oberhauser’s testimony about Belzec was quite
thorough for the period which did not potentially incriminate him but was
“very restrained” for the “particular events that he was on trial for.”
So, asked Christie, he was “minimizing his involvement but admitting the
truth of the extermination belief. That’s about the size of it?”
“He becomes extremely reticent,” said Browning, “in the area for which he
is under indictment.”
Asked about Oberhauser’s “apparent dishonesty,” Browning agreed that
other historians might “evaluate [the testimony] differently than I did.”
Christie and Browning disagreed about the truthfulness of Filip Müller’s
lurid tales of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Christie found them “just not ra-
tional,” while Browning said, “There is much about the Holocaust that bog-
gles the imagination.”
One example cited by Christie was Müller’s allegation that “muscles were
cut from prisoners and thrown into buckets, which made the buckets jump.”
Browning examined the text and said the expression was “jump about,” as
in “move sideways or rattle” because of contractions. It is “certainly possible,”
he said.
Well, said Christie, “I suggest that what you have is a predilection to be-
lieve these stories…”
It depends on the story, said Browning, and “its corroboration.”
Christie: So if there were enough people who said ridiculous things you’d
believe them all?
Not necessarily, said Browning. There is also plausibility to consider, plus
self-interest and other factors.
Browning said there was no suggestion in Müller’s book that he was “be-
ing novelistic,” so Christie asked him what he knew about “another famous
survivor” – Rudolf Vrba.
Vrba, said Browning, “admitted that what he wrote had literary dimensions
to it.”
Oh, said Christie, you must have read the transcript of his 1985 cross-
examination by me.
No, said Browning, “I just heard reference to it.”
“You realize,” asked Christie, “[that] in his book he published, I Cannot
Forgive, he claims it’s the truth and a very accurate account?”
No, said Browning, I haven’t read the book.
“Would you say,” asked Christie, “that someone who didn’t believe [the
Müller stories] would have to be dishonest?”
No, said Browning, but the implication in Harwood was that “no one has
ever come forward and claimed [he saw gassings],” and Müller did and “was
produced in the court” at Frankfurt.
Browning admitted he had seen “only one short snippet” of Müller’s trial
or pretrial testimony and had no recollection of what he said.
Christie next examined Browning’s last complaint about the Harwood
pamphlet, its assertion that no Western observers were permitted by the Sovi-
ets to view the alleged extermination camps in Poland. He produced a letter
published in 1959, and cited by Harwood, which was written by Stephen F.
Pinter, a lawyer with the U.S. War Department who was with the occupation
forces in Germany and Austria for six years after the war. Pinter had inter-
viewed thousands of Jews in his work and was convinced that fewer than one
million Jews had been killed during World War II. His letter also noted that
Auschwitz was off-limits to Westerners.
Christie conceded that Pinter and Harwood had overlooked the one-day
visit of selected reporters to Majdanek in August 1944, but asked Browning,
“[D]o you know that [the eastern camps] were open on other occasions?”
No, said Browning, who noted that Pinter had referred only to Auschwitz.
Christie pointed out to Browning that the New York Times article about
Majdanek which he had read aloud on Tuesday mentioned 1.5 million dead,
whereas Hilberg now said 50,000.
Browning admitted the information of the day “was very sketchy and ex-
aggerated.”71
Christie read to Browning a letter dated February 29, 1944, which the Brit-
ish Ministry of Information sent to the higher British clergy and to the BBC. It
began by noting the citizen’s occasional “duty” to “turn a blind eye on the pe-
culiarities of those associated with us.” The problem was the vicious behavior
of the Red Army, seen before in places like the Baltic states and now about to
happen again across central Europe. “We cannot reform the Bolsheviks,” said
the letter, nor would denials convince a British public opinion which knew
better. The “only alternative” was to “distract public attention from the whole
subject. Experience has shown that the best distraction is atrocity propaganda
71
Compare Browning’s assertion, on page 105, that the Allies were “extraordinarily cautious in us-
ing anything to do with the Holocaust as part of propaganda.”
directed against the enemy… Your cooperation is therefore earnestly sought

to distract public attention from the doings of the Red Army by your whole-
hearted support of various charges against the Germans and Japanese which
have been and will be put into circulation by the Ministry. Your expression of
belief in such may convince others. I am, sir, your obedient servant, H.
Hewitt, Assistant Secretary.”
“Thanks for [the] reference,” said Browning. He agreed that he would be
incorporating such bits of information learned during his two weeks in Toron-
to into his overall view of the Holocaust.
Christie: Raul Hilberg is quoted as stating that Holocaust revisionists such
as Robert Faurisson have rendered a service in that they have raised questions
which have had the effect of engaging historians in [new] research. Do you
agree with that statement?
“Yes,” said Browning, “it does raise questions.” He agreed that the sincere
academic should be receptive to new evidence.
Right, said Christie. “I put it to you that [Robert Faurisson] came up to you
in the Sorbonne on the thirteenth of December [1987] and tried to hand you a
piece of paper?”
Browning said he already had a copy of the paper, and added, “I don’t be-
lieve I knew for sure [at the time] that it was Dr. Faurisson.”
Pearson began his brief re-examination of Browning by having the profes-
sor read a short excerpt from E.H. Carr which noted that the “duty of the his-
torian” includes trying “to bring into the picture all known and knowable facts
relevant… to the theme.”
Pearson elicited from Browning that while the exposure of the Hitler dia-
ries as a fake was “almost instantaneous,” the Hans Frank and Goebbels dia-
ries had been used widely since the 1940s with, to Browning’s knowledge, no
scholarly charge they were fabricated.
Pearson turned to the Einsatzgruppen. He had Browning read selections
from R.T. Paget’s book which shed a somewhat different light on the defense
attorney’s overall view of the Holocaust. “Nobody ever will know what really
happened,” wrote Paget. “I think that [SS Officer Otto] Ohlendorf probably
told the truth when he said that before the campaign he received verbal orders
directly from Himmler to exterminate the Jews of the Ukraine, and that it is
probably also true that these orders were so secret that they were known only
to a few officers of the Einsatzkommando. I think that Ohlendorf probably
started off with the intention of carrying out his orders but very soon realized
that the task was enormously beyond the capacity of his command.” The main
problem was psychological, said Paget, and he was convinced that Ohlendorf
had greatly inflated his extermination figures. Paget also believed that the “ex-
termination camps” had been created to get around the psychological barriers
to mass killings on a face-to-face basis.
Pearson: So, if you had gone and spoken to Mr. Paget, von Manstein’s de-
fense lawyer, would it have changed your perspective on these events?
Browning: In terms of whether there had been a plan to murder the Jews of
Russia with the Einsatzgruppen, no.
The witness was excused, and Judge Thomas reminded the jury that the
court would not be in session the following week.
Chapter 4: Return to Auschwitz – and Belsen
W hen court resumed on Monday, February 29, Douglas Christie was

unable to give his opening address to the jury. The day was devoted
entirely to the sticky problem of a jury member, Sylvia Sadowyj,
who broke her oath to follow certain instructions. One of these was that she
not talk about the trial to non-jurors while it was in progress. Yet she appar-
ently did speak to a young Jewish attorney named Barbara Miller, going so far
as to say that Douglas Christie was “a fabulous cross-examiner.” Miller re-
ported the incident, and she, Sadowyj and a third party who overheard part of
the conversation were brought before an in-camera hearing of the court.
Judge Thomas decided to discharge Sadowyj on grounds of incompetence
and proceed with a jury of 11. This ruling, made the following morning,
March 1, left an uneasy feeling in many minds. Christie, in a motion for a mis-
trial, stated: “It just leaves us with a distinct impression there’s something
more to this than meets the eye. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to inquire into
it and it certainly troubles my client the way it all developed.”
Judge Thomas said he sympathized with Zündel’s feelings but noted “un-
less you could say Barbara Miller… is conspiring –”
“Well, there’s no evidence of that,” admitted Christie. “It may be an un-
founded feeling of unease…”
Another “housecleaning” matter, to use Judge Thomas’s expression, occu-
pied much of the remainder of Tuesday. William Cunliffe of the National Ar-
chives in Washington, D.C. was called by the prosecution to discuss the Allied
propaganda film “Nazi Concentration Camps,” which was shown at the 1985
Zündel Trial, and which Judge Thomas’s rulings of January 29 had not quite
closed the door on. John Pearson still hoped to show the film with the sound
off, since the Court of Appeal had ruled only that the narration constituted in-
admissible “hearsay” evidence. The silent heaps of corpses would thus be-
come the Crown’s grand finale. After Pearson and Christie questioned Wil-
liam Cunliffe about the film’s background, Judge Thomas ruled, much as he
had before, against its “prejudicial effect,” which might lead the jury to specu-
late wildly on what they were seeing.72
It was now about 3:30 in the afternoon as the jury returned to hear Chris-
tie’s opening address. There were three reasons, he said, why they should not
convict Zündel.
“The first is that what is written [in Harwood] is entirely opinion…” He
would be calling evidence to show that “historic fact is essentially opinion.”
Second, “if it is regarded as fact, it is true.”
Third, “the accused doesn’t disbelieve it and has no evidence to disbelieve
it,” and “the essence of this case… is that the accused must know it is false
beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“Many of the names mentioned as authors in [Harwood] will be called as
witnesses before you,” noted Christie. They and other witnesses would lay out
the information which was shown to Zündel prior to publication.
The pamphlet’s basic thesis, Christie continued, is this: “that there were no
six million… no gas chambers and… no official policy of extermination.”
On Wednesday morning, March 2, the first witness for the Zündel defense
took the stand. This was Ditlieb Felderer, a puckish and plucky Jehovah’s
Witness who escaped his native Austria to Sweden after the war. Christie elic-
ited that Felderer was 46 years old, lived in a suburb of Stockholm, first met
Zündel in 1979, and became interested in the Holocaust through research he
did for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Witnesses had been put into nearly every
Nazi camp and given a purple marking. They were also incarcerated in Cana-
da and many other countries, Felderer added.
For years, it was claimed that 60,000 Witnesses were killed by the Nazis,
but Felderer, through extensive work in their archives, determined that the real
number was about 200. This finding was very unpopular at first, but in a re-
cent yearbook the denomination stated that, indeed, only 203 had been execut-
ed during the Third Reich, and none of those was gassed.
Going to the question of what Zündel knew and when he knew it, Christie
asked Felderer if he had extended his knowledge on this subject to the accused
in their meetings.
Yes, said Felderer, adding that the self-revision of the Jehovah’s Witness-
es’ record is “essential in this thing” because they “have no political axe to
grind.”
Felderer first became interested in the Holocaust at the age of 13, but be-
gan to take a closer look only after someone sent him the Harwood pamphlet
anonymously in 1976. He soon began visiting the camps, beginning with Da-
chau, and decided to translate Harwood and publish a Swedish edition. As
72
However, Thomas did allow some of the same prejudicial pictures to be shown to the jury later, as
still photographs, in the anti-Harwood booklet Six Million Did Die.
with any book in Sweden, that meant submitting a copy to the attorney general
for approval. It was granted, and, after more than a decade in print and a wide
circulation, Felderer could report that there was never any “complaint or pros-
ecution” against the book in his country.
Characteristically, when Felderer began his Holocaust research he “wanted
to get all the documents I could lay my hands on” – blueprints of gas cham-
bers and crematory furnaces and other facilities. As a Jehovah’s Witness, he
also was able to closely interview many coreligionists who had been interned
in the camps. The legwork involved in this research was tremendous. Inside
the camps, there was also a lot of filthy crawling around in vents, ducts, and
other tight places and taking risks in off-limits areas. Felderer corresponded
with Martin Broszat and other leading “exterminationist” historians and
shared his correspondence with Zündel. People were friendly toward him at
the beginning.
Felderer devised an efficient indexing system for his vast Holocaust li-
brary. The notation 527: 182 signified Book No. 527, page 182. He pored over
the mainstream literature in search of highly specific data about the doors,
vents, walls, chimneys and other features of various alleged gas chambers.
Mostly he found gaps and contradictions.
Felderer visited Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, Birke-
nau, Gross-Rosen, Stutthof, Majdanek and many smaller Polish camps. He
took about 30,000 photographs. Travelling by van, he got to know the sur-
rounding areas and the local peasants too. Many spoke excellent German.
They and the townspeople of Auschwitz told him what they remembered from
the war years.
Felderer slowly established rapport with the guards and administrators at
the Auschwitz Museum, and made and taped interviews with officials like Dr.
Tadeusz Szymanski, then the director of artifacts. He promptly mailed these
tapes and his other findings to Zündel, an avid follower. The administrators
invited Felderer to study their archives and explore many off-limits buildings.
Sneaking around was no longer always necessary. Felderer was delighted to
find major revisionist works in the Auschwitz library. Szymanski’s successor
as director of artifacts at Auschwitz is or was Franciszek Piper, whom Felder-
er found to be a particularly knowledgeable, and at times very frank, individu-
al.
When Felderer first met Zündel in 1979, he showed him slides of the vari-
ous camps, so Christie now asked the witness to do the same for the court. The
300 slides which Felderer had selected were all among those seen by Zündel
in 1979, and Felderer limited his narration to what he had said then.
Judge Hugh Locke had forbidden Felderer to show his slides in 1985, but
the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that they were improperly excluded. The ju-
ry of 1988 would be more fortunate.
Most of Felderer’s slides showed the camps known as Auschwitz I and

Auschwitz II or Birkenau. Infrared film was sometimes used to detect altera-
tions made in buildings, of which there were many. Measuring rods and height
meters were among the other useful tools.
At both of the major Auschwitz camps, said Felderer, the guides told visi-
tors that almost everything remained as it was found by the Soviets on libera-
tion in January 1945. As Felderer got to know the various museum officials,
he used his growing evidence of alterations to challenge this assertion. Gradu-
ally, certain officials, especially Piper, admitted some of the changes to Feld-
erer, but they insisted these were always made to help clarify things for the
tourists. Although Felderer has notes and tapes of these admissions, he ob-
served that the guides, to his knowledge, still tell visitors that everything is
just as it was found.
Typical of many later experiences he had at Auschwitz I was Felderer’s
first encounter with one of the camp’s two largest buildings. He asked the
guide why this big building was not on the tour. “Oh, that’s not an important
building,” said the guide. Pressed on the matter of its size, the guide claimed it
was the place where the camp’s garbage was taken. Later, Felderer sneaked
inside and found a typical theater, with stage and arcades. This was not actual-
ly a deep secret, he later learned, but one of many features of the camps which
the masses of ordinary tourists are not supposed to learn of.
As Felderer, from the stand, described the theater’s attractive surroundings,
and commented that Auschwitz I is still the “most beautiful part of the whole
town of Auschwitz,” it became necessary for Christie to ask Judge Thomas for
quiet in the gallery. The judge obliged, advising “if some of you find this dis-
tasteful, unpleasant or emotionally draining, then, of course, you’re free to
leave.”
Shortly afterward, the jury was excused for 15 minutes and the judge stat-
ed, “I’m going to have to ask the spectators… to satisfy themselves that they
are emotionally and physically able to sit through these proceedings… If you
are, please show the courtesy of remaining quiet.”
Felderer’s testimony gave Holocaust true-believers a lot to murmur and
moan about. Highlights of his slide show of Auschwitz I included the camp
swimming pool, the theater, the brothel, the “secret museum,” the “Black
Wall,” and the many alterations in the crematorium and alleged gas chamber.
– The swimming pool is visible even in some of the Allies’ wartime aerial
photos. This reflects the survivors’ literature, which describes water-polo
matches. When Felderer told Piper, “Now this swimming pool must have
been used by the SS men,” Piper replied, no, they swam elsewhere, this
pool was used for the rehabilitation and recreation of patients among the
internees.
– Inmates presented plays for one another in the large Auschwitz I Theater.
Pianos were available, and there was an inmate orchestra.
– The camp brothel was located in what is now the museum library.
– Block 25 contains what Felderer calls a “secret museum,” filled with arti-
facts which he was specially permitted to see several times. Felderer was
curious to know why the gas mask, for example, was not shown openly at
the main museum. The answer, which he relayed to Zündel in 1979, was
that one did not want the visitors to realize that gassing is a complicated
business, involving many technical problems, because then they would
begin to make observations and ask difficult questions.
– The “Black Wall” or “Wall of Death” of Auschwitz, situated between
Blocks 10 and 11, is a place where some 20,000 prisoners were allegedly
shot. Felderer was surprised to find a wall only one row of bricks deep,
which would have been pulverized after two or three rounds, and no bullet
marks in the area. He never received an explanation which satisfied him.
– Felderer scrutinized the crematorium and alleged gas chamber, and uncov-
ered dozens of serious anomalies:
– Several of the most-important camp buildings were situated very near the
alleged mass-killing site. An SS hospital for guards and administrators
was 25 or 30 meters distant.
– The two gas-chamber doors were flimsy wooden things with simple han-
dles and locks, easily broken. The exterminationists’ literature had called
them sturdy, iron and airtight. Both doors opened inwards, which would
have presented extreme difficulties given the heaps of corpses described
as lying just inside. A peephole in one door, which figures prominently in
the exterminationists’ literature, with the camp commandant and others
gleefully watching their victims die, was placed incongruously with a
wall directly ahead and no view of the chamber. The other door held a
large pane of glass.
– The four openings on the roof, through which the Zyklon B was alleged-
ly dropped, were likewise shoddy, crude cement holes with wooden lids.
In the literature, they were described as airtight. “It’s only when you go
on the roof you discover these things,” said Felderer. “I should say the
first time I was on the roof, Mr. Smolen, who is the [museum] director,
and who has his office [beside it], tried to chase me off…”
– Equally nonfunctional were the body burning facilities. The large, free-
standing chimney, so impressive to the tourists, had no connection to the
crematory furnaces.
Felderer got to the bottom of some of these mysteries. The crudely hewn roof
openings, so “out of tune with the scientific know-how of the Germans,” were,
Franciszek Piper conceded, made about 1947. So were the four furnaces now
to be found in the crematorium. Dr. Tadeusz Szymanski told Felderer the huge
chimney had been added for “symbolic” reasons. No smoke channel or flue
connects it to the furnaces. Felderer managed to locate, measure, and photo-
graph the authentic crematory furnaces of Auschwitz I and the real flue. He
concluded, on numerous grounds, that the alleged gas chamber was, in fact, a
morgue, as all the original German records and plans showed it to be.
Christie: Was there ever any suggestion to you from the camp authorities
that this whole building had to be rebuilt?
Felderer: Well, after many, many visits and debates and discussions with
them,… [they stated] this building has been refabricated at various stages…
Christie: Did you ask [them] why it had to be rebuilt if there was an au-
thentic building?
Felderer: Well, of course their argument was… they had to help [the tour-
ists] along [with] certain alterations in the building.
Felderer asked various officials how, with so many people dying in the
chamber, “no one ever thought of breaking at least the window,” and the
“usual answer” was “well, no one has asked these questions before.”
Felderer projected a slide of a crematory furnace: “You see, the tourists put
these flowers [there] all the time… They have candles with them [and] they
put the candles there.” He had indicated to Zündel that the pervasive “reli-
gious aura” in the Polish camps today was “one of the reasons why people do
not ask questions.” Judge Thomas instructed the witness that he did not wish
to hear more about “the flowers and the religion.”
The subject of flowers came up again later as Felderer described his inter-
view with a Polish woman who had been the secretary of the mayor of Ausch-
witz during the war. When he mentioned the gas chamber at Auschwitz I, she
seemed indignant and said, “Well, you must be totally wrong. It was in Birke-
nau [which is further from the town]. It happened not here.” The woman de-
scribed a bucolic Auschwitz I with “flowers on the walls and bird cages” and
sidewalks with colored tiles – a “mother camp” of which the SS was proud.
Dr. Szymanski told Felderer that the ashes of those cremated at Auschwitz
I were mailed to the next of kin.
Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been interned at Auschwitz I told him of
hiking down to the River Sola to swim and pick berries.
Walking around the barracks, Felderer found many individual closets and
bedrooms and abundant laundry facilities. The huge camp kitchen had flush
toilets, an unknown luxury in Poland at that time.
As Felderer turned his attention to the larger camp of Auschwitz II, or
Birkenau, the number of “homey” touches in his narrative declined. He men-
tioned internees playing soccer and attending movies, but not a lot else.
Still, there were important findings to relate. The memorial wall at Birke-
nau still speaks of four million dead in the Auschwitz complex of camps,
whereas Hilberg claims one million.73 The four big crematory buildings, de-
noted by the numbers II through V, contain anomalies similar to Crematorium
I in the mother camp. A detective rather than a historian is needed here, Feld-
erer recalled telling Zündel.
As with Auschwitz I, several highlights from Felderer’s slide tour of
Birkenau may be mentioned:
– A large portion of the camp’s alleged gassing victims were supposedly
burned in great open-air pits. Yet Felderer made at least 30 trips to Birke-
nau in every season over several years, spent “months and months” in the
area, and invariably found the local water table to be near the surface. In
other words, Birkenau is a riverine swamp, where any hole immediately
fills with water, as other visitors have also noted.
– Where did the alleged tons of human ash go? Into a pond, Felderer was
told, and the jury was shown a slide of the water body indicated. When
Felderer suggested to his guide that he would dredge up some of the ash
and take it to Sweden for analysis, the response was instant: no, no, don’t
do that. “This is just a symbolic place.” Felderer told Christie: “So a lot of
things which they have are – once you pin it down – symbolic…”
– In late 1943, the largest building at Birkenau was completed. This was the
new sauna, otherwise known as the main delousing facility. Inside are sev-
eral fumigation chambers, still intact, where one may see the kind of so-
phisticated, air-tight doors and seals which are conspicuously absent at the
alleged human gas chambers. Here too may be seen the original wagons on
rails which carried the louse-filled clothing into the chambers for fumiga-
tion, and brought it out clean on the other side. The problem, said Felderer,
is that this is one of the “secret buildings” at Birkenau, and “very, very lit-
tle mentioned.” There is no public access. Felderer thought he located a
water-storage area and the place where internees’ hair was cut, but he
needed blueprints to know more. Auschwitz Director Smolen promised
these “many years ago” but “to this date I’m waiting for them.”
– Felderer was ever alert for the distinctive blue residue left wherever Zyklon
B has been used extensively. He found it in the various fumigation areas
around Birkenau, but not in the alleged gas chambers. Crematorium II, for
example, “is absolutely devoid of any blue marks anywhere… and I traced
inside that gas chamber74 for days, trying to get at all the crevices.”
– As at Auschwitz I, Felderer’s most detailed observations were at the al-
leged gassing/cremation sites. In this case, the buildings were in various
73
The memorial plaques were removed by the Auschwitz Museum in the summer of 1990 and re-
placed with new ones claiming 1.5 million victims. Editor’s note.
74
Felderer speaks here of a “gas chamber,” whereas Judge Thomas, for example, referred occasion-
ally to “alleged gas chambers.”
advanced stages of collapse. He tentatively concluded that Crematories IV

and V were “places for incinerating garbage” and perhaps heating the
camp’s water. His problem there was that the officials were “putting on the
brakes and not delivering the plans and… information” he needed.
– Crematories II and III were for burning bodies, although not in the “mere
minutes” of the “official version.” The adjacent gas chambers were actual-
ly morgues, as stated in the buildings’ plans, which made sense given their
cool underground location. The roof of the morgue at Crematorium II was
especially revealing, with openings apparently “chiseled out after the war
in order to give support to the theory” that SS men standing above had
dropped Zyklon B inside. Certainly, the present locations of the openings
did not correspond to those found on wartime aerial-reconnaissance photos
nor, indeed, to those on the Auschwitz Museum’s model. Felderer pointed
out all these things to Zündel, as well as the lack of provisions for venting
or exhausting the poison gas; the risk of an explosion presented by the
close proximity of Zyklon B and high crematory temperatures;75 and other
concerns.
At Birkenau, as at Auschwitz I, said Felderer, tourists are still being told
that what they see is “exactly as from the time when the Soviets liberated the
camp.”
One method favored by Felderer in his quest to circumvent official disin-
formation was to hop in his van, drive to the town of Auschwitz, knock on
doors, find people who were in the different camps during the war, bring them
back out for a few hours, “let them explain to me what they believed,” and
then return to town for “a new batch of people.”
Another Felderer method was dendrochronology, the counting of tree rings
to establish the age of living trees. Informed that the Germans deliberately hid
their crematoria by planting poplars, Felderer proved the trees to be newer.
Besides, he told the court, “it was very obvious to me that poplars are not the
right type of tree to hide anything,” and are used to decorate crematoria in
Sweden.
Felderer had just moved on to the camp at Majdanek (Looblin) when the
court was adjourned. He resumed his slide show there on Thursday morning,
March 3. One interesting point concerned a room at Majdanek with shower
heads, which tourist guides told him was “portrayed as being a gas chamber”
prior to 1966. Generally, Felderer’s testimony regarding the delousing cham-
75
According to current knowledge, Felderer’s statements were too sweeping. The rooms of Crema-
toria I-III had ventilation systems, albeit inadequate for mass-homicidal gas chambers. The danger
of explosion with HCN was indeed low, and a spatial proximity between the alleged gas chamber
and the cremation furnaces existed only in Crematorium I (Main Camp). See C. Mattogno, The
Real Case for Auschwitz: Robert van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Trial Critically Reviewed,
2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2019; idem., Auschwitz: Crematorium I and the Alleged
Homicidal Gassings, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016. Editor’s note.
bers, alleged gas chambers and crematory furnaces at Majdanek resembled

that given about Auschwitz I and II.
The witness proceeded next to Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, each of
which he had visited about 30 times. There is very little to see at these loca-
tions today, and Felderer brought along only a few slides, largely confined to
his dendrochronological testing. At Treblinka and Sobibor, he showed that
forest plantings attributed to departing Germans covering up their crimes
could be dated to the late 1960s. At Belzec, he found the caretaker to be a lo-
cal forester who “told me that he wasn’t sure about anything here, whether
there ever was a camp here.”
His slide show completed, Felderer was questioned by Christie about other
things. He told of distributing flyers in Poland which correctly attributed the
massacre of Polish officers at Katyn to the Soviets. For this, in 1980, he was
arrested by the secret police, and imprisoned in Gdansk for almost three
weeks. Three years later, Felderer was back in custody, this time in Sweden.
His “crime,” for which he received a 10-month sentence, involved the mailing
of satiric brochures about the Holocaust. Ernst Zündel was among those who
had suggested to Felderer that the brochures were in poor taste and counter-
productive. Felderer was prosecuted under Section 168 of the Swedish Crimi-
nal Code, which forbids the expression of contempt against an identifiable
group.
Felderer went to prison for satire. Four years earlier, a political group at-
tacked him in his own home, beat him over the head with an iron bar, and
briefly held him hostage. They, however, were not incarcerated following
conviction.
Repeated hunger strikes won Felderer the right to have a paper and pen in
his cell. Asked about his family background, Felderer noted that his mother
was interned at various places during World War II. She was accused of being
of Jewish background. At the end of the war, the Felderers escaped to Italy
and lived there until 1949. They later obtained refugee status in Sweden.
“Are you part of some Nazi conspiracy to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler?” asked
Christie.
“Well,” said Felderer, “I am of the opinion that Nazism is dead.” To revive
it made as much sense as trying to revive the Vikings.
Judge Thomas adjourned the court early. In a discussion with Christie and
Pearson after the jury had retired, he stated significantly that “the question of
Mr. Zündel’s state of mind and his honest belief [when he published Har-
wood] really can only come from his lips.” (The subject had arisen because of
Thomas’s unclear closing remarks to the jury concerning the significance of a
tape which Christie had played of Zündel interviewing Felderer in about the
Year 1980.)
The jury returned on Friday morning, March 4, and Judge Thomas at-
tempted to clarify what he had said the previous afternoon. The tape of the ac-
cused interviewing Felderer, he said, “goes to the state of mind of Ernst Zün-
del because… the Crown has to establish that the accused, when he published
the pamphlet, knew it was false…” So, he concluded, you are entitled to “use
the tape not for the truth of its contents, but for the state of mind of the ac-
cused.”
The seeming conflict with his “only from Zündel’s lips” remark of the pre-
vious afternoon went unremarked by the two attorneys.
Pearson began his cross-examination. In reply to one question, Felderer
stated that it was he, in some respects, who “converted” Zündel on the Holo-
caust issue.
Asked what, to his knowledge, Zündel had believed in 1979, Felderer
could only say that “he was searching, like I was searching.”
As Pearson posed more specific questions about what Zündel knew and
when, the almost-invariable refrain was “you’ll have to ask him.” With his of-
ten-rambling and indirect answers, Felderer seemed to quickly wear the prose-
cutor down.
“Let’s move on,” said Pearson at one point. “[In] 1979, you and Mr. Zün-
del knew that in trials held in West Germany in the 1960s, eight SS officers
had testified about Auschwitz and none of them denied that the gas chambers
at Birkenau were used to exterminate Jews. You knew that, didn’t you?”
Felderer’s response was characteristically digressive: “Well, I told Ernst in
1979 there was a trial [of] SS men where they were testifying in court about
bicycling inside the gas chamber and having a great time in between the gas-
sings and the floor was inclined in order for these exercises to be better, and I
took with me a bicycle in 1980 in order to ask my wife [to take] a picture here
of me having a bicycle [ride] inside the gas chamber to illustrate the absurdi-
ties of these trials. I mean, the most-ridiculous things are said in these trials
[so] that any thinking person who can add things together realizes what this is
all about. Are these people in a state like the witch trials we had in Sweden,
where people were admitting they were having sexual intercourse with the
devil and we had Sweden’s most-famous judges listening to this and accepting
it as the truth and the poor women were burned at the stake for that.”
Felderer was soon asking, “Why are these trials today under such secrecy?
Why is it that if I write the West-German government and ask them for the
addresses of these alleged people who have testified, they never give you their
addresses? Now, why is it that when I, myself, have been able to get hold of
the addresses of these people, these people tell me a different story from what
is presented in the newspapers?… Now very evidently to me, we have here a
similar case to the witch trials.”
“I suggest,” said Pearson later, “that you set out to take photographs to
support your theory.”
“That is wrong,” said Felderer.
After Pearson elicited Felderer’s lack of academic training, the latter ob-
served, “Jesus had no theological degree but a lot of people follow him.”
Pearson suggested that Felderer had to “break into” a lot of buildings at
Auschwitz and Majdanek. “I never, never even broke a window in any of
these places” said Felderer.
Poland is a totalitarian state, said Pearson. They could have shipped you
out at any time if they really wanted to.
Felderer: They could have done an awful lot but then I am an awful nice
guy if I want to boast about myself, so I think they were ashamed of doing it.
My wife had very quickly taught herself a lot of Polish and the Polish people
as a whole are very humane people. They are friendly, they are hospitable and
many times they tell you, look, I am politically appointed here. What I do per-
sonally or my personal feeling I cannot always express. One has to understand
these people. They are sometimes caught in a web which they, themselves, of-
ten don’t want to be in.
Pearson: Isn’t it possible that they just thought you were a little bit of an
annoyance, you weren’t someone to be taken seriously, and, while you were
annoying them, they really didn’t care what you were doing the 300 times that
you were at Auschwitz? Isn’t that more likely the story, Mr. Felderer?
“It’s very unlikely,” said Felderer. In the beginning he was harassed, and
had great difficulty winning the right to photograph. He was still the “only
person [to] have had deep discussions” with Smolen, Piper, and other offi-
cials. “I think they respected me,” he said, “and they knew when I showed
them mistakes they had made in their books… hey, this guy knows more than
many of us do.”
“Do you know,” challenged Pearson, “what is meant by the English ex-
pression ’setting up a straw man’?” Hadn’t he done that with the jury by em-
phasizing Auschwitz I? “I suggest to you,” said Pearson, “that no one has ever
suggested that large numbers of Jews were exterminated at Auschwitz I.”
Wrong, said Felderer. One guide at Auschwitz I had said that 6,000 people
at a time were gassed there, and, to his knowledge, they were telling visitors
the same things today.
Pearson asked Felderer when the theater at Auschwitz I was built and sug-
gested that the camp had been a Polish army barracks before the war. Felderer
agreed, noting it was an Austrian military site before that.
Pearson: And it’s quite possible that the theater hall was built by the Aus-
trians, wasn’t it, so they could play their music. Isn’t that right?
“Anything is possible,” said Felderer, but if that was the case, why had the
Auschwitz authorities never told him so? They would have been “very happy
[to give] such an explanation.”
The swimming pool, Felderer was quite sure, was German-built. All over
Poland, people told him that when the Germans entered a town, one of the
first things they often did was to build a modern swimming pool.
Pearson: I suggest, sir, that the authorities at Auschwitz may well consider
that anyone who can suggest that Nazi concentration camps had swimming
pools for the inmates and dance halls has such a lack of touch with reality that
it’s not worth responding to answer someone like that.
Felderer: There you are totally wrong because I was the one who talked to
Mr. Piper and said to him now look here Mr. Piper, you are not going to tell
me that in a death camp, the Germans were building – or the inmates were
having a nice swim. This swimming pool which we have here very evidently
was for the SS men to swim in, and Piper looked at me as if I was crazy and
said, well, no, no, no. This swimming pool here was used by the inmates, so
he was the one who corrected me on that point.
Will you at least agree, asked Pearson, that “it is claimed that the principal
spot at Auschwitz for the gassing of Jews was at Birkenau”? No, said Felder-
er, the stories one heard varied.
Pearson read at length from the famous 1979 CIA report about wartime
aerial photographs, titled “The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis
of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex.” When the reading was
completed, Felderer said the report had as many holes in it as a sponge.
The article stated that the Birkenau death total was “an estimated two to
three and one-half million.” It was claimed that Birkenau “was destined to be
the extermination center for the Czech and Polish nations.” It asserted that in
the aerial photos taken on August 25, 1944 “extermination operations at
Birkenau were recorded.” And it stated, incongruously: “By [January 1945]
the Nazis faced defeat on every front and were trying desperately to erase all
traces of the extermination program. When prisoners could not be evacuat-
ed…” (Emphasis added.)
The CIA report had raised so many questions in Felderer’s mind that he
immediately sent the authors a list of them. He received a letter from the Pub-
lic Affairs department of the CIA, dated October 4, 1979, stating, “The
Auschwitz project was accomplished entirely on [the authors’] own time, not
on work time, and their ability to pursue detailed follow-ups is extremely lim-
ited… I am sorry we cannot be of further assistance.”
During his examination-in-chief by Christie, Felderer had suggested that
the famous “selections” of Jews on the arrival ramp at Birkenau merely in-
volved women and children (of either gender) being sent to one side and men
to the other. Pearson challenged him now on why SS doctors were needed to
make selections by sex.
Felderer reversed tack. It was “an inspection to see whether the prisoners
were fit,” he replied. So, asked Pearson, if it was “just a matter of separating
the men from the women… anyone could have done that?”
Felderer: Yeah, but that’s not what the selections were for. The selections
were not what the exterminationists – that’s what they claim the selection was.
Pearson: Just a second, Mr. Felderer. You are saying the exterminationists
say that the selection process was separating the men from the women?
Felderer: Well, the exterminationists at times also say that, yes, that there
was a separation between the male and the female, that sometimes they –
Pearson: Maybe I misunderstood yesterday, because I thought you had told
us that what was being done was that the women were being separated from
the men and you’d agree with me today that you can put up a sign that would
make that clear; you could have a private do that? You wouldn’t need an SS
doctor just to separate the men from the women? You’d agree with me on that,
wouldn’t you?
Never conceding any point, Felderer replied “No.” He then explained that
some eyewitness accounts described men trying “desperately” to break into
the female line.
So a doctor was needed to stop the line-breaking, suggested Pearson.
“You would need a doctor,” said Felderer, in order to determine… if these
people were visually in [such] a state of health that they had to have treat-
ment.” To help check the spread of disease, a preliminary visual inspection
was useful. “And I must say,” added Felderer, that “I have published the
[medical] report” which describes in detail this visual inspection process of
the doctors on the Birkenau ramp.
And so the jousting continued inconclusively.
The last point raised by Pearson on Friday concerned an anti-Jewish flyer
which Felderer had been accused (in a newspaper) of distributing in Poland.
Felderer vehemently denied the accusation. After the jury was excused, Chris-
tie complained to Judge Thomas that the same charge had been raised against
Felderer at the 1985 Zündel trial, when he likewise denied it. “If the Crown
has those pamphlets” they should show them, said Christie. “The jury gets the
impression that there is something to it.”
Judge Thomas noted that “in cross-examination you are entitled to make
suggestions, and you are quite right, a certain point does come when the sug-
gestion has to be backed up, or the jury has to be told to completely disregard
the suggestion.” But the witness had strongly said no, and “the Crown is stuck
with ‘no.’”
Most of Monday morning, March 7, was devoted to several rather-tasteless
satirical flyers which Felderer once distributed. Pearson had him read at length
from the one for which he was imprisoned.
Another flyer mentioned Felderer’s “severe mental and physical torture”
by the Swedish government. “What are you talking about there?” asked Pear-
son.
“I was put into custody in a two-by-three-meter bunker,” explained Felder-
er, “where I was not allowed any form of writing, where I was not allowed my
watch, I was not knowing whether it was night or day, and where I was con-
stantly kept awake by some lunatics [playing] their radio, and when I com-
plained about that, the noise only increased.” The authorities, he recalled, had
said, “We’re going to get Mr. Felderer once and for all.”
Pearson wanted to know “what acts of physical torture” the witness had
been subjected to in Sweden. Felderer said he was hit on the head by the au-
thorities, and “struck several times in prison.” He was also compelled to stage
three hunger strikes to obtain normal prison rights.
The same flyer mentioned that Felderer was “forced into a mental asylum
for criminals where he had to go through a series of medical experiments…”
Asked about this by Pearson, Felderer likened Sweden’s treatment of dissi-
dents to the Soviet Union’s: “If you cannot get at him through arguments and
reasons, you… declare the man insane…” Felderer said the background in-
formation in his flyer came from the research of Roland Huntford into Swe-
dish abuse of dissidents.
Pearson posed a final question: “You can’t accept, Mr. Felderer, that the
Swedish authorities thought that you were sick and you needed some help?”
No, said Felderer, his medical records certified his mental stability. “I think
that’s more than you can prove,” he added.
During a brief re-examination, Christie elicited that Felderer, far from be-
ing “obsessed” with the Holocaust as the Crown had charged, had largely lost
interest in it since about 1985.
“[W]hat has been your main interest in the last three years?” asked Chris-
tie.
Teaching music and dancing, and selling songs, said Felderer.
After some courtroom details were dealt with, the defense called its second
witness, Thies Christophersen, a German who had been stationed at Ausch-
witz from January to December 1944 as a civilian employee of the military,
and who later wrote a book about his experiences.
Christie’s questions evoked answers from Christophersen which were gen-
erally as concise as Felderer’s were rambling. Christophersen explained that
his reason for being at Raisko, a satellite camp of Auschwitz I and II, was to
grow the Russian dandelion.76
The English translation of Christophersen’s Auschwitz book was first pub-
lished by Zündel, after the pair met in Germany about 1973.
Christie projected onto a screen photographs from Christophersen’s book.
One, he observed, “appears to show women working.”
“Yes,” said Christophersen, “those are the women from Birkenau.”
How far from Birkenau were these fields?
76
Taraxacum kok-saghyz, to use the plant’s scientific name, had been developed as a commercial
source of rubber in the Soviet Union just a few years earlier. Natural rubber, or caoutchouc (liter-
ally, “weeping wood”), is produced by many plants, particularly tropical trees. The rubber latex, a
white, milky liquid, is, in the Russian dandelion’s case, found mainly in the roots. The complex of
camps at Auschwitz was better known, however, as the major source of synthetic rubber of the
Buna variety.
It was about two kilometers from Birkenau to Raisko, said Christophersen,

and another two kilometers from Raisko to the fields.
He had taken the picture, he was responsible for the women’s work, he had
talked freely and had good rapport with them, and picked them out himself
from inmates at Birkenau. Also working at Raisko were men from Auschwitz
I, women internees who resided at Raisko, and civilian employees. Dr. Caesar
was the camp’s boss. The women, of various nationalities, but perhaps half of
whom were Jewish, worked an eight-hour day under an SS guard.
Christophersen explained that he was wounded at the start of the war and
thus ended up at an agricultural station. He had married in 1943, and his wife
visited him often at his apartment in Auschwitz.
Russian (inmate) agronomists worked alongside him at Raisko. Only a
horse-drawn transport was normally used at the camp, as gasoline was scarce.
Christophersen objected to the word prisoner. “They were internees,” he
explained, although “there were a few criminals there” as well.
The internees at Raisko had fairly good accommodations, with a closet for
each, running hot and warm water and showers, a laundry change every week,
and a bed linen change every two weeks. “In Birkenau it was not quite that
good… I don’t think they each had a closet.”
Christophersen estimated that he had visited Birkenau about 20 times dur-
ing 1944, to get workers or materials.
The internees who lived at Raisko received mail and parcels. Their mis-
treatment by guards was “punished severely” by the camp commandant if it
occurred.
Christie: Did prisoners have any opportunity or possibility to complain?
Christophersen: Yes, there was an order which originated from the Com-
mandant Höss, which was taken over by [Arthur] Liebehenschel [his succes-
sor]. According to that order, at any time the internees could talk to the com-
mandant.
Christie: Were you aware of those directives?
Yes, said Christophersen, and the internees were, too, because the orders
were posted.
Christie: Did you listen to any complaints or grievances on the part of pris-
oners yourself?
Christophersen: There weren’t really any complaints. They were rather re-
quests.
Christie: What kind of requests did you get from the prisoners at Raisko, or
the internees?
Christophersen: The greatest pleasure that I could give the internees was
when I allowed them to pick berries and mushrooms, or to swim in the River
Sola.
Christie: When you went to Birkenau, did you see crematories?
Christophersen: Yes, I knew that they were there and I did see them.
Christie asked the witness if he ever saw “smoke or flames shooting out of
the chimney of these crematories,” or smelled “the stench of burning bodies.”
Never, was the answer to both questions.
Christophersen wore the uniform of an officer on his visits to Birkenau and
could go wherever he chose.
He was well aware of epidemics at Auschwitz. His boss, Dr. Caesar, had
lost his wife to one.
Christie: Did you ever hear about gas chambers when you were working at
Birkenau or Raisko?
Christophersen: About gas chambers I only heard after the war.
Nor had Christophersen heard of atrocities of any kind during his year at
Auschwitz-Raisko.
Were there any rumors about bad happenings? asked Christie.
Yes, his Polish maid had mentioned burning corpses, but “she couldn’t
give me any details.” So Christophersen got on his bicycle and rode around
Birkenau and beyond, inspecting every burning site without finding anything
amiss. He noted that the usual ground-water level at Birkenau was just a few
feet below the surface.
Christie: When did you write your book?
Christophersen: I wrote my book in 1972 and I believe published it in
1973.
Christie: Why didn’t you publish these things earlier?
Christophersen: That’s a good question.
Christie: Did you discuss these things with your superiors at all before you
published?
Christophersen: Yes, that was the thing. They thought it was still too early
and were afraid of repressions and thought that I would also have to suffer un-
der those repressions.
Christophersen bravely published his book, Die Auschwitz Lüge (The
Auschwitz Lie), with his full name and title, address and phone number. He re-
ceived thousands of letters and calls, some defamatory and others supportive.
Some writers “claimed to know everything about gassings,” and Chris-
tophersen made a special effort to question them.
Although Christophersen was never prosecuted for his Auschwitz book, he
was taken to court for other writings which allegedly impugned the majesty of
the Federal Republic of Germany. In the days of the Kaiser, the equivalent
crime carried a maximum sentence of 14 days. Christophersen’s recalcitrance
as a teenager in the Third Reich had once, in 1935, brought him three days in
jail. In 1985, at the age of 67, his uppitiness got him a one-and-a-half-year
sentence, of which he served a year. “Before, it used to be the case that the in-
sulted person had to bring the charge, to lay the charge. Today that is no long-
er necessary if the insulted person is a Jewish person.”
Christie asked the witness what the three camps which he knew first-hand
had been like when he departed in December 1944. The best maintained was
Raisko, said Christophersen: “It was just a super camp.”
Christophersen attended the weekly Sunday concerts at Auschwitz I, given
by an orchestra of internees who were professional musicians. His own work-
ers included “lots of academics.”
Christie: How many times have you talked with Ernst [Zündel] about your
experiences in Auschwitz?
Christophersen: He visited with me twice [in Germany] and I was here
once [in] 1969.”77
Translations of Die Auschwitz Lüge had been made into Spanish, French,
Dutch, Danish, Portuguese and possibly other languages, as well as English.
Christophersen had lost many of his photos from 1944 during the bombing of
Dresden, having “escaped with only two suitcases.”
The Harwood pamphlet “seems credible to me,” said Christophersen, and
he had helped distribute it. But he had “absolutely no political ambitions. I
have never had them but I definitely like to express my opinion for perse-
cutees and repressed people and minorities. Today the Jews are no longer per-
secuted. Today, Ernst Zündel is being persecuted and that’s why I have all the
sympathy in the world for Mr. Ernst Zündel.”
Christophersen had gotten along well with his Jewish workers at Raisko.
Neither he nor the SS guards treated them differently from other internees, but
they did treat the Jehovah’s Witnesses especially well, leaving them unguard-
ed.
Christophersen was able to speak with the internees at Birkenau on his
trips there and was never prohibited from discussing Birkenau with his fellow
civilians at Raisko. He had seen the Red Cross at Raisko, probably in Septem-
ber 1944, and was told they came from Geneva. Sick prisoners, he noted, re-
turned to their work after being away in bed for a time.
The head of the Auschwitz hygiene department was Dr. Josef Mengele,
and Christophersen saw him deliver a scientific paper during the summer of
1944.
Christie: Were there Jewish prisoners in Raisko?
Christophersen: Yes, certainly.
Christie: Did you ever see any SS men mistreat anyone among your work-
ers?
Christophersen: Once I saw that.
Christie: What did you see?
Christophersen: That an SS person kicked a worker in the behind.
Christie: And what did you do?
77
The witness later corrected this to 1979.
Christophersen: I requested the name of the person and took it to the com-
mandant.
Sports were played at Birkenau and the other camps, and fraternization be-
tween the staff and internees sometimes occurred. A civilian Russian em-
ployed at Raisko married an internee and thereby won her release.
Christie: Do you think that the same situation prevailed at Birkenau?
Christophersen: No.
Christie: Why not?
“You’ll have to ask the commandant of Birkenau,” said Christophersen. “I
had a very friendly, humane boss.” Dr. Caesar, Obersturmführer (First Lieu-
tenant), was later imprisoned by the Poles for at least two years and treated
well. Christophersen later gave Caesar his Auschwitz manuscript to read.
Christie: Can you now publish your book about Auschwitz in West Ger-
many?
No, said the author, but “you can buy it in every bookstore,” because it is
not marked as prohibited in the catalogue. Thus, a West German can order it
from Switzerland or Denmark, despite its banning in 1977. The reasoning be-
hind that ban, explained Christophersen, was that “the denial of mass gassings
is an insult to the survivors.”
Christie posed a final question: “In Germany, is it possible to tell the expe-
riences that you’ve had publicly?”
Christophersen: According to the twenty-first revision of the penal code, it
is no longer possible.
After a short recess, Pearson had approximately half an hour left on March
7 to begin his cross-examination.
He learned that Christophersen has lived in Denmark since 1986 because
of its freedom from publishing restraints, and that for many years after World
War II he ran a farm in Schleswig-Holstein.
Christophersen said he believed he first spoke with Zündel in 1973, and
thought it “possible” the defendant was at that time denying the reality of the
gas chambers.
Pearson: Do you deny that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz for any
purpose?
Christophersen: I haven’t found anybody up to now, although I made all
kinds of efforts, who could give me details about the gas chambers.
Pearson read to Christophersen from page 20 of his book: “There were no
secrets at Auschwitz in September 1944. A commission of the Red Cross
came to inspect the camp but it was more interested in the camp at Birkenau.
We also had a great many inspections at Raisko but the people who came
were largely interested in plant cultivation.”
Yes, said Christophersen, that was correct. “Today the International Red
Cross in Geneva tries to deny. They claim that their delegates were only al-
lowed in September 1944 to the office of the commandant [at Auschwitz I].
That is simply not true. I, myself, saw the vehicles of the International Red
Cross when they drove to Birkenau…”
Minutes later, Judge Thomas adjourned the court for the day.
Pearson resumed his cross-examination on Tuesday morning, March 8. He
asked Christophersen to try to recall the testimony he gave at the first Zündel
Trial in 1985. Specifically, had he not said he went to Birkenau perhaps “five,
six or seven times”?
Yes, admitted Christophersen, but when, at this trial, he estimated 20 trips,
he was also counting stops at the airplane-disassembly plant, immediately ad-
jacent to Birkenau.
Furthermore, said Pearson, had he not been asked in 1985, “Did you ever
see a crematorium at Birkenau?,” and answered, “No, but I knew there was
one”?
Christophersen disputed the transcript, remembering the question as, “Did
you see a crematorium for the burning of corpses?” And the correct answer
should have been, “Only from the outside.” Whether it was Crematorium II,
III, IV, or V, he could not say.
Later, Pearson cited a quotation in the Harwood pamphlet taken from
Christophersen’s book, which in turn attributed it to Teufel und Verdammte
(Devil and Damned), a book by Benedikt Kautsky, a prominent Austrian Jew-
ish socialist: “I was in the big German concentration camps. However, I must
establish the truth that in no camp at any time did I come across such an in-
stallation as a gas chamber.”
After much confusion owing to the fact that the witness and his interroga-
tor were consulting different editions of the Christophersen book, a copy of
the Kautsky book was given to the witness for his perusal. Christie asked to
see the book, and quickly noted that this was the 1948 edition of Kautsky,
whereas Harwood had cited the 1946 edition. “Quite often,” he observed, “lat-
er editions change their text, and that’s why I submit it would be misleading to
refer to a 1948 edition to establish a 1946 quote. It may be the same, it may
not be the same…”
Since no one had a 1946 copy of Kautsky available, Judge Thomas allowed
Pearson to continue. Christophersen, he suggested, would be able to note any
discrepancy.
Pearson had Christophersen read a paragraph on page 316 of the 1948
Kautsky. The court interpreter’s rendition of it was: “I would like to include
here a short description of the gas chambers which I have, it is true, not seen
myself, but which were described to me by so many different parties in a cred-
ible fashion that I am not afraid to render the description here.”
“I suggest,” said Pearson, “it was misleading for you to write only half the
quote.”
Christophersen admitted he had never seen the rare Kautsky book before in
any edition, despite “great efforts” to obtain a copy. The quote he had used
was from a source which he usually found reliable. The truth, he said, was “I
don’t know anything about Kautsky.”
Pearson then proceeded to page 11 of the English translation of Chris-
tophersen’s Auschwitz book, which refers to a “suppressed Red Cross report.”
Beneath a picture of the report was what purported to be a “synopsis” of the
same. Christophersen admitted writing this, and agreed with Pearson that it
was inaccurate. But the error was “small,” he insisted, and was corrected in
later German editions.
Pearson: Did you have any trouble getting the Red Cross report?
Christophersen: No.
Pearson: So what do you mean then it is “suppressed”?
Christophersen: I mean by that that the report is not complete.
Pearson suggested that what Christophersen had written was not truly a
“synopsis” or summary of the report’s position, since he had injected much of
his own thinking, but Christophersen stubbornly said it was. Most notably,
Christophersen’s “synopsis” of the report had asserted that the Red Cross del-
egate to Auschwitz in 1944 had inspected Birkenau.
Christophersen: He claims he had only been at the door of the comman-
dant, and that is not true. The delegation was in the camp at Raisko and also in
Birkenau.
Pearson: So you don’t agree with what the Red Cross delegate said in his
report?
Christophersen: There is a detailed report where this has been left out.
Pearson: I suggest, sir, in your synopsis, you tried to create the impression
that the Red Cross delegate said he made a careful inspection. Isn’t that true?
Yes, said Christophersen. “And I claim that the Red Cross delegate did not
have the courage to say the truth.”
Pearson had Christophersen read from the ICRC delegate’s published re-
port about his visit to the Auschwitz commandant in September 1944. As at
Oranienburg, it stated, the German officers were “friendly and reticent at the
same time… One can literally sense the fear to give out even the least bit of
information.” Among the internees questioned, one, a senior British PoW, had
mentioned a rumor of gassings in “a very modern shower room.” But there
was no confirmation. “It was impossible to prove anything.” The report ended
on a positive note: “We believe that everything that is being sent is being
handed over to the internees completely.”
The Red Cross report, said Christophersen, “expresses an opinion. It is not
a report about fact.”
Pearson then criticized Christophersen’s handling of Jewish statistics: like
Harwood, he had relied on major sources like the American Jewish Commit-
tee (15.7 million Jews in 1938) and the New York Times (18.7 million Jews in
1948), without appreciating that such sources make mistakes and need to be
checked against other data.
Christophersen had also cited a figure of 200,000 total Jewish deaths dur-
ing World War II, and attributed it to the United Nations. He admitted to Pear-
son that his source for this number was secondary, but noted that he and others
had written to the UN about it, and never received an answer.
After a break for lunch, Pearson asked the witness if he had ever seen Red
Cross vehicles at Birkenau. No, said Christophersen, but he had seen them on
their way there and had heard about the visit in the officers’ mess.
Of the Jewish workers under him, Christophersen later volunteered, “I
knew that they were completely innocent people.”
He felt the internment of Jews had been “necessary” because international
Jewry had declared war on Germany, but he would not presume to call it “jus-
tified.” The whole war, he said, was not just.
Pearson challenged Christophersen on his story about a bike tour of Birke-
nau’s burning sites. Had he not really gone to Bielitz, 30 kilometers distant?
“No,” said Christophersen, “I only said in the direction of Bielitz.”
Pearson asked Christophersen about his North American lecture tour of
August and September 1979. Had not one of the sponsors been the American
National-Socialist leader Matt Koehl? And had his New York speech not
blamed the outbreak of World War II on Churchill, Roosevelt, and, to a lesser
degree, Stalin? Christophersen was not about to deny any of that. He saw it as
his “duty,” he said, to “justify” and “rehabilitate” himself and his generation.
Christie began his re-examination by asking Christophersen to clarify the
matter of his bike tour. The witness explained that he had pedaled around the
entire Auschwitz camp complex, including Birkenau, Auschwitz I, and other
sites such as an industrial plant “in the direction of Bielitz.”
Christie: Now, it’s [been] suggested to you that you have sympathies with
the National-Socialist movement. Does that justify, to you, lying?
“No,” said Christophersen.
Asked about his “motives” in coming to testify, Christophersen stated that
he was convinced that “all these gas chamber stories are a hoax.”
Christie: In the Crown’s questions, they suggest that your love or loyalty to
Adolf Hitler is so emotional that you could not tell the truth. Is that true?
Christophersen answered by saying that he could not join those who say
hosanna one day and crucify the next. “He who lived through the Hitler times
with the conviction, and who has experienced the enthusiasm that dominated
us at that time, will never forget that time if he is honest.”
Christie: Now, the Crown in its cross-examination and all of its attempts to
associate you with Adolf Hitler didn’t ask you but I will, would you come
here and tell lies for Adolf Hitler?
“No,” said Christophersen.
“Those are my questions,” said Christie.
After a brief recess, the trial resumed at 4:00. Before the jury was called
back, Christie explained who his next witnesses would be: ordinary Canadians
who had read Harwood and been changed for the better by it. Section 177 of
the Criminal Code required the Crown to prove that Zündel’s alleged “false
news” was “likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest,” and yet the
Crown “never bothered once” to call evidence on the point. Meanwhile, by
emphasizing Thies Christophersen’s National-Socialist sympathies, Pearson
had left the jury with the impression that only “malevolent cranks” held the
revisionist view of the Holocaust. That was mistaken, as was the notion that
reading and being persuaded by Harwood would turn one into a Thies Chris-
tophersen clone. On the contrary, ordinary Canadians were reading the pam-
phlet, having their curiosity aroused, and then pursuing further study, as
Christie wished to show. The defense was not arguing that Harwood was the
“final word on anything.” The pamphlet was a “very early and very probably
flawed piece of writing,” Christie conceded, but it had the redeeming value of
“stimulating people to inquire further.”
Judge Thomas was clearly impressed by Christie’s line of argument, and a
bit concerned that the Crown had in fact never directed the attention of any
witnesses to the question of the social impact of Harwood. Pearson interjected
that the Crown’s position was that “the pamphlet is direct evidence on that
point.” He meant that it condemned itself through its unreasonable point of
view.
Judge Thomas said he wished to reflect on the matter, and would hear fur-
ther argument on the point in the morning. He then adjourned the court.
The next morning, Wednesday, March 9, Christie asked to “postpone the
application that I began last night” because other witnesses had arrived and
should be accommodated first. That was okay with Thomas, so Christie asked
to call Dr. Russell Barton, a British-trained psychiatrist now living in upstate
New York. Barton, a short, slight, fine-boned man with white hair, would
again testify, as he did at the 1985 Zündel trial, as both an eyewitness to Ber-
gen-Belsen after its liberation and an expert on such phenomena as brainwash-
ing and mass hysteria.
After Barton was accepted by Thomas and sworn, Christie read to him that
part of the Harwood pamphlet (following) which pertained to him. It was read
in sections, with Barton agreeing each time that both his writing and his recol-
lections were fairly represented.
“A surprisingly honest appraisal of the situation at Belsen in 1945 appeared
in Purnell’s History of the Second World War (Vol. 7, No. 15) by Dr. Russell
Barton, now superintendent and consultant psychiatrist at Severalls Hospital,
Essex, who spent one month at the camp as a medical student after the war.
His account vividly illustrates the true causes of the mortality that occurred in
such camps towards the war’s end, and how such extreme conditions came to
prevail there. Dr. Barton explains that Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the British
Medical Officer who took command of Belsen in 1945, ‘did not think there
had been any atrocities in the camp’ despite discipline and hard work. ‘Most
people,’ writes Dr. Barton, ‘attributed the conditions of the inmates to deliber-
ate intention on the part of the Germans… Inmates were eager to cite exam-
ples of brutality and neglect, and visiting journalists from different coun-
tries interpreted the situation according to the needs of propaganda at
home.’
However, Dr. Barton makes it quite clear that the conditions of starvation
and disease were unavoidable in the circumstances, and that they occurred on-
ly during the months of 1945. ‘From discussions with prisoners it seemed that
conditions in the camp were not too bad until late 1944. The huts were set
among pine trees and each was provided with lavatories, wash basins,
showers and stoves for heating.’ The cause of food shortage is also ex-
plained. ‘German medical officers told me that it had been increasingly dif-
ficult to transport food to the camp for some months. Anything that moved
on the autobahns was likely to be bombed… I was surprised to find rec-
ords, going back for two or three years, of large quantities of food cooked
daily for distribution. At that time I became convinced, contrary to popular
opinion, that there had never been a policy of deliberate starvation. This
was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed inmates. Why then were
so many people suffering from malnutrition?… The major reasons for the
state of Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by central authority, lack
of law and order within the huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water
and drugs.’ The lack of order, which led to riots over food distribution, was
quelled by British machine-gun fire and a display of force when British
tanks and armoured cars toured the camp.
Apart from the unavoidable deaths in these circumstances, Glyn Hughes
estimated that about ‘1,000 were killed through the kindness of English
soldiers giving them their own rations and chocolates.’ As a man who was
at Belsen, Dr. Barton is obviously very much alive to the falsehoods of
concentration-camp mythology, and he concludes: ‘In trying to assess the
causes of the conditions found in Belsen one must be alerted to the tremen-
dous visual display, ripe for purposes of propaganda, that masses of starved
corpses presented.’ To discuss such conditions ‘naively in terms of ‘good-
ness’ and ‘badness’ is to ignore the constituent factors… ’”
Christie spent some time reviewing Barton’s impressive curriculum vitae, and
then turned to Bergen-Belsen. Barton had arrived there on May 2, 1945, as a
medical student just turned 22. The British Army had captured the area on
April 15. Like almost everyone else, Barton thought he was entering a camp
where people had been “ruthlessly exterminated and deliberately starved to
death.” He “felt outraged” toward those who had created the “awful night-
mare” of dead and dying inmates.
In the first weeks of British administration, up to 500 inmates were dying
daily despite the efforts made in their behalf. Barton would soon come to real-
ize that the death rate at his hands was many times higher than any experi-
enced under the Germans before the chaotic closing weeks of war.
Barton said he believes he left Belsen on June 1. From his first day there,
he was curious to know why some inmates were “quite plump,” while most
were terribly emaciated. During his month in the camp, he learned that a “ter-
rible internal tyranny” had developed late in 1944, with a minority of inmates
securing most of the scarce food for themselves. This loss of order occurred
because Belsen was built for 3,000 and about 50,000 additional inmates were
crowded into the camp at that time. The staff, which had run things well be-
fore, deeply resented the gross crowding which resulted when internees at
several of the eastern camps were given a choice between liberation by the
Soviets or retreat with the Nazis back to Germany. Tens of thousands elected
to stay with the Nazis. In his role of unofficial camp dietitian, Barton poked
around in the kitchen and discovered eight 450-kilo vats and other elaborate
cooking equipment, plus detailed records of the food cooked and served over
several years (before the breakdown). Some of the inmates were Jewish doc-
tors, who “told me that Belsen had not been too bad until the autumn of
1944.”
Barton talked about these things with Dr. Meiklejohn, the commander of
the British Red Cross. “He felt it was best not to look into these things too
deeply” and suggested Barton’s views “would not make me very popular.”
Christie: And have they made you very popular?
Barton: No, on the contrary.
Barton was also disturbed by the propaganda filming which he witnessed at
Belsen, with fake horrific scenes created by the British. “[T]here didn’t seem
to be the integrity of dealing with the situation as it really was…”
“Why,” asked Christie, “did you publish [the] article which was in Pur-
nell’s History of the Second World War?”
“I was approached to do it,” said Barton. “I wasn’t particularly keen to do
it.” But he did “what I thought was the correct thing, to put it down without
fear or favor.”
Christie: Having experienced the result, would you write again on the sub-
ject as you did?
Barton: Not for publication in my lifetime, no.
The Times of London had run an “inflammatory” headline over its account
of his article, and soon a “rather hot and furious” debate was raging. On a talk
show, one guest said of him, “This man killed 15,000 Jews.” To this day,
when he gives testimony in murder trials and the like, his views on Belsen are
brought up in hopes of smearing him. “It happened in… Buffalo last year,”
said Barton.
“What is typhus, really?” asked Christie.
Barton explained that the disease, incurable in 1945, had the effect of mak-
ing people emaciated and exhausted.
Christie then had Barton explain brainwashing and his view that many in
Nazi Germany were brainwashed. The psychiatrist also felt that some of those
approaching the German camps in 1945 had been brainwashed by the Allies.
Were the Germans brainwashed again after the war ended, asked Christie?
“Yes,” said Barton. “I think the pressures on them were tremendous.”
Christie: In circumstances of brainwashing, can confessions be obtained
that are false?
Barton: Yes. I don’t think I’ve gone over the whole of brainwashing be-
cause, in an administration, the threats to people’s pensions, or to their sav-
ings, or to their jobs, and so forth, is just another of the mosaic of coercive
measures, and I think one had to follow a line of thought, just as they had
done under the Nazi administration. I think the German people that were being
examined78 had to follow the new current line of thought, and I think this was
a tragedy for the German people too.
“What,” asked Christie, “was your objective in writing as you did about
Bergen-Belsen?”
“Simply to give my evidence,” said Barton, about “what I had actually
seen… It just wasn’t what it appeared to be. It was a terrible outbreak of ty-
phus. It was the death of, I think, 30,000 people.”
“Was there a fashionable belief about Germany among your colleagues?”
asked Christie.
Yes, said Barton. “That all Germans were bad people.”
“Did you find that that belief affected their willingness to accept what you
said?” asked Christie.
Yes, said Barton.
It was then Pearson’s turn to ask questions.
He quickly had Barton discoursing at length on National-Socialist attitudes
and policy toward Jews, and Christie protested the history lesson. Judge
Thomas ruled that because Barton “served his country at the time of the Sec-
ond World War” and “was involved in it,” his views on Central European his-
tory constituted admissible “personal knowledge.”
With unintended irony, Pearson finally asked the doctor, “Now, you can
only tell us about Bergen-Belsen, isn’t that right?”
Barton: That’s all I can tell you about, yes.
Pearson put to him that Belsen was one of the nicer German camps until
1944 partly because its internees were often being held as quasi-hostages to be
exchanged with the Allies for goods and people the Nazis wanted.
78
Examined, for example, by means of the notorious Fragebogen (questionnaire) which every adult
German male had to fill out completely after the war in order to receive the jobs and food ration
coupons needed to survive. The 131 questions pried into every detail of the individual’s past.
German wits of the time added a 132nd question: “Did you play with toy soldiers as a child? If so,
what regiment?” Hundreds of thousands of Germans – Nazi or otherwise – who held positions of
leadership during the Third Reich were arrested after honestly filling out the questionnaire,
stripped of their possessions, and interned under primitive conditions.
Pearson: And it makes sense, doesn’t it, Dr. Barton, that you keep in rela-
tively good condition the people you’re going to trade?
Yes, said Barton.
After the morning break, Pearson asked Barton some questions about “the
use of propaganda to incite racial hatred.” Barton agreed that belief in a “Zi-
onist conspiracy” would be an example of “projection,” that is, “attributing to
other people things that are denied in themselves.”79
Later, Barton suggested (albeit in slightly different words) that for a tall,
milk-skinned Swede to reject marriage with an African pygmy “is so crazy
because nobody knows what genes anybody else has.” Barton’s little lectures
on the subject of race climaxed as he asserted: “[O]ne has got to face the fact
that many people feel a [racial] kinship with others which is irrational and
which may be very damaging and destructive… and I think it is only by un-
derstanding that there is this basic beastliness [which seeks] to be with people
like [oneself]… that we are able to come out of this morass, this mess, this
emotional miasma.”
Pearson then labelled the natural attraction of like to like a “baser instinct”
and Barton responded by branding evolution’s key constructive force a “mis-
leading passion” which one might feel but should never act upon.
These acts of obeisance to the current “conventional wisdom” were partic-
ularly interesting in light of the fact that Barton had only recently answered a
question of Christie’s about brainwashing by claiming that he was a part of the
“least-suggestible” one-tenth of the population.
At times during his examination-in-chief, Dr. Barton misunderstood the
thrust of questions put to him by Pearson. For example, the prosecutor asked:
“Now, if the point of view that you are trying to get across is that Hitler was
right, would you agree with me that one of the hurdles you have to get over is
the fact that Hitler exterminated millions of Jews?”
From the context, it should have been very clear that Barton’s own views
were not being addressed, yet he seemed confused and answered, “Well, first
of all, I wish to make it quite clear I don’t think Hitler was right” – a point no
one in the courtroom had had reason to doubt.
In fairness to the doctor, he also made some percipient remarks. One must
look at a matter from all sides, he argued, “because it is usually the victors
who write history, and the vanquished have to accept whatever views they put
across. [Herbert] Butterfield in England has written several books on this very
fact.”
79
Without denying the legitimacy of the concept of “projection,” one may reasonably inquire as to
the proper clinical term for attributing to others the presence of undesirable traits which in fact are
not found in either one’s self or one’s identity group. In our time, correct assessments of real hu-
man differences are too often uncritically smeared as evidence of the assessor’s “prejudice,” “pro-
jection,” and so on.
To make these observations is not to take any position on the validity of conspiracy thinking.
A disturbing aspect of Barton’s cross-examination was the fact that Doug-

las Christie, normally on his toes and ready to spring, was seemingly napping
for once in his career.
Early on, Barton had said in so many words that he did not know the thesis
of the Harwood pamphlet because he had never read it.
Later, Pearson put increasingly inappropriate questions to the witness.
Pearson: Would you agree that someone who suffered through the Second
World War as an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp might well be enraged
by [Harwood]?
Yes, said Barton.
Pearson: I Suggest that the proposition [that] the death of millions of Jews
effectively discourages discussions of race [is] one of the theses of this pam-
phlet, Dr. Barton, do you agree?
Barton gave a vague answer, but Christie should probably have objected to
the question.
At another point in the cross-examination, Pearson and Barton had unwit-
tingly exchanged words of fine satiric potential. “Everyone agrees it had hap-
pened,” said Pearson.
“Yes,” said Barton. Maybe they differ on the “how,” said Pearson, but
“they all agree that it happened, don’t they?”
“I agree,” said Barton.
But what was “it,” on which all agreed? Barton himself had just said that
he did not accept the idea of any German policy to exterminate Jews, which
was one of the revisionists’ three main points of contention.
Later, during his re-examination of the witness, Christie tried to make hay
of the “it” silliness, but lacked the assurance to follow through:
“My learned friend,” began Christie, “said to you [that] ‘Everyone agrees it
happened… ’ He put that to you, didn’t he?”
Barton: Yes.
Christie: And you agreed with him?
Barton: Yes.
Christie: What I’m asking you is how do you know that everyone agrees
about that, that it happened?
Barton: I’m not – just how do I – ?
Christie: How do you know that everybody agrees? Apparently, Harwood
doesn’t.
Barton: I don’t know.
Judge Thomas: He didn’t say that everyone agreed. He said that that was
his view.
“I see,” said Christie. “Sorry.”
Of course, the judge was wrong. Barton had affirmed twice previously that
“everyone agrees” that “it” happened. Furthermore, he had agreed with Chris-
tie about his affirmations at the start of this very exchange!
Christie began his re-examination by asking Barton, “Is there any possibil-
ity that the Holocaust as presented today could be sensationalized, and we
could be brainwashed into believing [untrue] things about it?”
“Greater minds than mine have looked at the Holocaust,” said Barton –
who then cited Elie Wiesel as a foe of Holocaust sensationalism.
Christie – wincing inwardly, one must assume – again mentioned the word
“brainwashed,” and Barton responded that “a dogma seems to be being estab-
lished.” Perhaps younger people were being “enlisted emotionally instead of
being enlisted intellectually.”
“Is there an antidote to brainwashing?” asked Christie twice.
On the first occasion, Barton cited the Chinese philosopher Mencius’s
counsel of “fair play and compassion.” The second time around, he replied, “I
think we need to be trained that the most-important faculty we have as human
beings is to doubt and not to be enlisted.” Specifically, when we heard any-
thing bad about anyone, we should respond with initial skepticism.
Since Barton had told Pearson he believed that six million Jews died under
the Nazis, Christie asked where he derived his knowledge.
“From the population studies,” said Barton.
Had he seen such studies himself?
No.
Then where did he get the information?
From some “articles” he had read.
Barton ended his testimony with several strong answers.
Christie asked if he had ever objected to being quoted by Harwood or any-
one else.
No, said Barton.
Is “dissent upon all issues” healthy? asked Christie.
Absolutely, said Barton.
Should historical controversies be resolved in court?
No, said Barton.
Do people who have been brainwashed know it?
“Usually not,” said Barton.
Can you think of any historical number cited more often than six million,
asked Christie, or any event discussed more frequently than the Holocaust?
No, said Barton.
“Has that discussion diminished or increased with the passage of time?”
asked Christie.
“It has increased,” said Barton.
Christie: My friend put to you [that] Jews would be enraged by [Harwood].
Were you enraged by it at all?
“No,” said Barton. “You see, I think this discussion is necessary… I don’t
think I can dismiss what somebody else thinks peremptorily…”
Christie: Were people enraged by your writing?
Barton: Some were, yes.

Christie: Should that be a reason you should not have written?
No, said Barton.
“My friend,” said Christie, “made some reference to the need to disallow
racial discussion so that it would never happen again, or words to that effect…
What is… in your psychiatric opinion, a better way to deal with these subjects
than suppression?”
“Ventilation,” said Barton. “That is, they have to be brought out and dis-
cussed. You can’t really suppress something long term. Inevitably, if you do,
things go wrong politically.”
Christie: Do you think it is ever possible that there is an objectively truthful
history of events, from your own experience at Bergen-Belsen?
Barton: No, I don’t, but I don’t think that relieves us of the obligation to try
and arrive objectively at true belief. I think truth requires courage in the first
place.
So ended Russell Barton’s testimony. When the trial resumed following
lunch, the fourth defense witness, Dr. Kuang Fann, took the stand. With his
wild gray hair and corduroy jacket, Fann looked the part of a Marxist who had
once taught at Berkeley. As a philosopher of language, his role was to help the
jury distinguish statements of fact and statements of opinion in the Harwood
pamphlet, since the latter are not indictable under Section 177 of the Criminal
Code.
“From a philosophy of language perspective,” asked Christie, “how would
you classify” Harwood?
“The whole pamphlet obviously should be classified as a political opin-
ion,” said Fann. “It seems to be obviously a political tract.” The opening and
closing pages of commentary added by Zündel were “purely a political opin-
ion,” with no factual claims whose truth status could be verified one way or
the other. As for the main Harwood section, said Fann, it “includes factual
claims which the author believed to be true,” and some of which can be prov-
en or disproven, yet “it is a political opinion.” One method of determining this
was the “social context” of its style and publication, as part of a “political
movement.”
“It’s typical of a political tract,” the Taiwanese-born York-University pro-
fessor concluded, “no worse or no better than most political tracts” he had
seen.
During cross-examination, Pearson noted that not only was the name Rich-
ard E. Harwood a pseudonym but a note at the end of the pamphlet misrepre-
sented the author’s credentials. Fann agreed that “what has been written there
was written to mislead the reader,” and observed that other examples of false
claims could be found in the text. He also pointed to various logical fallacies
used by Harwood, adding that “most political writings are full of [them],” and
stated that he strongly disagreed with the pamphlet’s thesis.
During re-examination, Fann observed that the logical fallacies employed

in places by Harwood were not only “characteristic of most political writings”
but could be found in “some academic writings.” Shortly after this, an irritated
Judge Thomas took over the questioning of Fann from Christie. He was
peeved because he had thought that Fann would be helping the jury to separate
individual statements of fact and opinion. Instead, Fann was simply declaring
that the whole work was opinion, while conceding that true and false state-
ments of fact could be found within the whole. The decisive exchange went
like this:
“As far as I am concerned,” said Fann, “all the facts claimed here can be
false. Still, the whole pamphlet is a political opinion that ought to be allowed
to be expressed and I am here for a principle of freedom of opinion.”
Thomas: The reason why you’ve come here – we might as well come to
the bottom of this – you think people should be able to say anything they
want.
Fann: Not anything, but this particular one I feel [is in the] domain of opin-
ion.
Thanks, said the judge harshly, before asking Fann to step down and re-
cessing the court. Later, with the jury absent, he bemoaned his decision to let
Fann testify: “The Court of Appeal clearly stated that expressions of opinion
do not fall within the ambit of the charge. [But] the Court of Appeal also re-
jected an argument that the pamphlet was an expression of opinion and, as
such, was protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of expression.”
Thomas said he would explain the problem with Fann’s testimony when he
charged the jury at the end of the trial.80
By now it was 4:00, and Christie said he wished to call next certain “rea-
sonable people” from all walks of like who shared Harwood’s and Zündel’s
basic position on the Holocaust.
Judge Thomas agreed that the Court of Appeal had commented that “un-
reasonableness” was “an item of evidence to support an inference that [Zün-
del’s] belief was not honestly held.”
Calling these witnesses was not intended “to say that there was no [Nazi]
mass murder [of Jews],” Christie assured the judge. The evidence would not
“conflict with Your Honor’s ruling of what the facts of history are.”
Regardless of people’s beliefs, said Thomas, “reasonableness” finally
hinged on “whether it’s true or false.”
Christie countered, “No I would submit religious opinions are deemed to
be factual by those who believe them, for example, but they are not necessari-
ly factual at all.”
80
Fann was later ostracized by his colleagues and others at York University. He phoned Christie and
Zündel to describe the threats and verbal abuse.
“The Crown,” argued Christie, “was allowed to show alleged leanings to-
ward National Socialism by the accused in [unrelated] publications” in order
to suggest he had lying motives. Therefore, the defense “should be entitled to
show that many people who hold this view… do not have the political motive
that is ascribed.”
Pearson countered that only the accused’s state of mind was relevant.
“I’ll give my ruling in the morning,” said Thomas.
But it was not to be. Following a lengthy clash of opinions on the morning
of Thursday, March 10, the judge said, “I’m going to reserve on this matter.”
Pearson had asserted that “tolerance is a state of mind” and so he did not
need to prove that “people were moved to do intolerant acts” by reading Har-
wood. He also said that bringing in reasonable people from the general public
was “usurping the function of the jury,” whose members were intended by law
to be “the reflection of the community.”
Judge Thomas cited the 1985 judgment in Towne Cinema Theatres v. H.M.
The Queen, an obscenity case, whose synopsis stated, “The community-stan-
dards test is a test of tolerance, not of what Canadians think is right for them-
selves to see, but what Canadians would not abide other Canadians seeing…”
In other words, explained Thomas, “the meaning of tolerance has to be reas-
sessed not from the point of view of an individual saying ‘What is good for
me’… but what Canadians would not abide other Canadians seeing.”
Christie answered Pearson first: “Racial tolerance is a communication of
either action or expression. It is not merely a state of mind. There must be
something to verify the existence of racial and social intolerance.” Perhaps
“individual tolerance” could be reduced to a “state of mind,” but concepts like
racial and social tolerance implied more.
As for Pearson’s argument against “usurping the function of the jury,”
Christie demanded, “If there is no such effect [hostile acts or expressions],
how can we know what reading [Harwood] would do, outside of the jury
room, which is what we are supposedly dealing with… unless we have people
who have read the book out there in the world, and the Crown never called
anybody.” Instead, the Crown brought forward a mass of prejudicial material
(Felderer was once in a mental ward, Christophersen had twice met Hitler and
been impressed, etc.) to get the jury to react emotionally. “A very effective
method,” said Christie, “but [it] has nothing to do with what would be the [re-
sponse] before a charge [is made] and before a whole criminal process gets
involved, of a person reading this in an unpressured and unpremeditated cir-
cumstance.”
George Orwell would have relished some of the exchanges which fol-
lowed. Christie observed that if “racial and social tolerance” meant only a
“state of mind,” then “we have nothing but a thought crime.”
Judge Thomas: Well, it is not quite a state of mind because state of mind
produces acts. People, every day, their motor system responds to their state of
mind. That is axiomatic. If you have no state of mind then your acts are the
acts of an automaton.
Christie again insisted that consequently “there must be some objective ev-
idence of an effect.” But, he continued, if he was to be bound by “state of
mind,” then he should at least be allowed to show how reading Harwood had
no such “deleterious effect” on ordinary Canadians in a non-courtroom set-
ting.
Judge Thomas: The Court of Appeal says the maintenance of racial and so-
cial tolerance in a community is clearly a matter of public interest. Now, that
is all the help you get on that.
Christie: If all they say is [that] the public interest is the community stand-
ards, then I am obliged to prove that if you don’t meet the community stand-
ards, you can’t communicate this idea. But they didn’t say that. I’m simply
submitting to you that there must be a specific breach of a specific state of
mind created somewhere here by the public, whatever it is.
Thomas replied: “But it doesn’t say ‘likely to cause injury to a reasonable
person’s state of mind with respect to racial and social tolerance.’ It says ‘pub-
lic interest.’ Public interest is the community…”
The legacy of Anglo-Saxon individualism took a judicial battering in To-
ronto that morning. But it was at this point that Thomas decided to “reserve”
his decision.
Christie then disputed the judge’s brusque treatment of the previous de-
fense witness, Dr. Fann. He noted in passing how Fann had said he shared the
traditional presumption that a writer believes what he says, “not the presump-
tion of deceit” of the Crown. Thomas insisted, “There is no presumption
whatsoever.”
A bit later, the judge said, in effect, that he was just following orders with
regard to free speech. “The Court of Appeal has set down the law, and I am
duty-bound to instruct the jury to uphold the law. If this charge is proved,
freedom of expression steps aside. That is not law that I am making. It is the
Court of Appeal.”
After noon, the Court listened as the proposed fifth defense witness,
Juergen Neumann, testified on the voir dire. Neumann, a young video camer-
aman, said he had been in close contact with Zündel since about 1979 but
never heard him say anything hypocritical about the Harwood pamphlet. Zün-
del had always looked immediately into alleged errors in Harwood which
were brought to his attention. He was “one of the most honest people” Neu-
mann knew.
The witness had once tried to lay “false news” charges against Sol Littman,
a Jewish leader in Toronto, but the judge had “refused to bring proceedings.”
He and others staged frequent demonstrations because the egalitarian elite (a
nice oxymoron) “never seem to throw any of this equality our way.”
Under cross-examination, Neumann was asked what he thought of Nation-

al-Socialist party principles. It was another time and another place, said Neu-
mann, and irrelevant to Canada today.
Judge Thomas allowed Neumann’s testimony but disallowed his showing
of a two-hour video of Zündel and other revisionists which he taped about
1981.
With the jury back, Neumann again underwent questioning by Christie and
Pearson. The latter suggested to him that what he, Neumann, called “anti-
German propaganda” was really “anti-Nazi,” and that “one of the major vic-
tims of the Nazi regime [was] the German people,” but in both instances
Neumann declined to agree. As Christie began his brief re-examination, his
first question was, “Why do you not agree that it’s anti-Nazi propaganda, in
your experience?” Neumann said that once, long ago, he had felt the propa-
ganda was merely anti-Nazi, but he had since been sensitized to the harsh real-
ity by repeated exposure to blatantly anti-German material like the movie The
Wall, where the brutal bullies are “always [called] German, German, Ger-
man.”
Neumann’s testimony ended with him reemphasizing Zündel’s sincerity.
Friday morning, March 11, brought defense witness No. 6 to the stand.
This was Bradley Smith, the affable middle-aged director of the media project
of California’s Institute for Historical Review (IHR). Smith’s ready wit pre-
vailed despite a horrendous case of the “Shanghai flu,” which was making the
rounds in Toronto, particularly at 206 Carlton Street. The ailing Smith man-
aged to dominate John Pearson, one of the few witnesses who could do so.
Smith began by describing for Christie the count which he and others had
made of the contents of Zündel’s personal library. There were five to six thou-
sand books altogether. Among those written in English, 246 were on the Hol-
ocaust, of which 193 essentially followed the exterminationist line and 53 the
revisionist. Thirty-one books in German were on the Holocaust, of which 20
were exterminationist and 11 revisionist. There were also seven books of Hol-
ocaust revisionism in French, and six in Spanish.
Smith also noted that among 95 major articles published in the IHR’s
Journal of Historical Review, 54, or more than half, were on subjects other
than the Holocaust.
The point of these exercises was to demonstrate that neither Zündel nor
those affiliated with the IHR are “obsessed” with the Holocaust. Both Judge
Thomas and prosecutor Pearson were inclined to use this word “in a damning
sort of way.”81
81
The word “obsessed,” like “sensitive” and many others, is increasingly being abused by the ene-
mies of clear speech. Everyone today must be “sensitive,” of course – which translates as super-
sensitive to the concerns of some groups, and totally insensitive to the basic needs of other groups.
If one is not “sensitive” in this highly insensitive fashion, then one risks being relegated to the
Pearson commenced his cross-examination of Smith with the apparent be-

lief that he could deck the witness with wild, roundhouse swings.
Historical revisionism in general was “legitimate,” he suggested, but Holo-
caust revisionism had “nothing to do with looking objectively at historical
facts.”
Anyone who has read Smith’s careful dissections of some of the wilder
Holocaust claims will appreciate how he must have felt about his interrogator
at that moment. He answered with his customary restraint: “If you want to talk
about a specific incident, I’ll talk to you about it, but if you just want to make
general claims like that, there is no way for me to answer or respond to you.”
Soon, Pearson was asking if so-and-so had “denied the Holocaust.” Well,
said Smith, “he denies the parts in it that are deniable.”
“The term ‘denial of the Holocaust’ is misleading,” Smith suggested – in-
deed, it was a “newspeak” phrase.82
Weren’t neo-Nazis using Holocaust revisionism to attack Jews, Pearson
asked the politically liberal Smith, whose answer was ready: “[I]f there
weren’t so much fraud and falsehood in the orthodox view of the Holocaust,
anti-Jewish individuals and organizations would not be able to use these lies
to attack Jews with. I say rather than suppress the books, [the answer] is that
the academic community join in with an examination of the historical writings
on this event and clean it up, because there are fraud and falsehood growing
out of the Holocaust story, like pus from a canker, and of course, anyone who
wants to beat up on Jews can use these books and say ‘Look, Jewish lies, Jew-
ish lies.’ I say clean up the literature and then these people won’t be able to
use it against Jews.”
Following a recess, Pearson returned to his “Holocaust obsession” line of
argument.
Hadn’t Smith said that roughly 50 percent of the IHR oeuvre was on non-
Holocaust topics?
Yes, said Smith.
Pearson, implying that what many Jews call “the central event of history”
is a sacred preserve in which non-Jews must not linger, then drove home what
to his seemingly servile mind83 was a damning point: “And I suggest it fol-
lows that 50 percent of the work of the IHR is involved in Holocaust denial.
Isn’t that right?”
margins of public life. As for “obsessed,” it is often used selectively to help keep certain people
from persisting in the pursuit of their interests.
In the present instance, revisionists are often ridiculed as “obsessed by the Holocaust” at a time
when many Jews – who are not so labelled – admit to having made the Event (to use Elie Wiesel’s
favored capital) the center of their lives. One could argue that the “Holocaust obsession” of many
Jews has forced people like Ernst Zündel to become “counter-obsessed” in self-defense.
82
Reference to the terminology used by George Orwell in his famous novel 1984.
83
More-charitably, Pearson was only filling a social role and earning a paycheck.
Smith had already repeatedly rejected the term “Holocaust denial” as “mis-
leading,” and here he answered carefully, “Well, again, I would say that about
50 percent of these articles deal with exposing the fraud and corruption in the
orthodox Holocaust story because, listen, they don’t deny – they don’t deny
the tragedy that the Jews suffered in World War II. This is why I don’t under-
stand why it goes so against the grain of Jewish extremists to clean up their
own story because when the revisionists finish all their work, the tragedy of
the Jews remains.”
As an example of blatant Holocaust fraud, Smith cited the fantasies of Elie
Wiesel, who “claims that when some Jews were executed in the Ukraine, that
for months after the shootings… their cadavers continued to spurt geysers of
blood from their graves into the air. Now, I have two ways to look at this. I
can either look at it as if Mr. Wiesel believes it, then of course he’s not
wrapped too tight, or I can look at it that he’s passing along fraudulent infor-
mation. You don’t have to be a doctorate in hydrology to understand in this
day and age that even Jewish cadavers cannot spurt geysers of blood from
their graves for months after they have been buried. Now, not only is the fraud
in the original statement, but the fraud is also perpetuated by the unwillingness
of our academics and the press to question him about such matters. This is one
example.”
“What do you allege is the purpose of this fraud?” asked Pearson.
In part, said Smith, it was simply “an expression of the cowardice of these
professions in the face of the lobby that runs the Holocaust story.”
What lobby is that? asked Pearson.
Smith: “All of those organizations and people who treat a historical event
as if it were something that no doubt can be expressed about.” (Here and
elsewhere, Pearson was hoping that Smith would refer to “the Jewish lobby,”
thereby placing himself squarely within the “lunatic fringe.”)
Later, Pearson suggested to Smith that David Irving is “a journalist, basi-
cally, isn’t he?”
Smith: No, he’s not. He’s a historian and he’s the most widely read histori-
an in the British Isles.
Pearson: Thank you. And he does not deny that millions of Jews died, does
he?
Smith: No, Mr. Irving chooses not to discuss the issue yet. When he does,
it’s going to be a wonderful thing.
Later still, Smith made this point: “It’s interesting why people are so anx-
ious to believe Jewish eye-witness survivors and so fearful of giving German
eye-witness survivors the time of day. There’s a real fear involved in this and
it’s because of the taboo around this subject.”
Pearson closed his cross-examination by posing questions worded to make
the camaraderie which exists between IHR revisionists in California and Zün-
delists in Canada appear sinister. “You have to remember,” replied Smith,
“that the state apparatus, with all its tax monies, is supporting your prosecu-
tion of Ernst Zündel, and Ernst Zündel has to raise money on his own. It’s a
wonder that he could even have done it. I admire him for having been able to
raise enough money to apparently carry on these affairs which are meant to
destroy him financially and in other ways.”
After a brief re-examination by Christie, the witness was excused, and
court was adjourned before 1:00 for the day and for the long “March break.”
Chapter 5: Mark Weber and Others
O
n Tuesday, March 22, the trial resumed with the brief testimony of
Bernard Kneuper, a 67-year-old Texan who entered Dachau one day
after the American liberation of Sunday, April 29, 1945. Kneuper was
attached to (but not under the command of) the 42nd Infantry Division of the
U.S. Army, as an interrogator of German POWs. On April 29, Kneuper and
two colleagues were still outside Dachau and “trying to sort out thousands of
prisoners” (“We used to get maybe 3,000 a day at that time”) when someone
said, “Barney, we have two prisoners here that have a most interesting story to
tell.”
These two were survivors of the massacre of about 520 surrendered Ger-
man soldiers, perpetrated by the Americans a few hours earlier in Dachau. The
victims were not members of the SS, explained Kneuper, nor had most of
them been guards at Dachau until the last days of the war. The real guards had
largely deserted as German defenses collapsed, so the German field police
rounded up stray soldiers and small units and ordered them to guard Dachau.
These were men who had served in the German military, said Kneuper, but
they “had orders to exchange the uniforms of their units [for] guard uniforms.”
When the Americans lined them up in ranks and mowed them down with ma-
chine guns, the two survivors, in a rear rank, had dead men fall on them.
“They simply lay still and survived that way. And apparently they wandered
off and some unit of our division just picked them up and brought them to the
collection point.”
The nearby city of Munich was, at that time, “nothing but pandemonium,”
said Kneuper. “The Germans, the DPs, everybody looted warehouses, looted
stores, people ran through the streets, also Yugoslav partisans, all kinds of –
just all manner of people just sort of going crazy.”
On Monday afternoon, April 30, Kneuper and a friend ventured into Da-
chau in a jeep. They saw many former inmates. “It looked like they were just
as well off and just as husky and hardy [as] the German veterans, for instance
the two guards.”
Christie: How were the Germans treated by the Allies generally at that
time?
Kneuper: Well, of course they were treated real bad because of all the war
propaganda. But it varied. Some people were nasty to them, some GIs, and
some were friendly.
Under cross-examination, Kneuper was asked what he did with the infor-
mation given him by the two German survivors. There was an officer in his
group, he explained, who wrote up the reports, “and what he wrote, I do not
know.”
Pearson: When you received this information, didn’t it shock you, sir?
Kneuper: Yes, it did… It was a massacre you know.
Pearson: You didn’t do anything to follow it up?
“I was a technician,” explained Kneuper.
Pearson persisted: “For all you know, he may have made a very thorough
investigation and concluded that these were simply stories, couldn’t he?”
Kneuper could only say, “I doubt that.”84
Next to take the stand was Mark Weber, whose testimony would consume
most of five days. Christie and Pearson began by questioning him briefly
about his scholarly credentials. A historian by training, the 36-year-old Weber
had studied the Holocaust intensively since 1979, and Judge Thomas soon
ruled that he could give normally excluded “opinion evidence” as a recog-
nized “expert” on the subject.
Christie asked Weber about the reports of the Einsatzgruppen or “action
groups” in the German-occupied Soviet Union, and the latter noted that Raul
Hilberg and most “exterminationist” historians “select from these reports…
those portions which they can use to substantiate their story. As I found in re-
viewing the Einsatzgruppen reports carefully… when they are viewed as a
whole and taken in context, they, in fact, do not substantiate the Holocaust ex-
termination story.”
“Why is that?” asked Christie.
“There are several reasons,” said Weber. First, the German records “make
it clear” that the shootings of Jews “were carried out for specific security rea-
sons or in reprisals or for [other] specific reasons, not simply because these
people were Jews.” Further, others had researched the reports and found, as
Weber had, “that the numbers of Jews allegedly shot given in these reports are
grossly exaggerated…” Weber compared them to the exaggerated body counts
made by the Americans in Vietnam. He noted the case of Otto Ohlendorf, who
84
Colonel Howard A. Buechner, the first American physician to enter Dachau, has published a book
which gives the full story of the massacre, committed by the 45th Division. Dachau: The Hour of
the Avenger (Thunderbird Press, Metairie, La., 1986).
was in Einsatzgruppe D in southern Russia, and who claimed at Nuremberg

that his unit killed 90,000 Jews in one year. “Ohlendorf was a prosecution
witness and he tried very hard to cooperate with the Allies in the hope, I sup-
pose, of trying to save his own skin. However, much to his surprise, the Allies
turned around and put him on trial for his activities as commander of the Ein-
satzgruppe.”
Christie: Was that before or after he had testified for them?
“That was after he testified for them,” said Weber, “and then he changed
his story and he testified then that the figures of Jews killed were greatly ex-
aggerated.”
In the end, Ohlendorf was executed.
Christie mentioned Raul Hilberg, and Weber noted that he too was, in a
sense, “a revisionist.” He and others “who believe in the Holocaust story have
changed that story over the years [in] many, many ways.” As an example,
Weber cited Rabbi Stephen Wise, who, as president of the World Jewish Con-
gress during World War II, “stated repeatedly that the Germans were manu-
facturing soap bars from the corpses of Jews [they] were killing, and this story
was also repeated at Nuremberg and it also has been repeated many, many
times in the popular press ever since…” The Anti-Defamation League of
B’nai B’rith was still making the claim in a 1987 booklet, although “no repu-
table historian now accepts it.”
Weber described a “very-common defense strategy” at Nuremberg and
other postwar trials: “The attorney will argue that… there was [a] terrible ex-
termination program that we will not dispute but my particular defendant was
not involved in it, and this is done in order to avoid getting into what is an al-
most impossible task and that is to call into question the entire Holocaust ex-
termination story which is held to with an almost-religious fervor…”
Christie: Do you know whether any of the defendants at Nuremberg admit-
ted to extermination?
Weber replied that every single defendant denied that he knew of any pro-
gram to exterminate the Jews during the war.
Christie: In regard to the Einsatzgruppen reports, do they, in your opinion,
evidence a plan of extermination’ of the Jews of Russia?
“The reports,” said Weber, “when they are read as a totality and are read
critically, I think, show that the German government did not have a policy of
exterminating the Jews as Jews.”
The grave dilemma faced by the Germans in Russia needs to be understood
in context, said Weber. As soon as they invaded in June 1941, “the Soviet
government immediately called upon all citizens of the Soviet Union to carry
out a partisan war.” Throughout history, “guerrilla warfare, which is a form of
terrorism, [has] always [been] met by counter-terrorism.” Weber cited the
PLO as a contemporary example, which brought noises from the courtroom
and caused Judge Thomas to excuse the jury. Thomas called the reference by
Weber an “attempt to smear this trial.” Comparisons with the war in Vietnam
were permissible, he said, but “the present environment in Israel” was out-of-
bounds.
During the 20-minute recess which followed, a crowd of Jews gathered
around Weber and taunted him with epithets like “liar” and “neo-Nazi.” One
Jew cried out, “God should strike you dead,” while another observed, “He
even looks like Hitler.”
The mutterings of “liar” and rude noises had actually begun soon after
Weber began testifying. Later, an elderly Jewish woman would tell the wit-
ness, “You should be washed with Jewish soap.”
When court resumed, Judge Thomas admonished several Jewish spectators
for the “skirmish” which occurred “when I was absent.”
Christie asked Weber about the protocol of the Wannsee Conference in
January 1942: “Does it indicate a plan for the extermination of the European
Jews?”
“No, it does not,” said Weber, who added that the prominent West-German
historians Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen had, in recent years, come to
the same conclusion. Weber then went a step further, saying, “I believe that it
is, in fact, evidence that there was no German policy to exterminate the Jews
of Europe during the Second World War.” By reading the Wannsee document
as a whole and in “the context of other German documents of the time,” it be-
came “very clear” that “the German policy during the war was to deport the
Jews of Europe to the east… and then after the war… to some place outside
of Europe…”
Shortly after Wannsee, said Weber, Reinhard Heydrich, the SS leader who
called and chaired the conference, gave a speech in Prague to high German of-
ficials “in which he expanded on the German policy and said that the Jews of
Europe would be put in camps in the occupied Soviet territories and then after
the war, would be taken out of Europe altogether.”
Furthermore, said the witness, Hitler had held private conversations long
after Wannsee, on July 24, 1942 and other dates, when he still spoke of “de-
porting” the Jews. Weber also cited a memorandum of Martin Luther, of the
German Foreign Office, who was “very much in a position to know.” Dated
August 21, 1942, it described a German policy of deportation.
“Incidentally,” said Weber, “what happens very often is that when faced
with documents of this nature, those who believe in the Holocaust extermina-
tion story try to interpret the document to suit what I believe is their precon-
ceived notion, that they try to make the evidence fit.”
Christie asked if there were other sources of information upon which We-
ber relied for his understanding of Wannsee.
Yes, said Weber. “We have the post-war testimony of those who were pre-
sent at the Wannsee Conference and they are fairly unanimous in saying that
the Conference was not one held for an extermination program.”
Christie turned next to the wartime aerial-reconnaissance photos of Ausch-

witz, which were released by the CIA only in 1979. This was a major news
story at the time, and its extremely biased handling, said Weber, first pro-
voked him to investigate the Holocaust for himself. The photos, he noted,
were taken “at random during precisely the period when it’s alleged that the
greatest extermination took place at Auschwitz,” yet none of them showed the
belching smoke and flames which most of the alleged “eyewitnesses to gas-
sing” described as being constantly present. “What astounded me,” said We-
ber, was that Elie Wiesel and others “nevertheless seized upon these aerial
photographs to claim that the United States government knew that Jews were
being exterminated… and complacently refused to do anything about it…”
Weber mentioned this to the director of the Modern Military Branch of the
National Archives in Washington, D.C., and learned that he shared the feeling
that the CIA photos “were being blatantly misrepresented.”
Asked for his appraisal of the Harwood pamphlet’s overall thesis, Weber
called it accurate, in spite of scattered errors. Asked if he found the work of
Paul Rassinier, the pioneer French revisionist on whom Harwood relied heavi-
ly, to be “credible,” Weber said “overall, yes.” He hastened to add that revi-
sionism had come a long way since these men were active.
After a lunch break, Weber explained the purpose of the Einsatzgruppen:
“to bring about a sort of ‘rough and ready’ form of order and security in the
occupied Soviet territories behind the [front] and before the establishment of
regular civil administration.”
“We know,” he said, “from numerous Jewish sources and from German
records that the great majority of Jews living in this territory fled or were
evacuated by the Soviet government in 1941…” He believed the number left
behind “could not be more” than one to one-and-a-half million. Of this num-
ber, between 200,000 and “800,000 at the very highest” were shot by the Ein-
satzgruppen.85
Many different sources agreed that the Soviet Jewish death toll by shooting
was “grossly exaggerated,” and Weber named several of these: the Einsatz-
gruppen Defendants Paul Blobel and Gustav Nosske; the historians Gerald
Reitlinger, Werner Maser and Tom Bower; the journalist William Shirer; and
even Otto Ohlendorf, once he realized that he too was to be on trial for his
life.
What’s the story of Babi Yar? asked Christie.
Weber: That’s probably the most-striking and best-remembered case of
shooting of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. Babi Yar is a ravine out-
side of Kiev in the capital of the Ukraine in the Soviet Union.
85
When Pearson reminded Weber of this testimony during cross-examination, the witness admitted
he had calculated too hastily. He should have said that between 200,000 and 800,000 Soviet Jews
in the occupied zone died of all causes. (See page 167.)
The witness gave his reasons for believing that much fewer than the re-
ported 33,000 Jews were shot there. He then mentioned an “important” docu-
ment on the task of the Einsatzgruppen, dated July 2, 1941, which had come
to light in recent years. It was an order of Heydrich to the SS heads in the oc-
cupied Soviet territories which “specifically says that the only Jews to be shot
immediately as Jews were… Jewish officials in the Communist Party and the
Soviet government.”
Christie then began the lengthy process of reading Harwood almost line by
line, and eliciting Weber’s comments. The witness was perfectly candid, as he
repeatedly pointed to statements which he felt were entirely or partly inaccu-
rate.
The trial was often illuminated by Weber’s storehouse of knowledge. (He
had not brought notes for this portion of his questioning.) The “essential ex-
termination story,” he said, “first came out in the fall of 1942,” promoted
heavily by Rabbi Stephen Wise and the World Jewish Congress. Under their
prodding, the major Allies, in December 1942, issued a declaration that the
Germans were exterminating the Jews – however, “it is very important to real-
ize… that the American and British officials responsible for what was going
on with the Jews in Europe during this period of time said to their superiors
privately that there was no evidence that such an extermination program was
being carried out, and they urged that this declaration not be made…”
“There is a basis for the Holocaust story,” said Weber later. “It is not just
something made out of whole cloth.” Harwood was stretching things when he
called the standard Holocaust story “the most colossal piece of fiction,” be-
cause “it’s very clear that the Jews suffered a great catastrophe during the
Second World War, as did other people.” Nor was it accurate, Weber said, to
describe the Holocaust as “a gigantic hoax perpetrated by the Jews to get
money for the State of Israel.” A number of governments and ethnic groups
around the world benefitted directly or indirectly from maintenance of the un-
diluted Holocaust legend. The pressing problem was that certain Jews like
Menachem Begin were pronouncing the entire German people guilty until the
end of time, while others, like Elie Wiesel – the Nobel Peace Prize laureate –
had virtually called upon Jews to hate the Germans of today.86
Christie put this Harwood sentence to Weber: “It is very significant that
certain Jews [in the 1930s] were quick to interpret these [German] policies of
internal discrimination as equivalent to extermination itself.”
That’s correct, said Weber. Leon Feuchtwanger, for instance, a prominent
author who was a Communist Jew, had written the foreword to a 1936 book
which described the Hitler government as carrying out extermination at that
86
In Legends of Our Time, Wiesel writes, “Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a
zone of hate – healthy, virile hate – for what the German. personifies and for what persists in the
German.”
time. Actually, said Weber, before November 1938, the number of concentra-
tion-camp internees in Germany rarely exceeded 20,000 in a population of 60
million. Never, during that period, were Jews interned “as Jews.” The first de-
portation of Jews was made more than two years after the war began, to Riga,
Latvia in October 1941. Harwood was “essentially” correct to note that the
United States and Canada had already interned most of their Japanese aliens
and citizens before the Germans “applied the same security measures against
the Jews of Europe.”
Christie and Weber discussed photographs, which were displayed to the ju-
ry, made at the Auschwitz III, or Monowitz, Camp during the war. This was a
vast industrial complex where prisoners living in Auschwitz I, II, and III min-
gled routinely with British and other POWs and with civilian workers from
every part of Europe.
What is the relevance of Monowitz? asked Christie.
Well, said Weber, “it’s very hard to reconcile the fact that prisoners from
Birkenau – Auschwitz II, which is allegedly the major extermination center –
were allowed to move around freely in Auschwitz III where there was a great
deal of civilian workers, outside people coming in and out all of the time…” It
would, he said, have been almost impossible to keep the mass gassings secret
from the world when Monowitz’s workers regularly travelled everywhere.
Christie asked Weber about a reference in Harwood to a conversation of
April 17, 1943 between Hitler and the Hungarian leader Horthy, in which the
German leader asked for the release of 100,000 Hungarian Jews to work in the
Luftwaffe’s pursuit-plane program.
“That statement is correct,” said Weber.
“Do you know what happened to the guards at Mauthausen and Buchen-
wald?” asked Christie later.
They were summarily killed when the Americans liberated those camps, as
at Dachau, said Weber.
After a short break, Christie turned to the matter of Hellmut Diwald, a pro-
fessor of history at the University of Erlangen in West Germany, and his book
History of the Germans.
“This book,” explained Weber, “is a comprehensive overview of German
history,” in which the author questioned some commonly held assumptions
about the Holocaust. “Diwald wrote in his book that the Holocaust media
campaign consists in large part of distortions, misrepresentations and lies de-
signed to morally degrade and disqualify the German nation… He said that
we know that many of the stories said about what happened with the Jews, of
the German policy during the war, are not true… He also pointed out that the
‘Final Solution’ policy of the Germans was one of deportation to the East for
use as labor, and he concluded this section by saying… that despite all of the
literature that has been written about this subject, the central or most-impor-
tant questions of what happened with the Jews during the war are still not
clear…”
The result was that many thousands of copies of the 760-page book were
seized and pulped. The section on the Holocaust was then hastily rewritten
without Diwald’s permission, and a new edition produced. The witness
stressed that Diwald is “a very reputable and prominent and honored profes-
sor.”
The Harwood pamphlet quotes from the Rademacher memorandum of Feb-
ruary 10, 1942 calling for deportation of Jews to the East, and Christie asked
Weber its significance. This, said the latter, was “one more German document
which confirms, along with a number of other documents, what the German
policy was during the war towards the Jews, and they were all self-consistent.
I might even add in this regard, when the Allies took control of Germany in
1945, they confiscated an enormous quantity of German documents relating to
the German wartime policy towards the Jews, and of these thousands and
thousands of documents there is not one which refers to an extermination pol-
icy or program…”
Christie mentioned Christopher Browning’s emphasis on the March 27,
1942 entry in the Goebbels Diaries. Yes, said Weber, it “is widely quoted to
uphold… the extermination thesis,” but “it is not consistent with [other] en-
tries in the diary” like March 7 and also entries from a later date.
Christie asked if the diaries were genuine.
“Well,” said Weber, “there is a great doubt about the authenticity” of the
diaries in their entirety. “We have no real way of verifying if they are accu-
rate, and the U.S. government certified… near the title page… that it can take
no responsibility for the accuracy of the diaries as a whole.” Weber reempha-
sized that the content of the March 27 entry was “inconsistent” with both ear-
lier and later entries.
Weber readily agreed that Harwood’s section on Jewish statistics was
weak, but stressed the extreme difficulty of the subject. We do know, he said,
that the great majority of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories “were de-
ported by the Soviets or fled in 1941,” and thus never came under German
control.
Christie mentioned Harwood’s assertion that “the first accusation against
the Germans of the mass murder of Jews” was made by Rafael Lemkin in
1943.
“That is not a true statement,” said Weber. The first “major” accusations
had come in August or September 1942 from the World Jewish Congress.
After the controversial Gerstein statements were briefly discussed, Christie
read this remark of Harwood to Weber: “It should be emphasized straight
away that there is not a single document in existence which proves that the
Germans intended to, or carried out, the deliberate murder of Jews.”
“Normally,” said Weber, “a historian doesn’t say that any single document
or statement proves anything. You might say it substantiates or gives credence
to or supports a given idea, but again that’s a kind of hyperbole or a kind of
misleading language because no document proves anything.” But Harwood’s
point was basically right, if he meant “German official documents.” If he in-
cluded “documents of any kind, including affidavits… after the war,” it was
wrong.
So ended the day’s testimony.
Weber’s examination-in-chief resumed on Wednesday, March 23, with
Christie asking him about Einsatzgruppen statistics. Hilberg, said Weber, gave
an estimate of 1.3 million Jewish dead in the Soviet territories, which was in-
teresting because the German reports themselves indicated 2.2 million dead.
“By implication” this meant that Hilberg realized the Einsatzgruppen figures
were greatly exaggerated, “but he doesn’t really say so. That’s rather typical
of how he operates.” Thus, Weber’s position differed from Hilberg’s largely
in finding a greater magnitude of exaggeration, but also in that he made the
problem explicit.
The witness later mentioned various German orders to reduce the death
rates in the concentration camps. In 1942, Birkenau suffered a typhus epidem-
ic. “Himmler was very concerned with that” and ordered the camp comman-
dants there and elsewhere to take extreme measures to reduce deaths. Richard
Glücks, who was the inspector of the concentration camps, made a similar or-
der on January 20, 1943. “Every means,” he had said, “must be used to lower
the death rate” in the camps.87
Christie asked if “any documents made during the war by the Germans re-
fer to any extermination.”
None referred to an extermination program or policy, said Weber, but the
Einsatzgruppen reports did “talk about shooting Jews in various contexts, and
those are the most-important documents that are presented by those who be-
lieve in the Holocaust story to substantiate their case. When it comes to an ex-
termination program, there are no such documents and also there are no doc-
uments about exterminations in gas chambers or in concentration camps.”
There remains, Weber added, a widespread belief in verbal orders, but that
is changing. The new and growing school of “Holocaust functionalists” had
concluded “there may very well have been no order of any kind” but only a
spontaneous genocide.
What about the testimony of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant?
asked Christie.
His affidavit of April 1946 was still widely cited, said Weber, yet it was
“quite inconsistent with the Holocaust story” as told today. Höss mentioned a
fictional extermination camp never heard of since. He said he was ordered to
87
Nuremberg Document NO-1523. Editor’s note.
exterminate Jews in the summer of 1941, when today no one claims any order
until later. Finally, Höss stated that Jews were already being killed at Treblin-
ka in the summer of 1941, which no one maintains today. The chief signifi-
cance of this, for Weber, was that many “exterminationists” changed their sto-
ry line without acknowledging “the implications of these changes.” Typically,
they retained the Höss affidavit while adopting sources inconsistent with it.
One other matter made the Höss statements questionable for Weber. The
commandant had been tortured by the British to produce them, as described
“in rather gory detail” in the book Legions of Death, by Rupert Butler.88
Weber said he found Harwood’s account of the Wannsee Conference “es-
sentially correct.” Its purpose, in Weber’s words, was to “coordinate, among a
range of German agencies… the policy of deportation of Jews to the East.”
Christie read from Harwood: “The complete lack of documentary evidence
to support the existence of an extermination plan has led to the habit of rein-
terpreting the documents that do survive.”
“That is true,” said Weber.
Christie mentioned the emphasis placed by Browning and others on eu-
phemisms, and asked if anything like a code book was ever found which
would enable Germans to decipher such hidden meanings. No, said Weber,
Browning and those like him were “arguing backwards. They argue from an
assumption and try to make the facts or the evidence fit the assumption rather
than the way historians should operate.”
Christie read from Harwood: “The Germans had an extraordinary propensi-
ty for recording everything on paper in the most careful detail…”
Quite true, said Weber, “the volume of German records is staggering.”
Christie asked Weber if he was familiar with Himmler’s speech in Posen in
October 1943.
Yes, said Weber, it was deemed to be “one of the most-important pieces of
evidence for a German extermination program.”
Christie asked if any other Himmler speeches shed light on it.
Yes, said Weber, Himmler had given several very-similar speeches near
the end of 1943, “and in his speech of December 16, 1943, to naval officers in
Weimar, there is a passage which is very, very similar to the one which is of-
ten quoted from the Posen speech in which Himmler makes clear what he real-
ly more or less means by the so-called-incriminating passages from the Posen
speech. And what he said was that he had a policy, when Jews were shot in
the Soviet East, who were involved in partisan activities or other illegal activi-
ties or [were] Soviet commissars, that he also, as a rule, had the wives and
children of those Jews shot as well. And I think that that’s what Himmler is
88
One session ended with a British medical officer urging Captain Bernard Clarke to call off his
men “unless you want to take back a corpse.” (Butler, page 237.)
referring to [at Posen].” But this was not a call for exterminating the Jews of
Europe.
Christie then inquired about the situation existing on the Eastern Front at
the time.
It was “the most-savage war in modern history,” said Weber, and “there
was no pity on either side.” Therefore, “to talk about what happened with the
Jews… without a clear understanding of the terrible conditions and the terri-
ble nature of the struggle going on at that time and in that place, is to – it’s
very misleading, it’s illegitimate, it’s wrong, it’s not right…” Other peoples
had likewise suffered hideously. Only a tiny proportion of the German sol-
diers taken prisoner on the Eastern Front came back alive, for example.
Christie mentioned the idea of the six-million story “being given judicial
authority at Nuremberg.”
“Yes,” said Weber, “this is a very-important point. Article 21 of the Nu-
remberg Trial Charter specified that every official document by any of the Al-
lied governments… had to be accepted as valid evidence…” Many “lurid sto-
ries” advanced by the Soviets thereby entered general circulation. There was
no court of appeal above the tribunal at Nuremberg. On the other hand, Har-
wood was mistaken when he wrote that defense lawyers at Nuremberg were
not permitted to cross-examine prosecution witnesses.
The Crown had suggested, said Christie, that allegations of torture [of wit-
nesses and/or defendants] applied only to Malmedy or other trials, but not to
Nuremberg itself.
Well, said Weber, Julius Streicher and Oswald Pohl were Nuremberg de-
fendants, and they were tortured. But Weber did concede Harwood’s tendency
to confuse the overall situations existing at different trials.
One of the Nuremberg Trials involved Otto Ohlendorf and other Einsatz-
gruppen defendants. Harwood called them “four special units… whose task
was to wipe out partisans and communist commissars.”
No, said Weber, “their task was much wider than that.” Anti-partisan and
anti-commissar work “was not their main activity.” They were the basic pre-
liminary security and intelligence force for the occupied East. Harwood was
outdated on the subject, and a “much-stronger” case for revisionism could
now be made.
Christie mentioned the English jurist F.J.P. Veale, whose books argued that
Germans fighting on the Soviet front could hardly be expected to distinguish
between partisans and civilians because, in Harwood’s words, “any Russian
civilian who maintained his civilian status instead of acting as a terrorist was
liable to be executed by his countrymen as a traitor.”
Yes, said Weber, Veale had written about that.
And, asked Christie, had Veale’s own words been, “there is no question
that their orders [the Einsatzgruppen’s] were to combat terror by terror”?
Weber did not recall the specific quote, but he emphasized the outrage felt
by Veale and many other observers at the “gross double standard” of the Al-
lies, which held the partisans blameless of atrocities because they happened to
be on the winning side.
Christie: Do you know who Judge Konrad Morgen was?
Yes, said Weber. “Judge Konrad Morgen was an important official in the
SS who was… ordered by Heinrich Himmler to investigate cases of corrup-
tion and illegal activity, including murder, in the concentration camps. The SS
had its own internal policy apparatus, its own internal court system and Judge
Konrad Morgen was the most-important official in this team. He brought nu-
merous indictments against SS officials for corruption and for murder and for
other crimes, of whom a large number were punished.”
The commandant of Buchenwald, Karl Koch, was among those executed,
said Weber. He and Christie would discuss Morgen again the next day.
After a break for lunch, Weber mentioned the so-called Müller document,
recently brought to light, which “shows that the Allied governments carried
out investigations of the gassing allegations at camps in Germany proper and
in Austria… [and] concluded that there were no gassings at any of these
camps and that evidence for gassings at these camps was based on two things:
first, [false] statements by inmates… and second… torture of former SS
guards…” This document, an order issued in October 1948 by the Austrian
military police, then under Allied control, would be discussed again the next
day, and later (April 11-12) by Emil Lachout, who came from Vienna to testi-
fy about it.
Weber mentioned the astonishment of most Nuremberg defendants at alle-
gations of a Jewish extermination program, and showed how their response to
the story helped determine their fate. He compared the cases of Albert Speer
and Rudolf Hess. As armaments minister, Speer had played an enormous role
in “keeping Germany’s war machine going” until the end, yet received only a
20-year sentence, followed by book and movie royalties and the acclaim of
many moralists, because he elected to denounce German crimes while claim-
ing to personally know nothing about them. On the other hand, unrepentant
Hess had risked his life by flying to Britain on a peace mission in May 1941,
yet received a life sentence, served largely in solitary, and finally died under
questionable circumstances in 1987.
Christie read from the Harwood pamphlet: “No living authentic witness of
these ‘gassings’ has ever been produced and validated.”
Weber agreed that the witnesses’ accounts had not been validated.
Christie asked the witness if he accepted the gassing stories.
No, Weber replied, because they are “not consistent with other evidence
that we have.” He noted that “we have similar testimony by people claiming
to have witnessed gassings at camps where now it is conceded by even those
who believe in the Holocaust extermination story that no gassings took
place… We also have supposedly equally valid evidence that people were
killed not by gassing but by steaming people to death or by killing them with
electricity or by suffocating people to death, and so forth. This kind of testi-
mony, survivor testimony, is notoriously unreliable.”
Weber also found it noteworthy, in light of the monstrous allegations, that
long-term internees at Birkenau and other Polish camps were often released.
Moreover, many thousands, Jews and non-Jews alike, were evacuated from
Auschwitz toward Germany near the end of the war.
Equally curious was the massive flight of Jews from newly Communist Po-
land to Germany shortly after the war ended. Weber recalled a British House
of Commons inquiry of 1946 which said so many Jews were then leaving
Eastern Europe and heading elsewhere that it amounted to a “second exodus”
of Jews.
Following a break, Weber turned to the subject of Treblinka. He said that
the alleged extermination camp “is normally presented as a completely secret
extermination center, but in fact Treblinka was not a secret camp. Its existence
was announced in… an official bulletin of the German government in Poland,
in 1941… [T]hose who… uphold the Holocaust extermination story some-
times concede that there was indeed a publicly known labor camp at Treblin-
ka, but that in addition there was another Treblinka Camp right nearby, which
was allegedly an extermination camp. But the stories about this extermination
camp are very inconsistent with each other.”
At the main Nuremberg Trial, the U.S. prosecution introduced Document
PS-3311, which alleged that Jews were steamed to death at Treblinka. “In ad-
dition to that,” said Weber, “a Jew who took part in a Treblinka inmate revolt
in August 1943, Samuel Rajzman, testified to a U.S. Congressional committee
that Jews were killed at the camp… by suffocating them to death.”
A third source of information about Treblinka was The Black Book of
Polish Jewry, published in New York in 1946 [recte: 1943], which said Jews
were killed there in three ways: “by poison gas, they said, by steaming, but
they said the most ‘widespread method consisted of pumping all air out from
the chambers with large special pumps.’”
In the Nuremberg trial of Oswald Pohl, American Judge Michael Mus-
manno said that death was inflicted at Treblinka by gas, by steam and by elec-
tric current. Today, of course, all but the gassing claims have been dropped.
Turning to Harwood’s discussion of the Anne Frank Diary, Weber admit-
ted serious errors. The diary was by no means a total fraud. But neither was
the original revisionist position on the diary a fraud, as several official rulings
had demonstrated: “[A] number of years ago, in a West-German court case, it
was established that the entire diary was written in the same handwriting, and
then some years later a West-German government agency, the Federal Crimi-
nal Office, found that portions of the diary were written in a ballpoint pen ink
which was not available during the time of the Second World War, and this
led also to a number of persons making the claim that the diary is, therefore,
not authentic, or at least portions of it cannot be genuine. Since that time, the
Anne Frank Center in Amsterdam, which upholds the general authenticity of
the Anne Frank Diary, has held that those portions in ballpoint pen are only
minor portions and they were inserted by someone else but that the diary is es-
sentially accurate, my point being, though, that one has reasons for calling the
authenticity of the Anne Frank Diary into question.”
“It’s an edited, revised, gone-over book which is not a spontaneous diary,”
said Weber, a fact admitted by Anne Frank’s father, Otto, before his death,
and by others.
After Weber briefly mentioned some more-or-less-positive accounts of
concentration-camp life by former inmates, and touched lightly on other sub-
jects, Judge Thomas adjourned the court.
The witness returned to the stand on Thursday, March 24, and Christie at
once put to him a sentence from Harwood: “It is true that, in 1945, Allied
propaganda did claim that all the concentration camps, particularly those in
Germany itself, were death camps, but not for long.”
The sentence, said Weber, was essentially accurate “until at least 1960 or
so and, by some persons” even-later. Today, no one seriously calls the camps
in Germany and Austria “death camps.” The extermination story “has shifted
entirely to six camps, just six.”
Weber used this opportunity to read from the 1948 Müller Document: “The
Allied investigation commissions have up to now ascertained that in the fol-
lowing concentration camps no humans were killed by poison gas… Bergen-
Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen and
their satellite camps, Natzweiler, Nordhausen, Niederhagen, Ravensbrück,
Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Theresienstadt… In these cases, it can be proven
that confessions were extorted by torture and the eye-witness accounts were
false.”
Weber went on to say, “The publication of this document caused a sensa-
tion in Austria recently, but [its authenticity] has not been called into ques-
tion.”89 Emil Lachout, the official who had countersigned it in 1948 and re-
cently made it public, “has only been criticized for making public what is an
embarrassing document.”
89
This changed in 1989 with the publication of a book by Austrian professional antifascists Brigitte
Bailer-Galanda, Wilhelm Lasek, Wolfgang Neugebauer, Gustav Spann (Dokumentationszentrum
des österr. Widerstandes), Das Lachout-”Dokument” – Anatomie einer Fälschung, Verlag DÖW,
Vienna, 1989. In 2004, a controversy broke out even among revisionists regarding the so-called
Lachout Document, during which its authenticity was doubted; cf. Klaus Schwensen, “Zur
Echtheit des Lachout-Dokuments”, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung 8(2) (2004),
pp. 166-178 (online: www.vho.org/VffG/2004/2/Schwensen166-178.html); Emil Lachout, “Das
Lachout-Dokument – Eine Gegendarstellung”, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung
9(1) (2005), S. 81-98 (online: www.vho.org/VffG/2005/1/Lachout81-98.html). Editor’s note.
Later, Weber criticized the sometimes-deliberate confusion of two utterly

different things: gas chambers and crematories. The result, seen “very often”
in popular Holocaust literature, is “references to so-called gas ovens, which is
a nonsensical term.”
“The most-famous crematories,” explained Weber, “are at Auschwitz, and
the records are clear that… they were built in response to a large epidemic of
typhus at the camp… [T]he groundwater level at Auschwitz was high, so it
was very dangerous for the health of the camp to bury the bodies of those who
died in the camp, both prisoners and German guards and their relations…”
Weber cited Dachau as a classic case of unacknowledged Holocaust revi-
sionism. “There was a plaque… placed [there] shortly after the war which
proclaimed that 230,000 persons died at this camp and were cremated here…”
Today, said Weber, the number of Dachau dead is given as about 20,000, and
Harwood was quite correct to note that “the vast majority of those died from
typhus and starvation, only in the final months of the war.”
At other camps as well, the numbers of victims have been “drastically re-
vised downwards over the years, although normally or very often the public is
not [told]… that these figures have been changed. They simply present new
figures without explaining why the old ones are no longer accurate.”
Weber estimated that total Jewish losses during World War II were in the
area of one to one-and-a-half million.
Christie asked again about Dr. Konrad Morgen, the SS investigator, who
testified at the main Nuremberg trial on August 7, 1946.
“It’s important to emphasize,” said Weber, that Morgen is today a “re-
spected attorney in Frankfurt, West Germany,” who is anti-Nazi. Morgen tes-
tified at Nuremberg that, at Himmler’s command, he investigated about 800
cases of alleged SS abuse. He arrested the commandants of five concentration
camps. Buchenwald Commandant Karl Koch was shot for killing inmates af-
ter stealing their money. The camp’s head physician, Dr. Hoven, was also sen-
tenced to death by the SS but given a reprieve because of the shortage of doc-
tors. After the war, the Americans tried Hoven again and carried out the sen-
tence first imposed by their adversaries.
“Incidentally,” added Weber, “Konrad Morgen also testified… at Nurem-
berg about conditions at Buchenwald and his testimony was very astonishing.
He was led to believe or had heard that the… conditions were bad but he lived
for some time at Buchenwald and… was very surprised to find that the prison-
ers were healthy, normally fed, suntanned and working… [H]e said the com-
mandant there aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy of
human beings. They had regular mail service… a large camp library… varie-
ty shows, motion pictures, sporting contests and even a brothel. Nearly all the
other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald, [Morgen said].”
Morgen had also heard of killings at Auschwitz, but, as he testified at Nu-
remberg, “was not able to investigate this charge fully.” He believed the kill-
ings were happening at Monowitz or Auschwitz III, not at the two camps now
alleged to be gassing sites.
Christie read from Harwood: “In general, hundreds of affidavits from Nu-
remberg testify to the humane conditions prevailing in concentration camps,
but emphasis was invariably laid on those which reflected badly on the Ger-
man administration and could be used for propaganda purposes.”
Weber said he did not know if there were “hundreds of such affidavits but
there were many.” He agreed that “certainly the prosecution… tried to empha-
size evidence which reflected as badly [as possible] on the German admin-
istration.”
Harwood had asserted that Jewish testimony was particularly prone to ex-
aggeration, “whereas other nationals interned for political reasons… general-
ly presented a more-balanced picture.”
Weber agreed, and cited four sources for his opinion.
– Jewish historian Samuel Gringauz emphasized the extreme lack of objec-
tivity of Jewish survivors in an article published in a 1950 issue of the New
York journal, Jewish Social Studies. “The question thus arises,” concluded
Gringauz, “whether participants of such a world-shaking epoch can at all
be its historians and whether the time has [yet] come when valid historic
judgment, free of partisanship, vindictiveness and ulterior motives is possi-
ble.”
– The Jerusalem Post of August 17, 1986 quoted Shmuel Krakowski, the di-
rector of Israel’s major Holocaust archives, as saying that more than half of
the survivor testimonies in his records were “unreliable.” Many elderly
Jews had taken second-hand information and “let their imaginations run
away with them,” said the Post.
– In his book, The Final Solution, historian Gerald Reitlinger referred to the
tendency of Jewish Holocaust survivors to exaggerate their stories.
– French-Jewish historian Olga Wormser-Migot made the point, said Weber,
that “many Jewish inmates in the concentration camps made up stories
about gas chambers” in order to suggest they had suffered as badly as other
Jews in other camps.
Christie asked Weber to comment on Harwood’s description of “the last fear-
ful months” of war in 1945 as having furnished “emaciated human beings and
heaps of corpses which the propagandists delight in showing…”
That was accurate, said Weber. The awful pictures taken at Belsen,
Nordhausen and elsewhere in April 1945 “are presented usually as evidence of
how diabolic the Germans who ran these concentration camps [were]. In fact,
they’re very misleading… They show people, victims not of any German pro-
gram or policy, who are rather indirect victims of the war. In fact, if these
emaciated people shown in these photographs were supposed to have been

killed by the Germans, they would have long since been killed.”
Weber contrasted the emaciated inmates at Belsen (unintended victims)
whom the Germans (and later the British) kept alive until they died looking
like skeletons with the civilian victims of Dresden and other German cities
who were deliberately killed in Allied terror bombings. “They were literally
holocausted,” Weber said. “The word ‘holocaust’ means to be burnt up,
whereas the persons shown in the photographs that we’re all familiar with in
the concentration camps in the west were not literally burned to death.”
Christie questioned Weber about Paul Rassinier, the French revisionist pi-
oneer on whom Harwood relied heavily. Weber regretted Rassinier’s short-
comings, but emphasized his reliability about subjects of which he had first-
hand knowledge, such as the Buchenwald and Dora Camps. At the main Nu-
remberg Trial, said Weber, the French prosecutors had claimed (and he quot-
ed), “Everything had been provided for down to the smallest detail in 1944 at
Buchenwald. They had even lengthened a railroad line so that the deportees
might be led directly to the gas chamber. Certain of the gas chambers had a
floor that tipped and immediately directed the bodies into a room with the
crematory furnace.” The chief British prosecutor, in his closing address, had
likewise called Buchenwald a camp where “murder was conducted like some
mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens.”
Jean-Paul Renard was a French priest and former Buchenwald inmate who
wrote a book about his experiences, from which Weber quoted: “I saw thou-
sands and thousands of persons going into the showers. Instead of liquid, as-
phyxiating gas is poured out over them.” Rassinier, his fellow inmate, chal-
lenged him on this, and Renard confessed, “Right, but that’s only a figure of
speech and since those things existed somewhere, it’s not important.”
After a break, Weber described Rassinier’s efforts to track down an actual
witness to gassings. He found one such person, a German man who asked not
to be identified but said that the gassings he saw “were carried out on a very
small scale… by individuals acting on their own in Poland.”
During the long course of his investigations, Rassinier became increasingly
convinced that the gassings were a myth. He realized that the authors of books
which charged the Germans with the crime were never able to produce a “liv-
ing authentic witness” of the operation. Weber said he agreed with the Har-
wood pamphlet on these points.
When Christie asked Weber for his own opinion, the latter replied, “I think
that there is still some doubt” about the matter. “I mean, I do not believe they
did [gas] but I think that the question still needs to be investigated more be-
cause we are not absolutely sure, but we have established that most or many of
these claims are not true and I think that the investigation must continue.”
Later, Weber returned to Hitler’s “Table Talk” of July 1942, when he had
“emphasized his determination to remove all Jews from Europe after the war,
and he said that Europe is interested in the Jews for economic reasons but Eu-
rope must reject them if only out of self-interest because the Jews are racially
tougher…”
Weber also offered an interesting quotation from a Jewish professor in
Australia, W.D. Rubinstein, who wrote in September 1979: “If the Holocaust
can be shown to be a ‘Zionist myth,’ the strongest of all weapons in Israel’s
propaganda armory collapses.”
Weber vigorously challenged the tendency of both Harwood and Rassinier
to overemphasize the alleged Jewish financial interest in upholding the Holo-
caust story.
Jewish author Jacobo Timerman had been nearer the mark, Weber said,
when he complained that the Holocaust had become a “civil religion” for
American Jews. Yes, massive German reparations to Israel and to individual
Jews everywhere was a significant factor, but more-critical, in Weber’s opin-
ion, was the furtherance of the “idea that if a people as civilized… as the
Germans can turn into murderous Nazis and kill all the Jews, then one should
be very wary and untrusting of all people, [for which reason] Jews have only
themselves to rely upon. I think the story is used to greatly increase a sense of
solidarity among Jews.”90
On the subject of reparations, Weber mentioned the 1953 Luxembourg
Treaty signed among Israel, West Germany, and a special international Jewish
organization known as the Claims Conference. Rassinier had made the valid
point, said Weber, that “the very nature of the [reparations agreements] pre-
supposes that the Jews of the world are to be represented not by the govern-
ments of which they happen to be citizens, but rather by the State of Israel, of
which most Jews are not citizens and by a special international body called the
Claims Conference. The Luxembourg Agreement has no parallel in diplomatic
or international history…”
Weber was critical of Harwood’s handling of Jewish statistics, a problem
which “really deserves the most-careful… scrutiny. Unfortunately, one of the
90
Stephen D. Isaacs addresses the subject of ethnicity and distrustfulness in his book Jews and
American Politics (Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1974). On page 148, he cites “a survey con-
ducted by the National Opinion Research Center for Dr. Melvin Kohn of the National Institute of
Mental Health. In this survey, Jews almost leaped off the chart in terms of their intrinsic distrust
of others. That survey… attempted to assess various white ethnic groups’ comparable levels of
distrust. The scale went from Plus 4 – most-trusting – to Minus 4 – least-trusting:”
GROUP SCORE
Irish Catholic 2.506
Scandinavian Protestant 1.583
Slavic Catholic 1.481
German Protestant 0.767
German Catholic 0.757
Italian Catholic 0.502
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant 0.242
Jewish -3.106
best places for [researching the matter] would probably be the Arolsen Center
[i.e., Biedermann’s International Tracing Service in West Germany,” where
revisionists are unwelcome.
Christie asked Weber for his opinion of Harwood’s assertion that “a total
of 2,050,000 German civilians were killed in Allied air raids and forced repa-
ration after the war.” “The usually accepted figure,” Weber said, “is about half
a million German civilian dead from Allied air raids and… about two mil-
lion” during the brutal forced expulsion of some 14 million Germans from
Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, the Sudetenland, and other ancient German terri-
tories. If one added combat deaths, said Weber, he felt there was “no question
that far more Germans died during the Second World War than Jews.”
Weber reminded the court that European Jews who died of old age and all
other causes between 1941 and 1945 are now counted as victims of Hitler.
Many had died in Allied bombings and strafings. “One of the most-dramatic
cases was two large shiploads of concentration-camp inmates in north Germa-
ny right at the end of the war, in ships which were sunk by British airplanes,
and something like 10,000 concentration-camp inmates” were lost.
After a lunch break, Christie asked Weber to “evaluate the Harwood book-
let as a source of historical information.”
“[It] does not purport to be a scholarly work of history,” said Weber. “The
booklet is a journalistic or a polemical account” whose author never anticipat-
ed it being “held up to the same standards of rigid scrutiny” as serious scholar-
ly work. “Its main value lies in encouraging further discussion and thought
and debate…”
Weber compared Harwood favorably with William Shirer’s journalistic
and error-filled The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and with two Holocaust
pamphlets published recently by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
of B’nai B’rith, which contained numerous grotesque errors of fact.
John Pearson objected to this line of questioning, and Judge Thomas
agreed, saying, “This evidence is not relevant to the charge and will not be
admitted.”
Christie posed another couple of questions, and then handed over the wit-
ness to Pearson for cross-examination.
Pearson began by asking if he had argued that Harwood, while “generally
accurate,” contained “misleading and false statements.”
“Yes,” said Weber.
Pearson suggested that an example of Harwood’s mistakes was his claim
that “the first accusation against the Germans of the mass murder of Jews”
was made in a book by Rafael Lemkin in 1943.
Weber agreed that Harwood was wrong on Lemkin’s priority and on the
numbers Lemkin gave, but emphasized that the errors were derived from Paul
Rassinier, Harwood’s chief revisionist source.
Putting aside the question of origin, said Pearson, “I suggest that that is a
deliberate falsehood” to misrepresent Lemkin.
“I would not agree,” said Weber. “I know that the author of this booklet
was given a rather small amount of money to quickly produce [it]. He did not
know and did not expect, and those who asked him to make this booklet did
not expect, that this would have anywhere near the impact… that it has had…
The man who wrote it, Richard Verrall, is not a specialist in history. He relied
on secondary sources, and to the best of my knowledge, knowing this person,
I conclude that he did not maliciously or willfully make false statements of
fact.”
Further, said Weber, “Verrall was very glad to know from others whenever
errors were pointed out in the booklet. He wanted errors corrected in subse-
quent editions… and in fact they have been, in some cases, in subsequent edi-
tions.”
Weber clarified his statement that Verrall was “not a specialist in history,”
saying “he had a specialized interest in the political and diplomatic aspects of
the Second World War.” Further, he had been affiliated with the University of
London, where he graduated with high honors. So the biographical blurb at
the end of the pamphlet was basically correct.
Weber had suggested that Harwood/Verrall, as a journalist rushing to meet
a deadline, should be held to a lesser standard of accuracy than a historian.
Pearson asked Weber if he also made this allowance for Paul Rassinier.
Weber admitted that he had been “disturbed” by Rassinier’s “errors of
fact,” which was why “I have accepted nothing he writes,” except first-person
experiences, without checking his sources.
“Would you agree,” asked Pearson, “that the only reasonable conclusion is
that Rassinier deliberately falsified what Lemkin said?”
No, said Weber, “the Rafael Lemkin error is not a substantive error. It’s
not essential to Rassinier’s argument.”
“So how did he make this error?” asked Pearson.
Perhaps, said Weber, he relied on a newspaper account or other secondary
accounts of Lemkin’s work.
Pearson: Would you agree with me that a reasonable and competent histo-
rian would check a source before quoting?
Yes, said Weber.
So, asked Pearson, either Rassinier was incompetent or he deliberately fal-
sified, isn’t that correct. “There is another alternative,” said Weber. “He might
have tried to check his sources and was unable to do so.”
The “great value” of Rassinier’s work, Weber stressed, “lies, I believe,
mostly in what he himself reports about his own personal experiences in the
Buchenwald and Dora Camps.”
Pearson: Does Rassinier deny the Holocaust?
“Again,” said Weber, “that phraseology is tendentious and biased.”

Rassinier, he said, had concluded that as many as 1.2 million Jews died from a
variety of causes during the Second World War.
Pearson asked about Harwood again, and Weber emphasized that “alt-
hough this booklet is essentially journalistic, he does give sources… for much
of what he says, and that implies that he’s inviting the reader to check those
sources.” By contrast, said Weber, the ADL booklets he had mentioned earlier
did not give any sources.
Wouldn’t you agree, asked Pearson, that “anyone who is reasonably well-
read in this area knows about the Joint Allied Declaration [of December
1942]”?
Well, said Weber, “I’ll bet you that, if you go into some other courtroom in
this building, you wouldn’t find a single person who knows about [it].”
“The question,” said Pearson, “was ‘a reasonably well-read person.’”
“I would say,” Weber emphasized, “that there are many persons in Canada
with doctorates in history, even in modern European history, who are not
aware of the Allied Declaration of December 1942.”
Pearson asked Weber if it was correct that he had “conducted quite an ex-
tensive study” of Einsatzgruppen activities.
Yes, said Weber.
And, asked Pearson, you told us that roughly 200,000 to 800,000 Jews
were killed?
“Let me be more-precise,” said Weber. That estimate is for deaths by all
causes, and would include, for example, large numbers of Jews killed in the
occupied Soviet zone by Ukrainians and other ethnic groups.
Pearson: Wasn’t Mr. Christie asking you about the Einsatzgruppen when
you gave that answer?
Weber: Yes, and I spoke too hastily.
Weber disagreed with Harwood’s estimate of 100,000 Jews who died or
were killed in the occupied Soviet Union, suggesting that 200,000 who died or
were killed was a more-accurate minimum figure.91
Pearson: And I take it that, while you concede as many as 800,000 Jews
may have been killed, it’s your position that was not a policy of the Nazi re-
gime, that the Einsatzgruppen killed Jews?
Weber attempted to clarify his position. Einsatzgruppen policy was that
Jews were not to be killed “simply because they were Jews,” and yet many
Jews were shot for a variety of reasons – security, reprisals, and other reasons.
For example, if a Jew was found outside a ghetto without a yellow badge, he
was subject to execution.
“I’m not trying to whitewash whatever happened,” said Weber. “I’m only
trying to be as precise as I can.”
91
The vague wording here reflects inconsistency on the part of Harwood, Weber, and Pearson alike.
Pearson: If you were a non-Jew and you were caught where you shouldn’t
be, were you shot?
Weber: Well, they weren’t shot, but they were often punished.
Pearson: All right. So the reason they are getting shot is because they are
Jews. Doesn’t that follow, sir?
Weber: Look, in that case, that person would be shot because they were a
Jew outside of an area. That’s true.
Pearson: That was a policy, right?
Weber: That was a policy, yes.
Weber explained that his position on the issue was based on “what the or-
ders were for the Einsatzgruppen and [on] the reports of the Einsatzgruppen.”
Pearson mentioned Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev where thousands of
Jews were shot by the Germans over two days.
“Was there a battle at Babi Yar?” he asked.
No, said Weber, but “there had been a battle in Kiev.”
“Would you agree with me,” asked Pearson, “that when you look at the
[Einsatzgruppen] reports themselves, the Jews reported shot far exceeded the
number of partisans reported shot?”
“That’s correct,” said Weber.
If these Jewish-death numbers are exaggerated, asked Pearson, might not
the reason be “an attempt to curry favor” with superiors?
“That’s a reasonable supposition,” said Weber.
Pearson: Now, you say that [Otto] Ohlendorf’s testimony at his own trial is
important and discloses a very different story from his evidence when he was
a witness at Nuremberg against the major war criminals. You said basically
that?
Weber: That’s right.
Pearson began to read from the cross-examination of Ohlendorf at his own
trial: The prosecutor, a Mr. Heath, asked Ohlendorf to give a minimum esti-
mate for the number of people killed under his command by Einsatzgruppe D.
Ohlendorf said he could not give any figure, but would repeat what he had
said in direct examination – that the numbers given in the official reports were
exaggerated by at least half.
“Did you,” asked Heath, “exaggerate the reports which you sent” to Ber-
lin?
No, said Ohlendorf, “but I had to rely on those things which were reported
to me,” including German commandos who added Jews killed by Rumanians
to their own figures.
Ohlendorf had difficulty citing many specific instances of exaggeration.
So, said Heath, “it should be possible for you to give us a minimum fig-
ure.”
Ohlendorf: I can only repeat what I have already been saying for two and
one-half years, that, to the best of my knowledge, about 90,000 people were
reported by my Einsatzkommandos. How many of those were actually killed I

do not know and I cannot really say.
Heath then asked Ohlendorf about directives from Berlin concerning two
small groups of Jews in south Russia – the Karaites and Krimchaks.
Ohlendorf agreed that the orders had been to kill the Krimchaks, because
they were of Jewish blood, but to spare the Karaites because they were only of
Jewish faith.
Didn’t this distinction evince a German plan to exterminate the Jewish
race? asked Heath.
The order, said Ohlendorf, concerned the Soviet Jews as “carriers of Bol-
shevism,” but “it was not known to me that the Jews in all of Europe were be-
ing killed.” On the contrary, he had known that the plan favored Jewish emi-
gration from Europe.
Heath: Tell us how orders that you operated under in 1941 in Russia dif-
fered from the order which controlled killing of Jews in Poland in 1939?
Poland had been a matter of killing individuals, said Ohlendorf, while in
Russia “the killing of all Jews had been ordered.”
Pearson paused to ask Weber if his position was that there was “no policy
to kill Jews in Russia”?
Weber argued that Ohlendorf’s references to “the so-called ‘Fuehrer Or-
der’” were an “attempt to justify his actions,” and that “we know from exist-
ing orders and so forth what the tasks of the Einsatzgruppen were.” It was sig-
nificant that large numbers of Jews were left alive in these areas where an ex-
termination order supposedly applied. More remarkable still was the fact that,
in 1944 and 1945, “the Germans actually evacuated large numbers of Jews
from former Soviet-occupied territory back to Germany… especially from
Latvia and Lithuania.”
“No one,” said Weber, “has ever been able to find any evidence of such a
Fuehrer Order, and, again, I contend that Ohlendorf’s testimony here should
be looked at in the context of his motives, which was trying to save his life
desperately.”
Pearson: Ohlendorf doesn’t say that he received the Fuehrer Order directly
from Hitler, does he?
Weber: No, he doesn’t.
Pearson: He says he received it along with the other Einsatzgruppen com-
manders, such as [Bruno] Streckenbach, from Himmler, right?
Weber: Yes, that’s correct.
Court was adjourned and resumed the next day, Friday, March 25.
Pearson returned to the question of Harwood’s objectivity, getting Weber
to agree again that the pamphlet contains “false statements.”
The Harwood booklet is “not a scholarly, calm, dispassionate account,”
said Weber, but then, “I don’t believe… that Raul Hilberg’s book is objec-
tive,” although “he has taken into account more evidence.”
“Isn’t it false,” asked Pearson, “to say that Lemkin says ‘X’ when you
don’t know what Lemkin says, because you haven’t checked it out?”
Weber conceded that this was “sloppy,” but said that Harwood had relied
on “a second-hand source that he didn’t completely check.”
Well, asked Pearson, if Paul Rassinier was that source, didn’t his error “go
beyond mere sloppiness”?
“As I said yesterday,” replied Weber, “we don’t know why Rassinier made
that mistake. He may have been relying on still-another source which he and
others considered competent, and he was unable to check out. We don’t know.
This happens very often in historical [and] journalistic writing. There are
countless examples of that.” For example, Newsweek magazine had launched
a huge promotional campaign for the bogus “Hitler Diaries,” despite their vast
resources to check the matter out and determine the truth.
So, suggested Pearson, you would excuse Harwood because others make
the same kinds of mistakes?
“No,” said Weber, “I regret that kind of sloppiness, and, in the case of
Newsweek, I think [it’s] a much-more-culpable sloppiness, because they had
far more resources at their disposal to make these kinds of investigations…”
Weber was probably talking to a brick wall at this point. Anyone who, like
Pearson, has gone through life with a rich institutional support structure at
their command, would have difficulty fully understanding Weber’s point.
Pearson then posed a series of unrealistic and misleading questions:
“Won’t you agree with me that a reader is entitled to expect that a writer and a
publisher will not distribute a work which falsifies its source?” he asked.
“Will you agree with me that the reader has been seriously misled by a work
which indicates that the sources relied on say one thing when in fact they say
the exact opposite?”
Weber’s and Christie’s minds raced:
When had it been demonstrated that Harwood had falsified anything?
Didn’t caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) apply to readers as much as to
other consumers?
Could Pearson really be referring to all sources in Harwood, or did he have
just one in mind?
Pearson plowed ahead: “I suggest, sir, that when a reader has been told that
the sources indicate one thing when in fact they say exactly the opposite, that
in effect that reader has been the victim of a fraud?”
“Well,” said Weber, “I would very-carefully point out that they do not say,
as you put it, exactly the opposite. The errors that exist [in Harwood] are al-
most always rather insubstantial errors… like whether Rafael Lemkin was the
first to [report] the extermination story, or whether a few months earlier the
Allied governments were the first… That’s not exactly the opposite. It’s a de-
gree of difference.”
“Maybe [later] we’ll go to some others,” suggested Pearson.
Weber next agreed with Pearson that he had commenced his study of the
Holocaust in the spring of 1979.
Pearson: How long did it take you to put yourself in the position where you
felt comfortable as a historian to reach some conclusions about the Holocaust
issue?
“I would say,” said Weber, “that it was several months before I first came
to feel that the Holocaust extermination story is essentially not true.”
Pearson posed the same question a second time, and elicited a somewhat
different response – “something like” the summer of 1980.
Pearson then returned to the testimony of Otto Ohlendorf.
At one point, the Nuremberg Prosecutor Heath had asked, “You don’t
mean to say that the persons you killed had to endanger security in order to be
killed, do you?”
Ohlendorf: In the sense of the Fuehrer Order, yes.
Heath: Well, let’s not say about the sense of the Fuehrer Order. Let’s talk
about reality. Did the people you killed in fact endanger security in any con-
ceivable way?
At the present time, said Ohlendorf, no, not all of them. But the Fuehrer
Order was looking to the future.
Pearson then read to Weber an excerpt from Ohlendorf’s direct examina-
tion by his own lawyer.
The lawyer asked, “How do you explain the disgust with which the whole
world regarded these exterminations in the East?”
“For one thing,” replied Ohlendorf, “the deeds in the East were published
as being isolated excesses done by the SS. One took them out of their context
and made the SS alone responsible. In reality these executions in the East
were a consequence of total war…”
Ohlendorf added, “the fact that individual men killed civilians face-to-face
is looked upon as terrible and is pictured as specially gruesome because the
order was clearly given to kill these people; but I cannot morally evaluate [as]
any better a deed which makes it possible, by the pushing of a button, to kill a
much-larger number of civilians, men, women and children, even to hurt them
for generations, than those deeds of individual people who for the same pur-
pose, namely, to achieve the goal of the war, must shoot individual persons. I
believe that the time will come which will remove these moral differences in
executions for the purposes of war.”
Ohlendorf also stated that the conflict in which the Einsatzgruppen did
their ruthless killing began not in 1941, but in 1917, when Bolshevism con-
quered Russia. Only later would history’s true judgment be rendered on the
“various phases of this conflict.”
Pearson returned to Heath’s cross-examination of Ohlendorf. Were the
children killed too? Heath inquired.
The orders were the same, said Ohlendorf. The quest was for “permanent
security.” Then he noted, “I did not see the execution of children myself alt-
hough I attended three mass executions.” And he added, “but I have seen very
many children killed in this war through air attacks, for the security of other
nations…”
Weber agreed that Ohlendorf’s testimony makes for “very grim reading.”
But “the evaluation of his testimony must be made first on [the basis of] the
circumstances… and, second, [in light of] other evidence we have available.”
The official wartime German reports are remarkably candid, Weber sug-
gested. “We have the voluminous reports from the Einsatzgruppen about their
activities.” That being the case, why is there “no evidence, outside of this tes-
timony, of a Fuehrer Order” for extermination? In fact, said Weber, we do
have written orders, such as Heydrich’s of July 4, 1941, explaining precisely
what the duties of the Einsatzgruppen were, and there is nothing about exter-
mination.
“Now,” said Weber, “if [Ohlendorf’s] testimony is correct, and there was a
German policy to kill all the Jews in Russia,” why were large ghettos main-
tained in Minsk and other cities “for several years”? Why were German Jews
deported to the Soviet Union until 1944, when the Einsatzgruppen had been
dissolved? Why, in many cases, were Soviet Jews taken to work in Germany?
Ohlendorf’s testimony about Jews in the wrong places being shot was simi-
lar, said Weber, to the American policy of “free-fire zones” in the Vietnam
War. Civilian Vietnamese in hostile areas were rounded up and placed in
“strategic hamlets,” a euphemism for internment camps. Then, anyone found
outside the hamlets was routinely shot.
“My belief,” said Weber, is that these World-War-II executions were of a
somewhat similar nature, “and I believe this is borne out in the Einsatzgrup-
pen reports themselves.” But Ohlendorf was trying to make a case that was
reasonably consistent with “what the [Allies] were insisting, and had estab-
lished as ordained fact in the first Nuremberg Trial, and… he [was] trying to
justify all of this by reference to an imaginary Fuehrer Order of which we
have no real evidence.”
Pearson turned to Harwood’s assertion that Ohlendorf insisted in 1948 that
an earlier statement “had been extracted from him under torture.”
“To the best of my knowledge,” agreed Weber, that is incorrect.
Pearson then read from a section of a judgment of the American Nurem-
berg Tribunal titled “The Magnitude of the [Einsatzgruppen] Enterprise.” It
implicitly agreed with a previous declaration of the International Military Tri-
bunal that two million Jews had been killed by it.
So, asked Pearson, wasn’t Harwood wrong to call such figures “absurd,”
and to say they were “not given any credence by the American Tribunal which
tried and condemned Ohlendorf”?
Again, Weber agreed that Harwood was in error.
Even so, Weber added, “the fact that… these figures are not accurate is ac-
cepted now by every competent historian on the subject… Raul Hilberg
claims that not two million but one million Jews were killed in this area. Now,
I don’t believe that he’s correct, but the point is, here, that he does not accept
what the International Military Tribunal said, and he does not accept the accu-
racy of the figures given in the Einsatzgruppen Reports, [and] neither do the
very-best specialists on this particular subject…”
Pearson suggested that Harwood’s error on what the American Nuremberg
Tribunal had said was “a deliberate false statement.”
Weber conceded that it was certainly a “serious mistake,” but, knowing
Richard Verrall and the circumstances of his writing the pamphlet, he believed
that such mistakes “were not made deceitfully or maliciously.” Verrall, he
said, “relied almost totally on secondary sources.”
Pearson turned to R.T. Paget’s book about the trial of Erich von Manstein,
and Weber noted the cross-checking which Paget said he did in the case of
Simferopol, in the Crimea, which indicated that at most 300 Jews were shot
there, rather than the 10,000 stated in an Einsatzgruppe report.
Pearson: Did you contact [Paget] to make inquiries to determine how he ar-
rived at his conclusion?
Weber: No, I did not.
Pearson: So you just, in effect, relied on what Manstein’s lawyer said?
Weber: No, that’s not correct. I rely on what he said in relationship to what
many others have also said and written on this same subject, and what Paget
writes in both this particular instance and in general is consistent with what
every historian I know of who has studied this question at all in detail basical-
ly has to say, that these figures are grossly exaggerated.
Pearson asked if the chief piece of evidence against Manstein in this regard
was his order of November 20, 1941 directing the army to cooperate with the
Einsatzgruppen.
Weber agreed it was so.
Pearson: I suggest to you, sir, that that order gave basically the same ex-
planation as we have seen in Ohlendorf’s testimony at his own trial. Isn’t that
right?
Well, said Weber, there certainly was “this widespread feeling, which was
expressed by Manstein and others, that the Jews were a dangerous, nefarious
group. They were treated harshly, very harshly. I don’t dispute that.”
Judge Thomas: I think the question you were asked was: Was this order
given by Manstein in 1941 consistent with the testimony of Ohlendorf?
Weber: It’s consistent in a way.
After a short break, Pearson read from the Manstein Order, which says, in
part, “The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all.
Never again must it encroach upon our European living space.”
Would you agree, asked Pearson, that his order is equivalent, in essence, to
Ohlendorf’s testimony?
No, said Weber. “This order refers explicitly to what is called here the Jew-
ish-Bolshevist system. It does not say that Jewry has to be exterminated,
which is what, essentially, Ohlendorf is saying in his testimony… There is
only a talk about the extermination of their system… and consistent with
that… large numbers of Jews continued to live in occupied Soviet territory
under German rule. In fact, orders were issued because too many Jews were
being employed by the German Armed Forces. Even after the issuance of this
[Manstein] order, we also know… [about cases] of German soldiers who
were punished by death for killing Jews…”
Pearson appeared to switch horses at this point, asking: “And that is pre-
cisely, I suggest, why Manstein was not convicted, because the court was not
satisfied that he and the army were aware of what the Einsatzgruppen were up
to, and was not satisfied that that order was a specific order for the extermina-
tion of the Jews?”
Pearson then moved on to the trial of Oswald Pohl, chief administrator of
the German concentration camps.
Weber noted that Pohl had said he was subjected to severe torture, but add-
ed that without his files he could not give his source.92
After lunch, Pearson returned to a sentence from Harwood: “The prosecu-
tion strenuously pressed this charge, but Pohl successfully repudiated it” –
namely, that Pohl had admitted to seeing a gas chamber at Auschwitz.
Was Harwood right or wrong about Pohl’s “successful repudiation” of his
I-saw-a-gas-chamber admission? asked Pearson.
Weber wavered, and Christie then suggested that perhaps Pohl’s repudia-
tion had come after his trial. That sounded right to Weber, who remained un-
certain, saying hesitantly: “After he was sentenced and before he was execut-
ed, [Pohl] made a statement that he had been tortured and that his testimony in
this regard… was, in fact, not true. And I am sorry… I just don’t remember
my source for that.”
Weber later emphasized that Pohl’s (later-repudiated) testimony had been
that “these gas chambers were only at Auschwitz.”93
Pearson turned to Konrad Morgen, the SS officer charged with investigat-
ing conditions in the concentration camps. Pearson read from postwar testi-
mony of Morgen which referred to the existence of five extermination camps.
One of those five, said Weber, was the Monowitz Camp, or Auschwitz III,
which today no one claims was used for extermination. And Morgen had not
simply gotten the name of Birkenau (Auschwitz II) wrong, as could be proven
92
Under re-examination, he produced the source. (See page 180.)
93
Pohl considered himself legally innocent, as he had never ordered or approved of atrocities, Os-
wald Pohl, Credo. Mein Weg zu Gott, A. Girnth, Landshut 1950, p. 43. Editor’s note.
from his accurate descriptions of Monowitz. “He’s talking about Monowitz

and that’s absolutely clear.”
“Why,” asked Pearson, “would Morgen lie about extermination camps?”
“He may be misinformed,” said Weber.
What’s also interesting, Weber noted, is that Morgen, hearing rumors of
exterminations, asked Himmler for permission to investigate the matter, in-
cluding the question of whether any orders lay behind such actions. Himmler
gave him a green light. Morgen satisfied himself that no extermination order
existed, and that any such activities were being “carried out without any au-
thority or orders from Himmler.”
Finding a complete lack of orders, Morgen decided instead, according to
his testimony, “to take direct steps against [Rudolf] Höss,” the commandant of
Auschwitz. But it was too late. The Russian front had reached the area of the
camp.
“What this indicates,” concluded Weber, “is that there was no order to ex-
terminate the Jews.”
“You mean,” suggested Judge Thomas, “there was no order [Morgen]
could find in the [Reich Security Main Office].”
No, said Weber, there was a full investigation. To summarize, Morgen had
been disturbed by evidence coming from Auschwitz, so he questioned his su-
periors about it, and those superiors “encouraged him to look further into it. A
further investigation was made, they found no evidence of any orders, and his
superiors encouraged him then to go on and investigate further these stories or
allegations of mass murder.” The advance of the Russian front prevented it.
“That’s what he says in his testimony.”
Pearson then asked Weber for his opinion about the nature of five camps:
Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno.
Majdanek, said Weber, was a large concentration camp and industrial
works, much like Auschwitz.
Sobibor, like Izbica and some other places, was a transit camp, rather
small.
The nature of Belzec and Chelmno was unclear because the evidence was
so limited. “Today, those who uphold the extermination story cannot even say
where exactly Chelmno allegedly was.”
Pearson produced a Nuremberg document titled “Solution of the Jewish
Question in Galicia,” by an SS official named Katzmann, and asked Weber to
describe it.
“It’s a very grim document,” said Weber, “which refers to rounding up the
Jews in Galicia” in 1943. The translation, he noted, “does contain some er-
rors.”
Would you agree, asked Pearson, “that basically what’s happening here is
the sender of the report is recounting the difficulties in clearing Galicia of
Jews?”
Yes, said Weber, who also agreed that a use of the expression “special
treatment” in this document meant that the particular group of Jews involved
was to be killed. But, he added, “special treatment” had other meanings in
other contexts.
Weber argued that many of the Galician Jews were in fact transferred to
various places. Pearson pointed to a mass suicide by poison of 3,000 Jews in
the ghetto of Labov [Lvov], and asked Weber, “Is this to avoid being trans-
ferred?”
No, said Weber, “I think they took poison to avoid probably being killed.”
Pearson then asked Weber if Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka were leveled, and
if so, why.
“We don’t know why,” said Weber. “We don’t even know if the Germans
did it. We just know that after the war they weren’t there anymore.”
Pearson turned to the Wannsee Conference, asking if Eichmann had not
testified in 1961 that the conference’s purpose was “to finalize a plan for the
extermination of the Jews.”
“He did make that claim,” said Weber. “He is, incidentally, the only one
who was at that conference that made that claim.”
Was he lying? asked Pearson.
“I think he was lying,” said Weber, “and I think he was trying to save his
life. I think he was trying to say as much as he could that was consistent with
the extermination story that was absolutely accepted as fact in order to make
his own defense as credible as possible. What’s important [here] is [that]… a
number of credible historians who support the Holocaust extermination story
now concede that the Wannsee Conference was not a conference for any ex-
termination of the Jews.”
Pearson: If Eichmann wanted to save his life, wouldn’t it make more sense
to say, “Wait a minute, Wannsee wasn’t about killing Jews, it was about mov-
ing them eastward”?
“That would have been madness,” said Weber. “He would have had no
credibility. So he took the position, I believe, to try and save his life that, oh
yes, there was this great extermination program but for various reasons I’m
not really to be considered responsible for it.”
Weber added that “witnesses other than Eichmann have testified both at
Nuremberg and elsewhere that the Wannsee Conference was not a conference
about extermination.”
Pearson asked Weber about the British historian David Irving: “You’d
agree with me that Irving does not deny that millions of Jews were killed as a
result of German policy?”
Well, said Weber, regardless of Irving’s position, “I have been far more in-
fluenced in studying this issue by [an “exterminationist” like] Raul Hilberg
than by David Irving.”
“We’ll retire now for the weekend,” said Judge Thomas.
Court resumed on Monday, March 28, and Pearson began by having Weber
read in its entirety an article which he wrote in 1978 for a pro-white American
periodical. This autobiographical piece described sequentially Weber’s years
of liberal optimism in the 1960s, his brief turn to Marxism, his work in the
campaign to raise money for starving Biafrans, his year of work in Bonn,
Germany, his teaching experience at a secondary school in Ghana, his sober-
ing year in a racially-divided Chicago, his return to school in Munich and In-
diana, and, finally, his coming to Washington, D.C. to join (briefly) the pro-
white National Alliance, led by Dr. William L. Pierce.
The article, which Weber had not even looked at in many years, was filled
with observations about racial conflict in America and elsewhere, expressed
temperately and without apology. In West Africa, Weber had written, he ob-
served the “racial and cultural unity” shown by white people who instinctively
stuck together. He had also come to appreciate the “common attitudes” which
blacks on two continents shared toward “work, family, music, sex, liquor and
property.”
Isn’t that a “racist statement”? asked Pearson.
It’s accurate, said Weber, who asked Pearson what he meant by “racist.”
“It is my job to ask the questions,” said Pearson.
In Chicago, Weber had written, “I first began to grasp the importance of
the Jewish Question.”
Asked to explain the term “Jewish Question,” Weber said it had two as-
pects: the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, and the role of Jews in so-
ciety.
Well, said Pearson, what is its “importance”?
“In the society I grew up in,” explained Weber, “there is constant discus-
sion in newspapers and magazines, and by politicians, and by many people,
about the role of Jews… This is something which Jewish leaders themselves
talk about very often.” This isn’t only true in America, said Weber, but “in
every society in which Jews exist.” And he agreed that the subject is im-
portant.
“I think,” said Weber, “that as numerous Jewish writers have pointed out,
there is a conflict going on right now between, oh, loyalty among Jews to their
own cultural and racial or ethnic group, and [loyalty to] the larger society in
which they live, and I think that is an issue which is talked about constantly,
even here in the Toronto newspapers recently.”
Weber’s article mentioned Jews promoting racial integration while resist-
ing assimilation themselves.
Isn’t that assertion “anti-Jewish”? asked Pearson.
No more, said Weber, than many things which Jews write about other
groups. “I do not regard [that] statement as… anywhere near as anti-Jewish as
Elie Wiesel’s calling for hatred against Germans simply because they are
Germans, and there are numerous statements like that.”94
Weber’s article described the severe problems arising in Europe because of
the influx of nonwhites and the drastically reduced white birthrate. Isn’t that a
“racist statement”? asked Pearson. No, said Weber. “I think that’s a statement
of fact.” Weber’s article told of the new “lies and myth-making” in American
history, with “various obscure blacks… elevated to undeserved prominence”
and the heroic sacrifices of whites ignored or criticized. A study of history,
Weber had written, showed conclusively the decadence which followed racial
mixing.
Isn’t that a “racist statement”? asked Pearson.
“Absolutely not,” said Weber.
“You don’t consider it racist” to link decadence with racial mixing? asked
Pearson.
Weber: Well, could you tell me, please, what you mean by racist?
Pearson: Sir, what I think is irrelevant.
The prosecutor had completely missed the point. Weber had not asked
what he thought about a subject (he surely did not care), but what he meant by
the use of a word. Pearson’s answer was essential because “racist” has a wide
range of sometimes contradictory meanings.
Christie interjected: “If the term is unclear, then it should be clarified.”
This was practically the last thing in the world that Pearson, Judge Thom-
as, or other members of Toronto’s present establishment-club wished to have
clarified,95 so Thomas leapt in to say: “If he is not able to answer the question,
he is not able to answer it.”
Weber read on: “My ‘conversion’ over several years had resulted in a re-
jection of two basic liberal principles: inherent human equality; and human
material comfort and happiness as the highest social good…”
94
Michael Wolffsohn, an Israeli professor who teaches at the official West-German War College at
Neubiberg, recently stated in an essay on German-Jewish relations that Jews today need the Holo-
caust story and a kind of anti-Germanism to maintain their collective identity. According to
Wolffsohn, Jewish politicians both in and outside of Israel “need the Holocaust and, thereby,
Germany as an instrument and vehicle to bring about a collective Jewish ‘we’ feeling, that is, to
promote Jewish identity and identification. Since ‘God is dead’ for many Jews as well, religion
and tradition no longer bind Jews together so strongly. A Jewish heritage of suffering, for which
the Holocaust and Germany are shorthand terms, is a partial substitute for the Jewish religion and
the story of salvation… The Holocaust and anti-Germanism have become the only points in
common for all Jews in recent years. However, therein lies the precondition for the next German-
Jewish confrontation…” Wolffsohn’s essay appeared in a special edition of the semi-official Bonn
weekly Das Parlament, marking the fortieth anniversary of Israel’s founding.
95
Arguably, Toronto is now a hotbed of institutionalized anti-white racism. The city’s population
was largely British in origin until the 1950s, and almost totally white as recently as 1970. Today,
it is tipping toward nonwhite and appears guaranteed of a racial future similar to the large Ameri-
can cities. Yet no opposition to this deliberate, white-refugee-creating trend is or has been tolerat-
ed. Some might see in the process a not-so-subtle form of anti-white racism.
Pearson then sullied himself by asking, “You were converted by Dr.

Pierce, were you?”
Weber could only call attention to the quotation marks which he had delib-
erately placed around the word “conversion,” and to the long list of intense
personal experiences, on three continents over a span of 15 years, about which
he had been reading for nearly an hour.
Read on, said Pearson.
Weber: “However, I continued to honor several of the older liberal values:
devotion to truth, no matter where it may lead; social and individual justice
within the context of the community; protection and encouragement of pro-
ductive labor; rejection of uncontrolled and irresponsible capitalism.”
Pearson kept alluding to a “race ideology,” and Weber patiently tried to
explain by his answers that simply preserving the integrity of any pre-existent
thing has nothing to do with the concept of “ideology.”
“Virtually every American president up until the modern era was racialist
in the sense, I suppose, that you mean it,” said Weber. “The racial views ex-
pressed by Abraham Lincoln or by Theodore Roosevelt are far more emphatic
than anything I have ever expressed on the subject.”
Pearson turned to the Harwood pamphlet and read: “Unless something is
done in Britain to halt the immigration and assimilation of Africans and
Asians into our country, we are faced in the near future, quite apart from the
bloodshed of racial conflict, with the biological alteration and destruction of
the British people as they have existed here since the coming of the Saxons.”
It seemed to bother Pearson greatly that someone had called the sky blue or
said there were two sexes. With admirable self-restraint, Weber went directly
to the main point:
“I think it is very important to realize that [Harwood] has injected an issue
which is really secondary. There are many individuals who support revision-
ism who reject completely” a concern with racial preservation. “The issues,”
he insisted, “are really quite separate.”
“[T]he revisionist movement,” said Weber, “is not at all a racialist move-
ment. It has people in it who have every possible racial, political, ideological
and religious view.”
“In point of fact,” suggested Pearson, “when you had your ‘conversion’ as
you put it, you commenced your study of the Holocaust. Isn’t that right?”
“Mr. Pearson,” said the witness, “at the time that I wrote this article [1978],
I believed essentially in the Holocaust extermination story.”
Didn’t you tell us, asked-Pearson, that “it was not until the summer of 1980
that you felt confident in denying that the Holocaust had happened”?
Well, said Weber, by the summer of 1979, “I felt… that at least certain
parts… were not true.”
This reply was entirely consistent with at least the first, and probably the
second of the two responses which Weber had given earlier,96 but Pearson
pounced as if he had caught an inconsistency.
Pearson showed Weber an article he had written for The Spotlight dated
December 24, 1979, and suggested it was “a complete public denial of the
Holocaust.”
“It was a continuing process,” said Weber, and that article focused only on
certain aspects of the Holocaust story.
Pearson showed Weber an anti-Zionist article he had written in 1982 and
asked if he denied he was “anti-Jewish.”
“Zionism is Jewish nationalism, Mr. Pearson,” explained Weber. “It is a
view that the Jews of the world are not merely a religious group but a national
group, and I believe that that ideology… has been, and ultimately will be,
dangerous for Jews, and I believe that a person can very reasonably take the
view, as I have, that to be anti-Zionist is actually pro-Jewish.”
Christie began his re-examination of Weber by asking about the Nurem-
berg document titled “Solution of the Jewish Question in Galicia,” raised by
the Crown during cross-examination.
Weber mentioned that Galicia is a small region in eastern Europe known
for its poverty.
Christie asked what the document, dated June 1943, said about the amount
of gold allegedly seized from the Jews of Galicia.
The Nuremberg translation of the document, said Weber, claims that about
29.5 tons of broken gold was taken from the Galician Jews, plus 7.5 tons of
dental gold, 90.7 tons of gold coins, and so on. The grand total of pure gold
was about 140.7 tons, worth two-and-a-half billion dollars in current Canadian
money.
“I think these figures are wildly exaggerated,” said Weber. “To put it in
perspective, the total amount of gold mined in all of Canada last year, by
about 25 large mining operations, was about 75 tons.”
The figures showed that the Galician document was either “greatly exag-
gerated,” or “not genuine,” said Weber. And the same could be said for “many
other” alleged German documents of the time.
During your cross-examination, said Christie, you stated that Oswald Pohl
was tortured. Have you now found your evidence for this?
Yes, said Weber. Pohl, the German official in charge of the concentration
camps, wrote a statement dated June 1, 1948, in which he described his re-
peated brutal beatings by British soldiers two years earlier. Pohl held the rank
of general, so his treatment was “completely illegal” according to international
agreements.
96
See page 171.
During 60 to 80 interrogation sessions, Pohl was also emotionally tortured,

deceitfully accused of killing 30 million people to break down his resistance.
Weber quoted Pohl:97 “Because I am not emotionally thick-skinned, these
diabolical intimidations were not without effect, and the interrogators
achieved what they wanted: not the truth but rather statements that served
their needs.”
Pohl had no access to an attorney or other support during this period, and
was never formally charged with anything.
At his subsequent trial, the American prosecutor used false affidavits
which Pohl was forced to sign.
In his statement, said Weber, Pohl declared that the number of those who
died of all causes in all German concentration and labor camps between 1933
and 1945 was 200,000 to 250,000. Epidemics and general collapse near the
end of the war accounted for the vast majority of these deaths.
Can you explain, asked Christie, why the portion of Pohl’s official testi-
mony read by the Crown might be detailed and yet false?
At Nuremberg, said Weber, we have a number of statements made that
were later proven false even by mainstream historians. “I think the evidence is
quite clear that Pohl and others made statements often that seemed very damn-
ing… in an effort to show believability.”
Can you add, asked Christie, to what was said earlier about the Konrad
Morgen testimony?
Yes, said Weber. It is vital to appreciate that Morgen had testified that “to
the best of his knowledge there was no German program or policy to extermi-
nate the Jews of Europe, and almost no one in Germany at that time was in a
better position to know the truth about this matter than was Konrad Morgen.”
“It is not surprising,” said Weber, “that Morgen might have believed this
story [about Jews being gassed at Auschwitz III or Monowitz] because, appar-
ently, most of the inmates at Monowitz believed the “same thing, and it is
likely that Morgen based his belief on what he was told…” As a British POW
at Monowitz, Charles Coward testified after the war, the British were drop-
ping leaflets onto the area telling everyone that the gassings were occurring.
There were also radio broadcasts to the same effect, which got everyone in
Auschwitz talking about the subject.
The Crown suggested you might be into revisionism for the money, noted
Christie.
The suggestion, said Weber, “is both ludicrous and contemptible. In point
of fact, many of those who have supported the revisionist view have suffered
tremendously as a result of that support. One important Jewish revisionist, a
man named J.G. Burg, was beaten up, for example, by thugs as he was praying
97
Oswald Pohl, Letzte Aufzeichnungen, reproduced in: Udo Walendy, Historische Tatsachen No.
47, Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho 1991, pp. 35ff. Editor’s note.
at his wife’s grave in Munich. Wilhelm Stäglich, a West-German historian,

had his pension cut and his doctoral title revoked as a result of his speaking
out on the Holocaust issue based on his own experience and his own study of
the matter. Professor Robert Faurisson, another prominent revisionist histori-
an, was beaten several times [and] dragged into court repeatedly by powerful
and influential organizations. His family life was thrown into turmoil. I myself
have received numerous death threats as a result of writing on this issue.”
The Crown also suggested, said Christie, “that you somehow had denied
the Holocaust ever happened. Do you agree with that?”
“No,” said Weber, “that is a misleading and inaccurate characterization.”
Christie asked Weber if any Holocaust historians placed much weight on
the Galicia document as a proof of Jewish extermination.
No, said Weber. “In fact, I believe… that the document is not consistent
with the Holocaust extermination story… because, on a number of occasions
in the document, there are references to very severe or even brutal measures
against Jews, but these are all presented for some specific reason.” Further,
portions of the document emphasize the need for “good clothing, housing and
medical care for Jews in the camps.”
Judge Thomas had a question of his own: “Am I correct in my recollection
that you indicated that the authenticity of [the Galicia document] has never
been doubted?”
“Some of the content is clearly inaccurate,” said Weber, but “I myself have
not called the document’s authenticity into question.”
After a lunch break, the ninth witness for the Zündel defense took the
stand. She was Maria van Herwaarden, a Canadian woman interned at Birke-
nau (Auschwitz II) and later Auschwitz I between December 1942 and the
German evacuation of January 1945.
Under questioning by Douglas Christie, the witness explained that she had
been a 20-year-old farm worker in Upper Austria in 1942 when she was ar-
rested on June 16 for having sexual relations with a forced laborer of enemy
nationality. A child was born in October and placed with Maria’s parents. In
December, she was taken to Auschwitz to serve her sentence.
En route from Vienna to Auschwitz by train, van Herwaarden and the 20
women she was with were told by a Gypsy among them that they would be
gassed on arrival. At Auschwitz, someone told the group they must take a cold
shower.
Christie: What was your state of mind when you went into the shower
room?
Van Herwaarden: At first I was terribly scared because they said gas would
be coming from the top but it was only water.
The Jewish inmates at Birkenau were treated the same as others, said the
witness, who later added, “They had nice jobs. They were the block seniors
and they were working in the office and as doctors.”
Van Herwaarden did some agricultural work on a tree plantation, where the
food and other conditions were relatively good.
Christie: Did you see prisoners dying in the camp?
Van Herwaarden: Very many. Very, very many. And also people who took
their own lives on the electric fence.
Christie: Did you ever see any prisoners killed by anyone in the camp?
Van Herwaarden: No, never. Never. But many, many dead people. From
diseases.
The high death rate was from black fever. “There was nothing to do against
it. We couldn’t do anything.”
In January 1945 came the evacuation of Auschwitz, with Jews and every-
one included.
Christie: Did you see any indication of a mass murder, wholesale massacre
of Jews?
Van Herwaarden: Never.
Christie put to the witness several quotations from Thies Christophersen
which appeared in the Harwood pamphlet, among them: “During the whole of
my time at Auschwitz, I never observed the slightest evidence of mass gas-
sings.”
“Never,” agreed van Herwaarden, although there were rumors.
Christie: Now, have you had difficulty getting people to believe what you
saw in Auschwitz-Birkenau?
In Canada, yes, said van Herwaarden (who, outside of court, had recounted
the disbelief in her own family).
“From what you saw,” asked Christie, was there an extermination of Jews?
Van Herwaarden: I didn’t see anything of that sort.
John Pearson limited his cross-examination to a few minor questions, end-
ing with, “You told us that Birkenau was a very big place?”
“Yes,” said van Herwaarden.
The next defense witness was Tiudar Rudolph, a 77-year-old ethnic-
German native of Lodz, Poland, whose appearance reminded some of Freder-
ick the Great. He began his work for Jewish businesses in 1927, and spoke
Yiddish, Polish, and German fluently. Tragedy struck in early August 1939, as
he and thousands of other ethnic Germans, citizens of Poland, were arrested
without cause and hauled away to Polish concentration camps. This was
weeks before the outbreak of war between Germany and Poland, and almost
two years before the widespread German internment of Jews. Rudolph es-
caped in a matter of days and made his way to Germany. He returned to Lodz
shortly after the German occupation of Poland, and took a job as a translator
with the security service (the SD).
Rudolph explained that he met Zündel in 1969, and discussed his life expe-
riences with him often, both in person and by mail. Christie repeatedly elicited
this information from Rudolph during his testimony, because what Rudolph
had said had a direct bearing on Zündel’s “state of mind” when he published
the Harwood booklet in about 1981.
An important incident occurred in the autumn of 1941, when Rudolph, now
working in Cracow for his friend and superior Major Liska, prepared a report
which was sent to Hans Frank, the Governor General of German-ruled Poland.
It told about nine or ten days during which a delegation of the International
Red Cross of Geneva toured Majdanek and other camps in an “unhampered”
fashion. Many copies of this report were sent out to German officialdom, and
Rudolph sorely regretted not having retained one. Since the war, he had writ-
ten several letters to Geneva, asking the ICRC why it never mentioned this
major 1941 tour in any of its official reports. He never got an answer.
Christie asked Rudolph if he had drawn any conclusions about the alleged
extermination of Jews at Birkenau.
“It’s absolutely a lie,” said Rudolph.
Rudolph spoke favorably of the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, a day-by-
day account by the Jewish ghetto administration, which Rudolph had quickly
bought and read when it was published in Poland in 1965. “It’s a confirmation
of what I did experience myself and is very precious because the Jews did
write a diary every day with all things which happened during the day and for
historians it tells the truth.”
The Germans, said Rudolph, made the Lodz Ghetto into a great labor
camp. There, the industrious Jews produced the steel helmets which were used
by every German soldier. Those who wished to work, said Rudolph, were not
sent to concentration camps.
The Jewish chemical and metallurgic works in the Lodz Ghetto were
“booked out for two years” in 1940. “They had so many orders.” The tailor
shops “were always busy and the joiners, too.”
After a break, Pearson began a brief cross-examination. He had one key
question which Rudolph was unable to answer satisfactorily. Given the fact
that Rudolph had entered the German army in 1942, and fought in places like
North Africa, how much did he really know about the fate of the Lodz Ghetto
toward the end of the war, while he was away? Rudolph insisted on his great
personal interest in the fate of the ghetto (“I did know every Jew there”), but
gave little indication of first-hand knowledge past 1942.
The trial resumed the next morning, Tuesday, March 29. Christie asked
permission to call as an expert witness John C. Ball, a consulting geologist
from British Columbia who, since the early 1970s, has analyzed aerial photo-
graphs for clients to help them determine the mineral potential of land. In No-
vember 1987, at Ernst Zündel’s request, Ball obtained wartime aerial photo-
graphs of Birkenau from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and ex-
amined them at his office in Vancouver. He focused especially on the roofs of
the crematory buildings, including the alleged gas chambers, seeking physical
indicators relating to the standard Holocaust narrative.
Ball was finally rejected as a witness by Judge Thomas after he testified on

the voir dire. Thomas agreed that the aerial photos were proper evidence for
the defense to introduce, but concluded, after some reflection, that Ball was
not sufficiently qualified as an expert to do the job.
Ball had the remarkably bad luck to be cross-examined not only by Pear-
son but (informally) by a judge who admitted that he once tried a case where,
for two months, the finer points of aerial photography were debated. Before
admitting this, however, Thomas had a little fun with Ball (and the rest of the
court) by suddenly peppering him with questions like, “Have you ever pre-
sented or formulated a horizontal model? In the horizontal plane?” and “Have
you developed a computer-assisted vertical plane with the benefit of photo-
grammetry?” So sophisticated and assured was this technical questioning that
it looked like Toronto had an unsung Leonardo da Vinci in robes until Thom-
as’s explanation was forthcoming.
As Christie tried to save his witness, he jettisoned one line of potential
questioning after another until there was little left for poor Ball to have said.
For example, Ball had studied the correspondence among high American offi-
cials at a time, in 1944, when there was occasional talk about bombing the rail
lines to Auschwitz, and much speculation about what might be going on inside
the camp. Pearson complained that Ball lacked the expertise to discuss Allied
strategic considerations, and here, as elsewhere, Christie promised that he
would not lead evidence on the subject.
Ball was finally stripped almost bare, but it was not enough to save him.
Judge Thomas, flaunting his knowledge, was especially concerned that Ball
had indicated several times that “as far as he is concerned [a micro-stereo-
scope and a stereoscope] are the same thing. They aren’t the same.”
Yet the nub of Ball’s proposed testimony concerned only the naked eye
and those aerial photos taken on August 25 and September 13, 1944. On the
first date, four very low objects are clearly apparent on the roof of Leichenkel-
ler I (German for Morgue I, which is alleged to have been a gas chamber),
while 19 days later they have disappeared. This discrepancy raised the distinct
possibility of tampering, presumably by additions to the August 25 photo (a
speculation which Christie also ended up promising not to lead).
Tampering or no tampering, submitted Christie, the photos as a group “do
tend to indicate there is something wrong with the story as to the extermina-
tion of people in that place.” Ball, he said, “might [also] be testifying that
there is no smoke emanating from the visible chimneys… of both crematoria,
on all occasions” [i.e., April 4, May 31, August 9 and 12, and other dates].
In addition to no smoke, the main issue, for Christie, was, again, “what is
located on the roof on Leichenkeller I on various locations. It is quite obvious
even to the naked eye, in the September photo, there is nothing located on the
roof of the Leichenkeller to constitute either a vent or an exhaust, and on the
August 25th photograph there are some objects… [The jury] can look and see
for themselves.”
“All it means,” said Christie, “is that [the morgues] may not be what the
literature represents… gas chambers. Of course… other evidence will be
called… that there has to be an evacuation of the gas” so that bodies can be
safely removed.
That line of argument was fine, said Judge Thomas, but a proper expert
was still needed to present the photos to the jury. So after ruling against Ball,
he adjourned the court for lunch.98
Just after 2:00, Ernest Nielson took the stand as a witness to Zündel’s
“state of mind” at the time he published Harwood. Nielson had worked at the
University of Toronto as a senior technologist in the chemistry department. In
1971, he corresponded with the Nuremberg Defendant Albert Speer, then flew
to Heidelberg to meet him. The chief question he posed was “Were there gas
chambers in Auschwitz?” Speer replied that he never heard about gas cham-
bers until the Nuremberg Trials.
In 1979, Nielson enrolled in a Holocaust course at the University of Toron-
to taught by a Professor Kornberg, who stated that an order to exterminate the
Jews of Europe had come in 1942, and then asked the class for questions
about the matter. Nielson asked Kornberg for documentation and got into an
argument. “The outcome was that Professor Kornberg said the premise of this
course is the fact that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and ‘if you
don’t accept it, I don’t want you in’ this course.”
Christie: Did you discuss that with Mr. Zündel?
Nielson: Of course I did.
Christie: And what happened after that? Were you out of the course then?
Nielson: Well, there was a threatening attitude on the part of the other stu-
dents and I think I would have risked a bloody nose if I had shown up there.
Christie: You didn’t show up anymore?
Nielson: I didn’t, no.
In 1980, Nielson enrolled in another Holocaust course. He tried not to raise
any hackles, but got in a discussion one day with Professor Michael R. Marrus
“and I think I can truthfully say that he provoked me. It became an argument
and he said ‘Mr. Nielson, you are out of this course. We don’t want you.’”
Nielson reported his problem to the president of the university, asked Zün-
del for assistance, and soon “about a dozen letters” had flown hither and yon.
Among them was an open letter, dated November 10, 1980, which was sent to
Professor William J. Callahan, chairman of the Department of History at the
University of Toronto. Signed by Nielson, it was partly composed by Zündel.
Christie read the letter to the court, and had Nielson comment on the author-
ship of the different sections.
98
Such an expert was Kenneth Wilson, who testified on April 19. See page 277.
The letter began by appealing Callahan’s decision to back up Marrus and

have Nielson expelled from the course. “Never,” he argued, “did I question
the competence of the instructor, and any allegation on his part that I did so
must be viewed as an attempt to shift the direction of our inquiries away from
facts and issues and onto the subject of personalities…” Nielson explained
why he considered most of the course materials to be “Zionist incitements to
hatred of Germans” and himself to be “a victim of outright ethnic discrimina-
tion.” He asked if “barring questions” might constitute “indoctrination instead
of education,” and demanded to know why his teachers were “unable and un-
willing to produce documentary proof of the alleged extermination program.”
Wasn’t the University of Toronto “betraying its public trust” and “working
against Canadian unity” by allowing the dissemination of “irresponsible and
inflammatory” course material?
Nielson concluded his letter with several “urgent suggestions.” The Holo-
caust course should “be expanded to include actual documentation.” “Fiction-
alized personal and hearsay accounts” of the Holocaust should be dropped as
unhistorical and overly emotional. Non-fictional works by revisionists should
be added. Personal and group biases should be considered in the selection of
personnel to teach the subject. Not all Holocaust instructors should be Jewish.
Nielson also recommended a Holocaust symposium, at which speakers
“could present to the student body both sides of this vital issue.”
Noting the threats he had received from “Zionist-oriented students and fac-
ulty,” Nielson requested campus security personnel for his protection. Other-
wise, he warned, he would hire private guards.
During a brief cross-examination, Pearson elicited that Callahan had re-
sponded two days later, and that Nielson had not followed through on his end
of the confrontation for reasons of poor health and heavy work demands. But,
added Nielson, he would fight it out today.
Pearson suggested that Zündel’s involvement in the tiff was entirely for the
sake of publicity, and asked if “denying the Holocaust” wasn’t “the way Mr.
Zündel gets public attention.”
Sure he gets attention, answered Nielson, but the quest for historic truth
was his aim nonetheless. “Have you heard of slamming a horse with a two-by-
four to get its attention?”
Chapter 6: What Is Truth?
S
hortly before 4:00 on Tuesday, March 29, 80-year-old Joseph G. Burg
took the stand as the twelfth accepted witness for the Zündel defense.
Jewish on both sides of his family, with a Trotsky-like beard and the air
of a Nineteenth-Century rabbi, Burg offered his evidence to help show Zün-
del’s “state of mind” at the time he published the Harwood pamphlet. The two
men were already communicating then, primarily about Burg’s own Holo-
caust-debunking books, which he began to publish in West Germany about
1960.
In the autumn of 1945, said Burg, curiosity had taken him to Auschwitz.
Subsequently, he had spoken with hundreds of people who were there during
the war.
Christie: In your books and correspondence, do you indicate whether there
were gas chambers at Auschwitz, Majdanek or other German extermination
camps?
Burg corrected Christie’s terminology: “There were no ‘extermination
camps’ at all.”
During the war, Burg had lived in a district under Romanian control which
was reserved for Jews of the region. They had been collectively “banned” be-
cause many had “greeted the Red Army.”
“It was a lot worse for us than in a concentration camp,” Burg insisted.
“[T]he German authorities looked after the inmates in the camps… [W]e
were left to our own devices.”
Christie: When you visited Auschwitz in the fall of 1945, did you specifi-
cally look for gas chambers?
Yes, said Burg, “although at that time (allegations of) gassings were not in
fashion. Not yet. But I did look for them. I searched for them and I didn’t find
anything.”
Christie: And did you find any evidence of gas chambers in 1945 at Maj-
danek?
Burg: Yes.
Christie: And what were these gas chambers in Majdanek?
Burg: They were to exterminate lice, fleas, et cetera. Bugs which caused
epidemics. The Germans were super-bureaucrats, said Burg. “It can’t be that
after all these years not a document can be found.”
“I talked to hundreds of people who serviced and operated the crematoria,”
he continued, “but the people who operated gas chambers were impossible to
find…” The literature was all “completely contradictory. Why? Because it’s
all made up.”
Christie: Does [Zündel] appear to be sincere in his inquiries about that sub-
ject?
Burg: He told me that he saw it as his life’s work to defend his people be-
cause they are defamed.
Christie: And do you agree that his people are defamed?
Burg: Yes.
Christie: And have you expressed these views in your books?
Burg: Again and again.
Have you suffered for your views? asked Christie.
“Yes, of course,” said Burg – but Judge Thomas disallowed the question.
Christie asked Burg what he had told Zündel about how the yellow star
came to be worn by Jews.
Burg replied that the director of the Zionist movement in Germany had
called for it as early as 1933. The measure was finally implemented in 1938,
against the wishes of both Göring and Goebbels. The Zionists “didn’t under-
stand it as an insult, but rather as a heroic gesture. Just like the SS wear the
swastika.”
Burg stated that he and Zündel had often discussed Germany’s vast repara-
tions to Israel and Jewry and the effect which Holocaust propaganda was hav-
ing on German-Jewish relations. The situation would continue “for another
few generations,” he had predicted. Burg was pleased about teaching Zündel
to say “Zionist” rather than “Jew.”
The witness described meeting Ilya Ehrenburg, the famous Soviet Jewish
writer and propagandist, at the Nuremberg trials. Ehrenburg had examined
Auschwitz after the war, and was with another prominent Jew, a publisher,
who had been interned there for several years. Burg asked both men if they
saw anything suggestive of gassings, and both answered in the negative.
Shortly after Burg stated that he had read Harwood in the German edition,
Judge Thomas adjourned the court for the day.
The testimony continued the next morning, Wednesday, March 30. Christie
asked Burg what he told Zündel about “collaboration” between Nazi and Zi-
onist officials.
Burg corrected Christie’s terminology. In this context, he wrote and spoke

only of “cooperation,” since “collaboration is basically between opponents.”
Not only David Ben-Gurion but “almost all recognized [Zionist] leaders came
from Palestine to Germany in order to cooperate in Jewish questions…”
The head of Zionism in Germany at the time Hitler took power was Dr.
Leo Baeck, and Burg quoted him as declaring that the interests of Jewry and
German National Socialism were “identical.” Another German Zionist leader,
Dr. [Siegfried] Moses, “made a similar declaration.” But it was a very differ-
ent world from ours in more ways than one. Zionists then constituted only 1.5
percent of all German Jews, according to Burg.99
The Zionists, said Burg, worked constantly to keep countries other than
Palestine from admitting any Jews. The Nazis, for their part, seldom cared
where the Jews went. But nine years of Nazi-Zionist cooperation “came to an
end in 1942 when… the victory against Germany was even visible to the
dumbest person.”
“The truth is slowly coming out,” said Burg – and he feared the conse-
quences.
Burg mentioned his book Guilt and Fate, published in 1962, which Zündel
read years ago. “He told me once that thanks to this book he has become what
he now is, a fighter for the truth, a fighter against the wrong accusation of his
people.”
Many 1930s Zionists, said Burg, were of the opinion that only Germany
could help them get a Jewish state. They “used for their purposes… the major-
ity of the Jews.” A model ghetto was created in Lodz, with Jewish money and
Jewish postage stamps. “Thanks to the Berlin government we practiced a
small Israel.” Of course, “here and there,” Germans brutally murdered Jews.
“All these [other] things cannot be said today…”
Burg hoped to show by his example that not all Jews consider the Germans
a guilty nation. He admired Zündel’s courage. “If there were another two or
three Zündels,” he proclaimed, “it would be better for us Jews as well.”
Burg mentioned the case of Dr. Benedikt Kautsky, a prominent socialist
Jew who spent three years in Birkenau. His mother was there as well. She was
about 80, became ill, and got “special treatment” – which in her case meant
especially good food and care. She died nonetheless. After the war, Kautsky
returned to Vienna, said Burg, to publish a “workers’ newspaper” which
“brought out the truth.” He also published a book, Teufel und Verdammte
(1946), which told the truth about the alleged extermination of the Jews. “The
whole edition was burned. One and a half years later, he published another
edition. Yeah, he made a few changes…”
The story of the gassings, said Burg, “comes from a sick mind.”
99
Today, of course, it is precisely that one-time minority of Jews who were then most-amenable to
Hitler who maintain a tight grip on most of organized Jewry.
Christie asked the witness what he had told Zündel about “your interviews
with Jewish Sonderkommando workers in the camp crematories.”
Obviously, said Burg, every large camp had crematoria. The work there
was heavy and difficult and the internees who worked there – voluntarily –
were among the healthiest. Later, “it was invented that every crematorium was
a gas chamber.” Some claimed that “living Jews were pushed in to be burned.
I would like to see a Jew who has given such statements during trial. One
should force him to take an oath under the [rabbinical] rites with the skull cap,
without pictures of Christ [present], with the Hebrew Bible, in the presence of
a rabbi or a pious religious Jew. Then he should swear an oath that he has seen
something like that. Then these false oaths, these false statements, these sick
statements, would go down by 99.5 percent. Because the superficial oath is
not binding, morally binding, for these Jews. Is that a sufficient answer?”
Burg estimated that he had spoken with about 30 to 40 Sonderkommando
workers on the subject of gas chambers. He also stated that he had participated
in “dozens of discussion evenings” in West Germany.
Burg’s answers, often rambling and indirect like Ditlieb Felderer’s, became
more-so as the day wore on. Pearson began to complain, and Christie ap-
peared sympathetic.
In his last minutes on the stand, Burg launched into a monologue about a
great conspiracy. “It was a matter of the establishment of the State of Israel,”
he said. The large Jewish bankers did not want to go to Israel themselves, he
added, “but they support [the country] in their own way… They play a double
game…” They helped support the Hitler regime. Some had said they would
sacrifice European Jewry if it brought them Israel.
John Pearson elected not to cross-examine this witness.
Next on the stand was Gary Botting. The contrast in styles (and substance)
could scarcely have been greater. Botting, in his mid-forties, was elegantly
dressed, sophisticated, the owner of a stratospheric IQ.
Burg was a well-meaning eccentric who had rambled his way around Eu-
rope. The Oxford-born Botting had a curriculum vitae which would have
raised eyebrows in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Answering Christie’s opening
questions, the still-youthful-looking Botting mentioned noteworthy achieve-
ments in law, journalism, philosophy, literature, history, the social and natural
sciences, public and media relations, film, computers, editing and publishing,
college administration, and religion.
Botting, who had also testified at the 1985 Zündel trial, may play a large
role in Canada’s free-speech movement in the years to come. Here, he would
limit his remarks to a line-by-line analysis of the Harwood pamphlet in terms
of statements of fact and statements of opinion. Judge Thomas warned Chris-
tie not to let the witness discuss freedom of speech.
Having followed Burg on his tangents, those present were relieved to hear
crisp exchanges like the following, which came during Pearson’s cross-
examination of Botting on his expert qualifications.
Pearson: The purpose of literary criticism… is to analyze a literary work
and determine the message that the writer wishes to convey by that work.
Would you agree with that?
Botting: That would be a very narrow interpretation of literary criticism.
No. It’s much more than that. It’s also examining the way the words fit to-
gether, the nuance of the language, the poetry if you like… But the polemic
message is also part of it and certainly rhetorical devices and things like that
that assist the writer to convey his message most-appropriately and most-
efficiently are all concerns of literary analysis.
Botting testified that he had broken down the Harwood booklet into five
types of sentences. The first he called “authorial or editorial qualifications.”
An example would be, “In the following chapter the author has, he be-
lieves…” The last two words qualify the rest.
The second was substantive quotations or statements taken from other
books and sources, together with “common knowledge,” where a citation was
hardly necessary.
The third category was unsupported, undocumented statements of fact.
The fourth was “authorial opinions and intrusions,” that is, “when an au-
thor is making a thesis and suddenly makes a statement that is obviously from
his own opinion.”
The fifth was rhetorical devices, including rhetorical questions, where the
author does not really anticipate an answer.
Botting had color-coded his copy of Harwood with five Magic Markers to
show at a glance these five types of sentences. In practice, as the testimony
wore on, the five categories were often reduced to as few as two – statements
of fact and statements of opinion – to help speed the proceedings.
A few examples will suggest Botting’s mode of operation.
Near the beginning of Harwood appears a short section titled “Discour-
agement of Nationalism.” There, the author describes the “far-reaching impli-
cations for the people of Britain and Europe” of the Six-Million allegation.
“It has been used quite unscrupulously,” Christie read from the text, “to
discourage any form of nationalism.”
“Opinion,” said Botting.
Christie: The next sentence goes on, “Should the people of Britain or any
other European country attempt to assert their patriotism and preserve their
national integrity in an age when the very existence of nation-states is threat-
ened, they are immediately branded as neo-Nazis.” What would you classify
that sentence as?
Botting: A combination of common knowledge and rhetoric.
Christie: It says, “Because, of course, Nazism was nationalism, and we all

know what happened then – Six Million Jews were exterminated!”
Botting: That’s definitely a rhetorical statement. “We all know what hap-
pened then, Six Million Jews were exterminated” is kind of a colored com-
ment to try to underline his argument…
The first full chapter in Harwood is titled “German Policy toward the Jews
prior to the War.”
Christie began to read from it: “Rightly or wrongly, the Germany of Adolf
Hitler considered the Jews to be a disloyal and avaricious element within the
community, as well as a force of decadence in Germany’s cultural life.”
“Common knowledge,” said Botting.
Christie continued: “This was held to be particularly unhealthy since dur-
ing the Weimar Period the Jews had risen to a remarkable strength and posi-
tion in the nation, particularly law, finance and the mass media, even though
they constituted only five percent100 of the population.”
He then asked the witness, “Now, words like ‘unhealthy,’ ‘remarkable,’
’strength’ and ‘influence,’ what do they indicate about that sentence?”
Well, said Botting, “he’s talking about the way the world back then viewed
themselves… and, you know, I regard this whole paragraph as being a fairly
straightforward observation of history.”
Christie went to the next paragraph: “It is no part of the discussion here to
argue whether the German attitude to the Jews was right or not, or to judge
whether its legislative measures against them were just or unjust.”
Botting: A qualification of the author’s position up to this point [i.e., a Cat-
egory-1 statement].
From the second chapter, Christie read, “It is not widely known that world
Jewry declared itself to be a belligerent party in the Second World War, and
there was therefore ample basis under international law for the Germans to in-
tern the Jewish population as a hostile force.”
“How do you categorize that sentence?” he asked.
Botting: This is a very complex one. You know, it seems reasonable to as-
sume that it was not widely known, but then he’s giving a statement of opin-
ion right in the middle, that there is ample basis because of this not-widely
known fact. So it’s a combination of fact and opinion.
And so, the testimony laboriously proceeded for the remainder of the day.
Christie and Botting resumed their examination of Harwood on the follow-
ing day, Thursday, March 31.
The complexity of much of this testimony is suggested by an exchange
which occurred just before the lunch break. It involved Harwood’s discussion
of Anne Frank.
100
Actually one percent.
Christie read: “The truth about the Anne Frank Diary was first revealed in
1959 by the Swedish journal Fria Ord.”
“The search for truth is always a subjective thing,” said Botting. “You can
assume from that this is opinion.”
Pearson objected: “I don’t know what makes this witness qualified to say
that the search for truth is always a subjective enterprise.”
“Well,” Judge Thomas said to Pearson, “I think you’re going to have to
deal with this in cross-examination, [because] it’s apparent to me there is a
fundamental difference of opinion here.”
“Now,” Thomas continued, turning to the witness, “whether [or not] the
search for truth is subjective, what the Crown Attorney is saying is that that
statement is put forth by that author as an assertion of fact. You disagree, ob-
viously.”
Botting: Yes, I do.
Judge Thomas: Could you tell me why?
“We get into a question of epistemology and basic philosophy,” said Bot-
ting. “We get into Cartesian analysis and a whole range of things which obvi-
ously are impractical for a court to consider.”
Judge Thomas: I think we will have to leave it at that, Mr. Pearson.
Pearson: Your Honor, what I submit in light of that last answer [is that] this
witness is no longer qualified to do what he’s been purporting to do since the
beginning of his testimony, which is to distinguish between fact and opinion
in that he has now said, as I understand his answer, there is no such thing as
fact.
Christie suggested that “my friend should wait to insult the witness at a lat-
er point,” to which Pearson replied, “I meant no insult whatsoever to Professor
Botting.”
Judge Thomas advised Pearson that his role – later – would be to “high-
light” Botting’s approach to truth “for the jury, and the jury can [attach] what-
ever weight they wish to his evidence.”
Later, Christie noted the frequent assertions made by Harwood along the
lines of “this is a historical fact” or “this is the truth.”
“Does that mean,” he asked, “that it states or claims to be a statement of
fact?”
Botting replied, “It’s the author’s opinion… his [subjective] view of the
world.”
Christie asked the witness to classify the Harwood pamphlet as a whole.
Botting: It’s basically a polemical treatise, fairly common type, probably
more common in the Nineteenth Century than the Twentieth Century. We can
think of parallel works by other writers, George Orwell being among the main
ones, who have written in a very similar way. There are rhetorical elements,
it’s meant to be persuasive…
Christie: How would you define it in terms of fact or opinion?
Botting: Oh, in terms of fact or opinion, it’s very obviously an opinion.

Christie asked what the end result would be if one collected “all the fact
that you have segregated out.”
It would be something “very much like an encyclopedia or a dictionary,”
said Botting. Opinion was the “essence” of the pamphlet.
Court was adjourned until Tuesday, April 5. That morning, Christie asked
Botting to turn briefly from literary criticism to “textual criticism,” and ana-
lyze three different editions of Harwood – the British, the Canadian, and the
American – as to sequence.
Botting easily showed that the British edition came first. One sure indica-
tion was the book’s photographs. “There are some [pictorial] details in [the
American] edition that are not present in the Canadian edition, and there are
some details in the Canadian edition that are not present in the American edi-
tion, but all of the details of both these editions are present in the British edi-
tion.”
Pearson began his cross-examination by suggesting to Botting that the sep-
aration of fact and opinion was a common-sense operation performed by most
people in their daily lives.
No, said Botting, “the average person does precious little of that kind of
analysis.”
Pearson then turned to a series of specific items from Botting’s analysis of
Harwood which he found dubious. These were statements which Botting had
called “opinion,” but which Pearson suggested should be seen as “fact.”
“The conclusion,” countered Botting, “can only be as strong as the material
you put into it. That is to say, if there is one opinion in a whole list of various
premises that go into the argument, then the conclusion you come to is an
opinion.”
In one example, Pearson read from Harwood that so many Jews had emi-
grated from European countries other than Poland during a certain period of
time. “I suggest to you, sir,” he said, “that that purports to be a statement of
fact.”
“The fact is this is opinion,” said Botting. The individual figures may be
facts, but the analysis makes the total an opinion.
Pearson: Just so I’m clear on this, if I say Bill has two cats, that’s a state-
ment of fact. If I say Jane has two cats, that’s a statement of fact. If I say Bill
and Jane have four cats, in your view, that’s a statement of opinion. Is that
what you’re saying?
Botting: It is as good as the premise that goes into it. If, for example,
there’s also Sam with his cats and Joe with his, and they are not mentioned in
the context of what you said and yet they are relevant in some way, then the
conclusion that you’ve drawn that there are, say, four cats in the room is a ma-
terially different conclusion from fact. It’s an opinion that…
Pearson: Let’s deal with the conclusion I’ve drawn, which is that Bill and
Jane have four cats. You’re saying that that is a statement of opinion and not a
statement of fact?
Botting: I am saying that if you know that you have covered all your bases,
that is to say that there are only two cats from one person, two cats from an-
other person, so that you have four cats, and you also state there are no other
cats anywhere in the room, then you can effectively conclude that that is a
fact. But, the process of making that kind of analysis usually is dependent on
every single detail being present. If there’s one premise missing or if there’s
one premise that is an opinion, then the conclusion must be an opinion.
Pearson suggested that “we’re talking about what he’s intending here… to
give the reader the impression that he has covered all the possibilities, and it
leaves the figure he’s referred to there.”
“He may well believe that he’s covered all the bases,” said Botting, “with-
out having done so. That’s why his conclusion is nothing more than an opin-
ion.”
Pearson raised another statistical example from Harwood, and Botting ob-
served, “You can have fifteen hundred different numbers and there can be one
opinion included somewhere along the line, or one inconclusive number, and
you end up with an opinion. Now, for accounting purposes, if you were add-
ing columns of figures, for example, you would end up, assuming that the cal-
culation has been made correctly, with a fact, but only under those circum-
stances. If you have one column that says indeterminate amount, then the last
figure, the conclusion, must be an indeterminate amount… and that becomes
an opinion.”
Doesn’t it make a difference, said Pearson, that Harwood is “purporting to
be an expert”? And when his pamphlet describes him as “a writer and special-
ist in the political and diplomatic aspects of the Second World War with the
University of London,” isn’t that “intended to give the impression that he is a
professor”?
No, said Botting, it could “very well” mean he is a student at the Universi-
ty of London.101
“Well,” said Pearson, “we have your evidence.”
Taking another example of what Botting had called “opinion,” Pearson ob-
served, “I suggest that the use of words like ‘proof’ and ‘in fact’ are there to
give the reader the impression that the reader is not getting opinion, but is, in
effect, getting facts or evidence, and it is an attempt by the writer to character-
ize these as statements of fact. Isn’t that correct? Isn’t that why those words
are used?”
Botting: It is a rhetorical device that is used to reinforce the subjective con-
clusion that he has reached.
101
Which was, in fact, the case.
Pearson finally achieved a partial retraction from Botting on this Harwood

sentence: “The complete lack of documentary evidence to support the exist-
ence of an extermination plan has led to the habit of reinterpreting the docu-
ments that do survive.”
“It’s a statement of fact,” declared Pearson, “that there is a complete lack
of documentary evidence.”
Botting agreed that the first part of this sentence, which, in its entirety, he
had called “opinion” before, was clearly “fact.”
Pearson: And isn’t that a recurring [tendency] all the way through this
pamphlet, that within sentences we can have phrases of fact?
“That’s correct,” said Botting.
Pearson also won a partial retraction from Botting with his next example,
causing the latter to caution, “I should point out that almost three-quarters…
of this [pamphlet] I’ve identified as fact, [or as] facts supportive of the things
I’ve identified as opinions.”
Pearson agreed.
Botting: You’ve been focusing right from the beginning on the compara-
tively few areas I identified as opinion.
Pearson agreed again, but then Botting remarked that, nonetheless, the
opinions in Harwood were “the meat or the essence of the entire essay.”
After a lunch break, Pearson asked Botting to look at Harwood as a whole
and its effect on the public.
In the Nineteenth Century, said Botting, before the rise of the electronic
media, “there was a tendency to exchange tracts more.” The style of polemi-
cism in the Harwood pamphlet resembled, in his opinion, some of the essays
of men like Carlyle and Macaulay. “I would agree with you that it is not a
piece of journalism,” said Botting. “It is a piece of polemic.”
Pearson noted that Harwood, in his introduction, wrote, “the author has, he
believes, brought together irrefutable evidence [et cetera]…” Would you
agree, he asked Botting, “that the intention of that sentence is to convince the
reader that the writer is going to present evidence as opposed to simply his
opinions”?
Botting: He says that he believes that he has brought together irrefutable
evidence.
“As to what he has achieved,” said Botting, “very often people are delud-
ed… [as to] the level of their own achievements.”
But, said Pearson, wouldn’t the “average reader… be entitled to look at
that sentence and say, ‘Okay, what he is presenting here is not just his opin-
ions. He is presenting evidence.’?”
“No,” said Botting, “it is very clearly his opinion, and I think the average
reader, unless there is something wrong with him, would not be able to see it
any other way.”
Pearson turned to the last sentence in the introductory paragraph, where

Harwood spoke of doing “a great deal of careful research into this question.”
This is also a subjective statement, said Botting. One man’s deep research
is another’s skimming. “It could be that under the circumstances [of his life]
he has done a great deal of research. We’re splitting hairs here. The whole
thing is opinion.”
These are basically “rhetorical devices,” said Botting, of a kind which is
normal and accepted in polemic writing.
Pearson then objected to Harwood’s sentence, “The aim in the following
pages is quite simply to tell the Truth.”
“Again,” said Botting, “what is truth? I don’t mean that flippantly… We
come down to the balance of probabilities, and as far as he’s concerned the
balance of probabilities is in his favor rather than in the favor of the critics
who have come before him.”
“If there is anything wrong with this paper,” said Botting, “it is not from
the opinions, it is from the fact.” And “that,” he added, “in my respectful opin-
ion, is where you should be focusing.”
Pearson: And any persuasive effect that the pamphlet had rests on its fact,
not on his opinion, do you agree?
“The persuasive element,” said Botting, “is mixed with three different
things”: the accuracy of the facts, the author’s rhetorical and other writing
skills, and, “most importantly,” the statements of opinion, “based on fact.”
On re-examination, Christie asked Botting, “What is the purpose of polem-
ical works?”
To present one side, said Botting. “‘Polemic’ is from the root word ‘pole,’
meaning poles of argument.”
How often, asked Christie, do polemical works “fly in the face of general-
ly-accepted views”?
“Almost by definition they do,” said Botting.
“I don’t think,” said Botting, “that history is anything more than a collec-
tion of opinions that have been filtered down through various minds.”
Botting’s testimony ended and the court had a brief recess. Then came the
fourteenth witness for the Zündel defense. He was Ivan Lagacé, a funeral di-
rector and crematorium manager and operator from Calgary, Alberta. Lagacé
has disposed of more than 10,000 bodies since 1976, and cremated more than
1,000 since 1984. He has handled victims of fire, accident, and disease, and
seen every stage of bodily decomposition. His study of the Holocaust litera-
ture, including the crematorium plans for Birkenau, has led Lagacé to question
many “exterminationist” claims.
Pearson challenged the relevance of Lagacé’s experience and conclusions
to “Zündel’s state of mind when he published the pamphlet,” submitting it was
“really, once again, an attempt to take issue with the judicial notice ruling.”
But Judge Thomas said “I think the evidence is relevant, presuming that the
person is qualified to give that evidence.” So Christie and Pearson began by

briefly questioning Lagacé about his qualifications.
Lagacé explained the basic principles of combustion and how the modern
crematorium has changed very little since the 1880s. Christie then asked to
“tender the witness as an expert in the practical aspects of [cremation],” such
as “the time it takes [and] the heat involved.” Judge Thomas reserved judg-
ment on accrediting Lagacé as an “expert” free to express opinions, but oth-
erwise gave him a green light.102
Christie showed Lagacé a flowchart of the major processes in a retort or
oven. First, explained the witness, comes the main ignition chamber, where
the remains are placed and temperatures may reach 2,250° F. “From that
point, the gasses go through a flame port, which is a small opening just at the
back, and this leads to what they call a mixing chamber.” There, “a series of
baffles or twists and turns” cause air turbulence. Fresh oxygen is added and a
secondary burner brings about “total combustion” at 1,600° F or less. Any re-
maining particulates are sucked up the stack by a strong draft, but made to fall
into a settling chamber created by a localized drop in vacuum pressure. Be-
yond that point, one has only “clean hot air escaping” from the chimney.
If temperatures go too high, problems will occur. The refractory tile can
flake or “spall” excessively, leading to “refractory failure” and the risk of fire.
Lagacé’s crematorium is about the hottest and fastest in North America,
yet even he can cremate an adult body in an hour and a half only by “pushing
it.”
The refractory tile on the floor of a crematorium wears out especially
quickly, so “you have to baby it,” said Lagacé. Its life expectancy is only
about 1,500 cremations. The wall and ceiling tile is good for about 3,000,
while that in the after-burn chamber is rated for about 2,000. When the tile is
replaced, a cool-down period of 48 hours is needed, “and then you have to just
go in there, break the… tiling… and cement new ones in place.”
There is no way to speed up the normal cremation cycle, said Lagacé.
“You can’t just do one [body] right after the other.” The fastest pace would be
cremation (1-½ hours), cooling period (1 hour), cremation (1-½ hours), cool-
ing period (2 hours), cremation (1-½ hours), cooling period (2 hours), for a
maximum of three bodies in a normal work day. Taking it any faster and hot-
ter will not only cause excessive flaking of the refractory tiles but also fracture
the special insulating bricks behind them. Nor can one just pop in the next
body before temperatures have cooled, without risking the ignition of the op-
erator.
Even with “at least two hours of cool-down time,” said Lagacé, one “can’t
do that 24 hours a day, round the clock, day after day. The refractory will not
tolerate it.”
102
Later, he was accorded expert status.
At this point, Judge Thomas adjourned the court for the day.
The next morning, Wednesday, April 6, Ivan Lagacé showed up with a
special insulating brick – very light, very brittle, and good for 2,600° F –
which he let the jury members hold. “If I were to overheat the brick,” he said,
“it would simply crack along the length about half-way through the brick.”
The metal superstructure which supports the brickwork would soon buckle
from the heat.
The witness had other important points to make.
Older crematories, like those at Birkenau, were coal-fired and had to be
stoked. Once the coal was burning, the operator could not simply hit a switch
to shut off a gas or oil burner and cause a fairly rapid cooling. Thus, the cre-
mation cycle would inevitably be longer.
Lagacé also mentioned the “break-in cycle” required for new refractory
tile, which allows it to be cured or dried out. During this 25-day period, only
one cremation per day is safe. “If you exceed that, then you will certainly
cause refractory failure.”
Lagacé next explained some calculations he had made after studying the
plans for the 46 retorts at Birkenau (Auschwitz II).
Christie asked him how these compared to the plans for his own crematori-
um.
“Well,” said Lagacé, “When I first looked at these [Birkenau plans], I was
amazed.” The specifications were almost identical to his own retort, including
the unusually high 45-foot stack. Based on the afterburner design, he added,
“it is obvious they were concerned with environmental effects. There would
be no smoke and no odor.”
Lagacé estimated that the 46 retorts at Birkenau could handle about 184
bodies daily, or four apiece.
But, asked Christie, what about Raul Hilberg’s estimate of 4,400 crema-
tions per day at Birkenau?
“Well,” said Lagacé, “that’s preposterous, in my eyes. It’s beyond the
realm of reality.”
Christie asked if operating 24 hours a day would raise the output.
Just the opposite, insisted Lagacé, it would “shorten the lifespan of the re-
fractory” and create costly delays.
Christie read to Lagacé from Hilberg’s account of a period in 1944 when
about 10,000 Jews a day were allegedly being gassed at Birkenau, and asked
again if the 46 retorts could have cremated 4,400 of the victims daily.
Lagacé: It would be ludicrous to say something like that.
Lagacé went on to note that the Auschwitz furnaces were built in groups of
three, which cut construction costs but also meant that when one needed repair
work of any kind, two others would be incapacitated.
“Now,” asked Christie, “have you seen the remains of human beings
burned up in house fires?”
“I’ve handled many such cases,” said Lagacé.

Christie: And do people who are burned other than in confined places like
these retorts, do they burn up completely?
No, said Lagacé. The skin was usually charred, and the limbs might be
burnt, “but the torso is very difficult to cremate and [requires] high tempera-
tures over a prolonged period of time.”
Christie noted how the extermination literature describes 2,000 gassings at
a time, and asked Lagacé to explain, from his experience as an undertaker,
“what occurs to bodies… in one or two days after they die if they’re in close
proximity to other bodies?”
Decomposition, said Lagacé, because “what happens upon death is there is
a temperature rise in the body” called Algor Fever. The body’s metabolism is
still functioning, but the muscles cannot use the energy. “[T]he blood becomes
clotted and it promotes decomposition from the heat, and the body’s defense
systems are all shut down, so any bacteria, viruses residing in the human being
now have free rein to wreak their havoc.”
The first sign of decomposition is usually in the colon. Bacteria multiply
there, and soon escape, causing tissue gas or bloating. A leg can easily quad-
ruple in size. “Tissue gas, by the way, is highly contagious. It can be passed
from remains to remains…”
Christie asked about typhus victims, and Lagacé noted that, in Canada,
health officers normally order a direct cremation. A burial would require a
“hermetically sealed container.”
Christie mentioned the alleged “burning pits” of Auschwitz, and asked
about their fuel requirements. In a retort, explained Lagacé, “the bricks are
glowing red hot” and radiating a lot of heat. In the open air, burning a body
requires “far more fuel.”
You have done a thousand cremations over three-and-a-half years, said
Christie. What do you think of Olga Lengyel’s estimate that at Birkenau each
day 24,000 corpses were handled?
She was “irresponsible,” said Lagacé. Canada has plans for disasters in-
volving huge manpower, but “we couldn’t even think of something like that.
Unimaginable.”
Christie asked if crematory technology “has changed in any significant
way” between Birkenau then and Calgary now.
Only through the addition of a natural-gas burner, said Lagacé. “I can shut
the gas off to allow for cooling. With coal, it is very cumbersome” so a cool-
ing cycle would be longer.
John Pearson’s position was not to be envied as he began his cross-
examination. Could he pull a rabbit out of his hat? He could not, so he settled
for three skunks.
First came a mathematical diversion. Wasn’t it true, he asked Lagacé, that
Calgary, with 650,000 people, had six retorts, or about one per 100,000?
Yes, said Lagacé.

So, exclaimed Pearson, wouldn’t 100,000 people times the 46 retorts at
Birkenau give 4.6 million?
Yes, said Lagacé.
For his second diversion, Pearson put to Lagacé the obvious fact that he
had never cremated anyone under conditions where keeping costs down, pro-
tecting employees, and following legal restrictions on the number of bodies to
be cremated were of no importance.
“That’s unreality to you, isn’t it?” asked Pearson.
“Yes, sir. It is,” said Lagacé.
Pearson outdid himself with diversion No. 3.
All right, he said. Isn’t it true that facilities like blast furnaces in steel mills
run continuously?
Lagacé was not familiar with the matter.
A minute later, Pearson’s brief cross-examination was over. Christie
brought in three cages and immediately removed the skunks.
“Have there been many typhus epidemics in Calgary lately?” he asked.
“No, sir,” said Lagacé.103
Christie then asked what would happen to a crematorium where time and
safety restrictions were ignored.
“He’s [already] told us that,” said Judge Thomas impatiently.
The judge’s next little intervention caused him to be squirted in the face by
Pearson’s third skunk.
Christie: Now, the plans you were shown in relation to the crematory in
Auschwitz-Birkenau, do they in any way resemble a blast furnace?
Lagacé: Oh, no. I have no idea of the construction of a blast furnace.
Judge Thomas: Just a moment. There’s [been] no suggestion they resemble
a blast furnace.
Christie: Well, I thought that might be the case but I apologize.
Judge Thomas: He simply wanted to know if he knew anything about the
construction ingredients, mechanics, theory and practicalities of twenty-four-
hour operation of blast furnaces.
Christie: Yes.
Judge Thomas: He didn’t.
Christie: All right.
Christie returned to Skunk No. 2, and said to the witness:
“Now, my friend asked you about your motives for operating being eco-
nomic… I would like to know if you, in your experience, have found that the
capacity to complete and accomplish cremations changes or is affected by
your motives in any way?”
No, said Lagacé.
103
Further, only a very small percentage of North Americans elect to be cremated upon death.
The next witness was Engineer Hans Schroeder, who has known Zündel
well for about 14 years, and, like several other witnesses, testified about the
accused’s “state of mind” regarding the Holocaust at the time he published
Harwood.
The most-noteworthy remarks made during this brief appearance came
from John Pearson’s lips. Schroeder had just stated that he saw and spoke with
Zündel as often as three or four times a week, and Christie had asked about
Zündel’s “sincerity or otherwise” when it came to the Holocaust.
Pearson objected, saying, “I don’t see how this witness can tell us what’s in
Mr. Zündel’s mind. At most, his observations would be what appeared to him
and therefore we’re talking about conclusions that this witness is drawing
himself… It, in effect, is opinion evidence with respect to Mr. Zündel’s sin-
cerity.”
Judge Thomas quickly overruled the objection, but many in the courtroom
sensed the incongruity of a prosecution presuming to know what was in a
man’s mind eight years ago, and presuming that 11 jury members could also
know, yet suggesting that a close personal friend could not have known.
In his testimony, Schroeder observed that Zündel’s primary motive was “to
bring out the truth” about the Holocaust; that Zündel “tries to examine the
subject from various sides”; and that he speaks the same about it in public and
in private. Under cross-examination, Schroeder mentioned Zündel’s attempts
to establish contact with Canadian Jews of good will.
Next on the stand was Udo Walendy, a prolific writer on history and natu-
ral science who graduated from the German Institute for Advanced Political
Studies, in West Berlin, in 1956. With his white hair and firm jaw, Walendy
would prove to be a combative witness.
Walendy’s first book on the Second World War, Truth for Germany, was
published in 1964, and ordered by the Foreign Office of West Germany as a
reference work for its embassies around the world. This examination of the
causes of the war was, however, placed in 1979 on the Bonn regime’s list of
“indexed” books considered dangerous to youth. Walendy’s appeal of the list-
ing had not yet been resolved by the highest administrative court.104
In 1966 and 1967 appeared the two volumes of Walendy’s Europe in
Flames, 1939 to 1945, which together devote about 180 pages to the German
treatment of the Jews. Shortly afterwards, Walendy began to correspond with
Zündel. “[T]he main point of our discussions,” he told Christie through an in-
terpreter, was the inadequate historical writing about World War II, not the
events themselves.
104
In 1994, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the indexing of this book was a viola-
tion of the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of opinion, so that it has been possible to sell the
book freely ever since. Verdict German Federal Constitutional Court of January 11, 1994, Ref. 1
BvR 434/87, pp. 16f. Editor’s note.
In 1977, Walendy published Forged War Crimes Malign the German Na-
tion, a heavily illustrated volume which compares doctored and undoctored
versions of alleged atrocity photographs. Another major Walendy book is
Auschwitz in the I.G. Farben Trial. One of the points it makes is that none of
the engineers who served at Farben’s great Auschwitz plant during the war
heard of Jewish extermination before May 1945. Nor had they heard the now-
notorious word “selection” applied to the camp’s arriving internees.
Walendy testified that he first saw Did Six Million Really Die? in February
1975, and began distributing it himself in September of that year. Four years
later, he met Zündel for the first time.
The first West-German seizure of the Harwood pamphlet came only in
1983, as Walendy was carrying copies across the border. He went to court and
got them back. In 1984, more copies were seized. Walendy returned to court
and got them back. The third seizure came in 1985. This time, a higher Ger-
man court had just ruled, in a separate case involving revisionists, that to deny
the existence of a German extermination program was to “insult the Jews” and
hence illegal. “I went to the courts again,” said Walendy, “and this time I re-
ceived the advice not to go ahead with another trial because… there was no
prospect for me to win the case. I accepted that advice and waived the right to
further distribute the pamphlet.”
In 1977, Walendy wrote and published a booklet called The Nuremberg
Trials: Methods and Significance, in which he assumed the Richard Harwood
pseudonym himself (as several revisionist authors have done). The large inter-
national circulation of the original Harwood pamphlet guaranteed him an in-
creased market for his message.
Walendy discussed the Nuremberg trials and the London Treaty of August
8, 1945 which laid their legal foundation. Section 21 of the London Statutes
“set down that the judges at Nuremberg had to recognize generally known
facts which they were not allowed to investigate in detail… [These] so-called
generally known facts included all official documents from any of the [Allied]
government powers which were put on the table of the Nuremberg courts.”
Each Soviet “document,” for example, automatically received the official Nu-
remberg stamp and a Nuremberg number, and many of these “mere pieces of
paper” soon found their way into mainstream history books, accepted without
criticism.
The London Treaty, said Walendy, defined the basic legal rights of occu-
pied Germany. It declared that there would be “one main trial” (at Nuremberg)
and that “all subsequent trials [at Nuremberg and elsewhere] would have to
adhere to the rulings set down in that trial.” Even today, said Walendy, West
German courts may not “deviate from [the legal bases and rulings] of the main
tribunal of Nuremberg.”
Walendy recounted his visit to the major archives in Koblenz and Nurem-
berg in search of the originals of some suspicious documents. He was told that
their whereabouts were unknown, and that facsimiles did not exist. In many
cases, there were only “typed copies and copies of those typed copies.”
The witness emphasized, whenever asked, that he and the accused had
spoken of these matters prior to 1981.
After a lunch break, Christie had Walendy describe his “Historical Facts”
series of revisionist booklets. The German edition of Did Six Million Really
Die?, though no longer distributed, remains “Historical Fact No. 1.” Another
volume, “Historical Fact No. 7,” is titled The Modern Index.
Christie: What do you mean by the word “index”?
Walendy: “Index” is a term from the Middle Ages, where forbidden books
were put on a list and were no longer allowed to be sold, and “The Modern
Index” means that books on that list can no longer be sold to young people but
[only] to adults, but they cannot be publicly advertised either and they cannot
be sent through the mail. In West Germany… by way of the Index one makes
efforts to remove them from public knowledge.
At the time he testified, Walendy was preparing “Historical Fact No. 35,”
on the Wannsee Conference, for publication. As of 1981, when Zündel pub-
lished Harwood in Canada, there were 11 booklets in the series.105
Christie asked if Walendy personally believed there was a German plan to
exterminate European Jewry.
No, said Walendy, there were too many contradictions and “technical im-
possibilities” in the story.
Pearson objected to Walendy giving “opinion evidence,” and Christie re-
plied, “I thought [it] was implicit” that all the questions and answers con-
cerned matters which Walendy had discussed with the accused.
Well, said Judge Thomas, you don’t need to preface every question with
“Have you discussed this with Mr. Zündel?,” but you should touch that base
now and then. “We have rules… I don’t want the jury to think that this evi-
dence is being led for the truth of its contents.”
Christie turned his attention to the numerous aerial photographs of Ausch-
witz made by the Allies in 1944, and released in 1979, and to Walendy’s “His-
torical Fact No. 9,” whose title posed the question, Holocaust Now Under-
ground?
“Could you just tell us,” asked Christie, “what it is you indicated on the
front cover of that publication?”
Walendy: [It’s] an enlargement of a section of those aerial photographs
taken by the American Air Force, showing two crematoria in Auschwitz…
Birkenau, and also several barracks, and these enlargements show that the
crematoria did not show any smoke around. No dug-out areas [pits] were seen.
There, allegedly, people were buried and burned. It is also shown here [in the
booklet] that the Americans, in 1944, photographed the whole area every 10
105
In the end, Walendy published 119 issues of his periodical Historische Tatsachen. Editor’s note.
days from a height of 6,000 meters, and on not a single one of those photo-
graphs can smoke be seen coming from the crematoria, and also the area
around those crematoria did not show what was allegedly to be seen, and since
that time [1979] there are more and more claims that the Holocaust had taken
place underground, and it could not have been seen from above ground.
At about 4:00, the jury was excused for the day so that Christie and Pear-
son could question Walendy on the voir dire. Christie’s aim was to have
Walendy recognized as a quasi-expert who could express his opinion on those
matters of history about which he had written personally.
The voir dire questioning continued until adjournment, resumed the next
morning, Thursday, April 7, and ended after the lunch break with Judge
Thomas’s ruling in Walendy’s favor. “I propose,” he said, “to tell the jury that
he is not an expert in the sense of having acquired his expertise through aca-
demia, but he has followed a career as an author… and has published exten-
sively on Holocaust-related matters, specific and detailed, and to that extent he
may express his opinion.”
“As usual,” he cautioned, “the weight to be attached to that evidence is to
be assessed by the jury.”
Walendy made several interesting assertions during the voir dire question-
ing. One concerned the claim that the Germans murdered half a million Gyp-
sies during World War II. Walendy stated that the story had suddenly origi-
nated about 1972, without any basis in fact, and that one could easily trace its
origins.
The Soviet liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 was another topic
which Walendy, who is fluent in Russian, had explored. On February 2, 1945,
Pravda published an article explaining how the Germans had killed millions
of Jews at Auschwitz with an electrical conveyor-belt system. Nothing at all
was said about gassings or gas chambers.
Christie asked Walendy, “Have you ever been prosecuted for publishing
anything in Germany?” No, said Walendy, although he had waived his right to
distribute Harwood.106
Christie: Are you still doing any research at all?
“Yes, of course,” said Walendy. “You have to. For example, with regard to
the Gypsy topic… after publication of my issue [Historical Fact No. 23] there
was an open public debate in the Bundestag regarding the murder of 500,000
Gypsies and even Chancellor Kohl had made himself this claim. Right away I
contacted the Chancellor’s office in order to inquire about documentation for
such a claim, [and] expressly emphasized that if I had erred in my statements,
I would be quite willing to admit that and to change my opinion. I asked spe-
106
Later, Udo Walendy was sentenced to a total of 29 months’ imprisonment for six issues of his
Historische Tatsachen (Nos. 1, 44, 64, 66, 67, 68), which he had to serve until the final day. Edi-
tor’s note.
cifically to have documentation of that kind made available to me. I did not
receive a reply. I repeatedly made the same request. Again, I did not receive
an answer and that’s why I charged Chancellor Kohl with defamation of the
people and breach of his official oath to save from harm the German people.”
Christie asked Walendy how much reading he had to do.
Walendy: There is an incredible amount and it is at least a pile of books per
week.
Pearson, cross-examining on the voir dire, asked Walendy, “Hasn’t it oc-
curred to you, sir, [that] perhaps Chancellor Kohl, for instance, doesn’t take
you seriously and doesn’t think it’s worth his time to even reply to your let-
ters?”
Walendy: With respect to such a large amount of evidence and claims, I
think it is irresponsible on the part of Chancellor Kohl to not contest a publi-
cation of that kind by me.
If this “they never took you seriously” ploy sounded familiar to many in
the courtroom, so did Pearson’s pestering of Walendy about his lack of exper-
tise in various areas.
“Would you agree with me,” he asked, “that you have no formal training in
photo interpretation?”
Walendy: If it is correct that one cannot [therefore] allow oneself to have
an opinion, then I don’t know why here [in Canada] jurors are supposed to de-
cide on a subject matter who certainly on their part have even less experience
with respect to the topic.
Walendy noted that before publishing his book of forged photos “I sat
down with competent experts and consulted with them.” We “discussed every
detail,” he said.
Pearson grilled Walendy on a document dated June 5, 1942 purporting to
be a memorandum from Willy Just to Walter Rauff, which orthodox historians
of the Holocaust cite as their best evidence for the killing of Jews in “gas
vans.”
“It does bear a signature at the end, doesn’t it?” he asked.
Walendy: Yes, everybody can make a signature, that’s no problem either.
But when you analyze such a document, it is important to have a general
overview of the file, the dossier, to have concrete indications of places, tech-
nical details, and additional confirmation of the contents of such a letter.
Pearson: And I’m going to ask you some questions to try to determine what
it is you rely on when you make the statement that that is a forgery, all right?
It purports to be signed by Just, doesn’t it?
Yes, said Walendy.
“You have no formal education or training in handwriting analysis, do
you?”
No, said Walendy.
And Walter Rauff, the recipient, went to Chile after the war, didn’t he?
Yes, said Walendy.

And, in Chile, Rauff was interviewed by West-German investigators,
wasn’t he?
“That has not been made public so far,” said Walendy.
Pearson: Are you denying that that is in the Bundesarchiv, the interview
with Rauff?
Walendy: I didn’t check it because it was not known to me. That was not
known to me.
Pearson: All right. So you don’t know.
Walendy: No.
Pearson had Walendy read from the memo, which stated “97,000 were
processed by means of the three vehicles.”
“This memo was not sent,” Walendy persisted.
“Sir,” said Pearson, “just summarize for me what it is that you rely on [in
your book] for your allegation that that is a forged document.”
“[T]here are no supplementary confirmations,” said Walendy. “The con-
tents… contain a wealth of technical impossibilities.”
Pearson: Are you an expert in automotive engineering, sir?
All one can do, said Walendy, is consult with experts before publication.
“The commentaries that I have made in regard to this alleged document have
remained uncontested so far.”
Pearson: So, once again, because nobody disputes what you’ve said, you
think that’s proof that it’s true.
Walendy: No, but it is up to those people with a different opinion to render
me impossible in public, as they could do according to their knowledge. And
if they don’t do that, then that is not my responsibility.
Pearson returned to Walendy’s lack of expertise in photography.
Walendy replied: “After my first publication of these [allegedly forged]
photographs, the German prosecutor did a study and… he went as far as Tel
Aviv, Israel in order to examine whether my claims were correct or incorrect.
An official reply was sent back to the prosecutor’s office that it was indeed a
question of forged photos. In this context, that seems to me to be more im-
portant than my training.”
Pearson argued against letting Walendy give “opinion evidence” on the
Holocaust. “[W]hen he was pressed about one such statement, the evidence
discloses that he really has no foundation for giving that opinion…”
Well, said Judge Thomas, his viewpoint is “not widely accepted,” but “he
is, to some extent, a recognized writer… It may be that he’s not widely ac-
cepted because in West Germany, apparently, this subject is not encouraged.”
“It’s a close call here,” the judge continued, but within the revisionist
community Walendy “is regarded as an expert.” Surely the jury could judge
for itself what the man’s opinions were worth. “This man in this narrow area
is obviously a prolific writer and I don’t say that that makes him an expert in
the sense that we normally understand it, but by the very nature of this subject,
a certain amount of it is underground, a certain amount of it is dismissed by
the vast majority of the people in North America and, indeed, in some places
in Europe. That’s acknowledged. So that he has certain constraints on him in
any event.”
Your cross-examination, the judge told Pearson, will help to keep the jury
informed. Look on the bright side, he suggested. Some defense witnesses have
dismissed Harwood’s pamphlet as “frivolous… a polemic exercise. This man
regards it as a scientific publication. This man regards the statements of fact as
important.”
After the lunch break, as we have seen, Thomas ruled that Walendy could
give “opinion evidence” on the Holocaust. Then the jury returned, and Chris-
tie resumed his examination-in-chief.
Christie asked Walendy for his opinion on the Einsatzgruppen. Did he
agree with Harwood that the actual number of executions committed by these
groups was nearer to 100,000 than to one million?
“An opinion regarding the figure,” said Walendy, “is simply not possible.”
But the available evidence has “many flaws.” The numbers one hears are de-
rived mainly from the “so-called Einsatzgruppen reports,” but those were “al-
legedly written in Berlin” and gave “hardly any details” beyond the numbers.
Further, “in not a single case [have] the Soviets” cooperated with an investiga-
tion. “For example, there is not a single mass grave” which the Soviets have
found and examined with international observers.
Christie returned to the liberation of Auschwitz. Walendy explained that by
May 7, 1945 the Soviets had begun to talk about gassings. It was then that
Pravda published much of a Soviet report about the camp, which was also
“accepted without any inspection” by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Christie: Does the report of the seventh of May, 1945 indicate how long
they claimed it took to cremate a human body?
Walendy: In three different places, the Soviets give three different time
spans. On the one hand they say a corpse was burned within five minutes. In
another place they say seven to eight minutes, and in the third place they de-
clare that a corpse was burnt in nine minutes, but that is technically impossi-
ble.
Christie: Do they make other claims you believe to be technically impossi-
ble?
Walendy: The Soviets claimed in this report, for example, that the whole
extermination in Auschwitz was not directed against the Jews but the Europe-
an nations and that Hitler wanted to make his new order by the killing of the
European peoples.
Christie: Do you believe that?
Obviously not, said Walendy.
Christie and Walendy discussed Sefton Delmer, the head of British disin-
formation and black propaganda, who continued to smear the Germans with
London’s “official approval” until 1947. Delmer later described his dirty
deeds in Die Deutschen und Ich (The Germans and I, 1962), which, said
Walendy, created a “sensation” among European revisionists. Given his close
ties to British leaders and his intimate pre-war knowledge of Germany,
Delmer was ideally suited for the job, and his forgeries had “unhindered ac-
cess” to the German files, sometimes ending up accepted as authentic docu-
ments. The London Treaty, which stipulated that all “documents” submitted
by the Allied governments were to be accepted as bona fide, contributed to the
acceptance of forgeries at Nuremberg, said Walendy. From there it was
straight into the history books.
Christie: Were [the Nuremberg Trials], in your view, fair and impartial?
Walendy: No. There was a special new law created for the Nuremberg Tri-
als. All the other laws were declared invalid, and this new law was codified in
a political agreement among the major powers: the Soviet Union, America,
France, and England.
These were the Control Council laws, which, together with the London
Treaty, declared that “war crimes could only have been permitted by Germans
or enemies of the Allies. It was further stated that the Military Tribunals were
not held to normal rules of evidence.” Cross-examination of prosecution wit-
nesses was permitted but “sometimes hindered.” The victors ruled “what were
historical facts and what were not.” American judges, like Judge Powell,
complained of instances of torture.
Christie: Have you analyzed and formed an opinion about the Wannsee
Conference documents?
Yes, said Walendy. “These [alleged] minutes are written in such a bad
style that it is impossible that a German could have formulated such a proto-
col. There are contradictions and errors with respect to contents. As well, not a
single person in attendance at this meeting has confirmed… the minutes.”
The Wannsee Conference dealt with the transporting of Jews to “different
labor camps and also ghettos,” said Walendy, “but not for extermination pur-
poses.” Yet it “met [with] considerable resistance,” with the result that Hitler
“stopped those transports” in May 1942. It is claimed they continued, said the
witness, but “the situation here becomes fuzzy.”
Christie returned to the Gypsies. The genocide claim is “completely fic-
tion,” said Walendy, and apparently originated in England about 1972. The
first book about it gave no evidence for the allegation. The second book cited
as “evidence” the first book. “One book after another appeared, so that today
we already have a whole pile of these books. None of them gives any evi-
dence. It’s only claimed, and they copy each other.”
A few minutes later, Judge Thomas adjourned the court.
The next morning, Friday, April 8, Christie concluded his questioning by

asking Walendy how he determined the authenticity of a document.
“There is a very clear working method,” explained Walendy. One looked at
form or origin – “an examination of the paper, the context within a dossier,
and the examination of temporal context.” One also looked directly at con-
tents.
Walendy cited as examples two cases of typewriter changes occurring in
mid-document, one of which involved a document filed as “Exhibit AN” in
the present trial.
Pearson began his cross-examination by repeatedly suggesting to Walendy
that he remained “loyal” to “the National-Socialist regime.”
“For me,” answered Walendy, “it was never a question of loyalty towards
National Socialism,” but rather the clarification of historical facts. “I am also
skeptical toward National Socialism,” he said.
Pearson mentioned the 1950s, when the first books on the Holocaust ap-
peared, and said to Walendy: “I suggest that most [Germans] wanted to get on
with their new life” and put all that behind them.
Walendy: That was not at all the case. We were in a spiritual upheaval. We
had information from that [National-Socialist] time and were confronted with
completely new information so that we had a lot more material to work
through than people who had not gone through a political upheaval.
Walendy was 18 when the war ended. Pearson suggested that as a young
man he had learned that “the Jews were liars and cheats.”
It is hard for an educated person living in North America in the 1980s to
grasp that Europeans in the 1939-45 era – both in Germany and elsewhere –
simply did not have Jews and things Jewish on their minds. It is like trying to
tell an Eskimo that Africans do not think about ice every day. Walendy gave
the answer that millions of older Germans have given: that this “was not a
subject at all because we were dealing with completely different matters.”
Pearson asked next about Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, and here Walendy’s
answer was much-less-adequate. “A hatred towards the Jews cannot be seen
[there],” he insisted.
You liked the Harwood booklet because it was “scientific,” didn’t you?
asked Pearson.
Yes, said Walendy, and “because an Englishman had written it.”
Pearson: And it’s not just opinions?
No, said Walendy, it contains facts.
A bit later, Pearson asked, “You know there’s a law in Germany against
defaming minority groups, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Walendy, “but that law protects a very specific population
group… The whole German population can be defamed from morning ‘til
night. Only a specific group of people cannot be defamed.”
Walendy explained that the law – Section 183 of the German Criminal
Code – originated in 1949 during the occupation, but conflicts with the equali-
ty provision of the basic German law.
“Is it your position, then,” asked Pearson, “that the present government of
the Republic of West Germany is not a legitimate government?”
It’s legitimate, said Walendy, “but that does not mean that they get every-
thing right.”
After a break, Pearson delved into the book Six Million Did Die, published
in South Africa in 1976 in response to Harwood. Yes, said Walendy, I dis-
cussed it briefly in 1979, on pages 34 to 36 of “Historical Fact No. 5.”
Pearson: I suggest to you that, in Six Million Did Die, [the authors] Suzman
and Diamond made an extensive examination of Did Six Million Really Die?
They point out that quotes have been taken out of context –
Christie: Your Honor, if my friend is going to call Suzman and Diamond,
he’s entitled to allege this for the truth. Otherwise he’s leading evidence that
he hasn’t undertaken in his own case. Is he pretending he’s going to call these
people in rebuttal?
“Let’s review this,” said Judge Thomas. The witness wrote a critique of
that book, and discussed it with Zündel. “Crown counsel is now cross-
examining this witness… and he’s trying to get from [him] what he said
about their allegations. Clearly he’s not, at this stage, putting it forth for the
truth. He’s putting it forth for the fact that it’s in the book.… Now, your ob-
jection is overruled. Proceed.”
Pearson: Suzman and Diamond catalogue what they call the dishonest
techniques used by Harwood, don’t they? They have a title, “The Author’s
Dishonest Techniques,” and they say, “Harwood relies on the report by the In-
ternational Committee of the Red Cross, which he describes as almost unique
in its honesty and objectivity, however he deliberately suppresses numerous
passages in the report which give the lie to his own assertions. He also quotes
certain statistics from a Swiss source but falsifies the figures and falsely at-
tributes these doctored figures to the International Red Cross.” Suzman and
Diamond say that, don’t they?
Yes, said Walendy.
Pearson put seven similar quotes to Walendy, who answered “yes” each
time.
As Round Nine began, Christie interrupted: “At a certain point I’d like to
suggest that what he’s doing here is by no means asking this witness to reveal
his commitment or criticism for or against this publication. It is actually indi-
rectly to attempt to lead it for the truth of its contents which I suggest is an
improper procedure in cross-examination.
“You heard my ruling,” said Judge Thomas. At some point, he added,
Crown counsel would, “I presume,” pause to ask the witness if he had dis-
cussed all this with Zündel.
“Well, I’d like to hear a question on that,” said Christie.

“He’ll have to relate it to something,” said Thomas. “He isn’t obliged to re-
late each sentence to something.”
“I agree,” said Christie, “but he’s read so many passages, Your Honor.”
Maybe, later, it would all prove to be irrelevant.
“Well, this witness wrote a critique of it [Six Million Did Die],” said
Thomas. “He’s read the text and no doubt we’re going to find out what it is
that he discussed with Mr. Zündel. Proceed.”
After Walendy had said “yes” nine more times, for 17 yeses altogether, he
threw in his opinion that Six Million Did Die is a “very one-sided” review of
Harwood.
A lunch break followed, and then Pearson suggested that Six Million Did
Die be made a trial exhibit. Thomas reserved his judgment.107
Pearson asked Walendy if he and Zündel had discussed the Suzman and
Diamond book.
Yes, said Walendy, but he became vague and wavering when Pearson
pressed him for details.
Pearson turned to the Joint Allied Declaration of December 17, 1942, al-
leging extermination of the Jews, and asked Walendy if it didn’t disprove his
contention that the Allies knew nothing about the matter during the war.
No, said Walendy. This was not a declaration on the basis of knowledge,
but “a propaganda declaration” to heighten the war fever. “[I]t was exactly at
that point in time that the strategic air war against the [German] civilian popu-
lation was [increased], but… there were never any reasons given for it…”
After a break, Pearson had Walendy read aloud his two-page response to
Six Million Did Die, which appears in “Historical Fact No. 5.” The response
noted three “reproaches or allegations” made against Harwood, and Walendy
addressed each in turn.
The first reproach: “Harwood is a pseudonym.” Correct, said the Walendy
response, but it does not alter the facts.
The second reproach: “Harwood relies on quotes taken out of context [and]
leaves out contradictory passages.” Walendy’s response: “Nobody can write
history without exposing himself to such a reproach.” He cited an example
where he felt Harwood was clearly innocent.
The third reproach: “Harwood falsifies statistics.” This was the only criti-
cism which Walendy dealt with at some length. “All postwar [Jewish] statis-
tics are unreliable,” he suggested. He gave several examples of the South Af-
rican authors’ own faulty use of statistics:
First, all Jewish losses during these years were routinely attributed to the
Germans rather than to natural causes, warfare, hostile acts by eastern Europe-
ans, and so on. Walendy also noted that a Rabbi Benjamin Schultz had de-
107
Thomas later ruled to make it an exhibit (page 219).
clared, in 1954, before an investigating committee of the U.S. House of Rep-

resentatives, that “during the Second World War, 3.3 million Jews disap-
peared without a trace on Soviet territory”; and that the Soviets themselves,
during the war, stated that some 80% of their Jews were evacuated ahead of
the invading Germans.
Second, Walendy argued that the South African authors “consider the So-
viet official information as unrestrictedly authentic.”
The Walendy pamphlet’s third complaint with the statistics in Six Million
Did Die concerned the uncritical use of German wartime data: “They do not
take into consideration the objection by Dr. Richard Korherr in the magazine
Der Spiegel, Issue Number 31, 1977, page 12, which is… printed here.”
Korherr’s letter had ended: “The comment [which was published alleging]
that I had also stated that more than a million Jews had died in the camps of
[occupied Poland], by ’special treatment,’ is likewise not correct. I have to
protest against the word ‘died’ in this context. It was specifically the word
‘special treatment’ [in German, it is a single word] which caused me to call
the Reich Security Main Office, in order to ask what this word meant. I re-
ceived the answer: They were Jews that were to be settled in the District of
Looblin. Signed, Dr. Richard Korherr.”
Walendy’s pamphlet also complained in very-general terms about the fail-
ure of the South-African authors to provide adequate documentation for “the
death of six million,” or to go beyond the evidence of the chief prosecutors at
the Nuremberg and Eichmann Trials.
When Walendy had finished reading, Pearson demanded: “Is that your re-
sponse to Suzman and Diamond’s 137-page book?”
Well, said Walendy, only the first edition was available at that time [1979].
The court was adjourned, and resumed on Monday morning, April 11. John
Pearson devoted most of his remaining cross-examination to the subject of gas
vans, and then questioned Walendy briefly on the Wannsee Conference, the
Eichmann Trial, and Harwood’s use of Walendy’s own writings.
Pearson began by suggesting that Walendy had testified the previous week
that the purported gas-van memorandum from Willy Just to Walter Rauff
“was merely a piece of paper, typewritten, probably stamped ‘Secret’… with-
out signature.” Walendy said there “must be a misunderstanding,” because
there were most-definitely “several pieces of paper” and quite possibly a sig-
nature as well. In any case, said Walendy, “I analyzed scientifically that doc-
ument in No. 5 of ‘Historical Facts.’”
Pearson showed Walendy a book with a photograph of the document, on
which could be seen the signature “Just.”
Pearson then had Walendy read portions of the document, and give his in-
terpretation of their meaning. Walendy noted that nowhere was it stated that
the 97,000 items described as “processed” were people, but his main point
was that the purported memorandum “contains so much technical nonsense
that… a scientist would not consider this an authentic document.” Further,

said Walendy, there was no “dossier context” for the document.
Walendy suggested that Pearson read Sefton Delmer’s book Die Deutschen
und Ich, in which the author “described in great detail” how he forged docu-
ments “as exactly as possible.”
“Are you saying,” asked Pearson, “that Sefton Delmer, in any of his books
anywhere, admits forging documents used at the Nuremberg trial?”
“He says that very definitely,” said Walendy.
As for confirmation, said Pearson, what about the two interviews which the
recipient of the memorandum, Walter Rauff, gave in Chile in 1964?
“I don’t know the contents of his statements,” admitted Walendy.
Pearson noted that Rauff had died in May 1984, so Walendy asked when
the “exterminationist” book to which Pearson had been referring was pub-
lished. Pearson said 1985, and Walendy replied, “That’s a typical case for put-
ting something in a dead person’s mouth… and that was one of the typical
methods of Sefton Delmer…”
Do you deny, asked Pearson, that Rauff was interviewed in Chile in 1964?
“If this claim was first published in 1985,” said Walendy, “then I don’t
want to judge it right at the moment.”
Pearson paraphrased the gas-van document as having said that “97,000
people have been successfully gassed,” and Christie objected to the para-
phrase, since the document never mentioned “people.” Judge Thomas over-
ruled the objection, and Pearson again paraphrased it as “97,000 people.”
“Please give us specifics,” said Pearson. “What do you say proves that this
is a forgery?”
Walendy started to give a technical answer, and Pearson stopped him, to
ask, “Are you an automotive engineer, Mr. Walendy?”
Walendy asked permission “to read my commentaries on the technical
matter,” and Judge Thomas granted it.
When he had finished reading his highly technical critique of the gas-van
memorandum, Walendy argued that “people like Suzman and Diamond
should have long ago made it their business to deal with these details and mat-
ters. If they haven’t… I can only conclude that they are not in a position to do
so.”
Walendy concluded by asserting forcefully that the alleged document did
not go from Mr. Just to Mr. Rauff – it “didn’t go anywhere.”
Pearson turned to the Wannsee Conference and Adolf Eichmann’s testimo-
ny about it. “You’ll agree with me,” suggested Pearson, “that at Jerusalem,
Eichmann testified that the purpose of the Wannsee Conference was to discuss
the implementation of the extermination of the Jews of Europe.”
“You have to know Eichmann’s whole situation during the trial,” said
Walendy. “[He] was not a free man.” If the Wannsee Conference had really
talked about extermination, added Walendy, “then all the participants would
have been punished as war criminals. That did not happen with the exception
of Dr. [Wilhelm] Stuckart, where there were some other charges.”
How, asked Pearson, would it have benefitted Eichmann to lie in Jerusalem
and “fabricate the fact that he participated in a meeting about exterminating
Jews?”
Look at the Soviet show trials in the 1930s, said Walendy. It is nothing un-
usual for people under this enormous pressure to admit to anything.
I can’t prove Eichmann was tortured, said Walendy. “I can only prove that
what he allegedly said [in Jerusalem] contradicts all historical evidence.”
Pearson next demonstrated that Harwood had gotten a number of details
wrong in his discussion of Walendy’s book about faked atrocity photographs.
This did not bother Walendy, who said readers could check the sources indi-
cated for themselves.
Christie’s brief re-examination began with Walendy offering the file num-
bers on the West-German investigation of his book about faked atrocity pho-
tos. “In this dossier,” said Walendy, “the report from Tel Aviv [agreeing to at
least some of the fakes] is contained.” No action was taken, he added, “and the
investigation was closed in silence.”
Christie asked Walendy why, in his opinion, Germans “acknowledge guilt”
for the era of World War II.
Because, said Walendy, the occupational forces “made sure that all [Ger-
man] offices [contained] only people… they could agree with,” and the struc-
ture had perpetuated itself since. The postwar years were a time when no one
“could stand up publicly and express himself” for the other side.
The next defense witness was Emil Lachout, a tall, well-spoken Austrian
who testified with the aid of the court interpreter. Lachout brought with him a
copy of a document, dated October 1, 1948, of the Military Police Service, a
postwar Austrian force which worked with the four occupying governments.
This document, a circular letter, stated that careful Allied investigations had
determined that no gassings ever occurred in the 13 German and Austrian
concentration camps listed, and that former internees who persisted in saying
that they had should be charged with giving false testimony.108
Lachout explained that a function of the Military Police Service was to ac-
company the occupation forces when they arrested and interrogated Austrian
and other civilians. This was necessary due to past instances of torture and
other abuse, and the Allied interest in showing justice being done.
When Pearson questioned the relevance of Lachout’s testimony, Christie
explained that, until 1960 or so, there were widespread allegations of gassings
at Dachau and other concentration camps outside of Poland. The Harwood
pamphlet had noted as much. Yet the investigations of which Lachout was a
part had resolved the question as early as 1948.
108
On the controversy surrounding the Lachout Document, see Note 89, p. 160. Editor’s note.
Lachout explained that his personal involvement in the investigations ex-

tended only to Mauthausen and its satellite camps in Austria.
Why, asked Christie, had the Allied War Crimes Commission, which con-
ducted the investigations, been formed?
Because, said Lachout, instances of torture and of false testimony had been
occurring, “and the Allies wanted to prevent further such things from happen-
ing.”
The Austrian observers on the Commission were (then) Lt. Lachout and a
Major Müller. Lachout witnessed Müller’s signature on the document in 1948,
and restored it to public attention in 1987, when he was called as a witness at
two trials in Vienna.
“Was anyone charged with making false claims [because of the Müller-
Lachout document]?” asked Christie.
“No,” said Lachout. “Because as soon as [the former internees concerned]
heard about it, they withdrew their statements.”
Christie: What happened to the War Crimes Commission itself?
Lachout: A year later it ceased to exist and then it met again for individual
cases.
Lachout himself continued in the field of military-police work.
The jury was excused for the day, and Christie, Pearson, and the judge then
spent the better part of an hour discussing whether certain documents intro-
duced earlier should be given formal exhibit status so that the jury might pe-
ruse them.
With regard to the booklet Six Million Did Die, Pearson introduced the idea
of “willful blindness” on Zündel’s part, and read from the 1987 judgment of
the Court of Appeal: “The offense of knowingly publishing false statements
under Section 177 of the Code, however, requires proof of actual knowledge
of the falsity of the statements. Recklessness as to the truth or falsity of the
statement is insufficient. Willful blindness is, of course, the equivalent of ac-
tual knowledge.”
Pearson read from a Judge Macintyre’s definition of “willful blindness” in
another decision: “[W]illful blindness arises where a person has become
aware of the need for some inquiry [and] declines to make the inquiry because
he does not wish to know the truth. He would prefer to remain ignorant.”
According to Pearson, the Appeal Court judges had ruled that willful
blindness might have been applicable in the first Zündel trial if only the jury
had been informed of it. In Pearson’s opinion, the testimony of Udo Walendy
showed that Zündel must have known about the existence of the book Six Mil-
lion Did Die for some time before he published Harwood.
Judge Thomas agreed that Zündel “had two years to sit and meditate over
the report [of Suzman and Diamond]” before he published Harwood.
“I would submit,” said Pearson, “it goes beyond willful blindness… I sug-
gest it would be open to a jury to conclude… that [Zündel] went out and read
[Suzman and Diamond], and therefore it’s not willful blindness at all, he knew
full well of the falsities as alleged.”
“I have one brief reply,” said Christie. All of what Pearson says presumes
that Six Million Did Die is true.
“That could be the fallacy in the argument,” Judge Thomas concurred.
“If they want to prove it’s the truth,” said Christie, “call Suzman and Dia-
mond.”
Thomas decided to “reserve overnight” on whether Six Million Did Die
should be made an exhibit. As for mentioning willful blindness to the jury in
Zündel’s case, he said, “I’ll have to work it through in my own mind.”
The trial resumed on Tuesday, April 12, and Judge Thomas ruled, with re-
spect to Six Million Did Die, “I am satisfied that it should be made an exhibit,
with the caveat that the jury, of course, must be instructed that that pamphlet
is not filed for the truth of its contents but it goes merely to the state of mind
of the accused, having regard to the testimony of Mr. Walendy, and also to the
overall opinion of Mr. Walendy and the weight that the jury wishes to attach
to his evidence. He testified at length about his response to the criticisms by
the authors of the rebuttal pamphlet, and it is only fit and proper that the jury
have the pamphlet together with an extract of the article written by Mr.
Walendy in ‘Historical Fact No. 5,’ responding to the criticisms of the authors
with respect to [Harwood].”
The jury returned, and Thomas cautioned its members, “The limited use
that you can make of this pamphlet is to assess the state of mind of the ac-
cused… Also, it is in order for you to assess in your own mind the quality of
the reply by Mr. Walendy…”
Emil Lachout returned to the stand, Christie finished his questioning, and
Pearson began to cross-examine.
“Did you ever go to Mauthausen yourself?” asked Pearson.
“Frequently,” replied Lachout.
What about Hartheim Castle nearby, asked Pearson, where it is said that
people were gassed as part of the German euthanasia program?
I have heard those stories too, said Lachout.
“Well,” said Pearson, “you’d agree with me that the circular [letter] that
you’ve indicated for 1948 does not include Hartheim in the list of camps
where gassing did not take place?”
“Hartheim was not a concentration camp,” observed Lachout.
Where is the original of the document signed by Major Müller? asked
Pearson.
With the Austrian government, said Lachout.
Pearson: Now, these investigations were being conducted by the Allies, is
that right?
Lachout: Yes, we were only assistants.
“Okay,” said Pearson. “One of the reasons that you were there was to in-
sure that none of these civilians questioned by the investigators were co-
erced?”
“That’s correct,” said Lachout. “In view of certain complaints,” the Allies
wished to “cover themselves.”
Pearson: Was that during the Malmedy Trials?
No, said Lachout. “It was the result of those trials.”
On re-examination, Christie asked Lachout, “In your investigations, did
you personally receive allegations of torture other than regarding Malmedy?”
Yes, said Lachout, who then explained his basic operating procedure: “The
prisoners which were presented by the Allied Commission first talked to me
privately. First of all, I had to break the ice [with] these tortured individuals, to
get them to give exact statements. Sometimes the men didn’t dare to speak be-
cause they suspected an Allied officer in there as well. On the basis of my ob-
servations… it became clear and evident that those people [had been] tor-
tured.”
Before Professor Robert Faurisson was called as the next witness, the court
took a break.
Chapter 7: Professor Faurisson
P rofessor Robert Faurisson spent a full week on the witness stand, from
Tuesday, April 12 to April 19. But his presence was felt throughout the
trial, notably during Douglas Christie’s cross-examination of Christo-
pher Browning and other prosecution witnesses. Long planning sessions were
needed to prepare lines of questioning which would help bring out the
strengths of revisionism and the shortcomings of exterminationism, and Dr.
Faurisson was consistently Christie’s most-trusted advisor during those ses-
sions. When it was finally time for him to take the stand, there was an air of
anticipation in the courtroom which was exceeded only at the British historian
David Irving’s surprise appearance 10 days later.
Judge Thomas ruled that Faurisson should be examined concerning his ex-
pertise with the jury present, and Christie began by reviewing his distin-
guished academic record. Faurisson, a political liberal, was born near London
in 1929 to a French father and a Scottish mother, attended the Sorbonne in
Paris, and received in 1956 the “Agrégation de Lettres,” the highest academic
competition in France. While teaching at the Sorbonne between 1969 and
1974, Faurisson earned a “Doctorat d’Etat,” likewise the nation’s highest doc-
toral degree. Faurisson specialized in the appraisal of literary texts and docu-
ments, and achieved wide recognition in the field. Meanwhile, as early as
1960, he began to study the Holocaust independently. About 1974, this re-
search grew more-intense, as Faurisson began looking at primary documents
in archives.
In 1978, Faurisson was a tenured associate professor of French literature at
the University of Lyon. That was the year when he first made widely known
his conclusions about the Holocaust. The result was violent demonstrations on
campus by outsiders, which put an apparently permanent end to his teaching
career in 1979.
Christie ended his questioning by noting several of Faurisson’s revisionist

publications, and his previous expert testimony before a Toronto court in
1985.
John Pearson zeroed in on Faurisson’s lack of formal training on the Holo-
caust and in fields like chemistry and engineering. He suggested that the judge
in Toronto in 1985 had ruled that Faurisson was not an expert in the area of
gas chambers, but Judge Thomas interjected that this was not something for
the witness to comment upon.
Thomas ruled that Faurisson, like Raul Hilberg, could offer opinion evi-
dence, as an expert, on the subject of German policy toward the Jews during
the era of World War II.
Christie resumed by asking Faurisson his opinion of the booklets Did Six
Million Really Die? and Six Million Did Die. To no one’s surprise, he found
the former very accurate and the latter “rubbish.”
Christie then asked Faurisson to recite his famous “60-word-sentence”
about the Holocaust, which has attracted great attention in France. The Eng-
lish version which Faurisson gave to the court had slightly less than 60 words:
“The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form
one and the same historical lie, which opened the way to a gigantic political,
financial fraud, whose principal beneficiaries are the state of Israel and inter-
national Zionism, and whose principal victims are the German people – but
not its leaders – and the entire Palestinian people.”
“Most of the time,” said Faurisson, “I found it summarized in this way:
‘Faurisson says that the Jews lied to make money,’ which is absolutely not
what I said.”
Faurisson noted his family’s and his own “violently” anti-German feelings
prior to May 8, 1945, the day the war ended. Then his empathy came to the
fore. “I remember very well that my hatred against Germany suddenly fell
down, and at that time, when I heard the bells of the churches [signaling that]
the war was finished, suddenly I thought, it’s magnificent for me, but what
about the German people? It might be terrible for those ones.”
Faurisson received a “shock” in 1960 or 1961, when he read a letter by the
German historian Martin Broszat, published in Die Zeit on August 19, 1960,
which stated that there were no gassings in Dachau, Buchenwald, or any of the
camps in Germany proper. He felt at once that this was something to explore
further, and began writing to specialists on both sides of the controversy, in-
cluding the French revisionist Paul Rassinier.
Faurisson cannot be precise about the year when he became “absolutely
sure” that no homicidal gas chambers were ever used by the Germans, but he
believes it was 1974. Even that early, he published a small revisionist article,
and his troubles began, but it was only about 1978 that the real Faurisson con-
troversy commenced. There were many demonstrations against him and he
was “punched many times.”
Christie: And were you charged with anything in those days, ‘78, ‘79?
Faurisson: Oh, I had many, many lawsuits against me, many trials, yes.
“Falsifying history” was one of the accusations, but 10 years later the situa-
tion in France has brightened enormously: “I won’t say that [Holocaust revi-
sionism] is popular, certainly not… but in the intellectual circles, I would say
that the myth of the extermination of the Jews is a vanishing myth, which
means that, for me as a revisionist, I am at the same time very happy and very
anxious. Very happy because I see that progress, and very anxious because I
know perfectly well that the situation is more and more dangerous for me.”
Christie asked if the French courts had recently articulated any official
conclusions concerning the existence of a debate on the topic.
Yes, said Faurisson, on December 16, 1987, the Superior Court of Paris
(First Chamber, First Section) had held that, “The very statement of the theses
developed in Mr. [Pierre] Guillaume’s [revisionist] periodical, and the contro-
versy which is liable to come about because of it, are, in the absence of all
third-party lawsuits for liability, subject to the free expression of ideas and
opinions and to a public debate among historians. Things being as they are,
the court does not have to exercise a control over a discussion of this nature.”
Pierre Guillaume is Faurisson’s publisher, and the publisher of Annales
d’histoire révisionniste (Annals of Revisionist History). The first issue of this
new periodical happened to appear on French newsstands in May 1987, at the
time of the Klaus Barbie war crimes trial in Lyon. A judge in Paris, concerned
about its inflammatory potential, prohibited its dissemination except by sub-
scription. On October 22, 1987, Guillaume requested an end to this ban, which
was granted on December 16.
Pearson objected to Faurisson’s seeming to give a legal opinion. Judge
Thomas noted that, in fact, this was Faurisson’s “own personal opinion about
a [legal] judgment that affects his very being.”
After a lunch break, Christie projected some transparencies prepared by
Faurisson, which summarized his basic view of the alleged extermination, and
how it differed from that of his opponents. The first transparency said, in bold
letters, “Alleged extermination of the Jews – no order, no plan, no budget, no
weapon, no body.” Christie had the witness briefly explain what he meant by
this.
Concerning “no body,” Faurisson explained that at the end of the war many
autopsy reports were prepared by the Americans, British, French and Soviets,
yet no victim ever was described as having been gassed. Dr. Rene Fabre, dean
of the Faculty of Pharmacology in Paris, was asked to make a report about the
alleged gas chamber at Stutthof-Natzweiler in Alsace, and about the bodies of
those gassed. He concluded that there was “no trace” of the lethal hydrocyanic
acid (HCN) either in the bodies or in the scrapings from the alleged gas cham-
ber, nor in the debris from it. Yet Fabre’s report disappeared. We know about
it today only through another report by three doctors which describes it.
How many Jews do you think died? asked Christie.

The figure six million is merely “symbolic,” said Faurisson, who noted that
the word was historian Martin Broszat’s. We have no idea of the correct num-
ber, Faurisson continued, but “I think it is possible to find an answer.” Three
key places to look for that answer would be:
1. The “fantastic files” of the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, West
Germany.
2. The restricted documents in the possession of the Soviet and Polish gov-
ernments, including the official Auschwitz death registry, compiled by the
Germans.
3. The names of millions of Jews who have received reparation payments
during the past several decades.
Another Faurisson transparency posed the question “What really happened to
the Jews?” The professor listed a series of persecutions: deportation, intern-
ment, concentration in ghettos, forced labor, disease, execution of hostages,
reprisals, massacres. But, he added, when we ask what really happened to the
Germans during and after the war, we obtain exactly the same list except for
the ghettos.
Are there any photographs of gas chambers? asked Christie.
No, said Faurisson. In fact, the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur stated on
April 26, 1983 that none exists. This was a reversal, as shortly before they had
published a photo which allegedly showed a gas chamber at Majdanek.
Christie asked about the tribunal at Nuremberg, and Faurisson noted that
nowhere in the vast trial transcript is anyone cross-examined about the proce-
dures of gassing. “What I call a witness,” said Faurisson, “is not somebody
who comes and says, ‘I am a witness,’ but somebody who has been cross-exa-
mined about what he claims.”
The Nuremberg Trial, said Faurisson, was “like a boxing match. At the end
of the match, there is a victor, and a vanquished on the floor, and the victor
says to the vanquished, ‘Don’t think that it is finished. It is not finished. Let
me have enough time to change my suit, to put on the gown of a judge, and I
am going to judge you. ‘“
The Allies called it the “International Military Tribunal,” said Faurisson,
but it “was not international, not military, and, in my view, not a tribunal.”
Life is full of euphemisms, said Faurisson, but “I don’t know one euphe-
mism in a German document that you can interpret as meaning extermination.
For instance, Sonderbehandlung, or ’special treatment.’… Sometimes it
means execution, but sometimes it means exactly the contrary. Favorable
treatment and good food. So you have to see the context.”
Christie asked about the Wannsee Conference protocol. Faurisson noted
that he could not say if the document was genuine, since that is not his spe-
cialty. But, he added, “if this document is genuine, it doesn’t mean at all ex-
termination, if you read it carefully.”
Christie read from the Harwood pamphlet: “Rightly or wrongly, the Ger-
many of Adolf Hitler considered the Jews to be a disloyal and avaricious ele-
ment within the national community, as well as a force of decadence in Ger-
many’s cultural life.” As a statement of history, he asked Faurisson, is that
correct?
The conflict which came to exist between the Jews and National Socialists
in Germany was, said Faurisson, “like a kind of war.” As to who was most re-
sponsible for the escalation of hostilities, he was unable to say.
Faurisson noted that he met Ernst Zündel in California in 1979, at a con-
ference of the Institute for Historical Review, and had been in touch frequent-
ly since. At the IHR conference, Faurisson had even let Zündel present his pa-
per, “The Mechanics of Gassing,” because the Canadian’s English pronuncia-
tion was so much better than his. Though he was no expert on gas, toxicology,
and other pertinent technical matters, said Faurisson, he had consulted exten-
sively with specialists in these fields before publishing the “Mechanics” arti-
cle.
Faurisson’s most-famous essay is called “The ‘Problem of the Gas Cham-
bers.’” The title comes from a chapter heading of a book written by Olga
Wormser-Migot, a French Jewish historian. When the book appeared in the
late 1960s, Faurisson studied it for information about gas chambers. But, he
recalled, “I didn’t find anything until page 541.” The author spoke of a “prob-
lem of the gas chambers” because testimonies about them exist for camps like
Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, where it is no longer possible to believe in
their existence. But, said Faurisson, “she didn’t say anything about Auschwitz
because, for her, Auschwitz evidently had gas chambers and gassings. But
there was this expression, there was a ‘problem,’ and I know that this lady had
terrible trouble for having published that.”
In 1974, Faurisson wrote to Martin Broszat and asked him what the differ-
ence was between the now discredited gassing testimonies of Dachau, Buch-
enwald, and other western camps and the still accepted ones of Auschwitz and
other eastern camps. “He answered me with a very rude letter saying that I
was under the influence of right extremism. So I wrote once more and I said
no question of that, please answer me, and he said – I have the letter – I cannot
answer the [trick] questions about the complicated problem of the gas cham-
bers. That was in ‘74 and it means… that this problem was… so complicated
that he could not even answer very simple questions.”
Christie questioned Faurisson about an article he published in 1982 on the
Anne Frank Diary. The article sought to demonstrate that, at one time, Anne
Frank had very mature handwriting, but then; four months later, a childish
scrawl. Faurisson’s investigation took him to Basel, Switzerland, where he
spent two days talking with Anne Frank’s father. Otto Frank finally told him,
“Dr. Faurisson, I agree with you 100 percent. All those things [i.e., contradic-
tions which Faurisson found in the Franks’ alleged lifestyle-in-hiding] are
theoretically, scientifically impossible, but so it was.”
Faurisson tried unsuccessfully to obtain a handwriting specimen from Otto
Frank, but the man always used a typewriter.
Two West German court cases involving the diary were interesting. One
tribunal concluded that everything in the manuscript was by the same hand.
Another concluded that part of the manuscript was written in ballpoint pen
ink, available only from about 1950.
Concerning David Irving, Faurisson recalled the historian’s offer of a thou-
sand pounds/dollars to anyone who could produce a Hitler order for extermi-
nation of the Jews. Since Irving continued to believe that Himmler was behind
such an extermination, and that in the autumn of 1944 he had ordered it
stopped, Faurisson had in turn challenged Irving by promising him 1,000
francs to “show me this order of Himmler which has never existed.” The doc-
ument which is alleged as the order in fact has “nothing to do,” said Faurisson,
with stopping or starting an extermination.
Faurisson explained his concept of the “paper historian,” who is “totally
immaterial.” As an example, he cited ancient Rome, where “we are told…
you have had a democracy… You can believe in the democracy in Rome but
if you go to Rome and if you see the forum, how tiny it is, you understand that
this democracy could only have been a kind of aristocracy. So, you must go
and see the places.” Likewise, “if you say gas chamber in Auschwitz, go and
see the place.”
Christie anticipated a possible argument of the Crown, namely that Fauris-
son was creating a “straw man” with his emphasis on the western concentra-
tion camps as places where gassing was disproven. Perhaps the Crown would
say there had never been “significant claims” concerning those places.
Well, said Faurisson, there were “so many claims” about gassings in the
western camps – even confessions from the camp commandants. The implica-
tions are staggering. “It means… we must be very prudent [about gassings].”
Testimony must be approached with extreme caution. “Please show me the
difference,” said Faurisson, between the confessions about gassings proce-
dures at Ravensbrück and those at Auschwitz. “I don’t see any difference.”
I am still ready to believe, insisted Faurisson, “but give me a reason.” The
court then took a break.
Christie asked Faurisson to name the mistakes which he found in the Har-
wood pamphlet. Faurisson mentioned several, mostly minor, but said there
was no reason to doubt Harwood’s good faith. He and his students in text and
document criticism had once used the literary method known as “the patholo-
gy of the text,” which examines problems like why we make so many mis-
takes, how we make them, and so on. By applying this accepted method to
Harwood’s errors, one could see that deliberate fraud was not involved.
Faurisson noted his exchange of letters with Harwood in 1975, and the lat-
ter’s openness to new information.
“Instead of always criticizing [Harwood],” said Faurisson, one should look
at the things he got right at an early date. Among the 14 examples which
Faurisson cited was Harwood’s opinion that the Wannsee Conference said
nothing about extermination. In 1974, that was a rare opinion; today, it is
coming to be accepted by many. Harwood had also questioned the gas cham-
bers, said Faurisson, and now more and more Jews were beginning to do so,
among them Marc Ascione and Ida Zajdel, who recently wrote to the French
magazine Article Thirty-one with the opinion that the gas chambers were in-
vented by SS officers in their postwar confessions as a “time bomb against the
Jews.” Progress has been made, said Faurisson. On April 26, 1983, a French
court stated, in Faurisson’s words, that “every Frenchman had the right to say
that those gas chambers had never existed, in spite of all the testimonies say-
ing the contrary.” The ruling of December 16, 1987 was also positive, alt-
hough Jewish organizations were appealing it.109
Christie asked Faurisson to summarize the changes in court rulings about
the Holocaust since 1945, first by stating the “judicial notice” ruling of the
present trial. Faurisson read Judge Thomas’s remarks from the transcript, in-
cluding this sentence: “I have not had my attention drawn to any case of any
significance in the history of the world since the Second World War [where]
any reasonable person has ever suggested that the Holocaust did not take
place.” (Then Faurisson apologized to the judge for not having previously had
Christie bring to his attention the French ruling of December 16, 1987, which
did indeed suggest that a debate on the issue existed.)
Pearson objected to Faurisson quoting remarks the judge had made while
speaking on the voir dire. Judge Thomas elected to adjourn for the day, so that
the problem could be reviewed the next morning in the jury’s absence.
When the jury had left, Pearson submitted (once again) that Christie’s
questioning constituted “a thinly veiled attempt to attack the [judicial notice]
ruling.”
Judge Thomas noted that Faurisson “hasn’t said whether he draws the line”
at no gassings or goes on to say no extermination at all. He cautioned Christie
that should the witness take the latter position, he would “instruct the jury to
disregard it.”
The existence of an extermination plan is also at issue, noted Christie.
Yes, agreed Thomas, and “I carefully avoided [including] it” as a part of
my judicial notice of the Holocaust ruling.
109
The legal situation in France deteriorated dramatically a short while later with the introduction of
the so-called “Fabius-Gayssot” Law of July 14, 1990, which punishes with up to one year in pris-
on or with up to 300,000 francs in fines anyone who “denies the existence of one or more crimes
against humanity as defined in Article 6 of the London Agreement of August 8, 1945 concerning
the International Military Tribunal.” Editor’s note.
The trial resumed on Wednesday, April 13, with Judge Thomas heatedly
criticizing Christie for having let Faurisson “read portions of my ruling [made]
on the voir dire, which was held prior to the commencement of this trial with
the jury. Obviously you orchestrated that. What was your purpose?”
Christie vigorously denied having known that Faurisson would read from
the voir dire version of the judicial-notice ruling. He had thought the witness
would read from the version which was given later to the jury. In any event,
the two parts of the transcript were nearly identical, so there was no harm
done.
Judge Thomas: What was the purpose of looking at that evidence in any
event?
Not to criticize the ruling, said Christie, but to analyze it; to show how of-
ficial definitions of the Holocaust have changed through the years.
Well, said Thomas, “I won’t put up with any veiled attempt to challenge
the ruling.” To make sure, let me hear Faurisson’s proposed evidence on this
point in the absence of the jury.
Christie then questioned Faurisson on the voir dire about what the latter
called the “vanishing myth” of the Holocaust. Faurisson began by apologizing
to the court for not having understood the implications of the words “voir
dire” on the transcripts with which he was provided.
Faurisson discussed the changes in the Holocaust debate over the years.
For example, the functionalist position, which calls the alleged extermination
a series of “improvisations,” would have been “impossible” in 1960.
Pearson submitted that this sort of testimony was “irrelevant to any of the
issues that the jury has to determine.” Faurisson was “quibbling.” Even the
functionalists, insisted Pearson (questionably), recognize that there was a poli-
cy of extermination.
Pearson submitted that Thomas’s judicial-notice definition of the Holo-
caust “falls far short of the definition that would be given” by mainstream his-
torians. “It was done, I suggest, to allow the defense” to explore various is-
sues. Now the defense was abusing the leash it was given.
That’s right, said Judge Thomas. “I suppose that [my judicial-notice ruling]
was a definition [of the Holocaust], but it was within the context of this trial…
I could have gone further, but I didn’t.”
Christie: Well, it is, as I understand it, the judicial definition of what is a
fact that cannot be disputed by reasonable men, and, therefore, by logical in-
ference, any other statements that go beyond that statement are debatable by
reasonable men.
“That’s right,” admitted Judge Thomas. Still, he insisted, the witness “is
not going to paraphrase my order and do a dissection of it for his own purpos-
es.” He may give his evidence about changes in our understanding of the Hol-
ocaust since 1945, but he may not use my ruling as some kind of standard for
the Year 1988.
The jury returned, and Christie resumed his examination-in-chief. Have the
gas chambers been an important part of the Holocaust story? he asked.
“Essential,” said Faurisson, “because you cannot imagine a systematic
crime without a systematic weapon. If you don’t have the systematic weapon,
it is difficult to understand that there has been a systematic crime without
precedent… We were told that the Germans, inventing a crime, invented a
new weapon for that. The gas chamber.”
Recently, said Faurisson, we were told that gassings occurred at “six points
in Poland.” Now doubts are being raised by some mainstream historians about
gassings at Majdanek and Auschwitz I.
Another change described by Faurisson was the shrinking number of al-
leged victims at Auschwitz. Late in 1945, Jacques Billiet, director of the war
crimes information service in France, wrote a book which estimated eight mil-
lion dead at the camp (though the figures of four million and seven million al-
so appeared). An official May 1945 report of the Soviets, used at Nuremberg,
estimated four million dead at Auschwitz. It had the same legal status then
that a “judicial-notice” ruling of the Holocaust has today. Currently, Hilberg’s
estimate of one million dead Jews at Auschwitz (“he doesn’t say anything
about the others”) is close to the norm, said Faurisson. The French Jewish his-
torian Leon Poliakov recently chopped a million off his own Auschwitz esti-
mate, apparently without reducing his total Holocaust estimate.
Christie asked about the Anne Frank Diary. Faurisson conceded that Har-
wood made mistakes in this area, but said he used bad arguments to support a
good case, namely the claim that the diary was fraudulent. On May 20, 1980,
the State Criminal Office of West Germany gave to the District Court of Jus-
tice in Hamburg a report containing its official expert opinion on the diary.
Technical analysis of the manuscript showed that portions of the diary were
altered or added after 1951, casting doubt on the entire work. Faurisson also
noted that other German experts, in the 1960s, determined that the handwrit-
ing was the same throughout the diary.
Christie asked Faurisson to “comment on the evidence that [Raul Hilberg]
gave before this Court, that there was no change of his position on the Hitler
order from his first to his second edition. Is that, in your opinion, true?”
Judge Thomas interjected that Faurisson should focus on Hilberg’s book,
because “how he interprets Dr. Hilberg’s evidence in the previous trial… is of
no consequence.” The jury had heard that evidence in its entirety and could
draw its own conclusions.
Christie had Faurisson read from page 177 of the first edition of Hilberg’s
book: “How was the killing phase brought about? Basically, we are dealing
with two of Hitler’s decisions. One order was given in the spring of 1941 dur-
ing the planning of the invasion of the USSR. It provided that small units of
the SS and police… were… to kill all Jewish inhabitants on the spot…
Shortly after the mobile operations had begun in the occupied Soviet territo-
ries, Hitler handed down his second order. That decision doomed the rest of
European Jewry…”
Christie: Now, in his subsequent publications, does [Hilberg] claim the ex-
istence of such orders?
Faurisson: There is no more order. In his second edition, he totally
changed, which is the center of his thesis.
I admire Hilberg for his industry, said Faurisson, but he is “a little bit meta-
physical. For instance, in this big book, you don’t have one photo. You have
not the slightest idea of what could be a gas chamber. There is absolutely no
description.”
Is Hilberg’s work impartial? asked Christie.
No, said Faurisson. In the April 1987 issue of Midstream, the Israeli histo-
rian Yehuda Bauer wrote (in Faurisson’s words), “Hilberg’s whole work is
filled with burning hatred of Nazism and a deep thorough identification with
the victims.” That was intended by Bauer as a compliment, noted Faurisson,
who added, “I don’t criticize [Hilberg] for that, but I think that it is right.”
Christie attempted to elicit Faurisson’s general opinion of Hilberg’s 1985
testimony, but Judge Thomas’s restrictions on what he could say inhibited the
witness so much that he became confused, and soon after Thomas called for
the morning recess.
Upon resuming, Christie had Faurisson read Hilberg’s famous remark
about “mind-reading” bureaucrats: “What began in 1941 was a process of de-
struction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency.
There was no blueprint, and there was no budget for destructive measures.
They [meaning the measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus
came about not so much a plan being carried out but an incredible meeting of
minds, a consensus, mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”
Hilberg’s remarks, made at a conference on the Holocaust, were reported
in Newsday on February 23, 1983, by George DeWan. They astounded Fauris-
son, who looked for a revisionist who had attended the conference, and found
one in Dr. Robert John, who was equally surprised. Hilberg had gone beyond
saying “no order” here, noted Faurisson, and said “no organization.” The kill-
ing measures were taken independently, by local initiative. Said Faurisson: “I
don’t know any bureaucrat practicing his job like that… especially in a coun-
try like Germany.”
Christie asked Faurisson about the three-volume Red Cross Report of
1948, and whether it referred anywhere to the existence of gas chambers.
“There is no mention of gas chambers,” said Faurisson, “as long as the war
was not finished, in the entire files of the ICRC as published,” but after the
war there was the following from the camp of Ravensbrück, near Berlin: “As I
left the camp [wrote the Red Cross delegate], I almost asked [camp comman-
dant] Suhren to show me the gas chamber and crematorium, but did not.
Sometime later, in May [1945], I met a woman, clad in rags, in a Berlin
street… She told me she had come on foot from Ravensbrück… As she
stormed about ‘those SS swine,’ I asked her to tell me where the crematorium
and the gas chamber had been. ‘Under the big square,’ she answered, [but] we
know now that there were no gas chambers in Ravensbrück.”
As recently as 1973, said Faurisson, Germaine Tillion wrote a book called
Ravensbrück which alleged gassings there, but that is exceptional. My ques-
tion, said Faurisson, has always been, “Where was this gas chamber in Ra-
vensbrück? And the answer is no answer.”
Christie asked if the three-volume Red Cross Report of 1948 made any
mention of the widespread anti-German atrocities of the preceding several
years.
“Not that I know of,” said Faurisson. And during France’s “Bloody Sum-
mer” of 1944 there were incidents like that in the town of Annecy, where 80
German POWs were executed despite Red Cross efforts to prevent it. “[S]o I
suppose that there is a report about that, but not a published report.”
Pearson objected that the line of questioning was irrelevant.
Judge Thomas disagreed after Christie explained that the questions were
intended to show that the Red Cross was indeed “capable of publishing con-
veniently biased reports.”
Christie asked about the International Tracing Service at Arolsen, and
Faurisson’s answers differed somewhat from those of Charles Biedermann
earlier. Until 1978, said Faurisson, one could visit and do research in the so-
called “historical section” at Arolsen. At about that time, the ITS “decided to
close everything, for example, their annual report… which was of great val-
ue” both for its statistics and its descriptions of German documents. “Now, to
have the right to work in Arolsen, you must have the permission of your gov-
ernment.” Biedermann, of course, had testified that the use of Arolsen was al-
ways restricted by treaty, but Faurisson suggested that enforcement was lax
until the revisionists appeared on the scene.
What about the Hans Frank diaries? asked Christie.
Hans Frank “was tortured by two American soldiers, and tried to commit
suicide,” said Faurisson. At the Nuremberg Trial, he declared himself not
guilty, “and then they brought in… Rudolf Höss, who testified, and Hans
Frank was absolutely overwhelmed. He believed what Höss said about Ausch-
witz, about those millions of people killed.”
Frank then made his pronouncement that Germany was guilty for a thou-
sand years, but he still insisted he had never heard of the extermination, alt-
hough his occupation government headquarters, in Krakow, was only 50 or 60
kilometers distant from Auschwitz.
There is no proof of any extermination program in the 11,500 very-candid
pages of the Frank diaries, said Faurisson. When Frank heard rumors about
Belzec, he went to the spot and found only Jews at work there.
What is your interpretation of the Wannsee Conference? asked Christie.
Faurisson read a critical passage from the Wannsee protocol: “A large part
[of the Jews under forced labor] will be lost through natural decrease. The to-
tal remnant that finally in any case will remain, since this is undoubtedly the
part with the strongest resistance, will have to be treated accordingly, since the
latter, representing a natural selection, is to be regarded, upon release, as the
nucleus of a new Jewish revival. (See the experience of history.)”
“So there will be a release, a liberation,” said Faurisson.
Christie: Now, do those words today constitute, in the mind of the func-
tionalist [historian], a plan of extermination?
“I don’t think so any more,” said Faurisson.
Christie: Well, do historians normally translate the words “upon release,”
or have there been some historians who have not translated those words?
Faurisson: Many historians have not translated “upon release” and have not
given “see the experience of history,” and even in the fifth volume of the
NMT, or Nuremberg Military Trial, made by the Americans, when this docu-
ment is reproduced in English, you don’t have the word[s] “upon release” and
there are not three dots. There is nothing. “Upon release” is excised.
Are historians who fail to do material research “flawed in some way”?
asked Christie.
Dr. Browning’s lack of curiosity is “extraordinary,” said Faurisson. The
metaphysical historians always respond to your physical evidence with the
words, “But we have testimony.” Sure we do, said Faurisson, even for places
like Ravensbrück!
Faurisson recalled the first day he visited a Holocaust archive, in 1964. “I
went to the Center of Jewish Documentation in Paris, and I had only one ques-
tion for the [archivist]. I said I wish to have a photo of a gas chamber, and he
answered me immediately, ‘You know, we have many books about the gas
chambers,’ which is totally false. ‘We have many testimonies, we have con-
fessions.’ I said, yes, but I’m looking for a photo, not two, one. He said, ‘But
we have testimonies.’ I said no, I want a photo, and then he asked a lady, I
remember her name, Mrs. Imbert. He said, ‘This gentleman wants a photo of a
gas chamber,’ and the lady automatically said, ‘We have testimonies,’ and he
said, ‘No, no, not testimony. He wants a photo.’ ‘Okay, sit down,’ and I wait-
ed for 60 minutes, and what they brought to me was, for example, the false
gas chamber of Dachau, things like that.”
“We must be material,” declared Faurisson, “especially about something so
obscure, so difficult to understand, as a gas chamber.”
Christie asked about gas vans, and Faurisson stated, “Never have I found
one photo of an alleged homicidal gas van, never a document, a plan, a draw-
ing, something technical. When I was sued in France for falsification of histo-
ry… they tried to bring proof of everything, and they brought me as proof of
the gas van, two poor little drawings” by an internee, childlike in their sim-
plicity.
After lunch, and before the jury returned, Christie showed the court a letter
which was received by a West-German defense attorney from the Bun-
desarchiv in Freiburg. It began: “Dear Mr. Rieger: Documents pertaining to
gas vans could not be found in our military archives. There are only sporadi-
cally some materials pertaining to the so-called detoxification vans, see enclo-
sures.”
Unfortunately, the letter which attorney Jürgen Rieger had sent to the ar-
chives was not available, so that the context of the response was not entirely
clear. Judge Thomas ruled that no reference should be made to the corre-
spondence while Christie questioned Faurisson about the attached enclosures
dealing with the German “detoxification vans.”
The jury returned, and Christie said, “Before lunch, Witness, we were dis-
cussing the subject of gas vans and you indicated that you felt there might be
some source for this belief.”
That’s right, said Faurisson.
The two men read the documents from Freiburg, and looked over the pho-
tos, all of which pertained to the vans used for detoxifying German uniforms,
leather gear, and so on. “My supposition,” said Faurisson, is that the myth of
the homicidal gas vans developed from the fact that the Germans did in fact
use these non-homicidal gas vans.
Christie then asked Faurisson for his opinion about Auschwitz and Maj-
danek, two camps he had studied in detail.
Faurisson noted that Browning had been wrong to say that the Auschwitz
gas chambers were destroyed. “Millions of tourists” have seen Crematorium I,
one room of which is presented as a genuine gas chamber. Browning had also
testified that “Majdanek is the only [camp] in which there are the original gas
chambers.” Actually, said Faurisson, at Majdanek, “just after the war, the gas
chambers weren’t where the tourists see them today.” What is now called the
harmless shower room was then the gas chamber. Today, it is the former dis-
infection gas chamber which is being called a homicidal gas chamber.
Faurisson observed that it is impossible to quickly cremate a batch of 2,000
gassing victims in 15 muffles. After an hour and a half, one still has 1,985
bodies left to dispose of, and meanwhile others will be arriving to be gassed.
Also, the Zyklon B sticks to everything and “you cannot get rid of it just like
that.”
Browning had testified that when he did visit some German camps it was
only to check out their memorials. Faurisson objected to a historian visiting
“as if it was a holy place. He must go with a scientific spirit. He must try to
see what it is.”
Faurisson also faulted Browning for not knowing about the sworn affida-
vits introduced at Nuremberg to the effect that thousands were gassed at Da-
chau. Dr. Blaha, for example, the director of a Czechoslovakian hospital,
swore on January 9, 1946 that there was a gas chamber at Dachau, and that he
personally examined some of the victims.
What about Filip Müller’s eyewitness accounts of the Birkenau (Auschwitz
II) gas chambers? asked Christie.
Faurisson noted that Hermann Langbein, an Auschwitz internee, wrote a
book in which he talked about Müller. Langbein observed that Müller had
charged a man named Stark with gassing people at Auschwitz I, and that it
was later proven that Stark was never there at the time. The defense attorney
at the Auschwitz Trial, quoted by Langbein, said that this rendered Müller’s
testimony suspect “from A to Z.”
Actually, said Faurisson, Müller didn’t write the book Eyewitness Ausch-
witz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. This “stupid novel” full of sex orgies
was ghostwritten by one Helmut Freitag.
Christie: Could you summarize your opinion regarding Dr. Browning’s
[accuracy]? “It’s not exactly a question of accuracy,” explained Faurisson. “I
say that he should check what the witnesses are saying,” a process which be-
gins with careful reading to weed out the blatant impossibilities.
Faurisson added that Browning should “consult the defense counsels…
For instance, he could have written, as I did, to Dr. Servatius, who was the de-
fense lawyer of Eichmann… I asked [Servatius] how is it that you didn’t ask
any questions about the gas chambers, and he said [it was] because we decid-
ed not to get into that but to say that Eichmann had nothing to do with it, and
it’s classical in all those trials, the defense lawyer cannot defend something
which looks impossible. It looks impossible to say that the gas chambers did
not exist, so the tactic of those people, and I can bring proof of that, was not to
get into that. Exactly as in the witchcraft trials, when the people were accused
of having met the devil, they wouldn’t say… that the devil does not exist. It
would have been the end. No. The tactic was to say, oh yes, the devil was
there on top of the hill. Myself, I was down. And with Auschwitz it’s exactly
the same thing… They don’t say the entire truth. But how could they? No-
body wants to get into hot water and even into boiling water.”
Christie turned to the subject of Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, author of The
Auschwitz Myth (1979), a book for which he was stripped of his doctorate un-
der a 1938 Hitlerite law.
Faurisson described Stäglich’s account of Richard Baer, the third com-
mandant of Auschwitz, who died suspiciously just before the big 1960s
Auschwitz Trial. Stäglich wrote that Baer refused to concede the existence of
the gas chambers, so that the trial could not begin, but then he conveniently
died and the trial began.
After a break, and with the jury absent, Pearson objected to what he called
Faurisson’s stretching of the hearsay exception rule. As a court-designated ex-
pert, he was free to give opinion evidence, said Pearson, only if his sources
were “the type of material that a competent and reasonable historian would re-
sort to.” The Stäglich book did not qualify.
Well, said Christie, “it’s difficult, in fact I think impossible, to say who is
or isn’t a historian.”
Judge Thomas’s response was ambiguous. On the one hand, he said that
“having Dr. Faurisson quote Walendy or quote Stäglich, or someone else, to
form his opinion, is really stretching the concept of a source that reputable his-
torians would likely consult in the ordinary course of business.”
But Thomas muddied the issue by also saying that one could not qualify
for expert status if one relied overly much on secondary sources per se – re-
gardless, he implied, of their nature or quality. Then again, Thomas acknow-
ledged, “I realize Dr. Faurisson has done some considerable writing and
studying in this area.”
In the end, it wasn’t clear exactly where Thomas’s complaint lay. Appar-
ently realizing this, he concluded, “I don’t have any objection to him referring
to this particular matter [Stäglich writing about Richard Baer].” But he vague-
ly warned that the jury could attach more or less weight to any witness, and
that he, as the judge, would be giving the jurors pointers on the matter.
The jury returned, and Christie questioned Faurisson about West Germa-
ny’s restitution payments. Faurisson mentioned the so-called BEG laws, under
which 4,393,365 claims were submitted between 1953 and 1983. Through
1983, payments totaling 56.2 billion German marks had been made, and 40
percent of those compensated were in Israel.
Christie turned abruptly to Christopher Browning’s testimony about the
New York Times article of August 30, 1944 on Majdanek.
“My comment,” said Faurisson, “is that I am surprised that a historian
would use such a story. It’s pure propaganda.” There was a shoe factory at the
Majdanek camp, which explains at least some of the famous gigantic piles of
shoes. As for the piles of eyeglasses and other personal items, it is well known
that everything was recycled in Germany during the war years. Thousands
died at Majdanek, and it is hardly surprising that things were retained in piles.
Browning had read about 1.5 million dying at Majdanek without noting that
even Raul Hilberg now estimates that only 50,000 Jews died there. Browning
had also read about bodies being burned in 10 to 12 minutes, when he should
have known better. “After [a] war,” said Faurisson, “the propaganda should
stop and we should [go to work].”
Christie then had Faurisson begin an analysis of the anti-Harwood booklet
Six Million Did Die.
Throughout the book, said Faurisson, we have references to an extermina-
tion plan – for example, “a deliberate matter, a purpose, objective to eliminate
the Jewish race, plans were made, deliberation, program, policy, carried out,
deliberately, intentionally and methodically, policy to exterminate, plan of ex-
termination, planned a logical destruction, deliberate extermination, et cetera.”
Actually, said Faurisson, “this plan never existed.” The authors, Suzman
and Diamond, suggest that it did by relying on testimony. “It’s always testi-
mony.”
Christie asked about the booklet’s discussion of Dachau.
Faurisson noted its reliance on two detailed but discredited investigative
reports about the “Dachau gas chamber.” This was a room of about 20 by 20
feet, with space for about 100 victims, which had “all the characteristics of an
ordinary communal shower room, with about 50 shower sprays.” Above the
entrance was the inscription Brausebad, or “shower bath.” The sprays alleged-
ly squirted poison gas, which came through “elaborate controls and gas pipes
leading into the chamber.” There was a glass peephole through which the con-
troller could watch his victims die. On page 122, Suzman and Diamond even
published a photo with the caption, “Victims of the Dachau gas chamber lie
piled to the ceiling in the crematorium.”
Christie projected this photograph, and also one taken by Faurisson at Da-
chau, where an official sign may be seen: “Gas chamber disguised as a shower
room – Never used.”
Faurisson corresponded with the Dachau authorities, asking, “Why do you
call this place a gas chamber and what is the story of this gas chamber? And
the story that we have to accept is this: The Germans began the construction
of this place, called a gas chamber, in 1942, but in 1945 they had not finished
this little room because the inmates forbade [it].”
Faurisson recalled that about 1,500 internees at Dachau died during the
weeks following the American liberation, compared to only 1,100 who died
during the entire year of 1943. As at Belsen and elsewhere, the horrendous
conditions were due to the total logistical breakdown in Germany, not to who
was in charge of the camp.
In dealing with the Dachau authorities, said Faurisson, he tried to obtain an
explanation of what was “lacking” to make a completed gas chamber. “Tell
me what we need to have a gas chamber finished, and could you show me an
expert report because I do not understand…” But things were never clarified
for him.
Despite Suzman and Diamond, the Dachau authorities now maintain that
no one was gassed there, said Faurisson. “And what is troubling is that we
have so many testimonies and descriptions of the gassings of Dachau.”
Court was adjourned, and resumed the next day, Thursday, April 14. Be-
fore the jury entered, Christie objected to the jurors being provided with a
specially transcribed English translation of Udo Walendy’s response to Six
Million Did Die. “I submit,” he said, “that it adds undue emphasis to this evi-
dence and provides it with a form that is not available to the rest of the evi-
dence.”
Pearson countered that “Mr. Christie’s objection would be well taken” if
this was an “insignificant” part of the testimony, but, in fact, it “goes to the
very heart of the issue that the jury has to determine.” Judge Thomas admitted
the translation as an exhibit.
Christie resumed his examination-in-chief by projecting some German
plans of the crematoria at Birkenau (Auschwitz II), and questioning Faurisson
about them. The witness explained how the alleged gassees would enter a
room designated on the plans as Leichenkeller II (morgue II), remove their
clothes, and then go through a small corridor to Leichenkeller I, to be gassed.
Faurisson emphasized that it was only about 1979 that the world began to
learn that “Leichenkeller” (morgue) was the actual word which the Germans
used for these rooms, and that this belated enlightenment occurred because he
painstakingly obtained, identified, and published the German plans. He began
the process with little negatives which he found deeply buried in the disor-
ganized archives of the Auschwitz Museum.
Christie: Do historians like Raul Hilberg say how many were supposed to
[have been] gassed?
He and others are not precise, said Faurisson. But books at the Auschwitz
Museum say that 2,000 would enter a gas chamber, and the confession of Ru-
dolf Höss also gives that number. Yet there are “many material impossibili-
ties” in that account. After an hour and a half, when 15 bodies had been cre-
mated, and the “next batch” of victims was ready for gassing, what was done
with the remaining 1,985 bodies? And, if we believe Höss, the Jewish Sonder-
kommandos entered the gas chambers immediately after the operation, some-
times while eating or smoking, which indicated they did not wear gas masks.
Further, Zyklon B is a very difficult gas to ventilate, as it adheres strongly to
surfaces.
Christie asked Faurisson if he ever told Ernst Zündel what he believed the
rooms called Leichenkeller I and II were used for.
Certainly, said Faurisson. “Classical morgues.” The great crematorium
buildings at Auschwitz II were only opened in early 1943, in response to the
great epidemics of 1942. “And we know that those plans absolutely were not
hidden by the Germans.” On the contrary, they were “very proud” of these
buildings, and we have, for example, a “magnificent plan” of the large
Leichenkeller at Sachsenhausen, with 200 places to store bodies after an epi-
demic or other catastrophe.
Are these German plans unavailable? asked Christie.
Not since I published some of them in August 1979, said Faurisson. Now
others have also been published. Before that, however, most of the plans were
unknown. Faurisson recounted the great troubles he experienced with the bu-
reaucracy at the Auschwitz Museum while transforming some forgotten little
negatives into large, widely available plans.
Christie then questioned Faurisson about two plans which show the entire
Birkenau Camp. One came from a book published in Warsaw in 1980, and
agreed, said the witness, with all the other plans known to him. The second
came from The Auschwitz Album, a popular book first published in 1981 or
1982 that contains nearly 200 photos of the camp. The latter plan, said Fauris-
son, contains a “trick.”
He then explained himself. Exterminationists say that the women and chil-
dren selected for gassing at Auschwitz were led to the buildings called Crema-
toria II and III. Faurisson believes they were led to the camp’s large
bath/sauna complex by way of a road which passed between Crematoria II and
III. “The trick,” explained Faurisson, is that in the map in The Auschwitz Al-
bum, “they cut the road going to the big sauna,” making it look like it dead-
ends at the crematoria.
“There are other tricks” in the same book, said Faurisson. For example, the
well-known soccer field for internees beside Crematoria II and III is not des-
ignated as such because readers would find it hard to believe that gassings and
athletics were conducted side-by-side.
Christie asked Faurisson about the book Under Two Dictators, by Mar-
garete Buber (London, 1949). Harwood had cited Buber as a survivor who in-
dicated that the German camps were not always so bad as usually presented.
Suzman and Diamond attacked Harwood for this, writing, “Somehow the fol-
lowing later passages in [Buber’s] book appear to have escaped Harwood’s at-
tention.” Then came this quote: “In the winter of 1941-42, the extermination
of prisoners by gas began in Ravensbrück.”
Faurisson commented that “no reputable historian” now says anyone was
gassed at Ravensbrück. Furthermore: “[Buber] might be the only person to say
in ‘41-’42. Because [the others] said that it was right at the end of [the war],
the beginning of ‘45.” In other words, “[Harwood] was right not to quote
that.”
Faurisson went on to say that Buber, on page 304 of her book, admitted to
not knowing if there was really a gas chamber at Ravensbrück. Perhaps, she
wrote, mobile gas vans were used. “It is a strange contradiction,” he observed,
“that somebody talks about a gas chamber, then [about] gas chambers, and
suddenly says ‘I don’t know,’ but I have [seen] that sometimes… People con-
tradict themselves totally.”
So, asked Christie, given the fact that Suzman and Diamond accuse Har-
wood of ignoring a reference in Buber, “can you explain why [they] don’t re-
fer” to page 304?
Because it would create an inconsistency, said Faurisson.
Suzman and Diamond were especially hard on Harwood for his “selective
quotation” from the British historian Colin Cross, which was said to “entirely
distort the views of the author.” Christie asked Faurisson about this, and the
latter defended Harwood: “When I quote an exterminationist, I take some-
times one sentence, two sentences, and I don’t say every time, ‘But you must
know that this man believes in the extermination of the Jews. ‘“
The Suzman and Diamond booklet contains at least two horrific photo-
graphs of piles of corpses at Bergen-Belsen. These are very misleading, said
Faurisson. They seem to show extermination-as-usual at the camp, when in
fact the picture of the bulldozer “cynically” pushing bodies into a ditch was
cropped so that the British soldier driving it could not be seen. “It’s a fact,”
said Faurisson, that people saw these photos after the war and thought, “oh,
there we have a proof that Hitler exterminated the people.”
Faurisson also objected to the treatment of Paul Rassinier in Six Million
Did Die. Suzman and Diamond had noted that, in 1964, an article was pub-
lished in France alleging that Rassinier made common cause with neo-Nazis,
and that Rassinier instituted an action for defamation. The case was dismissed,
and Rassinier ordered to pay the costs, but, asked Faurisson, what did that
prove? It was and still is automatic to be called a Nazi when one questions the
gas chambers. The truth is that Rassinier was a true resister during World War
II – one of the few in France – who suffered greatly in the Buchenwald and
Dora Concentration Camps. “He came back in an awful state of health and de-
cided to write a book about his experiences, and, in his book, he talks, I think
very eloquently, about the horror of those concentration camps, but at the
same time he says that, even if you suffer so much, you have no right to lie,
and we must make a distinction between truth and lie in what happened in
those camps. He said that we should not do like Ulysses, the hero of Homer,
who suffered very much, and when he came back home, instead of telling
what he had suffered, tens of hundreds of sufferings, he multiplied them and
told extraordinary stories.”
From the beginning, said Faurisson, Rassinier had doubts about the gas
chambers. These grew as he heard bogus testimonies about gassings at Buch-
enwald.
Faurisson was incensed by the following sentence in Suzman and Dia-
mond: “Apart from a host of obscure pamphleteers who find no place in any
recognized bibliography on the subject, Harwood quotes as authoritative the
thoroughly discredited Senator Joseph McCarthy, one Harry Elmer Barnes,
the translator of Rassinier, and suchlike.” Most galling was the word “one”
which appeared before Harry Elmer Barnes, a great historian and social scien-
tist of this century. Even the New York Times felt obligated to run a four-
column obituary of Barnes on August 28, 1968, though they snidely referred
to him as “the controversial historian, sociologist, penologist and journalist of
the 1920s and 1930s,” as if Barnes had not remained active (and controversial)
right into the 1960s. Faurisson read the entire obituary, which included this
paragraph: “Dr. Barnes supported the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roo-
sevelt as America’s last alternative to fascism or communism, but he opposed
entry of the United State into World War II on the ground that the country
should devote its energies to preventing the rise of domestic dictators. He
wrote: ‘I perversely insist on the quaint practice of putting American interests

before those of Britain, Germany, Indochina or Patagonia.’”
Faurisson also read from an article which Barnes published in the Summer
1967 issue of Ramparts Magazine “An attempt to make a competent, objec-
tive and truthful investigation of the extermination question is now regarded
as far more objectionable and deplorable than… charging [Franklin] Roose-
velt with war responsibility. It is surely the most precarious venture that a his-
torian or demographer could undertake today.”
Christie asked Faurisson about Suzman and Diamond’s treatment of Arthur
Butz’s book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, and the witness observed,
“[F]or once those two authors are very prudent… [I]t is extremely difficult to
attack Butz. Even in France, Pierre Vidal-Naquet said about my work that it
was really nothing, but that Butz was very dangerous.”
When Christie asked Faurisson to summarize Butz’s position, Pearson ob-
jected, saying that the witness should restrict his testimony to conversations he
had overheard between Butz and Zündel. Judge Thomas agreed, and then the
court took a break.
Moving along in Six Million Did Die, Christie asked Faurisson about its
commentary on the Nuremberg Trials.
“Another opinion [of Nuremberg] is quite possible,” said Faurisson, espe-
cially if one recalls Articles 19 and 21 of the treaty under which the tribunal
operated. Article 19 states, “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical
rules of evidence.” Article 21 states, “The Tribunal shall not require proof of
facts of common knowledge, but shall take judicial notice thereof.” Thus, the
judges and prosecutors “did not even try to prove the existence of any gas
chamber.” Further, “there was no appeal [from Nuremberg], and the docu-
ments were chosen by the prosecution.”
Faurisson read from Six Million Did Die: “Harwood further alleges that the
spurious testimony in support of the myth of the six million was invariably
given by former German officers who had been subjected to torture or assured
of leniency. These scurrilous allegations are repudiated by two counsels of
great eminence, intimately involved in the Nuremberg trial, namely Lord
Shawcross, then Attorney General for Great Britain and chief counsel for the
prosecution for the United Kingdom, and Lord Elwyn-Jones, the present Lord
High Chancellor of Great Britain and one of the counsels for the prosecution
for the United Kingdom.”
“My comment,” said Faurisson, “is that I am not surprised that prosecutors
would repudiate that there were tortures… [B]ut we don’t know with what
kind of argument [they repudiated it].” Faurisson then named half a dozen
well-known postwar German victims of torture, including SS Captain Josef
Kramer, the commandant of Belsen, who was put “into a fridge” overnight by
the British and boxed around.
Concerning the existence of a plan of extermination, Christie asked Fauris-

son if the authors Suzman and Diamond had suggested anywhere in their
booklet that this view was under attack by some mainstream historians.
No, said Faurisson. Further, the booklet quoted from the judgment at Nu-
remberg on October 1, 1946, to the effect that “a special section of the Gesta-
po, under Adolf Eichmann, as head of Section B4, was formed [in the summer
of 1941] to carry out the policy [of exterminating the Jews].”
Christie: What is your opinion of that statement?
“Totally wrong,” said Faurisson. There is no proof of it, and I never saw
any historian allege that the Germans created a special office for exterminat-
ing Jews.
Faurisson also complained about a quotation used by Suzman and Dia-
mond, taken from the confession of Rudolf Höss, which reads in part: “Chil-
dren of tender years were invariably exterminated [at Auschwitz] since by rea-
son of their youth they were unable to work.”110
Totally false, said Faurisson. “We have many proofs that children were
born at Auschwitz,” such as in a book called The Anthology of Auschwitz, first
published in Poland in 1969. Faurisson said he was familiar with the French
edition, containing a report by a midwife at Auschwitz. He read a part of her
report to the court: “The women gave birth on the heating pipes. I delivered in
this manner more than 3,000 babies. In spite of the dreadful dirtiness, the
vermin and the rats, in spite of the infectious diseases and other horrors be-
yond description, extraordinary things occurred there which are unbelievable
but true. One day, the camp doctor asked me to submit a report to him con-
cerning the infections contracted by the pregnant women. The mortality
against mothers and infants, sucklings. I reported to him that I had not one
single case of death either with the mothers or newborn babies. The camp doc-
tor looked at me with incredulous eyes and informed me that even in the best
maternal wards in Germany they could not boast of such results.”
At the end of Six Million Did Die, said Faurisson, “we have a photo which
shows that the children were not killed in Auschwitz.” It comes from a well-
known Soviet film of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. We al-
so know that at Buchenwald alone, there were about 1,000 Jewish children at
the end of the war who had been evacuated from Auschwitz.
Christie: Now, when Suzman and Diamond quote these words, “Children
of tender years were invariably exterminated,” did they anywhere qualify it
and say that there is evidence that children were not exterminated [which is
presented] in this [i.e., in their own] book?
No, said Faurisson, and then the court was recessed for lunch.
110
At page 8372, Christie attributed this same quotation to the judgment of the Nuremberg tribunal.
Both citations are correct, since the Nuremberg judgment quoted this part of Höss’s confession.
Upon resuming, Faurisson emphasized that, on January 18, 1945, the Ger-
mans evacuated most internees from Auschwitz, but were forced to leave be-
hind about 8,500, including many children.
Christie then turned to a section of Six Million Did Die called “Other War
Crimes Trials.” Faurisson noted what Suzman and Diamond wrote about the
so-called Zyklon-B or Bruno Tesch Case: “The whole gassing procedure at
Auschwitz was described in detail by German eyewitnesses. Two of the three
accused were sentenced to death and hanged.” Faurisson commented that
“those two [hanged] people denied that they knew anything about the use of
Zyklon to kill people.”
A bit later in their booklet, Suzman and Diamond dealt with an interesting
1964 English civil case called Dering v. Uris et al. They called it a “striking
confirmation of the inhumane medical experiments carried out upon Jewish
inmates of Auschwitz,” and noted that the plaintiff Dering alleged he was li-
beled in the book Exodus by Leon Uris, and won a halfpenny in damages from
the jury.
Faurisson recalled that in the 1960s he read the book Auschwitz in Eng-
land, by two British lawyers, which dealt with the trial. Wladislaw Dering was
a Polish surgeon who worked at Auschwitz and was accused by Uris of having
operated without anesthesia on 17,000 female internees. Suzman and Dia-
mond declined to give that number, however, because, as Faurisson explained,
during the course of the trial it melted first to “a big number,” then to “130
people, men and women,” then to “perhaps five people,” and finally to “per-
haps two or three cases, [which] were not quite clear.” The meltdown was
greatly facilitated by Dering’s ability to obtain from the Auschwitz Museum
the register of surgical operations, said Faurisson, who observed that “the
Germans used to put everything in writing… We must realize that in Ausch-
witz, when there was one natural death, we had 21 signatures, and when it was
a [suicide or other unnatural death], more than 30” signatures were affixed to
a document about the death.
Where do you get those numbers? asked Christie.
From the International Committee of Auschwitz, as published in The An-
thology of Auschwitz, replied Faurisson.
The Dering Trial is very important, he continued. “Day after day, they
eliminated names [of alleged victims].” On reaching five, “they discovered
that [even] those operations had not been done without anesthesia, but with a
kind of anesthesia that was [new] at that time. We call that rachis anesthesia,
which is in the cerebral spine. It is a partial anesthesia.”
And where does this information come from? asked Christie.
From Auschwitz in England, said Faurisson.
The jury awarded Dering one halfpenny, but the judge ordered him to pay
for the trial nevertheless. Dering said, “My honor is saved, but financially I
am ruined.” Soon after, he died of cancer.
Leon Uris’s dirty work was not yet complete. He then wrote a novel about
the trial called QB VII, and invented the character of a son of Dering who at-
tended the trial and became ashamed of his father’s past. He refrained from
using the name “Dering,” however.
In summary, said Faurisson, “it’s quite clear that [at the beginning] every-
body was ready to believe that in Auschwitz it was possible to do such a thing
to 17,000 people.”
Is what you have told us indicated anywhere in Suzman and Diamond?
asked Christie.
No, said Faurisson. “They are veiling the fact that the accusation [of Uris]
was absolutely terrible.” Without the Auschwitz surgical register, he added,
most of that accusation would have stuck forever.
Christie asked about the 1970 trial of Franz Stangl, the commandant of So-
bibor and later Treblinka.
Anyone interested in the murkiness which surrounds Treblinka should read
Gitta Sereny’s book Into That Darkness (1974), said Faurisson. He contacted
Sereny and asked, “How is it that you apparently didn’t ask any question
about the gas chambers? Where are they exactly in Treblinka? Who really op-
erated them? You give us very vague details about that. How is it that you
didn’t ask the question to Franz Stangl?” And “believe it or not,” said Fauris-
son, “she told me, ‘I didn’t think of that.’”
Another interesting case was the Majdanek Trial, said Faurisson, which
lasted five years, and saw the alleged death toll at the camp fall from 1.5 mil-
lion to 50,000.
Commenting on the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, Suzman and Diamond
quoted the defense attorney, Dr. Servatius, as saying that he never questioned
the testimonies about gassing because the “suffering was too sacred for me to
attack.” The “first time in my life,” said Faurisson, “that I’ve seen witnesses
of Auschwitz really cross-examined –”
Pearson cut him off: “Well, Your Honor, I think I’m going to have an ob-
jection to this question.”
Judge Thomas excused the jury, and Faurisson finished his sentence in the
way expected: “The first time that I saw a witness of Auschwitz cross-exa-
mined about the procedures of gassings… was in Toronto, in 1985.”
Pearson submitted that leading evidence about testimony at the previous
Zündel trial was improper.
“He won’t do it,” agreed Thomas, and called the jury back.
Christie moved on to Suzman and Diamond’s version of the Wannsee Con-
ference. Faurisson noted their reference to “different methods of extermina-
tion [being] debated” at Wannsee, and judged it “totally false.” Had there been
any such debate, the functionalist position on the Holocaust (i.e., that it was
locally improvised) would not now be rapidly gaining adherents.
Later, Suzman and Diamond quoted the American historian John Toland
writing of Dr. Konrad Morgen that he “extensively investigated most of the
killing camps at the height of the operation” and was “among the few know-
ledgeable and reliable living German witnesses” of the Holocaust. Really! said
Faurisson. Morgen had testified quite clearly after the war that the Auschwitz
gassings and exterminations occurred at Monowitz (Auschwitz III). No less
disturbing was the fact that he testified again in the 1960s, at the Auschwitz
Trial in Frankfurt, and changed the killing site to Birkenau (Auschwitz II)
without anyone challenging him on it.
At one point, Suzman and Diamond quoted Ernst Nolte. Faurisson de-
scribed the German historian’s recent conversion to an “ersatz revisionism,”
for which his car was bombed. Nolte still says the Germans had gas chambers,
but has retreated on most other aspects of the Holocaust. In a 1987 French
book by Rene Schwok, Nolte was accused of being under the influence of
Faurisson. He is “totally functionalist” now, said Faurisson, who then added:
“I wonder who is still really an intentionalist, except perhaps [Eberhard] Jäck-
el.”
Suzman and Diamond cited the German Armaments Minister Albert Speer
at length in defense of the extermination thesis, but Faurisson deflated this by
noting that Speer’s books say he knew nothing of the extermination first-hand,
but only accepted the word of others after the war.
Christie: Is there any way that this execution of six million people could
have gone on without Speer knowing about it?
“It seems to me totally impossible,” said Faurisson. Speer was particularly
interested in the work output of the internees. “The Germany of Albert Speer”
was an “extraordinarily organized” place.
How much the Allies knew, or thought they knew, and when they knew it,
is a “very interesting problem for the historian,” said Faurisson. Walter
Laqueur, Martin Gilbert, and David S. Wyman have all written “essential”
books on the subject in English. In France, a Jewish lady historian recently re-
viewed a French book called Who Knew What, and concluded, “We must ad-
mit that [during the war] nobody knew [about extermination] in that sense
[i.e., in the sense of knowing for sure].” Walter Laqueur, said Faurisson, has
called Nazi Germany an almost transparent country. The secret German codes
were very quickly deciphered, and the Allies learned about massacres of Jews
in Poland and Russia, “but there is nothing in the German communications
about gas chambers. Nothing.”
Remarkably, Suzman and Diamond quote at length an old report about
Treblinka (Document PS-3311 at Nuremberg) which speaks of the steaming
of Jews in 13 “steam chambers” there. No historian believes that today, said
Faurisson, but there it is in Six Million Did Die, with no doubts or qualifica-
tions.
Suzman and Diamond also cite the hoary claim of Auschwitz survivor Ru-
dolf Vrba that 1,765,000 Jews were gassed at the camp between April 1942
and April 1944. Faurisson explained that Vrba arrived at the figure through
special memory techniques of his own devising. Part of the problem with the
number, he continued, was that Vrba said 150,000 French Jews were among
them, but we now know that only 75,781 Jews were deported from France to
all camps during the entire war, many of whom returned alive.
December 14, 1945 is a red-letter day in the history of the Holocaust, said
Faurisson. It was then, he believes, that the figure of six million dead Jews
was first heard.111 Major William F. Walsh, the American prosecutor at Nu-
remberg, referred to the affidavit of Dr. Wilhelm Höttl, which contained this
sentence cited by Suzman and Diamond: “Approximately four million Jews
had been killed in the various concentration camps, while an additional two
million met death in other ways, the major part of whom were shot by opera-
tional squads of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia.”
It is incorrect that Höttl himself ever said that, argued Faurisson. He was
simply saying that Eichmann had told him that. When Walsh read six million
in the morning session, the German defense lawyer did not react. But “at the
beginning of the afternoon… Dr. Kauffmann, defense lawyer of [Dr. Ernst]
Kaltenbrunner, said: ‘Your Honor, I’ve heard that story of the six million. It is
so grave that I want this man Höttl to come here to testify.’” That could have
been easily arranged, since Höttl was in the jail at Nuremberg. But Prosecutor
Walsh stood up and said, “No, Your Honor, I didn’t mean it.”112
The denouement was that “Höttl was not called, but the six-million figure
stayed.”
Noting its constant references to a “deliberate” and “methodical” German
plan of extermination, Faurisson branded Six Million Did Die “a brainwashing
book.”
What about the Otto Ohlendorf Trial and the Einsatzgruppen? asked Chris-
tie.
They are becoming increasingly famous, said Faurisson, since some histo-
rians “are trying now to replace the gas chamber.” Fortunately, there is a
countertrend, as revealed in a long article which appeared recently in the jour-
nal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The author was Yaacovnyah Lozowick,
a graduate student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his basic idea is
that we now must revise many things which were formerly accepted about the
Einsatzgruppen. Lozowick reminds us, said Faurisson, that “in many places
where the Einsatzgruppen came, the Jews survived in ghettos or in towns.”
111
In fact, this figure is much older; cf. Don Heddesheimer, The First Holocaust: The Surprising
Origin of the Six-Million Figure, 5th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2018. Editor’s note.
112
IMT, Vol. 3, pp. 571f., does not, however, contain a remark by Walsh that he did not mean it. Edi-
tor’s note.
“It seems that for this author,” said Faurisson, “everything in this matter is
open to question, and it seems that the essential reason is this one: Those fa-
mous [Einsatzgruppen] reports are simply those edited in Berlin and not the
originals written in the field.”
Pearson objected that “no matter what is now said about Ohlendorf, it
doesn’t change what Ohlendorf said [soon after the war], and Six Million Did
Die indicates what Ohlendorf said. Now, if my friend is adducing evidence
that, in fact, Ohlendorf didn’t say those things, then it would be relevant to Six
Million Did Die.”
Judge Thomas let Faurisson continue. The point, said the witness, is that
“there is a kind of revisionism beginning about the Einsatzgruppen.”
What about the alleged counter-order of Himmler, that the extermination
be stopped? asked Christie.
It never existed, said Faurisson. Hilberg’s first edition (1961) mentions it
on page 631: “In November 1944, Himmler decided that for all practical pur-
poses the Jewish question had been solved. On the 25th of that month he or-
dered the dismantling of the killing installations.” Hilberg’s footnote reads:
“Affidavit by Kurt Becher, March 8, 1946, PS-3762.” The problem, said
Faurisson, is that the Becher affidavit has nothing to do with the subject. SS
Officer Dieter Wisliceny testified at Nuremberg that a Fuehrer order to exter-
minate the Jews remained in place until Himmler’s counter-order, and Suzman
and Diamond quoted Wisliceny’s statement, but, said Faurisson, historians no
longer accept it. Wisliceny was never cross-examined about the extermination
at Nuremberg, and, in Faurisson’s opinion, “if there is no cross-examination,
there is no witness.”
“This is getting into areas of speculation,” protested Judge Thomas. “He
doesn’t have any knowledge as to why somebody wouldn’t cross-examine.”
Christie and Thomas began to tangle, and the judge excused the jury.
“Your questions,” complained Thomas, “were dealing with, in essence, tri-
al tactics. This witness had nothing to do with that. He has already told us time
and again that it [i.e., the claims of extermination] wasn’t cross-examined up-
on. He speculated as to the reasons. They [the defense attorneys] were scared;
they were this; they were that. How would he possibly know that?”
My real intention, said Christie, was to elicit his opinion, as an historian,
about the value of evidence which has not been cross-examined.
I won’t allow it, said Thomas, and he called the jury back. Christie in-
quired next about the affidavit of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss (April
5, 1946).
“This statement has absolutely no value,” declared Faurisson, because of
its serious errors. Yet Suzman and Diamond write, “The witness [Höss] was
finally re-examined by Dr. [Kurt] Kauffmann and was also questioned by Dr.
[Otto] Pannenbecker (counsel for the accused, [Wilhelm] Frick). No sugges-
tion was made that his prior affidavit was not given freely and voluntarily, and
again the substance of his evidence relating to the mass exterminations was in
no way questioned.”
Christie: Is that a true statement?
Yes, said Faurisson, it’s true in the sense that Höss’s evidence was not
questioned at Nuremberg, but this fact is presented by Suzman and Diamond
as a proof of its validity. In reality, today’s historians do question some of the
things Höss said, and the ways in which his Allied captors made him say
them.
Faurisson described how Höss once managed to tell a fellow German POW
about the methods used by the Allies to obtain his confessions. The POW later
took the information to Höss’s widow.
Pearson and Thomas objected to the obscurity of the source, so Christie
compared it to the testimony of people like Filip Müller. The difference, said
Thomas, was that Müller was “being relied upon” as an eyewitness, whereas
the German POW who spoke with Höss had only heard something. He then
adjourned the court.
Faurisson returned to the stand on Friday, April 15. He and Christie were
nearing the end of Six Million Did Die, and spent the opening minutes review-
ing some rather-mysterious alleged-atrocity photos at the back of the booklet.
Most of the captions provided nothing solid with which to identify the photos’
origins, and Faurisson pronounced them worthless from a historical viewpoint.
One caption quoted Eliyahu Rosenberg, a witness at the John Demjanjuk
trial in Jerusalem in 1987. Rosenberg is notorious for having sworn in 1946
that “Ivan the Terrible” was killed at Treblinka with a shovel, and then swear-
ing 41 years later that his past testimony was worthless because he now real-
ized that Demjanjuk is “Ivan the Terrible.” Pearson objected to Faurisson’s
questioning the credibility of Rosenberg’s testimony, and Thomas upheld him.
Another photo allegedly showed Elie Wiesel and some other survivors ly-
ing in bunk beds at Belsen, just after liberation. Faurisson noted that some ex-
terminationists have said this scene was at Auschwitz, and others have said
Buchenwald.
One caption reads, “Victims of the Dachau gas chamber lie piled to the
ceiling…” They might be real bodies, said Faurisson, but they weren’t gassed.
Between 1934 and 1945, he noted, exactly 206,206 people passed through
Dachau, and 32,000, or 15%, died there. The Encyclopedia Judaica said that
80 to 90 percent of Dachau’s internees were Jews.113
Germany occupied most of France between June 1940 and August 1944,
said Faurisson. There were about 350,000 Jews in France, of whom only
75,721 were ever deported.
113
During cross-examination (p. 271), Pearson showed that this attribution was incorrect. the ency-
clopedia states that 80-90% of Dachau’s vicitims were Jews, not its internees.
Christie read aloud Faurisson’s short article “The Mechanics of Gassing,”

which Ernst Zündel read for him at the 1979 conference of the Institute for
Historical Review. “I was shocked” as I learned the facts, wrote Faurisson.
“And now, you in turn will also be shocked.” The contradictions in the various
gassing testimonies were summarized in the article, along with the basic tech-
nical realities of Zyklon B, cremation, the ventilation of gases, and the like.
Faurisson’s article described the incredible complexities involved in execu-
tions by gassing in the United States, and concluded: “A gassing is not an im-
provisation. If the Germans had decided to gas millions of people, a complete
overhaul of some very formidable machinery would have been absolutely es-
sential. A general order, instructions, studies, commands and plans would
surely have been necessary also. Such items have never been found. Meetings
of experts would have been necessary: of architects, chemists, doctors and ex-
perts in a wide range of technical fields. Disbursements and allocations of
funds would have been necessary. Had this occurred in a state such as the
Third Reich, a wealth of evidence would surely have survived. We know, for
example, down to the pfennig, the cost of the kennel at Auschwitz and of the
bay trees which were ordered for the nurseries.”
The discordant testimonies about gassings by Germany concurred on one
point, wrote Faurisson: “… the crew responsible for removing the bodies
from the ‘gas chamber’ entered the site either ‘immediately’ or a ‘few mo-
ments’ after the deaths of the victims. I contend that this point alone consti-
tutes the cornerstone of the false evidence, because this is a physical impossi-
bility.”
Christie asked Faurisson if there had been a general discussion of his arti-
cle.
Yes, said Faurisson, and “I remember exactly what Ernst Zündel told me
about it.” Zündel had said very enthusiastically that Faurisson must pursue his
inquiry into the American gas chambers, and find an expert on the subject, for
this held the key to the solution. Zündel’s enthusiasm propelled Faurisson to
the gas chamber in Baltimore, Maryland a few days later, where he took pic-
tures and examined the set-up. These pictures were published in 1980 in a
French book by Serge Thion, whose title in English would be Historical Truth
or Political Truth?
Christie asked Faurisson if he explained to Zündel the conclusions he
reached in Baltimore.
Yes, said Faurisson, and “since that time he has had [what] we call in
French an idee fixé” on the subject.
In his encounters with specialists in execution and cremation, said Fauris-
son, he sometimes found men who were perfectly scientific until the subject of
the Holocaust came up, but then immediately reverted to “magic.” He and
Zündel had discussed the “Pavlov’s dog” which resides in every human
breast, and its frequent activation by mention of the Holocaust. At once, “there
is no more physics, no more chemistry, no more natural law. It’s totally mag-
ic.” One need not be clever to see through it, but only “wake up. That’s all.”
Lethal gassings are a very-complex business, said Faurisson, which is why
the first ever attempted, in Carson City, Nevada in 1924, nearly ended in ca-
tastrophe. Zündel, as “a very practical man,” saw at once that by placing three
doors side-by-side, one could solve the Holocaust problem: an alleged gas
chamber door from Auschwitz (very flimsy), a clothing-disinfection-room
door from Auschwitz (very strong), and the gas-chamber door from Baltimore
(even stronger).
Christie asked Faurisson about West-German restitution to Israel and the
Jews of the world. Faurisson said he agreed with many Jews that the Holo-
caust was being exploited politically. The central figure in the restitution ques-
tion was Nahum Goldmann, former president of the World Jewish Congress,
who spoke about it very candidly in his book The Jewish Paradox. He called
the “astronomical sums” paid an “extraordinary innovation” in international
affairs, and wrote: “Without the German reparations… the state of Israel
would not have the half of its present infrastructure [1978]; every train in Isra-
el is German, the ships are German, as well as electricity, a big part of indus-
try… without mentioning the individual pensions paid to the survivors…”
Do you consider those payments justified? asked Christie.
Faurisson: I don’t want to express an opinion about that, but I’m ready to
express an opinion about the way it was obtained.
When you read The Jewish Paradox, said Faurisson, you realize that
Goldmann was not above common “blackmail.” In the 1950s, the chancellor
of Austria was named Raab. Goldmann asked him to pay, but Raab insisted,
“We were victims of Germany too.” So Goldmann threatened to rent the big-
gest theater in Vienna, and show each day the film of the Viennese saluting
the Nazis’ arrival there in 1938. “Okay,” said Raab, “you will have your mon-
ey.” Later, when Goldmann saw a need for more money, he would return to
Raab and repeat the threat. “It was really blackmail,” said Faurisson.
Christie: All right, do you know who is Michel de Boüard?
Yes, said Faurisson, a prominent French historian who was once interned
in Mauthausen. In 1954, he wrote a monograph on the camp which twice men-
tioned a gas chamber. But in August 1986, he said in an interview with the
magazine Ouest-France: “When the time of reflection had arrived, I said to
myself: where did you arrive at the conviction that there was a gas chamber in
Mauthausen? This cannot have been during my stay in this camp, for neither
myself nor anybody else ever suspected that there was one there. This must
therefore be a piece of ‘baggage’ that I picked up after the war… [I]n my text
– although I have the habit of supporting most of my statements by references
– there was none referring to the gas chamber…”
De Boüard was the president of an association of French deportees, but in
May 1985 he resigned. Asked why, he said, “I found myself torn between my
conscience as a historian and the duties it implies, and on the other hand, my
membership in a group of comrades whom I deeply love, but who refuse to
recognize the necessity of dealing with the deportation as a historical fact in
accordance with sound historical methods. I am haunted by the thought that in
100 years or even 50 years the historians will question themselves on this par-
ticular aspect of the Second World War which is the concentration camp sys-
tem and what they will find out. The record is rotten to the core. On the one
hand, a considerable amount of fantasies, inaccuracies, obstinately repeated
(in particular concerning numbers), heterogeneous mixtures, generalizations,
and, on the other hand, very-dry critical studies that demonstrate the inanity of
those exaggerations. I fear that those future historians might then say that the
deportation, when all is said and done, must have been a myth. There lies the
danger. That haunts me.”
“People are opening their eyes in France,” said Faurisson, who spoke to de
Boüard in 1986.
Faurisson suggested that the important part of de Boüard’s statement was
“the record is rotten to the core.”
Judge Thomas did not like where the evidence was headed, and excused
the jury.
Christie: I would like the witness to be allowed to give his opinion pertain-
ing to who it is that has the “fantasies, inaccuracies, obstinately repeated, het-
erogeneous mixtures, generalizations” and on the other hand, Dr. Faurisson’s
opinion, who does the “very-dry critical studies that demonstrate the inanity of
those exaggerations.” That’s my objective.
Judge Thomas complained that “the witness is being allowed to proceed
without any control,” and should not be saying what “an honest, a good man, a
scientific man” de Boüard was.
When the jury returned, Christie pursued a new line of questioning. Would
you “give us your overall opinion” of the Harwood and the Suzman and Dia-
mond booklets? he asked Faurisson.
“Harwood is obviously [intended] for laymen,” said Faurisson. But it is a
“very good book,” indeed “prophetic,” and “is making history.” The rebuttal
booklet is “what I call rubbish.” Raul Hilberg “never could have signed this
book,” because “there are so many things which are not in accord with [him].”
Were these booklets discussed at the IHR Conference in 1979? asked
Christie.
“I don’t remember any discussion” about either, said Faurisson.
Christie: Has Ernst Zündel ever indicated any doubt to you about his belief
in revisionism?
Faurisson: Never.
Christie: Could you tell us what [your] difficulties [as a revisionist] have
been?
A wide variety, said Faurisson. For example, “I was condemned three

times, in 1981, in 1982 and in 1983,” in both penal [criminal] and civil pro-
ceedings.114
In 1981, the French “exterminationist” historian Leon Poliakov sued
Faurisson and his publisher, Pierre Guillaume, for libel, after Faurisson wrote:
“Conscious of the seriousness of my accusation, I state that I am in a position
to prove that Leon Poliakov is a manipulator of texts and even a forger of
texts.” The confessions of Kurt Gerstein and of Professor Johann Paul Kremer
were those which Poliakov was accused of manipulating. For example, Polia-
kov had changed the area of the “Belzec gas chamber,” allegedly used to gas
700 to 800 people at a time, from Gerstein’s preposterous 25 square meters to
a more-reasonable 93 square meters.
There were “so many things” wrong, Faurisson testified. “I made a total of
his manipulations on six pages, but Carlo Mattogno, the Italian, has published
recently something about Leon Poliakov, and he got really into the detail, and
he showed that Poliakov had made mistakes or manipulations… more than
400 times, in texts which were very short.”
Faurisson read a part of the French lower court’s verdict, which stated that
“Mr. Poliakov could, on some point of detail, have infringed upon scholarly
exactitude,” but insisted that Faurisson had no right to condemn him for it be-
cause Poliakov “had been motivated by a passionate and legitimate desire to
inform the public.”
The libel case was appealed to the highest level, said Faurisson, without
any change in the result. Illness kept him from attending the appellate hear-
ings.115
114
Professor Faurisson, like a number of foreign witnesses for the defense, was handicapped by lan-
guage. Several of these witnesses used a translator; others chose to struggle along in English; at
least one (Maria van Herwaarden) had difficulty sticking to one language. Faurisson chose to use
English, which, given the complexity of much of his testimony, limited his effectiveness to a de-
gree.
In the next few pages, the author has added explanatory material to Faurisson’s very-brief and -
incomplete accounts of three major trials of 1981-83, which he offered under questioning by
Christie. A bit later in the text, the same three trials will reappear, as Faurisson is questioned fur-
ther about them, by Pearson during cross-examination.
115
Elsewhere, Faurisson has written, “In fact, libel must be carefully distinguished from lying or cal-
umny. To libel is to cast a slur upon someone’s reputation. In France, one may libel someone by
accusing him of a verifiable fact. I thought that Poliakov would not lodge a complaint. He was, of
course, the first to know how he had fabricated and manipulated the Gerstein texts. However, Le-
on Poliakov [prodded by others] did lodge a complaint… French law provides the possibility for
the person accused of libel to present an ‘offer of proof’ in the ten days following the complaint.
“In less than ten days, I presented an offer of proof: it was a simple table showing, on the one
hand, the texts that Gerstein was thought to have written and, on the other hand, the incredible
manipulations and fabrications that Leon Poliakov derived from those texts in the course of the
years from 1951 to 1979. That was tangible proof; no reply was possible. French law provides that
the accuser has five days to respond to the offer of proof. I must state that, not surprisingly, Polia-
kov did not offer any response to my offer of proof within the time allowed.”
Instead, Poliakov and his circle pursued the successful strategy of obscuring the real issue by em-
phasizing anti-Semitism and Gerstein’s alleged saintliness. A parade of spurious witnesses was
Another penal suit was brought against Faurisson after he spoke over Ra-
dio Europe-I, a French national station, on December 17, 1980. French law
had given Faurisson the “right of reply” to charges made against him over the
station one day earlier by Jean Pierre-Bloch, president of the activist group
LICRA (the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism). On the
air, Faurisson carefully read his famous “60-word-sentence” about the Holo-
caust, which bears repeating: “The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the al-
leged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which opened
the way to a gigantic political-financial swindle, the principal beneficiaries of
which are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and the principal vic-
tims of which are the German people – but not its leaders – and the entire Pal-
estinian people.”
Faurisson prefaced the sentence with this warning: “Please note! None of
these words is inspired in me by any political sympathy or antipathy!”
LICRA and allied organizations filed a complaint for racial defamation (a
petty charge) and a complaint for incitement to racial hatred (a serious
charge). The lower-court judge who heard this case, Monsieur Cabié, was the
same one who heard the first round of the Poliakov Case – both times in an
atmosphere which Faurisson and other revisionists found detestably bigoted.
In the Radio Europe-I case, two of Faurisson’s Jewish supporters, Claude
Karnoouh and Jacob Assous, spoke in defense of his thesis.
The French plaintiffs misrepresented Faurisson as having asserted on the
radio that Jews deliberately lied about the alleged extermination in order to
make money. To the Toronto court, Faurisson emphasized that his sentence
spoke of a “historical lie,” which “is not a common lie. It means that I don’t
treat the people as liars, I treat them as victims of a lie.”
Faurisson noted that he was ordered to pay the unheard-of sum of about
3,600,000 francs, but that the case was appealed and the fine reduced to sever-
al thousand francs.
The civil suit against Faurisson was, as he suggested in his article “Revi-
sionism on Trial in France,” the “most-important” of the three. It carefully ex-
amined the most-important questions – were the gas chambers a fraud, or was
the fraud rather Dr. Robert Faurisson? “The answer,” wrote Faurisson, “is
flown in from all over Europe, whom Faurisson wished to ask “Do you have any idea of what is at
issue here? Do you know for what precise reasons Mr. Faurisson is criticizing Mr. Poliakov? Do
you realize that the person of Gerstein is not at issue and does not interest us here?” But Fauris-
son’s lawyer elected to maintain a contemptuous silence toward the diversionary witnesses.
Significantly, the judges declared that “the testimony of Gerstein about the functioning of the Nazi
camps is essential.” The Poliakov case proceeded to the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court
of Appeals with no change in the outcome. But the texts of the latter two verdicts are extremely
short, indicating that Faurisson’s ironclad technical case against Poliakov was not even examined
by the appellate judges. (“Revisionism On Trial: Developments in France, 1979-1983,” The Jour-
nal of Historical Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (summer 1985), pp. 133-181, here pp. 155-160.)
quite clear and no misunderstanding is possible. Never – I repeat, never – has

any court convicted me of falsifying history or of any similar crime…”116
The civil suit was brought by nine minority-oriented organizations in the
wake of Faurisson’s revisionist article in Le Monde, on December 19, 1978,
and his two short replies to the ensuing criticism on January 16 and March 29,
1979. Faurisson was charged with “personal damages” which were caused by
his alleged “falsification of history” in his role as an academic.
The lower court rendered its guilty verdict on July 8, 1981. Faurisson was
accused of lacking seriousness, of playing an intellectual game in which he
“denied everything.” The judges also reasoned that he should have let more
time pass so that people could calm down about World War II.
The appeal was pleaded before the First Chamber of the Court of Appeals
of Paris in three sessions, on December 13 and 14, 1982, and February 15,
1983, in the same impressive hall where Marshal Pétain was tried. Faurisson
has described his side’s tactic as having been “to say over and over again that
what we wanted from the other side was really very little:
(1) that it present to the judges one, just one proof of the existence of one
single homicidal gas chamber;
(2) that it furnish one, only one example of falsification on my part.”117
The judges and everyone in the courtroom waited tensely for the proof and
the example to appear. Instead, they got mainly theatrics, like Bernard Jouan-
neau, LICRA’s star attorney, turning to Faurisson and crying out: “Monsieur
Faurisson, you are haunting my nights!” Jouanneau began his plea in this fash-
ion: “Faurisson! Ah! Faurisson again! At home my children ask me: ‘But
when will you be finished talking about Faurisson?’” Jouanneau spoke for two
hours but did not try to produce the requested one example of Faurisson’s fal-
sification. He did attempt several proofs of the existence of a gas chamber,
saying plaintively each time: “Yes, I know. You will tell me that this is not re-
ally a proof.” At the end, Jouanneau left the courtroom and broke down in
tears.
The plaintiffs could not find one witness prepared to testify about seeing
gas chambers, not even Filip Müller, then living in Mannheim, West Germa-
ny, who declined even to make a written deposition. At the last moment,
LICRA did obtain a dubious deposition from one Alter Szmul Fajnzylberg, a
militant Communist atheist Jew, who claimed to have been a Sonderkomman-
do at Auschwitz from 1942 to 1945.
On February 15, 1983, the Attorney General, a Mrs. Flipo, representing the
new Socialist Ministry of Justice, pleaded her case, which was all heart and no
head, by repeatedly evoking emotional scenes like Willy Brandt dropping to
his knees in Warsaw.
116
Ibid., p. 134.
117
Ibid., p. 138.
The guilty verdict of the Court of Appeals, rendered on April 26, 1983;
was in fact a major victory for Faurisson. It stated, as Faurisson told the To-
ronto court, that the defendant was “a serious searcher on the question of the
gas chamber,” and it admitted there was no proof of frivolity, negligence, ly-
ing, or ignoring facts on the defendant’s part. The verdict concluded that the
evaluation of Faurisson’s work lay “solely” with the historians and with the
public. “And that,” said Faurisson, “is the first time that [scholars] have been
authorized by a court to say that the gas chambers have existed, have not ex-
isted, may not have existed. It is a kind of guarantee for a French citizen.”118
Faurisson also mentioned briefly the verdict of December 16, 1987 which
gave his publisher, Pierre Guillaume, the right to resume normal distribution
of his revisionist journal. That was important, said Faurisson, because it
acknowledged the existence of an historical debate on the Holocaust issue.
Have you noticed a change, asked Christie, in what the “historical commu-
nity” thinks of revisionism?
Yes, said Faurisson, “a change favorable to revisionism.” Various Jews
were among those who had “intervened actively in my favor,” some with re-
gard to free speech only (notably Noam Chomsky), but most in support of the
thesis itself. I am not anti-Jewish, said Faurisson, nor even anti-Zionist.
Why are you testifying here? asked Christie.
Because it’s my duty, said Faurisson.
Shortly after the lunch break, John Pearson began his cross-examination of
Robert Faurisson.
“Would you agree,” asked Pearson, “that your theories would be very use-
ful to someone who admired Hitler?”
My duty is to accuracy, said Faurisson, “and I don’t call it ‘the truth’ my-
self I try to be accurate. That’s the only thing I try to do.” In France we say,
“never mind if it pleases Peter or Paul.” Many people have come up to me in
France saying, “Oh, thank you, Dr. Faurisson, you did that for God, [or] you
are an atheist because you are fighting against a religion, the religion of the
Holocaust. The next one could say thank you because it’s against the British
or is for Germany, or for the right or for the left.”
Did you not, asked Pearson, give a speech in Washington, D.C. in 1979
where neo-Nazis were present?
“I am ready,” said Faurisson, “to deliver a speech, in this case, anywhere. I
don’t ask the people… show me your card…” I did feel “very uncomfortable”
when I saw “two young boys with a swastika.”
118
Elsewhere, Faurisson noted that the verdict “began with a sacrilegious sentence. Using a formula-
tion suggesting doubt and using the conditional voice, the court wrote: ‘Mr. Faurisson’s research
dealt with the existence of the gas chambers which, if one were to believe the many testimonies,
were supposedly used during the Second World War to systematically put to death some of the
persons deported by the German authorities.’” (Emphasis Faurisson’s. Ibid., page 140.)
Let’s look at your court cases, said Pearson. Then began a horribly mud-
dled discussion which lasted for the remainder of Friday afternoon. The pros-
ecutor and the witness often seemed unable to agree on translations and other
meanings.
In the Poliakov Suit, said Faurisson, the court emphasized that what mat-
tered most was that Poliakov was “motivated by a passionate and legitimate
desire.” It was very upsetting to be condemned, said the witness, but still “I
am a happy man,” because “they are not able, all those brilliant people, to
bring one proof of the existence of one gas chamber, I don’t want two
proofs…”
Pearson turned to the suit over the “60-word sentence” which Faurisson
read over Radio Europe-I. Now, he asked, didn’t you enjoy making that
broadcast?
Not at all, said Faurisson. I was forced to do it because “I was so strongly
attacked by Mr. Jean Pierre-Bloch, saying that I was a man paid by the Arabs”
to lie.
How did your “60 words” constitute a response to Pierre-Bloch’s allega-
tion? asked Pearson.
“Pierre-Bloch kept saying that I was denying the concentration camps, the
crematories, et cetera,” said Faurisson, “so I had to make the point quite clear,
and I said what I considered [to be] a historical lie, and, as the question is al-
ways asked to me, okay, it’s a historical lie, but why, for whom? Against
whom? I am obliged to give an explanation… When I say that the principal
beneficiaries are this one or that one, and the principal victim this one or that
one, that’s a value judgment.”
Pearson asked Faurisson if this was the offense for which he received a
three-month suspended prison sentence, and the witness said yes.
And were you also fined 5,000 francs, and ordered to pay 4,000 francs in
damages, and 2,000 francs in costs? asked Pearson.
Yes, said Faurisson, and a lot more. “And it’s not finished.”
Judge Thomas: You haven’t finished paying yet?
Faurisson: Absolutely not. I can tell you that when I was here in January…
the bailiff came to my house and ordered my wife to pay. She didn’t pay. He
was to seize our furniture. My wife had to ask for money from her mother to
pay.
At one point in 1981, said Faurisson, choking with emotion, his lips quiv-
ering, my wife and I were reduced to living like paupers for a year to avoid
seizures.
“There are consequences to breaking the law, aren’t there?” asked Pearson
coldly.
Turning to the Le Monde case – the civil suit – Pearson suggested that
Faurisson had been sued for damages for falsifying history “in his capacity as
an academic.”
No, said Faurisson, anyone could be sued.

Pearson: What job were you being paid for?
“None,” said Faurisson, “and that’s the point. My lawyer said you have no
right to use this law against Faurisson. He was not paid. Nobody ordered him
anything. He didn’t receive one franc.” And the tribunal did not judge me on
that basis. I was condemned on April 26, 1983 for having “made people suf-
fer,” but the judgment said that I was serious and honest, implying that any
French citizen may now challenge the gas chambers. But the press, in report-
ing this Court of Appeals judgment, failed to mention this key section.
Pearson read a part of what the judge in the first Le Monde trial said: “Mr.
Faurisson, a French academic, fails in his obligations of caution, objective cir-
cumspection and intellectual neutrality that binds the researcher he wants to
be.”
Quite true, said Faurisson, but the Court of Appeals said very simply “we
don’t agree.”
Pearson read from the judgment of the Court of Appeals: “Faurisson’s log-
ical approach is indeed to try to demonstrate… that the existence of the gas
chambers such as they have usually been described since 1945 runs into an
absolute impossibility which would be sufficient by itself to invalidate all of
the existing testimonies, or at least make them suspect. It is not the job of the
court to speak up on the legitimacy of such a method or on the full signifi-
cance of the arguments set forth by Mr. Faurisson. Nor is it any more permis-
sible for the court, considering the research to which he has devoted himself,
to state that Mr. Faurisson has frivolously or negligently set the testimonies
aside, or that he has deliberately chosen to ignore them… Therefore, the val-
ue of the conclusions defended by Mr. Faurisson rests solely with the apprais-
al of the experts, the historians and the public.”
Another part of the Appeals Court’s judgment accused Faurisson of “avail-
ing himself of every opportunity to mitigate the criminal nature of the deporta-
tions.” Pearson began to read this section, but Faurisson began objecting to
faulty translations and Christie to legal problems.
When the dust finally settled, Pearson read the following from the Appeals
Court’s judgment: “Mr. Faurisson, who is shocked about what he refers to as
the religion of the Holocaust, has never found a word to express his respect for
the victims by reminding his readers of the reality of racial persecutions, of
the mass deportation which caused the death of several millions of people,
Jewish or not. So that… [his work] could play in an attempt at an overall re-
habilitation of the Nazi war criminals.”
I will respond to that, said Faurisson, if you will accept my correct transla-
tion, which is “could look like an attempt” rather than “could play a role in an
attempt.”
Fair enough, said Pearson.
Okay, said Faurisson. “You must look at the text very closely, and it says
that it could ‘look like,’ but it could ‘look like’ to who? That’s the question.
And, of course, I know very well that some people may say Faurisson says
that because he wants to rehabilitate the Nazi war criminals. Of course I know
that. I think that the court is quite right in saying that, but let me tell you that it
is totally wrong [to say] that I have never found one word to show my respect
to the victims, because I have shown my respect.”
Pearson: So, what you’re saying is that another court has made a mistake
with respect to what your intentions are. Is that right?
“Intention is something else,” said Faurisson. This is a blatant mistake be-
cause I have paid my respects.
Pearson quoted the Appeals Court’s judgment as saying, against Faurisson,
that “the general public is induced to undervalue the suffering, if not even cast
doubt on it.” Further, Faurisson’s positions are of such a nature “as to provoke
passionate reactions of aggressivity against those who thereby find themselves
implicitly accused of a lie…”
A “historical lie,” corrected Faurisson.
Pearson returned to Faurisson’s cases against Jean Pierre-Bloch, which the
witness noted had been “many.” After the court had ruled, in the “60-word-
sentence” case, that treating Faurisson as a falsifier was wrong but [that he]
showed “good faith,” Pierre-Bloch, in his newspaper Le Droit de Vivre, trum-
peted the judgment, and, as Faurisson recalled, “after that, I saw everywhere
that I was once more a falsifier. And constantly there are two weapons against
me. One is the ever-good faith of my adversaries. When they say anything
against me, they are of good faith. They are wrong, but they did it with good
faith. And the other one is the public order. Faurisson has the right to say this
and that but he troubles the public order, so, we have to punish him. So, two
pistols, one the public order of the state, and the other pistol, the good faith of
my adversaries.”
The exchange between witness and prosecutor then grew quite muddled,
and Judge Thomas decided it was appropriate to break for the weekend, so
that Faurisson could review the translations of the judgments yet to be dis-
cussed.
Things were clearer on Monday, April 18. Pearson explained that the three
French judgments he would be going over were those of January 16, 1985;
December 16, 1987; and January 28, 1988.
The first involved a suit which Faurisson made against Jean Pierre-Bloch
for public defamation of a private person. The Court of Appeals of Paris dis-
charged the accused, and dismissed Faurisson’s application for damages.
Faurisson had objected primarily to a chapter in Pierre-Bloch’s memoirs
which dealt with his activities as president of LICRA. Pierre-Bloch wrote that
“we are going to turn against forgers,” such as Professor Faurisson, who de-
nies the gas chambers and thus morally injures LICRA.
It was the word “forger” to which he especially objected, said Faurisson.

And the court’s judgment, noted Pearson, reviewed what Pierre-Bloch ac-
cused you of, and one item was your claim on Radio Europe-I, on December
17, 1980, that “the lie of the gas chambers and the alleged Jewish genocide
represents a giant political and financial swindle benefitting the State of Israel
and international Zionism…” Now, “that’s your ‘60 words,’ isn’t it?”
No, said the witness. “It’s Faurisson quoted by Mr. Pierre-Bloch.”
Faurisson pointed out that the court ruled that not only was he not a “forg-
er” in the “strict legal meaning,” but not even in “a figurative way.”
Yet the court went on to dismiss your lawsuit, said Pearson.
“For what reason?” demanded Faurisson.
We’re coming to that, said Pearson. “Now, if we continue with the judg-
ment of the court, I suggest that it says that your work creates a social and ra-
cial intolerance because it gives rise to negative reactions against the Jews.”
“But liable to provoke is not [the same as] to provoke,” cautioned Fauris-
son.
“And the court concludes,” said Pearson, “‘The purpose of informing the
public seems to the court to be sufficiently serious and legitimate as to warrant
the means used [by Pierre-Bloch].’”
Yes, said Faurisson. The court admits that to treat me as a forger is a defa-
mation. “That’s quite clear.” Pierre-Bloch’s own title in his periodical had
read: “defamation but with good faith.” And, after that, “everybody treated me
as a forger [and] falsifier,” since they were protected by the “good faith” de-
fense. That and the “public disturbance” argument are the “two pistols” aimed
at me.
Pearson then moved on to the December 16, 1987 decision of the High
Court of Paris (which is lower than the Court of Appeals). He suggested that
all that decision did was to lift the injunction of May 25, 1987 against Pierre
Guillaume’s new revisionist journal because circumstances no longer warrant-
ed it.
It wasn’t so cut-and-dried, said Faurisson. “[I]n France, [there] was an up-
roar against this verdict. I have [articles] calling it a ‘criminal verdict.’ It
would be impossible in Canada. It would be contempt for the court.”
But, said Pearson, Pierre Guillaume not only wanted the ban lifted, but
sought damages from the eight organizations which applied for the ban.
Faurisson: That’s always what you ask when you consider that you have
been wrongly convicted, punished. You ask for a reparation, but the revision-
ists, they always obtain one franc. When they are punished, it’s always thou-
sands of francs… and when they win, it’s one franc. It will change.
But Guillaume did not even get one franc, said Pearson.
Faurisson wasn’t sure, but said, “It was an extraordinary victory… Espe-
cially when the tribunal said there is now in France an open debate among his-
torians. That’s the first time that I am treated as a historian. I don’t care myself
but they said I was a historian.”
Pearson read from the December 16 judgment, which noted that the May
25 ban had taken into consideration the timing of the release of Guillaume’s
journal, which coincided with the Klaus Barbie Trial in Lyon, and was felt to
be a “provocation… liable to entail, at the present time, violent disturbances
and reactions.” But, the judgment continued, circumstances had changed, and
now the journal and “the controversy liable to result” from it “come under the
free expression of ideas and opinions and constitute a matter for a public de-
bate among historians, [so] the court does not have to exercise a control over
such a discussion.”
Faurisson: That’s what those reasonable and courageous judges said. They
could have said something quite different. They could have said we consider
that it continues that it is a touchy problem and that the revisionists have no
right to publish anything. They could have said that. They said exactly the
contrary.
“We must put all this into context, Mr. Pearson,” said Faurisson, “and see
how the French courts reacted in ‘79, ‘80, ‘81, ‘82, ‘83, up til ‘87. At the be-
ginning, in 1979, do you know that the court decided that I had not even the
right to put gas chamber into quotation marks? To put gas chamber into quota-
tion marks was to show disrespect and to trouble public order and moral order
in France. Can you imagine that? And then in ‘83, they said, okay. He has the
right to say that the gas chamber did not exist but he mustn’t say more.”
Today, said Faurisson, we can go further, but we still “must walk on the
eggs very carefully. If you say [things] in a way which could be considered as
insulting, you are going to be punished.”
Let’s move on to the judgment of January 28, 1988, said Pearson.
I object, said Christie. That judgment was against the French presidential
candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, and “has absolutely nothing to do with this
case.”
Well, said Pearson, this witness, during his examination-in-chief, ranged
far and wide over matters of French law and public opinion.
Proceed, said Judge Thomas.
Pearson: You are familiar with the case of Le Pen, aren’t you?
“Totally,” said Faurisson.
Le Pen was invited, on a national TV show, to give his opinion of revision-
ism, said Pearson.
Faurisson: The question was – suddenly – have you read Faurisson and
Roques?119
119
In 1985, Henri Roques was awarded a doctorate for research, in the Faculty of Letters at the Uni-
versity of Nantes, for a thesis which critically evaluated the six known versions of the “gas cham-
ber confessions” of SS Officer Kurt Gerstein. In April of 1986, leading French Jews launched a
propaganda attack on the thesis and succeeded in having Roques stripped of his doctorate by July
Le Pen’s answer, said Faurisson, was no, but that everything should be
open to debate. Asked further, “but what about the gas chambers?,” Le Pen
called the matter of how the Jews were killed a “detail” of World War II – a
choice of words with which Faurisson said that he, as well as the court, disa-
greed.
Pearson read a portion of the judgment of the Court of Appeals of Ver-
sailles: “[S]urvivors of racial persecution and their families – the defense of
whose collective interest is the respondent’s responsibility – have seen their
right to faithful remembrance, respect, compassion and homage seriously im-
pinged upon. Given that this disturbance is obviously unlawful, starting from
the moment that the contentious comment – which attacks values as funda-
mental as the remembrance of the victims of genocide, worship of the dead,
and the profound and respectable convictions of a virtually unanimous public
opinion – was uttered in the course of a radio broadcast with a large audi-
ence… and that it is beyond the scope of strict historical debate.”
I suggest, said Pearson, that the court at Versailles called public opinion
“virtually unanimous” on this subject, and said that Le Pen’s comments were
“beyond the scope of strict historical debate.”
Faurisson: The court said that, yes.
And the defendant argued, read Pearson, that the meaning of his words was
“deformed by the media.”
Pearson: My point, Dr. Faurisson, is that all of these court decisions can be
summed up, really, in one statement, which is that in France, you and anybody
are free to express opinions about history without any legal restrictions, but
when you publicly make statements which could harm a public interest, such
as the public interest in social and racial tolerance, you break the law.
Faurisson disagreed, so Pearson asked him to sum up the judgments.
Faurisson said he failed to detect a pattern. Sometimes, as in December
1987, “a court says that we have absolutely the right to say that the gas cham-
ber… did not exist.” Other times, as in January 1988, a court focuses on the
potential for “disturbance,” a word used eight times in the short judgment
against Le Pen.
When Faurisson mentioned that he was suspended from teaching in 1979
solely because of his position on the gas chambers, Pearson appeared sur-
2. As Roques has written, “This is the first occasion in the history of French universities that a
thesis accepted by a properly constituted university jury was then rejected by a sort of extra-mural
and self-appointed anti-jury, not qualified by any sort of university authority and, moreover, in the
absence of the doctoral candidate!” (The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1988, page 13.) The
Jewish attack focused on Roques’s revisionist conclusions, not on his faultless method and careful
demonstrations. His doctorate was stolen by means of tiny bureaucratic irregularities which – not
too remarkably – existed in his university file. The tide began to turn in the “Roques Affair” by
August 1986, as prominent French historians like Michel de Boüard and Alain Decaux rallied to
the victim’s defense. Roques has applied to have his doctorate restored and his application was
under review at this writing. (It was ultimately denied. Editor’s note.)
prised. Certainly that was all, said Faurisson. The University of Lyon could
not guarantee his security after several attacks. “The last time it [punching]
happened was in the Sorbonne [in Paris] and Mr. [Pierre] Vidal-Naquet was
there. He said I was an excrement. Mr. Browning was there, and he applaud-
ed. Now, I don’t criticize him. It’s his opinion. It’s really because I said that
the gas chamber did not exist that I got into this trouble. Of course, it’s totally
evident. But now the president of my university is very embarrassed because
he sees very well, as everywhere in the French intellectual circles, that those
gas chambers do not stand anymore.”
The Court of Appeals at Versailles said otherwise, noted Pearson.
“I do not agree” with them, said Faurisson, and France has had no real poll
on the subject.
Pearson: You only run afoul of French law when you accuse the Jewish
community of a gigantic swindle.
But I only said “Zionists,” said Faurisson. Furthermore, I don’t even blame
them for it. “[I]n every country, sir, you have a historical lie… [N]ations are
founded necessarily on legends, on myth… [T]he French have all sorts of
legends…”
My “60-word sentence” only mentions the principal victims of the Holo-
caust legend, said Faurisson. “Among the non-principal victims, I [have] said
the young Jewish generations, which are brought up in this awful Holocaust
religion. I find it awful… to bring up a kid [telling him] that kids like you
were systematically killed in Himmler’s slaughterhouses by one of the most
so-called civilized nations, Germany. Now, what kind of kid are you prepar-
ing? How is he looking at the other peoples if he thinks that one of the most-
civilized nations has done that… ?… I wouldn’t bring up my kid like that… I
think that those people are victims also… and that’s why I have Jews on my
side…”
Revisionism in France is a “leftist movement,” and Le Pen simply “jumped
on the bandwagon,” said Faurisson. “He hurt himself and, five days after, he
recanted more or less. Every time that I see some high responsible [person]
taking a position in favor of revisionists, I look at my watch and I am waiting,
how much time to recant.”
“Quite recently,” said Faurisson, Le Pen “did something much more
grave… He said this war must finish, [that] we can no longer say… that
Germany was worse than the others during the war. And he said something
else: that the future Europe shall not be the Europe of Simone Weil and Julien
Benda. People who know a little bit of history [know that] Julien Benda is the
man who wrote in 1938 that if he had to press a button to kill all the Germans,
he would do it.”
Pearson asked Faurisson if he denied that Paul Rassinier wrote that com-
munist internees were to blame for many deaths in the concentration camps.
Of course not, said Faurisson. Indeed, Rassinier’s position was adopted by

a Paris court in December 1986, which ruled that Marcel Paul and his com-
munist gang were “the real masters inside” the camp at Buchenwald. That was
an “extraordinary judgment of great historical value,” said Faurisson.
“Let’s move on,” said Pearson. You maintain that the “generally accepted
view of the Holocaust has changed since 1946.” Let’s look at the judgment of
the Nuremberg Tribunal, and “see how much” things have changed. Pearson’s
method proved to be to jump back and forth between things said at Nuremberg
and things said by Raul Hilberg in the second edition of his book (1985).
The Nuremberg judgement said that in the summer of 1941, plans were
made for the “Final Solution” and a special section of the Gestapo under
Eichmann was created “to carry out the policy.” Pearson suggested that Hil-
berg, 40 years later, “essentially takes the same position,” and he read from
Hilberg: “Heydrich now took the next step. He instructed his expert in Jewish
affairs, Adolf Eichmann, to draft an authorization that would allow him to
proceed against Jewry on a European-wide basis. In carefully chosen bureau-
cratic language, the draft, not more than three sentences long, was submitted
to Göring, ready for his signature. The text, which was signed by Göring on
July 31, 1941, is as follows.”
Do you agree that Hilberg says this? asked Pearson.
Yes, said Faurisson, “and then [Hilberg] quotes the famous letter of Göring
[to Heydrich], July 31, 1941, which says… ‘Complementing the task already
assigned to you in the directive of January 24, 1939, to undertake by emigra-
tion or evacuation a solution of the Jewish question, as advantageously as pos-
sible under the conditions at the time, I hereby charge you with making all
necessary organizational, functional and material preparations for a complete
solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.’”
Pearson: And I suggest to you that it is clear what that means is, in addition
to the task that I’ve already given you of emigration or evacuation, I now tell
you to make a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere
of influence. That’s what it says there.
“No,” said Faurisson. “Never could this letter of Göring be interpreted as
something meaning extermination. Never. You wouldn’t have a dispute today
between functionalists and intentionalists.”
“Let’s deal with Hilberg,” said Pearson. “Your Honor, I am entitled to ask
this witness about what the text says, what Hilberg’s position is and not have
him, in my respectful submission, delve into irrelevancies about what other
people say.”
Judge Thomas supported Pearson, failing to notice that the prosecutor had
just finished saying to Faurisson, with regard to Göring’s letter – and not any
text of Hilberg – “I suggest to you that it is clear what that means is…” That
is, he was asking Faurisson to comment directly on Göring, not on Hilberg’s
interpretation.
Pearson rephrased his question: “So, Professor Hilberg is of the view, I

suggest, that when it says that Heydrich has been given the task in addition to,
or complementing, the task of emigration or evacuation, to make plans for a
complete solution, that it’s talking about something more than simply emigra-
tion or evacuation.”
“I don’t know,” said Faurisson. “It’s not clear. He is giving one element,
this letter of Göring, and he thinks that it is an element to demonstrate that,
further on, there will be something which he calls extermination.”
“The point, sir,” said Pearson, is that Hilberg considers this memo from
Göring to Heydrich to be “an important part of the decision.” Look at Hil-
berg’s next sentence: “With the receipt of this letter, Heydrich held the reins
of the destructive process in his hands. Soon he would be able to use his man-
date.”
“I agree that he says that without demonstrating it for one minute,” said
Faurisson. “I don’t have the slightest demonstration of [those last sentences].”
“What’s the last paragraph of the memo that’s quoted?” asked Pearson.
“This is Göring to Heydrich: ‘I charge you, furthermore, with submitting to
me in the near future an overall plan of the organizational, functional and ma-
terial resources to be taken into preparing for the implementation of the as-
pired Final Solution of the Jewish question.’”
“Yes,” said Faurisson. “We had already emigration and evacuation in
Germany itself. And now [after the memo], it’s for Europe… Nothing to do
with an extermination.”
Pearson proceeded to what Hilberg had written immediately after the ex-
cerpt about Heydrich receiving a mandate: “For years the administrative ma-
chinery had taken its initiatives and engaged in its forays one step at a time. In
the course of that evolution, a direction had been charted and a pattern had
been established. By the middle of 1941, the dividing line had been reached
and beyond it lay a field of unprecedented actions unhindered by the limits of
the past.”
“I grant you,” said Pearson, “the word plan is not used, but I suggest it is
obvious he is saying that.”
Faurisson: Yes, but the simple fact that it is not used is interesting. It’s no
more the affirmative Hilberg. It’s the man who talks of things vague like that.
He is transforming.
“I suggest two things,” said Pearson. First, the Nuremberg tribunal “draws
a clear connection between the activities of the Einsatzgruppen and the plan to
exterminate the Jews of Europe, and [second], that’s totally consistent with the
position taken by the historians presently.”
Faurisson: But without a plan.
Pearson: Sir, you’re quibbling over words.
“I am not quibbling,” said Faurisson. “We had at Nuremberg something
which was quite clear. There was a plan… And [now], what do we have?”
Hilberg’s formula of “no plan, no budget, but an incredible meeting of

minds.”
“I suggest to you,” said Pearson, that “if you want to find out what a man
really thinks about an area as complicated as this, you look at his three-
volume work,” not at an “interview” he gave.
Well, said Faurisson, when, in 1985, Hilberg was shown that text – not an
interview, but a conference – he agreed with it. The problem is that Hilberg’s
book is often “very vague,” but at the conference he was “rather precise.” “If I
want to know what this man really thinks, I go elsewhere [than his book]. And
I check. That’s why we asked Dr. Hilberg to be clear. Dr. Hilberg has been to-
tally clear in ‘85. No plan, no budget, but at that time he maintained that there
was an order.”
Pearson: Tell me, does the [judgment at Nuremberg] point to a specific or-
der?
I don’t see an order mentioned at this point in the transcript, said Faurisson.
“But I see plan, plan, plan.” And “not one historian today among the extermi-
nationists could say this. It’s impossible not only for this person [Hilberg] but
for many others.”
So you keep saying, said Pearson. Let’s look at what the Nuremberg tribu-
nal said about the Stroop report, which dealt with the clearing out of the War-
saw ghetto. Like Hilberg, said Pearson, the tribunal said the report illustrated a
planned destruction.
Now, isn’t the tribunal in fact saying that? asked Pearson.
“Surely,” said Faurisson.
Pearson: And my question to you is, is it not the position generally accept-
ed by historians that the plan and system [of the extermination] is demonstrat-
ed or illustrated by the Stroop Report?
“Not demonstrated,” said Faurisson.
Pearson: Well, sir, I suggest to you that any reasonable person who reads
the Stroop Report and sees the degree to which the Warsaw Ghetto was
cleaned out, agrees with the [Nuremberg court] that it illustrates the planned
and systematic character of the Jewish persecutions.
Faurisson tried to answer but was cut off. Christie objected, and Pearson
accused the witness of “continually attempting to divert” the subject.
“Part of the problem,” Judge Thomas said to Pearson, is that we keep
“jumping from the [Nuremberg judgement] into Hilberg [and] back.” Let’s
stick with Nuremberg for a while, and establish what they said.
Pearson followed the advice, and began to read from what the Nuremberg
Tribunal said about the Stroop Report: “The planned and systematic-character
of the Jewish persecutions is best illustrated by the original report of the SS
Brigadier-General Stroop, who was in charge of the destruction of the ghetto
in Warsaw, which took place in 1943.” The Stroop Report was then quoted at
length, and Pearson read this quote as well: “The resistance put up by the Jews
and bandits could only be suppressed by energetic actions of the troops day
and night. The Reichsführer-SS ordered, therefore, on the 23rd of April, 1943,
the cleaning out of the ghetto with utter ruthlessness and merciless tenacity.
[etc.]” The Nuremberg Tribunal then noted that Stroop had recorded “elimi-
nating” 56,065 people at Warsaw.
Pearson continued reading as the Nuremberg judgment launched into a
general summary of the alleged Jewish extermination in Europe. “Beating,
starvation, torture and killing were general,” read one sentence, and that was
the theme throughout.
Pearson asked if that was what the Nuremberg Tribunal said, and Faurisson
readily agreed.
Then Pearson addressed the subject of Rudolf Höss, commandant of
Auschwitz, and Faurisson pointed out that his dubious autobiography was not
published until 1958. And the publisher, Martin Broszat, “cut the parts which
were insane… and we know that because the Poles in 1972… published those
parts suppressed by Mr. Broszat.”
Pearson asked if Faurisson was calling the autobiography a “forgery,” and
the latter replied, “I say that this has been written under the control of his
Polish Communist captors.”
The chapter on the gas chambers is “totally preposterous,” said Faurisson.
Pearson: You don’t like the chapter on the gas chambers, but you do like
the chapter where he says he was mistreated by the British, so you accept that?
“No,” said Faurisson. “As everything has been done under the control of
the Poles, I am interested by the fact that he said that.”
Pearson: You would agree with me that at Nuremberg at no time did he
claim that he had been mistreated by his captors? You’d agree?
Yes, said Faurisson.
Pearson: Now, you have said that his testimony at Nuremberg contains ob-
vious errors?
Yes, said Faurisson.
And yet, said Pearson, “you told us in your evidence that Hans Frank, the
governor general of Poland, believed everything Höss said and was so over-
whelmed by his testimony that he admitted guilt for something he hadn’t
done. Didn’t you tell us that?”
Faurisson: I don’t say that [Frank] admitted everything, but he said there
was an extermination.
“Let’s explore this,” said Pearson. Weren’t the “obvious errors [in Höss]
that you, Dr. Faurisson, found” also obvious to Hans Frank?
“That’s a good question,” said Faurisson. “How is it that the Germans were
not sensible to those things? How is it? Or perhaps they were sensible be-
cause… Mr. Gilbert, who was the psychologist of the prison [at Nuremberg],
told us that, for instance, Göring didn’t believe it, but Göring didn’t say that
[he didn’t believe it].”
A more-reasonable explanation, suggested Pearson, is that Hans Frank

found the mistakes in Höss’s testimony to be only minor ones.
Well, said Faurisson, we know that Frank went to Belzec himself to look
for evidence of extermination, and he didn’t find any. But, understanding
Pearson’s larger point, Faurisson offered this explanation: “Frank was a man
totally overwhelmed by the defeat, by the fact he had been tortured, also by
what Höss was saying, and it’s so emotional that I understand that. Myself, at
one time, I was nearly ready to say that the gas chamber existed. I can tell you
[that] in September ‘79, I nearly wrote a letter to say, ‘Okay, they existed,’
because, you see, you want to get out of the hot water and you are ready – a
confession, sir, is the result of a confrontation with your victor. You must see,
in questioning, who holds the whip. That’s the question.”
“I’m sure,” said Faurisson, “that he was able to say anything at that time,
Hans Frank… He was not the only German who reacted like that. Becoming
totally Catholic [etc.]… What does it mean when a man is desperate like
that?”
Pearson: What it means [is] he knows the jig is up and Höss has testified
and they know what’s happened at Auschwitz.
Well, said Faurisson, “that’s your interpretation.” The major gassing con-
fessions involved “chemical impossibilities,” but the defeated Germans lacked
the “technical cognizance” to refute them.
Pearson: What technical education do you have, Dr. Faurisson?
“I tried my best,” said Faurisson. I talked to many experts.
Yes, said Pearson, and some told you they believed in the Holocaust.
“What you should do,” said Faurisson, “to prove I am wrong, is to ask an
American gas-chamber specialist to come [here] and testify.” (Faurisson was
well aware that Fred Leuchter [an American gas-chamber specialist] was pre-
paring to testify.)
After a lunch break, Pearson said he would read Raul Hilberg’s account of
“the process whereby the decision was arrived at to exterminate the Jews of
Europe,” from the second edition of The Destruction of the European Jews
(1985): “For years the administrative machine had taken its initiatives and en-
gaged in its forays one step at a time. In the course of that evolution a direc-
tion had been charted and a pattern had been established. By the middle of
1941, the dividing line had been reached and beyond it lay a field of unprece-
dented actions unhindered by the limits of the past. More and more of the par-
ticipants were on the verge of realizing the nature of what could happen now.
Salient in this crystallization was the role of Adolf Hitler himself.”
“That’s typical of the book,” exclaimed Faurisson, who began to critically
analyze many of the words and phrases. Participants were “on the verge of re-
alizing the nature of what could happen now,” he repeated. “What does it
mean to ‘realize what could happen now’?… ‘Salient in this crystallization…
’ That’s typically the kind of word that Hilberg didn’t use in the past.”
Are you saying, asked Pearson, that the German policy or plan “was to col-
lect all the Jews together in transit camps during the war when you had no in-
tention of doing anything with them until the end of war”?
No, said Faurisson, in transit camps, ghettos, labor camps, and other plac-
es. Hitler’s stated policy was to postpone the solution of the Jewish question
until after the war.
If the policy was one of sending Jews toward the East, asked Pearson, then
why were many Galician Jews sent west to Auschwitz and Treblinka?
It wasn’t always east, said Faurisson. Large numbers of Hungarian Jews
were sent west to factories in Germany and Austria.
Pearson read from Hilberg: “Then one day towards the end of the summer,
Eichmann was called into Heydrich’s office where the RSHA[120] chief told
him: ‘I have just come from the Reichsführer. The Fuehrer has now ordered
the physical annihilation of the Jews.’” Now, asked Pearson, “isn’t that a pret-
ty specific order?”
Yes, said Faurisson. “[T]hat’s the place where Mr. Browning was quite
right when he said that Hilberg systematically erased in his new edition every
mention of an order… putting only one mention of an order in a footnote. It’s
footnote 30, page 402.”
Nonetheless, it is a reference in Hilberg to an order? asked Pearson.
Yes, said Faurisson, but this “little shy mention” of an order goes into a
footnote because Hilberg has doubts of his own about it. He writes that
“Eichmann [elsewhere] suggested more-plausibly” that Hitler’s order came
later. In any event, said Faurisson, compare this with Hilberg’s first edition,
and “you will see that there is a world [of difference] between Hilberg Num-
ber One and Hilberg Number Two.”
Pearson: Who do you suggest should have been relied on [besides] Eich-
mann and Höss, the two people who had first-hand knowledge and were in-
volved in the operation?
“Show me a proof,” said Faurisson. “Don’t tell me, Mr. Eichmann or Mr.
so-and-so said that, etc. No. All that would have been transformed into a fan-
tastic machinery to exterminate the Jews. You’d have needed a real budget in
a country which is at war… You have to make a decision. You have to say
the trains will be like this, the coal that we need will be like that, etc., etc. Nod
theory, what does it mean? From Berlin, he’s doing a nod, and the other one is
doing a nod, and they are all doing nods? Those bureaucrats?”
“Let’s go back” to the tribunals at Nuremberg, said Pearson. They never
suggested, in their verdicts, that mass gassings were going on at Dachau, did
they?
No, said Faurisson, but nevertheless there were “many testimonies” and
even an “official report” about gassings at Dachau.
120
Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office.
Judge Thomas had a question: “Did the International Military Tribunal

judgment suggest that there were any gassings of Jews in concentration camps
in Germany?”
“In the judgment, no,” said Faurisson.
Pearson then cited a 1983 German book, the title of which, in English,
would be National-Socialist Mass Killings through Poison Gas (by Kogon,
Langbein, et al.), which accused revisionists of intentionally “exploiting” the
“confusion” which exists in early reports about Dachau.
Well, said Faurisson, these authors still “have the nerve to say that there
was a gas chamber [unused] in Dachau. What proof?” And, of course, I also
mentioned the fraudulent confessions of gassings performed at Ravensbrück
and Sachsenhausen.
Pearson: Would you agree with me that, with respect to Dachau, a number
of Nazis were executed for beatings, starvations, other types of mistreatment
of the prisoners, but not for gassing? With respect to Dachau, isn’t that true?
Yes, for Dachau, said Faurisson. “But what about the others?”
Pearson changed the subject, asking Faurisson about his dispute with Da-
vid Irving over the role of Himmler. Faurisson explained that their only disa-
greement concerned the existence of a 1944 Himmler Order to stop the exter-
mination, which Faurisson denied.
After a break, Pearson and Faurisson looked at Nuremberg Document NO-
1611, a memo signed by Himmler dated October 9, 1942, which calls for the
gradual replacement of Jewish labor in Polish factories with Poles. The goal
was to concentrate Jews in large concentration-camp factories in eastern Po-
land, and, “someday,” make those Jews “disappear” too, “in accordance with
the Fuehrer’s wishes.”
Faurisson gave his explanation: “It doesn’t mean that [the Jews] are going
to die or be killed.” The goal was “total separation.”
Pearson next produced Himmler’s speech at Posen of October 4, 1943,
where he spoke of “the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jew-
ish race.”
“Big words,” said Faurisson. Meanwhile, 200,000 Hungarian Jews were
being deported to work in German arms factories. “That’s what he called ‘ex-
termination.’” This was typical “warrior phraseology that you find every-
where.” “Churchill said things like that about the Germans.”
“‘We must be fanatics.’ That’s what it means,” concluded the witness.
Pearson asked if there was a Hitler Order telling Himmler to “deport the
Jews to transit camps.”
“Not that I know of,” said Faurisson.
Pearson: Is there a budget that you can show us where monies are set aside
for transporting Jews to transit camps?
Yes, said Faurisson. One can find it in Hilberg’s book about the sending of
special trains to Auschwitz. “We have every detail.”
Pearson: Hilberg says that that is evidence of the Jews being sent to Ausch-
witz to be gassed, doesn’t he?
That’s correct, said Faurisson.
Pearson: How many millions of Jews were deported?
Faurisson: We do not know, and we should know.
Pearson: So I take it then there is no blueprint or plan that sets out this pro-
cess of deportation that you say was going on?
Well, said Faurisson, there are “many plans, many blueprints” for “this and
that.” For example, the Jews of Poland were located in about 1,000 places
“and the Germans decided to put them in 55 places. And we have a quantity of
documents about that.”
Pearson: And all that took place without any order from Hitler?
“Yes,” said Faurisson. “The order was to send them to the East.”
When Hilberg quotes Eichmann, said Faurisson, we have “no document,
nothing. [But] we have everything for the deportation of the Jews. Everything.
And for the extermination, nothing.”
At the archives in Koblenz, West Germany, said Faurisson, are billions of
pieces of paper from the Reich Security Main Office alone, which is alleged to
have had responsibility for deportation and extermination. In 1986, I asked Dr.
Henke, the specialist, if there were indeed billions, and he agreed. “My next
question was: ‘How many documents do you have among those pertaining to
gassings?’” None, he responded.
Pearson returned to the Wannsee Conference Protocol, and disputed its
meaning with Faurisson. The witness insisted that “the text quite clearly says
that they [the Jews who survived forced labor] will be liberated.”
Pearson and Faurisson then argued for several minutes about the affidavit
of SS officer Kurt Becher, and what it said about the alleged Himmler order of
November 25, 1944 to end the extermination. Pearson noted the support which
Nuremberg defendant Ernst Kaltenbrunner gave to the Becher affidavit, and
the credit he took for having helped bring about the stop-extermination or-
der.121
Pearson then produced the booklet Six Million Did Die, and argued that the
cropping of photos from Belsen and elsewhere was not intended to deceive.
Faurisson thought it was deliberate. “We have plenty of books on the Hol-
ocaust where you have this kind of practice.”
Elsewhere in Six Million Did Die, Harwood was accused of having said
that the prosecutors at the Eichmann Trial “deliberately avoided mentioning”
121
Becher later stated that Himmler’s order had been to surrender concentration camps threatened by
the enemy peacefully in order to spare human lives. The “conditions in Nuremberg” had caused
him to give false testimony there. In fact, he had first learned of the extermination of the Jews af-
ter he had been brought to Nuremberg as a prisoner; cf. Göran Holming, “Himmlers Befehl, die
Vergasung der Juden zu stoppen”, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, Vol. 1, No. 4,
1997, pp. 258f.; online: www.vho.org/VffG/1997/4/HolHim4.html. Editor’s note.
the figure of “six million.” Pearson took Faurisson to the first words spoken
by Prosecutor Gideon Hausner at the trial: “As I stand here before you, Judges
of Israel, to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone.
With me in this place and at this hour, stand six million accusers.”
Faurisson conceded Harwood’s error.
Pearson: Now, Harwood also says that the Holocaust is an invention of
post-war propaganda. That’s wrong, isn’t it?
I tend to agree with him, said Faurisson. “It’s more a post-war propaganda
than a propaganda during the war. The people who expanded this rumor about
the extermination tried to do it and really not with very much success, and the
success came in March, April, May 1945, when Dachau, Buchenwald and
Belsen were discovered. So I agree it is… more something of the post-war
[period] than from the war itself.”
But the Joint Allied Declaration of December 17, 1942 called Poland a
“Nazi slaughterhouse,” said Pearson.
Yes, agreed Faurisson, we had “things like that” all through the war. “It
doesn’t mean a gas chamber. It doesn’t mean something specific. If the Allies
had known about something like a physical extermination in gas chambers,
they would not have behaved as they behaved.” Faurisson mentioned a French
book by Annette Wieworka which admits that, in fact, during the war, nobody
knew with certainty about an extermination.122
Court was adjourned, and resumed on Tuesday, April 19. Pearson asked to
have three items entered as exhibits: the Himmler Memo of October 9, 1942;
the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg which he
and Faurisson had gone through; and pages 393-407 of Hilberg’s book, deal-
ing with the decision-making behind the “Final Solution.” He requested that
the latter two items be combined as one exhibit, to help the jurors “assess
[Faurisson’s] evidence that the generally accepted view of the Holocaust has
changed.”
Despite Christie’s objecting to the Himmler Memo as a form of “hearsay,”
Judge Thomas accepted it as an exhibit during the next break in the proceed-
ings. But he rejected the other two proposed exhibits.
Pearson read to Faurisson some of his previous testimony about Dachau.
Questioned by Christie, he had said that, according to the Encyclopedia Judai-
ca, 80 to 90 percent of the Dachau survivors were Jews. Pearson went to the
encyclopedia, and read: “The exact number of people killed in Dachau is not
known; at least there were more than 40,000, of whom probably 80 to 90 per-
cent were Jewish.”
Faurisson appeared to become captivated by two matters which Pearson
was not interested in asking him about: the distinction between “died” and
“killed,” and the divergence between “more than 40,000” dead at Dachau,
122
Ils étaient juifs, résistants, communistes, Denoël, Paris 1986, pp. 173-176.
32,000 dead, and the much-lower figures which are given today. Consequent-
ly, Pearson – try as he might – could never get Faurisson to recognize that the
phrase “80 to 90 percent were Jewish,” in the encyclopedia, referred not to the
Dachau “survivors,” as he had testified, but only to the “people killed.”
Pearson then had another drawn-out tussle with Faurisson, but this time the
witness finally conceded, “You are right. I am wrong.” The dispute was over
what Suzmann and Diamond wrote about the Wannsee Conference in Six Mil-
lion Did Die, and Faurisson’s testimony about what they wrote. Pearson read
back this exchange:
Christie: Is there anywhere in the protocol of the Wannsee Conference any
reference to different methods of extermination?
Faurisson: None.
Now, asked Pearson, did Suzman and Diamond actually write that there
was a reference in the protocol to “different methods of extermination”? Or
did they merely write, “Eichmann at his trial admitted… “?
Faurisson seemed to miss the point: “In the Wannsee Protocol, we have no
trace” of this extermination talk, he said.
Sir, said Pearson, all Suzman and Diamond wrote is that “Eichmann at his
trial admitted…”
Something clicked, and Faurisson acknowledged his misunderstanding.
After German reparations were briefly discussed, Pearson brought up
Faurisson’s correspondence with Richard Harwood in the mid-1970s. Fauris-
son said that the “possible mistake” which especially concerned him was
Harwood’s attribution to Hilberg of a Jewish death toll for World War II of
less than a million.
As for Harwood’s right-wing politics, said Faurisson, “I am not interest-
ed… I listen to everybody.”
Christie began his re-examination by noting that “the Crown produced two
transcripts or copies of judgments involving yourself and one involving a Mr.
Le Pen.” He then asked: “How many lawsuits have you been involved in?”
Faurisson: I think seven.
Christie: How many have you won?
Faurisson: Four.
Christie: And how many have you lost?
Faurisson: Three.
Christie: Are they all related to the subject matter of what you found in re-
spect to the extermination theory?
Faurisson: Yes.
Judge Thomas ended the exchange, saying, “You had an opportunity to do
that in examination-in-chief where that matter could be the subject of cross-
examination. You touched on the lawsuits that you felt were important.”
Christie turned to the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at
Nuremberg, and asked Faurisson if there were portions of it, unread by Pear-
son, which demonstrated the difference between thinking about the Holocaust
then and now.
Yes, said Faurisson and named a few. Then Christie mentioned that the
judgment contained no reference to gassings at Dachau.
That’s right, said Faurisson, but “many times [in the evidence] they talked
about gassings at Dachau.” In the judgment, they only mentioned Auschwitz
and Treblinka as two examples of camps where gassings occurred. “But for
the accused, for everybody attending the Nuremberg trial, there had been a gas
chamber and gassings actually in Dachau.”
Christie had Faurisson read a few excerpts from near the beginning of Hil-
berg’s 1985 edition. From page 53: “The process of destruction unfolded in a
definite pattern. It did not, however, proceed from a basic plan.” From page
55: “Even though a particular office might have exercised a supervisory func-
tion in the implementation of a particular measure, no single organization di-
rected or coordinated the entire process.” From page 62, the conclusion of
Hilberg’s introduction: “The destruction of the Jews was thus the work of a
far-flung administrative machine. This apparatus took each step in turn… No
special agency was created and no special budget was devised to destroy the
Jews of Europe. Each organization was to play a specific role in the process
and each was to find the means to carry out its task.”
Christie mentioned the letter from Göring to Heydrich of July 31, 1941,
which the Crown had suggested was “proof of a plan of extermination,” and
then asked Faurisson to read from Christopher Browning’s book Fateful
Months.
Faurisson read: “The significance of this document is open to debate. Most
historians have assumed that it refers to an extermination program. In contrast,
Broszat and [Uwe Dietrich] Adam have interpreted it in terms of a ‘compre-
hensive program for the deportation of the Jews’ to Russia and an attempt of
Heydrich to strengthen his jurisdictional position to carry out this task.”
Faurisson seemed to recall that, in another place, Browning had gone fur-
ther and himself called the Göring letter “insignificant.”
The last minutes of Faurisson’s testimony were devoted to his going over
portions of Eichmann’s testimony in Jerusalem, particularly about the Wann-
see Conference. Faurisson noted that Eichmann said the discussion about ex-
termination methods occurred during an informal part of the conference, and
poison gas was not mentioned. Faurisson also noted Eichmann’s testimony
about the extermination buildings at Auschwitz, where he became confused
and could not recall if he had seen things or simply read or been told about
them. Eichmann’s hesitancy did not surprise Faurisson because the former, in
his prison cell, could read only books like Poliakov’s.
Chapter 8: Fred Leuchter and His Report
A
s Professor Faurisson gathered his belongings, Douglas Christie called
as his next witness Bill Armontrout, the stocky, carefully spoken war-
den of the Missouri State Penitentiary. Armontrout’s job keeps him in
courtrooms more than half the time, and his experience showed in Toronto.
Christie quickly elicited that Armontrout’s responsibilities include the di-
rection of Missouri’s executions, traditionally by hydrogen-cyanide (HCN)
gas. Though Missouri had executed no one during’ Armontrout’s tenure, he
had witnessed two gassings in other states, and helped with one.123
Armontrout described for the court, with the aid of slides, the incredibly
complex business of conducting a lethal gassing. He noted that 38 people “are
closely involved on-site” in such an operation in Missouri, while more than
200 participate indirectly.
The Missouri gas chamber measures six by ten feet, and has steel walls and
sealed, airtight doors. At the top of the chamber is an exhaust vent with a
powerful fan used to send the gas up a 40-foot stack. Armontrout said he
would never attempt an execution without a high stack. Even with it, the
guards stationed on two towers nearby must vacate their posts while the gas is
vented.
Christie: Without that ventilation fan, how long would it take you to clear
the chamber?
Armontrout: Oh, I wouldn’t have any idea. I think you would have to
abandon the [entire] area and open your [valves] and hope you have enough
draft across there to clear, but I wouldn’t have any idea. It would take many,
many hours.
123
At three minutes past midnight on January 6, 1989, Bill Armontrout presided over his first execu-
tion, and Missouri’s first since 1965. It was accomplished, however, by means of a lethal injec-
tion.
The Missouri system places a bucket of water-and-sulphuric-acid solution

beneath the condemned man, into which 37 cyanide pellets (about one pound)
are tipped with a lever. The solution is kept warm, explained Armontrout, so
that the pellets will “gas off quickly.”
Christie asked how quickly death occurs, and Armontrout said he kept
count at the last gassing he witnessed. “[At] the time I heard the lever drop, I
started my count, and I counted to ten and I noticed his eyes glazed over. At
the count of about fifty-eight, the fellow, in my opinion, was dead. However,
the EKG machine [took] 13 minutes before the doctor had a flat line and he
was [pronounced] dead.”
The Missouri chamber contains four ammonia reservoirs to help neutralize
the cyanide gas. “The ammonia goes in as you start your purging, as you start
expelling the gas.” The ventilation fan runs for about an hour, and then two
officers equipped with rubberized clothing and Scott air packs (such as fire-
men use in smoke-filled buildings) enter the chamber, remove the bucket of
solution, and begin to hose down the condemned man, “paying particular at-
tention to the hair and the clothing.” Finally, they hose down the entire cham-
ber with cold water.
Armontrout emphasized that practice drills are always made at least once a
month, and then nightly for a week before a possible execution date. The state
executes at a minute past midnight, and “many checks” are made on the sys-
tem during the preceding 20 hours. To ensure the safety of prison employees,
close coordination of the operation is imperative.
Christie asked the warden how he would tackle a gassing job involving a
room 30 meters long and seven meters wide. Armontrout’s response suggested
his reluctance to concede that such an operation might be deliberately under-
taken: “I think it would be dangerous,” he said, “if that [gas] got loose that
way. Without proper ventilation… it would be very dangerous.” (Emphasis
added.)
After a break, Christie inquired: “Could you tell me, Mr. Armontrout, if it
will be feasible for a person to enter the gas chamber minutes after a lethal
gassing, and eating and smoking?”
Pearson said he objected to the question unless the witness confined his an-
swer to his own gas chamber, in which case, he said, the answer would be “ir-
relevant.”
Armontrout confined himself, saying, “it would not be advisable in the
[Missouri] chamber.”
Christie asked Armontrout if, in the course of his work, he ever consulted
experts in the operation, maintenance, and design of gas chambers.
Yes, said the warden, but there is now only one consultant in the field in
the United States.
“And who is that?” asked Christie.
“Fred Leuchter.”
Pearson’s cross-examination was brief. “Would you agree,” he asked Ar-

montrout, “that you have really two objectives? The first one is to execute the
condemned man as humanely as possible, and the second objective is to en-
sure that the safety of everybody else other than the condemned man is as
closely guarded as possible?”
Armontrout agreed, and then Pearson asked, “Would you be able to com-
ment on my suggestion that hydrogen cyanide basically either kills you or it’s
expelled from the body quickly?”
“I do know,” said Armontrout, “that there is a first-aid kit that if you don’t
get a very heavy dose, that it’s possible to bring that person around.”
Pearson suggested that while 300 parts of HCN per one million parts of air
is fatal for humans, in cases of absorption “purely” through the skin the fatal
ratio is 20,000 parts of HCN per one million of air. Armontrout said he was
unfamiliar with the matter.
After a break, Kenneth Roy Wilson was sworn as the next defense witness,
and questioned by Christie about his expertise with the jury absent. Wilson, a
ruddy and freckled man in his mid-forties, sporting a reddish-blond crew cut,
testified that he received a Master of Applied Science degree at the University
of Toronto in 1969 in Photogrammetric Engineering. The next year, he opened
his own business, Anaphoto Services, which has since performed consulting
work for companies which draw maps.
Wilson reviewed some of the sophisticated triangulation and other equip-
ment which he uses in his work, such as a “measuring arch,” a tiny beam of
light forty-thousandths of a millimeter in diameter used in measuring photo
imagery. Under optimal conditions, said Wilson, he can accurately measure
distances on aerial photographs of “down to a few thousandths of a millime-
ter.” Since 1970, he has been “involved extensively in examining and making
judgments upon aerial photographs.”
Pearson declined to question Wilson on his qualifications, but expressed
concern about the relevance of his testimony. Judge Thomas agreed that
“some outline” of the testimony was needed with the jury absent, to determine
its admissibility.
Christie mentioned three areas which Wilson had examined closely on the
aerial photos of Auschwitz made by Allied flyers, which the defense paid the
National Archives $2,200 to greatly enlarge. These three areas were: the
swimming pool at Auschwitz I; the road which goes between Crematories II
and III at Birkenau (Auschwitz II); and, in particular, the roofs of the Leichen-
keller (morgues, or alleged gas chambers) of Crematories II and III at Birke-
nau. The key photos for the Leichenkeller roofs were those taken on August
25 and September 13, 1944.
Pearson remained unsatisfied: “I would like to know what he’s going to
say about these things, and, in my respectful submission, I’m entitled to know
before he gives the evidence in case, in my view, he has exceeded his area of
expertise…”
This is “delicate evidence,” agreed Judge Thomas, and “I want to be cer-
tain” that it’s all admissible.
“I can’t predict everything that the witness is going to say,” said Christie,
“but I understand that on the imagery of August 25, 1944, he found patches
visible which have no elevation. He hasn’t concluded what causes such patch-
es but… they are not shadows, in his opinion. And on the imagery of Sep-
tember 13… looking at the same objects, he sees no such [patches].”
What’s the relevance? asked Pearson.
Well, said Judge Thomas, “it can be linked to Felderer’s testimony. Felder-
er had certain discussions with Mr. Zündel. Felderer had been there frequent-
ly, to put it mildly,” and he examined some of these things. “As to the weight
to be attached to it, if any, that’s another matter.”
The jury returned, and Christie, after reviewing Wilson’s qualifications, re-
ferred him to a series of enlarged aerial photographs, most of which would be
passed over as “of no great consequence.”
The first important photos, numbered 3055 and 3069, and dated May 31,
1944, showed Crematories II and III at Birkenau. Wilson said he had exam-
ined the roofs of the Leichenkeller (morgues), and determined that the dark
patches were flat – without any elevation.
The next important photo, numbered 3183, and dated August 25, 1944,
showed what Wilson said “could be a swimming pool” at Auschwitz I.
Next was Photo 3185, also dated August 25, 1944, showing Crematories II
and III at Birkenau. Christie noted that “there appears, visible to the naked
eye, four black marks along the roof of the Leichenkeller in a straight line
down the middle. Have you looked at those?”
Yes, said Wilson, and they are not shadows, nor do they have elevation. He
called them “patches,” but could not identify what they were.
Looking at the Leichenkeller roofs on both Crematories II and III, asked
Christie, have you found “anything of any elevation at all”?
No, said Wilson, adding that his accuracy, in this case, was at the level of
one meter.
Christie then proceeded to Photo Number 6V2, dated September 13, 1944.
Wilson explained that the “patches” seen on the Leichenkeller roofs less than
three weeks earlier were no longer present, with one possible exception.
Again, nothing of any elevation was present.
Christie: Now, in any of these aerial photographs, were you able to deter-
mine anything about a swimming pool in Auschwitz I?
Wilson: I saw what looked like a swimming pool in a number of photo-
graphs. On one of the photographs, I noticed it looked like there were diving
boards there.
Christie concluded by asking if a road passed between Crematories II and

III.
Yes, said Wilson, there was a road, as “everybody can see” on the photos.
Pearson began his cross-examination by advising Wilson that he would be
referring to the Leichenkeller as “gas chambers.” He then asked about the roof
patches visible on the photo of May 31, 1944: “Would you agree with me that
those patches are consistent with openings into the gas chambers?”
No, said Wilson. “My impression is that they are discolorations on the
[concrete surface].”
And were those patches still there on August 25? asked Pearson.
Yes, said Wilson.
Pearson elicited that the photo of August 25 was on a scale of one to
10,000, while that of September 13 was one to 12,000. This could have a
slight effect on image quality, agreed Wilson.
Pearson then showed Wilson a reference report from the Cartographic
Branch of the National Archives, which said, with respect to Photo 6V2 of
September 13: “Image quality average. Smoky or hazy appearance because of
bombing activity.” For the photo of August 25, however, the image quality
was called “good.”
That’s a “subjective evaluation,” said Wilson. Looking at “my notes here, I
don’t have anything written down where the imagery [of September 13] was
obscured by smoke or haze, and I thought I was seeing pretty good imagery.”
Asked about the swimming pool, Wilson said he thought he could see wa-
ter in it in addition to the diving boards.
Pearson: Do I understand [correctly] that these are not particularly good
photographs for determining the heights of things?
Wilson’s answer was technical: with regard to “the geometry involved in
stereo,” no they were not, but “they are very good for determining elevations
of some features based on the shadow that they cast.” Some of the elevations
he had calculated for the chimneys connected to the crematory furnaces
(which are not on the Leichenkeller roofs) “looked pretty good,” said Wilson.
That ended Pearson’s questioning, there was no re- examination, and the
court was adjourned.
The night of April 19-20 was a hectic one at “Zündelhaus.” Some staffers
got to bed by one or two in the morning, but others worked non-stop until
dawn and beyond. The Leuchter Report124 on the alleged gas chambers had to
be presented in court the next morning, and so Professor Faurisson, retired re-
search chemist William L. Lindsey, Attorney Barbara Kulaszka, and others
went at it furiously, typesetting, printing, and collating. There were also legal
124
This was the first of a total of four reports that Fred Leuchter produced in the following years.
They were later republished with critical comments.: Fred A. Leuchter, Robert Faurisson, Germar
Rudolf, The Leuchter Reports. Critical Edition, 5th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2017;
online: https://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=16. Editor’s note.
problems to discuss, since the admission of the report, and even of Leuchter’s
testimony, was by no means certain.
At 7:30 a.m., two of the all-night workers rushed off to a local bindery,
which bound their papers in the required legal fashion. By 9:00, they were
back with 10 or 20 bound copies of the Leuchter Report – just in time to head
to court. The entire defense team was justifiably tired and anxious as the trial
resumed at 10:04 a.m. on Wednesday, April 20.
Judge Thomas: Yes, sir?
Christie: I think, Your Honor, you wanted to have me indicate who the
next witness would be.
Judge Thomas: Yes.
Christie: And this morning I decided that would be Mr. Fred Leuchter. He
was referred to by Warden Bill Armontrout as the person that he consulted
pertaining to gas chambers.
Judge Thomas: Oh, yes.
Christie reminded the court that Leuchter is the only person consulted by
American authorities on lethal gassings by hydrogen cyanide.
Judge Thomas: What’s the essence of the evidence going to be?
“He was commissioned by Mr. Zündel to go to Poland,” explained Chris-
tie. There he extensively investigated the alleged gas chambers to determine
their capability to do what the standard Holocaust literature says they did. “I
received a report last night as to his findings. Actually, I received it this morn-
ing. I would be seeking to qualify him as an expert in the maintenance, design,
construction and operation of lethal gas chambers using hydrogen cyanide,
and would be seeking his opinion [as] to whether the facilities located at
Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, in his observation and opinion, after a
thorough examination and measurements… would be capable of having ac-
complished the purposes alleged.”
After providing copies of the Leuchter Report to Pearson and Judge Thom-
as, Christie began to question Leuchter on the voir dire about his qualifica-
tions. The witness was totally the engineer in manner, pausing to reflect be-
fore each answer (the only witness to do so), and then speaking slowly and
precisely.
Leuchter’s experience is impressive. In the field of execution hardware
alone, he can boast of:
– Designing the first and only test for an electric chair.
– Designing and constructing the first lethal injection machine in the state of
New Jersey.
– Designing and building the gallows used by Delaware.
– Being the only consultant on execution gas chambers anywhere in the
world today.
– Redesigning and modifying several electrocution systems, for which he

manufactured all new hardware.
– Performing execution supervision and support services.
Leuchter also holds a research medical license, which permits him to carry
and administer drugs, and is currently designing a pulse-monitoring device.
He holds patents in fields like optics, encoding, navigation, surveying, and ge-
odetic instruments.
Naturally, Leuchter keeps abreast of all the scientific literature pertaining
to hydrogen cyanide, its uses and dangers.
On cross-examination, Pearson learned that Zündel engaged Leuchter’s
services early in February 1988. In addition to performing seven days of on-
site research in Poland, Leuchter prepared himself by reading selected perti-
nent literature about the Holocaust: a large portion of Raul Hilberg’s The De-
struction of the European Jews; an article by Dr. William B. Lindsey called
“Zyklon B, Auschwitz, and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch”; an article by Frie-
drich P. Berg titled “The German Delousing Chambers”; a document from
Nuremberg concerned with the normal prewar use of Zyklon B; some postwar
documents from the Du Pont and DEGESCH companies, also about the nor-
mal use of Zyklon B; and a number of plans and documents which were ob-
tained at the museum facilities at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek.
Pearson asked Leuchter if he agreed that when hydrogen cyanide does not
kill someone, it is expelled rapidly by the body.
Leuchter: Perhaps not as rapidly as you might think. Depending upon the
dosage, it would probably take several days to several weeks.
Pearson suggested that a toxicologist would be the “appropriate person” to
consult on the effects of hydrogen cyanide, but that Leuchter, in his report,
expressed opinions on the subject.
“Not based on toxicology,” said Leuchter. “The opinions that are expressed
I feel that I am qualified to give.”
In your report, said Pearson; you also express opinions about how many
people can be gassed in a given space. What allows you to make that calcula-
tion?
“Proper air flow” is required in such an operation, said Leuchter, “and that
is within my area of expertise.” It’s not only a question of expelling the poison
gas afterwards, but of getting the gas into and around the space.125
Pearson: And you try to translate your experience into events that occurred
a number of years ago under very different circumstances. Don’t you?
Leuchter: No, I do not.
125
The reader should note that some of Leuchter’s subsequent remarks on technical issues of the
crematoria and “gas chambers” of Auschwitz and Majdanek were corrected and clarified by later
research, see the corresponding remarks in the book cited in the preceding footnote. Editor’s note.
Well, asked Pearson, does Hilberg ever suggest that the Germans cared
about quick, humane gassings or the safety of the personnel who cleared out
the chambers?
No, said Leuchter, but “he does talk about the times involved in complet-
ing an execution,” and doing so “with a [given] chamber with a given number
of people in it.” And, said Leuchter, “it’s strictly an engineering consideration
and an air-flow consideration to make a determination of how long it would
take to distribute the air saturated with gas throughout that chamber.”
“First,” said Leuchter, “the engineer must distribute the air throughout the
chamber. Then the toxicologist can make a determination of how long it will
take the individual to die.”
“In this report,” said Pearson, you admit that “the historians say we’re
dealing with facilities where safety was not a concern and humanity was not a
concern.”
Leuchter: I’m sorry, counsellor, there are degrees of safety, and the opera-
tors of a given facility may not be concerned about the individuals that are ac-
tually performing the function or that are in the building, but the safety con-
straints go far beyond that. They also concern people in other buildings, in
other areas around the given structure that’s containing the gas. And the safety
of those people must likewise be considered unless one would evacuate the
area.
“What experience do you have with designing crematoriums?” asked Pear-
son.
Leuchter: I made a determination before and after I [went to Poland] to ap-
prise myself of crematorium design and operation. I consulted with a number
of the crematorium manufacturers, I received data from these manufacturers
on instruments that are used for cremation, and likewise, I visited two crema-
tories and I watched the entire operation several times and the cremation of a
number of corpses from the start of putting the corpses into the retort, until the
bones were crushed and the ashes were put into the urn.
Pearson: And I suggest, sir, that that really doesn’t give you the expertise
required to – give opinions and extrapolate with respect to crematoriums.
Leuchter: Only to the extent, sir, that it is common and expected of an en-
gineer that’s dealing with any given problem to investigate the problem and
then to investigate procedures relative to that problem.
Pearson: If someone came to you, sir, and said I’d like you to design a
crematorium, would you consider yourself competent to accept that contract?
Leuchter: I would.
Pearson: As a result of what you’ve learned since February?
Leuchter: As a result of what I’ve learned plus additional information that I
would obtain. This is the mark of an engineer. It’s his capability to determine
what has to be done and then implement the problem and carry it out.
Your report, said Pearson, states that “None of the facilities at Majdanek
are suitable or were used for execution purposes.” Now, “what criteria did you
apply to reach that conclusion?”
As you have time to study the report, said Leuchter, you will see that the
criteria are carefully defined, “but essentially all of the facilities at Majdanek
violate the basic requirements for proper gas chamber design.” For example,
there is not even a means of introducing gas or Zyklon B pellets into the
chamber. “If we have a container that we’re going to place people in and we
seal the doors, now we have these people confined within the container, we’ve
got to have some means of getting the gas into this container or the gas carry-
ing agent. There’s no physical way of doing this. There are no holes, there are
no roof vents, there are no – anything in the chambers involved.”
Pearson: How do you know that the present building at Majdanek was
there in 1944?
Leuchter: Because the officials at the museum claim – and I have to go by
what they’ve said – that the building is existing in the same manner it was
when it was used as a gas chamber.
“All right, Mr. Pearson,” said Judge Thomas, “I wish to take a half an hour
to read this report.”
Upon resuming, Pearson questioned Leuchter about his methodology, in
particular with regard to “what you call forensic samples. “ .
“Forensic samples,” said Leuchter, “are pieces of material, in this case
brick and mortar, that were removed from the various [alleged gassing] sites
in Poland,” and are called “forensic” because of their intended use for litiga-
tion purposes.
“What kinds of questions did you ask [the museum authorities]?” asked
Pearson.
Leuchter: We asked them questions relative to the existing structures,
whether or not there had been changes made, and we also asked for and ob-
tained some original drawings and blueprints of some of the facilities.
Am I right, asked Pearson, that you took these samples to determine if any
traces of hydrogen cyanide remained present?
Leuchter said yes, and Pearson asked, “What is the life of hydrogen cya-
nide in mortar?”
It depends, said Leuchter, on factors like location and the chemistry of the
material it is in contact with, but anywhere from “several days” to “as much as
two or three weeks.”
Pearson: Can you just explain to me then, what you were hoping to learn
from taking the sample?
Leuchter: Yes. The purpose of taking the sample was to determine residual
cyanide in the sample material. It would not be residual hydrogen cyanide. We
were looking for cyanide that had combined with other elements at the loca-
tion.
Pearson: All right. And how long will cyanide traces remain?
Leuchter: If they’re combined with the proper elements, for thousands of
years.
Pearson: And what elements are we talking about?
Leuchter: Primarily, in this case, iron.
Pearson asked if the amount of cyanide left would be related to the amount
of hydrogen cyanide originally introduced at a location, and Leuchter an-
swered yes.
How did you measure the cyanide in your samples? asked Pearson.
I personally took the samples to Alpha Laboratories, outside Boston, said
Leuchter, which tested them for levels of cyanide and of iron, recorded in mil-
ligrams per kilogram.
Most of the samples tested negative for cyanide, and Pearson asked what
that meant.126
Leuchter: It means that in the locations from which those samples were
removed, it is most likely that that area never experienced cyanide.
Pearson: Why do you say that?
Leuchter: Because all of the areas that were involved had high iron con-
tents in the brick and in the mortar, and if there was cyanide or hydrogen cya-
nide present, it would have entered into combination and it would have
formed a compound ferro-ferri-cyanide which would be residual in the brick
and/or mortar.
Pearson: For how long would it be residual?
Leuchter: Probably several thousands and maybe longer of years.
What about the control sample in your report? asked Pearson. Why do you
say it came from an area at Birkenau (Auschwitz II) “allegedly used for de-
lousing”?
Leuchter: I base [that assertion] on the fact that all of the maps, and the of-
ficial administrators of the museum, indicate that that was a delousing facility.
Pearson offered his own summary of Leuchter’s conclusion: Because the
cyanide traces found at the alleged gassing sites are “not as high” as that
found at the known delousing site, one may conclude that gassing did not oc-
cur at the former.
The point, said Leuchter, is not that the cyanide traces at the alleged gas-
sing sites are “somewhat less,” but that they are “negligible or nil. The sam-
ples from the alleged gas-chamber areas, most of them had totally no traces at
all. The few that did had traces that were barely above detection level. So,
we’re not talking about a situation that there was more, or less. We’re talking
about nothing and something, and in the area where there was something, we
had a very high content. We had a-thousand-and-fifty milligrams per kilo-
126
See the bar graph at the end of this book (before the book ads).
gram, and the highest that we detected in any of the other areas was seven mil-
ligrams per kilogram.”
Pearson asked how Leuchter determined the locations from which to take
his samples. Leuchter explained that he began by studying the layout of the al-
leged gas chambers and taking some samples broadly to cover all of the major
areas. He then focused on areas where hydrogen cyanide would most likely
accumulate during and after a gassing operation, and begin to combine with
iron, such as the floors adjacent to columns.
Pearson asked if the control sample removed from the delousing chamber
came from an area with visible blue staining.
Yes, said Leuchter, the staining was analyzed, and we confirmed that it
was Prussian blue pigment or ferro-ferri-cyanide.
Pearson asked if the trace of cyanide found in a few of the other samples
would allow a chemist to determine the concentration of hydrogen cyanide
which was once present in those areas.
“It would not,” said Leuchter.
So, asked Pearson, how can you conclude that the chambers could never
have been used to kill people?
Because, said Leuchter, the Holocaust literature tells us that “the facilities
in question were [allegedly] operated at low temperatures. We know that [in
that case] there would have been a considerable amount of condensation of
liquid hydrogen cyanide on the walls, floor and ceiling of these facilities.”
But, asked Pearson, would not the large number of bodies in the enclosed
area, plus the proximity of the crematory furnaces, have generated enough
heat to alter the situation?
No, said Leuchter. “These facilities were [allegedly] operated at zero de-
grees Fahrenheit [rather Celcius] or near-zero temperatures and perhaps below
that. The times of the alleged operation were well into the winter.” As for the
alleged proximity of the furnaces, that is another factor of “insanity,” said
Leuchter. Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) gas is explosive at concentrations of
6,000 parts per one million of air. In the chambers, the gas allegedly came
from Zyklon-B material, an inert carrier into which the gas has been pressed.
Upon exposure to air, the gas is released, and at first there will be very high
concentrations of HCN in local areas. “That creates an extremely dangerous
situation and it’s a situation where I wouldn’t even want to be present within
the vicinity of the building if someone were using Zyklon B and the crematory
was functioning.”
Pearson: You have based your conclusions on the premise that there was
no ventilation at Birkenau?
Leuchter: Partially.
Pearson: Did you take into account the evidence of Professor Hilberg that
powerful ventilation fans were installed at these locations?
Christie objected to the question, and Pearson said he was prepared to pro-
duce the page in Hilberg’s 1985 testimony where he expressed his awareness
of “correspondence indicating that with respect to all four installations at
Auschwitz, very-powerful ventilating fans were installed.”
Judge Thomas asked if the matter appeared in the new (1985) edition of
Hilberg’s book, and Pearson said he did not know.
Whether or not the evidence turns up in the Hilberg testimony and book,
said Thomas, the question is proper. The present witness has said that his con-
clusions are based, in part, on the assumption there were no ventilation fans at
Birkenau.127
While someone gets the transcript, said Pearson, “perhaps we can explore
the issue of the effect ventilation will have.”
Pearson: It [the presence of a ventilation fan] will have a bearing on what
traces [of cyanide] are present at some later date. Isn’t that right?
“That’s very true,” said Leuchter.
Pearson: Now, with respect to the delousing chamber, if there was no ven-
tilation at all, we could expect high levels of cyanide traces, couldn’t we?
“Probably,” said Leuchter.
Pearson: Do you expect that 45 years from now, people will be able to find
cyanide traces in your gas chambers?
No, said Leuchter.
So, suggested Pearson, if a ventilation system works almost perfectly, we
expect to find no cyanide traces.
Wrong, said Leuchter. Even with a perfect ventilation system consisting of
an intake and an exhaust, one would still obtain “very-high” cyanide readings.
Pearson’s next questions indicated considerable confusion, and Leuchter
finally cleared up the mystery. You see, he said, it’s “not entirely the ventila-
tion system that controls the problem. It’s the pre-heating of the intake air
which prevents condensation within the chamber and in the ventilation system
itself.”
Pearson then produced a German book containing an alleged official war-
time letter that discussed the completion of three crematories at Auschwitz on
June 26, 1943, which were said to bring the camp’s cremation capacity up to
the level of nearly 5,000 bodies per 24-hour period.
Leuchter said he was unfamiliar with the document, and Pearson noted that
the German book that reproduced it was referred to in a footnote in Hilberg’s
book.
Pearson then turned to some testimony which Raul Hilberg gave at the first
Zündel Trial on January 7, 1985. Hilberg said he had some correspondence
127
This assumption of Leuchter was correct regarding Auschwitz Crematoria IV & V, but wrong re-
garding Crematoria I-III. Cf. the corresponding remarks in the critically annotated edition of the
Leuchter Report., note 124. Editor’s note.
which dealt with four “very-powerful ventilators” which were installed in the
crematory buildings at Auschwitz II. “Motors,” he said, “would not, of course,
be on a building plan.”128
Pearson: Don’t you think it would have helped you in reaching your report
to take into account the testimony of Professor Hilberg on that point?
Leuchter: Not necessarily, because I went to the site.
Pearson: Don’t you think it’s likely that ventilator motors may have been
saved and taken off before the location was demolished?
Leuchter: I do not.
“I suggest you’re really just speculating there,” said Pearson.
“No,” said Leuchter. “Most of the facility at Crematorium II is standing.
Although the roof is caved in, most of the facility and all of the building mate-
rial is there. There are no holes, there is no provision for duct work, ventila-
tors, fans, et cetera. Crematorium III is not all there, but I can speak from ex-
perience and from inspection and investigation at Crematorium II, there were
no ventilator fans on the premises at all.”
So the correspondence about ventilators would not have assisted you?
asked Pearson.
“That is correct,” said Leuchter.
Well, said Pearson, isn’t the conclusion of your report based on the near
absence of cyanide traces in the samples?
“Part of it,” said Leuchter. Asked for a percentage, he gave 10 percent.
“What are the other foundations for your conclusion?” asked Pearson.
I rely on my experience with gas chambers for 20 to 30 percent, said
Leuchter, and the other 50 to 60 percent is accounted for by general know-
ledge of “good engineering design in terms of building structure, air-moving
equipment, plumbing, equipment that would be utilized to handle the air, and
mechanical equipment that would be utilized to introduce gas and gas carriers
into a structure.”
Pearson asked Leuchter if he assumed in his report that the present physi-
cal plants at the three camps were the same as those during the war, and
Leuchter said yes.
On re-examination, Christie asked Leuchter if he checked the roof of the
Leichenkeller at Crematorium II for holes for ventilation fans.
Yes, said Leuchter, the roof is intact and without ventilation holes.
Christie then inquired about interior walls, and Leuchter explained that, in
a gas chamber, these must be coated with epoxy or some other sealant. Those
128
The efficiency of the ventilation systems of the basement morgue of Crematoria II & III in Ausch-
witz-Birkenau, which are said to have served as homicidal “gas chambers,” is revealed by invoic-
es of the supplier company, as was discovered later. It corresponded to the usual performance for
morgues. No data have yet been found for the ventilation system of the morgue of Crematorium I
(Auschwitz Main Camp). However, correspondence at the time indicates that it was of a provi-
sional nature and functioned poorly even for a morgue. Cf. the corresponding remarks in the criti-
cally annotated edition of the Leuchter Report, note 124. Editor’s note.
in the Leichenkeller at Crematorium II are “rough, unsealed brick and mortar,”

and were never painted.
Judge Thomas had a question: “Now, you say there are no ventilation holes
in the roof of Crematorium II?”
Leuchter: In the roof, the sides or any place. I made a specific inspection
for ventilation capability, Your Honor.
Christie submitted that Leuchter was entitled by law to testify about not
only those technical matters which he understood from first-hand experience
but also information obtained from the study of other people’s work. He cited
various legal authorities which went so far as to say that “experts in reaching
their conclusions are entitled to and have a duty to draw on the work of others
in their field.” Christie added that “the analysis which [Leuchter] has conduct-
ed is certainly available to the Crown, it’s detailed, it’s specific. He has indi-
cated and identified his sources.” If the Crown wished “to displace his opinion
by evidence to the contrary… then of course they’re entitled to do so.” As for
“any criticism that [Leuchter] hasn’t read all the history books on the subject,”
that was “perhaps relevant to weight, but of no great consequence in terms of
admissibility of his evidence…”
Judge Thomas zeroed in on the main question he needed to be “satisfied”
on: “Within what parameters can this man testify?” Rather insultingly, the
judge said, “Certainly you wouldn’t be allowing a hangman to come into this
court and start discussing with us about the construction of buildings. It would
be absurd.”
“The witness,” said Christie patiently, “was only asked to test the hypothe-
sis, [which] is a series of given facts… provided to him in the form of infor-
mation from Hilberg and from the state museums where these installations
are.”
“The only thing that I’m asking,” said Christie, “is the right to file this re-
port which is his opinion –”
Judge Thomas: Just a minute. Just a minute. That is a totally different mat-
ter. This report is not going to be filed. Now you can forget that.
The witness “can give evidence in the witness box… if I permit him to,”
said Thomas, “within the narrow area that he’s qualified to comment upon.
That’s if he testifies at all. But I’m certainly not having this report filed. You
couldn’t get away with it in a civil case unless you did it on consent, let alone
in this case.”
Listen, said Thomas, “in civil cases… I get engineering reports all the
time. That doesn’t make them admissible because they’re prepared reports.
They go in the box, they’re qualified as experts, and they testify. If the judge,
with the consent of both sides, takes their reports to assist the court, that’s an-
other matter.”
“Admissibility,” he concluded, “is determined by the Rules of Evidence
and by the Evidence Act.”
“I have to hear from the Crown as yet,” said Thomas. But if the witness
starts “telling us about the absorption [into] the body of this poisonous gas,”
or giving other second-hand information, he will be stopped.
Thomas was also concerned about Leuchter’s premise that the buildings he
examined in 1988 were essentially the same as those which existed during the
war. “We saw certain photographs taken by Mr. Felderer which indicated that
the roof of Crematorium II [at Birkenau] was, as I recall it, in pretty bad
shape.”
We have Leuchter’s photos too, said Christie. “They’re the same roof. It’s
by no means in good shape but it’s intact… [There are] no pieces missing and
all the reinforcing holds it together. If the Crown wishes to displace these
basic presumptions… that’s open to them… When you have someone who
says the gas was introduced through a hollow pillar which had porous [sides]
and you go and you examine these concrete pillars and they’re not hollow,
that’s a simple fact…”
Judge Thomas: You’re speaking Majdanek.
Christie: Actually, I’m speaking of the very same thing in Birkenau, where
it’s often alleged that Zyklon B was poured through the porous columns in the
middle of the room.
Christie observed that the defense had paid more than $30,000 for the
Leuchter study, and Judge Thomas quickly replied, “I’m not going to be influ-
enced by whether he paid a lot of money for it or not.”129
After a lunch break, Christie noted that Browning had given opinion on gas
vans, and Hilberg on gas chambers, and “their expertise in those fields is noth-
ing like that of this witness. This is the only witness with any expertise in this
field that could possibly be called, and he should be allowed to express those
opinions.”
Pearson submitted that the Harwood pamphlet, which was the issue before
the jury, questioned the reality of the gas chambers not on the basis of studies
of cyanide traces and the like but rather by denying that the eyewitness testi-
monies had been validated. Leuchter should therefore be restricted to testify-
ing about modern American gas chambers.
Pearson was especially against Leuchter’s testifying about the taking of
samples. How did he know where to take them? And why was there only one
control sample?
Judge Thomas began to agree that Leuchter should be prevented from dis-
cussing his samples, when Christie sprang to the rescue. “We have a videotape
of the samples being taken,” he said. “This is not a mysterious process. It is
done all the time. Scientists take samples. If we reveal where and how they
were taken, how could anyone complain?”
129
The final accounting on the Leuchter investigation would show an expenditure of $60,000 (Cana-
dian).
“This is all news to me,” said the judge. “Now I’m told there is a video-
tape… But still, what’s the end result of all this?”
The videotape, said Christie, “shows where the samples were taken, how
they were taken… how they were placed in plastic bags, and the witness can
say how they were marked, how he carried them, how they remained in his
custody, and how he took them directly to a chemical analysis laboratory
which is reliable.”
Judge Thomas explained that the chemist who actually performed the anal-
ysis would need to testify.
Pearson then submitted that Leuchter, when testifying about what he saw at
the three camps, should not go further than “to say that if he was designing the
facility, this is not the way he would do it.”
Judge Thomas noted that, in his report, Leuchter stated there “were never
any gassings” at the facilities, and suggested, “from what I’ve heard, he is not
capable of giving that opinion.” On the other hand, “I think he is in a position
to say that from what he knows these facilities would not be appropriate.”
Pearson said he had a problem even with that, since Leuchter was a person
with experience only in “one little area.”
“What do you say about him testifying with respect to the crematoriums?”
asked Thomas.
“He has no expertise at all,” said Pearson, and Thomas agreed.
Leuchter can tell us, ruled Thomas, “whether these premises, as he saw
them, [and] having regard to the plans, were feasible for gas chambers. But he
is not going to get into crematoriums and all the rest of it.”130 Further, “there
will be no reference to this [Leuchter] report.”
The jury was called in, and Christie questioned the witness about his back-
ground and his recent trip to Poland for Ernst Zündel. Leuchter noted that his
wife Carolyn and three assistants accompanied him on the trip. These were
cinematographer Juergen Neumann, translator Tiudar Rudolph, and draftsman
Howard Miller.
130
In his report, Leuchter states that he “has limited the focus of this study to a determination of: (a)
the capability of the alleged execution gas chambers to have accomplished the mass murder of
human beings… (b) the capability of the investigated crematories to have accomplished the al-
leged number of human cremations in the alleged time period.” The section of the Leuchter Re-
port which deals with crematories is entirely in agreement with the testimony of Ivan Lagacé,
summarized in Chapter 6 of this book. Leuchter calculates that the 69 muffles at Auschwitz I,
Birkenau, and Majdanek together could have cremated a maximum of 207 bodies per 24-hour pe-
riod. Lagacé estimates that the 46 muffles at Birkenau alone could have cremated a maximum of
184 bodies per day, and calls Hilberg’s estimate of 4,400 a day “preposterous.” Leuchter further
calculates that the cremation facilities at the three camps he studied, during the entire period when
they were in use (1941-44), could not have cremated more than about 105,000 bodies.
(However, detailed historical, documentary, and engineering studies have since proven that Laga-
cé’s and Leuchter’s statements are unrealistically low; cf. the corresponding remarks in the criti-
cally annotated edition of Leuchter’s report, note 124, and: Carlo Mattogno, Franco Deana, The
Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2021. Editor’s note).
Christie and Leuchter went over matters such as air flow and ventilation,
room measurements, and so on, much as they had been discussed previously
on the voir dire. But new subjects were also raised. For example, Leuchter
mentioned that at Auschwitz I the alleged gas chamber in Crematory I has two
drains which “are tied into the main drainage system of the camp, as is all of
the additional plumbing. One of the main concerns with this is that if this area
were utilized as a gas chamber, there would be liquid condensed hydrogen cy-
anide gas that would get into the drains, mix with the water and eventually
come out of solution in all of the plumbing and would wind up coming out of
every storm drain and possibly every sink drain and toilet in the camp, so it
would have been a very dangerous situation to utilize this room as a gas
chamber.”
The same Leichenkeller, said Leuchter, also has square vents on the roof
with wooden, non-gasketed collars. “They were recently rebuilt when we ar-
rived. The purpose of these things was to air the area since this facility was in
fact a morgue where they stored the bodies prior to cremating.”
Christie asked Leuchter the official explanation for the roof vents. To drop
Zyklon B through onto the victims, came the reply.
From your knowledge of hydrogen-cyanide gas, said Christie, comment on
the feasibility of that.
Leuchter: Zyklon B was a special preparation of hydrogen-cyanide gas
where the gas was forced by compression into particles of chalk or wood pulp,
and these particles carried the gas and would, upon heating or being exposed
to the air, release the gas into the area that the gas was to be utilized. Now,
presumably what would have happened is the gas, the pellets, would have
been dropped down from these four vents into the morgue area, which was al-
legedly the gas chamber. One of these vents is in the washroom. It was not in
the presumed gas area at all. The area of this building is extremely cold and
damp, as expected, because it was in fact a mortuary. One of the main re-
quirements for driving or evaporating the hydrogen-cyanide gas out of the
Zyklon B is excessive temperature. You have to heat it in order to get this to
happen. It has to be heated above 78 or 79 degrees Fahrenheit.
If the temperature is well below 78°, said Leuchter, the gas will be released
very slowly.
“The chamber area itself,” said Leuchter, “had no exhaust system for re-
moving the air or gas. It simply had three vents in the roof, and assuming this
area was used as a gas chamber, it would take the better part of a week to air it
out before any humans could go in to remove anything or anyone who was in-
side the chamber area.”
Another problem with the alleged gas chamber, said Leuchter, is that “the
entire area that contained the gas, both inside and outside, should have been
coated with tar or pitch to prevent any gas leakage.” That was the “normal”
procedure for German delousing chambers. Another problem is that the roof
vents are barely above ground level, and far below the level of surrounding
buildings. As the gas escaped, it “undoubtedly would blow over through the
windows of the main SS hospital and also the other buildings in the immediate
area, probably causing the death of people.”
Pearson objected to the witness speaking like a toxicologist, and Judge
Thomas called Leuchter’s remarks “gross speculation. It’s dangerous; that’s as
far as it goes.”
After Leuchter summed up his many reasons for believing that the morgue
in Crematory I at Auschwitz I “could not have been used, then or now, as a
gassing facility for executing human beings,” Christie had him proceed to the
morgue in Crematory II at Birkenau (Auschwitz II).
Leuchter produced a drawing of the building, and Christie asked what
“roof vent (4)” referred to.
Leuchter: There is a note on the drawing, and there are four dots that indi-
cate that allegedly on the drawings there should have been roof vents [shown]
at the locations that are marked.
But, said Leuchter, he had examined the (collapsed but intact) roof of the
morgue, both inside and out, and determined that there were no vents or other
holes in it.
“What,” asked Christie, “is necessary to ventilate an area such as this after
lethal dosages of hydrogen cyanide?”
For simple ventilation by normal convection, said Leuchter, there should
be some kind of openings in the roof. But that would require “something bet-
ter than a week to ventilate.”
There was “absolutely no way of getting air into” or out of this morgue,
said Leuchter, as it had only one door. “Since there were no other apertures, it
wouldn’t even make sense to put an exhaust fan in.”
Leuchter said he was alert for “anything that would be indicative of the use
of hydrogen-cyanide gas in the facility.” But he saw no evidence of blue stain-
ing, or of any form of ventilation or sealant, and therefore concluded that the
premises could never have been used for gassing people. Anyone attempting
to do so “would probably lose their life.”
As for the alleged “hollow columns” in the Crematory II morgue, used, ac-
cording to some, for “introducing the gas,” they were all of “solid reinforced
concrete,” said Leuchter.
Christie asked Leuchter about his calculation of the amount of hydrogen
cyanide which would be needed to use such a gas chamber. Based on an area
of 2,500 square feet, a space of 20,000 cubic feet, and an air-flow limitation of
278 gassing victims at a time, the answer was about five pounds of hydrogen
cyanide per operation.
Pearson objected to Leuchter’s maximum of 278 victims per operation, and
Christie explained that any object – “human being or pillar or piece of furni-
ture” – impedes air flow, so that engineers routinely make such calculations.
Christie then asked the important question of whether the facility had “any
heating capability to heat the floor to make this gas vaporize?”
Leuchter: No, there was no heating capability in any of these facilities, and
heating is utilized for two purposes. First, it drives the gas from the Zyklon-B
pellets and allows it to mix with the air. Second and of almost-equal im-
portance is that if the temperature is not above 78 to 79 degrees, we get con-
densation of the gas on the walls, the floor and the ceiling. When the hydrogen
cyanide condenses into a liquid it will be absorbed by the brick and by the
mortar, making the area very dangerous for anyone who came in to remove
any of the corpses from the facility.
Christie asked Leuchter what the temperature was like inside Crematory I
when he visited in February, and the witness said about 10 to 12° Fahrenheit.
Under those conditions, “it would take more than several hours for the gas to
leave the Zyklon-B pellets and permeate the room.” And the Holocaust litera-
ture specifies that gassings continued in winter.
Christie: And could you tell whether the interior walls had ever been paint-
ed at all?
Leuchter: Yes, the interior walls had never been painted, or tarred or
pitched.
Moving on to Crematory III, Leuchter explained that it is a “mirror image”
of Crematory II.
Christie, noting the “four dots for alleged roof vents” in the plans for the
Crematory III morgue, asked Leuchter if he had found “any evidence of holes
in the roof.”
Leuchter: I was unable to make a determination at this location because the
roof slab had been broken up and much of it had been removed.
“For all the same reasons” as at the other sites, said Leuchter, there was no
reason to think that gassings could have been performed in Crematory III.
Crematories IV and V at Birkenau, both razed long ago, were supposedly
also “mirror images” of each other, said Leuchter, although, by examining
their foundations, he determined that the placement of the rooms internally
was different. By studying materials provided by the Auschwitz Museum,
Leuchter determined that the alleged gas chambers in these buildings had no
ceiling vents but “presumably slots in the wall that were utilized for throwing
in the Zyklon B gas material” – a particularly ludicrous alleged design, in
Leuchter’s opinion. “We found nothing to indicate that there was any heating
system[131] in these buildings, nothing to indicate that the buildings were ever
sealed. We found no evidence of any ventilation system in the buildings at
all… [and] we saw no evidence of any stacking there. But again, I have to
131
Plans and other documents indicate that one of the rooms in these crematoria called “homicidal
gas chambers” was heated and served as a shower room. Another heated room may have served as
a delousing chamber; see C. Mattogno, The Real Case… (note 75), Chapter 5.11., pp. 158-162.
Editor’s note.
point out that the buildings were not there and we relied almost totally for this
information on the drawings [and blueprints] that we were looking at.”
Leuchter gave his calculations for Zyklon-B requirements (per operation)
as three and three-quarters pounds for Crematory IV and ten and one-quarter
pounds for Crematory V.
He stressed that the four primitive roof vents in the morgue of Crematory I
at Auschwitz I were the only evidence he had seen of any ventilating system
at any alleged gassing site in Auschwitz I or II.
Christie showed some photographs taken by Leuchter in the areas of the al-
leged “burning pits” at Auschwitz II, and asked about them.
Leuchter: The most-notable thing about all of these pits is that the ground-
water was within one-and-a-half feet of the surface. Now, most of the litera-
ture describes these pits as being six feet or better deep, and most of the pits
that we saw were reasonably small, with the exception of a couple… But at
any rate, the water is high enough and there is no reason to assume that it has
changed because all of the literature described this facility as being built on a
swamp, and I’m told that the system for handling the rain water and such is
one of the minor engineering feats of that era, and at any rate, the water is
within a foot and a half of the surface and it is not possible to burn corpses
under water.
Other photos made by Leuchter showed the sauna building at Auschwitz II,
with its steam delousing chamber, made of steel and tightly gasketed. Infested
clothing or bed linens went in one side on hangers, were steamed, and came
out on the other side. The design, said Leuchter, was similar to that of other
German delousing chambers which utilized Zyklon B.
After leaving Auschwitz, the Leuchter party proceeded to the former camp
at Majdanek, where two areas held special interest for them: an alleged com-
bination crematory/gas-chamber building, and a pair of once-connected build-
ings known as “Bath and Disinfection 1.” The latter, said Leuchter, “contained
a delousing chamber and it was, according to the [standard Holocaust] litera-
ture and the information and the sign at the facility, an experimental gas
chamber.”
At the combination crematory/gas chamber, said Leuchter, the story told
by the museum authorities is that “shortly before the end of World War II the
entire building was destroyed. They don’t tell how, but the entire facility was
levelled, with the exception of the cremation furnaces. Subsequently, after the
war, the facility was rebuilt from plans that the museum officials said existed
but which they no longer had and didn’t know where they had disappeared
to.” On first inspection, said Leuchter, this building looks like the rest at Maj-
danek, of brick and mortar and wood. A closer examination shows that it is
“all precast concrete, pre-stressed concrete, poured concrete, with steel rod
and bar, and then the building was covered with wood to make it look like the
original.”
A very small part of this building is designated as the gas chamber, said
Leuchter. “The gas chamber had two non-sealable doors and a non-sealable
window that led directly into the crematory area, which, if it had been utilized,
would have caused an explosion due to the leaking gas from the gas cham-
ber.”
Judge Thomas called for a break and then, with the jury absent, questioned
the admissibility of the evidence, given that the alleged crematory/gas cham-
ber building at Majdanek is a reconstruction.
When the jury returned, Christie soon moved on to the other key area at
Majdanek: the pair of buildings known as “Bath and Disinfection 1.” The first
building, said Leuchter, contains a roughly L-shaped area of about 810 square
feet, with unpainted stucco walls and ceiling, that is alleged to have been a gas
chamber. The two holes in the ceiling allegedly served for dropping the
Zyklon B into the chamber. There is no stack above the roof, said Leuchter,
and the holes “were apparently simply room vents,” much like those in the
morgue in Crematory I at Auschwitz I. There are also two one-foot diameter
ducts, noted Leuchter, but “the location of these ducts is very strange. They
are part of an air-handling system, and they go out to another area that I was
unable to get to, but the two ducts… are placed much too close together to
give proper circulation in the room. Normally, if we’re looking for air circula-
tion, we would put one duct, the intake duct, at one end of the room, and the
exhaust duct at the other end… Normally, one is high and one is low, and
they’re as far apart as possible to guarantee complete air circulation. These
two ducts are… less than two feet apart.”
Leuchter concluded that the room could never have been used as a gas
chamber. Venting the gas would have taken about one week, there was no
sealant, and “the room is cold and damp all the time and has no capability of
circulating the gas in the room.”
The second building at “Bath and Disinfection 1,” a one-story brick affair,
is, said Leuchter, actually connected to the first by “a very loose wooden
structure that normally at these camps is termed a breezeway.” It “allegedly
contained two experimental gas chambers.”
Christie: Now, did you examine that structure in detail?
Yes, said Leuchter. “We made detailed measurements of the hardware in
the structure and also of the structure itself.”
Judge Thomas had a question about the plans drawn up by Leuchter and
his draftsman Howard Miller: “Where did you get the words on there, ‘delous-
ing chamber’? Who selected those?”
Leuchter: I selected that based on what I believe it is, Your Honor. It’s –
the entire facility was designated [by the museum authorities] as “experi-
mental gas chamber.”
Judge Thomas: Why didn’t you use that word?
Leuchter: Because I don’t believe it was a gas chamber.
Christie: And why did you come to that conclusion?

Well, said Leuchter, I actually labelled this area “CO delousing chamber
#1.” The “CO” stands for carbon monoxide, the gas that was being experi-
mented with, “probably for delousing purposes.” The building also contains a
second, smaller “CO delousing chamber #2,” and a chamber which is not ac-
cessible.
The larger “CO delousing chamber,” said Leuchter, has two gasketed doors
at opposite ends, mounted in steel frames, with peepholes of heavy glass. One
door contains “a chemical test cylinder which was threaded through the door
and which contained a chemical-test material which would have changed col-
or, depending upon the gas condition level in the facility.”
The smaller “CO delousing chamber” has one door of the same kind, in-
cluding the chemical test cylinder.
“Outside, straddling the wall that separates these two alleged gas cham-
bers, was a booth that allegedly was used by an SS officer.” He “would turn
on the valves on these two allegedly carbon-monoxide cylinders which would
supply gas through a piping system into these two chambers.”
Leuchter noted that to fatally gas someone with carbon monoxide in one-
half hour, 60,000 parts per million of CO in the air are required. Feeding that
much CO into a chamber of this size would require a compressor which would
pressurize the room to about two-and-a-half atmospheres or about 55 pounds
per square inch.132 “The people would probably exhaust the available air sup-
ply before you could pump enough gas into the chamber, and they would suf-
focate strictly from the lack of oxygen.”
Christie: And would this room hold that pressure?
“Probably not,” said Leuchter, and he mentioned several places where the
room would likely leak.
Although Leuchter designates the smaller chamber as “CO delousing
chamber #2,” he testified that “it should additionally be noted that Chamber 2
was alleged to have been used with Zyklon-B gas. However, there is an in-
complete aperture in the roof for which the gas would have been inserted into
the chamber. The problem is that the box or square is in the ceiling of the
chamber but was never cut through… the concrete slab [of the roof].” Vent-
ing would also have been a problem, since the door is the smaller chamber’s
only opening.
132
These statements by Leuchter are toxicologically weak and technically nonsensical. CO is already
lethal at 0.5% (5,000 parts per million parts of air), although a quick execution certainly requires
higher concentrations. However, it would not have been necessary at all to pressurize the chamber
(which would have been at most only a few percent above the outside pressure anyway), since the
CO would not have been pumped into the chamber in addition to the air already present, but
would have partially replaced the air inside. See on this Friedrich P. Berg, G. Rudolf, “Diesel Gas
Chambers: Ideal for Torture – Absurd for Murder,” in: G. Rudolf, Dissecting the Holocaust, 3rd
ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2019, pp. 431-473. Editor’s note.
As for the larger chamber, it has the two doors but “no holes in the ceiling
at all… Additionally, built on the side of the building, there is a shelter that
contains a heater/circulator which is ducted into the [larger] chamber. Now,
the intake and exhaust ports of that heater/circulator are much too close to-
gether to effect any proper air flow.”
Christie: So, in conclusion, did you form any opinion as to the capability of
either of these two rooms for use as a homicidal gas chamber?
Yes, said Leuchter, and his opinion was based not only on what he saw in-
side the building but also on a dangerous feature outside, a depressed concrete
walkway around the structure, about two-and-a-half feet below ground level.
With no sealant inside or outside the building, the hydrogen-cyanide gas “in-
evitably would leak through the brick, come out through the foundation,” and
get into the water which accumulates in the walkway. “The walkway would
now have gas mixed with water, and as the freed gas there would be evaporat-
ing from the water, it would make the entire facility a potential death trap for
anyone approaching it at any distance around the building.”
Christie: What was your conclusion pertaining to all these facilities [at
Majdanek]?
None of them was used as homicidal gas chambers, said Leuchter, “and
anyone using them [as such] probably would be endangering his own life and
others in the area.” Leuchter noted that the barracks and main assembly square
at Majdanek were almost across the street from these two groups of facilities.
Christie then went through some photographs of Auschwitz with Leuchter,
and asked, “Were the plans that you looked at original or not?”
For Crematory I at Auschwitz I, yes, said Leuchter, they were copies of
original blueprints. For Crematories II through V at Auschwitz II, no, they
were schematic drawings and floor plans.
It was nearly 5:00, so the jury was excused.
Now, said Judge Thomas, at Majdanek, the combination crematory/gas
chamber was apparently a “reconstruction.”
Apparently so, said Christie, although I recall that Dr. Browning “said at
one point [that Majdanek] was the only original facility.”
“Well,” said Thomas, “I remember him saying that, and that’s what con-
fused me. So I think you should review that overnight…”
The next morning, Thursday, April 21, Christie asked to have the copies of
the Leuchter Report returned to him since they were not admissible as evi-
dence.
Judge Thomas thought the report should be filed as a lettered exhibit, in
case the Court of Appeal disagreed with his ruling on its admissibility.133
133
Numbered exhibits may be examined by deliberating jurors. Lettered exhibits may not, but are
created so that appeal-court judges will understand what a given witness was referring to, and thus
be in a position to disagree on admissibility.
Pearson said, “I’d like to keep ahold of mine… I’ve marked it up. If
there’s a charge for it, the Crown will pay Mr. Leuchter the cost of it.”
Thomas agreed that the Crown should be allowed to use it for cross-
examination.
“It’s not the Crown’s property,” protested Christie. “I’m asking for it back
now.”
“It will be returned when he’s finished with it,” said the judge.
The jury entered, and Christie began to question Leuchter.
Now, said Christie, Hilberg says that 2,000 people entered the 2,500-
square-foot morgue in Crematory II at Auschwitz II, “and Zyklon B was
poured through what you found to be non-existent openings there.” That’s
about 1.25 square feet per person. “Could you explain what [would have hap-
pened]?”
Leuchter: Assuming there was some means of getting the Zyklon-B mate-
rial into the chamber area, for which there is no means at this point –
Judge Thomas: Well, just a minute. The plans indicate there were holes
there and you’ve been asked a hypothetical question. Just answer it.
Christie complained, and Thomas said: “I wish he would answer your
question and you assumed there were holes. He then changed the premise and
said of course there are no holes and I’d be grateful if you would instruct your
witness to answer your questions.”
“Well,” said Christie, “my objection is on the record.”
Leuchter finally got beyond the hole problem to the question of air circula-
tion. With all those people packed in a large room, he said, it would take about
“five to eight hours for the gas to totally permeate the chamber and kill those
people.”
To help make the trial record clearer for appeal courts and future students,
Christie then took Leuchter slowly back through all the drawings, maps, and
photographs which they had examined together the previous day. These were
carefully labelled and entered as trial exhibits.
Two of the photos were taken in the Sauna Building at Birkenau (Ausch-
witz II), and showed the characteristic blue staining left by Zyklon B and iron
on the walls of what the camp authorities call the “Delousing Facility Number
1.”
There were seven photos from Crematory I at Auschwitz I. One showed a
furnace, one the alleged gas chamber, and one the roof. Two others showed
internal and external drains, part of the camp’s drainage system. Two others
depicted the extreme proximity of the furnaces and the alleged gas chamber,
and of the entire building and the SS Hospital – “a few short feet away,” as
Leuchter said.
Next came photos from Birkenau – of Crematories II and III, of the alleged
burning pits, and (again) of the sauna and Delousing Facility Number 1.
The nine photographs of Majdanek were all from the second area of inter-
est, the two buildings with connecting breezeway (often referred to as one
building) known as the “Bath and Disinfection 1.”
The first of these buildings contains what was allegedly a conventional gas
chamber, said Leuchter, but which he believed was a delousing facility. A
photo of the chamber, taken by the witness, showed the blue stains left by hy-
drogen cyanide in combination with iron.
The second or rear building, said Leuchter, contains the two alleged exper-
imental gas chambers. The booth which was allegedly occupied by the SS of-
ficial in charge of the operation was not protected from leakage from the
chambers, said Leuchter. In the larger of the two experimental chambers may
be found blue staining, which is “puzzling” because “there was no means of
introducing Zyklon-B or hydrogen-cyanide gas into the facility,134 and this is
also the facility that had the depressed walkway where the gas would have
leaked out… and made it a total death trap for anyone approaching the build-
ing from any direction.”135
Christie showed a last photograph. Leuchter explained that it was the “in-
mates’ swimming pool” at Auschwitz I, to use the name given it on the “main
sign at the camp.”
When you retrieved your forensic samples from Alpha Labs, asked Chris-
tie, with whom did you discuss the analysis?
With Scott McLean, the lab director, and with James Roth, the chief chem-
ist, said Leuchter.
Christie: Now, prior to the time when you were asked to conduct this in-
vestigation, had you had any contact with or been involved in any way with
the revisionist view of the Holocaust?
Leuchter: I had not.
Christie: And had you ever considered the subject of the Holocaust?
Leuchter: Only in history in school.
Christie: And had you any particular views about this matter?
Leuchter: I assumed that what I had learned in history was correct and that
there were gas chambers and that many millions of people died therein.
Christie: And as a result of examining these facilities, has your –
Judge Thomas: Well, he’s not going to be giving opinion evidence on that.
Move on.
Christie: Well, I was going to ask if his opinion as to revisionist literature
had changed.
“He’s not going to comment on that,” said Thomas.
134
For a delousing chamber, this would not have been necessary either, since a disinfector wearing a
gas mask could spread the Zyklon B in the delousing room. Only a homicidal gas chamber abso-
lutely needs a means of introducing the poison from the outside without the possibility of interfer-
ence by the victims. Editor’s note.
135
The “depressed walkway” around the building is a post-war change. Editor’s note.
Christie: And have you, yourself, examined any of the revisionist literature
[to determine] whether it is a correct analysis of the alleged gas chambers?
Leuchter: I have.
Christie: And what is your conclusion pertaining to that information?
Judge Thomas: I have already made a ruling with respect to that.
What was your purpose of examining revisionist source material? asked
Christie.
I looked at both sides, said Leuchter, “to supplement the information that I
obtained in Poland and make a determination of what had been said and what
was, in fact, true.”
“That’s not the function of this witness,” declared Thomas. “He’s not here
to advise the court as to whether or not his observations agree with certain lit-
erature.”
Well, said Christie, “has your opinion changed in relation to what you pre-
viously believed?”
Leuchter: It has.
Judge Thomas: Well, I’ve already made a ruling on that.
Christie: He cannot say how his opinion has changed?
Judge Thomas: Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll retire for twenty minutes.
The jury departed, and Judge Thomas warned Christie to abide by his rul-
ing “or I’ll cite you for contempt.”
Following a recess, Christie asked Leuchter a few more questions, and then
turned him over to John Pearson.
After questioning Leuchter about his qualifications, Pearson asked him if
he would agree that hydrogen cyanide is lethal for humans at 300 parts per
million in air.
Yes, said Leuchter, over a span of 10 to 15 minutes, while 150 parts per
million is lethal in about half an hour.
But in the United States, suggested Pearson, about 3,200 parts per million
is used in executions.
Yes, said Leuchter, and it works in about four minutes.
Pearson: All right. Now, do you know that in 1942 and 1943, 19.5 tons of
Zyklon were delivered to the Auschwitz complex?
Leuchter: I have seen figures to that effect. I don’t know that that’s true.
Why, asked Pearson next, do you make your calculations for the gas
chambers on the basis of one victim occupying nine square feet? Where do
you get that figure?
Leuchter: The space required is determined by what’s necessary for air cir-
culation and those figures are normally used by all air-moving engineers
throughout the world.
But, said Pearson, “if you’re not really concerned about… the amount of
time it takes for the air to flow, it [space] isn’t as important. Would you
agree?”
“Within reason,” said Leuchter.

“When U.S. executions use 3,200 parts of HCN per million of air, or “ten
times the fatal dose,” asked Pearson, isn’t that done essentially for humane
reasons?
Yes, said Leuchter.
“When you were reading Hilberg’s book in connection with your investi-
gation, asked Pearson, “did you do research into the sources [he] referred to…
in his footnotes?”
“I did additional research,” said Leuchter, but “I don’t remember where I
got the citations.”
Pearson questioned Leuchter about Majdanek, and came to the peepholes
in the doors of the alleged experimental gas chambers. If that is a facility for
delousing clothing, he asked, is a peephole really necessary?
“It might be,” said Leuchter.
Pearson: “Why?
Leuchter: I don’t know [what] the individual running the facility would be
doing with the peephole, but someone felt that it was necessary to put a peep-
hole in the door.
Pearson: People, what people?[136] I thought you said it was for clothing?
Leuchter: That’s correct. Someone has to run it and people run facilities.
Pearson: Well, are you suggesting that the people were in the clothing
while it was being deloused?
Leuchter: No, counsellor. I’m suggesting that people ran the facility.
Pearson: Well, the peephole –
Leuchter: Yes?
Pearson: Was it looking into where people were operating the facility or
was it looking into the chamber itself?
Leuchter: Well, I suppose you could look either way. There was no magni-
fication. There was no lens. It was simply a piece of gasketed glass. You could
look through the door in either direction.
Leuchter stressed that “the only provision for putting the Zyklon B into this
room was to place it by hand on the floor and close the door. So it becomes
very obvious that it could not be an execution chamber because no one is go-
ing to stand in a chamber while somebody with a gas mask puts poison gas
pellets on the floor and then leaves.”[137]
“Were you there, sir?” asked Pearson.
136
Evidently a misunderstanding: peephole – people. Editor’s note.
137
In fact, there were regulations at the time which stipulated that, for safety reasons, a second person
had to observe from the outside through a peephole in the door how the person in the chamber
with the gas mask was doing, so that in case of emergency immediate action could be taken.
Therefore, peepholes in such delousing chambers were very necessary. Cf. C. Mattogno “Ausch-
witz: ‘Gas Testers’ and Gas Residue Test Kits,” The Revisionist, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2004, pp. 150-155,
here p. 152; online: https://codoh.com/library/document/the-gas-testers-of-Auschwitz/en/. Editor’s
note.
“I was not, counsellor,” said Leuchter.

“And you can’t conceive of somebody just opening the door and throwing
in Zyklon-B pellets?”
“No, I cannot.”
Pearson then inquired about the drainage system at Auschwitz I. Did
Leuchter really know the age of the drains in the alleged gas chamber?
Yes, said Leuchter. A blueprint of the facility, dated September 1944,
when minor changes were made, showed the drains as pre-existing.
Pearson: Can you plug up drains, sir?
Yes, said Leuchter, but that requires pouring concrete into it, and then the
drain can never be unplugged.
With respect to Birkenau, said Pearson, I take it your conclusions are based
on two foundations: the gassing facility “would have been too dangerous to
use” and it “wouldn’t have been efficient.”
“There’s a third reason,” said Leuchter. Crematory II “would have been
impossible to use because there was no means for getting the gas into the
chamber.”
Pearson: Am I correct in the statement that your conclusions are based on
the assumption that the gas chambers were not properly ventilated?
Ventilation was a major problem, said Leuchter.
Pearson: And are your conclusions [also] based on the assumption that the
facilities would not permit efficient diffusion of the hydrogen cyanide?
In part, said Leuchter.
Pearson: All right. Now, for Zyklon B to vaporize, you have to have a tem-
perature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Is that right?
“78.3,” said Leuchter.138
Pearson: Have you calculated the heat released into the air by 15 furnaces
working around the clock?
Leuchter failed to see the relevance, and Pearson then asked: “Have you
calculated the amount of heat that would be generated by squeezing up to
2,000 people into a room of 2,500 square feet?”
No, said Leuchter.
Pearson: You’d agree it would generate heat?
Leuchter: Certainly not enough heat to vaporize the Zyklon B.
Pearson: How much heat would it produce?
“You might get a temperature rise of maybe ten to 15 degrees out of it,”
said Leuchter.
Pearson: And I suggest that a facility that is underground has the benefit of
a good insulation. Wouldn’t you agree with me?
138
The boiling point of HCN is 25.7°C, but HCN is a highly volatile liquid that evaporates quite rap-
idly even at lower temperatures unless the Zyklon-B carrier material (gypsum) is moist. Editor’s
note.
Yes, said Leuchter. But “what does the heat generated from the furnaces
have to do with the facility that’s underground and well insulated?”
Pearson: Well, how far away were the furnaces from that facility?
The furnaces were 15 to 20 feet higher, but also in another wing of the
building, said Leuchter. “The total distance on a diagonal [is] maybe 50 or 60
feet to the nearest furnace.”
Pearson changed the subject: “Professor Hilberg says that there was a ven-
tilation system delivered [to Birkenau] and would you agree with me that that
is an important consideration –”
Leuchter: Professor Hilberg may say there was one delivered. I don’t know
that but I can say that there was not one there and there was not one installed.
Pearson: Have you been referred [by the defense team] to the testimony of
Dr. Hilberg where he says that there were powerful ventilators installed?
You asked me that earlier, said Leuchter.
Judge Thomas: Well, not in the presence of the jury he didn’t.
Sorry, said Leuchter. No, I haven’t.
Pearson asked Leuchter if he remembered reading, on page 885 of Hil-
berg’s book, about a letter of January 29, 1943 which discussed the near-
completion of a crematory at Birkenau. Hilberg wrote of “the pending deliv-
ery by Topf [and Sons, Erfurt] of the ventilation system for the Leichenkel-
ler.”
“Topf supplied crematory supplies,” said Leuchter. “This ventilation sys-
tem was, in fact, the blower for the furnace. It had nothing to do with ventilat-
ing the alleged gas-chamber area.”[139]
Have you looked at the letter cited by Hilberg? asked Pearson.
No, said Leuchter.
So Pearson produced Volume 5 of the IMT proceedings at Nuremberg,
pages 619-20, containing an English translation of Document NO-4473, titled
“Subject: Crematorium II, Condition of the Building.” In English translation,
it spoke of “the cellar used as a mortuary” and “the gas chamber” in one para-
graph, and of an “installation for aeration and ventilation” in the next.
Pearson: And that’s what Professor Hilberg relies on for his conclusion that
ventilation systems were installed. Right?
Leuchter: I don’t believe [it] says that. [It] says nothing about ventilation
systems installed in the Leichenkeller. It’s not even in the same paragraph.
Pearson: Well, Your Honor, I suggest that this become an exhibit and the
jury can make their own decision in that regard about what it says.
Judge Thomas made it Exhibit 153.
139
The Topf Company had a rather broad field of activity, which also included ventilation systems.
Those for the aforementioned basement morgues were actually supplied and installed by Topf, cf.
the Topf invoices for the equipment supplied, Carlo Mattogno, “Auschwitz: The End of a Leg-
end,” in: G. Rudolf (ed.), Auschwitz: Plain Facts, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016,
documents in the appendix. Editor’s note.
Pearson: Would you agree that it takes a much-higher concentration of hy-

drogen cyanide to exterminate insects than it does to kill human beings?
Leuchter was uninformed about the matter, and Pearson showed him some
evidence that bugs and rodents are more resistant to the chemical.
Pearson and Leuchter then discussed the explosion risk for hydrogen cya-
nide, with the prosecutor suggesting it was almost nil.
With all those people squeezed into the gas chamber, asked Pearson,
wouldn’t the smaller volume of air permit the fatal concentration of HCN to
be reached more rapidly?
No, said Leuchter. “You’re going to have hydrogen cyanide on the floor…
and it’s going to sit there because the room is going to be filled with solid ma-
terial. And it would take hours for the gas on this side of the room to reach
anyone at the other end.”
Pearson: Okay. If the people in the room start to get concerned about them-
selves and run or move as much as they can or stir about, isn’t that going to
cause the gas to circulate?
Leuchter: Two thousand people in that room couldn’t stir. I’m not even
sure how you could close the door on them.
Pearson: Would you agree with me that the human body, when exposed to
hydrogen cyanide, reacts?
Yes, said Leuchter.
Pearson: You start to gulp, you breathe more because you have less oxygen
in your bloodstream. And it increases the absorption of cyanide into the body
when you do that, doesn’t it?
Yes, said Leuchter.
Pearson asked a few more medical questions, and then Christie com-
menced his re-examination by asking “what kind of circulation” one would
get in a 2,000-square-foot room packed with 2,000 people.
“None,” said Leuchter.
Referring to the letter of January 29, 1943 about a nearly completed crema-
tory at Birkenau, Christie said: “I’d like the Crown to produce the original
German version because [my] information is that the translation is incorrect.”
“I don’t have the German version,” said Pearson.
Let’s break for lunch, said Judge Thomas. Then we can bring the court in-
terpreter here in the absence of the jury and deal with the problem.
When court resumed, the interpreter was there, but the basic problem had
not been solved. Nobody in the room had a copy of the original German ver-
sion of the letter.140 We’ll return to this matter when we’ve obtained it from
the National Archives, said Judge Thomas.
140
The relevant Text in translation is:
“The reinforced-concrete ceiling of the morgue could not yet be stripped of the formwork due to
frost. However, this is insignificant, since the gassing cellar can be used for this purpose.¶ Due
to a wagon blockage, the Topf & Sons Company was unable to deliver the aeration and deaera-
Christie submitted that, in any event, the document should not be made an
exhibit, but Thomas ruled it was admissible: “[T]his [document] is referred to
in the [Hilberg] footnote, and it is part of the information that was available
[to the witness], and I think it’s open to the Crown to be able to say in argu-
ment, at a later stage, ‘Well, if Mr. Leuchter had read the footnote and really
researched the subject, he might not have been so swift to come to the conclu-
sions he did.’ I’m not saying that’s an overwhelming argument. I’m saying
that’s open to the Crown, and so, for that purpose, it’s filed in the record, not
for the truth of its contents but simply as, in the usual case, a document [that
was] available for an expert to have in his research, and he was the one of
course who read portions of Hilberg… It is one of those documents where I
have to say to the jury, it is not admissible for its truth, but it is admitted be-
cause it is a footnote in a book, in a passage, in an area of a text that was read
by the individual. And maybe, if he had looked at that, he might have a differ-
ent view.”
Christie then completed his re-examination of Leuchter.
If the drains for the morgue in Crematory I were plugged, he asked, “how
would the water necessary to clean off corpses be drained?”
The water “would remain on the floor and be swept out the door,” said
Leuchter.
With regard to the letter of January 29, 1943, asked Christie, “did you con-
clude that it [the ventilation system to be delivered] had something to do with
the Leichenkeller?”
No, said Leuchter. “The document seemed to indicate that it was a blower
system for the furnace in the crematory.” Further, “I know for a fact there was
no ventilation system in the Leichenkeller of any type, and there was no provi-
sion in the construction of the building for that.”141
Christie and Judge Thomas thanked Leuchter, and the next witness was
sworn. He was Dr. James Roth, the Southern-accented laboratory manager for
Alpha Analytical Labs in Ashland, Massachusetts.
Roth’s presence was another testament to the perseverance of the defense
team. The day before, Judge Thomas had made it clear that only the chemist
tion system on time as requested by the Central Construction Office. After the arrival of the
aeration and deaeration system, however, installation will begin immediately, [… ]”
See Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate
Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989, S. 432. Editor’s note.
141
As mentioned earlier (note 127f.), Leuchter was fundamentally wrong here. He probably assumed
that the ventilation ducts had to go through the roof of the morgue, which could not have been the
case in the absence of holes or breakthroughs. In fact, the ventilation ducts ran inside along the
length of the morgue to the main wing of the building, where they were directed into chimneys.
The exhaust duct was integrated into the wall at floor level of Morgue 1 (the alleged homicidal
gas chamber) and is today buried by rubble, while the wooden cladding of the air-intake ducts
along the ceiling was removed at the end of the war. As the main wing of the crematorium with
the air-exhaust and -intake chimneys is in ruins, Leuchter could not tell this from the ruins. Edi-
tor’s comment.
who actually analyzed Leuchter’s forensic samples could testify about them.
When Leuchter got home, he immediately phoned Scott McLean, the director
of Alpha Labs. It was only then that anyone at Alpha learned of the unusual
origin of the samples they had analyzed.
McLean told Leuchter he would find out who performed the analysis and
get back to him. Fifteen minutes later, he called to say that his chief chemist,
James Roth, had done the job and was ready to testify, but only for a fee of
$200 (U.S.) per hour – from the moment he left home until the moment of his
return! Zündel swallowed hard and accepted the price, which finally came to
$2,600 (U.S.) or $3,200 (Canadian). More scrambling was necessary to obtain
an airline seat on short notice, and arrange fast ground transportation. Every-
thing went smoothly, and Roth reached the courthouse with 10 minutes to
spare.
On the stand, Roth was handed a report by Christie. He agreed that it was
prepared under his direct supervision.
Roth then explained the tests which he had conducted for Leuchter. Thirty-
two samples (31 of brick and one of gasket material) were chemically ana-
lyzed for cyanide content, and three of them were also analyzed for iron con-
tent. The iron content proved to be “essentially the same in all three samples,”
while the cyanide content was vastly greater in Sample No. 32, the control
sample. The minimum trace level of cyanide picked up by Roth’s lab was one
milligram per kilogram of material. For 18 of the samples, this level was not
reached.
During their analysis, the chemists at Alpha Labs sometimes added known
amounts of cyanide to the samples to check the accuracy of their results. They
also sometimes made a duplicate analysis of a given sample.
Thirteen of the 31 samples taken from alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz I
and Birkenau showed trace levels of cyanide ranging from 1.1 to 7.9 milli-
grams per kilogram of material. By comparison, the control sample (No. 32)
taken from the delousing chamber at Birkenau showed 1,050 milligrams of
cyanide per kilogram of material. Christie, with the judge’s permission, then
showed the dramatic discrepancy revealed on the bar graph which appears in
the Leuchter Report. The graph was made Exhibit 154 in the trial.
“What is Prussian blue?” asked Christie.
“It’s an iron cyanide,” said Roth. “If iron is present with hydrogen cyanide
around, then you are going to get a reaction between the hydrogen cyanide
and the iron,” which is Prussian blue.
Christie: And is Prussian blue the kind of thing you can wash off or what
happens?
Roth: In general, no. It’s a very stable compound. It stays around for a long
time.
Christie: If you are dealing with a porous material like brick or mortar and
significant quantities of ferrous irons are found, what will be the result of hy-
drogen cyanide that comes in contact with that?
In all likelihood, said Roth, the reaction will occur and Prussian blue (iron
cyanide) will result.
Christie: And in porous substances, how deep will this go?
Fairly deep, said Roth, unless perhaps the surface formation of the Prussian
blue inhibited its further penetration.
Roth then gave the iron contents of the three samples tested: 7,580 milli-
grams of iron per kilogram of material for Sample 9; 6,280 mg/kg for Sample
29; and 6,170 mg/kg for Sample 32, the control.
Christie: Are the other two [non-control] samples significantly different in
terms of their reaction capabilities?
Roth: No, they are not.
Christie: Given the presence of iron in the same quantities or virtually
same quantities, could you tell me what in all likelihood would occur to Sam-
ples 29 and 9 if they were continually exposed every day for, say, two years,
to 300 parts per million of hydrogen cyanide?
Roth: I would expect to see the formation of the iron-cyanide compounds.
Christie: And could you explain any way by which this would not happen,
or no such reaction would occur?
Roth: Well, one is the lack of water. These reactions to – in a lot of cases
have to take place in water or with some vapor around. Now, chances are
great [that with] normal temperatures and rooms of normal humidity, there
would be plenty of moisture present for this type of reaction to take place.
Christie: So in a normal room with normal humidity these quantities of
iron in the wall, hydrogen cyanide in quantities of 300 parts per million or
more, on a daily basis for two years or even two weeks, you would expect to
see the formation of Prussian blue, is that correct?
Yes, said Roth, “I would expect to see detectible amounts of Prussian
blue.” If not visually detectible, at least chemically detectible. “That type of
reaction is an accumulative reaction. In other words, as it reacts it does not go
away. It stays…”
“Is there a limit,” asked Christie, “to how much the reaction will occur?”
Yes, said Roth, at the point where all the iron on the exposed surface has
reacted.
Christie: Now, in relation to these analyses, what, if any, is the possibility
of error?
The chemical analysis error is usually less than plus or minus 15 percent,
said Roth. But the “sampling error, the way that we take the sub-sample that
we actually analyze, is probably much greater than that.”
How, asked Christie, could Prussian blue or ferro-ferri-cyanide be removed
from a porous surface like brick?
Roth: Sand blast it, grind the surface down. The other way would be a
chemical removal.
Christie: And what would you need to do to remove the chemical?
Roth: Essentially a strong acid.
How easy would that be? asked Christie.
“It’s more difficult to work on porous surfaces,” explained Roth, “because
of the fact that the formation will have taken on depth.”
When Pearson began his cross-examination, he seemed confused, so Roth
gave a short chemistry lesson. When carbon and nitrogen combine to form cy-
anide (CN), there is a negative charge. In order to achieve electrical neutrality,
and relative stability, the CN must react with something like hydrogen or iron
which is positively charged.
Pearson: Now, you didn’t take the samples here, did you?
Roth: No, sir.
Pearson: You didn’t have any control over the sample?
Roth: No, sir.
Pearson: Would you agree with me that the basic scientific principle, if
you’re trying to compare something with something else, it’s best to have con-
trol samples that deal with all situations?
“That is correct,” said Roth.
Pearson: Would you agree with me, if you have a place that’s blown up
with dynamite, and the surface is blown off, that you might thereby remove
the surface that has the Prussian blue?
Well, said Roth, if you’re able to take a flat surface like a wall and “instead
of blowing it out, blow it in and abrade it and remove just the surface and
[leave] the rest of the material,” then the answer is yes.
Pearson: Well, I’m suggesting that you don’t set out to do that but if you
do blow the place up, and, in the explosion, the surface – you’d agree with me
that the surface of brick would come off in an explosion?
The bricks will break up, said Roth.142 “Now, if that’s removal of the sur-
face, yes.”
On re-examination, Christie asked Roth if the quantities of iron found in
the brick samples which he analyzed were within the normal range.
Yes, said Roth, who added that “Red bricks are red because of iron. But
even in white bricks there are still these levels of iron present.” The court then
adjourned early for the day. Zündel’s best driver sped Roth to the airport at the
highest legal speed.
142
Mortar and bricks of the buildings in question in Auschwitz were not broken up by the explosion,
and certainly their surface was not removed. Editor’s note.
Chapter 9: David Irving
T he line formed early outside Courtroom 4-6 on the morning of Friday,

April 22. Douglas Christie had told the court that his last witness would
be testifying, and many assumed he meant Ernst Zündel. Shortly before
10:00, a class of students from a local Jewish school was led past the queue
and seated. When the doors to the courtroom opened, the Zündel supporters
and a few Jewish regulars who had waited patiently for hours rushed in and
refused to leave. There were shouting matches and things grew very tense.
Judge Thomas ordered the students to surrender their seats.
It turned out that the final witness was not Zündel, who exercised his right
not to testify in his own defense. As he later explained in a newsletter to sup-
porters, “I wanted the jury to concentrate not on my personality but on the
facts of history.” Instead, the final witness was British historian David Irving,
of whom John Pearson had spoken approvingly earlier in the trial as a histori-
an who still accepted the Holocaust story.
Irving had been vacationing in Florida at the time, and Zündel called to tell
him about the Leuchter Report. The two had been in touch intermittently since
1985, when Irving tentatively agreed to testify for Zündel in the future. Irving
flew at once to Toronto and read the report overnight. Deeply impressed, he
agreed to take the stand.
It is doubtful if anyone attending the Zündel Trial on April 22, 25, and 26
ever found his mind wandering. Even on an audio tape, David Irving com-
mands the rapt attention of listeners. In the flesh, he is that-much-more im-
pressive. Ernst Zündel would later remark that Irving strode to the front of the
courtroom “like some figure from a Greek drama.” When he spoke, it was
with the clear accent and keen diction of a member of the English upper class,
yet delivered with a machine-gun rapidity which at times nearly overwhelmed
the court reporter.
Columnist John Nobull has written, “In a nation of don’t-rightly-knows,

David Irving stands out as a man. He is a big, strongly built fellow with dark
hair and gray eyes, and much resembles his father, who was a naval officer. At
an earlier stage in English history, he might not have had a care in the world,
but he has been a rightist for over thirty years now, and experience has made
him watchful. Indeed, his entry into a crowded room has been likened to that
of a (quiet) heavyweight boxer…”143 Douglas Christie shares Irving’s meso-
morphic build and stentorian delivery. When Irving showed up in Toronto
with a deep tan but no suit, he borrowed one of Christie’s and it fit perfectly.
(The tie was one of Zündel’s.)
Judge Thomas ruled that Christie and Pearson could examine Irving on his
expert qualifications in the presence of the jury.
Christie began by holding up, one by one, some of Irving’s nearly 30 books
and having him comment briefly on them.
He began with the first book Irving wrote. Published in Switzerland in
1961, its title in English would be Germany’s Cities Did Not Die.
Irving’s first famous book was The Destruction of Dresden (1963), “an in-
vestigation,” said Irving, “of the British and American air raid… in which
over 100,000 people were killed in the space of 12 hours.”
Even-more-celebrated was the two-volume political and military biography
of Adolf Hitler, The War Path: Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939 and Hitler’s
War, 1939-1945, published in the mid-1970s, which, said Irving, “has attract-
ed to me a very great deal of difficulty as a historian since.”
The Hitler biography required 10 years of archival research, as did Church-
ill’s War, “a two-volume biography which again has produced nothing but
trouble for me.”
Along the way, Irving found the time to translate various important diaries,
memoirs, and documents from German into English. His book Breach of Se-
curity was actually “the document produced by the German wiretapping and
code-breaking agency [for] the twelve months before the outbreak of the Sec-
ond World War. [It is] based entirely on what the German Secret Service
learned from listening to the British-Embassy telephones in Berlin and the
other embassy telephones.”
Published in 1967, Breach of Security, said Irving, “is me beginning to rub
egg in the face of the other historians,” suggesting what kind of war history
they must be writing without information like this.
Asked by Christie about his work on Hitler, Irving noted, “For 10 years I
researched Hitler’s life based entirely on primary records. I don’t believe in
buying other people’s books or reading them on Adolf Hitler. We can readily
surmise there must be many tens or hundreds of tons of books. I think it’s eas-
143
Instauration, June 1981, p. 27.
ier to go to the archives and look at the documents. That way you avoid soak-
ing up other people’s prejudices.”
Irving named the “three criteria for a document to be acceptable to a histo-
rian,” as laid down by “the great English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper.” First,
is it genuine? Second, “was the person who wrote the document in a position
to know what he is writing about?” Third, the historian must ask, “why has
[this document] come into existence?” People often create documents in order
to protect themselves.
Irving said he “built up a shelf of about 70 feet of original documents [per-
taining to Hitler] that probably no other historian had ever seen. I persuaded
Hitler’s staff to trust me with their private papers that they had not shown to
anyone else. I also built up a card index of ten or fifteen thousand filing cards
on a day-by-day basis so you knew exactly what Hitler was doing, rather like
a diary. [It] meant that you had a useful tool to check any document. Any doc-
ument that was shown to you had to fit with that card index. If it didn’t, then
there was something phony about the document.”
Are you generally familiar with German documents? asked Christie.
Very much so, said Irving. German documents have a certain look, a cer-
tain smell, a certain feel. Things are phrased in a certain way. Irving described
the scientific tests which he had helped conduct on certain documents.
What general opinions have you formed about the so-called Holocaust and
Hitler’s knowledge of it? asked Christie.
“At the end of writing the Adolf Hitler biography in draft,” said Irving, “I
was aware of the fact that having written it from primary original Hitler
sources, I, as the author, didn’t know about the Holocaust. I had found no
documents showing any involvement between Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust,
which was very disturbing for me. So I reinvestigated… I couldn’t believe
what I was seeing, the fact there were no documents whatsoever showing that
a Holocaust had ever happened… This was very disturbing for me and it was
even more disturbing for my literary agent who warned me of the conse-
quences of producing the Hitler book in this fashion.”
Christie invited the Crown to cross-examine, and noted that he was tender-
ing Irving as an expert on World War II history, specifically in the fields of
German high-command records, German documents generally, historical ar-
chives and methodology, and documents pertaining to Adolf Hitler. He added
that he wished to question Irving about the Leuchter Report.
Pearson asked Irving if he made his living writing “controversial books
about history.”
Irving agreed that “many of them are controversial. I don’t create the con-
troversy, the media do.”
Pearson: And I suggest that controversy is good for book sales, isn’t it?
“Quite the contrary, sir,” said Irving. My literary agent told me that by
denying Hitler’s role in the Holocaust, “we would lose the Sunday Times deal,
the Reader’s Digest deal, the Book-of-the-Month Club deal, and we would not
sell the book as a paperback in the United States. We lost about one million
dollars. Controversy is not necessarily good.”
Wouldn’t you agree, asked Pearson, that the recent banning from Britain of
the book Spy Catcher “was good for sales”?
Irving: Being banned ipso facto is not good for sales. You have to be
banned in a certain way.
“You are in a fight for media attention, aren’t you?” asked Pearson.
Correct, said Irving. “In England, 58,000 new books are published every
year and only 1,000 will ever get reviewed.”
Pearson: Would you agree with me that you hold academic historians in
contempt?
Irving: I hold them in contempt for specific reasons. Not all academic his-
torians but the broad majority of them.
Pearson read to Irving from a review by the German historian Martin
Broszat of his Hitler book. “He is too eager,” wrote Broszat of Irving, “to ac-
cept authenticity for objectivity… and often seems insufficiently interested in
complex historical interconnections and instructional problems that transcend
the mere recording of historical facts but are essential for their evaluation.”
“What he is saying,” said Irving, “is that I haven’t learned to read between
the lines the way that the academic historians have.”
Pearson asked Irving about his treatment of the Holocaust in Hitler’s War.
“In the introduction,” said Irving, “I make plain that I regard Germany, by
the end of the Second World War, as a Fuehrer state without a Fuehrer. He
had lost control of whatever was going on and I’m not going to be so simple
as to say it was quite simply what is now called the Holocaust. Whatever it
was that was going on, there is no evidence that Hitler knew it. There’s not
enough evidence to satisfy an English Magistrate’s Court and it certainly
shouldn’t satisfy a [historian].”
“Are you repudiating,” asked Pearson, “what you wrote in Hitler’s War
about the activities of Himmler, Heydrich and Frank?”
“I would need to know exactly which passage,” said Irving.
As for Churchill’s War, said Pearson, isn’t the thesis basically that
“Churchill wanted a war because he knew he wouldn’t get elected in peace-
time and that he conducted a lot of his activities during the war in a drunken
haze”?
“I think [that’s] a very fair distillation,” said Irving.
Judge Thomas then accepted Irving as an expert witness who could give
opinion evidence on World War II, but withheld permission for Christie to
question him on the Leuchter Report pending further discussion of the matter
in the jury’s absence.
Christie resumed his questioning. Have you read Harwood? he asked.
Yes, said Irving, “two days ago, when a copy was sent to me by courier in
Florida with a request that I should read it for the purposes of this trial. And I
read it with great interest and I must say that I was surprised by the quality of
the arguments that it presented. It has obvious flaws. It uses sources that I
would not personally use. In fact, the entire body of sources is different. This
is based entirely on secondary literature, books by other people, including
some experts, whereas I use no books. I use just the archives. But inde-
pendently the author of this came to conclusions and asked questions of a log-
ical nature which I had arrived at by an entirely different route.”
“The value of a brochure like this,” said Irving, “is that it provokes people
to ask questions,” as did Hitler’s War. The historians’ dispute in Germany to-
day is “entirely as a result of my controversial book on Hitler. Until 1977, the
German historians had never asked the obvious questions. This is the kind of
value which I found this brochure to have… But I do emphasize that it con-
tains flaws and it contains also some opinions with which I personally
wouldn’t agree.”
What is your own view of the Holocaust? asked Christie. Were six million
Jews exterminated as a result of an official German policy?
“We [historians],” said Irving, “are not familiar… with the slightest doc-
umentary evidence that there was any such German policy. And I should be
familiar with it, having spent 10 years wading around in the archives of the
German high command and speaking with Hitler’s private staff. It isn’t there.”
As for the figure six million, it probably originated in an interview involv-
ing Robert H. Jackson, the American chief justice at Nuremberg.
Christie asked Irving if he had any opinion as to the number of Jews who
died in all German camps during World War II.
“I have opinions,” said Irving, but they go only to “statistical orders of
magnitude,” to “the balance of probabilities.” Certainly 100,000 or more, but
certainly less than six million. “But,” Irving added, “it shouldn’t be necessary
to talk about probabilities. All Hitler’s other crimes are documented in statisti-
cal details in the archives. This is supposed to have been the biggest crime of
all and yet the documents just aren’t there so why do we have to speculate?”
“Is there documentary evidence to support the policy of deportation?”
asked Christie.
“Quite definitely,” said Irving. The documents exist and “it’s quite clearly
referred to as Hitler’s order.”
Did you find “any orders for the extermination of Jews” in the archives of
any country? asked Christie.
“None whatsoever,” said Irving. And the British were reading the encoded
signals of the SS.
What about Himmler, Heydrich, Frank and other top Nazis? asked Christie.
“There are no explicit orders,” said Irving, “and this is where the academic
historians start asking us to read between the lines and find fancy translations
for certain words and I wouldn’t go along with those methods. I want in a
crime as big as this to find explicit evidence.”
What one does find, said Irving, is documents pointing in the other direc-
tion. For example, in the spring of 1942, Hans Lammers, who was something
like the German prime minister, telephoned the secretary of state of the Ger-
man Ministry of Justice, who made a note of their conversation. Lammers said
that Hitler had repeatedly said that he wanted the solution of the Jewish prob-
lem postponed until after the war. This document, said Irving, “was concealed
at Nuremberg,” and resurfaced only recently. It “takes some explaining, and
this is the kind of document which embarrasses the [academic] historians.”
How do you evaluate the Einsatzgruppen reports? asked Christie.
“Here,” replied Irving, “we have to look at the third of the Trevor-Roper
criteria… why does this document exist. A man is out in the field behind the
Russian front doing his job for the SS and he is being asked how well he is do-
ing and he’s going to submit a report containing figures and he’s going to
show he’s doing a jolly good job… Statistics like this are meaningless.”
Christie next showed Irving the document called “Solution of the Jewish
Question in Galicia.”
Irving noted its document number, L-18, and said, “I am very wary about
any Nuremberg document that has the Document Number L.” Many had
proven to be fakes, he said, “manufactured for the Nuremberg trials.” He had
written a book on the subject, Nuremberg: The Last Battle. “The L series were
a small collection of documents used at Nuremberg and contain documents
produced by journalists and handed over by a very eclectic series of sources.”
Christie asked Irving to look at the Galicia document and note “the type
styles and the various parts of the document to consider whether, in fact, they
are one consistent series. You’ll notice the pagination.”
Pearson objected on the grounds that Irving had said he did not know the
Galicia document, and Judge Thomas asked Christie to “move on.”
Christie: Now, have you yourself ever seen any evidence in any of the ar-
chives to establish the existence of homicidal gas chambers?
“None whatsoever,” said Irving.
Christie: Yesterday, the Crown produced a letter from someone in Ausch-
witz pertaining to the building of the crematories and the word used there was
Vergasungskeller. Are you familiar with that document?
Irving: I am very familiar with the German language and I am quite famil-
iar with that document also. No German would have referred to a gas cham-
ber, which of course is quite a common concept because the Americans used
gas chambers at that time for legal executions, no German would have trans-
lated the word gas chamber as Vergasungskeller. They have a perfectly good
German word for that word.
The word, said Irving, is Gaskammer.
Christie mentioned Martin Broszat’s review of Hitler’s War, from which

Pearson had read.
Irving explained that there had been “personal animosities between me and
the professor… over a certain young lady,” and, more importantly, over the
fact that “I revealed that documents [published by the Institute for Contempo-
rary History, which Broszat directs] were forgeries. The diary of General En-
gel turned out to have been written on post-war paper and yet the Institute
went ahead and published this diary knowing that it would pollute the writing
of history for many decades afterwards.”
Christie: And has that diary been recognized now as a forgery?
Irving: It is now recognized as a forgery and yet the Institute of Dr. Broszat
still publishes it.
Christie asked about the now-famous speech that Himmler delivered in Po-
sen in October 1943, to leaders of the SS. Irving found it “very strange” that,
in the transcript, the two pages where Himmler’s language became most brutal
had been retyped “by a different secretary on a different typewriter using dif-
ferent carbon paper,” and “repaginated in pencil.” For that reason, said Irving,
“I hold that document to be suspect.”
Asked about the Wannsee Conference, Irving noted, “You have to look at
the entire file containing that document. And you then realize what the docu-
ment is about.” Several of the participants had later testified about the confer-
ence, and “certainly none of them had any idea that… there had been a discus-
sion of liquidation of Jews.”
Christie: Are you familiar with Göring’s letter to Heydrich in July of 1941?
Yes, said Irving, and it was very doubtful that Göring had even bothered to
read what was actually only one of a pile of documents put on his desk by
Heydrich for signing.
Irving agreed that none of these items just discussed indicated any plan to
exterminate European Jews, and said it was “highly unlikely” that such docu-
ments would appear. “It is very difficult to prove a negative, to say that docu-
ments don’t exist. But I will say that if the documents did exist, I would have
found them by now…”
Is it likely, asked Christie, “that an enterprise of the magnitude of the ex-
termination of the Jews of Europe could be accomplished… without the ex-
istence of explicit orders and plans”?
Hardly, said Irving, and not only orders but “any written reference to it”
was lacking. “I have to say that the German wartime civil servant was basical-
ly a cowardly animal and he would not do something that he considered to be
criminal without getting a document clearing himself.” That, said Irving, “is
why there are letters showing Himmler saying on the Fuehrer’s orders we are
deporting the Jews. Which was the extent of the Fuehrer’s orders and which
was the extent, to my mind, of the Final Solution… Hitler’s other crimes, the
documents are there. The euthanasia order, the order to kill British comman-
dos, the orders to lynch American airmen, the orders for the killing of the
male population of Stalingrad if ever they occupied it. Hitler’s other crimes,
simple crimes, the documents are there where you expect to find them. And
yet this biggest crime of all, there is no document.”
Further, said Irving, “these orders would have been referred to in countless
files of different ministerial bodies. So, it would have been impossible for
these documents to have been destroyed at the end of the war. There would
always be carbon copies somewhere.”
Does the German word Ausrottung mean extermination or something less
precise? asked Christie.
Today, said Irving, it unquestionably signifies murder. In the documents of
the 1930s and 1940s, it did not. “In the mouth of Adolf Hitler, the word
Ausrottung is never once used to mean murder and I’ve made a study of that
particular semantic problem.” Irving gave two examples, and said, “I defy
anybody to find… the word… used by Adolf Hitler to mean the word mur-
der.”
Christie asked Irving if, in his opinion, the Holocaust had been “sufficient-
ly investigated to determine accurately its extent and meaning.”
“I think,” said Irving, “there has been virtually no investigation of the Hol-
ocaust. When we realize that Mr. Zündel, the defendant in this case, is the first
person who has gone to the trouble to get the aerial photographs of the Ger-
man concentration camps, the kind of concrete evidence that anybody is enti-
tled to demand when you’re carrying out an investigation, this shows us how
[negligent] all the [others] have been.” And the same could be said about
Zündel’s forensic examination of the sites.
Are there factual errors in major history books? asked Christie.
Certainly, said Irving. “The standard works like Allan Bullock’s Hitler: A
Study in Tyranny [are] riddled with errors,” yet they go into reprint after re-
print.
Christie and Irving discussed the mistreatment of key Nuremberg defend-
ants like the SS generals Ohlendorf and Pohl and Field Marshal Erhard Milch.
As an example, Milch was threatened with severe punishment unless he per-
jured himself by testifying against his superior in the air force, Göring. He re-
fused, and received life imprisonment. “There’s a whole string of examples of
the coercion of prisoners at Nuremberg,” said Irving.
In the early 1960s, Irving had obtained from the National Archives in
Washington “a complete photocopy of the Simpson Commission of Inquiry
which the American Justice Department, to its credit, sent to Europe to inves-
tigate the allegations that American officers were torturing German defense
witnesses.”
Christie: And did you form any opinions as a result of examining that doc-
ument?
Irving: I formed the opinion that, in the future, one would have to be very,
very cautious before accepting without verification the evidence sworn by de-
fense or prosecution witnesses in the Nuremberg trials.
How much of the factual content of the Harwood pamphlet is accurate?
asked Christie.
“I would estimate over 90 percent,” said Irving.
Christie asked Irving if he was familiar with the Hans Frank Diaries.
Very much so, said Irving. Since Frank was the governor general of occu-
pied Poland, one would expect to find some reference there to gas chambers
or exterminations. But “no explicit reference” could be found.
Have you examined, asked Christie, Hitler’s reaction when the great indus-
trial works at Auschwitz were overrun?
Yes, said Irving, the stenographers recorded every word he spoke at his
headquarters. When General Heinz Guderian informed him, he just said, “oh,
yes.”
“Now,” said Irving, “if Hitler had known… what was supposed to have
been going on, he would surely have said something like ‘well, let’s hope they
managed to get rid of it’ or ‘they’re not going to find anything.’ All he said
was ‘oh, yes,’ and moved on to the next business. This is the kind of clue that
one has. Straws in the wind. Altogether it makes a very different picture.”
How, asked Christie, were the prosecution and defense witnesses at Nu-
remberg treated?
The prosecution witnesses, said Irving, were “lavishly fed,” housed in lux-
ury hotels, paid well and promised good jobs.
“The defense witnesses were universally badly treated.” They were poorly
fed, housed in cold, windowless cells in a criminal institution, and subjected to
mental and physical coercion. Even Robert H. Jackson, the American Chief
Prosecutor at Nuremberg, was ashamed of the proceedings, as one learns in
his private diary, to which Irving had gained privileged access.
Could the prosecution control access to documents at Nuremberg? asked
Christie.
Oh yes, said Irving. “The prosecution obtained all the documents for its
own purposes and the defense was then allowed to build up its case entirely on
the basis of the prosecution collection of documents. No collection of docu-
ments by the defense was made possible by the authorities in Nuremberg.
They were allowed very limited access to the documents collected exclusively
for the purposes of the prosecution.”
Do you, asked Christie, consider the information from the Eichmann Trial
to be of value to historians?
This was about 20 years after the Wannsee Conference, said Irving, and,
after that span of time, a witness often can no longer separate in his mind what
he remembers and what he has read or been told.
Irving’s verdict on the (altered) Anne Frank diary was: “completely worth-
less” as a historical document.
How popular was Hitler in Germany? asked Christie.
In April 1938, said Irving, there was a “perfectly genuine plebiscite” in
which 48 million Germans voted with Hitler and about 200,000 against.
“There’s not the slightest evidence that this plebiscite was faked in any way.”
And did Churchill praise Hitler? asked Christie.
One occasion was in September 1937, said Irving, when he wrote in the
London Evening Standard that if Britain should ever fall as Germany had, he
hoped that she would find a leader of the same stature.
Christie: Is there a document called “Table Talk” by Heinrich Heim?
Yes, said Irving, it was a daily, semi-verbatim record of Hitler’s mealtime
conversations. Irving had met Heim himself. In the “Table Talk,” Hitler “re-
peatedly referred to his post-war plans with the Jews.”
“In your research,” asked Christie, “has there been any indication of hard
evidence for numbers [killed] at all?”
“Certain numbers for certain specific tragedies,” said Irving, and he named
three specific documented atrocities committed by Germans. Yet, he cau-
tioned, these episodes “are served up again and again as being examples of
what was going on.”
We know, said Christie, that the British broke the Germans’ secret codes.
“Did you investigate the effect of [this] upon the whole question of the Holo-
caust?”
Yes, said Irving. The point is we would have known about an operation to
liquidate millions. What we have instead, in the British public-records office,
is evidence of “attempts to start a black propaganda campaign alleging that the
Germans were employing gas chambers.”
What happens when one questions the Holocaust? asked Christie.
“After I wrote Hitler’s War,” said Irving, “my front door was smashed
down by a gentleman with a sledgehammer. I was raided by people disguised
as telephone engineers who turned out to be from a Jewish organization in
Britain.”
After a lunch break, Christie and Pearson questioned Irving in the absence
of the jury about the Leuchter Report.
Irving was unstinting in his praise for the document. Future historians of
the Holocaust could not afford to ignore it, he said. It passed Trevor-Roper’s
three tests: being authentic; “written by somebody in a position to know”; and
“written for a valid purpose.”
“I’m very impressed,” said Irving, “by the scientific manner of presenta-
tion,” and “as a historian I’m rather ashamed it never occurred to me to make
this kind of investigation.”
Pearson asked for clarification on Trevor-Roper’s third test.
Clearly, said Irving, the Leuchter Report came into existence as a defense
document. Therefore, its author would anticipate expert scrutiny by the other
side, and strive for “enhanced accuracy.” One would not expect such an au-
thor to “perjure himself,” or the analytic chemists who assisted him to falsify
their findings.
When he exposed the Hitler Diaries as a fake, said Irving, “it was on the
basis of the fact that the magazine purported to carry out tests on the ink but
didn’t, in fact, submit those tests to us at the press conference. They fudged
around their findings.”
Pearson suggested that “the tests themselves don’t tell us anything,” but
that only the conclusions drawn from them are important.
Irving: I think that if historians are inclined to accept the eyewitness or
hearsay testimony of people who were present on a site 40 years later, the tes-
timony of the bricks and stones which can be collected from the site and sub-
jected to objective chemical analysis should very certainly be relevant to a his-
torian.
The Leuchter Report, said Irving, “is shattering in the significance of its
discovery,” and “a stroke of genius on the part of the defense.”
In spite of Irving’s lofty assessment, Judge Thomas ruled, “There will be
no comment on the Leuchter Report.” Christie was only allowed to ask the
witness whether, to his knowledge, any physical examination of the alleged
extermination camps had been previously published.
Christie: Can I ask him whether he considers such evidence valuable?
Judge Thomas: No.
The jury returned, and Christie asked Irving the one question about Leuch-
ter he was allowed to ask. Irving explained in reply that, until the second Zün-
del trial, no one had published the results of a detailed physical examination of
“the so-called murder camps.”
Pearson began his cross-examination of Irving by intensively questioning
him about how he knew that Göring never read the document pertaining to the
Jewish question which he signed for Heydrich on July 31, 1941.
Göring’s Diary shows, said Irving, that the two men were only together for
10 minutes, and other matters were also dealt with. Göring was eager to get to
the station “to pick up his wife whom he hadn’t seen for three months.” Fur-
ther, the document was “a piece of bureaucratic bumpf,” of no importance, de-
spite the great significance attached to it later by some. At Nuremberg, Göring
had no recollection of it.
Göring was head of the German Air Force, Prussian minister of the interi-
or, Prussian prime minister, head of the German four-year-plan, and in charge
of German opera and wildlife, said Irving. He had an opulent lifestyle. Do you
want me to go on?
“We have 70 volumes of verbatim records of Hermann Göring’s wartime
conferences so we’re pretty-well-informed about the way his mind was work-
ing. If people take the trouble to read them. But they are in that strange lan-
guage and people don’t take the time.”
All this memorandum did, said Irving, was extend Germany’s Jewish poli-
cy eastward at a time when new Soviet territories were being occupied.
What about Eichmann and the Wannsee Conference? asked Pearson.
Eichmann “was under considerable physical and mental coercion” in Jeru-
salem, said Irving. There was also the great passage of time to consider. “Giv-
en the wealth of other documentation that we have” about Wannsee, why not
dispense with this conflicting evidence produced under questionable circum-
stances? Other Wannsee participants had been “interrogated in great detail”
immediately after the war. The Eichmann testimony was “polluted, dangerous
to read for a historian.”
The two or three different versions of the Wannsee Conference protocol
which are held in different files give “no explicit reference to extermination of
the Jews of Europe,” said Irving, and, more importantly, neither does “any of
the other documents in that file. We cannot take documents out of context.”
“Had Adolf Eichmann been questioned in 1945 at very great length by
American or British interrogators, that would have been of substantially great-
er evidentiary value for a historian,” said Irving.
Judge Thomas then adjourned the court for the weekend.
On Monday, April 25, John Pearson resumed his cross-examination by
asking David Irving some general questions about his books, his opinions of
other historians, and so on.
Do you have contempt for Hugh Trevor-Roper? he asked.
“Not the slightest,” said Irving. “[I owe him] a very considerable debt.”
Do you have contempt for Raul Hilberg? asked Pearson.
“Not the slightest,” said Irving. “Again, he’s one of the few academic his-
torians who has done his homework.”
Pearson turned to Irving’s views with respect to the Holocaust, as stated in
his introduction to Hitler’s War. “What do you mean,” asked Pearson “by ‘the
bloody and mindless massacre of the Jews’?”
Irving: There were very large numbers of massacres which can only be de-
scribed as bloody and mindless, of Jews and other ethnic minorities in occu-
pied Europe during the Second World War.
Fans of David Irving will recall that Hitler’s War basically supported the
orthodox view of the Holocaust except for demonstrating the lack of evidence
that Hitler knew anything about it until relatively late in the war. (On the other
hand, Hitler’s “constitutional responsibility” for what was going on behind his
back was stressed in the book, and again during Irving’s testimony at the Zün-
del Trial.) At this and other points during his testimony, Irving noted to Pear-
son, “I’ve come a very long way” in my views of the Holocaust since the mid-
1970s.
“On Friday,” recalled Irving, “I quoted you from memory a spring 1942
document in which Hitler is quoted by the chief of his Reich Chancellery
[Hans Lammers] as saying the Fuehrer wants the solution of the Jewish prob-
lem postponed until after the war is over. Now, you can’t have it both ways.
That document is a genuine document.”
Pearson: Well, sir, I suggest the only way you are trying to have it in the
introduction is you’re telling the reader that you’re going to prove that Hitler
did not have personal knowledge of the extermination of the Jews.
Correct, said Irving.
Pearson: Are you saying here [now] that you wrote a book to prove that
Hitler wasn’t responsible for something that never happened?
Irving: No, I didn’t set out to write a book to prove anything. I set out to
write a biography of Hitler based on the documents as accurately as I could
find them.
“Certainly,” said Irving, “it is questionable whether [Hitler] ever knew that
the Final Solution was going on, whatever the Final Solution was.”
“At the time I wrote that… introduction,” said Irving, “I believed. I be-
lieved everything I had heard about the extermination camps. I wasn’t investi-
gating the extermination camps. I was investigating Hitler.”
Pearson: But your mind changed?
Irving: My mind has now changed.
Pearson: You no longer believe it?
Irving: I have now begun to challenge that. I understand it is now a subject
open to debate.
“[C]ertainly in the course of what I have read in the last few days,” said Ir-
ving, “I am now becoming more and more hardened in this view.”
Pearson returned to Hitler’s War and read Irving’s account of how, on No-
vember 30, 1941, Hitler ordered that “there was to be ‘no liquidation’ of the
Jews.”
“Would you agree,” asked Pearson, that this order “is the linchpin of your
whole argument in Hitler’s War ?”
Irving: No, sir. I am aware of the newspapers [trying] to make out that that
was the linchpin. In fact, that is one minor item in a series of about 10 docu-
ments beginning in 1923, 1924 and going right through until 1944. [These are]
the only documents specifically linking Hitler with what was happening to the
Jews, and in each Hitler was putting out his hand to stop it happening. This is
just one of those items and I have to say here… that the word “the” in front of
Jews is wrong. It is one specific transport of Jews from Berlin going to Riga
[Latvia], who were, in fact, at that time, November 30, 1941, already dead by
some hours. This was one of the specific atrocities.
Irving noted, “You don’t see this kind of thing referred to in the history
books because they can’t make it fit. They pretend that these documents don’t
exist.”
But, said Pearson, if there was no annihilation going on, “why would Hitler
have to give those orders?”
I am not denying, said Irving, that “there were a number of massacres and
atrocities.”
Pearson: All right. Would you agree that Himmler and Heydrich had
knowledge of this “bloody and mindless” massacre that was going on?
Irving: To the best of my knowledge, they did, yes.
Irving also agreed that Himmler “had the authority to set the wheels [of
killing] in motion himself.”
“So, couldn’t we say,” asked Pearson, that “Himmler was implementing
policy?”
“I don’t think,” said Irving, “there was any overall Reich policy to kill the
Jews.”
Pearson quoted from Hitler’s War, where Irving describes “my own hy-
pothesis” as being “the killing was partly of an ad hoc nature… the way out
of an awkward dilemma, chosen by the middle-level authorities in the eastern
territories overrun by the Nazis, and partly a cynical extrapolation by the cen-
tral SS authorities of Hitler’s anti-Semitic decrees. Hitler had unquestionably
decreed that Europe’s Jews were to be swept back to the east… Partly in col-
lusion with each other, partly independently, the Nazi agencies there simply
liquidated the deportees as their trains arrived, on a scale increasingly more-
methodical and more-regimented as the months passed.”
Do you repudiate that? asked Pearson.
In part, said Irving. “At that time, I believed there had been an increasingly
more-methodical liquidation. This is something which I am now increasingly
inclined to challenge because… I still haven’t seen any evidence that there
was.”
“I have no axe to grind,” said Irving. “If somebody came forward with a
document proving that I am wrong on this, then I would accept that I am
wrong… It’s not the result, it’s the way you play the game, even in writing
history…”
Irving recalled his famous offer of a thousand pounds in cash to anyone
who “can find one single wartime document showing that Adolf Hitler knew
what was going on. The Holocaust, whatever it was. They can’t even do that.”
In Hitler’s War, said Irving, Hitler’s crimes are “set out in more detail than
in any other Hitler biography.”
Do you deny, asked Pearson, that Hitler was responsible for the Einsatz-
gruppen activities?
“It’s an entirely different kettle of fish from what we now commonly re-
gard as the Holocaust,” said Irving. “It was an atrocity. No other way of de-
scribing it.”
“And didn’t [the Einsatzgruppen] orders lead up to Himmler, at least?”
asked Pearson.
Indirectly, I believe so, said Irving.

And didn’t they proceed through Himmler to Hitler? asked Pearson.
“If you can find that piece of paper,” said Irving, then “you’re going to be a
rich man. You would then collect the reward.”
In your book, said Pearson, you cite a memo from Himmler to Hitler where
about 300,000 Jews are referred to as exterminated.
Right, said Irving. It’s dated October 1942. “It’s a rare document. It pokes
above the clouds of the other archives like Mount Kilimanjaro – you wonder
what it’s doing there… I am unhappy about it because it is such an unusual,
isolated document.”
Pearson: So you concede that there were units of security police extermi-
nating large numbers of Jews behind the battlelines in Russia, but you don’t
concede that that’s part of an official policy to exterminate Jews. Is that what
you’re saying?
Irving: I make the first concession that there were these operations. I don’t
concede it was part of an overall German state policy of exterminating Jews.
Pearson: Because Hitler had to know about it in order for it to be part?
Irving: No, because there is no documentary evidence to support the sec-
ond contention.
Pearson read from Hitler’s War: “In October 1943, even as Himmler was
disclosing to audiences of SS generals and gauleiters that Europe’s Jews had
virtually been exterminated, Hitler was still forbidding liquidations.”
Right, said Irving. “That comes under the category of ‘at that time I be-
lieved.’”
Reading Himmler’s speeches again, said Irving, one finds him admitting
frankly that Jewish men, women and children had been killed in liquidation
operations, “but this of course falls far short of what I say in that sentence that
Europe’s Jews had been virtually exterminated.”
You’ve changed your mind? asked Pearson.
Irving: That is correct. I certainly wouldn’t write that again.
Judge Thomas: And when did you change your mind on this?
Irving: As I became aware that the whole of the Holocaust was coming un-
der scrutiny and that the historians of the world were not able to put up a de-
fense.
Pearson tried to pin a date on Irving, but the witness insisted that his
change of opinion had “occurred gradually” over the past decade.
The subject of Konrad Morgen’s investigation of concentration-camp
atrocities was raised. Irving noted his own correspondence with Morgen, and
the fact that Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the chief of the Gestapo, “claimed that when
Morgen made these reports to him about atrocities… he, Kaltenbrunner, had
gone to see Hitler, who ordered that these atrocities had to stop.”
Nonetheless, said Irving, “I think it was very culpable on [Hitler’s] part”
that “he paid very little attention” to what was going on with the Jews.
Wouldn’t you agree, asked Pearson, that Himmler and Martin Bormann
“were very interested in seeing to it that the Fuehrer’s wishes were realized?”
“That’s right,” said Irving. “Himmler and Bormann [ordinarily would
write] ‘on the basis of the Fuehrer’s order, this is what we have done,’ and that
is what is lacking in this case.”
Pearson read from Hitler’s War about a report on an execution of 20 to 30
Poles, including children, which “an outspoken medical officer addressed to
Hitler in person.”
“Would you agree with me, sir,” asked Pearson, “that an SS major here is
reported to have conducted a massacre that was against non-combatants?”
Irving: Oh, indeed, and I would like to draw attention to the quality of the
documentary evidence which does exist relating to smaller crimes. Dealing
here with 20 or 30 Poles who are being massacred, a small atrocity. Why do
we not have documents on the huge crimes of equivalent evidentiary value?
Pearson continued reading from Hitler’s War. Irving had mentioned a letter
dated October 25, 1941 in SS files stating that Eichmann had approved a pro-
posal that deported Jews arriving in Riga, Latvia should be killed by mobile
gas trucks.
Irving remarked, “Without having another look at the letter now 10 years
later in the light of our present information, I would stand by what I wrote
there.”
Pearson continued reading: “This initially ad hoc operation gathered mo-
mentum. Soon the Jews from the Lodz Ghetto and [from Wartheland] were
being deported further east to the extermination camp at Chelmno. There were
152,000 Jews involved in all, and Chelmno began liquidating them on De-
cember 8th.”
Irving said, “I think it has to be pointed out we’re not talking about
152,000 Jews being exterminated. I’m just saying this is one figure which is
contained in the document and that Chelmno was certainly involved in killing
Jews.”
Pearson asked about the term “special treatment,” and Irving observed,
“We have to be very cautious with the word ’special treatment’ because it be-
longs in a category of words which mean different things in different mouths
and in different documents.”
Pearson: In Churchill’s War, do you say that the Holocaust never hap-
pened?
In Volume Two, said Irving, “we come to some very interesting documents
in the British Archives which show the British Intelligence Service suggesting
a propaganda campaign against Germany on the basis of invented allegations
of gas chambers…”
Irving described the Joint Allied Declaration of December 1942 as a
“propaganda declaration” which “probably attracted very little attention.”
When you wrote Hitler’s War, asked Pearson, “was it your belief that the
Wannsee Conference dealt with emigration and not extermination?”
“I tried not to be too polemical in this book,” said Irving. “I was in trouble
with the book as it was… If I had tried to be more polemical and said [the
Wannsee Conference] was notorious [only] because historians have got [its
significance] all wrong,” an editor would “very rightly” have reined me in.
Do I understand you to say, asked Pearson, that “you knew [in 1977] that
the historians had got [the Wannsee Conference] wrong”?
Yes, said Irving.
Pearson: But you didn’t feel that it was wise for you to point out how they
got it all wrong?
“I think,” said Irving, “I was striking a deliberately sober tone” in Hitler’s
War.
Pearson read from the book about Hans Frank being irritated in December
1941 by Berlin’s tendency to dump more deported western-European Jews on
eastern Europe. “Liquidate them yourselves!” he had exclaimed.
Do you repudiate that? asked Pearson.
“Magnificent piece of evidence,” said Irving, “showing how the tragedy
happened. Somebody on-the-spot taking a decision for himself.” The Jews
“were being dumped on [people] and they didn’t want them. Just like we in
Britain didn’t want them, like the Americans didn’t want them either.”
The “remarkable thing,” said Irving, “is that this is, I think, the only explic-
it reference in Hans Frank’s entire diaries, which occupy many feet of shelf
space, to the tragedy that was occurring.”
Pearson read from Hitler’s War where Irving wrote, “I cannot accept the
view of Dr. Kubovy of… Tel Aviv… that ‘there exists no document signed
by Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich speaking of the extermination of the Jews.’”
Irving had called attention to both a note of Himmler dated November 30,
1941 and a phone call of him dated April 20, 1942.
“Now I take it,” said Pearson, “that you now do agree with Dr. Kubovy?”
No, said Irving, he still took exception to Kubovy’s statement.
Then let’s look at Harwood, said Pearson, who writes: “Dr. Kubovy recog-
nized that not a single order for extermination exists from Hitler, Himmler,
Heydrich or Göring.”
So, asked Pearson, if Kubovy is wrong, must not Harwood also be?
No, said Irving, because I quoted Kubovy directly and got his meaning
right, whereas Harwood paraphrased him incorrectly. Harwood is right to
speak of there being “no order” but wrong to attribute the word “order” to
Kubovy’s statement. Kubovy only said “no document,” and that is wrong, be-
cause Himmler “speaks about the extermination of the Jews in the sense of
[saying] ‘no extermination.’”
So, said Pearson, your view in Hitler’s War was that a document exists in
which Himmler speaks of extermination. “Is it still your view?”
Irving: That’s still the view in the sense that Himmler says no extermina-
tion. It speaks of it in a negative sense.
Am I right in saying, asked Pearson, that a major thesis of Hitler’s War
“was that Hitler didn’t know about the mass extermination of Jews”?
Irving: Not quite right. The other way around. There is no evidence that he
did know what was going on, whatever it was.
Pearson: But now your position is it’s all irrelevant because there wasn’t
anything going on. Is that what you’re saying?
There is no evidence, said Irving, that “it” was going on.
Would you agree, asked Pearson, that Raul Hilberg has chronicled the ex-
termination in his book?
Irving: I think that Professor Hilberg will eventually also come to change
his beliefs.
Pearson read from Hitler’s War: “In a paper circulated early in March
1942, Heydrich’s office advised the ministries that Europe’s 11 million Jews
were to be concentrated in the East for the time being. After the war, they
might be allocated a remote territory like Madagascar as a national home.
Thus the official version.”
“Whose official version?” asked Pearson.
“As given by the [German] archives,” said Irving.
Pearson continued reading: “The actual operation proceeded differently.
Starting in March and April the European Jews were rounded up [and deport-
ed]… Upon arrival at Auschwitz and Treblinka, four in every 10 were pro-
nounced fit for work; the rest were exterminated with a maximum of con-
cealment.”
“Now,” asked Pearson, “where did you get the figure four in every 10?”
From one document, said Irving – “one unsigned purported eyewitness ac-
count” at the U.S. Mission in Berlin.
Pearson: And so you now repudiate what you’ve written in your book?
Irving: I am now uncertain because I now understand that the whole of the
story of what happened in Auschwitz and the other camps is controversial and
with that knowledge of the controversy at the back of my mind, I have kept
my eyes that-much-more-open in going through the archives again in the hope
of finding a document that would resolve the controversy.
So you don’t believe the accepted version of events now? asked Pearson.
Irving: Even in this book [Hitler’s War] I was challenging about how that
tragedy happened.
“What did you mean,” asked Pearson, “when you wrote that ‘the rest were
exterminated with a maximum of concealment’?”
Irving: By virtue of the fact that apart from this one document that I saw in
the archives of the American government in Berlin, there was no similar kind
of evidentiary proof of the existence of such an extermination program.
Pearson read from Hitler’s War about how “Each day after July 22, [1942,]
a trainload of five thousand Jews left Warsaw for the extermination center at
Treblinka.”
“Wouldn’t you agree,” he asked, “that we’re talking about the systematic
emptying of countries for the purpose of sending the Jews to extermination
centers?”
Today, said Irving, “I would be inclined to question what I wrote… there.
We know that each day after July the 22nd, a trainload of 5,000 Jews left
Warsaw because there is a document specifically saying that, and it continues
with the words ‘for Treblinka’ because the document adds those words, but it
doesn’t use the words ‘for the extermination center’ which I put in intending
to help my readers, but now, unfortunately, I would have to say on the basis of
my 1988 beliefs, I wouldn’t use those words.”
Do you deny that Treblinka was an extermination center? asked Pearson.
“I have not seen any credible evidence that it was,” said Irving.
Did you mislead your readers in 1977 so that Hitler’s War would sell?
asked Pearson.
Irving: I saw no reason in 1977 not to believe the then-existing version that
Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz had been death camps.
Pearson read from Hitler’s War: “By August 1942, the massacre machin-
ery was gathering momentum – of such refinement and devilish ingenuity that
from Himmler down to the ex-lawyers who ran the extermination camps, per-
haps only 70 men were aware of the truth.”
This date, said Irving, is derived from the “postwar confidential writings of
General Karl Wolff, who was Himmler’s personal adjutant and liaison officer
to Hitler,” and described a meeting he had with Himmler in August 1942.
Pearson: So you believe now that Wolff was not correct?
Irving: At that time [1942], Wolff himself had no knowledge of the massa-
cre machinery being in operation.
Pearson: You now believe that Wolff was lying when he said Himmler said
these things?
“No,” said Irving, “it’s possible that Wolff may have misinterpreted it.”
Skipping ahead in Irving’s testimony, he later clarified things: “Wolff re-
lated this in 1952 in a confidential memorandum for the Institute of [Contem-
porary] History in Munich, that he had had this conversation with Himmler,
and after the war he only assumed that this must have been a reference [by
Himmler] to what we now call the Holocaust.”
But, said Irving, “[Wolff] never admitted that he had ever known about this
during the war. I note that there are some documents which implied strongly
that he did know about it during the war from about this period. But certainly
in his testimony he never admitted that he had known about the mass extermi-
nation of Jews, nor [was it] ever proven to the contrary, because he was not
ever punished for it.”
Pearson suggested that Irving was denying the Holocaust, and the witness
replied, “I am not denying that the Holocaust happened in some degree. I am
saying that there was a large series of unrelated atrocities.”
After a lunch break, Pearson suggested to Irving that “if Himmler and other
senior officials were aware that it was taking place, it has to be considered of-
ficial policy because they are the policy makers of the Nazi regime.”
“I think,” said Irving, “that statement derives from a lack of knowledge of
the Fuehrer principle which exists in a Fuehrer state like Nazi Germany. Poli-
cy is only that which is laid down by the Fuehrer himself.”
But, asked Pearson, wasn’t the “name of the game” in Nazi Germany to
“anticipate the Fuehrer’s will”?
Irving: I think you’ve captured the essence of it precisely.
Pearson asked the witness if he hadn’t concluded in Hitler’s War that
Himmler used the power delegated to him to exterminate Jews?
Irving: I would alter the word “used” to “abused,” and then I would accept
your statement. Himmler abused the authority to exterminate large numbers of
Jews and other enemies of the State at a time when it was clear from Hitler’s
statements that Hitler was intent on a geographical solution instead.
Irving emphasized that at no time, “either orally or in writing,” did Hitler
give Himmler the job of “carrying out a mass extermination of Jews on any
scale whatever.”
Pearson: [But] you do say that later in the war, and we’ll be getting to this,
Hitler did find out what Himmler was doing, don’t you?
Irving: There are one or two documents of a post-war nature – I emphasize
post-war – which indicate that this possibly happened.
I do say in my book, said Irving, that “after October 1943, Hitler had no
real excuse for not knowing.”
Well, said Pearson, between then and April 1945, “did Hitler relieve
Himmler of his responsibilities or otherwise punish him or chastise him?”
Irving: Very much in character with Hitler, he left him in command.
Now, said Pearson, don’t we have two separate postwar sources, the testi-
monies of SS Major Dieter Wisliceny and of Adolf Eichmann – “and I con-
cede that it is hearsay evidence” – that Hitler “ordered the physical annihila-
tion of the Jews”?
Yes, said Irving, but their evidence is “mutually contradictory.” Wisliceny
said Eichmann showed him a letter signed by Himmler saying “The Fuehrer
has decided…” Eichmann said he had never received any such written order
from Himmler, but had only told Wisliceny verbally what Heydrich had re-
ported to him verbally.
Pearson mentioned a Report Number 51 dated December 1, 1942, which
mentioned 363,211 Soviet Jews executed over the past three months as “parti-
san accomplices and suspects.”
“I can only repeat what I said previously,” said Irving, “that this was such
an extraordinary document, that the figure was so unusual, that it is the kind of
thing which makes one raise one’s eyebrows and question further… [O]ne
would look for a reference to this document in perhaps the War Diary of the
German High Command or in some other collateral source where you would
find the same figures turning up quoted. It would be sufficient to make me
mistrustful of the document because it is such an extraordinary figure, and…
inserted there almost as an afterthought, a figure that is 20 or 30 times as large
as any other figure on the page.”
You asked for a collateral source, said Pearson, but “who else [but the Se-
curity Police] is going to be around [behind the front] to report on those
things?”
Presumably, said Irving, “we British would have intercepted it because we
were reading the German SS code at that time… That is one example.”
“This document is very much an orphan,” said Irving. “It is all by itself,
without parents… As a historian, I have to [ask] why, suddenly, this colossal
figure was inserted there in this report when all the other reports of that series
contained no such figure. I want to know. It raises questions in my head and
I’m uncomfortable with it.”
“Who is this report going to?” asked Pearson.
To Himmler, said Irving. “Himmler’s diary is unfortunately in the hands of
the Israelis. It is a point worth mentioning that the Israeli government would
not allow any historians to make use of Heinrich Himmler’s private diary. If
Heinrich Himmler’s private diary contained evidence that there had been a
Holocaust, such as defined by you, or that your interpretation of these docu-
ments is correct, then I’m sure the Israelis would have been the first to release
the diary and make it available, but they don’t.”
Pearson: Isn’t that a bit of speculation, sir?
No, said Irving, “I think it is a very reasonable assumption…”
Pearson read from Hitler’s War: “There are other illuminating references
to the ‘Jewish problem’ in Himmler’s files at this time. On October 2, 1942,
he wrote to Pohl, [SS General Odilo] Globocnik and Wolff about his determi-
nation to extract the Jews from their protected status within important arms
factories in Poland too.” Irving quoted Himmler as saying that, “in accordance
with the Fuehrer’s wish,” these working Jews must one day “disappear.”
Didn’t you put that in your book, asked Pearson, because it supported the
idea that Himmler was behind the extermination?
I put it in, said Irving, “because I wanted to help the historians who weren’t
doing their jobs, and I was providing documents for them which they hadn’t
seen before.” Himmler was choosing his words very carefully, and I repeated
them precisely, so that other historians would have “a chance to make up their
own minds on how they are going to interpret these words, and I very much
tried to avoid drawing conclusions myself.”
Pearson noted how, in Hitler’s War, Irving had called attention to three oc-
casions when Himmler or his office forwarded to other Nazis Western press
dispatches or memoranda alleging the extermination of Jews. On two occa-
sions, the cover letter had simply said something neutral like “for your atten-
tion.” On the third occasion, Himmler had commented: “Given the scale of the
Jewish migration, I’m not surprised that such rumors crop up somewhere in
the world. We both know there’s a high death rate among the Jews who are
put to work… you are to investigate at once in all quarters to find out whether
there have been any such abuses as the no-doubt-mendacious – rumors dis-
seminated around the world claim. All such abuses are to be reported to me on
the SS Oath of Honor.”
Irving had concluded in Hitler’s War that “This letter was the purest hum-
bug,” given “Himmler’s suave reaction” on the other two occasions.
In 1988, Irving reacted differently. Given the atrocities which were un-
doubtedly being committed, Himmler was likely writing his “investigate-at-
once” note to its recipient, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller, in order to say,
“Put this in your file, Müller. You may need it.” Again, said Irving, this is
speculation.
Pearson turned to the discussion in Irving’s book of Dr. Richard Korherr’s
1943 statistical report on the progress of the “Final Solution of the Jewish
Problem in Europe.”
“It’s a very questionable document,” said Irving. “It was only introduced in
part at the Nuremberg Trial. The evidence… showing that it had been tam-
pered with by Himmler or by other people… was omitted from the Nurem-
berg exhibits.”
As Hitler’s War had suggested, Himmler was “annoyed” because the doc-
ument spoke of a large number of Jews being subjected to “special treatment”
at Polish camps.
Now, suggested Pearson, this term means “liquidation.”
That’s “one possible interpretation,” said Irving, although Dr. Korherr
himself challenged it in a long letter to Der Spiegel, “saying he’s fed up with
his report always being adduced as evidence that there was a mass murder of
the Jews. The report that he wrote was quite a straightforward statistical report
and at no stage in his report had he referred to the mass killing of large num-
bers of Jews.”
But would you agree, asked Pearson, that, in 1977, “it was your clear be-
lief” that the Korherr Report meant “liquidation”?
Yes, said Irving, but “I just have to add the rider that the author of the re-
port himself says this is an improper imputation to place on his own report.”
The uncertainty here, said Irving, is one reason why I gave a high “upper
limit” for the number of Jews killed in the Second World War. If this docu-
ment is accurate; if “special treatment” means “liquidation” here; and if
“Korherr was lying after the war,” then obviously a lot more Jews were killed.
Pearson read in Hitler’s War about several letters which reached Dr. Hans
Lammers in about 1943, “alleging that Jews were being methodically exter-
minated in Poland. At the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Lammers stated that
he followed up these reports by asking Himmler. ‘Himmler [said Lammers]
denied that there was any authorized killing going on and told me – making
reference to the Fuehrer’s orders – “I have to evacuate the Jews and in such
evacuations there are… obviously fatalities. Apart from those, the people are
being housed in camps in the East.” And he fetched a mass of pictures and al-
bums and showed me how the Jews were being put to work in the camps… ’”
Wasn’t Himmler lying to Lammers? asked Pearson.
“It’s a bit vague,” said Irving. “Himmler denied that there was any ‘author-
ized killing’ going on… What does he mean by that?”
Pearson and Irving discussed the 1943 conversation and related corre-
spondence among Hitler, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop
and Hungarian Leader Nicholas Horthy about the fate of Hungary’s Jews.
“I suggest it was pretty clear to Admiral Horthy,” said Pearson, “that what
was happening in Germany, and elsewhere where the Nazis were in control,
was racial genocide.”
Irving: I don’t think that interpretation is borne out either by the German
document when read in full or by the Hungarian version of the same conversa-
tion.
Pearson returned to the subject of Himmler’s Posen speech and its treat-
ment by Richard Harwood, who wrote: “Attempts to find ‘veiled allusions’ to
genocide in speeches like that of Himmler’s to his SS Obergruppenführers at
Posen in 1943 are… quite hopeless.”
Wouldn’t you agree, asked Pearson, that “we found at least a ‘veiled allu-
sion’ to genocide”?
Irving: I think the precise allusion is… where Himmler says: “The hard
decision had to be taken to make this race disappear from earth.”
Pearson: And you didn’t have any trouble finding allusion to racial geno-
cide, is that right, sir?
Irving: No, sir.
Yet Irving insisted he was “unhappy about the integrity” of the document,
“because of the remarkable fact that precisely at this point the type script
changes, a page appears to have been inserted by a different typist, the numer-
ation of the pages changes from a typewritten page number at the top to a pen-
ciled page number at the top, and there are various other indications about that
speech that make me queasy.”
“This [Harwood] brochure,” said Irving, “was wrong to suggest that that
[Himmler] speech, as it is known to us historians, contains no allusion to gen-
ocide.” On the other hand, “the speech as known to historians has quite clearly
been tampered with at that point…”
“This is a different page,” said Irving, “that has been inserted in an other-
wise-homogeneous script.” “I’m the only person,” noted Irving, “to have tak-
en [the] trouble” to “look at the original typed script.”
Himmler’s sentence “The hard decision had to be taken to make this race
disappear from earth” happens to appear on “this rather suspect page,” said Ir-
ving. And “nowhere else in all of Himmler’s other speeches… does this pas-
sage appear. It is unique.”
I don’t challenge that he may have spoken these words, said Irving, but
“they were being spoken for a special reason because that page has, for some
reason, been taken out and put in and retyped, that page of all pages, and he
doesn’t make this statement anywhere else when he’s delivering almost-
identical speeches to similar audiences.”
Pearson: Doesn’t he start out his remarks on the Jews by saying, “I am now
going to deal with the subject that must not be spoken in public,” that “it’s a
matter that must be kept between ourselves”?
Yes, said Irving, but he makes “this kind of cautionary statement in very
many speeches. I think there are something like 10 or 15 speeches that he de-
livered between 1942 and June 1944, to this same kind of high-level audience,
where very-frequently he raises the same kind of matter, of what he is up to,
with his famous task of consolidating Germandom in the east. But this is the
only occasion where he makes this kind of statement, and it’s the only [point
at which] this transcript has been tampered with.”
Pearson: Was he talking about racial genocide, or wasn’t he?
Irving: He’s talking about – but can his statement be taken at face value?
Because that is the only time he says it. This is the only time that this particu-
lar page in his [standard] speech has been tampered with. This is the kind of
very-detailed forensic examination that has to be applied to important speech-
es like this.
Pearson: Wasn’t [Himmler] telling people who knew what had happened
that they shouldn’t feel bad about it because what they were doing was pro-
tecting themselves in the future?
That’s right, said Irving, reciting again “The hard decision had to be tak-
en…” But then he added, “And yet he hasn’t taken the decision, because at
this very time millions upon millions of Jews are within the Nazi clutches and
yet they are surviving… [A]nd I’m glad for every single one. So here, he’s
apparently saying, ‘I took the hard decision to make this race disappear from
earth,’ and yet he didn’t do it.”
Pearson asked if Irving had not said, in Hitler’s War, that Himmler was
“interested in killing all the Jews of Hungary, a ‘Final Solution’”?
Irving: That is correct at the time I wrote that book.
Don’t you still agree? asked Pearson.
In 1944, said Irving, Himmler was trying to exchange with the Allies Hun-
garian Jews for trucks, money and other goods. “If he was purely concerned
with the racial solution of liquidating every Jew from the face of the earth, he
was allowing the bucket to leak in several places.”
Pearson read from a quotation, in Hitler’s War, taken from Himmler’s
speech of May 5, 1944 about his “uncompromising” solution of the Jewish
Problem. “You can imagine,” Himmler told his audience of generals, “how I
felt executing this soldierly order issued to me, but I obediently complied…”
Pearson then read Irving’s comment: “Never before, and never after, did
Himmler hint at a Fuehrer order; but there is reason to doubt he dared show
this passage to his Fuehrer.”
Irving noted his footnote: “[The page] containing this pregnant sentence –
for only Hitler was empowered to issue a ’soldierly order’ to Himmler – was
manifestly retyped and inserted in the transcript at a later date, as the different
indenting shows.”
“Another example,” said Irving, “of a document being tampered with.”
Pearson came next to Himmler’s speech to an audience of generals on May
24, 1944, which again stated that the Jewish Problem was “solved uncompro-
misingly.”
Irving noted that Hitler’s War had said: “Himmler’s speech again hinted
that Jewish women and children were also being liquidated.” And that his
footnote had added: “This page alone was also retyped and possibly inserted
at a later date in the typescript.”
“This is what I mean,” said Irving, “when I say that these transcripts of
Himmler’s speeches are very odd. Every time there is a real killing reference,
in both senses of the word, that page has been retyped.”
Pearson then read a portion of Hitler’s speech to the same generals, on
May 26, 1944, which appeared in Hitler’s War. “My dear generals,” he had
said, “we are fighting a battle of life and death. If our enemies are victorious
in this struggle, the German people will be extirpated… Today, incendiary
and other bombs are dropped on our cities although the enemy knows he is
hitting just women and children. They are machine-gunning ordinary railroad
trains, or farmers working in their fields. In one night in a city like Hamburg
we lost over 40,000 women and children; burned to death… Kindness here as
indeed anywhere else would be just about the greatest cruelty to our own peo-
ple. If the Jews are going to hate me, then at least I want to take advantage of
that hatred. The advantage is this: now we have a cleanly organized nation, in
which no outsider can interfere.”
Soon after, court was adjourned. It resumed the next morning, Tuesday,
April 26.
After discussing the meaning of the language used in a couple of other
Himmler speeches, and in the Wannsee Conference Protocol, Pearson and Ir-
ving returned to the latter’s treatment of Admiral Horthy.
Pearson read from Hitler’s War: “But now Himmler’s ghastly secret was
coming out, for two Slovak Jews had escaped from Auschwitz extermination
camp, and their horrifying revelations were published in two reputable Swiss
newspapers early in July [1944]. Horthy refused to deport the Jews from Bu-
dapest; instead, he announced a general would bring Hitler a letter on July
21st.”
The report of the two Slovak Jews [Vrba and Wetzler] was very-well-
known, said Irving, but “I now understand that that report is open to some
question.”
Irving agreed that “Horthy certainly believed something was going on
which he disapproved of.”
And, asked Pearson, wasn’t the source of his concern what the two Slovak
Jews had reported?
“That is true,” said Irving.
Well, asked Pearson, who warned you that the report might be faulty?
“I can’t recall,” said Irving. “They certainly weren’t politically tainted in
any way.”
Do you think, asked Pearson, “that Admiral Horthy didn’t know what was
going on in Poland?”
Irving: Well, as you know having read Hitler’s War, my contention is even
Adolf Hitler didn’t know what was going on in Europe in every respect.
Pearson: With respect to the atrocities committed against the Jews, isn’t the
thesis of Hitler’s War that Heinrich Himmler was the one who was behind
them, not Hitler?
Irving: That the buck stopped with Heinrich Himmler.
Pearson: And have you changed your assessment of Himmler in that re-
gard?
Irving: I haven’t, no.
Pearson read to Irving what Harwood wrote about the SS Judge Dr. Konrad
Morgen and his investigations of concentration-camp irregularities. Upon fin-
ishing, he asked Irving, “Would you agree… that is not an honest summary of
Konrad Morgen’s testimony?”
“To the best of my recollection,” said Irving, “it is a fair reflection of Mor-
gen’s testimony except in the detail.”
Irving: Certainly the impression I had from the Morgen testimony was that
he found himself being drawn into a sink of SS iniquity at camp level. He
found that the most-extraordinary things were happening and that there was a
lot of reluctance by higher-ups to allow him to investigate further, and he ran
into the usual kind of obstructionism. He was obviously a very unusual and
dedicated judicial inquirer. Having said that, I would once again say that this
paragraph fairly reflects the essence of what the Konrad Morgen Report was.
Pearson then read a long excerpt from Hitler’s War about Morgen’s inves-
tigations. “Late in 1943,” Irving had written, “[Morgen] had realized that a
systematic mass murder was proceeding at two camps – Auschwitz and Loo-
blin [Majdanek]. The commandant at Looblin, a former Stuttgart lawyer
named Wirth, told him ‘they were destroying the Jews on the Fuehrer’s or-
ders,’ and he was running altogether four extermination camps in [eastern] Po-
land, including Majdanek.” An investigating judge was sent to “scrutinize the
files of the Reich Security Main Office itself… [but] found that no general
order for the massacre had ever been received or issued. Morgen himself was
the target of harassment; his staff’s barracks were burned down one night,
with all their files, but he fought on and eventually laid the dossier before Kal-
tenbrunner.” Kaltenbrunner sent the report on to Hitler, who then called in
Himmler and Pohl, “to account for their actions… Hitler gave Kaltenbrunner
his word, as they shook hands and parted, that he would put an immediate end
to the massacre.” When Hitler heard the Allied reports of 1.5 million killed at
Majdanek, he “angrily dismissed [them] as propaganda.”
Yes, said Irving, I wrote that in 1977, and “I don’t think I would change a
line of it. I think I built in all the necessary safeguards to point to the obvious
inadequacies of the testimony.”
Morgen, noted Irving, never got to the alleged extermination camps. “And
Hitler himself dismissed [Majdanek] angrily [as] Allied propaganda.” Maj-
danek was “among a number of very-large similar claims put out by the Brit-
ish psychological-warfare executive on the instructions of the British Secret
Service…”
Now, asked Pearson, do you agree “it would have been honest [for Har-
wood] to include in [his] summary the fact that Morgen’s investigations had
led him to conclude that there were six camps operating as extermination
camps in Poland”?
Irving: I think that the author of the brochure should have mentioned that
and then examined that allegation.
“Do you have any reason,” asked Pearson, “to doubt the honesty of what
Morgen told you?”
“He is a very-respected lawyer,” said Irving. “He would certainly temper
his statements in the modern Federal Republic of Germany with an element of
caution.”
Let’s look at one more place in Hitler’s War, said Pearson. The end of the
war. American troops are about to overrun Buchenwald, and Hitler is asked
what should be done with the prisoners. Evacuate them or liquidate them, he
replies.
“I can expand on [that],” said Irving. “This was testimony given to me by
the SS Colonel Otto Günsche,” Hitler’s personal adjutant and bodyguard. I
asked him when the killing of Jews or concentration-camp inmates had been
discussed at Hitler’s headquarters, and he said, “Mr. Irving, I remember one
episode only.” Right at the end of the war, said Günsche, Hitler told Himmler,
“Make sure that all the prisoners [at Buchenwald] are liquidated before the
Americans overrun the camp, if they cannot be evacuated.” Two or three years
later, Irving asked Günsche the same question, “as a check to see if his
memory had changed.” The only difference was an additional sentence he

placed in Hitler’s mouth: “I don’t want to think of these criminals being
turned loose on the local German population.”
Pearson attempted to question Irving on the German book Ich, Adolf Eich-
mann, based on his memoirs, but Christie protested that the witness was un-
familiar with it, and Irving added that he was also unfamiliar with Eichmann’s
testimony in Jerusalem. Judge Thomas ruled that Pearson should not refer to
the book.
Pearson turned to Hitler’s political testament, dictated shortly before his
suicide. Irving pointed out that there were seven versions of it, and that Pear-
son’s had not been “signed or engrossed in any way by Hitler, [although] I’m
not going to challenge its authenticity.”
Pearson asked Irving to translate and read two paragraphs from the six-
page document. There, Hitler mentioned his peace offers to Britain which
were spurned, and concluded: “Nor did I leave anybody in any doubt that if
the nations of Europe were once more regarded as just a bundle of stocks and
shares in the hands of these international gold dealers and financial conspira-
tors, then this volk would also be called to account. The race which are the real
culprits in this murderous struggle: the Jews!… Not only millions of adult
men would be suffering death and not only hundreds of thousands of women
and children would be being burned to death in the towns and cities without
the real culprits having to pay the penalty. Even if by far-more-humane
means…”
“He is not explicit,” observed Irving.
Pearson: There’s no way he could have been saying that it’s less painful to
be gassed to death than to burn to death in bombing?
Since you mentioned it, said Irving, I interviewed Sir Arthur Harris, com-
mander-in-chief of the Royal Air Force bombers, in 1962, “and I asked him
why he hadn’t bombed Auschwitz. His reply was ‘Mr. Irving, if I was a con-
centration-camp prisoner, I would prefer to die from gas than to be burned
alive by an incendiary bomb,’ which was the fate of two million people in Eu-
rope in the 1940s.”
So wasn’t Hitler also referring to gas? asked Pearson.
Irving: No, Hitler’s actual words were he had predicted that he would make
the Jews pay the penalty but in a far-more-humane way than the millions who
had died in the air raids.
The difference, said Irving, is that “Harris is talking about gassing and Hit-
ler is not talking about gassing.”
Have you read the memoirs of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss?
asked Pearson.
No, said Irving, I consider them “very suspect.”
What kind of coercion was used against Höss? Asked Pearson.
“I’m not going to be specific,” said Irving, “because I would be taking it

from memory that is 20-years-old.”
After a break, Pearson produced a Nuremberg document dated January 29,
1943, which referred to the construction status of Crematorium No. 2 at
Birkenau (Auschwitz II). Irving noted the dubious English translation of Ver-
gasungskeller as “gas chamber,” when the more-likely meaning was a small
underground room (or even a closet) involving the process of carburation, as
in an oil-fired heater.
“If a German was going to write the word ‘gas chamber,’” said Irving, “he
would not write Vergasungskeller. He would write Gasungskeller.” (The wea-
ry Irving apparently meant to say Gaskammer, the word he used previously in
his testimony. See page 312.)
Pearson produced Hugh Trevor-Roper’s review of Hitler’s War, and read
some critical portions of it. Trevor-Roper had argued that the Germans’ offi-
cial silence about the Holocaust was reflected in the fact that “Hitler’s notori-
ous commissar order (whose authenticity Mr. Irving does not dispute) does
not survive in documentary form.”
It’s correct that I do not dispute the commissar order, said Irving, but “in
my opinion Trevor-Roper is wrong. The commissar order exists in the files of
the German High Command as dictated by Hitler to General Alfred Jodl.”
Pearson: Is that the order whereby the Jewish commissars are to be liqui-
dated?
Irving: It wasn’t just specified the Jewish commissars. All the Soviet
commissars, who were principally, in my understanding, Jews, were to be liq-
uidated on the field of battle.
Pearson: Jewish-dash-Bolshevik commissars is perhaps more-accurate?
Irving: I’m not sure of the precise wording. Certainly all the commissars
who were known by the Nazis to be Jews.
Pearson: That was the order that the Einsatzgruppen were acting under?
Irving: That is correct.
Pearson read some more of Trevor-Roper’s review: “However, a historian
must not only read the official documents, he must also look behind them.”
Irving: And he is virtually doing in that article what you have spent three
days in doing, which is reading between the lines because there is no evi-
dence. After 40 years we’re entitled to expect evidence.
Pearson returned to Trevor-Roper: “Did [Himmler] not always insist that
the SS was built on the basis of unquestioning obedience to the Fuehrer? He
explicitly claimed Hitler’s authority for the action…”
“I would challenge [that],” said Irving. In the speeches at Posen and else-
where, Himmler “says ‘This is why I have had to take this severe decision,’
and I underline that fact in the book as being one more evidence that Himmler
is very much acting on his own when he carries out these isolated atrocities.”
From about October 1943 onwards, asked Pearson, “doesn’t Himmler

make reference to the fact that he was acting on orders?”
Irving: Not explicitly in reference to what you call genocide. He occasion-
ally said “you can understand how difficult it was for us to carry out this sol-
dierly order that was given to us.” And he uses these kinds of circumlocutions,
but he is not specific and this is the tragedy. The whole way through with the
tens of thousands of tons of documents, there’s not one specific line which
would help us.
Pearson read from Trevor-Roper: “The extermination was not a private se-
cret of the SS. It was well known, though not discussed at Hitler’s court. Gö-
ring, Goebbels, Keitel showed that they knew it.”
Irving disagreed. “Göring showed no knowledge whatsoever of the geno-
cide as you describe it. Goebbels showed limited knowledge of it in his diaries
but now that his entire diaries have become available… we see [that] his ig-
norance was as profound as that of the rest of us. Keitel appears to be largely
in the dark. I know of no documents showing that Keitel was aware of any-
thing approaching what you describe as the genocide or the Holocaust.”
Pearson read from Goebbels’s diary entry of March 27, 1942, about “war
to the death” between Aryans and Jews.
“This is typical of Goebbels shooting off his mouth,” said Irving. “We
need something far more explicit than that and surely we are entitled to it after
40 years, and tens of thousands of tons of documents. They’re all available to
us and you can’t help us.”
Pearson read Trevor-Roper’s complaint that Irving had misinterpreted Hit-
ler’s order of November 30, 1941, telling Himmler to spare a transport of
Jews, as a general order to spare all Jews. Irving conceded that Trevor-
Roper’s criticism on this point was correct. But, he added, this order was only
“part of a chain of evidence… You’ve just quoted the Goebbels entry to us of
March the 27th, 1942, which I described as Mr. Goebbels shooting off his
mouth. At precisely the same time as that document, [and] of much greater ev-
identiary value, there is a telephone call from the chief of the Reich Chancel-
lery [Lammers] to the minister of justice saying, and I quote: ‘The Fuehrer has
repeatedly said he wants the solution of the Jewish problem postponed until
after the war is over.’ How do you climb out of that one, Mr. Pearson?”
Pearson turned to Irving’s book Churchill’s War, the first volume of which
was published in 1987. Don’t you agree, he asked, that you suggest that
Churchill, during his “wilderness years,” fell under the influence of Jewish
moneylenders?
Irving replied, “This is approximately one page in about 300 pages describ-
ing that period.” I went to various archives – Czech, Israeli, French – and “I
then built up a picture of where Mr. Churchill’s money had come from, which
I considered to be germane to a Winston Churchill biography.”
Pearson: And you then say that [the] war starts and Hitler makes overtures
for peace to Churchill, which Churchill refuses.
Irving: Not quite as simple as that. Hitler had made very many offers of
peace, usually just after he secured a major military victory, and Winston
Churchill secured, increasingly from June 1940 onwards, the refusal of these
peace offers by one means or another. It was extremely urgent for him to do
so because by that time half the British people wanted peace, particularly the
working classes, and if peace had broken out in the summer of 1940, Winston
Churchill would have been finished as prime minister, so he used various
techniques to prolong the war.
Pearson asked Irving if a part of his thesis wasn’t that the Jews pressured
Churchill to resist peace overtures.
“I haven’t expressed that view in the book,” said Irving, “but in Volume II,
which is [now being produced], we do come to the extraordinary meeting be-
tween Chaim Weizmann,” the top Zionist, and Churchill, in September 1941,
“when Churchill was very keen to drag the United States into his war.” Irving
had obtained privileged access to Weizmann’s papers in Israel, and seen in his
own handwriting: “We managed to bring the United States into the First
World War and if you toe our line over Palestine and the Jewish fighting
force, then we can persuade the Jews of the United States to drag the United
States into it again this time.”
Pearson: And you state that Churchill conducted most of his war in a
drunken state?
“I wouldn’t go so far,” said Irving, but very frequently Churchill was in-
toxicated at important meetings, as the diaries of his fellow participants reveal.
For example, he was drunk on July 6, 1944, the occasion when he “issued the
criminal order for the launching of poison-gas warfare on German cities.”
“Roosevelt also described Churchill as ‘that drunken bum,’” said Irving.
So, suggested Pearson, in “many respects” you have written a biography of
Churchill which Hitler could have written?
Irving: I am not surprised that both Hitler and I came across the same basic
truths. Hitler himself said even a blind hen occasionally picks up a grain of
corn.
Pearson read from an editorial which Irving had written for a campus paper
in 1959.
The Carnival Times was a satirical magazine, explained Irving, as its title
indicates. I hope you won’t also read from the next article, called “Christopher
Robin and the Facts.,” “If you have nothing more recent than 30 years ago
with which to smear me, I think this in itself is a statement of the case.”
Pearson turned to an exchange of letters between Irving and historian Ger-
ald Fleming which appeared in the Jewish Chronicle of London in late 1983.
Fleming had criticized Irving’s recent speech to the Institute for Historical
Review, and Irving had replied: “I have a full recording of my talk, which was
about the Hungarian uprising of 1956. In the subsequent discussion about the
Holocaust, I made it clear that the Nazis undoubtedly did murder many mil-
lions of Jews, a view which was unpopular to that audience…”
“I suggest,” said Pearson, “that you were very specific when you said that
the Nazis undoubtedly did murder many millions of Jews. That’s a pretty spe-
cific statement, isn’t it?”
By substituting “hundreds of thousands” for “millions,” said Irving, I
would still be basically satisfied with the letter.
After a lunch break, Pearson elicited Irving’s reaction to several brief ex-
cerpts from the Harwood pamphlet.
With regard to allegations of a Holocaust “fraud,” Irving remarked, “I’m
prepared to accept that the Jewish community as a whole believes in the Holo-
caust. If that is so, then it is not a willful fraud.”
Pearson read from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s comments, some years earlier, on
the Harwood pamphlet: “My judgment of it is that, behind a simulated objec-
tivity of expression, it is in fact an irresponsible and tendentious publication
which avoids material evidence and presents selected half-truths and distor-
tions for the sole purpose of serving anti-Semitic propaganda.”
Irving: I would say to this that I value Trevor-Roper’s judgment, and like
any other historian he is entitled to his own opinion. It doesn’t change my as-
sessment of this brochure because my assessment was, as I stated on Friday,
that it serves a useful catalytic purpose in making people think and rethink and
possibly even revise their accepted opinions.
One could hardly expect any other opinion, said Irving, from “the estab-
lishment historians like Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, who hold very im-
portant semi-political positions in the English university structure.”
Christie began his re-examination of Irving by asking him if, as a historian,
he felt a scientific “voice analysis” of the recording of Himmler’s Posen
speech would be useful.
Yes, said Irving, “voice spectrograms” had been made in criminal cases,
and certainly should be made on a speech of this historical importance.
Could you tell us the details of your correspondence with Raul Hilberg?
asked Christie.
Irving: I wrote a letter to a number of Jewish authorities on the so-called
Holocaust when I was in a stage of some embarrassment with my Hitler biog-
raphy, not having been able to find any evidence linking Hitler with what I at
that time believed to have gone on, and I asked each of the Jewish authori-
ties… if they could provide me with evidence which I wanted to know about,
and Hilberg, in the course of the correspondence, which perhaps encompassed
two or three letters and replies, said that he had come to the same conclusion
independently, as I had, that quite probably Adolf Hitler himself was not con-
cerned in what had gone on.
This was about 1970, explained Irving.
Christie: And since that time, what was the most-significant piece of evi-
dence that has affected your opinion in the matter?
On the level of “did Hitler know,” said Irving, it was probably the docu-
ment in the files of the German Ministry of Justice, from the spring of 1942,
showing Hitler demanding that the “Final Solution” be postponed until the
war was over. “On the other front, as to whether a mass extermination oc-
curred in Auschwitz itself, I must say that the most-significant piece of evi-
dence is what I’ve been shown since I arrived here in Toronto on Thursday,
which is a document which I am not at liberty to talk about, I think.”
Judge Thomas angrily excused the jury, and reminded Christie that Irving
had alluded to the Leuchter Report during examination-in-chief, and should
not be bringing it up again. Further, said Thomas, “I made a ruling that… he
isn’t here in the position to give evidence on whether this report is valuable in
the history of mankind.”
Christie later called Irving’s attention to his description, in Hitler’s War, of
Himmler’s letter of November 30, 1942, as “the purest humbug.”
“In light of your current knowledge,” he asked, would you “think it appro-
priate to reassess” that judgment?
“Purest humbug,” said Irving, “was based on my belief in 1977… I
wouldn’t have used that phrase with such confidence if I was writing it now. I
would have toned it down, and I would have qualified it by saying if there
were atrocities on the scale now alleged, then for Himmler to have written a
letter in these terms would have been purest humbug.”
Christie thanked Irving and said, “That’s the case for the defense.”
Judge Thomas proposed a schedule where the two counsels would address
the jury beginning on the following Monday, and his own charge to the jury
would begin on the Monday after that. Everyone seemed amenable, so he ex-
cused the jury for the next six days.
Christie, Pearson, and Thomas agreed to reconvene on Friday morning, in
order to discuss the status of certain exhibits in the case, the legal questions
involved, and what would be the gist of the two counsels’ positions.
“I just want to make certain,” said Thomas, that I am able to express your
positions clearly. “I’m not asking for an outline of your jury address,” he em-
phasized. “Just… the framework within which certain matters of law should
be placed in the hands of the jury.”
On Friday, April 29, Pearson asked Judge Thomas to remind the jury that
“freedom of expression is not an issue here” and to repeat his judicial notice
ruling that the Holocaust is simply a fact. He also asked that the legal doctrine
stating “willful blindness is actually knowledge” be applied to Zündel, and
submitted that the Harwood pamphlet was false both “as a whole” (its thesis)
and in its parts (many of the individual facts).
Pearson argued that “if the jury concludes that [the Harwood pamphlet] is
an opinion, it would be the Crown’s submission that they can also consider
whether that opinion is being supported by so many falsehoods that the evil
that [Section 177] is directed at, which is mischief to social and racial toler-
ance, is engaged.” An opinion would not fall under Section 177, he conceded,
“but if you buttress an opinion by false statements of fact, and those false
statements… cause mischief to the public interest,” then the section would be
engaged.
On the issue of willful blindness, Christie argued that it “can only be rele-
vant to an issue of fact, not… another opinion, and there is nothing in any of
the [Crown’s] evidence that establishes fact, from either the experts or the fil-
ing of the booklet called Six Million Did Die.”
“If they wanted to call Suzman and Diamond [the authors of Six Million
Did Die],” said Christie, “and prove that those were facts stated therein, or if
they had referred to that booklet through their expert and identified some of its
content as fact through their expert, [they could have, but] they didn’t.”
Judge Thomas noted that one problem with invoking willful blindness in
the case was that “when that doctrine is applied, generally speaking, the Court
is in a position to conclude that an accused person failed to make inquiries.
Now here [since the accused declined to testify] we don’t know what hap-
pened.”
Thomas also stated: “It’s really a fundamental premise or condition prece-
dent to an application of the doctrine that if the accused did make the inquiry,
he would, of necessity, arrive at the truth. Therefore, if the circumstances
obliged him to inquire, he must not have inquired or he would have known the
truth and not committed the act. That’s, in essence, what willful blindness is
all about. They really say the truth was obvious if he chose to find out.”
Again, Thomas emphasized: “The assertion of fact must be so blatantly
false on its face that with a review of whatever supporting material there is…
any inquiry would arrive at the truth, not arrive at a controversial statement,
but arrive at the truth.”
Pearson conceded that the booklet Six Million Did Die was not being ad-
vanced in the trial for “the truth of its contents,” but only as one source of in-
formation upon which an expert witness (Walendy) had relied, and about
which Zündel had presumably been informed. Simply knowing that Suzman
and Diamond had itemized their complaints against Harwood should have
caused Zündel to make basic inquiries about Harwood, suggested Pearson,
and such inquiries would have caused him to arrive at the truth about Har-
wood’s falsity.
“How do we know,” asked Thomas, “that the inquiry would have produced
the truth unless we have independent evidence to support” the basic claims
against Harwood which are made in Six Million Did Die? “Now,” he conced-
ed, “we do have some independent evidence on some of those allegations.”
“I think I understand your submission,” was Thomas’s last comment on the

matter, and then he thanked the counsels for their assistance.144
144
Thomas elected not to mention willful blindness in his Charge to the Jury, because, he told Chris-
tie and Pearson, “I came to the conclusion that [it] didn’t apply. ” Cf. p. 378.
Chapter 10: Summation, Verdict, Aftermath
First Day of Christie’s Summation
O
n Monday morning, May 2, the time had come for Douglas Christie to
address the jury. But first, Judge Thomas asked Ernst Zündel to return
to his old, pre-testimony, seat in the prisoner’s box.
Christie began by reading aloud the indictment: “Ernst Zündel stands
charged that he, on or about the Year 1981… did publish a statement or tale,
namely Did Six Million Really Die?, that he knows is false and is likely to
cause mischief to the public interest in social and racial tolerance.”
“Statement” and “tale” are singular, noted Christie, so it must refer to the
thesis of the book, which is opinion, and therefore is “not caught by [Section
177] at all.” Further, said Christie, the indictment incorrectly reads “that he
knows is false,” when it should, by law, say “knew,” meaning in 1981.
Christie observed that Pearson, in his opening address, had said, “Of
course, it’s impossible to look directly into a man’s mind to determine what he
truly believes.” Then, to the surprise of many, he said, “It’s not impossible at
all. Especially since he declares his beliefs in the publication itself.” Christie
reminded the jurors of the opening and closing statements which Zündel add-
ed to his Canadian edition of the Harwood pamphlet. These laid out very
clearly Zündel’s beliefs at the time he published, yet the Crown chose to ig-
nore them. “They do this because it doesn’t help them at all to look at the ob-
vious. And what is obvious? A man’s stated intentions are the best evidence.
If I tell you this is what I believe, why should you start with the presumption
that I’m lying?”
In the Harwood pamphlet, noted Christie, Zündel said the following:
– Zionism is a political, not a racial movement.
– There are anti-Zionist Jews whom he counts as friends.
– The Zionists are using the letter of the law to suppress the truth about the
Holocaust.
– The real issue is not anti-Semitism, but truth, justice and freedom of speech
and inquiry. (“I’m not talking about freedom of speech,” added Christie.
“I’m not allowed to talk about that [but Zündel was].”)
– He is defending the Germans against hate propaganda.
– “Truth,” wrote Zündel, “has no need of coercion. Those who choose to ig-
nore the truth are not punished by law, they punish themselves.”
Christie noted that Zündel’s statements in Harwood are directed solely against
the threat of charges of “hate propaganda,” and that “never once does he even
contemplate the suggestion that it’s false news.”
Zündel hides nothing, said Christie. He publishes his name, address and
phone number. He gets his friends and colleagues to “come here at great ex-
pense and time to take the stand and verify” what they discussed with him.
“It’s right there in black and white,” said Christie. “No wonder they want
you to believe that ‘we can’t look into a man’s mind.’ Because everything sur-
rounding the actions of the accused at the time of publishing points to the fact
that he believed it was the truth.”
The Crown, said Christie, ignores all this, and takes the jury back to years
before Zündel published Harwood, and plays an audio tape and produces two
books on other topics. They cannot even prove the link between Zündel and
one of the books. “This is a straight appeal to prejudice and has nothing to do
with whether he disbelieves Did Six Million Really Die? or not.”
At one point, noted Christie, “the Court [i.e., Judge Thomas] seemed to rid-
icule Dr. Fann for saying we assume people believe what they say in a politi-
cal tract. What premises are we supposed to start from? That everyone is a liar
unless they can prove they’re not? I don’t care what someone’s political be-
liefs are, I shouldn’t start with the presumption that they don’t really believe
them. I couldn’t care what a person says. I shouldn’t start from the presump-
tion that I am sure he is a liar and he doesn’t really mean what he says. Could
you imagine functioning in life like that?”145
The Crown, said Christie, claimed that it could prove that Zündel knew
Harwood to be false simply by inference from some of his political views.
“What evidence have they led to prove that?” he demanded. None! “The hold-
ing of political beliefs does not prove knowledge of falsity, whatever the be-
liefs might be.”
“His Honor,” said Christie, “will tell you what he says is unreasonable for
reasonable men to contest. But it won’t include the six million, it won’t in-
clude the gas chambers, and it won’t include an official plan. That’s basically
145
The distinguished American Jewish journalist Walter Lippmann could not. He insisted that human
nature prohibits anyone from writing at length in a consciously duplicitous way. Like Dr. Fann,
but unlike Ron Thomas, he started from a presumption of sincerity.
what this book is all about. These three items are opinion and can be debated
by reasonable people. That is not to dispute the Jewish tragedy of mass mur-
der of some Jews by some Nazis during World War II, which His Honor will
tell you is a fact. The Judicial Notice ruling goes no further than that.”
“The defense,” said Christie, “maintains the Crown has failed to prove the
necessary ingredients of the crime with which Ernst Zündel stands charged.
It’s as simple as that. The whole charge is really based on emotionalism and
attempted character assassination and opinion. That doesn’t prove facts.”
Consider Dr. Raul Hilberg, said Christie, the Crown’s “paper witness.” He
“gave some very interesting excuses” for not coming back to testify. He was
worried about “seeming contradictions” between his testimony in 1985 and
“what he might say now.” Recall David Irving’s evidence that Hilberg told
him back in the early 1970s that he shared the belief that Hitler was not direct-
ly involved in the Final Solution. So, said Christie, “it’s understandable that he
wouldn’t want to be questioned because when he was here before… he said he
hadn’t changed his position. [But] he already had changed his position. He al-
ready had written the book which was published three months after he testi-
fied, and in it Dr. Browning indicates that the most-significant change [con-
cerned] the status and the order of Adolf Hitler.”
The “central issue” here, said Christie, “is whether there was an official
policy of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews.” In his 1985 testimony, “Dr. Hil-
berg maintained over and over again that there was a Hitler order.” Christie
read several instances of this from the transcript.
Christie suggested that the jury contrast Hilberg’s evasiveness with the ex-
ample set by David Irving, “who came to say he had changed his mind and
willingly submitted to the Crown’s cross-examination of his previous writ-
ings… He was man enough to admit he had changed his mind on the Holo-
caust story.”
Christie noted Hilberg’s misleading use of the Gerstein Statements, citing
what was credible and passing over the rest, but never alerting his readers to
the selection. “Can you imagine,” he asked, “what the Crown would say if
Harwood did that?” Hilberg “claims he has the expertise to decide what parts
of Gerstein the reader should hear about. Isn’t this the same great sin that the
Crown says Harwood is guilty of?”
“What if Harwood relied on a document for parts of its contents and ig-
nored a contradictory part?” asked Christie. “He would be accused of being
unjustifiably selective. I say that it’s all opinion and they can do what they like
in forming their opinions, as long as they identify the processes in a way that
can be observed.”
Irving inquired into torture at Nuremberg back in the early 1960s, said
Christie, while Hilberg still had not heard of the Simpson-van Roden Com-
mission Report. “The fact is that anything found to support the thesis of Did
Six Million Really Die? is regarded by Dr. Hilberg as a bit fanciful, even
though he’s made no inquiries into it.” Pressed on one section in Harwood –
“Confessions under Torture” – to find even one false statement, Hilberg had
finally been forced to yield.
Christie summarized some of the other weak points in Hilberg’s testimony,
such as the account of “flames belching from chimneys” at Birkenau (Ausch-
witz II), which Hilberg said he believed because “thousands” had claimed
they saw it. But, noted Christie, aerial photos of the camp had been taken on
many days, and they never revealed either smoke or flame.
Christie turned to the second major witness for the prosecution, Charles
Biedermann of the International Tracing Service, who “produced no evidence
of the death of any Jews at all. He produced one page of an alleged railroad
schedule with all but one name eliminated. He says he has no right to reveal
other records. He says all other persons not named and not recorded anywhere
were gassed. He has a copy of three [death] books from the Auschwitz Muse-
um, [but] 39 or 40 books from Auschwitz remain in Moscow.146 He couldn’t
tell us how many names are on each page nor how many pages in each
book.[147] He always hides behind 70 kilometers of records but said no one can
do research there so the archives are effectively sealed… We’re in 1988 now,
and I suggest to you there’s no very good reason why such records should not
be available if there isn’t a deliberate intent to conceal them.”
“Here’s the man with all the records,” said Christie, “and he doesn’t know
how many people, if any, went to Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec.”
“Biedermann has evidence of deportations, of course,” said Christie, “but
no evidence of exterminations.” He said that Jews with visas could leave
Hungary in 1944, which contradicts Browning, who said none could leave af-
ter 1941.
Harwood quoted the Red Cross Report 19 times, said Christie, and
Biedermann confirmed that 18 were accurate.
“[Biedermann] brought out the piece of paper with the name Nathan Bo-
gulawski,” said Christie. “The name on a list he produced. He can’t say if it’s
authentic or not. It was typed by his office from some handwritten list. We
don’t know to this day what is supposed to have happened to that individual;
did he survive or did he not survive? Was he among the unregistered or the
registered? What is this story all about? Well, they don’t want to tell us. The
ICRC has given definite instructions not to create statistics. Why? Why? Is a
statistic going to harm any individual?”
146
Actually, it is 36 or 37 of the books that have not been seen by the West.
147
In 1989, microfilms of the Auschwitz Death Books in Moscow were made available to the ICRC.
(In 1995, the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau published excerpts and statistical analyses of the
Auschwitz Death Books released by Moscow; they contain the names of about 68,864 people, but
cover only the period until the end of 1943. The year 1944 has been completely missing so far.
State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.), Die Sterbebücher von Auschwitz, Saur, Munich 1995.
Editor’s note).
“If he was coming to testify about alleged extermination,” said Christie of

Biedermann, “he might have been able to produce just one [transport] list to
one extermination camp. When it’s all said and done, I don’t know what he
came here for.”
The third major defense witness was Dr. Christopher Browning, noted
Christie. “He gave secondary sources repeatedly, and I hope there’s no criti-
cism of Harwood or any other witness for using secondary sources, because
it’s very definitely true that Dr. Browning uses secondary sources for almost
everything he said here. I’m not saying he’s a criminal for it, but all I’m say-
ing is it doesn’t make anybody else a criminal for doing the same thing.”
Christie ran through Browning’s institutional affiliations and observed,
“He is really in a position to be influenced by his connections to some extent,
to put it mildly. His whole academic career revolves around the Holocaust and
he referred to it himself as a windfall.”
Christie reminded the jury of the great debate among European historians
concerning whether or not there was actually any plan to exterminate the
Jews. Given the fact of that debate, he added, it follows that “there is no long-
er an infallible belief that the Wannsee Conference, the [Hans] Frank Diaries,
or [Himmler’s] Posen Speech proves the plan for the extermination of the
Jews of Europe. If such were the case, there would be no debate among these
approved historians.”
When Browning talks about nods and signals from Hitler, said Christie,
“this is getting to the point of… how many angels can dance on the head of a
pin.” Browning says the Holocaust was planned and methodical, but “he can
produce no evidence of a plan. He cannot produce a document that mentions
gassings in any way.”
Listen to the language that Browning uses, said Christie: “I have argued”;
“this is a judgment on my part”; “in what I’ve written, I infer”; and so on. “He
obviously is talking about opinion.”
“Isn’t it nice,” asked Christie, that Browning permits a “reasonable person”
to differ on the when and the how of extermination decision-making? But he
“denies us the right” to differ on the if – to “believe that there was no policy”
of extermination. “Browning admits there are a number of orders for particu-
lar actions but not a single global document that orders the killing of Jews. He
also admits that these individual orders to kill Jews were done under the
framework of reprisals.”
Browning, said Christie, “has never talked to anyone who, on behalf of the
German authorities, visited Birkenau during the war… [H]e certainly only
talks to one side of the issue… It’s interesting that he had only seen one of the
aerial photographs taken by the Allies during the war of Auschwitz and
Birkenau, and that was on [a museum wall]. He had never spoken to any of
the defense attorneys on the war crimes.”
Christie noted that Pearson, during re-examination, brought out that the de-
fense Counsel R.T. Paget had in fact agreed with most of the Holocaust story.
But that was exactly like the case of Dr. Russell Barton, said Christie. Both
Paget and Barton vigorously refuted that part of the Holocaust story with
which they were personally familiar, but accepted all the rest. “It’s safer to do
that,” said Christie.
Browning’s complaint with Harwood, said Christie, was that “most people
make their cases in such a way that the argument and the evidence upon which
the argument is based can be seen by the reader. Well, that’s true here and if
there are mistakes, the reason they can be found is that Harwood identifies his
sources.”
Browning had also charged Harwood with denying the existence of evi-
dence with which he was familiar, and questioned his seriousness or honesty
on that basis. Well, said Christie, the charge could be turned against Brown-
ing, “because there were a lot of things he didn’t know too. Does that mean if
you don’t know everything, you can’t hold an honest opinion?”
Browning had admitted, said Christie, that mainstream Holocaust histori-
ans never frame their research in terms of “did it happen.” He also admitted
that revisionist historians pay more attention to the physical evidence, and that
they raise good questions which others must investigate.
“Browning disagrees,” said Christie, “that there is not a single document in
existence that proves the Germans intended to carry out the deliberate murder
of Jews. He says the Hans Frank Diary proves that. Nobody else agrees with
him. I don’t think that Hilberg said that. I don’t think that any historian said
that, but that’s what he says. When it is pointed out to him that the things that
were said [in the diary] were contradictory… Dr. Browning simply chooses
his parts and sticks with those.” At Nuremberg, Frank denied any knowledge
of an extermination policy, but Browning had not read that testimony, and
admitted that studying it might “very well” alter his previous evidence. In the
end, Christie noted, Browning had acknowledged “he doesn’t believe there’s
any specific reference that he knows of [in the Frank diaries] to gas chambers
or any method of extermination.”
Browning’s answers about burning pits and the like showed that he “knows
nothing about practical matters;” said Christie. Referring to Felderer’s slides
of the swampy ground at Birkenau, Leuchter’s photos of alleged burning pits
filled with water, and Lagacé’s testimony about bodies not burning completely
even in major house fires, Christie said: “I would suggest that you have more
reason to believe what is physical and real and verifiable, and that [evidence]
really should cast doubt on the accuracy of Dr. Browning’s whole testimony.”
There’s so much Browning doesn’t know, exclaimed Christie. He “tells us
all about” gas vans, but then, he’s never seen a plan for one, or an interior
photograph. As for the alleged exterior photograph of one which he used in
his book, he admitted, “I don’t know for a fact it is a gas van. It is one they
[the Israelis] labelled as a gas van.”
Browning did most of his gas-van research at the archives in Freiburg,
West Germany, said Christie. Yet he admitted he knew nothing about gas vans
used by the Germans for disinfection purposes, when those documents are at
the same archives. “How thorough is this research?”
The Einsatzgruppen are a “side issue” in this case, said Christie. But Har-
wood could not be faulted for misreporting what Paget had written. “The fact
that [Harwood] didn’t put forward that Paget believes in the… gas cham-
bers… is irrelevant. The purpose of that evidence was to show what Paget
found in his own investigation of the very issue he was involved in.”
Christie resumed after the lunch break. Browning, he said, had never read
Paget. When Pearson re-examined Browning, he read aloud the part of Paget’s
book which affirmed the gas chambers. “That [part] is important to the
Crown. Hearsay is much more important than personal knowledge, you see.”
The surviving eyewitnesses referred to by Browning were Rudolf Vrba,
Filip Müller and Rudolf Reder. “Asked how he validates [them],” said Chris-
tie, he mentions reliability checks. “I suppose that means if he had 10 exag-
gerated stories, he would find them all to be true rather than check in terms of
‘Can this actually happen?’. If they all agree, well, that makes them credible. I
think that’s the effect of his evidence.”
After going through a large number of weak points in Browning’s testimo-
ny, Christie stated “the theory of the defense,” which was, simply: “If it’s
opinion, then you have to acquit.” The real purpose of Section 177, suggested
Christie, was to stop people from making statements like “The local nuclear
power plant is going to melt down,” which would create panic.
It was revealing, said Christie, that when the Crown counsel read aloud the
opening sentence of the Harwood pamphlet, he left out the words “he be-
lieves.” Pearson should have said, “In the following chapters, the author has,
he believes, brought together irrefutable evidence that the allegation that six
million Jews died during the Second World War, as a direct result of [an] offi-
cial German policy of extermination, is utterly unfounded.” And, of course,
Harwood never suggested he would present both sides of the controversy.
The defense, said Christie, called two experts in language to explain that
the Harwood pamphlet was an expression of opinion. They called experts in
history to explain that history is “basically opinion.” These same history ex-
perts testified that the facts which do appear in Harwood are essentially true,
despite occasional errors. The defense also called technical experts to demon-
strate the impossibilities in the standard extermination story.
The Crown provided no direct evidence that Zündel knew Did Six Million
Really Die? was false in 1981 or knows it to be false today. “All the circum-
stantial evidence indicates that the accused believes it to be true.”
The Crown must also prove that the pamphlet is “likely to create mischief,”
noted Christie. “They have not proved and cannot prove such is the case.”
They never even proved that it was received by anyone. They never showed
“one single social effect resulting from the publication.” Given the passage of
seven years, “how likely is such an effect if none has occurred in that time? It
is not likely at all.” The charge is plainly “ridiculous.”
The defense had shown a “substantial value” in the pamphlet as “provoca-
tive opinion,” said Christie, although “opinion needs to have no value to be
legal.” An internationally acclaimed historian, David Irving, had testified un-
der oath that he considered the evidence brought forward by Harwood to be
“significant to him.” What more could possibly be asked of any book?
Christie then offered a broad summation of the defense testimony, of
which some high points will be mentioned here.
The first defense witness, Ditlieb Felderer, was, said Christie, “the arche-
typal self-made expert… [challenging] the ’sacred cows.’” It turned out that
everything Felderer told Zündel nearly a decade ago about the blue staining
which is left on materials exposed to Zyklon B was “absolutely right.” A
Ph.D. chemist, Dr. Roth, had confirmed it all. Felderer found the blue staining
in places, at Auschwitz, where lice were allegedly gassed, but not in places
where people were allegedly gassed. “It can’t just be ignored.” How will the
Crown handle it? mused Christie. “Ridicule it? I don’t know.”
The Crown called Felderer “obsessed,” said Christie. But what about Raul
Hilberg, who has researched the Holocaust continuously for 40 years? The
Crown called him “dedicated.”
During Felderer’s cross-examination, the Crown read into the evidence
much of the CIA booklet about Allied aerial photos of Auschwitz. Why?
asked Christie, given that the booklet’s text was based on secondary sources
and conflicted with the message of the photos, and given that the witness de-
clined to adopt any of it. Lengthy portions were read with barely a question
asked of the witness. What was going on? “This [sort of thing] happened
throughout the trial… It’s got nothing to do with the witness. They are trying
to get testimony through cross-examination from people they don’t want to
call… By such a technique they slide into the evidence something which is
never subject to cross-examination. It is really never sworn either. It is not ev-
idence of its truth. I trust His Honor will tell you that there is a great distinc-
tion to be made between what is sworn to by a witness here from first-hand
knowledge and observations and what is put to that witness from some other
source… The CIA report text [brings us no] evidence of its truth.”
The next witness was Thies Christophersen. He told us, said Christie, as he
told Zündel years ago, what he saw with his own eyes during a year spent
around Auschwitz. Yes, he admired Hitler. So did nearly all Germans, as Ir-
ving’s testimony demonstrated, but that didn’t make them all liars. On re-
examination, Christophersen had said that any common criminal had a right to
defend himself, and “I want that same right for my people, who are presented
as criminals.”
Christie warned that the Crown, in its address, might “embark on some
fantasy” such as that “the resurrection of Adolf Hitler [is] likely or contem-
plated,” but “I would ask you to disabuse your minds of that.” This witness, an
older German, has positive feelings toward Hitler, whom he met twice, and
“that’s his business. It doesn’t make him a liar.” He’s “clearly sincere” about
what he personally saw around Auschwitz, and his views would naturally
have influenced the sincere views of the accused.
The Witness Dr. Russell Barton testified that Harwood’s account of his
writings was accurate, said Christie. From observing prayers and other evi-
dence, Barton had realized that about half of the internees at Bergen-Belsen in
May 1945 were Jews. And the great majority of these internees had been
transported back to Germany from the Polish camps near the end of the war,
often voluntarily, rather than be “liberated” by the Soviets: What did all this
indicate about a plan to exterminate the Jews?
Asked to comment on public discussions of the Holocaust, racial differ-
ences and other sensitive matters, Barton, a psychiatrist, insisted that ventila-
tion is healthier than suppression.
Of course, Barton also indicated that he accepted much of the standard
Holocaust story. That was understandable, said Christie. He had taken a “very
courageous stand to publish his views” on Belsen, and “paid a very heavy
price” for it over the years. “You can see a reason why he wouldn’t want to
say anything controversial anymore, but why should he? He doesn’t know
what went on in Poland. He is willing to accept what the Crown says about
that.”
Dr. Kuang Fann testified that the Harwood pamphlet was a typical polemi-
cal work, a piece of political opinion. If you believe Fann, warned Christie, or
even if you “have any reasonable doubt” that he may be correct, then you have
no choice but to acquit Zündel. “Keep [that] in mind.”
Mark Weber was a major witness who analyzed Harwood line-by-line.
Christie reminded the jurors of some of Weber’s observations. There was no
German policy to exterminate the Jews, and not one document indicating the
contrary, which was “mind-boggling” in light of the size of the alleged pro-
gram and the number of surviving German records. There was not even a pol-
icy to exterminate Jews in the occupied Soviet Union with the Einsatzgrup-
pen, despite what Otto Ohlendorf had falsely said at his own trial about a Hit-
ler order. Only the extermination of the Bolshevik system had been called for.
Several major pieces of alleged evidence for a German extermination policy
were not what they might at first seem to be: Himmler’s Posen Speech, Hey-
drich’s reprisal order of July 4, 1941, and Göring’s “Final Solution” letter to
Heydrich. The Galicia document was clearly not to be trusted, with its wild
exaggerations about confiscated gold, which mirrored other exaggerations in
other German reports. Konrad Morgen’s suspicions about Auschwitz were not
to be trusted, since the rumors he heard concerned the camp at Monowitz
(Auschwitz III). The evidence of Oswald Pohl and many other German de-
fendants was not to be trusted, since they had been tortured, which, Christie
noted, “was confirmed over and over again by other witnesses,” including Da-
vid Irving. As for Harwood’s errors, Weber emphasized that most, like the one
attributing priority to Rafael Lemkin in alleging an extermination of Jews,
were very minor, and crucial neither to Harwood’s thesis nor to the work of
his mentor, Paul Rassinier.
The minor Witness Maria van Herwaarden had testified that she saw no ev-
idence of Jewish extermination during her internment at Birkenau. When she
was finally evacuated in January 1945, Jews accompanied her party back to
Germany. The story she told was entirely consistent with that of Thies Chris-
tophersen.
Another minor witness was Tiudar Rudolph, who worked with the German
security police in occupied Lodz, Poland. Based on his experiences, said
Christie, he told Zündel that the alleged extermination was an “absolute lie.”
They had long discussions about it. Put yourself in Zündel’s place, said Chris-
tie. “You’ve met someone who was there and they tell you that it is an abso-
lute lie that Jews were being exterminated. I suggest to you that’s a reason
why that person, Ernst Zündel, could honestly hold the belief that there was no
extermination… [Rudolph] discussed with Zündel the technical impossibili-
ties of the gassing and cremation of six million Jews.”
Joseph Burg was another witness who was in Europe at the time, said
Christie, “an excellent source of first-hand knowledge” who told Zündel why
he felt the Holocaust was a hoax. Here was a Jew who personally investigated
Auschwitz as early as 1945, yet the Crown declined to cross-examine him.
“He is, I suppose, beneath their dignity,” said Christie. “No other Jews were
called in this case to confirm anything to the contrary.”
Second Day of Christie’s Summation

Christie resumed his address to the jury on Tuesday, May 3 with a review of
Dr. Gary Botting’s testimony. Botting had observed, said Christie, that “when
authors use the term ‘the truth,’ what they are doing is putting forth their opin-
ion of what truth is. We all claim truth for our own opinions. I think that’s a
common quality of everyone who believes an opinion. We all think it’s the
truth and we say it’s the truth, [but] that’s still our opinion when it comes right
down to it.”
Botting emphasized that “the opinion portions of the booklet are its meat,”
and showed that the facts in Harwood, without the opinions attached, are
meaningless. “Statements like Bishop Dibelius called Gerstein untrustworthy,

or his sister-in-law and not his sister was insane, are really of no consequence
when taken alone. Go to any street corner and repeat them to someone you
don’t know and see what effect, if any, they have, even if they were false.
Without any opinion derived from them, they’re really meaningless. They
may be some part of an opinion… but taken alone they have no effect at all.”
Christie then reviewed the testimony of Ivan Lagacé, who was “tendered as
a person with a certain amount of practical knowledge of some real things.”
The world hasn’t changed so much in 45 years, said Christie. “Temperatures,
human bodies, times for cremation, these are real things” which remain the
same. As Lagacé had said, the basic cremation process has not changed during
the past century.
Harwood wrote that the cremation of millions in a few camps, as described
in the orthodox Holocaust literature, was impossible, and Lagacé had proved
him correct. The Crown could only try to argue that the Germans were not
concerned with the safety of the Jewish Sonderkommando workers, with air
pollution, and so on, but Lagacé showed that cremation rates cannot be sub-
stantially increased without the failure of the crematory, and the building
burning down. And, noted Christie, there was no evidence that any crematory
at Auschwitz ever caught fire. Obviously, the Nazis were following all the
usual safety precautions. Thus, they could not have cremated more than about
200 bodies per day with their facilities at Birkenau, rather than the 4,000 per
day claimed by Hilberg.
In conclusion, said Christie, “the allegations of the exterminationist thesis
are impossible… This is important because if the thesis of Did Six Million
Really Die? is proven true… or if there’s a reasonable doubt about whether it
is false or not, that doubt has to be resolved in favor of the accused.”
During his brief review of Hans Schroeder’s testimony, Christie, a devout
Catholic, made this interesting remark: “It may be that Mr. Zündel is a person
who has a bias… We approach religion with a bias – we call it faith. Does
that mean we’re dishonest about our faith? No. It means we’re normal, we’re
human…”
Christie came next to Udo Walendy, who was told on the stand by Pearson,
“Look, Harwood couldn’t even quote you right.” But, asked Christie, how se-
rious could Harwood’s misrepresentation of Walendy have been, when
Walendy published a German translation of the pamphlet himself? Perhaps
Walendy never even spotted the error, so what was the chance that Harwood
or Zündel had?
“[Walendy] never discussed any mistakes in the booklet with Zündel be-
cause he felt [they weren’t] important,” said Christie, who agreed that “the
mistakes [in Harwood] are not important to the thesis.”
The word “scientific” was “flogged to death” by Walendy in describing the
Harwood pamphlet, said Christie. In Christie’s opinion, Walendy meant “logi-
cal”: he applied “common sense” to the Holocaust. Though perhaps not an ex-
pert himself in the eyes of the court, Walendy relied heavily on experts for as-
sistance.
Walendy had made many interesting remarks about Auschwitz. For exam-
ple, when the Soviets liberated the camp, they proclaimed that millions had
been killed there with “an electric conveyor-belt system.” The “second Pravda
story” told of corpses being burned in a few minutes.
In his commentary in the Canadian edition of Harwood, Zündel cited
Walendy as a source upon whom he had relied personally. The Crown never
established that Zündel was aware of the anti-Harwood booklet, Six Million
Did Die, but only that he had discussed Walendy’s brief rebuttal to it.
After quickly reviewing Emil Lachout’s testimony, Christie came to that of
Dr. Robert Faurisson, another individual named by Zündel as a personal
source of information. Christie asked the jurors to look at what Faurisson
wrote about gas chambers and crematories in the 1970s, and what experts like
Leuchter and Lagacé were saying under oath today: “It’s the same.”
Like Harwood, said Christie, Faurisson did not “in any way deny a Jewish
tragedy during the Second World War.” On the contrary, he prepared a list of
the severe measures suffered by the Jews. But the list did not include “belief
in six million deaths or an official plan or gas chambers.”
Christie spent a while reviewing some of the errors and misleading state-
ments in Suzman and Diamond’s Six Million Did Die, as enumerated by
Faurisson. The booklet’s assertions generally lacked qualifications. For exam-
ple, it mentioned “steam chambers” at Treblinka, but never suggested that
these are widely disbelieved. It mentioned the Rudolf Höss confession, but not
the doubting attitude which historians take toward it today. It mentioned gas
chambers at places like Dachau and Ravensbrück, but not the subsequent
proofs against them. “It’s quite clear,” said Christie, that Six Million Did Die
“is what Dr. Faurisson called it, it’s rubbish.”
There was no evidence, said Christie, as to whether or not Zündel ever in-
quired about Six Million Did Die, but, he added, “I would suggest that a rea-
sonable man with the knowledge that was in his hands at the time, need not
have inquired.”
Christie summarized the testimony of Bill Armontrout and Kenneth Wil-
son, and then came to Fred Leuchter. He reminded the jurors that it was not
necessary for the defense to prove Leuchter right beyond a reasonable doubt.
It was only necessary to prove that a reasonable doubt existed about the stand-
ard Holocaust story, something which Leuchter, calling it “totally impossi-
ble,” had unquestionably done. And, of course, even this minimal proof was
necessary only if the Harwood pamphlet was judged to be essentially “fact.”
The Crown, said Christie, had answered Leuchter (and Lagacé) by saying
that the Germans did not care about safety. “But safe use, of course, was nec-
essary [for] a process that was ‘allegedly repeated.”
“[Leuchter] doesn’t need to be an expert in the Holocaust to investigate

these claims,” said Christie. “He merely needs to know what the claims are
and how they are alleged to be carried out and to see the facilities that they are
alleged to be carried out in.” His was “the first on-site scientific investigation
of [what] is allegedly the greatest crime in history.”
“The Leuchter evidence has a chemical component,” said Christie, which
brought him to the testimony of Dr. James Roth, who “testified very clearly
that repeated use of hydrogen cyanide in conjunction with iron in brick or
mortar would unavoidably produce Prussian blue, the hydrogen cyanide com-
pound with iron.”
“The difference between 6 and 1,050 is a massive difference,” said Chris-
tie, which proves where Zyklon B was and was not used at Auschwitz. “This
evidence is unchallenged in any serious way by the Crown.” It’s “irrefutable.”
Christie showed the jury the Leuchter bar graph again.148 “That,” he sug-
gested, “is the strongest evidence that could be produced to demonstrate” the
correctness of Harwood’s thesis. Yet the accused needed only to “raise a rea-
sonable doubt about [the subject], and you must then acquit.”
The last witness was David Irving. “Now,” said Christie, “David Irving’s
opinions in 1977 are different than they are in 1988. It’s my submission that’s
not a sign of inadequacy. It’s a sign of honesty, that opinions change and be-
liefs change because information changes.”
Irving had spoken highly of the Harwood pamphlet, saying he was “sur-
prised by the quality of the argument,” found it valuable for provoking people
to ask important questions, and, further, deemed it 90-percent factually cor-
rect. Irving also noted that “there has been virtually no investigation of the
Holocaust.” A real extermination would have created “countless references [in
the] files,” he argued.
After a lunch break, Christie declared that “No one can view it [as being]
in the public interest to remain silent about opinions or about truth because it
might provoke a violent reaction among those who maintain lies.”
Was Section 177 of the Criminal Code the product of Canadian society’s
fear of an irrational, violent few? “If such was the case, any minority which is
prepared to react violently against an opinion they don’t like would be able to
enlist the power of the State through the authority of the courts to impose its
will as the public interest.”
“I urge you to consider,” said Christie, “that the day the public interest in
racial and social tolerance is defined as [no criticism of] minorities is the same
day all meaningful exchange of ideas in society will end.”
“I have summarized the position of the defense in respect to the evidence
in the case,” said Christie. Now, “I briefly want to [explain] our position as to
how you should assess that evidence.” We have argued throughout that “the
148
See Chart p. 408.
essence of this thesis is opinion,” and “no evidence has really contradicted
that.”
Opinions are not always prefaced with “I believe that…” The statement
“Joseph Stalin did not really kill six million Ukrainians” is actually an opin-
ion.
A “tale,” on the other hand, to use a word which appears in Section 177
and in Zündel’s indictment, is “a purported first-hand narrative of events, and
hence may be true or false.” The Harwood pamphlet is not a “tale.”
“To view history as other than an opinion, and to view it as fact subject to
legal proof as to its truth or falsity, is to attempt to set up an official history
such as they do in the Soviet Union where they have to write new history
books every time another person comes to power. Some people would like to
see that.”
“Some facts upon which an opinion is based may be true [and others] false
or inaccurate, but the opinion might still be honestly held and may still be val-
id for that matter.”
The Crown often used ad hominem arguments against the accused, said
Christie. This “smear campaign” was intended to suggest a motive for lying
about the Holocaust. But that was “nonsense.” “If a man loves his wife, is he
less likely or more likely to believe evil about her? Certainly he is less likely.
Because a man is a Communist, is he less likely to believe that Stalin killed
six million Ukrainians or more likely? He is certainly less likely, because of a
bias, as he would believe good about what he believes in… If it is alleged
or… suggested that the accused had admiration for Adolf Hitler, that is in no
way proof that he would therefore believe in the evil [deed] and lie about it.”
Christie added that Zündel’s bias in favor of Hitler or National Socialism had
not even been proven by the Crown.
Zündel had forthrightly declared his position about the Holocaust, said
Christie. “The Crown seems to want us to look behind the obvious, ignore the
obvious, to believe there is a sinister motive or intent where there is no evi-
dence of one at all. They almost ask you to say that he’s evil, even if nothing
[in him] appears to be anything but good.” If Zündel were a Communist, it
would not mean he was a liar, but the Crown “attempts to wrap him in some
sort of swastika flag, so you will react to his alleged belief. What they cannot
in any way prove, and they do not prove, is that he doesn’t believe what he
says he believes.”
“The Crown,” said Christie, “says [the accused] is not on trial for his be-
liefs, and I say in reply, he therefore is to be believed when he says he be-
lieves what he believes. Everything which would show absolute conviction in
an ordinary person, the Crown seems to imply, is evidence that Ernst Zündel
has no such conviction. I suggest they can only do so or attempt to do so by
appealing to animosities… toward beliefs that my friend pronounces so clear-
ly as ‘Nazi. ‘“
The Crown suggested repeatedly that “neo-Nazis” could make use of revi-
sionist findings. “The truth should be open to everybody,” said Christie, “no
matter what their political beliefs. Let the chips fall where they may. It doesn’t
justify viewing [something] as [false] because someone with a political view
that you don’t like might use it.”
Further, said Christie, “the Holocaust has become a very-important propa-
ganda weapon and it is politically dangerous to ask even reasonable questions
about it.” Therefore, “the right to discuss it should be established.”
The Crown had suggested “willful blindness” on Zündel’s part, said Chris-
tie, but that “presupposes that the Crown has the truth either in the booklet Six
Million Did Die or in some other person’s opinion, either Dr. Hilberg or Dr.
Browning. All they really have in any of those three sources is one more opin-
ion.”
None of the defense witnesses showed intolerance, said Christie. None
said, “Look, the whole world has to accept my opinion.” Felderer, at least,
said precisely the opposite – that he hardly cared what others thought.
How often during this trial, asked Christie, “has the Crown dealt with those
pages in Did Six Million Really Die? that Ernst Zündel wrote?” Very seldom,
yet they implied that “a man who states his belief… doesn’t really believe
what he says he believes, and then they say that he is not being… prosecuted
for his belief but [for] disbelief, because he doesn’t really believe what he says
he believes. To me that doesn’t stand up to reason, and the evidence, I sug-
gest, doesn’t support it.”
In his postscript to Harwood, Zündel wrote, “That is the truth.” “The
Crown,” said Christie, “must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that not only is
it not the truth but, further, that he didn’t believe it, and, further, that he knew
it was false. They have to prove that.”
“The Crown had the onus to prove the falsity of the thesis of Did Six Mil-
lion Really Die?,” said Christie. How did they go about it? They read a “pile
of papers” left over from the last trial. “I suggest it wouldn’t be [Hilberg’s]
sworn testimony today.” They produced “another paper historian,” Christo-
pher Browning. And they produced “a custodian of kilometers of records, who
says that not one of the Red Cross quotations [used in] Did Six Million Really
Die? was incorrect although the Red Cross doesn’t agree with the thesis.”
“And what did the Crown not produce?” asked Christie. Technical or fo-
rensic evidence of any kind. Survivors like Joseph Burg and Maria van Her-
waarden, or other wartime witnesses like Barton, Christophersen, Kneuper,
and Rudolph. A major historian like David Irving. Philosophy-of-language
experts like Fann and Botting. Real evidence of the accused’s state of mind
when he published. Some indication that anyone actually received the Har-
wood pamphlet from Zündel, much less deemed it a threat to a public interest.
The defense, on the other hand, “produced people who have the common-
sense approach of the ordinary man and are unintimidated” by academic au-
thority.
Some facts in Harwood are undoubtedly wrong, said Christie, but that’s
normal. “It’s only the thesis itself, the conclusion, which is in any way signifi-
cant or controversial.”
Let’s have faith in the intelligence of ordinary Canadian citizens, said
Christie. Is Harwood really a problem for them? “Or is this brochure just a
problem for those who benefit from the Holocaust as an idea, who seek to turn
a historical tragedy to political advantage? If so, then is their interest to be
viewed by you as the public interest?” The danger is one of society becoming
“a battleground for special-interest groups, each saying they represent the pub-
lic interest, each out to condemn the opinions of others.”
Christie noted that Faurisson said revisionist findings caused some disturb-
ances in France. “He is not speaking about Canada… There is not one shred of
evidence of any disturbance cause by Did Six Million Really Die? in Canada
in the last seven years since its alleged distribution. If any was likely it would
have occurred and the Crown would have been able to produce evidence of
it… Not one person, not one thing in the nature of mischief has happened, and
after seven years, if nothing has happened, who can honestly say that it is like-
ly?”
“The Crown has failed to prove what the law requires,” said Christie. “It
has failed to prove the thesis as fact and not opinion. It has failed to prove the
facts [that support the opinion] are false. It has failed to prove the accused
knew they were false when he published. It has failed to prove that anyone re-
ceived it in 1981 [or later]. They failed to prove that it is likely to cause mis-
chief to a public interest in racial and social tolerance. They failed to prove
that any fact in the brochure which supports the opinion, if taken by itself,
would have caused any social or racial intolerance. A reasonable doubt on any
of those points would be a reason to acquit. If you have a reasonable doubt on
any of those points, you [are required to] acquit.”
Having failed to prove all these points, what would the Crown attorney do
in his summation? Christie suggested that he would probably quote the words
of the defense witnesses in a selective, biased way – the “very thing” that
Harwood was accused of having done. “I’m not suggesting the Crown is in
any way going to be dishonest in doing so, nor that they have any criminal in-
tent. I merely suggest that, when people make arguments, they always make
selective presentations of their opponent’s position, and that is quite logical.
They will patch together, I suggest, from bits and pieces of what defense wit-
nesses have said, an argument that parts of Did Six Million Really Die? are in-
correct.”
Whatever his faults, said Christie, Harwood at least never suggested the
criminality of those who disagreed with him. For him, it was an academic de-
bate. Zündel’s opponents had made it into something “much more serious.”
You are the judges of the facts, said Christie to the jurors. “No one will ev-
er know [how you determine them] because no one can ever legally ask you
how you came to your conclusion.”
“You will get the law from His Honor,” said Christie. Remember that it is
your individual conscience that is bound by oath. “Nobody took an oath col-
lectively.” You must be “true to your own observations” of “what you’ve seen
in court and nowhere else.” Remember also that “it’s only when jurors like
yourselves have enough logic, common sense and decency to apply the law
impartially and correctly, and find the accused not guilty, [that] this kind of ri-
diculous exercise of trying people for their opinions [will] end.”
Pearson’s Summation
The next morning, Wednesday, May 4, John Pearson delivered his summation
to the jury. He began by reminding the jurors that they “must be satisfied be-
yond a reasonable doubt” (1) that Zündel willfully published Did Six Million
Really Die?; (2) that the pamphlet “is a statement of fact rather than an opin-
ion”; (3) that the fact is false; (4) that the accused knew it to be false when he
published it; and (5) that it “is likely to cause mischief to the public interest in
social and racial tolerance.”
“Those are the issues on trial in this case,” said Pearson. “While you
wouldn’t know it from the manner in which the defense has been conducted,
the Holocaust is not on trial here. The gas chambers at Birkenau are not on tri-
al here… The so-called revisionist movement is not on trial. In short, history
is not on trial. What is on trial is this pamphlet and Ernst Zündel’s state of
mind. Throughout the trial, the defense seems to have either lost sight of this
or preferred to raise irrelevant issues in the hope that the real issues in the case
would be obscured and could be avoided.”
Pearson insisted that it was appropriate to examine Zündel’s political be-
liefs. “He is not being prosecuted for his beliefs, but for the crime you are en-
titled to find his beliefs led him to commit.”
Christie was wrong, said Pearson, to complain that no evidence was led
that anyone received the Harwood pamphlet. The law required only evidence
that Zündel published it, and that was led.
The next issue was fact or opinion. “Do you think,” asked Pearson, “that
Dr. Botting’s opinion was influenced by his view that there is no such thing as
fact, that everything IS an opinion?” The central thesis of the Harwood pam-
phlet “is not presented… as an opinion, [but] as a fact.”149
Christie suggested that Section 177 is “only concerned with statements re-
lating to present facts. Let’s examine that submission for a minute. He says
that if I publish a false statement that the nuclear power plant in Pickering is
melting down, I would fall within the Criminal Code section… Surely Mr.
Christie is not suggesting that it does not offend the same section of the Crim-
inal Code for me to publish a false statement that the nuclear power plant
melted down last month and we are being poisoned now by radioactive fall-
out… [t]he pamphlet does not state that this gigantic fraud perpetrated by the
Jewish people is a historical event. It asserts that the swindle is continuing and
will continue for some time.
In this regard, the pamphlet is making a statement of fact with respect to an
alleged present event.”
Fact or opinion? asked Pearson. Harwood himself said that “what he pur-
ports to set out is not merely his opinion, but ‘irrefutable evidence that the al-
legation that six million Jews died during the Second World War, as a direct
result of [an] official German policy of extermination, is utterly unfounded’.”
“Let’s turn, then, to this irrefutable evidence because the third issue you
have to address is whether Did Six Million Really Die? is false.”
“Christie raised a straw man,” said Pearson, “by suggesting that the Crown
was out to criminalize sloppiness.” The Harwood pamphlet “does not merely
contain a few sloppy errors. It is a big lie constructed using numerous little
lies. It’s not false because of a few negligent slips. It’s false because it was de-
liberately fabricated to create a false impression and to impart false infor-
mation… It is indeed a cleverly contrived monument to mendacity.”
Pearson then discussed those false statements in Harwood which “the
Crown considers significant.” As he did, he alleged over and over that Har-
wood had sought to deceive his readers.
Some of Pearson’s fault-finding was nit-picking. Some, at the other ex-
treme, was broad disagreement over historical interpretations. The rest of the
criticism fell within that middle range of evidence which lends itself more eas-
ily to acceptance or rejection.
An example of nit-picking was Pearson’s continued emphasis on Har-
wood’s mistaken claim that Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, had been the first
to charge the Germans with exterminating Jews, and had asserted that six mil-
lion were dead by 1943.
Harwood, said Pearson, “wants to create an impression that this myth of
the Holocaust was generated by Jews, that it was based on the dishonest
149
Botting testified, of course, that two-thirds of the Harwood pamphlet consists of “fact.” As for the
one-third opinion, including the central thesis, it was often presented as fact, Botting readily ad-
mitted, but that was hardly exceptional.
statements of Jews, but that’s not true. The [Joint] Allied Declaration was read
in the House of Commons in England, and in Washington. It was a public
statement by the Allies. Even the defense witness Weber stated that this para-
graph is not a true statement, that any well-informed person knows that the
Allies declared, in 1942, that they were holding the Nazis responsible for a
genocide of the Jews.”
Actually, Weber’s testimony was precisely that it was Jews and Jewish or-
ganizations who, in 1942, generated most of the statements about an extermi-
nation, and pressured the Allied governments to accept them despite the con-
trary advice of their own specialists. (Weber also insisted that many well-
informed people did not know about the Allied declaration of 1942.) Thus, in
focusing on a small error in Harwood (Lemkin’s priority), Pearson committed
a more serious one himself (Weber’s testimony).
Pearson turned next to another error in Harwood – the matter of Bishop
Dibelius’s evaluation of Kurt Gerstein’s credibility as a witness. Dibelius had
called Gerstein “trustworthy.” Harwood had rendered this as “untrustworthy,”
but had accurately provided his source. Pearson branded this “deliberate falsi-
fication,” and said, “Professor Faurisson suggested this could have been an
honest mistake. Well, I suggest all that evidence does is show the lengths to
which Professor Faurisson will go to defend one of his revisionist colleagues.”
Among the accusations made by Pearson against specific points in Har-
wood, the following were arguably the most serious:
1. Statistics. Harwood was charged with “cooking the numbers” for both
the pre-war and post-war European Jewish populations.
2. The Eichmann Trial. Harwood, said Pearson, stated that the Israeli pros-
ecutor “studiously avoided mentioning the figure of six million. What’s the
truth? Professor Faurisson admitted that… the prosecutor… did refer to the
figure of six million.” Eichmann’s widow endorsed his memoirs, which
agreed with his trial testimony about an extermination. Facing certain death,
said Pearson, Eichmann would surely have told the truth.
3. The Nuremberg Trials. Harwood “suggested that the defense was not
permitted to cross-examine prosecution witnesses.” But Hilberg and Weber
agreed that that was incorrect. Harwood stated that a majority of the prosecu-
tion staff and witnesses were Jews, but “Hilberg has told you that is false.”
And Harwood “suggested that guilt was assumed from the outset,” which is
false because “some Nazi leaders were exonerated.”
4. Access to the Eastern camps. Harwood stated they were off-limits. But,
said Pearson, some had been destroyed, and at Majdanek a group of Western
newsmen was taken around in August 1944.
5. The Einsatzgruppen. “In this section [of Harwood] we have three main
themes,” said Pearson. “First, that there is no statistical basis for the killing at-
tributed to the Einsatzgruppen; secondly, that the American Tribunal that tried
Ohlendorf did not give any credence to his testimony; and third, that the
Einsatzgruppen were justified in their actions because they were under enemy
attack.” The statistical basis exists in the Einsatzgruppen Reports, said Pear-
son, which Harwood never mentions. “Mark Weber admitted when he was
shown the transcript of the proceedings that the American Tribunal that tried
Ohlendorf did not reject his testimony. In fact, they accepted it and agreed that
the figure originally given in the first trial where Ohlendorf was a witness had
been confirmed in the trial where Ohlendorf was an accused.” As for “enemy
attack,” the Himmler Report of December 20, 1942 shows that the number of
Jews being reported killed was totally out of proportion to German losses.
6. Repudiations of testimony. Harwood asserted that Oswald Pohl “suc-
cessfully repudiated” his “bogus admission that he had seen a gas chamber at
Auschwitz”; and that General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, in 1959, “pub-
licly repudiated his Nuremberg testimony [against Himmler] before a West-
German court.” Pearson reminded the jury that Weber said he “searched hard”
and found no evidence of the latter repudiation. Pearson argued as well (contra
Weber) that no Pohl repudiation existed.
7. Citations of Gerald Reitlinger and Raul Hilberg. Harwood got both his-
torians seriously wrong, said Pearson. He asserted that Reitlinger’s assump-
tion that Hitler verbally ordered an extermination is “probably [based on] the
worthless [Dieter] Wisliceny Statement”; and he cited an estimate of Hilberg
placing Jewish wartime deaths at about 900,000. Pearson reminded the jury
that “there’s no reference in Reitlinger’s footnotes to the Wisliceny Statement.
Professor Browning showed you that Reitlinger, like other historians, relies on
the Einsatzgruppen Reports.” As for the Hilberg estimate, it should have been
more than five-million Jewish deaths. Harwood’s mistake there could be at-
tributed to Paul Rassinier.
8. Witnesses to gassings. “The pamphlet suggests,” said Pearson, “that no
Jew has come forward and claimed to be a member of the Sonderkommando,
so the whole thing is conveniently unprovable. Well, you’ve heard from Pro-
fessor Browning that Jews have come forward and said that they were mem-
bers of the Sonderkommando. They have testified in other proceedings…”
Browning also testified that other witnesses to gassings “came forward at the
trials in West Germany.”
9. The Warsaw Ghetto. Harwood claimed the evacuation was peaceful and
led to resettlement. But, said Pearson, Hilberg and Browning produced evi-
dence that it was brutal and led straight to the extermination camps.
10. The Anne Frank Diary. The witness Weber told you, said Pearson, that
he became convinced that this part of Harwood was essentially wrong after
reading Suzman and Diamond’s Six Million Did Die. The novelist Meyer Lev-
in was never paid for writing the dialogue of the diary, as Harwood, quoting a
Swedish source, asserted.
11. Estimate from Die Tat. In 1955, this newspaper in Zurich, Switzerland
estimated that about 300,000 people had died in camps in Germany. But the
key words “in Germany” were omitted in the Harwood pamphlet, creating,
said Pearson, a “totally false impression.”
Pearson also charged Harwood with “suppressing” important information
in several places, notably in the cases of the Goebbels Diaries and Konrad
Morgen. Harwood referred to a Goebbels “memorandum” of March 7, 1942,
which favored sending the Jews to Madagascar, and gave as his source the
book Dr. Goebbels by Manvell and Fraenkl. In that volume, said Pearson, the
next item is Goebbels’s diary entry of March 27, 1942, where he “says the
complete opposite,” that “60 percent of the [Polish] Jews will be liquidated.”
In the case of Konrad Morgen, said Pearson, “David Irving admitted that the
author of Did Six Million Really Die? should have mentioned that Morgen’s
investigations led him to conclude that there were six camps operating as ex-
termination camps in Poland.”
Pearson further charged Harwood with occasionally employing the “dis-
honest technique” of “confusing apples with oranges.” Notably, this occurred
where he tried “to mix the Malmedy Trial and the controversy surrounding it
with the Nuremberg trials,” and where he confused Red Cross Reports on
German prisoner-of-war camps and German concentration camps.
Finally, Pearson suggested that the defense witnesses sometimes made al-
legations without presenting what he regarded as sufficient evidence to back
them up – notably, about the torture and mistreatment of defense witnesses at
Nuremberg and about the unreliability of the Einsatzgruppen Reports.
Pearson misspoke at various points during his summation. He accused
Harwood of referring to “political Zionism” as “a main plank of Nazi policy.”
He mentioned Browning citing “four documents” to prove extermination, but
named only three. And he asserted that Russell Barton’s observations had
been “pulled out of context” to support the revisionist thesis.
What about the controversy over Harwood quoting only a portion of what
the historian Colin Cross wrote? Christie had called it a legitimate and com-
mon technique of argument, said Pearson, and “suggested that I would do it.
Well, he’s right, I have referred to [portions of] the testimony of some defense
witnesses. I expect His Honor will tell you that you are entitled to accept all of
the evidence of a witness, some of the evidence of a witness, or none of the
evidence of [a] witness.”
But there’s a difference here, said Pearson. “You have heard the evidence
of the defense witnesses. You know their overall thesis. You are in a position
to determine whether their evidence should be used as I suggest. Harwood’s
reader is not in that position unless he goes and reads Colin Cross’s book,
Adolf Hitler, and I suggest the average reader will not do that.”
Pearson noted that there are only two places in the pamphlet where “the is-
sue of gas chambers is really gone into,” and they rely on what Paul Rassinier
said, but don’t do it accurately. “So, all of the evidence tendered in this trial
about gas chambers by the defense is not referred to in the Harwood pamphlet.
It was not available to Ernst Zündel when he published this pamphlet. The
Leuchter Report did not exist until this year.150 But the defense has spent a lot
of time in this trial on the issue of gas chambers. So I’m going to address it
even though I suggest that it really is irrelevant to the issues that you have to
decide.”
Pearson’s account of Leuchter’s findings was marred by incompleteness
and inaccuracy. He began by saying that Leuchter’s conclusions were
“based… on two findings”: that he “observed no means of heating the Zyklon-
B crystals to the point required so that they would vaporize,” and that “the risk
of explosion was great.” Concerning heat, Pearson stated, incorrectly, that
Leuchter “admitted in cross-examination that he didn’t take into account the
heat generated by 15 nearby crematoria ovens working 24 hours a day, the
heat generated by a large number of people being herded into the chambers,
and the possibility of another heat source, such as a hot brick, being intro-
duced into the chamber.” In his testimony, Leuchter failed to address directly
the matter of a local heat source, but he did dismiss both the oven-heat and the
people-heat theories.
According to Pearson, “[Leuchter] admitted that he didn’t know that large
amounts of Zyklon B went to Auschwitz.” The actual exchange went like this:
Pearson: Now, do you know that in 1942 and 1943, 19.5 tons of Zyklon
were delivered to the Auschwitz complex?
Leuchter: I have seen figures to that effect. I don’t know that that’s true.
A document which was “produced and shown to [Leuchter]” made refer-
ence to ventilation equipment arriving for the gas chamber at Crematory ll.
Because of this, reasoned Pearson, “Mr. Leuchter’s evidence that he observed
no signs of ventilation equipment151 does not stand up.”
As for the aerial photographs of Auschwitz, said Pearson, remember that
the original CIA report did conclude that those patches on the roofs were
“openings.”
And as for James Roth, he had no control over the samples he analyzed,
and “I suggest he agreed that the sampling procedure… was unscientific.”152
So, concluded Pearson, “I suggest that the defense evidence about the gas
chambers really was much to do about nothing. It came from a man who was
in over his head…”
“Once again,” said Pearson, “what we have is an example of revisionist
tactics. Let’s forget about Did Six Million Really Die? Let’s not deal with the
falsehoods in it. Let’s try to change the case into a case about gas chambers.
That is not this case.”
150
After the Zündel defense team had carefully refrained from ever mentioning the report by name
(though David Irving was criticized by the judge for alluding to it), prosecutor Pearson here lost
control and said the forbidden words.
151
Including installation holes, filled-in holes, etc.; cf. note 141.
152
Pearson later toned this down, at page 10502 in the trial transcript (page 308 here).
After a lunch break, Pearson moved on to the next issue, Ernst Zündel’s
state of mind at the time he published. “Mr. Christie suggested that the Crown
is unwilling to look at what Ernst Zündel had written in the pamphlet. Well,
let’s go to… where it states: ‘My conclusion, after I had originally believed
the dogma of the Holocaust, is that no such extermination program ever exist-
ed.’ What changed his mind? It’s interesting that almost every major defense
witness claimed credit for Mr. Zündel’s conversion,153 but did you think that
the witnesses Felderer, Faurisson, Burg, Christophersen and Walendy were
persuasive? Did they change your mind?”
“Where,” asked Pearson, “does a man who wishes to rehabilitate Hitler and
his racist policies turn? Mr. Zündel turned to the Institute for Historical Re-
view,” a group which “hides its message of hate under a phony veneer of
pseudo-academic respectability.”
Udo Walendy testified, said Pearson, that he and Zündel discussed Suzman
and Diamond’s critique of Harwood. “I suggest that it is open to you, on the
evidence you’ve heard, to find that Ernst Zündel came back from the Institute
for Historical Review’s conference in 1979 knowing that Did Six Million Re-
ally Die? was false, and he published it knowing it was false because he want-
ed the public attention that it would bring him.”
Finally, said Pearson, you must ask yourselves if the Harwood pamphlet is
“likely to cause mischief to the public interest in social and racial tolerance. I
suggest that a good way to approach this issue is to look at what [Harwood]
was attempting, what he hoped to achieve, because it’s set out in Did Six Mil-
lion Really Die?… under the heading ‘The Race Problem Suppressed.’”
Pearson read from Harwood’s allegation that the Holocaust “is not only
used to undermine the principle of nationhood and national pride, but it threat-
ens the survival of the Race itself. It is wielded over the heads of the populace,
rather as the threat of hellfire and damnation was in the Middle Ages. Many
countries of the Anglo-Saxon World, notably Britain and America, are today
facing the gravest danger in their history, the danger posed by the alien races
in their midst. Unless something is done in Britain to halt the immigration and
assimilation of Africans and Asians into our country, we are faced in the near
future, quite apart from the bloodshed of racial conflict, with the biological al-
teration and destruction of the British people as they have existed here since
the coming of the Saxons. In short, we are threatened with the irrecoverable
loss of our European culture and racial heritage. But what happens if a man
dares to speak of the race problem, of its biological and political implica-
tions?”
“Auschwitz” is waved in his face, was Harwood’s reply.154
153
An exaggeration on Pearson’s part.
154
The author participated in a peaceful anti-immigration demonstration in England in 1980. The
violent counter-demonstrators carried accusatory placards bearing pictures of emaciated bodies at
Belsen from May 1945. “Auschwitz” was indeed literally waved in our faces.
The goal of Did Six Million Really Die?, concluded Pearson, is to bring
about “rational discussion” of “the problem ‘of race” and the “need to pre-
serve racial integrity.”
This was a willfully narrow interpretation of the pamphlet’s goal, voiced
by Pearson in the cadences of evil.155
“Now, we know,” said Pearson, “that Professor Faurisson’s ‘60 words,’
which I suggest are very similar to the central thesis in Did Six Million Really
Die?, has caused disturbances in France.” Another damning point, apparently.
Remember what the psychiatrist Russell Barton told us, said Pearson. Na-
tional-Socialist propaganda sought “to make tolerance a dirty word. I suggest
to you that that is the goal of Did Six Million Really Die? to make tolerance a
dirty word, and I suggest that the Crown has established beyond a reasonable
doubt that it will likely cause racial and social intolerance unless something is
done about it.”156
“Those,” said Pearson, “are the five issues which the Crown submits are
important in this trial… Thank you for your attention.”
Thank you, said Judge Thomas, and then he excused the jury for six days.
Thomas’s Charge to the Jury

Court resumed on Tuesday, May 10, and Judge Thomas made his Charge to
the Jury. The burden of proving guilt, he reminded them, “rests upon the
Crown and never shifts… If you have a reasonable doubt as to whether the ac-
Officials in Australia, New Zealand, and other once-nearly-all-white countries have recently de-
manded in public that their countries must – must – become non-white over the next century or
two. Those who have opposed these demands have been damned in public as “Nazis” and “mur-
derers.” This is the sort of moral blackmail to which Harwood was calling attention, yet both
Pearson (here) and Judge Thomas (below) pretended to find something sinister in this moderate
“Save the Whales” mode of rhetoric.
How long, one must ask, will the present Western establishment continue its dangerous game of
“Chicken”? The fate of an entire race – few in numbers and loaded with genetically recessive
traits – hangs in the balance. Will some leader finally grab the wheel before we hit the last ditch
and are thrown like so many crazy teenagers?
155
Pearson might ‘have added that, as recently as the mid-1950s, Winston Churchill – the man who
once wanted to gas the inhabitants of Germany’s cities – and his cabinet ministers. regularly dis-
coursed together on the “problems of race” and the need to preserve British “racial integrity” be-
cause their nation of 50 million was then being confronted with a few thousand new immigrants
from India and the West Indies.
156
Philosophers explain that “tolerance” of one thing normally implies “intolerance” of something
else. Every “yes” in life is a “no” to something else. Thus, tolerance of massive nonwhite immi-
gration to Canada – and, even more, a legally enforced insistence upon it – is intolerance of a
white Canadian posterity. The goal of the present Canadian establishment, and of its propaganda,
is thus, in a sense, “to make tolerance a dirty word.” The present establishment will not tolerate
any meaningful racial continuity between the Canada of the past and the Canada which is to be,
although the great majority of ordinary Canadians desires such a link. Pearson’s sloppy use of
concepts like “tolerance,” “prejudice,” and “sensitive” betrays a philosophical and linguistic igno-
rance which is shared by many of his countrymen.
cused is guilty of the offense, it is your duty to give the accused the benefit of
the doubt and find him not guilty.”
Assuming his best Don Quixote pose, Thomas then admonished, “Your
findings of fact must be based solely and only upon the evidence produced be-
fore you in this courtroom.”
“When this trial started,” said Thomas, “I directed you on the matter of ju-
dicial notice. I directed you as a matter of law that the mass murder and ex-
termination of Jews in Europe by the Nazi regime during the Second World
War is an historical fact which is so notorious as not to be the subject of dis-
pute among reasonable persons… The Crown was not required to prove it. It
is in the light of that direction that you should examine the evidence in this
case and the issues before you.”
“You are the sole judges,” said Thomas, of the truthfulness and credibility
of the witnesses. As for evidence, remember that only the expert witnesses –
Browning, Fann, Weber, Botting, Lagacé, Walendy, Faurisson, Wilson,
Leuchter, Roth, and Irving157 – may give opinion evidence for its truth. Opin-
ion evidence from non-experts is “not admissible… for the truth of what is
said. This evidence has a very limited use. If those opinions were made known
to the accused person prior to the time of the publication of the pamphlet…
you are entitled to use that evidence in assessing the accused’s state of mind at
the material time.”
Expert historians are entitled to rely upon hearsay in arriving at their con-
clusions, noted Thomas. “Much of the documentary material filed as exhibits
in this case is hearsay… These documents are not admissible for the truth of
their contents, notwithstanding that they may have been contemporaneous
with the event and made by persons who were involved… They are available
for your consideration in assessing the quality of the source material which
was either examined [or passed over] by the expert…”
“Your function,” said Thomas, “is to decide the weight to be attached to
the opinions of a particular historian.” Some of the factors worth considering
are: “quality of research and source material”; “the extent of research and the
duration of it”; “any apparent bias”; “any motive that you may attribute to the
witness”; rationality; professionalism.
“Freedom of expression is guaranteed [in Canada] by the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms,” explained the judge, but “it is not absolute. Different reasons
are given as to why freedom of expression should be guaranteed: It is said that
freedom of expression is the best way to obtain truth through the free ex-
change of ideas. Another reason is the free expression of opinion is essential
to the working of a parliamentary democracy. Third, it furthers self-fulfill-
ment, the evolution, definition and proclamation of individual and group iden-
157
Thomas overlooked Hilberg, Biedermann, and Barton.
tity… Spreading falsehoods knowingly is the antithesis of seeking truth

through the free exchange of ideas.”
Thomas cautioned the jurors: “[I]f you have a reasonable doubt on any of
the essential elements of the offense, then you must give that doubt to the ac-
cused and find him not guilty.”
Thomas began to review some of the facts in dispute concerning the Holo-
caust, and highlighted the Crown’s suggestion that defense Witness Udo
Walendy “seemed to have no doubt what [the Harwood pamphlet] conveyed.
He said that the importance of the Historical Facts series, of which [Harwood]
is Historical Fact No. 1, lies in the facts they contain and not the opinions.”
Speaking for himself on the issue, Thomas said, “Although there are indi-
vidual items or passages in the pamphlet which, considered separately, might
be characterized as opinions, I direct you that it is open to you to find that the
pamphlet, considered as a whole, asserted as a fact that Jews were not exter-
minated as a result of government policy during the Nazi regime…”
“What is the position of the defense on this issue?” First, said Thomas,
they call it opinion. Second, they say that if it must be regarded as fact, then it
is true fact.
Dr. Fann and Dr. Botting both call Harwood opinion, said Thomas. Fann
“starts with the rather curious presumption that a person believes what he
writes.” Botting “said that authors generally mean opinion when they use the
word truth… He told you that the most-persuasive element [in Harwood] was
the opinion which purports to be based on facts.”
Like Pearson, Judge Thomas appeared to be confused by Botting’s testi-
mony. At one point he said that Botting found that Harwood “contained two-
thirds fact.” Moments later he said, “[The Crown asks] do you think, [Bot-
ting’s] view [of Harwood] was influenced by his contention that there is no
such thing as a fact, that everything is opinion?”
The defense contends, said Thomas, that Fred Leuchter “raised reasonable
doubts” about the gas chambers. “He says that this evidence remains unchal-
lenged… [and] that the evidence presented by the defense is as close as one
can get to a scientific inquiry, and… that in the presence of this evidence, you
should have a reasonable doubt, at the very least, that there were gas cham-
bers. He also relies on the evidence in this area from Faurisson and Felderer as
to what they observed.”
The judge faithfully repeated the Crown’s erroneous contention that
Leuchter based his gas-chamber conclusions on just “two findings” – the risk
of explosion and the lack of a means of heating the Zyklon-B crystals. He also
repeated the misleading claim of Pearson that “[Leuchter] admitted in cross-
examination that he didn’t take into account the heat generated by 15 nearby
crematoria ovens working 24 hours a day [and] the heat generated by a large
number of people being herded into the chambers.”
Thomas emphasized Exhibit 155 in the proceedings, the document about

the expected delivery of a ventilation system to Birkenau, whose authenticity
David Irving had not contested. It made a reference to “gassing,” Thomas al-
leged.
For long periods, Thomas essentially read from Pearson’s summation. On
occasion, he dipped briefly into Christie’s summation as well.
“In conclusion,” said (or read) Thomas, the Crown argued that “the defense
evidence about the gas chambers really was much to do about nothing. It came
from a man who was in over his head…”
“On this question of the gas chambers,” said Thomas, “there have been
numerous trials in the world commencing with the International Military Tri-
bunal in 1946… And there has been no evidence called in this courtroom to
indicate to you that at any time in the past anyone has suggested that gas
chambers did not exist.”
Thomas reminded the jurors of Faurisson’s testimony about writing to
Eichmann’s attorney, Servatius, to ask why he did not question the existence
of the gas chambers. “And we were told that Eichmann’s attorney informed
him that he decided not to take that stance. This was a deliberate trial tactic,
not to question the technique of gassing, but to minimize the role of Adolf
Eichmann in gassings. That letter, of course, was never produced. I would
have thought that that would have been for Dr. Faurisson a very precious doc-
ument. It’s not in evidence.”
During the testimony of Ivan Lagacé, said Thomas, “did you hear any evi-
dence as he went through the process of cremation… about ventilation sys-
tems within the retort? All you heard evidence about was that air is pumped
into the retort to cool down the process.” So was the defense correct to suggest
that the ventilation system to be delivered to Birkenau (Exhibit 155) was des-
tined for the crematorium? That exhibit is “hearsay in legal proceedings;” cau-
tioned Thomas, “but is a document that a reasonable, competent historian
might very well look at in forming his opinion.”
After a break, Thomas summarized portions of Faurisson’s testimony. “He
says that Jews no doubt did suffer but the suffering was confined to persecu-
tions, internment during the war, deportation to transit camps, concentration
camps, labor camps, ghettos, where diseases were encountered, execution of
hostages, reprisals and massacres. For him, the ‘Final Solution’ meant emigra-
tion and deportation.” Faurisson acknowledged only a few errors in the Har-
wood pamphlet.
“You’ve had the pamphlet with you at all times in the courtroom,” said
Thomas, “and Mr. Pearson summed up in his jury address some of the signifi-
cant false assertions of fact for you.” (Here, Thomas neglected to say “the al-
leged significant false assertions of fact.” Moments earlier, in a very similar
sentence, he had included the word “alleges.”)
David Irving’s position is “somewhat different” from some of the defense

witnesses, explained Thomas. “You will recall, in the witness box he indicated
that he now, apparently, as a result of the Leuchter examination, would like to
be shown evidence of gas chambers, although in none of his writings did he
ever question the existence of gas chambers or that there was a systematic ex-
ecution of the Jews. He now says in this witness box, not that he has changed
his mind but that he now feels that this issue is open… Now, this evidence
comes from David Irving, a man who has been able to profit substantially
from his writings… This evidence came to you from a man who apparently
gave a speech in 1983 and earlier in 1979 at the Institute for Historical Review
conference where he never questioned the Holocaust…”
The defense witness Thies Christophersen was stationed at Raisko, a satel-
lite camp of Auschwitz, said Thomas, but he never went inside either Birke-
nau or, “as I recall the evidence… Auschwitz proper.”
The prosecution witness Raul Hilberg “examined the railroad schedules,”
said Thomas, “and I’m sure this evidence is very important to your considera-
tions.” It was “clear that the transportees had to be counted because payment
had to be made to the railways for each person transported. Hundreds of thou-
sands of persons were sent to Treblinka and Sobibor, small villages, and the
trains returned empty.” Hilberg had estimated that about five million Jews
died in the Holocaust.
“Dr. Browning was taken through the [Harwood] pamphlet,” said Thomas,
“and he discussed with you his reasons for finding certain statements of fact in
the pamphlet erroneous.” Browning also “acknowledges that there is no doc-
ument in existence ordering the commencement of gassings and – as far as he
was concerned – there was no document ordering the stopping of gassings, no
document setting out the organizational plan or blueprint to carry out gassings,
and there is no single overall budget report on the ‘Final Solution’ and no au-
topsy report of any person killed by Zyklon B. He said that he did not know of
a document ordering the stopping of gassings. He apparently was not aware of
the [1944] document, attributed to Himmler by David Irving, about which
Robert Faurisson wrote an article challenging David Irving on the authenticity
of the document…”
Browning and Hilberg disagreed, noted Thomas, on the extent of Hitler’s
involvement in the Holocaust. “Browning’s view is that Hilberg’s interpreta-
tion is too focused on an almost-autonomous bureaucratic process.”
“Now,” said Thomas, “we come to what I suggest to you is the essential
element in this case for your consideration, and that is that the assertion of fact
must be false to the knowledge of the person who publishes it.”
“It is true that the accused man is not on trial for his beliefs… However, it
is open to you to find that if the accused believed in National Socialism… he
knowingly would publish falsehoods to foster and protect those beliefs.”
Thomas turned to the Suzman and Diamond booklet, Six Million Did Die.
“You will recall how that came into these proceedings,” he said. Udo
Walendy mentioned his critique of it as being a part of his booklet “Historical
Fact No. 5.” “He told you that he discussed his critique… with Zündel in Los
Angeles, at the [IHR] conference.” Now, cautioned Thomas, “you cannot use
[Six Million Did Die] for the truth of its contents. It has a limited use here and
it has to do with the publication of [Harwood]. I caution you again that the au-
thors of Six Million Did Die were not before this court. They were not exam-
ined and, therefore, their book is hearsay. It has a limited use and that use is
that Walendy, who was the major distributor of [Harwood] in Germany, was
aware of [its] significant criticisms of [Harwood]. He responded to [them] and
made Ernst Zündel aware of the criticisms… Now, he also did tell Mr. Zün-
del that there was nothing in Six Million Did Die of any significance… But it
is a circumstance which you can take into account when weighing any of the
other evidence that goes to the question of the accused’s state of mind. The
Crown argues that it is open to you to find that the accused came back from
the [IHR Conference] having reason to believe that Did Six Million Really
Die? is false, and he published it [anyhow] because he wanted the public at-
tention that it would bring to him. That is really the position of the Crown.”
If you have a “reasonable doubt” that the accused “honestly believed”
Harwood is true, then you must acquit, said Thomas. “Now, it is not necessary
for that belief, held honestly, to be reasonable. The unreasonable nature of the
belief is only one factor to be considered. In other words, it is only one item of
the evidence to support an inference that the belief is not honestly held. I will
state it another way. The more-unreasonable the belief, the easier it is to draw
the inference that the belief is not honestly held.”
Thomas returned briefly to the defense position. Christie, he said, argued
that “there is no reliable evidence… that the accused knew [Harwood] was
false or knows it to be false. There is no direct evidence, he says, and all the
circumstantial evidence, according to his submissions, is that the accused be-
lieves it to be true. He says that the conduct of the accused prior to publication
indicates a serious study and inquiry into the subject matter with other peo-
ple.”
“The next issue to consider,” said Thomas, is whether the Harwood pam-
phlet is “likely to cause mischief to the public interest in social and racial tol-
erance… There can be no doubt, I suggest to you, that the maintenance of ra-
cial and religious tolerance is certainly a matter of public interest in Canada.
What does the word ‘mischief’ mean in this context? It simply means damage
or injury. In other words, likely to cause damage or injury to the public inter-
est in social and racial tolerance.”
Thomas recalled the Crown’s submission that the contents of the Harwood
pamphlet condemned themselves by warning against the “biological alteration
and destruction of the British people as they have existed… since the coming
of the Saxons,” etc. The self-condemning goal of the Harwood pamphlet, ac-
cording to Pearson, was to bring about a “rational discussion” of the problem
of racial conservation. Further, said Thomas, the Crown attorney pointed out
that Faurisson’s revisionist thesis had caused a “disturbance” in France, and
“hate and intolerance do not know national boundaries.”
Thomas then noted Christie’s response that the Harwood pamphlet “has
substantial value as a provocative opinion. He argues158 that the public interest
in social and racial tolerance will be better saved from mischief when ideas
which are revisionist, as he calls them, are freely and openly discussed, and he
says opinions should be tolerated.”
Thomas immediately dismissed Christie’s appeal to openness with these
words: “I have already told you about what the law is with respect to freedom
of expression and its relationship to this particular subject.”
He then returned to Christie’s position: “Tolerance, he says, is taught and
achieved by example and not by intolerance of new and unorthodox ideas.”
Christie had warned against creating a “ministry of truth,” said Thomas, and
had asked, “Is this brochure [Harwood] just a problem for those who benefit
from the Holocaust as an idea and who tum a historical tragedy to political
advantage?”
In conclusion, said Thomas, “the possible verdicts in this case are ‘guilty’
or ‘not guilty.’” Without a unanimous decision, “there would be a ‘hung’ jury
and a new trial would be necessary.”
“Your deliberations are secret,” cautioned the judge. “They cannot be dis-
cussed with any person. You are entitled to absolute privacy and at no time
can your deliberations be revealed to any member of the public or indeed to
any person. In Canada we have a much different policy than in the United
States. No one can inquire of you any matter to do with your deliberations.
The jury room is a sacred room for your deliberations which are not to be the
subject of speculation, disclosure or discussion in the future anywhere. I simp-
ly say it is a criminal offense for any person to disclose your deliberations, as
it is for anyone to make an attempt to inquire about your deliberations.”
Do not consider the potential consequences of your verdict, said Thomas.
“The consequences of a verdict are completely irrelevant to your delibera-
tions.”
“I will be in the building,” said Thomas, “and available if you have any
questions.” Put them in writing, and, most often, I will discuss the matter with
counsel before answering. “We will all be here.”
158
With the psychiatrist Barton.
The Jury Begins Its Deliberations

It was 1:44 p.m. as the jurors departed to commence their deliberations.
After a short break, Thomas heard Christie’s objections to the Charge, and
quickly dismissed most of them. The first objection began: “The Charge as a
whole was biased against the defense and completely distorted some of the
important evidence of the case.” Christie then recited various instances of al-
leged misrepresentation.
One example was Thomas’s reference to “the theory of the defense” as be-
ing that “the Holocaust is a fraud. That was not the theory of the defense. It is
not the thesis of Did Six Million Really Die?, and it should not have been rep-
resented as such, because the judicial-notice finding which you have made
would dispose of that, if it was the theory of the defense, which I have con-
sistently argued it is not.”
“Well,” said Thomas, “you argued that from the outset but every one of
your expert witnesses except Irving said it’s a fraud…”
Christie: What I submit to Your Honor is that the definition of Holocaust
as provided by Your Honor is not in dispute here and that is not the subject of
the theory of the defense in any way. The theory of the defense is [that] the
numbers, the plan, and the allegation of gas chambers [are] in dispute, as set
out in the first paragraph of Did Six Million Really Die?
“Well, in my view,” said Thomas, “it’s open to the jury to conclude that
the central thesis of the publication… is that… the Holocaust… was a fraud,
an invention, a hoax… You told me at the outset of the trial that it wasn’t that
and you corrected me and put me in my place and told me that I was so far
off-side that it was incredible.” However, in looking over my notes on the de-
fense witnesses, I find them saying that indeed the Holocaust is a hoax. “It’s
open to [the jury] to find that.”
Christie then complained about Thomas telling the jurors that “Mr. Leuch-
ter didn’t know that large amounts of Zyklon B went to Auschwitz. There is
absolutely no evidence of that.”
Thomas became confused, asking: “You say that there’s no evidence to
support the fact that large quantities of Zyklon B went to Auschwitz?”
Christie noted that the quantities (which were large) did not exceed those
sent to some other camps where no gassings are alleged.
Christie found fault with other matters, and Thomas defended himself:
“This is the argument of the Crown that was put to them. It’s the same way I
put your argument to them. This is what the Crown is saying… I only put the
argument, the same way I put your argument to them and recited every wit-
ness in support of it. That’s the Crown’s argument summarized.” (Emphasis
added.)
Thomas’s repeated assertion that he had put the arguments of the opposing
sides in “the same way” was disingenuous.
Christie then complained about Thomas’s remarks on Faurisson failing to
bring Servatius’s letter to Canada with him. After all, Hilberg had not brought
any evidence of train schedules to court with him, although “Your Honor…
said that was very important evidence.”
“I think,” said Christie, “the comments of that kind are not necessarily the
function of the judge.”
After a couple of other objections, Christie pointed out that Thomas’s as-
sertion that Thies Christophersen never visited Birkenau and Auschwitz I “is
quite contrary to the evidence.”
Following additional complaints, Christie made a legal submission, that the
law went beyond what Thomas had suggested, and said that “even if [Zündel]
didn’t have an honest belief [in Harwood], and even if he was reckless or care-
less, not caring whether it was true or false, that would not amount to know-
ledge of its falsity.”
You may be right, said Thomas. “I’ll have to consider that.”
A bit later, Thomas noted that the jury “could find that an accused didn’t
honestly believe it was true but [still] might not be satisfied that he knew it
was false.”
“That’s my point precisely,” said Christie. “Even if they were satisfied be-
yond a reasonable doubt that he did not honestly believe it to be true, that
would not constitute knowledge of falsity as I understand it. They must find
further, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he was not just careless or reckless
with respect to its falsity, but that he had actual knowledge of its falsity.”
Christie turned to another error in Thomas’s charge. David Irving did not
speak at the Institute for Historical Review’s conference in 1979, but only in
1983.
More serious, said Christie, was the suggestion that Irving “has not
changed his mind” about the Holocaust. “[H]e said very clearly… that he’s
changed his mind.”
“I told [the jury] that he wants to have evidence,” said Thomas.
With respect, said Christie, Irving said that he “came to the same conclu-
sion as Harwood using only primary sources from the archives whereas Har-
wood used secondary literature. I respectfully suggest that it’s not accurate to
say that he simply had the Leuchter evidence. He had other reasons and he
said he came to the same conclusion as the brochure from other sources.”
Now, said Christie, given the lack of time for me to consider the Charge to
the Jury, that completes my submissions. Thomas then invited Pearson’s
comments.
Pearson recalled the defense argument that the Crown never called anyone
to testify to their outrage at the Harwood pamphlet, and complained to Thom-
as that he was “unduly favorable by even putting that defense position to the
jury because the issue here is not whether this pamphlet outraged people, but
whether or not it was likely to cause injury to the public interest, and [wheth-
er] somebody says ‘I read a pamphlet that outraged me’ is of no relevance to
that point.”
“Surely,” said Thomas, “it’s open to the defense” to say that the Crown
should have called someone. “That’s the position that he argues, that it would
have been very easy to call that sort of evidence. I’m not saying it had to be
called.”
Pearson noted Christie’s argument that “the defense was not suggesting
that the Holocaust is a fraud,” and said, “the Crown’s submission is that Did
Six Million Really Die? does clearly assert that, and the issue here is not what
the defense at this stage chooses to make an issue.” The Court of Appeal for
the first Zündel Trial has already held, said Pearson, that “it is open to a jury
to conclude… that this pamphlet is stating as a fact that the Holocaust is a
fraud.”
The Crown’s position on Dr. James Roth, said Pearson, is that he “said that
he had no control over the sampling, and it [is therefore] open to the jury to
conclude that Leuchter did not conduct a scientific sampling process.”
As for Thies Christophersen going to Birkenau and Auschwitz I, said Pear-
son, any mistake by Thomas “does not substantially change the assessment of
his evidence,” and “does not warrant recalling or re-instructing the jury when
it’s been made so clear to them that they are the masters of the fact.”
Right, said Thomas. Whatever time Christophersen spent at Birkenau “was
very, very slight.”
The discussion turned to Zündel’s knowledge or state of mind, and Thomas
suggested that “it’s not sufficient for him to be simply reckless or careless.
[The jurors] have to… decide that he knew that [Harwood] was false.” Not
believing that the pamphlet was true and knowing that it was false are in fact
two different things, reasoned Thomas. So, “I probably have to say to [the ju-
rors] that what’s required is actual knowledge that it was false.”
Pearson then examined Christie’s contention that he had “never referred to
freedom of expression” during the trial. Pearson submitted that Christie’s last
words to the jury included such a reference, and he quoted them: “It’s only
when jurors like yourselves have enough logic, common sense and decency to
apply the law impartially and correctly, and find the accused not guilty, that
this kind of ridiculous exercise of trying people for their opinions will end.”
“That,” said Pearson, “is a misstatement of what the charge is about. It
was, in effect, an attempt to encourage the jury to acquit.”
Judge Thomas: And to disregard the law.
Pearson’s final point concerned the issue of Zündel’s knowledge: “It’s the
Crown’s submission that you did make it clear to the jury in your instruction
that the Crown bore the onus of proving beyond a reasonable doubt actual
knowledge of the falsity of the pamphlet.”
Well, said Thomas, “I think I might have to recharge them on that, though.
It’s a vital issue in the case and I think that it wouldn’t hurt to underscore that
for them just so they’ll fully understand it.” As for willful blindness, said
Thomas, “I didn’t charge them on that because I came to the conclusion that
willful blindness didn’t apply, but I did say that the fact that [Zündel] knew
that there [existed] a critique written on the [Harwood] pamphlet was a cir-
cumstance that they could take into account together with any other evidence
on the issue to find that he knew it was false… I’d also have to tell them
Walendy had assured [Zündel] that the… criticisms of [Harwood] were not
well-founded and… Zündel needn’t worry about it, so I think that – let’s be
honest about it. [Suzman and Diamond’s Six Million Did Die] is not free from
errors. I don’t expect you to comment on it but if not plenty, there’s signifi-
cant errors in it. I mean, to have a photograph with a pile of bodies and say
they are from the gas chambers in Dachau is a misrepresentation and I don’t
say it’s fraudulent, I don’t say it’s deliberate, but it certainly is a misrepresen-
tation… I think the more you say about that subject the more difficult it can
get, so I don’t think willful blindness applies here.”
“I won’t belabor that point,” said Pearson.
The Jury Is Re-Charged by Thomas

It was now almost 4:00, and the jurors returned so that Thomas could recharge
them.
One important point he raised concerned the opinion testimony given by
Russell Barton during cross-examination, where “he indicated to you that he
believed certainly six million had died.” Now, said Thomas, “the question of
whether or not he believes it is not evidence of its truth at all. And if that im-
pression was left with you, it is a mistake on my part. [T]hat evidence… came
out at a time when he was being questioned within his professional experience
as a psychiatrist [about]… brainwashing and propaganda… and then… he in-
dicated to you… that it could be misleading to have his views placed in a
pamphlet that denied that six million died because he believed [they did]. And
it may be a subtle distinction, but… the fact that he believed six million died
is not evidence that that is true… [C]ertainly you cannot act on his evidence
that his opinion is that six million died, any more than you can act on Felder-
er’s evidence that six million didn’t die, or Burg or any other witness who was
not qualified as an expert [in that area].”
Remember too, said Thomas, that “it is your recollection of the evidence
that counts and not mine. It has been a long trial and it is certainly not human-
ly possible for me, at least, to memorize every word of evidence, even with
the transcripts available to me, so that there may be… items in the evidence
that I may have inadvertently misstated. For instance, saying that Chris-
tophersen was not inside Birkenau. I suppose what I meant by that was alt-
hough he knew where the crematoria were, he had not been close to them.”
“On the question of knowledge,” said Thomas, remember that “the Crown
has the onus to prove that the accused actually knew at the time that this pam-
phlet was published by him that it was false… Recklessness or carelessness is
not sufficient.”
The jury retired again, and Christie said that he “couldn’t understand the
reference to Dr. Barton,” and “where that came from.”
Judge Thomas: It didn’t come from you. It didn’t come from the Crown. It
came from me.
Earlier in the trial, said Thomas to Christie, “you, perhaps with good rea-
son, took umbrage with the fact that Dr. Barton was allowed to express that
opinion, and, although it’s been a long trial, Dr. Barton was probably one of
the most-impressive witnesses in this courtroom, at least from my perspec-
tive… I had intended to mention it to [the jury] at the time I discussed the
[opinion testimony of] non-experts, but I didn’t and it’s unfortunate…”
The court was recessed at 4:13, and resumed briefly at 7:20 p.m. when a
question arrived from the jury: “Does ‘public interest’ mean the effect on so-
ciety as a whole or does it mean the effect on a specific segment of the popu-
lation? We require a definition of the term ‘public interest.’”
Thomas began by asking Pearson for his comments. “The jury should be
told,” said Pearson, “that it’s the effect on the public interest generally and not
on the interest of [a] particular segment of society that the section is addressed
to.”
Christie agreed that “it is quite clear that it means society as a whole. I
think that’s what they should be told.”
The jury was brought in and Judge Thomas told them, “You would have to
find beyond a reasonable doubt that [the Harwood pamphlet] could have pro-
moted intolerance of or hatred against the Jewish people.”
The jury retired, and Thomas asked: “Any objections?”
“Yes,” said Christie, “I consider that a totally improper charge on the issue
of the public interest… Your Honor gave your own opinion on the way that
society as a whole could be affected. I don’t think you answered the question
at all.”
“Thank you,” said Thomas, and court was recessed.
At 10:45 p.m., the jury returned, and the foreman said, “Your Honor, I be-
lieve at this point the members of the jury are so tired that we really can’t
come to any conclusion.”
Very well, said Thomas. I’ve arranged for your hotel rooms and limou-
sines. You’ll be sequestered, and the matron or constable will relay any mes-
sages you need to send home. You all have your extra clothing and necessi-
ties, so we’ll see you at 10:00 tomorrow morning.
A Verdict Is Rendered
Court resumed at 4:59 p.m. on Wednesday, May 11. By now, the jury had de-
liberated for 17 hours over two days. “My information,” said Judge Thomas,
is that “the jury has a verdict.”
Suddenly the courtroom was full of reporters, conspicuous by their absence
during most of the past four months, but now displacing some of the court-
room regulars.
The jurors entered and the registrar asked the foreman to stand: “How say
you all, you find the accused at the bar, Ernst Zündel, guilty or not guilty?”
Foreman: We, the jury, find the accused guilty.
The courtroom was silent. Zündel, who was fully prepared for such a ver-
dict, scarcely blinked an eye. Many of his supporters, however, expecting an
acquittal, were quietly shocked.
“The Crown,” said Pearson, “moves for a conviction to be entered on the
finding of guilt.”
“I think I have the flu,” said Judge Thomas, “and I prefer to [pronounce the
sentence] at a later time.”
At 5:05 p.m., the jury was discharged. Minutes later, outside the court-
house, a swarm of reporters converged on an undaunted Ernst Zündel for an
impromptu press conference conducted in English and French.
“Mr. Zündel, are you surprised by the verdict?”
“Not at all. I can’t expect to overcome the 45 years of brainwashing we’ve
all received in a few weeks.”
“Was it a fair trial?”
“No. The Court of Appeal will have something to say about that. Last time,
everyone thought it was fair, but the appeal judges felt otherwise.”
“What do you think of Jews, Mr. Zündel?”
“Some I like. Some I don’t.”
“Will you keep speaking out against this myth of the Holocaust?”
“As long as I live.”
“What about publishing?”
“Certainly, but I’ll abide by whatever the legal system throws at me. I’m a
law-abiding fellow. Besides, there are other countries to go to. West Germany
is nice…”
“Do you still have faith in Canada’s judicial system?”
“Yes, in the end, I do. This was just one jury verdict, 11 ordinary Canadian
people, who, like all of us, have had thousands of hours of propaganda
pumped into their brains. It would be unrealistic to expect too much. I think
that the system works. I chose this country. You people were dropped here by
the stork.”
“Why haven’t more Canadians adopted your thinking, despite all the pub-
licity?”
“My mail shows three things. Ernst Zündel is alive and well. The Holo-
caust is ultimately going to be defeated. And it’s going to be a better world for
it. Because what’s happening now is sick. It’s a mental illness, and I’m the
doctor that’s about to cure it.”
“I’m a Clausewitzean German,” explained Zündel. “We have merely lost a
battle in an ongoing war, and no great war was won in 60 seconds flat… If
the Zionist Community is hateful enough to give me a few more chances, I’ll
inflict so much damage on their lie that we will prevail.”
The next day, Douglas Christie filed a Notice of Motion to Appeal the ver-
dict, while Alan Borovoy, a leading Canadian Jewish civil libertarian, went
before the press to say that Section 177 of the Criminal Code “should be de-
clared unconstitutional.”
On Friday the Thirteenth of May, Zündel arrived at the courthouse bearing
a mock coffin precariously on his head. Upon it was inscribed “FREE
SPEECH IS DEAD!” and “In My Opinion: the Holocaust Is a Hoax.”
Again, the reporters peppered him with questions.
“No cross this time, Ernst?” asked one.159
“No,” Zündel kidded back. “I’m going to do that one on the way out.”
“How would you feel about 300 hours of community service in a Jewish
hospital?” asked another.
“I’d be happy to do it,” smiled Zündel. “Nothing that the system throws at
Ernst Zündel fazes Ernst Zündel.”
Later, inside the courtroom, Christie had no evidence to call on sentence,
so Thomas asked Pearson what he had to say.
“Your Honor,” began the Crown attorney, “Ernst Zündel stands convicted
by a jury of his peers for using dishonesty to sow the seeds of hate… As Dr.
Barton told the jury, it was the constant repetition of lies by the Nazi Regime
which led to the tragedy which engulfed the world in the years 1939 to
1945… The verdict of the jury… is that Mr. Zündel’s crime does endanger
society as a whole.”
Pearson considered a variety of factors in recommending a sentence:
– Parliament has provided a maximum sentence of two years for Section 177
offenses.
– Maximum penalties are intended only for the worst cases of an offense,
and for the worst offenders.
– “A crime is aggravated when it is racially motivated,” according to a 1977
precedent.
159
See page 42.
– “The way in which [the crime] was perpetrated” was also deemed relevant.
“Ernst Zündel did not publish a crude, obviously anti-Semitic tract. He
willfully published a cunningly contrived piece of hate. It assumes the
mantle of truth to cover up the spreading of lies. It claims to appeal to rea-
son when in fact it panders to prejudice. It purports to deal only with histo-
ry, but the hoax and swindle it alleges is intended to generate hatred today.
Did Six Million Really Die? is dangerous in part because of the subtlety of
its message… So in the Crown’s submission, Ernst Zündel’s crime ap-
proaches the worst case of this particular offense.”
– “Ernst Zündel is a first offender,” said Pearson, but his “rehabilitation ap-
pears extremely unlikely. When he published Did Six Million Really Die?,
as he proudly proclaims at page three, he did so to challenge the law.”
– Judge Locke sentenced Zündel to 15 months. “It is a recognized principle
of our law that in most cases of a second trial the accused is entitled to
some leniency as a result of being put through the process a second time.
But in the Crown’s submission, applying that principle to Ernst Zündel
would be a mistake. Ernst Zündel welcomes an opportunity to be before
the courts. He glories in it.”
Pearson concluded that “the appropriate sentence… would be in the upper re-
formatory range.”
Christie responded by saying, “the Crown purports to give this Court a lec-
ture in history on the value of racial and social tolerance… Perhaps it should
be noted that in that very regime that the Crown alleges is the reason to justify
a heavy penalty in this case, there were numerous laws of the same kind… and
it is ironic to note that in a speech before the Reichstag, that involved the pro-
test by some of those who wanted to maintain an opposition and wanted to
maintain [freedom of speech], Adolf Hitler quoted the numerous prosecutions
of his party for the breach of those same [pre-existing] laws, and he quoted the
famous German poet Goethe, when he said, ‘Late you come but still you
come.’ He said, ‘Time after time I was forbidden to speak. Time after time my
meetings were cancelled by your laws and now you say freedom of speech is
necessary and opposition is salutary.’ Needless to say, that was the end of both
freedom of speech and freedom of opposition in Germany. So if history is to
be viewed as a lesson, that’s a good one to demonstrate that tolerance is best
achieved by the practice of tolerance… The Crown says that the actions of
the accused endanger society as a whole. There has been no evidence led by
the Crown at any point to show any danger or effect on society as a whole at
all.”
Judge Thomas: In other words, your position is that the jury’s verdict can-
not be taken any further than to say that there was a potential harm?
Christie: Well, I suppose that is what I take to be the logical interpretation
of their verdict. Not that I agree with it, but that could be the implication of it.
After seven years, said Christie, “the likelihood… has not in any way be-
come an actuality, and very obviously it could be the result of… the method
by which this communication occurred.” The pamphlet was distributed by
Zündel to leaders of Canadian opinion, hardly a demagogue’s typical audi-
ence.
As for sentencing, said Christie, “there are no precedents” under Section
177 “in the history of this country.” Only one conviction has even stood under
the section, The Queen v. Hoaglin in the early years of the century.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, said Christie, the accused did apply
for Canadian citizenship in 1966 “after having fulfilled all the requirements by
law, but was turned down without reasons: He is married and has two chil-
dren. He has been self-employed since 1960. He has employed many people
in his graphic-arts business and has many Jewish customers and friends. He
has never been a burden to Canadian society through illness or unemploy-
ment. His only other problems with the law were parking tickets. He is an art-
ist who has sold many paintings in this country. He taught himself both offi-
cial languages and is fluent in both. In all respects… he has been a productive
member of society. The Crown has failed to show any social effects at all in
seven years after the alleged publication. The charges were laid initially by
political opponents who are in court today as they have been throughout the
trial.”
Sending Zündel to jail “would be wrong for several reasons,” said Christie.
First, because the Law Reform Commission of Canada has recommended the
abolition of Section 177. Second, because a jailing will help “establish a form
of official belief or truth which may not be questioned.” Third, because the
maximum penalty for impaired driving is equivalent, and first offenders there
rarely if ever get any significant amount of jail time. Fourth, because with
such a dearth of precedents under the section, “it is unwise to assume that Par-
liament intends the severity of jail for a first offense.”
Let us assume, said Christie, that Zündel is the monster suggested in the
Crown’s submissions. Still, there are “lots of people who would be affected by
[the precedent of such] a jail term” who are ordinary, decent Canadians.
Christie submitted that if Zündel were imprisoned, and the higher courts let
it stand, “the effect would not be the dawn of a new era of tolerance and social
harmony, but the end of one, where until now, such writings have not resulted
in jail for anyone… and we have had no intolerance to be concerned about…
[I]t would be a serious responsibility to have undertaken that change in a soci-
ety that has not demonstrated any dire consequences from the mere communi-
cation of words.” Should that change for the worse occur, said Christie, histo-
ry would hold this court partly responsible.
Judge Thomas had a comment: “This [Harwood] pamphlet almost got
pushed aside… This trial became – Mr. Zündel, I mean he could have gone
home. He didn’t need to be here. This trial became a showpiece for the Insti-
tute for Historical Review and their right-wing teachings.”
“One of the things this trial [dealt] with was the issue of truth,” said Chris-
tie. “[O]ur law allows the accused the right to attempt to prove what he be-
lieves to be the truth.”
Judge Thomas: Well, as you know, he was permitted to do that.
Christie: Well, I don’t understand then, sir. I’m sorry.
My point, said Thomas, is that “the trial really became a question of at-
tempting to prove that there were no gas chambers, that there was no Hitler
order, there was no official plan… The defense focus was not on the book it-
self.”
I respectfully disagree, said Christie. “When we look at the opening para-
graph [in Harwood], it deals with the alleged plan, it deals with the six mil-
lion,” and by implication with the gas chambers as well.
Well, said Thomas, “when the court took judicial notice of the mass mur-
der and extermination of Jews in Europe during the Second World War, of
course that permitted you to question the numbers, it didn’t bar you from
questioning the official policy, or whether and how it took place.” And your
witness Irving said he had no trouble accepting the fact of a mass murder.
Christie: But then he said that 90 percent of the [Harwood] brochure was
true, and I think what, in effect, that means [is that] with your judicial-notice
ruling there need be no dispute, [and] the booklet could still be true, and we
endeavored therefore to prove so.
That suggests to me, said Thomas, “that the judicial-notice factor really
wasn’t much of a bar to the defense, was it?”
Christie: Well, I certainly think it was, but we had to live with it. It was a
major problem because of the way you ultimately interpreted the thesis of the
[Harwood] book in the end, but that’s a matter for another day, perhaps.
“That may very well be,” said Thomas. Anyhow, “I just wanted to under-
stand from you how it was that David Irving… was able to have no problem
with the judicial notice that I took and still say that the book was 90 percent
accurate.”
Christie: Well, Mr. Irving was carefully instructed that we were not al-
lowed to dispute that, as I’m sure Your Honor will understand.
Judge Thomas: Well, I’m sure that when he was in the witness box, he had
enough self-confidence – perhaps as much as I’ve ever seen of any witness –
too, so I don’t think he’d have had any problem disagreeing with one or two
matters.
Thomas asked Pearson if he had any reply.
Yes, said Pearson, “Mr. Christie and the defense have chosen to ignore the
verdict of the jury and there’s no need for me to respond to submissions that
ignore the verdict of the jury. It would be the Crown’s submission that there
also should be a probation term in addition to any term of imprisonment…
[and] there ought to be a condition of that probation that Ernst Zündel not
publish in writing or by speaking in public, by word of mouth, directly or indi-
rectly, in his name or any other name corporate or personal, any statement of
purported fact that the Holocaust is a swindle or a hoax.”
Thomas Gives His Reasons for Sentence.

After a short recess, court resumed and Judge Thomas said: “Mr. Zündel, will
you stand, please? Do you have anything to say?”
“No,” said Zündel, and Thomas asked him to be seated. He then offered his
Reasons for Sentence.
Referring to the jury’s single request for assistance, Thomas said, “An at-
tack on one segment of the community is an attack on the whole community.
If one segment is not protected from criminal defamation and libel… the
whole community is vulnerable because the next segment is fair game and
then the next segment is fair game until you have the prospect of the destruc-
tion of the entire community.”
“In essence,” said Thomas, “the verdict of the jury established beyond a
reasonable doubt that the false statement of the pamphlet published by the ac-
cused could promote intolerance of or hatred against Jews. In other words, the
accused was found by a jury of his peers to be a bigot, a person who deliber-
ately is spreading hate in the community. There are some who might suggest
that this case is a suppression of an individual’s right to hold views on a mat-
ter of history and that he has been convicted for his belief in the truth. In my
view, that is a complete misrepresentation of these proceedings. The accused
man hides behind a veil of hottest belief in the truth but the jury has exposed
him. It is not the Holocaust that is a fraud, it is Ernst Zündel who is a fraud.”
“The essential issue in this, in my view,” said Thomas, “was the know-
ledge of the accused. Did the accused know, at the time he published this
pamphlet, that it was false? Frankly, a very difficult matter to prove. The ac-
cused did not give evidence on his own behalf and of course that is his right.”
Thomas reasoned that “a person who would publish documents extolling
the beliefs of National Socialism might very well be a person who would
knowingly publish a false statement.” Further, there was Zündel’s association
with the Institute for Historical Review in California, “obviously a right-wing
organization.”
“The principles of sentencing are well known,” said Thomas. “I am re-
quired to consider a number of factors…”
Zündel’s “conduct in the courtroom was exemplary,” said Thomas. He
never “attacked the integrity of the jury,” and “certainly there have been cases
recently in this province where that has taken place.”
Judge Locke sentenced the accused to 15 months in 1985, noted Thomas,

but he has now “been through the trauma” of two long trials. “Rejected twice
by juries,” Zündel is “frankly… to be pitied.”
Before pronouncing sentence, Thomas launched into a tendentious sales
pitch for Toronto: “Persons who would spread hate in this community in order
to foster right-wing beliefs which attack the delicate balance of racial and so-
cial harmony in our community must be punished. Toronto, unlike any other
city in this country, is made up of vast numbers of ethnic groups. The great
strength of the City of Toronto is in its ethnic roots. They have brought cul-
ture, they have brought character and they have brought fiber to our communi-
ty, a city that is admired by any person who comes here from any other part of
the world… [B]ut this community has no place for persons who want to spew
hate for their own purposes. The line must be drawn…”
Many listeners were surprised to hear Thomas suggest that Toronto is the
only multiracial city in Canada. Even five years ago, more than half of all
public-school children in Vancouver, British Columbia spoke languages other
than English in their homes – overwhelmingly, a variety of Asian tongues.
Present Canadian immigration policy – coupled with the youth and urban
preference of most new immigrants – virtually guarantees that Vancouver, like
Toronto and many other Canadian cities, will be primarily nonwhite in the
not-distant future. This and other aspects of Thomas’s pitch for Toronto sug-
gested “false news” to some.
Thomas Sentences Zündel

Suddenly the judge said: “Stand up, Mr. Zündel. You will be sentenced to im-
prisonment for nine months. I don’t intend to impose any terms of probation. I
don’t intend to require you to perform any community service. I simply say to
you that it may be that you wish to be a martyr, and I was tempted to frustrate
you in that purpose that you have,160 but I am required to send a message to
any other persons like yourself that this community won’t tolerate hate mon-
gers. You’ll be sentenced to nine months with no other additional penalty.
Remove the accused.”
Handcuffs were immediately snapped onto Zündel’s wrists; he was led
from the courtroom, and court was adjourned.
Things had proceeded very slowly in Judge Thomas’s court all morning,
and it was now noon. Another two hours would pass before Justice Lloyd
160
Thomas was less than candid here. The real reason why he dared not deprive Zündel of a jail term
of at least six months is that most Canadian Jewish organizations would have been infuriated. A
term of at least that length is needed to deport Zündel to his native West Germany following 30
years of residence in Canada, and Zündel’s deportation had long been a goal of Jewish groups.
Houlden of the Ontario Appeal Court was prepared to see Christie and Pear-
son for the bail hearing. Houlden also moved very slowly, so that Friday clos-
ing time arrived and he had still not decided on his terms of release. Thus,
Zündel was removed from his cell in the courthouse and taken to Toronto’s
Don Jail for the weekend. En route to the jail, some criminals sharing the po-
lice van with Zündel called him “Nazi swine” and other names, made threats,
and threw lighted matches. They succeeded in igniting the bench on which the
handcuffed Zündel was seated. Luckily, the fire was extinguished.
On Monday, May 16, Justice Houlden decided that Zündel could be re-
leased on bail if he agreed not to write or speak about the Holocaust and relat-
ed subjects. Zündel was also forced to surrender his passport, and forbidden to
travel outside Ontario. This gag order was as sweeping as that imposed by
Judge Locke in 1985, yet the Toronto Globe and Mail and other big media, so
indignant three years earlier, kept their silence this time. If Zündel spoke on
the Holocaust, warned Houlden, he would forfeit his right to appeal and suffer
immediate arrest and jailing.
At about 4:00 p.m., a lady friend posted Zündel’s $10,500 bail, and he was
released. The reporters swarmed in again. “You know,” said Zündel, “[this]
country makes a fetish out of human rights [yet] Canadian officials are always
looking very far afield for violations… Good news, reporters: As of today,
Section 177 is active… Don’t ever make another mistake. Before you write
anything, hire a battery of lawyers and historians. You’ll be needing them…
Yes, I’ll abide by the gag order. Ernst Zündel believes in law and order, and
so do his friends.”
Christie Lists Grounds for Appeal

Christie’s appeal to the Supreme Court of Ontario (also known as the Court of
Appeal) listed 31 grounds of appeal, some of a technical nature and others
quite straightforward. Among them:
1. The Learned Trial Judge erred by taking judicial notice of a historical
fact, thus removing this from the jury who are supposed to be the Judges of
the facts, depriving the accused of full answer and defense. The judicial-notice
ruling may be interpreted from the Charge to the Jury to mean the booklet was
false and all defense evidence was to be excluded.
11. The section of the Criminal Code under which this charge is laid is in-
valid, inoperative, of no force or effect and ultra vires as a result of the provi-
sions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms pertaining to the fundamental
freedom of expression.
21. The Learned Trial Judge erred by advising the jury that it didn’t matter
that the Crown had not proven anyone had received the booklet, thus depriv-
ing the defense of their argument about likelihood of causing damage to the
public interest.
24. The Learned Trial Judge misdirected the jury on the facts.
25. The Learned Trial Judge misdirected the jury on the theory of the de-
fense.
27. The Learned Trial Judge erred in his instruction to the jury that a mo-
tive to lie constituted some evidence of knowledge of falsity.
29. The Learned Trial Judge erred by not granting a mistrial for the publi-
cation of an article by the Toronto Star commenting in its headline and in its
body about the [perfectly legitimate] failure of the accused to testify.161
30. The Judge’s arrangement of delivering his Charge to the Jury six clear
days after the defense address was closed… unduly prejudiced the defense by
removing defense submissions from the mind of the jury by the passage of
time, which when coupled with the general bias in the Charge against the de-
fense created serious prejudice and undue influence upon the jury.
31. Such further and other grounds as counsel may advise upon the reading
of the transcript.
Reception of the Verdict

How was the verdict in Toronto received?
Members of the revisionist community reacted with bewilderment and sor-
row. Some, following the lead of Professor Faurisson, regard the Harwood
pamphlet as overwhelmingly accurate; others have more reservations but (1)
did not necessarily have them in 1981 (the approximate date of Zündel’s pub-
lication), and (2) are well aware that many fellow revisionists do not share
their reservations. Both these groups, who might be designated “hard-core”
and “soft-core” revisionists, appreciate that a serious miscarriage of justice
occurred in Judge Thomas’s court, because both realize that honest differences
of opinion do exist on the issue, for which reason the jury had no way of find-
ing Zündel’s (or anyone else’s) stated beliefs to be insincere.
Douglas Christie, John Pearson, and Judge Ron Thomas all repeatedly told
the jurors that if a “reasonable doubt” existed that Zündel “knew Harwood
was false,” they were required by law to acquit. This being the case, it may be
understood that the distress over Zündel’s conviction extended far beyond the
ranks of committed Holocaust revisionists and was shared by the self-
proclaimed “Holocaust agnostics” and “fence-straddlers.” Uncertain of their
own convictions on the issue, and eager to turn to the Leuchter Report and
161
One of five or six Motions for Mistrial made by Christie during the proceedings.
other sources for further guidance, these halfhearted ones are well aware that
at least a “reasonable doubt” existed as to Zündel’s “state of mind.”
Beyond the “Holocaust agnostics” comes a third distressed group: those
who believe in the gas chambers and the six million themselves yet have re-
spected friends or relatives who do not. And beyond this comes a fourth group
– all those thoughtful individuals who wonder how anyone can presume to tell
anyone else that they really don’t believe something which they insist they do
believe.
While all of these groups were at a loss to understand how the jurors could
be satisfied about the accused’s “certain knowledge of falsity,” the revisionists
had the additional burden of comprehending the jury’s seemingly total rejec-
tion of Leuchter, Lagacé, and the rest of the defense witnesses. On June 25,
one of these “rejected” witnesses, Mark Weber, spoke to a large gathering in
Virginia, and offered several possible explanations. “We can only speculate,”
he emphasized, but “a few things seem clear.”
First, “the jury was almost certainly influenced by the prosecution effort to
wrap Zündel in a swastika flag, as it were, and to depict him as a terrible Nazi,
which is surely the most-awful thing anyone can be called these days.”
Second, by taking judicial notice of the Holocaust at the beginning of the
trial, Judge Thomas may have convinced some jurors that a conviction was the
only “reasonable” course open to them.
Third, said Weber, “I am afraid that much of the impact of the defense evi-
dence was lost on the jury because it was too detailed and complex for these
quite-ordinary citizens to really understand.” Related to this was the fact that
Christie and the defense witnesses had to somehow “overcome the effect of
years of one-sided propaganda on the jury.”
A fourth powerful factor, which Weber did not mention, was the slanted
nature of the Charge to the Jury, which, while emphasizing that the existence
of a “reasonable doubt” must lead to acquittal, left no doubt as to Judge
Thomas’s sympathy with the Crown’s position on the evidence.
The response to Zündel’s conviction of Canada’s organized Jewish com-
munity was greatly subdued in comparison with three years earlier. In 1985,
many Jews accused the nation’s media of handing a bullhorn to a pernicious
crackpot for almost two months. In 1988, when relatively few Canadians ever
got to hear about the sworn testimony of Ivan Lagacé, Fred Leuchter, David
Irving, and other defense witnesses, these same Jewish spokespersons ap-
peared reasonably content.
Sabina Citron, who brought the “false-news” charge against Zündel late in
1983, declared, “It was a long trial and [Zündel] didn’t use it to defend him-
self. He used it to attack Jewish people.”
Manuel Prutschi, a spokesman for the Canadian Jewish Congress, called
Zündel “an impresario of Holocaust denial,” and said revisionism has “a direct
effect on the victimized community. It bleeds internally on a daily basis… It is

not a victimless crime.”
Sol Littman, the Canadian representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
who, like Prutschi, was often present at the trial, wrote a letter to the Toronto
Star which contained “false news.” It had been, he asserted, “the same covey
of Zündel witnesses” this time as last.
The Canadian Jewish News headlined its editorial of May 19 “Deport
Zündel.” A week later, reporter Paul Lungen of the same paper, who had been
reasonably objective in his coverage of the trial, let his real feelings hang out.
“I have just returned from several months in a twilight zone of reality,” his ar-
ticle began.
“Zündel supporters,” wrote Lungen, “mocked the suffering of Holocaust
survivors while fervently believing the incredibly arrogant and twisted denial
of one of the most well-documented events in history… [I]t still boggles the
mind that these lunatic ideas have a constituency… The sheer numbing
weight of the repeated denials of the Holocaust… took their toll on court ob-
servers, myself included. As a Jew, one felt under constant assault, mired in
the Nazis’ hateful slime, the subject of so much animosity and lies.”
Lungen quoted Sister Marge Boyle, an activist with Toronto Christian-
Jewish Dialogue who attended the trial regularly: “Seeing what the testimony
did to these people was one of the more-terrible things I’ve experienced. The
pain they were going through was terrible.”
The most-provocative part of Lungen’s article was the allegation that “cru-
el and insensitive remarks were directed at the Jews” who attended, including
“the best Jew is a dead Jew” and “You Jews will burn again.” In fairness to
Lungen, he probably lifted these alleged comments from an article in the To-
ronto Star by Paul Bilodeau, dated May 12, which claimed that “Zündel sup-
porters muttered: ‘The best Jew… You Jews… ’” etc. Where Bilodeau ob-
tained his information is another matter. In the July/August issue of Insight,
Heinz Koppe insisted that no such remarks were made: “I know, because I
was there!”
One indication of the abysmally low level of public discussion which fol-
lowed the under-reported trial was a letter printed in the Toronto Star on May
21:
“I would like to say for the record that I (along with many others) am not
willing to pay for Ernst Zündel’s legal fees for idiotic and apparently unre-
searched views.
It seems Zündel and his handful of warped supporters are long overdue for a
Grade 9 history lesson where the Holocaust is studied in depth. If 14-year-old
children can accept the truth, why can’t Zündel?
My deepest sympathy to Jews and Holocaust survivors the world over.
TIM HEALEY
Tillsonburg”
Zündel has estimated that the 1988 trial cost him and his supporters approxi-
mately $350,000 (Canadian), and that the 1989 appeal will cost another
$150,000 (Canadian). The Leuchter investigation alone, of which poor Tim
Healey never heard, cost about $60,000 (Canadian). Not one cent of Zündel’s
legal fees and other expenses came out of Healey’s or any other taxpayer’s
pocket.
One cost borne by the defense was the required purchase of 185 expensive-
ly-bound volumes of trial transcript – that is, five complete sets of the 37-
volume collection. One set is for Douglas Christie, another for the designated
Crown attorney at the appeal, and the other three for the judges who will serve
on the appellate court panel. In the likely event that the case proceeds to the
Supreme Court of Canada, every document must be supplied in 21 copies – all
to be paid for by the defendant and his overwhelmingly non-affluent support-
ers.
As the spring of 1988 turned to summer, Zündel’s legal team remained ex-
tremely active. Represented by attorneys Douglas Christie and Barbara Ku-
laszka, Zündel appeared before Ontario Chief Justice William Howland, pan-
els of Ontario Supreme Court judges, and a variety of other legal bodies. The
main goal was to lift the gag order and travel ban imposed on Zündel by Jus-
tice Lloyd Houlden. Partial success was attained in July, when Zündel got his
passport back, along with permission to travel outside Ontario, provided that
he submit in advance a detailed itinerary to Ontario’s attorney general.
Zündel was thus able, in September, to make a speaking tour in western
Europe, during which he gave interviews to reporters and news editors from
West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the three Benelux
countries. Large and enthusiastic crowds were the rule, even as Zündel abided
strictly by the terms of his gag order. The only incident occurred in the Austri-
an town of Bregenz, located on Lake Constance (the Bodensee) near the point
where Germany, Austria, and Switzerland meet. There, more than a dozen
uniformed policemen with guns displayed raided the hotel meeting hall where
Zündel was in mid-speech, and a Dr. Marentz led him away for interrogation.
Meanwhile, the identities of all those present were registered, and the Austri-
ans among them were later visited by the political police. After spending sev-
eral hours at the local Security Police Headquarters, Zündel was returned to
the hotel under guard, to be met by a large, intensely emotional crowd of
sympathizers. Dr. Marentz and his men seemed embarrassed by the tears and
hugging, and explained that “orders are orders.” Zündel was expelled into
Switzerland.
Canadian Civil Liberties, Update

The months following the second Zündel Trial were filled with important
news pertaining to Canada’s endangered freedoms.
– On June 6, after 14 months of deliberation, the three-judge Alberta Court
of Appeal overturned the 1985 conviction of anti-Zionist history teacher
James Keegstra under Section 281.2 of the Criminal Code, the recently-
enacted “hate law.” The decision, written by Justice R.P. Kerans, stated:
“Parliament has created the crime of promotion of hatred against members
of the named groups. That law goes on to require a jury to convict an ac-
cused despite the fact that the jury thinks that what was said might be true.
The law also requires a jury to convict even though they are convinced that
not one person in all Canada actually came to hate any member of any
group as a result of what an accused said, or indeed that there was any like-
lihood of that. The law thus fails to respect adequately the constitutional
right of all Canadians to be convicted only when the crime is established
beyond a reasonable doubt. It also fails adequately to respect free speech.
For these two reasons, it has no force and effect… The only protection of-
fered by the law… is that we should place our trust in prosecutorial discre-
tion and this is an inappropriate and inadequate protection of a Charter
right.”
The reaction to this verdict was immediate and fierce. The Edmonton Sun
of June 8 ran a cartoon ridiculing the Alberta Court of Appeal as a jackass.
Jewish groups demanded that Alberta’s attorney general appeal the deci-
sion to the Supreme Court of Canada. Then, at 4 a.m. on July 18, Keeg-
stra’s home was set on fire, and he, his wife and relatives narrowly escaped
with their lives. No arrests had been made by the end of the year. The case
has now gone before the Supreme Court, even though Alberta’s attorney
general initially declined to appeal. (After four attorneys general from oth-
er provinces appealed, he changed his mind.)162
– On June 15, the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission launched an
investigation of Malcolm Ross, a teacher in Moncton, and his employer,
the Moncton School Board, for alleged discrimination. Ross, like Keegstra,
is a conservative Christian, and has written several anti-Zionist books. Yet
he has never conveyed any suggestion of his religious or political beliefs to
students or fellow teachers. On March 15, 1988, the Moncton School
Board gagged Ross by threatening him with dismissal should he ever again
dare to communicate his views to anyone privately outside of school. This
162
On February 28, 1996, Canada’s Supreme Court declared the law constitutional; cf. Toronto Star,
February 29, 1996.
was not enough to satisfy the provincial “Human Rights Commission,”

which began its investigation of the Moncton School Board.
As some of New Brunswick’s highest officials publicly denounced Ross as
“evil” and “wicked,” he was powerless to defend himself with so much as
a letter to the editor. At one hearing on December 1, 1988, eight lawyers
slugged it out at the public’s expense. This hornet’s nest was stirred up
some years ago by Dr. Julius Israeli, an immigrant from Romania, with
subsequent help from Lee Cohen, president of the Atlantic Jewish Council;
the late Bernie Vigod, a history professor who was active in the Atlantic
Region of B’nai B’rith; and others.
One member of a board which sits in judgment of Ross was heard to say
that she would be happy to see Ross’s wife and children “out on the street.”
Given the Keegstra house fire, a new, familial style of assault on dissenting
Canadians may be in the offing.
– On May 19, the Law Reform Commission of Canada released a report, Re-
codifying Criminal Law, which recommended that the nation’s existing
laws against “false news” and “hate” be replaced with an expanded “hate”
law which would be part of a new section called Crimes against the Social
Order. The report stated that only “socially important identifiable groups”
like Jews, blacks, and East Indians would be covered. The Toronto Star’s
account of the proposal (May 20) emphasized that “less-homogeneous and
less-vulnerable groups such as… white Anglo-Saxon Protestants” would
not be protected in any way.
On June 29, Douglas Christie met with a Department of Justice official
who warned him that the Law Reform Commission may go further, and
recommend that one or more of the defenses built into the present “hate”
law be dropped. Section 281.2(3) of the existing Criminal Code reads: “No
person shall be convicted of an offense under Subsection (2) (a) if he estab-
lishes that the statements communicated were true; (b) if, in good faith, he
expressed or attempted to establish by argument an opinion upon a reli-
gious subject; (c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public
interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on rea-
sonable grounds he believed them to be true; or (d) if, in good faith, he in-
tended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tend-
ing to produce feelings of hatred towards an identifiable group in Canada.”
– A minority of Canadians, aghast at the erosion of their freedoms, con-
demned the Zündel Conviction and related court cases. One such was col-
umnist Don McGillivray of Southam News, who suggested that all “hate”
laws are an unjust “projection” of libel laws from the individual to the
group level. “[T]rying to guarantee rights to groups,” he wrote, “can leave
individuals exposed to tyranny.”
Another friend of Canadian freedom was Architect Brian J. Rogers, who

wrote in The Gazette (Montreal, Aug. 10):
“The idea that the public interest supersedes private interests and rights
can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals
take precedence over the interests and rights of others…
Individuals are free, in a fundamental sense, not to purchase books or to
listen to speeches. They must also be free to read, listen, analyze, evaluate
what is being said – and only then accept or reject the writer’s or speaker’s
contentions…
How (to use some of the phrases bandied about in the media concerning
the Zündel case) do ‘mindless allegations, false statements, racist ideas,
preposterous lies, etc.’ spread ‘with impunity’ in a free society composed
of reasonably informed persons?
The answer, of course, is that they do not, unless such a society is al-
ready politically, culturally and intellectually corrupt. Censorship is the le-
galized version of book-burning by the mobs, and is one of the keys to
power for authoritarian governments…
Fool or not, Zündel has the right to his opinions. The Canadian public
has the right, too, to read what he has to say. They will judge accordingly.”
A most-encouraging development in Canadian society during the past several
years has been the “liberation” of the civil-liberties movement from the politi-
cal left-wing.
As Ernst Zündel, James Keegstra, Malcolm Ross and other Canadians bat-
tled to retain their freedom and honor, most of the nation’s traditional civil-
liberties establishment stood idly by. One result has been a proliferation of
grassroots organizations like the Canadian Free Speech League (CFSL), with
which many citizens feel more-comfortable.
Other News Pertaining to the Case

Other news stories of 1988 had a bearing on the continuing saga of Ernst Zün-
del. To mention a few:
– On July 29, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and the Main
Archival Administration of the Soviet Union signed an agreement in Mos-
cow which, for the first time, opens Soviet archives on the Holocaust to
American scholars. Americans will now be allowed to make microfilm and
microfiche copies of documents scattered in dozens of Soviet archives.
Two of the many important questions to be answered are whether the offi-
cial “death books” of Auschwitz will be released, and whether revisionist

scholars will be welcomed.163
– On October 5, the reformist weekly periodical Moscow News reported the
discovery of about 102,000 bodies which were buried in mass graves near
the Soviet city of Minsk during the years 1937 to 1939. Each of the 510
Minsk graves was found to contain 200 bodies, the victims of the NKVD,
the forerunner of the KGB. Soviet archeologist Zenon Poznyak reported
that similar “butcheries” had occurred at that time in most large cities in
the area, and that other mass graves are coming to light. This extraordinari-
ly important story was picked up by the Agence France-Presse but ignored,
at least initially, by nearly all North-American newspapers. As these Com-
munist mass graves of the western Soviet Union become better known, ad-
ditional questions will undoubtedly be raised about many alleged Nazi kill-
ing sites.
– On November 1, a headline in the New York Times read: “Four Films at
Once on Holocaust Offer a Dialogue.” Critic Caryn James noted that “Four
films about the Holocaust opened in New York almost at once recently…
All four of those films were artistically fresh and sophisticated; all received
extravagant critical praise.” American writer Joseph Sobran once cracked
that America’s most-influential newspaper should be renamed Holocaust
Update, and his words seem truer each year.
– At the same time, Holocaust revisionism continued to win adherents and
influence. On September 14, for perhaps the first time, a national television
audience in the United States heard important revisionist points being
made. The program was the popular “Crossfire” on the CNN cable televi-
sion network, where Croatian-American activist Jerome A. Brentar (a de-
fense witness at the first Zündel trial) and conservative pundit Pat Buchan-
an together made a number of telling “soft-core” revisionist points against
their opponents. A month earlier, in Canada, Doug Collins became the first
well-known columnist in North America to adopt a revisionist stance on
the Holocaust. Writing in Vancouver’s North Shore News on August 7, Col-
lins said, “It will be to the eternal disgrace of the major media in this coun-
try that the second Zündel trial was virtually blacked out as a result of
pressure from Jewish groups. They couldn’t have been much more craven
163
In January 1989, the government of Turkey announced a plan to open its archives pertaining to the
alleged mass murder of Armenians beginning in the spring of 1915. “We will accept whatever re-
ality emerges from the Ottoman archives,” said Prime Minister Turgut Ozal. Other Turkish offi-
cials emphasized the counter-killings of Turks by Armenians, while Armenians overseas ques-
tioned whether the Turks would really release the most-damaging material.
(In the 1990s, some revisionists actually succeeded in gaining access to some formerly Soviet ar-
chives, but since the late 1990s, the Russian government has again made access to its archives
more difficult. Editor’s note.)
if they had been living in a dictatorship. But now some fascinating stuff is
surfacing, most of it from obscure publications. The issue is whether the
so-called Holocaust took place. In other words, whether the Hitler regime
deliberately set out to kill all the Jews it could get its hands on, and that
6,000,000 died as a result. More and more, I am coming to the conclusion
that it didn’t… There are simply too many questions, and they won’t go
away.” The North Vancouver City Council censored Collins for the column
without bothering to look at the Leuchter Report, its main subject. This
abuse from on high did not dissuade more than 1,000 fervent Collins sup-
porters from jamming a Vancouver school auditorium on October 18 to
cheer his Reform Party nomination for Parliament. Sadly, Party Leader
Preston Manning later refused to sign Collins’s nomination papers because
of the “perception” (of others) that he might be a “racialist.”
– No date can be assigned to the following news story. Throughout the latter
part of 1988, the Leuchter Report lived up to its promise of underground-
best-seller status.164 Although Samisdat Publishers Ltd. is forbidden, under
Zündel’s judicial gag order, to publish or distribute the report, it holds the
copyright and may thereby authorize publication by others. By the end of
1988, the Leuchter Report had been published in four languages (English,
French, German, and Portuguese) with translations in progress in six more
(Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Russian, and Arabic). Seven thousand
copies had been distributed by the Australian Civil Liberties Association to
leaders of that nation. From Central Europe, Udo Walendy reported that the
first German-language edition had quickly sold out and become the subject
of debate in many periodicals. In the United States and Canada, various pi-
rated editions sprang to life, depriving Samisdat and Zündel of badly need-
ed defense funds.
As the eventful year of 1988 waned, a sprinkling of dates appeared on Ernst
Zündel’s calendar for 1989. At a hearing in November, Assistant Chief Justice
Charles L. Dubin of the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the Zündel defense
team had until July 1989 to file its Appellant’s Factum, the document which
states the facts of the case and the grounds for appeal. The appeal itself was
scheduled for September 18th through 20th, 1989.
What makes the Zündel Case an exceptional one in Canadian and North-
American history is its major impact on two distinct fields: the law and the
study of Twentieth-Century history. The full extent of this dual influence is
not yet recognized by many observers. As the 1990s dawn, however, it may be
stated with some degree of assurance that either:
164
In France, it was also sold more openly at kiosks and in bookstores.
1. The minority assault on majority civil liberties in Canada and the United
States will expand, in which case the Zündel Trials will be remembered as
the first important battleground; or
2. The assault will be called off, in which case the tenacity shown by men like
Zündel, Christie, and Faurisson will in time be widely saluted.
Likewise, it may be said that either:
1. The Leuchter Report and other revisionist evidence presented at the Zündel
trials will contribute significantly to a much-wider acceptance of at least
some facets of Holocaust revisionism; or
2. Such mass acceptance will not occur, and yet an important element of the
population, in Canada and elsewhere, will embrace it, with unforeseeable
political and cultural ramifications in an age of Holocaust-centrism – but
also of desktop publishing and video production.165
The case of Ernst Zündel has not reached its final stage. His Jewish oppo-
nents, of various political orientations and composed of representatives of Zi-
onist and other organizations, have publicly pronounced a curse against Zün-
del, which basically means that they will persecute him wherever he appears.
(See Canadian Jewish News, September 9, 1993.) Since surprise is one of
Ernst Zündel’s characteristics, it is anyone’s guess what he has up his sleeves
next. Come what may, he has already made his mark and has extended his
fame far beyond the borders of Canada.
165
A third case has actually occurred: due to the escalating persecution of political and historical dis-
sidents, triggered by their initial successes and continued by their increasingly convincing re-
search work, the establishment has succeeded in driving revisionism underground in most West-
ern countries. Editor’s note.
Chapter 11: Epilogue
T
he appeal to the Second Zündel Trial was duly held from September
18th to 20th, 1989, after the Ontario Court of Appeal had allowed it to
happen.
The mood in the courtroom was tense. Zündel’s legal team, consisting of
Douglas Christie, Keltie Zubko and Barbara Kulaszka, had again done a great
job, and mountains of appeal books, factums, which dealt with the disputed
points, were in front of the judges, prosecutors and the defense.
All the expenses incurred had to be paid by Zündel, which in turn required
tens of thousands of dollars.
The judges’ belligerent, biting irony as they questioned defense lawyer
Christie foreboded bad things for Zündel about the three judges’ impending
decision.
And so it came to pass!
The judges waited almost a year for their decision. As Zündel had gloomily
suspected, the decision was negative, meaning that the appeal was rejected as
unfounded on most points. The nine-months’ prison sentence was upheld, and
Zündel was still a convicted criminal who was only temporarily allowed to
remain free on bail.
Zündel’s only option now was to appeal to Canada’s highest court, the Su-
preme Court in Ottawa, Canada’s capital. He undertook this laborious and
again very costly and expensive path. To give just a few examples: All docu-
ments, factums, appeal books, books of authorities (precedents bound in
books) had to be submitted to the court in 21 copies of each document by a
certain date, printed only on one side, with prescribed colors and special bind-
ing method – often hundreds of pages.
The “Zionist lobby,” the powerful Jewish interest groups such as the B’nai
B’rith Lodge or the Canadian Jewish Congress, etc., now spoke out. All of
them wanted to appear in Ottawa as joint plaintiffs against Zündel.
This in turn meant new expenses for Zündel, because every Zionist appli-
cation had to be countered by Zündel’s lawyer through personal appearance
before the Supreme Court. Christie, however, lives nearly 5,000 kilometers
away, on the other side of the country on the Pacific Coast in Victoria, British
Columbia. The flights back and forth alone, with hotel expenses, cost nearly
$5,000 per appearance each time. In addition, there were further lawyer costs,
because certain formalities can only be carried out by lawyers who reside in
Ottawa and are admitted to appear before the Supreme Court in order to initi-
ate and prepare the proceedings and file them with the court.
It is obvious that such prestigious lawyers, who normally represent only
powerful, financially strong companies, governments or lobbies, are not exact-
ly cheap and are not squeamish in issuing bills, so that Zündel had to scrape
together the money, dollar by dollar, in a true Sisyphean work of continuous
appeals for support, begging letters, videos and tapes, as well as tiring lecture
tours.
Mysterious deaths in his circle, the disappearance without trace of long-
time comrades and close associates, as well as serious unexpected difficulties,
such as his arrest during the Leuchter Congress in Munich in 1991 and his
immediate sentencing without due process to over DM 30,000 in fines,
seemed to temporarily shake Zündel.
However, Zündel was surprisingly quickly released after a week in Stadel-
heim Prison near Munich, and he immediately appealed against the summary
punishment, which had been issued by an anonymous judge whom neither
Zündel nor his lawyer had ever faced.
The hearing in the second instance against the shocking, anonymous sum-
mary punishment of March 1991 took place in Munich on November 5, 1991
and dragged on for six weeks, creating a scheduling conflict with Zündel’s
appearance before the Supreme Court in Canada on December 10, 1991 in Ot-
tawa.
Zündel therefore had to fly back to Canada for the hearing shortly before
Christmas – without having received a verdict in the still pending proceedings
in Munich – on a very expensive, regularly scheduled flight, and return to
Germany just a few days later – again during the pre-Christmas high season –
for his renewed conviction, as it turned out.
The German judge Melder, at the insistence of the prosecution, refused to
admit or hear even a single Zündel witness. Zündel had, again at his own ex-
pense, flown in expert witnesses from America such as the American execu-
tion-gas-chamber expert Fred Leuchter. Zündel had also summoned as a Ger-
man expert witness the graduate chemist Germar Rudolf from the Max Planck
Institute in Stuttgart by the rarely used route of a court officer to Munich,
again at his own expense.
Despite Rudolf’s German-university education and his expert knowledge,
as well as his own studies in Auschwitz and the analyses of masonry samples,
which he, like Leuchter, had taken out on site,166 this witness was also rejected
by Judge Melder.
Even the French document expert Prof. Dr. Robert Faurisson, who among
other things was to testify on the subject of the diary of Anne Frank – on
which he had written several studies, books and papers, even having inter-
viewed Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, several times – was rejected as an
expert witness by the German judge.
The German media, which were present, reported only very sparsely on
these outrageous events in the Munich courtroom.
The foreign media, who were present in abundance at the beginning, were
stunned by what they experienced as German judicial proceedings in the
courtroom in Munich:
The judge quickly made sure that the press and television crews from all
over the world soon left expensive Munich by dragging out the court proceed-
ings by scheduling only one day of hearings each week. Television networks
could not have three- to four-man crews twiddling their thumbs for six weeks
in Munich without being able to report any news.
One of Zündel’s lawyers, Jürgen Rieger from Hamburg, therefore had to
take an expensive scheduled flight, including taxis to and from the airports,
every time for just one day of the trial, at a cost of DM 1,000 per day in flight
costs, taxis, etc. alone.
Thus, Ernst Zündel became acquainted with the justice system of the coun-
try of his birth, for whose honor and future he had so valiantly fought for dec-
ades in faraway Canada. In the end, he was sentenced to a fine of DM 10,000!
With lawyer’s fees, rental cars and railroad tickets, almost six weeks stay in
Europe, as well as his own expensive flights back and forth, the Munich pro-
ceedings cost Zündel another DM 50,000.
Zündel nevertheless immediately filed a new appeal to the next higher
court in Bavaria.
How differently and nobly Canada, where Zündel has lived since 1958,
treated its “guest worker” and immigrant Zündel in comparison to the authori-
ties and courts of his homeland: The judges and clerks of Canada’s Supreme
Court were dignified and courteous, and no partiality whatsoever was evident
against Zündel; on the contrary, the mostly Jewish lawyers of various provin-
cial governments as well as various provincial justice ministers were put
through the wringer by several of the judges in a kind of cross-examination in
the Zündel Case.
166
Current edition: G. Rudolf, The Chemistry of Auschwitz: The Technology and Toxicology of
Zyklon B and the Gas Chambers – A Crime-Scene Investigation, 4th ed., Castle Hill Publishers,
Uckfield, 2020; editor’s remark.
Poison and bile as well as bitter acrimony could only be heard from the
Jewish side and the lawyers of Jewish lobby groups, which certainly did not
go unnoticed by the high judges.
The seven judges of Canada’s highest court considered the Zündel Case
from December 10, 1991 to August 27, 1992.
The Zündel case was a “political issue” from the very beginning and re-
mained so, a fact that was repeatedly mentioned by many commentators.
Zündel was on trial because of his political and historical world view, be-
cause his opponents did not like the fact that in his lectures, circular letters and
radio and TV appearances, he defended his homeland, his people and especial-
ly the Reich government under National-Socialist leadership; that he repeated-
ly mentioned and emphasized the complicity of Jewish circles in the tragedy
of the Jews and the Germans, as well as the other peoples and nations affected
by the Second World War.
Zündel dared to do the outrageous: he publicly accused Jewish organiza-
tions and individual Jewish leaders, Communists, Zionists and terrorists of
complicity, and he explained certain political activities and decisions of the
Third Reich, thus presenting them as logical and normal in the context of the
time, and he refused to denounce them as diabolical or criminal.
This stance of Zündel became increasingly popular with North-Americans
over time, as Zündel was often a welcome guest on many popular talk shows
in Canada and the U.S. In the year before his trial, Zündel appeared on nearly
150 radio shows with well over 300 million listeners. Judge Locke’s muzzling
of Zündel after his first conviction in 1985 put an abrupt end to this educa-
tional work for years.
Against this background and the “Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” a kind
of constitution issued by the Canadian government in the 1980s, as well as the
tradition of freedom of speech, which has been one of the foundations of An-
glo-Saxon life for almost a millennium beginning with the “Magna Carta,”
Canada’s highest judges now had to make a Solomonic decision.
Like all the world’s institutions, courts do not function in a vacuum, out-
side the Zeitgeist of politics, the media and lobbies. While abortion was a seri-
ous crime in most countries a generation ago, and women and doctors who
performed it were severely punished, the pressure of the “mass media” and the
masses themselves forced this crime, the murder of the unborn, to be seen as a
non-crime, not just as a fashionable crime like drug use. The highest Canadian
judges faced a quasi-united Zeitgeist front in the Zündel Case. “Political cor-
rectness,” the intellectual conformity of the overwhelming majority, demand-
ed a conviction and the resulting deportation of Zündel from Canada.
To those familiar with Canadian political realities, where the well-
organized Zionist lobby plays a disproportionately large role in political life,
while there is no political lobby of Canadian Germans at all, Zündel’s pro-
spects for success seemed to be zero.
Zündel’s fate seemed sealed when the Canadian federal government sought
a final conviction before Canada’s highest court, as demanded by the Canadi-
an Attorney General and the Attorney General of the Province of Manitoba,
together with B’nai B’rith and the umbrella organization of the most important
Jewish organizations, the Canadian Jewish Congress, which was represented
almost exclusively by Jewish lawyers.
Only the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, of which Zündel had been a
member for many years and which was also represented by Jewish lawyers,
took his side and presented the point of view not only that Section 181, under
which Zündel was accused (formerly carrying the number 177), violated the
Canadian constitution, precisely the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which
accorded Zündel, as he himself had claimed for over a decade, the constitu-
tionally protected right to freedom of speech, but also that his views and his
appearance enjoyed the protective shield of Anglo-Saxon-Canadian tradition
and legal opinion!
He argued this point of view vociferously and with the utmost conviction,
even “against his own lawyers” who had often called him “naive” in his atti-
tude. Zündel insisted on his point of view until the end; but as a “realist,”
which he was at the end, he prepared himself for a nine-month prison stay
with subsequent deportation to Germany.
The Zündel team was prepared for all eventualities. The morning of Au-
gust 27, 1992 dawned as Zündel radioed out his last press releases to the
world and signed off from his worldwide circle of friends for “about 9 months
maybe.”
By 10 a.m., the “team room” was crowded with friends, associates, com-
rades, advisors and members of the media. Zündel himself was waiting by his
fax machine for word from his lawyers in Ottawa – or for a knock on the door
from police officers who would come to take him to jail.
A whistle signaled the arrival of a fax; it came from Ottawa, winding out of
the machine like a never-ending snake. On the seventh page, at last, were the
seven liberating sentences that brought victory after nine years of nerve-
wracking legal battle. A 4 to 3 majority of the judges declared Section 181 un-
constitutional and set it aside with their judgement in the case of “Regina,
Queen Elizabeth of England against Ernst Zündel”.
Ernst Zündel was thus a free man, who for nine years had only sought his
constitutionally guaranteed rights, as Canadian law grants to every Canadian.
But the judges also defined in their judgment the civil rights to which a cit-
izen is legally entitled to under the “Charter of Rights,” especially Section
2(b). It was this precise, never-before articulated definition of these basic
rights on the subject of freedom of speech that represented the true victory, an
almost total victory of Ernst Zündel over his opponents. Here are these all-
important definitions as articulated by the four Supreme Court Justices on Au-
gust 27, 1992:
Justices La Forest, L’Heureux-Dubé, Sopinka and Mc Lachlin rule that

Section 181 of the Criminal Code of Canada limits the guarantee of freedom
of expression, that is, freedom of speech.
Section 2(b) of the Charter (of Rights and Freedoms), the Canadian Consti-
tution, protects the rights of a minority to express its point of view, no matter
how unpopular it may be. All communications that express or attempt to ex-
press something are protected by Section 2(b) unless the physical form in
which the communication is made (e.g., a violent act) precludes this protec-
tion. The content of the communication is “irrelevant” (i.e., immaterial). The
reason for this guarantee is to allow free expression of opinion with the aim of
promoting truth (seeking), political and social participation and self-
fulfillment. The judges use the English verb “to promote” here. This purpose
extends to protecting the beliefs of minorities, which the majority labels or
perceives as not right or wrong. Section 181, which subjects a person to crim-
inal prosecution with a potential prison sentence for words he has published,
has the undoubted effect of restricting freedom of expression, and therefore
limits Section 2(b). Surely even the layperson can understand what this means
to Canadians in a multi-ethnic state. The implications of this wise judicial de-
cision were to become clear for the Zionist lobby and also for Ernst Zündel in
the following weeks after the judges’ decision.
The judgement caused a real avalanche of the worst anti-Zündel agitation
in the media, because now Zündel’s victory in his legal fight had granted the
Jewish lobby, a minority in Canada, in return the constitutionally guaranteed
right to represent their albeit wrong point of view protected by law, and they
now made abundant use of it. Zündel defended himself valiantly against these
new outpourings of hatred, and once again invited the Jewish leadership to
discuss all susceptible topics openly, honestly and without prejudice under the
neutral chairmanship of well-known public figures or high-ranking govern-
ment or police officials at a round table, in order to clarify misunderstandings
and to achieve a modus vivendi, a peaceful, unbiased coexistence. The answer
came on Monday, August 31, 1992, at ten o’clock in the morning, at the main
police station – Station 51, of the Toronto Police.
Leaders of Canadian Jewry met with senior police officers of the Toronto
Police Department, including the ranking police officer under whom the 51st
Division was subordinate, Staff Inspector Shillingten and Detective Pat Mac
Vicar. Their task would be to put Ernst Zündel through his paces again with
their unit, the so-called “Hate Unit,” in a joint investigation by several police
agencies of the local, provincial and federal police, even though he had just
been acquitted by the highest court. The Jewish leaders had officially filed a
new charge, this time under Section 319(2). This section had been added at the
end of the 1960s due to pressure from precisely those Jewish organizations
that were now filing charges against Zündel.
In their detailed, written complaint, the Zionists let the cat out of the bag,
so to speak, since the complaint reflected all their worries and fears. It became
clear that even then the censorship of dissidents was the main purpose of this
“hate law,” which was now to be used against the most-popular and well-
known opponent, Ernst Zündel. The press was now again full of inflammatory
articles from the pens of the scribblers known and often feared throughout the
country.
Zündel was not allowed to enjoy his amazing victory, let alone use it for
his educational work. He knew from articles in the press, especially from Jew-
ish newspapers such as the house organ of the B’nai B’rith Lodge, The Cove-
nant, and the Canadian Jewish News, that scouts, eavesdroppers, observers –
semi-official and official – would weigh every spoken or written word again
in order to arrive at a new indictment. The media boycotted Zündel for fear of
displeasing the Jewish lobby! Zündel brooded and pondered, and whoever vis-
ited Zündel in these months found a calm, philosophic Ernst Zündel, who
seemed to be working on some new initiatives.
The Bonn government of Chancelor Helmut Kohl broke this artificial si-
lence with a typical West-German government call on February 23, 1993, is-
sued by Deputy Interior Minister Eduard Lintner, who was responsible for se-
curity issues. In it, the Canadian government was implored to do everything in
its power to stop the flow of Zündel’s newsletters, writings, books and videos
from Canada.
It was all to no avail!
The Supreme Court ruling of August 27, 1992 withstood all pressure from
the Jewish lobbies and even from the Bonn government.
On March 5, 1993, Detective Staff Sargeant R. E. Matthews, the superior
of Detective Pat Mac Vicar, sent a letter to the National Director of the um-
brella organization of Jewish Federations in Canada, Bernie Farber, announc-
ing and justifying the result of his investigation of Zündel by his special police
unit.
Ernst Zündel, the victim of the Jewish denunciation and the target of this
intense renewed police investigation, received no such letter; only Detective
Mac Vicar visited him and verbally conveyed her boss’s decision not to
charge him this time. The police would not confirm Zündel’s innocence by
letter.
A journalist from state television sympathetic to Zündel gave him a copy
of the “Police Letter to the Jews.” Zündel was now once again the center of a
media frenzy because the Zionist lobby again felt snubbed, this time by the
police and provincial judicial authorities. The unspoken suspicion resonated
subliminally in Jewish commentaries that there must be many more, often dis-
guised anti-Semites in high places in Canada, because otherwise Zündel
would surely have been put out of business long ago. In Jewish circles, refer-
ence was made again and again to the Federal Republic of Germany, which
knew much better how to deal with people like Zündel.
Zündel again put out feelers for a dialogue. He again invited the Jewish
leadership to a round table, this time under even more favorable conditions,
but his peace feelers were again brusquely rejected. The Canadian Jewish
News ran a major article on page 4 on March 18, 1993, with the headline:167
“Groups hopeful Zündel will still be charged.”
In it, Ron Csillag described how Jewish leaders had been “outraged and dis-
mayed” that Zündel would not be indicted. Zündel waited patiently for an-
swers to his “peace feelers.” Not a single one came! The invitation to hold a
joint press conference was also declined through a police official as “middle
man”. The Canadian press largely concealed Zündel’s initiatives, allowing on-
ly Jewish or West-German diplomats, ministers or spokesmen to speak.
Zündel therefore decided, as he so often did, to flee forward in order to
break the encirclement by media and politicos. Made possible by a small in-
heritance, Zündel bought airtime on U.S. radio stations and on American tele-
vision satellites to make his point of view known to the world, as sanctioned
by the Supreme Court: democratically, non-violently and within the frame-
work of Canadian law. The Zionist lobby was furious about this “chutzpah,”
this impudence of Zündel to tell the world his point of view about the Holo-
caust. They were in a panic and upheaval, because now on Zündel’s radio and
television shows famous Zündel witnesses and revisionists like David Irving,
Prof. Dr. Robert Faurisson, David Cole and many others could announce their
theses uncensored!
Entire news segments focused on the Zündel programs, which quickly
gained a wide audience! In Germany, however, the rage against Zündel and
his fellow historical revisionists continued. Men of integrity – historians,
teachers, writers, politicians and ordinary citizens – were subjected to a wave
of house searches, book confiscations, bans, trials, occupational bans, and be-
ing sentenced to heavy fines and imprisonment as never before seen since the
end of the war. From 84-year-old men to young skinheads, everything went
before the courts and into the prisons just for contradicting Bonn’s life-lie: the
cradle from which sprang this regime of occupation. No Canadian law pro-
tects the Germans. Zündel can bring relief to his homeland only by continuing
to influence his homeland through his radio programs, his satellite broadcasts,
and his books, writings and newsletters from his base in much freer Canada,
as the law in Canada allows him to do.
167
https://newspapers.lib.sfu.ca/cjn2-2296/page-4
Meanwhile, Bonn wants to continue tightening the intellectual thumb-

screws with a new law that would give Zündel five years in prison for his
work on the Holocaust.168
In the meantime, a number of international bodies in Strasbourg and Gene-
va are addressing the untenable and undemocratic situation in Germany. How
these initiatives will be handled and reviewed in Geneva, Strasbourg and
Bonn has not yet been determined.169
Zündel, however, is confident as usual. He sees himself as one of the spir-
itual liberators of his homeland from the slander of the eternally suspicion and
accusation of the crime of genocide against the Jews. Zündel builds on the
success of his radio and television programs, which are broadcast worldwide.
He hopes thereby for a spiritual and political self-liberation supported from
the outside but coming from the inside in Germany.
In this endeavor, Ernst Zündel cooperates with the most diverse ethnic
groups and freedom movements around the globe!
To help Germany – his homeland – is foremost for him, but to create a free
world is his aim!
168
This law – an amendment to Section 130 of the German Criminal Code – came into force at the
end of 1994 and was tightened again in 2005. Editor’s note.
169
The European Court of Justice in Strasbourg, after initially voicing criticism of criminal laws of
various European countries against dissenting views of history, eventually fell in line and has ap-
proved of any and all of these laws. Editor’s note.
Illustration 1: Cyanide content of masonry samples taken by Fred A. Leuchter in

1988 at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in the crematoria indicated. The Control
Sample was taken from the delousing chamber of Building 5a, which had been used
during the war for delousing prisoners’ clothing and had thus been exposed to very
large amounts of Zyklon B.
Index of Names
Individuals only. Page numbers of entries in footnotes as italics.

—A— Broszat, Martin: 88, 94, 113, Countess, Robert: 9, 11
Adam, Uwe Dietrich: 272 150, 222, 224, 225, 265, Coward, Charles: 181
Amiel, Barbara: 42 272, 310, 313 Cross, Colin: 30, 65-70, 73,
Arcand, Adrien: 31 Browning, Christopher: 37, 74, 81, 87, 104, 127, 128,
Armontrout, Bill: 273-275, 65, 154, 156, 221, 232-235, 130, 131, 134, 184, 211,
278, 354 261, 267, 272, 287, 295, 213, 230, 231, 238, 346,
Ascione, Marc: 227 345-349, 357, 362, 363, 357, 363
Assous, Jacob: 252 367, 370, see also Chapter Cunliffe, William: 111
3
—B— Buber, Margarete: 238 —D—
Bach-Zelewski, Erich von Buchanan, Patrick: 393 Dawidowicz, Lucy: 93
dem: 362 Buechner, Howard A.: 69, Decaux, Alain: 260
Baeck, Leo: 191 148 Delmer, Sefton: 211, 216
Baer, Richard: 105, 234, 235 Bullock, Allan: 314 Demjanjuk, John: 104, 247
Ball, John C.: 184-186 Burg, Joseph G.: 181, 189- Dering, Wladislaw: 242, 243
Barbie, Klaus: 223, 259 193, 352, 357, 365, 376 DeWan, George: 230
Barnes, Harry Elmer: 239, Burgdorfer, Prof.: 77 Diamond, Denis: 213-216,
240 Burns, John F.: 30, 50 218, 219, 236, 238-247,
Barton, Russell: 38, 65, 132- Butler, Rupert: 156 250, 271, 340, 354, 362,
139, 348, 351, 357, 363, Butterfield, Herbert: 136 365, 371, 376
366, 367, 372, 376, 377, Butz, Arthur: 19, 33, 102, 240 Dibelius, Wilhelm: 78, 353,
379 361
Bauer, Yehuda: 230 —C— Diwald, Hellmut: 153, 154
Becher, Kurt: 246, 269 Caesar, Joachim: 125, 126, Downing, John: 49
Begin, Menahem: 152 128 Dubin, Charles L.: 394
Benda, Julien: 261 Callahan, William J.: 186, Dvorkin, Jeffrey: 40
Ben-Gurion, David: 191 187
Berg, Friedrich P.: 279 Carlyle, Thomas: 198 —E—
Bestic, Alan: 36 Carr, E.H.: 101, 109 Ehrenburg, Ilya: 190
Biedermann, Charles: 65-74, Castro, Fidel: 52 Eichmann, Adolf: 81, 82, 85,
165, 231, 346, 347, 367 Chomsky, Noam: 254 104, 176, 215-217, 234,
Billiet, Jacques: 229 Christie, Douglas: passim 241, 243, 245, 262, 267,
Bilodeau, Paul: 388 Christophersen, Thies: 32, 38, 269, 271, 272, 315, 318,
Blaha, Franz: 233 66, 124-132, 141, 183, 350, 322, 326, 334, 361, 369
Blobel, Paul: 151 352, 357, 365, 370, 374, Ellis, Burton P.: 63
Bormann, Martin: 322 375, 377 Ellul, Jacques: 25, 26
Borovoy, Alan: 379 Chumatski, Yuri: 53 Elwyn-Jones, Lord R: 240
Botting, Gary: 33, 38, 65, Churchill, Winston: 131, 268, Engel, General: 313
192-199, 352, 357, 359, 308, 310, 316, 322, 336,
360, 367, 368 337, 366 —F—
Boüard, Michel de: 249, 250, Citron, Sabina: 23, 33, 34, 44, Fabre, Rene: 59, 223
260 387 Fajnzylberg, Szmul: 253
Bower, Tom: 151 Clarke, Bernard: 156 Fann, Kuang: 65, 139, 140,
Boyle, Marge: 388 Cohn, Werner: 49 142, 344, 351, 357, 367,
Brandt, Willy: 253 Collins, Doug: 49, 52, 393 368
Brentar, Jerome A.: 393 Copfermann, Emile: 36 Faurisson, Robert: 12, 13, 22,
Cotler, Irwin: 50 26, 34, 36-38, 44, 50, 58,
Countess, Elda: 9 65, 68, 74, 109, 182, 220,
273, 277, 354, 358, 361, Harwood, Richard E.: 23, 24, 345, 347, 350, 351, 356,
365-370, 372, 374, 386, 36, 39, 44, 52-54, 57, 60, 362, 363, 365, 370, 380,
395, see also Chapter 7 63-67, 74-82, 86-89, 91, 94, 382, 394
Felderer, Ditiieb: 38, 112- 96, 100, 102-104, 106, 108, Hoffman, Michael A.: 32, 33,
124, 141, 192, 276, 287, 112, 119, 127, 129, 130, 34, 38
348, 350, 357, 365, 368, 132, 137-142, 151-167, Horthy, Miklos: 77, 153, 329,
376 169, 170, 172-174, 179, 331, 332
Feuchtwanger, Leon: 152 183, 184, 186, 189, 190, Höss, Rudolf: 19, 58, 61, 82,
Fleming, Gerald: 337 192-199, 204-207, 210, 97, 125, 155, 156, 175, 231,
Francq, Henri G.: 42 212-215, 217-219, 225-227, 237, 241, 246, 247, 265-
Frank, Anne: 159, 160, 194, 229, 235, 238-240, 250, 267, 334, 354
195, 225, 229, 316, 362 269-271, 287, 310, 315, Höttl, Wilhelm: 245
Frank, Hans: 78, 79, 88-90, 323, 329, 332, 333, 338- Houlden, Lloyd: 385, 389
94, 95, 98, 99, 109, 184, 340, 343-363, 365, 366, Hoven, Waldemar: 161
231, 265, 266, 310, 311, 368-377, 381, 382, 386 Howland, William: 389
315, 323, 347, 348 Hausner, Gideon: 270 Hughes, Glyn: 132, 133
Frank, Otto: 160, 225, 226 Heath, James E.: 168, 169, Hull, Cordell: 105
Freitag, Helmut: 234 171 Hunt, Douglas: 44
Frick, Wilhelm: 246 Heim, Heinrich: 316 Huntford, Roland: 124
Friedman, Arnold: 35 Hess, Rudolf: 158
Fulop, Ignatz: 35 Hewitt, H.: 109 —I—
Heydrich, Reinhard: 57, 63, Irving, David: 8, 12, 13, 22,
—G— 82, 85, 88, 150, 152, 172, 26, 65, 93, 145, 176, 221,
Galileo: 39 262, 263, 267, 272, 310, 226, 268, 345, 350, 352,
Gerstein, Kurt: 19, 37, 58, 64, 311, 313, 317, 320, 323, 355, 357, 363, 364, 367,
78, 100, 102, 106, 154, 251, 324, 326, 351 369, 370, 373, 374, 382,
252, 259, 345, 353, 361 Hilberg, Raul: 34, 36, 37, 83, 387, see also Chapter 9
Gilbert, Martin: 244, 265 85-92, 94, 100, 102, 108, Isaacs, Stephen D.: 164
Globocnik, Odilo: 327 109, 117, 148, 149, 155,
Goebbels, Joseph: 77, 94, 99, 169, 173, 176, 201, 222, —J—
100, 109, 154, 190, 336, 229, 230, 235, 237, 246, Jackson, Robert H.: 62, 311,
363 250, 262-264, 266-272, 315
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 279, 280, 283-287, 288, Jodl, Alfred: 56, 335
von: 380 296, 299, 301, 303, 318, John, Robert: 230
Goldmann, Nahum: 249 324, 338, 345, 346, 348, Jouanneau, Bernard: 253
Gollancz, Victor: 28 350, 353, 357, 361, 362, Just, Willy: 42, 84, 123, 186,
Göring, Hermann: 57, 94, 367, 370, 374, see also 190, 196, 201, 203, 208,
190, 262, 263, 265, 272, Chapter 2 215, 216, 286, 296, 323,
313, 314, 317, 323, 336, Himmler, Heinrich: 37, 79, 339
351 88, 106, 109, 155, 156, 158,
Graf, Jürgen: 13 161, 169, 175, 226, 246, —K—
Graham, Beth: 48 261, 268-270, 310, 311, Kaltenbrunner, Ernst: 245,
Griffiths, Peter: 35, 36, 41, 313, 320-333, 335, 336, 269, 321, 333
42, 54, 55, 64, 65 338, 339, 347, 351, 362, Karnoouh, Claude: 252
Guderian, Heinz: 315 370 Kauffmann, Kurt: 245, 246
Guillaume, Pierre: 223, 251, Hitler, Adolf: 21, 22, 28, 31, Kautsky, Benedikt: 129, 191
254, 258, 259 37, 42, 44, 52, 56, 57, 62, Keegstra, James: 34, 42, 390-
Günsche, Otto: 333 63, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83, 84, 392
Guttenplan, Don D.: 12 86, 88, 89, 91-94, 98, 109, Keitel, Wilhelm: 336
119, 131, 136, 141, 150, Kerans, R.P.: 390
—H— 152, 153, 163, 165, 169, Kissinger, Henry: 52
Haines, Helga: 94 170, 191, 192, 194, 210- Klarsfeld, Serge: 68, 96
Harris, Arthur: 334 212, 225, 226, 229, 239, Kneuper, Bernard: 147, 148,
254, 266-269, 308-339, 357
Koch, Karl: 158, 161 —M— —P—

Koehl, Matt: 131 Macaulay, Thomas: 198 Paget, R.T.: 103, 104, 109,
Kohl, Helmut: 207, 208 MacKenzie, Colin: 41 110, 173, 348, 349
Kohn, Melvin: 164 MacQueen, Ken: 47, 48, 49 Pannenbecker, Otto: 246
Koppe, Heinz: 388 Mahler, Horst: 17 Paul, Marcel: 262
Korherr, Richard: 215, 328 Makin, Kirk: 40, 41, 48 Peabody, Steve: 34
Krakowski, Shmuel: 162 Manning, Preston: 394 Pearson, John: passim
Kramer, Josef: 59, 240 Manstein, Erich von: 103, Pfefferkorn, Johann: 27
Kremer, Johann Paul: 251 110, 173, 174 Pierce, William L.: 177, 179
Kubovy, Aryeh Leon: 323 Marentz, Dr.: 389 Pierre-Bloch, Jean: 252, 255,
Kulaszka, Barbara: 12, 18, 20, Marrus, Michael R.: 186, 187 257, 258
277, 389, 397 Maschmann, Melita: 29 Pinter, Stephen E: 108
Mattogno, Carlo: 13, 251 Piper, Franciszek: 113-115,
—L— Maurer, Victor: 68 121, 122
Lachout, Emil: 158, 160, 217- McCarthy, Joseph: 239 Pohl, Oswald: 157, 159, 174,
220, 354 McGillivray, Don: 391 180, 181, 314, 327, 333,
Lagacé, Ivan: 22, 26, 65, 199- McLean, Scott: 297, 304 352, 362
203, 288, 348, 353, 354, Meiklejohn, Dr.: 134 Pol Pot: 41
367, 369, 387 Meinerzhagen, Ulrich: 17 Poliakov, Leon: 54, 229, 251,
Lammers, Hans: 312, 319, Mencius: 138 252, 255, 272
329, 336 Mengele, Josef: 40, 127 Powell, Judge: 211
Langbein, Hermann: 234, 268 Milch, Erhard: 314 Poznyak, Zenon: 393
Laqueur, Waiter: 244 Miller, Barbara: 111 Prutschi, Manuel: 387, 388
Lawrence, William: 83 Miller, Howard: 288, 293
Le Pen, Jean-Marie: 259-261, Mohler, Armin: 7, 8 —R—
271 Morgen, Konrad: 158, 161, Raab, Julius: 249
Leader, Henry: 35 174, 175, 181, 244, 321- Rajzman, Samuel: 159
Lemkin, Rafael: 78, 154, 165, 333, 352, 363 Rassinier, Paul: 55, 58, 151,
166, 170, 352, 360, 361 Moses, Siegfried: 191 163-167, 170, 222, 239,
Lengyel, Olga: 64, 202 Müller, Filip: 19, 61, 82, 85, 261, 262, 352, 362, 363
Lenski, Robert: 17 104, 107, 108, 234, 247, Rauff, Walter: 208, 209, 215,
Leuchter, Fred A.: 7, 8, 12, 253, 349 216
19, 22, 24-26, 38, 48, 59, Müller, Heinrich: 328 Reder, Rudolf: 19, 82, 85,
65, 266, 287, 288, 307, 309, Müller, Major: 218, 219 106, 349
310, 316, 317, 339, 348, Musmanno, Michael: 159 Reitlinger, Gerald: 54, 80, 81,
354, 355, 364, 367, 368, 100, 151, 162, 362
370, 373-375, 386, 387, —N— Renard, Jean-Paul: 163
389, 394, 395, see also Neumann, Juergen: 33, 142, Reuchlin, Johann: 27, 28
Chapter 8 143, 288 Ribbentrop, Joachim von: 94,
Levin, Meyer: 362 Nielson, Ernest: 186, 187 329
Levy, Harold: 50 Nobull, John: 308 Rieger, Jürgen: 233
Liebehenschel, Arthur: 125 Nolte, Ernst: 244 Rimland, Ingrid: 9, 15, 16
Lincoln, Abraham: 179 Nosske, Gustav: 151 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: 131,
Lindsey, William L: 38, 277, Nyiszli, Miklos: 19 239, 240, 337
279 Roosevelt, Theodore: 179
Lippmann, Waiter: 344 —O— Roques, Henri: 259
Lipstadt, Deborah E.: 12 Ohlendorf, Otto: 109, 148, Rosenberg, Eliyahu: 247
Littman, Sol: 142, 388 149, 151, 157, 168, 169, Rosenfeld, A.H.: 63
Locke, Hugh: 37, 40-45, 113, 171-174, 245, 246, 314, Ross, Malcolm: 390, 391, 392
380, 384, 385 351, 361 Roth, James: 38, 65, 297,
Lozowick, Yaacovnyah: 245 Orwell, George: 46, 141, 195 303-306, 350, 355, 364,
Luby, John: 53, 54 Ouellet, Andre: 33 367, 375
Lungen, Paul: 388 Owen, John: 49 Rubinstein, W.D.: 164
Luther, Martin: 62, 63, 150 Ozal, Turgut: 393
Rudolf, Germar: 8, 12, 13, 19, 250, 271, 340, 354, 362, Walendy, Udo: 38, 65, 204-
399 365, 371, 376 219, 235, 236, 340, 353,
Rudolph, Tiudar: 183, 184, Szymanski, Tadeusz: 113, 354, 365, 367, 368, 371,
288, 352, 357 116 376, 394
Wallenberg, Raoul: 40
—S— —T— Walsh, William: 245
Sadowyj, Sylvia: 111 Tesch, Bruno: 242, 279 Walter, Bernhard: 105, 208,
Sanning, Walter: 19 Thion, Serge: 248 215, 216, 244, 344
Sassen, Willem S.: 81, 82 Thomas, Ron: passim Weber, Mark: 65, 151, 167,
Schroeder, Hans: 204, 353 Thompson, H. Keith: 60 351, 361, 362, 367, 387,
Schultz, Benjamin: 214 Tillion, Germaine: 231 see also Chapter 5
Schwok, Rene: 244 Timerman, Jacobo: 164 Weil, Simone: 261
Scott, Ian: 24, 45, 274, 297, Timson, Ray: 49, 50 Weizmann, Chaim: 337
304 Tito, Josip Broz: 93 Wennerstrum, Charles F.: 60,
Sereny, Gitta: 243 Toland, John: 244 63, 64
Servatius, Robert: 82, 234, Tomaszewski, Chester: 35 Wetzler, Alfred: 35, 332
243, 369, 374 Tottle, Douglas: 53 Widmann, Albert: 84
Shawcross, Hartley: 240 Trevor-Roper, Hugh: 309, Wiesel, Elie: 25, 62, 138, 144,
Shefman, Alan: 49 312, 316, 318, 335, 336, 145, 151, 152, 178, 247
Sher, Julian: 41 338 Wieworka, Annette: 270
Shirer, William: 151, 165 Trudeau, Pierre: 52 Wilson, Kenneth Roy: 65,
Smith, Bradley R.: 42, 143- Tse-tung, Mao: 52 186, 275-277, 354, 367
145 Wirth, Christian: 333
Smolack, Helen: 45 —U— Wise, Stephen: 149, 152
Sobran, Joseph: 393 Uris, Leon: 242, 243 Wisliceny, Dieter: 80, 246,
Sola, River: 116, 125 Urstein, Dennis: 35 326, 362
Speer, Albert: 158, 186, 244 Wolff, Karl: 325, 327
Stäglich, Wilhelm: 19, 182, —V— Wolffsohn, Michael: 178
234, 235 van Herwaarden, Maria: 182, Wormser-Migot, Olga: 162,
Stahlecker, Franz: 80 183, 251, 352, 357 225
Stalin, Josef: 52, 99, 131, 356 van Roden, Edward L.: 60, Worthington, Peter: 42
Stern, Fritz: 101 345 Wyman, David S.: 244
Stevens, Geoffrey: 49 Veale, F.J.P.: 157, 158
Stolz, Sylvia: 17 Verrall, Richard: 23, 166, 173 —Z—
Stone, Harlan Fiske: 59 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre: 240, Zajdel, Ida: 227
Streckenbach, Bruno: 169 261 Ziereis, Franz: 58
Streicher, Julius: 62, 157 Vigod, Bernie: 391 Zubko, Keltie: 34, 397
Stroop, Jürgen: 55, 56, 264 Vrba, Rudolf: 35, 36, 39, 96, Zündel, Ernst: passim
Stuckart, Wilhelm: 217 97, 107, 245, 332, 349 Zündel, Hans: 31
Suzman, Arthur: 213-216, Zündel, Janick: 31
218, 219, 236, 238-247, —W— Zündel, Pierre: 31
Waldheim, Kurt: 69
Free Samples at www.HolocaustHandbooks.com
HOLOCAUST HANDBOOKS
T
his ambitious, growing series addresses various aspects of the “Holocaust” of the
WWII era. Most of them are based on decades of research from archives all over the
world. They are heavily referenced. In contrast to most other works on this issue,
the tomes of this series approach its topic with profound academic scrutiny and a critical
attitude. Any Holocaust researcher ignoring this series will remain oblivious to some of
the most important research in the field. These books are designed to both convince the
common reader as well as academics. The following books have appeared so far, or are
about to be released. Compare hardcopy and eBook prices at www.findbookprices.com.
SECTION ONE:
General Overviews of the Holocaust
The First Holocaust. The Surprising Origin of
the Six-Million Figure. By Don Heddesheimer.
This compact but substantive study documents
propaganda spread prior to,
during and after the FIRST
World War that claimed East Pictured above are all of the scientific studies that comprise the
European Jewry was on the series Holocaust Handbooks published thus far or are about to
brink of annihilation. The be released. More volumes and new editions are constantly in
the works. Check www.HolocaustHandbooks.com for updates.
magic number of suffering
and dying Jews was 6 million refutes the orthodox “Holocaust” narrative. It
back then as well. The book reveals that the Germans were desperate to re-
details how these Jewish fund- duce the death rate in their labor camps, which
raising operations in America was caused by catastrophic
raised vast sums in the name typhus epidemics. Dr. Koller-
of feeding suffering Polish and strom, a science historian,
Russian Jews but actually fun- has taken these intercepts
neled much of the money to Zionist and Com- and a wide array of mostly
munist groups. 5th ed., 200 pages, b&w illustra- unchallenged corroborating
tions, bibliography, index. (#6) evidence to show that “wit-
ness statements” support-
Lectures on the Holocaust. Controversial Is-
ing the human gas chamber
sues Cross Examined. By Germar Rudolf.
narrative clearly clash with
This book first explains why “the Holocaust” is the available scientific data.
an important topic, and that it is essential to Kollerstrom concludes that
keep an open mind about it. It then tells how the history of the Nazi “Holocaust” has been
many mainstream scholars written by the victors with ulterior motives. It is
expressed doubts and sub- distorted, exaggerated and largely wrong. With
sequently fell from grace. a foreword by Prof. Dr. James Fetzer. 5th ed.,
Next, the physical traces 282 pages, b&w ill., bibl., index. (#31)
and documents about the
various claimed crime Debating the Holocaust. A New Look at Both
scenes and murder weapons Sides. By Thomas Dalton. Mainstream histo-
are discussed. After that, rians insist that there cannot be, may not be,
the reliability of witness tes- any debate about the Holocaust. But ignoring it
timony is examined. Finally, does not make this controversy go away. Tradi-
the author argues for a free tional scholars admit that there was neither a
exchange of ideas on this topic. This book gives budget, a plan, nor an order for the Holocaust;
the most-comprehensive and up-to-date over- that the key camps have all but vanished, and
so have any human remains; that material and
view of the critical research into the Holocaust.
unequivocal documentary evi-
With its dialogue style, it is easy to read, and
dence is absent; and that there
it can even be used as an encyclopedic compen-
are serious problems with
dium. 3rd ed., 596 pages, b&w illustrations, bib-
survivor testimonies. Dalton
liography, index.(#15) juxtaposes the traditional
Breaking the Spell. The Holocaust, Myth & Holocaust narrative with re-
Reality. By Nicholas Kollerstrom. In 1941, visionist challenges and then
British Intelligence analysts cracked the Ger- analyzes the mainstream’s
man “Enigma” code. Hence, in 1942 and 1943, responses to them. He reveals
encrypted radio communications between Ger- the weaknesses of both sides,
man concentration camps and the Berlin head- while declaring revisionism
quarters were decrypted. The intercepted data the winner of the current state
ISSN 1529-7748 ∙ All books are 6”×9” unless otherwise stated. Artwork for paperback editions; plain hardcover editions available.
HOLOCAUST HANDBOOKS • Free Samples at www.HolocaustHandbooks.com
of the debate. 4th ed., 342 pages, b&w updates; 224 pages, b&w illustrations,
illustrations, biblio graphy, index. bibliography (#29).
(#32) Air-Photo Evidence: World-War-Two
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Photos of Alleged Mass-Murder Sites
The Case against the Presumed Ex- Analyzed. By Germar Rudolf (editor).
termination of European Jewry. By During World War Two both German
Arthur R. Butz. The first writer to and Allied reconnaissance aircraft
analyze the entire Holocaust complex took countless air photos of places of
in a precise scientific manner. This tactical and strategic interest in Eu-
book exhibits the overwhelming force rope. These photos are prime evidence
of arguments accumulated by the mid- for the investigation of the Holocaust.
1970s. Butz’s two main arguments Air photos of locations like Auschwitz,
are: 1. All major entities hostile to Majdanek, Treblinka, Babi Yar etc.
Germany must have known what was permit an insight into what did or did
happening to the Jews under German not happen there. The author has un-
authority. They acted during the war earthed many pertinent photos and
as if no mass slaughter was occurring. has thoroughly analyzed them. This
2. All the evidence adduced to prove book is full of air-photo reproductions
any mass slaughter has a dual inter- and schematic drawings explaining
pretation, while only the innocuous them. According to the author, these
one can be proven to be correct. This images refute many of the atrocity
book continues to be a major histori- claims made by witnesses in connec-
cal reference work, frequently cited by tion with events in the German sphere
prominent personalities. This edition of influence. 6th edition; with a contri-
has numerous supplements with new bution by Carlo Mattogno. 167 pages,
information gathered over the last 35 8.5”×11”, b&w illustrations, biblio
years. 4th ed., 524 pages, b&w illus- graphy, index (#27).
trations, bibliography, index. (#7)
The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edi-
Dissecting the Holocaust. The Grow- tion. By Fred Leuchter, Robert Fauris-
ing Critique of ‘Truth’ and ‘Memory.’ son and Germar Rudolf. Between 1988
Edited by Germar Rudolf. Dissecting and 1991, U.S. expert on execution
the Holocaust applies state-of-the- technologies Fred Leuchter wrote four
art scientific techniques and classic
reports on whether the Third Reich
methods of detection to investigate
operated homicidal gas chambers. The
the alleged murder of millions of Jews
first on Auschwitz and Majdanek be-
by Germans during World War II. In
22 contributions—each of some 30 came world-famous. Based on various
pages—the 17 authors dissect gener- arguments, Leuchter concluded that
ally accepted paradigms of the “Holo- the locations investigated could never
caust.” It reads as excitingly as a crime have been “utilized or seriously con-
novel: so many lies, forgeries and de- sidered to function as execution gas
ceptions by politicians, historians and chambers.” The second report deals
scientists are proven. This is the intel- with gas-chamber claims for the camps
lectual adventure of the 21st Century. Dachau, Mauthausen and Hartheim,
Be part of it! 3rd ed., 635 pages, b&w while the third reviews design criteria
illustrations, bibliography, index. (#1) and operation procedures of execution
gas chambers in the U.S. The fourth
The Dissolution of Eastern European report reviews Pressac’s 1989 tome
Jewry. By Walter N. Sanning. Six Mil- about Auschwitz. 4th ed., 252 pages,
lion Jews died in the Holocaust. San- b&w illustrations. (#16)
ning did not take that number at face
value, but thoroughly explored Euro- Bungled: “The Destruction of the Eu-
pean population developments and ropean Jews”. Raul Hilberg’s Failure
shifts mainly caused by emigration as to Prove National-Socialist “Killing
well as deportations and evacuations Centers.” By Carlo Mattogno. Raul
conducted by both Nazis and the So- Hilberg’s magnum opus The Destruc-
viets, among other things. The book tion of the European Jews is an ortho-
is based mainly on Jewish, Zionist dox standard work on the Holocaust.
and mainstream sources. It concludes But how does Hilberg support his
that a sizeable share of the Jews found thesis that Jews were murdered en
missing during local censuses after masse? He rips documents out of their
the Second World War, which were context, distorts their content, misin-
so far counted as “Holocaust victims,” terprets their meaning, and ignores
had either emigrated (mainly to Israel entire archives. He only refers to “use-
or the U.S.) or had been deported by ful” witnesses, quotes fragments out
Stalin to Siberian labor camps. 2nd of context, and conceals the fact that
ed., foreword by A.R. Butz, epilogue by his witnesses are lying through their
Germar Rudolf containing important teeth. Lies and deceits permeate Hil-
berg’s book, 302 pages, bibliography, camp. 3rd ed., 384 pages, b&w illus-
index. (#3) trations, bibliography, index. (#8)
Jewish Emigration from the Third Belzec: Propaganda, Testimonies, Ar-
Reich. By Ingrid Weckert. Current cheological Research and History. By
historical writings about the Third Carlo Mattogno. Witnesses report that
Reich claim state it was difficult for between 600,000 and 3 million Jews
Jews to flee from Nazi persecution. were murdered in the Belzec Camp,
The truth is that Jewish emigration located in Poland. Various murder
was welcomed by the German authori- weapons are claimed to have been used:
ties. Emigration was not some kind of Diesel-exhaust gas; unslaked lime in
wild flight, but rather a lawfully de- trains; high voltage; vacuum cham-
termined and regulated matter. Weck- bers; etc. The corpses were incinerated
ert’s booklet elucidates the emigration on huge pyres without leaving a trace.
process in law and policy. She shows For those who know the stories about
that German and Jewish authorities Treblinka this sounds familiar. Thus
worked closely together. Jews inter- the author has restricted this study to
ested in emigrating received detailed the aspects which are new compared
advice and offers of help from both to Treblinka. In contrast to Treblin-
sides. 2nd ed., 130 pages, index. (#12)
ka, forensic drillings and excavations
Inside the Gas Chambers: The Exter- were performed at Belzec, the results
mination of Mainstream Holocaust of which are critically reviewed. 142
Historiography. By Carlo Mattogno. pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography,
Neither increased media propaganda index. (#9)
or political pressure nor judicial per-
secution can stifle revisionism. Hence, Sobibor: Holocaust Propaganda and
in early 2011, the Holocaust Ortho- Reality. By Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues
doxy published a 400-page book (in and Carlo Mattogno. Between 25,000
German) claiming to refute “revision- and 2 million Jews are said to have
ist propaganda,” trying again to prove been killed in gas chambers in the
“once and for all” that there were hom- Sobibór camp in Poland. The corpses
icidal gas chambers at the camps of were allegedly buried in mass graves
Dachau, Natzweiler, Sachsenhausen, and later incinerated on pyres. This
Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Neuen- book investigates these claims and
gamme, Stutthof… you name them. shows that they are based on the se-
Mattogno shows with his detailed lective use of contradictory eyewitness
analysis of this work of propaganda testimony. Archeological surveys of
that mainstream Holocaust hagiogra- the camp are analyzed that started in
phy is beating around the bush rather 2000-2001 and carried on until 2018.
than addressing revisionist research The book also documents the general
results. He exposes their myths, dis- National-Socialist policy toward Jews,
tortions and lies. 2nd ed., 280 pages, which never included a genocidal “fi-
b&w illustrations, bibliography, index. nal solution.” 2nd ed., 456 pages, b&w
(#25) illustrations, bibliography, index. (#19)
The “Operation Reinhardt” Camps
SECTION TWO: Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec. By Carlo
Specific non-Auschwitz Studies Mattogno. As an update and upgrade
to the Volumes 8, 9 and 19 of this se-
Treblinka: Extermination Camp or
ries, this study has its first focus on
Transit Camp? By Carlo Mattogno and
Jürgen Graf. It is alleged that at Treb- witness testimonies recorded during
linka in East Poland between 700,000 the World War II and the immediate
and 3,000,000 persons were murdered post-war era, many of them discussed
in 1942 and 1943. The weapons used here for the first time, thus demon-
were said to have been stationary and/ strating how the myth of the “exter-
or mobile gas chambers, fast-acting or mination camps” was created. The
slow-acting poison gas, unslaked lime, second part of this book brings us up
superheated steam, electricity, Diesel- to speed with the various archeologi-
exhaust fumes etc. Holocaust historical efforts made by mainstream schol-
ans alleged that bodies were piled as ars in their attempt to prove that the
high as multi-storied buildings and myth based on testimonies is true.
burned without a trace, using little The third part compares the findings
or no fuel at all. Graf and Mattogno of the second part with what we ought
have now analyzed the origins, logic to expect, and reveals the chasm that
and technical feasibility of the official exists between archeologically proven
version of Treblinka. On the basis of facts and mythological requirements.
numerous documents they reveal Tre- 402 pages, illustrations, bibliography,
blinka’s true identity as a mere transit index. (#28)
Chelmno: A Camp in History & Propa- dition, material traces of the claimed
ganda. By Carlo Mattogno. At Chelm- massacres are rare due to an attitude
no, huge masses of Jewish prisoners of collusion by governments and Jew-
are said to have been gassed in “gas ish lobby groups. 2nd ed.., 2 vols., 864
vans” or shot (claims vary from 10,000 pp., b&w illu strations, bibliography,
to 1.3 million victims). This study cov- index. (#39)
ers the subject from every angle, un- Concentration Camp Majdanek. A
dermining the orthodox claims about Historical and Technical Study. By
the camp with an overwhelmingly ef- Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf. At
fective body of evidence. Eyewitness war’s end, the Soviets claimed that up
statements, gas wagons as extermina- to two million Jews were murdered
tion weapons, forensics reports and at the Majdanek Camp in seven gas
excavations, German documents—all chambers. Over the decades, how-
come under Mattogno’s scrutiny. Here ever, the Majdanek Museum reduced
are the uncensored facts about Chelm- the death toll three times to currently
no, not the propaganda. 2nd ed., 188 78,000, and admitted that there were
pages, indexed, illustrated, bibliogra- “only” two gas chambers. By exhaus-
phy. (#23) tively researching primary sources,
The Gas Vans: A Critical Investiga- the authors expertly dissect and repu-
tion. By Santiago Alvarez and Pierre diate the myth of homicidal gas cham-
Marais. It is alleged that the Nazis bers at that camp. They also critically
used mobile gas chambers to extermi- investigated the legend of mass ex-
nate 700,000 people. Up until 2011, no ecutions of Jews in tank trenches and
thorough monograph had appeared on prove it groundless. Again they have
the topic. Santiago Alvarez has rem- produced a standard work of methodi-
edied the situation. Are witness state- cal investigation which authentic his-
ments believable? Are documents gen- toriography cannot ignore. 3rd ed.,
uine? Where are the murder weapons? 358 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliog-
Could they have operated as claimed? raphy, index. (#5)
Where are the corpses? In order to get Concentration Camp Stutthof and Its
to the truth of the matter, Alvarez has Function in National Socialist Jewish
scrutinized all known wartime docu- Policy. By Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen
ments and photos about this topic; he Graf. Orthodox historians claim that
has analyzed a huge amount of wit- the Stutthof Camp served as a “make-
ness statements as published in the shift” extermination camp in 1944.
literature and as presented in more Based mainly on archival resources,
than 30 trials held over the decades this study thoroughly debunks this
in Germany, Poland and Israel; and view and shows that Stutthof was in
he has examined the claims made in fact a center for the organization of
the pertinent mainstream literature. German forced labor toward the end of
The result of his research is mind-bog- World War II. 4th ed., 170 pages, b&w
gling. Note: This book and Mattogno’s illustrations, bibliography, index. (#4)
book on Chelmno were edited in par-
allel to make sure they are consistent
and not repetitive. 398 pages, b&w il-
SECTION THREE:
lustrations, bibliography, index. (#26) Auschwitz Studies
The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied The Making of the Auschwitz Myth:
Eastern Territories: Genesis, Mis- Auschwitz in British Intercepts, Pol-
sions and Actions. By C. Mattogno. ish Underground Reports and Post-
Before invading the Soviet Union, war Testimonies (1941-1947). By
the German authorities set up special Carlo Mattogno. Using messages sent
units meant to secure the area behind by the Polish underground to Lon-
the German front. Orthodox histo- don, SS radio messages sent to and
rians claim that these units called from Auschwitz that were intercepted
Einsatzgruppen primarily engaged and decrypted by the British, and a
in rounding up and mass-murdering plethora of witness statements made
Jews. This study sheds a critical light during the war and in the immediate
onto this topic by reviewing all the postwar period, the author shows how
pertinent sources as well as mate- exactly the myth of mass murder in
rial traces. It reveals on the one hand Auschwitz gas chambers was created,
that original war-time documents do and how it was turned subsequently
not fully support the orthodox geno- into “history” by intellectually corrupt
cidal narrative, and on the other that scholars who cherry-picked claims
most post-“liberation” sources such as that fit into their agenda and ignored
testimonies and forensic reports are or actively covered up literally thou-
steeped in Soviet atrocity propaganda sands of lies of “witnesses” to make
and are thus utterly unreliable. In ad- their narrative look credible. 2nd edi-
tion, 514 pp., b&w illustrations, bibli- The Chemistry of Auschwitz: The
ography, index. (#41) Technology and Toxicology of Zyklon
The Real Case of Auschwitz: Robert B and the Gas Chambers – A Crime-
van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Scene Investigation. By Germar Ru-
Trial Critically Reviewed. By Carlo dolf. This study documents forensic
Mattogno. Prof. Robert van Pelt is research on Auschwitz, where mate-
considered one of the best mainstream rial traces and their interpretation
experts on Auschwitz. He became fa- reign supreme. Most of the claimed
mous when appearing as an expert crime scenes – the claimed homicidal
during the London libel trial of Da- gas chambers – are still accessible to
vid Irving against Deborah Lipstadt. forensic examination to some degree.
From it resulted a book titled The This book addresses questions such
Case for Auschwitz, in which van Pelt as: How were these gas chambers
laid out his case for the existence of configured? How did they operate?
homicidal gas chambers at that camp. In addition, the infamous Zyklon B
This book is a scholarly response to can also be examined. What exactly
Prof. van Pelt—and Jean-Claude was it? How does it kill? Does it leave
Pressac, upon whose books van Pelt’s traces in masonry that can be found
study is largely based. Mattogno lists still today? The author also discusses
all the evidence van Pelt adduces, and in depth similar forensic research con-
shows one by one that van Pelt mis- ducted by other scholars. 4th ed., 454
represented and misinterpreted every pages, more than 120 color and over
single one of them. This is a book of 100 b&w illustrations, biblio graphy,
prime political and scholarly impor- index. (#2)
tance to those looking for the truth Auschwitz Lies: Legends, Lies and
about Auschwitz. 3rd ed., 692 pages, Prejudices on the Holocaust. By
b&w illustrations, glossary, bibliogra- Carlo Mattogno and Germar Rudolf.
phy, index. (#22) The fallacious research and alleged
Auschwitz: Plain Facts: A Response “refutation” of Revisionist scholars by
to Jean-Claude Pressac. Edited by French biochemist G. Wellers (attack-
Germar Rudolf, with contributions ing Leuchter’s famous report), Polish
by Serge Thion, Robert Faurisson chemist Dr. J. Markiewicz and U.S.
and Carlo Mattogno. French phar- chemist Dr. Richard Green (taking on
macist Jean-Claude Pressac tried to Rudolf’s chemical research), Dr. John
refute revisionist findings with the Zimmerman (tackling Mattogno on
“technical” method. For this he was cremation issues), Michael Shermer
praised by the mainstream, and they and Alex Grobman (trying to prove it
proclaimed victory over the “revision- all), as well as researchers Keren, Mc-
ists.” In his book, Pressac’s works and Carthy and Mazal (who turned cracks
claims are shown to be unscientific into architectural features), are ex-
in nature, as he never substantiates posed for what they are: blatant and
what he claims, and historically false, easily exposed political lies created to
because he systematically misrepre- ostracize dissident historians. 4th ed.,
sents, misinterprets and misunder- 420 pages, b&w illustrations, index.
stands German wartime documents. (#18)
2nd ed., 226 pages, b&w illustrations, Auschwitz: The Central Construc-
glossary bibliography, index. (#14) tion Office. By Carlo Mattogno. Ever
Auschwitz: Technique and Operation since the Russian authorities granted
of the Gas Chambers: An Introduc- western historians access to their
tion and Update. By Germar Rudolf. state archives in the early 1990s, the
Pressac’s 1989 oversize book of the files of the Central Construction Of-
same title was a trail blazer. Its many fice of the Waffen-SS and Police Aus-
document reproductions are still valu- chwitz, stored in a Moscow archive,
able, but after decades of additional have attracted the attention of schol-
research, Pressac’s annotations are ars who are researching the history
outdated. This book summarizes the of this most infamous of all German
most pertinent research results on war-time camps. Despite this inter-
Auschwitz gained during the past 30 est, next to nothing has really been
years. With many references to Pres- known so far about this very impor-
sac’s epic tome, it serves as an update tant office, which was responsible
and correction to it, whether you own for the planning and construction of
an original hard copy of it, read it the Auschwitz camp complex, includ-
online, borrow it from a library, pur- ing the crematories which are said to
chase a reprint, or are just interested have contained the “gas chambers.”
in such a summary in general. 144 This emphasizes the importance of
pages, b&w illustrations, bibliogra- the present study, which not only
phy. (#42) sheds light into this hitherto hidden
aspect of this camp’s history, but also of SS officers. 398 pages, b&w illustra-
provides a deep understanding of the tions, bibliography, index. (#33)
organization, tasks, and procedures of Debunking the Bunkers of Auschwitz:
this office. 2nd ed., 188 pages, b&w il- Black Propaganda vs. History. By
lustrations, glossary, index. (#13) Carlo Mattogno. The “bunkers” at
Garrison and Headquarters Orders Auschwitz, two former farmhouses
of the Auschwitz Camp. By Germar just outside the camp’s perimeter, are
Rudolf and Ernst Böhm. A large num- claimed to have been the first homi-
ber of all the orders ever issued by the cidal gas chambers at Auschwitz spe-
various commanders of the infamous cifically equipped for this purpose.
Auschwitz camp have been preserved. With the help of original German
They reveal the true nature of the wartime files as well as revealing air
camp with all its daily events. There photos taken by Allied reconnaissance
is not a trace in these orders pointing aircraft in 1944, this study shows
at anything sinister going on in this that these homicidal “bunkers” never
camp. Quite to the contrary, many existed, how the rumors about them
orders are in clear and insurmount-
evolved as black propaganda created
able contradiction to claims that pris-
oners were mass murdered, such as by resistance groups in the camp, and
the children of SS men playing with how this propaganda was transformed
inmates, SS men taking friends for a into a false reality. 2nd ed., 292 pages,
sight-seeing tour through the camp, b&w ill., bibliography, index. (#11)
or having a romantic stroll with their Auschwitz: The First Gassing. Rumor
lovers around the camp grounds. This and Reality. By Carlo Mattogno. The
is a selection of the most pertinent of first gassing in Auschwitz is claimed
these orders together with comments to have occurred on Sept. 3, 1941 in
putting them into their proper histori- a basement. The accounts report-
cal context. 185 pages, b&w ill., bibl., ing it are the archetypes for all later
index (#34) gassing accounts. This study ana-
Special Treatment in Auschwitz: Ori- lyzes all available sources about this
gin and Meaning of a Term. By Carlo alleged event. It shows that these
Mattogno. When appearing in Ger- sources contradict each other about
man wartime documents, terms like the event’s location, date, the kind of
“special treatment,” “special action,” victims and their number, and many
and others have been interpreted as more aspects, which makes it impos-
code words for mass murder. But that sible to extract a consistent story.
is not always true. This study focuses Original wartime documents inflict
on documents about Auschwitz, show- a final blow to this legend and prove
ing that, while “special” had many without a shadow of a doubt that this
different meanings, not a single one legendary event never happened. 3rd
meant “execution.” Hence the prac- ed., 190 pages, b&w illustrations, bib-
tice of deciphering an alleged “code liography, index. (#20)
language” by assigning homicidal
meaning to harmless documents – a Auschwitz: Crematorium I and the
key component of mainstream histori- Alleged Homicidal Gassings. By Carlo
ography – is untenable. 2nd ed., 166 Mattogno. The morgue of Cremato-
pages, b&w illustrations, bibliogra- rium I in Auschwitz is said to be the
phy, index. (#10) first homicidal gas chamber there.
This study investigates all statements
Healthcare at Auschwitz. By Carlo by witnesses and analyzes hundreds
Mattogno. In extension of the above
of wartime documents to accurately
study on Special Treatment in Ausch
witz, this study proves the extent to write a history of that building. Where
which the German authorities at witnesses speak of gassings, they are
Auschwitz tried to provide health care either very vague or, if specific, con-
for the inmates. Part 1 of this book an- tradict one another and are refuted
alyzes the inmates’ living conditions by documented and material facts.
and the various sanitary and medi- The author also exposes the fraudu-
cal measures implemented. Part 2 lent attempts of mainstream histo-
explores what happened to registered rians to convert the witnesses’ black
inmates who were “selected” or sub- propaganda into “truth” by means of
ject to “special treatment” while dis- selective quotes, omissions, and dis-
abled or sick. This study shows that tortions. Mattogno proves that this
a lot was tried to cure these inmates, building’s morgue was never a homi-
especially under the aegis of Garri- cidal gas chamber, nor could it have
son Physician Dr. Wirths. Part 3 is worked as such. 2nd ed., 152 pages,
dedicated to this very Dr. Wirths. His b&w illustrations, bibliography, in-
reality refutes the current stereotype dex. (#21)
Auschwitz: Open-Air Incinerations. By year by well over a million visitors.

Carlo Mattogno. In spring and sum- Curated Lies exposes the many ways
mer of 1944, 400,000 Hungarian Jews in which visitors have been deceived
were deported to Auschwitz and alleg- and misled by forgeries and misrep-
edly murdered there in gas chambers. resentations about this building com-
The Auschwitz crematoria are said to mitted by the Auschwitz Museum,
have been unable to cope with so many some of which are maintained to this
corpses. Therefore, every single day day. 2nd ed., 259 pages, b&w illustra-
thousands of corpses are claimed to tions, bibliography, index. (#38)
have been incinerated on huge pyres lit Deliveries of Coke, Wood and Zyklon
in deep trenches. The sky over Ausch B to Auschwitz: Neither Proof Nor
witz was filled with thick smoke. This Trace for the Holocaust. By Carlo
is what some witnesses want us to be- Mattogno. Researchers from the
lieve. This book examines the many Auschwitz Museum tried to prove
testimonies regarding these incinera- the reality of mass extermination by
tions and establishes whether these pointing to documents about deliver-
claims were even possible. Using air ies of wood and coke as well as Zyk-
photos, physical evidence and wartime lon B to the Auschwitz Camp. If put
documents, the author shows that into the actual historical and techni-
these claims are fiction. A new Appen- cal context, however, as is done by
dix contains 3 papers on groundwater this study, these documents prove
levels and cattle mass burnings. 2nd the exact opposite of what those or-
ed., 202 pages, b&w illustrations, bib- thodox researchers claim. 184 pages,
liography, index. (#17) b&w illust., bibl., index. (#40)
The Cremation Furnaces of Ausch Mis-Chronicling Auschwitz. Danuta
witz. By Carlo Mattogno & Franco Czech’s Flawed Methods, Lies and
Deana. An exhaustive study of the Deceptions in Her “Auschwitz Chron-
early history and technology of crema- icle”. By Carlo Mattogno. Danuta
tion in general and of the cremation Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle is a ref-
furnaces of Ausch witz in particular. erence book for the history of Ausch
On a vast base of technical literature, witz. Mattogno has compiled a long
extant wartime documents and mate- list of misrepresentations, outright
rial traces, the authors can establish lies and deceptions contained in it.
the true nature and capacity of the This mega-fraud needs to be retired
Ausch witz cremation furnaces. They from the ranks of Auschwitz sources.
show that these devices were inferior 324 pages, b&w illust., bibliography,
makeshift versions of what was usu- index. (#47)
ally produced, and that their capacity
to cremate corpses was lower than SECTION FOUR:
normal, too. This demonstrates that Witness Critique
the Auschwitz crematoria were not
evil facilities of mass destruction, but Elie Wiesel, Saint of the Holocaust:
normal installations that barely man- A Critical Biography. By Warren B.
aged to handle the victims among the Routledge. The world’s first indepen-
inmates who died of various epidem- dent biography of Elie Wiesel shines
ics ravaging the camp throught its the light of truth on this mythomaniac
history. 2nd ed., 3 vols., 1201 pages, who has transformed the word “Ho-
b&w and color illustrations (vols 2 & locaust” into the brand name of the
3), bibliography, index, glossary. (#24) world’s greatest hoax. Here, both Wie
Curated Lies: The Auschwitz Muse- sel’s personal deceits and the whole
um’s Misrepresentations, Distortions myth of “the six million” are laid bare
and Deceptions. By Carlo Mattogno. for the reader’s perusal. It shows how
Revisionist research results have put Zionist control of the U.S. Govern-
the Polish Auschwitz Museum under ment as well as the nation’s media
pressure to answer this challenge. In and academic apparatus has allowed
2014, they answered with a book pre- Wiesel and his fellow extremists to
senting documents allegedly proving force a string of U.S. presidents to
their claims. But they cheated. In its genuflect before this imposter as sym-
main section, this study analyzes their bolic acts of subordination to World
“evidence” and reveals the appallingly Jewry, while simultaneously forcing
mendacious attitude of the Auschwitz school children to submit to Holocaust
Museum authorities when presenting brainwashing by their teachers. 3rd
documents from their archives. This is ed., 458 pages, b&w illustration, bibliogra-
preceded by a section focusing on the phy, index. (#30)
Auschwitz Museum’s most-coveted Auschwitz: Eyewitness Reports and
asset: the alleged gas chamber inside Perpetrator Confessions. By Jür-
the Old Crematorium, toured every gen Graf. The traditional narrative
of what transpired at the infamous They use Reder’s testimony to fill the
Auschwitz Camp during WWII rests void, yet his testimonies are just as
almost exclusively on witness testi- absurd. This study thoroughly scru-
mony. This study critically scrutiniz- tinizes Reder’s various statements,
es the 30 most-important of them by critically revisits Gerstein’s various
checking them for internal coherence, depositions, and then compares these
and by comparing them with one an- two testimonies which are at once
other as well as with other evidence similar in some respects, but incom-
such as wartime documents, air pho- patible in others. 216 pages, b&w il-
tos, forensic research results, and lust., bibliography, index. (#43)
material traces. The result is devas-
tating for the traditional narrative. Sonderkommando Auschwitz I: Nine
372 pages, b&w illust., bibl., index. Eyewitness Testimonies Analyzed.
(#36) By Carlo Mattogno. To this day, the
1979 book Auschwitz Inferno by al-
Commandant of Auschwitz: Rudolf leged former Auschwitz “Sonderkom-
Höss, His Torture and His Forced
mando” member Filip Müller has
Confessions. By Carlo Mattogno &
a great influence on the perception
Rudolf Höss. From 1940 to 1943, Ru-
dolf Höss was the commandant of the of Ausch witz by the public and by
infamous Auschwitz Camp. After the historians. This book critically ana-
war, he was captured by the British. lyzes Müller’s various post-war state-
In the following 13 months until his ments, which are full of exaggera-
execution, he made 85 depositions of tions, falsehoods and plagiarized text
various kinds in which he confessed passages. Also scrutinized are the
his involvement in the “Holocaust.” testimonies of eight other claimed
This study first reveals how the Brit- former Sonderkommando members:
ish tortured him to extract various D. Paisikovic, S. Jankowski, H. Man-
“confessions.” Next, all of Höss’s de- delbaum, L. Nagraba, J. Rosenblum,
positions are analyzed by checking A. Pilo, D. Fliamenbaum and S. Kar-
his claims for internal consistency olinskij. 304 pages, b&w illust., bib
and comparing them with established liography, index. (#44)
historical facts. The results are eye- Sonderkommando Auschwitz II: The
opening… 2nd ed., 411 pages, b&w False Testimonies by Henryk Tauber
illust., bibliography, index. (#35) and Szlama Dragon. By Carlo Mat-
An Auschwitz Doctor’s Eyewit- togno. Auschwitz survivor and former
ness Account: The Tall Tales of Dr. member of the so-called “Sonderkom-
Mengele’s Assistant Analyzed. By mando” Henryk Tauber is one of the
Miklos Nyiszli & Carlo Mattogno. most important witnesses about the
Nyiszli, a Hungarian physician, alleged gas chambers inside the cre-
ended up at Auschwitz in 1944 as Dr. matoria at Auschwitz, because right
Mengele’s assistant. After the war he at the war’s end, he made several ex-
wrote a book and several other writ- tremely detailed depositions about it.
ings describing what he claimed to The same is true for Szlama Dragon,
have experienced. To this day some only he claims to have worked at the
traditional historians take his ac- so-called “bunkers” of Birkenau, two
counts seriously, while others reject
makeshift gas chambers just outside
them as grotesque lies and exaggera-
the camp perimeter. This study thor-
tions. This study presents and ana-
oughly scrutinizes these two key tes-
lyzes Nyiszli’s writings and skillfully
separates truth from fabulous fabri- timonies. Ca. 250 pages, b&w illust.,
cation. 2nd ed., 484 pages, b&w illus- bibliography, index. (#45; May 2022)
trations, bibliography, index. (#37) Sonderkommando Auschwitz III:
Rudolf Reder versus Kurt Gerstein: They Wept Crocodile Tears. By Carlo
Two False Testimonies on the Bełżec Mattogno. This book focuses on the
Camp Analyzed. By Carlo Mattogno. critical analysis of witness testimo-
Only two witnesses have ever testi- nies on the alleged Auschwitz gas
fied substantially about the alleged chambers recorded or published in
Belzec Extermination Camp: The sur- the 1990s and early 2000s, such as
vivor Rudolf Reder and the SS officer J. Sackar, A. Dragon, J. Gabai, S.
Kurt Gerstein. Gerstein’s testimonies Chasan, L. Cohen and S. Venezia,
have been a hotspot of revisionist cri- among others. Ca. 250 pages, b&w
tique for decades. It is now discred- illust., bibliography, index. (#46, late
ited even among orthodox historians. 2022)
For current prices and availability, and to learn more, go to
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Published by Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 231, Dallastown, PA 17313, USA
Books by and from Castle Hill Publishers
Below please find some of the books published or distributed by Castle Hill
Publishers. For our current and complete range of products visit our web
store at www.castlehill.shop.
The Holocaust: An Introduction. By where more people are said to have
Thomas Dalton. The Holocaust was been murdered than anywhere else.
perhaps the greatest crime of the 20th This claim is based on a wide range of
Century. Six million Jews, we are evidence, the most important of which
told, died by gassing, shooting, and was presented during two trials: the
deprivation. But: Where did the six- International Military Tribunal of
million figure come from? How, exact- 1945/46, and the German Auschwitz
ly, did the gas chambers work? Why Trial of 1963-1965 in Frankfurt. In
do we have so little physical evidence this book, Wilhelm Stäglich, a former
from major death camps? Why haven’t German judge, critically analyzes
we found even a fraction of the six mil- this evidence. He reveals the incred-
lion bodies, or their ashes? Why has ibly scandalous way in which Allied
there been so much media suppres- victors and German courts bent and
sion and governmental censorship on broke the law in order to come to po-
this topic? In a sense, the Holocaust is litically foregone conclusions. Stäglich
the greatest murder mystery in histo- also exposes the superficial way in
ry. It is a topic of greatest importance which historians are dealing with the
for the present day. Let’s explore the many incongruities and discrepancies
evidence, and see where it leads. 128 of the historical record. 3rd edition
pp. pb, 5”×8”, ill., bibl., index. 2015, 422 pp. pb, 6“×9“, b&w ill.
Auschwitz: A Three-Quarter Century Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil. By
of Propaganda: Origins, Development Gerard Menuhin. This Jewish author
and Decline of the “Gas Chamber” says the “Holocaust” is a wartime-
Propaganda Lie. By Carlo Mattogno. propaganda myth turned into an ex-
During the war, wild rumors were cir- tortion racket. Far from bearing the
culating about Auschwitz: Germans sole guilt for starting WWII as alleged
testing war gases; inmates murdered at Nuremberg, Germany is mostly in-
in electrocution chambers, with gas nocent and made numerous attempts
showers or pneumatic hammers; liv- to avoid and later to end the confron-
ing people sent on conveyor belts into tation. During the 1930s, Germany
furnaces; oils, grease and soap made was confronted by a powerful Jewish-
of the victims. Nothing of it was true. dominated world plutocracy out to
When the Soviets captured Auschwitz destroy it… Yes, a Jew says all this.
in early 1945, they reported that 4 The author is the son of the great US-
million inmates were killed on elec- born violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who,
trocution conveyor belts discharging though from a long line of rabbinical
their load directly into furnaces. That ancestors, fiercely criticized the for-
wasn’t true either. After the war, “wit- eign policy of Israel and its repression
nesses” and “experts” repeated these of the Palestinians. 4th edition 2017,
claims and added more: mass murder 432 pp. pb, 6”×9”, b&w ill.
with gas bombs, gas chambers made Exactitude: Festschrift for Prof. Dr.
of canvas; carts driving living people Robert Faurisson. By R.H. Countess,
into furnaces; crematoria burning C. Lindtner, G. Rudolf (eds.) Fauris-
400 million victims… Again, none of son probably deserves the title of the
it was true. This book gives an over- most-courageous intellectual of the
view of the many rumors, myths and 20th and the early 21st Century. With
lies about Auschwitz today rejected bravery and steadfastness, he chal-
as untrue. It then explains by which lenged the dark forces of historical
ridiculous methods some claims were and political fraud with his unrelent-
accepted and turned into “history,” ing exposure of their lies and hoaxes
although they are just as untrue. 125 surrounding the orthodox Holocaust
pp. pb, 5”×8”, ill., bibl., index, b&w ill. narrative. This book describes and
Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evi- celebrates the man and his work dedi-
dence. By Wilhelm Stäglich. Ausch cated to accuracy and marked by in-
witz is the epicenter of the Holocaust, submission. 146 pp. pb, 6”×9”, b&w ill.
For prices and availability see www.castlehill.shop or write to: CHP, PO Box 231, Dallastown, PA 17311, USA
Auschwitz – Forensically Examined. and quite obviates all need for para-
By Cyrus Cox. Modern forensic crime- normal events such as genocide, gas
scene investigations can reveal a lot chambers, and all their attendant
about the Holocaust. There are many horrifics. With a preface by Germar
big tomes about this. But if you want Rudolf with references to more-recent
it all in a nutshell, read this book- research results in this field of study
let. It condenses the most-important confirming Werner’s thesis. 190 pp.
findings of Auschwitz forensics into pb, 6”×9”, b&w ill., bibl., index
a quick and easy read. In the first Holocaust Skepticism: 20 Questions
section, the forensic investigations and Answers about Holocaust Revi-
conducted so far are reviewed. In the sionism. By Germar Rudolf. This 15-
second section, the most-important re- page brochure introduces the novice
sults of these studies are summarized. to the concept of Holocaust revision-
The main arguments focus on two top- ism, and answers 20 tough questions,
ics. The first centers around the poi- among them: What does Holocaust
son allegedly used at Auschwitz for revisionism claim? Why should I take
mass murder: Zyklon B. Did it leave Holocaust revisionism more seriously
any traces in masonry where it was than the claim that the earth is flat?
used? Can it be detected to this day?
How about the testimonies by survi-
The second topic deals with mass cre-
vors and confessions by perpetrators?
mations. Did the crematoria of Ausch
What about the pictures of corpse
witz have the claimed huge capacity?
piles in the camps? Why does it mat-
Do air photos taken during the war
ter how many Jews were killed by the
confirm witness statements on huge
Nazis, since even 1,000 would have
smoking pyres? This book gives the
been too many? … Glossy full-color
answers, together with many refer-
brochure. PDF file free of charge avail-
ences to source material and further
able at www.HolocaustHandbooks.
reading. The third section reports on
com, Option “Promotion”. This item
how the establishment has reacted
is not copyright-protected. Hence, you
to these research results. 124 pp. pb.,
can do with it whatever you want:
5“×8“, b&w ill., bibl., index
download, post, email, print, multi-
The Second Babylonian Captivity: The ply, hand out, sell… 20 pp., stapled,
Fate of the Jews in Eastern Europe 8.5“×11“, full-color throughout.
since 1941. By Steffen Werner. “But
if they were not murdered, where did Bungled: “Denying the Holocaust”
the six million deported Jews end up?” How Deborah Lipstadt Botched Her
This is a standard objection to the Attempt to Demonstrate the Grow-
revisionist thesis that the Jews were ing Assault on Truth and Memory. By
not killed in extermination camps. Germar Rudolf. With her book Deny-
It demands a well-founded response. ing the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt
While researching an entirely differ- tried to show the flawed methods
ent topic, Steffen Werner accidentally and extremist motives of “Holocaust
stumbled upon the most-peculiar de- deniers.” This book demonstrates
mographic data of Byelorussia. Years that Dr. Lipstadt clearly has neither
of research subsequently revealed understood the principles of science
more and more evidence which even- and scholarship, nor has she any clue
tually allowed him to substantiate a about the historical topics she is writ-
breathtaking and sensational propo- ing about. She misquotes, mistrans-
sition: The Third Reich did indeed lates, misrepresents, misinterprets,
deport many of the Jews of Europe and makes a plethora of wild claims
to Eastern Europe in order to settle without backing them up with any-
them there “in the swamp.” This thing. Rather than dealing thoroughly
book, first published in German in with factual arguments, Lipstadt’s
1990, was the first well-founded work book is full of ad hominem attacks
showing what really happened to the on her opponents. It is an exercise
Jews deported to the East by the Na- in anti-intellectual pseudo-scientific
tional Socialists, how they have fared arguments, an exhibition of ideologi-
since, and who, what and where they cal radicalism that rejects anything
are “now” (1990). It provides context which contradicts its preset conclu-
and purpose for hitherto-obscure and sions. F for FAIL. 2nd ed., 224 pp. pb,
seemingly random historical events 5“×8“, bibl., index, b&w ill.
Bungled: “Denying History”. How their own side’s source material was
Michael Shermer and and Alex Grobman dismal, and the way they backed up
Botched Their Attempt to Refute their misleading or false claims was
Those Who Say the Holocaust Never pitifully inadequate. F for FAIL. 144
Happened. By Carolus Magnus (Carlo pp. pb, 5“×8“, bibl., index, b&w ill.
Mattogno). Skeptic Magazine editor Stalin’s War of Extermination 1941-
Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman 1945. By Joachim Hoffmann. A Ger-
from the Simon Wiesenthal Center man government historian documents
wrote a book in 2000 which they claim Stalin’s murderous war against the
is “a thorough and thoughtful answer German army and the German people.
to all the claims of the Holocaust de- Based on the author’s lifelong study of
niers.” In 2009, a new “updated” edi- German and Russian military records,
tion appeared with the same ambitious this book reveals the Red Army’s gris-
goal. In the meantime, revisionists ly record of atrocities against soldiers
had published some 10,000 pages of and civilians, as ordered by Stalin.
archival and forensic research results. Since the 1920s, Stalin planned to in-
Would their updated edition indeed vade Western Europe to initiate the
answer all the revisionist claims? In “World Revolution.” He prepared an
fact, Shermer and Grobman complete- attack which was unparalleled in his-
ly ignored the vast amount of recent tory. The Germans noticed Stalin’s ag-
scholarly studies and piled up a heap gressive intentions, but they underes-
of falsifications, contortions, omis- timated the strength of the Red Army.
sions, and fallacious interpretations What unfolded was the cruelest war
of the evidence. Finally, what the au- in history. This book shows how Stalin
thors claim to have demolished is not and his Bolshevik henchman used un-
revisionism but a ridiculous parody imaginable violence and atrocities to
of it. They ignored the known unreli- break any resistance in the Red Army
ability of their cherry-picked selection and to force their unwilling soldiers to
of evidence, utilizing unverified and fight against the Germans. The book
incestuous sources, and obscuring the explains how Soviet propagandists
massive body of research and all the incited their soldiers to unlimited ha-
evidence that dooms their project to tred against everything German, and
failure. F for FAIL. 162 pp. pb, 5“×8“, he gives the reader a short but ex-
bibl., index, b&w ill. tremely unpleasant glimpse into what
Bungled: “Debunking Holocaust Deni- happened when these Soviet soldiers
al Theories”. How James and Lance finally reached German soil in 1945: A
Morcan Botched Their Attempt to gigantic wave of looting, arson, rape,
Affirm the Historicity of the Nazi torture, and mass murder… 428 pp.
Genocide. By Carolus Magnus (Carlo pb, 6“×9“, bibl., index, b&w ill.
Mattogno). The novelists and movie- Who Started World War II: Truth for
makers James and Lance Morcan a War-Torn World. By Udo Walendy.
have produced a book “to end [Holo- For seven decades, mainstream his-
caust] denial once and for all.” To do torians have insisted that Germany
this, “no stone was left unturned” to was the main, if not the sole culprit
verify historical assertions by present- for unleashing World War II in Eu-
ing “a wide array of sources” meant “to rope. In the present book this myth
shut down the debate deniers wish to is refuted. There is available to the
create. One by one, the various argu- public today a great number of docu-
ments Holocaust deniers use to try to ments on the foreign policies of the
discredit wartime records are care- Great Powers before September 1939
fully scrutinized and then systemati- as well as a wealth of literature in the
cally disproven.” It’s a lie. First, the form of memoirs of the persons direct-
Morcans completely ignored the vast ly involved in the decisions that led
amount of recent scholarly studies to the outbreak of World War II. To-
published by revisionists; they didn’t gether, they made possible Walendy’s
even mention them. Instead, they en- present mosaic-like reconstruction of
gaged in shadowboxing, creating some the events before the outbreak of the
imaginary, bogus “revisionist” scare- war in 1939. This book has been pub-
crow which they then tore to pieces. lished only after an intensive study of
In addition, their knowledge even of sources, taking the greatest care to
minimize speculation and inference. ists in a “Western democracy”… 304
The present edition has been translat- pp. pb, 6“×9“, bibl., index, b&w ill.
ed completely anew from the German The Day Amazon Murdered Free
original and has been slightly revised. Speech. By Germar Rudolf. Amazon is
500 pp. pb, 6”×9”, index, bibl., b&w ill. the world’s biggest book retailer. They
Resistance Is Obligatory! By Germar dominate the U.S. and several foreign
Rudolf. In 2005 Rudolf, a peaceful markets. Pursuant to the 1998 decla-
dissident and publisher of revisionist ration of Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos
literature, was kidnapped by the U.S. to offer “the good, the bad and the
government and deported to Germany. ugly,” customers once could buy every
There the local lackey regime staged a title that was in print and was legal to
show trial against him for his histori- sell. However, in early 2017, a series
cal writings. Rudolf was not permitted of anonymous bomb threats against
to defend his historical opinions, as Jewish community centers occurred in
the German penal law prohibits this. the U.S., fueling a campaign by Jew-
Yet he defended himself anyway: For ish groups to coax Amazon into ban-
7 full days Rudolf gave a speech in the ning revisionist writings. On March
courtroom, during which he proved 6, 2017, Amazon caved in and banned
systematically that only the revision- more than 100 books with dissenting
ists are scholarly in their approach, viewpoints on the Holocaust. In April
whereas the Holocaust orthodoxy is 2017, an Israeli Jew was arrested for
merely pseudo-scientific. He then ex- having placed the fake bomb threats.
plained in detail why it is everyone’s But Amazon kept its new censorship
obligation to resist, without violence, policy: They next culled any literature
a government which throws peace- critical of Jews or Judaism; then they
enforced these bans at all its subsidia
ful dissidents into dungeons. When
ries, such as AbeBooks and The Book
Rudolf tried to publish his public de-
Depository; then they banned books
fence speech as a book from his prison
other pressure groups don’t like; fi-
cell, the public prosecutor initiated a
nally, they bullied Ingram, who has a
new criminal investigation against
book-distribution monopoly in the US,
him. After his probation time ended
to enforce the same rules by banning
in 2011, he dared publish this speech
from the entire world-wide book mar-
anyway… 2nd ed. 2016, 378 pp. pb,
ket all books Amazon doesn’t like…
6“×9“, b&w ill.
2nd ed., 151 pp. pb, 5”×8”, bibl., b&w
Hunting Germar Rudolf: Essays on a ill.
Modern-Day Witch Hunt. By Germar Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social
Rudolf. German-born revisionist ac- Programs, Foreign Affairs. By Rich-
tivist, author and publisher Germar ard Tedor. Defying all boycotts, Adolf
Rudolf describes which events made Hitler transformed Germany from a
him convert from a Holocaust believer bankrupt state to the powerhouse of
to a Holocaust skeptic, quickly rising Europe within just four years, thus
to a leading personality within the becoming Germany’s most popular
revisionist movement. This in turn leader ever. How was this possible?
unleashed a tsunami of persecution This study tears apart the dense web
against him: lost his job, denied his of calumny surrounding this contro-
PhD exam, destruction of his family, versial figure. It draws on nearly 200
driven into exile, slandered by the published German sources, many
mass media, literally hunted, caught, from the Nazi era, as well as docu-
put on a show trial where filing moments from British, U.S., and Soviet
tions to introduce evidence is illegal archives that describe not only what
under the threat of further prosecu- Hitler did but, more importantly, why
tion, and finally locked up in prison he did it. These sourcs also reveal the
for years for nothing else than his true war objectives of the democracies
peaceful yet controversial scholarly – a taboo subject for orthodox histo-
writings. In several essays, Rudolf rians – and the resulting world war
takes the reader on a journey through against Germany. This book is aimed
an absurd world of government and at anyone who feels that something is
societal persecution which most of us missing from conventional accounts.
could never even fathom actually ex- 2nd ed., 309 pp. pb, 6”×9”, index, bibl.
Hitler on the Jews. By Thomas Dalton. known is their involvement in war.
That Adolf Hitler spoke out against When we examine the causal factors
the Jews is beyond obvious. But of the for wars, and look at their primary
thousands of books and articles writ- beneficiaries, we repeatedly find a
ten on Hitler, virtually none quotes Jewish presence. Throughout history,
Hitler’s exact words on the Jews. The Jews have played an exceptionally
reason for this is clear: Those in po- active role in promoting and inciting
sitions of influence have incentives to wars. With their long-notorious influ-
present a simplistic picture of Hitler ence in government, we find recurrent
as a blood-thirsty tyrant. However, instances of Jews promoting hard-
Hitler’s take on the Jews is far more line stances, being uncompromising,
complex and sophisticated. In this and actively inciting people to hatred.
book, for the first time, you can make Jewish misanthropy, rooted in Old
up your own mind by reading nearly Testament mandates, and combined
every idea that Hitler put forth about with a ruthless materialism, has led
the Jews, in considerable detail and in them, time and again, to instigate
full context. This is the first book ever warfare if it served their larger inter-
to compile his remarks on the Jews. ests. This fact explains much about
As you will discover, Hitler’s analysis the present-day world. In this book,
of the Jews, though hostile, is erudite, Thomas Dalton examines in detail the
detailed, and – surprise, surprise – Jewish hand in the two world wars.
largely aligns with events of recent Along the way, he dissects Jewish mo-
decades. There are many lessons here tives and Jewish strategies for maxi-
for the modern-day world to learn. 200 mizing gain amidst warfare, reaching
pp. pb, 6”×9”, index, bibl. back centuries. 2nd ed., 231 pp. pb,
Goebbels on the Jews. By Thomas 6”×9”, index, bibl.
Dalton. From the age of 26 until his Eternal Strangers: Critical Views of
death in 1945, Joseph Goebbels kept Jews and Judaism through the Ages.
a near-daily diary. From it, we get a By Thomas Dalton. It is common
detailed look at the attitudes of one of knowledge that Jews have been dis-
the highest-ranking men in Nazi Ger- liked for centuries. But why? Our best
many. Goebbels shared Hitler’s dis- hope for understanding this recurrent
like of the Jews, and likewise wanted ‘anti-Semitism’ is to study the history:
them totally removed from the Reich to look at the actual words written by
territory. Ultimately, Goebbels and prominent critics of the Jews, in con-
others sought to remove the Jews text, and with an eye to any common
completely from the Eurasian land patterns that might emerge. Such a
mass—perhaps to the island of Mada- study reveals strikingly consistent
gascar. This would be the “final solu- observations: Jews are seen in very
tion” to the Jewish Question. Nowhere negative, yet always similar terms.
in the diary does Goebbels discuss any The persistence of such comments
Hitler order to kill the Jews, nor is is remarkable and strongly suggests
there any reference to extermination that the cause for such animosity
camps, gas chambers, or any methods resides in the Jews themselves—in
of systematic mass-murder. Goebbels their attitudes, their values, their eth-
acknowledges that Jews did indeed nic traits and their beliefs.. This book
die by the thousands; but the range addresses the modern-day “Jewish
and scope of killings evidently fall far problem” in all its depth—something
short of the claimed figure of 6 million. which is arguably at the root of many
This book contains, for the first time, of the world’s social, political and eco-
every significant diary entry relating nomic problems. 186 pp. pb, 6”×9”, in-
to the Jews or Jewish policy. Also index, bibl.
cluded are partial or full transcripts Streicher, Rosenberg, and the Jews:
of 10 major essays by Goebbels on the The Nuremberg Transcripts. By
Jews. 274 pp. pb, 6”×9”, index, bibl. Thomas Dalton. Who, apart from Hit-
The Jewish Hand in the World Wars. ler, contrived the Nazi view on the
By Thomas Dalton. For many centu- Jews? And what were these master
ries, Jews have had a negative repu- ideologues thinking? During the post-
tation in many countries. The reasons war International Military Tribunal
given are plentiful, but less-well- at Nuremberg, the most-interesting
men on trial regarding this question dox Holocaust narrative. When the
were two with a special connection to case went to court in 1985, so-called
the “Jewish Question”: Alfred Rosen- Holocaust experts and “eyewitnesses”
berg and Julius Streicher. The cases of the alleged homicidal gas chambers
against them, and their personal tes- at Auschwitz were cross-examined
timonies, examined for the first time for the first time in history by a com-
nearly all major aspects of the Holo- petent and skeptical legal team. The
caust story: the “extermination” the- results were absolutely devastating
sis, the gas chambers, the gas vans, for the Holocaust orthodoxy. For de-
the shootings in the East, and the “6 cades, these mind-boggling trial tran-
million.” The truth of the Holocaust scripts were hidden from public view.
has been badly distorted for decades Now, for the first time, they have been
by the powers that be. Here we have published in print in this new book –
the rare opportunity to hear firsthand unabridged and unedited. 820 pp. pb,
from two prominent figures in Nazi 8.5“×11“
Germany. Their voices, and their ver- The Second Zündel Trial: Excerpts
batim transcripts from the IMT, lend from the Transcript. By Barbara
some much-needed clarity to the situ- Kulaszka (ed.). In contrast to Ernst
ation. 330 pp. pb, 6”×9”, index, bibl. Zündel’s book The Holocaust on Trial
The Holocaust on Trial: The Second (see description to the left), this book
Trial against Ernst Zündel 1988. By focuses entirely on the Second Zündel
Ernst Zündel. In 1988, the appeal Trial by exclusively quoting, para-
trial of Ernst Zündel for “knowingly phrasing and summarizing the entire
spreading false news about the Holo- trial transcript…
… 498 pp. pb, 8.5“×11“,
caust” took place in Toronto. This book bibl., index, b&w ill.
is introduced by a brief autobiographic Lies & Gravy: Landmarks in Hu-
summary of Zündel’s early life, and an man Decay – Two Plays. By Gerard
overview of the evidence introduced Menuhin. A long time ago, in a gal-
during the First Zündel Trial. This is axy far, far away, the hallucination
followed by a detailed summary of the of global supremacy was born. Few
testimonies of all the witnesses who paid it any attention. After centu-
testified during the Second Zündel ries of interference, when the end is
Trial. This was the most-comprehen- in sight, we’re more inclined to take
sive and -competent argument ever it seriously. But now, we have only
fought in a court of law over the Holo- a few years of comparative freedom
caust. The arguments presented have left before serfdom submerges us all.
fueled revisionism like no other event So it’s time to summarize our fall and
before, in particular Fred Leuchter’s to name the guilty, or, as some have
expert report on the gas chambers of it, to spot the loony. Sometimes the
Auschwitz and Majdanek, and the tes- message is so dire that the only way
timony of British historian David Ir- to get it across is with humor – to act
ving. Critically annotated edition with out our predicament and its causes.
a foreword by Germar Rudolf. 410 pp. No amount of expert testimony can
pb, 6“×9“, index. match the power of spectacle. Here
The First Zündel Trial: The Tran- are a few of the most-telling stages
script. In the early 1980s, Ernst Zün- in the chosenites’ crusade against hu-
del, a German immigrant living in manity, and their consequences, as
Toronto, was indicted for allegedly imagined by the author. We wonder
spreading “false news” by selling cop- whether these two consecutive plays
ies of Richard Harwood’s brochure will ever be performed onstage… 112
Did Six Million Really Die?, which pp. pb, 5“×8“
challenged the accuracy of the ortho-
For current prices and availability see book-finder sites such as

www.findbookprices.com; learn more at www.castlehill.shop
by simply scanning the QR code to the left with you smart device.
Published by Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 231, Dallastown, PA 17313, USA

Holocaust On Trial

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THE HOLOCAUST ON TRIAL

Castle Hill Publishers

ISBN: 978-1-59148-303-8 (hardcover)

Published by CASTLE HILL PUBLISHERS

Set in Times New Roman

Foreword to the 2022 Edition

Truth is hate in the eyes of those who hate the truth.

Zündel’s PR campaign enraged cer-

Furthermore, in a fundamental decision, the Commission has stated that in-

Although that website had never

from a French revisionist who had been approached in 1989 to publish a

In 1988, the body of English-language revisionist literature was rather lim-

Ellul would be doubtful. Activity, he said, carried to a certain point, makes

Chapter 1: Inquisition in Toronto

arly in the Sixteenth Century, a conflict known as the “Battle of the

E Books” raged across Germany. In one camp was Johann Reuchlin, a

watched mystified as millions of leaves and branches were sucked violently

Meanwhile, a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Company named

Natzweiler Concentration Camp in Alsace, and took wall-scrapings. He found

ry on a second, similar charge, writing and publishing a four-page pamphlet

Chapter 2: A Paper Witness

T he District Court of Ontario’s busy docket caused opening day in the

Nazi mass killings of Jews. In Anglo-Saxon law, everything must be proved

2. It is argued in the courts that a communist or communist-sympathizer will

Hilberg: By “liquidate” I mean the physical removal of everything in this

Hilberg: It does not exclude the existence of an order.

A bit later, Christie quoted to Hilberg from an interview he had given to Le

Biedermann: Yes, I’ve heard about it.

Christie: Well, if the Israeli government wants access, isn’t it automatically

Certainly, said Biedermann.

Chapter 3: Professor Browning

T he prosecution’s most-important witness, Dr. Christopher Browning,

them. Browning disputed this by briefly describing the “series of measures”

“Where is the speech now?” asked Pearson.

1. The materials collected in Argentina by Sassen.

Browning offered one instance in rebuttal. A small group of Western

essarily explicit, exact, precise orders, but a conveying to subordinates of his

Yes, said Browning, “compared with other changes… it is the biggest

When the allegation is so grave, asked Christie, shouldn’t a reasonable per-

Nor to Majdanek, added Browning, because “the testimonies with which I

said 700,000 left “pre-war Poland,” and asked Browning if Harwood’s

pretation and his interpretation to his facts. It is impossible to assign primacy

Harwood estimated 100,000, said Christie. He suggested to Browning,

“I do not have a particular number,” said Browning, but he gave some

directed against the enemy… Your cooperation is therefore earnestly sought

Chapter 4: Return to Auschwitz – and Belsen

W hen court resumed on Monday, February 29, Douglas Christie was

Most of Felderer’s slides showed the camps known as Auschwitz I and

advanced stages of collapse. He tentatively concluded that Crematories IV

bers, alleged gas chambers and crematory furnaces at Majdanek resembled

It was about two kilometers from Birkenau to Raisko, said Christophersen,

A disturbing aspect of Barton’s cross-examination was the fact that Doug-

Barton: Some were, yes.

During re-examination, Fann observed that the logical fallacies employed

Under cross-examination, Neumann was asked what he thought of Nation-

Pearson commenced his cross-examination of Smith with the apparent be-

Chapter 5: Mark Weber and Others

was in Einsatzgruppe D in southern Russia, and who claimed at Nuremberg

Christie turned next to the wartime aerial-reconnaissance photos of Ausch-

Later, Weber criticized the sometimes-deliberate confusion of two utterly

emaciated people shown in these photographs were supposed to have been

“Again,” said Weber, “that phraseology is tendentious and biased.”

reported by my Einsatzkommandos. How many of those were actually killed I