Robert Faurisson : A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel

INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW

A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel

By Robert Faurisson

Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is generally accepted as a witness to the Jewish "Holocaust," and, more specifically, as a witness to the legendary Nazi extermination gas chambers. The Paris daily Le Monde emphasized at the time that Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Prize because: [1]

These last years have seen, in the name of so-called "historical revisionism," the elaboration of theses, especially in France, questioning the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and, perhaps beyond that, of the genocide of the Jews itself.

But in what respect is Elie Wiesel a witness to the alleged gas chambers? By what right does he ask us to believe in that means of extermination? 

In an autobiographical book that supposedly describes his experiences at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he nowhere mentions the gas chambers. [2]

He does indeed say that the Germans executed Jews, but ... by fire; by throwing them alive into flaming ditches, before the very eyes of the deportees! No less than that!

Here Wiesel the false witness had some bad luck. Forced to choose from among several Allied war propaganda lies, he chose to defend the fire lie instead of the boiling water, gassing, or electrocution lies. In 1956, when he published his testimony in Yiddish, the fire lie was still alive in certain circles. This lie is the origin of the term Holocaust. Today there is no longer a single historian who believes that Jews were burned alive. The myths of the boiling water and of electrocution have also disappeared. Only the gas remains.

The gassing lie was spread by the Americans. [3] The lie that Jews were killed by boiling water or steam (specifically at Treblinka) was spread by the Poles. [4] The electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets. [5]

The fire lie is of undetermined origin. It is in a sense as old as war propaganda or hate propaganda. In his memoir, Night, which is a version of his earlier Yiddish testimony, Wiesel reports that at Auschwitz there was one flaming ditch for the adults and another one for babies. He writes: [6]

Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load -- little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it -- saw it with my own eyes ... Those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my eyes.)

A little farther on there was another ditch with gigantic flames where the victims suffered "slow agony in the flames." Wiesel's column was led by the Germans to within "three steps" of the ditch, then to "two steps." "Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks."
An exceptional witness himself, Wiesel assures us of his having met other exceptional witnesses. Regarding Babi Yar, a place in Ukraine where the Germans executed Soviet citizens, among them Jews, Wiesel wrote: [7]

Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.

These words did not slip from their author in a moment of frenzy: first, he wrote them, then some unspecified number of times (but at least once) he had to reread them in the proofs; finally, his words were translated into various languages, as is everything this author writes.
That Wiesel personally survived, was, of course, the result of a miracle. He says that: [8]

In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?

In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the "gratuitous lie" with regard to the German concentration camps. She wrote: [9]

Those persons [who gratuitously lie] are, to tell the truth, much more numerous than people generally suppose, and a subject like that of the concentration camp world -- well designed, alas, to stimulate sado-masochistic imaginings -- offered them an exceptional field of action. We have known numerous mentally damaged persons, half swindlers and half fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation; we have known others of them -- authentic deportees -- whose sick minds strove to go even beyond the monstrosities that they had seen or that people said had happened to them. There have been publishers to print some of their imaginings, and more or less official compilations to use them, but publishers and compilers are absolutely inexcusable, since the most elementary inquiry would have been enough to reveal the imposture.

Tillion lacked the courage to give examples and names. But that is usually the case. People agree that there are false gas chambers that tourists and pilgrims are encouraged to visit, but they do not tell us where. They agree that there are false "eyewitnesses," but in general they name only Martin Gray, the well-known swindler, at whose request Max Gallo, with full knowledge of what he was doing, fabricated the bestseller For Those I Loved.

Jean-François Steiner is sometimes named as well. His bestselling novel Treblinka (1966) was presented as a work of which the accuracy of every detail was guaranteed by oral or written testimony. In reality it was a fabrication attributable, at least in part, to the novelist Gilles Perrault. [10] Marek Halter, for his part, published his La Mémoire d'Abraham in 1983; as he often does on radio, he talked there about his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto. However, if we are to believe an article by Nicolas Beau that is quite favorable to Halter, [11] little Marek, about three years old, and his mother left Warsaw not in 1941 but in October of 1939, before the establishment of the ghetto there by the Germans. Halter's book is supposed to have been actually written by a ghost writer, Jean-Noël Gurgan.
Filip Müller is the author of Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, [12] which won the 1980 prize of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA).
This nauseous best-seller is actually the work of a German ghost writer, Helmut Freitag, who did not hesitate to engage in plagiarism. [13] The source of the plagiarism is Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, another best-seller made up out of whole cloth and attributed to Miklos Nyiszli. [14]

Thus a whole series of works presented as authentic documents turns out to be merely compilations attributable to various ghost writers: Max Gallo, Gilles Perrault, Jean-Noël Gurgan (?), and Helmut Freitag, among others.

We would like to know what Germaine Tillion thinks about Elie Wiesel today. With him the lie is certainly not gratuitous. Wiesel claims to be full of love for humanity. However, he does not refrain from an appeal to hatred. In his opinion: [15]

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate -- for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead.

At the beginning of 1986, 83 deputies of the German Bundestag took the initiative of proposing Wiesel for the Nobel Peace Prize. This would be, they said, "a great encouragement to all who are active in the process of reconciliation." [16] That is what might be called "going from National Socialism to national masochism."
Jimmy Carter needed a historian to preside over the President's Commission on the Holocaust. As Dr. Arthur Butz said so well, he chose not a historian but a "histrion": Elie Wiesel. Even the newspaper Le Monde, in the article mentioned above, was obliged to refer to the histrionic trait that certain persons deplore in Wiesel:

Naturally, even among those who approve of the struggle of this American Jewish writer, who was discovered by the Catholic François Mauriac, some reproach him for having too much of a tendency to change the Jewish sadness into "morbidity" or to become the high priest of a "planned management of the Holocaust."

As Jewish writer Leon A. Jick has written: "The devastating barb, 'There is no business like SHOAH-business' is, sad to say, a recognizable truth." [17]

Elie Wiesel issues alarmed and inflammatory appeals against Revisionist authors. He senses that things are getting out of hand. It is going to become more and more difficult for him to maintain the mad belief that the Jews were exterminated or were subjected to a policy of extermination, especially in so-called gas chambers. Serge Klarsfeld has admitted that real proofs of the existence of the gas chambers have still not yet been published. He promises proofs. [18]

On the scholarly plane, the gas chamber myth is finished. To tell the truth, that myth breathed its last breath several years ago at the Sorbonne colloquium in Paris (June 29-July 2, 1982), at which Raymond Aron and François Furet presided. What remains is to make this news known to the general public. However, for Elie Wiesel it is of the highest importance to conceal that news. Thus all the fuss in the media, which is going to increase: the more the journalists talk, the more the historians keep quiet.

But there are historians who dare to raise their voices against the lies and the hatred. That is the case with Michel de Boüard, wartime member of the Resistance, deportee to Mauthausen, member of the Committee for the History of the Second World War from 1945 to 1981, and a member of the Institut de France. In a poignant interview in 1986, he courageously acknowledged that in 1954 he had vouched for the existence of a gas chamber at Mauthausen where, it finally turns out, there never was one. [19]

The respect owed to the sufferings of all the victims of the Second World War, and, in particular, to the sufferings of the deportees, demands on the part of historians a return to the proven and time-honored methods of historical criticism.

Summary

Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated eyewitnesses to the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly autobiographical book Night, he makes no mention of gas chambers. He claims instead to have witnessed Jews being burned alive, a story now dismissed by all historians. Wiesel gives credence to the most absurd stories of other "eyewitnesses." He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons sent to their deaths each day in Buchenwald.
When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners," or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the two decided to leave with their German captors.
It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for the genuine sufferings of the victims of the Second World War, that historians return to the proven methods of historical criticism, and that the testimony of the Holocaust "eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance.

Notes

1. Le Monde, October 17, 1986. Front page. 
2.  
3. There is one single allusion, extremely vague and fleeting, on pages 78-79: Wiesel, who very much likes to have conversations with God, says to Him: "But these men here, whom You have betrayed, whom You have allowed to be tortured, butchered, gassed, burned, what do they do? They pray before you!" (Night, New York, Discus/Avon Books, 1969, p. 79). In his preface to that same book, François Mauriac mentioned "the gas chamber and the crematory" (p. 8). The four crucial pages of "testimony" by Elie Wiesel are reproduced in facsimile in: Pierre Guillaume, Droit et Histoire (La Vieille Taupe, 1986), pp. 147-150. In the German-language edition of Night (Die Nacht zu begraben, Elischa [Ullstein, 1962]), on 14 occasions the word "crematory" or "crematories" has been falsely given as "Gaskammer" ("gas chamber[s]"). In January of 1945, in anticipation of a Russian takeover, the Germans were evacuating Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, a young teenager at the time, was hospitalized in Birkenau (the "extermination camp") after surgery on an infected foot. His doctor had recommended two weeks of rest and good food but, before his foot healed, the Russian takeover became imminent. Hospital patients were considered unfit for the long trip to the camps in Germany and Elie thus could have remained at Birkenau to await the Russians. Although his father had permission to stay with him as a hospital patient or orderly, father and son talked it over and decided to move out with the Germans. (See Night, p. 93. See also D. Calder, The Sunday Sun [Toronto, Canada], May 31, 1987, p. C4.) 
4.  
5. See the US War Refugee Board Report, German Extermination Camps: Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington, DC), November 1944.
6. See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293). Published in the IMT "blue series," Vol. 32, pp. 153-158.
7. See the report in Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4, and the UP report in the Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 2.
8. Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43, 44, 79, 93.
9. Paroles d'étranger (Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 86.
10. "Author, Teacher, Witness," Time magazine, March 18, 1985, p. 79.
11. "Le Système concentrationnaire allemand [1940-1944]," Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, July 1954, p. 18, n. 2.
12. Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p. 5.
13. Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19.
14. Published by Stein and Day (New York). Paperback edition of 1984. (xii + 180 pages.) With a foreword by Yehuda Bauer of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
15. Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: un caso di plagio, Parma (Italy): 1986. See also: C. Mattogno, "Auschwitz: A Case of Plagiarism," The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1990, pp. 5-24.
16. Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published by Fawcett Crest (New York).
17. Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: "Appointment with Hate"), New York: Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New York: Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178.
18. The Week in Germany (published in New York by the German government in Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2.
19. "The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American Public," Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p. 316.
20. VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37.
21. Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6.

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About the Author Robert Faurisson, born in 1929, has for years been regarded as Europe's leading Holocaust revisionist scholar.
He was educated at the Paris Sorbonne, and served as associate professor at the University of Lyon in France from 1974 until 1990. He is a recognized specialist of text and document analysis. After years of private research and study, Dr. Faurisson first made public his skeptical views about the Holocaust extermination story in articles published in 1978 in the French daily Le Monde. His writings on the Holocaust issue have appeared in several books and numerous scholarly articles.


http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/wiesel.shtml
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How our Understanding of History is Manipulated

How our Understanding of History is Manipulated Much of What Western Governments Tell Us is Fabricated March 07, 2012; By Andrew J. Fell Original Article

It's becoming increasingly apparent that in order for us, the general population, to understand the deeper issues of the current geopolitical situation, it is imperative for us to understand the relevant history.

This may sound somewhat obvious, but I would argue that this is a fundamental sticking-point when discussing such matters. It is difficult to link individuals to the antisocial and unethical actions they perpetrate [1:2] without a historically accurate point of reference. For example, when discussing matters such as the proposal that 9/11 may have been initiated by our 'leaders' [3], I find that people quite often respond with the simple question 'why?' It seems absurd to think that our 'leaders' would do something quite so inhuman and immoral for some sort of political gain.

I will not attempt here to go into what their motives were, but rather into why it is that we, the general public, rarely remember the lessons of the past and continue to be misled about the circumstances leading to each and every conflict. At this juncture I would suggest that the reader check out an article by John Pilger entitled 'Our children are learning lies' in which he clearly sets out several examples of how we are taught about an historic event at school and how this information will in turn have a direct effect on the formation of our future perceptions of the world [4] Unfortunately, this information can all too often bear little or no relation to the actual event (Pilger uses Vietnam as a prime illustration of this), because the language and information used to teach us essentially pre-programs our comprehension of future warfare, automatically predisposing us to whichever side has been identified as the 'goodies' while creating a vested dislike or even hatred of the 'baddies'. Perhaps 'baddie' should be rephrased in Orwellian terms as 'a figure of hate'. From what I remember of my own learning on Vietnam, I recall thinking that the Americans became involved in order to help protect the 'Democratic South' against the 'Communist North' - this is probably what most people believe. According to Pilger, this analysis of the Vietnam conflict is far from the truth; in fact, almost completely contrary to the reality of the situation. The excerpt below comes from his article referring to a school textbook written on the subject: It says that under the 1954 Geneva Accord: 'Vietnam was partitioned into communist north and democratic south.' In one sentence, truth is dispatched. The final declaration of the Geneva conference divided Vietnam 'temporarily' until free national elections were held on 26 July 1956. There was little doubt that Ho Chi Minh would win and form Vietnam's first democratically elected government. Certainly, President Eisenhower was in no doubt of this. 'I have never talked with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs,' he wrote, 'who did not agree that . . . 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.' Not only did the United States refuse to allow the UN to administer the agreed elections two years later, but the 'democratic' regime in the south was an invention. One of the inventors, the CIA official Ralph McGehee, describes in his masterly book Deadly Deceits how a brutal expatriate mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New Jersey to be 'president' and a fake government was put in place. 'The CIA,' he wrote, 'was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media].' Phony elections were arranged, hailed in the west as 'free and fair', with American officials fabricating 'an 83 per cent turnout despite Vietcong terror'. The GCSE guide alludes to none of this, nor that 'the terrorists', whom the Americans called the Vietcong, were also southern Vietnamese defending their homeland against the American invasion and whose resistance was popular. For Vietnam, read Iraq. What this essentially tells us is that, for all the democratic ideals that America and the West claims to espouse, as soon as someone who does not agree with their viewpoint is voted in they will do anything in their power to subvert and undermine them. This is rephrased and then becomes the 'official' history of events, finding its way into everything from textbooks to documentaries – George Orwell and 1984, eat your heart out! You don't have to look far to find similar examples of this subversive reinvention of recent history – simply look at how Hamas has been marginalized despite winning a clear majority in the Palestinian legislative election of 2006. [6] Hamas was not 'permitted' to govern, despite winning the overall support of the Palestinian people, due to their not having the same agenda as the policy makers in Washington. That is not to say that we should agree with all Hamas policies (or anyone else's, for that matter), but that we should at least respect the fact that the Palestinian people, through seemingly fair elections, have chosen their own government. The Americans evidently did not: they swiftly imposed sanctions and withheld aid from the Palestinian Authority in protest at the audacity of the Palestinians voting for an anti-American party [7]. The power sharing deal between Hamas and Fatah hammered out afterward under American influence is the equivalent of the Conservative Party in Britain winning over 50% of the seats in a general election and then being forced to govern in coalition with the previous losing Labour Administration - a ridiculous prospect but arguably a comparable scenario. [8] According to the words of former Republican Presidential hopeful, Newt Gingrich, the Palestinians are an "invented people" and are merely part of the larger Arab community, despite the fact that each Middle Eastern country has its own form of Arabic language and customs [9]. It could be argued that these types of statement serve to de-legitimize any section of society. Looking at history, this stratagem has been used as an excuse for ethnic cleansing, whether it be the United States in their treatment of Native Americans in the 19th Century; or 1930s Germany rounding up of the mentally ill, homosexuals, Jews and any other so-called undesirables; or the genocides in Bosnia or Rwanda in the 1990s – all the way through to Australia's expunging of aboriginal culture during the first half of the 20th Century. To say that Palestinians are not a people is evidently to completely ignore the reality of their current political situation. Very few countries have the same boundaries as they did 200 years ago, so it can be reasonably argued that the Palestinians who reside in the "occupied territories” are on the land of their forefathers and have every right to be there. Claiming that they are part of the larger Arab community and not a people is to imply that no Arab country is sovereign unto itself; something that would certainly be disputed on talking to most Moroccans, Saudis or Jordanians. Let us not forget that although the Israeli nation is intrinsically a modern construct, this doesn't mean that the Israeli people don't have a sense of nationhood or national culture; they evidently do. Are Walloon-Belgians to be considered as 'French' simply because they have the same language as France? Is Scotland, Wales or the United States to be classified as 'English' simply because they share similar customs? Unfortunately, this type of rhetoric is all too often put forward; and even if the effect is not immediate, it is likely to influence the thinking of a significant number of people over time as the corporate media repeatedly relays these words to the wider population. For further examples of this duplicity, we could briefly consider the undermining of Daniel Ortega as leader of Nicaragua, and the deposition of Mohammad Mosaddegh as Prime Minister of Iran. Ortega led a movement to oust the previous brutal U.S.-backed regime under Somoza and had put in place massive public programs to increase the living standards of his countrymen [10: 11]. Despite being lauded as the most free elections ever conducted in Nicaragua's history, the Western establishment media was falling over itself to imply they were in fact rigged. [12]. The illegal methods used by the U.S. and its agencies included the funding of an armed insurgency, later became known as the Iran-Contra affair – a huge topic in itself, well worth reading about as an illustration of the extent to which those in power will go in order to destabilize governments that do not agree with their policies. [13] Democratically elected Mosaddegh had instituted changes to transfer control of Iranian oil from Anglo-American interests to Iran. This resulted in a U.S.-sponsored regime change which saw the brutal Shah being imposed on Iran for the next 25 years, until his overthrow by the Islamic revolution of 1979 [14]. This fact is little known or cared about by Western observers, but it is widely known and taught throughout Iran. As Robert Fisk mentioned in a recent article in The Independent, 'It is a weird irony that Iranians know the history of Anglo-Persian relations better than the Brits' [15] This is something worth thinking about when looking at current Western-Iranian relations. My point here is that these three events (and there are many more), although in the public domain are not widely known about or understood by the general population. Moreover, I would argue that discussion of these events is actively suppressed by the Western-controlled media, as this in itself would show the collusion of Western agencies in these events. However, it is my belief that the situation is more dangerous than this, as noted at the start of this article. It is precisely this lack of information that prevents the general public from making informed decisions on a whole range of current areas of controversy -- be it Iran, Syria, Libya or Sudan. We are presented with dubious information from a young age through to adulthood via the public-education system and the corporate-owned media, and it is hard to filter it out and be objective. Grant Allen may have been onto something when he wrote that "No schooling was allowed to interfere with my education.” [16] There is much that could be said on this topic, but my main point is that it is absolutely vital for those who have an interest in these matters to critically appreciate and understand the history of how public opinion has been manipulated, how perceptions have been altered, and how half-truths have been purposely put forward by the media. It can be argued that in this way the media support the "Military Industrial Complex's" agenda [17]. George Santayana wrote 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' [18]. If it is true that we are being deliberately misinformed and poorly educated about still-relevant historical events, shouldn't we begin to at least question why this is the case? Might there be something more sinister at work in the world today? All the information is still freely available and out there on the Web or in books for anyone who cares to know. It's up to each one of us to find out everything we can so that we can understand the realities behind global and national policy making, thus enabling us to make informed and rational commentary and contributions to society. This is where a revolution in thinking should start. This is where the morally "repugnant" elite control structure should end. [19] End-notes and further reading: 1 - http://www.ponerology.com/ 2 - http://www.waking-you-up.com/articles-on-psychopaths-articles-on-cluster-B-Personalities-Articles-from-authors-on-psychopathy.html 3 http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041221155307646 4 - http://www.johnpilger.com/archive-december/page0e77.html?partid=374 5 - http://www.johnpilger.com/archive-december/page0e77.html?partid=374 6 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_legislative_election,_2006 7 - http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-02-09/news/0702090099_1_hamas-led-administration-mecca-agreement-rival-palestinian-groups-fatah 8 - http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-02-09/news/0702090099_1_hamas-led-administration-mecca-agreement-rival-palestinian-groups-fatah 9 - http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/newt-gingrich-ignorant-racist-say-palestinians 10 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front 11 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua 12 - http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2479 13- http://www.corbettreport.com/episode-102-know-your-history-iran-contra/ 14 - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh 15 - http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-sanctions-are-only-a-small-part-of-the-history-that-makes-iranians-hate-the-uk-6269812.html 16 - Rosalba: the Story of Her Development by Olive Pratt Rayner /Grant Allen, published by Putnam's, 1899, pg 101 - http://www.archive.org/stream/rosalbastoryher00allegoog#page/n114/mode/2up/search/interfere Note: this quote (or variation of) is also sometimes attributed to Mark Twain [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/09/25/schooling-vs-education/] 17 - http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html 18 - The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense by George Santayana. Scribner's, 1905: 284 19 - Excerpt from President John F. Kennedy Secret Society Speech - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhZk8ronces Andrew Fell lives in the Czech Republic and is a lecturer of English at a Social Work College in Prague. He has a keen interest in geo-politics, ethics, history, cooking and playing music. He can usually be found armed with a smile, sipping a cup of tea at a čajovna in Prague.