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Iran. Faurisson. Interview (Tehran, December 13, 2006)
Interview with Professor Robert Faurisson at the Guest House of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran
And so it is that we’re being served up again with the “Babi Yar massacre”.
At the Nuremberg trial, the place name “Babi Yar” (in fact, the name of a
ravine outside Kiev) didn’t come up, but a certain document simply
reported, in one sentence, that the Germans in Kiev, which they’d recently
taken, had, following a spate of arson attacks blamed on NKVD agents,
arrested, in a reprisal measure, all the city’s Jews, then, on the 29th
and 30th of September 1941, had apparently transported a number of them in
the direction of the locality known as Babi Yar to execute, in the end —
take note of this figure: marvel at the precision — no fewer than 33,771!
The document is neither dated nor signed. It’s one of a set selected by a
lieutenant Walter Rothschild of London. In itself, what this sentence
relates is implausible. The real massacre of Katyn, perpetrated by the
NKVD and later imputed to the Germans, had left about 4,400 men — formally
attested — dead, in over two months (March-April 1940). By comparison, in
the Babi Yar massacre there would thus, in two days, have been nearly
eight times more victims than at Katyn in two months. Such a fantastic
butchery would have left countless traces and the surroundings themselves
would have been turned upside down, if only by the efforts made in the
forbidding task of mass burial, and then, as some will tell us, of
unearthing followed by open-air cremations. However, the aerial
photographs of the time show no signs of any such thing and no material
evidence of this huge crime is available. These days, in the Ukraine,
there’s a Roman Catholic priest who’s been getting a lot of attention,
father Patrick Desbois, a Frenchman and great friend of the Jews. His
speciality consists in travelling the length and breadth of the land in
search of “mass Jewish graves”. He has the good Ukrainian peasants of a
given area informed that he’ll soon be calling at such or such locale and
that he intends to garner testimonies about the slaughters of Jews by the
Germans during the war. It’s wholly in the inhabitants’ interest to be
able to boast that the environs actually possess such mass graves over
which, afterwards, may be erected monuments that may in turn attract the
odd foreign tourist. The “witnesses” get together and prepare a story. The
priest then pays his visit and has his photograph taken with the
country-folk as they point towards some spot or other. One may, to begin
with, be astonished at the age of certain witnesses photographed thus far:
they are quite plainly below the necessary age, which would normally be
about 80. But there’s something more astonishing still: these supposed
mass graves will not be dug open; no disinterment or any material
verification will be carried out, all under the admirable pretence that
the Jewish religion prohibits the touching of Jewish corpses; however,
it’s enough to look in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1978) at the entry
“Autopsies [plural] and Dissection [singular]” to see that there is no
such prohibition at all. Only at a single location, Busk outside Lvov,
have fifteen common graves been dug open, but none of the skeletons found
there were examined and the sites were all covered over with a thick layer
of concrete, meaning no authentication will be very possible in future! A
curious way of respecting a body in accordance with Jewish law! The
historian will thus have to be satisfied with what father Desbois, a
clever man, tells us the witnesses told him. Hence, unverified numbers of
unfound and unshown victims will be added up and, at the end, we shall be
told that the Ukraine contains so many mass graves with so many Jewish
victims. And all this under the seal of the respective representatives of
the Roman Catholic Church, the “Yahad-in-Unum” association and “Zaka”, a
group presenting itself as “dedicated individuals determined […] to accord
the proper respect for the dead in accordance with Jewish law, heritage
and tradition”. As at Auschwitz, tourism will stand some chance of
thriving.
One question. You speak of “Shoah by bullets” and of documents. I myself
think I recall seeing documents showing maps with sketches of coffins
accompanied by the number of Jews executed at the spots thus indicated.
Apparently, these would be documents of the SS or the Einsatzgruppen sent
from the Russian front to Berlin. They would show how many Jews had been
killed by Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D. Is this not evidence? What’s your
view here?
I know those documents and, in particular, the one with the coffins and
the figures. It was the American author Arthur R. Butz who first dealt
with them in a critical manner, in 1976, in his remarkable work The Hoax
of the Twentieth Century. Too often it’s a question of suspect, unsigned
documents, coming from Soviet sources. The one that you’re speaking of
makes me think of the aerial photos of Auschwitz, published in 1979 by
Brugioni and Poirier, two former CIA men. In these photos one can make out
the Auschwitz crematoria with a naïve indication bearing the words “Gas
Chamber[s]”. Here, on the sketches of coffins, an anonymous hand has
written figures supposedly representing the totals of Jews slain. There’s
no indication of any sources that might make possible a verification of
the figures’ origins.
Have you noted how each time a common grave is discovered in Russia and
trouble is taken to make an examination it’s found that it contains
victims of Stalin and not of Hitler?
Finally, it’s a good idea, in any case, to be circumspect as concerns the
evaluations sent by military men to superiors in Berlin.
One might say that, caught up in the war, the Germans who had to send
reports to Berlin hadn’t the leisure to draw up, as in peacetime,
impeccable reports with all the necessary signatures on them.
That’s merely a hypothesis on your part, for countless German documents of
that era show they remained quite meticulous indeed.
A hypothesis, so be it, but isn’t it asking a bit too much, insisting on
perfect evidence, which perhaps has never existed?
When there is no evidence to hand, one refrains from making accusations.
One’s entitled to say “Rumour has it…” or “It seems plausible that…”, but
not to go any further. To sum up here, I’d say that, as concerns the great
massacres of Jews imputed to the Einsatzgruppen, I’m waiting for criminal
investigations to be carried out, like those that were made for Katyn. And
don’t let anyone come and tell us the corpses all went up in smoke! Even
if those mounds of bodies had been burnt in the open air, that would have
called for quite unlikely quantities of wood or fuel, and, what’s more,
traces would be easy to find, if only in the form of teeth or bone
fragments. Still today, bones of men of Napoleon’s army are found from
time to time in Russia.
But what do you make of the trials and the clues that demonstrate the
crime and allow a judgment to be made?
Clues are but apparent signs that simply render the existence of a thing
probable. They’re what Jean-Claude Pressac, that friend of the Klarsfeld
couple, called in his big American book “beginnings of proof” or “traces”.
Let’s be wary of people who’ve got the idea that by adding a quarter-proof
to a quarter-proof plus a half-truth, you obtain one proof. That practice
was, it seems, employed in certain witchcraft trials of centuries past and
it’s what was done in a number of court proceedings in the 20th century,
especially against those modern-day sorcerers known as the satanic “Nazi
war criminals”.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that these days there are trials
where real proof cannot be produced but where clues suffice to try the
accused.
Quite right. In France, for example, the judges can even invoke what they
call their “innermost conviction”. A judge can do that, but not the
historian. How many times has it been discovered, with the passing of
time, that a judicial error was committed at some moment or other? In the
particular instance of the gigantic case brought against Germany, I ask
that no one be content with his or her “innermost conviction”. I demand
proof, one single piece of actual proof. I note that the accusing
historians like Poliakov and Hilberg, and a fair number of others, have
wound up acknowledging that there is no proof. You’re well aware that Raul
Hilberg, at first (in 1961), had the nerve to write that Hitler had given
two orders to exterminate the Jews. He added that this extermination had
been carefully organised from top to bottom within the chain of command.
However, in 1983, under the revisionists’ pressure, he had to admit (and
later, in 1985 at the first Zündel trial in Toronto, confirmed under oath)
that there hadn’t been, after all, either an order, a plan or a budget.
Then he fell back on the most pitiful of explanations: according to his
new analysis, all had been done without an order and without a plan
through “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a
far-flung bureaucracy”, the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. I call that
“invoking the workings of the (Jewish) Holy Spirit”.
May I give you still another point?
Naturally.
Personally, something that really struck me, speaking of false proof, was
that solemn session at the UN, where American Defence Secretary Colin
Powell was seen claiming to demonstrate the existence of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. I can assure you that the revisionist I am perceived
at the very instant that it was all a sham. Glaringly obvious. We laugh
about it today but it’s disquieting that no one, there at the UN, should
have risen to cry out his indignation and proclaim before the whole
assembly: “I raise a solemn protest against this stunt of Mr Powell’s, who
takes us for fools. We all know that, in the phial he’s brandishing,
there’s surely nothing but some harmless liquid; here we’re just being
served a cinematic ploy. We all know as well that, in the photographs
projected on the screen, nothing but innocuous buildings have been shown,
and that it’s laughable to write, again up on the screen, that those
structures house weapons of mass destruction.” It’s quite precisely the
same put-up job that in 1979 Brugioni and Poirier, those ex-CIA men, went
in for when, showing us crematoria, they presumed to tell us those
buildings housed weapons of mass destruction called “gas chambers”. Same
sort of inscriptions, same crude lies.
To pick up on a question that I’ve already put, do you think the German
National Socialist regime committed injustices towards the Jews?
You said “crimes” and here you say “injustices”. I don’t know how to
qualify the measures that Germany was led to take regarding people whom,
not without reason, she held to be hostile or potentially dangerous. Any
nation at war may be led to take measures that will certainly be cruel for
the families affected. If, tomorrow, war broke out between France and
Italy, it’s obvious that the French government would intern or put under
house arrest all Italians residing in France and that the Italians would
act likewise with respect to the Frenchmen who happened to be in Italy.
So then, for you, Germany was at war with those whom one calls “the Jews”.
Yes, she was at war with “the Jews” just as “the Jews” were at war with
Germany.
And if we take things to their logical conclusion when observed from a
military viewpoint, at bottom, the totality of those potentially dangerous
persons could have been put in concentration camps or kept under house
arrest. But their numbers were such that it wasn’t practicable. Germany
therefore decided to take measures which, as the war intensified, grew
progressively harsher. Let’s take the example of the compulsory wearing of
the star, from a certain moment and in certain parts of German-occupied
Europe (in the southern zone of France, the Jews didn’t have to wear the
star).
This measure amounted to placing the Jews under probationary supervision.
But do note that it’s less cruel and far less of an exaction than locking
families away in camps as the Germans did in certain cases and as the
Americans and Canadians themselves did, not only with the Japanese on
their territory, which was normal, but also with Americans and Canadians
of Japanese origin. As for the reason why the Germans decided to implement
the wearing of the star, it was above all with a view to ensure the German
soldier’s safety. Many Jews belonged to groups of those whom the Allies
called Résistants and whom the Germans, for their part, called terrorists.
You can well imagine that the German soldiers weren’t going to look hard
and close at other pedestrians in the street in an attempt to see whether
they were walking near possibly dangerous individuals. That star warned
them. In Paris, in the underground, where each train was made up of five
carriages, the star-wearers had to get on the fifth carriage, in which the
German soldiers weren’t allowed to ride.
According to you, was this treatment of the Jews just? Couldn’t it be
argued that in France or Germany the Jews were well assimilated and that,
for example, the links between the Jews of Paris and those of New York
were, anyhow, not very strong?
It’s not a matter, strictly speaking, of a moral question but of military
necessity. From a moral viewpoint I can tell you that the treatment of the
Jews in Germany shortly before the war, at the time of Kristallnacht,
seems to me unworthy, even though I understand the exasperation that the
Germans could feel in the face of the growing number of Jewish
provocations, the Jewish organisations’ ceaseless calls for a crusade
against the New Germany and, most notably, the assassination in Paris of
vom Rath, the embassy counsellor, by the Jew Grynszpan. Just as unworthy,
in my eyes, was the fact that Goering should impose on the Jews a fine of
a billion marks for the damage then caused. But, you know, “to judge is to
compare” and, as concerns horrors of all kinds visited on minorities, no
nation has the right to dispense lessons to others. As I’ve had occasion
to say, every war is a butchery; the winner is a good butcher and the
loser, a less good one; thus, at the end of a war, the winner may give the
loser lessons in butchery but he’s not entitled to mete out lessons in
rights, justice and virtue to him. Yet that is indeed what, at Nuremberg,
the winners of the Second World War did to the losers, in proceedings of a
rare hypocrisy.
But you do agree, after all, with the principle that international justice
must be able to punish war crimes and, as it’s said today, “crimes against
humanity”?
As a principle I’ll agree readily enough; but see how, in practice, it’s
almost always, at the end of any war, the loser that this justice finds
guilty. It’s a revolting spectacle, this hunting party of prosecutors and
judges in black robes, all grouped around soldiers crushed by defeat who
now see their conquerors parading about in a courtroom. The American army,
although the bloodiest of all armies, never has any explaining to do
before the international community. To come back to the Second World War,
how can one allow that those who made alliance with Stalin should be able
to address the least rebuke to those who made alliance with Hitler? Let’s
suppose, taking up the usual comparison, that Stalin was the plague and
Hitler, cholera; I don’t see how those who have, in reality, chosen the
plague, can find fault with others for having, in reality, chosen cholera.
What right had the French general Leclerc, who was more or less in
American uniform, on May 8, 1945, when Germany had surrendered, to have a
group of twelve or thirteen prisoners taken out of a hospital and shot
without trial just for being in a more or less German uniform? Let’s point
out that it was mainly from horror or fear of Soviet-style communism that
so many young Frenchmen had signed up with either the Milice or the German
army.
Do you justify the nature of the reprisals carried out by the German army
in France?
Let’s talk about the bomb attacks and assassinations in France against the
German occupation forces or French partisans of Collaboration. A large
number of Germans died or were injured as a result of such attacks. There
were also many acts of destruction against the means of transport and
communication — for example telephone cables — , army barracks and depots,
crop harvests; there were weapons trafficking operations, espionage for
the Allies, aid to deserters, escape networks, there was the Communist
propaganda calling for ever more bomb and sniper attacks. What could the
German army officers in charge do? At first they had either the culprits
themselves or hostages shot by firing squad. Then, they realised that the
French population, on the whole, both strongly disapproved of the murders
of German soldiers and felt considerable indignation at the reprisals made
by the occupation forces. The Germans risked alienating this population.
Thus, from a certain point, they preferred, in numerous instances, to
apply deportation instead of execution. Towards the end, what with the big
increase in Résistance attacks in the wake of the Allied landings in
Normandy, they turned again to shootings, carrying out a large number of
them. In France, the total number of persons shot by sentence of a German
military tribunal or court martial seems to be situated, for the entire
duration of the war, between 4,520 and 4,540, and not, as was stated at
the Nuremberg trial, at 29,660. The Communists have long endorsed far
greater figures: they haven’t shrunk from presenting their party as “the
Party of the 75,000 firing squad victims”; for his part, Communist chief
Maurice Thorez dared to tell Stalin, on November 18, 1947: “In France
during the war, 350,000 Communists were shot by the Germans” (in the
review Communisme, summer 1996, p. 47). In France, the number of
Communists shot by firing squad was, in reality, a few hundred. When, in
1945, French troops occupied their part of Germany, they didn’t find
themselves confronted with any armed, organised resistance bent on killing
French soldiers. Otherwise they would have behaved as mercilessly as their
army had done at the time of the Ruhr valley occupation or in its actions
against “the rebels” in Madagascar, Indochina or Algeria. I have in mind a
poster that was put up all over one German city in the French zone,
showing the corpses photographed in a concentration camp and stating that
any person caught removing it would be condemned to death! From the moment
a country becomes the occupying power in another territory, it will be
inclined to instate a reign of terror there if those being occupied rebel,
and especially if they take up weapons to do so.
Going on to quite another question, today in Germany, in the trials for
disputing the Holocaust, the judges, in accordance with the law, warn both
the accused and his lawyer telling them: “The Holocaust is common
knowledge. It’s an established fact. You haven’t the right to dispute it,
nor even to try to prove your good faith or to justify yourself by
spelling out the reasons why you don’t believe in the reality of the
genocide of the Jews and the Nazi gas chambers”. What do you think of this?
This “common knowledge” argument stems from Article 21 of the Charter of
the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, which states: “The Tribunal
shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take
judicial notice thereof”. It’s outrageous. What, here, does “common
knowledge” mean? Facts of “common knowledge” for whom? According to what
criteria does the Nuremberg Tribunal decide that such or such a fact is of
“common knowledge” while some other fact isn’t? The answer is it’s the
Tribunal that, without giving its reasons, arbitrarily pronounces that
such or such a fact is of “common knowledge”, and grants itself permission
to make its assessments in this regard without adducing any relevant
evidence. Pre-emptively, from the very start it forbids anyone to remind
it that in proper justice all must be proved. As there exists no instance
of appeal, here we have a court that grants itself full power to violate
the duties of the judge. It’s in the secrecy of their deliberations,
without consulting anyone, that these judges choose such or such a “fact”
and decree that it need not be proved. The procedure is a cynical one.
In regard to revisionism, I’ve had dealings with people of the judiciary
in France, England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and English-speaking
Canada. I delight in hearing them all use a complicated and pretentious
language to express the simplest and clumsiest ideas. So it was that at
Nuremberg the judges, at bottom, decreed: “It’s like this because this is
how it is”, or else: “This is how it is because we’ve decided that it
should be so”. But Article 21 of that strange Tribunal’s Charter has an
even bigger surprise in store for us in its next sentence, and here the
very peak of cynicism is attained. Listen to this: “[The Tribunal] shall
also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports
of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of the committees
set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes,
and of records and findings of military or other Tribunals of any of the
United Nations”, that is, any of the States that happen to be the declared
enemies of the accused. Here’s what amounts to saying: “On these matters
the prosecution is automatically right and the defence need only hold its
tongue”. Hence one will not be surprised at the fact, for example, that
the document of Soviet origin concluding that the Katyn massacre was a
German crime (with 11,000 victims, it was stated!) should have been
considered right from the start as being “of probative value”. The German
barristers Stahmer and Laternser, who wanted to challenge it, found
themselves being shut up by a reminder of the magical Article 21 given all
at once by the Soviet prosecutor, by presiding judge Lawrence, and — the
extreme of the extreme — by Soviet judge Nikitchenko acting as if he
himself were a prosecutor. |
