By Faurisson
The Unraveling of the Witnesses at the First Zündel Trial (1985)
The important victory won by revisionism in France on April 26, 1983,
would go on to confirm itself in 1985 with the first Zündel trial in
Toronto. I would like to dwell a moment on this trial in order to
underscore the impact on one's point of view, and especially as far as
the testimonies on the Auschwitz gas chambers are concerned: for the
first time since the war, Jewish witnesses were subjected to a regular
cross-examination. Moreover, without wanting to minimize the
importance of the second Zündel trial (that of 1988), I should like it
to be understood that the 1985 trial already contained the seeds for
all that was attained in the 1988 trial, including the report by
Leuchter and all the scientific reports which, in the aftermath, would
proliferate in the wake of the Leuchter Report.
In 1985, as also afterwards in 1988, I served as advisor to Ernst
Zündel and his lawyer, Douglas Christie. I accepted this heavy
responsibility only under condition that all the Jewish witnesses
would, for the first time, be cross-examined on the material nature of
the reported facts, bluntly and without discretion. I had noted, in
effect, that from 1945 to 1985, Jewish witnesses had been granted
virtual immunity. Never had any defense lawyer thought or dared to ask
them for material explanations about the gas chambers (exact location,
physical appearance, dimensions, internal and external structure), or
about the homicidal gassing (the operational procedure from beginning
to end, the tools employed, the precautions taken by the executioners
before, during and after execution).
On rare occasions, as at the trial of Tesch, Drosihn and
Weinbacher,[5] lawyers formulated some unusual questions of a material
nature, hardly troublesome for the witness, but these always found
themselves on the fringes of the more fundamental questions which
should have been asked. No lawyer ever demanded clarifications on a
weapon which, indeed, he had never seen and that no one had ever shown
him. At the major Nuremberg Trial of 1945-46, the German lawyers had
manifested total discretion on this point. At the proceedings against
Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the lawyer Dr. Robert Servatius had not
wanted to raise the question; in a letter on this subject dated June
21, 1974, he wrote me: "Eichmann hat selbst keine Gaskammer gesehen;
die Frage wurde nicht diskutiert; er hat sich aber auch nicht gegen
deren Existenz gewandt" [Eichmann himself had not seen any gas
chamber; the question was not discussed; but neither did he raise the
issue of their existence].[6]
At the Frankfurt Trial of 1963-65, the lawyers showed themselves to be
particularly timid. I should mention that the atmosphere was rather
inhospitable for the defense and the accused. This show trial will
remain as a blot on the honor of German justice as on the person of
Hans Hofmeyer, initially Landgerichtsdirektor, then Senatspräsident.
During more than 180 sessions, the judges and juries, the public
prosecutors and the private parties, the accused and their attorneys,
as well as the journalists who had come from around the world,
accepted as a complete physical representation of the 'crime weapon' a
mere map of the camp of Auschwitz and a map of the camp of Birkenau,
whereupon five minuscule geometric figures were inscribed for the
location of each of the alleged homicidal gas chambers, with the
words, for Auschwitz: "Altes Krematorium", and for Birkenau:
"Krematorium II", "Krematorium III", "Krematorium IV", and
"Krematorium V"! These maps[7] were displayed in the courtroom.
The Revisionists have often compared the Frankfurt trial with the
1450-1650 trials against witchcraft. Nevertheless, at least during
those trials, someone sometimes bothered to describe or depict the
witches' sabbath. At the Frankfurt trial, even among the lawyers who
made difficulties for a witness like Filip Müller, not one asked of a
Jewish witness or a repentant German defendant to describe for him in
greater detail what he was purported to have seen. Despite two
judicial visits to the scene of the crime at Auschwitz, accompanied by
some German lawyers, it seems not one of the latter insisted on any
technical explanations or criminological expertise regarding the
murder weapon. To the contrary, one of them, Anton Reiners, a
Frankfurt lawyer, pushed complacency to the point of having himself
photographed by the press while raising the chute cover by which the
SS supposedly sprinkled Zyklon B granules into the alleged Auschwitz
gas chamber.
And so at Toronto in 1985, I had fully decided to do away with these
anomalies, to break the taboo and, for starters, pose, or rather have
Douglas Christie pose, questions to the experts and Jewish witnesses
as one normally poses in every trial where one is supposed to
establish whether a crime has been committed and, if so, by whom, how
and when.
Fortunately for me, Ernst Zündel accepted my conditions and Douglas
Christie consented to adopt this course of action and to pose to the
experts and witnesses the questions that I would prepare for him. I
was convinced that, in this manner, all might change, and the veil
woven by so many false testimonies could be torn away. While I was not
counting on Ernst Zündel's acquittal and we were all resigned to
paying the price for our audacity, I nevertheless had hope that with
the aid of this far-sighted man of character, and thanks to his
intrepid lawyer, history, if not justice, would at last carry him into
historical prominence.
From the moment of the first cross-examination, a tremor of panic
began to creep its way amid the ranks of the prosecution. Every
evening and throughout most of the night, I would prepare the
questions to ask. In the morning, I would turn over these questions,
accompanied by the necessary documents, to lawyer Doug Christie who,
for his part and with the aid of his female collaborator, conducted
the essentially legal aspects of the effort. During the
cross-examinations, I maintained a position close to the lawyer's
podium and unremittingly furnished, on yellow notepads, supplementary
and improvisational questions according to the experts' and witnesses'
responses.
The expert cited by the prosecution was Dr. Raul Hilberg, author of
The Destruction of European Jews. Day after day, he was subjected to
such humiliation that, when solicited in 1988 by a new prosecutor for
a new trial against Ernst Zündel, Prof. Hilberg refused to return to
give witness; he explained the motive for his refusal in a
confidential letter wherein he acknowledged his fear of having to once
again confront the questions of Douglas Christie. From the
cross-examination of Dr. Raul Hilberg, it was definitively brought out
that no one possessed any proof for the existence either of an order,
a plan, an instruction, or a budget for the presumed physical
extermination of the Jews. Furthermore, no one possessed either an
expertise of the murder weapon (whether gas chamber or gas van), or an
autopsy report establishing the murder of a detainee by poison gas.
However, in the absence of evidence regarding the weapon and victim,
did there exist witnesses of the crime?
A testimony must always be verified. The usual first means of
proceeding to this verification is to confront the assertions of the
witness with the results of investigations or expert opinion regarding
the material nature of the crime. In the case at hand, there were
neither investigations, nor expertise relative to the alleged
Auschwitz gas chambers. Here is what made any cross-examination
difficult. Yet, this difficulty should not serve as an excuse, and one
might even say that a cross-examination becomes ever more
indispensable because, without it, there no longer remains any way of
knowing whether the witness is telling the truth or not.
Jewish Witnesses Finally Cross-Examined:
Arnold Friedman and Dr. Rudolf Vrba
For those persons interested in the technical and documentary means by
which we were nevertheless in a position to severely cross-examine the
two principal Jewish witnesses, Arnold Friedman and Dr. Rudolf Vrba, I
can do no better than to recommend a reading of the trial
transcript.[8] Pages 304-371 cover the questioning and
cross-examination of Arnold Friedman; the latter breaks down on pages
445-446 when he ends by acknowledging that he in fact saw nothing,
that he had spoken from hearsay because, according to him, he had met
persons who were convincing; perhaps, he added, he would have adopted
the position of Mr. Christie rather than that of these other persons
if only Mr. Christie had been able to tell him back then what he was
telling him now!
Dr. Vrba was a witness of exceptional importance. One might even say
about this trial in Toronto that the prosecution had found the means
of recruiting 'Holocaust' expert number one in the person of Dr. Raul
Hilberg, and witness number one in the person of Dr. Rudolf Vrba. The
testimony of this latter gentleman had been one of the principal
sources of the famous War Refugee Board Report on the German
Extermination Camps - Auschwitz and Birkenau, published in November
1944 by the Executive Office of President Roosevelt. Dr. R. Vrba was
also the author of I Cannot Forgive,[9] written in collaboration with
Alan Bestic who, in his preface, declares with regard to him:
"Indeed I would like to pay tribute to him for the immense trouble he
took over every detail; for the meticulous, almost fanatical respect
he revealed for accuracy." (p.2).
,Never perhaps, had a court of justice seen a witness express himself
with more assurance on the Auschwitz gas chambers. Yet, by the end of
the cross-examination, the situation had reversed itself to the point
where Dr. R. Vrba was left with only one explanation for his errors
and his lies: in his book he had, he confessed, resorted to "poetic
license" or, as he was wont to say in Latin, to "licentia poetarum"!
In the end, a bit of drama unfolded: Mr. Griffiths, the prosecutor who
had himself solicited the presence of this witness numero uno and yet
now apparently exasperated by Dr. Vrba's lies, fired off the following
question:
"You told Mr. Christie several times in discussing your book I Cannot
Forgive that you used poetic license in writing that book. Have you
used poetic license in your testimony?" (p. 1636).
The false witness tried to parry the blow but prosecutor Griffiths hit
him with a second question equally treacherous, this time concerning
the number of gassing victims which Vrba had given; the witness
responded with garrulous nonsense; Griffiths was getting ready to ask
him a third and final question when suddenly, the matter was cut short
and one heard the prosecutor say to the judge:
"I have no further questions for Dr. Vrba" (p. 1643).
Crestfallen, the witness left the dock. Dr. Vrba's initial
questioning, cross-examination and final questioning filled 400 pages
of transcripts (pp. 1244-1643). These pages could readily be used in
an encyclopedia of law under a chapter on the detection of false
witnesses.
The Prosecution Gives up on Calling Witnesses
Three years later, in 1988, during the second trial against Ernst
Zündel, the public prosecutor deemed it prudent to abandon any
recourse to witnesses. Canadian justice had apparently understood the
lesson of the first trial: there were no credible witnesses to the
existence and operation of the 'Nazi gas chambers'.
Little by little, every other country in the world has learned this
same lesson. At the trial of Klaus Barbie in France, in 1987, there
was talk about the gas chambers of Auschwitz but no one produced any
witnesses who could properly speak about them.[10] The attorney
Jacques Vergès, courageous yet not foolhardy, preferred to avoid the
subject. This was a stroke of luck for the Jewish lawyers who feared
nothing so much as to see me appearing at the side of Mr. Vergès. If
this gentleman had accepted my offer to counsel him, we in France
might have been able to strike a tremendous blow against the myth of
the gas chambers.
All the while in France, during several revisionist trials, Jewish
witnesses sometimes came to evoke the gas chambers but none of them
testified before the court as to having seen one or having
participated in a homicidal gassing by hauling bodies out of the 'gas
chambers'.
Today, gas chamber witnesses are making themselves extremely scarce
and the Demjanjuk trial in Israel, which once again has revealed how
much false testimony is involved in the matter, has contributed to the
suppression. Several years ago, it happened that I was aggressively
questioned at the rear of a law court by elderly Jews who presented
themselves as "living witnesses to the gas chambers of Auschwitz",
showing me their tattoos. It was necessary for me only to ask them to
look me in the eyes and to describe for me a gas chamber that
inevitably they retorted:
"How could I do this? If I had seen a gas chamber with my own eyes I
would not be here today to speak with you; I myself would have been
gassed also."
This brings us back, as one can see, to Simone Veil and her
declaration of May 7, 1983, about which we already know what we should
think
http://www.ihr.org/ http://www.natvan.com
http://www.thebirdman.org http://www.nsm88.com/
http://wsi.matriots.com/jews.html