|
|
 |
 |
AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
|
| |
 |
Back |
 |
Contents |
Page 12 |
|
Home
Page |
Forward |
 |
| |
Preface
by Beate and Serge
KLARSFELD |
| |
| A scientific rebuttal of those who
deny the gas chambers |
| |
Jean-Claude Pressac deserves our praise: he has become one of
the rare researchers who specialize in the field of gas chambers
extermination technique, this in spite of the fact that he is not a
Jew and was very nearly a revisionist.
After eight years at
the la Flèche Military School, J-C Pressac chose, instead of
becoming an officer, to break with the army and study pharmacy.
As a newly established pharmacist, he decided at the age of
about thirty to write a work of historical fiction describing the
universe that would have resulted from a German victory in the
second world war.
J-C Pressac went to Germany and Poland to
get the necessary background for his novel, and discovered the world
of the concentration camps and the mechanisms by which the Jews were
exterminated. He was able to overcome his initial doubts thanks to
his rational and scientific training, to resist the advances of
Faurisson and his clique and listen only to the call of truth. This
was a demanding and difficult path to follow, for in his case it was
not only a matter of a comparative study of the testimonies of
victims and executioners to determine the points of convergence or
contradiction concerning the gas chambers: J-C Pressac's original
and eminently logical approach was to go to Auschwitz, working in
the archives and inspecting the site, as often as was necessary – a
total of over three months in about fifteen visits between 1979 and
1987 – in order to thoroughly master his subject.
It is now
almost ten years that we have been cooperating with Jean-Claude
Pressac. In 1980, in fact, we found the original album of
photographs that an SS man had taken of the arrival of Hungarian
Jews at Auschwitz in 1944, an album that had been brought back by a
deportee, Lili Jacob, when the camps were liberated. The complete
Auschwitz Album was published for the first time by
our Foundation in August 1980. The following year a version for a
wider public was produced by Random House. But as soon as our
version was published, J-C Pressac had contacted us to study the
original photographs, whose quality was better than that of the
published version. When Le Seuil decided to produce a French version
of the Random House edition, we put them in touch with J-C Pressac
and he was able to considerably enrich the French edition with his
pertinent commentaries and an annex containing a number of
photographs and explanations concerning Krematorien II, III, IV and
V. This was published in 1983.
The previous year, 1982, in
issue 107 of Le Monde Juif, the journal of the Centre
de Documentation Juive Contemporaine de Paris, directed by Georges
Wellers whose works are references on the subject, Jean-Claude
Pressac had published an important article entitled Les
Krematorien IV et V de Birkenau et leurs chambres à gaz.
Then, in 1985, when Editions Gallimard and Le Seuil jointly
published L'Allemagne Nazie et le Génocide Juif a
fundamental work containing the proceedings of the Colloquium held
in July 1982 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales J-C
Pressac’s detailed contribution Etude et Réalisation des
Krematorien IV et V d'Auschwitz Birkenau formed an integral
part of it. The same year, 1985, our Foundation published in English
a work by Jean-Claude Pressac entitled The Struthof
Album. |
| |
"We decided in fact to publish a study, for the
fortieth anniversary of Hitler’s defeat, devoted to the terrifying
episode of the assassination of 87 Jews, including 30 women, for
the purpose of constituting a collection of skulls and skeletons
to be kept at the Institute of Anatomy of a large German
university. Because they were Jewish, these men and women were
selected, asphyxiated, dismembered and carved up by men of
science. Racist science. We asked Jean-Claude Pressac to study, in
particular, how these Jewish victims were gassed at Struthof, near
Strasbourg ...."
"The record is a terrible one, but the
world must confront it, for it exemplifies the horror of the
Jewish condition during the Nazi period. Those things that
happened must be known. They cannot and must not be forgotten.
Such is the main ambition of the publications we have
undertaken." |
| Meanwhile, in 1983, we had asked J-C Pressac to write a
reference work with all the available drawings and photographs,
devoted to the technique and operation of the gas chambers at
Auschwitz-Birkenau. This initiative on our part was by no means
exceptional because already in 1978 we had published in English a
very detailed work entitled The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi
Mythomania, containing three parts: The Launching of
the Final Solution by Dr Joseph Billig. The Existence
of Gas Chambers and The Number of Victims and the
Korherr Report by Georges Wellers. In our introduction to
this work, the first published by our Foundation, we explained our
approach, which ten years later remains the same: |
| |
"We have taken the initiative not only for the
conception of this book, its edition and publication, but also for
its distribution. Our objective is to provide people of good faith
with the precise facts which incontestably refute the lies of the
Neo-Nazi propaganda relevant to the Holocaust.
"Those
propagandists who seek to rehabilitate Nazism are perfectly aware
that what marks it indelibly is the infamous genocide of the
Jewish people. They take advantage of the credibility of the
public and the more or less unconscious desire of the latter that
this nightmarish mass murder had never taken place. That is why
the Neo Nazis have during recent years launched an offensive which
has had a certain success. Their principal themes are the
following: that Hitler was not responsible for the "final
solution," that the gas chambers as a means of exterminating the
Jews never existed, that the number of Jewish victims has been
very considerably exaggerated.
"This propaganda is
internationally coordinated, and the most virulent of these Neo
Nazi publications appear in the major languages. In the following
pages, we shall give striking examples of this propaganda which
seeks to weaken the cause of the Jews in general as well as that
of Israel.
| |
AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
|
Back |
Page 12 |
Forward |
|
|
