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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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Page 551 |
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45 and 46 my visit to paid Berlin. It may appear foolish, but I
am proud of this.
All these trips were made at my own
expense. I owed nothing to Faurisson, not being a robot for his
exclusive use. I had undertaken the work in order to complete
documentation I required for my novel and there was no question of
my giving this up in this up in favor of a “crazy hypothesis” that
was turning out to look increasingly unlikely and indefensible as I
delved further into the drawings and files. His battle was not mine.
I first continued my own research concerning the founder and former
commandant of the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp, SS
Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Hoess. The manuscript of his
“Autobiography” was long declared to be “mythical” by
the French extreme right. Faurisson claimed it had emerged directly
from the headquarters of falsifying Soviet Polish Stalinist
communists. When I asked Iwaszko for this manuscript, he brought it
to me [Photo 20] without any hesitation and I was able to
consult it at my leisure. The thing that struck me the most was that
Hoess had written several hundred pages without any crossings out.
At first I thought that this could not be his first version, but the
resultant of previous draughts. I was no doubt wrong, for many
people, very self-controlled, write in this fashion [which is far
from being my own!]. I discovered, but I was not the first to do so,
that only the autobiographical part [about half the pages] had been
published at that time, and that virtually all the notes Hoess had
written about the officials with whom he had been in contact and
about various institutions of the Third Reich that he knew, remained
unknown. I would add that Hoess’ manuscript was written in pencil [a
normal constraint in the case of prisoners, but of capital
importance in the eyes of the revisionists because it the
facilitated falsification by the Polish Stalinist employees of the
Auschwitz Museum]. I was also able also able to see that the French
translation by Constantin de Grunwald, published by René Juillard in
1959, was of mediocre quality. The only valid and usable French
version is that by Jerzy Brablec in “Auschwitz vu par les
SS” Auschwitz State Museum. 1974. Unfortunately, this
edition presents only that part of the memoirs concerned with
Auschwitz. What is more, the preface of this book written by Jerzy
Rawicz is somewhat excessive. It is difficult to follow him in his
presentation of a Hoess [commandant of the camp] who slipped [and
the guards?] at night [like a robber] into the basement [what
comfort] of Block 11 [known as the “Death Block”] to join a
prisoner, Eleonora Hodys, and succeeded in making her pregnant
[whereas Dr Guilbert, American psychoanalyst at Nuremberg maintained
that Hoess was not much inclined to philandering]. Rawicz also
claims that Judge Jan Sehn, who led the interrogation of Hoess for
his trial [Photos 21 to 25], who won his confidence and
succeeded in making him talk completely frankly, despite the few
illusions that Hoess could have had about the fate awaiting him, was
mistaken in his assessment of the truth of what his “client” had to
say. Who knew Hoess better, Jerzy Rawicz or Jan Sehn [Photo
26], who had countless interviews with Hoess? |
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Photo 18:
(Photo by the author) |
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| Dummy crematorium
chimney rising above a row of Huts in B.Ia |
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Photo 19:
(Photo
by the author) |
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The dummy Krematorium
chimney for the film “MUR”. |
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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