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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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gas chambers; whereas others are only apparent, such
as the number of the latter. Rassinier here sees the "proof" that it is a
document that has been coldly "forged," "falsified," etc. It is necessary, on
the contrary, to see there the spontaneity of the writing, the author being in
a hurry to deliver up the memories which oppress him without checking himself
nor even re-reading himself attentively. Interviewed by Pierre Joffroy in 1967,
Madame Bek, the owner of the Hotel Mohren at Rottweil where Gerstein was lodged
in April-May 1945 and where he wrote his accounts, related (25, pp. 235 236):
"I remember. The man was overwhelmed. He
spoke to us of the concentration camps, of his past experience. Alone, without
news of his family.., we sometimes invited him to have coffee with us. (...)
Having made the acquaintance of the minister Hecklinger, he had borrowed his
(Hecklinger's typewriter to type up his report. He was always at the stationery
shop to supply himself with paper, but (paper) there was less and less of it at
that time." No "falsifier" or "forger" would ever have let such
obvious contradictions appear in his work.
There is also the
affirmation that 700 or 800 people were piled up in premises of an area of 20
or 25 m2. This is very difficult to believe if one takes literally both the
number of persons indicated and the area given. That is what Rassinier did
naturally and triumphantly, without taking into account the real circumstances
described in the "report" and which exclude the possibility of Gerstein's
having determined with precision the area of the chambers and the exact number
of persons. What the text of the "report" does allow one to conclude is that
the chambers were not very vast and that the number of persons who filled them
up to the very maximum attained the hundreds.
It seems useless to
continue the analysis of Rassinier's work on the "Gerstein report," his
obsession which he desperately sought to discredit with the assistance of the
most detestable processes: deceit, deformation of the texts and the facts,
insinuation, ambiguity. All in vain.
We have seen that none of his
"arguments" withstands a serious examination. None of his wiles to create false
mysteries and false problems to obscure the real ones stands up: Gerstein did
in fact see the gas chambers of Belzec in operation in 1942; he did in fact see
how an industrial enterprise for the extermination of men and women and
children worked, and he did in fact relate all of this several times before the
end of the war to thoroughly reliable persons. It was in fact he himself, in
his own hand, spontaneously and freely, who drew up his declaration of 1945. It
is in reality a terrible act of accusation.
8. A Mysterious Visitor
and his "Testimony" (?)
But it is impossible to conclude this
chapter without giving a place to the strange story that Rassinier told in his
work "The Drama of the European Jews" (pp. 79-91). It is the sole and unique
attempt at a positive contribution to our knowledge on the Nazi extermination
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The Holocaust and the Neo-Nazi Mythomania
© 1978, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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