Faurrison and the Zyklon B Question

by V. A.

A student essay from Dr. Elliot Neaman's History 210 class (historical methods - spring 2001)

The Holocaust has always been an important part of Jewish history.  During World War II The Nazi’s killed millions of people just because they were Jewish, mentally ill, prisoners of war, or were trying to help the Jewish people.  The Nazi’s did not start the Holocaust with the idea that they were going to round up all of the Jews and kill them.  They started off moving the Jews into their own Ghettos and not allowing them to take part in the everyday jobs in Germany. Many Jews such as teachers, doctors, lawyers and bankers lost their jobs because the Nazi’s believed that they were trying to take over the world. Jews were told to wear the star of David on their clothes this way, if they did go out into the cities people would know that they were Jewish. People were allowed to do anything to the Jews and not be punished. In Germany there were many Jews that owned their own business. They often found Germans boycotting their stores or the Germans would not allow Jews to shop at Jewish stores.

The Holocaust did not just start one day because the German’s hated the Jews, but it took a few years for the Nazi’s to start killing the Jews in concentration camps. The hatred for Jewish people was always prevalent in Germany. When the Germans had the opportunity to kill off the Jews they took the opportunity. The gas chambers were not the first way that the Germans killed people. The Nazi’s killed people through executions. The Nazi’s could kill a Jew without being punished. When the concentration camps were built the gas cambers were put in later. It was not until the middle of the war that the Nazi’s found an effective way to kill the Jews through the gas chambers. Women and children were not excluded from the horrendous acts of the Nazi’s.

It is hard to believe that some people do not believe that the Holocaust ever happened. These few people call themselves Holocaust revisionists. A revisionist is a person who believes that something is an error and they want to change the error. They take the facts and theories to disprove what ever they want to disprove. They do not want to be called Holocaust deniers because they do not believe that they are denying history, they are just trying to find out what the truth is. Holocaust revisionists believe that people made up the whole Holocaust, so they would have somebody to blame for all the deaths during the war. There are many different reasons why people believe that the Holocaust never happened. They believed that 6 million people did not die during the Holocaust and they are determined to find out what really happened at any cost. Robert Faurisson believes himself to be a Holocaust revisionist. He wants to disprove that there was ever a Holocaust.

He was born in Shepperton, England in 1929, but moved to France when he was very young. His mother was English and his father was French, he had three sisters and four brothers. His family often went hungry during World War II. When the war ended he started reading articles about what allegedly happened to the Jews during the war. At first he did not question the fact that there were gas chambers where millions of Jewish people were killed. When he started reading more about the alleged accounts of Holocaust survivors he saw that they were not consistent. He found that often many of them later would come back saying that in some concentration camps the gassings never happened. He wanted to learn for himself if 6 million Jews really died during the holocaust. After reading more information he realized that the Holocaust never happened and he was willing to tell the world the truth about the Holocaust. “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber,” states Robert Faurisson a leading Holocaust revisionist who asked this question throughout his life. Faurisson wanted anyone to prove that there was ever any homicidal gassing done during World War II.

Robert Faurisson believed that he is not anti-Semitic. He just does not feel that it is right for people to accuse the Nazi’s of something that they did not do. He feels that the Holocaust never happened and people just wanted somebody to blame because they are not able to explain what really happened to the Jews. “He insists that he himself is guided in his quest by no prejudice and no ulterior motive, merely an imperative to pursue objective and verifiable truth.” (The Nation 10/3/94) It is interesting to find out that he believes that he is not anti-Semitic and he is just trying to protect history. Even though when he is doing research he leaves out information and overlooks other information if it goes against what he is trying to say.

Robert Faurisson wrote different articles telling people why the Holocaust never happened. One of his biggest arguments is that there never were any gas chambers. He challenged people to come up with proof that there were actual gas chambers. He says that Zyklon B was used in the camps, but Zyklon B was only used as a disinfectant. Zyklon B was used to stop Typhus and the crematory ovens were used for sanitary purposes. Robert Faurisson also says that Hitler never made any direct order to kill Jews. If Hitler ever said he wanted to kill a Jew there would have been documents showing Hitler’s orders and there would be plans drawn out for the gas chambers. There was never any paper work saying that there were ever any gas chambers.

Robert Faurisson first found out about revising the Holocaust from Martin Broszat’s revelation in 1960. It stated that there was never any gassing in the camps in Germany. This made Faurisson start to think that the Holocaust was just a hoax. By 1974 he was “absolutely sure” that the Nazis never used the gas chambers during the war. He felt like he needed to tell the world about what he found out. He began questioning the gas chambers after the war reports came out saying that many camps had gas chambers, but later it was found out that only a few lead them. He believes that because they made one mistake then all of the reports must be mistakes. The gas chambers were not used to kill people, but were used for wartime propaganda. When the media shows people who have died they say that they were killed because of the gas chambers, but all it really shows are dead people not how they died. Faurisson does not believe that the pictures from the media shows are connected. If the media did try to show Faurisson photographs during the war he says that they are not proof. He said that if there were gassings going on then there would be smoke coming out of the buildings, but in the photograph there was no smoke. He uses Auschwitz as one of his main concentration camps that he looks at the gas chamber dilemma. At Auschwitz there were two main gas chamber areas that Faurisson looked at, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II. At Auschwitz II there are only remains left of the gas chambers there are no gas chambers standing today. Faurisson believes that the remains are not proof that there were every gas chambers at Auschwitz. He says that the buildings could have been used for anything. He uses the main plans at Auschwitz and shows that the buildings were never called gas chambers on the blueprints of Auschwitz, so how do we know that the remains of buildings were gas chambers. Faurisson was looking for anybody to tell him that, “I have been interned in such a camp and I have seen there, with my own eyes, a building which was undoubtedly a gas chamber” at Auschwitz. Unfortunately nobody has been able to tell Faurisson that they saw buildings that were undoubtedly gas chambers.

Zyklon B, which has different names such as Hydrogen Cyanide, hydrocyanic acid, and prussic acid. Zyklon B is supposed to be extremely poisonous to human beings. The gas is colorless and has a slight odor similar to “bitter-almond.”(Microsoft Corporation) In the gas chamber the gassing occurred very rapidly, so the prisoners did not have any of the side effects; they would have collapsed suddenly and died. Zyklon B prevents the cells to receive oxygen and causes a person to die due to lack of oxygen.

Faurisson says that the gas if used would be in the chamber for more then 30 minutes, in which that time prisoners would be ordered to start taking the bodies out of the chambers. This gas would be very deadly and take much longer to air out, so people could not go in and remove the bodies. He said it was not safe to enter the chambers 24 hours after a gassing.

Faurisson based his argument on the statistics that people need to stay clear of Zyklon B for 24 hours if it was in their homes. If a person did have Zyklon B in their homes the gases would be tramped into their furniture and would take 24 hours to air out. Faurisson over looks the fact that the gas chambers “were empty of any items except a small number of phony shower heads and dead bodies. The floors and ceilings were made of bare concrete.” (Lipstadt 1994; 224) The gas chambers did not have anything in them that needed to be aired out, so it was safe for them to go into the gas chamber.

 The number of people who went into the gas chambers was impossible and not physically capable was another argument that Faurisson had. The prisoners who were helping move the dead bodies would have been killed themselves by the gas. Faurisson is wrong here because he over looks the eyewitness testimony about what the prisoners wore when they were moving the bodies. “According to both former prisoners and SS personnel, the Sonderkommandos, the inmates who carried out the bodies, wore gas masks.” (Lipstadt 1994; 224) Faurisson likes to over look important facts, if they do not agree with his theory. Hydro cyanic acid is inflammable and explosive, so how were the workers able to enter the chamber while smoking and how could the crematory ovens be so close to the chambers.

The gas chambers were really “cold storage rooms.” The officers only used Zyklon B for disinfecting people, so they would not get sick. If people did die during the war it was not because from gas chambers, but because Typhus was passed from inmate to inmate. There were many inmates in the camps, so it was hard to keep them all healthy. If one person got a disease it was hard to keep them isolated, so they would not contaminate the other inmates. Faurisson also does not believe in any of the witnesses who were part of the Holocaust. He believes that they cannot be used as any source because they could have been making up the whole Holocaust. He believes the Jews are smart enough to make up this elaborate story about the Holocaust. He also believes that Zyklon B is a very dangerous drug and if the officers were on top of the aligned gas chamber they would have died if they dropped Zyklon B into the gas chambers from the top. The gases would have come up and killed them.

Faurisson uses the proof from Leuchter who he believed was a true engineer and was also a revisionist that the gassing at Auschwitz never happened. Leuchter allegedly went to Auschwitz and got some of the remains from the gas chambers and did scientific testing on them and found that they did not have a lot of Zyklon B in the findings. He believed because of his findings that the gas chambers could not have killed the Jews. Faurisson uses Leuchter’s findings as factual evidence to help him prove in his writings that there were never any people killed because of the use of gas chambers. Faurisson after going to Auschwitz and looking at the layout of the alleged camps found that if there was gassing in the chamber it would have exploded. The sizes of the gassing chambers were not the right size for people to have died. Faurisson is always asking for proof that the gas chambers existed, but when asked what kind of proof he wanted he did not say what kind of proof would be good for him.

Faurisson was using what he called scientific evidence from Leuchter. When looking at Leuchter findings people found out that he was not a true scientist. Leuchter clamed to be an engineer and new how to do real scientific research. It turns out that Leuchter never graduated from engineering school. The data that he had was not collected in a proper manner. Leuchter just went to Auschwitz and collected remains from buildings that were supposedly the gas chambers. He did not ask anyone if he could take the data and use it. Another reason why the remains did not show much Zyklon B was because the remains have been exposed to the summer and winter elements since 1945; so the Zyklon B could not have been detected in its entirety. The problem with Faurisson using Leuchters reports to back up his theory about the gas chambers is that Leuchter was not a scientist, so Faurisson could not use his reports to back up his theory.  

Faurisson believes that if the officers were dropping Zyklon B from the roofs of the gas chamber they would have died. He did not take in consideration that the officers could have been wearing masks or that they could have closed the door where they dropped in the Zyklon B and climbed off the roof states Shermer in his book Denying History. Zyklon B was dropped down into the chambers because it had less of a psychological effect on the men. The men did not feel like they were directly killing the people because they did not have to see the prisoners die. It would take a few minutes of the Zyklon B to go all of the way up to the ceiling of the “gas chambers.” Faurisson states that the crematories were built too close to the “gas chambers,” so if the Nazi’s were using Zyklon B the buildings would have exploded. He over looks the fact that the crematories were built with brick and had doors that were sealed so no heat would get out of the buildings. Zyklon B was not in contact with the heat or the fires within the crematory. In addition Zyklon B would not have caused an explosion because it was not used in high enough levels to cause an explosion. “It takes 300 parts per million (ppm) of hydrocyanic acid to kill human beings; it takes 56,000 ppm to cause an explosion, a 186 fold difference.” (Shermer-2000; 131) This means that in the concentration camps Zyklon B was not used in enough force to have been close enough to explode.

Faurisson states that gas chambers were never used for killing people, but for disinfecting. It helps control diseases and lice from contaminating other people with in the camps. He states that the Zyklon B was only used a little to kill the lice. It turns out that more Zyklon B is needed to kill lice then it is to kill a human being. If Faurisson were correct it would have turned out that the lice would have died along with the other disease, but the people also would have been killed. Faurisson looked at Auschwitz, which was a concentration camp were gas chambers were present. He did his research at Auschwitz, which the gas chambers were rebuilt and some of the buildings were destroyed. There is no concrete evidence that the remains that he was testing were from the gas chambers because all of the buildings were destroyed. It is hard to tell which piece of ruble went to what building. When Faurisson was trying to do research from Crematorium I at Auschwitz he said that he did not find any traces of Zyklon B in the gas chambers. When he did research on the material of the gas chambers he did not tell people that the pieces that he did his research on could have been new material. Auschwitz was destroyed and the gas chambers today are only reconstructions of what the gas chambers would have looked like. Not all of the material was original, so he very easily could have had a sample of material that was placed there when people were reconstructing the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Zyklon B was used in the gas chambers because it was available and easy to get to in Germany. Zyklon B was made by the “Desgesch Company of Frankfurt am Main and supplied through a wholesaler, Tesch and Stabenow of Hamburg.” (Bedenbaum/Gutman 1994; 167) It turns out that it would have been very easy to transport and deliver Zyklon B to Auschwitz. Before Zyklon B was used for mass murder it was used to disinfect Schutzstaffel (SS) men’s bunkers. The first time Zyklon B was used at Auschwitz for the purpose to have a mass murder was in September 1941. “850 inmates, including 200 who were ill and 650 who were Soviet prisoners of war, were locked into a building and gassed with prussic acid, or Zyklon B.” (Bedenbaum/Gutman 1994; 187) The only problem with this experiment is that the officers did not know how much Zyklon B was needed to kill a human being. They did not put enough Zyklon B into the chambers so the prisoners did not die right away like planned. Some of the prisoners were still alive after two days. The officers soon found out that at 27 degrees Celsius Zyklon B will vaporize. They were able to find out that Zyklon B was painless to use and there was no blood or guts coming from the victim to clean up. The gas was very easy to use and it did its purpose, which was to kill millions of Jews. If Faurisson is convinced that the gas chambers never existed then why are there so many reports on how Zyklon B was used throughout Auschwitz!