Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Kulaszka Barbara
Title : 'Did Six Million Really Die ?' Report of the Evidence in the Canadian False News Trial of Ernst Zündel
Year : 1988

Link download : Kulaszka_Barbara_-_Did_Six_Million_Really_Die_Report_of_the_Evidence_in_the_Canadian_False_News_Trial_of_Ernst_Zundel.zip

In the early 1980s, Samisdat Publishers Ltd., under the signature of its president, Ernst Zündel, published a 32-page booklet entitled Did Six Million Really Die?. The booklet was published under a licence from Historical Review Press in England which prohibited Samisdat from making any changes whatsoever to the publication. Samisdat sent the booklet to hundreds of teachers, ministers, politicians and media personalities across Canada in the hope that interest could be aroused in discussing the subject explored in the booklet: did six million Jews really die pursuant to a systematic policy of extermination by Nazi Germany during World War II? Samisdat received no complaints regarding the booklet's factual accuracy. Nevertheless, in 1983, Samisdat's president, Ernst Zündel, was charged under a private information laid by Sabina Citron, a founder of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, with the criminal offence of "spreading false news" likely to cause racial and social intolerance. The charge was later assumed by the Crown and led to two lengthy jury trials in 1985 and 1988, both of which ended in convictions. There is no doubt that Did Six Million Really Die? contained errors. It was written hastily by a young University of London graduate, Richard Verrall (who used the pseudonym "Richard Harwood") in the early 1970s. The errors, however, were the type of minor error which one can find in the first edition of any non-fiction book. For example, Verrall wrote that the first allegation of mass murder of Jews was made against the Germans in 1943 by the Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin. In fact, the first charge of mass murder was made by the Allies in a Joint Declaration issued on December 17, 1942. The error played no significant part in the argumentation of the author. The significance and importance of Did Six Million Really Die? lay in its logic, its reasoning and its opinions. It critiqued the weaknesses of the evidence and arguments provided in orthodox "Holocaust" literature and it gave to the reader littleknown alternate views of what happened in the camps, such as those of Dr. Russell Barton (who was present in Bergen-Belsen immediately after its liberation) and Thies Christophersen (who was stationed near Auschwitz during the war). It summarized the findings of the French revisionist historian Paul Rassinier, whose works at that time were not known at all in the English-speaking world. In short, Did Six Million Really Die? did what polemical works were meant to do: it provided the reader with an alternate viewpoint on a historical event. Two juries convicted Zündel notwithstanding devastating cross-examination of Holocaust "survivors" and Holocaust historians by defence attorney Douglas H. Christie and notwithstanding expert evidence which crushed the basis of the Holocaust story, namely, the allegation that millions of Jews were done to death with industrial efficiency in gigantic gas chambers and disposed of in crematories and burning pits. It did not matter to the jury in the second Zündel trial in 1988 that the warden of a United States penitentiary, Bill M. Armontrout, testified to the enormous difficulties of gassing even one person today in gas chambers. It did not matter to the jury that a forensic investigation of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek by the only expert in gas chamber technology in the United States, Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., resulted in Leuchter's opinion that no gassings could have taken place in the alleged Nazi gas chambers. It mattered not that the Canadian crematory expert, Ivan Lagacé, testified that the thousands of persons alleged by Holocaust historians to have been cremated in Birkenau and Auschwitz daily were "ludicrous" and "beyond the realm of reality." It did not matter to the jury that the internationally-known British historian David Irving testified that he no longer believed in the "Holocaust" as it had been defined by its historians. It did not matter that Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg refused to return to testify in 1988 after testifying in 1985 for fear of cross- examination. It did not matter that the Crown could not produce one expert witness in gas chambers or crematories to refute the defence expert evidence. If the evidence presented at the 1988 trial of Zündel was not enough to convince the jury to acquit him, it was enough to start an explosive chain reaction of books and studies into the veracity of the gas chamber claim. The evidence of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and his report on the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek by far caused the most reverberations. The Jewish Holocaust lobby at first ignored the Leuchter Report, but as its influence mounted internationally, they scrambled to attempt to refute it. The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation published the books Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers and Truth Prevails: Demolishing Holocaust Denial: the end of "The Leuchter Report." The success of these books in "demolishing" the Leuchter Report can perhaps be measured by the fact that almost no one has heard of them; the mass media, usually so willing to use anything to smear Holocaust revisionism, has virtually ignored them. Apparently unable to find competent experts to support the gas chamber claim among engineers and crematory experts, the Jewish Holocaust lobby turned the use of their considerable resources instead to ensuring the destruction of Fred Leuchter's career and the passage of laws in France and Austria making "denial of the Holocaust" a criminal offence. A full account of the tactics used against Leuchter can be found in his article "Witch Hunt in Boston" (Journal of Historical Review, vol. 10, pp. 453- 460). While the Jewish lobby has succeeded in the political arena in having repressive laws enacted against revisionism, they have not succeeded in refuting revisionism on its merits, most importantly its technical and forensic evidence. The report of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., has engendered three further studies of the gas chambers. ...