A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel
By
Robert Faurisson

Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He is
generally accepted as a witness to the Jewish "Holocaust,"
and, more specifically, as a witness to the legendary Nazi
extermination gas chambers. The Paris daily Le
Monde emphasized at the time that Wiesel was awarded
the Nobel Prize because: [1]

These last years have seen, in the name of so-called
"historical revisionism," the elaboration of theses,
especially in France, questioning the existence of the Nazi
gas chambers and, perhaps beyond that, of the genocide of
the Jews itself.

But in what respect is Elie Wiesel a witness to the
alleged gas chambers? By what right does he ask us to believe
in that means of extermination? In an autobiographical book
that supposedly describes his experiences at Auschwitz and
Buchenwald, he nowhere mentions the gas chambers. [2] He does
indeed say that the Germans executed Jews, but ... by fire; by
throwing them alive into flaming ditches, before the very eyes
of the deportees! No less than that!

Here Wiesel the false witness had some bad luck. Forced
to choose from among several Allied war propaganda lies, he
chose to defend the fire lie instead of the boiling water,
gassing, or electrocution lies. In 1956, when he published his
testimony in Yiddish, the fire lie was still alive in certain
circles. This lie is the origin of the term Holocaust. Today
there is no longer a single historian who believes that Jews
were burned alive. The myths of the boiling water and of
electrocution have also disappeared. Only the gas
remains.

The gassing lie was spread by the Americans. [3] The
lie that Jews were killed by boiling water or steam
(specifically at Treblinka) was spread by the Poles. [4] The
electrocution lie was spread by the Soviets. [5]

The fire lie is of undetermined origin. It is in a
sense as old as war propaganda or hate propaganda. In his
memoir, Night, which is a version of his earlier Yiddish
testimony, Wiesel reports that at Auschwitz there was one
flaming ditch for the adults and another one for babies. He
writes: [6]

Not far from us, flames were leaping from a ditch,
gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew
up at the pit and delivered its load -- little children.
Babies! Yes, I saw it -- saw it with my own eyes ... Those
children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not
sleep after that? Sleep has fled from my
eyes.)

A little farther on there was another ditch with
gigantic flames where the victims suffered "slow agony in the
flames." Wiesel's column was led by the Germans to within
"three steps" of the ditch, then to "two steps." "Two steps
from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to
go into a barracks."

An exceptional witness himself, Wiesel assures us of
his having met other exceptional witnesses. Regarding Babi
Yar, a place in Ukraine where the Germans executed Soviet
citizens, among them Jews, Wiesel wrote: [7]

Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after
month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from
time to time, geysers of blood spurted from
it.

These words did not slip from their author in a moment
of frenzy: first, he wrote them, then some unspecified number
of times (but at least once) he had to reread them in the
proofs; finally, his words were translated into various
languages, as is everything this author writes.

That Wiesel personally survived, was, of course, the
result of a miracle. He says that: [8]

In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 persons to their
deaths each day. I was always in the last hundred near the
gate. They stopped. Why?

In 1954 French scholar Germaine Tillion analyzed the
"gratuitous lie" with regard to the German concentration
camps. She wrote: [9]

Those persons [who gratuitously lie] are, to tell the
truth, much more numerous than people generally suppose, and
a subject like that of the concentration camp world -- well
designed, alas, to stimulate sado-masochistic imaginings --
offered them an exceptional field of action. We have known
numerous mentally damaged persons, half swindlers and half
fools, who exploited an imaginary deportation; we have known
others of them -- authentic deportees -- whose sick minds
strove to go even beyond the monstrosities that they had
seen or that people said had happened to them. There have
been publishers to print some of their imaginings, and more
or less official compilations to use them, but publishers
and compilers are absolutely inexcusable, since the most
elementary inquiry would have been enough to reveal the
imposture.

Tillion lacked the courage to give examples and names.
But that is usually the case. People agree that there are
false gas chambers that tourists and pilgrims are encouraged
to visit, but they do not tell us where. They agree that there
are false "eyewitnesses," but in general they name only Martin
Gray, the well-known swindler, at whose request Max Gallo,
with full knowledge of what he was doing, fabricated the
bestseller For Those I Loved.

Jean-François Steiner is sometimes named as well. His
bestselling novel Treblinka (1966) was presented as a work of
which the accuracy of every detail was guaranteed by oral or
written testimony. In reality it was a fabrication
attributable, at least in part, to the novelist Gilles
Perrault. [10] Marek Halter, for his part, published his La
Mémoire d'Abraham in 1983; as he often does on radio, he
talked there about his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto.
However, if we are to believe an article by Nicolas Beau that
is quite favorable to Halter, [11] little Marek, about three
years old, and his mother left Warsaw not in 1941 but in
October of 1939, before the establishment of the ghetto there
by the Germans. Halter's book is supposed to have been
actually written by a ghost writer, Jean-Noël
Gurgan.

Filip Müller is the author of Eyewitness
Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, [12] which
won the 1980 prize of the International League against Racism
and Anti-Semitism (LICRA). This nauseous best-seller is
actually the work of a German ghost writer, Helmut Freitag,
who did not hesitate to engage in plagiarism. [13] The source
of the plagiarism is Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness
Account, another best-seller made up out of whole cloth
and attributed to Miklos Nyiszli. [14]

Thus a whole series of works presented as authentic
documents turns out to be merely compilations attributable to
various ghost writers: Max Gallo, Gilles Perrault, Jean-Noël
Gurgan (?), and Helmut Freitag, among others.

We would like to know what Germaine Tillion thinks
about Elie Wiesel today. With him the lie is certainly not
gratuitous. Wiesel claims to be full of love for humanity.
However, he does not refrain from an appeal to hatred. In his
opinion: [15]

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a
zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate -- for what the German
personifies and for what persists in the German. To do
otherwise would be a betrayal of the
dead.

At the beginning of 1986, 83 deputies of the German
Bundestag took the initiative of proposing Wiesel for the
Nobel Peace Prize. This would be, they said, "a great
encouragement to all who are active in the process of
reconciliation." [16] That is what might be called "going from
National Socialism to national masochism."

Jimmy Carter needed a historian to preside over the
President's Commission on the Holocaust. As Dr. Arthur Butz
said so well, he chose not a historian but a "histrion": Elie
Wiesel. Even the newspaper Le Monde, in the article mentioned
above, was obliged to refer to the histrionic trait that
certain persons deplore in Wiesel:

Naturally, even among those who approve of the
struggle of this American Jewish writer, who was discovered
by the Catholic François Mauriac, some reproach him for
having too much of a tendency to change the Jewish sadness
into "morbidity" or to become the high priest of a "planned
management of the Holocaust."

As Jewish writer Leon A. Jick has written: "The
devastating barb, 'There is no business like SHOAH-business'
is, sad to say, a recognizable truth." [17]

Elie Wiesel issues alarmed and inflammatory appeals
against Revisionist authors. He senses that things are getting
out of hand. It is going to become more and more difficult for
him to maintain the mad belief that the Jews were exterminated
or were subjected to a policy of extermination, especially in
so-called gas chambers. Serge Klarsfeld has admitted that real
proofs of the existence of the gas chambers have still not yet
been published. He promises proofs. [18]

On the scholarly plane, the gas chamber myth is
finished. To tell the truth, that myth breathed its last
breath several years ago at the Sorbonne colloquium in Paris
(June 29-July 2, 1982), at which Raymond Aron and François
Furet presided. What remains is to make this news known to the
general public. However, for Elie Wiesel it is of the highest
importance to conceal that news. Thus all the fuss in the
media, which is going to increase: the more the journalists
talk, the more the historians keep quiet.

But there are historians who dare to raise their voices
against the lies and the hatred. That is the case with Michel
de Boüard, wartime member of the Resistance, deportee to
Mauthausen, member of the Committee for the History of the
Second World War from 1945 to 1981, and a member of the
Institut de France. In a poignant interview in 1986, he
courageously acknowledged that in 1954 he had vouched for the
existence of a gas chamber at Mauthausen where, it finally
turns out, there never was one. [19]

The respect owed to the sufferings of all the victims
of the Second World War, and, in particular, to the sufferings
of the deportees, demands on the part of historians a return
to the proven and time-honored methods of historical
criticism.

Summary

Elie Wiesel passes for one of the most celebrated
eyewitnesses to the alleged Holocaust. Yet in his supposedly
autobiographical book Night, he makes no mention of gas
chambers. He claims instead to have witnessed Jews being
burned alive, a story now dismissed by all historians. Wiesel
gives credence to the most absurd stories of other
"eyewitnesses." He spreads fantastic tales of 10,000 persons
sent to their deaths each day in Buchenwald.

When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz
prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their
retreating German "executioners," or remaining behind in the
camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the two decided to
leave with their German captors.

It is time, in the name of truth and out of respect for
the genuine sufferings of the victims of the Second World War,
that historians return to the proven methods of historical
criticism, and that the testimony of the Holocaust
"eyewitnesses" be subjected to rigorous scrutiny rather than
unquestioning acceptance.

Notes

Le Monde, October 17, 1986. Front page.

There is one single allusion, extremely vague and
fleeting, on pages 78-79: Wiesel, who very much likes to
have conversations with God, says to Him: "But these men
here, whom You have betrayed, whom You have allowed to be
tortured, butchered, gassed, burned, what do they do? They
pray before you!" (Night, New York, Discus/Avon
Books, 1969, p. 79). In his preface to that same book,
François Mauriac mentioned "the gas chamber and the
crematory" (p. 8). The four crucial pages of "testimony" by
Elie Wiesel are reproduced in facsimile in: Pierre
Guillaume, Droit et Histoire (La Vieille Taupe,
1986), pp. 147-150. In the German-language edition of
Night (Die Nacht zu begraben, Elischa [Ullstein,
1962]), on 14 occasions the word "crematory" or
"crematories" has been falsely given as "Gaskammer"
("gas chamber[s]"). In January of 1945, in anticipation of a
Russian takeover, the Germans were evacuating Auschwitz.
Elie Wiesel, a young teenager at the time, was hospitalized
in Birkenau (the "extermination camp") after surgery on an
infected foot. His doctor had recommended two weeks of rest
and good food but, before his foot healed, the Russian
takeover became imminent. Hospital patients were considered
unfit for the long trip to the camps in Germany and Elie
thus could have remained at Birkenau to await the Russians.
Although his father had permission to stay with him as a
hospital patient or orderly, father and son talked it over
and decided to move out with the Germans. (See Night,
p. 93. See also D. Calder, The Sunday Sun [Toronto,
Canada], May 31, 1987, p. C4.)

See the US War Refugee Board Report, German
Extermination Camps: Auschwitz and Birkenau (Washington,
DC), November 1944.

See Nuremberg document PS-3311 (USA-293). Published
in the IMT "blue series," Vol. 32, pp. 153-158.

See the report in Pravda, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 4,
and the UP report in the Washington (DC) Daily
News, Feb. 2, 1945, p. 2.

Night (Avon/Discus). See esp. pp. 41, 42, 43,
44, 79, 93.

Paroles d'étranger (Editions du Seuil, 1982),
p. 86.

"Author, Teacher, Witness," Time magazine,
March 18, 1985, p. 79.

"Le Système concentrationnaire allemand [1940-1944],"
Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, July
1954, p. 18, n. 2.

Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1985, p.
5.

Libération, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 19.

Published by Stein and Day (New York). Paperback
edition of 1984. (xii + 180 pages.) With a foreword by
Yehuda Bauer of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew
University, Jerusalem.

Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: un caso di plagio,
Parma (Italy): 1986. See also: C. Mattogno, "Auschwitz: A
Case of Plagiarism," The Journal of Historical
Review, Spring 1990, pp. 5-24.

Paperback edition, 1961, and later, published by
Fawcett Crest (New York).

Legends of Our Time (chapter 12: "Appointment
with Hate"), New York: Schocken Books, 1982, p. 142, or, New
York: Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178.

The Week in Germany (published in New York by
the German government in Bonn), Jan. 31, 1986, p. 2.

"The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American
Public," Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem), 1981, p.
316.

VSD, May 29, 1986, p. 37.

Ouest-France, August 2-3, 1986, p. 6.

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