Germar Rudolf - The Chemistry of Auschwitz: The Technology and Toxicology of Zyklon B and the Gas Chambers—A Crime-Scene Investigation

While I was making the last changes to this book in preparation for its publication, yet another Holocaust Remembrance Day January 27th passed with its many commemoration events. On that memorable day in 1945, the Red Army overran the infamous Auschwitz Camp. For the Politics of Memory, it is business as usual. Those equipped with finely tuned societal seismographs, however, have noticed that something is afoot.

The most-recent indicator for this was an article written by Jewish activist David Cole, and published in the conservative mainstream periodical Takis Magazine (Cole 2016). Cole had been dabbling for a while in Auschwitz research, and had burned his fingers in the process. Yet he had gained some insights which are worth considering. We will encounter him and his work later in the present book. In the just-mentioned article, Cole had the following to say about Auschwitz:

Ah, Auschwitz. Yes, heres where we still have a problem. [] there are genuine problems with what is commonly claimed to be part 3 [of the Holocaust] that in 1943 Auschwitz-Birkenau was renovated to become an ultra-super be-all end-all extermination facility. To me, the evidence just isnt there, and the evidence that does exist calls that claim into question. [Orthodox historians] backed themselves into a corner by putting Auschwitz, with its phony, postwar tourist-attraction gas chamber and its complete lack of documentary evidence supporting a killing program, front and center as the heart of the Holocaust. Theyre in so deep at this point that they cant back off.

Its surprisingly easy to get the leading lights of anti-denial to admit as much one-on-one. Rick Eaton has been the senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for thirty years. Hes as major a player in the fight against Holocaust denial as anyone on earth. Two years ago, I corresponded with him (under a pseudonym, of course hed never speak directly with the likes of me!) regarding the Auschwitz problem. I explained my thesis to him, that Auschwitz, having various issues that call the credibility of extermination claims into question, should not be used to represent the Holocaust. He agreed [].

Keep in mind that even though I was using a pseudonym, I was not falsely claiming to be anyone of note. In other words, Eaton made that admission to a complete nobody, a total stranger. One gets the feeling that many of these experts are secretly longing for the day when they can be open about the Auschwitz problem and move past it [].

If you want to find out why we have a problem with Auschwitz, the answer is in your hands, because the research forming the basis of the present study is what made Cole and other Jewish intellectuals take a closer, critical look into the orthodox Auschwitz narrative. In fact, in order to get an update on the latest research results, Cole got in touch with me in order to get some input before preparing the above article, among other things.

So, if the historian Eaton from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Cole can acknowledge that this research has revealed a profound problem with the mainstream Auschwitz narrative, cant we all do the same?

Of course we can.

But when I started to take a look at that problem in the late 1980s, it wasnt a matter of course at all. A good part of that trail had yet to be blazed, and it wasnt going to be easy. Let me briefly describe my journey along that path as a primer to what you are going to read in this book.

As a German citizen, I started my journey in that country. In 1985, while I was studying in West Germanys capital Bonn, the West-German parliament discussed whether the law should be tightened in order to make things more difficult for Holocaust deniers. At that time, I was merely 20 years old and still in the first half of my university studies of chemistry. I did not object to tightening the law against Holocaust deniers. After all, who could argue against outlawing the vile propaganda lies of Nazis, anti-Semites and other extremists? For justices sake, however, I thought back then that such laws should be applied equally against the deniers of all genocides.

Roughly a year later and by mere coincidence, I actually met such a denier for the first time, a self-declared right-wing radical. Discussing the topic with him at a bar under the influence of a couple of beers left some bad-tasting memories. His arguments, for instance that it wasnt six but only three million victims, seemed crass at best. Although I agreed with his analysis that the Holocaust is misused to suppress patriotic movements in particular in Germany, his evident political motives made me deem him untrustworthy.

Another three years later, a libertarian friend of mine gave me the book Was ist Wahrheit? ( What Is Truth? ) by Paul Rassinier. Rassinier, a French socialist, had established his own pacifist resistance group against the German occupiers during the Second World War. In that context, he helped Jews flee to Switzerland. He was caught by the Germans and promptly deported to the Buchenwald Camp. A short while later, he was sent to the underground production facility of the so-called V-Waffen (retaliation weapons = missiles) of the Mittelbau Concentration Camp under terrible circumstances. He survived the war only barely. What would you expect such a person to write about his experiences in the camps?

What I read in this book was the opposite of what I had expected. Rassinier accuses his fellow inmates of exaggerations and lies, and he profoundly challenges the traditional Holocaust narrative. He gives all kinds of reasons for this, and although I considered them comprehensible, they were difficult to verify. His book could not so easily be swept aside as the drivel of a Nazi and anti-Semite, simply because Rassinier was not a Nazi, quite to the contrary. He was not a perpetrator, but rather a victim; not an anti-Semite, but someone who had risked his life to help Jews. This book turned my moral worldview upside down. But because I was not a historian, I neither felt called upon nor competent to do anything about the matter.