Robert Faurisson

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Robert Faurisson (born January 25, 1929) is a French former professor of literature at the University of Lyon and a Holocaust denier who has generated controversy over various articles he has published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers (especially Le Monde) over the years which deny the existence of homicidal gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps and question whether there was actually a systematic killing of European Jews using gas during World War II.

[edit] Views, work and criticism

Faurisson, like most Frenchmen of that era, has said that he had anti-German sentiments during and immediately following World War II, but after reading the works of fellow Frenchmen Paul Rassinier and Maurice Bardèche, he began to question the Holocaust. Faurisson states that over the years he studied the Holocaust extensively, in the late 1970s came to the conclusion that it was a hoax. Since then he has written numerous letters to newspapers, published several books, and written many articles for Holocaust denial journals questioning the occurrence of the Holocaust.

Faurisson counts among his acquaintances and friends a number of Holocaust deniers, including the German-Canadian Ernst Zündel, Swedish Ditlieb Felderer and Moroccan expatriate Ahmed Rami.^[1]

In 1991 Faurisson, in collaboration with Siegfried Verbeke, published the Dutch-language brochure Het "Dagboek" van Anne Frank. Een kritische benadering ("The 'Diary' of Anne Frank - A Critical Evaluation"), which claimed that the diary of Anne Frank is a forgery since the original handwritten manuscript cannot be that of a child; the brochure was banned in the Netherlands.

As core arguments, Faurisson claims that to be feasible the Nazi gas chambers would have needed perfect hermetic sealing, a special introduction and distribution system for the gas, an elaborate ventilation system to eliminate the gas from the chambers after the mass murders, a system to neutralize the exhausted gases, and, separately, an expertly constructed device to eliminate the gas which would adhere to the bodies, making further handling lethal. These arguments were refuted in the book Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz, written in 1993 by a former supporter of Faurisson, Jean-Claude Pressac, who had familiarised himself with the installations at Auschwitz while searching for evidence to support Faurisson's arguments. Faurisson has attacked the book in writing numerous times since its publication.

Christopher Hitchens has described Faurisson's goal as "the rehabilitation, in pseudo scholarly form, of the Third Reich"^[2]^[3]. Faurisson claims to be apolitical and an atheist.

In the early to mid 1980s, the American intellectual Noam Chomsky drew much criticism for defending Faurisson's right to publish his claims on the grounds of freedom of speech. See Faurisson Affair.

In 1991, Faurisson was removed from his university chair on the basis of his views under the Gayssot Act, a French statute passed in 1990 that prohibited Holocaust denial. He challenged the statute as a violation of international law at the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Human Rights Committee. The Human Rights Committee upheld the Gayssot Act as necessary to counter possible anti-Semitism. Further trials followed, among them one in connection with a publication on the website of the "Association des anciens amateurs de récits de guerre et d'Holocauste" (AAARGH) in 1998, of which he was absolved due to lack of evidence of his authorship.

Faurisson was charged again in a trial on July 11, 2006. He was accused of denying the Holocaust in an interview with the Iranian television station "Sahar 1" in February 2005. On October 3, 2006 he was given a three-month probationary sentence and fined €7,500 for this offence. In December 2006 Faurisson gave a speech at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, which was sponsored by the government of Iran. He repeated his theories about gas chambers and said that in the past 32 years he had been waiting for someone to show him one of those chambers.

[edit] References

^ Faurisson, un falsificateur by Gilles Karmasyn, PHDN (French)
^ The Chorus and Cassandra, by C. Hitchens, Grand Street Magazine, Autumn 1985
^ Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers, Cambridge, Avukah, 1995