[back] Holocaust revisionism
HistoriansChristopher Browning
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Holocaust
revisionism
Historians
In place of Hilberg there came his friend Christopher Browning, an American
professor who specializes in the Holocaust. Admitted as an expert witness (and
paid for several days at the rate of $150 per hour by the Canadian taxpayer),
Browning tried to prove that the Harwood pamphlet was a tissue of lies and that
the attempt to exterminate the Jews was a scientifically established fact.
He had cause to regret the experience. During cross-examination, the defense
used his own arguments to destroy him. In the course of those days, people saw
the tall and naive professor, who had strutted while he stood testifying,
seated, shrunken in size, behind the witness stand like a schoolboy caught in a
mistake. With a faint and submissive voice, he ended up acknowledging that the
trial had definitely taught him something about historical research.
Following the example of Raul
Hilberg, Browning had not examined any concentration camps. He had not visited
any facility with "gas chambers." He had never thought of asking for an expert
study of the "weapon of the crime." In his writings he had made much of
homicidal "gas vans," but he was not able to refer to any authentic photograph,
any plan, any technical study, or any expert study. He was not aware that German
words like "Gaswagen," "Spezialwagen," "Entlausungswagen" (delousing van) could
have perfectly innocent meanings. His technical understanding was nil. He had
never examined the wartime aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz. He was
unaware of all the tortures undergone by Germans, such as Rudolf Hoss, who had
spoken of gassings. He knew nothing of the doubts expressed about some of
Himmler's speeches or about the Goebbels diary.
A great follower of the trials of
war criminals, Browning had only questioned the prosecutors, never the defense
lawyers. His ignorance of the transcript of the Nuremberg trial was
disconcerting. He had not even read what Hans Frank, former Governor General of
Poland, had said before the Nuremberg tribunal about his "diary" and about "the
extermination of the Jews." That was inexcusable! As a matter of fact, Browning
claimed to have found irrefutable proof of the existence of a policy of
exterminating the Jews in the Frank diary. He had discovered one incriminating
sentence. He did not know that Frank had given the Tribunal an explanation of
that kind of sentence, chosen beforehand from the hundreds of thousands of
sentences in a personnel and administrative journal of 11,560 pages.
Furthermore, Frank had spontaneously turned over his "diary" to the Americans
when they came to arrest him. The sincerity of the former Governor General is so
obvious to anyone who reads his deposition that Christopher Browning, invited to
hear the content, did not raise the least objection. One last humiliation
awaited him.
For the sake of his thesis, he
invoked a passage from the well-known "protocol" of the Wannsee conference (20
January 1942). He had made his own translation of the passage, a translation
that was seriously in error. At that point, his thesis collapsed. Finally, his
own personal explanation of a "policy of the extermination of the Jews" was the
same as Hilberg's. Everything was explained by the "nod" of Adolf Hitler. In
other words, the Fuhrer of the German people did not need to give any written or
even spoken order for the extermination of the Jews. It was enough for him to
give a "nod" at the beginning of the operation and, for the rest, a series of
"signals." And that was understood! The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988) by ROBERT
FAURISSON
[2003] Revisionist Brian Renk demolishes 'historian' Browning
Books
Ordinary men: reserve police battalion 101 and the final
solution in Poland