Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 17: A FRAUD AT LAST DENOUNCED IN 1995

It took no less than fifty years for a historian, Annette Wieviorka, and a filmmaker, William Karel, to reveal to general audiences, in a documentary entitled Contre l'oubli (Against Forgetting), the 1945 American and Soviet stagings and fabrications effected in the context of the liberation of the camps in East and West.

A. Wieviorka, a French Jewess, and W. Karel, an Israeli who has lived in France since 1985, have manifestly been influenced by the French revisionist school. Although quite hostile towards the latter, they have nonetheless admitted that the time has at last come to denounce some of the exterminationist propagandas most glaring fictions. On this subject one may refer either to an article by the journalist Philippe Cusin(50) or, especially, to another article which Béatrice Bocard prepared for the repeat broadcast of Contre l'Oubli on Antenne 2, a piece whose title alone says a great deal: The Shoah, from reality to the shows. The indecent stagings by the liberators in the face of the deportees accounts(51). In it she wrote:

With only slight exaggeration, it might be said that the liberation of the concentration camps introduced the reality shows. The first signs of the society of the spectacle which television channels like CNN were to make commonplace fifty years later were already there, with attempts to outdo [one another] at indecency, at voyeurism, and with recourse to staging. The least infirm of the survivors were made to repeat their script before the cameras: I was deported because I was Jewish, says one of them. Once, twice. Not to be left behind by the American show, the Soviets, who had done nothing at the time of the Auschwitz camps liberation, shot a fake liberation a few weeks afterwards, with Polish extras enthusiastically greeting the soldiers William Karel is the first to have dissected these false images which we had always been told, until quite recently, were genuine, says Annette Wieviorka. How had it been possible to accept them? People are not in the habit of questioning images as they question texts, the historian explains. The example of the mass graves at Timisoara is not too distant.

It goes without saying that, in this article by B.Bocard, the manipulations were presented as being offensive for the deportees. As for the Germans, German soldiers and civilians had denounced this sort of fakery as early as 1945 but, instead of being believed, they were accused of Nazism or antisemitism.