Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 7: GAS CHAMBERS WHICH HAVE NEVER BEEN SEEN, NEVER BEEN SHOWN

In March 1992, at a press conference in Stockholm, I put forth a challenge to the audience of newspaper and television reporters. That challenge was stated in the nine words: Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber.

The next day, the journalists reports on the conference indeed appeared but they passed over in silence its essential object: precisely that challenge. They had looked for photographs and had found none.

Billions of people over this past half-century assume (or imagine) that they have seen Nazi gas chambers in books or in documentary films. Many are convinced of having, at least once in their lives, come across the photograph of such a gas chamber. Some have visited Auschwitz or other camps where the guides have announced to them that a given structure was a gas chamber. They have been told that they have before their eyes, as the case may be, a gas chamber in its original state or a reconstruction (this latter expression implying that said reconstruction is faithful, that it conforms to the original). Sometimes, they are led to view remains said to be ruins of a gas chamber(23). Yet, in all such cases, they have been deceived or, better, have deceived themselves. This phenomenon is easily explained. Too many people imagine that a gas chamber amounts to a mere room with gas inside: this reveals confusion between an execution gassing and a suicidal or accidental one. An execution gassing, such as those carried out in some United States prisons for the killing of one man, is necessarily a highly complicated task for, in this case, care must be taken to kill only the condemned without causing an accident, and without putting ones own life, or that of ones associates, in danger, especially in the final phase, that is, at the moment when the room must be entered in order to handle a contaminated corpse and remove it. Of this, the greater part of museum visitors, as well as most readers, film-goers, and even most historians are obviously unaware. Those in charge of the museums, for their part, take advantage of this general unawareness. For a successful Nazi gas chamber exhibit, they need only display to the good publics gaze a space of gloomy aspect, a morgues cold room, a shower-room (preferably located below ground), an air-raid shelter (with a peephole in its door), and the trick will work. The tricksters can manage with less: it suffices to show a mere door, wall, or roof of a purported gas chamber. The wisest ones will get by with still less: they will show a bundle of hair, a mound of shoes, a pile of eyeglasses and claim that these are the only traces or remains to have been found of the gassed; naturally, they will avoid pointing out that, during the war and the blockade, in a Europe fallen prey to general shortages and penury, vast recovery and recycling schemes were set up to reclaim all convertible materials, including hair, which was used, for example, in textiles.