Germaine Tillion

[2005] The Problem of the Gas Chambers By Robert Faurisson 2005  as far as the "gas chamber" of Ravensbrück is concerned, we have many points of "evidence" and "undeniable eyewitness accounts," beginning with repeated and extensive eyewitness accounts by Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier or Germaine Tillion.
    It gets even better. Several years after the war, before both British and French tribunals, the camp officials of Ravensbrück (Suhren, Schwarzhuber and Treite) repeatedly confessed to the existence of a "gas chamber" in their camp. They even vaguely described its operation. Eventually, those who did not commit suicide were executed because of this alleged "gas chamber." The same "confessions" were given prior to their deaths by Ziereis for Mauthausen (Austria) and by Kramer for Struthof-Natzweiler (Alsace).

Confessions of SS Men who were at Auschwitz by Robert Faurisson My second remark is to recall that, in the cases from Ravensbrück where people now know that there never was any "gassing," the British and French courts obtained confessions which were particularly detailed on the alleged 11 gassings." People speak to us about the three principal confessions of Auschwitz, but they no longer speak to us at all about the three principal confessions of Ravensbrück: that of the camp commandant, Suhren, that of his adjutant Schwarzhuber and that of the camp physician, Dr. Treite. Do you know what was the size of that "gas chamber" that never existed? Answer: nine meters by four and one half meters. Do you know where it was located? Answer: five meters away from the two crematory ovens. Do you know how many persons were gassed there? Of what nationality? On what precise dates? Do you wish to know on whose orders all of that was done, from the top to the bottom of the German military and political hierarchy? Are you interested in learning how they used a "gas capsule" (sic)? You will find the answers to these questions and to many others while reading, for example, the historian Germaine Tillion. That French woman had been interned at Ravensbrück. After returning to France, she became an official specialist in the history of the deportation. She worked at that same famous CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris where Léon Poliakov also worked. Germaine Tillion enjoys in France, for reasons of which I am unaware, considerable moral credit. Her honesty is a sort of established fact. Nevertheless, several years after the war, she went before the courts to overwhelm the persons responsible for Ravensbrück with her stories about the "gas chambers." Even more than her book about the camp (Ravensbrück, Paris, Le Seuil, 1973 reprinting, 284 pages), one must read her "Reflections on the Study of the Deportation" ("Reflexions sur 1'étude de la d6portation," in the Revue d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, July to September 1954, pp. 3-38).
    Germaine Tillion begins by making some remarks regarding false testimony about the deportation. She says that she has "known of numerous mentally damaged persons, halfcrooks, half-fools, exploiting an imaginary deportation." She adds that she had known of other persons who were "authentic deportees, whose sick minds had striven to go even beyond the monstrous things that they had seen or about which people had spoken to them and which had reached them." She wrote further: "There were even some publishers to print certain of these fabrications, and some more or less official compilations to use them, but these publishers and editors absolutely cannot be excused, since the most elementary inquiry would have been sufficient for them to expose the deception."
    While reading those lines which already date from 26 years ago, we realize that the publishers and the editors of that kind have only increased in number and that the Martin Grays and the Filip Miillers still have a good future before them. Two of the three persons who confessed at Ravensbrück were hanged, and Dr. Treite committed suicide. What is horrible is that without this lie about the "gas chambers" they would perhaps have saved their lives. In regard to Suhren, Germaine Tillion wrote, on page 16, that he began by displaying a "stubborn bad faith" in the course of his two trials (one at Hamburg, by the British and one at Rastatt, by the French); she adds this terrible sentence: "But, without that gas chamber created by him, on his own initiative, two months before the collapse, he could perhaps have saved his life." In note 2 on page 17, she wrote in regard to Schwarhuber, who confessed immediately, these still more terrible lines, each word of which I ask you to ponder:

According to the English investigators, from the first moment he had coolly faced his position, he judged himself lost and either to have peace (and the small privileges to which the prisoners who do not deceive the examining magistrates have a right, or else due to lassitude, indifference or to quite another reason) he took his course and held to it, without regard for himself or for his accomplices. He was not a brute (like Binder or Pflaum.); he had an intelligent expression, the appearance and behavior of a psychologically normal man.