Var skall man börja?

"---The present work cannot be sold openly in our country. It is issued and distributed privately.

In France, it is forbidden to question the Shoah.

In application of a law on the "freedom of the press" enacted on 13 July 1990, the Shoah, in its three hypostases -- the alleged genocide of the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers, and the alleged figure of six million Jewish victims of the second world war -- has become unquestionable, on pain of imprisonment of from one month to one year, a fine of from 2,000 to 300,000 francs (305 to 45,800 $ or euros), an order to pay considerable damages, and still other sanctions. More precisely, this law forbids the questioning of the reality of one or more "crimes against humanity" as defined in 1945 and punished in 1946 by the judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, a court established exclusively by the victors exclusively to judge the vanquished.

Of course, debates and controversies about the Shoah -- also called the "Holocaust" -- remain authorised but only within the confines traced by the official dogma. Controversies or debates which might lead to a challenging of the Shoah story as a whole, or of a part of it, or simply to raise doubt, are forbidden. Let us repeat: in the matter at hand, even doubt is proscribed, and punished.

In France, the idea of such a law, of Israeli inspiration (2), had been formulated for the first time in 1986 by a certain number of historians of Jewish origin, among whom Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Georges Wellers, and François Bédarida, gathered round Chief Rabbi René-Samuel Sirat (3). The law was passed in 1990 on the initiative of former prime minister Laurent Fabius, then a member of the Socialist government, president of the National Assembly, and himself a Jewish militant of the Jewish cause.---"

"---Of course, the most notorious example of the application of these procedures came in the concentration camps. Upon arrival, inmates were routinely stripped, searched for valuables, showered, and then given clothes that had been previously disinfected.138 In fact, the most common procedure involved disinfecting the clothing in one part of the "bath and disinfection complex" while the arrivals showered in another part. Kurt Vonnegut's description shows how even American prisoners of war entering German custody could become anxious and fearful at the strangeness of the ritual:

The naked Americans took their places under many showerheads along a white-tiled wall. There were no faucets they could control. They could only wait for whatever was coming. Their penises were shriveled and their balls were retracted. Reproduction was not the main business of the evening.

An unseen hand turned a master valve. Out of the showerheads gushed scalding rain. The rain was a blowtorch that did not warm. It jazzed and jangled Billy's skin without thawing the ice in the marrow of his long bones.

The Americans' clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions. So it goes.139

There seems little reason to doubt that the level of disorientation and fear had changed since the time of Mary Antin 50 years before, to say nothing of the humiliation: indeed, there are witness testimonies that support the idea of such continuity.140

In recounting these aspects of German disinfection procedures, as well as Jewish responses, which ranged from sullen non-compliance and avoidance to paranoid fear, one finds a remarkable similarity and a probable point of contact for virtually all of the gassing claims from 1942 into the summer of 1944.

Sobibor, for example, was described in German documents as a transit camp [Durchgangslager].141 Yet a transit camp would require facilities for showering arrivals and disinfecting their belongings before sending them further on their journey.142 And indeed we find in survivor testimonies that that is exactly what happened to them there.143 Yet at the same time, we have rumors reported in the West, and later we will have testimonies, that assure us that Sobibor was a camp where arrivals were simply exterminated via the familiar shower-gas-burning sequence.144 The same situation applies to Treblinka testimonies, for the Malkinia disinfection establishment was only a few kilometers away.145---"