Sources for the Gas Chambers Are Rare and Unreliable
“Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable” (p. 362).
Most of what is known (on this subject) is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity (pages 362-63).
More Dead from Natural than Non-Natural Causes
During the period from 1942 to 1945 — in other words at the very time when, according to Exterminationist historians, the fantastic “gassings” supposedly took place — Professor Mayer estimates (unfortunately without furnishing any figures) that more Jews were killed by so-called natural causes (starvation, disease, sickness and overwork) than by “non-natural” causes (executions of all kinds). He specifically says that this was true “certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall” (p. 365).
Elsewhere, Mayer interprets, then eliminates one by one, all the documents or arguments which up until now have been used to make people believe that the Germans practiced a policy of exterminating the Jews (the Göring-to-Heydrich letter of 31 July 1941, the Wannsee Conference transcript, the conduct of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, Himmler’s speeches at Posen in October 1943, etc.).
Differentiating between, on the one hand, Jewish “memory” — not to say Jewish legend or mythology — and, on the other hand, “history,” Mayer deplores the existence of a cult of memory which, with the distortions that it imposes on historical reality, has become “too sectarian” (p. 16). Memory, he thinks, tends to “rigidify” while history calls for “revision” (p. 18). Historians today have “the urgent task of thinking, critically, about the unthinkable” (p. 363).
Source:
These excerpts are taken from Robert Faurisson’s review of Professor Mayer’s book, which can be found on the web at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v09/v09p375_Faurisson.html
Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ In History
by Arno J. Mayer, New York: Pantheon, 1988, Hb., 492 pages, $27.95, ISBN 0-394- 57154-1.