Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

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Archie
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Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

Postby Archie » 1 month 3 days ago (Sun May 07, 2023 4:02 pm)

I had seen many references to an interview Jean-Claude Pressac did with French historian Valerie Igounet. It is from June 15, 1995 but was not published until 2000 as an appendix to Igounet's lengthy book Histoire du négationnisme en France. The book was never published in English.

In an old thread from 2009, forum member PLAYWRIGHT had graciously translated the interview into English and uploaded the pdf. The link no longer works, but after some digging I was able to find a copy from the Wayback Machine. There was also a thread that had linked to a file with a French version.

Pressac 1995 interview with Igounet [English].pdf
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Pressac - Textes Divers [French].pdf
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The interview has some overlap with the postface of his 1989 book.
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/pressac0537.shtml

Both discuss some of his early visits to Auschwitz, his collaboration with Faurisson in 1980 and their subsequent split. He also gets into his interactions with Faurisson's aversaries in France, Georges Wellers and Pierre Vidal-Naquet and how he got involved with the Klarsfelds. There are some parts in the interview that are certainly not orthodox, though he is critical of both sides, as he was in his published writings. In the postface of this book, he starts out saying, "I am not a Jew and I was at one time a 'revisionist'. After reading this book, some will no doubt think that I still am one." This is because he is so critical of the establishment scholarship and many of the testimonies. For example (from the interview),

One is dismayed by the imbecilic explanations advanced in this business which, while spectacular, are minor points in the history of the camps. And when one studies the homicidal gassings which were practiced, in camp after camp there emerges an accumulation of silly things, each more stupid and dim-witted than the ones before it, which proves the pitiful level of science in concentration camp studies, based exclusively these days on the "sacrosanct" testimonies.


On the revisionist side, while he was very critical of Faurisson whom he regarded as overly dogmatic, he has some seeming admiration for other revisionists such as Butz and especially Mattogno.

At the beginning of 1970, an American electrical engineer, Arthur R. Butz, was revolted by Hilberg’s argument which he saw as a gross fraud, so much so that he considered what is known as the “genocide of six million Jews” to be “The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century”, which became the title of his book of refutation, published in 1976. No more than Reitlinger, an artist and collector, or Hilberg, a political scientist, is Butz a historian. But he brought a scientific knowledge and spirit which the traditional historians do not have, their background being literary.


Of Mattogno, he says he is "incontestably the best researcher on the revisionist side." He even had Mattogno over to visit on multiple occasions and was friendly with him for a time, although they stopped corresponding.

Mattogno gives some personal thoughts on Pressac in an obituary. He also discusses him some in interview with Zundel where he says that in his opinion Pressac's 1989 book was "crypto" revisionist.
https://codoh.com/library/document/my-memories-of-jean-claude-pressac/en/
https://archive.org/details/CarloMattognoInterview1994FULLWithErnstZundel

In one of the more striking parts of the interview, Pressac offers some shockingly low death tallies for some of the camps (at least for a supposed "believer").
Compared to Hilberg’s figures, borrowed from the Poles, here are the figures I obtained. Chelmno: 80 to 85,000 instead of 150,000; Belzec: From 100 to 150,000 instead of 550,000; Sobibor: 30 to 35,000 instead of 200,000; Treblinka: 200 to 250,000 instead of 750,000; Majdanek: less than 100,000 instead of 360,000. In fact, [Marcel] Ruby, while taking pride in Hilberg’s authority, does not take into account the minor corrections of the Polish figures and produces them with their original exaggeration. The emotional coefficient to multiply by varies from 2 to 7 and is on average 4 or 5. This average applies perfectly to Auschwitz.


The figure of 4,000,000 victims, fixed after the war after negotiations between the Soviet Communist and Polish authorities, is propaganda
without historical foundation. Even Ruby thinks it is advisable to advance the figure of 1,200,000. The most serious figure before my estimate is that of a Polish historian, Franciszek Piper, who advanced the figure of 1,100,000 in 1990. Regarding my quote, I had proposed 800,000, then after a more detailed study of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews, 700,000.


200K for Treblinka? I am very surprised he was willing to say this. It is also no wonder they didn't use him as much and the Holocaust establishment basically sidelined him and laundered the parts of his work they found useful through the more reliable Van Pelt. Pressac also makes some interesting technical comments, for example, explaining why the chimney at Auschwitz probably did not smoke and how this seems to be confirmed by air photos. The closing comments are also interesting although I agree with PLAYWRIGHT who says that Faurisson's characterization of this as a "recantation" is not really accurate.

Germar Rudolf goes so far as to suggest that Pressac was a "double agent," an undercover revisionist.

I suggest that he communicate with me in writing. To this he replied that, for reasons of security, he preferred to not communicate with me in writing, because it would be dangerous for him to do so. Then he warned me that I too should be on guard. Concerning the 'Holocaust' in particular, he advised me to avoid challenging every aspect of it at one time. He said that in dealing with 'Holocaust' the only hope for success without risking personal danger was to attack it piecemeal, one aspect at a time.

Since that telephone conversation, I have been convinced that Jean- Claude Pressac believed that we revisionists are correct in principle. In view of the overwhelming might of the exterminationists, however, he arrived early at the conclusion that the 'system' had to be fought from within. His apparent defection to the ranks of 'the enemy' and service to the cause of exterminationism was his version of salami tactics. His plan was to use the 'system' in order to extract one concession after another.


https://codoh.com/library/document/my-memories-of-jean-claude-pressac/en/

This is certainly interesting and I trust that Rudolf has accurately related the conversation. However, I don't see this as being necessarily incompatible with Pressac's other statements. It suggests he was holding back somewhat and was being a bit tactical in his approach, but I would not assume he was pretending to be a believer. I think Mattogno's take is more likely (and Mattogno spent much more time with him).

During our lengthy discussion, my astonishment about his attitude grew steadily: it was apparently not important to him to convince me, and once he even recommended that I should remain a revisionist. His sincerity cannot be doubted, and it seemed to me that he was more interested in free spirits, who are capable of objective criticism, than in uncritical followers. He was, of course, himself very much a free spirit, perhaps a little bit to much - in contrast to those official historians, who still cling to the outdated Auschwitz image of 1945. He told me that the Jewish translator who translated his book from French to English interrupted his work several times threatening to reject this project because some of Pressac's "revisionist" views tasted bitter to him.


My guess is that Pressac was 'hiding his power level" a little bit and was a "revisionist" in a sort of broad sense. His approach and interest in documentary and material evidence is certainly more revisionist than traditional. He could be called "a revisionist who believes in gas chambers" as Ernst Zundel used to refer to Charles Provan.

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Re: Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

Postby Archie » 1 month 3 days ago (Sun May 07, 2023 7:16 pm)

Another couple of points I forget to mention. He reiterates his position in his book that the Birkenau crematoria were initially "normal sanitary facilities." This to me is such a huge concession I do not see how you salvage the story after such a major change.

Concerning the history of the camp, it could be demonstrated that the Kremas had started off as normal sanitary facilities; then later changed into liquidation centers for “Jews unable to work”, that is women, children and the elderly.


The search for such “traces” would not be possible if the Kremas had a criminal beginning, as the Polish historians believed for 40 years.


Regarding Pressac's death totals, they are so low it is obvious that his final total (which as far as I know he never offered) would be well shy of six million. In this way he could be lumped in with David Cole and some others who have advanced a "Holocaust-lite" position. Interesting though, Pressac revised down Auschwitz relatively less than the other camps and so for Pressac Auschwitz gains relative importance whereas David Cole cuts Auschwitz out completely and focuses on the AR camps. We see then that while there is some similarity in terms of the final total, the means by which they get there are completely different (and contradictory). This is a fine demonstration of the problems with the half-way positions.

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Re: Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

Postby Hektor » 1 month 2 days ago (Mon May 08, 2023 2:05 am)

Archie wrote:....
Regarding Pressac's death totals, they are so low it is obvious that his final total (which as far as I know he never offered) would be well shy of six million. In this way he could be lumped in with David Cole and some others who have advanced a "Holocaust-lite" position. Interesting though, Pressac revised down Auschwitz relatively less than the other camps and so for Pressac Auschwitz gains relative importance whereas David Cole cuts Auschwitz out completely and focuses on the AR camps. We see then that while there is some similarity in terms of the final total, the means by which they get there are completely different (and contradictory). This is a fine demonstration of the problems with the half-way positions.


They use death-tolls they can not prove. And don't address the death toll neither.

What they do is throw a number on the board and then let people use their fantasy to imagine that those people were gassed or intentionally killed.

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Re: Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

Postby curioussoul » 1 month 2 days ago (Mon May 08, 2023 5:41 am)

Archie wrote:Germar Rudolf goes so far as to suggest that Pressac was a "double agent," an undercover revisionist.


I've had similar thoughts, but the most likely conclusion is that Pressac genuinely wanted to believe in the official Holocaust story, but simply found no way to maintain it given the insurmountable problems he kept facing, as he tried to reconstruct a plausible story for Auschwitz. From the outset, Pressac was probably naive enough to broadly trust the official narrative, but grew more and more disillusioned by the absolute mess of official Holocaust historiography. The mere fact that he - as an amateur historian - was able to easily surpass every orthodox Holocaust scholar in just a few years, was testament to the amateurishness of previous Holocaust research. For example, the fact that Henryk Tauber - who is recognized today as one of the most important Holocaust eyewitnesses from the Sonderkommando - was completely unknown by orthodox scholars and was "re-discovered" by Pressac, was probably embarrassing for Pressac.

By the end, he had practically given up on the official narrative altogether, and his 2nd book had received only limited appreciation in the Holocaust industry, hence his resignation in the Igononet interview.

Another couple of points I forget to mention. He reiterates his position in his book that the Birkenau crematoria were initially "normal sanitary facilities." This to me is such a huge concession I do not see how you salvage the story after such a major change.


He couldn't, and he knew it. This is why he conceded to Igounet:

Can we alter the course? It is too late. A general correction is factually and humanely impossible [...]. New documents will unavoidably turn up and will overthrow the official certainties more and more. The current view of the world of the camps, though triumphant, is doomed. What of it can be salvaged? Only little.


Some Holocaust historians are smart enough to realize that it's impossible to lower the death toll in Auschwitz or the Reinhard camps without accepting the revisionist position, because if even a small fraction of the presumably gassed Jews are no longer considered gassed, this means that unregistered deportees were indeed not murdered and thus transfered elsewhere.

As you highlight, Pressac's conclusion that the Birkenau crematoria had to have been planned without homicidal functions was nothing short of remarkable - but Pressac's discovery of the plans for the "Haeftlings-Lasarett" (Prisoner Hospital) in Construction Sector III, dating from July 1943, caused even more concern for him. In his first book, he admitted that these plans were "a god-send for the revisionists", because there was "incompatibility" with the existence of homicidal gas chambers a few hundred yards from a large hospital camp. Pressac's explanation for this incongruence was that these plans merely represented a theoretical project, but as Mattogno proved with documents unknown to Pressac, this hospital camp was indeed partly finalized during the war.

We do not know what Pressac's reaction to these revelations would have been, but we might guess that he would have grown even more disillusioned with the official narrative.

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Re: Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

Postby EtienneSC » 1 month 2 days ago (Mon May 08, 2023 8:31 am)

Archie wrote:Both [texts cited above] discuss some of his early visits to Auschwitz, his collaboration with Faurisson in 1980 and their subsequent split. He also gets into his interactions with Faurisson's adversaries in France, Georges Wellers and Pierre Vidal-Naquet and how he got involved with the Klarsfelds.

Robert Faurisson wrote a short book, Réponse à Jean-Claude Pressac sur le problème des chambres à gaz (1994, 3rd edition 2005). In the 2005 Appendix, he cites Pressac's "capitulation" in 1995 in a Paris court (which resulted later in a signed document and is discussed in Faurisson's Études révisionnistes), as well as the Igounet interview published in 2000, He denies that Pressac was ever his "collaborator" or "disciple", despite rumours to this effect. Faurisson also wrote responses to Wellers and Vidal-Naquet.

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Re: Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

Postby Archie » 4 weeks 21 hours ago (Fri May 12, 2023 10:09 am)

EtienneSC wrote:
Archie wrote:Both [texts cited above] discuss some of his early visits to Auschwitz, his collaboration with Faurisson in 1980 and their subsequent split. He also gets into his interactions with Faurisson's adversaries in France, Georges Wellers and Pierre Vidal-Naquet and how he got involved with the Klarsfelds.

Robert Faurisson wrote a short book, Réponse à Jean-Claude Pressac sur le problème des chambres à gaz (1994, 3rd edition 2005). In the 2005 Appendix, he cites Pressac's "capitulation" in 1995 in a Paris court (which resulted later in a signed document and is discussed in Faurisson's Études révisionnistes), as well as the Igounet interview published in 2000, He denies that Pressac was ever his "collaborator" or "disciple", despite rumours to this effect. Faurisson also wrote responses to Wellers and Vidal-Naquet.


According to the JHR article linked below, this 1995 trial arose over Réponse à Jean-Claude Pressac sur le problème des chambres à gaz. Unfortunately, it seems there is no transcript available for it.

French courts are notorious for their lack of seriousness, order and guarantees of basic rights. Typically, the trial of a revisionist lasts two to five hours. There is no jury, but rather a panel of three judges. There is no transcript of the proceedings, which means that there is no proof of what was actually said. This means, for example, that there is no transcript of the May 9 trial to prove precisely what Pressac said to the court.


It took me some time to realize the extent to which Faurisson's revisionist career was driven by legal battles (going back to the late 70s). I ask myself what his research might have looked like had it been done within a different context.
https://codoh.com/library/document/french-court-fines-faurisson-roques-for-holocaust/en/

As for Pressac, his words are a bit difficult to interpret. In particular, when he savages orthodoxy, it is not clear exactly how much of the story he thinks should ultimately be retained. Are the low death totals he gave essentially his true view? And did he simply expect orthodoxy would gradually be forced to converge toward these lower estimates? Or was he still holding back? It's impossible to say.

I forgot to link some of the previous threads. The first one is PLAYWRIGHT's original post. In his view, he did not feel Pressac's words could be fairly described as a "capitulation."

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5619
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7222
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=752

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Re: Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

Postby curioussoul » 4 weeks 15 hours ago (Fri May 12, 2023 3:46 pm)

Archie wrote:As for Pressac, his words are a bit difficult to interpret. In particular, when he savages orthodoxy, it is not clear exactly how much of the story he thinks should ultimately be retained. Are the low death totals he gave essentially his true view? And did he simply expect orthodoxy would gradually be forced to converge toward these lower estimates? Or was he still holding back? It's impossible to say.


Pressac's lower death tolls did not stem for historiographical considerations. As Mattogno highlights in several of his books, particularly in The Real Case for Auschwitz, Pressac's numbers were based on mere guesswork, partly drawn from his limited understanding of cremation ovens and open-air incinerations.

Pressac remains an elusive figure for many of the reasons you described above. It's difficult to square his ceaseless critiques of orthodox Holocaust historiography with his insistence that the Holocaust was an actual historical event, while simultaneously arbitrarily lowering the death tolls for all camps, making the official narrative completely untenable.

Perhaps Rudolf was right - Pressac was the ultimate undercover revisionist. Maybe the biggest suckers were Serge and Beate Klarsfeld?

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Re: Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

Postby Archie » 3 weeks 6 days ago (Sat May 13, 2023 11:13 am)

curioussoul wrote:
Archie wrote:As for Pressac, his words are a bit difficult to interpret. In particular, when he savages orthodoxy, it is not clear exactly how much of the story he thinks should ultimately be retained. Are the low death totals he gave essentially his true view? And did he simply expect orthodoxy would gradually be forced to converge toward these lower estimates? Or was he still holding back? It's impossible to say.


Pressac's lower death tolls did not stem for historiographical considerations. As Mattogno highlights in several of his books, particularly in The Real Case for Auschwitz, Pressac's numbers were based on mere guesswork, partly drawn from his limited understanding of cremation ovens and open-air incinerations.

Pressac remains an elusive figure for many of the reasons you described above. It's difficult to square his ceaseless critiques of orthodox Holocaust historiography with his insistence that the Holocaust was an actual historical event, while simultaneously arbitrarily lowering the death tolls for all camps, making the official narrative completely untenable.

Perhaps Rudolf was right - Pressac was the ultimate undercover revisionist. Maybe the biggest suckers were Serge and Beate Klarsfeld?


Yes, I don't think many of us would endorse Pressac's numbers, but his comments are still quite useful to us since it means that the man who was easily the most serious challenger to revisionism did not really believe in the standard version. This badly undermines the establishment assertion that the holocaust is settled history and there can be no reasonable doubt about it (except on very marginal points). Once they admit that the topic is open to debate, that is the beginning of the end.

If Pressac's statements were sincere, I think the best explanation would be that he so contrarian to the point that he ended up trying to debunk both sides of the debate. This left him with an in-between position that, imo, is the least coherent view of all (which is why it is so uncommon).

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Re: Pressac - 1995 interview w Igounet in English (plus some observations)

Postby Hektor » 3 weeks 6 days ago (Sat May 13, 2023 7:39 pm)

Archie wrote:....

Yes, I don't think many of us would endorse Pressac's numbers, but his comments are still quite useful to us since it means that the man who was easily the most serious challenger to revisionism did not really believe in the standard version. This badly undermines the establishment assertion that the holocaust is settled history and there can be no reasonable doubt about it (except on very marginal points). Once they admit that the topic is open to debate, that is the beginning of the end.

If Pressac's statements were sincere, I think the best explanation would be that he so contrarian to the point that he ended up trying to debunk both sides of the debate. This left him with an in-between position that, imo, is the least coherent view of all (which is why it is so uncommon).


Any figures that don't have any testable evidence to back them up and where there is refusal to actually look at the evidence have to be rejected. And that's the case with all of those exterminationist estimates about Auschwitz. There are death cases registered and perhaps one can extrapolate from this that they must be a little higher than what's on paper. But the virtually 20 fold those figures, which is super-extrapolation. And that shows that they are actually propaganda figures. If one calls those figures out as what they are, than the machine of government and the Holocaust priesthood will turn against you. And that means that the thesis pushed that way simply invalid, based on this alone.


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