For more than 20 years, Robert Faurisson has been Europe's foremost Holocaust revisionist scholar.
He was born on January 25, 1929, in Shepperton, England. His father was French and his mother was Scottish. As a boy and young man, he attended schools in Singapore, Japan, and in France. He was educated at a Lycée in Paris, and at the renowned Sorbonne. He received his "State Doctorate" in letters and the humanities from the Sorbonne in 1972, where he also taught from 1969 to 1974. From 1974 until 1990, Faurisson was a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon II. He is a recognized specialist of text and document analysis, and is the author of four books on French literature.
After years of private research and study, Dr. Faurisson first made public his skeptical views about the Holocaust extermination story in two items published in December 1978 and January 1979 in the influential Paris daily Le Monde.
In the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland , Faurisson discovered the technical and architectural drawings of the Auschwitz morgues, the crematories and other installations. He is the first person to publicize these important documents, and to point out their significance.
Since 1978, Dr. Faurisson has presented his critical view of the Holocaust extermination story in numerous articles, in many interviews, in several books, and in stunning April 1979 debate on a Swiss television network with prominent defenders of the "exterminationist" view. Many of his scholarly articles have been published in English in The Journal of Historical Review. A four-volume collection of many of his writings, Écrits Révisionnistes (1974-1998), was published in 1999.
Dr. Faurisson worked closely on the French revisionist quarterly, Annales d'Histoire Revisionniste, during the three years of its existence. He also worked on the successor quarterly, Revue d'Histoire Revisionniste.
A cogent summary of his skeptical view of the "Holocaust" is his lengthy article, "Impact and Future of Holocaust Revisionism," published in The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 2000. (It is posted online at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v19/v19n1p-2_F... )
Faurisson played an important role in both the 1985 and 1988 "Holocaust trials" in Toronto of Ernst Zundel. His role in those legal battles went far beyond his testimony on the stand as a witness. Especially during the 1985 trial, he spent hundreds of hours -- often working all day and very late into the night -- preparing questions used by defense attorney Doug Christie in his devastating interrogations of Raul Hilberg, Rudolf Vrba and other prosecution witnesses. Faurisson's most important contribution to the defense in the 1988 trial may well have been his key role in securing the participation of Fred Leuchter, an American gas chamber specialist. Faurisson played an important role in arranging for Leuchter's on-site investigation in Poland of supposed extermination gas chambers, and in making public the American's remarkable findings.
Much about Faurisson's role in the 1988 "Holocaust trial" in Toronto, Canada, can be found in the 562-page book edited and compiled by Barbara Kulaszka, Did Six Million Really Die?: Report of the Evidence in the Canadian 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel.
For years various government agencies and influential organizations have waged a concerted campaign to silence him. He has been obliged to defend himself many times in French courts for his forthright writings and statements. He has had to contend with numerous court convictions.
His bank account has been frozen, and court officials have repeatedly visited his home threatening him and his wife with seizure of their furniture to pay for financial "damages" imposed for his "heretical" remarks. Because of this campaign, his family life has been repeatedly disrupted and thrown into turmoil. His health has suffered terribly.
During an interview in December 1980 with the French radio network "Europe 1," Faurisson summarized the result of his historical research in one sentence of 60 French words. Here is that sentence, in English:
"The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews constitute one and the same historical lie, which made possible a gigantic financial-political fraud, the principal beneficiaries of which are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and whose principal victims are the German people -- but not their leaders -- and the entire Palestinian people."
That sentence, he declared 23 years later, "requires no changes."
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