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George Kren and Leon Rappoport, euphemistic language "facili–
tates the reification of atrocious activities into acceptable and routine
operations."· The use of these euphemisms also serves Faurisson's
revisionist purposes. After endless quibbling, he simply rejects the
recognized meaning of "Sonderaktion" as the selection process for
the gas chambers by the SS camp doctors upon arrival of new trans–
ports in Auschwitz. A rereading of the diary of Kremer, who was a
doctor at Auschwitz in September and October 1942, convinces
Faurisson that Kremer had to deal with the epidemic of typhus
during these special actions (Sonderaktion) rather than with selec–
tion for gassing. But then he remains strangely silent and uncon–
cerned about the fate of all those who 'never did enter the
camp-where are they? The question does not exist for Faurisson.
And he denies any validity to Kremer's later testimony. According to
Faurisson, Kremer had been imprisoned in Poland; therefore, he
now recites "lessons learned in Polish jails."
And, in general, revisionist historians claim that the testimonies
of the Nazis cannot be trusted either, because at the Nuremberg
trials they were subject to the purpose of the Allied prosecutors,
which was to provide, for propaganda reasons, accounts that
demonstrated the enormity and horror of genocide.
The meaning of the "no-Holocaust revisionism"
As I've argued elsewhere, current Jewish history is deeply
rooted in Auschwitz as the general symbol of the destruction of the
Jewish people during the Holocaust. For someone whose past is
rooted in Auschwitz, the experience of reading through the revision–
ists' tortured logic and documentation is similar to the psychologi–
cally disorienting experience of sensory deprivation experiments or
of solitary confinement in prison, where one loses touch with reality.
The insidious effect of reading this literature is ultimately to lose
one's identity as a survivor and, more generally, as a Jew. There–
fore, the revisionist allegations serve to dispossess the Jews from
their history, and in so doing, in seeking to destroy a people's
history, a symbolic genocide replaces a physical one. An example is
the fact that Faurisson had previously devoted much time (in par–
ticular with his students at the University of Lyon) to demonstrating
• George M . Kren and Leon H. Rappoport,
Holocaust and the Crisis of HUTTUln
Behavior
(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980).
