Publisher's Notes

In the early 1980s, Samisdat Publishers Ltd., under the signature of its president,
Ernst Zündel, published a 32-page booklet entitled Did Six Million Really Die?. The
booklet was published under a licence from Historical Review Press in England which
prohibited Samisdat from making any changes whatsoever to the publication.
Samisdat sent the booklet to hundreds of teachers, ministers, politicians and media
personalities across Canada in the hope that interest could be aroused in discussing
the subject explored in the booklet: did six million Jews really die pursuant to a
systematic policy of extermination by Nazi Germany during World War II?
Samisdat received no complaints regarding the booklet's factual accuracy.
Nevertheless, in 1983, Samisdat's president, Ernst Zündel, was charged under a
private information laid by Sabina Citron, a founder of the Canadian Holocaust
Remembrance Association, with the criminal offence of "spreading false news" likely
to cause racial and social intolerance. The charge was later assumed by the Crown and
led to two lengthy jury trials in 1985 and 1988, both of which ended in convictions.
There is no doubt that Did Six Million Really Die? contained errors. It was written
hastily by a young University of London graduate, Richard Verrall (who used the
pseudonym "Richard Harwood") in the early 1970s. The errors, however, were the
type of minor error which one can find in the first edition of any non-fiction book. For
example, Verrall wrote that the first allegation of mass murder of Jews was made
against the Germans in 1943 by the Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin. In fact, the first
charge of mass murder was made by the Allies in a Joint Declaration issued on
December 17, 1942. The error played no significant part in the argumentation of the
author. The significance and importance of Did Six Million Really Die? lay in its
logic, its reasoning and its opinions. It critiqued the weaknesses of the evidence and
arguments provided in orthodox "Holocaust" literature and it gave to the reader littleknown
alternate
views
of
what
happened
in
the
camps,
such
as
those
of
Dr.
Russell

Barton
(who
was present
in
Bergen-Belsen
immediately
after
its
liberation)
and
Thies

Christophersen
(who
was
stationed
near
Auschwitz
during
the
war).
It
summarized

the findings of the French revisionist historian Paul Rassinier, whose works at that
time were not known at all in the English-speaking world. In short, Did Six Million
Really Die? did what polemical works were meant to do: it provided the reader with
an alternate viewpoint on a historical event.
Two juries convicted Zündel notwithstanding devastating cross-examination of
Holocaust "survivors" and Holocaust historians by defence attorney Douglas H.
Christie and notwithstanding expert evidence which crushed the basis of the
Holocaust story, namely, the allegation that millions of Jews were done to death with
industrial efficiency in gigantic gas chambers and disposed of in crematories and
burning pits. It did not matter to the jury in the second Zündel trial in 1988 that the
warden of a United States penitentiary, Bill M. Armontrout, testified to the enormous
difficulties of gassing even one person today in gas chambers. It did not matter to the


jury that a forensic investigation of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek by the only
expert in gas chamber technology in the United States, Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., resulted
in Leuchter's opinion that no gassings could have taken place in the alleged Nazi gas
chambers. It mattered not that the Canadian crematory expert, Ivan Lagacé, testified
that the thousands of persons alleged by Holocaust historians to have been cremated
in Birkenau and Auschwitz daily were "ludicrous" and "beyond the realm of reality."
It did not matter to the jury that the internationally-known British historian David
Irving testified that he no longer believed in the "Holocaust" as it had been defined by
its historians. It did not matter that Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg refused to return
to testify in 1988 after testifying in 1985 for fear of cross- examination. It did not
matter that the Crown could not produce one expert witness in gas chambers or
crematories to refute the defence expert evidence.
If the evidence presented at the 1988 trial of Zündel was not enough to convince the
jury to acquit him, it was enough to start an explosive chain reaction of books and
studies into the veracity of the gas chamber claim. The evidence of Fred A. Leuchter,
Jr. and his report on the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek by far caused the
most reverberations. The Jewish Holocaust lobby at first ignored the Leuchter Report,
but as its influence mounted internationally, they scrambled to attempt to refute it.
The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation published the books Auschwitz: Technique and
Operation of the Gas Chambers and Truth Prevails: Demolishing Holocaust Denial:
the end of "The Leuchter Report." The success of these books in "demolishing" the
Leuchter Report can perhaps be measured by the fact that almost no one has heard of
them; the mass media, usually so willing to use anything to smear Holocaust
revisionism, has virtually ignored them.
Apparently unable to find competent experts to support the gas chamber claim among
engineers and crematory experts, the Jewish Holocaust lobby turned the use of their
considerable resources instead to ensuring the destruction of Fred Leuchter's career
and the passage of laws in France and Austria making "denial of the Holocaust" a
criminal offence. A full account of the tactics used against Leuchter can be found in
his article "Witch Hunt in Boston" (Journal of Historical Review, vol. 10, pp. 453460).
While
the
Jewish
lobby
has
succeeded
in
the
political
arena
in
having
repressive

laws
enacted
against
revisionism,
they
have
not
succeeded
in
refuting
revisionism
on

its
merits,
most
importantly
its
technical
and
forensic
evidence.
The
report
of
Fred
A.
Leuchter,
Jr.,
has
engendered
three
further
studies
of
the
gas
chambers.