博客來The question of the existence or non-existence of Nazi gas chambers is of considerable historical importance. If they existed, these gas chambers provide us with proof that the Germans undertook the physical extermination of the Jews; on the other hand, if they did not exist, we no longer have any proof of this extermination undertaking. Pierre Vidal-Naquet made no mistake. To those tempted to abandon the gas chambers argument, he replied that to abandon the gas chambers ’is to surrender in open country’. We can only agree with him. The gas chambers are not a mere detail in the history of the Second World War. Hence the legal sanctions that, in France, for example, are imposed on those who dispute their existence.
So the monumental Holocaust Memorial Museum (HMM), which was inaugurated in Washington on 22 April 1993, five hundred metres from the George Washington monument, could not afford to abandon the Nazi gas chamber argument. It remained to be seen what physical representation such a museum would give of this terrifying weapon.
Today we know, and the result is appalling: for want of anything better, this sumptuous museum, which has cost the American taxpayer and the American Jewish community millions of dollars, not to mention the money paid by the German taxpayer, has been reduced to showing us, as the only model of a homicidal gas chamber, a disinfection gas chamber located at Majdanek (Poland). As I will show later, even an author like Jean-Claude Pressac, author of a book published in 1989 under the patronage of the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation in New York, had to admit the obvious: the Majdanek gas chamber was only a disinfection gas chamber.
In 1945, the Americans had already presented four disinfection gas chambers in Dachau (Germany) as homicidal gas chambers.
If the organisers of the HMM in Washington took the risk of committing such a serious deception, it is, in my opinion, because they were forced to do so as they were unable to offer visitors a physical representation, in any form, of one of the gas chambers that the Germans, we are repeatedly told, used to kill crowds of victims.
