During the early 1980s, in my last three years at high school, I developed a passion for everything Bavarian: the soccer team Bayern München, Lederhosen, the dialect, and, of course, the Bavarian Party, the CSU,[530] which exists in Bavaria only. I also became a fan of Franz-Josef Strauß, who for many decades was chairman of this party and became kind of a symbol for everything Bavarian. I surely would have joined the CSU, also because of its strong conservative views, but unfortunately this party was open only to those residing in Bavaria, where I never lived.

At that time, I also joined the youth organization of Germany's semi-conservative party CDU,[531] but was active only a short time, because when my university studies took me to Bonn in 1983, I abandoned all political commitments for the time being.

When I started to study chemistry at University of Bonn in the fall of 1983, Bonn, then capital of West Germany, was a hotbed of anti-government demonstrations mainly by leftist students. The German federal government, lead by CDU and CSU, had agreed to the stationing of Pershing middle range nuclear weapons in Germany by the US. Armed Forces and also planned a census of the German population. Both infuriated the German left, who was strongly opposed to any foreign military presence in Germany and to any governmental intrusion into the privacy of German citizens.[532] I, on the other hand, took the position held by the German Federal government led by CDU/CSU, arguing for the census and for the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons to deter the Soviets.

However, my involvement was abruptly curbed when CSU chairman Strauß engineered a one billion Deutschmark loan to communist East Germany, a deal that contradicted everything Strauß stood for, in particular, the principle that one should never do business with the totalitarian powers of the East, unless some reciprocal benefit was forthcoming. The reciprocal benefit here, however, was only imaginary in that East Germany's communist government promised to remove the 'robot' machine guns on the inner-German border, which automatically killed or maimed every German trying to pass from totalitarian East Germany to 'Golden' West Germany. Subsequently, these atrocious weapons were indeed removed, but this was accompanied by the construction of a second border fence further inland. As a result, the inner-German border became even more impenetrable. Hence, Strauß' deal did not lead to any humane relief for the East Germans, but instead stabilized East Germany's economy, thus delaying its-as we know today-unavoidable final collapse for a few more years. From today's perspective, my criticism at the time was entirely justified. But at that time, it was the opinion of a separate minority only, a minority subject to ridicule-it was a 'peculiar view'.

In October 1983, I had joined a Catholic student fraternity, founded in Königsberg (East Prussia) in the late 1800s, but relocated to Bonn after WWII. At the end of WWII, almost the entire German population of East Prussia either fled or was murdered and expelled by the invading Soviets who divided this old German province in two parts, annexed the northern part and gave the southern part to Poland. In 1984, a 'brother' of this fraternity persuaded me to accompany him on a trip to Czechoslovakia in February of that same year. This fraternity brother was a student of Catholic theology and had adopted the cause of the suppressed Catholic Church in the then still Stalinist Czechoslovakia. Also, he had acquaintances there, and his parents were from the Sudetenland, a once purely German border region of Czechia, from where most Sudeten-Germans had been expelled or murdered after WWII by the Czechs. This fraternity brother of mine believed and fought for the rights both of the small Sudeten-German minority still living in Czechoslovakia and for the expelled Sudeten-Germans, most of whom had resettled in Bavaria and Austria after WWII.

With the knowledge and support of the Catholic Church, we attempted to smuggle theological and political books, as well as a photocopier, to a Catholic congregation in Prague. Our political literature included, for example, a Czech edition of George Orwell's 1984, which was forbidden in the then Czechoslovakian Socialist Soviet Republic. Although the books arrived at their destination, the photocopier was discovered at the border and my fraternity brother, another person traveling with us and myself were immediately confined to prison at Pilsen in the west of Czechoslovakia. After two weeks of nervous waiting, without any contact to the outside world, during which I was interrogated twice, I was told I could leave. My fraternity brother, however, was later sentenced to a year's imprisonment. He was forced to remain in jail for ten months until Christmas time 1984, when German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher intervened and managed to get him released early.

For many others, this experience might possibly have convinced them to leave controversial topics well enough alone. For me, it was the opposite. Because when I find that I have been the victim of injustice, my reaction is to fight until amends are made.

It was at this time that I became familiar with the dark side of the Communist dictatorship. I swore to myself in prison, once I was set free, I would combat the evil of Communism.

During the following year and a half, I became more involved with those who had been the victim of expulsions: firstly, because my father had been expelled from the east German province Silesia, together with millions of German compatriots (after WWII, Silesia was annexed by Poland and is now its southwestern part); secondly, probably as a result of memories of the fraternity brother mentioned above; and thirdly, from a conviction that the expulsion and persecution of East Germans by the communist dictatorships of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and the USSR was one of the greatest crimes in history, a crime which ought never be forgotten, trivialized or minimized, approved or justified. Parallels with the arguments invariably made in regards to the persecution of the Jews inevitably come to mind.

The year 1985 was marked by two events:

First, the so-called Engelhard[533] Law was discussed and finally enacted, according to which the offense to dispute, diminish, or justify the crimes of the National Socialist regime, or any other tyrannical regime, will be prosecuted automatically, without anybody needing to file a complaint. The original intention of those who started this discussion-the leftist Social-Democrats-was to make it easier for the legal system to prosecute 'Holocaust deniers', without the necessity of a complaint by some Jewish individual or organization. Certain segments of Germany's semi-conservative party-especially those lobbying for the German expellees-demanded that this law should also apply to anyone minimizing or justifying the crimes of other dictatorships, for example, those who minimized or justified the criminal post-war expulsion of Germans from east Germany and eastern Europe.

In this discussion, I vigorously took sides on the wing of the conservatives often disparagingly referred to as the 'steel helmet fraction'. By then, I had frequently experienced that those working and arguing on behalf of the German expellees are confronted with the argument that the Germans in general and the German expellees in particular have no right to insist on their claims, even if they were supported by international law.

After all, since Germany under Hitler had wanted war and started war, and since so much guilt had accumulated as a result of the 'extermination' or 'intended extermination' of the Jews and Slavs, any subsequent crimes committed against Germans by the peoples of Eastern Europe must be viewed as mere recompense. One had to take this view for the sake of a peaceful life. But by so doing, crimes, when committed against Germans by non-Germans, are considered to constitute a counterbalance to German crimes against other nationals, and are thus accepted as 'fair punishment'. This is common practice, it is a matter of good conduct in Germany to see it this way. But you will be sorry, should it ever enter your mind to turn this argument around and compare and counterbalance German crimes, actual or alleged, with those of other nationalities. This is, of course, verboten! In fact, continual reminders of German crimes, whether true or not, were and are still used to suppress any memory of crimes committed against my own people, the Germans, or to discuss justified claims resulting from the allied crimes.

Certainly, it would have been possible to try and dispute these German crimes, actual or alleged, as a means of overcoming the obstacles of discussing the crimes committed against Germans. But this course of action was not open to me, since I could neither argue nor act against my strongly held convictions. I was a firm believer in the standard historical account of the extermination of the Jews. This approach was therefore closed to me-it did not even occur to me as a theoretical possibility. The only available way was to take the position that two wrongs do not make a right, and no good could ever come of a wrong. This applies to the National Socialist persecution of the Jews as well as to the expulsion of the Germans.

The second significant event of 1985 was my joining a political party called Republikaner (not to be confused with the US Republicans). I made contact with this party through my involvement with the youth branch of an organization of Silesian Germans. At that time, these Republikaner were relatively unknown and their members were thought of as conservative patriots, but not as a right-wing radicals. I discovered that this party had originated from a split with Bavaria's conservative party CSU. The reason for some members of the CSU to leave this party and form their own was dissatisfaction with the mediation of the billion deutschmark loan to communist East Germany by CSU chairman Franz-Josef Strauß, as already mentioned. The party appeared to me as a kind of nation-wide CSU-minus the fear and trembling in the face of the Eastern bloc, and minus the marked patronage of offices and blatant corruption which was noticeable already then.

At first, I thought that this was just the party I had long been looking for, at least with respect to German national politics. However, their handling of the subject of immigrants repelled me, because as a Catholic I was very sensitive to programs or ideas that appeared to be motivated by hostility to foreigners.

The year 1986 was again marked by two events:

First, I came to realize that the Republikaner, at least in the Bonn-Siegburg districts, were mostly a collection of hard-core right-wingers who had been expelled from East Germany after WWII. At the only membership meeting that I attended, it was obvious to me that they could not find anything more important to talk about than the question of whether and to what extent West Prussia was German, and whether territorial claims to it could be asserted. This complete withdrawal from political reality accompanied by a failure to recognize that which was politically necessary at the time the world was debating the reunion of West and East Germany, contributed to my decision to leave the Party.

The most compelling reason for my decision was a recognition that the party included more than a few former members of the right-wing radical party NPD,[534] with whom I wanted no contact. After a membership of half a year, I left the party in early or middle 1986.

The second event that I wish to discuss here took place in January 1986, at a convention to celebrate the 115^th anniversary of the founding of the German Reich in 1871, organized by the student fraternity Verein Deutscher Studenten (VDSt, Association of German Students), and held in Frankfurt. It was at this convention that I first learned that the VDSt Frankfurt was a nationalistically oriented student organization. And it was after this celebration that I had a long argument with a student member of this organization who claimed to be a member of the nationalist party NPD. The subject of our argument was the extermination of the Jews. He maintained that the established description did not fit the facts, and that there were not, in reality, six million victims, but three million at most. I was appalled by this manner of argument, and will explain why.

First, there was the natural repugnance aroused by a line of argument which tended merely to diminish a few numbers, although the issue is not really the actual numbers, but the intention behind the deed. My belief at that time was that Hitler had planned to exterminate the Jews, and had done whatever had been necessary to accomplish this goal. The actual 'how' and 'how many' were of secondary importance.

From the student's style of argument, it was clear that he had strong political motives for his way of thinking. He spoke of the use of the 'Auschwitz bludgeon' against the political right, and in particular, against his party. His mixture of political objectives and scientific argumentation made me skeptical. I could not take his arguments at face value, because I was unable to trust him. I silently reproached him for his political involvement, believing that he was no longer willing or able to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between the justified and the unjustified.

I have forgotten his exact arguments and conclusions. Perhaps I do him an injustice, but I still retain a bitter taste of his unbending, politically-motivated way of thinking. It is possible that this is merely an impression I had, because at the time, I thought of all NPD members as extremists with dishonest intentions. It is therefore possible that it wasn't the NPD member who had a distorted view of things, but rather, that I saw him distortedly by my own prejudices. That question will never be answered.

What can one say today about that event? Although I had dealt with this Holocaust 'denier' and was well aware of the reality of the political misuse of the 'Auschwitz bludgeon' against the political right or right-wing oriented people, this did not lead to my doubting the truth of the usual historical version of the National Socialist persecution of the Jews. The reason was that I could not, and cannot, take seriously any position maintained for obviously political reasons.

In the years that followed, I devoted myself chiefly to my studies; in 1986, I had entered the demanding graduate phase of my studies with subsequent preparation for the Diplom examination.[535] During this period, I abandoned all political activity and withdrew from my work with German refugee organizations and with my student fraternity. This was due not only to my academic work load, but also because I had had my fill of nonsense and no longer cared about activities which were partially unrealistic and mostly useless.

The pressure let up in the year 1989, as I had just completed my Diplom examinations and therefore enjoyed some free time for different intellectual pursuits. The same year was also marked by two significant events.

The first event was the elections for the Berlin Chamber of Deputies, during which the Republikaner gained their famous (or infamous) entry into the city's parliament. Like most people, I was completely surprised by this outcome, since I had lost almost all contact with this party. But, in contrast to most other people, I had some idea of what the Republikaner were, and were not. The horrifying media witch-hunt against this party immediately following the electoral success infuriated me. Characteristic of this witch-hunt was the question posed by a journalist on election eve to Bernhard Andres, then party chairman in Berlin, as to whether the Republikaner wished to do to the Turks what Hitler had done to the Jews. That was when things turned sour. It was clear to me in the flash of a moment's insight that I would rejoin the Republikaner out of pure defiance and democratic solidarity, even if I was displeased by some things about this party. One could take or leave a few isolated party positions as one wished. As long as the party was in compliance with the German constitution, it was entitled to treatment on the basis of equality.

Of course, nothing that has happened since then bears any resemblance to democracy. Party meetings were regularly harassed or prohibited, although Germans were guaranteed the freedom of assembly as a 'basic right'. The print and electronic news media were instructed to report nothing but negative information about this party, a fact not in conformity with the standards of ethics and the legal duty of the publicly-funded news media to report the news with objectivity.

The establishment parties placed the Republikaner beyond the pale of democracy and constitutional politics. It was therefore those establishment parties who had violated the constitutional right of the Republikaner to equal treatment, as well as to the freedoms of expression and assembly.

One of my close friends, a long-time member of Germany's semi-conservative party CDU, had recently completed his studies in civil administration and was assigned to the city government of a large city in Saxony during his period of practical training. He then received orders from his supervisor, a CDU member, to prohibit the planned regional party convention of the Republikaner. Since it was his specific duty as a civil servant to respect the provisions of the German constitution, he refused to obey these orders on the grounds that the Republikaner were a legally constituted party, the unconstitutionality or undemocratic nature of which has remained unproven. Therefore, in accordance with the principle of equal treatment for political parties, as well as with the rights of free assembly and a respect for the duty of democratic parties to hold regular meetings of their members, their party convention could not lawfully be prohibited.

The consequence of this disobedience was that my friend was told that he would not be able to complete his period of practical training. To avoid forced termination during this period, my friend agreed to a termination agreement to become effective subsequent to this training. His concomitant attempt to fight the agreement in the Labor Court naturally failed. In Germany, those who defend the constitution are dumped on the street, while those who continually violate the constitution enjoy offices and power while the media cheer them on.

I need to discuss another reason for my rejoining the Republikaner in 1989. My belief that one should hold fast to the unity of the German Fatherland has never changed. The left-wing German party SPD[536] had abandoned the goal of reunification in the mid-70s, while the left-wing radical GRÜNE (Greens) had always supported the division of Germany into two independent states. The small liberal party FDP[537] followed in the mid-80s in their support for two independent German states, and towards the end of the 80s, even within the semi-conservative CDU calls to put off the German reunification forever became louder and louder. In this connection (I believe it was in 1987), I remember the commentary of Dr. Helmut Kohl, then leader of the CDU and German chancellor, on a position paper of a certain CDU Member of Parliament, Bernhard Friedmann, concerning German reunification, which Dr. Kohl described as "blooming nonsense". After the political sea-change of 1983, when the semi-conservative/liberal CDU/FDP coalition replaced that of the socialist/liberal SPD/FDP government of the decade before, the new government dissolved all governmental departments in charge of administrative preparations for a German reunification. The left wing of the CDU, under Rita Süssmuth, Heiner Geißler and Norbert Blüm, campaigned openly for dual statehood. In the summer of 1989, the Federal Council of the CDU youth organization Junge Union (Young Union) took the initiative to recommend the deletion of the political goal of German reunification from the party program of the CDU- just a few months before the Berlin Wall fell and Germany actually was reunified!

Now that Germany is reunited, a devastating judgment must be passed upon all the established political parties with regards to their political competence. From the standpoint of the present, the Republikaner were the only party, of those involved at the time, with a correct estimation of the historical and political forces, even if they were subsequently booted out by the turncoats of reunification. I was in the party because all the other parties had abandoned, or were about to abandon in an absolutely unconstitutional manner, the principle of reunification, a principle laid down in the preamble to the German constitution.

It is significant also that my membership in the Republikaner, which ended in the summer of 1991, was later used by the District Court Stuttgart as an indicator of my political mania- in full knowledge of what I have just described. Nowadays, support for the maintenance of constitutional political principles is deemed reprehensible, if not outright illegal. Further comments are superfluous.

The young people that streamed into the Republikaner party at that time wanted to do something for German reunification, since this was impossible in almost any other political party. Former members of the CDU, the SPD and the FDP joined, as well as people from right-wing splinter parties and many people who had never been in any party at all. It was a motley group resulting in an unholy chaos. But among us students in Frankfurt, where I completed work for my diploma thesis and later performed my compulsory military service,[538] this plate of mixed vegetables was intellectually very fruitful. In the newly founded Republikaner university organization, we had one former member of the liberal party FDP, one from the socialist party SPD, one from the conservative ecologist party ÖDP,[539] three from the semi-conservative CDU, and many who were active for the first time. During this time, we were flooded with new ideas and discussed controversial issues as never before.

In this Frankfurt period, which ended in late 1990, I read nearly 200 books, mostly during my 'loafer-service' in the Bundeswehr: I read right-wing and left-wing books, books from the middle-of-the-road, and books without any political viewpoint. It was one of the best times I have ever experienced. It was like preparing for an intellectual break-out.

Our interest in involvement with the Republikaner party disappeared due to the fact that it was extremely anti-academic, both in its ranks and leadership. We had to let ourselves be mocked and called greenhorns and academic egg-heads by other members, and the work of our high-school organization was torpedoed by the Republikaner leadership which led to our resignation. From 1990 onwards, the Republikaner party has concerned itself mostly with internal conflicts; since every initiative for constructive work was received with malicious criticism, I resigned in the summer of 1991, about nine months after my relocation to Stuttgart in order to start my PhD studies.

Now back to the question of how I became a revisionist. Certainly in the beginning of my second involvement with the Republikaner, I was repeatedly confronted with the use of the 'Auschwitz bludgeon' used against both 'my' party and myself. I have mentioned above the scandalous question of the journalist after the Berlin election, a question which was used continually to suggest that the Republikaner-after they had seized power-intended to 'gas' the Turkish immigrants residing in Germany. Wouldn't it have been easy to have introduced the idea of disputing the Holocaust at such a time?

I had a chance to do this in the spring of 1989, when one of my friends, who had left the 'liberal' FDP shortly before to join the Republikaner, addressed the Holocaust issue in one of our discussions. He recommended that I read the book Was ist Wahrheit, (What is Truth) by the socialist Frenchman, Professor Paul Rassinier.[30] This may be regarded as the first fully revisionist book ever published. It deals with the supposed extermination of the Jews from the point of view of a former member of the French Resistance who had been incarcerated by the Germans in several concentration camps during WWII.

The remarkable thing about the book is its author. Since he was interned in several concentration camps as a member of the Resistance and was a pronounced left-winger-before and after WWII, he was a French member of parliament for the leftist socialists-he could not be accused of wanting to whitewash anything or of having any kind of political agenda. Written in a factual and balanced style, the book was easy to read; we discussed it, and that was all. I felt no need to devote myself further to the subject, either through the examination of further revisionist or establishment literature or through undertaking my own investigations. If there had ever been a political reason for an involvement with Holocaust revisionism, it would have been when I was throwing myself intensively into debating on behalf of the Republikaner.

The cause of my interest in the Holocaust problem, beginning in the fall of 1989, came from quite another source, one that was only secondarily political and which had nothing to do with the Republikaner. In the fall of 1989, I bought the book Der Nasenring. Im Dickicht der Vergangenheitsbewältigung (The Nose Ring-In the Thicket of Coming to Terms with the Past) by the Swiss political scientist Dr. Armin Mohler.[540] I had already received an earlier edition of this book as a gift from my mother in the mid-1980s. This earlier edition was the result of an assignment given to Mohler by a semi-official institute of West Germany. Mohler was asked to study how and when German attempts to come to terms with their past-originally a purely moral impetus-had become a weapon in day-to-day political discussion and intrigues.

That 'coming to terms with the past' could lend itself to misuse for dirty schemes is obvious. From my own experience, I can think of three notable cases, where prominent German figures were driven out of office and their reputation destroyed by political and media smear campaigns. In such cases, the media and/or competing colleagues either use (allegedly) 'brown spots' in the CV of the attacked individuals' WWII history, or they distort and/or instrumentalize 'politically incorrect' statements certain individuals made in public or private about Germany's WWII past.[541] Whatever the CV or the statements about the past of the victims of these campaigns are; the treatment which they receive by colleagues and the media must arouse the suspicion that the German past is being used today as a weapon of political intrigue against undesirables in one's own political party, in other parties, or in general against any unwelcome professional competitor.

The question of how true the historical picture is that hides behind the 'coming to terms with the past' Mohler handled only peripherally in this early edition of his book. His new book, which I read in the fall of 1989, goes into this question very thoroughly and thereby naturally brings up the question of the validity of historical revisionism-something which first became clear to me while reading the book.

That I got hold of this book was due not so much to its contents, which I previously knew nothing about, but more to my interest in the analyses of a Swiss political scientist, someone writing from what I considered to be a neutral position.

This Swiss author also reported about a study on the alleged 'gas chambers' at the Auschwitz concentration camp. This study, so Mohler, had been prepared by an American expert for execution technologies, who had come to the conclusion that there had never been any gassings with poison gas in Auschwitz. One of his main arguments was the absence of traces of the poison gas supposedly used in the walls of those locations identified as homicidal 'gas chambers'. Since this was a quite intriguing argument, I decided to order a copy of this study, for which Dr. Mohler even provided an address in his book. Thus were the factors brought together that I needed to compel me to get to the bottom of the problem: the report of an author I held to be politically neutral of a study by an apolitical non-partisan American on a discipline in which I had recently completed my diploma examination: Chemistry.

At that point, I was ready to put to the test my hitherto held opinion on the correctness of the established Holocaust dogma, because I had been presented with arguments from politically neutral persons that I could examine by means of my technical skill.

In late summer 1989, I received an English copy of the so-called Leuchter Report, which I have just mentioned, and I read and translated it into German immediately, but the report did not convince me entirely, because it was inexact at points and contained sloppy errors, as I described extensively in a letter to the editor published in the small right-wing monthly newspaper Junge Freiheit in 1990. But the Leuchter Report had embedded the thorn of doubt in my heart. I must now explain what that meant, since therein lies the real reason for my involvement.

It is generally known that none of the world's religions reproaches its adherents for doubting the faith. Religion teaches us that to doubt is human, and therefore acceptable. One who doubts is not guilty as a result.

After reading the Leuchter Report, I began to doubt whether the historically accepted view of the events of the Holocaust was correct. I nevertheless felt guilty, because in western societies we are imbued with our mother's milk that the history of the Holocaust is the purest truth, and those who doubt or deny this are evil or insane: extremists, National Socialists, Jew-haters, ethnic persecutors, weak-minded, morons, idiots, fruitcakes, cranks, crooks, anti-Semites, and so forth.

Yet, through a purely chemical argument, the thorn of doubt had been deeply embedded and I could only get rid of it by plucking it out or trying to forget it. I doubted, and felt guilty for doubting; yet I knew that it is not right to feel guilty for doubting.

Religions expect their adherents to believe in certain dogmas, but they do not demand doubters to feel guilty. At least the same must apply to science, where doubters should not be expected to feel guilty either. Here I was confronted with chemical-historical questions, and ideally speaking, science knows no dogmas, knows no compulsion to obedience, and no punishments for those who contradict the prevalent paradigm.

I therefore asked myself, why do western societies guard the Holocaust dogma closer than any religion does its own dogmas? The reason is certainly that western societies, and in particular German society, regards the Holocaust as one of their moral foundations. This I have explained elsewhere, in the book Dissecting the Holocaust.[542] The German elites almost uniformly maintain that the health and wealth of the German Republic depends on the observance of current description of the Holocaust. In the German Republic, we are raised with the conviction that the Holocaust is the moral pole star of our world-view, with respect to which everything else must be oriented.

That was my own unconscious belief until I began to question the standard historical version of the Holocaust. When these doubts surfaced, I was confronted with the possibility that the pole star might turn out to be only a meteor, that everything which had been held as fundamental truth may in reality be false.

Here then are the reasons I have dedicated myself to revisionism:

1. Because of my upbringing, I felt bad merely for doubting. I knew something was wrong with a society when it instills guilt-feelings in its members simply because they dissent. The Holocaust is the one area, and almost the only area, where one is admonished to accept facts blindly; not to think critically. We are taught to question practically everything else, even that which is kept in high regard, such as the reality of God, or sexual intimacy. We are primed to be docile subjects and kept fearful of any transgressions with respect to the Holocaust. That angered me then and it angers me still.
2. Because of my doubts, my entire outlook on life became unstable. I was no longer certain what was correct or incorrect, who lied and who told the truth. The eternal conflict of good and evil was revived in me. The question where the truth could be found concerning the Holocaust was so important, that I knew I could only recover my peace of mind by finding out for myself, personally, where the truth lay. I wanted to rid myself of uncertainty one way or the other.
3. There is no scientific area in which those who hold dissident opinions are persecuted more mercilessly by the 'ruling order' than that of revisionism. That is probably why most people don't want to touch it, and most avoid it by convincing themselves that the subject is not relevant to current problems. But for me, this draconian persecution is the best proof there is that this is a crucial subject, because the powers that be regard it as most important that nobody touches this taboo. Comprehensive and critical research in this area is therefore very important for scientific, political and social reasons.[543]
4. The treatment of revisionism and its proponents in areas of science, journalism, politics and law is a scandal worldwide-it demands redress.

Up to the beginning of my PhD studies in the fall of 1990, I had read only two books on the subject: Wilhelm Stäglich's Der Auschwitz Mythos[41] and the book by Kogon and others entitled Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas.[42]

After reading these books I collected information on the so-called Zündel trial in order to find out what arguments had been made there. I had discovered in winter 1989/1990 that Zündel, who had commissioned the Leuchter Report, was an admirer of Adolf Hitler. This revelation had the equivalent effect of a kick in the stomach, because now I had to deal with the possibility that the Leuchter Report was not the independent report of an apolitical American technician, but merely the instrument of a German-Canadian Neo-Nazi. But such considerations could not remove the points made by Leuchter and therefore could not remove my doubts about the historical picture.

In other words, I fully realized that a fact-oriented argument remains a fact-oriented argument-and needs to be treated as such by the examining scientist-even if it came from somebody who stated them for political reasons.

I began my own research into this area at the beginning of 1991, at first out of pure personal curiosity regarding the question whether the pigment Iron Blue that developed in the walls of the buildings, where gassings with hydrogen cyanide from Zyklon B allegedly had taken place, were sufficiently stable to still be there today. After that had been proved, I concentrated on the question if, when, how, and under what circumstances this pigment could develop in walls of different compositions.

A revisionist had read my letter to the editor of Junge Freiheit in 1990, mentioned above, and after a phone conversation, he sent me a list of addresses of persons and organizations-almost all of them unknown to me.

After I had sent out my first research results in spring 1991 to this list, I was contacted by one person on that list, a friend of ret. Major General Otto Ernst Remer, a retired Wehrmacht officer. At that time, Remer was engaged in publishing political pamphlets, some of which made quite blunt revisionist statements, which had led to several criminal prosecutions against him. Because of this, his friend and the Düsseldorf lawyer Hajo Herrmann, a well-known former Luftwaffe fighter pilot who was now Remer's defense attorney, were looking for an expert to support Remer's revisionist claims.

At that time, it even appeared to be possible for me to work jointly with the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History), an official German left-wing historical institute, whose address was on that list as well. However, they never responded to my letters, apparently because they were not interested in the technical-scientific side of the problem.

In summer 1991, I decided to leave the Republikaner party. I have already given the reasons for my decision. An additional and decisive motivation was that I did not want my involvement with revisionism to be interpreted politically because of my membership of a party or that my scientific activity in this controversial area would conflict with the political goals or principles of any party.

I should mention another reason that may be helpful toward understanding my involvement. Until my first trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, I had had no exact idea of the condition of the camp's former crematoria, in which the alleged 'gas chambers' were located, so I had no idea whether it would actually be useful to undertake technical or chemical research. Before my first trip, I had thoroughly prepared myself as to what I might expect with respect to the material remains at, for example, 'gas chambers', if the generally accepted reports of the mass gassings in Birkenau were correct. It was clear to me, for example, if one was to believe the eye-witnesses, that the roofs of the morgues of crematoria II and III should show three or four holes through which Zyklon B was to have been thrown into the room.

On August 16, 1991, as I stood on the roof of morgue 1 of crematoria II at Birkenau, which was usually designated as the 'gas chamber' where the most mass-murders of the Third Reich were said to have taken place, a roof which was in various stages of collapse and yet still held together and partially rested on supporting columns; a roof in which I could find neither breath nor trace of these holes, so that I asked myself whether I lived in a world of madmen. I found myself horribly duped by a judiciary which had never thought it necessary to make any special technical examinations of the alleged crime scene. I had been lied to by all the politicians of the world who to date had failed to assemble even the most minuscule investigation commission. I had been deceived by the innumerable 'Holocaust historians' who to date had not deemed it necessary to make any investigation of the camps of Auschwitz or elsewhere, examinations which paleontologists and historians of antiquity have undertaken on the sites of ruins and other remains of ancient settlements. And I felt betrayed by the natural scientists and engineers world-over who swallowed any and every story whatsoever from the 'eye-witnesses' without so much as a murmur that the material remains, the supposed crime scenes, and the eye-witness testimony itself should be subjected to some rudimentary scrutiny.

On this 16th of August, 1991, my world-view collapsed and I swore to do whatever necessary to advance clarification to this complex of questions. I will only abandon my position when my doubts are confirmed or rejected through convincing scientific arguments in a fair scientific discourse. Use of force will never change this position. On the contrary: it fortifies my conviction that I am right, because only he who lacks arguments must use force. And since I have been chased all over the world ever since by all sorts of government with brute force, I now know that I must be right.

In time, a further motivation was added to those mentioned above, namely what I call the 'Eros of Cognition.' Whoever calls himself a scientist and has not experienced this, is not, in my opinion, a real scientist. The excitement of taking part in decisive scientific research and discoveries, to push things forward which one knows are new and even revolutionary, the consciousness of standing at the forefront and helping direct 'whither the ship of discovery goest'- those are things that one must know first-hand, in order to understand what is 'Eros of cognition'.

In February 1991, I attended a seminar in Bad Kissingen put on by a Sudeten-German youth organization-I was not a member but had been invited. Toward the end of the seminar, I got to know another participant of about my age. He suggested that before we departed we pay a visit to Wehrmacht Generalmajor Otto Ernst Remer, who lived in that town.

Remer, I was told, was the person who had suppressed the Putsch of July 20, 1944, against Hitler, and I was told he held fast to his views of that time. Our intended visit would be a little bit like a visit to a museum containing a living political fossil. I was curious, so I agreed and off we went.

To a young man from a bourgeois home who had been fed a steady diet of anti-fascism, the living room of General and Frau Remer was creepy-Hitler busts, military decorations and all kinds of propaganda hand-outs caused a shiver to run down my back. We were given a tour of the house by Frau Remer and then treated to a showing of a video-film that portrayed the events of July 20, 1944, from Remer's viewpoint. Thus 'enlightened', after an hour we left for home.[544]

In summer 1991, when I was requested by Remer's attorney to prepare an expert opinion on the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz for a criminal trial against his client, I well knew the client for whom I would be acting. It was clear to me that there was a danger that Remer's political opinions and activities could rub off on 'his expert witness', if the witness came to a 'politically incorrect' conclusion. Why I nevertheless decided to proceed is as follows.

In a state under the rule of law, a witness, including an expert witness, can not be punished for what he says before the court or for what he presents in writing to the court, in good conscience and to his best understanding.

Also, in civil law an expert witness is only liable if it can be proven that he violated the rules and accepted practices of his profession in producing his report and in so doing caused someone bodily or mental harm.

Therefore, when an expert witness through painstaking effort evaluates all available sources and interprets them in a technically sound manner, in good conscience and to his best understanding, then even if the conclusions of the expert report were wrong he could not be made liable for any gross negligence.

Consequently, he could defend himself at law against any civil disadvantages that resulted from the presentation of a possibly politically incorrect expert report because a witness-here an expert witness-may not be made to suffer for having testified in good conscience and to his best understanding.

Though I could see there were storms threatening to come my way, I looked on them placidly since I believed that having the law on my side gave me the upper hand.

It was intended from the beginning that the expert report arising from this request of Remer's attorney would be published. It is unusual to publish expert reports from judicial proceedings, but it does happen when the subject is of public interest. Expert reports drawn up for several trials against supposed National Socialist war criminals, for example, were later made available to a wide public for educational purposes. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial is a prime example of this. The expert reports produced during this trial by scientists at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte were later published as a collection.[545]

My report was ready for publication in spring 1992. The original document prepared for the court was enlarged by numerous substantial additions and the layout was improved. In summer 1992, the German publishing houses Ullstein-Langen Müller and von Hase & Köhler showed active interest in the project. Dr. Fleißner, head of the Ullstein-Langen Müller publishers, quickly got cold feet due to the controversial nature of the theme, despite initial agreement, but von Hase & Köhler wasted no time presenting me with a signed contract. The problem with this contract was that it did not contain any specification as to when the book should appear. This meant publication could have been put off indefinitely while my hands were tied by my contractual agreement. When I pressed them to fix this they lost interest.

Social and legal repression was a hint that the theme was a hot one, even when it was handled in a dry, scientific manner. On the advice of various people, I decided to postpone the publication of the document by a politically right-leaning publisher until after I had received my PhD degree.

In the European right-wing scene, the appearance of my report was awaited with increasing impatience throughout 1992; it was expected that my report would contribute decisively to a breakthrough of historical revisionism.

Various people began to prepare openly for the coming publication. I regarded these activities with mixed feelings and often needed to point out that my doctorate would not be properly completed until many months hence.

At the beginning of 1992, I reckoned that I could be in possession of the much-desired degree in the fall. Because of the workload of my doctoral supervisor Prof. von Schnering, however, I extended this period several times. I ended waiting five more months to February, 1993, until Prof. von Schnering began to proofread my dissertation.

I came into conflict with German-Canadian revisionist Ernst Zündel in this time, because in summer 1992, without my knowledge, he gave out copies of the report as prepared for the court in February, 1992. In November, again without my knowledge, he went so far as to translate this outdated version of my report into English. Later he let it be known that he would like to be reimbursed for his translation costs to the amount of $10,000.

I had a more pleasant experience with an attorney in Austria, Dr. Herbert Schaller. In February, 1993, he asked me if he could have 100 copies of the report to distribute discreetly in Austrian high society. Up to that point, I had made a total of 50 copies of the report by photocopier and glued in color photos by hand, which was an enormous labor. I told the attorney that since my doctoral supervisor had begun to work on my dissertation, I had no time to make 100 copies for him. However, I agreed that he could make copies from the copy he had and could distribute those-on the condition that he do so as discreetly as I myself had done already without accompanying commentary and without public propaganda.

As far as I know, Dr. Schaller did make and distribute 100 copies in February or March, 1993. To this day, there has been no public report of his action.

As fate would have it, the Austrian attorney Dr. Schaller was also one of Otto Ernst Remer's defense attorneys. Remer must have heard about the distribution of my report in Austria. Shortly thereafter, I was informed by one of Remer's friends, and without Remer's knowledge, as I found out later, concerning Remer's intention to do in Germany what his lawyer had done in Austria. According to what I was told, Remer intended to do exactly as the Austrian had done. But because Germany is more than ten times larger than Austria, Remer and his friends intended to do their distribution activity more professionally by having my expert report printed instead of photocopied. Though I knew this could put my PhD degree in jeopardy, I saw no reason to intervene. Naively I thought that Remer would stick to the rules the Austrian had followed, which were perhaps too natural to me to be pointed out specifically: the report must remain unaltered, no additional text, no public propaganda is to be made. As we shall see, these rules were not considered natural by Remer and his friends.

In March, 1993, with a furious publicity campaign, Remer announced as a measure of self-defense that he was going to publish and distribute that piece of exculpatory evidence that he was not permitted to present to the court, because the Holocaust is assumed to be self-evident.[546] Thereby Remer broke the first unconditional rule for the protection of my doctoral title, namely that there be no accompanying public propaganda. Thinking that this writing would only circulate in Remer's circle of supporters, I paid little attention. When I received a phone call from a journalist of a west German radio station, informing me that some of those advertising sheets had surfaced at the University of Cologne, the situation changed. Soon the management of the Fresenius Institute was on the telephone asking me what was in the report-the Fresenius Institute had analyzed the masonry samples from Auschwitz for me. They hinted that they might consider joining me in taking legal action against Remer. An hour later the Institute's attorney was threatening me with legal action. Remer had become a bull in the china shop.

My situation was precarious. At the request of an attorney, I had prepared an expert opinion to be used in the defense of his client. The conclusion of the report was potentially capable of reducing the culpability of said client with respect to the criminality of some of his factual assertions. I intended to publish the report a few months after completing my doctoral work anyway. Now the client took the step of publishing the report at a time that was uncomfortably early and, what was worse and unexpected, with an unhealthy press campaign. Should I now take him to court after having helped him in court? Should I take him to court for doing what I intended to do myself in a few months, though with a smaller or different press campaign?[547] After all, I had been informed in advance and did not intervene then. The only thing that had changed were Remer's public relation activities.

As if Remer's industrious publicity campaign were not enough, in April 1993, as my expert report was handed out for the first time, I learned that a one-page foreword and a five-page appendix consisting of a description of Remer's criminal trial had been added to my report.[548] I was not the least bit interested in whether or not the added commentary was criminally relevant. I only glanced at the forward and took no notice of the trial description added after the end of my report. I was aggravated in that Remer had expanded and thus altered the text without authorization. Never mind what was in the commentary-it did not have my approval and that was aggravating enough. But now that this report of mine had been printed, what could I do about it? I thought that it was obvious that I could not be held responsible for something whose addition to my report I had had no knowledge of, not to mention that I had neither given my agreement to it nor had participated in its preparation. So why should I care whether the content of Remer's commentary was criminal? As a matter of fact, I basically ignored Remer's comments. So it happened that I perused Remer's commentary for the first time at the end of 1994, fully one and three quarters of a year afterward, after my own criminal indictment because of that commentary.

In any case, in early 1993, I was concerned only about my doctoral work. This also was due to a passage in Remer's appendix, which my doctoral supervisor held under my nose shortly after he-as all professors of chemistry in Germany-had received his copy. In the above-mentioned report on Remer's criminal trial, I had been mentioned in connection with the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. Though I was preparing my PhD thesis in theoretical crystallography at this institute, my research about the 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz and my subsequent activities as an expert witness had nothing to do with this governmental research institute. It was my private activity. However, the fact that I was referred to in Remer's appendix as an "expert from the Max-Planck-Institute" had the consequence that the German news media and scientific, legal, and political circles unleashed a storm over the Max-Planck-Institute and demanded to have my head. At the insistence of the Institute, I consulted an attorney specializing in copyright law. He, however, made it clear to me that no 'serious' attorney would touch such a hot potato, both from conviction and for the sake of his reputation. Also, it was not clear whether I had any ground of action against Remer, since the copyright had probably gone to him because he had ordered and paid for the report as I had admitted.[549]

The question of the copyright to the report has never been cleared up. The Remers always held the position that they have the copyright to the report because they paid for it, and that they can do with it as they please. There was a contractual agreement set to paper, but unfortunately I lost my copy as a result of house searches and changes of abode, and the Remers could not find their copy after their flight to Spain, so that the actual contents of the document cannot be determined. I remember only that I was promised to be reimbursed for expenses that I incurred through the production of the report, and that in turn I was supposed to publish my expert report, but no time limit was given for that. The copyright was not discussed.

Also, the Remers have silently accepted that since June 1993, without consulting them, I have on my own determined where, when, and how my report is to appear in each of several languages-German, English, French and Dutch.

Left out in the rain, as it were, in mid-April 1993, I tried to divert Herr Remer. At the start of May, I finally succeeded in persuading him to curtail his distribution activities because of the reprisals I was experiencing.

Aside from any legal aspect of Remer's commentary, I would like to make a few observations. First, Remer's remarks were composed in a style that would insult any average anti-fascist citizen-and that would be about 95% of the population. One could well assume for that reason alone that most recipients of this version of the report would toss it into the wastebasket unread.

Not only that, but Remer had done something that would cause nearly all his recipients who possessed a spark of pride to consign the piece to the fire. In his foreword on the inside front cover, he attacked our leading politicians, media people, and jurists with the words, "These Liars need to be driven from their spoils fortresses".

At the same time, Remer sent this version of my report to exactly these leading politicians, media people, and jurists, and apparently believed he could achieve some success thereby. It is certain that to send a piece of writing to someone in which he is criticized and threatened is a useless exercise. Remer's defense action must have cost him thousands of Dollars-all for nothing.

After I had stopped Remer's defense action, the legal process ran its course. It was my thinking that no one could touch me for something I had not done. But the State's Attorney had to investigate, since many of those to whom Remer had sent his copies had filed criminal complaints against him and against me: the German Society of Chemists, many State Attorneys and Chief State Attorneys, Judges and Presidents of District Courts and Federal Courts, left-wing party representatives from various parliaments, professors of various disciplines from universities throughout Germany, and on and on and on. Not to mention that there were continual inquiries from Tel Aviv that persist even today.

Strangely, the State Attorneys were active only against me. They made inquiries about Remer, but saw no need to search his house. With respect to Remer, they were satisfied to push papers around. With respect to me, over the following years they searched my house three times and took away everything that was not nailed down. Apparently, German justice did not consider Remer to be dangerous. The Remer problem, they probably thought, would solve itself biologically. My case, however, they decided, needed extra effort.

The trial, which lasted from the end of 1994 to the middle of 1995, destroyed what remained of my illusions about the rule of law in Germany. I have described this in chapter 11.3. "Flaws of the State Under the Rule of Law".[550] On January 19, 1996, the Federal General State Attorney determined that I was to spend 14 months behind bars, not for my report but for Remer's commentary. The Federal Supreme Court concurred with this sentence in a decision on March 7, 1996 (Ref. 1 StR 18/96). On Remer's commentary, the District Court of Stuttgart stated in passing sentence (Ref. 17 KLs 83/94, S. 115):

According to the court, then, Remer's remarks were not punishable by themselves; only together with my report a reader so inclined could 'read between the lines' and would supposedly be led to hostility toward the Jews, and that is morally indefensible because it must be clear to everyone that one ought to be 'a friend of the Jews'.

Therefore, not only was I punished for a crime I had not committed, but for one which no one had committed.

This would have made some sense, at least, if Remer had foregone his commentary and I had been sentenced for my report and not for somebody else's commentary, but that was not the case.

On May 7, 1996, the criminal trial against me and others for the publication of the book Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte[551] (for this, see chapter 11.4.2.) began before the County Court of Tübingen. The sentence that could be imposed by such a court was one to four years imprisonment. Since I had already been sentenced to 14 months of imprisonment without probation, the sentence for me this time would probably not be less than two years-also without probation. Also, the public prosecutor of Tübingen was answerable to the General Prosecutor's Office in Stuttgart, and who knows to whom they are answerable. From the beginning, the following dicta overshadowed the trial:

In its sentence, the Tübingen County Court decided the book Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte should be withdrawn from circulation, effectively annihilated and that the author and publisher should be punished. This, after prominent German historians had submitted to the court expert opinions to the effect that the book held to scientific standards and that therefore the authors, editor, publisher, sellers, printer and purchasers were owed the right of freedom of science and the right of freedom of expression (see chapter 11.4.2.).[554] It did not help:

Since I was the editor of the book, Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte, a warrant for my arrest was issued and I fled the country. In view of all this I hope one may forgive and understand my reasons that I took my family and went into exile. A busy young father had better things to do than breathe jail-house air.[555]

Today, nine years after these events, I know that it is precisely the serious, scientific revisionist work that the establishment considers threatening, since one cannot fight a professionally written work with cat-calls and jeers. Unlike shallow pamphlets, it must be taken seriously. Patrick Bahners stated the establishment view in the highly respected German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:[556]

However, Bahners proceeds from false premises.

First, Bahners does not make clear how an intention to agitate can be recognized, if not by errors of form. It is stated in the German constitution that science is free without restriction. Decisions of the German Federal Constitutional Court have stated that science is defined by formal rules alone and not by content. These decisions are in agreement with fundamental theoretical works on the nature of scientific knowledge. If Bahners thinks differently, he is anti-constitutional, anti-scientific, and anti-human rights.

Secondly, there are no experts who assert that the survivors of Auschwitz were "never in mortal danger". Bahners warms up the calculated lie that revisionists would present Auschwitz as a vacation resort without danger to life or limb and generally characterize the National Socialist persecution of the Jews as harmless to the Jews. Either Bahners doesn't know what he's talking about-in which case he should stay away from the keyboard-or he himself is agitating against others with different opinions, in which case the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung should not allow Bahners to soil its reputation.

Thirdly, Bahners' conception that the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany is based on the unconditional recognition of the established version of the National Socialist persecution and extermination of the Jews is absurd and utterly false. If the Federal Republic of Germany were actually founded on this historical detail, it would be a dire weakness, because every state that bases its existence on a version of history enforced under pains and penalties must sooner or later come to grief.

Certainly, the formal foundations of the legitimacy of the German Republic are very different-human rights, civil right, acceptance by the people of the state, international recognition, political, historical and cultural identity and continuity with preceding German states-and there is no need to accept the harsh judgment of Bahners and some of his colleagues.

However, it was recently made clear by the Ministry of Justice of Baden-Württemberg that in future, Germany's judicial system will adopt Bahners' viewpoint that revisionist works of a scientific nature constitute incitement to hatred and must therefore be burned. In its answer to a question relating to the seizure of scientific revisionist books of Grabert Verlag it stated:[557]

The assertion of the Minister of Justice that even a scientific work can be seized when the fundamental rights of others are involved is completely false, and the decisions of the German Federal Constitutional Court cited here are misleading. It is true that no fundamental right can be guaranteed unconditionally and when there is a conflict with other fundamental rights that an optimal compromise of interests must be found by means of the principle of proportionality. However, this limitation of fundamental rights pertaining to the freedom of science can never extend to the determination of what theses may be studied and to which conclusions one may come.

Only the means by which research is conducted is subject to limitations, since research may not employ methods that compromise the rights of others-such as experiments on humans or endangering the environment. If it is forbidden to science to formulate new theses or to attempt to refute existing theories, however controversial these attempts and their conclusions might be, or if it is forbidden to science to use certain arguments or to come to certain conclusions, or to publish scientific conclusions in order to subject them to indispensable public scrutiny and scientific criticism, then one throws the fundamental right to freedom of scientific research out the window entirely, because the critical examination of standing theories and paradigms through serious attempts to refute them, and the publication thereof, is the heart of science, or even of human knowledge in general.[558]

The declaration of the Ministry of Justice given above is clearly unconstitutional and one may hope that the German Federal Constitutional Court will say so at some point in the case of Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte. Of course, it is not likely to do so under present conditions, since in a similar case of Federal book-burning in the early 1980s, the German Federal Constitutional Court itself made a statement in the sense of the Ministry of Justice's statement above.[559]

Therefore one cannot avoid the conclusion that the present situation in Germany is as follows:

1. With respect to the core of the Holocaust claim-gas chambers, the National Socialist's intention to annihilate the Jews, and the carrying out such a program-there can be only one predetermined conclusion under penalty of law.
2. The most important condition to the free pursuit of science would then be suspended, that which states: Every thesis must be subjected to the strictest attempts at refutation and must be refutable in theory and in practice. Neither may any conclusion of scientific research be prescribed nor proscribed (cf. Article 3(3) of German Basic Law).
3. The fundamental dignity of humans that sets us apart from animals lies in the fact that we do not take our sensual impressions as being identical to objective reality, but that we doubt and can resolve our doubts through intellectual activity-research. This factor of human dignity is suspended in Germany in this particular field. (cf. Article 1, of German Basic Law).

It remains an open question what one is to do with Article 20(4) of the German Basic Law which states:

Where politics and the Zeitgeist exert heavy pressure on justice, one must expect that unjust judgments will be handed down on purpose. For this there is no need either for a state with a constitution which is openly contrary to the rule of law or a condition similar to civil war. With respect to normal prosecutions of criminals, the legal procedures of nations observing the rule of law and those not observing the rule of law are similar. Only in politically motivated prosecutions will it show whether or not judges follow the rule of law, that is, whether they can be forced by trial procedures not to deviate from them. For some time there has been a discussion as to how far the character of the Federal Republic of Germany as a nation observing the rule of law has been endangered by certain phenomena of the Zeitgeist.

One case in particular caused severe accusations from many sides of the German society so that the political distortions within the German legal system have indeed reached such a degree that even legal experts are seriously troubled: In 1991, Günter Deckert, then leader of the German nationalistic party NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands), organized a convention where Fred. A. Leuchter, a U.S. expert for execution technologies, lectured about his technical and chemical research regarding the alleged 'gas chambers' of Auschwitz. Deckert translated his speech for the audience into German. He was subsequently prosecuted for this and eventually sentenced to 12 months on probation. Following a huge media-outcry and massive intervention of national as well as international politicians, Deckert was put on trial again-at a different court with different judges-and sentenced to two years without probation. His first judge Dr. Rainer Orlet was threatened to be prosecuted for violating the law-his sentence was considered to have been too mild-but was eventually only forced to retire.[560] Deckert's publication about this affair,[561] together with other 'thought' crimes like writing naughty letters to Jewish representatives and selling prohibited revisionist literature-were prosecuted as well and, together with his first conviction, led to an accumulated prison term of more than five years. Eventually, even his defense lawyer Ludwig Bock was prosecuted and sentenced for too vigorously defending Deckert by asking for permission to introduce revisionist evidence. This was considered criminal behavior because Bock allegedly indicated with this that he identifies himself with revisionist thoughts.[562] In a similar case, the well-know German right-wing defense lawyer Jürgen Rieger was put on trial in 2000, because during the proceedings against one of his clients in summer 1996, he had filed a motion to introduce me as an expert witness as evidence for the fact that his client's revisionist claims were well founded. Though Jürgen Rieger was initially acquitted by the Hamburg District Court,[563] the German Federal Supreme Court subsequently overturned this verdict, demanding the sentencing and punishment of every lawyer who dares to ask for, or introduce, evidence challenging the common 'knowledge' about the Holocaust.[564] Thus, it is clear that every judge, who dares to hand out lenient sentences to revisionist, at least risks an abrupt end of his career, and defense lawyers trying to defend their clients effectively may themselves be prosecuted for that.

In what follows, I shall show by my own experience which indicates that the rule of law in the German state has many flaws that make it easy for the judicial system in general and the judges in particular to deliberately make bad decisions uncorrectable, because they have the appearance of being decided according to the rule of law.

Again and again in various sorts of company I encounter the same disbelieving astonishment as to the state of the German criminal justice system that overcame me at the beginning of the prosecution avalanche against me. Despite my lack of legal qualification I believe I have been called upon to raise my voice on this subject, since the numerous formal defects of the German legal system have apparently not been dealt with by those with the professional competence to do so.

Since I am no legal expert but only one who has been self-educated on the subject through painful experience, I hope readers will excuse my ineptness of expression. If I make frequent reference here to my trial before the District Court of Stuttgart (ref. 17 KLs 83/94), it is because these examples serve to indicate major problems in the German system of government and its judicial system.

Until the end 70s, a record of the proceedings was kept during German criminal trials, in which the statements of witnesses and responses of the accused were set down. The contents of this record were never relevant for an appeal or revision. For example, if in the record it said 'The witness said A', but in the decision the court stated 'The witness said B', the assertion in the decision would be taken as the fact and that in the record would be considered meaningless.

In the course of a change in the German criminal law at the end of the 70s, the duty to make entries in the record of the proceedings was removed for reasons of economy for all courts higher than the County Courts. What appears now in German trial records is something like 'The witness made statements on the subject' or 'The accused made a declaration'. The substance of what was said cannot be found there and it can no longer be proven by documentation when the court uses statements incorrectly.[565]

In other nations observing the rule of law, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, or Austria, word-by-word transcripts of the proceedings are prepared.

The anti-justice consequences of the present German system can easily be imagined, and I will briefly illustrate it with three examples from my own trial.

1. The issue in this trial was whether or not I had participated in the distribution of a version of my expert report with added commentary by Generalmajor O.E. Remer in April 1993. The court was interested in, among other things, how Remer had come into possession of that particular version of my report which he used for producing his printed version. In the trial I had stated that Remer had probably received it from his attorney Hajo Herrmann. The court was more than eager to nail me as a liar, so they were trying to make Hajo Herrmann concede that he never sent a copy of this particular version to his client. Remer had reproduced the "second version of the 3rd edition" of my report, which the court called version "F2".[566] In the trial report made by an observer, the questioning of Herrmann on December 6, 1994, ran somewhat as follows:

What can be seen from this is that the witness Herrmann was basically confused and could not remember details about which version he had sent to whom and when. But at least Herrmann remembered clearly that he had requested changes to the expert report, so he concluded logically that I must have sent him copies of this rearranged version; after all, I had prepared this version on his request. The court, however, described the statements of the witness on page 199 as follows:

The difference between the two texts is obvious: The independent observer reported that Herrmann did revise his initial statement after I made him remember that it was Herrmann himself who made me prepare this particular version "F2", which leads to the logical conclusion that he did, of course, receive at least one copy of this version he had specifically demanded. But the court simply 'forgot' about this detail. From its own faulty reasoning, the court concluded on page 202f.:

2. The Court was also eager to try to prove that I did tell my sister about Remer's commentary before Remer had even started to distribute my report, which would have been possible only if I had been involved in the production of said commentary. The first copies of my report mailed out by Remer arrived at their destinations briefly after Easter 1993. Did I tell my sister already before Easter about these comments, then this would put a 'nail into my coffin'. According to the above-mentioned independent observer, the sister of the accused made the following statement on January 24, 1995:

The court described this witness statement as follows (p. 210):

However, according to the independent observer, my sister thought "it was possible" that Remer's mailout had already taken place before Easter 1993, which is clearly incorrect-all copies of Remer's version were mailed to their recipients only after April 15, 1993. This proves that my sister's memory was wrong regarding the chronology, which is also supported by her own statements under intensive inquiry both by the judges and by me that she simply could not remember when she had heard what from me. The fact that the witness could no longer remember the exact chronology was duly omitted by the court for obvious reasons. Who of us can remember, down to the exact day, what we heard from our siblings two years ago? But for the court, this was a major stepping stone to its verdict.

3. Another way to prove me a liar was the court's attempt to prove that my statements regarding contacts with the Remer couple were a lie. By showing that I was hiding my contacts to Remers, they sought to prove that I was in fact involved in their plot to hide the truth from the court. On my contacts with O.E. Remer, the independent observer wrote the following on the trial day November 11, 1994:

For January 24, 1995, one reads there:

But the court portrayed both happenings, which it interpreted as evidence of my lack of credibility, as follows (p. 148ff.):

Since the original of the application form to the revisionist gathering in Roding had been introduced as evidence during the trial and not a copy, as the court falsely claims in its written verdict, it is easy to see that I was not present at the gathering in Roding. In a later publication, my defense lawyer confirmed the report of the independent observer and criticized the court harshly for this rather odd mistake.[568] One can see even further that the report of the independent observer is correct with respect to my responses. If one considers that Remer was absolutely not involved in arranging the publication of the brochure Die Zeit lügt!, i.e., that it did not lead to any correspondence or meetings between Remer and me (not even the Court claimed that), that it was not me who decided to put Remer's name and publishing house on the imprint of the brochure,[569] and that in the letters and statements quoted by the Court I was always writing and speaking about actual dealings with Remer-there was none in connection with the brochure Die Zeit lügt!-it must be asked: who lacks credibility here?

A large number of similar cases could be shown in which the court made observations on the statements of mine or of witnesses that differ from the trial report. Since the differing interpretation of the court were always disadvantageous for me, the question must be raised whether we are supposed to believe that these errors were made unintentionally.

It appears possible that in German courts, the written judgment will suddenly present evidence as the main proof of guilt which had remained in the background during the proceedings of the trial, in that the court reinterprets it in a way that had not been mentioned during the proceedings. In this way, it is impossible for the defense to bring in evidence to refute evidence which at first appears to be harmless since no one can tell what evidence the court will use as proof of what fact.

When the defense attorney wants to introduce a piece of evidence, he must always provide a reason for it so that the court can decide on the request. On the other hand, this rule does not seem to apply to the court itself.

Here is one example of that. The court interpreted certain publication details of the original version of the Rudolf expert report used by Remer in his version as well as of the version without comments published by me a few months later as proof that Remer's distribution activities of his version and the subsequent publication of my authorized version were one single operation planned in advance. As one of the main proofs for this the court pointed to the fact that in the draft of my expert report produced in November 1992 (version F2), Prof. R. Faurisson had not been mentioned in the acknowledgements at the end of the report. He had first been expressly thanked in the authorized version of my expert report published in July 1993 on the inner cover. According to the Court, this allegedly proves that the authorized version was planned already in November 1992 (decision, pp. 93, 208ff. Don't try to find logic in it. There is none.). It did not enter the judges' minds that I had deleted the acknowledgement to Faurisson from the November 1992 version simply because I feared to be rejected as an expert witness, should any court recognize that I had been in contact and on good terms with the world's leading revisionist, and not because I already planned to thank Faurisson later in a prominent place in the authorized version. The whole argument spun around this point about the acknowledgement, which first surfaced in the decision and was based on different versions of the expert report that had been introduced as evidence, had never been mentioned even peripherally in the 29 days of the trial proceedings, so that the defense was unable to bring in any evidence to counter this supposed evidence proving the guilt of the accused.

It is doubtful whether the introduction of evidence following the trial is admissible. Nevertheless, the District Court of Stuttgart used exactly this method in order to portray me as untrustworthy. As supposed proof that I had manipulated witnesses, on page 170f. of its decision the court stated:

First, the description of the court is misleading, since I had only declared that my computer had been seized, but not that an answer list had been found on it. This document had been mentioned by the court in the trial but it had not been introduced as evidence in the trial. For this reason, the defense attorney did not think it necessary to produce evidence to oppose this imputation, which might have explained that the item was not an answer list intended for use in an upcoming questioning of a witness. In fact, it was a detailed record I had prepared about what Dill was asked and what he answered when he appeared for the first time in front of the court, and this list was prepared after this interrogation, hence could not be used to manipulate this witness at all.

In the middle of the 1980s, the German criminal justice system was altered so that motions could effectively be denied to hear the testimony of foreign witnesses in their own country. In the course of the trial concerning Remer's distribution of my report, it became obvious that several foreign revisionists had participated in the operation indirectly or directly. Since these revisionists faced the possibility of arrest if they traveled to Germany, due to their revisionist activity, they would have had to give their testimony outside the country. Because of the reformulation of the German law, however, it was possible for the court in the final phase of the trial to deny numerous motions of the defense that were intended to hear the testimony of foreign witnesses outside the country on key questions. The effect this can have on the judgment is obvious.

In criminal proceedings caused by crimes that are considered by the German authorities to have caused major violations of law and order, the trial is held immediately on the District Court level, i.e., on what normally is supposed to be the appeal level (the first level is the County Court). In such cases, the accused has only one trial during which evidence can be presented, that is, there is no appeal possible to the verdict of this court! Only a so-called application for a revision of the verdict with the German Federal Supreme Court is possible, but such an application can only criticize errors of form (matters of law). The factual assertions of the deciding court, i.e., description and evaluation of evidence (matters of fact), will not be discussed anymore. Furthermore, it is usually the case that applications for a revision will be denied by the German Federal Supreme Court, if the defense is the only party to request it.

Whoever determines, and on whatever basis, whether or not law and order have been seriously violated by an offender, must remain open. But such a serious violation seems to be always given, if the offence massively attacked political taboos. In such cases-where the accused's entire existence is at stake-he has no possibility of reopening the taking of evidence in an appeal.

The fact that recent attempts were made in Germany to deny an appeal even for trials of minor misdemeanors held before County Courts for the sake of relieving the workload of the court, shows how little room for maneuver is left to him who gets caught up in the wheels of justice.

Even if a court has introduced evidence in the course of a trial that made its delicately constructed bridge of circumstantial evidence to collapse by refuting it, this is no reason not to impose a sentence. Here is an example.

In my case, the court had come up with the idea that, already in October 1992, I had planned Remer's distribution activities of his version and the subsequent publication of my authorized version as one single operation planned in advance (decision pp. 207ff.).

At the same time, on Feb. 16, 1995, the court introduced a letter of mine to Mark Weber, dated May 22, 1993, from which it was clear that up to the end of May 1993, a month after the end of Remer's distribution operation, I still did not know where I could publish my authorized version of the expert report, which indisputably contradicted the court's thesis that I was already planning to publish the authorized version at the same time as I was allegedly helping to plan the Remer operation.

Here is a discussion of a second example of the court's logic-free evaluation of the evidence. In its written verdict, the court conceded that I intended to get the attention of the lay public for my expert report (decision pp. 23f., 108f., 210), so that I had paid attention that there was no reason for the general public to suspect any lack of technical merit and reputation, e.g., by including political comments (decision pp. 17ff., 196f., 218). This was supported by the evidence as a whole and in particular by the documents introduced on June 13, 1995, which was a series of letters that I wrote to various persons between 1991 and 1993, all clearly stating that I did not want any political or polemic comments included in or associated with my expert report. However, if one was to follow this logic, one has to assume that I would have sent out-or agreed to the distribution of-a version of my expert report which confined itself to technical discussion but would never have sent out one such as the Remer version with its polemical/political commentary. In the decision the court can escape this logical contradiction only by claiming that I had miscalculated the effect of Remer's commentary (p. 228).

Having arrived at a verdict in this way, the tens of pieces of exonerating evidence-documents and witnesses-that my lawyer had introduced served the court as evidence of my "criminal energy", since, according to the court, this exonerating evidence was all partly made up (decision pp. 13, 22, 65, 118-126, 131, 175, 192) and served only to deceive the court:

Which leads to the Court's conclusion:

since:

Given the present circumstances of the criminal justice system in the Federal Republic of Germany, when a judge or a panel of judges intend to render an unjust verdict, they will have no difficulty in doing so as long as they are assured there is no organized public resistance from the media, academia, the police, or the churches.

The statements of witnesses and accused may be manipulated at will. Evidence may be interpreted any which way in the decision or may be brought in after the process is over. Submitted evidence may be passed over without mention and use of foreign witnesses may be denied arbitrarily.

Exculpatory evidence may be discredited as a deceptive maneuver of the accused and serve as evidence that the accused is particularly deserving of punishment. A second trial instance to try to correct these measures can be denied in case of public necessity. The evaluation of evidence is bound neither by the evidence introduced nor by logic.

The question, how these conditions can be overcome so that further misuse can be reduced as much as possible, needs to be answered by honest jurists and politicians.

The court based its refusal to allow for a probation of the sentence of imprisonment not only on my supposedly high "criminal energy," but also on the fact that I did not seem to have a favorable social prognosis, since I had not only not repudiated my revisionist views, but defended them even more vehemently and kept propagandizing them. As proof for this the court pointed to the book Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte,[570] edited by me under a pen name, which had come onto the market just at the beginning of this trial, as well as to the almost-complete book Auschwitz: Nackte Fakten[571] found on my computer during a house search conducted in March 1995, i.e., right in the middle of the ongoing proceedings.

With this, a fact was used to harden my punishment that had not even been determined to be a criminal offense in a legally binding decision by a German court in the first place, as was a work which had not yet been published and which therefore could not even theoretically have been a crime. By German law, it is admissible for a German criminal court to take account of the opinions of the accused-here my historical revisionist opinions-in the weighing of punishment. Through this back-door, the trial against me was turned into a political trial.[572]

Reprinted below is the commentary of retired Major General Otto Ernst Remer, which he included in his version of the Rudolf expert report, as it was printed on pages 109a to 114 of the court decision against Germar Rudolf.[573] After reading this chapter 11 so far, readers should be in a position to judge whether this commentary was sufficient cause to sentence expert witness Germar Rudolf to 14 months' loss of freedom, had he been the author of the commentary, which he was not, though the Great State Security Chamber of the District Court of Stuttgart disregarded the evidence and said he was the author.

On Jan. 19, 1996, the German Attorney General demanded that Germar Rudolf should spend 14 months behind bars for nothing other than this commentary. The German Federal Supreme Court concurred with this demand in a decision on March 7, 1996 (ref.: 1 StR 18/96).

In addition to these judicial issues, there were other problems with Remer's commentary. In his preface printed on the inside front cover, under the caption "To all friends, countrymen ..." he attacked our leading politicians, media people and jurists harshly with the words, "These liars need to be driven from their spoils fortresses". At the same time, Remer mailed this version to exactly these leading politicians, media people and jurists. It is certain that to send such a piece of writing to these leading politicians, media people and jurists was entirely useless-though it must have cost many thousand DM.

Remer attached a comprehensive five-page article on the October 1992 trial, in which Remer himself had been sentenced to a 22 months prison term for denying the Holocaust and other things. This article was written by a close friend of Remer who had attended Remer's trial. It basically summarizes the major events of this trials, like a description of various pieces of evidence presented by the two defense lawyers, their rejection by the court, and the final pleadings of the public prosecutor and Remer's defence attorneys. The Rudolf Report had been prepared for this and for other trials.

In the trial against expert witness Rudolf, the District Court of Stuttgart took exception against this article, which had been entitled "Justice in Germany 1992". For example, they criticized that the quotation from the Foreign Office saying that it was known that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz (p. I) was incomplete, as the ellipses showed. The quoted German official Dr. Scheel had stated later in his letter that the gas chambers had been located in the Birkenau camp which was 3 km to the west. Thus he had not denied the existence of gas chambers in the complex Auschwitz-Birkenau, as the quotation suggested, but only with respect the main camp Auschwitz. This determination of the court is correct and demonstrates that Remer's friend misconstrued documents to mislead the public. However, it should be pointed out that the statement of the Foreign Office that there had been no gas chambers in Auschwitz contradicts many witnesses, such as Pery S. Broad or Rudolf Höß. If these witnesses were wrong with their statements about the main camp Auschwitz, how can we be certain that other witnesses to other camps were not just as wrong? How can it be that under such circumstances to doubt the existence of gas chambers in other camps, or even to dispute their existence, is a criminal offense?

The District Court of Stuttgart also commented that the "Comparison of official figures on the number of those killed in the gas chambers in Auschwitz" (p. II) was insulting and constituted incitement to racial hatred. But in the meantime, quite official and well reputed sources have added even lower figures to this list of massively differing numbers: in 1993 and 1994, the French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac claims between 630,000 and 470,000 'gas chamber' victims, and in 2002, a German mainstream journalist reduced the death toll of the Auschwitz 'gas chambers' down to as little as 356,000.[574] One could certainly agree to the view that any number of victims which is too high or too low can have an insulting effect on some people or can incite to hatred against others. However, it was not Remer who had put these widely differing figures into the world, among which only one can be correct at best-and all others potentially inciting to racial hatred.

Also, Remer's statement that the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial had determined that there were only 45,510 deaths in the gas chambers was not strictly true. In 1965, the Frankfurt Jury Court had sentenced some of the former camp staff on grounds of murder of a certain number of people by poison gas, and for other reasons. All told, it repaid 45,510 gas chamber murders in that it found some defendants guilty of having killed or contributed to the murder of a certain number of inmates. As to the question, how many prisoners had been killed by poison gas in Auschwitz all in all, the court had given no answer and did not have the duty to do so. The determination of the total count of victims is properly a scientific question. That having been said, this would also mean that the Stuttgart Court did not have the duty nor the competence either to make a judgment about the total death toll of Auschwitz, that is, it should not have criticized others for asking questions and having different views in this regard.

It remains true that German justice has judicially determined a figure of 45,510 gas chamber deaths, no more, no less, and that anything more is a scientific question and not a question of criminal justice. It must be asked then, why one should proceed against people with threats of criminal penalty and use of the magic formula 'common knowledge,' who do nothing else but to assert that counts of victims as high as several hundred thousand or even several millions are greatly exaggerated, particularly since several well-known mainstream authors do make similar statements. Only that can be judicially claimed to be 'common knowledge' which has been determined to be so in court on examination of evidence. With respect to the number of victims of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, that has not been done.

In the written basis for the decision, as proof of their assertion that the epilogue of the Remer version had deliberately created the impression that the Holocaust was used by Jews to exploit Germany, the Court gave this one example (decision, p. 235):

In the epilogue in a display box one sees that Remer has quoted a letter with a sender's address in Israel, in which the writer inquires about financial reparations based on the claim that his uncle was allegedly gassed in the concentration camp at Dachau. That this letter was written by a Jew is not mentioned anywhere, nor is there any reference to the religious affiliation of this person in this article. There is also no assertion in Remer's (or his friend's) comments "that the Holocaust was an invention of the Jews," quite contrary to what the court claims. All that Remer's friend did was to juxtapose the letter from Israel with a letter from the City of Dachau, in which the latter clarifies that there had never been any homicidal gassings in the concentration camp at Dachau.

The court had not examined whether or not this letter existed, therefore, on the principle "In dubio pro reo," it had to assume that it did exist. In fact, not just Remer but also many other activists had photocopies of the letter which Remer's friend had reproduced in the appendix to Remer's version. It is a fact that there is a large number of statements from witnesses attesting to homicidal gassing in Dachau, but it is also well known that both the official Dachau Concentration Camp Museum as well as the City of Dachau clearly state that there were never any homicidal gassings of humans in this concentration camp.[575]

These well-recognized facts were given with the documents published or quoted by Remer (or his friend), which cannot be a crime. In his commentary on this letter, Remer points out that false witness statements like the one quoted here, attesting to his uncle's death in a Dachau gas chamber, serve as a basis for 'common knowledge' in Germany. Nowhere did he make the claim that anybody had lied for purposes of material enrichment. It is the court that is to blame for the charge that the reader would get the impression from these two reproduced documents, Remer wanted to impute, Jews had invented a lie for the purpose of exploiting Germany.

That even Jews sometimes make false statements about the period between 1945 and 1993 cannot be disputed. This was particularly clear in the criminal trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem. The trial ended with an acquittal for the accused, since even the Israeli court could not shut its eyes to the flood of false documents and false witness testimony.[576] Fortunately, in this case also, Jewish personalities turned against the flood of untruths that appeared in this trial.[577]

That the same untrustworthy witnesses who appeared in this Jerusalem trial had made similar (incredible) statements in trials in Germany and elsewhere, did not affect their credibility in the eyes of the German court, of course.

In addition, the advertising blitz of the Jews Aze Brauner and his friends on May 6, 1995, in the German daily newspapers Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutschen Zeitung, which rehashed the old lies about soap made of the fat of Jews and lampshades made of human skin which have been repudiated even by the Holocaust Institute Yad-Vashem of Jerusalem,[578] did not serve to make our jurists consider that not everything a Jew says about the years from 1933 to 1945 is necessarily true.

Even the recently reconfirmed information that the Jew Ilya Ehrenburg, who was Stalin's chief propagandist, was one of the worst deceivers and liars in questions of the supposed National Socialist annihilation of the Jews[579] does not appear to impress anyone in Germany. On the contrary, the Federal German justice system seems to opine that a Jew always tells the truth and that a non-Jew who accuses a Jew of reporting falsehoods or even lying belongs in jail.[580]

In the decision of the 17th Criminal Chamber of the District Court Stuttgart, there is this discussion on Remer's preface and epilogue (p. 115):

-read: although the crime of which Germar Rudolf was accused of had not been committed...

-read: the judges can read the mind and intention of the accused...

-the court did nothing to find out whether or not Rudolf's Expert Report is correct, so it had to assume that it indeed is correct...

-read: even if the Expert Report is correct, the publisher has to make sure that his readers don't think wrongly, or he will be punished for that, and the judges know the effect of this publication on the reader without even having any evidence for it.

This meant the expert witness was not only punished for a crime that he had not committed, but also for one that no one had committed in the first place. The crime was invented by the court-they ignored the facts and fantasized about what may be written between the lines!

Even though this was Rudolf's first conviction, this sentence could, according to the court, not be suspended, (p. 239):

Here the court openly admits that it sentenced Rudolf to a prison term because of his scholarly convictions which allegedly render him an incorrigible criminal. No more proof is needed to show that Rudolf is politically persecuted in Germany.

Furthermore, the court uses publications, which it had called "scholarly" at the beginning of the verdict and which at that time had not yet finally been declared illegal by any court decision, to justify a prison term without probation.

By the time the judges handed down their verdict in June 1995, Rudolf had published three books. About the first, Rudolf's Expert Report on chemical and technical details of the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz, the verdict states at page 23:

In general, the verdict says about Rudolf's three main works (Expert Report, Vorlesungen zur Zeitgeschichte, Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte):

About Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte-now published in English under Dissecting the Holocaust-the verdict says, it includes "a maximum appearance of objectivity" (p. 26), which later was confirmed by two German mainstream historians in expert reports they wrote in support of Rudolf's scholarly work. Of course, the court had to insert the word "appearance", to cast doubt on the quality of these works, because otherwise it could not possibly have sentenced Rudolf.

Considering the contempt and hate this verdict shows against Germar Rudolf, such words of open endorsement cannot be underestimated. Since the court had to admit that Rudolf's main works are formally scientific and scholarly (form, i.e., appearance, not content, is the only criterion for scholarly works!), the accused could not possibly have committed any crime by publishing them, since the German constitution guarantees the freedom of science without restriction in article 5.3 of the German Basic Law (Germany's unofficial constitution). So Remer's additions were used instead to tie the rope around Rudolf's neck.

With this finding, the court turned the historical dissident (revisionist) Germar Rudolf into a "thought criminal".

It should be pointed out here that in May 2002, Fritjof Meyer, an editor of Germany's largest, left-wing weekly magazine Der Spiegel, stated in a scholarly article addressing the alleged death toll of Auschwitz that the evidence indicates only some failed test gassings for the Birkenau crematoria, but no mass murder on a genocidal scale.[581] This sensational statement is close to the claim Rudolf has been making since 1992, i.e., that "the mass gassings [...] did not take place [as] claimed by witnesses". Hence, Meyer's article is nothing short of a partial but timely rehabilitation of Rudolf, and it might take only one or two more revisions of the official historiography of Auschwitz to reach the point where it agrees totally with what Rudolf is stating in his expert report.

I pondered a long time over the question whether or not to reprint Remer's comments, since they caused me an awful lot of distress. But I think he had a perfect right to say what he had to say, and it was really a scandal how the German legal system persecuted this old man. Though I do not agree with everything Remer and his friend wrote, and much less with their style, I decided to reprint these comments in full, so that the reader can understand, how easy one can get imprisoned in Germany for making, endorsing, or-as in my case-simply being associated with hot-headed, but perfectly legal and harmless statements.

Otto Ernst Remer, General-major, retired, Winkelser Str. 11E, 8730 Bad Kissingen, Tel: 0971-63741, Fax: 69634

On October 22, 1992, the District Court of Sc