[“Rough” English translation – EM]
Lauck turns his head towards the door and says, happily :
“Heil Hitler, Thies !”
An old man, wearing a light-coloured hat, has just entered.
A walking stick is hanging from his arm, and he is playing
with the diaphragm collar of his camera.
He is Thies Christophersen, author of the Auschwitz Lie.
He is born in 1918. The first thing that catches the eye is
the hollow, as deep as a child’s fist, at the top of the nose,
between the two eyes. This is a war injury that makes him
say :
“I have got a screw loose. You can see it. With them, you
can’t see it.”
What ?, I think. This is he, the famous main witness ?
Thies Christophersen has a long face. The injury also
half-masted one of his blue eyes, the left one, the eyelid of
which is a bit lowered. But one cannot see it clearly behind
the glasses. When he takes off his hat, one can see he
has not luch hair left on the top of his head. When he
speaks, and even when he laughs, the corners of his lips
are strangely lowered. I ask him :
“May we interview you ?”. Christophersen was obvioulsy
not aware of the report we were making : he puts on a
stunned expression. Michael Kühnen intervenes and
starts to explain :
“They are shooting a leading documentary…”
Christophersen gratefully nods. He looks admiringly
at the camera. At this moment, Kühnen is called by
his colleague. He apologizes and leaves the room
saying, in a friendly manner : “But you can do this
without me…”. Lauck follows him. We are alone
with Thies Christophersen.
He is therefore free : he settles down at Lauck’s place.
He looks admiringly at the camera. I have the vague
feeling he did not understand who we were. As we keep
on meeting together, Michael Kühnen is so used to me
that he suffers from the same “habituation” effect as the
one I experienced some months ago. A loss of distance.
Since Kühnen treats me as a “companion” and since
I behave towards him in a similar friendly manner,
Christophersen did not understand we were not neo-nazis :
he calls the cameraman and the perchman “companions”,
while detailling the video camera :
“It must be expensive, such a tool, eh, companions ?
Me, I have my little box”, he says, pointing at his camera.
He uses some words of dialect. He comes from the
countryside – his bulletin is called Die Bauernschaft,
the peasantry, as a matter of fact.
[Archival note: According to Irene Zundel, the estranged wife of Ernst
Zundel, the newsletter ‘Die Bauernschaft’ mentioned above was
published by Zundel, not Christophereson. knm 1997/12/01]
Then he asks on what topic will be the interview . When
I tell him it will be on the Auschwitz Lie, he makes a
negative sign to me :
“No, it will yield nothing”.
“- Why ?”
This is nevertheless his “masterpiece”. His explanation
astounds me :
“You will never make it appear on TV ! It does not work.
We’ve already tried.”
Now, my doubts have turned into suspicion : Christophersen
really does take us for some companions of fight who want
to broadcast our report on the TV to manage a succesful
crypto-propaganda. I perform a last test to be clear in my own
mind, by telling him :
“We’ll succeed. It’ll work, I’m sure of that !”
He pensively smiles to me :
“Anyway, we can try. The best would be to say I simply
want to have the right to express my opinion. It always
make a good impression.”
I was right ! He takes us for nazis.
This is how Thies Christophersen is going to give an
interview that still torments him today. Because
“companion Thies” believes he is amongst friends,
now; he has not to be careful any more for his
possible contradictions, he trusts the self-censorship
of whose he believes to be companions of fight.
It sounds as if he was relating to a “companion” the time
when he was Sonderführer SS in Auschwitz :
“I have been transfered to the departement of the culture
of the vegetals. We did this at Auschwitz, because there
was so much manpower there”.
Christophersen put his hands together. A sign of internal
tension. But his voice is the voice of a teaching specialist :
“I made a selection. I went and looked for manpower in
Birkenau. I said : “Who worked in agriculture ?”. Then they
came, and I said : “You, you, and you -, you I take you.”
Do you know how I did it ? I looked at them in the eyes
– those who had white in the eyes could work.”
Christophersen chuckles when he remembers his
own cleverness. They had great fun, in the good old
days.
“But I always had some Tziganes, because the Tziganes
play music.”
I play to the end my part of a “companion” by stopping from
time to time the shooting to ask him if he would consider
it would be a good idea to talk about one thing or another.
He takes the initative :
“Denmark would be fine”.
I then ask him why he lives in Denmark.
“I have been charged yet again in Germany, he says,
so I exiled myself. Denmark is a very liberal country.
Here, you have the right to be a tzigane, and a jew,
and a nazi.”
As Kühnen may enter the room at any time and clear
up the “misunderstanding”, I must get to the heart of
the matter : the gas chambers in Auschwitz. The mass
extermination.
“Now, I’m going to ask you a difficult question”, I tell
him to prepare him, while winking at him in an eloquent
way. Then I come back to my official tone :
“Did gassings take place, or didn’t they ?”
“- I never wrote a single word on gassings in my story”,
he says, and he continues :
“But I heard rumors about fire, that said that people
were burnt. So, I examined all the source of flames
that were in the camp. I knew there were crematoriums?
But I didn’t see any cremation of corpses, and I’ve never
known anything about it neither.”
As always : nobody has never known anything about
it. Not even the Sonderführer SS. This is he, the main
witness of Faurisson and Irving, of the “famous English
historian” ! By the way, is Christophersen in touch with
David Irving ?
“I know David Irving for many years”, he says.
“And what do you think about David Irving ?
– He’s still being attacked, because he is English and
because we do not like very much that he also relates
the atrocities committed by the Germans. Some took
place, sure. But I admit it, I’m partial.”
Christophersen seems to be more and more bewildered.
He does not know what to say. It is nevertheless a
a matter of mass extermination of human beings by
gassing. And he claims in his Auschwitz Lie that it
never took place. But here, in front of what he believes
to be “companions”, he unsmaks himself. He tries to
explain why he lies. He speaks to us man to man,
to pronounce these few sentences that unmask him
and his Auschwitz Lie :
“I want to exonerate and defend us, but I cannot do
so with what we have really committed. I do not deny it.
But no advocate having something to defend would
ever present the charges against him.”
I listen to him. He has just got himself into deeper and
deeper water. And he did not even notice it. He explains
to me he has already endured a lot “because of the
book”. But despite the arrest, despite the exile (“now,
they have freezed my bank accounts, do you realize
that !”), he wants to be a model in the fight for the
“truth”. “My honor is fidelity” – it was the oath of the
SS. And a SS never gives up.
“But that does not affect me. I continue. I would
feel like a traitor to my friends if I go back today
on what I has said. I never did it.”
On September the 18th, 1991, our TV report The
Brown Plague is broadcast for the first time in
Sweden, under the title Wahrheit macht frei. It
includes the words of Christophersen. A very
unpleasant incident for those who deny the Holocaust.
In the nazi circles, people are dazed. Some nevertheless
consider that the movie is propaganda, but the majority
is “disappointed” and all those who do not appear in the
movie give a sigh of relief. In the next few months, the TV
report is broadcast in most of the European countries.
At this time, Christophersen starts to have troubles. He
feels then he has to “reassure” his companions by
publishing the following text in his Bauernschaft bulletin,
in December 1991 :
Here is how one falsifies
On September the 18th, 1991, the Sweden television
broadcast an interview of me during his 8 p.m. program.
My words have been totally reversed. No follow-up was
given to the following denial (*).
Of course, this TV program earned me some irate
letters from swedish and danish readers. But this
example clearly shows what primitive trickeries our
adversaries have now to use, in the embarassment
(sic!) where they are.”
Chistophersen obviously still thinks he has been
interviewed by his own campanions. In his memory,
he even confuses me with the neo-nazi leader :
“I never gave an interview to the Swedish TV. It
is true I gave an interview to Mister Michael Kühnen.”
In the following part of his “denial”, he becomes
confused and invents :
“I furthermore explained I would stop my work
for reasons linked to my age. But I would feel
like a traitor to my friends if I accepted their
help without doing anything in return. I said
the gas chambers existed, but only to gas
lice.”
Also spoke Thies Christophersen, the eyewitness
of the “revisionnists”. There is nothing to add to
the smart remark about having a screw loose.
But, nevertheless, whether mad or not, Christophersen
is one of those who pull the strings.
—
(*) : The swedish television never received a denial.
We heard about this “denial” later, by luck, when a
member of Searchlight read through Christophersen’s
bulletin, Bauernschaft.
From [email protected] Sun Jan 19 18:56:53 PST 1997
Article: 93612 of alt.revisionism
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From: [email protected] (Emmanuel Marin)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: Michael Schmidt’s “Neo-Nazis” book
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 02:55:07 GMT
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