REVISIONIST
VIEWPOINTS
Interview with a Holocaust Heretic:
Georges M. Theil
By Richard A. Widmann
Introduction:
In June of this year I first became aware of the persecution of French revisionist author and scholar Georges M. Theil through an Internet email notification. Theil was facing hefty financial penalties and even prison time for having written a slender autobiographical work in 2002. I began a personal correspondence with Theil and obtained copies of his work in English and French. Smith’s Report readers who are taken with Bradley’s Confessions and the more recent "Our Voices" project will certainly enjoy Theil’s tale of his transformation to revisionism. In his short preface to Theil’s story, Robert Faurisson comments, "A number of intellectuals call for a fight against the institutionalised lie and the unjust power of the law but few, in effect, take the risk themselves. Georges Theil, for his part, has chosen the risk. He has done so in deciding to reveal here how and why he embarked on the revisionist adventure." Some revisionist titles are dry scientific studies that prove to be very difficult reading for the non-specialist. This is not the case with Theil’s Heresy. Heresy is a page-turner in every way. Theil’s story is sure to enlighten and thrill. I highly recommend this title to all interested in revisionism and revisionists. What follows is a short interview that Mr. Theil agreed to as a result of our correspondence.
Q: Mr. Theil, I have just finished reading your wonderful autobiographical work, Heresy in Twenty-First Century France: A Case of insubmission to the "Holocaust" dogma which is the English translation of your French publication Un Cas D’Insoumission. For readers who may be unfamiliar with your work, why did you change the title for the English version?
Georges M. Theil
Theil: It’s rather funny: with my agreement, my translator showed the text to an English publisher friend of his who offered to print a test run, but thought a catchier title was in order. And so I saw a cover proof with a title that was a bit different but very expressive indeed!
Q: You were certainly aware of the Loi-Gayssot (French anti-revisionist law) before French justice system ordered you to pay over $130,000 in fines, damages and costs and sentenced you to a year in prison (now pending) for what was essentially telling your personal account of how you discovered Holocaust revisionism. Why did you go forward with the book knowing the risks that you could face?
Theil: Your remark seems to me "falsely naïve". Was Solzhenitsyn well aware of his country’s laws before going to the Gulag ? Was David Irving aware of the Austrian laws when he made his journey in the autumn of last year ? Was Horst Mahler, the famous German lawyer, aware of the risks involved with writings that are now to take him to Cottbus prison on November 15 ?
The aim of my action in writing this book was to bear witness, to relate my intellectual course, without leaving the reader any possibility to find fault with the exposition. Alas, I should have remembered that the word for witness in Greek is martyr.
Q: Some of your readers may find it strange that both your father and your grandfather were killed fighting wars against Germany and still rather than hating Germans you have sought out the truth about the events of the Second World War. Why is it important for the world to get a proper understanding of what exactly the Germans did or did not do with regard to Europe’s Jews?
Theil: It’s only paradoxical in appearance. My grandfather, a career officer before the First World War, saw himself drawn by duty into the conflict; in Indochina he was training local riflemen, getting them ready to join the French army’s "colonial troops", in the expectation of a likely war with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), a war concocted, ardently desired in any case, by France and the British empire, both of which found Germany’s strength too disquieting. He died in the Tonkin, a young lieutenant of 33.
My father, an engineer in his uncle’s factory, had borne the defeat of June 1940 with resignation, continuing his professional life peacefully enough. Then one day in late 1943 he became convinced he should work with the underground to hasten the departure of the occupying forces. This activity consisted in distributing the contents of large boxes parachuted in the night by the English; these could be weapons, provisions, money, forged papers, etc. At that period in the war, the Germans generally no longer took the trouble to explain their political vision for the new Europe that they had said they wanted to set up — with France — from the time of their arrival in the country three and a half years previously. In the autumn of 1943 their oppressive presence could be considered undesirable by our fellow citizens, and their future departure imagined as a liberation (the comparison with the Anglo-American troops in Iraq today is striking!). Caught at a roadblock check carrying a firearm, my father was arrested and locked up, then taken out of his jail after four days by external elements and killed in unclear circumstances, leaving his wife with a boy of 3 (myself) and my sister (aged 2).
Thus it was imperative for me, as early as my adolescence, to look into the causes of and the facts relating to those last two wars. For whom and for what had my grandfather, then my father, fallen tragically in two wars against so admirable a country as Germany? Were there not one or more reasons why Europe (and its great North American appendage) should have ferociously attacked Germany in order to erase her from the map?
And when you ask yourself that last question the role of the Jews appears very quickly: the Balfour Declaration was something of a decisive impulse in the final turning point of the First World War; the establishment of Bolshevism in Russia in 1917, then the attempts to do the same in Germany and Hungary straight after the war were wholly Jewish undertakings; the monstrous treaty of Versailles was possible only through the treason of the Jews supposedly representing Germany; "Adolf Hitler, born at Versailles" and coming to power in January 1933, found himself having war declared on him five weeks later, in the famous Daily Express front-page top headline "Judea Declares War on Germany"; one will recall that Hitler had wished to chase the Jews out of his country’s imperial sphere and had written as much, "no common future being possible". Thus his taking office had for immediate effect the mobilisation of the whole world — at least the most important part of it, that in which the Jews happened to play a major role in the communications media and thus the forming of public opinion — against Germany, for a war to the death. The Nuremberg trial, that legal ignominy, was entirely concocted by the all-powerful Jewish circles close to Roosevelt. And the pinnacle of abjection, the pinnacle of slander was the act of imputing to the German people an unprecedented crime: the programmed putting to death in installations, built to that purpose, of six million Jews, essentially by asphyxiation in alleged "gas chambers" concerning which there have not been found any blueprints, operational orders, references to such orders, architectural traces, trustworthy witnesses nor, of course, lists of deaths!
You see that the existence and the nature of the role of European Jews cannot be ignored as soon as one looks into the great conflicts of the 20th century, which I call "the century of the attempt to put Germany to death".
Q: You cited several key moments in your growth as a revisionist. These would include first reading Paul Rassinier and Henri Roques, meeting Robert Faurisson, reading the Leuchter Report and actually touring several of the key concentration camps. What single discovery convinced you that the Holocaust story really wasn’t entirely built on facts?
Theil: My first doubts came on when I was 21 and still a physics student in Paris. I had a girlfriend of my age, a Finnish girl, a wonderful girl of shining good health, an accomplished athlete and very intelligent, very upright in posture, a goddess… The Finns call women like that Sisu’s. She told me of the 1940 Russo-Finnish war, as she’d heard from her mother. And she went a good deal beyond that; her mother, very pro-German apparently, had warned her against the horrid slanders issued about the Germans from 1945 onwards which, she specified, quoting her mother, mere mainly of Jewish origin. She urged me to read Knut Hamsun, whom I then discovered and whose itinerary you are aware of. This captivated me in the utmost and was certainly something of a trigger. Cherchez la femme as they say in the detective novels. Only here it’s not about a novel !
And the truly deciding objective factor for me was the doctoral thesis by Henri Roques, which destroyed, leaving it no possible defence, what was presented to us as the keystone of the (alleged) "gas chambers".
Q: I was very interested in your comments regarding Arolsen (where the International Tracing Service is located.) Arolsen has recently been back in the news. It has been suggested by the media that opening up the archives to historians will refute the "deniers" once and for all. What is your opinion and why?
Theil: In effect I have long thought that the key to it all (that is, the extent of the so-called genocide) is to be found at the ITS in Arolsen. This vital statistics centre’s methodical work concerning the Second World War, although under Allied and Israeli supervision, is carried out with an altogether Germanic thoroughness, and the cross-checking of data rules out, in my opinion, any manipulation; Arolsen’s work has convinced me that the real figures are in its possession. An extra clue has been its services’ stubborn refusal to provide statistics and numbers of deaths for individual concentration camps. Along with the closing down in 1978 of the centre’s history department. For a few months now these archives have, in principle, been open to researchers, and this for the first time, 61 years after the war’s end!
Remember : following the fall of the Berlin wall and the implosion of the USSR, Moscow decided to open its Second World War archives ; some thought that there was to be at last proof of the 6 million ! Crash ! The opposite happened: there was confirmation of the accuracy of the revisionists’ findings, and notably of their figures! I can predict for you now the same thing as regards the Arolsen files, with a still more devastating effect, if ever "they" let them be published.
Q: With all of the trouble that governmental and Zionist groups have caused you because of your Holocaust revisionism, if you had to do it all over, what if anything would you do differently?
Theil: In writing my book I didn’t imagine, I confess, that the Jewish organisations’ reaction would be so violent; at the Lyon trial alone I was up against 12 Jewish associations assisted by five or six lawyers, all Jewish of course, displaying an unimaginable hatred for me. The impossibility of discussing on the basis of Faurisson’s and Germar Rudolf’s work was total, as it was rejected outright from the start. My barrister’s pugnacity succeeded in having the claims of three of the parties refused and "only" nine were awarded damages.
Smith’s Report readers interested in supporting Georges M. Thiel by purchasing a copy of his book, Heresy for £12.50 may contact:
Historical Review Press
PO Box 62
Uckfield, United Kingdom
TN22 1ZY
Online: http://www.ety.com/HRP/
This article originally appeared in Smith's Report No. 136, March 2007