Jean Claude Pressac

[ConfusedJew]

Why did Pressac change his mind about the Holocaust?

Jean-Claude Pressac was a French pharmacist who initially became involved with Holocaust denial in the 1970s and early 1980s when he became associated with Robert Faurisson who denied that the Nazis used homicidal gas chambers to kill undesirables or war prisoners during WW2. Faurisson believed that the documents describing the gas chambers were either misinterpreted or forged.

Pressac was initially sympathetic to Faurisson’s arguments and set out to investigate Auschwitz in order to prove that gas chambers were a myth. Around 1979–1980, Pressac visited Auschwitz with the assistance of Polish authorities, who allowed him access to archives and the physical site, expecting him to conduct serious research.

Once at Auschwitz, Pressac encountered detailed documentation that he found overwhelming. He saw architectural blueprints for crematoria and gas chambers, construction records, invoices, and internal memos from SS architects and camp authorities, references to “gas-tight doors,” “Zyklon B introduction devices,” and other materials specifically designed for homicidal use. The physical structures that he saw corresponded with the documents and witness accounts. The volume of technical and logistical evidence was so much that it overturned his pre-existing beliefs.

He ultimately turned against Faurisson and other deniers, realizing that he had been misled by pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.

He later published "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers" (1989) which was a monumental, highly technical study using Nazi documents, camp plans, and photographs. He believed that the denial arguments at the time were not just incorrect, but technically incompetent.

After visiting Soviet liberated archives in 1993, he further expanded his research and published "Les Crématoires d’Auschwitz" (1993).

Once Pressac approached the subject not as a polemicist, but as a technician, his work began to bridge the gap between historical narrative and forensic/technical detail.

Have any of you guys done any of your own primary research or visited the concentration camps? If you can convince me that anything you say is true, I would not hesitate to be honest about that with the Jewish community.

[HansHill]

Why did Pressac change his mind about the Holocaust?

We are aware of who Jean Claude Pressac is, however it's not very fair (or important) to ask us why a person would change their mind, we aren't mind readers. The best we can do is analsyse and critique his work as published.

Which of course has been done at great length. You won't read this, but i will leave this here for others:

https://holocausthandbooks.com/wp-conte ... aootgc.pdf

Have any of you guys done any of your own primary research or visited the concentration camps? If you can convince me that anything you say is true, I would not hesitate to be honest about that with the Jewish community.

Confused Jew has already been caught "fishing" for sensitive information from members and this feels like more of the same. I would advise the mods continue to monitor this and give Confused Jew a warning to stop these attempts, should anyone be foolish enough to offer up their professional credentials

[Wetzelrad]

Why did Pressac change his mind about the Holocaust?

The obvious answer is that he didn't. Pressac made a total mockery of Holocaust historians, and slipped it in under everyone's noses by also peppering in some critiques of revisionists. Case in point:

This study also demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of the traditional history (and hence also of the methods and criticisms of the revisionists), a history based for the most part on testimonies, assembled according to the mood of the moment, truncated to fit an arbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of uneven value and without any connection with one another.

https://www.historiography-project.com/ ... tz/264.php

Thus Pressac got away with calling Raul Hilberg and the rest of them methologically bankrupt. He also propped up his buddy Faurrison and amplified his ideas.

The best document for the historian concerning Zyklon-B is NI-9912 [...] It was Faurisson who was the first to publish it, while traditional historians had ignored it. [...] There remains the question of the 20 hours, which despite appearances. is very difficult to integrate in the picture of a homicidal gas chamber. [...] Here, Faurisson is right when he states that the operating sequences as described by the witnesses give rise to an almost insurmountable difficulty. [...]

https://www.historiography-project.com/ ... itz/16.php

Pressac also included throughout the text foolish factual errors. On that same page, he claimed diesel exhaust is "equally deadly" as gasoline exhaust. These errors serve to subtly raise questions against the overall narrative, which does indeed claim there were mass executions with diesel exhaust, while also rendering him imperfect so that no one takes his declarations on the Holocaust as infallible.

Having read about half of that book, practically every page includes statements like the above, statements favorable to revisionism. Here is Joel Hayward's summary:

Revisionists, aware that inferential evidence is always more open to multiple interpretations than direct evidence, have had no difficulty in countering all of Pressac’s arguments. As they point out in many reviews of Auschwitz: Technique, various other logical and plausible interpretations of Pressac's "indirect proofs" are possible, and none indicate the existence of homicidal gas chambers. Moreover, they say, Pressac actually made a number of major concessions to Revisionism. To provide just a few examples: Pressac stated that certain Soviet propagandists manufactured incriminating evidence and made structural changes to buildings after the liberation of Auschwitz. He acknowledged that cremation is considerably more time-consuming and problematic than Holocaust historians have claimed. The numerous eyewitness accounts about 10,000 or more cadavers being cremated daily in Auschwitz are grossly exaggerated and impossible. Also ridiculous, he continued, are the widely-repeated claims that the ovens operated continuously for days or weeks on end. He agreed with Revisionists that 'Sonderaktion' ('special action'), a seemingly-incriminating phrase found in some German documents, was not necessarily a euphemism for 'extermination'. He also agreed that the well-documented delivery of many tons of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz is not evidence of homicidal gassings. Whilst he stated that a little Zyklon-B was used for such gassings, Pressac admitted that approximately ninety-five percent of all Zyklon-B delivered to Auschwitz was used both in sophisticated disinfestation chambers to delouse clothing and bedding and in the barracks and facilities themselves as a means of countering the many typhus epidemics. Zyklon-B was, after all, a pesticide. Perhaps most importantly, he conceded that several key eyewitness accounts of gassings in Auschwitz - including those by Bendel, Nyiszli, Tauber and Vrba (WRB) - are filled with errors, distortions and fabrications.

https://archive.org/details/TheFateOfJe ... 1/mode/1up

At the end of his life, Pressac was willing to reduce the death tolls in the camps by close to two million. A true revisionist if ever there was one.



But if you are correct, if Pressac had his mind changed, then it follows that he put all the most convincing evidence in his book. If that is the case, it should be no difficulty for you to convince other revisionists to change their minds using the same material. What particular evidence from Pressac do you think should convince them?

[Nessie]

Why did Pressac change his mind about the Holocaust?

....

It was because of the volume of evidence that he found, when he accessed A-B camp document archives. A great source for that evidence, is the Holocaust handbooks series.

https://holocausthandbooks.com/wp-conte ... aootgc.pdf

That book records the documents he found, that proved the construction of undressing rooms, gas chambers and multiple corpse cremation ovens, inside the various Kremas.

[Archie]

Pressac was essentially revisionist in his approach and was somewhat revisionist in his conclusions as well. There is no question that Pressac was far from orthodox. I don't think he ever gave an overall death toll, but implicitly he likely believed some figure below 4 million. That is low enough to qualify as a moderate revisionist, imo. This is why the mainstream stopped using him.

I included some commentary on Pressac here:
https://www.unz.com/article/a-case-for- ... holocaust/

Spoiler

The first researcher to make a serious attempt to defend the Holocaust claims on a more technical basis was the French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac. Pressac, by his own account, was a former revisionist who had found his way back to belief in the 1980s after his many research trips to Auschwitz. He somehow convinced the Klarsfeld Foundation in Paris to publish his research, a decision the Klarsfelds perhaps came to regret. The result was a large 1989 volume, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, with over 500 oversized pages, full of reproductions of previously unknown documents from the Auschwitz archives, many of them blueprints and other technical documents. Although the book was supposed to be the ultimate refutation of Faurisson and the revisionists, the book was barely distributed with only around a thousand copies printed. Today, the book is so rare that physical copies sell for over $1,000, though fortunately digitized versions are available online.

Revisionists were generally pleased with the wealth of new information Pressac made available, and they noted that the book contained many surprising concessions. Pressac's assessement of the Holocaust literature was blunt and unflattering, as he called out the “complete bankruptcy of the traditional history” which was “based for the most part on testimonies, assembled according to the mood of the moment, truncated to fit an arbitrary truth and sprinkled with a few German documents of uneven value and without any connection with one another.” Pressac would echo these sentiments in a later interview (not published until 2000) where he described the “pitiful level of science in concentration camp studies, based exclusively these days on the ‘sacrosanct’ testimonies.” Conversely, in the same interview, he commended Arthur Butz for the “scientific knowledge and spirit” that he brought to the topic “which the traditional historians do not have," and he had similarly favorable comments about Italian revisionist Carlo Mattogno.

Pressac did not claim to have found any smoking gun document proving gassing. The core of his case was a collection of 39 “criminal traces,” such as orders for "gas-tight" doors. Pressac argued that these were each suggestive of criminal intent and when taken together established the reality of the gas chambers. It must be admitted that revisionists have not always had entirely convincing or consistent explanations for each one of these Pressac documents (interpreting construction documents years after the fact and without full context can be a challenge), but generally revisionists have argued that these “criminal traces” are ambiguous and could apply to fumigation chambers, gas shelters, and other purposes.

As Pressac’s approach was in many ways more revisionist than orthodox, we can see why Carlo Mattogno has described Pressac’s work as “crypto-revisionist,” and why Germar Rudolf has gone so far as to suggest he was a double agent. Pressac's more scientific approach also predictably sparked objections from traditionalists. Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, condemned Pressac’s work (specifically his 1993 follow-up book) because he felt it “legitimates the arguments of revisionists, who become the point of reference for future debate." Lanzmann also reaffirmed his preference for survivor testimony over documents and physical evidence: “I prefer the tears of the barber from Treblinka in 'Shoah' to a Pressac document on gas detectors."

Lanzmann’s view would more or less win out. Already in 1990, just a year after Pressac’s first book, France passed the Gayssot Act, a law targeted specifically at Faurisson, which made Holocaust denial illegal in that country. Overt censorship soon became the preferred way to handle the revisionists as such laws spread through most of Europe.

We see from the example of Pressac that any sort of serious engagement with revisionists is not really desired, and to the extent it has occurred it is always immediately obvious that the historicity of the Holocaust is not as sound as is claimed.

See also this thread from the old forum.
https://archive.codohforum.com/20230609 ... c0cf9.html

The attachment to the Igounet interview is dead, but I will reattach it here. Highly recommended reading.

Pressac 1995 interview with Igounet [English].pdf

(276.78 KiB) Downloaded 39 times

And here are updated links to some of the articles mentioned.

Carlo Mattogno, "My Memories of Jean-Claude Pressac," The Revisionist, Nov 2003 (#4)
https://codoh.com/library/document/my-m ... e-pressac/

Germar Rudolf, "The Double Agent," The Revisionist, Nov 2003 (#4)
https://codoh.com/library/document/the-double-agent/

[Nessie]

.... Here is Joel Hayward's summary:

Revisionists, aware that inferential evidence is always more open to multiple interpretations than direct evidence, have had no difficulty in countering all of Pressac’s arguments. As they point out in many reviews of Auschwitz: Technique, various other logical and plausible interpretations of Pressac's "indirect proofs" are possible, and none indicate the existence of homicidal gas chambers. Moreover, they say, Pressac actually made a number of major concessions to Revisionism. To provide just a few examples: Pressac stated that certain Soviet propagandists manufactured incriminating evidence and made structural changes to buildings after the liberation of Auschwitz. He acknowledged that cremation is considerably more time-consuming and problematic than Holocaust historians have claimed. The numerous eyewitness accounts about 10,000 or more cadavers being cremated daily in Auschwitz are grossly exaggerated and impossible. Also ridiculous, he continued, are the widely-repeated claims that the ovens operated continuously for days or weeks on end. He agreed with Revisionists that 'Sonderaktion' ('special action'), a seemingly-incriminating phrase found in some German documents, was not necessarily a euphemism for 'extermination'. He also agreed that the well-documented delivery of many tons of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz is not evidence of homicidal gassings. Whilst he stated that a little Zyklon-B was used for such gassings, Pressac admitted that approximately ninety-five percent of all Zyklon-B delivered to Auschwitz was used both in sophisticated disinfestation chambers to delouse clothing and bedding and in the barracks and facilities themselves as a means of countering the many typhus epidemics. Zyklon-B was, after all, a pesticide. Perhaps most importantly, he conceded that several key eyewitness accounts of gassings in Auschwitz - including those by Bendel, Nyiszli, Tauber and Vrba (WRB) - are filled with errors, distortions and fabrications.

I think Pressac understands evidencing better than Hayward. The problems that Hayward suggest, are not problems at all.

Pressac did not use inference, or argument. He used evidence. The documents that recorded the construction of undressing rooms, gas chambers and ovens for multiple corpse cremations, prove that was the usage of the buildings. Those documents are corroborated by all of the eyewitnesses who worked there and the circumstantial evidence around the arrival and processing of mass transports.

There have been no concessions to revisionism. It is a fact that the Poles rebuilt a chimney, knocked down walls and reopened holes at Krema I. That some witnesses exaggerated how many corpses could be cremated, or fitted inside the gas chambers, is to be expected, as people are poor at estimations. That 95% of the Zyklon B was not used for homicidal gassings, means that there was still enough for gassings. The witness errors etc, are normal for witnesses.

So-called revisionists exaggerate and invent problems with the evidence. Pressac has shown himself to be more knowledgeable about evidencing, hence when he saw the scale of the evidence for gassings, he accepted that his past doubts had been wrong.

[Archie]

Pressac did not use inference, or argument. He used evidence.

Nessie, do you realize that when you say this sort of thing that you sound like a complete fool? But thank you for exposing your grotesque ignorance so that readers know to discount all of your opinions.

Everyone uses "inference" and "argument."
"Argument" and "evidence" are not mutually exclusive.

Arguments are necessary for interpreting and giving meaning to the available data. In a situation where the evidence is so obvious that it speaks for itself, perhaps you could say that argument would be so trivial that it goes without saying, but that's obviously not the situation we are in here. Moreover, you are completely distorting Pressac who cautions against exactly what you are doing which is being too hasty in assuming that e.g. Vergasungskeller must refer to a homicidal gas chamber. Pressac calls all these things TRACES because he acknowledges that there must be some interpretation to arrive at the final conclusion. To say he presents pure evidence and makes no arguments is just idiotic.

There have been no concessions to revisionism.

Again, you are distorting Pressac whose work you have only heard about secondhand.

Here is Pressac conceding that the ventilation system was designed for an ordinary morgue.
"The ventilation and air extraction system of Leichenkeller 1 was designed for a morgue, not a gas chamber, though in the end it was used without modification;" (Pressac, 285)

And here is Pressac conceding that extraction and intact would have been backwards for an HCN gas chamber. Mainstream people would NOT admit this sort of thing (you couldn't even get them to discuss this sort of thing to begin with)
"...in Leichenkeller 1 the fresh air came in near the ceiling and the air extraction vents were near the floor, which means that the system was designed for a cool morgue, not for a warm gas chamber were the fresh air should come in front below and the foul air be extracted from above." (Pressac, 289)

Those are not the only examples.

[ConfusedJew]

Confused Jew has already been caught "fishing" for sensitive information from members and this feels like more of the same. I would advise the mods continue to monitor this and give Confused Jew a warning to stop these attempts, should anyone be foolish enough to offer up their professional credentials

I wasn't fishing for any sensitive information. I wanted to know what countries or regions you lived in. If what you are doing is illegal in your countries, which it may be, don't mention that.

I was curious if he lived in rural, suburban or urban areas. I spoke to a self identifying Neo Nazi who lived in a very rural area, almost off the grid, with his dog. He told me the state, which I won't bother to repeat because it's not important, but I am not looking for any kind of leverage or personally identifying information here.

He did bother to try and figure out where I lived. I left some personally identifying information on my twitter account as a decoy and he traced it back to where I had previously lived for a couple months. But no, I'm not looking to do anything like that to any of you.

[TlsMS93]

When Pressac died, the exterminationist side rarely mourned or mentioned his works, as he had somewhat turned to neo-revisionism toward the end of his life.

The selection of evidence from the exterminationist side is interesting. They use Pressac in the case of how the gas chambers would have worked, but when it comes to the number of deaths or the capacity of the crematoriums, they already dismiss him.

[ConfusedJew]

I'm being bombarded here.

From what I'm gathering, you believe that Pressac still is a revisionist because he believed in a death count far below the orthodox estimate (about 4 million). But you still consider him a "revisionist" even though he believes that the Nazis used gas chambers to mass exterminate Jews?

My question is a bit more precise then. Why do you think that he didn't believe in homicidal gas chambers to begin with but now he does?

[AreYouSirius]

I'm being bombarded here.

In what way?

You started a new thread. Because of course you did. People were aware of the researcher/author you brought up, and they gave you information and resources.

I hope you can get through this harrowing ordeal!

Kidding aside—I for one am grateful you started this thread. You may be flummoxed about opening a PDF, but I’m going to dive in on some of the linked resources in this thread. I’ve heard of Pressac and his journey of how he perceived the Holocaust, but I didn’t quite understand. I’m new(er) to the topic than most people on this forum.

[Archie]

At the end of his life, Pressac was willing to reduce the death tolls in the camps by close to two million. A true revisionist if ever there was one.

Chelmo: 80,000 to 85,000
Belzec: 100,000 to 150,000
Sobibor: 30,000 to 35,000
Treblinka: 200,000 to 250,000
Majdanek: <100,000 (funny enough, this one now looks a little high)

And for Auschwitz, he had estimated figures around 631,000-710,000.

At the low end, this would be around 1,141,000 vs around 3,000,000 for the orthodox estimates for the "extermination camps."

I don't think he ever gave estimates for the Einsatzgruppen or ghetto/misc deaths. If he was orthodox on those points (unlikely) that might get us up to around 4M. But if you taken the "exaggeration ratio" implied above and extend it across the board, you end up with only 2.3M. Maybe somewhere around 3-3.5M would be a reasonable guess for his implied position.

Interestingly, while this would seem to put him in the "Holocaust-lite" camp along with later Irving, Cole, and Weber, Pressac places relatively MORE emphasis on Auschwitz whereas the others cut Auschwitz out entirely. So these are really completely different and contradictory positions, although they all end up in Halfocaust territory.

[Wetzelrad]

But if you taken the "exaggeration ratio" implied above and extend it across the board, you end up with only 2.3M. Maybe somewhere around 3-3.5M would be a reasonable guess for his implied position.

Well, it's actually explicit rather than implicit. In the interview Pressac terms it an "emotional coefficient":

The emotional coefficient to multiply by varies from 2 to 7 and is on average 4 or 5. This average applies perfectly to Auschwitz.

Which if applied to the six million would give a very low total indeed, although he would probably have objected to that. The 6M has to be treated differently because it has always been disconnected from the subtotals. The subtotals, especially at the start, added up to a total far more than 6M.

Obviously the above quote would be seen as extremely provocative coming from a revisionist, but, unlike Faurisson, Pressac was never charged with any crime.

[Archie]

I'm being bombarded here.

From what I'm gathering, you believe that Pressac still is a revisionist because he believed in a death count far below the orthodox estimate (about 4 million). But you still consider him a "revisionist" even though he believes that the Nazis used gas chambers to mass exterminate Jews?

I regard Pressac as an "in-between" guy who approached the topic like a revisionist and who reached a quirky, intermediate position. See this thread for a discussion of compromise positions.

https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=176

My question is a bit more precise then. Why do you think that he didn't believe in homicidal gas chambers to begin with but now he does?

Let's set aside the double agent theory for a moment and take all of his statements at face value.

It seems he thought Faurisson was too doctrinaire and biased, like a mirror image of the orthodox crowd, and wanted to find a middle ground. It seems he was first convinced on the Natzweiler-Struthof gassings (very small scale), and later he published his much discussed "criminal traces" stuff on Auschwitz.

Sehn was charged with assisting the Polish prosecution in preparing the upcoming two Stalinist show trials against former camp commandant Rudolf Höss on the one hand, and against several former lower-ranking camp officials on the other. From the vast documentation, and with the help of Polish engineer Roman Dawidowski, Sehn cherry-picked ambivalent documents that included terms such as “gas,” “gastight,” and “gas chamber,” or “sonder” and “spezial” (meaning “separate” or “special”), ripped them out of their documental and historical context, and mispresented them as circumstantial evidence allegedly proving that homicidal gas chambers existed at the former camp, and had been used for mass murder.

Their long list of misinterpreted innocuous documents was rediscovered in the 1980s by French researcher Jean-Claude Pressac. He plagiarized Sehn’s and Dawidowski’s work without mentioning them, and rebranded their misrepresented pieces of evidence as “criminal traces.” Then he added a few more items he had found to this mendacious list, and used them in an attempt to bolster the orthodox Auschwitz narrative. A few years later, Jewish-Dutch historian Robert Jan van Pelt plagiarized Pressac’s work, without mentioning him, and presented it as his research result.

https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/histo ... n-jan/826/

Pressac was right about all the deficiencies and weaknesses in the orthodox story. He was wrong about his interpretation of the ambiguous construction documents. Overall, he is a bigger problem for the orthodox crowd than for revisionists, imo.

[ConfusedJew]

I'm being bombarded here.

In what way?

You started a new thread. Because of course you did. People were aware of the researcher/author you brought up, and they gave you information and resources.

I hope you can get through this harrowing ordeal!

Kidding aside—I for one am grateful you started this thread. You may be flummoxed about opening a PDF, but I’m going to dive in on some of the linked resources in this thread. I’ve heard of Pressac and his journey of how he perceived the Holocaust, but I didn’t quite understand. I’m new(er) to the topic than most people on this forum.

I asked why he changed his mind and I'm being bombarded with a lot of information that doesn't directly pertain to that question or my post directly.