The Sault Star
Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, January 18, 1985

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Scientific evidence of Holocaust missing

TORONTO (CP) - No scientific reports prove Jews were exterminated in Nazi gas chambers, a Holocaust scholar conceded Thursday at the trial of Ernst Zundel.

But numerous historical documents show that Jews were killed during the Second World War, said Raul Hilberg, a University of Vermont political science professor.

And even though German war documents contain no mention of killing Jews, euphemisms for such death such as 'resettlement' and 'special treatment' were used so commonly that Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, requested substitute phrases, Hilberg added.

Hilberg, who has spent 36 years studying the Holocaust and the subsequent Nuremberg trials of war criminals, testified earlier for the Crown that five million <sic> Jews were killed during the war.

Zundel, 46, a West German citizen living in Toronto, is charged with two counts of publishing statements that are known to be false and likely to cause injury or mischief to the public interest of maintaining social and religious tolerance.

Two of his publications--one called Did Six Million Really Die?--postulate that the Holocaust was a hoax to vilify Germans and exact compensation payments from them.

"Can you give me one scientific report that shows the existence of gas chambers anywhere in Nazi-occupied territory?" defence counsel Doug Christie asked Hilberg in a day-long rapid fire of cross-examination.

"I am at a loss," Hilberg replied.

"You are (at a loss) because you can't," Christie said.

The witness countered that there are aerial photographs of concentration camps, examples of ruined or reconstructed gas chambers, German industrial documents describing the lethal nature of various gases and filters for gas masks were found at the camps.

Hilberg agreed with Christie there are no autopsy reports indicating even a single person died from exposure to poisonous gas in chambers.

He has uncovered, however, a written request by a German scientist for some human subjects he wanted to kill by gassing in order to cut off their heads for anatomical research.

"In tens of thousands of [Nazi] documents, people were 'resettled' or 'the Jewish problem was solved' but the word killing was used only for dogs, not in reference to annihilation of Jews," Hilberg said.

Hilberg quoted from his book The Destruction of European Jews a message to Himmler from a Nazi official named Greiser stating that the "special treatment" of 100,000 Jews at a concentration camp would be complete in two to three months. Greiser then asked permission to have 35,000 tubercular Poles transferred to the camp for special treatment so they wouldn't infect Germans.

When Christie questioned Hilberg's interpretation of the last request, an exasperated Hilberg replied: "This was not a hospital."

Zundel, a balding, heavy-set man, took extensive notes from the prisoner's box during the day.

Hilberg told the district court jury of eight men and two women that Zundel's published account of some details of the Nuremberg war trials, which lasted from 1946 to 1949, was "fanciful."

His exhaustive research has not uncovered any evidence to support Zundel's supposition that Nazi officials were tortured to exact untrue statements implicating German war criminals, he said.

Christie introduced numerous accounts by German officers and a report by two American judges sent to investigate allegations of torture of German prisoners to back Zundel's claim that in one case, 139 prisoners were flogged until they bled and their genitals were trampled upon.