INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW

PUBLISHER OF THE JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL REVIEW

 

RECEIVED 20 OCT 1989

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(714) 631&emdash;1490 Theodore J. O'Keefe

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 10, 1989

SWASTIKA, CROSS, STAR OF DAVID:
POPE PIUS XII AND THE HOLOCAUST

What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?

A controversial Ph.D. thesis which rocked France by subjecting the testimony of a key Holocaust eyewitness and alleged informant of the Roman Catholic hierarchy - SS officer Kurt Gerstein - to thorough critical study is now available in English. The 'Confessions' of Kurt Gerstein (3l8+l5pp, Pb, bibliography, index, reference tables, ISBN 0-939484-27-7, $11.00), by Frenchman Henri Roques, is both a triumph of historical scholarship and a contribution to today's burning debate on the role of Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church during the Holocaust.

At the war's end Gerstein, who supplied the SS officer's concentration camps with the deadly Zyklon-B, gave Allied interrogators the most famous account of a mass gassing of Jews by Germans, then died mysteriously in a French prison. Sixteen years later his testimony was at the heart of The Deputy, the controversial play by Rolf Hochhuth which accused Pope Pius XII of remaining silent despite his knowledge of the systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe.

In 1979 Henri Rogues, nearing the end of his career in the French civil service, began an intensive study of the life and testimony of Kurt Gerstein. His stunning conclusions, duly honored with a doctoral degree by the University of Nantes in 1985, touched off an uproar in France that still hasn't subsided. For the Rogues thesis demonstrated, not only that Gerstein's witness of a mass gassing of Jews and a silent papal complicity in the slaughter is so fragile as to be groundless, but that postwar academics have deliberately manipulated and falsified key sections of his tortured testimony. The following year Henri Rogues made history by being the first man in the nearly eight-century history of French universities to have his doctorate "revoked" by government order.

The 'Confessions' of Kurt Gerstein, published for the first time in English by the Institute for Historical Review, contains the Rogues thesis in its entirety, together will a full account of the controversy it unleashed in France. With a full critical apparatus, including numerous documents and records never before published, for the scholar, and a lively exposition of Gerstein's eventful life and death for the layman, the book is for anyone interested in searching out historical facts lost behind the headlines and obscured by partisan strife.

 

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Henri Rocques: Thesis mark condemned

David Irving writes 1994 to The West Australian, about identical quantities of Zyklon-B canisters shipped to Auschwitz and Oranienburg (a non-"gas-chamber" camp) 

On the "madman" Kurt Gerstein see Prof Raul. Hilberg's testimony, 1985