The "Confessions" of Kurt Gerstein

The "confessions" of SS officer Kurt Gerstein, written right at the end of World War II, were for many decades the mainstay upon which the Holocaust orthodoxy erected their narrative about what presumably transpired at a camp near the eastern Polish town of Belzec. In his texts, Gerstein described that, during a two-day visit to the camp in the summer of 1942, he saw how thousands of Jews were crammed into small gas chambers, at a packing density of 30 people per square meter. After almost three hours of waiting, they were allegedly executed using Diesel-engine exhaust gas. Gerstein insisted on having seen veritable mountains of the victims' shoes and clothes up to 40 meters high, and tallied the total death toll of Belzec and the other extermination camps in Poland at some 20 million.

These and other improbabilities, plus the fact that mainstream scholars quoted Gerstein differently, induced skeptical researcher Henri Roques to gather all available original documents and subject them to critical scrutiny. The resulting PhD thesis was ultimately defended in 1985 at Nantes University in France. In his thesis, Roques presents the complete texts of the six different versions of Gerstein's "confessions" known to date, plus a wide array of related documents. He tracks these documents' authenticity, highlights differences between the six "confession" versions, and assesses their veracity. In conclusion, Roques confirms that at least two of the "confessions" are authentic, but that their factual claims are highly dubious and in many instances demonstrably untrue.

Roques's thesis, which was inspired by French fathers of revisionism Paul Rassinier and Robert Faurisson, led to a scandal in France that lasted some three years. It resulted in Roques's PhD title getting revoked, and the French parliament prohibiting Holocaust skepticism in 1990. In several appendices, the present book chronicles these events, as well as the considerable ripple effects Roques's thesis had both in mainstream and revisionist historiography.

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