Jean-Claude Pressac

Jean-Claude Pressac (born March 3, 1944 in Villepinte , Département Seine-Saint-Denis, † July 23, 2003 in Le Kremlin-Bicêtre ) was a French chemist , pharmacist and historian .

Life

Jean-Claude Pressac was the son of a right-wing teacher couple. Destined for a career as an officer, he was educated at the La Flèche cadet institute . After failing the entrance exam to the Saint-Cyr military school , he completed a pharmacy degree in Paris , graduating in 1970. He became a pharmacist in La Ville-du-Bois .

At the age of 18 he read Robert Merle's biographical novel Death is my job about the concentration camp commandant Rudolf Höss , who fascinated him. He was enthusiastic about everything related to the military, war and especially World War II . For a short time he was a member of the right-wing extremist Œuvre française, founded in 1968 .

To research a novel, he traveled to Poland to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1966 , and a second time in 1979. The archivist Tadeusz Iwaszko (1960–2005) was unable to fully satisfy his thirst for knowledge. He had noticed that in 1972, at the trial of Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl , files had emerged that did not come from the Auschwitz Museum.

Later he came across publications that claimed that it was technically impossible to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews in gas chambers operated with hydrogen cyanide. In early 1980, he turned to spokesman Robert Faurisson , who instructed him to find evidence for this thesis. On his third trip in 1980, however, he had doubts about it, as the archive research had convinced him otherwise. In April 1981 he broke with Faurisson and threw himself deeper and deeper into his hobby studies, working as a pharmacist during the day and as a historian at night.

He contacted Pierre Vidal-Naquet , who invited him to present the results of his travels at the Nazi Germany and the Holocaust conference on June 30, 1982, which was his first public presentation. He also got in touch with Serge Klarsfeld , who now became his sponsor. After an article on crematoria in Auschwitz, he wrote his book Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers in 1989 .

He had heard that after the liberation of Auschwitz the Soviets had taken away some of the files of the camp administration. The collapse of the Soviet Union made it possible that in October 1990 he was one of the first to see the holdings on Auschwitz in the Moscow secret archives. In 1993 his second book Les crematoires d'Auschwitz was published .

For decades Pressac dealt in detail with the extermination facilities of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . Pressac supplemented on-site assessments by evaluating extensive documents that had survived from the time of National Socialism , including correspondence , construction drawings , cost estimates and minutes of meetings .

During this time Pressac revised his original revisionist ideas. He published his research in his 1989 book Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers . Pressac not only refuted the claims of the Holocaust deniers, but also provided important information about the technology and organization of the National Socialist mass murder. In his 1993 book Les Crématoires d'Auschwitz (German “Die Krematorien von Auschwitz”), Pressac analyzed the functioning of the crematoria of Auschwitz and documented the involvement of various German companies in the mass extermination program. Details of Pressac's explanations have been corrected in more recent research papers, including some of his interpretations of documents, some of which he wrongly declared to be forgeries, and his estimate of the number of Jews murdered at Auschwitz, which was far underestimated . The historian Franciszek Piper accused Pressac:

"In general, he endeavors to minimize the number of victims, to reduce the capacity of the crematoria and gas chambers, and to delay the time when certain decisions and measures are taken."

Pressac himself emphasized that his calculations resulted in a “minimum value” which could be corrected with a careful evaluation of the documents; however, the Nazi crimes could not be put into perspective:

"Auschwitz still stands for the mass extermination of innocent people using gas."

Works

• The Struthof album . Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1985.
• Auschwitz. Technique and operation of the gas chambers . Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989 ( online ).
• The Auschwitz crematoria. The technique of mass murder . Piper, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-492-12193-4 .

literature

• Franciszek Piper : Fritjof Meyer, “The number of victims of Auschwitz. New findings through new archive finds ” . In: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde (Ed.): Eastern Europe . Vol. 52, no. 5 , 2002, ISSN  0030-6428 , p. 631–641 ( review article - 2.XII.2003 ( memento of October 5, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) online - in his discussion of Meyer's methods of interpretation, Piper also goes into some of the problematic interpretations that Pressac gave to the documents).
• Christian Mentel: Pressac, Jean-Claude. In: Brigitte Mihok, Wolfgang Benz and Werner Bergmann (eds.): Handbook of Antisemitism. Hostility to Jews in the past and present. Volume 2: People (L-Z). De Gruyter / Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-24072-0 , pp. 653-654.

Web links

• Literature by and about Jean-Claude Pressac in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ focus.de: The technique of mass murder , April 25, 1994.