Jean-Claude Pressac

Jean-Claude Pressac (3 March 1944 – 23 July 2003) was a French pharmacist by profession, who became a published authority on the Auschwitz concentration camp homicidal gas chambers deployed during the Holocaust in World War II. He was the author of the 1989 book Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers among other publications on the subject, which demonstrated the technical possibility of mass killing by gas chambers during the Holocaust, thus debunking many falsehoods promoted by Holocaust deniers.

Pressac's path to this scholarship was singular. Initially drawn in the late 1970s to Holocaust denial through contact with Robert Faurisson, his archival research on site at Auschwitz ultimately convinced him of the reality of the mass killings. Pressac was given access to blueprints which had previously survived unnoticed for decades due to being located in the construction office rather than the administrative offices. The analysis of material proof convinced him that his former views shaped by the Faurisson case were in error. He described his experience dramatically in the 'Postface' of Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, saying that he "nearly did away with [himself] one evening in October 1979 in the main camp, the Stammlager, overwhelmed by the evidence and by despair". Pressac wrote:

Publications Pressac published his conclusions along with much of the underlying evidence in his 1989 book, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers by Beate Klarsfeld Foundation of New-York with translation from the French by Peter Moss.

In his 1993 Les Crématoires d'Auschwitz, he further delineated the operation of the crematoria at Auschwitz, and their integration into the larger Nazi program to eradicate the Jews of Europe. Pressac estimated that some 800,000 people were killed at Auschwitz, rather than the widely accepted figure of 1.1 million. Roger Cohen, reporting for The New York Times, described it as written in a tone as matter-of-fact as an accountant's audit, and noted that its most significant contribution, in the view of several historians, was the new documentary evidence it provided of the mass killing process at a time of growing Holocaust denial.

At the same time, the book's cold methodology drew strong criticism. Nicole Lapierre argued that its deliberate exclusion of testimony – on the grounds that human memory is unreliable – amounted to a "science without conscience", which confined to the domain of pure technique at the expense of any human dimension. Claude Lanzmann went further, contending that by insisting on documentary proof and discounting survivor testimony, Pressac had legitimated the very arguments of Holocaust deniers: "I prefer the tears of the barber from Treblinka in Shoah to a Pressac document on gas detectors."

Works

Books and chapters

(with Anne Freyer).

Articles

"Les carences et incohérences du Rapport Leuchter", Jour J, la lettre télégraphique juive, December 1988. Read online. "Pour en finir avec les négateurs", L'Histoire, 156, June 1992, pp. 42–51.