Robert Faurisson

Robert Faurisson (1929-2018), a French Holocaust denier, was an associate Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Lyon, France. His Holocaust denial emerged in 1974 when he wrote a letter to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum, claiming there was no genocide of Jews during World War II. He became involved with the Institute for Historical Review, and served on their Editorial Advisory Committee since it was formed in 1979. He testified in defense of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel and wrote multiple denial works, one questioning the credibility of Anne Frank’s diary and another the historical facts about Auschwitz, calling the death camp “the biggest lie of the 20th century.” In 2012, he received a prize from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, for his “courage, resistance, and fighting spirit” in contesting the Holocaust.

In 1983, he was fined and given a suspended prison sentence for “racial defamation” after he made Holocaust denial remarks on French radio in 1980, and in 1991 was required to stand trial for disputing a crime against humanity. He was also convicted for remarks he made on Iranian TV in 2005 claiming “there was never a single execution gas chamber under the Germans. So, all those millions of tourists who visit Auschwitz are seeing a lie, a falsification.”  

In his words:

• “The alleged Hitlerian gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which permitted a gigantic financial swindle whose chief beneficiaries have been the state of Israel and international Zionism, and whose main victims have been the German people and the Palestinian people as a whole.” - 1991 quote of Faurisson’s trial, Guardian Weekly
• “When finally the collapse of the ‘Jewish Holocaust’ myth comes about, the tribunal of History will have to render justice to a sizeable number of revisionists and, to begin with, the Frenchman Paul Rassinier and the German Ernst Zündel, who never met but who, united in heart and spirit in one and the same truly heroic venture, have indeed fought not only for the honour of their respective homelands but also for the honour of Europe as a whole.” - an homage to Ernst Zundel published on Faurisson’s since-deleted blog