The 'homicidal gas chamber' in Paris

[Wetzelrad]

Regarding Denierbud, at 02:53 he talks about the coffins in the footage. He suggests the Allies put the coffins there strictly as props, but I differ for a couple reasons.

1. We can see that the coffins at 02:53 are closed, bulky, rectangular, old, located next to a pit, and we even see a woman next to them hold her nose, whereas the coffins at 03:03 are empty, lightweight, made of fresh wood, and more faceted.
2. Other sources do claim bodies were dug up there, even if all the details including their number are inconsistent.

So it's plausible that the rectangular coffins did actually contain victims of German executions, whereas the faceted coffins had just been brought in by Allied forces, whether it was to stage the scene or to remove bodies. Regardless, the newsreel clearly lies when it portrays the faceted coffins as German.

[Wetzelrad]

Sorry to speculate wildly, but is it possible that the footage shows the Allies using a smoke grenade inside the building? I think this would explain why the smoke:
- fills the room, such that everyone eventually has to exit.
- does not cause anyone to cough or get irritated eyes.
- may not emanate as much from the pipes as from an unseen source.

Maybe the Americans had heard it was supposed to be a gas chamber or a heat chamber (or whatever), so they tried to put on a good show to demonstrate how it would work in action. They may have put a smoke grenade in the extraction system (as Stubble described upthread) thinking it would flow through the vents in the opposite direction of what it was designed for.

It has to be something like this. There would be no other reason to stand in front of the camera gesturing at the pipes as they did.

[Stubble]

I had always assumed flour or talc.

Like you say, wild speculation though, and no way to confirm.

[Wetzelrad]

David Cole briefly mentioned this location in an article.

The U.S. National Archives and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum “€celebrated”€ the museum’s grand opening in 1993 by collaborating on a book in which old Army Signal Corps footage of a Paris rifle range was “€repurposed”€ as footage of a gas chamber. I uncovered that deceit the same year.

https://archive.ph/N7q8L

But I can't find the book he refers to. If there actually is a USHMM book that portrays the Balard footage as an authentic gas chamber, that would be rather significant. Does anyone know which book it is?

Alternatively, where could I find Cole's work from 1993? I find a brief mention of this in the Smith's Report of that year, but Cole evidently did not know what he had at that time, and I can't find a follow-up.
https://codoh.com/library/document/extr ... iscovered/

[Stubble]

If I had an X/Twitter account, I'd ask him.

Looking over his account on Nitter, he answers questions. Of course, he becomes loquacious and would likely try to tell you that 4,000,000 some odd jews 'were murdered', but, he'd give you the book title me thinks and if any of his work from that time survives, I have no doubt he would share it with you.

In the mean time, I will poke around and look for a title that meets the prescribed criteria. A book saying the fake gas chamber is real would be invaluable to cite, because the defense from exterminationists has been that this footage has never been claimed to be a gas chamber and it is we who are misrepresenting it.

[Wetzelrad]

I will go ahead and do that, but I want to say in advance of doing so that I have extremely low expectations for his response. Nearly 100% of Cole's replies that I've read have been insulting, and nearly 100% of his posts about the Holocaust are written in defense of it. Hopefully I will be pleasantly surprised.

Here are some titles from 1993 I already checked. I could have missed it, but I didn't see any image from or reference to the shooting range.
The World Must Know by Michael Berenbaum
Revolt Amid the Darkness / Fifty Years Ago: 1993 Days of Remembrance
Holocaust: The Documentary Evidence

[Stubble]

I will go ahead and do that, but I want to say in advance of doing so that I have extremely low expectations for his response. Nearly 100% of Cole's replies that I've read have been insulting, and nearly 100% of his posts about the Holocaust are written in defense of it. Hopefully I will be pleasantly surprised.

Here are some titles from 1993 I already checked. I could have missed it, but I didn't see any image from or reference to the shooting range.
The World Must Know by Michael Berenbaum
Revolt Amid the Darkness / Fifty Years Ago: 1993 Days of Remembrance
Holocaust: The Documentary Evidence

Part 1) True. Also, I went to look at your account through Nitter, and, you did ask. Hopefully the guy responds, with the relevant book title.

Part 2), I will scratch those off the list and keep digging. I've got about a half a dozen other irons in the fire currently and am winnowing a series of transport documents from Ostland currently. It, might be a while, before I hit paydirt on a book title.

Edit: it appears the only book that fits the bill is first edition of The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Michael Berenbaum. I'm having trouble sourcing a 1st edition (I'm assuming there was a revision in later editions) for review.

[Wetzelrad]

Cole did not respond.

Edit: it appears the only book that fits the bill is first edition of The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Michael Berenbaum. I'm having trouble sourcing a 1st edition (I'm assuming there was a revision in later editions) for review.

It would make sense for that to be the book, but I can't find anything in it that looks like or references Balard. Not in the two versions that are copyright 1993, nor in the 2006 "second edition". I will give up this pursuit for now.

[Wetzelrad]

There is more information about this location on the French net than in English. I briefly mentioned Jean-Pierre Petit's website upthread, but it deserves to be considered more fully. Petit published the accounts of three witnesses who called this place a gas chamber, plus himself. Petit goes so far as to assert that this was one of the Nazis' experimental gas chambers on which extermination camps were based.
https://www.jp-petit.org/nouv_f/issy_ch ... _paris.htm

I was a student at the National School of Aeronautics in Paris, Supaéro, from 1959 to 1961. [...] This training included shooting sessions held in a range located in Issy les Moulineaux, now destroyed.

I remember perfectly well that one room of this range was covered with wire mesh, which held, stuck to the wall, thick asbestos sheets, which represent a fairly good sound insulator. According to the photographs taken at the time of the liberation of Paris, this mesh was affixed afterwards. A non-commissioned officer, in charge of shooting, explained to me that these were fingerprints of people who had been gassed in this room and who had tried to climb the wall to escape the deadly gas.

I was able, guided by the district chief warrant officer Oyarsabal, to see a gas chamber and a shooting mound built for killing, Guynemer barracks, Boulevard Victor, Place Balard – Gestapo center 1940 to 1944 – Archives of the Air Ministry 1944.

Seen with my own eyes at the site of the Ziklon B cartridges, unbelievable handprints on the interior lining installed to hold back the screams of the dying. Fir coffins outside, execution poles riddled at face height;

This gas chamber adjoined the covered shooting range building. It had a false chimney through which a Gestapo officer introduced the lethal gas cartridge. After the execution, fans emptied the gases to the outside.

After being placed in coffins, the bodies were transported to places of disappearance other than here. At night, some of these tortured people, an unknown number, were burned and then thrown into the mouth of the Issy-les-Moulineaux thermal power plant adjoining the airfield – today the Paris heliport. There were no witnesses; the staff was invited to have a hot drink, well away from this criminal operation and for as long as necessary.

The clinker residues stored on peripheral land were intended to make the road bases of the Boulevard des Maréchaux.

A sinister and sumptuous cemetery to be shared with the most illustrious marshals of the empire. Counted and identified nowhere, how many are there in this soil and elsewhere; how many dead.

It is up to the associations to verify the testimonies of these crimes.

I, the undersigned Mr. Grégoire Maurice, who volunteered on October 9, 1944, in the 117th Air Battalion on Boulevard Victor in Paris, certify that upon my arrival at the barracks I discovered with horror the places where patriots were shot after their arrest.

Five were located in the shooting gallery and four in the gas chamber (execution poles).

Traces of flesh and blood were still visible on the walls.

Testimony established so that no one forgets this painful part of our history.

I, the undersigned, Robert VIZET, honorary Parliamentarian, former resistance fighter, volunteer for the duration of the 1939-1945 war, residing on the Route de Villaine in Palaiseau (91220), declare that I remember that when I was on duty at the Air Ministry, in October 1944, I had the opportunity to visit the Issy-les-Moulineaux training ground where resistance fighters had been shot. Far from there was a building whose interior was lined with asbestos where one could still see traces of fingers, of hands which seemed to express attempts of people who were locked there, to hoist themselves towards the glass but hermetically sealed air vents, in order to escape the suffocation of the gas.

According to contemporary accounts, it was a gas chamber intended in this area for the extermination of resistance fighters or people the Nazis wanted to get rid of. It's true that since then I haven't had to learn what became of the place of torture and execution by gas.

This confirms that the French, too, were portraying this location as a Nazi gas chamber, though in a limited fashion. Réant was almost certainly borrowing from tales of Auschwitz when he described it using Zyklon B by insertion through a false chimney. No one else mentioned these features.

There is also this fifth witness:
https://www.souvenirfrancais-issy.com/a ... 82543.html

Many said that they had heard shots, but without suspecting what these walls could hide. One room had posts. Halfway up, they were riddled with bullet holes. Worse. At the top were still nailed the blindfolds that were supposed to be used to cover the eyes of the tortured. At the back, an asbestos wall with handprints, embedded quite deeply. One of them was placed very high up. Completely unreachable for me. How could it have been at such a height?

Another room. The back wall was partly made of glass tiles. To the side, there was an installation. It looked like the ovens of a bakery. Around me, some people were saying that guys had certainly been gassed in this room and that the ovens could have been used to make the bodies disappear. Others said that the white wooden coffins were intended for German soldiers who had refused to shoot French soldiers. What could possibly be the truth in all this?

These are all the witnesses to the supposed gas chamber, of what's available online. I wasn't able to find anything that Romanov had not already found (and disregarded).

Bearing in mind these five witnesses, Romanov's hypothesis that the film got its title from a naive archivist is probably wrong. If these French witnesses who were on-site heard it was a gas chamber, probably so did the film crew, and they would have noted that down when describing the film's contents.

I must also point out that the description of ovens here, which Romanov accepts, is almost certainly wrong. The four hatches on the wall opened directly out to the range. This can be seen in the films. They were for shooting through. They do have a resemblance to ovens, and Lecomte may have mistaken them that way as a child, but I'm pretty sure they were just doors.

[Stubble]

Cole did not respond.

Edit: it appears the only book that fits the bill is first edition of The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Michael Berenbaum. I'm having trouble sourcing a 1st edition (I'm assuming there was a revision in later editions) for review.

It would make sense for that to be the book, but I can't find anything in it that looks like or references Balard. Not in the two versions that are copyright 1993, nor in the 2006 "second edition". I will give up this pursuit for now.

I also drew a blank man, sorry.

Too bad Cole didn't clarify. Maybe he will put the bottle down long enough to type you a reply, maybe he won't.

I read that witness stuff, and, yes, of course, it was claimed to be a gas chamber. For propaganda.

Why it ended up on the cutting room floor? Probably the 'clawmarks in cement' schtick. I'm betting it didn't pass the psyke warfare department test screening.