Ernst Zündel
Interviews Carlos Whitlock Porter
1988
The following is my transcription of an interview with Ernst Zündel in Luxembourg in the conference room of a hotel near the airport, in late 1988. I moved to Belgium (a different country) on January 3, 1989. It's interesting to see what I said 30 years ago. There's more where that came from.
EZ: I'm Ernst Zundel, the man behind the voice of freedom. Today we're going to see an unusual and interesting guest. His name is Carlos Porter. He is an American by birth. He is also an expatriate American. He lives in Belgium, in Europe. He has renounced his American citizenship because he says he was so disgusted by the interference by United States government agencies in the affairs of foreign countries. And in the moralising, not in the morality [that too.], but in the constant moralising, of the United States government, various administrations, about issues that didn't concern itself, that he decided to leave his own country and to live as a stateless person in Europe, he has vowed not to return to the United States until such time as there is a change of administration as also a change of attitude. Here is Carlos Porter.
EZ: Mr. Porter, you have consented to a short interview. I would like to ask you, number one, who are you?
CP: My name is Carlos Whitlock Porter, I was born in 1947 in South Pasadena, California, and my father was a Naval officer and a graduate of Harvard Law School. I am a translator, I live in Luxembourg, I am a member of the Institute of Linguists, London, and I studied in Spain and Portugal.
EZ: Did your interest in this subject matter come from your professional background as a reader of many texts? You're obviously quite well-read in different fields, essentially in your translation work, did you stumble upon this issue this way?
CP: No, I came upon it because I've always been anti-Communist. And I came across a review of the Hoax of the Twentieth Century, in "The South African Observer", edited by S.E.D. Brown, I was very impressed, in fact I was amazed, I then obtained "Did Six Million Really Die?" in 1976, and was immediately convinced, as much as I could be, by an opposing writer. I then wanted to verify this by reading the writer who maintain that the Holy-Coast [sic] is a "historical fact", and I attacked "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William L. Shirer, and it was immediately apparent to me that what he describes does not make any sense. Especially, on page 968, when Rudolf Höss says, "We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped". This is an obvious impossibility, because the victims of cyanide poisoning become unconscious. They do not die in the same period of time, if at all, they may remain unconscious for as long as six hours and then recover.
["Holy coast" = private joke. At the time, I used a letterhead with a graphic of a palm tree, and the slogan "Visit the Holy Coast: Where the Exotic Lies Close at Hand".]
EZ: Are there reports, that when they opened the alleged gas chambers, that they were semi-comatose, totally unconscious, people, plus dead, and some of them who walked away, are you saying that the period of death would be quite a long time. Have you read such reports?
CP: No, I have not, frankly I have not, except in Reitlinger and Nyzli, where they are speaking of the same case, Reitlinger has simply copied the apocryphal Mr. Nyzli, and this is the case of a case of a girl aged 15 who was supposed to have been saved from death by contact with the humidity of the cement floor, which raises the question of whether or not humidity is an antidote to cyanide poisoning. And I should say that the toxicity of cyanide gas is dependent upon its concentration in the air. It must reach a certain percentage of the air breathed, and be breathed for a certain period of time. It is an extremely complex sort of poisoning. It is something which no one in history has ever attempted. There has never been a mass gassing with cyanide gas, so that the Germans cannot possibly have known how to proceed.
EZ: The Germans had quite a body of knowledge, I understand, about gases in warfare. Why did they settle allegedly upon Zyklon B if they knew the qualities of them?
CP: This is simply an example of the stupidity and absurdity of the entire story from A to Z. The Germans were the world's foremost experts on poison gas and on poisons. They were in fact so far advanced in the field of poison gas that the Allies never duplicated their process for the volatilisation of mustard gas until shortly before the Armistice in 1918. The Allies used mustard gas, but had a very great deal of trouble trying to get the liquid to turn into a gas. Shortly before the Armistice, they discovered a process which worked very well, in fact, even better than the German process. The Germans never used hydrocyanic acid during WWI, no nation has ever used Diesel exhaust or carbon monoxide in gas warfare. In fact, the idea of gassing people with Diesel exhaust is so utterly stupid that I, I simply refuse to discuss the matter under any circumstances. I feel that if people want to believe that any industrialised nation could gas people with Diesel exhaust, it's beneath my dignity to discuss the matter.
EZ: Now in the First World War, when the Germans had accumulated all this knowledge about the various poisoned gases, why did the poisoning of prisoners in the United States was a victorious power capable and able of getting all these German documents and why did they settle on the gas chamber method of killing prisoners with that particular substance that they used?
CP: In the United States?
EZ: In the United States.
CP: I can answer that question very quickly. The reason why cyanide gas is used for the execution of criminals is because the proponents of capital punishment are under great pressure to be humane. Poisoning by cyanide gas is probably absolutely painless, it's probably the most painless death possible. The gas is absolutely imperceptible, it cannot even be smelled except in very high concentrations, it paralyzes the sense of smell, the person breathing the gas lapses into unconsciousness, the proponents have advocated this method because it was believed to be more humane than shooting or hanging, for example, or by gassing with other gases which would be far more effective, far deadlier, far quicker, far easier to use, but, if you are not motivated by humanitarianism, there would be probably no reason to settle upon cyanide gas as a means of killing.
EZ: So was the mass killing with Zyklon B the most humane mass murder in history, or the most stupid because they didn't use the most effective?
CP: Let me comment on that by saying that people don't think. And I'll give you an example of this from my own experience, I used to believe that it was possible to gas people with Zyklon B provided one takes a very long time. Zyklon B is liquid hydrocyanic acid absorbed in a carrier base. The liquid evaporates over a period of many hours, and is breathed by the moths and rats and so on inside the area to be fumigated. Now, let's assume that we fumigate an ordinary building which is not hermetically sealed, an ordinary mill or warehouse, and there just happen to be 200 members of the Rotary Club inside, we forgot they were in there, we didn't notice, OK, we open the barn doors the next day, and we find they're all dead. And this is fine, except, that it had never occurred to me to think, until I read the Leuchter Report, that if people are crammed in so tightly, 2,000 people in a chamber, they'll suffocate almost immediately, in half an hour, 45 minutes or so. There's no need to use any gas at all, much less a gas that takes one day, two days, six hours, eight hours.
If you are going to kill masses of human beings using a gas, the effective way would be to follow one of three procedures. You would have to follow the procedures used in gas warfare, for gas attacks in the open, you would have to follow the procedures used for fumigation of mills and warehouses, in which case you could use a mill or a warehouse, but you'd have to follow the procedures, and if you're going to cram them in so tightly, and you're not motivated by humanitarianism, why use a gas at all? Why not just cram them in, shut the doors and let them suffocate?
[The third procedure would be American gas chamber procedures, which weren't followed either. C.P.]
EZ: Free of charge.
CP: Absolutely.
EZ: No need for gas masks for the personnel...
CP: Cyanide gas is an extremely complex gas. It is probably the finest gas in existence, it will penetrate the filter of any gas mask not specifically intended to provide protection against cyanide gas. It is absorbed by porous surfaces, it will penetrate walls, it paralyzes the sense of smell, it's absolutely imperceptible, and for this reason it is completely dangerous, beyond its actual toxicity. There are other gases, which are between 2 to 10 times more poisonous, which have been used with great success, by the Germans, during WWI, and by all other combatants, but not hydrocyanic acid. If you are going to cram 2,000 people in a barn and kill them with cyanide gas, I had always assumed it would be possible provided you wore a gas mask, followed the procedures for fumigation and waited the necessary time, 6 hours or 8 hours. But if they're going to suffocate, why bother? Why bother with the risk of the gas coming through the walls and gassing you later? In a sense, it is comparable to water vapour.
If we place a can of water in a hot, dry room, the water will evaporate and the air will become more humid. You can't see it, the water doesn't go POOF!
We don't see the vapour coming at us like this, the air simply becomes more humid, the humidity will be absorbed by porous surfaces in a room, for example, wood, or the pin block of a piano, or the sound board of the piano, so you tune a piano, later you turn on the electric heating, and the water will evaporate from these porous surfaces, and the piano will go out of tune again.
And the same thing happens with fumigation with Zyklon B. The danger exists that a barn, a warehouse, will be fumigated, the area will be aired, but it will not be aired long enough. Here comes some fool who airs the building, then he closes the windows and he turns on the heat. He thinks the gas has gone away. OK, maybe it has gone away, until you turn on the heat, and close the windows, then it comes out of the walls, just like water vapour from the pin block of a piano, and gases you to death. This is why in the directions for the use of Zyklon it says you must air the area for at least 24 hours, and never the spend the night, the first night, in a house which has been fumigated with Zyklon, and never to sleep with the windows closed, after a house has been fumigated with Zyklon.
EZ: Amazing. Now, in your studies, you came across Nyzli, which you mentioned already. What did Nyzli describe?
CP: I will begin by saying that revisionists make a mistake when they say that Nyzli was not a real person. He was definitely a real person, he was a forensic expert, he wrote a doctoral thesis on methods of suicide in Breslau in 1930.
This book is available through international library loan. But "Doctor at Auschwitz" was not written by Dr. Nyzkli, because it is full of absurdities and impossibilities, it cannot have been written by any kind of forensic expert, or anyone with any kind of technical knowledge at all, it's written in the style of a cheap sex book, a cheap best-seller, and for a long time I considered that he was simply describing the usual absurdities where everything is impossible, cyanide gas irritating the eyes and throat and all that sort of thing, and then, in footnote in the American edition, I discovered that he believed, mistakenly, that cyanide gas contained chlorine, so that what he describes might make sense if wartime Zyklon had contained chlorine. Chlorine stings the eyes, irritates the lungs, the throat, and so on and forth, wartime Zyklon did not, because it was the pure liquid and could be used for fumigating foodstuffs, tobacco, everything, so that the gas was absolutely imperceptible.
EZ: So what do you make of Nyzli? Was it ghost-written for him? Did somebody adopt the name Nyzli? Was he dead and they just misused his name?
CP: To me, the "Doctor at Auschwitz" is like the "Diary of Ann Frank"; Ann Frank was a real person. But the book is a fake. "The Diary of Ann Frank" is a work of fiction. A self-evidently obvious work of fiction. Now in the case of the "Diary of Ann Frank", the authorship is, as far as I know, unknown; I don't know who wrote it, but I know it's not so. Now with Nyzli I think it is most probable that it was put together by a committee of Communists somewhere around a table, somewhere in Hungary, or in the Soviet Union someplace. A committee of forgers who simply wrote it as a ghost-written piece of anti-fascist propaganda, and stuck Nyzli's name on it because he was known to have been a real person.
EZ: And had written the thesis on suicide. How about other books, like Rudolf Vrba's book, "I Cannot Forgive".
CP: I have not read that one, and to be frank, I don't read a lot of books that have been published recently.
EZ: It was also written under the "Eyewitness Auschwitz" title. Do you know that?
CP: No, I prefer to read books that are old, which were published in the late 40s or early 50s. Because with more recent books there is the constant danger that they have forgotten all the most ridiculous things and has been edited also so that it looks like it halfway makes sense, and for this reason I prefer to read the older books where we can discover the vacuum chambers, steam chambers, quicklime chambers, pedal-driven brain-bashing machines, and all this other ridiculous nonsense that everyone has forgotten for 40 years.
EZ: Now, of course, the charge is made in America, in American propaganda, and was far more frequently used than in any other propaganda that the Germans were killing Jews by gas, the New York Times made a big deal about it. Is that because America had a history of gas chambers, while other countries, beheaded people, hanged people, shot people, so that there the dread of gas chambers was not as present or not as alive in the popular mind and in the folk myth?
CP: I had never thought of that before, and several answers are possible. Where the Americans are concerned, the American troops during WWI had an exaggerated fear of cyanide gas. Cyanide gas aroused more fear in them than any other gas. But they never came into contact with it, because the Germans never used it. The Germans never used it, because it didn't work well in the open, in fact it didn't work at all. Now, it's possible that these same people, with the same exaggerated fear of cyanide gas thought it up on that basis. But it's more likely that these stories have some sort of basis in fact, in the sense that if a person with delirium tremens comes out of a room and says "Bats and snakes in there, bats and snakes in there", and then somebody else comes along and puts a sign on the room that says "Beware of Bats and Snakes". Zyklon did exist. It was used to fumigate mills, warehouses, factories, all sorts of areas that could not be hermetically sealed. It was deadly used under the proper conditions for the proper period of time and so on. And there are all sorts of murder stories with all sorts of props involved. For example, if the Americans liberate a camp and they find gasoline, then the Germans killed everybody with injections of gasoline.
If they find some sort of instrument designed to measure how tall people are, then that proves that the Germans killed everybody by bashing their brains in with a pedal-driven brain-bashing machine. And there are all kinds of absurd props, for example, the steam chambers have a basis in reality, in the sense that one method of destroying vermin in clothing is to fumigate them with steam, I don't know the proper word, [perhaps] to "steamigate". There were and are steam chambers. They are a very effective means of destroying vermin in clothing so as to prevent typhus. There's no danger of using cyanide gas and getting poisoned, you don't have to use sulphur dioxide or other things that don't work as well, you can use a steam chamber. Fine, OK. The steam chambers existed, the poison gas existed, Zyklon existed, gasoline existed, benzene, benzaldehyde, the various drugs, hibitane, and other sorts of things with which people are supposed to have been done away with.
EZ: So you are saying that the propagandists just latched onto whatever was already available and then used something that already existed...?
CP: Well, yes, they came along and found virtually anything and everything that would fit any kind of atrocity story. And another thing I should mention that is very important, is that delirium is a symptom of typhus. So that if you have thousands of people in a camp who are suffering from typhus and you put them in a steam bath, or a in a shower bath, excuse me, you wash them off with hot water, you take their clothing away, you steam the clothing. These people are completely nuts, they're hallucinating all the time, they have absolutely no ability to perceive reality. Later, they're asked to provide any sort of hearsay, whether it's their own, something they've heard, anything at all that would support any kind of accusation in an atmosphere of emotional hysteria, and in some of the older Polish books, published just after the war, "Dokumenti e Materiali", for example, there are gassings with "ether", there are gassings with "compressed air", and this is so ridiculous that there's even a question mark in the text: "compressed air", question mark, inserted by the editor. Yet all this hearsay, all this surmise and conjecture, all these hallucinations are accepted as fact, when it suits us, when it suits the Holy-coast pedlars.
EZ: Why do you think it has come to dominate Allied propaganda so much more after the war than it did even during the war? The New York Times, for example, in 1944, made the gas chamber allegation into the dominant theme of Allied propaganda in about 1944.
CP: 40 or 50 years afterwards it's worse than ever. I think there are a number of reasons for this, there are all sorts of political reasons and there are psychological reasons as well. It is my conviction that the Holy-coast started out as a mixture of hearsay and Communist propaganda, and Allied propaganda, and that since the war, the Communist propaganda has somewhat diminished. It has been taken over by the Jews, it is virtually their sole property, whether or not they invented it or not in the first place is, I think, a difficult question; many people find this kind of insane Holy-coast legend to be a psychological and emotional necessity. Because if they admit that it's all wrong and they made a mistake, what was there to justify the war? They've got to justify the war in the first place, they've got to justify the political changes that took place after the war, they have to justify their own actions, after all, you're not going to tell somebody who's lost 2 or 3 sons fighting in the Pacific, that the whole war was just a silly stunt, and didn't have to happen, and that they were fools; they're not going to believe that. And they're going to believe it even less about Europe.
EZ: So you mean it's a very useful tool to keep this thing up even today?
CP: It is the prop upon which the entire post-war world rests. It's the only justification for the Second World War, it's the only justification for Potsdam, Yalta, the atomic bombings, Dresden. Nobody wants to be told that 40 or 50 fifty million people got killed, because the Poles didn't want to accept port facilities in Danzig and have a plebiscite in the Corridor. It's too impossible, it seems too ridiculous. They don't want to think, well, we were suckers when we went out and got our arms and legs blown off so that the Communists could become the dominant power in Europe, so they could be given the atomic bomb by a load of Russian Jews working for the Americans, so they could be given 80 billion dollars in so-called loans, 40 years in which to develop their delivery systems...
EZ: Are you saying here that we are looking at a cold, calculated plan to befuddle and confuse an entire planet, or that it's something that developed and now it's gotten out of hand, and everybody's using it for their own ends?
CP: I think it's probably a mixture of both things simultaneously.
EZ: I think that your father, while he was mayor of a small town in California, during wartime, had a document appear over his name which I think bears repeating for all those who believe all the stories in the world -- I just wondered if you could let the people hear it because I found it a kind of motherhood and apple pie argument, but I think it's a very good and useful pointer for people in today's age, when the war of lies rages all over the place...
CP: I will start with the fourth paragraph, which says, "Keep the moral standards of the nation high, it's sabotage on the home front to wangle something for ourselves on the side. Dishonesty and indulgence in us saps the nation's fountain of strength. A decent world tomorrow depends on how much each of us lives today".
And I would like to ask: is this a decent world? Is this a decent world today? Do you think so?
Now I will proceed from the top of the document to the end of the second paragraph: "The Secret Weapon that will Win the War"
[It seems obvious to me that my father did not write this. This is toothpaste talk. -C.P.]
"Morale: Congress can't vote it, dollars won't buy it, it's our job to build it. Put unity into your community. Unity starts with you. To win this war, stop private wars at home, on the job, with neighbours. Honest apology ends friction. Starts team work. If we all pull together, we'll all pull through. Be a rumour-stopper. Rumours help the enemy. Trace the facts. Face the facts. Don't exaggerate. Make your community gossip-proof, smear-proof, panic-proof, fear-proof. Every patriot shoots a rumour dead on sight."
EZ: Now although with today's attitudes, this might sound a little corny, but I personally think it is very good advice, especially the rumour-stopping. Because what is the Holocaust but a rumour that has gotten out of hand? And if all of us applied the very simple admonition that your father put out in the newspaper during the war, to be rumour-stopper, pointing out that rumours help the enemy, each person should trace the facts and face the facts, and not to exaggerate, and in that case the community would be a much better place, and wouldn't it be a much better place today if we were to shoot those rumours about the Second World War dead?
CP: "Every patriot shoots a rumour dead on sight."
EZ: I think we all ought to be patriots. And I thank you very much for sharing this with us, and I personally think that your father put a little weapon into our hands here, never realizing how useful this would be 50 years later.
CP: It is a good principle, yes.
EZ: I thank you very much.
--
Additional comments, 10 February 2017
The following should be noted in clarification:
a) The reason that cyanide gas can penetrate nearly any material, including walls, is because the molecules are very small.
b) The reason for absorbing the HCN into a carrier base was to slow the evaporation rate and render it less dangerous to human beings.
I question the wisdom of slowing the evaporation rate for that specific purpose and then using that same product to murder millions of people.
c) HCN is a colourless liquid which evaporates as a poison gas. The gas is "resorptive", which means that it is ingested at one rate and excreted at another rate. Its toxicity is the difference between the two rates.
d) Since the gas is "resporptive", this means that the concentration in the air must be many times higher than with an "absorptive" gas, which means that 100% of it is ingested, and remains in the body.
Human beings are usually thought of as breathing 8 litres of air per minute. Thus, to kill a man in 2 minutes with an absorptive gas requires only a much lower concentration in the air, theoretically as little as 1/8th or 1/16th as much.
For example, with phosgene, a man who does not notice that he has been gassed may die suddenly of heart failure up to 48 hours later. This is because the poison remains in the body.
e) In my view, the sensible way to "gas" people would be to use an oxygen blocker, a neutral gas, like nitrogen, argon, or several others.
f) The Germans had special hangars for the fumigation of railway carriages with Zyklon B, equipped with highly efficient heating, ventilation and air extraction systems. In this sense, Fritz Berg is undoubtedly correct. I don't think it would have worked; in this, Prof. Faurisson is undoubtedly correct.
So why didn't the Germans use their special fumigation hangars to gas the Jews? Well, either they knew it wouldn't work, or it never occurred to them to gas anybody.
g) The effect of cyanide gas on 200 people in a railway car would be similar to the effect of water vapour on a woodpile. It is obvious that the vapour will be absorbed by the logs; but will not evaporate from the logs in the middle of the pile until the logs are removed from the top of the pile. The logs at the bottom of the pile will continue to be damp underneath until the bottom log is turned over or lifted. Then it will start to evaporate from the ground and the bottom of the log.
h) HCN vapour precipitates as a liquid which is absorbed through the skin. If you walk into a damp house and wipe a windowsill -- "hmmm, dusty in here" -- you will absorb some tiny quantity of water vapour through the skin on the end of your finger. Of course, water vapour won't kill you. But HCN might, in fact, probably will, sooner or later.
i) In safety procedures and industry generally, you don't take chances. For example, if you work in a railroad yard, you are not allowed to step on a rail. Did you know that? You can step on rails all your life and maybe nothing will happen.
But if you have a quarter of a million miles of railroad and a quarter of a million railroad workers, someday, somewhere, somebody is going to have an accident.
Specifically, he'll probably step on the rail, slip on some ice or grease or something, fall and hit his head on the other rail, and be knocked unconscious with his feet on top of the first rail; then somebody "humps" a boxcar to make up a new train, and cuts his feet off! So, you don't step on rails.
--
Almost forgot:
j) HCN is a "protoplasmic poison", directly lethal to all tissue, both animal and vegetable.
k) The advantage to HCN as a fumigant is that it is the only poison which is equally effective against all life forms: adult animals, insects, eggs and larvae.
l) The purpose of the "irritant" ["Reizstoff" or "Warnstoff"] was obviously to render the gas less dangerous to human beings. A wide variety of irritants and lachrymators were used as irritants, but always left a residue, taste or odour. The irritant was removed during the war to produce a more versatile product, suitable for foodstuffs or tobacco, etc.
The Jews claim that removal of the irritant is proof of intent to commit murder. There is no proof of that.
Why don't they prove something once in a while?
--
See also:
The Chemistry of the Hoaxoco$t.
R.J. Copeland on the Chemistry of the Hoaxoco$t (with Comment by Germar Rudolf) under "Letters"
On the Chemistry of the Holocaust (from an Australian)
The Incredible Argon Hoaxoco$t (hey, something that would actually work for a change) -- from a professional welder
Recommended reading:
Der Gaskampf und die chemische Kampfstoffe, Julius Mayer, Leipzig, 1922.
1938 Enciclopedia Italiana, Gas Asfissianti.
1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Poison Gas Warfare
Various other articles in 1911 and 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica
Other miscellaneous sources
Please note the misprint in top line, page 362 of Made in Russia: The Holocaust:
Erratum: Perchlorformicacidmethyleseter = error for Perchlorformicacidmethylester
I stress this because "eseter" looks like a real word, but isn't. This might throw some people off.
-C.P. 10 February 2017.
