July 3, 1986
France
stops doctorate on Nazi gas
chambers
From Diana Geddes
Paris
M Henri Rocques, who caused a
public. outcry with the submission of
his doctoral thesis questioning the
existence of the Nazi gas extermination
chambers, is to be stripped of his
doctorate. 
The
professor who recommended the award
will be suspended from his post.
M Alain Devaquet, Minister
for Research and Higher Education, said
yesterday that he had instructed the
principal of the University of Nantes,
from which M Rocques' doctorate was
obtained, to take those measures in the
light of a government inquiry into the
affair revealing several
"irregularities" including a forged
signature.
M Jean Discamps, head of the
Nantes Education Service, who carried
out the inquiry, said that M Rocques, a
retired agricultural engineer and a
former member of an extreme-right
anti-Semite group, had originally been
enrolled as a doctoral student at the
University of Paris IV, But he had been
forced to look for another university
after his head of studies at Paris IV
had refused to continue to supervise
his thesis.
M Discamps' report shows that M
Jean-Claude Rivière, of
the French Literature department of
Nantes University, had agreed to take
on M Rocques in March 1985, despite the
fact that the deadline for student
enrolments had passed three months
earlier, and despite the fact that M
Rocques did not have the necessary
academic qualifications to apply for a
doctorate at Nantes.
M Rocques, aged 65, was
secretary-general from I 955 to 1958 of
an extreme-right group, the Phalange
Françoise, which openly
expressed anti-Semitic and racist
views. It was outlawed by the
Government in 1958. He is close to
revisionist historians who are seeking
to reinstate the Nazi movement.
David
Irving explains:
Henri
Rocques, who was what would now be
called a "mature" student, spent many
years researching the famous 1945
report written by SS officer Kurt
Gerstein, who was head of the Pest
Control division at Auschwitz.
Gerstein's name figures on the Cyanide
(Zyklon B) procurement papers in the
Nuremberg files. Captured by the
French, he died in captivity -- but not
before penning, not just one report,
but seven reports (as Rocques
found out), each one several shades
more lurid than the last. The seventh
report is the one eagerly used by such
conformist historians as Prof.
Christopher
Browning
and Prof. Robert
Van
Pelt.
See my
hilarious cross-examination of Browning
in the Lipstadt trial, where this
"academic" has to explain why he
surreptitiously omitted the more
monstrous statements by Gerstein when
writing his Expert Witness report for
the defence. [Lipstadt
Trial
Transcripts:
see especially Day
17, February 8,
2000,
at page 163]
Rocques, in
the course of his years of research,
obtained the confidential French police
file on Gerstein. This contained
private letters which he had written in
captivity, which clearly showed that he
was mentally disturbed. Indeed, he is
alleged to have killed himself. Hence
the fury of the largely Jewish
establishment when Nantes university,
quite rightly, awarded Rocques a
doctorate for his well-researched
thesis on the Gerstein Report. I
recently (October 2001) donated my copy
of the two-volume thesis, which Rocques
gave to me, to the Institute
for Historical
Review
in California.
write to David
Irving