For decades the late Professor Robert Faurisson was relentlessly pursued in the French courts for his “criminal writings”, particularly after July 1990 when a special law was enacted to ban outright the disputing of claims that, during the Second World War, Germany had perpetrated a “Holocaust” of the Jews of Europe, notably by means of mass execution gas chambers. The decision of his latest trial was awaited in the week following his death on October 21, 2018.

This interview is a unique publication: along with the exchanges that followed in the months afterwards on the pages of Storia Illustrata, it is the one and only exposure in the mainstream press – that popular magazine belonged to the leading Italian publisher Mondadori – that Faurisson ever managed to obtain after a wall of silence was imposed in France following his two brief articles on “the problem of the gas chambers”, carried by the daily Le Monde in December 1978 and January 1979.

The limitations of the interview format account for the large volume of information contained in the footnotes, written after the interview’s appearance in August 1979, where Faurisson seeks to develop a number of points not within the scope of the questions posed. The whole perhaps amounts to what he, already a pariah in his own country at the time, would have put in an article for a widely distributed review to make the general revisionist case as it stood then – an era before the two Ernst Zündel trials in Toronto and the Leuchter and Rudolf reports.