Sonderführer Thies Christophersen

In a previous article I mentioned how I had not heard of Sonderführer Thies Christophersen. To which I received the ‘you never heard of that guy?’ bit from my husband. After which I immediately corrected my ignorance.

A recent comment responding to my article on Oskar Gröning prompted me to invoke the case of Christophersen. The argument ‘Joe Mama’ made about the Holocaust denial not being illegal until the 1980’s falls flat when you consider that people like Christophersen were punished for their dissenting views before the law was enacted. After addressing Joe’s comment I decided that today was as good of time as any to write a mini bio on Christophersen.

Born in 1918, Christophersen worked as a farmer in Schleswig, which is in northern Germany. During the war he was stationed in Raisko, a satellite of Auschwitz, from January to December 1944. There he supervised around 300 workers. The workers were of various nationalities and many of them were Jewish. He was able to freely move about the Auschwitz/Birkenau camp when he was in his uniform. He visited Birkenau about twenty times.

In 1973 he released his memoirs, The Auschwitz Lie. About this Mark Weber in his obituary to Christophersen says, “As one of the first important works squarely to confront the Auschwitz extermination legend, Christophersen’s first-hand account was a major factor in the growth and development of Holocaust revisionism.” The following is a passage from The Auschwitz Lie where Christophersen avers that there was no mass murder of Jewish people at the so-called death camp.

The book was banned in Germany, but that didn’t stop it from reaching an international audience.

In 1988 Christopherson testified on behalf of Ernst Zundel. He was able to answer pointed questions from the prosecuting attorney. A record of the trial was compiled by Barbara Kulaszka in the book, Did Six Million really die – Report of the Evidence in the Canadian – False News Trial of Ernst Zuendel. You can read a recounting of Christophersen’s testimony on pages 378-385. The following is how Christophersen answered a pointed question:

Like most prominent revisionists Christopherson was the victim of persecution. He was forced to flee his homeland of Germany and had temporary refuge in Denmark, Belgium and Switzerland. In Denmark hundreds of “anti-fascist” thugs attacked his modest home in the small town of Kollund, pelting it with stones and defacing it with spray paint while police stood by. His book warehouse was also severely damaged. Using corrosive acid they ravaged his car and expensive copy equipment. He suffered through months of such abuse and in 1995 he left Denmark. His associates were not safe either as the German printer of his Bauernschaft magazine was fined 50,000 marks.

During his final months German officials continued to persecute this harmless old man. His German bank account was cancelled. In 1996 a German court rejected his application to return for a brief visit to attend the burial of a son who had died in a car crash. Because he had no permanent place of residence German authorities cancelled his state medical insurance coverage and stopped payment of his modest state retirement pension which he had paid into for 45 years. He also lost his military service pension.

In 1997 Christophersen was arrested for the last time. A German judge declared him too ill to be jailed, and he was released to a son’s custody. Perhaps this this was too much for Christophersen, who had been fighting cancer for years, as he passed away a few days later.

As I said to ‘Joe Mama’ in my response to his comment, there is no incentive to go against the official Holocaust narrative except for the truth. In fact, the incentive is to toe the line or else you’ll be punished. Fortunately for Christophersen and people like him the truth is incentive enough to defy those that abuse authority to keep it hidden.