1963 – 2002 From “The Vicar” to “Amen,” a Judeo-Franco-German story (how a Holocaust denier helped Gavras make his film)

The idea for this article originated when, on May 18, 2026, I heard a rebroadcast of a 2002 interview of filmmaker Costa-Gavras by Marc-David Calvet on his show “Chants des toiles”, on the occasion of the theatrical release of his film “Amen”.

In this program, Costa-Gavras explains the importance of music in his films, especially for Amen, a film in which he chose not to show explicit images, letting the music engage the viewer to reconstruct the scene himself, based on what he himself had been able to learn about the Holocaust.

In other words, the conditioning is such that now only a few notes of music are needed for the entire unfolding of the Holocaust to play out in people’s minds.

And yet, as we will see with firsthand documents, it was a Holocaust denier who helped Gavras, the diehard Antifa, make his film!

1 – Wikipedia Data

Amen is a film directed by Costa-Gavras in an international Franco-German-Romanian co-production, released in 2002. It is an adaptation of the play The Vicar (Der Stellvertreter) by Rolf Hochhuth, criticizing the inaction of Pope Pius XII during the Second World War, particularly in the face of the persecution of Jews

The play premiered on February 20, 1963 in Berlin. It focuses on the unsuccessful efforts of a young Roman priest and Kurt Gerstein (with the historical figure, with whom Hochhuth takes many liberties).

Several critics have seen in the play as an attempt by Rolf Hochhuth to shift the blame for Nazi crimes from his fellow citizens to others, primarily the Pope, but also the Allied powers who chose to look the other way while the Holocaust unfolded. The hypothesis that the play was conceived by the Soviets to destroy the Pope’s moral standing has also been put forward, supported by evidence from the Vatican Archives.

The film follows the same vein; here is its synopsis:

During World War II, Kurt Gerstein, a German SS officer and chemist supplying Zyklon B to the extermination camps, sought to alert the Vatican to the genocide being perpetrated against the Jews. Ricardo Fontana, a young Jesuit advisor to the apostolic nuncio in Berlin, whose career showed great promise, listened to him. They travel to Rome, Ricardo believing that his father’s high-ranking position in the Vatican’s secular hierarchy would help convince Pius XII of the need for an unequivocal condemnation of Nazi crimes against the Jews. However, their efforts to stop the Holocaust find no support from foreign or religious authorities.

2 – Revisionist Objections

Accusing Pope Pius XII of passivity in the face of Nazism is absurd since, as Cardinal Pacceli (before becoming Pope Pius XII), he was one of the authors of the Encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, which in its paragraph 5 goes as far as to speak of a war of extermination (Vernichtungskampf).

On March 14, 1937, the Vatican had an encyclical by Pope Pius XI (actually written by Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII) read from the pulpit in all German churches, in German and not in Latin as was the custom. The Reich’s reaction in its note of April 12, 1937, for those who might not have understood, is very clear:

This is a truly clandestine and subversive action which aims to incite, or at least to push into passive resistance, German Catholics against the Reich, to undermine the unity of the country, to undermine the authority and legitimacy of the National Socialists, to turn the whole world against Hitler.

Regarding Kurt Gerstein, in 1985, the French revisionist Henri Roques wrote a doctoral thesis that dismantled the absurdities of Kurt Gerstein’s testimony. The thesis was so compelling that it was politically overturned the following year, in 1986, following the direct and public intervention of Jacques Chirac, then Prime Minister. The thesis has been translated into English; references can be found on CODOH.

3 – The behind-the-scene revisionist story: how the German play became a French film.

It was a Jew born in Germany on December 25, 1925 in Marburg and who emigrated to France in December 1935 with his family, who served as contact between Rolf Hochhuth and Costa-Gavras.

This Jew, who died in September 2021 at the age of 95, let us call him Isaac, the name he gives himself in his memoirs which he sent to me in March 2018, as being an “authentic document provided that certain surnames and place names are changed”.

In his memoirs, Isaac doesn’t mention Amen or The Vicar, but the name Hochhuth appears in this passage where we can already discern revisionist tendencies. And for good reason: Isaac wasn’t deported to the camps; he was conscripted into the Compulsory Labor Service, he worked in Vienna as a watchmaker, and no one bothered him, except perhaps the Allied bombers.

We were enjoying the warm caress of the sun after a cold bath when we heard a distant rumble that grew louder for perhaps twenty minutes, until it became deafening, while hundreds of white trails appeared in the sky to the west, at a very high altitude. It was a formation of bombers approaching the city of Johann Strauss and Freud. A spectacle just as Apollinaire would have liked to describe it when he composed his poems glorifying war: “God, how beautiful war is!” We were fascinated and couldn’t tear our gaze away from this gigantic hydra that occupied a large part of the sky. The first flying fortresses were approaching the suburbs, and anti-aircraft fire filled the air with its small white clouds.That day we only saw one aircraft go down. We could follow the explosions on the ground and we amused ourselves, yes, we amused ourselves, trying to guess which neighborhoods, which avenues, which monuments were hit. I couldn’t say how many planes participated that day in this act of war against the civilian population, but it wasn’t uncommon for these attacks on German cities to be carried out by several hundred, or even a thousand, aircraft. A truly Dantesque spectacle, described and highlighted in horror by the English historian David Irving and then by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth in Soldiers (Le Seuil).

But by the time he was preparing the film Amen, Isaac had already embraced revisionism. Below, in chronological order, we present three emails in which he gradually reveals the inside story of the Amen/Gavras affair.

Email 1, dated January 8, 2007, original subject “the biter bit”, Sender: Isaac.

Forwarded on January 10th with the subject: “Hochhut excluded from the Basel Book Fair”.

The Basel Book Fair illustrated the absurdity of the anti-revisionists. The German playwright Rolf Hochhut, the most virulent denouncer of Auschwitz in his play “THE DEALER” in 1963, a subject recently revisited by Costa-Gavras in the film “AMEN”, although he has persisted and signed off on his exterminationism for 43 years, could not participate in this fair because he was considered a DENIALIST!

He told the Swiss magazine “WELTWOCHE” that the organizers had made it clear to him that there was no place for him in Basel. He is considered a Holocaust denier because he had spoken favorably of the British revisionist David Irving (he later recanted). He had merely acknowledged Irving’s qualities as a historian until he attacked sacred dogma. It had to be said: Could one imagine Robert Badinter among the ardent defenders of the death penalty?

This is also the case in Germany where a simple smile in the courtroom of the Zündel trial sends the president of the court into a complete rage!

Email 2, dated February 18, 2007, subject: “confidential Gavras”, original sender: Isaac
In this crucial email, Isaac reveals his letter to Costa-Gavras dated May 25, 2006.

Dear Costa-Gavras

I acted as your intermediary and translator two or three years ago in your negotiations with Hochhuth. I enjoyed your film AMEN, as with all your films, primarily for its cinematic quality. You or your wife had hinted that you would invite me to the premiere, but there was only silence after my letter in which I mentioned the scruples that had assailed me when the author of The Vicar had requested my friendly intervention. I accepted without enthusiasm and carried out my request to the best of my ability.

I am writing to you again today because I want to believe that you are a man committed to justice and freedom. Your work bears witness to this. I had previously informed you of the conviction of Gilbert Dubreuil, author of *A Case of Defiance*, hoping that you would have been outraged by this injustice. Today I have learned that Ernst Zündel, a German-Canadian revisionist, has just been sentenced in Mannheim to five years in prison, the maximum sentence, for the same reasons as Gilbert Dubreuil.

Dubreuil’s work was simple, honest, objective, and well-documented, recounting a development somewhat similar to my own. After thirty years of Holocaust denial, including through Hochhuth, I took the time to educate myself, to read revisionist works in detail, and came to the conclusion that a genuine, open debate needed to begin, as the Iranian president dared to do. Ernst Zündel, like Dubreuil and many others, is an honest, upright, and rigorous man who strives only for accuracy, objectivity, and historical truth based on facts and scientific realities. He is not the first victim of this inquisition that stifles freedom of expression, freedom itself, and the most basic human rights. The repression is taking increasingly intolerable forms: economic strangulation, ruined careers, exile, and now prison. And no one dares to defend these courageous people, like Luther and so many others before them, who did not simply humbly say “e pur si muove” but who persist, despite insults, outrages, and brutality, in affirming something that seems true to them…..How can you, dear Costa-Gavras, a paragon of commitment to justice and truth, not engage, cautiously, in this revision of history… which cannot be long in coming, for there are people in the world who take the trouble to inform themselves, to read, to open their eyes to the most formidable mystification perpetuating the legend of the uniqueness of the so-called genocide, of the supposed will to exterminate a people by the Germans? It took me years to evolve and finally face the facts.

No one is safe from the vengeance of those who benefit from the lie, not even you if you dare to make the slightest allusion to the problem. Abbé Pierre was once demonized. Garaudy is still called despicable.

But one can still, in the name of human rights, demand the repeal of the Gayssot law which prohibits the revision of history and makes the Nuremberg judgment an intangible taboo, even if a large number of its claims have since been contradicted.

Dear Costa-Gavras, dear Madam, I no longer know what to say…Act as your conscience tells you….

There are no people more innocent than revisionists who are simply claiming what is the honor of the historian: the right to uncover the lies of history.

Email 3, dated July 7, 2014, subject: Hochhuth, sender: Isaac

This email reveals what was the reaction Gavras took in response to the letter Isaac had sent him. That is to say, none.

The Holocaust Tsunami

On February 20, 1963, in a still-divided Berlin, a pivotal event in contemporary history took place. At the Freie Volksbühne theater, a thousand privileged spectators attended the premiere of a play by a young unknown, “Der Stellvertreter” (The Vicar), which unleashed a tsunami whose waves are shaking us today more than ever. The author, Rolf Hochhuth, had unearthed among the testimonies from the war the account of an SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, describing an attempt at mass killing in a gas chamber, a prelude to the extermination of the Jews, as well as the steps taken by this fervent Protestant to inform the Vatican. He turned it into a drama denouncing the silence of the then Pope, Pius XII, who should have called out to the world against such an abomination. No one can fault the author for having used this text—in good faith—to make Germany feel guilty by stirring public opinion through political theater.

Having never understood why the Pope, who is said to be God’s representative on earth, had never forbidden any Catholic, under pain of excommunication, from bearing arms and participating in a war, I rejoiced to finally see the truth revealed. Was this not the message of Christ? Seeing a pope accused of failing in his papal duties, I rushed to Berlin and, paying little attention to the Jewish problem, wholeheartedly approved of the play’s premise. When it was performed in Paris a few months later at the Théâtre de l’Athénée in a translation by George Semprun, my heart swelled upon hearing the line criminalizing the Holy Father. Violent demonstrations were organized against “The Vicar” by the papologists to have it banned. It was all in vain. It was then that I met Rolf Hochhuth, whose translator I became. Lacking contradictory information, I shared the author’s thesis and the firmly established belief in the extermination of European Jews in gas chambers. And in all good faith. Which just goes to show how “good faith” can be destructive!

Since then, revisionists of all stripes have ruthlessly refuted the lie that had taken hold and gained momentum, thanks in part to Hochhuth. The thesis by researcher Henri Roques, devoted to the implausibilities of Kurt Gerstein’s confessions, definitively destroyed any remaining credibility he might have had. The play became historically obsolete. But the damage was done, and since then, the supposed survivors of this fabricated extermination have relentlessly reinforced the edifice of lies. It has poisoned all nations since the creation of the State of Israel. The teachings of this imagined genocide, now an article of faith, are spreading throughout the world. The more people become aware of the rigor of revisionist researchers and the irrefutable nature of their findings, the more intense the delaying tactics of those who profit from this treachery become.

To heighten our awareness of the dangers that threaten us, the British writer Orwell created a terrifying world. Hochhuth, for his part, created a nightmarish Auschwitz on stage, dramatic to the extreme, much like Perrault brought a legendary ogre to life in his fairy tales. Fortunately, the awakening brought us back to reality. Certainly, Jews, like Poles, Dutch, Norwegians, Lithuanians, GIs, British soldiers… and especially Germans and Russians, perished because of the bloody madness of a war founded on lies! A tragic massacre!

Costa-Gavras made a film based on The Vicar, placing Kurt Gestein at the center of the action. I acted as an intermediary between him and the author for the acquisition of the rights. I was a loyal interpreter and friend, all the while betraying my convictions. I simply asked Dr. Henri Roques to send his book to the director to clear it before he embarked on a risky venture. The film AMEN, alas, adhered to the accepted version. I later delivered my revisionist message to Costa-Gavras, who then ceased all contact. Such is the way of the world.

So, whatever one thinks of the Holocaust and Nuremberg, we hope that the reader will have appreciated this little piece of French revisionist history which we dedicate of course to the memory of Isaac.

And the reader now knows that it was a revisionist who helped convert the play into a film: we see who is open-minded, and who is not.