The photograph of the crematorium site undressing scene in Auschwitz-Birkenau

A snapshot of a wooden area from Auschwitz (ASM neg. 282, close up from Swiebocka, Auschwitz: A history in photographs): Four naked women are walking to the left. Several other, unidentifiable persons and benches with clothes can be seen in the blurry background as well as two dressed male persons. The scene resembles the undressing of women. Without further context, it might show the bathing of people.

To say one thing straight away, the photograph was taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau. More precisely, the scene is taken place at the front yard of crematorium 5. Its eastern chimney is visible in the bottom right corner as observed by Auschwitz researcher Jean-Claude Pressac (Pressac, Technique, p. 424)

"Alvarez" and Marais lie about the judgment LG München I vom 14.07.1972, 114 Ks 4/70

The judgment mentioned in this blog’s title, which I quoted from in the blog Further information about what death in a gas van could be like, is commented on pp. 231-32 of a "Holocaust Handbook" with the title The Gas Vans. A Critical Investigation, which is authored by one "Santiago Alvarez" (presumably a(nother) pseudonym of our old acquaintance Thomas Kues), "with major contributions by Pierre Marais". The authors are hereinafter referred to as "A(lvarez)&M(arais)".
  

Further information about what death in a gas van could be like

In the blog Friedrich Paul Berg yelled for "PHOTOS photos of gassing victims"..., I posted a translation of an excerpt from the Munich Court of Assizes' judgment against members of Einsatzkommando 10a dated 14 July 1972, which describes in harrowing detail the murder in a gas van of handicapped children from an asylum at Jeissk (Eysk), a town by the Sea of Azov 247 km away from Krasnodar, which took place on 9 and 10 October 1942.
  

42,500 Camps and Ghettos

While the huge research effort led by USHMM researchers Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean deserves much respect, the same does not apply to the way their finds are being announced, especially in some of the English language press.
  

Charles Krafft

Now that his denier status is common knowledge, we can talk about Krafft without being accused of trying to 'out' the deluded Seattle artist. Today I will limit myself to the observations that Krafft has been a CODOH member since 2003, has a joke entity called The Society for a Five Minute Moratorium on Holocaust Hubub (see his post on this page), and has recently been collaborating with some despicable Nazi creatures, most notably here with Carolyn Yeager, whose most recent efforts include eulogies to Streicher and shows advocating Sandy Hook denial. His Youtube account, under the old RODOH pseudonym whodareswings, also has some dubious antisemitic ravings. I wouldn't want to ban Charles or his art but I would hope now that no sane person will wish to buy it, knowing that the man's Nazi fetish is genuine and steeped in hostility towards Jews.

Audrini Massacre

In early January 1942, a town containing orthodox Christians was burned to the ground in Audrini, Latvia, and its occupants were shot, including women and children. The responsible Nazi collaborator, Boleslavs Maikovskis, lost an appeal against denaturalisation in the US in 1985, in a case recorded here. He eventually fled to Germany and died in 1996 without serving time for his crimes. However, as the NYT summarizes, Maikovskis acknowledged that the killings took place:

Kalymon Case

The deportation proceedings against John Kalymon, a Ukrainian police guard in L'viv, which have been in progress for several years, produced a legal judgement that can be read here. The crucial finding is that there are documents in which Kalymon accounted for his use of ammunition by stating that he shot Jews. I quote these below to indicate the brutality of the police's regular activities, from which readers can deduce their own conclusions:

 A report dated August 14, 1942, indicated that “Iv Kalymun recorded that he fired four shots while on duty,” wounding one Jew and killing another. Further, the chief of the commissariat filed a summary report on the same date indicating that policemen “delivered 2,128 Jews to a central assembly point.” The report stated that twelve Jews were “killed while escaping,” seven Jews were wounded, and that “Ivan Kalymun” expended four rounds of ammunition. Additionally, on August 20, 1942, “Kalymun” fired two rounds of ammunition used during operations where 525 Jews were delivered to an assembly point; fourteen Jews were shot and killed and six were wounded. The following day, “Ivan Kalymun” shot two rounds of ammunition in an operation where policemen rounded up and delivered an additional 805 Jews. In June 1943, Kalymon’s commissariat participated “in the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto” where Jews were shot or sent to forced labor camps. From November 19 through 23, 1943, all UAP members in L’viv, including those in Kalymon’s commissariat, participated in massive search operations to locate and to turn over any remaining Jews in the ghetto to German authorities.

Radio debate "re-match"

Not that I think it’s very important, but last Friday there was a "re-match", requested by Friedrich Paul Berg, of the debate on Deanna Spingola’s radio show on 22 June 2012 (mentioned in the blogs The usual "Revisionist" victory dancing ... and Friedrich Berg's follow-up questions).

The record of the "re-match" is available here. Not being inclined – unlike Mr. Berg is – to tell our readers what the outcome of the debate was and who presented the better arguments and evidence, I just encourage our readers to listen to the record and draw their own conclusions.

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying Friedrich Paul Berg’s frantic post hoc attempts to score points on several threads of the RODOH forum (The LiIES of Rudolf Hoess--Commandant of Auschwitz, D-E-B-A-T-E, Walter LaGrand--Gassed to Death in 1999 in 18 minutes!).

The Kamenets-Podolsky Massacre

Photographs of mass executions by Nazi mobile killing squads, shown by the poster "Northman" on the RODOH thread The einsatzgruppen reports, real or propaganda? (specifically here and here), led to an intense discussion with apostles of the "Revisionist" faith. One of the "Revisionist" participants, noted for both his verbosity and the repetitiveness of his feeble arguments, was my old acquaintance "k0nsl", who on another RODOH thread vehemently denied being the person he had been identified as by EXPO.

[Caution: links lead to graphic images.]
The (main) bones of "k0nsl"’s contention were a photo of a mass grave in the Bikernieki forest near Riga, shown in the blog Photos from the German East, and one of the three photos in the Yad Vashem photo archive linked to below, which are also linked to in the blog June 22, 1941:

Kamenets Podolskiy, Ukraine, Bodies, August 1941.
Kamenets Podolsk, Ukraine, Bodies, August 1941
Kamenets Podolski, Ukraine, A pile of corpses
 

Film of Exhumed Bodies at Majdanek

Here is a Youtube version of the film made by the Polish army at Majdanek on July 25, 1944, directed by Aleksander Ford. Exhumation of a mass grave is shown from 12:00 minutes into the film. The sequence of shots corresponds to the version summarized in the Spielberg archive here.

Our Demolition of MGK: One Year On

By HC Guest Blogger

In December 2011, this blog published a lengthy critique of three books authored by the sole remaining semi-serious researchers on the Holocaust denial scene, Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf and Thomas Kues. The project evolved from a failed attempt in July 2009 to organise a formal debate on the Aktion Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka at the old RODOH forum.^[1] As we noted at the time, and observed in the critique, the denier scene had become more and more obsessed with Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka this side of the millennium, and so the Reinhard camps seemed to be a suitable subject for a proper debate along the lines of the RODOH 'Scholars’ Debate' on Auschwitz in 2004.^[2]. The failure of ‘revisionists’ to muster a debate team wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the reluctance that deniers have to ever allow themselves to be pinned down and actually defend an argument properly. So we decided instead to scrutinise the arguments of what we thought were the organ-grinders, instead of cleaning up the poo flung by monkeys on the internet. 

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka

Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard

A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues

A Holocaust Controversies White Paper, First Edition, December 2011

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com

© 2011 Jonathan Harrison, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jason Myers, Sergey Romanov, Nicholas Terry

---

NOTE: the definitive version of this Critique is in the PDF format. It can be downloaded from the following sources:

• Google Docs
• Rapidshare
• Archive.org

The blog version should be considered as an earlier version.

---

"Pregnant Women will be Put to Death": Policies on Childbirth

I am grateful to Kent Ford for transcribing ghetto diaries that show the policy of the Nazis towards pregnancy. The following text is largely in his own words and was originally posted in a RODOH thread that disappeared when the forum closed.

In Kovno ghetto, on 24 July 1942, around the time of Great Deportation from Warsaw, Avraham Tory noted the following: 

The Gestapo issued an order: pregnancy in the Ghetto is forbidden. Every pregnancy must be terminated. An eighth- or ninth-month pregnancy may be completed. From September on, giving birth is strictly forbidden. Pregnant women will be put to death.

Photographic Proof of Kerch Mass Graves, December 31st, 1941

On December 31st, 1941, Soviet troops temporarily liberated Kerch and excavated mass graves filled with Jewish victims of the Nazis. These were photographed by photo-journalists who included Dmitrii Baltermants, whose photos were published in Ogonyok on March 2nd, 1942. David Shneer gives an account of the photographs here and provenance is also discussed in this article and also here. Yad Vashem has photos here. Finally, the excavation was witnessed by Jewish-Russian poet Ilya Selvinsky, who recorded it in his diary and in the poem "I Saw It!", which was published in a Soviet newspaper on January 23rd, 1942; extracts from both sources are translated and discussed by Maxim D. Shrayer here. These sources deserve wider exposure and attention.

NOTE: Jason Myers kindly reminds me that the commander recorded the massacre thus: "Die Umsiedlung der Juden, etwa 2500 an der Zahl, wurde am 1., 2. and 3. Dezember vollzogen. Mit nachtraeglichen Exekutierungen ist zu rechnen, da ein Teil der judischen Bevoelkerung fluechtete, sich versteckt haelt und erst aufgegriffen werden muss." [Dok. 126 in this collection]. Umsiedlung replaced a crossed-out word, which may be Liquidierung or Exekutierung; see footnotes 5 and 6 in the link.

The Jäger Report (8)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (7)

The eighth and last blog of this series addresses Karl Jäger's involvement in the killings committed by Einsatzkommando 3 in 1941, his further wartime career and his postwar life until his arrest, interrogation and suicide in 1959. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").

19 November 1942

The book A Writer at War:A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945, edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, features some interesting pieces of Soviet journalist Vassili Grossman's writing as a war correspondent with the Soviet Army. One of the most impressive of these is Grossman's article about Treblinka extermination camp, which appeared in November 1944 in the magazine Znamya under the title "The Hell Called Treblinka".

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (8)

The seventh blog of this series addresses the events that led to a temporary suspension of the extermination of Lithuania’s Jews after the massacres organized by Einsatzkommando 3 in 1941, and the fate of this Jewish community’s remainders. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (8)

The present blog is about the massacre by Einsatzkommando 3 of Jews deported to Kaunas (Kowno) in November 1941. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").

Index of published evidence on mass extermination in Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau

The following is a list of evidence on large scale killings in the Auschwitz camp complex, in particular - but not limited to - homicidal gassing. The aim is to highlight the range, diversification and scale of the published evidence on mass extermination in Auschwitz.

Testimonies of prisoners (hearsay) on mass extermination in Auschwitz

The following compilation belongs to the blog post Index of published evidence on mass extermination in Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was necessarily "outsourced" as the blog software could not handle the large amount of text anymore. 

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (8)

The present blog contains accounts of massacres organized by Einsatzkommando 3 in the Kaunas (Kowno) ghetto and the killing of mentally handicapped people by this unit. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").

Reconstructing the "Scholars' Debate" about Auschwitz

In 2004 the now extinct original RODOH forum hosted a debate, known as the "Scholar' Debate", between the "Negationist Team", led nominally by the late Dr. Robert Countess and effectively by Scott Smith, and the "Veritas Team", led by Stephen Mock and including Sergey Romanov and myself.

The topic of the debate was the following:

"Resolved, at Auschwitz/Birkenau between 1941 and 1944, a) people were killed in homicidal gas chambers employing Zyklon B, and b) this killing claimed hundreds of thousands of victims."

The submissions of this debate are being reconstructed in the section "Scholars Debate" (2004 + under re-construction) of the new RODOH forum.

The opening statement of the "Veritas Team" has already been posted.

We have another immortal statement ...

... from "Revisionist" guru Friedrich Paul Berg, (a writer of "serious, dedicated works", according to "Thomas Dalton, Ph.D.).

Infuriated about my having rained on his parade in my post of Sat Sep 29, 2012 11:32 am, Berg produced the following pearl (screenshot):

For depraved imbeciles like Muehlenkrap as well as any new Arthur Harris's who might be lurking out there, I suggest they all be tied to stakes and drenched with gasoline with flaming torches nearby. That will be a learning experience for such "heroes." And if seeing the torches doesn't educate them, let them all burn--they earned it.

Please keep on showing what you're all about, Fredo. It's very much appreciated.

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (8)

The present blog addresses mass killings by Einsatzkommando 3 at Vilna (Vilnius) and Kaunas and isolated instances of Jewish resistance. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").

Auschwitz labour force reports as evidence of sinister activity at the crematoria

A number of fragmentary records from the year 1944 are known on the number of prisoner deployed at the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The known (published) records cover crematoria prisoner’s strength for days in January, February, April, May, July, August and October 1944. Some reports are available online at the Holocaust History Project website.

Friedrich Paul Berg yelled for "PHOTOS photos of gassing victims"...

.... and I showed him some.

The Jäger Report (3)

The Jäger Report (1)

The Jäger Report (2)

The Jäger Report (4)

The Jäger Report (5)

The Jäger Report (6)

The Jäger Report (7)

The Jäger Report (8)

The present blog is about the extermination of the Jewish population in the Lithuanian countryside in 1941. Like in the previous blogs of this series, the information presented in this blog is mostly based on German historian Wolfram Wette’s biography of Karl Jäger (Wolfram Wette, Karl Jäger. Mörder der litauischen Juden, S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, hereinafter "Wette, Jäger").

Meanwhile, on "Inconvenient History" ...

... our infuriated friends Mattogno, Graf and Kues announce another delay in their response to the HC critique.

I especially liked the part about the "comrade" who can't manage the translation of Mattogno's text from Italian to English. :-)

Thomas Kues is said to be "reviewing important material about new archeological investigations at Sobibór". These must be the investigations directed by Yoram Haimi, which have been reported in the press over the past days (see articles on the CBS News, Daily Mail and Haaretz websites, among others).

"Dalton" (again) shows what makes him tick

"White Nationalism", from that I have seen of it, is the domain of somewhat-less-than-recommendable individuals like Greg Gerdes – losers who seek to console themselves by taking pride in their "White" ethnic background and attacking all perceived threats to supposed "White" interests. The largest such threat is obviously held to emanate from Jews, who for some reason are not considered to be "White". Hence "White Nationalists" tend to be rabid, paranoid anti-Semites.

The Auschwitz open air incineration photographs as evidence for mass extermination

The Auschwitz open air cremation photographs (both the Sonderkommando ground photos as well as the aerial photographs) are examined if they provide evidence for mass extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau - without resorting to testimonial evidence. The non-incriminating Revisionist interpretation of the photographs is discussed and checked against the available evidence.