Debunking David Cole's Auschwitz video

The video is available here.

First, a quick historical intro. The video deals with the gas chamber at Auschwitz I, the so-called main camp.

This small makeshift gas chamber was adapted from a morgue in the crematorium I of the main camp in late 1941. The gassings here were occasional, it's unlikely that more than 10000 people were gassed in this chamber in total, the main killings took place in Birkenau since early 1942, first in two peasant houses whose rooms were converted into makeshift gas chambers; then in the 4 big crematoria completed in the early 1943.

Crematorium I was converted into an air-raid shelter by the Nazis in late 1944 (to repeat, the killings at that time took place in Birkenau and in late 1944 were coming to an end anyway). The main modifications were documented by the Nazis themselves, so we know that the morgue/gas chamber was divided into 4 smaller rooms. After the war the authorities tried to reconstruct the original look of the crematorium but botched the job in several ways. The most important mistake was knocking down one wall too many: as they were removing the recently installed air-raid shelter walls of the small inner rooms, they also removed the wall between the morgue and the former washroom (hence the visible toilet drains, which originally were in the washroom).

Given that it was tampered with by the Communists (though not with a provable ill intent), the reconstructed small gas chamber in the main camp is in its current state not a "proof" of the gassings. However the presence of the HCN residue in the original remaining walls of the gas chamber is highly suggestive and certainly corroborates the witness testimonies.

The video deals with misrepresentations of the gas chamber state by some people (incl. tour guides) in the video, but that is frankly irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust. We have the original documents and other sources and can examine the evidence for ourselves. Misrepresentations by third parties will always be there about any significant historical event, this does not mean they call these events into doubt. Also, nowadays the Auschwitz Museum is explicit about the gas chamber having been reconstructed. Representation and misrepresentation of facts by museums is, of course, a fair and important topic to discuss. But not with the dishonest individuals who would spin such a discussion into a denial of history.

A short debunking of Mark Weber's "Auschwitz: Myths and Facts"

Original here. A short debunking relying mostly on the already published materials follows.

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - Origin and Foundation

Mass Killing Unit of Warthegau

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents:

 Euthanasia 1940/41

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents:

Part I: Origin and Foundation

On 16 July 1941, officials of the Reichsgau Wartheland discussed the "solution of the Jewish question", which was picked up by the head of the SD and Umwandererzentralstelle (migration centre office) Posen Rolf-Heinz Höppner and forwarded to Adolf Eichmann with the request "to have your reactions sometime". Höppner himself considered the proposals "in part fantastic, but in my view...thoroughly feasible". Among mass sterilisation and erection of a huge camp for the Jews of the Warthegau, it was discussed "to finish off those of the Jews who are not employable by means of some quick-working agent" as "this winter there is a danger that not all the Jews can be fed anymore" (Document 15). The feasibility of the secret mass killing of people in the Warthegau had been previously demonstrated by the clearing of the asylums by Sonderkommando Lange with its carbon monoxide gas van (see the previous posting of this series Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents: Euthanasia 1940/41). On 2 September 1941, Höppner urged Eichmann for a policy decision: ^[1]

"It is by the way essential that it is entirely clear from the start what shall happen with those evacuated ethnic groups, which are undesirable for the greater German settlements: if the aim is to permanently assure them a certain life or if they shall be wiped out [ausgemerzt] entirely."

Ernst Jünger's March 1942 Diary Entry on Shootings in Lithuania

On March 30, 1942, a German war hero, Ernst Jünger, wrote in his diary that he had heard about shootings in Lithuania in which the victims had to dig their own graves and lie down in them in layers before being shot. 

Claus Valentiner kehrte aus Berlin zurück. Er erzählte von einem schauerlichen Burschen, früherem Zeichenlehrer, der sich gerühmt hatte, in Litauen und anderen Randgebieten ein Mordkommando geführt zu haben, das zahllose Menschen schlachtete. Man läßt die Opfer, nachdem sie zusammengetrieben sind, zuerst die Massengräber ausheben, dann sich hineinlegen und schießt sie von oben in Schichten tot. Zuvor beraubt man sie des Letzten, der Lumpen, die sie am Leibe tragen, bis auf das Hemd.

Claus Valentiner returned from Berlin. He reported about a horrible fellow, a former art master, who bragged about having commanded a murder detachment in Lithuania and other peripheral areas, which slaughtered countless people. After rounding up the victims they first have them dig mass graves, then lie down inside them, and then they shoot them dead in layers from above. Before they rob them of the last they have, the rags they wear, up to the last shirt.

Germans in Jünger's position were therefore hearing, not just about executions, but also their method.

4 more documents mentioning SK 1005.

I have added 4 British decodes to the article "Once More, With Feeling: Deniers And Aktion 1005, 10 Years Later". Yes, they count as original German wartime documents.

That means that we now have 26 German wartime documents mentioning Sonderkommando 1005, 12 of them published.

Remember how Mattogno and Graf lied about the very designation "1005" being a Soviet invention? That lie has discredited them forever.

Sources on a Gas Van in Belzec Extermination Camp

According to the member of the Belzec staff and later commandant of Treblinka, Kurt Franz, a homicidal gas van existed in Belzec prior the operation of the stationary gas chambers. Lorenz Hackenholt is supposed to have been involved in the construction of the gas van, which Franz described as a converted parcel van. Some corroboration can be found in the testimony of Anna Fuchs - the former wife of the gassing device specialist Erich Fuchs -, who stated that her former husband drove a closed parcel van during his Euthanasia time and wrote her from Belzec that he drove a gas van.

Rebutting the "Twitter denial": the most popular denier memes debunked

Let's face it, maybe a few thousand people have read more than a couple of Mattogno's books. In contrast, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, see the stupid "Red Cross stats" and "Auschwitz plaque" memes online. "Twitter denial" (this includes Facebook and other social networks, of course), as primitive as it is, is the main form of denial today. So it may be useful to compile a list of rebuttals to the most common memes. One such meme repository I found in one neo-Nazi twitter account, and the tweets from the account are being responded to here. With time this post may be updated with further meme rebuttals, as necessary.

If you want to translate this text into another language, you're hereby given permission to do so as long as you link this this original posting and give credit where credit is due.

Warning: this post is very image-heavy.

If you want to copy a link to a particular argument to post on Twitter or elsewhere, please use the table below. The links are anchored to specific items.

1. Revision of the Auschwitz plaque.
2. Detached Krema I chimney?
3. Leuchter's report.
4. Alleged lies by the British government.
5. The First Holocaust canard.
6. Auschwitz swimming pool, hospital etc.
7. Arbeit macht frei.
8. The World Almanac canard.
9. The Red Cross stats canard.
10. Gas chambers not mentioned in the memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower, de Gaulle?
11. Elie Wiesel did not mention gas chambers?
12. Elie Wiesel an impostor?
13. Auschwitz decodes.
14. Survivors did not see or hear about gas chambers?
15. Anne Frank diary.
16. Red Cross inspected the death camps?
17. Rassinier denied Auschwitz gas chambers. Or was that Thies Christophersen?
18. The Larson canard.
19. Fake, unreliable or mistaken witnesses.
20. Scratched gas chamber walls?
21. Dachau gas chamber.
22. Survivor Lieberman and the Auschwitz ovens.
23. More Wiesel stuff.
24. The Lachout document.
25. Fake Holocaust photos?
26. Science debunks Holocaust?
27. Flimsy gas chamber door with a window?
28. No Britannica mention of gas chambers?
29. Dr. Listojewski?
30. Small children and people unfit for work in Auschwitz?
31. Jews lie about the Holocaust?
32. Predetermined death toll?
33. Hilberg and famous witnesses shown to be liars, impostors during the Zündel trial?
34. Schindler's list a tale of fiction?
35. Bruno Baum admitted that false propaganda was created in Auschwitz?
36. Changing camp death tolls?

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents: Euthanasia 1940/41

The Mass Killing Unit of Warthegau

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents:

 Euthanasia 1940/41

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents

Part I: Origin and Foundation

Herbert Lange (source)

Herbert Lange, born 29 September 1909 in Menzlin in the Province of Pomerania, worked as criminal investigator at the Gestapo in Aachen before the war and took part in the Polish Campaign as member of Einsatzgruppe VI, which settled as Security Police headquarters in Poznan ^[1] (click or hover over footnotes to see references). For a short period of time until 16 October 1939, he was commandant of the Übergangslager (transition camp) Fort VII in Poznan ^[2]. Lange became the leader of a special detail (Sonderkommando) founded by and named after him, which specialized in the killing of mentally ill people with poison gas. In late 1941, he moved on to establish Chelmno (Kulmhof) extermination camp to wipe out the Jews of the Warthegau as well. He was replaced in Spring 1942 as commandant of the extermination camp by Hans Bothmann and employed as investigator in the RSHA. He supposedly died during the battle of Berlin at the end of the war.

Fort VII

Fort VII in Poznan; ref. 2, p. 13

The first Nazi gassings of people took place in Fort VII in Poznan in late 1939. Some experiments with the two most promising killing agents hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide may have been tried in casemates of the camp as early as early October 1939. What seems like an experimental gassing with hydrogen cyanide soaked pellets (Degesch's "Zyklon") was mentioned en passant by the RSHA driver Wilhelm F. ^[3] :

"Right after the Polish Campaign I was sent with a group of officers to a town in Poland, I do not remember its name. There was a red haired Untersturmführer, who was called Becker as I now recall. This Becker made experiments with poison gas. A number of people were locked in a casemate and gas was introduced into the casemate through venting pipes. I remember exactly how Becker dropped something into the pipes."

"I have seen that Becker fetched a box with cans. He threw them [into the air shafts]."

From November 1939, mentally ill people were systematically killed with carbon monoxide gas in Fort VII ^[4]. Under the command of Lange the inmates of the asylums near Poznan were driven to the camp, locked in casemates and suffocated with carbon monoxide from pressurized steel bottles. The corpses were buried in mass graves in a forest near Oborniki, 30 km North of Poznan. The handling of the corpses was done by Polish prisoners of Fort VII assigned to Sonderkommando Lange, among those Henryk Mania and Henryk Maliczak, who testified on the killings after the war.

Confirmed: a Holocaust denier has influenced Trump and his policy.

As we have reported recently, there has been a well-founded suspicion that Chuck C. Johnson, a Holocaust denier, has been collaborating with the Trump administration.

Now there is more information. Politico reports  (via Charles Johnson, not to be confused with the deplorable C(h)uck):

The consequences can be tremendous, according to a half-dozen White House officials and others with direct interactions with the president. A news story tucked into Trump’s hands at the right moment can torpedo an appointment or redirect the president’s entire agenda. Current and former Trump officials say Trump can react volcanically to negative press clips, especially those with damaging leaks, becoming engrossed in finding out where they originated.
That is what happened in late February when someone mischievously gave the president a printed copy of an article from GotNews‌.com, the website of internet provocateur Charles C. Johnson, which accused deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh of being “the source behind a bunch of leaks” in the White House.

To remind you, Chuck C. Johnson is a sociopath who simply invents facts when it suits him. He also denies the Holocaust (archived version):

I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic. I think the Allied bombing of Germany was a ware crime. I agree with David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real. I read the German War (highly recommend), Bloodlands, Mein Kampf, and all of David Irving. I’m more or less of the view that the war was an outgrowth of the efforts of communism to spread itself throughout the world. I also believe that the fears of German extermination were not misplaced, especially in light of the Ukrainian famine. But I support Israel as a Jewish state and Zionism as a concept. I’m pro-ethno state, generally. I understand why and how Hitler rose to power but think too much of our focus on World War II is spent trying to understand Hitler and not enough is spent trying to understand Weimar. Mecius Moldbug, aka Curtis Yarvin, is right. America is a communist country.

(The "Red Cross numbers" refer to a popular dumb denial meme  with the alleged "Red Cross stats" about the Nazi camps. The stats come from the ITS, not the Red Cross; were not gathered during the war but are based on the incomplete camp documentation; do not refer to camp death tolls but to the numbers of death certificates by the special registry office of the ITS; concern only the registered prisoners (most gassed Jews were not registered); never were claimed to have been complete camp death tolls; IOW Chuckie is full of $@#$).

Why has a metric ton of Holocaust denial articles recently resided on Ron Unz's website?

And by that I mean stuff like this - and there are 17 pages more like that. The links to the index are still live, the links to individual articles no longer work but many are accessible through the Google cache (archived example), and all of them are actually posted from Ron Unz's account.

Is this some kind of a sabotage or hacking attempt? Doesn't seem so, because Unz's other website still has the whole collection of the IHR articles here (archived version).

Jankowski and the Krema I "ventilators".

On 16.04.1945 Stanislaw Jankowski aka Alter Feinsilber testified before the investigative judge Jan Sehn and deputy prosecutor Edward Pechalski about his experiences in the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. Among other things he said this about the morgue of crematorium I in the main camp (Amidst a Nightmare of Crime, 1973, p. 40):

This big hall had no windows, only two vents in the ceiling, electric light and one door leading from the corridor, the other door leading to the ovens.

On 29.09.1980 he testified before a Paris notary as follows:

This room had no windows, but there were ventilators [ventilateurs] in the ceiling.

Carlo Mattogno also quotes Jankowski's 06.09.1985 statement (Auschwitz: Crematorium I, 2016, p. 34):

... in the ceiling, as far as I remember, there were two openings for the introduction of the gas; there were no false showers, I do not remember any ventilators.

Mattogno sums up (p. 35):

It is, moreover, very curious to see that Jankowski did not know anything about "ventilators" in 1945, then miraculously remembered them in 1980, only to forget about them again in 1985!

But did he? Notice how in the first two statements "vents" and "ventilators" follow the claim about there having been no windows. This hints at a possibility that Jankowski meant the same thing by them. Moreover, if he didn't, one would have to conclude - implausibly - that he forgot to mention the Zyklon B introduction openings at all.

Did he use some word to describe the vents that was mistaken by the French notary as "ventilateurs"?

Let's go to the Polish text of the 1945 statement (AGK, NTN 82, p. 13):

Ta duża sala była bez okien posiadała tylko dwa wentyle w suficie...

So the word translated as "vent" was "wentyl". French was not Jankowski's native language, so most probably in 1980 he used the Polish word which was then misunderstood as referring to a ventilator. He then failed to catch the mistake in the text.

This explains both why in 1980 "ventilators" appear instead of "vents", unlike in 1945, and also why in 1985 he knew of no ventilators. This is the most parsimonious explanation, which Mattogno, who has read the Polish text, could have thought of if he weren't such a hack.

Busted: Jürgen Graf caught lying. Again.

That Jürgen Graf is a discredited liar has been established long ago. See e.g. the articles "Jürgen Graf is a Liar", "He sure is".

As I mentioned in the postings "Deniers on Sonderkommando 1005" (published in 2006) and "Once More, With Feeling: Deniers And Aktion 1005, 10 Years Later" (2016 with several 2017 updates), Mattogno and Graf told an untruth about there being no documentary evidence for Aktion 1005.

Whether or not this untruth was deliberate or a result of the fraudulently ignorant pseudoscholarship is now less relevant, since in 2011 Graf published an article "The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of a Scholar" (about Christian Lindtner, a former denier who saw through the dishonesty of the denier dogma) in which he wrote about Jens Hoffmann's fine book about Aktion 1005:

It suffices to read Jens Hoffmann’s book about the "Aktion 1005”[15] to realize that the whole tale is exclusively based on "eyewitness evidence”, "confessions” and post-war trials where such "eyewitness evidence” and "confessions” formed the sole basis of the accusation.

This is however a blatant lie since Hoffmann cited two German wartime documents mentioning Aktion 1005, both cited by me here.

Fast forward to February 2017, when the fourth (!) revised edition of Jürgen Graf's books Der Holocaust. Die Argumente appeared (Graf wrote an introductory note on 03.02.2017). In it on pp. 104-5 he calls Aktion 1005 "mythical", refers to his and Mattogno's Treblinka book (whose treatment of this particular issue was debunked in 2006, not to mention the 2016 update, see links above), and repeats the above cited sentence about the history of the operation being based solely on witnesses and court acts, referring specifically to Hoffmann's book:

Dass die ganze Geschichte von der “Aktion 1005” ausschließlich auf “Augenzeugenberichten” und “Tätergeständnisse” sowie auf Gerichtsakten fußt, bei denen solche Zeugenaussagen und Geständnisse das einzige Beweismaterial bildeten, geht aus dem anno 2008 erschienenen Buch eines Jens Hoffmann eindeutig hervor.²⁹⁵

295 Jens Hoffmann, “Das kann man nicht erzählen.” ‘Aktion 1005.’ Wie die Nazis die Spuren ihrer Massenmorde in Osteuropa beseitigten, Hamburg 2008. 

Graf should know full well about our refutation of this claim and knows full well about the fact that Hoffman's book cited two German wartime documents mentioning Aktion 1005 and that Shmuel Spector's article quoted one such document.

Jürgen Graf is a proven liar.

Zündel Resurfaces

A couple of weeks ago, Eugene Volokh, a lawyer, blogger, and columnist with the Washington Post, reported that Ernst Zündel had filed a petition to have the ban on his living in the United States overturned. The Department of Homeland Security declined. I wrote to Volokh the below e-mail, which I append here since it includes some (I think) interesting "inside baseball" about the Zündel case.

Le Pens' National Front and Holocaust denial.

Valérie Igounet's 1998 article about National Front as the party of Holocaust denial is worth reading in full.

Obviously, considering that Marine Le Pen's deputy was forced to leave his post  because of Holocaust denial, nothing much has changed on the inside, despite the recent attempts to sanitize the party's image. Apple, tree.

What the CODOHites are saying when they think nobody is watching.

Remember how CODOH is supposed all to be about rationality, arguments and no hidden agenda whatsoever?

Except they used to have this hidden subforum called VIP Lounge, accessible only to the "time honored & trusted Revisionists", to quote Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis.

Well, here's what they really write when they think the Traditional Enemy is not watching.

Extermination of Children in Daugavpils, Latvia

According to this site, researched by Jacob Gorfinkel, "According to June 1942 Food Card distribution, there remained 487 Jews (245 men, 242 women, 22 children) in Daugavpils." The low number of children is strong proof of an extermination policy in Latvia. It converges with the photographic evidence from Liepaja, Latvia, and the other evidence about Latvia published previously on this blog. It also reinforces the evidence for the Rumbula massacre in Riga, such as the note of Operational Situation Report 155, dated 11.1.42: "The number of Jews left in Riga, 29,500, was reduced to 2,600 by an action carried out by the Higher SS and Police Leader of Ostland. In Daugavpils, there are still 962 Jews left who are urgently needed for the labor pool." This was in the wider context of reducing the Latvian Jewish population from an estimated 70,000 to fewer than 4,000 [Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories, No. 7, 12.6.42].

Another SK 1005 update

As mentioned previously on the blog, we have 22 German wartime documents explicitly mentioning Sonderkommando 1005, of them 7 have been published here. Now it's time for a little update of that posting. First of all, I have added an image of the official German wartime copy of Hegenscheidt's radiogram, the text of which has already been published. Hegenscheidt was arrested in 1944 and this official certified wartime copy is among the other materials in his case.

Further I have added a previously unpublished document from the same file - excerpts from the manuscript that Hegenscheidt wrote as a part of his defense in 1944, as he was sitting under arrest in Berlin.

That makes it for 8 published German wartime documents that mention SK 1005 explicitly (and 22 that we have overall).

Remember how Mattogno and Graf insisted on the very designation "1005" being a Soviet invention? And what did they base that on? Right, the same thing these clowns base all of their fraudulent "research" on: nothing (except wishful thinking).

Reports from the Occupied Eastern Territories, May 1942 to January 1943

Extracts from the Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten appear in this collection edited by Arad et al. Below I copy across several relevant extracts, each referenced by the page number in the collection.

No. 4, 22.5.42: "Of the Krimchaks (about 6,000) who were usually counted as part of the Jewish population, well over half lived in Simferopol (2,500) and in Karasubatsar [Karasubazar]. Their extermination, together with that of the Jews and the Gypsies in the Crimea, was accomplished for the most part by the beginning of December, 1941 [p.344, quoted here]."

No. 5, 29.5.42: 251 people shot and 28 hanged in Minsk on 5.5.42 [p.346].

Contemporary Reports of Killings in the USSR that included Children

The following is merely a sample of reports where the killing of children is included or clearly implied. More will follow in due course. To these must also be added the numerous actions in the Jaeger Report that included children, and Jaeger's update of 9.2.42 which gave a total killed of 34,464 children.We can also consider the high number of references to places being "free of Jews" (e.g. EM 88, EM 133, EM 150) as being inclusive of killing all the children.

Nacht und Nebel update

I have how added a couple of document images to the post exposing the old fool Faurisson.

Podcast Interview on Holocaust Denial

I gave an interview a couple of months ago to Matthew Buckley of Adelaide, Australia, who runs a podcast called Social Justice Warriors. We talked about the phenomenon of denial in general, techniques of denial, whether deniers are liars or just lousy historians, and the current status of Holocaust denial as a movement.'

For readers interested in the "inside baseball" of HC, there's a bit of our backstory at the beginning of the interview. Apologies to Nick for never remembering where he went to school and to Sir Ian Kershaw for failing to remember his name.

German Document on Chelmno Gas Van Driver Filling up Gasoline in Lodz

APL 221/30183, p. 11

A document from the Ghetto Lodz administration shows that on 2 September 1944 "Laabs" from the "SS police" refuelled his truck with the licence number "71449" two times with "45 liters" of gasoline at the tank station of the Ghetto Lodz administration. The driver "Laabs" of the "SS police" can be matched to the well known permanent gas van driver of the SS and police Sonderkommando Kulmhof Gustav Laabs (see testimonies in the appendix below). That this vehicle was indeed a homicidal gas van is supported by the fact that its license number of 71449 is close to those of other known gas vans 71457, 71462 and 71463 (see also How the convergence of evidence works: the gas van of Auschwitz, Mattogno and the Activity & Situation Report of Einsatzgruppe B on its Gas Vans and Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes).

Jews Shot because They Were Jews

In response to the brainless denier meme that Jews were only shot in the USSR because they were partisans, Communists, saboteurs or provocateurs (a meme that is antisemitic on its face, because no other group was automatically shot because it was assumed to inherently possess those characteristics), below are a list of quotes from Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Reports [hereafter EMs] which show that being a Jew alone - and for no other reason - was sufficient to get a person shot, regardless of age, class, gender or political history.

German Instigation of Pogroms

A favourite meme of Holocaust deniers is that pogroms were not the responsibility of the Germans. Germar Rudolf even claims here that Jewish deaths from pogroms were not "real Holocaust victims." This article refutes such lies by demonstrating that references to pogroms in the Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Reports [hereafter EMs] almost always show attempts by Germans to instigate them. The success or failure of these attempts varies with the region in which each Einsatzkommando was operating.

The Denial Fossil Faurisson Sounds Like a Broken Record (Again)

After the news that Angela Merkel will receive USHMM's Elie Wiesel award the French denier of the obvious Robert Faurisson couldn't stay silent and had to express his displeasure in an article with the name as long as Pinocchio's nose would be if he were to read any of Faurisson's articles out loud: "Is Angela Merkel Going to Endorse Elie Wiesel’s lies and, Particularly, his lie of the Extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz by Fire and not by Gas?" in which he, predictably, attacks Wiesel as a "false witness":

137 Crushed Lies, or Why Denial Is Beyond Repair

The average online denier is not a sophisticated creature. He is usually satisfied with a few memes he has found on Twitter or at some forum and repeats them ad infinitum, never bothering to fact-check them, thus regurgitating the deceptive tidbits that have been debunked over and over and over again. One such moldy debunked meme is the myth about the crushed testicles of 137 German defendants in the Dachau trials.

From David Irving's site:

All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was Standard Operating Procedure with American investigators.

The source is given as "The Progressive, February 1949, p. 21f", the author is alleged to be Edward L. Van Roden:

a Pennsylvania judge served in World War I and II, in the latter as Chief of the Military Justice Division for the European Theater where he saw service in Normandy, Belgium, the Rhineland, the Battle of the Bulge, and in the Ardennes. In 1946 he was reassigned to active duty and served on several important court martial trials in Germany. In 1948 Secretary of the Army Royall appointed him to an extraordinary commission charged with investigating the Dachau War Crimes program.

So of course this is repeated ad nauseam on Twitter and at trashy forums like CODOH, where this is a favorite of its know-nothing Aufseher Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis.

An Early Use of 'Ausrottung' - and a small deception by Jansson

On September 12, 1936, Julius Streicher used the word 'extirpated' [Ausrottung] in a clearly exterminatory sense in a speech reported by The Times, reproduced on September 16 in The Glasgow Herald, shown here. Jansson claims here that the quote was imputed falsely to Streicher by Jewish organizations, and credulously chooses to believe Streicher's defence at Nuremberg. However, Jansson's own source (pp.23-24) shows that the quote was published in The Times, which was not a Jewish organization, and the original author of the article was, according to his biography, Matthew Halton, a Canadian reporter.

Update: The Extermination of Entire Communities in Ukraine in 1941

It is often assumed that no Axis orders were issued before the invasion to kill women and children in any part of the USSR, but this assumption is false. The General Inspector of the Romanian Gendarmerie, Constantin Vasiliu, issued an order on June 17 or 18, 1941, mandating "the extermination on the spot of all Jews in rural areas, enclosing them in ghettos in urban areas, and the arrest of all those suspected of being Communist party members or of having held important functions under Soviet rule [cited by Ancel, here, note 21, and by Deletant, p.143]." However, it is correct that in the area under the authority of HSSPF Jeckeln, the killing of women and children only became systematic in late August. Prior to the Kamenets-Podolsky massacre of 27.8.41, 40,000 Jews had been killed, but from 27.8.41 to 30.9.41, 100,000 were murdered [Dieter Pohl, here, p.32]. This article examines how the German policy escalated from one of primarily shooting male Jews (as a "security measure" or in reprisal) to one of exterminating whole Jewish population centres.

More on Sebastian Gorka

LATE ADDITION AT BOTTOM

Since I wrote on this topic last, right wing bloggers and journalists have circled the wagons around Sebastian Gorka, Trump's deputy adviser for national security and purported anti-terrorism expert. Responding to reporting by the Forward, on the Lobelog blog, and in the Hungarian press, Richard Miniter – among other writers – responded on the Forbes Web site.

Miniter's defense of Gorka is remarkable for its sheer length and comprehensiveness. Going point by point, Miniter begins with the assertion that charges of anti-Semitism on Gorka's part, on the basis of his having cofounded a political party with former members of the Jobbik far-right party, are a matter of guilt by association. He elaborates:

Gorka founded a party that included some people who came from another party and that other party had some figures who… Really? This is the argument here? Gorka wrote for a newspaper that also published content that critics called “anti-Semitic” and hung around opposition figures that included people that critics say are “anti-Semitic,” therefore…. Even if the critics were right about the alleged “anti-Semitism” of the other journalists and the other politicians (and there are good reasons to believe that their characterizations are highly questionable), it reveals nothing about Gorka or his beliefs. Sharing a room with Helen Keller does not make one blind; sharing a subway car with Albert Einstein does not make one a genius.

Miniter has something of a point – the mere fact of a relationship between Gorka and some loathsome characters on Hungary's far right cannot be used alone to establish the political leanings of Gorka himself.

However, the analogy that ends the quote above is inapt. No, sharing a room with Helen Keller does not make one blind; however, sharing a political party with her might result in the reasonable assumption that the person sharing that party is a socialist, as Keller herself was. Moreover, it's certainly true that sharing a subway car with Albert Einstein does not make one a genius; however, publishing scholarly articles in the same journals with Einstein might reasonably result in the assumption that the person in question is a theoretical physicist.

Taking Miniter's argument about Gorka's political assumptions one by one, we can begin with the assertion that "Gorka wrote for a newspaper that also published content that critics called 'anti-Semitic' and hung around opposition figures that included people that critics say are 'anti-Semitic.'" What's irksome about this passage is not only the sneer quotes around "anti-Semitic" but also what even a cursory examination of the people in question reveals about their political points of view.

Among the photos making the rounds is one of Gorka standing to Támás Molnár (above), one of the former Jobbik members referred to above. As the screenshot shown below reveals, the two men are Facebook friends. To be fair, Gorka has more than 2,000 "friends" on Facebook, but there are several other Jobbik members and political allies not on Gorka's friends list. We might assume (and I do believe that the evidence suggests that Gorka should address this issue directly) that the two men are friends.

So what does Molnár believe? Apparently at least some of what informs Molnár's ideology is a belief in "double genocide" -- a popular right-wing theory in countries subjected to occupation by both the Nazis and the Soviets. Where the theory has seen expression most publicly since 1991 has been in the Baltic states, including Latvia, where members of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS have marched in parades with the status of heroes for having fought the Soviets.

Double genocide proponents in Hungary focus on Soviet repression, which began with the Soviet invasion in 1945 and extended through the late 1990s, with the peak occurring in 1956. These proponents suggest not only that the Soviet repression was as costly as Nazi occupation in terms of human lives (it was not: thousands were killed in 1956 vs. hundreds of thousands in 1944), but often, that the perpetrators of Soviet repression were Jewish.

This uncanny focus on the Jewish ancestry of some Hungarian communists is something we've seen before -- see Sergey Romanov's insightful comment on our blog. Molnár is apparently a firm believer, having co-signed an open letter on a Web site indicating refusal of the party (of which Gorka was cofounder) to sign a proclamation denouncing racism and anti-Semitism.

(I am in the process of seeking translation from Hungarian for this material and will post it when I do.)

Incidentally, this Web site features several bloggers from the party, one of whom is Gorka himself.

Lest we think that Molnár's views have moderated since he collaborated with Facebook friend Gorka in the mid-2000s, we need only consider the story of Eszter Solymosi, a Hungarian girl at the center of a blood libel in Hungary in the late 19th century. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the case has been revived since 1989 by Jobbik. Daniel Véri writes:

Besides the revival of Eszter Solymosi’s imaginary portrait, which will be examined in the next part of the study, two further works were created, showing the girl as a Christian martyr. Both were published on kuruc.info, the major news portal of the Hungarian extreme right. The first was created in 2008 by an unknown artist, the second – inspired by the previous one – in 2009 by painter Tamás Molnár.

The name Támás Molnár, it turns out, is not terribly rare in Hungary. It was the name of a conservative Catholic philosopher and U.S. resident, who died some time ago. It's also the name of a Hungarian Olympic water polo player. And, finally, it's the name of two artists -- one of whom was also a member of Jobbik.

Should Mr. Miniter be reading this, we can disagree over whether a double genocide theory is anti-Semitic. On blood libel, I don't think the jury is still out. Gorka has to answer for his friend.

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Added at 5:30 p.m. EDT

The Forward has just published video of Gorka defending Jobbik's Garda paramilitary. An interview with Gorka from 2007 has him appearing to do the same.

Update: Goebbels Statements from 1941

Goebbels' diary [hereafter TB], January 31, 1941: "Discussed with Bouhler the discreet liquidation of the mentally ill. 40,000 have gone, 60,000 have still to go. It’s a tough but necessary job. And it has to be done. Bouhler is the right man to do it [Longerich, Peter. Goebbels: A Biography (Kindle Locations 21516-21520). Random House Publishing Group, 2015. Kindle Edition, 21519, n.62; German text here]."

Das Reich, July 20, 1941: "Just as the fist of an awakened Germany has struck this racial filth, the fist of an awakened Europe will surely follow. Mimicry will not help the Jews then. They will have to face their accusers. The court of the nations will judge their oppressor.
Without pity or forgiveness, the blow will strike. The world enemy will fall, and Europe will have peace [source and source]."