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

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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.

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A forensic archaeologist's investigation of Treblinka ...

... made "Revisionist" propagandist Thomas Kues nervous when first mentioned.

CODOH Reactions to the Critique

Reactions on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" to the HC critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues are recorded and commented on the RODOH thread Our Holiday Gift to Mattogno, Graf and Kues: The AR Critique.

The most commendable effort so far to address arguments included in the critique was made by "Toshiro", albeit in connection with my earlier blog about Mattogno’s Chelmno book. See my response to this gentleman’s latest post in my RODOH post 13314.

Update, 09.01.2012: See my RODOH posts 13321, 13322 and 13323.

Update, 20.01.2012: More from Toshiro, discussed in my RODOH post 13325.

Homicidal gassings at the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial – A statistical survey

About 7000 SS men and auxiliary women were serving in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, some with relatives nearby, external authorities were in contact and corresponding with the Auschwitz camp, hundreds of thousands of people were deported to the site and a certain number of civilian workers had access to the camps. Not too far away were villages as well as the town of Auschwitz. In short, there were many people involved in and around the Auschwitz complex.

Now, suppose the Revisionist view on Auschwitz, i.e. the falseness of homicidal gassings, is true. Then this mass of people with different backgrounds, abilities and personalities should generate substantial testimonial evidence to support. Yet, only very few accounts are known – three come to my mind, Wilhelm Stäglich[1], Thies Christophersen[2] and Walter Schreiber[3], none of them can be classified as actual eyewitness against homicidal gassings and none is without substantial problems. Is this really it?

The e-mail we sent out to Mattogno/Graf/Kues.

To the attention of Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, and Thomas Kues: 

Please see the attached critique of your works concerning Aktion Reinhard. It has also been made available on Google Documents, RapidShare, and Wayback Machine. 

Over one year ago, Mr. Graf challenged the Holocaust Controversies blog to provide a “detailed and comprehensive critique” of one of a number of books he offered. By that time we had already decided not to limit ourselves to one Revisionist work, but the three works on the Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, which was earlier discussed in the Akte Sobibor brochure). These three works repeat and rely upon one another to such an extent that it would be silly to look at one in isolation. More information on our motivations can be found in the introduction to the work. 

Our formal critique also provides a test for those Revisionists who claim to be interested in ‘open debate’. We encourage those Revisionists who control their own public website to announce the existence of the critique as well as provide a direct link to its contents. We have also established conditions for a response in our conclusion.

Since the critique originally began to appear on the HC blog on Christmas Eve, various responses have arisen from Revisionists on internet forums. When one HC supporter posted web links and a brief introduction to the critique on the CODOH Revisionist Forum and invited critical Revisionist comments on the work (open debate, right?) his post was quickly deleted by the powers-that-be. This was the second time that reference to the critique was censored on the CODOH forum. Other Revisionists have simply engaged in base invective, without offering any substantial criticisms of our work. One fellow-traveller even decided to distract attention by faking an email purportedly from us. We trust that you will join us in unreservedly condemning such puerile antics.

Happy Holidays,

HC Team

P.S. This letter has been sent to other Revisionists as well as professional scholars who we feel would be interested in its content.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Afterword: A Special Note by Jason Myers.

Afterword: A Special Note by Jason Myers

 “I am not a Jew and I was at one time a ‘revisionist.” So said Jean-Claude Pressac in the postface to his monumental and technical study of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.[1] This writer can sympathize with Pressac, as I too identify with such a statement. A detailed history of my earlier Holocaust denial and subsequent ‘road to Damascus’ moment will not be offered here, as a brief account will be more than sufficient.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Conclusion.

Conclusion

This critique has presented new sources, and cast new light on old sources, which demonstrate the many different forms of proof that exist for the Aktion Reinhard extermination program. We have clearly established in Chapters 2-4 the timeline through which policy evolved from decimation to extermination, and how the planned locations shifted from the Strongpoints to the death camps in Poland. We have synthesized documents from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials with those in American, German and former Soviet archives to build a detailed picture of how the policy of extermination was understood and implemented at the centre and at the sites of death themselves. We have taken the twisted road to Belzec via this documentation and shown how the twists in the road can be better understood in the light of the convergence of evidence.

A Holiday Gift for Mattogno, Graf and Kues

The members of Holocaust Controversies have prepared a large critique entitled 'Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard: A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues.' It is the First Edition of a White Paper, and the background events that led to its creation are discussed in the introduction. We will be publishing the whole work as a PDF file on the Internet within the next 14 days; but first we are rolling out our current working version as a blog series, starting here. We have not employed a professional proofreader and we are working on this project for free in our spare time, so we would like to appeal to all readers to post feedback on any typos or other errors in the Comments below each blog article. We will incorporate any necessary corrections into the PDF and any subsequent versions of the White Paper.

Happy Holidays and Enjoy!

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses (6). Why Cremation?

Why Cremation?

In his Belzec book Mattogno provided the following explanation for the human cremation remains discovered at Belzec extermination camp:

The cremation of the bodies of the dead constitutes in and of itself neither proof nor evidence in favor of the official theses, because this was the practice in all concentration camps and had a well-established hygienic function. In the area of the Belzec camp, Kola’s findings show that, along a line linking grave 3 and grave 10, about two-thirds of the length of the camp,284 the groundwater level was at a depth of 4.80 meters.285 In the area below, toward the railroad, this level was obviously at a smaller depth; in the area of grave 1, it was 4.10 meters.286 It is probable that the cremation had to do with the danger of contamination of the ground water, as I have discussed elsewhere.287 Fundamentally, however, one cannot exclude the explanation adopted by the official historiography, while giving it a different interpretation. If the Soviets had discovered mass graves full of corpses dead of disease or malnutrition, then they would certainly have exploited them for propaganda against the Germans, as the latter did in Katyn and Vinnytsya against the Soviets.[264]

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses (5). Cremation Remains.

Cremation Remains

The remains left behind by cremation would correspond to about 5 % of the corpses’ non-decomposed weight and 6 to 8 % of the wood weight, according to Mattogno, Graf & Kues.[232] With the exaggerated corpse weights and enormous amounts of wood they claim (see section 8.3), this allows them to argue that the volume of ash (assuming specific weights of 0.5 g/cm³ for human ash and 0.34 g/cm³ for wood ash) would, in some camps at least, have exceeded the established or estimated volume of the mass graves.[233] With the more realistic corpse and wood weights explained in section 8.3, on the other hand, the problems that Mattogno and his colleagues make so much of become rather insignificant, as shown in Tables 8.37 and 8.38 below.[234] The average portion of the grave volume occupied by human and wood ashes is about 10 % in Table 8.37 and 12 % in Table 8.38, Belzec being the camp with the highest density of buried ashes (16 % respectively 19 %).

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses (4). Duration of Cremations.

Duration of Cremations

As mentioned in section 1 of this chapter, the author estimated the area of each of the grids used for burning the bodies at Treblinka extermination camp at 66 m², assuming a length of 25 meters and a width of 2.625 meters. Mattogno & Graf’s estimate, also based on the grates’ description in the judgment at the 1st Düsseldorf Treblinka trial (Kurt Franz et al)[188], is somewhat higher: 30 meters long by 3 meters wide = 90 m².[189] The first layer of bodies on this large area, according to the same authors, could have been no more than 4 bodies per 3 square meters, as each body would have occupied "a theoretical average surface area of the size of a rectangle of 1.75 m × 0.50 m, which also includes the necessary intervening space for the passage of the products of combustion." At 120 bodies per layer, and assuming a layer height of 0.30 m, a pyre of 3,500 bodies (the number that had to be burned on each of two pyres every day to dispose of about 860,000 bodies within 122 days[190]) would thus consist of 29 layers with an impracticable total height of 8.7 m.[191] 

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses (3). Fuel Requirements.

Fuel Requirements

Mattogno and Kues claim that burning the victims’ corpses at Nazi extermination camps would have required enormous quantities of fuel that are at odds with the evidence, if such were logistically obtainable at all. The main parameters on which this claim rests are the average weight of the corpses to be burned and the average amount of wood or wood equivalent required for cremation per kg of corpse weight.

As concerns the first parameter, the Revisionist authors present various deportation data in their Sobibor book according to which children up to the age of 16 made up just 17.05 % of deportees to that camp from the Netherlands, 5.5 % of deportees from France, 27 % of deportees from Polish and Soviet territories, 25 % of deportees from Slovakia, 6.91 % of deportees from Germany and Austria, and 11.5 % of deportees from Prague. Considering the numbers of deportees from each place of provenance, this means that 36,400 out of 169,000, or about 21.5 % of the total, were children below the age of 16.[84]

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses (2). Cremation Devices, Methods and Times.

Cremation Devices, Methods and Times

Burning of corpses at Belzec took place as early as August 1942, according to the testimony of Dr. Pfannenstiel.[2] At that time cremation was not yet used as a means of body disposal per se but probably in order to help stretch the available burial space (judging by Dr. Pfannenstiel’s description whereby the corpses burned just partly and fresh corpses were placed on top of them thereafter), perhaps also for reasons of hygiene.[3]

Wholesale cremation of corpses extracted from the Belzec mass graves only started in November 1942, according to the deposition of former SS-man Heinrich Gley:[4]:

The gassings, as far as I remember, were stopped at the end of 1942, when there was already snow on the ground. Then began the general exhumation and burning of the corpses; it should have lasted from November 1942 until March 1943. The burnings were carried out day and night without interruption, first at one and then at two fireplaces. One fireplace allowed for burning about 2,000 corpses within 24 hours. About two weeks after the beginning of the burning action the second fireplace was erected. Thus on average there were burned about 300,000 bodies at the one fireplace over a period of 5 months and 240,000 bodies at the other fireplace over a period of 4 months. Of course these are only approximate estimates. It should be correct to put the total number of corpses at 500,000. […] Again a short time later I was assigned to the burning detachment; the incineration of the dug-out corpses was a process so abominable humanly, esthetically and in what concerns the smell, that the fantasy of people who today are used to live under civil conditions probably is not sufficient to imagine this horror.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses (1).

Burning of the Corpses

The corpses of most people murdered at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chełmno extermination camps were burned, which means that what is left of most victims are cremation remains like ashes and bone fragments. Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf and Thomas Kues do not deny that bodies were burned at these places, but dispute the historically accepted scale of corpse cremation on grounds that it would have been logistically impracticable in what concerns fuel requirements and the duration of cremations and is incompatible with the available evidence, especially the amount of cremation remains found. Where (as in the case of Chełmno) particulars about the cremation devices and methods are known from archaeological research, the accuracy of research finds is also questioned.

This chapter starts with a presentation of what is known about the cremation devices and methods applied as well as the duration of cremations at each of these four camps, including a discussion of Mattogno’s arguments regarding archaeological research finds at Chełmno extermination camp. There follows a discussion of the deniers’ other arguments mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Finally the deniers’ alternative explanations for the undisputed cremation of corpses at these camps are examined. As concerns Belzec extermination camp the related arguments have been amply debated between Mattogno and the author[1], with Mattogno’s reply to the author’s last submission still outstanding. Although without referring to the author, the recent Sobibor book by Mattogno, Graf and Kues tries to address some of the author’s arguments in said debate. Being their latest publication on the subject, this book is deemed to contain their most up to date arguments and will thus be the main focus of the author of this present chapter

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[1] See the blog articles collected under the link http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/04/quick-links.html#mattbel .

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 7: Mass Graves (9). Density of Corpses in the Graves.

Density of Corpses in the Graves

Karl Alfred Schluch, a former member of the SS staff of Belzec extermination camp, described one of the graves in that camp as follows:

The size of a pit I can only indicate approximately. It should have been about 30 meters long and 20 meters wide. The depth is difficult to estimate because the side walls were at an angle and on the other hand the earth taken out had been piled up at the edge. I think, however, that the pit may have been 5 to 6 meters deep. All in all one could have comfortably placed a house inside this pit. [175]