An Ugly Analysis

[Slight addition about witness "F." - 12.02.1010]

Continuing with the demolition of funny "revisionist" videos at http://zamphir.litek.ws, produced by the Ugly Voice (just listen to it and you'll understand why we call it so), we shall examine "episodes" 7, 8, 22, 27 and 28, dealing with the “analysis" of testimonies of Abraham Bomba, Eli Rosenberg, Adolf Berman, Kurt Gerstein, Franz Suchomel and Adolf Eichmann. Along the way we will also deal with their clip no. 4 which concerns the diesel gassings.

First we will examine argument related to content of these testimonies, and then we will examine their significance.

Read more!

1. Content.

1.1) Abraham Bomba (clip no. 7) [YouTube version]

Nick has already written about this witness here. In my opinion, some details of his story told to Lanzmann are indeed problematic, but the Ugly Voice make the testimony look much more problematic than it really is.

There is no reason not to trust Bomba’s claim that he was a barber in Treblnka. As we have already seen, the hair was cut in Treblinka. If Bomba was a liar, isn’t it more likely that in his story he would be someone more “interesting" than a simple barber? How about a member of Sonderkommando which burned the bodies?

Second, there are several reasons why mistakes would creep in. Remember, first of all, Bomba wasn’t a native speaker. Second, the atmosphere of the interview was hyper-emotional. Emotions don’t really help one to be accurate. Third, and probably most important, several decades have passed since the described events.

Taking all this into account, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if some parts of Bomba’s testimony turned out to be a result of distorted memory, which wouldn’t mean that he is a liar. (We have already seen even more “egregious" case here. It’s a very human thing.)

Now, we have certain numerical claims, made by Bomba as follows:

[Lanzmann:] You said there were about sixteen barbers? You cut the air of how many women in one batch?

[Bomba:]In one day there was about, I would say, going into that place between sixty and seventy women in the same room at one time. After we were finished with this party, another party came in, and there were about 140, 150 women. They were all already taken care of, and they told us to leave the gas chamber for a few minutes, about five minutes, when they put in the gas and choked them to death.

It is entirely possible that he misspoke and meant something else, see above about the conditions of the interview). But is there a reason to think so?

How big was the room? Depends on which gas chambers are meant. The new gas chambers, according to different sources, were 7x7 or 4x8 meters. The old gas chambers might have been 4x4, 5x5 or 4x5 meters. Bomba says 12x12 feet. But in a later USHMM interview he clarified this issue:

When it was full the gas chamber--the size of it was...I would say 18 by 18, or 18 by 17, I didn't measure that time, just a look like I would say I look here the room around, I wouldn't say exactly how big it is.

So he only gave an estimate. It might have been 5x5 m as well for the old chambers, or 7x7 for the new chambers.

If the benches were placed along the walls, generously assuming only 2 women (including children, of course) per meter of bench and extracting 2 meters for two doors, we get 36 women along the walls for the old chambers and 52 for the new chambers. Plus, quite possibly, a dozen or more waiting in the center of the chamber, squeezed together (again, including children). So Bomba’s “exaggeration", if he didn’t misspeak, is not that great or serious, considering all the circumstances (and especially considering that according to Bomba himself, such a situation lasted no more than 10 days). And it might not have been an exaggeration at all.

Now let’s examine a despicable manipulation of Bomba’s testimony by the Ugly Voice.

When the Ugly Voice urges us to find out how many people there were in the room, he shows us the picture of the Rutherford model of the … Belzec gas chamber. No, it’s not a manipulation yet, just another sign of Ugly Voice’s “credibility".

After Bomba says “and there were about 140, 150 women", the Ugly Voice suddenly pauses the interview and does the calculation, according to which 169 people had to fit into a gas chamber. Now, although it is absolutely possible for so many people to squeeze into such an area, presumably the Ugly Voice’s point is that it would be impossible for barbers to do their job. And here’s the rub: Bomba explicitly claims that these’ women’s hair didn’t have to be cut!

They were all already taken care of…

It is exactly these words that are missing from the videoclip. Bomba speaks them immediately after mentioning 140-150 women, and that part was cut off by the Ugly Voice.

Where did these women come from? Apparently, from the undressing barracks. All other sources I’ve seen claim that it is in these barracks, situated right before the Tube, the women’s hair was cut. It is possible that for whatever reason (because of numerous transports?) during a period of 7-10 days the hair was cut both in the barracks and in the gas chambers. Thus these 140-150 “new" women (presumably, per chamber) would arrive, and the barbers would leave the room, as they were no longer needed. End of story.

True, some other details, such as time needed for clearing the chambers, are problematic and stem from confusion of distorted memory. But, I repeat, considering the circumstances it’s not such an important issue.

1.2) Eli Rosenberg (clip no. 8) [YouTube version]

The Ugly Voice whines about the capacity of the gas chambers and the use of the diesel exhaust.

Rosenberg presumably talks about the old, smaller gas chambers, and claims that 400 people were driven into one such chamber. The size of the chambers was 4x4 to 5x5 meters.

OK, according to the results of Charles Provan's simple but ingenious experiment, 700 people can squeeze into a 25 square meters gas chamber if about half of them are children. On average, thus, Rosenberg’s testimony about the capacity is entirely credible.

Now to the diesel gassings claim. This is an old chestnut which the Ugly Voice describes in more detail in the clip no. 4 [YouTube version]. He starts with quoting Hilberg’s claim of diesel engines in all camps, particularly in Sobibor. Hilberg obviously relied on Erich Fuchs’ testimony for Sobibor, given the quoted description of the engine. His footnote 40, shown in the video, says that he relies on witness "F.", who is identified as Kurt Franz. This, however, is incorrect, as the book on which Hilberg relies actually quotes Fuchs (identified as "F."), not Franz, and explicitly says that a gasoline engine was used (A. Rueckerl, Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse, 1977, S.166). In a later edition Hilberg corrected his mistake (Die Vernichtung der europaeischen Juden, B.2, 1990, S.941, esp. footnote 41).

So Hilberg was mistaken and is partly to blame, but shouldn’t the Ugly Voice have known better?

Then a discussion of the inefficiency of diesel engines at producing CO commences. I don’t see why I should deal with it here at length since I have already covered this part by showing that the diesel issue is currently irrelevant. The principles laid out in that posting apply to Rosenberg.

The next argument is that any engine is not the most efficient way to produce lots of CO. Oh well, it might not be, but who cares if the petrol engines are note the most efficient way? The only thing that matters is that they are sufficiently efficient. And it’s not difficult to install them. The rest is a vile demagoguery.

Conditioners are not used to produce water, true. But neither does one buy Cray to use it as a typewriter.

Why not use producer-gas instead of engine exhaust? Jamie McCarthy explains why:

Well, one need only learn how they work, to answer that question. The producer-gas engine at the rear of the vehicle burns wood in an oxygen-poor environment, and generates CO at such high concentrations that it is flammable. The CO is then piped to the front of the vehicle, where it is burned in an internal combustion engine, essentially the same way that natural gas is burned in special modern cars.

What Mr. Raven is suggesting is that the Nazis would have hooked up the wood-burning engine to the gas chambers, and pumped such high concentrations of CO directly into those rooms. CO has a very large range of flammable concentrations: from 12 to 75 percent, according to the Merck Index. Holocaust-denier Friedrich Berg says that the emissions of the wood-burning engines "always contained between 18% and 35% carbon monoxide." (This from the JHR, Spring 1984, p. 38 – an article which Mr. Berg was kind enough to photocopy and personally mail to me.)

So, what would be the result of pumping this flammable gas into a building?

Think "Bic lighter."

I submit that torching the building would have been an unpleasant side effect of using the producer-gas vehicles. Especially unpleasant for the victims in the gas chambers, of course, if they happened to still be alive. But also annoying and rather dangerous for the Nazis overseeing the operation. It's not very smart to build a gas chamber that's just going to burn down every time it gets used.

A denier David Thomas objects elsewhere:

The drawback of course is that it's also highly flammable, and in quantity, explosive. However, it is a simple matter to set such an engine so that its exhaust emits carbon monoxide in reduced but still deadly levels that would kill quickly without the risk of explosion.

Maybe, but if one has to tweak it, why bother and not install a petrol engine?

1.3) Adolf Berman (clip no. 22) [YouTube version]

Here the Ugly Voice whines about Adolf Berman’s testimony about shoes found in Treblinka, saying that he shouldn't have found anything because the Nazis planned to obliterate all the traces of their crime. Well, here's a clue, genius: they failed! Here are the photos made not long after the liberation of Treblinka. Lots of bones and rubbish, among them probably lots of old clothes, shoes and other such items. So when Berman testified about an area of many kilometers with scattered bones and shoes, he did exaggerate (quite possibly, not deliberately, after so many years, and under influence of enormous piles of shoes in other camps, such as Majdanek), but the gist of it was correct – there was a large area with scattered remains of crime, including the shoes he picked up and presented at the trial.

1.4) Kurt Gerstein (clip no. 27) [YouTube version]

Deniers have long been picking on Kurt Gerstein’s testimony, and some of their criticisms are correct. Dr. Christopher Browning summarizes the correct attitude to this testimony thus:

Many aspects of Gerstein's testimony are unquestionably problematic. Several statements he attributes to Globocnik are clearly exagerrated or false, and it is not clear whether Gerstein or Globocnik was the faulty source. In other statements, such as the height of the piles of shoes and clothing at Belzec and Treblinka, Gerstein himself is clearly the source of exaggeration. Gerstein also added grossly exaggerated claims about matters to which he was not an eyewitness, such as that a total of 25 million Jews and others were gassed. But in the essential issue, namely that he was in Belzec and witnessed the gassing of a transport of Jews from Lwow, his testimony is fully corroborated by Pfannenstiel. It is also corroborated by other categories of witnesses from Belzec.

Indeed, one cannot ignore certain blatant impossibilities in Gerstein’s testimony, like the piles of shoes of enormous height. It is my opinion that many historians who have used Gerstein’s testimony have done so uncritically. On the other hand, one cannot ignore the fact that the core his testimony finds strong corroboration. Professor Pfannenstiel testified in court several times that while Gerstein’s testimony is incorrect on many counts, they did visit Belzec together and witnessed a gassing. Pfannenstiel also testified about this in private to a denier patriarch Paul Rassinier, so there could be no coercion involved.

Many others testified after the war that during the war Gerstein told them about gassings. They include: Dr. Gerhard Peters of Zyklon-B producing company Degesch; pastor Rehling; Dr. Hermann Ehlers; Baron von Otter; bishop Otto Dibelius; and other people whom the judgement in a 1955 case against Dr. Peters lists as “Armin P. und Sch.“, “Prälat Bu., Kirchenrat We. und Dr. Me." (names abbreviated according to German legal requirements concerning privacy). (Also see this article and this judgement.)

Gerstein even managed to pass the information about the gassing to his contact in the Dutch resistance, J. H. Ubbink. Ubbink relayed information to Cornelis van der Hooft, who wrote it down in 1943. Here’s the document published by L. de Jong in Een sterfgeval te Auswitz, 1967, scanned and translated by Dr. Pieter Kuiper:

Because of conversations that I had with German officers that served in Poland and in Russia, I heard the most fantastic horror stories. When after that the sudden death notice of my mentally ill sister in law was received, I decided not to rest before I had discovered what was true of all the horror stories and of the killing of the insane. All my effort was now to get in touch with prominent SS-men in Poland and to completely gain their trust. After months I thus succeeded to visit two so-called Tötungsanstalten. The first one that I visited was in Belsjek on the road Lemberg-Lublin; the second one in Treblinka about 80 km north of Warsaw. There are two more in Poland, but I did not succeed in obtaining access there.

The two Anstalten named above are situated in sparsely populated forests and heaths. From the outside, these do not look different from the normal concentration camps. A wooden gate with some inscription ending on "-heim" gives passers-by no reason to suspect a murder lair.

From all occupied territories of Europe arrive trains with victims. The trains consist of cattle wagons, the openings covered with barbed wire. Every wagon contains 120 persons. In normal weather conditions approximately 90% arrive alive, although it had happened once last summer that 50% had died because of lack of water. If the wagons arrived in the camp, the people are beaten out with a whip and then driven into surrounding barracks and then locked up. The next day or a few days later, depending on what the supply has been, 700-800 people are rounded up on a court-yard. They are then ordered to undress completely, clothes are to be put in neat piles, while shoes are to be put in rows beside each other. Entirely naked, the men, women and children are now driven in a long corridor fenced in with barbed wire. Ukrainian criminals now start to cut and shave the hair of the the women and children, the hair is carefully collected and serves lates as "Dichtungen" (gaskets) for submarines. For many hours these miserable people are forced to stand in this way in the bitter cold or the burning sun. When some collapse exhausted by the singing heat or the cold, the brutes lash with their whips the naked bodies of these poor people. The suffering and misery in these corridors beggars all description. Mothers try to warm their naked infants with their naked bodies. Almost nobody talks, only their eyes speak a nameless pain and dull resignation.

The corridor ends at an iron door of a brick building. The door is opened and 700-800 death-doomed are beaten in with the whip till they like sardines in a tin cannot move anymore. A little boy of three years old that tried to run out was met with whips and driven back. After that, the doors were closed hermetically. Outside the building now a big tractor is started, the exhaust of which enters the building.

Through a small glass window I now was allowed to observe from outside the effect on the inside. Packed the poor people awaited their last moments. There was no panic, no screaming, just a weak mumbling was heard outside, as if a common prayer rose to heaven. Within an hour, everybody was dead. Sashes were raised from the outside, so that the carbon monoxide could escape. After half an hour, a number of Jews arrived - they thank their lives to the lugubrious work that starts now. They open a back door, and have to take out the bodies of the gassed. Before taking them to the prepared lime pits, they have to take the rings from the fingers, open the mouths and take out the gold teeth if their are any.

In every Anstalt statistics are kept of the number of Tötungen. Per day i.e. per 24 hours three of four Tötungen are executed. For the four Anstalten together, this amounts to 8-9000 per day. In total, already 6½ million people have been killed this way, of which 4 million Jews and 2½ million insane and so-called Deutschfeindlichen. The program encompasses 16½ million people, these are all Jews in the occupied territories and all Polish and Czech intellectuals. From higher up their is pressure to hurry up and the possibility is considered of finding a more efficient way of killing. Cyanide gas has been proposed, but does not seem to have been used thus far, so that killing still takes place in the cynical way described here.

As you see, certain details differ from Gerstein’s later confession. E.g. a tractor is mentioned instead of just a gassing engine. Unless the information was inadvertently distorted by Ubbink and van der Hooft (which is certainly possible), this is just another example of Gerstein mangling details, but the core of his testimony is the same.

Even before he was transferred to France, Gerstein wrote to Ubbink:

Dear Friend Ubbink
You are one of the first to whom I shall send greetings. Let me congratulate you from the bottom of my heart on the liberation of your country from our brood of vipers and criminals. However dark our fate may now be, those terrible people could not be allowed to win. Ask your people if, now at least, they believe what went on in Belzec, etc. I thank God that I did everything in my power to cut through this abscess on the body of humanity.

Given all this, how can the arrogantly stupid Ugly Voice claim that Gerstein’s testimony is nothing but a post-war fabrication? That Gerstein was giving hints about coercion? That he was murdered for inserting absurdities into his report?

But that’s why it is denial, not revisionism.

In conclusion, Gerstein’s report indeed contains quite a lot of inaccurate claims. In my opinion, it cannot stand on its own. But the gist of it is corroborated and corrected by other sources, so we can be certain that Gerstein did visit Belzec and did witness a homicidal gassing, even if he didn’t describe it absolutely realistically.

Refutation of some of the minor claims made in this clip follows.

a)

“Gerstein report" is important because it is essential for the validity of the Belzec story.

It is important, but not essential. We have other sources about Belzec.

b)

600,000 deaths

Outdated since the discovery of the Hoefle telegram. Belzec functioned as an extermination camp only in 1942, thus Hoefle’s figure for Belzec is the total death toll. Why does the Ugly Voice use outdated information? Isn’t “revisionism" supposed to be more accurate than the so-called “official" history?

c) 3 "main" witnesses? What about the detailed testimony of Pfannenstiel? What about Gley, Schluch and other Nazis in the camp? And how did the Ugly Voice decide that only the 3 witnesses he mentioned are the “main" ones?

d)

Then remember that at Nuremberg it was also said that engine exhaust was not the method of execution.

Who cares? The Ugly Voice shows us some general claims not tied to any particular eyewitness testimony. The rumors about the use of electricity for murder in Belzec were indeed floating around, and it is these rumors that did find a way into the record (nobody claims that Nuremberg trial was flawless). So why even bring it up, except for black propaganda purposes? Oh, but that’s what Holocaust denial is all about.

e) The claim about 25,000,000 in Belzec in Treblinka only – wrong again. 25,000,000 is Gerstein's estimated total of all victims of the Nazi regime, as clarified in another version of the testimony. One might be easily confused by imprecise wording in the former version, but one has no excuse not to have checked the latter version.

f) 750 people couldn’t have fit into 25 square meters? Tell that to Charles Provan. That’s not to say that 750 people were indeed driven into the gas chambers. That’s only to say that it was possible when there were lots of children, just as Gerstein described. Whether it happened is another question. But this is not an argument against Gerstein's testimony.

1.5) Franz Suchomel (clip no. 28) [YouTube version]

Franz Suchomel has been interviewed by Claude Lanzmann and the interview was shot with a hidden camera. Lanzmann promised Suchomel not to divulge the contents of the interview for many years, but, of course, it was only a trick to make Suchomel speak.

Deniers are at loss as how to explain such an interview, which couldn’t have been coerced in principle, so they have to create a semblance of an explanation.

The Ugly Voice objects to the following description by Suchomel:

Suchomel: In the "funnel," the women had to wait. They heard the motors of the gas chambers. Maybe they also heard people screaming and imploring. As they waited, "death panic" overwhelmed them. "Death panic" makes people let go. They empty themselves, from the front or the rear. So often, where the women stoof, there were five or six rows of excrement.

Lanzmann: They stood?

Suchomel: They could squat or do it standing. I didn't see them do it, I only saw the feces.

Forgive us for dealing with such topics, but if the deniers wish to discuss shit…

Anyway, the Ugly Voice says:

Defecation when scared does happen, but it wouldn’t happen en masse like that. 5 or 6 rows of excrement is absurd.

How about that? No evidence whatsoever is provided for this assertion. In fact, Suchomel is talking about lots of tired women, who have just spent hours – or more – on the train (in cattle cars) without chance to relieve themselves modestly (an overflowing bucket per car is certainly not the way), and thus many of whom had been waiting for a “transit camp" where they could take care of themselves, and now they were standing naked in a “tube", without any hint at any latrine nearby, hearing ominous sounds, panicking. One would expect mass “relief" in such a situation.

Also, Suchomel told the same story to Gitta Sereny (Into That Darkness, p. 161):

Suchomel had another remark to make about Stangl’s arrival in Treblinka. “The first suggestion I heard Stangl make after he arrived," he said, was to put buckets in the tube for the women. They all defecated you know, while they ran, or stood there, waiting. Stangl said he had put buckets in the tube in Sobibor and it had proved helpful. Wirth answered ‘I don’t care a damn what you did with the shit in Sobibor. Let them beshit themselves. It can be cleaned up afterwards."’ Apparently two men were then assigned to “cleaning up" the road to the gas chambers between transports.

Next, the Ugly Voice claims that Lanzmann paid Suchomel 1800$ for an interview. He relies on Faurisson for this. If Lanzmann, under a guise, paid Suchomel for a chance to interview him, how does that challenge the credibility of the interview? If we are to believe Faurisson, then:

He promised and he gave 3,000 deutschmarks to each of his German "witnesses," further assuring each before his interview that it would be sealed for thirty years ("Ce que je n'ai pas dit dans Shoah," VSD, interview by Jean-Pierre Chabrol, July 9, 1987, especially p. 11).

So he talked about that openly? Only someone with a very desperate need to deny the Holocaust can judge this alleged payment as hurting the credibility of the interviews. Just to show you how the Holocaust Denial Noise Machine works, here’s how the story transformed in J.-F. Beaulieu’s article:

And what is even more revealing, no word is mentioned either that all the German witnesses that agreed to participate as witnesses in this movie received 3,000 DM, but had to agree not to reveal this fact for 30 years.

Except, Faurisson says something completely different – not that the witnesses agreed to hide the fact of payment for 30 years, but that Lanzmann agreed to seal their interviews for 30 years.

The Ugly Voice also claims that Suchomel knew about the camera. His proof? Suchomel glanced at the camera a couple of seconds during his long interview. He also glanced in other directions, but that doesn’t bother our Ugly Voice.

Then he quotes from Faurisson’s testimony at 1988 Zuendel trial:

Exactly as in the witchcraft trial, when the people were accused of having [met] the devil, they wouldn't say, 'Your Honour, the best proof that I have not met the devil is that the devil does not exist'; it would have been the end. No. The tactic was to say, 'Oh, yes, the devil was there on the top of the hill. Myself, I was down [at the bottom]...and in Auschwitz it's exactly the same thing." The accused would admit the existence of the gas chambers, but deny their involvement with them.

Except the analogy doesn’t work. The accused “witches" likely believed in the devil themselves, so they couldn’t say in principle that the accusations against them aren’t true because the devil doesn’t exist. If there were no gas chambers, however, the accused Nazis wouldn’t believe in them in the first place. So where are all the testimonies of the Nazis (who were accused of involvement in gassings) denying the gas chambers to the end? Or, where are testimonies of the old Nazis, secretly taken by “revisionists" and neo-Nazis in general, that they were being coerced and told untruth during the trials?

We have lots of such testimonies for the fake Stalinist trials, where people often fought tooth and nail against NKVD interrogators, were writing letters describing tortures, refused to “confess", or took back their “confessions" later, etc., etc., etc. Where are such numerous cases among the accused Nazis? This problem is so embarrassing for the deniers, that they can’t think of any credible way to discredit the Nazi testimonies except for the weak excuses we’ve seen above.

1.6) Adolf Eichmann (clip no. 28) [YouTube version]

The case of Eichmann is similar to the case of Kurt Gerstein. Eichmann told his story before his capture (C. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, The University of Wisconsin Press, p. 5):

Beginning in 1956 Eichmann began a long series of tape-recorded interviews with the Dutch journalist and former SS man Willem Sassen and hand-corrected some of the resulting transcripts. He also wrote another memo on Nazi Jewish policy, referred to as file number 17.

During the interviews Eichmann didn’t even hide his anti-Semitism. In fact, they were so embarrassing for him that his lawyer Dr. Servatius tried to stop them from being submitted as evidence. Irmtrud Wojak, who examined the original tapes made by Sassen, concluded that the Sassen transcripts, if not word perfect, accurately reflect Eichmann’s statements at the time (ibid.).

And it is during these Sassen interviews Eichmann first mentioned the little houses used for gassing near a Polish village near Lublin. Browning puts forth a very plausible hypothesis that Eichmann visited an experimental gassing site in the woods near the future Belzec extermination camp (Browning, op. cit., p. 28). The only “suspicious" detail is the mention of a Russian U-Boat, but given that this is hearsay, and Eichmann might have misunderstood or misremembered what he was told, this is of no consequence. We know that he didn’t invent this account just in order to “sabotage" the trial.

The Ugly Voice makes a lot of fuss about Eichmann’s description of the “fountain" of blood his has seen erupting from a mass grave under a pressure of gasses. Except maybe for the word used, the phenomenon is quite plausible physically, as I have discussed earlier. And no, it didn’t have to be a literal blood – just all body liquids and products of decomposition mixed together. I don’t know if Eichmann told about this phenomenon before his capture, but he sure did before the trial: during the Less interrogations and in Meine Memoiren (Browning, op. cit., p. 19). If he tried to “sabotage", why wasn’t he stopped?

Finally, when Eichmann was confronted with incriminating evidence, he and his lawyer often stated or implied that it was fabricated. That happened both during the trial and after it. Why not simply expose the “hoax"?

The Ugly Voice finishes this videoclip with a goof of enormous proportion. He refers us to this page about Belzec.

His claim is that if so many Nazis at Aktion Reinhardt camps were male nurses, then it is plausible that these camps were disinfection camps. Does he think everybody stupid? It is well-known that they were male nurses at “euthanasia" institutions (the so-called “T4"). Indeed, on the very same page we read:

The crimes of genocide committed in the death camps at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka only began to emerge for the first time during euthanasia trials of 1946-48. Former SS-Scharführer Josef Hirtreiter, a locksmith, had been interrogated in Frankfurt on July 6, 1945 about the euthanasia at Hadamar. He mentioned a camp near Malkinia (Treblinka) where the gassing of several thousand Jews had taken place. He named several Hadamar colleagues who had accompanied him there.

[…]

Further evidence of the death camps and the connection with euthanasia and the KdF emerged in 1947 during the investigation into chief physician Adolf Wahlmann and other Hadamar staff.

Heinrich Unverhau, who had been in charge of the sorting depot in the second phase at Belzec (cutting out yellow stars after the victims had been gassed), was the first to be arrested and charged in 1948 in connection with the killing of patients at Grafeneck euthanasia . It was during the course of the trial that information began to emerge about the Reinhardt death camps. After a lengthy hearing into the euthanasia allegations, Unverhau was acquitted of all charges and released as it was proved he had not been involved in the killings. His testimony regarding the death camps was simply ignored by the court as being not relevant to the Grafeneck Case.

And elsewhere on the site:

In other war crime trials, 27 T4 personnel appeared before West German courts and from these proceedings the following trades and political affiliations emerged:
male psychiatric nurses - 13
builders – 2
photographers – 2
concentration camp guards – 2
cooks - 1
mechanics/drivers – 2
farm worker - 1
In a random selection of a further 22 people who entered T4 and were Party members and later transferred to Reinhardt with rank of SS-Scharführer, the following emerge:
male psychiatric nurses - 12
driver/mechanics - 3
concentration camp guards –3
photographers - 3
metal worker - 1
farm workers - 2
builder - 1
cook - 1
All 22 were either members of the Nazi Party, SS or SA.

In a postwar testimony Victor Brack, organizer of T4, told that he sent his “euthanasia" men in to Globocnik, and later found out that they have been used to murder Jews. This is corroborated by his wartime letter sent to Himmler [NO-205; German typescript [1, 2]; photostat [1, 2]; official Nuremberg translation [1, 2]]:

On the instruction of Reichsleiter Bouhler I placed some of my men – already some time ago – at the disposal of Brigadefuehrer Globocnik to execute his special mission. On his renewed request I now transferred additional personnel. On this occasion Brigadefuehrer Globocnik stated his opinion that the whole Jew-Action should be completed as quickly as possible so that one would not get caught in the middle of it one day if some differences should make a stoppage of the action necessary. You yourself, Reichsfuehrer, have already expressed your view that work should progress quickly for reasons of camouflage alone.

Brack goes on to describe his proposal for sterilization of 2-3 million Jews which he thought were fit for work and thus had to be preserved, but rendered “incapable to propagate". (So what was to happen to the rest?)

Globocnik, of course, was the head of Aktion Reinhardt.

Deniers have failed to explain why “euthanasia" men, experienced in killing with gas (and those of them that weren’t, like “mere" cooks, were at least accustomed to killing and were already under oath) were needed for simple “disinfection camps".

2. Significance

Not all witnesses are of equal significance. Ugly Voice devotes at least three clips to the witnesses whose testimonies don’t mean much for the history of extermination camps – Adolf Berman and Abraham Bomba. Bomba is “significant" only in that he was filmed by Lanzmann (non-historian). That his interview is featured on USHMM site is of no consequence, only the content of the interview matters. And while Bomba supplies an interesting detail about shaving hair in a gas chamber, his testimony is insignificant for writing the Treblinka history, and even if it were false, that would change exactly nothing.

Adolf Berman is even less important in regard to Treblinka. All he testified about this issue is that he visited Treblinka after liberation, saw lots of stuff and picked up some shoes. Indeed, Attorney General Hausner explicitly stated:

At this moment I am not asking for evidence about Treblinka, for we shall present the chapter of the camps to the Court at the appropriate time. But perhaps you are able to tell us in general terms what you saw there?

So he wasn’t a witness about Treblinka in the Eichmann trial. For all practical purposes, in regard to Treblinka he is a non-witness.

Why did the Ugly Voice bring up two insignificant witnesses to “tear" their stories apart (and even then, unsuccessfully)? Obviously, for propaganda purposes. Ugly Voice likes to pontificate about psychological impact of testimonies on a viewer. Doctor, heal thyself.

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