Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Eric Hufschmid Gets Sadder

I wrote back in August about 9/11 conspiracy lunatic Eric Hufschmid and his denial of the Holocaust, which I deemed the saddest attempt at Holocaust denial I'd ever seen.

As of yesterday, Hufschmid has merely gotten worse. He released a short film on the Holocaust as part of what (I assume) will be a larger piece on the "masquerade party" that is Zionists infiltrating everything from the U.S. government to Eric Hufschmid's tinfoil hat. It's another case of either immense lying by omission or an incredibly underinformed man, obviously motivated by anti-Semitism, trying to sound intelligent. I'll leave it to the readers to judge.

Anyway, here is my own fisking of Hufschmid's latest "work":

Read more!

(1) Hufschmid launches into the topic of denial with an attack on a radio station, KPFK, refusing to run any content by Hufschmid because he is a Holocaust denier.

Hufschmid asks whether Jerry Quickley, the manager of KPFK, refuses to run his content because he's a Holocaust denier or because he's trying to protect the "criminal network."

You can read Quickley's statement himself. As for Hufschmid, is he a Holocaust denier? Yes, of course he is. Why else would he use the word "HoloHoax" in his essays?

But for some reason, Hufschmid does not want to own up. So he moves forward into his "argument."

(2) Hufschmid's first gambit is to trot out the "Father of Revisionism," Paul Rassinier, who had been a prisoner at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora. Rassinier, Hufschmid tells us, during his internment, never saw gas chambers! Sakes alive! Perhaps this is because there were no gas chambers at Buchenwald or Dora, and no reputable Holocaust historian claims so.

Hufschmid also omits some important information about Rassinier, such as that he spent rather a long period of time during his internment in sick bay and, despite his leftist political leanings, befriended the SS during his internment. Hufschmid goes on to claim that when Rassinier published his books denying the Holocaust, his work "inspired people around the world" to investigate the Holocaust.

This is a, um, mild overstatement. In his own country, Rassinier was denounced on the floor of the French parliament and expelled from the Communist Party. It was a decade before Rassinier's work was translated into English, and the person most directly affected by Rassinier's work, Robert Faurisson, didn't publish his work until over twenty years had passed.

(3) Hufschmid next segues with a few rhetorical questions: Were the gas chambers hidden? Did the Nazis isolate them? Which camps had them? How many prisoners were killed at Buchenwald? At Dachau? How many were killed by poison gas? How many by other means?

Well, Mr. Hufschimd, there are answers for all these questions: It's not a mystery.
  • In some camps the gas chambers were essentially hidden -- most importantly Birkenau, where the most gassing was done. In other camps, such as Treblinka or Sobibor, they were not. So, yes, in some cases the Nazis did isolate the gas chambers. But they didn't have to do so at Buchenwald or Dachau because there were no gas chambers there.
  • The camps with gas chambers were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
  • The death toll at Buchenwald was around 55,000; at Dachau it was around 130,000 but a great many were not Jews.
  • Approximately 2.7 million Jews were gassed in the camps; that means around another 3 million were killed by other means, mainly shooting.
This is pretty much Holocaust 101, and to pretend that these things aren't known is either lazy and stupid or perversely dishonest.

(4) Hufschmid concedes next that some "investigators" might be biased in favor of the Nazis. If he's talking about so-called "revisionists," then how about the vast majority? Even a leftist like Rassinier toured Germany sponsored by the far right wing, and Faurisson is a close ally of the neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel.

I defy Hufschmid to present to me three prominent Holocaust "revisionists" who are not demonstrably apologetic for the Nazis.

(5) Hufschmid tells us that "some clever Jew" coined the term "Holocaust denial."

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "Holocaust denial" was coined in 1984 by William Gleberzon in an article published in the journal Interchange on Education. Here is some public information about Dr. Gleberzon. I can't seem to tell whether the man is Jewish or not. Does Hufschmid know something about this relatively obscure man that we don't? Most people think Deborah Lipstadt coined the term. She didn't.

(6) Next Hufschmid would like to reassure us that no one is denying that the Nazis had concentration camps, or the Nazis themselves. Instead, he tells us, investigators are trying to uncover the details.

Well, I suppose it needs saying (since Hufschmid didn't) that the Holocaust is not simply about the Nazis and their camps. It is about the killing that went on inside and outside of those camps. To deny something that the Nazis themselves were proud of (they opened Dachau about forty days after they took power) would be ridiculous anyway.

Hufschmid is trying to play fast and loose with the definition of the Holocaust. As we'll see, he can't really do that and not appear to be lying, stupid, or both.

(7) Hufschmid spends a large period of his message in a pathetic appeal, or argumentum ad misericordiam (appeal to pity), with the case of the 1989 beating of Robert Faurisson, allegedly by Jewish thugs. (Hufschmid tells us that Faurisson has no connections to Nazis, but this is false, as Faurisson did travel in the same circles as Leon Degrelle and Otto Ernst Remer.)

How, Hufschmid wonders, does a college professor provoke the Jewish community by "investigating the Nazis"? Well, that's not what Mr. Faurisson has been doing for the last thirty-plus years, now, is it? He has been specifically denying Nazi atrocities and accusing Jews of conspiracy. That doesn't mean that he should have been beaten on several occasions, but I can see why someone would want to kill the guy. I know people that have met him, and they can attest that he's truly an obnoxious man.

Moreover, we are told that Faurisson was only recently convicted for Holocaust denial and fined and sentenced to a three-month suspended prison term. Hufschmid doesn't tell us that this was the fifth time Faurisson was convicted under this law. I note this in my recent article about how Holocaust deniers get themselves arrested to draw publicity to themselves.

Hufschmid notes that "many European nations" (actually eleven) have passed laws against Holocaust denial. While these laws are indeed unjust, there is no logical connection to the legitimacy of Holocaust denial and these laws. It is another appeal to pity.

Finally on this point, Hufschmid offers us a false analogy, telling us that Vietnamese and Americans wouldn't mind people researching the Vietnam War or Americans mind research on the U.S. Civil War, but dem nasty Joos hate anyone who "investigates" the Holocaust. Perhaps a better analogy would be comparing how Armenians react to people that deny what happened to them during WWI. That would be a comparable phenomenon (and one that actually happens) rather than some made-up idiocy that isn't a fair comparison.

(8) Hufschmid takes up David Irving next. We are told that Alexander Baron (a convicted criminal) accused Irving of being a pedophile, but "the Jews" don't care and have successfully put him in jail for Holocaust denial.

Irving is in prison in Austria on a charge filed against him in 1989. He willingly entered Austria last year and boasted that he was going to do so. He wanted to get caught.

As for the "returning the money" of Holocaust deniers that Hufschmid refers to late in his short film, Irving lost his money by being fool enough to file a libel suit in England, where the loser pays the bill. No one took anything from Irving; he conceded his money through his own foolishness.

(9) The last major point Hufschmid makes is to bring up the situation of Germar Rudolf, currently in jail in Germany on Holocaust denial charges.

First things first: Rudolf does not have a Ph.D. By the way, if you go to the Wikipedia article on Rudolf, you can see that's where Hufschmid cribbed his script from.

Hufschmid tells us that "the Jews" had Rudolf deported. Actually, Rudolf had himself deported by staying past the expiration of his visa. If you're stupid enough to violate U.S. immigration law after 9/11, then frankly I have a hard time feeling sorry for you.

(10) Finally, Hufschmid ends with this point: Anti-Semitism is caused by badly behaved Jews. He offers up "proof" that the majority of anti-Semitic incidents are, in fact, committed by Jews, and then he offers an expurgated quote from Theodor Herzl, proving he never bothered to look the quote up himself.

"Stop the ridiculous accusations of Holocaust denial," Hufschmid says. The problem is, as already established, Hufschmid is a Holocaust denier.

How do we know this for sure? Well, does Hufschmid deny plan, method, and numbers, and does he believe the "hoax" is mainly used to make money for the State of Israel? The last one is undoubtedly a "yes." He has stated explicitly that he doesn't believe in gas chambers, so method is clearly denied by Hufschmid. In an attempt to be fair, I'm going to send Hufschmid this link by e-mail and ask him to answer on the issue of plan and numbers.

Will he pick up the gauntlet? I wouldn't hold your breath, reader.

5 comments:

  1. Andrew, let me make a small correction to your excellent article, which I think is necessary in order to avoid misunderstandings.

    You write that

    «The camps with gas chambers were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.»

    This is correct if you mean camps in which gas chambers were used for systematic mass extermination, overwhelmingly of Jews. However, there were also other camps that used homicidal gas chambers, though not for systematic mass extermination but for sporadic group executions or for experiments. And there were places other than extermination and/or concentration camps where homicidal killing by gassing was carried out.

    A standard reference work on the subject, "Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas", edited by Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl et al, provides an overview of the evidence to the following complexes of homicidal gassings by the Nazis, which is largely based on the files of West German criminal investigations and trials regarding these crimes:

    • Gassing of mentally handicapped people in installations of the so-called Aktion T4, aka the "euthanasia" program (Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein,
    Bernburg and Hadamar), as well as the sequels of Aktion T4 , the so-called "wild euthanasia" and the Aktion 14f13 , a program for the killing of sick concentration camp inmates no longer able to work.

    • The use of gas vans as an alternative to mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen killing squads in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, mainly against Jews but also against Soviet partisan suspects and patients of Soviet mental health institutions.

    • The use of gas vans as an alternative to mass shootings for wiping out the Jews in German-occupied Serbia.

    • The use of gas vans for exterminating the Jews of the Warthegau (a territory that Germany annexed from Poland in 1939), at the Chelmno extermination camp.

    • Gassing with the exhaust of stationary engines at the extermination camps of Aktion Reinhard(t) (Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka). The victims were mainly Jews, but some Gypsies were also gassed at these camps.

    • Gassing with Zyklon B at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. The victims were mainly Jews, but also Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war and emaciated inmates no longer able to work who were known as "musulmans".

    • Gassings at the following other camps: Lublin-Majdanek, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, Stutthof and Natzweiler. The victims were mainly Jews at Lublin-Majdanek, where Auschwitz-style extermination was conducted on a smaller scale. At the other camps, the gas chambers were used rather sporadically for experiments or for group executions of prisoners, as an alternative to shooting, hanging or other methods. Gassing at these six camps was not systematic extermination, but just another execution method.

    • Finally, the study mentions "Barracks X" at Dachau as a "special case". The intention to build a gas chamber there for medical experiments is considered proven, but not so the actual homicidal use of "Barracks X" for homicidal gassing. The only eyewitness mentioned is Dr. Franciszek Blaha, who provided testimonies somewhat different of each other at various trials, without the respective tribunal having concluded on the fact of homicidal gassings at Dachau at any of these trials. For reasons not explained in the book, Blaha’s testimony was/is obviously not considered conclusive in what concerns the homicidal gassings to which he testified.

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  2. And not one source for your 'information'....

    Eric wins. Hands down.

    You make unsubstantiated claims and than offer zero for a source.

    Try again.

    ReplyDelete
  3. He also denies alien visitation to Earth. Have you seen his photo? He looks like an alien life form!

    ReplyDelete
  4. He also denies alien visitation to Earth. Have you seen his photo? He looks like an alien life form!

    ReplyDelete

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