Friday, March 31, 2006

Mattogno's special treatment of evidence

In a 100+ page treatise Special Treatment in Auschwitz. Origin and Meaning of a Term [large PDF] leading Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno argues that the terms like "Sonderbehandlung" (special treatment) and "Sonderaktion" (special action) had an innocent meaning when used in Auschwitz documents. Mattogno concedes that outside of Auschwitz the term "Sonderbehandlung" could have meant execution, so I won't dwell on this well-known fact here, noting only that it meant execution in the absolute majority of known documents [old link no longer works; see this for examples].

Mattogno discusses lots of Auschwitz documents which contain the code words, and an unsuspecting reader might be duped into believing that Mattogno really did discuss (and rip to shreds) all the Auschwitz-related documentary evidence containing the code words. However, Mattogno deceptively omits the most crucial source on the use of the code word. Before discussing Mattogno's deception, I should say that I agree with Mattogno that "Sonderbehandlung" did not always mean "murder" in Auschwitz. Cost estimate for expansion of Birkenau [1, 2], first published by F. Freund, B. Perz and K. Stuhlpfarrer ("Der Bau des Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz-Birkenau", Zeitgeschichte, Jg. 20/1993, H. 5/6) mentions the following buildings:
16a) Delousing facility 1. for special treatment [...] Extra charges for heating, shower and disinfestation facilities RM 73,680.00 310,000.00 16b) 2. For the guard troops [...] Extra charges for heating, shower and disinfestation facilities RM 7,920 RM 30,000"

Building 16a, "delousing facility for special treatment", was actually the so-called Central Sauna, the purpose of which was not murder, but rather disinfestation of deportees and their belongings. Mattogno ties the term "Sonderbehandlung" to hygienic measures on this basis, but there is no justification for doing so. By this logic, not only the designation "delousing facility for special treatment" is tautological, but the second delousing facility is also for this "special treatment", so why the first one was called such, but not the second? The meaning of "special treatment" in this case can probably be explained on the basis of Eichmann's testimony. Eichmann claimed during his trial:
A. I would like to say the following about this. The term "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung) has various meanings. As Poliakov says, in Poliakov - Black or Red - I can give the page number right away...I have it in my files somewhere...he reproduces forms. On these forms it says, "Re: Special Treatment" - first of all for Poles suitable for Germanization (eindeutschungsfaehig), and the same word, special treatment, is also for Poles not suitable for Germanization, that is those to be sent from the Eastern Occupied Territories to the Generalgouvernement. So that is one meaning of special treatment (Sonderbehandlung). Special Treatment also means - I want to say this here in this context as well, although I know that it is known - also means all transports of Jews, the deportation transports.
Taken alone, this claim might be seen as a defensive lie. But if we assume that Eichmann was telling the truth, everything clicks into place: Central Sauna was a delousing facility for the deportees (perhaps specifically Jews), i.e. those who came into the camp as a part of "Sonderbehandlung". The second delousing facility is strictly for the guard troops. Thus, "Sonderbehandlung" was probably roughly synonimous with the term "Final Solution", which included not only immediate murder, but also deportation to the labor camps. (I should also note that in an earlier interrogation by Less, Eichmann claimed that everybody knew that "special treatment" was killing; this claim does not actually contradict Eichmann's later testimony. Eichmann did not claim that it meant only killing. However, it follows from this early interrogation that killing was the primary meaning of "Sonderbehandlung").

This hypothesis is certainly much more plausible than Mattogno's baseless musings about "hygienic measures". But it also shows that one must be careful not to make hasty conclusions about any document containing this term. For example, historians Goetz Aly and Heinrich Schwendemann both mistook "Entwesungsanlage fuer Sonderbehandlung", i.e. (relatively) innocent Central Sauna, for homicidal gassing facility, hinting that Speer, to whom the cost estimate had been sent, must have known about the gas chambers...

Given this, each document containing the code words should be examined on its own merits. And it so happens that there is a crucial group of documents in which "Sonderbehandlung" meant killing. The documents which Mattogno chose not to mention in his book despite their significance. These are the so-called prisoners' strength reports (Staerkemeldungen) of the women's camp at Birkenau. The typical Staerkemeldung looks like this:
Frauen-Lager, KL. Au. II
Abteilung III/a
BIa-b/B.II b.g.c/B.III                  Birkenau, den 8.10.1944


S t ae r k e m e l d u n g


Staerke am 7.10.1944                            38792 Hftl.
[Strength on 7 October 1944                     38792 prisoners]

Zugaenge am 7.10.1944
[Arrivals on 7 October 1944]

Einlieferungen                     7
[Entries                           7]

Uberstellungen                     1              8    "  
[Transfers                         1              8    "]

Abgange am 7.10.1944
[Departures on 7 October 1944]

Gestorben nat. Todes               7
[Natural deaths                    7]

S.B.                             1229

Entlassungen                       8
[Releases                          8]

Ueberstellungen                  1150           2394    "
[Transfers                       1150           2394    "]

SA.:         36406 Haeftl.
[Total:      36406 prisoners]
Only a handful of reports exist for the women's camp, all of those for 1944. I have most if not all of them in possession thanks to Prof. John Zimmerman. I also have several strength reports for camp BIIe in Birkenau. It seems that the reports for other parts of Birkenau have been destroyed. So, how do these reports help us? Note that the meaning of all entries is clear with one exception. What could S.B. mean? Prof. van Pelt argues, repeating the argument used in the book Nazi Mass Murder : A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas:
Rudolf asks at the bottom of this picture the question "'Sonderbehandlung' or 'Schonungsblock'?" The obvious answer is "Sonderbehandlung." The document Rudolf introduced lists two sub-classes of "Departures." The first lists "Died a natural death." The second category, S.B., is not defined. It seems plausible that it refers to "Died an unnatural death."
Prof. van Pelt's response is not fully satisfying. Since the reports cover only the women's camp, he cannot exclude that S.B. meant a special kind of transfer into into a block for convalescents (Schonungsblock) in another part of the camp (for example, because this block in the women's camp was full). Obviously, this alternative looks implausible, and yet it still should be excluded before proceeding further. So the first question we should ask is whether "S.B." meant "Sonderbehandlung" or "Schonungsblock".

There are three conclusive lines of evidence which establish that "S.B." meant nothing but "Sonderbehandlung" and killing.

1) The first argument is based on comparison of several documents mentioning the phrase "der Sonderbehandlung zugefuehrt" ("sent to special treatment") or variations thereof. In March 5, 1943 report of SS-Obersturmfuehrer Schwarz there is a mention of a number of arrived Jews who were "sent to S.B." ("der S.B. zugefuehrt"). The report was published in 1946 in Dokumenty i materialy, edited by Nachman Blumenthal. Unfortunately, there was a typo made by the publisher - the line which begins "Davon 200 Frauen..." has been accidentally typed instead of the first line of the second paragraph. According to information from Danuta Czech's Auschwitz Chronicle (1990 edn., p. 344), the first line contained the information about 632 men, of whom 517 were registered. The second line of the second paragraph, which contains the words "der S.B. zugefuehrt", pertains to those Jewish men who had not been selected. In another report by Schwarz, written on March 8, 1943, we read:
Am 5. und 7. Maerz trafen folgende juedische Haeftlingstransporte ein. Transport aus Berlin, Eingang 5. Maerz 43, Gesamtstaerke 1128 Juden. Zum Arbeitseinsatz gelangten 389 Maenner (Buna) und 96 Frauen. Sonderbehandelt wurden 151 Maenner und 492 Frauen und Kinder. Transport aus Breslau, Eingang 5.Maerz 43, Gesamtstaerke 1405 Juden. Zum Arbeitseinsatz gelangten 406 Maenner (Buna) und 190 Frauen. Sonderbehandelt wurden 125 Maenner und 684 Frauen und Kinder.
The structure here is the same: some people are selected as fit for labor, and the rest are "specially treated" (Sonderbehandelt). Thus it is proven that "S.B." was abbreviation for "Sonderbehandlung" and not "Schonungsblock". There are more documents which use the phrase "sent to special treatment", or its variations. One is Liebenschel's 28.3.1942 letter to concentration camp commanders concerning "Sonderbehandlung 14 f 13" (which was the name of "euthanasia" program in the camps):
Through the report of a camp commander it became known, that 42 of the 51 inmates selected for special treatment 14 f 13 became "fit for work" again after some time wich made their transfer for special treatment unnecessary [der Sonderbehandlung nicht zugefuehrt]. This shows that the selection of these inmates is not being effected in compliance with the rules laid down. Only those inmates who correspond to the conditions laid down and, this is the most important thing, who are no longer fit for work, are to be brought before the examining commission.In order to enable the concentration camps to carry out the tasks they are set, every inmate fit for work is to be put at the disposal of the camp. The camp commanders of the concentration camps are asked to give their special attention to this matter.
The second document is Liebenschel's 10.12.41 letter to concentration camp commanders on the same topic:
After the checks are finished, submit a report to the inspector of the concentration camps, the number of prisoners sent to Sonderbehandlung '14 f 13' [der Sonderbehandlung '14 f 13' zugefuehrten] is to be reported. The exact date of the arrival of the doctor-commission will be announced at time.
The third document is a telex from the Stapo office Nuernberg-Fuerth to the Stapo central office in Munich received on 24.1.42:
To the Stapo central office - to the hands of H[err?] Reg. Rat Schimmel Munich . ::-:: Secret = U R G E N T ::-:: present immeadiately. == Re.: Check of Soviet-Russian POWs - So far 2009 Soviet-Russians (652 officers and 1357 troops) were selected and sent to Sonderbehandlung [der Sonderbehandlung zugefuehrt] by the Einsatzkommandos of the Stapo office. - The coorperation with the commandant of the POWs in the Wehrkreis Roem. 13, Generalmajor Schemmel, is excellent, there were no difficulties whatsoever so far. == STAPO office Nuernberg-Fuerth. signed Otto Krim[inal]-Rat
Finally, it should be noted that "S.B." in Schwarz's telegram cannot mean "Schonungsblock" for purely linguistic reasons: since "Schonungsblock" is masculine (as opposed to "Sonderbehandlung", which is feminine), the phrase would have read as "dem S.B. zugefuehrt". Case closed. Note: This line of evidence has been single-handedly developed by Hans at RODOH.


2) Let's analyze what "S.B." could and could not have been. "S.B." is a kind of departure.
  • a) But it cannot cover transfers out of Auschwitz camp complex, because this is covered by "Transfers".
  • b) Neither can it cover natural deaths, because this is covered by "Natural deaths".
  • c) Neither can it cover releases, because this is covered by "Releases".
  • d) Neither can it cover transfers to another Auschwitz sub-camp like Auschwitz I or Monowitz.
  • This is proven by the fact that such transfers were either included in the "Transfers" category, or were mentioned explicitly. In the 8.11.44 report about the situation in Birkenau women's camp on 7.11.44 we read:
    gest. nat. Todes 2 S.B. 8 Ueberstellungen 86
    According to the Auschwitz Chronicle for that date, 30 of these transferred women were deported to other camps and 56 - to Auschwitz I (Czech relies on one of Auschwitz I strength reports). This means that transports to Auschwitz I (and, by induction, to other sub-camps) have been included in the general category "Transfers". In the 29.11.44 report about the situation in Birkenau women's camp on 28.11.44 we read:
    gestorben nat-Todes 4 S.B. 5 Ueberstellungen 141 Verlegt nach Auschw. 148
    This means that sometimes transports to Auschwitz I (and, by induction, to other sub-camps) had their own separate entries. All this means that "S.B." cannot cover these transfers.
  • e) Neither can it cover internal Birkenau transfers from one section to another.
  • In the 21.7.44 report about the situation in Birkenau women's camp on 20.7.44 we read:
    gestorben nat.Todes 6 S.B. 1 Entlassungen 17 verl. b.BII/e 7
    Reproduction quality is not the best here, so, just to be sure, here's an excerpt from the strength report of section BII/e for that date, in which you can see that 7 women did arrive from the women's camp:
    Note that the transfer of 7 women to section BII/e (also part of Birkenau) is covered explicitly. This means that S.B. cannot cover these transfers.
Since all the possibilities have been exhausted, "S.B." can only mean an unnatural death. Case closed, for the second time now.

3) Edwin Black in his book IBM and the Holocaust mentions a decode key for concentration camp card index files (p. 365; the archival reference is in the notes). I wrote to Mr. Black and he kindly supplied me with a copy:
SB = Sonderbehandlung. Case closed once and for all. Notably, this list contains the entry "Exekution", which obviously means a legal execution. "SB", thus, was an extrajudicial execution.
We have established that "S.B." in the prisoner's strength reports meant extrajudicial execution (i.e., simply murder), and was an abbreviation for "Sonderbehandlung", not "Schonungsblock".

What does Mattogno say about these reports in his book? Absolutely nothing.

It cannot be argued that he doesn't know about them - everybody with a real interest in Auschwitz history knows about them. It cannot be argued that he thought that "S.B." meant "Schonungsblock", and thus chose not to include these documents. Obviously, since "S.B." in these documents has always been assumed to be "Sonderbehandlung" by the historians, he should have mentioned these documents if only to refute such an interpretation.

Therefore, by omitting any mention of these prominent documents Carlo Mattogno has engaged in a gross and unforgivable deception. We hope to treat Mattogno's other arguments from this and other books in the future, but it has already been established that one cannot rely on him to present the evidence fairly.

Zündel's Defence Lawyer Removed By Court

Just as Sergey predicted, Sylvia Stolz is history:
German court removes defence lawyer from trial of alleged Holocaust denier Canadian Press Friday, March 31, 2006,BERLIN (AP)
- A German court removed a defence lawyer Friday from the trial of far-right activist Ernst Zundel, charged with denying the Holocaust, accusing the lawyer of trying to sabotage the proceedings.
Zundel, 66, who emigrated to Canada from Germany in 1958 and lived in Toronto and Montreal until 2001, returned to court Thursday to face charges of incitement, libel and disparaging the dead. He went on trial before a state court in Mannheim in November, but proceedings have bogged down in a string of motions, objections and interruptions from his defence team.
On Friday, the superior state court in Karlsruhe said it suspected defence lawyer Sylvia Stolz of illegally obstructing proceedings "with the sole goal of sabotaging the trial . . . and making it into a farce." Stolz has a week to appeal the decision. Prosecutors accuse Zundel of years of anti-Semitic activities including denying the Holocaust - a crime in Germany - in documents and on the Internet. The presiding judge halted the trial on March 9 to ask for Stolz's removal after she denounced the court as a "tool of foreign domination" and described the Jews as an "enemy people" in earlier sessions.

Lesson #1: Don't listen to Horst Mahler

Lesson #2: It sometimes helps to find a defence lawyer least like yourself. Female was a good start; shame Stolz turned out to be a barking-mad Moonbat.

Oh yeah, this got posted before the doofuses at CODOH realised their hero just lost another lawyer. Heh.

Update: The Cesspit finally notices their hero's lawyer is in trouble.

Poland Seeks Designation Change For Auschwitz

This in from The Washington Post, The Guardian,BBC and dozens more newspapers:
WARSAW, Poland -- Poland wants to change the official name of the Auschwitz death camp on the U.N.'s world heritage directory to emphasize that it was run by German Nazis, not Poles, an official said Thursday.
The government requested that UNESCO, the U.N.'s educational and cultural body, change the name from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau," Culture Ministry spokesman Jan Kasprzyk said.
Polish officials have complained in the past that foreign media sometimes refer to Auschwitz - a death camp located in occupied Poland where Nazi Germans killed 1.5 million people during World War II - as a "Polish concentration camp."

The casual description of German concentration camps on Polish soil as 'Polish camps' has long caused considerable offense to many Poles. If the initiative helps avoid some of these slips of the tongue, so much the better, yet I fear that the English language being what it is, the phrase will keep on recurring.

Connoisseurs of fact-checking and accuracy might be intrigued to know that of the three media outlets cited above, only the BBC got the numbers right:
More than a million people, almost all Jews, died there between 1940 and 1945.
In 1991, Franciszek Piper of the Auschwitz State Museum authored a work, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz , which gave the death toll as 1.1 million. Since then, new research has indicated that 80,000 more Hungarian Jews than were previously assumed survived the selections during May to July 1944 to be deported to other concentration camps. Piper himself demolished the attempt by Spiegel editor Fritjof Meyer to reduce the Auschwitz death toll to under half a million on the basis of dubious source interpretations.

Thursday, March 30, 2006

News From The Death Factory


Anyone acquainted with punk rock will be well aware of the role played by Nazism and the concentration camps in providing shock value and confronting the complacency of late 1970s Britain. Quite apart from The Sex Pistol's historically ignorant but symbolically powerful 'Belsen Was A Gas', the leading exponents of such imagery were undoubtedly the founding fathers of industrial music, Throbbing Gristle. With tracks such as 'Zyklon B Zombie' and the slogan 'Music from the Death Factory' emblazoned on their debut album 'Second Annual Report', not to mention haute couture camouflage uniforms, Throbbing Gristle used Nazi imagery to provoke and confound, all while adopting the style and modus operandi of a business corporation. Because of the controversies they caused, they share with Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf the honour of a mention in Hansard, the parliamentary records of the British House of Commons, in which they were described as 'wreckers of civilisation', later the title of an excellent biography by Simon Ford.

A news story from Spiegel's online English edition would probably leave Genesis P.Orridge tickled pink. It turns out that the Topf und Soehne factory in Erfurt, abandoned after the bankruptcy of the East German successor firm in 1994, has become a punk squat. The 'Topf Squat' is not only a well-known venue for punk gigs, but also houses informational displays drawing attention to the history of the site, located a short walk outside the Erfurt city centre in an industrial park. The squatters, in residence since 2001, have also produced a virtual tour of the factory, highlighting the involvement of Topf und Soehne in the construction of the crematoria at Auschwitz, the use of forced labour by the company, the knowledge of 'ordinary' employees of the extermination process, as well as related subjects such as the role of the Reichsbahn and antisemitism.

Moves are afoot to transform the site into a permanent home for a travelling exhibition
on Topf und Soehne which was organised by the staff of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial and which has been displayed in several German cities to considerable acclaim. Though the local Land, Thurinigia, has decided not to contribute the necessary funds, the city authorities in Erfurt have been prompted by the exhibition to begin planning the renovation of at least part of the industrial site. The squatters, meanwhile, are being encouraged to come up with plans for what they themselves would like to do with the site.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Zündel is doomed...

... with an attorney like this:
The defense rejects the accusations against Ernst Zündel, a citizen of the German Reich. This is not a legal prosecution under the laws of the Reich or any other legal system. It is an exercise of power that is illegal under international law, by a puppet government called “Federal Republic of Germany.”[1] To use the expression coined by the professor of international law, Dr. Carlo Schmid, the Federal Republic of Germany is an “Organizational Form of a Modality of Foreign Rule.” Henceforth we shall refer to this foreign occupation government as “OMF-FRG.”

Irving Meme Spreads

Two different anti-denier bloggers have separately posted links to what might well be a fast-spreading meme, 'specially now we're adding to the trackbacks, heh heh.

Both Orac's Respectful Insolence and Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial picked up on an album review in the NME which opened with the classic line

Aside from the deaf or those in a level of denial up there with David Irving's idiot pronouncements on the Holocaust, everyone's aware that we live in great times for music.


Not that we're trying to claim prescience or anything, but one of the tag-lines we played around with when scheming up this blog was:

Some countries lock up Holocaust deniers... but we believe in free speech. We prefer just to laugh at them.

Irving's recent mishap might have attracted a certain abstract sympathy from libertarians (among whom be us, let it be reiterated), but in his home country, such feelings have been strongly tempered by a sense that the old fool really has become little more than a figure of fun.

No, he doesn't deserve to be in jail. He should have been laughed out of polite society years ago.

Monday, March 27, 2006

No comments necessary

Here are responses of "revisionists" to the arson attack on the Holocaust History Project office:
Official CODOH forum
Why would Revisionists want them silenced? Are they kidding? Their material is a blessing to Revisionists efforts. Their laughable 'documents' and the irrational material on their website have been utterly demolished by Revisionists, each and every one.
"a pair of military uniforms worn by a judge at the Dachau trials". What's up with that? Do these clowns run around in WWII uniforms?
There has been quite a lot of cases during the last years of "hate crimes" being perpetrated by the "victims", and I wouldn't put it past Mazal et.al in this case. I mean, their "evidence" and "refutations" are mainly made out of thin air, so they could easily replace the old ones.
Two thousand (2,000) books? I would imagine many of them would be Holocaust books. Holocaust books in the future will be the testament to the scope of the fraud. As things start to spiral downwards for the Holocaust community they will be making a effort to burn their own books. You know, attempts at erasing the record. Who knows, maybe the process is already in motion. They could even have mass burnings and then try to capitalize on it.
What if it was a group of Jewish lesbians imitating the hate crime at Claremont college in California.
Denier at RODOH
The truth is that the arsonists are Mazal, Keren et al.
This is their surrender. They found out that there is no prove for the h-cheese.
Another denier at RODOH
Jews' are famous for arson.
:)

Sunday, March 26, 2006

The Arolsen Archive Controversy: Cold Comfort for Deniers

Today's Washington Post brings an update on the spat over the records housed at the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, Germany. The story first broke just over a month ago, when it was revealed that more than 20 countries were calling on Germany to open up access to the Arolsen archive to both historians and relatives.

The archive, administered since 1955 by the Federal Republic of Germany, contains records created by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) after 1945 through their efforts to trace and locate the countless displaced persons, refugees and concentration camps. Reputedly, over 17 million names are contained in these records.

So why are the Arolsen archives of interest to both historians of the Holocaust as well as to Holocaust deniers? For more, see below the fold.

The reason, it appears, for the obstinacy of both the ICRC and the German government lies in the strict privacy laws which govern access to German archives. If you've ever wondered why Christopher Browning and other leading historians have to write of Hans K. or invent pseudonyms for eyewitnesses, then it's because of German data protection law. This applies both to victims as well as perpetrators, with the result that unconvicted or acquitted SS men accused of war crimes in German courts cannot be named by historians, even though their identities can be freely established by resort to the SS personnel files available in the US National Archives.

From today's WaPo story, it would appear that the ITS is also lagging behind in its primary function, with an alleged backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases requiring identification. This hurts not only those seeking to establish the fate of missing relatives, but also might undermine the compensation cases brought by survivors under existing schemes. Yet it appears that the German government might fear an avalanche of new claims should the archives be opened.

But compensation is a second-order issue to the main controversy surrounding access to ITS files. This concerns access for historians. As historians already labour under incredibly tight restrictions on privacy in other German archives such as the former Zentrale Stelle für Landesjustizverwaltung in Ludwigsburg, which houses the records of West German war crimes investigations, there are already precedents for how privacy concerns can be managed. So far, because of German opposition, no agreement has been reached among the 11-nation oversight committee in charge of Arolsen concerning establishing even a working group of scholars to assess the value of the records for historians.

Among the research centres that have protested the lack of access to Arolsen include the University of Amsterdam and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The irony of the entire controversy is that many files from Arolsen have long been copied to other archives, including the US National Archives, and through then, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

So what do these existing collections contain? The 189 reels of microfilm at NARA alone contain records of some but not all German concentration camps, but more interestingly also an incomplete set of deportation lists from Berlin and several other German cities. They therefore help document the number of Jews transported to Auschwitz, including thousands of Berliners deported during the so-called Fabrikaktion of early 1943, about which Wolf Gruner has recently written at length.

Moreover, other Arolsen files have been copied to Yad Vashem Archives. It was in these files, for example, that Christian Gerlach found a copy of a 1945 report indicating the numbers of arrivals at Auschwitz during 1944 who were selected for work, thereby clarifying the fate of Jews deported during the Hungarian Action.

Thus, the ITS files offer cold comfort for Holocaust Deniers such as Ernst Zundel, who claims that the Arolsen materials prove a far lower death toll inside German concentration camps.

The value of the Arolsen archive to researchers does not lie in the opening-up of files relating to the main concentration camps, since most of these are already available for public access at NARA. Moreover, the detailed records for many camps like Majdanek and Neuengamme were destroyed, never to be recovered. Nor does Arolsen contain materials relating to the Aktion Reinhard camps. It cannot be ruled out that the Arolsen archive may also contain more documents related to the fate of Jewish deportees like the Glaser report mentioned above. But this is not the only material that Arolsen holds.

Rather, the ITS archives could also help to clarify the fates of literally millions of other deportees, especially non-Jewish forced labourers from Western and Eastern Europe, but also the victims of ethnic expulsions in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. Arolsen is therefore of concern not just to historians of the Holocaust, but to historians of the Second World War and its aftermath as a whole. Research into the deportation of well over 7 million foreign workers to Germany, the postwar movements of Displaced Persons, repatriaton programs and the ethnic expulsions will all be immeasurably enriched by access to the ITS files.

In this sense, Holocaust deniers expose their lack of imagination and lack of humanity when they concentrate solely on the fate of European Jews, ignoring the fate of millions of non-Jews who also suffered because of Nazi policies of deportation. Nor do they seem as concerned with the fate of ethnic Germans expelled from east of the Iron Curtain. Perhaps, in this last case, because it is easier to spout superficially sourced figures than to do proper research.

Update: see a reply to AAARGH here.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Historians Behind Bars

Nick has pointed me to the site of an organization called "Historians Behind Bars", aiming to decriminalize the Holocaust denial. I fully and unequivocally support such a decriminalization, so my beef is not with HBB's aim. Rather, the problem is their name.

What "historians" are behind bars?

None of the deniers currently imprisoned is a historian - certainly not Rudolf, Zuendel or Verbeke. Irving used to be a historian. He no longer is. At some point he became a liar and a fraud (as has been established during the Irving v. Lipstadt trial), which is incompatible with being a historian.

Even if one has an opinion that Irving is still a historian, then the organization should have been named "A historian and several wackos behind the bars".

So what does this organization, which starts off with a lie, hopes to achieve, really?

Our First Link

Our first link, courtesy of Respectful Insolence. Forgive us for the childish excitement, but it's early days. Oh, okay then, full disclosure: Orac is a mate of Andrew Mathis. Still, it's fun to see part of our manifesto cited somewhere else on the net.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Carlo Mattogno and interrogations of Topf engineers

In March of 1946 the Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH arrested four men directly responsible for the ovens and gas chambers of Auschwitz. They were engineers Kurt Pruefer, Karl Schultze, Fritz Sander and Gustav Braun, employees of "Topf und Soehne", the German firm specializing in construction of crematoria. All of them were interrogated at length. Sander soon died, and the rest were sentenced in 1948 to 25 years of labor camps. Pruefer died in 1952, Schultze and Braun were amnestied in 1955 and deported to East Germany.

Protocols of their interrogations were gathering dust in the archives until the beginning of 1990s. In 1992 Russian prosecutor's office refused to rehabilitate Pruefer, Schultze and Braun, confirming their sentence. In 1993 and 1994 British historian Gerald Fleming published several short excerpts from the interrogations.

One particular passage from these excerpts caught Holocaust deniers' attention.

The leading "revisionist" Carlo Mattogno in his response to Prof. John Zimmerman wrote:

During the interrogation of 19 March, K.Pruefer declared:

"I spoke about the enormous strain on the overused furnaces. I told Chief Engineer Sander: I am worried whether the furnaces can stand the excessive usage. In my presence two cadavers were pushed into one muffle instead of one cadaver. The furnaces could not stand the strain." [my italics]

[...]

The attempt to simultaneously cremate two cadavers failed because "the furnaces could not stand the strain."

When the topic came up at The Cesspit, I e-mailed Mattogno and asked if he had the scanned images of the protocols. He answered that he couldn't deliver them to a third party, but he was kind enough to send a scanned excerpt from Pruefer's interrogation in question, which you can see below.

He admitted:

As far as I knew the Russian language, I understand that the passage you point out is ambiguous.

And also added:

However it is important to consider that both Pruefer and Sander stated that the crematory ovens in Birkenau could incinerate one corpse per muffle per hour.

Information from the second quoted sentence, while strange, does mean that the testimonies weren't simply concocted by the Soviets. After all, if the Soviets would coerce these engineers, the latter would testify about miracle crematoria destroying 1,500 to 3,000 corpses per day, as the Polish-Soviet act of Roman Dawidowski et al., and the official Soviet Nuremberg report had stated. It should be noted that this low estimate was contradicted by Pruefer himself, who testified about witnessing the succesful cremation of two bodies per muffle (more about it here, see part VIII for extensive quotes and analysis), and also by Pruefer's memo of September 8, 1942.

The first quote is crucial, since Mattogno admits that the passage is "ambiguous", and thus cannot be used as evidence for "revisionist" case. So, what does the passage really say?

I told Sander that I was present at a test run of the ovens in the crematorium in Auschwitz concentration camp; that I came to a conclusion that the crematoria [sic] do not cope with such an amount of corpses that were there for incineration, because the crematoria ovens were of low capacity.

With this I gave Sander an example - that in Auschwitz, in my presence, two-three corpses were being pushed into crematoria openings /muffles/ instead of one per opening, and even then the crematorium's ovens did not cope with that load, because there were too many corpses for incineration.

So what was actually said is that there were too many bodies in the camp for furnaces to effectively cope with (those were 6 muffles of the old crematorium - Birkenau crematoria with 46 muffles had not been built yet), not that several bodies couldn't have been burned at the same time. This is also confirmed by testimony of Sander, taken on March 13, 1946:

Pruefer then gave me an example that in his presence two-three corpses were being put into each muffle, and even then they did not cope with the load, because there were too many corpses for incineration in the concentration camp. (Emphasis mine - SR)

Thus, these passages do not support "revisionist" argument about impossibility of multiple cremations in Auschwitz. The corpses, according to the engineers, were being cremated in batches of two or three. As we have seen, Pruefer also testified that the ovens worked succesfully after burning two corpses per muffle. Neither Sander, nor Pruefer have mentioned any oven failures resulting specifically from multiple cremations. And, in fact, a document from "Topf" archive supports these testimonies. Fritz Sander wrote on September 14, 1942 (transl. by Roberto Muehlenkamp; emphasis mine):

The high demand of incineration ovens for concentration camps - which lately has shown especially in what concerns Auschwitz, and which according to Mr. Pruefer's report again led to an order of 7 three-muffle ovens - led me to examine the question whether the current oven system with muffle for the above-mentioned entities is the right thing. In my opinion things don't go fast enough in the muffle ovens to remove a huge number of corpses within a desirably short time. Thus one helps out with a multitude of ovens or muffles and by stuffing full the individual muffle with several corpses, without thereby solving the basic source [of the problem], i.e. the deficiencies of the muffle system.

(To overcome the difficulties of the muffle system Sander proposed a super-crematorium for mass cremation of corpses, which would far surpass Auschwitz ovens. Fortunately, his plan was never implemented.)

When I first received the excerpts from Mattogno, I thought that he had them at the time when he wrote a response to Zimmerman, in 2000, and accused him of being deceptive. I didn't know that his colleague Juergen Graf got the protocols only in February of 2002, so I was wrong.

However, it turns out that even after stating that the passage in question was ambiguous, Mattogno still peddles the same old argument! In Auschwitz Lies [large PDF] he simply reiterates the argument on p. 111, in order to show that Zimmerman used Fleming's translation dishonestly. In fact, Fleming's incorrect translation is simply vague and ambiguous, so it cannot be stated that Zimmerman's use of it was dishonest. On p. 112 Mattogno adds:

I later found out that Fleming's translation ("enormous strain," "the furnaces could not stand the strain") is wrong, too. Particularly the sentence "pjeci nje spravljalis' s toi nagruzkoi" does not mean "the furnaces could notstand the strain" but "did not cope with that load," that is to say, to the load of two to three corpses inserted into one muffle; "nagruzka" designates in fact the "load" of the oven. Pruefer therefore meant that the ovens did not succeed to cremate such a load in an economically advantageous manner if compared to a load of merely a single body per muffle. This does, of course, not alter the fact of Zimmerman's own manipulations.

Here Mattogno obviously refers to our brief exchange. What he doesn't mention is that he himself branded Pruefer's statement as "ambiguous" (although actually, it is not; but it is clearly useless for deniers). The "load" meant is emphatically not the load of 2 or 3 bodies in a muffle, but rather the "load" of all the corpses in the camp, as demonstrated above. It is flabbergasting that Mattogno could misinterpret the plain meaning of the text in such a manner.

Predictably, his buddy Germar Rudolf also uses faulty translation and misinterprets the text badly in the same book (pp.274, 275).

And these are two best "revisionists" out there!

Update: It is really not surprising that lemmings at The Cesspit swallow Mattogno's and Rudolf's arguments, hook, line and sinker.

So Much For The 'Extortion Racket'

So much for the Holocaust as extortion racket. An article in The Forward proves otherwise. Last week, the Hungarian government finally agreed a compensation scheme for surviving relatives of Hungarian Jews murdered during the Second World War. The amount? For each relative that died, just $1,800. An earlier program paid out just $150 per parent and $70 per sibling.

And how much is your life insurance?

Contrary to popular myth, the deportation of Hungarian Jews in the spring and early summer of 1944 was a crime carried out largely by the Hungarian government, not the German occupation force. Eichmann and his helpers were on hand to 'supervise', but the men in uniforms who herded Hungarian citizens onto a mix of German and Hungarian trains belonged to Hungarian Gendarmerie. So the fact that payments of some small kind have been finally made acknowledges this responsibility.

Because of property expropriations made by Eastern Bloc countries on a class basis, as well as the expropriation of property owned by ethnic Germans expelled after 1945, many East European countries have been extremely reluctant to compensate survivors for loss of their homes and businesses. Many Hungarian Jews will have received compensation payments as survivors of Nazi slave labour camps.

Yet as German historians Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly showed in their 2002 book Das letzte Kapitel, the proceeds of 'Magyarisation' were the main motivation for the Horthy regime to cooperate with the SS in deporting over 430,000 Hungarian Jews before the transports stopped in July 1944. Gerlach and Aly's claims have been substantianted by the work of Hungarian historians, who strongly emphasise material greed as the prime cause of Hungarian complicity in genocide.

Aly has since gone on to stir up controversy over the conclusions of 2005's Hitlers Volksstaat, which argues that the expropriation of Jewish property across Europe helped fund part of the Nazi war effort. By levying burdensome occupation costs, the Nazi regime brought about a 'sparing of the German taxpayer' (Schonung des deutschen Steuerzahlers - the phrase was Göring’s from November 1941). In today's terms, the amount of money seized by Nazi Germany was much less than the amount paid out in compensation by the Federal Republic of Germany since 1954.

Quite aside from exposing Denier claims of 'Holocaust greed' as fiction, the Hungarian case poses another interesting challenge to Denier myths. The 'Hungarian Action' from May to July 1944 brought over 430,000 Jews on more than 140 trains to Auschwitz, of whom 110,000 were selected as slave labourers and transported onwards to practically every single concentration camp in occupied Europe. Over 320,000, however, were selected for the gas chambers and murdered.

Proving a rightful claim to the Hungarian government's compensation scheme will be the work of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also known as the Claims Conference. I've seen their research staff at work; it is a job which requires considerable documentation and proof. And therein lies the rub.

No matter how hard Holocaust Deniers try, no amount of fancy aerial photo-interpretation, disputing of eyewitnesses or claims of forensic improbability will get around the fact that the trail for hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews went cold at Auschwitz. Where did they go? Hungary was a Soviet ally after 1945. No, they did not emigrate; they were murdered.

Of 825,000 Jews in 'Greater Hungary' before 1944, approximately 500,000 died, at Kamenets-Podolsk in 1941, inside Hungarian Army forced labour battalions and during the occupation, as well as in Auschwitz or other German concentration camps. Around 300,000 survived, the majority of these escaped deportation. Today, after border changes and emigration, especially in the wake of the 1956 Uprising,there are less than 100,000 Jews in Hungary. But by no means all will be able to make a claim. Since the claims are being paid only for those whose relatives died, many tens of thousands of Jews who resided in Budapest, which was not as affected by the deportations as provincial Hungary, will be automatically excluded.

It will be interesting to see what the take-up rate for this compensation scheme turns out to be. So much, methinks, for the extortion racket.

What They Won't Tell You At CODOH

Somehow, I doubt Hargis/Hannover will ever link over CODOH to this particular story from the Middle East Times in his pro-Iranian Zeal.

Former Iranian president attacks Ahmadinejad over Holocaust
By Stefan Smith
AFP
Published March 1, 2006

Iran's former reformist president Mohammad Khatami has described the Holocaust as a "historical reality" - a stinging attack on his controversial and revisionist successor Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
"We should speak out if even a single Jew is killed. Don't forget that one of the crimes of Hitler, Nazism and German national socialism was the massacre of innocent people, among them many Jews," the cleric said in comments carried in the Iranian press on Wednesday. The Holocaust, he asserted, should be recognized "even if this historical reality has been misused and there is enormous pressure on the Palestinian people".

Ahmadinejad has caused international outrage by insisting that the Holocaust - the killing of an estimated 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during World War II in death camps and elsewhere - was a myth used to justify the creation of Israel. He has also said that the Jewish state "must be wiped off the map" or moved as far away as Alaska - comments that have provoked anger in the West and even condemnation from the UN Security Council. Ahmadinejad's violent rhetoric has also served to increase tensions over Iran's atomic energy drive, seen in the West as a mask for weapons development.
Khatami served as Iran's president from 1997 to 2005, and attempted to open up Iran to the West and initiate a "dialogue among civilizations" - in stark contrast to the ultraconservative agenda of Ahmadinejad. The mild-mannered former president, who has shied away from the political limelight since leaving office, also asserted Muslims were not out to persecute Jews. "The persecution of Jews, just like Nazism, is a Western phenomenon. In the east, we have always lived side by side with them. And we follow a religion that states that the death of an innocent person is the death of all of humanity," Khatami said.
He also argued that it was of little importance "whether the number killed [during the Holocaust] was high or not" - but at the same time went on to accuse Israel's leaders as being "victims of fascism and practicing fascist policies today".
Ahmadinejad also came under attack from the prominent and centrist Shargh newspaper, which complained that "the Holocaust has, as wished for by the president, become a topic of our foreign policy".
"The Jewish question was never a problem for Iran or Islam, and is a Christian-European problem," the paper argued. "Don't we have enough with the nuclear question, human rights, free elections and political in-fighting, so do we need to add another problem to that?" it said, saying that Iran would be better off "thinking of the creation of a Palestinian state rather than the destruction of Israel". But an editorial in the ultra-hardline Kayhan newspaper, a firm supporter of Ahmadinejad, continued to champion Holocaust revisionism. The president's controversial remarks, the paper said, were "like a dagger in the side of the US and its allies".
Iran's top-selling daily, Hamshahri, is also running a contest for cartoons of the Holocaust in a tit-for-tat move over European newspaper publications of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that have angered Muslims worldwide. And Iran's foreign ministry is sticking by its plan to host a conference on the Holocaust - an idea that British Prime Minister Tony Blair has described as "shocking, ridiculous, stupid". Last month Iran's Ambassador to Portugal Mohammed Taheri also questioned the Holocaust, telling Portuguese public radio that "to incinerate 6 million people, you'd need around 15 years". Iran has nevertheless offered to send a team of "independent investigators" to the former Nazi death camps.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Meet Moonbat


Meet Moonbat. He's a typical Holocaust Denier. He has genuine learning difficulties and reading comprehension problems, since he's, you guessed it, from the Moon. Though some actually doubt the existence of the Moon and claim it's just another Hoax. But we know better, don't we?
You'll be seeing a lot of Moonbat in the coming weeks and months, so I wanted to get the introductions out the way early, since we're all friends round here (so far).

Told you we'd have fun.

[Addendum: just to clarify, "moonbat" is usually a word used by the far-right to describe the left. We began using it in 2006 to denote crazy Holocaust deniers, who are found among far-left and far-right extremists, certainly not meaning that Holocaust denial is somehow peculiar to the far-left (in fact, in our experience the far-right deny the Holocaust much more frequently). If anything, our dear Moonbat's surname is Wingnut. So, meet Moonbat the Wingnut!]

Intention and Explanation

This is where we begin.

To choose the title of a twenty-five-year-old essay by Tim Mason to headline the first post of this blog might at first glance seem obscure. But although Mason was writing a quarter of a century ago, his exposition of the debate been the rival intentionalist and structuralist or functionalist schools of interpretation of the Third Reich retains a power and impact which has rarely been bettered since. Moreover, this essay, to be found in the collection Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, Cambridge, 1996, was one of the few occasions in which the leading historian of Nazi Germany of his era tackled the subject of the mass murder of European Jewry, the Holocaust. Like many historians of the 1960s generation that began to study the Third Reich intensively, Mason concentrated his efforts on the period leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. He openly admitted that he was psychologically incapable of confronting the horrors of Nazism at war; a psychic block which some of his friends believe may have contributed to his tragic decision to take his own life in 1990.

Holocaust deniers would only snort at this tragedy. How could anyone be so affected by atrocities that never happened? To the doyens of 'historical revisionism', Mason's personal tragedy would become transmogrified into a far-right morality tale: look, see, the psychic damage that is being done because of this incessant propaganda about the Holocaust!

Yet they have reckoned without two things. The first is that the study of the Third Reich consists of much more than the forensics of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. I would almost wager that few leading 'revisionists' other than David Irving would even be aware of Mason's existence, let alone his writings. Holocaust denial fails not only as an account of the Holocaust, but of the Hitler era as a whole; it is a curious, stunted, impoverished freak-show of a history that has nothing to do with the rich historiography of Nazi Germany.

The second omission that 'historical revisionists' have made is to abstract their obsessions with the gas-chambers from the surrounding context of Nazi persecution and mass-murder of European Jews. They proffer interpretations of the death-camps and, more rarely, of Nazi Judenpolitik, that bear no resemblance to the reality of wie es eigentlich gewesen war, how it really happened. Time and time again one hears a litany from Holocaust deniers - it is alleged that six million Jews died in the gas chambers. Wrong. They confuse the 'Hollycaust' of media myth with the grubby reality of genocide; a reality that encompassed deliberately-induced starvation, epidemic diseases incubated inside ghettos and concentration camps; mass executions by rifles, machine-guns and the Genickschuss.

As a practising historian of the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia at war, I hope to dedicate some of my postings to this collective blog to discussing the genuine revisionist controversies that make my chosen profession and field so exciting. All historiography barring the first draft of history - the newspapers of the day - is by its very nature revisionist, challenging our previous interpretations of the past, and in the process hopefully forcing us to think through the events afresh. Since long before I began researching in this field, the study of the Third Reich and the Holocaust has proven especially controversial. Perhaps beginning with Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in the 1960s, these controversies have come thicker and faster. From the intentionalist-functionalist debate of the late 1970s, the field moved on to disputing the tasks of the Einsatzgruppen five years later, and soon after to the Historikersteit of 1987. Before the end of the Cold War, German historians were tearing into Götz Aly and Susanne Heim for daring to highlight 'The Economics of the Final Solution'. They did so again after unification when Aly and Heim published Vordenker der Vernichtung in 1991, since translated into English as Architects of Annihilation. Five years later came the turn of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Hitler's Willing Executioners. This in turn generated a follow-on controversy over Norman Finkelstein's critique and subsequent publication of The Holocaust Industry. Finkelstein himself then intervened into the latest controversy, over Jan Tomas Gross's Neighbours and the pogrom of Jedwabne in eastern Poland scant weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Holocaust Controversies was set up in part to discuss these debates between historians as well as news related to them. Since both myself and some of my fellow contributors have interests in similar controversies over the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, we will from time to time also discuss these debates, which offer so many remarkable parallels and sharp contrasts with the historiography of Nazi Germany.

But this blog has an additional, perhaps more important purpose, namely to confront the arguments of Holocaust Revisionism and 'historical revisionism' in general. It may come as no surprise to learn that professional, mainstream historians have paid relatively little attention to what they regard as the ramblings of cranks. I can testify to meeting expert witnesses for the defense in the David Irving libel trial, world-famous professors, who have never heard of the leading Italian Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno.

Yet one only needs type in a concentration camp-related Google search to be met with a barrage of hits to 'Revisionist' websites. In this sense, professional historians have left the internet wide open for colonisation by deniers. Valiant efforts have been made by many, starting with the 1990s Nizkor project and the flame wars on alt.revisionism, to battle deniers online. We have linked to many such organisations, not least the explicit anti-denier site The Holocaust History Project as well as the implicit rebuttal of many a denier argument, the Aktion Reinhard Camps website. Some of the contributors to Holocaust Controversies are members of both organisations, yet this blog is independent of them both, and remains the expression of our personal views, not those of any corporate body.

The contributors here met online at the RODOH forum, the only place on the internet where there is Real Open Debate On the Holocaust. Other internet forums have either censored denial, or censor its rebuttal, but RODOH has allowed deniers and anti-deniers to argue with each other freely and openly.

The decision to set up Holocaust Controversies was a simple one: a blog allows forms of expression which a forum cannot; by its very nature, it demands more from the writers than even the best php-ed bulletin board can ever do. We are not, then, fleeing a denier onslaught; we can still be found hanging out over at RODOH. Rather, we hope that the medium of a blog will allow us to hone, refine and develop our arguments, and to present material that falls in between the quickfire postings of a forum, and longer essays that might find homes elsewhere.

In engaging with denier arguments, some might charge that we pay them too much respect. Yet this reckons without the insidiousness of what are otherwise absurd debating-points. Like it or not, Holocaust Denial must be confronted. In spite of the work done by web projects and academics to demolish Holocaust Denier arguments, 'revisionist' literature is mushrooming yearly and by no means all arguments have been deconstructed and exposed. We therefore will from time to time post reviews, critiques and ongoing debates about the 'classics' of 'Revisionist' literature, which we hope readers may find instructive, even perhaps enlightening as to the inadequacies of 'Revisionist' argumentation.

Yet we also intend to have fun here. So much of what is posted on the internet as 'Revisionism' is so ludicrously absurd that we will also respond with laughter. In part, we were compelled to set up this blog in order to maintain a record of the illogicalities, inanities and insanities to be found on the heavily censored, hyper-moderated circle-jerk known as The Revisionist Forum over at the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust website. That we informally call this The Cesspit will persist so long as this forum remains censored and inaccessible for us. Most contributors here have either been banned from CODOH forum or have not even bothered trying to post there, knowing full well they would not survive much longer than.... well, you can probably guess.

'Revisionists' might charge that the playing-field is not level; that 'Revisionist' writers are hampered in their research efforts, persecuted, prosecuted and thrown into jail. Let it be stated from the outset that we do not endorse censorship of any kind; nor are we in favour of anti-Holocaust Denial laws being passed in Britain or the United States. We would prefer that continental countries such as Germany, Austria and France did not make martyrs out of Deniers. Yet it should not be forgotten that Holocaust Deniers are convicted and sentenced for hate-speech, not for 'revising history'. No functionalists can be found in jail, as much as some within my profession might like to lock up mavericks like Christian Gerlach or Götz Aly.

In Britain, the bar for incitement is set relatively high; as it should be. We will show no compunction or mercy towards revisionists who express what we feel are racist or antisemitic views; we will accuse and criticise them accordingly. It is however up to others to decide whether their racism has breached the laws of the land in question. As far as we are concerned, it is beyond proven that David Irving, for example, is a racist antisemite; yet he would not be convicted in a British court.

Therefore, we will state the following: we are paying Holocaust Denial the respect of engaging its arguments on a scientific, historiographical basis. No others. If we discuss history, comments from readers are welcome on the history, from all viewpoints. Should readers post tired old saws about how many 'revisionists' are jailed in their comments on history posts, their posts will be edited or deleted at the administrators' whim. This is editing and moderating, not censorship.

We will, however, also discuss the politics of Holocaust controversies and Holocaust Denial. Readers are welcome to comment on the proprieties of censorship, jail sentences and the International Conspiracy in response to those posts.

In similar fashion, we reserve the right to use the terms Holocaust Denial and 'Revisionism' interchangeably. This is our blog, after all.

With that, let the blogging begin.