The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 4)

In Part 3 of this series, we highlighted Sanning's false dating of Nazi demographic data. This fourth part looks at two other forms of distortion. Firstly, we highlight Sanning's misrepresentation of eyewitness testimony to the Eichmann trial. Secondly we examine his misuse of Jewish enclyclopaedia sources.

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Sanning (p.41) discusses the eyewitness testimony given by Zvi Pachter in the Eichmann trial, and cites Pachter’s description of Jews being force marched “four abreast in long columns” across the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line. However, Sanning omits to mention these parts of the testimony:

Q. Of the two thousand who began the march, how many reached the border?

A. Few, very few, perhaps one hundred persons.

[…]

[A] I don't want to go into the details of the tragedy, for they are not relevant to this trial - but they sent us back there.

Q. What do you mean by "there" - to the area of the Generalgouvernement in Germany?

A. Yes, to this bridge, for this was the bridge between Sokal, the town that belonged to the Soviet Union, and the suburb that belonged to the German Generalgouvernement. Thus they returned us to the Germans - yes, to the Germans.

Contrary to Sanning’s claim, therefore, the witness was giving evidence of a large death rate during German forced marches of the Jews, and he testified that the Soviets had a policy of forcing the Jews back across the line. It is impossible that 750,000 Jews could have crossed the line in the manner described by the witness. Moreover, Sanning takes his quotes from Rassinier’s 1963 ‘account’ of the trial, so his distortion is not even original. Sanning has simply recycled a falsehood from an earlier denial guru.

A further technique used by Sanning that is tantamount to fraud is his use of old encyclopaedia entries, even when they have been superseded by more recent encyclopaedias. In other words, not only does Sanning shamefully lean on a secondary source to distort primary ones, he chooses one that was subsequently corrected. For example, Sanning (p.40) quotes an entry on the city of Tomaszow Lubelski from Volume 15 of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, published in 1972, which claimed that “75% of the city’s 6,000 Jews left together with the Red Army when it withdrew to the newly established line of demarcation further east” in 1939. However, the more recent Pinkas Hakehillot Polin entry, written in 1976, states that only 2,000 Jews fled whilst 3,500 remained . Moreover, Sanning has a clear motive to shift this town’s population into Soviet territory: most of the remaining Jews were gassed at Belzec.

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 4)

[Continued from The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 3)]


In this part I shall take a look at items 2 to 6 and 8 of the “Ten Other Points to Consider” in denierbud’s Stroop Report feature.

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8. “A great piece of trial evidence” (item 2 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Like many a good “Revisionist”, denierbud believes that every criminal trial involving crimes committed by his Nazi heroes was a charade in which mischievous prosecutors and judges acting on behalf of sinister conspiratorial entities crapped upon the law and their legal duties and sentenced innocent men to death or long-term imprisonment on the basis of flimsy or manipulated evidence. Accordingly every incriminating document exhibited at any such trial must be a forgery, especially such “prominent” exhibits as the Stroop Report and its two supposed “parallels”, a “family album bound in tattooed human skin” mentioned at the trial of Ilse Koch and a photo album entitled “Good Times” that was kept by Kurt Franz, the deputy commander of Treblinka extermination camp.

Regarding the first, denierbud’s claim is the following:

Indeed such a book was mentioned (but never produced as evidence) at the trial of Ilse Koch. In her case, we have the lie that she had a family album bound in tattooed human skin.

Denierbud is contradicting himself here insofar as the fact that Ilse Koch’s album was not introduced as evidence against her at the trial belies the notion that it was considered “a great piece of trial evidence” by either the prosecution or the tribunal. According to this page of a site with certain “Revisionist” leanings, which I accordingly would not expect to withhold any claim that might help discredit this particular trial, the album was testified to by a prosecution witness, but also invoked by Ilse Koch herself in her defense:

Apparently this photo album was confiscated by the American liberators, but it was not introduced into evidence in the courtroom. In her plea for mercy from the court, Ilse Koch pointed out that Newsweek magazine had published an article in which it was stated that the US military government in Germany was in possession of her photo album. Frau Koch claimed that the album contained several photos of her home which showed lampshades made from dark leather; Frau Koch said the photos showed that the lampshades were clearly not made from human skin.

According to the above, the introduction of this exhibit as evidence was in the interest of the defense and not the prosecution. The aforementioned testimony, according to which the album had tattooed human skin on its cover, was apparently not considered reliable by the court, for there’s no mention of Ilse Koch having been sentenced on account of this testimony. She was also not sentenced on account of the more well-known testimonies about her having made lamp shades out of human skin:

She was convicted by a panel of 8 military judges on the charge of participating in a "common plan" to violate the Laws and Usages of War, but she was not convicted on the specific charge of ordering human lamp shades to be made from the skin of tattooed prisoners.

So much for this “great piece of trial evidence”.

Regarding Kurt Franz’s photo album, denierbud’s claims are the following:

Evidence in the 1960's Kurt Franz trial where similar to the Stroop Report, an incriminating album of Treblinka pictures was simply found in Franz's apartment (upon arrest 15 years after the war) with an album title that would anger any jury: "Good Times." Franz, who was accused of skimming millions of dollars in addition to sadistically murdering Jews, lived in a modest apartment under his real name for 15 years prior to his arrest, and it evidently never occured to him to throw this incriminating piece of evidence away.

It is correct that Kurt Franz was leading a modest middle-class life when arrested and that he was living under his own name, something he could afford to do due to the initial sluggishness of West German justice in matters of NS-crimes that has been addressed in this article.

It is also correct that he possessed a photo album with the title “Die schönsten Jahre meines Lebens” (“The best years of my life”), which was missing some photographs and their captions but still contained pictures of camp commandant Stangl, of Franz himself, of his dog Barry and of the excavators that had been used at Treblinka, first to dig the mass graves and later to exhume the corpses and move them to huge roasters for incineration (Adalbert Rückerl, NS – Prozesse. Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung: Möglichkeiten, Grenzen, Êrgebnisse, page 46 f.).

What is not correct, however, is that the case against Kurt Franz was made around this photo album at the trial against Franz and other former members of the Treblinka camp staff before the Düsseldorf County Court, or that the album was an important element of incriminating evidence on which the court’s findings of fact in its judgment were based. The evidence underlying the court’s findings of fact about the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews and the execution of that policy at Treblinka extermination camp has been listed in this article. A specific mention of Franz’ photo album is not to be found there. There is also no mention of this photo album in the court’s specific findings of fact regarding the defendant Franz’s individual criminal actions, which are transcribed in my RODOH post # 7191. Franz was found guilty of eagerly commanding and taking part in the mass killings carried out at Treblinka, and of numerous killings on his own initiative beyond the scope of orders received, on the basis of his co-defendants’ depositions and the testimonies of a number of eyewitnesses considered credible by the court, which belied his mendacious claims that he had done no more than orders required him to do and helped the poor Jews wherever he could. Only on one occasion the judgment mentions photographs presumably taken from the photo album in connection with its findings of fact regarding Kurt Franz. These are photos of Kurt Franz’s dog Barry, which were shown to animal psychiatrist and court expert Konrad Lorenz for the purpose of his expert opinion about Barry’s character. For while several witnesses provided detailed and coincident descriptions of how Franz had often sadistically set his big dog upon inmates to kill or maim them, there were also statements that Barry had been a playful and harmless animal when not in the presence of his master Franz. Court expert Lorenz concluded from the photos of Barry shown to him that the dog had been a half-breed, and explained that half-breed dogs have a particularly strong tendency to adapt to their master’s character. This, according to Lorenz, explained why Barry had been a murderous beast when under the influence of Franz but a peaceful animal when Franz was not around. Lorenz’ expert opinion was the only instance I found in the judgment in which photographs presumably taken from Franz’ album were used, not as direct evidence against Franz but as input for a court expert’s opinion meant to solve an apparent contradiction between various elements of evidence.

A look at the Treblinka photos shown here and here, many of which are from Kurt Franz’s album, helps to understand why the album is not specifically mentioned in the judgment, let alone as the key incriminating evidence that denierbud claims it to be: none of these photos, at first sight, points to a mass murder site let alone to murders committed or partaken in by Kurt Franz. Only with extraneous knowledge of these pictures’ location and context, based on other evidence, is it possible to link them to the mass killing at Treblinka, and that only through photo analysis such as described in Alex Bay’s article The Reconstruction of Treblinka. A criminal court, whose task was not an exact physical reconstruction of the Treblinka site but a reconstruction of events at that place insofar as required to ascertain the individual defendants’ criminal deeds, didn’t have much use for these photographs, interrogation and cross-examination of defendants and eyewitnesses being the court’s main source of evidence instead. Denierbud’s claim that Franz was “nailed” on the basis of his photo album is taken out of thin air.

Denierbud also makes no effort to explain why on earth Franz did not deny that Treblinka had been a place of mass murder and that he had himself participated in the killing, even though he tried to play down the extent and nature of his participation. What advantage could he have gained by not challenging the evidence that Treblinka had been an extermination camp, by not claiming that it had been a mere transit camp and the accounts of mass killing were all part of one great big hoax? In the case of Kurt Franz, there’s no room for even the absurd and baseless “Revisionist” fantasies about mendacious plea-bargaining by corrupt criminal justice authorities acting at the behest of some sinister conspiracy, for Kurt Franz was sentenced to life imprisonment, the highest penalty that the German Criminal Code provides for.

Last but not least, denierbud doesn’t know what he’s talking about (or then he is simply making things up) when he claims that Kurt Franz “was accused of skimming millions of dollars”. While the plunder of the Jewish victims at the camps of Aktion Reinhard(t) is mentioned in some detail in the judgment, there is no mention of Kurt Franz having, in violation of orders to hand over all valuables to the administration of Aktion Reinhard(t), kept for himself any of the loot, let alone “millions of dollars”.

Thus his wishful thinking is all that denierbud is left with in support of his claim that Franz’s album was “likely another planted fake document”.

The baseless conclusion that denierbud ends this item with:

In short, the Stroop Report fits in with other faked albums which had the aim of serving as courtroom evidence. Jürgen Stroop was sentenced to death by a Polish court and an American court. Kurt Franz got life in prison.

requires no further comment.

9. “The Stroop Report is too readable” (item 3 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

This is where I’m at loss with what our poet denierbud is trying to tell us. His irrelevant subjective opinion that the Stroop Report reads “like a fiction book” aside, what “specific details or mentioning of technical issues” does he expect it to contain, beyond those it contains, that would interest a superior following the progress of a murderous police action against a despised minority? Denierbud doesn’t tell, and I doubt he would be able to specify what the hell is talking about if required to do so. In the opinion of Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, the Stroop Report contained not too little detail, but far too much for the despicable minor undertaking if referred to:

The dirty arrogant SS swine! Imagine writing a 75-page boastful report on a little murder expedition, when a major campaign fought by soldiers against a well-armed army takes only a few pages.

It is also hard to understand what exactly denierbud expects to be “hard for a layman to understand” in a report about such “little murder expedition”. Stroop was reporting neither about complex technical issues such as might be the topic of conversation between denierbud’s jet-fighter pilots, nor about a military engagement involving knowledge obtained at some military academy. He was reporting about a violent roundup and killing operation that essentially consisted in burning down the Warsaw ghetto block after block and then rooting out the surviving Jews from dugouts and sewers. I don’t see anything there that could be hard to understand for anybody, but perhaps denierbud can enlighten us about what exactly he had in mind.

10. “Another reason why the German death toll is not believable” (item 4 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Harking back to his previous rambling against the “unbelievably” low casualties reported by Stroop (discussed in Part 2 of this article), denierbud surmises that the Jews must have prepared for resistance ever since the presumed dissemination in the Warsaw ghetto of a «Jewish Underground report known as the "November 1942 Report"», describing the Treblinka death camp (he is probably referring to the description of Treblinka appended to a report entitled “The Destruction of Jewish Warsaw”, which on 6 January 1943 was transmitted to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London through its delegate in occupied Poland, and which is mentioned in the excerpt from Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps transcribed in my RODOH post # 8970), and that this makes the low casualty rate reported by Stroop “even harder to believe”.

If, as denierbud assumes, said report was disseminated in the Warsaw ghetto, it probably had no greater effect than an earlier report about Treblinka mentioned in Marek Edelman’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. For as becomes apparent from that account,

• most of the ghetto’s inhabitants were reluctant or refused to accept a reality that was too horrible to contemplate, or selfishly stuck to the irrational hope that they might be spared while others perished;

• the Germans cleverly used a combination of trickery and terror in order to assure compliance with the deportation measures, and

• those Jews who were willing to face the facts and not resign to their fate, essentially the members of the Jewish resistance, took a long time to gain acceptance among the ghetto population and had to obtain their weapons from the Polish underground, which was of little assistance at least in the beginning.

Here’s how Marek Edelman describes the reactions of most ghetto inhabitants to the deportations from the ghetto and to news about fate of those deported (emphases are mine):

On the second day, July 23rd, a meeting of the so-called Workers' Committee took place. All political parties were represented on the Committee. Our group, supported only by the Hechalutz and Hashomer organization, called for active resistance. But public opinion was against us. The majority still thought such action provocative and maintained that if the required contingent of Jews could be delivered, the remainder of the ghetto would be left in peace. The instinct for self-preservation finally drove the people into a state of mind permitting them to disregard the safety of others in order to save their own necks. True, nobody as yet believed that the deportation meant death. But the Germans had already succeeded in dividing the Jewish population into two distinct groups--those already condemned to die and those who still hoped to remain alive. Afterwards, step by step, the Germans will succeed in pitting these two groups against one another and cause some Jews to lead others to certain death in order to save their own skin.
[…]
On the second day of the "deportations" the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. He knew beyond any doubt that the supposed "deportation to the East" actually meant the death of hundreds and thousands of people in gas chambers, and he refused to assume responsibility for it. Being unable to counteract events he decided to quit altogether. At the time, however, we thought that he had no right to act as he did. We thought that since he was the only person in the ghetto whose voice carried a great deal of authority, it had been his duty to inform the entire population of the real state of affairs, and also to dissolve all public institutions, particularly the Jewish police, which had been established by the Jewish Council and was legally subordinate to it.
[…]
So that we might learn conclusively and in detail about the fate of the human transports leaving the ghetto, Zalmen Frydrych (Zygmunt) was ordered to follow one of the transports to the "Aryan side". His journey "to the East", however, was a short one, for it took only three days. Immediately after leaving the ghetto walls he established contact with an employee of the Warsaw Danzig [Gdanski] Terminal working on the Warsaw--Malkinia line. They travelled together in the transport's wake to Sokolow where, Zygmunt was told by local railroad men, the tracks forked out, one branch leading to Treblinka. It proved that every day a freight train carrying people from Warsaw travelled in that direction and invariably returned empty. No transports of food were ever seen on this line. Civilians were forbidden to approach the Treblinka railroad station.

This in itself was conclusive proof that the people brought to Treblinka were being exterminated somewhere in the vicinity. In addition, Zygmunt met two fugitives from the death camp the following morning. They were two Jews, completely stripped of their clothes, and Zygmunt met them on the Sokolow market place and obtained the full details of the horrible procedure. Thus it was not any longer a question of rumours, but of facts established by eyewitness accounts (one of the fugitives was our comrade Wallach).

After Zygmunt's return we published the second issue of On Guard with a detailed description of Treblinka. But even now the population stubbornly refused to believe the truth. They simply closed their eyes to the unpleasant facts and fought against them with all the means at their disposal.

In the meantime the Germans, not too discriminating in their choice of methods, introduced a new propaganda twist. They promised--and actually gave--three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to everyone who voluntarily registered for "deportation". The offer was more than sufficient. Once the bait was thrown, propaganda and hunger did the rest. The propaganda value of the measure lay in the fact that it was truly an excellent argument against the "stories" about gas chambers ("why would they be giving bread away if they intended to murder them?..."). The hunger, an even stronger persuader, magnified the picture of three brown, crusty loaves of bread until nothing was visible beyond it. Their taste which one could almost feel in one's mouth--it was only a short walk from one's home to the "Umschlagplatz" from which the cars left--blinded people to all the other things at the end of the same road. Their smell, familiar, delicious, befogged one's mind, made it unable to grasp the things which would normally have been so very obvious. There were times when hundreds of people had to wait on line for several days to be "deported". The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.
[…]
After this temporary let-up, the deportations from Warsaw started again with intensified force. Now the blockades were even more dangerous for us, because there were fewer people and the area had become smaller. They were also more difficult for the Germans, however, because people had already learned how to hide. Therefore, a new method was used: every Jewish policeman was made responsible for bringing 7 "heads" daily to the "Umschlag". And this is how the Germans were playing their best game. Never before had anyone been so inflexible in carrying out an action as a Jewish policeman, never before had anyone been so unyielding in holding on to a captured victim as one Jew in relation to another Jew. So that they might furnish the 7 "heads", Jewish policemen would stop a doctor in a white coat (the coat could be sold for a fantastically high price later, in the "Umschlag"...), a mother with her child in her arms, or a lonely, lost child in search of its home.
[…]
The following incident may serve to clarify the conditions in which we had to work at the time. About mid-November (in the period of "quiet") a few hundred Jews from several shops were deported, allegedly to work in the Lublin Concentration Camp. During the trip Comrade W. Rozowski broke open the bars in the car window, threw out six female prisoners, while the train was in motion (among others, Guta Btones, Chajka Betchatowska, Wiernik, M. Kojfman), and then jumped out himself. Similar feats would have been quite impossible to perform at the time of the first deportations, because even if there had been somebody brave enough to attempt an escape, the other victims would never had allowed it for fear of German revenge. By now the Jews finally began to realize that deportation actually meant death; that there was no other alternative but at least to die honourably. But as was quite natural for human beings, they still tried to postpone death and "honour" for as long a time as possible.

And here’s how Edelman describes the efforts of the Jewish resistance to obtain arms from the Polish underground. Emphases are also mine:

Once again we built a large organization, not alone this time, but by common efforts, and once again the major problem of weapons was encountered. There were almost none at all in the ghetto. In must be taken into account that the time was the year 1942. The resistance movement of the Poles was just beginning at the time, and only vague stories were being circulated about partisans in the woods. It must be remembered that the first organized act of armed resistance on the part of the Poles did not take place until March 1943. Therefore, there was nothing unusual in the fact that our efforts to obtain arms and ammunition through the Government Delegate and through other agencies encountered major difficulties and as a general rule, brought no results. We were able to obtain a few pistols from the People's Guard.
[…]
At the end of December 1942 we received our first transport of weapons from the Home Army. It was not much--there were only ten pistols in the whole transport--but it enabled us to prepare for our first major action. We planned it for January 22nd and it was to be a retaliatory measure against the Jewish police.

The “first major action”, however, was not what it had been expected to be, and its outcome was disastrous:

However, on January 18th, 1943, the ghetto was surrounded once again and the "second liquidation" began. This time, however, the Germans were not able to carry out their plans unchallenged. Four barricaded battle groups offered the first armed resistance in the ghetto.

The ZOB was baptized in battle in the first large-scale street fighting at the corner of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets. The best part of the Organization was lost there. Miraculously, because of his heroic attitude, the ZOB Commander, Mordechaj Anielewicz, survived. After that battle we realized that street fighting would be too costly for us, since we were not sufficiently prepared for it and lacked the proper weapons. We, therefore, switched to partisan fighting. Four major encounters were fought in the apartment houses at 40 Zamenhofa Street, 44 Muranowska Street, 34 Mila Street and 22 Franciszkanska Street. In the Schultz shop area the SS men taking part in the deportation were attacked by the partisans. Comrade A. Fajner took an active part in this action and was killed in its course.

One of our battle groups, still unarmed, was caught by the Germans and was taken to the "Umschlag". Shortly before they were to enter the railroad cars, B. Pelc addressed the group with a few words. It was only a short address, but it was so effective, that not a single one of the sixty people moved to enter the car. Van Oeppen (the chief of Treblinka) shot all sixty himself on the spot. This group's behaviour, however, served as an inspiration that always, under all circumstances, one should oppose the Germans.

Of all the prepared 50 battle groups only five took part in the January activities. The remainder, not having been assembled at the time of the Germans' entry into the ghetto, was caught by surprise and was unable to reach the place where their weapons were stored.

Once again, as was the case in the first stage of the ZOB's activities, four-fifths of the Battle Organization's members perished.

Thus weakened by their first engagements, the Jewish resistance had to reorganize its activities. It was only now, at the end of January 1943, that it received broader support from the ghetto population, and also more assistance from the Polish underground:

The latest developments, however, reverberated strongly both within the ghetto and outside of it. Public opinion, Jewish as well as Polish, reacted immediately to the ghetto battles. For now, for the first time, German plans were frustrated. For the first time the halo of omnipotence and invincibility was torn from the Germans' heads. For the first time the Jew in the street realized that it was possible to do something against the Germans' will and power. The number of Germans killed by ZOB bullets was not the only important thing. What was more important was the appearance of a psychological turning point. The mere fact that because of the unexpected resistance, weak as it was, the Germans were forced to interrupt their "deportation" schedule was of great value.

In the meantime legends about "hundreds" of dead Germans and the "tremendous" power of the ZOB started circulating throughout Warsaw. The entire Polish Underground was full of praise for us. At the end of January we received 50 larger pistols and 50 hand grenades from the Home Army Command.

It was this “awakening” to the realization that it was possible to resist the Germans, rather than any reports about the fate of the deportees at Treblinka, that ended the passivity of the majority of the surviving ghetto inhabitants and caused them to help the resistance organize the defense of the ghetto against the final roundup. At the same time, a change in the attitude of the Polish underground, also brought about by the first acts of armed resistance in January 1943, helped the Jewish fighters obtain armament that, while still miserable compared to the hardware of a modern army, was a lot better than the few pistols they had been fighting with at first:

By now every partisan was equipped. on the average, with one pistol (and 10-15 rounds for it), 4-5 hand grenades, 4-5 Molotov cocktails. 2-3 rifles were assigned to each "area". There was just one machine-gun in the entire ghetto.

Thus we can see that the notion that reports about Treblinka death camp galvanized the Warsaw ghetto’s Jews into putting up a big fight is merely theoretical and fails to take into account the ostrich-like attitude of most of the ghetto’s population, the hunger and misery in the ghetto that some people irrationally hoped to escape from by allowing themselves to be deported, the violence employed by the Germans where deceitful coaxing failed, the selfishness of people hoping that while others would perish they might themselves be spared, the difficulties faced by the resistance in obtaining arms, and the widespread notion that nothing could be done about the impending fate. Only the first armed engagements starting 18 January 1943, which despite their disastrous outcome showed the people that it was possible to fight the Germans, brought about a significant change of attitude, away from the wishful thinking, selfishness and fatalism that until then had paralyzed the Warsaw ghetto’s population. Had it not been for the armed battle groups that resisted the roundup on 18 January 1943, Stroop would probably have had a much easier job when he took to wiping out the ghetto three months later.

11. “A different Jewish strategy due to the Germans losing the Battle of Stalingrad?” (item 5 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Never one to mind contradicting himself, denierbud forgets his previous claim, about a description of Treblinka in November 1942 having galvanized the Jews into resistance, when indulging in one of the most idiotic “Revisionist” speculations that I have ever seen: up to the German defeat at Stalingrad, where the remains of the German 6th Army surrendered to Soviet forces on 2 February 1943, the Jews (not only in the Warsaw ghetto, but throughout Europe and also in the US – denierbud apparently believes in some central body directing Jewish activities worldwide) are supposed to have changed their “strategy” from one of “collaborating” with the Nazis (never mind that such “collaboration”, apart from helping the genocidal mass killing that denierbud denies, implied dying like flies of starvation and disease in ghettos and being treated like garbage in concentration or labor camps, among other inconveniences) to one of a) resisting and b) promoting the “holocaust myth”.

This conjecture is so flagrantly at odds with all evidence and reason that it’s hardly worth even commenting on. Suffice to say that even its basic assumptions (absence of Jewish atrocity reports and resistance before Stalingrad, commencement of both only thereafter) are mistaken, as will be shown hereafter.

Reports in Jewish publications about the Aktion Reinhard(t) extermination camps appeared as early as April 1942, see the quotes in my RODOH post # 8036. At about the same time, see the excerpt from Arad’s book in my RODOH post # 8970, the Polish underground, drawing on its own sources and on “Jewish Underground groups in Poland, like the Jewish National Committee and the Bund”, started transmitting news “news of the deportations to the death camps and what was happening there” to the Polish Government in Exile in London. Reports about Belzec that reached London “were handed over by the Polish Government-in-Exile to Dr. Ignacy Schwarzbart, a Jew and a member of the Polish National Council”, who on November 15, 1942, “published in London an open statement with all the known details about the extermination actions going on in Belzec”. Then there was the already mentioned report on "The Destruction of Jewish Warsaw", which was issued on the same day and transmitted to London on January 6, 1943. These are but a few examples prior to the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, which alone are sufficient to show the ignorance (let’s give him the benefit of doubt) that underlies denierbud’s conjecture. Denierbud ices the cake by repeating his favorite rambling about “a February 1943 Reader's Digest article” written by “Irgun member Ben Hecht”, which is the subject of one of his videoclips and of Andrew Mathis’ commentary on that clip.

As concerns resistance, there are examples dating as far back as July 1942 of Jews resisting the elimination of ghettos in the administrative area known as Reichskommissariat Ostland, namely in Kleck on 21 July 1942 (25 of 400 escapees survived) and in Nieswiez on 22 July 1942. The presidents of the Jewish Councils in Marcinkánce in the Bialystok district and in Lachwa (Polesia) defended themselves against the liquidations at the end of 1942. On 23 December 1942 Jewish fighters and Communists attacked a German café in Cracow. In Minsk Mazowiecki the last 400 Jews resisted their liquidatioin on 10 January 1943. They were burned alive by the Germans in the school building from which they threw bricks. These and other acts of resistance are mentioned in the translated excerpt from the “Poland” chapter of Benz et al’s Dimensionen des Völkermords that is transcribed in my RODOH post # 3877. My previous post on the same thread, # 3876, contains a translated excerpt from Christian Gerlach’s Kalkulierte Morde about Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Belorussia.

On the other hand – contrary to what one would expect if there had been a “new Jewish strategy” following the German defeat at Stalingrad – the overwhelming majority of Jews under Nazi rule continued to “cooperate” all the way to gas chambers and execution pits. Perhaps the most striking example of an utter absence of resistance, even when the remaining Jews realized that they would also share the fate of those deported before them, is that of the Lodz ghetto.

Nonsensical though denierbud’s “Stalingrad” theory is, it is worth reading on account of a revealing statement showing what denierbud thinks of those lazy, good-for-nothing Jews, a statement that might be taken straight from an issue of Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer, or from this Nazi newspaper article published in August 1939. Emphases are mine:

The Germans, upon entering Warsaw, had found a lot of Jews who had no visible means of income. No apparent legitimate job. They wanted to have the Jews learn to work in labor camps in order to prepare them to move to a temporary Jewish state in occupied USSR.

Bravo, denierbud!

Every Jew-hating scumbag in the world would probably give you a hearty slap on the back for that.

And any reasonable human being who was still in doubt about what cesspit you come from should be in doubt no longer.

But before that pep-talk, denierbud treats his readers to a revelation that, if it could be substantiated, would probably make him the most famous “Revisionist” ever. He claims to have found out that the Jews deported from Warsaw in 1942 were actually sent to labor camps:

The standard account is that 7 months earlier (in July through September 1942), the Germans deported around 300,000 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto and there was no resistance: the Jews went willingly because the Germans told them they were being deported to labor camps. It was the truth[my emphasis – RM]: […]

So our friend denierbud claims to know of evidence leading from Treblinka, which all evidence known to historians (such as Ganzenmüller’s letter to Wolff dated 28 July 1942 and Höfle’s radio message to Heim dated 11 January 1943) shows to have been the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Jewish deportees from Warsaw and other Nazi-occupied areas of Poland, to labor camps where he believes the Germans had those lazy Jews “learn to work” (he apparently has no objection to forced labor as long as it’s Jews performing the same).

To think that “Revisionist” big-shots Mattogno & Graf frantically searched archives in Eastern Europe for such evidence without finding anything, when all they would have needed to do is visit their faithful disciple denierbud in northern California …

12. “ The beginning of the report contains a short philosophical summary of the Jews in Europe, which seems out of place for a general writing it for two superior generals:” (item 6 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

This “point” is about as inane as the previously discussed “too readable” baloney. After pointing out that the Stroop Report was “a commemoration book meant as a limited edition printing of 3 copies, 2 of which are given to generals Himmler and Kruger” (the Reichsführer SS would probably have enjoyed being referred to as a “general”), denierbud argues that background information about the history of Jewish ghettos would have been out of place in such a document, because its addressees would not be interested in the history or know it already.

Why, and I thought this was a commemoration book!

The following excerpt from page 26 of Richard Raskin’s A Child at Gunpoint contains a quote of Stroop explaining what purpose his report was meant to serve:

Just as it was Krüger’s idea to collect the daily reports in this way, it was also his suggestion that photographic records be kept of the operation. In a conversation while in prison in 1949, Stroop told of a meeting he had with Krüger on May 2, 1943, in which Krüger

… was particularly anxious that our accomplishments be preserved on film. During our final conference, held in my headquarters, he declared: ‘Photographs of the Grand Operation will serve as invaluable tools for future historians of the Third Reich – for the Führer, for Heinrich Himmler, for our nationalist poets and writers, as SS training material and, above all, as proof of the burdens and sacrifices endured by the Nordic races and Germany in their attempt to rid Europe and the world of the Jews.’

Would some background information about the history of Jewish ghettos in general and the Warsaw ghetto in particular not be a proper introduction for a work that might one day be used as historical and training material and as proof of the Nazis’ heroic struggle against the Jews? I’d say such background information would be spot-on there. And from Stroop’s career point of view, it would show his superiors that he was not just a numb executor of orders, but a man with interest in and background knowledge of the “Jewish problem”, therefore a candidate for a higher leadership post. In other words, Stroop was meeting the expected wishes of his superiors and brown-nosing them.

On the other hand, why would the female Jewish forger of denierbud’s fantasies have included this historical background in the document? In order to highlight the Nazis’ emphasis on Jews being a threat to non-Jews? That would hardly serve any “vilifying” purpose and might even have a slightly apologetic effect.

Once again, denierbud’s conjectures leave much to be desired in terms of logic and reason.

13. “Over-the-top use of the word "bandit" and "subhuman."” (item 8 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Denierbud has a problem with the frequent use of the term “bandits” throughout the Stroop Report. He argues that Stroop “would” have been more specific about what “bandits” exactly he was up against, so that his report could be used for intelligence purposes, and that the derogatory nature of the term points to a forger trying to denigrate poor Stroop and denierbud’s Nazi heroes in general.

In his “intelligence” argument, denierbud ignores the fact that Stroop’s daily teletypes to Krüger were progress reports for a superior who wanted to know how the operation was doing, and not something meant for intelligence services interested in collecting information about underground fighting organizations. Such intelligence services would probably not rely on Stroop’s daily teletypes for information, but obtain protocols of prisoner interrogations or, even better, take part in such interrogations themselves. If their only or main source were a commanding officer's progress reports to his superior, they would be bunglers not worth their salary. Regarding the Stroop Report as a whole, denierbud keeps forgetting that this was a commemorative book, something to celebrate the Nazi struggle against Jews and other sub-human scum and to look at when reminiscing of the good old times by the fireside. Intelligence-relevant information about specific fighting organizations that the “bandits” belonged to would not only be boring in such a context, but create the perhaps unwelcome impression that the “bandits” were political organizations with a cause and not the underworld rabble that the Nazis liked to see themselves as fighting against.

As to the derogatory nature of the term “bandits”, denierbud reveals his ignorance of the fact that “bandits” was a term commonly used by the Nazis for partisans and other members of resistance organizations in the countries they occupied during World War II, with the obvious and understandable intent of portraying members of underground resistance as criminals acting against the established order, rather than patriots fighting to free their country of the Nazi occupiers. The fight against partisans, especially in Poland and the occupied territories of the USSR, was designated by the Nazis as Bandenbekämpfung, i.e. fight against bandit gangs. The Bandenbekämpfung also served as a cover and pretext, in the occupied territories of the USSR, to wipe out Jews and other undesirable elements of the population allegedly linked to the Soviet partisans. Thus, for instance, a report by Himmler dated 29 December 1942, of which a facsimile can be viewed on this site, refers to “Bandenbekämpfungserfolge”, i.e. successes in the fight against bandits, achieved in Southern Russia, Ukraine and Bialystok between 1 September and 1 December 1942. It separately lists “Banditen” (“bandits” - 1,337 killed in battle, 737 prisoners immediately executed, 7,828 executed after longer intensive questioning) and “Bandenhelfer und Bandenverdächtige” (“bandit helpers and bandit suspects” – 16,553 arrested, 14,257 executed, and 363,211 Jews executed). Jews were obviously seen as “bandit helpers and bandit suspects” regardless of whether or not they had any connection to the partisans, on account of being Jews alone.

So it is only natural, within the scope of Nazi terminology, that Stroop should refer to Polish resistance fighters found in the ghetto as “bandits”. Referring to the specific organizations they belonged to might affect their depiction as criminals against the established order and instead give them a certain aura of legitimacy, which was the last thing the Nazis wanted.

In this context, it is of interest to have a look at just how many members of the Polish underground took part in the fighting inside the Warsaw ghetto between 19 April and 16 May 1943. According to this page and this excerpt, an 18-man unit of the Polish Armia Krajowa, under the command of Henryk Iwański, fought inside the Warsaw ghetto, amid the ruins on Muranowski Square and Nalewki Street, alongside one of the Jewish fighting organizations. This seems to have been the unit that Stroop referred to as follows:

The main Jewish battle group, mixed with Polish bandits, had already retired during the first and second day to the so-called Muranowski Square. There, it was reinforced by a considerable number of Polish bandits.

If – as denierbud would probably be prone to argue – the emphasis on “bandits” in the Stroop Report is out of proportion to the size and the achievements of Iwanski’s unit, the reasonable explanation for this would be that Stroop, embarrassed by how long it was taking him to subdue the Jewish resistance, and perhaps also by high casualties that he eventually played down in his report (see Part 2 of this article), reckoned that the Polish underground fighters, the “bandits”, would be seen by his superiors as a more formidable opponent than the despised Jews, and thus make his difficulties in crushing the uprising more excusable in Krüger’s and Himmler’s eyes. For the female Jewish forger of denierbud’s fantasies, on the other hand, there would be no reason to have the non-Jewish underground play a bigger part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising than it actually did.

At the end of this item of his feature, denierbud points to the oddness of the term “subhumans” in Stroop’s teletype message of 16 May 1943:

180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed.

Indeed it makes no sense to interpret the “subhumans” as a category other than “Jews” and “bandits”, so the reasonable interpretation is that “subhumans” is being used as an epithet for either Jews or Polish underground fighters, whereby in the first case the term “bandits” would in this particular message be another epithet for the Jews. Either of both scenarios fits the Nazi view that Jews were “bandits” or “bandits helpers” per se, non-Jews were “bandits” if they fought as partisans against the Nazis, and both the Jews and the Slavic Poles were Untermenschen. In the latter scenario (“bandits” = Polish underground fighters = “subhumans”), it is possible that the text in Stroop’s manuscript was, for instance, “Es wurden 180 Juden, bzw. Banditen und Untermenschen vernichtet” (“180 Jews, or bandits and subhumans were destroyed”), and by mistake this became “Es wurden 180 Juden, Banditen und Untermenschen vernichtet”(“180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed”) when the message was typed. Such banal explanation is more realistic than denierbud’s manipulation fantasies.


Denierbud’s “Ten Other Points to Consider” have thus been dealt with. The next and final part of his article will be dedicated to denierbud’s theory about his female Jewish forger’s identity.

---

Continuation:

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 5)

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 3)

In Part 2 of this series, we examined Sanning's distortion of a wartime Jewish source. In this third part, we examine his false dating of Nazi demographic data.

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Sanning builds a deliberate deception into Table 6 (p.75-78), which purports to show the populations of major cities in the Soviet Union (including former eastern Poland) immediately prior to the Nazi invasion of June 1941. Sanning’s footnote ‘j’ (p.78) reveals that most of these data are taken from a Nazi document written in January 1943:

j. Zentralblatt des Reichskommissars für die Ukraine, Rowno, 2. Jahrgang, No. 2, 9. January 1943, S. 8-20.

On page 85, Sanning uses this same document to note that the “local population living under German administration in the RK Ukraine numbered 16.91 million as of January 1, 1943.” Sanning must therefore know that the figures in Table 6 should apply to that date, not the date that the Nazis invaded the USSR, yet he still brazenly goes on to claim that reductions in the population of Ukraine between 1939 and January 1, 1943, were due entirely to Soviet action, despite the fact that the Nazis had been in the Ukraine for eighteen months at that point:

…the pre-war population of the Ukraine must have numbered more than 22.5m; however, the Germans found less than 17 million. One-quarter of the population had disappeared.

Sanning has therefore deliberately converted the Jews murdered by the Nazis between June 1941 and January 1943 into Soviet deportees by conflating the two dates and pretending the population data for January 1943 refer to June 1941.

Sanning's distortions concerning the Soviet Union are systematic. For example, Zimmerman has shown how Sanning repeatedly distorts sources relating to Soviet evacuation policy to give the misleading impression that most Jews were evacuated, when in fact those sources state explicitly that most Jews "could not or would not leave."

The date of Sanning’s Nazi source is also revealing because it coincides with that of the Korherr Report, which covered the same time frame as Sanning’s source (i.e. up the end of 1942) but openly admitted that the reductions in population were caused by Nazi policy. For example, at the foot of page 2 of his “short” report (which was specifically produced for Hitler’s attention), Korherr helpfully summarized the results of Nazi killings. Roberto has translated this table as follows:

Region; Time of Taking over of Power; Number of Jews before Taking over of Power; Number of Jews on 31.12.1942

Old Reich and Sudetenland; 30.1.1933 and 29.9.1938; 561,000 and 30,000; 51,327

Ostmark [Austria after annexation, translator’s note]; 13.3.1938; 220,000; 8,102

Bohemia and Moravia; 16.3.1939; 118,000; 15,550

Eastern Territories (with Bialystok); September 1939 (June 1940); 790,000; 233,210

General Government (with Lemberg); September 1939 (June 1940); 2,000,000; 297,914.

Sum Total; - ; 3,719,000; 606,103

Sanning’s failure to discuss this report reveals his discomfort with its contents. For example, Sanning's fraudulent figures are clearly exposed by the transportation data to the Operation Reinhard camps that can be found in the Korherr Report, and also in the Hoefle Telegram and Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. These all tell a similar story. Sanning had claimed that only 857,000 Jews were left in western Poland after the rest fled over the demarcation line, yet Korherr’s figures show that a higher number of Jews than this was transferred to the Reinhard camps and Chelmno:

Number passed through the camp in the general government [of Poland]... 1,274,166 [and] through the camp at Warthegau [Chelmno]…145,301

The Hoefle Telegram repeated the total of 1,274,166, consisting of 24,733 at Majdanek, 434,508 at Belzec, 101,370 at Sobibor and 713,555 at Treblinka.

Arad estimates the total transported at 1.7 million. Furthermore, Arad’s breakdown of transports from specific locations refutes Sanning’s claim that the reductions in population occurred before the Nazi invasion. For example, Sanning (p.42) claims that 50,000 Jewish refugees had been deported from Lvov by the Soviets, but Arad demonstrates that over 70,000 Jews were deported from Lvov to Belzec.

Germar Rudolf on Nazi Crimes

In his Introduction to Dissecting the Holocaust, Germar Rudolf claims that "It must be said here and now that none of the authors contributing to the present work considers himself ideologically anywhere in the vicinity of National Socialism." The evidence presented below suggests that Rudolf’s statement is insincere. His published work, which is easily accessible on-line, is a systematic attempt to whitewash the Nazi regime using a range of techniques that alternate between denial, obfuscation, minimization and false moral equivalence. It is inconceivable that such a project could have been undertaken by someone who did not have some sympathy for that regime.

Read more!

The repertoire of rhetorical devices and language games used by Rudolf is not limited to Holocaust denial; it also taps into a wider literature of justification for Nazi domestic and foreign policy. For example, Rudolf leans heavily on the work of Ernst Nolte, which argues that Nazi genocidal policy was an überschießende Reaktion (overshooting reaction) to the rise of Soviet Bolshevism. Thomas Sheehan has accurately summarized Nolte’s position:

Mr. Nolte does in fact intimate that "the so-called annihilation of the Jews" (as he termed the Holocaust) could be justified in Hitler's eyes as a "preventative war." For one thing, Nolte claims that "the slide from 'Communists threaten us' to 'Jews threaten us' that occurred in Hitler's mind and some of his entourage is not entirely irrational." For another, he thinks Chaim Weizmann's 1939 declaration that Palestinian Jews would support Britain gave Hitler "good reasons to be convinced of the determination of his enemies [world Jewry as well as the Bolsheviks] to annihilate him".

Rudolf endorses Nolte’s claim that Nazi antisemitism arose from “the Jews' intimate entanglement in Communism”. He then quotes a passage in which Nolte cites (out of context) a remark by Jerry Z. Muller that "The Trotskies make the revolutions [i.e., the GULag] and the Bronsteins pay the bills [in the Holocaust]." He concludes that:

Thus it seems understandable that National Socialism, and the eastern peoples fighting alongside for their freedom, equated the Jews in general with the Bolshevist terror and the activities of the commissars-though such an identification, being sweeping and collective, was unjust. Nevertheless, it is therefore more than plausible that it was Jews, first and foremost, who were made to pay for the partisan warfare and other war crimes of the Soviets. Anyone who (rightly) criticizes this, however, should also not omit to consider where the blame for this kind of escalation of the war in the East was to be found. And clearly it was to be found with Stalin who, as an aside, had treated the Jews in his sphere of influence at least as mercilessly ever since the war had begun, as Hitler had.

Rudolf also cites Nolte in this nauseating attempt to create a moral equivalence between T4 and abortion:

Like Nolte,[90] however, I cannot help but remark in amazement that people today are morally outraged by the killing of 100,000 generally severely disabled persons for perhaps dubious reasons of 'genetic public welfare' during the 12 years of National Socialist dictatorship, whereas those same people are not shocked in the slightest by the willful murder of unborn, but healthy persons numbering some four million in the last 12 years in Germany alone - murders motivated solely by materialistic and egoistical considerations. Clearly the moral categories by which we judge today are completely different than those of 55 years ago. I doubt that they are better

This false moral equivalence is built on a lie. Contrary to Rudolf’s false claim, the T4 program did not only kill children who were “generally severely disabled.” Moreover, Rudolf cannot even bring himself to condemn the killings outright: he merely states that they were “perhaps dubious.”

It is therefore obvious that Rudolf is seeking to minimize the moral repugnance of T4. Furthermore, it is probable that Rudolf only admits that T4 took place at all because there is a written Hitler order that he cannot paint as a forgery. This is apparent from the fact that he is willing to lie about the documentation supporting other Nazi atrocities. For example, Rudolf claims that:

…it has been irrefutably proven by now that the alleged massacre of Babi Yar is an atrocity lie of no substance,[57] this admittedly throws the authenticity or at least the reliability of the entire IMT document series "USSR Event Reports" and all other documents into doubt, and hence the entire Special Units mass murder per se. [...] Even today, when the mass graves of hundreds of thousands of Stalin’s victims are being discovered, often by accident and 50 or even 60 years after the fact, there are still no traces of any German mass graves or burning sites, and in fact any public speculation whether modern methods might not help to locate some is studiously avoided - after all, any such sites have vanished without a trace, thanks to the wondrous methods only the Germans knew about

When Rudolf does admit to mass killing by the Nazis, he resorts to two fraudulent defenses. Firstly, as stated above, he uses Nolte’s fatuous argument that the killings were acts of preventive warfare against Bolshevism. Secondly, Rudolf presents a false picture of partisan warfare, and lies about the legality of Nazi anti-partisan actions. Whilst it is true that international law in the 1939-1945 period did not outlaw reprisals against partisans, it placed clear limitations on those reprisals. Rudolf knows these limitations but deliberately chooses not to cite them. He therefore gives the misleading impression that the Nazis acted within the laws rather than flouting them. In particular, Rudolf lies about the principle of proportionality in this discussion:

…we can sum up by saying that there was no set common law with respect to proportionality, much less with regard to a ratio of 1:1. And thus we must agree with Laternser,[111] that in the Italian case of the Fosse Ardeatine on March 24, 1944, given the particular circumstances in Rome (only 20 km behind the Nettuno front), the execution of 330 Italians ordered in reprisal for the death of 33 German policemen[112] did not exceed the degree warranted by military necessity.

In reality, The British Manual of Military Law, an authority which Rudolf himself cites in his own link, had made it clear that proportionality did apply at the time. Para. 459 states:

Acts done by way of reprisals must not, however, be excessive, and must not exceed the degree of violation committed by the enemy.

Moreover, Rudolf’s discussion of the Kommissar Order shows that his discussion of international law was a deliberate obfuscation. He recognizes that the Kommissar Order was “judicially untenable” but still asserts that it was “morally appropriate.” He also claims that the Order was not really put into effect and was eventually revoked:

Seidler[11] recently published a balanced up-to-date study about the Wehrmacht's struggle in the partisan warfare, showing not only the disastrous and probably decisive effects of the partisan's attacks against German units and especially their supplies, but he proves also that most of the German reactions were totally covered by international law-although not always most far-sighted. Furthermore, he shows that those orders from higher up which broke international laws (e.g., the infamous "Kommissar order", which might be considered morally appropriate, but politically stupid and judicially untenable) were in most cases sabotaged by the front units, and that these orders, after long-lasting and massive protest, were eventually revoked

In conclusion, therefore, there is no Nazi atrocity that Rudolf condemns unequivocally. Reprisals against civilians, T4 euthanasia killings and the murders of Soviet Communist Party members are all defended in Rudolf’s writing. His denial of being a Nazi sympathizer can therefore be dismissed as a transparent attempt to conceal the pro-Nazi content of his own writing from the authorities.

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series, we examined Sanning's distortion of sources concerning the Jewish population of pre-war Poland. This second part looks at Sanning's treatment of a Jewish wartime source that refers to Polish Jewish refugees who had been deported to the USSR.

Read more!


In his attempt to place Jews from western and central Poland beyond the reach of the Nazis, Sanning claimed that 750,000 Jews crossed the German-Soviet demarcation line between September 1939 and June 1941, and that Stalin subsequently had all of them deported to areas in the Soviet interior where most of them subsequently died from poor treatment. The following passage (p.43-44) explains how Sanning’s figure of 750,000 was derived:

The Universal [Universal Jewish Encyclopedia] reported that the Joint Distribution Committee - a large international Jewish refugee aid organization - initiated a relief program in early 1942 for 600,000 Polish-Jewish refugees in Asiatic Russia. However, if there were 600,000 of these Jewish refugees in Soviet Asia in early 1942, many more must have been shipped off to Siberia by the Soviets, because the journey brought death and hardship to many. In connection with the inhuman transport to the east, the Joint Distribution Committee wrote in its Bulletin of June 1943: "From a fifth to a third of the number of refugees died ... whoever did not see the thousands of graves, mostly of children, cannot understand". This means that the number of Jewish refugees from western Poland who were arrested by the Soviets and deported to Siberia ranged from 750,000 to 900,000! But only 600,000 survived the incredible journey and arrived at their destination. [...] For lack of further proof, we will accept the lower figure of 750,000 Jews as having fled from western Poland to the Soviet-occupied former Polish territory.

A serious flaw of methodology can be found in this passage. Why is Sanning relying on a secondary source (The Universal) for a reference to a primary source (the JDC) whose archives are readily accessible? To investigate this question, we contacted the JDC Archive section, which kindly sent us scans of the relevant monthly JDC Digests and annual Reports for 1942 and 1943. The first reference to a figure of 600,000 in these scans is contained in JDC Digest, Vol 1, No. 4, October 1942:

…the JDC is buying complete equipment to outfit six 100-bed base hospitals to care for the many sick among the estimated 2,000,000 Polish refugees in Siberia, of whom 600,000 are said to be Jews

This is probably the Universal’s source, yet it is apparent from this passage that the 600,000 figure is hearsay: “600,000 are said to be Jews.” Sanning avoids the direct source because he would be embarassed by its hearsay nature. More importantly, Sanning would have been obliged to mention that a later JDC Digest, from April 1943, contained a report entitled 'Field Trip To Teheran by Harry Viteles', which admitted that there were huge variations in available estimates:

Estimates varied on the number of Polish Jews in the Asiatic Russian Republics. Some claims were as high as 600,000, others indicated that there were less than 100,000...

Furthermore, Sanning does not ask an obvious critical question about the source of the JDC’s supposed information: did the JDC have people on the ground in Russia distributing the aid? The answer can be found in the November 1942 Digest, p.4:

The Polish Government [In Exile] has arranged for this material to enter duty-free and to be shipped to its embassy in Kuibyshev, from which point it is distributed to its 300 district offices.

Moreover, it was a condition of this program that the aid had to be distributed on a “non-sectarian basis”. This stricture did not just apply to the JDC, but to all charities. It does not therefore require much imagination to work out why the Polish Government In Exile officials might have fed the JDC false information about the numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union. The JDC may have thought its parcels were going to Jews but these officials may have been siphoning them off to their own kith & kin. This suspicion is supported by a study of another charity, the "Vaad", that provided aid to Polish Jewish scholars exiled in Russia in 1942, and went through the same bureaucracy as the JDC, discussed here. Note the following key passage:

This project faced formidable technical obstacles since it was often difficult to locate the individuals whom the Vaad sought to aid and, moreover, the Soviet government's regulations hampered relief work. The most important directive stipulated that all mass aid to Polish citizens in the Soviet Union had to be channeled through agencies of the Polish government-in-exile. While assistance could be directed to specific individuals, there could be no special aid programs for Jews qua Jews. Thus aid sent to Russia had to be distributed among the Polish refugees-Jews and non-Jews-by Polish officials. This measure put Jewish refugees at the mercy of the Polish officials, many of whom were antisemitic.

Sanning’s failure to quote the JDC sources directly must thus lead to a suspicion that he has concealed the primary sources in order to avoid revealing that the JDC had no officials in the Soviet Union and was relying on hearsay, which led it to quote a wide range of estimates from “below 100,000” to “600,000”. Sanning’s quotation of the highest estimate, whilst omitting the lower one in the Viteles report, is either crassly negligent or simply fraudulent.

The suspicion of fraud rather than simple neglect is strengthened by the fact that Sanning similarly distorted the JDC's figures for western Poland. In order to “show” that 750,000 Jews crossed the demarcation line, Sanning tries to demonstrate that only 630,000 Jews were left in western Poland in June 1941. In order to do this, he resorts to a quotation out of context from the aforementioned Universal Jewish Encyclopedia suggesting that the JDC treated 630,000 Jews in the German zone. As Zimmerman demonstrates, Sanning’s quote is taken out of context from this passage:

In the German occupied area about 1,725,000 Jews were subjected to the full force of German fury. Some 250,000 lost their lives during the 12 months after the outbreak of the war. At least an equal number were uprooted from their homes. They, together with the remaining Jews of Poland, were herded into ghettos, beaten, driven from their homes, dragged into forced labor gangs and reduced to beggary. Once again starvation and disease took their toll. The death rate in the Warsaw ghetto, containing over 500,000 people in a 100 square block area, rose to 15 times its pre-war size.

Throughout this tragic period the network of institutions which the J.D.C. had built up in Poland since the first World War stood it in good stead. . . J.D.C. help was reaching 630,000 people daily in over 400 localities throughout the German occupied area..

Sanning therefore takes his 630,000 figure from a source that explicitly states that 1,725,000 Jews were ghettoized and forced into labour gangs, of which 500,000 were in the Warsaw ghetto alone. Once again, therefore, we find Sanning flagrantly abusing his source.

Ahmadinejad at Columbia

I'm sure it's no surprise to our readers at this point that Iranian President and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke yesterday at Columbia University, one of the U.S.'s finest universities (they turned me down, so they must be good), and fielded questions regarding his remarks concerning the Final Solution. A purportedly full transcript of his remarks can be found here.

Read more!

So what did the smiling guy sans necktie have to say?

M.A. addressed the issue first (not prompted by a question) by saying this: "My first question was if -- given that the Holocaust is a present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives?"

I'm sorry, Mr. Ahmadinejad, but for someone who purportedly holds a Ph.D., you know absolutely nothing about Holocaust studies. There are hundreds of perspectives on the Holocaust, including minimalist interpretations, functionalist interpretations, intententionalist interpretations, anti-Zionist interpretations, and a host of other approaches.

M.A.: "Our friend referred to 1930 as the point of departure for this development. However, I believe the Holocaust from what we've read happened during World War II, after 1930, in the 1940s. So, you know, we have to really be able to trace the event."

Not sure who "our friend" is, or in what context the date 1930 was mentioned, so I'm going to have to take a pass on this one.

M.A.: "My question was simple: There are researchers who want to approach the topic from a different perspective. Why are they put into prison? Right now, there are a number of European academics who have been sent to prison because they attempted to write about the Holocaust or research it from a different perspective, questioning certain aspects of it."

OK, first of all, none of the people in jail for Holocaust denial are so-called academics. Not a one.

That being said, I have to wonder exactly where a man who runs a police state gets off asking a question like this. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran does not allow religious freedoms outside those recognized by the Qur'an. People are thrown in jail -- routinely -- for opposing the government. When government opponents visit the country, they are jailed. I say this without qualification: Every single country that has a law against Holocaust denial is a more free country that Iran. EVERY LAST ONE.

Now, none of us here at HC Blog believe in having laws against Holocaust denial, but one must wonder why Ahmadinejad has taken this issue up as his cause célèbre.

M.A.: "My question is: Why isn't it open to all forms of research?"

It is. What some countries (I think twelve in total, and the only one in his part of the world is Israel) have done is made it a crime to "research" the Holocaust with the implanted conclusion that it never happened and then work from that assumption.

Actually, scratch that: These idiots can "research" whatever they want. It's when they publish or speak that they get into trouble. So now we're back to the pot-kettle-black scenario.

M.A.:"I have been told that there's been enough research on the topic. And I ask, well, when it comes to topics such as freedom, topics such as democracy, concepts and norms such as God, religion, physics even, or chemistry, there's been a lot of research, but we still continue more research on those topics. We encourage it."

"Enough research on the topic"? Really? Then what am I doing here, or Jon, Nick, Roberto, and Sergey?

I seriously doubt this guy was every told this by anyone. If anyone ever actually said this, they're as big an idiot as Ahmadinejad.

As for research on democracy and freedom, what would Ahmadinejad know about either?

M.A.: "But, then, why don't we encourage more research on a historical event that has become the root, the cause of many heavy catastrophes in the region in this time and age?"

Ah, an old denier favorite. The Holocaust caused the Nakba.

No, it didn't. Zionism was a movement for fifty years before World War II and two partition plans were floated before the Holocaust even happened.

The Holocaust may have sped up the Nakba, but it wasn't the root cause.

M.A.: "Why shouldn't there be more research about the root causes? That was my first question."

There's been exhaustive research on root causes. One of the most recent overviews, Holocaust: A History by Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, questions the traditional root causes fairly extensively.

M.A.: "And my second question, well, given this historical event, if it is a reality, we need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it or not. After all, it happened in Europe. The Palestinian people had no role to play in it. So why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price of an event they had nothing to do with?"

Well, again, the Holocaust didn't cause the Nakba, but this is a fair point. I'll grant Ahmadinejad this one. As I once heard Rashid Khalidi say, the Jews of Europe jumped out of a burning building, and nobody can blame them for jumping, but they landed on people, and they bear a responsibility for that."

M.A.: "The Palestinian people didn't commit any crime. They had no role to play in World War II. They were living with the Jewish communities and the Christian communities in peace at the time. They didn't have any problems."

Patently false. As much sympathy as I have for the Palestinian national cause, there were anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1920 in Jerusalem and 1929 in Hebron -- the second one famously carried out against a non-Zionist Jewish population that had been living there for a thousand years.

M.A.: "And today, too, Jews, Christians and Muslims live in brotherhood all over the world in many parts of the world. They don't have any serious problems."

OK...

M.A.: "But why is it that the Palestinians should pay a price, innocent Palestinians, for 5 million people to remain displaced or refugees abroad for 60 years. Is this not a crime? Is asking about these crimes a crime by itself?"

OK, we get it. But who said it's a crime to ask about the Nakba?

M.A.: "Why should an academic myself face insults when asking questions like this? Is this what you call freedom and upholding the freedom of thought?"

Sorry, I started laughing at "an academic myself" and lost attention for a moment. I'm back.

At this point, M.A. went on to the nuclear issue.

A few minutes later, a question came, presumably from a student (or from Colubmia's President Bollinger, who frankly acted like an asshole -- not that Ahmadinejad isn't an asshole, too, but Bollinger just lowered himself to M.A.'s level): "Mr. President, a further set of questions challenged your view of the Holocaust. Since the evidence that this occurred in Europe in the 1940s, as a result of the actions of the German Nazi government, since that -- those facts -- are well documented, why are you calling for additional research? There seems to be no purpose in doing so, other than to question whether the Holocaust actually occurred as a historical fact. Can you explain why you believe more research is needed into the facts of what are -- what is -- what are incontrovertible?"

This is a lousy question. I would have asked him, rather, why he doubted the evidence and not why he thought more research is needed, because more research is needed.

That being said, I think the supposition of the question is correct. M.A. responded: "Thank you very much for your question. I am an academic, and you are as well."

Sorry, but that doesn't get any less funny as I read it.

M.A.: "Can you argue that researching a phenomenon is finished, forever done? Can we close the books for good on a historical event? There are different perspectives that come to light after every research is done. Why should we stop research at all? Why should we stop the progress of science and knowledge?"

I concede him this point, which is why my question would have been better. Damn Columbia for rejecting my application some fifteen years ago!

M.A.: "You shouldn't ask me why I'm asking questions. You should ask yourselves why you think that that's questionable? Why do you want to stop the progress of science and research? Do you ever take what's known as absolute in physics? We had principles in mathematics that were granted to be absolute in mathematics for over 800 years. But new science has gotten rid of those absolutisms, come forward other different logics of looking at mathematics and sort of turned the way we look at it as a science altogether after 800 years. So, we must allow researchers, scholars, they investigate into everything, every phenomenon -- God, universe, human beings, history and civilization. Why should we stop that?"

As correct as the questioner's supposition is, M.A. really has him by the balls at this point.

M.A.: "I am not saying that it didn't happen at all. This is not that judgment that I am passing here."

Well, with all due respect (i.e., none) you've denied it outright in the past.

M.A.: "I said, in my second question, granted this happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people? This is a serious question. There are two dimensions. In the first question..."

And again with the linkage to Zionism. He is a one-trick pony -- two tricks at best.

Here the student continued his/her question: "Let me just -- let me pursue this a bit further. It is difficult to have a scientific discussion if there isn't at least some basis, some empirical basis, some agreement about what the facts are. So calling for research into the facts when the facts are so well established represents for many a challenging of the facts themselves and a denial that something terrible occurred in Europe in those years."

Here the audience gave the questioner applause. Again, his supposition is correct and I think he enunciated his point better here.

The student continued, "Let me move on to..." but was interrupted by M.A.: "Allow me. After all, you are free to interpret what you want from what I say. But what I am saying I'm saying with full clarity."

I think the man has a congenital inability to answer a direct question. Maybe that's just me.

M.A.: "In the first question I'm trying to actually uphold the rights of European scholars. In the field of science and research I'm asking, there is nothing known as absolute. There is nothing sufficiently done. Not in physics for certain. There has been more research on physics than it has on the Holocaust, but we still continue to do research on physics. There is nothing wrong with doing it."

Gee, "Mr. President," maybe the reason there's more research on physics is because physics is as old as the universe, and the Holocaust is only sixty years old?

But tell us all: In your country, could a scholar publish a physics paper proving God did not create the universe? The answer, I will provide for you, is this: No, s/he could not.

M.A.: "This is what man wants. They want to approach a topic from different points of view. Scientists want to do that. Especially an issue that has become the foundation of so many other political developments that have unfolded in the Middle East in the past 60 years."

Ugh. Not only does he dodge questions, but he endlessly repeats himself.

M.A.'s final remark on the topic: "Why do we stop it altogether? You have to have a justified reason for it. The fact that it was researched sufficiently in the past is not a sufficient justification in my mind."

We don't stop it altogether, you fucking idiot.

Incidentally, the next question was on capital punishment in Iran, including for homosexuals. Again: Not one of the twelve countries with laws against Holocaust denial will execute a person for a homosexual act. In many of these countries, in fact, homosexuals are a protected minority group.

His repsonse? "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country."

Oh, OK...

And I'm the queen of Romania.

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 1)

One way to tell the difference between a scholar and a Holocaust denier is to examine how they select and treat their sources. A researcher who willfully limited his range of sources, made no attempt to check their veracity, and exercised a lack of critical judgment, would not get pass first base if he had to submit his work for peer review in the academic community. He would thus be a non-scholar, or even, as it were, an anti-scholar. It is our contention that all Holocaust deniers routinely commit these sins of anti-scholarship. Furthermore, these anti-scholars are also prone to lying and deceit to cover up their shoddy use of sources.

To illustrate this point, we have put together a six-part study of the methods used by the denier Walter Sanning in his The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry. In this first part, we discuss the claim made by Sanning (p.33) that the number of Jews in Poland at the end of September 1939 was 2,633,000, a reduction of nearly 500,000 from the 1931 census figure of 3,113,933. A study of his sources and arguments reveals a number of deliberate omissions, distortions, and perverse interpretations of data.

Read more!

Firstly, to justify his choice of sources, Sanning (p.44) makes a false claim about Nazi population data by asserting that “their figures were not based on a census, not even on estimates". This is a blatant lie because, as Sanning must have known, every Jewish ghetto in Poland was forced to conduct a census. This had been mandated by Heydrich on September 21st, 1939:

(3) The Jewish councils are to take an improvised census of the Jews in their local areas - broken down if possible by sex (age groups): a) up to 16 years of age, b) from 16 to 20 years of age, and c) over, as well as by principal occupation groups - and are to report the results in the shortest possible time.

Sanning contradicts his own lie when he discusses Nazi demographic figures for Soviet cities (p.74). Suddenly, we discover that:

…the German authorities began to initiate detailed counts of the remaining population. Obviously, the German occupiers had to obtain some information on the available stock of the working population.

Sanning’s Soviet chapter thus, with rank hypocrisy, leans on Nazi demographics that he ignores in his Polish chapter. This flagrant dishonesty is damning because it reveals his true motives: evasion and obfuscation of the true historical record.

Secondly, Sanning claims that Jewish natural population growth (births over
deaths) between 1931 and 1939 was only 0.2% per annum. This figure is refuted by a Polish government survey, published originally in 1936, with which any demographer of Poland should be familiar: "The Accuracy of the Registration of Births and Deaths" (Statistics, Series C. Pt. 41). A team of demographers examined rabbinical records dating back to 1927 and found that the number of births among the Jewish population in Poland was at least 50% larger than that given in the official birth tables. Joseph Marcus’s The Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939 (1983, p.173) discusses these data in depth and concludes that the natural growth rate was 1.32% per annum for 1931-1935 and 1.29% per annum for 1936-1938. Sanning (p.26-27) claims that, in 1931, there were 52,305 births and 40,000 deaths, but the Polish data indicate a birth rate of 2.7% (84,076) and a death rate of 1.38% (42,972). Sanning is therefore understating Jewish natural growth by 30,000 per year.

Thirdly, Sanning prints a graph (p.28) showing that, as of 1931, the percentage of Jews to non-Jews was falling in proportion with age, i.e. there were proportionally far more old Jews than young ones in the overall population. He claims that this proves that the Jewish birth rate was far lower than for non-Jews. However, Sanning fails to mention the obvious explanation of these data, namely that, as he himself notes (p.30), 294,139 Jews emigrated between the 1921 and 1931 censuses, and most of these were young families with children.

Fourthly, Sanning claims that 100,000 Jews left Poland annually from 1933. As Roberto Muehlencamp has demonstrated, Sanning obtained this figure from an article by Hermann Graml that was based on the flawed assumption that his source document referred to emigration from Poland when it actually referred to emigration from the whole of Eastern Europe, including the USSR, not just Poland. Sanning makes no attempt to check Graml’s source.

The bumbling “demographer” makes a similar error when discussing Polish Jewish emigration to the USA. Sanning (p.31) makes the fatuous claim that:

Of the 4.3 million Jews in the geographic area encompassed by Poland, the Baltic Countries, Rumania and Czechoslovakia before the war, approximately two thirds lived in Poland. Therefore, the largest contingent of Jewish immigrants in North America between 1933 and 1943 must have come from that country.

The sheer absurdity of this position can be shown by examining any American Jewish Yearbook from this period. For example, the Yearbook for 1937-38 (p.765, Table XVII) lists all Jewish immigrants into the USA by country of last residence. The total from all countries for the year up to June 30th, 1936 is 6,252. The number of these emanating from Poland is just 528.

Sanning displays further ignorance about the United States when he deals specifically with that country in Chapter Seven, pp. 160-166. Sanning cites an article from the American Jewish Yearbook (1976, Vol 77, p.268) which he claims shows that the Jewish population of the USA rose from 4,228,029 in 1927 to 4,770,000 in 1937. Sanning argues that the rise between these figures cannot be explained by natural increase but can only be due to illegal immigration. Had Sanning consulted the original source of the 1937 figures (1940-41 Yearbook, p.215-256), he would have discovered two facts that debunked that assumption. Firstly, the author, H.S. Binfield of the US Census Bureau, explicitly states that the growth was not due to immigration. Secondly, the data were collected from a Census of Religious Bodies, i.e. the figures were self-reported by the Jews. It is therefore absurd to claim that these Jews entered the USA illegally, as their census returns would thus have been self-incriminating. A clandestine population would not reveal its whereabouts to a government survey.

Sanning's lack of basic knowledge is further exposed when he discusses the possibility of Jewish emigration from Poland to France. He assumes (p.31) that Jews arriving in France must have emigrated either from Germany or from “countries to the east and south east of Germany”. He then narrows this area down to one country: Poland! Anyone with even the scantest knowledge of French Jewish history would have known that France had an empire in North Africa, which contained many Jews, and these were allowed to enter France freely. France also had a strong reputation, prior to 1939, for Jewish immigration from Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia, due to her historical role as a recipient of Jewish refugees fleeing from the Ottoman Empire, a role that continued after the Ottoman period into the 1930’s.

In addition to this ignorance, Sanning’s thesis contains glaring inconsistencies. His claim that there was high illegal emigration from Poland in the 1918-1939 period contradicts his earlier claim that natural Jewish population growth was very low. If high illegal emigration occurred during the 1920’s, there would have needed to be an extraordinarily high surplus of births over deaths between 1921 and 1931 to replace the departed population, otherwise the Jewish population would have plummeted between the 1921 and 1931 censuses, instead of actually increasing.

However, merely to accuse Sanning of ignorance and hypocrisy is to overlook glaring examples of flagrant dishonesty. We saw above that Sanning lied about Nazi population data and discussed Polish births and deaths data without making any mention of the 1936 government study that forms the cornerstone of all Polish academic demography of the period. This dishonesty appears again in his discussion of the USA when Sanning quotes the claim of US Assistant Secretary of State, Breckenridge Long, made in 1943, that the US had admitted 580,000 refugees in the previous ten years. Sanning neglects to mention a fact that he must have known: shortly after Long’s testimony, Congressman Emanuel Celler demonstrated that Long’s claim was deceitful because the 580,000 figure was concocted from the maximum quota limit of immigrants (not just refugees), not the number of refugees that were granted visas.

Once again therefore, we find that Sanning is has written a deceitful and fraudulent piece of work.

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 3)

[Continued from The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 2)]


“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 3)

Discussion of denierbud’s “Ten Other Points to Consider” will be divided into two parts, of which one deals with “points” 1, 9 and 10 because these three contain similar claims (staging of photographs contained in the Stroop Report). “Points” 2 to 6 and 8 will be the subject of the other part, while “point” 7 was already addressed in Part 1 of this commentary.

Read more!


5. “An unlikely photo for a commemorative book” (item 1 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

With regard to one of the photos attached to the Stroop Report, which can be viewed online here and is captioned “Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt” (“Forcibly pulled out of dug-outs”) denierbud mouths off as follows:

1) The most famous photo of the holocaust comes from the Stroop Report. It is the photo of the little boy with his hands raised up, with a soldier behind him holding a gun. Would a German general choose to include such an un-chivalric photo in a commemorative book? Any person in any culture is going to be turned off by the "bully" implication of the photo: a nice little boy scared into putting his hands up by a grown man with a gun. Who, below, is more likely to put this into a photo album:

A) A Jew trying to vilify the Nazis

B) A Nazi General

As a means to grasp the absurdity, try to imagine General Patton sending General Eisenhower a commemorative photo of an American soldier herding 5 year old Japanese children at gunpoint into some enclosure.

In the last paragraph of the above quote, American citizen denierbud reveals his ignorance of his own country’s history by placing US generals George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese, instead of the European Theater of Operations.

He further reveals his ignorance of the nature and tasks of commanders like SS-Brigadefuehrer and Major General of Police Stroop by comparing him to military commanders conducting engagements between military forces. Patton and Eisenhower would probably have resented this comparison, and so, as already mentioned in Part 2, would Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, who made a clear distinction between a campaign “fought by soldiers against a well-armed army” and what he contemptuously called Stroop’s “little murder expedition”. Stroop may have liked to see himself as a soldier, but his operation against the Warsaw ghetto was but a large-scale police operation, directed against a population group that, as a whole, was deemed to be a threat to public security and to the “Aryan” population. This view was expressed by Stroop himself in the summary account part of the report, namely in the following statements:

Page I:

These restrictions were imposed with the intention of protecting the aryan population against the Jews.

Page 2:

The experiences in the district of Lowicz after Ghettos had been installed, showed that this method is the only one suitable for dispelling the dangers which emanate repeatedly from the Jews.
[…]
At that time the Department for Hygiene urged the speedy erection of a Ghetto in the interest of preserving the health of the German Forces and of the native population as well.

Page 3:

It soon became clear, however, that not all dangers had been removed by this confining the Jews to one place. Security considerations required removing the Jews from the city of Warsaw altogether.

Jews were seen by Stroop as a threat to public health and security, as a pest to be segregated and removed. And they were also seen as despicable creatures, contemptuously referred to as rabble and sub-humanity and portrayed as the dregs of humanity, abominable not only physically but also character-wise, like these Jewish traitors being scrutinized by a smart-looking German officer. This was a view that Stroop shared with his superiors, including Himmler, who in a later speech would refer to the Jews as “this disintegrating plague in our body popular”, which he had undertaken to wipe out for the good of Germany.

Such being their views and attitudes, neither Stroop nor Himmler would realize the “bully” implication of this photo that denierbud talks about. The “nice little boy” would be a filthy, crooked-legged, sickly showpiece of the Jewish “rabble and sub-humanity” that threatened the strong and healthy German people, the “grown man with a gun” a worthy SS-man helping to carry out a task that was, in Himmler’s words, “the most difficult we had so far”. The “grown man vs. boy” – situation made no difference to this assessment, and neither did the fact that the SS-man was heavily armed and the Jewish boy obviously defenseless, for what made the Jews dangerous in the Nazis eyes’ was not any physical power but their supposed “disintegrating” influence. A part of this “disintegrating” influence, according to Nazi ideology, was the notion of conscience and of compassion for the weak and helpless underlying the chivalric custom of sparing them. Among the statements attributed to Hitler there are the following:

"Only when the time comes when the race is no longer overshadowed by the consciousness of its own guilt, then it will find internal peace and external energy to cut down regardlessly and brutally the wild shoots, and to pull up the weeds."

"Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish like circumcision."

"I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading modifications of a chimera called conscience and morality"

In his book Mein Kampf, Volume II, Chapter I, Hitler had proclaimed that what he called an “ethical ideal” had to step aside if it endangered “the existence of a race that is the standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal”:

The völkisch belief holds that humanity must have its ideals, because ideals are a necessary condition of human existence itself. But, on the other hand, it denies that an ethical ideal has the right to prevail if it endangers the existence of a race that is the standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal. For in a world which would be composed of mongrels and negroids all ideals of human beauty and nobility and all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity would be lost forever.

Thus there was no room for ethical considerations, such as keep the stronger from killing, harming or brutalizing the weaker, within the scope of what Goebbels, in his diary entry of 27 March 1942, called “a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus”. On the contrary, acting with utmost ruthlessness even against defenseless women and children carrying that “bacillus” was the dictate of a “higher ethical ideal” borne by the superior “Aryan” race, a sacrifice made for the German people by men who loved it, a supreme virtue. In his speech on 6 October 1943, Himmler expressed this idea in the following terms (my translation):

I ask you that what I tell you in this circle you will really only hear and never talk about it. The question came up to us: What do to with the women and children? – I decided to find a very clear solution also in this respect. This because I didn’t consider myself entitled to exterminate the men – that is, to kill them or to have them killed – and to let the children grow up as avengers against our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth. For the organization that had to carry out the task if was the most difficult we had so far. It has been carried out without – as I consider myself entitled to say – our men and our leaders having taken harm to their spirit and soul. The path between the possibilities existing here, to either become crude and heartless and no longer to respect human life or to become weak and collapse to the point of nervous breakdowns the path between this Scylla and Charybdis is horrendously narrow.

Abhorrent though it may appear to normal human feeling, the situation portrayed on this photo is thus perfectly compatible with how Himmler and his subordinates saw themselves – as men willing to make the sacrifice of acting ruthlessly against the perceived carriers of what Himmler called “this disintegrating plague”, for the benefit of Germany – and those they were fighting against. The answer to denierbud’s rhetorical question whether a “Nazi General” would be likely to include this photograph in a photo report meant for Himmler is: yes, definitely so. On 23 April 1943 Himmler had ordered “to complete the combing out of the Warsaw Ghetto with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity”. Photos like the one under discussion showed that Stroop had complied with this order.

Against the reality of Nazi ideology stands the fantasy of denierbud’s manipulation scenario, which would have his female Jewish forger directing a large team of actors and photographers, some dressed up as SS-men and others as poor Jews, elaborately staging more than four dozen photographs against a background of burning buildings and/or urban ruins chosen or created for that sinister purpose, all of that at a time when Warsaw and all of Poland was under Nazi control, and furthermore without leaving any evidence to this large outdoor photo session (which even included a shot of the C.O. of the large-scale action himself) other than the “bully” effect discussed above and the claim of one Tsvi Nussbaum that he was the boy with his hands in the air, and that the photo had been taken not inside but outside the Warsaw ghetto and on a date after the completion of the Stroop Report.

For Nussbaum’s account denierbud refers his readers to this page, which he apparently did not read very carefully. If he had, he would have noticed that his source features excerpts from Richard Raskin’s A Child at Gunpoint, in which it is ruled out that Nussbaum and the boy on the picture are identical. Emphases in the following quote are mine.

If the boy in the photo is Tsvi Nussbaum, then the picture would have to have been taken at the Hotel Polski, and not within the Warsaw Ghetto, where all of the photos from the "Stroop Report" are generally thought to have been taken.
Dr. Lucjan Dobroszycki was quoted in a New York Times article, expressing doubts about whether Tsvi Nussbaum is the boy in the photo, for the reasons set out below:
"The scene," he noted, "is on a street, not in the courtyard in which the Hotel Polski roundup took place. Some of the Jews are wearing armbands that they surely would have shed while in the Aryan quarter of Warsaw. The German soldiers would not have needed combat uniforms at the hotel. The heavy clothing worn by most of the Jews suggests that the photograph was taken in May – the date General Stroop put on the report – rather than July. Moreover every other photograph in the "Stroop Report" was taken in the Warsaw Ghetto."

Tsvi Nussbaum commented:
"I am not claiming anything – there’s no reward. I didn’t ask for this honour. I think it’s me, but I can’t honestly swear to it. A million and a half Jewish children were told to raise their hands."

Finally, with the help of someone trained in photo-comparison, Dr. K.R. Burns, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Georgia, compared the famous photo, with a passport photo of Tsvi Nussbaum taken in 1945, and stated the following:
"Having examined the two photographs, although the mouth, nose and cheek are consistent, there is one important disparity; the ear lobes on the 1943 boy appear to be attached, whereas the earlobes of the 1945 boy are not attached. This generic trait cannot change with age and the difference indicates the pictures are not of the same boy. "

So the child at gunpoint is clearly not Mr. Nussbaum. And while other attempts to identify this little boy have failed as well, four of the Jews shown on this photograph have been identified by relatives, and the man holding the gun identified himself. Raschke, as quoted by denierbud’s source:

The one person in the photograph whose identity has been established beyond any doubt is the SD soldier aiming his sub-machine gun in the direction of the little boy.

He was SS-Rottenführer Josef Blösche, a most feared predator, who was often teamed up with SS-Untersturmführer Karl–Georg Brandt, and SS-Oberscharführer Heinrich Klaustermeyer, to terrorize the occupants of the ghetto on hunting expeditions, randomly killing whomever they chose.

Blösche was born in Friedland (former "Sudetenland") in 1912, and after joining the SS, saw service in Platerow as a guard patrolling the River Bug. In May 1941 he was transferred to the SS post at Siedlce. Following service in an Einsatzgruppen unit in Baranowitchi, he was transferred to the Warsaw Security Police, where he took part in the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943 and the Polish national uprising in August 1944.

So there is little if any room for doubt that this is a photo taken during the Warsaw Uprising, and that it shows what it is captioned as showing.

Denierbud should learn to read his own sources before invoking them. And then, perhaps he read this one but expected his readers to take his word for it and not check behind him. The line between ignorance, sloppiness and stupidity on the one hand and dishonesty on the other is hard to draw when it comes to “Revisionism”.

6. “A Picture of acute scoliosis” (item 9 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Denierbud can be an amusing fellow, especially when in this “point” he tells his readers that this picture “looks more like a medical photo” and that “Nazi philosophy had a racial component to be sure, but it didn't involve running to the hospital of conquered cities and taking photos of people with rare medical problems in order to point out their inferior characteristics.”

First of all, what is supposed to make this picture look like a medical photo? Is it because in denierbud’s imagination medical photos are usually taken on the outside of buildings with bullet marks in them, which is what the two men in this photo seem to be facing? Because he figures that axes (we see one by the man on the left) are not only a useful tool when it comes to breaking open doors in a round-up, but also standard medical equipment? Or just because the men in the photo have no clothes on? The latter is the only feature that might point to a medical background, except that there’s a likelier reason that becomes apparent from the Stroop Report, namely the teletype message of 3 May 1943, where the following is written:

Since we discovered several times today, that Jewesses had pistols concealed in their bloomers, every Jew and bandit will be ordered from today on, to strip completely for the search.

So the men on the photo obviously had to strip in order to make sure that they had no concealed weapons on them. Medical photo my ass.

As to denierbud’s objection regarding Nazi “philosophy”, denierbud has revealed enough ignorance of the subject matter of his productions to warrant the question on what basis he presumes knowledge of what the Nazis would or would not do. Nazi racist and pseudo – anthropological madness went so far that, on one occasion, over 100 prisoners were killed at Natzweiler concentration camp, with Himmler’s blessing, in order to put together a collection of skeletons from Judeo-Bolshevik sub-humans at the Anatomic Institute of Strasburg University. The well-documented execution of this project is described in detail on pages 271 ff of the study Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, edited by Kogon, Langbein and others. It was also the subject of a criminal trial before a West German court. Taking photographs of hospital patients with deformities in order to point out their inferiority would have been just a less harmful manifestation of the same lunacy.

However, denierbud further objects, the deformity of the man on the right also existed among Germans and would thus not have been suitable for demonstrating Jewish inferiority. To be sure, there were also non-Jewish Germans with all sorts of physical and/or mental handicaps, but arguing that this would have kept the Nazis from deriding Jews with shots of physical deformities is like arguing that club-footed little Goebbels and other members of the government, who were not exactly models of “Aryan” perfection, kept the Nazis from juxtaposing “Aryan” beauty and Jewish ugliness in charming publications like this one. What is more, denierbud apparently doesn’t know – or “forgot” to tell his readers – that the Nazis saw also otherwise worthy German Volksgenossen as inferior and a burden to society if they suffered from physical or mental handicaps, to the point of instituting a program for the killing of disabled children and adult disabled patients living in institutional settings. As early as 1936, the Nazis had portrayed handicapped people as dregs of humanity living at the expense of the healthy body popular, like in this propaganda poster.

Within the scope of such “philosophy”, to use denierbud’s terminology, a physically or mentally handicapped person who furthermore was a member of the despised Jewish race, or a stinking Jew who on top of that was physically deformed, was the epitome of all that National Socialism fought against and stood for, an illustration of Hitler’s “higher ethical ideal” that called for ruthlessly defending “human beauty and nobility” against the “mongrels and negroids” who might otherwise destroy “all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity” (see above quotes from Mein Kampf), and of the “most difficult” task of eliminating “this disintegrating plague in our body popular”, which Himmler would refer to in his speech on 6 October 1943. In this sense, the man with acute scoliosis on the right of the photo, being physically deformed and obviously a Jew, was a carrier of two perceived evils that the Nazis sought to erase, and thus an excellent motive for a photo that would warm the heart of a Nazi race ideologist.

On the other hand, and probably in order to make clear that a Jew was trash whether or not he bore a physical anomaly, there was the man on the right, apparently of normal build and externally showing his “inferiority” only through his low stature, weak complexion, sagging shoulders and ugly big ears. Denierbud apparently failed to notice that this man was labeled a “dreg of humanity” just like the one suffering from scoliosis, and that the photo’s message in the context of Nazi ideology, while emphasized by the latter man’s handicap, was not dependent thereon. Two Jews looking like the man on the left would have been “dregs of humanity” as well.

7. “Photo of Man Falling In Mid-Air” (item 10 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Regarding this photo from the Stroop Report, denierbud treats his readers to the following showpiece of wisdom:

In a combat situation, it must be pretty hard to get that mid-air photo of a man jumping out of a 4 story building. Particularly since there might be someone else in the building who refuses to be taken alive and has a gun and might shoot at soldiers below. Setting up the camera and being ready to click at just that right moment might be tough. However for a faked photo to be used for propaganda, you'd want just that: you'd want the man caught mid-air. When I've looked at old black and white photos I've noticed that their resolution is incredible, and German cameras were considered the best, like the Leicas. Old photos circa WWII rarely have blotches on them either, so it's odd that this photo has a blotch right on that crucial spot: on the man's face so we can't see if perhaps it's a dummy. We see smoke coming out of an apartment. Not the apartment he's jumping out of though. The rest of the apartments don't have smoke and many have curtains which haven't gone up in flames. These things point to this photo being staged. The caption is "These bandits are avoiding arrest by jumping down."

Before examining the above, let us briefly assume, just for the sake of argument, that denierbud is right about the photo having been staged. Would this necessarily mean that the staging was organized by someone forging the Stroop Report? No. It might just as well be that Stroop himself or the photo crew attached to his forces organized the staging of one of the scenes that Stroop described so vividly in his report, for the simple reason that it was easier than capturing such a scene “live”. Such scenario would at least be less far-fetched than denierbud's scenario of elaborate Jewish or Polish outdoor photo sessions using German uniforms and hardware in German-occupied Warsaw in mid-1943.

So, even if denierbud were right about the staging, this wouldn’t help his case.

But let us nevertheless look at what he’s got to back up his claim with.

Denierbud figures that taking such a photograph in a “combat situation” would be “tough”, but he does little to explain what exactly would be so “tough” about the taking of this picture (which was obviously shot from a certain distance, as it shows almost all of the building’s façade, and by someone standing in a somewhat diagonal direction from the building rather than squarely in front of it), and what particular photographic talents would be required to set up the camera and be “ready to click just at the right moment” after realizing that there was a man in the building on the verge of jumping, probably with the expectable hesitation that precedes such a move. The possibility of being shot at from the building? Bud seems to think that German Propaganda Kompanie (PK) photographers were bunglers and/or pussies, when actually such photographers covered combat situations much tougher than the one portrayed on this picture, where the probability that the building’s residents might be armed with long-range weapons constituting a risk for the photographer (like a rifle) was not very high, considering the reduced number of Jewish combatants and the little armament they had (see Part 2 of this article).

As to denierbud’s sermon about the quality of World War II photos (especially if taken with German cameras), I wonder just how many such photos denierbud has seen to support his claim that they generally have an “incredible” resolution (whatever he means by that) and “rarely have blotches on them either”. I don’t expect someone who has American generals Patton and Eisenhower fighting against the Japanese rather than the Germans, and who considers the staff of Nazi extermination camps to have been members of “the elite forces of the German army”, to be a World War II buff looking at World War II pictures very often.

Denierbud claims that there is a suspicious “blotch” obscuring the face of the man leaping from the building, which would otherwise allow for telling whether or not it is a human being or a dummy. I don’t think that’s much of an argument, insofar as I expect dummies – at least such dummies, assuming they existed at the time, that are built close enough to nature to have their right arm pointing upwards and the left one pointing downwards when falling from a multi-story building, like the leaping man on the picture – to also have a face that may be mistaken for a real human face from the distance from which this photo was taken, especially on a black-and-white photograph. There is also nothing suspicious about the man’s face being unrecognizable, which seems to be due to the very bright background of the jumping figure. This background looks like either flames engulfing the figure or a part of the building’s façade from which the paint has fallen off, revealing some bright construction material underneath that creates a very bright tone on the picture. Another factor leading to the “blotch” may be the man’s position as he is leaping: he seems to have his left side and back turned towards the camera, his right side towards the building, and his front side and face towards the balcony a little below him. He further may have his head bent downwards, like someone who has just taken a leap towards mattresses and other upholstered articles he has previously thrown into the street and wants to land on, or like this person falling from one of the WTC towers on 11 September 2001, the main difference being that the man in the Stroop Report photo is probably hoping to survive the fall. Last but not least, I don't expect decades of lying in an archive to have done our Stroop Report photo's quality any good. To cut a long story short, there are several possible explanations for the “blotch” that require no speculations about some sinister manipulator.

Now to the alleged absence of smoke coming from the apartment from which the man is jumping. To be sure, it is difficult to see any on the picture featured by denierbud, where the arrow above the text “Face is obscurred[sic!]” covers the relevant part of the window behind the man:



But if you look at the picture without this arrow, and especially if you amplify the relevant part:



you see something coming out of the right side of the window (from the photo viewer’s perspective) that looks like a plume of smoke to me.

So, contrary to what denierbud tries to make believe, the jumping man obviously had fire in the room from which he was jumping, and was escaping from that fire. The plume of smoke shows exactly where denierbud placed the arrow in his commented edition of the picture, which makes it hard to believe that he failed to see it.

So what is denierbud left with to support his claim that this photo was staged?

Just his baseless and vague subjective notion of what “you” would want for a “faked photo to be used for propaganda”, which by itself is meaningless. A man jumping from a multi-story building looks “good” on any photo.

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Continuation:

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 4)