Saturday, December 29, 2007

Another Note to "Bankdraft"

There is a discussion forum which, unlike the Cesspit run by Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis, offers open, uncensored debate.

It is called RODOH, which stands for "Real Open Debate on the Holocaust" (the pun on the misnamed "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" is intended).

"Bankdraft" is herewith invited to leave the cozy safety of the Führerbunker and join the discussion on RODOH.

Note to Bankdraft

The opening blog on this site (dated March 23rd, 2006) states:
Let it be stated from the outset that we do not endorse censorship of any kind; nor are we in favour of anti-Holocaust Denial laws being passed in Britain or the United States. We would prefer that continental countries such as Germany, Austria and France did not make martyrs out of Deniers.
So perhaps you need to do some reading before mouthing off on the Cesspit, which is (lest we forget) a censored forum, despite the fact that its moderator, Jonnie Hargis (who lies about his identity), claims that it is a forum for open debate? There's a good chap.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Domestic Dispute

My wife is on a Nazi kick lately. She found out I had a copy of Lebert, Lebert, and Evans's My Father's Keeper for sale and asked to read it before I sold it, and then she picked up Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life from my shelf o'Holocaust books. On deck is Ron Rosenbaum's Understanding Hitler.

Novick has got her pretty pissed off. She disagrees with at least 90 percent of his conclusions, and I've done a fairly good job of keeping my mouth shut, since I agree with about 90 percent of his conclusions. After all, the book is on my shelf because I used it in a Holocaust seminar I taught five years ago.

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The argument that arose last night, however, was one that was fairly unavoidable in hindsight. It would have come up eventually; it just happened to come up now. And, by happenstance, it happened to come up on what is on the Jewish calendar the tenth day of the month of Tevet, which commemorates the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 B.C. and the date on which non-Zionist Jews, like myself, commemorate the Holocaust.

The subject of the argument was the so-called March of the Living, a yearly held series of events that take Jewish youths to Nazi death camps in Poland, culminating in ceremonies on Yom ha-Shoah (Day of the Holocaust — the date on which Israel, and now most of the world, commemorates the Holocaust) at Auschwitz. From Poland the kids go to Israel, where they celebrate Yom ha-Atzmaut (Israel's Independence Day).

"When we have children," my wife said, "I'd like them to do this."

"I would be very much against that," I replied.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because," I said. "It teaches Jewish children that the solution to violent anti-Semitism is Israel. And it isn't."

"Don't you think that the Holocaust made it clear that the world's Jews need a safe place to live?"

Several issues went through my mind at once. What's so safe about Israel? Why can't Jews live safely where they already live — particularly here (the U.S.)? Shouldn't living safely where we already live be a goal? Those kinds of questions. I didn't ask any of them, because I saw that it would only prolong an argument I didn't want to have — at least not right then.

My wife is quick to point out when we disagree on issues like this that much of her grandparents' families (from Lithuania, Belarus, and mainly Ukraine) were killed during WWII because they were Jews. The name of one of her great-grandfathers' shtetls appears in the infamous Jäger Report. My Jewish ancestors were German-speaking Jews from Prague and Bavaria who left Europe before the U.S. Civil War. No Holocaust casualties anywhere in my line — at least as far as I know. When my wife "waves the bloody shirt" (as I would call it were I debating someone on the issues rather than having a disagreement with my wife), I normally get angry. And I did last night. But as I was reflecting on the argument on my way to work this morning, I considered that maybe she had a point — at least in so far as I can't understand what it's like to have lost family in the Holocaust. I may know far more facts and figures, but personal loss vis-à-vis the Final Solution is absent in my psyche.

This doesn't mean I'm going to change my mind w/r/t the March of the Living. I think it's a crass Zionist recruitment method that, like so much else in Israeli discourse, uses the Holocaust to justify Israel's actions, right or wrong. But maybe on this particular day, as I commemorate the victims of the Nazis, I should consider the inevitable generational effects of this genocide, right down to my own household.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Grubach on Longerich

How about this for pure mendacity?

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Grubach quotes Longerich here, but then lies blatantly about the Longerich testimony he has just quoted:
Longerich agreed that most, if not all, of these words are capable of being used in a non-genocidal sense. For example, ausrotten can bear such anodyne meanings as ‘get rid of’ or ‘wipe out’ without connoting physical extermination. But he asserted that its usual and primary meaning is ‘exterminate’ or ‘kill off," especially when applied to people or to a group of people as opposed to, for example, a religion. He contended that all depends on the context in which the words are used."10

This undermines Herf’s claim that the meanings of these terms are clear. In fact, they are equivocal, as has been admitted by Peter Longerich, a court recognized expert who believes the Nazis had a policy to exterminate the Jews.
Only in the land of Grubach can the phrase "usual and primary meaning" be read as "equivocal".

Friday, December 07, 2007

Mattogno and Graf: Reverse Logic

Mattogno and Graf have a problem. They have decided that, instead of simply ignoring vast quantities of transport data (see Sanning), they will distort them. However, anyone who studies these data eventually finds trains running into the Reinhard camps from the East (e.g. Bialystok, Minsk, Lida, Vilnius and Lwow). To any logical person, this fact alone disproves the 'resettlement thesis'. How do Mattogno and Graf lie their way around this evident fact?

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Mattogno/Graf's (M/G's) first approach to this issue is the blatant non-sequitur. 'Evidence A' is cited in support of totally unrelated 'Hypothesis B'. This is the equivalent of someone pointing to a barrel of apples as proof that there must be orange trees in the area. This is most apparent in Section 6 of Chapter VIII of their Treblinka screed, which begins with the claim:
The deportations of Jews to the east therefore took place in two stages: the Jews were first temporarily settled or lodged in transit camps and then deported farther east. In view of the paucity of existing documentation, we cannot determine with certainty what the final destination of this deportation was, but there exist various pieces of evidence, which make it possible for us to draw plausible conclusions.
In the absence of a 'final destination', M/G infer one by discussing a tiny sample of Dutch Jews who were selected for labour on the ramp at Sobibor. However, by definition, these labour selections were not 'resettlements'. The Jews quoted by M/G never set foot inside the USSR. Moreover, the labour camps cited in their testimony were to the west of Sobibor, so trains were going in the wrong direction to constitute 'deportations to the east'. M/G's own source, Danneker's statement of June 1942, clearly indicates that the 'east' was understood by the Nazis to mean the USSR:
For military reasons, an expulsion of Jews from Germany into the eastern deportation area can no longer take place during the summer.
We thus have a case of 'reverse logic' by M/G in which west and east are deliberately switched: a geographical and logical fallacy. Furthermore, the number of labour selections per transport in the cases cited by M/G was less than 5%. For example, Cato Polak was one of 42 people selected from a transport of 1105 Jews.

M/G's second distortion is to misrepresent a historical authority by cherrypicking a genuine historian's deportation data without giving its context. For example, in the case of Slovakian Jews, M/G claim that:
In an article published in 1992, Polish historian Janina Kielbon drew a close-to-complete picture of the deportation of Jews into the district of Lublin between 1939 and 1942.[703] We reproduce the data for 1942 in table form
M/G give the destinations as Trawniki, Izbica, 'Lublin' [Majdanek?], Lubartów, etc. What they fail to mention is that Kielbon's data indicated that these were merely temporary locations in which Jews underwent labour selection and those unfit for work were held in ghettoes for varying periods awaiting transport to the death camps, as shown here. See also the individual cases from the Majdanek State Museum shown here. M/G's technique here is therefore a snapshot fallacy. It takes a specific moment in a deportation, or one link from a transport chain, and uses this to obfuscate the full history of that deportation from its origin to its final location.

Thirdly, the most serious lie of all committed by M/G is to distort the ultimate fate of the people who were selected for labour:
It is characteristic that nearly all the Dutch Jews, who had been transferred from Sobibór to another camp, returned home by way of Auschwitz-Birkenau; instead of being liquidated as bearers of top-secret knowledge, they survived even this 'extermination camp.'
This can be shown to be false by examining one of M/G's own sources: Jules Schelvis's "Sobibor" study. Mattogno writes:
At Dorohucza, 5 km from Trawniki, was a labor camp where peat was cut. According to Schelvis, at least 700 Dutch Jews were transferred there directly after their arrival in Sobibór, but according to him only two of them are supposed to have survived the war.[765] There is certain knowledge of 171 of these persons - 147 men and 24 women - since they sent postcards home from Dorohucza.
M/G's hypocrisy towards Schelvis is telling. They accept his estimate of the number of Jews in the camp, which comes from the Judenrat in Amsterdam, but reject his findings on the number of survivors. Such hypocrisy is typical of M/G's quote-mining methodology.

Schelvis's estimate of 700 Dutch Jews at Dorohucza is confirmed here:
From Dorohucza a total of 171 written messages (postcards) were received at the Judenrat in Amsterdam. The senders of 160 of these cards could be identified, together with the dates of their deportation. They were on 8 different transports. With these 8 transports, plus the first deportation of 10 - 13 March 1943, from which there were no survivors, the number of Dutch Jews put to work at Dorohucza, can be calculated as at least (9 x 80 + 1 =) 721.
The fate of these Jews is made clear by the same link:
Out of over 34,000 Dutch Jews deported from Westerbork to Sobibor, an estimated 1,000 were sent to the forced labour camps in the Lublin and Trawniki areas. One of those camps was the peat digging camp of Dorohucza. Sixteen of these Dutch Jews survived the war, 13 women and 3 men.

[...]

During the night of 3 November 1943 almost all Jews in the labour camps in the Lublin district (40 - 50,000) were shot. This massacre was conducted under the code name of Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival). In this operation the Jewish slave labourers in Dorohucza and Trawniki were murdered. It also meant the end of the work camps. In the digital ‘In Memoriam-Lezecher’ book are the names of 144 Dutch Jews who were murdered during Aktion Erntefest in Dorohucza, for administrative reasons with 30 November 1943 given as their date of death for administrative reasons. See the testimony of Robert Jührs.
This evidence alone is sufficient to confirm Schelvis's findings about the number of survivors. I am grateful to my friend Earldor for supplying this extract (Schelvis, "Sobibor", p.191):
Of the approximately 700 Dutch men who, upon arrival, were immediately transferred to labour camp Dorohucza to dig peat, only two survived the war. In the rest of the Lublin district, only thirteen women and one man were liberated - though not at Dorohucza or Lublin - after spending time at numerous other camps, relentlessly torn between misery, death and hope.
Finally, M/G set up a false dilemma, and a fallacious argument from incredulity, concerning the Jews in Galicia:
If, as official historiography has it, the establishment of these Jewish residential districts was aiming at concentrating the Jews in order to be able to liquidate them more easily, then why did the Belzec camp, allegedly founded for the purpose of just this liquidation, terminate its 'extermination activity' in December of 1942, although 161,514 Jews were still living in the district of Galicia on December 31, 1942?
The obvious answer to this argument from incredulity is that the Jews died by other means, such as being gassed at Sobibor:
After Belzec closed in December 1942, it is estimated that over 25,000 Jew from Lwow (Janowska Camp) and Stryj ghetto were sent to Sobibór and murdered.
In conclusion, therefore, although Mattogno and Graf present far more documentation than their fellow deniers, their approach to that documentation is no less fallacious and dishonest.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

CODOH Demographics

In January 1953, Paul Rassinier wrote an article for Der Weg in which he claimed that "the majority (80%) of the Jews in the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia" were rescued from the Nazis by Soviet evacuation procedures. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet noted here, Rassinier based this claim on a single source - a Soviet newspaper article by David Bergelson - that had no primary corroboration. This single-source claim was repeated by deniers Richard Verrall in 1974 and Walter Sanning in 1983. In April 2003, fifty years after Rassinier's article, CODOH repeated the single-source propaganda claim on this thread. What does the thread tell us about the state of revisionism, and CODOH's intellectual bankruptcy?

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Unlike Sanning, CODOH moderator Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis makes no attempt to fabricate a pseudo-scientific method based on fraud, deception and manipulation. For Hargis, it is sufficient to state a faith position:
Jews went where Jews are.

Look at Israel.. how many Jews were there before WWII? How many are there now? Jews were literally flooding out of Europe immigrating to Israel, US, Canada, S. America, S. Africa..you name it.
It never occurs to Hargis that the onus is on him to prove this claim with demographic evidence from the countries concerned. He also embarasses his fellow revisionists, Mattogno and Graf, by showing that they - like Rassinier, Verrall and Sanning - are forced to rely on hearsay from journalists rather than proper historical and demographic sources:
Mattogno/Jürgen quoted in their Treblinka book a Jewish journalist Louis Rapoport from his book La guerra di Stalin contro gli Ebrei, Rizzoli, Mailand 1991
This is the best that CODOH can do. Like all its fellow fraudsters in the 'revisionist' school, therefore, CODOH does not have a clue how to study a demographic or historical subject seriously.

CODOH Lies and Ignorance: Himmler's Visit to Minsk

On October 22nd, 2007, the appropriately named 'Mr Nobody' started this CODOH thread, which gave a false account of how Holocaust websites have described Himmler's visit to Minsk. The thread was particularly significant because it exposed the shortcomings of three CODOH regulars: 'Mr Nobody', 'nathan' and 'Laurentz Dahl'. It also exposed the dishonest moderation of Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis, because Hargis never checked the idiocies being posted, nor did he ask the posters concerned to verify their sources. Here's how the lunacy unfolded.

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Firstly, Mr Nobody claimed, falsely, that Holocaust websites derive all their information about Himmler's visit to Minsk from Bach-Zelewski's testimony to the Eichmann trial. Mr Nobody offered no evidence for this assertion, and did not quote from the websites concerned. His assertion can be refuted through a simple exercise. Mr Nobody claimed to have conducted a search on the words "Himmler Minsk", but when I did a search on those words, the third hit that came up was Richard Evans' submission to the Irving-Lipstadt trial, which contains two facts that immediately falsify Mr Nobody's claim. The first is that Bach-Zelewski gave evidence to the Wolff trial in 1964, in which he revealed that:
Himmler declared after the shootings that the hard struggle that the German people [Volk] had to undertake made harsh measures such as this imperative. The Jews were the bearers of world Bolshevism and they must therefore be destroyed. He and Hitler had assumed responsibility for this before the court of history. The task was difficult, but it had to be carried out.
Evans' second fact is that "Bach-Zelewski's account of Himmler's words was corroborated by no fewer than seven other witnesses at the [Wolff] trial," including the leader of EK 8, Otto Bradfisch.

Evans thus shows that there is plenty of testimony, from later than the Eichmann trial, which shows that the Minsk shootings were genocidal in intent. I would submit that Mr Nobody's search brought up this link but he dishonestly chose not to mention it.

Secondly, Mr Nobody made a great meal out of the fact that the content of Holocaust websites differs from the claims in Bach-Zelewski's diary. Mr Nobody concluded that the websites have therefore embellished the factual record. However, a review of these supposed "embellishments" shows that the websites have simply used other sources that are more authoritative than the diary. For example, Mr Nobody said:
1. the date is often given as the 15th August (2 days before Zelewski's Diary Entry).
A simple Google search would have told Mr Nobody that the 15th August is the date in Himmler's diary. There is simply no excuse for this willful stupidity and dishonest failure to check sources.

Thirdly, Hargis then intervened and made the moronic comment that:
it needs to be said the the 'partisans' (called 'terrorists' today), were subject to legal execution under international law.
Hargis ignored the fact that Himmler's diary entry referred to him witnessing an "execution of partisans and Jews" (Der Dienstkalendar Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, p.193), therefore the Jews killed were not partisans.

Fourthly, Laurentz Dahl then joined the idiots' chorus with an extract from a press report on the Wolff trial which stated that Wolff had denied any knowledge of the mass shootings of Jews and also that Wolff had claimed that:
he believed only partisans and saboteurs were shot.
Dahl would have seen that Wolff's defense was false had he read Evans' commentary on the trial (which was my third hit on Google as noted above), showing that eight witnesses, including Bach-Zelewski and Bradfisch, had all heard Himmler declare at Minsk that:
The Jews were the bearers of world Bolshevism and they must therefore be destroyed.
Fifthly, this moronic babble was then joined by 'nathan', who deliberately misquoted the evidence given by Christopher Browning to the Irving-Lipstadt trial:
[Bach-Zelewski's diary] was mentioned during the Irving trial by Professor Browning, who deemed it “doctored and sanitized” because it contains no evidence of genocide.
This was simply a lie. Browning never said "it contains no evidence of genocide". Browning simply claimed that Bach-Zelewski doctored the diary to remove evidence of his own guilt:
He did send apparently his doctored and sanitized diary to the Bundesarchiv all nicely typed up and all references to things that you have referred to, that he probably has many hundreds of thousands on his conscious [sic] nicely deleted.
In conclusion, therefore, we can see from this one thread alone how CODOH posters, as a group, have colluded in the distortion of evidence to make false claims about Holocaust websites and distinguished Holocaust historians. Jonnie Hargis has been the orchestrator-in-chief of this symphony of lies, but he has employed a full ensemble of monkeys and useful idiots to post distorted and mendacious claims on his behalf.