Is Dalton More Dishonest Than Graf?

How does Thomas Dalton's treatment of evidence compare to that of his colleagues Mattogno and Graf? Here are two examples.

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In his reply to this blog, Dalton stated that:

Evidence for the Reinhardt camps as transit camps exists, but is not plentiful. But we do not need much evidence to undermine the traditional view, in which everyone sent to those 3 camps was exterminated. In fact, just a few examples would suffice. Here are a few, as cited by Graf

So Dalton is giving us an opportunity to compare his honesty with that of Graf. The comparison can be narrowed to two examples. Firstly, Dalton makes this claim concerning the Warsaw Jews:

The vast majority of deportees from the Warsaw ghetto went to Treblinka (arguably, all the deportees), wherein they were allegedly gassed. But we have record of several thousand Jews departing Warsaw and ending up in places like Minsk (1000), Smolensk (2000), and Brzesc and Malchowicze (4000); evidently, they passed through Treblinka.

This is Graf's version of the same claim:

On July 31, 1942, the Reichskommissar of Bielorussia, Wilhelm Kube, sent a telegram to the Reichskommissar for the occupied Eastern territories, Henrich Lohse, in which he protested against the deportation of 1000 Warsaw Jews to Minsk[47]. As the deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto had commenced eight days before, and as everybody agrees that at that time all Warsaw Jews were deported to Treblinka, the 1000 Jews mentioned by Kube must by necessity have been deported to Minsk via Treblinka. On August 17, 1942, the illegal Polish newspaper Informacja Biezaca reported that 2000 skilled Jewish workers had been deported from Warsaw to Smolensk on August 1[48]. On September 7, 1942, the same paper informed that two transports with 4000 persons had been sent for labour at installations important for the war effort in Brzesc and Malachowicze[49].

Graf has simply assumed that all Warsaw Jews were sent to Treblinka during that period, therefore any Warsaw Jews sent to labour camps went via Treblinka. He says that "everybody agrees" with this assumption. But of course they don't. One historian who has studied those labour camps is Christian Gerlach. He simply states that:

On 28 July another train with Warsaw Jews reached Bobruisk; a part of the Jews were sent to Smolensk. In Bobruisk the Jews also had to do work for the Wehrmacht. The return to Lublin in September 1943 only 91 men out of the 1,500 deportees lived to see, while all others had fallen victim to the constant selections, the work, the hunger and the terrible treatment.

No mention of going via Treblinka. Moreover, it would have made no sense to delouse these Jews at Treblinka because, as Gerlach also tells us:

In a similar manner in 1942 Jews from Lida and Nowogrodek came to Smolensk, and 900 Jews from Brest were sent to the East in June 1942, only twelve of them coming back.

These Soviet Jews clearly did not go to Smolensk via Treblinka yet would have been just as susceptible to carrying lice as the Polish Jews, who would in turn have been vulnerable to catching lice from these Soviet Jews when they arrived in Smolensk, thereby making their delousing at Treblinka pointless.

Comparing Graf and Dalton from this example therefore results in Graf being slightly more dishonest. Dalton says only that "The vast majority of deportees from the Warsaw ghetto went to Treblinka (arguably, all the deportees)" whereas Graf insists that "everyone agrees" they all went to Treblinka in that period. However, this difference is moot because Dalton has still misrepresented Graf's sources, which make no mention of the 7,000 Warsaw deportees in his examples going to labour camps via Treblinka.

The second example, by contrast, shows Dalton being more dishonest than Graf! Dalton claims that:

A more recent book, by survivor Julius Schelvis, recounts his deportation from Sobibor to Majdanek, and later to Auschwitz. He survived all three camps, ending up back in his native country of the Netherlands. Around 700 Dutch Jews followed a similar itinerary.

This is Graf's claim:

The author of the most detailed book about Sobibor[53], the Dutch Jew Julius Schelvis, was himself an inmate of this camp. He naturally presents Sobibor as a death factory, but his description is solely based on what he has heard from others or read in books, for he only spent a few hours at the camp. From Sobibor, he was deported to Lublin and later to Auschwitz whence he finally returned to the Netherlands. Schelvis was not an isolated case: At least 700 other Dutch Jews were moved from Sobibor to labour camps, and some of them returned home via Auschwitz – another “extermination camp” where the Germans apparently forgot to “gas” them[54].

So Dalton has inflated Graf's 'some of them returned home via Auschwitz' into 'Around 700 Dutch Jews followed a similar itinerary', a gross distortion of even Graf's claim.

Both Graf and Dalton, of course, misrepresent the fate of the Dutch Jews selected at Sobibor for forced labour camps. As I noted in this blog, Schelvis (p.191) only traced 16 survivors:

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.

Moreover, when Graf wrote his Treblinka screed with Mattogno, he suffered from a bout of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, M/G acknowledged that:

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.

On the other hand, M/G reverted to Dalton's position by stating that:

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 statement is a blatant non-sequitur in relation to the evidence they actually presented concerning the Dutch Jews.

In conclusion therefore, Graf and Dalton both emerge from this exercise as charlatans and fools.