Monday, November 30, 2009

"The Climate Swindle vs. the Holo-Lie"

Some RODOH Holocaust deniers' reactions to the latest manufactured "Climategate" nontroversy are interesting. Here's the old Nazi-Canadian Wilfried Heink:
Similarities between the "Great Climate Swindle" and the "Great Holo-Lie", taken from "timesonline":

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936289.ece

"[T]his weekend it emerged that the unit has thrown away much of the data. Tucked away on its website is this statement: "Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites ... We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (ie, quality controlled and homogenised) data." (True for "The Holocaust", as well, besides, archives are still locked)

If true, it is extraordinary. It means that the data on which a large part of the world's understanding of ("The Holocaust") climate change is based can never be revisited or checked. Pielke said: "Can this be serious? It is now impossible to create a (real Holo body count) new temperature index from scratch. [The unit] is basically saying, 'Trust us'." (Are you listening, nickterry?)

WHERE does this leave the ("Holocaust") climate debate? While the overwhelming belief of scientists is that ("The Holocaust" happened) the world is getting warmer and that (Germans) humanity (are) is responsible, sceptical voices are increasing.

Lord Lawson, the Tory former chancellor, announced last week the creation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank, to "bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant" (this is yet to happen re. "The Holocaust").

Lawson said: "("The Holocaust") Climate change is not being properly debated because all the political parties are on the same side, and there is an intolerance towards anybody who wants to debate it. It has turned ("The Holocaust") climate change from being a political issue into a secular religion."

But, the time will come when "The Holocaust" will also fall by the wayside.
Arme True Believers, armes Deutschland.
Then there's this, by another lemming:
Nick Terry always likened Global Warming Denial to HD when he was trying to tar us all with the brush of lunacy and conspiracy mania. I think GWD and HD sit together very comfortably. I say screw the totalitarian liberals and their desperate desire to control thought.
Yikes!

Update: there's more!

The Demjanjuk trial has started (updated)

It certainly promises to be an interesting experience. Both Blatt and Schelvis will testify.

The good place to get info on this is http://www.spiegel.de/thema/john_demjanjuk. Cleveland Plain Dealer also seems to be a good source.

Here's a decent recap of Demjanjuk's history before this trial from them (although it gets numerous historical details incorrect, like saying that 1.5 million people were killed in Majdanek instead of about 80,000):

http://xmedia.live.advance.net/cleve/plaindealer/061908_demjanuk_pdf/Demjanjuk/DemjPart1.pdf
http://xmedia.live.advance.net/cleve/plaindealer/061908_demjanuk_pdf/Demjanjuk/DemjPart2.pdf
http://xmedia.live.advance.net/cleve/plaindealer/061908_demjanuk_pdf/Demjanjuk/DemjPart3.pdf
http://xmedia.live.advance.net/cleve/plaindealer/061908_demjanuk_pdf/Demjanjuk/DemjPart4.pdf



Update 1: and so it begins. D's lawyer accuses the judges and prosecutors of arbitrariness - so many perpetrators were acquitted, and yet the man who just followed orders now must pay?

This argument is quite weak, though. If we go to JuNSV site and click on Tatort Sobibor, we will see these data:

Orwell: British v Nazi Imperialism

In this seminal essay, Orwell explains why he had decided to support the British cause in World War II, having originally opposed the conflict, which he regarded as a war between two imperialisms. He does not claim that the Nazi version of imperialism was worse than the British one, but he focuses on its sense of racial certainty, and shows how this makes Nazi imperialism more dangerous than the 'decadent' British form, because it makes the Nazis "completely merciless". Orwell does not demonize the Nazis here, yet he shows why, even in early 1940, an intelligent British writer could recognize how a virulent form of racism made a regime more dangerous than a merely a decadent late-imperialist regime.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Recovery of liquid human fat from pyres is impossible...

... say many Holocaust deniers.

Writes Germar Rudolf:
It is true that flesh burned in fire releases fat. But since fat is highly inflammable, one cannot collect it. And fat does not boil, it decomposes and catches fire beyond a certain temperature (184°C/363°F)

Saturday, November 28, 2009

"Exile and Extermination in Turkish Are the Same"

On 16 July, 1916, German Consul Kuchhoff wrote that "Exile and extermination in Turkish are the same, for whoever is not murdered, will die from hunger or illness." This quote is taken from a collection of sources, many of them written by Germans, on the Turkish genocide of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians between 1913 and 1922. The Germans, who were Turkey's allies in World War I, clearly saw how deportation and genocidal killing could become synonymous when the population being deported was demonized and deprived of its humanity. Could this help to explain why the Nazis, both in their wartime broadcasts and when facing trial after World War II, did not try to pretend that an intention to forcibly deport Jews that existed in 1939-41 was proof that there could not have been a subsequent policy to exterminate those Jews?

Let's correct one misconception about John Demjanjuk...

... which is still present to this day in some articles about his case, namely, that it's still possible that he was "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, in addition to his service in Sobibor. The latter is not in doubt, as it is based on solid documentary evidence. But the former charge was based solely on eyewitness identification from the start, and was a pure travesty.

Contrary to Tom Teicholz, the eyewitness identification of a person 35-40 years after the fact is not trustworthy in principle. You just don't do that (and this is even aside from the fact that the identification procedures themselves in this case were found to be extremely flawed by Willem Wagenaar, one of the leading experts on the psychology of eyewitness identification). This applies both to the survivors and a single perpetrator who identified Demjanjuk. The latter identification is actually even more problematic, as Otto Horn was caught either lying about the initial identification procedure (which had been flawed), or misremembering it, which is just as problematic for his credibility as an identifying witness. (In fact, OSI tried to cover up the initial reports of Horn interrogation; this and other OSI misdeeds in the Demjanjuk case were characterized as "prosecutorial misconduct" and "fraud on the court" by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.)

So yes, Demjanjuk had been sentenced to death without any credible evidence whatsoever (even though the judges probably believed the identifications to be credible). But absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence, so how do we know that he wasn't Ivan the Terrible? It's simple: in postwar interrogations of dozens of Treblinka Wachmaenner another person is identified as Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Marchenko. Marchenko was an entirely "separate" man with a different bio from that of Demjanjuk and one of his daughters (Kateryna Kovalenko) was still alive in 1990s.

But there's still this silly ad hoc "alias hypothesis" going around. It is easily debunked by the fact of the existence of real Marchenko, who was Ivan the Terrible. Sometimes a useless bit of information is bandied about, namely, that Demjanjuk once listed his mother's maiden name as Marchenko, even though her maiden name was different. Marchenko is as common surname in Ukraine, as Smith is in the US. Actually, Demjanjuk claimed to have forgotten his mother's maiden surname, so it's no wonder he inserted such a commonplace surname instead.

But the main evidence actually lies in the fact that in official German documents Demjanjuk is always listed under his real surname. I.e., he was called "Demjanjuk" outloud by the Germans, both in the Trawniki training school and in the camps. Thus his fellow guards would surely know his real name. But not a single one stated that "Marchenko" was an alias of a "Demjanjuk". Also, since both the Germans and fellow guards knew his real name, there was no rationale whatsoever to use an alias.

Ivan Demjanyuk may have been "experienced and efficient" as a guard at Sobibor (his pal Danilchenko claimed so), and we will see in the coming weeks what the German prosecutors have in store regarding his role. But we do know that he never was a breast-slicing psycho from Treblinka.

The Julius Meinl Connection

Our today's Guest Blogger is Kent Ford

In Walker Percy's novel, The Last Gentleman, a young man, Williston Bibb Barrett, haunted by the historical drama of the American Civil War, lapses into spells which launch him wandering across the great battlefields of that conflict. Less sensitive souls today join organized outings to visit and memorialize great events, making tourist destinations of battlegrounds, homes, camps, and notorious buildings. Families pack into minivans to drive to Concord Bridge, or they make their way to Verdun. In contrast, I am certainly no longer young, nor am I given to tourist groups seeking the markers and relics of great historical dramas. Just the same, the artifacts of one of these events the genocide of Europe's Jews known as the Holocaust, are so prolific that they frequently manage to track me down - and sometimes in the most unexpected ways and places. Yes, some cataclysms, their reverberations so widespread, in time and space, are impossible to escape; these things seem to follow certain people like wraiths, never quite absent from their lives, surprising them like death showing up in Samarra.

So it is that my wife and I often meet our son halfway between the university where he studies and the neighborhood in which my wife and I reside, in a German neighborhood, actually nearby to his apartment, for tea and conversation, at a coffee house called Julius Meinl, advertised innocuously as "Vienna's leading coffee roaster for 145 years." The corporate positioning is more or less as a high-end, continental Starbucks. We don't actually like the place much, always commenting that seating is not comfortable, the pastries don't taste as good as they look, and the wait for a table is often too long. Still, not quite able to put our finger on why, we meet there.

But the case of Meinl is not entirely free of entanglements, so to speak.

 And so yesterday I was reading Adam Czerniakow's journal. Czerniakow, you will recall, was chairman of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, an administrative body made up of the city's prominent Jews and appointed by the German occupiers to administer affairs, starting September 1939 in the city's Jewish neighborhoods and finally in November 1940 in the ghetto. Czerniakow, whose leadership had its adherents and detractors, was a conscientious man who worked long days, without break, yet still managed to make personal daily notes on the Council, great events, and daily life amongst Warsaw's Jews during 1939 to 1942. These notes were made in nine little notebooks of which eight survived the war; the journal was discovered in the 1960s and, subsequently, an English edition was prepared by Raul Hilberg for publication in 1979. The journals break off on 23 July 1942, at the outset of the Great Deportation of Warsaw's Jews mostly to Treblinka, the day on which when Czerniakow took his own life rather than continue as chairman of the Jewish Council.

Studying the entries of the journal for 1941, then, I stumbled upon this: During fall, as so often occurred in Warsaw, "parcels [were being] requisitioned at the post office" [entry for 8 October]. In short, food and goodies mailed to Warsaw ghetto residents were stolen from them at their point of entry into the ghetto, the police confiscating in September, for example, 15,000 parcels valued at several millions of zlotys. Parcels with > 6 pounds of goods were stolen by the authorities for leather goods, flour, fats and < 4 pounds in cases of several packages to one addressee were taken as well. Fair enough: as a denier would say, there was a war on. On October 8 Bischof of the Transferstelle scolded Czerniakow that in the matter of these thefts "like all Jews I am not accurate." Czerniakow finally, concluding his entry for the 8th, noted that "They say that the parcels go to Meinl's chain store," a comment footnoted by Hilberg as follows: "The firm Julius Meinl, a grocery chain acted as middle-man in distribution of confiscated food to canteens and other favored German users. A few months later, the food went directly to Order Police Battalion 61."

But the Meinls have world-famous anti-Nazi credentials and the patina that comes with opposition to the Führer and his band of grim idiots. A branch of the Meinl family were indeed anti-Nazi, Meinl III married to a Jewish woman and having fled Austria in 1938-1939 for the UK, where his son (Meinl IV) became a pilot in the RAF during the war. (Today, the family have both retail and banking interests, and Meinl V was famously arrested this year in a Madoff-like scheme.)

According to the Meinl corporate history, "By the 1930s, the Meinl retail empire had grown to more than 600 company-owned stores, and some 400 franchised stores, making the leading retailer in all of Europe and a mainstay of daily life throughout most of Central Europe. The company also had built a strong string of food processing plants, enabling it to produce foods and other items under the Meinl brand. . . . The outbreak of World War II, however, brought an end to the Meinl family's expansion. The company's bank was shut down in 1943; meanwhile, the country's Central European holdings were ravaged by the war. With the end of hostilities, most of Meinl's former retail empire had fallen within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union."

What the corporate PR machine doesn't mention, however, is that whilst Meinl III hunkered down in London to wait out the war, Meinl II stayed home and ran the commercial empire, as noted by Czerniakow, only to see his bet lose and the firm nearly collapse as the Third Reich came undone. Meinl III returned after the war and rebuilt the Meinl empire from the "good guy" lineage, the empire headed subsequently by more Meinls with roman numerals after their surname. In 1998 the family sold all but one landmark store (in Vienna) and extensive property holdings throughout Europe. Julius V focused on banking only to become during the world economic meltdown, it would seem, a Madoff wannabe.

I have no idea whether the Meinl brews are as good as claimed, since I notoriously don't do coffee. The tea is decent, but it rankles that a simple cup of tea can nest in such a complex moral and structural nexus.

Friday, November 27, 2009

That plume was actually even larger

New RAF photos of Birkenau are now available at http://aerial.rcahms.gov.uk

That famous 23.08.44 photo released several years ago is actually just one of many frames depicting open-air incineration in Birkenau on that day, and the plume of smoke is actually much larger than the part depicted on the frame released back then. Go to http://aerial.rcahms.gov.uk/database/record.php?usi=006-001-003-072-C and http://aerial.rcahms.gov.uk/database/record.php?usi=006-001-003-155-C

Friday, November 20, 2009

Yet another H.E.A.R.T. attack (yawn)

[Update: Lisciotto and Webb have also created several fake impersonating blogs, click here to learn more.]

Chris Webb has a ridiculous piece up on his site, "Holocaust Remembrance. A time to memorialize, debate, debunk or debauch?" ( http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/essays&editorials/memorial-debunk-debate-debauged.html ) by a certain "Dr. Martin Friedhaus". Google search has nothing on this alleged "Dr.". Whether he is real, or a creation of Chris Webb or his flunkies, the article is a hoot. It is painfully obvious that it is aimed at us.

Some quotes:

Monday, November 16, 2009

Thomas Kues' Double Standards: The Sobibor Revolt

Never trust a denier when he produces a couple of testimonies as 'proof' that a particular camp could not have been an extermination camp. Below I show how 'Klueless' Kues does this with the Sobibor revolt, and how this leads him to commit blatant double standards in his treatment of evidence.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Thomas Klueless on Gerstein

The new "revisionist" star Thomas Kues strikes me as a "Samuel Crowell"-lite: a somewhat "savvy" guy who can write coherently, but who at the same time is a pompous long-winded ignoramus, who mostly fills his writings with his irrelevant observations on witnesses' testimonies (tearing witnesses apart - oh, what a hard work!), and who does not really dig deep. But at least "Crowell" (nom de plume of Alan Buel Kennady) seems to have done a bit of original documentary research (which, in the end, was demolished by Carlo Mattogno anyway). Kues is more of a commentator. When Kues was posting as Laurentz Dahl at the Cesspit, he demonstrated that he was quite inept at handling the historical evidence.

Let's take a look at his handling of the Gerstein story.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Defending the free speech for deniers

Orac posts a defense of free speech for the Holocaust deniers, and I can't fail to link to it. As much as I despise the phenomenon and its followers, I think it should not be illegal - even in Germany. There are all kinds of both ethical and practical arguments to be made for this proposition.

I also fully understand that there are some good arguments that can be made for the opposite thesis, and I respect that. There will always be some limits on the free speech, and where one stops is quite subjective. I, for one, support the limited ban on Nazi symbols (depending on the intent of their display), while Orac argues against that too.

In the age of the Internet it is useless to ban Holocaust deniers' writings. It is much more effective to debunk them, to show that they're based on lies, misinterpretations, misrepresentations, omissions, stupidity and bigotry.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Stangl Gassing Testimony, 12th September 1947

In 1999, Peter Schwarz published this excellent article concerning Hartheim 'euthanasia' physician Georg Renno (click here for Google translation). Schwarz examined the interrogation of Renno by LG Frankfurt in February 1965 and found that Renno changed his denial defence strategy to one that admitted to involvement in gassings after being shown the testimony given by Stangl to LG Linz on 12/9/47. This is highly significant in light of Stangl's role in Aktion Reinhardt as commander of Sobibor and Treblinka.

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Testimony of Vinzenz Nohel, 4th September 1945

Vinzenz Nohel was a stoker (brenner) at Hartheim. His testimony, given to the Kriminalpolizei Linz, is one of the earliest gassing accounts given by a 'euthanasia' perpetrator. Its provenance is significant because the statement was given to Austrian police, who were investigating crimes by their own nationals, and the interrogation took place six months earlier than the American military trial that led to Nohel's execution. Austrian police investigations, which have, to my knowledge, been totally ignored by deniers, produced a crucial body of testimony that implicates Aktion Reinhard personnel in 'euthanasia' murders.

War-time German document mentioning Auschwitz gassings: testimony of Eleonore Hodys

Eleonore Hodys was a non-Jewish Auschwitz inmate. She became commandant Hoess' lover, and when he found out that she was pregnant, apparently he ordered to have her locked into a bunker cell so she could die of starvation.

Hodys was somewhat lucky in that SS Judge Konrad Morgen and his colleague Gerhard Wiebeck were investigating corruption in Auschwitz at about the same time. In autumn of 1944 they found and interrogated Hodys. She testified against Hoess.

Her very long and extremely detailed official statement survived the war, although the current location of the original German text is unknown (Institut für Zeitgeschichte only has a reverse translation into German by Wiebeck). The English translation was published in 1945 book Dachau and in 2003 in Dachau liberated. Apparently the document was handed over to the Americans by Wiebeck, who had prepared the statement (see Hilberg's Destruction..., 1985, p. 579n25; he relies on Wiebeck's testimony, NO-2330). Why it was published in the book about Dachau I have no clue. Perhaps just as a general illustration of Nazism. And the editors of the 2003 tome had no clue about who E.H. was and simply reprinted the statement, thinking it was a testimony of a Dachau prisoner about her time in Auschwitz.

Friday, November 06, 2009

Thomas Kues and False Paraphrasing

We have already shown in this recent blog series how Thomas Kues (who previously posted as 'Laurentz Dahl' at the Cesspit) makes a futile attempt to use anomalies and discrepancies to support a conspiracy theory concerning the West German legal system. In this new series, we illustrate several techniques that Kues employs to magnify and distort the anomalies he claims to have identified. We begin with a example of false paraphrasing.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Carlo Mattogno and crematoria Sonderkommandos

Carlo Mattogno likes to make statements to the effect that he has researched a topic, did not find evidence of something, and therefore that something is not true. Even though it is true.

For example, he claimed that Sonderkommando 1005 was not mentioned in any German war-time documents, and yet it was. He claimed that Vladimir Davydov was the only "alleged" surviving member of Babiy Yar Sonderkommando, and he wasn't the only one. Mattogno claimed that the Soviet Treblinka investigator Jurovskij based his drawings of gas chambers in large part on his speculations. Except he didn't. In all these cases the contrary evidence was readily available.

In this posting we will see one more example of this approach.

Teabagging nuts getting creepier by the day

It seems "Obama = Hitler" posters are just not enough for the far-right American activists. Now they're exploiting the bodies of victims of the Nazi brutality in their battle against the American healthcare reform. What a sad irony.

Think what you want about that reform, but this is just vomit-inducing behavior by a bunch of kooks.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Samuel K. and Belzec

Interesting news from Germany, as the judicial proceedings against a former Nazi extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk (Ivan Demjanyuk) are about to begin on Nov. 30.

One of the witnesses called for the trial is Samuel K., a Trawniki man himself, as Der Spiegel informs us.

He served at Belzec as a guard. Turns out he was never prosecuted, even though he had been interrogated by the German authorities in 1969, 1975 and 1980. Apparently noting this curious double standard, the Ludwigsburg Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes has started an official inquiry regarding his past.

There are two more interesting bits in this story that caught my eye. First of all, the man's testimony. He never denied what happened in Belzec:
Uns war allen klar, dass dort die Juden vernichtet und später dann auch verbrannt wurden.

We were all aware that Jews were being exterminated there, and later also burnt.

The second bit is the possible charge against Samuel K.:
dringend verdächtig, Beihilfe zu der grausamen Ermordung von mindestens 434.000 Menschen geleistet zu haben

strongly suspected to have aided the brutal murder of at least 434,000 people

The main German body dealing with the prosecution of Nazi war criminals now seems to accept the Hoefle telegram's number of Jewish victims of Belzec. Not long ago the reasonable estimates ranged from about 500,000 to 600,000, but the telegram found and published [PDF] in 2001 by historians Tyas and Witte put the number at 434,508 victims until the end of 1942 (and Belzec stopped functioning at the end of 1942). Thus the new research enters the "public sphere", slowly but surely.