What "Revisionism" is all about – A Chat with Fredrick Töben (Part 1)

Some days ago the discussion with Michael Santomauro and "Thomas Dalton, Ph.D." on this blog spot caught the attention of one of the "Revisionist" movement's dinosaurs, Dr. Fredrick Töben.



This German-born Australian citizen is known as the founder of the "Revisionist" Adelaide Institute, which in turn is known for, among other "Revisionist" activities, having funded the bumbling and counterproductive attempt of one Richard Craigie, also known as Richard Krege, to demonstrate by ground penetrating radar scanning that the soil of the former Treblinka extermination camp shows no disturbances suggesting the mass graves in which most of the camp's victims were buried, before being exhumed and cremated in a somewhat-less than successful effort to conceal or erase the physical traces of the crime.

Last Monday Mr. Töben asked diligent "Revisionist" messenger Michael Santomauro, who had earlier forwarded messages of "Thomas Dalton, Ph.D.", to post the following message under the blog mentioned at the beginning:

From: Fredrick Toben [mailto:toben@toben.biz]
Sent: Monday, 20 September 2010 12:36 PM

"A discussion with Michael Santomauro and Thomas Dalton, Ph.D."

In his comment Roberto Muehlenkamp offers no new aspect except that his comment reveals he is afflicted by a deeply authoritarian mindset that cannot tolerate another viewpoint.

He is great on personal abuse, and instead of asking the basic question, which is Faurisson's challenge: Show me or draw me the murder weapon, the homicidal gas chamber? - he avoids basic scientific research thinking.

To date Faurisson's challenge remains just that. Why?

Then, another basic question: Where is the written order that allegedly started the systematic extermination process? Any bureaucracy needs a written order before it begins physically to act. Don't tell me that all Germans involved in the alleged extermination process knew that Hitler hated the Jews and that to fulfill his hate-driven plan needed no written order.

The Holocaust is a miracle story that has no reality in space and time, only in memory.

Incorrectly assuming that the author of this message was Mr. Santomauro himself, I responded as follows:

Like Mr. "Dalton", his publisher can offer nothing better than old herrings in a new can.

Authoritarian mindset? Nonsense. I can accept any other viewpoint that is duly substantiated by evidence. Unfortunately "Revisionist" viewpoints are sorely lacking in this respect.

Faurisson's "basic question"? Apart from the fact that homicidal gas chambers are not the "basic murder weapon" (they accounted for little more than half of the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide and mass murder and a much lower percentage of all victims of Nazi crimes), it's not like the homicidal gas chambers cannot be reconstructed in their essential features on the basis of eyewitness testimonies - see for instance the CAD Reconstruction of the Gas Chambers in Treblinka. And even if eyewitness testimonies were not precise enough to allow for such reconstruction, they would still leave no room for reasonable doubt that these devices existed and were used for mass murder. No, they are no longer physically visible because the Nazis destroyed or dismantled them. But then, this also applies to just about all facilities of the Stalin's Gulag labor camps, to mention just one example. Faurisson's "challenge" is bereft of logic.

Basic scientific research thinking? No stranger to me, as it consists in testing a thesis against evidence and determining if and to what extent evidence supports this thesis. "Revisionists" are understandably unwilling to put their theses to that test.

A written order from the Führer? The quest for such order, which would have been almost certainly destroyed if it had been issued, reveals a laughable ignorance of how the Nazi state's decision-making progress functioned at high levels. The Führer hardly ever issued orders, not to mention written ones. He let his paladins know what his policy was and what programs and procedures he accordingly wished them to prepare, whereupon said paladins did what they thought the Führer wanted them to do and submitted it to his approval. Furthermore guys like Himmler and Heydrich were allowed and displayed a great degree of initiative. A book that might help Santomauro overcome his ignorance is Christopher Browning's The Origins of the Final Solution.

A miracle story that has no reality in space and time? That applies not to the amply documented Nazi genocide of the Jews, but to the cloud-cuckoo-land fantasies of Santomauro and his ilk about an all-powerful conspiracy that, among other utterly implausible achievements, is supposed to have induced millions of Jewish non-victims throughout the world into concealing their identity and origins and refrain from compensation claims. Or does Santomauro endorse the even more preposterous "fish tale" lunacy of Mr. "Dalton"?

"Revisionists" projecting their own fallacies onto their opponents is a spectacle well known to who is familiar with these people. Santomauro's rambling is just more of the same.

After realizing that Mr. Santomauro had merely been transmitting the message of Mr. Töben, I added the following:

Oh, I see now that the rambling was authored by Mr. Toben.

I had forgotten that Mr. Santomauro likes to play the messenger for other enlightened spirits from "Revisionist" cloud-cuckoo-land ...

These posts must have hit a raw nerve, judging by Mr. Töben’s apparent hysteria as he spilled out his resentments in a ten-point "brief response", to which he attached a "Short Introduction to the Study of Holocaust Revisionism" by another of the movement's dinosaurs, Arthur R. Butz. Mr. Santomauro laboriously posted (or tried to post) this material in several parts under the aforementioned blog, before deciding to send me the whole thing by e-mail. The contents of this e-mail have been reproduced on the thread "Fredrick Toben responds to Roberto Meuhlenkamp" of the RODOH (Real Open Debate on the Holocaust) discussion forum.

In the following I shall comment Mr. Töben’s "brief response" and Mr. Butz’s writing attached thereto, item by item. So as not to pack too much material into a single blog, the present blog will address Mr. Töben's utterances while those of Mr. Butz will be commented in a second blog.

Fredrick Töben responds: 22 September 2010

1. Roberto Muehlenkamp’s response is typical of those individuals who uncritically believe in the Holocaust narrative and who feel threatened by having to concede that a raging public discussion has been in progress since the late 1960s. Labelling Mr Santomauro as a ‘messenger’ merely reflects Mr Muehlenkamp’s own personal frustrations at not being in control of setting the Holocaust narrative parameters to his likings. Becoming abusive towards those who dissent from his own held beliefs about matters Holocaust indicates Muehlenkamp’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

When "Revisionist" ramblers like Mr. Töben go bitching about their opponents, they usually express their wishful thinking and project their own characteristics.

First of all, I don't have to believe in anything, let alone uncritically. All I have to do is follow the known demographic, documentary, eyewitness and physical evidence where it leads, applying nothing other than logic and common sense. "Revisionists" are not in this fortunate situation. With no evidence to support their pet preconceived notions, they can only uphold the same by uncritically believing in utterly baseless, implausible and fantastic conspiracy theories.

Second, if I ironically call Mr. Santomauro a messenger, that's because transmitting messages of other "Revisionists" – first Mr. "Dalton", now Mr. Töben – is what I have mostly seen him doing since I made his acquaintance. Quite unlike Mr. Töben, I have no personal frustrations, whereas his frustrations are obviously related to his and other "Revisionist" propagandists' inability to bend the historical record of Nazi Germany to what they would like it to be, however hard they try to get rid of evidence inconvenient to their articles of faith.

As to becoming "abusive", the tone of Mr. Töben’s response doesn't exactly qualify him to lecture me in this respect, the difference between his abusiveness and mine being that the former is a rhetorical subterfuge to cover up the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of his "Revisionist" beliefs (or a consequence of frustration about that bankruptcy), whereas the latter is just an outspoken person's expression of heartfelt and wholly warranted contempt for those who try to falsify history to serve an ideological agenda.

Töben:

2. Over these past 40 years the Holocaust narrative has changed in detail and re-fabricating itself as Revisionists sift through the rubbish. Revisionists do not deny anything because their task has been to evaluate the details of the official Holocaust narrative, which as stated above, keeps on changing. For example, it was through the Zündel Toronto trials of 1984-5 and 1988 that established the 4 million deaths figure at Auschwitz was a nonsense and the removal and replacement of the official 20 plaques with an inscribed figure of 1.0-1.5 million deaths confirmed this.

Over the past 40 years the historical record of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, commonly known as the Holocaust, has changed as concerns a number of details, just like any historical record of any historical event or series of events is bound to change over time as hitherto unknown evidence is discovered by researchers or existing evidence is subject to new, more sustainable interpretations. This process is known as revisionism and not to be confounded with the "Revisionism" of Töben et all, which consists of nothing other than ignoring, misrepresenting or unreasonably challenging evidence that contradicts a certain pre-established, ideologically motivated belief system.

Notwithstanding such changes in detail, however, the historical record has not changed in its essential aspects as concerns Nazi Germany's crimes against the Jews, summarized by Richard Evans as "the attempt by Nazi Germany, led by Hitler, to exterminate the Jewish population in Europe, which attempt succeeded to the extent of murdering between 5 and 6 million Jews in a variety of ways, including mass gassings in camps built for the purpose".

And notwithstanding their pretensions to the contrary, the contribution of "Revisionists" to corrections of the historical record have been marginal at best. Thus it was not "through the Zündel Toronto trials of 1984-5 and 1988" that the 4 million deaths figure for Auschwitz-Birkenau was shown to be exaggerated. The fact is that this figure, while written in stone behind the Iron Curtain until the same came down, was never taken seriously by western researchers of history, some of whom (like Reitlinger and Hilberg) produced estimates in the order of 1 million dead or less as early as the 1950s and 1960s. After the demise of Communism in Poland, it wasn't long before a Polish historian confirmed what his western predecessors, although being like himself kept by the Cold War from doing detailed documentary research, had long been maintaining or at least suspecting. This evolution is outlined by Robert Jan van Pelt in Part One, section II of the Van Pelt Report, as follows (bolding emphases added and quotes inside the quote put in italics format by RM):

The first post-war attempt to establish within the context of a forensic investigation the total number of dead was undertaken by the "Extraordinary State Committee For the Ascertaining and Investigation of Crimes Committed by the German-fascist Invaders and Their Associates On Crimes Committed by the German-fascist Invaders in the Oswiecim Death Camp." The committee came to the conclusion that four million people had been killed in Auschwitz. Their conclusion was based on an assessment of the capacity of the crematoria. The five crematoria would have been able to burn, at least in theory, 5,121,000 bodies.79 Added to that was the extra capacity provided by the pyres.

Making allowances for possible undercapacity operation of the crematoriums and stoppages, however, the Commission of technical experts established that during the existence of the Oswiecim camp the German executioners killed in it no less than four million citizens of the USSR., Poland, France, Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, and other countries.80

Apart from the engineering approach to the question how many people had died in Auschwitz a second method emerged to establish the number of victims. It was based on an analysis of the number of deportations to the camp. As early as 1946, Nachman Blumental, using this method, came to an informed guess that the number of victims ought to have been somewhere between 1.3 and 1.5 million.81 In the early 1950s, Gerald Reitlinger also tried to make a rough guess of the number of victims on the basis of the number of deportees.

As to the total number of Jews brought to the selection place at Auschwitz, it is possible to estimate fairly closely for the Western and Central European countries and the Balkans but not for Poland. There is no real guide to the percentage gassed. It was low before August,1942,and generally low again after August,1944, but in the meantime gassings might vary between fifty and nearly a hundred per cent. The following list makes allowances for a number of French and Greek transports sent to Majdanek and 34,000 Dutch Jews who went to Sobibor:
Belgium 22,600
Croatia 4,500
France 57,000
Greater Reich [....direct transports only ]* 25,000
Greater Reich [ via Theresienstadt] 32,000

Greece 50,000
Holland 62,000
Hungary (wartime frontiers) 380,000
Italy 5,000
Luxembourg 2,000
Norway 700
Poland and Baltic States* 180,000
Slovakia (1939 borders) 20,000

840,800
(*uncertain)
Of this total,550,000 to 600,000 may have been gassed on arrival and to this must be added the unknown portion of the 300,000 or more, missing from the camp, who were selected.82

It is important to note that Reitlinger systematically chose, if confronted with different estimates about the number of victims, the lowest one. The first reason was that exaggeration would serve those who wished to deny the Holocaust.83 The second one must be located in his unusually cheerful disposition vis-a-vis the whole story, which was rooted in his very bleak assessment of human nature: as he wrote the book, he always reminded himself that it could have been worse--a sentiment few have shared.84

Finally there were different assessment made by witnesses. The most important of these was, without doubt, Commandant Rudolf Höss. During his initial interrogations, Höss seems to have confirmed an initial assessment done by his interrogators that three million people had been killed in Auschwitz.85 In Nuremberg, he gave different numbers at different occasions. During his interrogations he gave detailed list of numbers for each nationality that came to over 1.1 million deportees. 86 In his affidavit, however, he stated that "at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated [in Auschwitz ] by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000."87 He confirmed this number in a conversation with the prison psychologist Dr. Gilbert. "He readily conformed that approximately 2 1/2 million Jews has been exterminated under his direction."88 In a short memorandum which he wrote for Gilbert later in April Höss returned to the lower number. He now stated that the number of 2.5 million referred to the technical potential. "[T]o the best of my knowledge, this number appears to me much too high. If I calculate the total of the mass operations which I still remember, and still make allowance for a certain percentage of error, I arrive, in my calculation, at a total of 1.5 million at the most for the period from the beginning of 1941 to the end of 1944."89 Finally, in Poland, Höss re-affirmed that the number of victims had been most likely less than 1.2 million persons, commenting that "I regard the number of 2.5 million as far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive capabilities."90

Thus, by the beginning of the 1950s, there were basically three estimates of the number of victims, each based on different sources: a high one of 4 million based on the assumed capacity of the crematoria, a low one of around 1 million based on the number of transports and Höss's final assessment given to Dr. Gilbert in Nuremberg and Dr. Jan Sehn in Cracow, and a middle one of around 2.5 million, based on Eichmann's number as related by Höss, and as initially substantiated by Höss in his Nuremberg affidavit.

Until the early 1980s no original scholarship was undertaken to come to a resolution of the unacceptably great range between the lowest and highest estimate. The Cold War was largely to blame: the figure of 4 million had been established by the Soviets, and the figure of 1 million had been first proposed in the West. As relations between the East and West deteriorated, with the largest part of Germany becoming part of NATO and with that country refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the post-war Polish annexation of the former German territories of East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, the issue of the number of victims became an object of politics. The communist rulers of Poland were unwilling to give an inch on their claims against Germany as long as the Bonn government did not recognize the territorial integrity of the People's Republic of Poland, and therefore they continued to maintain, as a matter of policy, that 4 million people had been killed in Auschwitz. In the West, most historians of the Holocaust who, given the political climate, were unable to do original research in the matter tended to accept, with reservations, the middle figure of 2.5 million. Initially only Raul Hilberg, who did important statistical analysis into the number of victims of the Holocaust, supported the lower figure of 1 million. He reasoned--with justification--that given the total number of victims of the Holocaust (5.1 million in his conservative estimate), and given more or less reliable assessments about the number of Jews who died of general privation in the ghettos, who were executed in open-air shootings, and who died in other extermination and concentration camps, the total number of Auschwitz victims could not have been more than 1 million.91

The advent of Solidarity and the election of the Pole Karol Wojtyla as Pope John-Paul II (1978) changed the intellectual climate in Poland. While the government was still committed to the official figure of 4 million victims, Dr.Piper of the Auschwitz Museum, who had been banned until then from researching the issue, began to focus his attention on the question of how many people had died in the camp. A catalyst for his research were new figures produced in France by Georges Wellers, who had come to the conclusion that 1,613,455 persons had been deported to Auschwitz (of whom 1,433,405 were Jews) and that 1,471,595 of them had died (of whom 1,352,980 were Jews).

Piper, brought his work to a first completion in 1986. Given the fact that he largely endorsed the figures that had been proposed in the West by Reitlinger and Hilberg, he decided to proceed carefully--a smart move considering that Poland was in the mid 1980s subjected to military rule. He first subjected his conclusions to a process of internal review within the museum, and then to a thorough external review by the leading Polish research institute on the Nazi era, the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland. In 1990, after endorsement of his findings (and with the first post-communist government in power), Piper made his new estimate of 1.1 million victims known to the international community. This figure has been endorsed by all serious, professional historians who have studied the complex history of Auschwitz in some detail, and by the Holocaust research institutes at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.92

Töben:

3. Then in 1996 the alleged homicidal gas chamber, Krema I, at Auschwitz Stammlager, was de-commissioned by van Pelt/Dwork with the claim that this re-construction was made to symbolically represent what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Krema II.

Mr. Töben is requested to provide a quote from van Pelt/Dwork’s work supporting his claim, which implies that before 1996 the reconstruction of the gas chamber in Krema I at Auschwitz was claimed to be the original thing. Evidence that this was so is also requested. Once such evidence has been provided, Mr. Töben is requested to tell us what – other than a museum's attempt to present a reconstruction of a certain object as the original object to visitors, big deal – this is supposed to imply, and on what basis he is convinced of such implications.

Töben:

4. In 2002 non-Revisionist news magazine Der Spiegel editor, Fritjof Meyer, stated that there were no gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau, something Gitta Sereny also stated in The Times on 29 August 2001. This effectively removes Auschwitz I-Stammlager and Auschwitz II-Birkenau as gassing/killing centres.

I’m aware that Fritjof Meyer wrote an article in Osteuropa magazine with the title Die Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkenntnisse durch neue Archivfunde, in which he claimed that "only" 510,000 people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, of which 356,000 were gassed. I’m also aware of the controversy unleashed by this claim and of Meyer’s refutation by Piper and by Albrecht Kolthoff, which can be accessed together with Meyer’s own writings on the THHP site. I am not aware, however, of Meyer’s having stated that there were no gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is possible, though, that Mr. Töben is disingenuously trying to make Meyer's claim that gassings took place in the Birkenau "bunkers" but not inside the camp complex proper into a statement that "there were no gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau". If Mr. Töben is not playing this contemptible trick, he'll have to back up his claim lest the conclusion be warranted that he doesn’t know what he is talking about at best.

As to Gitta Sereny, I presume that Mr. Töben is trying to make her statement that Auschwitz-Birkenau was not an extermination camp, quoted for instance on this forum:

"She is puzzled, too, by what she perceives as a reluctance to confront the truth by those who seem to have the most interest in it: "Why on earth have all these people who made Auschwitz into a sacred cow. . . ..It was an almost pathological concentration on this one place. A terrible place -- but it was not an extermination camp." Then she sighs; and suddenly the fierceness leaves her. "The distinctions are important," she says more quietly. "But -- death is death."

into a statement that there were no gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau – an interpretation that stretches intellectual honesty, to say the least. Sereny obviously meant to say that Auschwitz-Birkenau was not a pure extermination camp like Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, because it also functioned as a plain concentration camp. How this is to imply that there were no homicidal gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau is beyond my understanding. Homicidal gassings also took place, albeit on a comparatively much smaller scale, in camps that were not extermination camps according to definitions of the term broader than Sereny’s, namely the concentration camps Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, Stutthof and Natzweiler. Gas chambers were also used at the "euthanasia" killing centers. On the other hand, the Janowska concentration camp, which also functioned as an extermination center (as pointed out in the blog Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (5,2)) had no homicidal gas chambers; mass killing at or near that camp was done by shooting. The claim that an extermination camp necessarily implies gas chambers and vice-versa is mere ignorant rhetoric.

Now, let's assume that Meyer and Sereny stated exactly what Mr. Töben would like them to have stated. What would this mean? It would mean that two comparatively reasonable people said stupid things totally at odds with the evidence on a given occasion, nothing more and nothing less. The fuss that "Revisionists" make about one or the other thing that so-and-so said is only a further demonstration of how desperately bereft of evidentiary support their case is.

Töben:

5. Mr David Brockschmidt wrote to the US Holocaust Museum asking about the gas chambers and on 21 April 1995 Michael Berenbaum responded. Among other things he stated: “1. We do have crematoria ovens in the Museums. We could not bring over gas chambers because there was no original that was available for us to bring to the United States. Instead we made a model of the crematoria and labelled it a model.” This statement speaks for itself.

I'm a bit at loss about what the poet is trying to tell us here. The surviving original gas chambers or remains thereof are part of museum sites that obviously weren't enthusiastic about having them dismantled for exhibition at the USHMM. So what? And even if that possibility had existed and the USHMM had not taken advantage of it, what would this mean other than a failure by the USHMM to add an exhibit of potential instructive value for visitors to its collection? Perhaps Mr. Töben can explain what far-reaching conclusions his fantasy-prone mind derives from the absence of a gas chamber in the USHMM building, if only for the purpose of amusement.

Töben:

6. If the ‘homicidal gas chambers are not the “basic murder weapon”…’, then why has Germar Rudolf’s The Rudolf Report, and its precedent, The Leuchter Report, been criminalized/banned in Germany, for example? Remember how the official 9/11 reports fiddled the scientific data to fit the official narrative, which is exactly what Soviet Union scientists had to do when they had to align their research with Marxist ideology. Of interest is the fact that Rudolf, as a true scientist, stated that his results are not absolute because there is always an element of error in any research. This was taken up by some critics as indicating Rudolf’s work is basically flawed when in fact any body of scientific research admits that results are not absolute. Note how those scientists, who are pushing climate change ideology, are absolute in their assertions, something that is quite un-scientific. In scientific research an element of error is always expected

The first sentence makes me wonder about Mr. Töben's capacity for logical thinking. How is the banning of Rudolf’s and Leuchter’s "reports" in Germany supposed to imply anything about the importance of gas chambers as a murder weapon? The reason for the banning of these reports is that they are considered hate speech under German criminal law, the same applying to pamphlets in which Rudolf and others deny or play down, say, the Einsatzgruppen massacres by shooting in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.

In their fixation on homicidal gas chambers, Hitler's willing defense attorneys tend to forget the fact that these devices accounted for less than half the Jews murdered by Nazi Germany and a much lower part of all Jews and non-Jews that fell victim to Nazi criminal actions. According to the comparatively conservative estimates in my blog 5 million non-Jewish victims? (Part 2), the Nazis murdered at least about 12,495,000 noncombatants, thereof ca. 5,364,000 Jews (43 %) and 7,131,000 non-Jews (57 %). The dedicated or dual-purpose extermination camps Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin Majdanek accounted for "only" about 2.5 million of these 12.5 million victims, while the remaining ten million (including about 2.9 million Jews considering Dr. Nick Terry’s estimate referred to in my aforementioned blog) were murdered mostly by shooting or by placing them under conditions that caused them to die like flies from starvation, exposure or disease. As I pointed out in an earlier blog, "Revisionist" concern with mobile killing operations is dwarfed by their obsession with gas chambers (especially those of Auschwitz-Birkenau), and Jewish mass mortality due to privation in ghettos and camps is hardly addressed by them at all. True to the populist nature of "Revisionism", this weighting is, of course, a mirror image of public knowledge of either aspect of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Nazi crimes against non-Jews are even less well known to the general public than Jewish deaths outside camps wholly or partially dedicated to mass extermination, and accordingly occupy even less space in "Revisionist" attempts to falsify history.

Now to Mr. Rudolf, the "scientist". Contrary to what Mr. Töben tries to make believe, what Rudolf’s critics – especially his professional colleague Dr. Richard Green – have taken issue with is not his having "stated that his results are not absolute because there is always an element of error in any research", but his having done what Mr. Töben claims regarding the "official 9/11 reports", i.e. his having fiddled with scientific data to support a pre-ordained conclusion. Rudolf's approach to science is characterized as follows by Dr. Green, in the expert report submitted in response to a report prepared by Rudolf for David Irving’s appeal in his lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt (emphasis added):

Rudolf writes:
There is no shame in not having understood something. Actually that is the very beginning of science: realizing that one does not understand. Whereas in pre-scientific ages, humans tend to find mystical or religious answers to unsolved questions, in our modern time scientist [sic] take problems they do not understand or can hardly imagine as a challenge to investigate in order to understand. This quest for knowledge is the most important driving force behind modern humanity. So, after such a statement, one would expect that the Poles would now try to find out, whether the blue stains are indeed Iron Blue and how it could have formed.

One would think from Rudolf's pontification that the IFFR had concluded that because they did not understand the origin of the blue staining that there were in fact no blue stains. Rather, they kept in mind their purpose: to examine whether there were traces of exposure to HCN in the homicidal gas chambers. Their methodology makes sense. If the iron blues in fact originated from HCN exposure, a test that includes iron blues is in essence a test for two processes: 1) exposure to HCN 2) efficiency of iron blue formation. Both 1 and 2 must occur for the results to be comparable. The point of their study was to test for exposure to HCN. Unless it can be proved without a shadow of a doubt that Prussian blue must have been formed with equal efficiency in all facilities, then it is incorrect not to exclude iron blue. Not having understood something is the beginning of science. Unfortunately Rudolf, only goes half the distance. Having proposed a mechanism for formation of iron blue in the delousing chambers that is not entirely implausible, he does not take the next step and ask why did iron blue not form efficiently in the homicidal gas chambers. Rather, he assumes that he knows why. He assumes that worldwide historians and eyewitnesses are all liars. A scientist would admit ignorance and ask whether there could be other explanations.

The above also shows that Rudolf did exactly what Mr. Töben accuses his critics of having done, in unscientifically postulating that the absence of iron blue in the homicidal gas chambers of Birkenau was due to no gassings having taken place in those chambers.

Rudolf’s fiddling is also exposed in Dr. Green’s article Chemistry is not the Science, which I presume is what Mr. Töben had in mind when accusing Rudolf’s critics of taking him to task for admitting that his results are not absolute. Perhaps Mr. Töben can quote the statements of Dr. Green that support his accusation, along with those supposedly revealing that Rudolf's critics are unscientifically "absolute in their assertions".

Töben:

7. Muehlenkamp’s mindset is an absolute mindset that cannot tolerate dissent because as new information comes along he would have to revise his views on things. How does he cope with the deaths reduction at Auschwitz – from 4 million to 1.-1.5 million? And yet the overarching six million was not reduced. Why not?

Actually I welcome any new information that is duly supported by evidence, quite unlike Mr. Töben, who doesn't seem likely to accept any evidence that would require him to revise his preconceived notion that there was no such thing as a Nazi genocide of the Jewish population of Europe.

As to the "deaths reduction at Auschwitz" - mantra, this has such a long beard that Mr. Töben's bringing it up gives reason to doubt either his intelligence or his intellectual honesty. For unless he is not a mentally challenged person, Mr. Töben has been long enough in "Revisionism" to know that the 4 million figure for Auschwitz and estimates of the overall Jewish death toll from Nazi persecution, in the order of 5 to 6 million, were never connected to each other. One need only look into the IMT’s judgment at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals, one of the first official documents mentioning about 6 million Jewish victims, to see that no reference is made there to the Soviet overestimate of the Auschwitz-Birkenau victims. At the end of this judgment, one reads the following:

Adolf Eichmann, who had been put in charge of this programme by Hitler, has estimated that the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6,000,000 Jews, of which 4.000.000 were killed in the extermination institutions.

Apart from presenting the figures not as their own findings of fact but as an estimate of Eichmann's, the judges obviously didn’t consider the extermination institutions to be limited to Auschwitz-Birkenau, for earlier in the judgment one reads the following (emphasis added):

The massacres of Rowno and Dubno, of which the German engineer Graebe spoke, were examples of one method, the systematic extermination of Jews in concentration camps, was another Part of the " final solution " was the gathering of Jews from all German occupied Europe in concentration camps. Their physical condition was the test of life or death. All who were fit to work were used as slave labourers in the concentration camps; all who were not fit to work were destroyed in gas chambers and their bodies burnt. Certain concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz were set aside for this main purpose.

Certain camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, Mr. Töben. Not just Auschwitz. Are we asked to believe that you never read the IMT’s judgment?

Whereas the estimate rendered by one of Eichmann’s assistants concerning the extermination institutions was too high – as we have seen above, the combined death toll of the six extermination camps was about 2.5 million – Jewish population losses from Nazi persecution had been established in demographic studies by the time of the IMT's judgment.

The first report detailing Jewish population losses in Europe, "Statistics on Jewish Casualties During Axis Domination", was prepared by the Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York in June 1945. According to the table attached to this report, out of a total population of ca. 9,612,000 Jews living in the listed European countries (including the USSR) before Axis domination, between 3,825,000 and 3,889,000 were still alive, which meant a loss of 5,723,000 to 5,787,000 lives.

The estimated Jewish population in Europe at the end of World War II was also established by an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry appointed in order to, among other tasks, "examine the position of the Jews in those countries in Europe where they have been the victims of Nazi and Fascist persecution …". In Appendix III to the committee’s report, which was completed in Lausanne/Switzerland in April 1946, the committee listed the Jewish population in 1939 and the current number of survivors, divided into the categories "Native" and "Refugee and displaced", for two groups of European countries, those that had been under Axis domination and those that had not or not wholly (the USSR) been occupied or otherwise dominated by the Axis. In the first group, the committee established a total of 6,015,700 Jewish inhabitants in 1939 vs. 1,153,106 remaining after the war, i.e. a loss of 4,862,594. In the second group, the corresponding subtotals were 3,930,600, 3,071,600 and 859,000. The totals for Europe were 9,946,300 Jews in 1939 and 4,224,700 after the war, the difference being 5,721,600.

Jewish population losses in Europe were also the subject of various later studies, some of which are mentioned in the blog Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (2). None of these studies (including the pre-1990 ones like that of Hilberg, which is the only one to break down deaths by cause) considered 4 million deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau, or even the 2.5 million that Höss claimed at the Nuremberg trial (and later expressly corrected to about 1 million, as pointed out by Van Pelt – see above quote).

That being so, I’m looking forward to Mr. Töben’s explanation why on earth estimates of the Jewish death toll during World War II should have been lowered when, following the collapse of Communism, the Auschwitz figure of 4 million upheld by the Poles was finally lowered to the order of magnitude assumed by every western historian who had taken a closer look at the matter, which becomes apparent from evidence going back as far as the 1946 statements of camp commandant Rudolf Höss.

Töben:

8. This paragraph reveals Muehlenkamp’s mindset in full flourish:

“A written order from the Führer? The quest for such order, which would have been almost certainly destroyed if it had been issued, reveals a laughable ignorance of how the Nazi state's decision-making progress functioned at high levels. The Führer hardly ever issued orders, not to mention written ones. He let his paladins know what his policy was and what programs and procedures he accordingly wished them to prepare, whereupon said paladins did what they thought the Führer wanted them to do and submitted it to his approval. Furthermore guys like Himmler and Heydrich were allowed and displayed a great degree of initiative. A book that might help Santomauro overcome his ignorance is Christopher Browning's The Origins of the Final Solution.”
Raoul Hilberg in his The Destruction of European Jews stated there were two written Hitler orders that started the Final Solution process. Yet after he had left the witness stand in the Zündel Toronto trial, Hilberg had himself made history by having admitted there were no written orders. Muehlenkamp in this respect is either ignorant of the fact or a blatant liar. No bureaucracy operates without written orders when it entails massive actions such as the alleged extermination of European Jews. Muehlenkamp’s claim that to insist there be a written order: “…reveals a laughable ignorance of how the Nazi state's decision-making progress functioned at high levels.” is pure rubbish. The German war machine was meticulous in record keeping. In his own words, Muehlenkamp’s embrace of this massive conspiracy theory – that Germans exterminated Jews – is behaviour that is “…projecting their own fallacies onto their opponents [and] is a spectacle well known to who is familiar with these people”.

First of all, Mr. Töben – whose rendering of sources doesn't inspire much confidence – is requested to provide a sourced quote showing Hilberg’s supposed claim at the Zündel Toronto trial that there were "two written Hitler orders that started the Final Solution process". I don’t recall any such claim, but then I'm not very acquainted with the records of the Zündel Toronto trial. In reading the 1985 student's edition of The Destruction of the European Jews, I don’t recall having come upon a mention of written Hitler orders, so unless I missed or forgot something Hilberg's supposed statement at the Zündel trial would be in contradiction with his writings.

When Mr. Töben has provided the required backup, he is invited to explain why on earth I should have mentioned Hilberg’s supposed statement in my above-quoted statement (which is based on the later research of Browning and German historian Christian Gerlach) to warrant his hysterical accusation of being "either ignorant of the fact or a blatant liar".

After that, I would like to know what, other than general claims obviously based on nothing other than personal opinion ("No bureaucracy operates without written orders when it entails massive actions such as the alleged extermination of European Jews"; "The German war machine was meticulous in record keeping."), which are not even relevant as concerns top-level decision-making (bureaucrats may have wanted to cover their backs, especially at lower levels of the hierarchy, but Nazi big-wigs like Himmler and Heydrich were no mere bureaucrats carrying out orders – they were decision-makers themselves with a high degree of autonomy, as I pointed out) he has got to offer against the research of Gerlach and Browning, which shows that the decision about the "final solution" was taken in several steps and was an interactive process between Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi politicians also influenced by initiatives from below, like Gauleiter Arthur Greiser's obtaining a special authorization from Himmler to kill 100,000 Jews of the Warthegau. A key moment in this process was Hitler’s meeting with high-ranking party officials on 12 December 1941, in which Hitler made statements that are recorded in Goebbels’ diary entry of the following day and discussed in the blog Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (3). (The aforementioned special permission prior to the Europe-wide go-ahead, by the way, is mentioned in a letter of Greiser's to Himmler partially transcribed in the blog Gauleiter Arthur Greiser. At administrative levels below the Führer incriminating things were sometimes rather clearly expressed in writing, and some such documents survived the Nazis' frantic attempts to destroy the documentary evidence.)

Töben:

9. As an afterthought, I assume Muehlenkamp is aware of the fact that a whole legal fraternity exists that persecutes Revisionists in trials where the matters of fact of the Holocaust are never tested for truth content. This is done because not believing in the Holocaust scandalises certain societies! But he would know that, and hence it explains his abusive and defamatatory tone because through verbal abuse it makes it easier for him to deflect opening his mind to the fact that he has believed in nonsense for decades. No wonder he needs to project his hatred on anyone who demands clarity of thought and physical proof that during World War Two Germans systematically exterminated European Jews in homicidal gas chambers, in particular at Auschwitz concentration camp. That this belief is also pure German hatred need not be canvassed at this stage.

Mr. Töben’s tirade ends as it started, with hysterical rhetoric distinctly colored by wishful thinking and self-projection.

It is a fact that in certain countries "Revisionism" is subject to criminal prosecution (something I disagree with – Mr. Töben is kindly invited to sign my Petition to the German Legislator), because it is (rightly) considered a form of offensive hate speech and certain legislators are (rightly or not) concerned that it may give their country a bad image and/or constitute a threat to the public order (regarding the German legislator’s motivations see the blog Old Herrings in a New Can: Thomas Dalton’s Debating the Holocaust (1)).

The connection that Mr. Töben makes between my knowledge of these facts and my "abusive and defamatatory tone" is somewhat hard to understand, but then Mr. Töben doesn't stand out for the clarity of thought he loudly demands.

Having believed in nonsense for decades is rather Mr. Töben's problem than mine – as I pointed out at the beginning, I don’t need to believe anything but merely have to follow what the evidence and my logical thinking tell me, whereas "Revisionists" have little more than faith to cling to in support of the history they would like to have.

As to my supposed "hatred", Mr. Töben was clearly looking in the mirror, for hatred is what becomes apparent from his tirades. Clarity of thought is the last thing he should lecture anyone about, and if he is really interested in physical proof corroborating documentary and eyewitness evidence for the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews (though I doubt he is interested in any evidence that calls his pet beliefs in question), he will find plenty of it referred to on this blog spot – for instance in the blogs that carry the label graves. I wonder if Mr. Töben is equally demanding as concerns evidence for crimes the factuality of which I suppose he doesn’t question, by the way – things like Stalin's purges and penal camps or crimes committed by Red Army soldiers against German civilians. If not, his double standards of evidence would well fit the image he has so far brought across.

As to what Mr. Töben calls "pure German hatred" (I presume he means pure hatred of Germans), it may burst his bubble to know that this supposed "German hater" is a German citizen who has much pride in things and people German, including but not limited to an uncle of his who fought and died on the Eastern Front, one of the millions of worthy Germans who laid down their lives for the most unworthy of conceivable causes while the Nazi REMFs that Mr. Töben speaks for were safe in the rear murdering defenseless women and children.

Töben:

10. My brief response, however, is inadequate and hence I augment it with Professor Arthur Butz’s brief 12-point summary of what Revisionism is all about.

Hence the title of this article. I thank Mr. Töben for having given me this opportunity to once more show our readers what "Revisionism" is all about (to the extent that Mr. Töben's rant didn't do the job on its own), and hereby invite him to continue our discussion on the RODOH thread mentioned at the beginning.

As mentioned before, Mr. Butz’s "brief 12-point summary" will be commented in my next blog. But I can already give Mr. Töben the comfort that his rhetoric is no more inadequate than that of his admired coreligionist.