Sunday, January 31, 2010

Photos from the German East

I recently acquired a German publication (Deutscher Osten 1939-1945
Der Weltanschauungskrieg in Photos und Texten
, edited by Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Volker Rieß, Wilhelm Pyta, 2003 Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt) that contains transcriptions of numerous documents (letters, reports, diary entries, deposition transcripts), mostly from the German side, related to the Nazi war of extermination in Eastern Europe. It also contains a number of interesting photographs related to that war.

Kues and Mattogno are associated with yet another antisemitic blog

Carlo Mattogno and Thomas Kues, the Clueless Duo, usually try to write in a neutral style, but their associations give their game away, I'm afraid. Not that they didn't write some nasty stuff before, e.g. here's Carlo:
[Jean-Claude Pressac] was no longer a valuable goldmine to the guardians of the 'Holocaust' orthodoxy, but had turned into a more and more rebellious and uncontrollable Goy, jeopardizing the official historiography with each new publication. [...]

For this reason, the position as the "world's leading Auschwitz expert," until then occupied by Pressac, was taken by a trustworthy Yehudi, who was to take Pressac's theses - cleaned from all revisionist waste - and embed them into an unalterable, definitive version of Auschwitz.
And of course they write articles for the antisemitic CODOH "Inconvenient history" blog.

Finally, both Kues and Mattogno write articles from time to time for the blog of a certain Andrea Carancini. The blog is obviously antisemitic. I guess one picture is worth a thousand words, so here's that picture:



'Nuff said.

Friday, January 29, 2010

How Carlo Mattogno distorted Henryk Tauber's testimony

On 27.01.2010 Carlo Mattogno made a guest appearance at the antisemitic CODOH blog "Inconvenient history".

He presented his new comic book about Auschwitz, Le camere a gas di Auschwitz. Studio storico-tecnico sugli “indizi criminali” di Jean-Claude Pressac e sulla “convergenza di prove” di Robert Jan van Pelt, whining that it
has now been in print for several months and, as expected, it has been met with almost complete silence
This complaint is absolutely ridiculous. If even CODOH chimps did not know about this book until now, how would any mainstream scholars learn about it? Not that they would care, of course.

Moreover, the book is in Italian. Don't get me wrong, but if someone wishes to get some more or less quick responses to one's work from the most important scholars, one should publish in English, maybe in German. But Italian? And Mattogno complains? What arrogance. Especially considering Mattogno has yet to reply to the many arguments against him at this very blog.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Sobibor survivor Thomas Blatt sets the record straight

On 17.01.2010 there appeared a news item on The Independent's site, in which the Sobibor revolt participant Thomas (Toivi) Blatt is quoted as follows:
"We heard the whine of the generator that started the submarine engine which made the gas that killed them. I remember standing and listening to the muffled screams and knowing that men, women and children were dying in agony as I sorted their clothes. This is what I live with," he said.
The mention of the submarine engine was, of course, seized on by Holocaust deniers. Supposedly a submarine engine would be a diesel engine and that is a big no-no for deniers (most other people find this irrelevant). To date only Eichmann mentioned the use of such an engine for gassings in regard to Christian Wirth's early gassing experiments, and it was hearsay and probably also an example of distorted memory.

Mr. Blatt never claimed to be in the extermination zone proper, so even if he would say such a thing, that would be but a speculation. But did he say that? I contacted Mr. Blatt, and here is his response, which he kindly permitted me to post online:
Dear Mr. Romanov

This is the first time I heard about submarine engine in Sobibor.
It was a Tank engine.
Must be a mistake by the journalist.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Exaggerating the role of "new" Auschwitz blueprints

According to this news item ("Auschwitz blueprints go on display in Israel") Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev
said the publication of the blueprints would help combat Holocaust denial and make sure that the lessons of the Holocaust remain fresh.
These are the same blueprints recently found in Berlin, bought by Bild and presented to Netanyahu. Unfortunately, Mr. Shalev does not explain in what way these blueprints can help combat Holocaust denial. The blueprints contain no incriminating details and almost no new information. Numerous similar blueprints are in Moscow's Special Archive in RGVA and in the archive of the Auschwitz Museum, they have been known and studied for years. The only new information is the presence of Heinrich Himmler's initials which, if authentic, may confirm Rudolf Hoess' claim that he sent some plans to Reichsfuehrer-SS.

Yeah, some of the plans show crematoria and their infamous cellars. But so do numerous "old" plans, and even the majority of Holocaust deniers don't deny the existence of the crematoria in Auschwitz. So?

The ignorance about these plans is sometimes astounding. E.g. in the initial Bild publication Ralf Georg Reuth tried to present the normal delousing Gaskammer as proof of the existence of homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. This kind of thing only breeds deniers.

From the same article we learn that
The Chief Director of the Federal Archives in Berlin, Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, attaches to the discovery of the documents an "extraordinary importance". Kreikamp told BILD: "The plans are the authentic evidence of a systematically planned genocide of European Jews."
Once again, excuse me, but how is this evidence of the Holocaust? The cumulative evidence for homicidal gas chambers is found in numerous other documents from Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung and other sources, but not in these blueprints.

The ignorance and exaggerations from journalists are inexcusable, but at least utterly unsurprising. After all, from the article quoted in the beginning we also learn that "Some of the photos captured smoke billowing from the camp's six [! ~SR] crematoria".

But academic scholars should know better. And thankfully, Prof. van Pelt has been a voice of reason on the issue:
Prof. Robert Jan van Pelt, a internationally acknowledged expert on the planning and construction of Auschwitz, said that based on what he had seen on the Internet, there seemed to be nothing new about the documents.
[...]
Van Pelt, an architectural historian, said that copies of the plans of the stages of the camp's construction were also in the archive of the Polish National Museum at Auschwitz and in an archive in Moscow.
[...]
Van Pelt also said the words "gas chamber" on one of the drawings meant a room in which disinfection of clothing was done by means of gas, and that the sketch is not of an extermination camp established in 1942, but rather of earlier plans for a huge concentration camp in which a force of 130,000 slave laborers was intended to work.
And I cannot but applaud these words:
"Everyone is repeating the same nonsense, and the deniers are having great fun because it shows how people are gullible," he told JTA.
[...]
"If these were the initials of Himmler, that would be very interesting," van Pelt agreed. But "it is completely and utterly incomprehensible" that the director of the national archive would "open his mouth on something so sensitive without having consulted the literature." And when the Bild publishes this "without doing any homework, it puts us back 20 years. It's as if we didn't publish these documents already."

PS: Yad Vashem's description of the exhibition is here, with pictures. Yad Vashem commits at least one serious mistake - when they write that "[t]he drawings included in the [Vrba-Wetzler] report are surprisingly accurate." In fact, the drawing of a crematorium with a gas chamber in the report is quite inaccurate, though unsurprisingly so, "given the conditions under which information was obtained [...] and the situation in which the report was compiled".

Meanwhile, Anglican vicar uses police to intimidate a blogger...

...who exposed his apparent sympathy for some Holocaust deniers and other unwholesome personages.

Read more about it here and here.

Joseph Weissman:
I am the blogger at the centre of Sizergate, having had an unwelcome visit from the police at 10am on a Sunday morning when I was still in my pyjamas. You can read my story on the Index on Censorship or on BBC News.
And the original posting is here.

The question, though, is whether Sizer knew about the HD activities of some of the people he quoted. Sizer himself claims that personally he speaks out against denial. He even writes:
Thankfully it is a crime in some countries to deny the Holocaust. It is a shame that it is not yet a crime to deny the Palestinian Nakba, as Moore does.
and
Holocaust denial has no place what so ever in contemporary political, social or religious discourse.
I guess it's a "sleep with dogs, wake up with fleas" situation.

"Mises Daily" and HD

Since 2003, a certain gentleman has been posting articles for Mises Daily, a daily commentary for the Ludwig von Mises Institute that reaches about 40,000 people daily according to LMI's "About" page. Here is the list of his Mises Daily articles [screenshot]. The Daily and its subscribers are clearly unaware that he has begun a parallel Internet career as a Holocaust denier.

This month, Bradley R. Smith's Holocaust denial Report has published an article by him entitled Free-Riding on the Juggernaut of Conscience, which argues, without citing any sources, that, of those persons claiming to be Holocaust survivors or relatives of Holocaust survivors, "the proportion of deserving...is miniscule." He predicts that
...despite the Juggernaut’s rude health and limitless capacity for expansion, a cancer is metastasizing aboard it that will one day break its axles, shatter its cross-beams, and bring it to a sudden, catastrophic halt in the center of a mob that has suddenly realized that they have been its dupes for many years and have heaped onto it far too great a portion of what would today remain their own treasure but for the inertial deception practiced upon them by the Juggernaut and its now-dismounted riders.
And concludes:
And when the breakdown finally occurs, and the free riders are spilled out onto the road among their erstwhile worshippers, those feeling vengeful urges against any of them will have the comfort of the enormous odds that any given one of them never paid in any way for their high and mighty ride aboard the Juggernaut of Conscience.
Who is the author of this fact-free screed, with its offensive stereotypes of masses of free-riding Jews?

Monday, January 25, 2010

Carmelo Does CODOH!

Very fittingly, Carmelo Lisciotto (of holocaustresearchproject.org) descended into the Cesspit to promote his fake blogs there.

Clickie here, here or here. [Note: links expired, see screenshots below]

Dr. Terry immediately sets him straight:
Hi Carmelo,

I'm surprised you are still crusading about something that happened in 2006, and on a revisionist site to boot, or did you switch sides? You used to put up fake blogs claiming that Sergey Romanov was a Holocaust denier, yet here you are on CODOH talking about 'hoaxers' running the ARC site.

Incidentally, I was merely a collateral casualty of a feud between other people. I belonged to the ARC group for a few months, contributed nothing, and lost nothing much when I was histrionically booted out for having done absolutely nothing. Can't say I particularly care, but evidently the internet is such a serious business for you that you do.
And poor Cesspit Clown Carto's Cutlass Supreme is aloof and out of touch, as usual:
I have to say that someone starting death-camps.org to imitate and confuse with deathcamps.org seems dishonest to me.
That would be dishonest indeed, if not for the fact that death-camps.org was set up by ARC members who disagreed with Chris Webb's and Carmelo Lisciotto's policy of promoting fake documents on deathcamps.org (as described here). The intent was to preserve the authentic information, cleared from "Andy Schmidt's" forgeries.

Carmelo Lisciotto should stay at CODOH. Holocaust deniers are a fitting company for him.

PS: Carmelo's spam was deleted, as had been expected. Here's a screenshot of just one of his spam messages, in which Lisciotto tries to suck up to Holocaust deniers and to attack Dr. Nicholas Terry:

  

Here is another, in which Carmelo promotes his fake blogs:

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Yeager vs. Neander

Dr. Neander will probably have something to say about this reaction to his Zisblatt critique by the neo-Nazi scum Carolyn Yeager when he returns from vacation. I will only note that Yeager shows her idiotic paranoid mindset once again:
However, probably for the reason that he seems to have been assigned this project by some well-known Holocaust defenders (Kenneth Waltzer, Chairman of the Jewish Studies Dept. at the University of Michigan, who provided him with the Seigelstein documents, for one)...
Let me assure you, Yeager, that Dr. Neander doesn't lie when he writes "independent scholar". He is not assigned to anything by anyone, and particularly not concerning this essay, and I say this as someone who knows the story behind it.

And Yeager, of course, is not a very attentive reader, to put it mildly:
In the first paragraph, Neander writes that she “had her first name changed to Irene” when she obtained a visa in 1947 for emigration to New York. That can be understood either as ‘someone else changed her first name’ or ‘she herself had it changed’ - leaving the interpretation up to the reader. In fact, she claims in her book (but not in her testimony) that her name was Chana (by which she called herself up to that point), and this name was changed, much to her surprise, by an immigration official because he (or someone) thought the “American” name of Irene would be better for her. Taking such prerogatives is and was simply not done by immigration officials, and adds to the farcical quality of the book.
And here's what Dr. Neander writes later in the essay:
The first thing we learn from the documents, by the way, is that Mrs. Zisblatt was "Irene" already at Auschwitz, that she did not receive this first name just on immigration, as she relates: "I panicked. ‘This is not my name ... Irene ... I have never heard of that name,' I cried" (TFD:103). It is, however, possible that she had "Chana" as an additional, Jewish, first name.
So Dr. Neander recounts enough of this episode for the reader to understand that she supposedly received this "new" name against her will. And that first mention Yeager cites was the initial short recounting of her story (Neuengamme and all) which Dr. Neander later deconstructs.

She writes:
The reason Neander gives for telling the truth about dishonest holocaust survivors is not a regard for truth itself, but is because students who today are gullible enough to believe it, might, when they grow up, “reach for a scholarly book” and, discovering they were lied to, reject the entire Holocaust story.
But here's what Dr. Neander wrote:
It is not sufficient to defend the historical truth about the Holocaust only against distortions from the deniers' side. Distortions from the side of exaggerators, mythmakers, and self-aggrandizers must equally be rejected. A matter as serious as the Holocaust demands serious, honest, and accurate treatment. Not least with regard to the dignity and the memory of those who perished.
She is also not very bright and doesn't even get dry sarcasm (cf. the "feces ingestion" episode).

Carolyn Yeager is a dumb neo-Nazi liar, pure and simple.

The rest I leave to Dr. Neander.

Update: here's his response.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

"Thereafter Kube had shown the Italians a gas chamber in which the killing of the Jews was allegedly carried out."

The German Foreign Office document below was an exhibit T/341 in the Eichmann trial. It is also cited in Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Eine Dokumentation (S.92). The author of the note is Eberhard von Thadden, who became an expert on Jewish affairs in the Foreign Office in April 1943. Franz Rademacher was his predecessor and is a well-known figure in the history of the "Final Solution". Werner Koeppen was Alfred Rosenberg's adjutant and his permanent representative to Hitler. Wilhelm Kube was the infamous Gauleiter of Belorussia.
Mr. Legation Counselor Rademacher informed me that on occasion of a visit by Fascist representatives in Minsk Gauleiter Kube had also shown a church that had been used by the Communists for worldly purposes. Asked by the Italians what the little parcels and suitcases piled up there meant, Kube had explained that these were the only leftovers of Jews deported to Minsk. Thereafter Kube had shown the Italians a gas chamber in which the killing of the Jews was allegedly carried out. Supposedly, the Fascists had been most deeply shocked.

Mr. Rademacher learned of this incident through Mr. Koeppen, adjutant of Reichsleiter Rosenberg. In his opinion General Consul Windecker in Riga is likely to also be informed about this incident, for as far as he, Rademacher, could remember, the incident had occurred on occasion of the Fascist representatives sent east to take care of Italian workers.

Berlin, May 15, 1943
(Translation by Roberto Muehlenkamp with small changes by me.)

Friday, January 22, 2010

Closed Debate is Open Debate

Deniers often claim that the Holocaust 'industry' is 'Orwellian'. But it is our old friend Jonnie Hargis who practices the ultimate form of Doublethink on the subject of free speech. He states here that:
I can't think of any regular at this forum that hasn't had a post deleted for one reason or an other. You have to understand that the emphasis here is on debate that is free of subject changing, distortion, namecalling, and dodging, etc. Without our very basic guidelines (which are not unusual, they are generally found in moderated debates), we would end up with very confusing threads ... unfortunately that is exactly what some desire.
The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust is therefore promoting closed debate.

What's on Limbaugh's mind?

We already knew Rush is a race-baiter. Then we have this in his comments on 20.1.10 The Rush Limbaugh Show:
There are a lot of people, when you say banker, people think Jewish. [...] People who have [...] a little prejudice about them. To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting? He's assaulting bankers. He's assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there's - if there's starting to be some buyer's remorse there.
ADL thinks Limbaugh
reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote.

Limbaugh's references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate. While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans. His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

When he comes to understand why his words were so offensive and unacceptable, Limbaugh should apologize.
Now couple it with his response to Obama's mild speech at Buchenwald:
And he [Obama] is beating Germany up. He is ripping them to shreds over something they did 60 years ago. One day after praising all of Islam. Now can you imagine, there's of course Elie Wiesel gets up there and he does his thing but it's 65 years here or close to it. [...] He [Obama]'s up there and he's ripping Germany for what it did 60 or 65 years ago, blah, blah, blah, blah. One day after praising to the hilt Islam, and talking about Islam, how America is a Muslim nation, so forth.
"Beating Germany up"? "Ripping them to shreds"? Really? And for merely "something they did 60 years ago"? Then there's this:
Dear Mr. Limbaugh:

During your December 16 broadcast, in response to a caller's comments suggesting an international tribunal for Saddam Hussein rather than having the deposed dictator tried in his own country by his fellow Iraqis, you referred to the "failed" Nuremberg Trials, describing them as "an absolute joke, an absolute travesty."
Makes one wonder about all kinds of things.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Is this fellow dumb ...

... or just playing dumb?

In his CODOH post of Thu Jan 21, 2010 1:12 am, Drew J triumphantly comments:

Blatt is claiming a diesel engine was used for murder. That's funny. I thought Roberto and Sergy already declared the diesel engine moot and were instead trying to focus on petrol engines as the real culprit instead.


Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Monday, January 18, 2010

CODOH Censorship Supreme

Less than a week after my re-admission to the "CODOH Revisionist Forum", my old collection of censored posts has already grown considerably, given that almost everything I posted on CODOH since my readmission has been either deleted after publication or – in most cases – not published at al.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Samuel K. is to be charged for participating in the murder of Jews

Trawniki man Samuel K. (probably Samuel Kunz) about whom we informed in the posting "Samuel K. and Belzec" is likely be charged in Germany with participating in the murder of Jews in Belzec extermination camp.

(Thanks to Albrecht Kolthoff for the tip.)

Deniers Who Favour the Prosecution of Free Speech (Part 2)

In this radio interview, starting at 22 minutes, 19 seconds, Carolyn Yeager states:
The point I want to make is that I think the time has come that while...we have debunked so much...the only way to go forward is through the courts...The European people founded this country and we can't go into our own courts, because they have been taken over. We need to use our courts for ourselves.
At 35:28, she says:
If they attack us in the courts, I think we should be going after them in the courts based on they cannot back up what they say.
This advocate of using courts to prosecute free speech writes for the Inconvenient History blog, which claims be founded on...the protection of free speech.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Deniers Who Favour the Prosecution of Free Speech (Part 1)

The Inconvenient History blog prides itself on opposition to the prosecution of free speech. It is therefore odd that its articles on Zisblatt should be based on the research of Eric Hunt, who is bringing a libel case against Zisblatt and others. It is also notable that Hunt's complaint uses similar terminology to that which Inconvenient History blogger Paul Grubach uses here, where Grubach notes that laws could be used "to prosecute Jews for the pain they cause when they promote the Holocaust ideology".

The dumbest Holocaust denial icon: the Auschwitz swimming pool

[Update: here is a more in-depth piece on the swimming pool and other stuff the sillier deniers like to bring up.]

I mean, Jon Harrison dealt with it, Pressac dealt with it, van Pelt dealt with it:
Given the dichotomy between the very complex nature and history of Auschwitz and the habit of many to consider the camp only as a "top-secret mass extermination center," many people, including bona-fide historians, survivors, and not so bona-fide holocaust deniers, often commit the fallacy of composition: they reason from the properties of the part of Auschwitz that was engaged with mass extermination to the properties of Auschwitz as a whole. A favourite example of the negationists is the so-called swimming pool in Auschwitz I. They argue that the presence of a swimming pool, with three diving boards, shows that the camp was really a rather benign place, and therefore could not have been a center of extermination. They ignore that the swimming pool was built as a water reservoir for the purpose of firefighting (there were no hydrants in the camp), that the diving boards were added later, and that the pool was only accessible to SS men and certain privileged Aryan prisoners employed as inmate-funcionaries in the camp. The presence of the swimming pool does not say anything about the conditions for Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, and does not challenge the existence of an extermination program with its proper facilities in Auschwitz II.
Yet it keeps returning, and returning, and returning, and returning, like a zombie.

The "argument" is so mind-bogglingly illogical that one is surprised that even denial cultists would want to repeat it, yet they keep doing it till it's not longer funny.

No historian or court ever claimed that every single inmate of Auschwitz had to perish - or had to perish immediately. The presence of relatively privileged groups of prisoners (like Kapos, "Aryan" or Jewish) is acknowledged by everyone. The presence of amenities (like a brothel) for certain privileged prisoners is hardly a secret.

So why the persistent mentions of the structure, the existence of which contradicts nothing even if one denies its primary use as a water reservoir (and which is not even situated in the extermination section, i.e. Birkenau, though even if it were otherwise, it would still not be an issue)?

How utterly braindead, ignorant or devious one must be to even think about using the Auschwitz swimming pool as a PR trick in the name of "revisionism"?

Shielding CODOH From Debate

CODOH Rules state:
Keep your posts limited to one point.

Voluminous, lengthy, and redundant posts are not welcomed.
So how are posters supposed to debate if they are not allowed to cite relationships and convergences between pieces of evidence? Clearly no such meaningful debate is possible, and that is the intention behind the rule: to shield CODOH from true debate.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

The Memory Hole Festival started ...

... with my first post on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" following my re-admission to that lovely place after a long time of being banned.

My post of Wed Jan 13, 2010 7:38 am briefly appeared on the thread Muehlenkamp and Mermelstein, before the moderator got cold feet and deleted it.

Now let's see what happens on the thread DEMJANJUK: Scapegoat for Jewish Madness, where I currently have three posts waiting for moderator approval ...

Update, 15.01.2010: See my RODOH posts 11806, 11807 and 11808.

What seems plausible to them reflects only their ignorance

The Cesspit Clown Carto's Cutlass' Supreme (CCCCS) produced this gem:
Yankel Wiernik's book published in The Forward building

by Carto's Cutlass Supreme » Thu Jan 14, 2010 12:07 am

The cover of A Year In Treblinka by Yankel Wiernik states:
Published by AMERICAN REPRESENTATION of the GENERAL JEWISH WORKERS" UNION of POLAND

175 East Broadway

New York, 2, N. Y.
Compare addresses:

See the Wikipedia entry for Forward Magazine. Same address:
At the peak of its popularity, the Forward erected a ten-story office building at 175 East Broadway on the Lower East Side, designed by architect George Boehm and completed in 1912.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forward

The mouthful of "AMERICAN REPRESENTATION of the GENERAL JEWISH WORKERS" UNION of POLAND" doesn't seem that plausible as a real group. I think this points to the people behind The Forward being the publishers of A Year in Treblinka. And it wouldn't have looked so good had the inside cover said "Published by Forward Magazine."

Then again, had there been such a "American Representation" group, it wouldn't be surprising that they would rent space in the 10 story Forward building.
It seems that even the simplest googling no longer works for these chimps. They don't even try anymore - they just go with what seems plausible or implausible to them, facts be damned. Except given their paranoid mindset and utter ignorance nothing good ever comes out of it.

PS: there is some evidence that CCCCS is the Ugly Voice aka denierbud aka Budly, which makes it all the more funny.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

CODOH's Response to the Virginia Tech Massacre

Anyone seeking an insight into the minds of antisemites will find enlightenment in this CODOH thread, where members frothed at the mouth upon learning that one of the victims was a Holocaust survivor.

The copy of the thread is below. The most interesting parts are emphasized in red.

Carolyn Yeager and the ANSWP

Further to Sergey's article, Yeager was a director of the American National Socialist Workers Party until 2007. Her resignation was discussed by Bill White here:
I am sorry to see Carolyn resign. She was very helpful with the magazine and a good activist.
This was the response of Yeager's organisation to the Virginia Tech shooting, the victims of which included Liviu Librescu.

Monday, January 11, 2010

CODOH's "Inconvenient History" blog - just another antisemitic outlet

From the "Purpose" page of the blog in question:
In discussing the controversial issues brought forth by historical revisionism, we will always strive to take the moral high ground. This means that we will abstain from ad hominem attacks and other forms of unfair argumentation. Rather than involving ourselves in polemics, we will calmly present our arguments and then let the facts speak for themselves.
From Carolyn Yeager's critique of Irene Zisblatt from that same blog, which the IC team is "proud to present":
Middle school, the two to three years between grade school and high school, is when Holocaust studies are most heavily force-fed to American school children because of laws passed in many state legislatures by craven politicians hungry for Jewish votes and money, or fearful of Jewish media power.
Who's Carolyn Yeager?

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Fritz Berg disses other denier gurus

This deserves to be copied here.

http://revforum.yourforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5864

The SANITY Test!
by Friedrich Paul Berg » Tue Jan 05, 2010 12:24 pm

The test: Do you agree with me that railroad delousing gas chambers could have been e-a-s-i-l-y used to commit mass murder by the Nazis?

Many prominent "revisionists" such as Butz, Faurisson and Toben have flunked the test.

Gerdes Banned at the Cesspit

It took a while but here it is:
by Moderator2 » Sun Jan 10, 2010 6:41 am
Mr. Gerdes,
You have been banned for 14 days. You didn’t read our guidelines carful enough. From viewtopic.php?t=358
  • No namecalling, threats, or personal attacks; period.
  • Keep your posts limited to one point.
  • Voluminous, lengthy, and redundant posts are not welcomed.
Meanwhile I'll give you the possibility to rethink your posting strategy. As it’s now, you are thrashing our forum.

Moderator 2

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Irene Zisblatt, the "Diamond Girl" - Fact or Fiction?

by Joachim Neander, PhD, independent scholar

(Last revised: 10.01.2010; 2 typos corrected: 04.02.2010)

[Today our guest blogger is Dr. Joachim Neander from Cracow, Poland. Dr. Neander has degrees in mathematics (Saarbrücken University, 1962) and history (Göttingen and Bremen Universities, 1997). He is the author of Mathematik und Ideologie, München 1974, Das Konzentrationslager Mittelbau in der Endphase der NS-Diktatur, Clausthal-Zellerfeld 1997, 4th ed. 2001, Gardelegen 1945, Magdeburg 1998, “Hat in Europa kein annäherndes Beispiel” ... Mittelbau-Dora, ein KZ für Hitlers Krieg, Berlin 2000.

He is a contributor to PRO MEMORIA (Oświęcim, Poland), Informationen des Studienkreises Deutscher Widerstand (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), German Studies Review (Carleton College, USA), Yad Vashem Studies (Jerusalem, Israel), Newsletter des Fritz-Bauer-Instituts (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), theologie.geschichte (Saarland University, Germany) and other scholarly publications. In 2001-2002 he had a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Guest bloggers' opinions are not necessarily shared by the HC team, nor do we endorse each and every argument made by our guests.

This item is placed here solely to facilitate further discussion.]





Irene Zisblatt, the "Diamond Girl" - Fact or Fiction?


An Amazing Story of Survival in the Holocaust

Irene Zisblatt, a petite (5ft. 1")[1] blonde, energetic lady nearing her eighties, is a remarkable personality. Her life-story, as told by her in her memoir The Fifth Diamond,[2] begins in Polena,[3] a small spa town in Subcarpathian Ruthenia,[4] where she grew up as Chana Seigelstein.[5] From her memoir and newspaper reports, we must conclude that she was born in 1931.[6] She survived ghettoization in Hungary, deportation to Auschwitz, transfer to concentration camp Neuengamme, she says, slave labor in a munitions factory, and a months-long death march that led her into Czechoslovakia, where she eventually was liberated on the eve of VE Day by soldiers of the U.S. Third Army. After recovering from typhus in a U.S. Army hospital near Pilsen, she claims, she went to a DP camp in Austria, waiting for an opportunity to emigrate to the U.S. She obtained a visa in 1947, had her first name changed to Irene, and went to New York, where she was heartily welcomed by family members who had emigrated already before World War II. She settled there, married twice, and gave birth to two children.

She never talked to anybody about her wartime experience until 1994, when she attended a screening of Schindler's List. Since that time, she has been traveling across the U.S., sharing her experience with high school and college students, always receiving broad coverage in the local media. According to The Press of Atlantic City NJ from April 28, 2009, she "is booked twice a day between two and five times a week," and until the end of 2009 she "will have shared her story of surviving the Holocaust with about as many people as Jewish lives were claimed during World War II," i.e. "six million" listeners and viewers.[7] In addition, since 1994 she has been a regular participant in the March of the Living in Poland. In October 1995, she was interviewed for Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.[8] She was one of the five Holocaust survivors that were chosen to tell their story in the award-winning documentary movie The Last Days,[9] released in 1998. Finally, in 2008 her memoir The Fifth Diamond appeared in print.

The Clueless Duo and early corpse incineration in Treblinka and Belzec

In a posting at the aptly named "Inconvenient History" blog (history is indeed inconvenient - for those who deny it) Thomas Kues (aka Laurentz Dahl at CODOH forum) reviews two accounts of Treblinka survivors Israel Cymlich and Oskar Strawczynski. Notably, he can't find any serious problems with their testimonies except several insignificant details, so Roberto Muehlenkamp's observations in regard to Strawczynski's testimony still stand.

Monday, January 04, 2010

Carlo Mattogno, the failed Dragon-slayer

(Last revised: 30.01.2010)

Long sections of Carlo Mattogno's book The Bunkers of Auschwitz [PDF] are devoted to the critique of various testimonies of Auschwitz Sonderkommando Shlomo Dragon and his brother Abraham.

First, let's take a look at Mattogno's comparison of Shlomo Dragon's Soviet and Polish testimonies. Since I have examined the original Soviet testimony and have the text before me, I'm in a good position to analyze Mattogno's analysis.

The first thing I want to state is that all the citations from Dragon's testimony in Mattogno's book, given in footnotes in original Russian, are indeed authentic. Mattogno's translation of some of them is another matter, as we shall see shortly...

Sunday, January 03, 2010

On Pressac's Interpretation of a Crematorium II Photograph

[Our today's guest blogger is a German RODOH contributor who prefers to be known simply as Hans. He is a very able debunker of Holocaust deniers' claims with a keen eye for small but significant details and he employs what I would call an "exactitude" in his contributions.]

A photograph taken by the SS presumably in summer of 1943 shows the sewage treatment plant of Auschwitz-Birkenau (fig.1, 2).

Saturday, January 02, 2010

Richard Widmann and Verohnika Clark (Amended)

Originally posted: 24 Dec 2009; amended 2 January 2010.

Richard A. Widmann recently made this statement concerning his new journal:
Inconvenient History attempts to return to the roots of revisionism without any political agenda or desire to white wash totalitarian regimes.
This statement can be shown to be false.