A message from Jürgen Graf

Last Tuesday I received the following e-mail message from "Revisionist" guru Jürgen Graf:

Dear Muehlenkamp,

You recently challenged Mattogno, Kues and myself to debate you on the "holocaust" issue. I accept your challenge, but on my own terms. Since my time is of value, I will not bother to answer a critique with pretends to refute a revisionist book by pointing out a (real or alleged) error on page 98, a second one on page 176 and a third one on page 253. Show that you can do better than that. Do what Faurisson and Mattogno have done with Pressac's study "The crematories of Auschwitz" and write a detailled and comprehensive critique of a revisionist book, discussing all major arguments presented therein. I give you the choice between 4 books:

Graf, Kues, Mattogno: "Sobibor. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality".
Graf, Mattogno: "Concentration Camp Majdanek. A Historical and Technical Study".
Mattogno, Graf: "Treblinka - Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?"
Graf, "The Giant with Feet of Clay".

Upon receiving your text, I will publish it on my website (juergen-graf.vho.org) without any modifications, together with my answer. You will then publish both texts on your own website. (Attention: If you use foul or obscene language, as you have repeatedly done in the past, I will not react at all). I might ask either Kues or Mattogno to help me with some points, especially technical ones. It goes without saying that you may use the help of your three fellow "draggon slayers" if you wish so.

I suggest you publish this e-mail on your website, together with your answer.

Juergen Graf

It's not the first time that Graf comes up with this kind of talk. Last October he sent me a message challenging Sergey Romanov and me to «write a detailled critique of the book "Sobibor. Holocaust propaganda and reality" which was authored by T. Kues, C. Mattogno and me». I responded as follows (excerpt from my e-mail sent on Thursday, October 21, 2010, 1:13 AM, links converted to blog format):

Now to your "challenge" that Sergey Romanov and/or I write a review of MGK's Sobibór book.

Is that all you've got to offer?

You see, my fellow HC bloggers and I have been debunking your and Mattogno's propaganda since 2006, several writings by Kues have also been dissected on HC, yet the "Revisionist" scions' reaction so far, apart from Mattogno's long risposta a Muehlenkamp (which I finished shredding about a year ago - see the last installment under [link]) and some rant against Sergey Romanov in some of Mattogno's Italian publications (which includes me in the blog commented under [link]), has been deafening silence. Last year Dr. Nick Terry tried to put together a Real Debate on the Aktion Reinhard Camps (see under [link]), but you folks were obviously not interested. Now you're "challenging" Sergey and me to write a review of MGK's Sobibór book, as if that were a big deal (the difference between exposing examples of falsehood, poor reasoning and deplorable scholarship in a "Revisionist" publication and writing a review of the publication as a whole is essentially quantitative, as I see it - if you disagree please explain what is supposed to make the latter more challenging than the former). Poor show, Jürgen. The only reason why I’m not disappointed by your performance is that I never expected much from you and your companions.
That said, you can of course have your review if you send me the book’s text in MS Word or PDF, or provide a link to where it can be downloaded. I’d say that’s the minimum courtesy you should show when demanding a review.

Graf got angry, of course, and responded on the same day with a sermon about the merits of MGK’s recently published Sobibór book, followed by a categorical refusal to send me a free copy of that book, which at the time was not yet available online. I responded on October 21, 2010 12:54:29 PM, reiterating my demand for a free copy of the Sobibór book and pointing out the following:

I've seen the arguments you brag about in Die Akte Sobibór, and they are frankly laughable. The stuff about the mass graves in that pamphlet contains a nasty little lie about the groundwater level, which I exposed under [link]. As to why archaeologists haven't so far found the gas chamber building, the simple explanation is that either it was completely obliterated and its foundations removed or Prof. Kola looked in the wrong place - big deal. Gilead, Haimi and Mazurek are still on the job, so there's no point in making a fuss about the preliminary results of their investigations, wait until you get the final results. Prof. Kola found a wooden building not mentioned by any witness? How frightfully shocking, considering that eyewitness always mention absolutely everything - in "Revisionist" cloud-cuckoo-land, that is; the experience of historians and criminal investigators is another. As to Kues' writings regarding deportation of Jews from Western Europe, he wrote a lengthy article about the same subject in the "Inconvenient History" Journal, which I commented under [link] , [link] and [link]. Do you know when that article's continuation is due, by the way?

Mattogno's review of Shermer and Grobman is no argument. A "Revisionist" can write a lot of nonsense in a review of a scholarly publication, without this meaning that exposing that "Revisionist" as the propagandist he is takes more than pointing out instructive examples of falsehood, ill-reasoning and poor scholarship in that "Revisionist"'s considerations. That's what we do at HC (among other things), and I'm glad to see by your "challenge" and by Mattogno's hysteria on Franziska's blog that we're thereby getting to you folks. What efforts you undertake in trying to sell your articles of faith don't mean that similar efforts are required to expose the worthlessness of your productions, my friend. Try to get used to that idea. Incidentally, do you know if and when laborious reviewer Charlie intends to respond to my debunking of his risposta? It's been over a year now, and his silence in a direct confrontation between him and me suggests that your "joke" mumbling at the beginning of your message is based on nothing more than wishful thinking. Remember what Charlie said in his latest blog about the "indecorous" silence of Mr. Zimmerman? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

This was followed by an exchange of e-mails about the possibility of making available the Sobibór book. Graf agreed to check with the editor, but ended up informing me that «the same categorically refuses to let you of all people benefit from a Sonderbehandlung and argues that you can buy the book, just like anybody else», to which I gave a short reply that ended this conversation.

Since then, MGK’s Sobibór book has been made available online, and I have exhaustively commented the arguments in this book regarding mass graves and mass cremation at Sobibór, along with the corresponding arguments regarding Treblinka and Bełżec in earlier publications by, respectively, Mattogno & Graf and Mattogno alone, in the blog series Mattogno, Graf & Kues on the Aktion Reinhard(t) Mass Graves and Mattogno, Graf & Kues on Aktion Reinhard(t) Cremation. The equivalent parts of Mattogno’s book about Chełmno have been addressed in the blog Mattogno on Chełmno Mass Graves and the series Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation. The sequel of Thomas Kues’ conjectures about «Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories» has been taken apart in the two-part blog series More «Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories». A discussion between Thomas Kues and me following the blog On 12.05.2011, Demjanjuk was sentenced to 5 years in prison. seems to have ended with my last response in the blog Thomas Kues tries to defuse the Benda report (my challenge that Graf refers to in his above-quoted e-mail message is presumably the one stated at the end of the blog Thomas Kues on »Lies and obfuscations about Himmler’s Sobibor directive«, which is part of that discussion). And Mattogno’s response to my deconstruction of his "important work" (Thomas Kues in the "Inconvenient History" blog Grave pit enlargement at Bełżec caused by soil movement?) Bełżec e le Controversie Olocaustiche di Roberto Muehlenkamp” (original text, English translation) is still outstanding (apart from already refuted commentaries of the first two installments, see the blog Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology – Continuation), almost two years after the last installment was posted.

The above-mentioned detailed critiques of important parts of MGK's books about the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps and Chełmno, as well as earlier deconstructions of key claims and arguments made by one or more of these authors (for instance in the series That's why it is denial, not revisionism.) raises further doubts about Graf's intellectual honesty as he tries to play down the criticism from HC as "pointing out a (real or alleged) error on page 98, a second one on page 176 and a third one on page 253". To be sure, we also practice the "death by a thousand cuts" – approach of pointing out punctual blunders and falsehoods in MGK's writing, as can be seen in some of the blogs collected under the labels Mattogno, Graf and Thomas Kues, but the comprehensive refutations mentioned in the previous paragraph go way beyond this approach.

MGK have for the most part remained indecorously silent (to use a phrase coined by Mattogno) in the face of this extensive and devastating criticism, and this makes Graf's challenge to discuss one of the productions authored or co-authored by him look like a lame attempt to save face and bide for time. On top of this criticism, Graf will however get more than he asked for in his latest e-mail, and perhaps also sooner than he may have expected, because we didn’t wait for his challenge to start working on a comprehensive critique covering several screeds produced by one or more of the "Revisionist" coryphées.

As to publishing, I think I can speak for my fellow HC contributors when I say that we gladly accept Graf's offer to publish our upcoming work on his website – provided of course that it appears there as soon as he receives it (and not only whenever he and his companions have finished an answer thereto) and that we are free to also publish it wherever else we like. Needless to say, MGK's eventual answer will be treated by us in the same manner, and we expect this to also apply to our refutation of said answer.

As to whatever corresponds to Graf’s presumably extensive definition "foul or obscene language", he can rest assured that the place where the critique is meant to be published (besides HC and his own website) precludes the use of such language, which is supposed to make those oh-so-sensitive "Revisionist" souls cringe despite the obscenity of their hate speech (that hypocrisy is the source of some amusement among their opponents, actually).

As a final note, we don’t consider ourselves "dragon-slayers", because MGK don’t qualify as "dragons". While they are certainly the best that "Revisionism" has got to offer, that only makes them the one-eyed among the blind (to put it politely).

Update, 26.06.2011

Jürgen Graf sent me a message yesterday, requesting that I publish it on the blog. I'm not sure which critique he's talking about, but here it is:

Dear Muehlenkamp,

Thank you for your message. Writing an extensive answer to your critique will take a couple of days, and as I am exceedingly busy right now, I will only be able to do so in some weeks. You should get my answer by the end of July.
Please publish this short message on your website.

J. Graf