Dishonest Treatment of SS Witnesses
While the overwhelming
majority of witness criticisms produced by MGK are aimed at survivors, they
have also attempted to deal with some of the accounts by former SS men who
served at the camps. Several of their interpretations on those witnesses will
be examined below, all of which fail to provide an honest treatment of the
statements.
In Sobibór, Kues argues that SS camp official
Gustav Wagner "adamantly denied the existence of gas chambers at Sobibor."[101] He
bases this claim on an article in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo on
June 6, 1978, which quoted Wagner stating to the police: “I never saw any gas
chamber at Sobibor” (Eu nunca vi nenhuma camara de gas em Sobibor).[102]
However, Kues has lifted this quote from a series of reports in which Wagner
contradicted this denial with a number of damaging admissions. On May 31, 1978,
the Journo de Brazil reported:
Wagner said: - No Jews were killed at Sobibor. There were other orders --- Wagner said to the DOPS (of São Paulo) yesterday, shortly before contradicting himself by saying: "Stangl did not kill anyone. Those who killed the Jews came out and they executed the orders, without which we knew nothing of it." New contradiction: “there were no gas chambers in Sobibor.”[103]
The original news source
on Wagner’s arrest therefore noted contradictions in Wagner’s account, which
Kues has omitted, such as the obvious contradiction between “No Jews were
killed at Sobibor” and “Those who killed the Jews came out and they executed
the orders.” A similar contradiction suppressed by Kues in an article he uses
is from Der Spiegel, which noted on the one hand that Wagner claimed "not
a single Jew was killed, neither by him nor by others. His role in Sobibor was
with the production of barracks"; but on other hand quoted this exchange
between Wagner and Szmajzner:
Wagner...then committed one of his biggest mistakes. "Yes, yes, I remember you well. I had you taken out from the transport, and I have saved the lives of you and your two friends who were goldsmiths." "So," said Szmajzner, "and my sister, my mother, my father and my brothers? If you say you saved my life, then you have indeed known that others had to die." Wagner did not answer.[104]
Kues (as Dahl) even posted
this exchange in February 2007 by including it in a quoted passage that appears
in Richard Rashke’s Escape from Sobibor.[105] Rashke’s work was also cited in MGK’s Sobibór.[106] The
Brazilian article had noted that Wagner had already attempted suicide several
times (ele tentou o suicídio várias vezes). Moreover, American reports, easily available
to Kues through online archives, contain more damaging admissions. The New
York Times of June 11, 1978, quotes Wagner’s admission of May 30 that “I
knew what happened there but I never went to see - I only obeyed orders. You
would not want to see what they did there either.” Thus, Kues knowingly engages
in dishonesty when he selectively quotes Wagner’s statements. In one of his
many articles, Kues also gives a dishonest paraphrase of one of Erich Bauer's
statements. Kues states as follows:
According to Bauer's "confession", written while serving a life sentence in a Berlin prison, he had at one occasion overheard camp commandant Franz Stangl mention that 350,000 Jews had been killed at Sobibor (quoted in Klee et.al. The Good Old Days, p. 232). Since Stangl left Sobibor for Treblinka in September 1942, it follows that the final death toll would be much higher - that is, if we are to believe Bauer's testimony rather than the documentary evidence of the Höfle telegram.[107]
Bauer's actual statement,
taken from the same source cited by Kues, does not say the 350,000 figure came
from Stangl:
I estimate that the number of Jews gassed at Sobibor was about 350,000. In the canteen at Sobibor I once overheard Karl Frenzel, Franz Stangl and Gustav Wagner. They were discussing the number of victims in the extermination camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor and expressed their regret that Sobibor 'came last' in the competition.[108]
The figure of 350,000 was therefore
Bauer’s estimate, made in the 1960s, not (as Kues states) Stangl’s contemporary
estimate. The purpose of this false paraphrase[109] is to
mislead the reader into assuming that Bauer's 350,000 was taken from a
conversation in 1942, and only covered the period when Stangl (the supposed
source of the figure) was at the camp, and thus artificially raise the estimate
of deaths at the camp. Taken in isolation, such a false paraphrase may appear
to be a minor case of dishonesty. However, this instance is highly significant
because Kues is attacking a perpetrator who he clearly regards as one of the
most dangerous to the denier’s case on Sobibor. He bases his attack on an
unsupported assumption (a 'begging the question' fallacy) concerning the amount
of knowledge that Bauer 'must' have had:
It seems curious that Bauer, who, if the gassing story was indeed true, must have known with accuracy the capacities of the gas chambers as well as the average number of daily gassings, could have been so wide off the mark as to put credence in the figure reportedly mentioned by Stangl.
Kues does
not explain why Bauer must have known "with accuracy the capacities of the
gas chambers as well as the average number of daily gassings." Did Bauer
keep a diary and write down the number of transports and their passenger
contents? Did he measure the capacity of the chambers? The obvious answer has
to be no, because his estimate was far too high. There are several reasons why
such an error could be made (lack of access to some necessary data;
misremembering the dimensions; not being aware of gaps in the transport
schedule; miscalculating the number of days the gas chambers were in use; the
variance of transport figures to the camp) that do not make the witness
unreliable on the fact of whether Sobibor was a death camp.
This attempt to discredit Bauer
through an anomaly-hunting technique is therefore incoherent. It does not alter
the fact that Bauer was already serving life with no immediate prospect of
release, so cannot be accused of taking a 'plea bargain' (even ignoring the
fact that West Germany
did not have an American-style plea-bargaining structure[110]). Kues
makes no attempt to explain why Bauer chose to co-operate, because Kues knows
that any such explanation will come across as a transparently faith-based
assumption rather than a deduction from any actual evidence concerning how the
West German legal system really worked. In the absence of any motive to lie,
the only plausible assumption is that Bauer decided to tell the truth, but that
the time which had elapsed between the end of the war and the date of his
statement caused him to make minor errors. Kues cannot make these errors into a
narrative, so he has to settle for well-poisoning and obfuscation, which fools
nobody except his gullible fellow deniers. In Sobibór, the only
reference to the 350,000 made in the work is directly attributed to Bauer (in a
section authored by Graf); we can take this drop, especially given the numerous
remarks against Bauer in the work, as an implicit admission of guilt by Kues.[111]
Kues also makes an accusation of ‘scripting’ concerning
the testimony of SS-Unterscharführer Hubert Gomerski, who served at the Sobibor
camp. Regarding Gomerski’s 1950 trial, Kues wonders:
Did he really receive a fair trial back in 1950, as implied by Schelvis? Was he able to speak his mind openly to his interrogators and lawyers, or was he, like Auschwitz SS man Hans Aumeier, handed a number of leading questions, demanding that he stated what he “knew” about the “gas chambers”?[112]
Kues is, of course, unable
to substantiate any of his concerns about the coercion of Aumeier or Gomerski
with any shred of evidence (as evident by the lack of footnotes in the
section). We know for instance that SS-Unterscharführer Heinrich Unverhau
admitted to his participation in the Aktion Reinhard camps “on his own
accord…during his first police interrogation in March 1948.”[113] Indeed
Kues’ point is directly contradicted by the available evidence, as after his
release Gomerski himself stated in an interview that his crimes deserved a
sentence of 8-10 years and acknowledged, "After all, I was there
(Sobibor). I cannot deny that."[114]
Where charges are not made of ‘scripting’, there often
are claims of retribution against Nazi perpetrators who refused to incriminate
themselves about the extermination camps. Graf claims that Franz had always
persistently denied the official Treblinka picture, and thus spent 35 years
behind bars in retaliation.[115] In
reality, this is how Franz described the scene upon his arrival at Treblinka:
It was late summer or the beginning of autumn 1942, when I came from Belzec to Treblinka. I went by foot from the railway station of Malkinia to Treblinka; when I arrived it was already dark. Everywhere in the camp there were corpses. I remember that these corpses were already bloated. The corpses were dragged through the camp by working Jews…[116]
Franz also stated after
his life sentencing:
The Treblinka camp was split into three parts, there was the reception camp, where the transports arrived, the Todeslager (extermination area), and then where the camp staff and leaders were accommodated. Some two and two and a half kilometers away from the extermination camp (Venichtungslager) there was also a labor camp. The uprising was in the extermination camp, it had nothing to do with the labor camp. After the uprising there were still between 25 and 30 Jews in the extermination camp.[117]
Obviously Franz was
describing the operations of the death camp, yet he received a life sentence,
and despite his later statements, was never released early or given leniency by
the court. During his time in jail, Franz corresponded with Michael Tregenza
about the gas chambers and was visited by Demjanjuk’s defence lawyer, Jerome
Brentar. David Irving gave an example of the Franz-Tregenza correspondence:
Mike Treganza [sic] wrote to Kurt Franz (deputy Kdt, owner of the Saint-Bernard dog called Barry, originally Stangl's; arrested 1959 and sentenced to life index, he died 1998)and Franz said to Mike from prison in a letter ca. 1980s he thought it was diesel, but never operated it himself).[118]
Brentar, in a speech to a Revisionist
IHR conference, described a meeting with Franz:
In Germany, I met with the wartime commandant of the Treblinka camp, Kurt Franz, who was then serving a sentence in a prison near Düsseldorf. During our meeting, Franz told me: "Mr. Brentar, several years ago six of your people were here, and I told them that this man [Demjanjuk] is not the Ivan of Treblinka. The Ivan of Treblinka was much older, had dark hair, and was taller. He had a stoop because he was so tall. So why do you come here again to ask me the same questions?"[119]
If Franz had been framed
by the West German authorities, Brentar would have been a perfect advocate for his
justice: an international lawyer with connections to deniers, who could have
publicized his case and presented the evidence that Jews were not exterminated
at Treblinka. Conversely, if Franz were being coerced or in fear for his life,
he would not have denied that Demjanjuk was Ivan of Treblinka.
Both Gomerski and Franz’s admissions in private about the
Aktion Reinhard camps are reminiscent of Adolf Eichmann’s similar statements to
journalist Willem Sassen prior to his arrest by Israeli police. Though not a
member of the SS, as previously mentioned Wilhelm Pfannenstiel also provided
confirmation of the gassings at the Reinhard in private to Holocaust denier
Paul Rassinier. There also is the private Shoah interview that Claude
Lanzmann conducted with Franz Suchomel, who was falsely promised anonymity by
Lanzmann; this interview has been ignored across MGK’s entire ‘trilogy’.[120] These
and other private admissions, in which the relevant witnesses had easy
opportunities to deny the reality of homicidal gassings but never did, are
extremely damaging to MGK’s negationist beliefs. Perhaps due to the difficulty
which they cause the three Revisionist writers, the confirmation of
exterminations by perpetrators in such open and allowing circumstances has
never been adequately addressed in MGK’s writings.
Of course, there are also some SS witnesses who have
never been discussed in MGK’s collective trilogy. One such example is Joseph
(Sepp) Hirtreiter, who was the first SS man to be charged for crimes committed
at Treblinka. Hirtreiter was arrested in Frankfurt on July 2, 1946 and, whilst
being interrogated about his role in the euthanasia project at Hadamar,
revealed that he had worked at a death camp in ‘Malkinia’ in which Jews had
been killed in gas chambers. His interviewer did not know that Hirtreiter was
referring to Treblinka, and thus did not pursue the matter.[121]
In addition to dishonesty, one could
easily classify some of MGK’s handling of SS testimonies as sloppy. The
clearest example of such is Carlo Mattogno’s discussion of Lorenz Hackenholt in
Sobibór. Mattogno states that Hackenholt’s involvement with the gas
chambers at Belzec is “mentioned only in the “Gerstein report”!”[122]
Unfortunately, such a claim is simply and unequivocally not true. Mattogno
himself would realize that Hackenholt’s involvement has been supported by more
than just Gerstein if he would read his own writing within the same chapter in Sobibór,
where he quotes the statement of Josef Oberhauser[123], and
in Bełżec, where he quotes the statements of both Oberhauser and Karl
Alfred Schluch.[124]
Such carelessness is surprising, but not unusual for MGK. The notable feature
about such sloppiness is that it always serves to further their criticism of
the Holocaust, which betrays MGK’s dishonesty in their treatment of the
available evidence.
[101] MGK, Sobibór, p.191
[102] MGK, Sobibór, p.105, n.285
[103] Translated
by Roberto Lucena and posted at ‘Kues on Gustav Wagner (Revised and Updated)’,
11.1.2011. Other sources listed below are linked in the same article:
[105] See the initial post of ‘Laurentz Dahl’ (Kues’ CODOH forum handle)
in the thread ‘Richard Rashke’s “Escape from Sobibor,’ http://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4056.
[106] MGK, Sobibór, pp.34-35
[108] Klee, Good Old Days, p.232.
[109] This same distortion also appears in Thomas Dalton, Debating The
Holocaust, p.237, suggesting a degree of collaboration and showing how
quickly a lie spreads in the denier pool.
[110] J.H. Langbein, ‘Land without plea bargaining: How the Germans do
it.’ Michigan Law Review, 78 (2) (December 1979), pp.204-225.
[111] MGK, Sobibór, p.60.
[112] Kues, ‘Review of Sobibor.’
[113] De Mildt In The Name of the People,, p.294.
[114] De Mildt, In The Name of the People, p.392, citing Elie Aron
Cohen, De negentien treinen naar Sobibor, Elsevier, 1979, interview with
Gomerski in 1978.
[115] Graf, Der Holocaust auf dem Prüfstand, p.54.
[116] Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, pp.92-93; citing
Treblinka-Franz, Band 8, p.1493.
[117] Statement of Kurt Franz, Sta. Do. Sob 56, June 1966, No. 1477, p.3.
[118] David Irving, ‘A Radical’s Diary’, 2.3.2007, http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2007/020307.html
[119] Jerome Brentar, ‘My Campaign for Justice for John Demjanjuk’,
adapted from his address to the Eleventh IHR Conference, October 1992. The
Journal of Historical Review,Nov.-Dec. 1993 (Vol. 13, No. 6).
[120] Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust.
New York: Pantheon, 1985, pp.52-57.
[121] De Mildt, In The Name of the People, p.249; citing Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager,
p.39; JuNSV Lfd. Nr. 270, p.262
[122] MGK, Sobibór, p.277.
[123] MGK, Sobibór, p.255; citing interrogation of Josef
Oberhauser on 12 December 1962, ZStL, 208 AR-Z 252/59, vol. IX, p.1685.
[124] Mattogno, Bełżec, pp.65, 66; citing interrogation of Karl Alfred Schluch on November
10, 1961. ZStL, 208 AR-Z 252/59, p.1512.
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