Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Mattogno's Deceptions on Nazi Policy: An Updated Analysis


We are currently preparing the 2nd edition of our White Paper, which will update our analysis of the lies, distortions, evasions and pro-Nazi rhetoric in the work of MGK on the policy and camps of Aktion Reinhard. This current blog series previews some of the arguments in my contribution, which will primarily be my response to the ludicrous claims by Mattogno in Chapter 5 of MGK's 'riposte', published in September 2013, which can be read here.

Lying about the dating of Orders: the Wisliceny Testimonies

Mattogno began writing about Nazi policy in the 1980s. A recurrent theme in that writing has been his attempts to demonstrate that Hitler could not have given an order to exterminate Europe's Jews by the dates claimed by what he calls the "orthodox historiography." Two of the sources he has repeatedly used to make this case are the testimonies provided by Wisliceny at Nuremberg and from prison in Bratislava. Mattogno's devious sleight of hand with these sources shows a long-term technique being perfected of "bait and switch", whereby a testimony is quoted by Mattogno but then an entirely different précis of its contents is given afterwards.

Mattogno's Failure to Evolve, 2000-2010

Mattogno was hyperactive in the first decade of the new century, producing a body of work that included his 'trilogy' on the Aktion Reinhard camps. On the subject of policy, I would identify four developments, which are really indicative of Mattogno's failure to adapt in an evolutionary way to how historians were discussing the Final Solution. Firstly, Mattogno began to tackle shootings in the East, but these were framed against a straw man which assumed that the "orthodox historiography" regards the Einsatzgruppen as forces that only shot Jews because they were Jews, and for no other reason. Secondly, Mattogno elaborated a theme, which he had introduced back in the 1980s, that there was continuity between the emigration policies of 1939-1941 and the Final Solution, and the only change was the destinations of the 'emigrants' and the manner of their emigration. Thirdly, Mattogno set out to neutralize the statements of leading Nazis such as Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels, prompted seemingly by the use of those statements in Shermer and Grobman's Denying History and perhaps by Irving's defeat in the Lipstadt court case. Finally, Mattogno in Sobibor reignited his discussion of the Hitler Order by confronting historians whom he had largely ignored to that point, such as Gerlach, Browning and Kershaw. This attack would continue in his riposte to our White Paper in 2013.

Mattogno's 'Riposte', 2013

In December 2011, we published the first edition our White Paper, exposing MGK's dishonesty, antisemitism and fallacious reasoning concerning the Aktion Reinhard camps. One of our motives was to compel Mattogno to discuss documents that he had previously ignored or minimized. His contributions to MGK's 'riposte' of 2013 did discuss these documents at inordinate length, but primarily in a mode of obfuscation interspersed with blatant lying. I now turn to a detailed discussion of his Chapter 5 of that riposte.

Mattogno: Conclusion

Our White Paper obliged Mattogno to discuss sources that he usually prefers to ignore. When confronted with chains of documents that refer to extermination we can see him resort repeatedly to a set of tricks. Those identified above include:

1) Stating that the use of an exterminatory term was rhetorical or hyperbolic

2) Stating that a proposal was only hypothetical, or the opinion of one person

3) False emphasis on a non-operative part of a phrase