Short debunking of Steven Anderson's video "The Holocaust Hoax Exposed".

This video by a nutty religious fanatic is popular enough to merit some attention, so here it goes.

Needless to say, the man is a total hack who is ignorant about the very trivial basics of the Holocaust. Like, its definition.

1:32: "The issue is: whether or not 6 million Jews died in gas chambers and were subsequently cremated".
3:27: "The question is: were 6 million Jews gassed and then cremated?"

Since nobody serious has ever claimed that 6 million Jews died in gas chambers, Anderson shows that he has not even bothered to look up what the Holocaust is supposed to be before barging in to "debunk" it!

It's like trying to "debunk" quantum physics while thinking that Newton's laws are paragraphs of the British penal code.

There, I could end this review right now. No one who's uttered something this stupid deserves to be taken seriously.

But just for the fun of it let's see what else he has to say.

3:50 Auschwitz plaque meme:

See: Revision of the Auschwitz plaque.

Obviously Anderson sucks at basic arithmetic.

5:40 First Holocaust/foreordained 6 million figure meme:

See The First Holocaust canard.

Obviously Anderson sucks at basic logic.

7:40 Auschwitz cremation capacities:

Anderson does not justify his claim that the efficient cremation rates were not possible. He claims that it takes 2 to 2,5 hours to "cremate" someone. He is speaking from a position of ignorance here, for modern civil cremation practices are not comparable to the Nazi ones. Yes, obviously the physical processes did not change, but the overall cremation time depends on the procedure and end goal. The goal of the civil cremation is to have a nice pile of white (or as light as possible) ashes to present to the relatives at the end. That means: no mingling of ashes is allowed; a single body per oven; cremation lasts as long as it takes to whiten the bones and then to reduce the whole to a nice-looking pile of ashes.

That was obviously not the goal in the Nazi camps where no one cared about sanctity of the corpses nor about how the ashes looked like. Compared to the civil cremation procedures the camp incineration consisted of stuffing several corpses into one muffle, burning the corpses as continuously as possible (only with some downtime for oven maintenance) and not waiting until the larger bones were reduced to ashes. The remaining brittle but hard-to-burn bones were actually broken down afterwards by a special team using special wooden mallets/logs. This is described by numerous Sonderkommando members, and David Olere, one such member, even left an illustration of the process:

That alone reduced the time considerably.

The mingling of ashes - an absolute no-no in the civil crematoria even back then, to say nothing of today - was an official part of the procedure, as is clear from the Topf instructions on the use of their ovens:

As soon as the remains of the corpses have fallen from the chamotte grid to the ash collection channel below, they should be pulled forward towards the ash removal door, using the scraper. Here they can be left for a further 20 minutes to be fully consumed, then the ashes should be placed in the container and set aside to cool.
In the meantime, further corpses can be introduced one after the other into the chambers. 

This was one of the "secrets" behind the enormous capacities exhibited by the camp ovens. The actual physico-chemical process of incineration was not shorter than the one exhibited in the modern ovens. But the hard-to-burn, albeit small in size, remaining parts did not have to be incinerated in the main oven chamber - they would burn in the ash collection channel while the new corpses were being introduced into the muffles. This has to be kept in mind when reading the German documents with the oven capacities - they basically list corpse-introduction rates rather than the "true" physico-chemical incineration rates. But from the practical point of view the introduction rate was all that mattered.

Then there were the multiple cremations. At this point deniers always object: if you load more bodies into the oven, it takes so much longer to burn them all! No shit, Sherlock. Obviously it would take somewhat longer than for 1 body. But it's still a win over introducing 3 bodies one after each other.

Here is where the difference lies:

a) Every opening of the muffle door means heat losses. If you stuff several bodies at once, obviously they take longer to burn than a single body, but you reduce the downtimes/heat losses needed to stuff the other bodies into the oven.

b) According to one of the participants of a British cremation conference in 1975 most of the corpse is incinerated away in the first 30 minutes:

After about half an hour, whether the furnace has gotten up to a temperature of 1100°C or whether it is 900°C, there is a rapid fall away, and I think the investigations should be concerned with the last twenty minutes or so of the cremation cycle. At that time you have in the cremator a very small quantity of body material...roughly the size of a rugby football, about twenty minutes from the end of the cremation, and this is the thing which is most difficult to remove.

So with a single cremation you have merely a rugby-ball sized piece in the oven in 30 minutes. Imagine how much heat is lost that could have been used to incinerate additional matter. In a civil crematorium you're not allowed to push in an additional body into the oven at this point, whereas the Nazis had no such compunctions.

c) Each cremation begins with an endothermic phase, energy is consumed to dry the body out. Afterwards comes the exothermic phase when the dried out corpse itself becomes fuel and gives off serious amounts of heat. If one manages the trick of introducing the fresh bodies during the second phase, one saves fuel and time. The cycle can then be repeated.

Then there's the issue of continuous cremations. Continuous does not mean 24/7 - some downtime could be used each day for oven maintenance (cleaning out of the slag from the gasifiers etc.). But these cremations were continuous compared to the civil ones, where you have certain cycles: oven is heated up; the body is cremated; oven is cooled down.

To heat up an oven you need additional time and additional fuel. So in this respect the Nazi camp procedure was much more efficient than the civil one exactly due to its barbaric nature: new bodies were introduced as the rest of the last batch was being cremated, no additional time/fuel for cooling down or heating up.

Finally, even the leading deniers like Carlo Mattogno put the cremation rates of the Auschwitz ovens at 1 hour per body:

Since the Auschwitz-Birkenau ovens lacked draft intake installations (p. 81), the average time for a cremation (principal combustion in the chamber) was one hour.

He even conceded that it could take much less than that:

The shortest time required for a cremation resulting from experimental data referred to in this chapter is that of the Ignis-Hüttenbau oven in Terezín: 35-36 min.

Which fully negates Anderson's 2-2,5 body/hr figure and shows he's nothing but an ignorant clown.

Now, both Anderson's and Mattogno's amateur musings are trumped by the actual experience in the camps as are evident from an overwhelming number of the wartime Nazi documents:

On 14 July 1941, the Topf engineer Paul Erdmann provided the construction office Mauthausen with a cremation rate of 33 to 40 min per corpse “without overloading” the two-muffle oven.

On 30 October 1941, the SS construction office Auschwitz noted that the planned crematorium 2 will have an arithmetic cremation rate of 15 min per corpse. (In reality such a rate would, for example, correspond to simultaneously cremating 2 bodies in 30 min).

On 10 July 1942, the SS construction office Auschwitz informed the SS construction office Stutthof on the three-muffle oven that “incineration takes about ½ hour according to the Topf company”.

On 8 September 1942, the Topf engineer Kurt Prüfer noted nominal cremation rates of 30 min for the double-muffle oven, 22 min for the triple-muffle oven and 12 min for the 8-muffle oven (note that there is probably a typo/mistake in one of the last two figures since there is no technical reason (or any other evidence) why each muffle of the 8-muffle oven should out-perform that of a three-muffle oven by a factor of almost two).

On 24 September 1942, the Topf engineer Fritz Sander wrote to the Topf management that the concentration camps “help themselves with a large number of ovens/muffles and by stuffing several corpses in the individual muffles”.

In a report of SS-Hauptsturmführer Krone from the WVHA of 20 January 1943, it reads that “two oil-fueled cremation furnaces...can dispose of some 100 bodies in a 12-hour period” in the concentration camp Majdanek, i.e. the arithmetic rate of 15 min per corpse (In reality such a rate would, for example, correspond to simultaneously cremating 2 bodies in 30 min).

For 28 June 1943, a draft was prepared in the construction office Auschwitz according to which the cremation rate of the Topf two-muffle oven was 26 min per corpse and that of the three- and eight muffle oven 15 min per corpse. (In reality such a rate would, for example, correspond to simultaneously cremating 2 bodies in 30 min).

List of cremations from Theresienstadt between 3 October to 15 November 1943 according to which the cremation time was less than 35 min in 72% cases.

On 4 February 1944, oven builder Hans Kori wrote to the Majdanek concentration camp that the cremation time of his ovens can be halved to 30 min per corpse by employing multiple cremations.

Note that 15 min/body refers to a mathematical average; this basically corresponds to 2 bodies per 30 minutes in real life.

(Click here for full sources.)

Basically Anderson is not up to date not only on the modern scholarship but even on the more advanced denier "research". Pretty pathetic.

10:22 Anderson tries to explain why they had 52 muffles. And fails. There is no good explanation for why, when Obersturmführer Krone learned that the Auschwitz cremation capacity exceeded 2000 for one day, he still was not satisfied and thought the capacity "is not yet sufficient". (And no, the analogy with Phoenix, AZ, is not clever considering everything above).

11:16 Anderson falsely claims that only 1 body at a time could be introduced into 1 muffle, without providing any support for his claim, which is directly refuted by the documentary evidence. The Topf engineer Fritz Sander wrote about the experiences in the concentration camps on 14.09.1942 that in the camps one tries to overcome the deficiency of the muffle system by "fully stuffing individual muffles with several corpses". He noted that "it is a hard and unpleasant work to introduce the corpses lengthwise into the muffle, namely when always several corpses must be packed simultaneously into the muffle".

He calls the gas chamber in Krema 2 "supposed" without ever addressing the documents that call it a "gassing basement" (Vergasungskeller) and "gas basement" (Gaskeller).

He complains about the elevator thing without ever bothering to put it into the historical context.

It was established long ago that Kremas 2 and 3, unlike 4 and 5, were not planned as homicidal from the start, this change occurred quite late in the planning. So some of the features are indeed less than efficient, since the design at first presupposed those were normal morgues. Some details were changed to accommodate the new homicidal function (like the direction of the doors opening), some, like the morgues being semi-basements, were already too late to change. So yes, the logistics in these two individual Kremas was not as efficient as it could have been, but this is simply explained by the historical circumstances.

The important thing to understand is that the elevators were not the bottleneck. The cremation ovens were. The Nazis knew this very well.

One elevator (in Krema 3) had a minimum payload of 750 kg, the other (in Krema 2) maybe 300 kg - it is not known if it wasn't upgraded later, as it was temporary, and it was a minimum payload as specified in the construction order, it is quite possible that a more powerful temporary elevator was actually produced. The documentation is fragmentary, so we can't tell.

But let's assume the worst case of 300 kg for one crema. That's 6-7 corpses per one time on average. You have to load 15 muffles in the ovens above, let's say with 2.5 corpses on average, that is you want to have about 40 corpses available for the start of the operation (and again, the 5 3-muffle ovens worked separately, so not 40 corpses at once). But with 6-7 corpses per trip (and it's a worse-case assumption) you get to 40 just in a few minutes. And before this batch is incinerated and the next corpses are introduced, you've got quite a lot more time.

But again, nothing speaks against this temporary elevator having been upgraded. And this is an “issue” only with Krema 2.

Oh, one more point. Obviously the ovens of a single Krema did not have to dispose of 2000 bodies daily. First of all, the groups would be divided among different crematoria. And second, not every day 2000 people would arrive to be gassed. It was not a 24/7 operation.

13:11 "At that rate" you're never get to 1 million figure.

Say what? Nobody claims that the 1 million Auschwitz victims were disposed of solely in the crematoria. The incineration pits were dug out in Auschwitz exactly because at times the crematoria could not cope. While it is hard to say how many people were cremated in the ovens and how many in the open, let's go with the ballpark of 50/50. Anderson never mentions the open-air incinerations. There are two possible explanations for that: he doesn't know about them and is thus so ignorant as to render anything he says useless; or he knows about them and suppresses this important fact, i.e. lies.

14:57 Claims that Treblinka victims were dug up by hand. Whereas actually an excavator was used.

How ignorant can one get? Here are photos of the excavators at Treblinka (from Kurt Franz's album):

Source.

Source.

15:13 Impossible to cremate someone on a BBQ grill.

Well, obviously no one has claimed they were cremated on "barbeque grills". Here's what actually happened.

15:20 Why is one supposed to believe that? Well, for one thing, these 700k+ people are simply missing. They were supposed to have been deported to the "Russian East" but we know they never arrived there. Their last stop was Treblinka. So what happened to them? Anderson can't explain. The only evidence (documentary, testimonial, physical) that exists points to them having been murdered there.

18:25 Claims that Treblinka and other camps were forced labor camps, thus contradicting the usual denier excuse that these were transit camps. Treblinka II, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno were obviously not labor camps of any sort, were never claimed to be such and were too small to be such. So Anderson not only shows his utter ignorance once again, he shows that he cannot account for the basic function of these camps. If Treblinka was not an execution camp, for example, why did Stroop deport 7000 Warsaw Jews there for a liquidation? If Chelmno was a forced labor camp, how come 100,000 Jews were liquidated there with gas vans up to summer of 1942?

Sure, Auschwitz, for one, was a huge complex which served many functions and consisted of many subcamps (3 main ones and ~50 smaller ones). Extermination was only one of the functions. It was also a labor camp.

Question: why did the Nazis transport the Jews unable to work to Auschwitz? What happened to these Jews after they were "selected"? Surely small children, the disabled, the old people were useless for the Nazi war effort. They were certainly not transported "to the Russian East". What happened to them? What happened to the 320,000 Hungarian Jews unable to work (out of 437,000) deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944?

All the evidence, including the documentary, points to them having been killed there. Notably no credible alternative explanation has been offered by any denier.

19:15 Why would one register Jews in the camps and shave them to prevent lice?

Well duh, because the Jews able to work were to be used as slave labor force for the Nazi war effort. Nobody has ever claimed that the Nazi policy was killing every Jew immediately.

So, what happened to the Jews unable to work?

Then Anderson shows some camp currency he claims comes from Auschwitz but it's actually from the model "propaganda camp" Theresienstadt.

Indeed, at 19:44 you can clearly see the label "Lagergeld Theresienstadt".

Such a poor liar, that Anderson.

21:59 The tired Haavara meme.

It actually has nothing to do directly with the Holocaust, but as a general historical note it should be noted that creation of a Jewish state in Palestine was officially contrary to the Nazi policy.

After Hagen and Eichmann's trip to Palestine and Egypt in 1937 Hagen wrote in his report:

To further promote the emigration of Jews from Germany, the Jew Polkes proposed to make possible the emigration of 50,000 Jews per year with 1,000 Sterling per head, by means of an increase in the transfer of goods through Paltreu (Palaestina Treuhandstelle der Juden in Deutschland) and "Nemico" (Near and Middle East Corporation). The goods would be sold in Palestine, Iraq, Turkey and in Peria. Immigration to Palestine would in this case be possible without the special consent of the English Mandatory government since Jews with 1,000 Sterling are considered as so-called capitalists.

Opinion: This plan must be rejected by us for two reasons: (a) It is not our aim to have Jewish capital transferred, but rather, in the first place, to induce Jews without means to emigrate. Second, the aforementioned emigration of 50,000 Jews annually would in the main strengthen Judaism in Palestine, and considering that according to the policy of the Reich the establishment of an independent state of the Jews in Palestine should be prevented, this plan cannot be a subject for discussion.

On 28.11.1941 Hitler said during his talks with the Mufti:

... Germany’s fundamental attitude on these questions, as the Mufti himself had already stated, was clear. Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a center, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests. Germany was also aware that the assertion that the Jews were carrying out the functions of economic pioneers in Palestine was a lie. The work there was done only by the Arabs, not by the Jews. Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time to direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well. 

[...] 

At some moment which was impossible to set exactly today but which in any event was not distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia.

... As soon as this had happened, the Führer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.

27:05 He goes on about some unreliable witnesses.

See: Fake, unreliable or mistaken witnesses.

31:35 Alleged motive for lying about the Holocaust: foundation of Israel.

But was the Holocaust a significant factor in the birth of Israel in the first place?

So in the end in this video we have a guy with a stupid face waving his hands around while blurting out incoherent, unsourced claims, some of which are contrary even to the "best" denier "research", not to mention proven history. That's a video that is popular among the internet deniers. Which should tell you something about the state of the denial movement.