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."

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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".

Mahmoud confirms his Moonbat status

Reuters:

Asked by Der Spiegel, in its cover story entitled "The man the world is afraid of", whether he stood by his earlier view the Holocaust was a myth, Ahmadinejad said: "I only accept something as the truth if I am truly convinced of it.

"In Europe there are two opinions on it. One group of researchers who are by and large politically motivated say the Holocaust happened. There is another group of researchers who have the opposite view and are by and large in prison for that."

Yeah, as if that last group was not politically motivated and as if it is their imprisonment that has anything to do with historicity of the Holocaust, and not the substance of their "research".

This is clearly a person whose logical circuits are faulty. He is fit to be neither teacher, nor president.

PS: as usual, incompetent journalists get everything wrong.

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies in concentration camps.

Such incompetence only feeds filthy neo-Nazis, who already react:

They stopped insulting the Einsatzgruppen.
A good progress.

Two new additions to THHP

One is a great article on Treblinka by Stephen Potyondi.

Another, not so great "Revisionsm FAQ".

With phrases like "resulting in at least 6 million Jews dead" (there should be no "at least" here; it would be correct if the figure of 5 million dead was used; this "at least" is quickly contradicted in the Q/A 10), and "[i]n addition, another 6 million non-Jews" (a widely spread myth, started by Simon Wiesenthal, about which we will write later) it can only mislead.

FAQ also states:

The "final solution" was the attempt to physically annihilate all Jews under Nazi control. The reason it is called "final", as the Nazi documents attest, is that other solutions were attempted before this radical step was taken.

The answer is formally correct - the "Final Solution" was murder, and it was final because other means had been tried before. But the reply is incomplete and therefore misleading.

As is clear from the scholarly literature, initially the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" meant "mere" deportation. And though it was also called "final", in the end it also turned out to be interim. I.e., it cannot be argued on a purely linguistic basis that the "final solution" meant murder. This is crucial for correctly understanding and analyzing deniers' arguments - and Nazi documents, for that matter.

In QA 12 we read:

As an example, only about 7 Jews survived the Belzec extermination camp, although at least 550,000 were killed there.

This, of course, contradicts the Hoefle telegram, according to which 434,000+ Jews were killed in Belzec. It is true that numbers like 500,000 and greater can be derived from witness testimonies and yizkor books, but now that we have the exact statistic, and in absence of the evidence to the contrary, only the Hoefle figure should be used. At the very least one should use the phrase "at least 434,000 were killed there" to be accurate.

Or take QA28:

None. "Resettlement" meant deportation to, and death at, an extermination camp.

Not necessarily in the extermination camp - Einsatzgruppen were also "resettling" the Jews in their own way, without the camps, and a minority of Jews actually were resettled to the "Eastern territories".

QA41 is not better:

He [Kurt Gerstein] visited Belzec with Professor Pfannenstiel and while there, witnessed a botched gassing van attempt where the engine refused to start for over two hours before the Jews could be gassed.

What Gerstein witnessed was a gassing in stationary gas chambers, not gas vans.

Also there's the topic of Auschwitz plaques:

The correct number, estimated by the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess as early as 1946, is about 1.1 million, mostly Jews, and that is the number on the plaque today.

Nope, that is not the number on the plaque today. Here's the modern plaque:

Finally, the matter of 6 million again:

The overall total of around 6 million is based on demographic studies and analysis of Nazi train records that record the numbers of Jews shipped to Auschwitz during its existence. An example of the methodology used is in Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews.

Hilberg's best estimate is 5.1 million, which again contradicts the claim of "at least 6 million".

Clearly, a revision of the FAQ is in order.

WJC representative shows lack of logic

We have already written about Poland's request to change the designation of Auschwitz from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau".

Now World Jewish Congress chimes in:

Polish request to rename Auschwitz site met with criticism

07 April, 2006

The Polish government's request to change the official name of the "Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau" has been met with criticism. Maram Stern, deputy secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, said that "they want to redefine history by changing the name". Although the camp had been built and run by Nazi Germany, everybody in the area had known about its existence and workers were recruited from the Polish population in the neighboring village. The government in Warsaw wants the history of Auschwitz, which is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, to be separated from Polish history and make it clear that Poland had no involvement in the death camp. Officials in Warsaw expect an answer to the renaming request from UNESCO later this year.

Let's be frank here: Mr. Stern's claim is silly. To repeat, the proposed new designation is "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau". This describes the camp absolutely correctly. How can a correct description "redefine history"?

That "everybody in area knew about its existence", etc., does not change the fact that Auschwitz Birkenau was a German Nazi camp.

Really, it's not rocket science, Mr. Stern.

Update: the news item disappeared from the site. It will be available through the Google cache, until it expires.