Traffic and Publicity of the Holocaust Controversies Blog

Recently, the Holocaust Controversies (HC) blog has surpassed two million page views since June 2010 (the blog was actually founded in 2006, but the counter was reset at that time for unknown reasons). Since readers tend to recur and check out more than one page, this is not to be confused with "unique visitors" and even less so with unique persons. Still, two million page views in 6.5 years seems like some decent traffic considering that the blog is about an atrocious part of human history and its denial by a fringe group - not exactly a subject predestined  to attract the masses.

"Resettlement" used as Camouflage Language in Shooting Documents

Below are four examples where 'resettlement' was used as camouflage or euphemism for the killing of Jews by shooting units.

1) 7/12/41 NOKW 1628 Activity Report Ortskommandantur I/287 Kertsch, reported the execution of 2,500 Jews in Kertsch. In the Manstein trial, the document was forensically examined by Rudolf Mally, who established that "Exekutierung" had been crossed out and "Umsiedlung" substituted. See  TR.4/14, pp.17-20, and DEJ 7, Dok. 126, pp.389-391, especially note 5. See also, on this action, Molotov's note here and HC articles by Roberto and myself here and here.

Manstein Trial Documents: Further Debunking of the Paget Meme

Following the excellent article on Simferopol by Hans here and the older debunking of the Paget/Manstein meme by Roberto here, the article below examines the exhibits presented at the Manstein trial, the proceedings of which have been digitized by Yad Vashem in 62 files in the record group TR.4. I will deal with documents in their date order; most of them were discussed at trial in the transcripts digitized at TR.4/58 and TR.4/59.

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans

Part I: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant (update 1, 2)
Part II: Producer Gas

 Part III: The Ford Gas Wagon (update)
Part IV: The Becker Letter (update)
Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute (update 1, 2, 3, cf. on Mattogno & here)

Part VI: The Turner Letter

Part VII: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes

Part VIII: The Einsatzgruppe B Activity & Situation Report (cf. on Mattogno)

Part IX: The Just Memo

Part X: The West-German Trials Against Members of Einsatzkommando 8

Part XI: Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol

Beginning with late July 1941, the Einsatzgruppe D followed the army via Moldava and South Ukraine into South Russian territory. More than 30 years later, two of its members, Max Drexler and Walter Kehrer, were trialled by the regional court Munich for atrocities committed by the group (Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, volume 40, no. 816). Kehrer was accused of killing Jews with a gas van in Simferopol on the Crimean Peninsula in Spring/Summer 1942, where Einsatzgruppe D had established its headquarter since November 1941.

As to be expected after parts III and X of this series on other West-German trials, the Holocaust denier Santiago Alvarez shines with crass ignorance and deception on the subject. Apart from addressing the mistakes and systematic flaws in his writing, the posting also compiles the available evidence on the mass shooting of Jews in Simferopol and the later presence and use of homicidal gas vans in the town.

Observer article on Holocaust Denial

Today's recommended reading: the British newspaper The Observer has published an article on Holocaust Denial featuring an interview with Nick Terry: New online generation takes up Holocaust denial

Karoline Cohn

As this video and this article show, a pendant uncovered at Sobibor has the date of birth (July 3, 1929) of a girl called Karoline Cohn, who was deported from Frankfurt to Minsk on November 11, 1941, according to testimony given by Sophie Kollmann in 1978, and to this entry in the Memorial Book. According to Yoram Haimi (in the video), the pendant was found in the area thought to be the women's undressing and shaving hut. Cohn would have been 12 when deported to Minsk, and 14 when the ghetto was liquidated and the survivors sent to Sobibor. The pendant is thus evidence that at least one Frankfurt Jew was gassed in Sobibor, having spent two years in the Minsk ghetto. Alternatively, if Cohn died in Minsk, it is feasible that the pendant passed from Cohn to another Minsk deportee who was killed in Sobibor. What is not feasible is that Cohn survived the war yet her pendant wound up in Sobibor.

On Mattogno's Hallucination That von dem Bach-Zelewski's Extended Testimony on the Minsk Shooting Is a Jewish Forgery

In a handwritten post-war manuscript, the former Higher SS and Police Leader for Central Russia Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski briefly mentioned the show mass shooting carried out by Einsatzgruppe B on 15 August 1941 for the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in Minsk (NARA Record Group 238, M1270/1/111, p. 41, see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Page five from a declaration of von dem Bach-Zelewski on the "persecution of Jews".

The mass execution was also reported by numerous other witnesses. From a historiographic point of view, what is most significant in von dem Bach-Zelewski's account is that he described how after the shooting and visiting of a mental asylum in Minsk (which are both confirmed by Himmler's appointment diary) Himmler ordered the Einsatzgruppen B leader Arthur Nebe "to make use of a more human method of killing" on the mentally ill people, which links the incident to the subsequent mass killing trials with explosives and poison gas in asylums in Minsk and Mogilev. The connection between the events is supported by von dem Bach-Zelewski's own documented activity on the next day to get a demonstration of the mobile carbon monoxide gas chamber of Sonderkommando Lange (for obvious reasons, he kept quiet about this in his post-war testimony).

A more vivid and detailed description of the Minsk shooting by von dem Bach-Zelewski was published on 23 August 1946 in the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau (Figure 2). The account is somewhat more general with respect to the scope of Himmler's order following the mass execution and asylum visit. He considered that "shooting is not the most human method", ordered Nebe "to think about it and submit a report based on the experiences made" and agreed to try explosives on mentally ill people in Minsk.

Figure 2: Aufbau, volume 12, issue 34, p. 2.

But if it were according to the Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno, von dem Bach-Zelewski's account in Aufbau is a forgery based on his more brief statement from the NARA Record Group 238:

"This anecdote appeared on 23 August 1946 in the New York Jewish newspaper Der [sic!] Aufbau as part of a statement attributed to von dem Bach-Zelewski, but its contents had been massively manipulated by the editorial staff of the newspaper, as is apparent from a comparison with the original statement of this SS officer."

(Mattogno, Inside the Gas Chambers, 2nd edition, p. 58)

Unfortunately for Mattogno, this is rubbish. Upon systematically searching the Yad Vashem Archives digital collection of Yitzhak Stone, who "was a senior aid to the American prosecutor in the Nazi War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg" for interesting material for the blog (and there sure is, so stay tuned), I stumbled across the English translation of an undated, 60 pages long "declaration von dem Bach" (YVA, O.18/90, p. 20ff.). The declaration contains amongst other things also the passages reproduced in German in Aufbau (Figure 3).

On Alison Weir, the CNI, and Holocaust Denial

It is perhaps unsurprising that the international Palestinian Solidarity Movement (PSM) is fertile ground for anti-Semitism generally and Holocaust denial specifically. Any area in which Jews play a role as villain will lend itself to generalization of anti-Jewish sentiment, and when the Holocaust has been exploited by often cynical Israeli governments to justify occupation, settlement, expansion, and expulsion, the simplistic conclusion that removing the Holocaust as a factor in the creation of Israel could help the Palestinian cause might seem self-evident. To be fair, the PSM has generally done a good job of identifying and censuring anti-Semites when they emerge, going way back to Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish's exposé on Israel Shamir more than a decade ago.

However, the PSM has seen unusually high levels of conspiratorial anti-Semitism in the last couple of years, with a good measure of Holocaust denial thrown into the mix. What's remarkable about this escalation is that a large number of people around whom controversy has emerged have been Jewish: Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen, and Henry Herskovitz are among the people who have been censured to some extent by elements of the PSM, in addition to non-Jews like Ken O'Keefe, Greta Berlin, and others.

Eisen and Herskovitz in particular have been explicit in denying the Holocaust. Along with Daniel A.McGowan, Ph.D., a former economics professor (now retired) at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, these two men sit on the board of Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), a PSM organization originally founded to draw attention to the massacre of around 250 100 Palestinian civilians by right wing Zionist militias in 1948. McGowan, for his own part, drew attention a few years ago when he was targeted by colleagues at Hobart and Smith for a defense of Holocaust "revisionism" published in a local upstate New York newspaper. McGowan has since gone on to author material for the CODOH concern Inconvenient History.

German Document on Gas Van Blown up by Einsatzgruppe D

The available German records from the Third Reich contain a number of references to the infamous homicidal gas vans, which were used by the German paramilitary forces like the Einsatzgruppen to kill people, mostly Jews, without attracting attention and sparing the nerves of the executioners. The vehicles were disguised as special van or s-van in some of the correspondence. However, in the daily usage in the commandos, they were simply known as gas vans or g-vans (as common in this context, the term van is used to translate the more general German Wagen = wagon).

This quite open language was also maintained in a report of Einsatzgruppe B on its motor pool, e.g. "both smaller gas vans will be sent to SK 7a and SK 7b after completing the operation at EK 8", which was already featured in the posting Mattogno and the Activity & Situation Report of Einsatzgruppe B on its Gas Vans.

Another case is a radio message from the head of Einsatzgruppe D to the RSHA, which reports a "g-van" in its motor pool and that another "g-van has been blown up and burned" upon the retreat of the group from Stavropol in the North Caucasus region to Rostov in early 1943. The destruction of the gas van was confirmed by several former members of Einsatzgruppe D in 1962 - 1970 in West-Germany, many years before the document became available to researchers and investigators after the German reunification. The independent corroboration is strong evidence on the existence of the German homicidal gas vans.

Attached below are extracts of the document and supplementary sources.

Rudolf on Holocaust Handbooks

Germar Rudolf has kindly responded to a CODOH Forum user on my posting "Holocaust Handbooks" Updating Policy - Cosmetic Changes and Recycling Instead of Engaging With Critique and provided this pointed summary of the "Revisionist" problem these days:

"Carlo Mattogno cannot revise 30 books every year and write thirty more on top of it."

The Holocaust Handbooks series is essentially a three man show of Mattogno, Graf and Rudolf, who are the main authors of 3/4 of the books, and it is especially dependent upon Mattogno:

The fact that he is the main author of 2/3 of the Holocaust Handbooks even underestimates his impact as his writings have occupied the most relevant issues of "Revisionism". Mattogno had been hyperactive for years, publishing at a pace where the level of research has to leave a lot to be desired, as amply demonstrated on this blog. At his age of 65 years, this source will likely run dry in some years.

The lack of authors and diversity is symptomatic for the poor state of Holocaust "Revisionism". This is not limited to printed media, the Inconvinient History Blog has seen just three postings this year - one remembering the dead Bradley Smith, one reviewing the journals' year 2015 and one announcing the publication of the journals' articles from 2015 - thus none adding anything new to advance "Revisionism". Anyone following the blog would think the movement is close to clinically dead.

We have not heard from Santiago Alvarez since February 2016, Thomas Kues left the scene, Jansson's blog is idle since almost 18 months and the theblackrabbitofinl has become sceptical of denial. The recycling of Mattogno's decades old Italian pamphlets on Miklos Nyiszli and Rudolf Höß (Holocaust Handbooks 36 & 37) and his forthcoming Einsatzgruppen book, which will ask for the stunning mental gymnastics to explain the extermination of the Jews in the occupied Soviet Union within the hypothesis that there was no policy to exterminate the Jews, will keep the patient in a vegetative state for the time being, but that's not exactly a promising perspective for 2017 and further.

"I'd appreciate it if everybody reading this start publishing yourself -- in print -- serious research rather than bickering about somebody having forgotten over overlooked something. Some nagging on an internet blog isn't exactly what can be taken all that seriously anyway."

Obviously, Rudolf did not check out and examine the links to the rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz Open Air Incinerations if he reduces this comprehensive critique to "nagging". In general, the Holocaust Controversies blog addresses specific, fundamental, systematic and methodological flaws in "Revisionist" works. The publication on the medium internet blog does not affect the validity of the arguments. Conversely, not much substantial is gained from compiling related postings (such as the series on Mattogno on Auschwitz and Alvarez on Gas Vans) to print-on-demand books on amazon.com. Publishing a book has become meaningless at latest since Fritz Berg has done it (see also Rudolf's own review of the book), but the Holocaust Handbook series is another example that publishing something in print does not establish quality of content (only quality of form, if there is a proper editor).

Incidentally, the lack of "serious research" is actually the reason why "Revisionists" are ignored by Holocaust historians. The difference is that Holocaust historiography can afford to freeze them off.