Sebastian Gorka: Anti-Terrorism Advisor to Donald Trump and Family Friend of David Irving?

If you've paid more than passing attention to first month of the Trump administration, you've likely noticed the National Security aspect of the incipient cabinet more than anything else, not only because of the appointment of Breitbart News troll Steve Bannon to the NSC but also because of the ascent within this milieu of Dr. Sebastian Gorka, who was named Deputy Assistant to the President due to his alleged foreign policy and anti-terrorism credentials. 

While discussing the questionable qualifications of Dr. Gorka might be beyond the purview of this blog, the relationship of his family with Holocaust denier David Irving is not. A few days ago, the Forward reported that Gorka had pursued ties with the far-right Jobbik party in Hungary – itself no stranger to Holocaust denial. On February 27, the Twitter account of the Southern Poverty Law Center's HateWatch project (itself the alma mater of yours truly) linked to a blog post on the LobeLog foreign policy blog. In this post, author Eva S. Balogh writes: 

Another intriguing aspect of the Gorka family’s life in Great Britain is their relationship to David Irving, a revisionist historian who tried to clean away the “years of grime and discoloration from the façade of a silent and forbidding monument” to reveal the real Hitler […] Eventually, he decided to write a book on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which he published in 1981 under the title Uprising! One Nation’s Nightmare, 1956. The massive 740-page book is available online. Irving’s conclusion is that the revolt was “primarily an anti-Jewish uprising,” a gross misrepresentation of the facts. He interviewed a lot of people both in Hungary and abroad who had a role to play in the events. Although Pál Gorka [Sebastian's father], who had been freed from jail a few days after the outbreak of the uprising, certainly wasn’t a key player, he got at least a couple of footnotes. More interesting was the introduction where Irving thanked his three interpreters, one of whom was Susan Gorka, Pál’s wife and Sebastian’s mother. Considering that Irving, according to his own admission, spent about six years off and on doing research on this book and knew not a word of Hungarian, Susan Gorka must have worked with the author fairly closely. [emphasis added] 

A point of clarification: Sebastian Gorka was born and raised in the U.K., so presumably the Gorka family's association with Irving began there. While Irving was not yet a denier in 1981, when Uprising was published, he had already published Hitler's War, which was his opening foray of the phase of his career dedicated to exculpating Hitler for the Holocaust. 

It would be premature to conclude that Sebastian Gorka or his parents are Holocaust deniers because of their associations with David Irving. However, it would be far less premature to conclude that, as has been repeatedly alleged in the left-wing media over the course of the last several weeks, the Gorka family has demonstrable links to the far right, Irving included. Only a year after publishing Uprising, Irving founded Focal Point and declared himself a "mild fascist." 

The Chelm T4 Deception

On September 4, 1940, a decision was taken to kill Jews who were in the care of German asylums. The decision is referenced here by Pfannmueller. This led to a transport on September 20, 1940, to a gassing site, camouflaged here. However, the Nazis did not wish the public to know that these Jews died on German soil, so they fabricated a story that these Jews died in an asylum in Chelm [also known as Cholm], Lublin, Poland, despite no such asylum existing there (see Henry Friedlander here, pp.17-20). Examples of such deceit are the cases of Hilda Sara Buchbinder (here) and Mirjam Sara P. (here, based on Tom Lampert's research using her German case file held at the Hessian State Archive, Darmstadt). Viktor Brack maintained this deception in his Nuremberg testimony as did Pfannmueller (see here) because they knew that the policy specifically targeted Jews, and they wished to maintain the fiction that Jews were never specifically murdered by T4 on racial grounds.

"Revisionists" produce lots of nonsense …

… as has been and continues being amply demonstrated on this blog site.

Unfortunately, nonsense is also produced on occasion (though less egregiously) by serious and respected historians. Two examples of such nonsense shall be addressed in this blog.

Order from the BdS Generalgouvernement That Prisoners and Jews "Are to Be Liquidated" When Evacuation Is Not Possible

The following reproduces an order from the Senior Commander of the Security Police and Security Service (BdS) Generalgouvernement Walther Bierkamp of 20 July 1944 - as it was circulated by the Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service Radom the day later - that "it is to be avoided under all circumstances that prisoners or Jews should be liberated by the enemy...or should fall into their hands alive". In case that the evacuation of the inmates of SD prisons turns out as not possible, these "are to be liquidated, and the bodies of those shot are to be disposed as far as possible (burning, dynamiting of the building, etc.)" and "Jews still employed in the armaments industry or on other work are to be dealt with in the same way".

According to Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches, p. 57ff., the order should be seen in the context of Heinrich Himmler's directive "Security of Concentration Camps in Case A" of 17 June 1944, which handed over the responsibility for the security of the camps from the WVHA to the Higher SS and Police Leaders in case of an emergency situation. The document was cited on this blog in Mattogno's Ineptitude on the Fate of Jewish Workers in the General Government.

Update: Kube, Lohse and Strauch (Part 1: September 1941 to December 1942)

A major theme of the literature on the Ostland is the disputes between the civil administration and the SS over the scope and methods of killing operations. In the Autumn of 1941, Lohse prohibited the killing of work Jews in both Schaulen (at the instigation his subordinate Gewecke) and Libau. In the summer of 1943, he expressed disgust at the methods used to kill partisans. Kube and Strauch meanwhile had an ongoing feud that lasted throughout Strauch's time as KdS Weissruthenien and only concluded when Kube was assassinated (see extract from Hilberg here). The following article updates the material presented in the Critique on these issues (here and here) and adds links to sources that have come to our attention since 2011.

Update: Kube, Lohse and Strauch (Part 2: Strauch's Euphemisms)

Continued from Part 1

Strauch's complaint to Bach-Zelewski of July 25, 1943 (NO-2662) reveals that the use of the word 'resettlement' was a deception:

On 1 March 1942 an action was to take place against the Russian ghetto in Minsk. The Generalkommissar received prior notification. In order to disguise the action the Council of Elders was to be informed that 5,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto were to be resettled.

Strauch then states that "It is clear, however, that the Gauleiter used his knowledge to save his Jews."

An Update On The Traffic of the Holocaust Controversies Blog

I've revived the old Statcounter account and lo and behold, it contains the almost complete traffic stats from the creation of our blog to some point in time in early 2016.

The Blogger counter that you see on the right only contains the pageviews since some moment in May 2010.

When I set the Statcounter to show the data from March 23, 2006 to May 1, 2010 it gives the following results:

Hans Gewecke and the Jews of Lithuania

Below I present two documents written by Hans Gewecke, Gebietskommissar in Schaulen, Lithuania, on September 3 and September 10, 1941. The first describes how he refused to implement an order from Jaeger, transmitted to him verbally by Hamann, to kill all the Jews in the city. This document appears to show Gewecke in a favourable light. The second document, however, shows Gewecke's complicity in the murder of Jews across his region. On August 13, his boss Lohse had drafted directives which included the statement that "The countryside is to be cleansed of Jews." The September 10 document shows Gewecke pursuing that objective vigorously, such that all areas are "almost free of Jews" except for essential labourers in the city of Schaulen itself, in addition to implementing executions for sabotage and savage reprisal measures. Moreover, Gewecke reveals that young Lithuanians are being trained so that they can eventually replace the Jews, whom he hints can then be killed. This hardly makes Gewecke a protector of those Jews.

"Brought to the Final Solution"

On January 3, 1946, Wisliceny admitted in court that Jews sent to Auschwitz from Hungary were  "brought to the final solution". On February 19, 1944, a document on executions in Piaski gave a list of Jews who were "brought to the final solution." ["der Endlösung zugeführt wurden" [YVA O.53/82, pp.50-52]. These types of executions had been defined by Heydrich as special treatment [Sonderbehandlung], as quoted here. We therefore have a convergence of documentation and testimony that "final solution" in the context of SS operations in Auschwitz and in Poland generally meant killing, albeit disguised as "special treatment" [Sonderbehandlung] in which death was meted out via extralegal executions.

Update: Mattogno's Ineptitude on the Fate of Jewish Workers in the General Government

Carlo Mattogno denies the established fact that Jewish workers were massacred in the General Government in early November 1943 and claims instead that there was "a mass transfer of Jewish inmates to the west [Majdanek, p.230]." As we noted in the Critique (pp.233-238), Mattogno's knowledge of this event is woefully inadequate, and he has clearly failed to read the literature on the shootings or the real labour transfers that took place in 1943. His only source for "a mass transfer of Jewish inmates" is "the November 20, 1943, issue of the Polish newspaper-in-exile Dziennik Polski, printed in England."  He quotes numbers from Hilberg showing that "22,444 Jews worked in the armaments industries of the General Government in October 1943" but "it had increased to 26,296" by January 1944, but fails to address the true sources of that increase, which we showed on page 237 of the Critique (note 430). Below I examine a further source of documents ignored by Mattogno: Nuremberg exhibits whose authors documented the fate of the plants that were closed down in the "special action" on November 3, 1943, and bemoaned the fact that the "withdrawal" of Jewish workers caused irreparable losses to the economy.