On fakes, misunderstandings and sensationalist headlines.

Update 11.01.20: thankfully, The Tablet has fixed this, the article was renamed to "Did a Supposedly Nazi Document Fool the Experts?".

A few days ago Tablet published an article by Mel Laytner entitled "How a Fake Nazi Document Fooled the Experts".

The article itself is a good piece of research. Laytner points out that many publications and exhibitions have used an alleged document in which the Nazis supposedly calculated the "profitability" of the averge inmate including the allowance for the costs of cremation and the use of ashes and bones. From the information gathered by Laytner it becomes clear that claims about the alleged document are based on the data published by the survivor and historian Eugen Kogon in 1946 and then republished by Reimund Schnabel in the book Macht ohne Moral and then mistaken by various authors as an actual document.

Unfortunately, the title of the article, chosen not by the author but rather by a Tablet editor (acc. to a personal communication from Mel Laytner) is absolutely misleading. There is no actual document involved, so there was no "fake Nazi document" to speak of, nobody forged an actual document in this case.

Still lying about Wiernik... and others.

In 2006, in the article Lying about Wiernik I exposed Mattogno and Graf's mendacity by showing that their accusations of plagiarism against Yankiel Wiernik were completely unfounded - they failed to prove that the map included in an early edition of his book was claimed to have been drawn by him (yet they still made the false claim of plagiarism) and they further falsely claimed that Wiernik claimed to have drawn his map in 1943 (he made no such claim) and by omitting the part where he explicitly says he drew it in 1944.

In a 2007 article If they're the best, what about the rest? I exposed Mattogno and Graf's dishonest omissions of eyewitness descriptions of openings on the roofs of the Treblinka gas chambers that would have been used to avoid overpressure in the chambers (even if some witnesses were unsure about their function). I pointed out that they ignored the cache of the 1944 Treblinka survivor statements given to the Soviets even while using some sketches from the same file. This alone tells everything one needs to know about their level of "research".

In the failed response (The "Extermination Camps" of "Aktion Reinhardt", 2013) to our debunking of denial on Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor Mattogno returns to the topics of these posts insofar as they were discussed in our critique.

Correction Corner #9: Höß on how long the crematoria could work continuously.

In his methodologically brilliant rebuttal of the Auschwitz Holocaust denial of the David Irving variety The Case for Auschwitz, 2002, Robert Jan van Pelt quotes an excerpt from Rudolf Höß' testimony during his Cracow trial (p. 262):

Even as we added another 1,000 additional inmates to the squads sorting the luggage, there was no way to speed up the action. We had not enough space to store all these things, and this is why we failed in our effort to faster send out of the camp all the clothing and belongings these people had brought to Auschwitz. No improvements could be made to the crematoria. After eight to ten hours of operation the crematoria were unfit for further use. It was impossible to operate them continuously. As Eichmann had mentioned that we should expect by the end of the year 1944 and in 1945 more transports, we planned a larger crematorium. It was to be a huge, circular brick furnace, to be built underground. Due to lack of time, it was never designed.”

This quote was seized upon by the semi-revisionist Fritjof Meyer, whose pretty pathetic 2002 article on the number of the victims of Auschwitz misused various sources to severely reduce the number of the Jewish Auschwitz victims. The quote was one of the cornerstones of Meyer's argument, signifying to him that the ovens couldn't be used 24/7 and thus the number of the victims had to be lower.

Meyer's overall thesis was soundly debunked, but when responding to this particular point, Meyer's opponents merely appealed to Höß' other statements indicating that the ovens could indeed be operated longer than the 8-10 hours in the quote. This was done by Albrecht Kolthoff, John Zimmerman and Franciszek Piper. While this response did its job, it is necessary to check the Polish transcript in question.

"Here They Go Again for Gassing" - Nazi Euthanasia in German Documents

On 16 May 1941, the Higher Regional Court President of Frankfurt, Arthur Ungewitter, reported to the Reichs Minister of Justice on what the population in the area talked about the "extermination of unworthy life":

The children are said to shout "here they go again for gassing" when they spot "the vehicles with which the sick are taken...to the liquidation institutes". It is also told that the victims are brought to a "gas room, where they would be liquidated with hydrogen cyanide and a numbing gas". Note that the actual killing agent was carbon monoxide gas, although hydrogen cyanide was another candidate considered for the Nazi Euthanasia and possibly tested earlier, in 1939, in Fort VII in Posen (see also Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents: Euthanasia 1940/41).

DOCUMENT

"Liquidation Institutes" for the "Extermination of Unworthy Life" - Nazi Euthanasia in German Documents

DOCUMENT

Update of Posting Contemporary German Documents on Homicidal Gas Vans

We've updated the reference posting Contemporary German Documents on Homicidal Gas Vans with the following items:

• image of radio telegram of Arthur Nebe to Einsatzgruppe B of 13 December 1941 on "special vehicles"
 

• colored images of all other documents from the German Bundesarchiv (including the letter from Walther Rauff to the Criminal Technical Institute at the Reich Criminal Police Office of 26 March 1942, the letter from Harald Turner to Karl Wolff of 11 April 1942 and the memo of Willy Just of 5 June 1942)
 

• addition of document 16.) letter from the Gaubschat company to the RSHA of 24 September 1942 on "Coachwork f. delivered 10 Saurer Chassis".

Holocaust Denial and Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part III)

Now that Carlo Mattogno is out of the game (see Part I & Part II), let's hear the rest of the denier's band on Himmler's report to Hitler.

Irregular Musings on the Unicellular Denial. #2. Nick Fuentes.

Let's continue our sporadic review of the "revisionist" flora and fauna.

So this little boy, Nick Fuentes, has been in the news lately, what with the mainstream right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin embracing this Holocaust denier (nobody could have seen that coming, nothing like that has happened before) and being shunned by some of her fellow far-right screamers.

Anyway, somebody sent this to me:

Here's Nick Fuentes denying that the Holocaust happened.

Him and his followers are scum of the earth and their bad faith, anti-Semitic attacks should be shot down by the entire conservative movement. pic.twitter.com/7wJ9S7Q6zv

— Caleb Hull 🎅🏻🎁 (@CalebJHull) October 30, 2019

Ooh boy, where do we even start.

The cookie monster thing. You can see that little Nicky is all excited to talk about cookies, that's his intellectual level after all. It goes like this:

If I take 1 hour to cook a batch of cookies and the cookie monster has 15 ovens working 24 hours a day every day for 5 years, how long does it take the cookie monster to make 6000000 batches of cookies? 

What a clever, clever camouflage.

Anyway, let's list most things wrong with this.

1. Due to the specific illegal procedures involved it took about 1 hour to burn 4 bodies per muffle in the Auschwitz crematoria, as was documented by the Nazis themselves.

2. Obviously, no one credible claims 6 million were incinerated in crematoria; in fact, crematoria were used on a massive scale only in Auschwitz. The other concentration camps did not have to deal with such numbers, and in the pure extermination camps the bodies were incinerated outside, on pyres. Elsewhere the bodies were simply buried, graves of shootings victims are still being found.

And even in Auschwitz about half or so of the bodies were burned on pyres; so let's say, conservatively, about 600,000 bodies were cremated specifically in Auschwitz ovens.

3. There were not "15" but 46 oven muffles in Auschwitz-Birkenau. There were also 6 in the main camp but let's ignore them for simplicity's sake since most were cremated in Birkenau.

Now some simple math, assuming, once again conservatively, a 20-hour work day.

• 20 hours * 4 corpses/hour per oven = 80 corpses per day per oven
• 46 ovens * 80 corpses per day per oven = 3680 corpses per day
• 600,000 corpses / 3680 corpses per day = 163 days

Which also corresponds to 1840 corpses per day in 326 days, 920 corpses per day in 652 days and so on.

In reality, with all the children who were murdered (and underrepresented numbers of adult men, who, if they were younger than 65 and deemed "healthy", were usually temporarily saved for work) the rates were much higher.

How is it that the Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis always fail at both basic history and basic math? IQ too low?

Speaking of basic history, no the Red Cookie association never said anything about 200-300 thousand cookies either.

How is it that types like Nicky always fall for the most random and easily debunked hoax claims?

And why is it that they engage in open lies, such as Nicky claiming that no smokestacks are visible on the photos, when they obviously are...

... along with the smoke from the pyres, confirming the mass extermination (because they wouldn't need to incinerate outside given how many ovens they had - those would have dealt with the "natural" daily camp death toll in a few hours without any problem)?

And of course, given that most of the bodies were directly incinerated (with the exception of about 100,000 that were first buried but caused hygienic problems so had to be disinterred and burned in 1942) there was no problem with "underground storage".

Right after this the child engages in what comes naturally to it - fantasizing. For obviously nobody has claimed "wooden" ovens with "windows". You can almost hear the tiny gears in the child's head grinding, trying to come up with the most ridiculous thing to say next. Such as the use of cremation ovens for delousing.

Well, that's it for this little bro. It's unlikely we'll write about him again unless he shoots up his kindergarten.

Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part II)

Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part I, II, III)

The previous part of this series examined Mattogno's bizarre arithmetic and his nearly illiterate understanding of secondary literature in his Einsatzgruppen book on Himmler's report to Hitler on 363,211 executed Jews.

Now, if Mattogno had taken his own credo seriously that only Nazi documents have a historical value (as opposed to non-German documents and testimonies), his confused 9-pages on Himmler's report to Hitler could have been boiled down to a concise two-pager. Several contemporary German sources answer the key points:

How many Jews had been in the Generalbezirk Wolhynien before summer 1942?

Ironically, Mattogno did quote, but not use the most relevant and clear German source on the Jewish population in the Generalbezirk Wolhynien before their systematic extermination was carried out:

"Today, the total population of the General District of Volhynia and Podolia is about 4,630,000, of which approx. 465,000 are Poles and 326,000 are Jews. In the cities, Jews and Poles make up the majority. For example, the cities of Rovno, Dubno, Vladimir-Volhynsk, Lutsk, Kovel, Kostopol, Stolbunov, Brest-Litovsk, Pinsk and Kobrin have a total of 2,438,000 inhabitants, of which 71,300 (around 35%) are Poles and 103,200 are Jews."

(Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten (MbO) no. 5 dated 29 May 1942, Angrick et al. Deutsche Berichte aus dem Osten 1942-1943, p. 351 f.)

Here you've got it black on white: by May 1942, the Nazis estimated that there had been 326,000 Jews in the Generalbezirk Wolhynien.

Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part I)

Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part I, II, III)

The Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's report to Adolf Hitler of 29 December 1942 that 363,211 Jews had been executed within three months in the area of Bialystok, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and the Army Rear and Operation Area in the South is yet another show stopper for Holocaust denial. This series will review deniers' lame attempts to explain away this contemporary Nazi document.

Let's begin with the "Revisionist" who has published most, but who is arguably read the least.