Debunking of the video "Jews tell the truth about the Holocaust" (an excerpt from Eric Hunt's film)

Added this debunking to the YouTube section. Lots about sport in the camps, "canteens", postcards etc.

On the SS judge Konrad Morgen's Monowitz confusion

During the Nuremberg trial on 08.08.1946 the former SS judge Dr. Konrad Morgen testified:

MORGEN: Yesterday I described the four camps of the Kriminalkommissar Wirth and referred to the Camp Auschwitz. By "Extermination Camp Auschwitz" I did not mean the concentration camp. It did not exist there. I meant a separate extermination camp near Auschwitz, called "Monowitz."

[...]

MORGEN: The prisoners who marched off to the concentration camp had no inkling of where the other prisoners were taken. The Extermination Camp Monowitz lay far away from the concentration camp. It was situated on an extensive industrial site and was not recognizable as such and everywhere on the horizon there were smoking chimneys. The camp itself was guarded on the outside by special troops of men from the Baltic, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and also Ukrainians. The entire technical arrangement was almost exclusively in the hands of the prisoners who were assigned for this job and they were only supervised each time by an Unterfuehrer. The actual killing was done by another Unterfuehrer who let the gas into this room. Thus the number of those who knew about these things was extremely limited. This circle had to take a special oath...

Etc. Holocaust deniers have naturally carped on this ever since, given that the extermination camp was actually called Birkenau, so Morgen must have been coerced or was lying for another reason.

Irregular Musings on the Unicellular Denial. #4. Holocaust deniers reach the new level of stupidity - now allegedly with the help of ChatGPT.

Some dummy named E. Michael Jones writing at the neo-Nazi Unz website provides today's bit of really hilarious comedy in the posting "Why It’s Easier to Talk to a Robot Than to a Jew How Artificial Intelligence destroyed the Holocaust":

When someone asked Chatbot “How many Jews died in Auschwitz?” Chatbot responded: “It is estimated that at least 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz, the majority of who were Jews.

That answer led to the following conversation:

“Were the murdered Jews in Auschwitz cremated?”

“Yes, the bodies of those murdered in Auschwitz were cremated.”

“How many crematorium ovens did Auschwitz have?”

“Auschwitz had a total of four crematorium ovens.”

“How long does a crematorium oven take to cremate one body?”

“A crematorium oven typically takes between two and three hours to cremate one body.”

“Is it possible to cremate 1.1 million bodies, using only four crematorium ovens in four years.”

“No.”

“How many years would it take?”

“It would take more than 78 years to cremate 1.1 million bodies using only four crematorium ovens.”[11]

Shockingly, it turns out that Chatbot is a Holocaust denier.

[...]

But what happens if Chatbot claims that running the crematoria at Auschwitz nonstop for three years, 24 hours a day, every day of the week for the three years the camp was in existence could have disposed of 120,000 corpses, not 1.1 million, as the Virtual Jewish Library claims? The answer is that the Holocaust narrative collapses. 

Now, Auschwitz actually had 15 ovens which summarily had 52 muffles (6 in Auschwitz I, 46 in Auschwitz II Birkenau) with the formal capacity of 4756 corpses per day (real capacity could vary depending on many factors). 

Multiple bodies were continuously burned at once in each muffle which did conserve fuel and time compared to single cremations. This fact is well-documented. So, garbage in, garbage out. As is usual with the denial.

And of course no mention is made whatsoever of the open-air burnings, which accounted for hundreds of thousands of bodies in Auschwitz and were thus a key body disposal method.

It could be that the whole exchange is fake, but that numerous deniers have latched upon it thinking it "destroys the Holocaust" because muh AI fully illustrates the low-IQ nature of these creatures.

Autopsies of victims gassed with carbon monoxide.

 Here I will be gathering such reports.

1. Act of inspection of a mass grave, exhumation and forensic medical examination of 254 corpses of Soviet citizens killed by the Nazis in Krasnodar.

Source: TsA FSB, f. K-72, op.1, por. 33, l. d. 258–261.

Source of yet another fake "fake Holocaust photo" found.

Rick Yair emailed us to tell about the source of one of those photoshopped photos that the Holocaust denier liars like to spread on social networks claiming they are "original" while the actual original photos are fake.

Turned out that it came from a sort of an art project "Revisionist Photos. Removing the Horrors of the Third Reich From the Pages of History", in which various objects and people were photoshopped out of the original Nazi and Holocaust photos:

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events in human history.

It is also one of the best documented.

Still, there are those who deny it ever happened.

Come with me and visit a world where these revisionists have won. A world where facts too painful to be remembered are simply erased, and the sins of facism are eliminated en masse.

Experience Revisionist Photos

Here is the page with the edited photo in question. Here is the original, which is a part of a series.

While the author of the project might have had good intentions, the idea was extremely dumb, if only because it was to be expected that the dumb and/or dishonest Holocaust deniers will use exactly such images to spread their lies - and voila, they are doing exactly this.

Once more on judicial notice and article 21 of the IMT Charter.

Earlier I already presented evidence that the dogmatic Soviet interpretation of the article 21 of the Nuremberg Charter (that the official Allied evidence was irrefutable due to judicial notice) was not supported by the International Military Tribunal. Ironically, the Holocaust deniers seem to share the rejected Soviet interpretation. So it is useful to post this official IMT protocol that decisively refuted the claim that according to the article 21 the Allied evidence was basically irrefutable. The article 21 concerned itself with the mere technicality of how the evidence was introduced. The defense had a right to debunk such evidence and the Tribunal was free to ignore any official Allied evidence in its judgment as it saw fit and was not bound to assign any special probative value to it.

Debunking Grover Furr's Katyn screed.

In this posting I will analyze Grover Furr's 2018 book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, the Solution. A copy can be found online. I've already dealt with Furr several times at this blog, demonstrating his ignorance and lack of honesty and I have already dealt with some key arguments from this book here and elsewhere. As it is still used by the deniers of history to whitewash criminals, it is useful to take a closer look at it.

It is not the aim of this post to educate beginners about Katyn - in fact, following the arguments in this post can at times require some relatively advanced knowledge of the issue. The discussion is often compact (readers are supposed to have read and understood Furr's arguments on their own) and sometimes the counter-argumentation is presented in form of links to my Russian Katyn website with more details. That said, let me give a relatively short overview of the Katyn evidence.

Czech Communists sentenced for Katyn denial

From a Communist website:

On 31 October 2022, Tomáš Hübner, single judge of the Prague 7 District Court, sentenced Josef Skála, a well-known Marxist intellectual and former vice-president of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), together with Vladimír Kapal, and Juraj Václavík, all three indicted, to eight months’ imprisonment, under Article 405 of the Criminal Code of the Czech Republic, for having challenged the version attributing the Katyn massacre [...] to the Soviet leadership.

The first round of the appeal hearings started on Feb. 1. From a news item:

Judge Tomáš Hübner stopped Václavík after several tens of minutes. "We're not going to prove history here, because it's absolutely clear that the Soviet Union and its units did it," he said, adding that the same arguments as Václavík were repeatedly used by staunch Stalinists before Soviet politician Nikita Khrushchev revealed how the massacre really happened.

"If you want to explain to me for several hours that Katyn was committed by the Germans, you can, but I won't believe you," the judge added to the disapproving roar of the public in the courtroom.

(Nota bene: obviously, Khrushchev never revealed anything about the Katyn massacre.)

Here's the relevant article of the Czech Criminal code:

Section 405 - Denial, Impugnation, Approval and Justification of Genocide Whoever publicly denies, impugns, approves, or attempts to justify Nazi, Communist or any other genocide, or other crimes of the Nazis and Communists against humanity, shall be sentenced to imprisonment for six months to three years.

Several points:

1. Obviously, I'm against such laws.

2. These Commies are, naturally, falsifiers of history (just like their lying comrade Grover Furr). There's no historical doubt that the Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre. Denial of this fact is intellectually equal to Holocaust denial. The Katyn deniers have been unable to muster any credible evidence for their claims and have been unable to account for the two key issues: if the Germans did it, where did the Polish POWs in question remain from May 1940 to July 1941 (we know they were neither in the POW camps, contrary to the official Soviet claims, nor in the GULAG) and which German units exactly committed the crime (we know it wasn't the unit that the Soviets officially blamed)?

3. The shouts from the Communist websites are hypocritical when the decades-long Communist suppression of the truth about Katyn using the criminal codes as a cudgel (numerous people were imprisoned for disputing the Soviet claims) is not acknowledged by the same websites.

4. The Western Holocaust deniers usually accept the Soviet guilt for the Katyn massacre (thus showing their intellectual inconsistency, since Holocaust and Katyn denial methods are identical) and try to use it to discredit the Allied evidence of the Nazi crimes (of course, without success). They also love to claim that if some historical claim needs to be protected by law, then it's at least suspicious, if not outright false. This case puts them in a bind.

Michael Tracey's Pearl Harbor Gambit

Michael Tracey, gadfly of the commentariat, friend of Glenn Greenwald, and survivor of "unwarranted physical contact" from U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, recently published a lengthy essay on World War II on his Substack. It's not anything new or revelatory and so I'm not going to address most of it. Any readers of this blog familiar with Tracey's work generally won't be surprised. I do, however, want to discuss his allegation that "US entry into World War II did not prevent the Holocaust, and there is substantial reason to believe it was a factor in accelerating the most lethal phase of the Holocaust."

This is a combination of one quite obvious statement and one quite wrong one. Of course U.S. entry into the war did not prevent the Holocaust because both things happened and the former event (U.S. entry) demonstrably did not prevent the latter event (the Holocaust -- for the most part [see below]). Perhaps Tracey meant to say "U.S. entry into the war was not intended to prevent the Holocaust," in which case it's also not a very debatable point. Few historians believe this was the American intention.

The latter point though is a real howler, so it's worth refuting it here because, for whatever reason, Tracey has a large number of readers.

We'd have to start with "the most lethal phase of the Holocaust." Luckily, the data we have on Jewish fatalities during the war are granular enough that we can identify 1942 as the year during which the most Jews died. According to Hilberg, more than half of all the Jews who were killed during the war were killed in 1942; during that year, therefore, there went from being more Jews alive than dead in Europe in January to there being fewer alive than dead in December. Moreover, a scientific article published in 2019 not only correctly identified Aktion Reinhard -- the campaign to murder Poland's Jews -- as the largest "campaign" of the Holocaust but also showed that a single 100-day period (covering August to October) accounted for approximately 1.5 million of the 1.7 million deaths from Aktion Reinhard.

So that's the most lethal phase, clearly. Tracey in fact acknowledges this point -- even links to the Science Advances article linked to in the previous paragraph.

So what role did the United States' entry into the war have on Aktion Reinhard? This is, in fact, not a question that Tracey seeks to answer. Rather, he begins with a discussion of Christian Gerlach's landmark 1998 essay on the Wannsee Conference. To be fair to Tracey, he cites several sources in his article and he doesn't rely on pikers; Gerlach is a rather big gun. But Tracey does not portray Gerlach's position accurately. Central to Gerlach's essay is the matter of when it was decided to exterminate very specific groups of Jews: German Jews; and Jews from outside the Soviet Union and Poland. Tracey does not acknowledge or perhaps understand this distinction. Therefore, when he quotes Gerlach's line about "systematic planning for the destruction of the Jews throughout Europe," he does not realize Gerlach's intent underlying the phrase "Jews throughout Europe" as not including Soviet or Polish Jews, whose fate had already been decided.

Again, to be fair to Tracey, he acknowledges that mass murder of Jews had already been taking place before Pearl Harbor. But he doesn't say where (the Soviet Union) or by what means (mass shootings performed by the Einsatzgruppen and police units) -- indeed the term Einsatzgruppen doesn't appear in the article at all.

Nor does the phrase "Aktion Reinhard," which is highly significant because this after all is the "most lethal phase" to which Tracey refers, whether he is aware of it or not. And most importantly, the planning of Aktion Reinhard was already under way when Pearl Harbor happened: construction on Belzec had begun more than a month earlier. Is there any evidence to suggest that construction of Belzec was accelerated by Pearl Harbor or even that the establishment of camps at Sobibor and Treblinka was thus affected? There is not, nor does any source used by Tracey make that claim. Gerlach claims only that German Jews being deported from the Reich would eventually be sent to death camps because of a decision contingent on Pearl Harbor. But the vast majority of the Jews killed in the Reinhard camps were Polish Jews, not German.

Tracey continues to compound this very basic error. He quotes from Brendan Simms's Hitler's American Gamble that "a primary motivation and context for Hitler's war of annihilation against western and central European Jewry was his relationship with the United States" (emphasis mine), again failing to see the significance of the geographical limitation of this decision and that it did not include Soviet or Polish Jews, whose fates had already been sealed by Pearl Harbor. Tracey continues the same error with his excerpt from Klaus Schmider's Hitler's Fatal Miscalculation. His first quote from Friedlaender's Years of Extermination fails to acknowledge that the specific context, again, of the killing of German Jews (Friedlaender discusses Aktion Reinhard some fifty pages earlier); his quotes from Rafecas are about the very pages from Friedlaender dealing with German Jews being deported.

Tracey's use of Richard Evans's Third Reich at War is odd in that the excerpt he uses doesn't discuss a change in extermination policy at all relative to Aktion Reinhard -- only an escalation in propaganda accompanying Barbarossa and its effect on radicalization in the Einsatzgruppen's activities. Nor does his citation from the work of Adam Tooze. In the end, it is really only Tobias Jersak, among the authors cited by Tracey, who supports his viewpoint -- to an extent. But Tracey's citation here is not wholly representative of Jersak's view. Jersak writes a few pages before the quotation Tracey provides, "It is clear from developments in the autumn of 1941 that the ‘final solution’ as we understand it in retrospect, i.e. the systematic murder of the European Jews, did not originate in a single decision or a single order" (p. 324).

(Note: I have not addressed Tracey's use of the work of Laurence Rees and John Toland. Rees's work is not academic history. Toland's work is far too old to be considered here given its publication before the opening of Soviet archives, which have given us a much clearer picture of the evolution of Nazi policy vis-a-vis Jews.)

So what does that leave us with? Tracey reiterates his chief point regarding the Holocaust: "There is a robust body of evidence that suggests escalation of US involvement in the war, followed by official US entry, may well have been factors in the acceleration of the most lethal phase of the Holocaust." But is there a "robust body of evidence"? None of the authors Tracey writes draws a straight line between Pearl Harbor (or Lend Lease or the Atlantic Charter) and Aktion Reinhard. They all, in fact, acknowledge its separate existence before the events of the summer or fall of 1941. Therefore, Tracey has in fact failed to prove his chief point made in his essay about the Final Solution.

Does Tracey want to argue that U.S. entry into the war sealed the fate of German Jews or of Jews from central and western Europe? Even though there would still be historians who disagreed, he'd be on much more solid grant if he made that argument. But he doesn't. In his desire to paint the worst possible picture of the effects of U.S. involvement in World War II, he pushes too far and fails.

Grover Furr’s lie about my claim about the Polish policemen’s tags found at Volodymyr-Volynskyi

Grover Furr is a neo-Stalinist falsifier of history well-known for his stunning incompetence, ideological myopia and fanaticism ("I have yet to find one crime that Stalin committed"). 

On 15.08.2022 he published an article accusing me of a "lie" on the issue of the police identification tags (he calls them badges, which is OK, but since we're not talking about the badges worn on the uniform, I will call them tags) found at Volodymyr-Volynskyi (a detailed explanation of the issue is here) in my 15.12.2021 article (about a Katyn denial propaganda film on the Russian NTV channel) in the Nobel-prize-winning Novaya gazeta (here in Russian; I will refer to it as "the NG article").

Ironically, Furr focuses only on this one claim, even though the bulk of the argumentation in his pseudoscholarly Katyn denial book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, the Solution has been debunked by me here, here and here (as well as all over the Katyn Files website; though mostly as arguments of other people; there's precious little original content in Furr's propaganda pamphlet). [Update: a full debunking of his book.]