"A minor "revisionist" admits Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jews!"

Or so I could have said, if were fond of pathetic demagoguery, which the Holocaust deniers use all too often.

As usual, David Irving posted some trash on his website, this time it's a letter by Paul Grubach about, what Irving calls, a "minor conformist concession about Himmler's Posen speech of 1943".

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IN the summer of 2006 Professor Jeffrey Herf published his book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). It has been said this is one of the most important books on the Holocaust in the past decade.

I would like to bring to your attention an admission by Professor Herf that actually corroborates the revisionist thesis of Dr. Arthur Butz.

In October of 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered a speech in Posen, in occupied Poland. This speech is considered by many to be absolute proof that the Nazis had a policy to exterminate all the Jews of Europe, primarily through the use of homicidal gas chambers.

Um, no. The speech indeed is a piece of evidence (one of many) that the Nazis had a policy to exterminate Jews. That's all. No specific methods are explicitly mentioned in the speech, and nobody, to my knowledge, claims that the speech directly proves specifically gassings. So Grubach erected a strawman.

Let us assume that Himmler really did make the comments attributed to him.

Note the usual "revisionist" "I can't debunk it, but I will try to cast unreasonable doubt on it anyway" rhetoric.

Here is the key passage in question:

"I [Himmler] am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people. This is something that is easily said: 'The Jewish people will be exterminated,' says every Party member, 'this is very obvious, it is in our program -- elimination of the Jews, extermination will do.'"

Himmler continued: "Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a descent person...has made us tough."

Herf writes that in this speech, "Himmler referred only to the early methods of the Einsatzgruppen murders and said nothing about the death camps, gas chambers, and crematoria [p.233]."

Herf is admitting that Himmler is referring only to the mass shootings of Jews that took place on the Eastern Front, and this speech says nothing at all about the alleged "death camps, gas chambers, and crematoria."

Note how Grubach tries to mislead the readers by using the word "admitted". The word implies that it is usually assumed by historians that Himmler somehow explicitly mentioned gas chambers and crematoria in his speech, and only rare honest researchers actually "admit" that this is not true. What a load of... Nevermind.

As far back as the early 1970s, Arthur Butz made the important revisionist point that the only part of the extermination legend that contains a particle of truth is that the Einsatzgruppen exterminated some Russian Jews by mass shootings (See Hoax of the Twentieth Century, p.241).

Professor Butz wrote:

"At the time of the invasion of Russia in June 1941, there was a Führer order declaring, in anticipation of an identical Soviet policy, that the war with Russia was not to be fought on the basis of the traditional rules of warfare. Necessary measures were to be taken to counter partisan activity, and Himmler was given the power to 'act independently upon his own responsibility.' Everybody knew that meant executions of partisans and persons collaborating with partisans. The dirty task was assigned to four Einsatzgruppen…which had a total of about 3,000 men…We have had occasion to note in several instances that the Jews did, in fact, pose a security menace to the German rear in the war…The task of the Einsatzgruppen was to deal with such dangers [anti-German partisan and guerrilla warfare] by all necessary means, so we need not be told much more to surmise that the Einsatzgruppen must have shot many Jews, although we do not know whether 'many' means 5,000, 25,000 or 100,000. Naturally, many non-Jews were also executed (pp. 241-242)."

Butz, being the dishonest bloke he is, tries to obfuscate things, by pretending that EGs murdered (some) Jews as a security danger, not as, well, Jews. But, as I wrote elsewhere

I think I should only mention that according to message no. 412 of 09.02.1942, out of 138,272 people killed by EG A, 55,556 were women and 34,464 were children.

Only idiots and deniers will argue that this was any sort of anti-partisan action.

In fact, of these 138,272 people only 56 were partisans, and 136,421 - Jews.

Or take Jaeger's report with its clear division of the victims into men, women and children, like

20.9.41 in Nemencing
128 Jews, 176 Jewesses, 99 Jewish children

22.9.41 in Novo-Wilejka
468 Jews, 495 Jewesses, 196 Jewish children

24.9.41 in Riess
512 Jews, 744 Jewesses, 511 Jewish children

25.9.41 in Jahiunai
215 Jews, 229 Jewesses, 131 Jewish children

27.9.41 in Eysisky
989 Jews, 1,636 Jewesses, 821 Jewish children

Yes, one must be a real idiot to deny the obvious extermination plan (at least for the Soviet Jewry).

Herf is now admitting that Himmler is referring to only the mass shootings of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front, something that was never denied by Holocaust revisionists.

Ah, yes, this "admitting" thingie again. That's how "revisionist" sensations are made. Remember all the "Auschwitz Museum Director F. Piper admits this or that" hype? Nothing ever changes.

The secret police chief was not referring to the alleged Hitler "gas chambers" and accompanying crematoria, and the so-called extermination camps. So, this passage cannot be used by orthodox Holocaust historians to "prove" that the Nazis had a policy to exterminate Jews in "gas chambers."

Thank you Dr. Herf for corroborating this key Holocaust revisionist point!

So, the redundant, never-contested point that Himmler did not mention the words "crematoria" and "gas chambers" in his speech is actually a "key Holocaust revisionist point"? Thanks for such an embarassing admission, Mr. Grubach!

Now, Grubach, being the silly denier that he is, ignores THE key phrase in Himmler's speech:

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people.

So, no. Himmler did not refer solely to Einsatzgruppen mass-murderers. He directly, and truthfully, equated deportation with extermination. And indeed, the bulk of the evacuated Jews were exterminated in the death camps, mainly by gas, as we know from numerous testimonies and some documents. So, while Himmler did not explicitly mention murder by gas in his speech (and nobody has ever implied that he did), his speech serves as a confirmation of the established fact that the bulk of the deported Jews were indeed exterminated. And since they were deported to the camps, this speech also indirectly confirms the existence of extermination camps.

So much for "revisionist" analyzing skills.