Mattogno's Abuse of History

During the last two years, we have posted a multitude of blogs demonstrating how 'sonderbehandlung' was used as a euphemism for killing in numerous Nazi documents. One of these blogs is Sergey's excellent shredding of Mattogno's shameless Auschwitz screed. This stands alongside other demolitions of Mattogno's dishonest pseudo-scholarship that we have conducted at HC since 2006, including Roberto's superb analysis of Mattogno's distortions concerning Kola's work at Belzec.

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Mattogno is different from other deniers in that he does attempt to use a range of primary source materials. However, his stock technique is to present these materials in a way that distorts, and even reverses, their contextual, geographical and chronological framework. Here is another example of this technique in action.

One of the documents that Mattogno seeks to whitewash is this report from Schwarz dated 8 March 1943, which describes the processing of arrivals at Auschwitz as follows:

Transport aus Berlin, Eingang 7. März 43, Gesamtstärke 690 einschließlich 25 Schutzhäftlingen. Zum Arbeitseinsatz gelangten 153 Männer und 25 Schutzhäftlinge (Buna) und 65 Frauen. Sonderbehandelt wurden 30 Männer und 417 Frauen und Kinder.

Translation:

Transport from Berlin, arrival March 7, 1943 total strength 690 including 25 prisoners in protective custody. 153 men and 25 prisoners in protective custody were assigned for work (Buna), and 65 women, 30 men and 417 women and children received special treatment.

How does Mattogno deal with this obvious reference to gassing? I am grateful to Hans at RODOH forum for supplying this extract from Mattogno's attempted whitewash of the documentation:

How was this 'special treatment' managed in practice? In the third paragraph of a letter dated June 4, 1943, already cited on p. 41, Bischoff wrote of the central sauna, then under construction:145

"The large dressing and undressing rooms are absolutely necessary,
since the influx of an entire transport (approx. 2000), most of which arrive
at night, must be confined within a single area until the next morning. Having
the arrivals wait in the fully occupied camp is excluded due to the danger
of transmission of lice."

This citation is both amateurish and fraudulent. It is amateurish because, as Hans notes, Kremer's diary shows that "transports arriving at night were usually not locked somewhere until the next morning but immediately selected." It is fraudulent because, as Nick Terry observes on the same thread:

Mattosha shows his usual incredible grasp of chronology by citing a document from three months after the document he is trying to 'neutralise'.

Mattogno claims that the Jews undergoing sonderbehandlung in the March 8th document were being treated in a Central Sauna that was still 'under construction' on June 4th. He also claims that these Jews were then sent on to the USSR, at a time when the Germans were, to put it mildly, suffering 'major reversals' at the hands of the Red Army and Soviet partisans. As I have noted elsewhere, this is blatantly dishonest because Mattogno has cited in his Treblinka screed that:

On 31 July 1942, the Reichskommissar for White Russia, Wilhelm Kube, sent a telegram to the Reichskommissar for the Ostland, Heinrich Lohse, in which he protested the dispatching of a transport of "1,000 Jews from Warsaw to work at Minsk," because this would lead to danger of epidemics and an increase in partisan activity.

Mattogno is seriously asking us to believe that officers in the USSR who bitterly protested the arrival of 1,000 Jews in July 1942 would have given the nod to far greater deportations in 1943 and even 1944, when the phrase 'S.B.' was still appearing in the so-called prisoners' strength reports (Staerkemeldungen) of the women's camp at Birkenau, at a time when the military situation for the Germans fighting the Red Army and partisans had become dire. Moreover, at least one of the Staerkemeldungen mentioning 'S.B.' was dated November 29th, 1944, whereas the Red Army recaptured Minsk on 3 July 1944 and Riga by 13th October, 1944. It is therefore no surprise that Mattosha ignores these documents, as even he would not insult his gullible denier readership by pretending that Auschwitz Jews were being resettled in Soviet territory that was no longer in Nazi hands.

Finally, another part of the extract cited by Hans shows the desperation of Mattogno's sourcing:

According to Radio Moscow, several thousand Jews were resettled in the Ukraine. In its issue number 71 of April 1944, the Jewish underground newspaper Notre Voix was able to report...

Needless to say, Mattogno would excoriate any orthodox historian who resorted to such piss-poor use of a state propaganda outlet and secondary source. That such a source should be Mattosha's primary weapon against authentic Nazi documentation is simply an admission on his behalf that he is fighting an ideological battle by dishonest means, not engaging in honest historical scholarship.