Grubach Lies About Death Camp Testimonies

In two recent articles, Holocaust denier Paul Grubach systematically misrepresents testimony concerning the death camps by treating hearsay witnesses, discussing phenomena such as 'electrocution chambers' and 'chlorine gassing', as 'eyewitnesses'. He then uses this misrepresentation to attack historians, such as Browning and Arad, for not taking these 'eyewitness' accounts as seriously as the eyewitnesses who described gassing by vehicle exhaust.

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In his attack on Browning, Grubach claims that:

There are "eyewitnesses" who claimed that Jews were murdered en masse in "electrocution chambers" at Belzec, and not with the use of "gas chambers."

However, the only 'eyewitness' that Grubach discusses was never even present at Belzec:

In February 1944, the New York Times published a false eyewitness report of "electrocution chambers" at Belzec. Here is what is stated: "A young Polish Jew who escaped from a mass execution in Poland with the aid of false identification papers repeated today a story that the Germans operated an 'execution factory' in old Russian fortifications in eastern Poland. The Jews were forced naked onto a metal platform operated as a hydraulic elevator which lowered them into a huge vat filled with water up the victims' necks, he said. They were electrocuted by current through the water. The elevator then lifted the bodies to a crematorium above, the youth said."

The article concludes: "The youth said he personally had seen trainloads of Jews leave Rawna Luska in eastern Poland in the morning for the crematorium at near-by Beljec [sic] and return empty in the evening. He was told the rest of the story, he said, by individuals who escaped after actually being taken inside the factory. The fortifications, he added, were built by the Russians after they occupied eastern Poland." [my emphasis - JH]

The youth in Grubach's account only witnessed a deportation. His account of 'electrocution chambers' is pure hearsay. We are not even told the names or roles of the individuals from whom the youth heard the story. Grubach, incredibly, asserts that Browning should have given this hearsay account more credibility than the accounts of German perpetrators:

The reader should ask himself why Browning ignored mentioning these "electrocution chamber" reports in his books and essays. If the "evidence" that "proves" that Jews were electrocuted en masse is bogus, isn't it also possible that the "evidence" that "proves" that Jews were murdered in "gas chambers" is also bogus, or at least very suspect?

Indeed, it could be argued that the false "eyewitnesses" to the "electrocution chambers" are more "credible" than Browning's "eyewitnesses" to the "carbon monoxide chambers." Browning himself wrote: "Historians almost invariably prefer contemporary documents to after-the-fact testimony." 29

After all, the "eyewitnesses" to the "electrocution chambers" were contemporary "observers" of the bogus "electrocution chambers." They were not prisoners in a 1960s, years- after-the-fact trial who-for legal/tactical reasons-were coerced into giving testimony claiming they witnessed gas chambers.

Grubach does the same in his attack on the Sobibor historiography. He starts again by falsely presenting hearsay as an eyewitness account of gassing:

Sobibor eyewitness Hella Fellenbaum-Weiss told the story of how Jews on their way to Sobibor were gassed with chlorine. We let her pick up her story here: "The arrival of another convoy distressed me in the same way. It was thought to come from Lvov, but nobody knows for sure. Prisoners were sobbing and told us a dreadful tale: they had been gassed on the way with chlorine, but some survived. The bodies of the dead were green and their skin peeled off."

This is a hearsay account of a gassing that did not even occur at Sobibor itself, yet Grubach claims that Arad should have given it the same credibility as the account of Fuchs, who actually installed the gasoline engine at Sobibor:

So, once again, here we have another problem. The official story coming from Raul Hilberg asserts that a diesel engine supplied the deadly gas used to commit mass murder. Nevertheless, Holocaust expert Arad cites the testimony of a German official who claimed that a benzene engine was used. Yet, other Sobibor "eyewitnesses" say the murder weapon was chlorine, not diesel or benzene engine exhaust. The chlorine gas story has clearly been quietly abandoned and the "engine exhaust" story is now the "official truth." But did the Germans use a diesel or benzene engine?

Grubach then, unbelievably, asserts:

At this point the hardcore believer in the Sobibor gas chambers should ask himself this question: if the story of Jews being gassed with chlorine at Sobibor is false, isn't it also possible that the story of Jews being gassed with some type of engine exhaust is also untrue?

The only thing that any sane person reading Grubach's bullshit will be asking is: why has this imbecile insulted my intelligence by assuming I cannot tell the difference between a hearsay testimony about killing methods and a genuine eyewitness account of the murder weapon?