Mattogno's Deceptions on Nazi Policy: An Updated Analysis

We are currently preparing the 2nd edition of our White Paper, which will update our analysis of the lies, distortions, evasions and pro-Nazi rhetoric in the work of MGK on the policy and camps of Aktion Reinhard. This current blog series previews some of the arguments in my contribution, which will primarily be my response to the ludicrous claims by Mattogno in Chapter 5 of MGK's 'riposte', published in September 2013, which can be read here.

Mattogno's approach the history of Nazi policy follows the same trajectory that Elizabeth Strakosch identified here in the writing of Rassinier:

Instead of basing his history on the convergence of evidence (overwhelming oral testimony, documents, etc), he based it on a convergence of doubt. Unable to cast doubt on the undeniable fact of the camps, he made isolated attacks on various aspects of the seemingly unified narrative of the Holocaust. He concluded that these various errors were linked together by a political conspiracy of the victors, rather than by the fact of the Holocaust. Thus he established the basic pattern of denial - dividing the event into its component parts and attacking smaller targets, thereby casting doubt on the whole without confronting it [Elizabeth Strakosch, 'The Political Methodology of Genocide Denial', Dialogue , 2005, 3/3, p.9].

Mattogno's writing strategy on the three Aktion Reinhard camps was to establish a "convergence of doubt" regarding the "official version." This convergence is then combined with a paranoid epistemology, defined by the exaggerated powers that the paranoiac gives to the forces of darkness. It is a form of chimeria which ignores the fact that the evidence of extermination of the Jews rests on thousands of pieces contained in archives built across continents and decades; documents, testimonies and excavations that converge to a positive conclusion, not a negative. The first edition of our White Paper presented only a fraction of the total volume because no work could contain it all without expanding to tens of thousands of pages and millions of words. Equally, the paranoid mind of Mattogno refuses to grasp what is obvious to any neutral, namely that it would be impossible to silence thousands of witnesses to a Jewish resettlement in the East; that a vast number of false confessions by SS officials cannot go unexposed indefinitely without someone retracting; that no resettled population entirely disappears in modern times without leaving a trace of how it disappeared; that no bureaucracy has yet been devised that could construct a body of thousands of pieces of evidence that converge on one conclusion, namely that the Nazis said they were going to exterminate the Jews and then regularly left traces in documents and physical evidence of this extermination.

The strategy of convergence of doubt can be quantified. Mattogno's Belzec spends 96 pages on negation before only 12 pages on his alternative account. In MGK's Sobibór, the ratio is 346 to 54. In MG's Treblinka the ratio is 176 to 124, but many of the 124 pages of alternative explanation spent either on events that occurred before September 1941 (pp.179-183) or on casting doubt on documents such as the Ereignismeldungen (p.204) and the Stroop Report (p. 283). Moreover, these pages display an extraordinary double standard of doubting the exterminatory aspects of the documents whilst displaying extreme gullibility in looking favourably on the Nazis' stated reasons for killing Jews. For example, Mattogno here callously excuses the claim in Activity and Situation Report no. 6 that "in Mogilev 337 Jewesses had to be shot" because they "displayed especially rebellious behaviour." Mattogno sweeps these murders under the blanket assertion that, in eastern Poland: 

The “Soviet Jews” were shot, while the great majority of the remaining resident Jewish population was ghettoized. But also many other eastern Jews were killed: on account of sabotage, anti-German activities, as carriers of diseases, and above all as retaliatory measures for partisan attacks.

This is both gullible in how it accepts the murder of 337 women on the grounds of the Nazis' own claims about "rebellious behaviour" (whilst not querying why the Nazis did not spell out how that behaviour was defined) but also dishonest in omitting the fact that the ghettos of eastern Poland were mostly liquidated in 1942.

Lying about the dating of Orders