Tuesday, July 05, 2016

Dumb Neo-Nazi Carolyn Yeager Attacks an Auschwitz Survivor, Beclowns Self.


In her articles Joshua Kaufman vs Reinhold Hanning – Insanity in a German courtroom, I want to see Joshua Kaufman’s Auschwitz tattoo – 109023Further evidence that Joshua Kaufman is lying about being Auschwitz prisoner 109023 and Busted: Joshua Kaufman’s claimed Auschwitz number belongs to someone else the infamously dim neo-Nazi Carolyn Yeager proposes that Joshua Kaufman, an Auschwitz survivor, is lying about his Auschwitz number being 109023 because the number and Kaufman's chronology do not fit together and because someone else was registered in Auschwitz under the same number.


She writes in one article:
Most Hungarian Jews were not touched until Spring 1944, when large numbers were sent to Auschwitz, and from there on to other labor camps. They were tattooed with numbers that began with an A or B. Kaufman said his number was 109023. This doesn't fit with Hungarian deportee numbers we know – Lazar Wiesel was A7713. Paul Argiewizc says he was arrested in 1941 in Poland and his Auschwitz number was 176520. If Joshua were arrested a year or two or three later, his number should be higher than Paul's, not lower.
And in another:
I heard nothing from Kaufman, but I did hear from Carlo Mattogno, the accomplished Italian revisionist. Carlo looked up the numbers and helpfully sent me the following information (my bolding):
A list of inmates compiled by the judge Jan Sehn reports the names of the inmates of a transport that arrived at Birkenau on March 15, 1943. The last number assigned was 108530.
The next number in this list is 109371 – a certain Jakob Zakar – who was part of a transport from Greece which arrived in Auschwitz on March 20, 1943.
This means that the number 109023 was assigned between these two dates.
According to Danuta Czech’s Kalendarium [a source used as official Auschwitz data -cy] the number 109023 was assigned on March 18th, 1943 to a group of 465 male (numbers from 108763 to 109227) and 114 female prisoners (they received the numbers 38469 to 38582) sent to Auschwitz from the SiPo [Security Police] Radom, in the General Gouvernment (now Poland).
Mattogno concludes from this that Kaufman’s story lacks either truthfulness or exact dates. The dates, however, are confirmed by the Kalendarium of Danuta Czech and by the judge Jan Sehn.
And in yet another one:
Like Joseph Hirt, who is a complete fraud, Joshua Kaufman has now been proven to be at least half a fraud. The number he claimed to be his when he told NBC News, “I am not Joshua Kaufman, I am number 109023” belongs to Mateusz Judasz, born September 12, 1901 in Łaznów, Poland.
The problem? Joshua Kaufman never said that his Auschwitz number was 109023.

Here are his words (that Yeager often quotes):
Can you imagine working in a crematorium, when you are only 15 years old? I had to break the bones of the dead to get them untangled … I am not Joshua Kaufman, I am number 109023.
He doesn't say "My Auschwitz number is 109023". Upon reading one of Yeager's pieces, remembering that Kaufman was also a prisoner in Dachau, and immediately realizing that she's twisting his words, I searched for a database of Dachau prisoners.

I found Steve Morse's and Peter Landé's Searching Dachau Concentration Camp Records in One Step and typed "Kaufman" into the search field. Since there were no Joshuas, I searched for the first name that was as close to Joshua as possible, in this case Jeno, and clicked on "details". Luckily, I found our man on the very first try:

 Last Name:  KAUFMANN 
 First Name:  Jeno 
 Title:   
 Birth Day:  20 
 Birth Month:  Feb 
 Birth Year:  1928 
 Birth Place:  Szebreczen 
 Came From:  Auschwitz 
 Residence (town):  Szebreczen 
 Residence (street):   
 Prisoner Number:  109023 
 Date of Arrival:  v. 18 Sep 1944 Auschw. 
 Disposition:  befr. Mühldorf 
 Disposition (translated):  liberated. Mühldorf 
 Category:  befr. Mühldorf 
 Category (translated):  befr. Mühldorf 
 ID:  148039 
 Page:  2658/Sch. 
 Disk:  3 
 Frame:  521 
 Comment:   

Just to be sure, I double checked against the Dachau records at fold3. Finding Jeno/Joshua Kaufman(n) was no longer a problem:


So, to recapitulate: Jeno Kaufmann/Joshua Kaufman was a so-called "transit Jew" (Durchgangsjude) in Auschwitz. The Jews belonging to this category usually stayed for a period of time in Auschwitz but were not registered and thus also not tattooed (this is basic knowledge). Kaufman's number 109023 was given to him in Dachau, not in Auschwitz. And neither did he claim that it was his Auschwitz number. It was a figment of Yeager's imagination.

It took me literally a few minutes to "solve" this case (not that there was much to solve in the first place...). But I guess I also should not be surprised that the noted great "revisionist" fraud expert on Auschwitz, Carlo Mattogno, was too slow to understand that he was dealing with a Dachau number, instead churning out lots of seriously looking but ultimately irrelevant information. How ... typical.

102 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Yeager hasn't learned a thing since Dr. Neander schooled her 6 years ago. As ignorant as ever.

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  3. I wonder what Carolyn will do now that Mr. Wiesel (RIP) has passed on. Maybe this means she will stop cluttering up cyberspace with her garbage.
    I guess that might be too much to ask.....

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  4. Was the Transit Jew Kauffman a Sonderkommado during his brief stint at Birkenau, as his lawyer Markus Goldbach claimed in a German court on 13 May 2016, or is Kauffman lying about that?

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  5. I'm not interested in Kaufman's story per se, only in how the deniers operate. Yeager spent thousands of words instead of stopping for a second to actually think about what she is doing.

    If Kaufman is wrong about something or exaggerated something, I won't be shocked, as I know how frail human testimonies can be, especially after decades. That said, to evaluate his story one needs to hear what he himself said.

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  6. Hey guys. I've discovered your blog a while ago and I gotta say, it helped me a lot. Unfortunatly I found myself going a bit to deep into the world of arguments with Holocaust deniers, and i have to say that at first some of their comments actually created some tiny bits of doubt in my mind, which I felt really bad about. Your website, gotta say, helped me a lot.
    However there are few "revisionists" points still bug me even if I don't believe them, and I've yet to counter-arguemtns to them on your website. I'm sure there are some, I just couldn't find them. Thus, I would to ask you for links to anything that you've written about:
    a) The "The world Almanac of 1949 doesn't show a decrease in the Jewish world population" claim
    b) The "There were glass windows and wooden doors Majdanek" claim
    c) The "some survivors claim to have survived the gas chambers" claim.

    I don't agree with those arguments, I just want to see how you've countered them.

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  7. Hello, Gabi, don't feel bad about doubts, some deniers are sneaky and some of their arguments sound superficially plausible until you dig further.

    Don't forget that in the end millions of Jews are missing and no denier has been able to explain where exactly they are. E.g. over 700000 Jews were transported to Treblinka in 1942 alone and no denier has ever told us where they went. And we know they went nowhere because they have never been found. So it is for the other camps. This is a sine qua non of the Holocaust.

    While deniers pick at the margins here and there (sometimes successfully, but mostly failing to prove anything), they can't deal with the sum of documentary, testimonial and physical evidence.

    Now to your questions.

    a) http://www.nizkor.org/features/denial-of-science/worldalmanac.html

    b) This I'll leave to our expert on Majdanek, Statistical Mechanic.

    c) 1. Some of those claims stem from a misunderstanding. Quite a lot of prisoners had expected to be gassed in the shower rooms (rumors went around) and they tell about their amazement when the water came out of the showers. So if you mean such types of claims, this is easily explainable by human psychology. Such people may claim (unwittingly incorrectly) to have survived the gas chambers. An example of such a misunderstanding is at http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/auschwitz-survivor-gena-turgel-walked-out-gas-chamber-alive-n293496
    Gina Turgel was, of course, not in a gas chamber but in a normal shower facility. It doesn't mean she's lying, she's misinterpreting her experiences (and her identification of the room as a gas chamber stems from hearsay anyway).

    Here is another similar case: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/holocaust-remembrance-day/.premium-1.651422

    While Braun thinks she was in a malfunctioning gas chamber, there is nothing to exclude that she actually was in a normal (malfunctioning) shower and incorrectly interpreted her experience.

    A testimony that needs interpretation and a differentiation between two partially similar processes (such as a gassing and taking a shower would have been in their initial stages) are obviously not very valuable. One prefers testimonies of people who actually saw things that were hard to misinterpret - e.g. if they personally dragged out the corpses, threw them into the ovens, etc.

    Historians don't base their conclusions on such weak testimonies.

    2. There are a few testimonies from survivors who claim to have survived an actual gassing, with Zyklon B and all. While purely theoretically such a survival might be possible under very special circumstances, it is hard to see why such survivors would have been left alive. So such claims sound pretty implausible and should be seen with a skeptical eye.

    Assuming none of such testimonies are accurate, the following options may explain them:

    2.1. Some of them were lying.
    2.2. Some of them have developed false memories. Current memory research shows that it doesn't take much for a false memory of an event to arise. Some of those false memories of gassings would be based on misinterpreted shower experiences, as above. Others would be based on something a witness might have seen in a dream (one of the common ways for false memories to arise). Note that such would be a one-time event, so it's not comparable to, say, testimonies of the people who had to deal with the corpses of the gassed for a period of time.

    In the end such testimonies are few and they're usually quite vague. For any big event you can always expect some outlier testimonies, there are such testimonies about Katyn for example, and yet it happened. Such testimonies no more debunk the Holocaust than they debunk the WWII, of which the Holocaust was a part.

    Moreover, a testimony should always be analyzed within a historical and documentary context - this is what historians (usually try to) do.

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  8. There is a lengthy discussion of Majdanek at Skeptics Society Forum
    http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=24902

    which is also where any further discussion of this issue should go, as per our off-topic rules on this blog.

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  9. Sergey -
    a) I've read the Nizkor page about this matter a long time ago, and I didn't quite understand it: Deniers say that the 1949 edition says 1 thing (15M) and Nizkor says it gives a different number (11M). I would have checked the book myself if we had them in my country. So who's right?
    b) Great, where and when will he give an answer?
    c) Can't deniers use the "false memory" thing to support their own arguments?

    Nicholas -
    The name of your link alone looked like a Denialist forum, and when I checked it I saw this is exactly the case. Why would you give such a link?

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    1. Gabi, Nizkor gives a great deal of information about the whole issue:

      Whoever first started propagating World Almanac figures neglected to mention that all figures before
      1949 were from 1938 estimates. Since the year of etimate is given at the top of the chart it is difficult to believe that the originator did not intentionally mean to decieve by negelecting this key piece of information.

      I have posted the following correction several times:

      The University of Alberta library has the World Almanac issues for the pertinent period for 1941, 1944, 1947, 1948, and 1949. The figures listed for total world Jewish population are as follows:

      1941 15,748,091
      1944 15,192,089
      1947 15,688,259
      1948 15,688,259
      1949 11,266,600

      Now you may be wondering what happened to all those Jews in 1948-49. No fresh estimates were made between 1938 and 1947. The figures listed for 1941, 1947, and 1948 are identified as estimates made in 1938. The source for the estimate for 1944 is not given, and the numbers are listed differently than in other years. In 1944, the numbers are given as a part of a list of various world religions rather than standing on their own with a country-by-country breakdown as in the other years.

      Only in 1949 are postwar estimates employed, the figures given are for estimates made in 1948. A year or two lag seems to be common for various other population estimates given by the World Almanac.

      The difference between the 1938 and 1948 figures is thus 4,481,491.

      In 1949, however, the World Almanac gives a revised 1939 population of 16,643,120 giving a difference of between 1938 and 1947 of 5,376,520. Where the extra population between 1938 and 1939 came from is not cited, though one might speculate that it was based upon the Nazi estimates made in 1942 for the Wannsee Conference.

      Despite the apparent exactness of the numbers listed, the World Almanac warns that all numbers listed are estimates.

      The World Almanac estimates figured prominently in another instance of the Gambit when the New York Times published inflated estimates of the post-war Jewish population in 1948, and early deniers used the story to dismiss claims of 6 million Jewish deaths. i

      The Times later explained that their data had come from the 1948 World Almanac in this letter to Morris Kominsky from the author of the piece:

      "Dear Mr. Kominsky,
      "Thank you for your letter of inquiry of January 6.
      "The world Jewish population figures printed in this
      story came from the 1948 edition of the World Almanac.
      Later we checked it with the American Jewish Committee and
      other sources and said in the correction, as I noted to you
      in my previous letter, that the authorities agree that
      Hitler's wholesale massacre of Jews during the war reduced
      the Jewish population to perhaps 12 million today (2/26/48).
      "If Mr. Freedman met with me I do not remember it.
      The problem is of course, that you are talking about events
      that took place 19 years ago. I see hundreds of people per
      year, many of them only for a few minutes so I could not
      swear that I did not see Mr. Freedman but if I did it made
      no impression either upon me or upon my assistant.
      "I do not know what Mr. Freedman means by examination
      of documents but to my knowledge we had no particular
      documents bearing on the issue in question.
      "I hope this answers your questions; if there is
      anything else you wish to know please do not hesitate to
      write again.
      "Sincerely, Hanson W. Baldwin (Military Editor)"

      Delete
  10. Gabi, I'm a member of that forum, it is not a denier forum. Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine hosts it, that's why it is called that. Deniers do post there, however, it is not dedicated to Holocaust denial.
    I do recommend going to Skeptic and checking out the Hunt Majdanek thread.

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  11. Here's the thing, J.

    Deniers often copy a list from a a blog called "Holohoax 5.0" that says that the number given in 1949 is "World Almanac, 1949, pg. 289: World Jewish Population — 15,713,638".

    Nizkor says it's 11,266,600.

    So again - who is right?

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  12. Gabi, are you really doing a magical balance fairy act between Nizkor, that actually cites the source, and some anonymous deniers?

    Frankly, your responses to our answers in this thread make me question your sincerity in asking the questions above.

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  13. Sergey, I am an Israeli Jew. I can asure you, I am not some Anti-Semite or Denier who tries to trick you by dicuising myself.

    I know that paying to much attention to the smallest details is something that deniers often do, but the only thing that bothers me is that the anonymous denier gives a page number while Nizkor doesn't.

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  14. Gabi,

    Skeptics Society Forum is not a denier forum. It is a forum for skeptics interested in DEBUNKING pseudoscience and other forms of crackpottery, which is why it hosts a sub-forum on Holocaust denial. It helps to have some true-believers in lunacy around to enjoy debunking to the fullest extent possible.

    The thread linked was started by a Holocaust denier, with a few other deniers joining in, but non-deniers rebutted them. Read the discussion as a whole. Statistical Mechanic, who is very much an anti-denier, is the most active poster in that thread.

    regarding your questions as a whole:

    a) the whole gambit is a logical fallacy, indeed we might as well dub it 'argument from encyclopedia', the first error is assuming that encyclopedias, almanacs and yearbooks covering a very large number of topics are always up to date, the second error is placing so much emphasis on a TERTIARY source. Because encyclopedias are neither primary sources nor are they usually works of cutting-edge scholarship (secondary sources).

    b) This is not the homicidal gas chamber at Majdanek. The window is in a delousing chamber, as is crystal clear from the heavy Prussian Blue staining on the walls, which would only emerge from sustained use in delousing. Some mainstream sources continue to misidentify the delousing chamber as a 'gas chamber' implying a homicidal gas chamber, while deniers also misidentify the chambers.


    c) No, because false memory explains why SOME people misremember things, it does not and cannot explain testimony as a whole.


    Further discussion of these issue should take place elsewhere. Statistical Mechanic may chime in with an informational post about Majdanek, but this is a comments thread for a blog post that is NOT about Majdanek, the World Almanac or survivors that misremembered being gassed.

    If you don't like the look of the Skeptics Society Forum, try the International Skeptics Forum, which moderates more strictly for insults and so forth. There is a 'General Holocaust Denial Discussion Thread' there in the conspiracy theories forum: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=91

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  15. It's not "paying attention to the smallest details". It's a strange inability to weigh the sources' credibility.

    It's really not hard. Some anonymous deniers made a claim. This claim was checked by actual persons at a uni library and was found to be fraudulent. Nobody has challenged the rebuttal or alleged that the Nizkor authors lied. You don't seem to understand how scholarship works. Moreover, quick googling would have shown to you, even denier sources, like Butz, confirm Nizkor's figure.

    As for being an Israeli Jew, it's neither here, nor there in terms of denial.

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  16. Thank you, Nicholas.

    Once again, I am not a denier myself guys! My Grandmother's cousin and her [the counsin's) children were all murdered in Riga. I have have interviewd a Holocaust survivor for 6 months on a weekly basis for a community project when I was a teenager. This entire thread is because, I'm ashamed to admit, in the last two weeks some denier arguments started to creep into my mind in a way that made me worry about my own conscience and because I'm am admitably too young and not as well educated as others on the subject, I just brought you some of the questions that kept bugging me.

    No hard feelings, okay?

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    1. Gabi, I invite you to look over the Skeptics Forum. Click a few of links under "Holocaust Denial."

      As for the Almanac Canard, that's an old one and just as useless as the old "there weren't six million Jews under Nazi control" canard that I see bandied about.
      As for your concerns, when I first came across Holocaust denial a few years ago I also began to have doubts. This shocked me, I majored in History at the university and thought I knew everything about WW II and the Holocaust. I then realized that I only scratched the surface. I did my own research, began reading books specific to the Holocaust and came out realizing the historical record was correct. Nizkor and websites like this also helped.
      I also don't rely on witness statements or memoirs.

      Delete
  17. @ Gabi,

    Not to keep an off-topic point going, but this from Nick -

    "b) This is not the homicidal gas chamber at Majdanek. The window is in a delousing chamber, as is crystal clear from the heavy Prussian Blue staining on the walls, which would only emerge from sustained use in delousing. Some mainstream sources continue to misidentify the delousing chamber as a 'gas chamber' implying a homicidal gas chamber, while deniers also misidentify the chambers. "

    is exactly right. To the best of my knowledge the door/window issue was most "famously" raised by David Cole. Here's a post that was part of the discussion of this topic at Skeptic Society Forum: http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=26545#p502135 The room in question is the disinfestation chamber in the bathhouse (B&D I) just south of the bunker in which the three gas chambers were located. Once thought to be one of the Majdanek gas chambers, this room is now understood as where clothing was disinfested with Zyklon B. Some historians, among them Barbara Schwindt, say that it is possible that a few homicidal gassings were carried out there in early fall 1942 before the chambers in the bunker were brought into use. The museum director, Tomas Kranz, who has written on the extermination of Jews at Majdanek, says however that the firm evidence we have is that the room was for clothing disinfestation. (This room, including the matter of the window, has been discussed at greater length in the Skeptic Society Forum thread on Majdanek.)

    I hope that this answers your question, Gabi. I am happy to provide any further information that might be of help to you.

    (The Skeptics Society Forum discussion area on Holocaust denial is NOT a denier area; it is, as Nick and Jeff have explained it, a subforum of the Skeptics forum meant to discuss HD in all its aspects - most people posting there for the past several months are not deniers, thus, most of the discussion is now about the history of the Third Reich, the Final Solution, and the war; exchange of sources and ideas; book/reading discussion; and like that.

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  18. @ Statistical mechanic - you guys both gave exalent explatnations, however there's one thing I dont understand: Why was there a delousing chamber for clothing anyway? And were they disinfected before of after the victims took them off? I mean isn't the Zyklon-B supposed to kill them there already?
    Also, about the Prussian Blue: Isn't the lack of Prussian Blue due to 50 years of being exposed to European weather conditions is how the Leuchter Report was debunked in the first place?

    Once again - those are not questions of denier but of an uneducated young lad, nothing more.

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  19. Hello, I am also an Israeli-Jew and it's the first time I post in this blog.
    I also happen to find myself quite often debating with Holocaust-Deniers online.
    I used this blog a lot in order to refute their claims, and I've also Nizkor and hdot.
    I must say this blog is doing terrific work.

    There is one point I've seen by one denier I ask of you to refer to :
    He claims that some famous Holocaust-Denier stole the Asuchwitz's crematoria blueprints, which were hidden from public in some museum's archive, and based on these blueprints he says it is impossible the structure was used as a gas chamber.

    I did some google-work, to see if this claim is true, I reached a certain denier called Robert Faurisson who tells a similar story about stealing these blueprints.

    I therefore have a few questions :
    1) Is the story reliable? Did Faurisson or any other denier really stole the Auschwitz's blueprints? And were they really "hidden from public"?
    2) Assuming it is true, and such blueprints were indeed stolen, can you refer to the claim asserting that the structure in question was impossible to be used a gas chamber?

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  20. Gabi:

    "Why was there a delousing chamber for clothing anyway? And were they disinfected before of after the victims took them off? I mean isn't the Zyklon-B supposed to kill them there already?"

    Majdanek, like Auschwitz, was a concentration camp housing forced labourers, including non-Jewish prisoners, so it needed hygienic facilities. Prisoners were crowded into barracks so delousing their clothes every so often was one means of preventing epidemics of typhus spread by lice.


    "Also, about the Prussian Blue: Isn't the lack of Prussian Blue due to 50 years of being exposed to European weather conditions is how the Leuchter Report was debunked in the first place?"

    For the Birkenau gas chambers, yes, because a homicidal gassing exposes a room to half an hour of Zyklon B followed by ventilation time. Ergo Prussian Blue doesn't form. Delousing chambers expose the room to Zyklon B more continuously. Ergo Prussian Blue is more likely to form. Prussian Blue staining is visible at Stutthof and Majdanek - those rooms were delousing chambers first and foremost. At Stutthof, a small number of homicidal gassings were carried out in the delousing chamber as well, as a secondary use.

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  21. So from you said, I understand that Zyklon B is not deadly in small, unconcetraded doses? Did I get it right?

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  22. Hydrogen cyanide is not guaranteed to be deadly to *lice* in small doses, which is why fumigation takes many hours. But it is very deadly to human beings in relatively small doses, the LD50 (lethal dose for 50% of the exposed population) is only 100-300 parts per million for human beings.

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  23. So I still don't get it. In the delousing chambers, were prisoner's cloths spraied with Zyklon B while still on the prisoners? If so, why did the prisoners die?

    Gosh, I probsbly sound really stupid in here .

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  24. @Gabi, In the course of its existence, Majdanek had about 150,000 prisoners enter the camp, according to the most recent research. Just about half those prisoners were Jews, and of the 74,000 Jews, about 59,000 perished in the camp. At times Jews made up the overwhelming majority of the camp's population. But at other times, e.g., after the mass shooting of Jews on 3 November 1943, there were only very small numbers of Jews in the camp. Majdanek housed Polish political prisoners, POWs, Belorussian and Polish peasants who failed to make agricultural quotas set by the German occupier, hostages, and other prisoners. Inmates worked in a variety of jobs (many in building/maintaining the camp and many sorting goods taken from Jews in Einsatz Reinhard); thus, Majdanek was an extermination camp, a POW camp, and a punishment camp but also a labor camp and a supplier of workers to the Lublin labor camps under Globocnik's management. Given this, the camp operated a laundry and other services (kitchens, repair shops, etc). Among these were facilities for disinfesting prisoners' clothing to prevent epidemic typhus - an effort that, as Nick Terry mentioned, was minimal and not very successful.

    I cannot tell but you seem to be confusing the reception of incoming prisoners and the selection process which they went with the "regular" process of delousing clothing. The reception of incoming Jewish prisoners beginning in fall 1942 involved a selection in which some prisoners were sent to the gas chambers whilst others were bathed and/or given disinfection baths before being sent to the prisoners compounds. The belongings of these prisoners, including their clothing, were taken from them before they went through the bathing/disinfection process - and prisoners were often made to run from the valuables/clothing drop-off, called the Effektenkammer, over to the bathhouses where they were shaved, showered, and disinfected. After being bathed/disinfected, the prisoners selected for labor were given prison clothing from the camp's stores. Those Jewish prisoners who on arrival were not gassed were then sent to "fields" in the prisoner section of Majdanek, where they were housed in horse-barn type barracks and put to work.

    The process of delousing clothing with Zyklon B - there were a few rooms in various locations in the camp for this - was separate to the processing of arriving prisoners. The clothes processed in these rooms had been taken from incoming prisoners or were the normal camp garb that the SS wished to treat. This work was done by prisoners assigned to this task under the command of a Kapo and Camp SS men. Even lingering amounts of Zyklon B caused skin and other irritation on prisoners who had to work in the disinfection chambers. But there was not an intent to kill these prisoners in those rooms - those rooms were for the purpose of disinfecting clothing which was to be used and reused by prisoners in the camp.

    Again, I hope this answers your questions. - SM

    (Nick - do you have suggestions for handling further Majdanek related questions so as not to take this off topic? thanks)

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  25. @Gabi - apologies, I dropped a word, this sentence "prisoners were often made to run from the valuables/clothing drop-off, called the Effektenkammer, over to the bathhouses where they were shaved, showered, and disinfected" should have said that the prisoners were made to run naked, as they'd surrendered their clothing at the drop-off place and would receive camp clothes after showering, etc.

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    1. So the cloths were disinfected while the prisoners were somewhere else?

      Delete
  26. "So the cloths were disinfected while the prisoners were somewhere else?"

    Yes.

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  27. Can someone refer to my questions in my post above about the Auschwitz blueprints allegedly stolen by Faurisson? Is it a trustworthy story?

    Thanks.

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  28. Again, thanks. Your website was very helpful. By googling I've discovered that there are many "revisionist" trolls that try to paint you guys as "hate bloggers" or some shit like that - but it's obviously nonsense.

    איתי - למה אנחנו עושים את זה לעצמינו בעצמם? הא? כל הוויכוחים האלה עם מכחישי שואה, אין לנו דברים יותר טובים לעשות בחיים? אני אשכרה מרגיש רע עם עצמי שאני מגיע למצבים האלה, הרגשה של פתטיות.

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  29. גבי - אתה צודק, אבל אני חושב שהדבר הפך למין אובססיה אצלי, אני יכול לשבת ולסחוט שעות מול מכחיש-שואה בויכוח וירטואלי.
    אני חייב לציין שרוב הפעמים הויכוח פשוט גולש להאשמות אנטישמיוות טהורות מצד המכחישים, ולכן זה כבר ממש בזבוז זמן ואנרגיה.
    אני חייב לציין שהבלוג הזה עזר לי המון, יש פה חומר רב שמכחישי שואה לא מסוגלים להתמודד איתו, כמו כל מיני מסמכים מפלילים למשל. בסופו של דבר הם טוענים שהמסמכים מזויפים, בלי שום ביסוס מצידם.

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  30. אחי, אני נשמע ממש כמו כוסית כשאני אומר את זה, אבל הוויכוחים איתם כבר הביאו אותי למצב של אשכרה סטרס פיזי, לחץ בחזה וחוסר תיאבון ודפיקות לב מואצות בגלל הג'וק הזה בראש שאולי אם אני אבדוק את הטענות שלהם מספיק, אני אגלה שהם צודקים - אפילו כשאני יודע שזה לא באמת נכון! אשכרה התמכרות ואובססיה.

    אתה יודע, אם תסתכל מספיק עמוק בכל מיני פורומים למשל ה"קודו"* הזה, אפשר למצוא שם גם ניסיונות להפריך את הבלוג הזה... אבל אלה בעיקרון אתרים שהם באופן מובהק מכחישי שואה, וגם ככה חצי מטיעוני הנגד שלהם הם אד הומינום נגד הכותבים של הבלוג כאן (משהו על זה שלסרגיי יש חשבונות אי מייל מזוייפים ושניקולאס הוא חזיר. קלאסי). אשכרה מה שמצחיק במכחישי שואה זה שהם ה-הגדרה ל"משכנעים את המשוכנעים".

    וכן הרבה פעמים כשנגמרים להם הטיעונים הם פשוט זורקים את הקונספירציה היהודית הגדולה והולכים משם.


    * codoh

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  31. Itay

    "Can someone refer to my questions in my post above about the Auschwitz blueprints allegedly stolen by Faurisson? Is it a trustworthy story?"

    Sorry for overlooking your question - this is something of a distortion of the story of Jean-Claude Pressac's short-lived association with Faurisson. As far as I am aware, Pressac gave Faurisson some photocopies, and I have not heard that Faurisson was himself able to acquire a significant number of sources from the Auschwitz Museum.

    The story is recounted in more detail in the final chapter of Pressac's 1989 book which is back online here, it is very much worth reading
    http://www.phdn.org/archives/www.mazal.org/pressac/Pressac0537.htm

    Valerie Igounet, Faurisson's biographer, writing in French, does not say anything about stolen blueprints. Igounet regards Faurisson's posturing about his 'deep' research as in essence a bluff.

    In the 1980s, Faurisson certainly tried pretending he had superior knowledge of Auschwitz in his 'duel' with Pressac, but he lost this duel very quickly. vho.org has all the relevant texts from the start of the 1980s to the 1990s, many but not all are in English, some are in French only.

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  32. Nicholas Terry

    Thank you for your reply.
    The Holocaust-Denier with whom I talked kept on waving these Auschwitz blueprints as if they were the holy grail of holocaust-denial. The so-called ultimate proof Auschwitz had no gas chambers. This is why I am very eager to debunk this matter.
    I still wonder if the 1980's Faurisson-Pressac duel you mentioned is indeed referring to the same Auschwitz blueprints I'm talking about.

    I tried to investigate this matter further. First, I used google to find the blueprints again. By googling "Auschwitz blueprints" I found one copy in this website http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/auschwitzgaschambers.html
    It doesn't seem to be a denier website.

    I have uploaded the blueprints to imgur :

    http://imgur.com/tzu7hi2

    Now, can you please tell :
    Do you know these blueprints? Are they authentic? Since I took them from a non-denier website I have the reason to assume they are authentic.
    Also, do Holocaust-Deniers indeed use these blueprints in an attempt to disprove the existence of the gas chambers? As you can see I am very confused. Is it possible that the Holocaust-Denier with whom I talked just waved some random blueprints as if they were Faurisson's blueprints?


    Another thing, I did some more google search and I have managed to find Faurisson's blog in which he writes about his "discovery" :

    http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.com/2009/07/letter-on-discovery-of-auschwitz.html

    And in this link he write how he found them :

    http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.com/2015/12/auschwitz-crematoria-building-plans-and.html


    If you'll read it you see he mentioned the "Leichenhalle" (Corpse Hall) appearing in the blueprints.
    The Holocaust-Denier who showed these blueprints to me also talked about the gas chambers actually being morgues.

    So, can you give me some insight about this matter?


    גבי - אני מזדהה עם התחושות. לגלות על הכחשה שואה ממלא אותך בזעם ורצון עז לספר את האמת ולהגן על הזכרון של מליוני הקורבנות, ביניהם גם קרובי משפחתנו (לפחות במקרה שלי). חשוב לזכור שבסופו של דבר מדובר בקונספירציה, הרי קיימות קונספירציות רבות בעולמנו, בין אם זה בקשר לפיגוע במגדלי התאומים, פרל הארבור או הנחיתה על הירח.
    חשבתי מזה זמן מה שכדאי להקים אתר הנוגע למאבק בהכחשת שואה בשפה העברית (ואולי גם באנגלית), אולי תהייה מעוניין לקחת יד בדבר?

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    Replies
    1. איתי, כעיקרון הייתי שמח לתת יד לאצר שכזה, אבל - א) קצת בא לי לשכוח מכל הסיפור, ו-ב) לפרוייקט כזה גדול לא יהיה לי זמן: כל הכניסה העמוקה שלי לעולם הזה היא תוצאה של שעמום טרום גיוס לקרבי, אז... כן.
      אתה צודק לגבי הקטע של תאוריות הקונספירציה. הקטע של המכחישים הוא היטפלות אובסיבית לפרטים קטנים. הייתה לי שיחה עמוקה בנושא עם אח שלי והוא אמר לי שאפילו ונניח ותמונה כזאת או אחרת באמת מזוייפת או ונניח פרט מסויים שנחשב כנכון שנים מתגלה כלא נכון - בשורה התחתונה יש לך מיליוני עדויות שכולן מצביעות לאותו כיוון, שהייתה רציחה מכוונת של יהודים. פחות משנה איך וכמה בדיוק. רק שאת זה לא תראי אותי כותב למכחיש שואה כי הוא ייראה בזה תירוץ והודאה בטעות מצידנו היהודים (כמובן בלי לשכוח להוסיף oy vey goyim).

      Delete
  33. Itay,

    You should read Pressac's 1989 book (online at the link provided), it reproduces all the known blueprints, and also discusses the other documentation for the Birkenau crematoria and gas chambers. Every source is reproduced in facsimile (photograph), in German and in English translation.

    More sources have been discovered in the 1990s and beyond, but the core documentation is in Pressac, and all of it must be explained *together*. So it is no use for someone to go on about a blueprint when there are many other sources to explain at the same time; it is no use if someone points to a blueprint from early 1942 and ignores the changed blueprint from early 1943.

    Another source to read, with less technical detail but more philosophical clarity, is Van Pelt's report for the Irving-Lipstadt trial, at hdot.org.

    Both Pressac and Van Pelt agree that what became Crematorium II was originally designed with an ordinary morgue, which was later adapted into a gas chamber; the first signs of this date from the autumn of 1942. Correspondence and documents, but not blueprints, started to designate the two morgues in Crematorium II and III, and the spaces in IV and V, as undressing rooms, gassing cellars or gas chambers.

    You may remember when Netanhayu showed blueprints from Auschwitz with spaces marked as gas chambers - those were not blueprints of the crematoria, and this was one of several occasions when your prime minister likely caused his historian father to roll in his grave in anguish at such stupidity.

    As for the denier saying the gas chambers were morgues, it is worth knowing that deniers have come up with many different and mutually contradictory explanations, saying that they were air raid shelters (Staeglich, Crowell, sometimes Butz and Faurisson), 'carburetion chambers' (Butz, sometimes Faurisson), delousing chambers (Mattogno), morgues (Mattogno) and probably other fairy tales as well. Each of these explanations accounts for some of the documentary evidence, but cannot explain ALL of it.

    On the internet, the loudmouth with one 'crucial source' can convince themselves they don't need to account for all the evidence; in history and academia, failing to account for all the pieces of evidence is as fatal as leaving the firing pin out of a rifle along with all the other parts is for a soldier; the explanation simply doesn't work.

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  35. Itay, I'm not aware of any stolen blueprints. Link?
    None of the existing blueprints undermine the gas chambers. Quite the contrary is true.

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  36. Sorry, but Yeager was involved in Bill White's American National Socialist Workers' Party in 2007. Her blog and radio show not only whitewash national socialism but promote it.

    On Yeager and the ANSWP
    http://niksnest.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/coldshot-tonight.html
    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/carolyn-yeager-and-answp.html
    https://billwhitetrial2013.wordpress.com/publications/answp/

    Examples of Yeager promoting national socialism on her website
    http://carolynyeager.net/women-and-national-socialism
    and promoting others who call themselves national socialists
    http://carolynyeager.net/vincent-reynouard-be-national-socialist-today

    a now-disappeared essay on a defunct blog was quoted on Stormfront
    https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t981377/
    the Wayback Machine finds a summary of a video by Yeager with topics including 'why whites should be proud to use the word Nazi'
    https://web.archive.org/web/20130812011855/http://endzog.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/a-vindication-of-nazism-national-socialism-carolyn-yeager/

    meanwhile she is interviewed by the Daily Stormer 'in defense of National Socialism'
    http://www.dailystormer.com/saturday-afternoon-with-carolyn-yeager-in-defense-of-national-socialism/

    This web page summarises another Yeager radio show in which she apparently feuded with the Black Rabbit of Inle, a revisionist who is not addicted to Hitler Worship
    http://zioncrimefactory.com/2016/05/13/carolyn-yeager-rips-into-the-black-rabbi-of-winston-smith-ministry-of-half-truth-and-half-baked-nonsense/

    ReplyDelete
  37. Bobby, you have apparently failed to follow the link given in the post.

    Had you done that, you would have seen that the very first post about Yeager at this blog deals with this issue.

    Yeager is a *self-described* "National Socialist" i.e. a Nazi. Next time do more research.

    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/01/inconvenient-history-blog-just-another.html

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  40. Hello Nicholas,

    For your information, I have put the whole holocaust-history project back online:
    http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/

    As you have seen, I also put back the Mazal Holocaust Library, but be aware that the Pressac on the Mazal backup is not complete (there are many missing files). On the contrary, the Pressac is OK on the tHHP backup:
    http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/

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  41. @Gilles K - fantastic news! I and others have been hoping for this . . .

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  42. Hi Gilles,

    yes, I saw your previous comment about archiving THHP on your website, that's fantastic work. I will add the links to our sources/literature page and in my course handbooks.

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  43. Another esoteric question - I've already mentioned it, but can you shed some light on that werid campaign against your website, with multiplue blogs calling you guys "hate bloggers" and trying to demonize you personally (saying stuff about "fake E-mail accounts" and some crap like this)? It's pretty funny (and sad) but I'd like to know what's behind it, if it's possible. Again, just out of curiousity.

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  44. Nicholas Terry
    Thank you for your reply. I will look into the material you mentioned.

    Sergey Romanov
    Unfortunately the discussion I had with that denier was in an imageboard, so the threads there are being deleted, if you know the format. I had a few discussions with him actually, being pretty much repetitive.
    Yet I was able to find one of his post in the imageboard's archive.

    I therefoe copy his post :

    "here are the actual blueprints of krematorium II. it disproved the fact that this place was used as a gas homicidal gas chamber but rather a morgue. holocausters claimed that the room on the left was the undressing room and the room to the south was the gas chamber where then 5 bodies at a time would be dragged out of the room and lifted by the elevator to the 15 ovens that would take 1 hour to burn 1 body. holocausters claimed that 2,000 people were gassed to death at a time at the gas chamber.

    some frenchman was snooping around where he wasn't supposed to be and got in an area closed off to tourists and he found this blueprint which shows the label "leichenkellar" (corpse cellar) proving that krematoria II was just a morgue. after this discovery holocausters changed the story for the names just being euphanisms"

    I now notice he mentiones a "frenchman" so he is definetly talking about Robert Faurisson.
    Someone has an insight about his mumbel-jumble?

    Also, in my comment above to Nicholas Terry I posted two links to Faurisson's blog where he tells about blueprints he acquired.

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  45. It was started by a psycho American Carmelo Lisciotto, a former webmaster of deathcamps.org who had been kicked out of that website for some irregularities before I, Nick and Roberto became members. Shortly after we joined, it turned out that one British member of the group, Chris Webb (the group's "treasurer"), was pushing fake documents (some of which are still on the deathcamps website).

    After I pointed out the fakes, Webb refused to remove them and engineered a coup, which was easy, since the creator of the website, a German citizen Mike Peters, didn't want his address to appear on the website (as mandated by the German law), so it was Webb who had the domain name registered to him. He overtook the site completely, kicked out all the members that complained (which was most of them, including the site's creator Mike Peters, Peter Laponder, us three, and others). He then called upon the disgraced webmaster Lisciotto and they made a new website, holocaustresearchproject, which is pretty inept.

    Lisciotto then engaged in a years-long smear campaign under different names. All the "blogs" and "forums" and "sites" with smears are (or were) run by a single person. He even posted at CODOH as blogbuster, where he was very chummy with the deniers and the neo-Nazis. If you search old Usenet posts, you will see that Lisciotto was known as a mentally unstable troll long before this, back in the 1990s.

    The initial post that caused the storm is here: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/10/on-demise-of-deathcampsorg-how-fakes.html

    There were additional ones, exposing Webb and Lisciotto's antics.

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    1. Interesting, deathcamps.org didn't look like a denier website to me when I first came across it. Now I see it's more of a personal thing than anything else.
      Where there any genuine attempts do debunk your website, without ad hominums such as this? How did you counter them?

      Delete
  46. Itay, the denier you were speaking to doesn't seem to understand a simple fact that the gas chambers *were* the converted morgues. So there is no contradictions whatsoever. We have German documents referring to these morgues as undressing rooms and gassing cellars.

    As for Faurisson stealing or discovering the plans, it's nonsense. They were never hidden in the first place. Faurisson's own posts show this: they showed him the plans and let him make copies without any problem whatsoever. You should read what he says happened (saw plans, made copies) and ignore the baseless spin (plans hidden! no they weren't).

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  47. I know that I am extremely late to this but SSF is not a denier site, most of us are opposed to denial and work to eradicate it totally.

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  48. Gabi, nobody said that deathcamps was or is a denier website. It was very respectable once upon a time, which is why we joined its team in the first place (invited by Mike Peters, its creator). Only somewhat later did we learn that Webb was pushing fakes (probably unwittingly, though it's hardly an excuse) given to him by some apparently German guy going by the name "Andy Schmidt". I suppose the "Feix" on the photos might be the faker himself. My working hypothesis is that "Schmidt" was a denier planting fakes only to "expose" them later, to "debunk" the Holocaust.

    As of now, deathcamps still contains the fake Münzberger testimony about diesels as well as some other fake details, so you can't rely on it. Neither can you rely on HEART since it's run by an idiot (Webb) and by a sociopath (Lisciotto).

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  49. So Webb and Lisciotto AREN'T deniers? Hmmmm.
    One day I'll have to map things out for myself, listing who is a denier-revisionist enemy, and who Isn't. It's getting confusing. The first time I came into your blog, I actually wasn't sure on which territory I'm standing. Same goes for your (Sergey's) site in the Russian Langauge, I had to make my father read some posts in there because the title "Holocaust Skeptik" confused me. Only when he explained to me the Эрнст Врундель joke I realised I'm on freindly ground.

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  50. > So Webb and Lisciotto AREN'T deniers?

    Sorry, but who said that they were? Maybe you should read more carefully?

    Врундель basically means "Liardel" (yeah, it doesn't work in English.)

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  51. Nobody said that. It was my assumption. After all, why would someone who believes the holocaust happened attack someone who shares that belief? After you explained what was behind all of this, I understand. That's all :)

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  52. > why would someone who believes the holocaust happened attack someone who shares that belief

    To give the most obvious example, both Trump and Hillary accept that the Holocaust happened. Need I continue? ;)

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  53. Well, a big chunck of Trump supporters ARE actaully Holocaust deniers, unfortunatly (or this is at least what the Internet makes things look like. There's been an explotion of new wave antisemetism and Holocaust denial in the last year and a half).
    But yeah, I get your point. What's important is that you guys ARE on the correct side.

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  54. Oh yeah, the "alt right" creeps are in full force for "Daddy" Trump.

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  55. Those alt-right dillholes are extactly the people who "made" me go on the journey that ended up with me finding your blog. Anti-Semties and Holocaust Deniers are one thing and they're bad enough, but RETARTED Anti-Semtites and Holocaust deniers are the new and real problem.

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  56. Who would have guessed that in 2016 a Presidential candidate of one of the two major parties would be mainstreaming white supremacist and antisemitic memes...

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  57. Trump made NAZI-ANIME-TEENAGE-GIRLS a real thing. Google "Evalion" if you haven't heard of her yet. It's both scary and hialrious (but mostly scary) at the same time.

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  58. Googled. For fuck's sake (pardon my Japanese).

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  59. Surely non of you imagined you'd ever have to deal with these kinds of horrors when you started this blog in 2006. Your generation had to deal with proffessors (Irving etc.) or pseudo-Academic bodies like the IHR... people my age have to deal with stuff like HER.

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  60. Nah, not quite. Those are eternal douches.

    Take Jonathan Andersson, for example...

    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/04/just-another-poor-persecuted.html

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  61. Oh and her name is Veronica, which reminds me of Verohnika Clark. You should have seen her Hitler site back then...

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  62. איתי, במידה ואתה עדיין פה - "אני חייב לציין שהבלוג הזה עזר לי המון, יש פה חומר רב שמכחישי שואה לא מסוגלים להתמודד איתו, כמו כל מיני מסמכים מפלילים למשל" - איפה נמצאים כאן המסמכים האלה? קצת קשה הניווט באתר הזה.

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  64. Gabi

    I will reply to you in English.
    I said to Gabi (in Hebrew) in a previous post that I've used this blog to show deniers some documents they were unable to deal with and had no choice but to yell "forgery !".
    Gabi asked me to provide some links to some of these documents

    If anyone could show me more documents out of this blog I would appreciate that.

    Gabi, here are some link I found in this blog :

    Contemporary German Documents on Homicidal Gas Vans
    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.il/2015/10/contemporary-german-documents-on.html

    Index of Published Evidence on Mass Extermination in Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau
    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.il/2012/10/index-of-published-evidence-on.html

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  65. There is lots here, you just have to search, but here are a couple more:

    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/07/documents-about-murderous-purpose-of.html
    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/03/mattognos-special-treatment-of.html
    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/10/how-convergence-of-evidence-works-gas.html

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  66. Let me guess, Itay... not only did the Deniers shout "forgery !", they've also probably said that those lists are invalid becuase they are not lists of links (as if ALL the documents ever are digitally scanned and posted online)? Happened to me once. A Nazi told me "can you name a SINGLE document that supports your claims?", and after I did he claimed that "just saying that there's a physical copy of it does not make it true!"

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  67. Sergey Romanov

    Thanks, I'd put it into good use if I will happen to debate with deniers again.

    Gabi

    Yeah, they have many excuses. They can claim the Allies typed these documents by themselves, etc.

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  68. Hey guys. I'm really sorry to bother you on this post again, but I have found myself again in a state where a denier claim bugs me, and I haven't found something on your blog about this specific subjact. So once again, I'll be happy if you can direct into a place where you discuss it (in this blog, or in some other place...), if there is one.
    So, the thing that bothers me is this thread from codoh, which I stumbled across while trying (and mostly succeeding) to disprove the "bones can't be burned" argument that some deniers use.
    https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=6313
    The two comments that bother me are first comment by the user "The Warden" (third comment from the top) and the 8th comment from the top, by the user "ovd1965", both comments how the "supposed" bone fragments "can't" be disposed off.

    Once again - I'm not even leaning towars agreeing with them, just haven't found the answer to combat these two specific comments.

    And Sorry, once again, if I'm getting on your nerves and breaking any more blog policies.

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  69. Gabi,

    There's really not much point worrying about five-year-old speculative wank from chimps, many of whom haven't been seen online for some time.

    If someone brought up this supposed 'bottleneck' now, then it's worth mentally reconstructing the *entire* process, because there are a lot of trucks moving around at Auschwitz, and the inputs - people in their clothing and fuel - were physically larger than the outputs - clothing/property and ash.

    At Birkenau, the SS brought invalid and elderly deportees from the unloading ramp to the crematoria and 'Bunkers' using trucks. Testimonies suggest several trucks were used per transport if it was a large one, but the majority were *not* so large - 500-700 deportees might be selected for the gas chambers and could be killed then cremated over a period of two days in many cases in 1943 to early 1944. The 'Hungarian Action' between May and July 1944 increased the number and the tempo, but the victims were killed and cremated in a larger number of sites.

    More transport was needed to cart off the clothing and personal property of the victims than to cart off their ashes. Adult clothing, factoring in shoes and overcoats, weighs about 5kg, more than the ash left from a cremated 70kg body (and the victims rarely weighed 70kg). The victims left their luggage on the ramp, but it's doubtful that every single victim was separated from handbags and so forth. Fuel delivered to the crematoria or 'Bunkers' open-air cremation sites would, of course, have weighed massively more when first trucked or carted in than when slag and ash was removed. So the ash and slag from coke or wood is a non-problem.

    As usual, the elephant in the room here is the total inability of deniers to account for the movement of live and uncremated human beings, who collectively weighed more than after being cremated, and would also if kept alive require feeding and supplying - a year's food supply at starvation level is over 250kg per person, *vastly* more than even the exaggerated figures bandied about by deniers for the quantity of wood or coke needed to burn the bodies. If a denier fusses over the logistics of killing and cremating someone, it seems only fair that they can explain, with evidence, the logistics of keeping someone alive, point to where this happened, etc.

    Considering the two alternatives side by side, as is normal in science and academia (it is called inference to the best explanation), and not letting deniers shirk their own burden of proof, is the only way to reach a properly reasoned conclusion.

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  70. Thanks again. I wish I had the same amount of confidence like you guys have. But I guess It comes with age (and with academic degrees. At least in your case)

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  71. And another question, it it's still okay - this time note about debunking some denier claim, but a more philosophical question: One thing deniers absolutly love to do is to present themselves as a silent majority whose on the brink of beating the "Jewish conspiracy" (for example: "gettin sweaty now huh? The past kreeping up on you from behind ,faster and faster. And it worries you . Soon everybody will tell the story about the big lie.")

    Now, obviously they're lying. They try to prtend they are something bigger than just an angry inority, circlejerking around white supremacist forums where they use the same arguements since 1996 and mostly spand their time convincing those who are convinced.

    My question is: in you opinion (one of you being a doctor whos an expert on holocaust denial) - How come this small group of haters is so VOCAL? It is impossible these days to watch a youtube video that has even the slightest relation to Jews, Israel or the Holocaust without deniers bombradign the comment section with "holohoax" calls, racist memes like "oy vey goyim" and the "happy merchant", and off course copy-and pasting old as hell arguments such as the Auschwitz plaque and stuff like that. Nulike old times, you don't need to get to the bottom of comment sections or to some dark corners of the internet to finding holocaust deniers, today they pop out massively onf the biggest online stages, at the top of comment sections and on some very popular twitter accounts. How come such a tiny minority is so loud? My theory is simply that "shite floats", but maybe there's something more behind it.

    What do you think?

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  72. Gabi,

    I don't think deniers are doing anything that different to 9/11 Truthers, conspiracy theorists, Ron Paul supporters in 2008 and 2012, Gamergaters, MGTOW/PUA misogynists, alt-right trolls, etc. Social media seems to invite this kind of loudmouth obnoxiousness, even though it tends to turn off lurkers and ends up reducing the credibility of the ideas being marketed. Because one group sees another making a lot of noise and getting attention, another group copies the tactics. Moreover, as many of these groups overlap, then they are also competing for market share and attention from other fucktards, while also trolling their opponents.

    There also seems to be a general trend for women and ethnic minorities including Jews to receive an above-average level of abuse and trolling, or to attract more negative comments - the Guardian tested this recently by quantifying data on comment posts removed for violating their community guidelines, and found that the ten writers provoking the most moderation were nearly all not white males.

    Then there's the political context: Trump's campaign in particular has emboldened bigots in the US to spew anti-black racism, Islamophobia and threats of violence against a female candidate for the Presidency, and enticed a horde of white nationalists and antisemites to join in.

    On discussion forums, deniers tend to be middle-aged or older; quite a few denier etc YouTube video-makers also belong to this generation (eg Jim Rizoli, born in 1958). By and large, the full-blooded embrace of crankery and douchebaggery tends to occur in males in their 40s or 50s, and many vocal deniers who have popped up in the past 10 years on the internet somewhere confirm this pattern (eg been-there at RODOH, going on his own self-description), just as one can find similar examples among the CT crowd, aficionados of pseudohistory/'Ancient Aliens', etc. The 9/11 Truth Movement was conspicuously split between younger activists who burned out rapidly, and an older crowd who were already into conspiracy theories and jumped on the bandwagon.

    Younger trolls are going to be attracted to a wider but shallower range of ideas, maybe buying into this or that package, or trying on things for the lulz before moving onto something else. Dumbed-down Holocaust denial can be spouted without much thinking, but this won't translate into long-term growth for revisionism, which would require a lot more work - actually studying history, learning languages and so on. Far easier to become a flat-earther, which is maybe why there has been a glut of books advocating flat-earthism in the past two years; it's the perfect creed for trolls in the 21st century.

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  73. It's intresting for you mention MGTOW. I, personally, have disocovered this entire anti-semetism and holcoaust denial wave when I was hanging around in areas of the internet that were devoted to anti-feminism (or "anti Social Justice Warriors"), a view that I persoanlly mostly agree with. When I found out that so many people in the community that I got along pretty well with would start cursing and spitting on me if they knew I was Jewish, I got pretty shocked. There's something really hypocritical about being anti-feminist and an antisemite denier at the same time: they (rightfully) think it's ridicoulous when feminists believe that there's some great worldwide conspiracy against them, known as the "the patriarchy", but then they go around spewing crap about how there's a Jewish shadow goverment the controlls the universe, straight outta "The Protocols".

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  74. Another thing.
    I came across this "article" that seems to have been written by Sergey 12 years ago.
    http://fpp.co.uk/Letters/Auschwitz/Romanov_131204.html
    Maybe I undestood something wrong here, but it seems to me as though this article is attempting to discredit Yad VaShem's victims names archive. What's up with that? I know that even some anti-deniers are not big fans of Yad Vashem, but this blog has a link to "Yad Vashem Resource Center" in the side banner. So... did I just understand this article in a wrong way? Or do you guys actually think that Yad Vashem is not a reliable source about the Holocaust?

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  75. That doesn't read like Sergey at all, and indeed the writer named himself "Serge" Romanov, quite possibly hijacking Sergey's name because he was already active as an anti-denier in 2004.

    The key to figuring out identities, alter egos and sockpuppets is to pay close attention to the Writing style. The "Serge" Romanov writes English with native verbosity - normally one would say native fluency, but the letter-writer's style is quite heavy, with long paragraphs, a bit wordy here and there, and it doesn't read like it was written by a native Russian speaker writing in their 2nd language.

    Yad Vashem is a website, a museum, a library, an archive, a sources-gathering agency, a digitisation project, a place to deposit family records, a gatherer of oral histories, a preserver of names in the database, a publisher of books, a publisher of a journal, and an academic research centre. USHMM has all of these functions as well, one way or another (they maintain a survivors' registry for the US rather than a victims' names database, is one difference).

    So it's a bit difficult to regard either of them as a singular 'source' when they aggregate many different sources.

    This also applies to the YV names database - they have clearly entered in all the names from the Dutch and German memorial books, which were researched by the governments in question; they seem to have added in name lists from other official sources from other countries that are not as thorough as the Dutch and German memorial books; and they accept pages of testimony from relatives which necessarily means the names database can never be complete, since there were many families in especially Poland and the USSR who were wiped out entirely with no relatives surviving to remember them at all, while the Nazis stole and destroyed Jewish records of births, deaths and marriages from many East European regions (but not all).

    Both present encyclopedia like web pages with basic information for the public - these are generally OK, but such pages are not "sources" any more than Wikipedia is really a source. The Yad Vashem lexicon entries seem to be derived from the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust originally published in about 1990, so there are some occasional facts that are a bit out of date, e.g. they overestimate the number killed at Chelmno by relying on older guesstimates. That's about the only criticism I have of the website - they are adding to it all the time and uploading masses of sources and resources (which is great), but a few older parts could do with revision and correction. Which is more or less inevitable, I think.

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    1. I've seen attempts to dissmis YV's list on codoh, pretty dure it was written bt Mattogno. No point bothering reading into this, right?

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  76. Gabi: "I've seen attempts to dissmis YV's list on codoh, pretty dure it was written bt Mattogno. No point bothering reading into this, right?"

    I blogged about this back in 2006 - search tags for Arolsen. The YV database FAQs and explanatory pages cover the key points anyway.

    It's one of a dozen or so idiotic numbers game gambits, the best advice is to look up Matthew White's 20th Century Hemoclysm web-page (Hemoclysm is easily googled as it's his neologism), and digest the fact that megadeaths are extremely hard to quantify with any precision, and the estimate ranges for other megadeaths are wider and less well founded than for the Holocaust. Nor does one find examples of pristinely counted or 'verified' cases of mass violence unless they are well below six figures. And yet there are still Srebrenica deniers out there - some lunatic 'anti-imperialists' as well as a few diehard Serbian nationalists, despite that being an atrocity committed in the age of DNA.

    Reading up on other mass atrocities and genocides (even if only browsing around) is generally a good idea - you swiftly realise how most denier claims regarding the Holocaust are simply special pleading, since some are even worse sourced than the Holocaust (fewer perpetrator sources), memoirs and testimonies tend to have pride of place (for example Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag), little to no archaeology or forensics gets done on the older ones in the first half of the 20th Century, and there usually turn out to be nationalists who want to deny or minimise the crimes, or other ideologues who want to exaggerate them (eg Dresden).

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  77. The anti-YV article I was reffering to is barely related to the Aroslen files, and it is relaitvely new, from 2013.
    https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=9366

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  78. Also:
    "They have clearly entered in all the names from the Dutch and German memorial books, which were researched by the governments in question".
    I believe you, however I'll be more than happy for any links that verify this.

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  79. "The anti-YV article I was reffering to is barely related to the Aroslen files, and it is relaitvely new, from 2013.
    https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=9366"

    the Arolsen blog post discussed the YV names database.
    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk/2006/05/arolsen-aaargh-all-those-names.html

    That was 10 years ago, and YV have clearly been doing a lot of work since, but at this stage the inputting of data is really not very coordinated so there are more and more multiple-entries, people who survived, and so on. Thus the headline figures are not very meaningful and won't be for 50-100 years. No historian would rely on the database for statistics or try to use the database to work anything out.

    Point being, we have quite a lot of very good, detailed statistics for cities and towns from which we have far fewer names, like Warsaw. Multiple documents show 250,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, no name lists were taken by the Nazis or could be preserved by the Judenrat there. There are quite a few survivors from Warsaw who likely sent in pages of testimony but I would seriously doubt if more than a fraction of the victims are known by name.

    Deniers dispute that they were killed in Treblinka but don't apparently dispute that 250,000 were deported, despite not having names for them. They have no names for any survivors not already accounted for by conventional understanding (eg the names of escapees from Treblinka, and train-jumpers who escaped before reaching the camp who lived to testify after the war)

    So the whole gambit and entire subject is rather pointless, unless the deniers are trying to jeer at Jews for seeing entire family trees extinguished and having their community records destroyed so that nobody can reconstruct everything down to the last detail. But that's what one would *expect* in a genocide that aimed to wipe a people off the face of the earth and erase their memory, therefore the 'why haven't you got all the names?' line is actually self-defeating.

    "Also:
    "They have clearly entered in all the names from the Dutch and German memorial books, which were researched by the governments in question".
    I believe you, however I'll be more than happy for any links that verify this."

    See the FAQ, 'where did the names come from?'
    http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/resources/names/faq.asp

    and their list of partners
    http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/resources/names/partners.asp

    These partners include the organisations that put out memorial books of names, e.g. NIOD did the Dutch registry of names for the whole country decades ago, on behalf of the Dutch government, as well as the German Memorial Book (which is online - google Bundesarchiv Gedenkbuch, an English version is then available).

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    1. Just one final reqest (I promise!) - "We have quite a lot of very good detailed statistics from cities and towns" - again, a link to a pool of those records will be nice. I'n just trying to build an arsenal of anti-deneir links for any future arguments.

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  80. Once again you are extremley helpful. This blog is a godsent, seriously. Keep up the good work Nick!

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  81. Gabi: "Just one final reqest (I promise!) - "We have quite a lot of very good detailed statistics from cities and towns" - again, a link to a pool of those records will be nice. I'n just trying to build an arsenal of anti-deneir links for any future arguments."

    Google Korherr report, which presents country and region level statistics for 1942. The main deniers like Mattogno don't deny the figures in this report, they just try to dispute the documented rewriting of the wording and/or fuss over the meaning of special treatment (Sonderbehandlung).

    There isn't a convenient resource breaking things down across the whole of Europe with sources; for western/central Europe you can find all kinds of websites listing deportations from Theresienstadt, Drancy etc, and these have name lists.

    A good resource is the Bundesarchiv Memorial Book, which has a deportation chronology for central Europe and western Europe, which adds up to ca. 450,000.
    https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/chronicles.html.en
    The database itself only covers German Jews, however.

    For Hungary an excellent summary page, explaining the complexities, is here
    http://www.zchor.org/hungaria

    The key point is that 25% of the deportees were selected, not all were registered in Auschwitz, as Sergey noted in this blog post. The unregistered, untattooed deportees were transferred to other concentration camps, and then show up to a very great extent in their records. The 75% who were not selected for work don't show up anywhere, and at the time of the Hungarian action there wasn't much of an 'east' to 'resettle' them to. Deniers have no answer to that question whatsoever, and Butz was stupid enough to try to deny that 430,000 were even deported, something Mattogno and others had to reject eventually for being too dumb even for deniers.
    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/number-of-hungarian-jews-gassed-in.html
    http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk/2006/08/missing-hungarian-jews-revisionist.html

    It's easy to find large numbers of testimonies from Hungarian Jews at degob.hu (some in English translation), at Yad Vashem in their documents archive under O.33 (don't forget the dot when putting this into the record group advanced search box), and other places - survivors who are not the famous few that deniers harp on about.

    For Poland there is a useful page on Lodz
    http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/lodz/statistics.htm
    It's worth knowing that there are name lists for the Lodz ghetto deportations; these are online at http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/39/278/0/7#tabZespol, the Statistische Abteilung is how it sounds. Should you wish to wave further evidence under anyone's nose.

    while for the Government-General, there's the Hoefle telegram breaking down deportations to Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and also Majdanek (a smaller number for that one, they were registered for work not all gassed on arrival)

    There are various websites regarding the Warsaw ghetto, eg this one
    http://warszawa.getto.pl/index.php?show=kalendarium&lang=en

    You can also search the Skeptics Society Forum and RODOH for posts by Statistical Mechanic regarding Warsaw and other places, he is good at summarising the literature.

    Long experience of watching deniers react to StatMech suggests that keeping things concrete, focusing on specific cities like Lodz and Warsaw or countries like Hungary, is better than trying to discuss the Holocaust or deportations as a whole. They really don't like it when you ask them for the whereabouts of the documented deportees, and would much rather argue over cremation mechanics at Treblinka or Chelmno than provide a genuine answer. You can do the same thing with Hungary - yes, they like debating the air photos and arguing about crematoria, but they have never explained what happened to the missing three-quarters of the victims.

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  82. I googled "Korherr report", appearantly Carlyn Yeager have tried to debunk it as well (or at least some parts). That's my main problem with this entire war between deniers and anti-deniers: finding debnks of denier claims is easy. But than deniers try to debunk the debunks (the guys on the codoh forums love to bash Daniel Keren for example). What is really hard to find is a debunk-of-the-debunk-of-the-debunk.

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  83. Gabi: "I googled "Korherr report", appearantly Carlyn Yeager have tried to debunk it as well (or at least some parts). That's my main problem with this entire war between deniers and anti-deniers: finding debnks of denier claims is easy. But than deniers try to debunk the debunks (the guys on the codoh forums love to bash Daniel Keren for example). What is really hard to find is a debunk-of-the-debunk-of-the-debunk."

    Yeager merely highlighted the contentious parts of the report in blue, so there's nothing to debunk.

    Roberto dealt in-depth with the possible interpretations of the Korherr report's crucial wordings in a blog post here: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/richard-i-didnt-know-korherr.html
    I don't see where this has been responded to on a semi-serious denier platform in a coherent article length format. It's tagged, and was listed first on a straight search of the blog if you find (as I just did) that the tags mean too much slogging back through older posts.

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  84. I wasn't reffereing to the Korherr report but to a general issue. It's really sad and frustrating it is to first discover reports agaisnt Holocaust deniers, but than find out that this guys have refutations to those reports? Such as, like I mentioned, their bashing of Daniel Keren which I must admit I'm afraid to read.

    https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=4405
    https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=4404

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  85. > I came across this "article" that seems to have been written by Sergey 12 years ago.

    It was written by a Serge Romanov, just not by this one. Very obviously so, I might add, so it wouldn't really "appear" as "written by Sergey" to anyone who has actually bothered to read the crap that other SR wrote at Irving's site and apply a modicum of common sense.

    (PS: That guy used to live in Moscow then moved to the US and is (or was) a somewhat well-known douche blogger. His blog is full of CTs like Trutherism and whatnot, and of course antisemitism.

    http://emdrone.livejournal.com/
    http://zvezda.ru/authors/220.htm
    )

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  86. BTW here is the entirety of *my* interactions with Irving:

    http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/controversies/deathroll/340_000_plaque.html

    Dear Mr. Idiot, [writes Sergey Romanov on Monday, March 7, 2005] as has been explained to you (and as the plaque itself clearly states), this number signifies only those registered in the camp; same with the Krakau trial. I don't see how one can be so freakin' dumb. The alternative is that you're consciously and purposefully lying.

    IrvingDavid Irving comments:

    ROBUST language indeed. I am aware of that theory. But why commemorate only the "few" who were registered, and not the "many" who were not? Seems illogical, doesn't it?

    ----------------------------------

    http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2012/020112.html

    Sergey Romanov sends me a lengthy conformist paper on the Reinhardt camps [download pdf, 5.6MB]. It is drafted by a new team, "Holocaust Controversies." This turns out to consist of Dr. Nicholas Terry, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jonathan Harrison, Sergey Romanov and Jason Myers.

    "Dr. Nicholas Terry is a lecturer at Exeter U, so it's not quite anonymous," Romanov protests, adding sarcastically: "Of course, Mr. Irving, you've never had a problem with anonymous publications when it suited you (see: 'Samuel Crowell')."

    ("Crowell" is a writer and researcher in the revisionist camp, who has asked to remain pseudonymous.)

    I reply civilly: "Your paper looks very interesting, but a bit long. I will of course read it, but later. You may appreciate why some of the revisionist historians with professional positions needed to conceal their real names; but I was aware of them [their real names] as I am no threat to them."

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  87. > It was written by a Serge Romanov, just not by this one. Very obviously so, I might add, so it wouldn't really "appear" as "written by Sergey" to anyone who has actually bothered to read the crap that other SR wrote at Irving's site and apply a modicum of common sense.

    Sergey, I hope you realize that it's not as easy for me the recognize your writing style like other people who know you for years.

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  88. So you think it's about the writing "style" and not about the fact that you thought I was cheerfully schmoozing with a Nazi-apologist while pushing one antisemitic canard after another? Neat.

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  89. Well, that's kind of thep point. I did not understand why someone who I THOUGHT was you was cheerfully schmoozing with a Nazi-apologist while pushing one antisemitic canard after another. Now I understand that it JUST WASN'T YOU. Problem solved. Everything is awesome.

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  90. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  91. 2024 update: in addition to being grotesque, C. Yeager appears to be the same quitter on her own that she's been elsewhere. Her website (no link will be provided) just had a post where she said she was giving up her Nazi advocacy, at least in terms of posting bullshit on her pathetic site. My only note is that she says she's "retiring" after 16 full years of online pro-Naziing, and she has had 23 commenters show up to wish her well. That amounts to slightly more than 1 person per annum who gives a damn that she's hanging up her black-and-red shoes. She's pathetic.

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