"Twitter denial" (this includes Facebook and other social networks, of course), as primitive as it is, is the main form of denial today. So it may be useful to compile a list of rebuttals to the most common memes. One such meme repository I found in one neo-Nazi twitter account, and in the beginning the tweets from the account were being responded to here, but the post is still being updated with various other tweets and memes.
If you want to translate this text into another language, you're hereby given permission to do so as long as you link to this original posting and give credit where credit is due.
Warning: this post is very image-heavy.
Also, take a look at this debunking of YouTube denial.
If you want to copy a link to a particular argument to post on Twitter or elsewhere, please use the table below. The links are anchored to specific items.
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1. Revision of the Auschwitz plaque.
2. Detached Krema I chimney?
3. Flimsy wooden gas chamber door with a window?
4. Leuchter's report.
5. Alleged lies by the British government.
6. The First Holocaust canard.
7. Auschwitz swimming pool, hospital etc.
8. Arbeit macht frei.
9. The World Almanac canard.
10. The Red Cross stats canard.
11. The Red Cross inspected the death camps?
12. Gas chambers not mentioned in the memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower, de Gaulle?
13. Elie Wiesel did not mention gas chambers?
14. Elie Wiesel an impostor?
15. More Wiesel stuff.
16. Auschwitz decodes.
17. Survivors did not see or hear about gas chambers?
18. Anne Frank diary.
19. Rassinier denied Auschwitz gas chambers. Or was that Thies Christophersen?
20. The Larson canard.
21. Fake, unreliable or mistaken witnesses.
22. Scratched gas chamber walls?
23. Dachau gas chamber; the Broszat letter.
24. Survivor Lieberman and the Auschwitz ovens.
25. The Lachout document.
26. Fake Holocaust photos?
27. Science debunks Holocaust?
28. No Britannica mention of gas chambers?
29. Dr. Listojewski? Simon Wiesenthal's quote?
30. Small children and people unfit for work in Auschwitz?
31. Jews lie about the Holocaust?
32. Predetermined death toll?
33. Hilberg and famous witnesses shown to be liars, impostors during the Zündel trial?
34. Schindler's list a tale of fiction?
35. Bruno Baum admitted that false propaganda was created in Auschwitz?
36. Changing camp death tolls?
37. Death camps found only by the Soviets?
38. Rick debunks the Holocaust?
39. 6-digit tattoo but 6 million victims?
40. Cherry-red skin color absent on gassed corpses?
41. Contradictory Holocaust survivor numbers?
42. ADL admitted the Holocaust might be a hoax?
1. Revision of the Auschwitz plaque.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the plaque never said those were 4 million Jews. So there is no mathematical contradiction whatsoever.
Further comments: the Communists never claimed that all Auschwitz victims were Jewish; the Soviet Auschwitz report didn't mention this, there was an oblique reference to "not less than 4,000,000 citizens of the USSR, Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, and other countries", but that's it.
Also, history is not written by plaques. A museum plaque is not any kind of an authoritative scholarly study.
While some survivors did accept the exaggerated Soviet figures, most Western historians didn't. The initial hugely exaggerated Soviet death toll was based on alleged cremation capacities supposedly available there, a very unreliable way to calculate anything, something that was recognized by many in the West. The Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß initially also claimed millions of deaths in the camp, but in the end he settled on an estimate of about 1.1 million Jewish deportees, which corresponds to the ballpark figure of about 1 million or so Jewish victims, i.e. what we know today. Notably, in providing this estimate Höß went against the interests of his Polish captors, who were intent on promoting the official Soviet figure of 4 million.
The exaggerated Soviet Auschwitz estimate was never a part of the Jewish death toll estimates arriving at between 5 and 6 million victims, both because it did not denote "4 million Jews" and because such estimates were not arrived at by summing up camp death tolls, but rather by adding death tolls for individual countries/territories.
The claim that the exaggerated Auschwitz death toll was considered "the truth" for 50 years is a lie. It was so considered in the Communist Poland, but even there the literature usually quoted the "2.5-4 million" range. Hilberg's estimate, for example, was 1 million. He was an authoritative Holocaust historian and yet did not accept this as the "truth".
Conclusion: the meme is deceptive and irrelevant.
Further reading: The Auschwitz Gambit: The Four Million Variant.
2. Detached Krema I chimney?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: this is the crematorium 1 in the so-called main camp; during the war the crematorium (including the morgue that served as a gas chamber) was converted into an air-raid shelter (the chimney was removed, of course); after the war the crematorium was restored by the authorities to represent the original state, including the chimney. The attempt was partially symbolic and partially botched. That said, the chimney always looked "detached" because it was connected to the crematorium by underground flues.
Further comments: it is not clear what the argument is supposed to prove. That there was no crematorium there? This is debunked by numerous documents acknowledged by all leading deniers. No leading denier denies that the crematorium with a functioning chimney actually existed there during the war. They only deny its homicidal function. So this meme is doubly deceptive because it goes even against the leading deniers, not to mention proven history. The author of the meme acts as if they're the first person ever to have noticed that the chimney is detached. This sort of argumentation may work on simple, naive rubes but not on someone willing to do some basic research.
Pressac explains about the chimneys of the crematorium before the conversion into an air-raid shelter: "[t]he initial chimney was of circular section, but as the result of damage it was replaced by one of square section. ... Between the furnace room and the chimney there was a shed housing the motor for the collective forced draught installation for the three furnaces" (Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, p. 131).
That is, the chimneys - the unreconstructed ones - had always looked "detached", especially the second one. Because they were connected to the crematorium by the underground flues. (This was due to the standard cremation oven design which allowed for (optional) recuperation of heat of the combustion gases, which were sucked out of the incineration muffle in the downward direction due to chimney draft while giving off the heat to the neighboring ducts with the combustion air streaming upwards, into the incineration chamber.)
Here's a German wartime plan of the crematorium (dated 03.08.1942) showing both chimneys: the old one (the taller one) and the new one (doc. 8 in Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz):
Numerous plans show the "detached" chimney and the underground flues, like this one from 25.09.1941:
As a side note: there were relatively few gassings in Auschwitz I as opposed to Birkenau (Auschwitz II), it is unlikely that the number of the people gassed in this small gas chamber exceeded 10000, so the "non-stop" comment, if it has ever been uttered, must have referred to the Birkenau crematoria, not to this Krema that played a truly secondary role in the Auschwitz Holocaust.
Further reading: Pressac's Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, pp. 132, 133.
3. Flimsy wooden gas chamber door with a window?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: it was not a gas chamber door, so all the arguments comparing it to the "real" gas chamber doors are irrelevant.
Further comments: first of all, some quick historical context. This small gas chamber was adapted from a morgue in the crematorium I of the main camp in late 1941. The gassings here were rare and occasional, it's unlikely that more than 10000 people were gassed in this chamber in total, the main killings took place in Birkenau since early 1942.
As already explained above, crematorium I was converted into an air-raid shelter by the Nazis in late 1944 (to repeat, the killings at that time took place in Birkenau and in late 1944 were coming to an end anyway). The main modifications were documented by the Nazis themselves, so we know that the morgue/gas chamber was divided into 4 smaller rooms. After the war the authorities tried to reconstruct the original look of the crematorium but botched the job in several ways. The most important mistake was knocking down one wall too many: as they were removing the recently installed air-raid shelter walls of the small inner rooms, they also removed the wall between the morgue and the former washroom (hence the visible toilet drains, which originally were in the washroom).
The door with a window (or a missing upper panel) is the door to the washroom, not to the morgue/gas chamber.
This, by the way, is clearly indicated in the modern on-site diagrams showing both the present state and the pre-air-raid-shelter state.
A little bit of reading about the basics goes a long way.
The above applies also to the other door in that gas chamber as seen today. The tiny vestibule was added in 1944 to serve as an airlock for a newly added air-raid shelter entrance. Thus two new doors were added (entrance door and airlock door), which had not existed before that.
To repeat, originally there were only two doors in the original gas chamber - the door in the no longer existent wall between the washroom and the gas chamber and the door between the gas chamber and the furnace room.
Deniers sometimes point to the opening between the furnace room and the gas chamber, claiming there was never a door there. However even a normal morgue would have to have a doorway to the furnaces, and that doorway would have to have a door. And indeed, it existed according to the original documentation.
But that original door opening between the furnace room and the gas chamber was also sealed by the Nazis during the conversion into an air-raid shelter, and everything said above also applies to it. The current opening is simply not the original. In fact, if you look at the diagram above, it was reopened in the wrong place, and the original doorway is still sealed.
Yet other deniers acknowledge that there was a door between the furnace room and the gas chamber, but point out that in the German plans it's a swinging door (e.g. in the plan of April 1942) which allegedly could not be gas-tight or strong enough for the mass gassings.
The deniers make an assumption that the swinging door on the April 1942 plan was not a mistake. But it's clear that such plans did contain mistakes. Let's compare the April 1942 plan (left) with the with the November 1940 plan (right):
Notice the differences in the door locations and the way they open. It's very unlikely most of those were actual changes since they served no purpose (except for the opening direction of the door between the washroom and the gas chamber - the door had to open outwards indeed, so that the corpses would not have blocked it, so it's a very telling change - but also note the alleged change in the location), therefore one or both of the plans contain mistakes. That originally there was a swinging door there is a fact, but it's not a given that it wasn't replaced with a normal gas-tight door in late 1941, despite a later plan showing it, the draftsman quite possibly simply having copied it from an older plan.
Further evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from a 1944 plan of the crematorium turned into an air-raid shelter:
You will notice that the same swinging door is drawn here. Problem? There was no longer a door or even a door opening there! That's something even the deniers are forced to admit (e.g. Rudolf in Lectures on the Holocaust, 2005, p. 255: "But this door and the wall opening belonging to it were removed during the conversion of this building to an air raid shelter, so the floor plan in Ill. 72 is faulty in this regard"; the above illustration is taken from this book). So the deniers know that this very door was mindlessly copied by a draftsman from an old plan in 1944, when it not only no longer existed but also contradicted the very purpose of the air-raid shelter rooms to be gas-tight, yet they still insist that the April 1942 plan is absolutely correct in this regard! This is simply irrational.
What doors were actually used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz? The same as for the delousing chambers, i.e. the gas-tight ones. Notably, the delousing chambers in Auschwitz used wooden doors made gas-tight by felt stripes. Here is one such wooden gas-tight door in the delousing gas chamber of Block 1 in the main camp:
Here is a wooden gas-tight door of a delousing gas chamber in Kanada I in Birkenau:
And another wooden gas-tight door from Kanada I delousing gas chamber:
The possibility of using wooden doors for Zyklon B delousing chambers was described by the engineers G. Peters and E. Wüstinger of the firm Degesch (the producer of Zyklon B) in 1940 ("Sach-Entlausung in Blausäure-Kammern", Zeitschrift für hygienische Zoologie und Schädlingsbekämpfung, 1940, vol. 32, issue 10/11, p. 193):
Among the mentions of the gas-tight doors for the homicidal gas chambers in the Auschwitz documentation perhaps the most curious is the following one, in the 31.03.1943 letter from Karl Bischoff to DAW (see van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, pp. 314, 315), talking about the morgues no. 1 in crematoria 2 and 3 in Birkenau, the same rooms the witnesses described as homicidal gas chambers:
Not only were the doors to the gas chambers gas-tight, but also note that although the order was "very urgent", Bischoff specified that a "spy-hole of double 8 mm glass" was to be installed in the door in a gas-tight manner. While peepholes can often be found in the delousing chamber doors (and this was not designated as a delousing chamber but as a morgue), they are not necessary there, so why make such an urgent order more difficult?
The document most probably referred to a sturdy gas-tight door of this type:
Why was there a heavy peephole protection grid on the inside of the door?
Further reading:
Hans Metzner on the gas chamber doors and the crowd pressure.
4. Leuchter's report.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: Leuchter has been debunked numerous times over the years, including by other deniers. It will suffice to read the following:
Nizkor on Leuchter
Harry Mazal, "A Documented Analysis of the Speech given by Fred A. Leuchter on November 10, 1991".
Richard Green (PhD in chemistry), "Leuchter, Rudolf and the Iron Blues".
Robert Jan van Pelt on the Leuchter report.
Further comments: Leuchter is so outdated even by the denier standards that it's always weird to see him brought up on twitter as if he still had any relevance. I mean, I could at least understand the deniers relying on Germar Rudolf, an updated version of Leuchter (though as thoroughly refuted as Leuchter). But it seems that most of them are stuck in the 1980s.
Contrary to some denier suggestions, Leuchter has not constructed a single gas chamber in his life. He claimed to have been tasked with designing a replacement gas chamber in Missouri, but even if the project was real, it never came to fruition. In fact, he both lacked the necessary expertise and was accused of underhanded business tactics.
His report is full of fraudulent assertions. One small example will suffice, his claim about the Kremas 2 and 3:
On the basis of this assertion Leuchter claimed that each of those gas chambers had to be naturally ventilated at least for a week after each gassing! This alone disqualifies his non-existent "expertise".
Even worse, in a leaflet summarizing the results of his "investigations" Leuchter wrote:
Clearly, then, he's a fraud.
As it happens, some deniers also didn't fall for Leuchter's deceptive claims.
The hardcore Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi antisemite Robert Frenz, of FAEM infamy, who also happened to be a professional chemist, left nothing of Leuchter's arguments in Liberty Bell, Feb. 1993, pp. 32ff. To quote a small part:
Frenz continued his attack in the April issue, pp. 22ff, listing many specific mistakes and contradictions, and pointing out that "internally, the LR has many serious flaws which tend to diminish its technical acceptability", "the LR has been called a "forensic" report, that is, admissible in a debate or court of law which adheres to some set of pre-established rules. In courts of law, evidence obtained illegally (rule breaking) is not admitted", "the LR is full of mind-boggling roa poo", "the LR report is full of foolish material which could be used as grist for a "refuter's" mill" and "the LR contains so many internal contradictions that outside help isn't really necessary".
If you want to translate this text into another language, you're hereby given permission to do so as long as you link to this original posting and give credit where credit is due.
Warning: this post is very image-heavy.
Also, take a look at this debunking of YouTube denial.
co
1. Revision of the Auschwitz plaque.
2. Detached Krema I chimney?
3. Flimsy wooden gas chamber door with a window?
4. Leuchter's report.
5. Alleged lies by the British government.
6. The First Holocaust canard.
7. Auschwitz swimming pool, hospital etc.
8. Arbeit macht frei.
9. The World Almanac canard.
10. The Red Cross stats canard.
11. The Red Cross inspected the death camps?
12. Gas chambers not mentioned in the memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower, de Gaulle?
13. Elie Wiesel did not mention gas chambers?
14. Elie Wiesel an impostor?
15. More Wiesel stuff.
16. Auschwitz decodes.
17. Survivors did not see or hear about gas chambers?
18. Anne Frank diary.
19. Rassinier denied Auschwitz gas chambers. Or was that Thies Christophersen?
20. The Larson canard.
21. Fake, unreliable or mistaken witnesses.
22. Scratched gas chamber walls?
23. Dachau gas chamber; the Broszat letter.
24. Survivor Lieberman and the Auschwitz ovens.
25. The Lachout document.
26. Fake Holocaust photos?
27. Science debunks Holocaust?
28. No Britannica mention of gas chambers?
29. Dr. Listojewski? Simon Wiesenthal's quote?
30. Small children and people unfit for work in Auschwitz?
31. Jews lie about the Holocaust?
32. Predetermined death toll?
33. Hilberg and famous witnesses shown to be liars, impostors during the Zündel trial?
34. Schindler's list a tale of fiction?
35. Bruno Baum admitted that false propaganda was created in Auschwitz?
36. Changing camp death tolls?
37. Death camps found only by the Soviets?
38. Rick debunks the Holocaust?
39. 6-digit tattoo but 6 million victims?
40. Cherry-red skin color absent on gassed corpses?
41. Contradictory Holocaust survivor numbers?
42. ADL admitted the Holocaust might be a hoax?
1. Revision of the Auschwitz plaque.
Denier claim:
Further comments: the Communists never claimed that all Auschwitz victims were Jewish; the Soviet Auschwitz report didn't mention this, there was an oblique reference to "not less than 4,000,000 citizens of the USSR, Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, and other countries", but that's it.
Also, history is not written by plaques. A museum plaque is not any kind of an authoritative scholarly study.
While some survivors did accept the exaggerated Soviet figures, most Western historians didn't. The initial hugely exaggerated Soviet death toll was based on alleged cremation capacities supposedly available there, a very unreliable way to calculate anything, something that was recognized by many in the West. The Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß initially also claimed millions of deaths in the camp, but in the end he settled on an estimate of about 1.1 million Jewish deportees, which corresponds to the ballpark figure of about 1 million or so Jewish victims, i.e. what we know today. Notably, in providing this estimate Höß went against the interests of his Polish captors, who were intent on promoting the official Soviet figure of 4 million.
The exaggerated Soviet Auschwitz estimate was never a part of the Jewish death toll estimates arriving at between 5 and 6 million victims, both because it did not denote "4 million Jews" and because such estimates were not arrived at by summing up camp death tolls, but rather by adding death tolls for individual countries/territories.
The claim that the exaggerated Auschwitz death toll was considered "the truth" for 50 years is a lie. It was so considered in the Communist Poland, but even there the literature usually quoted the "2.5-4 million" range. Hilberg's estimate, for example, was 1 million. He was an authoritative Holocaust historian and yet did not accept this as the "truth".
Conclusion: the meme is deceptive and irrelevant.
Further reading: The Auschwitz Gambit: The Four Million Variant.
2. Detached Krema I chimney?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: this is the crematorium 1 in the so-called main camp; during the war the crematorium (including the morgue that served as a gas chamber) was converted into an air-raid shelter (the chimney was removed, of course); after the war the crematorium was restored by the authorities to represent the original state, including the chimney. The attempt was partially symbolic and partially botched. That said, the chimney always looked "detached" because it was connected to the crematorium by underground flues.
Further comments: it is not clear what the argument is supposed to prove. That there was no crematorium there? This is debunked by numerous documents acknowledged by all leading deniers. No leading denier denies that the crematorium with a functioning chimney actually existed there during the war. They only deny its homicidal function. So this meme is doubly deceptive because it goes even against the leading deniers, not to mention proven history. The author of the meme acts as if they're the first person ever to have noticed that the chimney is detached. This sort of argumentation may work on simple, naive rubes but not on someone willing to do some basic research.
Pressac explains about the chimneys of the crematorium before the conversion into an air-raid shelter: "[t]he initial chimney was of circular section, but as the result of damage it was replaced by one of square section. ... Between the furnace room and the chimney there was a shed housing the motor for the collective forced draught installation for the three furnaces" (Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, p. 131).
That is, the chimneys - the unreconstructed ones - had always looked "detached", especially the second one. Because they were connected to the crematorium by the underground flues. (This was due to the standard cremation oven design which allowed for (optional) recuperation of heat of the combustion gases, which were sucked out of the incineration muffle in the downward direction due to chimney draft while giving off the heat to the neighboring ducts with the combustion air streaming upwards, into the incineration chamber.)
Here's a German wartime plan of the crematorium (dated 03.08.1942) showing both chimneys: the old one (the taller one) and the new one (doc. 8 in Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz):
Numerous plans show the "detached" chimney and the underground flues, like this one from 25.09.1941:
As a side note: there were relatively few gassings in Auschwitz I as opposed to Birkenau (Auschwitz II), it is unlikely that the number of the people gassed in this small gas chamber exceeded 10000, so the "non-stop" comment, if it has ever been uttered, must have referred to the Birkenau crematoria, not to this Krema that played a truly secondary role in the Auschwitz Holocaust.
Further reading: Pressac's Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers, pp. 132, 133.
3. Flimsy wooden gas chamber door with a window?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: it was not a gas chamber door, so all the arguments comparing it to the "real" gas chamber doors are irrelevant.
Further comments: first of all, some quick historical context. This small gas chamber was adapted from a morgue in the crematorium I of the main camp in late 1941. The gassings here were rare and occasional, it's unlikely that more than 10000 people were gassed in this chamber in total, the main killings took place in Birkenau since early 1942.
As already explained above, crematorium I was converted into an air-raid shelter by the Nazis in late 1944 (to repeat, the killings at that time took place in Birkenau and in late 1944 were coming to an end anyway). The main modifications were documented by the Nazis themselves, so we know that the morgue/gas chamber was divided into 4 smaller rooms. After the war the authorities tried to reconstruct the original look of the crematorium but botched the job in several ways. The most important mistake was knocking down one wall too many: as they were removing the recently installed air-raid shelter walls of the small inner rooms, they also removed the wall between the morgue and the former washroom (hence the visible toilet drains, which originally were in the washroom).
The door with a window (or a missing upper panel) is the door to the washroom, not to the morgue/gas chamber.
This, by the way, is clearly indicated in the modern on-site diagrams showing both the present state and the pre-air-raid-shelter state.
 |
| Photo credit: "Le Monde1" @flickr |
A little bit of reading about the basics goes a long way.
The above applies also to the other door in that gas chamber as seen today. The tiny vestibule was added in 1944 to serve as an airlock for a newly added air-raid shelter entrance. Thus two new doors were added (entrance door and airlock door), which had not existed before that.
To repeat, originally there were only two doors in the original gas chamber - the door in the no longer existent wall between the washroom and the gas chamber and the door between the gas chamber and the furnace room.
Deniers sometimes point to the opening between the furnace room and the gas chamber, claiming there was never a door there. However even a normal morgue would have to have a doorway to the furnaces, and that doorway would have to have a door. And indeed, it existed according to the original documentation.
But that original door opening between the furnace room and the gas chamber was also sealed by the Nazis during the conversion into an air-raid shelter, and everything said above also applies to it. The current opening is simply not the original. In fact, if you look at the diagram above, it was reopened in the wrong place, and the original doorway is still sealed.
 |
| Based on a photo of "Le Monde1" @flickr |
The deniers make an assumption that the swinging door on the April 1942 plan was not a mistake. But it's clear that such plans did contain mistakes. Let's compare the April 1942 plan (left) with the with the November 1940 plan (right):
Notice the differences in the door locations and the way they open. It's very unlikely most of those were actual changes since they served no purpose (except for the opening direction of the door between the washroom and the gas chamber - the door had to open outwards indeed, so that the corpses would not have blocked it, so it's a very telling change - but also note the alleged change in the location), therefore one or both of the plans contain mistakes. That originally there was a swinging door there is a fact, but it's not a given that it wasn't replaced with a normal gas-tight door in late 1941, despite a later plan showing it, the draftsman quite possibly simply having copied it from an older plan.
Further evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from a 1944 plan of the crematorium turned into an air-raid shelter:
You will notice that the same swinging door is drawn here. Problem? There was no longer a door or even a door opening there! That's something even the deniers are forced to admit (e.g. Rudolf in Lectures on the Holocaust, 2005, p. 255: "But this door and the wall opening belonging to it were removed during the conversion of this building to an air raid shelter, so the floor plan in Ill. 72 is faulty in this regard"; the above illustration is taken from this book). So the deniers know that this very door was mindlessly copied by a draftsman from an old plan in 1944, when it not only no longer existed but also contradicted the very purpose of the air-raid shelter rooms to be gas-tight, yet they still insist that the April 1942 plan is absolutely correct in this regard! This is simply irrational.
What doors were actually used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz? The same as for the delousing chambers, i.e. the gas-tight ones. Notably, the delousing chambers in Auschwitz used wooden doors made gas-tight by felt stripes. Here is one such wooden gas-tight door in the delousing gas chamber of Block 1 in the main camp:
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| Source. |
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| Source. |
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| Source. |
The chambers should be kept as narrow as possible in order to ensure a sufficiently safe and gas-tight construction for the doors provided at both ends, also those made of wood; if possible, the doors should also have steel frames and the sealing surface (rubber profile or elastic felt strip) should rest on them. In addition to the suitability of the fumigation equipment, the tightness of these doors is of course a decisive factor for successful killing.For the delousing chamber in the concentration camp Flossenbürg we have the following cost estimate from 12.04.1940 (F. Freund, B. Perz, K. Stuhlpfarrer, "Historische Überreste von Tötungseinrichtungen im KZ Mauthausen", Zeitgeschichte, 1995, vol. 22, issue 9/10, p. 310):
Manufacture and delivery of double-walled wooden doors for gas chamber with sealing edge and closure on all sides as well as frames and thermometers incl. fittings [...] Puttying and painting with protective paint twice of wooden doors for gas chamber, dimensions from pos. 60.Point made. The usual denier claim that wooden doors somehow cannot be made gas-tight is debunked by the brute fact of the delousing gas chambers having used such wooden doors (for gassings of likely higher HCN concentrations and longer durations). And no, the other argument, that such a door cannot withstand the crowd pressure, doesn't hold water.
Among the mentions of the gas-tight doors for the homicidal gas chambers in the Auschwitz documentation perhaps the most curious is the following one, in the 31.03.1943 letter from Karl Bischoff to DAW (see van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, pp. 314, 315), talking about the morgues no. 1 in crematoria 2 and 3 in Birkenau, the same rooms the witnesses described as homicidal gas chambers:
At this occasion we remind you of another order of March 6, 1943 for delivery of a gasdoor [Gastür] 100/192 for morgue 1 of crematorium 3, Bw 30 a, which must be equipped exactly in the form and size of the basement door of crematorium 2, located opposite, to be made with a spy-hole of double 8 mm glass with a rubber seal and metal fitting. This order must be considered as very urgent.
Not only were the doors to the gas chambers gas-tight, but also note that although the order was "very urgent", Bischoff specified that a "spy-hole of double 8 mm glass" was to be installed in the door in a gas-tight manner. While peepholes can often be found in the delousing chamber doors (and this was not designated as a delousing chamber but as a morgue), they are not necessary there, so why make such an urgent order more difficult?
The document most probably referred to a sturdy gas-tight door of this type:
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| Source. | Source. |
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| Source. |
Further reading:
Hans Metzner on the gas chamber doors and the crowd pressure.
4. Leuchter's report.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: Leuchter has been debunked numerous times over the years, including by other deniers. It will suffice to read the following:
Nizkor on Leuchter
Harry Mazal, "A Documented Analysis of the Speech given by Fred A. Leuchter on November 10, 1991".
Richard Green (PhD in chemistry), "Leuchter, Rudolf and the Iron Blues".
Robert Jan van Pelt on the Leuchter report.
Further comments: Leuchter is so outdated even by the denier standards that it's always weird to see him brought up on twitter as if he still had any relevance. I mean, I could at least understand the deniers relying on Germar Rudolf, an updated version of Leuchter (though as thoroughly refuted as Leuchter). But it seems that most of them are stuck in the 1980s.
Contrary to some denier suggestions, Leuchter has not constructed a single gas chamber in his life. He claimed to have been tasked with designing a replacement gas chamber in Missouri, but even if the project was real, it never came to fruition. In fact, he both lacked the necessary expertise and was accused of underhanded business tactics.
His report is full of fraudulent assertions. One small example will suffice, his claim about the Kremas 2 and 3:
The investigated areas were the alleged gas chambers designated as morgue #1 on both drawings ... there was no ventilation...Whereas the intake and exhaust ventilation systems are amply documented for the morgues #1 in Krema 2 and 3.
On the basis of this assertion Leuchter claimed that each of those gas chambers had to be naturally ventilated at least for a week after each gassing! This alone disqualifies his non-existent "expertise".
Even worse, in a leaflet summarizing the results of his "investigations" Leuchter wrote:
Categorically, none of the facilities examined at Auschwitz, Birkenau or Lublin (Majdanek) could have supported, or in fact did support, multiple executions utilizing hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide or any other allegedly or factually lethal gas. Based upon very generous maximum usage rates for all the alleged gas chambers, totalling 1,693 persons per week, and assuming these facilities could support gas executions, it would have required sixty-eight (68) years to execute the alleged number of six millions of persons. This must mean the Third Reich was in existence for some seventy-five (75) years.Since it is not claimed that a) six million Jewish victims were gassed (and gassed specifically at Auschwitz and Majdanek), b) that six million Jewish victims were incinerated in crematoria, Leuchter erected a monstrous, ridiculous strawman in order to knock it down.
[...]
Of equal importance are Exterminationist errors relating to the crematories. If these crematories, operated at a theoretical rate of maximum output per day, without any down time and at a constant pace (an impossible situation), and we accept the figure of at least six million executed, the Third Reich lasted for at least forty-two (42) years, since it would take thirty-five (35) years at an impossible minimum to cremate these six million souls.
Clearly, then, he's a fraud.
As it happens, some deniers also didn't fall for Leuchter's deceptive claims.
The hardcore Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi antisemite Robert Frenz, of FAEM infamy, who also happened to be a professional chemist, left nothing of Leuchter's arguments in Liberty Bell, Feb. 1993, pp. 32ff. To quote a small part:
The latest Journal of Historical Review, Winter 92-93 has been "Leuchterized". Fred Leuchter was the fellow who left occupied America to visit occupied Poland. While there, he stole some Polish property in the form of bricks, mortar, dust, roach droppings and such, and brought them home as souvenirs of Auschwitz. Fred then rushed the samples to a laboratory for an analysis of the "cyanide" content. By the beard of the Holocaust, the findings were blown into a gigantic whoopee. Lotsa cyanide in some bricks. Notta lotsa cyanide in other bricks. Conclusion: No one died from being "gassed" at Auschwitz. Ain't science grand - and simple? Imagine visiting kitchen "A" and finding spaghetti sauce all over the walls. Following that, you visit kitchen "B" and find no spaghetti sauce on the walls. Would you conclude that there were no spaghetti suppers in kitchen "B"? A revisionist would.Frenz hit the nail on the head with most points. Delousing chambers and homicidal chambers differed in the frequency of use, duration of the gassings, the necessary goal concentrations and the operational procedures (in the homicidal gas chambers the walls got washed after gassings). HCN does evaporate quickly enough below the boiling point, and so on.
[...]
I mentioned the above for a good reason. From what I have read in Mr. Leuchter's report, I would never get too excited until I had some other questions answered. Were the chemical compositions of the pieces of stone identical? Did the "gas chambers" have the identical building material as the "disinfection chambers" (disinfestation chambers)? Are you sure that the wall the samples came from were the identical walls which existed in 1944? Were the time, temperatures, humidity, light and hydrogen cyanide concentrations identical in both sites. In other words, were the fumigation chambers and the "extermination" chambers identically used? If not, then how can you make such a definitive conclusion, Fred? Did enthusiasm cloud your reason?
[...]
The boiling point of hydrogen cyanide is 78 degrees Fahrenheit - right out of a book. The poo-plah about this or that because HCN (gas) would condense below this temperature occurs in most of the revisionist twaddle in an attempt to "prove" that "gassing" was impossible without heat and a full moon. (Are American gas chambers heated?) If these people would "get a life" they would soon learn that a little knowledge is dangerous. Water boils (change of state - liquid to gas) at 212 degrees. Below this temperature, if Mr. Grubach's view of the earth is valid, there shouldn't be any water in the atmosphere. Ever hear of humidity? If your body temperature is normal, your lungs are full of water vapor (gas) which is not itching to condense anywhere or at anytime even though it exists as a gas below the boiling point. Water remains as a gas, when evaporated, and never condenses until the "dew point" is reached and then, only a fraction of it. Hydrogen cyanide gas also has its own dew point and that is why Mr. Leuchter's surmise is all gas.
[...]
It's too bad that Mr. Grubach (follower) and Mr. Leuchter (the leader) never got into the blueprint business. They'd soon discover (hopefully) that in the formation of Prussian blue, the blue is initially a quite stable SOLUBLE substance. (The precipitate is not technically "soluble" but is actually an easily dispersed colloid.) In this state, one can rinse the substance away. In the blueprint section of Taylor-Sybron, excess Prussian blue, on week-old prints, was bleached away, as a matter of course, with nothing more sophisticated than a 4 to 10 percent solution of washing soda (sodium carbonate). (Perhaps Nazi chemicals operate with a different set of rules.) Hydrated chromous oxide, and countless other insolubles, also exhibit the same property. Since the "gassing" took place with all of that sweating, urinating, and vomiting within a chamber that was already damp, one could easily develop a scenario by which the lack of accumulated Auschwitz blue could be legitimately explained. [...] During a clothes fumigation process the articles are never fumigated in a wet state. Therefore, this chamber would have "unused" HCN all over the place. When gassing people, the great quantities of moisture present on and in the bodies would absorb large quantities of HCN leaving a lesser amount to react with whatever hematite, siderite or magnetite that was present in the stone walls. Hydrogen cyanide has a very strong attraction to water. It dissolves in all proportions which leads to the strange term "infinitely soluble".
[...]
If the walls were such that Prussian blue could be formed, then the walls of the chamber containing the cloth would be more blue. Another question which should be answered is in regard to the frequency. Where the "gas" chambers used to the same extent as the fumigation chambers? Also, if the disinfestation chambers were indeed warmer than the "execution" chambers, then another reason is found for the evidence of a greater concentration of reaction products (blue stuff).
Mr. Leuchter is also strung out on this 78 degree temperature bit. To Fred, hydrogen cyanide would be condensing all over the place. Not so. (How's your dew point?) Under the temperatures and pressures being considered, the hydrogen cyanide molecule has a greater affinity for the water molecule than it does for its own kind. It is a molecular race-mixer. This means that hydrocyanic acid would be formed in preference to the liquid hydrogen cyanide because water is not exactly rare. Moreover, every fumigator knows that it takes very much higher concentrations of HCN to kill fleas than it does people. Here again we have another reason (if you need one) for one chamber having bluer walls than another. Higher concentrations of HCN are needed to kill fleas, bedbugs (they need a lot of gassing!) and lice than would be necessary for human beings or Bushbunnies. So there. My blue is bluer than your blue. Mr. Leuchter also overlooks the fact that crowded rooms get very warm. People are actually radiant heaters and so are the cows which heat up cow barns. Revisionists spend too much time in isolation to know this.
[...]
The problem with all revisionists is that while they CLAIM to be scientific, they fail to ACT in a scientific manner.
Frenz continued his attack in the April issue, pp. 22ff, listing many specific mistakes and contradictions, and pointing out that "internally, the LR has many serious flaws which tend to diminish its technical acceptability", "the LR has been called a "forensic" report, that is, admissible in a debate or court of law which adheres to some set of pre-established rules. In courts of law, evidence obtained illegally (rule breaking) is not admitted", "the LR is full of mind-boggling roa poo", "the LR report is full of foolish material which could be used as grist for a "refuter's" mill" and "the LR contains so many internal contradictions that outside help isn't really necessary".
Relatively recently the leading Holocaust denial publisher Germar Rudolf gathered all the "Leuchter reports" together and published them as a "critical edition". He wanted to create an air of objectivity, which is why he added his own critical footnotes to Fred Leuchter's text in which he often points out Leuchter's false statements. I will post a few of them here to show how low the quality of Leuchter's "expertise" was. Remember: main text is from the denier Leuchter, footnote is from the denier Rudolf.
(See here for the refutation of the swinging door argument.)
(See here on the actual capacities.)
Further reading (in addition to the sources listed in the short debunking):
Expert report of Dr. Richard J. Green.
5. Alleged lies by the British government.
Denier claim:
While the letter calls for spreading atrocity propaganda to distract from the Red Army atrocities, nowhere in the letter it is claimed or hinted at that such propaganda would be based on lies or invented from whole cloth.
Since historians don't rely on the Ministry's propaganda, this whole document is irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust. Moreover, the letter is relatively late, the big picture of the Nazi atrocities had already been known by that time.
Further reading: for some general historical context it is useful to read this part of van Pelt's report.
6. The First Holocaust canard.
Denier claim:
Further comments: the whole argument, if there is one, is incoherent. The established death toll of between 5 and 6 million Jews is based on demographic data which is not dependent on what can or cannot be found in the newspapers. Not to mention that the whole argument is based on cherrypicking. The deniers search for "holocaust" and "six million" and sure enough, find some mentions.
What happens when we search for "five million" in the same time frame?
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| New-York Tribune, November 11, 1901, p. 2. |
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| New-York Tribune, July 08, 1903, p. 7. |
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| New-York Tribune, April 27, 1906, p. 6. |
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| Daily Capital Journal, April 12, 1912, p. 1. |
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| Arizona Republican, January 02, 1916, p. 8. |
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| The Watchman and Southron, January 26, 1916, p. 2. |
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| Norwich Bulletin, February 20, 1917, p. 1. |
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| Bogalusa Enterprise and American, January 09, 1919, p. 4. |
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| Bisbee Daily Review, June 01, 1919, p. 1. |
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| Evening Star (Wash. DC), June 01, 1919, p. 6. |
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| Great Falls Daily Tribune, June 01, 1919, p. 2. |
And what happens when we search for "three million"?
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| New-York Tribune, February 14, 1915, p. 2. |
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| The Washington Herald, September 18, 1915, p. 10. |
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| The Washington Herald, November 15, 1915, p. 2. |
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| Der Deutsche Correspondent, January 31, 1916, p. 4. |
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| Arizona Republican, March 27, 1917, p. 5. |
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| The Lexington Progress, March 30, 1917, p. 1. |
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| The Wheeling Intelligencer, May 15, 1917, p. 14. |
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| The Public Ledger, August 31, 1918, p. 1. |
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| The Bismarck Tribune, October 21, 1918, p. 5. |
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| The West Virginian, October 25, 1918, p. 10. |
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| The West Virginian, October 30, 1918, p. 6. |
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| The West Virginian, October 30, 1918, p. 6. |
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| The Donaldsonville Chief, January 04, 1919, p. 2. |
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| The True Democrat, January 11, 1919, p. 2. |
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| The Central Record, April 10, 1919, Section 2, p. 9. |
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| The Washington Herald, July 15, 1919, p. 8. |
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| The Sun and the New York Herald, February 08, 1920, Section 3, p. 2. |
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| The Butte Daily Bulletin, November 15, 1920, p. 1. |
Well, you get the point. The explanation is simple: the mentions of 5 and 6 million were mostly referring to the Jewish population of the Russian Empire (or its former territories after the Bolshevik revolution, including Poland) which was estimated as... you guessed it, between 5 and 6 million. 3 million referred mostly to the Jewish population of Poland and neighboring territories.
There is no special significance to the "6 million number". Some nutjobs, like the "Birdman Bryant", refer to some alleged mystical Jewish literature (actually relying not on primary sources but on a pseudonymous neo-Nazi) that allegedly says that the Torah predicts 6 million Jews. Even if there is such literature, it's postwar, so those are not predictions but postdictions (like the so-called "Torah Codes"). They therefore don't prove any alleged religious significance of the 6 million number in the pre-war Judaism (not that such a significance would be in any way relevant to the established historical facts).
The use of the word "holocaust" in connection with the Jewish persecution in the early reports is expected, since it was a normal word widely used to describe things both catastrophic and mundane:
"... the loss of population in the holocaust of 1914-1918." (American Historical Review, January 1931, p. 477)Its use in such a context is thus absolutely unsurprising and expected. The conventional meaning referring to the Nazi genocide of Jews became popular only in the 1960s-1970s. So, as before, there is no connection whatsoever and no coherent argument to be made.
"There are women ... whose household labours resounds [with] the constant ringing of crashing china and glasses ... Those glasses that escape the holocaust of housework ..." (Palestine Post, 26 July 1946, p. 8, cols. 1-2)
After all of the above has been said, it is clear that the newspaper clippings in the meme mostly consist of irrelevant filler. 5 articles (June 11th, 1900; Jan 29th, 1905; Mar 25th, 1906; Dec 2nd, 1914; Jul 20th, 1921) refer to the 6 million Jews of the Russian empire, an independent demographic estimate that has nothing to do with the WWII Holocaust. Most mention some form of suffering (hardly surprising) but one is simply a neutral statement that Russia has 6 million Jews.
5 articles mention the word "holocaust" in various contexts (May 16th, 1903; Sept 16th, 1903; June 1st, 1933; May 31st, 1936; Oct 2nd, 1941). As mentioned above, the term was used for any calamity under the Sun. In fact one of the articles refers to a slaughter of Christians(!) by Turks, having nothing to do with Jews. Seems like the meme author didn't even bother to read the clippings.
2 articles (Sept 8th, 1935; Jan 15th, 1939) use the number 6 million in completely neutral, unrelated contexts - once to refer to a meeting of representatives of 18 countries representing 6 million Jews, once to an inability to evacuate 6 million Jews from Europe.
One article is from 1945 and does mention the 6 million number as a Holocaust estimate, but obviously at this time the extent was already known. Another 1945 article estimates the number of the surviving European Jews (apparently not taking the Soviet Jews into account).
The rest of the articles refer to demographic estimates of 6 million Jews for various parts of Europe (Eastern Europe, Central Europe or Europe as a whole - apparently excluding Russia).
So basically the list is a hoax. And so is the whole argument.
Further reading: here is a book in which actual specialists (as opposed to amateur neo-Nazis and proven liars), go country by country and, based on reliable sources, arrive at the Holocaust estimates; that's how real scholarship looks like, not the mind-numbingly stupid nonsense above:
W. Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus.
The articles about the countries, with the authors listed:
Deutsches Reich (Arndt, Ino / Boberach, Heinz)
Österreich (Moser, Jonny)
Luxemburg (Arndt, Ino)
Frankreich und Belgien (Wetzel, Juliane)
Niederlande (Hirschfeld, Gerhard)
Dänemark (Weiß, Hermann)
Norwegen (Mendelsohn, Oskar)
Italien (Picciotto Fargion, Liliana)
Albanien (Grimm, Gerhard)
Griechenland (Fleischer, Hagen)
Bulgarien (Hoppe, Hans-Joachim)
Jugoslawien (Sundhaussen, Holm)
Ungarn (Varga, László)
Tschechoslowakei (Schmidt-Hartmann, Eva)
Rumänien (Zach, Κrista)
Polen (Golczewski, Frank)
Sowjetunion (Röbel, Gert)
Jon Petrie, "The Secular Word "HOLOCAUST": Scholarly Sacralization, Twentieth Century Meanings"
Jamie McCarthy and Ken McVay, "The World War I "Holocaust" Claim".
Short debunking: Auschwitz consisted of numerous sub-camps and served many functions, among them: a POW camp, a labor camp, a detention camp, an extermination camp. There were tens of thousands of non-Jewish inmates in Auschwitz and its sub-camps too, who as a rule were subjected to a different treatment than Jews. And of course there were thousands of SS men who had to be entertained in their free time. Therefore there is no contradiction whatsoever between the camp having facilities the laymen may not associate with an extermination camp and the Holocaust.
Moreover, the Nazi extermination plan was never "let's kill every single Jew immediately". It was killing all Jews eventually. The Jews thought to be permanently unable to work due to sickness or age (in practice it was the majority) were gassed as a rule. But many of them, those able to work, were thought of as a valuable resource for the war economy, especially during the periods of labor shortage. Since every person eventually becomes unfit for work - sooner than later when it's back-breaking slave labor - all Jews were eventually to perish. But until then most Jews that the Nazis deemed "fit for work" could stay in the camp and even visit hospitals if it was thought that they would soon recover.
Moreover, the Nazi extermination plan was never "let's kill every single Jew immediately". It was killing all Jews eventually. The Jews thought to be permanently unable to work due to sickness or age (in practice it was the majority) were gassed as a rule. But many of them, those able to work, were thought of as a valuable resource for the war economy, especially during the periods of labor shortage. Since every person eventually becomes unfit for work - sooner than later when it's back-breaking slave labor - all Jews were eventually to perish. But until then most Jews that the Nazis deemed "fit for work" could stay in the camp and even visit hospitals if it was thought that they would soon recover.
Further comments: once again the leap of logic here is as big, as the argument as a whole is deceptive. Auschwitz consisted of 3 large subcamps lying a few kilometers from each other (Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) and Auschwitz III (Monowitz-Buna), as well as about 50 smaller subcamps. Here's a map showing the extent of the three largest subcamps:
If some event took place in any of those subcamps, it could be said to have taken place "in Auschwitz", but the actual extermination camp was Birkenau. For a relatively short time there were also gassings in the main camp - Auschwitz I - which had a small makeshift gas chamber (currently shown to the tourists) where probably no more than 10000 people were murdered. But the extermination camp proper was Birkenau.
So the denier logic goes: if some innocent activity took place somewhere - anywhere - "in Auschwitz" - e.g. in any of its numerous subcamps, no matter how unrelated to and distant from the direct process of murder, it disproves that extermination took place where claimed. Does that logic make any sort of sense? Obviously not.
So the first question to ask is: where were the events or the facilities situated?
Moreover, Auschwitz obviously wasn't an exclusively Jewish camp, and Jews were treated differently than the other groups. And the thousands of the SS troops also needed recreational facilities and events.
So the second question to ask is: for whom were these facilities and events?
Finally, the mass extermination of Jews in Birkenau began in 1942.
So the third version is to ask: when did the facilities exist/were built or when did the events take place?
Let's take the swimming pool, for example. First of all it was built in 1944 in the main camp Auschwitz I (which was not an extermination site for Jews at that point in time). Second, who even said that when used as a swimming pool, it was for the Jews and not for the non-Jewish prisoners, like Poles and Germans? I'm not even saying that some Jews couldn't use it (it wouldn't contradict the Holocaust in any way), but the deniers claim that a) they could, b) that it somehow contradicts the extermination program. But if they claim a contradiction, maybe they should prove both premises in the first place?
(Note: the "swimming pool's" actual main function was to serve as a firefighting water reservoir, with the diving board added for a secondary use as a swimming pool; on the date of construction see e.g. Rudolf Kauer, Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, 06.07.1964, S. 11723, 11770; on the use as a firefighting reservoir see e.g. the Dejaco-Ertl trial, Eugeniusz Nosal's statement on 09.02.1972 and Erwin Olszowka's statement on 11.02.1972; also note: the deniers claim the Soviets and the Poles were allegedly falsifying things all over Auschwitz; yet the pool is still there... See more on the "pool" here.)
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| Source: USHMM |
So the denier logic goes: if some innocent activity took place somewhere - anywhere - "in Auschwitz" - e.g. in any of its numerous subcamps, no matter how unrelated to and distant from the direct process of murder, it disproves that extermination took place where claimed. Does that logic make any sort of sense? Obviously not.
So the first question to ask is: where were the events or the facilities situated?
Moreover, Auschwitz obviously wasn't an exclusively Jewish camp, and Jews were treated differently than the other groups. And the thousands of the SS troops also needed recreational facilities and events.
So the second question to ask is: for whom were these facilities and events?
Finally, the mass extermination of Jews in Birkenau began in 1942.
So the third version is to ask: when did the facilities exist/were built or when did the events take place?
Let's take the swimming pool, for example. First of all it was built in 1944 in the main camp Auschwitz I (which was not an extermination site for Jews at that point in time). Second, who even said that when used as a swimming pool, it was for the Jews and not for the non-Jewish prisoners, like Poles and Germans? I'm not even saying that some Jews couldn't use it (it wouldn't contradict the Holocaust in any way), but the deniers claim that a) they could, b) that it somehow contradicts the extermination program. But if they claim a contradiction, maybe they should prove both premises in the first place?
(Note: the "swimming pool's" actual main function was to serve as a firefighting water reservoir, with the diving board added for a secondary use as a swimming pool; on the date of construction see e.g. Rudolf Kauer, Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, 06.07.1964, S. 11723, 11770; on the use as a firefighting reservoir see e.g. the Dejaco-Ertl trial, Eugeniusz Nosal's statement on 09.02.1972 and Erwin Olszowka's statement on 11.02.1972; also note: the deniers claim the Soviets and the Poles were allegedly falsifying things all over Auschwitz; yet the pool is still there... See more on the "pool" here.)
There was a brothel in the Auschwitz main camp strictly for the non-Jewish prisoners (and of course with strictly non-Jewish women; "race-mixing").
There was a sports association, as is evidenced by this photo:
As for the fencing competition, the swastika on the flag and the badge worn by the fencer on the right, the presence among the spectators of SS and SA officers, members of the party in uniform and of policemen, show that this is a meeting for “Reichsdeutschen”, exclusively for "sound" elements and no others.Indeed, it was a sports association run by IG Auschwitz/IG Farben in Monowitz (Auschwitz III), quite away from the extermination sites. For example on 23.07.1944 it organized an athletics competition to which "the whole German staff of the construction site" was invited. Lying deniers of course would like people to believe that the sports association was for the prisoners. (It is not the only attempt by the deniers to present images made in Monowitz as if they were representative of Auschwitz as a whole; Pressac commented on such attempts, though he did not know the photos come from Monowitz, specifically from Dürrfeld's defense exhibit 133 at the IG Farben trial; see Dürrfeld's comments on each individual photo on 16.04.1948 in the IG Farben trial transcript, pp. 11619-11634).
Which is not to say that some inmates could not engage in sports (see here for more details).
The library photo on one of the memes is an outright hoax: it's actually a photo of the library in Pforzheim Officer POW Camp in Germany made in 1918:
There were, however, indeed several libraries in the Auschwitz complex. One, in the main camp Aushwitz I, was run by Abteilung VI responsible for the care, training and welfare of the SS troops. In the official camp orders it was called an "SS-Bücherei" (SS library), so it is clear that only the camp personnel could use it.
Another one, a prisoner library in the main camp, was housed in block 24 (alongside the brothel). It contained no more than 1500 items, mostly German-language Nazi propaganda literature and newspapers, as well as some novels. The library was used mainly by the privileged camp functionaries among the inmates, those who could read German, thus mostly Germans or certain Poles. (See T. Seela, Bücher und Bibliotheken in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern: das gedruckte Wort im antifaschistischen Widerstand der Häftlinge,1992, pp. 86-7). Most prisoners of the main camp simply didn't know about the existence of such a library, didn't know the language and had no time for reading (T. Iwaszko, "Kontakt ze światem zewnętrznym" in Auschwitz 1940-1945. Węzłowe zagadnienia z dziejów obozu, vol. II, 1995, p. 320).
In the extermination camp - Auschwitz II Birkenau - it was simply forbidden to read books (Seela, op. cit., p. 87), with one exception: a small library in the Theresienstadt family camp was tolerated. Note that the family camp was privileged for propaganda purposes, a "Potemkin village" of sorts, probably prepared for a possible Red Cross visit (which never took place) - its Jewish inmates did not undergo regular selections and were allowed to stay with the children, who were not gassed. The family camp was not representative of the way of life among the Jewish inmates in Birkenau. (Still, most family camp inmates were eventually gassed.)
There was no library in Auschwitz III Monowitz (Seela, op. cit., p. 88).
The denier Faurisson claimed that the survivor Marc Klein (a professor at a medical faculty in Strasbourg) described “a library where numerous reference works, classic textbooks, and periodicals could be found” in Auschwitz. What Faurisson omitted was that Klein was describing a library belonging to the laboratory in Rajsko (a privileged Auschwitz sub-camp) where he worked as a researcher for some time during his detention:
There was a farm in the sub-camp Babitz, where also the horses were groomed, among many other things, and another farm in the sub-camp Harmense, with ducks, hens, turkeys and angora rabbits. Think for a second: how does that contradict anything?
The so-called "Old Theater" building on one of the memes was built before the camp, as a part of a Polish military barracks yard (S. Steinbacher, "Musterstadt" Auschwitz: Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien, 2000, p. 179n124), and, upon having been overtaken by the Germans, was used both as a place of entertainment for the SS troops (ibid., p. 188) and as a storage depot (where, among other things, Zyklon B cans were stored, see e.g. the statement of Josef Klehr, 06.07.1962, Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, S. 4166). The building is located just outside of the camp fence and thus wasn't readily accessible to the inmates.
The library photo on one of the memes is an outright hoax: it's actually a photo of the library in Pforzheim Officer POW Camp in Germany made in 1918:
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| Source. |
Another one, a prisoner library in the main camp, was housed in block 24 (alongside the brothel). It contained no more than 1500 items, mostly German-language Nazi propaganda literature and newspapers, as well as some novels. The library was used mainly by the privileged camp functionaries among the inmates, those who could read German, thus mostly Germans or certain Poles. (See T. Seela, Bücher und Bibliotheken in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern: das gedruckte Wort im antifaschistischen Widerstand der Häftlinge,1992, pp. 86-7). Most prisoners of the main camp simply didn't know about the existence of such a library, didn't know the language and had no time for reading (T. Iwaszko, "Kontakt ze światem zewnętrznym" in Auschwitz 1940-1945. Węzłowe zagadnienia z dziejów obozu, vol. II, 1995, p. 320).
In the extermination camp - Auschwitz II Birkenau - it was simply forbidden to read books (Seela, op. cit., p. 87), with one exception: a small library in the Theresienstadt family camp was tolerated. Note that the family camp was privileged for propaganda purposes, a "Potemkin village" of sorts, probably prepared for a possible Red Cross visit (which never took place) - its Jewish inmates did not undergo regular selections and were allowed to stay with the children, who were not gassed. The family camp was not representative of the way of life among the Jewish inmates in Birkenau. (Still, most family camp inmates were eventually gassed.)
There was no library in Auschwitz III Monowitz (Seela, op. cit., p. 88).
The denier Faurisson claimed that the survivor Marc Klein (a professor at a medical faculty in Strasbourg) described “a library where numerous reference works, classic textbooks, and periodicals could be found” in Auschwitz. What Faurisson omitted was that Klein was describing a library belonging to the laboratory in Rajsko (a privileged Auschwitz sub-camp) where he worked as a researcher for some time during his detention:
The laboratory had an extensive garden, experimental animal farms, and laboratory supplies. We had at our disposal a library with many reference books, classic textbooks and periodicals.
The Nazis did not spare resources for the research that was useful to them, so, again, there is nothing surprising about this research library at the laboratory. Faurisson simply lied by presenting it as a general camp library.
Klein also mentioned a library in Auschwitz 1 (mentioned above), but it is clear why Faurisson would not cite him on this:
There was a library at Auschwitz I, but it was only accessible to a very few people.
The photo of a greenhouse also comes from Rajsko, where plant breeding research was done in order to study the best methods of production of rubber from kok-saghyz, an important wartime project.
There was a farm in the sub-camp Babitz, where also the horses were groomed, among many other things, and another farm in the sub-camp Harmense, with ducks, hens, turkeys and angora rabbits. Think for a second: how does that contradict anything?
The so-called "Old Theater" building on one of the memes was built before the camp, as a part of a Polish military barracks yard (S. Steinbacher, "Musterstadt" Auschwitz: Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien, 2000, p. 179n124), and, upon having been overtaken by the Germans, was used both as a place of entertainment for the SS troops (ibid., p. 188) and as a storage depot (where, among other things, Zyklon B cans were stored, see e.g. the statement of Josef Klehr, 06.07.1962, Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, S. 4166). The building is located just outside of the camp fence and thus wasn't readily accessible to the inmates.
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| Source. |
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| The Theatergebäude just outside of the camp fence. |
Sometimes the denier liars (like judicial-inc.biz) will deceptively present the footage of some theatrical and other cultural activities as if coming from Auschwitz, even though the propaganda footage was made in Theresienstadt (an officially designated "propaganda camp", not in any way representative of concentration camp system and most of whose inmates were still murdered in the end).
That Theresienstadt was a propaganda camp follows from this Nazi document (Eichmann trial exhibit T/537):
Another German document records Eichmann himself saying in 1942 that deportations of Jews to this ghetto served the function of "saving face before the outside world" (Eichmann trial exhibit T/734).
The Theresienstadt footage is often interspliced with some propaganda footage from the transit camp Westerbork (where some of the "permanent" privileged prisoners - such as the "Jewish council" members - were encouraged to organize "cultural activities", which also served for the entertainment of the camp SS, before the camp was converted into a labor camp and all such activities ceased).
This is obviously not to say that cultural activities did not take place in Auschwitz - as has already been explained above, Auschwitz consisted of a large number of different groups which had different status and privileges, so activities in which some inmates participated don't tell us anything about the prisoner population as a whole (more on cultural activities in Auschwitz see in Z. Jagoda, S. Kłodziński, J. Masłowski, "Życie kulturalne w obozie oświęcimskim", Przegląd Lekarski, 1974, 39(1), pp. 19ff.; for theatrical activities in Auschwitz see E. Kuźma, "Działalność teatralna w KL Auschwitz", Krakowskie Studia Małopolskie, 2002, vol. 6, issue 6, pp. 291-300; for theatrical activities in the Nazi concentration camps see A. Goldfarb, "Theatrical Activities in Nazi Concentration Camps", Performing Arts Journal, 1976, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 3-11; for cultural activities in the Nazi concentration camps see J. Jarowiecki, "Przejawy życia kulturalnego w obozach koncentracyjnych", Rocznik Naukowo-Dydaktyczny, 1982, z. 78 (Prace Bibliotekoznawcze 1), s. 143-168).
The so-called Auschwitz soccer team pictured on the photo was actually none of the sort. Its members were not Auschwitz inmates. They were British POWs from the camp E715, which was administered not by KL Auschwitz but by Stalag VIII-B in Lamsdorf. Very different rules applied to these POWs who, to repeat, were not Auschwitz inmates.
When football matches did take place in Birkenau, well-nourished (and therefore in practice mostly privileged in some way, ) or younger prisoners could indeed take part - it was, after all, a good entertainment for the SS; and there's not much surprising about the fact that football matches were tolerated in the non-extermination sections like the main camp or Monowitz (more on soccer and other sports activities in Auschwitz see H. Langbein, People in Auschwitz, 2004, pp. 130ff.; Z. Ryn, S. Kłodziński "Patologia sportu w obozie koncentracyjnym Oświęcim-Brzezinka", Przegląd Lekarski, 1974, 39(1), pp. 46ff.). More on football, basketball, volleyball and other sports in Auschwitz here.
Whatever the outliers and exceptions, the situation for the average inmate, was described by Dr. Otto Wolken (inmate physician in the camp) during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (Der 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozeß, 27.02.1964, S. 5111):
Chief Judge: May I just ask a question then? Do you think that there could have been even a single inmate with such a diet and state of health in general, who had the desire to do sports?During the existence of Auschwitz only one wedding took place there, the one that the deniers point to as contradicting something, never bothering to explain exactly what; it was the wedding of the Austrian (non-Jewish) resistance fighter and Communist Rudolf Friemel and Margarita Ferrer (A. Lasik, "Struktura organizacyjna KL Auschwitz" in Auschwitz 1940-1945. Węzłowe zagadnienia z dziejów obozu, vol. I, 1995, p. 133). Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein writes in People in Auschwitz, 2004, p. 289:
Witness Otto Wolken: Yes, there were prisoners, the block elders, the kapos, who were well nourished.
Chief Judge [interrupts]: Yes, I do not mean them now.
Witness Otto Wolken: We even had a football field.
Chief Judge: Yes, well, I don't mean them now.
Witness Otto Wolken [interrupts]: Yes, the prisoners - not. No, they were happy if they could stand on their feet.
Rudolf Friemel, a Viennese, fought in the ranks of the international brigades in Spain and married a Spanish woman. There was a civil wedding in accordance with the laws of the Republic. [...] the German authorities also regarded Friemel’s marriage as invalid. For this reason Friemel’s father and his wife tried very hard to enable Rudi Friemel to marry his wife again in accordance with German law, and their petition wound upon Himmler’s desk. Himmler made a positive judgment; the father, the wife, and the little son received permission to travel to Auschwitz, and Rudi was permitted to let his hair grow. On March 18, 1944, he put on civilian clothes and went to the Auschwitz registry, which normally issued only death certificates, and the marriage was contracted in accordance with German law. Because Himmler had personally given permission for this, the camp administration granted Friemel unusual rights. The Identification Service, which took only photos that filled rogues’ galleries, made a real wedding picture, and a room in the camp bordello was placed at the disposal of the couple for one night.Friemel was publicly murdered by hanging in Auschwitz on 30.12.1944 due to him taking part in organizing prisoner escapes.
Deniers take this exceptional marriage well-described in the mainstream literature, deceptively turn it into plural "marriages", and, through some inconceivable twist of "logic", try to show it disproves something about Auschwitz.
The so-called "canteens" in the concentration camps were actually commissaries rather than cafeteria. Here the Nazis could extract even more from their prisoners, whether in "Reichsmarks" (sent by families) or in camp scrip (camp "money"). Here the inmates who had some of that money could buy additional food (e. g. pickled beets, salted snails, salad, mineral water in Auschwitz - the quality, however, was often bad) as well as shaving articles, toothbrushes and toothpaste, camp stationery for writing letters, postage stamps, and other trifles.
The postage stamps and camp stationery could be used for sending mail out of the camps. Such mail was heavily censored and from time to time there were prohibitions or additional restrictions on sending such mail by particular groups (like Jews or Soviet POWs). On the other hand, from time to time there were propaganda letter-writing actions in Auschwitz, in order to convince the outside world that certain prisoners, like Jews, were handled normally there.
There was a dental clinic in the main camp (i. e. not in the mass extermination area) with mostly Polish dentists, described in the literature. The treatment was limited to the essentials: teeth were extracted and filled. Deniers like to post a photo of this clinic from 1941, as if trying maintain the slave workforce productivity was somehow contrary to the Nazi policy.
One could go on and on. But let's even suppose that some of the facilities touted by the deniers were occasionally used by some of the Jewish workers. Where exactly would be the contradiction?
It was after all the Jews permanently unable to work who were as a rule (with very few exceptions) exterminated upon arrival, the rest lived and worked in the camp until they were unable to work (then they were "selected" and killed), and in the meantime could have used some of those facilities (like hospitals) because the Nazis were not against increasing their slaves' work productivity, especially as the war progressed and more slave labor became necessary. Again, not a single of these facilities or activities is inconsistent with the Holocaust. And of course all of them are mentioned by the mainstream sources. Like this mention of the orchestra in Danuta Czech's Auschwitz Chronicle (p. 175):
One could go on and on. But let's even suppose that some of the facilities touted by the deniers were occasionally used by some of the Jewish workers. Where exactly would be the contradiction?
It was after all the Jews permanently unable to work who were as a rule (with very few exceptions) exterminated upon arrival, the rest lived and worked in the camp until they were unable to work (then they were "selected" and killed), and in the meantime could have used some of those facilities (like hospitals) because the Nazis were not against increasing their slaves' work productivity, especially as the war progressed and more slave labor became necessary. Again, not a single of these facilities or activities is inconsistent with the Holocaust. And of course all of them are mentioned by the mainstream sources. Like this mention of the orchestra in Danuta Czech's Auschwitz Chronicle (p. 175):
The famous photo of the orchestra is literally one of the first things that visitors of the Auschwitz main camp see upon entering through the "Arbeit macht frei" gate.
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| The photo of the orchestra on the site of the main camp. |
Those who make arguments of this type are out to deceive unsuspecting people. Like the denier whose tweets come last and show various photos he attributes to Auschwitz. Some are from Auschwitz (like the first swimming pool photos or the dentist photo discussed above), but many are simply unrelated, like:
- a 1930 photo from Hungary;
- a 1936 photo from Croatia;
- a swimming pool photo from Novaky forced labor camp in Slovakia, which was not run by the Nazis in the first place and where, as Yad Vashem notes, the conditions "were not bad: food rations were adequate, the prisoners ran their own school, medical clinics, and welfare institutions, and cultural activities such as drama, religious studies, and sports were allowed. In fact, the camp even had a swimming pool" (the neo-Nazi misuse of the Novaky photo was debunked at length by Reuters);
- a photo from the 1920s or 1930s showing toddlers in a Jewish home for abandoned children in Warsaw;
- a photo of former Dachau prisoners celebrating their liberation;
- a still with a football game from a propaganda film about Theresienstadt, as analyzed above.
PS: the "fake chimney" argument in one of the tweets is debunked here.
Further reading:
Debunking of the video "Jews tell the truth about the Holocaust" (an excerpt from Eric Hunt's film).
Short debunking: It was both. See the previous item. There is documentary evidence for mass killings of Jews in Auschwitz. And all other kinds of evidence.
Short debunking: World Almanac was a non-academic, general-purpose reference book and thus not a reliable source of demographic data. The data cited by the deniers either refers to the 1939 population estimates or is unsourced and actually comes from the statistics dated 1937 or earlier and is thus completely useless.
Further comments: it may come as a surprise to the people not acquainted with the historiographical methodology, but popular sources like general-purpose encyclopedias and almanacs are usually not considered reliable sources for writing history. The World Almanac and Book of Facts is not an exception. It's just a compendium of numerous bits of information of differing reliability each of which needs to be analyzed before being taken seriously. (It was also not a "Jewish publication", contrary to some denier claims.)
Indeed, the deniers would have to agree with this because in the relevant time-frame the World Almanac used the American Jewish Congress' demographic data, which the deniers would surely reject. Notably, up to and including 1948 these AJC stats are explicitly stated to be estimates for 1939 (e.g. 15,688,259 is given for 1939 in 1945-48) - this is sometimes misrepresented, including by the twitter user cited above, as the AJC admitting to there having been no Holocaust.
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| World Almanac in 1948. |
The problem is that the almanac never stated its source for these estimates, without which they are a priori totally useless.
Indeed, turns out that they were at least partially cribbed from the ... 1937 (or earlier) data! On p. 362 of The Lutheran World Almanac and Encyclopedia 1934-1937 we see the following (we thank our reader Jiří Fojtík for pointing this out):
Note that a huge chunk of the statistical data was simply taken over without change either from this other almanac (directly or through some other source, like National Almanac and Year Book for 1938, which references the Lutheran almanac) or from a source common to them both, and not only for Jews either, as the graphic below shows for several data points (a comparison between the 1948 World Almanac and the 1937 Lutheran Almanac).
In fact, on p. 849 in the 1942 edition of the World Almanac we see the actual unchanged table from the Lutheran Almanac, with a lower overall number of Jews (15,192,089; also see p. 231 in 1943, p. 470 in 1944, p. 367 in 1945).
Most importantly the number of the European Jews (9,372,666) was repeated throughout without any changes whatsoever.
That some other numbers were updated after 1945 is of little consequence - the whole methodology of the World Almanac (cribbing from an outdated source, then, later, updating several numbers while leaving key outdated numbers intact, and never providing sources) was askew.
The "scholarship" of the almanac was in fact so bad, that in 1949 it reprinted the table on p. 289, even correcting the arithmetic mistake repeated for 3 years (now the sum is 15,713,638), but on p. 202 it provided the fresh estimate of the American Jewish Committee for 1947, which was ... 11,266,600. As they say, when you publish statistics, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
Earlier this article stated: "Most probably they were purely hypothetical calculations made in absence of new censuses, based on pre-war data, failing to take into account the changed demographic situation. Using this to "disprove" the Holocaust is like using a Wikipedia article full of [citation needed] to "disprove" quantum mechanics."
This conclusion still holds after the likely original source of the useless, outdated stats has been established. The denier methodology is hereby laid bare.
Another example of how reliance on non-scholarly encyclopedias can lead astray: a video is going around showing a guy showing an entry on Jews from the 1908 edition of the Chambers's encyclopaedia: a dictionary of universal knowledge.
The text says that in 1908 there were about just 8 million Jews around the world.
Fake news is not a modern invention.
Another example of poor scholarship in an encyclopedia would be the famous Britannica.
As mentioned above, the actual demographic research based on a careful analysis of many sources shows between 5 and 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazi policies, see W. Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus.
As mentioned above, the actual demographic research based on a careful analysis of many sources shows between 5 and 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazi policies, see W. Benz (ed.), Dimension des Völkermords. Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus.
Further reading: William Daffer's analysis.
Short debunking: no Red Cross records with total camp death tolls exist; the numbers in the deniers' memes are absolutely consistent with the Holocaust since they do not purport to be the total camp or Nazi victim death tolls in the first place nor do they stem from the wartime activities of the Red Cross. Rather, they're numbers of postwar death certificates (such as those issued on request of the few surviving relatives).
Further comments: this one counts as a pretty brazen lie. After all the document refers only to the "beurkundeten Sterbefälle" - i.e. "certified death cases".
Even if one were to assume that those are death tolls of registered inmates in the camps, the letter is still useless for the deniers since most Holocaust victims (and hence also their deaths) have never been claimed to have been registered in the camps (most were murdered before any camp registration took place). Literally, most of the camps' victims were not registered as camp inmates. That's basic history.
So there would be no contradiction on the above assumption: those would be the numbers of the dead inmates, which would constitute a small part of all the camp victims, not to mention that the camp victims constitute only a portion of all the Holocaust victims.
But the phrase "certified death cases" does not even refer to all the registered inmates, it refers to something else, more on that in a moment.
Sometimes another document is also posted by the deniers as "evidence":
It stems from the same agency that issue the same document and explicitly says in German:
The certification numbers of the Special Registry Office do not allow for any conclusions about the actual numbers of the dead in the concentration camps.What could be clearer?
The third document, once again from the same agency, is more rare (it's from G. Menuhin's book Tell the truth and shame the Devil, 2nd. edn., 2016, p. 19):
The numbers however don't say anything about the actual death cases in the concentration camps.There is yet another similar data set clearly from the same series published by the denier Germar Rudolf in the form of a table in Dissecting the Holocaust, 2nd edn., 2003, p. 212 (he did not publish the original document):
The underlying documents are authentic, but contrary to the deniers they do not stem from the Red Cross.
The English words that appear, in a different font, on the image of the first German document (as appearing in a denier tweet above) were obviously added by whoever published it (the Germans did not call their country "West Germany", for one).
Whether intentional or not, but adding the words "From: International Red Cross..." objectively made this a fake image, since the average person is likely to assume that the words are a part of the original document.
This point is all the more relevant since the denier publisher of this document fraudulently translated the word "Anzahl" (number, quantity, count, tally) as "Total Deaths", thus completely falsifying the meaning of the numbers, which do not purport to contain any "total deaths".
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The Red Cross never had an access to the official camp stats during the war. Nor has it ever attempted to gather such stats. It was simply outside of the scope of its activities. The Red Cross said so itself in the numerous statements it issued throughout the years to address the denier misrepresentations, see for example "Red cross exposure of “false propaganda”", Patterns of Prejudice, 1978, vol. 12, issue 2, p. 11:
Consequently the ICRC considers it must make clear the fact that it has never published -- or even compiled - statistics of this kind which are being falsely attributed to it. The work of the ICRC is to help war victims, not to count them. In any case, how could its delegates have obtained data for such statistics? They were able to enter only a few concentration camps, and then only in the final days of the war. [...]ICRC letter from 22.08.1975 (published in facsimile in A. Suzman, D. Diamond, Six million did die: the truth shall prevail, 1978, p. 10):
The same propaganda scheme has recently been making use of other figures, namely the number of deaths recorded by the International Tracing Service on the basis of documents found when the camps were closed. Obviously this number bears no relation - though the authors of the propaganda pretend otherwise - to the total deaths in concentration camps; firstly because a considerable quantity of documentary material was destroyed before the departure of the Nazi administration, and secondly because many deaths were never recorded, such as those which occurred in the extermination camps where records were generally not kept.
The figures cited by the author of the booklet are based upon statistics falsely attributed to us, evidently for the purpose of giving them credibility, despite the fact that that we never publish information of this kind. The main purpose of our institution is to help the victims of armed conflicts and not to act as an investigatory agency nor as a statistical bureau.ICRC letter from 10.05.1979:
Unfortunately, we are not able to provide you with the figures you are seeking, since the ICRC has never tried to compile statistics on the victims of the war and has never certified the accuracy of the statistics produced by a third party. In fact, the basic aim of the ICRC is to come to the aid of victims of armed conflicts and not to act as a commission of enquiry or a statistics service.As already emphasized above, the Red Cross did not have access to all the camps:
On 27 September 1944, Dr Rossel went to Auschwitz. There he spoke to the commander of the camp, but he was not authorized to go inside it.
The documents clearly state that they originate with a German government institution, the Special Registry Office (we'll call it SRO in this article) in Bad Arolsen (Sonderstandesamt Arolsen), since only such an official institution (a Standesamt) can lawfully issue death certificates in Germany. Indeed, the Sonderstandesamt Arolsen is, as of this writing, the only German office that may issue death certificates for the victims of the concentration camps (Personenstandsgesetz, §38, Abs. 1).
Moreover, the aim of the ITS and the SRO has never been to compile the complete mortality statistics for the camps. The numbers in the reports actually represent the numbers of people for whom the death certificates were issued by the SRO, as issuing such certificates is the SRO's raison d'être. The procedure was explained by the ITS director Charles Biedermann during one of the Zündel trials (as summarized by the denial-friendly Barbara Kulaszka):The Special Registry Office was an agency of the Federal Republic of Germany, responsible directly to the Ministry of the Interior of the Province of Hesse and whose mandate was to certify deaths which occurred in concentration camps. (10 2407) The Special Registry Office consisted of two divisions: the preliminary investigation registry and the regular registry. The ICRC and the Special Registry Office were two separate institutions. (11-2498)
If dependents of former persecutees who had died during the war requested a death certificate, the ICRC passed the request together with any evidence it had concerning the individual to the Special Registry Office. Such death certificates were required in order to make restitution or pension claims. (11-2498, 2499) The latter organization decided whether the information was sufficient to certify a death. (10-2407, 2408)
Biedermann confirmed that as of December 31, 1983, the total number of deaths registered with the Special Registry Office and various other registry offices was 373,468. (11-2515) This figure represented death certificates issued pursuant to received applications and was based, with respect to the Special Registry Office, on camp records kept by the Nazis during the war. (11-2516, 2517)
[...] He pointed out, however, that these figures resulted from applications. If an entire family had died, there was no one to make an application for a death certificate. Secondly, the ITS had complete documentation for only two of the twenty-two concentration camps. For the remainder, it had either partial or no documentation. Therefore, if an application was made for a person who had allegedly died in one of these camps, the ITS would not have the records to justify a request to the Special Registry Office for a death certificate. (12-2647)This means that the data cannot be complete because, first of all, many documents simply did not survive. Second, because the data does not represent an attempt to count all the deaths but rather represents the number of the death certificates which depended on the number of applications.
The ITS director Albert de Cocatrix explained in 1977 that the following categories are not included in the SRO data:
(A) Death cases in extermination camps. The persons destined for destruction were brought into the gas chambers without registration. The same applies to the Jews deported to Auschwitz, who were destined for the gas chambers after the "selection".That the data is not complete is also evident to anyone not ignorant of the basic facts about the camp death toll statistics. For example, the death books of Auschwitz (which only contain the deaths of registered inmates and which are very incomplete, we have them only for 27.07.1941-31.12.1943) contain 68864 entries, more than the numbers given in all the documents. For Majdanek the leading deniers Mattogno and Graf concede that "[m]ore than 40,000 Majdanek inmates died, primarily from disease, debilitation and malnutrition; an unknown number was executed". Whereas the SRO documents have around 7000 deaths (or more accurately, death certificates issued by the SRO).
(B) Death cases in part before or shortly after the liberation.
(C) Deaths in concentration camps for which no documents are available at the ITS.
(D) Deaths of persons transferred to the concentration camps for execution.
And of course the pure extermination camps like Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Kulmhof are not even on the list.
Finally note the progression of the summary numbers:
1979: 271,301Obviously, the number of the registered concentration camp deaths did not grow with time; the number of the postwar certificates did, as families were still applying for such certificates.
1980: 273,905
1984: 282,077
1993: 296,081
To sum up, we basically have 4 sets of numbers.
Set A: complete death toll for all Nazi camps.A >>>>>> B > C > D.
Set B: complete death toll for all registered inmates of the Nazi camps.
Set C: incomplete death toll for all registered inmates based on partial surviving documentation.
Set D: the number of death certificates which depended on the number of submitted applications which could be confirmed through set C.
Set D (the information in the SRO documents) cannot tell us anything about set A (the total death toll in the camps).
Also keep in mind that a huge proportion of the Holocaust victims were murdered outside of any camps (mostly through mass shootings), which is another reason why the meme doesn't make any sense.
Despite such obvious falsity of the claim it remains one of the more popular denial memes. E.g. the loony James Fetzer cited the alleged stats as one of the reasons for why he now thinks the Holocaust was a hoax.
But all it shows is that the Holocaust denial is a big lie.
PS: anti-deniers sometimes claim, as a rebuttal, that the numbers in the documents refer only to German citizens (incl. Jews); this is false and is based on a confusion caused by another denier argument. The denier David Hoggan lied in his book The Myth of the Six Million:
... only 300,000 of all persecuted groups, many of whom were not Jews, died from all causes during the war. This figure of 300,000 stands out in marked contrast with the 5,012,000 Jews estimated by the Jewish joint Distribution Committee to have lost their lives during the war, mainly through extermination by National Socialists.Hoggan's figures come from the newspaper Die Tat (19.01.1955) and not only does the article not refer to the Red Cross, the number 300,000 only refers to the German citizens.
Hence it's an unrelated argument. Indeed, the SRO's registers are available online and one look into them shows they contain death records for numerous citizens of different European countries.
11. The Red Cross inspected the death camps?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the Red Cross did not inspect the extermination camps. It was not allowed to inspect Auschwitz. The "Red Cross stats" meme has already been debunked above.
Further comments: the Red Cross obviously never visited the pure extermination camps like Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor or Kulmhof (which were not even concentration camps).
In its official report the ICRC states very explicitly that they were not allowed to visit all the camps:
It should be stressed that the powers of the ICRC for help and protection could not be extended to all concentration camps; there were numerous camps and labour detachments of which they had no knowledge, or to which they were denied access until the end of hostilities. [Report Of The International Committee Of The Red Cross On Its Activities During The Second World War (September 1, 1939 - June 30, 1947), vol. 1, p. 625]
Whereas other camps exclusively reserved for Jews were not open to inspections for humanitarian purposes until the end, the Committee's activities were at least effective in several concentration camps containing a minority proportion of Jews. [ibid., p. 643]In fact the ICRC complained about the lack of an access already during the war, as can be seen from the letter of 21.07.1943 (USHMM, Days of remembrance, April 18-25, 1993..., p. 267):
You will see from the enclosed that it is, unfortunately, extremely difficult for the International Red Cross Committee to help the Jewish population in Germany and the occupied countries. As we have written to you before, the German authorities do not consider the civilians who are arrested in occupied countries, including France, as civilian internees, thereby excluding them from the application (by analogy) of The Geneva Convention regarding Prisoners of War. The International Red Cross Committee's field of action, unfortunately, does not include this large category, known as "detained civilians".Thus, when the Red Cross representative Maurice Rossel tried to visit Auschwitz (Auschwitz I, not Auschwitz II Birkenau where the actual extermination camp was), all he was allowed to do is talk to the commandant for about half an hour. This is described in detail in the very ICRC report which the meme calls "document #9925" and which is, of course, fully distorted in the tweet.
Inasmuch as it is impossible for the International Committee to visit the camps where these people are interned, the Committee is not in a position to check on the distribution of relief supplies. For this reason these concentration camps are not included in the category of internment camps to which the Blockade authorities allow relief supplies from overseas to be sent. Furthermore, the International Red Cross Committee does not receive any lists of the names of the Detained Civilians.
The report is dated 29.09.1944 - not "June, 1946". The report does not contain any results of interrogating detainees after the war (obviously). Rather it contains the story of the aforementioned failed visit to Auschwitz. After describing how instead of being allowed to inspect the camp he could only talk to the commandant (who, according to Rossel's later reminiscences, told him: "No, these are internees, you have no right to see whatever. But if you would like to send help to the infirmary, or medications, you can do that"), the ICRC delegate described a talk which he had had with a British POW in Teschen (Cieszyn, more than 50 km away from Auschwitz):
That's where the quote in the meme comes from. Rossel spoke to a British POW far away from Auschwitz who told him about his less than fruitful attempts to establish facts. Another dud. Another denier lie.Spontaneously, the British main man of confidence in Teschen asked us if we knew about the 'shower room'. It is rumored that there is a very modern shower room in the camp, where the detainees would be gassed in series. The British man of confidence, through his Auschwitz Kommando, tried to obtain confirmation of this fact. It was impossible to prove anything. The protective custody prisoners themselves have not talked about it.Once again, coming out of Auschwitz we have the impression that the mystery remains well guarded.
Assuming there was an indirect attempt to talk to the inmates on the part of this British POW through his "Auschwitz Kommando" - i.e. a group of British POWs working in a mine in one of Auschwitz subcamps, the reluctance of the inmates to talk about this to the outsiders is easily explained. For example, Fiszel Szpiro (Auschwitz inmate no. 157291), who worked in commando 178 at Monowitz, was flogged 10 times for telling his civilian supervisor that a worker who did not appear for work became a "Muslim" (camp slang for exhausted people near death) and went to the crematorium (see NI-11019; also I. Strzelecka, "Kary i tortury", p. 282 in Auschwitz 1940-1945. Węzłowe zagadnienia z dziejów obozu, vol. II, 1995; GARF f. 7021, op. 108, d. 33, l. 103). Paul Steinberg was flogged 10 times for speaking with the British POWs during his work time (though, notably, without leaving his workplace) and receiving food and smoking implements from them (Arolsen Archives, reference 8002300, pp. 136a-bb). One can imagine the punishment for detailed discussions of the extermination process.
The phrase in a later ICRC letter, misused by the deniers, stating that "one of our delegates was able to enter this camp" is based on the September report and refers to Rossel entering the commandant's office, which was a part of the main camp.
But, as follows from the report, Rossel was not able to actually inspect even the main camp, much less the actual extermination site in Birkenau.
Question: why? What did they have to hide?
The attempts to make the Nazis allow the Red Cross to inspect Auschwitz didn't stop. On 23.11.1944 Gustav Steengracht forwarded another such request to Eberhard von Thadden, the official responsible for the "Jewish affairs" at the Foreign Office. He was told by the Swiss ambassador that a visit of a camp for Poles evacuated from Warsaw by a Red Cross representative considerably contributed to calming down the world. Steengracht further reports regarding the ambassador:
This was von Thadden's official response (28.11.1944, PAAA, ibid.; also see Die Verfolgung..., op. cit.):
Are any comments necessary?
Further reading:
Hans Metzner, "Kollerstrom's Deception on the Visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross to Auschwitz"
12. Gas chambers not mentioned in the memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower, de Gaulle?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the logic here is not clear: suppose they didn't mention gas chambers in their books. And? Their books were not about the Nazi method of killings. They presumably also did not mention Auschwitz at all. Does that mean Auschwitz did not exist? They were writing about the war, not about camps. This factoid is simply irrelevant. The deniers should address the actual evidence.
Further comments: hardly necessary. This is a type of a fallacious appeal to authority. Churchill, De Gaulle and Eisenhower are simply not historical sources on the Holocaust and nobody sane expects them to be. The interest in the Holocaust-as-such in the West came later anyway; these authors were writing about the military and military-political side of things.
And yes, Churchill did mention mass extermination in the German camps. Funny how the deniers are silent about that. From the first chapter of The Gathering Storm:
A stupid non-argument all-around: addressing what someone allegedly did not mention and projecting own interests, biases and motivations on them instead of addressing the actual evidence.
(Side note: the core of the quote attributed to Lynn is actually by Faurisson. Rense's website, where the quote prominently resides, doesn't give any link to the source. However, somebody emailed Lynn and he confirmed that he did write at least the first part of the quote: "YES - ANYTHING WRONG WITH MAKING THIS FACTUAL OBSERVATION?". Of course, Lynn, a self-described "scientific racist", falling for this tripe is not that surprising. For someone studying intelligence he turned out to be pretty dumb, not to mention dishonest, because of course there is everything wrong with making a misleading "observation" (and a false one to boot, because there is nothing "astonishing" here and due to what Churchill actually wrote) for all the reasons explained above.)
13. Elie Wiesel did not mention gas chambers?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the crematoria Wiesel did write about in a homicidal sense contained gas chambers. Another non-argument.
Further comments: since Elie Wiesel is not any sort of a historiographically important Auschwitz witness (that he was an important cultural and political figure does not mean that his novel-memoir serves as a basis of history-writing), this is sort of a silly argument.
Most Auschwitz survivors including Wiesel never witnessed the gas chambers, which obviously were not out there in the open but were either inside the crematoria or just outside of the camp perimeter (the Bunkers). Since going to a gas chamber usually meant going to the crematorium, "he goes to the crematorium" and "he goes to the gas chamber" were in many cases interchangeable in the camp-speak and needed no further explanation. Only people like Faurisson, who are very poor at assessing the texts having to do with history, can find Wiesel's usage of "crematorium" problematic. Just one example:
Further reading:
Night.
Sergey Romanov, "The Denial Fossil Faurisson Sounds Like a Broken Record (Again)"
14. Elie Wiesel an impostor?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: Wiesel did have a tattoo, the claims by another survivor about Wiesel's identity can be debunked with the original documents and the survivor's own statements, the basis of the claims rests on provable clerical mistakes in the original documents.
Further comments: I wrote a full-length article about all these issues with exhaustive documentation: Lying about Elie Wiesel.
15. More Wiesel stuff.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: Wiesel is not a crown witness for Auschwitz or the Holocaust, so what would debunking him prove vis a vis the historicity of the events in question? Nothing.
Further comments: Historians use many sources for writing the history of Auschwitz, and Wiesel's memoir-novel is not one of them in the absolute majority of cases. So debunking it proves exactly nothing. But let's take a look at the claims anyway.
Suppose the episode with dumping of the living babies into a firing pit didn't happen (I, for one, have doubts about it). Could be that Wiesel mistook a truck dumping corpses of children into such a pit with living children being dumped. Notably, there were other such claims.
That there were incineration pits in Auschwitz is a fact, they can be seen on the aerial and ground photos.
Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald and never claimed otherwise. True, the articles sometimes make such claims, but when they do, they don't give Wiesel's direct words. E.g. JTA's article says:
Since this comes up in an occasional meme, let's also deal with the fake surprise over why the Wiesels chose to go with the Germans. Actually, this is clearly explained in the text of the book itself, so I'll just quote it and it will be enough to debunk the dishonest claim:
Denier claim:
Short debunking: like in the case of the Special Registry Office stats discussed above, this refers solely to the registered prisoners and is fully compatible with the mass murder by gas in Auschwitz.
Further comments: here is how the denier author describes the content of the decodes:
The gassings of the inmates after internal selections (quite small in numbers compared to the gassings of non-inmates upon arrival) would be given in the Abgänge but obviously nobody would have written "they were gassed".
So yes, it was entirely possible for non-inmates to have been gassed at a rate of 2000 per day (just as a theoretical illustration), and for them not to appear in the inmate statistics sent per telex. Did I say "possible"? I meant "inevitable".
The ignorant author claims this to be an ad hoc hypothesis, but this is of course hogwash - that it was mostly the unregistered prisoners who never became Zugänge (and, logically, also could not become Abgänge) that were gassed was claimed from the start by all the people in the know. The author is ignorant of basic history (or is simply being dishonest).
The decodes with the death stats were intercepted only for less than a year, from the spring of 1942 to January of 1943, when they stopped (F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War. Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, 1981, vol. 2, p. 673).
It is also important to note that the decoded messages were being sent to the the WVHA (to which Auschwitz was subordinated). Unlike, say, Himmler, the WVHA in its daily routine was concerned first and foremost with the camp population and labor force productivity. They would receive the non-inmate extermination statistics on separate occasions, but apparently not daily.
The author asks how the numbers of those murdered (which were surely kept) were otherwise reported. Probably they were collected and, as highly sensitive, sent to the RSHA in Berlin with a courier at regular intervals. This hypothesis is supported by the historical context: a similar model was adopted already in 1941 by the chief of the Order Police Kurt Daluege, who, suspicious of the radiograms, issued the following order on September 13, 1941 (N. Terry, "Conflicting Signals: British Intelligence on the ‘Final Solution’ through Radio Intercepts and Other Sources, 1941-1942", Yad Vashem Studies, 2004, vol. 32, pp. 365-366):
That similar daily information about mass executions of non-inmates was reported separately also in Auschwitz is therefore very probable. The author of the article cannot refute this.
In any case we know, despite the author's protestations, that the decodes, to repeat, only referred to the registered inmates, i.e. to a small part of all the people who had arrived in Auschwitz. What the author can't explain is where the rest of the Jewish Auschwitz arrivals went (after we subtract the documented transfers to the other camps). That's about 900,000 Jews. They were obviously not "sent to the East". So where are they?
17. Survivors did not see or hear about gas chambers?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: most survivors did not see the gas chambers, nor were they supposed to, so the argument is illogical as usual. Many, if not most, did hear at least generic information about the gas chambers (e.g. in form of rumors). If someone didn't, what does that prove? Nothing. And of course the deniers outright lie about some of these survivors.
Further comments: as usual, the text in the quotes posted by the twitter user is his own forgery - no survivor has ever uttered those words.
Let's take a look at the specific people in the meme.
Joseph Burg was never an Auschwitz inmate in the first place, so his opinion "as a survivor" on the Auschwitz gas chambers is irrelevant (in addition he was an enthusiastic KGB and Stasi agent with a knack for telling incredible (read: made up) stories). Deniers lied, as usual.
An actual Auschwitz survivor Marika Frank (Maria Frank Abrams) did claim that she never heard about gas chambers while in Auschwitz. This might be seen as weird at first sight because everybody, including the leading deniers, accepts that at the very least the rumors about the gas chambers existed in the camp. Here is how Frank describes her experiences:
Whether or not Frank heard anything about the gas chambers, we know that people did talk about them in the camp. She was eventually told about the gassings by other Auschwitz inmates, although already in Belsen. This point is also illustrated by another survivor quoted in the tweet - a non-Jewish inmate Maria Vanherwaarden. As quoted by the denier-friendly Barbara Kulaszka:
As for Vanherwaarden, let's quote further:
Basically, her testimony is also irrelevant to the gas chambers issue, which is why she is, of course, quoted by the deniers.
The reliability of the statement of an alleged survivor Esther Grassman quoted by the Holocaust denier M. R. Wright (obviously with an ideological agenda in mind) is in question. Wright never identifies his source so it can be rejected out of hand. But even if it were authentic, everything written about Marika Frank above would also apply to Grassman.
As for Kautsky, this is another brazen denier lie. Kautsky spent all of his time in Monowitz (Auschwitz III) where there were no gas chambers, so he wasn't supposed to personally see any. But the quote is a fake! And yes, he did write in his book that he learned about gas chambers even in Monowitz from sources he considered reliable. Deniers lied, as usual.
As for the alleged denial of the gas chambers by the French Resistance members, not a single quote or a source is given. Claim dismissed.
18. Anne Frank diary.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the diary was extensively forensically tested by the Netherlands Forensic Institute and is undoubtedly genuine.
Further comments: a very detailed summary of the forensic testing of the diary by the Netherlands Forensic Institute was published in The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (issued by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation). The experts investigated the paper, the glue, the ink with the then latest technology. Then they analysed the handwriting, compared it to Anne Frank's handwriting from the other documents (e.g. letters she wrote). The diary was concluded to be authentic. The following discussion is based on this conclusive scholarly edition unless specified otherwise.
The claim about "portions" of the diary written in ballpoint pen not available until 1951 is of course false and rests on two scraps of papers with notes not made by Anne Frank (which found its way into the diary but do not constitute a part of the diary), as well as, possibly, on a few small postwar editorial corrections in the main text of the diary. The actual text of the diary - what Anne Frank wrote herself during the war - was not written in a ballpoint pen.
The claim originated with a terse report by the Bundeskriminalamt which also tested the diary and published a summary mentioning the ballpoint pen markings (and an improbability of them having been made before 1951) without being more specific as to what those markings were. The Bundeskriminalamt later issued a clarification:
These are the only pieces of paper found in the diary that have been established to have been written with a ballpoint pen beyond a reasonable doubt.
As for Meyer Levin being the author of the diary, this is an even older canard also exposed, among other places, in the Critical Edition. Otto Frank hired Meyer Levin in 1952 to write a play based on the diary (which, in an abridged form, had already been published in Dutch in 1947 - which, by the way, also contradicts the denier argument about the diary or its significant portions having been written not earlier than 1951). He basically failed at his job, other authors were hired to write another version which turned out to be a critical success. Levin sued Frank for an alleged breach of contract and fraud, claiming he had been chosen to write the play, that the other authors (the Hacketts) used his ideas, etc., etc.
His claims of fraud and breach of contract were rejected by the court. His claim of the Hacketts having used his ideas was put before a jury which decided to award him $50,000 in damages. The court however set the jury verdict aside, ruling that the Hacketts' alleged plagiarism could not be proven since their inspiration came from the same source as Levin's - Anne Frank's diary. However new lawsuits from Levin were inevitable, so Frank, Bloomgarden and Levin signed an agreement that Levin would be paid $15,000 in exchange for dropping his royalties claim.
Not a single time during the various court and settlement proceedings has the authenticity of the diary been called in question. The only issue was the play that Levin wrote.
The quote that the twitter user ascribes to a decision of the "New York Supreme Court" actually comes not from the court decision but rather from an article in a Swedish far-right publication Fria Ord. The twitter user has thus engaged in outright fraud.
As mentioned above, Anne Frank's handwriting was comprehensively investigated by the experts, the diary was proven to have been written by one hand. Anne used two scripts - cursive and "handprinting", both in the diary and in the letters. Examples taken from the Revised Critical Edition follow.
Anne Frank's 30.07.1941 letter:
Anne Frank's entry in Jacqueline van Maarsen's autograph album, 23.03.1942:
A page from the diary with both kinds of handwriting:
As for the copyright/authorship issues, this is a purely legal fiction. The Swiss Anne Frank Fonds wanted a copyright extension to further be able to collect royalties, so it claimed, absurdly when it comes to the common sense, but apparently with some support from the law, that Otto Frank could be seen as a legal co-author of the edited version due to the work that he has done on the original text (editing, collating, etc.). It is important to understand that this applies only to the version edited by Otto Frank and first published as Het Achterhuis in 1947, not to the original text.
Such a move, which seems to be all about the money, hardly does justice to Anne Frank's memory, contrary to what the AFF claims. However even the AFF does not go so far as to claim that Otto Frank was an actual co-author:
The original text also remains protected due to other legal circumstances, as explained here:
Since this comes up in the discussions sometimes, it is also useful to mention that Anne Frank not having been gassed in Auschwitz is not in any way strange or inconsistent with the Holocaust: she was 15 at the time and, arriving from the Netherlands, still in a relatively good health, hence she was selected as a potential part of the slave labor force. She arrived in September, the gassings of the Jews unfit for work stopped just 2 months after that. See more in here on this.
Further reading: Dene Bebbington, "Rebuttal of Faurisson on the Anne Frank Diary"
19. Rassinier denied Auschwitz gas chambers. Or was that Thies Christophersen?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: Rassinier had never been an Auschwitz inmate. He had been imprisoned at Buchenwald where there were indeed no gas chambers. Another denier lie. Christophersen got caught on camera saying he did not tell the whole truth.
Further comments: the quote attributed to the notorious liar Rassinier is actually by the SS-man Thies Christophersen who was stationed at an experimental farm in the area of Auschwitz. Once again, the twitter puppets cannot even get their deniers straight!
Rassinier's Auschwitz denial is thus irrelevant.
As for Christophersen, Hans Metzner characterized his account as follows:
Worse, he got caught on film admitting that he did not tell the truth about Auschwitz. This can be seen in Michael Schmidt's documentary Wahrheit Macht Frei (here is a YouTube copy; scroll to 56:35):
20. The Larson canard.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the absolute majority of the corpses of gassed people were incinerated anyway, so we wouldn't expect many such autopsies, if any; Larson did not visit any extermination camps anyway.
Further comments: Larson actually did imply that some autopsies indicated gassing as the cause of death. In the book Crime Doctor he claimed:
(Also see this CODOH thread.)
So we see that Larson did not deny gassings. In any case, this whole Larson story is irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust since he never claimed to have examined victims of extermination camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka.
21. Fake, unreliable or mistaken witnesses.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the existence of fake or unreliable Holocaust witnesses no more disproves the Holocaust than the existence of the fake or exaggerating Vietnam war vets disproves the Vietnam war. Irrelevant. Also, deniers create and promote their own fake "Holocaust testimonies".
Further comments: Joseph Hirt was exposed by a mainstream history teacher.
Question: why? What did they have to hide?
The attempts to make the Nazis allow the Red Cross to inspect Auschwitz didn't stop. On 23.11.1944 Gustav Steengracht forwarded another such request to Eberhard von Thadden, the official responsible for the "Jewish affairs" at the Foreign Office. He was told by the Swiss ambassador that a visit of a camp for Poles evacuated from Warsaw by a Red Cross representative considerably contributed to calming down the world. Steengracht further reports regarding the ambassador:
Now he repeats the request that the camps Auschwitz and Birkenau are also visited by an IRC representative in order to possibly also produce a report on these camps that would help to detoxify the atmosphere.Source: PAAA, R 99337 Inl II A 3987/44; also see Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933-1945, Band 16: Das KZ Auschwitz 1942–1945 und die Zeit der Todesmärsche 1944/45, 2018, p. 512.
This was von Thadden's official response (28.11.1944, PAAA, ibid.; also see Die Verfolgung..., op. cit.):
The camps Birkenau and Auschwitz are, according to the Reich Main Security Office, absolutely out of question for a visit. Even the Reich Germans or even members of the Reich Main Security Office would be allowed to visit these camps only in special cases and mostly only after a request to the Reichsführer [Himmler]. The Reich Main Security Office considers a request to the Reichsführer himself to be futile, but leaves it up to [you].Steengracht replied that given the above-mentioned circumstances the matter can be temporarily put to rest; the request was shelved.
However, it may be possible to obtain permission to visit some of the other Jewish camps should this be of interest. However, the difficulties lie in the fact that in almost all Jewish camps special production is currently taking place for the Wehrmacht and it seems inappropriate to make foreigners aware of it.
Hereby submitted again through Mr. group leader of Inland II [Horst Wagner] to the Secretary of State v. Steengracht with a request for instructions whether, despite this opinion, the matter should be brought directly to the attention of the Reichsführer and, if not, whether the plan to visit camps other than Birkenau and Auschwitz should be taken up and prepared.
Are any comments necessary?
Further reading:
Hans Metzner, "Kollerstrom's Deception on the Visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross to Auschwitz"
Hans Metzner, "Kollerstrom and the 1948 Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the Holocaust"
Sébastien Farré, "The ICRC and the detainees in Nazi concentration camps (1942–1945)"
12. Gas chambers not mentioned in the memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower, de Gaulle?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the logic here is not clear: suppose they didn't mention gas chambers in their books. And? Their books were not about the Nazi method of killings. They presumably also did not mention Auschwitz at all. Does that mean Auschwitz did not exist? They were writing about the war, not about camps. This factoid is simply irrelevant. The deniers should address the actual evidence.
Further comments: hardly necessary. This is a type of a fallacious appeal to authority. Churchill, De Gaulle and Eisenhower are simply not historical sources on the Holocaust and nobody sane expects them to be. The interest in the Holocaust-as-such in the West came later anyway; these authors were writing about the military and military-political side of things.
And yes, Churchill did mention mass extermination in the German camps. Funny how the deniers are silent about that. From the first chapter of The Gathering Storm:
Crimes were committed by the Germans under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record. The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough-and-ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pygmy proportions.
So will the deniers accept this now? Obviously not.
In the appendices to Triumph and Tragedy Churchill printed a note he sent to the Foreign Secretary Eden on 11.07.1944:
De Gaulle doesn't even mention the deportations of French Jews as such in his memoirs, does it mean they did not take place?
For Eisenhower all Nazi camps were "horror camps", as he names Ohrdruf in his memoir Crusade in Europe (1948, p. 408), in which his visit is briefly described. He specifically called for documenting Ohrdruf and other liberated camps in order to preclude some people at home saying that the stories of the Nazi brutality were propaganda:
On 19.04.1945 he telexed Gen. Marshall (op. cit.; Box 134, Cables Off (GCM/DDE 19 Apr - 10 Nov 45 (4); NAID #12007738):
In the appendices to Triumph and Tragedy Churchill printed a note he sent to the Foreign Secretary Eden on 11.07.1944:
There is no doubt that this [persecution of Jews in Hungary and their expulsion from enemy territory] is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. I cannot therefore feel that this is the kind of ordinary case which is put through the Protecting Power, as, for instance, the lack of feeding or sanitary conditions in some particular prisoners’ camp. There should therefore, in my opinion, be no negotiations of any kind on this subject. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death.This was written in the light of the news about the deportations of the Hungarian Jews to the extermination camp Auschwitz, especially after parts of the Auschwitz escapee reports had been published. Indeed, Eden wrote to Churchill about the Auschwitz extermination just a few days before this statement (see M. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews, 1900-1948, 1985, p. 294):
On 6 July, 1944, Eden told Churchill of an appeal he had just received from Dr. Weizmann, that Government 'should do something to mitigate the appalling slaughter of Jews in Hungary'. Detailed information about the murders at Auschwitz had been leaking out since April, 1944, supplied by escapees, the Swedish Government, and the Czech Government-in-Exile.This explains why he wrote his statement, and on 13.07.1944 he repeated its essence in his reply to Lord Melchett's letter about the planned extermination of the Hungarian Jewry:
Now Weizmann reported mistakenly that 60,000 Jews were being gassed and burned to death each day at Birkenau (the death camp at Auschwitz II). Eden told Churchill that this figure might well be an exaggeration. But on the next day, Eden forwarded an additional report to Churchill, describing the four crematoria at the camp, with a gassing and burning capacity of 60,000 each day. Some 40,000 Hungarian Jews had already been deported and killed there. Over the past one year and a half, some one-and-a-half million Jews had been done to death in the camp.
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There is no doubt in my mind that we are in the presence of one of the greatest and most horrible crimes ever committed. It has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great state and one of the leading races of Europe. I need not assure you that the situation has received and will receive the most earnest consideration from my colleagues and myself but, as the Foreign Secretary said, the principal hope of terminating it must remain the speedy victory of the Allied Nations.Already in his 29.10.1942 letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury with a message for a public meeting Churchill wrote:
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I cannot refrain from sending, through you, to the audience which is assembling under your Chairmanship at the Albert Hall today to protest against Nazi atrocities inflicted on the Jews, the assurance of my warm sympathy with the objects of the meeting. The systematic cruelties to which the Jewish people – men, women, and children – have been exposed under the Nazi regime are amongst the most terrible events of history, and place an indelible stain upon all who perpetrate and instigate them. Free men and women denounce these vile crimes, and when the world struggle ends with the enthronement of human rights, racial persecution will be ended.Note that all these noble sentiments clashed with his lack of direct action, so the whole matter would have been embarrassing to shine too much light on in the memoirs. The historian David Reynolds, who devoted a whole book to Churchill's history writing, explains (In Command of History, 2005, ch. 29):
Neither of these minutes [in which Churchill expresses support for bombing Auschwitz] appears even in the appendix to volume 6. In November 1954, an Israeli reader wrote to ask whether “the desire for Anglo-German friendship was so strong as to compel you to withhold essential knowledge and information about the greatest mass murder in history.” Denis Kelly replied that “in general Sir Winston tried to confine himself to happenings on which he could either throw some personal light or could provide an account which was not readily accessible to the general public. The happenings you mention were so deeply impressed in the mind and imagination of the world that he felt it was unnecessary to reiterate them in his volumes.”De Gaulle and Eisenhower were military men writing about military matters.
This was lame stuff. So why the omission? Perhaps because nothing came of Churchill’s demands for action. The Foreign Office dragged its feet, the Air Ministry pleaded technical difficulties, the U.S. War Department considered the idea impractical, and Churchill lost track of it during his foreign travels in August and September 1944. On 1 October, he sent Eden a brief minute (again omitted from the memoirs) supporting a public denunciation of German crimes. This might, he said, “have a chance of saving the multitudes concerned.” But then he was off to Moscow, followed by Paris in November and Athens for Christmas. To print his exhortations of July 1944 would therefore draw embarrassing attention to how little was actually done. And it might also have hinted at the Ultra secret, source for some of the detailed evidence of the Final Solution available to the Allies in 1944.
De Gaulle doesn't even mention the deportations of French Jews as such in his memoirs, does it mean they did not take place?
For Eisenhower all Nazi camps were "horror camps", as he names Ohrdruf in his memoir Crusade in Europe (1948, p. 408), in which his visit is briefly described. He specifically called for documenting Ohrdruf and other liberated camps in order to preclude some people at home saying that the stories of the Nazi brutality were propaganda:
I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.This wording more or less repeats what he wrote to Gen. Marshall on 15.04.1945 (Dwight D. Eisenhower's Pre-Presidential Papers, Principal File, Box 80, Marshall George C. (6); NAID #12005711). After Patton wrote to him about the horrors of Buchenwald on 15.04.1945 (op. cit., Patton George S. Jr. (1); NAID #12007734), Eisenhower urged Patton to invite every visitor to the region to the camp (18.04.1945; op. cit., NAID #12007733).
On 19.04.1945 he telexed Gen. Marshall (op. cit.; Box 134, Cables Off (GCM/DDE 19 Apr - 10 Nov 45 (4); NAID #12007738):
We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail. From Eisenhower to General Marshall for eyes only. I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you would see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of Congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54s, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps. I am hopeful that some British individuals in similar categories will visit the Northern area to witness similar evidence of atrocity.Eisenhower's understanding of the Nazi camp system was raw and naive, like of most laymen at that time, who wouldn't be able to tell Auschwitz from Buchenwald and Belsen from Belzec (despite their radically different nature). He wasn't a historian of genocide or an investigator, so expecting him to have written more about it than he himself experienced (which obviously made the strongest impression on him, unlike reading some newspaper or even intelligence reports) is simply unwarranted. In his mind this mention was sufficient.
A stupid non-argument all-around: addressing what someone allegedly did not mention and projecting own interests, biases and motivations on them instead of addressing the actual evidence.
(Side note: the core of the quote attributed to Lynn is actually by Faurisson. Rense's website, where the quote prominently resides, doesn't give any link to the source. However, somebody emailed Lynn and he confirmed that he did write at least the first part of the quote: "YES - ANYTHING WRONG WITH MAKING THIS FACTUAL OBSERVATION?". Of course, Lynn, a self-described "scientific racist", falling for this tripe is not that surprising. For someone studying intelligence he turned out to be pretty dumb, not to mention dishonest, because of course there is everything wrong with making a misleading "observation" (and a false one to boot, because there is nothing "astonishing" here and due to what Churchill actually wrote) for all the reasons explained above.)
13. Elie Wiesel did not mention gas chambers?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the crematoria Wiesel did write about in a homicidal sense contained gas chambers. Another non-argument.
Further comments: since Elie Wiesel is not any sort of a historiographically important Auschwitz witness (that he was an important cultural and political figure does not mean that his novel-memoir serves as a basis of history-writing), this is sort of a silly argument.
Most Auschwitz survivors including Wiesel never witnessed the gas chambers, which obviously were not out there in the open but were either inside the crematoria or just outside of the camp perimeter (the Bunkers). Since going to a gas chamber usually meant going to the crematorium, "he goes to the crematorium" and "he goes to the gas chamber" were in many cases interchangeable in the camp-speak and needed no further explanation. Only people like Faurisson, who are very poor at assessing the texts having to do with history, can find Wiesel's usage of "crematorium" problematic. Just one example:
We did not know, as yet, which was the better side, right or left, which road led to prison and which to the crematoria. Still, I was happy, I was near my father. Our procession continued slowly to move forward.In fact, in the "prayer" episode Wiesel writes about gassing explicitly:
Another inmate came over to us:
"Satisfied?"
"Yes," someone answered.
"Poor devils, you are heading for the crematorium."
He seemed to be telling the truth.
But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!But, to repeat, Elie Wiesel has never been presented as an eyewitness to the gas chambers so it's hard to understand what this argument is all about aside from the usual denier ignorance and illogic.
Further reading:
Night.
Sergey Romanov, "The Denial Fossil Faurisson Sounds Like a Broken Record (Again)"
14. Elie Wiesel an impostor?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: Wiesel did have a tattoo, the claims by another survivor about Wiesel's identity can be debunked with the original documents and the survivor's own statements, the basis of the claims rests on provable clerical mistakes in the original documents.
Further comments: I wrote a full-length article about all these issues with exhaustive documentation: Lying about Elie Wiesel.
15. More Wiesel stuff.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: Wiesel is not a crown witness for Auschwitz or the Holocaust, so what would debunking him prove vis a vis the historicity of the events in question? Nothing.
Further comments: Historians use many sources for writing the history of Auschwitz, and Wiesel's memoir-novel is not one of them in the absolute majority of cases. So debunking it proves exactly nothing. But let's take a look at the claims anyway.
Suppose the episode with dumping of the living babies into a firing pit didn't happen (I, for one, have doubts about it). Could be that Wiesel mistook a truck dumping corpses of children into such a pit with living children being dumped. Notably, there were other such claims.
That there were incineration pits in Auschwitz is a fact, they can be seen on the aerial and ground photos.
Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald and never claimed otherwise. True, the articles sometimes make such claims, but when they do, they don't give Wiesel's direct words. E.g. JTA's article says:
But Wiesel, who noted that on April 11, 1945, he was one of the survivors liberated at Dachau by the U.S. Army...This is not a direct quote. This is a rephrasing, and the reporter obviously made a mistake. Deniers can't prove Wiesel actually said "Dachau". Same applies to Auschwitz liberation.
Since this comes up in an occasional meme, let's also deal with the fake surprise over why the Wiesels chose to go with the Germans. Actually, this is clearly explained in the text of the book itself, so I'll just quote it and it will be enough to debunk the dishonest claim:
The camp had become a hive of activity. People were running, calling to one another. In every block, the inmates prepared for the journey ahead. I had forgotten about my lame foot. A doctor came into the room and announced:16. Auschwitz decodes.
"Tomorrow, right after nightfall, the camp will start on its march. Block by block. The sick can remain in the infirmary. They will not be evacuated."
That news made us wonder. Were the SS really going to leave hundreds of prisoners behind in the infirmaries, pending the arrival of their liberators? Were they really going to allow Jews to hear the clock strike twelve? Of course not."All the patients will be finished off on the spot," said the faceless one. "And in one last swoop, thrown into the furnaces.""Surely, the camp will be mined," said another. "Right after the evacuation, it will all blow up."As for me, I was thinking not about death but about not wanting to be separated from my father. We had already suffered so much, endured so much together. This was not the moment to separate.
I ran outside to look for him. The snow was piled high, the blocks' windows veiled in frost. Holding a shoe in my hand, for I could not put it on my right foot, I ran, feeling neither pain nor cold.
"What are we going to do?"
My father didn't answer.
"What are we going to do?"
He was lost in thought. The choice was in our hands. For once. We could decide our fate for ourselves. To stay, both of us, in the infirmary, where, thanks to my doctor, he could enter as either a patient or a medic.
I had made up my mind to accompany my father wherever he went.
"Well, Father, what do we do?"
He was silent.
"Let's be evacuated with the others," I said.
He didn't answer. He was looking at my foot.
"You think you'll be able to walk?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Let's hope we won't regret it, Eliezer."
After the war, I learned the fate of those who had remained at the infirmary. They were, quite simply, liberated by the Russians, two days after the evacuation.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: like in the case of the Special Registry Office stats discussed above, this refers solely to the registered prisoners and is fully compatible with the mass murder by gas in Auschwitz.
Further comments: here is how the denier author describes the content of the decodes:
As shown by the Bletchley Park documents, the commandant of Auschwitz had to file a report every single day. With the exception of Sunday, these messages consisted of daily reports on population [Bestand], arrivals [Zugänge], and departures [Abgänge] from the concentration camps.He concedes:
Zugänge referred to the arrival of new inmates; Abgänge referred to deaths, executions, releases and inmates transferred to other camps.Since most of the Jews who arrived in Auschwitz never became its inmates and were never registered, but rather were gassed upon arrival, the bulk of the gassings would never have appeared in these decodes at all since they only dealt with the registered inmates.
The gassings of the inmates after internal selections (quite small in numbers compared to the gassings of non-inmates upon arrival) would be given in the Abgänge but obviously nobody would have written "they were gassed".
So yes, it was entirely possible for non-inmates to have been gassed at a rate of 2000 per day (just as a theoretical illustration), and for them not to appear in the inmate statistics sent per telex. Did I say "possible"? I meant "inevitable".
The ignorant author claims this to be an ad hoc hypothesis, but this is of course hogwash - that it was mostly the unregistered prisoners who never became Zugänge (and, logically, also could not become Abgänge) that were gassed was claimed from the start by all the people in the know. The author is ignorant of basic history (or is simply being dishonest).
The decodes with the death stats were intercepted only for less than a year, from the spring of 1942 to January of 1943, when they stopped (F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War. Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, 1981, vol. 2, p. 673).
It is also important to note that the decoded messages were being sent to the the WVHA (to which Auschwitz was subordinated). Unlike, say, Himmler, the WVHA in its daily routine was concerned first and foremost with the camp population and labor force productivity. They would receive the non-inmate extermination statistics on separate occasions, but apparently not daily.
The author asks how the numbers of those murdered (which were surely kept) were otherwise reported. Probably they were collected and, as highly sensitive, sent to the RSHA in Berlin with a courier at regular intervals. This hypothesis is supported by the historical context: a similar model was adopted already in 1941 by the chief of the Order Police Kurt Daluege, who, suspicious of the radiograms, issued the following order on September 13, 1941 (N. Terry, "Conflicting Signals: British Intelligence on the ‘Final Solution’ through Radio Intercepts and Other Sources, 1941-1942", Yad Vashem Studies, 2004, vol. 32, pp. 365-366):
The danger of decoding of radio messages is great. Therefore only such matters should be transmitted by radio that are classified as open, confidential or secret, not however such reports that require special preservation of secrecy as secret state matters (geheime Reichssache). Among these are more precise statistics on executions. These matters are to be transmitted by couriers.In a copy of this order by the Police Regiment Center dated September 16, 1941 the following summary was added specifically for the battalion and regiment units (W. Benz, K. Kwiet, J. Matthäus, Einsatz im "Reichskommissariat Ostland": Dokumente zum Völkermord im Baltikum und in Weißrubland 1941 - 1944, 1998, S. 69):
Matters concerning executions are no longer to be specified in radio messages, telexes, etc., they must be submitted in writing in a sealed manner.This was quite probably caused by Churchill's 24.08.1941 speech, partially based on the decodes, in which he referenced the German police crimes on the Eastern Front (R. Hanyok, Eavesdropping on Hell, 2005, 2nd edn., p. 49).
That similar daily information about mass executions of non-inmates was reported separately also in Auschwitz is therefore very probable. The author of the article cannot refute this.
In any case we know, despite the author's protestations, that the decodes, to repeat, only referred to the registered inmates, i.e. to a small part of all the people who had arrived in Auschwitz. What the author can't explain is where the rest of the Jewish Auschwitz arrivals went (after we subtract the documented transfers to the other camps). That's about 900,000 Jews. They were obviously not "sent to the East". So where are they?
17. Survivors did not see or hear about gas chambers?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: most survivors did not see the gas chambers, nor were they supposed to, so the argument is illogical as usual. Many, if not most, did hear at least generic information about the gas chambers (e.g. in form of rumors). If someone didn't, what does that prove? Nothing. And of course the deniers outright lie about some of these survivors.
Further comments: as usual, the text in the quotes posted by the twitter user is his own forgery - no survivor has ever uttered those words.
Let's take a look at the specific people in the meme.
Joseph Burg was never an Auschwitz inmate in the first place, so his opinion "as a survivor" on the Auschwitz gas chambers is irrelevant (in addition he was an enthusiastic KGB and Stasi agent with a knack for telling incredible (read: made up) stories). Deniers lied, as usual.
An actual Auschwitz survivor Marika Frank (Maria Frank Abrams) did claim that she never heard about gas chambers while in Auschwitz. This might be seen as weird at first sight because everybody, including the leading deniers, accepts that at the very least the rumors about the gas chambers existed in the camp. Here is how Frank describes her experiences:
Let me explain that even though I had been in Auschwitz I did not know about the gas chambers. Can you imagine that? We thought, when we were there, that our parents and the children were taken to camps which were much better. We assumed that they couldn't live through the camp we were in. It was not until a large contingent from Auschwitz came to Bergen-Belsen that I had to give up that idea that they were safe. I met two women in their thirties who spoke Hungarian and they asked if it was true that the Hungarian transports were so severely selected people to the camps and the others to be gassed. I said, 'What are you saying?' And they looked at me as if I were foolish, but they didn't want to destroy my hope and so didn't try to explain.However the level of knowledge about the extermination among the Hungarian Jews is often overestimated. On this see Hans Metzner's article "Knowledge of Mass Extermination Among Hungarian Jews Returning from Auschwitz".
I ran back to the tent and collapsed. I think I cried for weeks. I finally realized that everybody was killed.
Whether or not Frank heard anything about the gas chambers, we know that people did talk about them in the camp. She was eventually told about the gassings by other Auschwitz inmates, although already in Belsen. This point is also illustrated by another survivor quoted in the tweet - a non-Jewish inmate Maria Vanherwaarden. As quoted by the denier-friendly Barbara Kulaszka:
From Linz, Herwaarden was transported to Vienna and from there to Auschwitz. There were about twenty other women on the train travelling from Vienna to Auschwitz. She could not say if any were Jewish. They received food on the train. A gypsy told Herwaarden that they were going to be gassed when they arrived at Auschwitz. They arrived in the camp on 2 December in the afternoon. (25-6625, 6626, 6627)Vanherwaarden did not see the gas chambers, but she did hear of them. So what does Frank's not hearing about the gas chambers prove? Only that she, personally, did not hear about them. Nothing else.
That night the SS people came and took them to Birkenau. They were taken to a cold, windowless room and told that they had to take a cold shower. They handed over their clothes and all hair was shaved, both head and pubic. Herwaarden was "terribly scared" when she went into the shower room because "they said gas would be coming from the top but it was only water." They received soap, but the water was cold. When they finished, they received their numbers and prisoners clothing and were taken to the barracks. Herwaarden was listed as an Aryan. (25-6628, 6629)
As for Vanherwaarden, let's quote further:
While gassings were talked about at the camp, she personally never saw anything of the sort. There was a terrible smell in the camp, however...She wasn't supposed to have seen a gassing in the first place, obviously. So her never having seen one is fully compatible with everything. Not every Auschwitz inmate automatically became a gas chamber eyewitness. In fact, the absolute majority of the survivors didn't. Indeed, Vanherwaarden conceded that she "never saw a crematorium at Birkenau. It was a big place". Does Vanherwaarden never having seen the crematoria prove that they didn't exist? Obviously not, only that she personally didn't see them.
Basically, her testimony is also irrelevant to the gas chambers issue, which is why she is, of course, quoted by the deniers.
The reliability of the statement of an alleged survivor Esther Grassman quoted by the Holocaust denier M. R. Wright (obviously with an ideological agenda in mind) is in question. Wright never identifies his source so it can be rejected out of hand. But even if it were authentic, everything written about Marika Frank above would also apply to Grassman.
As for Kautsky, this is another brazen denier lie. Kautsky spent all of his time in Monowitz (Auschwitz III) where there were no gas chambers, so he wasn't supposed to personally see any. But the quote is a fake! And yes, he did write in his book that he learned about gas chambers even in Monowitz from sources he considered reliable. Deniers lied, as usual.
As for the alleged denial of the gas chambers by the French Resistance members, not a single quote or a source is given. Claim dismissed.
18. Anne Frank diary.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the diary was extensively forensically tested by the Netherlands Forensic Institute and is undoubtedly genuine.
Further comments: a very detailed summary of the forensic testing of the diary by the Netherlands Forensic Institute was published in The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (issued by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation). The experts investigated the paper, the glue, the ink with the then latest technology. Then they analysed the handwriting, compared it to Anne Frank's handwriting from the other documents (e.g. letters she wrote). The diary was concluded to be authentic. The following discussion is based on this conclusive scholarly edition unless specified otherwise.
The claim about "portions" of the diary written in ballpoint pen not available until 1951 is of course false and rests on two scraps of papers with notes not made by Anne Frank (which found its way into the diary but do not constitute a part of the diary), as well as, possibly, on a few small postwar editorial corrections in the main text of the diary. The actual text of the diary - what Anne Frank wrote herself during the war - was not written in a ballpoint pen.
The claim originated with a terse report by the Bundeskriminalamt which also tested the diary and published a summary mentioning the ballpoint pen markings (and an improbability of them having been made before 1951) without being more specific as to what those markings were. The Bundeskriminalamt later issued a clarification:
The forensic report of 1980 does not justify any doubts about the authenticity of the Anne Frank diaries.The Netherlands Forensic Institute disagrees with the BKA that it has been truly established that the small corrections were made in ballpoint pen ink. The NFI reports (p. 167):
[...]
1. The report, according to the task set by the Hamburg district court, concerned only the question of whether the writing material used to record the diaries - writing paper and writing materials - was customary in the years of the Second World War. This is undoubtedly confirmed in the report.
2. On the other hand, according to the report, additional inscriptions found on the originals of the diary sheets, so-called corrections [Korrekturschriften], were applied with a ballpoint pen ink, which was customary only since 1951. Obviously, these are editorial remarks or corrections made by a further editor.
Conclusion:
The BKA's report of 1980 concludes that paper and writing materials used for the actual text of the diaries were available in the relevant period and were customary.
No further findings, especially those on the diaries' authorship, were made in this report.
The BKA emphasizes that the expert report of the Institute for Criminal Investigations of 1980 cannot be called upon to question the authenticity of Anne Frank's diaries. The BKA distanced itself decisively from all speculation aimed in such a direction.
In no more than six places do we find corrections and additions to the page numbers in black, which, considered morphologically, display the characteristics of ballpoint writing. [...] When analyzed chemically, however, the ink behaved differently from a series of reference ballpoint inks, including samples from an earlier date.As for the two loose scraps of paper with the ballpoint ink writing, they obviously do not bear Anne Frank's handwriting (they're in German and comment on the specific pages of the diary) but most probably stem from the German expert Dorothea Ockelmann who was a part of a court expert team graphologically investigating the diary in 1959-60 (her son recognized her handwriting). Here is how they look like:
However, even if further investigation had brought to light a ballpoint with a similar chemical reaction, this discovery would not have detracted from the authenticity of the diary, for all we have here is the addition of page numbers for which there are indications that they were not written by Anne Frank.
These are the only pieces of paper found in the diary that have been established to have been written with a ballpoint pen beyond a reasonable doubt.
As for Meyer Levin being the author of the diary, this is an even older canard also exposed, among other places, in the Critical Edition. Otto Frank hired Meyer Levin in 1952 to write a play based on the diary (which, in an abridged form, had already been published in Dutch in 1947 - which, by the way, also contradicts the denier argument about the diary or its significant portions having been written not earlier than 1951). He basically failed at his job, other authors were hired to write another version which turned out to be a critical success. Levin sued Frank for an alleged breach of contract and fraud, claiming he had been chosen to write the play, that the other authors (the Hacketts) used his ideas, etc., etc.
His claims of fraud and breach of contract were rejected by the court. His claim of the Hacketts having used his ideas was put before a jury which decided to award him $50,000 in damages. The court however set the jury verdict aside, ruling that the Hacketts' alleged plagiarism could not be proven since their inspiration came from the same source as Levin's - Anne Frank's diary. However new lawsuits from Levin were inevitable, so Frank, Bloomgarden and Levin signed an agreement that Levin would be paid $15,000 in exchange for dropping his royalties claim.
Not a single time during the various court and settlement proceedings has the authenticity of the diary been called in question. The only issue was the play that Levin wrote.
The quote that the twitter user ascribes to a decision of the "New York Supreme Court" actually comes not from the court decision but rather from an article in a Swedish far-right publication Fria Ord. The twitter user has thus engaged in outright fraud.
As mentioned above, Anne Frank's handwriting was comprehensively investigated by the experts, the diary was proven to have been written by one hand. Anne used two scripts - cursive and "handprinting", both in the diary and in the letters. Examples taken from the Revised Critical Edition follow.
Anne Frank's 30.07.1941 letter:
A page from the diary with both kinds of handwriting:
As for the copyright/authorship issues, this is a purely legal fiction. The Swiss Anne Frank Fonds wanted a copyright extension to further be able to collect royalties, so it claimed, absurdly when it comes to the common sense, but apparently with some support from the law, that Otto Frank could be seen as a legal co-author of the edited version due to the work that he has done on the original text (editing, collating, etc.). It is important to understand that this applies only to the version edited by Otto Frank and first published as Het Achterhuis in 1947, not to the original text.
Such a move, which seems to be all about the money, hardly does justice to Anne Frank's memory, contrary to what the AFF claims. However even the AFF does not go so far as to claim that Otto Frank was an actual co-author:
At the same time, the Anne Frank Fonds would like to reiterate that Anne Frank was the only author of her original diaries. Since its establishment, the Anne Frank Fonds has, on the basis of forensic/scientific evidence, dismissed differing interpretations, accusations of forgery, or third-party co-authorship of Anne Frank’s original manuscripts.That the AFF is playing right into the deniers' hands with its shady legal maneuvering is ironically sad.
The original text also remains protected due to other legal circumstances, as explained here:
In the Netherlands copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. And even though Anne Frank was killed in 1945, this doesn’t mean that the A and B versions of her diary are in the public domain under Dutch law. This is because the full manuscripts were first published in 1986, and the rule at that time said that works which were first published posthumously are protected for 50 years after the initial publication.
The 2013 Dutch copyright act implementing the 1991 term directive contained transitional provisions stipulating that rights which existed under the previous law continue to exist. This means that versions A and B of the Frank diary will remain under copyright in the Netherlands until 1 January 2037 (50 years after the 1986 publication).Mind-boggling legal technicalities aside, the fact remains: Anne Frank is the sole author of her diary, which was fully forensically tested, found authentic and there is not a single fact to refute this.
Since this comes up in the discussions sometimes, it is also useful to mention that Anne Frank not having been gassed in Auschwitz is not in any way strange or inconsistent with the Holocaust: she was 15 at the time and, arriving from the Netherlands, still in a relatively good health, hence she was selected as a potential part of the slave labor force. She arrived in September, the gassings of the Jews unfit for work stopped just 2 months after that. See more in here on this.
Further reading: Dene Bebbington, "Rebuttal of Faurisson on the Anne Frank Diary"
19. Rassinier denied Auschwitz gas chambers. Or was that Thies Christophersen?
Denier claim:
Further comments: the quote attributed to the notorious liar Rassinier is actually by the SS-man Thies Christophersen who was stationed at an experimental farm in the area of Auschwitz. Once again, the twitter puppets cannot even get their deniers straight!
Rassinier's Auschwitz denial is thus irrelevant.
As for Christophersen, Hans Metzner characterized his account as follows:
Christophersen did not know there were four crematoria in Birkenau either, even though he is supposed to have visited the camp. He was only told there was “a crematorium…in Auschwitz”. He did not know anything about open air cremations in Birkenau, even though these were carried out in Auschwitz in summer 1944 according to aerial and Sonderkommando ground photographs. Therefore, either Christophersen was a poor observer and not much talented to obtain reliable hearsay information about Birkenau or suffered from severe memory fading at the time he wrote down his account.Christophersen's account was analyzed in detail by John Zimmerman and Wahrheit at CODOH and found wanting.
Worse, he got caught on film admitting that he did not tell the truth about Auschwitz. This can be seen in Michael Schmidt's documentary Wahrheit Macht Frei (here is a YouTube copy; scroll to 56:35):
Ich will uns entlasten und verteidigen, dann kann ich das nicht mit dem was wir tatsächlich getan haben. Ich leugne das nicht. Aber jeder Verteidiger, der etwas zu verteidigen hat, der wird doch nicht das Belastende aufführen. Aber alles das trifft mich nicht, ich mache weiter, ich käme mir vor als Verräter an meinen Freunden, wenn ich jetzt widerrufen würde. Das hab ich nie getan.
I want to exonerate and defend us, then I can't do it with what we actually did. I don't deny it. However every defender, who has to defend something, will not present something that incriminates. However all that does not affect me, I carry on, I would see myself as a traitor to my friends if I would recant now. That I have never done.So much for this "witness".
20. The Larson canard.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the absolute majority of the corpses of gassed people were incinerated anyway, so we wouldn't expect many such autopsies, if any; Larson did not visit any extermination camps anyway.
Further comments: Larson actually did imply that some autopsies indicated gassing as the cause of death. In the book Crime Doctor he claimed:
Outside the building, guards dropped in cyanide pellets. Then they'd blow the cyanide gas out and remove the bodies next door to the crematorium ovens. I think this is what happened to most of the truly psychotic prisoners and those they considered unruly and unmanageable and who, in the Gestapo's opinion, were incorrigibles. But, in my opinion, only relatively few of the inmates I personally examined at Dachau were murdered in this manner.This is all the more curious since the gassings in Dachau have not been established beyond reasonable doubt. In any case, Larson does not quote any such autopsy report. In 1980 he was apparently interviewed for Wichita Eagle:
Larson said that in southern Germany, where he served, autopsies showed that death by gassing and shooting were rare. Never was a case of poisoning uncovered, he said.Side note: the denier O'Keefe fraudulently misquoted this as saying "never was a case of poison gas uncovered".
(Also see this CODOH thread.)
So we see that Larson did not deny gassings. In any case, this whole Larson story is irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust since he never claimed to have examined victims of extermination camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka.
21. Fake, unreliable or mistaken witnesses.
Denier claim:
Further comments: Joseph Hirt was exposed by a mainstream history teacher.
Herman Rosenblat was exposed by a Holocaust historian.
The story of the "Wolf Girl" Misha Defonseca (not Jewish) was also questioned by mainstream scholars, among others.
The story of Binjamin Wilkomirski (not Jewish) was debunked by a mainstream journalist.
Bernard "Holstein" Brougham (not Jewish), of the "masturbation machines" infamy, was exposed by a private investigator hired by his publisher and denounced as a faker by his family.
And what have the deniers ever done, except lie?
Sure, there are some fake witnesses. Who ever doubted it? For almost any significant event such people are bound to appear. Their existence has no bearing on the historicity of the event itself.
One should also differentiate between outright fakes and, say, confused people misinterpreting their experiences (like several survivors who truly believe they survived the gas chambers through luck, misinterpreting their shower experience). Sometimes these people were misled by the others around them, including the Nazis.
Let's take Samuel Rajzman's testimony about air pumped out of the Treblinka chambers. The exact method of murder (suffocation through gasoline exhaust) would be most securely known by the people who operated the murder weapon. Thus the engine operator Shalayev testified about the gasoline engine having been the murder weapon.
The other witnesses wouldn't necessarily know such details. Thus many Nazis and Jewish inmates assumed that the engine was a diesel (there was a diesel engine in the same room to provide the camp with electricity, so it was an easy mistake to make). Yet others speculated on other methods of murder, including the air being sucked out of the room. Their speculations on the topic of the exact method of murder are of little value. Their observation of hundreds of thousands of Jews being deported to the camp and killed in the closed chambers (whatever method they thought was being used) and later incinerated is what is valuable.
Some testimonies are clearly flawed in places, but still betray the inside knowledge, see an analysis of Bendel's testimony, for example.
Some other survivors probably fell victim to false memories. This is especially plausible with the child survivors (Moshe Peer could be such a case).
There were also people who were true survivors who gilded the lily, exaggerated things intentionally. Yes, this also happens, like in any large group of people. And this also doesn't disprove the Holocaust.
But before even starting to critique the testimonies one should make sure that what one reads is what the alleged witness truly said. Let's take the item that supposedly retells an unknown comedienne Soocha Renay's story. It was taken from a newspaper column. The author of the column did not indicate where his descriptions came from. It is thus unknown if they actually fairly represent Soocha Renay's claims (if those were ever made) or are a result of "Chinese whispers". Knocking down this newspaper item achieves exactly nothing. It's not a historical source.
One should also take into account that survivors would sometimes report rumors they heard and believed in (like the "Jewish soap"; note, however, that the Danzig human soap was real, it just didn't have anything to do with Jews).
Sure, there are some fake witnesses. Who ever doubted it? For almost any significant event such people are bound to appear. Their existence has no bearing on the historicity of the event itself.
One should also differentiate between outright fakes and, say, confused people misinterpreting their experiences (like several survivors who truly believe they survived the gas chambers through luck, misinterpreting their shower experience). Sometimes these people were misled by the others around them, including the Nazis.
Let's take Samuel Rajzman's testimony about air pumped out of the Treblinka chambers. The exact method of murder (suffocation through gasoline exhaust) would be most securely known by the people who operated the murder weapon. Thus the engine operator Shalayev testified about the gasoline engine having been the murder weapon.
The other witnesses wouldn't necessarily know such details. Thus many Nazis and Jewish inmates assumed that the engine was a diesel (there was a diesel engine in the same room to provide the camp with electricity, so it was an easy mistake to make). Yet others speculated on other methods of murder, including the air being sucked out of the room. Their speculations on the topic of the exact method of murder are of little value. Their observation of hundreds of thousands of Jews being deported to the camp and killed in the closed chambers (whatever method they thought was being used) and later incinerated is what is valuable.
Some testimonies are clearly flawed in places, but still betray the inside knowledge, see an analysis of Bendel's testimony, for example.
Some other survivors probably fell victim to false memories. This is especially plausible with the child survivors (Moshe Peer could be such a case).
There were also people who were true survivors who gilded the lily, exaggerated things intentionally. Yes, this also happens, like in any large group of people. And this also doesn't disprove the Holocaust.
But before even starting to critique the testimonies one should make sure that what one reads is what the alleged witness truly said. Let's take the item that supposedly retells an unknown comedienne Soocha Renay's story. It was taken from a newspaper column. The author of the column did not indicate where his descriptions came from. It is thus unknown if they actually fairly represent Soocha Renay's claims (if those were ever made) or are a result of "Chinese whispers". Knocking down this newspaper item achieves exactly nothing. It's not a historical source.
One should also take into account that survivors would sometimes report rumors they heard and believed in (like the "Jewish soap"; note, however, that the Danzig human soap was real, it just didn't have anything to do with Jews).
One example could be the Buchenwald survivor Morris Hubert, whose claim that in Buchenwald each day a Jew was mauled by a bear and an eagle picked at the remains was uncritically repeated by New York Times and became a denier favorite.
This claim is clearly based on the existence of a zoo in Buchenwald. There were both bears and eagles (in the so-called Falkenhof).
Obviously, that Hubert was (likely) repeating a rumor no more means that the Holocaust is false than it means that there was no Night of Broken Glass (about which he was reminiscing in the first place, not about the Holocaust).
Believing in something false, however, is not the same as being an unreliable witness. One could believe that the Earth is 6000 years old and still be a reliable witness about a specific murder.
Claiming that "soap & lampshades" (to which there is a core of truth, by the way) somehow disprove the Holocaust is like claiming that the falsity of the Angels of Mons story disproves the World War I (D. Clarke, "Rumours of Angels: A Legend of the First World War", Folklore, 2002, vol. 113, no. 2, pp. 151-173):
In the case of the Angels of Mons, a popular belief developed that a miracle had occurred at a crucial stage in the battle, with the outcome that the British Army was preserved from destruction. This twentieth-century belief emerged from a background of religious and martial traditions that had their ultimate origins in the Middle Ages. St George, who it was claimed had appeared to lead troops fighting at Mons, was traditionally regarded as the patron of English fighting men. [...]In 1915, when the war had reached stalemate on the Western Front, rumours originating from the first months of the conflict became immortalised by a stream of newspaper stories, pamphlets and books. As a result, many thousands of people both in Britain and across the world were led to believe that angels had intervened on the Allied side at a decisive point in the first battle of the Great War, and that the course of the conflict had been changed as a result. [...]First, the newspaper reports shook their English audience and, more importantly for the seeding of rumour, predisposed sections of society towards a belief that the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] had escaped destruction as a result of a miracle. Once this idea had become established, the path was prepared for claims of supernatural intervention on the battlefield. Second, the published accounts of the Mons battle inspired a leader writer on the London Evening News, Arthur Machen, to produce a short story - "The Bowmen" - that he would later claim to be the single source for the angels legend (Machen 1915). [...]Although "The Bowmen" was written and presented as unambiguous fiction, within days the newspaper's editor had received letters from The Occult Review and from the spiritualist magazine Light. They wished to reprint the story and had interpreted the events described not as fiction, but as fact. Both magazines asked for the identity of the sources upon which the story was based, and Machen replied to the effect that "I could not give my authorities, since I had none, the tale being pure invention" (Machen 1915, 14-15). There the matter ended and six months passed without any further published stories or rumours.By the spring of 1915, the war had entered the stalemate of trench warfare. Tens of thousands of lives had been lost on both sides and hopes of a decisive victory before Christmas had long been abandoned. It was in these circumstances that Machen's story re-appeared in a new form, as a rumour reported within the pages of one of the same magazines that had initially responded so emotionally to Machen's fictional story. [...]A Protestant version of this story, which contains a variation of the "vegetarian restaurant" motif, was published a short time later and further clarified the identity of the horseman who led the bowmen. It was published in an account of a sermon preached by the Revd Fielding Ould, the vicar of St Albans, and reproduced in Light. The clergyman said he heard the story from three sources and added: "I think it may be true." [...]The source for both stories, as proved to be the case in virtually all the others that followed them into print, remained anonymous. The witnesses are identified by the newspapers and magazines that reprinted them as "a soldier," "an officer," "a nurse," or "a story heard by Mrs M-." This slow trickle of rumour soon broke into a flood, with spiritualists adding their own variations to the theme. Miss Callow, secretary of the Higher Thought Centre in Kensington, told the London Weekly Dispatch how an officer had sent a detailed account of a vision that appeared to himself and others "when fighting against fearful odds at Mons." [...]Miss Marrable's circumstantial account was accepted by thousands who had hitherto remained sceptical. Her story was featured as the centrepiece of a sermon delivered by an influential nonconformist pastor, the Revd R. F. Horton, in Manchester on 13 June 1915 against a backdrop of stalemate in Ypres and at Gallipoli. Horton said of the angels: "... this is a story repeated by so many witnesses that if anything can be established by contemporary evidence it is established ... of the retreat from Mons." [...]Miss Marrable's testimony and the Revd Horton's sermon broke the floodgates. The story was reprinted by the national and regional newspapers and was reproduced in pamphlets distributed to soldiers fighting on the Western Front. [...]Caught up in a wave of patriotic fervour, Machen was pressed to issue "The Bowmen" in book form in August 1915 (see Figure 1). He reluctantly obliged, adding an introduction that carefully explained how his original story had become transformed into a living legend. [...]His book, although successful, did nothing to dampen the desire of the masses to believe in and identify with the idea of supernatural intervention in the war. For simultaneously, the British public was overwhelmed with further published accounts providing new testimony and "evidence," all supporting the claims that angels had indeed appeared on the battlefield! Variations of the angels s rumour were by now being circulated and published at an astonishing rate. In England, where the public was receiving dreadful news of great losses from the Western Front every day, the clergy used the story in Sunday sermons as a method of boosting morale on the Home Front and to foster belief in the rightness of the British cause. Published sermons, pamphlets and books appeared alongside the stories, filling columns of the daily newspapers and a mass of correspondence hotly debating the rumours. Ralph Shirley, editor of the Occult Review, issued a booklet called The Angel Warriors At Mons, which he claimed to be an "authentic record" of the visions including "numerous confirmatory testimonies," but which contained little more than hearsay and speculation (Shirley 1915, 1). [...]The writer Harold Begbie, author of On the Side of the Angels, subtitled "an answer to Arthur Machen," went one step further. Begbie was a patriot who realised the story was an inspiration to the British war effort and felt it should be defended. He suggested that telepathy rather than coincidence best explained the source of Machen's inspiration [...]During 1915 a number of named soldiers did come forward to relate personal experiences of battlefield visions that were published in the newspapers, but none appeared until a year after the events they claimed to describe. Others came forward in later years with more elaborate stories, but these cannot be regarded as reliable as they were all influenced by the publicity the claims had received during 1915. [...]It was not until the spring of 1918 that angel rumours were again spread through the elaborate grapevine that had developed in the trenches of the Western Front. [...] One story concerned the leaning statue of the Virgin and Child, which balanced precariously upon the ruined Basilica at Albert. A rumour gained ground among the British and German troops that the war would end when the statue finally fell, and both tried in vain to destroy it with artillery shells. The statue-that was referred to as "the angel" by the soldiers-was finally dislodged by British shellfire in April 1918. Newspapers quickly declared that "the Germans had wantonly destroyed it" (Fussell 1975, 132). [...]Stories and alleged personal accounts from BEF veterans of visions witnessed at Mons and elsewhere continued to appear following the end of the Great War, but the accounts became more elaborate in their re-telling [...]As the rumours multiplied, many story variations appeared in the newspapers within the context of "established fact." [...]In 1915 a careful inquiry set in motion by the SPR arrived at a similar conclusion. This said of the first-hand testimony, "we have received none at all, and of testimony at second-hand we have none that would justify us in assuming the occurrence of any supernormal phenomenon." The SPR established how many of the stories relating to alleged "visions" on the battlefield, circulated during the spring and summer of 1915, "prove on investigation to be founded on mere rumour, and cannot be traced to any authoritative source." Despite this poverty of evidence they concluded: ... after the rumours had been discounted, we are left with a small residue of evidence, which seems to indicate that a certain number of men who took part in the retreat from Mons honestly believe themselves to have had at that time supernormal experiences of a remarkable character (Verrall 1915, 117). [...]The origins of the angels of Mons lie not so much in the events of the battle itself, but at a time when the war had entered a new, bleak phase of trench warfare and unremitting suffering. It was within this context that claims of divine intervention on the side of the Allies were invented, circulated and widely believed despite a complete absence of evidence.
So how about that? Did that battle, or, better yet, the whole WWI happen?
When analyzing the testimonies one has to be very careful to differentiate between the first-hand parts of them and the hearsay parts. For example, deniers are fond of quoting an excerpt from a testimony of a survivor named Lieberman (analyzed here) and some sort of a text with the obviously absurd description of the extermination process in Auschwitz (which they call a "Holocauster", Holocaust roller-coaster) from Eugene Aroneanu's book Inside the Concentration Camps: Eyewitness Accounts of Life in Hitler's Death Camps.
Lieberman's statement is simply hearsay (the denier memes lie about this by omission). The "holocauster" comes from a source that is not easily verifiable (Aroneanu specifies it simply as "AUSCHWITZ Report of the Russian Section" without further details). Until the source is verified, it is simply not known with whom the claim originates. Deniers even claim that it's a proof of "Jews" lying, but nowhere in the text is the ethnicity of the author indicated.
Also, nowhere in the text is there any indication that its author claims to have seen the absurd method of extermination - and only that would have made the author an alleged eyewitness. An appeal to the book's title ("eyewitness accounts") is a failed argument - only the content of the testimony can decide this, the person who collected these bits and pieces in one book could have easily been mistaken (or overgeneralizing; it's just a book title, not a precise mathematical treatise). So in the end the claim that it was an alleged eyewitness account describing an absurd method of extermination is simply unproven. But even if it were, everything written in the preceding paragraphs would apply to it. It would't somehow mean that all testimonies are unreliable. And that some are needs no further proof and hasn't been denied by anyone.
Notably, like so many garbled descriptions of the extermination process, the "holocauster" is likely based on some sort of a core of truth, namely, the description of the wagons rolling towards the ovens is probably based on the actual corpse wagons used in the Auschwitz oven rooms. Such descriptions might have traveled through several levels of distortion (due to language differences etc.) which might have resulted in the "holocauster" rumor.
Then one should be wary of claims made up by the Holocaust deniers themselves. E. g. the "bendy shotgun" story is popular among the denial flora and fauna on Twitter:
Lieberman's statement is simply hearsay (the denier memes lie about this by omission). The "holocauster" comes from a source that is not easily verifiable (Aroneanu specifies it simply as "AUSCHWITZ Report of the Russian Section" without further details). Until the source is verified, it is simply not known with whom the claim originates. Deniers even claim that it's a proof of "Jews" lying, but nowhere in the text is the ethnicity of the author indicated.
Also, nowhere in the text is there any indication that its author claims to have seen the absurd method of extermination - and only that would have made the author an alleged eyewitness. An appeal to the book's title ("eyewitness accounts") is a failed argument - only the content of the testimony can decide this, the person who collected these bits and pieces in one book could have easily been mistaken (or overgeneralizing; it's just a book title, not a precise mathematical treatise). So in the end the claim that it was an alleged eyewitness account describing an absurd method of extermination is simply unproven. But even if it were, everything written in the preceding paragraphs would apply to it. It would't somehow mean that all testimonies are unreliable. And that some are needs no further proof and hasn't been denied by anyone.
Notably, like so many garbled descriptions of the extermination process, the "holocauster" is likely based on some sort of a core of truth, namely, the description of the wagons rolling towards the ovens is probably based on the actual corpse wagons used in the Auschwitz oven rooms. Such descriptions might have traveled through several levels of distortion (due to language differences etc.) which might have resulted in the "holocauster" rumor.
Then one should be wary of claims made up by the Holocaust deniers themselves. E. g. the "bendy shotgun" story is popular among the denial flora and fauna on Twitter:
Yet the story is clearly a denier fake: the first paragraph and the last sentence are lifted straight from the NYT article with the bear and eagle story mentioned above. Yet all the gullible deniers reposting this fake probably think they're somehow smarter than random folks repeating rumors.
Another example is a screenshot of a "Yari Rappaport"'s bio:
In conclusion: all kinds of evidence need to be checked against each other. And just because someone was in Auschwitz, for example, doesn't make them an eyewitness to the gas chambers - and they're, as a rule, not used in such a capacity by the historians. So finding some survivor telling implausible stories does not mean history should be rewritten - it was most probably not written in reliance on that survivor in the first place.
Further reading:
Sergey Romanov, "The Auschwitz Museum's instant factchecking of a "gas chamber survival" story"
Joachim Neander, "Irene Zisblatt, the "Diamond Girl" - Fact or Fiction?"
22. Scratched gas chamber walls?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: these are merely marks left by the visitors.
Further comments: that these are victim fingernail marks may be a piece of folklore, but as the Auschwitz Museum's twitter account doesn't tire of pointing out, these are nothing but marks left by the visitors. One could even characterize this as vandalism.
Here is the wall of the gas chamber that was not accessible to the visitors:
23. Dachau gas chamber; the Broszat letter.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: Dachau was not an extermination camp, so whether or not some gassings happened there is irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust.
Further comments: the homicidal gassings in Dachau have not been established beyond the reasonable doubt. The door to the gas chamber before which a US soldier stands indeed belonged to a delousing gas chamber. The early reports in the aftermath of the liberation indeed contained a lot of nonsense - isn't that too often so? But history is not written based on such reports.
There was indeed, as far as we can tell, a homicidal gas chamber built in Dachau (not to be confused with the delousing ones). In a 09.08.1942 letter to Himmler, Siegmund Rascher wrote (see B. Distel, "Die Gaskammer in der 'Baracke X' des Konzentrationslagers Dachau und die 'Dachau-Lüge'" in G. Morsch, B. Perz (Hrsg.), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, 2012 (2. Aufl.), S. 339):
Whether the gas chamber was indeed used is hard to say on the available evidence. There were rumors about its use as well as some uncorroborated testimony. The small-scale use, however, cannot be excluded. The old museum sign claiming the chamber was not used was removed a long time ago.
After the war some members of the public had a mistaken impression that people had been gassed en masse in Dachau. As a result, the German historian Martin Broszat wrote a letter entitled "No gassing in Dachau". Deniers like to claim that in it Broszat denied any gassings on the territory of the Old Reich (or even outside Poland). This is obviously not true, Broszat pointed out that the mass gassings of Jews took place outside of the Old Reich (mostly in Poland), and no gassings took place in Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. This does not contradict the fact that smaller-scale gassings mostly of non-Jews (but including some Jews) did take place in the camps and other facilities in the Old Reich.
Universally accepted by the modern experts are gassings in the euthanasia facilities at Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, Hadamar, as well as in the camps Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Neuengamme, all of which are on the Old Reich territory (see Morsch, Perz, op. cit.). Deniers misuse Broszat's claim (just like they do with Simon Wiesenthal's similar claim).
(Here it should also be mentioned that also non-Eastern gassing facilities outside of the Old Reich existed, for example in Mauthausen and Hartheim (Austria), Natzweiler (France), see Morsch, Perz, op. cit.)
Broszat was correct about no gassings having taken place in Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, however his claim that there were no gassings in Dachau was unsubstantiated. Modern researchers don't exclude the possibility of a trial gassing (or gassings) there (see Distel, op. cit., S. 341).
In the end, however, Dachau was not an extermination camp like Treblinka or Auschwitz, so this is a secondary issue at best.
24. Survivor Lieberman and the Auschwitz ovens.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the denier failed to clarify that this was explicit hearsay; also: the existence of fake or unreliable Holocaust witnesses no more disproves the Holocaust than the existence of the fake Vietnam war vets disproves the Vietnam war. Irrelevant.
Further comments: in the typically mendacious denier fashion the twitter user omitted this part (NCA, vol. VI, p. 1101):
No historian has based anything on this particular hearsay claim by Lieberman. So the "calculations" are a typical strawman - nobody takes the claim seriously, so there is no reason to show the obvious absurdity.
We do have a bunch of the actual Nazi documents that help to establish the actual Auschwitz cremation capacities. The capacities were significantly larger than 1 corpse per hour, not to mention 2-4 corpses per hour. There were not 4 but 46 muffles in Birkenau (and 6 in the Auschwitz main camp), so anyone retweeting this meme admits not to have learned the very basics of the history of Auschwitz.
25. The Lachout document.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the "document" is a proven fake. How typical for deniers to spread fake documents.
Further comments: this so-called document was concocted by the notorious forger Emil Lachout and ripped to shreds by the experts, but not before having been swallowed by a bunch of deniers as a true document debunking gassings.
Holocaust deniers are suckers for forgeries. Though the forgery is so obvious, even some deniers were forced to admit it's a fake. Even Germar Rudolf, who used to defend this obvious and crude forgery, got cold feet in the end:
Further reading:
Sergey Romanov, "The Auschwitz Museum's instant factchecking of a "gas chamber survival" story"
Joachim Neander, "Irene Zisblatt, the "Diamond Girl" - Fact or Fiction?"
22. Scratched gas chamber walls?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: these are merely marks left by the visitors.
Further comments: that these are victim fingernail marks may be a piece of folklore, but as the Auschwitz Museum's twitter account doesn't tire of pointing out, these are nothing but marks left by the visitors. One could even characterize this as vandalism.
Here is the wall of the gas chamber that was not accessible to the visitors:
23. Dachau gas chamber; the Broszat letter.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: Dachau was not an extermination camp, so whether or not some gassings happened there is irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust.
Further comments: the homicidal gassings in Dachau have not been established beyond the reasonable doubt. The door to the gas chamber before which a US soldier stands indeed belonged to a delousing gas chamber. The early reports in the aftermath of the liberation indeed contained a lot of nonsense - isn't that too often so? But history is not written based on such reports.
There was indeed, as far as we can tell, a homicidal gas chamber built in Dachau (not to be confused with the delousing ones). In a 09.08.1942 letter to Himmler, Siegmund Rascher wrote (see B. Distel, "Die Gaskammer in der 'Baracke X' des Konzentrationslagers Dachau und die 'Dachau-Lüge'" in G. Morsch, B. Perz (Hrsg.), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, 2012 (2. Aufl.), S. 339):
As you know, the same facility is being built in KL Dachau as in Linz. Since the "disableds' transports" end up in certain chambers anyway, I ask if it is not possible to test the effects of our various war gases in these chambers on the persons who are in any case destined for them. Up to now only animal experiments and reports about accidents during the production of these gases are available. Because of this paragraph I send the letter as a "secret matter."
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| Full text of Rascher's letter. |
After the war some members of the public had a mistaken impression that people had been gassed en masse in Dachau. As a result, the German historian Martin Broszat wrote a letter entitled "No gassing in Dachau". Deniers like to claim that in it Broszat denied any gassings on the territory of the Old Reich (or even outside Poland). This is obviously not true, Broszat pointed out that the mass gassings of Jews took place outside of the Old Reich (mostly in Poland), and no gassings took place in Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. This does not contradict the fact that smaller-scale gassings mostly of non-Jews (but including some Jews) did take place in the camps and other facilities in the Old Reich.
Universally accepted by the modern experts are gassings in the euthanasia facilities at Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, Hadamar, as well as in the camps Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Neuengamme, all of which are on the Old Reich territory (see Morsch, Perz, op. cit.). Deniers misuse Broszat's claim (just like they do with Simon Wiesenthal's similar claim).
(Here it should also be mentioned that also non-Eastern gassing facilities outside of the Old Reich existed, for example in Mauthausen and Hartheim (Austria), Natzweiler (France), see Morsch, Perz, op. cit.)
Broszat was correct about no gassings having taken place in Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, however his claim that there were no gassings in Dachau was unsubstantiated. Modern researchers don't exclude the possibility of a trial gassing (or gassings) there (see Distel, op. cit., S. 341).
In the end, however, Dachau was not an extermination camp like Treblinka or Auschwitz, so this is a secondary issue at best.
24. Survivor Lieberman and the Auschwitz ovens.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the denier failed to clarify that this was explicit hearsay; also: the existence of fake or unreliable Holocaust witnesses no more disproves the Holocaust than the existence of the fake Vietnam war vets disproves the Vietnam war. Irrelevant.
Further comments: in the typically mendacious denier fashion the twitter user omitted this part (NCA, vol. VI, p. 1101):
As already mentioned, I was one of a working party whose duty it was to unload potatoes at the station. We had at this time no contact with the prisoners of the big camp. We were separated in quarantine but housed together with another working party which was serving the crematorium and the gas chamber. It is due to this fact that I know how things occurredSo that's explicit hearsay and basically a Chinese whispers game, possibly partially due to language differences. Irrelevant.
No historian has based anything on this particular hearsay claim by Lieberman. So the "calculations" are a typical strawman - nobody takes the claim seriously, so there is no reason to show the obvious absurdity.
We do have a bunch of the actual Nazi documents that help to establish the actual Auschwitz cremation capacities. The capacities were significantly larger than 1 corpse per hour, not to mention 2-4 corpses per hour. There were not 4 but 46 muffles in Birkenau (and 6 in the Auschwitz main camp), so anyone retweeting this meme admits not to have learned the very basics of the history of Auschwitz.
25. The Lachout document.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the "document" is a proven fake. How typical for deniers to spread fake documents.
Further comments: this so-called document was concocted by the notorious forger Emil Lachout and ripped to shreds by the experts, but not before having been swallowed by a bunch of deniers as a true document debunking gassings.
Holocaust deniers are suckers for forgeries. Though the forgery is so obvious, even some deniers were forced to admit it's a fake. Even Germar Rudolf, who used to defend this obvious and crude forgery, got cold feet in the end:
After the denier Schwensen confirmed the "document" as fake in Germar Rudolf's "journal", Lachout responded with an insult-filled but fact-free diatribe, to which Rudolf wrote in his afterword:
I also remember that a review of a few cases showed that Lachout's interpretation of official or court decisions was wrong. Decisions, which were made for technical or procedural reasons, were interpreted by him as substantive confirmations of his assertions.As an example of the distorting way of presentation, take the assertions made in the above article:- Lachout claims that Skorzeny, Brunner, Degrelle, and Gerd Honsik were granted asylum for Holocaust or gas chamber denial. This is not true. Honsik alone was prosecuted for this offense, and Spain's refusal to extradite him to Austria is not based on any grant of asylum, but on the fact that Austria admitted the political nature of Honsik's persecution. No EU citizen can be formally granted asylum in any EU country because all EU states have officially recognized each other as non-persecutor states, thus precluding them from even accepting asylum requests from EU citizens.- Lachout claims that in the cases of Gerd Honsik, engineer Friedrich Rainer, Walter Ochensberger, Regina von Finta, Leon Degrelle, engineer Walter Lüftl, and engineer Emil Lachout there were acquittals in the matter of gas chamber denial, which explicitly confirmed that there were no gas chambers. So far, he owes proof for any of this. The most "positive" of all verdicts that I have read so far have at most sidestepped this question. That Lachout's statements are inaccurate, if not even misleading, can be seen in the Lüftl case. Criminal proceedings were initiated against him because of his revisionist writing, but they were dropped beforehand. Therefore, there was no trial and thus no acquittal, let alone a judicial gathering of evidence on Lüftl's arguments. A victim of the fatal misjudgment that Lüftl's statements were thus approved as "legal" was Herwig Nachmann of the Austrian magazine Aula, who published parts of Lüftl's paper after the investigation against him was dropped and was promptly prosecuted for this under the new §3h of the Austrian Prohibition Act and sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment and a fine of ÖS 240,000 (approx. €17,000).- Lachout claims to know what the European Commission of Human Rights (ECHR) would have judged to be a fair trial, namely that "all exculpatory evidence and the truth of my [Lachout's] statements or the accuracy of the content of the Lachout document would have been confirmed [...] by an acquittal [...]". Lachout cannot possibly know what the ECHR would have judged to be fair. What we do know for sure, however, is that the EU Court has given its highly official blessing to all other cases brought before it in which revisionists have been convicted without hearing evidence on the manslaughter argument of "obviousness," most recently in the Roger Garaudy case. It is therefore likely that Lachout would have lost before the EU Court if the Austrian courts had behaved similarly to the Federal German and French courts, i.e., if they had swiftly convicted Lachout with a blanket rejection of his evidence. But even if it should be true that at some point a revisionist has been or will be acquitted, this ultimately only proves that at some point a revisionist has been or will be acquitted. But it proves nothing with respect to the question of whether there were gas chambers. The communication difficulties between Lachout and his historical critics are due to the fact that Lachout's arguments are exclusively legal, not scientific, and that his legal interpretations of verdicts are hair-raisingly wrong.[...]Since the day Lachout was attacked for the authenticity of the so-called "Lachout Document," he has been defending himself through legal action (legal threats and lawsuits). Legal actions against abuse of power by authorities are perfectly legitimate. But they should not be directed against fact-based critics. Now, however, Mr. Lachout is threatening Mr. Schwensen and me. This is not the way to convince critical minds.
Further reading:
Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Wilhelm Lasek, Wolfgang Neugebauer, Gustav Spann, "The Lachout Document. Anatomy of a Forgery" (here is the complete German-language original).
Sergey Romanov, "Holocaust "revisionism" and forgeries"
Dachau gas chamber.
Death camps found only by the Soviets?
The Broszat letter.
26. Fake Holocaust photos?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the denier offers fake examples of fake photos. Fail.
Further comments: the first step in proving a photo falsification is to clearly specify the sources of both the original and the fake. The denier has failed to do this so his examples can be dismissed simply on that ground with the exception of the Buchenwald photo. Finding a random, unsourced doctored picture on the internet only proves that there are random, unsourced doctored pictures on the internet and nothing more than that. Nevertheless let's take a look.
The first image shows the famous post-liberation photo of Dachau prisoners demonstrating how a corpse could be pushed into an oven. In fact the photo is a part of a series. Someone photoshopped the corpse out of the photo as a part of a dumb "art project", and the the denier muppets simply started spreading it without a second (or first) thought.
Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Wilhelm Lasek, Wolfgang Neugebauer, Gustav Spann, "The Lachout Document. Anatomy of a Forgery" (here is the complete German-language original).
Sergey Romanov, "Holocaust "revisionism" and forgeries"
Dachau gas chamber.
Death camps found only by the Soviets?
The Broszat letter.
26. Fake Holocaust photos?
Denier claim:
Further comments: the first step in proving a photo falsification is to clearly specify the sources of both the original and the fake. The denier has failed to do this so his examples can be dismissed simply on that ground with the exception of the Buchenwald photo. Finding a random, unsourced doctored picture on the internet only proves that there are random, unsourced doctored pictures on the internet and nothing more than that. Nevertheless let's take a look.
The first image shows the famous post-liberation photo of Dachau prisoners demonstrating how a corpse could be pushed into an oven. In fact the photo is a part of a series. Someone photoshopped the corpse out of the photo as a part of a dumb "art project", and the the denier muppets simply started spreading it without a second (or first) thought.
Second image with many photos is again a useless mish-mash without any sources, but it is clear that most photos are internet photoshops, most probably made by the deniers themselves as a provocation. Such photos are being distributed as alleged examples of Soviet manipulations, but of course no Soviet source contains such photos. For example, some hoaxer took one of the authentic photos from the ARC website:
and photoshopped it into this fake:
But he did not remove the ARC signature in the bottom right corner, which shows that this cannot be a Soviet fake even in theory. The hoaxer was most probably a denier, and in any case it is the deniers that spread lists of such obvious newly photoshopped photos, falsely presenting them as actual Soviet fakes, thus making deniers hoaxers.
The claim about the Buchenwald photo is debunked here. Long story short, the New York Times Magazine deleted the standing guy from the picture. This in no way proves the original picture a fake. Contrary to the lie in the meme, the NYTM publication was not the first publication of this photo.
Deniers cannot prove that any of the fake photos above have been used in serious historical studies. The photoshopped photos usually come from websites like pinterest and finding them proves exactly nothing.
Since we are at it, let's take a look at the following "debunking" of a famous photo:
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| Image courtesy of wm. |
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| Image courtesy of wm. |
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| Image courtesy of wm. |
The author of the meme above is of course ignorant about basic history. He claims that the shooter does not wear a typical SS combat uniform, and he indeed doesn't, and nobody has claimed that he was an SS man in the first place. It is so typical for a denier to erect a strawman argument to beat it down without addressing the actual facts.
The shooter wears the uniform typical for the order police (Ordnungspolizei) that was responsible for shooting hundreds of thousands of Jews. Here are some photos made in context of the Lidice massacre for a comparison:
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| Source. |
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| Source. |
Indeed, other Mauser models also looked like this. He could be holding the G24(t):
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| Photo credit: C&Rsenal |
So both arguments are based on lazy ignorance.
Occasionally the deniers do manage to find a mislabeled or a somewhat retouched photo or a collage and label it a "fake" with a cry of victory. But it's hard to see what such rare instances prove except that you can always find some bad apples among the overwhelming majority of the good ones. As we've seen, some deniers engage in fakery of photos, taking the real ones, making absurd fakes and presenting them as "Holocaust" fakes. By the denier logic this should disprove the denial.
Also, the deniers often fall for forgeries themselves.
Further reading:
Andras Szilagyi, "A Charge of Forgery Supported by Forgery: The Smearing of a Genuine Auschwitz Photo"
Hans Metzner, "The Auschwitz Open Air Incineration Ground Photographs and Revisionist Forgery Allegations"
Brian Harmon, "See No Evil: John Ball's Blundering Air Photo Analysis"
Sergey Romanov, "The tree-hanging photo was not a fake after all..."
27. Science debunks Holocaust?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the Krege report does not exist. It's a dud. Fail. The claims about the cyanide residue are just false. The "deprogramming" hoax site has been fully refuted here.
Further comments: Richard Krege allegedly conducted a ground penetrating radar scan of Treblinka in October of 1999 and promised to publish his results. Decades later the promised report still has not materialized. Need one say more?
Well, maybe a couple of points. First of all, Krege's preliminary description of his results includes this bit:
A comparison reveals that the radar images taken everywhere in the camp show an almost perfect soil untouched by humans.This, of course, is impossible since even the deniers admit that there was a camp there, they merely claim it was a transit camp. So the soil just couldn't have been mostly undisturbed on any account except Krege's.
[...]
Almost all of the ground consists of undisturbed soil, sand and rocks.
Treblinka's wartime graves are documented, see the daily report of 24.10.1942 from the official German war diary of the Oberquartiermeister of the military commander in Poland:
Supreme Command Ostrow informs that the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and that, as a result, an unbearable body stench befouls the air.
With today's bounty of Jews, a very large portion of the bandits and lowest elements of the Ghetto has, in my opinion, been captured. Immediate liquidation was not carried out due to the onset of darkness. I will attempt to obtain a train for T II for tomorrow, otherwise the liquidations will be carried out tomorrow.T. II, that is, Treblinka II, was the official designation of the extermination camp (as opposed to a tiny work camp Treblinka I nearby).
On 26.04.1943 Stroop reported:
At this time there are no more captured Jews in Warsaw. The previously mentioned transport to T.II was successful.Then on 13.05.1943:
The rest of the inhabitants, where the fire fight took place, were destroyed by the strongest explosive charges. From a Wehrmacht operation 327 Jews were captured today. These captured Jews will only be sent to T.II.And finally on 24.05.1943:
Of the overall total of 56,065 captured Jews, about 7,000 have been destroyed in the course of the large-scale action in the former Jewish living quarter. 6,929 Jews were destroyed by transport to T. II, so that overall, 13,929 Jews were destroyed. It is estimated that, in addition to the number of 56,065, 5 - 6,000 Jews were destroyed by explosions and fire.Post-liberation investigations did find traces of the graves, ashes and bones. Thus, the August 1944 inspection by the Soviets resulted in this:
A huge area of the camp was covered with cinders and ashes. The road, which connected the two camps and is three kilometers long, was covered with cinders and ashes to a height of 7 - 10 cm. One could recognize the presence of lime in large pieces of cinder with the naked eye. It is well known that lime is a product of burning bones. There were no production sites in the camp, but cinders and ashes were brought out of the camp every day by the ton. This freight was loaded onto railroad cars, and 20 to 30 peasant carts distributed them and poured them onto the road. (Witness testimony of Lucjan Puchała, Kazimierz Skarzinski. Stanisław Krym inter alia).The Polish investigation yielded further results:
The statements of the witnesses, the book ‘One Year in Treblinka’ [by Jankiel Wiernik], the presence of a large quantity of ashes and cinders, the presence of personal commodities and documents strewn on the grounds as well as excavated from the pits confirm that there were ovens in the camp where people were cremated.
[…]
Remaining as marks of the existence of the camp are: an abatis of barbed wire, ashes, cinders, and a great number of pits, where household objects of the cremated Jews have been buried.
The camp was finally ,,liquidated" in November, 1943. At the present time no traces of it are left, except for the cellar passage with the protruding remains of burnt posts, the foundations of the administration building, and the old well. Here and there can also be traced the remains of burnt fence posts and pieces of barbed wire, and short sections of paved road. There are also other traces. For example, in the north-eastern part, over a surface covering about 2 ha. (5 acres), there are large quantities of ashes mixed with sand, among which are numerous human bones, often with the remains of decomposing tissues.
As a result of an examination made by an expert it was found that ashes were the remains of burnt human bones. The examination of numerous human skulls found in the camp has shown that they bear no traces of external injuries. Within a radius of several hundred yards from the camp site an unpleasant smell of burnt ash and decay is noticeable, growing stronger as one approaches.
The south-western part of the camp site is covered with the remains of all kinds of aluminum, enamel, glass and porcelain vessels, kitchen utensils, trunks, rucksacks, and remnants of clothing. Almost the whole camp-site is now covered with pits and holes.
 |
| Photo of Treblinka made by Aleksandr Kapustyanskiy on 01.08.1944. Source: RIA Novosti. |
The largest of the craters produced by explosions (numerous fragments attest to the fact that these explosions were set off by bombs), which is at maximum 6 meters deep and has a diameter of about 25 meters – its walls give recognizable evidence of the presence of a large quantity of ashes as well as human remains – was further excavated in order to discover the depth of the pit in this part of the camp. Numerous human remains were found by these excavations, partially still in a state of decomposition. The soil consists of ashes interspersed with sand, is of a dark gray color and granulous in form. During the excavations, the soil gave off an intense odor of burning and decay. At a depth of 7.5 meters the bottom was reached, which consisted of layers of unmixed sand. At this point the digging was stopped here.Furthermore, after the liberation there was a gold rush in Treblinka, during which the soil was very much disturbed (again).
Finally, a modern archaeological investigation by Caroline Sturdy Colls' team using both the partial GPR scan and partial excavations located some of the probable former mass graves and the gas chambers ("some" and "partial" because most of the former camp area is now either wooded or under the stones of the memorial, which was designed to cover the largest mass graves area). Just a small sample of her results follows.
Sturdy Colls' PhD thesis Holocaust Archaeology: Archaeological Approaches to Landscapes of Nazi Genocide and Persecution (Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham, September 2011), p. 215:
Five pits were located with the GPR (G50-G54) on the eastern side of the Death Camp (Figures 4.29 and 4.34). Although the GPR survey was unable to achieve a large enough depth range to determine the full extent of these pits, it is possible to say that they were all deeper than four metres and that they were all of considerable size in plan (G50 was visible to an extent of 34m x 12m, G51-19m x 12m, G52 – 22m x c.15m, G53 – c.18m x 7m and G54 was visible to 20.8m x c. 14m). Given their location in the area thought to contain most of the mass graves and their proximity to the memorial, there is a strong case for arguing that they represent further disposals. Similarly, they appear too large to be a result of post-war looting activity.From C. Sturdy Colls, M. Branthwaite, "'This is Proof'? Forensic Evidence and Ambiguous Material Culture at Treblinka Extermination Camp", International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2017, 22(3), pp. 430–453:
The excavation of Trench 4 confirmed that the 22 × 15 m anomaly in the GPR results did in fact represent the foundations of the first gas chambers built by the Nazis at Treblinka (known as the old gas chambers), which existed at a depth of 0.85 m below the ground. Seven hundred twelve individual items were also recovered from this small trench. These items can be divided into three groups:Krege's claim about "almost perfect soil untouched by humans" is just a hoax then.
(1) Building materials – e.g., tiles, bricks, and plaster
(2) Personal belongings – e.g., jewelry, hair clips, a belt buckle, and coins
(3) Functional items - scissors, a knife, bullets, a battery, glass, etc.
A selection of the items found are shown in Fig. 2
Dentures, and gold and silver teeth were also found along with a considerable amount of fragmented human remains, some of which exhibited evidence of burninga some that did not. All of these different types of material traces were commingled, confirming the nature of destruction afforded to the gas chambers in autumn 1943 and the heavily disturbed nature of the ground exhibited in the GPR results. This wasf established by the discovery of 286 objects in Trench 3, which existed outside of the area of the gas chamber foundations. The items found in this area can also be grouped into the categories outlined above and human remains were also found intermingled with the objects in this area.
Finally, it should be mentioned that for years this image of uncertain origin was touted by many deniers as the result of Krege's scan that proved absence of graves in Treblinka (it can be found, among many other places and memes, on David Irving's site and in the CODOH version of Krege's 2000 article, albeit not in the original German version):
I looked at the web site, and the image you sent. It is only one small part of his 'grid'. The picture shows him using a 200 MHz antenna and collecting about 1 meter spaced transects in a huge grid. That image is not processed, and only shows about a 5 meter long section in one line. And even in that profile it looks like a bunch of "things" in the ground on the right hand side that could easily be mass graves. It is apparent that this guy either does not know anything of GPR, or at the very least does not know how to process it. To really do a good job, the data need to be put into a 3-D cube of reflections and processed in a batch, including ALL the profiles collected. If you really wanted to get to the bottom of this you either need to get his data and let someone else process it, or re-collect it all and re-process your own data. This is NOT a scientific or representive study of the ground by any stretch.Oops.
Krege has become an embarrassment for denial, so it's funny how his non-existent research is touted here. Twitter deniers are the most ignorant, dumb deniers.
Yet another denier (who has since abandoned and denounced denial) Eric Hunt made an entire film about how Sturdy Colls' excavation was a "hoax". Here is her response (Holocaust Archaeologies. Approaches and Future Directions, 2015, p. 348):
In particular, revisionists have focused upon the suggestion in the programme that a Star of David was present on the tiles of the gas chambers. However, the comments made in the programme by the archaeologists were initial reactions to seeing the tiles which were taken out of context. In reality, as soon as the research was undertaken off-site concerning the origins of the tiles, it became apparent that they were manufactured by a Polish company and that the star was in fact not a Star of David at all but rather the company logo. However, due to the short turnaround time between the filming and broadcast, only the initial reaction was present in the documentary and the idea that the tiles possessed the Star of David was seized upon by the media. Once again, this was announced by revisionists as a sign that the excavation was a hoax. Because earlier work undertaken at the site was not included in the documentary, revisionists have also claimed that no mass graves were found at the extermination camp.
She also directly addresses the already debunked Krege, pointing out her finding mass graves, human remains and gas chambers, as well as the "presence of considerable disturbance across the entire former camp area".
The claims about no cyanide residue having been found or results withheld are a lie.
Markiewicz et al. tested the gas chamber walls and found the cyanide residues, the results were published.
Just because the delousing chambers have the blue staining does not automatically mean the homicidal gas chambers also have to have it. Delousing and homicidal gassings very simply took place under very different conditions, so comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges.
Leuchter has been debunked above, Rudolf has been debunked here.
28. No Britannica mention of gas chambers?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: it is simply irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust.
Further comments: first of all, of course there was no article on the "Holocaust" since the term became popular only in the 1960s-1970s.
Anyway, what is the logical argument here? Someone did not mention gas chambers in a popular encyclopedia (general-purpose encyclopedias aren't really scholarly sources) therefore there were no gas chambers? Surely even the most dumb denier should understand that this does not logically follow?
Suppose Marcus' article is indeed an example of sub-par scholarship. And? This might characterize the Britannica of those years, but this tells us exactly nothing about the historicity of the Holocaust and the gas chambers.
Anyway, the explanation of the lack of a mention in this article is most probably as follows: the article was repeated without updates (at least in what this part is concerned) from 1947 to at least 1956. It was, by the way, still the same 14th edition of the Britannica that first got published in 1929, revised in 1933 and got very slowly updated from time to time, but on the whole in those years the Britannica was pretty outdated. This eventually led to Harvey Einbinder's hard-hitting 1964 book The Myth of the Britannica, in which he showed that major parts of the encyclopedia didn't get updated for decades, and which served as an impetus for a major overhaul of the encyclopedia with the 15th edition in 1974 (!).
Indeed, on pp. 203-208 of his book Einbinder specifically points out the complete inadequacy of the Britannica entries on the Nazi period:
The entry on Concentration Camps in the 1958 edition occupies only eight lines and simply notes,"The Nazi regime used them in peace and war." For further information, readers are directed—"see SOUTH AFRICAN WAR,1899-1902."So much for the Britannica's quality in those years. Notably, even when it did report on atrocities, it got its facts wrong, like its claim about 2 million victims of Mauthausen, something the deniers don't fail to complain about.
The article on National Socialism ignores the violence and bloodshed that marked the final years of Nazi rule in Europe. Instead it concentrates on the early history of National Socialism before Hitler assumed power. It speaks in vague terms about the Party's "Anti-Judaism," but says nothing about the liquidation of European Jewry during the war. There is nothing about the dark reign of terror which comprised the closing chapter of the Third Reich when all Europe suffered under German occupation, and the Gestapo became a synonym for wickedness and brutality. The article glosses over the grim consequences of a political movement that began by exalting the Aryan race and the philosophy of Deutschland über Alles. It is not difficult to explain why these matters are neglected. The article on National Socialism was written during the war before the Nazi harvest of misery and suffering was complete. When it first appeared, the latest reference in its bibliography was 1941; and after the war, despite the lurid evidence given at the Nuremberg trials and the mass of captured German documents revealing the depths of Nazi depravity, no attempt was made to recast this inadequate entry. Instead it was revised by inserting a few references in the bibliography - and a few sentences in the text that ironically neglect German atrocities by stating: "National Socialism under Hitler's leadership ended thus in complete failure; the national socialist Reich ended in total catastrophe after 12 years' existence."
[...]
Although the article on Anti-Semitism is eight pages long, it allots only a single page to the systematic destruction of European Jewry. Separate sections trace the history of anti-Semitism in individual countries, such as Hungary and Poland, but they ignore the period of mass extermination by skipping the years 1941-45. This momentous era is discussed in a brief factual resume that recounts some of the statistics relating to Nazi genocide, without examining the subject in any depth.
[...]
[in the survey article on Germany] More than ten thousand words are devoted to the events of 1933-45, but there is little attempt to explore the evils of Nazism or to comprehend the nightmare that seized Germany for twelve years. The Nazi regime is described as a "totalitarian police state," but its monumental crimes are neither examined nor discussed. One paragraph is allotted to the treatment of the Jews. It states:
...Jews were restricted to a ghetto-like existence until the war when they were systematically put to death in different extermination camps. Altogether in German-occupied Europe, out of a total of 8,300,000 Jews, 6,000,000 were so killed or died of starvation and disease.There is no endeavor to explain how these events came to pass, or indeed, how they were possible.
[...]
The article on Germany devotes seven pages to the history of the Nazi era, but its wartime atrocities are limited to a single paragraph. It notes that German economic exploitation of occupied Europe was ruthless, and it reports:
At Mauthausen, one of the extermination camps in Austria, close to 2,000,000 people, mostly Jews, were exterminated between 1941 and 1945, at Oswiecim (Auschwitz) in Poland, 2,500,000 were executed in gas chambers, while another 500,000 died from starvation and disease.There is no comment on these acts, and there is no effort to relate them to the nature of the Nazi regime. Indeed the article on Germany says nothing about the International Military Tribunal which was convened in Nuremberg after the war to try major Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity. Robert H. Jackson in his opening statement at the Nuremberg trials said, "History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or ever carried out with such calculated cruelty." Yet there is no account of the Nuremberg trials in the Encyclopaedia and no description of Nazi atrocities.
[...]
It may be natural that Germans should wish to shield their eyes from the crimes which were committed in the name of a greater and more glorious Germany, but why should such reticence be practiced by the Encyclopaedia Britannica?
On the other hand, it is clear that the Britannica does mention the extermination of Jews. The deniers should decide whether to complain about the Britannica's alleged silence about the Holocaust or about its exaggeration of some aspects of it.
The 6 million number and the gas chamber bits quoted above appeared in the Britannica as early as 1952 (vol. 10, pp. 286, 288). So the meme author simply lied.
As for Marcus's article, as far as I know, it was probably first published in 1947, but considering the editing processes it could have been written a year or even two earlier. During that time the big picture was already clear, so Marcus wrote that:
national socialists set out deliberately to destroy large numbers of Polish and Russian-Jewish civilians. If but a fraction of the atrocities reported were accurate, then many thousands of defenseless Jewish non-combatants, men, women and children, were butchered after September 1939However he could have reasoned that he might as well take a "wait and see" approach as to the details of how it happened, including methods and numbers. His article then got republished and republished and republished for years without updates (at least in this part), usual for the Britannica in those years, as already pointed out.
In any case, to repeat, whatever the Britannica did or did not publish has no logical relation to the issue of the historicity of the Holocaust. The argument boils down to silly innuendo.
29. Dr. Listojewski? Simon Wiesenthal's quote?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: not only a citation of an unknown "Dr." without any evidence doesn't prove anything, the citation originally comes from an antisemitic publication.
Further comments: one of the images cites the most probably imaginary "Dr. Listojewski" (whose alleged citation has been incestuously regurgitated by numerous denier publications) from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the other is more honest - it cites The Broom (1952).
Now, The Broom was an antisemitic publication by a certain C. Leon de Aryan:
The Broom newspaper touted itself as a voice to the Christian Community of Southern California. The Broom was published by owner Fred de Aryan and his father and editor, C. Leon de Aryan, in East San Diego in 1932. The Broom was primarily dedicated to expounding reactionary theories on anti-Semitism, racial purity, war, and interpreting the word of Christ. Typical examples of article subjects are "Message of Holy Zarathushtra," "The Heroism of Peace in Wartime," "Synopsis of and Essay on the 'Race Problem'," "Slave-Laboring German Prisoners of War," and "Sanhedrin: 70 Anti-Christ Master Minds."From the article "The San Diego Crack Pot":
His confrontational views drew the attention of the California Senate’s Un-American Activities Committee in April 1942. Testifying in Los Angeles, de Aryan proudly told the committee he had pursued an active anti-Communist policy in The Broom from “practically the first issue.” Because of this, he claimed, the Communists were after him and even threatened him on the telephone. Fortunately, he could identify the Reds on the telephone, explaining to the committee that all Communists have a “guttural sound” in their voices. Examining de Aryan’s testimony, a government attorney concluded that the publisher was a paranoid “crack pot” who would probably savor prosecution for the sake of publicity.He was also one of the defendants of the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 and battled against fluoride in water.
Most probably he just invented this "Dr. Listojewski" or got hoaxed by a fellow fascist.
In any case, to repeat, without any actual evidence the quote is useless.
Simon Wiesenthal's alleged quote is a double fabrication. The tweet cuts off the second part of the phrase as it is usually quoted by the deniers: "on German soil".
However even that quote is actually a falsification, as explained by William Daffer:
No, Simon Wiesenthal did not say "no gassings too place on any camp in German soil." The fact that those words are in quotes and an attribution given (Books and Bookmen, page 5, Apr 1975) means that this passage is meant as a quote. That's how one signifies quoting in the written word. Cramer may not understand this, but Fields assuredly does.So the twitter user took a falsified quote and falsified it further.
But if you go to that page of that edition of Books and Bookmen, what you find Weisenthal *actually* said is
'Because there were no _extermination camps_ on German soil the Neo-Nazis are using this as proof that these crimes did not happen...'I'm hoping that you're intelligent enough to see the difference between "no gassings on any camp on German soi" and "no extermination camps on German soil" because Cramer couldn't. It's one of the reasons I call him an idiot.
As for R. Lewis' book, its full name is The Thirteenth Stone - History Rewritten, the Jesus Myth Exploded and the Great Secret of the Knights Templar Revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wow. Sounds really serious!
30. Small children and people unfit for work in Auschwitz?
Denier claim:
Further comments: first of all, with "small children" we mean someone younger than 14-15. Those around that age and older could be deemed fit for work depending on their condition (this happened to Anne Frank, for example). During periods of labor shortage children as young as 13 could be spared.
Extermination of Jews unfit for work (including children) is the big picture. Obviously, considering the numbers of people involved and the complicated history of the camp the big picture would also have some exceptions.
The general rule about killing off the people permanently unfit for work (incl. small children) applied mostly to Jews, especially after April 1943 (there were circumstances under which non-Jews also shared the same fate before April of 1943 and in some instances after, but not as a rule), so finding non-Jewish children or people unfit for work in Auschwitz in 1944 or 1945 should hardly raise eyebrows.
So Rudolf's nice graph is right out: it shows all inmates, not only Jews. The rest of his speculations is just that - pure guessing (one just needs to take a look at this article about the age composition of the Hungarian Jews). Rudolf also doesn't take all the Jewish children into account that lived (and died) in the camp due to exceptional circumstances, like the children who arrived with the Slovak transports in 1942 before the selections were instituted or the children in the Family Camp, or the children from the transports discussed in the next few paragraphs.
Second, the photos are not self-explanatory as to the ethnicity of the depicted children. Though there certainly were Jewish children among them, for example those who escaped having been gassed only to become subjects of Dr. Mengele's experiments (like the twins) or those who arrived in Auschwitz after the last transport selection took place on 30.10.1944. There were also several exceptional late Jewish transports that did not undergo selection and were registered together with children. An example of one such transport would be the so-called Phillips transport:
The train arrived in Auschwitz on June 6, the day of the allied invasion in Normandy. The acting commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss was informed that a transport of trained radio technicians would be arriving in Auschwitz. The message came from Gerhard Maurer, head of the department for labour deployment at the SS Economic Administrative Main Office who had been contacted by Ewald Löser, a senior Philips executive in Berlin. Thus the Jews from Vught did not undergo a selection and were kept alive.A group of Jewish transports from labor camps in the Generalgouvernement at the end of July, beginning of August of 1944 underwent no selection upon arrival. This includes the transport from Starachowice on 30.07.1944, the transports from Pionki and Blizyn on 31.07.1944, the transport from Kielce on 02.08.1944 and the transport from Ostrowiec on 03.08.1944. The most probable reason is that these GG transfers were seen as "internal" transfers from labor camps on an otherwise "judenrein" territory: it was assumed that most Jews unfit for work would have already been eliminated in the previous labor camps by the time of the arrival in Auschwitz, and it would be a waste of manpower to stage a selection for such transports for a few people who might be unfit for work.
Relatively speaking these transports were still nothing compared to the transports that did undergo selections.
Let's take a closer look at the famous photo with liberated children which is also used in the tweet. This Yad Vashem page identifies 7 of the children and gives the background information about their arrival in Auschwitz. 6 of them (Gabriel Neumann, Tomy Shacham (formerly Schwarz), Erika Dohan (née Winter), Shmuel Schelach (formerly Robert Schlesinger), sisters Marta Wise (née Weiss) and Eva Slonim (née Weiss)) were deported to Auschwitz from the Sered camp in Slovakia.
According to Danuta Czech's Auschwitz Chronicle the transport from Sered arrived in Auschwitz on 03.11.1944. That is both after the last transport selection took place on 30.10.1944 and the Auschwitz gassings stopped forever on 02.11.1944. The Sered transport thus did not undergo a selection, despite it being full of people unable to work, including small children. The 7th person identified in that article was Bracha Katz (aka Berta Weinheber/Weinhaber). She and her brother Adolf said they were twins during the initial selection and were saved for Mengele's "research" (but Adolf died in the camp).
This article identifies further 4 children from the photo: Paula Lebovics, Miriam Ziegler, Gabor Hirsch, Eva Kor. Yet another survivor on the photo is Ruth Muschkies Webber.
Lebovics, Ziegler and Webber (who were friends in the camp) were all deported in the above-mentioned transport from Ostrowiec that did not undergo a selection.
Gabor Hirsch, was 15 when he arrived in Auschwitz and thus was considered fit for work.
Eva Kor was used in Mengele's experiments together with her twin sister Miriam.
Some of the other children appearing in the Soviet footage of Auschwitz liberation were Michael Bornstein and Sarah Ludwig, who came to the camp in the above-mentioned transport from Pionki that did not undergo a selection. Also Tova Friedman (aka Tola Grossman) appears there. She arrived from Starachowice (also without a selection, as mentioned above) with her friend Rachel Hyams (aka Rutka Greenspan); her other friend Frieda Tenenbaum arrived from Blizyn (also without a selection, as mentioned above).
Thus Jewish children in Auschwitz were an exception, not a rule. Indeed, that the surviving children almost exclusively fall into the "exceptional" groups (twins; children from transports arriving without selections) requires an explanation from the deniers. Where are the rest of the Jewish children transported to Auschwitz and not registered there, i.e. children who were "selected"?
Same principle of being an exception is also true for Jewish babies born in Auschwitz. The absolute majority perished. If there were some who survived, they must have been born to the mothers from the "exceptional" groups as listed above, or after the gassings stopped in November of 1944, or they must have been hidden from the authorities (which would have been a very rare occurrence).
The story of a Polish midwife in Auschwitz, Stanislawa Leszczynska, who allegedly helped 3000 children to be born is also pretty useless for deniers. First of all, assuming the number is correct (and it is likely significantly exaggerated, see H. Kubica, "Dzieci i młodzież w KL Auschwitz", p. 190n88 in Auschwitz 1940-1945. Węzłowe zagadnienia z dziejów obozu, vol. II, 1995), how many of those children were Polish, how many Russian, how many German, how many Jewish?
Second, here is what Leszczynska had to say about it (Przegląd Lekarski, Nr. 1, 1965, pp. 105, 106):
In May 1943 the situation of some children has changed. Children with blue eyes and blond hair were taken from their mothers and send to Germany to be Germanized. Overwhelming scream of mothers accompanied departing of each transport of newborns. As long as a newborn was together with the mother, motherhood itself created a ray of hope. Separation with the newborn was overwhelming.(This obviously refers to non-Jewish children.)
Jewish children were still drowned in the most brutal fashion. There was no way to hide a Jewish child or put him or her among other children. Schwester Klara and Schwester Pfani observed Jewish mothers very closely during the delivery. The newborn was tattooed with the number of the mother; afterwards Klara and Pfani drowned the child in the barrel and threw the body outside.
The life of other children was the worst; they died from a slow starvation. Their skins become thin and transparent, with muscles, blood vessels and bones seen through the skin. Newborn Russians survived the longest. 50% of all women were from Russia.
[...]
Among those horrible memories there is one main thought coming back to me all the time. All children were born alive. Their goal was to stay alive! Only thirty of them survived the camp. Several hundred children were send to Germany to grow up as Germans, more than 1,500 were drowned by Schwester Klara and Pfani, more than 1,000 children died because of cold and starvation (the numbers do not include the period to April 1943).So again, how does all this help the deniers, exactly?
Hermann Langbein, the camp survivor and historian, has a whole chapter "Those born in Auschwitz" in his book People in Auschwitz (2004, UNC Press, pp. 234ff.):
On September 18, 1943, a girl born in the women’s camp was the first baby who was given an inmate number and added to the camp population. The mother was a Pole from Kattowitz. Even after this, however, Jewish women were not allowed to give birth. If such a woman managed to conceal her pregnancy until delivery, which had to take place in the utmost secrecy and under unimaginably primitive conditions, the child had to die so that at least the life of the mother could be preserved.The quote about the playground is just another deception. This refers specifically to the "Gypsy" family camp (Langbein, op. cit., p. 237):
‘‘We stockpiled all the poison in the camp for this purpose, and it was not sufficient,’’ writes Lucie Adelsberger, an inmate physician who had to deal with this problem in 1944.
[...]
Adelsberger realizes that some mothers ‘‘did not forgive themselves and us.’’ Because a Jewish mother could be saved only if her baby was poisoned and a miscarriage was pretended, ‘‘the Germans turned us into murderers’’ (Olga Lengyel). A female nurse had no other choice. Who will relieve her and her colleagues of the torment of memory?
[...]
Janina Kosciuszkowa noted the next development. ‘‘In 1944 Jewish babies were not murdered immediately after being born.’’ However, the mothers had no milk, and no one had food for the babies. Krystyna Zywulska has reported that they cried, whimpered, grew weaker and weaker, became bloated, and died. Kosciuszkowa, who experienced the end of this episode, writes: ‘‘One day the news spread that mothers with infants were being gassed. The children who were still alive were ‘liquidated,’ and the mothers were hurriedly released from the infirmary and added to the camp population. The next day, a fellow prisoner discovered two live children wrapped in blankets, and we managed to save them.’’ Zywulska states that those who had to witness this greeted the death of the children with a sigh of relief, for this seemed to avert the general killing campaign.
[...]
At the time of the Hungarian transports in 1944, women who had been found fit for work at the initial selection were gathered in Section B II c of Birkenau. Gisella Perl, who worked as a physician there, soon noticed that all pregnant women were taken away and gassed. In an effort to save at least the mother, it was her bitter duty to perform abortions. At a later date the SS gave the order to kill only the newborn babies and let the young mothers live. From then on, the abortions could be stopped and deliveries did not have to be secret anymore. ‘‘I was jubilant,’’ writes Perl. There were 292 women waiting to give birth when Mengele surprisingly revoked this order and had all pregnant women taken to the gas chamber. In September 1944 abortions were permitted again and the killing of newborn babies was stopped. Even so, many of them died because their mothers were not able to feed them.
Julia Skodova, who worked in the registry, remembers clearly how careful those in charge were to avoid any irregularity in the register of births.The camp administration also provided some visual effects by building a playground in the Gypsy camp. ‘‘Like any proper playground, it had a merry-go-round with rocking horses and the like as well as all kinds of gym equipment, such as rings and parallel bars, and a wooden fence without barbed wire’’(Lucie Adelsberger).
The lying denier edited out any mention of the Roma.
Now to the Jews unfit for work. First of all, this means people unable to work for a really prolonged period of time (old people, children, disabled...). It does not mean that all Jews who fell ill were automatically murdered. The Nazis needed working hands, and this was especially true as the war progressed (so the conditions were also different in different periods, which should be always taken into account). Working Jews were a valuable resource - just as slaves were once a valuable resource to their slavemasters.
So, especially in 1944, Jews who fell ill but with a hope of a relatively quick recovery (in a matter of a few weeks) would have been medically treated, including surgical operations in a hospital. This is absolutely logical and in no way contradicts the general outlines of the Final Solution. When these Jews would become permanently disabled they would be killed, but "for now" the Nazis wanted to exploit them for what it was worth.
So the silly denier memes feigning "surprise" about medical treatment of Jews stem from ignorance or dishonesty.
And the photo of a little person in Auschwitz is taken from the so-called Auschwitz Album which documents the arrival of a Hungarian Jewish transport. Its use in this context is thus dishonest because this person's immediate fate is unknown - he was probably gassed, unless he became a subject of medical experiments. It is therefore hardly evidence for Jews permanently unfit for work as Auschwitz inmates.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: eh, wut?
Further comments: aside from being an antisemitic assumption that all or most Jewish survivors lie simply by the nature of them being Jewish, this is also an incoherently nonsensical claim. Who said that the historicity of the Holocaust depends on what the mythical Jewish monolith "says"? It is proven by the cumulative evidence of a) the documents (mostly German wartime documents), b) testimonies by people belonging to numerous ethnic groups (incl. Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians), who were perpetrators, bystanders, and victims; c) demographic and d) physical evidence. What does that have to do with Jews or believing or disbelieving "them" (again, as if they were a monolith)?
Further comments: aside from being an antisemitic assumption that all or most Jewish survivors lie simply by the nature of them being Jewish, this is also an incoherently nonsensical claim. Who said that the historicity of the Holocaust depends on what the mythical Jewish monolith "says"? It is proven by the cumulative evidence of a) the documents (mostly German wartime documents), b) testimonies by people belonging to numerous ethnic groups (incl. Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians), who were perpetrators, bystanders, and victims; c) demographic and d) physical evidence. What does that have to do with Jews or believing or disbelieving "them" (again, as if they were a monolith)?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: conclusions first arrived at through demographic means, camp data retrofitted, so nothing strange or curious; different reliability of the two historians.
Further comments: the Auschwitz plaque nonsense has been debunked in the very first item of this post. As for Hilberg and Dawidowicz, first of all, if the antisemitic CT about the predetermined 6 million figure were true, Hilberg would have tried to reach it. Instead he only reached 5.1 million.
What actually happened is that Hilberg and Dawidowicz arrived at the totals through the country-by-country historico-demographic analysis. Since any such analysis, if done honestly, will most likely result in a figure between 5 and 6 million, it's hardly surprising that the end figures are comparable. They were not predetermined by a bias.
The apparent "strangeness" only resulted from the historians trying to fit the data for killing places to these independently derived demographic results. Hilberg managed to do it much better because he had always used much better camp data - his camp estimates have, by and large, withstood the test of time. What one sees in the tweet is actually an updated version (note the Höfle figure for Belzeс). His earlier estimates were:
Further comments: the Auschwitz plaque nonsense has been debunked in the very first item of this post. As for Hilberg and Dawidowicz, first of all, if the antisemitic CT about the predetermined 6 million figure were true, Hilberg would have tried to reach it. Instead he only reached 5.1 million.
What actually happened is that Hilberg and Dawidowicz arrived at the totals through the country-by-country historico-demographic analysis. Since any such analysis, if done honestly, will most likely result in a figure between 5 and 6 million, it's hardly surprising that the end figures are comparable. They were not predetermined by a bias.
The apparent "strangeness" only resulted from the historians trying to fit the data for killing places to these independently derived demographic results. Hilberg managed to do it much better because he had always used much better camp data - his camp estimates have, by and large, withstood the test of time. What one sees in the tweet is actually an updated version (note the Höfle figure for Belzeс). His earlier estimates were:
Auschwitz: 1,000,000
Treblinka: 750,000
Belzec: 550,000
Sobibor: 200,000
Kulmhof: 150,000
Lublin: 50,000
Total: 2,700,000
After the Höfle telegram delivered more precise figures, the historian of course revised his camp table (the demographic total stayed the same). At a time when many historians were using the figures of 360,000 for Kulmhof, 2,500,000 or more for Auschwitz, and big figures for Lublin (Majdanek) Hilberg stayed sober and nowadays the acknowledged figures for these camps largely coincide with his old estimates.
Dawidowicz, on the other hand, was simply a hack. Note her Majdanek figure which was simply taken from one of the post-liberation documentaries about Majdanek, in which it was not claimed that those were Jewish victims in the first place. So yes, her camp data is unreliable. Whether her demographic data is reliable is another question, but her research is outdated anyway, so the issue is irrelevant. The point is, there was no "conspiracy" to arrive at the same figure here. The deniers just misunderstood the methodology involved. Or maybe they understood it very well but still used the differing estimates for propaganda purposes.
33. Hilberg and famous witnesses shown to be liars, impostors during the Zündel trial?
Denier claim:
Denier claim:
Further comments: the tweet relies on an article by Faurisson, who is demonstrably dishonest. Anyway, this must be the place in the transcript [125 MB PDF] Faurisson was referring to when he said Hilberg might have committed perjury:
Q. "Shortly after the mobile operations had begun in the occupied Soviet territories, Hitler handed down his "second order."
Now, where is his second order?
A. The problem with that particular order is the same as it is with the first. It is oral.
Q. It is oral.
A. And there are people who say, no, it was not one order at all. It was a series of orders that were given to various people at various times.
Q. Mm-hmmm.
A. This is a matter for dispute and for argument among historians, and for this purpose one has meetings and second editions of books, too.
Q. I see. So you have to correct that statement in your second edition. Right?
A. No, I am not saying that I have to correct this statement, but there are corrections in the second edition, of course.
The answer thus was not about maintaining the statement in the new edition but rather about whether Hilberg had to do it. Hilberg's answer might have been evasive, but it was also formally correct. No perjury was committed.
As for the strawman argument about a "scientific report" or an "autopsy" showing gassed bodies, this is ridiculous. At most a "scientific report" without any historical input can show the presence of HCN in the former gas chambers (as the Markiewicz et al. study has done). Obviously this wouldn't be enough for the deniers who would just claim those were delousing chambers. And due to a significant time lapse between the stop of the gassings in the extermination camps and their liberation, as well as due to the fact that the bodies were usually disposed of immediately, neither can we expect autopsy reports showing gassings there. Theoretically it might have been possible with rare late small-scale gassings in some smaller (non-extermination) camps, like Gusen, but had such autopsy reports existed, the deniers would simply claim that they still don't prove gassings in Auschwitz or Treblinka, and that they are most probably propaganda fakes anyway.
As for the strawman argument about a "scientific report" or an "autopsy" showing gassed bodies, this is ridiculous. At most a "scientific report" without any historical input can show the presence of HCN in the former gas chambers (as the Markiewicz et al. study has done). Obviously this wouldn't be enough for the deniers who would just claim those were delousing chambers. And due to a significant time lapse between the stop of the gassings in the extermination camps and their liberation, as well as due to the fact that the bodies were usually disposed of immediately, neither can we expect autopsy reports showing gassings there. Theoretically it might have been possible with rare late small-scale gassings in some smaller (non-extermination) camps, like Gusen, but had such autopsy reports existed, the deniers would simply claim that they still don't prove gassings in Auschwitz or Treblinka, and that they are most probably propaganda fakes anyway.
Arnold Friedman was not a "famous" survivor, contrary to the tweet. He had never claimed to have personally witnessed gassings in Auschwitz, so in which sense was he proven, during the Zündel trial, to have been an impostor and a liar just because he did not see the gassings? Right, he wasn't.
Rudolf Vrba was indeed famous, but his main role was merely that of a messenger. He sure believed in a lot of mistaken things about Auschwitz (such as the exaggerated death toll), and testified about some of them, which would not, strictly speaking, make a perjurer or an impostor out of him unless he knew he was testifying falsely and was not simply misremembering and misinterpreting some of his experiences. Be that as it may, his testimony is at most of tertiary importance in what the historicity of the gas chambers is concerned.
He never claimed to have been inside the Birkenau crematoria, the famous not quite accurate sketch was done very quickly from memory of a hearsay:
He never claimed to have been inside the Birkenau crematoria, the famous not quite accurate sketch was done very quickly from memory of a hearsay:
Q. MR. CHRISTIE: How do you. explain the fact that you've drawn on the diagram that I showed you every crematorium·the same shape in 1944, when you drew the diagram upon your escape.And of course the "poetic licence" comment has been taken out of context and exaggerated. Here is the exchange, you be the judge of how horrible poetic licence is:
A. Because I had only two days to write the whole report, and to try to depict the crematoria.
There was a great urgency with that plan, because the objective of the plan was to get it to Hungary and to use this whole report towards the Hungarian Jews of imminent deportation.
Under that conditions I didn't lose much time with.details like what is the difference between Krematorium I and II and Krematorium II and Ill, but I limited myself to depict the position of the gas chambers and crematoria one side, and the geographic position of the whole murderous complex on the other side.
Q. I suggest, also, that you falsified to some extent as well, because throughout the book you referred to someone by the name of Rudolf Vrba, and you attribute the name Vrba to the conversations, and Rudi, meaning you, and in fact, there was nobody by that name in the camp, sir. Is that right?
A. That is perfectly so, but I would take a great objection against your word "falsify", because I would say, then, that the artist drawn my moustache in a different way has falsified something.
This is not a document, but literature, and literature has been meant mainly for young people and it would be for young people a considerable confusion to explain to them all the methods of clandestine work and how it came that the names have to be changed.
Moreover, I would have to explain my real ground and reasons why I changed my German name to the name of my native language, and this would have transferred, perhaps, a national hatred to the reader, which I wanted to avoid, against the Germans. In other words, I used my licence of a poet, it is called licensia poetarium, to put in the book only those facts and events which will enable a young person to understand the general situation.
Q. Mm-hmmm. So for you it's poetic licence?
A. Poetic licence in this particular case.
Q. Yeah.
A. In other words, I am not bound to make of it a document, but re-creates the situation as close as possible to the truth without complicating it.
34. Schindler's list a tale of fiction?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: and?
Further comments: since Schindler's Ark is classified as a "historical fiction novel", of course it's fiction. Duh. Nobody claimed otherwise. What, exactly, is supposed to be the point?
The novel was based on the true events. Obviously, Oskar Schindler existed, and so did the Jews that he saved. So does Schindler's list.
The denier "arguments" are sometimes so dumb that it's hard to say much about them, they self-destruct.
35. Bruno Baum admitted that false propaganda was created in Auschwitz?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: quote taken out of context; Baum used the word "propaganda" in a purely neutral sense of "spreading of ideas/information", never once implying that the "propaganda" in question was false. The word is used today mostly in a negative context, which allows the deniers to quote-mine and distort old texts for their own propaganda.
Further comments: this refutation of the meme was posted by our Hans Metzner at CODOH:
To this I should add that the word "entfacht" is more properly translated as "sparked", not "made up".
The German dictionary Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache provides the following three meanings of "Propaganda":
The first one was in use in the GDR and thus was also used by the Communist Baum. It meant, quite neutrally, the systematic spreading of political, philosophical and other ideas in order to influence the public consciousness. Obviously, in this sense propaganda can be good or bad, true or false. The deniers spread false propaganda.
PS: Needless to say, Baum was never a "President of East Germany". Another lie.
36. Changing camp death tolls?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: some of the listed changes in estimates are real, initial exaggerated tolls stem from incomplete information, incorrect way of estimating and, yes, probably propaganda; overall death toll was not estimated on the basis of individual camp tolls so their correction, logically, should not result in the correction of the overall death toll.
Further comments: we have already touched on this topic in this and this item.
Differing estimates in the literature are nothing new and nothing that "refutes" the Holocaust. Dresden bombing death toll estimates range from 20,000 to 1,000,000 (the true figure being 25,000). Does that mean the bombing never happened? No, only that not all estimates are equally credible.
First of all, let's separate the more "accepted" numbers from the flukes: the exaggerated Mauthausen death toll from the Britannica was never accepted by any significant number of historians dealing with the Nazi history. To repeat, general purposes encyclopedias are not scholarly sources, so whatever the Britannica wrote is, frankly, irrelevant. It was not the number accepted by the scholarly consensus.
The Majdanek death tolls over 1 million were relatively quickly revised downwards already in the Communist Poland and were not meant to denote the Jewish or mostly Jewish deaths, so their revision is also irrelevant to the overall Jewish death toll. There was one exception, as mentioned above, Lucy Dawidowicz who, for reasons known only to her, claimed over 1,3 million Jewish deaths in Majdanek. But one hack historian does not a consensus make. In roughly the same time period Raul Hilberg estimated 50,000 Jewish deaths in Majdanek and his figure is more or less in accordance with the current knowledge.
The 800,000+ shoes are easily explained: Majdanek was one of the sorting and storage depots for the Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps (Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor).
The Auschwitz death toll has already been commented on. The initial hugely exaggerated Soviet death tolls for these two camps were based on alleged cremation capacities supposedly available there, a very unreliable way to calculate anything. The Soviet death toll was not generally accepted in the West, but the Western historiography was influenced by some of Rudolf Höß' earlier statements about 2.5-3 million victims. However Höß himself later revised this estimate down to about 1 million, based on the transport statistics as he roughly remembered it. Raul Hilberg's estimate was also about 1 million.
The modern estimates are based mainly on the transport data. The data is incomplete, but as more and more sources are analyzed by the historians, the more precise the camp estimates become. Sometimes even unexpected new documents are found that refine the picture, like the Höfle telegram.
In other words, what we are seeing is the natural process of going from sensationalist news items and propaganda to the more sober analysis of all available sources. The historians are the true revisionists. The denier hacks are just liars.
37. Death camps found only by the Soviets?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the Western Allies did liberate several camps with homicidal gas chambers, so that claim in the first tweet is a lie. That only the Soviets liberated dedicated extermination camps is not a coherent argument. The evidence for their exterminatory function was found by all Allies.
Further comments: first, a point of order: the term used in the historical literature nowadays to designate camps either wholly or significantly dedicated to extermination is "extermination camps" (Vernichtungslager). Examples of such camps would be Auschwitz-Birkenau (which was part-concentration, part-exterminaton camp), Treblinka, Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor (which were pure extermination camps).
The term "death camps" is ambiguous and is sometimes used to designate "ordinary" concentration camps like Buchenwald or Belsen, which were not extermination camps, but which exhibited such atrocious conditions at some point that it was arguably a proper term to use. When you see piles of human bodies in the camps, even if they died of the so-called "natural causes" (the Nazis being still responsible for these deaths since they put these people there in the first place), surely calling those places of death "death camps" is a natural thing? It can, however, be misleading since some people will assume that extermination camps are meant.
Another important point to make is that having a homicidal gas chamber in a particular camp did not make it an extermination camp. It's the organized, relatively numerous mass killings that count.
With this in mind, here is a not necessarily complete list of camps liberated by the Western Allies which contained dedicated homicidal gas chambers or where some homicidal gassings took place in makeshift gas chambers (I don't list the "euthanasia" institutions on the German soil - Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, Sonnenstein - in which people were also murdered in carbon monoxide gas chambers, among other methods; and I don't include the Soviet-liberated concentration camps with homicidal gas chambers, like Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück):
Short debunking: there are both testimonies and autopsy reports mentioning this and we cannot actually expect the color to have appeared consistently and often due to the specific circumstances of how mass murder was done.
Further comments: first of all, witnesses rarely describe body color at all. That would not have been the most important detail to mention compared to, you know, the fact of the mass murder. And obviously the corpse-dragging/unloading would not have often taken place under optimal lighting conditions in a clinical setting.
Second, witnesses do mention red discoloration. One of the most important Auschwitz witnesses, Henryk Tauber, described the gassed corpses (HCN) thus:
The reason for the differing descriptions is simple - the so-called characteristic skin color with poisonings applies to individual cases, normally without additional physical injuries and with enough oxygen, i.e. the discoloration strongly depends on the circumstances of death and citing medical surveys of skin color in "normal" individual fatal poisonings is of very limited value to the question of what happened during mass gassings in closed chambers with obvious lack of oxygen and numerous physical injuries involved.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: and?
Further comments: since Schindler's Ark is classified as a "historical fiction novel", of course it's fiction. Duh. Nobody claimed otherwise. What, exactly, is supposed to be the point?
The novel was based on the true events. Obviously, Oskar Schindler existed, and so did the Jews that he saved. So does Schindler's list.
The denier "arguments" are sometimes so dumb that it's hard to say much about them, they self-destruct.
35. Bruno Baum admitted that false propaganda was created in Auschwitz?
Denier claim:
Further comments: this refutation of the meme was posted by our Hans Metzner at CODOH:
There is one statement which you see frequently cited in discussion with Revisionists, it is from the little book Widerstand in Auschwitz by Bruno Baum (1949). On page 34, Baum writes:
Ich glaube, es ist keine Übertreibung, wenn ich sage, daß der größte Teil der Auschwitzpropaganda, die um diese Zeit in der Welt verbreitet wurde, von uns im Lager selbst geschrieben worden ist.A similiar statement was apparently made by him in 1945:
„I believe it is no exaggeration, when I say, that the largest part of the Auschwitz propaganda, which was spread at the time around the world, was written by ourselves in the camp.“
Die ganze Propaganda, die dann im Ausland um Auschwitz einsetzte, war von uns, mit Hilfe unserer polnischen Kameraden, entfacht.from: Rudolf, Aus der Forschung - Aus den Akten des Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses, Teil 7
The entire propaganda which started abroad, was made by us with the help of our Polish mates.
Those statements have been referred to at least 13 times in the past 8 years alone at this forum - Sailor (2003), Hannover (2003), Hannover (2003), Hannover (2004), Richard Perle (2005), Hannover (2006), PotPie (2007), PotPie (2007), Hannover(2007), Driansmith (2007), PotPie (2007), Goethe (2011), Toshiro (2011).
In addition, it is cited in several Revisionist articles, such as Lectures on the Holocaust (Germar Rudolf), Aus der Forschung - Aus den Akten des Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses, Teil 7 (Germar Rudolf), Aus der Forschung - Aus den Akten des Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses, Teil 2 (Germar Rudolf), »Ein Kommentar ist an dieser Stelle überflüssig« (Knud Bäcker), Die neue Weltordnung und der Holocaust (Jürgen Graf)
In all those postings and articles it is implicitly or explicitly assumed that the statement is evidence for the spreading of false propaganda. However, when Bruno Baum used the term in the 40s, he did understand “propaganda” in this context in the sense of spreading true information as follows already from the title of the chapter in the 1949 book “Wir informieren die Welt” (we inform the world) and from the actual description of their work. For instance, just the next sentence reads “Wir haben in diesen Tagen so manches Mal die Absichten der politischen Abteilung durchkreuzt, indem wir ihre Pläne der Öffentlichkeit übergaben“ (In those days we foiled the intentions of the political department by making their plans public). etc.
There is no indication whatsoever that he meant to say that they created any false information. In the 1962 edition of the book the term “Auschwitzpropaganda” was changed to “Veröffentlichungen über Auschwitz”, apparently to avoid exactly the misunderstanding, which Revisionists exploit today, when they misinterpret it as admission of false propaganda and hoax. Whereas in fact it is an "admission" of spreading true information around the world (even though one may doubt weather they always did).
To this I should add that the word "entfacht" is more properly translated as "sparked", not "made up".
The German dictionary Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache provides the following three meanings of "Propaganda":
1. DDR systematische Verbreitung politischer, philosophischer und anderer Lehren, Ideen, Meinungen mit dem Ziel, das öffentliche Bewusstsein dahingehend zu beeinflussenOnly the second one carries the negative connotation of sinister manipulation. The third meaning, which is not used in English, colloquially means to advertise something (e.g. one's business).
Beispiele:
politische, sozialistische, marxistisch-leninistische, revolutionäre Propaganda
eine breite, massenwirksame Propaganda (für etw.) entfalten
Agitation und Propaganda
2. die Verschleierung der wahren Ziele dienende politisch-ideologische Beeinflussung, Hetze
Beispiele:
staatsgefährdende, feindliche, gegnerische, gehässige Propaganda
das ist doch alles nur Propaganda! (= es steckt nichts dahinter!) umgangssprachlich
3. ⟨Propaganda für etw. machen⟩ umgangssprachlich Reklame für etw. machen
Beispiel:
der macht für sein Buch ja ganz schön Propaganda
The first one was in use in the GDR and thus was also used by the Communist Baum. It meant, quite neutrally, the systematic spreading of political, philosophical and other ideas in order to influence the public consciousness. Obviously, in this sense propaganda can be good or bad, true or false. The deniers spread false propaganda.
PS: Needless to say, Baum was never a "President of East Germany". Another lie.
36. Changing camp death tolls?
Denier claim:
Further comments: we have already touched on this topic in this and this item.
Differing estimates in the literature are nothing new and nothing that "refutes" the Holocaust. Dresden bombing death toll estimates range from 20,000 to 1,000,000 (the true figure being 25,000). Does that mean the bombing never happened? No, only that not all estimates are equally credible.
First of all, let's separate the more "accepted" numbers from the flukes: the exaggerated Mauthausen death toll from the Britannica was never accepted by any significant number of historians dealing with the Nazi history. To repeat, general purposes encyclopedias are not scholarly sources, so whatever the Britannica wrote is, frankly, irrelevant. It was not the number accepted by the scholarly consensus.
The Majdanek death tolls over 1 million were relatively quickly revised downwards already in the Communist Poland and were not meant to denote the Jewish or mostly Jewish deaths, so their revision is also irrelevant to the overall Jewish death toll. There was one exception, as mentioned above, Lucy Dawidowicz who, for reasons known only to her, claimed over 1,3 million Jewish deaths in Majdanek. But one hack historian does not a consensus make. In roughly the same time period Raul Hilberg estimated 50,000 Jewish deaths in Majdanek and his figure is more or less in accordance with the current knowledge.
The 800,000+ shoes are easily explained: Majdanek was one of the sorting and storage depots for the Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps (Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor).
The Auschwitz death toll has already been commented on. The initial hugely exaggerated Soviet death tolls for these two camps were based on alleged cremation capacities supposedly available there, a very unreliable way to calculate anything. The Soviet death toll was not generally accepted in the West, but the Western historiography was influenced by some of Rudolf Höß' earlier statements about 2.5-3 million victims. However Höß himself later revised this estimate down to about 1 million, based on the transport statistics as he roughly remembered it. Raul Hilberg's estimate was also about 1 million.
The modern estimates are based mainly on the transport data. The data is incomplete, but as more and more sources are analyzed by the historians, the more precise the camp estimates become. Sometimes even unexpected new documents are found that refine the picture, like the Höfle telegram.
In other words, what we are seeing is the natural process of going from sensationalist news items and propaganda to the more sober analysis of all available sources. The historians are the true revisionists. The denier hacks are just liars.
37. Death camps found only by the Soviets?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the Western Allies did liberate several camps with homicidal gas chambers, so that claim in the first tweet is a lie. That only the Soviets liberated dedicated extermination camps is not a coherent argument. The evidence for their exterminatory function was found by all Allies.
Further comments: first, a point of order: the term used in the historical literature nowadays to designate camps either wholly or significantly dedicated to extermination is "extermination camps" (Vernichtungslager). Examples of such camps would be Auschwitz-Birkenau (which was part-concentration, part-exterminaton camp), Treblinka, Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor (which were pure extermination camps).
The term "death camps" is ambiguous and is sometimes used to designate "ordinary" concentration camps like Buchenwald or Belsen, which were not extermination camps, but which exhibited such atrocious conditions at some point that it was arguably a proper term to use. When you see piles of human bodies in the camps, even if they died of the so-called "natural causes" (the Nazis being still responsible for these deaths since they put these people there in the first place), surely calling those places of death "death camps" is a natural thing? It can, however, be misleading since some people will assume that extermination camps are meant.
Another important point to make is that having a homicidal gas chamber in a particular camp did not make it an extermination camp. It's the organized, relatively numerous mass killings that count.
With this in mind, here is a not necessarily complete list of camps liberated by the Western Allies which contained dedicated homicidal gas chambers or where some homicidal gassings took place in makeshift gas chambers (I don't list the "euthanasia" institutions on the German soil - Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, Sonnenstein - in which people were also murdered in carbon monoxide gas chambers, among other methods; and I don't include the Soviet-liberated concentration camps with homicidal gas chambers, like Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück):
- Mauthausen and its subcamp Gusen (B. Perz, F. Freund, "Tötungen durch Giftgas im Konzentrationslager Mauthausen" in G. Morsch, B. Perz (Hrsg.), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, 2012 (2. Aufl.), S. 244ff.; F. Freund, "Tötungen durch Giftgas in Mauthausen und Gusen" in B. Bailer, W. Benz, W. Neugebauer (Hrsg.), Wahrheit und "Auschwitzlüge". Zur Bekämpfung "revisionistischer" Propaganda, 1995, S. 119ff.):
- Neuengamme (R. Möller, "Die beiden "Zyklon B"-Mordaktionen im Konzentrationslager Neuengamme 1942" in Morsch, Perz, op. cit., S. 288ff.);
- Natzweiler (F. Schmaltz, "Die Gaskammern im Konzentrationslager Natzweiler" in Morsch, Perz, op. cit., S. 304ff.; J.-C. Pressac, The Struthof Album. Study of the Gassing at Natzweiler-Struthof of 86 Jews Whose Bodies Were to Constitute a Collection of Skeletons, 1985);
- most probably also Dachau, although whether anyone was gassed in the built gas chamber is not clear (B. Distel, "Die Gaskammer in der "Baracke X" des Konzentrationslager Dachau und die "Dachau-Lüge" in Morsch, Perz, op. cit., S. 337ff.).
It is true that the above-mentioned extermination camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka were liberated by the Soviets. The explanation is very simple: the Nazis concentrated these mass-killing factories away from the so-called "Old Reich", in the East (relatively speaking), one of the main concerns being secrecy vis-à-vis the average Germans as well as other Western and Central Europeans (the opinion of the traditionally hated Poles and Soviets obviously did not count). This obviously did not prevent the information from leaking out eventually (you can't keep operations on such huge masses of people really secret - which is how we know with certainty that the alleged deportation of the Jews "to the Russian East" never happened and they were murdered in the extermination camps instead), but the location of the camps made sense. Which is why such camps - or the places where they used to be (for camps like Treblinka and Belzec had been fully destroyed some time before the Soviet army overran the territories) were found en masse by the Soviets and not the Western Allies. There is nothing surprising about this if you take just a few seconds to think things through.
The argument in the tweet is thus incoherent. Indeed, that these particular camps were extermination camps was known long before anyone even suspected that the Allies would win the war. It's not like their extermination function was suddenly discovered upon liberation. Just as a quick example, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor were mentioned as extermination camps for Jews in the official note by the Polish government-in-exile in December of 1942 (see The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland; the information about the methods of murder was unsurprisingly garbled). The clandestine Polish Home Army publication Informacja Bieżąca reported on these three camps, as well as Kulmhof and Auschwitz, throughout the war. Even the extremely antisemitic radical right-wing Polish press mentioned specific extermination camps during the war.
More importantly, there is no correlation between overrunning the territory with extermination camps and finding evidence for the activities in these camps. The evidence about the above-mentioned extermination camps was found by all Allies. Very simply because the Western Allies also had access to numerous witnesses who had been in those camps (incl. some of the victims, bystanders and of course the perpetrators), as well as to the partial documentation.
Another important aspect to mention here is that the Soviets simply would not have faked information about the mass murder specifically and primarily of Jews. With very few exceptions they insisted on using the "internationalist" language to describe the Nazi mass murder of Jews. Thus the Jewish victims of the Babiy Yar massacre were turned into "peaceful Soviet citizens" by a stroke of a pen in the official Soviet message, and, as already mentioned above, the official Soviet report on Auschwitz does not mention any Jewish victims. The famous Black Book was notoriously censored by the Stalinist officials specifically because it focused on the murder of Jews. Had the Nazi mass murder been a Soviet fake, the story would have been the murder in the camps of millions of Slavs, like Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians.
The argument in the tweets makes no sense whatsoever. As usual.
38. Rick debunks the Holocaust?
Denier claim:
Debunking: I hesitated including this, but then I thought: well, it's not really dumber than most of the other memes here and it's pretty popular among the low-IQ neo-Nazi crowd for some reason, so why not?
Anyone retweeting this confesses his or her total ignorance of the Holocaust basics. They deny the Holocaust without having bothered to look up what they are denying.
Nobody claims 6 million people were incinerated. (The actual Holocaust victim number estimates are between 5 and 6 million, by the way.) For example, the Nazis tried to remove the traces of their crimes by exhuming and incinerating the corpses of the mass shooting victims (special action 1005) but of course they left quite a few mass graves to be found by the Soviets, Yahad In-Unum etc. There are still unexumed graves of the Holocaust victims.
Nobody claims 6 million people were murdered in 6 camps (or only in camps) in the first place. This ignores the mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen and the order police, starvation in ghettos etc.
Total ignorance. This alone disqualifies anyone taking this meme seriously from any discussion of the Holocaust. They don't know the basics.
Additionally, no, it doesn't take "forever" to cremate a body. We have a pretty good idea from the contemporary German documentation what the capacities of the ovens in the camps were, as long as they were used not like in the modern civilian crematoria, but were allowed to "break the rules", like cremating several bodies at once and cremating the bodies continuously, without numerous individual heating up and cooling down cycles, thus mingling the ashes of many corpses (something no crematorium nowadays is allowed to do).
39. 6-digit tattoo but 6 million victims?
Denier claim:
Short debunking: of all the Nazi victims, only the Auschwitz inmates were tattooed and the number of registered Auschwitz inmates was obviously far lower than 1 million, hence the 6 digits were more than enough.
Further comments: anyone posting this meme is basically saying: "I haven't bothered to take several minutes to research the very basics of the Holocaust, but I still want to say something very important on the topic!".
Let's unpack the assumptions in this meme:
A huge part of the Jewish victims were never in the camps in the first place, in any capacity. That's basic knowledge. 2+ million died from mass shootings, starvation in the ghettos and so on.
Any serious history book on the topic will tell that the practice of tattooing the prisoners was limited only to the Auschwitz camp complex. And then, not even to all inmates.
Here are the categories of inmates that got tattooed in Auschwitz (T. Iwaszko, "Przyczyny osadzania w obozie i kategorie więźniów" in Auschwitz 1940-1945. Węzłowe zagadnienia z dziejów obozu, vol. II, 1995, pp. 18ff.; International Tracing Service, Häftlingsnummernzuteilung in Konzentrationslagern..., 1965, pp. 2ff.):
About 400,000 camp numbers were issued in all in Auschwitz. Women, men, Soviet POWs, Roma, reeducation prisoners had their own separate series, and the Nazis used new series for Jewish deportees from time to time (such as the series beginning with letters "A" and "B"), so the actual tattooed numbers never reached 300,000. In fact, the highest issued number was "202499" (the general series for males).
By now it should have become painfully clear that anyone posting such a meme is either an absolute ignoramus or a deceptive person, likely both.
PS: funnily (or sadly) enough, some cuckoo deniers even go so far as to deny the tattooing altogether, despite it being well-documented.
38. Rick debunks the Holocaust?
Denier claim:
Anyone retweeting this confesses his or her total ignorance of the Holocaust basics. They deny the Holocaust without having bothered to look up what they are denying.
Nobody claims 6 million people were incinerated. (The actual Holocaust victim number estimates are between 5 and 6 million, by the way.) For example, the Nazis tried to remove the traces of their crimes by exhuming and incinerating the corpses of the mass shooting victims (special action 1005) but of course they left quite a few mass graves to be found by the Soviets, Yahad In-Unum etc. There are still unexumed graves of the Holocaust victims.
Nobody claims 6 million people were murdered in 6 camps (or only in camps) in the first place. This ignores the mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen and the order police, starvation in ghettos etc.
Total ignorance. This alone disqualifies anyone taking this meme seriously from any discussion of the Holocaust. They don't know the basics.
Additionally, no, it doesn't take "forever" to cremate a body. We have a pretty good idea from the contemporary German documentation what the capacities of the ovens in the camps were, as long as they were used not like in the modern civilian crematoria, but were allowed to "break the rules", like cremating several bodies at once and cremating the bodies continuously, without numerous individual heating up and cooling down cycles, thus mingling the ashes of many corpses (something no crematorium nowadays is allowed to do).
39. 6-digit tattoo but 6 million victims?
Denier claim:
Further comments: anyone posting this meme is basically saying: "I haven't bothered to take several minutes to research the very basics of the Holocaust, but I still want to say something very important on the topic!".
Let's unpack the assumptions in this meme:
- all Jewish victims of the Holocaust are supposed to have had tattoos;
- all Jewish victims are supposed to have gone through camps;
- all Jewish camp inmates are supposed to have had tattoos;
A huge part of the Jewish victims were never in the camps in the first place, in any capacity. That's basic knowledge. 2+ million died from mass shootings, starvation in the ghettos and so on.
Any serious history book on the topic will tell that the practice of tattooing the prisoners was limited only to the Auschwitz camp complex. And then, not even to all inmates.
Here are the categories of inmates that got tattooed in Auschwitz (T. Iwaszko, "Przyczyny osadzania w obozie i kategorie więźniów" in Auschwitz 1940-1945. Węzłowe zagadnienia z dziejów obozu, vol. II, 1995, pp. 18ff.; International Tracing Service, Häftlingsnummernzuteilung in Konzentrationslagern..., 1965, pp. 2ff.):
- Soviet POWs from autumn of 1941 and some other, mostly sick/weakened inmates in 1942 (tattoos on the breast);
- all newly arrived Jewish registered inmates from spring of 1942;
- all registered inmates from spring of 1943 with several exceptions.
- people who were not formally registered inmates in the camp, despite temporarily residing there, usually before being sent to a labor camp (the so-called transit Jews);
- German prisoners;
- so-called reeducation prisoners.
About 400,000 camp numbers were issued in all in Auschwitz. Women, men, Soviet POWs, Roma, reeducation prisoners had their own separate series, and the Nazis used new series for Jewish deportees from time to time (such as the series beginning with letters "A" and "B"), so the actual tattooed numbers never reached 300,000. In fact, the highest issued number was "202499" (the general series for males).
By now it should have become painfully clear that anyone posting such a meme is either an absolute ignoramus or a deceptive person, likely both.
PS: funnily (or sadly) enough, some cuckoo deniers even go so far as to deny the tattooing altogether, despite it being well-documented.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: there are both testimonies and autopsy reports mentioning this and we cannot actually expect the color to have appeared consistently and often due to the specific circumstances of how mass murder was done.
Further comments: first of all, witnesses rarely describe body color at all. That would not have been the most important detail to mention compared to, you know, the fact of the mass murder. And obviously the corpse-dragging/unloading would not have often taken place under optimal lighting conditions in a clinical setting.
Second, witnesses do mention red discoloration. One of the most important Auschwitz witnesses, Henryk Tauber, described the gassed corpses (HCN) thus:
"We found heaps of naked bodies, doubled up. They were pinkish, and in places red. Some were covered with greenish marks and saliva ran from their mouths."S. I. Pilunov described the corpses of the gas van victims in Belorussia on 20.05.1944 (Prestupleniya nemetsko-fashiststkikh okkupantov v Belorussii. 1941-1944, 1965, p. 172):
"The skin on the corpses had a pronounced red color, such that happens after a long stay in the bath."The German chemist Dr. Theodor Friedrich Leidig described the results of a gassing of the Soviet POWs in a gas van in Sachsenhausen as follows (06.02.1959, E. Kogon et al., Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, 1983 (4. Aufl. 2003), p. 84; BArch B162/5066, p. 107):
"Some corpses fell out, the others were unloaded by the inmates. The corpses had, as we chemists established, the pinkish-red appearance, which is typical for the people who die from a CO-poisoning."Wilhelm Findeisen, gas van driver of the Einsatzgruppe C, testified (interrogated on 17.10.1967, BArch B162/18154, p. 90; thanks to Hans Metzner for the reference):
"The dead victims were lying with rosy-colored faces in the car."Anton D., gas van driver from KdS Weissruthenien (interrogated on 28.03.1969, BArch B162/3460, p. 32; thanks to Hans Metzner for the reference; earlier similar statement from 07.06.1962 in BArch B162/3412, p. 199):
"As the Minsk driver came for the second time, the inmates in his car were already dead. They were bloated and had pink skin color".Some other witnesses describe different shades, such as Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, who said that the Belzec gassing victims showed “a bluish puffiness about the face”.
The reason for the differing descriptions is simple - the so-called characteristic skin color with poisonings applies to individual cases, normally without additional physical injuries and with enough oxygen, i.e. the discoloration strongly depends on the circumstances of death and citing medical surveys of skin color in "normal" individual fatal poisonings is of very limited value to the question of what happened during mass gassings in closed chambers with obvious lack of oxygen and numerous physical injuries involved.
Both in Auschwitz and in the Reinhardt camps, as well as in the gas vans, many victims must have died from pure asphyxiation, because that's what would have happened when you push hundreds, sometimes thousands people into a closed room with a limited air supply. Indeed, that is exactly the cause of death claimed by Pfannenstiel - not the engine exhaust. One of the gas vans documents in fact states that when "the application of the gas is not undertaken correctly" "the persons to be executed suffer death from suffocation and not death by dozing off as was planned".
Moreover, medical surveys usually cited by the deniers mostly refer to "cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis" as an indicator of a CO poisoning. But livor mortis normally becomes visible to the untrained eye only about two hours after death.
Further factor is anemia (P. Saukko, B. Knight, Knight’s Forensic Pathology (4th ed.), 2016, p. 592):
"Anaemic persons will not show the external cherry-pink colour if insufficient haemoglobin is available for the monoxide component to become visible."
Does it need to be repeated that a huge number of the Holocaust victims were subject to malnutrition?
"In most cases, cyanide poisoning causes a deceptively healthy pink to red skin color. However, if a physical injury or lack of oxygen is involved, the skin color may be bluish. Reddening of the eyes and pupil dilation are symptoms of cyanide poisoning. Cyanosis (blue discoloration of the skin) tends to be associated with severe cyanide poisonings."Needless to say, mass gassings in Auschwitz involved physical injuries, lack of oxygen and severe cyanide poisoning. And "healthy pink" skin color would be unremarkable in the first place.
And autopsy reports do exist, for some of the cases where the corpses had not been burned (i. e. we cannot really expect such reports about Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka). One example would be the report from 17-19.06.1943 about the victims of gas vans in Krasnodar. E. g. about 117 corpses of men, women, children and adolescents found in one of the graves we read:
External inspection of the corpses.Some of the corpses were preserved rather well and have the same appearance as the corpses extracted from the anti-tank ditch, i.e. without significant putrefactive changes. Another part of corpses is more or less changed by putrefactive processes, up to significant putrefactive changes of soft tissues and internal organs.The preserved corpses had moist, pale skin, in some places with bright pink-red coloring. Upper layer of epidermis was easily detached and in some places absent. No mechanical injuries were found on external examination of the preserved corpses. No injuries were also found on the corpses changed by putrefactive processes.Internal examination of the corpses.All corpses extracted from the pit "B" were dissected. All preserved corpses, unchanged by putrefactive processes, had similar characteristic changes, similar to those found during the autopsy of the corpses extracted from the antitank ditch. The soft covers of the skull are moist, juicy, scarlet-red in color. The bones of the calvaria and the base of the skull were intact. The hard membranes are scarlet-red in color and moist, brain tissue is mushy, dirty gray-pink color. Skeletal muscles all over /thighs, chest, abdominal wall, intercostal, dorsal/ are scarlet-red. Mediastinal tissue is pinkish-red in color. Small amounts of bright red fluid in pleural cavities. The internal organs: lungs, heart muscle, liver, spleen, and especially kidneys have bright scarlet coloring on sections. The gastrointestinal tract is swollen with gases. The stomachs of most corpses were empty, while some corpses had mushy mass in their stomachs. A characteristic red or pinkish-red coloration is noted in some preserved organs or muscles also on corpses altered to some degree by putrefaction.No mechanical injuries of soft tissues, internal organs, or skeletal bones were found in any of the corpses examined.
The immediate denier objection will, of course, be that such autopsy reports come from the Soviets who cannot be trusted. But that misses the point. The reader will be the judge of the reports' credibility, but the argument that such reports do not exist is utterly false.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: the Time article's definition of a survivor is simply inconsistent; the total number of the survivors, depending on the year, is 400-500 thousand in the articles, depending on the year, and the 100 thousand who were in the camps, ghettos etc. are a subset of this total. No actual contradiction, just bad editing in one article.
Further comments: the first source, the 2016 Time article, says:
There are about 100,000 Jews who were in camps, ghettos and in hiding under Nazi occupation who are still alive today, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, one of the few international organizations that tracks that type of data. The group, which negotiates with Germany’s government for payments to Holocaust victims and provides social services for survivors, said there were about 500,000 living survivors, including those who fled Nazi Germany, in 2014.
Yet in a previous paragraph we read about how "the number of living Jewish survivors ... dwindles to about 100,000 in the world", plus there is the headline. This is merely an indication of sloppy writing and editing, not the problem with the actual numbers.
The article is clear that in 2014 there were around 500000 survivors, of them about 100000 had been in the camps, ghettos etc. The article's source is the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which defines a survivor thus:
... a person who lived in one of the countries occupied by or under the influence of the Nazi regime for any length of time between 1933 and 1945. The survivor population also includes those who were forced to leave their place of residence because of the Nazi regime.
So this total includes a smaller subset of those who had been in the Nazi captivity (camps, ghettos etc.).
E. g. a 2015 Washington Post article refers to just such a subset:
The total number dropped to around 400000 by 2020, as the Economist article states:
Today, 400,000 Jews who survived or fled the Nazis and their collaborators are alive, reckons the Claims Conference, a body that sends them €480m ($564m) a year in compensation, mostly from the German government.
Of them around 192000 live in Israel according to the 2020 Jerusalem Post article.
Denier claim:
Short debunking: some deniers clearly have severe reading comprehension problems, since Greenblatt describes what the Holocaust distortionists think, not what he thinks.
Further comments: a better example of the stupidity of some Holocaust deniers is hard to come by. Jonathan Greenblatt describes how people who distort the Holocaust see it. According to him, those of them who deny it see it as a nefarious Jewish plot and those who don't deny it still see it as some sort of a plot by Jews (e. g. Zionists) together with the Nazis (there are variants of it, in which Hitler himself is Jewish or a Jewish puppet etc.). While Greenblatt's statement is not precise (there are more variants that these two), it is painfully obvious what he means.
Maybe we should formulate Greenblatt's law (with apologies to Poe) as follows:
"Without a clear indication of a denier's intent, it is difficult to tell the difference between extreme stupidity and an outright lie."
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Nice Work, Sergey. I agree that this sort of thing is popular on Facebook as well. This is very useful.
ReplyDeleteYou must have the patience of a saint to be willing to slog through all that crap.
I wont't be surprised if ALL of what you've written will be dismissed as "based on communist forgeries". I mean your name aftee all is SERGEY. Which is Russian = Soviet = commie = Joo = liar.
ReplyDeleteIt already has been, on twitter, by the people who swallow random twitter memes as the truly truthy truth!
ReplyDelete>>> "Long story short, the New York Times Magazine deleted the standing guy from the picture."
ReplyDeleteWhat about Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor Mel Mermelstein—who actually appears in the photo—did he also *delete the standing guy" for the cover of his 1979 memoirs?
I have found irrefutable evidence that Mermelstein was aware of the Toncman-present version before he published the Toncmanless version on the first edition of his book.
https://rodoh.info/forum/viewtopic.php?p=80453#p80453
And an abundance of evidence that MM was aware of it before he again used the Toncmanless version on the late-1981 revised edition of his memoirs, following his legal victory over the IHR.
> did he also *delete the standing guy" for the cover of his 1979 memoirs?
ReplyDeleteWe have discussed it previously.
Look at the cover again. Don't you see the gray smudge instead of the bunks, absent in the NYTM version?
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81J349WzFFL._SL1500_.jpg
A much more crude retouching than that done by the NYTM.
The MM version is of even poorer quality than the photo in the NYTM [which was almost certainly just a wirephoto cheaply printed on cheap paper, and is 68 years old in the photos and scan that I have posted online].
ReplyDeleteSo, just to be certain of your position which you opted not to define previously, are you are saying that MM doctored the photo [or had someone do it for him]? And that it's simply a coincidence that MM doctored it in the same manner as had been done by the NYTM 34 years earlier?
What do you suppose was his motive?
Re gas chamber knowledge:
ReplyDeleteKnowledge of Mass Extermination Among Hungarian Jews Returning from Auschwitz
In short, the statistics from 999 Hungarian Au survivors shows that one tends to overestimate the (shared) knowledge on extermination in Auschwitz among Hungarian Jews.
I have previously defined my position:
ReplyDelete"Not only the bottom part of the posts cannot be seen, almost the whole area is a grey smudge (unlike the NYTM version), which means that yes, whoever made the cover manipulated the photo anew (whether not to take away the focus from Mel, or because of nudity, or both)."
The gray smudge can be seen at http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81J349WzFFL._SL1500_.jpg regardless of the photo quality. With poor quality we would expect merely not to see the dark parts in the background. Instead we see a gray fog-like smudge, distinct from the dark parts of the bunks, which appears exactly where the man stands in the original.
If you have another edition with an even poorer quality - this one for example
http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/btoAAOSwImRYf-dl/s-l1600.jpg
then you can't see anything.
Note also that the texture of the wooden post is different where the man's shoulder should be (in both editions).
http://i.imgur.com/ZpVajBz.png
I obviously don't believe that MM did design for his own books. So most probably it was done by the publisher. Publishers can do such thing without the authors knowing, so the assumption that this was done at MM's behest is uncertain.
Most probable reason: the book is about MM; but he is barely seen, so that they even had to use a red circle to show him. The standing man would obviously steal the focus from MM.
>>>> "There was one exception, as mentioned above, Lucy Dawidowicz who, for reasons known only to her, claimed over 1,3 million Jewish deaths in Majdanek. But one hack historian does not a consensus make."
ReplyDeleteLipstadt out did Dawidowicz by insisting a whooping 1,700,000 Jews had been killed at Majdanek, in a 1983 LA Times article which was subsequently syndicated in other US newspapers, i.a. Finger Lake Times (Geneva, NY), Friday, April 22, 1983, p.5.
Is she a "hack historian"?
I found a very interesting quote r.e Majdanek in Telford Taylor's memoirs. It shows that even US Nuremberg prosecutors believed the Soviets were deliberately exaggerating death tolls, which had warped many of their reports.
Smirnov went on to give figures of the death toll in several cities: 632,253 during the blockade of Leningrad; over 100,000 at Vilna; 70,000 at Kaunas; some 200,000 at the Yanov camp; 1.5 million at Maidanek.
Were the statistics inflated? Were the atrocities invented or overstated? Total reliance on official reports based on untested depositions by unseen witnesses is certainly not the most reliable road to factual accuracy. Furthermore, some of the numerical totals, such as those for Maidanek and the German-occupied cities, are plainly estimates, in contrast to Leningrad, where circumstances made exact counts possible. Considering the number of deponents and the play of emotional factors, not only faulty observation but deliberate exaggeration must have warped many of the reports. But granting all that, were the flaws so numerous and so deep as to undermine the general accuracy of the picture presented?
- Telford Tayfor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, NY: Knopf, 1992, p.315.
So, in May 1945 an unspecified NYTM editor ordered an unspecified photo technician to paint bunks, floor, ceiling shadow over Simon Toncman because he didn't want to offend his readers, but he didn't think of simply cropping the photo, as the paper had done the previous week.
ReplyDeleteThen, 34 years later, MM's "publisher" had the photo doctored in precisely the same way but this time it was because he, and perhaps MM, thought the presence of ST distracted from the young MM peaking over the edge of the top bunk.
LMFAO
Lipstadt acted as a hack in that instance, but her "sin" is incomparable to that of Dawidowicz. Lipstadt is not, strictly speaking, a Holocaust historian and she wasn't a specialist on the numbers. Dawidowicz on the other hand wrote a whole book on the topic and mucked up things badly.
ReplyDeleteI have seen Taylor's quote.
> So, in May 1945 an unspecified NYTM editor ordered an unspecified photo technician to paint bunks, floor, ceiling shadow over Simon Toncman because he didn't want to offend his readers, but he didn't think of simply cropping the photo, as the paper had done the previous week.
ReplyDelete> Then, 34 years later, MM's "publisher" had the photo doctored in precisely the same way but this time it was because he, and perhaps MM, thought the presence of ST distracted from the young MM peaking over the edge of the top bunk.
Since we know that retouching did take place twice (as proven above and in the relevant post), this is what most probably happened. And there are no other versions that would be anywhere close to this one as far as parsimony is concerned.
FYI, MM's book was vanity press. So, you'll have to say MM ordered the doctoring or think up a new CT entirely.
ReplyDelete>>> I have seen Taylor's quote.
I thought you might have, considering what we were discussing on SF. But it doesn't appear to have been quoted in any article or book available on the web, at least in English.
> or think up a new CT
ReplyDeleteYou obviously don't understand the meaning of such a basic term as "conspiracy theory". For nothing I have described is anywhere within 1000 km of a CT.
The irony is that my posting has debunked your actual - and implausible to the level of craziness, not to mention absolutely lacking in supporting evidence - conspiracy theory.
The Taylor quote is available at GB, as usual.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteToo scare to go on record saying MM doctored the photo? This is as far as we got last time!
ReplyDelete>>> I obviously don't believe that MM did design for his own books
You, obviously, are unaware of MM's artistic streak. In his USC Shoah testimony he shows off many pieces of art he created with cutlery and other such items he found at Birkenau.
>>> You obviously don't understand the meaning of such a basic term as "conspiracy theory". For nothing I have described is anywhere within 1000 km of a CT.
I'm well aware of your tendency to indulge in a little persuasive definition.
Your theory is that unnamed persons conspired to doctor the photo, not once but twice, completely independently and for totally different reasons. That is a conspiracy theory, or conspiracy theories, to be precise.
The alleged motives of your conspirators are absurd; you don't have a scrap of evidence to support either of your CTs, and you've not even bothered finding out if they're even theoretically possible—you didn't even known MM self-published before announcing his publisher dun did it!
Your "debunking" essentially boils down to: the NYT dun did it, and anyone who doesn't accept this evidence free say-so has mental health issues.
Any contentious person will treat such an argument with the contempt it deserves, regardless of whom they suspect doctored the photo.
> Too scare to go on record saying MM doctored the photo?
ReplyDeleteUnlike you I don't usually jump to unwarranted conclusions.
> You, obviously, are unaware of MM's artistic streak. In his USC Shoah testimony he shows off many pieces of art he created with cutlery and other such items he found at Birkenau.
I'm not really interested in tertiary details. If MM did it, it's no skin off anyone's nose. You can't prove that MM did it of course. All we know is that it's different from the NYTM version. Whether it was MM or the publisher interests only small minds.
The point is that you got totally debunked. And are trying to hide it by arguing about trivia.
> Your theory is that unnamed persons conspired to doctor the photo, not once, but twice, completely independently and for totally different reasons. That is a conspiracy theory, or conspiracy theories, to be precises.
Just as I said, you have no idea about basic terms like "conspiracy". Nobody has "conspired" to retouch the photo. They simply did it for mundane reasons.
For example, the SK photos were retouched in some books for mundane reasons. Was that a conspiracy? Obviously not. Women's images get retouched in some fundies' newspapers out of modesty. Is that a conspiracy? Obviously not.
Not every deviation from truth is defined as a conspiracy. So, as I said, you're clueless.
On the other hand your claim, not supported by any evidence, of someone pasting in the standing man for absolutely absurd reasons as a part of some kind of a govt forgery effort for iconic photos and conspiring to hide the original photo, but then it somehow getting out and reaching the NYMT (and only NYMT), then it being retouched again (because the photo *is* retouched differently) and somehow getting into MM's hands decades later (despite the fact that both photos are differently retouched versions), then it being published by MM who allegedly designed the cover himself, but somehow did not see that he was publishing the wrong photo, is a pure convoluted CT that makes exactly zero sense.
Facts remain:
1. The NYTM photo was retouched, as I have shown. You have failed to refute the evidence.
2. The MM book photo was retouched, and retouched differently than the NYTM photo, as I have shown. You have failed to refute the evidence.
3. Thus the two retouchings were independent.
Since this is proven, any theory as to what the original is must incorporate these 3 points. All other theories are dismissed as false, since they contradict proven facts.
Since the two retouched photos by definition cannot be the originals, one has two choices - either the original no longer exists, or the photo claimed as the original is the original. Quite obviously the latter is the only plausible, parsimonious version.
> you don't have a scrap of evidence to support either of your CTs,
True, I don't, because I don't have any CTs unlike you, oh believer in the Jewish blood libel. My main claims (the 3 above), on the other hand, have all been proven. So I have facts and no need of CTs.
> The alleged motives of your conspirators are absurd
You mean, the alleged motives of *your* conspirators are absurd. I agree.
The motives I have stated for non-conspiratorial retouching are fully plausible.
> Your "debunking" essentially boils down to: the NYT dun did it, and anyone who doesn't accept this evidence free say-so has mental health issues.
Well, anyone who accepts your Rube Goldberg CT certainly has mental issues. It lacks any shade of plausibility, not to mention any evidence.
> Any contentious person will treat such an argument with the contempt it deserves, regardless of whom they suspect doctored the photo.
Almost anyone knowing your m.o. of branding anything you don't like a fake for absolutely absurd reasons will ignore your blather. I'm being kind in responding at all.
>>> The attempt was partially symbolic (as the detached chimney shows) and partially botched.
ReplyDeleteThe detachedness is utterly irrelevant, as Soviet probably knew from an original 1942 plan.
Fighting fire with fire. The artwork's ropey but the info's good:
http://fotos.fotoflexer.com/30a8c97e7d38774f191a43e651311006.jpg
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ReplyDeleteOhhh can you please tell us what Negroid had written? Should be fun.
ReplyDeleteI've no idea; Negroid and any sockpuppets he might create are perma-banned from commenting on this blog, so we just went 'delete'.
ReplyDelete> The artwork's ropey but the info's good:
ReplyDeleteThanks.
I love lists . Even more so when they are backed up with supporting notes !
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for this, Sergey.
hi ! i saw your list , but im not convinced , i have some little arguments here :
ReplyDeletethe holocaust is a lie to manipulate the world to never support national-socialism and to never try to destroy the liars... i question you who are the liars ?
THE JEW !
yeah but not the jewish people... the zionist-bolchevik globalist...
in fact the jewish people lived in harmony in the reich... (in the end of my arguments i will put a link to the photos)
i have some questions about the holocaust :
1- if the holocaust existed.. how worked concentration camps.. the "historians" should know right ?
2- if the holocaust existed.. where are the "gassed body piles in the ground near concentration camps" ?
3- if the holocaust existed.. the concentration camps comsumed lot of resources right ? because for the light , wood , steel , gaz and etc..
where are the importation notes for the death camps ?
4- if the holocaust existed.. why we let survivors ? we had guns, mechanised , armored , tanks... why we didn't kill them ?
5- if the holocaust existed.. why the hell we would record everything... some videos show "nazis" doing awful things.. and they look to the camera.. why would we record..
6- if the holocaust existed.. why stalin killed polish , jews and other peoples to blame on hitler ? and why the "photoshopped" some photos ?
7- why auschwitz opened to the public in 1955-60 and the other camps in 1970 ?
the holocaust is a lie to stop people to support national-socialism and destroy the zionist new world order plan... and its a propaganda of war..
hitler in some speeches the blame some jews.. its true.. but who are they ?
THE ZIONIST !
the national socialist german party is the only one who closed the rothschild banks...
that's why the rothschilds and the jewish zionist greated the holocaust... TO STOP THE ONLY WAY OF GOVERNMENT AGAINST THEM.. IT MAKES SENSE NOW ???
and in the war more than 125.000 jews fought for the wehrmacht , sturmwaffe , luftwaffe , kriegsmarine and even the most important one.. THE WAFFEN-SS
there was jewish field marshals , generals , captains , soldiers and doctors...
GO FIND , THERE ARE A LOT OF PROOF , IM NOT LYING !
please anwser to ALL the questions
photos : http://imgur.com/a/yhoo9
hitler man of peace : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC1fdasTqSk
the greatest history never told : http://thegreateststorynevertold.tv
relate of a survivor from the "holocaust" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y66aJl-FMhA
jewish old women talking about jews.. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjqN4dtbSOA
> 1- if the holocaust existed.. how worked concentration camps.. the "historians" should know right ?
ReplyDeleteEh? And what does that have to do with the Holocaust "existing"?
> 2- if the holocaust existed.. where are the "gassed body piles in the ground near concentration camps" ?
See item 18 above. http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2017/05/rebutting-twitter-denial-most-popular.html#larson
> 3- if the holocaust existed.. the concentration camps comsumed lot of resources right ? because for the light , wood , steel , gaz and etc..
where are the importation notes for the death camps ?
Most did not survive the war for obvious reasons. Those few that did are in the archives. One such series will be published at the blog soon.
Also, it's not like you can readily find this stuff for normal concentration camps, but you don't doubt them on this basis, right?
> 4- if the holocaust existed.. why we let survivors ? we had guns, mechanised , armored , tanks... why we didn't kill them ?
They were mostly killing Jews unable to work and using the other Jews as slave labor many of whom survived until the end, after the gassing stop order was issued.
> 5- if the holocaust existed.. why the hell we would record everything... some videos show "nazis" doing awful things.. and they look to the camera.. why would we record..
Well, since they did, the question is irrelevant, right? They just did.
But some people just enjoy this stuff, so they did it even though it was prohibited. Of course, far from everything has been recorded.
And what does that have to do with the Holocaust "existing", aside from proving that it did?
> 6- if the holocaust existed.. why stalin killed polish , jews and other peoples to blame on hitler ? and why the "photoshopped" some photos ?
Katyn was blamed on Hitler simply because the Nazis found the graves and made a propaganda show out of them. You are making up Stalin killing Jews and blaming them on Hitler (aside from those Jews who died as Katyn victims).
And what does that have to do with the Holocaust "existing"?
As to the photos, see item 25 above: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2017/05/rebutting-twitter-denial-most-popular.html#photos
> 7- why auschwitz opened to the public in 1955-60 and the other camps in 1970 ?
lolwut
> the holocaust is a lie
Got any proof of that?
As to your other sources, I have to assume that aside from being an illiterate freak you are also a liar. Your very first source has been debunked above: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2017/05/rebutting-twitter-denial-most-popular.html#auschwitzswimmingpool
So you have not actually read the post.
The Greatest Story nonsense has been debunked at https://pastebin.com/5chc7yPZ
So in the end... you got nothin'. :-)
The fact that you had the patience to reply to all that nonsense makes you a hero in my book!
DeleteA very, very awesome summary refuting most, actually probably all, of the average internet troll's commonly used ensemble of "clever questions that debunk the holohoax in 5 mins". Wherever we encounter them, be it YouTube, twitter, facebook, the various chan imageboards etc., this is I daresay the "one Link to refute them all." At least it should get them back to the drawing board.
ReplyDelete- the Communists never claimed that all Auschwitz victims were Jewish; the Soviet Auschwitz report didn't mention this, there was an oblique reference to "not less than 4,000,000 citizens of the USSR, Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, and other countries", but that's it.-
ReplyDeleteThe law/act the Polish Government issued when establishing the Auschwitz Memorial in 1947 is also worth mentioning. The Law is explicitly named "ACT of 2 July 1947 on the commemoration of the martyrdom of the Polish Nation and other Nations in Auschwitz".
Like you said, the communists never claimed that all Auschwitz victims were Jewish. The actual official edict issued by the Communist government makes it clear that this was the case. So, it's based on 2 false assumptions: the 4 million being a physical count of actual people (which it wasn't), and that it referred to only Jews and impacts the Jewish death toll (Refuted by the official edict).
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ReplyDeleteIvan, first photo has nothing to do with any German chambers:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5176177
"Contract Mexican laborers being fumigated with the pesticide DDT in Hidalgo, Texas, in 1956."
Second photo shows a clean side of the hot air disinfestation chambers in the Auschwitz Central Sauna.
Third photo shows the delousing chambers in the Dachau crematorium.
None of the photos has *anything* to do with the historicity of the homicidal gas chambers. I'm not sure what the argument is supposed to be.
Funny tha you didnt even answer to him telling you about the jews who held high rankings in the NSDAP. Hitler's best friend was half jewish and he called him aryan.
DeleteThere is no need for an answer since it's not an argument for or against anything.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI still don't get what delousing gas chambers have to do with anything or why you posted a new batch of denier crap (debunked directly above, here and here).
ReplyDeleteRE #35,
ReplyDeleteIf that's the case, then why was that sentence reworded without the word "propaganda" in it in the 1957 edition? From what I saw of that book, that was the only rework in the entire volume.
@anti-commie: your question was already answered in #35 in the quote from Hans: "There is no indication whatsoever that he meant to say that they created any false information. In the 1962 edition of the book the term “Auschwitzpropaganda” was changed to “Veröffentlichungen über Auschwitz”, apparently to avoid exactly the misunderstanding."
ReplyDeleteBy 1957/1962, East Bloc authors and publishers were undoubtedly more aware of how propaganda sounded like a pejorative to western ears. Propaganda was widely used in the English-speaking world in a neutral fashion until the interwar period when it took on more and more of a negative connotation, but in Europe, the term was still being used neutrally by e.g. the Nazis and communists, but also other political groups, through to at least the 1940s.
In USSR "propaganda" was neutral too (unless it came from the "enemy"). E.g. one spoke of "scientific propaganda".
ReplyDeleteSergey, I know you touched a bit on the subject in the "unreliable witnesses" section, but I think you should add a seperate, dedicated "Soap and Lampshades" section, knowing how big of a component it is in the deniee narrative.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the "this man is not a German" photo, the Wikipedia description mentions the Einsatzgruppen killing Jews in Ukraine, but the photo is about a man in a Ordnungspolizei uniform. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)
ReplyDeleteWhat's up with That? Was it a mistake on Wikipedia's part?
In general, don't trust wiki on such details.
ReplyDeleteYou have a point.
DeleteI have another question. What would you say to someone who has doubts about the documents historians use as proof that the Holocaust happened?
Some people believe they could have been faked by the Allies. Truth be told, I've taken that what-if into consideration because - unfortunately - my paranoid-mindset influences the way I perceive evidence. Even worse, my lack of knowledge on how to identify forgeries and false documents in general works against me. I can accept video footage showing the Nazi's atrocities, recordings, photographs, Holocaust survivor and perpetrator testimonies, forensic evidence, and information from genuine Holocaust historians, but my mind starts entertaining the idea of a "'possible' Allied conspiracy" (e.g. what if they faked the documents?) when I look at the papers.
I need help.
Haazen, the key things are
ReplyDelete1) look for corroboration. Documents can be corroborated by other documents as well as by testimonies, photos, physical evidence and other types of sources.
2) examine provenance, which also produces further corroboration. Damning documents on the Holocaust can be found in the archives of many different countries. Some might have been used in 1940s war crimes trials, but a corroborating source might not have been, and historians have been identifying relevant documents for 70 years; they are still not finished.
3) remember that both in the 1940s war crimes trials as well as subsequent historical research, the documents discuss more than just the Holocaust. Really interesting documents can be found in otherwise boring business records or in the files of the German Foreign Office which obviously also discuss regular diplomacy. The Einsatzgruppen reports are really lengthy intelligence reports as well as records of mass executions.
A good example is the documentation for the Babi Yar massacre
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/evidence-on-babi-yar-massacre-29-30.html
There are 20 contemporary German documents, from the files of the SS, Order Police, Foreign Office, civil administration of the Ukraine and the German Army. These were found in archives in the Czech Republic, Russia, and the US-captured records that are microfilmed in the US and restituted to Germany. There are also 13 photographs showing the aftermath of the massacre - the clean-up of the site and covering over of the corpses.
Contemporary non-German sources include diaries of Ukrainian bystanders, Soviet intelligence and Soviet partisan reports, also reports from Swiss intelligence and the Polish underground.
In all, 46 contemporary sources from diverse provenances. About five of these were known and used in 1940s war crimes trials, so they have since been corroborated on different aspects about eight times over.
Not all events or sites have this much corroboration. It's important to remember that historians do not expect everything to be fully corroborated because records and other sources are easily destroyed, and physical evidence can also be manipulated as indeed the Nazis attempted with Aktion 1005 at Babi Yar. But postwar investigations found human remains and physical evidence of a cover-up there, and received further evidence from 1943 testimonies by escapees from the cover-up work gang under Aktion 1005.
It's also not much use restricting discussion to one site, since Babi Yar was hardly the only five figure massacre of Jews in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.
I'm not totally convinced, let's review a bit what you're saying
ReplyDeleteYou say (within the chimney argument separate from krema I), that "no denial leader denies that the crematorium with a working chimney actually existed there" when you do not give the name of any particular
What do you tell me about these images:
https://quenosocultan.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/a-christmas-tree-standing-in-front-of-block-15-in-auschwitz-i-auschwitz-birkenau-state-museum-archives- christmas.jpg, Christmas tree in front of block 15 in Auschwitz I, so were the gassings before or after Christmas?
https://k61.kn3.net/A/F/0/3/6/B/036.jpg, Soccer field in buchenwald
You have said that "popular sources such as general-purpose encyclopedias and almanacs are generally not considered reliable sources for writing history.The World Almanac is no exception." But I do not know if you know that for more than a century, the Jewish World Almanac has been widely regarded as the most authentic source for figures of the world's Jewish population. Scholars all over the world, including the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica, rely on the accuracy of these figures.
- "There is not a single signature of Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich authorizing the extermination of the Jews"
DR kubovy (JUDGE) of the Tel Aviv documentation center, 1960
-Sven Hedin
Despite being of Jewish origin, and that his great-grandfather had been a rabbi, Hedin was an apologist for National Socialism and was a friend and admirer of Hitler, whom he met at the 1936 Olympics.
-Jewish Hitler Soldiers:
https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/YLqVJrxBD.HYocXs.sh_1w--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9MzUwO2g9MjE1O2lsPXBsYW5l/http://media.zenfs.com/es-ES/blogs/historia/Algunos-mischlinge- in-the-army-nazi-kansaspress.jpg
-Emil Maurice (JUDIO), personal driver and best friend of Hitler
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRG7QLiOy85qnXHxW2XPEJc8oDgSnmNg7eCGLeimG5aHCSXCRiwUg
If what you mention your blissful official story about the holocaust is true, why does it even blatantly affirm such absurd things as, for example, misrepresenting a document in which Goering supposedly authorized in writing the extermination of the Jews of Europe? .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYdXtHB2c18
And to finish and hit the nail on the head, you know that at the Nuremberg trials, hoss and many other German officers were tortured to confess to crimes they never committed.
https://doctrinanacionalsocialista.blogspot.com.co/2017/03/11-de-marzo-de-1946-rudolf-hoess-es.html
Anyway, that's all I have to say at the moment.
There's something else I want to show you.
ReplyDeletehttps://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/how-much-did-each-holocaust-survivor-weigh-at-the-time-of-liberation/
How would you respond to Furtherglory's claim about the Holocaust survivors' weight at the time of liberation?
"Every Holocaust survivor seems to know exactly how much he or she weighed when they were liberated."
How would you respond to all of his "observations"?
@Haazen: the blog post by Furtherglory cites exactly zero testimonies from survivors mentioning their weight at the time of liberation.
ReplyDeleteConsidering there are 10s of 1000s of concentration camp survivor testimonies, from Jews and non-Jews, that at least mention their liberation, whereas Furtherglory cited exactly none of them, the claim that "every Holocaust survivor seems to know exactly how much he or she weighed when they were liberated" is hyperbole.
While a number of survivor memoirs and oral histories do mention weight on liberation, many others do not. Since survivor testimonies have been given in waves from 1945 onwards through to the 1980s/1990s, it's not even clear whether 'weight on liberation' is something mentioned in more recent oral history testimony-gathering surveys or was always there, nor is it clear what percentage of survivors even mention this. From everything I have seen - and I have seen thousands of accounts by now - the percentage is quite low.
1940s testimonies seem less likely to mention this, but a survivor with a low weight wouldn't be up and about giving testimonies - they would be in freaking hospital, where scales would be relatively standard equipment. Whether the survivor remembered the correct weight 40 years later is another issue - but we don't even know what percentage talk about their weights.
Contemporary medical journals do have info on survivor weights, e.g. P. L. Mollison, 'Observations On Cases Of Starvation At Belsen', The British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 4435 (Jan. 5, 1946), pp. 4-8 has surveys of average weights among Belsen survivors - but the samples were taken from those who ended up in hospital, so cannot be properly generalised to all survivors.
"The average weight of 18 males who were strong enough to stand upright on scales was 44 kg. (38.7-59.7) ; 11 females averaged 35.3 kg. (25-45.5): i.e., males just under 7 st. ; females about 5 1/2 st. In 11 of these 29 the previous weight was known, and the loss was calculated as a percentage of the figure in health : the average loss was 38.8% (29-57%)"
lord:
ReplyDelete> You say (within the chimney argument separate from krema I), that "no denial leader denies that the crematorium with a working chimney actually existed there" when you do not give the name of any particular
I'm not sure what I am supposed to give. All leading deniers acknowledge a wartime crematorium there. Not a single one has doubted it.
I'm afraid it's up to you to point me to any leading denier that doubts it.
> https://quenosocultan.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/a-christmas-tree-standing-in-front-of-block-15-in-auschwitz-i-auschwitz-birkenau-state-museum-archives- christmas.jpg, Christmas tree in front of block 15 in Auschwitz I, so were the gassings before or after Christmas?
What Christmas? What year was the photo made? What does it signify?
So far you've failed to make any argument.
> https://k61.kn3.net/A/F/0/3/6/B/036.jpg, Soccer field in buchenwald
You have failed to show that this is a photo from Buchenwald.
This description says:
http://www.gettyimages.de/detail/nachrichtenfoto/recently-liberated-polish-men-playing-soccer-goalie-nachrichtenfoto/50768009
"Recently liberated Polish men playing soccer; goalie wearing uniform of Buchenwald concentration camp."
It doesn't even say where they play.
Anyway, that Buchenwald had a football pitch is well-known. I'm not sure what your point is or what you want me to address, given that you have failed to formulate an argument.
> But I do not know if you know that for more than a century, the Jewish World Almanac has been widely regarded as the most authentic source for figures of the world's Jewish population.
Let's assume this is so. What does that have to do with my posting which addressed the World Almanac, and not the Jewish World Almanac? Again, what you wrote doesn't make much sense.
I'm not sure what the random quotes you posted thereafter are supposed to show.
> If what you mention your blissful official story about the holocaust is true, why does it even blatantly affirm such absurd things as, for example, misrepresenting a document in which Goering supposedly authorized in writing the extermination of the Jews of Europe? .
There is a July 31, 1941 order by Goering to Heydrich to develop a plan for the complete solution of the "Jewish Question".
Currently we know that it is not yet the extermination program as such, that decision would be taken later as we now know.
Some historians did interpret this document as a part of the wholesale extermination since they dated the taking of the decision earlier than July 31. AFAIC it's an honest misinterpretation of the evidence as a whole, not a wilful misrepresentation.
> And to finish and hit the nail on the head, you know that at the Nuremberg trials, hoss and many other German officers were tortured to confess to crimes they never committed.
And how do we know that Hoess was initially mistreated? Oh, right, he wrote about that in his memoirs. In those same memoirs in which he told about the extermination in Auschwitz, including the gas chambers, and reduced the death toll to 1 million. Thank you for hitting that nail on the head... of the Holocaust denial!
And you haven't cited any other allegedly tortured German officers.
sergey please
ReplyDelete-The image says it all, friend, why would other trees come out in the middle of winter, just respond to that and leave your mouth closed, or at least try to explain to me that this photo is due
- "Anyway, that Buchenwald had a football field is well known"
So why do you contradict yourself and tell me that I have not verified that it was a picture of Buchenwald T-T
Besides that you give me the reason with the following:
"Polish men released recently playing football, goalie with uniform from the Buchenwald concentration camp".
"He does not even say where they play"
I mean if you claim that I was from Buchenwald or not ?, my dear uncle, human stupidity has no limits!
-It's the same just that you add the word Jew, everything remains the same as it continues to refer to the figure of the Jewish population of the world, DUH !, again, I wait for you to answer me.
as for my other sources, ok if Hitler really hated the Jewish population in general as he could have Jewish friends and Jewish soldiers, it is simply contradictory about the extensive German anti-Semitism that has always been mentioned to us and the strange thing is that these little details are included not even by the "history already written", and of course do not ignore what is mentioned by the doctor roger guy dommergue, in fact it would be interesting to do some publication trying to discredit the arguments of this man in the video that happens to you
Sergey you can read true, there is no authorization on the part of the Hitler himself not even that he wanted to carry out an extermination of the Jews or any other group of people, then how to carry out acts of aggression or murder without authorization of the own German dictator? it's simple logic friend
-You still do not answer, so because you affirm that you were tortured in the same way, I keep hitting my dear friend (only not in the way you said it) :)
> The image says it all, friend
ReplyDeleteThe image says nothing. You have failed to answer the questions. Why? IQ too low?
> So why do you contradict yourself and tell me that I have not verified that it was a picture of Buchenwald T-T
Where have I contradicted myself? You can't show it because I haven't. Do you always make stuff up?
You haven't shown that the photo is from Buchenwald. You also haven't made any point or an argument.
> I mean if you claim that I was from Buchenwald or not ?, my dear uncle, human stupidity has no limits!
Correct, as you so amply demonstrate with your incoherent comment. Were you drunk when you wrote it?
> It's the same just that you add the word Jew, everything remains the same as it continues to refer to the figure of the Jewish population of the world, DUH !, again, I wait for you to answer me.
How is it the same when you were talking about an entirely different publication altogether? Jewish World Almanac is not the World Almanac. Low IQ strikes again?
> ok if Hitler really hated the Jewish population in general
There is no if here.
> Sergey you can read true, there is no authorization on the part of the Hitler himself not even that he wanted to carry out an extermination of the Jews or any other group of people,
Incorrect, see his 12.12.41 speech.
> You still do not answer, so because you affirm that you were tortured in the same way
Answer what? I've answered on Hoess. You have failed to give any other examples. Are you still drunk?
WARNING: if I detect so much a hint of rudeness in your next reply, it will be deleted without any comment.
This website is incredible! David Cole had me thinking for a day or so. I was open to his points. He sounds so sincere and intelligent. But he's really so superficial in his analysis. You dubunk him very well.
ReplyDeletePlease, as you list Ino Arndt as an expert on the victim estimates. Could you provide his C. V., incl. his academical career and credentials? I can't find it anywhere.
ReplyDeleteNo, we listed Ino Arndt as the co-author of a chapter and single author of another chapter in an edited collection published in 1991, i.e. gave a citation.
ReplyDeleteNobody is obliged to "provide a CV" of an author in an academic debate, especially regarding contributors to a collectively authored work, which will usually vary from full professors to just-starting-out scholars, as everyone has to start somewhere.
If you want to look up an author, used a targeted search like "Ino Arndt" and follow the links. She was a researcher for the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte in Munich during the mid-1970s and beyond, while library catalogues indicate she was born in 1930 and thus is now long retired. Which would be why you cannot find a homepage/profile for Arndt today, when she would be 88 years old.
https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1976_2_1_arndt.pdf (final page for her status at the time)
Her co-author for the chapter on Germany, Heinz Boberach (1929-2008), was a senior archivist at the Bundesarchiv and a trained PhD historian; their chapter discusses the research conducted by the Bundesarchiv for the memorial book of German Jews, which as of 1991 was restricted to what was then West Germany, but which was reissued in 2006 covering the whole of reunified Germany. Both were collectively researched works, the most recent version is online.
https://www.bundesarchiv.de/gedenkbuch/
The transports from Germany are discussed and also presented with facsimiles of transport lists at this site:
http://www.statistik-des-holocaust.de/stat_ger.html
Excellent site, well researched! Amazing to me that holocaust denial is even a thing, and you jave the patience to address even the most ridiculous of statements trying to refute it! Well done
ReplyDeleteYes.. with even more ridiculous statements haha :) Trying to make a number of using 6 million all the time... with the argument that 6 million was again used in another claim so then its nothing strange that 6 million is used in every other claim too. It just happend to be 6 million again. And the next time also regarding another claim.
DeleteHey Sergey, i recently found this website talking about supposed photo forgeries and i wondered if you could say something about it
ReplyDeletehttp://www.vho.org/GB/Books/dth/fndgcffor.html#ftn13
Amazing work Sergey!
ReplyDeleteHolocaust Denial is a real problem and it's unfortunate to see how people still deny that the atrocity happened. I really respect how you took time out of your day to debunk the garbage that Holocaust deniers spread. Thank you!
I think you need to start by actually proving any of the initial claims that were made to begin with.. since there are so far 0 proof of anny mass gassings or the number 6 mil. We know they have a history of making things up though.
ReplyDeleteJust making new unproven claims or often illogical explanations that are easily debunked doesnt lead anywhere. Just to an endless loop.
Of course they are not going to build pools and libraries for such a place or a couple of other prisoners if the intention is to kill everyone. Doesnt work like that in a war where you need every resourve you can get....
It has been done, you are welcome to read our blog.
DeleteI have seen zero evidence of mass graves or incinerated bodies. You need evidence to make claims like these in a court of law. All I've read is he said-she said hoopla.
ReplyDeleteThe evidence has been cited, so you having seen zero of it is a you-problem, not an us-problem.
DeleteIt's on the blog. Look it up.
DeleteHello. I appreciate your coverage of the peculiar case of Stasi agent provocateur Josep Ginsburg, aka Joseph Burg, however, the <> link does not work, and there is no backup at the Internet Archive website.
ReplyDeleteIf you happen to know of any comparable coverage of Ginsburg's story, and have the opportunity, then please follow up in the "replies" column.
The problem with people like you, you have no qualifications to figure out if what the governments are saying is true or false, you just presume they are true because they are American. Jews were not just sitting idley by in WW2 and for no reason whatsoever they just randomly were killed for being Jews. Many zionists and communist jews were part of partisan underground movies, violating the Geneva convention. So just because jews died in WW2, don't mean there was a holocaust. The term "genocide" is so vague, it is easily politicized by the winners of wars, so just mentioned genocide is used as a method of psychological manipulation.
ReplyDeleteYou guys claim 6million jews were systematically rounded up and murdered through gas chambers disguised as showers and then cremated. You need to prove that. But every time we ask for specific evidence, suddenly its "oh the nazis destroyed that evidence". Not only that, but the claim is that 5million other people were deliberately killed in the camp. Do you not realize how big of a number that is? 11 million people... think how big cities are that hold 11 million people, how you could possibly kill that many in secret...
These are made up numbers... There's newspapers articles from after the war saying 26 million people were turned into soap...that in ONE day in Auschwitz 1.5 million people were turned into soap.
Other newspaper article also say 500,000 children were lured into gas chambers with candies and chocolate...
It's all absurd nonsense. It's called atrocity propaganda. And people like you have been duped into pushing this nonsense... If 11 million people magically went poof into ashes... you need to show it... show the piles of fuel needed to cremate that many people... the record of coal and wood transported...
Zyklon-B could not have been used in the method you described, because it doesn't start turning to gas until it reaches 26C... yet we are told the gas chambers were running night and day 24/7 winter and summer to get that many people killed.
Zyklon-B doesn't magically go poof into gas when dropped on the ground. So nobody was gasses within 10-20minutes.
You can discuss swimming pools all you like, but jews write about swimming in the pools.
And you have a problem when you say no more that 10,000 were killed in Auschwitz 1, that means you have to increase the number of deaths at the other camps to keep your magically number of 6 million jews +5 million gentiles to remain the same.
Apparently you people really are just story writers, than actual historians or anyone with technical knowledge or thinking of logistics.
People like you who care about narratives over reality are dangerous...
Dude, you are a typical low-IQ mushy brained denier puppet who not only doesn't know the basics but who ascribes to us what we have never written. Two examples will suffice:
Delete1. "Do you not realize how big of a number that is? 11 million people... think how big cities are that hold 11 million people, how you could possibly kill that many in secret..."
What are you even on about? What "11 million"? Are you referring to the very meme our blog debunks (showing you have no idea what you're talking about)? And since what do you even mean by "hold"? Who said they were "held"? Dumb, dumb muppet.
2. "And you have a problem when you say no more that 10,000 were killed in Auschwitz 1, that means you have to increase the number of deaths at the other camps"
How so? Why? Why do you dumb f*cks always fail at even the kindergarten-level math?
Anyway, these two examples suffice to show why someone like you is not worth engaging with LOL.
Just a short (and late) note on one "Chris"'s objection:
Delete"Zyklon-B could not have been used in the method you described, because it doesn't start turning to gas until it reaches 26C... yet we are told the gas chambers were running night and day 24/7 winter and summer to get that many people killed."
That's a simple pure massive lie.
First some vocabulary. Zyklon B does not "turn into gas". Hydrogen cyanid (HCN) contained in liquid form in Zyklon B carrier does. Zyklon B is the mix of a porous carrier with liquid HCN inside.
26°C is the BOILING temperature of liquid HCN.
100°C is the boiling temperature of water.
Chris just wrote that water NEVER evaporates under 100°C. This is a hilarious stupid antiscientific lie.
Evaporation (liquid turning into gas) is a COMPLETE different phenomena than boiling. And it starts way below the boiling temperature.
Most liquid start to evaporate way below their boiling point.
HCN evaporates way below 26°C. It evaporates at MINUS -18°C.
At 15°C it evaporates fast.
At 20°C it evaporates (turns into gas) SUPER FAST.
Zyklon B manufacturers wrote (before WWII) that at 20°C most of HCN has evaporated within 30 minutes. One Zyklon B specialist said that experimental measures provided a 28% HCN evaporation rate from ZB after 5 minutes at 20°C (that's 86% after 30 minutes). In Krema II gas chamber, an HCN concentration of 3000ppm would be reached in 5 minutes. 300ppm is enough to kill in a few minutes. 3000ppm always kills in one minute.
So "Chris", happy?
And you know what? We have testimonies that gas chambers were either heated or there was some waiting before pouring ZB so that the temperature would rise inside (it would rise fast with compressed naked people inside each at 37°C). I may even have risen way above 26°C, making the main phenomenon taking place beeing boiling and not evaporation which would make HCN turn into gas even faster.
So in fact, testimonies do match physics and vice versa.
And "Chris" in a pathetic incompetent liar.
Ah you say that NO holocaust historian says 6 million jews were killed in the concentration camps.... Actually that's exactly how it started...
ReplyDeleteA jew in palestine in 1944 came up with the number. That was read into the record of nuremberg with no objective evidence, since evidence wasn't a requirement of the nuremberg trials.
Raul Hilberg's book "The Destruction of the European Jews", the authorative volume that constructed the holocaust narrative, puts the deaths at 5.1million, and thats mostly in the concentration camps.
But people like you and others are realizing that it couldn't be done, so you have to now change the narrative and say "well most jews weren't killed in concentration camps"...so now they magically went poof somewhere else, with no proof.
You can't proof 6 million died plus 5 million others.
People are making up numbers.
Notably it is you who is simply making stuff up in your incoherent rant. It is not even clear what you are arguing against and you have clearly not bothered to read our blog. Low-IQ and mushy-brained - a typical representative of the denier tribe LOL.
Delete>Ah you say that NO holocaust historian says 6 million jews were killed in the concentration camps.... Actually that's exactly how it started...
Delete6 million weren't killed in concentration camps. More about 3-4 million. The rest were killed in ghettos, bombings, starvation, etc..
>A jew in palestine in 1944 came up with the number. That was read into the record of nuremberg with no objective evidence, since evidence wasn't a requirement of the nuremberg trials.
What's this guy's name? At least give a name. And do you have a source for this?
>Raul Hilberg's book "The Destruction of the European Jews", the authorative volume that constructed the holocaust narrative, puts the deaths at 5.1million, and thats mostly in the concentration camps.
Hilberg isnt the only person to make an estimate. And the "holocaust narrative" wasn't constructed by Hilberg, he played a role in it.
>But people like you and others are realizing that it couldn't be done, so you have to now change the narrative and say "well most jews weren't killed in concentration camps"...so now they magically went poof somewhere else, with no proof.
This has been the narrative for a long time. You seem new to this.
>You can't proof 6 million died plus 5 million others.
Are you contesting the 11 million number? 6 million was the number of Jews dead. 11 million is the total of Jews and other "unterminsches" by Nazi Germany
>People are making up numbers.
You are.