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Friday, November 02, 2018

Bunkers, dugouts, Mattogno's honesty.

In "Carlo Mattogno, the failed Dragon-slayer" I wrote in regard to Mattogno's claim that the term "Bunkers" (in relation to the first two extermination installations in Birkenau, Bunker 1 and Bunker 2) was invented by the Poles and forced on Hoess:
The problem for Mattogno is that Hoess did mention the term "Bunker" before he was transferred to Poland. Here's a quote from the joint interrogation of Otto Moll and Rudolf Hoess at Nuremberg on 16 April 1946, by Lieut.-Colonel Smith W. Brookhart, as published in R. Overy, Interrogations. The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945, 2001, p. 394:
Q. How does that figure strike you, Hoess?
A. It is impossible for him to know the exact figures, but they appear to me to be much too small as far as I can remember today. The people buried in the two big mass graves of the so-called dugouts one and two, amounted to 106,000 or 107,000 people.
[...]
Q. Hoess, what do you think would be the correct figures?
A. Moll, in my opinion, cannot possibly have any idea of the number of killings in the dugouts where he was working and responsible. At any rate, they were far, far too low - that is, Moll's figure.
Obviously "dugouts one and two" are Bunkers 1 and 2, and the translator was clueless about what Hoess meant. And why would that be if there was such a grand conspiracy? So much for Mattogno's claim about Hoess.
In his response Mattogno characterized my explanation as follows:
He argues that Rudolf Hoess used the term "Bunker" before his extradition to Poland (contrary to what I said) and cites an interrogation of the former commandant of Auschwitz on April 16, 1946 where, however, the term "Bunker" does not appear but rather "dugouts one and two". Romanov said: "Obviously "dugouts one and two" are Bunkers 1 and 2, and the translator was clueless about what Hoess meant." The explanation is quite feeble. The fact is that the text does not mention the term "Bunker", and here we are speaking precisely about terminology.
During the interrogation of 1 April 1946 Hoess spoke of "two old farms", and on 11 March 1946 of "two old farmbuildings". These terms correspond to the German Bauernhäuse, so that the term "dugouts" is explained more by an inappropriate translation of Bauerhaus than that of "Bunker".
In my response I explained, citing dictionaries:
"Dugout" is one of the direct English translations of the German term "Bunker". Indeed, the very English word "bunker" in the military sense of "dugout" came from German [...] Hence, in context, it is obvious that originally Höss used the term "Bunker" which for a native English speaker made sense as a dugout.
Lo and behold: in his subsequent book Commandant of Auschwitz - Rudolf Höss, His Torture and His Forced Confessions (Nov. 2017, p. 227) Mattogno adopts my "quite feeble" explanation without any further ado!
Most likely, Höss had used the term “bunker” earlier on April 16, 1946, when he spoke about “dugouts” 1 and 2 [...] The term in question, “dugout,” is in fact the English equivalent of the German word “Bunker,” whose primary meaning is “concrete shelter” (“betonierter Schutzraum”; Brockhaus…, p. 86), such as a fortress or an air-raid shelter.
No acknowledgment of his previous conspiracy theory about Poles forcing the term on Hoess (he concocts an entirely new one instead, which is even less convincing) and no acknowledgment that he was wrong about my explanation being "quite feeble" either.

Carlo has shown his true face again.

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