Irregular Musings on the Unicellular Denial. #3. Chris Crookes and Mike Peinovich.

Let's continue our sporadic review of the Holocaust denial flora and fauna.

So there is this guy named Chris Crookes - the disgraced Holocaust denier kicked out of the Labour party. He was kicked out for this article. Let's take a look at it.

He begins by discussing Viktor Frankl's deception in his book. Well, duh, this was exposed basically by Frankl himself, and later in this peer-reviewed article (the author of which published an in-depth critique already after Crookes' "article" appeared). It's a big "so what" that has zero to do with the historicity of the Holocaust.

Then Crookes shows his utter pig-like ignorance by being "surprised" about Jews treated in hospitals as if it contradicted the Holocaust (hint: it obviously doesn't, they needed the labor force, especially at the end of the war, so they took minimal care of their actual and potential slave workers, that's basic history, duh).

Then comes this part:

I soon discovered that the SS German Judge Konrad Morgan, who was tortured by the allies at Nuremberg but who refused to perjure himself and who instead gave testimony about how he had been visiting the concentration camps investigating and charging German officers and staff for corruption, cruelty and murder. Even some kamp kommandants were convicted on murder charges (of a few inmates) and were executed for it. Really! That was surprise to me and I recommend people check this out for themselves if they doubt me.

Indeed, if we check Morgen's Nuremberg testimony, we see him testifying at length about the genocide of the Jews, including mass gassings at Aktion Reinhard camps and in the Auschwitz camp complex (something he would later repeat in the German court or courts in the 1960s). Interestingly, the other deniers usually carp on this testimony since Morgen momentarily confused the names Birkenau and Monowitz (something he was asked about later and said he was simply mistaken). Yet the one-cell-megabrain Chris Crookes doesn't even know about this.

Morgen also explained as follows about his investigations in the camps:

MORGEN: The answer is already entailed in the question. The circumstances prevailing in Germany during the war were no longer. normal in the sense of State legal guarantees. Besides, the following must be considered: I was not simply a judge, but I was a judge of military penal justice. No court-martial in the world could bring the Supreme Commander, let alone the head of the State, to court.
HERR PELCKMANN: Please do not discuss problems of law, but tell us why you did not do what you realized you should have done?
MORGEN: I beg your pardon; I was saying that it was not possible for me as Obersturmbannfuehrer to arrest Hitler, who, as I saw it, was the instigator of these orders.
HERR PELCKMANN: Then what did you do?
MORGEN: On the basis of this insight, I realized that something had to be done immediately to put an end to this action. Hitler had to be induced to withdraw his orders. Under the circumstances, this could be done only by Himmler as Minister of the Interior and Minister of the Police. I thought at that time that I must endeavor to approach Himmler through the heads of the departments and make it clear to him, by explaining the effects of this system, that through these methods the State was being led straight into an abyss. Therefore I approached my immediate superior, the chief of the Criminal Police, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Nebe; then I turned to the chief of the Main Office SS Courts, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Breithaupt. I also approached Kaltenbrunner and the chief of the Gestapo, Gruppenfuehrer Muller, and Obergruppenfuehrer Pohl of the Economic and Administrative Main Office, and the Reichsarzt, Gruppenfuehrer Dr. Grawitz. But aside from taking these necessary steps, I saw a practical way open to me by way of justice; that is, by removing from this system of destruction the leaders and important elements through the means offered by the system itself., I could not do this with regard to the killings ordered by the head of the State, but I could do it for killings outside of this order, or against this order, or for other serious crimes. For that reason, I deliberately started proceedings against these men, and this would have led to a shake-up of this system and its final collapse. But these activities had another far-reaching effect in the near future, for through the big concentration camp trials against Commander Koch, of whom I spoke earlier, and against the head of the political section at Auschwitz-Kriminalsekretur Untersturmfuehrer Grabner, whom I charged with murder in 2,000 cases outside of this extermination action-the whole affair of these killings had to be brought to trial. It was to be expected that the perpetrators would refer to higher orders also for these individual crimes. This occurred; thereupon the SS jurisdiction, on the basis of the material which I supplied, approached the highest government chiefs and officially asked, "Did you order these killings? Is the legal fact of murder no longer valid for you? What general orders are there concerning these killings?" Then the supreme State leadership would either have to admit its mistakes and thereby bring the culprits definitely under our jurisdiction also with regard to the mass exterminations, or else an open break would have to result through the abrogation of the entire judicial system. If I may anticipate, on account of the trial in Weimar against Koch and Grabner, this problem became acute as I had foreseen; the proceedings were suspended and the SS jurisdiction put these questions, which I mentioned before, publicly and officially to the Reich Security Main Office. For this very purpose a judge was sent there, who had the task of investigating all sections of the Reich Security Main Office, to see whether such orders were in existence. As I heard, the result was negative.

IOW, Chris Crookes simply lied by claiming that Morgen testified about this instead of testifying about the genocide of the Jews. As we see, he testified in addition to his claims about the Auschwitz camp complex and the Aktion Reinhard camps, and in fact as a part of his testimony about the Jewish genocide.

He then claims about the dead in the concentration camps is that "the cause for that want and disease was not German, but was directly related to our own Allied war crime of intentionally targeting civilian populations and supply routes via aerial bombardment" - without providing a shred of evidence for this claim, so we can assume it's just another lie.

Then we come to this part:

To get back to the currently widespread and accepted mythology that demonizes the Germans unfairly, here was a shocker: I discovered that Auschwitz had a swimming pool for the inmates.
Did you know that? I myself was doubtful at first, but when I investigated to check out if that was accurate I discovered not only that but that the camp also had a cinema. It even had a brothel for the inmates (prostitutes had also been sent to concentration camps). And a canteen with beer and food (ice cream and cake). Plus the workers were originally paid money for their labor (but later in vouchers) to be used in the canteen, stores and brothel.
Looking into it further I discovered that it also had dental facilities, sick barracks, a camp kitchen which had the caloric content of the diet carefully monitored by camp and Red Cross delegates. (This only deteriorated in Auschwitz and other camps towards the end of the war when the entire German transport system collapsed under constant aerial bombardment.)

Obviously, none of the "leisure facilities" are in any way shocking, as explained at length here. But worse, obviously the Red Cross never inspected Auschwitz, so that part is just another outright lie.

Then:

Auschwitz had up to 16 camp orchestras (with instruments available), a camp theatre (where live plays were performed by camp inmate actors), camp sculpture classes (conducted for interested inmates by professional sculptors), camp art classes for inmates, a camp university (with lectures on topics from health, the arts, philosophy, science, economic issues, etc.). Marriages took place (worker inmates fell in love and were allowed to marry their inmate partners there). It had its own Auschwitz maternity ward (over 3,000 live births were registered there, with not a single infant death while Auschwitz was in operation under German rule). The women sections of the camp had female guards. It had a camp post office (with twice weekly pick-ups and deliveries).

Note how the liar doesn't bother citing any sources for his claims (we'll come back to this in a second).

It will suffice to point out (linking to the article I've already presented) that there was a single wedding in the whole history of Auschwitz, which was a huge exception approved by Himmler (and obviously it concerned a non-Jewish couple).

As for the claim about births, considering that according the Auschwitz Museum the current records only establish up to 700 births (including those born in exceptional circumstances, like the "Gypsy camp" - which was later liquidated anyway), the claim of 3000 registered live births is probably a distorted denier meme about 3000 births testified to by Stanislawa Leszczynska, whose story is dealt with at length here and obviously doesn't help the deniers in any way possible, as it describes mass murder of Jewish babies (so much for the clearly pathological individual's "not a single infant death while Auschwitz was in operation under German rule").

Now, Chris Crookes' source is the extremely primitive site "judicial inc". The author of the site outright confessed to putting random unrelated images on the site alongside the ridiculous texts just for propaganda. The site was known for extremely deceptive, unsourced content even by the denier standards (so much so that even some deniers began complaining).

As pointed out here, judicial-inc took the Nazi propaganda videos from Theresienstadt and Westerbork and simply lied about them being from Auschwitz. This, then, is the source of Chris Crookes' claim about "sculpture classes", "16 orchestras" and other nonsense.

So what happened? The low-IQ dudebro Chris Crookes came upon a random Holocaust denial site that made patently ridiculous and false claims without, of course, citing sources for them, and simply plagiarized the claims from that site for his "article" without bothering to perform even a basic fact-check, as an actual skeptic would. What a loser. So much for this sad case.

Speaking of sad cases and low-IQ dudebros, we've been alerted to Mike Peinovich's (aka Enoch's) "critique" of some things we wrote here, particularly in regard to the Franke-Gricksch report which we confirmed to be authentic.

First someone alerted Peinovich to the existence of the Franke-Gricksch report. Some furious googling later Peinovich emerged with a response:

The Franke-Gricksch report literally only exists as an "excerpt" typed up by an American Eric Lipmann.

This went on for a while, with Peinovich satisfiedly linking to the obsolete denier stuff on the Lipman excerpt. Then, exposing his poor Google-Fu, someone pointed Peinovich to our article on the actual wartime carbon-copy of the document (thus showing Mikey's basic incompetence as a researcher).

The core of the confirmation was the typewriter analysis, objective evidence. How does Peinovich deal with it?

The typewriter analysis is a bunch of mumbo jumbo meant to wow you.

Oh wow. (See, I was wowed by that counterargument). You can almost imagine all the rusty mini-gears in Peinovich's head turning trying to deal with the simple typewriter analysis, failing at it and emitting this squeak of desperation.

Will somebody please explain to poor Mikey how arguments actually work?

He adds this master stroke:

There is no signature and no date on the document.

Wowed for the second time in a row! Well, of course an attachment to a larger document (which this report obviously is) doesn't have to have a date (check out some of the attachments to Globocnik's report to Himmler on the Aktion Reinhard), and a carbon-copy of that attachment is not supposed to have a signature. And it's not like we haven't mentioned the nature of the document in our analysis or didn't provide examples of similar (Holocaust-unrelated) documents coming from Franke-Gricksch and not containing a date or a signature.

Clearly, in Peinovich's world repetition of stillborn arguments counts as a win. And he keeps beating that dead horse of his by mentioning the "absurdities" of the FG report - carefully analyzed and explained in our analysis (including the explicit debunking of the deniers' attempts at refutations in the Appendix D).

In another tweet Peinovich recommends a CODOH thread as a counterargument. (Really?)

Everyone should read this thread, the new HC doc is analyzed at the bottom, but the whole thread contains some spicy red pills.

It's not for nothing that Peinovich's informer told him to look at the bottom of the thread. Indeed, most of the thread is spent regurgitating the "arguments" made absolutely obsolete by our discovery of the original wartime carbon copy of the document. It seems like the snow of yesteryear is Mikey's favorite kind of snow.

Anyway, at the bottom of the thread we find this:

What is more likely is that some German speaking individual was given a German typewriter and told to type up this fake report by the Americans, with no name or date or anything. Then, this fake document was handed off to Lipmann who was instructed to sort through a bunch of documents until he could find someone to pin it on. Eventually, Lipmann found the longer report where Franke-Gricksch discussed visiting Poland (including Auschwitz) in May 1943 and figured Franke-Gricksch and the [longer] report was a perfect scapegoat. So he took the "Carbon copy" made after the war for the purpose of incriminating the Germans, got a typewriter, typed the "Part of a report by Franke-Gricksch on a trip to Poland in May 1943" title and proceed to copy the rest of the document, word-for-word (with a few spelling mistakes), and then signed the bottom of the second page, affirming it was a true copy.

Notice anything missing? Like, the actual argument and evidence? Let's dispose of this in a few words: there is no evidence of any forgery or that anyone would have even thought of employing such a hare-brained procedure to make one; the typewriter analysis ties the document to Franke-Gricksch, shows the wartime nature of the document, and is objective evidence; the author knew the relevant details and the Nazi lingo confirmed by numerous disparate documents, so had to possess an impressive knowledge of the issue (and yet still be able to make mistakes that could be expected from a remembering witness but not from a post-war expert); despite having been originally discovered during a hunt for incriminating documents, the report was never used in any of the trials; the typed copy by Lipman was discovered decades after the trials, one original wartime carbon copy was rediscovered decades after the typed copy, another copy may (or may not) still be gathering dust somewhere among the Nuremberg documents. So all this elaborate "hoaxing" was for nothing?

This Rube Goldberg school of forgery thesis is as inane as it is superficial, so of course it can only appeal to inane and superficial minds. This doesn't make it in any way plausible or supported by any evidence, not to mention common sense.

And that's basically all CODOH has on the issue.

In yet another tweet Peinovich links to his comments on the FG report, which however are nothing but yawning emptiness. He lies about the lack of evidence that the carbon copy comes from FG, even though the typewriter analysis and the Lipman attribution combined together firmly establish its origin, which is further amply confirmed by the historical context (including the fact of FG's and von Herff's trip and FG's post-war note about Himmler ordering the trip and explaining the extermination of the Jews). Like all other muppets before him, he proceeds to carp on the inaccuracies in the report, which do not in any way prove its inauthenticity, as we have explained at length in our analysis (some of them actually show that it's unlikely to be a propagandistic forgery: e. g. FG's exaggerated estimate of about 500,000 murdered Jews up to May 1943 was plainly incompatible with the 3-4,000,000 overall death toll estimate extremely popular during the trials as it meant that in the remaining ~17 months of the extermination the disproportional 2,5-3,5 million still had to be murdered).

To cap off this tragic story of a wasted mind we will turn to one last exchange:

[some denier muppet about Pressac's book:] The book is hard to find. It was financed by the Beaten Klarsfeld foundation. Only 1000 copies were sold. 

[Mikey:] Odd how hard to find it is

So odd, indeed. If only someone had scanned it and put it online where it would be available for the whole world to see... Wait a minute!

Kids, Holocaust denial is a very dull exercise for very dull folks. That is all.

Update 02.05.2020:

Peinovich claims to have responded:

So the Holocaust Conrtoversies Blog called me out, saying that my narrative on the fake 'Franke-Gricksch report" is dumb because I didn't take their N tower (see below) seriously enough. I responded on today's show. If they want to see/hear it they will have to pay us.

Uh no, Mikey, it doesn't work like this. So we'll chalk it up as "no response".

Peinovich's lapdog chimes in and its tweet characterizes the intellectual level of this low-IQ bunch perfectly:

I love how they supposedly consulted a totally real but anonymous typewriter expert to confirm it's real. Yeah OK bro, seems legit.

Uhh, except we name the expert.

In another couple of tweets Peinovich responds to the lapdog (notably, without correcting it) thus:

The typewriter shit doesn't matter, even if totally true. The document literally cannot be real because the camp didn't have the railway line described in the document at the time it was supposedly written. It did have it after the war though. Typewriter shit is a misdirection.

Getting into the weeds with typewriter shit is where they want you to be, not looking at the glaring absurdities. Their explanation for the rail anachronism is "Well, maybe he heard about the plans and imagined it." LOL. There is not enough snark in the world to sell that pile.

The typewriter analysis proves that this is an actual wartime document, so obviously it cannot be not real. As for the railway spur, we actually proffered three possible explanations in our article (appendix C), so Mikey lied again, and did not even mention, much less refute, the most probable one. (Also see this post where the issue is treated at even more length.) Clearly we are dealing with a pathologically dishonest, agenda-driven individual here. But we knew that already.

Update 28.05.2020 :
[brushed up a couple of sentences without changing the meaning on 30.05.2020]

Mikey attempted to respond here ("HOLOCAUST FACT CHECK: THE FRANKE-GRICKSCH N-TOWER") and oh boy, did he fail again.

At about 5:30 he misrepresents our typewriter argument as the typewriter being of the same model (at about 5:58 he repeats: "because how common was this type of typewriter").

Um, sorry, did he even read our article?

As can be readily seen, the letters "i", "m", "n" and "u" appear defective in the Franke-Gricksch report and the letter to Krüger. While truncated letters can be occasionally found in other documents as well, it is the exact combination and characteristics of the defective letters, which point to the same typewriter."
[...]
To be on the safe side, we had photographs of the documents examined by a qualified expert on typescripts. According to this expert opinion, both the report on Auschwitz (document "A") and the Krüger letter (document "B") were written with the font AR 1 from the company Ransmayer & Rodrian with a layout in use since 1930. The analysis concludes the following:

"The matching system features and type features justify the conclusion that the documents  "A" and "B" were with a great probability [mit großer Wahrscheinlichkeit] written with one and the same typewriter. A higher probability statement was not possible because the examined documents were not available as originals."

(expert opinion of 3 April 2019 by Bernhard Haas, Sachverständiger für Maschinenschriften, provided to the author)

That's right, we did not merely establish that it's the same model (that wouldn't prove much), we established "with high probability" that it's the very same typewriter on which both documents were typed - due to the same defective characters on this machine (this is one of the usual methods the forensic document experts use). How difficult was this point to get?

So yes, Mike, you are dumb. We don't mean it as an insult, it's just a fact of life. There's just no getting around it.

Mikey goes on to claim that there is no evidence of a Hitler "order" (even though there's evidence both of Hitler's decision-in-principle and of the systematic nature of the Nazi extermination of Jews), then he lies about the lack of documents about gas chambers having been built (thus ignoring these Auschwitz documents, for one).

He then makes a non-argument about the document being so open about murder (according to the historical context explained in our article it was written in the framework of Himmler's task, thus first and foremost for Himmler (even if formally through von Herff), so no need for "secret code", as opposed to the case of, for example, more regular, sometimes daily reports with mass execution stats for various Nazi agencies - or other similar lower-level documents more readily liable to fall into the enemy hands). The Soviet documents about executions also sometimes speak in code (like "special tasks" in the awards order for the Katyn executioners) and sometimes speak openly of executions (like the Katyn shooting order), does that mean those documents are fake? No, different contexts - different formulations.

Mikey then says that we must have found the original "forgery" and then simply repeats that this doesn't mean FG typed it, bla bla bla - of course, for that he has to ignore the typewriter analysis, which established that it's a document that comes from a typewriter from Franke-Gricksch's office, which blows Mikey's conspiracy theory right out of water.

Poor Mike then goes on and on about how some carbon copies can be signed - whereas the point was that a carbon copy doesn't have to be signed (that some carbon copies are signed doesn't help the deniers a bit). Moreover, he ignores other examples of the Franke-Gricksch documents - both carbon copies and an original report from him, from his file - without a signature (see figs. 5 and 7). He goes on and on about how it's just a piece of paper with typed text (well, obviously we have shown otherwise), without a signature - yet he accepts the British translation of some excerpts from the longer report as authentic despite it being ... just a piece of paper with typed text, without a signature or anything. Isn't that just marvellous?

He ties himself into knots about what part of the report this document was supposed to be, pointing to the page numbering. Obviously an attachment to the main report, hence the separate numbering. This is no different from Globocnik's numerous attachments to his 05.01.1944 letter to Himmler (some of which are really attachments to attachments), all with separate numeration.

Mikey complains about the alleged number of mistakes, comparing the small report to the large report. Well, first of all, we only have excerpts of the large report and Mikey has not yet gone through these excerpts with a fine-tooth comb and checked every little claim, so right from the start he has no argument here; more importantly, the known parts of the large report also don't go into the kind of technical detail where we would expect a casual witness repeating some of what he has seen and has been told (without documents on hand) to make most mistakes.

FG's inaccuracies are a mix of the claims he had been told by the boasting SS (like 10,000 incinerations in 24 hours or death in 1 minute) and likely his own mix of faulty memory and perception (like misremembering 10 steps as 5-6 - as if the precise number matters anyway - or talking about 3 columns instead of 4). All of them are natural, some of them are plain incompatible with the document being an Allied propaganda fake (the mention of only 500k Jews murdered up to May 1943 - given the numbers of Auschwitz victims thrown around during the Nuremberg trials; a faker at that time would have added quite a few hundred thousands to that number). Most of the specific details - like the terminology and the general process and principles - FG gets correct - as we showed.

Some of the mistakes, as we also showed, were made even by the people who knew the premises inside out, like the number of ovens inaccuracy:

The mistake would be nothing unusual. Two people, who had seen the furnace room far more often than AFG, Otto Moll and Rudolf Höß, both gave wrong figures of the number of ovens in their interrogations. Höß even "corrected" Moll's twelve ovens with his mistaken figure ("Moll is slightly wrong in regard to the figures he quoted on the furnaces. The two large units were made up of five double furnaces each and the others of four double furnaces each."). If these two guys could be mistaken about the exact number and composition of furnaces of the crematoria, no doubt then that the one-time, short-term visitor AFG could be as well.

Why does Mikey ignore this? Oh, because it's inconvenient.

Low IQ, personified.

He dismisses the most probable explanation of FG's special tracks description (the old ramp) by falsely claiming the old ramp was in Auschwitz 1 ("which is a couple of miles away from Birkenau", he emphasizes). That's right, he did not even bother to look at a map. Neither did the aerial photo that we helpfully included with our explanation help our dumb, confused denier.

In fact, the sidetrack was specifically on the side of Birkenau, about 600 m from the main gate, with a direct road leading to the main gate; whereas it was on the other side of the railway relative to Auschwitz I, was about 1 km away from it and without a direct road to it.

So, the sidetrack was between Auschwitz I and II and was in the "interest area" of the Auschwitz camp complex - so it was a sort of a special "district" of the Auschwitz camp complex - specially designated for unloading the Jews headed for Birkenau. FG's description is an outsider description, thus not perfect, but that's the most parsimonious explanation of it.

There is nothing at all suggesting that the report refers to the later railway spur leading inside Birkenau, so Mikey's incessant repeating that the report describes an anachronistic structure is just BS. For more on this, as mentioned in the previous update, see here.

Mikey is being outright dishonest about Irving's remark about the FG document not implicating Hitler personally - obviously Irving did not mean that the document was no danger to Hitler's image because it was obviously fake or anything like that, rather he wrote: "As Hitler was not personally implicated in the Franke-Griksch document, I paid little attention to it for my Hitler biography". The meaning is clear - authentic or not, according to Irving, Hitler is not implicated personally in the document itself, so Irving did not pay attention to it (this would include investigating its authenticity). Nothing about it being fake and therefore not dangerous. Since Hitler very much is implicated in the document itself, we pointed out this contradiction. Peinovich cannot be trusted even on the smallest things.

Mikey then misunderstands our argument on the match between Höß and FG on the jewels in hollow teeth. While we already know that the report is authentic (from the typewriter analysis combined with the historical context), there are certainly questions about it, like what parts FG learned from whom. This match is strong evidence that Höß, who mentioned it in his uncoerced memoir (and we know his "Polish" essays and the memoir were not coerced because in them he not only tells about his initial torture by the British, but also denounces his former 2,5 m estimate as too high, the Auschwitz survivors' estimates as figments of their imagination, and brings the total down to about 1 million - contrary to the wishes of his Polish jailors with their dogmatic Soviet 4 million estimate), most probably gave this information to FG and thus most probably was his tour guide. This is not the matter of authenicity - that wasn't our argument in this instance, as we established the authenticity by other means - but of sourcing, in this case Höß being FG's source during the visit.

Poor Mike screams and raves a lot during the video, apparently all his failed attempts at thinking are overheating his interaural ganglion, making him uncomfortable. Understandable. Anyway, we have shown the Franke-Gricksch report to be authentic, that's all there is to it.