Holocaust Denial and Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part III)

Now that Carlo Mattogno is out of the game (see Part I & Part II), let's hear the rest of the denier's band on Himmler's report to Hitler.

137 Crushed Lies, or Why Denial Is Beyond Repair

The average online denier is not a sophisticated creature. He is usually satisfied with a few memes he has found on Twitter or at some forum and repeats them ad infinitum, never bothering to fact-check them, thus regurgitating the deceptive tidbits that have been debunked over and over and over again. One such moldy debunked meme is the myth about the crushed testicles of 137 German defendants in the Dachau trials.

From David Irving's site:

All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was Standard Operating Procedure with American investigators.

The source is given as "The Progressive, February 1949, p. 21f", the author is alleged to be Edward L. Van Roden:

a Pennsylvania judge served in World War I and II, in the latter as Chief of the Military Justice Division for the European Theater where he saw service in Normandy, Belgium, the Rhineland, the Battle of the Bulge, and in the Ardennes. In 1946 he was reassigned to active duty and served on several important court martial trials in Germany. In 1948 Secretary of the Army Royall appointed him to an extraordinary commission charged with investigating the Dachau War Crimes program.

So of course this is repeated ad nauseam on Twitter and at trashy forums like CODOH, where this is a favorite of its know-nothing Aufseher Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis.

Holocaust deniers, Gerhard Maurer and Jews unfit for work in Auschwitz

In his "classic" denial pamphlet "Auschwitz: Myth and Facts" the IHR official and later director Mark Weber published the following claim:

In fact, a very high percentage of the Jewish inmates were not able to work, and were nevertheless not killed. For example, an internal German telex message dated Sept. 4, 1943, from the chief of the Labor Allocation department of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), reported that of 25,000 Jews held in Auschwitz, only 3,581 were able to work, and that all of the remaining Jewish inmates — some 21,500, or about 86 percent — were unable to work.[11]

11. Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw, German document No. 128. Cited in: H. Eschwege, ed., Kennzeichen J (Berlin [East]: 1966), p. 264. 

What "Revisionism" is all about – A Chat with Fredrick Töben (Part 2)

As announced in Part 1 of this article, I shall now comment on Artur Butz’s "brief 12-point summary" attached to Mr. Töben’s "brief response".

What "Revisionism" is all about – A Chat with Fredrick Töben (Part 1)

Some days ago the discussion with Michael Santomauro and "Thomas Dalton, Ph.D." on this blog spot caught the attention of one of the "Revisionist" movement's dinosaurs, Dr. Fredrick Töben.

Fritz Berg disses other denier gurus

This deserves to be copied here.

http://revforum.yourforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5864

The SANITY Test!
by Friedrich Paul Berg » Tue Jan 05, 2010 12:24 pm

The test: Do you agree with me that railroad delousing gas chambers could have been e-a-s-i-l-y used to commit mass murder by the Nazis?

Many prominent "revisionists" such as Butz, Faurisson and Toben have flunked the test.

The Convergence of Negation

As we enter a new calendar year, let us take stock of where we are in the history of denial. The movement itself has been running out of gas for some time. Anyone who visits the Cesspit can do some simple maths to see how its traffic has declined year-on-year, due partially to its openly antisemitic premises and self-contradictory censorship practices (no-one but a cretin is going to stay with a 'free speech' forum that crudely censors all deviation from a totally negationist editorial line). The IHR is non-functioning. Most damagingly of all, the Internet has exposed the techniques of denial, and the movement cannot do anything other than wilt and wither when exposed to the heat of reason.

Read more!

The methodology of denial has not changed since the days of Rassinier, whose approach is summarized here by Elizabeth Strakosch:

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

As we have noted before on this site, deniers use the cloak of 'doubt' to create negations: doubt is used, not to revise knowledge, but to nullify it. Strakosch thus shares our insight that the main debating strategy of denial is the argument from ignorance. This can be defined as the claim that:

'a proposition is true simply on the basis that it has not been proved false, or that it is false because it has not been proved true' (Copi and Cohen, Introduction to Logic, 9th ed., 1994, p.116)

Strakosch cites a passage where Butz uses this fallacy:

If it [the Holocaust] did take place, it should be possible to produce a book showing how it started and why, by whom it was organised and the
lines of authority in the killing, what the technical means were and that
those technical means did not have some sort of more mundane interpretation (eg crematoria), who were the technicians involved, the numbers of victims from the various lands and the timetables of their executions…no historians have undertaken anything resembling such a project (Butz 1975: 8).

This is what I mean by my title for this blog, 'The Convergence of Negation'. It is the logical next step implied by Strakosch's phrase, 'the convergence of doubt'. A supposed faulty brick is treated by deniers as proof that the wall itself is a hoax. The supposed inability of any single historian to fill in every gap in a narrative that has millions of components is seen as proof of a deception, without any attempt being made to construct a plausible narrative of how the hoax occurred, or to offer an alternative account of the fate of the Jews that coheres with the evidence. A single historian - or, even more absurdly, the writer of a single post on an Internet forum - is assumed to be 'debunked' if he or she has not summarized in a few pages or paragraphs the thousands of pieces of evidence, often only existing in foreign languages, which prove that every single event included in the term 'Holocaust' occurred.

Beneath this negationist methodology, there is a paranoid epistemology. Instead of 'revising' the narrative that they find so objectionable, with new evidence and interpretations, deniers demand that legitimate historians prove that there was no hoax. How exactly does one falsify paranoia? We can show that lesser conspiracies than a 'Holohoax' have always been exposed in the past; that it would be impossible to silence thousands of witnesses to a Jewish resettlement in the East; that a vast number of false confessions by SS officials cannot go unexposed indefinitely without someone retracting or resiling; that no bureaucracy has yet been devised that could construct a body of thousands of pieces of evidence that converge across continents and decades; that no resettled population entirely disappears in modern times without leaving a trace of how it disappeared.

We can show all these things but no paranoid epistemology will ever 'see' them. Paranoia, by its nature, is defined by the exaggerated powers that the paranoiac gives to the forces of darkness. It is a form of chimeria. We can see this in the current Cesspit obsession with the OSS, which apparently gave inordinate powers to Marxist sociologists and Irish-American film directors, no less!

The Cesspit's failure to recognize that it carries any burden of proof to substantiate any of this paranoid shit-slinging with evidence is itself an hilarious spectacle, and gives us a reason to smile as we enter another year fighting against lunacy and lies.

Butz and Hargis Expose Themselves to Ridicule

Even by 'revisionist' standards, the latest claim made by Butz, and defended by his dullard lapdog Hargis, beggars belief. In this astonishingly ill-educated essay, Butz claims that, when Himmler wrote his famous "keine liquidierung" note, "Himmler was either reporting to Heydrich that the transport had not been canceled, or in some sense discussed the fact with him." In the crazy world of Butz, 'liquidated' therefore meant 'canceled' when used by the head of the SS.

Read more!

You would think that Hargis would steer clear of this idiocy, but instead he has placed both feet firmly in his mouth. He has devoted this CODOH thread to the issue and then ignored or deleted the multiple objections thrown up by his brethren, especially Wahrheit's excellent points about chronology (Himmler's note was written after the transport had already arrived in Riga) and Himmler's reprimand of Jeckeln. Fortunately, this thread at RODOH has captured the discussion as it has developed, and preserved Warheit's deleted rebuttal.

Let us firstly summarize the linguistic issues. Hargis uses the 'Scheiffler-Weiss German and English Dictionary', 1981, to claim that liquidierung means "to wind up pending affairs." However, it is clear from on-line dictionaries that this function of the word only applies to the liquidation of a company by a financial liquidator. Googling the quoted text "wind up existing affairs" brings up only the CODOH thread and this Korean guide to the role of a liquidator. Butz and Hargis must therefore know that they are abusing a financial linguistic application by imposing it on Himmler's far more obvious meaning. This is recognized on the CODOH thread by 'Vlad', who posted on date and time stamp "Sat Nov 01, 2008 9:29 pm" that:

Butz's German seems to be very limited indeed, otherwise he wouldn't have come up with such a far-fetched "theory". One doesn't liquidate trains or transports, neither in English nor in German.

However, whereas Vlad seems prepared to put this down to poor German, Butz has no such excuse, because he says he discussed his essay with German-born Germar Rudolf before the latter was deported. We can imagine how Germar must have raised his eyebrows in disbelief before encouraging Butz to blunder on with his project anyway. Such is Rudolf's dishonesty and Butz's willingness to deny linguistic evidence.

The real meaning of 'liquidierung' in SS usage is made clear in Longerich's 'Glossary' prepared for the Lipstadt trial:

1.5 For example, in January 1942 the head of the Gestapo, Müller, issued an ordinance according to which terms such as "liquidation" (Liquidation) and "liquidate" (liquidieren) were words "used by the Soviet rulers". In German reports, essays, etc. such terms should only be used in this connection.

As jnovitz acknowledges on the CODOH thread, Goebbels imported this Soviet usage into his Total War speech, when he said:

The German people, in any event, is unwilling to bow to this danger. Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy

Similarly, Vlad points out that:

Cornelia Schmitz-Berning in her Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (p. 390) quotes a press directive, issued in November 1941, in which the replacement of standrechtliche Erschießung [shooting under martial law] by liquidieren was censored as "highly inappropriate".

Butz and Hargis really should have thought this through before subjecting themselves and their movement to this public embarrassment.

Missing Hungarian Jews - a "revisionist" dilemma

Deportation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz is firmly documented. "Revisionists" deny that most of these Jews have been killed, but, interestingly, they differ between themselves on whether these Jews were even deported to Auschwitz. Arthur Butz is a known denier of the deportation of 400,000+ Hungarian Jews. Carlo Mattogno and Juergen Graf, on the other hand, are convinced by the documentary evidence that these Jews were deported from Hungary.

Both positions have a reasonable side to them. Mattogno and Graf are not ready to dismiss numerous documents, and thus accept the deportation but not the killing. But Butz's position is eminently reasonable in a "revisionist" framework:

Graf accepts the 438,000 figure, but denies the killing. I also deny the killing of those who were deported, but I also deny the 438,000 figure or, more precisely, the idea that the May-July deportations virtually emptied Hungary of Jews, except for the Budapest area. I accept however that many Jews were deported in May-July 1944, mainly for labor. I cannot give a figure, but I believe it would have been only a fraction of 438,000. Graf cannot tell us what happened to most of the 438,000 Jews. Indeed the question that is the title of his paper remains begged.

Indeed, selection for labor purposes explains the destiny of only about 100,000+ Hungarian Jews (more or less). What happened to the rest?

One cannot envy a "revisionist" - either she accepts the documents, but then cannot explain what happened to the Jews, and thus looks like a loony. Or she dismisses the documents and thus looks like a moonbat. Tough choice!