Unz, Roberts, and Irving

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration Treasury official, was dancing tantalizingly close to flat-out Holocaust denial. He's back again, now defending the choice of libertarian activist and one-time California gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz to publish David Irving's Hitler's War on his website, Unz.com, which publishes a variety of libertarian materials, as well as "race realism," anti-Zionist polemics, and other generally far-right materials.

For his own part, Unz is a bit of a cipher. For instance, he is Jewish himself, although we have seen in the cases of Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen, and others that being Jewish isn't always a guarantee against anti-Semitism. For a while now, Unz has drawn suspicion for his willingness to publish blatantly anti-Semitic material, although he has generally been able to defend his editorial judgment on the basis of his libertarian leanings. This orientation has generally led to the comments threads at Unz.com being something of a free for all, as I'd noted in the past. Sergey Romanov has also commented here on Unz's activites in this regard.

Book chapter "Holocaust denial in the age of web 2.0" by Nicholas Terry Available Online

The multi-author book Holocaust and Genocide Denial: A Contextual Perspective edited by Paul Behrens, Olaf Jensen and Nicholas Terry (2017) is a more recent publication on the development, incidence and encountering of Genocide Denial in general and Holocaust Denial specifically. The chapter Holocaust denial in the age of web 2.0 by Holocaust Controversies' Nick Terry is online available at google books. Its conclusion points out these seven reasons which "can be adduced for the decline of Holocaust denial":

1 Consistent social disapproval
2 Its political ineffectiveness
3 The ease of finding other ways of expressing anti-Semitism or delegitimising Israel
4 Loss of 'market share' to other conspiracy theories
5 Inability to cope with the volume of recent Holocaust research
6 Lack of novelty
7 The ageing of the 'movement'

(Behrens et al., Holocaust and Genocide Denial: A Contextual Perspective, p. 53)

Podcast Interview on Holocaust Denial

I gave an interview a couple of months ago to Matthew Buckley of Adelaide, Australia, who runs a podcast called Social Justice Warriors. We talked about the phenomenon of denial in general, techniques of denial, whether deniers are liars or just lousy historians, and the current status of Holocaust denial as a movement.'

For readers interested in the "inside baseball" of HC, there's a bit of our backstory at the beginning of the interview. Apologies to Nick for never remembering where he went to school and to Sir Ian Kershaw for failing to remember his name.

Sebastian Gorka: Anti-Terrorism Advisor to Donald Trump and Family Friend of David Irving?

If you've paid more than passing attention to first month of the Trump administration, you've likely noticed the National Security aspect of the incipient cabinet more than anything else, not only because of the appointment of Breitbart News troll Steve Bannon to the NSC but also because of the ascent within this milieu of Dr. Sebastian Gorka, who was named Deputy Assistant to the President due to his alleged foreign policy and anti-terrorism credentials. 

While discussing the questionable qualifications of Dr. Gorka might be beyond the purview of this blog, the relationship of his family with Holocaust denier David Irving is not. A few days ago, the Forward reported that Gorka had pursued ties with the far-right Jobbik party in Hungary – itself no stranger to Holocaust denial. On February 27, the Twitter account of the Southern Poverty Law Center's HateWatch project (itself the alma mater of yours truly) linked to a blog post on the LobeLog foreign policy blog. In this post, author Eva S. Balogh writes: 

Another intriguing aspect of the Gorka family’s life in Great Britain is their relationship to David Irving, a revisionist historian who tried to clean away the “years of grime and discoloration from the façade of a silent and forbidding monument” to reveal the real Hitler […] Eventually, he decided to write a book on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which he published in 1981 under the title Uprising! One Nation’s Nightmare, 1956. The massive 740-page book is available online. Irving’s conclusion is that the revolt was “primarily an anti-Jewish uprising,” a gross misrepresentation of the facts. He interviewed a lot of people both in Hungary and abroad who had a role to play in the events. Although Pál Gorka [Sebastian's father], who had been freed from jail a few days after the outbreak of the uprising, certainly wasn’t a key player, he got at least a couple of footnotes. More interesting was the introduction where Irving thanked his three interpreters, one of whom was Susan Gorka, Pál’s wife and Sebastian’s mother. Considering that Irving, according to his own admission, spent about six years off and on doing research on this book and knew not a word of Hungarian, Susan Gorka must have worked with the author fairly closely. [emphasis added] 

A point of clarification: Sebastian Gorka was born and raised in the U.K., so presumably the Gorka family's association with Irving began there. While Irving was not yet a denier in 1981, when Uprising was published, he had already published Hitler's War, which was his opening foray of the phase of his career dedicated to exculpating Hitler for the Holocaust. 

It would be premature to conclude that Sebastian Gorka or his parents are Holocaust deniers because of their associations with David Irving. However, it would be far less premature to conclude that, as has been repeatedly alleged in the left-wing media over the course of the last several weeks, the Gorka family has demonstrable links to the far right, Irving included. Only a year after publishing Uprising, Irving founded Focal Point and declared himself a "mild fascist." 

Traffic and Publicity of the Holocaust Controversies Blog

Recently, the Holocaust Controversies (HC) blog has surpassed two million page views since June 2010 (the blog was actually founded in 2006, but the counter was reset at that time for unknown reasons). Since readers tend to recur and check out more than one page, this is not to be confused with "unique visitors" and even less so with unique persons. Still, two million page views in 6.5 years seems like some decent traffic considering that the blog is about an atrocious part of human history and its denial by a fringe group - not exactly a subject predestined  to attract the masses.

Observer article on Holocaust Denial

Today's recommended reading: the British newspaper The Observer has published an article on Holocaust Denial featuring an interview with Nick Terry: New online generation takes up Holocaust denial

Rudolf on Holocaust Handbooks

Germar Rudolf has kindly responded to a CODOH Forum user on my posting "Holocaust Handbooks" Updating Policy - Cosmetic Changes and Recycling Instead of Engaging With Critique and provided this pointed summary of the "Revisionist" problem these days:

"Carlo Mattogno cannot revise 30 books every year and write thirty more on top of it."

The Holocaust Handbooks series is essentially a three man show of Mattogno, Graf and Rudolf, who are the main authors of 3/4 of the books, and it is especially dependent upon Mattogno:

The fact that he is the main author of 2/3 of the Holocaust Handbooks even underestimates his impact as his writings have occupied the most relevant issues of "Revisionism". Mattogno had been hyperactive for years, publishing at a pace where the level of research has to leave a lot to be desired, as amply demonstrated on this blog. At his age of 65 years, this source will likely run dry in some years.

The lack of authors and diversity is symptomatic for the poor state of Holocaust "Revisionism". This is not limited to printed media, the Inconvinient History Blog has seen just three postings this year - one remembering the dead Bradley Smith, one reviewing the journals' year 2015 and one announcing the publication of the journals' articles from 2015 - thus none adding anything new to advance "Revisionism". Anyone following the blog would think the movement is close to clinically dead.

We have not heard from Santiago Alvarez since February 2016, Thomas Kues left the scene, Jansson's blog is idle since almost 18 months and the theblackrabbitofinl has become sceptical of denial. The recycling of Mattogno's decades old Italian pamphlets on Miklos Nyiszli and Rudolf Höß (Holocaust Handbooks 36 & 37) and his forthcoming Einsatzgruppen book, which will ask for the stunning mental gymnastics to explain the extermination of the Jews in the occupied Soviet Union within the hypothesis that there was no policy to exterminate the Jews, will keep the patient in a vegetative state for the time being, but that's not exactly a promising perspective for 2017 and further.

"I'd appreciate it if everybody reading this start publishing yourself -- in print -- serious research rather than bickering about somebody having forgotten over overlooked something. Some nagging on an internet blog isn't exactly what can be taken all that seriously anyway."

Obviously, Rudolf did not check out and examine the links to the rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz Open Air Incinerations if he reduces this comprehensive critique to "nagging". In general, the Holocaust Controversies blog addresses specific, fundamental, systematic and methodological flaws in "Revisionist" works. The publication on the medium internet blog does not affect the validity of the arguments. Conversely, not much substantial is gained from compiling related postings (such as the series on Mattogno on Auschwitz and Alvarez on Gas Vans) to print-on-demand books on amazon.com. Publishing a book has become meaningless at latest since Fritz Berg has done it (see also Rudolf's own review of the book), but the Holocaust Handbook series is another example that publishing something in print does not establish quality of content (only quality of form, if there is a proper editor).

Incidentally, the lack of "serious research" is actually the reason why "Revisionists" are ignored by Holocaust historians. The difference is that Holocaust historiography can afford to freeze them off.

"Holocaust Handbooks" Updating Policy - Cosmetic Changes and Recycling Instead of Engaging With Critique

The denier site holocausthandbooks.com has repeatedly released "corrected" and "expanded" editions of their "Holocaust Handbooks Series", most recently Carlo Mattogno's book Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations. Upon scrolling through the pdf, the most important "correction" seems to be the replacement of "official" by "orthodox" and "cremation" by "incineration". Aside this, three articles have been attached at the end. One might think that these additions constitute new researched material, but they are merely rehashed articles previously published in 2003 (1998 in German), 2003 and 2015 (2004 in German). 

As usual, the new edition of the book entirely refrains from engaging with its critique, most notable my blog posts The Photograph of the Crematorium Site Undressing Scene in Auschwitz-Birkenau (re: section 7.2), The Auschwitz Open Air Incineration Photographs as Evidence for Mass Extermination (re: section 10,11) and Auschwitz Labour Force Reports as Evidence of Sinister Activity at the Crematoria (re: section 12). It is, by the way, also noteworthy that the latter seems to have contributed at least something to the evolution of the former denier going after the name theblackrabbitofinlé to acknowledge Nazi mass extermination. This loss is particular bad for Holocaust denial as he was one of the few - if not the only one - still active in actual archival research.

__________________________
Update of 26/12/2016: Follow-up posting Rudolf on Holocaust Handbooks

Results of our Poll on Holocaust Controversies Coverage

Here are the results of our Holocaust Controversies poll on what the present readership would like to have featured more on the blog. Posted here without further comment (but open for discussion). Thanks to all who took part (49 participants, multiple votes were possible).

Holocaust Denier Carlos Porter Wants the Mass Extermination of Refugees

The Holocaust Denier Carlos Porter has demanded to "machine-gun" the refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa entering Europe and "if that doesn’t work, how about napalm or poison gas". 

Tattoo Denial

When the usual methodological and historical ignorance characteristic of Holocaust denial gets further reduced to virtual complete historical ignorance and meets some more spitefulness, you get Tattoo Denial. It denies or - in its slightly less silly variant - doubts that Jewish and Soviet prisoners were crudely tattooed their prisoner number in Auschwitz. It's main advocate used to be Carlos Porter, a number of sceptic species can observed right now in the CODOH thread Doubts about Tattoos by the book author Nick Kollerstrom (by the way, the CODOH moderator Hannover delivers a particular thrilling performance in this thread when he reveals that his attention span is less than it takes to read and grasp a single book page). The failure of most Holocaust deniers in this thread to spot some historical truth related to the Holocaust even when its right infront of them says volumes about how defective and irrational the methods, arguments and concepts of this movement are also in general and how common sense is lacking or completely masked by ideological beliefs.

I attach seven German sources on the tattooing of Jewish and Soviet prisoners by the Germans to this posting:

• three testimonies of former Auschwitz SS men (Pery Broad, Wihelm Boger, Hans Stark) of the Political Department, whose admission office was responsible for the tattooing of prisoners 
• four contemporary German document: two orders by the German Armed Force High Command to mark Soviets POWs and two reports on the escape of Auschwitz prisoners with tattooed prisoner numbers

Biological eradication (biologische Ausmerzung)

On page 118 of the Critique, I cited Rosenberg's briefing of November 18, 1941, taken from Christopher Browning's submission to the Irving-Lipstadt trial. Rosenberg spoke of the necessity of "a biological eradication of the entire Jewry of Europe" (eine biologischen Ausmerzung des gesamten Judentums in Europe) by measures that would "expel them over the Urals or eradicate them in some other way." Mattogno replied to this by stating that the "purely figurative meaning of “Ausmerzung des Judentums” (extirpation of Jewry)...designated the eradication of Jewry from the soil of the Reich and from the European soil." However, this can be refuted by two points.

"I am Charlie, you are Horst"

The German journalist Malte Herwig suggests to reconsider Anti-Holocaust denial laws in the light of the recent discussions on free speech after the fatal attack on the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015. Quoting Voltaire's famous (actually put into his mouth by a biographer) "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", he makes the point that this should also hold for one of the "most contemptible opinions" like Holocaust denial and the likes of Horst Mahler.

VHO stands for ...

… "Video Heat Online", a porn site (don’t open it if porn disgusts you).

It also stands for "Vrij Historisch Onderzoek" (which must mean something like "Free Historical Research"), "The World's largest website for Historical Revisionism!".

It's an appropriate coincidence that one finds both sites on the same page when googling for "VHO". After all, "Revisionism" is to historiography what pornography is to eroticism - and that may even be a favorable comparison.

A Petition to the German Legislator

Dear readers,

The text in italics at the end of this article is a petition to the legislator of the German Federal Republic, urging that legislator to revoke all provisions of German criminal law whereby the praising, playing down or denying of violent crimes committed by the National Socialist regime between 1933 and 1945 is a criminal offense.

It is placed here for the purpose of collecting as many signatures as possible, in order to then submit it to competent bodies in the German Federal Republic.

This article has been dated so as to stay at the top of the HC blog for a period of one month starting today, 13.01.2008.

If you wish to sign the petition, please do so by posting a message after this article containing only your name and the place and country where you live (e.g.: «Roberto Muehlenkamp, Lisbon, Portugal»). If you don’t wish to reveal the city or town where you live, just write your name and country (e.g. «Roberto Muehlenkamp, Portugal»). If you don't want to reveal in what country you live, your message may contain your name alone. Signatures made under obvious pseudonyms are meaningless and will therefore be deleted.

Please do not post any comments or questions about the petition text after this article, because this article is meant to contain an uninterrupted list of signatures following the petition text. Comments or questions posted after this article will therefore be deleted. Any comments or questions you may have can be posted on a thread that has been opened for this purpose on the RODOH discussion forum.

This is the petition:

Dear Legislator of the German Federal Republic,

We hereby request you to revoke the provisions of the German criminal law whereby the praising, playing down or denying of violent crimes committed by the National Socialist regime constitutes a punishable criminal offense, as well as any other provisions whereby the dissemination of untruths in support of an extremist political line may be subject to criminal punishment.

We are of the opinion that such utterances should not be subject to criminal prosecution, for reasons expressed as follows in an article written in a German legal journal in 1994:

"Allgemein bekannte geschichtliche Tatsachen zu leugnen kann keine Strafe verdienen. Wer etwa behauptet, Deutschland habe am 1. Weltkrieg nicht teilgenommen, oder Adenauer habe 333 bei Issus mitgewirkt, ist durch seine Dummheit genug bestraft. Gleiches muβ für die Leugnung der Scheuβlichkeiten und Verbrechen der jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit gelten."

Source of quote:
Brigitte Bailer-Galanda/Wolfgang Benz/Wolfgang Neugebauer (Hrg.), Die Auschwitzleugner, 1996 Elefanten Press, Berlin, page 261. Work cited: NStZ 1994, S. 392 (Baumann).

Translation:

"Denial of generally known historical facts should not be punishable. For those who maintain, for instance, that Germany did not take part in World War I or that Adenauer fought at Issus in 333, their own stupidity is punishment enough. The same should apply to the denial of the horrors and crimes of the recent German past."

We are also of the opinion that, however disgusting and offensive to certain people the utterance of such propagandistic untruths may be, the democratic constitutional state should rely on prevailing over them on the free marketplace of ideas. The means to keep the discontented in our society from being taken in by extremist hate speech should be education and information, not criminal prosecution.

Sincerely Yours,

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 6)

In the previous five parts of this series, we exposed Sanning's fraudulent use of sources. This sixth part examines the convergence of evidence from Soviet and Polish archives that allows us to state, beyond reasonable doubt, that the number of Polish Jews deported to the Soviet interior in 1940-41 was less than 100,000.

Read more!

The first source of archival data is Aleksander Gurjanov, who obtained access to Soviet deportation records at GARF and published his findings in Cztery deportacje 1940–1941 (Four deportations 1940-1941), KARTA, 12, 1994, pp. 114–136; available on-line here. Gurjanov concluded that approximately 315,000 people were deported, in four sets of deportations, on transports which we have listed in English here. Gurjanov's data allow us to estimate the maximum number of deportees who were refugees from western Poland. The deportation that targeted Jewish refugees took place in June-July 1940; the transports in that action totaled 75,267 deportees, not all of whom were Jews.

Gurjanov’s data refute Sanning, not just for the overall total of deportees, but also for individual cities. Sanning (p.41-42) claims that 50,000 Jewish refugees were deported from Lvov, and 50,000-60,000 from Bialystok, but Gurjanov’s data show only 26,798 deportees in total from Lvov and 9,551 in total from Bialystok.

Gurjanov’s data closely converge with the second source: NKVD archive data concerning camps in the USSR. Sergey Romanov found an excellent discussion of such archives in Mordechai Altshuler's Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust (1998: p. 325-326). This cited an NKVD report, dated 1 April 1941, which showed that the number of deported western Polish refugees (bezhentsy) being held in camps under NKVD control on that date was 76,068, of which 64,533 were Jews. Altschuler concludes that these data, when adjusted for births and deaths, correspond to the June-July 1940 transports.

Other declassified, previously ‘top secret’, Soviet documents also corroborate the number of deportees. This source states that, on 13 January, 1943, 215,081 former Polish citizens remained in the Soviet interior, among them 102,153 Jews (Source: Katyn. Mart 1940 - sentyabr' 2000. Rasstrel. Sud'by zhivykh. Ekho Katyn, compiled by N.S.Lebedeva, Moscow, "Ves' mir", 2001, document 184). Moreover, the same document states that 389,041 former Polish citizens had been freed in the amnesty of August 1941, of which 90,662 were Jews. It also reveals that, in 1939-1941, 218,606 former Polish citizens from Western Ukraine and Belorussia volunteered for work in the Soviet interior, of which 8,830 were Jews. A note from the NKGB head, V. Merkulov, dated May 1st, 1944, tells us that 257,660 of the amnestied 389,041 former Polish citizens were passportised in the USSR in January 1943 (221,150 civilians, 36,510 Berling army) and that among these former Polish citizens, the number of registered Jews plus their children amounted to 81,217 (source: GARF 9401-2-64, pp. 381-384; image and transcription here, translated by Nick Terry here).

In our view, it is reasonable to infer that the 81,217 amnestied Polish Jews alive in the Soviet interior in January 1943 in the 1944 document, after adjustment for births and deaths, was a subset of the 90,662 amnestied Jews alive in August 1941 in the 1943 Beria-Stalin document. The 81,217 figure was also a subset of the total number of 102,153 Polish Jews alive in January 1943 that were counted by Beria (both figures refer to the same month: January 1943). The difference between the 90,662 and 81,217 figures may be partially accounted for by the 4,226 Polish Jews who went to Iran with the Anders Army during 1942, and by deaths between August 1941 and January 1943. The difference between the 102,153 and 81,217 figures consists of 20,936 Polish Jews who were not in the amnestied figure because they were never arrested. It may be explained by the number of labour volunteers, such as the 8,830 in Beria’s document, and by the number other refugees who may have fled to the Soviet interior on their own initiative instead of being deported.

Furthermore, it also seems reasonable to infer that the 64,553 deported refugees as of 1 April 1941 in the NKVD document cited by Altschuler formed a subset (adjusted for births and deaths) of the 90,662 Jews amnestied in August 1941 in the Beria-Stalin document. The other 26,009 amnestied Jews may have been on the other transports in Gurjanov's data (in deportations that did not target refugees), or may have been arrested inside the Soviet interior, or may have been survivors from the group of POW's taken prisoner by the USSR in 1939.

When we have posted some of these facts on the RODOH forum on this thread, 'revisionists' have raised four objections, which we will rebut below. Firstly, they state that death rates among deportees were as high as 50% so deaths must be added to the NKVD data. Secondly, they insist that Soviet data was deceitful and should not be trusted. Thirdly, they claim that our figures are lower than those in Polish Government In Exile sources. Fourthly, they note that the number of Polish Jews repatriated from the USSR after the war was higher than our number of deportees.

The claim concerning deaths overlooks the fact that refugees were deported in the Summer of 1940, so deaths from cold weather would be far lower than those among Poles deported in February. Furthermore, data for Gulag deaths, which Roberto Muehlencamp has posted here, show that overall death rates were far lower than revisionists assume. Total deaths for all Gulag inmates were 46,665 in 1940, out of a total Gulag population of 1,344,408, making a death rate of 3.47% (source: Richard Overy, The Dictators, 2004, Tables 14.2 & 14.3). Moreover, as we have shown above, the number of amnestied Polish Jews passportised in early 1943 (81,217) was only 5.76% lower than the number of Jews amnestied in August 1941 minus the Polish Jews who went to Iran with the Anders Army (i.e. 90,662 minus 4,226).

The claim that NKVD sources are suspect ignores the fact that Beria and other NKVD officers were writing for their superiors, not a public audience, and that the punishment for lying to one's superiors in Stalin's terror state would have been certain death.

The third revisionist objection cites Sanning's claim (p.42) that "The Polish Government In Exile, too, declared the Soviets deported 600,000 Jewish refugees from western Poland in the spring of 1940." However, Sanning provides no footnote for this sentence so does not allow us to check his source. More importantly, Sanning's claim is contradicted by Polish Government In Exile statistics whose sources can be traced precisely. In his contribution to the collection of essays edited by Polonsky and Davies, Jews in Eastern Poland and the U.S.S.R., 1939-46, published in 1991, David Engel (p.177) cites a communication from the Polish Government In Exile Foreign Minister, Raczynski, to Bund representative Zygielbojm, dated 17 March 1943, stating that there were 260,000 Polish citizens in the USSR, "half of whom are Jews". The figure of 260,000 Poles is very similar to that cited above in the note from the NKGB head, V. Merkulov, dated May 1st, 1944, which stated that 257,660 of the amnestied 389,041 Poles were still in the USSR in January 1943. Raczynski is therefore clearly a far more valid source than Sanning's unidentified one.

As to why Raczynski gave a higher figure for Jews than does the NKVB data, the most likely explanation is provided by the context, namely that Raczynski was warning the Bund that aid to Jewish refugees may be jeapordised if the Bund were to criticise Stalin's actions. Raczynski therefore probably exaggerated the proportion of Jews in the refugee population in order to make his point more persuasive.

This hypothesis can be supported by reference to a second Polish Government In Exile source. In another contribution to the Polonsky and Davies collection, Keith Sword (p.155) discussed a document that he found in the archives of the Polish Institute and General Sikorski Museum (PIGSM), located in London. The document was compiled by Raczynski's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is entitled 'Relief accorded to Polish citizens by the Polish Embassy in the USSR (with special reference to Polish Citizens of Jewish Nationality)' (PIGSM File A/11.49 (Sow).31). The report revealed that the Embassy was co-ordinating relief for 260,399 Polish citizens, of whom the proportion of Jews was either 36.15% or 39.4% (the report gave two different breakdowns). The report therefore corroborates Raczynski's total figure for Poles but reveals that his figure for Jews was indeed higher than that reported within his own Ministry.

Furthermore, this reveals yet another omission on Sanning's part: a document in a London archive, written in English, from a wartime Polish Embassy source in the USSR, would have disabused Sanning of his misconception that refugee agencies were providing aid to 600,000 Polish Jews in central Asia.

With regard to repatriation, 157,420 Jewish "repatriates" were registered by the Central Committee of Polish Jewry as having returned to Poland by the end of June 1946. This figure was cited by Sanning and confirmed by Yosef Litvak in his contribution (Chapter 13; pp. 227-239) to the collection of essays edited by Polonsky and Davies, cited above. Litvak (p.235) also claimed that more than 70,000 further Polish Jewish repatriates returned by the end of the decade (bringing the total to 230,700), and a further 30,000 returned under the repatriation agreement of 1957. However, Sanning (p.45) falsely assumes that all of the repatriated Jews were refugees from western Poland who had fled across the Polish-Soviet demarcation line in 1939:

Of the many hundreds of thousands who fled to the Soviet Union in 1939 only 157,420 took advantage of this option and returned to Poland. In other words, the primary source which released these figures - the Central Committee for Jews in Poland, a Communist organization - wants to make us believe that only 83,059 Jews of western Poland (240,489 minus 157,420) survived the Second World War under German administration.

Sanning's claim is another example of his poor quality of research because it overlooks the fact that the Polish-Soviet repatriation agreement, signed on 6 July 1945, allowed any person who had been a Polish citizen on 17 September 1939 to return. Repatriates therefore could include not only western Polish refugees but anyone in eastern Poland who took Soviet citizenship in 1939-41.

Repatriates thus included Jews who were not deportees. Anyone who crossed the Polish-Soviet demarcation line in 1939-1941 but was not deported could be a repatriate; and anyone who fled eastwards when the Nazis crossed the demarcation line in June 1941 could be a repatriate, provided they had been Polish citizens on 17 September 1939.

Moreover, the total of 157,420 that had returned by June 1946 did not only consist of repatriates from the agreement of 6 July 1945, but also included many of the returnees who were repatriated under the agreements of September 1944 between Poland and the districts of the western USSR, which resulted (between 7 September 1944 and 1 January 1947) in 784,000 Polish repatriates from the Ukraine, 272,000 from Belorussia and 170,800 from Lithuania (Source: Piotrowski (2000), Genocide and Rescue in Wolyn, p. 248). The research of Czerniakiewicz (Repatriacja ludnosci polskiej z ZSRR, 1944-1948, Warsaw, 1987, p.154) found that 54,594 of these were Jews. Consequently, not all of the repatriates had been in the Soviet interior in September 1944. This is further evidence that repatriates included not only deportees, but also migrants who had fled from the Nazis on their own initiative, and Polish Jews in annexed territories of former eastern Poland who had been unable to flee from the Nazis in 1941 but survived Nazi occupation.

The repatriation figures are further complicated by three other factors. Firstly, Litvak (p.231) reveals that Poles who married Soviet citizens during the war were allowed to take their spouses, and the spouses' children from previous marriages, back to Poland. He claims that many Soviet war widows had married Poles. Secondly, Litvak (p.235) advises us that the Central Committee of Polish Jewry reported that the number of registered repatriates was 10-15 per cent higher than that of actual repatriates, because some people registered more than once. Thirdly, Litvak's breakdown of repatriates by sex (p.235) also shows that the proportion of males to females was higher than in the 1931 census, suggesting that a significant number of repatriates were labour volunteers rather than refugees.

Repatriation data does not therefore, when properly analysed, refute the evidence we have presented from Soviet and Polish sources, which in our view proves, beyond reasonable doubt, that fewer than 100,000 Polish Jews were deported to the Soviet interior in 1940-41.

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 5)

Andrzej Gawryszewski has very kindly sent me the list shown below of Aleksander Gurjanov's transport data for deportations to the Soviet interior from annexed areas of former eastern Poland between February 1940 and June 1941. This helps to debunk the claim, made by Walter Sanning, that two million Poles were deported, of which 750,000 were Jews. Gurjanov estimates a total of 315,000 deportees, with a margin of error of between 10,000 and 15,000. The deportation that targeted Jewish refugees took place in June-July 1940; the transports in that action totaled 75,267 deportees, not all of whom were Jews. In the next blog, we will show how these records can be synthesized with other Soviet and Polish documentation to refute Sanning.

Read more!

The full spreadsheet can be viewed on-line here.

Departure details are given below.

Source: Aleksander Gurjanov, Cztery deportacje 1940-1941 [Four deportations 1940-1941]. Karta, 12, 1994, Warszawa, p. 130-136.

(Format: Date, Departure Station, Number Of Deportees)

2/5/1940 Lida 1680
2/5/1940 Wysokie Litew. 1350
2/5/1940 Brzesc n.Bugiem 902
2/5/1940 Molodeczno 551
2/5/1940 Sienkiewicze 1506
2/5/1940 Pinsk 1492
2/5/1940 Drohiczyn 1743
2/5/1940 Dziatkowicze 1509
2/5/1940 Iwacewicze 1791
2/5/1940 Kosów 1206
2/5/1940 Orańczyce 1166
2/5/1940 Domanowo 1506
2/5/1940 Nowojelnia 1194
2/5/1940 Mickiewicze 1200
2/5/1940 Horodziej 1493
2/5/1940 Jeziornica 1484
2/5/1940 Niemen 1533
2/5/1940 Augustów 1859
2/5/1940 Postawy 2127
2/5/1940 Ziabki 1604
2/5/1940 Woropajewo 1863
2/1/1940 Molodeczno 1981
2/1/1940 Mosty 1669
2/1/1940 Bialowieza 1488
2/1/1940 Bialystok 1582
2/1/1940 Swislocz 1716
2/1/1940 Wolkowysk 1818
2/1/1940 Pogorzelce 1597
2/1/1940 Baranowicze 1290
2/1/1940 Rozanka 2090
2/1/1940 Molodeczno 1155
2/1/1940 Molodeczno 1793
2/1/1940 Lomza 1745
2/1/1940 Horodenka 1280
2/1/1940 Buczacz 1367
2/1/1940 Iwanie Puste 1400
2/1/1940 Dereniowka 1287
2/1/1940 Husiatyn 1514
2/1/1940 Worwolince 1371
2/1/1940 Biala Czortkow. 941
2/1/1940 Rudniki 1400
2/1/1940 Borszczow 1530
2/1/1940 Monasterzyska 1419
2/1/1940 Tlumacz 1113
2/1/1940 Wlodzimierz 1462
2/1/1940 Antonowka 1446
2/1/1940 Kostopol 1110
2/1/1940 Wojnica 1491
2/1/1940 Kamien Koszyr 1672
2/1/1940 Rumosz 1770
2/5/1940 Chodorow 1102
2/5/1940 Zapytow 1145
2/5/1940 Kalusz 1661
2/5/1940 Korszow 1521
2/5/1940 Kolomyja 1423
2/5/1940 Berezowica-Ostr.1312
2/5/1940 Hluboczek Wielki1108
2/5/1940 Zborow 1396
2/5/1940 Podhajce 1158
2/5/1940 Karnaczowka 1567
2/5/1940 Tarnopol 1920
2/5/1940 Grzymalow 1456
2/5/1940 Denysow-Kupcz. 1522
2/5/1940 Skalat 1568
2/5/1940 Brody 1288
2/5/1940 Cholojow 1353
2/5/1940 Stojanow 789
2/5/1940 Zablotce 1081
2/5/1940 Radziechow 1420
2/5/1940 Werba 1249
2/5/1940 Perespa 1260
2/5/1940 Jeziorany 1280
2/5/1940 Krzemieniec 1432
2/5/1940 Zwiniacze 929
2/5/1940 Nieswicz 1425
2/5/1940 Zdolbunow 1319
2/5/1940 Ostrog 1133
2/5/1940 Lanowce 1349
2/5/1940 Woronowka 1113
2/5/1940 Stanislawow 1253
2/5/1940 Rohatyn 1337
2/5/1940 Parchacz 1241
2/5/1940 Lubycza 1767
2/5/1940 Nowe Miasto 1393
2/5/1940 Rawa Ruska 1320
2/5/1940 Przemysl 1361
2/5/1940 Medyka 1110
2/5/1940 Chlebowice Wiel. 1472
2/5/1940 Chyrow 1321
2/5/1940 Krasne 1232
2/5/1940 Jaworow 1233
2/5/1940 Żólkiew? (Żołczów?) 1475
2/5/1940 Zydaczow 1194
2/5/1940 Stryj 1249
2/5/1940 Zloczow 1642
2/5/1940 Chodaczkow 1241
2/5/1940 Saranczuki 1650
2/5/1940 Wolkow 1590
4/14/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 450
4/14/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 1011
4/14/1940 Mikaszewicze 1282
4/15/1940 Mikaszewicze 1349
4/15/1940 Oranczyce 876
4/14/1940 Baranowicze 1049
4/14/1940 Baranowicze 713
4/14/1940 Stolpce 873
4/15/1940 Krolewszczyzna 1003
4/16/1940 Baranowicze 1378
4/18/1940 Lida 1146
4/19/1940 Grodno 1111
4/20/1940 Ziabki 1233
4/20/1940 Krolewszczyzna
4/15/1940 Druja 1189
4/15/1940 Gawja 1068
4/14/1940 Mosty 1040
4/15/1940 Mikaszewicze 1228
4/15/1940 Mikaszewicze 1137
4/16/1940 Wolkowysk 1443
4/20/1940 Baranowicze 994
4/13/1940 Stolpce 1048
4/19/1940 Bialystok 1190
4/19/1940 Bialystok 893
4/19/1940 Molodeczno 1508
4/20/1940 Oszmiana 1067
4/13/1940 Tarnopol 1209
4/13/1940 Tarnopol 1283
4/13/1940 Tarnopol 1187
4/13/1940 Kopyczynce 1423
4/13/1940 Husiatyn 973
4/13/1940 Stanislawow 1778
4/13/1940 Kolomyja 1545
4/13/1940 Biala Cerkiew 1218
4/13/1940 Lwow 1150
4/13/1940 Lwow 1354
4/14/1940 Ozydow 1604
4/14/1940 Sarny 1278
4/15/1940 Luck 1434
4/16/1940 Szepietowka 1392
4/16/1940 Sarny 1324
4/17/1940 Zdolbunow 1061
4/13/1940 Lwow
4/13/1940 Lwow 1111
4/13/1940 Lwow 1165
4/13/1940 Potutory 1379
4/13/1940 Stryj 1552
4/17/1940 Lwow 1139
4/20/1940 Rawa Ruska 1333
5/21/1940 Zdolbunow 452
5/23/1940 Sambor 120
6/30/1940 Bialystok 1303
7/1/1940 Bialystok 1589
7/1/1940 Grodno 1158
6/29/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 1244
6/29/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 1244
6/30/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 1427
6/30/1940 Siemiatycze 1085
7/4/1940 Brzesc n. Bugiem 431
6/29/1940 Stolpce 1732
6/30/1940 Luniniec 964
6/30/1940 Baranowicze 785
6/29/1940 Minsk 1679
6/29/1940 Minsk 1504
6/29/1940 Minsk 1372
6/29/1940 Minsk 1021
6/29/1940 Minsk 1461
6/30/1940 Bialystok 1533
7/1/1940 Molodeczno 771
7/1/1940 Bialystok 804
4/7/1940 Bialystok 657
6/28/1940 Szepietowka 160
6/28/1940 Szepietowka 1029
6/30/1940 Kowel 1300
6/30/1940 Kowel 2003
6/30/1940 Wlodzimierz 1877
6/30/1940 Wlodzimierz 1483
6/30/1940 Zdolbunow 1266
7/1/1940 Zdolbunow 1777
7/1/1940 Zdolbunow 1675
7/1/1940 Zdolbunow 1371
7/29/1940 Lwow 1789
6/30/1940 Lwow 1412
6/30/1940 Lwow 1470
6/30/1940 Lwow 1305
6/30/1940 Lwow 1604
6/30/1940 Lwow 1394
6/30/1940 Lwow 1527
6/30/1940 Lwow 1466
6/30/1940 Lwow 1300
6/30/1940 Lubaczow 1504
6/30/1940 Brzuchowice 1356
6/30/1940 Przemysl 1398
6/30/1940 Potutory 1040
6/30/1940 Tarnopol 995
7/1/1940 Husiatyn 930
7/1/1940 Stryj 1211
7/1/1940 Lwow 1547
7/1/1940 Lwow 1538
7/1/1940 Lwow 1544
7/1/1940 Rawa Ruska 1700
7/1/1940 Sambor 1316
7/1/1940 Ustrzyki 1142
7/12/1940 Lwow 1444
6/30/1940 Lwow 1208
6/30/1940 Sambor 1165
7/1/1940 Lwow 848
7/1/1940 Stryj 1776
7/5/1940 Lwow 633


6/13/1941 Glubokaja 1444
? ? 1656
? Jelgawa 1736
6/14/1941 Dwinsk 1655
6/16/1941 Dwinsk 1172
7/5/1941 Babynino 1162
6/16/1941 Jelgawa, Ryga 1475
6/16/1941 Jelgawa 1272
6/18/1941 Dwinsk 1242
6/18/1941 Dwinsk 1104
76
? Lomza 1175
6/19/1941 Hajnowka 1090
? Horodziej 821
Ryga, Litwa 311
6/21/1941 Lida 863
6/21/1941 Nowa Wilejka 871
6/17/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1102
6/17/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1296
6/19/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1066
6/19/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1311
6/20/1941 Nowa Wilejka 1139

'Transit Camps' and Occam's Razor

Deniers such as Mattogno and Graf tell us that most of the Jews transported to the Reinhardt camps were resettled within the USSR. The principle of Occam's Razor advises that, for this thesis to be plausible, it must require as few assumptions as possible. We have identified six assumptions that are either implicitly or explicitly stated in denial claims concerning 'transit camps', none of which has any evidential basis.

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1. The Soviets destroyed the Nazi records of transports from the Reinhardt camps to the USSR. No evidence is offered that the Soviets would have been able to capture all these records. The assumption overlooks the fact that many Nazi documents were captured by the British and Americans.

2. Witnesses to the transports were frightened into remaining silent by the Soviets. This fails to explain how witnesses to other Soviet actions such as the Katyn massacre did manage to get their testimonies to the west. It also fails to explain why no surviving witnesses who subsequently emigrated to the west or survived the downfall of the Soviet regime have ever come forward.

3. Eichmann never mentioned the transports in his defence because he was tortured. In reality, Eichmann had 15 years in which to reveal details of these transports before he was arrested. He was interviewed by a Dutch journalist, Willem Sassen, in Argentina in 1957 but never mentioned these transports.

4. The Soviets murdered the Jews. Deniers who make this argument never identify the mass grave sites where these dead Jews can be found, yet they hypocritically attack the mass graves evidence of normative historians.

5. The Jews moved to Palestine or the USA. Deniers are unable to cite any demographic data for the USA or Israel that would support this claim. They also ignore the fact that the Soviet Union had strict emigration controls so an emigration of at least 1.2 million Jews would have needed to be authorized and documented.

6. The Soviets forced them to renounce their religion and to take Soviet citizenship, so they didn't appear in the 1959 census. This fails to explain why the Soviets allowed up to 260,000 Polish Jews to repatriate between 1944 and 1960, despite the fact that they had taken Soviet citizenship during the war. None of these repatriated Jews has ever stated that he or she was transported to the USSR from the Reinhardt camps, and deniers have never found any evidence that any of the repatriates was ever in a Reinhardt camp.

More Holocaust Denial Fallacies

Andrew recently wrote an excellent article for The Holocaust History Project, published here, in which he used the principles of general semantics to expose the fallacies of Holocaust deniers. Below I explore five more fallacies that I have encountered in 'revisionist' literature and in on-line debates with deniers on RODOH.

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1. 'The fact that there is no evidence that the Reinhardt Camps were transit camps is not evidence that they were not transit camps'. This argument is a perverse application of Carl Sagan's dictum that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. The dictum was infamously deployed by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 to claim that absence of WMD being found in Iraq is not evidence that WMD were never present. It has also been deployed in medical discussions, such as here, to claim that the failure of a product to produce a demonstrable effect is not evidence that such effects are always absent. Such claims have been debunked brilliantly by Dr. Marvin J. Schissel here. Schissel points out that:

While absence of evidence is not absolute evidence of absence, it is generally evidence of a high probability of absence.

With reference to the Reinhardt camps, we do, of course, have a convergence of evidence from transport records, contemporary documents, the Korherr Report, the Hoefle Telegram, eyewitnesses, perpetrators and site investigations which shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that over a million Jews were murdered at the camps. Revisionists have had over sixty years in which to find records of transports taking Jews from the camps to the USSR, or records of resettlement, or even eyewitnesses of such resettlement, but have been unable to uncover any such evidence. They have been unable to explain why no defendants at postwar trials, including those such as Eichmann who had direct responsibility for 'evacuation' transports, ever used the 'transit camp' gambit in their defence, despite the fact that this would surely have been the most obvious defence available, had it been true. Moreover, they ignore the fact that the Soviets signed repatriation agreements with Poland in September 1944 and July 1945 but the total number of Polish Jews who returned under those agreements was only 230,700 (source: Yosef's Litvak's essay in Polonsky and Davies, Jews in Eastern Poland and the U.S.S.R., 1939-46, p.235).

Consequently, the 'absence of evidence' gambit is a fallacy because there are powerful reasons why evidence of resettlement should be present.

2. 'Evidence of gassing at camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz does not meet an absolute standard of scientific proof'. This is the burden of proof fallacy. It is fallacious to demand that historians meet a higher burden of proof than would be required in a court of law. It is also fallacious to ignore the fact that the Nazis systematically destroyed evidence of their crimes so historians must reconstruct the Holocaust from fragmentary documentation. In view of the incomplete documentary record, the high degree of convergence in the remaining evidence is conclusive proof of genocide, beyond reasonable doubt. Moreover, even scientific experiments carried out in a laboratory are subject to an uncertainty principle, so the deniers' burden of proof is not even accepted by physical scientists.

3. 'The story keeps changing'. As with the burden of proof fallacy, this claim appeals to an audience that is ignorant of historical method, legal procedure and the sociology of knowledge. There is no historical event which is currently interpreted in exactly the same way that it was in 1945. Demanding that the Holocaust 'story' remains static is thus bone-headed.

4. 'The Soviets lied about Katyn and the Ukrainian famine so they could have fabricated the Holocaust and lied about that too.' This fallacy ignores two obvious facts. Firstly, evidence of Katyn and the famine did reach the west, both at the time and since, and the Russians did eventually admit to Katyn in the post-Glasnost era, so this denier fallacy simply begs the question as to why no evidence of Soviets fabricating the Holocaust has ever come to light. Secondly, the Soviets did not have a monopoly of access to Nazi documents or eyewitnesses. For example, the gas van documents submitted to the IMT (as bundle 501-PS) were discovered by the US 12th Army in Germany, not by the Soviets (see John C. Zimmermann, Holocaust Denial, pages 357-358).

5. 'The allies fabricated propaganda of German atrocities in World War I so obviously did so in World War II as well.' There is no evidence cited to support this claim, and it ignores the fact that many Nazi atrocities were documented by the Nazis themselves. Deniers are falsely equating atrocity stories from WWI that never had supporting evidence with a historical record from WWII that contains an overwhelming convergence of evidence.

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 4)

In Part 3 of this series, we highlighted Sanning's false dating of Nazi demographic data. This fourth part looks at two other forms of distortion. Firstly, we highlight Sanning's misrepresentation of eyewitness testimony to the Eichmann trial. Secondly we examine his misuse of Jewish enclyclopaedia sources.

Read more!

Sanning (p.41) discusses the eyewitness testimony given by Zvi Pachter in the Eichmann trial, and cites Pachter’s description of Jews being force marched “four abreast in long columns” across the Nazi-Soviet demarcation line. However, Sanning omits to mention these parts of the testimony:

Q. Of the two thousand who began the march, how many reached the border?

A. Few, very few, perhaps one hundred persons.

[…]

[A] I don't want to go into the details of the tragedy, for they are not relevant to this trial - but they sent us back there.

Q. What do you mean by "there" - to the area of the Generalgouvernement in Germany?

A. Yes, to this bridge, for this was the bridge between Sokal, the town that belonged to the Soviet Union, and the suburb that belonged to the German Generalgouvernement. Thus they returned us to the Germans - yes, to the Germans.

Contrary to Sanning’s claim, therefore, the witness was giving evidence of a large death rate during German forced marches of the Jews, and he testified that the Soviets had a policy of forcing the Jews back across the line. It is impossible that 750,000 Jews could have crossed the line in the manner described by the witness. Moreover, Sanning takes his quotes from Rassinier’s 1963 ‘account’ of the trial, so his distortion is not even original. Sanning has simply recycled a falsehood from an earlier denial guru.

A further technique used by Sanning that is tantamount to fraud is his use of old encyclopaedia entries, even when they have been superseded by more recent encyclopaedias. In other words, not only does Sanning shamefully lean on a secondary source to distort primary ones, he chooses one that was subsequently corrected. For example, Sanning (p.40) quotes an entry on the city of Tomaszow Lubelski from Volume 15 of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, published in 1972, which claimed that “75% of the city’s 6,000 Jews left together with the Red Army when it withdrew to the newly established line of demarcation further east” in 1939. However, the more recent Pinkas Hakehillot Polin entry, written in 1976, states that only 2,000 Jews fled whilst 3,500 remained . Moreover, Sanning has a clear motive to shift this town’s population into Soviet territory: most of the remaining Jews were gassed at Belzec.