Review of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 - Carlo Mattogno, Chełmno (Part IV - Testimony of Chełmno Escapee Szlama Winer)

Part I - Method

Part II - Scholarly Avoidance

Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example

Part IV - Testimony of Chełmno Escapee Szlama Winer

Szlama Winer escaped Chełmno extermination camp on January 19, 1942 and upon arriving in the Warsaw Ghetto, provided a detailed account of the atrocities committed there. His report is extensive, comprising approximately 15,450 words and 692 sentences in its English translation. Carlo Mattogno even mocks the "extraordinary wealth of detail" and a "truly prodigious memory". It's remarkable that detailed recollection is now considered as a flaw in eyewitness testimony.  

Slzama Winer

One might think that such a detailed testimony would provide ample material for a thorough analysis. Yet, Mattogno, in his critique, chooses to come up with a mere handful of points - six, to be precise - in an attempt to discredit the entire account as "completely unreliable".

Review of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 - Carlo Mattogno, Chelmno (Part I - Method)

Part I - Method

Part II - Scholarly Avoidance

Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example

 
Nearly two-thirds of the Holocaust Handbooks - based on page volume and principal authorship - can be credited to a single figure. If this weren't bad enough, it's none other than Carlo Mattogno, a prime example in the "How Not To Do History" playbook. It's truly comforting to know that the bulk of revisionist historiography rests on him.

Take Holocaust Handbook no. 23 on the Chełmno (Kulmhof) extermination camp, for instance. It's one of Mattogno's worst contributions, though the competition is fierce. In this work, a lack of proper historical method combines with near-total avoidance of research of the subject and unfortunate timing. 

Mattogno sums up his approach in a single statement, which begs to be quoted in its full beauty:

"As there are no documents which can be used as a basis of comparison, this means that for Chełmno the testimonies cannot constitute historical sources, so that there cannot even exist a genuine historiography for this camp."

(Mattogno, Chelmno, p.9)

There's more than half a million words of witness accounts, hundreds of wartime documents, photos, and archaeological studies on the camp. Among all events of mass violence in human history, the extermination camp Chełmno (Kulmhof) is relatively well documented. But why let overwhelming evidence get in the way?

Review of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 26 – Santiago Alvarez, The Gas Vans

From December 1941, the Nazis deployed homicidal gas vans using gasoline engine exhaust for the extermination of the European Jews, the liquidation of mental asylums and clearing of prisons in the occupied Soviet Union. The mass killing technique was supposed to provide mental relief for the shooting squads and enable more discreet mass killing. The vans came with two types of chassis: 3 tons trucks of various makes as first series, and 5 tons trucks of the make Saurer as the second series. The Security Police distributed around 20 vehicles for use in occupied Eastern territories (Serbia, Poland and Soviet Union). Another gas van on a Ford chassis was operated by the Secret Field Police. About a quarter of Million people fell victim of these mobile gas chambers (according to Alfred Kokh and Pavel Polian (ed.), Denial of the Denial, or the Battle of Auschwitz, p. 142).

Their historical reality is established by numerous contemporary Nazi documents, contemporary accounts and reports of other origins, and several 100s of post-war testimonies, thereof mostly by former members of the Nazi paramilitary and military forces towards German criminal investigators (many examples cited in the blog series Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans).

Graf's Russian Source, or How to Accumulate an Asylum of Loons

I recently wrote a blog post for our larger Holocaust Handbooks project on Ingrid Weckert's Jewish Emigration From the Third Reich. In the beginning, I pointed out that Weckert has the closest demonstrable ties to neo-Nazis among the living deniers, with Jürgen Graf a close second. Since writing that post, I had occasion to read Graf's The Giant With Feet of Clay -- his lengthy critique of the work of Raul Hilberg. I wanted to provide this brief post to make a few brief comments on the man generally and one of his sources.

First, Graf is easily the most overtly antisemitic of the Castle Hill/CODOH authors. Given how frequently he has collaborated with Carlo Mattogno -- who has comparatively much cleaner hands in this regard -- it doesn't really say much for Mattogno that he apparently regards Graf's work so highly. Should the accusation arise that this statement amounts to guilt by association -- well, yes, it does.

Second, Graf's writing of history is garbage. He doesn’t understand the basics of source analysis and seems to believe (or at least argues) that eyewitness statements are never reliable. He also shamelessly quote mines, often to suppress information that he must be aware would undermine his own theses. He just plainly doesn't know what he's doing most of the time. Mattogno's writing brings its own set of related -- but distinct -- problems. But compared to Graf's solo work, Mattogno should be shortlisted for the Pulitzer. Graf is really that bad.

We'll be elaborating on these points over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to describe my pursuit of a source that Graf cites in TGWFOC. Among the more striking claims made by Graf in this opus is buried in a footnote on page 36 of the most recent edition: "Of 531 leading personalities in the Soviet Union in 1920, 447 were Jews, cf. Juri K. Begunov, Tajnye Sily w istorii Rossij [sic], Isdatelstvo Imeni A.S. Syborina, St. Petersburg 1996." 

It took a bit of work, but I did manage to find a copy of the cited book by Yurij Begunov, about whom, it should be noted, enough has been written to firmly cast him into the group of conspiracy loons. Mina Sodman reported in Searchlight (March 2002) that Begunov was among the attendees of a Holocaust denial "conference" held in Moscow in January 2002; Graf was also in attendence.

Regarding the book and its claim about 447 of 531 "leading personalities" of the USSR being Jewish in 1920 (which, it bears mention, isn't 1941 and is, therefore, after the conscious Russification of the Soviet leadership undertaken under Stalin and after the Great Purges, in which many, perhaps most, of these leaders were shot), it seems Begunov cribbed his list at least in part from Robert Wilton. Our own Sergey Romanov has already discussed Wilton's lists in some detail, so I won't belabor his points.

I'll add only that, where Begunov has added individuals, he seems to have followed Wilton's basic rules of both creating people and positions where none previously existed and assuming that any person whose name doesn't end in -sky, -vich, or -ov must be a Jew, regardless of any other evidence. To be clear, both Russia proper and the Baltic States had large, influential German-speaking populations into the early 20th century who kept their German names. The White Army General P.N. Wrangel is just one prominent example. In addition, Begunov counts several people multiple times in multiple lists, so what the true numbers are of Jews and total people listed in his book are anyone's guess.

The bottom line is that Graf is a kook's kook and relied on a real garbage heap of a "study" to make this specific allegation.

On Weckert's 'Jewish Emigration from the Third Reich'

Unlike Heddesheimer, Ingrid Weckert is a known quantity. She has a long career on Germany’s far-right; of all the HH authors, she has the clearest connections with the neo-Nazi movement in Europe, with Jürgen Graf a close second. Now in her 90s, she has spent the last 40 years writing exculpations of Nazi figures (including Julius Streicher and Josef Goebbels) and crimes (most notably Kristallnacht). Beyond contributions to Holocaust denial, she was closely affiliated with the neo-Nazi leader Michael Kühnen in the 1980s and participated in attempts to form legitimate far-right political parties --  most recently, Kühnen’s Deutsch Alternative, which was banned in 1992. Trained as a librarian, she also studied theology and history, including allegedly studying Jewish history in Israel.

Weckert’s contribution to the HH collection, Jewish Emigration from the Third Reich, is a translation of her Auswanderung der Juden aus dem Dritten Reich, which Castle Hill published in 2004. A slim volume numbering only 70 pages not including frontmatter, backmatter, and appendices, it attempts to strike a more seemingly conciliatory tone than much of Weckert’s previous work. Nevertheless, it repeats the grotesque errors of that work, with the typical lying by omission, whitewashing, and blame shifting found there. It is important to state at the outset that a thorough checking of Weckert’s use of source material is beyond the scope of this short review. That said, an earlier review by Andrew E. Mathis of Weckert’s article on Kristallnacht in the Journal of Historical Review (summer 1985 issue) found that she was a routine abuser and misrepresenter of her cited sources.[1]

On Heddesheimer's 'The First Holocaust'

If one thing becomes abundantly clear when one looks at the list of Holocaust Handbooks published by Castle Hill and CODOH, it is that they are overwhelmingly concerned with the Holocaust itself and, within that topic, the part of the Holocaust occurring within the concentration camp system. Where the handbooks are comparatively lighter is in any sense of the history of the Third Reich or of Jews – to say nothing of the intersection of the two in terms of Nazi Jewish policy – before the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. If Hilberg dedicated the first sixth of Destruction of the European Jews to the events leading up to Barbarossa, we might perhaps expect that seven of the 42 HH books similarly address topics from medieval and early modern European antisemitism through the invasion and occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany; instead, we have essentially two -- The First Holocaust by Don Heddesheimer and Jewish Emigration from the Third Reich by Ingrid Weckert -- or 4.8%.[1]

On the 'Holocaust Handbooks': An Occasional Review Series

At the end of last month, the flagship denier ‘Holocaust Handbooks’ series welcomed a new author, the pseudonymous Ernst Böhm, into the fold. With this publication, the series reached 40 titles. The bigger news that will likely go unmentioned by his publisher Germar Rudolf is that Böhm is the first new contributor to the series since the equally pseudonymous Warren B. Rutledge, a whole five years ago. Still, reaching the milestone of 40 books is worthy of some celebration (by the deniers) and criticism (by anti-deniers), and thus we at Holocaust Controversies announce a new occasional series of reviews of the ‘Holocaust Handbooks’ series.

How Mattogno & Rudolf Invented A Crazy Journey of a Jewish Transport from Holland Through Upper Silesia

Almost unnoticed, an Italian researcher made a surprising discovery on the route of Jewish transports to Auschwitz.

On 16 October 1942, a Jewish transport with 1,710 departed from the Netherlands (Westerbork camp) to Auschwitz. But the train did not only halt at the station Cosel in Upper Silesia, where 570 Jews were taken out for forced labour, as it is well-known so far.

According to this Italian researcher, the transport was diverted from its route to Auschwitz after reaching Cosel. Instead of going eastwards to Auschwitz, the train headed North-West to Gogolin, where some Jews were unloaded and admitted to the camps St. Annaberg or Sakrau. At Gogolin, the transport was either going further North to Oppeln and then East to take a halt at Voßwalde. Here, some more people got off to go to the camp Malapane between Oppeln and Voßwalde. The journey continued South to Blechhammer, some 5 km East of Cosel, where the train had started its detour and where more people were again taken out for forced labour. The train headed straight to Königshütte near Kattowitz, where it let off more forced labourers for the Bismarckhütte. Finally, the transport arrived at the Auschwitz camp.

Alternatively, the deportees were sent back from Gogolin to Cosel via Kattowitz to Auschwitz. But the transport was not unloaded at the Auschwitz camp. Instead, some Jews were selected for forced labour for the camp Bobrek. The rest of the people was taken back to Blechhammer (5 km East of Cosel, where they had been earlier the day), then to Königshütte (which they pass now for the third time) to sent Jews to Bismarckhütte and finally to the Auschwitz camp.

How does that sound? Incredible? Unbelievable? Well, perhaps I should have mentioned that this Italian "researcher" is not doing historical research in the proper sense, but he is just watching out for any straw - how matter far-fetched and absurd - to deny the Holocaust.

Amazon stops selling more than 70 Holocaust denial books

In the past month, a wave of articles has been published around the world criticising Amazon for selling Holocaust denial books. To my knowledge, Amazon offered no public response, seemingly ignoring the growing chorus asking why denial literature was on sale through the world's largest online bookseller. So imagine my surprise when last night I tried searching for Kindle updates to the 'Holocaust Handbooks' series on amazon.co.uk and found... nothing.

“The Jews buried in a little wood near Kulmhof”: Documenting Cremation at Chelmno

In his brochure Chełmno: A German Camp in History and Propaganda, Carlo Mattogno declared (p.83):

Not a single document exists on the alleged Chełmno crematoria

Unfortunately for “the world’s premier revisionist scholar”, this assertion is false.