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 III - Systematic Analysis of One Example)

Part I - Method

Part II - Scholarly Avoidance

Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example

There is consensus among researchers that the Chełmno extermination camp began operations in early December 1941. 

Mattogno states that Krakowski claims the camp was inaugurated on 8 December 1941 without providing "any documentary evidence, not even a single testimony" (p.29, 2nd edition). While Krakowski does indeed fail to cite sources for this specific assertion, this shortcoming is unique to his work (see also Part II). Other scholars, including Montague, Klein, Alberti, and Pawlicka-Nowak, provide sources to confirm the camp’s start-up date.

Mattogno attempts to discredit this consensus by citing Andrzej Miszczak’s testimony from Blumental, Dokumenty i materiały tom I (1946) that the first transport arrived at the camp on 9 December 1941 and dismesses it as “a simple claim without any documentary confirmation.” This highlights the fundamental methodological flaw in Mattogno’s approach that was pointed out in the Part 1 of this review: his refusal to treat testimonies as historical sources unless confirmed by official Nazi documents. 

Let us now move beyond theoretical critiques and examine how Mattogno’s flawed methodology impacts the specific question of Chełmno’s start-up operations.

Review of Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 - Carlo Mattogno, Chelmno (Part II - Scholarly Avoidance)

Part I - Method

Part II - Scholarly Avoidance

Part III - Systematic Analysis of One Example

Mattogno’s Holocaust Handbooks Volume 23 on Chełmno was first published in 2009 (Italian) and in 2011 (English), with a "2nd revised edition" in 2017. 

Key scholarly works on the extermination of Jews in the Reichsgau Warthegau include 

• Michael Alberti’s Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Warthegau (2006)
• Shmuel Krakowski’s Das Todeslager Chelmno/Kulmhof: Der Beginn der 'Endlösung' (2007)
• Peter Klein’s Die Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt 1940-1944 (2009)
• Patrick Montague’s Chelmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler’s First Death Camp (2012). 

Of these four major studies, Mattogno references only Krakowski's work, which is arguably the least comprehensive of the group, rather than engaging with the strongest and most recent scholarship. Furthermore, Mattogno appears unaware of Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak’s Chełmno Witnesses Speak (2004), a critical source collection. As a result, his work was already outdated at the time of its first publication and even more obsolete by the time of the revised edition.

This omission is not merely a matter of quantity, but it has a significant qualitative impact. Montague's research, for instance, offers more thoroughly sourced and detailed synthesis of Chełmno's history than Krakowski's book. Alberti and Klein, meanwhile, provide nuanced analyses of Nazi policies connected to Chełmno and leverage official Nazi documents effectively. 

On pages 23 to 29, Mattogno touches Nazi policy with tons of full quotes - he seems to take the view that the extermination of Jews in the Warthegau would have required an overarching, pre-existing plan to kill all European Jews. Mattogno appears oblivious to the regional and situational policies and of escalation and shifts over time -  and of decades of historical scholarship that examines the evolution and nuances of Nazi policy toward Jews. 

In conclusion, Mattogno's approach to literature research and keeping his work up-to-date is nothing short of abysmal. His refusal to engage with the extensive body of scholarship on Chełmno / Nazi policy suggests he might have spent more time avoiding books than actually reading them.

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).

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.