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.

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." 

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. 

Meanwhile, on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" ...

... my old friend Drew J (who obviously knows that my CODOH account has not yet been reactivated, for he refers to the previous blog and thereby signals that he's interested in what we write here) is again mouthing off about me, thereby displaying a miserable personality and (as he claims to have bested me here and there) his delusions of adequacy.

Old Herrings in a New Can: Thomas Dalton’s Debating the Holocaust (1)

They say one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and I agree with that.

Experience also tells me that one shouldn't praise a book after reading its introduction and the first one or two chapters, for what comes later may fall short of what the beginning makes you hope for.

But does one go wrong in dismissing a book as thinly disguised propaganda, written by an author with an obvious un-confessed agenda, when its introduction and first chapter strongly point in this direction already?

How Irving tried to create a Soviet forgery

This self-explanatory exchange happened on 9 August. It concerned the alleged doctoring of Soviet documents by Soviet/Russian historian Lev Bezymenskij:

Bezymenski, a Jew, had also written a definitive account of the death of Adolf Hitler. He had been attached at that time as an interpreter to the Red Army unit concerned in Berlin. As an Appendix to his book he published the autopsy report, and it struck me as odd that while it contains such prurient details as that the body had only one testicle, which may well be true, it concealed the fact that Hitler had shot himself; if Bezymenski was to be believed, Hitler had just swallowed poison. There were psychological and propaganda reasons for asserting this.

YEARS later, Bezymenski came clean and admitted that he had been ordered by the Soviet Authorities to doctor the autopsy to conceal the fact that Hitler's skull clearly showed the bullet's entry and exit wounds, and he published a revised edition of his work.

This again just goes to show how careful one has to be before accepting any documents from governments which have political axes to grind. To which I must add that in all the years in which I have worked in Western Archives I have never personally found any forgeries. There are, however, very many such documents floating around private hands, fabricated for one reason or another.

Below you will find the exchange which Irving chose not to publish on his site. The reason for this should be obvious.

Read more!

Mr. Irving, you wrote:

"YEARS later, Bezymenski came clean and admitted that he had been ordered by the Soviet Authorities to doctor the autopsy to conceal the fact that Hitler's skull clearly showed the bullet's entry and exit wounds, and he published a revised edition of his work."

Then you continue about forgeries.

Well, this is incorrect. In his book "Operatsija 'Mif', or how many times Hitler was buried" (http://militera.lib.ru/research/bezymensky2/index.html) Bezymenskij explains what exactly he had lied about on KGB's request (otherwise his book would not come out). He lied when he wrote that the bodies were burnt in 1945 and that on June 3 some SMERSH official reported about this to Moscow. That's all. He did not "doctor" any existing documents, rather, he invented a new one, this SMERSH report. Or, to be more precise, he invented not the document itself, the "text" of which he did not cite, but rather he invented the existence of this document, so to say. He also omitted one forensic report, which stated that no traces of poison were found in the bodies (the Soviet experts explained to him that this doesn't play any role, since the bodies were in bad shape and a week had passed since death). Bezymenskij himself suspects that there was a "double" suicide - both by shooting and poisoning.

In that same book he reprints the (authentic) act which doesn't mention the shooting. The suicide by shooting issue is complex and is explored by Bezymenskij in his book, and doesn't actually involve any forgeries.

Sergey

My dear Sergei

I am reporting what my friend Besymenski TOLD me privately, not what he wrote in his book. We know how much to trust his boks now, don't we. Don't we?

I am very sad that he is dead.

David Irving
(currently in Wiltshire)

By the way: My own bookstore is now open at irvingbooks.com

Mr. Irving, since Bezymenskij confessed about his single lie and a single omission in his book, which are rather serious confessions by themselves, there is no reason to believe that he reprinted the falsified report once again in his new edition, and moreover, there is no reason to think that he wouldn't confess to have had doctored that same report in the first (Soviet) edition.

Yet the report is the same in the new book, because it doesn't mention shooting, and Bezymenskij elaborates on this point at length in his "new" book. This is actually one of his major points - the ideology of the time required for Hitler the "cowardly" death by poisoning rather than "officer's death" by shooting (although, again, probably he used both methods).

I.e.: either you misunderstood Bezymenskij, or you're misremembering what was said by him.

Sergey

PS: an example with Bezymenskij actually demonstrates how _reluctant_ were the Soviets to forge documents. There would be nothing easier for them than to simply write some fantasy reports from scratch, "proving" whatever point they wanted to prove (e.g. that Hitler's corpse was wholly incinerated and ashes were scattered). Rather, Bezymenskij was simply told to omit one report from publication (but they still showed it to him!) and to write that Hitler's corpse was indeed completely incinerated somewhere in beginning of June (they didn't supply him with any fake documents for this either).

Update: Irving linked to this post after the URL had been sent to him.

"A minor "revisionist" admits Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jews!"

Or so I could have said, if were fond of pathetic demagoguery, which the Holocaust deniers use all too often.

As usual, David Irving posted some trash on his website, this time it's a letter by Paul Grubach about, what Irving calls, a "minor conformist concession about Himmler's Posen speech of 1943".

Read more!

IN the summer of 2006 Professor Jeffrey Herf published his book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). It has been said this is one of the most important books on the Holocaust in the past decade.

I would like to bring to your attention an admission by Professor Herf that actually corroborates the revisionist thesis of Dr. Arthur Butz.

In October of 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered a speech in Posen, in occupied Poland. This speech is considered by many to be absolute proof that the Nazis had a policy to exterminate all the Jews of Europe, primarily through the use of homicidal gas chambers.

Um, no. The speech indeed is a piece of evidence (one of many) that the Nazis had a policy to exterminate Jews. That's all. No specific methods are explicitly mentioned in the speech, and nobody, to my knowledge, claims that the speech directly proves specifically gassings. So Grubach erected a strawman.

Let us assume that Himmler really did make the comments attributed to him.

Note the usual "revisionist" "I can't debunk it, but I will try to cast unreasonable doubt on it anyway" rhetoric.

Here is the key passage in question:

"I [Himmler] am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people. This is something that is easily said: 'The Jewish people will be exterminated,' says every Party member, 'this is very obvious, it is in our program -- elimination of the Jews, extermination will do.'"

Himmler continued: "Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a descent person...has made us tough."

Herf writes that in this speech, "Himmler referred only to the early methods of the Einsatzgruppen murders and said nothing about the death camps, gas chambers, and crematoria [p.233]."

Herf is admitting that Himmler is referring only to the mass shootings of Jews that took place on the Eastern Front, and this speech says nothing at all about the alleged "death camps, gas chambers, and crematoria."

Note how Grubach tries to mislead the readers by using the word "admitted". The word implies that it is usually assumed by historians that Himmler somehow explicitly mentioned gas chambers and crematoria in his speech, and only rare honest researchers actually "admit" that this is not true. What a load of... Nevermind.

As far back as the early 1970s, Arthur Butz made the important revisionist point that the only part of the extermination legend that contains a particle of truth is that the Einsatzgruppen exterminated some Russian Jews by mass shootings (See Hoax of the Twentieth Century, p.241).

Professor Butz wrote:

"At the time of the invasion of Russia in June 1941, there was a Führer order declaring, in anticipation of an identical Soviet policy, that the war with Russia was not to be fought on the basis of the traditional rules of warfare. Necessary measures were to be taken to counter partisan activity, and Himmler was given the power to 'act independently upon his own responsibility.' Everybody knew that meant executions of partisans and persons collaborating with partisans. The dirty task was assigned to four Einsatzgruppen…which had a total of about 3,000 men…We have had occasion to note in several instances that the Jews did, in fact, pose a security menace to the German rear in the war…The task of the Einsatzgruppen was to deal with such dangers [anti-German partisan and guerrilla warfare] by all necessary means, so we need not be told much more to surmise that the Einsatzgruppen must have shot many Jews, although we do not know whether 'many' means 5,000, 25,000 or 100,000. Naturally, many non-Jews were also executed (pp. 241-242)."

Butz, being the dishonest bloke he is, tries to obfuscate things, by pretending that EGs murdered (some) Jews as a security danger, not as, well, Jews. But, as I wrote elsewhere

I think I should only mention that according to message no. 412 of 09.02.1942, out of 138,272 people killed by EG A, 55,556 were women and 34,464 were children.

Only idiots and deniers will argue that this was any sort of anti-partisan action.

In fact, of these 138,272 people only 56 were partisans, and 136,421 - Jews.

Or take Jaeger's report with its clear division of the victims into men, women and children, like

20.9.41 in Nemencing
128 Jews, 176 Jewesses, 99 Jewish children

22.9.41 in Novo-Wilejka
468 Jews, 495 Jewesses, 196 Jewish children

24.9.41 in Riess
512 Jews, 744 Jewesses, 511 Jewish children

25.9.41 in Jahiunai
215 Jews, 229 Jewesses, 131 Jewish children

27.9.41 in Eysisky
989 Jews, 1,636 Jewesses, 821 Jewish children

Yes, one must be a real idiot to deny the obvious extermination plan (at least for the Soviet Jewry).

Herf is now admitting that Himmler is referring to only the mass shootings of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front, something that was never denied by Holocaust revisionists.

Ah, yes, this "admitting" thingie again. That's how "revisionist" sensations are made. Remember all the "Auschwitz Museum Director F. Piper admits this or that" hype? Nothing ever changes.

The secret police chief was not referring to the alleged Hitler "gas chambers" and accompanying crematoria, and the so-called extermination camps. So, this passage cannot be used by orthodox Holocaust historians to "prove" that the Nazis had a policy to exterminate Jews in "gas chambers."

Thank you Dr. Herf for corroborating this key Holocaust revisionist point!

So, the redundant, never-contested point that Himmler did not mention the words "crematoria" and "gas chambers" in his speech is actually a "key Holocaust revisionist point"? Thanks for such an embarassing admission, Mr. Grubach!

Now, Grubach, being the silly denier that he is, ignores THE key phrase in Himmler's speech:

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish people.

So, no. Himmler did not refer solely to Einsatzgruppen mass-murderers. He directly, and truthfully, equated deportation with extermination. And indeed, the bulk of the evacuated Jews were exterminated in the death camps, mainly by gas, as we know from numerous testimonies and some documents. So, while Himmler did not explicitly mention murder by gas in his speech (and nobody has ever implied that he did), his speech serves as a confirmation of the established fact that the bulk of the deported Jews were indeed exterminated. And since they were deported to the camps, this speech also indirectly confirms the existence of extermination camps.

So much for "revisionist" analyzing skills.

Kramer vs. Kremer

In 2003 David Hebden sent a letter to David Irving, in which he tried to cast doubt on the incriminating meaning of the word "Sonderaktion" in Dr. Kremer's diary. I will quote it in full, in case anything happens to Irving's site.

Read more!

Dr Kremer and the word "Sonderaktion"

The diary of Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, and in particular, those entries which record the two months he spent stationed at Auschwitz (Aug 30 - Nov 1, 1942), are considered strong evidence that mass gassings occurred at the Auschwitz camp.

At first sight, several entries do indeed appear incriminating.

It contains several seemingly incriminating references to Sonderaktion, Dante's inferno, anus mundi and the like. Revisionists have responded that the term Sonderaktion could refer to selections or disinfection measures.

Thirteen of the fourteen "special actions" that Kremer attended involved incoming transports. But one, that of September 5 1942, concerned women prisoners only:

"In the morning attended a special action from the women's concentration camp (Muslims); the most dreadful of horrors. Master-Sergeant Thilo (troop doctor) was right when he said to me that this is the anus mundi. In the evening towards 8:00 attended another special action from Holland. Because of the special rations they get a fifth of a liter of schnapps, 5 cigarettes, 100 g salami and bread, the men all clamor to take part in such actions. Today and tomorrow (Sunday) work."

The importance of this is this: The deaths of these women, as registered prisoners, should show up in the so-called Death Books.

Although the diary entry does not mention how many women were included, the editors of KL Auschwitz As Seen Through the Eyes Of The SS give, in a footnote, the number as "about 800." I emailed the Auschwitz State Museum to ask where this number came from. The museum replied that it derived from Danuta Czech's Auschwitz Kalendarium which in turn relied on a statement made by Dr. Kremer during his trial in Cracow in 1947.

Having established this, I then emailed the museum again to ask how many deaths were recorded in the relevant Death Book for September 5. Their reply was interesting:

"Searching after date of death as it was noted on Sterbebücher forms is hopeless, since after every major Action prisoner-clerks employed in the camp Standesamt were obliged to distribute death cases among next several days; in other words, dates of deaths from those documents are not fully credible. In September, as much as 1,654 deaths of female prisoners were listed in the Sterbebücher, 24 only on September 5th."

I asked them to put this hypothesis to the test by providing a breakdown of deaths for the whole month of September and received the following in reply:

"Complying with your request I have checked again daily rates of deaths in the "Sterbebuch" register for September 1942; this was about 20-70 death cases a day, grouped roughly in regular manner.
September 1 86
September 2 43
September 3 40
September 4 48
September 5 24
September 6 19
September 7 38
September 8 63
September 9 12
September 10 68
September 11 19
September 12 12
September 13 73
September 14 78
September 15 23
September 27 127"

Unless I'm missing something obvious, the Death Books therefore do not support a homicidal interpretation of the term Sonderaktion as used by Dr. Kremer.

David Hebden

Irving was so impressed with this argument that he even used it in a draft of his Himmler biography.

If all the premises of the argument are true, what follows?

a) Either "Sonderaktion" in Kremer's diary did not have an incriminating meaning.

b) Or not all deaths of registered prisoners were recorded in the Death Books.

Let's examine the premises.

1)

Although the diary entry does not mention how many women were included, the editors of KL Auschwitz As Seen Through the Eyes Of The SS give, in a footnote, the number as "about 800." I emailed the Auschwitz State Museum to ask where this number came from. The museum replied that it derived from Danuta Czech's Auschwitz Kalendarium which in turn relied on a statement made by Dr. Kremer during his trial in Cracow in 1947.

This is most likely a case of confusion either on part of the Museum Staff, or on Mr. Hebden's part.

When I wrote to the Museum to inquire about Czech's source ("APMO, Hoess Trial, vol. 16, p. 55", in Auschwitz Chronicle, p. 233) Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, head of the Auschwitz archives, replied with the following quote:

In September 1942 ging dann einmal der jüdische Krankenblock /Block 27/, es waren über 800 Menschen.

It comes from Josef Kramer ("Aussagen zu dem in Lüneburg stattfindenden Bergen-Belsen-Prozess gegen den Lagerführer Josef Kramer"). According to Dr. Setkiewicz, this is all that Kramer told about this selection. So, Kramer testified about 800 people who were selected in Jewish infirmary in September of 1942. (He didn't even explicitly state that those were women, though possibly such an identification may be found in context.)

While no other selections in the women's camp in September 1942 are known at present (possibly because of scarcity of sources), there is no direct corroboration that Kramer's selection is Kremer's Sonderaktion of September 5. Danuta Czech should have made her assumptions clear when she wrote that during the selection on 05.09.1942 800 women were gassed.

So, apparently, somebody confused Kremer with Kramer above. Kremer himself explicitly stated in 1947 that he didn't know how many women there were (Auschwitz Chronicle, p. 233 - "How big the group was, I can't say").

Thus the first premise of the argument is unproven: there is no confirmation that during the 05.09.1942 Sonderaktion no less than 800 women were gassed.

2) Premise: absence of an increase in deaths on September 5 in the Death Books means that inmates were not murdered en masse that day.

As explained by the Museum official:

Searching after date of death as it was noted on Sterbebücher forms is hopeless, since after every major Action prisoner-clerks employed in the camp Standesamt were obliged to distribute death cases among next several days; in other words, dates of deaths from those documents are not fully credible.

Although no evidence has been cited by the official, there is some supporting evidence in the Auschwitz Chronicle (p. 310):

AUGUST 3

The SS Camp Doctor carries out a selection in the prisoners' infirmary. He selects 193 prisoners recuperating from typhus. They are taken to Birkenau and killed in the gas chambers. **

[...]

** In the Prisoners' Infirmary register of Block 28, "moved to Birkenau" is entered next to the names of the 193 sick prisoners. In the Occupancy Register, on the other hand, the names of these prisoners are entered in the list of the deceased, the entries divided among three successive days. 30 of them are entered on August 10, 100 on August 11, and 63 on August 12.

On p. 178 we see the following explanation:

To wipe out the traces of the crimes, the names of the prisoners killed in mass executions are crossed out in the Occupancy Register on a few successive days.

If they falsified the Occupancy Register in such a way, why they couldn't have distributed the deaths over several days in the Death Books also?

Thus, the second premise is unproven.

Conclusion:

... the Death Books therefore do not support a homicidal interpretation of the term Sonderaktion as used by Dr. Kremer

Such a formulation is misleading. The Death Books may not support a homicidal interpretation, but they don't contradict it, given that both premises of the argument are unproven.

And note that even after proving the untenability of the above argument there still remains a hypothesis which we have yet to tackle, and which, if true, alone refutes Mr. Hebden's logical construction: that not all deaths of registered inmates were recorded in the Death Books. We will return to this issue.

Irving Meme Spreads

Two different anti-denier bloggers have separately posted links to what might well be a fast-spreading meme, 'specially now we're adding to the trackbacks, heh heh.

Both Orac's Respectful Insolence and Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial picked up on an album review in the NME which opened with the classic line

Aside from the deaf or those in a level of denial up there with David Irving's idiot pronouncements on the Holocaust, everyone's aware that we live in great times for music.

Not that we're trying to claim prescience or anything, but one of the tag-lines we played around with when scheming up this blog was:

Some countries lock up Holocaust deniers... but we believe in free speech. We prefer just to laugh at them.

Irving's recent mishap might have attracted a certain abstract sympathy from libertarians (among whom be us, let it be reiterated), but in his home country, such feelings have been strongly tempered by a sense that the old fool really has become little more than a figure of fun.

No, he doesn't deserve to be in jail. He should have been laughed out of polite society years ago.