On the SS judge Konrad Morgen's Monowitz confusion

During the Nuremberg trial on 08.08.1946 the former SS judge Dr. Konrad Morgen testified:

MORGEN: Yesterday I described the four camps of the Kriminalkommissar Wirth and referred to the Camp Auschwitz. By "Extermination Camp Auschwitz" I did not mean the concentration camp. It did not exist there. I meant a separate extermination camp near Auschwitz, called "Monowitz."

[...]

MORGEN: The prisoners who marched off to the concentration camp had no inkling of where the other prisoners were taken. The Extermination Camp Monowitz lay far away from the concentration camp. It was situated on an extensive industrial site and was not recognizable as such and everywhere on the horizon there were smoking chimneys. The camp itself was guarded on the outside by special troops of men from the Baltic, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and also Ukrainians. The entire technical arrangement was almost exclusively in the hands of the prisoners who were assigned for this job and they were only supervised each time by an Unterfuehrer. The actual killing was done by another Unterfuehrer who let the gas into this room. Thus the number of those who knew about these things was extremely limited. This circle had to take a special oath...

Etc. Holocaust deniers have naturally carped on this ever since, given that the extermination camp was actually called Birkenau, so Morgen must have been coerced or was lying for another reason.

Irregular Musings on the Unicellular Denial. #3. Chris Crookes and Mike Peinovich.

Let's continue our sporadic review of the Holocaust denial flora and fauna.

So there is this guy named Chris Crookes - the disgraced Holocaust denier kicked out of the Labour party. He was kicked out for this article. Let's take a look at it.

Rebutting the "historical" appendix to David Cole's book "Republican Party Animal".

A post on David Stein/Cole's book Republican Party Animal, or rather on the historical appendix to it in which he explains his views on the Holocaust.

Short intro: Cole used to be a hardcore Holocaust denier in the early 1990s, shot a comical video about Auschwitz which became a hit among the deniers (the deceptions of this video are fully exposed here). He reinvented himself as a Republican event organizer in Hollywood and there was a moderately large scandal when his cover got blown up.

He tells about this event and many others in his "tell all" book. He moderated his historical views considerably, coming to the conclusion that extermination camps did exist. His shtick had always been being a Jewish denier. Now it's a drunken ex-denier who kinda saw the light, but is still an asshole towards both sides. He condemns total hardcore denial, but also claims that Auschwitz wasn't an extermination camp at least from 1943 on and the well-documented gas vans didn't exist.

In fact, Cole didn't find anything new or big about the Holocaust, he simply takes the extremely well-known documents like the Korherr report and interprets them with varying degrees of plausibility, while ignoring the documents that contradict his other positions. All banal, nothing notable. But for some reason some see his position as the "golden middle", or something. Nonsense. This deeply confused and superficial individual has nothing new or interesting to add to the Holocaust historiography.

In the appendix to his book Cole tries to lay out his views. Let's take a look at a couple of points.

Dirlewanger to an SS Investigator on Poisoning of Jews

In 1942, the SS Main Office "investigated" charges launched by the SD and the SS and Police court Cracow against Oskar Dirlewanger, the commander of the infamous SS penal unit Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, which included racial defilement, abuse of his own men, extortion, illegal hunting, illegal confiscations, illegal arrests and illegal killings in the Generalgouverment. 

During his interrogation of 1 September 1942, Dirlewanger explained to the SS court martial officer (Gerichtsoffizier) that the SD could not cope with the killing of the Jews caught violating Nazi regulations and that therefore in November 1941, the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin district Odilo Globocnik ordered they are to be handed over to Dirlewanger for execution. Initially, the Jews were just shot, but later they had to undress in a cellar under the pretense vaccination against typhus and were killed by injection of the poison strychnine. Their gold teeth were broken out to be used for the SS dental station and the clothes were provided to Russian POWs.

It is noteworthy that Dirlewanger tried within his sphere of influence and on a small scale what were to be basic elements of large scale Nazi mass extermination sites: disguise, poison and robbing of dead people.

How Reliable is the Statement of Maximilian Grabner?

The post-war statement scripted by the former head of the Political Department in Auschwitz Maximilian Grabner in Vienna, probably in late September 1945, was recently published by Sergey. In this posting, the reliability of his testimony will be assessed in some more detail. As a result, Grabner is a fairly reliable witness on most of the Auschwitz history touched by him, including atrocities. Only anything tangent to his own role and fate in the camp has been distorted and perverted to serve his purpose and discharge himself from any misconduct.

A point for point dissection of his testimony can be found in the appendix. This exercise is meant to assist in gauging the reliability and credibility of his account. A trained historian may do such en passant while studying the source, but it's use full to remind Holocaust deniers that corroboration forms a bond between evidence that needs to be broken first else it is greatly enhancing their mutual strength and that pointing out a few deliberate or undeliberate mistakes in a lengthy testimony (of which typically only some are real mistakes, while others are simply made up by denier's historical ignorance and personal incredulity) is not sufficient to dismiss it as uncredible, nor does it explain anything.

War-time German document mentioning Auschwitz gassings: testimony of Eleonore Hodys

Eleonore Hodys was a non-Jewish Auschwitz inmate. She became commandant Hoess' lover, and when he found out that she was pregnant, apparently he ordered to have her locked into a bunker cell so she could die of starvation.

Hodys was somewhat lucky in that SS Judge Konrad Morgen and his colleague Gerhard Wiebeck were investigating corruption in Auschwitz at about the same time. In autumn of 1944 they found and interrogated Hodys. She testified against Hoess.

Her very long and extremely detailed official statement survived the war, although the current location of the original German text is unknown (Institut für Zeitgeschichte only has a reverse translation into German by Wiebeck). The English translation was published in 1945 book Dachau and in 2003 in Dachau liberated. Apparently the document was handed over to the Americans by Wiebeck, who had prepared the statement (see Hilberg's Destruction..., 1985, p. 579n25; he relies on Wiebeck's testimony, NO-2330). Why it was published in the book about Dachau I have no clue. Perhaps just as a general illustration of Nazism. And the editors of the 2003 tome had no clue about who E.H. was and simply reprinted the statement, thinking it was a testimony of a Dachau prisoner about her time in Auschwitz.