Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (2)

I. Introductions
III. Policy
IV. Techno-babble and Conclusions

II. Documents and Numbers

In his response to Andrew Mathis and me following our radio conversation with Kevin Barrett on American Freedom Radio, "Revisionist" author "Thomas Dalton" writes:

(3) On the Korherr report, it is true that I do not address it in my book Debating the Holocaust. This is because it is, in my estimation, an insignificant and inconclusive matter in the overall debate. The report was not secret, and nothing in it points to mass killing of Jews. It does, however, talk about mass evacuations, which were indeed occurring at that time (early 1943). And there are internal contradictions, in that the conclusions do not follow from the statistics, which suggests either significant error or ulterior motives of some kind. Finally, Korherr himself stated in 1977 that the “special treatment” cited in the report referred to “Jews who were to be resettled,” not killed.

Interviews on American Freedom Radio

Yesterday between 17 and 19 hours local time, Kevin Barrett interviewed "Revisionist" author "Thomas Dalton" and then Andrew Mathis and me on America Freedom Radio. The record of these interviews is available on Kevin Barrett's page on AFR.

Euphemisms and Camouflage (Part 2)

I noted in Part 1 how Korherr and Hoefle got their euphemisms in a twist. The same contradiction can be found when we trace the original instructions for transports from the ghettos to Treblinka.

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On the one hand, official documentation listed the Jews transported from Warsaw to Treblinka as "resettlers". However, transports from Grodno/Bialystok to Treblinka were listed as labour transports, according to this trial judgement:

However, Altenloh and Errelis deny they knew that the final destination was Treblinka, and that the intent of the order was the extermination of the Jews. They claim they believed the purported official motivation: relocation of Jews for conscripted labor.

Deniers who insist that Treblinka was a transit camp must therefore explain why the Grodno transports had this 'labour' euphemism.

It seems to me that the most likely reason why the euphemism 'transit camps' was not used for the Bialystok/Grodno transports was that such camouflage would obviously have seemed ridiculous to anyone reading the order, because they would have known that the transports were going from east to west. If the SS and RSHA had worked out this obvious fact in 1942, why are deniers still struggling with the concept in 2007?

Euphemisms and Camouflage (Part 1)

Michael Mills makes an interesting point in this letter to Irving, but probably not the point he wanted to make!

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In a nutshell, the Hoefle Telegram and Korherr Report contain identical figures for Jews transported to the Reinhardt camps. However, Hoefle used 'zugang', which means 'influx' or 'inflow', whereas Korherr (on instruction from Himmler) changed his wording from sonderbehandlung (special treatment) to 'durchgeschleust', which means 'guided through'.

We therefore have two contradictory forms of camouflage. Hoefle camouflaged death camps as labour camps, whilst Korherr camouflaged them as transit camps.

The contradiction reveals why it is absurd of dim-witted deniers to claim that documents should be read literally. The only explanation that makes sense is that camouflage terms are being used, as the same populations of Jews could not have been simultaneously admitted as labourers and sent to the USSR because they were unfit for labour.

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 3)

In Part 2 of this series, we examined Sanning's distortion of a wartime Jewish source. In this third part, we examine his false dating of Nazi demographic data.

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Sanning builds a deliberate deception into Table 6 (p.75-78), which purports to show the populations of major cities in the Soviet Union (including former eastern Poland) immediately prior to the Nazi invasion of June 1941. Sanning’s footnote ‘j’ (p.78) reveals that most of these data are taken from a Nazi document written in January 1943:

j. Zentralblatt des Reichskommissars für die Ukraine, Rowno, 2. Jahrgang, No. 2, 9. January 1943, S. 8-20.

On page 85, Sanning uses this same document to note that the “local population living under German administration in the RK Ukraine numbered 16.91 million as of January 1, 1943.” Sanning must therefore know that the figures in Table 6 should apply to that date, not the date that the Nazis invaded the USSR, yet he still brazenly goes on to claim that reductions in the population of Ukraine between 1939 and January 1, 1943, were due entirely to Soviet action, despite the fact that the Nazis had been in the Ukraine for eighteen months at that point:

…the pre-war population of the Ukraine must have numbered more than 22.5m; however, the Germans found less than 17 million. One-quarter of the population had disappeared.

Sanning has therefore deliberately converted the Jews murdered by the Nazis between June 1941 and January 1943 into Soviet deportees by conflating the two dates and pretending the population data for January 1943 refer to June 1941.

Sanning's distortions concerning the Soviet Union are systematic. For example, Zimmerman has shown how Sanning repeatedly distorts sources relating to Soviet evacuation policy to give the misleading impression that most Jews were evacuated, when in fact those sources state explicitly that most Jews "could not or would not leave."

The date of Sanning’s Nazi source is also revealing because it coincides with that of the Korherr Report, which covered the same time frame as Sanning’s source (i.e. up the end of 1942) but openly admitted that the reductions in population were caused by Nazi policy. For example, at the foot of page 2 of his “short” report (which was specifically produced for Hitler’s attention), Korherr helpfully summarized the results of Nazi killings. Roberto has translated this table as follows:

Region; Time of Taking over of Power; Number of Jews before Taking over of Power; Number of Jews on 31.12.1942

Old Reich and Sudetenland; 30.1.1933 and 29.9.1938; 561,000 and 30,000; 51,327

Ostmark [Austria after annexation, translator’s note]; 13.3.1938; 220,000; 8,102

Bohemia and Moravia; 16.3.1939; 118,000; 15,550

Eastern Territories (with Bialystok); September 1939 (June 1940); 790,000; 233,210

General Government (with Lemberg); September 1939 (June 1940); 2,000,000; 297,914.

Sum Total; - ; 3,719,000; 606,103

Sanning’s failure to discuss this report reveals his discomfort with its contents. For example, Sanning's fraudulent figures are clearly exposed by the transportation data to the Operation Reinhard camps that can be found in the Korherr Report, and also in the Hoefle Telegram and Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. These all tell a similar story. Sanning had claimed that only 857,000 Jews were left in western Poland after the rest fled over the demarcation line, yet Korherr’s figures show that a higher number of Jews than this was transferred to the Reinhard camps and Chelmno:

Number passed through the camp in the general government [of Poland]... 1,274,166 [and] through the camp at Warthegau [Chelmno]…145,301

The Hoefle Telegram repeated the total of 1,274,166, consisting of 24,733 at Majdanek, 434,508 at Belzec, 101,370 at Sobibor and 713,555 at Treblinka.

Arad estimates the total transported at 1.7 million. Furthermore, Arad’s breakdown of transports from specific locations refutes Sanning’s claim that the reductions in population occurred before the Nazi invasion. For example, Sanning (p.42) claims that 50,000 Jewish refugees had been deported from Lvov by the Soviets, but Arad demonstrates that over 70,000 Jews were deported from Lvov to Belzec.

Richard "I didn’t know" Korherr

German statistician Dr. Richard Korherr is known for his statistical reports about "The Final Solution of the European Jewish Question". The original text of these reports is available on this site, and the respective English translation can be found on this thread of the HC forum(posts 03/28/12 10:09:44, "long" version, and 03/28/12 10:10:42, "short" version).

Questions Mikey Piper Can't Answer

Michael Collins Piper and I went round and round a month or two ago. While I was on hiatus, I fired off the following e-mail. He has chosen not to respond, and elected, rather, to report me to my employer for "harassing" him.

Three Questions for You

Hello again, Mr. Piper:

I understand that you are one of these people that believes that the number of Jews killed during World War II is heavily inflated and that there were no gas chambers nor any central plan by the Nazis to kill Jews.

I was wondering how you would answer three questions:

(1) In a letter written January 29, 1943, to SS Colonel Hans Kammler, Karl Bischoff, an SS captain and architect at Auschwitz-Birkenau, mentions a room in Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau that he refers to as a "Vergasungskeller." He is referring to the room that the blueprints for Krema II designate as a "Leichenkeller" (morgue). It has been suggested that the "Vergasungskeller" could have been a gas production cellar or a gas attack shelter for the Nazis. However, it would have been foolish to place a gas production cellar so close to the crematory ovens in Krema II, and certainly the word for a gas attack shelter would have the word "Schutz" in there somewhere. Complicating the matter is the fact that a letter from Erhard Wetzel, a Nazi adviser on Jewish Affairs, to Heinrich Lohse, Reichkommissar for Ostland, stationed at Riga, mentions the "Vergasungsapparate" that had been used in the T-4 Euthanasia program in Berlin. So clearly "Vergasung" can mean "to kill with gas."

How would you explain this document if the room being referred to in Bischoff's letter is not a gas chamber?

(2) During an "action" against Jews on the Eastern Front during the war, an SS man named Max Täubner was brought up on criminal charges for, as an officer, shooting Jews himself, as well as photographing the "action" and showing the photos to people back in Berlin. He was tried before an SS court in Munich, which rendered its verdict on May 24, 1943. The judge wrote, in part:

"The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of Kommandos which were set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for considering himself to have the authority to take part in the extermination of Jewry himself."

If there was no program to exterminate the Jews, then what was this judge in Munich talking about when he rendered his verdict?

(3) By the end of 1942, Nazi statistician Richard Korherr estimated that 2.5 million Jews had already been killed since the beginning of the war. The so-called Reinhard camps would continue to operate into the following year, Kulmhof would not close until 1944, and Auschwitz-Birkenau stopped killing prisoners in November 1944. Given the census that the Nazis themselves took for their conference at Wannsee, chaired by SS General Reinhard Heydrich, in January 1942 -- a census that concludes that there were, at that time, 11 million Jews in Europe and areas under Jewish control (primarily North Africa and the Middle East), is it ridiculous to suggest that the number of Jews killed could have been at least twice that many by May 8, 1945?

I thank you in advance for your responses.

Andrew E. Mathis, Ph.D.

Please e-mail Mikey and ask him why he hasn't answered these simple questions.

More Misrepresentations from Graf: Lithuania

When prominent Swiss denier Jürgen Graf is not calling Filip Müller, Rudolf Vrba and Elie Wiesel "bald-faced liars and swindlers", he is busy misrepresenting the pioneering historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg. Not content with writing an entire book attacking Hilberg, albeit of less than 10% of the length of The Destruction of European Jews, Graf has also attacked Hilberg's recent methodological work Sources of Holocaust Research. Graf calls Hilberg 'incurably autistic' - the question is, is he projecting or simply making up fairy-tales again? Let's see.

A case in point: Graf's discussion of the infamous Einsatzgruppe A Report on the Final Solution in the Baltic States and in particular the Jäger Report on Lithuania.

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Here's what Graf says about Hilberg's use of the Einsatzgruppe A report:

On page 145 Hilberg reproduces a card sketch, which, along with other evidence, is intended to support his allegations concerning executions in the East. On this card the numbers of Jews shot by Einsatz Group A in various regions are represented by coffins. The highest number of shootings is given for Lithuania, where, he alleges, no fewer than 136,421 Jews had been murdered as of 1942. This number does indeed appear in one of the Einsatz reports, where it is reported:
"At the time of the Bolshevik invasion, according to a census made in 1923, 153,743 Jews were living in Lithuania. This represented 7.58% of the population... In numerous individual operations, a total of 136,421 Jews have been liquidated...
Jews in Ghettos:
In Kauen, around 15,000 Jews;
In Wilna, around 15,000 Jews;
In Schaulen, around 4,500 Jews."
Simple addition shows that the total number of allegedly liquidated Jews, when added to those still living in ghettos, is a great deal higher than the number of Jews present before the German invasion.

Stop right there. Graf is evidently too stupid to remember, or deliberately doesn't want to remember, that Lithuania as of 1941 incorporated the Wilno district, which was inhabited by 110,000 Jews in 1931, and swollen by many refugees from western Poland between 1939 and 1941. Wilno (today, Vilnius) was home to up to 80,000 Jewish inhabitants by the outbreak of war.

Indeed, let's tot up the numbers reported for the town of Wilno alone, between August 12 and November 25, 1941: 21,169 executions
On top of these, let's add up how many the same Kommando executed in the surrounding towns: 13,484 executions
Not to mention, the Teilkommando sent to Minsk: 3,050 executions
And then we have the German Jews deported to Kovno in November 1941, who clearly did not live in Lithuania before the war: 4,934 executions
Already, that's 42,637 executions not carried out on the inhabitants of the same territory as Lithuania in 1923. Of course, Graf does not bother to do anything as elementary as look at the statistics, does he? So he continues to dig himself deeper into a hole.

This is only a part of the puzzling statistics, however:
The same operational report for the adjoining country of Latvia states that around 25% of the Jewish population there had fled with the Bolsheviks. No corresponding exodus is mentioned for Lithuania, however.

Because Lithuania was overrun in less than one week, whereas Latvia was farther away from the border.

This is very puzzling because the Lithuanian Jews had as little reason to expect good things from the Germans as did the Latvian Jews. Jewish participation in the Bolshevik terror there had been proportionately much greater than in Latvia and had enraged the native population.

Here, naturally, Graf shows his double standards, by failing to cite a single source for this antisemitic 'Jew/Bolshevik' canard.

But it gets worse: Graf not only does not understand that Lithuania was closer to the German border of 1941 than was Latvia, he also does not understand what territories were located in Lithuania:

A large part of the Lithuanian Jews had lived in regions, which had been annexed to the Reich after the German conquest of Lithuania. At the time of the Einsatz report these Jews were still alive. According to Gerald Reitlinger, there were 40,000 such Jews in the area of Grodno at that time.[17] According to the Korherr report,[18] 18,435 Jews still resided in the Königsberg region at the end of 1942.

Can anyone be more stupid? Grodno was never in Lithuania, not even under the Tsars. It belonged to the Bialystok voivodship under Poland, and to the Bialystok oblast under the Soviets. As for the citation in the Korherr report of Jewish workers remaining in East Prussia, this, too, explicitly refers to the Bialystok district of Poland/Belorussia, not to Lithuania. 18,435 Jewish workers of 'Soviet Russian' nationality are recorded, and just 96 others.

But let's humour Jürgen The Swiss German, and see what happened in a small sliver of territory just beyond the Memelgebiet (which Germany had annexed in 1939. Alas for Graf, it is fairly certain, however, that they did not contain any formerly Lithuanian Jews, because they had been murdered by Staatspolizeistelle Tilsit in June and July 1941. Here is a quote from a document that Graf evidently missed on his visit to the Osobyi Arkhiv in Moscow:

In Zusammenwirken mit dem SD-Abschnitt in Tilsit wurden drei Grosssaeuberungsaktionen durchgefuehert, und zwar wurden
am 24. Juni 1941 in Garsden 201 Personen (einschl. 1 Frau)
am 25. Juni 1941 in Krottingen 214 Personen (einschl. 1 Frau)
am 27. Juni 1941 in Polangen 111 Personen
erschossen
Stapostelle Tilsit, Betr.: Saeuberungsaktionen jenseits der ehemaligen sowjet-litauischen Grenze, RGVA 500-1-758, p.2

By July 18, the renamed Einsatzkommando Tilsit had executed 3,302 victims.

Next, in an attempt to over-egg the pudding, Graf tries the 'vot-on-earth-are-ze-unfit-doing-alive!!!!' routine deniers like so much, without realising it makes them sound like the SS officers they evidently fantasise about being:

According to statistics prepared in Lithuania and based on original documents from the war years, there were 3,693 children plus a large number of elderly persons (up to age 90) who were living in the ghetto of Vilnius at the end of May 1942. Since they were unfit for work, one would expect that these Jews would have been the first victims of any policy of extermination. In a report on schools in Vilnius, the Jewish American author Abraham Foxman points out that in October 1942, 1500 to 1800 children were receiving instruction there.

And once again, Graf exposes his complete ignorance of the history of the Wilno ghetto. To quote the ARC website page:

On 23 October 1941, Murer distributed 3,000 yellow coloured Scheine (certificates / permits), among the Jews in Ghetto 1. A Gelbschein enabled its bearer to register three additional family members, who carried blue permits.

The surviving dependants were deported to Sobibor and gassed there in September 1943. Why so late? There are many local factors, not least the interventions of courageous Wehrmacht officers to protect the families of their key workers in maintenance workshops. And why should Graf assume that German policy was always the same everywhere?

Finally, no denier rant would, of course, be complete without a reference to the physical evidence.

Finally, material evidence of a mass murder of Jews in the alleged numbers is totally nonexistent. In the Lithuanian city of Marijampol in 1996, it was decided to erect a monument to tens of thousands of Jews who had allegedly been shot by the Germans. They began excavations at the site designated by eyewitnesses in order to locate the mass grave, but lo and behold, there was nothing there.[21] Even if the Germans had posthumously exhumed and cremated those tens of thousands of corpses, as Hilberg and his consorts allege, any mass grave would still be easily identifiable because of altered configurations of the soil.

Alas for moonbat Graf, this canard has been proven wrong and debunked.

Under these circumstances, a conscientious historian would not unquestioningly accept field reports as an infallible source.

Under these circumstances, a conscientious historian would make sure he or she has read the document correctly, and then tries to remember not to get his or her geography mixed up, before finding other documents that help confirm the source, and remember not to pontificate about missing physical evidence that was in fact found.

It seems the only one suffering from incurable autism around here is Jürgen Graf.