A (not so) short debunking of the "Holocaust Deprogramming Course".

The archived website.

The first sentence (after the title) is a lie:

"Free yourself from a lifetime of Holo-brainwashing about “Six Million” Jews “gassed” in “Gas Chambers Disguised as Shower Rooms”"

The claim is not that 6 million Jews were gassed. Only about a half or so of all Holocaust victims were gassed, the rest were murdered through mass shootings, starvation, death marches and so on.

There. We are done. The author of the site did not even bother to learn the basic claim that he has set out to debunk. He doesn't have the slightest clue. Dismissed.

But just for fun, let's go further.

"I have seen the gas chambers, I have seen the crematoria"

We've received clarification of our post about the widely circulated Oskar Groening interview for the BBC Auschwitz series.

Though we pointed up a discrepancy between the English transcript and German audiotrack of Groening's interview, it turns out, according to director Laurence Rees, that

the transcript correctly represents what Mr Groening said in his interview. He did say he had seen the gas chambers. But these words were not used in the final edited sequence of the film. Much fuller versions of Mr Groening's testimony are already available in published form in the book of the series which I wrote. On page 373 of the British paperback edition, for example, you can read a more complete section of his interview where he talks about seeing the gas chambers. It was this section which was edited down for inclusion in programme six of the series. Elsewhere, on page 207 he describes seeing the Zyklon B inserted into a gas chamber.

Unlike deniers, at least we publish corrections.

When deniers are right

Holocaust deniers are seldom right, even in the details. But, very rarely, their claims of falsified evidence do turn out to be correct. Such is the case with Laurence Rees' Auschwitz documentary.

The transcript of the part 6 contains the following text:

Oskar Gröning: "I see it as my task, now at my age, to face up to these things that I experienced and to oppose the Holocaust deniers who claim that Auschwitz never happened. And that's why I am here today. Because I want to tell those deniers: I have seen the gas chambers, I have seen the crematoria, I have seen the burning pits - and I want you to believe me that these atrocities happened. I was there."

I emphasized the critical part. Portuguese denier A S Marques wrote a letter to David Irving, in which he pointed out that the words "the gas chambers" were absent from Groening's speech in the documentary itself - both in the original German, and in the translation.

Upon checking, this claim turned out to be correct. Somebody has deliberately inserted the words "the gas chambers" into the transcript, and they've spread over the Web. This is the kind of thing that keeps deniers ticking.

Update: Mr. Rees has clarified the issue in the comments. Also see this posting. It's weird that the editor(s) chose to cut out these most important words.