Saurer Company or Why even Rudolf has shown the Diesel Issue is irrelevant on Gas Vans ("Rebuttal of "Holocaust Encyclopedia")

For decades, Holocaust deniers have claimed that the Saurer gas vans had to have diesel engines, and since diesel exhaust has lower carbon monoxide, they conclude the vans couldn’t have been used for murder. The argument is irrelevant as the RSHA turned chassis with gasoline engines into gas vans. A detailed refutation of the "diesel issue" argument was published ten years ago and has never been answered in substance to my knowledge (see Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant). Denier Alvarez’s new edition (2023) of his book "The Gas Vans" continues to repeat it, without a single source, counter-argument, or whisper of a rebuttal to the refutations that already exist. 

Germar Rudolf’s entry "Saurer Company" in CODOH's Holocaust Encyclopedia tries a fresh variation:

He notes that the RSHA motor pool acquired a number of Saurer 5-ton chassis in 1942  and the company Gaubschat in Berlin built a cargo box on each chassis - "for an unspecified purpose".  The historical consensus (or as Rudolf  like to call it "orthodoxy") holds that these were mobile gas chambers. Rudolf argues that because gasoline-engined trucks were supposedly "much easier" to obtain from other manufacturers, the RSHA’s Saurers “must have had diesel engines".

Here’s where the things get interesting. 

Rudolf concedes for the first time what deniers once swore was impossible and what we have pointed out at this blog: that Saurer did, in fact, produce gasoline-engine trucks during the war - in the French factory in Suresnes near Paris

No, Germans were not accused of, sentenced or executed for the Katyn massacre in the Leningrad trial.

 On David Irving's site we find the following message:

Innocent executed

Doing my reading on the history of German war crimes, German war criminals and their adjudication by the victors after World War II, I came across a most interesting passage. In November 1945, seven officers of the German Wehrmacht (and I think it is reasonable to mention their names -- K.H. Strueffling, H. Remlinger, E. Böhom, E. Sommerfeld, H. Jannike, E. Skotki and E. Geherer) were tried by a court of the victorious allies, the Americans, the English, the French and the Russians. They were condemned to death for war crimes and subsequently hanged.

Three more were tried on the same charges (E.P. Vogel, F. Wiese, A. Diere), received sentences of 20 years of hard labor, were turned over to the Russians and never heard of again.

Most interesting about this particular war trial is the charge. The officers were charged and hanged for having shot thousands of Polish officers in the forest of Katyn after the defeat of Poland in 1939.

Now, with glasnost and all, it has been officially established and admitted by the Russians themselves that the murder of thousands of the gallant Polish officer corps in the forest near Katyn was committed by the bolsheviks of Stalin, not by the murderous Nazis, years before the German army invaded. The poor above-mentioned soldiers never got near the scene of the crime.

What evidence was used to hang these innocent soldiers? Who fabricated the "facts" that convinced the court that these men were guilty? Murderers? What do the judges, if they are still alive, have to say for themselves? What of the prosecutors? What were these people hanged for?

H. Famira

Professor of German

Concordia University

Montreal

This claim is moderately popular among the Holocaust deniers. One finds it in places "high" and "low". There are messages at the CODOH forum making the claim. 

It is repeated by the denier Georges M. Theil in his Heresy in Twenty-First Century France, 2006, pp. 65-66:

Although the Allied intelligence services (notably the British) had known from the start that it was the Soviets who had put thousands of captive Polish officers to death in Katyn forest in 1940, they subsequently let the rumour spread that the Germans were the authors of that massacre. Afterwards, the Soviets were to hang seven German officers and men for the crime: Ernst Böhm, Ernst Geherer, Herbard Janicke, Heinrich Remmlinger, Erwin Skotki, Eduard Sonnenfeld and Karl Strüffling. They sentenced another three innocent Germans to twenty years’ hard labour: Arno Diere, Erich Paul Vogel and Franz Weiss.

By Joachim Nolywaika in Die Sieger im Schatten ihrer Schuld, 1994, p. 246:

Im Winter 1945/46 wurde in Leningrad mehreren deutschen Offizieren als angeblich für die Katyn-Morde Verantwortlichen der Prozeß gemacht, worüber die sowjetische Agentur „Tass" am 30. Dezember 1945 berichtete. Zum Tode durch den Strang wurden verurteilt Karl Hermann Strüffling, Heinrich Remmlinger, Ernst Böhm, Eduard Sonnenfeld, Herberd Janike. Erwin Skotki und Ernst Geherer. Zwanzig beziehungsweise fünfzehn Jahre Zwangsarbeit erhielten Erich Paul Vogel, Franz Wiese und Arno Diere.

The claim also appears in the neo-Nazi "encyclopedia" Der Grosse Wendig and in the neo-Nazi wiki Metapedia and the Holocaust denying fraudster Germar Rudolf simply swallows and then regurgitates the latter's claim in his Garrison and Headquarters Orders of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, 2020, p. 2:

Ernst Böhm (born 1911 in Oschersleben, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, died on 5 January 1946) was one of the seven German officers of the Wehrmacht who were convicted and executed/murdered in the Soviet Union after a show trial. They had been wrongly accused of having participated in the Katyn massacre. For me, the choice of this name as a pseudonym is a declaration of solidarity for those innocently persecuted. Metapedia writes in the entry about Ernst Böhm (accessed on March 27, 2020): ...

One of the dishonest denier gurus, Walter Lüftl, also repeated the claim.

Predictably, most of the claim is false. But first let's address the core of truth (I. S. Yazhborovskaja, A. Yu. Yablokov, V. S. Parsadanova, Katynskij sindrom v sovetsko-pol'skikh i rossijsko-pol'skikh otnoshenijakh, Moscow, 2001, pp. 336, 337):

Two people were prepared as "German witnesses who were participants in the Katyn provocation" - Professor Butz's assistant Ludwig Schneider and soldier Arno Düre. Military prosecutors [investigating the Katyn crime] found the archive criminal case of general of the German army H. Remlinger, who carried out punitive actions on the territory of Leningrad region. As it turned out, from December 28, 1945 to January 4, 1946, the criminal case against Remlinger, Düre and five other German soldiers was considered by the military tribunal of the Leningrad military district in the presence of a large number of Soviet and foreign correspondents. A. Düre, who had shot people with a machine gun in several villages, escaped the death penalty because, answering the prosecutor's leading questions, he confirmed that he had allegedly participated in the burial of 15-20 thousand Polish prisoners of war in Katyn. For this, the security organs let the "witness" live (he received 15 years of hard labor), but still did not dare to use him as a witness at Nuremberg: he was not able to play the role assigned to him properly. Düre gave absurd answers to many questions of the prosecutor and the court, which unambiguously exposed the false plot. For example, allowing his fantasy to run wild, he claimed that the Katyn Forest was in Poland, that the depth of the ditch in which the Poles had been buried was 15-20 m, that they had strengthened the walls of the ditch with tree branches, etc. Later, in a statement of November 29, 1954, Düre recanted his testimony about his participation in the burial of the Poles in Katyn, and declared that he had been forced to say so during the investigation.

Now let's turn to the indictment of the trial from 25.12.1945 (TsA FSB, f. K-72, op. 1, por. 28, l. 247–258). We see that nobody was accused of anything to do with Katyn and specifically Düre was accused as follows (p. 18 of the indictment):

The accused DÜRE, while a soldier of the 2nd company of the 2nd battalion for "special purposes" on 20.07.1944, while retreating with the battalion, took part in the burning of a village near the town of Ostrov and at that time shot 25 peaceful Soviet citizens.

That's all.

Now let's look at the verdict (ibid., l. 221-246). Katyn is not mentioned at all. Nobody was convicted for participating in the Katyn massacre. About Düre the verdict has only the following to say (p. 6 of the verdict):

Wiese, while the commander of the 1st company of the 2nd battalion for special purposes, and Düre and Vogel being soldiers of this same battalion in July of 1944 in the vicinity of the town of Ostrov took part in the burning of villages, incl. the village of Yudino, and in shooting and robbery of peaceful citizens.

Düre's sentencing (p. 6v of the verdict):

... exile for hard labor for the duration of 15 years.

Vogel and Wiese were sentenced to 20 years of hard labor, the rest were sentenced to death. There's no evidence whatsoever any of them were innocent.

So let's sum up. While Düre was a false witness about Katyn and probably provided his testimony during the trial in exchange for a more lenient sentence, contrary to the deniers the trial wasn't about Katyn, nobody was accused of participating in the Katyn massacre or sentenced for it. (And, I should add, Düre recanting his false testimony was pretty typical and makes a mockery of the deniers' claims that the Nazis who confessed in a much more free environment of West Germany would have upheld their allegedly false testimonies until their deaths).

So much for the "revisionist" "research".

The doors to wisdom are shut - Rudolf on the crematorium in Auschwitz main camp

The Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf published an article on "The Thin Internal Walls of Krematorium I at Auschwitz" with supposedly "far-reaching consequences" - summed up as yet another nonsensical slogan: "No doors, no destruction".

Rudolf argues that the internal walls of the crematorium were "unable to support the installation of massive steel doors". Even if - for the sake of argument - the internal walls of the crematorium were too weak for a "massive steel door", there is no reason the Nazis had to have used a "massive steel door" in the first place. The screwing shut mechanism mentioned by witnesses does not point to "massive steel fixtures", as Rudolf presumes, but to the makeshift gas-tight strong wooden doors pictured in Pressac's Technique and Operation of the Auschwitz Gas-Chambers (see also Rebutting the "Twitter denial"). Nothing suggests, let aside proves, that these doors and their anchoring could not withstand the pressure from inside the homicidal gas chambers (Viewer's Guide to "Auschwitz - The Surprising Hidden Truth").

The homicidal gassings in the crematorium in Auschwitz main camp are demonstrated by numerous pieces of evidence (e.g. Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria). It does not 'hinge' on the gas-chamber's door. There is no indication that the gas-tight wooden doors produced in the camp's workshop could not do the job for the provisional crematorium 1 gas chamber (or any other, for that matter).

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.

How Mattogno & Rudolf Invented A Crazy Journey of a Jewish Transport from Holland Through Upper Silesia

Almost unnoticed, an Italian researcher made a surprising discovery on the route of Jewish transports to Auschwitz.

On 16 October 1942, a Jewish transport with 1,710 departed from the Netherlands (Westerbork camp) to Auschwitz. But the train did not only halt at the station Cosel in Upper Silesia, where 570 Jews were taken out for forced labour, as it is well-known so far.

According to this Italian researcher, the transport was diverted from its route to Auschwitz after reaching Cosel. Instead of going eastwards to Auschwitz, the train headed North-West to Gogolin, where some Jews were unloaded and admitted to the camps St. Annaberg or Sakrau. At Gogolin, the transport was either going further North to Oppeln and then East to take a halt at Voßwalde. Here, some more people got off to go to the camp Malapane between Oppeln and Voßwalde. The journey continued South to Blechhammer, some 5 km East of Cosel, where the train had started its detour and where more people were again taken out for forced labour. The train headed straight to Königshütte near Kattowitz, where it let off more forced labourers for the Bismarckhütte. Finally, the transport arrived at the Auschwitz camp.

Alternatively, the deportees were sent back from Gogolin to Cosel via Kattowitz to Auschwitz. But the transport was not unloaded at the Auschwitz camp. Instead, some Jews were selected for forced labour for the camp Bobrek. The rest of the people was taken back to Blechhammer (5 km East of Cosel, where they had been earlier the day), then to Königshütte (which they pass now for the third time) to sent Jews to Bismarckhütte and finally to the Auschwitz camp.

How does that sound? Incredible? Unbelievable? Well, perhaps I should have mentioned that this Italian "researcher" is not doing historical research in the proper sense, but he is just watching out for any straw - how matter far-fetched and absurd - to deny the Holocaust.

Holocaust Denial and Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211" (Part III)

Now that Carlo Mattogno is out of the game (see Part I & Part II), let's hear the rest of the denier's band on Himmler's report to Hitler.

Germar Rudolf’s foreword to Mattogno’s Einzatzgruppen book

The English translation of Mattogno’s Einsatzgruppen opus, which bears the title The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories. Genesis, Missions and Actions and has already been addressed in several HC articles, has finally been published.

Towards the end of October, as mentioned in this article, Germar Rudolf wrote that "We have submitted a long list of open issues -- including remarks made by the HC Blog -- to the author for his review, and are awaiting his feedback". However, there seems to have been no such feedback, or then it was limited to excuses for not addressing that long list of open issues, or then Rudolf changed his mind.

Either possibility is in line with the final part of Rudolf’s foreword to Mattogno’s book, which will be addressed in this article. Said foreword is on pp. 11-22 of the book, and the part referring to the "remarks made by the HC Blog" is on pp. 21 and 22.

Germar Rudolf's fraudulent treatment of the Balard shooting range footage.

In the mockumentary "Probing the Holocaust", the transcript of which is available here, Germar Rudolf presents the footage of the Balard shooting range in order to "prove" that the Allies were engaged in an outright Holocaust-related fraud.

The Balard shooting range was built in 1938 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, at the boulevard Victor in the XVth arrondissement of Paris for training police offcers. It was demolished in 1964. During the Nazi occupation it served as a place of torture and executions.

In his mockumentary Rudolf brings up the postwar footage of the shooting range during his segment on the gas chamber of Dachau (which will be dealt with at a later date). He tries to prove that the footage proves that the Allied Psychological Warfare divisions were faking evidence of Nazi atrocities, and thus wants to dismiss the Dachau gas chamber as another such fake.

Let's take a look at his arguments.

Germar Rudolf doubles down on John Ball's Babiy Yar lie.

John Ball's blatant lie about Babiy Yar was exposed by me here back in 2006.

Long story short, Ball lied about the place where the shootings took place in the ravine and "analyzed" the wrong area of the aerial photo. Here, once again, is the photo with Ball's picture overlaid. No witness has claimed shootings took place there. Ball deceptively omitted most of the ravine, including the places where the shootings did take place.

Ball's lie was republished under Germar Rudolf's editorship numerous times.

Ball's book is the volume 27 of the "Holocaust Handbooks" series and is already in its 5th "corrected and updated edition".

There's a note:

The first three editions of this book bore John C. Ball as the author of this work. On Jan. 29, 2015, John requested not to use his name for new editions, but allowed us the use all of the photographic and texual material as we see fit.
The first edition appeared in 1992 under the title Air Photo Evidence: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen, Belzec, Babi Yar, Katyn Forest— World War II photos of alleged mass murder camps! Does evidence confirm or dismiss eye witness stories? Were gas chamber marks put on by CIA workers?, self-published by the author, Ball Resource Services Ltd., Delta, BC, Canada. The second edition of January 2015 has the same title as the current one and is a marginally corrected reprint of the first edition with a preface similar to the present one plus a number of footnotes added. The third and fourth editions (January 2015, March 2017) resembled the current one closely, except for some updates, corrections and material added.

Naturally, the lie is still in the book:

Wrong! This location is not alleged to have been used for shootings or cremations.

Fake news! Entirely wrong location.

A blatant lie! "8" is not the location "where between 33,771 and 100,000 bodies were said to have been exhumed and cremated".

Rudolf is well aware of our blog, so he has no excuse whatsoever.

Needless to say, this lie fully discredits not only the hoaxer John Ball (about whose other exploits you can read here, here and here) but also the fraud Germar Rudolf, known for his use of numerous fake PhDs in absence of a real one.

Prussian blue penetration depth.

Many years ago a few article drafts appeared on the late Harry Mazal's website mazal.org. One of them was entitled "Techincal requirements for a gas chamber and some observations on Prussian blue".

It turned out to be a draft of the article quoted by Dr. Richard Green in his devastating rebuttal of the fraudulent Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf. Apparently it was initially to be a part of the collective report responding to Rudolf, though later it was decided that only Dr. Green and Prof. Jan van Pelt would officially respond.

The drafts disappeared from the site some time later, and Mr. Mazal died in 2011. The paper was left unpublished, and it is highly unlikely that it will ever be published. Therefore I decided to post an excerpt from this article that concerns one point about the formation of Prussian blue with several valuable photos.

The excerpt follows. There has been some minimal editing of the references (like picture numbers).

Mattogno’s Marijampolė Mass Graves Controversy

One of the largest massacres committed in German-occupied Lithuania in 1941 took place near the city of Marijampolė. The victims were the following, as recorded in the report dated 1.12.1941 by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 (the 2nd Jäger Report)^[1], under the date 1 September 1941:

Mariampole

1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses 1,404 Jewish children, 109 mentally ill, 1 fem. German national who was married to a Jew, 1 fem. Russian

The Kinna Report - German Document on the Killing of Unfit Jews in Auschwitz

Introduction

In late 1942, several thousand Poles were deported from Zamosc to destinations according to their racial value attributed to them by Nazis since the area was declared "to the first German settlement area in the Generalgouvernement" (order of Himmler of 12 November 1942, Jaczynska, Sonderlaboratorium SS, p. 414). The racially most inferior defined people were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. The transport left Zamosc with 644 Poles of this group on 10 December 1942. Several people escaped from the train, the rest was admitted to Auschwitz on 13 December 1942.

The SS officer Heinrich Kinna of the migration central office wrote a report about the transport on 16 December 1942, in which he also summarised his talk with the deputy commandant in Auschwitz, Hans Aumeier (who he spelled phonetically as "Haumeier"). Aumeier informed Kinna on the camp's lethal policy on unfit prisoners, an indiscretion only trumped by Kinna writing that down in plain words:

"Imbeciles, idiots, cripples and sick people have to be removed from the camp within a short time by liquidation to unburden the camp. But this measure has insofar complications as, according to the order from the RSHA, the Poles have to die of a natural death contrary to the measures applied to the Jews."

(extract from the report of Heinrich Kinna of 16 December 1942, reproduced in full below)

It is noteworthy that while Kinna's employer, the migration central office in Lodz, sounds rather innocent and unrelated to the murder of Jews, its men were dispatched to Chelmno/Kulmhof extermination camp in 1942 (see documents 16 and 17 in Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - Origin and Foundation), so that Kinna might have been already inside the circle of people knowing details on the extermination of Jews. In fact, in his job description Kinna himself included the task "carrying out measures [Zweckmaßnahmen] against Jews and anti-social people" (letter of Kinna to the SS Personnel Main Office of 13 July 1943, cited in Aly, "Endlösung". Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden, p. 20).

The significance of this contemporary German document lies in its reference to the killing of Jews unfit for work in Auschwitz without resorting to the usual camouflage language (see for instance Mattogno's special treatment of evidence and "Separate accommodation" in Auschwitz: a code word for extrajudicial executions).

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.

The Rothstein canard

In a vain attempt to find a single Jewish prisoner transited through Belzec, Treblinka, Chelmno or Sobibor to the "Russian East" the Holocaust deniers turned to the electronic Holocaust names databases. In "Gassed at Treblinka and deceased in Minsk" Jean-Marie Boisdefeu claimed to have found one such person:

Germar Rudolf destroys Don Heddesheimer in a single sentence.

Heddesheimer's thesis in The First Holocaust is just silly: the figure "six million" was mentioned in relation to Jews before the WWII, therefore something something. There is no logical or historical connection between those cherrypicked mentions and the proven facts of the Holocaust. Basically, that is all that needs to be said to deal with this sad little irrelevant brochure.

But now, on the heels of Amazon throwing out of dozens of Holocaust denial books, comes Germar Rudolf and agrees:

[Heddesheimer's book] deals with Jewish fundraising campaigns during and after the FIRST World War, and therefore if only for chronological reason does not deal with the Jewish Holocaust of the SECOND World War.

There you have it, from the horse's mouth:  Heddesheimer's thesis is totally irrelevant to the Holocaust.

PS: one should ask though why Rudolf published it as a "Holocaust Handbook"... Oh well.

Amazon stops selling more than 70 Holocaust denial books

In the past month, a wave of articles has been published around the world criticising Amazon for selling Holocaust denial books. To my knowledge, Amazon offered no public response, seemingly ignoring the growing chorus asking why denial literature was on sale through the world's largest online bookseller. So imagine my surprise when last night I tried searching for Kindle updates to the 'Holocaust Handbooks' series on amazon.co.uk and found... nothing.

Eric Hunt is No Longer a Holocaust Denier

[Update by SR: here is DenierBud (previously debunked by us) confirming that Hunt changed his mind on his own, without any coercion.]

The 'Revisionist' scene increasingly has a problem: while its videos, spam and other propaganda keep the flame alive on the far right and in at least some parts of the conspiracy theory world, the 'movement' seemingly cannot retain its activists. It's almost a year since Committe for Open Debate on the Holocaust founder Bradley R. Smith passed away, prompting zero newspaper obituaries and little acknowledgement from anti-defamation watchdogs, leaving the CODOH empire in the hands of the 'Holocaust Handbooks' publisher Germar Rudolf.

Despite revamping and rebranding many parts of the portfolio, it's been increasingly obvious for some time that the denier scene lacks enough researchers and writers to do more than put lipstick on an increasingly doddery pig. Worse still, the small number of newer stars drop out of the scene almost as fast as they become known, as happened for example with Thomas Kues and Friedrich Jansson. Or, like The Black Rabbit of Inlé, they openly admit that they no longer believe in the core tenets of 'Holocaust revisionism'.

The latest apostate? None other than video-maker Eric Hunt.

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. 

Rudolf on Holocaust Handbooks

Germar Rudolf has kindly responded to a CODOH Forum user on my posting "Holocaust Handbooks" Updating Policy - Cosmetic Changes and Recycling Instead of Engaging With Critique and provided this pointed summary of the "Revisionist" problem these days:

"Carlo Mattogno cannot revise 30 books every year and write thirty more on top of it."

The Holocaust Handbooks series is essentially a three man show of Mattogno, Graf and Rudolf, who are the main authors of 3/4 of the books, and it is especially dependent upon Mattogno:

The fact that he is the main author of 2/3 of the Holocaust Handbooks even underestimates his impact as his writings have occupied the most relevant issues of "Revisionism". Mattogno had been hyperactive for years, publishing at a pace where the level of research has to leave a lot to be desired, as amply demonstrated on this blog. At his age of 65 years, this source will likely run dry in some years.

The lack of authors and diversity is symptomatic for the poor state of Holocaust "Revisionism". This is not limited to printed media, the Inconvinient History Blog has seen just three postings this year - one remembering the dead Bradley Smith, one reviewing the journals' year 2015 and one announcing the publication of the journals' articles from 2015 - thus none adding anything new to advance "Revisionism". Anyone following the blog would think the movement is close to clinically dead.

We have not heard from Santiago Alvarez since February 2016, Thomas Kues left the scene, Jansson's blog is idle since almost 18 months and the theblackrabbitofinl has become sceptical of denial. The recycling of Mattogno's decades old Italian pamphlets on Miklos Nyiszli and Rudolf Höß (Holocaust Handbooks 36 & 37) and his forthcoming Einsatzgruppen book, which will ask for the stunning mental gymnastics to explain the extermination of the Jews in the occupied Soviet Union within the hypothesis that there was no policy to exterminate the Jews, will keep the patient in a vegetative state for the time being, but that's not exactly a promising perspective for 2017 and further.

"I'd appreciate it if everybody reading this start publishing yourself -- in print -- serious research rather than bickering about somebody having forgotten over overlooked something. Some nagging on an internet blog isn't exactly what can be taken all that seriously anyway."

Obviously, Rudolf did not check out and examine the links to the rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz Open Air Incinerations if he reduces this comprehensive critique to "nagging". In general, the Holocaust Controversies blog addresses specific, fundamental, systematic and methodological flaws in "Revisionist" works. The publication on the medium internet blog does not affect the validity of the arguments. Conversely, not much substantial is gained from compiling related postings (such as the series on Mattogno on Auschwitz and Alvarez on Gas Vans) to print-on-demand books on amazon.com. Publishing a book has become meaningless at latest since Fritz Berg has done it (see also Rudolf's own review of the book), but the Holocaust Handbook series is another example that publishing something in print does not establish quality of content (only quality of form, if there is a proper editor).

Incidentally, the lack of "serious research" is actually the reason why "Revisionists" are ignored by Holocaust historians. The difference is that Holocaust historiography can afford to freeze them off.