An interview with «"Mike Smith" -- aka "Denier," aka "Bud"»

Yesterday, when I was looking up the list of columnists writing for the "Inconvenient History" journal, the name Michael K. Smith caught my attention.

"The Stroop Report is a Forgery" (Part 5)

[Continued from The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 4)]

14. “Who wrote the Stroop Report?”

Following his “Ten Other Points to Consider”, denierbud turns to musing about who, other than its apparent author (who, as we have seen in Part 1, not only did not contest his authorship but also provided details about how the document came into being), may have written the Stroop Report. He “suspects” that “the author was a woman who was a feminist and a zionist, and who was connected to a propaganda group headed by Adolf Berman and Emmanuel Ringelblum”, and announces that “The one person who fits that mold is Rachel Auerbach.”

Read more!


Why he suspects a “feminist and a zionist” behind the forgery of his fantasies denierbud sort of tries explaining in this section of his feature. Yet he leaves his readers in the dark about what his suspicion that the author was related to “a propaganda group headed by Adolf Berman and Emmanuel Ringelblum” is based on. As this commentary is not just about debunking denierbud’s nonsense but also meant to provide further information about issues he refers to, I shall therefore start by having a look at this “propaganda group”.

Adolf Berman was the secretary of a Polish organization called the Council of Assistance of the Jews ("Rada Pomocy Zydom"—ZEGOTA), which was founded on 4 December 1942 and provided assistance to Jews living in hiding outside the ghettos.

Emanuel Ringelblum was a Polish-Jewish historian, politician and social worker who chronicled Jewish life in Poland and particularly the Warsaw ghetto and whose work, insofar as it has been recovered, is kept in the State Archives in Poland as Ringelblum’s archives.

The “propaganda group headed by Adolf Berman and Emanuel Ringelblum” seems to have been headed by Emanuel Ringelblum alone. It was a group known as Oneg Shabbat, which was dedicated to documenting life in the Warsaw ghetto. Adolf Berman and his wife helped smuggle Ringelblum and members of his family out of the Warsaw ghetto, and during his subsequent hiding in the “Aryan” part of Warsaw, which culminated with his being discovered on 7 March 1944 and subsequently executed, Ringelblum regularly corresponded with the Bermans.

Rachel Auerbach, according to a short biography found on this site, was a writer for Oneg Shabbat. She was also “a Zionist and a literary modernist”, and furthermore “one of the very few Jewish women before World War II to cross the gender barrier to be acknowledged and respected for her artistic expression”. The latter may be the reason why denierbud calls her a “feminist”.

Now to the first of what denierbud believes to be an indication of Rachel Auerbach’s authorship:

A passage in the Stroop Report that perhaps reveals the true voice of the author is the following passage from section II of the introduction:

"During this armed resistance the women belonging to the battle groups were equipped the same as the men; some were members of the Chaluzim movement. Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands. It happened time and again that these [women had pistols or hand grenades (Polish "pineapple" hand grenades) concealed in their bloomers up to the last moment to use against the men of the Waffen SS, Police, or Wehrmacht."

Some thoughts on the above passage:

First of all, General Stroop never mentions the real names of the Jewish combat organizations in his report. The forger makes the mistake of portraying him as too ignorant. As if, with all the possible interrogation opportunities from the thousands of captured Jews, Stroop would never mention the organizations behind the fighting: the ZOB and ZZW. The author poorly gauged how knowledgable she should make Stroop. But here's the kicker: we're supposed to believe he can just throw out the word "Chaluzim." A term that means "Young Pioneers"-- A Jewish group centered around learning skills to take with them in their future immigration to Israel. Does that seem like Stroop's voice or a momentary revealing of the voice of the true author?

First of all, denierbud should have read the Stroop Report with more attention before claiming that Stroop “never mentions the real names of the Jewish combat organizations in his report”. If he had, he might have noticed the following:


Daily Report 04.05.1943, 1st page:

As is learned from depositions made by the Jews, today we caught part of the governing body of the so-called "Party." One member of the committee which leads the gang will be used tomorrow for mopping up some more fortified dug-outs with armed Jews inside.

Daily Report 06.05.1943, 1st page:

It could not be reliably ascertained so far whether the so-called "Party Directorate" of the Jews ("PPR") have been caught or destroyed. We are on their traces. It is to be hoped that tomorrow we shall succeed in tracing down this so-called Party Directorate.

Daily Report 08.05.1943, 1st page

We continued today the operation against the dug-out of the so-called select "Party Directorate" which we had discovered yesterday, as reported in my teletype message yesterday. We succeeded in forcing open the dug-out of the Party Directorate and in catching about 60 heavily armed bandits. We succeeded in catching and liquidating Deputy Leader of the Jewish Military Organization "ZWZ" and his so-called Chief of Staff.

The term “ZWZ” looks like a garbled reference to one of the Jewish fighting organizations in the ghetto, the Jewish Military Association (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, initials ZZW), which is mentioned, for instance, in the translated excerpt from Benz et al’s Dimensionen des Völkermords transcribed in my RODOH post # 3877:

In the ghettos there were numerous smaller and larger resistance groups. They partially were split up in accordance with the Jewish pre-war parties, while in other cases they joined forces, e.g. to the left-wing super-party fighting organization of the Anti Fascist Block (Bojowa Organizacja Bloku Antyfaszystowkiego) in April 1942 in Warsaw or the ZOB (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa – Jewish Fighting Organization) under Zionist leadership, but also with the participation of Bundists, which had definitely taken shape at the end of 1942. In Warsaw there was also the rather right-wing Jewish Military Association (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy). Only during the ghetto revolt itself a coordination of the resistance efforts was achieved.

What Stroop refers to as the “Party Directorate” seems to have been the “Coordinating Committee (KK)” mentioned by Marek Edelman, “whose members were representatives of all existing political parties”. The initials “PPR” probably stand for “Polska Partia Robotnicza”, the Polish Workers’ Party that was one of the parties represented in the “Coordinating Committee”. The battle groups of the ZOB were made up in accordance with party membership, and Marek Edelman mentions one battle group that obviously consisted of members of the PPR:

The following battle groups took part in the fighting here: Gruzalc's (Bund); Merdek's (Hashomer); Hochberg's (Bund); Berek's (Dror); Pawel's (PPR).

Stroop did not have a fully accurate idea of how the Jewish resistance was organized. He got the initials of the Jewish Military Association ZZW wrong, and he seems to have believed, or wanted to believe (after all Jews and Communism were considered by the Nazis to be closely linked together), that the “Coordinating Committee” was a “Party Directorate” of the Communist PPR, when actually all political parties active in the Warsaw ghetto were represented therein. But he was not nearly as ignorant as sloppy reader denierbud would like the forger of his fantasies to have presented him.

As concerns the Chalutzim, i.e. members of the Jewish youth movement known as HeChaluz, denierbud should have done some reading about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising before indulging in his farcical conspiracy theories. He might have realized that the HeChaluz played a important part in the ghetto’s Jewish resistance. It is mentioned accordingly in Marek Edelman’s account, and also on page 295 of Reitlinger’s The Final Solution:

The Resistance Committee, which had come into being far too late in the day, never possessed the facilities for overall leadership. It had originated during the resettlement actions of 1942 in a union of the Zionist Hechalutz Party and the Socialist Bund, parties which barely commanded the support of the majority among the young and active, who had some chance of surviving the actions.21 The general accession of all political groups of any serious consequence was not brought about till October, 1942. The inner history is dim-lit and confused. Various reconstructions of the events have been made on the basis of the testimony of survivors, but they leave a bewildering impression of endless small groups and individual names.* A very young man, called Mordechai Anielewicz, a member of the Hechalutz, is said to have been the elected combat leader. Needless to say, survivors writing in the Moscow Jewish press name a Communist.22 The Germans, at any rate, gave all the credit to the Hechalutz. Stroop described the grenades hidden in the skirts of the women Chalutzim, and Krüger praised their endurance. Even Eichmann distinguished them as ‘important biological material .’23

As on many other occasions, ignorance and sloppiness have again been the hallmarks of denierbud’s conjectures.

Denierbud’s “thoughts on the above passage” continue as follows:

Secondly the passage promotes women as fighters which might point to a woman writing it. But it's an absurd notion that an SS general would admire the enemy for doing something as ridiculously "wild west" as firing pistols with both hands. Stroop supposedly writes, " Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands." Wouldn't it be better just to have one pistol and hold it with two hands to steady the aim? Considering the Resistance hardly ever killed a German, aiming is probably more of an issue than doubling your rate of fire with two guns. Would Stroop admire their brazen courage or wonder why they are so poorly trained by the ZOB and ZZW? The forger wants to make the women in the Resistance look courageous and attempts to convey this through Stroop's admiring voice.

The first thing I wonder about is where, in the quoted excerpt from the Stroop Report, Stroop is supposed to have expressed anything like admiration for the Chalutzim women. The text reads to me like a plain description of facts, and what Stroop seems to be highlighting in regard to the Chalutzim women is their fanaticism and the “treacherous” fighting methods they employed, namely the use of hand grenades hidden in their bloomers. Such tactics seem to have given Stroop some concern, judging by this statement in his teletype message of 3 May 1943:

Since we discovered several times today, that Jewesses had pistols concealed in their bloomers, every Jew and bandit will be ordered from today on, to strip completely for the search.

.

While denierbud would like to see Stroop’s emphasis on women fighters as indicative of a female author, the probable explanations are this concern and the wish to hypocritically express condemnation for the Jews’ fighting methods and/or call attention to the risks that he and his men had run. It should also be taken into account, in this context, that the Nazis seem to have considered women combatants in the ranks of those they saw as “sub-humans” to be something particularly perverse and indicative of a lack of moral values. Thus female partisans and female soldiers of the Red Army were referred to as Flintenweiber, which can be translated as “rifle broads” or “gun broads”, and fighting women stood a good chance of being killed after capture even if belonging to the regular armed forces. The following is a part of the translated excerpt from Christian Gerlach’s book Kalkulierte Morde transcribed in my RODOH post # 3973:

The women of the Red Army drew especial hatred. There was even an army order to kill them all – at least one. On 29 June 1941 there was an instruction signed by General Field Marshal v. Kluge, in which it read: “Women in uniform are to be shot.” At the same time that v. Kluge intervened against mass shootings in one respect, he was ordering others. This order was passed on the same day by VII Army Corps and reinforced for instance by the 286th Security Division on 1 and 2 July. On 3 July a counter-order of the Army High Command reached the 286th Security Division, according to which uniformed women, armed or not, were to be recognized as prisoners of war. But even thereafter the hatred of German front line soldiers against the so-called gun broads didn’t remain behind the initial orders from above, and they were fought with enormous brutality or massacred after battle. New orders to kill all female Red Army soldiers were issued, so in July 1941 at Infantry Regiment 167 in the central section and in October 1941 at the 75th Infantry Division in Ukraine. As late as 6 March 1944 the Wehrmacht High Command ordered that captured female Soviet army soldiers were as a rule to be handed over to security police and SD as so-called unreliable elements. In Belorussia there were special prisoners of war camps for women, like at Bobruisk and Baranovichi.

It is possible that anti-partisan fighter Stroop - unlike Krüger and Eichmann, see the above quote from Reitlinger's book - shared this murderous aversion to female combatants and thus highlighted the female Chalutzim not only as a threat and an enemy not fighting “fair”, but as a general expression of the perceived perversion of the Jewish insurgents.

As concerns these women’s firing pistols with both hands instead of holding one pistol with two hands to steady the aim, I don’t know what deniedbud’s problem is. Pistols, as pointed out in Part 2 of this article, are weapons useful only in combat at close quarters, and in such combat aiming would not be a big deal due to the proximity of the target, while doubling one’s firepower in order to kill or wound more enemy soldiers might be considered desirable, especially for fighters trying to cover the retreat of their comrades and/or making a last stand in a hopeless situation.

In the last paragraph of his “thoughts”, denierbud harks back to his argument regarding German casualties, which was already discussed in Part 2. He especially takes issue with the following passage from page 5 of the summary account:

SS Untersturmfuehrer Dehmke fell in this skirmish with the bandits; he was holding in his hand a hand-grenade which was hit by the enemy and exploded, injuring him fatally.

Independently of the probability of this happening, what is beyond my understanding is how the description of SS Untersturmfuehrer Dehmke’s death can be taken as indicative of denierbud’s female Jewish forger. For the officer, who (as stated immediately before this passage) was part of a special raiding party that captured the Jewish and Polish standards hoisted by the insurgents, is clearly being portrayed in a heroic light, a man killed in the thick of the fight by the hand grenade with he apparently was about to throw at the enemy. Would denierbud’s female forger provide such a portrayal of an SS officer? Hardly so. On the other hand, it is not unlikely that Stroop may have wanted to embellish the circumstances in which Dehmke had been killed, if these had actually been less heroic than described.

Denierbud further believes that he detected Rachel Auerbach’s “sardonic style” in the following passages from Page 10 of the summary account:

The longer the resistance lasted, the tougher the men of the Waffen SS, Police, and Wehrmacht became; they fulfilled their duty indefatigably in faithful comradeship and stood together as models and examples of soldiers. Their duty hours often lasted from early morning until late at night. At night, search patrols with rags wound round their feet remained at the heels of the Jews and gave them no respite. Not infrequently they caught and killed Jews who used the night hours for supplementing their stores from abandoned dug-outs and for contacting neighboring groups or exchanging news with them.

Considering that the greater part of the men of the Waffen-SS had only been trained for three to four weeks before being assigned to this action, high credit should be given for the pluck, courage, and devotion to duty which they showed. It must be stated that the Wehrmacht Engineers, too, executed the blowing up of dug-outs, sewers, and concrete buildings with indefatigability and great devotion to duty. Officers and men of the Police, a large part of whom had already been at the front, again excelled by their dashing spirit.

Denierbud claims that, in the above text, the forger of his fantasies was

...juxtaposing a chummy camaraderie of cheerful troops with the deplorable killing of meek Jews who venture out at night with the humble goal of making contact with a neighbor or finding some food. It's the irony of doing a despicable deed with gusto

Try as I might, I can find nothing sardonic in the above-quoted excerpt from the Stroop Report. Especially the reference to “search patrols with rags wound round their feet” who “remained at the heels of the Jews and gave them no respite” can hardly be understood, even objectively, as referring to “the deplorable killing of meek Jews who venture out at night with the humble goal of making contact with a neighbor or finding some food”. For even if Stroop’s casualty figures are realistic and were not “cooked” by a commander embarrassed to report high casualties to his superiors (see the discussion in Part 2 of this article), going on night patrols after the ghetto’s Jews, some of whom were armed and all of whom were desperate, was a risky undertaking requiring a certain amount of courage, and it is obviously this courage that Stroop intended to bring to the fore. When I first read this passage, I was actually astonished at the ability of inexperienced troops to engage in night patrols in an urban area, which not only involved some risk but also suggests a certain combat skill, and wondered if Stroop might not be exaggerating in order to extol his troops' performance. Yet these night patrols are also mentioned by Marek Edelman, whose account describes them as a far more dangerous undertaking than Stroop’s reported casualty figures suggest:

Battles and armed encounters were now fought mostly at night, while in the daytime the ghetto was completely lifeless. The Germans and the ZOB patrols met only when the streets were completely dark, and whoever had time to fire first, won. Our patrols were spread over the entire ghetto area. A great many died on both sides every night. The Germans and Ukrainians made it a practice to patrol the streets in larger groups, and lay in ambush for the partisans only.

It is rather unlikely that a forger intent on sardonically denigrating the Germans might portray them as going on night patrols that, even in the face of an opponent inferior in numbers and especially in armament, might in the reader's eye have the flair of dangerous combat missions requiring courage and fighting skill. At least as unlikely as these other references to the troops' courage and abilities (emphases are mine):

Page 9 of the summary account:

Frequently from the street, we could hear loud voices coming through the sewer shafts. Then the men of the Waffen SS, the Police or the Wehrmacht Engineers courageously climbed down the shafts to bring out the Jews and not infrequently they then stumbled over Jews already dead, or were shot at.

Daily Report 24.04.1943, 1st page:

This success is furthermore due to the fact that the noncommissioned officers and men have meanwhile become accustomed to the cunning fighting, methods and tricks used by the Jews and bandits and that they have acquired great skill in tracking down the dug-outs which are found in such great number.

Daily Report 27.04.1943, 2nd page:

The leader of the raiding party had a difficult task because the bandits were disguised in German uniform, but despite this fact, he did his duty with great efficiency.

Daily Report 13.05.1943, 1st page:

After a portion of the bunker inhabitants had been brought out and were being searched, a woman reached as quick as lightning under her dress and pulled a hand grenade from her panties, from which she pulled the pin and threw into the men doing the search, while at the same time she jumped for cover as quick as a flash. Only the presence of mind of the men prevented casualties.

Rachel Auerbach’s sardonic style here? Bullshit.


15. “Hate for Nazis and compassion for Jews in the Stroop Report”

Denierbud claims that

The person who wrote it wanted to make General Jürgen Stroop look cruel and evil, while at the same time engendering sympathy for the Jews.

and quotes a few passages from the Stroop Report that are supposed to support this claim.

What he doesn’t quote are passages that are likely to engender some sympathy for Stroop’s troops, like those quoted in item 14 above, or present the Jews in a way that might interfere with the supposed goal of eliciting the reader's sympathy towards them.

It can hardly have been in the interest of a forger pursuing the goals that Stroop attributes to her to state that prior to Stroop’s operation the Jews had “control of everything” in the ghetto and manipulated the German managers of the ghetto’s enterprises through bribery and sex, as Stroop claimed in the following passages on pages 5 and 6 of the summary account (emphases are mine):

The conditions discovered there are indescribable. I cannot imagine a greater chaos than in the Ghetto of Warsaw. The Jews had control of everything, from the chemical substances used in manufacturing explosives to clothing and equipment for the Armed Forces. The managers knew so little of their own shops that the Jews were in a position to produce inside these shops arms of every kind, especially hand grenades, Molotov cocktails, and the like.[…] Over and over again we discovered that these labyrinths of edifices belonging to the armament concerns as residential blocks, contained rich Jews who had succeeded in finding accommodations for themselves and their families under the name of "armament workers" and were leading marvelous lives there.[…] According to the statements of arrested Jews, women also seem to have played a prominent part. The Jews are said to have endeavored to keep up good relations with officers and men of the armed forces. Carousing is said to have been frequent, during the course of which business deals are said to have been concluded between Jews and Germans.

It also wouldn’t elicit much sympathy for the Jews to mention that they still had lots of money, like in the daily report of 25.04.1943:

Further today, significant supplies of paper money, currency, gold coins and items of jewelry were secured. The Jews still control possessions of significant value.

The same goes for the upholding of class differences even in so dire a situation, with ”differently equipped dug-outs for rich and for poor Jews”.

Such statements suggest a Nazi’s stereotypic idea of Jews and/or his eagerness to point out their defects, rather than a Jewish forger’s endeavor to make Jews look good in the reader’s eyes.

This can also be said of referring to Jews as “cowards by nature”.

And would a forger bent on engendering sympathy for the Jews highlight the fact that there were Jewish traitors helping the SS to find dugouts?

Page 7 of the summary account:

To discover the individual dug-outs was difficult for the units, as they had been efficiently camouflaged. In many cases, it was possible only through betrayal on the part of the Jews.

Daily Report 30.04.1943, 1st page:

In many cases we are not able to discover those dug-outs unless some Jew, whom we have already caught, gives us a hint as to their whereabouts.

Daily Report 02.05.1943, 1st page:

To find more dug-outs, the raiding parties took along with them some Jews caught on the previous day to act as guides.

Daily Report 04.05.1943, 1st page:

Discovering the dug-outs becomes more and more difficult. Often they can only be discovered by betrayal through other Jews.

Would the forger, on top of so prominently mentioning Jewish betrayal, even stage a photograph in which a smart-looking German officer is seen interrogating two ugly-looking ”Jewish traitors”?

Denierbud must have failed to read the above-quoted passages when going through the Stroop Report. Or then he read them and, for obvious reasons, chose to keep silent about them. The former could be called bungling, the latter – lying.

16. “Read it Yourself”

At the end of his masterpiece, denierbud harks back to his rambling about the low casualty figures reported by Stroop, which has been discussed in Part 2 of this article. He recommends reading the teletype report of 27.04.1943, regarding which he points out that:

Around 600 Jews were killed that day, but notice how many Germans were killed: Zero. And only 3 wounded.

before repeating his brilliant conclusion:

Another not-believable day in the Stroop Report. The Stroop Report is a fake.

It is possible, as pointed out in Part 2, that Stroop manipulated his casualty figures downward in order to avoid embarrassment before his superiors. But what stands out in the above quotes is not so much denierbud’s idiotic notion that a low reported casualty count is indicative of forgery rather than plain and simple underreporting. It is that he apparently tries to create the impression that the “around 600 Jews” killed on 27 May 1943 were killed in battle, when actually most of them were executed after having been captured:

A total of 2,560 Jews were caught today within the former Ghetto, of whom 547 were shot.

Mendacity to the end. The Stroop Report is a fake like denierbud is an honest and reasonable researcher. Or then, the latter notion is even more nonsensical than the former.

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 4)

[Continued from The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 3)]


In this part I shall take a look at items 2 to 6 and 8 of the “Ten Other Points to Consider” in denierbud’s Stroop Report feature.

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8. “A great piece of trial evidence” (item 2 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Like many a good “Revisionist”, denierbud believes that every criminal trial involving crimes committed by his Nazi heroes was a charade in which mischievous prosecutors and judges acting on behalf of sinister conspiratorial entities crapped upon the law and their legal duties and sentenced innocent men to death or long-term imprisonment on the basis of flimsy or manipulated evidence. Accordingly every incriminating document exhibited at any such trial must be a forgery, especially such “prominent” exhibits as the Stroop Report and its two supposed “parallels”, a “family album bound in tattooed human skin” mentioned at the trial of Ilse Koch and a photo album entitled “Good Times” that was kept by Kurt Franz, the deputy commander of Treblinka extermination camp.

Regarding the first, denierbud’s claim is the following:

Indeed such a book was mentioned (but never produced as evidence) at the trial of Ilse Koch. In her case, we have the lie that she had a family album bound in tattooed human skin.

Denierbud is contradicting himself here insofar as the fact that Ilse Koch’s album was not introduced as evidence against her at the trial belies the notion that it was considered “a great piece of trial evidence” by either the prosecution or the tribunal. According to this page of a site with certain “Revisionist” leanings, which I accordingly would not expect to withhold any claim that might help discredit this particular trial, the album was testified to by a prosecution witness, but also invoked by Ilse Koch herself in her defense:

Apparently this photo album was confiscated by the American liberators, but it was not introduced into evidence in the courtroom. In her plea for mercy from the court, Ilse Koch pointed out that Newsweek magazine had published an article in which it was stated that the US military government in Germany was in possession of her photo album. Frau Koch claimed that the album contained several photos of her home which showed lampshades made from dark leather; Frau Koch said the photos showed that the lampshades were clearly not made from human skin.

According to the above, the introduction of this exhibit as evidence was in the interest of the defense and not the prosecution. The aforementioned testimony, according to which the album had tattooed human skin on its cover, was apparently not considered reliable by the court, for there’s no mention of Ilse Koch having been sentenced on account of this testimony. She was also not sentenced on account of the more well-known testimonies about her having made lamp shades out of human skin:

She was convicted by a panel of 8 military judges on the charge of participating in a "common plan" to violate the Laws and Usages of War, but she was not convicted on the specific charge of ordering human lamp shades to be made from the skin of tattooed prisoners.

So much for this “great piece of trial evidence”.

Regarding Kurt Franz’s photo album, denierbud’s claims are the following:

Evidence in the 1960's Kurt Franz trial where similar to the Stroop Report, an incriminating album of Treblinka pictures was simply found in Franz's apartment (upon arrest 15 years after the war) with an album title that would anger any jury: "Good Times." Franz, who was accused of skimming millions of dollars in addition to sadistically murdering Jews, lived in a modest apartment under his real name for 15 years prior to his arrest, and it evidently never occured to him to throw this incriminating piece of evidence away.

It is correct that Kurt Franz was leading a modest middle-class life when arrested and that he was living under his own name, something he could afford to do due to the initial sluggishness of West German justice in matters of NS-crimes that has been addressed in this article.

It is also correct that he possessed a photo album with the title “Die schönsten Jahre meines Lebens” (“The best years of my life”), which was missing some photographs and their captions but still contained pictures of camp commandant Stangl, of Franz himself, of his dog Barry and of the excavators that had been used at Treblinka, first to dig the mass graves and later to exhume the corpses and move them to huge roasters for incineration (Adalbert Rückerl, NS – Prozesse. Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung: Möglichkeiten, Grenzen, Êrgebnisse, page 46 f.).

What is not correct, however, is that the case against Kurt Franz was made around this photo album at the trial against Franz and other former members of the Treblinka camp staff before the Düsseldorf County Court, or that the album was an important element of incriminating evidence on which the court’s findings of fact in its judgment were based. The evidence underlying the court’s findings of fact about the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews and the execution of that policy at Treblinka extermination camp has been listed in this article. A specific mention of Franz’ photo album is not to be found there. There is also no mention of this photo album in the court’s specific findings of fact regarding the defendant Franz’s individual criminal actions, which are transcribed in my RODOH post # 7191. Franz was found guilty of eagerly commanding and taking part in the mass killings carried out at Treblinka, and of numerous killings on his own initiative beyond the scope of orders received, on the basis of his co-defendants’ depositions and the testimonies of a number of eyewitnesses considered credible by the court, which belied his mendacious claims that he had done no more than orders required him to do and helped the poor Jews wherever he could. Only on one occasion the judgment mentions photographs presumably taken from the photo album in connection with its findings of fact regarding Kurt Franz. These are photos of Kurt Franz’s dog Barry, which were shown to animal psychiatrist and court expert Konrad Lorenz for the purpose of his expert opinion about Barry’s character. For while several witnesses provided detailed and coincident descriptions of how Franz had often sadistically set his big dog upon inmates to kill or maim them, there were also statements that Barry had been a playful and harmless animal when not in the presence of his master Franz. Court expert Lorenz concluded from the photos of Barry shown to him that the dog had been a half-breed, and explained that half-breed dogs have a particularly strong tendency to adapt to their master’s character. This, according to Lorenz, explained why Barry had been a murderous beast when under the influence of Franz but a peaceful animal when Franz was not around. Lorenz’ expert opinion was the only instance I found in the judgment in which photographs presumably taken from Franz’ album were used, not as direct evidence against Franz but as input for a court expert’s opinion meant to solve an apparent contradiction between various elements of evidence.

A look at the Treblinka photos shown here and here, many of which are from Kurt Franz’s album, helps to understand why the album is not specifically mentioned in the judgment, let alone as the key incriminating evidence that denierbud claims it to be: none of these photos, at first sight, points to a mass murder site let alone to murders committed or partaken in by Kurt Franz. Only with extraneous knowledge of these pictures’ location and context, based on other evidence, is it possible to link them to the mass killing at Treblinka, and that only through photo analysis such as described in Alex Bay’s article The Reconstruction of Treblinka. A criminal court, whose task was not an exact physical reconstruction of the Treblinka site but a reconstruction of events at that place insofar as required to ascertain the individual defendants’ criminal deeds, didn’t have much use for these photographs, interrogation and cross-examination of defendants and eyewitnesses being the court’s main source of evidence instead. Denierbud’s claim that Franz was “nailed” on the basis of his photo album is taken out of thin air.

Denierbud also makes no effort to explain why on earth Franz did not deny that Treblinka had been a place of mass murder and that he had himself participated in the killing, even though he tried to play down the extent and nature of his participation. What advantage could he have gained by not challenging the evidence that Treblinka had been an extermination camp, by not claiming that it had been a mere transit camp and the accounts of mass killing were all part of one great big hoax? In the case of Kurt Franz, there’s no room for even the absurd and baseless “Revisionist” fantasies about mendacious plea-bargaining by corrupt criminal justice authorities acting at the behest of some sinister conspiracy, for Kurt Franz was sentenced to life imprisonment, the highest penalty that the German Criminal Code provides for.

Last but not least, denierbud doesn’t know what he’s talking about (or then he is simply making things up) when he claims that Kurt Franz “was accused of skimming millions of dollars”. While the plunder of the Jewish victims at the camps of Aktion Reinhard(t) is mentioned in some detail in the judgment, there is no mention of Kurt Franz having, in violation of orders to hand over all valuables to the administration of Aktion Reinhard(t), kept for himself any of the loot, let alone “millions of dollars”.

Thus his wishful thinking is all that denierbud is left with in support of his claim that Franz’s album was “likely another planted fake document”.

The baseless conclusion that denierbud ends this item with:

In short, the Stroop Report fits in with other faked albums which had the aim of serving as courtroom evidence. Jürgen Stroop was sentenced to death by a Polish court and an American court. Kurt Franz got life in prison.

requires no further comment.

9. “The Stroop Report is too readable” (item 3 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

This is where I’m at loss with what our poet denierbud is trying to tell us. His irrelevant subjective opinion that the Stroop Report reads “like a fiction book” aside, what “specific details or mentioning of technical issues” does he expect it to contain, beyond those it contains, that would interest a superior following the progress of a murderous police action against a despised minority? Denierbud doesn’t tell, and I doubt he would be able to specify what the hell is talking about if required to do so. In the opinion of Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, the Stroop Report contained not too little detail, but far too much for the despicable minor undertaking if referred to:

The dirty arrogant SS swine! Imagine writing a 75-page boastful report on a little murder expedition, when a major campaign fought by soldiers against a well-armed army takes only a few pages.

It is also hard to understand what exactly denierbud expects to be “hard for a layman to understand” in a report about such “little murder expedition”. Stroop was reporting neither about complex technical issues such as might be the topic of conversation between denierbud’s jet-fighter pilots, nor about a military engagement involving knowledge obtained at some military academy. He was reporting about a violent roundup and killing operation that essentially consisted in burning down the Warsaw ghetto block after block and then rooting out the surviving Jews from dugouts and sewers. I don’t see anything there that could be hard to understand for anybody, but perhaps denierbud can enlighten us about what exactly he had in mind.

10. “Another reason why the German death toll is not believable” (item 4 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Harking back to his previous rambling against the “unbelievably” low casualties reported by Stroop (discussed in Part 2 of this article), denierbud surmises that the Jews must have prepared for resistance ever since the presumed dissemination in the Warsaw ghetto of a «Jewish Underground report known as the "November 1942 Report"», describing the Treblinka death camp (he is probably referring to the description of Treblinka appended to a report entitled “The Destruction of Jewish Warsaw”, which on 6 January 1943 was transmitted to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London through its delegate in occupied Poland, and which is mentioned in the excerpt from Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps transcribed in my RODOH post # 8970), and that this makes the low casualty rate reported by Stroop “even harder to believe”.

If, as denierbud assumes, said report was disseminated in the Warsaw ghetto, it probably had no greater effect than an earlier report about Treblinka mentioned in Marek Edelman’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. For as becomes apparent from that account,

• most of the ghetto’s inhabitants were reluctant or refused to accept a reality that was too horrible to contemplate, or selfishly stuck to the irrational hope that they might be spared while others perished;

• the Germans cleverly used a combination of trickery and terror in order to assure compliance with the deportation measures, and

• those Jews who were willing to face the facts and not resign to their fate, essentially the members of the Jewish resistance, took a long time to gain acceptance among the ghetto population and had to obtain their weapons from the Polish underground, which was of little assistance at least in the beginning.

Here’s how Marek Edelman describes the reactions of most ghetto inhabitants to the deportations from the ghetto and to news about fate of those deported (emphases are mine):

On the second day, July 23rd, a meeting of the so-called Workers' Committee took place. All political parties were represented on the Committee. Our group, supported only by the Hechalutz and Hashomer organization, called for active resistance. But public opinion was against us. The majority still thought such action provocative and maintained that if the required contingent of Jews could be delivered, the remainder of the ghetto would be left in peace. The instinct for self-preservation finally drove the people into a state of mind permitting them to disregard the safety of others in order to save their own necks. True, nobody as yet believed that the deportation meant death. But the Germans had already succeeded in dividing the Jewish population into two distinct groups--those already condemned to die and those who still hoped to remain alive. Afterwards, step by step, the Germans will succeed in pitting these two groups against one another and cause some Jews to lead others to certain death in order to save their own skin.
[…]
On the second day of the "deportations" the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide. He knew beyond any doubt that the supposed "deportation to the East" actually meant the death of hundreds and thousands of people in gas chambers, and he refused to assume responsibility for it. Being unable to counteract events he decided to quit altogether. At the time, however, we thought that he had no right to act as he did. We thought that since he was the only person in the ghetto whose voice carried a great deal of authority, it had been his duty to inform the entire population of the real state of affairs, and also to dissolve all public institutions, particularly the Jewish police, which had been established by the Jewish Council and was legally subordinate to it.
[…]
So that we might learn conclusively and in detail about the fate of the human transports leaving the ghetto, Zalmen Frydrych (Zygmunt) was ordered to follow one of the transports to the "Aryan side". His journey "to the East", however, was a short one, for it took only three days. Immediately after leaving the ghetto walls he established contact with an employee of the Warsaw Danzig [Gdanski] Terminal working on the Warsaw--Malkinia line. They travelled together in the transport's wake to Sokolow where, Zygmunt was told by local railroad men, the tracks forked out, one branch leading to Treblinka. It proved that every day a freight train carrying people from Warsaw travelled in that direction and invariably returned empty. No transports of food were ever seen on this line. Civilians were forbidden to approach the Treblinka railroad station.

This in itself was conclusive proof that the people brought to Treblinka were being exterminated somewhere in the vicinity. In addition, Zygmunt met two fugitives from the death camp the following morning. They were two Jews, completely stripped of their clothes, and Zygmunt met them on the Sokolow market place and obtained the full details of the horrible procedure. Thus it was not any longer a question of rumours, but of facts established by eyewitness accounts (one of the fugitives was our comrade Wallach).

After Zygmunt's return we published the second issue of On Guard with a detailed description of Treblinka. But even now the population stubbornly refused to believe the truth. They simply closed their eyes to the unpleasant facts and fought against them with all the means at their disposal.

In the meantime the Germans, not too discriminating in their choice of methods, introduced a new propaganda twist. They promised--and actually gave--three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to everyone who voluntarily registered for "deportation". The offer was more than sufficient. Once the bait was thrown, propaganda and hunger did the rest. The propaganda value of the measure lay in the fact that it was truly an excellent argument against the "stories" about gas chambers ("why would they be giving bread away if they intended to murder them?..."). The hunger, an even stronger persuader, magnified the picture of three brown, crusty loaves of bread until nothing was visible beyond it. Their taste which one could almost feel in one's mouth--it was only a short walk from one's home to the "Umschlagplatz" from which the cars left--blinded people to all the other things at the end of the same road. Their smell, familiar, delicious, befogged one's mind, made it unable to grasp the things which would normally have been so very obvious. There were times when hundreds of people had to wait on line for several days to be "deported". The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.
[…]
After this temporary let-up, the deportations from Warsaw started again with intensified force. Now the blockades were even more dangerous for us, because there were fewer people and the area had become smaller. They were also more difficult for the Germans, however, because people had already learned how to hide. Therefore, a new method was used: every Jewish policeman was made responsible for bringing 7 "heads" daily to the "Umschlag". And this is how the Germans were playing their best game. Never before had anyone been so inflexible in carrying out an action as a Jewish policeman, never before had anyone been so unyielding in holding on to a captured victim as one Jew in relation to another Jew. So that they might furnish the 7 "heads", Jewish policemen would stop a doctor in a white coat (the coat could be sold for a fantastically high price later, in the "Umschlag"...), a mother with her child in her arms, or a lonely, lost child in search of its home.
[…]
The following incident may serve to clarify the conditions in which we had to work at the time. About mid-November (in the period of "quiet") a few hundred Jews from several shops were deported, allegedly to work in the Lublin Concentration Camp. During the trip Comrade W. Rozowski broke open the bars in the car window, threw out six female prisoners, while the train was in motion (among others, Guta Btones, Chajka Betchatowska, Wiernik, M. Kojfman), and then jumped out himself. Similar feats would have been quite impossible to perform at the time of the first deportations, because even if there had been somebody brave enough to attempt an escape, the other victims would never had allowed it for fear of German revenge. By now the Jews finally began to realize that deportation actually meant death; that there was no other alternative but at least to die honourably. But as was quite natural for human beings, they still tried to postpone death and "honour" for as long a time as possible.

And here’s how Edelman describes the efforts of the Jewish resistance to obtain arms from the Polish underground. Emphases are also mine:

Once again we built a large organization, not alone this time, but by common efforts, and once again the major problem of weapons was encountered. There were almost none at all in the ghetto. In must be taken into account that the time was the year 1942. The resistance movement of the Poles was just beginning at the time, and only vague stories were being circulated about partisans in the woods. It must be remembered that the first organized act of armed resistance on the part of the Poles did not take place until March 1943. Therefore, there was nothing unusual in the fact that our efforts to obtain arms and ammunition through the Government Delegate and through other agencies encountered major difficulties and as a general rule, brought no results. We were able to obtain a few pistols from the People's Guard.
[…]
At the end of December 1942 we received our first transport of weapons from the Home Army. It was not much--there were only ten pistols in the whole transport--but it enabled us to prepare for our first major action. We planned it for January 22nd and it was to be a retaliatory measure against the Jewish police.

The “first major action”, however, was not what it had been expected to be, and its outcome was disastrous:

However, on January 18th, 1943, the ghetto was surrounded once again and the "second liquidation" began. This time, however, the Germans were not able to carry out their plans unchallenged. Four barricaded battle groups offered the first armed resistance in the ghetto.

The ZOB was baptized in battle in the first large-scale street fighting at the corner of Mila and Zamenhofa Streets. The best part of the Organization was lost there. Miraculously, because of his heroic attitude, the ZOB Commander, Mordechaj Anielewicz, survived. After that battle we realized that street fighting would be too costly for us, since we were not sufficiently prepared for it and lacked the proper weapons. We, therefore, switched to partisan fighting. Four major encounters were fought in the apartment houses at 40 Zamenhofa Street, 44 Muranowska Street, 34 Mila Street and 22 Franciszkanska Street. In the Schultz shop area the SS men taking part in the deportation were attacked by the partisans. Comrade A. Fajner took an active part in this action and was killed in its course.

One of our battle groups, still unarmed, was caught by the Germans and was taken to the "Umschlag". Shortly before they were to enter the railroad cars, B. Pelc addressed the group with a few words. It was only a short address, but it was so effective, that not a single one of the sixty people moved to enter the car. Van Oeppen (the chief of Treblinka) shot all sixty himself on the spot. This group's behaviour, however, served as an inspiration that always, under all circumstances, one should oppose the Germans.

Of all the prepared 50 battle groups only five took part in the January activities. The remainder, not having been assembled at the time of the Germans' entry into the ghetto, was caught by surprise and was unable to reach the place where their weapons were stored.

Once again, as was the case in the first stage of the ZOB's activities, four-fifths of the Battle Organization's members perished.

Thus weakened by their first engagements, the Jewish resistance had to reorganize its activities. It was only now, at the end of January 1943, that it received broader support from the ghetto population, and also more assistance from the Polish underground:

The latest developments, however, reverberated strongly both within the ghetto and outside of it. Public opinion, Jewish as well as Polish, reacted immediately to the ghetto battles. For now, for the first time, German plans were frustrated. For the first time the halo of omnipotence and invincibility was torn from the Germans' heads. For the first time the Jew in the street realized that it was possible to do something against the Germans' will and power. The number of Germans killed by ZOB bullets was not the only important thing. What was more important was the appearance of a psychological turning point. The mere fact that because of the unexpected resistance, weak as it was, the Germans were forced to interrupt their "deportation" schedule was of great value.

In the meantime legends about "hundreds" of dead Germans and the "tremendous" power of the ZOB started circulating throughout Warsaw. The entire Polish Underground was full of praise for us. At the end of January we received 50 larger pistols and 50 hand grenades from the Home Army Command.

It was this “awakening” to the realization that it was possible to resist the Germans, rather than any reports about the fate of the deportees at Treblinka, that ended the passivity of the majority of the surviving ghetto inhabitants and caused them to help the resistance organize the defense of the ghetto against the final roundup. At the same time, a change in the attitude of the Polish underground, also brought about by the first acts of armed resistance in January 1943, helped the Jewish fighters obtain armament that, while still miserable compared to the hardware of a modern army, was a lot better than the few pistols they had been fighting with at first:

By now every partisan was equipped. on the average, with one pistol (and 10-15 rounds for it), 4-5 hand grenades, 4-5 Molotov cocktails. 2-3 rifles were assigned to each "area". There was just one machine-gun in the entire ghetto.

Thus we can see that the notion that reports about Treblinka death camp galvanized the Warsaw ghetto’s Jews into putting up a big fight is merely theoretical and fails to take into account the ostrich-like attitude of most of the ghetto’s population, the hunger and misery in the ghetto that some people irrationally hoped to escape from by allowing themselves to be deported, the violence employed by the Germans where deceitful coaxing failed, the selfishness of people hoping that while others would perish they might themselves be spared, the difficulties faced by the resistance in obtaining arms, and the widespread notion that nothing could be done about the impending fate. Only the first armed engagements starting 18 January 1943, which despite their disastrous outcome showed the people that it was possible to fight the Germans, brought about a significant change of attitude, away from the wishful thinking, selfishness and fatalism that until then had paralyzed the Warsaw ghetto’s population. Had it not been for the armed battle groups that resisted the roundup on 18 January 1943, Stroop would probably have had a much easier job when he took to wiping out the ghetto three months later.

11. “A different Jewish strategy due to the Germans losing the Battle of Stalingrad?” (item 5 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Never one to mind contradicting himself, denierbud forgets his previous claim, about a description of Treblinka in November 1942 having galvanized the Jews into resistance, when indulging in one of the most idiotic “Revisionist” speculations that I have ever seen: up to the German defeat at Stalingrad, where the remains of the German 6th Army surrendered to Soviet forces on 2 February 1943, the Jews (not only in the Warsaw ghetto, but throughout Europe and also in the US – denierbud apparently believes in some central body directing Jewish activities worldwide) are supposed to have changed their “strategy” from one of “collaborating” with the Nazis (never mind that such “collaboration”, apart from helping the genocidal mass killing that denierbud denies, implied dying like flies of starvation and disease in ghettos and being treated like garbage in concentration or labor camps, among other inconveniences) to one of a) resisting and b) promoting the “holocaust myth”.

This conjecture is so flagrantly at odds with all evidence and reason that it’s hardly worth even commenting on. Suffice to say that even its basic assumptions (absence of Jewish atrocity reports and resistance before Stalingrad, commencement of both only thereafter) are mistaken, as will be shown hereafter.

Reports in Jewish publications about the Aktion Reinhard(t) extermination camps appeared as early as April 1942, see the quotes in my RODOH post # 8036. At about the same time, see the excerpt from Arad’s book in my RODOH post # 8970, the Polish underground, drawing on its own sources and on “Jewish Underground groups in Poland, like the Jewish National Committee and the Bund”, started transmitting news “news of the deportations to the death camps and what was happening there” to the Polish Government in Exile in London. Reports about Belzec that reached London “were handed over by the Polish Government-in-Exile to Dr. Ignacy Schwarzbart, a Jew and a member of the Polish National Council”, who on November 15, 1942, “published in London an open statement with all the known details about the extermination actions going on in Belzec”. Then there was the already mentioned report on "The Destruction of Jewish Warsaw", which was issued on the same day and transmitted to London on January 6, 1943. These are but a few examples prior to the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, which alone are sufficient to show the ignorance (let’s give him the benefit of doubt) that underlies denierbud’s conjecture. Denierbud ices the cake by repeating his favorite rambling about “a February 1943 Reader's Digest article” written by “Irgun member Ben Hecht”, which is the subject of one of his videoclips and of Andrew Mathis’ commentary on that clip.

As concerns resistance, there are examples dating as far back as July 1942 of Jews resisting the elimination of ghettos in the administrative area known as Reichskommissariat Ostland, namely in Kleck on 21 July 1942 (25 of 400 escapees survived) and in Nieswiez on 22 July 1942. The presidents of the Jewish Councils in Marcinkánce in the Bialystok district and in Lachwa (Polesia) defended themselves against the liquidations at the end of 1942. On 23 December 1942 Jewish fighters and Communists attacked a German café in Cracow. In Minsk Mazowiecki the last 400 Jews resisted their liquidatioin on 10 January 1943. They were burned alive by the Germans in the school building from which they threw bricks. These and other acts of resistance are mentioned in the translated excerpt from the “Poland” chapter of Benz et al’s Dimensionen des Völkermords that is transcribed in my RODOH post # 3877. My previous post on the same thread, # 3876, contains a translated excerpt from Christian Gerlach’s Kalkulierte Morde about Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Belorussia.

On the other hand – contrary to what one would expect if there had been a “new Jewish strategy” following the German defeat at Stalingrad – the overwhelming majority of Jews under Nazi rule continued to “cooperate” all the way to gas chambers and execution pits. Perhaps the most striking example of an utter absence of resistance, even when the remaining Jews realized that they would also share the fate of those deported before them, is that of the Lodz ghetto.

Nonsensical though denierbud’s “Stalingrad” theory is, it is worth reading on account of a revealing statement showing what denierbud thinks of those lazy, good-for-nothing Jews, a statement that might be taken straight from an issue of Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer, or from this Nazi newspaper article published in August 1939. Emphases are mine:

The Germans, upon entering Warsaw, had found a lot of Jews who had no visible means of income. No apparent legitimate job. They wanted to have the Jews learn to work in labor camps in order to prepare them to move to a temporary Jewish state in occupied USSR.

Bravo, denierbud!

Every Jew-hating scumbag in the world would probably give you a hearty slap on the back for that.

And any reasonable human being who was still in doubt about what cesspit you come from should be in doubt no longer.

But before that pep-talk, denierbud treats his readers to a revelation that, if it could be substantiated, would probably make him the most famous “Revisionist” ever. He claims to have found out that the Jews deported from Warsaw in 1942 were actually sent to labor camps:

The standard account is that 7 months earlier (in July through September 1942), the Germans deported around 300,000 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto and there was no resistance: the Jews went willingly because the Germans told them they were being deported to labor camps. It was the truth[my emphasis – RM]: […]

So our friend denierbud claims to know of evidence leading from Treblinka, which all evidence known to historians (such as Ganzenmüller’s letter to Wolff dated 28 July 1942 and Höfle’s radio message to Heim dated 11 January 1943) shows to have been the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Jewish deportees from Warsaw and other Nazi-occupied areas of Poland, to labor camps where he believes the Germans had those lazy Jews “learn to work” (he apparently has no objection to forced labor as long as it’s Jews performing the same).

To think that “Revisionist” big-shots Mattogno & Graf frantically searched archives in Eastern Europe for such evidence without finding anything, when all they would have needed to do is visit their faithful disciple denierbud in northern California …

12. “ The beginning of the report contains a short philosophical summary of the Jews in Europe, which seems out of place for a general writing it for two superior generals:” (item 6 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

This “point” is about as inane as the previously discussed “too readable” baloney. After pointing out that the Stroop Report was “a commemoration book meant as a limited edition printing of 3 copies, 2 of which are given to generals Himmler and Kruger” (the Reichsführer SS would probably have enjoyed being referred to as a “general”), denierbud argues that background information about the history of Jewish ghettos would have been out of place in such a document, because its addressees would not be interested in the history or know it already.

Why, and I thought this was a commemoration book!

The following excerpt from page 26 of Richard Raskin’s A Child at Gunpoint contains a quote of Stroop explaining what purpose his report was meant to serve:

Just as it was Krüger’s idea to collect the daily reports in this way, it was also his suggestion that photographic records be kept of the operation. In a conversation while in prison in 1949, Stroop told of a meeting he had with Krüger on May 2, 1943, in which Krüger

… was particularly anxious that our accomplishments be preserved on film. During our final conference, held in my headquarters, he declared: ‘Photographs of the Grand Operation will serve as invaluable tools for future historians of the Third Reich – for the Führer, for Heinrich Himmler, for our nationalist poets and writers, as SS training material and, above all, as proof of the burdens and sacrifices endured by the Nordic races and Germany in their attempt to rid Europe and the world of the Jews.’

Would some background information about the history of Jewish ghettos in general and the Warsaw ghetto in particular not be a proper introduction for a work that might one day be used as historical and training material and as proof of the Nazis’ heroic struggle against the Jews? I’d say such background information would be spot-on there. And from Stroop’s career point of view, it would show his superiors that he was not just a numb executor of orders, but a man with interest in and background knowledge of the “Jewish problem”, therefore a candidate for a higher leadership post. In other words, Stroop was meeting the expected wishes of his superiors and brown-nosing them.

On the other hand, why would the female Jewish forger of denierbud’s fantasies have included this historical background in the document? In order to highlight the Nazis’ emphasis on Jews being a threat to non-Jews? That would hardly serve any “vilifying” purpose and might even have a slightly apologetic effect.

Once again, denierbud’s conjectures leave much to be desired in terms of logic and reason.

13. “Over-the-top use of the word "bandit" and "subhuman."” (item 8 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Denierbud has a problem with the frequent use of the term “bandits” throughout the Stroop Report. He argues that Stroop “would” have been more specific about what “bandits” exactly he was up against, so that his report could be used for intelligence purposes, and that the derogatory nature of the term points to a forger trying to denigrate poor Stroop and denierbud’s Nazi heroes in general.

In his “intelligence” argument, denierbud ignores the fact that Stroop’s daily teletypes to Krüger were progress reports for a superior who wanted to know how the operation was doing, and not something meant for intelligence services interested in collecting information about underground fighting organizations. Such intelligence services would probably not rely on Stroop’s daily teletypes for information, but obtain protocols of prisoner interrogations or, even better, take part in such interrogations themselves. If their only or main source were a commanding officer's progress reports to his superior, they would be bunglers not worth their salary. Regarding the Stroop Report as a whole, denierbud keeps forgetting that this was a commemorative book, something to celebrate the Nazi struggle against Jews and other sub-human scum and to look at when reminiscing of the good old times by the fireside. Intelligence-relevant information about specific fighting organizations that the “bandits” belonged to would not only be boring in such a context, but create the perhaps unwelcome impression that the “bandits” were political organizations with a cause and not the underworld rabble that the Nazis liked to see themselves as fighting against.

As to the derogatory nature of the term “bandits”, denierbud reveals his ignorance of the fact that “bandits” was a term commonly used by the Nazis for partisans and other members of resistance organizations in the countries they occupied during World War II, with the obvious and understandable intent of portraying members of underground resistance as criminals acting against the established order, rather than patriots fighting to free their country of the Nazi occupiers. The fight against partisans, especially in Poland and the occupied territories of the USSR, was designated by the Nazis as Bandenbekämpfung, i.e. fight against bandit gangs. The Bandenbekämpfung also served as a cover and pretext, in the occupied territories of the USSR, to wipe out Jews and other undesirable elements of the population allegedly linked to the Soviet partisans. Thus, for instance, a report by Himmler dated 29 December 1942, of which a facsimile can be viewed on this site, refers to “Bandenbekämpfungserfolge”, i.e. successes in the fight against bandits, achieved in Southern Russia, Ukraine and Bialystok between 1 September and 1 December 1942. It separately lists “Banditen” (“bandits” - 1,337 killed in battle, 737 prisoners immediately executed, 7,828 executed after longer intensive questioning) and “Bandenhelfer und Bandenverdächtige” (“bandit helpers and bandit suspects” – 16,553 arrested, 14,257 executed, and 363,211 Jews executed). Jews were obviously seen as “bandit helpers and bandit suspects” regardless of whether or not they had any connection to the partisans, on account of being Jews alone.

So it is only natural, within the scope of Nazi terminology, that Stroop should refer to Polish resistance fighters found in the ghetto as “bandits”. Referring to the specific organizations they belonged to might affect their depiction as criminals against the established order and instead give them a certain aura of legitimacy, which was the last thing the Nazis wanted.

In this context, it is of interest to have a look at just how many members of the Polish underground took part in the fighting inside the Warsaw ghetto between 19 April and 16 May 1943. According to this page and this excerpt, an 18-man unit of the Polish Armia Krajowa, under the command of Henryk Iwański, fought inside the Warsaw ghetto, amid the ruins on Muranowski Square and Nalewki Street, alongside one of the Jewish fighting organizations. This seems to have been the unit that Stroop referred to as follows:

The main Jewish battle group, mixed with Polish bandits, had already retired during the first and second day to the so-called Muranowski Square. There, it was reinforced by a considerable number of Polish bandits.

If – as denierbud would probably be prone to argue – the emphasis on “bandits” in the Stroop Report is out of proportion to the size and the achievements of Iwanski’s unit, the reasonable explanation for this would be that Stroop, embarrassed by how long it was taking him to subdue the Jewish resistance, and perhaps also by high casualties that he eventually played down in his report (see Part 2 of this article), reckoned that the Polish underground fighters, the “bandits”, would be seen by his superiors as a more formidable opponent than the despised Jews, and thus make his difficulties in crushing the uprising more excusable in Krüger’s and Himmler’s eyes. For the female Jewish forger of denierbud’s fantasies, on the other hand, there would be no reason to have the non-Jewish underground play a bigger part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising than it actually did.

At the end of this item of his feature, denierbud points to the oddness of the term “subhumans” in Stroop’s teletype message of 16 May 1943:

180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed.

Indeed it makes no sense to interpret the “subhumans” as a category other than “Jews” and “bandits”, so the reasonable interpretation is that “subhumans” is being used as an epithet for either Jews or Polish underground fighters, whereby in the first case the term “bandits” would in this particular message be another epithet for the Jews. Either of both scenarios fits the Nazi view that Jews were “bandits” or “bandits helpers” per se, non-Jews were “bandits” if they fought as partisans against the Nazis, and both the Jews and the Slavic Poles were Untermenschen. In the latter scenario (“bandits” = Polish underground fighters = “subhumans”), it is possible that the text in Stroop’s manuscript was, for instance, “Es wurden 180 Juden, bzw. Banditen und Untermenschen vernichtet” (“180 Jews, or bandits and subhumans were destroyed”), and by mistake this became “Es wurden 180 Juden, Banditen und Untermenschen vernichtet”(“180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed”) when the message was typed. Such banal explanation is more realistic than denierbud’s manipulation fantasies.


Denierbud’s “Ten Other Points to Consider” have thus been dealt with. The next and final part of his article will be dedicated to denierbud’s theory about his female Jewish forger’s identity.

---

Continuation:

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 5)

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 3)

[Continued from The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 2)]


“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 3)

Discussion of denierbud’s “Ten Other Points to Consider” will be divided into two parts, of which one deals with “points” 1, 9 and 10 because these three contain similar claims (staging of photographs contained in the Stroop Report). “Points” 2 to 6 and 8 will be the subject of the other part, while “point” 7 was already addressed in Part 1 of this commentary.

Read more!


5. “An unlikely photo for a commemorative book” (item 1 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

With regard to one of the photos attached to the Stroop Report, which can be viewed online here and is captioned “Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt” (“Forcibly pulled out of dug-outs”) denierbud mouths off as follows:

1) The most famous photo of the holocaust comes from the Stroop Report. It is the photo of the little boy with his hands raised up, with a soldier behind him holding a gun. Would a German general choose to include such an un-chivalric photo in a commemorative book? Any person in any culture is going to be turned off by the "bully" implication of the photo: a nice little boy scared into putting his hands up by a grown man with a gun. Who, below, is more likely to put this into a photo album:

A) A Jew trying to vilify the Nazis

B) A Nazi General

As a means to grasp the absurdity, try to imagine General Patton sending General Eisenhower a commemorative photo of an American soldier herding 5 year old Japanese children at gunpoint into some enclosure.

In the last paragraph of the above quote, American citizen denierbud reveals his ignorance of his own country’s history by placing US generals George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese, instead of the European Theater of Operations.

He further reveals his ignorance of the nature and tasks of commanders like SS-Brigadefuehrer and Major General of Police Stroop by comparing him to military commanders conducting engagements between military forces. Patton and Eisenhower would probably have resented this comparison, and so, as already mentioned in Part 2, would Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, who made a clear distinction between a campaign “fought by soldiers against a well-armed army” and what he contemptuously called Stroop’s “little murder expedition”. Stroop may have liked to see himself as a soldier, but his operation against the Warsaw ghetto was but a large-scale police operation, directed against a population group that, as a whole, was deemed to be a threat to public security and to the “Aryan” population. This view was expressed by Stroop himself in the summary account part of the report, namely in the following statements:

Page I:

These restrictions were imposed with the intention of protecting the aryan population against the Jews.

Page 2:

The experiences in the district of Lowicz after Ghettos had been installed, showed that this method is the only one suitable for dispelling the dangers which emanate repeatedly from the Jews.
[…]
At that time the Department for Hygiene urged the speedy erection of a Ghetto in the interest of preserving the health of the German Forces and of the native population as well.

Page 3:

It soon became clear, however, that not all dangers had been removed by this confining the Jews to one place. Security considerations required removing the Jews from the city of Warsaw altogether.

Jews were seen by Stroop as a threat to public health and security, as a pest to be segregated and removed. And they were also seen as despicable creatures, contemptuously referred to as rabble and sub-humanity and portrayed as the dregs of humanity, abominable not only physically but also character-wise, like these Jewish traitors being scrutinized by a smart-looking German officer. This was a view that Stroop shared with his superiors, including Himmler, who in a later speech would refer to the Jews as “this disintegrating plague in our body popular”, which he had undertaken to wipe out for the good of Germany.

Such being their views and attitudes, neither Stroop nor Himmler would realize the “bully” implication of this photo that denierbud talks about. The “nice little boy” would be a filthy, crooked-legged, sickly showpiece of the Jewish “rabble and sub-humanity” that threatened the strong and healthy German people, the “grown man with a gun” a worthy SS-man helping to carry out a task that was, in Himmler’s words, “the most difficult we had so far”. The “grown man vs. boy” – situation made no difference to this assessment, and neither did the fact that the SS-man was heavily armed and the Jewish boy obviously defenseless, for what made the Jews dangerous in the Nazis eyes’ was not any physical power but their supposed “disintegrating” influence. A part of this “disintegrating” influence, according to Nazi ideology, was the notion of conscience and of compassion for the weak and helpless underlying the chivalric custom of sparing them. Among the statements attributed to Hitler there are the following:

"Only when the time comes when the race is no longer overshadowed by the consciousness of its own guilt, then it will find internal peace and external energy to cut down regardlessly and brutally the wild shoots, and to pull up the weeds."

"Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish like circumcision."

"I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading modifications of a chimera called conscience and morality"

In his book Mein Kampf, Volume II, Chapter I, Hitler had proclaimed that what he called an “ethical ideal” had to step aside if it endangered “the existence of a race that is the standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal”:

The völkisch belief holds that humanity must have its ideals, because ideals are a necessary condition of human existence itself. But, on the other hand, it denies that an ethical ideal has the right to prevail if it endangers the existence of a race that is the standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal. For in a world which would be composed of mongrels and negroids all ideals of human beauty and nobility and all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity would be lost forever.

Thus there was no room for ethical considerations, such as keep the stronger from killing, harming or brutalizing the weaker, within the scope of what Goebbels, in his diary entry of 27 March 1942, called “a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus”. On the contrary, acting with utmost ruthlessness even against defenseless women and children carrying that “bacillus” was the dictate of a “higher ethical ideal” borne by the superior “Aryan” race, a sacrifice made for the German people by men who loved it, a supreme virtue. In his speech on 6 October 1943, Himmler expressed this idea in the following terms (my translation):

I ask you that what I tell you in this circle you will really only hear and never talk about it. The question came up to us: What do to with the women and children? – I decided to find a very clear solution also in this respect. This because I didn’t consider myself entitled to exterminate the men – that is, to kill them or to have them killed – and to let the children grow up as avengers against our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth. For the organization that had to carry out the task if was the most difficult we had so far. It has been carried out without – as I consider myself entitled to say – our men and our leaders having taken harm to their spirit and soul. The path between the possibilities existing here, to either become crude and heartless and no longer to respect human life or to become weak and collapse to the point of nervous breakdowns the path between this Scylla and Charybdis is horrendously narrow.

Abhorrent though it may appear to normal human feeling, the situation portrayed on this photo is thus perfectly compatible with how Himmler and his subordinates saw themselves – as men willing to make the sacrifice of acting ruthlessly against the perceived carriers of what Himmler called “this disintegrating plague”, for the benefit of Germany – and those they were fighting against. The answer to denierbud’s rhetorical question whether a “Nazi General” would be likely to include this photograph in a photo report meant for Himmler is: yes, definitely so. On 23 April 1943 Himmler had ordered “to complete the combing out of the Warsaw Ghetto with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity”. Photos like the one under discussion showed that Stroop had complied with this order.

Against the reality of Nazi ideology stands the fantasy of denierbud’s manipulation scenario, which would have his female Jewish forger directing a large team of actors and photographers, some dressed up as SS-men and others as poor Jews, elaborately staging more than four dozen photographs against a background of burning buildings and/or urban ruins chosen or created for that sinister purpose, all of that at a time when Warsaw and all of Poland was under Nazi control, and furthermore without leaving any evidence to this large outdoor photo session (which even included a shot of the C.O. of the large-scale action himself) other than the “bully” effect discussed above and the claim of one Tsvi Nussbaum that he was the boy with his hands in the air, and that the photo had been taken not inside but outside the Warsaw ghetto and on a date after the completion of the Stroop Report.

For Nussbaum’s account denierbud refers his readers to this page, which he apparently did not read very carefully. If he had, he would have noticed that his source features excerpts from Richard Raskin’s A Child at Gunpoint, in which it is ruled out that Nussbaum and the boy on the picture are identical. Emphases in the following quote are mine.

If the boy in the photo is Tsvi Nussbaum, then the picture would have to have been taken at the Hotel Polski, and not within the Warsaw Ghetto, where all of the photos from the "Stroop Report" are generally thought to have been taken.
Dr. Lucjan Dobroszycki was quoted in a New York Times article, expressing doubts about whether Tsvi Nussbaum is the boy in the photo, for the reasons set out below:
"The scene," he noted, "is on a street, not in the courtyard in which the Hotel Polski roundup took place. Some of the Jews are wearing armbands that they surely would have shed while in the Aryan quarter of Warsaw. The German soldiers would not have needed combat uniforms at the hotel. The heavy clothing worn by most of the Jews suggests that the photograph was taken in May – the date General Stroop put on the report – rather than July. Moreover every other photograph in the "Stroop Report" was taken in the Warsaw Ghetto."

Tsvi Nussbaum commented:
"I am not claiming anything – there’s no reward. I didn’t ask for this honour. I think it’s me, but I can’t honestly swear to it. A million and a half Jewish children were told to raise their hands."

Finally, with the help of someone trained in photo-comparison, Dr. K.R. Burns, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Georgia, compared the famous photo, with a passport photo of Tsvi Nussbaum taken in 1945, and stated the following:
"Having examined the two photographs, although the mouth, nose and cheek are consistent, there is one important disparity; the ear lobes on the 1943 boy appear to be attached, whereas the earlobes of the 1945 boy are not attached. This generic trait cannot change with age and the difference indicates the pictures are not of the same boy. "

So the child at gunpoint is clearly not Mr. Nussbaum. And while other attempts to identify this little boy have failed as well, four of the Jews shown on this photograph have been identified by relatives, and the man holding the gun identified himself. Raschke, as quoted by denierbud’s source:

The one person in the photograph whose identity has been established beyond any doubt is the SD soldier aiming his sub-machine gun in the direction of the little boy.

He was SS-Rottenführer Josef Blösche, a most feared predator, who was often teamed up with SS-Untersturmführer Karl–Georg Brandt, and SS-Oberscharführer Heinrich Klaustermeyer, to terrorize the occupants of the ghetto on hunting expeditions, randomly killing whomever they chose.

Blösche was born in Friedland (former "Sudetenland") in 1912, and after joining the SS, saw service in Platerow as a guard patrolling the River Bug. In May 1941 he was transferred to the SS post at Siedlce. Following service in an Einsatzgruppen unit in Baranowitchi, he was transferred to the Warsaw Security Police, where he took part in the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943 and the Polish national uprising in August 1944.

So there is little if any room for doubt that this is a photo taken during the Warsaw Uprising, and that it shows what it is captioned as showing.

Denierbud should learn to read his own sources before invoking them. And then, perhaps he read this one but expected his readers to take his word for it and not check behind him. The line between ignorance, sloppiness and stupidity on the one hand and dishonesty on the other is hard to draw when it comes to “Revisionism”.

6. “A Picture of acute scoliosis” (item 9 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Denierbud can be an amusing fellow, especially when in this “point” he tells his readers that this picture “looks more like a medical photo” and that “Nazi philosophy had a racial component to be sure, but it didn't involve running to the hospital of conquered cities and taking photos of people with rare medical problems in order to point out their inferior characteristics.”

First of all, what is supposed to make this picture look like a medical photo? Is it because in denierbud’s imagination medical photos are usually taken on the outside of buildings with bullet marks in them, which is what the two men in this photo seem to be facing? Because he figures that axes (we see one by the man on the left) are not only a useful tool when it comes to breaking open doors in a round-up, but also standard medical equipment? Or just because the men in the photo have no clothes on? The latter is the only feature that might point to a medical background, except that there’s a likelier reason that becomes apparent from the Stroop Report, namely the teletype message of 3 May 1943, where the following is written:

Since we discovered several times today, that Jewesses had pistols concealed in their bloomers, every Jew and bandit will be ordered from today on, to strip completely for the search.

So the men on the photo obviously had to strip in order to make sure that they had no concealed weapons on them. Medical photo my ass.

As to denierbud’s objection regarding Nazi “philosophy”, denierbud has revealed enough ignorance of the subject matter of his productions to warrant the question on what basis he presumes knowledge of what the Nazis would or would not do. Nazi racist and pseudo – anthropological madness went so far that, on one occasion, over 100 prisoners were killed at Natzweiler concentration camp, with Himmler’s blessing, in order to put together a collection of skeletons from Judeo-Bolshevik sub-humans at the Anatomic Institute of Strasburg University. The well-documented execution of this project is described in detail on pages 271 ff of the study Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, edited by Kogon, Langbein and others. It was also the subject of a criminal trial before a West German court. Taking photographs of hospital patients with deformities in order to point out their inferiority would have been just a less harmful manifestation of the same lunacy.

However, denierbud further objects, the deformity of the man on the right also existed among Germans and would thus not have been suitable for demonstrating Jewish inferiority. To be sure, there were also non-Jewish Germans with all sorts of physical and/or mental handicaps, but arguing that this would have kept the Nazis from deriding Jews with shots of physical deformities is like arguing that club-footed little Goebbels and other members of the government, who were not exactly models of “Aryan” perfection, kept the Nazis from juxtaposing “Aryan” beauty and Jewish ugliness in charming publications like this one. What is more, denierbud apparently doesn’t know – or “forgot” to tell his readers – that the Nazis saw also otherwise worthy German Volksgenossen as inferior and a burden to society if they suffered from physical or mental handicaps, to the point of instituting a program for the killing of disabled children and adult disabled patients living in institutional settings. As early as 1936, the Nazis had portrayed handicapped people as dregs of humanity living at the expense of the healthy body popular, like in this propaganda poster.

Within the scope of such “philosophy”, to use denierbud’s terminology, a physically or mentally handicapped person who furthermore was a member of the despised Jewish race, or a stinking Jew who on top of that was physically deformed, was the epitome of all that National Socialism fought against and stood for, an illustration of Hitler’s “higher ethical ideal” that called for ruthlessly defending “human beauty and nobility” against the “mongrels and negroids” who might otherwise destroy “all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity” (see above quotes from Mein Kampf), and of the “most difficult” task of eliminating “this disintegrating plague in our body popular”, which Himmler would refer to in his speech on 6 October 1943. In this sense, the man with acute scoliosis on the right of the photo, being physically deformed and obviously a Jew, was a carrier of two perceived evils that the Nazis sought to erase, and thus an excellent motive for a photo that would warm the heart of a Nazi race ideologist.

On the other hand, and probably in order to make clear that a Jew was trash whether or not he bore a physical anomaly, there was the man on the right, apparently of normal build and externally showing his “inferiority” only through his low stature, weak complexion, sagging shoulders and ugly big ears. Denierbud apparently failed to notice that this man was labeled a “dreg of humanity” just like the one suffering from scoliosis, and that the photo’s message in the context of Nazi ideology, while emphasized by the latter man’s handicap, was not dependent thereon. Two Jews looking like the man on the left would have been “dregs of humanity” as well.

7. “Photo of Man Falling In Mid-Air” (item 10 of the section “Ten Other Points to Consider”)

Regarding this photo from the Stroop Report, denierbud treats his readers to the following showpiece of wisdom:

In a combat situation, it must be pretty hard to get that mid-air photo of a man jumping out of a 4 story building. Particularly since there might be someone else in the building who refuses to be taken alive and has a gun and might shoot at soldiers below. Setting up the camera and being ready to click at just that right moment might be tough. However for a faked photo to be used for propaganda, you'd want just that: you'd want the man caught mid-air. When I've looked at old black and white photos I've noticed that their resolution is incredible, and German cameras were considered the best, like the Leicas. Old photos circa WWII rarely have blotches on them either, so it's odd that this photo has a blotch right on that crucial spot: on the man's face so we can't see if perhaps it's a dummy. We see smoke coming out of an apartment. Not the apartment he's jumping out of though. The rest of the apartments don't have smoke and many have curtains which haven't gone up in flames. These things point to this photo being staged. The caption is "These bandits are avoiding arrest by jumping down."

Before examining the above, let us briefly assume, just for the sake of argument, that denierbud is right about the photo having been staged. Would this necessarily mean that the staging was organized by someone forging the Stroop Report? No. It might just as well be that Stroop himself or the photo crew attached to his forces organized the staging of one of the scenes that Stroop described so vividly in his report, for the simple reason that it was easier than capturing such a scene “live”. Such scenario would at least be less far-fetched than denierbud's scenario of elaborate Jewish or Polish outdoor photo sessions using German uniforms and hardware in German-occupied Warsaw in mid-1943.

So, even if denierbud were right about the staging, this wouldn’t help his case.

But let us nevertheless look at what he’s got to back up his claim with.

Denierbud figures that taking such a photograph in a “combat situation” would be “tough”, but he does little to explain what exactly would be so “tough” about the taking of this picture (which was obviously shot from a certain distance, as it shows almost all of the building’s façade, and by someone standing in a somewhat diagonal direction from the building rather than squarely in front of it), and what particular photographic talents would be required to set up the camera and be “ready to click just at the right moment” after realizing that there was a man in the building on the verge of jumping, probably with the expectable hesitation that precedes such a move. The possibility of being shot at from the building? Bud seems to think that German Propaganda Kompanie (PK) photographers were bunglers and/or pussies, when actually such photographers covered combat situations much tougher than the one portrayed on this picture, where the probability that the building’s residents might be armed with long-range weapons constituting a risk for the photographer (like a rifle) was not very high, considering the reduced number of Jewish combatants and the little armament they had (see Part 2 of this article).

As to denierbud’s sermon about the quality of World War II photos (especially if taken with German cameras), I wonder just how many such photos denierbud has seen to support his claim that they generally have an “incredible” resolution (whatever he means by that) and “rarely have blotches on them either”. I don’t expect someone who has American generals Patton and Eisenhower fighting against the Japanese rather than the Germans, and who considers the staff of Nazi extermination camps to have been members of “the elite forces of the German army”, to be a World War II buff looking at World War II pictures very often.

Denierbud claims that there is a suspicious “blotch” obscuring the face of the man leaping from the building, which would otherwise allow for telling whether or not it is a human being or a dummy. I don’t think that’s much of an argument, insofar as I expect dummies – at least such dummies, assuming they existed at the time, that are built close enough to nature to have their right arm pointing upwards and the left one pointing downwards when falling from a multi-story building, like the leaping man on the picture – to also have a face that may be mistaken for a real human face from the distance from which this photo was taken, especially on a black-and-white photograph. There is also nothing suspicious about the man’s face being unrecognizable, which seems to be due to the very bright background of the jumping figure. This background looks like either flames engulfing the figure or a part of the building’s façade from which the paint has fallen off, revealing some bright construction material underneath that creates a very bright tone on the picture. Another factor leading to the “blotch” may be the man’s position as he is leaping: he seems to have his left side and back turned towards the camera, his right side towards the building, and his front side and face towards the balcony a little below him. He further may have his head bent downwards, like someone who has just taken a leap towards mattresses and other upholstered articles he has previously thrown into the street and wants to land on, or like this person falling from one of the WTC towers on 11 September 2001, the main difference being that the man in the Stroop Report photo is probably hoping to survive the fall. Last but not least, I don't expect decades of lying in an archive to have done our Stroop Report photo's quality any good. To cut a long story short, there are several possible explanations for the “blotch” that require no speculations about some sinister manipulator.

Now to the alleged absence of smoke coming from the apartment from which the man is jumping. To be sure, it is difficult to see any on the picture featured by denierbud, where the arrow above the text “Face is obscurred[sic!]” covers the relevant part of the window behind the man:



But if you look at the picture without this arrow, and especially if you amplify the relevant part:



you see something coming out of the right side of the window (from the photo viewer’s perspective) that looks like a plume of smoke to me.

So, contrary to what denierbud tries to make believe, the jumping man obviously had fire in the room from which he was jumping, and was escaping from that fire. The plume of smoke shows exactly where denierbud placed the arrow in his commented edition of the picture, which makes it hard to believe that he failed to see it.

So what is denierbud left with to support his claim that this photo was staged?

Just his baseless and vague subjective notion of what “you” would want for a “faked photo to be used for propaganda”, which by itself is meaningless. A man jumping from a multi-story building looks “good” on any photo.

---

Continuation:

“The Stroop Report is a Forgery” (Part 4)