Source of yet another fake "fake Holocaust photo" found.

Rick Yair emailed us to tell about the source of one of those photoshopped photos that the Holocaust denier liars like to spread on social networks claiming they are "original" while the actual original photos are fake.

Turned out that it came from a sort of an art project "Revisionist Photos. Removing the Horrors of the Third Reich From the Pages of History", in which various objects and people were photoshopped out of the original Nazi and Holocaust photos:

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events in human history.

It is also one of the best documented.

Still, there are those who deny it ever happened.

Come with me and visit a world where these revisionists have won. A world where facts too painful to be remembered are simply erased, and the sins of facism are eliminated en masse.

Experience Revisionist Photos

Here is the page with the edited photo in question. Here is the original, which is a part of a series.

While the author of the project might have had good intentions, the idea was extremely dumb, if only because it was to be expected that the dumb and/or dishonest Holocaust deniers will use exactly such images to spread their lies - and voila, they are doing exactly this.

Debunking Grover Furr's Katyn screed.

In this posting I will analyze Grover Furr's 2018 book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, the Solution. A copy can be found online. I've already dealt with Furr several times at this blog, demonstrating his ignorance and lack of honesty and I have already dealt with some key arguments from this book here and elsewhere. As it is still used by the deniers of history to whitewash criminals, it is useful to take a closer look at it.

It is not the aim of this post to educate beginners about Katyn - in fact, following the arguments in this post can at times require some relatively advanced knowledge of the issue. The discussion is often compact (readers are supposed to have read and understood Furr's arguments on their own) and sometimes the counter-argumentation is presented in form of links to my Russian Katyn website with more details. That said, let me give a relatively short overview of the Katyn evidence.

Czech Communists sentenced for Katyn denial

From a Communist website:

On 31 October 2022, Tomáš Hübner, single judge of the Prague 7 District Court, sentenced Josef Skála, a well-known Marxist intellectual and former vice-president of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), together with Vladimír Kapal, and Juraj Václavík, all three indicted, to eight months’ imprisonment, under Article 405 of the Criminal Code of the Czech Republic, for having challenged the version attributing the Katyn massacre [...] to the Soviet leadership.

The first round of the appeal hearings started on Feb. 1. From a news item:

Judge Tomáš Hübner stopped Václavík after several tens of minutes. "We're not going to prove history here, because it's absolutely clear that the Soviet Union and its units did it," he said, adding that the same arguments as Václavík were repeatedly used by staunch Stalinists before Soviet politician Nikita Khrushchev revealed how the massacre really happened.

"If you want to explain to me for several hours that Katyn was committed by the Germans, you can, but I won't believe you," the judge added to the disapproving roar of the public in the courtroom.

(Nota bene: obviously, Khrushchev never revealed anything about the Katyn massacre.)

Here's the relevant article of the Czech Criminal code:

Section 405 - Denial, Impugnation, Approval and Justification of Genocide Whoever publicly denies, impugns, approves, or attempts to justify Nazi, Communist or any other genocide, or other crimes of the Nazis and Communists against humanity, shall be sentenced to imprisonment for six months to three years.

Several points:

1. Obviously, I'm against such laws.

2. These Commies are, naturally, falsifiers of history (just like their lying comrade Grover Furr). There's no historical doubt that the Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre. Denial of this fact is intellectually equal to Holocaust denial. The Katyn deniers have been unable to muster any credible evidence for their claims and have been unable to account for the two key issues: if the Germans did it, where did the Polish POWs in question remain from May 1940 to July 1941 (we know they were neither in the POW camps, contrary to the official Soviet claims, nor in the GULAG) and which German units exactly committed the crime (we know it wasn't the unit that the Soviets officially blamed)?

3. The shouts from the Communist websites are hypocritical when the decades-long Communist suppression of the truth about Katyn using the criminal codes as a cudgel (numerous people were imprisoned for disputing the Soviet claims) is not acknowledged by the same websites.

4. The Western Holocaust deniers usually accept the Soviet guilt for the Katyn massacre (thus showing their intellectual inconsistency, since Holocaust and Katyn denial methods are identical) and try to use it to discredit the Allied evidence of the Nazi crimes (of course, without success). They also love to claim that if some historical claim needs to be protected by law, then it's at least suspicious, if not outright false. This case puts them in a bind.

Grover Furr’s lie about my claim about the Polish policemen’s tags found at Volodymyr-Volynskyi

Grover Furr is a neo-Stalinist falsifier of history well-known for his stunning incompetence, ideological myopia and fanaticism ("I have yet to find one crime that Stalin committed"). 

On 15.08.2022 he published an article accusing me of a "lie" on the issue of the police identification tags (he calls them badges, which is OK, but since we're not talking about the badges worn on the uniform, I will call them tags) found at Volodymyr-Volynskyi (a detailed explanation of the issue is here) in my 15.12.2021 article (about a Katyn denial propaganda film on the Russian NTV channel) in the Nobel-prize-winning Novaya gazeta (here in Russian; I will refer to it as "the NG article").

Ironically, Furr focuses only on this one claim, even though the bulk of the argumentation in his pseudoscholarly Katyn denial book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, the Solution has been debunked by me here, here and here (as well as all over the Katyn Files website; though mostly as arguments of other people; there's precious little original content in Furr's propaganda pamphlet). [Update: a full debunking of his book.]

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

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

Innocent executed

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

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

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

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

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

H. Famira

Professor of German

Concordia University

Montreal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much for the "revisionist" "research".

Holocaust deniers and the Yad Vashem database

[Update 14.05.2020: a quick rejoinder to Denier Muppet's non-response has been added. Also added to the Buchhalter section.]

So, some silly neo-Nazi (to whom we will refer as Denier Muppet) thinks he has a gotcha - allegedly he found some prominent Holocaust survivors listed in the Yad Vashem database and the neo-Nazi muppets have been all agog about this. Let's take a quick look, but before that, what is the Yad Vashem database?

It's a database that intends to list the names of the Holocaust victims. According to the FAQ, currently it contains 6.5 million records and it is estimated that those refer to about 4.8 million individuals (i. e. YV tries to account for duplicate records).

What are the sources of the database? The FAQ explains: a huge chunk comes from the pages of testimony (basically, forms filled out by survivors or relatives about the presumed victims), archival documentation and local commemoration projects.

Now comes the important part, so I will directly quote from the FAQ:

Looking for the Katyn lighthouses.

[Update: Grover Furr’s lie about my claim about the Polish policemen’s tags found at Volodymyr-Volynskyi]

We have already devoted a couple of posts to the neo-Stalinist apologetics, showing how it is qualitatively not different from Holocaust denial. In this one we will deal with an example showing how the denial methodology isn't much different from flatearthism.

On that Netflix documentary about Demjanjuk...

Updated on 26.01.2020.

Not going to watch it, to be honest. But I see some ignorance-based commentary around it, namely that there's still some kind of a lingering unresolved mystery around Demjanjuk's identity.

There simply isn't. It is known for a fact that he wasn't Ivan the Terrible. Period.

Already pointed this out here, but let's recap very briefly.

The two basic facts:

Irregular Musings on the Unicellular Denial. #1. "Stonetoss", Ron Unz.

This starts an irregular (i.e.: whenever I feel like it) series in which I will be briefly commenting on the especially primitive specimens of the denier fauna.

Now, to be honest, even the crème de la crème of the denier kingdom, the "academic" deniers, are not really far away from the lower branches of the rotten tree in that they will more often than not mangle the sources, proffer trivial and laughable "arguments" and fall victim to the most common logical fallacies. But at the very least they are able to put up a facade of sophistication on their anti-knowledge project, what with their archival references and the sometime use of scientific jargon. Which looks more like posh lipstick on a chihuahua, but hey.

So this series won't be concerned with them, but rather with the lower-tier negationists who more or less fully ignore the "research" of their slightly less devolved colleagues, instead subsisting on whatever radioactive slime and long-ago-expired fast-food-for-thought leftovers they randomly find while aimlessly crawling through the Great Internet Wastes.

Again about the Stalinist deniers: yes, the Moscow trials were staged, duh.

[Update: also see a full debunking of Furr's Katyn book.]

Sometimes we tackle other kinds of denial here, since the "methodology" employed by the Holocaust deniers can be employed to "debunk" practically anything, and highlighing this fact now and then is useful. 

Various brainwashed Stalin apologists, like Grover Furr (exposed as a liar and an ignoramus here) and Ludo Martens claim, despite all evidence, that the absurd Moscow show trials were real, that the Old Bolsheviks really were reduced to the level of pitiful wreckers and then freely and with gusto confessed their crimes.

The simple fact is that the trials were staged. Some of the evidence for this is provided below. If these neo-Stalinists (who are no better than neo-Nazis, as far as I'm concerned) are wrong on such a trivial matter, they simply cannot be trusted on anything else.