Not With a Bang but a Whimper

Those of you reading this who don't "get" the title, read T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" here.

The final installment of One Third of the Holocaust begins with a story from Reuters about negative population growth in Germany. Economic implications are the reason for the drop in population growth, the article says. Denierbud doesn't agree.

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"Nothing is bigger in the German psyche and identity than the Holocaust," denierbud tells us. Really? How does he know? Not only is he demonstrably not German (both because of his accent and his deplorable pronunciation of the German language), but he's engaging in the "no true Scotsman" fallacy -- again. Incidentally, one of this blog’s contributors is a German citizen. Ask Roberto is he feels "guilt, self-hatred and demoralization", which is what, according to denierbud, is instilled by the Holocaust in the poor German people. Roberto will probably tell you how proud he is of his German heritage, and of his uncle who fought and died as a Wehrmacht soldier in World War II. Apparently it is possible to distinguish the overwhelming majority of decent Germans past and present from denierbud’s mass-murdering Nazi heroes, no less so than it is possible to distinguish the overwhelming majority of decent Turks from the masterminds and executors of the Armenian genocide, the overwhelming majority of decent Japanese from the organizers and perpetrators of the Nanking massacre, the overwhelming majority of decent Cambodians from the likes of Pol Pot, or the overwhelming majority of decent Americans from the likes of George A. Custer, William Calley or Curtis LeMay, to name but a few out of many possible examples. And we expect most Germans to be intelligent and objective enough to have that capacity of distinction.

Plus, what does this have to do with negative population growth in Germany? Are Germans supposed to refrain from reproducing out of "guilt, self-hatred and demoralization"? If so, then Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Czech Republic must have similar psychic problems, because their birthrates, according to this BBC report, are not much higher than that of Germany. And in Germany, as the same report shows, the problem lies chiefly in the areas that formerly belonged to the so-called German Democratic Republic, where the transformation process following the reunification has been accompanied by immense insecurity and social crisis. Financial burden and conflict between job and family figure prominently as the reasons given by Germans for their reluctance to have children, according to a survey referred to on Andrew Hammel’s blog:

The Allensbach institute, on of the principal public-opinion research institutes in Germany, recently asked Germans of child-bearing age why they aren't having children. Here are some of the reasons (German):

1. A child would be too much of a financial burden (47%)

2. I'm still too young for that (47%)

3. My career plans would be hard to fulfill with a child (37%)

4. I haven't yet found the right partner (28%)

5. I want to have the maximum amount of freedom, not to have to limit myself (27%)

6. I have many interests that would be hard to reconcile with having a child (27%)

7. Children are hard to raise; I am not sure I have the strength and nerves for that (27%)

8. I want to be as independent as possible (26%)

9. I would then have less time for friends (19%)

10. I don't know if my relationship will stay together (17%)

11. I or my partner would be at a career disadvantage if we had a child (16%)

Yet there’s nothing suggesting "guilt, self-hatred and demoralization", as far as I can see. But then, who would expect denierbud, the self-appointed expert on the "German psyche" to know something about social and economic realities?



Then denierbud cuts to a Steven Spielberg cameo in the third Austin Powers movie. He compares the "fun and laughs of Hollywood" with Spielberg's "catch 'em while they're young" tactic of instilling guilt in non-Germans (demonstrated with a cut from Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah project with voice-over by Morgan Freeman).

We're next brought to the Web site of Prof. Harold Marcuse of the University of California-Santa Barbara. Denierbud remarks on syllabi from Prof. Marcuse, noting that "a people's ability to navigate their future" is important. Denierbud flashes back ominously to the news story about negative population growth in Germany. He has yet to make any statement that definitely link the Holocaust to negative population growth in Germany. We've already established that he has no idea what the "German psyche", if such a thing even exists, consists of, and he hasn't given us any more to go on.

Denierbud also shows us that Prof. Marcuse has shown in previous courses the films Schindler's List and Escape From Sobibor, the latter of which denierbud "treated" back in Part 14.

A final point about Prof. Marcuse: His grandfather was Herbert Marcuse, who was an OSS agent during the war. If anyone might have known about mass killing of Jews before it became general knowledge, it was Herbert Marcuse.

After repeating some of the soundtrack from the trailer from Escape From Sobibor, denierbud flashes quickly to a clip from Schindler's List, this one showing Schindler's car driving over a street near the labor camp Plaszow (where the first half of the movie takes place) that has been paved with Jewish gravestones. Denierbud says cryptically that Spielberg shares much with Ben Hecht, implying (I guess) that they both lie and add religious elements to the "story" to make it more tragic.

There are two problems with this line of argumentation. The first is that the "story" wasn't invented in 1993, when Schindler's List was released. It is included in Thomas Keneally's 1982 book Schindler's List, from which the movie was adapted. You can find references to the road on pp. 221-22 of the paperback edition and on p. 16 (in the Prologue). So if anyone added this detail to the "story," it was Keneally and not Spielberg. But the second point tell us even more: Keneally didn't invent the story -- there actually was a road to Plaszow paved with Jewish headstones, even if denierbud tells us -- again -- that Hilberg doesn't mention it (not that he doesn't lie also, denierbud reminds us; he just knows what's truly outrageous).

In case there's any doubt that Keneally was telling the truth when he included in his book a description of the road paved with stones, here is an article from an anti-Semitic Web site indicating that Polish headstones were also used. In fact, the road still exists today, and anyone can go to Krakow and see it.

After showing the clip from Schindler's List, denierbud segues to a discussion of Holocaust education of teens in the U.S., stating that the primary audience now consists of "young hip-hop kids." I'm not quite sure what this means, though we have thankfully already been shown a young African American listening to testimony from the Survivors of the Shoah project in Clip 14, so you can connect the dots, I suppose.

Then something rare for this four-and-a-half-film happens: Denierbud makes a decent point. He says that young American high school students should be learning about the genocide against the indigenous population of North America. I, for one, could not agree more (although I disagree that this education should take place to the exclusion of teaching about other genocides, including the Nazi Holocaust).

Now denierbud asks a rhetorical question he believes his viewers might have, i.e., "Well, even if one-third is a lie, the other two-thirds are still true." Don't make that mistake, denierbud says. "The whole thing is a lie"

(As a side note, let's consider that in this series of refutations of One Third of the Holocaust, we will have successfully countered all of denierbud's claims against nearly 1.5 million Jewish deaths at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. If denierbud should attack the remaining 3.6 million Jewish deaths during World War II, assuming Hilberg's casualty figures that he refers to, we will probably have an easier job debunking his BS. For these 3.6 million include the death toll for Auschwitz [ca. 1 million, according to Hilberg] and mobile killing operations [i.e., open-air massacres by the Einsatzgruppen and other German formations, mainly in the occupied territories of the USSR, for which Hilberg’s estimate is about 1,300,000]. That would account for over 2.3 million, and, I'm sorry to break it to denierbud and his fans, but those figures are more easily proved than the Reinhard[t] figures because there was more evidence left after the war for both. The other 1.3 million [Kulmhof and Lublin, ghettoes, privation, labor camps, and camps in Romania and Croatia] are also supported by sufficient documentation, demographic data, and testimonies to leave no room for reasonable doubt. It should be borne in mind, in this context, that Hilberg’s estimates are rather conservative; more recent studies (e.g., those published in Benz et al, Dimensionen des Völkermords) point to a somewhat higher overall death toll.)

In the final assault, we go back to newspaper discussion from Clip 1 on the foundation of U.S. policy in the Middle East on the Holocaust. Denierbud finishes his diagram and then says this: "Bomba down here equals bombs up here," "up here" indicating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Abruptly, the film ends.

As I noted in my analysis of Episode 9, anti-Zionism is typical among Holocaust deniers:

Here the UV has tipped his hand, so to speak. Like most Holocaust deniers, he doesn't just have a problem with "the orthodox version" of events. Rather, he has a problem with Jews. Thus his obvious problem with Zionism: Were Israel populated by non-Jews, would the UV mention it at all in his film? And yet Israel is populated mostly by Jews, and we hear about Israel in the very first clip of this film.

Well, now he's included it in the last part of the film also.

Nice work, Bud.


Some final words about the film as a whole, as this article finishes our debunking of the same.

I think the thing that never ceases to amaze me is how Holocaust deniers get so easily impressed by such facile arguments. I actually found One Third of the Holocaust at YouTube by accident, and it wasn't obvious to me until denierbud said so that the film was intended to deny the Holocaust. This revelation took place when he advanced the argument that, because Hilberg and Arad both used the testimony of Yankel Wiernik in their individual works, then both Hilberg's and Arad's works had to be dismissed out of hand. (What's funny here, despite the obvious immense lapse in logic in such a proposition is that denierbud then continues through twenty-nine subsequent parts of the film to use Hilberg and Arad. I thought they were worthless?)

If there's one other thing that came shining though while working on a refutation of this film, it was the continued observation on my part that most Holocaust deniers have no idea of the details of the events that they are denying. Just for a few examples (from the pieces I principally wrote): The origins of the flag of Israel, the role of the SS during the Holocaust, the status of the war at different points in Holocaust historiography. With the possible exception of Mark Weber, who actually did graduate level work in German history (but who has a checkered past history of membership in neo-Nazi groups), the average Holocaust denier is totally ignorant of most of the historiography of the period.

Then there's the Zionist issue. I've stated many times that I am not a Zionist, but I do get awfully suspicious of anti-Zionists who focus entirely on Israel when there are far more oppressive régimes running countries around the world. When these people are also Holocaust deniers, then my anti-Semitism bells begin to go off. Denierbud set my bells off at least three separate times. Granted, that's a relatively low number for a four hour and fifteen minute film, but it's there nevertheless.

I also realized during this period just how brilliant the people I work with on this blog are. Nick Terry (who read, edited, and vetted every post), Roberto Muehlenkamp, and Sergey Romanov are some of the best researchers (and all around smart folks) I've come across, and I feel lucky even just to have been invited to share a blog with them.

Finally, I really have to thank denierbud himself. As I have stated several times over the last several years, refuting Holocaust denial has made my own knowledge of the period stronger. So thanks, Bud!

"The Germans wouldn’t have done it that way"

One of the recurring themes in "Revisionist" wisecracking is the contention that "the Germans" wouldn’t have adopted the killing and body disposal methods that evidence shows them to have adopted for killing and removing the bodies of about 2.5 million people murdered at the Nazi extermination camps during World War II.

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This contention is a potentially relevant one where based on the alleged physical, technical or logistical impossibility of a certain reported method. Try though they might, however, "Revisionists" haven’t managed to demonstrate that the mass killing and body disposal at Nazi extermination camps, in the manner and on the scale reconstructed by historians and criminal investigators based on evidence, would have been physically, technically or logistically impossible.

Of less potential relevance is the argument that a certain killing or body disposal method had certain practical shortcomings and "the Germans" would have necessarily eliminated such shortcomings or chosen a "better" method. Hindsight is always 20/20, but all too often in human history things have been done less efficiently than they could have been done, or even in a grossly inefficient manner, without this being an indication against the accuracy of evidence showing that they were done. Man is simply everything other than perfect, even if belonging to the German "master race" whose capabilities many "Revisionists" have such a high idea of. So this kind of arguments don’t mean much even where the killing or body disposal method in question had certain shortcomings indeed and a "better" method could have been applied.

Even less potentially relevant, and all the more revealing of the cloud-cuckoo-land of "Revisionist" ill-reasoning, is the contention that the oh-so-technically-advanced Germans would have "designed" the killing or body disposal process in a technically advanced manner rather than applying a comparatively primitive methodology that evidence shows to have been applied. The proponents of this kind of argument seem to be of the strange conviction that technically advanced methods and devices tend to be applied just because they exist and are available, regardless of whether they are a cost-efficient or even a suitable solution for the task at hand in a particular case. They apparently don’t realize that the oh-so-technically wise Germans they look up to could also be practical enough to do without technology and mechanization where simpler methods achieved the same or better results at lower cost and/or in less time.

True to this "Revisionist" tradition, denierbud has tried all three lines of argumentation in his One Third of the Holocaust video, almost all clips of which have been debunked on this blog.

In clip # 10, denierbud essentially uses the second and third lines of argumentation described above, as he contends that certain reported killing or body disposal methods wouldn’t have been adopted or even tried by "the Germans" because they were unpractical, uncouth or unsophisticated. These contentions shall be addressed hereafter.

1. Height of gas chambers.

On pages 73 and 74 of Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (hereinafter "Arad"), the author quotes from a description of the Belzec gas chambers by Rudolf Reder, one of the handful of survivors of that camp. Reder’s description includes the mention that "The corridor and the gas chambers were lower than ordinary rooms, no higher than two meters". Denierbud has a problem with the height: he claims that if the gas chambers were only 2 meters high, everything inside the chamber would be in reach of the victims, who could have blocked the pipes through which the exhaust entered their room with their hands or, as "it is often claimed that they were given towels", by stuffing towels into the openings.

Denierbud is obviously referring to the showerhead openings attached to the pipes along the gas chamber roof (see this CAD model, based on eyewitness descriptions of the gas chambers at Treblinka), which he figures could have been reached and blocked by the people inside the chamber because of the low height of the sealing.

Was this really a disadvantage, not compensated by the advantages of a low roof as concerns reduction of the oxygen available to the victims and the time required to fill the chamber with exhaust? Only if the people were on average tall enough to reach the openings and had enough presence of mind to a) realize that poisonous gas was coming out of the openings and b) react by trying to block them in some way.

The former is hardly a realistic expectation as the people gassed at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were mostly women, children and elderly people, and even the comparatively few younger adult males would rarely if ever have been tall enough to easily reach the sealing or the pipe openings fixed to the sealing.

The latter expectation is even less realistic: exhausted, frightened and confused people, naked and packed together like sardines into a chamber in which it was hard to breathe even before the exhaust was introduced, would hardly react in a rational and cold-blooded manner when faced with the introduction of a poisonous gas into the room. They would panic, completely loose their heads and be incapable of a rational thought or reaction. Any individuals tall and cool-headed enough to try blocking the openings would furthermore have had a problem finding those openings because, as mentioned by Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel regarding Belzec, the lights were turned off prior to gassing.

So the probability that the victims might block openings through which the exhaust was introduced into the chamber was so reduced as to be negligible. Denierbud’s problem was no problem for the SS at the camps of Aktion Reinhard(t).

2. Exhaust introduction and air outlet

Denierbud tells his viewers that "If you have a pipe that pumps exhaust into a hermetically sealed room, you also need a pipe to let the air that's already in the room escape". Why this is so he doesn't explain, but a contemporary Nazi document about the use of homicidal gas vans shows that the need or advantage of an air outlet from a room used for homicidal gassing was also realized by the Nazis. This document, a letter sent by Willy Just to Walter Rauff on June 5, 1942, describes in great detail the technical issues of special vans used in the gassing murders of tens of thousands of people, following the information that "Since December 1941, ninety-seven thousand have been processed, using three vans, without any defects showing up in the vehicles". The document mentions several adjustments that "would be useful" according to "previous experience", the first of which is the following:

In order to facilitate the rapid distribution of CO, as well as to avoid a buildup of pressure, two slots, ten by one centimeters, will be bored at the top of the rear wall. The excess pressure would be controlled by an easily adjustable hinged metal valve on the outside of the vents.

The slots here mentioned were obviously air outlets, and their function was to facilitate the rapid distribution of the carbon monoxide gas introduced from the exhaust of the vehicle and to avoid a buildup of pressure in the cargo area, which was stuffed with people to be gassed at a concentration of – as the document also reveals – 9 to 10 per square meters. The probable reason for wanting to avoid a buildup of excess pressure in the van's cargo area was that excess pressure could have the effect of blocking the gas van's exhaust pipe and causing the gas van's engine to die off or be damaged, or at least to lose power and burn much more fuel, like when a vehicle’s exhaust pipe is blocked by an object or substance not easily blown out by the exhaust:

Yes, it will blow the bottle out. However, if the exhaust is blocked by something more substantial, like the tail pipe being sandblasted shut by hours of travel on a gravel road (it happened to us) then the catalytic converter and/or other sections of the exhaust will probably balloon, your vehicle will get noisier, you will lose power - hills will get more difficult, and you will burn far more gas.

Nevertheless, the apparent absence of such slots before the date on which the aforementioned letter was written did not impede the well-documented killing of tens of thousands of people in gas vans at Chelmno extermination camp, which the letter refers to when mentioning that ninety-seven thousand [people] had been "processed" (see the translated excerpt from the Bonn District Court’s judgment of 30 March 1963 at the trial against Heinrich B. et al in my post of 8-Apr-2007 18:12 on the RODOH forum). It may have been the reason, however, for the gas vans' large fuel consumption, mentioned by German historian Peter Witte:

For the extermination camp Chelmno and the gas vans there the same applies: unquestionably petrol motors. Walter Burmeister, gas van driver at Chelmno, mentioned mid-heavy Renault lorries with an Otto-Motor. Camp chief Walter Piller described the killing process with “gasses which were produced by petrol motors”. Polish mechanics, who were personally ordered to repair a gas van, precisely described exactly the huge petrol motor and its consumption: “The motor of this car uses 75 litres of petrol per 100 km, that is, twice the consumption of normal motors.”

Let’s assume that denierbud didn't find a mention of a "second pipe" to let out the air in either Arad’s or Hilberg’s work (even though there is at least one mention of apertures in the gas chambers, which would have served as an air outlet, by an eyewitness, Shimon Goldberg, quoted on page 153 of Arad’s book). If neither Arad nor Hilberg wrote much about this detail or didn't mention it at all, this only means that they were more interested in the overall reconstruction of the events that were the subject of their research than in specific technical details of the gas chambers, as becomes their being historians. This doesn’t change the fact that an air outlet in the homicidal gas chambers of the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps is mentioned not only by eyewitness Jankel Wiernik (who is quoted by denierbud in this sense), but also by other eyewitnesses or in drawings based on eyewitness testimonies. The following are mentioned by the authors of the aforementioned CAD Reconstruction of the Treblinka gas chambers:

Gas chambers - openings in gas chambers ceilings / hermetic caps.
a) “... the Germans poured chlorine through a window above the chamber.” (Rosenberg, Demjanjuk, Teicholz, p.130)
b) “The outlet on the roof had a hermetic cap.” (Wiernik, Donat, p.157)
c) Explanation of the legend in Jurowski's plan: Nr ?: Window (= opening) through which gas was drawn off to the roof. (Jurowski plan)
d) “The 'windows' on the ceiling measured approximately 0.5 m x 0.5 m according to the plan, and were supplied with grates." (Jurowski plan)
e) An exhaust / chimney type of construction is visible on the Kurt Franz photo.
f) Checking the window in the ceiling / roof. (Rosenberg drawing)

The outlet of air through openings in the gas chambers may explain why some eyewitnesses believed that the victims were killed by extracting the air from the chamber. This method was considered a possibility in an early report (April 1942) by the Polish underground about Belzec, quoted in Arad, page 350. The report states that "It is unknown by which means the Jews are liquidated in the camp. There are three assumptions: (1) electricity; (2) gas; (3) by pumping out the air". On pages 67 f. of their book about Treblinka, "Revisionist" gurus Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf enjoy themselves regarding the "hopeless confusion" among eyewitnesses who mentioned the pumping out of air from the chambers, alone or in combination with the introduction of exhaust gas. They probably wouldn’t be too happy about denierbud having unintentionally provided what may be a plausible explanation for these eyewitness descriptions.

A case of possible violation of the exhaust inlet/air outlet principle that particularly amuses denierbud is the gassing experiment at the lunatic asylum in Mogilev by Dr. Widmann of the German Criminal Police and SS Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe, commander of the mobile killing unit known as Einsatzgruppe B, which is described as follows on page 10 of Arad’s book:

A few days later an experiment with poison gas was carried out by Nebe and Dr. Widmann in Mogilev. In the local lunatic asylum, a room with twenty to thirty of the insane was closed hermetically, and two pipes were driven into the wall. A car was parked outside, and one of the metal pipes that Dr. Widmann had brought connected the exhaust of the car to the pipe in the wall. The car engine was turned on and the carbon monoxide began seeping into the room. After eight minutes, the people in the room were still alive. A second car was connected to the other pipe in the wall. The two cars were operated simultaneously, and a few minutes later all those in the room were dead.

Denierbud argues that when connecting the second car's engine to the "other pipe in the wall", which he figures was the air outlet pipe, the killers would have blocked the air outlet and thus kept their experiment from working properly. What exactly would have gone wrong he does not explain, but the above-quoted excerpt from Just’s letter to Rauff of June 5, 1942 suggests that the gassing experiment would, for the reasons explained above, have been in risk of not succeeding or of damaging the engines, or at least used up a lot more fuel than would have been necessary with an air outlet.

Arad’s description of the experiment is based on the description by Dr. Widmann quoted on pages 81/82 of Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl u.a., Nationalsozialsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas. This is my translation of Dr. Widmann’s description, which he provided in the course of the West German criminal investigation StA Düsseldorf, AZ: 8 Js 7212/59; emphases are mine:

Then on the afternoon of that day Nebe had the window bricked up and two openings left for the gas inlet pipes … When we arrived, at first one of the hoses that were in my car was connected. It was connected to a passenger car … In the holes along the wall there were pieces of pipe on which one could comfortably fit the hoses. After 5 minutes Nebe came out and said that no effect could be seen. Also after 8 minutes he established no effect and asked what was to be done now. Nebe and I became convinced that the car was too weak. Thereupon Nebe had the second hose connected to a troop truck of the order police. After that it was only a few minutes before the people became unconscious. Both cars were then allowed to run for another ten minutes.

The above text suggests that Dr. Widmann assumed both openings to have been meant for the gas inlet pipes (Gaszuleitungen), though it is also possible that a misunderstanding on the part of the interrogator taking down Widmann's deposition was at play. However, it does not become apparent from Dr. Widmann’s description that the second hose was necessarily connected to a pipe in the second hole in the wall; as Dr. Widmann didn’t mention how many "pieces of pipe" there were, it is possible that at least the inlet opening had more than one pipe in it, and that both hoses were connected to pipes in that same opening. Arad's reading of Widmann's testimony, which assumes that the second car was connected to "the" other pipe in the wall (suggesting that there were only two pipes in total) would thus be incorrect.

On the other hand, there is a film about the Nuremberg Trials containing a gassing sequence that seems to correspond to Dr. Widmann’s description. Stills from this sequence show two hoses connected to two openings in the wall, with not other opening visible. According to the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at USHMM, which features this film, stills from the gassing sequence were used in evidence at the trial of Albert Widmann (Widmann was sentenced to 6 ½ years in prison by the Stuttgart District Court on 15.09.1965. According to the trial summary available on the University of Amsterdam's Justiz und NS-Verbrechen site, the subject of the proceeding included the blowing up of a bunker near Minsk in which mentally disabled patients had been locked up, as well as gassing of mentally disabled patients in Mogilev):

05:38:38 CU pipes from a German police car bearing a license plate POL-28545 and a German police truck with license POL-51628 (as well as military unit markings: 7 circle-with-flag IX). Apparently metal piping is directed into the brick work of a small brick building, in an area that appears to be a bricked up window or door. Projected against the wall is what appears to be the shadow of a man in uniform. Five emaciated men pass on an open farm cart/wagon to a wooded location; a tall naked emaciated man and two emaciated children (different from those seen first) are led by a man and a woman in white lab coats to the building. Small red cross appears on man's white coat sleeve. The man and woman put blankets around the patients' shoulders as they are led toward the building (and over a child lying on the cart). A uniformed man - probably German - is visible in the background, along the fence, watching the scene. CU car and pipes connecting the car exhaust to the building. [Scene is consistent with descriptions of September 1941 experimental killings by Einsatzgruppe B of patients from a local asylum in the area of Mogilev, Belarus. Corresponding still images were used in evidence at the trial of Albert Widmann.]

The accuracy of the above-quoted information is put in question by the fact that the Nuremberg film is stated to have been made in 1947, i.e. two years before the discovery, in Nebe’s former Berlin apartment, of an amateur film showing a gas chamber operated by the exhausts of a car and a lorry (Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, 2nd Revised and Augmented Edition, Thomas Yoseloff, South Brunswick, New York, page 137). It seems more likely that what was used in evidence at Widmann's trial was this amateur film discovered in 1949. If so, the question arises where the 1947 gassing sequence came from. Could it be that there were several films of this experimental gassing, and that one of these films was captured by the Allies and presented as evidence at Nuremberg?

Assuming that the 1947 film is (also) a life recording of the gassing experiment at the Mogilev insane asylum in September 1941, that the building was hermetically sealed and that no air outlet was made in the sealed building before the second hose was connected to the second opening with a pipe in it, this would mean that Nebe and Dr. Widmann made a mistake in their experiment. How long it would have taken for pressure building up inside the room to shut off or damage the engines, or at least cause them to lose power and burn a lot more fuel (see above), would probably depend on how big the room was and how tightly it was packed with insane asylum inmates to be gassed. Nebe and Widmann may have been lucky to complete their gassing experiment before the absence of an air outlet led to any of these consequences, or to any consequence beyond excessive fuel consumption. Given the evidence – which sufficiently convinced an independent court of the Federal German constitutional state that the gassing experiment had taken place and Dr. Widmann was guilty of having taken part in it – concluding on an experiment that could have gone wrong but did not seems more reasonable than denierbud's conjecture about a tale invented by technically unwise "storytellers". After all this was just the first trial-and-error approach to a procedure that, as Just’s letter to Rauff of June 5, 1942 shows, was eventually purged of this error when homicidal gassing with engine exhaust was conducted on a large scale.

3. Killing experiment with explosives

Earlier on page 10 of Arad's book, the author describes a killing experiment carried out by Nebe and Dr. Widmann at an insane asylum near Minsk, in which the insane were blown up with explosives:

In September 1941, Einsatzgruppe B was faced with the task of liquidating the patients of the lunatic asylums in the cities of Minsk and Mogilev. Nebe decided to find a simpler way for his men to kill the mentally diseased, other than by shooting them. He contacted Kripo headquarters and asked for their help in carrying out the killing of the insane with either explosives or poison gas. Dr. Widmann of the Criminal Police was sent to Nebe in Minsk, but before he left, Dr. Widmann discussed with the director of the Criminal Police Technological Institute, Dr. Heess, ways of using the carbon monoxide from automobile exhaust for killing operations in the East, based on the experience gained from the euthanasia program. Dr. Widmann took to Minsk 400 kgs of explosive material and the metal pipes required for the gassing installations.
Nebe and Dr. Widmann carried out an experimental killing using explosives. Twenty-five mentally ill people were locked into two bunkers in a forest outside Minsk. The first explosion killed only some of them, and it took much time and trouble until the second explosion killed the rest. Explosives therefore were unsatisfactory.

Denierbud calls this a "ridiculous" experiment on how to kill "millions of Jews" with explosives. He also tells his viewers what he thinks makes this experiment so "ridiculous": "Explosives would take a toll on the bunker as well, by blowing it up, and imagine the mess."

Say what?

The bunker in question, as we shall see below, was a bunker-like wooden refuge, i.e. something that could be set up without too much of an effort.

And the mess, as we shall also see below, was one of the reasons why the method of killing by explosives was not pursued beyond this one experiment.

But was the possibility of such mess a reason not to try this experiment at all?

One should bear in mind the problem that experimenting with this and other killing methods to replace mass shooting was meant to solve: the emotional stress of regularly bumping off at close range large numbers of defenseless people, including many women and children, with the victims screaming and crying and their blood and brain matter flying all over the place and unto the killers’ boots and uniforms, was taking a toll on the executors' psyche, and therefore alternative killing methods were sought that would spare the killers the direct confrontation with their victims. Blowing the victims up from afar came to mind as such a method, and it promised the additional advantage of giving the victims a more "humane" death: instead of suffering the agonies of death panic as they were waiting for their turn to be lined up in front of a trench or ravine or lie down inside it, and then for the fatal bullets to hit them, the victims would be unsuspecting of their fate until killed by the explosion in a split second, without even realizing what was going on. So this method was at least worth a try, not because it would make killing more efficient if it worked – it would hardly be a match for mass shooting as concerns efficiency – but because it would spare the victims suffering and keep the executors from losing their minds.

Incidentally, explosives were considered a recommendable method for killing large numbers of people at a time – more so than homicidal gassing, and on a par with mass shooting – by no less a "Revisionist" icon than Fred Leuchter. Leuchter said as much in the documentary film Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., as is mentioned on the Wikipedia page about this film (emphasis added):

In the course of the film Leuchter goes so far as to state frankly that he could not believe in the gas chambers because he could not himself conceive of their mechanics, although he makes it plainly evident that he knows very little of the history in which these arose. He suggests a series of options (hanging, shooting, and explosives), most of which the Nazis had in fact attempted (shootings and explosives) before determining that direct, ongoing, and extensive SS involvement would not be sufficient to the genocidal objectives they set for themselves after earlier forays into mass murder, such as Einsatzgruppen and Babi Yar.

.

The exact words used by Leuchter in the film were the following (emphasis added):

It's a tough job...

to execute several hundred people at once.

We have a hard job executing one man.

I think it would be easier to shoot them or hang them.

I probably could do a reasonably good job by building a multiple gallows...

and hanging people at once.

I probably could execute more people...

within a shorter time frame.

Why didn't they just shoot them?

Bullets would've been cheaper than doing this.

Why didn't they just blow them up?

Why didn't they take them down into a mine and seal the mine off?

While Leuchter’s conjectures are not less ignorant than denierbud’s, it's amusing to see a mass killing method recommended by "Mr. Death" himself called "ridiculous" by one of his admirers (denierbud seems to have Leuchter in high esteem as a "scientist", see clip # 18 of his One Third of the Holocaust video and the related article on this blog).

The oh-so-ridiculous explosion experiment at the Minsk lunatic asylum (the outcome of which was indeed as ridiculous as it was horrifying, but then even denierbud's oh-so-efficient Germans made blunders sometimes) was reconstructed in detail in the course of the West German criminal investigation and trial of Dr. Widmann. An account of the planning and execution of this experiment, based mostly on the files of this trial, can be found on pages 368 ff. of the book Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943, by historian Andrej Angrick (English translation see my RODOH post # 10473). This account mentions that Himmler himself instructed Nebe to research for murder methods other than shooting, and that the bunkers used for the explosion experiment were "two small bunker-like wooden refuges" in a forest near Minsk. It also becomes apparent from this account that Nebe himself considered the outcome of the explosion experiment a mess, and that the mess, together with the extensive preparations, was what led to this method being rejected, despite the advantages in expectation of which the experiment had been carried out in the first place:

Meanwhile darkness had fallen, so that the »experiment team« returned to Minsk, but the next day they were back on the site of the crime in order to analyze the results and remove the traces as best as possible. After these »tests«, Nebe dismissed killings by explosion, which he - probably because they were even more burdensome on the perpetrators than other forms of murder and furthermore implied unpredictable risks to themselves - called a »very big mess« (»ganz große Schweinerei«). Dr. Widman and Schmidt were in a depressed mood after the »failure« of the »experiment«.
[…]
One day later the KTI-workers and Nebe compared the various murder techniques at the headquarters of Einsatzgruppe B in Smolensk, because Himmler had ordered a report about the results. Despite the »fitfully« occurring death, blasting was rejected on account of the extensive preparations and the need to fill in the bomb craters: »Under these circumstances the killing by exhaust was to be preferred, because there were vehicles available everywhere and any kind of room could be used.«

Another hint that makes the findings of a detailed investigation by German criminal justice authorities into a "made-up story from someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about" in denierbud’s book is the amount of explosives brought along for the experiment: 400 kilograms, which denierbud apparently considers too much. Actually some redundancy or overkill is what one would logically expect to be in the plans of who was trying to find a killing method as quick and painless as possible and therefore disinclined to run the risk that the amount of explosives might not be sufficient. The question why the amount of explosives was so high seems to have also been raised during the West German criminal investigation of this incident, which also managed to establish where the explosives had been obtained:

Regarding the alternative killing variant Nebe had instructed through Werner that members of the KTI should get on their way to Minsk with 250 kilograms of explosives. As neither the KTI nor the police had such an amount of explosives at their disposal and the Wehrmacht made none available, the explosives were bought from Wasag (Westfälische-Anhaltische Sprengstoff AG) in Berlin. Widmann had increased the quantity to 400 kilograms for good measure, »because that must be done in any blasting in case something goes wrong«. With the explosives in their luggage – the detonators were transported separately – Dr. Widmann, Hans Schmidt (expert on ammunition and fires) and Dr. Hans Battista (a member of the KTI Vienna) drove to Belorussia with their drivers.

Widmann’s precaution turned out to have been justified, because something did go wrong in the initial blast, as is also mentioned in Angrick’s account:

The institution inmates were locked into the bunker with the explosive charges, the Jewish men into the other. The area was sealed off so that the »experiment« could begin. In Nebe's refuge the detonator cables were activated, then there was a short explosion. The desired effect had not occurred as expected. While the wooden roof had collapsed and the door had been blown open, half of the patients crawled or ran out of the bunker in panic, screaming loudly. While Jewish forced laborers had to catch the surviving patients in the twilight, Widmann and his companions analyzed their errors. They concluded that the explosive charge had been too weak, and a second attempt was undertaken. After this explosion the refuge collapsed completely, and there was no longer any noise. Several parts of the victims' corpses were hanging in the trees. Now the hole in the ground should have been filled-in by the Jewish ghetto inmates, but these had managed to flee in the general confusion.

Rather than a story made up to vilify the poor Germans, what we have here is the detailed reconstruction of a well-evidenced, botched experiment aimed at finding an alternative to mass shooting that would be more "humane" on both the victims and the killers – and what is more, one that corresponded to Fred Leuchter’s own ideas on how best to kill large numbers of people at one time.

4. Body-burning experiments with fire bombs

Denierbud has a problem with experiments to burn dead bodies with incendiary bombs, which are mentioned on page 171 of Arad's book in the following context:

After his appointment, Blobel, along with a small staff of three or four men, began experimenting with systems for burning bodies. The place chosen for these experiments was Chelmno, the first death camp that had been established and had been operating since the end of 1941. At that time, tens of thousands of Jews from the Lodz area had already been killed there; they were buried in pits in a wooded area. The pits were opened, and the first experiments were carried out. Incendiary bombs were tried, but these caused large fires in the surrounding woods. Then they started to cremate the bodies on wood in open fireplaces.

Denierbud’s comment: "Hmm, multiple large fires in the surrounding woods. OK."

What’s the poet trying to tell us here? That the perfectly efficient Germans of his fantasies would not have tried this method because they would have realized, without even trying, that fires caused by incendiary bombs might have undesirable collateral effects offsetting their effectiveness as a body disposal method? Such reasoning fails to take into account the situation that led to this method being attempted. Tens of thousands of bodies lying in mass graves at Chelmno had to be removed, and burning them in huge fires seemed the best way to do that, so the question was how to make such huge fires, preferably with the least effort and at the lowest cost. Incendiary bombs were a simple and effective way to start large fires at high temperatures, which were just what was needed to burn all those bodies in a speedy and thorough manner. Incendiary bombs were something that could be handled by the small staff of SS-men assigned to the task (see above quote from Arad), whereas building fireplaces to cremate the corpses (the solution eventually adopted), and transferring the corpses from the graves onto these fireplaces, required time and a workforce of permanent camp inmates. And the SS-officer in charge of burning the bodies, Paul Blobel, was not at the same time a forest-keeper, and may only have started caring about environmental side effects of his work after he or his superiors were faced with complaints about forest fires caused by the body-burning. Such complaints from the local forest administration and/or other entities were probably what caused this method to be abandoned and a burning method perhaps less comfortable but more sparing on the environment to be adopted. What's the implausible part supposed to be?

The early method of body disposal tried at Chelmno by Paul Blobel may also have been related to his experience as a combat engineer in World War I, which is mentioned in a lecture about >Operation 1005< in Riga:

During the summer of 1942 Blobel stayed several times at the >Waldlager<-section of CheŁmno to test the cremation of corpses. The local camp guards were also interested in Blobels experiments, as he knew something about flamethrowers and incendiary bombs from his experience as a combat-engineer in World War I.

5. Dragging the corpses from gas chambers to mass graves

Denierbud argues that his admired Nazi Germany, with its advanced technology (the only country to have operational jet aircraft during World War II, and miles beyond any country in rocket science) would have applied some "mechanized industrial process" to drag large numbers of bodies from the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps' gas chambers to the mass graves in which they were buried before cremation became the chosen body disposal method, instead of having permanent camp inmates carry or drag them there manually. However, he doesn’t tell his viewers what "mechanized industrial process" exactly he has in mind, let alone if such process would have produced better results than the non-mechanized method of carrying or dragging the bodies to the graves one by one. He tries to impress his viewers with big numbers ("A 100 pounds each, which is 45 kilos, that is 1,200,000 pounds of bodies to be hauled to the pits to be hauled to the pits in just one day, or 545,000 kilos"), as if transporting this weight (corresponding to the maximum number of people killed at Treblinka in one day, 12,000 to 15,000 according to camp commandant Stangl, an average weight of 45 kilos being a somewhat exaggerated assumption considering that the overwhelming majority of the victims were women, children and elderly people) to the mass graves were not just a matter of having a fast-working labor force large, organized and experienced enough. And he doesn’t tell his viewers that at Treblinka a "mechanized industrial process" was actually tried, but found to be less efficient. Arad, page 87, emphasis added:

The removal of bodies from the gas chambers and their transports in trolleys to the ditches was also a slow process, and it delayed the arrival of new victims to the gas chambers. The hand pushed trolley used to transfer the corpses to the pits would often derail and overturn, and it finally was decided to dispense with it altogether. Instead, the prisoners dragged the bodies by their feet to the ditches.

At Sobibor, on the other hand, a trolley rail was used to take the bodies to the mass graves as long as burial and not burning was the body disposal method, according to the judgment at the trial against former members of the Sobibor staff before the Hagen District Court. But then, the killing and body disposal work at Sobibor was much less intensive than at Treblinka or Belzec. Arad, page 79:

The extermination machine of Sobibor operated for months without interruptions and in an orderly way. The structure of the camp was adapted to the extermination technique and enabled more efficient treatment of the arriving transports than in Belzec. Moreover, the frequency of the transports to Sobibor was lower than in Belzec and, in most cases, less people were in each train. Usually only one train with deportees arrived daily, and there were even days without any transports. The size of the transports rarely exceeded twenty freight cars carrying from 2,000 to 2,500 people.

While at Sobibor the luxury of some form of "mechanized industrial process" for taking the bodies to the mass graves could be afforded because there were less bodies to be moved in a given time, such process was unsuitable for the permanent rush job at Treblinka, as the frequent derailing of the trolley cars (probably due the hurry), made it slower than the use of labor alone. For certain tasks, methods that "predate the invention of the wheel" (denierbud) are more effective than what "mechanized industrial process" might be employed instead, and denierbud’s SS-heroes were not enamored with mechanized processes to the point of applying such even if they were more time-consuming.


At the end of this clip, denierbud involuntarily describes himself when he remarks that "What we’re really seeing is the recurring theme of the storytellers thinking they know how the Germans would have done it.". For unless he’s well aware that his conjectures are nonsense, denierbud obviously thinks he knows that his admired Nazis would have engineered elaborate "industrial" methods for mass killing and body disposal instead of doing things in a primitive but more effective manner where necessary, and he dismisses all evidence that doesn’t fit his world-view, however conclusive, on grounds that it contradicts his preconceived notions of the technically advanced German way of mass murder.


Thanks to Sergey for his valuable input about Fred Leuchter’s utterances in "Mr. Death".

CODOH and Shawcross

It has been established beyond any reasonable doubt that statements attributed to Hartley Shawcross in which he supposedly claimed that "we are forced to realise that Hitler was right" are false. Furthermore, anyone who Googles the words "Shawcross Stourbridge" will find this full debunking in one of the first returned search results.

Read more!

It is therefore instructive that, when a user named Reviso began this thread on the topic, the moderator (Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis) did not ask him for a source for the quote. His 'show me' rhetoric was notably absent from his reply. Instead, he gave this bogus reasoning:

My reason for "supposedly" is that it is quoted frequently but I have never seen the text of the speech in any traditional publication, that doesn't mean it does not exist. A local newpaper where the speech was given may have carried the text. I haven't spend much time on it as I do not find the contents particularly unique.

Usually the meaning and implications of such quotes is what people want to debate. And as I have stated, finding support for it's content is easy. IOW, it follows that someone like Shawcross would eventually make such statements.

So, in direct contradiction of his approach towards any Holocaust documentation, Hargis's approach to the bogus statements attributed to Shawcross is to state that:

1. Pro-Nazi evidence may still be genuine even if it cannot be produced!

2. Even if Shawcross did not make pro-Nazi statements, and we can't produce a quote by anyone else with his background saying them, we can still assume that "it follows that someone like Shawcross would eventually make such statements."

Hence we have proof that Hargis has no real interest in 'evidence' as such, and his 'show me' calls were always a sham.

Furthermore, a CODOH user called Lamprecht currently has the false quote as his signature, without any action being taken by the 'moderator'.

Jonathan’s last blog …

… led the cretin of "Revisionist" cretins, Greg Gerdes (who is probably identical with this illustrious "White" specimen, and who thought I had written that blog), to display his low intellect and lower character in bitching about me on this thread of the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" (where I, as the coward well knows, am not allowed to post).

I commented on Gerdes' primitive nonsense in my post # 1760 on the VNN thread Archeological Investigations of Treblinka.

Update, 10.12.2008

A few more "Revisionist" geniuses have opened their big mouths on the aforementioned CODOH thread, so I’ll comment their utterances hereafter.

Read more!


Post of Mon Dec 08, 2008 2:01 pm by “NeilfromBris” (a debutante hollow-head, of maybe just another hollow-head’s sock-puppet)

NfB

I wish I had been on this list when this guy was.

I thank NfB for mentioning that I don't post on CODOH anymore. I'm not allowed to, you know. Moderator Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis had to ban me because neither he nor any other enlightened "Revisionist" could handle my arguments.

NfB

I got some great laughs from reading some of his old messages.

That suggests NfB is just another laughing imbecile. And as he's so eager to talk to me and I'm not allowed to post on CODOH, I suggest he come over to the RODOH forum for some real open debate on the Holocaust (as opposed to the censorship-protected mutual backslapping among "Revisionist" true believers that one sees on CODOH). He can then tell me what’s supposed to have been so laughable about my arguments on those CODOH threads, and explain why, if my arguments were so laughable, Hargis considered it necessary to delete or retain some of my posts (as documented on the RODOH thread A message to Jonnie Hannover Hargis ...).

If he’s not just some other fellow’s sock-puppet, that is.

And if he is not a whimpering coward like Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis.

NfB

I did a search on him and it seems that he contributes to a lot of blogs and chat sites.

Actually I contribute to only two blogs, this one and the Brazilian blog O Holocausto (as can be seen on my profile). And the only "chat sites" I currently post on are RODOH and the VNN thread Archeological Investigations of Treblinka. But the compliment is appreciated.

NfB

I just finished reading something he posted on another group where he says that in addition to the 6 million jews there were also 7.9 million non jews who were also "murdered".

That must be my article 5 million non-Jewish victims? (Part 2), at the end of which I wrote the following:

20. Sum total

According to the above estimates (rounded up or down to the nearest thousand), the total number of non-Jews who perished through criminal violence by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II, i.e. of non-Jews who died at the hands of the Nazi “killing apparatus” as defined in Part 1 of this article, is the following:

Soviet Union 5,030,000 to 5,800,000
Poland 1,000,000
Czechoslovakia 33,000
Yugoslavia 260,000
Romania 51,000
Hungary 28,000
Greece 150,000
Italy 76,000
France 147,000
Belgium 17,000
Netherlands 75,000
Norway 2,000
Denmark 1,000
Austria 16,000
Germany 245,000
Total 7,131,000 to 7,901,000

Even the lowest of these totals (7,131,000) exceeds by far not only the 5 million non-Jewish victims “invented” by Simon Wiesenthal but also the highest estimates (around 6 million) of Jews who died at the hands of the Nazi “killing apparatus”. If we consider Nick Terry’s minimum estimate of ca. 5,364,000 Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, the minimum total of people who died at the hands of the Nazi “killing apparatus” would be 5,364,000 + 7,131,000 = 12,495,000, thereof 43 % Jews and 57 % non-Jews.

NfB doesn’t seem to be a very attentive reader. But I’m glad he visits this blog, for this means he will also read the present article and thus be informed about my invitation to open debate on RODOH.

I'm starting to wonder if there was anyone left alive in Europe at the end of the war. Confused

A confused person is what NfB seems to be indeed, and also one not interested in historical fact and notoriously ignorant. Maybe he should start by informing himself about the population of the European countries mentioned in my above-quoted list during World War II. Next he may take a look at World War II casualties in those countries, wherein the non-combatants who perished through criminal violence by Nazi Germany and its allies are included.


Post of Mon Dec 08, 2008 6:54 pm by Jonni "Hannover" Hargis (who must have read my RODOH thread Hey Bankdraft, what kind of a slimy @sshole are you … and therefore be in need of venting his anger at having once more been shown for the cowardly liar he is)

Hargis

People like Muehlenkamp are in denial of science, logic, and rational thought processes.

Actually people like me apply science, logic and rational thought processes without making a fuss about it, whereas bigmouthed charlatans like Hargis throw these terms around but know as much about what either implies as a pig does about Sunday – awareness of which is probably the reason, or one of the reasons, why Hargis never leaves his warm and cozy online Führerbunker and ventures into the real world of open debate.

Hargis

We have his debunked claims on record here, he's a classic example of the irrational 'holocaust' liars in general.

Yeah, sure. See the aforementioned thread on how (i.e. by censoring posts and eventually banning the poster) this "debunking" was done. Also of interest in this respect is the RODOH thread The Memory Hole Festival goes on ....

Hargis

13.9 million absurdly claimed and they cannot even show us ONE mass grave as alleged, not ONE.

First of all, it's not 13.9 million, as I prefer the lower range of estimates on the number of Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder. According to my calculations quoted above, it's at least 12.5 million, thereof 43 % Jews and 57 % non-Jews.

Second, it's amusing to see Hargis emulating the "not ONE" – rhetoric of his fellow coward, liar and obnoxious fish-wife Greg Gerdes.

And third, one only sees no mass graves if one sticks one's head in the sand, ostrich-style, like the characters on this caricature by Dr. Seuss :



If Hargis ever took his head out of the sand (or stopped lying), he would realize (or acknowledge) that one can find quite a few investigators’ or archaeologists’ descriptions of Nazi-made mass graves and photos of such mass graves and of dead bodies of Nazi murder victims even on the web these days. Regarding civilians and prisoners of war bumped off or made to die of starvation and disease in Nazi-occupied territory, see for instance Nick's article Mass Graves in the Polesie, Sergey’s article That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part II: Deniers and the graves of Marijampole and my articles Neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass graves with even only a few thousand bodies … , Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research, Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure …, Archaelogical Research at Chelmno and Mass Graves at Sobibor, as well as my RODOH threads Busk, My Trip to Sobibor, Mass Graves and Dead Bodies and Pictures of German Occupation in the USSR. Regarding the siege of Leningrad, Hargis should pay a visit to, say, the Piskaryov Memorial Cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Hargis

Jewish supremacists made up a laughable story and now they are left trying to defend the impossible. Imagine what they are feeling.

So the "Jewish supremacists" of Hargis' fantasies are supposed to have invented non-Jewish victims of Nazi criminal violence in numbers that, even by the lowest of my counts, largely exceed even the highest estimates on the number of Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide, instead of trying to sweep non-Jewish victims of Nazi criminal violence under the carpet in order to highlight the "uniqueness" of the Jewish people's suffering (as some Jewish scholars unfortunately do)? So much for the "logic" of Jonni "Hannover" Hargis.

Hargis

Revisionists are just the messengers, the ease in which the 'holocaust' lies are shot down is the message.

Those "lies" are so "easy" to "shoot down" that Hargis only "shoots" inside his warm and cozy Führerbunker and stifles opposition by censorship even there, right?


Post of Mon Dec 08, 2008 8:28 pm by "KostasL" (a Greek giggler whose contributions to "Revisionism" are essentially limited to infantile clowning and pitiably lame attempts at provocation)

KostasL

Well, defending the impossible is not so bad when you are defending Truth, Justice, Freedom, Humanity, even if the odds are overwhelmingly against you. Smile

But if you are attacking Truth, Justice, Freedom and Humanity then how are you supposed to feel ? Embarassed

Embarrassed is what this fellow should feel indeed, being as he is one of the benighted fanatics who attack historical facts and the memory of murdered human beings with cloud-cuckoo-land fantasies about an impossibly efficient and powerful (and at the same time laughably dumb) conspiracy that, despite the supposed "blunders" that "Revisionists" make a fuss about, pulled off the well–nigh supernatural feat of manipulating or suppressing thousands of documents, training thousands of false incriminating eyewitnesses (apparently chosen for their telepathic capabilities, which would keep them from straying too far from what their colleagues had said even if they had no way of hearing or reading it), coercing or otherwise inducing a couple of thousand indicted perpetrators, especially before West German courts, into falsely incriminating themselves, silencing all potential exonerating witnesses throughout Europe and the rest of the world, fooling governments and other administrative authorities, criminal justice authorities and historians and demographers all over the world (unless, of course, all these people were/are in the pay of said conspiracy) and brainwashing or otherwise inducing millions of non-victims living in Israel, the US and other countries into concealing their origins and identity so it could be claimed that they had been murdered (even though that meant renouncing to compensation claims against the Federal German government – the conspiracy must have paid them better).

But then, conspiracy theorists like this sorry howler never notice that the small inconsistencies in the accounts which they reject are dwarfed by the enormous, gaping holes in logic, likelihood and evidence in any alternative account.

Or maybe some know how full of shit they are and therefore prefer to spout their nonsense in the comfortable company of like-minded buddies only, instead of facing the cold wind of opposition.

We’ll know what category "KostasL" belongs to if and when Gerdes finally dares to link the CODOH clowns to this blog and to the VNN thread Archeological Investigations of Treblinka, as I again challenged him to do in my VNN post # 1760.

I frankly like it when these low-lives mouth off about me in their cesspit, for every time they do I they give me another chance to wipe the floor with their "Revisionist" nonsense.

And it seems they are too stupid to realize that.

I hope they remain that way.

Ethnic Germans Found, 'Resettled' Jews Not Found

We now know that, in the post-war USSR, a highly stigmatized ethic German population was still able to be traced by the West German government:

Nearly 2.2 million ethnic Germans have returned to Germany from the Soviet Union since 1950, said Jochen Welt, a high government official whose office is responsible for the immigration and assimilation of ethnic Germans back to Germany.

So why has no-one found those millions of Jews - transported to Auschwitz, Chelmno and the Reinhardt camps - that deniers claim were resettled in Soviet territory?

The Subtext of Denial

Deniers attempt to morally justify most Nazi acts that they do not deny. Siegert and Rudolf have defended reprisals; Hargis has defended the shooting of Jewish children; and both Berg and Porter have defended deportations to 'internment' camps. These defenses only make sense if we assume a threshold for the definition of genocide that is far higher than that used by the UN. Deniers state there was no genocide of the Jews; thus deportations, reprisal killings, and even executions of children, are not genocide.

Read more!

Why do deniers insist on this high threshold for genocide and is it logically sustainable? The two parts of this question are interconnected. Deniers insist on the high threshold partially because they wish to impose a fallacy of personal incredulity on the events they deny. Their argument, in a nutshell, is that gassing claims and atrocity 'propaganda' require the Germans to have exhibited a degree of personal cruelty and malevolence that is psychopathic and demonic. The Holocaust is thus, in their view, a form of mystical demonology.

This position is only sustainable, however, by ignoring the malice present in the Nazi acts that deniers are happy to defend. Was it cruel to rob Jews of their property? Hargis says 'no'. Was it cruel to break up families and separate the sexes? Apparently not. Most importantly of all, the threshold ignores simple maths. A ratio of killing that equates a hundred Jews to one dead German - which Siegert and Rudolf defend - is a more cruel ratio than if a decision had been made to kill between five and six million Jews in reprisal for the deaths of over two million Germans in World War I. The acceptance by deniers of the fact that Germany employed a 100:1 killing ratio should therefore destroy any incredulity defense when faced with evidence that Hitler authorized a genocide, and a vengeful SS carried out that genocide, in fulfillment of a desire to exterminate a 'race' that had 'stabbed Germany in the back.'

However, contra deniers and contra Goldhagen, to accept that these acts were cruel, and that the perpetrators were therefore perfectly capable of killing six million Jews, is not to engage in demonology. When an ideology of vengeance, which may be held by just a few individuals, is spread through a state bureaucracy with a culture of violence, the state can commit acts of cruelty without most of its members being sadists or psychopaths or 'exterminationist antisemites.' Moreover, the genocidal nature of Nazi acts does not preclude comparisons with similar acts by other states. Anti-deniers should not, in my view, argue that the Nazi state was 'uniquely' genocidal whilst ignoring genocidal acts committed by the allies, but nor should they ignore the fact that Nazi genocide had racial underpinnings that made it more likely to escalate into an attempt to kill every Jew in Europe, thereby exceeding all other genocidal acts in their attempted scope and comprehensiveness.

Instead, anti-deniers need to be more mindful of a high denier threshold for genocide when debating such issues as the gas chambers at the death camps. It would be a dangerous error to create the impression that anti-deniers were agreeing with deniers that the crucial crossing of the threshold of genocide did not occur until the Nazis began to gas children at Chelmno, or until the Einsatzgruppen began to shoot women and children in the USSR. The threshold was crossed far earlier than that, in acts that deniers have never claimed did not take place. The full moral meaning of that fact is a fundamental truth that deniers cannot face. Their shifting of moral boundaries is therefore the ultimate 'denial within denial'.

News from denierbud

After we have long taunted the author of the "One Third of the Holocaust" video clips about his not linking to our rebuttals of his productions, it's only fair to point out that he has finally linked to those rebuttals, on the "Rebuttals" page of a new site on which denierbud has put together all his videos and writings.

I don't know how long the text quoted below has been there as I don't look up denierbud's publications on a regular basis, so I'll assume it's at least as old as denierbud's new site:

This website will publish any rebuttal written by a full or associate professor in a History department of a recognized university, right here, unedited, at the top of this page.

Currently there are rebuttals written to episodes of One Third of the Holocaust. They are written by people who are not tenured professors in History departments, and the writers do engage in ad hominem put downs. Nevertheless they can be found here. Read them and make your own decision.

One wonders who denierbud thinks he is to require rebuttals from "tenured professors in History departments". Does he have any academic credentials? If so, that's not what becomes apparent from the arguments in his videos and writings, which are sometimes hilariously infantile. And someone who makes such high demands on the qualification of who writes rebuttals to his wisdom should at least reveal who he is and what educational background he has. Tenured professors in history departments of recognized universities might want to know who they are addressing.

As to the fellow's second argument, it's an amusing spectacle to see someone indulge in something as offensive as denying the proven murder of millions of innocent people and at the same time complain about "ad hominem put downs". This hypocritical whining and the nitpicking about his critics' academic qualifications seem to be the only arguments denierbud can offer against our rebuttals.

Anyway, we recommend our readers to do just what denierbud asks his readers to do: watch the videos and read what denierbud has written, then read our rebuttals, then decide for yourselves about the merit of one and the other.

Hargis Defends the Robbery of Jewish Property by the Nazi State

At the height of his public embarrassment, Hargis spews forth his antisemitic filth here:

Revisionists do not argue that Jews were not deported, relocated, and at times had their assets seized (assets that many felt were nefariously gained).

Hargis does not tell us who this 'many' were and he does not cite any evidence for this supposedly popular viewpoint, which he makes clear that he shares.

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 9)

Below are two further cases of blatant manipulation and distortion by Sanning to consider.

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Firstly, Sanning states (p. 103) that a Canadian-Jewish journalist by the name of Arthur Raymond Davies, attended a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee meeting in the fall of 1944, during which the secretary, Schachne Epstein, "reported the evacuation of 3.5 million Jews from the territories occupied by Germany".

RODOH poster Warheitseeker has kindly located the original passage in Davies' book and posted it here. This is what Davies actually wrote:

He thanked the Jews of the world for their aid to the Soviet people. He greeted the Jews of Poland. He revealed that the Germans had killed about five million Jews and that the Soviet Union had succeeded in saving three-and-a-half million.

So what does Sanning add and omit? Firstly, Epstein does not mention evacuation; Sanning infers it without telling his readers that he is drawing an inference rather than reporting direct speech. This in itself is dishonest. Secondly, Epstein does not specify that the 'saved' Jews had ever lived in territories occupied by Germany. Epstein may simply mean that, by blocking the German advance, the USSR had saved Jews in unoccupied areas of both the USSR and the rest of the world.

Thirdly, Sanning omits the most obvious rebuttal of his interpretation: the mention of five million Jewish murder victims. Clearly, many of these victims must have been living in areas that Sanning claims were evacuated. Moreover, Sanning's entire thesis is a denial of these five million deaths, therefore it is blatantly dishonest to use a source that actually refers to them in the same sentence as the "3.5 million" saved Jews that Sanning quote-mines.

Sanning's second distortion occurs on p.112, where he queries the sex ratios of Soviet Jews:

On the basis of the age distribution of the Jews in the RSFSR 705,290 Jews of the recorded 2,267,814 Jews in the Soviet Union (1959) belonged to the age group "0-28 years" which at the end of WWII hadn't either been born yet or was too young for military service; its sex structure should have been more or less balanced. The male/female composition among those 29 years and older thus was 677,984 and 884,540, respectively. [...]

Sanning has therefore, outrageously, taken the age profile for a Soviet Republic, the RSFSR, which suffered proportionally far fewer Holocaust deaths than the western republics, and used it for a projection on to the entire Soviet population, which he has then used as 'evidence' that a Holocaust did not occur in the western USSR! This alone disqualifies him as an honest demographer.

Butz and Hargis Expose Themselves to Ridicule

Even by 'revisionist' standards, the latest claim made by Butz, and defended by his dullard lapdog Hargis, beggars belief. In this astonishingly ill-educated essay, Butz claims that, when Himmler wrote his famous "keine liquidierung" note, "Himmler was either reporting to Heydrich that the transport had not been canceled, or in some sense discussed the fact with him." In the crazy world of Butz, 'liquidated' therefore meant 'canceled' when used by the head of the SS.

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You would think that Hargis would steer clear of this idiocy, but instead he has placed both feet firmly in his mouth. He has devoted this CODOH thread to the issue and then ignored or deleted the multiple objections thrown up by his brethren, especially Wahrheit's excellent points about chronology (Himmler's note was written after the transport had already arrived in Riga) and Himmler's reprimand of Jeckeln. Fortunately, this thread at RODOH has captured the discussion as it has developed, and preserved Warheit's deleted rebuttal.

Let us firstly summarize the linguistic issues. Hargis uses the 'Scheiffler-Weiss German and English Dictionary', 1981, to claim that liquidierung means "to wind up pending affairs." However, it is clear from on-line dictionaries that this function of the word only applies to the liquidation of a company by a financial liquidator. Googling the quoted text "wind up existing affairs" brings up only the CODOH thread and this Korean guide to the role of a liquidator. Butz and Hargis must therefore know that they are abusing a financial linguistic application by imposing it on Himmler's far more obvious meaning. This is recognized on the CODOH thread by 'Vlad', who posted on date and time stamp "Sat Nov 01, 2008 9:29 pm" that:

Butz's German seems to be very limited indeed, otherwise he wouldn't have come up with such a far-fetched "theory". One doesn't liquidate trains or transports, neither in English nor in German.

However, whereas Vlad seems prepared to put this down to poor German, Butz has no such excuse, because he says he discussed his essay with German-born Germar Rudolf before the latter was deported. We can imagine how Germar must have raised his eyebrows in disbelief before encouraging Butz to blunder on with his project anyway. Such is Rudolf's dishonesty and Butz's willingness to deny linguistic evidence.

The real meaning of 'liquidierung' in SS usage is made clear in Longerich's 'Glossary' prepared for the Lipstadt trial:

1.5 For example, in January 1942 the head of the Gestapo, Müller, issued an ordinance according to which terms such as "liquidation" (Liquidation) and "liquidate" (liquidieren) were words "used by the Soviet rulers". In German reports, essays, etc. such terms should only be used in this connection.

As jnovitz acknowledges on the CODOH thread, Goebbels imported this Soviet usage into his Total War speech, when he said:

The German people, in any event, is unwilling to bow to this danger. Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy

Similarly, Vlad points out that:

Cornelia Schmitz-Berning in her Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (p. 390) quotes a press directive, issued in November 1941, in which the replacement of standrechtliche Erschießung [shooting under martial law] by liquidieren was censored as "highly inappropriate".

Butz and Hargis really should have thought this through before subjecting themselves and their movement to this public embarrassment.