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July 27, 2008 | 12:34 pm
David Irving makes NY appearance, attacks Jews and defends Hitler
David Irving, the Holocaust-denying historian for whom Kevin MacDonald testified in 2000, made an appearance in New York last week as part of a U.S. tour. Irving was oddly hosted by a Catholic church, which said it was tricked into believing the organization reserving space was simply a book club. Max Blumenthal, who you might remember as the thorn in the Rev. John Hagee’s side, was there and produced the above video based on an exclusive interview with Irving. A few choice comments from the infamous historian:
“The word ‘Holocaust’ is odious. It’s American commercialism at its worst.”
“I think the Jews have to ask themselves why is it that every time they arrive somewhere as pitiful refugees in a country after a few years they have to move on… They don’t ask themselves what they could do to change the way that they are disliked.”
“Adolph Hitler was being kept out of the loop and was probably not at all anti-Semitic by the time the war began.“
“Hitler wanted a little war, but it got out of hand.”
Posted by Brad A. Greenberg in 42 Comments — Leave your comment
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“I think the Jews have to ask themselves why is it that every time they arrive somewhere as pitiful refugees in a country after a few years they have to move on… They don’t ask themselves what they could do to change the way that they are disliked.”
I have to completely agree with this comment, as I have asked myself this question, and answered it.
Now I know I was supposed to knee-jerk react to any and everything a David Irving says, and automatically reject it. Sorry, not me. I hate to be labeled, and though you labeled Mr. Irving ‘a Holocaust denier’; I am not stupid. EVERYBODY KNOWS THERE WAS A HOLOCAUST. Repeat…EVERYBODY KNOWS THERE WAS A HOLOCAUST.
I know the reason the Jewish community likes to harp on so-called Holocaust deniers is to play into your own stereotype of the stupid Goyim. Instead, as usual, it is really the stupid Jew, who is too stupid to realize that people LIE. Yes children, people lie! Of course none of you have ever told a lie, but there are people who lie, and yes children, some of them even lie on purpose (which would be the definition of a lie). Some do this just so they can laugh at morons like yourselves who want to somehow feel superior, by telling yourselves that these people do not believe that the Holocaust occurred.
Instead of figuring out why you are so hated by these heathens, you want to tell yourselves how much smarter you are and how dumb they are, when it is you who are dumb; too dumb to see the writing on the wall, and “shocked” when they prove how much they hate you. I could go on, but I will let you chew on this for now.
Please don’t waste your time with calling me names. I am way beyond caring about your little labels and names. If you have nothing intelligent to say in response, please don’t respond!!
I don’t believe you do deserve an intelligent and serious response, but just to make it obvious I will give you one anyway.
I would reply that the Jews have asked themselves that question very seriously, and also come up with answers. More or less practical and effective. None permanent. some counter-productive. You might propose as some did that the ultimate answer is that the Jews not be Jewish and not be Jews at all, and even that did not work. Almost enough to make you believe in God.
But since you say that you agree with David Irving about it, ‘completely’, if the Jews did ask themselves what they could do to change the way that they are disliked, what would be your answer?
While we are waiting for your wisdom, I invite anyone considering the problem to spend a few minutes with this analysis: http://www.aish.com/seminars/whythejews/
It starts like this… “Why?... Historians propose six possible reasons.“ etc.
Mr Blumenthal and all of his thug buddies are simply professional smearmongers.
They read none of Mr Irvings books.
Mr Irving is a historian (a very good one at that) and a writer (a very good one at that).
In the course of his work and findings that are based on archives and interviews with people, it is clear that “unpleasant” and “politically incorrect” things will be found. Mr Irving publishes these “unpleasant findings” and he gets thrown in jail and smeared by people like Mr Blumentahl.
I have read many of Mr Irvings books and I met Mr Irvings, so I do not know what all the fuss is about.
To you Mr Blumental and your thug buddies; GET A LIFE.
Blumenthal’s video is garbage. He doesn’t even get his facts straight. Irving was not imprisoned for “glorifying the Nazi Party.“ He was arrested under a Stalin (early 50s) -era law against “reactivating” the Nazi Party. Only an idiot would fall for Blumenthal’s propaganda. He’s preaching to the choir, so why bother preaching?
The trouble is that the Holocaust, to what extent it was planned from the top, how many it killed and by what means—all matters of legitimate dispute among historians since 1945—has become a political football, and late in the day at that.
before 1967 Israel on the whole wanted to forget about persecutions and look forward. Ben Gurion repeatedly said that the founding of the Jewish state and the revelations of Nazi slaughter were coincidental. He did not want Israel to become a gigantic displaced persons’ camp for the Diaspora, and he feared that some concentration camp survivors would be bad immigrants because their survival was due to perfidy and collaboration.
Later, Zionists turned the Holocaust into a moral club with which to beat anyone and everyone who opposed their Middle East expansionism and aggressive militarism as “antisemites”. It was also a valuable cash cow, and you don’t have to be Irving to accept that much of the reparations money has been misdirected and embezzled (ask PM Olmert).
But above all, it’s evident from the rising tide of Holocaust “revisionism” (“denial” is a childish strawman epithet) that no amount of harrying and criminalising can silence the backlash of curiosity against the superstitious reverence which singles out this one episode of bloodthirstiness from all the others of the 20th century, many of which cost more blood by far, and turns it into a sacred cow.
The Holocaust has ceased to work as a “get out of jail free” for whatever Jews do 60 years later; Israel’s basement-level reputation in the world indicates that the old shame-on-you-goyim shtick (much of it directed against the children and grandchildren of those who fought Hitler) is a crock.
Time to lay it to rest as a myth and start taking it apart as a set of claims. After all, when “respectable” historians have cut the estimated death toll at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 4m in 1945 to just over 1m, how much is left for the denialists to do?
Nilsson is right. No mention was made of the Holocaust in the post-war memoirs of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin…the word didn’t even become “popular” until after the ‘67 war…if the Holocaust was as horrible as Zionists would have you believe, not even Mel Brooks could have gotten away with making light of it (and Blumenthal would have had to steal somebody else’s music). But The Producers was released before the whole Shoah business really hit the road and gained traction; while Hitler was JUST ANOTHER REALLY BAD GUY, like Stalin, Mao, Castro and the rest of them—not the very personification of evil. Man, are we tired of hearing about it!!! And tired of having it used as a defense of anyting pro-Israeli. There’s no way to bring people back from the dead, but if WW3 starts in the Middle East, there will be another holocaust—for everyone.
‘Eric Yankovich’
What are your personal qualifications to pronounce David Irving a very good historian (I don’t really care about his writing ability)? A central quality of a good historian is accuracy, other is integrity, and another is insight. irving has none of those. Let’s remember the Lipstadt libel case. Hint - David Irving lost.
‘James Wilson’
OK. Reactivating. So what?
‘David L Nilsson’
When we blame the German populace for the holocaust,
they point to the Wehrmacht
When we blame the Wehrmacht, they point to the SS
When we blame the SS, they point to the Nazi Party
When we blame the Nazi Party, they point to the Nazi leadership
When we blame the Nazi leadership, they point to Hitler.
So don’t be nervous, the Holocaust was the repsonsibility of only one man, and he’s dead.
As for the extent, it is about six million. That is the arithmetic. The Holocaust is the best documented event in all of known human history. A third of the entire Jewish nation was exterminated, in the most horrific manner that its architects could devise, and nothing you say is relevant in the face of that.
‘Robert Cummings’
If you are sick of hearing about the Holocaust, why are you here? Ever heard the term “Never Again”? That’s for us. If you are innocent of genocidal actions and plans, or too young and naive to understand life and people, then by all means ignore the Holocaust and maintain focus on what really matters to you. But if you want commit yourself to triviality, butt out of our validity.
Irving’s mother was Jewish. David Irving happily confirmed it: yes, his mother was Jewish, but he was never interested in this fact, nor was he raised within the Jewish tradition. He therefore never considered it to have any relevance. Thus, according to orthodox Jewish tradition, David Irving is a Jew, plain and simple. Of course, Holocaust promoters can have no interest in advertising that the “main exponent” of “Holocaust Denial” is a Jew. Oy vey, what a publicity disaster that would be! (Even though Irving is, strictly seen, not even a Holocaust revisionist, but merely a benevolent observer.)
Extracts from that Judgment:
Judge Gray on Antisemitism:
“I have more sympathy for Irving’s argument that Jews are not immune from his criticism. He said that he was simply expressing legitimate criticisms of them. Irving gave as an example what he claimed was his justified criticism of the Jews for suppressing his freedom of expression. Another legitimate ground of criticism might be the manner in which Jews in certain parts of the world appear to exploit the Holocaust. I agree that Jews are as open to criticism as anyone else.”
Judge Gray on racism: “I accept that Irving is not obsessed with race. He has certainly not condoned or excused racist violence or thuggery.” Judge Gray on right-wingers: “I accept that when he has spoken at their meetings, Irving has not expressed himself in extremist or anti-semitic terms.”
Judge Gray on the gas chambers: “[Irving] is right to point out that the contemporaneous documents, such as drawings, plans, correspondence with contractors and the like, yield little clear evidence of the existence of gas chambers designed to kill humans. Such isolated references to the use of gas as are to be found amongst these documents can be explained by the need to fumigate clothes so as to reduce the incidence of diseases such as typhus. The quantities of Zyklon-B delivered to the camp may arguably be explained by the need to fumigate clothes and other objects.”
For Ben Plonie: So what? Because the charge (“reactivating the Nazi Party”) is literally ludicrous on its face. It is not true, nor is it possible to prove, that Irving was TRYING to reactivate the Nazi Party, nor that he could possibly SUCCEED in trying to reactive the Nazi Party, even if he was trying (which he wasn’t). He was actually, uh, giving a lecture on history, not holding a political rally. He writes history and sells books, he is not a politician and not trying to be a political or party leader. So he was imprisoned on false charges, ludicrous charges, politically motivated charges, unprovable charges. That’s why “reactivate” is important, and his imprisonment so unfair and evilly-motivated. People shouldn’t be thrown in prison unless they’ve actually committed a crime. Some us have have respect for the rule of law—what’s left of it, that is.
I AM sick about hearing about the Holocaust, but I am NOT sick of hearing information that gives me hope that someday I may hear less about it (or, indeed, stop hearing about it altogether—hope that’s not too complex for ya’ !!
To Michael S.
So, grasshopper, how does it feel as a tadpole Holocaust denier to accompany the master himself? And just between us, does it bother you and David to have Hebrew names? I always wondered about that.
Not often I get to meet a real movie star. You are the dark-haired young guy who showed up to rouse the rabble at the church lecture. I must say by those interviewed you did a good job, unless they were ringers. Did you have time to get them to sing ‘Throw the Jew down the well’?
“Irving’s mother was Jewish. David Irving happily confirmed it: yes, his mother was Jewish”
Before going on, just so you know that I know, let’s admit that this is a lie, as information of that nature in connection with the Jew-obsessed Irving would exist somewhere in the world other than your blog post. There is a lot of published information on Irving including his birth and upbringing and that pseudo-factoid is made nowhere. Without too much digging I found more about Irving than I really care to know. Irving was adopting the fascist salute at age six, he asked for a copy of Mein Kamp as a lower school prize, he was dismissed from the student newpaper he edited bacause of antisemitic pieces he dismissed as satirical, he seconded Mosley the British brownshirt-style fascist in debates, he moved to Germany to work there and learn German which led to his first big falsification, that estimating the dead of Dresden at 135,000, or five to ten times the reality (gee, I hope Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t traumatized by this falsification). Irving’s falsification has been copied and cited elsewhere.
Straight to the point, if Irving’s mother was technically Jewish, it would still be irrelevant. Noam Chomsky’s parents were Jewish, and he is a terrible antisemite. Norman Finklestein the same. Very many Jews without the internal content to prevent internalizing environmental antisemitism. Jews devoted and loyal to antisemitism and who have no wish to affiliate with the Jewish nation don’t get a ‘no’ vote on Judaism. Incidentally, Irving tried to make a case in one of his books that Churchill’s mother was similarly Jewish. Let’s overlook that his source was a sentence from an old Jerusalem Post article with no source for the statement. Irving accidentally footnoted it with the wrong date which is no big deal in itself, but his informnation and note were then propagated into other works by other historians. Doesn’t say much for the state of the art in historical scholarship. My point here is that Irving’s ‘Jewishness’ would have come up big-time in that discussion.
On to Judge Gray and the Lipstadt libel case (62 days, 35,000 documents in evidence, Judgement runs to 334 pages). The judge found that Irving was a worse character and even historian in every way than the descriptions by Lipstadt that triggered the libel case. I hope he was not influenced by Irving’s surreal slip of the tongue when he addressed the judge as ‘mein Fuhrer’ instead of ‘my Lord’. He was a little frazzled at that point in the trial trying to explain about his contacts with German extremists in 1991 who greeted his speech with ‘Seig Heil! Seig heil’
Let’s not cherry-pick, ok? From the Newsday editorial roundup, 4/13/2002 of the judgment :
“He cited example after example where Irving “significantly misrepresented . . . the evidence . . . pervert[ed] the evidence . . . misrepresentation . . . misconstruction . . . omission . . . mistranslation . . . misreading. . . . double standards.“ The judge found Irving’s explanations for his writings “tendentious . . . unjustified . . . specious . . . distorted . . . fanciful . . . hopeless . . . disingenuous . . . [and] a travesty.“ “It appears to me,“ Gray also wrote, “that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier . . . . Irving is anti-Semitic . . . . Irving is a racist. . . . Irving [is] a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist.“
These British judges are not prone to overstatement. Don’t take my word for it, it is published on the web here http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2000/115.html
James Wilson
I ask again, who cares? You had a problem with Blumenthal saying ‘glorifying’ instead of ‘reactivating’. Now the problem is with the Austrians falsely convicting Irving based on their impossible law. They ought to know, it’s their law, and who knows how it comes out in their German dialect? Doesn’t seem that difficult to prove that Irving was active in furthering the agenda of extremists. I suppose he got a little too cocky and blatant, maybe that’s what he meant about being the architect of his own misfortune in the video.
Robert Cummings
No, it’s not too complex for me, maybe too convoluted. Whole days go by for me without hearing about the holocaust, I don’t know why that’s not true for you. Could I interest you in Asian cooking? Fly fishing? Stock car racing? The History Channel? Strike that, “All Hitler - All the Time”.
It’s nice to see I have so many new readers ... Keep fighting the good fight, BP.
I once heard a radio talk show say that when he wanted to take it easy, he could just open a show with guns, abortion or Israel and throw the phones open. It’s like that with the Holocaust.
Judge Gray on the scale of the killing of Jews in the gas chambers: “I have to confess that, in common I suspect with most other people, I had supposed that the evidence of mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was compelling. I have, however, set aside this preconception when assessing the evidence adduced by the parties in these proceedings.
Judge Gray on David Irving on the documentary evidence: “Vulnerable though the individual categories of evidence may be to criticisms of the kind mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, it appears to me that the cumulative effect of the documentary evidence for the genocidal operation of gas chambers at Auschwitz is considerable.“
Judge Gray on David Irving: “As a military historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of military history Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research into the archives. He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many documents which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years. It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and dealt with a sustained and penetrating cross-examination that his knowledge of World War 2 is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent. He was invariably quick to spot the significance of documents which he had not previously seen. Moreover he writes his military history in a clear and vivid style. I accept the favourable assessment by Professor Watt and Sir John Keegan of the calibre of Irving’s military history (mentioned in paragraph 3.4 above) and reject as too sweeping the negative assessment of Evans (quoted in paragraph 3.5). But the questions to which this action has given rise do not relate to the quality of Irving’s military history but rather to the manner in which he has written about the attitude adopted by Hitler towards the Jews and in particular his responsibility for the fate which befell them under the Nazi regime.
I am afraid that in my original comment I had not at the time viewed the video. Upon viewing, I still have no real problem with David Irving, though almost everyone else in that video are the typical pagan/Catholic garbage that ALWAYS, I mean ALWAYS blame everyone else. For example, blaming Israel and the Jews for a possible war with Iran. I was a bit suprised because I assume these heathens want to pretend they respect the Jews nowadays, in order to use the Jews in their latest Crusade against Islam. Apparently in Catholic Church basements, their true colors can come out.
It is very important to not try to suppress these *#!-&*#@‘s at all, because they’ll only end up in basements or sewers, but they won’t go away. They need to be exposed and dealt with. That is if NEVER AGAIN actually means something. It needs to be understood that the root cause, I firmly believe, can be summed up in two words: Christianity and Judaism.
Michael Santomauro
I provided a link to Judge Gray’s 334 page judgement earlier. Please don’t cut and paste it all in here. Irving not only lost the libel case but lost it overwhelmingly and decisively to the point that he was bankrupted in paying all court costs, in his case minimum because he represented himself. Hubris. Irving is highly intelligent and talented, so it it doubtful if he could have done better with a barrister anyway.
Quote 1: The Judge is merely supplying a context for the proceedings, that he will make no assumptions despite common knowledge on the topic. Just professional diligence.
Quote 2: The judge is saying that technical arguments regarding the limitations on the design and specifications of the apparatus are outweighed by the record and evidence of what actually took place.
Duh.
Quote 3: As with Quote 2, the judge refocuses the issue of Irving’s veracity on what and how and on what basis he actually expresses things, rather than on his technical abilities or his style and wit and talent and charisma and so on. Where is that quote… ah, here it is… “Your flash ain’t nuthin’ but trash”
In this case, if you are trying to make black white and vice versa, these quotes do not serve your purpose, and I have dealt with these but probably for the last time.
The Levite Line
Now that you have watched the video, you don’t seem to have learned anything. David Irving is a cancer on the rectum of society, and if the best you can do is look for points of agreement with him and about the Jews of all things, you are mentally ill.
Auschwitz: Myths and Facts
By Mark Weber / From Michael Santomauro
Auschwitz is regarded as the most notorious Nazi extermination center. During World War II, we are told, hundreds of thousands of prisoners — most of them Jewish — were systematically killed there, especially in gas chambers.
Auschwitz was unquestionably a place of horror, where many perished under terrible circumstances. And yet, much of what has been said about the camp is untrue or exaggerated. A close look at the facts calls into question at least some aspects of its reputation as a center of systematic mass extermination.
A Large Camp Complex
The Auschwitz camp complex was set up in 1940 in what is now south-central Poland. Large numbers of Jews were deported there between 1942 and mid-1944. The main camp was known as Auschwitz I. Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was supposedly the main extermination center, while Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, was a large industrial site where gasoline was produced from coal. In addition there were dozens of smaller satellite camps devoted to the war economy.
Four Million Victims?
At the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, the Allies charged that the Germans exterminated four million people at Auschwitz. This figure, which was invented by the Soviets, was uncritically accepted for many years, and often appeared in major American newspapers and magazines. [1] Today no reputable historian accepts this figure.
Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer said in 1989 that it is finally time to acknowledge that the familiar four million figure is a deliberate myth. In July 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland, along with Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, announced that altogether perhaps one million people (both Jews and non-Jews) died there. Neither institution would say how many of these people were killed, and no estimates were given for the numbers of those supposedly gassed. [2]
One prominent Holocaust historian, Gerald Reitlinger, estimated that perhaps 700,000 Jews perished at Auschwitz. [3] French Holocaust historian Jean-Claude Pressac estimated in 1993 that the number of those who perished there was about 800,000 – of whom 630,000 were Jewish. [4]
Fritjof Meyer, a respected foreign policy analyst, author of several books, and managing editor of Germany’s foremost weekly news magazine, presented a still lower figure in 2002. Writing in the scholarly German journal Osteuropa, he estimated that altogether 500,000 or 510,000 persons — Jews and non-Jews — perished in Auschwitz. [5]
While all such figures are conjectural, they show how the Auschwitz story has changed drastically over the years.
Fake ‘Gas Chamber’
Each year for decades, tens of thousands of visitors to Auschwitz have been shown an execution “gas chamber” in the main camp, supposedly in its “original state.“ In January 1995 the prestigious French weekly magazine L’Express acknowledged that “everything” about this “gas chamber” is “false,” and that it is in fact a deceitful postwar reconstruction. [6]
Bizarre Tales
At one time it was seriously claimed that at Auschwitz Jews were systematically killed with electricity. American newspapers in February 1945, citing a Soviet eyewitness report from the recently-liberated camp, told readers that the methodical Germans had killed Jews there using an “electric conveyor belt on which hundreds of persons could be electrocuted simultaneously [and] then moved on into furnaces. They were burned almost instantly, producing fertilizer for nearby cabbage fields.“ [7]
At the Nuremberg Tribunal, chief US prosecutor Robert Jackson charged that the Germans had used a “newly invented” device to instantaneously “vaporize” 20,000 Jews near Auschwitz “in such a way that there was no trace left of them.“ [8] No reputable historian now accepts either of these fanciful tales.
The Höss ‘Confession’
A key piece of Holocaust evidence is the “confession” of former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. In a sworn statement, and in testimony before the Nuremberg Tribunal on April 15, 1946, he declared that between May 1940 and December 1943, while he was commandant of the camp complex, “at least two and a half million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning,“ and that “at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million” during that period alone. [9]
Although it is still widely cited as solid historical evidence, this “confession” is actually a false statement obtained by torture. Some years after the war, British military intelligence sergeant Bernard Clarke described how he and five other British soldiers tortured the former commandant to obtain his “confession.“ Höss himself privately explained his ordeal in these words: “Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and half million Jews. I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not.“ [10]
Even historians who generally accept the Holocaust extermination story now acknowledge that many of the specific statements made in the Höss “confession” are simply not true. For one thing, no serious scholar now claims that anything like two and a half or three million people perished in Auschwitz.
The Höss “confession” further alleges that Jews were already being exterminated by gas in the summer of 1941 at three other camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Wolzek. The “Wolzek” camp mentioned by Höss is a total invention. No such camp existed, and the name is no longer mentioned in Holocaust literature. Moreover, those who accept the Holocaust story currently claim that gassings of Jews did not begin at Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Belzec until sometime in 1942.
Many Jewish Inmates Unable to Work
Many thousands of secret German wartime documents dealing with Auschwitz were confiscated after the war by the Allies. But not a single one refers to a policy or program of extermination. In fact, the familiar Auschwitz extermination story cannot be reconciled with the documentary evidence.
It is often claimed that all Jews at Auschwitz who were unable to work were immediately killed. Jews who were too old, young, sick, or weak were supposedly gassed on arrival, and only those who could be worked to death were temporarily kept alive.
But the evidence shows otherwise. In fact, a very high percentage of the Jewish inmates were not able to work, and were nevertheless not killed. For example, an internal German telex message dated Sept. 4, 1943, from the chief of the Labor Allocation department of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), reported that of 25,000 Jews held in Auschwitz, only 3,581 were able to work, and that all of the remaining Jewish inmates — some 21,500, or about 86 percent — were unable to work. [11]
This is also confirmed in a secret report dated April 5, 1944, on “security measures in Auschwitz” by Oswald Pohl, head of the SS concentration camp system, to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Pohl reported that there was a total of 67,000 inmates in the entire Auschwitz camp complex, of whom 18,000 were hospitalized or disabled. In the Auschwitz II camp (Birkenau), supposedly the main extermination center, there were 36,000 inmates, mostly female, of whom “approximately 15,000 are unable to work.“ [12]
These two documents simply cannot be reconciled with the familiar Auschwitz extermination story.
The evidence shows that Auschwitz-Birkenau was established primarily as a camp for Jews who were not able to work, including the sick and elderly, as well as for those who were temporarily awaiting assignment to other camps. That is the considered view of Dr. Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, who also says that this was an important reason for the unusually high death rate there. [13]
Jewish scholar Arno Mayer, a professor of history at Princeton University, acknowledges in his 1988 book about the “final solution” that more Jews perished at Auschwitz as a result of typhus and other “natural” causes than were executed. [14]
Anne Frank
Perhaps the best known Auschwitz inmate was Anne Frank, who is remembered for her famous diary. But few people are aware that thousands of Jews, including Anne and her father, Otto Frank, “survived” Auschwitz.
The 15-year-old girl and her father were deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz in September 1944. Several weeks later, in the face of the advancing Soviet army, Anne was evacuated from Auschwitz along with many other Jews to the Bergen-Belsen camp in western Germany, where she died of typhus in March 1945.
While at Auschwitz, Otto Frank came down with typhus, and was sent to the camp hospital to recover. He was one of thousands of sick and feeble Jews who were left behind when the Germans abandoned the camp in January 1945, shortly before it was overrun by the Soviets. He died in Switzerland in 1980.
If the German policy had been to kill Anne Frank and her father, they would not have survived Auschwitz. Their fate, tragic though it was, cannot be reconciled with the familiar extermination story.
Allied Propaganda
The Auschwitz gassing story is based in large part on the hearsay statements of former Jewish inmates who did not personally see any actual signs of extermination. Their beliefs are understandable, because rumors about gassings at Auschwitz were widespread. Allied planes dropped large numbers of leaflets, written in Polish and German, on Auschwitz and the surrounding areas which claimed that people were being gassed in the camp. The Auschwitz gassing story, which was an important part of the Allied wartime propaganda effort, was also broadcast to Europe by Allied radio stations. [15]
Survivor Testimony
Former inmates have confirmed that they saw no evidence of extermination at Auschwitz.
An Austrian woman, Maria Vanherwaarden, testified about her camp experiences in a Toronto District Court in March 1988. [16] She was interned in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 for having sexual relations with a Polish forced laborer. On the train journey to the camp, a Gypsy woman told her and the others that they would all be gassed at Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Maria and the other women were ordered to undress and go into a large concrete room without windows to take a shower. The terrified women were sure that they were about to die. But then, instead of gas, water came out of the shower heads.
Auschwitz was no vacation resort, Maria confirmed. She witnessed the deaths of many fellow inmates by disease, particularly typhus. She saw some take their own lives. But she saw no evidence at all of mass killings, gassings, or of any extermination program.
A Jewish woman named Marika Frank arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau from Hungary in July 1944, when 25,000 Jews were supposedly gassed and cremated daily. She likewise testified after the war that she heard and saw nothing of gas chambers during the time she was interned there. She heard the gassing stories only later. [17]
Inmates Released
More than 200,000 prisoners were transferred from Auschwitz to other camps, and about 8,000 were in the camp when it was liberated by Soviet forces. In addition, about 1,500 prisoners who had served their sentences were released, and returned to their home countries. [18] If Auschwitz had actually been a top secret extermination center, it is difficult to believe that the German authorities would have released inmates who “knew” what was happening there.
Telltale Aerial Photos
Detailed Allied aerial reconnaissance photographs taken of Auschwitz-Birkenau on several random days in 1944 — during the height of the alleged extermination period there — were made public by the CIA in 1979. These photos show no trace of piles of corpses, smoking crematory chimneys or masses of Jews awaiting death, things that have been repeatedly alleged, and all of which would have been clearly visible if Auschwitz had been the extermination center it is said to have been. [19]
Absurd Cremation Claims
Cremation specialists have confirmed that thousands of corpses could not possibly have been cremated every day throughout the spring and summer of 1944 at Auschwitz, as has often been alleged. Ivan Lagacé, manager of a large crematory in Canada, testified in court in April 1988 that the Auschwitz cremation story is technically impossible. The allegation that 10,000 or even 20,000 corpses were burned every day at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 in crematories and open pits is simply “preposterous” and “beyond the realm of reality,“ he declared under oath. [20]
Gassing Expert Refutes Extermination Story
A leading American gas chamber expert, Fred A. Leuchter, carefully examined the supposed “gas chambers” in Poland and concluded that the Auschwitz gassing story is absurd and technically impossible. At the time he conducted his examination, Leuchter was acknowledged as the foremost specialist on the design and installation of gas chambers used in the United States to execute convicted criminals. For example, he designed a gas chamber facility for the Missouri state penitentiary.
In February 1988 he carried out a detailed onsite examination of the “gas chambers” at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek in Poland, which are either still standing or only partially in ruins. In sworn testimony to a Toronto court and in a technical report, Leuchter described every aspect of his investigation. He concluded that the alleged gassing facilities could not possibly have been used to kill people. Among other things, he pointed out that the so-called “gas chambers” were not properly sealed or vented to kill human beings without also killing German camp personnel. [21]
Dr. William B. Lindsey, a research chemist employed for 33 years by the Dupont Corporation, likewise testified in a 1985 court case that the Auschwitz gassing story is technically impossible. Based on a careful on-site examination of the “gas chambers” at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, and on his years of experience, he declared: “I have come to the conclusion that no one was willfully or purposefully killed with Zyklon B [hydrocyanic acid gas] in this manner. I consider it absolutely impossible.“ [22]
In March 1992, a prominent Austrian engineer made headlines when a report he had written about alleged German wartime gas chambers was made public. Walter Lüftl, a court-recognized expert engineer who headed a large engineering firm in Vienna, concluded that the familiar stories of mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers at the wartime camps of Auschwitz and Mauthausen are impossible for technical reasons. Lüftl also specifically affirmed Leuchter’s findings about Auschwitz. [23]
Himmler Orders Death Rate Reduced
In response to the deaths of many inmates from disease, especially typhus, the German authorities responsible for the camps ordered firm counter-measures. The head of the SS camp administration office sent a directive dated Dec. 28, 1942, to Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. It sharply criticized the high death rate of inmates due to disease, and ordered that “camp physicians must use all means at their disposal to significantly reduce the death rate in the various camps.“ Furthermore, it ordered:
“The camp doctors must supervise more often than in the past the nutrition of the prisoners and, in cooperation with the administration, submit improvement recommendations to the camp commandants ... The camp doctors are to see to it that the working conditions at the various labor places are improved as much as possible.“
Finally, the directive stressed that “the Reichsführer SS [Heinrich Himmler] has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced.“ [24]
Combating Disease
As ordered, German physicians in Auschwitz carried out wide-ranging and intensive measures to reduce the prisoners’ death rate. For example, in a letter of Feb. 25, 1943, camp physician Dr. Wirths informed the central WVHA office, which was responsible for the SS concentration camp system:
“As already reported, after the typhus epidemic in the Auschwitz camp had practically been suppressed in November and December, there followed a new rise in typhus cases among the Auschwitz inmates as well as among troops, brought by the newly arriving transports from the East. In spite of the counter-measures that were immediately taken, a complete suppression of typhus cases has still not been achieved.” [25]
None of this can be reconciled with the currently official Auschwitz extermination story.
Summary
Maintaining the hatreds and passions of the past prevents genuine reconciliation and lasting peace. The Auschwitz extermination story originated as World War II propaganda. And all wartime propaganda, unless hatred and passion are to have the final word, must be viewed critically. It is high time to take a more objective look at this highly polemicized chapter of history.
Notes
1. Nuremberg document 008-USSR. International Military Tribunal (IMT) “blue series,“ Vol. 39, pp. 241, 261; Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (NC&A;), “red series,” vol. 1, p. 35; C.L. Sulzberger, “Oswiecim Killings Placed at 4,000,000,“ New York Times, May 8, 1945, and, New York Times, Jan. 31, 1986, p. A4.
2. Y. Bauer, “Fighting the Distortions,“ Jerusalem Post (Israel), Sept. 22, 1989; “Auschwitz Deaths Reduced to a Million,“ Daily Telegraph (London), July 17, 1990; “ Poland Reduces Auschwitz Death Toll Estimate to 1 Million,“ The Washington Times, July 17, 1990, p. A11.
3. G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London: Sphere [2nd ed.], 1971), pp. 500-501.
4. J.-C. Pressac, Le Crématoires d’Auschwitz: La Machinerie du meurtre de mass (Paris: CNRS, 1993), p. 148. See also: M. Weber, “New ‘Official’ Changes in the Auschwitz Story,“ The Journal of Historical Review, May-August 2002, pp. 24-28.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v21/v21n3p24_weber.html )
5. F. Meyer, “Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz,” Osteuropa, May 2002, pp. 631-641. Cited in: M. Weber, “New ‘Official’ Changes in the Auschwitz Story,” The Journal of Historical Review, May-August 2002, pp. 24-28.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v21/v21n3p24_weber.html )
6. Eric Conan, “Auschwitz: La Memoire du Mal,“ L’Express, Jan. 19-25, 1995, pp. 54-73. See also: “Major French Magazine Acknowledges Auschwitz Gas Chamber Fraud,“ Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1995, pp. 23-24.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v15/v15n1p23_Weber.html )
7. Washington (DC) Daily News, Feb. 2, 1945, pp. 2, 35. (United Press dispatch from Moscow).
8. IMT “blue series,“ Vol. 16, pp. 529-530. (June 21, 1946).
9. IMT “blue series,“ Vol. 11, pp. 414-418, and IMT, Vol. 33, pp.275-279 (Nuremberg document 3868-PS [USA-819]).
10. Rupert Butler, Legions of Death (England : 1983), pp. 235; R. Faurisson, “How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Höss,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986-87, pp. 389-403.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p389_Faurisson.html )
11. Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw, German document No. 128. Cited in: H. Eschwege, ed., Kennzeichen J (Berlin [East]: 1966), p. 264.
12. Nuremberg document NO-021. Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) “green series,” Vol. 5. pp. 384-385;
13. Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Chicago : 2003), pp. 157-159.
14. Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The ‘Final Solution’ in History (Pantheon, 1988), p. 365.
15. Nuremberg document NI-11696. NMT “green series,” Vol. 8, p. 606.
16. Testimony in Toronto District Court, March 28, 1988. Toronto Star, March 29, 1988, p. A2; B. Kulaszka, ed., Did Six Million Really Die?: Report of the Evidence in the Canadian ‘False News’ Trial of Ernst Zündel (Toronto : 1992), pp. 253-255.
( http://www.ihr.org/books/kulaszka/21herwaarden.html )
17. Sylvia Rothchild, ed., Voices from the Holocaust (New York: 1981), pp. 188-191.
18. Franciszek Piper essay in: Y. Gutman & M. Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (1994), p. 71.
19. Dino A. Brugioni and Robert C. Poirier, The Holocaust Revisited (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1979).
20. Testimony in Toronto District Court, April 5-6, 1988. Canadian Jewish News (Toronto), April 14, 1988, p. 6; B. Kulaszka, ed., Did Six Million Really Die?: Report of the Evidence in the Canadian ‘False News’ Trial of Ernst Zündel (Toronto: 1992), pp. 267-271.
( http://www.ihr.org/books/kulaszka/26lagace.html )
21. Testimony in Toronto District Court, April 20-21, 1988. B. Kulaszka, ed., Did Six Million Really Die?: Report of the Evidence in the Canadian ‘False News’ Trial of Ernst Zündel (Toronto: 1992), pp. 354-362.
( http://www.ihr.org/books/kulaszka/33leuchter.html )
The Leuchter Report (Toronto: 1988).
( http://www.ihr.org/books/leuchter/leuchter.toc.html )
22. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Feb. 12, 1985, p. M3. See also: M. A. Hoffman, The Great Holocaust Trial (1995 [3rd ed.]), pp. 65, 66.
23. Walter Lüftl, “The Lüftl Report: An Austrian Engineer’s Report on the ‘Gas Chambers’ of Auschwitz and Mauthausen,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1992-93, pp. 391-420.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p391_Luftl.html )
24. Nuremberg document PS-2171, Annex 2. NC&A;“red series,” Vol. 4, pp. 833-834.
25. Document 502-1-68, pp. 115-116, from the archives of the Center for the Custody of Historical Document Collection, Moscow. Quoted by C. Mattogno in “Die ‘Gasprüfer’ von Auschwitz,“ Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, March 1998, p. 16 (and fn. 26). Cited in: M. Weber, “High Frequency Delousing Facilities at Auschwitz,“ The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1999, pp. 4-12.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v18/v18n3p-4_Weber.html )
Auschwitz: Myths and Facts
Auschwitz is regarded as the most notorious Nazi extermination center. During World War II, we are told, hundreds of thousands of prisoners — most of them Jewish — were systematically killed there, especially in gas chambers.
Auschwitz was unquestionably a place of horror, where many perished under terrible circumstances. And yet, much of what has been said about the camp is untrue or exaggerated. A close look at the facts calls into question at least some aspects of its reputation as a center of systematic mass extermination.
A Large Camp Complex
The Auschwitz camp complex was set up in 1940 in what is now south-central Poland. Large numbers of Jews were deported there between 1942 and mid-1944. The main camp was known as Auschwitz I. Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was supposedly the main extermination center, while Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, was a large industrial site where gasoline was produced from coal. In addition there were dozens of smaller satellite camps devoted to the war economy.
Four Million Victims?
At the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, the Allies charged that the Germans exterminated four million people at Auschwitz. This figure, which was invented by the Soviets, was uncritically accepted for many years, and often appeared in major American newspapers and magazines. [1] Today no reputable historian accepts this figure.
Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer said in 1989 that it is finally time to acknowledge that the familiar four million figure is a deliberate myth. In July 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland, along with Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, announced that altogether perhaps one million people (both Jews and non-Jews) died there. Neither institution would say how many of these people were killed, and no estimates were given for the numbers of those supposedly gassed. [2]
One prominent Holocaust historian, Gerald Reitlinger, estimated that perhaps 700,000 Jews perished at Auschwitz. [3] French Holocaust historian Jean-Claude Pressac estimated in 1993 that the number of those who perished there was about 800,000 – of whom 630,000 were Jewish. [4]
Fritjof Meyer, a respected foreign policy analyst, author of several books, and managing editor of Germany’s foremost weekly news magazine, presented a still lower figure in 2002. Writing in the scholarly German journal Osteuropa, he estimated that altogether 500,000 or 510,000 persons — Jews and non-Jews — perished in Auschwitz. [5]
While all such figures are conjectural, they show how the Auschwitz story has changed drastically over the years.
Fake ‘Gas Chamber’
Each year for decades, tens of thousands of visitors to Auschwitz have been shown an execution “gas chamber” in the main camp, supposedly in its “original state.“ In January 1995 the prestigious French weekly magazine L’Express acknowledged that “everything” about this “gas chamber” is “false,” and that it is in fact a deceitful postwar reconstruction. [6]
Bizarre Tales
At one time it was seriously claimed that at Auschwitz Jews were systematically killed with electricity. American newspapers in February 1945, citing a Soviet eyewitness report from the recently-liberated camp, told readers that the methodical Germans had killed Jews there using an “electric conveyor belt on which hundreds of persons could be electrocuted simultaneously [and] then moved on into furnaces. They were burned almost instantly, producing fertilizer for nearby cabbage fields.“ [7]
At the Nuremberg Tribunal, chief US prosecutor Robert Jackson charged that the Germans had used a “newly invented” device to instantaneously “vaporize” 20,000 Jews near Auschwitz “in such a way that there was no trace left of them.“ [8] No reputable historian now accepts either of these fanciful tales.
The Höss ‘Confession’
A key piece of Holocaust evidence is the “confession” of former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. In a sworn statement, and in testimony before the Nuremberg Tribunal on April 15, 1946, he declared that between May 1940 and December 1943, while he was commandant of the camp complex, “at least two and a half million victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning,“ and that “at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million” during that period alone. [9]
Although it is still widely cited as solid historical evidence, this “confession” is actually a false statement obtained by torture. Some years after the war, British military intelligence sergeant Bernard Clarke described how he and five other British soldiers tortured the former commandant to obtain his “confession.“ Höss himself privately explained his ordeal in these words: “Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and half million Jews. I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not.“ [10]
Even historians who generally accept the Holocaust extermination story now acknowledge that many of the specific statements made in the Höss “confession” are simply not true. For one thing, no serious scholar now claims that anything like two and a half or three million people perished in Auschwitz.
The Höss “confession” further alleges that Jews were already being exterminated by gas in the summer of 1941 at three other camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Wolzek. The “Wolzek” camp mentioned by Höss is a total invention. No such camp existed, and the name is no longer mentioned in Holocaust literature. Moreover, those who accept the Holocaust story currently claim that gassings of Jews did not begin at Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Belzec until sometime in 1942.
Many Jewish Inmates Unable to Work
Many thousands of secret German wartime documents dealing with Auschwitz were confiscated after the war by the Allies. But not a single one refers to a policy or program of extermination. In fact, the familiar Auschwitz extermination story cannot be reconciled with the documentary evidence.
It is often claimed that all Jews at Auschwitz who were unable to work were immediately killed. Jews who were too old, young, sick, or weak were supposedly gassed on arrival, and only those who could be worked to death were temporarily kept alive.
But the evidence shows otherwise. In fact, a very high percentage of the Jewish inmates were not able to work, and were nevertheless not killed. For example, an internal German telex message dated Sept. 4, 1943, from the chief of the Labor Allocation department of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), reported that of 25,000 Jews held in Auschwitz, only 3,581 were able to work, and that all of the remaining Jewish inmates — some 21,500, or about 86 percent — were unable to work. [11]
This is also confirmed in a secret report dated April 5, 1944, on “security measures in Auschwitz” by Oswald Pohl, head of the SS concentration camp system, to SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Pohl reported that there was a total of 67,000 inmates in the entire Auschwitz camp complex, of whom 18,000 were hospitalized or disabled. In the Auschwitz II camp (Birkenau), supposedly the main extermination center, there were 36,000 inmates, mostly female, of whom “approximately 15,000 are unable to work.“ [12]
These two documents simply cannot be reconciled with the familiar Auschwitz extermination story.
The evidence shows that Auschwitz-Birkenau was established primarily as a camp for Jews who were not able to work, including the sick and elderly, as well as for those who were temporarily awaiting assignment to other camps. That is the considered view of Dr. Arthur Butz of Northwestern University, who also says that this was an important reason for the unusually high death rate there. [13]
Jewish scholar Arno Mayer, a professor of history at Princeton University, acknowledges in his 1988 book about the “final solution” that more Jews perished at Auschwitz as a result of typhus and other “natural” causes than were executed. [14]
Anne Frank
Perhaps the best known Auschwitz inmate was Anne Frank, who is remembered for her famous diary. But few people are aware that thousands of Jews, including Anne and her father, Otto Frank, “survived” Auschwitz.
The 15-year-old girl and her father were deported from the Netherlands to Auschwitz in September 1944. Several weeks later, in the face of the advancing Soviet army, Anne was evacuated from Auschwitz along with many other Jews to the Bergen-Belsen camp in western Germany, where she died of typhus in March 1945.
While at Auschwitz, Otto Frank came down with typhus, and was sent to the camp hospital to recover. He was one of thousands of sick and feeble Jews who were left behind when the Germans abandoned the camp in January 1945, shortly before it was overrun by the Soviets. He died in Switzerland in 1980.
If the German policy had been to kill Anne Frank and her father, they would not have survived Auschwitz. Their fate, tragic though it was, cannot be reconciled with the familiar extermination story.
Allied Propaganda
The Auschwitz gassing story is based in large part on the hearsay statements of former Jewish inmates who did not personally see any actual signs of extermination. Their beliefs are understandable, because rumors about gassings at Auschwitz were widespread. Allied planes dropped large numbers of leaflets, written in Polish and German, on Auschwitz and the surrounding areas which claimed that people were being gassed in the camp. The Auschwitz gassing story, which was an important part of the Allied wartime propaganda effort, was also broadcast to Europe by Allied radio stations. [15]
Survivor Testimony
Former inmates have confirmed that they saw no evidence of extermination at Auschwitz.
An Austrian woman, Maria Vanherwaarden, testified about her camp experiences in a Toronto District Court in March 1988. [16] She was interned in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 for having sexual relations with a Polish forced laborer. On the train journey to the camp, a Gypsy woman told her and the others that they would all be gassed at Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Maria and the other women were ordered to undress and go into a large concrete room without windows to take a shower. The terrified women were sure that they were about to die. But then, instead of gas, water came out of the shower heads.
Auschwitz was no vacation resort, Maria confirmed. She witnessed the deaths of many fellow inmates by disease, particularly typhus. She saw some take their own lives. But she saw no evidence at all of mass killings, gassings, or of any extermination program.
A Jewish woman named Marika Frank arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau from Hungary in July 1944, when 25,000 Jews were supposedly gassed and cremated daily. She likewise testified after the war that she heard and saw nothing of gas chambers during the time she was interned there. She heard the gassing stories only later. [17]
Inmates Released
More than 200,000 prisoners were transferred from Auschwitz to other camps, and about 8,000 were in the camp when it was liberated by Soviet forces. In addition, about 1,500 prisoners who had served their sentences were released, and returned to their home countries. [18] If Auschwitz had actually been a top secret extermination center, it is difficult to believe that the German authorities would have released inmates who “knew” what was happening there.
Telltale Aerial Photos
Detailed Allied aerial reconnaissance photographs taken of Auschwitz-Birkenau on several random days in 1944 — during the height of the alleged extermination period there — were made public by the CIA in 1979. These photos show no trace of piles of corpses, smoking crematory chimneys or masses of Jews awaiting death, things that have been repeatedly alleged, and all of which would have been clearly visible if Auschwitz had been the extermination center it is said to have been. [19]
Absurd Cremation Claims
Cremation specialists have confirmed that thousands of corpses could not possibly have been cremated every day throughout the spring and summer of 1944 at Auschwitz, as has often been alleged. Ivan Lagacé, manager of a large crematory in Canada, testified in court in April 1988 that the Auschwitz cremation story is technically impossible. The allegation that 10,000 or even 20,000 corpses were burned every day at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 in crematories and open pits is simply “preposterous” and “beyond the realm of reality,“ he declared under oath. [20]
Gassing Expert Refutes Extermination Story
A leading American gas chamber expert, Fred A. Leuchter, carefully examined the supposed “gas chambers” in Poland and concluded that the Auschwitz gassing story is absurd and technically impossible. At the time he conducted his examination, Leuchter was acknowledged as the foremost specialist on the design and installation of gas chambers used in the United States to execute convicted criminals. For example, he designed a gas chamber facility for the Missouri state penitentiary.
In February 1988 he carried out a detailed onsite examination of the “gas chambers” at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek in Poland, which are either still standing or only partially in ruins. In sworn testimony to a Toronto court and in a technical report, Leuchter described every aspect of his investigation. He concluded that the alleged gassing facilities could not possibly have been used to kill people. Among other things, he pointed out that the so-called “gas chambers” were not properly sealed or vented to kill human beings without also killing German camp personnel. [21]
Dr. William B. Lindsey, a research chemist employed for 33 years by the Dupont Corporation, likewise testified in a 1985 court case that the Auschwitz gassing story is technically impossible. Based on a careful on-site examination of the “gas chambers” at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, and on his years of experience, he declared: “I have come to the conclusion that no one was willfully or purposefully killed with Zyklon B [hydrocyanic acid gas] in this manner. I consider it absolutely impossible.“ [22]
In March 1992, a prominent Austrian engineer made headlines when a report he had written about alleged German wartime gas chambers was made public. Walter Lüftl, a court-recognized expert engineer who headed a large engineering firm in Vienna, concluded that the familiar stories of mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers at the wartime camps of Auschwitz and Mauthausen are impossible for technical reasons. Lüftl also specifically affirmed Leuchter’s findings about Auschwitz. [23]
Himmler Orders Death Rate Reduced
In response to the deaths of many inmates from disease, especially typhus, the German authorities responsible for the camps ordered firm counter-measures. The head of the SS camp administration office sent a directive dated Dec. 28, 1942, to Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. It sharply criticized the high death rate of inmates due to disease, and ordered that “camp physicians must use all means at their disposal to significantly reduce the death rate in the various camps.“ Furthermore, it ordered:
“The camp doctors must supervise more often than in the past the nutrition of the prisoners and, in cooperation with the administration, submit improvement recommendations to the camp commandants ... The camp doctors are to see to it that the working conditions at the various labor places are improved as much as possible.“
Finally, the directive stressed that “the Reichsführer SS [Heinrich Himmler] has ordered that the death rate absolutely must be reduced.“ [24]
Combating Disease
As ordered, German physicians in Auschwitz carried out wide-ranging and intensive measures to reduce the prisoners’ death rate. For example, in a letter of Feb. 25, 1943, camp physician Dr. Wirths informed the central WVHA office, which was responsible for the SS concentration camp system:
“As already reported, after the typhus epidemic in the Auschwitz camp had practically been suppressed in November and December, there followed a new rise in typhus cases among the Auschwitz inmates as well as among troops, brought by the newly arriving transports from the East. In spite of the counter-measures that were immediately taken, a complete suppression of typhus cases has still not been achieved.” [25]
None of this can be reconciled with the currently official Auschwitz extermination story.
Summary
Maintaining the hatreds and passions of the past prevents genuine reconciliation and lasting peace. The Auschwitz extermination story originated as World War II propaganda. And all wartime propaganda, unless hatred and passion are to have the final word, must be viewed critically. It is high time to take a more objective look at this highly polemicized chapter of history.
Brad, I hope you understand what you are doing in opening this can of worms and leaving it open, and you might consider a more aggressive moderation policy. This is the Jewish Journal, and I think it has been open to fault to views destructive of Israel and the Jews. Holocaust denial content probably runs second to porn on the internet. There are sites and newsgroups and blogs and dating back to the very beginnings of public participation in the internet and wordlwide web. There are gobs and gobs and gobs of gigabytes of text and media funded and assembled in emergency mode and using all of the tools of modern propaganda, ‘questioning’, ‘examining’, revisiting and revising and revisioning and reopening the facts of the Holocaust, softening and downplaying its crimes and perversions, dehumanizing and depersonalizing and demonizing its victims. They are going to cut and paste the contents of thousands of pages into this blog, by people who seemingly have no lack of time and resources and actually make money selling the material online as Michael Santomauro does. There are some counter propaganda sites, but far fewer and with far fewer resources. The Jews are a fifth of a percent of the general population, most of them have been persuaded to abandon their identity by people such as Richard Silverstein, some of the rest have been corrupted or fooled into actively aiding enemies of the Jews, and most of the rest are busy with other pursuits. After all of the ‘Never Again’, the goal of people like Michael Santomauro and the larger interests involved is to convert Auschwitz and all of the evidence sites into a shopping mall with perhaps a pigeon-spattered plaque marking the events that took place there. I urge you not to allow this forum to become a propaganda outlet for a gang of perverts.
For the sake of any readers of the above kind of thing, I will respond to Michael Santomauro but again not for long. I don’t make a living at this. To continue:
A series of straw men. Somebody reported this, other people say that is impossible, it’s all games. The Nazis took elaborate steps to conceal what they planned to do and did do, so that the absence of explicit detailed project requirements and plans about every little thing and the worst of the big ones is not indicative.
The facts of the Final Solution were known and smuggled out beginning in 1942, but were suppressed by Allies who had other priorities and were not in the war for the Jews anyway. Many more facts emerged during the war but the details and extent of the horrors were not widely known by the public until after the Allied soldiers had personal contact with the camps. The number of survivors and refugees was a drop in the bucket, and those mostly were busy trying to stay alive and find any families and someplace to go.
Immediately after the war it was known that conservatively three million Jews had been exterminated, it was later determined that about two million more had been killed less economically and efficiently by the bullets of Einzatzgruppen in the Ukraine, and the remaining million found as documents with local figures were collated and added together. Working both ends to the middle, the world Jewish population was at 18 million before the war and 12 million after.
That’s the big picture. If anybody cares, here is one reaction to the Leuchter report http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org/learning/myth-fact/leuchter//body/1037
The home page http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org/
Another resource http://www.nizkor.org/
I could find a couple of dozen more, all of them good, and so can anyone who cares to. At least, don’t take the word of Nazis, Arabs and radical leftists no matter how intelligently and persuasively written. And before Michael Santomauro chimes in with a plea for equal time, I will remind him of his performance in the video telling the audience to resist, to block out voices opposing Irving’s message, “that’s what THEY want you to think, that’s what your supposed to do” etc.
Dear Ben,
While the late Raul Hilberg of course holds to his basic extermination thesis, this explanation is radically different from the one he had previously given. It is obvious that revisionism is responsible for this change. Hilberg more or less conceded this, even if only indirectly. Specifically, he declared:
“I will say that, in a certain way, Faurisson and others, without wanting to, did us a favor. They raised questions which had the effect of engaging historians in new research. They have obliged us to once again collect information, to re-examine documents and to go further into the comprehension of what has taken place.“
Hilberg summarized his new thesis before an audience of nearly 2,700 at Avery Fischer Hall in New York City: the entire German policy for the physical destruction of the Jews was to be explained by mind reading! No document attesting to this criminal policy could be found, because no such document existed. For several years, the entire German bureaucratic machinery operated through a kind of telepathy. As Hilberg put it:
“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus—mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.“
Ben,
I understand and appreciate your concerns. I plan to address them at length later today or tomorrow. Thanks again for fighting the good fight in this thread. I had no idea I was so popular with the David Irving crowd. But I don’t want people to misinterpret the arguments here for my own beliefs. The Holocaust happened and smaller versions have followed because people find their own ridiculous meanings to well-documented—unbelievably well-documented—history.
Irving is an amateur historian who likes to bend the truth. In professional circles he’s not taken seriously at all.
What these holocaust revisionists say or think is unimportant and the Jewish community would be wise not to pay so much attention to them. It’s a waste of time and effort.
Dear Brad,
In the “revised and definitive” edition of Raul Hilberg’s Holocaust book, the University of Vermont professor did not use the expression “consensus” or “mind reading.“ And yet he wrote:
“In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization.“
He also wrote of “countless decision makers in a far-flung bureaucratic machine” without “a basic plan.“ He mentioned “written directives not published,“ “oral directives and authorizations,“ and “basic understandings of officials resulting in decisions not requiring orders or explanations.“ There had been “no one agency,“ he wrote, and “no single organization directed or coordinated the entire process.“ The destruction of the Jews, he concluded, was “the work of a far-flung administrative machine,“ and “no special agency was created and no special budget was devised to destroy the Jews of Europe. Each organization was to play a specific role in the process, and each was to find the means to carry out its task.“
For me, this is like explaining what would have been a huge criminal undertaking of industrial proportions based, in particular, on a weapon (a chemical slaughterhouse using an insecticide), operating through the intervention of the Holy Ghost, all of which had been conceived and created through a kind of spontaneous generation.
I refuse to believe that which is not believable. I refuse to believe in the incredible. I refuse to believe in what Hilberg himself calls “an incredible meeting of minds.“ I refuse to believe in mind reading or telepathy, just as I refuse to believe in the intervention of the Holy Ghost or in spontaneous generation. I take exception to any historical thesis, any system of historical explanation, based on such hare-brained notions.
On November 23, 1978, the French historian René Rémond declared: “As for the [Nazi] gas chambers, I am ready to follow the Revisionists; as for the genocide, I have the deep conviction that Nazism in itself was sufficiently perverse so that this genocide was part of its motivations and its actions, but I recognize that I have no scientific evidence for this genocide.“
This is indeed the least one might say when one is concerned about historical truth.
Dear Michael,
I am not an academic professor of social science researcher. So I don’t care what the late Raul Hilberg said or even who he was. History is not a thesis. Aside from a million or millions of documents detailing the activites and requent status updates of the projects and missions, there are enough first-person accounts and testimony that corroborate each other so as to exceed by orders of magnitude the requirements for historic verification.
My personal information comes from the portion of my family that was wiped out, from the the broken and sick and crazed (and some surprisingly resilient) neighbors and parents of friends with the faded blue tattoos on their arms, from the perhaps dozens of firsthand written and manuscript accounts I have read. Every goes or should go through a phase in making the Holocaust a reality, an effort that you and your colleagues are struggling against via the tools of an academic intifada. However, academia rests upon the presumption of a commitment to truth, and it is this that makes the Lipstadt libel trial so significant. Rather than merely protesting and contending with David Irving’s statements, Lipstadt assembled a team to systematically expose and debunk each and every one of David Irving’s falsifications and applause lines, with the result of a complete rout. David Irving may find a fine place in some Palestinian university but the successful if controversial academic has been reduced to sneaking around for a venue to flog his wares for free.
If theses are employed to bridge gaps in our knowledge, the tests of those theses are their explanatory power, and first and foremost to make sense. Nazi Germany was a regimented, regulated, tightly controlled totalitarian dictatorship with widespread embedded paranoid-level reporting mechanisms. All planning and decision-making was centralized, at least one factor in their military defeat. If initiative and personal ambition were factors in any given ‘aktion’, we may be confident that they were well within the parameters of approved policy. Rather than some gestalt of individual acts of cruelty and brutality and so on, vast resources and monies had to be tightly coordinated to carry out the extermination.
The irrationality of the Nazis in carrying out the Final Solution in the face of competing priorities is explainable by the philosophical and ideological statements of Hitler regarding the impediment to his new order that the very existence of even unaffiliated Jews posed. There were esoteric factors in some of this but we will stick to the substantive.
If it is important to you to give the White European Colonialist Invaders any kind of break, to my knowledge Hitler in the first phase of his planning did not believe a Final Solution was feasible, and he focused on primarily expelling them from Europe (only to catch up with them later, Eichmann was dispatched to Palestine briefly to set up plans for exterminatrion centers in there in anticipation of Rommel’s victory, in the strangely secure knowledge that nobody else would allow them refuge). It was the poisonous British-appointed Grand Mufti Husseini who came to Germany, spending the war years there, and convinced Hitler to kill them all in Europe and save him the trouble of doing it later in Palestine (which of course would be his to rule following a German victory). Note that some Semites are more semitic than others. For Arabic Semites, you may be able to comfort yourself with the fact that Hitler was not an antisemite.
Brad,
I am not so sure about ‘popularity’, but I do know that Google for example is sweeping the blogs at about fifteen minute intervals, so anyone looking for revisionism info will find it here quickly. I have been surprised to see search entries for things that I know are very recent.
Let’s not confuse a lot of these comments with “revisionism,“ which is a revision of the historical record accomplished by accurately and dispassionately revisiting and reinterpreting the facts.
The art of making the Holocaust disappear has been spcifically dubbed ‘Holocaust Revisionism’, to take advantage of the idea you have stated, and it sounds less agenda-driven than ‘denial’ which is what it really is. A blog or website devoted to it typically has a humble, sincere, well-written introductory statement by an ordinary schmo who used to accept conventional wisdom, sometimes also supporting Israel and the Jewish people, until he had his eyes opened by something or other and now wishes to devote an obsessive ampount of time questioning blind acceptance and seeking the truth, exonerate the innocent and vilify the guilty and so on, and the schmo is of course available for guest appearances at the local university and don’t forget to check out the donation tab or button because all this truth-seeking is very expensive, amen.
Dear Ben,
Revisionists do not deny the genocide and the gas chambers. That is a misconception. Galileo didn’t deny that the earth was stationary; he affirmed, at the conclusion of his research, that the earth was not stationary, but that it rotated on its axis and revolved around the sun. In the same way, the revisionists, after concluding their own research, affirm that there was no genocide and no gas chambers, and that the “final solution of the Jewish question” consisted of the removal of the Jews from Europe—by emigration if possible, and by deportation if necessary.
The revisionists strive to establish what happened; they are positive, while the exterminationists doggedly continue to tell us about things which didn’t happen: their work is negative.
The revisionists stand for the reconciliation of the antagonists in the recognition of what really happened.
The generally acknowledged founder of Holocaust revisionism was Paul Rassinier, a French educator and underground Resistance activist who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and interned until the end of the war in the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps. His courage and suffering were later recognized with France’s highest decoration awarded for Resistance activities, and he was elected to the French National Assembly as a deputy of the Socialist Party (SFIO). His memoirs of wartime camp experiences, Passage de la Ligne (“Crossing the Line”) and Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (“The Lie of Ulysses”), brought heated rebuke.
In 1950 the gifted French writer Albert Paraz provided a preface to an edition of Rassinier’s “Ulysses’ Lie.“ In this remarkable piece, Paraz courageously and elegantly identified with Rassinier’s skepticism about the gas chamber story, even calling for an international commission of independent historians to thoroughly investigate this emotion-laden issue.
The generally acknowledged founder of Holocaust revisionism was Paul Rassinier, a French educator and underground Resistance activist who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and interned until the end of the war in the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps. His courage and suffering were later recognized with France’s highest decoration awarded for Resistance activities, and he was elected to the French National Assembly as a deputy of the Socialist Party (SFIO). His memoirs of wartime camp experiences, Passage de la Ligne (“Crossing the Line”) and Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (“The Lie of Ulysses”), brought heated rebuke.
In 1950 the gifted French writer Albert Paraz provided a preface to an edition of Rassinier’s “Ulysses’ Lie.“ In this remarkable piece, Paraz courageously and elegantly identified with Rassinier’s skepticism about the gas chamber story, even calling for an international commission of independent historians to thoroughly investigate this emotion-laden issue.
Dear Ben,
The Mufti and the Holocaust
Among the many tart insights in Robert Novick’s Holocaust in American Life is his brief consideration of the part that Haj Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, has played in Zionist and Holocaust propaganda. As Novick notes, Husseini, the leading Palestinian nationalist leader from the 1920s through the 1940s, plays a “starring role” in the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (edited under the auspices of Yad Vashem by Yisrael Gutman):
The article on the Mufti is more than twice as long as the articles on Goebbels and Göring, longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined, longer than the article on Eichmann—of all the biographical articles, it is exceeded in length, but only slightly, by the entry on Hitler.
There is much more to Zionist distortions of the mufti’s wartime role than its vast overemphasis in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. In fact, accusations that the mufti (the title given a judge of Islamic law) was not only privy to, but deeply involved in the alleged genocide of the Jews have been a staple of Zionist propaganda since 1945.
To be sure, Husseini was no friend of Israel. Of a prominent Palestinian family, the young ex-Ottoman officer was appointed mufti of Jerusalem, at British behest, early in their mandate over Palestine. Any hopes that Husseini would prove a colonial tool were dashed when he led the resistance to Britain’s pro-Jewish policies, culminating in the Arab revolt of 1936-1939. After he fled Palestine, the onset of war and his role in an unsuccessful rising against the British in Iraq drove Husseini to Axis Europe in 1941.
There, according to objective historians, the mufti helped the Germans with propaganda and recruiting among his fellow Muslims, steadfastly opposing any German actions that would facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine (which National Socialist policy had earlier supported).
Those verifiable grievances have never been enough for Zionist publicists, however. The earliest accusations seem to stem from the circle of Rudolf Kastner, whose Zionist “rescue” operation dickered with Adolf Eichmann for Jewish emigration in return for trucks and other supplies in Budapest in 1944. Shortly after the war Kastner submitted an affidavit to British authorities in which he claimed that Eichmann’s subordinate Dieter Wisliceny had told Kastner he was convinced that the mufti had “played a central role in the decision to exterminate the Jews.“ Rather than indict Husseini at Nuremberg, the British dismissed this and other charges as Zionist propaganda. (Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem [NY: Columbia University Press, 1988], pp. 105-107)
In another early postwar smear effort, Simon Wiesenthal, in his 1947 Grand Mufti—Grossagent der Achse (Grand Mufti—Axis Agent Extraordinary), related that Husseini had visited Auschwitz and Majdanek, paying close attention in both camps to the efficiency of the crematoria, and praising personnel particularly conscientious at their grisly work. (Joseph Schechtman, The Mufti and the Führer [NY: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965], p. 160)
Shortly after Israeli agents kidnapped Adolf Eichmann and spirited him to his show trial in Israel, the once prominent journalist Quentin Reynolds was hired by the Israelis to do a hatchet job on Eichmann. Based on material supplied by the Zionists, Reynolds’s Minister of Death claimed that the mufti had been a close confidante of Eichmann, and had displayed an avid interest in the extermination machinery. Reynolds quoted the mufti as telling friends “the Palestine problem will not be solved in a diplomatic conference but by other means—simple and radical like the gas chambers,“ and reported that “[h]is green turban was seen many times in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek.“ Yet the author offered no sources for any of these claims, which were published by Harold Guinzburg’s respected Viking Press in 1960.
Following the deaths of Kastner (in 1957) and Eichmann (in 1961), the need to displace the charge of collaboration from Zionists to Palestinians grew less urgent, and Zionist writers retreated from the more brazen charges to innuendo. Thus Joseph Schechtman’s 1965 Mufti and the Führer: “It is hardly accidental that the beginning of the systematic physical destruction of European Jewry by Hitler’s Third Reich roughly coincided with the Mufti’s arrival in the Axis camp,“ and Zvi Elpeleg: “It is impossible to estimate the extent of the consequences of Haj Amin’s efforts to prevent the exit of the Jews from countries under Nazi occupation, nor the number of those whose rescue was foiled and who consequently perished in the Holocaust.“ (The Grand Mufti, London: Frank Cass, 1993, p. 72)
While the more scrupulous Zionist writers have fallen back on weasel words, and the mufti goes unmentioned in such orthodox versions of the Holocaust as Hilberg’s and Reitlinger’s, the diabolization of the Palestinian freedon fighter by the Holocaust lobby continues. The website of the tax-supported Simon Wiesenthal Center’s, carrying on its namesake’s libels, profiles the mufti as follows: “He supported the Nazis, and especially their program for the mass murder of the Jews. He visited numerous death camps[,] encouraged Hitler do [sic] the extend the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine.“ (at http://motlc.wiesenthal org/pages/t031/t03148.html) Any search of the Internet will reveal many similar accusations.
As Palestinians and other Arabs discover the revisionist challenge to orthodoxy on the alleged Jewish Holocaust, they are taxed by Zionists with wielding “denial” as a weapon against Israel. Yet long before most Palestinians had ever heard of the Holocaust, they were being smeared for complicity in it, thanks to lies about one of their greatest leaders, Haj Amin al Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem.
The entire revisionist program is tailored to the stupid, the ignorant, aand the lazy-minded, and always hateful. It is an attempt to overawe them with names, daes, places, and interpretations more or less independent of facts.
It is an interesting but unsurprising feature of neo-Nazism that it has embraced and supported Arab anti-Zionism. But it has.
Dear Ben,
No one, not even those individuals who regard the Third Reich with nostalgia, denies the existence of concentration camps under Hitler. Everyone also recognizes that certain camps were equipped with crematory ovens: instead of being buried, the corpses were reduced to ashes. The repeated occurrence of epidemics made cremation necessary, especially for those who had died of typhus (see the photos of mass graves at Belsen et cetera). What is disputed by numerous French, British, American, and German authors is the existence of “extermination camps.“ This expression is used by historiographers to refer to those camps that were supposed to have been equipped with “gas chambers.“ Allegedly, these “gas chambers” were different from American gas chambers in that they were used to kill hundreds of men, women, and children at a time. Because the victims were chosen because of their race or religion, this is referred to as “genocide.“ The poison employed in this “genocide” is said to have been Zyklon B (a pesticide based upon prussic or hydrocyanic acid).
Those who contest the “genocide” claim and the existence of the “gas chambers” are called Revisionists. Their argument runs approximately as follows:
It suffices for both of these problems (“genocide” and “gas chambers”) to apply the customary methods of historical criticism, to see that one is confronted here by two myths that are inseparable. The criminal intentions that are attributed to Hitler have never been proven. As far as the weapon for this crime is concerned, no one has actually seen it. Here one is confronted by an extraordinarily successful war and hate propaganda campaign. History is full of frauds of this kind, beginning with their religious fables of sorcery and witchcraft. What distinguishes our times from earlier epochs is the frightening power of the media and the propaganda ad nauseam which is made for what must be called “the hoax of the twentieth century.“ Let him beware who, after 30 years, gets the idea to expose this hoax. He will learn depending upon the situation through imprisonment, fines, assaults and insults. His career can be shattered or endangered. He will be denounced as a Nazi. Either his thesis will be ignored, or else it will be distorted. No country will be more unrelentingly ruthless toward him than Germany. [1]
Today however, the silence is about to be broken about those men who have dared to write responsibly that Hitler’s “gas chambers” (including those of Auschwitz and Majdanek) are only a historical lie. That is a great advance.
But what insults and distortions an Exterminationist historian such as Georges Wellers allowed himself when, more than ten years after Paul Rassinier’s death, he decided to expose the minutest part of the arguments of this ex-inmate of a concentration camp who had had the courage to reveal the lie of the “gas chambers” in his writings!
The best way in which a historian may inform himself regarding the actual claims of the disciples of Paul Rassinier is to refer to the work of American professor Dr. Arthur R. Butz entitled The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. [2]
For my part, I take the liberty of making only a few observations specifically for serious research-oriented historians.
I call their attention to a paradox. Although the “gas chambers” are, in the view of the official historians, absolutely central to a picture of the Nazi concentration camp system (and furthermore, as proof for the totally perverse and devilish character of the German concentration camps in comparison to all previous and more recent concentration camps it ought to be meticulously shown how the Nazis proceeded to invent, construct, and operate these fearsome human slaughterhouses), one must be thoroughly astonished that in the impressive bibliography of the concentration camp literature there is not a single book, not a single brochure, not a single article, on the “gas chambers” themselves. One must not be misled by some very promising titles; rather one must ascertain the contents of these writings for oneself. I regard as “official historical writing” those publications which are written about the concentration camps by institutions or foundations that are partly or wholly financed from public funds, such as, for example, in France, the Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Committee for the History of the Second World War) and the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaire (Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center), and in Germany (Munich), the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History).
One must wait until page 541 of the thesis by Olga Wormser-Migot on the system of Nazi concentration camps, before one finds a passage about the “gas chambers.“ However, for the reader there are still three other surprises:
The passage in question covers only three pages.
It carries the title: “The Problem of the Gas Chambers.“
The “problem” consists of trying to determine whether the “gas chambers” at Ravensbrück (Germany) and Mauthausen (Austria) really existed; the author comes to the conclusion that they did not exist; however she does not examine here the “problem” of the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz or any of the other camps, probably because in her mind they do not present a “problem.“ [on page 157 of her book she says that Auschwitz I had no gas chamber.]
At this point, the reader probably wants to know why an analysis that concludes that “gas chambers” did not exist in certain camps is suddenly discontinued as soon as, for example, Auschwitz is discussed. Why, on one hand, is the critical spirit awakened, and then, on the other hand, is it allowed to collapse into lethargy? After all, as far as the “gas chamber” of Ravensbrück is concerned, we have many points of “evidence” and “undeniable eyewitness accounts,“ beginning with repeated and extensive eyewitness accounts by Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier or Germaine Tillion.
It gets even better. Several years after the war, before both British and French tribunals, the camp officials of Ravensbrück (Suhren, Schwarzhuber and Treite) repeatedly confessed to the existence of a “gas chamber” in their camp. They even vaguely described its operation. Eventually, those who did not commit suicide were executed because of this alleged “gas chamber.“ The same “confessions” were given prior to their deaths by Ziereis for Mauthausen (Austria) and by Kramer for Struthof-Natzweiler (Alsace).
Today, one can see the alleged “gas chamber” of Struthof-Natzweiler and in the same place one can also read the unbelievable “confession” of Kramer. This “gas chamber,“ which is designated as an “historical monument,“ is a complete fraud. The slightest amount of critical spirit will be sufficient to convince oneself that a gassing in this small room, without any sealing whatsoever, would have been a catastrophe for the executioner as well as for the people in the vicinity. In order to make this “gas chamber” (which is guaranteed to be “in its original condition”) believable, someone has gone so for as to clumsily knock a hole into the thin wall with a chisel, and thereby break four tiles. The hole was so arranged that Josef Kramer would have dumped through it the mysterious “salts” (about which he could give no further details and which, when mixed with a little water, killed within one minute!). How could salts and water make such a gas? How could Kramer have prevented the gas from coming back out the hole? How could he see his victims from a hole which would have let him see no more than half the room? How did he ventilate the room before opening the rudimentary door, made from rough-cut lumber? Perhaps one must ask the civil engineering firm in Saint-Michel sur-Meurthe (Vosges), which after the war altered the place which today is presented to visitors “in its original condition”?
Even long after the war, prelates, university professors, and some ordinary citizens gave eyewitness descriptions regarding the terrible reality of the “gas chambers” of Buchenwald and Dachau. With regard to Buchenwald, the “gas chamber” gradually disappeared from the minds of the people who had previously maintained that there was one in this camp.
Dachau
With regard to Dachau, the situation is different. After it had been firmly established for example by His Eminence Bishop Piguet, the bishop of Clermont-Ferrand that the “gas chamber” had been especially useful in gassing Polish priests, [3] eventually the following official explanation came to pass:
This gas chamber, whose construction had been started in 1942, was still not completed in 1945 when the camp was liberated. No one could have been gassed in it.
The little room, which visitors are told is a “gas chamber,“ is in reality completely harmless and, while all sorts of construction plans are available for “Baracke X” (the crematorium and vicinity), one cannot determine upon what basis or technical explanation one can claim that this structure is an “unfinished gas chamber.“
Broszat
No official historical institute has done more than the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich to make the myth of the “gas cham