Let me begin by telling you a little bit about myself, and what made me create this blog for free during my spare time over the course of several months. See, I have been interested in history since I was a 12 year old boy. But after finishing compulsory education, I decided to dedicate myself to the sciences instead, and partly also motived by the higher demand in the job market a STEM degree offers. However, my interest in history remained. At the same time, I have been active on Youtube almost since its conception in 2005, and therefore what shocked me most is when I started coming across an increasing barrage of holocaust denial videos on that website in the past year or two, as well as increasing troll accounts (e . g. "Shlomo Shekelstein") posting their denial in the comments section of even non-holocaust related WW2 or political videos. I took personal offense not just because these people were slandering the death of 11 million* human beings (I use Simon Wiesenthal's figure as an approximate, the real total of all deliberately targeted Jewish and non-Jewish civilian or disarmed victims by the Nazis is likely higher), but also because they attacked not just historiography (and by implication all historians involved), but also our entire world view, everything we believe in, and everything we have been taught our entire life. Naturally, I was intrigued like just about anyone else, and watched their "documentaries", but while others might have had an "eye opener" moment that confirmed their inner xenophobia and turned them into holocaust deniers, watching these denial videos only made me more aware of how much fact-twisting and lies these "revisionists" did to present their theories, whose ultimate goals are not scholastic (correcting an erroneous historical record), but rather political in nature, namely whitewashing National Socialism in an effort to rehabilitate it, promoting White Nationalism and calling for another Jew-hunt ("Jews run the media, hence you're brainwashed, time you wake up and do something about it"). I began to research more and more about the holocaust from legitimate sources (books by historians, original documents, photos, census data, victim testimony, perpetrator testimony etc.), and all it did was reaffirm my conviction about the historicity of this event rather than shatter it. Therefore I decided to do my part in dedicating this blog to set the record straight, as best as I can. The only thing I have to agree with holocaust deniers is that indeed, researching about the holocaust (or any other historical event for that matter) is a rabbit hole. Depending on how far down you are willing to go (or your curiosity ends up taking you), your research will last for hours, days, weeks, months, years or even decades. My research took two years. And one thing I noticed, was that holocaust denial and holocaust acknowledgement are not two unified fronts clashing against each other, but that there are rifts and quarreling both among deniers, and defenders. On the denier side, we have on one hand the active wing consisting of contributors to the holocaust denier echo-chamber and safe space known as the CODOH forum (the late Bradley Smith's Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, run by the admin Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis who makes an oxymoron out of the site's name, because open debate is NOT permitted on CODOH, as not only topics but even individual replies of new members are initially only allowed to appear on the site after approval; posts are deleted, even signatures he doesn't like are erased - therefore the acronym should really stand for Committee for Open Denial on the Holocaust); a dozen or so frequent revisionist posters on the RODOH forum (Real Open Debate On The Holocaust, created as a less policed alternative to CODOH), Carolyn Yeager "Elie Wiesel Cons the World", Gen Baugher (head of the "furtherglory" blog, and the innocuous appearing scrapbookpages), Jürgen Graf, Jim & Joe Rizoli, Carlos Whitlock Porter and his website, Michael Santomauro, Vincent Reynouard, Ursula Haverbeck and the more prominent figures Germar Rudolf (Rudolf Report) and Carlo Mattogno, with Rudolf now being the chief editor of the "holocaust handbooks" series (Castle Hill Publishers) that compiles and re-publishes all relevant (often decades old) denier material, and the latter a very active contributor to said material (I wonder if there's anyone who has read everything Carlo "quantity is a quality of its own" Mattogno has ever written apart from Carlo himself), as well as the people running the "Inconvenient History" blog; then a more inactive wing consisting of Robert Faurisson ("No Holes, no Holocaust"), Arthur Butz ("Hoax of the Twentieth Century"), John C. Ball ("Air Photo Evidence"), Nicholas Kollerstrom, Ernst Zündel (Samisdat publications), Fred Leuchter (Leuchter reports), Walter Lüftl (Lüftl report), Richard Harwood/Verrall ("Did Six Million Really Die?"), Udo Walendy, denierbud ("One Third of the Holocaust"), Gerald Fredrick Töben ("Adelaide Institute"), as well as "on the fence" guys like James Bacque ("Other Losses") or the mysterious individual known as "Thomas Dalton, PhD" and many dead deniers such as Paul Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes, David Hoggan, Benjamin Freedman (infamous 1961 speech at the Willard Hotel), Thies Christophersen ("Auschwitzlüge"), Wilhelm Stäglich, Bradley Smith, Henri Roques, Walter Sanning ("Dissolution of European Jewry") and Willis Carto (former head of the Institute for Historical Review); a "Jewish" wing consisting of holocaust deniers of Jewish ancestry (as if this makes them more legitimate compared to gentile deniers) such as alternative medicine guru Roger Dommergue, famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin's enfant terrible son Gerard Menuhin ("Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil"), Nathanael Kapner ("Brother Nathanael" on YouTube) and David Cole (though today he accepts most of the holocaust happened, such as Aktion Reinhard); a wavering wing that is starting to question their former revisionist positions, consisting of David Irving, "The Black Rabbit of Inlé" and his "Winston Smith Ministry of Truth" blog, Eric Hunt and Mark Weber, all beginning to accept certain facts of the holocaust as legitimate, such as several million victims being the combined result of Einsatzgruppen massacring innocent civilians and homicidal gassings at the Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Chelmno with Mark Weber even being the head of the IHR (Institute for Historical Review), denier central, as well as people who started out as holocaust deniers and ended up wholly realizing their erroneous beliefs, such as Charles D. Provan or Jean-Claude Pressac, whose "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers" only ended up becoming an extensive collection of documents underscoring Auschwitz's homicidal nature; and then we have Friedrich Paul Berg, who is an active denier but has made himself many enemies in the denier scene, especially Robert Faurisson, as Berg believes mass gassing by Zyklon-B is a very plausible possibility, but it just wasn't done in the homicidal gas chambers and could have instead been done in the big railway delousing chambers such as at the Eisenbahnbegasungsanlage in Budapest, while he calls Robert Faurisson an irrational technophobe as the latter believes mass gassings are impossible because the bodies would all be contaminated with Zyklon-B after a gassing, killing all the Sonderkommando during body retrieval. Berg is a one-man army, a raving, grumpy gramps lashing out against both sides. As fractured as the holocaust denier scene is, rifts also run among those that dedicate their lives to researching and defending the holocaust from the deniers' attacks. For example, it is a fact that among holocaust scholars like Christopher Browning, Dieter Pohl, Peter Longerich, Christian Gerlach, Bogdan Musial etc., most including Raul Hilberg and Deborah Lipstadt refuse(d) to debate holocaust deniers altogether, saying that doing so would validate all arguments holocaust deniers make as being worthy of scholarly debate, rather than the fact-twisting to suit an anti-semitic world view they really are. This, of course, the deniers interpret as the holocaust scholars' fear and inability to debate them properly, knowing they would lose (despite official clashes having taken place in the past, such as during the Zündel or Irving-Lipstadt trials that led to a defeat of the deniers despite them presenting the same theories that are still in circulation today). Then there are those that think ignoring holocaust deniers won't make them go away and therefore dedicate websites to set the record straight, such as Nizkor (http://www . nizkor . org). You might also want to check out the article on RationalWiki (http://rationalwiki . org/wiki/Holocaust_denial). A nice website that summarizes some of the most frequent holocaust denial claims into neat sections and addresses them is Emory University's: http://hdot . org/debunking-denial/. We also have the Holocaust Controversies blog (http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2006/04/quick-links . html) that goes into extreme detail regarding many issues (search function is advised) and H . E . A . R . T. (Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team) (http://www . holocaustresearchproject . org/toc . html), but there's a feud between these two, the latter also hosting the Aktion Reinhardt Camps (ARC) website, reachable at deathcamps . org. Finally for any German speakers a site I can recommend is http://www . h-ref . de, and for any French speakers http://www . phdn . org. For some "dead" links you will need to use the Internet Archive / Wayback Machine. As for myself, I am neither a certified historian (but then again, neither is David Irving), nor a chemist or engineer. I am merely a student of science with an interest in history as a hobby, who has decided to use his amateur and non-scholarly perspective to contribute to the debate from the eyes of the target audience, which both deniers and defenders are aiming to reach in the first place. My contribution is that of a person who comes across these theories on the net, decides to do research (you know, ACTUAL research rather than stopping at the first denier video and calling it a day), collects material largely the contribution of others, looks up original documents, and presents what he finds for other folks like me to see. In being neither a denier nor part of "the establishment", I think my conclusions offer a degree of unbiasedness that might be useful to both parties. I would also like to remind some deniers that I am, in fact, not a paid hasbara shill or employed by the ADL. This blog is dedicated to fight those who slander the holocaust with their anti-semitic drivel about a world Jewish conspiracy, because at the end of the day that's always what holocaust deniers ultimately have to admit, no matter how scholarly and professional they present their arguments: You cannot believe the holocaust as we have been taught (several million victims incl. homicidal gas chambers) did not happen, and at the same time, not believe the Jews are in charge of the Western world and have all banks, media, schools, universities and think tanks firmly under their payroll and control. It's impossible. Therefore, pragmatically speaking, there really is no point in wasting time to read holocaust denier material, because it's either, or: either you are a rational person who agrees that the Jews do not control the western world, and have therefore not censored every academic agency there is, and therefore holocaust historiography is legitimate as there is no reason for it not to be, just like historiography about any other historical event (and therefore reading holocaust denier material is at best just a character study into the minds of these folk who peddle it), or, you are a paranoid conspiracy nut who concludes it has been faked on purpose because Jews control the world and want the 'goyim' to support the legitimacy and continued existence of Israel, providing it with a moral blank check to do whatever it pleases, as well as eternal reparations, in which case you've already made up your mind and this blog isn't going to change your beliefs. There is no middle ground. But if, for whatever reason, you still are on the fence, then by all means, continue reading. Hopefully this blog will help you understand there always is a logical explanation for all crackpot theories deniers present that calls historiography into question (my future project is to dedicate a blog to debunk 9/11 theories involving controlled demolition, interestingly something most deniers also believe in). Written by a 25 year old European atheist gentile fluent in German and English, using a pseudonym. * see: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2008/04/5-million-non-jewish-victims-part-2 . html
Unfortunately imgur oftentimes tends to add spaces after a dot, which breaks many links in my posts. For example, a link will look like: www . google . com rather than www.google.com Therefore, copying one of the links I list, pasting it in your browser and hitting enter often won't work, what you will have to do is to erase the extra spaces after pasting and before hitting enter. Secondly, URLs tend to, as someone else once wisely said: "degrade over time". That means websites working as of 2016 might not work in the future. But this doesn't mean you can no longer access the link. In this case what you need to do is head on over to archive.org/web and paste the (corrected - no spaces, remember?) url in the site's bar and then click 'browse history'. The page will then take you to a calendar of sorts - the years are at the top, one of them is selected (marked yellow) and that year's calendar is shown below. Blue circles on certain dates indicate when a "snapshot" was taken of the page in question, on that day. Clicking on that date will then hopefully take you to a working version of your original link in question. Sometimes the default selected year does not have any snapshots at all. In this case, please select a year which has some kind of activity on it (represented by black bars), then you'll be able to find snapshots taken of the link in question during that year. Enjoy!
Woefully naive is the one who thinks that out of all historical events so far recorded, one of the most well documented of them is in fact so erroneous that a small band consisting of determined scholars have taken it upon themselves to embark on a journey to set the record straight, for their selfless love for historical accuracy is so great that it has trumped their fear of becoming social pariahs and losing their careers as a result... ...Right. The idea, that "revisionist scholars" are merely seeking to correct an erroneous historical record, and do not have an agenda of their own is ridiculous. While they are quick to accuse actual holocaust historians worldwide of having an agenda (being in league with Jewish organizations and via indoctrination to secure Western moral and monetary support for the continued existence of Israel, and discourage the questioning of its policies in the Middle East) which they so far haven't been able to prove beyond the generic accusation hurled in the general direction of holocaust historians worldwide, us holocaust acknowledgers on the other hand can very much prove how the overwhelming majority, if not entirety, of holocaust deniers has ties to far-right, white nationalist, "race realist", ethnocentric, anti-zionist or anti-semitic, conspiracy theorist and/or openly neo-Nazi circles. I have yet to encounter a stable minded, level-headed individual who denies the holocaust. In almost all cases these people doubt many other "narratives" as well, like 9/11, JFK, the moon landings, global warming, Sandy Hook, European migrant crisis, Bilderberg meetings, and so on. The aim of even the most scholarly holocaust denial is, as mentioned earlier, to convince the world that "they" have been deliberately lying to "us", for 70 years to secure geopolitical and ZOG interests that date back hundreds of years. This, and the rehabilitation of National Socialism with its Rassenlehre and eugenics, as a viable political ideology again, as well as the whitewashing of all its crimes, and eventually the implementation of Nuremberg laws 2 . 0 to stop population replacement ("white genocide") and secure the existence of the White Race, which these people deem in danger of due to immigration and miscegenation, are the long-term agendas and ultimate end goals of any "scholar" who produces holocaust denying material, and anyone who distributes it. I should know, I have spent quality time listening to these people bring up these subjects again and again while debating them on the holocaust. But returning to those who like to pose as an unbiased "holocaust skeptic", but end up with a clear agenda, a case in point is the book "Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides" penned by the supposedly "impartial observer" calling himself "Thomas Dalton, PhD", available e . g. here on amazon: http://amzn . to/2dVlbyo In reality, whoever this figure is, his motives become clear and his intent is exposed in the book's introductory chapter itself which can be read for free on the net, and is dissected here: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2009/05/old-herrings-in-new-can-thomas-daltons . html Ironically, I wonder how furious the Nazis would be, were they to realize their future admirers would one day be trivializing the most long-lasting achievement they managed to accomplish in their reign of terror that lasted 12 years and plunged the world into a war that cost some 60 million lives: the (largely successful) eradication of European Jewry and "other undesirables", culminating in the gruesome death of some 6 million Jews, millions of other defenseless civilians and the reduction of 2/3rds of the European Jewish population. Recommended literature: Jean-Claude Pressac: "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers" (1989) Raul Hilberg: "The Destruction of the European Jews" (1961) Lucy Dawidowicz: "The War Against the Jews" (1975) Robert Jan van Pelt: "The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial" (2002) Debórah Dwork, Robert Jan van Pelt: "Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present" (2002) James & Lance Morcan: "DEBUNKING HOLOCAUST DENIAL THEORIES" (2016) Michael Shermer, Alex Grobman: "Denying History" (2002) Richard J. Evans: "Lying About Hitler" (2002) Joshua D. Zimmerman: "Holocaust Denial: Demographics, Testimonies, and Ideologies" (2000) Deborah Lipstadt: "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" (1993) Stephen E. Atkins: "Holocaust Denial as an International Movement" (2009) http://www . phdn . org/negation/gravediggers/index . html
Introduction The point of this blog How to use the Internet Archive / Wayback machine and concerning links in this blog Why do people deny the holocaust? Table of contents Concentration and extermination camp locations in Europe - an overview Extermination camps in Nazi occupied Poland - an overview Auschwitz The Auschwitz camp complex - an overview Aerial photograph of the entire Auschwitz-Birkenau complex Auschwitz III Monowitz and the I.G. Farben "Buna-Werke" industrial area - an overview Auschwitz I Stammlager Aerial photography of the Stammlager: April 4, 44, August 25, 44, January 14, 45 Denier infographic # 1: A fat Jew means he did not starve The Auschwitz death book gambit "The Aktion" at Block 11 - one of the first gassings Document listing the names of an Auschwitz execution squad, November 22, 1940 Document listing the names of those executed, November 22, 1940 "Gesondert untergebracht" is code-word for homicidal gassing The hair room Krema I, located at Auschwitz I main camp The sign outside Krema I Holes on Krema I's roof, and their correspondence to the building's interior Wartime aerial photographs of Krema I compared with modern satellite imagery Krema I blueprint and underground chimney flues Krema I ovens Krema I Gas chamber Scratchmarks on the interior of Krema I's gas chamber More "souvenirs" tourists leave behind at Auschwitz-Birkenau Denier infographic about Krema I's "gas chamber door" A denier pic comparing American gas chamber doors to the ones in Auschwitz Those doomed to die "breaking down the gas chamber doors" Outside door of Krema I, rear view Krema I outside door, front view The other entrance of Krema I The other exit of Krema I The Swimming Pool Horse grooming in Babitz, one of the Auschwitz sub camps Greenhouse in the Rajsko subcamp The Stammlager's theater The Angora project Auschwitz football team of 1944 (Allies prisoners of war) Location of the British POW Camp The Brothel Jewish Babies born in a concentration camp Holocaust denier "truth bombs" about Auschwitz summed up in one picture Concluding Auschwitz I Stammlager Auschwitz II Birkenau Auschwitz II Birkenau aerial photos taken on August 23rd, 44, August 25, 44 Guard towers Gas chamber roof of Krema II compared between Aug 25th and May 31st photo David Olere's sketch of Krema III matches with Air photos of 1944 published 30 years later A picture of Krematorium III, taken from the Bauleitung construction album Women standing in front of the Krema III building Birkenau photograph taken on 31st May, 1944 The Krematoria security screen Images from the Auschwitz Album Kremas II and III (background) during construction, February 1943 Defending the Image If the zyklon-b inlets weren't clear enough, here they are once again Another Birkenau aerial photograph, taken approx. 3 weeks later Krematorium V Grisly details around Krematorium IV and V Krema IV Gas-tight window shutters Kremas IV and V had ventilation Krematorium VI was planned Birkenau, December 21, 1944 Birkenau photograph taken 2 weeks before liberation Topf & Sons ovens of Krematorium II and III Birkenau ovens 1943 Zentralbauleitung Document regarding the crematory output (the "Janisch document") A denier pic that tries to mess with your mind 1942 Kurt Prüfer document Another popular anti-crematory capacity image circulated among holocaust deniers Krematorium II Victims entering Krematorium II Ruins of Krematorium II's undressing room (Leichenkeller 2) Ruins of Krematorium II's homicidal gas chamber (Leichenkeller 1), viewing East Ruins of Krematorium II's homicidal gas chamber (Leichenkeller 1), viewing North-West Auschwitz Krema building located in the Birkenau camp, scale model Grisly details of the Krematorium II scale model Auskleideraum A day in the life of a Sonderkommando Cremation The elevators of Kremas II and III So how realistic and achievable is multiple corpse cremation per Topf muffle? Can crematory smokestacks belch smoke and fire? Cremation time sheet from the Gusen camp (Mauthausen-Gusen complex) An overview of the crematoria capacities in some Nazi camps Engineer Fritz Sander's letter to Topf, dated September 14th, 1942 Auschwitz typists can't keep their lies straight Documents and arguments regarding the homicidal nature of the facilities in question Zyklon-B pellets containing HCN poison gas The Prussian Blue argument made by holocaust deniers The American gas chamber strawman Blueprint of Krematorium II Vertical cross section of Krema II's Gas chamber March 6, 1943 Karl Bischoff Letter about heating a "morgue room" More proof of warm air ventilation, April 13th, 1943 Gaskeller Document regarding Krematorium II and III's gas chamber ventilation system's capability Bischoff's "Vergasungskeller" and "Be- und Entlüftungsanlage" If Kremas II and III were air-raid shelters, and Usain Bolt was an SS-guard... Time sheet / Daily report of an Auschwitz worker Krematorium III inventory Gas-tight doors for the Birkenau Crematoria buildings, March 31st 1943 Zyklon-B Outgassing curve presented by holocaust deniers Dr. Johann Paul Kremer's Diary Collage using Sonderkommando Photographs Closeup of Sonderkommando photograph # 282: The undressing women Closeup of Sonderkommando photograph # 280: taken during the 2nd half of August 1944 A closeup of Krema IV and V Image comparison around the "White House" The Auschwitz water table Concluding Auschwitz II Birkenau Concluding Auschwitz II Birkenau World Jewish Conspiracy theories from past to present Debunking the "Ashkenazi Jews are Khazars" theory "Karl Marx the crypto-Jew" Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and "the Kalergi Plan" False quotes attributed to Ilya Ehrenburg "Did you know Winston Churchill never mentioned the holocaust?! Amazing, right?" "B-but I am sure Eisenhower didn't speak of the holocaust either! Or so I've heard!!!!" Yehuda Bauer and the gambit of "debunking the Wannsee Conference" Simon Wiesenthal and the "no gassings in Germany" false quote The fake Voltaire quote The fake Sefton Delmer quote The Rothschild Family, Warburg family and the Federal Reserve (FED) The Kaufman-Plan, Hooton-Plan and Morgenthau Plan "The Anne Frank diary is a hoax!" The Diary of Anne Frank Elie Wiesel's tattoo and many other denier allegations about him Elie and Shlomo Wiesel voluntarily going on a death-march with the Nazis Selectively citing novels and newspaper clippings Moshe Peer, the man who claimed to have been gassed six times March 24th, 1933: "Judea Declares War on Germany", evening edition But were there any actual boycotts and to what extent? Nazi Propaganda Another document regarding Nazi policy of Jewish "freedom of movement" outside their ghettos The "history shows us Jews really are a problem" gambit "Soap made out of Jews", human soap and bars of RIF "But the mainstream is saying no soap was ever made out of anyone...like...ever!" Do Jews really control the world? Supposed fakes and "restored" originals How denier photo-fakery is easily exposed The deniers also try to claim the "Judenaktion in Ivangorod" photo is fake This is a German uniform Another denier image, this one trying to discredit the "Letzte Jude von Vinnitsa" image "The most famous holocaust photo a fraud?" Was Hitler a man of peace? Hitler's Invasion of the Soviet Union "was just a pre-emptive strike" The Müller-Lachout Document - anatomy of a hoax The myths about the Waffen-SS Adolf Hitler's admiration of Islam The myth that Britain bombed civilian targets before Germany bombed civilian targets The Firebombing of Dresden and Tagesbefehl-47 Another denier claim: Eisenhower created death camps to kill 1-2 million German P.O.W.s Concluding World Jewish Conspiracy theories The Holocaust by numbers Deniers like to implicate the International Red Cross in their holocaust denial Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 12, p.11 (1978) International Red Cross letter debunking the denier figure in 1975 already 1984 Arolsen document tallying the documented deaths in some German concentration camps Swiss newspaper "Die Tat", Jan 19, 1955 mentioning 300,000 victims in jails & concentration camps Once again, the IRC responds to denier allegations Conflicting numbers of the Babi Yar massacre Another denier picture, this time using "World Jewish Almanacs" as proof Estimate of the American Jewish Committee of Jewish population in the world in 1933 1948/49 "compilation of the latest available data", American Jewish Year Book The Auschwitz numbers claim "What about Rudolf Hoess? Surely he spoke of several million victims?" Debunking the myth about the 6 Million figure already being referenced by newspapers before WW2 Holocaust by country So where did the Jews go? Concluding the Holocaust by numbers National Socialist guilt of crimes against humanity, Einsatzgruppen and Gas Vans Addressing the "no extermination order from Hitler" nonsense Göring's Final Solution letter to Heydrich Did Hitler know what was going on regarding the Final Solution to the Jewish question? The Hitler Interview in 1922 and many other recorded instances of Hitler's genocidal intent More proofs about Hitler's intent regarding the fate of the Jewish race in Europe Goebbels' Diary entries Hans Frank, Generalgouverneur of Nazi-occupied Poland Heinrich Himmler as a German dictionary - the October 4th, 1943 Posen (Poznan) speech Hoefle Telegram "Bandenbekämpfung" and the Korherr report The Jäger report Letter to Himmler by Viktor Brack, the organiser of Aktion T4, talking about castration Wetzel's letter to Lohse and "the Brack remedy", October 29, 1941 Franz Walter Stahlecker's Map, January 31 1942 Naked women being executed Another shot of the massacre Mass grave in Proskuriv, Podolia (Western Ukraine) Mobile Gas Vans Documentary evidence of the existence and homicidal nature of gas vans Gas vans were also used within the Reich, such as in Mauthausen SS-Major General Harald Turner's letter to chief of German Administration in Serbia, Karl Wolff Saurer Gas vans in Smolensk, 23rd February 1942 "SHOW ME A PHOTO OR VIDEO OF A GASSING VICTIM!!!!" The tale of Dr. Charles P. Larson's Dachau autopsies and other "crime doctors" Prisoners who have committed suicide on the electrified barbed wire fence of the camp Nazi Medical experimentation and the horrors of Ravensbrück and Natzweiler-Struthof August Hirt and the Jewish Skeleton Collection The Kommissarbefehl of 6th June 1941, and how it is relevant to the holocaust Treatment of Soviet PoWs (September 8th, 1941) and why they're part of the holocaust The Nuremberg trials Concluding National Socialist guilt of crimes against humanity, Einsatzgruppen and Gas Vans Exposing holocaust deniers David Irving Ernst Zündel and Samisdat publishers Fred A. Leuchter - What came first? The chicken (gas chamber expert) or the egg (gas chambers)? Germar Rudolf Carlo Mattogno The Institute for Historical Review Dean Irebodd aka "denierbud" aka "Carto's Cutlass Supreme" (still active) over at CODOH Eric Hunt, psychopath David Cole / David Stein Walter Sanning & Jürgen Graf Aktion Reinhard and other camps Why the transit camp theory is bunk Sketch of Treblinka II Extermination camp (produced during Franz Stangl's 1967 trial in Germany) The horrors of the Treblinka II extermination camp, photo taken 1944 (note ground disturbances) Some maps and models of Treblinka II CG model of the new gas chamber building in Treblinka II Photo of the excavator and old gas chamber building at Treblinka II Dossiers of Aktion Reinhardt Sonderaktion 1005 The Operation Reinhard oath Kurt Gerstein's account Holocaust deniers try to wholly discredit Kurt Gerstein's account How about an anti-denier infographic about Treblinka this time? Friedrich Paul Berg's obsession with diesel engine exhaust being harmless "But German submarines used diesel engines and nobody was killed!" Friedrich Paul Berg's obsession with cherry red corpses (CO poisoning) Fritz Berg and his railway delousing chambers, producer gas vehicles and air-circulation chamber Shipments of hair from Treblinka and Majdanek W. Rutherford's Sketch of the new gas chambers of Belzec The Majdanek controversy Mauthausen's homicidal gas chamber Idiot defacing Mauthausen gas chamber Doors at Mauthausen concentration camp's gas chamber Layout of the homicidal Mauthausen gas chamber and its operation Some questions for holocaust deniers Crying about hate speech laws How to become a holocaust denier in 10 easy steps
First off, let me just quickly answer the famous denier question "Why is the Holocaust emphasized so much when there have been so many other genocides in history?" Their disgusting Jew-hatred already surfaces when they insinuate it's because Jews run Hollywood and therefore have the power and money, and as "a neurotic people" have found an infinite cash cow to milk guilt-tripped 'goyim' for having allowed the Germans to put their ancestors to hard manual labor in camps for the first time since centuries. This is a paraphrase of the most vile rhetoric holocaust deniers (in combination with their admiration of national socialism, white nationalism and "race realism" aka racism in general) usually spew, and I make no fuss about showing you their true convictions in the introductory images to give you an idea why I created this blog in the first place - it's people like this that make my blood boil, more so when they manage to corrupt innocents with their deceptive "documentaries" on sites frequented by tens of millions. Given that there was no easy-to-read counter with lots of pictures (something the public likes to see, rather than oceans of text), I got to work. So to answer why the holocaust is unique, simple: Because it is the only 'assembly-line' style genocide in history on an industrial scale that ended up exterminating millions of people in a short period of time, most of whom belonged to one religion: The pogrom of all pogroms. Just so that you get an approximate idea of what we're dealing with here, the image above shows the locations of most of the bigger Axis concentration and extermination camps in Europe (many of them had lots of sub-camps not detailed on the map). I do not like the distinction between these two camp types, as concentration camps exacted their own considerably high death toll from labor attrition, starvation, disease, torture, summary execution and medical experimentation, while furthermore some concentration camps like Mauthausen had functioning gas chambers as well, where thousands of people were gassed, not to mention the T-4 Euthanasia centers like Hartheim Castle and Sonnenstein Castle, or the concentration camps Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, Stutthof and Natzweiler. On the other hand, the Janowska concentration camp (not marked on the map, but right next to Lwow), which also functioned as an extermination center had no homicidal gas chambers; mass killing at or near that camp was done by shooting. Same applies to Maly Trostenets. The claim that an extermination camp necessarily implies gas chambers or that concentration camps did not have any, is ignorant rhetoric. However, the bulk of deliberate physical extermination en masse and mostly immediately upon arrival did take place in Poland (actually back then, in and around the area classified by the Nazis as the Generalgouvernement, as Poland had ceased to exist), and therefore those camps are labeled extermination camps, along with Jasenovac and Maly Trostenets. Note that Jasenovac was run by the NDH (Independent State of Croatia), not the WVHA (SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt), Odilo Globocnik (orchestrator of extermination during Aktion Reinhard), or any other German authority. To understand the origins of the Final Solution, this makes for a good, short introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPXPjZurupc
Since most of the killing took place in Poland, we'll turn our attention to this region. I will dedicate a future presentation to refute holocaust deniers regarding their claims made about Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno/Kulmhof, but the focus of the current one will be especially about Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as a bit about general antisemitic conspiracy theories, Einsatzgruppen, gas vans, Treblinka and Majdanek. The reason Auschwitz-Birkenau is so infamous is because it is the camp with the highest death toll of them all. Therefore, holocaust deniers have also given this camp the most attention, in their effort to disprove the holocaust, especially the homicidal gassings of around a million people in this camp's gas chambers, and then to spin their usual yarn about the others having died due to Allied bombings destroying supply lines and infrastructure - a classic reversal of victim and perpetrator roles.
So, zooming in further, this is the layout of Auschwitz I "Stammlager" (center), Auschwitz II "Birkenau" (left), the industrial area of Monowitz used during wartime by I.G. Farben, and the Auschwitz III "Monowitz" camp located to the right.
...with more detailed camp layouts.
The aerial photographs that follow are part of a series of high resolution wartime photographs that were released by Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirier in 1979, as well as some taken from the NCAP archive. Taken on June 26, 1944, you can see Birkenau toward the top of the image, the Stammlager a bit below that, the I.G. Farben "Buna-Werke" toward the bottom, and the Auschwitz III Monowitz camp toward the bottom left of the industrial area. Please note that many high resolution aerial photographs will follow. It is best to view them in a separate tab rather than just clicking on them. This way you will be able to zoom in all the way, and won't be limited to imgur's default zoom on this page, which is limited to your monitor size and desktop resolution. Thomas Dalton, PhD (in what?) a holocaust denier who disguises himself as "skeptic" and author of "Debating the Holocaust" makes the claim that "most damning is the June 26 photo, which, by standard accounts, should have shown us three heavily smoking crematoria and several ongoing open pit fires" (Dalton, Debating the Holocaust, p.181) Actually, the photo should show us exactly zero smoking crematoria and zero open pit fires, since no transport had arrived the day or even the week before, which is exactly what it is doing: On 26 June 1944, no large scale killings are reported for Auschwitz-Birkenau (according to Danuta Czech's Kalendarium as well as the Glaser list). Furthermore, John C. Zimmerman, respected author of "Holocaust Denial: Demographics, Testimonies and Ideologies" has this to say: "The best known of these photos was taken on June 26, 1944. It shows the whole Auschwitz complex which consisted of three main camps: the Birkenau camp where the gas chambers and crematoria were located, the Auschwitz main camp, and Monowitz area of the camp where industrial production occurred. The Birkenau area of the camp shows no activity. However, on this particular day there were no arrivals from Hungary." Hungary is in so far relevant, because the majority of Birkenau extermination activity happened in 1944, a large chunk of which occurred when some 400,000 Hungarian Jews were taken to the complex during the Ungarnaktion and reduced to ash. This is also why deniers are so livid about insisting that 1944, of all years, should show damning evidence of genocide in Birkenau in aerial photography. Don't worry - there's plenty of evidence to go around, I will address these piecemeal in the aerial photos that'll follow.
A synthetic oil and rubber (Buna) manufacturing facility. Some 10,223 prisoners were stationed here shortly before liberation in January 1945
At Buchenwald, "Jedem das Seine" (literally, "to each his own", but idiomatically "everyone gets what he deserves") was used. At Auschwitz and some other camps, the logo was "Arbeit macht frei". Notice how the B in this sign is put upside down, allegedly in irony or an act of silent defiance by those who put it up. The infamous slogan reads: "Work liberates" (or "work sets you free"). Auschwitz I opened in former Polish army barracks in June 1940. After this part of Poland was annexed by Nazi Germany, Oświęcim (Auschwitz) was located administratively in Germany, Province of Upper Silesia, Regierungsbezirk Kattowitz, Landkreis Bielitz. It was first suggested as a site for a concentration camp for Polish prisoners by SS-Oberführer Arpad Wigand, an aide to Higher SS and Police Leader for Silesia, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. Bach-Zelewski had been searching for a site to house prisoners in the Silesia region, as the local prisons were filled to capacity. Richard Glücks, head of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, sent former Sachsenhausen concentration camp commandant Walter Eisfeld to inspect the site, which already held sixteen dilapidated one-story buildings that had once served as an Austrian and later Polish Army barracks and a camp for transient workers. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), approved the site in April 1940, intending to use the facility to house political prisoners. SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Rudolf Höss oversaw the development of the camp and served as the first commandant. Auschwitz I, the original camp, was to became the administrative center for the whole complex. Local residents were evicted, and the Germans also ordered expulsions of Poles from the villages of Broszkowice, Babice, Brzezinka, Rajsko, Pławy, Harmęże, Bór, and Budy to the General Government. The first prisoners (30 German criminal prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp) arrived in May 1940. The first mass transport to Auschwitz concentration camp, which included Catholic prisoners, suspected members of the resistance, and 20 Jews, arrived from the prison in Tarnów, Poland, on June 14, 1940. The inmate population grew quickly as the camp absorbed Poland's intelligentsia and dissidents, including the Polish underground resistance. By March 1941, 10,900 were imprisoned there, most of them Poles. By the end of 1940, the SS had confiscated land in the surrounding area to create a 40-square-kilometer (15 sq mi) "zone of interest" surrounded by a double ring of electrified barbed wire fences and watchtowers. Do you want me to let you in on a little "secret"? The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign so significant to Auschwitz and shown to over a million tourists each year is, in fact, a post-war fake. And do you want to know why it is fake? The story is tragic: Because the original was stolen by thieves. Motivation for the theft was originally thought to be for financial gain, however when the individuals responsible for the theft were identified it was revealed that the thieves themselves were affiliated with the Neo-Nazi movement. This fact is also told to tourists before they enter the camp, and therefore it's not really a secret. The sign over Auschwitz was stolen in December 2009 and (thankfully) later recovered by authorities, but in three pieces. Anders Högström, a Swedish neo-Nazi leader, and two Poles were jailed as a result. The original sign is now in storage at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and a replica was put over the gate in its place. Arbeit macht Frei signs also exist in other camps, like Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, and Theresienstadt. In November 2014, the sign over the Dachau gate was also stolen. The thieves remain unidentified as of 2016 and the artifact has not been recovered. This is part of the motivation of why I did this blog - to expose people attacking the holocaust not for what they claim to be, i.e. honest scholars trying to correct an erroneous historical record, but for what they really are: rabid Neo Nazis using various methods to conceal and better present their Jew hatred.
This is an aerial shot of Auschwitz I Stammlager, taken on April 4, 1944
Taken more than 4 months later
Another aerial shot, taken almost another 5 months later, on January 14, 1945, about two weeks before the camp's liberation on January 27th, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Snow melt on the roofs indicates that the barracks remain occupied, with one important exception. The lack of heat and presence of snow on the roof of Barracks Block 10, site of infamous medical experiments, indicate that it is empty.
This picture is often brought up when one tries to debate a denier on undernourishment and starvation running rampant in German concentration camps. When the denier is not busy: 1) spinning the tall tale of Allied bombs destroying German infrastructure and therefore being the main cause of emaciated corpses found by the Allies by the end of the war upon the camps' liberation 2) or saying those corpses are all typhus victims 3) or saying those corpses are German victims collected from the cities, carried over to the liberated camps by "Allied psych warfare divisions", stripped naked and photographed ...he will show you pic related instead, as an example of just how good those Jews had it in the camps. Except....this picture isn't even from World War 2. You heard right. The picture was taken by SS and Himmler's personal photographer Friedrich Franz Bauer on the 20th of July 1938, is stored in the German Federal Archives (Sammlung Berlin Document Center, Bild 152) and shows detainees of Dachau concentration camp, which had been operational for YEARS before WW2 started, standing for an Appell, a mustering. Even earlier, on July 16, 1933 Bauer wrote and published a propaganda photo report about the Dachau concentration camp in the journal Munich Illustrated Press. It was under the title "Die Wahrheit über Dachau" (The Truth about Dachau). This report was intended to refute criticism of treatment of prisoners at the concentration camp by showing photos of prisoners' appearances to be "normal" and "well dressed". Looks like Bauer's techniques keep working some 80 years later... Needless to say, we do not know how long it had been since this inmate was transferred to the camp. Heavy people don't turn into emaciated Muselmänner from one day to another, or even one week to another. Therefore the act of using this picture of a fat Jew as proof that he was receiving adequate food in the camp, is the epitome of stupidity. see: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_152-27-13A,_Dachau_Konzentrationslager,_Häftlinge_beim_Appell.jpg
Pic related shows a camp death book (Sterbebuch) at the Auschwitz Museum Preservation lab for documents, books and other historical papers. All together 51 death books were so far preserved, in which the camp Political Department (Politische Abteilung), in other words, the Gestapo, recorded the deaths of 69,000 registered camp prisoners who died between July 29, 1941, and December 31, 1943. Holocaust deniers claim: "Auschwitz-Birkenau was not a center of extermination for the Jews of Poland and Europe. Collections of camp death certifications (Death Books) list only 69,000 deaths in the entire inmate population—all from natural causes." However, the reality is that the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Books do not reflect the nearly 900,000 Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival at the camp. Only those prisoners who were inducted into the slave labor pool (including some 230,000 Jews) were given numbers and only those prisoners were listed in the death certificates in the Death Books. The death certificates certified that these prisoners died of "typhus", the “weakness of old age,” “influenza,” “heart failure,” “pneumonia,” etc. According to Holocaust deniers, these books of death certificates “discredit a central pillar of the Holocaust extermination story—that is, that Jews were murdered en masse by poison gas."[1] The death certificates record the date of issue, first and last names, date, time and place of death, date and place of birth, and cause of death. The cause of death was usually fictitious. In January 1945, when the Russians liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau they took the Death Books back with them to Moscow where their existence was unknown until they were released in 1989 for use by researchers. In 1991 they were repatriated to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. How we know that some 900,000 Jews were murdered in the gas chambers without their number being listed in German records? Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau from mid-1941 to December 1943, after which he was promoted to the administrative office that supervised all of the camps. In early May 1944, Höss briefly returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau to take up his command again during the Hungarian Action. After the war, Höss was arrested, tried, convicted and put to death for his role in the Final Solution. Before he was executed he wrote his memoirs in which he noted: “Originally, all the Jews transported [to Auschwitz-Birkenau] . . . were to be destroyed without exception, according to Himmler’s orders.” However, because of labor needs in the armaments industry by 1942 some able-bodied Jews were saved as workers. According to Höss: “The railway cars were unloaded one after another. After depositing their baggage, the Jews had to individually pass in front of an SS doctor, who decided on their physical fitness as they marched past him. Those who were considered able-bodied were immediately escorted into the camp in small groups. Jews selected for gassing were taken as quietly as possible to the crematories.” Only those selected for labor were given numbers, the Jews sent to the gas chambers were not. These prisoners who passed the Selektion were the ones accounted for in the Death Books. Like the inventory for a business, these prisoners were now the property of the Third Reich. Stanislaw Jankowski was a member of the Sonderkommando at Krema/Gas Chamber V in Birkenau. Jankowski gave a deposition to the Russian authorities after the war: “I have to stress here that only persons destined to do various kinds of work were included in the registers of prisoners’ strength and were given camp numbers. No camp numbers were given and no registration was effected . . . in the cases of all those who went straight on to the gas from the transports . . .” Jankowski further noted: “Circa 30% of the then arriving transports . . . were selected to be put in the camp . . . The rest were gassed and cremated in the crematoria ovens.”[2] Franciszek Piper, a Polish scholar and historian, conducted extensive research on the total number of people that were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau from all over Europe from 1940 to 1945. Piper concluded that the total number of people who were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau was at least 1,305,000. This figure included Jews, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners-of-war and non-Jewish prisoners of other nationalities. Inside this figure the total number of Jews sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau was about 1,095,000, of which at least 865,000 were murdered immediately. The remaining Jews—some 230,000—were admitted to the camp as slave laborers.[3] Of those people admitted as slave laborers, some 188,000 were transferred to other camps and so were not directly murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Among these were Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and Elie Wiesel who was liberated in Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Piper was able to trace the fate of the Jewish transports that arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. For instance, on August 10, 1943, a transport of about 3,000 Polish Jews from Sosnowitz, Poland: “Following the selection, 100 men, given Nos. 136303-136412 and 195 women, given Nos. 54332-54526, are admitted to the camp. The other almost 2,700 people are killed in the gas chambers.”[4] Conclusion: The Holocaust deniers’ assertion that the Death Books reflect the total number of deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau is false. The Death Books do not reflect the nearly 900,000 Jews who were murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sometimes these people were not even properly counted, much less registered or phony death certificates created. Only those people who were inducted into the slave labor pool (including some 230,000 Jews) were given numbers and only these prisoners were listed in the death certificates in the Death Books. Sources: [1] Mark Weber, “Pages from the Auschwitz Death Registry Volumes: Long-Hidden Death Certificates Discredit Extermination Claims,” Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1992, (Vol. 12, No. 3). [2] Robert Jan van Pelt, The Van Pelt Report (“IV Attestations, 1945-46”). [3] Franciszek Piper, Auschwitz: How Many Perished Jews, Poles, Gypsies . . . (Krakow, 1994), pp. 51-57. [4] Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle 1939-1945 (Henry Holt, 1997), p. 459.
Oh I'm sure deniers will start rambling on about the fact that the word "execution" could mean a ton of various things, for example the execution of some harmless work-duty...
...except we also have the document listing the names of that same event's victims. Oh I'm sure the execution of some harmless work duty would warrant such a list to be created, including the last and first names of those involved, as well as their birth date and birthplace...
These are just two documentary examples of the Selektion process, i.e. Jews getting off a train and then being divided into men and women, and further divided into those fit for labor (e.g. being sent to the Buna-Werke in Auschwitz III Monowitz), and those who weren't selected for labor. What do you think happened to those who weren't selected for work duty (Arbeitseinsatz)? Did they get to sit around all day in the camp twiddling their thumbs? As the documents state, they were "gesondert untergebracht", which translates to "accomodated separately" or received "special accommodation". Deniers assume that means what it says on the paper. Which would insinuate there were not only women with children in Auschwitz, but even men who were not selected for work duty. Take a look at the document on the right. We have thousands of Jews being brought in from the Theresienstadt ghetto in early 1943. Of these, only some 15-20% are being selected for work. Everyone else gets special accommodation? Because, as the last sentence in the document explains, the men were infirm and there were so many children in the women's group? I sure would like the deniers to show me where these "special accomodations" were in Auschwitz, reserved for women, children and elderly. I know where they were and what they were called: Krematoria I, II, III, IV, V and the red and white house.
The only place in Auschwitz today where photography is prohibited is in the museum's room containing some 2000 kilograms of shorn hair, due to Jewish rites concerning the dead. However, I did manage to snap the inscriptions on two signs there, which conclude that forensic testing not only revealed the hair to be human in origin, but also that it contained traces of hydrogen cyanide. Which corroborates testimonies of gassing victims in Auschwitz being shorn AFTER they were gassed, rather than before. On a similar note, there goes revisionist veteran and "esteemed" professor Robert Faurisson's ridiculous theory of corpses "saturated with hydrogen cyanide" killing anyone who handled them. The man should stick to teaching literature instead of trying to pass for a scientist.
Holocaust deniers often make the passive-aggressive claim: “Show me one name, one single name, with proof that a person was gassed at Auschwitz”, thinking historians are unable to answer this basic question. How about two names? Fritz Renner and Bruno Grosmann, both from Breslau, and both prisoners died on September 5, 1941, by gassing in the basement of Block 11 (at that time, Block 13). One day in the autumn of 1941, something happened in the Auschwitz Stammlager that was unprecedented and so extraordinary that it made a deep and lasting impression on all who witnessed it. The Aktion took place in the middle of the camp and lasted for several days, from the first preparations until the final clean-up. Several dozens of prisoners were involved in it as participants, and hundreds saw, at least partially observed, what was going on. It is recorded in the work of former Auschwitz political prisoner Stanisław Kłodziński, presented in the scholarly journal Przegłąd Lekarski, no. 1/1972, under the title Pierwsze zagazowanie więźniów i jeńców w obozie oświęcimskim on pages 80-94. In 1969, he wrote to 250 former Polish prisoners across Poland, who in the autumn of 1941 had been in Auschwitz, and who could have been witnesses or participants of the Aktion, and asked them about it. He received 108 positive responses. They tallied to a degree of 90% with regard to basic information, from which we can compile the following approximate time-line: 1st day: All the bunks from Block 11 are carried to the garret. The prisoners who are billeted in Block 11, i.e. the “quarantine” and penal companies, and all inmates of the Bunker cells (the whole basement of Block 11) are transferred to another block. Material for sealing doors and windows inside the bunker and soil for filling up the windows from outside is brought to Block 11. 2nd day: The doors of the cells are sealed, also the windows from inside. A prisoner work detail fills up the windows of the basement of Block 11 (outside) with soil. The plumber work detail checks the function of the central heating in the Bunker. In the camp hospital, pre-selections are carried out among the sick. 3rd day: Beginning in the morning, SS doctors select a rather large group of sick prisoners from the hospital blocks. Immediately after the evening roll call, Lagersperre is ordered. Exempt from it is a work detail of prisoner orderlies, who carry and lead the selected sick comrades to Block 11 and cram them into a part of the Bunker cells. Shortly thereafter, several hundred Soviet POWs, who arrived by trucks, are herded into the remaining cells. Then one or more SS officers with gas masks enter Block 11. 4th day: In the night, the prisoners in the adjacent blocks hear terrible cries from the Bunker. In the morning, an SS officer with a gas mask enters Block 11 again for a short time. The camp commandant orders that the premises be aired out for two days. Again Lagersperre is ordered after evening roll call. Exempt is a prisoner work detail that begins to remove the soil from the Bunker windows. The windows and the doors of the bunker are opened for airing. 5th day: During Lagersperre, ordered again after evening roll call, a working squad is formed from about a dozen prisoner orderlies. They and the “corpse carrier” working squad (Kommando Leichenträger) are summoned to Block 11. They enter the Bunker and find all prisoners there dead. They pull out the corpses from the cells, undress them, and carry them away for burning or burial. The complicated labyrinth of corridors and cells in the Bunker makes the work last until early in the morning. 6th day: A cleaning squad, probably from the penal company, removes the remnants of the sealing and cleans walls and floors. The state of Block 11 is restored as it was before the Aktion. Its inmates return to their rooms. The Bunker is ready for new intakes. I deliberately left out from this time-line everything the prisoners could not have witnessed personally, e.g. what the SS men with gas masks did in the basement of Block 11. It is also obvious that not every witness could have witnessed the whole Aktion. But from the set of information, by clustering and eliminating testimony that is off and by combining the parts of the puzzle, every honest and professionally working historian would have derived a similar picture of the Aktion. As I previously said, the prisoners could not see what the SS men did in the Bunker late in the evening of the 3rd day and on the 4th day in the morning. They could see, however, that the SS men who entered the building wore gas masks, they could witness that the Bunker was aired for quite a period of time, during which nobody entered the building, and they saw, on the 5th day, that all those were dead who had been alive in the Bunker still in the evening of the 3rd day. They also knew that, on the 2nd day of the Aktion, doors and windows were sealed. It does not take much imagination to conclude from this that the prisoners in the Bunker had died from poisoning by some gas that was introduced by the SS on the evening of the 3rd day. Though there cannot be the slightest doubt that the Aktion took place, there remains the question of when it took place. The great majority of witness testimonies set the Aktion in the month of September 1941. Here a “hard” document is helpful: the Bunker ledger (Bunkerbuch), which was smuggled out by the camp resistance and survived the war, shows only one “window” into which the previously established time-line fits: September 3rd to 8th. This means that the gassing (3rd day) took place on September 5, 1941, in accordance with the early reports from the Polish camp resistance. It is first mentioned in the Situation report for 15.VIII – 15.XI.1941 of the Polish Government-in-Exile’s Home delegation, a contemporary source: “The camp was the scene of a perfidious crime when, on the night of September 5, about 600 Soviet prisoners including army political indoctrination officers and about 200 Poles were crowded into a ‘bunker.’ After the ‘bunker’ was sealed, they were poisoned with gas and their bodies taken to the crematorium and burned.” There remains, however, a remarkable fact: the Bunker ledger mentions for September 5, 1941, not only the intake, but also the death of three prisoners: two Germans and a Pole, as well as the death of a Polish civilian, who had been taken in before September 5. This is a confirmation of the Aktion, since we here have the documented fact that all those who were registered in the Bunker ledger and who were in the Bunker on that day - the aforementioned three concentration camp prisoners and the Polish civilian - suddenly died on one and the same day. Moreover, the date of September 5 is again confirmed, because the killing in the Bunker could not have started earlier than the admission of the three prisoners on that day. If the Aktion in which they died was the “first” gassing or a later one, is of little importance. At any rate, it was the first that drew the attention of nearly the whole camp on itself. Theoretically, the four could have been taken out before the sick prisoners and the Soviet POWs were crowded into the Bunker, and could have been shot at the Wall of Death, as was the routine procedure for Bunker inmates condemned to death. But here enters the Rögner report, which states that two German prisoners were not taken out in the course of the Aktion and died together with the others. Sure, Rögner is not the most precise witness, and he does neither give the names of the prisoners nor an exact date of the Aktion. As Kapo of the electricians’ work detail Rögner got around all over the camp, and as a German he observed and remembered many things concerning German prisoners, in which the Polish majority was not much interested. That two German prisoners were in the Bunker during the Aktion was something extraordinary, worth remembering for a German Kapo. And who else could they have been than Renner and Grosmann, registered in the Bunker ledger on that very day? - by Dr. phil. Joachim Neander, Kraków, Poland
Krematorium I is the only intact crematorium + gas chamber building in the entire Auschwitz-Birkenau complex today. All other Krema buildings are either ruins or have been razed to their foundations by the Nazis before they retreated in January 1945 due to the advance of the Soviet Red Army - except for Krema IV, which had been badly damaged during the Sonderkommando Uprising back on October 7th, 1944 already[1]. So the first question we must ask is: If these were just harmless delousing facilities or morgues, as the deniers maintain, then why did the Nazis take the extra trouble to blow up these installations before retreating, while leaving almost all of the other buildings intact? Something tells me they were trying to cover up their crimes against humanity. A few deniers like to challenge this observation by claiming that it wasn't the Nazis, but the Soviets that blew up the Kremas (without offering any proofs, as usual). However, we know it wasn't the Soviets that dismantled Kremas II, III, and V because this process can already be observed via the aerial photos taken in December 1944 (https://imgur.com/NiCqlpx) and mid-January 1945 (https://imgur.com/ov5vCuU), BEFORE Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on January 27th, 1945 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day). Returning to the first sentence of the paragraph above, we can visit Krema I today, but this building is a 1947 reconstruction. There is a sign outside (imgur.com/duS3xZA) telling visitors about the history of the building. Note the Zyklon-B inlet holes in the roof. I address these here: (imgur.com/q4VFa66). But first, let's look at the big smokestack. More than two decades ago, a young, and completely-ignorant-of-structural-engineering David Cole, and later, a certain Dr. Frederick Töben, were highlighting the fact that the chimney isn't attached to the former crematorium, and is therefore completely useless, a "post-war fake". If they had taken some lessons from structural engineers, they would have known that the flues which connect the chimney to the ovens were underground (https://i.imgur.com/aitbmff.jpg). Furthermore, we have air-photo evidence proving the existence of the chimney - a few meters away, and therefore seemingly detached from Krema I at ground level - even during the war: imgur.com/NF1BtZf Here is a cinematic clip taken from a German holocaust documentary that recreates the scene of people being led into Krema I in the Auschwitz I Stammlager for gassing. It demonstrates how the SS-guards poured the Zyklon-B from the holes in the roof into the chamber below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBc3y8A7DmY Source: [1]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderkommando#Revolts
To summarize, Krema I was originally a munitions bunker, and used from August 1940 to July 1943 as a crematorium with 3 double-muffle ovens. Autumn 1941 onward, it was also used as a gas chamber. Summer 1942 onward, the gassings gradually moved from the Stammlager over to Birkenau, when more and more gas chambers were constructed there. By July 1943 the cremation had also stopped here. The building was then used for storage, and eventually as an air-raid shelter (toilets were installed, and the gas chamber was subdivided with additional wall segments for the additional structural stability needed to better support the ceiling) for the SS HQ stationed in the offices nearby as the war turned sour and the industrial area of Auschwitz III "Monowitz" was subjected to bombing raids by Allied forces. This also explains the wooden doors nobody (except deniers) claim is the original gas chamber door (more later). photo credit: BroI (Jan 2012)
Let's look at the bottom part of the above image first. What we see here, is Eric Hunt's 3D model of roughly half of Krema I. It covers (from left to right) the "storage for spare gratings" room, the wash room, the gas chamber, and the vestibule. When Krema I was partially reconstructed in 1947, 4 interior walls were knocked down (2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th from left to right). The Soviets made two mistakes: one, knocking down the 2nd wall, as this was the actual gas chamber wall rather than the 1st (which is the wall between the store room and the wash room where a wooden door is located). And the second "oddity" (I wouldn't say mistake) they made is leave the vestibule to the right intact, as this is not on the 1942 blueprint and was part of the efforts (along with the 3rd, 4th and 5th interior wall that are also missing on the blueprint) of the Nazis to convert the building into an air-raid shelter with the additional walls reinforcing structural integrity. Holocaust deniers say, that if you leave the first two walls (from left to right) intact and remove the 3rd, 4th and 5th wall as well as the vestibule to get the original gas chamber configuration, you end up with holes in the ceiling that are not spaced out properly (they are if you knock down the 2nd wall and consider the 1st wall as the gas chamber wall, i.e. the way the interior looks today, but which is false). They tout this as proof that these holes were not placed there by the Germans and instead are a Soviet invention, with the Soviets' dumb mistake of knocking down one wall too many interior walls leading to them spacing out the holes wrongly, and therefore getting caught by our revisionist heroes some decades later. This conclusion deniers make would indeed have made sense IF one of the holes today were to be found OUTSIDE the borders of the morgue that ended up being the gas chamber - except that isn't the case. What we have instead, are all four holes located exactly on the morgue roof, except they aren't as symmetrically spaced as people suffering from Obsessive-compulsive Disorder would like them to have been. Now while I personally am leaning toward a 3-hole configuration having been the historical case, the 4-hole configuration is still anything but far-fetched. Let me explain: this asymmetry makes sense, given that the Krema I gas chamber is the only gas chamber in the entire Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex to have had two gas chamber doors in close proximity to each other: placing an additional zyklon hole close to the two doors would ensure higher initial levels of HCN lethality near said doors to prevent the trapped from trying to break these open. I do not try to exculpate the Soviets from their shoddy reconstruction work, however. Because knocking down the original gas chamber wall while leaving the vestibule intact, and making a wrong entrance to the crematorium that does not align with the tracks anymore is shoddy restoration work indeed. Now let's take a look at the roof. There's a whole bunch of stuff here, so bear with me. We have two smaller chimneys above the crematorium section of the building. And of course the 4 zyklon-b inlet holes poking through the roof and protected from the elements by square-shaped wooden covers (for a closeup, see top right). We also have two smaller chimneys in between (3rd row of chimneys going away from us from left, in the centre top of the above image). The Nazis sealed up the vents when they converted the building to the air-raid shelter, and the smoothness of the roof indicates the Soviets didn't miss these and drill in the wrong place. The only question then, is if the Soviets drilled too many holes, as eyewitness accounts indeed vary regarding the exact number of zyklon-b vents on the roof of Krema I. There definitely were two, three is a reasonable estimate, though four is a bit less likely. Given that the gas chamber of Krema I is much smaller than that of e.g. Krema II or III in Birkenau (and those used to have 4 inlet holes each, as I will show air photos indicating this later on), I do agree that 4 holes on Krema I's roof seems a bit much. This is really the best holocaust deniers have so far been able to legitimately achieve: make historians ask themselves whether the Soviets drilled one too many holes during restoration or not. For more, see: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2016/02/on-number-of-zyklon-b-introduction . html
What I have done here, is compare wartime aerial photography of Krema I with that of a modern satellite image provided by Google Earth. In clockwise order from top left to bottom left, we have the images taken on April 4th 1944, August 25th 1944, modern satellite image, and January 14th 1945 In the bottom left part of the image above, you can see the new tunnel-like entrance created after Krema I's transformation to an air-raid shelter - an entrance that is not visible in earlier photographs. Some more observations: - the chimney today is not in the same position as the chimney was in the wartime photographs - the two smaller chimneys above the crematorium's roof section are visible in both wartime photography and today's satellite imagery - despite us knowing that zyklon-b holes exist on today's Krema I roof, these are baaaarely visible in the satellite photo - there definitely are some objects visible on the gas chamber's roof section of Krema I in the April and August 1944 photos that are no longer there in the January 1945 photo. Keep in mind though, that we have no idea how thick the snow on the roof in the January photo really is. These observations lead me to believe Krema I was not fully converted into an air raid shelter until at least September 1944.
Regarding many holocaust deniers' observation that the chimney is not connected to Krema I, the blueprints demonstrate the underground flues leading to the chimney, located apart from the building. In fact, Krema I has a history of multiple chimneys: 15.08.1940 - First chimney 10 metres tall completed (Chimney 1) and first cremation performed in the sole double-muffle oven 20.02.1941 - Second double muffle oven is completed ??.04.1941 - Chimney height is increased to 20 metres (Chimney 2) to raise the performance of second oven by increasing the draft 23.06.1941 - Constant use results in the chimney cracking; cremations cease for 5 days whilst iron bands are put on the chimney 30.05.1942 - Installation of third double muffle oven finally completed 30.05.1942 - Once all three ovens are fired up, the iron hoops on the chimney snap and deep cracks appear in the masonry. "The men of the Political Department began to fear that the smokestack would collapse on to their offices." 12.06.1942 - Construction of a new chimney 15 metres tall begins 08.08.1942 - New chimney is complete (Chimney 3), cremations resume after 3 month gap during which a typhus epidemic raged 13.08.1942 - New chimney is damaged by the three triple muffle ovens constantly working at full capacity ??.07.1943 - Cremations cease at Krema I ??.10.1944 - (date approximated) Chimney (3) is demolished as part of the process of converting the building to an air raid shelter 1946-1947 - Soviets reconstruct the chimney we see today.
Pictured are two of the three double-muffle Topf & Sons ovens in Krema I. The small doors at the bottom are for the removal of the ashes. There are doors on the rear as well, meant for the coke.
Note the wooden door at the far end, one of two, which I will address later The operation of the gas chamber from openings in the roof was described by the SS men Rudolf Höß, Hans Aumeier, Maximilian Grabner, Pery Broad, Hans Stark, Richard Böck, Martin Wilks and the prisoners Ignacy Golik, Hermann Langbein, Karl Lill, Zdzislaw Mikolajski, Edward Pys, Jan Sikorski, Czeslaw Sulkowski and Stanislaw Jankowski (from Brian Harmon's TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF THE HOLOCAUST: Cyanide, Zyklon-B, and Mass Murder) Many documents discussing the operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz exist, but first we'll go through some testimonies. The testimony of Hanz Stark is an excellent example. Hanz Stark was connected with Auschwitz's "Political Department", and was responsible for registering new arrivals to the camp. He was also responsible for observing executions carried out in a room next to the crematorium, initially carried out with a small caliber rifle. The terminology used for people dispatched in this manner was "Sonderbehandlung" -- special treatment in English. Prisoners who had received "special treatment" were said "to have been found special lodgings." Stark was quite explicit that this meant execution. Later on, "experimental" gassings took place in the execution room adjoining the crematorium. Stark was also a witness to gassings that took place there, and his description is quoted here (in English, typos are mine): "As I have already mentioned, the first gassing was carried out in the small crematoria in autumn 1941. Grabner ordered me to go to the crematorium in order to check numbers, just as I had had to do with the shootings. About 200-250 Jewish men, women, and children of all ages were standing at the crematorium. There may also have been babies there [....] Nothing was said to the Jews. They were merely ordered to enter the gas chamber, the door of which was open. While the Jews were going into the room, medical orderlies prepared for the gassing. Earth had been piled up against one of the external walls of the gassing room so that the medical orderlies could get onto the roof of the room. After all the Jews were in the chamber, the door was bolted and the medical orderlies poured Zyklon-B through the openings..." And as he later describes in a gassing he participated in personally: "As the Zyklon-B - as already mentioned - was in granular form, it trickled down over the people as it was being poured in. They then started to cry out terribly for they now knew what was happening to them [...] After a few minutes there was silence. After some time had passed, it may have been ten to fifteen minutes, the gas chamber was opened. The dead lay higgeldy piggeldy all over the place. It was a dreadful sight." Note that these gassings took place at Krema I, a much smaller structure than the homicidal gas chambers constructed at the Birkenau complex (Krema II, III, IV, V). This explains why the chamber had a much smaller capacity, and earth had to be piled up along side the room to allow access to the roof. The testimony of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss is also very useful. With regards to the gassing process, he describes both gassings in the large chambers in the Birkenau complex and ones carried out in the makeshift Bunkers I and II. Bunkers I and II were used while the major extermination facilities were under construction, and had a capacity of about 200-300 people at once. The process in the bunkers was similar to that in Krema I (see above). The extermination chambers was somewhat different, as Höss mentions that they where equipped with an electric ventilation system to quickly ventilate the rooms, and an electric lift to quickly transport bodies to the Krema ovens for incineration. Here the gas chambers were located underground, which allowed easy access for pouring Zyklon-B into the chambers. A particularly gruesome testimony is provided by former camp inmate Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier: Extract from evidence given at the Nuremburg Trials on the Auschwitz Extermination Camp: --------------------------------- M. DUBOST: Did you actually see the "selection" when transports arrived? VAILLANT-COURIER: Yes, because when we were working in the Sewing Block in 1944, the block in which we lived was situated just opposite the place where the trains arrived. The whole process had been improved: Instead of carrying out the "selection" where the trains arrived, a siding took the carriages practically to the gas chamber, and the train stopped about 100m from the gas chamber. That was right in front of our block .. They were taken to a red brick building with a sign that said Baths. There they were told to get undressed and given a towel before they were taken to the so called shower room. Later, at the time of the large transports from Hungary, there was no time left for any degree of concealment. They were undressed brutally. I know all these particulars because I was acquainted with a little Jewess from France .... when I got to know her she worked on undressing the small children before they were taken into the gas chamber. After all the people were undressed they were taken into a room that looked like a shower room, and the capsules were thrown down into the room through a hole in the ceiling. an SS man observed the effect through a spy-hole. After about 5-7 minutes, when the gas had done its job, he gave a signal for opening the doors. Men with gas masks, these were prisoners too, came in and took the bodies out. They told us that the prisoners must have suffered before they died, because they clung together in bunches like grapes so that it was difficult to separate them....
Holocaust deniers will often ironically point you to the "scratch marks on the gas chamber wall those desperate victims made" and then ask you how this is even possible if the chamber was partially reconstructed by the Polish-Soviet authorities in 1947. They lay out the word "partially" as a bait because anyone who goes on to defend the scratch marks by saying this part of the wall along with the scratch marks is genuine, will take the bait hook, line and sinker, as the deniers will then ask them to prove how human nails are even physically able produce long scratches like those on the wall without snapping off. According to the Auschwitz museum[1] the scratches were not made by the victims - they were made by tourists who, over the past decades, have thought it funny and cool to scratch and deface what should be a very sombre and horrific site with sharp tools such as their keys. If you wish to independently verify the above, simply contact the Auschwitz museum directly and ask them about it. They've gotten a number of inquiries. Or, you know, you can just look at the Stars of David present in the picture, as well as the letter P. Given that the chamber sees a million tourists each year, and with there often being no museum personnel keeping watch inside, it's not surprising that the walls have become subject to vandalism. source: [1]: https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum/status/829719431962038273
Tourists can indeed be the most destructive cunts to disgrace Auschwitz-Birkenau since the end of the Second World War. The picture above showing the interior of one of the women's barracks is another example - including marking the current year this blog post was written in - of how Auschwitz-Birkenau is being damaged and defaced and I'm not even going to say these are deniers like Leuchter who chiseled into the walls many years ago for his "Leuchter report". Rather, these are the kind of brain damaged, self-absorbed pricks that want to leave "their mark" on any famous place they visit. If I were in charge of the museum and caught any of them I'd make sure they would spend the night tied to one of the trees near Kremas IV and V.
Holocaust deniers parade the picture of this door (one of two wooden doors in Krema I's gas chamber today) around as penultimate proof to convince people that nobody was gassed, in Krema I at least. Unlike the average person they are trying to convince, the (at least more intelligent) deniers themselves know full well that gassing at Krema I had stopped by 1943, and the building was converted into an air-raid shelter by 1944, as explained earlier. This wooden door leads from a storage room for spare gratings into an area called the "wash room" - clearly marked as such on the sign outside (http://i.imgur.com/duS3xZA.jpg) as a. and b., respectively, put in front of Krema I for all to read. The wall section separating the wash room from the actual former gas chamber no longer exists. So the door pictured never led into the gas chamber, and is therefore not the original gas chamber door.
In this widely circulated pic, holocaust deniers try to make people aware of the existence of gas chambers for executing people in the United States and use them as proof of how "complicated" gassing with Zyklon-B really is, and how the lack of such doors in Auschwitz is proof no homicidal gassings could have possibly taken place there. Both Fred Leuchter and Robert Faurisson are pretty hysteric regarding this. Already, part of this "infographic" is a flat-out LIE obviously intended to only fool the clueless, because the door pictured on the bottom right is NOT the homicidal gas chamber door of Auschwitz's Krematorium I, and isn't even claimed as such by any historian or reputable camp authority. What you are seeing instead, is the 2nd of two wooden doors in Krema I's enlarged gas chamber today, a building that underwent renovation in 1943 after homicidal gassings had been moved to Birkenau, and which was subsequently used as an air-raid shelter, as is stated in the sign in front of the building brought up to explain this to the million or so tourists that visit it each year (imgur.com/duS3xZA). I have explained what the 1st wooden door is previously (imgur.com/1bm1yrw). This 2nd one (the two are distinguishable from one another in that this one does not have a missing wooden panel in the upper half) leads into a small vestibule built in 1944 in front of the other exit of Krema I (you can see the far sturdier metal door behind it). Now let's look at the other two doors in the infographic's bottom left. The denier narrative goes, that these doors were claimed to be homicidal gas chamber doors (note the hemispheric metal grid over the peep-hole on one of the left one's sides), but in reality are innocent delousing chamber doors, as deniers do not believe in homicidal gassing, but do accept Zyklon-B's historical use for fumigation and delousing. Even if the two doors on the bottom left are "just" doors of delousing chambers, holocaust deniers still have a problem: Considering these doors are made out of wood, and therefore "flimsy", and therefore Zyklon-B gas leaking out, the deniers would have to abandon their argument about Zyklon-B being used for delousing as well, because using their same, frequently toted "leaking is lethal" argument they use to discredit homicidal gassing, the case can be made that even the delousing chambers would kill everyone around them due to gas leakage. And keep in mind the delousing chambers were located far closer to the (women's) inmate barracks than the homicidal gas chambers, as shown on the Birkenau camp map here: imgur.com/wdxcRbF. Make up your minds, deniers - either these doors saw historic use involving Zyklon-B, or you need to abandon your stance on delousing as well. Krematorium II and III, located underground, had a ventilation system proven both by testimony and documents (blueprints) here: (imgur.com/cXSdJkz), here (imgur.com/17mmlGM), here (imgur.com/KxRpFZ5), and here (imgur.com/mBd6lps), while the other gas chambers were at ground-level and therefore easier to ventilate simply by opening the doors and chimney vents. We know from chemistry that Zyklon-B is lighter than air, and by venting out into the open air it rapidly loses its lethality[1]. This is the reason why the aforementioned American gas chambers also vented the gas via exhaust tubing into the open. Now then, deniers will have to make up their minds whether Zyklon-B that escapes from high concentrations in a room and mixes with the air of the surroundings continues to be lethal (in which case no delousing could have taken place either using said flimsy doors), OR is only lethal within the chamber and loses its lethality when escaping the chamber, in which case the hermetically sealed American gas chamber doors are NOT a necessity but rather merely an excessive security measure that complied with stringent American safety standards. Long story short: American gas chamber doors do NOT debunk the doors used for the Auschwitz gas chambers, which are also NOT the wooden doors still existing inside Krema I today. But we still have one more argument from deniers, and that is about how easily these doors (they still use the picture of the wooden ones) could have been broken down by those trapped inside. I address this here: imgur.com/q9Qrcf3 Source: [1]: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/mhmi/mmg8.pdf
Holocaust deniers often ask the question, why those doomed to die once locked in the gas chambers did not break down the door, especially if, as they claim, the door looked nothing like one of the American gas chamber doors presented in their infographic above. But the question I have to ask these deniers in return is, how do a group of people who are naked and unarmed break down a door? The answer would be by using their bodies as a battering ram, i.e. by running up to it and smashing their torsos/shoulders against it in unison to maximize force applied to the door. However, this only works with as many people as the door is wide, i.e. maybe 5 or 6 people. Another crucial requirement is that there should be enough room in the chamber for the batterers to gather speed and thereby force as they run up to the door and smash themselves against it. Which is not the case if the room is packed with people. Why do I only say 5 or 6 people that can realistically open the door? Simple: What you need to realize, is that the force vector does not add up in a linear fashion. Adding more people into this equation is futile because their additional manpower will not add up the way you might think it does. We are talking about a writhing mass of soft bodies here. All you will achieve is a bunch of people pressing into each other and cracking their arms or getting their torsos quashed on the backs of the ones in front of them as a result as others behind them crash into their backs. And this is assuming they're all thinking like a hive mind and doing a combined "heave-ho" effort to break down the door, and not a panicking mass of people grappling in all directions. We are presented with a whole host of additional problems: First of, the idea to break open the door coming to the minds of those closest to the door. Would you expect a large group of people who had been deceived into undressing just moments ago in the belief they would be receiving a shower undergo this realization quickly enough that their doom was imminent and they should do something about it? And even regarding those in the chamber who realized it, the question remains how close were they to the door? I'd say tough luck if you realize something is horribly wrong, but are on the far end of the gas chamber with over a thousand people between you and the door you came in. Secondly, communication: these Jews were from different parts of Europe. I doubt they would all have a common language to communicate, as English wasn't such a universal language back then as it is today. We have Dutch Jews, German Jews, Czech Jews, Ukrainian Jews, Hungarian Jews, and of course lots of Polish Jews, and you have to ask yourself whether they all spoke some dialect of Yiddish, or rather just the language of their country. Not to mention that these people aren't healthy, well-fed individuals like us, but mediocrely fed Western Europeans from wartime 1940s at best, and malnourished Eastern Europeans who had been living for years in Jewish ghettos at worst. And then we have another problem: those guys breaking down the door in unision I mentioned earlier, you had men in mind, didnt you? Too bad you missed the part where the fit and able-bodied were the ones who passed the Selektion at the Rail Ramp and the ones sent to the gas chambers were the rest, i.e. the ones that didnt make the cut, namely the elderly, the pubescent, the children and infants (and I presume the mothers they belonged to). So the only demographic in said gas chamber that have some kind of chance of breaking down the door are the elderly men, the boys under 15 years of age, and the women cradling their infants, provided they gave them to someone else to hold on to while they joined the others. Are you realizing how ridiculous we are getting at this point? But we're not done yet. The SS were already pouring in the Zyklon-B from the holes in the roof (Krema I, II, III) or side walls (Krema IV, V), and the combination of a pre-heated gas chamber (as documents later will prove) and over a thousand warm bodies in the room mean the pellets begin their outgassing almost immediately. At best, the people trying to break down the door only have a few minutes to do so before the room is full of HCN that their vitals begin to fade. And before this sets in they already are presented with the scenario of hearing those closest to the inlets coughing, retching, crying, screaming in panic, and the latter reactions spreading through the rest of the crowd very fast. So before their own strength fades, their minds are already taking a severe psychological beating. Under such duress they must break the door open, and hammering against it with their fists won't cut it, I think we can all agree on that. Oh and the lights were switched off. Can you continue to think straight and communicate with others under such circumstances? http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/auschwitzgaschambers.html Sometimes the following video has been presented as proof that even concrete breaks down to the weight of the people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA376hNFddE But notice how it broke BENEATH them, i.e. due to their combined weight, i.e. a vertical force vector that indeed increases when more people are present. This cannot be extrapolated to a horizontal force vector applied against a door to force it open if there's a mass of panicking people on the other side. We finally get to the picture itself, which is what I think the stadium's seating arrangement's lower section in the video looked like. It wouldn't surprise me if a huge weight of people causes flimsily constructed concrete with nothing underneath it, to break. A couple more things to consider, now that we have established how difficult it is for the people within the gas chamber to make any kind of coordinated effort to break down the door using their strength: First of, the only fully intact homicidal gas chambers that survive today is (haphazardly restored) Krema I at the Auschwitz I Stammlager (and I say haphazardly because its current state neither reflects its layout during its use as a gas chamber + crematorium, nor its layout when the SS used it as an air raid shelter in 1944/45), as well as one at Majdanek and Mauthausen. Krema II, III, IV and V, all located in Birkenau, as well as the White House and Red House, are either ruins or razed to the foundations. As far as I am aware, none of the original gas chamber doors of any Birkenau gas chambers survived the war, and therefore cannot be examined as to how sturdy they were. What survived in Birkenau, were some doors of the delousing chambers located elsewhere in the camp, as well as outside doors leading into Krema I, which I will show below. Even if the doors had survived, the buildings (e.g. Kremas II, III, IV, V) have not, therefore we also cannot answer the question whether the doors opened inwards or outwards apart from blueprints where they, in fact, do open outwards. Logically speaking it makes sense for the deniers to say they should have opened outwards, as otherwise it would be extremely hard to open them after a gassing, as the bodies would be stacked against them on the other side. At least for Krema I we can say that one of the gas chamber doors opened outwards, and the other both inwards and outwards, as demonstrated in the blueprint seen here: http://i.imgur.com/aitbmff.jpg. If you pay close attention, you can also see on the blueprint that the 1st wooden door seen today opens inwards. But this is irrelevant, as this antechamber (wash room) was not part of the gas chamber in the first place! Once again, it only appears so because the dividing wall has been torn down and therefore the gas chamber is larger today than it EVER was. Even the smarter holocaust deniers acknowledge (sometimes even point out) how there are marks on the walls of the gas chamber where previously dividing wall sections had once been. The fact that the 2nd wooden door on the far end of the gas chamber also opens inwards is irrelevant because this vestibule did not exist until the building was converted into an air raid shelter in 1944, as shown both on the sign outside (http://i.imgur.com/duS3xZA.jpg) and demonstrated by the complete absence of said vestibule + door in the blueprint (http://i.imgur.com/aitbmff.jpg). Mauthausen's relatively small gas chamber claimed the lives of "only" about 3000 people throughout its existence, so we aren't faced with the situation of over 1000 people in the room there. In any case, the Mauthausen gas chamber has reinforced doors that I will also show below. From these realizations, it is hard to judge how sturdy Krema II, III, IV and V's gas chamber doors really were, but what I have been able to provide, is an account of how unlikely it would have been for the panicking, naked, unarmed people from different parts of Europe, not knowing each other and who didn't pass the Selektion, inside (in a rapidly toxifying atmosphere, to boot) to breach it.
This is the door (with peep hole) on the entrance of Krema I. You can see on the sign outside (http://i.imgur.com/duS3xZA.jpg) that this door does not lead directly to the gas chamber (labeled c on the sign), but to an antechamber. Of course I cannot rule out that this isn't the gas chamber door taken from the inside and remounted on the exterior as the SS converted Krema I to an air-raid shelter in 1944. In any case, it doesn't look flimsy to me even 70 years after it was installed. Maybe to a group of 200 pound weightlifters, but not to me.
Reinforced with metal on both sides. There's a keyhole on the outside, but you won't see it on the door's inside.
Once again, if you look at the sign outside (http://i.imgur.com/duS3xZA.jpg), this exit did not exist while Krema I was operated as a homicidal facility. However, an entrance nearby existed leading directly into the back room of the crematorium. Nevertheless, we have another sturdy door here, whose other side will follow in the photo below.
An equally sturdy looking door, mounted on the building's exterior as Krema I was converted into an air-raid shelter. This exit, as well as the additional vestibule ("air-lock") constructed inside the gas chamber, did not exist until 1944. So now we have two different sturdy gas chamber doors mounted on the two entrances/exits of Krema I leading to the exterior. Is it so hard for deniers to imagine these could be the two doors of the original gas chamber the Nazis remounted FROM the interior TO the exterior when they converted Krema I into an air raid shelter? Namely one leading into the gas chamber from the wash room whose wall no longer exists today, and the other leading from the gas chamber into the crematorium? Again, see http://i.imgur.com/duS3xZA.jpg. There is no door between the crematorium and the gas chamber today. Some deniers have pointed out these are air raid shelter doors even advertised as such. Well, obviously there was no company in Germany manufacturing Jew-killing gas chamber doors now, was there? I have no idea what deniers want to achieve with an argument like this. You kill people with pesticide, not a "people killer". Similarly, you lock people in with air raid shelter doors, not "people trapping" doors. But in a sense, when David Irving said: "More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz", there was one grain of truth in his otherwise ridiculous sentence: the way the gas chamber at Krema I is presented to tourists today in its current configuration (with the two wooden doors, with the additional concrete vestibule on the far side; with the entrance to the crematorium shifted by about a meter, with the missing wall section that separated the original's wall from the wash room thereby extending its area) - indeed nobody was gassed in the (enlargened) room in THIS current configuration. However, this does NOT mean that this isn't the exact location where once the original homicidal Krema I gas chamber stood. And I don't even mean in the next room, I mean exactly occupying roughly 4/5ths the area today's Krema I gas chamber occupies. Therefore anyone calling the Krema I gas chamber today a 'fake' needs to be smacked on the head with a copy of J.C. Pressac's "Auschwitz: Technique And Operation of the Gas Chambers" for being a nitpicking prick. And speaking of Irving (who I will address in more detail much later), he no longer denies the extermination aspect of the holocaust but is only haggling with numbers and locations. In fact, even on denier central, the CODOH forums, all I could sense was frustration: "Irving has long ago become an embarrassment to our cause" - Steven Willow "I totally support [Jürgen] Grafs view of what caused Irving to join the revisionist position in the first place. His assumption was, that the Leuchter report would lead to the total collapse of the hoax, and thus wanted to be among the "winners". This however, proved to be a total miscalculation..." - ganglere "Instead of stabbing revisionists in the back with his recent silly thoughts about gassings, Irving might have simply kept his big mouth shut for a change since he has no "real" idea as to what he is talking about anyway in this regard. Could it be that Irving sees some big pot of gold waiting somewhere if he makes enough brownie points with the Jews? Gee, I wonder? How much revisionist money will it take to get David Irving to switch sides once again?" - Friedrich Paul Berg
A favorite example of holocaust deniers is the Auschwitz I Stammlager's swimming pool. They argue that the presence of an "Olympic-size swimming pool, complete with diving boards", where the occasional water polo match was held, shows that Auschwitz was really a rather benign place, almost a holiday resort, and therefore could not have possibly been a center of extermination. For the deniers, the presence of a swimming pool automatically turns a concentration camp into a nice place. Somehow, the swimming pool, by its sheer presence, debunks gas chambers and other cruelties going on elsewhere in the gigantic camp complex. Yes, this is revisionist logic in full swing. Apparently, good and bad things cannot exist in the same place. To begin with, revisionists do NOT tell you that the swimming pool (commissioned by camp commandant Arthur Liebehenschel[1]) worked as a water reservoir for the purpose of firefighting and that the pool was only accessible to SS men and privileged non-Jewish prisoners who were at the top of the complex prisoner hierarchy and employed as inmate-functionaries in the camp, including Polish Catholics or German political prisoners. To evidence this claim that the pool was off-limits to most, let us hear what survivor Marc Klein has to say: Klein's exact words were "Il est à noter que seul les prominents [individus privilégiés dans le vocabulaire des camps] bien nourris, exempts des travaux les plus pénible, pouvaient se livrer à ces sports"[2] which translates to: "It should be noted that only the very fit and well-fed, exempt from the harsh jobs, could indulge in these games which drew the liveliest applause from the masses of other detainees." This brings us to the second point which revisionists make sure NOT to educate the common folk about: The term "Auschwitz" is used broadly to describe three distinct camps that were about a mile away from each other: Auschwitz I Stammlager, Auschwitz II Birkenau and Auschwitz III Monowitz. The presence of the swimming pool in the comparatively tiny Auschwitz I Stammlager with its few thousand inmates, originally built for political prisoners, and that's where the pool was, does not say anything about the conditions for Jewish inmates, and does not challenge the existence of an extermination program, predominantly carried out a mile or so away in vast and sprawling Auschwitz II Birkenau which could hold 100,000 prisoners at a time. For reference, see the map at: i.imgur.com/R6ZGEmF.jpg The overwhelming majority of prisoners (and Birkenau housed over 100,000 of them) NEVER got anywhere NEAR this small pool - this is fact. So what we witness here is typical revisionist scholarship at its finest: a classic generalization tactic from things which were limited in their application (i.e. from the relatively decent conditions provided to the Nazis running the camp, and a small number of privileged prisoners who were their most loyal lapdogs quartered here) to the entire camp population, especially everyone over at Birkenau, to then publish scholarly conclusions such as 'oh look how great the Jews had it in this camp we only keep hearing horror stories about!' Why is this important? Because the Auschwitz swimming pool is a key factoid with which revisionists seek to lull an unsuspecting target audience into beginning to doubt the holocaust: the swimming pool argument deniers present, is a complete red herring with the sole purpose of baiting the average person on the street into denial, because clearly he didn't hear about this in school, and clearly it exists, so clearly the denier who told him about this was not lying, therefore there's something fishy about the entire camp and he was lied to his entire life. The idea that, after years of deliberate persecution, anti-semitic laws, pogroms, destruction of synagogues, ghetto starvation, massacres, and so on...that the Nazis forcibly removed Jews from their homes and transported them hundreds of miles in cattle cars...to a friggin holiday camp complete with swimming pools, brothels, and 'work to set them free'...is just such a load of COMPLETE AND UTTER BOLLOCKS that any denier espousing it seriously needs the most secure straight jacket that can be found. Sources: [1]: Barbara Cherish, "My father, the Auschwitz commandant", 2009 [2]: Marc Klein, "Auschwitz I Stammlager", p. 258
This is another picture used by deniers to show us just how nice the prisoners of Auschwitz really had it. Except this is neither the Stammlager, nor Birkenau, nor Monowitz. Taken from the SS Auschwitz album, this image was most likely taken in the Babitz sub camp, near the depopulated village of Babice, opened in the first half of May 1943. About 180 women were placed in its former school building, and an equal number of men in a nearby wooden barracks. The windows of the building occupied by the women were walled up or secured with barbed wire. Inside were sleeping rooms with bunk beds, offices for the SS men and female overseers, a first-aid room, a washroom, and a kitchen. Food was delivered from the Birkenau camp. Two barns, a stable, storage sheds, and a shed for harnesses were built inside the barbed-wire fence. The women prisoners were employed caring for and milking cows, clamping potatoes, spreading manure, and weeding and earthing up cabbages and beets. The male prisoners groomed the horses, plowed, mowed hay, and harvested. When the army requisitioned some of the horses in the spring of 1944, women prisoners were harnessed to the plows with long ropes. The supervisors of the women’s Kommando were SS Aufseherinnen Erna Kuck and Johanna Bormann, in turn; SS-Oberscharführer Rosenoff was director of the men’s Kommando. The women’s Kommando was liquidated and the women transferred to Birkenau in July; the men’s Kommando remained in Babitz until January 1945.
What we see here is most likely a photo taken by SS Unterscharführer Dietrich Kamann in 1941. These were built by slave labour in the German-occupied Polish village of Rajsko - a subcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a few miles away from Birkenau. Hundreds of female Auschwitz prisoners were forced to work tending flowers, plants and vegetables for their Nazi captors and also help conduct agricultural experiments: During the first part of the war the greenhouses were both the base for initial experiments in rubber production through the use of specially grown dandelions, and later growing vegetables and flowers. The never reused glasshouses have remained untouched on private land since Auschwitz's liberation, and are derelict today. SS-guard and holocaust denier Thies Christophersen was stationed here, in the Rajsko subcamp, because he knew a thing or two about farming. He is the author of "Die Auschwitzlüge" (The Auschwitz Lie). Deniers use him as prime witness that no homicidal gassings took place in Auschwitz, since Thies Christophersen "was stationed in Auschwitz", and he himself said he never saw any gassings (although in Die Auschwitzlüge he actually does not say this and rather says nothing at all about homicidal gassing). But here's the catch: In an hour long interview he gave to fellow denier Ernst Zündel, Thies Christophersen himself admitted live on cam that he had NEVER been to Auschwitz I Stammlager and only seldomly visited Birkenau. So let me get this straight: this guy never spent much time at the camps where the extermination took place, spent most of his "Auschwitz" duty in a small sub-camp miles away, but is supposed to be an authority and prime eye witness to (a lack of) extermination? Don't make me laugh. What's more, in another interview aired on the film "Wahrheit macht frei - Dokumentation über Neonazis & Holocaustleugner, Deutschland (1991)" Thies Christophersen actually admitted that he left the Nazi atrocities unmentioned in his book due to him being biased [toward the Neo-Nazi cause]. If they hadn't taken place at all, then this is not how he'd have worded his sentence. Clearly this "witness" is a liar.
Just outside the fence on the west side of the prisoner compound is the so-called theater. The building was built before World War II. During the camp's history, this building served as a warehouse for prisoners' confiscated belongings, and also a storage site for Zyklon B. Carmelite nuns moved into the former theater building in 1984, and in 1988 erected the large cross in the adjacent execution site (many Polish prisoners, including Catholics, were murdered there). The nuns moved out of the Theater building in 1993, which remains empty, but the large cross remains at the gravel pit site. However, it is also true that during the camp's operation, artists performed here in cultural programs provided for the SS men in the camp garrison. The German newspaper Die Zeit carried a long article on the subject by the German historian Ernst Klee, titled “How German Artists Kept Their Compatriots in a Good Mood while They Were Busy Murdering.” Klee’s research shows that at least several hundred actors, musicians, singers, and writers took part in artistic events at Auschwitz during the years when the camp was in operation (1940-1945). Klee draws attention to an account by one of them, Dieter Borsche, who was then a theater director in Breslau (Wrocław). Documentary filmmaker Joseph Wulf recorded Borsche’s account shortly after the war. Borsche tells about how he appeared at Auschwitz over the winter of 1943 for the camp’s SS sentry units. The actors were surprised that, despite the cold weather, the prisoners were dressed only in striped camp uniforms. Borsche states that SS men told him that theatrical troupes appeared frequently at the camp. Kurt Knittel, a schoolteacher in civilian life and an Unterscharführer SS during the war, organized the cultural program at Auschwitz. In October 1941, he was appointed head of the department responsible for the ideological indoctrination of the camp personnel. Klee lists numerous cultural events held in Auschwitz and contrasts them with the crimes being committed in the camp at the same time. “An evening devoted to ‘Goethe—The Serious Side and the Lighter Side’ . . . will be held at 8:00 PM on Monday, February 15, 1943. This event is, especially for Volksdeutsche, a good opportunity to learn about the highest achievements of German culture,” reads an invitation signed by Hauptsturmführer Robert Mulka, who was sentenced after the war to 14 years’ imprisonment for his crimes. On the afternoon of February 23, 1943, writes Klee, 39 Polish boys aged 13 to 17 were killed in block no. 20 by injections of phenol to the heart. At 6:30 PM that evening, a theater from Mährisch-Ostrau (Ostrava, now in the Czech Republic) performed the operetta Princess Greta. “Since the performance begins relatively early, the time for the end of work in the camp and the evening roll call have been moved to an earlier hour,” reads the invitation. On May 21, 1943, the orchestra of the Kattowitz opera played works by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Dvorak for the SS men. “The arrangements are easy to follow, and therefore, even for people with no taste in music, this was not a waste of time,” noted camp commandant Rudolf Hoess, with satisfaction, in his diary. In May 1944, when almost half a million Hungarian Jews were arriving in Birkenau in transports designated for immediate extermination, cultural life at the Stammlager was flourishing. Camp posters from the period announce a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Beaver Coat by a theater from Beuthen (Bytom), a Viennese evening featuring the best artists from the city on the Danube, and a guest appearance by a troupe from Gleiwitz (Gliwice). As usual, deniers mention the theater in the Stammlager (chiefly existing to provide some form of escapism for the SS personnel from the effects of camp life on their minds) as proof the place was not so bad after all...yeah right. I guess those negligibly few musically and theatrically talented inmates that performed there did get to escape hard labor, but that's about it. The theatre's existence and the numbers of people it entertained, was minuscule in comparison to the amount of people interned in the entire camp complex, which is probably the reason why you wont find this highlighted in every Auschwitz book or movie compared to ever denier book where they make this the # 1 priority. Source: http://auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/the-lighter-side-of-auschwitz-or-the-cultural-life-of-the-ss-in-the-death-camps,483.html
The album above shows angora farms in German facilities, including concentration camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz. The Angora rabbit project was an SS project for breeding Angora rabbits. The objective was to provide fur for the linings of jackets for Luftwaffe pilots. Himmler's Angora album, which he hid in a farmhouse with his other papers near the end of World War II, tells the story of the Angora rabbit project that operated in the camps. Chicago Tribune war correspondent Sigrid Schultz found the book near Himmler's alpine villa. Today, the book is housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Photographs, charts and maps from Himmler's Angora are among the more than 27,000 images available in the Wisconsin Historical Society's digital collections. Angora was featured in a Wisconsin Historical Images online gallery in March 2007. One of the denier trains of thought is that if cute things existed in horrible places, those places couldn't have been horrible. This is why they bring up the Angora project in their attempts to deny the holocaust. And of course also because comparatively few people know about this project, so when a denier drops this info on them and they say "no you are lying! there weren't any bunny rabbits in Auschwitz! Wtf is wrong with you", the denier can then take his sweet time to provide proof and thereby sow the seeds of doubt in the mind of the person(s) he is trying to convince - this is how holocaust deniers operate.
Alongside the main Auschwitz complex was a prisoner-of-war camp known as Auschwitz E715, located near Monowitz, where the inmates included several hundred British soldiers. Indeed, when journalist and author Duncan Little stumbled across the story of the British prisoners of war who worked as slave labourers alongside Jewish Auschwitz inmates at the IG Farben chemicals factory next to the camp, he was shocked. He recalls: “I was at the national archives researching a television programme I was directing and I stumbled across a document about a British man who had been flogged. I wasn’t aware of any British prisoners at Auschwitz. “I began to do some more picking and I realised there were many British POWs there.” Little made contact with three of those who experienced the horror of the death camp: Brian Bishop, Doug Bond and Arthur Gifford-England. Through their experiences, and archive documents he unearthed, Little put together a book, "Allies in Auschwitz", which tells their remarkable story. The regime of the POWs at Auschwitz was not significantly different from those elsewhere. They received Red Cross parcels and, nominally at least, had the protection of the Geneva Convention, but they had to endure the freezing temperatures of the Polish winter and witnessed the extraordinary suffering of the Jewish inmates. Little says: “The documents clearly show that Jewish inmates were beaten and killed at the IG Farben factory — the British prisoners witnessed that. They saw people being hanged and they smelled the smoke pouring out of the crematorium a couple of miles away. One British prisoner complained about being forced to work for the German war effort at the factory, at which one of the managers pointed his revolver and said: ‘This is my Geneva Convention’.” In fact, the British were not immune to Nazi brutality. One soldier, a Corporal Reynolds, refused to climb girders because it was cold and he did not have appropriate clothing — he was shot dead on the spot. There was retribution against other British personnel too. However, in the midst of the killing there were activities laid on for the POWs which would be familiar to anyone who has seen "The Great Escape" — there were indeed organised games of football - but the British PoWs held at Auschwitz never played football in Birkenau, they played near their own camps which were situated close to the industrial complex at Monowitz. You can see the location of the British POW camp in the picture that follows. But like Jewish inmates, the British prisoners also went on the death march of January 1945, when the camp was evacuated in the face of advancing Soviet forces. Little says: “The POWs followed the same route taken by the Jewish prisoners a week to 10 days earlier, which meant that along the way the soldiers saw the dead bodies of many thousands of Jews. They were marching in freezing conditions with very little food. They had to use their own resources to find things to eat. Ultimately, the horse which carried their rations in a cart was slaughtered and eaten.” In the end, the POWs were abandoned by their German guards and liberated by the Americans. Little feels that the testimony of the British troops is important — particularly in countering Holocaust denial. He says: “They were independent witnesses. It’s an important corroboration of the Holocaust.”
A diagram of the Monowitz Buna Works, displayed during the Nuremberg IG Farben trial. This is where British POWs played football - not in Birkenau.
Fifteen minutes in Block no. 24... Houses of prostitution for the use of prisoners functioned under SS supervision in the German concentration camps for several years. Until recently, however, there was a reluctance to speak about them. Brothels operated in ten concentration camps on the territory of the Third Reich and occupied Poland. One of them was opened in Auschwitz in the summer of 1943. “It was located in Block no. 24. The first building on the left past the gate with the inscription Arbeit macht frei,” says Piotr Cywiński, director of the museum located at the site of the camp. The women were recruited from among the prisoners. Some of them did so under compulsion, while others, mostly professional prostitutes, volunteered. “It was a choice between the house of prostitution or death,” explains Robert Sommer, a German historian who is working on a book on the subject. “Many of these women would have been sentenced to immediate extermination if they had not decided on the assignment.” Only gentiles could avail themselves of their services. No Jews allowed. Even in the houses of prostitution, the SS remained faithful to the Nuremburg Laws. German men could sleep with German women, and Polish men with Polish or other Slavic women. For decades, the subject of the camp bordellos was only whispered about. It was, of course, mentioned in the scholarly literature, and especially in prisoner memoirs. “There is no room for illusions. The camp brothels were no humanitarian gesture on the part of the Germans. They placed them in the camps in order to humiliate us and cause dissension. To strip us of our higher feelings and reduce us to the role of animals who only work in order to sate their primal instincts,” says Jerzy Bielecki. The greatest victims of this crime were the women who worked in the bordellos. The SS took no particular interest in their health or safety. Because the male prisoners were not given condoms, pregnancies were frequent. The women were then subjected to routine abortions. Camp physicians carried out the abortions in a slipshod way, in primitive conditions. Many women suffered permanent injuries as a result. They were also treated brutally when the prisoners infected them with diseases. “We have accounts of the condition these women were in when they were released from camp,” says Robert Sommer. “They were human wrecks, in both physical and psychological terms.” While researching her book, Christa Paul contacted two former camp prostitutes. “Even decades later, it was difficult for them to talk about it,” she says. “The things they did in the camp scarred them forever. After the war, they had trouble finding a place for themselves. None of them ever had children. They struggled with various psychological problems.”
What we see here, is an image from the private photo archive of Miriam Rosenthal, born Miriam Schwarcz in Komarno, Czechoslovakia, on Aug. 26, 1922, an Auschwitz and Dachau survivor who married the Hungarian Bela Rosenthal in 1944, shortly before they were rounded up by the Nazis as Hungary could no longer protect its Jews. Some particularly dumb holocaust deniers make the mistake of parading this picture around as "babies born in Auschwitz", when in reality it shows an image of babies born towards the end of the War in Kaufering I, a sub-camp of Dachau located 50 kilometres west of Munich. Miriam Rosenthal was transferred from Auschwitz to work in an Augsburg Messerschmitt factory (yes, transfers of the able-bodied from Auschwitz to work at munitions factories was a thing) before she was taken to Dachau at age 22 along with Eva Fleischmanova. When American soldiers liberated Dachau and its subcamps, they were surprised to find this rare sight - a total of seven Jewish mothers and their babies, George, Jossi, Leslie, Marika, Agnes, Judit and Szuzi. Deniers like to spin this around and use the picture (and less than a handful of others) to make the false claim that babies born and raised in concentration camps was a common occurrence.
A picture widely circulating among far right forums, is this one that sums up the Auschwitz amenities. I think I have addressed the swimming pool (imgur.com/QykBcbA), rabbit farm (imgur.com/CFOReRs), green house (imgur.com/bTUyGkq), horse grooming (imgur.com/iTjcA3l), brothel (imgur.com/IMnzcX0), theatre (imgur.com/0zEqQtf) and football team (imgur.com/J0qEZMH) individually, providing context for their existence. The image to the picture's left isn't even from Auschwitz and the one to the right shows children because the gassing program was stopped by the end of 1944, while the camp wasn't liberated until January 27th, 1945. The fact that the denier is stupid enough to even spell it out that the children are wearing the clothing of adult inmates only underscores the lack of standardized child inmate clothing in Auschwitz (hmm, I wonder why). The discharge certificate you see at the bottom of the image, was standard issue paperwork supplied to many other camps as well, such as Sachsenhausen. Some people did indeed get discharged from internment in Auschwitz, but the questions you need to be asking is who and how. The picture shows a Slavic woman being discharged from Auschwitz - and what's more, this didn't mean she walked scot-free out of the camp. Instead, she had to report to a Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) office in another city. During the war, some inmates originally interned in Auschwitz were sent to work in munitions factories in other parts of the Reich for the war effort. What's left to discuss? That the note says Arbeitserziehungslager (correctional facility) Birkenau? Well, you weren't honestly expecting the Nazi clerks to write Vernichtungslager Birkenau now, were you? Regarding the amenities, there is less a question that these things existed and more a question of who got to use them. To understand, you need to do some research on what complex prisoner hierarchy the Auschwitz camp system (over 100,000 prisoners at a time) had. At the bottom of the pyramid you had Jewish prisoners who were being worked to death or gassed upon arrival if they were too young, too old or crippled / diseased. Slightly above, you had the Sonderkommando, Jews who were tasked in clearing the bodies of their fellow Jews from the gas chambers, searching their cavities for valuables, removing gold teeth, and then cremating them in the crematory above. The SK were awarded small trinkets like a pack of cigarettes or extra rations if they performed well, but they were shot after a couple of months when they were cycled out of rotation due to being witnesses to genocide. A bit above them were the Kapos and Blockälteste. You had Polish and other Slavic prisoners, who were treated better. Then you had German prisoners (traitors to the regime like communists, anti-regime intellectuals, homosexuals, people trying to defect to the enemy and so on), and finally you had a few Allied prisoners, like British POWs who were the ones who ended up playing football. And one colossal thing you need to realize is that most of the amenities of Auschwitz (swimming pool, whorehouse, post office, theatre, etc) were located in the comparatively tiny Auschwitz I Stammlager, which is where only up to 10% of the over 100,000 prisoners could be interned at a time, while the green houses and stables were located in even more remote sub camps. Ergo: An estimated 90% of Auschwitz prisoners never got to see these facilities, and even fewer got to partake in them. These are of course, the details holocaust deniers do NOT tell you. So the thing is that while those pictures may be new to you, they aren't new to historians, and the deniers like to act like they are presenting some radical new information the mainstream does not want YOU to know. These aren't revelatory - there is no "top secret Holocaust photo archive" in which pictures have been located that aren't available elsewhere. The deniers just take pictures actual researchers have uncovered in the past, and act like they've found some particularly damning evidence. As far as that goes, holocaust deniers are hypocrites: If someone shows a picture of piles of corpses taken in 1945 from a concentration camp in Germany upon its liberation, they will point out that this tells us nothing about gassings, because these people weren't gassed. But then the deniers show us pictures like the swimming pool or the bunny rabbit farm to "prove" that gassings never happened. Double standard, much? So at the end of the day, I guess you can blame our school system for not mentioning any of these amenities, but then again history text books cover a period from stone age cave paintings to 9/11; it would be truly stupid to demand they show a picture of the rabbit farm when teaching children about the holocaust in Auschwitz. To an extent you can say the same about the second mass medium of public "education" - Hollywood. It has contributed to the image of Auschwitz being a place the public perceives to have always been night, the chimneys were belching smoke, dogs were barking, and prisoners were milling about, many of them arriving by train and heading into the gas chambers. While all of these depictions obviously happened at one point in the camp's history, e.g. during the winter months, homicidal gassings and human suffering taking place under sunshine and clear blue skies is also a fact, but harder to accept for the human mind, so you can't blame film directors for keeping a certain art style. Therefore those who aren't interested in reading scholarly literature should stick to the many documentaries made about this camp, as here you are likely to find the things you are looking for.
Well, kids, let us recap all holocaust denier "truth bombs" we have debunked so far, shall we? I have given a brief history of Auschwitz I I have provided several aerial photographs of Auschwitz I toward the end of the war I have exposed the fraudulent conclusions drawn from the Auschwitz death books I have provided execution lists I have addressed the experimental gassing at Block 11 (and delivered the names of gassed victims) I have addressed the transformation of Krema I both during the war and post-war I have addressed the chimney that doesn't seem to connect to Krematorium I I have addressed existence of gas chamber doors and the (ir)relevance of American gas chamber doors I have addressed victims breaking open the gas chamber doors I have addressed claims of gas chamber doors opening inwards I have addressed the holes in the roof I have addressed scratch marks I have addressed the swimming pool I have addressed the horse grooming I have addressed the green house I have addressed the theatre I have addressed the bunny rabbit farm I have addressed the British football team I have addressed the brothel I have addressed a photograph of children in the Auschwitz camp I have addressed the Auschwitz discharge note I have addressed the photo of "concentration camp babies" I think at this point it's safe for us to move to Auschwitz II, and have a look at what deniers have to say about that camp. So pack your bags, kids, the holocaust denier debunking train is headed for Birkenau!
The infamous entrance to Auschwitz II Birkenau, also known as "Main Guard House" Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened in March 1942, and served as a center for the extermination of Jews. The majority—probably about 90%—of the victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp complex died in Birkenau. This means more than a million people. The majority, more than nine out of every ten, were Jews. A large proportion of the more than 70 thousand Poles who died or were killed in the Auschwitz complex perished in Birkenau. So did approximately 20 thousand Gypsies, in addition to Soviet POWs and prisoners of other nationalities. In November 1944, with the Soviet Red Army approaching through Poland, Himmler ordered gassing operations to cease across the Reich. Crematoria II, III, and IV were dismantled, while Crematorium I was transformed into an air raid shelter. The Sonderkommando were ordered to remove other evidence of the killings, including the mass graves. The SS destroyed written records, and in the final weeks before the camp's liberation, blew up the krematoria. Himmler ordered the evacuation of all camps in January 1945, charging camp commanders with "making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy."[1] On January 17, 58,000 Auschwitz detainees were evacuated under guard, largely on foot; thousands of them died in the subsequent death march west towards Wodzisław Śląski. Approximately 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners made it to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where they were liberated by the British in April 1945.[2] Those too weak or sick to walk were left behind. When the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army arrived at the camp on January 27 they found around 7,500 prisoners and about 600 corpses had been left behind. Among the items found by the Soviet soldiers were 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 women's garments, and 7.7 tonnes (8.5 short tons) of human hair.[3] Source: [1]: page 648, Friedlander, Saul (2009). The Years of Extermination. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-198000-8. [2]: p. 265, Rees, Laurence (2005). Auschwitz: A New History. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 1-58648-303-X. [3]: Steinbacher, Sybille (2005). Auschwitz: A History. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck. ISBN 0-06-082581-2
This is the Birkenau camp in its entirety. Birkenau is where most of the mass murder in the Auschwitz complex took place. Next to four purpose-built Krema buildings (crematorium + morgue rooms used as undressing rooms and gas chambers), Birkenau also had two makeshift gas chambers, the "red house" and "white house", known as Bunkers I and II. North is to the top of the image. For an overview, see: http://www . deathcamps . org/gas_chambers/gas_chambers_auschwitz . html Note the huge plume of smoke. Some deniers claim this is a fake plume of smoke and show you a very similar looking image of the camp with NO smoke, however, beware their deception: The image they will show you was taken on August 25th 1944 (from a series titled 4185, 4186, 4187 and 4188), while this image was taken 2 days earlier, on August 23rd, 1944, one of several ones as well: this image (along with 2 others from this set) is labeled "3084" (the others are "3083" and "3085", respectively). 3085 shows the same plume of smoke, but the image is shifted a bit to the West and 3083 to the East, in accordance with the plane flying from East to West over the area. The photos can be viewed on the NCAP (National Collection of Aerial Photography) homepage, all you have to do is type Birkenau in the search function: http://bit . ly/2aKPc7e Since these three images (as well as the other four from Aug 25th) were taken within the span of a minute, a most excellent "video" of the entire camp's activity can be recreated by gifs that compare the zooms of the images, found at: https://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2015/06/personal-movement-in-auschwitz-birkenau . html From March 1, 1942 to November 22, 1943, Birkenau was under the command of the commandant of the whole Auschwitz complex, Rudolf Höss, followed by Fritz Hartjenstein, Josef Kramer and Richard Baer. Several separate organizational units, also referred to as “camps,” along with the mass extermination facilities, came into being in Birkenau between 1942 and 1944. Each of these internal divisions of Birkenau was run by a camp director (Lagerführer), with a non-commissioned report officer (Rapportführer) and block supervisors (Blockführer) reporting to him. The first of the camps to be founded inside Birkenau, in March 1942, was the men’s camp for prisoners of various nationalities. Until July 1943, it was located in sector BIb. The women’s camp opened in August 1942. Located in sector BIa, it expanded to take in BIb in July 1943. Seven new administrative units were opened in segment BII in 1943. The first, in February 1943, was the Gypsy Family Camp (sector BIIe). Throughout its existence, a total of 23 thousand Gypsies from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the lands annexed to the Third Reich were sent there. The camp was liquidated on August 2, 1944, when the approximately 3 thousand Gypsies still there were killed in the gas chambers. A men’s camp (sector BIId) was created in July 1943; the men from sector BIb were moved there. That same month, a hospital camp for men of various nationalities opened in sector BIIf. A quarantine camp for men prisoners of various nationalities opened in sector BIIa in August. A family camp for Jews from Theresienstadt (sector BIIb) opened on September 8. About 18 thousand Jews from the ghetto in Terezin were placed there in 1943 and 1944. This was the second camp, after the Gypsy camp, where men stayed together with women and children. Both these family camps were probably set up for propaganda purposes. In what was known as the Briefaktion (letter campaign), prisoners in the BIIb family camp were required to write censored correspondence with predetermined contents, in an effort to mislead public opinion and potential victims as to the purpose of the deportation of Jews. A warehouse complex known as “Kanada” where baggage confiscated from the mass transports of Jews was stored and sorted, was conveniently located between Kremas II&III and IV&V.
This isn't the entire camp, in fact less than half of it. North is toward the bottom of the image. A rail transport of 33 cars is at the Birkenau railhead and debarkation point. Prisoners can be seen beside the train. The selection process is either underway or completed. One group of prisoners is being marched to Krematorium II. The gate of that facility is open and appears to be the destination of that ill-fated group. On 20, 23 and 25 August 1944, the number of mass-murdered people from transports from Lodz was as low as as 1000 - 2,000 people per day and could have been handled by one or two Krema buildings. You can see Krematorium II and III on the bottom right, each of them having an L-shaped undressing room and gas chamber below ground level, the latter having distinct smudges on the roof, indicating the presence of zyklon-b inlet holes (why else would there be smudges exactly on the two gas chamber roofs while the two undressing room roofs remain smooth?), which most deniers claim is a photo forgery based on their strawman argument that because these smudges are too big in diameter to be the actual holes in the roof, that the mainstream instead claims these are the zyklon vent/chimneys' shadows, and they don't align in the perfect angle with other shadows (e.g. that of the main crematorium chimney) nearby. Except "the mainstream" never makes such a claim. But we'll get to these in more detail later.
Some deniers have pointed out that it seems as though prisoners can simply keep on running toward the right and escape to freedom. But we already see the presence of at least one guard tower in close proximity. They'd have trouble running past that, not that there'd be much reason to flee, as they were deceived into thinking they were going to shower. The idea that there were no patrols beyond camp Birkenau's immediate borders (i.e. once you got past the barbed wire you were safe) is also a myth. After undressing in an anteroom, the victims were herded into the gas chamber and killed by means of Zyklon-B pellets introduced into the chamber through the exterior vents. The bodies were then moved to the crematoria or external burning pits for disposal.
Some observers just looking at the May 31st photo (right; which I will show in its entirety in one of the posts to follow) might think the 4 spots on the gas chamber roof of Krema II that were so clearly visible in the August 25th photo (left) are wholly missing, while the "borders" of the gas chamber remain the same in both photos - except they aren't. What appears to you as the upper (western) edge of the gas chamber roof in the May 31st photo, is actually some kind of dirt on the ground next to it, or part of the security/camouflage fence that is supposed to shield the courtyard of the crematorium from the rest of the camp. Similarly, what appears to you as the lower (eastern) edge of the gas chamber roof, is in actuality the discoloration running down the middle. I have emphasized this by drawing a red line to mark the actual borders of the gas chamber roof, while the blue box next to it aligns with the edge of the crematorium. Therefore, we can conclude that the discoloration on the gas chamber roof (as opposed to no discoloration on the undressing room roof) is present in the May 31st photo just as it is on the Aug 25th photo. Now then, what are these things? Deniers have pointed out that it is impossible for them to be the actual HOLES of the chimneys in the roof where zyklon-b was cast into the chamber, because in relation to the rest of the building they'd be more than 1.5 m in diameter. The deniers also dismiss the notion that these black spots are the SHADOWS of the zyklon-b inlet chimneys, as the direction of the shadows does not align with the direction of the shadow of the crematorium's smokestack. What historians, and smarter deniers like Mattogno therefore conclude, is that these spots mark some kind of discoloration on the gas chamber roof. Mattogno says it is bitumen underneath the roof surface showing, while historians say it could either be that, or compacted soil or grass. I personally would like to add that it could be shadows dependent on the position of the lids placed on the chimneys - the shape of these coverings and how they are positioned on the chimneys would influence the way the shadows cast look like. If the lids on the chimneys are bigger in diameter than the chimneys, they would jut out and it would be their shape influencing shadows, rather than the little chimneys/vents themselves. In any case, one question remains that the deniers need to answer: Why do these spots exist on Krema II's gas chamber roof, while they DO NOT exist in any shape or form whatsoever on Krema II's undressing room roof? And why does this phenomenon also show up regarding Krematorium III? The answer is simple: because there is activity on the roof of the gas chambers, but none on the roof of the undressing room. Where there's activity, there's boots. Where there's boots, there's all sorts of dirt and footprints. Hence the long line of dirt leading away from the gas chamber roof, or the discoloration also running between the spots. Meanwhile, the roofs of the undressing rooms are as clean as the day they were built.
A powerful corroboration is displayed between a drawing David Olere made in 1945 and the aerial photographs. Olere pictured the four gas openings as west-east alternating (starting west for the south-most opening seen at the top of the image, since north is to the bottom), which is exactly how aerial photographs (published more than 30 years later) show the pattern of the most pronounced spots on the roof. The Italian holocaust denier and linguistics and philosophy major Carlo Mattogno says the spots are "black bitumen which was shielded from the atmosphere by a thin layer of cement which probably later crumbled in certain areas" and is utterly incapable of explaining how eye witnesses Olere (or Bacon or Tauber) were able to describe it, even sketch it in agreement with photographic evidence unknown to any of them at the time. In fact, Carlo (the flagship of "scholarly" holocaust denial, mind you) only hurts the revisionist cause by not jumping on the popular bandwagon allegation of the CIA having retrospectively added the shadows onto the photographs after consulting Olere's sketch. One denier who however has held on to the "CIA manipulated the images" theory is John C. Ball. So confident was he in fact, that he posted a $100,000 challenge he would pay if 3 different experts (with his prior approval, of course) could agree that the photos were NOT altered in any way apart from the captioning. However, what's funny is that John C. Ball made it all but impossible to contact him regarding his $100,000 challenge, and in fact has now wholly disappeared from the holocaust denial scene. Well before Ball's challenge was posted to his web page, Dr. Nevin Bryant, supervisor of cartographic and image processing applications at Caltech/NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, examined the photographs with digital enhancement techniques unavailable to the CIA photo publishers Brugioni and Poirier in 1979. Dr. Bryant's analysis proves that the photographs were not tampered with. (Van Pelt, The Case For Auschwitz, p. 354). It gets better: US planes weren't the only ones who flew over the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex taking photos. Britain's commonwealth forces also involved SAAF Mosquito planes doing a fly-by, and the negatives from that sortie were stored for years in archives in Britain, and only discovered recently, 2011 I believe, and are now available to view in the NCAP archive in Edinburgh, and its website. Not only do the gas chamber roofs also show the same number of smudges as in the US photos made available to the public by Brugioni and Poirier in 1979, but the smudges are also in the same shape, the same angle. So to keep the story of doctored photos going, one needs to set the date of retouching to earlier than 1979, then assume the agency that did the retouching had access to both the US and British negatives, then conclude that one set was to be published in the US, and the other set was to lay dormant in the archives of a different country, and then be published by that country 4 decades later, all to maintain this grand illusion of independent corroboration, all part of a several-decade spanning master plan that ensures the longevity of the holocaust story. Notice how am I fast approaching the realm of crazy. Or, of course, you can maintain the story that the CIA did the retouching on their negatives prior to 1979, and the British used modern methods to replicate the CIA forgery before making their prints available to the public in 2011. Which leads us to the next leg of the story that deniers need to explain; how the manipulation was even done: Just try to picture how absurd John C. Ball's CIA photo manipulation claim sounds - he theorizes that the negative was enlarged about 800%, marked, then reduced and reshot into a negative (how else can you draw microscopic markings onto a negative?). Yet first of all, the original negatives are not separate; they are still on a giant roll in the archives at Yad Vashem, connected with hundreds of other aerial photographs seamlessly. And secondly, if only the enlarged photo was marked while the original negative was not, then why don't deniers sneak in one of their many agents to look at the originals in the archives, and BOOM! if they don't find the holes in this alleged unaltered original, they'd have landed a major victory. The fact that none of them has accomplished this only lends credence to the conspiracy theory they must cling on to, that the negatives were altered, which, as pointed out earlier, is absurd, because drawing these marks onto such a tiny portion of a negative is impossible. The only way one could do it is, as mentioned earlier, enlarging the negative, editing the print, and reshooting it into a negative, and then destroying the original negatives, while seamlessly pasting (you can't) the reshot negatives back into the original microfilm rolls that contain all the other negatives of the series. Because otherwise, my challenge is as follows: dear deniers, find the alleged unaltered original US negatives, or even the SAAF negatives, show them to the world and tear open holocaust defenders a new one. Until then: we win, you lose.
A fun image to debunk any denier that spouts nonsense like "no wartime images of these buildings remain taken at ground level". Taken (according to Pressac) in June 1943, viewing north. Note the railway line running in front of the Krematorium. The Auschwitz crematoria were built by the company Huta Hoch- und Tiefbau. The entrance to the Krematorium's underground undressing room is to the extreme left of this image. The gas chamber with the zyklon vents on its roof would be in a 90° angle to the undressing room, and located behind the crematorium building. A slightly higher res version of this image can be found here: http://images.slideplayer.com/24/7482495/slides/slide_27.jpg
These make for some "fine" workers, don't they? I wonder what happened to them. Some may observe that the courtyard in front of Krematorium III is visible, rather than being shielded from view by a non see-through perimeter fence. However, the gas chamber is on the other side of the building, and therefore any SS activity on its roof would be wholly out of view of these people or anyone marching along the train track, who also would enter the underground undressing room further left of the building. And obviously there would be no need for activity on the gas chamber roof until everyone had entered the gas chamber, which is a while after they had entered the undressing room. Therefore the only necessary security screen would have to be located behind the building, and to the right, as that's where the rest of the camp was located. Anything else was merely additional precaution. But I will get to the fencing in a moment.
The arrows point to long lines of prisoners. On 31 May 1944, about 6,700 Hungarian Jews were killed in Auschwitz, and on 8 July 1944, the figure was about 8,800 people (according to Research Notes on The Hungarian Holocaust by Michael Honey here: http://www.zchor.org/hungaria). The 31 May aerial photograph shows open air cremation behind crematorium 5, which I will zoom in on later in the blog. But it's not that these (rounded up) 7,000 to 9,000 victims had to be killed and incinerated simultaneously, even exactly at the time the site was targeted by aerial reconnaissance planes. The 31 May photograph was taken in the morning, between 9 - 10 a.m according to the sun's position. For all we know, the incineration of the victims from the previous day was already finished (apart from the open air cremation site still smoking behind crematorium 5) and new transports with victims did not arrive yet or new victims were not killed yet or were just killed (for 31 May 1944, numerous train cars can be observed at the Birkenau ramp indicating the more or less recent arrival of a transport; personnel movement is visible according to air photo experts including close to crematorium 4, see Zimmerman, Holocaust denial, Addendum and Shermer & Grobman, Denying History, p. 149). Any likely incineration activity of an open air cremation site can be determined from the absence or presence of smoke, since open wood fires with a surface area of many m² can be assumed to generate substantial smoke most of the time, which should be visible even on aerial photographs taken from high altitude (see the 31 May, 8 July, 20 August and 23 August 1944 aerial photographs of the Birkenau compound). This is not so clear for the crematoria. The question is, if and to what extent did the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau emit smoke. The "if" can be answered quite easily: SS ground photographs of crematorium 2 and 5 show black soot at the top of the chimney, which is a clear sign that there was emission of considerable smoke at some point before. Less straightforward is to quantify the extent and frequency of smoke. In the most extreme case, the chimneys always spouted thick, heavy smoke generating clouds of several square meter projected surface area readily visible on aerial photographs even of poorer resolution. In this case - and only in this case - absence of visible smoke from crematoria chimneys on aerial photographs would be proof of inactivity of the cremation ovens. Holocaust deniers assume this - without saying - when they discount cremation activity based on the absence of visible smoke on aerial photographs. Carlo Mattogno is the prime example.
Holocaust deniers have often pointed out how close the Birkenau crematoria were to the rest of the camp harboring up to 100,000 people. They show us some aerial photo closeups and then make the claim that thousands upon thousands of people could have easily seen activity around the crematoria, and therefore it would have been impossible for the Nazis to conceal genocide, some even going so far as to say the Appellplatz near Krematorium III was, in fact, a football field where team Gypsy played team Jew, some 100 meters from Krema III. What the holocaust deniers of course don't tell you, is that the Birkenau crematoria possessed a security screen - basically a fence that consisted of thick foliage, and the exact opposite of the kind of see-through barbed wire fence that you might be familiar with from the movies, and which exists to this day. The pic above shows the security screen, the likes of which are also seen in this video around Krematorium V: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRT6oYUg494 The security screen was discussed in Hoess's memoirs, the testimony of Jerzy Bielski, and in the Nuremberg document 4463. This screen was erected to block any line of sight from the gas chambers to other parts of the camp, lest prisoners discover that people going in weren't coming out. Documentary evidence of the security screen is existing on both aerial photographs (the thick border around the Krematoria as compared to the thin fence surrounding the camp perimeter) as well as ground photography regarding Krematorium II seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP790K8DR50 John C. Ball hilariously failed to recognize the screen, and thought the CIA had used some kind of marker to create a thick border: http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/see-no-evil/screen_fence.jpg http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/see-no-evil/Barbedwire_air.jpg More documentation exists, e.g. construction office member Werner Jothann writing: "The local Construction Office has submitted to us the allocation documents relating to camouflaging the crematoria. In the PoW camp, but only for the installation of wooden posts with shrubbery." Wooden posts with shrubbery is indeed a good description of the image you see above.
On the left you see a trainload of arrivals with at least seven SS officers in the foreground and more at the very back; on the right you see an image where in the background, Krematorium II (with security screen even shielding its front courtyard) is visible behind the barbed wire fence, as well as one of the guard towers on the perimeter of the camp toward the extreme right. The rest of the Auschwitz album can be viewed at: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/index.asp or http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/de/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/photo_1.asp
If you look closely to the right of the locomotive (probably an Orenstein & Koppel locomotive. Built around 1910, 30 Pferdestärke, type Bn2t, bearing the logo of the company Carl Brandt, (?)Magdeburg), you can see a platform in front of Krema II. This is the roof of the gas chamber located underground along with the undressing room in an L shape beneath the ground level crematory building, and the zyklon-b inlet holes are visible on this photograph as well, this time at ground-level instead of the aerial photo before, and located right below the crematorium's windows.
Some holocaust deniers have attacked the above image, bringing the laws of perspective into the argument and saying the train tracks are too broad for the train and that the gas chamber does not intersect with the Krematorium where it is supposed to, according to the surviving blueprints. Well, let's extend those lines, shall we? The above picture demonstrates how everything checks out. All lines converge to the vanishing point. And in case the deniers haven't noticed, it is winter, and there is snow everywhere, therefore some of the gas chamber's roof is covered toward the left of the locomotive's smokestack with snow. Also note how broad the driver's cabin of the locomotive is - this corresponds to the breadth of the train track. I have to admit the image suffers from overexposure in several areas, making things harder to spot. But if you insist on a more professional analysis than the above, well, it has already been done by Mazal, Keren et al. in "The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau" and can be found at: http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/1/68.abstract even Charles D. Provan agrees that Faurisson's "No holes, no holocaust" argument is moot at this point: https://web.archive.org/web/20040402071014/http://revisingrevisionism.com/
This collage suggests the location of the 4 inlet holes of Crematorium II (as seen in the aerial photo of August 25, 1944) in the ground level photo of early 1943. The two images to the top right consist of a (bottom) zoom in on Krema II's gas chamber roof as seen in the train photograph, and (top) the most plausible locations of the vents, superimposed on the zoom. The top left image is a flipped (both horizontally and vertically) zoom of the August 25, 1944 aerial photo, with red lines converging on the approximate geographical location from where the 1943 ground photo was taken. From this position, Krema II is in the foreground and Krema III in the background, just like in the ground level photo. Ever so slightly left of the red line 3rd from right, the line of sight is blocked by the locomotive smokestack, obscuring the 3rd zyklon inlet. The thickness of the smokestack also obscures parts of the 4th, though the leftmost part of it is still visible to the left of the smokestack if you observe closely. This is the basis used to superimpose the inlets behind the smokestack. Note that inlets 3 and 4 appear closer together than 1 and 2, but observing the laws of perspective this is the case the further away a row of equidistant objects lies from the observer. And even in the aerial photo you can see that the inlets 3 and 4 are closer together than inlets 1 and 2 or 2 and 3. What can the deniers do at this point, given that we have both aerial and ground-level photographic proof of the zyklon-b inlets, except either keep yelling fake in an ever desperate manner, or say ventilation or some stuff like that without providing any more detail? What discredits the ventilation theory is that deniers themselves go to great lengths to disprove the existence of these vents in the ruins today (such as the deniers Robert "No holes, no holocaust!" Faurisson or Vincent Reynouard), which they wouldn't do if they tried to explain away their existence as mere ventilation in the first place. And yet, a research team consisting of Harry Mazal, Daniel Keren and Jamie McCarthy investigated the collapsed roof of the gas chamber ruin of crematorium 2 in the late 90s and managed to identify three of the four zyklon-b inlets (see their paper, as mentioned earlier: "The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau"), also available here: http://bit . ly/2dGo6ka
This time more of the camp is visible, including Krema IV and V (which is partially obscured by the trees around it). North is to the right of the image. In this image, the zyklon-b inlet holes of Krema III seem to be in the same position as the previous image, but 3 of the 4 inlets on the roof of Krema II's gas chamber are not visible except the shadow of the one closest to Krema II. However, the presence of white patches near the building suggests clouds or artifacting on the photo negative has obscured the remaining three. A large column of prisoners, probably over a thousand, is marching on the camp's main north-south road. Crematorium IV's gate is open; this may be the final destination of the newly arrived prisoners.
Krematorium IV during and after its construction. By June 1943, all four Birkenau Kremas were fully operational. Unlike in Kremas II and III whose gas chambers were located underground, at Bunker 1 and 2 and Kremas IV and V with their pitched roofs, the gas was introduced via windows in the walls that were closed with gas-tight shutters, whose delivery to the camp is proven via documentation and photos.
Contraptions like these were mounted on the exterior of Krematorium IV and V's gas chambers, as the Zyklon was introduced through the windows, rather than through the roof. A similar process was also the case in Bunkers 1 and 2, known as the red and white house: Pressac p. 323, regarding Bunker 1 (the little red house): "The rooms of an ordinary farmhouse were turned into gas chambers by roughly sealing the windows, fitting gas tight doors and making small apertures filled with shutters in the wall alongside these doors at about head height. Through these the Zyklon B was introduced." Note how the handle for closing the windows is on the OUTSIDE, a decidedly impractical arrangement for any room, unless one wanted to ensure that those inside could not open them. For more, see Jean-Claude Pressac's "Auschwitz Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers": http://www.phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/
These trees look oddly familiar with the ones that surround a group of naked women in one of the Sonderkommando photographs that will follow later. Hmm, I wonder whether they might have been heading to Krema V's gas chamber? Holocaust deniers have a particularly hard time wrapping their head around this one, trying to find all sorts of excuses as to why there should be a group of naked women disrobing in the middle of a damn forest.
This is a zoom of the aerial photo taken on May 31st, 1944 (north is to the right) showing cremation pits West of Krema V, seveal to the SE of Krema V, and some large trenches due North of Krema V some distance away. This last set of trenches were probably used for burying corpses from Bunker I. A plume of smoke can be seen emanating from the pit near Krema V. According to Holocaust deniers, the aerial photographs supposedly refute that mass extermination was taking place at the Birkenau camp, because the extent of visible smoke would not correspond to large scale body disposal activity: "1944 photos show no smoke coming from chimneys, and only little smoke from outdoor fires." (Air Photo Evidence v.3, holocaust handbooks, p. 94) However, let's keep in mind that (1) regarding outdoor fires, these deniers have apparently ignored the August 23rd 1944 photo that shows a gigantic smoke plume coming from the same area and (2) regarding chimney smoke, these are the same deniers who keep reminding us that crematory chimneys are not designed to emit thick, visible smoke in the first place. So on one hand they tell us that crematories aren't supposed to be belching smoke all the time (when they are trying to discredit eye-witness testimonies) but then they say the lack of smoke from crematory chimneys is proof no large scale body disposal activity in the crematoriums was going on. Contradictory, much? Make up your minds, deniers! Either bodies CAN be cremated in a crematorium without massive amounts of smoke escaping through the chimneys (in which case you make a point against the eye-witnesses, but not against the aerial photography), or they CANNOT (in which case you make a point against the aerial photography, but not against the eye-witnesses). Can't have it both ways, I'm afraid. And if you ask any crematory operator, he will tell you that under heavy strain smoke will escape 20th century crematory chimneys, which corroborates the eye-witness accounts. The Birkenau crematoria came under heavy strain in 1944 during the Ungarnaktion, which is why outdoor cremations had to be done. We have ground-level Sonderkommando photographs proving this, taken right outside Krematorium V's damn doorway (!), that I will show later. So, the holocaust denier will once again make an observation: since these aerial photographs were taken in 1944, during the Ungarnaktion, i.e. the height of extermination activity, and since the crematories came under duress, WHERE IS THE SMOKE? Why is it only present in some of the photographs? And why is it coming from cremation pits near Krema V and not from any crematory chimney in said photographs? Obviously when outdoor cremation becomes necessary, clearly something has happened that has rendered indoor cremation impossible during such days. Therefore, the crematories will either be under maintenance, or under manageable loads while the bulk of corpses is taken outside for cremation. Hence smoke OUTSIDE the Krematorium, rather than from its chimneys (which, in the case of Krema IV and V, are two smokestacks to the lower-left of the building roof - Krema IV's smokestacks are covered by the label "trenches", but you can see one of their shadows) Also, a question I need to ask the denier in return is: can 1.1 million people be killed and cremated in Auschwitz without non-stop everyday cremation to breaking point? The answer is yes, as I have demonstrated in my crematory calculations elsewhere. We also need to remember that a year has 365 days and the amount of photography flybys over Birkenau number around a half dozen, of which several were taken too late, i.e. in December and January when the mass extermination was largely over. You can calculate what percentage of a year's activity these photographs managed to capture, not to mention that they also only captured 1 second of an entire day. Who knows what happened during other hours of that same day. And finally, another proof that non-stop 24/7 mass extermination with smoke everywhere wasn't a thing is by looking at the Glaser List and realizing not many Jews were cremated on several of the days the aerial photographs were taken. I have addressed this regarding the June 26th photograph that shows the entire Auschwitz camp complex towards the beginning of this report.
It wasn't just Kremas II and III with the underground gas chambers that had ventilators (Entlüftungs-Anlagen) as well as ventilation ducts (Entlüftungskanäle). This document shows Kremas IV and V, with their ground-level gas chambers had these systems in place as well.
The following document and blueprint detail plans for a sixth crematorium, one with even more effective ovens...scratch that...incinerators purpose-built allowing zero dignity regarding human cremation. March 13, 1946: From the Interrogation of the Chief Engineer of the Berlin Firm Topf and Söhne, Fritz Sander: "I decided to design and build a crematorium with a higher capacity. I completed this project for a new crematorium in November 1942—a crematorium for mass incineration—and I submitted this project to a State Patent Commission in Berlin. This crematorium was to be built on the conveyor belt principle, that is to say, the corpses would be brought to the incineration furnaces continuously. When the corpses were pushed into the furnaces, they would fall into a grate, then slide into the furnace to be incinerated. The corpses would serve at the same time as fuel for heating the furnaces. This patent could not then be approved by the Main Patent Office in Berlin because of its secrecy classification. The project file is registered in the Patent Office but the invention could not be patented in wartime." - Fritz Sander Did you get that into your thick skull, Carlo Mattogno? (what is your job, again, Mr. "I never worked a day in my life?") Because Fritz Sander, the engineer, tells you corpses themselves can be used as fuel for heating the furnaces.
Most of the crematoria as well as parts of the camp and guard towers have been partially dismantled at this point, except for Krema IV which, after the Sonderkommando uprising on October 7th 1944, no longer exists. "The Grey Zone" is a film that covers and commemorates this heroic show of defiance. The aforementioned dismantling is by the way also the reason why you won't find any Zyklon-B wire-mesh columns, shower-heads etc. in the partially collapsed ruins of Krema II's gas chamber today, even if you hop down one of the holes in the ceiling when no one is looking: the Crematoria didn't remain operational till the day they were blown up, but were dismantled during the weeks prior to this, with most of the equipment shipped back to Germany.
Section III of Birkenau has been completely dismantled and evacuated, including the guard towers. The snow cover on the roofs of the Women's Camp indicates that it had been evacuated. Within Section II, it is easy to detect which of the barracks are probably still occupied as evidenced by the melting snow on the barrack block roofs. The camp has been partially evacuated. The remaining Crematoria buildings would be blown up in the coming days. Note that "Gas Chamber II" and "Gas Chamber III" are incorrectly labeled, as the labels point to the undressing rooms - the gas chambers were in a 90° angle to them, facing away from the main railway line.
This is a picture taken during the construction of Birkenau's Krema II and III buildings that had identical layout, each featuring 5 triple-muffle Topf & Sons ovens. The leftmost oven's third muffle is not in the frame, as altogether there were 15 crematory muffles in this building, and 37 others spread among the 10 other ovens in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex.
This is a picture taken during the construction of Birkenau's Krema II and III buildings that had identical layout, each featuring 5 Topf & Sons triple-muffle ovens. The right-most one is not in the frame. You can find the photos as part of the 1943 Bauleitung album on Yad Vashem.
This is the famous 1943 document from the Zentralbauleitung, which lists the daily crematory capacity of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Some have questioned whether this is a realistic, achievable number, a peak performance, an exaggeration/advertisement intended to impress the higher ups, or the usual denier last resort argument of it being a forgery. Josef Janisch (born April 22, 1909 in Salzburg, † July 26, 1964 at the Tuxer Joch) was an Austrian engineer. He was a member of the management staff of the Central Construction (Zentralbauleitung) involved in the construction of the Auschwitz camp and its crematoria with gas chambers. Josef Janisch was a member of the SS (no. 299 849) and reached the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (equivalent to Hauptmann). Janisch became head of Bauleitung 2, which was initially responsible for Birkenau as a labor and POW camp, but then also became responsible for its conversion to an extermination camp. 1943 onward, the task description for Bauleitung 2 was supplemented with the addition: "implementation of special treatment". [1] On January 29, 1943, the head of the Zentralbauleitung in the Auschwitz concentration camp, Karl Bischoff, stressed in a letter the indispensability of his employee Janisch, in regard to the management of the "special construction" of Auschwitz-Birkenau due to him being "the only reliable technical specialist". [2] The term "special construction" was chosen as the code name for the extermination facilities. [3] Dated June 28, 1943, the document above, a list of the "daily [cremation] performance of the various crematories", was attached to Janisch's message regarding the "construction of crematorium III" and thus of "all ordered crematoria" at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The message was sent to the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS-WVHA) in Berlin, intended for the head of the construction industry in the SS, the SS-group leader and Amtsgruppenchef of "Amt C" ("Bauwesen"), Hans Kammler. Kurt Prüfer, senior engineer of Topf and Sons, the company that manufactured the crematoria ovens, gives a more conservative estimate in a telegram here: http://imgur.com/d09KvVO Josef Janisch was a devout Nazi, while his brother, Franz Janisch, was the opposite. Franz Janisch's daughter, Line Wintersteller, still has memories of her uncle, and claims he once threatened to send her mother to Dachau for saying Jews are people, too.[4] Source: [1]: Rainer Fröbe: "Bauen und Vernichten. Die Zentrale Bauleitung Auschwitz und die Endlösung" in: Christian Gerlach (Hrsg.): „Durchschnittstäter.“ Handeln und Motivation (= Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, Band 16). Assoziation – Schwarze Risse – Rote Straße, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-922611-84-2, page 183. [2]: Annegret Schüle: "Industrie und Holocaust. Topf & Söhne – Die Ofenbauer von Auschwitz." Herausgegeben von der Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0622-6, page 187. [3]: Ibid, page 186 [4]: http://www.salzburg.com/nachrichten/salzburg/chronik/sn/artikel/onkel-pepi-war-bauleiter-in-hitlers-todesfabrik-201514/
Krema III had 5 ovens with 3 muffles each, 15 muffles in total, as shown in the pictures earlier. ...so 1440 corpses cremated a day in 15 muffles is 1440 / 15 = 96 corpses cremated in every muffle per day. One day has 24 hours, so 96 / 24 = 4 corpses per hour. If you stuff 4 corpses into each muffle (2 adults + 2 children or infants) and it takes an entire hour for the contents to be somewhat reasonably cremated, to then be dropped to the ash collection channel below, so that the muffle is clear for the introduction of the next batch of bodies, the calculation checks out. But we're not done cremating the ones that were dropped just yet: In the operating instructions of the Topf double-muffle oven, the following is written: "As soon as the remains of the bodies have fallen from the chamotte grid to the ash collection channel below, they should be pulled forward towards the ash removal door, using the scraper. Here they can be left for a further twenty minutes to be fully consumed . . . In the meantime, further bodies can be introduced one after the other into the chambers." - J.C. Pressac, "Technique & Operation..." page 136 I like how it says "bodies". It's almost like it's plural. OH WAIT! It is plural. As well from the Pelt report: "The procedure was to put the first body with the feet towards the muffle, back down and face up. Then a second body was placed on top, again face up, but head towards the muffle. . . " The idea that only one body fits in a muffle can therefore be dismissed. 1 corpse a minute is just a stupid way of saying 1440 corpses / 24 hours / 60 minutes = 1 per minute.
This document, a telegram sent in 1942 by Kurt Prüfer, senior engineer from Topf & Sons, the company that manufactured the crematory ovens, gives lower numbers (the relevant areas have been highlighted by me) than the document of the Zentralbauleitung: 250 instead of 340 could be cremated per day in Krema I 800 instead of 1440 could be cremated in Krema II and III each (were being built) 800 instead of 768 in Krema IV and V each (were being built) So the only concrete evidence (one can postulate has been gathered from experience) is that Krema I can realistically cremate 250 instead of 340 people a day, a realistic capacity of only 73% of what is advertised on the 1943 document seen here: http://imgur.com/jSj3fsf However, bear in mind that this lower number might simply be because less people were being killed in 1942 than in 1943 when the genocide reached its peak, rather than a physical limitation of how much Krema I's ovens can cremate per day. Still, for argument's sake, I am putting on my skeptic glasses here and very dumbly extrapolating this to the other Kremas (73% as much as advertised) shown on the Zentralbauleitung document. We can conclude the following: Kremas II and III = 2102 corpses instead of 2880 corpses per day Kremas IV and V= 1120 corpses instead of 1536 corpses per day This means, if you include the figures for Krema I, a total of 3472 corpses instead of 4756 corpses per day across all crematoria could be incinerated. However, even with these more conservative figures, it still means that in 365 days of 24h operation, close to 1.3 million corpses could be cremated even if the ovens were only 73% as effective as advertised in the 1943 Zentralbauleitung document. And we know that each Auschwitz crematorium operated close to 2 years. So we can safely assume less than 4 corpses were being cremated per hour on a 24 hour basis, and rather view these as peak performances in short spikes throughout the camp's operation. Verdict: the Holocaust happened and is very real. You can read Kurt Prüfer's testimony in Erfurt here: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Prufer.html
Oftentimes, holocaust deniers list the time it takes for a modern civilian crematory to cremate a corpse as proof that the much older Auschwitz ovens couldn't have possibly worked faster because modern = automatically better. On the left, they first build the straw man that 7-8 bodies means 7-8 adult corpses, and not any infants or children. And speaking of straw men, while their appeal to logic is true that an adult corpse already inside the muffle might block the insertion of the stretcher that would insert an additional corpse into the muffle, who is saying corpses were inserted one after the other into the muffle via the stretcher, rather than being piled on the stretcher and inserted in one go? And regarding modern crematoria on the image's right, their point is also moot for several reasons, and I am not sure whether they are well aware of these and continue to present the argument anyway (in the hopes of fooling the layman) or are truly dim-witted. For starters, they fail to provide citation that modern crematories are PHYSICALLY INCAPABLE of incinerating bodies faster (e.g. if the crematory operators were held under gunpoint). None of the cremation times they cite are from crematory ovens that are operating under heavy duress. Also, they conveniently "forget" the part where corpses in these modern civilian crematories are usually cremated inside a wooden coffin. Not the expensive heavy ones used for burials mind you, but one nonetheless. This means that "an average human body" ends up being much heavier than your intuition tells you, since it is cremated with the coffin. ...and one at a time. ...and the ashes are treated as holy, not garbage that can be mixed with that of others, so cool-down and retrieval are part of the procedure. ...and temperature regulation, adhering to safety standards and so on are all added to the time. A more detailed takedown of why the comparison to civilian crematories is deliberately deceitful is presented here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130109050448/http://www.holocaust-history.org/quick-facts/crematorium-capacity.shtml If one insists on making comparisons to present-day facilities, then one should rather look at cadaver incinerators that are used for getting rid of animal corpses or Pathological Solid Waste Incinerators and scale them down to compare what one Auschwitz oven was capable of, because these give us a much better time approximation of the actual physiological process itself, i.e. the combustion of flesh to ash. But even if it took 1 hour to cremate 1 corpse and the Auschwitz crematories only operated in a 16 hour cycle with 8 hours of cooldown and maintenance every single day, then Krema II for example could cremate 175,200 people in 2 years (5 ovens with 3 muffles each = 15 muffles. 15 corpses (1 in every muffle) times 16 hours, times 365 days, times two will get you the answer), as each of the Auschwitz crematories was operational for approximately 2 years. Krema III has an identical layout, so another 175,200. Krema IV and IV that each had an 8-muffle oven, could cremate 186,800 combined. Krema I that had 3 ovens with 2 muffles each, could cremate 70,080 based on this calculation of mine. = 607,280 people in 2 years if only 1 person was cremated per muffle, and it took an entire hour to cremate before the next corpse could be introduced, and the ovens only operated 16 hours per day. Auschwitz's death toll also includes open air cremations. The point is, with these restrictions imposed, we can still perfectly explain half of the death toll or higher if you include open air cremation. Now all you need in your calculation is 2 corpses per muffle (unlike this denier infographic is trying to fool you into believing, anyone who has been to one of the Nazi camps and seen the ovens can attest that at least 2 adult corpses can be shoved with the stretcher into a muffle, leaving room at the top for child corpses as well) and you will arrive at the current death toll of 1.1 million, while still accounting for 8 hours of each day when no cremations were taking place and not including any open-air cremations. So if you include weeks of non-stop 24 hour cremation cycles (and we have documentation that the Topf ovens are capable of this), as well as the open-air cremations (again, we have 2 Sonderkommando ground photos showing this as well as aerial photos), then we can achieve even higher numbers, or say that less than 2 corpses per muffle were cremated on average per hour, or account for the Sonderkommando uprising on October 7th 1944 that destroyed Krema IV. ========================================= tl;dr: with 2 corpses per muffle per hour it is perfectly possible to achieve the number of cremations that reflect Auschwitz' death toll. No need to cremate 4 corpses in an hour (1 corpse in 15 minutes) or any other nonsense holocaust deniers try telling you the mainstream MUST cling on to, to be able to explain the numbers.
Now that we have covered the basics regarding aerial and ground photography and crematoria capability, it is time to get into the heart of the ugly matter and reconstruct the genocide process. This image is part of a model on display at the Auschwitz museum and is a photo that did not fit into the frame of the image that will follow soon, which shows a scale model of Krema II. This image is basically an extension of the image that follows, toward its left. Krema II and III's undressing room and gas chamber were located below the surface, so the victims, under the pretense that they had to take mandatory showers before being admitted into the camp, were led to the undressing room below ground.
This is where the victims disrobed and placed their clothes on numbered hooks aligning the length of the walls along with benches on both sides, before heading to the gas chamber disguised as a shower room.
Several hundred thousand people were murdered here. Understandably, this area of the camp has been the subject of great (revisionist) controversy, and was even part of the Irving-Lipstadt trial, because this is the place about which Robert Faurisson made his famous "no holes, no holocaust" statement. My untrained eyes can already see holes on the gas chamber roof, as well as what appears to be blue staining on the wall to the extreme right. There goes the height of revisionist 'scholarship'....
Can you spot the two trap-doors some particularly smug denier adventurers have used to climb down into the collapsed gas chamber when nobody was looking?
The homicidal gas chamber ("Vergasungskeller") and undressing room ("Auskleideraum") are located below ground level in an L shape. Those who did not pass the "Selektion" upon arrival by train (i.e. anyone deemed unfit for labor, predominantly the elderly, the sick, mothers with infants and children) were sent to the gas chambers, while the healthy and able-bodied were absorbed into the camp labor force, showered, shorn and tattooed. A stairway would lead those that didn't pass the Selektion below ground. A lift existed that would haul the bodies up to the ground floor for cremation after the gassing was done. Both of these procedures were done by the "Sonderkommando", Jewish prisoners doomed to partake in the genocide of their own people. Hundreds, if not over a thousand people were gassed at once, with Nazi camp personnel pouring Zyklon-B pellets from cans into the four inlets you can see protruding atop the gas chamber - inlets that fed into four hollow pillars made out of reinforced mesh wire going all the way to the gas chamber's ground, as described by Michal Kula, and therefore sometimes referred to as "Kula columns". The Zyklon-B (German patent name insecticide) pellets release the poisonous gas hydrogen cyanide (HCN) that kills warm-blooded human beings in concentrations as low as 300ppm well within 20 minutes, while it takes several hours (at least!) of exposure at concentrations around 16,000ppm to kill cold-blooded lice, as this gas was also used for fumigation (delousing) of inmate clothing and bedding in separate delousing chambers ("Entwesungskammern") existing elsewhere in the camp. HCN only becomes volatile/explosive at much higher concentrations (56,000ppm)[1]. This modeled Krematorium (Krema II) is equipped with 5 triple-muffle ovens manufactured by a company called "Topf & Söhne", i.e. each oven has 3 muffles, and each muffle is capable of cremating more than two corpses at a time, especially if you consider that corpses of infants and children take up very little space. Cremation temperature was probably between 800°C-1100°C, it took less than an hour to cremate the contents put into a muffle; the ash would fall through a grating into an ash collector underneath the muffle. Thus it wasn't necessary to collect the ash from the muffle, i.e. having to cool it down or anything. Just from a hypothetical continuous 16 hour work-shift with 3 corpses per muffle, per hour, this building alone was able to cremate 720 corpses a day, or 525,600 corpses in 2 years of operation, i.e. half of Auschwitz-Birkenau's death toll. And this was just one of several (I, II, III, IV, V) crematoria in operation in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. The total amount of people killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau is between 1.1 and 1.5 million souls, of which approx. 900,000 died by gassing, and the rest by other means such as summary execution, labor attrition, starvation, medical experimentation or other camp conditions, as well as those already arriving dead in the trains where they were packed like cattle. A Sonderkommando revolt on October 7th, 1944 destroyed Krema IV (events portrayed in the 2001 film: "The Grey Zone") and the demolition of Krema IV's walls commenced in mid-October 1944. The dismantling of Kremas II and III began in early December of 1944. The demolition (with dynamite) of Kremas II and III took place on January 20th, 1945 and Krema V, which was operational until the end, was demolished on January 26th, 1945. So the Nazis dynamited the Krema buildings before retreating while leaving most of the rest of the camp intact; Auschwitz I "Stammlager" and Auschwitz II "Birkenau" were liberated on January 27th, 1945 by the Soviet Red Army (International Holocaust Remembrance Day). Today, Krema I in Auschwitz I is the only intact Krema building (reconstructed in 1947), all others are either ruins or razed to their foundations. This video (taken from a PBS documentary called "NOVA: Holocaust on trial" about the Irving vs. Lipstadt trial) offers a 3D look of the interior of one of the Birkenau "Krema" buildings from minute 48:00 to 49:32 in the link provided: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCERa40KP64 Here is a far more visceral cinematic gassing clip at one of the Birkenau Kremas (warning: graphic!) taken from the 1988 miniseries about the Holocaust called "War And Remembrance" that makes the gas chamber layout (including the pillars etc. as demonstrated in the video earlier) accurate enough to the description provided by historians (watch 11:36 onward): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgb7Kgjma-g Source: [1]: https://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/chemical/14746
The details speak for themselves. If you are still asking for proof, see the compilation of evidence at: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2014/11/rebuttal-of-mattogno-on-auschwitz-part . html
Illustration made by David Olere of the victims being told to undress and put their clothes on numbered hooks for later recollection before being herded into the "shower" that was the gas chamber. Yehuda Bacon spoke about them during the Eichmann trial: http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-068-06.html
Bodies being dragged from the gas chamber, before their cavities were searched for valuables and gold teeth fillings removed before being cremated. Ovens on the same floor as the gas chamber suggest this is David Olere's rendition of Krema IV or V. However, there is a slight inaccuracy in this sketch as Tauber recorded that the Sonderkommandos wore gas masks when removing the bodies to the corridor. Note that a gas mask was not mandatory for survival, because the gas chambers in all four Birkenau Kremas possessed ventilation.
Illustration of the many hours of cremation that followed after a gassing in Krema II and III. Notice the dead infants in the sketch? Holocaust deniers always skirt around this fact when they present their absurd calculations about cremation time. It takes, say, 20 minutes to kill e.g. 1500 people in e.g. the 2000 sq. ft. area of the Krematorium II gas chamber. Let's say it takes twice as long for the ventilation system to do the air exchanges necessary for the Sonderkommando to be able to enter the chamber and begin with the corpse extraction. Keep in mind that the pellets, if they haven't been retrieved from the bottom of the Kula columns yet, are still outgassing, but the colums (where the toxicity is still highest) are quite a ways away from the entrance of the gas chamber and the ventilation system is still working, therefore the SK can enter the chamber without dying like Faurisson and his buddies erroneously claim. Plus, once enough corpses have been hauled away from the chamber so that the SK can move further inside, they can, as testimony of e.g. Daniel Behannais describes, start hosing down the chamber to wash away the blood and emptied bowels of the unfortunates and, by doing so, the water also destroys the still outgassing zyklon pellets, this is a common chemical reaction (H20 and CO2) that neutralises the HCN bound in the clay-pellets. More about this later. My point is, the SK still have 23 hours of the day left to cremate these 1500 people, and considering Krema II has 15 muffles, and assuming 4 people per muffle (2 adults, 2 infants, and believe me children made a good chunk of those gassed considering 99% of them were not accepted into the camp's work force) and again, for sake of argument assuming 1 hour per muffle to cremate enough so that the cremains can be dropped to the ash collector below so the next batch can be introduced, this gives us an efficiency of 15 * 4 * 24 = 1440 corpses which is, LO AND BEHOLD, EXACTLY THE FIGURE LISTED IN THE JANISCH DOCUMENT (http://imgur.com/jSj3fsf) that tallies up the crematory capacity of Birkenau. Of course, my above example would leave the SK with only 23 hours, therefore the output would be 1380 but it's a close figure nonetheless. Clearly this was a theoretical number, and the actual performance of the crematorium was lower (the following document is another hint: http://imgur.com/d09KvVO), which is why we have the outdoor cremations going on when time constraints meant the SK did not have more than a day or two to cremate all those killed in the gas chamber (as well having to cremate the additional influx of corpses that kept coming from within the camp). But the actual capacity was not FAR lower as revisionist wisecrackers want to tell us, I am convinced definitely above 1k bodies per day as concerns Krema II and III each, but lower than the stated 1440. This still means a single crematorium could process most of its gassed in the span of 2 days, 3 at most. The other crematoriums (I, IV, V) had lower crematory capacities, but keep in mind their adjoining gas chambers were also smaller. Now, what would happen with all the ash? They were dumped into nearby ponds (there's a memorial next to them in Birkenau today to remind us), rivers (Vistula, Sola), strewn across fields and even used as winter salt on the roads leading to the camp, as Yehuda Bakon testified during the Eichmann trial (see my article attached to i.imgur.com/KxRpFZ5). Sonderkommando Shaul Chazan reports: “Every few days or once a week, a few German trucks with prisoners came by and took the ashes to the river to wipe out all the evidence. They say that somebody once asked what they were dumping into the river, and the answer was fish food. At first, we didnt know what they'd do with the bones and they were disposed of in the crematorium compound. A deep pit was dug in the yard and the bones were dumped there until an order was given to remove all the bones from the pit in order to pulverize them. At that stage, we removed the bones from a deep pit in the compound of Crematorium II [III] and what remained of them was hauled away in a truck” (Gideon Greif, "We Wept Without Tears")
Given that unlike Kremas I, IV and V, Kremas II and III had their gas chambers located below ground level, the buildings needed a way of hauling the corpses from the cellar to ground level, where the crematory ovens were located. We know from documentation that Krematorium III was equipped with an elevator from the company Gustav Linse, installed by the company Heinrich Messing in early summer 1943, a few months after the building was finished and began homicidal operation. In his holocaust denying book "Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity" (a nice piggybacking on holocaust scholar Robert Jan Van Pelt's "The Case for Auschwitz"), holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno argues that the flat-plate elevator "with a capacity of 300 kg" installed into crematorium 2 "is absolutely out of proportion when it comes to the gigantic figures of a mass extermination cited by van Pelt" (Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 54). It is noteworthy that the argument is not valid for crematorium 3, since there an elevator with 750 kg capacity (with optional upgrade to 1500 kg) was installed from the very beginning. Mattogno explains that for an: "average duration of five minutes for one complete operation (loading, upward journey, unloading, downward journey), the transportation of 2,000 bodies from the half-basement to the furnace hall...would have taken...some 33 hours" First of all, 300 kg was not the available capacity, but the "minimum payload" ordered by the construction office. That's a difference. The metalworking shop may have constructed the platform with a higher maximum payload. We don't have the technical documentation of the device, so we don't know. And even if its maximum payload was 300 kg, if it was properly constructed with safety factor, its actual maximum load that could have been exploited by the Sonderkommando prisoners was higher. The cables were designed for higher loads anyway, else the construction office would not have ordered a minimum, but a maximum load. Furthermore, it cannot be excluded that the payload of the elevator wasn't upgraded at some point. In short, the actual operation capacity of the elevator is far from certain and well established from German documents. Secondly, Mattogno does not explain why two strong Sonderkommando prisoners should have required at least 2 minutes for putting five corpses on the elevator's platform. This is 24s for one single corpse, which sounds patently absurd. All they had to do was to grab the legs or arms of the corpse, rotate by 180°, walk one or two steps and drop the corpse. This is done in few seconds. After un/loading these corpses on/off the elevator platform, they had time to get more bodies from the gas chamber if they were in the cellar, or haul the bodies into empty furnace muffles on ground level until the empty platform came back again. Thirdly, Mattogno assumed that it took 60s for a round trip of the elevator without the loading time. Actually, he misunderstood the estimation from an "anonymous architect" cited by Van Pelt in The Case for Auschwitz, p. 469. This Revisionist assumed that it took 30 s for a modern elevator round trip of one person for one floor, including loading of the (living) person. Mattogno understood that these 30s referred only to a single upward trip. So he doubled it to arrive at 60s for the roundtrip. But this is doublecounting, since the 30 s is already the time for the round-trip according to the anonymous architect. By the way, Mattogno's 30s for the upward trip translates into an average elevator speed of something like 0.1 m/s. It takes a power of about 300 W to lift 300 kg (neglecting the weight of the platform) in 30 s at a height of 3m. Yet, the engine installed in crematorium 2 to operate the elevator had 10 HP or about 7000 W (proof that Krema II's lift had 10HP will br provided in a document later). If Mattogno's assumption of load and speed were true, this elevator had an awfully poor efficiency. Thus, each of Mattogno's parameters assumed to estimate the time it took to transport 2000 bodies from the basement to the furnace is either unfounded or false. The loading capacity may have been higher than 300 kg, the elevator took likely less than 30s for the 2.6 m from the basement to the furnace hall and the time to un/load a corpse was certainly less than 24s. If we only correct Mattogno's loading time down to 12s (which seems still too long for something like lifting a corpse onto/off the elevator by two men, who may have been replaced once they got fatigued), the 2000 corpses were transported in less than 17 hours to the furnace hall, which is less than the actual bottleneck, the cremation, of these corpses took. Conclusion: The provisional elevator in crematorium 2 was very much capable of transporting 2000 corpses from the basement to the furnace hall in less than 20 hours. Carlo Mattogno's contrary conclusion is based on unfounded and false parameters determining the daily capacity of the elevator. Most seriously, he assumed the Sonderkommando prisoners were working in slow motion. It's entirely possible that Mattogno - at his present age and shape, as the man is in his sixties - would need twenty-four seconds to move 30 kg (= 60 kg corpse lifted by two) by say one meter. But certainly not the strongest guys in their early 20s and 30s selected from a pool of hundreds of people to become a Sonderkommando. The order for its Krema II's provisional elevator is to be found in the “Metal working” file, Annex 15 of Volume 11 of the Höss trial: "Order No 61 of 15/2/43 — POW camp Krematorium II/III BW 30. Subject: 1 goods lift with a minimum payload of 300 kg. including the fitting of suitable winches, cable and motor and the guide rail. Order No 2563/:146:/ of 26/1/43 from the Bauleitung. Order taken over from the former prisoners' metalworking shop. Completed on 13/3/43." It was subsequently replaced by a 1500 kg capacity Demag goods lift.
Very. Denier Carlo Mattogno has made the issue of cremation (together with that of the gas introduction openings of Krema II) to the central pillar of his rebuttal of mass extermination in Auschwitz - so much that it would “destroy his [Robert Jan Van Pelt’s] historical method in a radical way and completely refutes all the conclusions which are based upon it” (Auschwitz The Case For Sanity, p. 663). Since 1988, Mattogno has researched the cremation capacity and fuel consumption of the crematory ovens in Auschwitz. But he is nothing more than an elaborate liar 90% of holocaust deniers (and likewise common people on the other side of the argument) are too dumb to realize and therefore be in a position to refute. The crematoria in Auschwitz were operating with a high throughput of corpses in order to cope with the corpses from the extermination of the European Jews. With the term “high-throughput”, I mean nominal cremation times of < 40 min per (adult) corpse per oven opening (muffle). This time is less than the physiochemical processes of the incineration take at typical operating conditions of an oven. Therefore, these cremations are characterized by multiple cremation techniques, i.e. the simultaneous presence of more than one (adult) corpse in the main incineration chamber (for single cremations, the time to cremate an adult corpse was about 1 hour, see also letter Topf to Mauthausen of 1 November 1940, reproduced in I Forni Crematori di Auschwitz, Documentazione, p. 404). Most of the witnesses, who have testified about the operation of the crematory ovens in Auschwitz, have mentioned multiple cremation techniques - aside numerous Sonderkommando prisoners, also the Topf engineers Kurt Prüfer and Fritz Sander and the SS men Rudolf Höß, Erich Muhsfeldt and Pery Broad. According to Mattogno, the crematory ovens in Auschwitz “did not allow multiple cremations” and “even if multiple cremations had been possible in the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau, they would not have led to any gain in time or in fuel” (ATCFS, p. 285). However, several contemporary German sources provide evidence for high-throughput cremations intended/possible/carried out in crematory ovens in camps: On 14 July 1941, the Topf engineer Paul Erdmann provided the construction office Mauthausen with a cremation rate of 33 to 40 min per corpse “without overloading” the two-muffle oven. On 30 October 1941, the SS construction office Auschwitz noted that the planned crematorium 2 will have a cremation rate of 15 min per corpse. On 10 July 1942, the SS construction office Auschwitz informed the SS construction office Stutthof on the three-muffle oven that “an incineration takes about ½ hour according to the Topf company”. On 8 September 1942, the Topf engineer Kurt Prüfer noted nominal cremation rates of 30 min for the double-muffle oven, 22 min for the triple-muffle oven and 12 min for the 8-muffle oven (Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust, p. 442). On 24 September 1942, the Topf engineer Fritz Sander wrote to the Topf management that the concentration camps “help themselves with a large number of ovens/muffles and by stuffing several corpses in the individual muffles”. (Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust, p. 443) On 28 June 1943, a draft was prepared in the construction office Auschwitz according to which the cremation rate of the Topf two-muffle oven was 26 min per corpse and that of the three- and eight muffle oven 15 min per corpse (Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust, p. 460). List of cremations from Theresienstadt between 3 October to 15 November 1943 according to which the cremation time was less than 35 min in 72% cases (Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 279). On 4 February 1944, oven builder Hans Kori wrote to the Majdanek concentration camp that the cremation time of his ovens can be halved to 30 min per corpse by employing multiple cremations. It should be emphasized that these sources contradict Mattogno’s central hypothesizes that the cremation rate of the Topf two-, three- and eight-muffle ovens were not exceeding one corpse per 60 min, or that multiple cremations were not possible or at least not beneficial in crematory ovens. Revisionists usually tend to discard post-war testimonial evidence in favor of incomplete, ambiguous and unclear contemporary German sources in order to deny German atrocities. In this case, however, even most of the relevant contemporary German documents are too problematic from a Revisionist point of view, since they corroborate significant parts of testimonial evidence and further suggest death rates for Auschwitz exceeding that of natural deaths and thus supporting unnatural deaths and mass murder in Auschwitz. Instead of taking these German documents as basis for a discussion of the cremation capacity of the crematoria in Auschwitz (as one would intuitively do), Mattogno brushes them away as unreliable . The evidence for high-throughput incinerations in Auschwitz consists of numerous testimonial evidence supported by the cited documentary evidence and demographic evidence indicating the disappearance of over a million people in Auschwitz. Such multiple corroborating evidence can be considered as strong by any standard. If numerous people of different backgrounds report a certain incident at numerous occasions and under numerous conditions, if this is to a significant extent backed up by contemporary written sources from authorities and if it fully explains a demographic loss of over a million people otherwise unexplained, you clearly need some serious evidence that weighs way more. And here is where Mattogno’s problems begin. A technical/physical/chemical argument brought forward by an autodidact on the field of cremation (supported by Franco Deana of whom nothing else is known other than the academic title dott. Ing.) never peer-reviewed by recognized experts can hardly be considered as powerful. Mattogno probably interprets the lack of expert response to his hypothesizes on the crematory ovens as confirmation of the same. However, it is actually the high improbability of his assertions compared to the solid evidence for mass extermination in Auschwitz and – most importantly – the extremely low impact and publicity of his work, why there is so little attention paid to him. On the technique of introducing a fresh corpse into the muffle after the previous corpse has been dehydrated and enters the combustion phase (as he acknowledges it was done in the crematorium in Theresienstadt), he says that “such a procedure was impossible in the Topf crematorium ovens, both because they were coke-fired and because the dimensions of the muffle precluded it” (ATCFS, p.280). However, he provides no explanation of why it was not possible to have one corpse in combustion phase and one corpse in dehydration phase in the muffle if the oven is coke-fired instead of naphtha. Likewise, Mattogno does NOT demonstrate that the muffle was too small. It is guesswork, but that’s not enough to refute the solid evidence on cremation cycles as short as 20 to 30 min. On the second multiple cremation technique, the introduction of several fresh corpses into the muffle at the same time, Mattogno argues that 1.) it was thermochemically not possible to dehydrate multiple corpses in the muffle, 2.) it was spatially not possible to cremate multiple corpses into the muffle and 3.) it did not decrease the cremation time anyway. For the thermochemical argument, Mattogno estimates the amount of energy required to evaporate the water contained in four corpses per muffle, which would be way less than the amount of energy supplied from the coke gasifier and would lead to a critical decrease of the muffle temperature. He discusses four corpses per muffle, because the figure was supplied by Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber. However, whether Tauber’s figure of 4-5 corpses per muffle is historically correct or exaggerated is not essential for the question of mass extermination in Auschwitz. As rule, one needs to address the minimum claim, where a narrative can still be supported, in order to refute the narrative. In other words, Mattogno should have discussed the heat balance with 2 instead of 4 corpses per muffle. But the argument is also fundamentally flawed. Mattogno has not taken into account a major contribution to the heat balance after fresh corpses are pushed into the openings according to testimonial evidence – the combustion of dehydrated corpses already inside the muffle. On the second point, Mattogno claims that “if two or three bodies had been introduced into one muffle, the corpses would have blocked…the passage of the combustion products coming from the gasifiers” (p. 285). According to Mattogno, the muffles of the three-muffle ovens were 70 cm wide, and it is entirely unclear and not obvious at all why two corpses on top of each other or even two corpses with reversed head-feet direction next to each other would have blocked any openings located in the side of the muffles. Mattogno once again failed to demonstrate his assertion. Mattogno’s last point (“multiple cremations...would not have led to any gain in time or in fuel”, p. 285) is an excellent case example of how not to perform a "rigorous scientific treatment of the matter" (ATCFS, p.229). Mattogno wants to test the hypothesis if multiple cremations as reported for the Auschwitz crematoria would have reduced the nominal cremation time or the required fuel and cites some information on slaughter house incinerators mentioned in Wilhelm Heepke’s “Die Kadaververnichtungsanstalten” (1905). However, the operation principle of the cadaver incinerators was significantly different to the one reported for the crematoria in Auschwitz. The data cited by Heepke refers to incinerators that were loaded once with cadavers with a mass equal to 7 – 9 corpses when scaled to the floor area of the Topf ovens (or > 9 corpses when scaled to the volume). In contrast to this, the Topf ovens were only loaded with a fraction of this number of corpses (2-4), but reloaded after a well-defined time (corresponding to the end of the dehydration of the previous load). The benefit of this well-defined reloading (but which required a higher man power) was saving of external fuel, since the combustion of the dehydrated corpses was efficiently exploited as a source of internal fuel. There is no evidence that this technique was carried out for the slaughter house incinerators. Hence, the data provided by Heepke cannot test for the impact of multiple cremations as performed in Auschwitz on the amount of required external fuel. Keeping the size of the muffle and the ratio surface area to volume of the cadavers constant, one would assume that the cremation rate increases upon increasing the amount of mass while increasing the amount of energy until it saturates or even decreases because a) the necessary energy can longer be supplied, b) because the fresh air injection or exhaust gas removal becomes limiting or c) because the ratio of the available surface area to bulk drops below a critical value. In other words, there is no general answer to the question if multiple cremations increase the cremation rate, but it depends on the actual regime an oven is operating and if sufficient energy is supplied. At low loadings, the cremation rate will increase, at high loadings it will be saturated or decrease. The fact that numerous eyewitnesses have reported high throughput cremations being carried out in Auschwitz is sufficient evidence to assume that the Topf ovens in Auschwitz-Birkenau were still in a low loading regime with beneficial impact of increasing load on the cremation rate. The additional energy was obviously supplied by the combustion of the dehydrated corpses from the earlier batch. It is up to Revisionists to demonstrate that the Topf ovens in Birkenau were already saturated with one adult corpse and that any increase of the number of corpses would have resulted in a proportional increase of the cremation time even if extra heat was supplied by the exothermic reaction of the previously dried corpses, if they disagree with this empirical knowledge from numerous eyewitnesses. Mattogno also argues that the durability of the Birkenau ovens (and lack of documents on rebuilding the brickwork) allowed for only a maximum 92,000 cremations. The figure is based on the limit of 2,000 cremations per muffle provided in an article by Rudolf Jakobskötter from 1941 on electrical Topf ovens (ATCFS, p. 298). However, the argument does not take into account the higher loading per introduction as well as the reduced thermal stress on the refractories (compared to civilian use of crematory ovens), since they were subjected to less temperature changes during a) the cremation of fresh and dehydrated corpses at the same time in the muffle reducing the temperature peaks from the different phases of the cremation process and b) continuous operation. The latter was also pointed out by the Topf engineer Erdmann in the letter of 14 July 1941 to the concentration camp Mauthausen: “It is doing no harm to carry out cremations day and night one after the another, if required. The fact is that the fireclay materials last longer if there is a uniform temperature in the oven all the time.” In conclusion, it is clear that Mattogno has not performed well on this issue of the capacity of the crematory ovens in Auschwitz that he defined as of prime importance and that he studied for the last 3 decades. He can't explain the paper trail & the numerous sources on high throughput cremations, nor does he provide a scientific treatment of why high throughput cremations are impossible.
Short answer: Yes. Holocaust deniers often circulate this sketch of David Olere in fits of laughter saying it is impossible to flames to shoot out of a crematory chimney, and that they also don't emit thick smoke either. They also attack Hollywood depictions of Auschwitz such as a scene from Schindler's List that show smoking crematory chimneys. So on one side deniers use witness testimony of smoke and fire as proof that they're swindlers, as they go on to claim crematory chimneys do not emit either. And on the other side deniers use the lack of thick smoke and fire on aerial photography as proof there was no extermination going on because if there was, huge plumes of smoke should be visible. Notice the hypocrisy? What we need to find out, is if 1940s Topf & Sons crematory chimneys were physically capable of emitting smoke and even fire. Let's first address the fire issue. According to head of B&L Cremation Systems Inc., Dr. Steve Looker, older crematoria were quite capable of shooting out flames if overloaded, a phenomenon he called a "candle." His own product is designed to avoid this. Even so, he allowed that if he actively tried for it, there is a decent chance he could produce the effect as well. This contradicts the revisionist "expert claim" that flames cannot shoot out of crematorium chimneys. Auschwitz survivor Arnold Friedman, prisoner number B14515's account of fourteen foot flames delivered as testimony at the first false news trial of Ernst Zundel, however, could be considered hyperbole (the height in numbers), were it not for another overlooked fact: an actual chimney fire caused by the build-up of highly combustible creosote due to the coke-fired nature of the Auschwitz crematory ovens. As the smoke rises through the chimney it cools, causing water, carbon, and volatiles to condense on the interior surfaces of the chimney. The black oily residue that builds up is referred to as creosote. Over the course of a season creosote deposits can become several inches thick. Since creosote is highly combustible, a thick accumulation creates a fire hazard which then ignites—causing a chimney fire. In order to properly maintain chimneys and heaters that burn wood or carbon-based fuels, the creosote buildup must be removed. 73% of heating fires and 25% of all residential fires in the United States are caused by failure to clean out creosote buildup. Since 1990, creosote buildup has caused 75% fewer fires. This is partly due to the use of efficient wood-burning stoves that fully combust the carbon from fuel, and partly due to the use of Class A flues, insulated double wall stainless steel pipe. Can't say the same about 1940s Topf crematory ovens. Therefore, the flames observed could also have been the result of a normal chimney fire, caused by an ignition of the built-up creosote in the chimney. As stated, creosote is condensed particles of smoke that stick to the inner wall of the chimney. Creosote is highly combustible, and can result in a long, hot, destructive chimney fire. The documented problems that occurred with the Auschwitz chimneys - cracking, collapse of liners - suggest that there were chimney fires which resulted from poor maintenance. Now, let's talk about smoke. If you look at the 1943 photograph of Krematorium IV shown earlier, you will see the tip of the smokestacks is covered in soot. Is that proof enough or do you need more? Also, keep in mind that smoke and open flame was also emanating from the outdoor cremation pits, and these were located near the Krematoria (e.g. V and its surroundings). I include the possibility of the witness seeing this activity and attributing it to the smokestack of Krema V. Given that this area was off-limits to the average prison inmate, i.e. they couldn't get close to judge where exactly the smoke and where the fire was coming from, it is no surprise that they attributed it to the crematorium itself. Regarding Arnold Friedman's statement about being able to guess the physical makeup and even nationality of the cremated by the color of the smoke (as quoted from a newspaper article in the 'Globe and Mail' Toronto, January 12, 1985), one has to keep in mind that factors like the amount of coal used, the amount of hours since the crematory had begun its current batch of incineration and any physiochemical differences when it comes to the incineration of emaciated musulmans and somewhat well-fed civilians, can explain observed variations in the shade of the emanating smoke. These observations, if I may say so humbly, are a more realistic interpretation of the testimony than using blunt denier rhetoric (as e.g. expressed by codoh's resident troll Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis) calling Arnold Friedman a crank and a liar.
This is the report about crematorium activity in the Gusen camp. "Leichen" in the table's upper row means corpses (of all ages); the table lists the daily number of corpses cremated during autumn 1941. What is particularly interesting about Mattogno's methodology is that he was quite willing to accept this timesheet as authoritative when he was trying to make arguments about the amount of coke that would be needed to incinerate the bodies of the gassed at Auschwitz by extrapolating this chart of Gusen to there. Now, however, that this timesheet shows that the Topf ovens were able to function in a very timely capacity (namely, that the SINGLE Topf double-muffle oven in Gusen is capable of cremating 806 corpses in 18 days, or an average of 45 corpses per day or 2 corpses an hour if we consider 24/7 non-stop cremation...which wasn't the case, and therefore a higher corpse incineration rate per hour since you have to account for the downtime but still reach the numbers listed), Mattogno claims that such numbers are "technically absurd." Classic example of denier cherry-picking. We don't know how the Gusen workers decided to add coke to the ovens. At certain times they may have added more than was necessary. The idea that how much coke an average corpse required can be derived through a simple division is absurd. Also, there is only information that states how many wheelbarrows of coke were used, but no weight is attached to the individual barrows. Rather, the weight of each barrow-load is listed as a round figure of 60 kg. Certain barrow-loads of coke could have weighed less than others. Part of the theory that Mattogno is advancing is that each coke load weighed the same. Case in point: On October 28, 1941, 18 barrows of coke were needed to cremate 30 corpses, while just a day earlier, 30 corpses could be cremated using only 17 barrows, or upto 60 kgs less coke. In a similar fashion, on November 1st, 1941, 38 corpses could be cremated with 21 barrows of coke while on the following day 42 corpses could be cremated with the same amount of barrows, and on the day following that a further 2 barrows less were needed. Source: Austrian Bundesministerium für Inneres, document B/12/31, Archiv der Gedenkstätten, Konzentrationslager Mauthausen. Thanks to Daniel Keren For context, see: http://www.phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/response-to-mattogno/
The way you should read this map is as follows: Each semi-circle represents one oven muffle. Each rectangle, wherein these muffles are contained, represents one oven. Each oven bears the name of the crematory company that manufactured it. The letter T stands for the manufacturer Topf & Söhne, while the letter K stands for the manufacturer Kori. It is clear from the map that e.g. Auschwitz-Birkenau had 3 double-muffle ovens, 10 triple-muffle ovens and 2 eight-muffle ovens, all made by Topf & Sons. To sum up the entire cremation debate in the simplest of terms, consider this: If baking 1 pizza in 1 oven takes 1 hour and 1 kg of coke, then it is true that stuffing more pizzas in the oven will make it take longer than 1 hour. E.g. 4 pizzas in the oven take 3 hours to bake. So while the principle of more muffle content prolonging the baking process is correct, we are still looking at 4 pizzas in 3 hours, i.e. 1 pizza in 45 minutes. Even though 1 pizza was not done in 45 minutes, 4 pizzas were in 3 hours, which still averages 1 pizza = 45 minutes, and therefore a higher output in, say, a week than baking 1 pizza at a time. The same can be applied to the coke required. More matter to bake equals more coke, but baking more at once averages to less coke per pizza. And that, is a very offensive, but in my opinion easy method to grasp the issue at hand. Because I have met my fair share of deniers who claim if 1 pizza takes 1 hour to bake and requires 1kg of coke, then 2 pizzas take 2 hours to bake and require 2 kgs of coke.
When a denier asks you to provide evidence beyond mere testimony that crematory workers in Auschwitz stuffed more than one body at a time into a muffle, show him this. It is proof of multi-corpse incineration per muffle in Auschwitz I ("man hilft sich [...] mit einem Vollstopfen der einzelnen Muffel mit mehreren Leichen" translates to "one is trying to handle the situation by stuffing individual muffles with multiple corpses"). Now watch the denier move the goal posts to "well this doesn't prove it happened all the time and in the other crematoriums, let alone other camps as well". Welcome to debating holocaust deniers 101. So let's let the Sonderkommando speak, shall we? Henryk Tauber described how the muffles were filled with multiple bodies: "We burned the bodies of children with those of adults. First we put in two adults, then as many children as the muffle could contain. It was sometimes as many as five or six. We used this procedure so that the bodies of children would not be placed directly on the grid bars, which were relatively far apart. In this way we prevented the children from falling through into the ash bin. Women's bodies burned much better and more quickly than those of men. For this reason, when a charge was burning badly, we would introduce a woman's body to accelerate the combustion."[1] Filip Müller, also a member of a Sonderkommando that cremated bodies, confirmed the process of multiple cremations in his memoirs. The bodies were: "...sorted according to their combustibility: for the bodies of the well-nourished were to help burn the emaciated. Under the direction of the Kapos, the bearers began sorting the dead into four stacks. The largest consisted mainly of strong men, the next in size of women, then came children, and lastly a stack of dead Mussulmans, emaciated and nothing but skin and bones. This technique was called 'express work,' a designation thought up by the Kommandoführers and originating from experiments carried out in crematorium 5 in the autumn of 1943. The purpose of these experiments was to find a way of saving coke. [...] Thus the bodies of two Mussulmans were cremated together with those of two children or the bodies of two well-nourished men together with that of an emaciated woman, each load consisting of three, or sometimes, four bodies." [2] Source: [1] Robert Jan van Pelt, "The Van Pelt Report" (“IV Attestations, 1945-46”). [2] Filip Müller, "Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers" (Ivan R. Dee, 1979), pp. 98, 99. Also, see: https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/ab4-civilian-ovens-comparison/
The left document talks about permission being granted for a vehicle to bring "material for special treatment" from Dessau. Which is the town where there was the ironically named Zyklon-B manufacturing plant "Dessauer Zuckerraffinerie GmbH" (Dessau sugar refinery ltd.) for the company DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung - German Society for Pest Control). The right document, just 2 months later, talks about bringing material for "Jewish relocation" Interestingly, Sonderbehandlung changes to Judenumsiedlung in just a span of 2 months...well, what is it? Is special treatment being administered or are Jews being relocated?
The Zyklon-B that was the principal agent in the mass murder of human beings in Auschwitz, Majdanek and Mauthausen was manufactured by the German companies DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung; "German Society for Pest Control") and Degussa. Holocaust deniers often go on long 'appeal to reason' monologues stating why the Germans, despite being such a technologically advanced and efficient people, resorted to an insecticide to kill people rather than something more efficient. But what is more efficient? Bottles of pure CO that are expensive as hell? Shooting Jews on the spot? The latter was done to over a million people in many parts of Eastern Europe - as part of Einsatzgruppen and massacres like Babi Yar, Rumbula, Ponary and so on. But the Nazis are people too, and killing unarmed civilians at gunpoint over, and over again takes a psychological toll over time on anyone. Nazis were not immune to PTSD. Himmler's concern for the psychological well-being of his subordinates is recorded, many of whom were cracking up after shooting men, women and children day in day out. This is why a more industrial method of mass killing was devised based on experience drawn from the T4 Euthanasia program and experiments at Mogilev, where the killer doesn't have to look at the faces of people whose life he is going to take. And speaking of efficiency, what could have done the job "more simple and easier" - and more inconspicuous, than ordering some extra cans of a standard insecticide that had to be stockpiled at concentration camps anyway for disinfestations, dropped through some openings into basements packed with people? Nothing, if you ask me. taken from: http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/mmg/mmg.asp?id=1141&tid=249 So what is hydrogen cyanide? At room temperature, hydrogen cyanide is a volatile, colorless-to-blue liquid (also called hydrocyanic acid). It rapidly becomes a gas that can produce death in minutes if breathed. Hydrogen cyanide is used in making fibers, plastics, dyes, pesticides, and other chemicals, and as a fumigant to kill rats. It is also used in electroplating metals and in developing photographic film. What immediate health effects can be caused by exposure to hydrogen cyanide? Breathing small amounts of hydrogen cyanide may cause headache, dizziness, weakness, nausea, and vomiting. Larger amounts may cause gasping, irregular heartbeats, seizures, fainting, and rapid death. Generally, the more serious the exposure, the more severe the symptoms. Similar symptoms may be produced when solutions of hydrogen cyanide are ingested or come in contact with the skin. taken from: http://www.cyanidecode.org/cyanide-facts/environmental-health-effects The LD50 for gaseous hydrogen cyanide is 100-300 parts per million. Inhalation of cyanide in this range results in death within 10-60 minutes, with death coming more quickly as the concentration increases. Inhalation of 2,000 parts per million hydrogen cyanide causes death within one minute. The LD50 for ingestion is 50-200 milligrams, or 1-3 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. For contact with unabraded skin, the LD50 is 100 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Although the time, dose and manner of exposure may differ, the biochemical action of cyanide is the same upon entering the body: Once in the bloodstream, cyanide forms a stable complex with a form of cytochrome oxidase, an enzyme that promotes the transfer of electrons in the mitochondria of cells during the synthesis of ATP. Without proper cytochrome oxidase function, cells cannot utilize the oxygen present in the bloodstream, resulting in cytotoxic hypoxia or cellular asphyxiation. The lack of available oxygen causes a shift from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism, leading to the accumulation of lactate in the blood. The combined effect of the hypoxia and lactate acidosis is depression of the central nervous system that can result in respiratory arrest and death. At higher lethal concentrations, cyanide poisoning also affects other organs and systems in the body, including the heart. Description: Colorless gas or colorless or pale-blue liquid Warning properties: Almond odor at >l ppm; inadequate warning for acute or chronic exposure Molecular weight: 27.03 daltons Boiling point (760 mm Hg): 78ºF (25.6ºC) Freezing point: 8ºF (-13.4ºC) Specific gravity (liquid): 0.69 (water = 1) Vapor pressure: 630 mm Hg at 68ºF (20ºC) Gas density: 0.94 (air = 1) Water solubility: Flammable at temperatures >0ºF (-18ºC) Flammability: flammable limits 3.9% to 21.8% at room temperature Flammable range: 5.6% to 40% (concentration in air)
As if all this wasn't enough, Holocaust deniers still cling on to their belief that nobody was gassed in any gas chamber anywhere in the Nazi camps. So the argument they make to support their claim that nobody was gassed is, that in the camps that used Zyklon-B (HCN) to gas humans (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Stutthof), a blue pigment has formed in the concrete walls of rooms that both deniers and historians agree were used for delousing. However, no such visible pigment is found on the walls of the actual homicidal gas chambers (e.g. Mauthausen, or Krema I in Auschwitz Stammlager, or the semi-collapsed interior of Krema II's gas chamber in Birkenau), something also proven in the findings of the Leuchter report, the Rudolf report (both are deniers who took samples illegally by chiseling directly into the concrete) and the report done by the reputable Krakow Institute for Forensics (KIFR), although trace amounts have been found in the walls of the homicidal gas chambers in all three reports - just "not enough" (according to denier standards) compared to the delousing chambers. The deniers' arguments are addressed and refuted in the picture above. Which leaves us with the question as to why iron-cyanide compounds were even found in these homicidal gas chambers if no homicidal gassing had occurred there at all, and these rooms were "just" morgues according to the deniers? The deniers have carefully constructed an alternate explanation, but one that is never consistent: according to some deniers, the morgues were really just morgues and the trace amounts come from the fumigated clothing of the corpses stored therein. Except in Birkenau, corpses were stored naked, and cremated naked. Other deniers instead claim the morgues, just like many other buildings in the camp complex, were routinely fumigated to prevent typhus from spreading. Really? You "routinely" fumigate morgues? Name me one morgue operator who agrees - especially considering Zyklon-B is an insecticide and NOT a bactericide, therefore it makes no sense to fumigate a morgue routinely used to store corpses (as deniers claim). Yet other deniers make the claim that these rooms marked as morgues on blueprints were *also* used for delousing clothing, but only occasionally and therefore the minuscule amount of residue. This lack of consistency among revisionists is a clear example of them grasping at straws. If you cannot even form a proper consensus amongst yourselves, how on earth will you achieve the feat of rewriting history? So what is the real explanation, then? Why haven't "enough amounts" of Prussian Blue staining, so as to become visible, formed on the walls of the homicidal gas chambers? The answer is a combination of several factors, but let's first look at the following: Hydrocyanic acid is a very weak acid, and accordingly its salts dissolve easily in stronger acids. Even carbonic acid, which is formed as a reaction of carbon dioxide (higher levels of which will be in a room that was filled with people) with water (which I will get to in a second), will dissolve ferro-cyanide. Carbonic acid is CO2 + H2O = H2CO3. In Dr. Richard Greens essay "Leuchter, Rudolf, and the iron blues" he points out these rooms were washed. Which is also logical, because after a homicidal gassing and the clearing of corpses, the room will neither look nor smell fine enough to continue to pass for a harmless shower room, which is the deception required to get the next batch of victims into it. Evidence of hosing down gas chambers during cleanup from witnesses: “The water tap was in the corridor and a rubber hose was run from it to wash the floor of the gas chamber...” (Henryk Tauber, p.484 Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers) “The Sonderkommando squad, outfitted with large rubber boots, lined up around the hill of bodies and flooded it with powerful jets of water. This was necessary because the final act of those who die by drowning or by gas is an involuntary defecation....” (Miklos Nyszili, p-52, "Auschwitz") "Once the gas chamber had been cleared, it must be hosed free of all traces of blood and excrement-but mainly blood-and then it must be whitewashed with a quickdrying paint. This step is crucial and it is done each time the gas chamber is emptied, for the dying have scratched and gouged the walls in their death throes. The walls are embedded with blood and bits of flesh, and none of the next transport must suspect that he is walking into anything other than a shower. This takes two or three hours.” (p.46, Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando) So what have we established so far? We have established that the walls of the homicidal gas chambers were subjected to a different treatment (regularly washing down with water to get rid of stains, even repainting) compared to the walls of the delousing chambers where none of this was necessary. Next, we need to look at the time factor within which a high concentration of HCN was present: A typical delousing cycle lasted for many HOURS while a typical homicidal gassing took approx. 20 minutes (followed by ventilation and several hours of clearing bodies during which HCN levels would have dropped considerably). So we're left with the fact that walls being exposed at best 20 minutes at a time to high concentrations of HCN before ventilation and subsequently washed, compared to walls being exposed to HCN for many hours (delousing) would obviously, over time, react differently. THIS is why you'll find visible cyanide residue on delousing chamber walls and none visible (yet trace amounts still existing as per samples taken) on the walls of the homicidal gas chambers. There is no equation known to chemists with which anyone can independently calculate that "X amount of cyanide residue should permanently form for Y hours of exposure to HCN gas". Therefore, holocaust deniers using the amount of cyanide residue present on brick walls as proof of how much HCN was ever present in this chamber, is not science at all. Deniers have one more argument left: "Well, what about the small homicidal gas chambers at Stutthof or Majdanek? They display visible PB staining. If relatively few people were gassed here in comparison to Birkenau, why has so much PB formed? HUH?????" The answer, again, is simple: historiography points out to these chambers being dual-purpose ones: Homicidal gassings happened here, AS WELL AS delousing. This is the position holocaust historians hold. But holocaust historians do not ever claim the homicidal gas chambers at Birkenau or Mauthausen were also used for delousing. We move on with what Dr. Green has to say: "Rudolf was unable to create Prussian blue with brick and cyanide in his own experiments. The presence of Prussian blue in at least some of the delousing chambers is interesting, but the current arguments presented by Rudolf continue to assume that HCN concentration is the sole variable that caused this, which is clearly not any kind of consensus among chemists worldwide. It needs to be established beyond doubt that Prussian blue would ALWAYS form beyond a certain concentration under specified conditions. Concluding that the lack of Prussian blue in the homicide chambers means that cyanide gas was not used in them at lethal concentrations requires concrete proof that Prussian blue would have 100% had to have formed under operating conditions, including not just concentration, but also duration, temperature, humidity and pH. I do not see that enough has been done to establish this. In this matter, the burden of proof is on the "activist" to demonstrate this precondition." - Dr. Richard Green, in his essay It is also not the cyanide which alone causes the pigmentation - it is the reaction with wall compounds which must be present in certain conditions. For instance, Rudolf did not find visible PB in the delousing chambers of Dachau. So once again, to summarize, Germar Rudolf and revisionist "scientists" need to prove to the world that: 1) It is Hydrogen Cyanide gas ALONE that forms Prussian Blue residue on concrete walls in the first place 2) Even low concentrations of HCN, e.g. 300ppm will, over 2 years, lead to its formation 3) Even low exposure times (< 1 hour) will, over 2 years, lead to its formation 4) Even at temperatures and humidities present in the homicidal gas chambers, PB will form over 2 years 5) Cleaning the walls will not prevent PB from forming. Or if it prevents the PB from forming, that cleaning the walls after the bodies had been cleared would be too late to prevent the PB from forming. 6) Relating to point 5), that enough HCN was still present in the room after the ventilation system had begun doing its job to still contribute to the PB formation process as the bodies were being cleared. 7) Their research meets the standards of the scientific method, i.e. is nicely protocoled, reproducible, and peer reviewed (I am sure they can think of ways to camouflage the intent of their paper so that third party chemists from e.g. developing nations can independently review their paper and judge the accuracy of the methods and conclusions without being informed of any underlying motives) Until they can present these results - and being barred from Auschwitz is not an excuse because they can recreate these conditions in any lab or even a shed - their findings so far, are meaningless to science. Therefore, I daresay case closed. If you're still not satisfied about refuting Leuter and Rudolf, see: http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/blue/ http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/not-the-science/index.shtml http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/cyanide/cyanide.002 http://www.nizkor.org/features/techniques-of-denial/blue.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140704024940/http://holocaust-history.org/irving-david/rudolf/affweb.pdf
"Revisionists" like Fred Leuchter or Robert Faurisson take great pains to emphasize again and again how many safety measures and protocols a homicidal gassing in an American gas chamber required, how "complicated" it was and so on and so forth and use this to make their case that therefore, homicidal gassings per se are nigh impossible to be done, let alone en masse, in a room of far simpler making. Interestingly, these are the very same people who have no trouble believing in the existence of delousing chambers which also lacked the kind of doors American gas chambers had, and were often located in even closer vicinity to inmate barracks in the Nazi camps. And for the record anyone who has studied the history of gas chambers in America will know that initially, before chambers like the above were built, people (and by people I mean sometimes up to 2, were successfully gassed in normal concrete rooms, some even with glass windows. E.g. see following image: http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/nevada.jpg Germar Rudolf is also one whose theory is based on the fact that American gas chambers delivered much higher concentrations of HCN to kill a death row inmate than is the required minimum lethal dosage, and because these inmates took several minutes to die despite breathing deeply and calmly (and therefore a similar amount of time as the gassing victims of Nazi camps), he comes to the conclusion that similar high levels of HCN would have to have been present in the gas chambers of e.g. Birkenau (rather than 300ppm) to kill everyone in such a short amount of time, to make his argument that higher levels of iron-cyanide compounds (prussian blue) should have therefore formed in the gas chamber walls. But he fails to realize this: If the human lethal minimum is 300 ppm for a clinical result defined as immediate death or death in minutes, then the hugely increased ppm for penal gassing in US gas chambers cannot better the outcome. The man will die when the lethal minimum has arrested his breathing process. Therefore the lethal minimum will achieve the same outcome as a much higher ppm saturation. The penal quantities are to ensure the victim's distress is minimised and that lethal minimum is inhaled as fast as possible. The Nazis had no similar altruistic values, and you CANNOT dismiss the premise that if the lethal minimum achieved the similar knock-down times in Birkenau, then that is reasonable evidence that all that was required was the lethal minimum applied in the time necessary to do the job - not the penal overdose, used for moral and medical propriety. In other words: if 8000ppm of HCN is present in a gas chamber rather than 300ppm, this doesnt mean the person inhaling it will die 26 times faster. Because around 300 ppm is the minimum required HCN concentration in the air so that it comes straight into the victim's lungs and inhibits his ability to process air into oxygen at cellular level, and this takes his body 2 minutes, namely breathing shut-down and clinical death - is 270 ppm, according to literature (USEPA; Ambient Water Quality Criteria Doc: Cyanides p.C-7 (1980) EPA 440/5-80-037). So if the fastest you can bring about death is 300 ppm because that's all you need to cause an immediate shut-down of the body's oxygen-related processes, then 5000 ppm, 8,000 ppm or 20,000 ppm will not do that job any faster because 300 does it in the minimum amount of time it takes that level of poison to cross the blood-air barrier and paralyse cellular respiration. So this kind of reverse-engineering argument of "amount of HCN present in an American gas chamber + minutes it took for the inmate to die means less concentration results in a much longer killing process" is BASELESS UNSCIENTIFIC NONSENSE. Once again, the height of scientific holocaust revisionism debunked.
Here is the (in big letters) labeled blueprint of Krematorium II, designed by Walter Dejaco and Fritz Karl Ertl, whose original survived the war and is available in the Auschwitz archives. Holocaust deniers will be quick to point out that the rooms in question are labeled 'Leichenkeller' (morgues; literally corpse cellars) and not 'Gaskeller', but we'll get to those in a moment. First, remember that all the forensic reports conducted found trace amounts of iron-cyanide compounds in the samples taken from the gas chambers. Why were even trace amounts there, if according to the deniers nobody was gassed? Holocaust deniers have an answer for that: the morgues were fumigated a couple of times, just like all other rooms in the Auschwitz complex were, including prisoner barracks, as a precautionary method to combat typhus. The revisionist/denier explanation is that the gas chambers were morgues for typhus victims. "Where there's typhus and attempts to battle it, there should be traces of a well known insecticide, correct? Therefore trace amounts of cyanides were found in the concrete walls despite nobody being gassed here. Zyklon was used to kill lice which one would expect be found on the bodies and clothing of people who died of typhus. Zyklon fumigation may have been utilized in these rooms for exactly the same reasons it was utilized in many other parts of the camp." But why would you disinfect corpses you are going to cremate anyway? Let that sink in for a while. Okay, so maybe the clothes are still useful. So, why not remove the clothes, and disinfect them in the already existing disinfection facilities? Why are morgues needed for this? Is it because you don't want the Sonderkommando handling the diseased bodies to get infected? Is that it? Why, it would be awfully considerate of the Nazis to expend additional Zyklon-B to prevent the Sonderkommando from getting infected, only to kill them later, given the short lifespan Sonderkommandos had in the first place. But even if the Nazis were so considerate, there's just two more problems: First off, disinfecting a morgue that will be infected the next moment when new typhus-ridden corpses will be brought in seems rather like a Sisyphean task. Secondly, HCN is not a bactericide, therefore useless on disinfecting anything dead - it is well known that lice flee the human body upon death. Furthermore, non-gas chamber related deaths in Birkenau yielded bodies that were transported naked to the crematoria - lice tend to cling to clothes most of all: not present by the time the body gets to the morgue. Sonderkommando were never spending time undressing corpses before hauling them into the furnaces, nor did they haul them into the furnaces clothed. Therefore, there is absolutely zero reason to fumigate a morgue for lice. HCN has no use in a morgue, period. So the argument that it is just as valuable to fumigate a morgue as it is to fumigate a barrack room doesn't hold. It's completely pointless. Yet another issue that speaks against delousing bodies (clothed or not) infected by typhus in the morgue where they were supposedly stored is because in actuality, the bodies never even entered it. No need for them to enter the morgue, because in Birkenau there were 4 crematoria with 46 muffles (2x [5x3] + 2x[1x8]). To understand where I am going with this, taking one of the revisionists' favorite documents, the number of *officially registered* 'natural' deaths in the entirety of 1943 was 36,000, i.e. less than 100 per day. More than one adult body could be cremated in one muffle, as is testified to, and as a simple measurement of the dimensions of the muffles indicate. Nor did these bodies arrive all at once, but were carted over from their various places of death in the camp to the crematoria by dedicated corpse-carrying commandos ("Leichenkommando"), whose existence is documented and witnessed. Ultimately this leaves us with no other interpretation than that the rooms marked in the surviving Krema blueprints as 'morgues' (Leichenkeller) were actually in use for other purposes, i.e. a place for people to get undressed (Auskleideraum) and a place to gas them (Vergasungskeller). But we're not done. There are deniers who argue that the morgues were actually used occasionally as morgues, and occasionally as disinfection facilities, therefore being able to explain the cyanide traces for the gas chambers that showed up in the Leuchter, Rudolf and Krakow reports in that they came from deliberate processes (delousing of clothing) having taken place there, rather than routine building fumigation. First off, we have plenty of disinfection rooms known by everyone in the camp as such, both in Auschwitz I and in Birkenau (e.g. Zentralsauna). Their argument also includes the flow of bodies from the Leichenkommandos having to be diverted to the Leichenkeller, because they're gullible enough to believe denier nonsense about very slow cremation speeds (i.e. one corpse at a time, several hours per incineration based on the average times taken from modern civilian crematories following all procedures, ovens constantly breaking down or having to be cleaned and so on). But then they have caught themselves on the horns of a dilemma: If the cremation speeds were so slow that bodies had to be stored in the Leichenkeller temporarily, then the morgues would have been in use. Therefore, a delousing - underground in the case of Krema II and III - would have disrupted this for a minimum of 24 hours, since a lice-disinfestation takes that long. Can the deniers care to explain how not a single crematorium worker claims that these rooms were morgues? There isn't a single document spelling out that '100 bodies were stored here on Tuesday' - clearly there was no need for the Nazis to destroy such a mundane document among their meticulous records. So, all they've got is a dodgy coulda-woulda-shoulda that doesn't have any external evidence to back it up, documentary or testimony. Whereas the conventional explanation has more than 150 witnesses and a number of documents. Personally, I like corroboration. It's the bread and butter of historiography as well as court cases. Verdict: Deniers insisting that the Leichenkeller remained morgues until the end of the war show their complete lack of familiarity with the documentation. Why don't we play a game with them? Let them explain why documentation exists where these facilities are instead labeled 'disrobing cellars' and 'gas cellars', to which I will get in a second. Deniers need to come up with a scenario that can explain all of these documents coherently in such a way that their gas chamber denial can stand up. Hint: if they say the word forgery, they lose. Now that we have ruled out morgues and disinfestation in these chambers, what remains for the holocaust deniers? Air-raid shelters. Some holocaust deniers' claim is that the buildings were originally morgues built to deal with a typhus epidemic. These morgues were later converted to air-raid shelters when the epidemic was in abeyance and the threat of allied bombing had increased. At the time of conversion they were fitted with standard gas-proof bomb shelter doors. While this was true about Krema I in Auschwitz I some time in 1944 onward, the "morgues" in Auschwitz II Birkenau were never converted to air-raid shelters, because the SS HQ was stationed in Auschwitz I, and the SS barracks of Birkenau were too far away to realistically save the personnel from an air raid. If holocaust deniers can bring forth any documentary or testimony proof about big air-raid shelters in Birkenau, by all means. Until then, this is another baseless wildcard they are simply throwing at holocaust historians while they are grasping at straws to be able to explain the presence of gas-tight doors and cyanide residue in a morgue.
While the former blueprint shows us a horizontal cross section of the entire Krema II, this blueprint shows us a vertical cross section of just "morgue" 1, aka Krema II's gas chamber that claimed several hundred thousand lives. Note the ventilation systems in place ("Entlüftung" and "Belüftung") that shuts up any denier claims about poison gas being difficult to ventilate out of an underground room. I think both these blueprints should answer Robert Faurisson's famous (stupid) question/challenge: "Show me or draw me the murder weapon, the homicidal gas chamber". You may notice that the aeration/de-aeration system was designed as is common for a morgue, with the fresh air coming in from the top, and the foul air exiting from the bottom. When the morgue was put to use as a homicidal gas chamber, the Nazis encountered two problems: One, bodies lying haphazardly across the entire chamber after a gassing (unlike neatly stacked bodies in a morgue) had a chance to block the de-aeration near the floor, and two, HCN is lighter than air, and tends to accumulate near the ceiling, and therefore a system wired the other way would have worked more efficiently (i.e. poison air gets sucked out on top and fresh air is blown at floor level). However, note that the only permanent fixtures in this regard are the air canals - the pumps themselves could be remounted to reverse the system. What's more, even with the current system in place, the HCN could escape out of the same, porous wire-mesh columns/vents the Zyklon was introduced into the chamber in, once the laws of pressure equilibrium dictated by the introduction of the (heavier) clean air from the Belüftung would force the lighter HCN upward and out. What we still need to clarify, is whether these gas chambers labeled "morgues" in the blueprints, especially those of Kremas II and III, since they were located underground, were heated or not. Some defenders argue why would morgues need heating? Bodies are supposed to be stored cold. So the few letters we have remaining (which I will post below) requesting heating and ventilation for the morgue/gas chamber are proof that it couldn't have been a morgue. However, some deniers have argued that if there were heaters in any of these rooms - even if these were just morgues and only used as such - it would have been to keep the temperature above freezing so the bodies wouldn't freeze together in winter while they were piled on top of each other. Not a pleasant thing to have to use an axe or something similar to separate the bodies whose liquids spilled out and froze because they need to be dragged out of the room and into the crematoria one floor above to then cremate them. At least this is the theory for Kremas II and III (because Kremas IV and V had the gas chamber/"morgue" on the same ground level as the crematory). So both deniers and defenders agree that it would be convenient if the underground rooms of Kremas II and III were heated at least in the winter, for different reasons obviously. Why do defenders of the holocaust have to accept it as well? Because: The Zyklon-B pellets dropped into the gas chamber via holes in the roof need approx. 26°C to begin proper evaporation/outgassing of HCN, and 300ppm concentration needs to be achieved to start killing people. Hundreds, if not over a thousand panicking people in the room might be able to produce enough body heat and hyperventilation to bring the ambient temperature to 26°C in an underground room (average body temperature 37 centigrade. I would like to see over a thousand denier dickheads crammed together naked in a 2000 sq ft room and I would drop some crystals myself just to test out their dumb theory), but I'm not sure they could achieve the temperature change within 5-10 minutes after entering, as gassings usually were over within 20 minutes according to eyewitness testimony, so I will stick with the idea of the chambers being heated. Besides, due to the proximity of the crematory right above, I am also of the conviction that heat would seep down via convection through the building material and ground. Believe it or not, sometimes even unheated cellars in winters can be, in fact, warmer than the freezing cold outside. And let's not forget that it is nonsense to say Zyklon-B pellets are completely harmless until 25.7°C is reached. Yes, that is how a typical denier argument goes: “Since, at 1atm, HCN only boils at around 26°C, if the air in the gas chamber was colder, the pellets would be harmless”. One doesn't have to possess extensive knowledge of physics and chemistry to see why this is nonsense: It's like saying that at 1atm, water can only evaporate at 100+°C. Still, to answer whether these chambers were heated or not, holocaust historian Jan Van Pelt writes in page 115 of the Pelt Report: "Cross-referencing this letter with blueprints of the basement of crematorium 2, Dawidowski concluded that the designation “Vergasungskeller” applied to morgue 1. He noted that the blueprints showed that the section of this morgue differed from that of morgue 2 in that the former was equipped with two built-in ventilation ducts on each side. Correspondence explained that these ventilation ducts were connected to a ventilator driven by 3.5 horsepower electric motor, and that the space was also equipped with a separate system for introducing warm air into it—an arrangement which made a lot of sense if the space was used as a Zyklon B gas chamber (because hydrogen cyanide, with a boiling point of around 27 Celsius, works much faster when used in a pre-heated space—an issue Dawidowski was to discuss at length later in his report). Both eyewitness testimonies, blueprints and correspondence corroborated each other." Van Pelt goes on in page 116 of the Pelt report: Dawidowski noted that the gas chambers were either pre-heated with portable stoves or, in the case of crematoria 2 and 3, by warm air generated by the ovens. And he presented the results of the laboratory analysis on the presence of HCN in the six zinc covers found in crematorium 2 and the bags of hair. (taken from the Van Pelt report, page 296) Essential for Leuchter’s argument was that the gas chambers had been operated on low temperature. “We know that the facilities in question were operated at low temperatures,” he testified in court. “We know that there would have been a considerable amount of condensation of liquid hydrogen cyanide on the walls, floor and ceiling of these facilities.” Leuchter was even prepared to testify that “these facilities were operated at zero degrees fahrenheit or near zero temperatures and perhaps below that.” It is not clear on the basis of what evidence Leuchter came to this conclusion. There is, in fact, ample evidence that the gas chambers were heated. One piece of anecdotal evidence was given by Yehuda Bakon during the Eichmann trial. In 1943 he had joined a group of youngsters who had to pull a cart, the so-called Rollwagenkommando: Q. “Who gave you orders where the cart should go?” A. “The Blockälteste (block elder) always went with us and he knew what we had to do. Our tasks were quite varied: Sometimes we had to collect papers, sometimes we had to transfer blankets, sometimes we had to go to the women’s camp to which other people did not have access. With the Rollwagenkommando we went through all the camps of Birkenau, A, B, C, D, E and F, as well as the crematorium.” Q. “You went into the crematorium?” A. “Yes.” Q. “Did you see the crematorium from the inside?” A. “Yes. We had to take wooden logs that were in the vicinity of the crematorium for the fire. Sometimes these had to be taken for regular heating in the camps. And when we finished our work and it was cold, the Kapo of the Sonderkommando took pity on us and said: “Well, children, outside it is cold, warm yourselves in the gas chambers! There is nobody there.” Q. “And you went to warm yourselves inside the gas chambers?” A. “Yes. Sometimes we went to warm ourselves in the Kleidungskammer, sometimes in the gas chambers. It sometimes happened that when we came to the crematorium, we were told: “You cannot enter now—there are people inside.” Sometimes, it was in crematorium 3, after they had been burned, we took the ashes, and in winter the ashes were to be used for the road.” Q. “Did you use human ashes to spread on the roads?” A. “Yes.” Q. “For what purpose?” A. “So that people could walk on the road and not slip.”
There are also German documents that attest to the fact that the gas chambers were heated. The most important is a letter the chief architect of Auschwitz, Karl Bischoff, sent to the crematorium oven builders Topf & Sons on March 6, 1943. In it, Bischoff discussed the heating of morgue 1 of crematorium 2: "In accordance with your proposal, the department agrees that cellar 1 will be preheated with the air coming from the rooms with the 3 installations to generate the forced-draught. The supply and installation of the necessary ductwork and ventilators must follow as soon as possible. As you indicate in your letter, the work should begin this week." While the letter says "keller 1" (cellar 1), rather than "Leichenkeller 1" (morgue 1), if you look at the header, you'll see the document is talking about Krematorium II and III, and the only cellars these buildings possessed, were said morgues, as the blueprints prove, therefore the document DOES suggest heating morgues. Both Yehuda Bakon’s testimony and Karl Bischoff’s letter demolish Fred Leuchter’s argument that the gas chamber of crematorium 2, and by implication crematorium 3, was not heated. Furthermore, do not forget the fact that heating can also be done at the source, i.e. a canister of Zyklon-B can be heated to induce evaporation: In Mauthausen, Zyklon wasn't dropped into the gas chamber as pellets but rather the prussic acid the pellets were soaked with was introduced into the chamber in gaseous form (HCN) via tubing: "If a gassing was due to take place, … Roth gave orders to one of the prisoners of the crematorium work detail, who were his subordinates, usually to the witness Kanduth, to heat a brick in the crematory oven. Roth took the burning-hot brick in a shovel and placed it inside the apparatus for admitting the gas. The apparatus consisted of a metal chest with a removable cover, which could be hermetically sealed by means of wing screws and airtight packing. By giving off heat, the brick led to the quick release of the poison gas..."- Judgement, Hagen Mauthausen trial, 24 July 1970 (as quoted in:) - Kogon, Langbein and Rueckerl. Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas. Yale University Press. 1993. pp. 179-9. That being said, Jean-Claude Pressac, in bullet point 4 on page 432 of his most excellent "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers" book, postulates that the forced-draught installations (Saugzuganlagen) only saw limited use before technical problems (relying on the testimony of Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber) including a small fire forced the Nazis to abandon this method of increasing the temperature in the gas chamber obviously intended for more efficient evaporation of HCN. Regardless, the fact remains that the Nazis considered heating a cellar which on all blueprints was marked as a morgue. This is cold, hard, wartime documentary evidence that the "morgues" saw use other than their intended purpose, namely the cold storage of corpses. Even top tier holocaust deniers such as Germar Rudolf and Carlo Mattogno are forced to agree with this and accept this document as genuine and fact, but they claim that points to the morgues seeing limited use as delousing chambers. Thing is, they have no testimony to back up their hypothesis that the cellars of Kremas II and III were ever used the way the already existing delousing chambers elsewhere in the camp, much closer to the inmate barracks, were.
Italian holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno uses this document as proof one of the rooms in Krema II (he argues, the gas chamber, i.e. morgue 1), was in fact used as a delousing facility (which is a nice way of explaining the trace amounts of HCN residue found in the forensic tests and also a nice way of explaining gas-tight doors), because according to this document 2 Topf delousing ovens (Entwesungsöfen, as referenced in the document) were part of its inventory. But did it cross his mind how little a grand total of 2 delousing ovens are capable of, and how odd and out of place they would look in a 2000 square foot room? It makes far more sense to me that if these ovens were ever installed in the building, they would be for the Sonderkommando who worked and lived on the ground floor (and slept in the attic) to clean their personal clothing. The Zentralsauna building was where the steam chambers used for delousing went, chances are these two ended up there as well. And obviously of note, the delousing ovens (Entwesungsöfen) used HOT AIR... and NOT poison gas! The room was also labeled a Vergasungskeller which would make sense if the delousing ovens used poison gas, but they didn't. No German in his right mind would call steaming something as "vergasen". Hence, only the gullible will buy in to Mattogno's nonsense. Interestingly, this document rather only holds more incriminating evidence of the Saugzuganlage, as well as speaks of an "Erweiterung", a modification (expansion), of the aeration and de-aeration system to use warm air (Warmluftzuführung).
Ventilation blower Nr. 450 for the gas cellar in Auschwitz is missing... In February 1943 Auschwitz camp building authorities complained to Topf, the company that built the crematoria equipment, that they needed ventilation blowers 'most urgently'. Why the urgency, if this was an air-raid shelter, morgue, or delousing chamber? There is no reputable evidence that affirms the deniers' claims. Deniers hypothesise that the urgency was a result of official fears that the camp would be hit with a typhus epidemic, which would cause a tremendous spike in the death toll. Without the proper ventilation system, the crematoria would not be able to operate (but if you check the telegram, it clearly says, the ventilation blower is needed for the gas cellar, not the crematorium on ground level). So if during a typhus epidemic the morgue was stacked with bodies, then it would only smell bad if the ventilation system wasn't working properly. A real urgency makes far more sense if one needs to get hydrogen cyanide out of an underground room so that corpse extraction from the chamber can commence properly, which is obviously what has to happen before the next batch of victims can be gassed. Corpse cellar 1 (the gas chamber) was the only room in the basement which was ventilated by both aeration AND de-aeration blowers, which we saw in the cross-section blueprint earlier. Carlo Mattogno makes the case that the number of air-exchanges this ventilation system was capable of, is lower than the number of air exchanges delousing facilities elsewhere display, and therefore comes to the stunning conclusion that this place could not have functioned as a homicidal gas chamber. This is the height of revisionist logic. The ventilation capacity of corpse cellar 1 was considered sufficient for homicidal gassing by the SS. Keep in mind that at the time the SS was operating the Bunker extermination sites without any forced ventilation whatsoever, just by natural aeration. The > 9.5 air exchanges per hour were a technical improvement over the natural ventilation at the Bunker sites, which was speeding up the ventilation process significantly.
As you can see, the Belüftungsgebläse Nr. 450 is directly related to the homicidal gas chamber (cellar 1), has a capacity of 3.5 PS (Pferdestärke, horse power) or 2.6 kW. It is proof that both crematoria II and III's underground gas chambers were equipped with ventilators. Jean-Claude Pressac's "The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz" says: "In mid-March [1942] , Bischoff received new calculations from Schultz. After reviewing the original numbers, he had decided that it was better to increase the total capacity of the ventilation system of the new crematorium, now to be built at Birkenau, from 32,600 cu m of air an hour to 45,000 an hour. The room most affected by this was the B. Keller, which was to receive a system capable of aerating and deaerating 8,000 instead of 4,800 cu m an hour, that is, a 66-percent increase. Bischoff accepted Schultze's new proposal on April 2. He asked Topf to bring the designation on the firm's blueprints into line with the ones drawn" 8000 ÷ 504 = 15.8 air exchanges per hour. Deniers claim 4,800 ÷ 506 = 9.48 air exchanges per hour. Dr. Richard Green said: "John Zimmerman has recently researched, 502-1-327, a Topf bill dated May 27, 1943, which may refer to crematorium II (however, the first page in his copy is missing so he cannot yet be sure); it may indicate that the 4800 cu m/hour figure is correct." We also see here how Krema II's lift had an output of 10PS and Krema III's elevator 15PS. This is about as far as some holocaust deniers' tales of "hand-drawn elevators" will ever get.
This document, presented at the Nuremburg trials under the number NO-4473 and reproduced in Pressac, Jean Claude, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989, p. 432, is dated 29 January 1943, with SS Hauptsturmführer Bischoff, head of the Auschwitz Central Construction Management (Zentralbauleitung), writing to Dr. Ing. Kammler in Berlin regarding Krematorium II, and in this letter he refers to a Vergasungskeller (gassing cellar): "The Crematorium II has been completed - save for some minor constructional work - by the use of all the forces available, in spite of unspeakable difficulties, the severe cold, and in 24 hour shifts. The fires were started in the ovens in the presence of Senior Engineer Prüfer, representative of the contractors of the firm of Topf and Sons, Erfurt, and they are working most satisfactorily. The formwork for the reinforced concrete ceiling of the Leichenkeller could not yet be removed on account of the frost. This is, however, unimportant, as the Vergasungskeller can be used for this purpose. The firm of Topf and Sons was not, on account of the unavailability of rail transport, able to deliver the aeration and ventilation equipment on time, as had been requested by the Central Building Management. As soon as the aeration and ventilation equipment arrive, the installing will start so that the complete installation may be expected to be ready for use by 20 February 1943. A report of the inspecting engineer of the firm of Topf and Sons, Erfurt, is enclosed." The mainstream interpretation of this incriminating letter is clear: "Vergasungskeller" translates to "gassing cellar" ('vergasen' means 'to gas'), and Krema II indeed had underground rooms or cellars ("Keller"), one of which (LK2) was the undressing room, and the other, the gas chamber (LK1). The letter also speaks of the installation of ventilation systems, which have also been attested to Leichenkeller 1 in the blue print shown earlier. Now, why would the author of NO-4473 not refer to a Leichenkeller as a Leichenkeller? As another example, the engineers Jährling and Messing referred to LK2 of Crematoria II and III via the terms "Auskleideraum" and "Auskleidekeller" (undressing room or cellar), another slip that betrayed a criminal purpose. Jährling used this designation in a document of 6 March 1943, and then Messing used it in three documents later in March. However, holocaust denier Arthur Butz offered an explanation in his 1976 book "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century", saying that the Vergasungskeller was a part of the crematorium building devoted to generating a combustible gas for the ovens. The American believed the meaning of the German word "Vergasung" is gas generation or carburetion, i . e. turning something into a gas, based on the noun "Vergaser" (carburettor). Thirteen years later, fellow holocaust denier Robert Faurisson realized that Arthur Butz's interpretation was wrong, and later in 1989, mainstream Auschwitz expert Jean-Claude Pressac (who interestingly started out as a holocaust denier and ended up realizing the holocaust was real) conclusively showed that it was wrong, based on the design of the solid coke-fired cremation ovens which did NOT need carburettors. In 1991, Faurisson offered a theory that the Vergasungskeller was instead a storage area for fumigation equipment. The German word "vergasen" can not only mean to kill or do away with something via gas, but next to the aforementioned sublimate, i . e. turn a solid into gas (Vergaser), more importantly, also 'to fumigate' something. The instinct of a modern German speaker might suggest the latter should be called "begasen" instead, but as source I use the Standort und Kommandaturbefehle des KL Auschwitz, a book penned by 1940s Germans stationed in the camp itself. If you use ctrl+f and try finding the word 'vergasen', you will see it repeatedly mentioned in routine fumigation procedures of office buildings elsewhere in the camp. Something no native German speaker can deny: https://archive . org/stream/Kommandanturbefehle194045OhneIfZBemerkungen530S/Kommandanturbefehle%201940-45%20ohne%20IfZ%20Bemerkungen-530S_djvu . txt So at first glance, Faurisson is right: the "Vergasungskeller" document, by itself, cannot prove that one of the morgues of Krematorium II was being used for homicidal gassing. Instead, the word could also mean it was a cellar used for storing fumigation equipment. But wouldn't it make more sense to store these on the other side of the camp where the delousing chambers were? Why would the fumigators have to run all the way to the cellar of Krematorium II to get the fumigation equipment? This is where Carlo Mattogno chimes in, with his theory that in the spring of 1943 a typhus epidemic was ravaging Birkenau, and additional hygiene measures had to be undertaken. Except Mattogno's theory is that the cellars of Krema II and III were used as actual showers for the inmates until the Zentralsauna building was completed. Meanwhile, Arthur Butz's newest proposal is that the Vergasungskeller was a gas shelter, on account of the fact that Crematoria II and III, with their large concrete cellars, were obviously ideal for adaptation as air raid shelters. Indeed, when this problem is looked at from the point of view of defense against air raids it seems there was no better choice at Birkenau. But before we debunk the air raid shelter scenario, I hope you've noticed how there is no kind of consensus whatsoever among these 'revisionist scholars', as every chap has a different theory. One says a storage for carburettors related to the firing of the crematory ovens. Another says a place where fumigation equipment was stored. A third chimes in and says an actual disinfection facility with working showers. A fourth maintains they really were morgues all along, just as the blueprints say. And then we have the fifth guy saying it was an air-raid shelter. Everyone somehow magically KNOWS this was not a cellar for homicidal gassing, but cannot agree what it was instead. Hilarious. The air-raid shelter theory at first glance makes sense, given that we have gas-tight doors delivered to this place, given that the Leichenkeller are located underground, and given that Krema I over at Auschwitz I really did end up becoming an air-raid shelter, so why not these morgues at Birkenau as well? Except for four small problems: First, a cellar built as a shelter against poison gas attacks will be referred to as a "Gasschutzkeller". Second, building a gas raid shelter in the cellar of Krema II and III would be very nice for the camp inmates, but I highly doubt the Nazis were considerate enough to take extra measures to protect the lives of the common camp inmates from poison gas attacks (the irony). Third, this would have to also mean the rooms could no longer be used as morgues for the storage of the dead, because due to the unpredictable nature of an air raid, you would otherwise have the scenario of vital camp personnel finding themselves in a room that is filled with bloating carcasses. It would certainly not have been inviting to be locked up in a closed space with gas-tight doors for many hours with rotting corpses! And fourth, and this is the most damning evidence against a gas-raid shelter, its location: It is comically situated at the exact opposite end of the SS-barracks. If the Nazi personnel stationed in Birkenau built this shelter for themselves, then (if you look at the aerial photos I provided earlier), they would have to jog for minutes from their barracks alongside the camp's outer perimeter, then through the main gate, then jog for another few minutes along the rail ramp where the Selektion was done, before they could finally reach Krematorium II and III at the other end. Arthur Butz and friends would have saved me the trouble if they had looked at the aerial photography before establishing their crackpot theories.
Just to illustrate how stupid the air-raid shelter concept is, this would be the route from the SS-Barracks to the underground cellars of Kremas II and III some holocaust deniers claim were air-raid shelters. If the scale is correct, we're looking at some 2 kilometers they would have to traverse before they would reach the shelter. At best, such a configuration would only allow the guards in the immediate vicinity of Kremas II and III to save themselves. Needless to say, that would be some 4000 square feet of gas chambers wasted just to save the guard tower personnel nearby.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a larger, clearer copy of this document on the web, so bear with me. In the bottom half of the image, what's written is the following: 5 Fußboden Aufschüttung auffüllen, stampfen und Fußboden betonieren im Gaskammer (author's note: grammatically "in Gaskammer" is right) which is are technical construction terms I can only roughly translate to: finish the work on the flooring, tamp and concrete the flooring in gas chamber Alright, so we have a document about construction work being done in a gas chamber. What completes the incriminating nature of this document is if you look at the very top left, what does it say? It says Einäscherungsanlage 4 which is Crematorium 4 or Krema IV. What we can conclude from this document, is that Crematorium IV possessed a gas chamber. Let me stress that coke-fired ovens do not need a carburetor (Vergaser), so "carburetion room" as translation for Gaskammer is once again invalid. And deniers Mattogno et al. have already demonstrated what a piss-poor air raid shelter Kremas IV and V would make, due to their pitched roof and lack of underground rooms, so air-raid shelter is also not a valid translation for Gaskammer. And obviously a morgue is not a Gaskammer either, so unless blueprints, photographic or testimony proof can be obtained explaining an additional Gaskammer was tacked on to Krematorium IV apart from the "morgue", we can only conclude it IS the "morgue". Therefore, this can only leave two explanations: the Kammer was used for delousing/fumigation, or homicidal gassing. The fact that we have a Crematorium without a morgue to store the corpses is already giving us clues as to the real purpose of this crematorium. For more, see Pressac's 39 criminal traces: http://www.phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/pressac0429.shtml
The following document shows 44 lamps (Kugel-Lampen), 9 faucets/spigots (Zapfhähne), 14 shower heads (Brausen) and 1 gas tight door (Gasdichte Tür, in handwriting) delivered to Krematorium III. At the top left, we see the building being inventoried, "Krematorium III," also known as "KGL 30a." Below that, the first room listed ("Raum 1") has been written in as "Leichenkeller 1," which literally means "morgue 1." This is the homicidal gassing chamber, and this is where the showers and door were installed The handwriting is hard to read; the III might look like a II, but this document is reproduced in Pressac, Jean Claude, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989, p. 432. Its source is given as Auschwitz State Museum Archive reference BW 30/43, p. 24. Wait a minute...showerheads? For a morgue???? For a carburetion room??? For an air-raid shelter??? For a delousing/fumigation chamber?? And if they were for genuine showers, why a gas-tight door???
This photo scan showing the order of 3 gas-tight doors for worksite 30b (Krematorium IV), and 30c (Krematorium V) is taken from Jean-Claude Pressac's "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers" Note how: "We remind you of an additional order from 6.3.43 for the shipment of a gas door 100/192 for morgue 1 of Krematorium III, which should of of the same make as the cellar door of the adjacent Krematorium II, [namely] with a spy-hole of double 8 millimeter glass and gas-tight seal. This order is particularly urgent.' Signed, SS Major Bischoff." mentions the one gas-tight door for morgue 1 of Krematorium III we were talking about earlier, and how this is urgent, and also proves how by March 31st, 1943, Krematorium II was already equipped with a gas-tight door.
Another important issue remains, regarding the outgassing curve of the clay-type granules or pellets that release the HCN into the surroundings. Given that a HCN air concentration of 300ppm is lethal to humans, from an initial 0ppm, can 300ppm be achieved within 5-10 minutes so that everyone is dead within half an hour? The holocaust denier narrative expressed in the above image states, that at 15°C (curve 4) ambient temperature, the Zyklon-B pellets have outgassed 25% of their contained hydrogen cyanide after 15 minutes and upto 40% by 30 minutes. Deniers express disbelief that it's possible to kill people with only 25% of the Zyklon-B pellets' contained HCN having evaporated into the gas chamber. Dr. Franciszek Piper, one of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum's curators, said in his book that between 5 and 7 kilograms of Zyklon-B were typically used for a gassing of 1500 people. Germar Rudolf himself accepts that for a gassing execution time of 15 minutes, all you needed was 5.8kg of Zyklon-B (see the table in Germar Rudolf, "The Chemistry of Auschwitz", page 263). How much is 25% of, say, 6 kilograms of Zyklon-B? 6 / 4 = 1.5 kilograms of pellets' worth of absorbed HCN gas released into the chamber. But before that, let's quickly do away with the denier claim about Zyklon-B pellets "continuing to outgass for HOURS", which the above graph clearly indicates. The gas chambers were washed down. Lots of water around, and HCN outgassing from the quite soluble clay pellets can be neutralized when sprayed with water. Very easy to do in Krema II and III, where all pellets would be contained inside the four Kula columns. A detailed source for procedures in the Birkenau gas chambers are the interviews in Gideon Greif, "We Wept Without Tears"; also Henryk Tauber's testimony in Pressac. Now, to address the Zyklon-B outgassing curve and whether 300ppm can be achieved quickly (taken from http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/cyanide/cyanide.001) and edited by yours truly: Imagine a room with 210 square meters of floor space (approx 2200 sq feet). The walls are 2.4 meters high, so the building will have a total volume of 504 cubic meters minus the volume of the supporting concrete pillars as laid out in the blue prints, therefore yielding 480m^3. If there are 1000 litres in a cubic metre, there'll be 480000 litres here, or 4.8 X 10^5 liters. The structure would be fitted with 4 vents on the ceiling for pouring in the Zyklon, surrounded by wire-mesh pillars called "Kula colums". These 4 Kula columns' total volume wouldn't be subtracted from the remaining volume since they are hollow and meshed. Exhaust fans would be used to clear the room once the homicidal gassing was completed, a ventilation system whose installation has been proven via documents. This gas chamber would be largely below ground, to help maintain a constant temperature using the earth as insulation (not all of the gas chambers at Auschwitz were below ground, in fact Kremas I, IV and V were above ground structures). Keeping the chambers below ground would also allow easy access to the roof. The perpetrators could pour gas in through the roof while wearing gas masks, Sonderkommando inmates then used, to remove the bodies and transport them to the crematoria once the gassing was complete and the room had been cleared of gas. In reality, a quite simple operation. Also, imagine that there are four such buildings in the camp (representing Kremas II, III, IV, and V at Auschwitz), and that each has a crematorium to go with it. For the sake of simplicity, each gas chamber will carry out only one gassing per day, and the chambers will be forcibly ventilated for at least one hour. I am aware that Krema IV and V's gas chamber areas were smaller than those of II and III, but keep in mind I am not taking the areas of the remaining gas chambers of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex into this equation, which would be Krema I as well as the red and white house. For the specifics of the gassing, let's look at just one chamber. A building with 210 m^2 of floor space can easily and generously accommodate six people per square meter (my calculations based upon how many people I could fit in one square meter, it wasn't even a tight fit). As I said earlier, the empty volume of the room is 480m^3. A human person's volume (in litres) is closely related to his weight in kilograms. People from all walks of life were sent to the gas chambers, from infants and children to the elderly, with most of the prime, healthy and able-bodied already having been selected for the camp population, and therefore less likely to find themselves in the gas chamber. Considering this, I have come to the average gas chamber person's volume in litres to 40, which will take up 0.04 cubic meters. At six people per square meter, that's 1260 people in one room, which take up 50.4 m^3 of space. That leaves a free volume of 429.6 m^3 (430 m^3 from now on.) To show (1) how much Zyklon it would take to reach the lethal 300 ppm level, and (2) how fast 1 kilo of Zyklon would have to evaporate to reach 300 ppm in ten minutes, we need to know how much volume one kg of air takes up. Ideal gas assumptions say that one mole (6.021 X 10^23 molecules) of gas occupy 22.4 liters at 25 deg Celsius. One mole of gas is 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen (ignore the 1% of other gases and assume they're not there.) Multiply this times the molecular weight of the gases (grams per mole of gas, 28g for N2, 32g for O2) and the weight of one mole of gas is (0.21)*32 + (.79)*28 = 28.84 grams, or 0.02884 kg per 22.4 liters (the vol. of one mole of gas). One kilogram of gas will therefore occupy 776 liters of volume. How much Zyklon-B will be needed to reach a concentration of 300 ppm? 300 ppm HCN corresponds to 300 milligrams of HCN per kg of air. For 430 cubic meters of air, you need to do some manipulations: 430 m^3 = 4.3 X 10^5 liters * (1 kg air/ 776 liters) = 554.1 kilos of air. (0.300 grams HCN/ kg air)*(554.1 kg air) = 166.23 grams HCN. ...less HCN than is contained in one can of Zyklon-B (200g). In reality, if only 160 grams of HCN are poured into such a room,they may have to wait some time before everyone is dead. But what if you pour in a whole kilogram of HCN? The question now becomes, "If 1 kg of HCN (5x 200g cans) are poured into our gas chamber, how fast will the HCN have to evaporate to reach a lethal concentration in ten minutes?" For this example, I will assume a constant rate of evaporation on a per gram basis. The rate of evaporation will be: 166 grams HCN/10 minutes = 16.6 grams/minute (16.6 grams HCN/minute)/(1000 g HCN) X 100 = 1.66% Only 1.66% of the HCN will have to evaporate per minute. Actually, the numbers would be slightly different as there will be less HCN each minute, so 1.66% won't be as much HCN after eight minutes as it was in the first. Taking this loss of material into account, even a constant 1.66% evaporation rate takes only 13 minutes. For a substance that is normally a gas at room temperature, an evaporation rate this slow seems quite probable. As HCN boils at 26 degrees Celsius, it is quite likely that the gas will evaporate much faster than 1.66% per minute. Let us recap: 1kg of Zyklon-B emptied into the Krema II gas chamber, at a temperature of 25°C, and an evaporation rate of 1.66% per minute, will, after 13 minutes, have created a concentration of 300ppm throughout the chamber. And that's what it takes to kill humans. Official figures say 5-7 kgs were used instead, therefore within this time frame, an even higher concentration could be reached. Rudolf's curve at 15°C (ten degrees cooler) shows that by 15 minutes, 25% of the Zyklon will have outgassed into the room. I find this as conclusive evidence that a homicidal gassing with Zyklon-B as the killing agent could easily kill 1500 people, most of who weren't adults in their prime and exhausted from a long train ride to boot and panicking and hyperventilating to top it all off, at room temperature well within half an hour. With only one gassing a day, plenty of time will be left for ventilating the gas chamber and moving the bodies to the crematoria for combustion. The next question is, given one gassing a day and four purpose-built gas chambers at Birkenau (not counting the red and white house, known as Bunkers I and II and Krema I at Auschwitz I), how many people can be killed in a time period of one and one half years (18 months)? I chose this time period since the four large extermination facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau were in operation from mid 1943 until their destruction by the fleeing Nazis in November 1944. For the sake of argument, I'll say that's about 1.5 years (May 1943 to Nov. 1944). If the gas chambers were in operation for 548 days (1.5 yrs), and, considering that a daily gassing in 4 gas chambers was not really the case for the camp's history during this time, if we therefore lowered the average number of people gassed daily in each of the four gas chambers to a mere 500, the total dead would be: (500)*(4)*(548) = 1,096,000 dead from gassing alone. Today the Auschwitz museum says approximately 900,000 people died in Auschwitz-Birkenau by gassing. Most estimates say that 1.1 to 1.5 million died in Auschwitz-Birkenau altogether, including deaths from starvation, torture, summary execution, sickness and medical experiments. Clearly then, based upon my largely hypothetical example, it was both possible and feasible to murder that many, even in a fairly short time scale of 584 days with just four working gas chambers and only 500 people per chamber on average. And we still have 3 gas chambers to spare. If we brought them into the equation, it would be even less people per chamber. Or we could increase the people per chamber to more realistic levels, but then only gas every other day. The bottom line is, twist and turn it all you want, gassing 900,000 people in Auschwitz-Birkenau over a span of 2 years is clearly possible, with plenty of room to spare for more. Therefore, the more careful revisionists have also realized that gassing isn't the problem, and rather concentrate their efforts in trying to contest the possibility of cremating 1.1 million people in around 3 years.
On August 29, 1941, Johann Paul Kremer, a medical doctor who had joined the Wehrmacht on May 20, 1941, was ordered to Auschwitz to replace another surgeon. Kremer kept a diary of many of his daily activities throughout the war. After his arrival at Auschwitz, oftentimes within the same entry Kremer speaks without emotion of “actions” he observed and the food he ate, as if these two activities are on the same plane. The footnotes to the diary contain important corroborating or clarifying information and should be read along with the primary text. Source: “Diary of Johann Paul Kremer,” translated from the German by Krystyna Michalik, in KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS by Rudolf Hoss, Pery Broad, and Johann Paul Kremer. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oswiecim, 1995, pp. 161–165 Read the diary translated here: http://www-tc.pbs.org/auschwitz/learning/guides/reading2.3.pdf The image above shows one of the diary pages where Kremer mentions "special actions" involving women, Dutch Jews, calls Auschwitz the "anus mundi" (ass of the world, a popular German slang still used today is the phrase "Arsch der Welt" to describe a horrible place). He also compares such a special action performed at 3 a.m. with Dante's Inferno and says Auschwitz is rightly called a CAMP OF EXTERMINATION. "Revisionists" have tried to downplay these diary entries. When they're not trying to label the diary a forgery, they go on to say that Sonderaktion could mean anything. But why then does Kremer compare it with Dante's Inferno? The best bet deniers have at this point is to use this document as evidence of widespread outbreaks of disease, and label the Sonderaktion as the mass incineration of corpses, potentially outdoors. However, Kremer was one of the defendants at the trial of the Auschwitz camp garrison. The trial took place before the Supreme National Trubunal in Cracow in the period from November 24 to December 22, 1947. It was then that he offered detailed information on the meaning of some of the entries in his diary. In the official record of the interrogation of August 18, 1947, in Cracow, Kremer stated as follows: “By September 2, 1942, at 3 a.m. I had already been assigned to take part in the action of gassing people. These mass murders took place in small cottages situated outside the Birkenau camp in a wood. The cottages were called Bunker in the SS-men’s slang. All SS physicians on duty in the camp took turns to participate in the gassings, which were called Sonderaktion [special action]. My part as physician at the gassing consisted in remaining in readiness near the bunker. I was brought there by car. I sat in front with the driver and an SS hospital orderly [SDG] sat in the back of the car with oxygen apparatus to revive SS-men, employed in the gassing, in case any of them should succumb to the poisonous fumes. When the transport with people who were destined to be gassed arrived at the railway ramp, the SS officers selected from among the new arrivals persons fit to work, while the rest—old people, all children, women with children in their arms and other persons not deemed fit to work— were loaded onto lorries and driven to the gas chambers. I used to follow behind the transport till we reached the bunker. There people were driven into the barrack huts where the victims undressed and then went naked to the gas chambers. Very often no incidents occurred, as the SS-men kept people quiet, maintaining that they were to bathe and be deloused. After driving all of them into the gas chamber the door was closed and an SS-man in a gas mask threw the contents of a Cyclon tin through an opening in the side wall. The shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through that opening and it was clear that they were fighting for their lives [Lebenskampf]. These shouts were heard for a very short while. I should say for some minutes, but I am unable to give the exact length of time.” A selection took place on September 5th, 1942 in the women’s camp at Birkenau, resulting in the killing in gas chambers of about 800 women prisoners. In the formal record of the interrogation of July 18, 1947 (Cracow) Kremer explains this entry as follows: “The gassing of emaciated women from the women’s camp was particularly unpleasant. Such individuals were generally called Muselmänner [Moslems]. I remember taking part in the gassing of such women in daylight. I am unable to state how numerous that group was. When I came to the bunker they sat clothed on the grounds. As the clothes were in fact worn out camp clothes, they were not let into the undressing barracks but undressed in the open. I could deduce from the behaviour of these women that they realized what was awaiting them. They begged the SS-men to be allowed to live, they wept, but all of them were driven into the gas chamber and gassed. Being an anatomist I had seen many horrors, had dealt with corpses, but what I then saw was not to be compared with anything ever seen before. It was under the influence of these impressions that I noted in my diary, under the date of September 5, 1942: ‘The most horrible of all horrors. Hauptsturmfuhrer Thilo was right when he said to me today that we were located here in the anus mundi.’ I used this expression because I could not imagine anything more sickening and more horrible.” Prisoners in a state of acute starvation were called Muselmänner in camp slang. A Muselmann was like a walking skeleton. The bones were barely covered with skin, the eyes had a faraway look. Apathy and somnolence were typical symptoms of starvation disease. Complete psychological exhaustion went together with general physical emaciation. These Muselmänner are what deniers like to label "typhus victims", when they're not busy peddling the "it was Allied bombing that destroyed supply lines and caused starvation in the camps" tale. Too bad for them the diary entries are from 1942.
The Sonderkommando photographs are perhaps the most interesting of all photos taken in Auschwitz, taken secretly in August 1944 by Alberto "Alex" Errera, a Greek inmate in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and smuggled out of the camp by September 4, 1944 along with the following note: "Urgent. Send two iron reels of film as soon as possible. It is possible to take pictures. We send you photographs from Birkenau - people who have been gassed. The photograph shows a heap of bodies piled outdoors. Bodies were burned outdoors when the crematorium could not keep pace with the number of bodies to be burned. In the foreground are bodies ready to be thrown on the heap. Another photograph shows one of the places in the forest where people were told to undress, allegedly for a bath, but in fact before being driven to the gas chambers. Send a reel as soon as possible. Send the enclosed photographs to Tell" (a member of the Cracow underground). The photographer was a member of the Sonderkommando, inmates forced to work in and around the gas chambers. He took two shots from inside Krematorium V, and two outside, shooting from the hip, unable to aim the camera with any precision. The Polish resistance smuggled the film out of the camp. The photographs were numbered 280–283 by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Nos. 280 and 281 show the cremation of corpses in a fire pit, shot through the black frame of the Krema's doorway or window. No. 283 (not shown in the collage) is an image of trees, the result of the photographer aiming too high. Deniers have so far only been able to address the "actual origin" of ONE of these Sonderkommando photographs (I wonder why they never took pains to address the others?), which they have labeled "Ohio train wreck, 1912", although they have not been able to come up with independent pictures of this alleged train disaster that look similar enough in terms of people and location to be able to prove any kind of forgery having taken place (i . e. the addition of the corpses and the fence). Instead, what they managed to do was edit out some of the corpses in that SK photograph, point out an odd body shape, and call it a day. The "Ohio trainwreck" holocaust denier theory has been thoroughly DEBUNKED here: http://hungarianskeptics . blogspot . co . at/2012/12/a-charge-of-forgery-supported-by . html The final three photos added to the SK photographs in the above collage only proves how the location where these SK photographs were taken checks out with the location in Birkenau today. The surroundings are forested (the tree line may have grown a bit in the past 7 decades), the image aligns with the fence still standing today, and what's more, such an outdoor cremation would also explain the smoke plume in some of the aerial photographs, how conveniently located near Crematorium V!
No. 282, shows a group of people undressing, with three naked women in the foreground just before they entered the gas chamber. They are standing in the forested area between Krematorium IV and V, and to the extreme right of the uncropped image (as shown in the collage earlier) you can see a chimney. From left to right, the first foreground woman seems to be looking straight ahead, the one next to her has her eyes downcast and the woman to the right of the image seems to have noticed the cameraman and is looking eerily, directly toward him. There's also another woman slightly to the left of the first foreground woman - this woman is a bit further back, and also seems to be walking in the same direction the other three are headed. Carlo Mattogno thinks what's happening in the background isn't a bunch of people undressing and/or stacking/sorting their clothes and other belongings on what seem to be luggage stacked on top of one another, but rather water tubs, and claims they're having some kind of a pool party splashing water around instead. He goes on to say that the woman and man to the right are both holding what appear to be water pails/jugs, reinforcing a bath scene hypothesis. However, if you look closely you will see that the right woman's arm would be waay too long to be holding a water pail - her "arm" in fact is severed - and therefore the "water pail" is actually an image artifact. It is harder to dismiss the "water pail" in the hand of the man to the extreme right of the image. However, the 2nd image makes his right arm a bit clearer and it suggests he is holding nothing, and the white splotch is in fact part of the image background. So Mattogno, the flagship of analysis-based holocaust denial is wrong (yet again!): https://www . youtube . com/watch?v=cTuVK27_bhY&feature=youtu . be For a more detailed refutation of Carlo Mattogno's claims on the image, see: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2013/05/the-photograph-of-crematorium-site . html Not only this, but Carlo Mattogno bases the image to the right as the original, and goes to make the claim that the women are too young to be sent to the gas chambers. The image on the left is in fact the original. The image on the right, is a retouched version. I do not know who retouched the image and why, but the fact that retouched versions of other SK photographs also exist leads me to believe retouching attempts have been made to enhance clarity. However in this case, the retouching actually tried to alter key aspects of the scene itself: The clearest evidence (bear in mind that I am talking about "our" left and "our" right, not "their" left and "their" right) of photo fakery in the right image is the fact that the foreground woman on the left seems to have gotten a new, young face (while her face is indistinguishable in the original). Furthermore, her body seems to have been smoothed out. The left woman in the background seems to have her body shadow removed to enhance her nakedness and also gotten a clearer face. And right of the 2nd foreground woman's shoulder there seems to be a new, dark patch added in the background. Finally, the biggest whopper comes in form of the complete body lift the 3rd foreground woman to the image's right received: While she (or he with long hair) looks like a hag sporting a rack befitting their age in the original, in the retouched photo it is definitely a "she" now, and also possessing the body of someone in their 20s or 30s, including B-cup breasts. This is no longer retouching for sake of better clarity - clearly someone made a serious attempt to make the foreground people look young and feminine. In any case, this is NOT the original photo, as my image comparison above demonstrates. Carlo Mattogno once again displays his intellectual dishonestly by basing his "research" off this image.
As mentioned earlier, this Sonderkommando photo is showing heavy smoke, naked corpses and prisoners dragging corpses towards the bonfire in the backyard of Krema V in Birkenau. Smoke is emanating from the ground but the actual pyre is not visible, suggesting it is actually located in a pit - a detail which corroborates numerous eyewitness accounts on corpse cremation in trenches in Birkenau. Revisionists mention the marshy land around Auschwitz, and claim Birkenau had a high water table, but this would only be a problem during spring thaw and snow melt, not all year round. The photo above for example was taken during the peak of summer 1944, and any central European can attest to how hot summers can get, contrary to popular (non-European) belief about "cool European summers". During my visit to Poland and spending only 5 days outside touring Krakow and surroundings in early September 2016, I actually got a sun tan on my face! Germar Rudolf has argued that the fenceposts look nothing like the fenceposts in Auschwitz today, as these have curved tops. A closeup of SK 280 clearly shows that the fenceposts have the curved tops as well. While SK 281 does not, even a fool will realize that the image is slightly shaky, and therefore one of the first details to blur would be the curvature of the fencepost. But if you look closely at SK 281, you can still see the curvature of 2 of the 4 fenceposts' top parts (from left to right). Now then, three other things revisionists have pointed out is first of, the arm length of the man in the centre of the image, saying that his left arm is too long, or that his right arm has two elbows. If I stand up and slightly tilt my body to the left, my hand can indeed drop down to around knee height. And the man's right arm does not have two elbows - it's just a shadow created by his shirt sleeve. The second thing they point out, is that these men aren't dressed in the "striped pyjamas" of your typical concentration camp inmates. Well, do we even know what the Sonderkommando dressed like? Do we even know if they did NOT wear hats? Keep in mind these people worked near the gas chambers, where the victims had disrobed prior to entering. The SK clearly had access to heaps of civilian clothes, whether they were allowed or not, and the Kanada section of the camp was between Krema II, III and IV, V. And finally, the last thing revisionists point us to, is the "spaghetti person" near the legs of the SK in the middle. To them, it looks like a woman sporting an afro and kneeling with two impossibly curved arms of differing thickness raised above her head and sporting a very thin neck. To me, it appears the "afro" belongs to the corpse on the left, and the arms, neck and torso of the spaghetti person isnt even part of the same person. For instance, the right arm might be a detail of a corpse further back. All I can say is, it is very, very hard to make out more than just a handful of distinct corpses in this corpse mess even in this detailed zoom of # 280. I think the same effect starts to apply here as what applies when different people look at a cloud formation in the sky: different people see different shapes.
Credit goes to Hans from Holocaust Controversies Note the smoke rising in real time near Krema V and people moving toward the buildings. The plume is rising from cremation pits just northwest of Krema V, precisely where eyewitness accounts claim bodies were burned. [1][2][3] Source: [1] Mueller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz. New York : Stein and Day, 1979. pp 136-139 [2] Hoess, Rudolph. Quoted in Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-1945. ed. by J. Noakes and G. Pridham. New York: Shocken Books, 1988. p. 1181 [3] Broad, Pery Quoted in Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-1945. p 1183.
We can observe a discoloration in the burial pits around Bunker II "the white house", hinting at activity in this area in the time between. This is comparing the Aug 23rd and Aug 25th 1944 photographs.
After Prussian Blue, the holes on the gas chamber roof, cremation time and coke consumption, another central pillar of "revisionist science" that is supposed to debunk mass extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau is the region's "high water table". Revisionist science basically says, the water table was too high to make cremation pits possible, therefore no mass body disposal (beyond crematory capability) could have occurred as the diggers would have struck water and you cannot incinerate corpses if they are wet, and if no mass body disposal could have occurred, they'd either still be around for us to find, or that many people were never killed in the first place. Revisionist scientists also repeat this for the AR camps. Revisionist scientists, in their infinite wisdom, are unable to explain if the water table was so high that it made even digging a mere cremation ditch impossible, how then was it possible to build some eight thousand square feet of underground cellars for Krematoria II and III? Revisionist scientists also conveniently do not point out to their gullible readers trying to debunk the holocaust from the comfort of their own home, that if they actually took the trip to Poland and visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, they would notice the remains of many drainage ditches that criss-cross the entire Birkenau camp to this day, visible to over a million tourists that visit the camp each year, dug by the slave labor force's manpower available to the SS in Birkenau. Of these many ditches honeycombing the camp, e . g. drainage excavation ditches E, F and H of Bauabschnitt (Building Segment) III were almost entirely finished by September 1943.[1] Furthermore, a sharp fall in the ground water table in the area around Auschwitz was noted in February 1944. This is from a letter from the head of the Central Building Administration Jothann "to the Regierungspräsidenten - Division IIIQ - Kattowtiz" dated 10 February 1944, which begins as follows: "As a result of the catastrophic fall in the ground water level in the area around Auschwitz, the wells sunk to supply the concentration camp and related operations are no longer sufficient."[2] The "area around Auschwitz" refers to the Stammlager and Birkenau, in the immediate vicinity of the Sola and Vistula rivers. So during the period in which Auschwitz was active, the SS had the area drained; as can be seen today, the drainage, which has not been maintained since 1945, has deteriorated and the water level has risen. How do we know the SS had equipment necessary to drain the water table? Because we have surviving documents from the Continentale Wasserwerks Gesellschaft relating to drainage work carried out at Birkenau between February 6 - August 7, 1943, including lists of pumping hours worked at Birkenau.[3] The fact that pic related, a photograph of the excavation work on the Zentralsauna building taken in May 1943, shows a pit more than 4.3 meters deep, completely dry on the bottom, is proof that a "high water table" at Auschwitz-Birkenau did not pose an insurmountable problem for the camp administration. Also, in this picture are clearly visible the homicidal gas chambers of Krematoria IV and V, including the gas-tight window shutters mounted on the exterior. It is in the area in the image's background (around Krematorium V) where we have air photo evidence of incineration pits / cremation ditches dug. Furthermore, keep the weather in mind, and the fact that the cremation ditches were not used all the time, but only when there were not enough furnaces to cremate the victims or during the extermination of the Hungarian Jews in 1944, when so many people were murdered daily that the furnaces could not handle the amount of corpses. There is documentary evidence that the water table around Auschwitz-Birkenau did not remain at a constant level, but fluctuated a lot during the camp's operation. The incineration trenches are known to have been active in October-November 1942 and the summer of 1944, which do not coincide with the period the snow melts and the water level rises. Revisionist allegations about the water table at Sobibor extermination camp have been debunked here: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2006/10/but-wait-ugly-voices-fans-will-say . html Sources: [1]: Bauantrag zum Ausbau des Kriegsgefangenelagers der Waffen-SS in Auschwitz O/S. Errichtung von 25 Stck. Effektenbaracken. RGVA, 502-1-230, p . 7. [2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20130721122315/http://www.vho.org/tr/2003/1/Image1006.gif [3]: Continentale Wasserwerks Ges., Tagelohn- (Neben-) Arbeiten
Pic unrelated, as it shows naked Jewish women, some of whom are holding infants, waiting in a line before their execution by collaborating Ukrainian auxiliary police, most likely October 14, 1942. These Jews were collected by the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft during the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto, which held roughly 1,700 Jews. On the eve of the ghetto's liquidation (13 October 1942), some of the inhabitants rose up against the Germans and were defeated after a short battle. The remaining members of the community were transported from the ghetto to this ravine in the Sdolbunov Gebietskommissariat, south of Rovno, where they were executed. Information regarding this action, including the photos, were acquired from a man named Hille, who was the Bezirks-Oberwachtmeister of the Gendarmerie at the time. Hille gave several of the photos to the company lawyer of a textile firm in Kunert, Czechoslovakia, where he worked as a doorman after the war. The Czech government confiscated the photos from the lawyer in 1946 and they subsequently became public. That the photos indeed show the shooting of Jews in connection with the liquidation of the ghetto was also confirmed by a statement of Gendarmerie-Gebietsfuehrer Josef Paur in 1961. source: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1065461 Let's recap what things I have addressed, shall we? I have given a brief history of Birkenau I have explained the Selektion process and made it clear why Auschwitz survivors exist in the first place I have provided ground and high resolution aerial photographs of the Kremas, roof "holes" and the camp I have addressed the lack of crematory chimney smoke question I have addressed the "crematoria / gas chambers could be seen by anyone in the camp" question I have addressed the "victims could just flee past the Krema buildings" question I have provided photographic evidence of the vents/chimneys through which zyklon-b was poured in I have provided crematory capacity documentation I have shown documentary evidence of lifts installed in Krematoriums II and III I have addressed the nonsensical crematory capacity claims made by Mattogno I have shown documentary evidence of multiple corpse cremation per muffle I have addressed the gas chamber Prussian Blue staining claims made by Leuchter and Rudolf I have shown via testimonial evidence and appeal to logic that the gas chambers were routinely washed I have addressed the nonsense regarding the HCN LD1 for humans and LD100 for lice argument I have addressed how pointless it is to bring in American gas chambers into the argument, and how much higher HCN concentrations won't kill people much faster I have addressed Faurisson's challenge to show or draw him a gas chamber by providing blueprints. I have addressed the issue with getting poison gas out of an underground room I have addressed how ridiculous the concept of fumigating a morgue is I have addressed how ridiculous the concept of a double duty morgue / delousing chamber is I have shown documentary evidence of the "morgues" being heated I have addressed the underground gas chambers of Krema II and III possessing a ventilation system I have addressed the Vergasungskeller document and ruled out carburetion chambers & air-raid shelters I have shown documentary evidence of gas-tight doors and shower-heads installed in the Krematoria I have shown documentary evidence that Krematorium IV had a gas chamber I have addressed the Zyklon-B outgassing curve and whether 300ppm can be achieved within 10 minutes I have addressed the "Zyklon-B pellets continue to outgass for hours!" argument I have addressed the evidence of corpse cremation near Krematorium V using ground photographs (SK) I have addressed the evidence of cremation pits near Krematorium V using aerial photography I have addressed the Birkenau water table As to coke consumption, please see: https://web.archive.org/web/20110717081521/http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/pressac0224.shtml What I have not addressed, is the reduction of the 4 million death toll, which I have moved to the next section that debunks other common generic claims made about the holocaust & "the Jews" by deniers
This next section deals with generic World Jewish Conspiracy theories. They are unrelated to the holocaust but many deniers keep bringing these up during holocaust discussions (derailing topics is their trade) to show us "evidence" that either discredit Jewish claims to modern Israel, or expose Jews as liars and falsifiers of history, or list alleged war crimes committed by the Allies during World War II that resulted in a genocide or planned genocide of the German people. Let us begin, shall we? One must realize that those who we label as antisemites, don't all necessarily hate all Jews. Some of them only hate "the Big Jews", i.e. those they are convinced are running the world and in control of entire nation states' economies and policy making. When asked who these are, they tell us George Soros, "the guys who own Hollywood and the news stations", AIPAC, wall street bankers or the Rothschild & Warburg family. Then there are those antisemites who keep stressing they don't hate Jews per se, but just the Zionists (including non-Jews who support Zionism). When asked why they do not support Zionism, they spin us the old yarn about land grabbing Khazar Zionists who stole the land from innocent native Palestinian Muslims who had been living there peacefully for 1400 years and totally did not migrate to the region in the recent past at all, no it's just the land grabbing Jews who did in the 20th century. Of course you also have the smartasses who remind us that the term "antisemite" is flawed, because Middle Easterners and North Africans are semitic people as well, and "antisemitic" would mean someone who is disparaging of all semitic peoples, many of whom are already extinct. Semitic comes from the word "Shem", i.e. a people who are descended from one of Noah's sons. You already begin to realize how mythology-based, and therefore bogus this whole concept of classifying people this way is, as there's also a "Hamitic people" who are alleged to be the descendants of Ham, another one of Noah's sons. In any case, the Jewish diaspora today is classified into mainly three branches: Ashkenazi Jews (Jews who gradually moved from the Middle East to Europe in the AD centuries), Sephardi Jews (Jews who gradually moved from the Middle East to the Iberian Peninsula in the AD centuries) and Mizrahi Jews (remained throughout history in the Middle East). It is true that Jews have long practiced endogamy (which reflects in parts of the Jewish community being prone to various genetic diseases such as Tay Sachs). The Inquisition shattered Sephardi Jewry, leading to far more incidences of intermarriage and to a less distinctive DNA. One method "anti-Zionists" (commonly neo nazis, white supremacists, and islamists) use to discredit the legitimacy of the modern Israeli state is by saying that Ashkenazi Jews never ever had any historic connection to this part of the world, and tell you (e.g. Benjamin Freedman) the following tale: "Once upon a time, in the central Asian kingdom of Khazaria during the early Middle Ages, a king decided to pick and choose a new religion for his subjects eeny, meeny, miny, moe style and settled for Judaism. His Khazar subjects who adopted Judaism became known as Ashkenazi Jews, and they poured into Europe over the following centuries. Therefore, these Ashkenazi Jews that make up the bulk of World Jewry today, have no connection to the true Hebrews and have no claims to any land in the Middle East." The same people that call all Jews Christ-killers (rather than just Mizrahi) are, on a different day of the week, peddling the story of only Ashkenazi Jews allegedly converted in the 9th century a.d. being the supposed destructive, nation-wrecking element of "World Jewry" today. Notice the hypocrisy? It gets better: If Ashkenazi Jews really have no connection with other Jews, why do antisemites still speak by and large of "the Jews" as one entity? And isnt Khazaria located near the Caucasus? Wouldnt Khazars converted to Judaism therefore be Caucasians, the race these white supremacists are defending in the first place? Unfortunately, it's not just antisemites who concocted this tale. Even a few "Jewish" authors, such as Shlomo Sand, an Austrian-born Israeli historian who reignited this complex controversy with the 2008 publication of a book as controversial in title as “The Invention of the Jewish People”, and his mentor Arthur Koestler with his 1976 book, “The Thirteenth Tribe,” have given this hypothesis some solid ground. There is a legitimate debate going on in Israel about Judaism being just a religion, or also an ethnicity, an identity or even a race. So the issue is there, but I am here to address the Khazar hypothesis. Let's hear what Rev. Klett has to say about the whole Ashkenazi "Out of Khazaria" theory: So, is it true that most of the Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars? The evidence by no means leads to the conclusion that they are not descendants of Abraham because of the Khazari connection. Let's see what we can find out about the Khazars: 1. We know that the Khazars were a Turkish tribe living between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea in the eighth century.[1] 2. To what extent the Khazars converted to Judaism is open to debate. According to the scholar Robert M. Seltzer, “The Judaism of the Khazars has been much discussed but the historical evidence is very limited. Only the ruling class of the Khazars became Jews...”[2] Raphael Patai states: “For more than two centuries Judaism was the religion of the ruling class while other religions, notably Islam, but also Christianity, were extensively practiced among the people.”[3] 3. Abba Eban has written: “...the rulers of the Khazars apparently converted to Judaism at the end of the eighth century, although the majority of the population appears to have remained either Christian or Moslem.”[4] Conclusion: There were members of a tribe of Turkic people who converted to Judaism. Many of their people remained Christian or Muslim, and some of those who had converted to Judaism became Russian Orthodox when conquered by Russia. Some of their descendants probably survived to join the Eastern European Jewish community. This, in a nutshell, is what we know about the Khazars. Not a Race: A “Community of Descent” There is truth to the statement “the Jews are not a race.” The Jewish people are a “community of descent,” which differs from a “race.” Today's Jewish people are, by and large, the community of physical descent from Abraham and the patriarchs. Let me illustrate this point. If I were to marry an Asian woman and father children who then married other Asians, these children would be my descendants. If that woman were to die and I were to marry an African woman and have children, and they were to marry others of African descent, they would also be my descendants. One set of descendants would be racially Asian and the other racially African, but they would both be my descendants! Today's Jewish people are, by and large, the community of physical descent from Abraham and the patriarchs, whatever their race. Race is not the issue. The issue is descent. Black Ethiopian Jews, blonde Jews from Scandinavia, and Cochin Jews from India are racially different but are all Jewish. Sure there has been intermarriage, but at the core, the Jewish community remains descended from patriarchal Israel. There is still a Jewish “community of descent.” From a scientific standpoint, genetic studies have shown Ashkenazi Jews have significant Middle Eastern genetic origins, which demonstrates non-Khazar ancestry. DNA tests [5] have proven the Khazar theory to be complete B.S.: A 2013 trans-genome study carried out by 30 geneticists, from 13 universities and academies, from 9 countries, assembling the largest data set available to date, for assessment of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic origins found no evidence of Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews. "Thus, analysis of Ashkenazi Jews together with a large sample from the region of the Khazar Khaganate corroborates the earlier results that Ashkenazi Jews derive their ancestry primarily from populations of the Middle East and Europe, that they possess considerable shared ancestry with other Jewish populations, and that there is no indication of a significant genetic contribution either from within or from north of the Caucasus region", the authors concluded. Only geneticist Eran Elhaik is contesting this. He obviously is backed by Shlomo Sand. Even David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and one-time Republican Louisiana State Representative, says that the Khazar theory is a complete lie. Straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udO65M_KIOA Also in the video, he makes a big issue about intermarriage laws in Israel but funny enough, he doesnt tell you how "much" freedom non-Muslims have in marrying Muslims (or vice versa) in most Muslim countries. So where did Ashkenazi (literal meaning "the Jews of Germany") originate from? The most well supported theory is the one that details a Jewish migration from Israel through what is now Greece, Italy and other parts of southern Europe.[6] So let us conclude: There is historic consensus that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from Khazars[7]. There is genetic, and therefore scientific consensus that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from Khazars[5]. A tiny minority among scholars contests this, chiefly three people: Eran Elhaik (1 scientist), Schlomo Sand (1 historian) and Arthur Koestler (1 journalist writer). By comparison, there's tons more academics who deny evolution, man-made climate change and the WTC collapsing due to a weakened structure (rather than controlled demolition as they claim). But even they, despite their numbers, remain a minority compared to the overwhelming numbers of academics who have concluded the opposite. Sources: 1. My People, by Abba Eban, page 149, Behrman House/Random House, © 1968 by Author. 2. Jewish People, Jewish Thought, by Robert M. Seltzer, page 787 in note 7, Macmillan Pub. Co. NY, NY© 1980 by author. 3. Tents of Jacob, The Diaspora - Yesterday and Today, by Raphael Patai, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, © 1971 4. Eban, page 149. 5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25079123 6. Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Basic Books, 2009 pp. 195–196. 7. http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/1.601287
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Born in Prussia to a middle-class family, he later studied political economy and Hegelian philosophy. As an adult, Marx became stateless and spent much of his life in London, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and published various works, the most well-known being the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. His work has since influenced subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. Marx's theories about society, economics and politics—collectively understood as Marxism—hold that human societies develop through class struggle: a conflict between ruling classes (known as the bourgeoisie) that control the means of production, and working classes (known as the proletariat) that work on these means by selling their labour for wages. According to Marx, states are run in the interests of the ruling class but are nonetheless represented as being in favor of the common interest of all. He predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism. For Marx, class antagonisms under capitalism, owing in part to its instability and crisis-prone nature, would eventuate the working class' development of class consciousness, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, communist society governed by a free association of producers. Marx actively fought for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic emancipation. Karl Marx was born to Heinrich Marx, formerly He(r)schel Mordechai, and Henriette Pres(s)burg. Marx's maternal grandfather was a rabbi, while his paternal line had supplied the city of Trier's rabbis since 1723, a role taken by his grandfather Marx Levy Mordechai. Prior to his son's birth, and to escape the constraints of anti-semitic legislation, He(r)schel converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, the main Protestant denomination in Prussia at the time, taking on the German forename of Heinrich over the Yiddish Herschel. Largely non-religious, Heinrich was a man of the Enlightenment, interested in the ideas of the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Voltaire. His wife, a Jewish woman, Henriette Pres(s)burg, was from a business family that later founded the company Philips Electronics. In contrast to her husband, Henriette retained her Jewish faith until 1825, when she received an adult baptism. So let me recap: Marx's father converted to Protestantism, Marx's mother converted to Protestantism, and Marx himself was not religious, though he was baptized Christian in August 1824 at age 6. But he is apparently still a Jew? Not by religion, but by race? The "once a Jew, always a Jew" National Socialist classification apparently continues to be applied. Yet at the same time, antisemites like to remind us there is no such thing as "one" Jewish race, and keep insisting on the "Ashkenazi out of Khazaria" theory. So what was Karl Marx's ethnicity ultimately? Was he a Jew or a Caucasoid non-Jewish Khazar? Make up your minds, before you apply your labels, revisionists! If revisionists insist Karl Marx being in league with Jewry, well, let me remind them of Karl Marx's antisemitism: "On the Jewish Question" is a work he wrote in 1843, and first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title "Zur Judenfrage". In it, he writes the following: "Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew [...] What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money." It is clear he disliked both religious and non-religious Jews. Some other "truth bombs" you might have encountered about Marx is that next to this revelation that he was a non-Judaic Jew, we're also told his real secret name is Moses Mordechai Levy, which is, of course, utter nonsense. The only truth to this is that Karl Marx's father changed his family name from Mordechai to Marx in 1808, ten years before Marx was born. This is why many antisemitic websites have quietly dropped this and continue to call him Karl Marx, but the German Metapedia just as an example, still calls him as such, which tells you a thing or two (once again) about the quality of "alternate encyclopedias" such as these: http://de . metapedia . org/wiki/Karl_Marx I personally do not hold Karl Marx (not a Jew), Friedrich Engels (not a Jew), or Lenin (not a Jew) in high regard, because they set in motion a movement that ended up - with the help of Stalin (not a Jew), Mao (not a Jew), Kil Il-Sung (not a Jew) and Pol Pot (not a Jew) - in the brutal murder of "political enemies" like the children of the Romanov family and claiming the lives of tens of millions in an artificially imposed clash of social orders and the forced redistribution of life's necessities. However, I just brought up Marx as an example of what fact twisting antisemites stoop to, so that they can convert this baptised Protestant, yet irreligious critic of organized religion including Judaism, into a Jew. For further reading regarding the far right's similar obsession with something they call Cultural Marxism: http://rationalwiki . org/wiki/Cultural_marxism http://rationalwiki . org/wiki/Frankfurt_school https://en . wikipedia . org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
Many times when you encounter holocaust deniers and they try to prove to you the holocaust is a hoax, they never seem to be able to focus on one issue. They are more than happy to leave the time period in question altogether, hop on their nazi time machine, and jump all over the place regarding the timeline of history when it comes to cherry picking their little world view, on how Jews are the root of all evil. From reminding us who killed Christ to Talmudic prophecy and numerology to the "Out of Khazaria" theory to the Napoleonic Wars and the Rothschild Family tree to secret societies like the Freemasons, Illuminati and Bohemian Grove, to who REALLY started WW1, to the early roots of the European Union, to modern day Israel and its mistreatment of Palestinians, it is nigh impossible to nail down a holocaust denier on the holocaust itself and discuss a topic (one aspect of this event that itself is extensive) at length. With this behavior, they make it almost impossible for someone to follow them through their time machine of antisemitism and prove them wrong on every account. It's also the reason why this section of my presentation will try to partake a little bit in this wild goose chase all over history and show that the fraudulent modus operandi of holocaust deniers is not just evident in their attempts to distort holocaust historiography, but pretty much wherever else they go as well. One such notion, is their claim that a man named Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi is the spiritual father of the European Union, and the spiritual father of race-mixing, and with it, the downfall/genocide/ethnocide of distinct European ethnic national identities as well. In fact, this topic even made it to the European Parliament itself, when it was brought up by the raving cross-eyed lunatic going by the name of Nick Griffin (BNP member)! See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmDuPccLON4 ...which is why Kalergi is an oft used buzzword among the same circles that cry White Genocide because they can't get laid. It is interesting to note, that these same people who talk about a Jewish conspiracy to control gentiles, conveniently forget to mention that Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was, in fact, NOT a Jew at all. Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894 - 1972) was an Austrian-Japanese politician, and philosopher. A pioneer of European integration, he served as the founding president of the Paneuropean Union for 49 years. His parents were Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Mitsuko Aoyama, daughter of an oil merchant, antiques-dealer, and landowner in Tokyo. His first book, Pan-Europa, was published in 1923, and contained a membership form for the Pan-Europa movement which held its first Congress in Vienna in 1926. Coudenhove-Kalergi indeed proposed Beethoven's Ode to Joy as the music for the European Anthem. But this is where the similarities end. The antisemites go on to say that Kalergi not only drafted the so-called "Kalergi Plan", but also stated in his works that he wanted a mixed race Europe, and with it, the destruction of distinct European ethnic identities. The dimwitted morons who parrot this probably dedicated a grand total of 5 minutes of research to get this information instead of finding any of the supposed quotes in Kalergi's books themselves. Kalergi never said he WANTS Europe to become a mixed race continent - it's just a hypothesized observation/prediction he made of the future (you know, like Southpark had that one episode where time travelers from the future are all mixed race). Nor did he EVER imply that Jews will rule over this race in the future. As usual, these convictions come when taking this nonsense from secondary sources (aka neo nazi websites) instead of primary sources. The "race of the future" is in fact a concept that has been hypothesized by many to be a theoretical composite race which will result from ongoing miscegenation. Kalergi predicted in his work "Practical Idealism" (Praktischer Idealismus) in 1925: "The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals." see: Praktischer Idealismus (Wien/Leipzig 1925), page 23 The same scenario had been envisaged, with rather less enthusiasm, by Madison Grant in his 1916 "The Passing of the Great Race", calling for a eugenics program to prevent this development, and in a similar ideological context in Lothrop Stoddard's "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy" in 1920. In 1933 Kalergi responded to the ascendance of National Socialism by collaborating with Heinrich Mann, Arthur Holitscher, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Max Brod in writing and publishing the pamphlet "Gegen die Phrase vom jüdischen Schädling" (Against the Phrase 'Jewish Parasite'). The other claim, that Jews will rule over this new mixed-race, is also baseless. The origin of this can be found many pages later in Kalergi's book, in a completely different context: "Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process [of persecution]. No wonder that this people, that escaped Ghetto-Prison, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe. Therefore a gracious Providence provided Europe with a new race of nobility by the Grace of Spirit. This happened at the moment when Europe's feudal aristocracy became dilapidated, and thanks to Jewish emancipation." see: Praktischer Idealismus, page 50 For further reading, see: http://rationalwiki . org/wiki/White_extinction_scenario https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theory
The reason the odd holocaust denier (or antisemite) might have brought forth an Ilya Ehrenburg quote to a discussion isn't because this is some obscure guy, but because Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) was a Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure. Ehrenburg was among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist – in particular, as a reporter in three wars (First World War, Spanish Civil War and the Second World War). His articles on the Second World War provoked intense controversies in West Germany, especially during the sixties. His novel "The Thaw" gave its name to an entire era of Soviet politics, namely, the liberalization after the death of Stalin. The Black Book, edited by him and Vassily Grossman, has special historical significance; detailing the genocide on Soviet citizens of Jewish ancestry. Clearly, he is an important figure. It is true that Ilya Ehrenburg sprwed much hate-filled rhetoric against "the German" (as in: German man, German soldier, German enemy), and if the holocaust deniers and generic antisemites had merely stuck to these, they would have a better argument (not that it's a good argument, because this was during a Vernichtungskrieg, a war that claimed the lives of over 20 million Russians. A Russian writer putting his emotion to paper and saying kill those damn German bastards while he witnessed the western part of his country be reduced to a burning, cratered, war-torn ruin by the hands of an invading enemy who had come to conquer it should not come to anyone as a surprise. However, the antisemites shoot themselves in the foot by attributing wholly false quotes to Ehrenburg as well, wherein they claim he called for the rape of German women, such as: "KILL! KILL! In the German race there is nothing but evil. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill! You gallant soldiers of the Red army" Supposedly this was from a Russian leaflet, except that this leaflet never existed, and Ehrenburg stressed multiple times that he never said anything about urging others to rape German women, or even urging anyone to kill German civilians for that matter. And in an article entitled "Justification of hatred" (Krasnaya Svjesda, summer 1942) Ehrenburg explained: ".. Our people dream not of revenge. Not for this purpose have we educated our youths, so that they stoop to the level of Hitlerite atrocities. Never will Red Army soldiers kill German children, set ablaze the Goethe House in Weimar or destroy the library in Marburg. Revenge means that you will repay with the same coin, that one gets ready to speak the language to speak of the enemy. But we have no language in common with the fascists. .. " Below are references to some German scholars that have found out this quote is a myth: Fisch, Bernhard: "Ubej! Toete! Zur Rolle von Ilja Ehrenburgs Flugblaettern in den Jahren 1944/45". In: Geschichte, Erziehung, Politik, 8 (1997) 1, S. 22-27 Urban, Thomas: "Als Held der Roten Armee gefeiert, als "Deutschenhasser" dämonisiert. Ilja Ehrenburg zwischen den politischen Fronten", in: Süddeutsche Zeitung 14 . 04 . 05, S. 10. Carola Tischler: "Die Vereinfachungen des Genossen Erenburg. Eine Endkriegs- und eine Nachkriegskontroverse", Elke Scherstjanoi (Hrsg.) "Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland". Briefe von der Front (1945) und historische Analysen. Texte und Materialien zur Zeitgeschichte, Bd. 14. K . G. Saur Verlag, München 2004; S. 326-339 The latter author cites the expert examination of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (in Munich) from May 15, 1966. The Institute claims it has no evidence of either Ehrenburg's authorship nor existence of this leaflet in Russian. More info here: https://rodoh . info/forum/viewtopic . php?t=2050 Of course, the fact that many German women did end up being raped by Red Army soldiers is accepted by historians, and there have also been credible books even in Germany about it written by female authors who do not belong to any fringe right wing group. No secrets here, so I don't really know what the "truthers" are trying to achieve.
Another old revisionist chestnut is the tall tale, that none of the great leaders at the time ever mentioned the holocaust in any of their memoirs immediately following WW2, and therefore "the holocaust" was invented some time in the 50s or 60s and retroactively attributed to WW2. The only grain of truth in this is that this continent-spanning atrocity (deliberate mass murder committed by Nazis and their collaborators on the civilians of Europe, with the main goal of exterminating European Jews) was not labeled as "the holocaust" on the closing day of the Second World War. Churchill had this to say about the holocaust in his memoirs: "Crimes were committed by the Germans under Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record." - THE SECOND WORLD WAR “The Gathering Storm” page 15 ...which some may interpret as too generic a statement, but Churchill goes on: "The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough and ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pygmy proportions. Deliberate extermination of whole populations was contemplated and pursued by both Germany and Russia in the Eastern war." -THE SECOND WORLD WAR, Volume 1 “The Gathering Storm”, Book One "From War to War", Chapter One "The Follies of the Victors", page 17 https://ia800402.us.archive.org/33/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.211070/2015.211070.The-Second_text.pdf So much for Churchill never mentioning the holocaust. Churchill, in fact, knew a lot more about Jewish politics than you might think. In 1920 he published several essays among which he rightly observed the fact that Zionism and (what he thought Jewish) Bolshevism were movements ideologically opposed to each other, rather than being the same thing as some far-right idiots like to say: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zionism_versus_Bolshevism The book "The Second World War" is a history of the period from the end of the First World War to July 1945, written by Winston Churchill. It was largely responsible for his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. For more, a book I can recommend is British historian Martin Gilbert's "Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship"
Eisenhower issued orders to record camp atrocities specifically to counter denial. He also issued the following to Gen. George Marshall on April 19, 1945: "We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail. I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you could see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of Congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theatre in a couple of C-54's, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps. I am hopeful that some British individuals in similar categories will visit the northern area to witness similar evidence of atrocity." General Eisenhower in fact wanted to be in some of the pictures his soldiers were taking in liberated concentration camps. One such picture shows him at Ohrdruf with other high-ranking U.S. Army officers. They are witnessing a view of bodies of prisoners on the 12th of April, 1945. Accessible online via the U.S. National Archives. See: https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/EISENHOWER-S-PROOF-Holocaust-Evidence On a similar note, holocaust deniers often either half-quote, or completely paraphrase many non-deniers to lend their theories more credibility, such as Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus from the Encyclopedia Britannica as having dismissed gas chamber stories, accuse German historian Martin Broszat as having said "no death camps or gassings in Germany" or Yehuda Bauer from Yad Vashem as having said "The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at.", the latter I will address separately in the next post. To begin with, it is indeed true that early post-war editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica did not contain detailed accounts of the Nazi extermination program in regards to Einsatzgruppen, Zyklon-B and gas chambers, but Jacob Rader Marcus wrote the following: "In World War II the situation of Jewry in the mass settlements of eastern Europe was even worse, for the national socialists set out deliberately to destroy large numbers of Polish and Russian-Jewish civilians. If but a fraction of the atrocities reported were accurate, then many thousands of defenseless Jewish non-combatants, men, women and children, were butchered after September 1939 ..." (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1947 and 1956 editions, Vol. 13, p. 63 C.) 'set out to deliberately destroy large numbers of Polish and Russian-Jewish civilians' and 'Butchered' does not sound like mere resettlement or expulsion to me. Another classic example of deniers (e.g. Germar Rudolf in his publication "Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte" purposefully not quoting them entirely, or even properly is regarding Martin Broszat: Martin Broszat said the following: "Die Massenvernichtung der Juden durch Vergasung begann 1941/1942 und fand ausschließlich an einigen wenigen hierfür ausgewählten und mit Hilfe entsprechender technischer Einrichtungen versehenen Stellen, vor allem im besetzten polnischen Gebiet (aber nirgends im Altreich) statt: in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Sobibor am Bug, in Treblinka, Chelmno und Belzec. Dort, aber nicht in Bergen Belsen, Dachau oder Buchenwald wurden jene als Brausebäder oder Desinfektionsräume getarnten Massenvernichtungsanlagen errichtet, von denen in Ihrem Artikel die Rede ist. Diese notwendige Differenzierung ändert gewiß keinen Deut an der verbrecherischen Qualität der Einrichtung der Konzentrationslager." which translates to: "The mass extermination of Jews by gassing began in 1941/1942 and only at a few camps provided with the appropriate technical equipment for this purpose, particularly in the occupied Polish territory (but nowhere in the Old Reich): in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Sobibor on the Bug [river], in Treblinka, Chelmno and Belzec. There, but not in Bergen Belsen, Dachau or Buchenwald were those installations of mass exterminations installed, disguised as showers or disinfection rooms, of which there is talk in your article. This necessary differentiation changes certainly not one bit in the criminal quality of the establishment of concentration camps ." So what Martin Broszat said in this quote, is that the mass extermination of Jews by gassing was carried out especially (vor allem) in Polish territory and nowhere in the Altreich*, in a few camps equipped for this. And he said installations of mass exterminations were not installed in Belsen, Dachau, or Buchenwald. He did not say there were no homicidal gassings in the Altreich, or that there were no homicidal gas chambers here either. He said there was no program of mass extermination of JEWS via homicidal gassings in the Altreich. Thousands of people died by homicidal gassing in the Altreich: consider the Aktion T4 euthanasia program whose victims weren't Jewish, but this is not the type of mass extermination that went on in Poland, where the numbers were millions. Hence, the quote. *definition: those territories that were part of Nazi Germany before 1938, therefore not including Austria or the Sudetenland.
Oftentimes, holocaust deniers, in their tactic of trying to cite respected historians and "mainstream people" for their denial arguments, will misquote Yehuda Bauer from Yad Vashem, as having only said: "The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at." and will then go on to quote him as having said: "little of what was said there was executed in detail." This is usually a denier bombshell fired at anyone who tries to bring the Wannsee conference into the debate. Naturally, the astonished person then tries to fact check the quote, realizes it is genuine, and the denier expects his world view to suddenly shatter. However, what we have here is a classic half-quote. As for Yehuda Bauer, this is what he really said: "The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at. Wannsee was but a stage in the unfolding of the process of mass murder." (Canadian Jewish News, Jan. 30, 1992) Historians do not think of Wannsee as the conference where the Nazis first thought of physically exterminating the Jews. It is accepted that this conference was more a formal event to inform the middle echelons of the plan, one that was already known among the higher-ups. The article can be accused of shoddy journalism. Because unlike what it states, Bauer did not "debunk the Wannsee Conference", as he clearly says it was a historical event, a meeting. He rather emphasizes that the DECISION to carry out the Final Solution was not made THERE. The only thing that revisionists have gotten right, is pointing out Mr. Bauer saying "little of what was said there was executed in detail." ...as 'evacuation' and 'resettlement' turned into mass murder.
In a similar fashion, Simon Wiesenthal is often quoted by deniers as having said there were no extermination camps and no mass gassings took place on German soil. These are all supposedly admissions that shake the foundations of the holocaust. For deniers, that is. Not for anyone else. Read exactly what Wiesenthal said: "...no mass gassings such as those that took place in Auschwitz, Treblinka and other camps" "Such as those" is a direct comparison. The homicidal gassings that did indeed take place in the camps and facilities Wiesenthal goes on to mention in the 3rd and 4th paragraph, were a fraction of the size and scale of those in Poland. Hence "no mass gassings such as..." rather than "no mass gassings". Of course, details like these are swept under the rug by deniers when they quote mine others.
There are tons of fake quotes attributed to famous people by Neo-Nazis, in their quest to "educate" (read: lie to) the public. Perhaps the most famous of them all, is the one presented above, attributed to Voltaire, the pen name of French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher Francois-Marie Arouet famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. While it is true that many famous historical figures we previously thought of as unblemished actually were virulent antisemites, such as Martin Luther, Immanuel Kant, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft or George S. Patton, in reality, Voltaire never said the above. This quote is actually a paraphrase of Kevin Alfred Strom, an American White nationalist, neo-Nazi, Holocaust denier, White separatist and associate editor of the National Vanguard. Strom in his program, "All America Must Know the Terror That is Upon Us" (1993) said: "To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?" The misattributed quotation continues to spread across the Internet, just like the "atrocity propaganda" quote falsely attributed to Sefton Delmer, or many false quotes attributed to Winston Churchill. However, it is also true that Voltaire was (at least during a certain time in his life) a raving antisemite. I am not going to list his entire biography here, but if you look into it you will see. He did change his views, however, in his reply to Isaac de Pinto, and ended up writing an apology to the Jews entitled "Apologie pour la Nation Juive". I just find it funny how the far right shoots itself in the foot by attributing false quotes rather than genuine ones, like: "All of the other people have committed crimes, the Jews are the only ones who have boasted about committing them. They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race."- Voltaire, Lettres de Memmius a Cicéron (1771) The fact that quotes falsely attributed to Voltaire (and others) aren't just limited to poorly informed trolls on the internet, but can have international consequences in present-day politics is proven by Australian conservative politician Cory Bernardi spreading the same hoax-quote: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/nov/27/cory-bernardi-mistakenly-quotes-voltaire-on-twitter-with-supposed-neo-nazis-line On a similar note, the famous quote: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", attributed to Voltaire by many hate speech apologists who like to label themselves as freedom of speech proponents, is also a hoax, as the true author is S. G. Tallentyre, pseudonym of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who claimed (without evidence) that Voltaire said those words in her 1906 book “The Friends of Voltaire”. It didn't help that many newspapers and other publications contributed in spreading this hoax quote. source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/
The quote above is often peddled around in right wing forums as proof of Allied psychological warfare and atrocity propaganda. It is often mixed with anti-German propaganda from WW1, and Allied posters and propaganda films in WW2 as well that portray the German soldier as an enemy (duh). The key point here though, is that this quote supposedly proves that the Allies are trying to suppress a "historic truth" through carefully monitored (post-war) re-education (read: continuous brainwashing). The source for this quote is given to us by the far right "truth seekers" as: "Delmer, Sefton (1904-1979), former British Chief of 'Black propaganda', said after the German surrender, in 1945, in a conversation with the German professor of international law, Dr. Friedrich Grimm in a later publication by him called Politische Justiz, published in 1953." Okay, so we find out there's apparently another person involved, namely one Friedrich Grimm. Who was Friedrich Grimm? Friedrich Wilhelm Johannes Grimm (1888 - 1959) was a German antisemite and national socialist politician, lawyer, publicist and propagandist. He fought the Treaty of Versailles, supported the rise and the crimes of the Nazis and fought resistance fighters like David Frankfurter, Herschel Grynszpan or Berthold Jacob. He was also involved in Nazi policy regarding occupied France. After 1945, he trivialized Nazi crimes, participated in the defense of Nazi criminals and talked about various proposals for a general amnesty for Nazi perpetrators. So let me get this straight: our source, is a real Nazi. And we just have to believe him. Interestingly, even in his publication he does not say the quote was uttered by Sefton Delmer. He does not name his source. In fact his description makes his source rather a Frenchman than an Englishman. Therefore, it can be safely concluded that the quote is, at best, hearsay written by a Nazi propagandist, and in any case even he did not say that Sefton Delmer is the author of it.
The above is a common pic shared among those who are convinced the Rothschild family runs the world. If you want to excite the average conspiratard, offer him a quotation from a Rothschild: Nathan Rothschild, who allegedly "controlled the Bank of England" after 1820, has been alleged to have notoriously declared: "I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply." - Ellen Hodgson Brown quoting him in "Web of Debt", p. 65., without further source. See Brown's response when she got called out on her BS: http://www . garynorth . com/public/7160 . cfm By the way, he didn't control the Bank of England. There's no primary source evidence indicating that he did (oh, silly me, I forgot, it's a secret!) His grandson did sit on the board of directors, beginning in 1869. As to why you might not find many individual Rothschilds in the Forbes list of Billionaires, it is not because there is some cover-up going on, but because the "huge net worth" of the Rothschild family (and the Rothschild family has been around for hundreds of years) has been distributed amongst hundreds of heirs, and has therefore diluted each individual’s personal fortune. With this being said 500 trillion is still a nonsense figure, as it is estimated that the Rothschild Family as a whole still possesses in the region of $350-400 billion USD in assets throughout the world. For reference: that is not even 1 trillion, not even 1/500th of what is claimed in the pic above! Also, to claim every Rothschild knows the others, and operates in the best interest of the family (rather than individual gain), and that this also goes against the interests of all non-Rothschilds, is called a baseless accusation (or rather, based on "gut feeling"). I have asked many times the people who believe the Rothschild banking family to be "the worst thing ever" and "head of the serpent" to give me some concrete examples of their allegedly many evil deeds. All I got in return was lots of woulda-coulda-shoulda's and "duh"s & ad hominems questioning my intellect. The man pictured in the red-pill infographic above, Jacob Rothschild, only has a net worth of 5 billion, which is comparable to Donald Trump, but nowhere near that of (in 2016) Bill Gates (81 billion), Warren Buffet (65 billion), or Mark Zuckerberg (55 billion). Amancio Ortega is sitting on some 67 billion, and the Koch brothers at 40 billion. Similarly, the Warburg family has also been the subject of many accusations. Out of many long-lasting rich families on the globe, notice how the Jewish ones are always targeted. If anything, historical evidence points to the Rothschild family having a financial interest in keeping peace in Europe in the 19th century, rather than the other way round, and by the 20th century they had lost financial influence to the US. Today, in the world financial market, the Rothschilds are literal whos. Split into three different branches, (Rothschild & Co; Groupe LCF Rothschild, and RIT Capital Partners PLC) their influence is minimal in the grand scheme of things. In today's world, Burger King employs more people and has more to say in the business world than any Rothschild. Which is probably why more serious sounding conspiracy nuts rather focus their attention on Bilderberg meetings than keeping tabs on the Rothschilds. For more, see: https://skeptoid . com/episodes/4311 Niall Ferguson: "The House of Rothschild" Vol. 1&2 (1999,2000) Similar allegations are made as to "who owns the Federal Reserve". Short answer: no-one. It was created by the Congress and was set up to serve public interest. http://www.usagold.com/federalreserve.html
On the internet, you will often find conspiracy theorists who like to wail and cry about the existence of various "secret plans" most people have never heard about (but they managed to find out about) that would have almost genocided the German people after WW2, and then wave them around as proof that the Allies were evil. Some even go so far as to claim these Plans are currently being implemented. Before we debunk this nonsense, let us look at what really did happen to Germany each time it lost a World War: We all know what happened to Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire after World War 1: All three powerful monarchies ceased to exist and changed into democracies (federal/parliamentary republics). Furthermore, all of them lost territories, and the entente powers gained territories, and new nations were created, many of whom existed earlier in history as well before they had been consumed by these imperial powers. Without going into detailed maps and holding a lecture about the Treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain, Trianon, Lausanne, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and so on and so forth, let me just briefly summarize: Turkey lost all non-Turkish territories, Austria lost all non-Austrian territories (and lost South-Tyrol to Italy but gained the Burgenland state from Hungary), and Germany did the following: In the west, Germany returned Alsace-Lorraine to France. It had been seized by Germany more than 40 years earlier. Further, Belgium received Eupen and Malmedy; the industrial Saar region was placed under the administration of the League of Nations for 15 years; and Denmark received Northern Schleswig. Finally, the Rhineland was demilitarized; that is, no German military forces or fortifications were permitted there. In the east, Poland received parts of West Prussia and Silesia from Germany. In addition, Czechoslovakia received the Hultschin district from Germany; the largely German city of Danzig became a free city under the protection of the League of Nations; and Memel, a small strip of territory in East Prussia along the Baltic Sea, was ultimately placed under Lithuanian control. Outside Europe, Germany lost all its colonies, e.g. in Africa or New Guinea. When WW2 was over, in the decade of allied military occupation that followed, Austria convinced the allies that it was a victim of National Socialism and therefore escaped much punishment, having already been reduced to a tiny country from a large colonial power (over slavs, with Hungary's help). Germany lost the remaining East Prussian territories to Poland, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast was created around the Königsberg region, and the eastern (formerly central) half of Germany became a Communist country for the next 40 years. As if this isn't enough, antisemites instead take great pains to dig up barely known alternate plans that had been drafted by individuals of varying importance, just to show how evil those allies were in destroying Germany for good (funny enough, everyone right now considers Germany the leader of the EU, and it is the strongest economic powerhouse in Europe to begin with. So much for its demise) In short, they have three plans for us: 1) The Kaufman Plan 2) The Hooton Plan 3) The Morgenthau Plan Theodore N. Kaufman was a literal who, a nobody operating by himself who self-published a book called "Germany Must Perish!" during wartime where he demanded the sterilization of all Germans and to carve up the country as shown in pic related. Joseph Goebbels got news of this and used the German propaganda machinery to inflate Kaufman's book to a supposedly nationwide US Bestseller, and ultimate proof of the genocidal nature of Jewry, claiming he had close ties to the US President. In truth, his book had a very limited publication in the US and nobody had heard of it until the Germans started using it for their own propaganda of how the Allies are out and about to exterminate them. Funny enough, another time he also called for the sterilization of all Americans instead of sending them to war, something not mentioned by those who drop the Kaufman-Plan info-bomb on the average layman. They also won't tell you this: "Few Americans have ever heard of a prominent fellow-citizen named Kaufmann ... In Germany every child has known of him for a long time. Germans are so well informed about Mr. Kaufmann that the mere mention of his name recalls what he stands for. In one of his recent artlcles Dr. Goebbels wrote, "Thanks to the Jew Kaufman, we Germans know only too well what to expect in case of defeat." — The Nation, November 14, 1942 Ernest Hooton was a perhaps more famous person in that he was an anthropology lecturer at Harvard and eugenicist believing in racial theory who once appeared in an article in the PM Daily newspaper saying attempts should be made to "breed the war strain out of Germans" by mating them with the populace of other nations. This, of course, is interpreted by current conspiracy theorists as an actual officially formulated plan that was then implemented by the powers-that-be, and is proof of Germany's multiculturalism today (quietly forgetting that former Allies countries are, in fact, even more multicultural including Russia that has a large Muslim population). Furthermore, regarding multiculturalism (which is present in both North America and at least half of Europe today rather than just in Germany, already something that debunks the Hooton narrative), the problems arising (apart from crime) are chiefly the presence of parallel societies created by immigrants refusing to assimilate, which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Ernest Hooton had in mind, namely large-scale miscegenation with the German population in order to, as he believed, "breed out the war strains". According to statistics, less than 10% of relationships in Germany involve one person who is a German citizen and the other who isn't. source: https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/bundesamt-fuer-statistik-deutsche-heiraten-am-liebsten-deutsche-oder-tuerken_id_4487355.html Therefore, claiming multiculturalism is proof of the Hooton Plan is beyond stupid. Perhaps this is the reason why modern far-right activists (from the American Alt-right with figureheads like Richard Spencer, over European Identitarians with leaders like Martin Sellner, to actual murderous terrorists like Anders Breivik or Brenton Tarrant) have dropped the whole miscegenation paranoia and have instead switched to the "we're being outbred by foreigners" rhetoric. I.e. that ethnic Whites are being demographically replaced/genocided, not via miscegenation, but rather by a combination of immigration and the higher birth rate of non-whites, which they conveniently assume will never decrease as a result of wealth and education, as it did for the whites over the past century. This is how they then create all sorts of horror-scenarios, and find a terrified audience willing to accept their models. Now let's look at the last guy. The only actually important figure related to American decision making was Henry Morgenthau Jr., U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He played a major role in designing and financing the New Deal. After 1937, while still in charge of the Treasury, he played the central role in financing US participation in World War II. He also played an increasingly major role in shaping foreign policy, especially with respect to Lend Lease, support for China, helping Jewish refugees, and proposing (in the "Morgenthau Plan") to prevent Germany from again being a military threat by wrecking its industry and mines and turning it into an agrarian state. So yes, if revisionists want to bring up any one of these three figures, it should be Morgenthau. In 1944, Morgenthau indeed proposed the Morgenthau Plan (as an actual plan) for postwar Germany, calling for Germany to lose the heavy industry, and the Ruhr "should not only be stripped of all presently existing industries but so weakened and controlled that it can not in the foreseeable future become an industrial area". Except it was never implemented, because post-war Germany never became an agrarian state, and the Ruhr area (located in West-Germany) remained productive. Interestingly, it was Communist East Germany that suffered from poverty and agrarianism, both of which had nothing to do with Morgenthau.
This is another one of those commonly peddled revisionist "truth-bombs" - that the Diary of a Young Girl, read in tens of thousands of classrooms across the planet each year, and part of the education of our children, is, in fact, a hoax and therefore part of Jewish indoctrination as its author is not Anne Frank. The California-based hub of holocaust denial, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) says (original): "The evidence compiled by Dietlieb Felderer of Sweden and Dr. Robert Faurisson of France establishes conclusively that the famous diary is a literary hoax." The IHR says (revised): "Evidence compiled by Dr Robert Faurisson of France establishes that the famous diary is a literary hoax." Dietlieb Felderer is a notorious neo-Nazi, probably Austrian, who spent time in a Swedish prison for spreading hate propaganda. He is best-known for mailing snippets of hair to Jews in Europe, and asking them sarcastically if this can be proven to be hair from a gassed Jew. He has also written many disgusting tracts involving sex and Nazi murder. One which is too repulsive to repeat here describes (sarcastically) how cyanide gas influences a female sexual organ. His website is now a porn site. Note that the IHR omits the reference to Felderer in the revised version. Again, as revisionism tries to move from the antisemitic fringes into the mainstream, they must jettison or at least disguise their ties to people like this. Robert Faurisson is at least not as crude as Felderer. But he is not a historian, forensic expert, or handwriting expert. He was a professor of literature at the University of Lyons specializing in medieval and renaissance poems. The testimony of this so-called "foremost Holocaust authority" regarding the authenticity of the writings of Anne Frank was rejected by the Frankfurt Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) in 1979. In 1981, the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation submitted Anne Frank's handwritten diaries to the Dutch State Forensic Science Laboratory of the Ministry of Justice to determine their authenticity. The State Forensic Science Laboratory examined the materials used -- the ink, paper, glue, etc. -- and the handwriting and issued a report of some 270 pages: The report of the State Forensic Science Laboratory has convincingly demonstrated that both versions of the diary of Anne Frank were written by her in the years 1942 to 1944. The allegations that the diary was the work of someone else (after the war or otherwise) are thus conclusively refuted. Furthermore, that despite corrections and omissions...the Diary of Anne Frank [i.e., the published version of the diaries] does indeed contain "the essence" of Anne's writings, and that there are no grounds on which the term "forgery" can be applied to the work of the editors or publishers of the book. Deniers argue that there are multiple versions of the Diary of Anne Frank. This fact alone, they claim, proves it is a fraud. There are indeed multiple versions of the diary, and Anne herself explains why this is so: In 1944, a Dutch government official, broadcasting from London, urged the population to save eyewitness accounts of their wartime experience, including memorabilia and diaries. Hearing this, Anne, decided to rewrite some of the entries. She also used her diary as a basis for a novel, "The Annexe". Hence the multiple versions. The most common complaint against the diary however, is that it allegedly contained writing made by a ballpoint pen, and that ballpoint pens were not popular until after Anne's death. This is a fraudulent but persistent myth. The only ballpoint ink in the diary were on slips of paper known to be inserted by someone other than Anne anyway. The writings of Anne herself are not in ballpoint: All the diary entries are written in various types of ink and (colored) pencil, not in ballpoint. The document analysis by the Netherlands Forensic Institute showed that the main part of the diary and the loose sheets were written in grey-blue fountain pen ink. In addition, Anne also used thin red ink, green and red colored pencils and black pencil for her annotations: not ballpoint. The origin of the "ballpoint myth", which deniers cite as source, is the four-page report that the German Federal Criminal Police Office (the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) in Wiesbaden published in 1980. In this investigation into the types of paper and ink used in the diary of Anne Frank it is stated that "ballpoint corrections" had been made on some loose sheets. The BKA’s task was to report on all the texts found among the diaries of Anne Frank, and therefore also on the annotations that were made in Anne’s manuscripts after the war. However, the Dutch investigation by the Forensic Institute in the mid-1980’s shows that writing in ballpoint is only found on two loose pages of annotations, and that these annotations are of no significance for the actual content of the diary. They were clearly placed between the other pages later. The researchers of the Forensic Institute also concluded that the handwriting on these two annotation sheets differs from the writing in the diary "to a far-reaching degree." Photos of these loose annotation sheets are included in the NIOD’s publication (see The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, 2003, pages 168 and 170). In 1987, a Mr. Hans Ockelmann from Hamburg wrote that his mother had written the annotation sheets in question. Mrs. Dorothea Ockelmann was a member of the team that carried out the graphological investigation into the writings of Anne Frank around 1960. In short: the "ballpoint myth" is easy to disprove. The "ballpoint myth" is based on the simple fact that, around 1960, two annotation sheets with ballpoint writing were inserted between the original pages. These two annotation sheets were written by a graphological researcher, Dorothea Ockelmann, whose handwriting differs drastically from that of Anne Frank, and these two sheets are not included in most editions of the diary (apart from the Critical Edition, where photos of the annotation sheets are reproduced). In July 2006, the BKA found it necessary to state in a press release that the 1980 investigation cannot be used to call the authenticity of the diary into doubt. And then we have a guy called Meyer Levin. The allegation goes, that Meyer Levin is the original author of the Anne Frank Diary, i.e. that it is a work of fiction, and as proof for this the deniers point us out to the fact that Meyer Levin sued Anne Frank's father Otto Frank over the rights of the book. Meyer Levin (1905-1981) was an american novelist. What really happened, is that in the 1950s, Levin was caught up in an argument about the rights to a STAGE ADAPTATION of the diary of Anne Frank, which occupied him for many years and left him bitter in the end. His wife had made him aware of the diary in 1951, after which he had promoted its publication in the US and drew attention to it by writing an article about the diary in the New York Times. With the consent of Anne's father Otto Frank, he took up a dramatization of the diary and gave Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford a draft, which she accepted. On the advice of Lillian Hellman however, who found Levin's version inadequate, Crawford instead decided to commission the author-couple Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett with the diary's adaptation for theatre. Her two-act The Diary of Anne Frank, premiered at the Cort Theater in New York in October 1955, was a huge success, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, and in 1959, George Stevens turned it into a multiple Oscar-winning feature film. Meyer Levin claimed that the play neglected the Jewish subject matter of the diary in shameful fashion, but on the other hand used his design. He sued Kermit Bloomgarden, who had produced the piece instead of Crawford, as well as Goodrich, Hackett and Otto Frank. There followed a long-standing legal dispute, which finally ended with a settlement, according to which Levin received compensation, but refrained from publishing his adaptation. Levin however, did not want to resign himself to the court's decision and continued to fight for the rest of his life trying to bring his play onto the stage. He brought these experiences of his to paper in the novel "The Fanatic" (1964). He also described the events in detail in his (second) memoir "The Obsession" (1973), as did his widow Tereska Torrès in the book "Les maisons hantées de Meyer Levin" (1991). To date, only private prints of Levin's "Anne Frank, A Play" exist. So let's recap: after the war, Levin wrote, with initial approval of Otto Frank, a THEATRE PLAY based on the diary of Anne Frank, called "Anne Frank, A Play", but his play was not produced. Instead a version of the same story dramatized by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett reached Broadway theatre. Levin sued them all for plagiarism regarding rights to the play and got compensated. Levin never once claimed anything the deniers are saying about the diary. Source and further reading: http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/anne-frank-diary-young-girl https://www.annefrank.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Wanderausstellungen/Dokumente/JVA_Tournee_Sieben_Fragen_zur_Echtheit_des_Tagebuchs_JVA_Tournee.pdf
Does this look like ballpoint pen to you? Also, notice how two different styles of handwriting on this page are on display in the museum, visible to the public in broad daylight here. Clearly the museum has nothing to hide. If the deniers keep insisting that a young girl is incapable of changing her handwriting after learning cursive writing in school around the onset of puberty (I know my handwriting changed rapidly around that time), or is incapable of writing alternately in cursive and block letters as a result of this new skill, then I suggest they produce Otto Frank's or Meyer Levin's handwriting samples to prove their claim these sections were not written by Anne. Normal copyright on books extends only 70 years after the author’s death. As Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen Belsen in February 1945, the book entered the public domain in February 2015. Proposals to extend copyright on the book past the 70 year cut-off period by making Otto Frank, who died in 1980, a “co-author”, is not a sign of admitting fraud, but an attempt to navigate the ocean of copyright infringement, e.g. see the controversy regarding Mein Kampf and the State of Bavaria recently...
A favorite pastime of certain holocaust deniers is to single out Elie Wiesel (to their credit, he does hold the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, was chairman of The President's Commission on the Holocaust, helped establish USHMM - the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - in Washington D . C., was founding board member of the New York human rights foundation, and author of 57 books, perhaps the most famous of them being "Night") and call him, arguably the most famous holocaust survivor, a conman and fraud. The deniers' gambit is this: if they manage to expose the posterchild of holocaust survival as a liar, the entire facade of "the holocaust industry" (as Norman Finkelstein puts it, even though he isn't a denier) will come crumbling down and the "goyim" will finally wake up. As a bonus they wouldn't have to bore the broad public to death with their convoluted theories of prussian blue, delousing showers, diesel engines, producer gas, cremation oven capacity and what camp the IRC got to visit when and to what extent. Central to the deniers' attempts to defame Elie Wiesel is attacking details in his book read across many schools, "Night" (such as why he and his father 'decided' to go on the death march), bringing up his dispute with a Hungarian by the name of Nikolaus "Miklós" Grüner, and most importantly, asking the question: "Where is Elie Wiesel's tattoo?" In fact, there is an entire website dedicated to the latter. Surely it will make the average person think, well if there's an entire website dedicated to it, then the question hasn't been answered yet? Also, one of Eric Hunt's videos deals with the issue, so youtube might be the first place the common person may come across this denier accusation for the first time. Couple things you need to keep in mind is that first, it was not customary in all concentration camps to tattoo inmates (therefore not every holocaust survivor has a tattoo) - inmates got tattooed only in Auschwitz and even here, the practice of tattooing did not start from day one. Those prisoners who were liberated at other camps and were tattooed, had been transferred there from Auschwitz by the Germans. Second, tattoos fade over time, and this depends on a ton of factors from the ink used to what kind of things the tattooed skin was exposed to over the decades that followed and so on. In the above collage, the pic in the center bottom displays the arm of one Auschwitz survivor, whose tattoo has faded away almost entirely. However, Elie Wiesel's tattoo (A-7713) is more visible than this, and the pictures should speak for themselves. In fact, on the left image I can even make out an 'A-'. So the question regarding his tattoo is settled for me. The next denier allegation is that Elie Wiesel never spoke about gas chambers in his memoir. Initially, this would make sense to me because he was interned in the Monowitz forced labor camp, also known as Auschwitz III, where there were no gassings, rather than in Birkenau with its 6 gas chambers. And yet, he did find out about them, so the denier allegation that he didn't write about them at all is another lie, since in his book 'Night', chapter 'Prayer', page 85-86, Elie writes the following: "But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!" Another denier "proof" that Elie Wiesel wasn't a Hungarian holocaust survivor but a fraud is their claim that he could barely speak Hungarian and was far more fluent in French and English. Well, let us ask ourselves this simple question: Did Elie Wiesel spend his entire, or even a good chunk of his life among a Hungarian community? Hint: Nope. After the war he spent 10 years in France and then left Europe for the US. Let us recap: he spent 16 years with, and 72 years of his life away from, a Hungarian speaking community. Naturally you forget some of your language. And YET, we do see him speaking Hungarian here, albeit like a person who doesn't speak it often (duh): https://www . youtube . com/watch?v=YWt8ICajaD8 There are holocaust survivors who had to flee Germany at a young age and are living in the US today. How many of them can still speak German fluently, without an American accent? Exactly. The deniers' next claim concerns the aforementioned Miklos Gruener (alternate spelling), who claimed Elie Wiesel stole the identity of a dead Auschwitz survivor called Lazar Wiesel who was a friend of Gruner. I find it amusing how deniers suddenly trust a single witness and his testimony when the rest of the time they're calling this a piss poor standard of proving something. I will leave it to the Holocaust Controversies team to show you why the claims of Miklos Gruner are baseless: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . com/2017/04/lying-about-elie-wiesel . html But the quick summary is, this "Lazar Wiesel" has not stepped forward to support his buddy Miklos Gruner's allegation. And if the claim is that Lazar Wiesel is dead and therefore cannot step forward to back his friend, well, he certainly had to have been alive long enough to have become a friend of Miklos Gruner, who claims he met him after arriving at Auschwitz, which in turn means Elie Wiesel could not have known about him on the day of his own arrival and registration at Auschwitz. So how did Elie Wiesel possess the mystical knowledge about another inmate's identity who he had not even met? Exactly. The truth is, Elie Wiesel is Lazar Wiesel. And "Elie" is in fact a shortform of "Eliezer", which can also be shortened as "Lazar". Being only 15 years old, Elie Wiesel lied about being older than he actually was at the time he arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944, so as to be deemed old enough to serve in the labor force, rather than being gassed which was the fate of young teens at the time. What have we so far debunked? The claim that Elie didn't have a tattoo, the claim that his book never mentioned homicidal gassings and the claim that he is a fraud who stole someone else's identity. If none of these claims presented by revisionists have so far been able to hold any water, things are looking pathetic for them indeed. So regarding holocaust deniers' beliefs of Elie Wiesel's tattoo etc. we can safely conclude: "It wasn't real... in their minds!" :-)
Another attack on Elie Wiesel by holocaust deniers is their observation that if Elie Wiesel's accounts in his memoir "Night" are true, then Elie and his father Shlomo Wiesel's decision to voluntarily follow the Germans on the evacuation/death-march back into Nazi Germany could only be proof that the German captors were fine gentlemen rather than sadistic tormentors, and Elie and his father's decision detailed in "Night" was therefore a Freudian slip of the fact that those Nazi camp guards really never harmed a soul, because if the mainstream depiction of them is true, then Elie and his father would have surely seized the first opportunity they got to voluntarily leave and put as much distance between them and Nazi Germany as possible. Let's address the above redpill infographic. Note how it raises the question "Why would the Germans evacuate the Jews at all? Why wouldn't they have killed them on the spot?" Why indeed - to address the killing, keep in mind that all gas chambers had been dismantled by late January 1945, so disposing of the camp population this way was no longer possible. And regarding a mass shooting, given that there had already been an uprising in Auschwitz on October 7th, 1944, it would have been a loud and risky undertaking to start shooting all survivors and expect no chaos, assuming there was enough ammunition. Keeping the hope for survival alive is how a small group can instill compliance and therefore exert control over a large crowd of people. Why indeed did the Germans want to evacuate the inmates back into the Reich? Because they did not want these prisoners to fall into Soviet hands as witnesses to what they had been doing to them. Now regarding the quoted passage from Night, couple things to observe here. First of, note the lengthy dilemma this section of "Night" recounts between Elie and his father. They don't know what to do. This already shows that they didn't just follow the Germans blindly, and rather took some time to process this choice they had been given by their captors and evaluate their chances of survival in both cases. Second, has it escaped the deniers that the time of year when the camp was evacuated was the heart of winter in January 1945? Not a good time for anyone to be taking a stroll across the countryside to the nearest village wearing inmate rags once the Nazis are gone. And how long should one wait in an abandoned camp that will not receive any more supplies, for the eventual arrival of an unknown army rumors say are liberators? This reluctance expressed by Jewish inmates is also another nail in the coffin of deniers equating the Soviet Union with Judaism. Let's hear the scholar Dr. Joachim Neander's take on this matter: "The matter is, indeed, somewhat complicated. I studied in great detail the evacuation of the Mittelbau camps in my PhD dissertation (published 1997). I found out that in two cases the SS guards at a certain time declared the transport "finished" and told the prisoners that they were free. Reichsdeutsche prisoners [prisoners who once had been citizens of the Reich], however, being afraid of getting lynched (as it did happen e.g. at Bergen-Belsen and Gunskirchen), preferred to stay with their guards and continued the evacuation march. Similarly, Helen "Tzipi" Tichauer, a Slovak Jewish prisoner who had been employed at the Birkenau administration, told me in 2002 that, on the eve of the evacuation of Birkenau, the camp commandant called Reichsdeutsche female prisoners and offered them Entlassungsscheine (documents stating that they were released from camp), so they could leave and be free. After a lengthy discussion together with the other women prisoners, the Reichsdeutsche women decided to reject this offer. They were afraid of falling into the hands of the rapidly advancing Red Army (unfortunately, being women, this fear not without reason) and therefore preferred to stay with the SS and go on transport into the Reich. Of course these were exceptions and concerned only Reichsdeutsche prisoners, i.e. "Aryans" with Reich citizenship, who generally enjoyed some privileges. As a rule, all concentration camps that could be evacuated were evacuated and only those prisoners who were unable to walk were left behind. As the prisoners feared (not without reason) that those left behind would be killed, even very sick prisoners volunteered for joining an evacuation transport. 'It was always safest to stay with the crowd,' a Camp Dora survivor told me in the 1990s." So while this doesn't directly answer the situation in Elie Wiesel's book Night, it goes on to shed light on why citizens of Nazi Germany, regardless how they were treated by the SS guards, had reasons to stay away from especially Red Army liberators. But coming back to Elie Wiesel, I wonder if deniers have ever heard of something called "Stockholm Syndrome". Perhaps they should try looking that one up. Also, after watching the film "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994), what I realized is just how prolonged incarceration removes one not just physically, but also mentally from the civilian world. When your mind and body have adjusted to camp life, when your psyche has gotten numb from the daily misery, at one point you become apathetic. Especially those who lost their entire family, what hope do they have to keep looking forward to life outside the camp anymore? Did Elie Wiesel and his father not lose family members upon arrival? At one point you even become fearful of leaving behind this camp life you had adjusted to, the only constant in your recent life, and be thrown back into the world out there again, in a miserable physical state to boot. There have been recorded instances in recent history where people released from prison have ended up committing suicide because they just could not adjust back to civilian life anymore. So obvious reasons why Elie and his father decided to follow the Germans is because of a combination of familiarity ("stay with the crowd") as opposed to fear of the unknown variable that was the Soviet Red Army; Stockholm Syndrome; and the fact that staying behind could very likely mean death - either from the fact that in January 1945 winter meant one couldn't just go trekking out of Auschwitz-Birkenau to the nearest hub of civilization in the emaciated, half-starving form without dying, or from waiting for an unspecified amount of time in the derelict camp until the Soviets arrived. The final lie deniers accuse Elie Wiesel of having said in his book, is when he writes about babies being thrown into fire pits (outdoor cremation pits). This video, if you can understand German, is a compilation of testimonies from multiple eye-witnesses during court trials (Severina Schmaglewskaja, Coutourier, Izrael Rozenborn, Dr. Claude Loch, Dr. Samuel Steinberg, Raphael Feigelson, Sonderkommando David Olere (see 1947 drawing), Hermann Langbein (Auschwitz trial), Sonderkommando Filip Müller, Sonderkommando Buki (Auschwitz trial), Sonderkommando Saul Chasan (interview with Gideon Greif published in the 90s), Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber (24 May 1945), and Annani Silovich Perko) that lead credence to Elie Wiesel having told the truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGmr6E6XGV0
Another pillar of holocaust denial is their cherry-picking of certain things that have little in common with established holocaust historiography, in order to discredit established holocaust historiography. See where I am going with this? What you see above, are many such examples. I am sure the deniers have more. Open the image in a new tab to be able to read everything. Collecting such newspaper clippings or novel excerpts is particularly the work of the denier "The Black Rabbit of Inlé". Take note how the majority of them are from novels and newspapers penned by journalists sitting in an office with little knowledge of history (or even survivors for that matter, a tiny fraction of which turned out to be frauds like Joseph Hirt, Misha Defonesca, Herman Rosenblat...) rather than major holocaust historians like Reitlinger, Hilberg, Dawidowicz, Arad, Gutman, Laqueur, Franciszek Piper, Tomasz Kranz, Kuwalek, Andrzej Strzelecki, Henryk Swiebocki, Piotr Setkiewicz, Janina Kielbon, Andrej Angrick, Götz Aly, Christian Gerlach, Peter Longerich, Dieter Pohl, Thomas Sandkühler, Robert Van Pelt, Jacek Mlynarczyk, Bodgan Musial, Tim Cole, Martin Dean, Donald Bloxham, Michael Thad Allen, Rebecca Wittmann, Robert Gellately, Ian Kershaw, Richard J. Evans, Richard Overy, Adam Tooze, Christopher Browning, John Zimmerman, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Nick Terry, Sergey Romanov, and a whole host of others. For instance, I am still waiting for a denier to systematically tear apart Raul Hilberg's 1200+ page The Destruction of European Jewry, chapter by chapter. Chances are, I'll be waiting for a long time, because Walter Sanning has penned a thesis of his own than having what it takes to attack Hilberg directly. For the sake of brevity, let's refute one such example, the "holocoaster", while another newspaper article, the one about Moshe Peer, is discussed separately here: https://imgur.com/WQc0tfq and the novel "Stolen Soul" was penned by an Australian who wasn't even a holocaust survivor. The rollercoaster/holocoaster redpill image macro as often shared by edgy kids on 4chan/pol comes from war rumors passed out of the camp and to Polish resistance who reported it (among others) to Eugene Aroneanu who compiled these reports in a book which was published in the immediate aftermath of the war, before the first historians could even get to work. These rumors however, while exaggerated, aren't wholly made up, because they are in fact based on the very real rail tracks located in the crematorium which you can see in i.imgur.com/pau3sra.jpg , and these tracks lead directly to the crematory muffles. That is how rumors during the war worked, they are based on truth and something horrible was indeed happening in the camp, so when these descriptions were passed on as rumors out of the camp, they took on a dimension of their own until the dust had settled. 80 years later, deniers cherry pick these snippets and present them as evidence of deliberate lies.
We all know how one of the most popular denier memes is "I was gassed six times!" which they then mock as "I was gassed six gorillion times!" This meme has its origins in a 1993 article of the Montreal Gazette where a guy called Moshe Peer not only insisted Bergen Belsen had homicidal gas chambers, but also claimed to have survived half a dozen gassings. We of course also know the deniers' tendencies to cling on to such newspaper stories like parasites. They call Moshe Peer "a famous Canadian Holocaust speaker", while ignoring that his story is not recognized or used by any real historiographers, his name as Moshe Peer is not found on sources like Yad Vashem or the USHMM, and in fact googling him only brings up denier articles. Deniers turn him into an icon, when he's just a guy who got his 5 minutes of fame back in 1993 on one lousy tabloid article, and does not seem to have been active since besides publishing a book ("Unforgettable Bergen-Belsen", Montreal, 1993). Deniers also claim that he still "tours Canada talking to children, telling them of the horrors of the death camps", but provide no proof. And if they had proof, this does not change the fact that nobody, both holocaust scholars or even uneducated simple-folks (seriously, had any of you heard about him before stepping into the world of denial/anti denial? By the way deniers talk about him, they make him look like Anne Frank), care about him. That's not the funny part anyway. The funny part is a picture that is often used by deniers where they claim he is shaking hands with an Israeli politician: All three pictures allegedly show Peer "getting recognized by the state of Israel". The picture furthest to the left, which comes from the article about Peer on everyone's favorite Nazi wiki "Metapedia" also lets us know that Peer is the older guy on the right. To any novice denier who's just taking his first steps into this world, this is yet another proof to all the "Holohoax!" theories, therefore, this picture succeeds in what it's supposed to do, from a denier standpoint. Only problem? Whoever made this picture probably never conceived the idea that an Israeli person would come across it. Because upon seeing this picture, EVERY Israeli person, even if he's dead-drunk at the time, would recognize the guy on the right to be former Israeli president Moshe Katazv. A December 1945 born Persian Jew. I would guess that if this fact was presented to a denier, he'll try to cover his ass by saying that Metapedia and RIghtpedia and all others touting that image just made an honest mistake, and Peer is actually the guy on the left, getting recognized by President Katazv. But even that won't make sense, as whoever this guy on the left is, he does not look even close to be as old as Peer was supposed to have been during Katzav's term as president (2000-2006. Peer was born in 1933)! Indeed, a colleague has pointed out to me that in the photo the left man is Peer Steinbrück, former German minister of finance, and the right man is Moshe Katazv. That is proof how shoddy revisionist research is: Google images for "Moshe Peer" and you actually end up getting a picture that shows one Moshe, and one Peer, but not our Moshe Peer! One must entertain the thought that holocaust survivors can quite frankly suffer from PTSD, and writing novels or giving interviews can be considered their way of trying to cope and process something that they otherwise lock into a deep corner of their mind. Hence, steamy showers they survived can be interpreted as gas chambers, and engine exhaust emanating from homicidal gas chambers can be interpreted as steam chambers to an external observer. Revisionist scholars so quickly calling someone a liar are only shooting themselves in the foot. So the only thing we can conclude from this case study is just how much digging, cherry-picking and exaggerating revisionists need to do regarding what some person said, some decades ago, in order to attack historians or "the holocaust industry". Honestly, if there really were some kind of large-scale brain-washing going on, flaws should be far easier to find.
This is a common newspaper headline peddled around by holocaust deniers in an attempt to reverse the roles of victim and perpetrator. Their conviction is that the mere existence of this newspaper scan somehow proves to the world that Jews declared war on Germany in 1933, six years before the outbreak of WW2, therefore they are the aggressor, and Germany the victim. Why don't we begin by asking the denier giving us this information some very simple questions such as: Who exactly was this "Judea"? What did this "war" allegedly started in 1933 look like? How many tanks, planes & soldiers? What armies and navies were involved? How did international leaders react to this supposed declaration of war? Clearly this can't go unnoticed... They will have difficulty providing answers. An alternate scan of this newspaper, of the same day exists. See here: http://www.h-ref.de/feindbilder/juedische-kriegserklaerungen/judea-declares-war-morning.jpg (re-enter url if the image doesn't initially show) Two different versions of the same newspaper of the same day (a morning and evening edition). The morning edition in the linked image even states this was not an action, but a reaction to "medieval Jew-baiting" that was already going on in Germany. So on March 24, 1933, the headline "Judea Declares War on Germany" was indeed splashed across the front page of the British newspaper Daily Express. The problem with this is there was no such thing as "Judea", no unified political entity, nevermind country (the article mentions Israel, but only in a metaphorical sense as this country did not exist anywhere on the world map in 1933), and no Jewish organization declared war on Germany. Sensationalist headline and likeminded fiery rhetoric delivered in subsequent rally speeches aside, the article's actual content was about an economic boycott (and not an enacted one, but a proposed one): the only organization mentioned in the article, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, was scheduled to meet two days later to "discuss the German situation," but they did NOT end up supporting a boycott, for fear that this would only worsen the situation for Jews in Germany (per London Times, March 27, 1933) There's your proof. The article also mentioned protests in many different cities without going into detail, apart from one at Madison Square Garden. But even there, the resolution was caution, rather than bold action. If revisionists still insist that there was a Jewish declaration of war on Germany, I kindly ask them to produce a copy of this declaration of war as proof. Surely a newspaper article is a report ABOUT it and not the declaration of war ITSELF? It would indeed be hilarious if a non-country could declare war on a country via newspaper. I would also like to lecture the revisionist crowd that National Socialist Germany itself did not immediately react to this as a formal (or even informal) declaration of war. Instead, they denounced it as agitation and more proof of Jewish harassment and anti-German propaganda. Only much later (during the war) did Hitler refer to this event as "das Judentum hat uns damals den Krieg angesagt" in some of his speeches ("Judaism declared war on us back then") Challenge to deniers: bring forth ONE German document or politician's speech from that time (March 1933) that took this newspaper headline at face value and recognized it as a declaration of war. Protip: you can't. The reason why this issue is important is because it is a core revisionist claim that tensions between the Nazis and Jews weren't started by the Nazis, but by International Jewry as per their "declaration of war" in March 1933, and that the German boycott of Jewish stores on April 1, 1933 (with the famous "Kauft nicht bei Juden" signs and Stars of David painted on Jewish stores by the SA shown in every German, Austrian, and Swiss school children's history textbook) was a RE-action to this. In fact, if these revisionists had bothered to do more research, they would find out the NSDAP had been existing throughout the 1920s, and calling for anti-Jewish activism since its beginning. Cases in point: Mein Kampf containing chapter upon chapter of antisemitism was written in 1925; the antisemitic NS propaganda newspaper "Der Stürmer" started to be published since 1924, and started inciting hatred against Jews since...1924. And the 25 points of the NSDAP were written in 1920. (Point # 4 being: Jews can't be German citizens) For the Nazi leadership, the American and British campaigns against the Nazi German government as early as March 1933 became more proof for their beliefs about the existence and power of “International Jewry”. The Nazi - and revisionist - argument was/is that this Jew-organized boycott happened simply as a result of the Nazis coming to power in 1933, and was therefore an ACTION, giving Germany every right to REACT to this provocation accordingly. The English historian David Cesarani, in his book "Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949" (Macmillan, 2016) takes the position that the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 was indeed the regime's RE-action to mounting international outcry/boycott attempts against the Nazi government, BUT that that the Jew-organized boycott itself, was not an ACTION, but itself a REACTION to the Nazi policy concerning Jews that had been existing in their pamphleteering throughout the 1920s, and which already turned into physical violence against Jews in the years before Hitler coming to power in January 1933. So, contrary to the revisionist argument that "the Nazis didn't start it", here's proof they actually did start it after all: ___________________________________________Pre-1933 background____________________________________________ Cesarani explains that the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany was not a new weapon for the Nazis in April 1933 but rather a tactic that the SA had deployed earlier already. For example, following Germany's September 1930 elections, “Nazi gangs vandalized the Wertheim and Teitz department stores in Berlin and attacked Jewish shops along the Kurfürstendamm, the main shopping street of central Berlin. . . . Wherever they gained a foothold, [the Nazis] incited local people to cease buying from Jewish shops or dealing with Jews. On the eve of the Jewish New Year, 12 September 1931, 1,000 storm troopers again rioted along the Kurfürstendamm, assaulting anyone who they thought looked Jewish.” (pp 23-24) Cesarani describes a Nazi riot of late January 1933 in which 15,000 SA-men smashed the KPD headquarters - shouting "We {!#%@} on the Jew republic . . . We {!#%@} on freedom." (p 29) Events like these dispense the absurd revisionist argument that the Nazis only reacted on April 1st 1933, rather than already having employed both propagandistic and actual, physical violence against Jews years earlier. That said, the events of March-April 1933 need closer examination. _____________Early days after the Machtergreifung and following the election of 5 March 1933______________ The March election was conducted in an extremely fraught environment, as the German government took extraordinary measures following the Reichstag fire. Already the day following the fire, Hindenburg suspended civil rights. The SA established makeshift camps (Konzentrationslager, or KLs) for opponents or suspected opponents of the Nazis and the new government; brown shirt squads raided bars and cafés where leftists and Jews hung out. The KPD, the communist party of Germany, was outlawed and the SPD, the socialist party of Germany, harassed. After the election (the Nazis failed to win a majority despite their terror tactics), “party activists turned on the Jews. From early March a rash of local boycotts spread across the country". (pp 36-37). Note the timing of these assaults: from early March, immediately after the election, weeks before the so-called Anglo-Jewish "declaration of war against Germany" so often toted around by revisionists. Cesarani explains that “These actions were not centrally planned or coordinated, but they stemmed from the well-honed Nazi practice of using intimidation to drive a wedge between Jews and non-Jews.” SA units and local governments took matters into their own hands and “began taking measures against Jews.” (p 37) Again, on 6 March, the SA attacked shoppers on the Kurfürstendamm, leaving many bloodied. The next day gangs set the synagogue in Königsberg on fire, “and two days after that, Jewish-owned stores.” Stores in other cities were defaced or vandalized, including large-scale attacks in Breslau, where Jews in court buildings (lawyers and judges) were targeted. (p 38) ___________________________Reactions to Nazi anti-Jewish actions - US and Britain____________________________ As the Nazi election terror unfolded, foreign observers reported home on what they were seeing. Cesarani writes that in the US and Britain, “the extensive coverage of events led to outrage in Jewish communities.” (p 40) Jewish leaders began meeting and considering what they could do - with the idea of a boycott of German goods gaining currency. In the US, the American Jewish Committee - representing better off, more assimilated, mostly German - preferred “quiet diplomacy” in coordination with the US State Department. Representing Jewish immigrants, who were less better off, the American Jewish Congress, led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, “responded more viscerally”. As the campaigning gathered headway, with rallies and demonstrations, the American Jewish Committee grew so alarmed that its leaders “condemned boycotts” and other forms of protest and tried to get American diplomats to help calm things with their German counterparts. But the activists went ahead anyway. Rabbi Stephen Wise led a massive rally at Madison Square Garden on 27 March (with speakers including Senator Robert Wagner, two bishops, the mayor of NYC, and Al Smith) - and many thousands of Jews and their supporters rallied in cites across the US (Cesarani estimates that a million people participated in the protests). It is also during March that Samuel Untermeyer began pressing for an international boycott of Germany (it was not until October 1933, however, that the American Jewish Congress finally endorsed the boycott call). Meanwhile, German Jews hoped that the Americans would step back and not inflame the German authorities. (pp 40-41) In Britain, Jewish leaders across the spectrum, fearful of antagonizing the Nazis, favored behind the scenes pressure and careful diplomacy. On 21 March they stated their opposition to street protests. But the bottoms up campaign surged forward in Britain as in the US - focusing on the boycott idea. The protest movement was especially active in East End of London, and on 24 March (the day the “Judea Declares” headline appeared) thousands marched from the East End to the German embassy. With the international protests continuing, the Nazis began to make plans for their response. On 26 March Hermann Göring who was convinced of the fantasy of a coherent, single International Jewry, instructed German Jewish leaders to get their counterparts in the US and Britain to put an end to the boycott movement . German Jewish leaders flew to London to try to get the protests stopped. They failed. _______________________________The Nazi anti-Jewish boycott of 1st April 1933_______________________________ The international campaigns, blunted as they were, outraged the Nazis. Starting 27 March, Nazi bands went into action, especially in the Ruhrgebiet: “in Dortmund shots were fired into the establishment of a Jewish merchant. A hundred Jews were taken into custody by the SA. The local rabbi and five other Jews were forced to parade through the street in Oberhausen.” (p 38) An initially reluctant Hitler then approved a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. He demanded that “international Jewry” stop the protests or the Nazis would proceed with retaliation, using their familiar boycott method. In late March, Goebbels, interpreting the situation through the lens of an international Jewish conspiracy and grossly misunderstanding the course of events, wrote in his diary, “We shall make headway against the foreign lies ...We must, therefore, proceed to a large-scale boycott of all Jewish businesses in Germany. Perhaps the foreign Jews will think better of the matter when their racial comrades in Germany begin to get it in the neck.” (p 44) In the last days of March, there was “violence against Jews” at “an unprecedented pitch.” Jews were seized from apartments, Jewish shop windows were smashed and there was a murder of a Jewish shop owner in the town of Straubing in Bavaria. I should add that one of the biggest strengths of Cesarani's discussion of the boycott battles of '33, is the attention paid to Jewish responses. Cesarani is very good on the nature of the Jewish communities - in Germany and overseas: he outlines how political, occupational or class, religious or organizational, ideological, age, veteran, gender, and regional differences among Jews shaped their responses to the Nazis - the critically important aspects of history which revisionists and other deniers subsume under monolithic categories like "international Jewry." There was not a single Jewish interest but many interests which led different people to pursue different lines - often lines that brought people into conflict and sometimes lines which led some to even make "compromises" with the Nazis such as during the Ha'avara Agreement. Special thanks and credit to "Statistical Mechanic" from The Skeptics Society forum. To claim the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses was a limited reaction, and then nothing of the sort ever happened again, is beyond foolish. It was only the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_paragraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesetz_über_den_Widerruf_von_Einbürgerungen_und_die_Aberkennung_der_deutschen_Staatsangehörigkeit Here, for example, is a document showing the decree by Herman Göring with which Jews were officially removed from socio-economic life by 1938: imgur.com/cnYugnQ A great book I can recommend that meticulously details how the Jews in Germany were removed from economic, political and social life year by year is "Final Sale in Berlin. The Destruction of Jewish commercial activity 1930-1945" by Christoph Kreuzmüller see: https://www2.hu-berlin.de/djgb/www/book?language=en_US
There were many anti-Nazi rallies outside of Germany, yes. It would be pointless if anyone tried to deny this. Most of them were similar in character to demonstrations today, i.e. a group of people gather in a hall or on a street, hold some signs, chant some slogans, and call it a day. I have had trouble finding the source for the images above, i.e. what year they were taken in (1933 or later?) and where. Similarly, the newspaper headline in the middle is about a protest supposedly held in Madison Square Garden, but I can't find the original. Now, how many of these protests actually ended up in committed boycotts? I don't know. Revisionists don't seem to provide properly sourced material either. Obviously, individual stores might have enacted them for varying lengths of time, but what about bigger organizations? If revisionists want to advance the "Anti-Nazi boycott really damaged Germany's economy" theory of theirs, they need to do better than this. What is clear however, is the message revisionists are trying to send here: THEY started it, not Hitler. Which of course, is absolute nonsense because the Nazi Party's rise to prominence was centered around railing against the Treaty of Versailles and against Jews all throughout the 20s. Mein Kampf was written in the 20s. For the revisionists to portray these largely American rallies as an action and not a reaction is them being deliberately fraudulent about history. Furthermore, they go on to label these as provocations which resulted ("naturally") in Germany eventually rounding up all its Jews and sending them to camps. It's a bit like saying 'holding Free Tibet rallies is counter-productive and only makes life worse for the Tibetans in China, so kindly refrain from doing so or you are the aggressor, not the Chinese'. Some even go so far as to say the "Declaration of War" (which I have dismissed previously) meant all Jews were enemies and compare their internment in concentration camps with the internment of SOME Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in camps in the United States after Imperial Japan had attacked the US at Pearl Harbor killing 2,403 people. This is the nerve and modus operandi of revisionists: 'Because foreign Japs attacked the US and the US put local Japs into camps, why is it so criminal for Germany to have done likewise? Put local Jews into camps as a result of foreign Jews declaring war?' Comparing Nazi concentration camps with American Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) Assembly Centers, civilian-run War Relocation Authority (WRA) Relocation Centers, and Department of Justice (DOJ) camps where Japanese-Americans were held and treated well is ridiculous. These people enjoyed freedoms and comforts of life 99% of Nazi camp inmates could only dream of. The death toll in these US camps is so ridiculously low it is shameful to even bring them up in a holocaust discussion. But wait! Holocaust deniers have an answer to that one as well: everyone in Nazi concentration camps was doing juuuust fine until the Allies started their bombing. We've heard that one already, haven't we? Given that holocaust deniers do not believe anyone was gassed, and think far fewer Jews lived in Europe than really did, they still do not deny that Jews were deported into camps against their will. So they need to whitewash Germany in this regard as well. Therefore, foreign anti-Nazi rallies and boycotts and US internment of ethnic Japanese civilians is used as an excuse to justify the rounding up and deportation of completely uninvolved, poverty-stricken Eastern European Jews to slave labor and death: Revisionist logic.
Needless to say, Nazis called others agitators while doing the above. And funny how revisionists who still believe what the Nazis propagated (i.e, Jews are behind most wars) get upset if we call them (Neo-) Nazis. Open the image in a new tab for a better zoom. Some translations: Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden! Kauft in deutschen Geschäften! Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews! Buy from German stores! So würde es enden! Qualitativer Bevölkerungsabstieg bei zu schwacher Fortpflanzung der Höherwertigen This is how it would end! Qualitative population reduction from the lack of procreation of those Superior. So wird es kommen, wenn Minderwertige 4 Kinder und Höherwertige 2 Kinder haben. This is what awaits, when the inferior have 4 children and the superior 2 children. Mit dem Stürmer gegen Juda. Die Juden sind unser Unglück. With the Stormer [newspaper] against Judea. The Jews are our misfortune. Ich bin am Ort das größte Schwein und lass mich nur mit Juden ein. I am the biggest swine in town and only deal with Jews. Ich nehm als Judenjunge immer nur deutsche Mädchen mit aufs Zimmer. As a Jew-boy I always only take German girls to my quarters. Juden sind in Behringerdorf nicht erwünscht. Jews are not welcome in Behringerdorf. Hinter den Feindmächten: Der Jude Behind the enemies: The Jew Achtung, Juden! Warning, Jews! Der Jude! Kriegsanstifter, Kriegsverlängerer The Jew! Causer of war, prolonger of war Ohne Lösung der Judenfrage keine Erlösung des deutschen Volkes! Without a solution to the Jewish question, no salvation for the German people! Judas Greueltaten The Jew's atrocities Bin ich nich ä guter Daitscher? (in broken German) Am I not a good German?
NOTICE Concerning: the Sheltering of Escaping Jews. There is need for the following reminder: In accordance with paragraph 3 of the decree of October 15, 1941, on the Limitation of Residence in General Government (page 595 of the GG Register) Jews leaving the Jewish Quarter without permission will incur the death penalty. According to this decree, those knowingly helping these Jews by providing shelter, supplying food, or selling them foodstuffs are also subject to the death penalty. This is therefore a categorical warning to the non-Jewish population against: 1) Providing shelter to Jews, 2) Supplying them with food, 3) Selling them foodstuffs. Częstochowa 24/9/42 Der Stadthauptmann Dr. Franke In this context, it would be wise to also have a look at the documents and photographs that make up the Stroop Report regarding the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, a souvenir album for Heinrich Himmler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_Report
There are various lists floating around the internet, showing how many times Jewish communities have been expelled or suffered serious persecution and sarcastically, the question is basically asked in the form of: "Jews have been kicked out of X countries in the past X centuries, but clearly everyone else is the problem", e.g. "109 Locations whence Jews have been Expelled since AD250", or "Jews Banished 47 Times In 1000 Years - Why?" It's a bit hard for me to comprehend how some holocaust deniers try to use very real pogroms they do not deny happened to point out a supposed problem with the Jewish community as a whole, in their quest to deny the greatest of all pogroms. Maybe it's just their rabid Jew-hate seeping through the charade of scholarly debate when they begin to get frustrated. Ignoring the fact that bringing up historic Jewish persecution as defense and thereby only outing themselves as Jew haters, such a comparison, based on historical events can also be made about Whites, regarding colonized countries liberating themselves across the planet from their majority White colonial masters in the recent past - I decided to create the above little joke in my spare time just for the banter. As you can see, if they can generalize an entire people and fool around, so can I. As to answering why Jews really have been persecuted in the past, the answer is simple: Minorities attract suspicion and distrust by a majority. This has been the case for every minority I can think of in any country. When a calamity befalls a people (such as plague, drought or war), it's always easy to put the blame on a minority nobody of the majority really knows well enough, compared to the way they are convinced they know each other. That, and of course the historic fact that Christianity did impose some laws upon itself, making life tough for their co-religionists to flourish in business and banking. Or that many Guilds (with mandatory membership) did not accept Jews, and therefore Jewish merchants, not being guild members, also didn't have to pay fees and could therefore sell their wares at lower prices. Also keep in mind in many cases Jews in Europe could not own property, and therefore had to focus on mercantile rather than agriculture. Another fun fact occurs when White "race realists" try bringing up outdated early 20th century eugenics and race and IQ statistics to "prove" there is scientific correlation between intelligence and a person's race, completely ignoring factors like access to education, opportunity, wealth & prosperity, lack of oppression, motivation, and how large the pool of people who participated in the survey was and from where they came. In such situations I just remind them whether they have read their own "science papers" they are presenting to realize that their supposed master race in fact possesses an inferior IQ than East Asians and Jews or tell them to look up how many Jews have received Nobel Prizes for their work, and how this is more in percentage to the total number of Jews than the percentage of White recipients is to their race total. That's usually when they quietly drop their claims and scurry away to another topic.
After the war, there were many rumors about the remains of Holocaust victims, specifically Jews, having been made into soap. Tom Segev's "The Seventh Million" reports that Holocaust survivors arriving in Israel after 1948 were sometimes derisively referred to as soap. Holocaust deniers love bringing up the soap story for some reason, so let's see if there is any truth to it. To begin with, pic related shows a bar of "soap" marked RIF, which has sometimes been mistranslated to RJF and then subsequently explained as "Reines Judenfett" (pure Jewish fat) or even "Reichsjudenfett" (State Jewish fat). RIF actually stands for "Reichsstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung" (National Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning), the German government agency responsible for wartime production and distribution of soap and washing products. So while the RIF bars do not have human origin, the "soap story" is far from concluded. Because at the war crimes trial, Simund Mazur, laboratory assistant at the Danzig Anatomic Institute, testified that the institute conducted experiments in producing soap from human bodies and even gave the formula for its production. Mazur said: “The finished soap then went to Professor Spanner, who kept it personally. The work for the production of soap from human bodies has, as far as I know, also interested Hitler’s Government. The Anatomic Institute was visited by the Minister of Education, Rust; the Reichsgesundheitsführer, Doctor Conti; the Gauleiter (party regional leader) of Danzig, Albert Forster; as well as professors from the medical institutes.” We can conclude that soap was never part of the regular and official corpse processing in the manner that hair or dental gold was processed. But other kinds of body-processing was done by individuals, but not as an official policy or undertaking. For this reason we should not be surprised that experimentation with the processing of human fat for soap was apparently undertaken at the Danzig Anatomical Institute. Further citations: Nuremberg Blue Series, XXXIX, p . 463ff. Hilberg, Vol. III, pp . 966-967. His footnote 27, p . 967, quoted from Friedman, "Oswiecim," p . 64, contains a statement that Poles liberating the Danzig Institute discovered 350 bodies which they believed were used for experimentation. While the fact remains that regular processing of human fat for soap was not done, there was some experimentation. *So the fat of which human corpses was this experimental "soap" made out of? In the period to be considered for the soap-making, i . e. February 1944 to January 1945, neither corpses from Jews, nor from executed Poles or Russians could have been delivered to the institute. All eyewitnesses who testified in 1945/46 confirmed that toward the end of the war, the “material” came from the Conradstein/Kocborowo insane asylum and from the prisons of Danzig/Gdansk, Elbing/Elblag, and Königsberg/Kaliningrad. That means that the dead resp. executed must have been, in their great majority, non-Jewish German citizens. That cakes of soap tested positively for human fat underscore this, as an article in a Gdansk newspaper regarding experiments concerning the production of human soap reads as follows: By Roman Daszczynski, Gdansk July 10, 2006 (From Gazeta Wyborcza) Translated from Polish by Prof. Arie Galles "This wasn't an invention of communist propaganda. A German scholar in Gdansk manufactured soap from human cadavers, in order to maintain laboratory cleanliness. Thus show the results of an investigation just completed by the Gdansk INM. In the investigative process there were found samples of soap impounded in 1945 for the needs of the Nuremberg Trials. Over the years it was thought, that they have been lost, but they are kept in the International Justice Tribunal in The Hague. They come from the laboratory of Prof. Rudolph Spanner who was the Director of the Anatomical Institute of the Medical School in Gdansk during the war. Samples from The Hague were tested by using, among other means, the innovative method of identifying fats created by Prof. Andrzej Stolyhwo from the Main School of Farm Enterprise in Warsaw. - This soap was made from human fat - ascertains Stolychwo. Prof. Spanner who was interrogated by the crime police in Hamburg in May of 1947 confessed, that he manufactured in Gdansk, a substance, which may be called soap. Supposedly it was a byproduct resulting from the boiling human bones for anatomical exhibits. He claimed, that he used the substance only for saturating (making waterproof) the specimens. Spanner lied. There exist statements from students, who had the responsibility to remove fat tissues, in the process of dissecting the cadavers, and to collect them in pails. By the end of the war he brought great numbers of cadavers from places of execution in Krilewiec, Gdansk, Stutthof and the Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Kocborow, states prosecutor Piotr Niesyn, who was in charge of the investigation. Why did Spanner do this? By the end of the war animal fat was completely used for the manufacture of glycerin for the Nazi Armament Industry. Spanner needed soap to maintain hygienic conditions in the laboratory, among others, to wash the dissection tables. He decided to help himself, and produced not more than a few tens of kilograms of soap for his needs. The soap never found its way to the market. The INM investigation lasted four years. It was started after articles in Dziennik Baltycki (The Baltic Daily) concluded that soap from people was not made, and the statement from the writer Zofia Na kowska in "Medallions" claimed it was the result of a game of communist propaganda." *credit to Dr. Joachim Neander
Holocaust deniers often present the above articles as proof that "the mainstream" has done a 180° on the soap story. Obviously, they fail to provide context for all their examples. First of all, historians never claimed Nazis made soap out of Jews on the scale the very real rumors circulating among inmates toward the end of the war had suggested (and this is also the reason why you may still find holocaust survivors mentioning the soap story - it doesn't mean they are lying; they are repeating what they had heard in the camps). Therefore, scholars cannot do a 180° on something they never claimed was fact to begin with. The only valid issue deniers can raise with the above articles, is that they also seem to dismiss the experiments at Danzig involving corpses. However, note the dates the articles were published. All of them pre-date the forensic testing results from 2006. Some even by several decades, like Deborah Lipstadt's almost forty year old article deniers love to bring up as if she had said this yesterday. And regarding Yehuda Bauer, more recently, he replied to the previously stated finding as follows: "This whole story was presented at the Nuremberg Trials of blessed memory, and there simply is absolutely nothing new about it. We have known, and published, for 60 years now that Germans used fat of bodies of Polish slave laborers (not Jews) in order to produce this fat, as an experiment, in early 1945. The very fact that this was an experimental station at such a late stage disproves all the theories about making soap from Jewish bodies. If they had done that, they would not have needed an experimental station with one "expert" in Gdansk, in 1945. The issue was, at that time, in the air, because of the stories (invented) of Germans in World War I making soap out of dead German soldiers' bodies. German guards in Auschwitz and elsewhere used the story as a means of psychological torture of Jews. There is absolutely no truth whatsoever about soap made of Jews, or anyone else, except for this Gdansk thing. What I am saying here one can read in the Nuremberg Trials proceedings." Letter dated 27 July 2007
The charge of alleging group-thinking and a hive-mentality on all Jews in the world and accusing them of conspiring together to subvert and control all goyim would be hilarious, were it not so serious. The fact that there are so many people (negligible in terms of overall populace, but still a lot in terms of individuals) who are absolutely convinced that Jews run the world and do everything they can to "expose the ZOG" is reason enough for me to feel the need of addressing this charge. It is true that in the western world, you can criticize almost any country as much as you want, but eyebrows will be raised more than in any other instance if you criticize Israel without wording your sentences more carefully. It is also true that the charge of antisemitism is more serious than any other charge regarding common and well-known prejudices in the West, such as islamophobia, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, fat-shaming, slut-shaming and whatnot. It is also true that Jews are over-represented (i.e. percentage-wise compared to their total numbers in society) in non-menial labor sectors of the economy, just like African Americans and Hispanics are over-represented in US prisons. Does this mean we can make a scientific case that blacks and hispanics are criminal by nature? Or does this rather mean the socio-economic conditions, and perspectives regarding education have unfavorably affected these communities and we're seeing the results of a failure by the government to properly address these persisting deficits when it comes to education and opportunity? Jews have indeed placed importance in education for hundreds of years. Being barred from owning land in Medieval Europe and self-imposing mercantile restrictions helped Jews establish themselves in educational and business ventures. When they came to the New World, they brought these skills with them. But we're here to discuss the following charge: Do Jews control the world? Are they in charge of entire governments, the banks, the film industry, the media, the schools, the colleges, the universities and all centers of learning, are their think-tanks and watch dogs making sure the goyim remain stupid and easily controlled? This has been the charge laid out on "world jewry" since the late 19th century, a charge that continues to persist to this day and therefore can be resolved by something as simple as a fact-check. The charge that the Jews control the world is one of the most easily dismissable things ever conceived by conspiracy theorists, because the entire Islamic world stretching from Morocco to Indonesia is either impartial to, dislikes, or literally hates Israel's guts. Not just their governments but especially the local populace. By definition this means Jews do not control the world. But let's continue: Asia is largely impartial to Israel. There are some countries that view Israel favorably, like India, but most do not even concern themselves with Israel. It's just another country to them, and Jews are literal whos in their societies. Even in Latin America, Jews do not have any kind of influence worth mentioning. So then, we can only lay the charge on Europe, the US and Canada as to whether they are being controlled by Jews. How do we determine this? The most popular way antisemites do is by circulating lists of the CEOs of companies and claim they're all Jewish. If a company is owned by someone of Jewish ancestry or even someone whose wife or uncle has Jewish ancestry, the entire company is kosher and pro-Zion, right? I'm still waiting for these clowns to publish lists for Canada and European countries, but they have so far failed spectacularly. The only country we have lots of lists circulating about, is the United States. So let's take a look at who really is in charge of major US companies, shall we? Do Jews control American media as of 2016? This should be the conspiracy theorists' home turf. Let's first acknowledge where they are right in terms of ancestry: Walt Disney CEO: Bob Iger (Jewish) CBS CEO: Leslie Moonves (Jewish) Paramount Pictures Ceo: Brad Grey (Jewish) 20th Century Fox CEO: Stacey Snider (Jewish) Comcast CEO: Brian L. Roberts (Jewish) Condé Nast (parent company of Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Reddit) CEO: Robert Sauerberg Jr. (Jewish) And here's where they are wrong: CNN (Turner Broadcasting System) CEO: Ted Turner (non-Jew) NBC Universal / CNBC CEO: Stephen "Steve" Burke (Irish Catholic) Time Warner Parent Chairman and CEO: Jeff Bewkes (non-Jew) Viacom CEO: Robert Bakish (non-Jew) 21st Century Fox / Fox News Executive co-chairman: Rupert Murdoch (non-Jew) Executive co-chairman: Lachlan Murdoch (non-Jew) (former) CEO, founder: Roger Ailes (non-Jew) PBS CEO: Paula Kerger (non-Jew) Chairman: Afsaneh Beschloss (non-Jew; Iranian) C-Span / National Cable Satellite Corp Chairman: Brian Lamb (non-Jew) CEO: Rob Kennedy (non-Jew) Univision President & CEO: Randy Falco (non-Jew) Netflix CEO: Reed Hastings (non-Jew) Hulu CEO: Mike Hopkins (non-Jew) Warner Brothers Entertainment Chairman & CEO: Kevin Tsujihara (non-Jew) Vice-Chairman: Ed Romano (non-Jew) Universal Studios CEO: Steve Burke (non-Jew) Chairman: Donna Langley (non-Jew) Pixar Studios President: Edwin Catmull (non-Jew) CCO: John Lasseter (non-Jew) Associated Press Chairman: Mary Junck (non-Jew) CEO: Gary Pruitt (non-Jew) Reuters Chairman: David Thomson (non-Jew, British royalty) CEO: James Smith (non-Jew) Woodbridge Company (60% owner), controlled by Thomson family, non-Jewish CEO; not Rothschilds as is frequently claimed Gannett Company / USA Today Chairman: John Jeffry Louis (non-Jew) CEO: Bob Dickey (non-Jew) Dow Jones & Company / Wall Street Journal CEO: William Lewis (non-Jew) Editor-in-Chief: Gerard Baker (non-Jew) New York Times President & CEO: Mark Thompson (non-Jew) Editor-in-Chief: Dean Baquet (non-Jew) Washington Post CEO: Fred Ryan (non-Jew) Owned by Jeff Bezos (non-Jew) Philadelphia Inquirer CEO: H.F. Lenfest (non-Jew) Editor-in-Chief: Bill Marimow (non-Jew) Financial Times CEO: John Ridding (non-Jew) Editor-in-Chief: Lionel Barber (non-Jew) Time Magazine / Time Inc. / Fortune Parent Executive Chairman: Joseph A. Ripp (non-Jew) Editor-in-Chief: Nancy Gibbs (non-Jew) IBT Media / Newsweek / International Business Times CEO: Dev Pragad (non-Jew) Editor-in-Chief: Jim Impoco (non-Jew) Houston Chronicle / San Francisco Chronicle / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Houston Chron CEO: John McKeon (non-Jew) Houston Chron Editor-in-Chief: Nancy Barnes (non-Jew) San Francisco Chron CEO: Jeffrey Johnson (non-Jew) San Francisco Chron Editor-in-Chief: Audrey Cooper (non-Jew) Parent chairman: William Randolph Hearst III (non-Jew) Parent executive vice-chairman: Frank Bennack (non-Jew) Case closed.
...according to holocaust deniers. It's interesting, because I have yet to come across a (Soviet?) publication that showed merely the images on the left and tried to pass them off as authentic. In fact, various search tools only yielded me denier websites who had already "uncovered this hoax" with the fake/original comparison shots as shown above. Chances are, deniers photoshopped the left images themselves, only to discredit them with the originals on the right and then say "woah guys, look what we uncovered!" This doesn't seem to be the work of "professional" holocaust deniers like Udo Walendy or anyone at CODOH, which is why you wont find this plastered over there, as those folks usually seize any opportunity they get to try and prove photo faking. Note how these foolish hoaxers even had the audacity to keep the ARC website watermark on one of the images they grabbed from the net and doctored.
In a similar fashion there's another photo-comparison circulated by these denier photoshop clowns where the corpse of the Muselmann that survivors of Dachau are pushing into one of the ovens as a demonstrated re-enactment of the cremation operation to US army photographers has been photoshopped away. The pictures speak for themselves.
This photo was attached to a letter of a German soldier, intercepted by the Polish resistance in Warsaw. It bore the caption "Ukraine 1942 - Judenaktion in Ivangorod", a misspelling of Ivanhorod. The original print was owned by Tadeusz Mazur and Jerzy Tomaszewski and now resides in Historical Archives in Warsaw. Holocaust deniers have pointed out that several publications only show a cropped version of this picture focusing on the man aiming his rifle at the mother and child, instead of publishing the entire image, and accuse the croppers of being deliberately deceptive this way. But the cropping has nothing to do with sinister propaganda: The photo is sometimes cropped to zoom in on the terrified woman clutching her child the instant before the rifleman's bullet smashes into her skull. It is a horrific visual image which graphically sums up what the Einsatzgruppen were all about - cruel inhumanity. The uncropped image isn't any less sinister at all. We see more unarmed people cowering in fear on the right, and more rifles being aimed at them from the extreme left, only lending credence to the conclusion that this wasn't a lone Nazi in the middle of nowhere posing with his rifle trained at a mother and child, but rather part of a group (both killers and victims) as was the customary practice with the Einsatzgruppen shootings (they are called Gruppen for a reason). The only difference I can observe here, is that the victims are not naked, but without source that this was how all Einsatzgruppen victims were dumped into their graves (and the following photo also questions this practice as customary), I think raising this issue is meaningless. One popular denier theory is that the Nazis are actually selflessly brave souls protecting the civilians from enemies to the extreme right of the image, out of frame. Essentially, the civilians are alleged to be caught in the moment of going to ground while the Nazis fire above their heads. This sounds fine and dandy, were it not for the fact that there is a dead person right next to the boot of the Nazi executioner, while the Nazis themselves are standing tall, making no effort to get to cover. Such a scenario goes against any and all military training, where going to ground while taking enemy fire becomes instinct especially when you come under fire in the open terrain shown in this photo. And when under enemy fire, nobody in their right mind would have the time to take a photo either. One interesting point deniers have raised however, is pointing out the lack of a mass grave nearby. This would corroborate eye-witness accounts of Einsatzgruppen shooting their victims near mass graves, so that the corpses could be disposed of easily. Shooting them in the middle of nowhere would mean they would have to leave the corpses lying about, or carry them with them for disposal, the latter a very unlikely scenario. However, notice the height of the cameraman in the photo. The photographer/camera is at knee-height of the executioner. This leads me to believe the photographer took the photo while being inside a pit himself. And last but not least, notice the shovel next to the cowering civilians. What on earth is a shovel doing in the middle of nowhere, unless of course, it was used for digging? Some holocaust deniers have suggested the Einsatzgruppen were primarily there for intel gathering, and quelling unrest (such as armed partisans), but this is incorrect. You may be surprised to know that the German Army had their own rear area commands (Korück, Oberfeldkommandantur, Feldkommandantur, etc.) already in place, manned with security battalions. The German armed forces had their own counter-intelligence units (the Abwehr) and field police. The Einsatzgruppen of the SS were unnecessary for any other task in the rear areas except the murder of civilians. And woman and infant partisans? Really? And yugoslavian firearms and uniforms in Ukraine? It's funny how the Mauser rifle they're trying to discredit looks so similar to the one in the photo - and even the M24 is a Mauser variant. The author(s) in the denier url quoted in the image above, is in fact also very careful at labeling this photo as anything but authentic: http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/07/28/image-murder-of-woman-and-child-at-ivanhorod/
Typical German Schutzpolizei uniform (note the tell-tale dark cuffs), as can be seen in the photo of German stooges posing in front of the destroyed Horák family farm to the right, taken in Lidice, 1942, during or after the Lidice massacre. All other features on the uniform match as well. For deniers to claim the guy at Ivanhorod is a Soviet either displays their ignorance or is deliberate deception. Regarding Lidice and the other photo, a tale of bestial revenge: On May 27, 1942, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had been attacked (Operation Anthropoid) in Prague by Free Czech agents to assassinate him. They shot at Heydrich as his car slowed to round a sharp turn, then threw a bomb which exploded, mortally wounding him. Heydrich managed to get out of the car, draw his pistol and shoot back at the assassins before collapsing in the street. Reinhard Heydrich survived for several days, but died on June 4th from blood poisoning. Meanwhile the Gestapo and SS hunted down and murdered Czech agents, resistance members, and anyone suspected of being involved in Heydrich's death, totaling over 1000 persons. In addition, 3000 Jews were deported from the ghetto at Theresienstadt for extermination. In Berlin 500 Jews were arrested, with 152 executed as a reprisal on the day of Heydrich's death. As a further reprisal, Hitler ordered the small Czech mining village of Lidice to be liquidated on the fake charge that it had aided the assassins. In one of the most infamous single acts of World War II, all 172 men and boys over age 16 in the village were shot while the women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most died. Ninety young children were sent to the concentration camp at Gneisenau, with some spared and taken later to Nazi orphanages if they were "German looking". The village of Lidice was then destroyed building by building with explosives, then completely leveled until not a trace remained, with grain being planted over the flattened soil. The name was then removed from all German maps. Perhaps now you understand how Aktion or Einsatz Reinhard got its name.
This is a picture currently stored in the US Library of Congress, courtesy of the USHMM Photo Archives. A picture from an Einsatzgruppen soldier’s personal album, labeled on the back as “Last Jew of Vinnitsa” in German, it shows German soldiers of the Waffen-SS and the Reich Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst) looking on as a member of Einsatzgruppe D prepares to shoot a Ukrainian Jew kneeling on the edge of a mass grave filled with corpses, near Vinnitsa, taken in either 1941 or 1942, sometimes mislabeled 1943 in archives, but most likely 1941, as thousands of Jews from Vinnitsa and its surrounding areas were massacred at the time: There were two mass shootings in Vinnitsa, on the 16th September, and the other on 22nd September. A subsequent massacre of Jews appears to have been of Jews brought in from outside the district. This is the evidence for the date of this photograph. There was one eye witness to the procedure involved. Wehrmacht officer Lieutenant Erwin Bingel had been ordered to assist the Commandant of Uman district with men to guard the railway lines and around the airport. The Jews of the area had been ordered to gather for a ‘census’. In fact you can find a whole bunch of Einsatzgruppen photography - with captions and archival source as well - here: http://history1900s . about . com/od/holocaust/tp/Einsatzgruppen-Pictures . htm As usual, holocaust deniers spin a completely different yarn, as evidenced in the image description above. One has said the following: "Those arent German uniforms and that is not a German pistol in the soldier's hand. The soldier in the image is wearing a Soviet M35 uniform and is holding a Tokerev TT33 pistol. The boy right behind the arm of the soldier wielding the pistol (he looks no more than 16-17 years old perhaps younger) is wearing a Soviet M35 airforce uniform. You can distinctly see everything the soldiers are wearing are Soviet issue, and do not corrospond to German uniforms or equipment." ...which of course, is absolute nonsense because on an enlarged version of the photo viewable here: http://1 . bp . blogspot . com/-1MaLAzQo5AM/UT-wcSzQthI/AAAAAAAAC5M/SN218aYs4Mk/s1600/The+last+Jew+in+Vinnitsa,+1941 . jpg you can clearly see the Nazi Reichsadler on at least 6 men's uniforms, and one of the soldiers is wearing shoulder pauldrons indicating he is part of a Heer band. Soviet uniforms, huh? As to what pistol the executioner is using, the deniers trying to say it's either a Korovin TK or Tokerev TT33 are being deliberately dishonest because it is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL. The following article gives you an overview of the various pistols used by the Nazis during WW2, and as you can see, not only did they use a bunch of different ones, but many of them look very similar to each other: http://www . imfdb . org/wiki/List_of_firearms_used_by_German_Armed_Forces or https://en . wikipedia . org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_firearms_of_Germany It could be a Walther PP, a Sauer 38H, a Mauser HSc, and for the record it would be a deliberate lie to claim Germans just used German or Austrian manufactured weaponry during the entire war. To be able to tell with certainty what type of pistol is used in the image would even make a firearms expert shake his head in disbelief at the level of bold conviction holocaust deniers employ when making their claims, especially when somewhere else they are accusing their opponents of the very same thing. Point 3 is nonsense, because the victim's arms do not seem to be on a position which would imply they were tied behind his back. The white blob rather looks like a hand bandaged with white cloth to me. Point 4 is also nonsense, because this grey "fog" does not appear to cloud the bystanders' faces in the uncropped original, which can be viewed here: https://s-media-cache-ak0 . pinimg . com/564x/e4/07/1c/e4071c86a1c07c4a7f18e6f37d251cae . jpg You can also see structures in the background toward the extreme left and right of the image. So chances are, the denier who made this infographic applied some photo manipulation himself. The other points are also moot because the uncropped version is readily available on the net; the fake border and creases is something that is NOT part of the original photo (again, denier photoshop at work) and the uniforms are very much German (Wehrmacht and SS uniforms), including the guy third from left in the cropped version with the white, triangular shoulder pauldrons who is a Gefreiter (corporal) from a Wehrmacht band. Clearly there was something ceremonious about this image (Last Jew of Vinnitsa might be a hint), and therefore representatives from different echelons of German units operating nearby were present at the grave's edge. Given that the victim is, from his kneeling position, looking slightly upward and to his left (our right), it is safe to say there is at least one more person standing to the right of the pit, and the cameraman is on the opposite edge, so we can assume the victim is surrounded by onlookers. Perhaps the only element of truth in the denier infographic is that yes, indeed Vinnitsa had been a place where just a few years earlier, in 1937 or 1938, people had been murdered during the Stalinist Great Purge and buried in unmarked graves as well (Vinnytsia massacre). And these were indeed discovered by the Germans during the German occupation in Ukraine by 1943. Just some of the evidence that Germans were indeed around Vinnytsia is the fact that one of Hitler's Führer HQs (Werwolf) was located there! This would only rule out a Soviet photo manipulation because the last thing they would want to do (after liberating the area only by March 20, 1944) is exhume their own 6-7 year old mass grave sites (kudos if they even find the location without having to dig around blindly!), make a person (victim or actor) stand at its edge, and shoot him (or not) and close the graves once more and then pin it on the Nazis. And if this photo was actually taken during the Stalinist purge, why on earth would the photo feature a bunch of Russians in stolen German uniforms from the future and have a German caption on its back? Especially considering the fact that the Soviets were not enemies of the Reich in 1937 or 38. As for Stalin's "Order No 428" saying "hey comrades, don some Wehrmacht and SS uniforms and do nasty stuff so we can pin it on the Germans", that's a denier hoax. See: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2006/07/blame-it-on-germans . html
The allegation made by a British holocaust denier going by the online pen name "TheBlackRabbitofInlé" on his (now inactive) the "Winston Smith, the Ministry of Truth" blog[1], is that the famous Buchenwald photo shown to us, one that includes Elie Wiesel among the bunks, has actually been doctored, as an early newspaper clipping is shown where the inmate Simon Toncman in the foreground isn't visible at all. Was he added in retrospectively? That's what the rabbit claims, see caption. Interestingly, the opposite is the case, i . e. Simon Toncman was actually removed in the newspaper print due to the prude editor's squeamishness taking over his reporting of the holocaust when it comes to showing an emaciated, naked victim covering his modesty with some clothing. So much so, that in the supposedly original newspaper clipping, the first bunk post from the right (not visible in the photo with the inmate in the foreground) is actually missing its base, compared to the ones left of it. I'll leave it to Sergey Romanov from the HC blog to debunk this accomplishment of the Black Rabbit in more detail: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2016/07/the-denier-logic-at-its-finest-famous . html Bonus: you are treated to the BlackRabbitofInlé himself throwing a hissy fit in the comment section! So while we have proof of a newspaper editor doctoring an original image available in an enlarged format in the archive, what exactly does this prove? If Simon Toncman was added in, we would first have to find the original print of this famous photo without him (instead of just the pic in the newspaper), as well as the original photo where he has been taken from (so that he could be copy-pasted into the famous photo above), which also no denier has ever been able to find, and in any case, the collage would have only proven that someone was trying to emphasize the very real emaciation that affected most victims found in the liberated camps - which is something no sensible (oxymoron!) holocaust denier disputes in the first place. But the opposite is the case here: the foreground person was removed, so that the image would pass the censor, and in fact LESS of the holocaust's grim reality be shown to the public. So this is The Black Rabbit's greatest accomplishment: The image that adorns the front page of his blog to this day, in fact, PROVES American media were DOWNplaying holocaust atrocities to the civilian populace, rather than the opposite which deniers allege the press of doing. Thanks...I guess? These are the kinds of elephants holocaust deniers make out of flies, and even get the order wrong when doing so, and it only proves how pathetic their cause really is. Source: [1]: https://archive . is/2gHs5
Hitler, in his speeches, spent time and time again reminding his German subjects that it is not he, but international racketeers that brought this war upon Germany: He kept saying it was Britain and France that emboldened Poland with the confidence to go to war with Germany, he claimed it was the bankers and war industrialists of America who could make money off this war because unlike him they had stocks in the armament industry, and therefore war was forced on the German people. Carefully selected segments of his speeches with English subtitles are accompanied by colorized high resolution footage stolen from WW2 documentaries with their respective audios muted, then underscored with stolen movie soundtracks like the ones composed by Hans Zimmer, and then presented by today's neo-nazis on Youtube as "documentaries" that "tell the true story" which "THEY don't want YOU to know" and "expose the lies we've all been told about Hitler". One example is a video called "Adolf Hitler's Struggle For Peace": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW-pw4rRvUI If you have trouble opening the video, just type the given video title in youtube and usually some other neo-nazi will have re-uploaded it with comparatively few views, and therefore it isnt blocked yet. In any case, they garner tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of views and many people get swayed by Hitler the same way the German people did 70 years ago. Part of that fault lies with our own media and education system that ever portray Hitler in fits of rage rather than a cunning and clever orator. The same people who keep saying "you are a sheep if you trust the government" are here trusting the Hitler government's official speeches, because it plays well into their pre-conceived notion that the Allies are the bad guys because in the Cold War that ensued, the "good guys", especially the US, went on waging a ton of proxy wars to stop the enemy's ideology (communism) from spreading, from the Vietnam war in the 60s over Central- and South America in the 70s, Afghanistan and the Middle East in the 90s to the Global War on Terror today. This makes them believe Hitler when he said he does not have stocks in the armament industry to be a profiteer of war, but the enemy. Let's examine this "Hitler was a man of peace" meme, shall we? The first thing this "man of peace" did after the Machtergreifung in 1933 was to ban all other political parties. He confirms it himself in his 10.11.1933 Montagenhalle Berlin speech: "Vielleicht wird mancher unter Ihnen sein, der es mir nicht verzeihen kann, dass ich die marxistischen Parteien vernichtete. Aber mein Freund: ich hab die anderen genauso vernichtet!" which translates to: "Perhaps there's one of you here are who is unable to forgive me because I eradicated the Marxist party. But my friend: I have eradicated all other parties likewise!" Earlier on 10th February 1933, he had also said: "Deutsches Volk, gib uns vier Jahre, und ich schwöre dir: So wie wir, und so wie ich in dieses Amt eintrat, so will ich dann gehen." which translates to: "German people, give us four years, and I swear: Just as we, and just as I came into office, so will I then leave it." Indeed, what became of Hitler's promise 4 years later? By 1937 he was dictator for life, and anyone publicly criticizing the Nazi party would be put in a camp, if not executed for treason to the German people, because the NSDAP had been deemed the one and only representative of the German people, as Adolf Hitler attested during the Parteitag in early September 1934: "Denn als unsere Partei gerade sieben Mann hoch war, sprach sie schon zwei Grundsätze aus: Erstens, sie wollte eine wahrhaftige Weltanschauungspartei sein, und zweitens, sie wollte daher kompromisslos die einzige Macht und alleinige Macht in Deutschland." which translates to: "Because back when our party numbered just seven men, she made two basic principles: First, she wanted to be a party with a real world-view, and second, she therefore wanted without compromise the sole power and only power in Germany." and we have Rudolf Hess who made clear in 1934: "Die Partei ist Hitler! Hitler aber ist Deutschland, wie Deutschland Hitler ist!" i.e.: "The Party is Hitler. But Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler!" This "man of peace" was also orchestrator of the Night of the Long Knives, also known as Operation Hummingbird or the Röhm-Putsch, where from June 30th, to July 2nd 1934 Hitler and his wing murdered the wing of the Nazi party he could no longer work well with: At least 85 people, possibly more than a hundred were killed when Hitler carried out a series of political extra-judicial executions intended to consolidate his and his cabinet's absolute hold on power in Germany. Many of those killed were leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the best-known victim was Ernst Röhm, the SA's leader and one of Hitler's longtime supporters and allies. Leading members of the left-wing Strasserist faction of the NSDAP, along with its figurehead, Gregor Strasser, were also killed, as were prominent conservative anti-Nazis such as former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had suppressed Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Does this look like a peaceful way of conflict-solving to you? Adolf Hitler has had a long trail of blood covered by telling lies to the public. From re-militarizing the entire nation, over claiming German Volksgenossen residing in north-western Czechia (Sudetenland) were being systematically mistreated to the point that annexation or war were the ONLY options; to getting Austria "Heim ins Reich" (and erasing the entire nation's 900 year identity by calling it Ostmark henceforth including even renaming two of its states, Oberösterreich and Niederösterreich to Oberdonau and Niederdonau), historians can list you a long list of demagoguery that would be too long for this post. Encouraged by the passivity of Britain and France (Hitler-Appeasement policy), he wiped yet another nation off the map, namely Czechia, and eventually set his eyes on reclaiming East Prussian territories lost after WW1, including the city of Danzig and the corridor bearing the same name. Let's not forget Hitler's involvement in the Spanish Civil War, especially the bombing of Guernica (a Basque civilian town) under the code name Operation Rügen on April 26, 1937, during which German Luftwaffe planes (part of the Condor Legion) violated the Kriegsvölkerrecht, international laws of armed conflict. Indeed, what were Germans doing in Spain in the 1930s aiding Franco? Perhaps this "peaceful nation" was rehearsing for war? By this point it was clear that German promises to the rest of Europe were worthless. The annexation of Czechia had already proved that despite assurances in Munich that this would be the last (another lie), Hitler intended to continue taking territory he deemed "should be German", having expanded his army around tenfold and his navy in contravention of treaty obligation. Hitler got away with re-militarizing the Rhineland despite this being forbidden according to treaties. He got away with annexing Austria "democratically", despite this being forbidden according to treaties. He got away with annexing the Sudetenland despite this territory belonging to a sovereign nation. He got away with swallowing whole the rest of this sovereign nation next. And now he was trying the same thing with the territory of another sovereign nation - the Danzig corridor in Poland. So this allegation of Hitler "proposing peace solutions to the Poles who rejected them" were in reality very much like a street thug offering to leave me alone if I would just give him $100, and then my wallet, and then my bank account. He was not offering peace solutions because there already was peace. He was making demands to keep the peace, backed by threats. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, was signed on August 23, 1939, 9 days before the invasion of Poland. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939, having already given the order to do so on August 26th. Early in the afternoon of August 31st, Hitler gave the go-ahead order for pre-planned overt operation that faked an attack around 8pm that evening on the German border radio station Gleiwitz to create a false flag excuse for the invasion that began at 4:45 the next morning, September 1st. The next day, September 2nd, France and England notified Germany that the invasion of Poland had triggered a mutual defense treaty between the 3 countries. That didn't change Hitler's mind. Something revisionists won't tell you. On September 3rd, the Nazi government received an ultimatum by the British ambassador demanding a response by eleven o'clock concerning the assurance to withdraw from Polish territory. Even that was ignored. Again, something revisionists will not tell you. Only as a result of all this was Germany declared war by Britain and France. Indeed, this "man of peace" then proceeded to invade a whole host of other nations like Denmark, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece within the next 2 years. Again, something revisionists conveniently decide to "overlook", or try justifying by saying a war between two big powers turns smaller countries around them into something akin to "pawns on a chessboard ripe for the taking, only to prevent the opposing power from claiming them". Let's also not forget the fact that Hitler allied himself with the Empire of Japan on September 27, 1940 through the Tripartite Act. Why? They're on the other end of the world, a beyond useless trade partner especially during wartime, so what practical use could an alliance such as this have after the war had started, given that Hitler had already defeated France and sent the British Army across Dunkirk by June 1940? The only logic is if Hitler were following an expansionist geopolitical strategy, specifically in trying to open an eastern front in the Soviet Union (whose western flank he was to invade without warning in summer 1941). The alliance with Japan after WW2 had started is also a slap in the face to any revisionist who insists Germany did not have any international interests, and was only seeking to secure a future for her own people. And speaking of Dunkirk, another revisionist fairy tale is that Hitler halted the Wehrmacht's advance to spare the lives of the British trapped on the beach, as a show of compassion with which he hoped Britain would see reason and accept peace terms. In reality, it was Von Rundstedt and Kluge who ordered the advance halted, primarily because the advancing tanks had overextended themselves, the terrain was marshy, the armor was valuable and still needed for the final assault on France, and Göring had assured Hitler that his Luftwaffe could deal with the stragglers on the beach. Hitler might have been an admirer of the British people due to their anglo-saxon ancestry. But his "many peace offers" revisionists like to remind us were not worth the paper they were written on given this track record, and Winston Churchill, unlike Joseph Stalin, did not fall for them. Stalin did, and how did history reward him for trusting Hitler? Operation Barbarossa, the largest motorized land invasion in the history of mankind that ended up costing over 20 million Soviet lives, and two poorly sourced novels trying to make a quick buck off people 50 years later claiming Hitler's goal of destroying "Judeo-Bolshevism" was but a pre-emptive strike to an invasion of Europe planned by Stalin. Keep in mind the guy had trouble gaining ground in Finland. Finally, let's address the question revisionists ask regarding the hypocrisy of Britain and France, given that they did not declare war on the Soviet Union when she invaded Poland two weeks after Hitler did. Let me begin by saying the Soviet Union was not part of the Allied powers until Operation Barbarossa, so "letting an allied power get away with something" is not the answer. Rather, given that Britain and France had already committed themselves to war with a European superpower and Poland was all but overrun, it would have made little sense to declare war on the largest nation on the planet on top of that as well. A bit like committing to challenging a 6 foot bully to a fist-fight but realizing there's an 8 foot bully nearby beating someone else up as well. In the end, when that bully got attacked by this bully, he was considered a friend until the first bully was brought down. Then a cold war ensued with the surviving bully. The only legitimate question then, is how Britain and France would have acted, had the opposite been the case: the Soviet Union invading Poland first, and Nazi Germany two weeks later. Would their defense treaty have included guaranteeing Poland's safety from a Soviet attack? The answer is no: there was a legal loop-hole that meant the treaty was mostly tailored to respond to German aggression. The idea of the Soviet Union invading Poland, and nothing happening as a result, and then Hitler invading to take back Danzig, and having Britain and France declare war on him wouldn't have sat well with post-war morality. Good thing for the victors then, that Hitler turned out to be an ideological warmonger after all, and Stalin the cold opportunist, rather than the other way round.
Nazi apologists often argue that Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 only ended up preceding a planned Europe invasion of Stalin by mere days or at best, weeks. The German invasion of the Soviet Union was thus a preventive war, meaning: Hitler wasn't such a great villain after all - he had only valiantly tried to defend Europe from a Soviet invasion, and because half of Europe did end up becoming part of the East Bloc for the decades that followed anyway, we should, in fact, nevertheless thank Hitler for his actions and crown him Savior of Western Europe from the Red Terror via the heroic deeds and sacrifice of the Wehrmacht and its Axis allies! This is a story primarily cooked up from the books (such as "Icebreaker") of Russian authors Viktor Suvorov (pen name of one Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun) and Ignor Bunich. Except: It's bullshit. Pic related shows a declassified document proving Stalin was informed by his intelligence about the imminent German attack and he basically told his informant to fuck off. Because Stalin considered the warning to be unfounded and even thought the transmitter of the warning to be an agent of disinformation, the idea that (if he had been preparing to invade Europe) he would have reacted accordingly can be dismissed. We know Stalin continued to wallow in stark denial for the first few weeks after the invasion, refusing to believe Hitler was actually attacking the Soviet Union in full force, refusing to react as expected and give the orders necessary to prepare defenses. We know Stalin executed many of his own close aides and had huge trust issues. So far, except for those two clowns Suvorow and Bunich, no Russian General, ex-pat or anyone far away from the Kremlin's reach has come forward and said: "Yes, Stalin was preparing to invade Europe". No documentary evidence exists, and historians across the world have dismissed this hypothesis with a collective handwave. The handwritten comment in the pic above that Stalin has written across the message of June 1941, can be roughly translated as: "Comrade Merkulov can take this source coming from Luftwaffe Command and stick it up his ass. This is not an informer, but a disinformer." The signature is clearly that of Joseph Stalin. But let's return to this "Viktor Suvorov" for a moment, shall we? Suvorov says the amount of paratroopers the Soviet Union had compared to other nations in the world at that time is proof that they were on the verge of an attack. (see: Suworow, Der Eisbrecher, S. 129) Suvorov dedicates 15 pages of his book just to emphasize how many paratroopers the Soviet Union had. Except he does not provide a SINGLE source. Another proof of Stalin's aggression for Suvorov, are inflatable gliders made out of rubber (ibid, S. 139) In the same page, Suvorov believes the Soviet Union was busy creating tanks that could fly. Don't believe me? Take a look at his flying tank illustration in the book: http://www . h-ref . de/literatur/s/suworow-viktor/flugpanzer . jpg Behold the glorious KT/A-40 Antonov "flying tank". He even goes on to say this was flown by a pilot called Sergei Anochin. Of course, for Suvorov, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union forced the country to abandon all these wondrous plans. We find out later that this is nothing but a drawing. Igor Bunich is the guy behind giving this invasion of Stalin the name "Operatsia Groza" or "Operation Thunder" Bunich, too, has failed to provide any archival source for his claims. Both of them are clowns. There is a third book I am aware of, that also tries to cement the revisionist pre-emptive strike hypothesis. Written in German by a retired general of the former East Germany's People's Army (NVA, Nationale Volksarmee), a guy called Bernd Schwipper, the book's 'convincingly serious' long title reads: "Deutschland im Visier Stalins: Der Weg der Roten Armee in den europäischen Krieg und der Aufmarsch der Wehrmacht 1941 - Eine vergleichende Studie anhand russischer Dokumente", which roughly translates to "Germany in Stalin's sights: The Red Army's path into the war in Europe and the deployment of the Wehrmacht 1941 - a comparative study via russian documents" Again we observe the pattern of an absolute who in the academic world suddenly popping up with a supposedly revelatory book and barely getting noticed outside fringe far-right circles. Which leads us to two conclusions: either the guy is a tosser like the rest of 'em, or there is a global cover-up regarding truths that threaten to expose the mainstream narrative. Hmm....tough call for anyone who isn't hoarding excessive amounts of tinfoil. But I am not going to just dismiss a publication without addressing its content, lest someone thing there is no counter except ad hominem, so given that it is in German, I will link you to a German review by Dr. Klaus Hesse that pretty much destroys the book, feel free to use google translate: http://www . vtnvagt . de/images/aktuelles/rezension . pdf You can find out who Dr. Klaus Hesse is, and what his credentials are, here: http://www . vtnvagt . de/index . php/aktuelles/470-rezension-zu-deutschland-im-visier-stalins On the other hand, I still have trouble finding out about the academic qualifications of this (sometimes Dr.) Bernd Schwipper - how interesting...
This document was forged by the Austrian Emil Lachout, born in 1928. It is not mentioned by many holocaust deniers, probably because even they have concluded it is a fake, as you can see in the German article here (use google translate if you must): http://vho.org/VffG/2004/2/Schwensen166-178.html At the 1988 trial of Ernst Zundel in Toronto, Canada, an Austrian defence witness named Emil Lachout gave sensational testimony. Lachout said he had served under a Major Müller in the military police after the war, and brought with him a document which, he claimed, had been signed by his superior officer in 1948 but had resurfaced only in 1987 (hmm). This document, sometimes known as the Müller-Document, sometimes as the Lachout-document, or an amalgam of both as stated above, was said to have been a circular letter dated October 1, 1948 which stated that “careful Allied investigations had determined that no homicidal gassings ever occurred in the 13 concentration camps listed, that in these cases it had been proven that victim testimonies were false and perpetrator testimonies had been delivered under torture, and that former internees who persisted in saying that there had been homicidal gassings, especially of Jews, should be charged with giving false testimony.” A detailed English refutation of this revisionist hoax can be read at: http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/austrian/austrian-resistance-archives/lachout-document.html And then there's the book by Brigitte Bailer-Galanda: "The Lachout 'document': Anatomy of a Forgery". Some of the main reasons that it has been identified as fraud are: 1) Lachout could never produce the original document for forensic testing and tracing back to source 2) there never was a body called the "militärpolizeilicher Dienst (Military Police Service)", or "alliiertes Militärkommando (Allied Military Command)" in Austria. 3) The 'official stamp' on the forgery reads "Republik Österreich Wachbatallion Wien Kommando". Austria didn't have a military force until 1955. 4) And there certainly was no "Guard Battalion Vienna" in 1948. 5) Lachout signed the document stating he was a Lieutenant. He was born in 1928 which made him 20 at that time. That's too young to hold such a position in the military. 6) Lachout was a civil servant in Vienna. He could therefore not - by law - have served with the Allies. 7) He claimed he worked for the "military police as line officer" from 1947-1955 and was also with the "Mountain Troops" and the gendarmerie where he was promoted to Hauptmann (captain) in 1954. Austria had no armed forces at that time, as already mentioned. In any case, let's just for a second assume the document is legitimate (which it isn't). Where does it say anything about nobody being gassed in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Chemno and Belzec? At best it would correct the record of a few thousand gassing victims (most of them from Mauthausen), but nowhere close to achieve any kind of significant revision of anything. So once again - what did Emil Lachout want to achieve with this except 5 minutes of fame at the Zündel trial?
This next subsection will debunk some of the myths surrounding Nazi Germany the far right clings on to. A frequent myth that persists to this day is that the SS were the elite forces of the German Army. Except they weren't. The SS were the armed forces of the Nazi Party, and were never integrated into the German Army. Nor were the SS particularly "elite." The initial SS divisions were trained poorly and fought poorly in the campaigns in Poland, France, and the Balkans. The later Waffen SS panzer and panzergrenadier divisions got first call for men and equipment, so they were larger in size and better-armed than Wehrmacht troops, and were able to fight better. But most of the rest of the SS divisions, drawn from somewhat less "Aryan" manpower sources, were not first in line for weapons and skilled men, and did not fight as well. The 30th SS Division, made of renegade Russians, actually mutinied... The SS Muslim divisions, raised in Yugoslavia to butcher other Yugoslavians, did so poorly that they were disbanded. The SS men that fought to the end in Berlin, oddly enough, were mostly French, Dutch, Norwegian, and Danish renegades, who had nothing to live for, knowing that capture would merely be a ticket to a treason trial in the nation they had disowned and dishonored by their service for Hitler. Other SS units that compiled records of sadism and brutality without any battlefield merit included the Dirlewanger Penal Brigade, an outfit made of convicted criminals, led by a convicted sex offender. Their chief accomplishments were the butchery of partisans in Russia and Warsaw. And finally, most of the KZ (concentration camp = Konzentrationslager, sometimes abbreviated KL) staff were the bottom of the German manpower barrel: thugs, often police and army rejects without the capacity or inclination for skilled work, some declining into petty criminals who saw in KZ service the opportunity for graft and the exercise of power. Some were real sadists, like Wilhelm Boger, the flogger. Most, however, as Roger Manvell wrote, "were insensitive and brutalized morons of a kind any nation can produce if the streets, prisons, and brothels are scoured. The best men of Germany were on the fighting fronts, or doing skilled work in the factories. The worst gravitated towards the concentration camps, or into the guard rooms and interrogation cells of the Gestapo." Manvell further writes in his book 'SS and Gestapo,' that the SS "inherited the men of the poorest quality whom Hitler could spare from his failing battlefronts, and they incorporated the waste products in manpower of the occupied countries in the form of collaborators prepared to join forces with them for what they could get out of the camps in graft and petty theft." He adds: "the most alarming fact about the SS is that it was manned, rank and file, by very ordinary men and women of many nationalities, most of them below normal intelligence, leavened here and there by sadists who reached instinctively for victims, by criminals who welcomed a quick release from jail and the chance for graft, and above them at the 'top,' by intellectuals who savored the opportunity of power. "The SS attracted the kind of people who were in one way or another the misfits in normal society, from whatever level or class or nation they might originate. They were, whatever their psychological motive, the enemies of the people, and the destroyers of their liberties. This is the final outcome of a police state, that the best must be destroyed at the hands of the worst." Of course, military history buffs might criticize me for not making it clear that the SS in the camps was a DIFFERENT branch of the SS, i.e. not the Waffen-SS - that the camps were run by the Allgemeine SS, who didn't have the same amount of military training. Still, a great many concentration camp guards and staff were transferred from frontline Waffen-SS divisions, e.g. Mengele came from 'Wiking' division. However, the Aktion Reinhard camps were entirely different, and their staff came either from SSPF Lublin, thus from the Police, or from the Allgemeine-SS and Police via T4 euthanasia program (eg Stangl). I wonder what the millions who fought and died as German soldiers would have said if someone had told them that scum like Christian Wirth and Kurt Franz belonged to the elite forces of the German army… Another popular myth is that there were females serving in the Schutzstaffel. According to German scholar Johannes Schwartz, who was recently a Revson Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, most women guards in German concentration camps who are listed as being members of the SS actually were not. No female camp guard could become member of the SS. Even Irma Grese, the infamous wardress from Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was not a member of the SS. They were never given any positional titles or equivalent ranks of the SS, like Obersturmbannfuhrer, etc. Rather, they were known as "SS-Helferinnen" (SS-helpers) and the supervisory levels within the SS-Helferin were as follows: Chef Oberaufseherin, "Chief Senior Overseer" [Ravensbrück] Lagerführerin, "Camp Leader" Oberaufseherin, "Senior Overseer" Erstaufseherin, "First Guard" [Senior Overseer in some satellite camps] Rapportführerin, "Report Leader" Arbeitsdienstführerin, "Work Recording Leader" Arbeitseinsatzführerin, "Work Input Overseers" Blockführerin, "Block Leader" Kommandoführerin, "Work Squad Leader" [Senior Overseer in some satellite camps] Hundeführerin, "Dog Guide Overseer" Aufseherin, "Overseer" Arrestführerin, "Arrested Overseer" The SS was a male organization, which included women only in the so called SS-Sippengemeinschaft, the SS clan, if they married an SS man. Female camp guards were members of the female auxiliary of the Waffen-SS (weibliches Gefolge der Waffen-SS, SS-Helferinnen). They were Reich employees and they could get three different Reich employees grades. After a three-month probation period, a Reich eagle was sewn on the left sleeve. This sovereign insignia showed that they were employees of the Reich. Their grade as simple camp guards was indicated by a black triangle with a bar on the lower part of the sleeve. If they attained a higher service grade, then a star was added. In March 1944, the service grades were further differentiated. Thus female superintendents, chief camp guards (Oberaufseherinnen) could be recognized by three aluminum-colored stripes on the sleeve and silver-gray piping on the edge of the cap. Although the female camp guards had no SS rank, their service grades were based on a military hierarchy. Courtesy of Johannes Schwartz
Friendly reminder to all White Supremacist National Socialist Aryan racists, that their beloved Führer was an admirer of the Mohammedan faith. Pic related shows his meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, at the top left in December 1941. He is seen on the right, greeting Bosnian Waffen-SS volunteers in November 1943 (to his left is SS General Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig), and the bottom shows Bosniak soldiers of the SS 13 Division, reading Husseini's pamphlet "Islam and Judaism", wearing one of those funny stereotypical hats you call Fez. Back in the summer of 1940 and again in February 1941, al-Husseini submitted to the Nazi German Government a draft declaration of German-Arab cooperation, containing a clause: Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries, as required by the national and ethnic (völkisch) interests of the Arabs, as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.[1] In the final draft, which differed only marginally from al-Husseini's original proposal, the Axis powers declared their readiness to approve the elimination (Beseitigung) of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.[2] Hmm, this takes a big dump on the Haavara Agreement and all crackpot theories about Adolf Hitler being the "greatest friend of Israel" now, doesn't it? In short, Jews were not simply to be driven out of the German sphere but would be hunted down and destroyed even beyond it.’[3] Here's just some of what Hitler had to say about Islam, Europe and Christianity: "Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers -already, you see, the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing Christianity! -then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so."[4] I wonder how stomach churning it is for many of these Hitler fanboys to see men in SS uniforms praying toward Mecca? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fo99fIsMOI Of course, for completeness sake it has to be noted that Hitler's religious views changed over time. For instance, back in his speech delivered at Stuttgart on the 15th of February 1933, he defended the Christian image of National Socialism in an attempt to clear it off any charges from being Atheistic. Source: [1]: page 190 of Lewis, Bernard (2002) [1984]. The Jews of Islam. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-4008-1023-9 [2]: page 151-152 of Lewis, Bernard (1999). Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-31839-5. [3]: Browning 2004, p. 406 drawing on Yisraeli 1974, p. 310. [4]: page 667 of Cameron, Norman; Stevens, R. H. Stevens; Weinberg, Gerhard L.; Trevor-Roper, H. R. (2007). Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: Secret Conversations
Another, rather pathetic attempt revisionists make in trying to exculpate Germany as an aggressor of any kind is the claim that it was, in fact, the British, who bombed civilians before Germany bombed civilians. Therefore, Germany only started bombing civilians as a retaliatory measure and the real aggressors with complete disregard for human life were the Allies. Pic related shows Warsaw burning after being saturated with German bomb raids in September 1939 during the Polenfeldzug. I sure am curious what proofs deniers have to offer that would place Allied bombing of civilian targets on a date earlier than this. If they say "British bombing of German Wilhelmshaven on September 4th, 1939", they will lose, because on 1 September 1939, at 04:40, the Luftwaffe bombed the Polish town of Wieluń, destroying 75% of the city and killing close to 1,200 people, most of them civilians. So, the revisionists will carefully move the goalposts from "first bombing" to "first strategic bombing of a major city". But even here, they lose, because of the bombing of Warsaw: As the German Army approached Warsaw on 8 September 1939, 140 Junkers Ju-87 Stukas attacked the portions of the city on the east bank of the Vistula River and other bombers bombed the Polish Army positions in the western suburbs. On 13 September Luftwaffe level and dive bombers caused widespread fires. Finally, starting at 0800 on 25 September, Luftwaffe bombers under the command of Major Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen conducted the largest air raid ever seen by that time, dropping 560 tons of high explosive bombs and 72 tons of incendiary bombs, in coordination with heavy artillery shelling by Army units. The center of Warsaw was badly damaged. Approximately 1,150 sorties were flown by a wide variety of aircraft. By estimates around 20,000 to 25,000 civilians were killed, 40 percent of the buildings in the city were damaged and 10 percent of the buildings destroyed. However, some of the damage was the result of ground artillery fire and not solely caused by aerial bombing—including intense street fighting between German infantry and armor units and Polish infantry and artillery. The September 25 raid was an example of terror bombing, with the aim of breaking Polish morale and forcing a Polish surrender. Of course, the revisionists also have an answer for that: "But the laws of war tolerate bombing cities as long as they are under siege or on the frontline, which was the case with Warsaw or Rotterdam. It has to be recognized that the RAF was the first to target cities or civilian targets, behind the frontline, and thus broke the laws of war." Was Warsaw really on the frontline when it was first bombed on September 1st, 1939? Nope. The troops did not get there till after the 8th, a week later. The Nazis also bombed Wieluri, Frampol, and Kamieniec in Poland killing Polish civilians in September 1939, they bombed 14 cities in France, including Lyons, between May 9 and 10, 1940 and on 14 May 1940 the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam, a major city full of civilians, killing over 800 people, destroying the historic city center, which (with the Luftwaffe threatening to terror bomb Utrecht as well) lead to the capitulation of the Dutch, therefore a success when it comes to terror bombing civilian targets for strategic purposes. Now of course, the revisionists will conveniently further move the goalposts and say "well we were talking about whether Germans deliberately bombed British first or whether British deliberately bombed Germans first, and we can guarantee you it was the British who bombed Germans first!" The smirking historical revisionist will then proceed to point out the following date: September 4th, 1939. And name you the city: Wilhelmshaven. He might go to say: It was the first RAF Bomber Command raid of World War II, where ten Bristol Blenheims of No. 110 and No. 107 Squadrons attacked units of the German fleet at low altitude. Except...what he will not say, is that said attack ended in the squadron losing half their number without achieving any significantly damaging hits. Would you consider a terrorist blowing himself up in a crowd but managing to kill none except himself a successful terrorist attack worth remembering compared to one where people actually do get killed? Therefore, the widely accepted view is that Germany successfully bombed British civilians first when a bomber flying over London lost its way and bombed a number of houses instead of factories, killing civilians. In retaliation Britain lead an all out bombing raid on Berlin killing a handful of civilians. Thus, it was Germany who started the bombing of CIVILIANS between itself and Britain, and that's what is considered an atrocity - not any successful or failed attempts to bomb military targets. So to answer the question, only between Britain and Germany, was Britain the first to intentionally order the bombing of non-military targets in German cities, but the Germans were the first to unintentionally kill British civilians, and intentionally kill allied civilians in their bombing raids in Poland, France, Norway, Holland and Belgium. But it gets a bit more complicated because the first deliberate British attack on a German city itself, rather than ON a military target IN a city, was the attack on Mannheim on 16 December 1940. But by then thousands of British civilians had been already killed by the Luftwaffe in what is known as "the Blitz". As Richard Overy puts it: "The raids on Berlin were in reality retaliation for the persistent bombing of British conurbations and the high level of British casualties that resulted. In July 258 civilians had been killed, in August 1075; the figures included 136 children and 392 women." To conclude: First intentional bombing of a civilian target: Germany (on Poland, September 1st, 1939) First intentional and successful strategic bombing of a city: Germany (on Warsaw, throughout Sep. 39) Only Germany vs. Britain first intentional bombing of a military target: Britain (September 4th, 1939) Only Germany vs. Britain first unintentional yet successful bombing of civilians: Germany (Aug 24, 1940) Only Germany vs. Britain first intentional (and successful) bombing of civilians: Britain While we're at it, let's go back a few years to Hitler's involvement in the Spanish Civil War: the bombing of Guernica (a Basque civilian town) under the code name Operation Rügen on April 26, 1937, during which German Luftwaffe planes (part of the Condor Legion) violated the Kriegsvölkerrecht, international laws of armed conflict. Or even further back, say, couple decades, shall we? Because Germans also turned out to be aggressors during WW1: In WW1, the first civilian target to be bombed from the air was the Belgian city of Antwerp. This city was bombed during the night of 24-25 August 1914. Instead of targeting the surrounding fortresses, the Zeppelin LZ 25's intention was to bomb the clearly distinguishable historical centre of the city. After dropping approximately ten bombs, ten people were killed and forty injured. The British Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) undertook the first Entente strategic bombing missions on 22 September 1914 and 8 October, when it bombed the Zeppelin bases in Cologne and Düsseldorf. On 19 January 1915 two German Zeppelins dropped 24 fifty-kilogram (110 lb) high-explosive bombs and ineffective three-kilogram incendiaries on the English towns of Great Yarmouth, Sheringham, King's Lynn, and the surrounding villages; in all, four people were killed, 16 injured. London was bombed in May and in July 1916, the Kaiser allowed directed raids against urban centers, sparking 23 airship raids in 1916 in which 125 tons of ordnance were dropped, killing 293 people and injuring 691. Gradually British air defenses improved and the Germans also introduced large bomber aircraft for bombing Britain. The British developed an Independent Force of long-range bombers that could bomb Berlin, but the war ended before these raids began. After the war, bombers' increasing sophistication led to the general belief that aerial bombing would both destroy cities and be impossible to stop; as Stanley Baldwin stated in a 1932 speech, "The bomber will always get through". I want to stress that my intention is to not exculpate Allied war crimes here, least of all Bomber Harris. What I want to do, is combat the fact twisting (who did what first), intent speculation, death toll exaggeration and fake quotes (Churchill, Sefton Delmer...) deniers usually use to spin a narrative to make it stick out as the opposite of historic consensus.
The bombing of Dresden was a British/American aerial bombing attack on Dresden, capital of Saxony, that took place in 2 raids between February 13th and 15th, 1945: 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on March 2nd aimed at the city's railroad marshaling yard and one small raid on April 17th, aimed at industrial areas. Fact # 1: The allied bombing on Dresden killed fewer people (22,700–25,000 deaths) than the German air-raids on London during the Blitz (40,000 deaths) Fact # 2: In the entire allied bombing raids over Germany, fewer German civilians were killed (305,000 - 635,000) than Soviet civilians who were starved to death by the German siege of Leningrad (1,000,000). "Revisionists" are fond of dismissing the documents they don't like as forgeries, under the flimsiest of pretenses. Yet do they fall for forgeries themselves? The answer is an emphatic "Yes!" One of the most famous forgeries related to far-right history revisionism (as made popular on places like Youtube with "documentaries" like Hellstorm) is the so-called Tagesbefehl-47 and it concerns the number of victims of the Dresden bombing - the famous amateur researcher David Irving fell for it. And after him, many revisionists relied on the bogus Dresden death toll, contained in this "document". In fact, revisionists shamelessly embellish the death toll even further: (some revisionist quotes about Dresden) "The real number of victims in Dresden alone were in excess of 350,000, possibly as high as 500,000! This in one German city alone! More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be traced. Approx. 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were murdered in one night." In 1977 the Tagesbefehl-47, which had long been strongly suspected as a forgery (e.g. by Max Seydewitz), was conclusively proven to be so: a copy of the original document was discovered by Götz Bergander. Bergander had found a reservist, Werner Ehlich, who reported that not only that he had had the original in his hands, but, as a then member of the Dresden police force, had also made one typed and one hand-written copy of it. The copy was still in Ehlich's possession. It started 'In order to be able to counter wild rumours....', and proceeded to list all the details listed in the version of TB 47 used by Irving: with one crucial difference: In this authentic Ehrlich copy the death figure was put at 20,204, the expected dead at 25,000, and the number cremated at 6,865. What had clearly happened was that someone had doctored the document by simply adding a '0' to the end of each number it contained. What Irving had claimed as authentic documentary evidence turned out to be a crude forgery. It was not until 1977 in Germany that Irving finally described TB 47 as a Nazi fake, as Seydewitz had argued all along. But it was not until 1995 that Irving came clean with his English language readers as well, and made clear that TB 47 was in fact a product of the Propagandaministerium's 'machinations'. Despite having been finally forced to disown TB 47, Irving has continually kept the legend of a higher death toll alive and sown the seeds of doubt amongst the unwary and the ill-informed. Another lie holocaust deniers perpetuate, is the MYTH that Dresden was filled to the brim with refugees fleeing the advance of the Soviet Red Army in the East. As early as 1953, the Dresden civil defence engineer Georg Feydt had struggled to defeat the myth of the city saturated with a million refugees. He wrote: ‘I cannot imagine a more peaceful and calm picture than Dresden on the afternoon of 13 February 1945.’ Rudolf Bergander likewise confirmed from his own memory that at no point did Dresden become crammed with refugees. Bergander proceeded to calculate that the number of refugees in Dresden could sensibly be put at 200,000. To have accommodated some half a million or more refugees would have required one of two measures, neither of which took place: either forced billeting in private homes on a massive scale, or huge temporary camps. The Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert went one step further. He likewise quoted witnesses who attested that no refugees were billeted in Dresden houses and that no billeting took place in the parks or squares. 567,000 were resident in the city at the time. To that he added 100,000 refugees. This was already a very considerable number in view of the city’s overall population; but nowhere near the ‘one or two million’ suggested by Irving in 1995. Exactly 17,295 bodies had been buried in the Heidefriedhof cemetary, including the ashes of the 6,865 people burnt on the Altmarkt. In addition to the 3,462 burials in the Johannisfriedhof cemetary, 514 were buried in the Neue Annenfriedhof cemetary. This gives a total of 21,271 registered burials. Between October 1945 and late 1957, a further 1,557 bodies were recovered, as quoted by Reichert. Reichert adds (1994) that not a single body had been found since 1990, despite heavy building and despite archaeological excavations on the Altmarkt and around the Taschenberg Palace. When Reichert added the sums together he came to the inescapable conclusion that the final number of deaths for the raids of February 13/14 and April 17 1945 was 25,000, as I mentioned earlier. Another revisionist allegation is that Dresden was a civilian city, and the Allied command targeting this city on purpose was because of a new terror bombing strategy with the intent of inflicting mass civilian casualties. They base this claim on the testimony of one Kurt Vonnegut, but they are wrong. Germany had begun moving troops and war material to Dresden precisely because it had been spared for so long. Kurt Vonnegut survived the fire bombing as a POW, but he was wrong about Dresden when he wrote a wrenching tale that Dresden was fire bombed so that a new technique could be tried on a city that hadn't yet been reduced to rubble. This theory of his is not supported by the records of the decision making process that led to this event. The real death toll of 25,000 is relatively low because the Germans had a very effective system for getting people under cover during air raids, and Dresden was at the limit of the RAF and USAAF's range, so they had more than their usual amount of time to take cover. The majority of casualties were civilian refugees who had the least preparation and experience for doing so and they tried to use whatever cover they could find. That Kurt Vonnegut survived on the surface (as a POW and hence of low priority for the Germans) should tell you something in that regard. The bottom line of all this is, while the bombing of Dresden was a tragedy, it DID NOT claim six figures, therefore revisionists who often claim to know history better than "court historians" have been objectively proven to be ideology-driven falsifiers of history. Dresden is a case study where you realize what kind of hypocrites these people are: the same people who question historical accuracy regarding the death toll of the holocaust are here busy pushing vastly inflated death tolls with piss-poor sources when it comes to German casualties. Just like James Bacque and his "Eisenhower death camps". Incidentally, if deniers focused on Operation Gomorrah, the bombing of Hamburg, they could make a better case as Hamburg's death toll is higher.
The claim, that 1 million German prisoners of war, rather than upto 56,000 (the highest estimate accepted by historians) dying in US captivity after World War II, were "casually genocided" in Eisenhower's rhine meadow camps ("Rheinwiesenlager") is a claim put forth by James Bacque in his book "Other Losses". But who is James Bacque? A philosophy major (!) from the University of Toronto, who also seems to hold a Bachelor's degree in history. Fair enough, but what did the man proceed to do with his bachelor's history degree for the next few decades after earning it? You guessed it, nothing. Bacque instead proceeded to become a fiction writer and essayist before finally turning his attention in 1989, to the fate of German soldiers held as POWs by the Allies after World War II. He then wrote this book, and is now hailed by the far right (not necessarily holocaust deniers, but Wehrmacht fanboys and those who spend great amounts of time trying to track down every war crime committed by the allies) as some kind of investigative journalist exposing the deliberate "casual" mass murder of upto 1 million German POWs by Eisenhower and subordinates. 1 million....sound familiar? The official Auschwitz death toll is 1.1 to 1.5 million. The intent is clear: creating an allied Auschwitz. Mr. Bacque misread (I'll leave to you whether it was deliberate or not) the documents he based his conclusions on and then coaxed a half-blind old man into confirming his reading. What’s utterly absurd is the notion that about one million or more German POWs could have died in US prison camps without such catastrophe leaving a distinguishable mark in German oral history (while there’s little if anything about this subject, there’s a lot about the horrors of Soviet captivity in the gulags), in the records of German state administration (which in the 1950s went out of its way to establish the fate of prisoners of war in Allied hands) and in the works of German historians, including Rüdiger Overmans and Paul Carell, who have written extensively about the fate of German POWs in Allied hands. Paul Carell, a former Nazi propagandist by the name of Paul Karl Schmidt, whose works about the war are dedicated to glorifying the German soldier, would have been the first to decry a crime of such magnitude if there had been any evidence that it occurred instead of leaving it to a Canadian fiction author to do so in the 1990s. After the publication of Bacque's book, a panel of historians gathered for a symposium in the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans from December 7–8, 1990 to review Bacque's work. The historians concluded that the work: - misuses and misreads documents - ignores contrary evidence - made no attempt to see the evidence he has gathered in relation to the broader situation - puts words into the mouths of the subjects of his oral history Academic reviewers question three major aspects of Bacque's work: his claims that there was no post-war food shortage in other European countries; Bacque's estimate of the number of German deaths; and the allegation that Eisenhower was deliberately vindictive. Many German soldiers were sick and wounded at the time of their surrender, and Bacque does not place the plight of the German prisoners within the context of the grim situation in Western Europe in 1945 and 1946. R.J. Rummel, a scholar of 20th-century atrocities, has written that "Bacque misread, misinterpreted, or ignored the relevant documents and that his mortality statistics are simply impossible." More recently, writing in the Encyclopedia of Prisoners of War and Internment, S. P. MacKenzie states, "That German prisoners were treated very badly in the months immediately after the war […] is beyond dispute. All in all, however, Bacque's thesis and mortality figures cannot be taken as accurate". Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, in a 1991 New York Times book review, claimed that "when scholars do the necessary research, they will find Mr. Bacque's work to be worse than worthless. It is seriously—nay, spectacularly—flawed in its most fundamental aspects. […] Mr. Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation or about the column "other losses." Mr. Bacque's "missing million" were old men and young boys in the Volkssturm (People's Militia) released without formal discharge and transfers of POWs to other allies control areas." I want to add that conditions in the camps improved and, even more important, there was an enormous effort to release these POWs as quickly as possible. By the Fall of 1945 most of the camps were empty. A book-length disputation of Bacque's work, entitled "Eisenhower and the German POWs", appeared in 1992, featuring essays by British, American, and German historians. Bacques 2nd book, "Crimes and Mercies" is no better. He claims the Allies fabricated the worldwide food shortage, that the "Genocide committed against the Germans" was due to “Anglo-Saxon militarism” and that English speaking nations were filled with “warlike peoples”. He gets numbers such as 9.3 million Germans being deliberately starved by the Americans and uses the same botched logic that he used in Other Losses. He blames the entire thing on Eisenhower, saying that he continued the "Morgenthau Plan" and that he “assured the prolonged starvation of Germans.” Deniers love bringing up Morgenthau, conveniently forgetting that the plan was abandoned when public outcry forced its cancellation. Food supplies were short everywhere in Europe. The British rationed meat and other food products until 1954. There you have it. Many historians disagree with this man's novels. We can safely conclude that this book does not belong on the hallowed history shelves which only have place for truth and reality, rather than fabricated numbers and false conclusions. It belongs into the same garbage bin that already holds a copy of Thomas Goodrich's "Hellstorm" and Viktor Suvorov's "Icebreaker". As for the gulags...consider this: The death rate for Russian POW's in German custody was 60-65%. The death rate for Germans in Russian custody was 38%. That is a fairly massive gap. The Russian gulags were awful places, but the German treatment of the Soviet POW's was genocidal: massacres and documented deliberate starvation, which is why Russian POWs are part of the 11 million holocaust death toll. If you want to find out how German soldiers really died; when, where and by whose hand, then the books you should be reading are respected German military historian Dr. Rüdiger Overmans' "Soldiers behind barbed wire. German prisoners of war of World War II" (2000) and "German Military Losses in World War II" (2004), with the latter being the most complete reference work about German casualties in WW II. It is historiographic tomes like these that separate real historians from jokers like James Bacque and Thomas Goodrich.
Pic related is photographic evidence of how humans being loaded into cattle cars for transport very often arrived dead at their destination. and were pulled from the wagons. The CFR logo on the wagon suggests Căile Ferate Române, the state railway carrier of Romania, a country whose dictator Ion Antonescu was an ally of Hitler. In Romania were murdered in various forms, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews on Romanian soil and in the war zone of Bessarabia, Bukovina and in the Transnistria Governorate. Concluding the aforementioned section: I have debunked the "Ashkenazi Jews are Khazars" theory I have shown how little baptised, irreligious Karl Marx and even his parents have in common with Judaism I have debunked the Kalergi Plan I have shown that Churchill knew and spoke out about the holocaust I have shown that Eisenhower knew and spoke out about the holocaust I have exposed fake quotes deniers have created around Ilya Ehrenburg, Jacob Rader Marcus, Martin Broszat, Yehuda Bauer, Simon Wiesenthal, Voltaire, and Sefton Delmer I have shown how the Rothschild family isn't controlling the world after all I have debunked the Kaufman-Plan, Hooton Plan and large parts of the Morgenthau Plan I have debunked Robert Faurisson and Felderer's allegations on the Anne Frank diary being a hoax I have shown Elie Wiesel's tattoo and exposed an entire movement that tried to slander him I have demonstrated how deniers use novel excerpts and newspaper clippings to attack historians I have dismissed the Jewish "Declaration of War" on Germany in 1933 as tabloid sensationalism I have shown the lack of scholarship regarding the impact some low profile economic boycotts really had I have shown there is truth to Nazi manufacture of soap from corpses I have shown Jews, in fact, do not control the world, not even the western world I have exposed photographic fakes holocaust deniers themselves create to then blame Soviets or others without providing source I have debunked denier allegations on some famous holocaust photos, like Judenaktion in Ivangorod, Der Letzte Jude von Winnitsa or Simon Toncman's Buchenwald photo I have debunked various claims of Hitler being a man of peace and Britain and France the warmongers I have debunked "Operation Groza" and "Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was a pre-emptive strike" I have exposed the Müller-Lachout document as a hoax I have debunked various myths regarding the SS I have shown not just the Nazis' but even Hitler's admiration of Islam throwing a wrench into the workings of today's White Nationalist identity that almost universally condemns any and all things Islam I have debunked the accusation of Britain dropping bombs on civilian targets before Germany I have debunked the vastly inflated numbers regarding the death toll of Allied bombing on Dresden and exposed Irving's deceptions I have debunked the vastly inflated numbers regarding the death toll of the Eisenhower camps and exposed Bacque's novel for the fiction it is I have made a case of German prisoners of war in gulags having a higher rate of survival than Soviet POWs under German control.
This next section will deal with the numerical extent of the holocaust, the mass graves and medical horrors that are part of it, and includes genocide via Einsatzgruppen and Gas Vans. But first we will begin by debunking supposed "official records" that state very few by comparison, died. One denier gambit is the claim that the International Red Cross got to visit all concentration and extermination camps, recorded all those that died there, and their numbers only tally up to a low six figure amount. Apart from Theresienstadt, the Potemkin village of Nazi Germany specifically built for propaganda purposes, the IRC was, in fact, not allowed proper and complete access to concentration camps, nevermind the extermination camps. Pic related shows a poorly made neo-Nazi infographic showing a widely circulated scan of what is supposed to be a purported letter from the Bad Arolsen International Tracing Service from 1979, addressed to a certain "Herr", a Mr. That this is a letter in German with English words thrown in should already raise the alarm, but we'll continue anyway: the document lists only registered deaths ("beurkundete Sterbefälle") at some Nazi concentration camps. The vast majority of people who died at the death camps were never registered since they didn't enter the camp (e.g. at Auschwitz, see my article about the Auschwitz death books for more) and were marched on immediately to the gas chambers if they failed the Selektion, or in the case of the AR camps, weren't meant to be absorbed into the camp in the first place. So this Bad Arolsen letter and similar correspondence is frequently misrepresented as the absolute death toll of the Holocaust by deniers and attributed to the Red Cross. Another such widely circulated document among the far right is an essay titled: "The Jews And The Concentration Camps: A Factual Appraisal By The Red Cross." sometimes you will find it under an even more self-incriminating title: "A Factual Appraisal Of The 'Holocaust' By The Red Cross The Jews And The Concentration Camps: No Evidence Of Genocide" http://www.rense.com/general69/factua.htm One such example is featured on Jeff Rense's website. This isn't a report written by the Red Cross (it saying 'By The Red Cross' doesn't make it so), but rather a report about a report: It is a report penned by a denier (probably Richard Harwood, as this article is one of the chapters of the 1974 booklet: "Did Six Million Really Die?"), about the three-volume Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva, 1948 (which is posted in the link below). The latter contains key sections where the IRC explicitly states that the systematic extermination of Jews was Nazi policy, but they are ignored and left out in the aforementioned "report of the report", for obvious reasons (what, you thought holocaust deniers did not have an agenda?) For instance, Harwood disputed the notion that homicidal gas chambers were disguised as shower facilities by citing references in the report where ICRC officials inspected bathing facilities. He used their responses to argue that showers functioned as showers and were not part of a killing installation. However the passage Harwood cited is in reference to Allied camps for civilians in Egypt and thus had nothing to do with Nazi concentration camps. I will proceed to post original documentation that is official correspondence, and the response, of the International Red Cross to various queries sent to them after this "truth bomb" was dropped on the general public through the publication of Richard Harwood/Verrall's booklet. Of course, deniers will casually claim the IRC was infiltrated by Jews or coerced by Jews into adjusting their position without providing further proof. So if you do not accept the letters I will post below as the IRC's genuine response on the grounds that they are nothing but damage-control of an agency caught red-handed, then I invite you to go and read the original, neutral three volume report of the IRC yourself, and try and find the passages that allegedly contain what Richard Harwood claimed in his essay: https://archive.org/details/ReportOfTheInternationalCommitteeOfTheRedCrossOnItsActivitiesDuringTheSecondWorl I'll make life easy for you and say you won't find them, but if you don't trust me, feel free to peruse the entire report, find/cite those passages in question and prove us all wrong.
Patterns of Prejudice is a journal about historical and contemporary social exclusion published by Taylor & Francis. Founded in 1967, it is a peer-reviewed journal published five times a year devoted to study racial and religious prejudice throughout the world and report on contemporary political events. In the 1978 official bulletin, entitled "False Propaganda", the ICRC denounced Holocaust denial and confirmed that the agency "Never published—or even compiled—statistics of this kind which are being falsely attributed to it" and stated that its mission was "to help war victims, not to count them", and questioned how they would have even been able to obtain such statistics had they wanted to, given that they were "only able to enter only a few concentration camps...in the final days of the war". The agency states that the figures used are rather "the number of deaths recorded by the International Tracing Service (ITS) on the basis of documents found when the camps were closed", and accordingly bear no relation to the total death tolls, since the Nazis destroyed much documentation, and that many deaths occurred in camps where prisoners were generally not registered. The ICRC considers this misrepresentation as propaganda, and because these claims regarding the ICRC were used for the defense of Ernst Zündel at his trial in 1985, critics state that despite the agency's attempts to demonstrate the truth, Holocaust deniers have continued to rely on disinformation pinned on the ICRC for the subsequent three decades. In 1979, the ICRC stated a second time that they have "never tried to compile statistics on the victims of the war", nor "certified the accuracy of the statistics produced by a third party", and state that the authors of such material have falsified both claims that the document originates from the ICRC.
In case it isn't perfectly clear already, this letter is dated 22nd August 1975, where Francoise Perret of the IRC responds to letters landing in his office after the publication of "Did Six Million Really Die?" a year earlier, which nevertheless was to be used a decade later by Ernst Zündel's defence. No wonder he lost. Read again what the letter said: Either Francoise Perret who held a law degree, was active in Poland, and worked for the IRC as delegate for 3 decades is a liar, or the Red Cross never published those numbers and holocaust deniers cooked up a nice hoax saying the IRC had compiled and published it. Another funny observation is that the aforementioned list only mentions a fraction of all concentration camps, and doesn't mention any of the extermination camps with the exception of Auschwitz. And lastly, the numbers seem to be compiled in 1979, 4 years after the IRC's letter above.
Sometimes deniers spread these figures without dragging the IRC into it, and just basing it on the ITS records in the Bad Arolsen archive. The numbers vary slightly compared to the previous Neo-Nazi infographic. Still, the order of magnitude remains the same. And again, nothing said about Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Maly Trostenets, Janowska, and a whole host of other camps. Deniers who love to spread the Bad Arolsen figures around, love to ignore (either deliberately or due to the lack of German skills) the underlined sentence clearly visible in the document, which says: "The documented numbers of the Sonderstandesamt [Bad Arolsen] do not allow for any conclusions to be made over the actual number of dead in the concentration camps." There is some secrecy (and backlog) surrounding Bad Arolsen, and deniers interpret this as the institute being afraid - very afraid - of releasing its records "because they fear the holohoax will come crumbling down"...in reality, it has more to do with strict data protection laws in Germany, e . g. even historians who quote eye-witnesses something cannot cite their full name if e . g. the witness is a perpetrator but was not convicted. For more, read: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2006/03/arolsen-archive-controversy-cold . html and http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2006/05/arolsen-aaargh-all-those-names . html
There is another source for the roughly 300,000 number deniers use: this time, an article titled "The harrowing tally of two world wars" appearing in the German newspaper "Die Tat" in Switzerland, January 19th, 1955. I have marked the article in question. Source: https://www.nb.admin.ch/themen/02074/02076/03887/05009/index.html?lang=en This newspaper article is often misquoted by the deniers as another reputable source of how many people perished in German concentration camps. Except: that's not what the newspaper is saying. After publishing a tally of all military deaths as well as German civilian deaths as a result of bombing and expulsion, the newspaper goes on to list 300,000 as a figure only for Germans, including German Jews (Deutsche, einschließlich der deutschen Juden), who perished in jails and concentration camps between 1939-1945 as a result of political, racial or religious persecution. Which is a very wonky statement, as such a loose definition could also include gulags, but woe is me if I tell a holocaust denier that this is the official figure of all those Germans who died also in Allied POW camps including Soviet gulags as well, given that the article doesn't specify which facilities in Europe it means by "jails and concentration camps"... In the first sentence, the article says "Vor einigen Tagen wurden die amtlichen Zahlen [...] bekanntgegeben", which translates to "A couple of days ago the official numbers [...] were made public". Except it does not go on to say who released these numbers. As a source, at the end of the article we have the following: (Ar). Could this mean Arolsen? Or just the initials of the journalist who wrote the article? In any case, note how the International Red Cross isn't mentioned at all. The bottom line is: The 300,000 figure supplied here says nothing about any non-Germans, including non-German Jews, who perished in jails and concentration camps. And given that even revisionists agree non-Germans and non-German Jews died in the camps, this 300k figure simply CANNOT be used to support their claim that this is "a realistic tally" of all camp deaths.
This German letter penned by the IRC in 1976 is a response to allegations raised presumably after the publication of Richard Verrall's "Did Six Million Really Die?" in 1974. However, the letter makes responsible as the source of all this misinformation the aforementioned 1955 "Die Tat" Swiss newspaper article, and goes on to draw attention to the newspaper article saying the 300,000 are German victims only (Jewish and non-Jewish), and now nowhere in the newspaper article the IRC is claimed as source. The letter goes on to explain how their organization is falsely implicated in these figures to lend them more weight and credibility. Therefore, case closed. To summarize: 1) We have a poorly sourced 1955 swiss newspaper article talking about 300k Jew & gentile German dead 2) Some camps' Bad Arolsen ITS figures the organization has stressed are registered deaths are misused 3) One chapter in "Did Six Million Really Die?" (1974) falsely reviews the 3 volume IRC report (1948) 4) A ton of letters flood the IRC office and as a result the organization points out these false allegations. 5) Some 10 years later Ernst Zündel is tried for publishing the booklet in 1974, loses, but goes on appeal. 6) Holocaust deniers continue to use this IRC/Bad Arolsen gambit 30 years later and counting...
Germar Rudolf likes to present the above table of differing victim numbers as proof that nobody really has any clue how many people died in this massacre, but he couldn't be further from the truth. Anybody can write a book and publish numbers, but only those who hold a degree in history are generally relied on as a secondary source, and the primary sources THEY use, are then accepted as legitimate. Let's go through this list, shall we? - Vitaly Korotych is a Ukrainian writer and journalist - Vladimir Posner is a Russian journalist - New York Times is a newspaper - Hennadiy Udovenko was a Ukrainian politician and diplomat - The Polish resistance figure is realistic (hmm, maybe because it stems from first hand experience). - Leni Yahil was a HISTORIAN - oh look! His number is very close to the death toll accepted today (33,771) I have no idea what this "Encyclopedia of Ukraine" is, but it does not seem to be written by any qualified person (Rudolf does not provide the source of the encyclopedia's figure - I am sure it should have one, maybe he should check that, and if it doesn't, then the encyclopedia can be safely discredited), and the same can be said about the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse, as this is the first time I have heard about it. Must be a local, low profile publisher. Once again, let me stress: newspaper articles, novels and journalists are not historiographers. Historians are. So we can only then have a debate, when conflicting figures are presented by different historians. Which is not the case in the above table. Therefore, case dismissed. But let us address the 33,771 figure. Deniers have asked, how this very specific number has been arrived at, given that the corpses buried after the mass execution at the Babi Yar site were, similar to what happened in the Aktion Reinhard camps, exhumed and cremated to cover up traces of the crime committed and therefore no longer exist, so that they can be counted. We have this figure from a series of dispatches known as the "Ereignismeldungen UdSSR". When the German military forces invaded the Soviet Union in the early summer of 1941, four groups consisting of battalions of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; SiPo) and the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD) followed the Heeresgruppen (army groups). Assigned by Reinhard Heydrich with the broad mission of a security policy involving pacification, and effectively deprived off any control by the military administration, these Einsatzkommandos, in cooperation with the higher SS and police officers (HSSPF) employed by Heinrich Himmler began to carve a bloody path in the newly conquered territories behind the army front lines: using the perpetrators' records during the period leading up to spring 1942 we can already ascertain 535,000 mass murders of Jews and others. The commanders had to report on their missions to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) in Berlin. This is how 195 daily "Ereignismeldungen UdSSR" (Soviet Union event dispatches) were produced, and modified from May 1942 onward in the form of 55 weekly "messages from the occupied Eastern territories". They were stamped "Geheime Reichssache" and distributed to a selected circle of readers, providing proof of the barbaric practices occupying German forces undertook in the East. With regard to the historical classification of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen into the context of the Holocaust, an essential prerequisite for the radicalization towards the Holocaust was the careful and deliberate selection of the Einsatzgruppenchefs (Dr. Franz Walther Stahlecker, Arthur Nebe, Emil Otto Rasch, Otto Ohlendorf). The Einsatzberichte not only reflect this ongoing radicalization, but also display a rivalry, a "race for the highest quotas" among the various Einsatzkommandos' executors. The deadliest single mass-murder event of 1941 is the notorious massacre of Babi Yar near Kiev, attributable to Einsatzgruppe C, reflected in the Ereignismeldung UdSSR No. 101 of October 7, 1941: http://i . imgur . com/Z1vUeCT . jpg where the relevant passage reads: "In collaboration with the Group-staff and 2 Commanders of Police-Regiment South, Sonderkommando 4a executed 33,771 Jews on the 29th and 30th September." We have circumstantial photographic evidence of a mass event involving civilians happening at Babi Yar. Photos from before the event (undressed women): http://bit . ly/2n5IPNl and after the event (piles and piles of clothing, colorized): http://bit . ly/2lOm0wD leave little room for doubt. Deniers will resort to their usual tactics of evading photographic evidence, e . g. pointing out 33,771 Jews aren't on the photo, or that this could have been a mass delousing event where everybody got fresh clothes for free and were then sent on their merry way, which is why I wont go down this line any further. Returning to the document, revisionists such as Fritz Berg, in their attempt to prove it is a forgery, have tried to shed doubt on the Einsatzbericht No. 101 by claiming the line containing the 33,771 figure appears too long compared to the length of any other line on the same page. Berg's theory is that the word "exekutiert" (10 characters) has been superimposed on an alleged former word "evakuiert" (9 characters) when the document was reworded by a forger and therefore sticks out. Too bad for Berg that this Einsatzbericht contains other pages as well, and there you also have a similar situation of a line being "too long" compared to others, e . g. the one containing the innocuous word "auffallend" (remarkably): http://bit . ly/2lSHB7T Other revisionists have asked where the "Geheime Reichssache" stamp is. It is on the first page of the Ereignismeldung, as it should be: http://bit . ly/2lwcUJV Yet others have asked why no code-words like "Judenevakuierung" have been used here and say directly typing "exekutiert" casts doubt about the authenticity of the document. But keep in mind the wide-spread use of code-words only became customary from 1942 onward. You then have revisionists asking how the Nazis did not destroy this incriminating document? Because they were too many documents floating around among too many different offices to rigorously destroy every single one of them in the war chaos. Suppose this were the only copy of the report, then the Germans had destroyed 98% of the copies, which is pretty good, but 2% too little to hide this atrocity. And finally, deniers like to pretend this is the only surviving document of the Babi Yar massacre, when in fact there are over 60 contemporary sources on the Babi Yar massacre. The 60+ sources include 3 other Ereignismeldungen UdSSR (no . s 97, 106, and 112) and TuLB no. 6.
This is one of the holocaust deniers' Golden Oldies. They clearly don't know how almanacs work. They do censuses every decade or so, but keep publishing their books almost annually. Doesn't that seem odd? It isn't - during peacetime. The sharper tools in the shed are capable of understanding that the annual figures are nothing but mathematical projections, aka "reasonable estimates". In 1945, the world just got out of a war that cost the lives of some 60 million people all over the world. Do deniers really think that the world Almanacs will already have the correct numbers one or two years later? Those kind of death tolls take years to assess, as censuses have to be conducted in dozens of countries and countless lists of dead have to be analyzed. Unsurprisingly, the 1949 addition of the Almanac does show a decrease of the world's Jewish population to 11,266,600 people for the year 1947 (see the left page here: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1949z.jpg) , while in 1939 it was around 16 Million, as shown here: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/1949WorldAlmanacJewsMissing.pdf). The funny thing is, the denier who made the above infographic was stupid enough to even include it without noticing (or included it on purpose to show us how stupid and incriminating a fraud a Jewish population plummet AFTER world war 2 would be, right? err..right guys? g-guys?). It is indeed the sharp drop that appears around 1948-49. The icing on the cake, of course, is that despite each almanac specifically pointing out that all figures are estimates and which last obtained hard data they are based on (in this case, pre-war), we are treated (yet again) to the epic hilarity of watching the less sophisticated deniers use almanacs as proof. More detail here: http://www.nizkor.org/features/denial-of-science/worldalmanac.html To recap: Wartime and immediate post-war estimates were projections using pre-war data. These weren't updated in the Almanac until 1949 when the Jewish total did in fact plummet. As usual, dickhead deniers cite Almanac figures as entirely credible....but if they somehow know which brave committee was conducting accurate census surveys in Europe during wartime when bombs were flying all over the place, I would be glad to let them tell me who these brave souls were... E.g. for 1940: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1940z.jpg and 1941: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1941z.jpg To think almanacs published during these war years are accurate is the height of (denier) stupidity.
Ca. 9.5 million Jews in Europe in 1933 I once came across a denier who tried to use this to prove to me there were no 6 million Jews in Germany that could be killed. Talk about idiocy. Now let's talk about the immediate post-war years. The following scans are from almanacs published in the years listed below, including a source that shows you the original scan, respectively. What the deniers do not explicitly mention (after all, it would destroy their argument) is how in the top-left corner the almanac says "compilations from the latest available data 1938": 1945 = 15,688,259 jews worldwide. source: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1945z.jpg 1946 = 15,688,259 jews source: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1946z.jpg 1947 = 15,688,259 jews source: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1947z.jpg 1948 = 15,688,259 jews source: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/jews1948z.jpg So according to these almanacs deniers wave around as evidence, for four consecutive years, the World Jewish Population didn't increase or decrease by even one Jew. Well, deniers, what is it? A miracle? Or the more likely case of almanacs continuing to be published every year, but the lazy committee using old, pre-war data? The bottom line is: Deniers cannot make the case that the almanacs published in the immediate aftermath of the war were using accurate figures, as demonstrated by the four examples above. So when did the first, proper revision of almanac data happen? As early as May 1946 by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in their Thirty-Ninth Annual Report (source: http://ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1946_1947_13_Statistics.pdf), but the almanacs remained inaccurate till 1949.
Ca. 9.74 million Jews in Europe in 1939 Ca. 3.78 million Jews in Europe in 1948/49 Ca. 16.64 million Jews in the World in 1939 Ca. 11.37 million Jews in the World in 1948/49 Also, see the World Almanac of 1949 here: http://fathersmanifesto.net/jews/1949WorldAlmanacJewsMissing.pdf
A frequent claim some of the less gifted holocaust deniers make, is to keep pointing us to the fact that once upon a time, there was a sign at Auschwitz saying 4 million had died there, and since the 1990s it has been reduced to 1 . 5 million. The particularly dumb deniers go on to add: "Well, if it has been 6 million Jews all along, how can it still be 6 million Jews if the death count quietly dropped by 2 . 5 million?" Even the dimmest observer will have noticed that first of all the old sign said 4 million people, not 4 million Jews, and therefore does not directly attack the 6 million Jewish death toll of the Holocaust at all. Secondly, the confusion stems from the fact that there are two quite separate - and completely different - interpretations of the four million figure in this context: 1) The Western figure, which is the total number of Jews believed murdered in all camps - not just in Auschwitz. This figure was given to the International Military Tribunal (IMT) by Wilhelm Höttl: "Approximately 4,000,000 Jews had been killed in the various concentration camps, while an additional 2,000,000 met death in other ways, the major part of whom were shot by operational squads of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia." source: http://avalon . law . yale . edu/imt/12-14-45 . asp ...was accepted by the tribunal, and appears in the Judgement: "Adolf Eichmann, who had been put in charge of this programme by Hitler, has estimated that the policy pursued resulted in the killing of 6,000,000 Jews, of which 4,000,000 were killed in the extermination institutions." source: http://avalon . law . yale . edu/imt/judwarcr . asp Note that it says nothing at all about the number of deaths at Auschwitz. 2) The Soviet figure, which was the number of people (not specifically Jews!) the Soviet Union claimed were killed at Auschwitz alone. Their conclusion was based on an assessment of the capacity of the crematoria. It was submitted to the IMT in the Count Three Indictment, but NOT accepted. source: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . com/2006/09/some-misconceptions-related-to . html The Soviets, however, retained it for propaganda purposes, and it remained on the sign (and quoted by various western magazines and newspaper articles as well) until the regime collapsed in the early 90s. It was never really accepted by Western holocaust historians though, because it was based on the assumption that the Kremas functioned on a 100% duty cycle. Proof that this figure was not accepted by Western historians is that as early as 1946, Nachman Blumental came to an informed guess that the number of Auschwitz victims ought to have been somewhere between 1 . 3 and 1 . 5 million. In the early 1950s, Gerald Reitlinger also arrived at a similar estimate of the number of victims on the basis of the number of deportees (see G. Reitlinger, "Die Endlösung", S. 522). Pre-eminent holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who did important statistical analysis into the number of victims of the Holocaust, also supported the lower figure of 1 million (see: R. Hilberg, "Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden", S. 1299). Six million is the total number of Jews believed to have been killed in the Holocaust, by all means, and in all locations - not just the camps. It is based on a comparison of legitimate pre- and post-war census data, deportation lists, documentation, and cross-referencing - not by adding up the number of all deaths in all camps and then doing guesswork on the death toll of the Einsatzgruppen, death marches and so on. Though Raul Hilberg did offer a detailed tally of some 5 . 1 million Jewish victims, he never claimed "this was it". So much for the notion that "6" is some kind of ritual, cabalistic number invented by the Jews. Upto 1 . 5 million is the number of people (not specifically Jews) western historians believe died at Auschwitz alone. Its earliest appearance, as far as I can tell, is March 25 1947, when the Central Jewish Historical Committee presented an expert report to the Krakow-Auschwitz trial, stating that the total killed there was 1,500,000 - not four million. So when Poland freed itself from communism, and the museum staff changed the sign which displayed the Soviet claim of 4 million, to the western one of 1 . 5 million, they were simply changing a number they knew was wrong, to one they were confident was right. This explains why the six million Jewish total remained the same - because it was never based on four million Jews having been killed at Auschwitz to begin with! If you are going to insist that the Soviet figure of 4 million was part of the 6 million, then why not also insist on the Soviet figure of 2 million dead at Majdanek? 4 + 2 = 6. If these two figures were part of the 6 million, it would mean no Jew ever died in any other camp ever, or anywhere else in Europe either, but thats not what anyone back then claimed. The holocaust death toll in its entirety, is 6 million Jews, and millions of other non-Jews, whose number varies on how one defines the holocaust, e . g. whether you include all those non-Jewish, non-combatants dying from unnatural causes not related to collateral damage during war, i . e. Soviet prisoners of war who perished during internment, Soviet civilians who perished during the Siege of Leningrad, the persecution and murder of Roma and Sinti people, homosexuals, political opponents, those considered spies, Jehovah's Witnesses and other clergymen, etc., and for these purposes Simon Wiesenthal's 11 million figure (5 million non-Jews) is a good approximation, though the number is likely higher.
Some holocaust deniers are eager to point out that it wasn't just the Soviets with their now discredited "4 million" figure, but the most infamous camp commander of Auschwitz himself, who claimed a death toll several million in number for the camp: Rudolf Höss (alternately spelled Rudolf Hoess or Rudolf Höß, and not to be confused with Rudolf HESS, the dindu nuffin, who became a martyr for modern neo-nazis due to his "unjust and long imprisonment"). Let's investigate on what Höss really had to say, shall we? Keep in mind the deniers also claim this "several million" confession was extracted under torture and that he was made to sign a document in English, a "language he did not understand". So we have three allegations here: 1) Hoess spoke about several million killed at Auschwitz, a number that has been quietly revised 2) Hoess was tortured by his captors 3) to sign a document in English, a language he did not understand These three points, when presented in the above format seem convincing that mass murder on an industrial scale is a fairy tale cooked up by holohoaxers. But let us examine each of these claims separately, one after the other. Let us begin with the last claim, namely the allegation that Höss could not understand English: THIS IS WRONG. Just like how deniers question every fact thrown at them by historians, we have to stop and question every "fact" thrown at us by deniers. Where is proof that Rudolf Höss did not understand English? Surely deniers have some proof beyond "gut feeling" and "umm...he was like...a German guy from the 40s so the chance is slim". Exactly. Deniers have no proof. But we have proof that Höss understood English. To begin with, if you read the IMT transcripts you will see how Hoess is asked whether he understands English, the language many of the documents shown to him have been transcribed into. He repeatedly says yes. Of course, this isn't proof by itself because he could have been coerced into saying "yes" when asked, right? Which is why we need to dig deeper into Hoess' past. It turns out that during the 1920s, Rudolf Höss was arrested and sent to prison. You see, Höss played a leading role in at least one political assassination for which he spent several years in jail.[1] On 31 May 1923, in Mecklenburg, Höss and members of a paramilitary he had joined called the Freikorps attacked and beat to death local schoolteacher Walther Kadow. Kadow was believed to have tipped off French occupational authorities that Höss' fellow Nazi, paramilitary soldier Albert Leo Schlageter, was carrying out sabotage operations against French supply lines. Schlageter was arrested and executed on 26 May 1923; soon afterwards Höss and several accomplices took revenge on Kadow. In 1923, after one of the killers confessed to a local newspaper, Höss was arrested and sentenced in May 1924 to 10 years in Brandenburg Penitentiary for the crime, but released in July 1928 as part of a general amnesty and in 1929, he married Hedwig Hensel. The point is, during his time in prison, Rudolf Hoess learned English, and I quote him as having said: "...In my free time I eagerly studied English. I even had textbooks sent to me. Later I had them regularly send me books and magazines in English, so that in about a year I learned this language without anyone helping me. This was terrific discipline for my mind."[2] So much for the revisionist insistence that Hoess signed an affidavit in a language he couldn't understand, huh? LAWL. Let us move on to 1): During his initial interrogations, Höss indeed confirmed an initial assessment done by his interrogators that three million people had been killed in Auschwitz. But here's where it gets tricky: In Nuremberg, he gave DIFFERENT numbers at DIFFERENT occasions (surely a scandal for his torturers!) During his interrogations he gave a detailed list of numbers for each nationality that came to over 1.1 million deportees. In his affidavit, however, he stated that "at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated [in Auschwitz] by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000."[3] He confirmed this number in a conversation with the American military psychologist Dr. Gustave Gilbert. "He readily conformed that approximately 2.5 million Jews have been exterminated under his direction." But wait! In a short memorandum which he wrote for Dr. Gilbert later in April 1946, Höss returned to the lower number. He now stated that the number of 2.5 million referred to the technical potential. "[T]o the best of my knowledge, this number appears to me much too high. If I calculate the total of the mass operations which I still remember, and still make allowance for a certain percentage of error, I arrive, in my calculation, at a total of 1.5 million at the most for the period from the beginning of 1941 to the end of 1944." Finally, in Poland, Höss re-affirmed that the number of victims had been most likely less than 1.2 million persons, commenting that "I regard the number of 2.5 million as far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive capabilities."[4] It seems that he had gotten the 2.5 million number rather from his conversations with Adolf Eichmann, than personal assessment. And Eichmann obviously had propagandistic reasons to report to his higher ups about how many Jews had been sent to Auschwitz. This back-and-forth by Höss repeatedly revising his numbers absolutely destroys the revisionist notion that Rudolf Höss was forced to confess to a specific number of Auschwitz dead his captors had cooked up. Which leaves us with point 2): Was he tortured? What the deniers have gotten right is that yes, Rudolf Höss’ family was harshly interrogated by the British (verbally only), including having one of Höss' sons being threatened with being shipped off by train to the Soviet Union [5], until they (Höss' wife Hedwig) told them where Höss was. When captured by British troops on 11 March 1946 in Gottrupel, Rudolf Höss was disguised as a gardener and called himself Franz Lang. Again, ask yourself the following question: If Auschwitz was a by-the-book labor camp as the revisionists claim, why would its commander go into hiding, under a new identity? If Josef Mengele was a doctor who merely saved lives at Auschwitz, why did he do the same (go into hiding, in fact, successfully until he died)? Anyway, the British force that captured Höss was led by Hanns Alexander, a young Jewish man from Berlin who was forced to flee to England with his entire family during the rise of Nazi Germany. And again, Höss denied his identity until Alexander noticed his wedding ring and demanded to inspect it. It had the names Rudolf and Hedwig inscribed inside. After being questioned and roughed up, Höss confessed his real identity. And here is what the revisionists do not tell you: While Höss may have been manhandled during his capture, it’s interesting that during the Nuremberg trial, or his later trial in Poland, he was NOT TOUCHED. In his two long autobiographies in Polish jail, WHICH DENIERS OBVIOUSLY HAVEN'T BOTHERED TO READ, Höss confessed he was astonished by how well the Poles treated him, considering the scale of his murders. Just before his execution, he stated to both his son, and his daughter Ingebirgitt, that he had been treated well, particularly by his Polish captors. They are on tape explaining this, and have published the same. So I call revisionist bullshit out. If he had been tortured to sign a confession he did not want to sign, he would have explicitly said so, particularly if he was about to be executed....but he went out of his way, unnecessarily (despite clearly knowing what awaited him anyway), to say that he was treated well. Nevertheless, deniers keep insisting he was tortured (the dumber ones bringing up the "testicle crushing" incident that has nothing to do with Höss but rather the Malmedy Massacre trial), and as source for the alleged torture, cite a novel written by a journalist who interviewed one of Höss' captors who bragged about roughing up Höss, mostly by playing psychological tricks on him (sleep deprivation, sent him outside in the cold morning etc. rather than brute force) to get him talking. I have debunked this in the IMT section here: imgur.com/FLz3laH. And once again, to prove that Höss was not tortured in the classic sense, keep in mind deniers have so far conveniently not mentioned the absolute lack of scars, bruises or anything of the sort on Höss' post-war photographs, and there are many of them. As you can see, even this point, as alleged by deniers, has been debunked. Sources: [1]: "Death dealer: the memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz" p. 52 [2]: ibid p. 76 or https://i.imgur.com/o4ZfTHD.png [3]: Modern History Sourcebook: Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz: Testimony at Nuremberg, 1946. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1946Hoess.html [4]: Höß, Kommandant in Auschwitz, S. 252 [5]: Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0 434 02236 6.
There are a couple of youtube videos circulating where a denier shows you a whole bunch of pre-war newspaper clippings talking about 6 million Jews. Or you may come across a video that talks about a "holocaust" of some other group before WW2. From what I understand, both of these "revelations" are supposed to be a huge eye-opener, a truly shocking "woah" moment that should convert you to questioning "the" holocaust of six million Jews, given that we have proof that these things pop up BEFORE WW2 even happened! One huge conspiracy, right? Long-planned and in the making ever since the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were first laid out? Wrong. I'll tell you why: did you come across the pre-war newspaper articles that spoke of 5 million Jews??? No? How about 4 million Jews? No? What about 7 million Jews? No? Well I have, see the pic above. All these other newspaper articles exist. It's just that the guy who posted the "omfg 6 million" pre-war newspaper clippings conveniently does not show the other numbers also listed in pre-war newspaper snippets. Why should he? It would detract from his intended message of somehow making the 6 million number unique and prophetic. The Google News Archive returns these hits for the period 1905-1939: "Five Million Jews": 42 "Six Million Jews": 44 "Three Million Jews": 57 Stories relating to the imminent starvation, deportation or annihilation of 5 million (not six) can be found here: http://bit . ly/2Gymkvi and here: http://bit . ly/2BEbYpG and here: http://nyti . ms/2FwFv7f In reality, all of these were rough estimates of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe and Western Russia, being in danger due to the turbulent events of the early 20th century happening there (war, famine, revolution etc.). Some deniers also try to claim there are references to a "holocaust" or a "6 million" in the Torah and Talmud, though when I asked them to give me the verse so I could look it up myself, they balked and changed the topic. The best they could come up with, is rather than citing scripture itself, to cite a book supposedly citing from the scripture, which is "Keystone of the New World Order: The Holocaust Dogma of Judaism", written by a guy called Ben Weintraub. Makes you think he is Jewish, and therefore in the know, right? Wrong: "Ben Weintraub" is the pen name of presumably one Robert L. Brock, a Jew-hater[1].Others refer me to the respected Rabbi Benjamin Blech instead. I have tackled Blech's POST WAR prophecy here: imgur . com/WVi1AgE Keep in mind the Nazi genocide on the Jewish and non-Jewish non-combatant population of Europe was not given a proper name immediately after the war. It took some time. Today, we only think of the Nazi genocide when hearing the word "holocaust", because no other such large scale deliberate genocide of entire peoples marked as "undesirable" by a regime has happened that was not the result of famine or other natural factors. Therefore, it is perfectly natural for our current understanding of the word "holocaust" to find its meaning in the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Sources: [1]: https://www . amazon . com/Holocaust-Dogma-Judaism-Keystone-World/dp/0972416005
source: https://www . ushmm . org/wlc/en/article . php?ModuleId=10005161 In 1933, approximately 9 . 5 million Jews lived in Europe (11 million if you take the Nazis' own estimate at the Wansee conference), comprising 1 . 7% of the total European population. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15 . 3 million. The majority of Jews in prewar Europe resided in eastern Europe. The largest Jewish communities in this area were in Poland, with about 3,000,000 Jews (9 . 5%); the European part of the Soviet Union, with 2,525,000 (3 . 4%); and Romania, with 756,000 (4 . 2%). In pre-war central Europe, the largest Jewish community was within the German Reich, which around 1933 was about 500,000 members (<1% of the total Reich population), but which, by means of Jews fleeing Germany to other countries, including to neighboring European countries, had reduced itself by 1939 to 234,000 members, excluding Jews in the newly annexed Austria and Sudetenland. This was followed by Hungary with 445,000 (5 . 1%), Czechoslovakia with 357,000 (2 . 4%), and Austria with 191,000, most of whom resided in the capital city of Vienna (2 . 8%). For a more detailed breakdown of the Jewish population within Germany in the years leading up to the Holocaust, see: https://www . bundesarchiv . de/gedenkbuch/einfuehrung . html . de?page=2 In western Europe the largest Jewish communities were in Great Britain, with 300,000 Jews (0 . 65%); France, with 250,000 (0 . 6%); and the Netherlands, with 156,000 (1 . 8%). As you can see, the numbers vary slightly depending on the source, but in both instances the fact remains that after 1945, millions of Jews in Europe had disappeared, even if you account the emigration to regions like USA, Canada and the Levant, as census data is readily available for these countries. Therefore, where did all the still missing European Jews vanish to? The Soviet Union? The small autonomous "Jewish" Oblast of Birobidzhan on practically the other side of Russia (of which only the tiniest fraction actually has Jewish ancestry), is meaningless. Deniers who keep yapping about Treblinka and so on only being transit train stations (instead of terminal stops where the genocide of these peoples happened, along with camps such as Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor) have so far not been able to produce any verifiable evidence to convince us Hitler really "evacuated" all the Jews into the East after all. Instead, what they have been able to provide are a handful of interviews of Jews who got transferred from, say, Treblinka to Majdanek, another camp relatively close by and well within the German occupied territories. Or documents showing the transfer of a few thousand Jews from Germany and into ghettos outside Minsk or Riga. Again, both were well within German-occupied territory in 1941, 42, etc. Or, holocaust deniers will show you one or two newspaper articles where a Jew who had e . g. fled to the US and who had thought his brother had died ends up being reunited with him after all, as the brother had been trapped on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The deniers argue that, for every such case covered in the newspapers, there's surely a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand such cases that didn't make the papers. And hundred thousands of cases where there was no post-soviet reunion. Or that millions of Jews changed their names and their faiths for whatever reason, and never spoke about having been Jews ever again. This is the kind of mental gymnastics denier "historians" do to be able to explain away the big question, the gaping hole in holocaust revisionism, namely the still missing several million Jews. Bottom line is: the denier hypothesis, that millions upon millions of Jews really were evacuated to the East (that is, into Russia, past the frontline!), and that "Judenevakuierung" isn't a code-word for physical extermination at the Aktion Reinhardt camps, is nonsense. The Holocaust happened. One might think that the Nazis’ crimes during World War II amounted mainly or exclusively to killing Jews in the gas chambers of a number of extermination camps, especially Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. For this is what holocaust deniers, generally motivated by admiration of the Nazi regime and/or hatred of Jews, predominantly focus on. Yet the gas chambers of the extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka and the dual purpose camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek were but one aspect of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. According to Raul Hilberg’s "The Destruction of the European Jews", Table B-1 on page 1219, about 800,000 Jews died as a result of "ghettoization and general occupation" in ghettos in German-occupied Eastern Europe, in Theresienstadt and the Transnistria colonies of Nazi Germany’s Romanian ally or due to privation outside of ghettos, 1 . 3 million were killed in open air shootings by Einsatzgruppen, SS and police units and Wehrmacht or Romanian army units, and about 300,000 perished in the concentration, labor or transit camps or mass killings by Nazi Germany’s Croatian ally or other causes. So a total of 2 . 4 million out of the 5 . 1 million Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide estimated by Hilberg, or 47 % of the total, were not killed by mass gassing in camps with installations dedicated to this purpose. More recent research, including but not limited to the country studies published in Wolfgang Benz et al., "Dimensionen des Völkermords", points to an overall Jewish death toll above 6 million and to an even higher proportion of deaths outside such camps, especially open air shootings in mobile killing operations. Yet "revisionist" concern with mobile killing operations is dwarfed by their obsession with gas chambers (especially those of Auschwitz-Birkenau), and Jewish mass mortality due to privation in ghettos and camps is hardly addressed by them at all. True to the populist nature of holocaust denial, this weighting is a mirror image of public knowledge of either aspect of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. To find out how the Jewish population in Europe developed in the post war decades that followed, see: http://www . pewresearch . org/fact-tank/2015/02/09/europes-jewish-population/
Once again, let me make things really simple: - Ca. 1933, there lived about 9.5 million Jews in Europe - in 1946 there lived about 3.7 Million Jews in Europe - Ca. 1931, there lived about 175,138 Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine - Through the Haa'vara Agreement only some 50,000-60,000 Jews poured into Palestine 1933-1939 - In 1945 there lived about 553,600 Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine - Ca. 1933 there lived about 4.2 million Jews in the United States and 155,000 in Canada - in 1946 there lived a total of 5.2 million Jews in the United States and Canada combined - Ca. 1933 there lived 2.6 million Jews in the entire Soviet Union - In 1959 despite territorial gains, there only lived close to 2.3 million Jews In the entire Soviet Union Keep in mind that these figures include population increase by birth as well, not just immigration. And given that the borders of countries in Europe shifted around quite a bit in the 1930s and early 40s, different surveys will yield slightly differing results, but on a continental basis the numbers will remain similar. What ultimately matters, is the order of magnitude. So while it is much easier to do a comparison of the total world Jewish population, that will not answer the question of how many emigrated where. Despite including the births in both the already existing native Jewish populace and that of those that immigrated into the US and Canada, between 33 and 46 the North American Jewish figure barely increased by a million, which leads me to believe just a few hundred thousand Jews fled Europe to the American continent. I don't have to remind you that the US and UK (including her colonies) imposed harsh immigration laws and set quotas rather than welcome Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, so the population increase by immigration is smaller than you think. A landmass of even greater size, and supposed final destination of Jewish "evacuation to the East" by Nazis according to holocaust deniers, the number of Jews from 33 till even much later 59 actually was a net loss in the Soviet Union. And in the Israel region, once again taking native population increase by birth into account, between 33 and 45 probably less Jews as went to the American continent fled Europe to here by various means, most of which was through the Haavara Agreement. None of these can explain away a European population net loss of some 6 million. And keep in mind that according to the Nazi statistic during the Wannsee-Conference, the number of Jews in Europe by the early 40s was in fact 11 million rather than 9.5, and by the early 1940s quite a chunk had already fled Europe to the aforementioned countries, as emigration was rendered all the more difficult during wartime compared to the years earlier. Furthermore we have not counted the increase of the European Jewish population by birth between 1933 and 1941, so it is quite credible that the figure was between 9.5 and 11 million in Europe at the time, despite the < 1 million that had emigrated in the years prior. Keep in mind that this is just a very crude, amateur analysis of mine and in no way represents that of a statistician and census records analyzer. Bottom line is: the Holocaust cannot be explained away by emigration. The seven figure revisionist emigration claims into the Soviet Union have no basis in reality, and the emigration to the American continent or the Levant region is not enough by a long shot.
I have shown the false allegations put on the International Red Cross by deniers to drag the organization into their denial I have shown some of the IRC's responses I have shown how the Bad Arolsen figures are fraudulently used to "prove" denier numbers regarding the holocaust death toll In the case study of Babi Yar, I have exposed the denier tactic of listing different death tolls without evaluation of the authors in question, to deliberately confuse the reader I have shown typical denier deception by quoting World Almanachs between 1939 and 1948 I have compared pre-war and post-war census data showing the huge drop in World Jewish Population I have explained why Auschwitz's 4 million death toll was reduced and how this does not affect the 6 million Jewish death toll of the holocaust I have shown how historiography does not really rely on Hoess's confession "extracted under torture" I have shown pre-war newspaper articles mentioning "6 million" to be cherry-picked, meaningless drivel I have provided a breakdown of the Holocaust by country
This section will now deal with deniers trying to exculpate Hitler and many senior Nazis from the holocaust, saying it was dirty work undertaken by the lower ranks without knowledge of the higher ups. Additionally, it will also deal with other aspects of the holocaust not related to camps, i.e. the mass graves and medical horrors that are part of it, and includes genocide via Einsatzgruppen shootings & Gas Vans. Holocaust denial is a religion with many religious principles its adherents feverishly cling on to. One such tenet, is there is no surviving extermination order from Hitler. While this is true, to therefore conclude that there never was a Hitler order, neither verbal nor in writing, is the worst kind of blunder a historian can make. Later on I will show how verbal commands were a thing in Nazi Germany's chain of command, and how written orders had limited circulation and usually only for higher ups - which also made it easy for highly incriminating documents to be destroyed. Documents being fed to paper shredders is not just a mere meme. Adolf Ehinger's paper shredder was manufactured in 1935 in Germany. Ehinger later marketed his shredders to government agencies and financial institutions from hand-crank to electric motor. Keep in mind burning paperwork was also a thing. But let's address the document at hand. Pic related was sent from the Führerhauptquartier on the 11th of July 1943, titles "Treating (better translation: "About" or "Dealing with") the Jewish question" and states that the Führer has commanded that when it comes to dealing with the Jewish question in public, NO description is to be given regarding the future implementation of a "complete solution". It goes on to state that HOWEVER, that it is *allowed* to be spoken of that Jews en masse are being drafted to a befitting work duty. While holocaust deniers say this falls perfectly in line with, and is simply more proof of, the mass internment of the Jewish people in camps which they don't deny in the first place, I would like to ask them why there is a specific Führer order demanding nobody be descriptive about the meaning of the term "complete solution" to begin with. The German phrase "Es kann jedoch..." actually implies that one is allowed to give a slightly more vague explanation, instead of interpreting the missive as being ordered to say nothing at all. Why all the secrecy, unless they were trying to cover up the fact that "complete solution" in reality does NOT mean sending all Jews to work in labor camps after all? The whole order basically says "here is a top secret Führer order stating you should not be descriptive about A but it is okay to explain it as B". Very suspicious indeed.
Furthermore, we have the above, dated July 1941, an order from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to Reinhard Heydrich, one of the key architects of the Holocaust, instructing him to take all organisatory and material preparations necessary to begin the operation of the TOTAL Solution (Gesamtlösung) to the Jewish Question in territories under German control in Europe by means of emigration and evacuation, and to soon let him know exactly what the logistical and material requirements for the impending FINAL solution (angestrebte Endlösung) to the Jewish Question are going to be. While this is not an order from Hitler himself, it can still be accepted as a written order for the Final Solution, first beginning by emigratory means ("...in Form der Auswanderung und Evakuierung"), given by Göring, one of Hitler's closest aides. During the Nuremberg trials, Göring stressed about the words "emigration and evacuation" to point out that this particular order was not about physically exterminating Jews. He wanted to exculpate himself this way, but he did NOT deny that the physical extermination of Jews had happened. Hermann Göring also doesn't say that he had no idea about the physical extermination while he was in office. To assume both Himmler (you can hear his frank discussion about the physical extermination of the Jewish race in his 1943 Posen speeches) AND Göring were acting behind Hitler's back and without his consent is a tall claim that is not supported by any evidence provided by Holocaust deniers.
Throughout the 1920s, Hitler maintained that "the Jewish question" was the "pivotal question" for his Party and would be solved "with well-known German thoroughness to the final consequence."[1] With his assumption to power in 1933, Hitler's racial notions were implemented by measures that increasingly excluded Jews from German society. On January 30, 1939, Hitler warned that if Jewish financiers and Bolsheviks initiated war, "The result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."[2] On, September 21, 1939, after the Germans invaded Poland, SD chief Heydrich ordered the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units operating in German-occupied territory) to forcibly concentrate Polish Jews into ghettos, alluding to an unspecified "final aim." [3] In the summer of 1941, with preparations underway for invading Russia, large-scale mass murder initiatives - already practiced domestically upon the mentally ill and deformed (see Aktion-T4, the euthanasia program) - were broadly enacted against Jews. Heydrich, acting on Hitler's orders, directed the Einsatzgruppen to implement the "special tasks" of annihilation in the Soviet Union of Jews and Soviet commissars.[4] On July 31, Heydrich received orders from Goering to prepare plans "for the implementation of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question" in all German-occupied areas, which is the shown document above.[5] Eichmann, while awaiting trial in Israel in 1960, related that Heydrich had told him in August 1941 that "the Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews."[6] Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in 1946 that "In the summer of 1941... Himmler said to me, 'The Führer has ordered the Final Solution to the Jewish Question... I have chosen the Auschwitz camp for this purpose.' "[7] On January 20, 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference to discuss and coordinate implementation of the Final Solution. Eichmann later testified at his trial: "These gentlemen... were discussing the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language that I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced no words about it at all... they spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination."[8] Ten days after the conference, while delivering a speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin that was recorded by the Allied monitoring service, Hitler declared: "The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. . . the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least or a thousand years."[9] On February 24, 1943, he stated: "This struggle will not end with the annihilation of Aryan mankind, but with the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.[10] Keep in mind that many of Hitler's orders, particularly on the extermination campaigns after the Aktion T4 fiasco, were made verbally, as the testimonies of Nazi higher ups confirm. Eichmann recorded in his diaries and memoirs, to Hitler propagandist and history distorter David Irving's chagrin (and Irving has spent his life saying Hitler had no clue about the holocaust), that Hitler gave Himmler the final verbal orders for the extermination campaign in October 1941. The underlings were expected to determine the Führer's wants and do their best to achieve them. They knew what he wanted, because he outlined what he wanted often enough in his repetitious table talks, speeches, and harangues, for decades. Hitler, seeing himself as a visionary and artist, was not interested in the details of how things were done, except with military operations, where he threw himself into tiny details, like the number of towed anti-tank guns in an infantry division. He was fascinated with this stuff, from his World War I experiences as a soldier. This mania for detail on minor military subjects turned Führer conferences into lengthy ordeals for all attending, as they often focused no trivialities instead of the big picture. After a few years, the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) officers knew that the way to present Hitler with bad news was to sandwich stories of an isolated incident of heroism or a small victory, so he would be less infuriated by the defeat, and still focus on the small victory. Hitler also saw warfare in terms of propaganda, and designed a lot of his military strategy in those terms. The Battle of the Bulge was not designed as much to take Antwerp and cut off the British 21st Army Group as it was to set the Western Allies squabbling amongst each other. He did not understand how well SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) worked, compared to his feuding bureaucracies. One of the major facets of how Hitler developed his image in Germany was that he was a leader who was above and beyond the normal political fray, an ordinary man who had given up all normal desires (family, civilian career, time, art) to achieve Germany's destiny. When things went wrong in Germany, they were not the Führer's fault. It was somebody else's. It helped enable him to take the credit, avoid the blame, and keep anyone from noticing his shortcomings and health issues. It's also worth noting that in the final days in Berlin, a lot of paper in the Führerbunker was burned, some on orders of Hitler, others on orders from Martin Bormann. God knows what valuable incriminating evidence was lost. We can be certain that at least a good portion of it was sensitive information, as it wouldn't have been burned otherwise. Hitler regarded his war on the Jewish people (and Bolshevism as an extension in accord with his belief) as central to his life and career, and a subject for which he believed he would be considered a great hero decades later. Bormann likely destroyed a lot of key papers. Another load of key papers went down in one of the planes flying to the Berghof, Hitler's private residence in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, crashing in what became East Germany. This crash became the tool by which Konrad Kujau displayed his fake "Hitler diaries" in 1983, which apparently were going to whitewash Hitler. In all likelihood, that plane contained many of the Table Talks that Bormann had transcribed. But the key point...many of Hitler's orders and desires were given verbally, particularly after the Aktion-T4 mess. Also, see Hitler's complicity regarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion_Pommern (see death tolls below) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_Death_(Bydgoszcz) (1,200 - 5,000 civilians executed) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenberg (20,000 civilian deaths in 760 mass executions) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_in_Piaśnica (an estimated 12,000 - 14,000 victims) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_AB-Aktion_in_Poland (upto 7500 shot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmiry_massacre (around 1700 murdered) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wola_massacre (upto 50,000 liquidated) Sources: [1]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 489. [2]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 490., speeches also available on youtube [3]: Holocaust, Jerusalem: Keter Books, 1974, p. 104 [4]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 657 [5]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 492. [6]: Ronnie Duggar, The Texas Observer, Austin, 1992, D. 48 [7]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, pp. 641-642. [8]: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume 2, p. 657. [9]: Ronnie Duggar, The Texas Observer, Austin, 1992, D. 48. [10]: Holocaust, pp. 105-106.
Major Josef Hell was a journalist in the twenties and in the beginning of the thirties, during which time he also collaborated with Dr. Fritz Gerlich, the editor of the weekly newspaper "Der Gerade Weg", as cited in Fleming, Gerald. Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. p. 17 In 1922, Hitler told Josef Hell the following: “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows — at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example — as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews. — Adolf Hitler, 1922. (Josef Hell, "Aufzeichnung," 1922, ZS 640, p. 5, Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte.[13]) For more, see: https://www.phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/statements.htm Similarly, Hitler expressed his genocidal hatred for Jews many other times as well: On 21 January 1939 Hitler spoke with František Chvalkovský and said: "We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November 1918. The day of reckoning has come." (Helmuth Krausnick, 'The Persecution of the Jews', in Buchheim et al., Anatomy of the SS State (New York, 1968), p. 44, cited in Germany, 1866-1945, p. 637 Craig, Gordon Alexander) In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that in World War I, if upto 15,000 Jews had been homicidally gassed, this would have at least vindicated the sacrifices of German soldiers made at the front: "If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain." (Kaes, Anton; Jay, Martín; Dimendberg, Edward. The Weimar Republic sourcebook. University of California Press. p. 806. ISBN 0-520-06775-4, requoting Mein Kampf page 766, Stalag Edition, Ostara Publications) And then we have the time when Hitler told the Italian ambassador Vittorio Cerruti on the eve of the April 1st, 1933 SA-organized nationwide boycott of Jewish stores in Germany: "I don't know whether my name will be held in honor in Germany in 200 or 300 years, but I'm absolutely certain that in 500 or 600 years the name Hitler will be universally glorified as the name of the man who once and for all eradicated the global pestilence that is Jewry." - as quoted in Max Domarus, "Hitler, Vol.1, part 1", pp. 300f. Did you get the memo? Hitler is being quoted as having considered himself someone who will have "eradicated the global pestilence that is Jewry". Emphasis on the words 'eradicated' and 'global'. This doesn't leave room for interpretations of mere deportation out of Germany or Europe, as revisionists like to spin yarns around. Its meaning is pretty clear: worldwide physical extermination.
Oh you thought we were done? Not by a long shot. This article summarizes how many more times Hitler made clear in his many speeches exactly what awaits the Jews, should war happen in Europe once more: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2014/05/three-hitler-speeches-from-1942 . html My particular favorite is the following speech of his, delivered to the Reichstag on January 30th, 1939: https://www . youtube . com/watch?v=W6mIO-kYI0I in case the link doesn't work, he says the following: "Ich will heute wieder ein Prophet sein: Wenn es dem internationalen Finanzjudentum in und außerhalb Europas gelingen sollte, die Völker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu stürzen, dann wird das Ergebnis nicht die Bolschewisierung der Erde und damit der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse in Europa!" translation: "Today I want to be a prophet again. If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!" A man who threatens on tape that war brought upon Europe will result in the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race (Jüdische Rasse, aka people, not "Judentum" as a political or economic power, or "jüdische Macht" (power) or "jüdischer Einfluss" (influence) but RASSE) in Europe, is about as clear as can be that he means the mass killing of Jews and nothing else, no figure of speech or any bullshit like that holocaust deniers would like to believe. He doesn't talk about evacuation, about "durchschleusen", or "evakuierung", or "deportation", about Sonderbehandlung, or even about "Ausrottung" (which some particularly obstinate deniers interpret as "to root out"), no, he says VERNICHTUNG (annihilation, destruction) very clearly. Before you accuse me of only showing you a snippet, here's a longer clip: https://www . youtube . com/watch?v=QWx7nq_lnQM Hitler then goes on to say: "Die Völker wollen nicht mehr auf den Schlachtfeldern sterben, damit diese wurzellose internationale Rasse an den Geschäften des Krieges verdient und ihre alttestamentarische Rachsucht befriedigt. Über der jüdischen Parole: Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt euch wird eine höhere Erkenntnis siegen, nämlich: Schaffende Angehörige aller Nationen erkennt euren gemeinsamen Feind." translated to: "The peoples no longer want to die on the battlefields, so that this rootless international race can profit from the affairs of the war and sate its old-testamentarian vengefulness. A higher realization will prevail over the Jewish slogan proletarians of the world unite!: Productive members of all nations, recognize your common enemy!" Unless holocaust deniers can procure a 1940s dictionary that gives a different meaning to the German word Vernichtung, I daresay at this point they only can resort to saying: 1) the recording is fake (easy way out) or 2) Hitler was only a hothead making empty threats, or poetic ("we will not die, for it is they who will...") both are very moronic attempts at this point to exculpate Hitler.
Holocaust deniers often like to claim there is no physical evidence written on paper that the Nazi regime was planning on physically exterminating European Jews. But they couldn't be further from the truth. From the plethora of documents left that prove this, one such example are the many diary entries and other publications of Joseph Goebbels which make the genocidal intent of the Nazi regime all too clear. =======================The History of the Diary itself, and how it was found==================== To better understand the importance of the diary, we have to first look at the history of its creation: Goebbels began to keep a diary in October 1923, shortly before his 27th birthday, while unemployed and living in his parents' home at Rheydt in the Ruhr region. He had been given a diary as a present by Else Janke, a young (part-Jewish) woman with whom he had an unsuccessful relationship, and most of his early entries were about her. His biographer Toby Thacker writes: "Writing a diary quickly became a kind of therapy for this troubled young man"[1] From 1923 onwards he wrote his diary almost daily. According to biographer Peter Longerich, Goebbels' diary entries from late 1923 to early 1924 reflected the writings of a man who was isolated, preoccupied by "religious-philosophical" issues, and lacked a sense of direction.[2] Diary entries of mid-December 1923 forward show Goebbels was moving towards the völkisch nationalist movement.[3] Goebbels first took an interest in Adolf Hitler and Nazism in March 1924.[4] In February 1924, Hitler's trial for treason had begun in the wake of his failed attempt to seize power in Munich, Bavaria, during 8–9 November 1923 (this failed coup became known as the Beer Hall Putsch).[5] The trial garnered Hitler much press and gave him a platform for propaganda.[6] After Goebbels first met Hitler in July 1925, however, the Nazi leader increasingly became the central figure in the diary. By July 1926 Goebbels was so enraptured by Hitler speaking on "racial issues", that he wrote: "It is impossible to reproduce what [Hitler] said. It must be experienced. He is a genius. The natural, creative instrument of a fate determined by God. I am deeply moved.".[7] By mid 1941 the diaries had grown to fill twenty thick volumes, and Goebbels realized that they were too valuable a resource to risk their destruction in an air raid. He therefore moved them from his study in his Berlin home to the underground vaults of the Reichsbank in central Berlin.[8] From this time onwards, he no longer wrote the diaries by hand. Instead he dictated them to a stenographer, who later typed up corrected versions. By November 1944 it was evident to Goebbels that Germany was going to lose the war. Realizing that he was unlikely to survive the fall of the Third Reich, he gave orders that his diaries were to be copied for safekeeping, using the new technique of microfilm.[9] A special darkroom was created in Goebbels's apartment in central Berlin, and Goebbels's stenographer, Richard Otte, supervised the work of microfilming the diaries on about 1,700 glass plates in 1944 and 1945.[10] The original handwritten and typed diaries were packed and stored in the Reich Chancellery.[11] After the war, these were originally destined to be sold as 7,000 pages of scrap paper to a German scrap merchant, but rescued in the last moment. Through the hands of different intermediaries, the papers came into the possession of American reporter Frank E. Mason. Mason suspected that they were Goebbels diaries and took them to Louis P. Lochner, former chief of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press. While some sections were damaged or missing, such as the entries detailing the annexation of Austria and the Kristallnacht in 1938, buried in the scattered manuscript were nevertheless several telling entries from the war years (as translated in Lochner, The Goebbels Diaries, 1948, pp. 86, 147-148) which will follow below. The boxes of glass plates containing the microfilmed diaries however, were sent in April 1945 to Potsdam just west of Berlin, where they were buried. They were discovered by the Soviets and shipped to Moscow, where they sat unopened until they were discovered by German historian Elke Fröhlich from Munich's Institute for Contemporary History in the Moscow archives in 1992. Only then did the publication of the full diaries become possible (in German in 32 volumes). ============================The Diary Entries Proving the Holocaust========================= Now that you have understood the history of the diary, let us begin with the incriminating entries. First, I will begin with a piece that Goebbels wrote for "Das Reich" on November 16th, 1941 in which he stated: "The Jews are receiving a penalty that is certainly hard, but more than deserved. World Jewry erred in adding up the forces available to it for this war, and now is gradually experiencing the destruction that it planned for us, and would have carried out without a second thought if it had possessed the ability. It is perishing according its own law: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." source: "Die Juden sind schuld!" Das eherne Herz: Reden und Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1941/42 von Joseph Goebbels, Munich, 1943, p. 85; English translation by Randall Bytwerk at Calvin College German Propaganda Archive: http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb1.htm. Not related to Goebbels, but two days later, on November 18, three days after a meeting with Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg gave a briefing to the German press in which he stated that: "In the east some six million Jews still live, and this question can only be solved in a biological eradication of the entire Jewry of Europe. The Jewish question is only solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew lives on the European continent up to the Urals. ...for this reason it is necessary to expel them over the Urals or eradicate them in some other way." source: Christopher R. Browning, "Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution", citing Rosenberg, 18.11.1941, in Political Archives of the Foreign Office, Pol. XIII, VAA Berichte, online at: https://www.phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/browning3.htm. Now let's begin with Goebbels' diary entries. One example is Goebbels paraphrasing Hitler, spoken at a meeting of the NSDAP Reichs-and-Gauleiter on 12 December 1941 and recorded in Goebbels' diary entry on the following day: «Bezüglich der Judenfrage ist der Führer entschlossen, reinen Tisch zu machen. Er hat den Juden prophezeit, dass, wenn sie noch einmal einen Weltkrieg herbeiführen würden, sie dabei ihre Vernichtung erleben würden. Das ist keine Phrase gewesen. Der Weltkrieg ist da, die Vernichtung des Judentums muss die notwendige Folge sein. Diese Frage ist ohne jede Sentimentalität zu betrachten. Wir sind nicht dazu da, Mitleid mit den Juden, sondern nur Mitleid mit unserem deutschen Volk zu haben. Wenn das deutsche Volk jetzt wieder im Ostfeldzug an die 160 000 Tote geopfert hat, so werden die Urheber dieses blutigen Konfliktes dafür mit ihrem Leben bezahlen müssen.» [Quoted after Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, page 117] translation: «Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that, if they were again to bring about a world war, they would experience their destruction therein. That was no catch-phrase. The world war is here, the destruction of Jewry must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be regarded without any sentimentality. We are not here to have pity with the Jews, but only to have pity with our German Volk. If the German Volk has now again sacrificed about 160 000 dead in the Eastern Campaign, the authors of this bloody conflict must pay for this with their lives.» February 14, 1942: "The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.” On 27 March 1942, during the height of the war, Goebbels wrote into his diary one of the most explicit recorded references to the Nazi genocide of the Jews: «Aus dem Generalgovernement werden jetzt, bei Lublin beginnend, die Juden nach dem Osten abgeschoben. Es wird hier ein ziemlich barbarisches und nicht näher zu beschreibendes Verfahren angewandt, und von den Juden selbst bleibt nicht mehr viel übrig. Im großen kann man wohl feststellen, daß 60 % davon liquidiert werden müssen, während nur noch 40 % in die Arbeit eingesetzt werden können. Der ehemalige Gauleiter von Wien, der diese Aktion durchführt, tut das mit ziemlicher Umsicht und auch mit einem Verfahren, das nicht allzu auffällig wirkt. An den Juden wird ein Strafgericht vollzogen, das zwar barbarisch ist, das sie aber vollauf verdient haben. Die Prophezeiung, die der Führer ihnen für die Herbeiführung eines neuen Weltkriegs mit auf den Weg gegeben hat, beginnt sich in der furchtbarsten Weise zu verwirklichen. Man darf in diesen Dingen keine Sentimentalitäten obwalten lassen.» translation: «The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning near Lublin, to the East. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn't work too conspicuously. The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophesy that the Führer issued to them on the way, for the eventuality that they started a new world war, is beginning to realise itself in the most terrible manner. One must not allow any sentimentalities to rule in these matters.» More examples: "...the greater the number of Jews liquidated, the more consolidated will the situation in Europe be after this war." -March 6, 1942 "Short shrift ["kurzer Prozess"] is being made of the Jews in all eastern occupied areas. Tens of thousands will 'have to believe in it' [German: "müssen daran glauben", idiom for 'bite the dust'], and the prophecy of the Führer is being fulfilled on them, that Judaism will have to pay for a new world war which it has ignited with the extermination of its race." -April 29, 1942 German original for reference: "Zehntausend müssen daran glauben, und an ihnen erfüllt sich die Prophezeiung des Führers, dass das Judentum einen von ihm entfachten neuen Weltkrieg mit der Ausrottung seiner Rasse wird bezahlen müssen." May 30, 1942 (..and this is where Dr. Joseph Goebbels blows apart the whole transit camp and evacuation to the east theory that holocaust deniers have been touting for decades, in a single diary entry): [...] Therefore one must liquidate the Jewish danger, cost it what it will. Given how few Jews can in reality adjust themselves to Western European life, one sees that, where they are led back into the ghetto, they quickly revert to form. West European civilization represents only an external coat of paint to them. There is also the Jewish essence, which works with a dangerous brutality and vindictiveness. Therefore the Führer does not at all wish that the Jews should be evacuated ["evakuiert"] to Siberia. There, under the harshest living conditions, they would undoubtedly develop again a strong life-element. [...] "At bottom, however, I believe both the English and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff." -December 13, 1942 May 13, 1943: "The intellectual does not have the natural means of resisting the Jewish peril because his instincts have been badly blunted. Because of this fact the nations with a high standard of civilization are exposed to this peril first and foremost. In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew." (Joseph Goebbels' Diaries: Excerpts, 1942-43, Part 2 of 2: May 13, 1943 (pp. 376-377) Revisionists like to claim that the Nazis had absolutely no interest in wasting their time with silly concepts like world domination, and that this is something pinned on them by allied propagandists. But again, Dr. Goebbels humiliates their theories by continuing to say the following in his May 13th, 1943 diary entry: "Sie werden sich mit allen Mitteln gegen diesen allmählichen Vernichtungsfeldzug zur Wehr setzen. Eines dieser Mittel ist der Krieg. Wir müssen uns also darüber klar sein, daß wir in dieser Auseinandersetzung zwischen der arischen Menschheit und der jüdischen Rasse noch sehr schwere Kämpfe zu bestehen haben, weil das Judentum es verstanden hat, große Völkerschaften aus der arischen Rasse bewußt oder unbewußt in seinen Dienst zu bringen . . . Das Weltjudentum steht nach der festen Überzeugung des Führers vor einem geschichtlichen Sturz . . . Die Völker, die den Juden am ehesten erkannt haben und ihn am ehesten bekämpfen, werden an seiner Stelle die Weltherrschaft antreten." translation: "They will resist this campaign of gradual destruction with everything at their disposal. One of these is war. So we have to be aware that in this conflict between Aryan humanity and the Jewish race, we still have to fight very hard battles because Judaism has managed to bring large peoples of the Aryan race consciously or unconsciously into its service . . . It is the Fuhrer's strong conviction that World Jewry is about to undergo a historic fall . . . Those peoples who have recognized and are most eagerly fighting the Jew, will take over world domination in his place." Speaking of world domination, here's another entry that proves claims of National Socialist world domination weren't far-fetched at all: May 13, 1943: "Aus alledem aber hat der Führer die Konsequenz gezogen, daß das Kleinstaatengerümpel, das heute noch in Europa vorhanden ist, so schnell wie möglich liquidiert werden muß. Es muß das Ziel unseres Kampfes bleiben, ein einheitliches Europa zu schaffen. Europa kann aber eine klare Organisation nur durch die Deutschen erfahren. Eine andere Führungsmacht ist praktisch nicht vorhanden. (...) Wer Europa besitzt, der wird damit die Führung der Welt an sich reißen. In diesem Zusammenhang können wir natürlich Fragen von Recht und Unrecht überhaupt nicht zur Diskussion akzeptieren." source: Fröhlich II, Bd. 8, S. 287ff translation: "From all this, however, the Führer has drawn the conclusion that the plethora of small-states, which still exist in Europe, must be liquidated as soon as possible. It must remain the goal of our struggle to create a united Europe. But Europe can only be clearly organized by Germans. There is practically no other leadership. (...) He who owns Europe will take leadership of the world. In this context we can obviously not accept questions of right and wrong to be brought to the discussion." Revisionists (aka holocaust deniers) are quick to dismiss Goebbels' diaries as a forgery, without, as usual, providing examples as to how, where and by whom it was forged. Several aspects that speak against forgery claims is that first of all, Goebbels began writing his diary in the early 1920s, almost daily entries for YEARS, with most of the diary being quite mundane, and interesting only to political historians. Why would the supposed Jewish conspiracy forge tens of thousands of pages just to insert just a few incriminating lines regarding the final solution in the 1940s? How did they manage to know Goebbels' affairs intimately enough to avoid contradictions, e.g. putting him or his associates in the wrong city at the wrong date? I understand the task of faking minor documents, but I cannot comprehend how one could forge thousands of pages. That is a herculean task for anyone to accomplish, making sure there are no contradictions. Secondly, Goebbels' diary was not used during the Nuremberg Trials even though it had already been in possession of the Russians and the Americans - with the latter even being fully aware about the potential author of those papers. In fact, the reluctance of the American government to (at that time) accept the diary as genuine and therefore enter it as evidence can only be interpreted as proof they did not forge it. Well, how about the Russians? Did they forge it? Remember, the Russians were the ones trying to pin the Katyn forest massacre on the Germans during the Nuremberg Trials - and this is a fact EVERY revisionist will try to hammer into your brain, without telling you that the International Military Tribunal did not accept Katyn and therefore it was not part of the verdict. Still, the point is, the Russians were trying to falsely frame the Germans for Katyn at this point. And yet, they did not enter into evidence the microfilmed glass plates of the Goebbels Diaries they possessed. The only conclsion is, they didnt do this, because they had even less of an idea of what was in their possession until much later. So, maybe the Soviets forged em in the decades that followed? Even that theory is bunk because the incriminating passages were in also in the typewritten pages in the possession of the Americans, allowing Louis P Lochner to publish the war years 1942-1943 of the diary in the initial years after WW2. I hope you understand what I am getting at here. And finally, the fact that several copies of the diary exist in different locations: the handwritten and typewritten papers in Germany, later transferred to America, and the microfilmed plates also found in Germany and then taken to Moscow, corroborating each other. This proves the diary is genuine, as does the plethora of evidence of the diary's existence before the war was over. Sources: [1]: Thacker, Toby (2010). Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, page 2 [2]: Longerich, Peter (2015). Goebbels: A Biography. New York: Random House, pages 28, 33, 34 [3], [5]: ibid, page 33 [4], [6]: ibid, page 36 [7]: Kershaw, Ian (2008). Hitler: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 127-131 [8]: ibid, pp. 133-135 [9]: Stroebel, Leslie; Zakia, Richard D. (1993). The Focal Encyclopedia of Photography. Focal Press, p. 482 [10]: Thacker 2010, p. 285 [11]: ibid, p. 295
While we're at it, why not hear a little bit about what Hans Frank, governor of the Generalgouvernement had to say about the Jews? "(...) The General Government is our work force reservoir for lowgrade work (brick plants, road building, etc.,etc.).(...) Unconditionally, attention should be paid to the fact that there can be no "Polish masters"; where there are Polish masters, and I do not care how hard this sound, they must be killed. (...) The Fuhrer must emphazize once again that for Poles there is only one master and he is a German, there can be no two masters beside each other and there is no consent to such, hence all representatives of the Polish inteligentsia are to be killed. (...) The General Government is a Polish reservation, a great Polish labour camp." - note of Martin Borman from the meeting Dr. Hans Frank with Adolf Hitler, Berlin 2 October 1940 "This war would be only a partial success if the whole lot of Jewry survived it, while we shed our best blood to save Europe. My attitude toward the Jews will therefore be based solely on the expectation that they must disappear. They must be done away with. Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible." - Hans Frank, speech at a meeting with soldiers, December 1941, quoted in "The Trial of the Germans" (1997) - Page 438, by Eugene Davidson expanded quote featured here: "Let me tell you quite frankly: in one way or another we will have to finish with the Jews. The Führer once expressed it as follows: should Jewry once again succeed in inciting a world war, the bloodletting could not be limited to the peoples they drove to war but the Jews themselves would be done for in Europe. If the Jewish tribe survives the war in Europe while we sacrifice our blood for the preservation of Europe, this war will be but a partial success. Basically, I must presume, therefore, that the Jews will disappear. To that end I have started negotiations to expel them to the east. In any case, there will be a great Jewish migration. But what is to become of the Jews? Do you think that they will be settled in villages in the conquered eastern territories? In Berlin we have been told not to complicate matters: since neither these territories, nor our own, have any use for them, we should liquidate them ourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to remain unmoved by pleas for pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we encounter them and wherever possible, in order to maintain the overall mastery of the Reich here." - Hans Frank, to senior members of his administration, December 16, 1941, quoted in "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: the final solution in history" (1088), page 302, Arno J. Mayer "Both Einstein and Freud were clever in leaving Germany, because both of them would doubtlessly have been caught by Himmler and murdered." - Hans Frank, to Leon Goldensohn, July 20, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" (2004) by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately
Now that we've established not only the complicity of people like Höss (Auschwitz), Heydrich (Einsatzgruppen) or Globocnik (Aktion Reinhard) but also higher ups like Goering, Hitler and Goebbels in the physical extermination of the Jewish race in Europe, which other leading Nazi higher-up can we include? Oh, I know - Himmler! Chief of the SS, obsessed with occultism and secrecy, 2nd most hated and known Nazi figure after Hitler by the broad public today, do I really need to point out Himmler's complicity in the holocaust? Of course I have to. Why don't you take a listen to his 1943 Posen speech, freely available with translation on youtube? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a_cmbi3iIg The largely American, largely only English speaking deniers over at CODOH quotemined an old German dictionary to look up the meaning of the word "Ausrotten", and, after "extermination" (which is what every German native speaker understands it as) also found the meaning "extirpation", i.e. to root something out. Ausrotten = outroot. This is the straw deniers cling onto from drowning in an ocean of guilt. Himmler, just like Hitler apparently, was also a poet. Removing all Jews from Europe kinda sorta somehow means they have been exterminated from Europe, doesn't it? This is the denier lifeline. Needless to say, if Himmler meant evacuation only, why change the word? Why not use words like "Deportation"? "Evakuierung"? "Vertreibung"? "Auswanderung?" "Aussiedlung?" There's plenty. In fact, why is the matter of mass deporting all Jews from Europe such a DIFFICULT MATTER to speak about for poor Himmler? See: "I want to mention another very difficult chapter here before you in all frankness. Among ourselves, it ought to have been spoken of; yet we shall NEVER speak of it in public. Just as little as we hesitated to do our ordered duty as ordered on 30 June 1934, and place comrades who had failed, against the wall and shoot them, just as little did we ever speak of it, and we shall never speak of it. It was a matter of course, of tact, for us, thank God, never to speak of it, never to talk of it. It made everybody shudder; yet everyone was clear in his mind that he would do it again if ordered to do so, and if it was necessary: I mean the Jewish evacuation - the extermination of the Jewish people." Notice that Himmler is clearly making a comparison between what is known as the Night of the Long Knives/Operation Hummingbird/Röhm-Putsch, which resulted in the purge of the SA (Sturmabteilung) and the execution of right-wing enemies in 1934, and the current "Ausrottung des jüdischen Volkes". Why make this comparison between actual executions, actual physical killings that occurred in 1934, and the "deportation" of the Jews? Himmler clearly links these actions together. He also speaks of this as something not to be spoken of. The deportations themselves were no secret, this was hardly a matter of great secrecy. I will go on to destroy the extirpation argument holocaust deniers bring up, by addressing the rest of the speech as well (apparently, they lacked the patience to listen to the other few minutes, or they wouldnt have bothered with the extirpation nonsense). This will also cover a 2nd denier claim, which is that Himmler was referring to the killing of armed Jewish partisans and no one else. Himmler goes on to say "Ausschaltung der Juden", which translates to "Elimination of the Jews" (literally it would translate to "turning off") The speech gets even more revealing now. Himmler goes on to say "Und zugesehen, es durchgestanden hat keiner", which translates to: "And yet, nobody has witnessed it, has had to endure it". What? Endure Jews being evacuted out of Europe? That's a harrowing experience for Nazis, the party that wanted them out of Europe in the first place? To bid farewell to the Jewish people as they forever leave Europe and head for a new home in the East? Get real. Because Himmler goes on and says: "Von euch werden die meisten wissen, was es heißt, wenn 100 Leichen beisammen liegen, wenn 500 daliegen, oder wenn 1000 daliegen." which translates to "Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses are lying next to each other, wenn there are 500, or 1000" and he goes on to say how this had strengthened them, and is a page of glory that shall never be mentioned. By this point we can tell he is obviously referring to the holocaust and no longer to the Night of the Long Knives, because he goes on to even explain why (the Jews had to be exterminated): because otherwise in the middle of war and daily allied air raids on German cities they would then also have to deal with Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators, "wenn diese noch im deutschen Volkskörper säßen" (he makes a comparison with them being a parasite in the body of the German people). As if that's not enough, Himmler makes it clear once again, so that even the dumbest 21st century denier finally gets it into his thick skull: "We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our Volk (the German people) to KILL this Volk (the Jewish people) that wanted to KILL us." "Umbringen" in German means "to kill". THERE CAN BE NO DEBATE. And he makes it clear that it was referring to killing the Jewish people, not killing "these individuals" or "these bandits", "these partisans" or whatever else holocaust deniers want to interpret the bodies + killing section of the speech as. VOLK means an entire people, not individuals, not bands. In his second Posen speech (there was a similar one delivered on the 6th) he says: "Es trat an uns die Frage heran: Wie ist es mit den Frauen und Kindern? Ich habe mich entschlossen, auch hier eine ganz klare Lösung zu finden. Ich hielt mich nämlich nicht für berechtigt, die Männer auszurotten- sprich also, umzubringen oder umbringen zu lassen – und die Rächer in Gestalt der Kinder für unsere Söhne und Enkel groß werden zu lassen. Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen." which translates to: "We came to the question: How is it with the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed – and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth." TO MAKE THIS PEOPLE DISAPPEAR FROM THE EARTH. At this point, holocaust deniers are only left with one option: to call the entire recording a fake. Which some of them have already done, like Germar Rudolf, who goes on rambling about how older recording tech was used for this recording than what was the latest fad in the 1940s, or how strange it is that a recording of a secret meeting exists in the first place (displaying his utter ignorance about Himmler even having his speeches typed and handed out to senior officials). A few other deniers point out that Himmler's voice in this recording is different to that of others, which is nonsense. If you listen to the many Hitler speeches you'll often realize how his tone often changes from very deep to a medium pitch. Another "rebuttal" I have come across is when people point out "well if Germans wanted to physically kill all the Jews, why Haavara Agreement? Why Madagascar Plan?" and go on to quote Himmler from May 25th, 1940: "Den Begriff Jude hoffe ich, durch die Möglichkeit einer großen Auswanderung sämtlicher Juden nach Afrika oder sonst in eine Kolonie völlig auslöschen zu sehen [...] die bolschewistische Methode der physischen Ausrottung eines Volkes aus innerer Überzeugung als ungermanisch und unmöglich." The document, a memorandum Himmler had presented Hitler with and is published in VfZ 5 (1957), pp. 194-198, included the the above key sentence with respect to the fate of the Jews: "I hope to see that by means of the possibility of a large emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some other colony - that the concept of Jew will be fully extinguished. [...] the Bolshevist methods of eradicating a people out of inner conviction, as un-German and impossible." Hitler judged this memorandum to be "very good and correct", according to Himmler's note of 28 May. The document however was "to be held in the greatest secrecy"; Himmler was to show it to Hans Frank at some point "in order to tell him that the Führer finds it correct". So the last straw of deniers is, that if Himmler in 1940 had said it is un-German to physically exterminate Jews, and move them to Madagascar instead, then the 1943 Himmler couldnt have possibly spoken of physically exterminating the Jews even though 3 years had passed, the Madagascar plan had failed, and Germany was fighting a war she would lose at some point while the Jewish question was still unsolved. Also, keep in mind that moving millions of people to Madagascar is genocide in and of itself, not just due to the scope of such an undertaking, but also because Madagascar had virtually no infrastructure back then, and the Jews would essentially be left to their own devices on an island whose climate isnt a tropical paradise as some naive person might think, but actually malaria ridden and hostile to life. This utter lack of a coherent response among holocaust deniers to tackle and refute Himmler's 1943 Posen speeches is just more proof how fragmented the holocaust denier scene really is. And finally, while we're at it, we can also dismiss the revisionism some deniers try to do concerning Nazi Germany's Lebensraum policy and its attitude toward Slavic people aka "oh they held no grudge against Slavs, they just fought to get rid of Bolshevism". WRONG. Himmler makes the following clear elsewhere during the October 4th Posen speech: "What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished."[1][2][3] This is followed by a long paragraph that only the German Volk and German blood matters compared to non-Germans, and non-Germans, especially Russians, are labeled "Menschentiere" (humanoid animals). That the Nazis ALSO had the physical extermination of Catholic Poles in mind is made clear three years earlier when Himmler had this to say on the 15th of March 1940, in a speech also held at Posen to concentration camp commanders: "Später werden alle Polen aus dieser Welt verschwinden [...] Es ist erforderlich, dass das großdeutsche Volk die Vernichtung sämtlicher Polen als seine Hauptaufgabe versteht." translates to: "Later, all Poles will disappear from this world [...] It is necessary that the Greater German people understand the annihilation of all Poles as being their main task."[4][5][6][7] Sources: [1] IMT: Volume 29 (Urkunden und anderes Beweismaterial), p. 123 [2]: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1513 [3]: http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=388 [4]: Piotrowski, Tadeusz (2007). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947. McFarland & Company, p. 23. [5]: http://auschwitz.org/en/history/categories-of-prisoners/poles-in-auschwitz/ [6]: USSR-522 Letter from the Block office Mogilno to all confidential agents, IMT proceedings, Blue series, Vol XXIV, p 186 https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/NT_Vol-XXIV.pdf [7]: Exchange between Counsellor Smirnov and Hoeppner, IMT proceedings, Blue series, Vol XX, p 228 https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/NT_Vol-XX.pdf
The Höfle Telegram (or Hoefle Telegram) is a cryptic one page document discovered in 2000 among the declassified World War II archives of the Public Record Office in Kew, England. The document consists of two top secret messages, one to SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin, and one to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim in German-occupied Krakau, sent by SS Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on 11 January 1943. The Telegram contained the detailed statistics on the 1942 killings of Jews in the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and in the concentration camp Lublin-Majdanek; as compiled by Höfle. Even though the Holocaust train-records were notoriously incomplete as revealed by the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes against the Polish Nation, the quoted numbers shed a new light on the evidential standard of proof for the scope of the crimes committed by the SS. The telegram gave train arrivals in the prior fortnight, as well as cumulative arrivals until 31 December 1942, for the camps of Einsatz Reinhardt (later commonly called Aktion Reinhard), the most deadly phase of the "Final Solution". The SS paid German Railways the equivalent of a third class ticket for every prisoner transported via Sonderzüge to extermination camps of Operation Reinhard from the Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe and the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland. Children under four went free during the Holocaust. The payment was collected from the SS by the German Transport Authority on behalf of the Reichsbahn according to a schedule, at a cost of 4 Pfennig per each track kilometer.[6] The actual waybills did not include the number of prisoners per each Güterwagen boxcar because calculations were predetermined. The standard means of delivery was a 10 metre long cattle freight wagon, although third class passenger carriages were also used with train tickets paid by the Jews themselves, when the SS wanted to keep up the "resettlement to work in the East" myth. The DRB railway manual which was used by the SS for making payments, had a listed carrying capacity of each trainset set up at 50 boxcars, each loaded with 50 prisoners. In reality, boxcars were crammed with up to 100 persons and routinely loaded from the minimum of 150% to 200% capacity for the same price. This resulted in an average of 5,000 people per trainset; 100 persons in each freight car multiplied by 50 cars. Notably, during the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in 1942, trains carried up to 7,000 victims each. The Höfle Telegram is a decoded message, encrypted at source by the German Enigma machine. A missing "5" is added in the table, and is considered to be the correct figure, because only the number 713,555 yields the correct total of 1,274,166, and also, the Korherr Report of 1943 substantiates that the total number of 1,274,166 Jews subjected to "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung) in General Government is correct to the last incongruous digit. The telegram reads; Concerns: 14-day report Operation Reinhart [recorded arrivals for the 2 weeks until December 31, 1942] L = Lublin [Majdanek] (12,761) B = Belzec (0) S = Sobibor (515) T = Treblinka (10,335) Total: 23,611 (sum total as of 31 December 1942) L = Lublin [Majdanek] (24,733) B = Belzec (434,508) S = Sobibor (101,370) T = Treblinka (71,355) Total: 1,274,166 It appears the British analysts who had decrypted the message missed the significance of this particular message at the time. No doubt this happened because the message itself contained only the identifying letters for the extermination camps followed by the numerical totals. The only clue would have been the reference to Operation Reinhard, the meaning of which – the plan to eliminate mostly Polish Jewry that was named after the assassinated SS General Reinhard Heydrich – also probably was unknown at the time to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Höfle's radio telegram is one of two evidential proofs making use of the very exacting figures, suggesting their common origin; the other one is the Korherr report. Both of them detail the numbers involved in the execution of Jews during Einsatz Reinhard/t. Apart from quoting identical totals as of 1942, the Telegram also indicates that the camp at Lublin (Majdanek) was part of Odilo Globocnik's Operation Reinhard, a fact that historians previously had not fully realized.
This document is presented as evidence of the complicity and approval of Adolf Hitler ("Meldungen an den Führer" means report for the Führer), regarding the murders that took place during the Holocaust. It tallies the Nazis' death toll exacted on armed partisans, as well as their arrest of non-Jewish and execution of both non-Jewish and Jewish partisan accomplices in Eastern Europe between September 1st to December 1st, 1942 in Southern Russia, Ukraine and Bialystok. The tally? 363,211 Jews executed in autumn 1942. If Himmler was trying to artificially inflate numbers to impress Hitler, the first thing he would have done is raise the rather pathetic looking list tallying the number of defectors as a result of German propaganda. The original is now in file NS19/291, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. Likewise in the literature you find the following archive reference for the reports: BA, NS 19/2566 On a similar note, the Korherr Report is a 16-page document on the progress of the Holocaust as reflected in the dwindling numbers of Jews in Germany and German-controlled Europe. It was written by the chief inspector of the statistical bureau of the SS and professional statistician Dr Richard Korherr under the title die "Endlösung der Judenfrage", in English the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. You can read the entire Korherr Report in the German original here: http://www.statistik-des-holocaust.de/stat_ger_korherr.html Korherr, commissioned by Heinrich Himmler calculated that, from 1937 to December 1942, the number of Jews in Europe had fallen by 4 million, of which 1 . 274 million were subject to "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung - a code name for mass murder). Notice how this exact number is also mentioned in the Höfle-Telegram. The decrease of Soviet Russian Jews from the territories overrun in Operation Barbarossa was not included due to lack of statistical data. The summaries came from the RSHA office receiving all SS reports about the so-called "already evacuated" Jews. Their "special treatment" was removed from the document on the request of Himmler who intended to share it with Hitler. The main report, published in March 1943, summarized how many Jews remained in Germany, Austria and Europe; detailed the numbers of Jews detained in the Nazi concentration camps; how many Jews had died natural deaths since 1933; and how many Jews had been "transported from [Germany's] Eastern territories to the Russian east". This was further sub-divided into the summary of all Jews that had been given the special treatment from the camps in the Generalgouvernement and the Jews from the camps of the Warthegau. Himmler accepted the report, but made Korherr change the word Sonderbehandlung or "special treatment," to the word "durchgeschleust" or "processed". The report also calculated that, from 1937 to December 1942, the number of Jews in Europe had fallen by 4.5 million. And the report also stated that since 1933, European Jewry had been slashed by half. If we look at the data from 1933 (imgur) which estimated 9.4 million Jews in Europe, the Nazi statement of European Jewry being slashed by half by end 1942 does make the 4.5 million figure plausible. Furthermore, the Korherr Report estimated that by now, a quarter of the total European Jewry as of 1937, had emigrated to other parts of the world. Korherr ascribed this fall to "emigration, partially due to the excess mortality of the Jews in Central and Western Europe, partially due to the evacuations especially in the more strongly populated Eastern Territories, which are here counted as ongoing." By way of explanation, Korherr added that "It must not be overlooked in this respect that of the deaths of Soviet Russian Jews in the occupied Eastern territories only a part was recorded, whereas deaths in the rest of European Russia and at the front are not included at all. In addition there are movements of Jews inside Russia to the Asian part which are unknown to us. The movement of Jews from the European countries outside the German influence is also of a largely unknown order of magnitude. On the whole European Jewry should since 1933, i.e. in the first decade of National Socialist German power, has lost almost half of its population." You can read these documents (that is, Himmler instructing Korherr to change the terminology, the terminology changed, and the recorded Jewish population reduction) in their original here: i.imgur.com/o12pbGF
The Jäger Report was written on 1 December 1941 by Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3, a killing unit of Einsatzgruppe A which was attached to Army Group North (Heeresgruppe Nord) during Operation Barbarossa, i.e. the invasion of the Soviet Union. It is the most precise surviving chronicle of the activities of one individual Einsatzkommando. The Jäger Report is a tally sheet of actions by Einsatzkommando 3, including the Rollkommando Hamann killing squad. The report keeps an almost daily running total of the liquidations of 137,346 people, the vast majority Jews, from 2 July 1941 to 25 November 1941. The report documents exact date and place of the massacres, number of victims and their breakdown into categories (Jews, communists, criminals, etc.). In total, there were over 100 executions in 71 different locations listed there. On 1 February 1942, Jäger updated the totals to 136,421 Jews (46,403 men, 55,556 women and 34,464 children), 1,064 Communists, 653 mentally disabled, and 134 others in a handwritten note for Franz Walter Stahlecker. The six-page report was prepared in five copies, but only one survives and is kept by the Central Lithuanian Archives in Vilnius. for more, see: http://web.archive.org/web/20070312214303/http://www.holocaust-history.org/works/jaeger-report/htm/intro000.htm and https://www.phdn.org/archives/einsatzgruppenarchives.com/jagerimages.html Jäger escaped capture by the Allies when the war ended, assumed a false identity, and was able to assimilate back into society as a farm hand until his report was discovered in March 1959. Arrested and charged with his crimes, Jäger committed suicide by hanging himself in prison in Hohenasperg while he was awaiting trial in June 1959.
This document talks about how trying to sterilize someone (persumably in Auschwitz) with x-rays is a waste of time and can be done operatively which only takes 6 to 7 minutes ("die, wie ich mich selbst überzeugt habe", i.e. as I have come to the conclusion myself).
The above pictured letter is chronologically the first German document which called for an extermination of Jews deemed unfit for labor via homicidal gassing. At the same time, the existence of this document proves a link between, on one hand, Aktion T4, regarding which Adolf Hitler's personal involvement has been conclusively proven (including signature), and on the other hand the mass murder of Jews that became collectively known as the Holocaust, even referencing the Einsatzgruppen shootings. Viktor Brack, a civil servant in the T4 euthanasia program, had served in 1930 and 1931 as Heinrich Himmler’s driver. In 1934, he was appointed the head of Central Office II of the Chancellery of the Führer (address Tiergartenstraße 4, hence abbreviated T4), where he oversaw the murder by gas and lethal injections of some seventy thousand mentally and physically handicapped ethnic German victims. Hinrich Lohse (yes, Hinrich, not Heinrich) was the Reich Commissar for the East - for the combined Baltic States and Russia. In 1941, he moved into his offices in Kovno, and then Riga. On October 4, 1941, Lohse sent a letter from Riga to court judge and Adviser on Jewish Affairs Dr. Erhard Wetzel, “re: the solution of the Jewish question.” While that letter did not survive the war, three weeks later, on October 25 1941, Wetzel replied the following to Lohse, which is the letter pictured above: The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories Berlin, October 25, 1941 Expert AGR Dr. Wetzel Secret! Re: Solution of the Jewish Question 1. To the Reich Commissar for the East Re: Your report of October 4, 1941 in respect to the Solution of the Jewish Question With reference to my letter of October 18, 1941, this is to inform you that Oberdienstleiter Brack of the Führer Chancellery has agreed to collaborate in the production of the required shelters and gassing devices. At this time, the envisaged devices are not available in sufficient quantity; they will first have to be manufactured. Since in Brack’s opinion, the manufacture of the devices in the Reich will cause much greater difficulties than doing it on the spot, Brack considers it most expedient to send his people to Riga, especially his chemist Dr. Kallmeyer, who will effect all further steps there. Oberdienstleiter Brack points out that the procedure in question is not without danger, so that special protective measures are necessary. In these circumstances, I request that you address yourself to Oberdienstleiter Brack in the Führer Chancellery through your Higher SS and Police Leader and request the dispatch of the chemist Kallmeyer and other assistants. I should inform you that Sturmbannführer Eichmann, the expert for the Jewish Question in the RSHA is entirely in agreement with this process. According to information from Sturmbannführer Eichmann, camps for Jews are to be set up in Riga and Minsk, to which Jews from the Old Reich territory may also come. At this time, Jews are being evacuated out of the Old Reich to Litzmannstadt (Lodz), and also other camps, to then later be used for labour in the east insofar as they are capable of work. As things now are, there are no objections if the Jews who are not capable of work, are eliminated with the Brackian remedy. In this way, events such as those that, according to a report in front of me, took place on the occasion of the shootings of the Jews in Vilna, and which, considering that the shootings were carried out in public, can hardly be excused, will no longer be possible. On the other hand, those capable of work will be transported for labour in the east. It goes without saying that the male and female Jews capable of work will be kept apart. I request a report on your further measures. (the last paragraph is translated from the harder to read original 2nd page, so I will provide the transcript of this page below:) "Nach Sachlage bestehen keine Bedenken, wenn diejenigen Juden, die nicht arbeitsfähig sind, mit den Brackschen Hilfsmitteln beseitigt werden. Auf diese Weise dürften dann auch Vorgänge, wie sie sich bei den Erschießungen der Juden in Wilna nach einem mir vorliegenden Bericht ergeben haben, und die auch im Hinblick darauf, daß die Erschießungen öffentlich vorgenommen wurden, kaum gebilligt werden können, nicht mehr möglich sein. Die Arbeitsfähigen dagegen werden zum Arbeitseinsatz nach Osten abtransportiert. Daß bei den arbeitsfähigen Juden Männer und Frauen getrennt zu halten sind, dürfte selbstverständlich sein." So what we have here, is a letter that speaks plain as day of gassing devices (Vergasungsapparate), in all likelihood mobile gas vans rather than stationary gas chambers (since they theoretically could, but for practical purposes cannot be manufactured in the Reich and should rather be assembled on-location instead, as Wetzel stresses); of eliminating (beseitigen) Jews via the Brackian remedy (T4), and even references to Einsatzgruppen activity, i.e. shootings of Jews in Vila in public (Erschießungen der Juden in Wilna; öffentlich vorgenommen). No euphemisms this time. Given his role in Aktion T4, we can be certain that the "Brackian remedy" is something more sinister than mere sterilization.
Franz Walter Stahlecker (1900 – 1942) was Commander of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) for the Reichskommissariat Ostland in 1941–42. Stahlecker commanded Einsatzgruppe A, the most murderous of the four Einsatzgruppen active in German-occupied Eastern Europe. Pic related shows the annotated map from the report sent by Stahlecker, and summarizes 220,250 murders committed by Einsatzgruppe A under his command by October 1941; Estonia is marked as "Judenfrei" {free of Jews} On a related note regarding the genocide committed by the Einsatzgruppen in the Baltics, here is an excerpt from a contemporary diary entry by Swiss Red Cross doctor Robert Hegglin, who wrote that around 100,000 Jews had been shot in the Riga area by Germans and Baltic collaborators: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . nl/2016/11/contemporary-diary-of-swiss-doctor . html
A picture from the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives. It shows members of the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft shooting individual Jewish women who remain alive in a ravine south of Rovno (Rivne) in the Sdolbunov Gebietskommissariat, after a mass execution of Jews from the Mizocz ghetto, taken October 14, 1942. On June 28, 1941 Rovno was captured by Nazi Germany and served as the administrative center of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. According to the Zentrale Stelle in Germany (Zst. II 204 AR 1218/70), these Jews were collected by the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft during the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto, which held roughly 1,700 Jews. On the eve of the ghetto's liquidation (13 October 1942), some of the inhabitants rose up against the Germans and were defeated after a short battle. The remaining members of the community were transported from the ghetto to this ravine... Multiple copies online and in published works are available, for example at Reitlinger, Gerald, The SS -- Alibi of a Nation, Viking (Da Capo reprint), New York 1957 ISBN 0-306-80351-8, at page 264c. Also available at the USHMM website as photo 17878 Some holocaust deniers who have stumbled upon this image have tried to discredit its authenticity by various means. One of their theories is that at first glance the two executioners do not look like they're wearing stereotypical Wehrmacht or SS-uniforms, especially pointing us out to the fact that the round peaked caps (Schirmmützen) look more Soviet than German, which is obviously nonsense: http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c359/Voldy26/A_SS_092.jpg Their next point of criticism to claim the event is staged is their observation that the gun the executioner is using is a Russian PPSH. I am no firearms expert but to me, it looks like an MP18. The deniers move on to make the next observation, namely that the victims in the photo look too clean - if this is supposed to be a photo of a mass execution, we're supposed to see a mass of dirtied, bloodied bodies, so the deniers. But are we? First off, the photo seems to be taken during or shorty before the execution, rather than after. You can verify this by observing how some victims appear to be crawling, or seem to have just finished lying down, and one of the executioners leveling his weapon at precisely these people. Furthermore, it would be a waste of bullets to spray a mass of people with gunfire rather than delivering individual shots to the head or neck, which also goes in line with testimony and diary entries regarding the manner in which these mass executions took place. When shot this way on an individual basis, the rest of the body will remain clean and unbloodied, which also corresponds well with the notion that the victim has stripped down only recently, e.g. at the lip of the ravine. This also explains the elevation of the person taking the photograph compared to what's going on below him. What remains then, regarding this type of execution, is the question regarding the complicity of the victims: how could they have offered no resistance, not tried to run away, or any incident of mass panic happening if the executions were happening one bullet at a time? To understand crowd compliance despite certain doom awaiting them, all you need to do to verify this aspect of human behavior for yourself is to watch one of the ISIS videos shot in 1080p quality in summer 2014 where a row of some 50 P.O.W.s are told to lie down next to each other while a single ISIS militant with an AK files past them, delivering head shots. None of them try to get up, panic and run. This same scenario repeats itself in another ISIS video, where victims line up in a row leading to a river, where they are shot and their bodies immediately dunked into it. If these videos don't convince you, I don't know what will.
A German policeman prepares to complete the mass execution by shooting two Jewish children, who were shot with the others in connection with the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto, October 14, 1942. What remains is how these photos were acquired. Information regarding this action, including the photos, were acquired from a man named Gustav Hille, who was the Bezirks-Oberwachtmeister of the Gendarmerie at the time. Hille gave the five photos (there were originally seven) to the company lawyer of a textile firm in Kunert, Czechoslovakia, where he worked as a doorman after the war. The Czech government confiscated the photos from the lawyer in 1946 and they subsequently became public. That the photos indeed show the shooting of Jews in connection with the liquidation of the ghetto was also confirmed by a statement of Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer Josef Paur in 1961. During the war, the images were owned by SS-Unterscharführer Schäfer until 1945 and became part of the Ludwigsburg investigation (ZSt. II 204 AR 1218/70). Source: From photographs of the Mizocz shootings in the USHMM collection (No. 17876, 17877, 17878, 17879). also, see Struk, Janina, Photographing the Holocaust, pages 72-73
The town was occupied by the German Army from July 8, 1941 to March 25, 1944. On November 4, 1941, 5300 Jewish inhabitants of the town and surrounding villages were shot by an Einsatzgruppe.[1] A ghetto was formed on December 14, 1941, where all surviving Jewish inhabitants had to resettle and were subjected to forced labor. They were subsequently killed in the fall of 1942. More than 9500 Jews were killed in the town in total.[2] How far will holocaust deniers go in their delusion to call photographic evidence of mass murder staged or fake? Do they honestly think this was some kind of Soviet propaganda event in the style of Spencer Tunick? Or will they drop their usual Typhus victim nonsense on every mass grave they are shown (only to later claim no mass graves were ever found)? This is why people label their mental condition DENIAL and not revisionism. read more at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3205754/Blood-oozed-soil-grave-sites-pits-alive-secrets-Ukraine-s-shameful-Holocaust-Bullets-killing-centre-1-6million-Jews-executed.html?ito=social-facebook sources: [1]: Husson, Edouard (11 November 2008). "L'Ukraine et le début de la " solution finale de la question juive en Europe " - Le meurtre des Juifs d'Ukraine par les nazis et leurs collaborateurs - Introduction historique". Centre Européen de Recherche et d'Enseignement sur la Shoah à l'Est. [2]: "До 70-річчя останнього розстрілу в'язнів проскурівського гетто". http://biznes.km.ua. 30 November 2012.
The Nazis used mobile gas vans to murder Jews (eventually they abandoned this system because it was not efficient enough). This is known partly because SS-Major General Dr. Harald Turner, chief of the German Administration in Serbia, wrote to Karl Wolff, chief of Heinrich Himmler's personal staff, on 11 April 1942. In the note Turner describes a 'delousing van' - the quotation marks (he used!) around the word already suggest that it is a euphemism - then makes it quite clear what this means: "Already some months ago, I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a 'delousing van', that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp..." Additional details about these vans are to be found in a letter from Willy Just to SS Lieutenant Colonel Walter Rauff on 5 June 1942. In the letter, Just describes how a load of '97,000 have been processed'. Just also offers Rauff a series of suggestions on how the vans might be improved. Since there was a problem of 'off-road manoeuvrability', he suggests that the cargo area be reduced. This would make the operation more efficient, because '... were the cargo area smaller, but fully occupied, the operation would take considerably less time, because there would be no empty space.' The above pic shows a purported gas van. Holocaust deniers have pointed out that this vehicle is of the company Magirus-Deutz, as the logo indicates. They then go on to claim "that real gas vans were, so the holocaust narrative goes, only converted from vans of the companies Diamond, Renault, Sauer and Opel". However, I have this to say about the source of the above image: The Chelmno extermination camp was examined by a commission dealing with Nazi war crimes on Poles in May 1945. The commission was informed, that in the former Ostrowski factory of Kolo (approx. 12km from Chelmno) the remains of a gas van had been located, which according to witnesses was used by the Chelmno camp. The van was found, photographed, and these photos can be found in the Warsaw archives (47398, 47396, 47397, 47399). These photos are titled to this day as: "a van for the killing of humans by exhaust gas, in Chelmno". You'll also find one of these photos in Fleming's book "Hitler And the Final Solution". Thanks to Sergey Romanov who provided me with more information regarding the photo above: http://pages . ucsd . edu/~lzamosc/chelm00 . htm For a more detailed dismissal of futile attempts deniers have made to discredit gas vans, see: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2016/08/rebuttal-of-alvarez-on-gas-vans-schafer . html
These are just some of the documents that not only prove the existence of vans having been jury rigged to be mobile gas chambers, but also what their purpose was: not fumigation or any other nonsense, but the murder of human beings using Carbon Monoxide (CO). I have marked the incriminating passages and boy are there many. Open the image in a new tab for a zoom. You will find a far more detailed analysis here: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2015/10/contemporary-german-documents-on . html So, what do some of the marked passages say? Here is just some translation of mine: (author's note: grammatically, "einzige Ausfertigung" is right, as "einzigste" would translate to "onliest") "Since December 1941, 97,000 have been processed by 3 employed vans." CO gas (not necessarily pure, but e . g. a component of exhaust) is repeatedly mentioned as the agent. Not Zyklon or anything else. Cleanup of the vans' interior is mentioned Observation windows are no longer necessary... There's a discussion whether interior lighting should be bothered with or not... ...but closing the back door and ensuing darkness causes the "load" inside to push around, making it tough to lock the door. ...such a commotion also causes noise... ...therefore lighting should be used at least for the first couple of minutes... ...and the lighting is also useful during cleanup after nightfall. Signed, SS-Obersturmführer Rauff, June 5, 1942 The document below the first talks about the vans being employed during executions in remote areas, and how badly maneuverable off-road terrain is. How windows had to be installed on the van's exterior as windowless vans were perceived as death-vans by the local populace already, and doubts expressed whether this new guise will work for long or not. The gassing procedure is also mentioned, and how after such a gassing the people unloading the van's contents complained that the task not only took a toll on their health, but also incredibly affected their psyche. And finally, how the drivers commit the malpractice of driving too fast during the gassing, resulting in the inmates dying from asphyxiation rather than gradually losing consciousness and dying, leaving behind excrement and faces twisted in agony. Signed, SS-Untersturmführer Becker, Kiev, May 16, 1942 The fact that it says inmates (Häftlinge) also rules out a possible denier explanation of this being a van killing animals.
I have marked the incriminating passages. This document, dated March 26, 1942 is about a delay in the manufacture and delivery of "special vans" that require a modification time of 8 - 14 days each before they can be used, and how one such van can be arranged for Mauthausen concentration camp (which by the way also had and still has a gas chamber one can visit today; at least 3,000 people are said to have been gassed while the camp and Gusen subcamps' total death toll approaches 100,000). SS-Standartenführer Walter Rauff also asks for a delivery of bottled CO or other "aids" to "perform" the duty. Hmm, gee, now what purpose do modified vans and bottled CO serve? Fumigation? Get outta here.
This is the letter I mentioned in my introduction to gas vans earlier. Source: Friedlander, Henry, and Sybil Milton, Eds., Archives of the Holocaust, Vol. 11, Part 2, 1992, pp. 284-286. The translation is by Gord McFee, who notes that Turner's German leaves something to be desired. Thanks to John Zimmerman for research. Translation (I have highlighted the incriminating passages in the document and used exclamation points to quickly get you there in the translation): Privy Councillor Dr. Turner SS-Major General F.P.Number 18.739 O.U., April 11, 1942 Dear Comrade Wolff! Now that the decision has been taken in my favor, I would be remiss - since I am convinced that this is singularly and only thanks to your influence and your tireless activity - if I did not transmit to you my most comradely and heartfelt thanks. I can also again today, the more so since you know me well enough, only again repeat, that the matter did not have to do with my person - the person concerned could have just as easily had another name - but rather with a necessary battle that had to be fought against one-sided Wehrmacht interests, by which in the final unspoken result the SS Leaders, and therewith also the SS and further also the civil servants would have been affected. The best proof for this is, on the one hand, a remark woven into an official document from WB Southeast "the appointment of the Higher SS and Police Leader, which did not take place according to the proposal here" or words to that effect, and on the other hand, the comment of the Chief of the General Staff WB Southeast after receipt of the decision in my favor "herewith the Wehrmacht has lost a battle". In any event, there reigns here in all circles, even the Wehrmacht who have in any way followed this struggle, only joy over this victory and this joy you have alone, as I see it, afforded these people. My thanks for that. May I use this occasion to send you as an attachment a copy of a letter from me to the Reichsführer of January 15, 1942 to which I have yet to receive an answer. I am not complaining because as I know, such things take time and I don't feel it is right for me to press the Reichsführer for the settlement of an affair. I know that for such matters you have an interest and the reason I now draw your attention to it is only because this question is now more than critical. !!! Already some months ago, I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a "delousing van," that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp, which in any event since the arrival of Meyssner and the turning over of this camp to him, was continued by him. Then the time is come in which the Jewish officers to be found in prisoner of war camps under the Geneva Convention find out against our will about their no longer existing kinfolk and that could easily lead to complications. Were the affected persons now to be freed, they would in the minute of the arrival have their ultimate freedom, but like their racial comrades not for very long, and then this entire question should be resolved once and for all. Any consideration could have counter-effects on our prisoners in Canada, if it comes out that the freed persons do not move around freely here... I personally do not agree with this consideration. !!! With best wishes for your personal well being, heartiest greetings and Heil Hitler! I am as always your loyal Turner
They arrived in a defect condition and were attached to the Einsatzkommandos after repair.
Holocaust deniers, in their usual habit of committing logical fallacies, try to disprove the homicidal gassing aspect of the holocaust by (boldly assuming) the notion that not a single photo of any gassing victim exists (having rudimentary knowledge of Nazi secrecy and the fact that gassing victims are said to have been exhumed and cremated), and therefore go on to challenge holocaust defenders by saying "show me one photo of victims of Nazi gassings - if millions died by gassing, surely a single photo exists?" They are then prepared for the defenders to commit the fallacy of showing them photos of the heaps and heaps of emaciated corpses found and photographed in Western and Central Europe's concentration camps when they were liberated by the Western Allies and shown in many documentaries, like the top image in the above photo. Sneering gleefully that the bait has been taken, the holocaust deniers then go on to lecture that these are not gassing victims, but victims of typhus or malnutrition, all caused by allied aerial bombing that destroyed Germany's infrastructure in 1945 and therefore the Allies are actually responsible (the gall!) for this atrocity (the only real atrocity, according to the deniers) of the holocaust. Of course, the deniers won't accept the e.g. in Auschwitz piles and piles of shoes, clothes, spectacles, personal belongings such as suitcases or even prostheses (what the hell are prostheses doing in a pile in a room in the camp unless of course their owners are all DEAD?) as proof, claiming the Soviets could have just dumped these things into the camp from somewhere else when trying to create a museum (again, makes your stomach churn listening to these people, doesn't it?). I would start by showing them the 2 Sonderkommando photos instead that show a heap of corpses burning outside Krematorium V. If it isn't for their pathetic "Ohio train wreck" attempt to discredit the image, the holocaust deniers otherwise usually resort to saying things like "well clearly there was a typhus epidemic some time in the camp's history, and during that time the crematory ovens were overstressed, and therefore outdoor cremation became necessary, and the photo could just be showing typhus victims being burned". At this point you already begin to realize you're becoming a victim of the game deniers play well (they are called holocaust DENIERS for a reason): they'll always weasel away from accepting historiography and try to find an alternate explanation for every bit of attention thrown their way, which is why historians don't waste their time trying to engage in a "debate" with these clowns in the first place. It's not because they're afraid, or incapable of debating (we've already had the pleasure of witnessing Van Pelt, Evans et al. tear apart the former revisionism world "expert" David Irving in court) but because deniers won't accept any evidence as evidence: A jewish eye-witness is a paid liar. A Nazi eye-witness is a tortured soul. A document is a forgery. A photo actually is showing something else or a forgery too. An audio recording is a forgery too. A corpse is a typhus victim. A poison gas canister is a delousing agent meant to save lives. A German word always has an innocuous meaning. A threat to kill Jews is just a hollow threat made out of frustration. A census is unreliable. ...these are the tools of the trade for holocaust deniers. In any case, a further image of gassing victims is the bottom image shown above, taken near Krasnodar. you can find out more here: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2012/09/friedrich-paul-berg-yelled-for-photos . html Once again, the tried and tested method of holocaust deniers is to say "we can't trust anything Soviet", citing examples like the 4 million Auschwitz death toll, or the Katyn massacre they tried to attribute to the Nazis as proof that it is fine to dismiss anything and everything else Soviet investigators ever brought up. More Nazi crimes in the east: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2011/06/22-june-1941 . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2009/03/photographic-documentation-of-nazi . html And while we're at it, how about the fact that we also have video footage of people being led into a homicidal gas chamber after all? That's right. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx4pUKF7I1E The experimental gas chamber at Mogilev has been jury rigged to dispose of people in a fashion similar to mass killing in the AR camps: using engine exhaust. Read more about this at: http://www.deathcamps.org/gas_chambers/gas_chambers_mogilev.html
Another tale uncle holocaust denier would like to tell his listeners in relation to the corpses of Dachau, is that of Dr. Charles P. Larson, how he did "countless autopsies" in "20 different camps" (oh really? which other ones apart from Dachau?) and didn't find a single case of a victim having been killed by poison gas. Source for the tale: http://rense.com/general62/camps.htm Let's look at the facts, shall we? Larson was a US Army pathologist. Larson only visited camps in Germany, and never went to the major killing centres in Poland. His experiences, therefore, do not refer to the places where the bulk of the murders by poison gas took place. However, on page 61 of McCallum's book "Crime Doctor", Larson clearly states that he DID autopsy GASSING victims at Dachau (see excerpt below). So where did the revisionist claim about Larson having said "Not one case of poison gas was found", come from? The author of that IHR article, Theodore J. O'Keefe from the Institute for Historical Review, mentions as source, a newspaper, "The Wichita Eagle, April 1st, 1980, p. 4C". Now unfortunately, I could not find any properly digitized scan of that newspaper from April 1st, 1980, except for one grainy image of the article which you can see here: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-f48f514b789c131d6b66490ad7b1d296 The headline of that newspaper article reads: "Concentration Camp Conditions killed most inmates, Doctor says". Interesting how it says "most", rather than "all", with the latter being the denier argument. So perhaps some of the dead were by gassing? Because Larson destroys the revisionist narrative about him, by mentioning the following in the article: "Dachau did employ gas chambers, but their existence was among the closely guarded secrets in Germany" Another quote from that newspaper article: "Larson said that in southern Germany, where he served, death by gassing and shooting were rare. Never was a case of poisoning uncovered". It is clear here that Larson differentiates between gassing and poisoning, admitting that the former may have occurred. One can therefore draw the conclusion that he refers to the common understanding of poisoning, i.e. being forced to ingest a poison in the classic sense, for which he found no cases. This, deniers misrepresent as Larson having found no cases of gassing. So while Larson may have had the (false) impression, based on his activity ONLY in southern Germany, that most Jews during the holocaust were just worked to death rather than exterminated by gassing, Charles P. Larson did believe in cases of gassing, as the following excerpts from his book "Crime Doctor" will tell: On page 68 of "Crime Doctor", Charles P. Larson described Nazi physician Josef Mengele as a man "who sent millions to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau". Although not speaking from direct experience in this case, it is obvious that Larson himself firmly believed the homicidal gassing aspect of the holocaust. Let me show you just how holocaust denier websites twist and outright lie when it comes to "citing" sources (caps are my emphasis in the quote that follows), as I fully cite the source in question: "The majority died of natural diseases of one kind or the another. However, we did probe into such questions as, 'What happened to those prisoners who became psychotic at Dachau? What did the Gestapo do with them?' Well, they took those people to the crematorium. First, however, they were taken to a big windowless building next to the crematorium where the ceiling was covered with false shower heads. The victims were then ordered to strip and take a 'shower.' Outside the building, guards dropped in cyanide pellets. Then they'd blow the cyanide gas out and remove the bodies next door to the crematorium ovens. I think this is what happened to most of the truly psychotic prisoners and those they considered unruly and unmanageable and who, in the Gestapo's opinion, were incorrigibles. But, in my opinion, ONLY RELATIVELY FEW of the inmates I PERSONALLY EXAMINED at Dachau WERE murdered in THIS manner. Still, medical facilities were totally inadequate. When people fell hopelessly ill and death was imminent, and when they grew so weak they could no longer work or function, they were taken to the cyanide room for disposal. The Nazi called them 'mercy killings' because there was no hope of them getting well. Actually, the Germans considered them a liability, and extermination was the answer." ('Crime Doctor,' McCallum & Larson, p. 61. ISBN 0-916076-20-2; Library of Congress Catalog Number: 78-16403) So Larson not only says people were gassed at Dachau, but that he examined at least one of them and found the cause of death to be cyanide gassing. Either this, or he lied. In any case, once again holocaust denial has been exposed at creating false narratives (something they otherwise fondly like to accuse historians of doing), which in this case, is the fairy tale that Charles P. Larson found no evidence of homicidal gassing when he did his autopsies. As to whether homicidal gassings really took place at Dachau or not, that question has also been answered (in fact, you can find the Dachau gas chamber debate in any modern encyclopedia, no secrets): http://www.nizkor.org/features/qar/qar04.html On a similar note, holocaust deniers also dubiously cite another "expert source": "Most deaths in Concentration Camps were caused, not by starvation nor maltreatment but by Typhus!“ attributed to a Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, who apparently was with US forces in Germany in 1945. Except the quote is a deliberately misworded hoax, because Dr. Gordon rather reported in 1948 that: "The outbreaks in concentration camps and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus infection encountered in Germany." IHR source: http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/libcamps.shtml The meaning of this quote is something completely different, and only underscores historiography, i.e. that this "Typhus" holocaust deniers like to convince us was everywhere in Europe due to Allied bombardment, was in fact mostly only found in the concentration camps, and therefore NOT the result of Allied bombing. In fact, I am still waiting for a holocaust denier to give a SINGLE proof of ONE concentration camp's supply route that was bombed by Allies (or even sabotaged by partisans, see, they're spoiled for choices here!) so that one can deduce that the camp inmate population suffered a shortage of supplies as a direct result of this. Hint: they are unable to, so don't bother waiting. The allies did drop bombs near camps like Auschwitz (due to their proximity to industrial areas like the IG Farben plant near Auschwitz III Monowitz), but never was a lack of supplies to the camp a result of this bombing. Dr. Gordon's views found corroboration by one Dr. Russell Barton, (a psychiatrist "of international repute", according to deniers but I've never heard of him), who entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student in 1945. Barton, who volunteered to care for the diseased survivors, testified under sworn oath in a Toronto courtroom in 1985 (hmm, I wonder what that could have been...hint: Zundel trial) that: "Thousands of prisoners who died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of diseases." Even this single statement, made by a man who came to the defense of Ernst Zundel, does not rule out deliberate starvation in Bergen Belsen, but that is a different topic.
Historic photograph from the archives at Natzweiler. Photographer unknown. Many prisoners tried to commit suicide on the electrified fences surrounding the camps. 11"x14" Silver Gelatin Print I wonder what the deniers have to say about this photo? Typhus victims exhumed and tangled into a nearby fence for a photo shoot? There is no limits to the depravity of holocaust denial.
Historic photograph from the archives at Natzweiler - photographer unknown. Camp prisoners were selected for death and their bodies were pickled and sent to the University Medical School in Strasbourg. 11"x14" Silver Gelatin Print At Ravensbrück, so-called "rabbits" (female prisoners mainly from Poland) underwent a variety of experimental procedures, including bone splintering, bone grafts, and bone breaks (an example would be chiseling pieces of bone from legs; Polish prisoner-doctors documented the crimes). One series of procedures tested the effectiveness of drugs on infections, another bone regeneration under various conditions. Tens of the subjects died or were executed (phenol injections, shooting), and many survived, suffering permanent damage to their health. You can find well-sourced photos of the lasting impact of the experiments on women who survived the procedures at Ravensbrück. The above image is from the Struthof album. At the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, one of the projects involved 87 Jews, including 30 women, who were killed for the purpose of constituting a collection of skulls and skeletons to be kept at the Institute of Anatomy of the Reichsuniversität Straßburg. Because they were Jewish, these men and women were selected, asphyxiated, dismembered and carved up by men of racial science. If you've got the STOMACH to go take a look at photographic evidence of Nazi horrors, by all means: http://www.phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/klarsfeld/Struthof/T001.shtml The corpses were dismembered on the order of German Professor August Hirt, Director of the Institute of Anatomy from 1941 to 1944, probably at the end of 1944, as this was the time the Natzweiler camp in Alsace, France, was liberated by Western Allies. The identification number of each corpse, tattooed on the left forearm, was removed.
Pic related is from an exhibition, organized by Austrian anthropologists most likely at the Natural History Museum (Naturhistorisches Museum) in Vienna in 1939 titling: "The physical and mental appearance of the Jews." The skulls and skeletons for this exhibit came from excavations in the Jewish cemetery. The caption says: The Jewish Question is only through clear segregation of "Non-Jews from Jews" solvable. August Hirt (April 28, 1898 – June 2, 1945) was an Swiss-German anatomist who served at the Reich University in Strasbourg during World War II. He performed experiments with mustard gas on inmates at Natzweiler-Struthof and played a lead role in the murders of 86 people at Auschwitz for the Jewish skeleton collection. The skeletons of his victims were meant to become specimens at the Institute of anatomy in Strasbourg, but completion of the project was stopped by the progress of the war. Hirt studied medicine after the end of WW1 at the University of Heidelberg. In 1922, he obtained his doctorate. He then worked at the Anatomical Institute in Heidelberg and in 1925, was authorized to teach thanks to a thesis on nerve cells. An illustrious career followed: 1930: professor at the Heidelberg University 1 April 1933: joined the SS (SS-Nr. 100 414) 1 April 1936: associate director of the Institute of anatomy at University of Greifswald 1 July 1937: promoted in the SS to Hauptsturmführer (captain) 1 October 1938: associate director of the Institute of anatomy at Goethe University August 1939: SS medical chief April 1941: director of the new Institute of anatomy at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg. 1 March 1942: member of the RuSHA, the organisation in charge of "racial and ideological purity" of SS 1944: Sturmbannführer (major) The Ahnenerbe under the Third Reich was a society that organised medical experiments on prisoners. August Hirt conceived and directed one called the Jewish skeleton collection, which was begun but not completed as intended. He also performed experiments on cadavers and collected human skulls. Hirt wanted to create a collection with skulls of "Judeo-Bolsheviks", as part of his research on race. According to him, the Jewish race was on the point of extinction and he wished to gather a collection of them while there was still time. Hirt sent his project to Himmler. Hirt wrote of this project: "There are important collections of skulls of nearly all the races and peoples. Except for the Jews, of which science has so few skulls, so it is not possible to draw any meaningful inferences. The war in the East gives us the opportunity to fill the gap. We have the opportunity to acquire a tangible scientific document by procuring the skulls of Jewish-Bolsheviks who embody the disgusting but characteristic subhuman."[1] Hirt conceived the project to go beyond a collection of skulls, to a collection of Jewish skeletons and so presented his research plan to Himmler. Working with the Ahnenerbe division, Wolfram Sievers, Bruno Beger, Hans Fleischhacker and Hirt together collected people from among the Auschwitz inmates in order to create an anatomical specimen collection specifically of Jews. Hirt proposed to use the small-scale gas chamber at Natzweiler-Struthof to murder the people selected, keeping their corpses intact, and then have their corpses shipped immediately to the Anatomical Institute in Strasbourg for the casts and skeletons he wanted for this collection.[2],[3] Hirt directed that 115 persons be selected for measurements: 79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles, and 4 "Asians". They were selected among the inmates in August 1943 at Auschwitz by his assistants, the anthropologists Bruno Beger and Hans Fleischhacker. Of those initially selected, it is believed that 89 persons (60 men and 29 women) were sent to Natzweiler-Struthof. Three men died en route, leaving 86. These people were sent to Natzweiler-Struthof on July 30, 1943. They were fed reasonably well to improve their appearance for the body casts. The 86 people were divided into four groups, they were successively gassed by Josef Kramer, on August 11, 13, 17 and 19, 1943. Their bodies were returned to Hirt at the anatomical laboratory of the Reich University in Strasbourg for preparation as an anthropological display, taking body casts and preparing the skeletons.[4] In September 1944, the rapid approach of the Allies led to the project being abandoned and Himmler ordered the destruction of all traces of this compromising collection. That order was not completed, nor had the casts been taken or the skeletons been prepared. The Allies found corpses and partial remains preserved in formalin for eighty-six bodies upon the liberation of Strasbourg.[2] The corpses were buried 23 October 1945 in the municipal cemetery of Strasbourg-Robertsau before being transferred in 1951 in the Jewish cemetery of Strasbourg-Cronenbourg. August Hirt fled Strasbourg in September 1944, hiding in Tübingen in southern Germany across the river from Alsace. Hirt committed suicide on June 2, 1945 at Schluchsee, Baden-Württemberg, in the Black Forest.[6] His suicide was not known when he was tried in absentia at the Military War Crimes Trial at Metz on 23 December 1953 for his war crimes.[5] For many years only a single victim, Menachem Taffel (prisoner no. 107969), a Polish born Jew who had been living in Berlin, was positively identified through the efforts of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. In the book, Die Namen der Nummern (2004, ISBN 978-3455094640.The Names of the Numbers), Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang describes this mass murder. He also recounts in detail the story of how he was able to determine the identities of 86 victims, 60 years after they were murdered. Sources: [1]: Shirer, William L. (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. United States: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-72868-7. [2]: Reamey, Anne S. "August Hirt". Archived from the original on December 26, 2013. [3]: Henry, Diana Mara. "Photographs at Natzweiler-Struthof". Natzweiler-Struthof.org. Archived from the original on February 21, 2015. [4]: Lang, Hans-Joachim. "The Names of the Numbers: Scientific Murders". Retrieved April 7, 2016. [5]: Lang, Hans-Joachim (19 August 2004). "Skelette für Straßburg Eines der grausigsten Wissenschaftsverbrechen des "Dritten Reiches" ist endlich aufgeklärt" [Skeletons for Strasbourg: One of the most gruesome crimes of science in the "Third Reich" is finally cleared]. Die Zeit (in German). Retrieved 23 March 2016.
The Commissar Order (Kommissarbefehl) was an order issued by the German High Command (OKW) on 6 June 1941, that is to say, BEFORE Operation Barbarossa had even started. Its official name was 'Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars' (Richtlinien für die Behandlung politischer Kommissare). It instructed the Wehrmacht that any Soviet political commissar identified among captured troops be summarily executed as an enforcer of the Judeo-Bolshevism ideology among military forces. According to the order, all those prisoners who could be identified as "thoroughly bolshevized or as active representatives of the Bolshevist ideology" should also be killed. The order, translated, was as follows: "Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars In the battle against Bolshevism, the adherence of the enemy to the principles of humanity or international law is not to be counted upon. In particular it can be expected that those of us who are taken prisoner will be treated with hatred, cruelty and inhumanity by political commissars of every kind. The troops must be aware that: 1. In this battle mercy or considerations of international law is false. They are a danger to our own safety and to the rapid pacification of the conquered territories. 2. The originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars. So immediate and unhesitatingly severe measures must be undertaken against them. They are therefore, when captured in battle, as a matter of routine to be dispatched by firearms. The following provisions also apply: 3. ...Political commissars as agents of the enemy troops are recognizable from their special badge—a red star with a golden woven hammer and sickle on the sleeves.... They are to be separated from the prisoners of war immediately, i.e. already on the battlefield. This is necessary, in order to remove from them any possibility of influencing the captured soldiers. These commissars are not to be recognized as soldiers; the protection due to prisoners of war under international law does not apply to them. When they have been separated, they are to be finished off. 4. Political commissars who have not made themselves guilty of any enemy action nor are suspected of such should be left unmolested for the time being. It will only be possible after further penetration of the country to decide whether remaining functionaries may be left in place or are to be handed over to the Sonderkommandos. The aim should be for the latter to carry out the assessment. In judging the question "guilty or not guilty", the personal impression of the attitude and bearing of the commissar should as a matter of principle count for more than the facts of the case which it may not be possible to prove." What's particularly interesting to me is the content of the first page, which says that the orders and detailed instructions are only to be distributed among the higher echelons of command, and then transmitted only orally to the lower levels of command. So here we have a document proving in writing how important orders only reached the lower ranks by word of mouth. It is therefore easy to conclude that incriminating orders in writing only resided in the personal possession of a select few higher-ranking officers, if at all, and could therefore be disposed of easily. About half a million Soviet POWs held by the Germans were executed when the POW camps, which were otherwise death traps, were combed through by German units for political commissars (under the Commissar Order of 6 June 1941), "politically intolerable and suspicious elements," and Jews. Those selected in the camps were to be shot at once (recall that the Commissar Order stated about the political commissars that, "if taken while fighting or offering resistance they must, on principle, be shot immediately" and that otherwise, the commissars "are to be separated from the prisoners of war immediately, i.e. already on the battlefield. . . . These commissars are not to be recognized as soldiers; the protection due to prisoners of war under international law does not apply to them. When they have been separated, they are to be finished off". Now, the classical revisionist approach to this is to maintain that this might have been an order given, but that it was never implemented by the honorable Prussian soldiery, i.e, "German commanders refused to follow Hitlers' Commissar Order of 1941, as they considered cold-blooded killing dishonorable and a violation of international law....and ya better believe it!" Do you know how ridiculous the concept of disobeying orders sounds, especially in the Third Reich? These were lies Erich von Manstein propagated after the war. But fact is that Manstein passed the order on to his subordinates. And all German army commanders enforced the order: Source: Förster, Jürgen "The Wehrmacht and the War of Extermination Against the Soviet Union" pages 494-520 By fall 1941 the SD were regularly shooting prisoners combed out from the mass of those held. Often, trucks would come to the camps and haul selected prisoners to execution sites. By contrast, camp 4 of Dulag 131 (Bobruisk) is an example of mass killing by the German authorities in charge of a POW installation; in November 1941, because "the camps are overcrowded," and based on orders from the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) in Berlin, the commandant of camp 4 ordered a special detachment of his men to force several 1000 prisoners into a barrack and set it on fire, incinerating the prisoners. A squad surrounded the barrack with machine guns to shoot anyone trying to flee the inferno. Also, in forced marches many prisoners were "shot while trying to escape." By early 1942, about 2 million Soviet prisoners were dead, from both privation and execution. These combing actions have to be taken into account in evaluating what happened to Soviet POWs in German custody and what the Germans' intentions were. There is nothing remotely similar to the German policy of shooting some POWs on the spot and having execution squads comb through those imprisoned that can be compared to the Eisenhower camps, or even Soviet Gulags for that matter. A popular revisionist canard after all, is that Eisenhower allegedly ran “death camps” in liberated Western Europe and starved 1.7 million or so German POWs to death, the brain-child of Canadian fiction author James Bacque in his novel “Other Losses”, which I have debunked here: https://imgur.com/yao6lgo There appears to be, judging by what's been presented here, no evidence like what we have for German camps for the Eisenhower camps; instead, there's exaggeration, hyperbole, and rhetoric by James Bacque. Of course, we can and should be critical of aspects of US policy - but without demonizing Eisenhower and without making false charges of genocide (and engendering such nonsense as this, "HE HATED THE GERMAN PEOPLE AS A RACE. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible." From Bacque we get worse-than-dubious maths on casualties among German POWs, cherrypicking of quotations as well as policy and implementation details, falsification of the postwar food situation, and games with documents - to falsify a charge of mass murder. The reason exaggerated numbers do matter, is that some people use them to create false equivalences and tart up phony charges about intention and scope. The German war in the east was a war of conquest and annihilation - the Germans' "treatment" of Soviet POWs was part and parcel of the Reich's war aims and war conduct. Anyone trying to make a similar case for Allied aims and practices in Europe is going to have to do a lot better than James Bacque. On a related note, we also have the Commando Order (Kommandobefehl), issued by Adolf Hitler on 18 October 1942 stating that all Allied commandos encountered by German forces in Europe and Africa should be killed immediately without trial, even in proper uniforms or if they attempted to surrender. Similarly, the "Kugel-Erlass" (bullet decree) also known as "Aktion Kugel" was a secret decree (Geheimbefehl), issued by Nazi Germany on March 2, 1944. The decree stated that escaped Allied prisoners of war, especially officers and senior non-commissioned officers, should be handed over to the Sicherheitsdienst who should execute them, "im Rahmen der Aktion Kugel", in concentration camp Mauthausen. This order was in direct contravention of the provisions of the Third Geneva Convention. The number of escaped POW's executed by the Kugel-erlass is not precisely known. Estimates vary between 1,300 and 5,040 executed POW's. The vast majority of these POWs came from the USSR.
Some excerpts translated: "Bolshevism is the arch-enemy of national-socialist Germany. Each German soldier has to keep distance from Soviet POWs. Any form of lenience expressed is to be strictly prosecuted. The feeling of pride and superiority of the German soldier tasked with guarding a Soviet POW is to be displayed at all times even to the public. Any active or even passive resistance encountered is to be immediately dealt with by the weapon. And those who do not do this, or not energetically enough, incriminate themselves. Fleeing Soviet POWs are to be shot immediately without prior yelling for them to stop. Warning shots are not to be given." Under orders like these surviving the war in writing, it is perfectly acceptable to see why the death toll of Soviet prisoners of war is part of the holocaust's 11 million figure. Killing someone in battle in one thing. Deliberately seeing to his demise when he is a prisoner of war, is a crime against humanity. By February 1942, 2,000,000 of the 3,300,000 Soviet soldiers in German custody up to that point had died from starvation, exposure, disease, gassing or shooting. Read more at: https://www . ushmm . org/wlc/en/article . php?ModuleId=10007183 The plight of Soviet prisoners of war is, unlike the holocaust on European Jews, not given as much attention, in a sense rightly so because these unfortunates were at one point, armed soldiers, unlike the other victims of the holocaust. Nevertheless, they deserve attention, as their treatment was far worse than anything Germans encountered in the Rheinwiesenlager, or even in the gulags.
This is another favorite of holocaust deniers: citing a handful of disparaging remarks made by a few judges about the objectivity of the International Military Tribunal proceedings and using these critics to brand arguably the most important trial ever conducted in human history, and one that has inspired many young people to become lawyers and dedicate their career to serving their country's judiciary system in the decades that followed, as one giant kangaroo court. What are their principal allegations? One is to selectively quote the following two lines from the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (which can be found here: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imtconst.asp) Article 19: "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and nontechnical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to be of probative value." and Article 21: "The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof." ...except the deniers don't even cite article 21 fully, as it goes on to say: "It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United [Allied] Nations, including acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and the records and findings of military and other Tribunals of any of the United [Allied] Nations." The deniers then go on to say that this way, homicidal gassings at Dachau and reports of steam chambers at Treblinka were accepted by the IMT. What they don't tell you, is that the allegation of mass gassings having taken place at the Dachau camp have been the subject of dispute and investigation by mainstream historians for a while now, and it certainly was not the work of any holocaust denier that led to this claim being dropped by holocaust historians. Furthermore, calling gas chambers at Treblinka where people were gassed by engine exhaust "steam chambers" isn't far fetched, as engine exhaust can indeed appear to the eyes of the witness as "steam", depending on the color and consistency. Lastly, holocaust deniers go on to cite other claims that appear here and there in the full IMT transcript that is 42 volumes big (e.g. Volume IX itself is 715 pages long) - that's how transcripts work: everything that is said in court is put on paper. Everyone person called up to testify gets to speak (obviously) and whatever he or she says, gets recorded. That there are some incredulous claims that turned up among the hundreds of people involved is, in fact, to be expected in a trial of this scope. However, they make up a minority, a drop in the ocean. But when confronted with this assessment, deniers once again just point us to Article 19 and 21 as if thats proof that innocent National Socialists were hung because of electric floors, peddle-powered brain bashing machines and acid pits. Falso in Uno, Falso in Omnibus - that is the holocaust deniers' modus operandi. Isn't it remarkable that not a single one of these "elites" ever said this whole thing was a lie in court? The defences usually were "I was just following orders" or "I didn't know" or "I didn't participate." It never was "impossible! That is a complete fabrication! How dare you! The only thing we did at Auschwitz was push paper and delouse clothing", and so on. Men who were well aware that they were going to be sentenced to death anyhow could have seized the opportunity and tried to set the record straight about any false accusations about mass murder alleged by the victors onto their beloved Reich, but they didn't. Even after they were sentenced to death there were no tirades, nothing. It is amazing to think that all these high ranking Nazi officials were, as deniers like to lecture us, tortured by the allies to extract confessions, without deniers providing any proofs except those two odd books that consist of one questionable memoir written by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland about the "London Cage", an MI19 prisoner of war facility that was subject to frequent allegations of torture (though it turned out this wasn't conventional torture in the brutal physical sense after all. For more, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Cage), the CSDIC (Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre) at Bad Nenndorf whose perpetrators were brought to justice (and interestingly Bad Nenndorf attracts demonstrations held by neo nazis from far right movements to this day) and Rupert Butler's 1983 novel "Legions of Death", according to which Rudolf Höss, longest serving Auschwitz camp commandant, was supposedly tortured. Except Rupert Butler is neither a witness, nor a historian, but a journalist, and his book, written as a novel, does not contain adequate citations for independent verification of his claims. He tells the story and we have to accept it, a bit like children gathered around a camp fire. Holocaust deniers of course, have absolutely no problems accepting the tales of Scotland and Butler, but always start dancing around, demanding for proofs when eye-witnesses to Nazi atrocities speak of their experiences. And of course, the fact is that Höss' autobiography and the depositions during his pre-trial interrogations in Poland contained a number of statements that his interrogators would rather not have heard or read. The most striking example is his insistence in that “only” about 1.1 million people had been killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau and that the higher figures upheld by the Poles were figments of imagination lacking any foundation whatsoever. But even if we take Rupert Butler's book "Legions of Death" at face value, the book does not state that Hoess' confession, a "made-up story", was extracted under torture. Rather, it says after some initial rough handling to get the man talking, once Hoess started, there was no stopping him. (see: R. Butler, Legions of Death, page 237) What's also funny is that if holocaust deniers present Rupert Butler's "Legions of Death" book as legitimate, they are then also presenting the book's claim that the Sobibor extermination camp claimed 600,000 lives as legitimate (see R. Butler, Legions of Death, page 170) In any case, my point still stands: Not ONE of those directly involved in the holocaust spoke up! Or maybe their families who supposedly knew that it was a lie and were enraged by the "unfair" execution of their fathers/husbands/brothers could speak up in the weeks, months, years, or decades that followed. Or the descendants, eager to clear grandpa's good name and war service, would come forward. And there's no shortage of audiences for these guys to take it to: Holocaust denier central, The Institute for Historical Review, is always holding "conferences" and publishing stuff on the web, so you'd think these guys would write or appear at one of these events. And neither did the SS guys who got jailed and released after serving their terms (often shortened). They could have filed suit against the US and British governments for the torture, for the physical injuries that must have been created from eating so much bully beef. You'd think these families would be waving X-Rays and doctors' reports. You'd think they'd be lining up in US District Court to file a civil class-action suit...and the US is a very litigious country, where people sue and win over hot coffee at McDonalds. There are plenty of ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyers who would take up such cases. But they don't. Because the confessions weren't extracted by torture. They were extracted by reasonably trained American and British prosecutors like John Harlan Amen, who knew how to get people to talk without smacking them in the head. Of course, the deniers, most of whom have no physical connection to the events in Europe that transpired 7 decades ago, are the only ones contesting the Holocaust, and not the perpetrators themselves, or the families they left behind, or even their children like Edda Göring or Kathrin Himmler. Think about it: All those Nazis that managed to flee to Argentina and remained there in safety for decades, would have had plenty of freedom to publish the odd memoir to take apart the IMT and question the holocaust. But even they, did not.
I have shown the written order regarding the secrecy of the Final Solution I have shown the written order to implement and begin the Final Solution, and Göring's complicity I have repeatedly demonstrated Hitler's intent and complicity in the Final Solution I have shown Goebbels' complicity in the Final Solution I have shown Himmler's complicity in the Final Solution I have shown the Höfle Telegram as documentary evidence of Aktion Reinhard in progress I have shown further documents detailing the murder of Jews in six figures and higher I have shown documents proving the existence of Einsatzgruppen and the atrocities they committed I have shown documents proving forced castration was part of Nazi racial policy I have shown documentary evidence of the Euthanasia program and how its members were later implicated in genocide in the East I have repeatedly shown documentary evidence concerning the homicidal use of mobile gas vans I have shown both a photo and video of gassing victims I have exposed holocaust deniers of falsely quoting Charles P. Larson I have shown evidence of Nazi horrors in Ravensbrück, Natzweiler-Struthof and August Hirt's Jewish Skeleton Collection I have provided photographic evidence of both in-progress mass shooting and mass graves of unarmed, naked civilians in the East I have shown written orders explaining the genocidal treatment Soviet Prisoners of War received at the hands of the Nazis I have debunked allegations of a "kangaroo court" placed on the Nuremberg trials
In this section we will take a look at some of the leading holocaust deniers around the globe and how they all turned out to be frauds. To begin with, David Irving is not a historian. David Irving tried to study physics and failed. Then he tried to study political economy and failed. He then went on to endorse Oswald Mosley from the British Union of Fascists, became an editor of a student rag-mag called Carnival Times where he first started spouting antisemitism such as saying the British Press was owned by Jews and that Hitler is the greatest unifying force Europe has known since Charlemagne. He then worked as a steelworker for Thyssen AG in West Germany, wrote for a German boulevard journal (Neue Illustrierte), and his writing career began with his novel "The Destruction of Dresden", where he claimed 100,000 to 250,000 people were killed in the allied fire-bombings of Dresden (a number he based off the TB-47 document promulgated by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a forgery), when today historians have concluded this number to be only around 25,000 dead. More about that here: i.imgur.com/k3kukxO There was a time when David Irving had conned people into believing he was not only a historian but also an expert on Hitler, more than anyone else. But his little game ended when believing Faurisson and the Leuchter report, he jumped onto the "no Jew was ever gassed at Auschwitz" bandwagon and sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel as she figured him out and rightly called him a neo-Nazi. The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who penned the classic work 'The Last Days of Hitler', observed: “I regard Irving as a very industrious and efficient investigator, and hunter of documents, a hard worker and good writer. That is on the credit side. But I don’t regard him as an historian. I don’t think he has any historical sense. He is a propagandist who uses efficiently collected and arranged material to support a propagandist line.” There was a time when David Irving was holding speeches at neo-Nazi rallies and attending revisionist meetings hosted by the IHR. Indeed, the denier bunch didn't take it too well that he has now returned from his erroneous path and currently is no longer entirely denying the holocaust, just playing around with the number. For instance, he now accepts homicidal gassing at the Aktion Reinhard camps and Einsatzgruppen massacres in the east. Interestingly, he also accepts the gassing of Jews in the makeshift gas chambers known as the red and white house at Birkenau, and offers the accounts of Hans Aumeier as evidence for them - yet continues to deny the homicidal nature of the larger Krema facilities even though Aumeier also mentions these. During his trial in Austria, Irving admitted saying that there were no homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz was a mistake. See: https://www.theguardian.com/guardianweekly/story/0,,1715580,00.html In 2009 he gave a two and a half hour long interview called "Talking Frankly" where he spoke about his life, the books he had written, his rise to fame, the Irving-Lipstadt trial, and also about his revised views on the Holocaust. The short version is: David Irving today accepts homicidal gassings happened at Auschwitz, but only in the little red house and white house, while dismissing all the other homicidal gas chambers. He still calls the place a Disneyland-style theme park. However, David Irving also accepts Einsatzgruppen massacres and homicidal gassing at the Aktion Reinhard camps as fact, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIdjRJMyByY A bit late, as his entire rep and fortune is in tethers. The world's true expert on Adolf Hitler is Richard J. Evans, who destroyed Irving's so-called reputation and exposed him as a fraudulent researcher during the Irving vs. Lipstadt trial in the 90s, when he wrote his book-length refutation freely available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160213122844/http://hdot.org/en/trial/defense/evans.html You can find the entire Irving-Lipstadt trial transcripts here: https://www.hdot.org/trial-materials/trial-transcripts/ A quicker way to learn more about this trial during which the "holocaust was up for debate", is watching the PBS documentary "NOVA: Holocaust On Trial". Those few holocaust deniers who still admire Irving today, rather than hating him for backstabbing them, reverse the story and claim it was poor Irving that was the victim of the Irving-Lipstadt trial (and not the other way round even though HE sued HER for libel) as he had no one for defense and therefore, so they claim, he lost to Lipstadt's "well paid" defense team containing actual historians. But keep in mind David Irving felt perfectly fine and confident representing himself and I am sure many fellow deniers like Faurisson, Butz, Leuchter, Mattogno etc. would have come to his aid for little or no pay, had he asked. And when it comes to crying about freedom of speech, consider this: If David Irving had won, it means Lipstadt would have gotten smacked hard for exercising her freedom of speech (calling someone a neo-Nazi), and the trial would have been an example of the censoring of free speech. But that's of course something the deniers will never mention when they invoke their usual one-sided wailing about their freedom of expression (calling out an alleged group they call "International Jewry" to be the biggest criminals and falsifiers of history) coming under assault. And finally, here is a short summary of how David Irving operated as a falsifier of history (in regard to whitewashing Hitler's role in the holocaust), complete with examples and citations: http://www.phdn.org/negation/gravediggers/gom-1998-david_irving_hitler.html
A second significant focal point of revisionist propaganda centered around the now defunct Samizdat Publishers in Toronto. The founder and guiding spirit was Ernst Zündel, a German who emigrated to Canada in 1958. Well equipped with printing equipment, archives, and literature, Samizdat published and distributed revisionist literature glorifying Hitler and the Third Reich, and denying the Holocaust. Its staff dispatched distorted versions of “the truth” about the Third Reich era around the world, including Germany and Poland. In 1983 Sabina Citron, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, filed a private complaint against Zündel before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Zündel was charged under the Criminal Code, section 181, of spreading false news by publishing Richard Verral's "Did Six Million Really Die?" Zündel underwent two criminal trials in 1985 and 1988. The charge against Zündel alleged that he "did publish a statement or tale, namely, "Did Six Million Really Die?" that he knows is false and that is likely to cause mischief to the public interest in social and racial tolerance, contrary to the Criminal Code." After a much publicized trial in 1985, Zündel was found guilty. His conviction was later overturned in an appeal on a legal technicality, leading to a second trial in 1988. The 1988 trial relied on testimony from the Holocaust deniers David Irving and Fred A. Leuchter, a self-taught execution technician. Leuchter's testimony as an expert witness was accepted by the court, but his accompanying Leuchter report was excluded, based on his lack of engineering credentials. In 1985, key expert testimony against Zündel's alleged Holocaust denial was provided at great lengths by Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who refused to testify at Zündel's 1988 trial. Zündel was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment, but was finally acquitted upon appeal by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Zündel which held in 1992 that section 181 (formerly known as section 177) was a violation of the guarantee of freedom of expression under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 1997, Zündel's marriage with his second wife, Irene Marcarelli, collapsed after 18 months. She subsequently testified against him in the late 1990s when he was under investigation by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for promoting hatred against Jews via his website. In January 2000, before the commission had completed its hearings, he left Canada for Sevierville, Tennessee, where he married his third wife, Ingrid Rimland, and vowed never to return to Canada. After his extradition to Germany in 2005, a court in Mannheim sentenced him to 5 years' imprisonment in 2007. His colleagues and supporters run the Zundelsite, which propagates his ideas. When Zündel started Samisdat Publishers in the 1970s, he became interested in UFO-logy when the subject was at its peak of worldwide attention. His main offerings were his own books claiming that flying saucers were secret weapons developed by the Third Reich and now based in Antarctica. Under the pseudonyms Christof Friedrich and Mattern Friedrich, Zündel also wrote several publications promoting the idea that UFOs were craft developed by German scientists who had fled to New Swabia (Neuschwabenland), Antarctica. These titles include "Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions" [1978] and "Hitler at the South Pole" [1979]. He promoted the idea of Nazi secret bases in Antarctica, Nazi UFOs and Hollow Earth theories. In the Samisdat Publishers newsletter of 1978, Zündel advertised an expedition to Antarctica to find these bases and UFOs. A ticket would cost $9,999 for a seat on an exploration team to locate the polar entrance to the hollow earth. This expedition never took place.
Leuchter is not, as many deniers hail him as, "America's foremost gas chamber expert" (because the gas chambers in American prisons were built by experts and in operation long before he even came into the scene, see: http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/gascham.html), he only holds a bachelor's degree in liberal arts and is thus absolutely unqualified - this is obvious to any trained engineer that listens to the man (e.g. when he says stuff like the gas chamber being in so close proximity to the crematoria should have meant the entire place would have exploded, which is simply not true because you need HCN concentrations beyond 56,000ppm for volatility). Fred Leuchter coldly exploited a legal loophole whereby an engineering license (registration) was not required to practice engineering in many states at the time, unless the engineer is involved in construction of buildings or dealing with the general public. This way, Fred Leuchter ran a nice shakedown scheme wherein he offered his services to inspect, modify and sell after-market parts to several US prisons with capital punishment facilities, and if a state refused to use his services, Leuchter would testify at the last minute on behalf of the inmate, claiming that the state's gas chamber might malfunction! source: Memorandum from Ed Carnes, Alabama Assistant Attorney General, to all Capital Punishment States July 20,1990; Shapiro 'Truth Prevails' pp. 17 and 21; Newsweek, Oct. 22, 1990, p. 64; Swampscott Journal, Nov. 1, 1990. Leuchter's shady business came to an abrupt end when he was hired as an expert by the defense team of German-Canadian freelance publisher Ernst Zündel, who was on trial (for having published Richard Harwood/Verrall's "Did Six Million Really Die?" holocaust denial pamphlet, which at that time violated Canada's false news laws), and tasked to travel to Poland, in order to find out whether the homicidal gassing of hundreds of thousands of human beings in the gas chamber facilities over the course of several years at Auschwitz-Birkenau was historical fact or a big, fat, Jewish lie. Leuchter did this by taking samples in the gas chambers of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II Birkenau, as well as the delousing chambers in Birkenau, to investigate the presence of "Prussian Blue" staining left on the walls by the pesticide Zyklon-B, pellets containing and releasing hydrogen cyanide (HCN) poison gas used by the Nazis for the genocidal killing, but also for fumigation and delousing of inmate clothing for the slave labor force. Leuchter committed a number of errors: Despite the gas chamber in Krema I being a Polish-Soviet reconstruction from 1947 and the Birkenau Kremas being nothing but mangled ruins that had been exposed to the elements for over four decades, with the floors periodically flooding during heavy rain, Leuchter nevertheless decided to go ahead and not only that, but chiseled directly into the brickwork to take samples (rather than scraping alongside; and without any permission to boot) and after smuggling the samples back to the Alpha Analytical Labs in Massachusetts, United States for testing without telling them where the samples were from, came to the conclusion that because of the low cyanide concentration compared to the samples taken from the relatively well-preserved delousing chamber elsewhere in the camp, that no one was gassed in the gas chambers, or to put the conclusion more in his own words, that these chambers couldn't have been functioning gas chambers at all. Furthermore, Leuchter repeatedly expressed concern and disbelief over the proximity of the gas chambers to the crematoria, stating that due to the explosivity of HCN, the entire place would blow up if a homicidal gassing took place - although an "execution expert" and "engineer" like him should have known that warm blooded human beings can be killed with concentrations as low as 300 ppm, while HCN only becomes explosive in concentrations beyond 56,000 ppm[1]. Leuchter's "science report" didn't hold up in court and therefore did not help Zündel. Understandably, you can't get away with fraud, and therefore Leuchter's engineering career was ruined and the man was reduced to a divorced bus driver. He still had a good amount of luck though, because he wasn't charged with defacing a national monument and extradited to Poland, as for example would befall someone who would hammer home a chisel into the Statue of Liberty to take samples in order to prove where it was actually built. The fact that Leuchter is a free man today, and not rotting away in some Polish prison is proof enough of how lightly he got away with what he did. The Leuchter report is a perfect example of how the scientific method can be abused to come to "conclusions" by the clueless that spit in the face of history, and even science itself because one fails to take in so many other factors. I have yet to see holocaust deniers provide any scientific study that can irrefutably prove how much prussian blue MUST form on a concrete wall in a given time frame and under what conditions and concentrations, and how likely or unlikely it is to fade away when exposed to something as simple as regularly hosing down the walls with water, or periodic flooding due to heavy rain over the decades. A common counter-argument by the holocaust denying chemistry student Germar Rudolf is that the "exposed to the elements" theory is bunk because there is prussian blue staining on the outside walls of the delousing chamber as well. But so far, neither Leuchter, nor Rudolf have been able to prove that the the entire brickwork is SOAKED with prussian blue (how else would they explain pigmentation on the OUTSIDE of the delousing chamber wall unless the pigment worked its way from the inside all the way through the brickwork to the outside?). Oh, I know - perhaps if it were the remnant of a coat of paint, as suggested by Josef Bailer, or if the deloused clothing and bedding had been piled up outside to dry. If anyone is interested in reading a scientific refutation of the Leuchter and Rudolf reports, I recommend respected chemist Dr. Richard Green's essays "Leuchter, Rudolf and the Iron Blues", "Chemistry is Not the Science: Rudolf, Rhetoric, and Reduction", or for those who are fluent in German, Joseph Bailer's "Die Revisionisten und die Chemie". Even if you dismiss all other explanations, even if you accept it as fact that concrete walls always develop prussian blue as a result of exposure to HCN, the fact still remains that while the walls of the delousing chambers were exposed to the gas for many, many hours at a time (cold-blooded lice take a lot longer to die than warm-blooded humans) the walls of the homicidal gas chambers were exposed to the gas, even at the height of extermination, less than an hour a day (each gassing took around 20 minutes and the moment the ventilation system started working, the HCN concentration in the air dropped, so the theory that the gas remained in the chamber until all bodies have been cleared, which took many hours, is nonsense, and HCN rapidly loses its toxicity and danger when ventilated into the open air, as was done with the US gas chambers as well, or even the delousing chambers for that matter, so the idea of it killing everyone around the building upon ventilation is equally nonsense) and therefore we have an observable difference in the build-up of prussian blue. If you think Leuchter is just some poor, naive fool who got caught in the holocaust denier vs defender battle as the Errol Morris documentary "Mr. Death - The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter" makes one believe, think again - this man is a rabid antisemite like the rest of them. Here's what he had to say: "Because I was somewhat naive at the time, I was not aware that by so testifying I was offending the organized world Jewish community. By providing final, definitive proof that there were no execution gas chambers utilized for genocidal purposes by the Germans at these wartime camps, I established the simple fact that the Holocaust story is not true. What I did not know was that anyone expressing such beliefs is guilty of a capital crime: that of thinking and telling the unspeakable truth about the greatest lie of the age." - Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., “Is there Life after Persecution? – The Botched Execution of Fred Leuchter,” presented at the eleventh IHR Conference, 1992. Journal of Historical Review Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter, 1992-93, pp. 429-444. Straight from the horse's mouth. Leuchter isn't a simple-minded fool. He's a cold & calculating conman. Source: [1]: https://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/chemical/14746
"If the Holocaust is seen as a unique collection of lies, then the sole pillar supporting international Judaism's legitimacy will collapse. The idol of substitute religion will disintegrate. The possibility of extorting more billions from Germany on account of its alleged obligation will likewise collapse. The possibility of obligating America to eternally rescue the Jews from new Holocausts through endless donations of money will likewise collapse. World sympathy for the greatest liars and swindlers in the history of mankind will likewise collapse. Europe's second attempt to establish a lasting enclave in Palestine against the will of the Arabs, similar to the crusades, will likewise collapse. And finally, the future Arabia, which will be unified and self ruling without Jewish, American or European occupiers and colonial powers, will develop irresistibly. This explains why the Jews and Jewish dominated media and politicians everywhere defend these (Holocaust) lies and repress the prophets of truth by all means possible." - Germar Rudolf, page 80 "Expert Report on the Formation and Detectability of Cyanide Compounds in the ‘Gas Chambers’ of Auschwitz," aka Rudolf report. source is page 39 of: http://germarrudolf.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ListPos1_e.pdf ...and he gets upset when people call him antisemite rather than impartial chemist & revisionist scholar... This man has had a history of using several different pseudonyms (like Ernst Gauss, H. K. Westphal, Dr. W. Kretschmer, Dr. Ch. Konrad, Dr. R. Scholz, Dr.-Ing. Hans Jürgen Nowak, etc.) to publish or peer-review his own writings (reminder that the one-time gas chamber denier and former President of the Austrian Chamber of Engineers, the Bundesingenieurskammer, Walter Lüftl, also wrote under pseudonyms, including Dipl-Ing. Werner Rademacher). I have to admit that Germar Rudolf is a tougher nut to crack than Fred Leuchter, given that we actually have someone here who saw the inside of a science faculty (the Max-Planck-Institut für Festkörperforschung in Stuttgart, Germany). His sob-story of getting into trouble with German hate speech laws aside, Rudolf is, together with Carlo Mattogno the world's leading active holocaust denier, in that he has actually written and presented lots of material that builds on Leuchter and seems more convincing (to a layman) rather than point-blank Jew-hatred, witness-shaming and logical fallacies as is customary with the bulk of deniers on the internet. Keep in mind that Germar Rudolf did not travel to Auschwitz, do the examination and write the Rudolf Report out of selfless, pure academic interest, but because similar to Leuchter working for Zundel's defense, Rudolf did it for the legal defense of Otto Ernst Remer, so the intent is clear: this was not a neutral "scientist" pursuing academic curiosity in his spare time, but someone involved in the defense of an actual, real Altnazi. His Rudolf report is currently hailed as the pinnacle of revisionist science. You can find the report here: http://holocausthandbooks.com/dl/02-trr.pdf Note how it is a 467 page tome of detailed tables, diagrams, equations, and accompanying images. Someone who isn't in, or graduated from, STEM and a holocaust historian at the same time, will be in no position to be able to spot the errors on his own accord, since the expanded Rudolf Report uses both chemistry and history. Doubtless, he will be overwhelmed, and would consider that no dimwitted man (a lack of intelligence is, after all, the stereotype of Neo-Nazis) could have written this, therefore there must really be some truth to this. In reality, the majority of the Rudolf report isn't even about the science regarding the gas chambers. In fact, this isn't even the original Rudolf report, but an edited version including many portions dedicated to revisionist history to "provide context". Along with these, it also contains a regurgitation of highly selective references to how things work outside Auschwitz, and only once all of that has been mentioned, to then test Auschwitz for the principles established earlier. The fact that Germar Rudolf set out to simply and effectively prove that science alone can expose "the holohoax" but has now converted himself to the approach of a regular 'revisionist historian', i.e. having to add everything else other deniers have come up with is proof that science itself cannot refute the reality of homicidal gassing at Auschwitz. In scope, the Krakow Institute for Forensic Research (KIFR)'s report, "A Study of the Cyanide Compounds Content In The Walls Of The Gas Chambers in the Former Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps" by Jan Markiewicz, Wojciech Gubala, Jerzy Labedz of the Institute of Forensic Research, Cracow" seems truly pathetic by initial comparison: https://archive.is/wy5g ...but that is exactly the scientific core to what testing the gas chamber walls of Auschwitz can be reduced to. Rudolf's 400 page rambling is the house of cards necessary to defend HIS intepretation of the same forensic testing the KIFR did. And the KIFR's conclusion, despite similar results (far less HCN in the gas chamber walls compared to the delousing chamber) nevertheless refuted Rudolf. But it wasn't just them. Germar Rudolf has also been refuted (among others) by a fellow chemist, albeit with a higher degree: Dr. Richard Green who seems to make a habit of naming and shaming Rudolf's rape of the scientific method: https://web.archive.org/web/20050830124922/http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/not-the-science/ If the link is dead, it's "Chemistry is Not the Science: Rudolf, Rhetoric and Reduction". In the Prussian Blue section. I have already presented more arguments and links that expose Rudolf's tomfoolery regarding cyanide chemistry, though I haven't talked much about vapor pressure which is in the link above. Jamie McCarthy and Josef Bailer have also addressed Rudolf's "science". In fact, in August 1998, Germar Rudolf himself conceded that chemistry alone cannot refute the Holocaust, which pretty much dealt a staggering blow to all those deniers who relied on him and believed the scientific method was the be-all, end-all means with which "the holocaust narrative" could be factually disproven once and for all, without having to bother with elaborate historiographic methods. As already provided in the Prussian Blue section of this blog, these are links to the papers that debunk the Rudolf report: http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/blue/ http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/cyanide/cyanide.002 http://www.nizkor.org/features/techniques-of-denial/blue.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140704024940/http://holocaust-history.org/irving-david/rudolf/affweb.pdf Of course Rudolf has responded to these. And of course Dr. Green has responded to Rudolf's response and Rudolf has subsequently responded to Dr. Green's response to Rudolf's response to Dr. Green's original response to Rudolf's claims and so on and so forth. Feel free to spend weeks reading all their available correspondence, but to me, perhaps the most important sentence in the Rudolf Report is the following sentence: "All of the above makes prediction with certainty of the quantities of cyanide which one might have expected to find in the masonry of the alleged 'gas chambers' impossible." - Rudolf Report, Limits of the Chemical Method, Ch. 8.4.6. What this means, is the holocaust revisionists' brightest (and only) scientist walked into Auschwitz expecting to find levels of Iron Blues in a "homicidal quantity" he based on lots of woulda-coulda-shoulda postulation of his own, one-man's worth of understanding of science (and a hint of political motivation) and when he didn't find those levels set by himself, he concluded hundreds of thousands of people were not gassed here. That is, in summary, the original Rudolf Report. The revised one expanded to twice its size, is a result of the author noticing his science is not solid on its own, and therefore used the standard "historiographic methods" of other holocaust revisionists to flesh out his report, which is quite self-defeating, to put it in plain words. Piggybacking on his success and respect among holocaust deniers, a finding falsely attributed to Germar Rudolf is a hoax document supposedly authored by one "Dr. Germar Rudolf". It titles "OFFICIAL GERMAN RECORD OF PRISONERS IN AUSCHWITZ CONCENTRATION CAMP MAY 1940 THROUGH DECEMBER 1944" The hoax can be found here: http://www.heretical.com/miscella/rudolf.html Germar Rudolf was already contacted about this fraud and replied: ”the article 'Official German Record of Prisoners in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, May 1940 through December 1944,' accredited to a 'Dr. Germar Rudolf' was not authored by me. Actually, I have not contributed anything to that paper. In addition, I have never used a doctor title for anything which was published with my consent under my real name, because that would be fraudulent, as I do not possess a doctor title. The paper was written by Peter Stahl, aka Gregory Douglas. I was in frequent contact with him in 2000-2004, but had a major falling out with him in 2002/2003. He once offered me the files/microfilms he claims to have containing the figures published in this paper. I do not remember why I didn’t get/obtain them. I probably had other more pressing issues and didn’t exactly trust the guy anymore at that point.” source: https://rodoh.info/forum/viewtopic.php?p=51162 The figures are fakes because the archive named, "Russian Central Archives, Central State Archives", does not exist and never did through the 1990s or 2000s. The Russian archives were renamed the State Archive of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR, Gosudarstvennoi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii or GARF. It houses the records of the Extraordinary State Commission, whose fond number is 7021. The other major archive holding captured German records is the special archive, or Osobyi Arkhiv. This was renamed the Russian State Military Archive or Rossiiskoi Gosudarstvennoi Voennyi Arkhiv or RGVA. Although the Russians have microfilmed some of their files, this would not result in the existence of any of the numbers given such as 'rolls 281-286'. Further confirmation that the figures are simply made up can be found in the fact that the figures for numbers of prisoners registered by year and by month do not even vaguely match the numbers reconstructed from all other sources by the Auschwitz Museum. Overturning that research effort, which rests on countless transport lists, and the knowledge of registration numbers issued on specific days which can be corroborated from several directions and several sources, is not something that can be done by merely asserting a table of made up figures. The work is also sloppy when it claims that "The number of Hungarian Jews claimed sent to Auschwitz during May-October 1944 in Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, New York (1975) is 450,000; in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, New York (1985) it is 180,000." Hilberg said no such thing; he used the known German reports from Hungary to specify that 437,000 deportees were sent to Auschwitz. Why the author decided to simply make up these statistics is beyond me. They do not make any sense in relation to all other known sources, and not one leading holocaust denier such as Carlo Mattogno or Juergen Graf has cited Kreig's brochure or acknowledged these figures. As for the writer of this, Peter Stahl, this is what Irving had to write about his so called document: “Stahl/Douglas has shown nobody anything original, whatever, whenever. No films, no documents. Just promises upon promises for decades. A true thief and forger “. — David Irving, April 26, 1998 http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/Peter_Stahl/diary_extracts.html more fun regarding how Peter Stahl has tried to fool other deniers: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-german&m
Mattogno likes to introduce himself as a linguist, a researcher and a man of international note in the field of history. A person who has dedicated his life to historical revisionism. While the suit and tie might give off an air of professionalism, the fact remains that he is associated with neither a university nor any reputable organization. Nor does he hold any degree I am aware of. And so far I am still unable to tell whether this man ever worked a day in his life. Chances are, his wife has a job while he is at home typing up his upteenth novel. Yet he would have us believe he is a scholar of international importance. The only organization he is affiliated with is the Institute for Historical Review. As we are by now well aware, the institute is devoted to denying the intent, scope, mass civilian shooting, medical experimentation, deliberate mistreatment such as torture, and homicidal gas chamber aspects of the Holocaust. Mattogno is a lying shyster and anybody who takes the time to look this up will find plenty of instances where this has occurred, to then be able to conclude that Carlo Mattogno's standard method of refuting holocaust scholars is by lying about their credibility. I . e. he builds a strawman that a certain holocaust historian is not to be taken seriously, to then be able to escape the responsibility of refuting all his works. One such example is found here: http://www . skepticforum . com/viewtopic . php?f=39&p=575424 Mattogno, among other things, also claims expertise on the cremation process and boasts about having researched it for decades. Studies of the crematory ovens have to confront and solve two problems, what Mattogno calls "thermotechnical problems": capacity and yield. Capacity is the number of corpses cremated within a time frame. Yield is the relation between heat produced and used. More to the point, it is the relation between amount of fuel needed to heat the oven to the degree needed for consumption. Mattogno says Jean-Claude Pressac did not scientifically examine either of these two problems while doing his study. He therefore could not have come to the conclusions he did, which are as follows: The Auschwitz oven muffle had a capacity of 30 to 36 corpses per day. The ovens were used approximately 21 hours per day. Realistically speaking, the three double-muffle ovens had an average capacity of 200 to 250 corpses per day. The capacity of the 5 triple-muffle ovens at Krema II and III each, was 800-1000 corpses per day each. The capacity of the two eight-muffle ovens installed in Kremas IV and V at Birkenau was 500 corpses per day each. Cremations lasted approximately forty minutes. Therefore the total capacity of the crematories at Auschwitz-Birkenau was 4,156 per day starting in March 1943. To Mattogno, these figures are completely without technical proof. Concerning the capacity and attacking Pressac’s citation of a Topf firm letter, he says Pressac had no understanding of the content of the letter. He states the rate of 30 to 36 corpses a day, taking 40 minutes to burn in one oven on average, could only be obtained under optimal conditions with the aid of an intake draft system. The oven’s typical limit of efficiency for adult corpses was 60 minutes when you count principal combustion plus the post-combustion which lasted 20 minutes. Mattogno says the aforementioned figures which Pressac is using don't apply to Auschwitz because they are based on a model called the "Gusen Model", therefore, when Pressac was applying them to the ovens at Auschwitz, he was doing so theoretically. The capacity of the eight chambered ovens is actually more like 756 copses per day, so Pressac's estimate of 800 to 1000 is technically errant. What is Matagno's main point through all of this is that since Pressac's information has technical faults, then we should ignore his study as it is incorrect. Mattogno then attacks the figures of the estimated number of people who lost their lives at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Again, he returns to belaboring the point of crematory capacity in his supposition of the reality of gassings. He bases this part of his argument on the apparent lack of an efficient draft intake system in the ovens at Auschwitz. For this reason, he only allows 20 hours of operation (a point he repeatedly makes), the operation time is further reduced by the need for the air to clear. Therefore, it is his point that the actual capacity of the entire complex is only 1,040 corpses per day, approximately 3000 less than Pressac's estimate. Next, he attempts to explain the reason for the gas chambers. During the summer of 1942, a typhus epidemic had descended on the camp. The decimation in the male sector alone in the first weeks of August was 4,113. Therefore the ovens were established on the order of Himmler, to deal with the deaths due to the typhus outbreak and the expected increase in the POW population who would ultimately die from the disease. The ovens were not there as result of any homicidal gassings, according to Mattogno. Pressac asserted that Zyklon B was the ingredient used for extermination. Though he recognizes that Zyklon B was used for delousing purposes, massive amounts were ordered by the SS commandant as the major extermination tool. Mattogno rejects this assertion outright. He argues Zyklon B was only used for a disinfectant on all incoming prisoners. Mattogno says the amount needed for the final solution would have actually been much more than what was used. Of the total tonnage of Zyklon B which was ordered and used by Auschwitz, only 2% to 3% of the amount Pressac stipulates (95%) would have been needed for disinfecting. Therefore, it is Mattogno's reasoning that Pressac was, for all intents and purposes, fabricating his evidence. It is important to bring up Mattogno's argument against the figures relating to the deaths of the Hungarian Jews. Why he decides to I’m not sure because Pressac does not discuss the plight of the Hungarian Jews in his study. But since Mattogno raises the issue in his reasoning against the existence of gas chambers and crematoria, I felt it prudent to address his argument. According to Mattogno, of the 438,000 Hungarian Jews who were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, allowing for the deaths of roughly 28,000 old and infirm people who died from hardship, it is conceivable for him that 410,000 survived Auschwitz-Birkenau. If 410,000 survived, then the process of extermination that supposedly was in existence could not have been so. According to Mattogno, of the Hungarian Jews who survived the death camp, most either went on to live in either the United States or Israel, living to a ripe old age. Now that you have the basic arguments Mattogno has against Pressac, what does Pressac really say in his study on Auschwitz-Birkenau? The Topf Firm was, in fact, engaged to build the crematoria. They had the technical know how, the experience of qualified personnel. By 1941 there would be an exceptionally close relationship growing between the camp command structure, the Zentralbauleitung, and the firm. The architect of the ovens whose correspondence forms evidence for Pressac’s argument, was a regular guest at the camp. Kurt Prüfer designed the entire system from gas chamber to the inner workings of the crematoria. When the system needed to be expanded, he showed them how. When the smokestack of the crematoria began to crack from overuse, he made a special trip to correct the problem, and ended up making the system more efficient. Prüfer provided all the technical assistance the Nazis needed. He left a detailed description of everything he did. For Auschwitz, they would incorporate what were then considered new innovations to facilitate the task of the crematoria. The ovens had to be fueled by coke. The older systems fueled by oil had to be phased out due to the rationing that had been necessitated in Germany by the war. This new coke firing system would need a special ventilation system incorporated into the roof of the ovens in order to handle the added time needed to burn the amount corpses they would have to for the final solution. The designers of the system realized they needed to increase the size of the ventilators in conjunction with the rest of the system. It was decided the number of ventilators in each oven would be increased from 2 to 3. This would provide enough intake of air to create what they called forced draft, a system that took in air in an exponentially greater rate to facilitate consumption, and move the smoke faster into the stack which served the entire crematorium. For example, the crematoria that were to built at Birkenau, were to have a 66% increase in their ventilation capacity. This would mean they would have the capacity to move 8,000 cubic meters of air through the ovens in one hour. It was on-line and functioning by the summer of 1943. To further add credence to Pressac’s argument, I though it might be a good idea to get another scholar's point of view. I decided on Franciszek Piper. Piper states the first of the prisoners gassed by Zyklon B were 600 Soviet prisoners of war, who met their deaths in the summer of 1941. The resulting test gassing pointed to Zyklon-B as the most likely agent to perform the job at hand. Corroborating Pressac on his analysis, Piper states that in the months of 1942, the gassing operation was extended to Birkenau. This was caused by the small capacity of the Krema I gas chamber at the main camp, the Stammlager, and the difficulties the SS was having in camouflaging it. The expansion at Birkenau was a move that was the direct result of the Nazi decision to exterminate European Jewry. Initially, the victims were gassed in farmhouses ridded of their inhabitants and converted into gas chambers. As I have already stated, Mattogno puts forth the theory that the majority of the Hungarian Jews survived Auschwitz. I will now attack that theory using a study by historian Randolph Braham. According to Braham, the Hungarian Jews represent a unique aspect of the Holocaust. The reason being, they remained relatively well off and cohesive until the Nazis occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. There were more than 800,000 Hungarian citizens of Jewish faith in 1944. Protected by their government, an ally of Germany, they believed they would be safe from persecution. After German occupation in the late stages of the war, this large community was subjected to the most ruthless, concentrated and swift destruction process in the entire war. Within a few months, all of the Jews in Hungary had, for the most part, been sent to concentration camps, the majority of which went to Auschwitz. To ensure the orderly deportation, Hungary was divided into six zones. Accompanied by Hungarian police and SS, special "civilian officials", anti-Semitic Hungarian citizens who volunteered for the task, the roundup began on April 16, 1944. Their first destination were ghettos, a little less than one month from when the Germans occupied the country. After many days in the ghetto, many were relived they were leaving, lulled by the rumors the SS spread which led them to believe they were going to work farms for the remainder of the war. They arrived in Auschwitz on May 16. These were the first Jewish citizens of Hungary who entered the death camp. Now, here are the real figures for what happened to the Hungarian Jews: Of approximately 438,000 Hungarians who were deported to Auschwitz from May 19 to July 9, 1944, only about 10% were determined to be fit for labor. Not the other way around as Mattogno’s reverse logic would like us to believe. Of this minority who weren't gassed, some remained in Auschwitz-Birkenau but the remainder and the vast majority were sent to other camps in the Nazi dominion, the largest going to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen. Most of those who were sent to these camps did not survive to see liberation in April and May 1945. They most assuredly did not live to emigrate to Israel and the United States. So how do we know so much about these late stage deportations? The reasons are that both the Germans and the Hungarians prepared detailed reports on the progress of the liquidation process and especially those who went to Auschwitz. The completion of operations for northern Hungary was reported on June 30. Following the completion of this zone, the number of deportees had risen to 340,162. After the southern part had been rid of its Jews, that number rose to 381,661. After the final deportations, 437,402 Jews had been taken to their final destination. In this analysis of Mattogno’s argument against the existence of the gas chambers, I have seen the demented effort of one man to cast doubt on the horrifying reality of the Holocaust. Mattogno, through clever jargon, rewording of facts, and belaboring his fraudulent points over and over, would have us believe the single most devastating event in Jewish history did not happen. Since, according to Mattogno, Pressac’s study is incorrect, then all accepted beliefs of Auschwitz must also be wrong. This includes the fate of the Hungarian Jews, of which, he would have us believe the vast majority survived the war. Something he states as fact, without offering any solid proof. Mattogno is an idiot. A lackey of the Institute For Historical Review. He offers no counter-evidence for his arguments. He thinks that by cleverly rewording the facts and figures, and bombarding the reader with endless amounts of graphs that only convince a layman, he can trick people into believing Auschwitz was not the death camp it was. If Auschwitz was not the final destination for so many helpless European Jews, then by his reasoning, its conceivable the Nazis never enacted the plan they called "The Final Solution". Carlo Mattogno has authored a whole host of other books. Arguably, more than any other holocaust denier has ever written. Worry not, if you want to waste your life reading his books, and then reading refutations to his books, I can only point you toward the Holocaust Controversies team who put up with his ramblings. And then you will have the pleasure of seeing him getting furious and writing refutations to those refutations, and the HC team working on refutations to his refutation of their refutation of his refutation of holocaust historiography. Enjoy.
The world's focal point of holocaust revisionism since 1978 has been the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in California. Its main propaganda organs were the quarterly Journal of Historical Review (JHR) and the bi-monthly IHR Newsletter. The 29 members of the editorial staff and board came not only from the US, but also from Germany (Udo Walendy, Wilhelm Stäglich, Georg Franz Willing), France (Robert Faurisson and Henri Roques), Argentina (W. Beweraggi-Allende), Australia (John Bennet), Spain (Enrique Aynat), Italy (Carlo Mattogno), and Japan (Hideo Miki). David Irving (Britain), Ernst Zündel (Canada), Fred Leuchter, Arthur Butz, Bradley Smith, Jürgen Graf (Switzerland), Fritz Berg, John C. Ball, David Cole, and Radio Islam founder Ahmed Rami (Moroccan-Swede) are just some who have attended conferences and/or contributed to publications of the IHR. The JHR became a tribunal for holocaust deniers around the world. The activities of the Institute, headed by the historian (!) and current director Mark Weber, have been curtailed in recent years by financial problems. Publication of the JHR ceased in 2002, and the Bulletin now appears only in an online edition. The IHR has had a long history of organizing annual revisionist congresses presenting the latest “achievements” in the field of denying Nazi genocide. Wolf Rudiger Hess, the son of Hitler’s chosen deputy, Rudolf Hess, addressed the October 1992 eleventh congress as guest of honor. In 2001, Eric Owens, a former employee, alleged that Mark Weber and Greg Raven from the IHR's staff had been planning to sell their mailing lists to either the Anti-Defamation League or the Church of Scientology. The IHR today is loathed by many holocaust deniers. The reason for this is because Mark Weber is no longer interested in propagating revisionist material. Instead, he has chosen for the 'institute' to rather focus on anti-zionism and anti-Israel sentiments. Whether it is pointing out their human rights violations, taking the side of the Palestinians, or pointing out the presence of powerful Jewish organizations and people in the United States, Mark Weber's current focus is purely on present politics. When asked by deniers why his interest in "exposing the holohoax" has sunk so much despite him being the director of the IHR and a historian to boot, they finally realized it is because Mark Weber no longer fully denies the holocaust. Mark Weber now accepts homicidal gassings happened in the Aktion Reinhard camps, just like David Irving, David Cole and Eric Hunt. He goes on to say between 2 and 4 million Jews died in the holocaust. A classic "on the fence" guy, disliked by both sides. Here's proof of this via a skype interview he gives to the denier who interviews many other deniers, Jim Rizoli and his "League of Extraordinary Revisionists", around the 59:10 minute mark where it begins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cvCg4_wFD0 One of the most provocative public acts of the IHR back in its heyday was the public challenge it issued in 1979, offering a prize of $50,000 to anyone who could prove that there were gas chambers in Auschwitz. When a former Auschwitz prisoner living in California who had lost his mother and two sisters in the camp, Mel Mermelstein, came forth with such proof, the IHR rejeced his claims because it wasn't the type of proof they wanted. Mermelstein took the IHR to court. In 1995, he was awarded the prize and an additional sum in damages. Nevertheless, the IHR continued informing the world that Mermelstein had failed to prove his case. It still continues to declare this in its “66 Questions and Answers about the Holocaust,” which is widely available on the Internet. All 66 questions have been addressed and answered by Nizkor, a website dedicated to giving holocaust deniers the attention they are so desperately attempting to get from historians: http://www.nizkor.org/features/qar/qar00.html
The central, easily accessible body of denier material for the average consumer (aka not Carlo Mattogno's thousand page tripe) involving the Aktion Reinhardt camps is denierbud's "One Third of the Holocaust" series on family friendly mass media sites such as YT. What's interesting to note, is that this video is about a decade old, and you will only find re-uploads made by people who are denierbud's followers, rather than the man himself. The video is over 4 hours long, oftentimes you will find it segmented into many smaller parts, each 10-15 minutes long. If you are asking yourself whether a refutation to this video exists, or whether this is the ultimate redpill that has left mainstream historians baffled and unable to answer, well, you won't have to search long. The fine gentlemen from the Holocaust Controversies Blog have systematically destroyed the entire "One Third of the Holocaust" material part by part, and you can find their refutation here: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . com/2006/04/quick-links . html (scroll down to "Debunking denierbud videos and writings") While he was active (in terms of video making), denierbud had a history of not allowing debate in the comments section of his videos, routinely deleting anyone who dared challenge his theses. He even ventured into holocaust debating forums to link his videos and asked what the others think, but when they began to ask questions he started setting up demands for what kinds of questions he allows, and which ones break his rules. This guy ended up being a coward and a fraud who closed shop and achieved with his 'one third' what David Cole achieved with his visit to Auschwitz, namely making himself look like an idiot (well, at least to Cole's credit, he did expose 1990s polish tour guide girls to be poorly informed). This is why the HC team coined the famous "chicken challenge" - counting the days denierbud had been refusing to link to their refutations of his video. Other deniers (like Jürgen Graf, Germar Rudolf or Carlo Mattogno) have at least had the decency to acknowledge, link and respond to rebuttals of their work by the HC team. Denierbud eventually did respond. But he didn't run an active site the way our next hero, Eric Hunt did. In any case, it is still a mystery as to who he could be. His phonetic anagram is Dean Irebodd. He does have a somewhat active account, and is, in fact, the user "Carto's Cutlass Supreme"[1], over at codoh. He might be a gentleman going by the name of one "Mike Smith", living in the San Fransisco Bay Area. Indeed, if "Truth Does not Fear Investigation", why are holocaust deniers living in the land of the free, protected by the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution, still so elusive? http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . com/2011/11/interview-with-mike-smith-aka-denier . html source: [1]: https://forum . codoh . com/viewtopic . php?f=2&t=11631&sid=376897b755874ea9281ddc8660b67e53
There's one little detail many deniers probably don't know about their young, smart revisionist hero Eric Hunt whose videos grace Youtube to this day, and who had grand ambitions to open a virtual "holocaust hoax museum", whose domain is for sale today: Eric Hunt turned out to be a deranged psychopath who stalked and physically assaulted Elie Wiesel in the Argent Hotel in 2007. Eric Hunt was taken to court and spent 18 months in jail. His attorney, John Runfola, pleaded to the court that Eric Hunt was a "lost soul", "had bipolar disorder" and was mentally ill. These are the "poor victims of Jewish persecution" holocaust deniers like to admire: Convicted felons, conmen and terrorists. http://www . sfgate . com/bayarea/article/Jury-convicts-man-in-attack-on-Elie-Wiesel-3276032 . php#photo-2347749 Today, among other activities, Eric Hunt runs a twitter account happily retweeting stories that fulfill every stereotype one can think of that go hand in hand: contempt for people of color, beliefs in Jew-organized White Genocide, White Nationalism, "race realism", support for Donald Trump, hatred toward all things Islamic, hatred toward the Clinton administration, the list goes on...I daresay he might even browse /pol/. It seems he has deleted his twitter recently. Once again we witness what noble souls holocaust deniers really turn out to be, merely embarked on a purely academic pursuit of correcting the historical record, and nothing else.... But enough of the character assassination, let's attack the man's research, right? Except...there isn't any work of his worth discrediting, as Eric Hunt hasn't done any noteworthy original research of his own accord. All he does is parrot the claims made by other deniers long before him, e . g. Mattogno, and just presents them in a more palpable format for the gullible on youtube. Recently though, it seems even this spokesperson for revisionism, this 'errand boy' of older revisionists whose job it was to make the content of holocausthandbooks more accessible to the youtube generation, to have had a change of heart: Eric Hunt is now no longer a hardcore holocaust denier, given he cannot find a satisfactory answer to the question "Where did all those Jews deemed unfit for labor (babies, children, elderly...) end up going?" He wrote a 14,000 word essay denouncing his earlier work and explaining how he finally saw the light: https://archive . is/DoGTn The HC blog analyzes his change of heart, and the resulting panic in denier safe spaces such as codoh in the following post: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . com/2017/02/eric-hunt-is-no-longer-holocaust-denier . html
We have two David Coles on the internet, and they are one and the same person: One, the late teen or early twenties looking kid (a high school dropout, no less) in the 1990s who made a "documentary" where he filmed himself at Auschwitz asking poorly trained, broken English speaking Polish girls working as tour guides clever questions and then appeared on talk-shows like the Donahue or Montel Williams show together with CODOH founder Bradley Smith or the later IHR director Mark Weber to piss off elderly holocaust survivors with his smartassery, And two, the almost middle aged, greying David Stein (and alcoholic) of today - but with the same squeaky voice - who is also the author of "Republican Party Animal". Isn't it interesting how holocaust deniers always prefer to show you the 25 year old David Cole videos rather than current ones of him? Gee, I wonder why. Maybe because David Cole, like David Irving, like Jean-Claude Pressac, like Charles D. Provan, like Mark Weber, like Eric Hunt and others have realized some of their errors. While Cole still denies the homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz, he accepts homicidal gassings at Natzweiler-Struthof and Aktion Reinhardt as facts. You can listen to snippets taken from his recent interviews here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Tr19lvXmQ Here's an excerpt of what he has to say about fellow deniers getting awfully upset over him: "Since the release of my book, Republican Party Animal, I have received many emails from revisionists regarding my position, laid out in some detail in the book’s appendix, that Treblinka and the other so-called “Reinhardt” camps were places that functioned primarily, if not solely, as killing centers. To the credit of the revisionist community, most of these emails have been intelligent and supportive. But recently, Fred Leuchter and Robert Faurisson launched a campaign of name-calling against me, with Fred going so far as to declare that I am “not a revisionist. I have seen abysmal things written about David Irving and Mark Weber, due to what is perceived to be their “weakness,” their “lack of commitment to the cause,” because they accept that many Jews were killed at the “Reinhardt” camps in Poland in 1942 and 1943, and that many were also killed in mass shootings, especially in the occupied Soviet territories in 1941. “Hardcore” revisionist researchers like Carlo Mattogno and Jurgen Graf have pushed the notion that Treblinka and the “Reinhardt” camps were merely transit camps. Jews were sent there, only to be divided up and sent to other camps. Simple transit camps. This explains the camps’ small size versus the numbers sent there. I can kill that argument with one sentence. In their book “Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp,” Mattogno and Graf acknowledge the authenticity of the Korherr Report, which they correctly describe as “made by the statistician Richard Korherr at the beginning of 1943 at the instruction of Heinrich Himmler.” The report, they accept, contains “very accurate numbers of the Jews deported to the supposed extermination camps” (both quotes are from page 106 of the English-language version of the book). Among these “very accurate numbers:” Transportation of Jews from the Eastern provinces to the Russian east: 1,449,692 Processed through the camps in the General Government area: 1,274,166 Through the camps in the Warthegau: 145,302 Mattogno and Graf hold that these numbers indicate Jews sent through “transit camps,” on their way to other camps. But what these two gentlemen fail to mention is the sentence in the Korherr Report that follows those numbers (numbers they admit are accurate, in a report they admit is authentic): “The above numbers do not include the inmates of ghettos and concentration camps” (in the original German: “In den obigen Zahlen sind nicht enthalten die Insassen der Ghettos und der Konzentrationslager”). And right there, the “Reinhardt camps as transit camps” theory is dead. Killed. Finished off. Irreparably. My work is done. I’m off to Moe’s to have a drink. Anyone care to join me? Korherr makes it clear that the Jews “processed through the camps in the General Government” were NOT, following the processing, “inmates of ghettos and concentration camps.” Transit camp theory, RIP. Mattogno and Graf devote not one word to that sentence. Not one word is devoted to “The above numbers do not include the inmates of ghettos and concentration camps.” Odd, as that seems to be a rather key sentence. I could stop here. But I won’t. Because maybe you’re thinking, “okay, okay, they weren’t transited through Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec to other camps or ghettoes...maybe they were just set free! You know, to roam about in Ukraine or near the front.” Putting aside the patently ridiculous notion that the Nazis would take over a million Jews (people they considered sworn enemies and communist partisans) out of Polish ghettos, transport them closer to the front, and let them roam free, the Korherr Report still kills that theory, as Korherr enumerates the only remaining countries under Nazi control that still had, by early 1943, sizeable Jewish populations: Romania, Hungary, and France. He says nothing about a million Polish Jews milling about freely in Ukraine or at the front. The Jews “processed through the camps in the General Gouvernement” were not thereafter “processed” into other camps or ghettos. They “disappeared.” Need more proof? Here’s the most important part. In Korherr’s conclusion, here’s what he writes (I’ve kept one sentence in the original German): “From 1937 to the beginning of 1943, the number of Jews in Europe has diminished by an estimated 4 million, partially due to emigration, partially due to the excess mortality of the Jews in Central and Western Europe, partially due to the evacuations especially in the more strongly populated Eastern Territories, die hier als Abgang gerechnet werden (“which are here counted as departed”). These Jews are departed. “Evacuations,” along with excess mortality and pre-1941 emigration, constituted a population reduction in West, Central, and Eastern Europe of an estimated 4 million Jews. If the evacuated Jews were merely transferred from Poland to Ukraine, or from Poland to the occupied East, why would these Jews be counted as among those who are no longer in West, Central, or Eastern Europe? Why would their status be equal to those who have died from natural causes and suicide? Use your damn common sense here. It’s as clear as day. The evacuees were not, by early 1943, in camps or ghettos. They were “counted as departed.” Not departed from the Reich proper, but departed from all of West, Central, and Eastern Europe. Departed. Gone. Not in Ukraine. Not at the front. Gone. The “Höfle message” confirms the Korherr Report numbers. Mattogno, in his latest book “Inside the Gas Chambers,” mentions Höfle seven times in the book’s main body (Korherr gets two footnote mentions). Why? Because the Höfle document is merely numbers, with no pesky mentions of “diminished/reduced population,” and no argument-killing sentences about how “the numbers do not include the inmates of ghettos and concentration camps.” Mattogno can use Höfle and his transit camp theory is not jeopardized. But he has no answer to Korherr. Some revisionists will reflexively ask, “but where’s the physical evidence for the ‘Reinhardt’ camps? Where are the ‘gas chambers?’” I feel partly responsible for the fetish among revisionists regarding physical evidence. Yes, physical evidence is vital to study, when it exists. But if it doesn’t, it’s completely acceptable to build a case through contemporaneous documents. That’s not a “cop out.” Did the inmates at Treblinka eat? For a year-and-a-half, did they ever ingest food? Did the commandant ever eat? Well, show me the Treblinka stove. Did the inmates ever go to the bathroom? Did the commandant? Well, show me a Treblinka toilet. Show me or draw me a Treblinka toilet. You can’t? Then none existed. My sarcasm aside, the fact is, we all know that Treblinka existed. Studying the barren land where Treblinka once stood isn’t like looking for Noah’s Ark. We know that what we’re studying did exist. And we know that the camp was razed. The case for Treblinka (and Sobibor, etc.) must be made through documents. This is not abnormal in the field of historical research. My work in the early ‘90s with physical evidence was never intended to suggest that only by physical evidence can a case be made for a gas chamber, for a camp, for intent, for population changes. I did not study physical evidence to the exclusion of all other types of evidence. If you want to claim that the Colossus of Rhodes never existed, fine. But your “proof” can’t be “because there’s no photo of it,” or “because we can’t find any remains.” Some things did exist in this world, only to be erased by natural or man-made causes. Were the Jews at the Reinhardt camps gassed? Were the bodies buried and then dug up to be burned, or burned immediately? We may never be able to say with 100% accuracy. But, we can say that the “transit camp” theory is bunk. It holds no water. The Korherr Report kills it. Simultaneously, the Korherr Report, coupled with the Höfle telegram, coupled with the March 1942 Goebbels diary entries about liquidating Polish Jews, coupled with the December 1942 entry about having to “answer to some things” regarding what’s happening to Polish Jews “if we do not want to run the risk of becoming gradually discovered,” coupled with Himmler’s admission at Sonthofen about murdering Jewish children and rubbing the Jewish ghettos in the General Government out of existence, creates a good case for mass-killing at the Reinhardt camps. We don’t have a still-existing Treblinka gas chamber. What we have is documentary evidence that not only points to the Reinhardt camps as being terminal stops, but also voids the “transit camp” theory as a viable possibility. Mark Weber, David Irving, and I, have all separately come to the conclusion that there is good evidence to regard the Reinhardt camps as killing centers. If Fred Leuchter and Robert Faurisson wish to claim that I am “not a revisionist,” I would humbly suggest that a more accurate solution would be for them to refer to themselves as “deniers,” and reserve the term revisionist for people who follow rather than finesse the evidence. Two Postscripts 1) In a piece on Inconvenient History, Jurgen Graf attacked David Irving for his belief that mass murders occurred at the Reinhardt camps. Graf’s position is 100% dependant on the idea that if the Nazis did have four secret murder camps, the Nazi higher-ups would have been blabbing about them left-and-right to every underling and bureaucratic cog. Graf’s view is that the Nazi leaders had no secrets, and dispensed no information on a need-to-know basis. If Fritz Reuter, an employee in the Department of Population and Welfare in the Office of the Governor General for the District of Lublin, didn’t know the nature of Belzec, if he believed it to be a regular camp, well then, gosh darn it, it was, because the Nazileaders never kept anything secret. Himmler? Goebbels? They were like Wikileaks. Everything out in the open, 24 hours a day. If you actually buy that, you’ll buy Graf’s attack on Irving. When Himmler received the Korherr Report, he insisted that the term “special treatment of the Jews” be removed in the section regarding the General Government evacuees (through Brandt, Korherr was instructed to use the term “processed through the camps in the General Government” instead). Himmler himself told Korherr that the report might be good in the future for “camouflage purposes” (Tarnungszwecken), but that, for now, it would be for his eyes only. If Himmler insisted on “camouflage” in a report that only he was going to see, doesn’t that give some indication of the level of secrecy surrounding the “evacuations?” If he was that cautious with a document not distributed to anyone else, why would he be expected to scream the truth about the Reinhardt camps to low-level bureaucrats? 2) Ever since my position on Treblinka became known, well-meaning revisionists have been pillorying me with instructions to “watch Eric Hunt’s Treblinka archeology video. Watch it. Oh, just watch it. You’ll see how wrong you are.” I have never met Mr. Hunt, and I have no beef with the young unsuccessful elevator conversationalist. But I must confess, there was little of value in Hunt’s examination of the Smithsonian Channel’s Treblinka “excavation” show. To be clear, that Smithsonian program was nutty as a bowl of pistachios. It was empty, meaningless, overwrought, and just plain dumb. There was nothing of value in it. It should rightfully be mocked, and I’m glad young Mr. Hunt invested an hour-twenty in doing so. Hunt devotes a lot of time to the fact that many survivors – perhaps numbering in the thousands – were sent through Treblinka to other camps. But this is no scoop. As I point out in my book, Reitlinger made this exact point in “The Final Solution” in the 1950s. That possibly thousands of Jews were chosen for labor and sent on from Treblinka to other camps doesn’t negate the horrific figure given by Korherr for the Jews processed through the General Government camps who constitute the Jewish “population reduction” in Europe. Hunt’s takedown of the Smithsonian Channel’s stupidity is fine enough, but what’s relevant to the discussion here is what Treblinka actually was. Hunt “addresses” that around the fifty-three minute mark in his video. And what he says exposes him as either a liar or a man with no actual comprehension of what he’s speaking about. His quote: “We’re told the Nazis used ‘transited to the East’ as a code word to mean ‘gassed at extermination camps.’ Yet there is credible evidence of hundreds of thousands of Jews being expelled eastwards. For instance, this is a report from September 1942, of the Joint Distribution Committee providing medical aid to 600,000 Polish-Jewish refugees in Asiatic Russia.” This is pure fraud on Hunt’s part. The “report” in question (which is actually a fundraising appeal by the same “Zionist liars” whose “Zionist lies” Hunt repeatedly cautions us about) refers to Polish Jews who supposedly fled to the Soviet Union from Poland after the German invasion in 1939. This “report” with its 600,000 figure refers to Jews who fled long before the German invasion of Russia. Walter Sanning uses the Joint Distribution Committee claim correctly in his early revisionist work, “The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry.” He accurately states that the 600,000 figure refers to Jews who either fled from Poland into Russia, or who were “evacuated” and/or “deported” by Stalin into the Russian interior in ’39 and ’40 (Dissolution, pages 42 through 44, hardcover edition). That 600,000 figure is completely, entirely, 100% unrelated to the Nazis “expelling Jews eastwards” in 1942 and 1943. Does Hunt even know enough about basic World War Two history to understand the logistical impossibility of the Nazis expelling Jews to “Asiatic Russia” in ’42 and ’43? Does he know that it would have necessitated crossing the front? During the time of the Battle of Stalingrad? How much World War Two history does this guy know beyond “gas chambers?” Regardless, Hunt either lied about the Joint Distribution Committee claim, which dealt purely with Jews who either fled or were “evacuated” by the Soviets in 1939 and 1940, or he is simply too ignorant of basic history to understand that in 1942 and 1943, trains were not running from occupied Poland to “Asiatic Russia.” In any event, his “documentary” adds nothing but misinformation (intentional or due to ignorance) to the legitimate study of the nature of Treblinka." Also, see: http://hooverhog.typepad.com/hognotes/2015/02/a-reply-by-david-cole.html (author's note): this "Walter Sanning" David Cole fondly refers to, is a fraud even in his own work, whose title, "The Dissolution of European Jewry" is a deliberate choice of name so that it could be seen as the antithesis and "refutation" of holocaust historian Raul Hilberg's famous "The Destruction of the European Jews". This piggybacking is by the way a common practice of holocaust deniers so that their works get noticed more easily, e.g. Carlo Mattogno's "Auschwitz: The Case For Sanity" as response to Jan Van Pelt's "The Case For Auschwitz", or "Fail: Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories" as Mattogno and Rudolf's reponse to James and Lance Morcan's "Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories". In any case, Walter Sanning, including the 600,000 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union claim also mentioned above, has already been refuted, which I will link to in the next section. If you're still not convinced that David Cole has pretty much left denial, here you can see him destroy the recent denier Ron Unz in an e-mail exchange where he dismantles a denier's most common talking points: http://www.countercontempt.com/archives/5908
Sanning (presumably the pen name of one Wilhelm Niederreiter who passed away in 2014) is a classic example of shadowy revisionist figures who publish under presumably pen names and are never heard from again. A rule of thumb that will save you a lot of time in your reading career is before reading a book, always try to find some information on who wrote it, what credentials he or she has, and how the book was received. Most revisionist authors can only boast about the latter (in regards to their circles). Instead of attacking gas chambers, eye-witnesses, Nuremberg trials or "missing documents", as is the norm for other holocaust deniers, Walter Sanning chose a different approach: games involving census data. If he could prove, that there either never were as many Jews to begin with, or that more of them escaped the Shoah by evacuation than historians have shown were killed in it, then, so Sanning's logic, the holocaust death toll will be proven a hoax. His chief opponent in this aspect was to try and take down Raul Hilberg's weighty tome "The Destruction of the European Jews", where Hilberg meticulously traced and calculated over 5 million Jewish dead. Piggybacking on his title to get more attention, Sanning aptly titled his much thinner novel: "The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry". Apart from this publication, Sanning's activity in the revisionist scene remained minimal. I'm just going to take a bet and say he realized the error of his calculations. One author who has debunked Walter Sanning's calculations is John C. Zimmerman, who discusses Poland's pre-war demographics in his book “Holocaust Denial: Demographics, Testimonies and Ideologies.” Zimmerman notes that the Polish Census of 1931 shows a Jewish population of 3,113,900. He brings up Sanning’s attempt to show that Poland didn’t have enough Jews living there during the German occupation to account for some 3,000,000 dead: Sanning made the claim that 100,000 Jews left Poland annually from 1933, apparently citing the respected Munich Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, IFZ). Zimmermann however notes that the article in question deals with German-Jewish Immigration and only mentions Poland once. The article also fails to note where these Jews immigrated to. Zimmermann attempted to contact the Munich Institute and was never contacted back. Zimmermann notes that the total number of Jews from all countries that immigrated to the United States from 1933-1943 was 168,128 but that only 9,300 came from Poland. Sanning attempted to show that the difference from 4,228,039 Jews in the US in 1927 to 4,770,647 Jews in 1937 came from immigration, but Zimmerman notes that this was not necessarily so. Many were already immigrants who had come earlier and produced more children during this period of time, something that Sanning completely left out of his calculation. Official Polish totals for Jewish emigration placed the number at 109,716 Jews from 1931-1937. These numbers were published in 1940 and give a breakdown of the countries the Jews wound up in. There simply wasn’t an outlet of nations where these Jews could go. The Holocaust Controversies team has done a 9 part refutation of Sanning's dishonesties, see here: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2007/08/crazy-world-of-walter-sanning-part-1 . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2007/08/crazy-world-of-walter-sanning-part-2 . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2007/09/crazy-world-of-walter-sanning-part-3 . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2007/09/crazy-world-of-walter-sanning-part-4 . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2007/10/crazy-world-of-walter-sanning-part-5 . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2007/10/crazy-world-of-walter-sanning-part-6 . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2008/07/crazy-world-of-walter-sanning-part-7 . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2008/08/crazy-world-of-walter-sanning-part-8 . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2008/11/crazy-world-of-walter-sanning-part-9 . html On a similar note I can also mention the other revisionist attempt to tackle Hilberg: Jürgen Graf's "Giant with Feet of Clay". Except this book is even thinner than Sanning's 200 page novel, numbering just a bit more than 120 pages. Even if you put both books together you'll only achieve maybe 30% of Hilberg's book, and the majority of these pages is rather spent attacking Hilberg's conclusions rather than establishing alternate revisionist research. For instance, on page 41 of GwfoC Graf claims Einsatzgruppe A had 990 members, subtracts all truck drivers and women from the equation because they apparently cannot operate a gun, and then says it is impossible for this unit to have killed some 125,000 Jews over the period of 2 months, although each soldier tasked with killing some 130 people over this period of time should be no problem, given that the victims were unarmed and marched to their deaths in an orderly fashion. Jürgen Graf, in his infinite wisdom, of course also assumes no local militia assisted the Einsatzgruppen whatsoever in rounding up and killing Jews. For those of you having trouble imagining people offering no resistance despite death by firing squad awaiting them, I kindly advise you to watch some 1080p ISIS videos, especially of summer 2014 where you can see first hand how "Einsatzgruppen" 73 years later are still a feasible thing, and you'll have ample opportunity to see Iraqi civilians dig their own graves and line up to get shot. And this is just the more civilized way for ISIS to kill unarmed victims. Partial beheading along the drainage channel in a slaughterhouse and subsequent hanging onto the meathooks is where ISIS outdid the Nazi Einsatzgruppen. Of course, I can't guarantee you won't be scarred mentally as a result. Jürgen Graf also deliberately ignores the fact that in many, many cases the shooters were local auxiliaries themselves. He is ignoring Baltic auxiliaries like the Lithuanian Shaulists or in Latvia Arajs Kommando. And it seems to have also eluded him that Himmler ended up reinforcing the other Einsatzgruppen in Belorussia and Ukraine with SS Cavalry and Order Police (Ordnungspolizei), about 30,000 men. In the Baltics, Hamann’s Rollkommando for example had a core of 60 mechanized Lithuanian troops, and 100s more at his disposal. Arad (Ghetto in Flames) writes of “a force of several hundred soldiers” (p 172) available as needed to the German Einsatzgruppen operating across Lithuania. For more about how Einsatzgruppe A operated, see: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/lithuaniamurders.html credit to "Statistical Mechanic" and "Jeffk 1970" from the SkepticForum
The following section will deal with Aktion Reinhard, specifically Treblinka, the Nazi camp with the second highest death toll after Auschwitz-Birkenau, and also briefly address Majdanek and Mauthausen later. No evidence exists that would exculpate the Aktion Reinhardt camps as harmless transit camps, even though it should be plentiful if resettlement to the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories via the AR camps had taken place. There is no reason whatsoever why there should not be a lot of documentation about transportation from the AR "transit camps" to the East if such transportation had taken place, not only in related railway records and documentation pertaining to the organization and execution of the transports but also in the largely recovered files (ask Dr. Nick Terry) of the civilian and military administrations of the occupied eastern territories, who would have had to deal with these hundreds of thousands of resettled Jews. And while it is understandable that the Nazis would destroy incriminating documents related to a mass murder operation, there is no reason whatsoever why they should have destroyed documentation about resettlement via transit camps to the occupied eastern territories. On the contrary: not only would such documentation have been paraded as a means to counter wartime reports that the Nazis were massacring the Jews ("hey look here, we're not killing them but just deporting them to Russia"), but every official big and small who was involved in Aktion Reinhard(t) would have had a vital interest in preserving these documents in order to invoke them in his defense in case of being accused of war crimes. After Stalingrad at the latest the hypothesis of Germany losing the war had to be taken into consideration, and as early as February 1943, following the Casablanca Conference announcement of "punishment and retribution in full" upon Nazi Germany's "guilty, barbaric leaders", officials involved in measures against the Jews had to count on being held to account as war criminals. Later in the same year, the Moscow Conference's "Statement on Atrocities" made it clear beyond doubt what the Allies' policy regarding prosecution of and punishment for Nazi atrocities was, and that "all officers and men and members of the Nazi party" (not just the top leaders) would be held accountable for crimes they had been involved in. Under these conditions, the organizers and executors of Aktion Reinhard(t), from Himmler, Globocnik and Höfle down to the staff manning the supposed "transit camps", would have been suicidal masochists if they had destroyed documentation proving that they had been involved in mass deportation but not mass murder, documentation that was their life insurance. Yet no such documentation exists, and this alone should make "Revisionists" realize and admit how worthless all their theories and hypotheses are. What revisionists sometimes cite, are records of several thousand Jews departing Warsaw and ending up in places like Minsk (1000), Smolensk (2000), and Brzesc and Malchowicze (4000). None of these records prove that the railway lines went through any of the AR camps, i . e. Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor. Therefore, revisionists using this as proof the AR camps are transit camps are committing deliberate deception. Now why on earth haven't holocaust deniers been able to trace the route of at least over 1 . 3 million people to the occupied Soviet territories and have only been able to trace the route of a couple of thousand? Here's just another example of how Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf are caught with their pants down when they try to construct their house of cards known as "Resettlement to the East" by selectively using documentation as "evidence": http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2008/04/mattogno-and-graf-screwed-by-their-own . html
To get an idea of how the camp looked and worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V0yiNYCpoA Franz Stangl was an Austrian-born SS commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. Holocaust deniers like to remind us that it is not clear how many people deported ever actually graced the gates of the Reinhardt camps and how many ever left, let alone the names. But names are not required to establish that at the very least the 1,274,166 deportees mentioned in Höfle’s report to Heim of 11 January 1943 were delivered at the camps of Einsatz Reinhardt and that, except for a few dozen escapees, no one who entered these camps ever left them alive. The issue is simply that Aktion Reinhardt was not just a deportation and population movement. It was a deportation to places where the deportees were killed upon arrival. That’s what all evidence clearly shows, as there’s no evidence to the deportees having been taken anywhere further east – although there should be plenty of it if such had happened, as this involves over a million people. We then have the testimony of Stangl: «It must have been at the beginning of 1943. That’s when excavators were brought in. Using these excavators, the corpses were removed from the huge ditches which had been used until then [for burial]. The old corpses were burned on the roasters, along with the new bodies [of new arrivals to the camp]. During the transition to the new system, Wirth came to Treblinka. As I recall, Wirth spoke of a Standartenführer who had experience in burning corpses. Wirth told me that according to the Standartenführer’s experience, corpses could be burned on a roaster, and it would work marvelously. I know that in the beginning [in Treblinka] they used rails from the trolley to build the cremation grill. But it turned out that these rails were too weak and bent in the heat. They were replaced with real railroad rails.» Source of quote: Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, pages 173 and following. Holocaust deniers often point us to the testimony of Eichmann during the Eichmann trial, where Eichmann claimed that submarine engines were the diesels that gassed the Jews, an "amazing whopper if there ever was one", as they like to add. That was just a mistake Eichmann made about a technical detail he was not and didn’t have to be familiar with (holocaust deniers expect witnesses who were watching naked women and children heading into gas chambers and hearing their screams to have focused all their attention on how many cylinders the gassing engine had, for instance), and it doesn’t change the accuracy of his statements about the purpose of the camp he visited. If holocaust deniers could demonstrate that he didn’t know much about the deportations he was accused of having organized, that would be something different.
The 1944 aerial photo of Treblinka II after "clean-up". The new farmhouse and livestock building are visible to the lower left. The photograph is overlaid with already-dismantled structures (marked in red/orange). On the left are the SS and Hiwi ("Hilfswilliger" - foreign volunteer) guards living quarters (1) with barracks defined by the surrounding walkways. At the bottom (2) are the railway ramp and unloading platform (centre), marked with the red arrow. The "road to heaven" (Himmelsstrasse) is marked with a dashed line. The undressing barracks for men and women, surrounded by a solid fence with no view of the outside, are marked with two rectangles. The location of the new, big gas chambers (3) is marked with a cross. The burial pits, dug with a crawler excavator, are in light yellow. Holocaust deniers have often asked historians to provide ONE demonstrable documented fact about DEATH in Treblinka (i.e. the numbers from e.g. the Hoefle Telegram they wont accept as they cling on to the theory that Treblinka was merely a transit camp with free showers and cloth delousing for Jews being sent "eastward", wherever that meant) How about a complaint by the local Wehrmacht commandant of Ostrow about the unbearable stench of insufficiently buried Jewish corpses at Treblinka, recorded in the Wehrmacht war diary of the General Government, as evidence that there were so many corpses in Treblinka at the time of the complaint that they couldn't be sufficiently buried? There are also postwar eyewitness testimonies from Treblinka SS-men and the diary of a German soldier en route to the Eastern Front mentioning this nauseating stench of death, which could be smelled miles away. Would deniers accept those accounts as evidence that Treblinka was full of stinking Jewish corpses, so full that even the enormous grave pits (also described by witnesses and in a Polish crime site investigation report) couldn't keep the camp from stinking to high heaven? And what about an April 1942 commentary by a high-ranking German official about the "Generalplan Ost", in which that official recommended about solving the Polish question in the same manner as the Jewish question, i.e. by liquidating the Poles like the Jews? Those are just a few examples of evidence from the German side pointing to mass murder. Why don't you have a listen to how Franz Suchomel describes Treblinka, secretly recorded during the interview for the documentary film Shoah, directed by Claude Lanzmann? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R66iv3-lBE Suchomel participated in the Action T4 euthanasia program, in the Einsatzgruppen actions, as well as Operation Reinhard: In August 1942, he was transferred to the Treblinka extermination camp with the rank of SS-Unterscharführer. There he was responsible for handling incoming transports of Jewish victims as well as the confiscation and collection of valuables. In October 1943 he served at the Sobibor extermination camp for a short time. After Operation Reinhard ended in November 1943, Suchomel was transferred along with the rest of Globocnik's staff to Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral in Trieste. Here he was a member of Sonderabteilung Einsatz R (English: "Special Action Unit R"), involved in extermination of Jews, confiscation of Jewish assets, and fighting partisan activity. As the end of the war approached, the "Special Unit" withdrew from northern Italy at the end of April 1945. Twenty years after the end of the war, in the framework of first official investigations into war crimes at the Treblinka extermination camp, German authorities collected evidence of Suchomel's participation in the Holocaust. He was arrested on 11 July 1963. The Treblinka trials took place from 12 October 1964 until 3 September 1965 against ten defendants before the 3rd District Court of Düsseldorf. The charges consisted of the murder of at least 700,000 mainly Jewish people in the gas chambers, as well as deadly assault, shootings, and hangings of individual prisoners.
Maps were drawn after the war, on memory. Yet notice how they all have a similar layout, and make sense when taking a look at the aerial photo of the similarly shaped area. Treblinka II had two gas chamber buildings: an old, and a new. As Suchomel stated, the old one was not demolished after the new one went into operation, and instead served as a reserve in case even the newer, bigger gas chamber building became overburdened. For a detailed list and description of all maps, see: http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/maps.html And for the other AR extermination camps: http://www.deathcamps.org/belzec/maps.html http://www.deathcamps.org/sobibor/maps.html Unfortunately, no wartime photograph of the new Treblinka gas chamber building exists, though we have models.
From the undressing barracks, the Jews were led down a narrow, winding pathway referred to in the maps as "the tube" - surrounded by bushes, tree branches, and barbed wire. The SS men liked to call this pathway "the path to heaven" since it led to the gas chambers. At the end of the pathway, the doomed prisoners would have seen a large building -- where they were told they would be deloused after having their hair shorn. But once the prisoners were packed in and the doors latched shut, engine exhaust was pumped in and was the agent of murder. The doors on the sides of the gas chamber building were then opened and the corpses taken to huge pits located nearby. Special workers called "dentists" were given the horrible task of removing gold teeth from the corpses.
This photo is important because to the left of the excavator it shows the old gas chamber building of the extermination camp. Other, at first glance less interesting photos taken by Kurt Franz at Treblinka show the excavation process from a distance, but these are photographic evidence of Sonderaktion 1005, which I will address in a moment. It has also been possible to roughly pinpoint the position of Kurt Franz when he took these photographs, if you follow the link below: https://web.archive.org/web/20131010113041/http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/appendixd/index.shtml If you are interested in how a mass grave of 50mx25mx10m can hold 100,000 corpses, see: https://web.archive.org/web/20131010072048/http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/appendixd/appendixd2.shtml
The Aktion Reinhardt fellows had been involved with the mass killing of physically and/or mentally disabled people at the euthanasia installations during Aktion T4. The only “medical” expertise they brought along was their experience with and/or indifference to the murder of helpless human beings. Let’s look at some of their curricula: Christian Wirth In October 1939 to Grafeneck euthanasia centre. Then in Brandenburg, Hadamar (chief of registry office) and Hartheim (head clerk and chief of police until Summer 1941). In mid-1940, Wirth was appointed as a kind of roving director or inspector of all euthanasia institutions throughout the Third Reich. At the Brandenburg euthanasia centre, he experimented in developing gas chambers for gassing the physically and mentally disabled. Gottblieb Hering Chief of the registry offices of Bernburg, Sonnenstein and Hadamar euthanasia centres. Also served at Hartheim. Member of the NSDAP, and SS since 1943. Werner Dubois In August 1939 to T4. Bus driver in Brandenburg and Grafeneck. "Burner" and bus driver in Bernburg (from early 1941 until mid 1941) and Hadamar. As "burner" he also transported corpses and urns. Kurt Hubert Franz End of 1939 summoned to the Führer's Chancellery and detailed for service as cook in the euthanasia institutes at Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein and Brandenburg. Erich Fuchs In 1940 or summer 1941 drafted to T4. Worked as Dr Eberl's driver in the gassing centres Brandenburg and Bernburg, and was, as he expressed it himself, "an interested spectator" at the gassing of 50 mental patients. Was driver of a lorry, fetching food for the staff, for a short time. Heinrich Gley Came to T4 on 4 January 1940. At Grafeneck he transported victims. Served also at Sonnenstein. Josef Oberhauser In November 1939 to T4. At Bernburg as "burner" from autumn 1940 until autumn 1941. Also at Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Sonnenstein. Karl Alfred Schluch Duty bound to T4 on 13 June 1940. Served at Grafeneck and Hadamar. Erich Unverhau Duty bound to T4, where he worked as nurse from January 1940 - early 1942 at the Hadamar and Grafeneck euthanasia centres. There he escorted victims to the gas chambers, injected sedatives, ventilated the gas chambers and dealt with the disposal of the bodies and property.
In March 1942, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich placed SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel in charge of Aktion 1005. However, its start was delayed after Heydrich was assassinated in June 1942 by Czechoslovakian SOE agents in Operation Anthropoid. It was after the end of June that SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo finally gave Blobel his orders. The Sonderaktion 1005 (Special Action 1005), or Aktion 1005, or Enterdungsaktion (Exhumation Action) was overseen by selected squads from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and Ordnungspolizei and involved getting rid of the evidence of massacres committed by SS-Einsatzgruppen, Nazi death squads that had massacred millions of people including 1 . 3 million Jews according to Raul Hilberg, as well as Roma and local civilians in Eastern Europe. The operation, which was conducted in secrecy until 1944, used prisoners, Leichenkommandos (corpse units), to exhume mass graves and burn the bodies. Blobel began his work experimenting at Chełmno (Kulmhof). Attempts to use incendiary bombs to destroy exhumed bodies were unsuccessful as the weapons set fire to nearby forests. The most effective way was eventually found to be giant pyres on iron grills. The method involved building alternating layers of corpses and firewood on railway tracks. Afterwards remaining bone fragments could be crushed by pounding with heavy dowels or in a grinding machine. The operation officially began at Sobibór. The Leichenkommando exhumed the bodies from mass graves around the camp and then burned them, after which the workers were executed. The process then moved to Bełżec in November 1942 where it lasted till March 1943. The incineration at Treblinka began as soon as the political danger associated with the earlier burials was realized. In 1943, the 22,000 Polish victims of the Soviet Katyn massacre were discovered near Smolensk in Russia. Their remains were well preserved underground, attesting to the Soviet mass murder. By April 1943, the Nazis began to draw attention of the international community to this war crime. The Katyn Commission was formed to make detailed examinations in an effort to drive a wedge between the Allies (which did result between Poland and the Soviet Union). Meanwhile, the corpses that had been buried at Treblinka were dug up and cremated on Himmler's orders, who visited the camp in March 1943. The instructions to utilise rails as grates came from Scharführer Herbert Floss, the camp's cremation expert. The bodies were placed on cremation pyres that were up to 30 metres (98 ft) long, with rails laid across the pits on concrete blocks. They were splashed with petrol over wood, and burned in one massive blaze attended by roughly 300 prisoners who operated the pyres. The operation also returned to the scenes of earlier mass killings such as Babi Yar, Ponary, the Ninth Fort, and Bronna Góra. And if you come across one of those particularly moronic holocaust deniers still barking to show him mass graves in Eastern Europe because "none exist", show him this: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2009/03/photographic-documentation-of-nazi . html The Germans did not build or use crematoriums in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Cremation was done on makeshift grills/grates consisting of railroad tracks laid over one another, with combustible material placed underneath them to initially get the fire going. The exhumed victims were cremated at once with a mixture of straw and branches in between them, in batches of approximately 2000 corpses at a time, per grill, per day. This is attested to in Arad's "Belzec Sobibor and Treblinka". The Germans had 212 days between the 1st of march and the Treblinka revolt on the 19th of October to accomplish one of the most grotesque tasks in human history. So doing the math: 2000 corpses x 212 days = 424,000 corpses burned. Two grills could then burn 848,000 corpses and three grills could cremate 1,272,000 corpses. "Gley stated that each grate could burn about 2,000 corpses within 24 hours, so the capacity of two grates would be 4,000, that of three grates 6,000 within 24 hours. Comparison with the Dresden pyres suggests that these figures are realistic, even conservative." http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . com/2016/06/mattognos-cremation-encyclopedia-part-3_18 . html?m=1 The picture above shows such a type of open air cremation method used during WW2, which involved stacking corpses on rails. The pic above is a real photograph taken showing the cremation employed in Dresden after allied air raids. Is it so hard for deniers to understand the extrapolation that the same method was used in the AR camps although no photo exists? If you still insist that cremation using this method is impossible or highly impractical (possibly because you watched a denierbud video where he tried to grill some meat on a beach) then you should read this if you have an afternoon to kill: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2006/12/incinerating-corpses-on-grid-is-rather_18 . html Deniers have raised several other issues about outdoor cremation as well, from the amount of wood allegedly needed based on arbitrary standards they set "per corpse" using Hindu funeral pyres as an "efficient method" of cremation, to setting up strawmen like expecting to find millions of teeth in areas where close to a million people were murdered, buried, exhumed and cremated; the strawman being "cremation leaves behind intact teeth that should be found in the soil". All these issues have already been debunked: Why Hindu funeral pyres are a bad counter-example: https://www . hdot . org/debunking-denial/or15-hindu-funeral-pyres/ Why huge amounts of wood were NOT needed per body cremated: https://www . hdot . org/debunking-denial/or18-not-enough-wood/ Why human bodies CAN burn on their own: https://www . hdot . org/debunking-denial/or17-cremation-bodies/ Why you wont find millions of teeth: https://www . hdot . org/debunking-denial/or21-remains-teeth/
Pic related is an important document (you can find the original in the state museum of Majdanek) from Aktion Reinhard(t) that (among other interesting observations to which I will get to in a moment) explains why there isn't much photographic documentation of the camps Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec as compared to other camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau. First, the translation: ======== July 18, 1942 Undertaking. concerning the obligation of [name of person]......... as a person with special duties in the execution of tasks in the evacuation of Jews within the framework of "Einsatz Reinhard," [Operation Reinhard] under the SS Police Leader (SS- und Polizeifuehrer) in the District of Lublin. ........ [Name] declares: I have been thoroughly informed and instructed by SS Hauptstuermfuhrer Hoefle, as Commander of the main division of "Einsatz Reinhard" of the SS and Police Leader in the District of Lublin: 1. that I may not under any circumstances pass on any form of information, verbally or in writing, on the progress, procedure or incidents in the evacuation of Jews to any person outside the circle of the "Einsatz Reinhard" staff; 2. that the process of the evacuation of Jews is a subject that comes under "Secret Reich Document," in accordance with censorship regulation Verschl. V. a; 3. concerning the special regulations made by the SS and Police Leader in the District of Lublin in this case, with explicit reference to the fact that these regulations are "Orders concerning Duties," and/or "Orders and Prohibitions" in accordance with Para. 92b of R.St.G.B.; 4. that there is an absolute prohibition on photography in the camps of "Einsatz Reinhard"; 5. concerning Para. 88 through 93 of R.St.G.B., of the formulation of April 24, 1934, and the Regulation on Bribery and Revealing of Secrets on the part of Persons who are not in Official Employ, of May 3, 1917, and February 12, 1920; 6. concerning the paragraphs of R.St.G.B. 139 (Duty to Lay Information) and 353c (Breach of the Official Secrets Act). I am familiar with the above Regulations and Laws and am aware of the responsibilities imposed upon me by the task with which I have been entrusted. I promise to observe them to the best of my knowledge and conscience. I am aware that the obligation to maintain secrecy continues even after I have left the Service. ======== Note the several incriminating passages I have marked in the document. To begin with, if the "resettlement of Jews" really was a resettlement, then why, as I have already shown countless times, so many orders about keeping it top secret? Why can't it be freely spoken of? Secondly, the ban on photography. If the "revisionist scholars" are correct and Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor were transit camps, then photography of the transit process would have only shown rows of Jews disembarking from the cattle cars (nice and comfortable way to resettle people, btw...), getting a health inspection, perhaps their hair shorn, and so on before being sent to their final destination (excuse the pun). Given that we have plenty of photography of inmates with shorn hair in e.g. Auschwitz, why a need for secrecy here? What makes Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka so unique, so different? Third, note how the order also says secrecy is to be kept even after the Aktion Reinhard personnel have left service, i.e. they can't go around telling their pals how they oversaw lots of Jews transiting their innocuous little camps. And lastly, the fact that the AR camps had been completely dismantled by the Nazis before the Soviets even reached them is just more proof of their criminal nature. Why bother dismantling a lame old transit station? There are tons of old rail stations all over Europe that are in disuse. More nails in the coffin that AR camps were transit camps, rather than centers of mass extermination. Of course, the few surviving wartime pictures we have from Treblinka come from Kurt Franz, who violated this oath, but the contents of his private album were apprehended when Franz was arrested (some of the photos had been torn out and their captions erased, see Manfred Blank, "Zum Beispiel: Die Ermordung der Juden im 'Generalgouvernement' Polen", in: Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Prozesse. Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung: Möglichkeiten – Grenzen – Ergebnisse, 1971 Verlag C.F. Müller, Karlsruhe, pages 46/47)
One of the most horrifying testimonies from the horrors of the Holocaust was left by a conscience-stricken SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, who visited Belzec and Treblinka in August 1942 and witnessed (at Belzec) a mass gassing of Jewish men, women and children. Gerstein realized that as a witness, he was determined to expose what he knew to the world to stop the atrocities. After the war the basic facts of Gerstein’s report were verified by SS Obersturmbannführer Dr. W. Pfannenstiel before the Land-Court of Darmstadt in the Federal Republic of Germany, on June 6, 1950. Kurt Gerstein graduated as a mining engineer in 1931. In 1942 he was appointed head of the Technical Disinfection Department of the SS, responsible for improving the efficiency of Zyklon B. In the late summer of 1942 he was sent on a mission to introduce Zyklon B gassing into the Nazi death camps in Poland in place of gas engines. Eventually he risked his life to inform the Allies. He described how the Jews were forced to undress, the piles of shoes were allegedly 25 meters high, the women’s hair was cut off, and how the naked Jews were driven between two barbed wire fences to the gas chambers. Kurt Gerstein desperately tried to alert the world about the atrocities: “I see everything! The mothers, their babies at the breast, the little naked children, the men and women, naked. They enter into the death chamber, pushed by the leather whips of the SS. Pack well, that is what the captain ordered. Seven to eight hundred persons on twenty-five square meters. More than half are children …” Men, women, children filed past in ghastly parade as a burly SS man promised in a loud voice that nothing terrible was going to happen to them. “All you have to do is breathe in deeply. That strengthens the lungs. Inhaling is a means of preventing infectious diseases. It’s a good method of disinfection.” To those who asked what their fate would be, the SS man gave more reassurance: the men would build roads and houses, the women would do housework or help in the kitchen. When the doors closed, the diesel engine would not work but broke down while pumping its deadly carbon monoxide gas into the chamber. While mechanics worked to repair the diesel engine, the Jews had to await death, pressed body-to-body against one another. An SS officer, Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, looking through the glass peep hole in the door of the gas chamber, commented that the Jews were weeping “as they do in the synagogue.” Finally after two hours, it stuttered to life. “Up till then people were alive in these chambers .. another 25 minutes went by. True, many were now dead. After 28 minutes, only a few were still alive. At last after 32 minutes, everyone was dead. Finally, all were dead like pillars of basalt, still erect, not having any place to fall”, Kurt Gerstein later wrote. The outside doors to the gas chamber were opened and the bodies taken out. “One could tell families even in death. They were still holding hands, stiffened in death so that it was difficult to tear them apart to clear the chamber for the next load,” Gerstein wrote. Before the corpses of the Jews were tossed into large trenches, they were searched for valuables in the form of gold teeth or gems or gold hidden in the vagina or rectum. Gerstein was shown the processing of the dead: “With gold to the left – without gold to the right .. Dentists hammered out gold teeth, bridges and crowns. In the midst of them stood Captain Wirth. Hew as in his element, and showing me a large can full of teeth, he said: “See for yourself the weight of that gold! It’s only from yesterday and the day before. You can’t imagine what we find every day – dollars, diamonds, gold. You’ll see for yourself!” Kurt Gerstein forced himself to watch the final process. The bodies were flung into trenches, each some hundred yards long, conveniently located near the gas chambers. He was told that the bodies would swell from gas after a few days, raising the mound as much as six to ten feet. Once the swelling subsided, the bodies would be piled on railway ties covered with diesel oil and burned to cinders.
So Kurt Gerstein claimed that they (he and Pfannenstiel) witnessed a gassing of Jews at Belzec with a diesel engine and saw a pile of clothing looted from dead Jews that was fifteen stories high. Both claims, holocaust deniers point out, are absurd lies quoted as gospel without critical analysis by Holocaust historians, as well as packing some 28 people per square meter and making them wait 2 hours while repairing a diesel engine that then took 30 minutes to kill them. Of course, the trump card holocaust deniers deliver us to wholly discredit Gerstein's testimony is his claim of 25 million Jews. They go on to say he got the 25 million figure from a trade paper on fumigation, which he would have been aware of as an SS hygienic specialist. The 25 million figure refers to the number of persons during the war up to early 1944 who had their clothing and personal effects gassed by the commercial fumigant Zyklon-B. The paper was given at the Hydrocyanic Acid Conference of the Labor Committee for Room Disinfestation and Contagious Disease Prevention on January 27-28, 1944 by Emil Wüstinger, an engineer from Frankfurt am Main, and published in Gesundheits-lngenieur, Vol. 67 (1944) on pages 179-80. Of course Gerstein’s 25 million figure is bullshit. Everybody has arrived at that conclusion, both deniers and historians, which is also why you wont find this figure as part of holocaust historiography. But this doesn’t exclude the possibility of there being many accurate elements in Gerstein’s account, which is what this article will be about: rehabilitating Gerstein's account despite the numerous exaggerations he made. Remember: the man was trying to get the message out that horrendous crimes against humanity were happening in the AR camps. Gerstein’s claim about the height of the pile of shoes and clothes at Belzec and Treblinka may also be exaggerated, and his claim about a diesel engine being used, which he didn’t SEE but had HEARD about from Odilo Globocnik, not because it’s “absurd”, but because the evidence suggests that the engine used for gassing at Belzec was not a diesel but a gasoline engine. But none of that changes the fact that his description of the gassing of Jews from Lwow he witnessed at Belzec coincides and is fully corroborated with those of other eyewitnesses independent of and more objective than Gerstein, like Prof. Pfannenstiel and Karl Alfred Schluch. There is thus no reason to wholly dismiss Gerstein’s account. What holocaust deniers like to do in the case of Gerstein, is throw out the baby with the bath-water. But we're not done. Holocaust deniers like to point out that in Leon Poliakov's book "Breviary of Hate" (1951), reference for the English translation is 'Harvest of Hate', 1955, pg. 195, he quadruples the square footage of the size of gas chamber that Gerstein actually claimed so that the numbers of victims Gerstein claimed would more reasonably fit into the specified space: "SS men pushed the men into the chambers. 'Fill it up', Wirth ordered; 700-800 people in 93 [sic - Gerstein's original claim is 25] square meters. The doors closed. [...]" All it tells us is that it doesn’t look good on Mr. Poliakov. But it doesn’t change the fact that, as demonstrated by an experiment conducted by former holocaust denier Charles Provan, described under http://holocaust.skeptik.net/documents/provan_gerstein.html, Gerstein’s figures are not implausible. Provan used a group made up of two adult males, one adult woman, 4 children and a doll representing an infant, which corresponds to how Gerstein described the age and sex composition of a transport to Belzec. The only difference between Gerstein’s description and the test group in Provan’s experiment is that the latter consisted of well-fed Americans whereas the deportees to Belzec were Jews worn out by years of malnourishment in ghettos. But see the pictures for yourself: http://holocaust.skeptik.net/documents/provan_photos.htm Charles Provan managed to provide photographic evidence including measurements, of how 8 people can fit in a space of roughly 0.3 square meters (21" x 21" = 441 sq. in. = 0.285 m²). A room packed this way will yield 26 people per square meter. Anyone who claims this to be an impossibility defying the laws of physics has been objectively proven wrong thanks to the efforts of the late Mr. Provan and his family. So at the end of the day, the only things questionable about Kurt Gerstein's testimony, are his numbers: the height of the pile of shoes and clothes, perhaps the amount of people packed into a gas chamber (but remember - a woman carrying an infant and leading a small child by the hand, i.e. 3 people, occupies not much more space than she would by herself), and the time it took to kill them (in fact, as absurd as it may sound, the incident of the engine breaking down and the doomed waiting for their death can indeed be true, because when faced with doors that are secure enough, it doesn't matter if there are 10 people, a hundred, or a thousand in the room, their manpower doesn't add up to force it open, so once inside, they really cant do anything but scream and hurt each other as they await death, however long it takes because they don't have room to batter the door). And the reason why historians do not dismiss Gerstein's account is because the killing PROCESS is corroborated by other testimonies, such as that of Dr. Pfannenstiel, which you can find here: http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/ftp.py?people//p/pfannenstiel.wilhelm/pfannen.001, http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/ftp.py?people//p/pfannenstiel.wilhelm/pfannen.002 and on p. 173 of Kogon/Langbein/Rückerl et al, "Nationalsozialitische Massentötungen durch Giftgas" Final question to deniers in this regard: What would Kurt Gerstein gain by lying? What would his motivation be, in the first place? A one-man vendetta against the Nazi regime? A potential acquittal after his capture by allied forces for saying things they like to hear? Well, too bad he committed suicide in 1945. I think I know why: http://old.post-gazette.com/headlines/20010304provan2.asp
It's quite fun when you create an infographic "truth bomb" except this time it isnt one going against established history, but doing the exact opposite - blowing up some common denier canards about Treblinka in their own faces. One of these, is that some Australian dudebro going by the name of Richard Krege mowed Treblinka (and apparently Belzec located 270km away, too, how sneaky!) with a GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) some time in 1999 and found absolutely zero traces of disturbed soil beneath the ground's surface. Long story: Denier Gerald Fredrick Töben from the "Adelaide Institute" (basically an Australian IHR) sponsored the Australian engineer Richard Krege and a, as is alleged, "team of scientists" to hire GPR equipment and travel to Poland in order to definitely disprove mass graves on the site at Treblinka II. Some photographs were released of the expedition showing Krege using the equipment which looked like a giant lawnmower. It was claimed that raw and unprocessed GPR data obtained from a survey of the Treblinka camp was absolute proof that there were no mass graves at Treblinka, and that the "soil was undisturbed". Internet deniers whooped and yelled that there had been no Holocaust in Treblinka. The "Adelaide Institute" announced that they had mailed History University departments across the world with a report containing copies of the results of their findings. The report apparently also included a CD containing the data. However, no reports were ever received by any University department. All that really emerged in the way of a report were these statements by the "Institute" and a grainy scan that was released onto the Internet of the unprocessed GPR data purporting to be taken from the area of the mass graves and said to show no signs of expected disturbances. When Holocaust Controversies team member Roberto Muehlenkamp sent a copy of the scan to a person who actually understood the workings of GPR, one Dr. Lawrence Conyers, he stated that the scan contradicted the Adelaide Institute's findings, that it was ambigious and he then stated that the scan could indeed be showing evidence of soil disturbance at Treblinka after all. This amusingly threw into question denier ability to comprehend or understand what they had done. The "Krege report" as it became known did not prove to be the miracle weapon of Holocaust denial - it was never an actual report, and in December 2006 during the Iranian holocaust denial conference ("International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust")that gained international notoriety and negative press coverage, Gerald Fredrick Töben attended, but did not use this great opportunity to discuss the now Krege report and present Krege's results to the world. So yes, it's too bad Mr. Krege never published his report as a PDF (like the Leuchter or Rudolf report) so that people can read it and arrive at the same conclusion. Instead, what we have are the usual denier sites like IHR or Rense giving us a nice SUMMARY of Mr. Krege's Treblinka adventure, i.e. that he was there, did the scan, found nothing, and you better believe it, rather than making the report itself available for download. Sometimes, a small SCREENSHOT of his laptop with the GPR software is provided in the article, as well as photos of him dragging the GPR across a green lawn. Is this the height of post-Rudolf revisionist science? Until Krege releases his findings as a detailed science report with documentation of when he was there, on which day(s) he did the scan in which direction, along which route, and the usual amount of graphs and documentation a science report entails, and in the SEVENTEEN YEARS since he has been there he has not released the report, we can treat Mr. Krege's bedtime story with the same amount of trust that holocaust deniers treat the story of any Jewish Auschwitz survivor with. And finally, one fun observation of the constantly adapting, slimy eel that is holocaust denial is this: Krege's alleged findings (no disturbed soil in Treblinka) go AGAINST the currently accepted holocaust denier position about Treblinka, which is that it existed, but was a transit camp with the necessary buildings erected and dismantled upon the camp's closure. So if it existed, and there's nothing there anymore today, it means the buildings were dismantled, correct? And all of this leaves no soil traces for a GPR to pick up? So what is it, holocaust deniers? Did the Treblinka camp exist, or did it not? If it existed, why didnt Krege's GPR scan find ANY soil disturbance whatsoever? And if it didn't exist, you're back to square one of holocaust denial, which is fully doubting camps' existences altogether and making a fool out of yourself as a result. I thought you had crawled out of this position long ago? Too easy.
The source of the claim that diesel exhaust cannot kill humans, and therefore nobody in the AR camps was gassed, is one questionable "expert" going by the name of Friedrich Paul "Fritz" Berg, operating a site called nazigassings. His claim is that idling diesel engines produce fumes that are no more dangerous than e . g. cigarette smoke, and therefore incapable of killing people since they contain "lots" of oxygen. There are plenty of studies showing diesel engines are capable of killing when their fumes are pumped into an enclosed room. "The Toxicity of Fumes from a diesel Engine Under Four Different Running Conditions", by Prattle et al., British Journal of Industrial Medicine, 1957, Vol 14, p. 47-55, ...proves that small mammals can be killed by a very weak engine with only 6 bhp. The vehicle engines employed in the Reinhardt camps on the other hand had several hundred bhp. Furthermore, In earlier years, the study of carbon dioxide had revealed that additional carbon dioxide increases the speed of breathing. Because of this, several German studies had concluded that the presence of carbon dioxide directly affects the quantity of carbon monoxide absorbed by human beings. [Archiv für Hygiene und Bakteriologie, Vol. 102, 1929, pgs. 254 - 262, "Zur Beurteilung der Giftigkeit kohlenoxydhaltiger Luft"(Evaluating the Toxicity of Air Containing Carbon Monoxide), by Dr. Walter Deckert.] Hence we may conclude that Kurt Gerstein, one of the Belzec eye-witnesses, trained as a mining engineer, viewed the exhaust deaths of the Jews at Belzec as due to poisoning by carbon monoxide, more speedily absorbed due to faster breathing caused by increased carbon dioxide. This theory was known and current in Europe (especially in Germany) and the United States at the time. [Carbon Monoxide: Its Hazards and the Mechanism of its Action, by W . F. von Oettingen, Principal Industrial Toxicologist, United States Public Health Service, by Direction of the Surgeon General, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1944, p. 160.] See also the previously mentioned article, by Dr. Walter Deckert, which says, "With the same content of carbon monoxide, an air rich in carbon dioxide is more poisonous than air with the normal content of carbon dioxide, in proportion to the content of carbon dioxide. This is explained in a two-fold way: first through the increased breathing activity as a result of the stimulating effect of the carbon dioxide on the breathing, and secondly on p. 257, Deckert states that the carbon monoxide is more poisonous, the less oxygen there is. Therefore, concluding from the Carbon MONOxide levels of diesel exhaust the lack of its toxicity is an exercise in mental gymnastics when the denier doing so is using the oxygen content as a red herring (to fool the layman) and ignoring the elephant in the room: the vastly increased levels of Carbon DIOxide (e.g. 12%) compared to what is found in normal air (0.04%). I still have trouble grasping what would be the big deal about making diesel exhaust toxic enough by running the engine at a high rpm while restricting the engine's air intake, or why CO content would matter in a closed space crammed with people having little oxygen to start with, when that oxygen was displaced by the incoming exhaust and the CO2 content raised beyond survival levels. And finally, Fritz Berg and friends need to prove that the fuel used for the diesel engines in wartime Poland was of a quality good enough to not affect anyone breathing in its fumes. They haven't been able to. Rather, they show us modern commercials of a suicidal person not being able to kill himself in a diesel car, or some person breathing in diesel fumes in a controlled lab environment from a diesel engine adhering to modern safety and environmental regulations...talk about false equivalence. But all of the above is mostly irrelevant as we can make a good case that the witnesses who talked about diesel were mistaken (not something that casual witnesses to mass murder who didn't possess a technical background should be crucified for) and the gassing engine used was an engine running on gasoline. We know that, because all witnesses who either handled the engine or were otherwise familiar with it, be it at BELZEC (Rudolf Reder and the Polish electrician Kasimierz Czerniak, who helped to establish the motor room in 1942; described a petrol motor of approximately 200 or more PS, from which exhaust fumes were led away over ground pipes. Confusion with a diesel engine is out of the question because diesel fuel is called olej napedowy in Polish), SOBIBOR (SS-men Erich Bauer, Erich Fuchs, and Franz Hödl), CHELMNO (Walter Burmeister and Walter Piller, polish mechanics mentioned by German historian Peter Witte, survivors Mordka Zurawski and Bruno Israel) or the mobile gas van operations (Zalman Levinbuck, SS-commander Friedrich Jeckeln) ALL spoke of a gasoline engine. From TREBLINKA there are NO eyewitness testimonies of people who either operated or were familiar with the engine, but even there at least two eyewitnesses (Ukrainian guard Ivan Shevchenko and surviving inmate Oskar Strawczynski) expressly mentioned a gasoline engine. So forget about the diesel mantra - it's irrelevant. Citing mainstream sources still speaking of diesel is not a valid counter-argument for two reasons: one, the above paragraph, and two, as I have already shown, even Diesel engines can kill. Let me summarize once again, for the particularly dense: 1. Most eyewitnesses said nothing about the type of engine. 2. Those eyewitnesses who either operated the engine or were otherwise familiar with it, the people "in the know", spoke of a gasoline engine. 3. Some casual eyewitnesses, who neither operated the engine nor were otherwise familiar with it, mentioned a diesel engine (though there are also two casual Treblinka eyewitnesses, Oskar Strawczynski and Ivan Shevchenko, who mentioned a gasoline engine). So the preponderance of testimony mentioning the type of engine, and especially of knowledgeable testimony, is clearly on gasoline and not diesel. for more, see: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2006/06/why-diesel-issue-is-irrelevant . html
Some of the slightly less brained deniers throw the old submarine gambit into their argument why diesel engines are harmless. The argument they make is Germany used diesel subs and it didn't kill the crew... Of course, what they apparently haven't bothered researching is how diesel-electric submarines work. The diesel engines are only used while on the surface, the exhaust gases are released into the air. As well as providing power for the propellers, one or more engines is used to recharge the banks of batteries. It's the batteries that are used for the submarine's propulsion while it is submerged. For obvious reasons, the diesel engines are not used. Some submarines included a snorkel, which permitted the use of diesel engines when the submarine was at periscope depth. Unlike nuclear submarines, diesel-electric submarines spent quite some time on the surface - and only submerged for short periods of time, to attack or avoid a specific threat. Batteries have limited power and hence, run out much sooner (36-48 hours depending upon the submarine type). So there you have it. German diesel-electric submarine crew never ended up breathing the exhaust fumes of their sub's diesel engine, so the argument is moot.
Now that we've established gasoline engines (and therefore much higher CO content compared to diesel) were the most likely agent of death in the AR camps (though I personally don't completely rule out diesel engines myself, given that they are indeed lethal), the holocaust denier "Fritz" Berg chimes in with the other half of his theory in which he tries to discredit gasoline engines as well: Berg's idea (based on some medical literature he selectively quotes that show a link between CO poisoning and this phenomenon in about 70% of observed cases) is that the bodies of people who died due to CO poisoning turn a bright cherry red color, and the fact that none of the eye-witness testimonies mentioned this unique phenomenon (except for Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber in Auschwitz, or Nazi chemist Leiding in Sachsenhausen, woops) is proof to him that the mass gassing by engine exhaust regarding the AR camps & gas vans has finally been exposed as a complete hoax. Let us first begin with Henryk Tauber's testimony, shall we? (caps for emphasis) "We found heaps of naked bodies, doubled up. They were PINKISH, and in places RED. Some were covered with greenish marks and saliva ran from their mouths. Others were bleeding from the nose. There was excrement on many of them. I remember that a great number had their eyes open and were hanging on to one another. The bodies were most crushed together round the door. By contrast, there were less around the wire mesh columns. The location of the bodies indicated that the people had tried to get away front the columns and get to the door. It was very hot in the gas chamber, and so suffocating, as to be unbearable. Later on, we became convinced many people died of suffocation, due to lack of air, just before the gassing." source: Robert Jan Van Pelt, "The Case For Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial", page 197 Furthermore, regarding the gas vans tested at Sachsenhausen on Soviet POWs (see: "KL - A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps" by Nikolaus Wachsmann, professor of modern European history), the corpses were described as pink in the testimony of Nazi chemist Theodor Friedrich Leiding: "One day, I was summoned to travel to Sachsenhausen ... and there was a van, which was equal or like that, which I had seen in the yard of the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt. The number of men, which entered into the van, may have been around/about 30 ... The corpses had, as we chemists found out/observed the typical pink outlook of men, who had died of a CO-poisoning." source: http://www . nizkor . org/hweb/camps/chelmno/sonderdruck . html And here Dr. Leiding testifies again: “I was told that the people who had climbed into the truck were Russians who would otherwise have had to be shot. They were looking for a different way of killing them. We then went to another place, where we met the truck again. It was near the crematory oven. I can still remember that one could see through a peephole or a small window into the inside of the truck, which was lit up. One could see that the people were dead. The van was opened. Some bodies fell out; the others were unloaded by prisoners. Those of us who were chemists could ascertain that the bodies had that pinkish look which is typical of victims of carbon monoxide poisoning”. source: E. Kogon, H. Langbein, and A. Rueckerl, Eds. "Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas" Yale University Press, 1993, p. 54 What can we already establish? Deniers are LIARS if they say there is no testimony of pinkish red corpses. Now to turn to the question how frequently this phenomenon occurred among the gassed dead. Strangely enough, I find myself quoting a denier site (chances are, the article wont be there for long): http://www . vho . org/tr/2004/2/Provan159-164 . html Oh, I know why! It's because the author is our true skeptic, Charles D. Provan, reviled by deniers (because he was a born skeptic, managed to mingle with the denier scene, but then realized they are a bunch of tossers after all). The above article shows that CO poisoned victims have, in fact, a slightly higher chance of displaying cyanosis (bluishness) than reddishness. And neither of these ALWAYS show up. Furthermore, the corpses do not necessarily turn cherry red, especially when the victims have a compromised ability to oxygenate, which is likely to have been the case with Jews from miserable Polish ghettos due to anemia and other conditions related to prolonged malnutrition, compared to the corpse of a healthy, perhaps overweight, dare I even say obese person you are looking at in the picture above. "When the victim is anaemic the color may be faint or even absent because insufficient haemoglobin is present to display the colour." source: Forensic Pathology, by Bernard Knight MD, MRCP, FRC(Path), Barrister, Oxford University Press, New York, 1991, p. 507. Besides that, the victims didn't necessarily die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Suffocation as the incoming exhaust further reduced the already sparse amount of available oxygen by displacement from the non-airtight* gas chambers may well have killed a great many before carbon monoxide poisoning got to them. And don't forget how densely packed the victims were - if you have researched how many people have lost their lives due to being crushed in a panicking human crowd, I think you will realize how lethal an extremely dense crowd of people can be on its own. If you are so densely packed in a room that you can't fully expand your lungs to take a deep breath, well, you will asphyxiate before any CO or hydrogen cyanide even gets to you. See Henryk Tauber's aforementioned testimony for Auschwitz. For the AR camps, Dr. Pfannenstiel attributed the bluish tinge he observed on some of the victims' faces to suffocation, further underscoring the presence of cyanosis. But here's the real shocker**: Deniers have been asked to show us medical literature that asserts that this cherry-red discoloration sets in either at the time of death or shortly thereafter, so that it would be obvious to those opening and emptying the gas chambers, and the deniers have failed spectacularly, including our expert Fritz Berg. Instead, they refer to the coloration that has set in on cadavers hours after death when lividity has formed and settled, which is completely IRRELEVANT to the case at hand in e . g. Treblinka, as by this time the corpse would either be in one of the mass graves (Mid 1942 - March 1943) or already burning on the pyre (March 1943 to late August 1943). Now before some wise guy tries to remind me about the exhumed corpses, I'll ask him to go on a small medical literature errand and inform me how long this cherry-red coloring is visible on said corpse after it has set in. Days? Weeks? Months? Then we can talk about it still being relevant during the exhumation process that started March 1943 onward. And finally, let me also know how many Aktion Reinhardt corpse cremators survived and got to deliver a testimony. Because they, of all people, would have had the best chance to observe any kind of repeatedly occurring skin discoloration on the bodies they routinely hauled into the cremation pyres over, and over, and over again. Not someone who observed corpses from a safe distance. *it is extremely hard to place a chamber under a true (as in lab conforming) hermetic seal if it has corpse-removal doors that open the way they did in the gas chambers of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka according to the sketches (http://i . imgur . com/JAPJImU . jpg). Holocaust deniers create red herrings when they bring in pressure arguments stating the engines would fail, or some of the crazier ones, that the chambers' structural integrity would falter and they'd blow up. So when witnesses spoke of "hermetic seal", how do you think they arrived at this conclusion? Were they scientists who inspected every nook and cranny of each of the gas chambers, or did they rather notice the gas chambers being windowless rooms, and/or their doors the victims went through having rubber and felt linings covering their crevices (as attested to by SS guards/witnesses at Treblinka/Sobibor camps in their trials and by finding the felt at Belzec during the archeology), and came to their conclusion based on such observations? This does not mean the gas has no other way to escape. But for the sake of continuing the point, let's just assume it didn't. This still does not mean the chamber would blow up or the motor would fail, because it is not hard to overcome gas compression with a reasonable size motor....witness all the people who seal up windows and kill themselves in their cars. Air, even at sea level, has a reasonably high degree of compression tolerability. Gases are pretty thin.....simple physics. Think about how much you can pump up a bicycle tire, or fill a scuba tank, or even a spray can with gas without any of these exploding. The holocaust denier argument of gas pressure buildup can therefore be completely dismissed in either scenario. Any and all arguments regarding a "true hermetic seal" being present or not are therefore completely meaningless in any court of law. **credit to Nessie from RODOH So let me recap: Fritz Berg makes the case that death by CO poisoning usually causes cherry-red corpses, citing some medical literature and points out how AR witnesses do not mention this. I have compiled evidence that his theory is nothing but a rape of the scientific method because: - he assumes CO as the sole agent of murder when humans packed like sardines breathe in exhaust gas - he deliberately neglects suffocation, cyanosis, and this being correctly observed by witnesses - he uses a well-fed corpse that inhaled god knows how much CO to extrapolate his claim from - he cannot prove that cherry-red coloring sets in immediately / very shortly after death so it can be noticed before burial / cremation - he cannot prove that the coloring continues to show on the corpse months later even during putrefaction so that it could have been noticed during exhumation Gee, perhaps all this is the reason why no scientist or doctor (and in extension holocaust historian) take Fritz Berg's cherry-red ramblings seriously. He tried to catch holocaust historians with their pants down, but it backfired on him instead. Also see: http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . in/2007/10/bergs-big-lie . html http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . in/2011/12/belzec-sobibor-treblinka-holocaust_6507 . html
Another cornerstone of Berg's theory of how implausible the gassings conducted in the Birkenau and AR camp gas chambers are, is his notion that the Nazis could have just used one of the giant delousing chambers used to delouse railway wagons, like the one located in Budapest, Hungary or Sarajevo, Bosnia. Berg thinks that since the Jews were carted off the various ghettos in Europe by rail anyway, why not simply drive the trains into these gas chambers instead? Why take the Jews to some far away camp, have them disembark, kill them in separate, purpose-built gas chambers and send the trains back rather than killing them in these already existing chambers? A much more complicated procedure, according to Berg. So the Bergian theory of denial really boils down to "The Nazis did not do homicidal gassing using A because they could have done it using B which is according to my perception more effective" and can be therefore considered a kind of crude Occam's razor. Berg also applies Occam's razor in his other theories, namely that the Nazis should've used producer gas to kill Jews (even though they were volatile and a fire hazard for the drivers). Undue handling of these could easily have led the killers to poison themselves or blow themselves up. Another consideration speaking against the use of producer gas was that producer gas vehicles were needed to carry supplies on the Eastern Front, and taking any such vehicle out of frontline service and replacing it with an engine-driven vehicle would not have been a good choice regarding fuel-saving. Killers do not necessarily use the best killing method. So if the evidence shows that engine exhaust was used, the evidence is not faulty just because a "revisionist" 20/20 hindsight wisecracker thinks that he would have used producer gas instead. Same applies for Berg's other Occam's razor attempt, which is his bewilderment that a continuous "Kreislauf" air circulation system wasn't used in the homicidal gas chambers as was in the delousing chambers. What he doesn't understand, is that such a system isn't necessary to have HCN spread from its pellets into the surroundings especially when introduced in 4 separate locations simultaneously in a 2000 sq. ft. room with a low ceiling packed with panicking, hyperventilating people, many of whom died by getting crushed before a lethal dose of HCN even got to them. To answer why the railway delousing chambers weren't used, I can't think of a more stupid arrangement than clogging up the few railway delousing facilities that existed (which still needed to delouse trains, surely) with train-loads of deported Jews who would release the contents of their bowels into otherwise usable clothing, and soil the wagon floors, creating a horrendous mess for clean-up on however many wagons on the train. Not to mention that a single railway fumigation tunnel could only process several cars at a time rather than an entire train-load, so the cars would have to be split into groups, and then those not being gassed, wait. If forced to dismount from the trains, strip naked, and re-board the train to prevent clothes soiling, I think the shower story would no longer be convincing to the victims anymore. Besides, how much of the HCN actually penetrated the interior of these train wagons during such a procedure? And regarding the idea of leaving the train outside and just marching the Jews into the empty facility as tall as a cathedral, then one might as well build a smaller gas chamber and not have to waste Zyklon, which is exactly why the Nazis did what they did in Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Mauthausen etc. Furthermore, as the names Budapest and Sarajevo suggest, these facilities were located close to hubs of civilization. I think Berg missed the secrecy of the holocaust. Else Nazis might as well have built the extermination camps right outside Berlin, Warsaw and Vienna, rather than in remote areas of Poland (on a sidenote, while it was located very close to Lublin, Majdanek exacted a relatively small death toll and Lublin had even fewer inhabitants back then than it does today - it was anything but a hub of civilization). And lastly, keep in mind that the pictured facilities were not located in countries under direct German administration. Berg's argument also hilariously debunks 'transit camp' notions made by other deniers since one reason cited for his harebrained idea is that the Nazis wouldn't have to transport the deportees as far as eastern Poland; yet being sent so far eastward is central to the hypothesis of the other deniers who believe the deportees were sent hundreds if not a thousand km further east as Hitler "wanted them out of Europe". The Bergian theory of denial therefore is the exact opposite of "Judenevakuierung" to the East. This is also the reason why Fritz Berg is called a lunatic by many of his prominent fellow deniers, since he believes homicidal gassing of large amounts of people using Zyklon-B is perfectly possible - it just wasn't done in the places he thinks it should have been done. In fact, Fritz Berg and Robert Faurisson hate each others' guts! Berg also strongly dislikes Leuchter, but this is what Berg has to say about Robert Faurisson: "On technical subject matter, Robert Faurisson is hopeless! He is a kind of techno-retard locked into his fixed ideas about “impossibilities” [of mass gassings using Zyklon-B]. Unfortunately, so are many “revisionist” true-believers who seem to worship at his feet. Denial is their new religion. That may explain why holocaust revisionism is not far more successful than it is. No doubt, if I give the same test to "exterminationists"--the results will be better. No doubt, if I am clever enough and disguise my motives--most “exterminationists” will agree that the railroad delousing tunnels could have easily worked for mass murder. They will agree that those real gas chambers would, at the very least, have been vastly better than the alleged gas chambers for humans at Birkenau which they already believe in. Of course, since the Nazis really had such huge delousing gas chambers (on railroad tracks of all places), why didn't they use them? Why have such chambers never even been implicated?" - F.P. Berg To summarize: Berg is a proponent of the "Zyklon-B gassing, using railway fumigation tunnels" hypothesis. He expresses his denial by raising the question as to why Nazis did not use these huge halls to gas Jews who were bring transported across Europe in rail cars in the first place, wagons that needed to be disinfected anyway. Faurisson disagrees with him as the literature professor doesn't believe in mass gassings involving Zyklon-B because he believes the corpses would be saturated with poison that clearing them out of the chamber would be impossible (though Berg argues this is very much possible due to the ventilation system in the hangar). Just another example of deniers unable to offer a united front against historians and instead squabbling amongst themselves, only exposing & ridiculing each others' theories.
Just some documentation to discredit the denier claim that Nazi industry had no use for hair, and therefore the "hair story" is as much an absurd fairy tale as the "soap or lampshade story". Also, see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/4930165/German-car-company-used-hair-from-Jews-murdered-at-Auschwitz.html
In August 1942, Lorenz "Hacko" Hackenholt oversaw the construction and operation of newer and larger gas chambers at Belzec extermination camp, after initial gassings had been carried out in smaller chambers earlier in spring. Once the new gas chamber building with 6 chambers (3 on either side, divided by a corridor in the middle) came into operation, he put up a sign which said "Hackenholt Foundation" on the outside, with potted geraniums on either side of the entrance. I have also heard reports of the building bearing the slogan "Bade- und Inhalationsraum" (Bath & Inhalation room). Hackenholt also designed and operated gas chambers at the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps. Franz Suchomel mentions him in his testimony linked earlier.
Like Dachau, controversy exists among holocaust historians over the frequency of homicidal gassing at Majdanek concentration camp located in the ass end of Poland, near the nevertheless beautiful city of Lublin. It was one of the first Nazi camps to be liberated, on July 24th 1944, and early on the Soviets did indeed think of it as an extermination camp with a death toll numbering in the millions. This death toll, thanks to research by actual historians, was continuously lowered over the post-war decades to 78,000 today. As early as 1948 it had gone down to 360,000 (Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz). None of this was the contribution of any holocaust denier. Due to the poorer amount of surviving documentation compared to camps like Auschwitz, we really cannot be certain how people were murdered at Majdanek by which means, though we can speculate based on documentation (such as delivery shipments) and testimony that the agents of murder by gassing were Zyklon-B & CO, but the former obviously was also a delousing / fumigation agent. This is why some controversy exists whether the several surviving gas chambers at Majdanek concentration camp museum today were once homicidal gas chambers or delousing chambers, or both. I haven't researched this subject well, I have not visited Majdanek, I have not had a chance to see the available documentation or listen to the testimonies, so my expertise here is very limited. Oftentimes, the following image is presented by deniers as "the homicidal Majdanek gas chamber" and they tell us to note the window on the left or how there are door handles on the inside as well, and therefore the door "could be opened from the inside": http://forum . axishistory . com/download/file . php?id=156306&sid=b515581e1e818ae5b8a442a7bc5fdc0f Note that the doors are standard issue air raid shelter doors which came with handles on both sides. This does not mean it is impossible to lock them from the outside. The picture below shows how the door at the far end of the room actually opens outward, rather than inward as the holocaust deniers claim: https://rachelonyearcourse . files . wordpress . com/2013/03/dsc_0001 . jpg As for the supposed window, you have been the victim of camera perspective: The pic above shows one of the Majdanek gas chambers that has survived the war and can be visited today, in the "Bath and Disinfection I" building equipped with showerheads. Holocaust deniers, in their attempts to discredit homicidal gassing, keep talking about a "Majdanek gas chamber window" whose glass could be broken by the victims to somehow survive the homicidal gassing this way (how this would drastically lower the HCN concentration in the room and allow more than 2 or 3 people closest to the window to survive is, of course, not explained by the deniers). In any case, the pic above shows a panorama of the chamber. Do you see any window? I don't. What I see, are two doors and three holes in the wall in two of which there're actually lights mounted, one off, the other on. Also, note the piping running the length of the chamber and the vent in the corner. This denier video below on youtube shows how the brightly lit door in the pic is the entrance to this chamber, and how outside (not visible in the picture due to the light) the doorframe, there is the same type of sturdy metal gas chamber door that also opens OUTWARD: https://www . youtube . com/watch?v=YToi7Gejl3k And note how at 0:59 you can see how it can be LOCKED from the OUSTIDE, which I mentioned earlier. The only controversial aspect here is the glass covering the door's observation hole from the inside. I suppose if someone knocked out the glass (good luck figuring that out in a panic) and stuck his nose on the hemispherical grid, he and maybe 1 other person could survive by breathing the air from the outside, as only the exertion from their lungs could draw outside air through the grid into the chamber. This would perhaps save 2 person's lives, bravo. That is, if they arent being clawed to death by panicking people in their death throes behind them. Then, we have this chamber, complete with induction holes in the ceiling: https://www . youtube . com/watch?v=W2X8zX_56p8 Like the larger anteroom with the showerheads (all within the barrack called "Bad & Desinfektion I") this room also has a window which lets in natural light from the exterior, but it is too high up on the wall - the inmates would have to literally be jumping if they wanted to break its glass, and this of course is assuming the window looked exactly like this during the war and didn't have any kind of external coverings like the ones on Krematorium IV and V in Auschwitz. Note how at 0:35 the guy filming does not show you the height of the window properly, but you can see it in this video: https://www . youtube . com/watch?v=gAWoCqYcdco The video in the link directly above, beginning around 5:16, also shows two more windowless chambers, apart from the one earlier which the museum says stored clothing (now empty Zyklon-B cans). This next one also has a metal gas chamber door that opens outward. The latter of these two chambers is the one presented earlier in the denier video and pic of this post. There is also the aforementioned shower room, that has windows on a lower level. This shower room has been used by cinematographers as footage to explain the concept of fake shower-heads in homicidal gas chambers (as was the case in e . g. Birkenau). I am not aware of them saying in their documentary that this room in Majdanek was where homicidal gassings took place, so deniers build a strawman when they accuse the cinematographer of dishonesty by using footage from Majdanek. Today, you can see a row of ovens (Kori company) with a total of at least 5 muffles in the camp's crematorium. I will admit I know very little about this camp, its history and its layout as I have not visited or studied it. What I do know from the pictures, is that there are blue stains, the gas chambers have reinforced iron doors, and historians, not deniers, have placed the death toll on a comparatively very low level. If anything, this is more proof to me that nobody is trying to perpetuate any kind of hoax. The only museum flaws you will find here are some wording on the signs that has been revised, that not all of the chambers are accessible to the public (including Bad & Desinfektion II), that the Bad & Desinfektion I has been extended, and bottles of CO2 are on display to commemorate CO gassing, because no original canisters the CO was bottled in survived, and canisters labeled CO are pretty hard to find, given that there is no industrial use for pure CO. Wow. Majdanek museum exposed. Good job, deniers, I guess it really is game over now... In fact, if you read head of Majdanek museum Thomas Kranz's, „Mass Killings by Means of Toxic Gases in the Majdanek Concentration Camp“, you would know that he mentions all these things. No secrets kept. Now then, on what basis do we claim homicidal gas chambers existed in Majdanek? While the death toll based on estimates of crematory capacity and frequency of open air incineration turned out to be erroneous, the "Communique of the Polish-Soviet extraordinary Commission for investigating the crimes committed by the Germans in the Majdanek extermination camp in Lublin", foreign languages publishing house Moscow, 1944, provides detail: The Committee of Technical and Chemical Experts under the Chairmanship of Kelles-Krause, Engineer-Architect of the City of Lublin, and consisting of Engineer Major Telaner, Docent; Grigoriev, B . M . E.; and Pelkis, B . M . E., found that the chambers erected within the precincts of the camp were mainly utilized for the purpose of the wholesale extermination of people. There were six such chambers in all. Some of them were adapted to the purpose of putting people to death by means of carbon monoxide; the others were adapted to the purpose of putting people to death with Zyklon. Within the precincts of the camp were found five hundred and thirty-five canisters containing Zyklon B, and several containers with carbon monoxide. The chemical analysis revealed the following: "The contents of the canisters were tested for the presence of prussic acid by the reaction of the formation of Prussian blue with the aid of benzidino-acinate indicator paper and picric sodium. Samples were taken from eighteen canisters and forty-eight-separate reactions were produced. All the tests gave positive results showing the presence of prussic acid with the aforesaid reagents. Samples of the gas taken from the containers were tested for carbon monoxide with the aid of reactions to iodinc pentoxide and palladious chloride indicator paper. In all, sixteen tests were made with iodine pentoxide and ten were made with palladious chloride indicator paper. All the tests made with the aforesaid reagents gave positive reactions to carbon monoxide." On the basis of a precise calculation of a technical examination of the gas chambers, a chemical analysis of the carbon monoxide and the substance known as "Zyklon" the Committee of Experts also found the following: "The technical and sanitary-chemical inspection of the gas chambers at the Majdanek Concentration Camp wholly confirmed the fact that all these chambers, particularly I, II, III and IV, were intended and utilized for the purpose of the wholesale and systematic extermination of people by poisoning with the aid of poisonous gases such as: prussic acid (the substance known as 'Zyklon'), and carbon monoxide." By utilizing all tbe chambers adapted for the purpose of poisoning simultaneously, it was possible to put to death one thousund nine hundred and fourteen persons at a time. It has been established that in these gas chambers were put to death all the prisoners who were exhausted by starvation and enfeebled by exhausting labour and the severity of the camp regime, all those unfit for physical work, all those who fell sick with typhus, and all others whom the Germans deemed it necessary to put to death. The witness Stanislawski informed the Commission of the following: "In March 1943, three hundred Poles were put to death in the gas chamber. On June 20, 1943, three hundred and fifty persons were stripped naked in field No. 1 and taken to the bathhouse. From there they were taken into the gas chamber, where they were asphyxiated. On October 14, 1943, two hundred and seventy persons were put to death in this way." The witness Zelent quoted the case of the asphyxiation by means of gas of eighty-seven Poles on March 15, 1944. Another witness, Jan Wolski, a Pole, formerly a prisoner at the camp, testified to the wholesale asphyxiation of people with gas. "In October 1942," he stated, "a large number of women and children were brought to the camp. The healthy ones were picked out for work, while the feeble ones, the sick and the children were asphyxiated in the gas chambers. In March l943, another two hundred and fifty women and children were exterminated in the same chamber, and several days later another three hundred persons of different nationalities were exterminated in this same way. On May 16, or 17, 1943, one hundred and fifty-eight children of ages ranging from two to ten were brought to the camp in motor trucks. These children were put to death in the gas chanber. In June 1943, the camp administration collected all the sick prisoners of war and civilian prisoners to the number of about six hundred and put them all to death the gas chamber." Evidence concerning the wholesale asphyxiation of people by means of gases was given at the meeting of the Commission by German SS men who had served in the camp. Rottenfuhrer SS Hensche stated that on September 15, 1942, three hundred and fifty persons including women and children, were put to death in the gas chambers. Oberscharfuehrer SS Terner informed the Commission of the case which occurred on October 16, 1943, of the asphyxiation in gas chambers of five hundred persons, including many women and children. The selection of people to be put to death by asphyxiation was systematically made by the German camp doctors Max Blanke and Heinrich Rindfleisch. The aforesaid Ternes stated: "In the evening of October 21, 1943, camp doctor Untersturmfuehrer SS Rindfleisch told me that that day three hundred children of ages ranging from three to ten were asphyxiated in the gas chamber with the substance 'Zyklon'." The corpses were systematically removed from the gas chamber to be incinerated in the crematorium, or on bonfires. The corpses were transported on special lorries hauled by tractors. This is testified to by numerous eyewitnesses. German prisoner of war, Rottensfuehrer SS Theodor Schollen, who served in the camp, stated: "I often saw this machine with trailers going to and fro between the gas chambers and the crematorium. It came from the gas chamber loaded with corpses and went back empty." The Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission has established that in addition to the gas chambers, the Germans in Lublin utilized gas vans for the purpose of putting people to death. The witnesses-Stetdiener, an ex-soldier of the Polish army, and Atrokhov, a Soviet prisoner of war, gave a detailed description of the machine in which the Germans asphyxiated their victims with the aid of the exhaust gas from the engine. The discovery within the precincts of the camp of a number of corpses bearing the characteristic symptoms of poisoning by carbon monoxide confirms the fact that the Germans utilized carbon monoxide for the purpose of putting prisoners to death. The aforementioned Committee of Medical Experts expressed the opinion that: "The extermination of prisoners in the concentration camp was accomplished by different methods. In the initial period of the camp's existence the Hitlerites mainly resorted to wholesale shooting. Later, they also resorted to the wholesale poisoning of people in specially built gas chambers by means of powerful poisonous substances such as prussic acid (the substance known as 'Zyklon') and carbon monoxide." Thus, the evidence of numerous eyewitnesses, the findings of the Committee of Medical Experts and the Committee of Technical and Chemical Experts prove that for nearly three years the Germans in the Majdanek Camp Systematically carried out the wholesale asphyxiation with the aid of gases of people, including aged people, women and children. In the initial period of the existence of the Majdanek Camp the Germans buried the bodies of all those they shot and tortured. Later, and particularly in 1943 and 1944, they burnt the bodies, exhuming them from the pits in which the victims had been previously buried. Already in the beginning of 1942 two furnaces for burning corpses were erected within the precincts of the camp. Owing to the extremely large number of corpses that had to be dealt with, the Germans, in 1942, began to erect a large new crematorium with five incinerators. This crematorium was completed in the autumn of 1943. The furnaces were in continuous operation. The Committee established that for a long time, particularly during the past two years, the Germans, in addition to burning corpses in special furnaces, widely resorted to the practice of burning corpses on bonfires within the precincts of the camp as well as in the Krembecki-Woods. The witnesses Hospodarek and Matyasek, inhabitants of the village of Dziesiata (near the Majdanek Camp) and the village of Krembec, stated that they had seen gigantic bonfires in the camp and in the Krembecki Woods on which the bodies of the people who had been shot and tortured by the Germans were burnt. Photographic evidence of open air cremation here: http://collections . ushmm . org/search/catalog/pa13594 The Germans resorted to the grinding up of small bones in a special "mill." A detailed description of this mill was given by the witness Stetdiener, whom the Germans compelled to work this mill. Lieutenant General Hilmar Moser, of the German army, ex-Military Commandant of Lublin, stated the following: "I have no reasons for hushing or covering up the heinous crimes committed by Hitler, and I regard it as my duty to tell the whole truth about the so-called "Extermination Camp" the Hitlerites established along the Cholm Road, near Lublin. In the winter of 1943-44 a large number of the prisoners-among whom, to my great indignation, were women and children-were exterminated there. The number of killed was round about one hundred thousand. Part of the unfortunate people were shot and part put to death by means of gas. Last spring an incalculable number of corpses were exhumed and burned in furnaces specially built for the purpose, evidently with the object of wiping out the traces of the crimes committed by Hitler's orders." As a result of a thorough investigation of numerous affidavits by medical experts and material proof, the aforesaid Committee of Medical Experts under the chairmanship of Professor Szyling-Syngalewicz, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at the Lublin Catholic Univcrsity, found that: "During the whole period of four years that the Lublin Majdanek Camp was in existence, a deliberate and consistent system operated for the premeditated, wholesale extermination of people, both prisoners in the camp as well as people especially brought there for the purpose of extermination." Just as a general observation, historians usually avoid reasoning backwards from assumptions based on the present. The perils of the approach are obvious - it might lead someone to conclude that the battle of Gettysburg was a hoax because the present terrain features of the land don't correspond with the 1863 descriptions, so the 1863 descriptions must be bogus. In a similar fashion, trying to deduce from the current Majdanek camp museum's state to the past is erroneous, and the opposite approach is the historically correct one, i . e. how was the camp built, how did it evolve during the war, and how did it end up in the state it is today. If you're still not satisfied, there's a huge thread over at the forums of the Skeptic Society where various denier claims raised about Majdanek (made popular by Eric Hunt's youtube video) are examined and refuted in detail. It has some 1000 posts & counting, so keep in mind it'll take days to go through: http://www . skepticforum . com/viewtopic . php?f=39&t=24902
It goes without saying that both the sign and the commemorative plaques are post-war. Around 3,000[1] people were murdered by homicidal gassing at Mauthausen, located some 20km away from Linz, Austria. As shown earlier via documentation, at least one gas van also operated around the camp. Mauthausen concentration camp was part of a larger camp complex called Mauthausen-Gusen, and had sub-camps further away such as Ebensee. Other gassing facilities nearby included Schloss Hartheim some 6km away, where during Aktion T4 those deemed "lebensunwertes Leben"[2][3] (life not worth living) were euthanized. In total the camp complex cost the lives of 100,000 people. This gas chamber was completed by 1942, and could kill about 100 prisoners at a time.[4] Contrary to Himmler's orders issued in fall 1944, homicidal gassing continued well into 1945 in this camp, in fact even peaked toward the final years. Lagerkommandant Franz Ziereis' testimony confirms this: "A gassing facility was built in Camp Mauthausen by order of the former garrison doctor, Dr. Krebsbach, camouflaged as a bathroom. The gassing plant in Mauthausen was really built by order of SS Obergruppenfuehrer Gluecks, since he was of the opinion that it was more humane to gas the prisoners than to shoot them." -Franz Ziereis, in the interrogation protocol and sworn affidavit from prisoner clerk Hans Marszalek, with the interrogation conducted in the presence of Commander of the 11th Armored Division (American Armored Division) Colonel Richard R. Seibel. See Nuremberg document 3870-PS. Also, in a diary he kept, Drahomir Barta, a Czech internee, wrote an entry on 13 July 1944 about Kapo Franz Suslak having told him about seeing over 150 Czech women and girls huddled in front of the gas chamber before being killed in October 1942 (Wingeate, Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the horror on the Danube, pp 74, 335). On 3 May 1945 a report given by two escaped inmates to the ICRC and describing a botched gassing on 23 April in the camp was forwarded to SHAEF (Hundschmied, Mills & Witzany Durda, St. Georgen Gusen Mauthausen: Concentration Camp Mauthausen Reconsidered, pp 213-214). A US Army report of 12 May 1945 (US 11th Armored Division, Periodic Report no. 133) (Wingeate, pp 161, 377) included a description of a gassing given by a witness from the camp. A plaque dedicated to the memory of Ludwig Haider, a train operator (Lokführer) also commemorates this, who was gassed in April 1945. Revisionist scholars have pointed out there must be something phony about these plaques, as these names cannot be found at the Yad Vashem database. Taking their statement at face value (i . e. that they have gone there and combed through the records), I still wouldn't be surprised as these individuals needn't have to have been Jews. Roma (gypsies), Communists, homosexuals, prisoners of war, dissidents, saboteurs, spies and all other sorts of political prisoners were also murdered by (among other methods also) homicidal gassing in the Nazi camps. If these esteemed revisionist scholars had bothered to do more research, e . g. you know, something as simple as a google search, they would have found out there's a street in nearby Linz named after this very Ludwig Haider [5], who, additional details reveal, was born on the 9th of August 1885 in Straßwalchen, and was a Socialist, which is the reason why the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) [6] who either were or knew dear friends of his, and who found his records, set up the memorial for him in the gas chamber in 2001 [7]. Perhaps the only legitimate complaint the deniers can make regarding this gas chamber is that its showerheads that had been put up until not too long ago, have been removed as of 2016, possibly because they are part of a temporary exhibit on display in a different museum. I have already addressed the lack of prussian blue staining earlier in this blog. Especially expecting its formation in a chamber that "only" claimed the lives of some 3000 souls is several magnitudes more asinine that the debate we had about it earlier in Auschwitz - in any case, Leuchter did find trace amounts. A floor drain and tiled walls make washing the chamber easy, and in the chamber's corner you can see ventilation on the ceiling. Another interesting read concerning Mauthausen is the Taylor Report, attributed to Lieutenant Jack Taylor. During WW2, the American intelligence service, the "Office of Strategic Service" operated behind German lines and tried to hinder German defenses by means of targeted espionage and sabotage campaigns. Jack H. Taylor was one of many OSS agents who were recruited during the war. Arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Mauthausen in 1945, Taylor describes in his report to the OSS not only the character of the mission, but also the murderous and inhuman conditions in the concentration camp. The TAYLOR REPORT is an important source of espionage and the Holocaust during the Second World War, which has found its way into post-war judiciary.[8] See: [1]: Bertram Perz, Florian Freund: Tötungen durch Giftgas im Konzentrationslager Mauthausen. In: Günther Morsch, Bertrand Perz: Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940938-99-2, S. 256. [2]: "Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens" Karl Binding, Alfred Hoche [3]: "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide", Dr. Robert Jay Lifton [4]: Robert Abzug (1987): "Inside the Vicious Heart" pp. 106–110, Michael Shermer; Alex Grobman (2002) "Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?" pp. 168–175. [5]: http://ooe . kpoe . at/article . php/20060405102750978 [6]: http://ooe . kpoe . at/article . php/20060421181531835 [7]: http://bit . ly/2dLXtZR [8]: http://www . manz . at/list . html?isbn=978-3-86924-180-7
Here you have the pleasure of watching America's foremost gas chamber expert Fred Leuchter damaging another national monument after Auschwitz.
Friendly reminder that both doors of the homicidal gas chamber at Mauthausen open OUTWARD, both have PEEPHOLES, and locking handles on the OUTSIDE. Let that sink in. David Cole once pointed out the outer handles can be turned today by grabbing the knob inside and turning it with your palm. He truly was the most talented revisionist kid in the 90s. Looking up the word 'rust' in an encyclopedia and how it messes up a door's locking mechanism after half a century might have been helpful. Given that esteemed revisionist scholars keep insisting the Mauthausen gas chamber was but a mere shower room, I kindly ask them why this supposed shower room was equipped with two reinforced gas tight doors, and why both these doors had peep holes unless of course the Nazis were some kind of perverts. Well they were, but of the sadistic, murderous sort. Then we have David Irving, who maintains the Mauthausen gas chamber was in fact an air-raid shelter. But kindly note the stupidity of mounting air-raid shelter doors deep inside the main building, where this chamber is located, and were this chamber to be used as such, rather than as the building's main doors leading directly outside.
The chronicler of camp Mauthausen's history, Hans Maršálek, describes the gas chamber as follows: "In the main camp [Mauthausen], set up in August 1938 east of Linz, work on a gas chamber was started in the autumn of 1941. It was in the cellar of the bunker that served as a prison, near which the crematoria were also located. It was a windowless room [...] and the two doors could be hermetically sealed. [...] From a neighboring room, called the 'gas cell' the gas was directed into the room through an enameled pipe which had a slot in it about a meter long on the side nearest the wall (in other words, on the side invisible from the room). The remains of this gassing facility can be seen to this day."[1] He continues: "This room, 3.7m long and 3.5 wide, partially covered with tiles, was disguised as if it was a shower, with 16 shower-heads. Central heating and lights were on a wall, above the tiles; in a corner of the ceiling was an electric ventilator and a glazed pipe about a meter long. In a part of the wall that was not visible, this tube had a large half-centimeter split in it, around 80cm long, and was connected with the gas storage point in the adjacent cell. The switches for the lights, water and the ventilation were all outside the gas chamber. A brick that had already been heated up was placed above a shovel, and carefully laid down at the bottom of the container. An SS man, wearing a gas-mask, placed the Zyklon-B on the brick, and the container would immediately be sealed and hermetically closed via two lateral screws. The warmth given off by the brick caused the rapid release of the gas."[2] So in Mauthausen, Zyklon wasn't dropped into the gas chamber as pellets but rather the prussic acid the pellets were soaked with was introduced into the chamber in gaseous form (HCN) via tubing: "If a gassing was due to take place, … Roth gave orders to one of the prisoners of the crematorium work detail, who were his subordinates, usually to the witness Kanduth, to heat a brick in the crematory oven. Roth took the burning-hot brick in a shovel and placed it inside the apparatus for admitting the gas. The apparatus consisted of a metal chest with a removable cover, which could be hermetically sealed by means of wing screws and airtight packing. By giving off heat, the brick led to the quick release of the poison gas..."[3] The Ventilation took about an hour, and a Gas detector would alert the operators that the room was clear of the gas. Ventilation was controlled by a "Elektror" brand power engine with an output of 1.5 hp / 1.1 kW. Jean-Claude Pressac also mentions Mauthausen's gas chamber: "There was a 13.3 m² gas chamber at Mauthausen, operated by preheating the chamber before introducing Zyklon-B, which thus expanded as it vaporized. While 3455 victims were killed here according to the tribunals, [...] [Ref: “Les chambers à gaz. Secret d'Etat”, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1984]"[4] Even Fred Leuchter's chemical tests verified the chamber's use (though he says otherwise) finding 32mg/kg of cyanide residue. credit goes to Skepticforum member "Denying-History" (he has made many other great contributions to expose holocaust denial on that forum, you should also check out his youtube channel) Sources: [1] Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Adalbuert Rueckerle, Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, Yale University Press (1993), pp. 177 [2] Les chambres à gaz secret d’État p. 223 [3] Judgement, Hagen Mauthausen trial, 24 July 1970 (as quoted in:) - Kogon, Langbein and Rueckerl. Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas. Yale University Press. 1993. pp. 179-9. [4] Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, page 470
1) How much money did Steven Spielberg personally make off his movie "Schindler's List?" 2) Why were Hans and Sophie Scholl, and several others of the non-violent 'White Rose' resistance group sentenced to death by the Nazi regime? Why weren't they merely incarcerated for their activity instead? 3) Why was refusing to swear fealty to Adolf Hitler and to enlist in the Wehrmacht, when called upon, a crime punishable by death? A famous victim, for example, was the Catholic priest Franz Reinisch, not just incarcerated, but actually executed for refusing to report to duty. 4) Why would a historian of Jewish origin (Gerhard L. Weinberg) take the trouble to find, translate and publish Adolf Hitler's unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, the "Zweites Buch"? And if you consider it a propagandistic move by "the holocaust industry", why have so few people heard about this book? 5) If the Anne Frank story is a hoax, why did the storytellers give her a very revisionist death (transferred AWAY from Auschwitz, to die later of typhus in Bergen Belsen) rather than symbolically attributing this innocent life's demise to the gas chambers? Why needlessly complicate the story and diminish its climax? Unless of course, the story of Anne Frank is not a story at all, but reality which is told exactly the way it happened. 6) Why did so many Nazi officials carry cyanide pills with them? 7) Why did so many Nazi officials commit suicide upon capture by western Allies, often involving said cyanide pills? 8) Why did Hitler, Göbbels, Himmler and several other high ranking Nazis commit suicide, often even before capture, if they had nothing to hide? If it was merely because they were afraid of what might be done to them at the hands of the Allies, then was their belief in martyrdom as innocents so non-existent? 9) Why does the overwhelming majority of holocaust deniers today and in the past consist of civilians unaffiliated to the NSDAP rather than the once convicted Nazis themselves, or their descendants, or organizations like ODESSA? 10) Even if Hitler and friends were right about International Jewry all along, how does it justify the mass deportation of Polish Jews, most of whom were poor, uneducated and in no way related to any rich Wall Street capitalists? How do you justify laying blame on an entire people, for alleged actions of a tiny few? Answering this question with a question (Japanese internment camps) is evasion and not a valid answer. Using a sensationalist newspaper headline (Judea Declares War on Germany) which even National Socialists themselves did not take all too seriously, to justify the incarceration of an entire people as a logical reaction, is also not a valid answer. 11) Speaking of, give us proper elaboration of exactly what evils the aforementioned Wall Street capitalists of Jewish origin actually did? Or are you going to attribute something as mundane as inflation or financial depression to "the Jew"? If you want to bring up Black Tuesday, the Wall Street crash of 1929, kindly deliver proof it was all organized by International Jewry. 12) And why on earth do you keep bringing a proposed (perhaps even partially enacted) economic boycott in 1933 as legitimate casus belli to incarcerate an entire people most of whom didn't even take part in it? Again, pointing out to Japanese internment camps is a classic example of whataboutism, rather than answering the question. 13) Regarding the deportation and forced incarceration of an entire people solely due to their ethnicity, given that you like to equate what befell the Jews in Europe to what befell Japanese Americans in the United States, and given that you like to lay the blame concerning the high mortality in the concentration camps to allied saturation bombing, how will you nevertheless explain away the crucial difference of Japanese Americans essentially relaxing in their camps while Jews were put to back-breaking labor, put under meager rations, and housed like animals in the German camps long before the Allies gained air superiority in Europe? 14) If your hypothesis about Allied bombing destroying the infrastructure of Germany to the extent that it worsened the situation of concentration camp detainees when it came to supplies is correct, why don't you provide a SINGLE credible, independently verifiable case where a concentration camp's food supply was directly affected by allied bombing to the extent that for example the rail lines leading to it were destroyed, and therefore supplies could no longer reach the camp properly? I can wait. If you say Nordhausen, you lose, because that was firstly not a concentration camp (the Boelckekaserne was a Luftwaffe barracks/prison), and secondly that is not the subject of this question (allied bombing allegedly destroying supply lines to concentration camps resulting in lack of supplies, starvation etc.) 15) Why don't revisionists attack the 50-60 million total death toll of WW2 in the same way they attack the Jewish death toll? Can anyone break this number down to the sum total of all casualties sustained in all battles fought and how many civilians died in which city during which year? And if that's not possible, then why accept this number without much question while writing volume after volume of why only the Jewish death toll is a hoax and at the same time claim you aren't fueled by antisemitism? 16) Why are there no movements in the West to deny other genocides in history, such as the Rwandan genocide where 800,000 people were killed in around 3 months (that's 8,888 people per day!), or the Stalinist purges, the Holodomor, or Mao's Great Leap forward? How are all those death tolls historians provide accepted without question, why aren't almanac comparisons made, census data questioned, official documents alleged to be forgeries, eyewitnesses dismissed with a casual hand-wave and so on? 17) Given that you don't spend nearly as much time attacking the death toll of other genocides compared to the holocaust, kindly name 3 proofs, or even 1 you have that underscore the authenticity of other genocides in human history, which however remain elusive regarding the holocaust. 18) Since many concentration camps were equipped with delousing facilities, and since you revisionists believe clothes and bedding were regularly deloused with Zyklon-B, why does the Prussian Blue staining only appear in Auschwitz, Majdanek and Stutthof? Why dont Dachau or Mauthausen's delousing facilities show this blue coloration? Why isn't "HCN = observable PB staining" common knowledge among chemists worldwide? If every forensic scientist knows UV light is a reliable indicator for cleaned up stains of blood or semen, why does none of them claim Prussian Blue stains are a reliable indicator for hydrogen cyanide? Why isn't there any chemist on the planet, apart from denier Germar Rudolf, who can theorize how much PB should form on a concrete wall per hour of it having been exposed to HCN? 19) Prove to me that nowhere close to 3 million Jews lived in Poland in the years leading up to WW2, and THEN we can have a discussion about numbers. 20) When you repeatedly hail Fred Leuchter as "America's foremost gas chamber expert", I consider the "what came first - the chicken or the egg" question. Given that American gas chambers have been existing since at least the 1940s, how is it that there were no gas chamber experts in the United States till this Leuchter showed up? Who designed, built, operated, and maintained American gas chambers? How many gas chambers did this "foremost gas chamber expert" Leuchter even end up building for the US? 21) If people's careers are ruined for questioning the numbers of dead in the concentration camps, why is it no longer claimed that mass gassings took place in Dachau? Why was there even a debate about it? And why did Auschwitz and Majdanek receive drastic reductions of the death toll? None of this was the result of Faurisson and friends' meddling, it was done without their involvement. So why weren't the people who did this incarcerated? In fact, if a worldwide Jewish conspiracy needed the holocaust to legitimize the existence of Israel, why would revisions like these even be permitted? Maybe, just maybe, there is a difference between legitimate revisionism as performed by level-headed scholars, and the time wasting activity that holocaust deniers like to engage themselves with and call "research", which is just an elaborate term for flat-out denial. 22) If the Treblinka ground photos show no criminal activity, what is the logical explanation for there being giant excavators digging around Treblinka, located in an area in the ass end of Poland where there is no mining, no rare earths, no mineral deposits, no building projects, unless of course these cranes served a nefarious purpose, which is digging, or in this case, unearthing mass graves. 23) Despite the above, how can you keep claiming Richard Krege did a legitimate archaeological investigation of Treblinka and found "the soil undisturbed", while at the same time claiming Treblinka was a transit camp where structures were erected and then dismantled, claiming all of this left behind no trace at all? 24) Why has Richard Krege still not published the findings of his report, the Treblinka and Belzec GPR scan? We have been waiting 18 years for his report.... 25) HOLOCAUST DENIER CHALLENGE! If the Jews were "evacuated to the East" rather than being exterminated in Poland, what happened to them? Why didn't even one of them come forward after the war and tell historians they have got it all wrong? That the Nazis merely helped their family safely relocate from Europe to Russia? Prove one Jew had his clothes deloused in Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno or Sobibor, given a hot bath, and then "evacuated" out of Reich occupied territories (rather than somewhere else within occupied territory such as Majdanek) via one-way train ticket across the bloody Eastern Front and into Russia! And while we're at it, here's another challenge of mine: PROVE not enough Jews existed in Europe in 1939 to be genocided to a tally of around 6 million in the first place! EARN BIG BUCKS!!! http://holocaustcontroversies . blogspot . co . at/2011/07/challenge-to-supporters-of-revisionist . html 26) If Bolshevism, Judaism and Zionism are the same thing, why did Winston Churchill differentiate between them in his letters after WW1? Why were Soviet Bolsheviks so opposed to Zionism? Why did Israel and the Soviet Union have such a troubled relationship? Why did the Soviet Union support the Arab states during the Six Day War? And why was "globalist" Israel a friend of apartheid South Africa? Why are there many Jews today opposed to Zionism and the Israeli state? Lumping people into one basket is how you discredit yourself. 27) Why do you keep labeling Atheist Communists who didn't care one bit about the Talmud, Torah or even believe in Jehovah God, as Jews? If you claim Judaism is A RACE, why do you, at the same time, cling on to the theory that Ashkenazi Jews, the main target of your attacks, are in fact Khazars while Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews are not? Either all Jews are a race, or they aren't. If they aren't, are Khazars their own race now? Aren't they from the Caucasus region and therefore Caucasians? Make up your mind. And if you still believe in races, maybe it's time to pick up a 21st century biology book. Oh wait - you also doubt the legitimacy of modern science and think science is dead now and conforms to political correctness, don't you? You're a lost cause. 28) Describe to me how terrible it must feel like to wake up every morning knowing that you live in a world where vast amounts of academia and the establishment have conspired against humanity, and are actively working on the destruction of what you perceive as "your people" and "our values" and working towards the enslavement of the world and the creation of a World Government under the New World Order. Because this is what holocaust denial ultimately points to, isn't it? Don't deny it. 29) Have you seriously considered the possibility that you may, in fact, have lost your fucking marbles and you just don't know it yet? See Dunning-Kruger effect.
The fact that holocaust deniers spend a great amount of time crying and wailing extensively about some of the persecution and court cases their compatriots had to undergo as a result of their voluntary activity is just proof that presenting their points to counter the historical record is apparently not enough. No, it always has to be mixed in with generic conspiracy theories as I have taken apart above, or references to George Orwell's 1984 and all sorts of appeals to emotion. Under their famous slogan "Truth does not fear investigation", holocaust deniers always make the case that if the holocaust as it has been recorded really happened, why should there be laws to incarcerate those who question it. Shouldn't that be a red flag? First of all, questioning the holocaust is not illegal in any country on the planet, else every school kid asking their teacher something they didn't quite grasp, would be in the slammer. Denying, is in some. Secondly, if you look at the countries in the world, the amount of them that have these laws is pathetic in number. Coincidentally, these countries are also those who were most affected under the Nazi dictatorship. Maybe the only political agenda here is something called "Never Again"? How about that. And in these few countries where denying or grossly downplaying the death toll of the holocaust is a punishable offense, in these very same non-islamic countries, it is also a punishable offense to e.g. slander the prophet Muhammad with allegations of bestiality or pedophilia or raise your right hand in a 45° angle in public, or display Nazi symbols for recreational or commercial purposes, or call someone a nigger or post on social media that all refugees should drown in the Mediterranean. People have gone to jail in these countries for all these offenses: It's called generic hate speech laws. You'd only have a point if saying anything and everything were perfectly legal, where true freedom of speech existed except when it came to denying the holocaust, but deniers cannot point to a single country where such laws exist. And holocaust denial IS hate speech (against Jewish people; some or all in this case doesn't really matter), ...because as my introductory post in this blog already said, even the most scholarly form of holocaust denial is ultimately saying that hand-wringing, hook-nosed kike merchants have been lying to the goyim for 70 years straight with world historians under their control-censor in order to cash in shekels for Israel. While I personally do not endorse any kind of hate speech laws (slandered individuals or organizations have the right to sue, but it shouldn't be the government's business) especially holocaust denial, as I think incarcerating holocaust deniers only turns them into martyrs after giving them a great deal of attention during their trial thanks to the media, I still harbor some level of understanding why those countries worst affected by the Nazi regime have made it an offense, e.g. because presenting deliberately fraudulent information in a deceptive pseudo-scholarly format can seriously mislead the general public (and this is a concern even scientists share when it comes to material spread by e.g. climate change skeptics), and the consequence of reading holocaust denier material and becoming convinced of its falsehoods is a rise in antisemitism with a realistic chance of culminating in renewed persecution. And guess what? A civilized society protects its vulnerable and minority populations from hateful incitement that could culminate in the very kind of genocide that these folks try to deny in the first place. A bit like yelling FIRE in a crowded theater and when they get arrested for causing the deaths of countless people getting trapped at the exits they would cry that their right to freedom of speech was violated...
As for the photo, it shows the remains of Jewish victims executed by Nazis and collaborators near the city of Zolochiv in Lviv province of western Ukraine, discovered at former Gestapo headquarters after the liberation of the city in July 1944. From the documents of the Extraordinary Soviet Commission that was researching Nazi crimes. Step 1) Arrive at a preconceived notion (the holocaust, as it is defined in terms of death toll, intent, and methods including homicidal gas chambers, never happened) based on personal beliefs (the world is run by Jews) and then proceed to cherry-pick anything that supports your conclusion while ignoring everything that doesn't. Step 2) Proceed to dismiss all testimonial evidence historians rely on with a casual hand-wave (or apply the 'poisoning the well' fallacy to point some contradictions as proof of lying), or only go so far as saying if it's a victim, he is a paid shill, and if it's a perpetrator, he was tortured, or accuse either party of insanity. Step 3) Proceed to dismiss all documentary evidence as forgery, without bothering to specify who forged it and when and how, or concoct an innocuous explanation ignoring other documents and testimonies that give context and what we call a convergence of evidence. Step 4) Proceed to dismiss all photographic evidence in the same manner as 3) or blame it (if the corpses are from Western Europe) on typhus or (if the corpses are from Eastern Europe) the Soviets. Step 5) Proceed to keep emphasizing and exaggerating allied war crimes as much as possible to shift the debate onto a more level playing field, accompanied by Hitler's 'peace offers'. And while you're at it, attribute false quotes to famous people along with it and do not provide source while doing so. Step 6) Proceed to show every piece of evidence you have where someone was exposed as a fraudster who wanted to make a quick buck off the holocaust, even if 10 out of 10 people exposed this way were novelists and irrelevant to historians, or point out errors in journalism (newspapers) to attack historians. Step 7) Rely on the flawed and selective arguments of the few scientists on your side to dismiss the empirical knowledge of all other scientists worldwide. Also, use pen names to feign revisionist numbers. Step 8) Keep changing the subject to bring forth one allegation after another allegation against Jews when you seem to be losing ground on one particular technical aspect of the holocaust you are debating an opponent on. Such as drawing attention to the modern Israeli state today, as well as the current Middle Eastern conflict, or other events like 9/11 or any Jew who has doubted the holocaust or criticized Zionism. Step 9) Relating to step 8), keep in mind why you're really here: not to debate the feasibility of the holocaust with someone in the know, but rather to recruit unsuspecting laymen lacking the knowledge to debate you, to your cause. E.g. throw the Rudolf report in the face of an average youtuber to silence him. Step 10) Always keep whining to your opponent about holocaust denial laws in some countries and make sure to evoke George Orwell's 1984 whenever possible to paint yourself as a victim of thought crimes. And the moment he calls you names, point out his ad hominem as proof of you having won the debate. Congratulations, you are now a holocaust denier! I will end this presentation dedicated to the millions of defenseless victims of Nazi genocide and post-war slander by a small band of deliberately dishonest charlatans with the wise words of Dr. Elizabeth Strakosch, who exposed the Great Father of the School of Holocaust Denial himself, Paul Rassinier, for the intellectual fraud he truly was: "Instead of basing his history on the convergence of evidence (overwhelming oral testimony, documents, etc), he based it on a convergence of doubt. Unable to cast doubt on the undeniable fact of the camps, he made isolated attacks on various aspects of the seemingly unified narrative of the Holocaust. He concluded that these various errors were linked together by a political conspiracy of the victors, rather than by the fact of the Holocaust. Thus he established the basic pattern of denial - dividing the event into its component parts and attacking smaller targets, thereby casting doubt on the whole without confronting it." - Dr. Elizabeth Strakosch, 'The Political Methodology of Genocide Denial', Dialogue, 2005, 3/3, p.9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRmdJTiOSh8
