Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Nick Terry]

Ah, silly of me to discount Kater's book because the subtitle involved "Kulturpolitik". That'll teach me to make such assumptions.
Seems like a pilgrimage to the Landesbibliothek is in order for Kater and Schulte. I already read most of Lang's book a while ago, I borrowed it from my dad.

Depending on what aspects interest you, I can probably recommend other things too.

 

[Moss]

Depending on what aspects interest you, I can probably recommend other things too.

Though it borders a bit on the woo side of things I am quite interested in the more loony esoteric parts of the Ahnenerbe. For example Wirth's theories about the Ura-Linda chronic and similar things.
It's a source of constant amusement that Himmler got duped by Karl Maria Wiligut.

 

[Robrob]

ftfy.

Spielberg is a film-maker, not a historian. The Academy which dishes out Oscars is in Hollywood, and not part of the Ivy League.

Wasn't it CM who used a scene from a movie as evidence against the Holocaust?

 

[Nick Terry]

Though it borders a bit on the woo side of things I am quite interested in the more loony esoteric parts of the Ahnenerbe. For example Wirth's theories about the Ura-Linda chronic and similar things.
It's a source of constant amusement that Himmler got duped by Karl Maria Wiligut.

Bettina Arnold has done some very interesting work on the Externsteine (fake ancient standing stones) which the Nazis and Himmler rather liked. I think you might even find some taster articles for free on the net with a google search; she also has a chapter in Garret Fagan (ed) Archaeological Fantasies, which is IMHO one of the best books on pseudery (in this case pseudoarchaeology) around.

Some of the loony stuff is also covered fairly soberly in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, which discusses a bit about Ahenerbe, IIRC.

 

[Dogzilla]

You are still arm-flapping. It is rather telling that you are virtually incapable of writing a post without asking endless questions.

Sorry. Answering a question with a question is a cultural thing.

If you have a serious case to make, please state it, remembering to back up your assertions and check the facts. If you think that site access is some kind of major issue, please explain why it matters.

Having access to the crime scene is necessary for investigating the crime. Questioning that is beyond stupid.

In previous posts you reacted like a scalded cat when asked to explain the hoax, but what we have here is conspiracy lite, a bunch of extremely vague insinuations that don't actually go anywhere, especially not if they're reduced to 'oh the East Bloc is sinister'.

The Soviet bloc governments weren't exactly known for their openness and honesty. But it's not black/white issue with East=bad and West=good like you want it to be. Knowing when Auschwitz was open to researchers is relevant to our understanding of the nature of the evidence. If Auschwitz was closed to the world for ten years after the war and all archival material was strictly controlled by the Poles/Soviets, then that is the nature of the evidence during that period. If Auschwitz was completely open to the British and the Americans right after the war, then that is the nature of the evidence. If the British and Americans were allowed in but the French and Irish weren't, then that is the nature of the evidence. Free and unfettered access to everything behind the Iron Curtain doesn't mean all the evidence is rock solid and therefore the gas chambers are true and absolute control by the Soviets doesn't mean it's all a lie. But knowing where you got the evidence is important. Needing to explain that to you is beyond stupid.

Knowing when the Poles/Soviets admitted they had modified the "gas chamber" they show to tourists is relevant. Knowing when they admitted they had modified the "gas chamber" they show to visiting scholars is relevant as well. If there's a difference, it's relevant to ask why. Again, questioning this is beyond stupid.

I cannot promise that this will answer all your questions, but I previously wrote a short essay about the provenance of the Einsatzgruppen reports which is on the Holocaust History Project website.

Issues of provenance and investigation become increasingly moot after 1949 or so, for the simple reason that so much was investigated and discovered by that date. That's why the Holocaust became a historical fact and an accepted part of reality in the 1940s.

And yet you criticize me because you believe I rely entirely on source material from the 1980s.

It's precisely because there were separate but parallel investigative endeavours on both sides of the Iron Curtain that we can be quite confident there was no grand-scale fabrication.

The Western allies had most of the documents and a lot of the witnesses and the perpetrators, in addition to accessing the sites which fell on their side of the Iron Curtain (eg Hartheim, Mauthausen - places with gas chambers). Poland and the Soviet Union had the physical sites, a lot of documents, and a great many witnesses. Every single country in Europe which had been occupied by the Nazis was running an investigation of some kind into what had happened during the war. The results matched, and they were independent of each other. Some of the results were publicised, and quite a lot not, as we see with the Soviet Extraordinary Commission reports. The varying degrees of publicity means we can look back and find other examples of independent corroboration which were not known in the 1940s, when the world decided that the Nazis had indeed mass-murdered the Jews of Europe.

If the West had the paper trail but couldn't access the physical plant while the Soviets had the physical plant but not the documentation, it's not difficult to understand how both sides were hobbled. The independence of the investigations is debatable but clearly the results and conclusions didn't always match. Does four million ring a bell?

Just as there is the problem to explain what really happened to the Jews from 1942-45, you also have the problem of explaining the investigations of 1945-49, before you even get to the issues you think are oh-so-crucial. Droning on about when-did-the-west-get-to-see-the-crematorium has completely missed the bus by several decades.



I'm quite sure I've made points about this to you before. There were a very large number of units involved in mass shootings. Not all of their reports survive, but a significant number do. We don't have anything like the Jaeger report for any of the other 15 Sonder- and Einsatzkommandos, with that level of detail. We have more sporadically detailed reports breaking down victims by sex and age. It isn't very likely that all of the units would have headcounted their victims as precisely as EK 3. Nor is it very likely that such headcounts would survive for the extermination camps, given the described conditions upon arrival at many of them.

There were really only five 'big' extermination camps, of which four were run by company-sized units. You're talking about more than 100 company sized units operating in 1941 in the Soviet Union killing Jews; and we have war diaries for a couple of them at best. It's a matter of simple common-sense to realise that more documentation for the mass shootings ought to survive than would be the case for five extermination camps, three of which were entirely shut down in 1943.

Before we go on: do you accept that common sense or not? If not why not?

I accept that war diaries (if you are talking about personal, unofficial documents by individual participants) would be more likely to be more numerous for EG than the DC simply because there were far more individual participants. Even allowing for a leave-no-papertrail policy, the more people there are who are involved in keeping a secret, the more likely somebody won't.

It also makes sense that tangential documentation would be more numerous for EG than for DC. More men means that more food needs to be provided, more clothing needs to be provided, more men are going to be promoted and reprimanded, they're going to have more contacts, good and bad, with the local population, etc. So, yes, a larger paper trail is far more likely.

But it's not immediately evident that some EG units would keep extremely detailed records while others wouldn't. If all the EG units were charged with exterminating the Jews and somebody wanted a report of that activity, it doesn't make sense that one unit would be required to submit very detailed reports while another unit would not. It's possible that Jaeger kept more detailed reports than what was required for whatever reason. It's also possible that detailed reports from other units simply didn't survive.

The discrepancy between the various EG unit reports isn't a red flag. But it doesn't make sense that the men in charge of 96% of the personnel involved in exterminating the Jews would be required to submit detailed reports that clearly indicate that they are exterminating the Jews while those in charge of 4% of the personnel involved in exterminating the Jews wouldn't be.

That said, we do have quite a bit of information which is comparable. Deportation lists help calculate age and gender breakdowns. Not only are they available for western and central Europe, but there is a lot of similiar data from the Lodz ghetto relevant to Chelmno, in addition to that deeply inconvenient document from June 1942 which states that 97,000 had been processed in gas vans.

There are also four Jaeger-like reports on the reception of transports to Auschwitz, breaking down the number of men, women and children deported, the number of men and women registered, and the number who were subjected to special treatment or were 'specially accomodated'. Four survive, whereas there were hundreds of transports to Auschwitz. The obvious conclusion is that the rest were lost because the SS destroyed them, and overlooked the four that survive in another department's files.

We can document the fact of arrival at Auschwitz of many more transports with their full complements of deportees. BdS Frankreich sent a stream of telexes saying a transport is on its way with 1112 or 1002 Jews from Drancy and will arrive in Auschwitz on x day. The transport lists for France are preserved, so we have the age breakdowns. The numbers of men and women registered at Auschwitz from those transports are known from a master list of registration numbers. This is confirmed by several hundred survivors who carried the relevant tattoo numbers on their arms until they died. It is utterly irrefutable that those transports arrived in Auschwitz, based on all the sources.

And then there are the rather precise contingent who don't get registered.

You know all this, or you really ought to by now; what is your point?

The point is why was the extermination of the Jews carried out openly by those who used bullets while it was shrouded in secrecy by those who used gas? The evidence for Jews being murdered in gas chambers is evidence that people were sent to camps. A stream of telexes saying a transport is on its way with 1112 or 1002 Jews from Drancy and will arrive in Auschwitz on x day is evidence that Jews are being transported to Auschwtiz. The transport lists for France that breakdown ages that were preserved is evidence that there were transports from France. The numbers of men and women registered at Auschwitz is evidence that men and women were registered at Auschwitz. The hundreds of survivors who carried the relevant tattoo on their arms until the day they died is proof that they were registered. Utterly irrefutable evidence that transports arrived in Auschwitz is utterly irrefutable evidence that transports arrived in Auschwitz. You need to take that perfectly ordinary data, translate coded language and euphemisms to decipher criminal intent and employ accounting sleight of hand to arrive at a death toll for those Jews who were victims of the Nazi's intentional genocide if they were killed by gas. The smallest number of personnel involved in implementing the Final Solution, who successfully murdered appalling numbers of Jews did so secretly and without being required to report on their activities. Meanwhile, the shoot-the-Jews department of the final solution project, who employed twenty times as many people and therefore was expected to generate at least twenty times as much paperwork, openly discussed the final solution project without coded language or euphemisms and precisely documented the numbers of Jews who were murdered, broken down by age and sex. To calculate the number of Jews murdered by gas required understanding a secret language and having access to disparate reports that needed to be cross referenced and calculated in a time consuming error prone process. One glance at an EG report would be all somebody would need to see to know that Nazi Germany was killing all the Jews and how many were killed by whom.

The point is that you have to bend over backwards to make the various documents that refer to people being deported and documents that refer to people being executed work together as evidence that Nazi Germany had a plan to exterminate all the Jews.

 

[Dogzilla]

The detour into reading recommendations does, of course, once again beg the question of what precisely Dogzilla has read on this subject.

I answered your obvious attempt at shifting focus away from your inability to respond intelligently to any questions. You know perfectly well that I cannot possibly prove to you that I read any books on the holocaust last just as you cannot prove to me that you read any. I told you that I read 345,981 books on the holocaust last year and you have nothing besides your own incredulity to prove otherwise. So we'll just have to leave it at that.

 

[LemmyCaution]

I accept that war diaries (if you are talking about personal, unofficial documents by individual participants) would be more likely to be more numerous for EG than the DC simply because there were far more individual participants.

If, instead of being a smart-ass about reading, or not, this history, you actually read any of it, you would know, and not just from the context, that by "war diary" Nick certainly referred to what is called a KTB, for Kriegstagebuch. A KTB is not a random individual's personal journal kept during wartime but rather is a record made by a German military unit of its engagements and military actions as well as situations encountered and activities, its changes in location, losses of equipment and personnel, key orders, etc. Nick, having studied the military history much closer than I, will know better but my understanding is the KTBs have been part of German military protocol dating to the mid-19th century (not sure of this?) and that during WWII the high command laid down guidelines for such records. I have seen KTBs referenced for both the army and for U-boats, but, again, Nick is the best qualified to explain the war diaries in detail.

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=163718

 

[LemmyCaution]

On second thought . . . If you know American baseball, you know it has a language peculiar to it, which one learns by doing baseball. In baseball, to "go home" means to score a run by crossing what is called home plate. I am pretty sure you non-Yanks know this . . . So when I was a mere youth, we were once, near dusk, playing a game of baseball - a number of families with children of various ages. We assumed baseball knowledge and basic baseball language of all the players. However, one player, Bobby Dawster, it turned out did not know baseball. Somehow he reached third base, poised to score a run by crossing home plate, that is, from third base he could "go home." The batter struck the ball and immediately a cry went up from Bobby's teammates - "Bobby, go home, run, Bobby, go home!" Bobby paused, looked devastated - he burst into tears and ran off the playing field toward his . . . house about a half a block away, going home indeed.

Discussing history with Dogzilla is like playing baseball with Bobby Dawster.

 

[Nick Terry]

I answered your obvious attempt at shifting focus away from your inability to respond intelligently to any questions. You know perfectly well that I cannot possibly prove to you that I read any books on the holocaust last just as you cannot prove to me that you read any. I told you that I read 345,981 books on the holocaust last year and you have nothing besides your own incredulity to prove otherwise. So we'll just have to leave it at that.

No, we're not going to leave it at that, because the question goes deeper than just what you read in the past year. Based on your posting history here, I have formed the impression, rightly or wrongly, that you've not read anything written about the Holocaust in book form that has appeared in the past quarter-century. You can correct this impression only by demonstrating a proper awareness of a book about the Holocaust written in that time-frame.

Showing that awareness is perfectly easy - it involves discussing the contents of a book in such a way that another person who has read the same book can recognise the discussion. This doesn't require much effort, and it ought to be extremely easy to do if you've actually read anything. Other posters manage it all the time. But you seemingly can't.

 

[Nick Terry]

Sorry. Answering a question with a question is a cultural thing.

So trolling and crank behaviour now constitute a whole culture. Got it. Good to know.

 

[Nick Terry]

Having access to the crime scene is necessary for investigating the crime. Questioning that is beyond stupid.

The Dutch Red Cross did not need to physically visit the Sobibor crime scene to investigate Sobibor when they interviewed all the survivors of the deportations to that camp from the Netherlands. They could be sent the results of the Polish investigation, which is what happened.

Nor did the French need to have access to Auschwitz in order to carry out their investigation when they interviewed French Auschwitz survivors. They sent their results to Poland, who carried out a separate investigation which included inspecting the site and conducting chemical tests, among other things.

When the West Germans came to investigate Treblinka, they were sent the results of the Polish investigation in 1945, including the crime scene reports and crime scene photos. They did not need to reinvestigate the site because there was nothing there that would help them prove or disprove the guilt of the suspects. They were dealing with an already proven fact that was simply not in dispute by any of the suspects, none of whom denied that Treblinka had been an extermination camp.

Likewise, when a West German state attorney's office was investigating Auschwitz, it too was sent the older results, and then brought the case to trial, at which point it was felt that to resolve issues arising from court testimonies, a visit to Auschwitz would be helpful. So they arranged a visit and walked the ground, which led to a number of eyewitnesses' testimonies being thrown out since they could not physically have seen what they claimed from the vantage points they had described. The same consideration wouldn't have applied to Treblinka, because the entire camp was dismantled, whereas the main camp at Auschwitz was still standing.

As the materials available to the West Germans included the 1946 Sehn report, then the West German investigators would have known that whatever they were presented with in the 1960s when they saw Krematorium I was a reconstruction. Whether or not that fact was stressed, noted or emphasised was however irrelevant to the purpose of the trip, which was to establish whether eyewitnesses had line of sight to events they had claimed.

In the 1970s, East German investigators were sent materials from a Soviet province showing the precise locations of graves of partisan suspects who had been executed by the Secret Field Police. These materials included the 1944 exhumation reports and photos taken at the time showing the condition of the ground and also showing where memorial markers were placed to commemorate entire villages that had been wiped off the map, along with maps showing where they had been.

Your apparent pseudolegal proceduralism is a dead end for the following reasons:

1) crime scenes are generally investigated once. Very few crime scenes are revisited over and over again and dug up or retested. There is especially little reason to revisit crime scenes when no defendant or suspect is raising any issues which might actually be resolved by revisiting the crime scene or metaphorically "exhuming the corpse". None of the recent archaeological investigations were conducted in a legal context; archaeology is a separate endeavour to criminal investigation.

2) it is perfectly possible for investigations to yield concrete results about crimes without involving forensics. This happens all the time when different police forces cooperate with each other. A crime happens in one district and is investigated there, but ramifications emerge which require the involvement of a neighbouring police force, who are sent the results and then generate new leads by standard police investigative means - interviewing witnesses. Or someone is sent off to check records (documents) and this yields results.

3) the basic point of what I wrote in the previous post to which you replied is this. The Polish and Soviet investigations were trusted on the crucial points from the 1940s onwards because there were other investigations unfolding entirely independently of these two states which came to the same results by other routes. Thus legal investigators, commentators and historians could see that there was evidence from this country, that country and the other country, and it matched the picture being developed by the Polish state and the Soviet Union, but especially the Polish investigations when talking about the death camps.

Those investigations were clearly trusted, because the Holocaust became an accepted historical fact by the end of the 1940s, as a result of combining the evidence uncovered in the east with the evidence uncovered in the west.

Cold War suspicions meant that there was probably more distrust of the Soviets, who were also more secretive and did not do much to publicise their investigations. But this only reinforces the basic point about the independence of the investigations.

The Einsatzgruppen trial relied exclusively on documents; only 2 witnesses were presented by the prosecution and there were no forensic reports used. The Americans could have asked the Soviets for thousands of forensic reports which had been drawn up from 1943-45 as the sites were investigated, but they didn't, because the trial took place in the time frame between the Soviet rejection of the Marshall Plan and the start of the Berlin Blockade.

Today, we can easily compare the two halves of the torn-up card and find oodles of corroboration, convergence and game-of-snap matches between the US investigation and trial of the Einsatzgruppen leadership, and the Soviet Extraordinary Commission investigations. These two investigations took place entirely independently. That is the best guarantor possible that neither was fraudulent.

Quite clearly, the results of the Einsatzgruppen trial were enough to convince western historians as well as western legal investigators through the whole of the Cold War that the Nazis had carried out mass murder in the occupied Soviet territories. That is what happened - people were convinced by the evidence in the west alone on this part, because they simply didn't know about the full extent of the Soviet investigations. It wasn't until well into the West German investigations of the 1960s that copies of the 1940s Soviet investigative reports were sent to West Germany. But once they were sent, then these confirmed what was already being developed from the documents and the witnesses. They were independent sources.

Far from casting any serious doubt on the historicity of the Holocaust, the east-west split negates the quibbling of Holocaust deniers because the investigation of the crimes proceeded independently on both sides of the Iron Curtain to the point where it is impossible to claim a massive forgery/fabrication exercise.

 

[Clayton Moore]

ftfy.

Spielberg is a film-maker, not a historian. The Academy which dishes out Oscars is in Hollywood, and not part of the Ivy League.

He's a film-maker not a historian so it's OK to film lies as if documented truth.

Spielberg had access to the truth yet he chose to spread lies. He's a scumbag.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Goodness gracious great balls of fire! You want evidence of a denier denouncing Zisblatt before a "scholar" got to her? Read Joachim Neander's "expose" on the holocaustcontroversies blog. He's the holocaust scholar who denounced Zisblatt. Neander refers to work done by Eric Hunt. Eric Hunt is the denier who got to Zisblatt first. Didn't you even see somebody, I forget who, probably Nick or Lemmy, taking me to task for saying that Neander used Hunt's work without acknowledgement? (which, btw, is a dressing down I totally deserved because what I wrote earlier was completely unfair to Neander. I know Neander referenced Eric Hunt. I didn't intend to imply that Neander didn't acknowledge Eric Hunt. But when I wrote was poorly written and it sure sounded like that's what I meant.) How could you miss THAT?!

As far as what I expect people to do about Zisblatt? I would expect Irene Zisblatt's public appearances to receive the same response that public appearances by David Irving or Norman Finkelstein receive by the same people. If they got time to stalk Irving and Finkelstein, they can stalk Zisblatt just as easily.

They lie and accept lies till they can't possibly get away with them. Then they erase the lies and ignore them as if they never existed.

Scummy liars beget scummy liars.

 

[Tomtomkent]

He's a film-maker not a historian so it's OK to film lies as if documented truth.

Spielberg had access to the truth yet he chose to spread lies. He's a scumbag.

No he presented it as a fictionalised account of a true story.

There is a difference between basing a fiction upon the truth and producing a documentary.

At the time of release a vhs was sent to schools in the UK by one exam board whose GCSE history curricululm included this period. The pack included the film, and a documentary by the producers highlighting what was real, and what was fiction, with interviews with the surviviors.

Strange kind of scum who go out of their way to highlight to children which bitsof fiction are just fiction.

 

[TSR]

He's a film-maker not a historian so it's OK to film lies as if documented truth.

.
CM, what do you think movies *are*?
.

Spielberg had access to the truth yet he chose to spread lies. He's a scumbag.

.

.

Edited by jhunter1163: 

Edited for civility.

 

[FluffyPersian]

Good quote, thanks.

I think that Longerich's Heinrich Himmler is indispensable; I read it over the holidays and seem to be carrying it with me wherever I go these days. I read Gerwarth's biography Heydrich just before - and they go well together, Longerich's being by far the better piece of work.

I'll check out Longerich's version. Does anyone know if there are plans to release an English translation of Longerich's Goebbels bio?

 

[tsig]

He's a film-maker not a historian so it's OK to film lies as if documented truth.

Spielberg had access to the truth yet he chose to spread lies. He's a scumbag.

They lie and accept lies till they can't possibly get away with them. Then they erase the lies and ignore them as if they never existed.

Scummy liars beget scummy liars.

Your stock of insults seems to be running low.

 

[OCaptain]

Can you imagine the rage that would befall someone who dared speak up and out at an Irene Zisblatt appearance? A teacher questioning her lies? A parent demanding she not be allowed to lie at her child's school?

That's what the Holohoax has done to free speech.

Can any average person with a working family take that risk?

If you really believe what you say, then why don't you have the courage to act on your convictions and speak? Nut up or shut up.

 

[Clayton Moore]

If you really believe what you say, then why don't you have the courage to act on your convictions and speak? Nut up or shut up.

Originally Posted by Clayton Moore

Can you imagine the rage that would befall someone who dared speak up and out at an Irene Zisblatt appearance? A teacher questioning her lies? A parent demanding she not be allowed to lie at her child's school?

That's what the Holohoax has done to free speech.

Can any average person with a working family take that risk?

I do believe what I said. That's why I don't.

I'm waiting for 9/11 to break. The Holohoax will shatter in the 9/11 excrement.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Originally Posted by Clayton Moore


I do believe what I said. That's why I don't.

And yet, even though you don't, everyone else who doesn't is a lying scumbag?

Now, leaving your paranoia aside for a moment, why is it, as TSR asks, that you guys lie routinely and don't get worked up about those lies? One of you makes up dates and locations, he doctors quotations to make them say what he wants, he lies about what is in source material he's read, another of you lies about what members of the forum have written, all of you make claims you cannot support with citations or evidence . . . why doesn't that have you all worked up?