General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[gabeygoat]

And I can't ask Lance Armstrong, he's dead.

No, he's not.

 

[Robrob]

For the CT believers; I imagine you also claim this guy was part of the "conspiracy?"

Major General Sidney Shachnow

Surviving the concentration camp:

Sid Shachnow was born in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1934. At the age of seven, Shachnow was imprisoned in the brutal Kovno concentration camp during World War II because his family was Jewish. For three years he endured countless brutalities in the camp and was forced to watch helplessly as almost every single one of his extended family were slaughtered. To increase his prospects of survival, young Shachnow performed heavy manual labor under harsh conditions. He narrowly escaped death only days before Kovno's gruesome "Children's Action", of March 27–28, 1944, when Nazi troops rounded-up all children in the camp and marched them to The Ninth Fort for execution or to Auschwitz to be gassed. After smuggling out of the camp, Shachnow lived in hiding for months, mostly in austere seclusion, where he nearly expired from starvation and malnutrition. Shachnow fled west after the Soviets liberated Kovno from the Nazis and began to implement Communism. His grueling 2,000 mile, six month journey across Europe, mostly on foot, took him across Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and finally to American occupied Nuremberg, Germany where he hoped to obtain a visa to the United States. To make a living in war-torn Nuremberg, Shachnow resorted to pirating black market contraband such as pantyhose and chocolate.

 

[EtienneSC]

Hi folks,

This is my first post here. I'm a contributor to CODOH forum and have been advised this is a good way to engage in discussion of the holocaust, as 'revisionist' ideas are challenged here and new information brought to light. I see this thread is classified under conspiracy theories. I'm not sure whether the "conspiracy theory" at stake here is that of the Germans conspiring to exterminate the Jews or the Jews and communists conspiring to convince the world that they did so, but no matter I guess.

I have spent some years trying to find evidence for key aspects of the Holocaust and cannot find any in the places I would expect it, such as the books of Raul Hilberg and Martin Gilbert. The main areas of absence ar:
(1) the Hitler order or other information supporting the idea that the German policy after 1941 changed from deportation to extermination.
(2) any evidence that there were homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz or the Aktion Reinhardt camps or refutation of the archaeological evidence that they could not have been (i.e. the 'Rudolf report')
(3) any evidence of the so-called 'holocaust by bullets' (such as mass graves, exhumations, provision of materials for destruction of evidence, etc). This last is certainly under-researched, but I understand that Carlo Mattogno intends to publish on the subject around 2014.

In my experience there is a contrast between 'holocaust studies' and other branches of history in terms of the paucity of evidence in relation to the vastness of the claims made. This was recently remarked on by Caroline Sturdy-Colls, a forensic archaeologist who has tried to find evidence of killings at Treblinka camp in a video talk published at vimeo.

If I am wrong to observe this lack of evidence, I'm here to be put right. My overall impression though, is that the 'holocaust' is the Oedipus complex of our day, a flagship of intellectually bankrupt leftist ideology. On that analogy, I would expect it to die a death of neglect over a period of a couple of generations, at least if the current state of knowledge on the subject is correct.

I appreciate that I am a late-comer to this debate, which has obviously been going on for some years on this thread. I am happy to read past answers relevant to the above points, but as there are over 10,000 previous posts, I would appreciate any pointers to posts of particular relevance to the intersts I have expressed above.

 

[Robrob]

If I am wrong to observe this lack of evidence, I'm here to be put right. My overall impression though, is that the 'holocaust' is the Oedipus complex of our day, a flagship of intellectually bankrupt leftist ideology. On that analogy, I would expect it to die a death of neglect over a period of a couple of generations, at least if the current state of knowledge on the subject is correct.

1) Not exactly the most unbiased academic POV.

2) Several generations have already passed since 1945.

 

[Belz...]

Hi folks,

This is my first post here. I'm a contributor to CODOH forum and have been advised this is a good way to engage in discussion of the holocaust, as 'revisionist' ideas are challenged here and new information brought to light. I see this thread is classified under conspiracy theories. I'm not sure whether the "conspiracy theory" at stake here is that of the Germans conspiring to exterminate the Jews or the Jews and communists conspiring to convince the world that they did so, but no matter I guess.

Actually, "yes matter".

"Conspiracy theory", in this case, is the contention that the holocaust is a fabrication of the victors of WWII.

As an aside, if you can't find any evidence for the holocaust, I have to wonder how hard you've been looking.

 

[Border Reiver]

I have spent some years trying to find evidence for key aspects of the Holocaust and cannot find any in the places I would expect it, such as the books of Raul Hilberg and Martin Gilbert. The main areas of absence ar:
(1) the Hitler order or other information supporting the idea that the German policy after 1941 changed from deportation to extermination.

The Wansee Conference is an excellent place to start for the evidence of the policy shift. Although you can see it in the increasingly restrictive legal acts puts on Jews in the Reich from 1933 on.

(2) any evidence that there were homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz or the Aktion Reinhardt camps or refutation of the archaeological evidence that they could not have been (i.e. the 'Rudolf report')

The blueprint calling them gas chambers should work for you then.

(3) any evidence of the so-called 'holocaust by bullets' (such as mass graves, exhumations, provision of materials for destruction of evidence, etc). This last is certainly under-researched, but I understand thaGt Carlo Mattogno intends to publish on the subject around 2014.

The oft-cited Jäger Report should be a good place to start for "Holocaust by bullets". Nothing like an official report by a subordinate to a superior detailing what had been done.

In my experience there is a contrast between 'holocaust studies' and other branches of history in terms of the paucity of evidence in relation to the vastness of the claims made. This was recently remarked on by Caroline Sturdy-Colls, a forensic archaeologist who has tried to find evidence of killings at Treblinka camp in a video talk published at vimeo.

If I am wrong to observe this lack of evidence, I'm here to be put right. My overall impression though, is that the 'holocaust' is the Oedipus complex of our day, a flagship of intellectually bankrupt leftist ideology. On that analogy, I would expect it to die a death of neglect over a period of a couple of generations, at least if the current state of knowledge on the subject is correct.

I guess you need to look other than to denial websites for your sources of this part of history then.

Acknowledging the reality of the Holocaust is not an example of a "bankrupt leftist ideology". It is simply the study of history and a willingness to look the rather unpleasant fact that as a species we will do incredibly evil things to other people for the flimsiest of reasons. How the history is portrayed may have an ideological bent, but the fact that an event happened is not ideological.

I appreciate that I am a late-comer to this debate, which has obviously been going on for some years on this thread. I am happy to read past answers relevant to the above points, but as there are over 10,000 previous posts, I would appreciate any pointers to posts of particular relevance to the intersts I have expressed above.

At the bottom of Nick Terry's post is his sig block with a link to a good starting point for you. An on-line PDF addressing all the points you have raised above with references to the primary sources.

 

[Nick Terry]

Hi folks,

This is my first post here. I'm a contributor to CODOH forum and have been advised this is a good way to engage in discussion of the holocaust, as 'revisionist' ideas are challenged here and new information brought to light. I see this thread is classified under conspiracy theories. I'm not sure whether the "conspiracy theory" at stake here is that of the Germans conspiring to exterminate the Jews or the Jews and communists conspiring to convince the world that they did so, but no matter I guess.

The 'conspiracy theory' is the set of claims advanced by revisionism, since the denial of the Holocaust unavoidably requires a belief in an impossibly vast conspiracy of many different actors during WWII and after 1945.

I have spent some years trying to find evidence for key aspects of the Holocaust and cannot find any in the places I would expect it, such as the books of Raul Hilberg and Martin Gilbert. The main areas of absence ar:
(1) the Hitler order or other information supporting the idea that the German policy after 1941 changed from deportation to extermination.
(2) any evidence that there were homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz or the Aktion Reinhardt camps or refutation of the archaeological evidence that they could not have been (i.e. the 'Rudolf report')
(3) any evidence of the so-called 'holocaust by bullets' (such as mass graves, exhumations, provision of materials for destruction of evidence, etc). This last is certainly under-researched, but I understand that Carlo Mattogno intends to publish on the subject around 2014.

To clarify, is there a mass murder or genocide running to six or seven figures which you regard as satisfactorily proven according to your personal standards of evidence? And are there other mass murders or genocides which you doubt, and if so why? Please note these are questions of fact and epistemology which are entirely separate from whether one atrocity is more or less "popular" or "ignored".

It would help if you are open and honest about what books you have actually read on the subject. It does not sound as if you have really seriously investigated the topic.

As a rule of thumb, history students are expected to do the following amounts of reading depending on the level:

1st year 1500 word essay: 10-15 books and articles
2nd/3rd year 3000 word essay: 15-20 books and articles
3rd year undergraduate dissertation: 50 books and articles
MA dissertation: 100-200 books and articles
PhD: 300-500 books and articles

Now nobody is saying you have to read as much as for a PhD, but if you only know Hilberg and Martin Gilbert (whose works date back to the 60s-80s really), this is really not enough, even though they both discuss a lot of evidence which is very relevant to your questions.

I would recommend the following online books/book-length works as basics in this discussion. Several are now 10-20+ years old, so there will be things which have advanced since the original publication/writing.

But it would be a fair assessment that someone wishing to debate the Holocaust should have digested these online book length works/books, and be fairly familiar with the many pieces of evidence discussed inside them, and how they fit together.

1) For the issue of decision-making and the "Hitler order"

1.Christopher Browning, expert report for the Irving trial (2000)
2-3. Peter Longerich, 2 expert reports for the Irving trial (2000)
4. Chapter 2 of the Holocaust Controversies-authored critique of revisionists (2011) linked in my signature and here

2) Regarding the gas chambers

1. Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (1989)
2. Robert Van Pelt, Expert Report for the Irving Trial (2000)
3. Christopher Browning, Expert Report for the Irving Trial (2000)
4. The Holocaust Controversies authored critique of revisionist arguments about the Aktion Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka (2011) linked in my sig and here including a discussion of archaeological research

3) Regarding the Holocaust by bullets, first one must digest the documentary evidence which can be found summarised in

1.Christopher Browning, expert report for the Irving trial (2000)
2. Peter Longerich, expert report 'The Systematic Character of the National Socialist Policy of the Extermination of the Jews' for the Irving trial (2000)
3. Chapter 2 of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard linked in my sig or here

There is not currently a comprehensive summary of the forensic investigations of Holocaust-related mass graves in the Soviet Union but rather a lot of bits and bobs. There is equally no comprehensive summary of forensic investigations into Stalinist mass murders carried out in the same country. Indeed there is no study of any mass murder or genocide in the 20th Century which presents primarily forensic evidence, and it is fairly abnormal in any book on genocide or another mass murder (no matter who carried it out) to find extensive discussion of the issue.

Thus if it is absolutely critical to you to have such a study for the Holocaust, then you must logically deny all mass murders and/or reject all scholarship on them which doesn't bother to discuss the forensics/mass graves, which would mean rejecting almost everything ever written on mass killings in the modern era.

In the meantime, there is an extensive collection of photographs of mass graves mainly from the Nazi-occupied USSR, some from Nazi-occupied Poland, to be found here.

Since it will be some time before you work through queries (1) and (2) and need to answer a few questions of your own, I will postpone further discussion of the mass graves/forensics issue until a later date. It rapidly involves discussing primary sources and journal articles since it just isn't a subject which is 'trade paperback' territory, because it is after all quite gruesome.

In my experience there is a contrast between 'holocaust studies' and other branches of history in terms of the paucity of evidence in relation to the vastness of the claims made. This was recently remarked on by Caroline Sturdy-Colls, a forensic archaeologist who has tried to find evidence of killings at Treblinka camp in a video talk published at vimeo.

I doubt you can prove any such contrast when comparing scholarly field to scholarly field.

While I have recommended some online works because they are accessible and free, here is a far from complete list of some important scholarly works on the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and directly related issues published since 2000. There are more than 500 books listed there, and I'll update this with a few more:

1. Bartoszewski, Wladyslaw and Zofia Lewinowa (eds), Ten jest z ojczyzny mojey. Polacy z pomoca Zydom 1939-1945. Warsaw: Swiat Ksiazki, 2007
2. Benz, Wolfgang, Barbara Distel, Angelika Königseder (eds), Nationalsozialistische Zwangslager. Strukturen und Regionen, Täter und Opfer. Berlin: Metropol, 2011
3. Braham, Randolph L. and William J. vanden Heuvel (eds), The Auschwitz Reports and the Holocaust in Hungary. Boulder: East European Monographs, 2011
4. Christ, Michaela, Die Dynamik des Tötens: Die Ermordung der Juden in Berditschew. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2011
5. Confino, Alon, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011
6. Cziborra, Pascal, Frauen im KZ. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der historischen Forschung am Beispiel des KL Flossenbürg und seiner Aussenlager. Bielefeld: Lorbeer, 2010
7. Didi-Huberman, Georges, Images in spite of all: four photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008
8. Ellger, Hans, Zwangsarbeit und weibliche Űberlebensstrategien. Die Geschichte der Frauenaussenlager des Konzentrationslagers Neuengamme 1944/45. Berlin: Metropol, 2007
9. Gigliotti, Simone, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust. Oxford: Berghahn, 2009
10. Greiser, Almut, Der Kommandant Josef Schwammberger. Ein NS-Täter in der Erinnerung von Ueberlendenden, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2011
11. Hedgepeth, Sonja and Rochelle G. Saidel (eds), Sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust, Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2010
12. Ibel, Johannes (ed), Einvernehmliche Zusammenarbeit? Wehrmacht, Gestapo, SS und sowjetische Kriegsgefangene. Berlin: Metropol, 2008
13. Keller, Rolf, Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene im Deutschen Reich 1941/42. Behandlung und Arbeitseinsatz zwischen Vernichtungspolitik und kriegswirtschaftlichen Zwängen. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011
14. Knopp, Sonja, ‘Wir lebten mitten im Tod’. Das ‘Sonderkommando’ in Auschwitz in schriftlichen und mündlichen Häftlingserinnerungen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009
15. Kotarba, Ryszard, Niemiecki oboz w Plaszowie 1942-1945. Warsaw/Krakow: IPN, 2009.
16. Małek, Aneta, Praca w systemie KL Gross-Rosen. Wałbrzych: Muzeum Gross-Rosen, 2003
17. Mark and Ljubica Erickson (eds), Russia War, Peace and Diplomacy Essays in Honour of John Erickson. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004
18. Matthäus, Jürgen (ed), Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor. Holocaust Testimony and its Transformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009
19. Meyer zu Uptrup, Wolfgang, Kampf gegen die ‚jüdische Weltverschwörung‘. Propaganda und Antisemitismus der Nationalsozialisten 1919-1945. Berlin: Metropol, 2003
20. Meyer, Ahlrich, Das Wissen um Auschwitz, Täter und Opfer der ‘Endlösung’ in Westeuropa. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010
21. Montague, Patrick, Chelmno and the Holocaust. The History of Hitler’s First Death Camp. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011
22. Mühlenberg, Jutta, Das SS-Helferinnenkorps: Ausbilding, Einsatz und Entnazifizerung der weiblichen Angehörigen der Waffen-SS 1942-1949. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2011
23. Nelson, Robert L. (ed), Germans, Poland and Colonial Expansion to the East. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
24. Netz, Reviel, Barbed wire: an ecology of modernity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004
25. Neumann, Boaz, Die Weltanschauung des Nazismus: Raum – Körper – Sprache. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010
26. Orth, Karin, Die Konzentrationslager-SS. Sozialstrukturelle Analysen und biographische Studien. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000
27. Rentrop, Petra, Tatorte der ‘Endlösung’. Das Ghetto Minsk und die Vernichtungsstätte von Maly Trostinez. Berlin: Metropol, 2011
28. Riedel, Dirk, Ordnungshüter und Massenmörder im Dienst der ‘Volksgemeinschaft’. Der KZ-Kommandant Hans Loritz. Berlin: Metropol, 2011
29. Riedle, Andrea, Die Kommandanturstabsangehörigen des KZ Sachsenhausen: Sozialstruktur, Dienstwege und biografische Studien. Berlin: Metropol, 2011
30. Rohrkamp, René, ‘Weltanschaulich gefestigte Kämpfer’: Die Soldaten der Waffen-SS 1933-1945. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010
31. Sarti, Wendy Adele-Marie, Women and Nazis: Perpetrators of Genocide and Other Crimes during Hitler’s Régime, 1933-1945. Palo Alto: Academica Press, 2011
32. Semelin, Jacques, Claire Andrieu and Sarah Gensburger (eds), Resisting Genocide: The Multiple Forms of Rescue. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011
33. Stein, Harry (ed), Konzentrationslager Buchenwald 1937-1945. Begleitband zur ständigen historischen Ausstellung. Göttingen, Wallstein, 2008
34. Sula, Dorota, Arbeitslager Riese. Filia KL Gross-Rosen. Wałbrzych: Muzeum Gross-Rosen, 2003
35. Sula, Dorota, Filie KL Gross-Rosen. Wybór artykułów. Wałbrzych: Muzeum Gross-Rosen, 2001
36. Thalhofer, Elizabeth, Entgrenzung der Gewalt. Gestapo-Lager in der Endphase des Dritten Reiches. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010
37. Zürcher, Regula, ‘Wir machten die schwarze Arbeit des Holocaust’. Das Personal der Massenvernichtungsanlagen von Auschwitz. Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2004

don't make the mistake, by the way, of thinking that evidence about Auschwitz is only discussed in books with the word 'Auschwitz' in the title. Eg Dorota Sula's study of the Riese subcamp complex in Gross-Rosen has some facsimiles directly relevant to the issue of mass murder at Auschwitz.

If I am wrong to observe this lack of evidence, I'm here to be put right.

See above.

My overall impression though, is that the 'holocaust' is the Oedipus complex of our day, a flagship of intellectually bankrupt leftist ideology. On that analogy, I would expect it to die a death of neglect over a period of a couple of generations, at least if the current state of knowledge on the subject is correct.

This is unfortunately a textbook example of wishful thinking and projection. The Holocaust is not something that interests only left-wing intellectuals, but is accepted as a historical fact across the entire political spectrum in every single country in the western world, with the sole exception of a few neo-Nazi parties; even the extreme right parties in Europe no longer bother to espouse 'revisionism' because the consensus against Holocaust denial is so overwhelming.

As the revisionist movement is visibly wilting and demonstrably ageing (Faurisson is in his 80s, to name but one of numerous examples), I would instead predict that it is Holocaust denial that could die a death in the next generation, since there has not been a noticeable surge in growth in the revisionist movement, despite most people with an internet connection being quite well aware it exists.

I appreciate that I am a late-comer to this debate, which has obviously been going on for some years on this thread. I am happy to read past answers relevant to the above points, but as there are over 10,000 previous posts, I would appreciate any pointers to posts of particular relevance to the intersts I have expressed above.

You have asked rather oversized questions which are, in fact, sufficiently large that the appropriate response is to recommend book-length works, not to write out reams of material which is already written up elsewhere.

I of course could ask equally oversized questions of you, but one in particular really interests me and seems to be under-discussed by revisionists. Namely how the so-called 'hoax' works - how the world came to be 'hoodwinked' by a mass of evidence for the Holocaust, and how that evidence was supposedly fabricated.

Maybe you shy away from 'hoax' as a term, but the same point can be put in other ways.

Personally, I find it absolutely incredible, to the point of impossibility, that the many 10s of 1000s of survivors of Auschwitz would all be lying or mistaken about Auschwitz having gas chambers, and I have never seen a convincing explanation from revisionists for why 10s of 1000s of people of different nationalities, ethnicities, religions and political persuasions would agree on something that wasn't true. I am open to persuasion, however, so give it your best shot.

 

[uke2se]

Hi folks,

This is my first post here. I'm a contributor to CODOH forum and have been advised this is a good way to engage in discussion of the holocaust, as 'revisionist' ideas are challenged here and new information brought to light. I see this thread is classified under conspiracy theories. I'm not sure whether the "conspiracy theory" at stake here is that of the Germans conspiring to exterminate the Jews or the Jews and communists conspiring to convince the world that they did so, but no matter I guess.

I have spent some years trying to find evidence for key aspects of the Holocaust and cannot find any in the places I would expect it, such as the books of Raul Hilberg and Martin Gilbert. The main areas of absence ar:
(1) the Hitler order or other information supporting the idea that the German policy after 1941 changed from deportation to extermination.
(2) any evidence that there were homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz or the Aktion Reinhardt camps or refutation of the archaeological evidence that they could not have been (i.e. the 'Rudolf report')
(3) any evidence of the so-called 'holocaust by bullets' (such as mass graves, exhumations, provision of materials for destruction of evidence, etc). This last is certainly under-researched, but I understand that Carlo Mattogno intends to publish on the subject around 2014.

In my experience there is a contrast between 'holocaust studies' and other branches of history in terms of the paucity of evidence in relation to the vastness of the claims made. This was recently remarked on by Caroline Sturdy-Colls, a forensic archaeologist who has tried to find evidence of killings at Treblinka camp in a video talk published at vimeo.

If I am wrong to observe this lack of evidence, I'm here to be put right. My overall impression though, is that the 'holocaust' is the Oedipus complex of our day, a flagship of intellectually bankrupt leftist ideology. On that analogy, I would expect it to die a death of neglect over a period of a couple of generations, at least if the current state of knowledge on the subject is correct.

I appreciate that I am a late-comer to this debate, which has obviously been going on for some years on this thread. I am happy to read past answers relevant to the above points, but as there are over 10,000 previous posts, I would appreciate any pointers to posts of particular relevance to the intersts I have expressed above.

I'd recommend you to read the links in Nick Terry's signature. All your three points are addressed there, and elsewhere online and offline. Basically, your three points are oft debunked holocaust denialist talking points.

The reason this thread is in conspiracy theories is because holocaust denial is not an accepted historical process, and holocaust deniers do not engage in historical revisionism. Instead, it is an agenda driven process to restore credibility to the failed Nazi ideology, or to just generally express a hatred for Jews. To do this, the holocaust denier has to believe in a conspiracy theory.

That the Nazis murdered millions of Jews and non-Jews is not in doubt by any rational person. The evidence is overwhelming, and the holocaust is probably the most studied event in history.

I hope your stay on these forums will be enjoyable and educational for you. The neo-Nazi run Codoh forums is not a place for any sort of education on the holocaust, after all.

 

[EtienneSC]

I will address Nick Terry's points, as they seem to wrap up those of the other repliers, with the exception of the person who said I was not unbiased. He may be right, but I did not change my mind before weighing a considerable body of evidence.

The 'conspiracy theory' is the set of claims advanced by revisionism, since the denial of the Holocaust unavoidably requires a belief in an impossibly vast conspiracy of many different actors during WWII and after 1945.

I would not say that a single "conspiracy" is being alleged. However, there is documentation of the predecessors of the CIA planning how they would counteract Nazi propaganda. This was done in a co-ordinated way and I have a book written on the subject by one of the leading operatives, which is unfortunately hidden in a pile of other books, If anything depends on it, I can unearth it and advise the title. The American view expressed therein was that an effort had to be made to influence German opinion, as this had been subject to a monopoly of information under Goebbels. In the course of this, former camp inmates were co-opted, including Eugen Kogon. I believe equivalent policies were carried out by the Soviets and other communist groups with zionist agendas also playing a role. That there was no organised global conspiracy is indicated by the conflicting atrocity material produced. However, this is not a logical order to broach the subject, so I will revert to the order of Nick's questions.

To clarify, is there a mass murder or genocide running to six or seven figures which you regard as satisfactorily proven according to your personal standards of evidence? And are there other mass murders or genocides which you doubt, and if so why? Please note these are questions of fact and epistemology which are entirely separate from whether one atrocity is more or less "popular" or "ignored".

The only other genocide I have studied in any depth was the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot after 1975. This was questioned in a series of articles culminating by a book by Noam Chomsky in the late 1970s. Again, I can provide references if necessary. I thought at the time that Chomsky's book was reasonable. Again, he alleged CIA fabrication in the service of American interests and the creation of anti-communist propaganda. I believe he has gone silent on the subject over the last two decades and the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime has brought new evidence to light. Hence I do not have a strong opinion on the Cambodian genocide, but can believe that the scale of killing may have been greatly exaggerated.

I am also familiar with the revisionist work of Domenico Losurdo on Stalin. Hence I am open to the view that Stalinist atrocities may be also exaggerated, but again, I do not have a strong view either way. If necessary, I can go into more detail here.

The situation is not so much of "proof" (which is more a legal concept) as of there being a reasonable narrative and hence a presumption that something happened until reasonable doubt is cast on it. One's judgement is then swayed by general considerations, including one's general experience of human nature and motives. One has to be aware that political motives are at work, for example. I have not heard of any good reason to doubt the Armenian or Rwandan genocides, but that is not to say such may not exist.

It would help if you are open and honest about what books you have actually read on the subject. It does not sound as if you have really seriously investigated the topic. [...] Now nobody is saying you have to read as much as for a PhD, but if you only know Hilberg and Martin Gilbert (whose works date back to the 60s-80s really), this is really not enough, even though they both discuss a lot of evidence which is very relevant to your questions.

I am familiar with French and English revisionist work and with a variety of more orthodox material. The holocaust is not my main area of interest, but rather the reception of German thought in the English speaking world. My original question was thus 'how could the holocaust have occured?' i.e. what motive for it would have emerged from German culture. It never occured to me to question the fact itself until around three years ago. The total reading I have done in the area amounts to six piles of books around 1 to 3 feet high, of which revisionist work is an indeterminate part. The total reading I have done on German thought is around 30 years worth. If you need more precision, I will see what I can do.

I would recommend the following online books/book-length works as basics in this discussion. Several are now 10-20+ years old, so there will be things which have advanced since the original publication/writing.

But it would be a fair assessment that someone wishing to debate the Holocaust should have digested these online book length works/books, and be fairly familiar with the many pieces of evidence discussed inside them, and how they fit together.

1) For the issue of decision-making and the "Hitler order"

[...]
2) Regarding the gas chambers

[...]
3) Regarding the Holocaust by bullets, first one must digest the documentary evidence which can be found summarised in

[...]

Many thanks for this. Single books are much easier to digest. I have read Lord Justice Gray's summary of van Pelt and Longerich and have also read Richard Evans' account of the Irving trial and some of the transcripts. I think it was unfortunate that Irving sought to distance himself from "the revisionists", particularly Faurrison. The Irving trial appeared before most of Mattogno's writings had been published, which contain reasonable refutations of Pressac and van Pelt on Auschwitz. I do not have easy access to material in German and slavonic languages.

There is not currently a comprehensive summary of the forensic investigations of Holocaust-related mass graves in the Soviet Union but rather a lot of bits and bobs. There is equally no comprehensive summary of forensic investigations into Stalinist mass murders carried out in the same country. Indeed there is no study of any mass murder or genocide in the 20th Century which presents primarily forensic evidence, and it is fairly abnormal in any book on genocide or another mass murder (no matter who carried it out) to find extensive discussion of the issue.

Thus if it is absolutely critical to you to have such a study for the Holocaust, then you must logically deny all mass murders and/or reject all scholarship on them which doesn't bother to discuss the forensics/mass graves, which would mean rejecting almost everything ever written on mass killings in the modern era.

I am prepared to doubt the scale of killings by Stalin. There is no particular reason to doubt some other genocides. I can see that there is a problem in evaluating evidence in this area, but do not see any royal road to knowledge, except perhaps our general knowledge of human nature in war and peace which gives us hints on the relative plausibility of various narratives. The human propensity to lie and manipulate is also relevant.

Since it will be some time before you work through queries (1) and (2) and need to answer a few questions of your own, I will postpone further discussion of the mass graves/forensics issue until a later date. It rapidly involves discussing primary sources and journal articles since it just isn't a subject which is 'trade paperback' territory, because it is after all quite gruesome.

It certainly is. Fair enough.

I doubt you can prove any such contrast when comparing scholarly field to scholarly field.

While I have recommended some online works because they are accessible and free, [...] is a far from complete list of some important scholarly works on the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and directly related issues published since 2000. There are more than 500 books listed there, and I'll update this with a few more:

What is chiefly missing is a response to Mattogno. I see that you have attempted to provide this and we are all awaiting Mattogno's reply. I find it unfortunate that Mattogno does not approach academia with his work and indeed that they are not more receptive to his ideas. I think this division emerged following Butz's book in the 1970s and the French historians' response to Faurrison.

This is unfortunately a textbook example of wishful thinking and projection. The Holocaust is not something that interests only left-wing intellectuals, but is accepted as a historical fact across the entire political spectrum in every single country in the western world, with the sole exception of a few neo-Nazi parties; even the extreme right parties in Europe no longer bother to espouse 'revisionism' because the consensus against Holocaust denial is so overwhelming.

As the revisionist movement is visibly wilting and demonstrably ageing (Faurisson is in his 80s, to name but one of numerous examples), I would instead predict that it is Holocaust denial that could die a death in the next generation, since there has not been a noticeable surge in growth in the revisionist movement, despite most people with an internet connection being quite well aware it exists.

I think many people are aware that it exists, as I was, but rely on the fact that it is derided in academia, as I also did, and hence look no further. I was surprised by the cogency and reasonableness of its central claims when I began to investigate them first hand. Some reprochement of academia and the more reasonable revisionists id desirable in my opinion.

You have asked rather oversized questions which are, in fact, sufficiently large that the appropriate response is to recommend book-length works, not to write out reams of material which is already written up elsewhere.

I of course could ask equally oversized questions of you, but one in particular really interests me and seems to be under-discussed by revisionists. Namely how the so-called 'hoax' works - how the world came to be 'hoodwinked' by a mass of evidence for the Holocaust, and how that evidence was supposedly fabricated.

Maybe you shy away from 'hoax' as a term, but the same point can be put in other ways.

I have addressed this in outline above. The term 'hoax' was unfortunate in tone and implications.

Personally, I find it absolutely incredible, to the point of impossibility, that the many 10s of 1000s of survivors of Auschwitz would all be lying or mistaken about Auschwitz having gas chambers, and I have never seen a convincing explanation from revisionists for why 10s of 1000s of people of different nationalities, ethnicities, religions and political persuasions would agree on something that wasn't true. I am open to persuasion, however, so give it your best shot.

One thingthat impressed me was that only two supposed eye-witnesses of gas chambers were produced at the 1985 Zundel trial in Toronto and under cross-examination both their stories fell apart. Another was the leader of the French deportees conceding in a filmed discussion that Faurrison may have been right on the gas chambers, for which he was insulted by a young anti-semite and carried himself with great dignity in response.

The implausibility of atrocity stories compared with the known human propensity to lie also counts with me. If numbers of harmonious witnesses are of great probative value, should we not also believe in witchcraft?

 

[EtienneSC]

I'd recommend you to read the links in Nick Terry's signature. All your three points are addressed there, and elsewhere online and offline. Basically, your three points are oft debunked holocaust denialist talking points.

I have looked at an online version of this critique of Carlo Mattogno on the Aktion Reinhardt camps. I will not try a sentence by sentence response here, as this is already being undertaken by Mattogno himself as a priority over his original work on the 'holocaust by bullets'.

The reason this thread is in conspiracy theories is because holocaust denial is not an accepted historical process, and holocaust deniers do not engage in historical revisionism. Instead, it is an agenda driven process to restore credibility to the failed Nazi ideology, or to just generally express a hatred for Jews. To do this, the holocaust denier has to believe in a conspiracy theory.

The two are not mutually exclusive. The very term 'holocaust denial' is emotive, particularly given the quality of recent work that is given that label. So is Nazi, though I will not object as a convenient shorthand. How far would you get in a university if you referred to 'commies' instead of 'communists' or 'marxists' for example. Some but not all "deniers" may wish to revive national socialism, or more likely draw from some of its intellectual resources to revive radical right politics. Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, implicitly denied the holocaust in the 1950s (letter to Marcuse) by referring to the victims in the hundreds of thousands and he was a life long Nazi. More recently, Vincent Reynouard is in the same camp. On the other hand another philosopher, Roger Garaudy, was a Marxist who converted to Islam. Another French revisionist, Paul Rassinier was a socialist with Trotskyist sympathies who was concerned that the story of the camps was being dictated by Stalinist former Kapos.

There are of course agendas at work on both sides.

That the Nazis murdered millions of Jews and non-Jews is not in doubt by any rational person. The evidence is overwhelming, and the holocaust is probably the most studied event in history.

Taking the reference to murder as meaning the 'holocaust', the first sentence here is untrue. One might say that there are elements of irrationalism in Heidegger's later thought for example, but he is in any ordinary sense a rational person. The same would go for Roger Garaudy or Robert Faurrisson, both of whom held teaching posts at French universities, which I suppose requires rational capacity.

If there is irrationality at work, it is more on the side of those who support the holocaust narrative, who have resorted to irrational methods of persuasion - fines against Garaudy, physical violence against Faurrisson, book burning and imprisonment against others.

As to the evidence for the holocaust being overwhelming, what is overwhelming is the evidence of deportations of Jews, consequent deaths by typhus and a degree of brutality perhaps comparable with the allied bombing campaign against German cities. As to overwhelming evidence of the components of the holocaust I named in my initial post (the order and its execution), I'm not so sure.

I hope your stay on these forums will be enjoyable and educational for you. The neo-Nazi run Codoh forums is not a place for any sort of education on the holocaust, after all.

Thanks. CODOH has its problems. I hope we maintain the civil tone we have managed thus far.

 

[Dcdrac]

The allies did not set out to massacre ntire popualtions based on race like the Nazis did, it was laid out time and time again by Hitler and hos cohorts that this was the aim.

The allies did not build extermination camps to murder millions of innocents, so to say there is moreal equivlanece is disingenuous.

The documentation for the existance and operation of the death camps is voluminous no serious historian questions their existance.

 

[Belz...]

I would not say that a single "conspiracy" is being alleged. However, there is documentation of the predecessors of the CIA planning how they would counteract Nazi propaganda.

I'm not sure there would be a point to continue said propaganda years after the war was over; or construct elaborate camps and emaciated victims, etc. after the war was won.

 

[uke2se]

The two are not mutually exclusive. The very term 'holocaust denial' is emotive, particularly given the quality of recent work that is given that label.

The label is only emotive because of the poor quality of work by holocaust deniers. Similarly to the word "truther" which has now to a large degree acquired negative connotations, simply because truthers in general are extremely stupid, and their arguments even more so.

So is Nazi, though I will not object as a convenient shorthand. How far would you get in a university if you referred to 'commies' instead of 'communists' or 'marxists' for example.

"Nazi" is the term the Nazis themselves used, and it is completely different from the word "commie" which is only used as a pejorative.

Some but not all "deniers" may wish to revive national socialism, or more likely draw from some of its intellectual resources to revive radical right politics. Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, implicitly denied the holocaust in the 1950s (letter to Marcuse) by referring to the victims in the hundreds of thousands and he was a life long Nazi. More recently, Vincent Reynouard is in the same camp. On the other hand another philosopher, Roger Garaudy, was a Marxist who converted to Islam. Another French revisionist, Paul Rassinier was a socialist with Trotskyist sympathies who was concerned that the story of the camps was being dictated by Stalinist former Kapos.

Those that aren't Nazis instead fall into the "virulent antisemite" category. Holocaust denial is a form of antisemitism, after all.

There are of course agendas at work on both sides.

Only if you see the preservation of historical truth as an agenda. Otherwise there is only agendas on the holocaust denier side.

Taking the reference to murder as meaning the 'holocaust', the first sentence here is untrue.

No, it is very much correct. It is impossible to formulate a rational argument for holocaust denial.

One might say that there are elements of irrationalism in Heidegger's later thought for example, but he is in any ordinary sense a rational person. The same would go for Roger Garaudy or Robert Faurrisson, both of whom held teaching posts at French universities, which I suppose requires rational capacity.

A person who is rational can still have irrational points of view, but I will take your point and instead say that the fact that the Nazis murdered millions of Jews and non-Jews can not be doubted rationally.

If there is irrationality at work, it is more on the side of those who support the holocaust narrative, who have resorted to irrational methods of persuasion - fines against Garaudy, physical violence against Faurrisson, book burning and imprisonment against others.

Bookburning, physical violence and other such measures is normally within the confines of Nazi ideology, I would agree, but I don't see it as irrational that countries that suffered under the yoke of national socialism take extreme measures to ensure that never happens again. After all, the only good nazi is a dead one, and we really don't want to have to reignite the war just because they make another power grab.

As to the evidence for the holocaust being overwhelming, what is overwhelming is the evidence of deportations of Jews, consequent deaths by typhus and a degree of brutality perhaps comparable with the allied bombing campaign against German cities. As to overwhelming evidence of the components of the holocaust I named in my initial post (the order and its execution), I'm not so sure.

Well, I am sure, and so is all of the world's historians (the few dissenters can hardly be called historians). If you read this thread, or read the works presented to you by Nick Terry, you will be left in no doubt.

It is fortunate, however, that the historicity of the holocaust doesn't stand or fall with a single individual. The vast majority of the world's population accept the common historical narrative as the correct one, and holocaust deniers will never get the opportunity to poison the minds of young people again.

 

[000063]

...
I would not say that a single "conspiracy" is being alleged. However, there is documentation of the predecessors of the CIA planning how they would counteract Nazi propaganda. This was done in a co-ordinated way and I have a book written on the subject by one of the leading operatives, which is unfortunately hidden in a pile of other books, If anything depends on it, I can unearth it and advise the title. The American view expressed therein was that an effort had to be made to influence German opinion, as this had been subject to a monopoly of information under Goebbels. In the course of this, former camp inmates were co-opted, including Eugen Kogon.

This is all sounding awfully vague. Is there any evidence indicating that the current understanding of the Holocaust is the result of this alleged counter-propaganda?

I believe equivalent policies were carried out by the Soviets and other communist groups with zionist agendas also playing a role.

Same question as above.

That there was no organised global conspiracy is indicated by the conflicting atrocity material produced. However, this is not a logical order to broach the subject, so I will revert to the order of Nick's questions.

There's a difference between different interpretations of the material, different material, and conflicting material. Most of the information is corroborated. There isn't anything major that would indicate the Nazis didn't kill millions of people.

...
The situation is not so much of "proof" (which is more a legal concept)

No, it's an intellectual one. Proof is just really good evidence.

as of there being a reasonable narrative and hence a presumption that something happened until reasonable doubt is cast on it.

That's not what skepticism is about. Skepticism is about looking at all available evidence, in context, and choosing the best explanation. Despite the common misconception, it's about proving things, not doubting things.

I am prepared to doubt the scale of killings by Stalin. There is no particular reason to doubt some other genocides. I can see that there is a problem in evaluating evidence in this area, but do not see any royal road to knowledge, except perhaps our general knowledge of human nature in war and peace which gives us hints on the relative plausibility of various narratives. The human propensity to lie and manipulate is also relevant.

Which is why historians, such as Doctor Terry here, have developed methods that take such things into account. He's kind of an expert on this sort of thing. Ask him about the methodology.

...One thing that impressed me was that only two supposed eye-witnesses of gas chambers were produced at the 1985 Zundel trial in Toronto and under cross-examination both their stories fell apart. Another was the leader of the French deportees conceding in a filmed discussion that Faurrison may have been right on the gas chambers, for which he was insulted by a young anti-semite and carried himself with great dignity in response.

I don't think you'll find anyone here who doesn't agree that alleged victims are sometimes liars. Like Terry said; tens of thousands of people or more saying the chambers did exist, versus a handful of frauds.

The implausibility of atrocity stories compared with the known human propensity to lie also counts with me.

Again, you have to find evidence that actively indicates a lie, not just present a lie as possibility. What about the atrocities is so implausible?

If numbers of harmonious witnesses are of great probative value, should we not also believe in witchcraft?

You are on a skeptical forum. Skepticism requires evidence and testing. Witnesses are corroborated by physical evidence, Nazi testimony, heck, even bookkeepping. Prayer, for example, can have positive effects on people, but there's a question of whether God/Allah/Yahweh/Thor is intervening or whether it's psychological, akin to affirmations or a placebo.

 

[Nick Terry]

I will address Nick Terry's points, as they seem to wrap up those of the other repliers, with the exception of the person who said I was not unbiased. He may be right, but I did not change my mind before weighing a considerable body of evidence.

I have snipped the point about conspiracy and replied to it at the end in tandem with witnesses, since the two issues are quite directly related.

The only other genocide I have studied in any depth was the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot after 1975. This was questioned in a series of articles culminating by a book by Noam Chomsky in the late 1970s. Again, I can provide references if necessary. I thought at the time that Chomsky's book was reasonable. Again, he alleged CIA fabrication in the service of American interests and the creation of anti-communist propaganda. I believe he has gone silent on the subject over the last two decades and the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime has brought new evidence to light. Hence I do not have a strong opinion on the Cambodian genocide, but can believe that the scale of killing may have been greatly exaggerated.

This is interesting since as you may know, the French revisionist Serge Thion was also a skeptic about reports of atrocities from Cambodia, and a friend of Chomsky's. It is especially significant since only a couple of months after the start of the Faurisson affair, and long before Chomsky's foreword to Faurisson's book, the Khmer Rouge were overthrown and the true extent of the killing fields revealed.

The motives for 'Cambodia denial' were sadly the same as the motives for Sartre's Gulag denial decades beforehand - partisan politics.

I am also familiar with the revisionist work of Domenico Losurdo on Stalin. Hence I am open to the view that Stalinist atrocities may be also exaggerated, but again, I do not have a strong view either way. If necessary, I can go into more detail here.

There is a strong consensus that Stalinist terror was exaggerated during the Cold War, but the post-glasnost revelations have enabled a very precise calibration of the numbers of dead during the Terror (executions) and in the GULag, while the subject of the 1932 famine remains mildly contentious due to the Ukrainian nationalist interpretation of the Holodomor as a famine-genocide. The ethnic dimension of many Stalinist crimes has been exposed thoroughly.

Nazi and Stalinist crimes have been bracketed together firmly since the 1940s, not only by the concept of 'totalitarianism' (whose original claims have been revised heavily in both cases) but because they so obviously engaged in mass repression via secret police forces and camp systems.

One might add that there is a tendency among many revisionists of an extreme-right persuasion to relentlessly exaggerate Stalin's crimes (eg the meme of '100 million Christians' which does the round on Stormfront and other sites), displaying a remarkable set of double standards compared to their denial of Nazi crimes.

The situation is not so much of "proof" (which is more a legal concept) as of there being a reasonable narrative and hence a presumption that something happened until reasonable doubt is cast on it. One's judgement is then swayed by general considerations, including one's general experience of human nature and motives. One has to be aware that political motives are at work, for example. I have not heard of any good reason to doubt the Armenian or Rwandan genocides, but that is not to say such may not exist.

Your first post spoke of an 'absence of evidence', which would certainly speak to issues of proof qua epistemology rather than law. It is indeed quite easy to slip into a legalistic language of proof - as many revisionists do - but "historical proof" is a more slippery concept. Nazi crimes including the Holocaust were in one sense 'proven' already in 1942 by being widely accepted as ongoing, in another sense the 1940s investigations and trials 'proved' the Holocaust but there was never a singular moment of 'proof'. But nor was there ever a singular moment of 'proof' of Soviet crimes. And over time what might 'symbolise' those crimes can change. Belsen or Katyn probably caused more of a splash, but Kolyma was vastly 'worse' than Katyn in most regards, and Auschwitz was clearly more central than Belsen to Nazi crimes.

I am familiar with French and English revisionist work and with a variety of more orthodox material. The holocaust is not my main area of interest, but rather the reception of German thought in the English speaking world. My original question was thus 'how could the holocaust have occured?' i.e. what motive for it would have emerged from German culture. It never occured to me to question the fact itself until around three years ago. The total reading I have done in the area amounts to six piles of books around 1 to 3 feet high, of which revisionist work is an indeterminate part. The total reading I have done on German thought is around 30 years worth. If you need more precision, I will see what I can do.

It would be helpful to have some idea regarding the conventional historical literature.

Many thanks for this. Single books are much easier to digest. I have read Lord Justice Gray's summary of van Pelt and Longerich and have also read Richard Evans' account of the Irving trial and some of the transcripts. I think it was unfortunate that Irving sought to distance himself from "the revisionists", particularly Faurrison. The Irving trial appeared before most of Mattogno's writings had been published, which contain reasonable refutations of Pressac and van Pelt on Auschwitz. I do not have easy access to material in German and slavonic languages.

We will disagree over Mattogno (see below), but the recommendations for especially the 'Hitler order' issue are quite central.

To briefly elaborate, historians do not believe there ever was a written order because this did not fit Hitler's style of rule; if one existed it went up in smoke along with the majority of the stenographic protocols of the Lagebesprechungen (which are demonstrably incomplete). Nonetheless there are numerous retrospective references to a Fuehrer order to carry out the destruction of the Jews, especially from Himmler. These would include but are not limited to the explicit references in the Posen and Sonthofen speeches, especially the latter, which really cannot be read as referring to anything other than extermination.

The 1977 Irving thesis, that Himmler carried out genocide behind Hitler's back, is not really very tenable, because of Hitler's own paper trail of remarks regarding the Jews from 1941-1945.

One source of confusion which often recurs among revisionists and is also subject to a certain slippage in the mainstream is what 'destruction' meant. In German - Vernichtung - used synonymously with extirpation - Ausrottung. There was no word in German for 'extermination' but Vernichtung is usually translated as meaning this (in Russian, unichtozhenie carries the same meaning of 'annihilation'). However the Final Solution was implemented from 1942 onwards on the basis of selection, with 'useless' Jews unfit for work being murdered ahead of able-bodied Jews, who were slated for eventual liquidation once they were no longer needed. Having established the policy, the SS could sometimes force through total extermination (in most parts of the occupied USSR) but elsewhere could not, and had to react to changing circumstances in the way. Himmler's speeches in the autumn of 1943 and spring of 1944 were a recognition that the bulk of the Final Solution was essentially over, although killing continued until the end of the war the changing circumstances of war meant more were being spared for labour and some set aside for negotiations, even; so that there was never a policy of 100% extermination, and after a certain point with the impending loss of the war, then the goal of 'after the war' fell away, which was not the case in January 1942.

I am prepared to doubt the scale of killings by Stalin. There is no particular reason to doubt some other genocides. I can see that there is a problem in evaluating evidence in this area, but do not see any royal road to knowledge, except perhaps our general knowledge of human nature in war and peace which gives us hints on the relative plausibility of various narratives. The human propensity to lie and manipulate is also relevant.

But there is a problem here, which is that there are very few examples of totally fabricated atrocity propaganda on a mass scale in modern history. Many atrocity outbreaks have been 'spin-doctored' dating back to the Bulgarian atrocities in the 1870s, but for example the manipulations of German atrocities in 1914 do not negate the fact that Wilhelmine forces shot thousands of Belgian and French civilians in 'reprisal' for, usually, phantom 'partisan' resistance that was in many cases a product of friendly fire.

Pretty much every atrocity outbreak or genocide in modern history has been contested and negated by a partisan faction or different groups with motives to minimise the extent of suffering. I already mentioned left wing negationism over Cambodia and the Gulag; one finds the same suspects doing it all over again with Srebrenica. Thus skepticism of atrocities carries its own drawbacks because too often it slips into partisan denialism, and because in cases like Cambodia, the skeptics asserted their skepticism too early.

Conversely, we are used to propaganda in wartime or states of emergency or from foreign powers exaggerating or embellishing aspects of many conflicts. But when the smoke clears, the facts can be checked. And then, researched historically.

It certainly is. Fair enough.

I would add that there is more than sufficient material to write such a book documenting Nazi atrocities that way, indeed more than would fit into a single volume.

What is chiefly missing is a response to Mattogno. I see that you have attempted to provide this and we are all awaiting Mattogno's reply. I find it unfortunate that Mattogno does not approach academia with his work and indeed that they are not more receptive to his ideas. I think this division emerged following Butz's book in the 1970s and the French historians' response to Faurrison.

Mattogno's work is unfortunately for revisionism as good as it gets, but falls a long way short of satisfying academic expectations. While he has done some proper archival research and like many other amateur researchers, has found some new sources from time to time, his ability to structure his research, to contextualise and to advance logically coherent arguments is shockingly poor.

He has been a very bad salesman of his work, not least because he has engaged routinely in unnecessary ad hominem and has organised most of his work as a series of polemics. If his claims held water, he could write them out without constant obsessive references to Pressac et al; his oeuvre is one long series of criticisms of others rather than standing on its own two feet. This also means he fails, like every other revisionist, to tell us what actually happened, and write out a coherent narrative/analytical history.

Certainly his work is very interesting to someone like me who has studied the evolution of revisionist ideas and it is more 'challenging' than the drivel coming from many other revisionists in "print", but it does not have enough explanatory power to convince academics, most of whom would be turned off by his style and presentation.

At the very least, Mattogno or a new revisionist author would have to try to learn and absorb conventional academic modes of presentation, and then make an effort to tone down the vitriol, to let the argument speak for itself. But the motivation for such an amateur researcher is clearly to 'get one over' mainstream historians and cock a snook, to show them up on minor errors. Unfortunately this can also be done with Mattogno's work, as we showed in the critique.

What I would finally observe is that Mattogno has nowhere justified his methods with reference to commonly accepted standards, methodologies or philosophical underpinnings.

For example, time and again, Mattogno says that because there is no German document about x, then x did not happen, but this is a standard of evidence that is nowhere accepted in conventional history no matter what the period, era or subject. It also blows up in his face when he says there is no German document about x and one happens to exist which he should have known about (because they're in the same publications/files he cites) or he was not up to date enough with the research and did not realise that one had in fact been found.

I think many people are aware that it exists, as I was, but rely on the fact that it is derided in academia, as I also did, and hence look no further. I was surprised by the cogency and reasonableness of its central claims when I began to investigate them first hand. Some reprochement of academia and the more reasonable revisionists id desirable in my opinion.

There are many problems with this. First is determining who is a 'reasonable revisionist'. While Mattogno can seem very 'reasonable' in some parts of his work, he lets the mask slip elsewhere, and is overly associated with a full blown whackjob antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Graf. There are so few 'name' revisionists that they do not profile very well as a cohort or group. Too many obvious neo-Nazis, too much overt and intrusive antisemitism, too few writers who have really engaged with enough of the material to make credible assertions.

Meanwhile, academic research has exploded exponentially in the past 30 years, either closing off gaps that revisionists tried in the past to exploit, or refuting revisionist claims inadvertently, for example by revising our knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union fairly completely since 1991.

I have said elsewhere many times that major weaknesses of revisionism as it exists is its neglect of demographics and its often wilful refusal to outline a coherent, sourced alternative explanation. As long as revisionism is simply negationism ('there were no gas chambers') it will never have enough credibility to be able to make a rapprochement.

Fundamentally, revisionists seem to have standards, expectations and methods which don't exist elsewhere, being hypercritical of anything that makes the Nazis look bad or which might conventionally be thought of as indicating mass murder, but totally uncritical of anything that makes the Nazis look good, or which is supposed to disprove mass murder. As long as there are these obvious double standards, then revisionism will be shut out in the cold.

I have addressed this in outline above. The term 'hoax' was unfortunate in tone and implications.

Indeed it was unfortunate, but saying that isn't enough. I don't mean you personally, I mean collectively. There is a marked tendency to flush embarrassing or inconvenient past revisionist assertions down the memory hole. Yet all the works spouting a 'hoax' line are still on the internet, still read by revisionists (Butz is probably the most touted author, even today, among revisionists I have encountered online), and still cited.

In my view, 'actually existing revisionism' has reached an impasse where it would have to rationalise itself and discard obviously untenable claims, distancing itself from the loonier proponents and acknowledging that the founding fathers got it howlingly wrong on many occasions.

One thingthat impressed me was that only two supposed eye-witnesses of gas chambers were produced at the 1985 Zundel trial in Toronto and under cross-examination both their stories fell apart. Another was the leader of the French deportees conceding in a filmed discussion that Faurrison may have been right on the gas chambers, for which he was insulted by a young anti-semite and carried himself with great dignity in response.

It is a matter of perspective as to whether the witnesses at the Zundel trial 'fell apart'. I make some of my students look at the cross-examination of Vrba in 1985 and they really don't think he was 'destroyed' or anything as drastic as that; they come away quite unimpressed by Christie's badgering. As of course did the jury in that trial.

But your quite predictable invocation of the Zundel trial is a good example of how revisionism doesn't address the actual evidence. There were 400 witnesses at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial from 1963-65, of whom 254 commented on gassings, 44 offering direct eyewitness evidence. And this was not the only such large trial, or the only occasion on which witness testimony was offered or taken down.

The number of direct witnesses is in the many hundreds (not just a few Sonderkommandos). The credible indirect witnesses who smelled things, or could observe part of the process, runs into the many 1000s, probably 10s of 1000s for Birkenau, and definitely 10s of 1000s within the whole complex, who witnessed selections or heard things from the mouths of SS men.

The sheer number requires a satisfying, convincing explanation if we are to reject all of this evidence. At the very least, a coherent explanation should be offered for how so many people came to be convinced that mass murder was going on in the camp complex; saying it's just 'propaganda' or 'hysteria' doesn't really cut it.

The implausibility of atrocity stories compared with the known human propensity to lie also counts with me. If numbers of harmonious witnesses are of great probative value, should we not also believe in witchcraft?

and the witchcraft jibe doesn't cut it, either. Firstly, the claims made in witch trials are fundamentally at odds with our entire understanding of the way the world works, since the supernatural has not been measured. By contrast, we know that cyanide gas will be lethal to human beings and that corpses can be cremated. The two claims are fundamentally different.

While I know revisionists are in love with the claim that mass murder was 'physically impossible', this doesn't answer the question: why, or how, did so many witnesses become convinced otherwise. The allegation of 'physical impossibility' is precisely what is at dispute here, so that invoking it at every opportunity, as many deniers do, ends up assuming the consequent.

Secondly, there are no cases of witch trials where we have nearly as many witnesses to 'singular' events. There are probably a few where 10s of witnesses claimed to have seen someone ride a broomstick, but not to anyone's knowledge where 100s or 1000s or 10s of 1000s of witnesses did so. The same applies to the other favourite jibe about 'UFO abductions'. There aren't cases of mass abduction claims where 1000s of people saw them happen. There are clearly 1000s of witnesses who had some line of sight observation of what went on in Birkenau in the summer of 1944. The order of magnitude is 2-3 times greater.

Thirdly, in neither witch trials nor in UFO abduction claims do we have the volume of non-witness evidence that is available for Auschwitz or indeed other sites.

From a strict Rankean perspective, there is simply no debate over Auschwitz because we have approaching hundreds of contemporary documents written in 1942-44 reporting gassings - the camp underground reports sent out by the Polish resistance or buried by Sonderkommandos. These sources chronicle events inside the camp in great detail. I do not think many people are aware quite how many of them there are, or how well they mesh with the surviving Nazi documents. Which exist in considerable number also.

Thus, the 'Vergasungskeller' letter we have been discussing recently on this thread simply doesn't exist in isolation. It must be seen in relation to the witness testimonies, to contemporary documents from Polish and Jewish sources, and to other Nazi documents.

I am well aware there are facile explanations for the underground reports and witness testimonies, but have seen no revisionist study, not even from Mattogno, which dissects all of them or takes a reasonable number into consideration, and is honest in how it analyses these groups of sources.

I would not say that a single "conspiracy" is being alleged. However, there is documentation of the predecessors of the CIA planning how they would counteract Nazi propaganda. This was done in a co-ordinated way and I have a book written on the subject by one of the leading operatives, which is unfortunately hidden in a pile of other books, If anything depends on it, I can unearth it and advise the title. The American view expressed therein was that an effort had to be made to influence German opinion, as this had been subject to a monopoly of information under Goebbels. In the course of this, former camp inmates were co-opted, including Eugen Kogon. I believe equivalent policies were carried out by the Soviets and other communist groups with zionist agendas also playing a role. That there was no organised global conspiracy is indicated by the conflicting atrocity material produced. However, this is not a logical order to broach the subject, so I will revert to the order of Nick's questions.

Unfortunately, your hero Mattogno along with other name revisionists has repeatedly alleged, on an ad hoc basis, that contacts existed between the Soviets/Poles and the western Allies in order to explain away deeply inconvenient 'matches' in obscure details of witness testimony. These allegations are asserted without any proof to back them up and can be dismissed out of hand.

But they highlight the fact that implicitly an organised conspiracy is alleged. The Americans captured the Einsatzgruppen reports but did not have access to Soviet Extraordinary Commission investigations of the same towns, yet the details routinely match up. The two sources of evidence are independent of each other, and corroborate each other. There is thus no room for reasonable doubt on mass execution after mass execution. Yet revisionist articles of faith would dictate that one or other ally fabricated the story. How to explain both arriving at the same conclusions?

Likewise, the Allies interrogated many witnesses on very obscure details - such as the name of the first gas chambers at Birkenau being the 'Bunkers' or the wire-mesh columns - which did not appear in any public report in 1944 or 1945, and the same details come up in Polish or Soviet interrogations, and there is zero evidence of transfer or communication in either direction in 1945. Therefore, the evidence is independent. The same can also be said for Chelmno and Reinhard camp witnesses.

Mattogno has tried, but utterly failed, to outline how the 'story' was transmitted and was communicated so that all the many different witnesses knew what to say. He cannot even demonstrate how the wartime reports were spread because he doesn't know about dozens of examples of reports which went off in strange directions or didn't come from one of his rogue's gallery of 'propagandists'.

The end result is that revisionism alleges 'hoax by telepathy'.

Simply avoiding the use of the word 'hoax' or 'conspiracy' doesn't get you off the hook. What is required is a very robust explanation of how all the evidence that convinces the rest of the world came into being, which can be tested as a hypothesis against all the examples, and if it cannot account for all the examples, then the hypothesis should be discarded.

 

[Corsair 115]

As to the evidence for the holocaust being overwhelming, what is overwhelming is the evidence of deportations of Jews, consequent deaths by typhus and a degree of brutality perhaps comparable with the allied bombing campaign against German cities.

If I have to again post about the Combined Bomber Offensive and clear up some, ah, misconceptions, on that subject held by some parties 'round here I shall get annoyed.

 

[dafydd]

Since you know very well that I have been doubting too that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, why are you bringing this up as an argument for me to believe?

The camp should not have been there. It doesn't matter how many people died in it.

 

[Tommy1234]

It is impossible to formulate a rational argument for holocaust denial.

Clearly, because citing a lack of physical evidence isn't a rational argument.

The vast majority of the world's population accept the common historical narrative as the correct one, and holocaust deniers will never get the opportunity to poison the minds of young people again.

This is only partly true because "Holocaust deniers" and their social affiliates aren't typically involved in the propaganda industry. Let's take a wild guess at which social group has a disproportionate dominance in this field.

Is there any evidence indicating that the current understanding of the Holocaust is the result of this alleged counter-propaganda?

The name a few: the Katyn Forest Massacre, prior claims of 'gas chambers' in every camp, "steam chambers", evidence of torture in many cases, highly apparent motive.

Witnesses are corroborated by physical evidence...

Like what?

These would include but are not limited to the explicit references in the Posen and Sonthofen speeches, especially the latter, which really cannot be read as referring to anything other than extermination.

During WWII Germany "ausrottung" was more closely defined as "uprooting", for which I can provide several examples. This changes the the perceived context of the Posen speech. According to Dr. Wilhelm Staeglich, the speech in Sonthofen given by Himmler:

"refers to the execution of Jews only in connection with the fight against partisans and other bandits operating behind the German lines on the eastern front."

Regarding any reference to 'genocide':

"Even these excerpts — Peterson and Smith [publishers] do not give the whole texts of the speeches — must be regarded with skepticism, for they were taken from documents that are manifestly unreliable. In both of these cases, there are elements that strongly suggest a manipulation of text or forgery."

There is one revealing question about all of these proclaimed speeches:
If Himmler successfully ordered the destruction of 'incriminating evidence' pertaining to Jewish extermination, how would he forget about his own speeches? Why would he speak openly and on-record to an audience of thousands over an issue that was allegedly "so secret" that code names, verbal orders and an overwhelming lack of documentation was necessary?

Pretty much every atrocity outbreak or genocide in modern history has been contested and negated by a partisan faction or different groups with motives to minimise the extent of suffering.

On that note, how many have heard of the Allied concentration camps in which more than 750,000 Germans were murdered post-war? Since negation of this event can be shown, who has been the negationist? Is it the US Government, the Jewish media bias in the United States and abroad or other anti-German interests? If so, doesn't that show these organizations are willing to lie? What does that say about 'the Holocaust', in general?

This also means he fails, like every other revisionist, to tell us what actually happened, and write out a coherent narrative/analytical history.

Perhaps that is because Revisionists tend to admit when a lack of evidence exists rather than make up fairy tales to fill in gaps. This reminds me of why I am not religious; just because we don't know the answers doesn't mean "God did it" any more than it means "extermination plan". Ironically, both of these magical stories are dependent on 'eyewitness testimony'.

I have said elsewhere many times that major weaknesses of revisionism as it exists is its neglect of demographics.

I find your neglect of 'gas chamber' evidence, which would account for more than half of the 'Holocaust', to be far more significant. The members of CODOH are still waiting for your response to both of these topics.

Fundamentally, revisionists seem to have standards, expectations and methods which don't exist elsewhere, being hypercritical of anything that makes the Nazis look bad or which might conventionally be thought of as indicating mass murder, but totally uncritical of anything that makes the Nazis look good, or which is supposed to disprove mass murder.

I assume you would claim that the opposite cannot be said for Believers.

There is a marked tendency to flush embarrassing or inconvenient past revisionist assertions down the memory hole.

Really? From what I gather, Revisionists have held steadfast to the same basic assertions: no 'gas chambers', nothing close to '6 million' Jewish deaths, no 'extermination plan'.

Tell me, Mr. Terry, where are these "steam chambers", "skin lampshades" and "human soap"?

There were 400 witnesses at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial from 1963-65, of whom 254 commented on gassings, 44 offering direct eyewitness evidence. And this was not the only such large trial, or the only occasion on which witness testimony was offered or taken down.

Of course, this is more evidence against the ridiculous 'gas chamber' proposal. It shows there would have been widespread rumor of 'gassings' throughout the main camp. How were 2,000 Jews crammed into a relatively tiny gas chamber on a regular basis with apparently flawless precision (by other Jews) if they had already known these buildings were not "showers", as alleged? Moreover, why do you regard testimony so highly when these witnesses who would have been predominantly Jewish had overwhelming personal reasons to 'punish' the Germans by whatever means possible?

From a strict Rankean perspective, there is simply no debate over Auschwitz because we have approaching hundreds of contemporary documents written in 1942-44 reporting gassings.

I'm sure the members at CODOH would love to discuss this with you.

The Americans captured the Einsatzgruppen reports but did not have access to Soviet Extraordinary Commission investigations of the same towns, yet the details routinely match up. The two sources of evidence are independent of each other, and corroborate each other. There is thus no room for reasonable doubt on mass execution after mass execution. Yet revisionist articles of faith would dictate that one or other ally fabricated the story. How to explain both arriving at the same conclusions?

It is not a rare occurence for governments to conspire for private gains. You should be well aware of this as a historian. Are there authenticated originals of these documents available for review? Have any of these 'mass graves' been excavated?

What is required is a very robust explanation of how all the evidence that convinces the rest of the world came into being, which can be tested as a hypothesis against all the examples, and if it cannot account for all the examples, then the hypothesis should be discarded.

Why should the scientific method account for what the "rest of the world" has been convinced of? Does one have to disprove every religion before it can be regarded as false? If you are making an initial claim, such as a mass German conspiracy to exterminate all Jews, YOU have the burden of proof. This is common sense. Revisionists don't claim to know exactly what happened during WWII -- they assert that no evidence has been sustained to support an "extermination plan".

 

[EtienneSC]

The allies did not set out to massacre ntire popualtions based on race like the Nazis did, it was laid out time and time again by Hitler and hos cohorts that this was the aim.

Race was not discredited as a category in the 1930s. There was a white Australia policy for example and segregation in the USA. Recent work in empirical and evolutionary psychology tends to reaffirm that race is a category of human thinking. The view that German policy was to massacre entire races was not laid out time and again by Hitler. His view in Mein Kampf was that Germany needed Lebensraum in the East and that the Jews, about whom he is abusive, and Germans could not live together.

The allies did not build extermination camps to murder millions of innocents, so to say there is moreal equivlanece is disingenuous.

That is the point at issue on a holocaust denial thread. To use emotive language from the outset prejudges the issue.

The documentation for the existance and operation of the death camps is voluminous no serious historian questions their existance.

It is voluminous, except perhaps for Belzec, as to their existence. As to their character as "death camps", there are many book length accounts describing their function as as industrial complex and refugee camp (Auschwitz) and as transit camps on the Polish/Soviet border marked by the river Bug (Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka).

 

[EtienneSC]

I'm not sure there would be a point to continue said propaganda years after the war was over; or construct elaborate camps and emaciated victims, etc. after the war was won.

The camps were not constructed after the war was won, though there is strong evidence that Krema I at Auschwitz was altered after the war to give the appearance of a gas chamber. Several camps were kept open for many years by the Soviets after the war, e.g. Buchenwald and many Germans died there. The emaciated victims in 1945 were found mostly in the Western camps, which were not part of the holocaust, if this occurred.