General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

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I think the bunks have been photoshopped in. In the original photo the people would have been levitating horizontally.
 
The photo was enlarged and sent on travelling exhibitions:

http://www.whale.to/b/LestWeForget.jpg

Edited by LashL: 
Changed hotlink to regular link. Please see Rule 5.


The standing man is also suggested to be a resistance fighter who appears in other Buchenwald image on this page:

http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/category/germany/buchenwald/

This page examines it more, claiming to find evidence of how it was faked:

http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/discovered-iconic-photo-in-buchenwald-is-dishonest-photo-fakery/

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions in it in, but zooming in very close you can see that there is a hint of movement that has produced a ghost ear on the right. What they are arguing is a 'scissor cut' along the post I think is the same thing - a ghost image caused by movement.

Having overlain the two images they are definitely the same in terms of the individuals in the bunks - it is not one image taken slightly after another.

The problem the holocaust deniers have is that they are having to argue that the people in the bunks are genuine, although some even try to deny that.

It's interesting, but it says as much about the motives of people looking at the photo as it does of the people who removed (or added!) the gentleman concerned.
 
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I would have thought that all of the beds would have been occupied. I suggest the fact that some of them are not is evidence that the photo has been altered, say by removing a person in the foreground and that the first photo is the original.
 
Let's question a single picture. That'll counter all of the eyewitness testimony including that of the perpetrators themselves.
 
I don't know the motivation behind the OP (although I have my suspicions) , so I will simply note that the original photo, with the standing man, is part of a famous series of photos of the liberation of Buchenwald by Bourke-White that were published in Life Magazine. The photo, and the rest of the series (many of which are far more disturbing) are highly documented, taken in front of many US soldiers and journalists, and published widely at the time. I believe the original negatives remain available to scholars.

Why someone chose to manipulate the photo by eliminating the standing man is impossible to say. Perhaps to avoid offending someone by the partial nudity. Or perhaps for political purposes, or by Holocaust deniers (who I believe run the site stamped on the photo).

MaGZ, the man in the bunk is looking somewhat happy because he is now liberated, and the Nazis who imprisoned him for years are now facing jail or execution. His happiness, and that of the others, is undoubtedly limited by having been tortured, starved, and seeing their family members killed. It is possible that they also look grim because they have seen the worse of human nature, and they know that some day a new crop of slimy, bottom dwelling, racist, anti-Semites will attempt to deny their suffering. Fortunately this group of evil fascists remain a tiny cohort that can only convince the stupid.
 
The standing gent was removed from the New York Times printing, maybe at the behest of their editors, for reasons unknown. Other newspapers, like the front page of the Altoona Mirror, published several days prior to the NYT has the man unedited.

db4bf014d0901638c070102.jpg

From page 4 of the Moberly Monitor-Index, April 30.

A search for a "Private H. Miller" from the Signal Corps. brings up a lot of circlejerk Holocaust denialist sites regarding this photo, which I'd rather not visit, but I did find this book site, which lists a German photopamphlet containing the photo, titled "Bildbericht aus fünf Konzentrationslagern", which seems to be the photo's first publication.

There's a PDF copy avaliable here. It's not a page for page scan, but re-typed. Looking at eBay, there's an original copy floating for $4000.

Most English sources say the pamphlet was published by the "American War Information Unit", in Germany, which seems to be a mistranslation for the "United States Office of War Information" (Amerikanische Kriegsinformationsamt). Published April 1945, "on behalf of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces."

Caption for the photo reads "In vier Reihen von Holzverschlägen haben die Lebenden keinen Raum, sich zu bewegen, oft auch nicht einmal die Kraft dazu", which is Google Translated as "In four rows of wooden crates the living have no room to move, and often do not even have the strength."

The photo is attributed to a "Pvt. H. Miller" in the National Archives. Neither the pamphlet, the New York Times or other newspapers credit him, as far as I can see. He was attached to the 166th Signal Photo Company, which went into Normandy with the 29th Infantry Division. Other photos from the 166th I've found are credited to "Pvt. Harry Miller."

I found an obit for a Harold H. Miller, 4 years in the Signal Corps. Whether that's him or not I don't know.

=-=-=-=-=-

Searching for this stuff makes me feel unclean. Its page after page of StormFront, denialist blogs and anti-Semitic screeds. A wretched hive of scum and villainy.
 
I must correct my first post- the photo presented is indeed more often attributed to the Signal Corp, as researched by jimfish, and its attribution to Bourke-White on the websites I visited was probably due to its very close resemblance to Bourke-White's famous (and well-documented) concentration camp liberation photos.

If you wish to see the actual Life magazine photos, go here (but I warn you many of the images are very disturbing). They make the Signal Corp photo pale:
http://life.time.com/history/liberation-of-buchenwald-the-story-behind-an-iconic-life-photo-1945/#1
 
It's been AGES, but I vaguely remember someone once telling me that the New York Times and other major establishment papers wanting to absolutely avoid even the hint of impropriety in their photos. Because the figure on the right does not actually affect the meaning of the picture that much (I feel its impact would be the same had he been cropped out entirely), they may have edited it so his partial nudity did not 'distract'.

Why they edited him out, and didn't just crop him? I don't know.
 
I wasn't too sure what to think when first seeing this, but I'm now strongly convinced he was edited out because of the partial nudity.
 
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I've noticed that the Holocaust historians like Nick Terry seem to like going around and around in circles with their old foes like Carlo Mattogno.

All the while, new writers are springing up outside these circles; people like Alan Hart and Paul Eisen, to mention two I found just with one search on other things altogether.

Not to mention Gilad Atzmon, who somehow seems to have intimidated Alan Dershowitz into pretending he doesn't matter (Atzmon offered to debate Dershowitz, Dershowitz didn't even acknowledge it, and Mearsheimer refused an offer from Dershowitz).

:blackcat:
 
Major Major said:
I've noticed that the Holocaust historians like Nick Terry seem to like going around and around in circles with their old foes like Carlo Mattogno.

All the while, new writers are springing up outside these circles; people like Alan Hart and Paul Eisen, to mention two I found just with one search on other things altogether.

Not to mention Gilad Atzmon, who somehow seems to have intimidated Alan Dershowitz into pretending he doesn't matter (Atzmon offered to debate Dershowitz, Dershowitz didn't even acknowledge it, and Mearsheimer refused an offer from Dershowitz).
Click to expand...

Since the HD thread has fallen off the frontpage, it took me a while to notice Major Major "noticing" me. Pretty much everything that MM has said, however, is wrong.

Firstly: I am more or less the only historian of the Holocaust currently taking an active interest in contemporary Holocaust denial; others don't bother. Academic research on denial is generally done by lawyers and specialists in right-wing extremism.

Secondly, you won't find me going 'round and round' with Mattogno since I've only ever written one piece (linked in my sig) and a few blog articles from 2006-7 about him, and Mattogno hasn't replied to them.

If you are referring to my co-authors on the critique linked below, then only Roberto Muehlenkamp actually seems to enjoy going 'round and round' with denier gurus, and then mainly to expose the fact that the gurus are the ones going 'round and round'. The other co-authors don't do this any longer.

Or if you are referring to the debates on JREF, then I think you'll find that plenty of people enjoyed going "round and round" with deniers for a time, until the local contingent of deniers became so tedious and incoherent they couldn't keep the ball in the air anymore. Which is why the thread has fallen off the frontpage.

Thirdly, your 'new writers' aren't actually new names but have been around for some time. One, Alan Hart, is vocally against Holocaust denial and thinks it's a colossal distraction from their common cause, which is anti-Zionism.

It is really not difficult to work out that while almost all Holocaust deniers are anti-Zionists, very few anti-Zionists are Holocaust deniers. Paul Eisen, Gilad Atzmon and a few others such as Daniel McGowan are all fairly rigidly excluded from the mainstream anti-Zionist movement precisely because they cross the line over into denial, or consort with overt antisemites too frequently.

Fourth, all the 'new writers' you name are utterly dependent on the supposed authority of guru level deniers like Mattogno, Faurisson, Leuchter or Butz, since not a single one of them writes anything that can be vaguely considered to be history. All the guru deniers at least pretend to be historians whereas none of your new names can be bothered. They simply tout the virtues of 'revisionism'. Therefore there is nothing to 'debunk', since these soapbox rants are essentially content-free, and one might as well address the organ-grinders rather than the monkeys.

It so happens that I have just finished the formal write-up for academic publication of a conference paper I gave in 2010 that surveyed the contemporary denier scene and examined all the links and filiations from the extreme right, white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, anti-Zionists etc. The conference paper was deemed noteworthy enough that the Jewish Chronicle interviewed me about it, and summarised my core arguments.

Denial is a tripartite phenomenon: there are a small number of gurus who 'research' the Holocaust, i.e. people like Mattogno; a slightly larger pool of cheerleaders like Paul Eisen, Bradley Smith, Bishop Williamson etc who trumpet the supposed virtues of 'revisionism'; and a somewhat larger group of footsoldiers, i.e. anonymous internet posters like Clayton Moore or the average member of CODOH forum, who spam weblinks, YouTube videos and generally act like any other internet advocate of a loony idea.

Compared to 10 or 12 years ago, the number of active gurus has declined dramatically. A number have died, others have become little more than preaching cheerleaders (like Faurisson). There are now barely half a dozen pseudohistorians writing in the denier mode. The number of cheerleaders hasn't really increased, and for every 'new' voice, an old one vanishes. The base of support for denial, and the recruiting-ground for footsoldiers, is only slightly different, with more coming from a 'CT' background, but most still come from the far right.

I'm not convinced that the internet has actually really increased the prevalence of denial compared to the past; it's just drawn a little more attention to it. Website traffic figures for denier sites are not much different to the number of subscribers to their journals 20 years ago, i.e. a few thousand/month.

On the whole, the new base of support in the CT scene is not going to add coherence or relevance to denial, (a) because other CTs are much more appealing and relevant to contemporary affairs, (b) because crank magnetism means that advocates of multiple CTs are ineffective at propagating any of their ideas, and (c) because cranks suffering from crank magnetism are almost all incapable of dedicating themselves to their 'craft' and turning themselves into gurus or even effective campaigning bloggers.

The far right has realised that denial is a vote-loser, time-waster and dead end. This is very visible in Europe (think Nick Griffin and Marine Le Pen) but also apparent in the internet white nationalist scene, where people like Kevin Macdonald and Greg Johnson reject HD despite being fervent antisemites. One white nationalist blogger called HD "strategic buffoonery".

And so it is for the anti-Zionists, which is why Atzmon is relatively marginal in that movement. Incidentally, part of the 'base' for his popularity has recently been undermined by the crisis in the Socialist Workers' Party in the UK. A senior SWP cadre who liked jazz and basically insisted that members go to Atzmon's shows has become the centre of a mini-Assange rape scandal, which is currently tearing the SWP apart. The much bigger Palestine Solidarity Campaign (with 2-3 times the number of members of the SWP) expelled Atzmonites a while back.

So these 'new voices' are cut adrift on the internet, where they can find an audience on sites like Veterans Today or Press TV, but those sites are repositories of every kind of crankery and politically motivated conspiracy theorising out there, and thus their 'support' is not going to increase the coherence of Holocaust denial as a movement or idea, especially not when Paul Eisen et al seem happy to refer back to the HD heroes of a quarter of a century ago, like Leuchter and Zundel.

As to Atzmon debating Dershowitz: nothing compels anyone to live-debate anyone else. Atzmon has no political or academic standing, he is just a writer/saxophonist with a certain following. Other commentators, whether they are "just" bloggers or are mainstream journalists, can comment and criticise Atzmon for his views. Atzmon or his supporters can criticise them back. Live debates are for Presidential elections, internet forums or high schools/sixth forms, and are not that common in other parts of the public sphere. Written debates are infinitely more common - someone writes something, someone else criticises, there are replies, and everyone else joins in. Thus, the blogosphere, op-ed pages and so forth.

Obviously, those written dialogues would include Alan Hart saying Holocaust deniers need their heads examining, which in turn led various antisemites to accuse Hart, a fervent anti-Zionist who would seem to be fairly happy to see Israel disappear from the map, of being a Zionist stooge. See the comments on three recent blog posts by Hart for examples.

The fact that a number of the commentators on those blog posts turn out to be CODOH forum members, i.e. drawn from a group numbering barely past 700 people despite the forum being around for more than a decade, is a good reflection of the marginality of denial as an idea. Indeed, the same names or userhandles recur constantly when surveying denier activities on the internet. A whole bunch of them post at Stormfront, or CODOH, then troll JREF, Skeptics Society Forum or the New Statesman, or get themselves banned from The Guardian's Comment is Free section or the Daily Mail website. After a while, the frenetic activism drops off, and the denier troll gives up out of exhaustion, and does something else instead.
 
To Holocaust Believers.

I don't believe Jewish men performed the labor required to slaughter 3 million Jewish children, Jewish women, Jewish men, and Jewish seniors with gas chambers.


All the voluminous so called holocaust facts can't obscure the bottom line that is being spewed almost imperceptibly to fill in the huge gap in the Holocaust fabrication by those who perpetuate the fabrication for personal gain. The labor involved. Talk about audacity and disrespect. They blame dead Jewish men for performing the labor involved with the slaughter of about 3 million Jewish children, Jewish women, and Jewish men with gas chambers.

I'm the only one here who believes group after group of Jewish men could not be forced to kill Jewish children, Jewish women, Jewish men, and Jewish seniors with gas chambers.

Again, I don't believe Jewish men performed the labor required to slaughter 3 million Jewish children, Jewish women, Jewish men, and Jewish seniors with gas chambers.

You obviously do.
 
The horror keeps increasing, even after 60 years:

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking
THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington. ​


Lucky mister Greenbaum even managed to escape the selections for the gas chambers despite his young age - or the periodic killing of Sonderkommandos digging trenches burying the bodies - and get transited through Auschwitz to another camp.

The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.

When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.

But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they’ll remember.” ​
 
Clayton Moore said:
I don't believe Jewish men performed the labor required to slaughter 3 million Jewish children, Jewish women, Jewish men, and Jewish seniors with gas chambers.
Click to expand...


Should there come a time when your beliefs intersect the historical evidence, I will give you a little thumbs up.
 
Loss Leader said:
Should there come a time when your beliefs intersect the historical evidence, I will give you a little thumbs up.
Click to expand...

So you know the truth? That's a start.

How can anyone believe that so many Jewish men would go along with slaughtering women and children to save their own lives for another month or two or three?
 
Simon666 said:
The horror keeps increasing, even after 60 years:

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking
THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington. ​


Lucky mister Greenbaum even managed to escape the selections for the gas chambers despite his young age - or the periodic killing of Sonderkommandos digging trenches burying the bodies - and get transited through Auschwitz to another camp.

The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.

When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.

But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they’ll remember.” ​
Click to expand...


When somebody asks "where did they all go??" the answer is "maybe to one of those 35,500 camps we discovered in 2013." Think about it: if each of those camps we didn't know until now about held only 170 people, that's a whole bunch of people we didn't know about until now either.
 
CaptainHowdy said:
When somebody asks "where did they all go??" the answer is "maybe to one of those 35,500 camps we discovered in 2013." Think about it: if each of those camps we didn't know until now about held only 170 people, that's a whole bunch of people we didn't know about until now either.
Click to expand...
That's what I'm thinking too. Notice also the blatant rip off of the comfort women for the Japanese.

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/s...t-got-more-shocking.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&​


Yeah right.
 
CaptainHowdy said:
When somebody asks "where did they all go??" the answer is "maybe to one of those 35,500 camps we discovered in 2013." Think about it: if each of those camps we didn't know until now about held only 170 people, that's a whole bunch of people we didn't know about until now either.
Click to expand...

Except the overwhelming majority of camps interned non-Jews, and the types of camps cover already known phenomena, like the mass deployment of conscripted foreign labour inside Germany and Austria, as well as the use of POW labour, along with prisons and other sites of confinement, all of which have certainly been discussed and known about since 1945.

By documenting these systems of camps more precisely, the headline figure of 'known camps' seems to have risen, but that's because they are looking across the whole of Nazi and Axis occupied Europe and including all types, not just concentration camps. There's a whole volume on camps run by Axis satellite states like Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Finland etc.

We have known since the 1940s that 7 million non-Jewish foreign workers were held inside Germany by 1944, the overwhelming majority of the 42,500 camps were for foreign workers.

In 1979, we already "knew" that there were 6,000 camps inside the postwar borders of Poland, because Polish historians had published an encyclopedia of camps, in Polish, obviously. Belarusian and Ukrainian historians did the same things in the 1990s, finding thousands of camps. They were able to say which camps held what types of prisoners. The USHMM project is synthesising all this previous work.

Historians can be very certain as a result of this project where deported Jews did not go, because if we know about a camp and all the sources indicate it held non-Jews, then it would be pretty remarkable for the Nazis to have snuck in 170 Jews to 30,000+ camps and for nobody to have noticed, nor for there to be a shred of surviving historical evidence for such a claim.

What is being documented properly and systematically is the extent to which the Nazis imprisoned all target groups, Jews and non-Jews alike, and what happened to them once they found their way into the overlapping systems of camps and prisons. Not just for Germany, but the whole of occupied Europe.

Disclosure: I am a contributor to future volumes of the USHMM encyclopedia, and suggestions from me can be blamed for a tiny part of the increased headline figure of 42,500 camps. Catch being, the camps I spotted which were 'new' were for non-Jews.
 
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