I see no evidence from this letter of Himmler ordering the Korherr report to be "sanitised". He ordered it to be changed. One obvious reason for this is that "Sonderbehandlung" is uninformative in the context, conveying little more than "other" to the reader. It is thoroughly sensible to require something more precise.
This is nonsense. The letter states: "Er wünscht, dass an keiner Stelle von "Sonderbehandlung der Juden" gesprochen wird". Himmler did not want Sonderbehandlung of the Jews to be used.
His editorial guidance, however, was rather poor so while a couple of the uses of Sonderbehandlung were excised, one was left in, in the description of the overall total. Oops...
And 'transported to the Russian east' isn't more precise. It's ultra-vague, and also a demonstrable falsehood, as I already pointed out.
Mattogno has given a long list of instances where Sonderbehandlung is used for actions other than killing.
No, he has not. He has cited just one document, from 1939, where a non-SS agency used the term Sonderbehandlung in a different context.
From 1939, the RSHA introduced Sonderbehandlung as its standard term for extrajudicial execution. It rapidly caught on and spread through the rest of the SS as well, and was also so used by the Wehrmacht exposed to SS reports (especially the Geheime Feldpolizei, who were recruited from the Gestapo), and by some civilian agencies.
Mattogno's attempted exegeses of Sonderbehandlung are actually really, really funny, because he seems to believe it meant 'resettlement' and 'hygiene' simultaneously. His parsing of the term is flagrantly inconsistent even on its own terms. So that's yet another reason why he's a loon.
Faurisson too suggests that such actions gave rise to additional payments to staff, for example, in which case it meant something like our 'overtime'.
This is nonsense. Sonderbehandlung shows up interchangeably with other terms for killing and execution. Executions were indeed rewarded with extra rations, that connection is firmly and repeatedly documented, so it is nonsense to imply that Sonderbehandlung only meant extra rations/payments for unnamed, innocuous actions that wouldn't be worth extra rations/payments and aren't documented as earning extra rations/payments anyway!
You have not shown that Himmler ordered any "sanitising", merely that he required a change.
Wrong, see above.
Here we have Mattogno's "Chelmno: a German Camp in History and Propaganda" (2011):
http://codoh.com/library/document/1205
and Alvarez's account of the 'gas vans'.
Yes, we know the gas vans documents are IFWF-class statements for deniers. (It's a Forgery or We're ...). This doesn't mean anyone else has to follow suit.
It is hypocritical, illogical and inconsistent to whine about absent documents in one case then declare that when documents are present, they were forged. Your original criticism of Holocaust historians was that they value witnesses over documents, but this ignores the simple fact that there are explicit gassing documents. This alone blows your original contention out of the water.
There were many threatening and ambiguous statements from leaders on all sides in the war. Think of Ehrenberg's 'Comrade kill your German' for example. Yet the overall Russian policy against the Germans was one of reprisal and deportation, with the exception of massacres like Nemmersdorf. I am not aware of Himmler referring to a Hitler order to "kill the Jews" - surely you are paraphrasing inaccurately and reading the sense back through Nuremberg spectacles. Vincent Reynouard has recently addressed the Posen speech.
Try the Sonthofen speech for starters. The statements made by the Nazi leadership were not very ambiguous. One can divide them into several categories:
1) public statements in speeches by Hitler and the Reichsleiter/Gauleiter such as Goebbels, Ley, Rosenberg, Goering, Streicher, Adolf Wagner, Grohe - very numerous
2) public statements in the press by more junior officials and functionaries or propagandists, such as Johannes von Leers - especially numerous and explicit for 1943
The latter class of statements might correspond functionally to Ehrenburg's writings, but then we know that Ehrenburg's writings egged on the Red Army to commit massive atrocities on the German civilian population in 1944-5, which hardly helps your case, even if we ignored the obvious structured response of Nazi policy towards Jews.
In the Soviet case we do not have anything like the same pattern of wartime bloodthirsty utterances from Politburo members as we have from Hitler, the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter during WWII vis-a-vis the Jews.
Nazi antisemitism as spouted by the senior leadership very clearly incited pogrom-like violence from 1939 through to 1945 without any formal orders, both in 1939 in the Polish campaign as well as in 1945 during the death marches, before and after the formal implementation of the Final Solution.
But such a reading of the public utterances would also ignore the finality of many of the public statements made by the Nazis, especially in 1943. Thus, Streicher wrote that reports in a Swiss newspaper of millions of Jewish dead were "not a Jewish lie" in November 1943. Robert Ley ranted in May 1943 that the Nazis would not rest "until the last Jew is destroyed and dead".
The centrality of Hitler's 1939 "prophecy" is also manifest from the pattern of statements; thus not only did Hitler keep on repeating it, so did his diadochi, and this was echoed down the hierarchy to the level of individual trigger-pullers in the Order Police, who helpfully reminded themselves that they were seeing Hitler's prophecy coming true while they slaughtered Jews in Mogilev and elsewhere in 1941.
The full pattern of statements is amply documented in recent scholarship such as the work of Bernward Doerner (Die Deutschen und der Holocaust) as well as Peter Longerich (Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!).
3) secret statements from the Reichs- and Gauleiter plus Hitler - including the multiple speeches by Himmler which are 100% explicit, Hans Frank talking to his cabinet in Krakow, Goebbels in his diary
4) secret statements from more junior officials, eg Wetzel of the Ostministerium commenting on the Generalplan Ost, where he states baldly "one cannot solve the Polish question by liquidating the Poles like the Jews".
5) repeated invocations of execution, Sonderbehandlung, liquidation and destruction on an operational level, eg directives decreeing the sparing of able bodied Jews while ordering the Sonderbehandlung of unfit ones,
6) rather loaded documents where the fate of able bodied Jews is discussed but there is utter silence on the fate of the unfit Jews
There are overall, hundreds of examples across all six categories, easily 100 in the first two open-source categories, probably more, since after you encounter several dozens, it becomes overkill.
Yes, it was interesting to see confirmation of the 1.274 million figure from the Hoefle telegram, but in the context of deportation. The westward transports are interesting, but not inexplicable given the vagaries of war and practicalities of railway transport.
To repeat: the Hoefle telegram as well as every single transport document recording the arrival or intention to deport Jews to Belzec, Sobibor or Treblinka speaks only of deportation
to those camps or of 'intake'. The same pattern exists for Chelmno and Auschwitz; every single transport
stops at the death camps.
The westward transports are completely inexplicable from a revisionist perspective. If they were explicable, then revisionists would have explained them by now with something better than 'the vagaries of war'. But they haven't, and there is a noticeable pattern of avoiding the subject in the writings of the Gurus.
For God's sake, the Bialystok district was already hooked directly into the rail network for the occupied eastern territories, and the Jews of that district were concentrated in several collection points that already functioned as transit camps. One, at Wolkowysk, recycled the site of an existing Stalag for POWs that had been vacated by the Wehrmacht, thus there were already adequate facilities to process the deportees and send them, if that was desired, to the east. But all the deportees went
westwards to Treblinka and Auschwitz.
Something else you should have picked up if you or your Gurus had done their jobs properly: the Jews in several ghettos were told explicit, demonstrable lies about where they were going to be sent. The Lwow ghetto was told they would be resettled, westwards, to the Lublin district, as the local Wehrmacht commander noted at the start of the deportations in March 1942. Not a trace of this resettlement can be found. The Wehrmacht commander of Lwow followed up on this and noted how there was no news from the deportees. Lublin and Galicia were both in the Generalgouvernement, there was not even the slightest reason to cut off postal communications which were still functioning for other ghettos, or to cut off the deportees from Jewish welfare organisations, which also still functioned at this time.
The Lodz ghetto was told similar lies in early 1942, and saw through them rapidly.
If we are to believe you and your Gurus, the Nazis not only managed to 'resettle' Jews in the wrong direction, but to do so with such ineptitude that they caused not only the Jews but also the German Army to become concerned and even alarmed, and then failed to document the whereabouts of the deportees. These truly were Aryan Supermen if they pulled all this off, because it's nothing short of miraculous.
I think "free associated" would be more accurate than "inferred" here. The Brack letter is a peculiar document which implies that x-rays cause infertility, which is not necessarily so:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/ents/switch/slink/askdrmel/story38.shtml
If higher doses were used to induce temporary infertility there would be a risk of impairing work performance. It does not read like a normal medical proposal.
Brack's X-ray sterilisation experiments were already underway from 1941 and were put into practice at Auschwitz in 1942, as is well known. There were survivors of the experiments who were medically examined. You'll need to do a lot better than a quick google to dispute this part of the document.
The Brack-Himmler letter is cited in the context of Aktion Reinhard because it very clearly states at the beginning that personnel from Brack's organisation, which we know to be T4, were transferred to Globocnik. There are several other sources confirming this, along with promotion lists for the AR camp staff, and personnel files showing that the key German personnel all came from T4. There are actually even more personnel files since the RuSHA files for enlisted SS men survive for a lot of the non-officer AR camp staff.
Nobody sensible denies the connection between T4 and Aktion Reinhard.
The Brack-Himmler letter also goes on to say that of the 10 million Jews Brack estimates as living in Europe at the time, 2-3 million should be 'kept alive'. The inference that the rest of the Jews of Europe will be killed is so blindingly obvious, and so inescapable, that it's no wonder that there is no denier commentary on this part of the source, and that Mattogno snipped the relevant part when he selectively cited this document in his recent book 'Sobibor'.
And there's another source, from Brack's counterpart in T4, Philip Bouhler, writing to Bormann shortly after Brack wrote to Himmler, saying that Bouhler had made available personnel from his organisation to Himmler "for a solution of the Jewish question going down to the final consequence". A circumlocution, but the two sources together make it pretty damn clear that what the purpose of the T4 personnel in Aktion Reinhard was: to kill Jews.
The transfer of personnel who had experience killing 10s of 1000s of mental patients would be suspicious enough, but with these two references, becomes highly probative.
Take this together with the Goebbels diary, and Hans Frank reporting on the destruction of the Jews as an ongoing fact/completed process, and other sources pointing in the same direction.. well, is it any wonder that historians think the Reinhard camps were extermination camps?
To persuade historians
otherwise would require accounting for all the sources they use and cite in support of their existing interpretation.
Frank testified that he handed his diary over voluntarily. His testimony suggests that he became convinced of the atrocities only during the trial:
Try actually
reading the sources which were used at IMT from the Frank diary (2233-PS). The published diary contains more examples, and there are even more examples of unpleasantness which the editors left out that can be found in the archival version.
Hans Frank repeatedly referred very explicitly to the destruction of the Jews in his region, as something ordered from higher authority (meaning Hitler) and something that also caused economic problems due to the loss of labourers. On 16 December 1941, he also stated that deportation to the east was impossible, and that therefore Berlin had told the GG to 'liquidate them yourselves!'
The diary thus not only did for Hans Frank at Nuremberg, it also confirmed the essentials of the course of the Final Solution in the Generalgouvernement.
As I stated, there are numerous other Nazi documents from the GG or which refer to the GG that repeat the same terms of destruction, liquidation, execution, killing and death.
An honest revisionism would confront all these sources simultaneously and come up with a coherent explanation for them. Whether that be forgery or something else doesn't matter, all that is required is that there is a coherent explanation which does not handwave away the sources, does not leave
any of them out, and does not contradict itself, and can account consistently and plausibly, in detail, for the full wording of the sources, without omitting key lines.
But this doesn't exist. Mattogno hasn't delivered any such thing because he has systematically omitted most of the key sources. It is the height of dishonesty to omit the infamous Goebbels diary entry of March 27 1942 from every single volume Mattogno has written about the Reinhard camps. This source is routinely cited in the standard mainstream histories, it's hardly an obscure document. It is dishonest to invoke Brack-Himmler and then omit the part about 7-8 million Jews
not being 'kept alive'.
Revisionist explanations for that Goebbels diary entry have not been convincing, but they are also not foregrounded in the standard revisionist case. They are buried away in pretty obscure brochures, not discussed front and centre in the big standard revisionist works. This is dishonest.
Your original claim that historians prioritise witnesses over documents was quite clearly a lie or statement made from ignorance, precisely because it is patently obvious that mainstream historians regard the Goebbels diary entry as one of many contemporary Nazi documents that confirm and prove a policy of extermination especially relating to the Reinhard camps and Generalgouvernement. Hilberg cites it in all three editions of his book!
How could such a source not be relevant to the AR camps? Goebbels relates that he has been informed of what Globocnik is up to in Lublin. We know from separate sources that what Globocnik is up to in Lublin was later on called Aktion Reinhard, which involved three camps, Belzec Sobibor and Treblinka. This inference is connected in a clear chain by documents that can obviously be read 1-2-3. For us not to read them that way would be a gross insult to human intelligence.
Goebbels says that at this time, late March 1942, the plan is to liquidate 60% of the Jews and keep 40% for labour, referring to Globocnik's action in Lublin.
This is confirmed by all the other sources from the same time-frame, which show a gradual start to the extermination campaign in the GG in the first half of 1942. The only camp actually operating at this time was Belzec, Sobibor did not become operational until May 1942. Brack-Himmler confirms this too because he says in June 1942 that after further, implicitly recent discussions, he has transferred
additional men. Thus, they could set up Treblinka.
Goebbels also says that he will not describe the methods - thus of liquidation - but they are barbaric.
On what planet are we prohibited from correlating between Goebbels, Brack-Himmler, Globocnik's decidedly opaque correspondence around AR, the Frank diary and sources such as the Korherr report?
More importantly: those correlations, which are elementary, simple and require only matching source A to source B in tight, logical inferences, are precisely what historians have been doing since the 1940s.
This is the basis, the framework for the historical understanding of Aktion Reinhard. Every witness testimony filling in the blanks about what happened inside the camps is understood in the light of the above evidence.
It's a shame Father Desbois doesn't cite any of these documents in his book on the Shoah by bullets (Porteur des Memoires, 2007), though he does state that the Germans disguised reports of shootings as metereological reports, without citing any evidence either of the metereological reports or the disguising of them. Pretty convincing stuff.
Father Desbois isn't a historian, although he seems perfectly aware of the scholarly literature and has helped organised enough academic conferences he's heard about many of the sources from historians' mouths. Your weird parsing of his book is actually about reports of digging up bodies in Aktion 1005, not the shootings. Before you bleat, Aktion 1005 left other documents, so it did happen, contrary to denier fantasies.
The mass shootings are quite clearly, explicitly and abundantly documented. You have claimed to own Hilberg, unless it is the student edition then you can see the sources. Crack open any other book on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and you'll see plenty more such documents.
I refer you back to the statements from the senior leadership in Germany. Apparently, your claim is Vernichtung doesn't mean destruction, even when we have document after document showing the destruction of 100s of 1000s of Jews per region.
Once again: you need to place yourselves in the shoes of non-revisionists here and understand why it is that the mainstream has laughed at revisionism for its feeble explanations, if you are going to come up with better ones that don't make us laugh.
The Holocaust, the Final Solution, was very clearly carried out by shooting, gassing, 'destruction through work', and malnutrition. Those methods were parts of a greater whole, used in varying combinations across different regions of Europe. In the Soviet Union, shooting was the dominant method. In Poland, shooting was a very prominent method alongside deportations and gassings. In Galicia, after Belzec had to be closed because the graves overflowed, the size of the remnant Jewish population was such that the local SS/Police forces reverted
back to shootings in 1943.
Because the Final Solution was simultaneously in whole and in part, carried out as a general policy across Europe with regional differences (as one would expect in the polycratic Third Reich) and different methods, then all the shooting evidence is connected to the sum of the parts. The destruction of a lot of the files doesn't change this: most of the police battalion records were destroyed along with most of the camp records, but enough survives that we can see what was intended, and we can make solid inferences about the gaps in the records.
Which is what historians traditionally have to do anyway, for God's sake! Very few documentary records in human history over the last millennium since the transition away from an oral culture are genuinely complete, and the destruction of records is hardly unknown for the 20th Century. Think of the incineration of most of the Luftwaffe records from WWII as well as the Wilhelmine Army records of WWI in 1945 during the British air-raid on Potsdam.
I agree that this is a gap in the historiography of the subject. I have to ask how hard people have looked for this evidence though, given that they generally believe there was nothing to find. And of course, there is a lack of commensurate forensic evidence from the Aktion Reinhard camps. There was an interesting discussion on CODOH recently about deportations of Jews to Magnitogorsk in the Urals, though this was of a few Polish Jews in the Soviet sphere of influence.
The denier 'resettlement thesis' is a joke. Please, look at the critique chapter 'So Where Did They Go?' - just crack open that chapter and see the criticisms we have made of the frequently repeated claim of 'resettlement'. Notice how many denier claims have been utterly destroyed by our criticisms in that chapter. Then reflect on what it would take to prove resettlement, and the logistical and evidentiary problems involved.
The simple fact is that there is no credible evidence whatsoever for 'resettlement'. It is a pure fantasy. By contrast, there is enough forensic evidence from the Reinhard camps that from the 1940s, everyone other than deniers concluded they were extermination camps.
Moreover, the documents that exist for the occupied eastern territories
flatly contradict any claimed resettlement to region after region. The best example is the Ostland, which is repeatedly alleged to have been a resettlement destination by Mattogno, Graf and Kues. The Ostland leadership discussed in mid-1943 that there were only 72,000 Jews left in three districts of the Reichskommissariat. The breakdowns conform to what is known from multiple other sources about the Riga, Minsk, Kaunas and Wilno ghettos, to name the obvious examples, as well as all of the smaller labour camps which existed in close proximity to the big ghetto centres. The number includes the few survivors of the 60,000 Reich Jews deported to the Ostland ghettos in 1941-2. It cross-references so well with so many sources that it can be taken as a proven fact that there were only 72,000 Jews left in the Ostland in mid-1943. (That number was of course reduced drastically further through to 1944, when the final survivors were either killed or transported to Stutthof, at a time when the Nazis had belatedly realised that Jewish labourers might be a good idea.)
This evidence utterly refutes any contention that there were extra Jews swirling around a major region of the occupied eastern territories. Do you agree - yes or no? Answer the question straight up without hedging.
But let's leap ahead to possible responses from the Gurus, who are unlikely to give up their fantasy so quickly, and possible speculations from you. There are only two possible hypotheses which could be advanced to explain the presence of only 72,000 Jews in the Ostland in mid-1943 in a sensible manner.
Firstly,
maybe there were hidden Jews under SS control in the Ostland, in something like a concentration camp network, who don't show up in the 72,000 figure. But this is refuted by the extensive paper trail for the HSSPF Ostland and its subordinate commands, which enables us to locate every single unit quite precisely, as well as identify all the relevant SS officers from their personnel files. and to check on what else the units were up to (security operations of course). It is certain that any hypothesised resettlement camp network
cannot have come under the WVHA because there is a breakdown of WVHA-controlled camps for August 1943, which shows Riga as a nascent KZ, as was being ordered and discussed at the same meeting where the 72,000 number came from. Enough documentary evidence survives from individual districts and towns that it is simply implausible that there were any large Jewish camps located in any of the districts that somehow escaped the attention of all of the officials in this region.
The second hypothesis is that the resettled Jews were then sent onwards into Army Groups North and/or Centre. But the Wehrmacht records for both these formations are so voluminous for each sector that we can rule this out entirely. One of the very few resettlement destinations in those army group areas ever claimed by a revisionist was Marina Gorka, a town in eastern Belorussia, claimed by Steffen Werner on the basis of comparing a road and a rail map, and nothing else. There are complete reports from the Feldkommandantur based in Marina Gorka for 1942-3, and they do not mention any Jews
whatsoever.
It is likewise implausible to hypothesise a secret SS-run network of camps for the military zone because every SS institution in the field required a field post number, these are fully known and survive in several registries, they help identify the very few SS camps that did exist (such as the camp at Bobruisk under the Nachschubkommandantur der Waffen-SS Russland-Mitte), and the SS infrastructure is further documented in circulars, as well as manpower strength figures, down to identifying the precise number of SS-owned state farms (sovkhozy) expropriated for SS purposes. The number of collaborator policemen for these military administered regions is also known in precise detail with breakdowns by command, sector and region, and there is simply not one documentary indicator that anyone, whether German or non-German, was being tasked with guarding camps of resettled Jews.
Not one SS-Untersturmfuehrer seems to have a letter of commendation or any kind of comment in his personnel file for his achievements administering the resettlement camps, there isn't even a single such posting noted that anybody has seen. And we have lists of SS officers assigned to the Einsatzgruppen for various relevant time-frames, plus enough converging evidence from the Befehlsblatt of the RSHA noting postings, and other sources, to say who was sent where, along with the staffs of the HSSPFs. Hundreds of researchers have gone over the personnel files, either they are all blind or there is nothing there.
Are you seriously going to tell me that the task of supervising resettled Jews sent through your hypothetical transit camps wasn't supervised by an SS officer? Given the volume of data, the fact that no one has been named as in charge is a HUGE strike against the 'resettlement thesis'.
One can further note that there is not one hint in the records about food and agriculture for the Ostland, the individual districts, the Wirtschaftsstab Ost, its agricultural department, the economics inspectorates of Army Groups North or Centre, their agricultural departments, the security divisions and rear area commands or the quartermasters of the army groups or armies, or any other agency that there were extra Jews in the region that needed feeding, and all of the records regarding the feeding of the non-rural civilian population break down perfectly to encompass the known urban populations, with no hidden extras, ditto for the POWs housed in these regions, ditto for the army group ration strengths, which break down by Army, Luftwaffe, OT, Axis allies, etc. I have
been through those agricultural and quartermaster records systematically myself and there is nothing about extra resettled Jews. Nada. Zip. Gar nichts. Rien.
And finally, one can note that there is not one hint in the records of extra 'resettled' Jews being put to work for any purpose whatsoever by the Army or the civilian administrations in the Ostland, since any utilisation in economic or military/logistic enterprises would show up in the records of the economics departments, labour departments or other interested staffs. These records do indicate the handful of SS-run camps where Russians etc worked, and they match up with the SS records about the handful of agricultural estates mentioned already.
Therefore, the hypothesis that ANY Jews were 'resettled' to northern and central Russia via transit camps misnamed as death camps can be rejected on multiple grounds because it is contradicted by documentary evidence from every possible angle.
We can repeat the same exercise for Reichskommisariat Ukraine and Army Groups A and B/South.
I've been saying the above for seven years now, and revisionists refuse to listen because they don't want to hear it, they don't want their fantasy destroyed.
I've been saying this because my doctorate was on the occupation zone of Army Group Centre, and I necessarily had to examine the records of other sectors nearby, since this army group transferred large numbers of Russian civilians out of its area, and since the higher command staff records are excellent sources. I examined all this evidence - literally thousands of files and microfilms -
before I encountered revisionism seriously, and am obviously aware of the work of dozens of other historians on these regions and sectors, who confirm the assertions made above over and over again.
The field of research into the occupation of the Soviet Union has to consider all of these aspects - were there any Jews left, what was the SS/Police hierarchy and who belonged to it, what was life like in individual cities and towns for the population under occupation, what was Nazi labour policy and where were the forced labour camps, and so on. We thus have extensive knowledge of the fate of the 60,000 Reich Jews deported to the Ostland, and of 4 other transports of Polish and French Jews who were actually sent east, none via the death camps (one of the transports was sent in the winter of 1941/2 from Upper East Silesia and was actually returned home).
By contrast, revisionists have yet to account for the whereabouts of well over 2 million Jews deported to the death camps. It is honestly not worth their wasting their time looking through all of the files to find nothing. But if they want to prove resettlement they will have to do just that, no ifs, no buts, that's what will be required, explaining the total absence of evidence for 'resettled Jews' in all of the surviving files - which incidentally overwhelmingly fell into
Western hands. The documents itemising ration lists and labour deployment and the personnel files can be found in NARA in Washington DC or on Germany, even ordered on microfilm to be read wherever you want in the world on a microfilm reader.
We have now said most of this to Mattogno, Graf and Kues, while also demonstrating that their hypothesised claims of 'transited' Jews being liberated in 1944 by the Soviets, then deported to Siberia are also contradicted by documentary evidence, this time the Soviet records of special settlers and the GULag.
Compared to some of the implausible conspiracy theories discussed around here at JREF, the revisionist 'resettlement hypothesis' is arguably one of the most barking mad pieces of made-up nonsense ever devised in the past 50 years.
It is wildly improbable that the Nazis could have jumped through all the evidentiary and logistical hoops to pull this off without leaving a single trace in the documentary record. Even though the Nazis TRIED to eliminate all traces of extermination from the documentary record, they FAILED. The denier alternative explanation of 'resettlement' must invoke magic to pull off such an amazing cover-up. The violations of Occam's Razor involved in asserting a 'resettlement thesis' are legion.
That is why extermination is the currently accepted explanation, and 'resettlement' is not.
He cites the plans of Kremas II & III, but these show these buildings as morgues and crematories rather than homicidal gas chambers. Once again, the eye-witness evidence trumps the offical
documentation.
No. The documents, starting with the Vergasungskeller letter that revisionists have never explained coherently, would on their own prove gassing. But historians do not observe any artificial restriction on what types of evidence they use, so Hilberg and others cite witnesses.
Saying that witnesses trump official documentation is OBVIOUS NONSENSE in one key area: the numbers. Survivors of death camps unsurprisingly, and consistently, gave exaggerated death tolls. This was because they were not usually in a position to count properly, or if they tried, lost count and made false assumptions about the number of arriving transports. They were usually overly impressed by peak-performance phases and generalised them across the whole lifespan of the camp. In every single case, historians have thrown out such evidence and rely on documents to calculate the death tolls. The documents discredit the witnesses on this individual point, and that point alone. Historians reconstruct plausible death tolls from transport lists or sources like the Hoefle telegram, i.e. documents.
Historians as well as courts have long concluded that it is unreasonable to expect witnesses in such a situation of serial mass extermination to come up with accurate figures. This is something which is repeated with witness-based estimates for the number of Poles deported from eastern Poland in 1939-41 and for estimates of the Kolyma death toll, or indeed the GULag death toll as a whole; Solzhenitsyn was not alone in exaggerating the GULag death toll to 100 million. This is why we ignore denier wibble about Gerstein's 25 million, because other people have done it with other mass crimes. Nobody is denied the right to cite Solzhenitsyn on the basis that he was hopeless with numbers.
That is virtually true by definition, but it is telling that no-one has produced a reply to Mattogno's Auschwitz: the Case for Sanity (2010) in getting on for three years. Have any holocaust studies publications even reviewed it?
There would be no point reviewing such a book, because it has not presented itself via proper channels. It's not peer-reviewed, and was put out by a fairly obscure, obviously political house - whose other products are extreme right, pro-Nazi, antisemitic and conspiracist in nature.
Mattogno would have found it very, very difficult to get the sprawling mess that is ATCFS accepted by a commercial or academic publishing house, because there are some basic flaws in this book, as with his other books. These flaws are precisely what would be pointed out in an extended review, no matter who wrote the review. They include: a massive amount of repetition, poor structuring, incoherent presentation, an addiction to verbatim quotes, and an excess of ad hominem. Any editor worth his salt would have thrown back the manuscript at Mattogno and asked him to rewrite it, probably after giving him a word-limit of around half to two-thirds of the book's length. It would not be difficult to rewrite the book to conform to these basic requirements and strictures.
If Mattogno actually presented his work in a recognisable and acceptable format, then critical reviewers or peer reviewers would note: ignorance of relevant academic literature directly on Auschwitz; an inability to present proof for key arguments advanced; and a rather obnoxious tendency towards self-citation. Again, this could have been solved, and finally we might have a book worthy of review.
Specialists on Auschwitz who are familiar with the files would then note that Mattogno advances crucial claims which are not borne out by the files. His entire argument on cremation is based on the claim that coke delivery receipts to Auschwitz in 1943 are complete. They are not. The file makes this perfectly clear. Pressac initially asserted the file was complete (in 1989) then changed his mind in 1993/1994, a revised interpretation which Mattogno has never once acknowledged, even though it is perfectly obvious that he must have read every square inch of Pressac's two books. Maybe he has acknowledged this in the latest as yet untranslated big fat book on crematoria, I don't know. But he very clearly hasn't acknowledged this in every piece of writing since 1994 on Pressac - and there have obviously been many.
Another example: Mattogno cites the Westerbork crematorium as a counterexample, but suppresses the fact that every cremation done in his chosen sample time frames was from a cold start, days apart, and thus bore no resemblance to the relatively continuous operation of the Auschwitz crematoria.
Even non-specialists would note that Mattogno has not actually woven the "criminal traces" together into a coherent narrative. Pressac's original presentation did just that, so one can follow the evolution of the design and the course of construction. Mattogno's structuring is designed to avoid the risk of placing documents into their proper sequence or into close proximity. This is exposed with especial alacrity with his treatment of the 'Vergasungskeller' document and the document about 'simultaneous cremation with Sonderbehandlung' that dates from the
very same day (29 January 1943). In the Italian edition, Mattogno discusses them 157 pages apart from each other! This is quite ridiculously dishonest, even before we get to the nonsensical readings of both sources.
This pattern of deconvergence and discombobulation is repeated with his treatment of witness testimonies; he handles separately multiple testimonies about the temporary erection of a barracks in front of the not yet completed undressing room (from Aumeier, Tauber, Pruefer, and there are others he does not cite), and is evidently at a loss how to explain the fact that the existence of a temporary barracks is shown on a map.
The same could be said for his treatment of the paper trail proving multiple-body cremation. The relevant documents are discussed piecemeal, and some are actually omitted altogether.
Fundamentally, it is obvious that historians do not write up their histories by considering each source in isolation from each other, but this is Mattogno's standard method.
A specialist reviewer, one familiar with the sources, would thus point out that Mattogno has omitted certain sources, some documentary and some eyewitness accounts, that render his explanation as inert as a rifle minus its firing pin.
Any reviewer, meanwhile, would notice that despite Mattogno's professed aim of responding to Van Pelt, he has serially misrepresented Pelt's argument, and omitted discussion of much of what was in Pelt's book and report. Pelt's book and report was very largely a historiography of Holocaust denial arguments about Auschwitz. Pelt was able to document the serial dishonesty of deniers to 2000 and showed that they changed their arguments constantly, especially Butz and Faurisson.
Virtually all readers of Pelt's book or report will come away with a powerful impression of incoherence in denier arguments, especially about the 'Vergasungskeller' document as well as the ever-changing explanations of the purposes of the basement cellars of Kremas II/III, and the manner in which deniers have fixated on those spaces to the exclusion of Kremas IV/V (where no arguments about 'holes' and other cliches can be made). Mattogno ignores this historiographical aspect of the book, and flushes past denier arguments down the memory-hole, presumably on the basis that he has 'triumphed' against Crowell's air-raid shelter thesis, even though other deniers still like to cite that today.
This then extends to demonstrating his philosophical illiteracy, by criticising Van Pelt for saying that there was enough evidence for Belzec/Sobibor/Treblinka to come to a 'moral certainty' about them. Mattogno doesn't realise this is an
epistemological term referring to a standard of proof, dating back to John Locke and even earlier, and has nothing to do with ethics.
The remarks I just wrote out off the top of my head run to about 900 words, which is little different to the space that would be allotted to any other book in most journals. One could say more, but the proper venue would be a consideration of modern negationism.
As there was an extensive study of the firm Topf und Soehne, and thus cremation at Auschwitz published in 2010, by Annegret Schuele, while the Auschwitz museum put out a brochure not long ago with new sources on the gas chambers in its Glosy Pamieci series, mainstream historians continue to publish work on the same areas that Mattogno purports to master, and will keep on doing so. The Auschwitz museum has just revised its standard 5 volume work to more than double the size of the 1990s/2000 edition, and there will also be a full length book on extermination at Auschwitz written by someone I know
out next year.
There were threatening and ambiguous statements, but often they were in response to similar statements from the Allied side. We tend to read back meanings into contemporary statements assuming the holocaust narrative, when the naive meaning is as likely to be reprisals and tactics in partisan warfare.
No, these statements
were being interpreted by contemporaries as meaning extermination. This is especially clear for the multiple reactions to Hitler's Sportpalast speech of 30 September 1942, which was understood by Swiss newspapers and the Manchester Guarduan as meaning extermination, as well as multiple diarists inside occupied Europe. The same for Goebbels articles in Das Reich during 1942 and 1943. There are in fact so many contemporary reactions to Nazi utterances that a student of mine wrote an entire undergraduate thesis about them.
You concede that there is a gap then when it comes to the crucial part to do with the killing operations.
Everybody accepts there is a gap on the precise methods regarding the Reinhard camps. There is no such gap for Chelmno or Auschwitz, or the euthanasia program.
My point was that this gap is very narrow, since there are documents only 1-2 steps removed from Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka which use terms like liquidation, Sonderbehandlung or destruction.
Moreover, the destruction of the actual camp files is documented by Globocnik, in 4024-PS, which has been known since 1946 at Nuremberg. When it is known beyond any reasonable doubt that the direct files were destroyed, then historians will look around to triangulate on the probable explanation to fill the gap, and they will turn to other types of sources, such as eyewitnesses.
You simply cannot show that this method is illegitimate or has not been practiced widely by historians in other situations. Absence of one type of evidence is not the same as absence of all evidence. No work of historical methodology or philosophy of history prohibits historians from using eyewitness testimony. If this were insisted upon, then the writing of most of recorded history would actually become impossible!
We have 300 or so eyewitness accounts regarding the Reinhard camps, some of which were written down in 1942-3 while they were still operational. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of eyewitness evidence, they cannot generate the same precision as if we had the kind of paper trail we see for Auschwitz. But this is a situation that historians and lawyers encounter routinely, and there are methods and rules of thumb which allow historians and lawyers to cope with the imprecisions. Such methods have progressed mightily in the past 70 years because our civilisation and scholarship are actually highly dependent on eyewitness testimony in order to function, and because we have just that much more experience dealing with the imprecisions, and know how to cope with them.
This, on one crucial issue, the type of engine, the evidence is now clear that they ran on petrol. Many other witnesses referred to diesel engines, but it has become clear this was a misnomer or piece of camp slang, because all those witnesses who operated the engines said petrol, and because multiple witnesses point to colocated petrol and diesel engines. The degree of proximity and familiarity (in terms of time spent with it etc) with the engine becomes crucial, which is a valid criteria by which to assess eyewitness evidence. Therefore, recent historiography corrects an earlier error of interpretation. This may end up being one of the very few and rather trivial achievements of denial in its heyday, although historians would probably have changed their minds when examining the expanded evidence base anyway, without the benefit of deniers caterwauling about diesels.
You said historians think witnesses trump documents; but in fact it's deniers who believe this, since deniers have argued for about 20 years if not longer that as witnesses said diesels, and diesels can't kill as well, if at all, then all the witnesses are lying, and the Reinhard camps were
therefore not death camps.
Such an argument runs smack into the solid framework of documentary sources proving extermination at the Reinhard camps, as well as the physical evidence of the sites themselves.
A proper use of the hierarchy of evidence examines the eyewitnesses within the framework of the documentary and forensic evidence. It also uses documents and physical evidence to corroborate witnesses on multiple points. Witnesses say a guy named Christian Wirth was in charge at Belzec at a certain time - Wirth is documented as assigned to Globocnik's command. Witnesses say transports arrived at Treblinka from 'Bulgaria' - documents prove just such transports arrived at Treblinka from Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia. Witnesses say a grenade was thrown out of an arriving transport at Treblinka - there is actually a hitherto unpublished document confirming the casualties described by witnesses. Witnesses say that the bodies were exhumed and cremated in open air pyres - forensic evidence confirms that mass cremation took place on the selfsame sites, underground reports from 1943 say cremation had begun. And so on.
The very nature of the process means that physical evidence of cremation will always be superior to physical evidence of gassing, which cannot have survived in any meaningful way. Ditto with the process of document preservation - if the files of the camps were destroyed, as was clearly the case, we cannot expect documents to survive about the construction of the gas chambers, but we can expect statements that prove extermination by using terms like liquidation and destruction, terms which can encompass "gassing", which was only one method of destruction and liquidation used at these camps anyway - quite a large number were shot on arrival.
Any methodology attempting to reconstruct the past which ignores the fact that information is routinely lost is bogus. One might as well say there were no dinosaurs because we cannot really reconstruct their skin colour, despite the fact that fossilisation doesn't allow this piece of information to be preserved.
Oh, and by the way, archaeological digs at Belzec in the 1960s prior to the erection of the old memorial uncovered carbon monoxide bottles used to experiment with the killing methods, as reported by witnesses. Just one of many tidbits presented in Robert Kuwalek's lengthy new book on Belzec, now available in German and Polish.
Yet the paper trail has to be interpreted on the unproved assumptions of "euphemism", "coded language" etc to get to the desired conclusion.
But these conclusions are perfectly well proven. The example of Himmler's order to rewrite the Korherr report is more than clear enough. One might add that any document where inverted commas are used is a clear euphemism, and there are still more that indicate the Nazis operated using Sprachregelungen (the term survives in contemporary documents) and codes (think of the death codes from the KZs, which is why we speak of Aktion 14 f 13) on many occasions.
Linguistic analysis is sufficient to do the rest; one striking feature of the Nazi use of 'resettlement' (Umsiedlung) regarding the Jews in 1942-3 is that it is nearly always used intransitively, on its own, with no precision as to where the Jews were going to be resettled to. The cases where we find such terms are always vague, like 'transported to the Russian east'. Even if we did not have Himmler's letter ordering a rewrite, we would still consider this to be vague, because the 'Russian east' consisted of four regional territories - the Ostland, Ukraine and four army group rear areas. A genuine resettlement would have said very clearly that the Jews were transported to the Ostland, and broken down the numbers by region, since we can find plenty of such examples for
other resettlements conducted in the same time frame, of non-Jews, as well as earlier expulsions of Jews from one region to the other inside western Poland.
Well Faurisson deals enough with documents and all it has got him is legal sanctions and ostracism.
No, Faurisson has never dealt enough with documents. He cites from only
four unpublished documents in his Ecrits revisionnistes, which runs to a million words. He discusses a few more he was given by Pressac, but you would find it very difficult to show me where Faurisson has actually explicitly addressed more than 100 or 200 documents. Faurisson may have earned legal sanction and ostracism for his blatantly obvious, virulent antisemitism, but that is a different thing to whether he has any scholarly competence. Given how many pieces he has written (since 1990) versus how many times he has ended up in court, it's actually fairly obvious he goes unpunished virtually all of the time. But if we look at his work up to 1990, then we find it's completely pathetic and hardly addresses even a fraction of the relevant evidence.
So spare us the appeal to pity and predictable whine about persecution.
The simple fact is that no revisionist has yet examined all of the Einsatzgruppen reports, to give just one obvious example. Mattogno et al are starting to dabble in them, but it seems unlikely they will actually discuss all 195 reports, much less the high hundreds of documentary sources relating to the mass shootings in the Soviet Union which survive in other agencies' files.
The simple fact is that not one revisionist book has been written up in conventional narrative form. Not one revisionist book has offered an explanation for the fate of the Jews which uses more than a handful of cherrypicked, quote-mined, out-of-context sources. Thus, the revisionist thesis has simply not been proven.
Your last two sentences apply as much to Hilberg, Goldhagen and the rest of them as to the revisionists.
No they don't. Historians have told us, with supporting evidence, what happened to the Jews, over and over again. You may disagree with that explanation but you cannot deny that it
is an explanation, or deny that it has a narrative structure.
You will fail to prove that revisionism has any kind of logical narrative structure to its writings, because the genre simply isn't written in that fashion. That is the key reason why revisonism is not history.
Deniers don't tell us what happened with proper evidence. Mattogno said not a word about the Einsatzgruppen, 'resettlement', and even I think said nothing about gas vans or Chelmno in his original 'Myth of the Extermination of the Jews' essay from 1985/1987. He has gone on to talk about such things belatedly, but failed to provide any credible evidence against those killings or for his 'resettlement thesis'. His work does not tell a coherent story.
I would also reiterate: historians have collectively examined the paper trail from hundreds of different directions, collectively turning up document after document which confirms the reality of extermination. There are still more which are to be presented, although most of the easy examples have been located, published or discussed. Someone trying to write a single overview like Hilberg would have great difficulty discussing all of the relevant documents in even three volumes today.
Poliakov had 481 footnotes, Reitlinger had 1660, Hilberg's 1st edition had more than 3,000, his 1985 edition had 4,329 and the 2003 edition had 4,711.
Bearing in mind that all of these authors preferred Nazi documents to witnesses, and therefore did not cite all the witnesses they could have done, and that none of them were able to round up all of the killing-relevant sources, these are good proxy numbers for just how many Nazi sources there are out there about the extermination of the Jews. For every 'inocuous', repeated, eyewitness or secondary source you could point to in Hilberg's 2003 edition, I could name a damning one he didn't include or didn't know about.
And it's really not difficult to show that there are multiple documents of damning quality which have never been discussed by revisionists or which are deliberately omitted even when they are known about.
No matter what the Three Stooges will say in response to our critique, they have been caught bang to rights omitting the greater preponderance of the evidence regarding the Reinhard camps. Unsurprisingly, from what we have seen of the preview of their response, they seem hellbent on blustering their way past this point, and on digging an even deeper hole for themselves.
Just one example for now, since we will have more to say formally at a later date. In responding to a comment where I daydreamed about what it would take to understand "literally" a wartime hearsay source that was disbelieved at the time by its recipient, Mattogno started blethering about a
Soviet coverup of documents, ignoring the fact that we went on to cite documents from NARA and the Bundesarchiv regarding the same region in a subsequent chapter. As in, he completely missed the point.
This error is the result of basic research incompetence on Mattogno's part, and explains why MGK as well as the deniers who read them, are so shockingly ill-informed about the evidence for the Holocaust.
