Sighhhhhhh.......
"gumboot", I am afraid, is only digging his own grave in his attempts to prove what a non-denier he is. His "evidence" is, in fact, nothing more than a combination of three well-known holocaust denier's techniques:
1).
True claims that have been know for decades, but which do nothing to support his claim: e.g., that it's hard to estimate the exact number of victims; that the concentration camps (such as Dachau) and extermination camps were not the same,and only extermination camps had gas chambers; and that the extermination camps (Sobibor, Maidanek, Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka and above all Auschwitz, which was the only camp that was BOTH an extermination and concentration camp) were in Eastern, not Western, Europe.
Why does gumboot think these claims, known to all historians to be true for decades, somehow "cast doubt" on the "holocaust myth"? Presumably because he thinks--completely incorrectly, of course--that the estimation of the number of dead in the holocaust is based on the distortions, in Hollywood movies or Soviet propaganda of the holocaust--e.g., that the figure is only six million because the Soviets claimed four million dead for Auschwitz and Hollywood movies sometimes show a crematorium in a camp labeled "Dachau".
This is a famous denier's denial technique--see
here, for example. The truth, of course, is quite different. The estimate of the six millions dead is NOT based on either Hollywood, or on Soviet propaganda, or on any belief in gas chambers in western Europe, but of objective methods, such as estimating pre-and post-war populations, captured nazi and soviet documents, survivors' and perpetrators' testimony taken into acount, and so on.
Quite differently from the claim that it is somehow "not allowed" to question the number of dead--another gumboot lie--there are numerous papers who do just that, using the techniques I mentioned above, and the vast majority of them reached the conclusion that, yes, the number of jewish dead is with all probability in the 5,700,000-6,100,000 range. None of those papers, of course, rely in any way on the false assumption of gas chambers in the west, or on the Soviet's "four million dead in Auschwitz" claim.
2).
Silly, absurd conclusions based on true, but irrelevant, factoids--while ignoring mountains of contrary evidence: here we have the "Hitler didn't know about the holocaust" claim, or "gas chambers used sparingly claims". The sole reason for these absurd conclusions is that some Nazi documents say "special treatment" and "relocation" instead of "extermination", or that there was no signed document saying "Kill all the jews, love and kisses, Hitler".
Of course, this, too, is a well-known deniers' technique (see
here) , and its problems are obvious. First, it uses the self-serving secrecy the nazi exterminators used--giving oral orders and not written ones, using euphemism, etc.--as if its gospel truth. Second, it ignores mountains of evidence--including tons of written documents--that prove that the extermination took place (at the Nuremberg trials, at the latest, the real meaning of "final solution", "relocation", "special treatment", etc. became crystal clear). Third, its claims are so beyond common sense--Hitler not knowing about the holocaust--as to beggar belief.
By the same "logic", one can "prove" that, since Hitler's own membership card in the NSDAP misspelled his name as (IIRC) "Hittler", then there is no REAL proof that Hitler (one "t") was ever a Nazi. Or perhaps the battle of Waterloo never occured--where is the signed order, "Fight at Waterloo, (signed) Napoleon"?
3).
Outright lies, distortions, and fabrications: We already encountered gumboot's lie that one is somehow "not allowed" to question the number of holocaust dead, when numerous papers did just that (but their answer is one that gumboot doesn't like, so he just ignores them).
Another one is his claim about Krakowski saying that the majority of the holocaust testimonails Yad Va'shem has are fake. A
reporter that interviewed him
misrepresented him as saying that, but he never said anything remotely like that--in fact, he says just the opposite!
Here, for instance, is his outraged letter to the Jerusalem Post clarifying what he really said:
To the Editor of the Jerusalem Post
Sir, - I was deeply astonished to read Barbara Amouyal's front-page article of August 17, which is based in part on an interview with me.
Many hundreds of the 20,000 testimonies held in our archives were extensively used in Nazi war criminal trials, contrary to what Amouyal wrote.
I told Amouyal that survivors wrote their accounts for the record of history. I cannot understand why she made of it that survivors wanted "to be part of history."
I said there are some - fortunately very few - testimonies, which proved to be inaccurate. Why did Amouyal make them out to be a large number?
Regarding the final remark, I did not receive any "orders" not to discuss the Demjanjuk case. I simply refused to discuss it with Amouyal.
Shumel Krakowski
Not
quite the same thing, and--if gumboots had bothered to use anything apart from neo-nazi holocaust-denier sites for his "research"--it would have taken him exactly 30 seconds of googling to find out the truth. But gumboot doesn't care, as lying for the cause (rehabilitation of Hitler and the Nazis) is obviously his real goal.
To sum up, what gumboot calls "good reasons" for "skepticism" about the holocaust are nothing more than the shopworn, refuted-a-thousand-times "arguments" of holocaust deniers. See
here for some more of them, and the original web site is well worth visiting as well.
