General Holocaust denial discussion Part III

[Ivanesca]

Have you read the 5-volume Auschwitz camp history, with 3286 references to a variety of sources? Your single source here is laughable in view of works like that one and many others - e.g., Fleming's Auschwitz, The Allies and Censorship with 847 references and in-depth discussion of contemporary reports about the camp.

No.

I'm really not surprised. The bolded title talks about the actual wartime policies of the Allies vis a vis the Holocaust, which was to downplay reports of atrocities against Jews in order to avoid stoking American antisemitism, by avoiding the impression of the war being fought "for the Jews". This was the reality, not your repeated false statements about "fabrication" or "Allied Narratives". There was no fabrication, and there was no "Allied Narrative". The actual policies pursued by the Allies completely invalidate the fundamental assumption of Holocaust denial: the so called "hoax". It never happened, and this has been called to your attention several times and you have avoided it.

As far as I know, no scholar has thought it worthwhile to respond to revisionist critiques.

All of us besides Dr. Terry and LemmyCaution are not scholars or Historians. Half of the HC blog crew are not historians. And yet, we have absolutely no problem or trouble exposing the false claims of "Revisionist Critiques". Just look at Leo Major utterly blowing the lid on Rudolf's lie about Rothstein, or anything Ai'sha posts. Or Hans' responses to Mattogno. If complete amateurs can easily shred "Revisionist" nonsense, professional Historians don't really need to waste any time on them.

 

[smartcooky]

Its time you owned up EtienneSC to what you really are.. a Holocaust Denier.

Your JAQing-off here is fooling nobody.... we already know you are a WW2 revisionist from reading the content of your postings on the bombing of Germany. Your postings and musings in this thread are indistinguishable from those of a full-on, anti-Semitic Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist.

"When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck"
- James Whitcomb Riley

 

[LemmyCaution]

I'm really not surprised. The bolded title talks about the actual wartime policies of the Allies vis a vis the Holocaust, which was to downplay reports of atrocities against Jews in order to avoid stoking American antisemitism, by avoiding the impression of the war being fought "for the Jews". This was the reality, not your repeated false statements about "fabrication" or "Allied Narratives". There was no fabrication, and there was no "Allied Narrative". The actual policies pursued by the Allies completely invalidate the fundamental assumption of Holocaust denial: the so called "hoax". It never happened, and this has been called to your attention several times and you have avoided it.

As a side point, Fleming argues that the reluctance to disseminate information about the genocide came for the reasons you say, not mainly from the Polish underground, as is often claimed, but from the sensibilities and wartime concerns of those who received the reports, that is, the British government. Fleming's book discusses in detail dozens of reports about Auschwitz and other camps/killing sites generated on the scene, in Poland, and sent on only to find little distribution and attract not much contemporary attention in the west. In the back of my copy of the book I jotted down 33 such reports, broadcasts, etc that I deemed important enough to go back to. But EtienneSC wants to play some game that books like Fleming's, without sourcing, are exercises in vilification ("these people were so bad you wouldn't believe it and deserved what they got"). Again, I defy EtienneSC to support this claim drawing from works I've highlighted or a broad cross-section of the literature from Nick Terry's list.

Anyway, in Fleming's book are at least 33 important reports/sources most of them unknown to EtienneSC because he relies on revisionist glosses on scholarship . . . yet we are to take his criticism of the scholarship seriously? I don't think so, frankly.

When it comes to Hilberg EtienneSC plays a different game - it could be called "Bad Tangent" or "Lookie Here, a Distractor" - commenting on Hilberg's quick survey of the historical background to anti-Semitism, ignoring the body of the work and its voluminous documentation. I would doubt EtienneSC has even heard of Angrick & Klein's study of Riga and so can't speak to what kinds of source materials the co-authors used. And so on. Ignorant of such narratives, EtienneSC says that historians take an approach like this:

"OK, about these footnotes, where are the documents?" "The Germans destroyed them. That's how cunning they were." "That's not what you said at first...(turns to Germar Rudolf)."

Despite the rich sourcing in these books. As to German Rudolf, well, see below . . .

All of us besides Dr. Terry ... are not scholars or Historians.

Correction, just Dr Terry. I'm not a scholar, I studied history in a PhD program many years ago, but not even European history. Lots of amateurs eh?

Just look at Leo Major utterly blowing the lid on Rudolf's lie about Rothstein . . . If complete amateurs can easily shred "Revisionist" nonsense, professional Historians don't really need to waste any time on them.

I'm actually most interested to learn how EtienneSC explains Rudolf's article, on which there have now been several posts. It'd be great if he starts by telling Leo and me where he thinks we've got it wrong and why he believes that what Rudolf wrote about Rothstein is defensible.

 

[Ivanesca]

[Quote="EtienneSC]. Thirdly, how reliable is a book that relies "heavily" on the statements of people described as liars likely to be?[/quote]

Like LemmyCaution said, EtienneSC completely missed the point. Browning's aim was to understand the motivations of the perpetrator, i.e. Human nature, something EtienneSC ignorantly assumes Historians don't do. In this respect, the "lies" told by the pb101 extremely reliable and valuable: they tell us both how they took advantage of the defendant friendly German justice system to either get light sentences or get off completely, and most importantly, they tell us how the defendants viewed their victims and how they justified their actions. The result is the validation of theories eatablished by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, and a model that explains how inurement to violence and especially peer preasure can shape anyone into killers.

This is actually a continuation of EtienneSC's epic fail about Konrad Morgen upthread. Simply put, human nature shows that men on trial tend to lie in order to defend themselves and minimize their culpability. Policemen like Darren Wilson did it, Filipino policemen accused of executing a witness against Duterte did it. Konrad Morgen did it, and PB101 does it. Browning's study is actually an illustration of how researchers can sift the wheat from the chaff and work through the statements of criminals trying to defend and justify themselves. This is something that our self styled "Human nature" expert is either too ignorant or too lazy to do. Worthless. Utterly worthless as usual.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Like LemmyCaution said, EtienneSC completely missed the point. Browning's aim was to understand the motivations of the perpetrator, i.e. Human nature, something EtienneSC ignorantly assumes Historians don't do. In this respect, the "lies" told by the pb101 extremely reliable and valuable: they tell us both how they took advantage of the defendant friendly German justice system to either get light sentences or get off completely, and most importantly, they tell us how the defendants viewed their victims and how they justified their actions. The result is the validation of theories eatablished by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, and a model that explains how inurement to violence and especially peer preasure can shape anyone into killers.

This is actually a continuation of EtienneSC's epic fail about Konrad Morgen upthread. Simply put, human nature shows that men on trial tend to lie in order to defend themselves and minimize their culpability. Policemen like Darren Wilson did it, Filipino policemen accused of executing a witness against Duterte did it. Konrad Morgen did it, and PB101 does it. Browning's study is actually an illustration of how researchers can sift the wheat from the chaff and work through the statements of criminals trying to defend and justify themselves. This is something that our self styled "Human nature" expert is either too ignorant or too lazy to do. Worthless. Utterly worthless as usual.

Very good observation. Browning's Remembering Survival has IIRC a concluding essay exploring the concepts in your post very successfully, shifting the lens to victims. In certain ways that book rounds off his earlier research and looks at how memory and testimony are to be understood by historians. Anyone who imagines that historians accept testimonies at face value and are unaware of the problems with testimonies (the nature of memory, propensity for self-justification, biases of point of view, etc) hasn't, er, read what historians have to say.

 

[LemmyCaution]

. . . [Browning] assumes the narrative, rather than first trying to establish it, even though he describes it as "astounding". It's fair enough to limit an inquiry, but that's not designed to convince someone with doubts. . . .

I take it that you have doubts about the mass shootings of Jews in the occupied East. On what basis? Speaking of German documents, as has been noted, German documents (reports of the Einsatzgruppen and military units operating in the East, also from within the Ostministerium) are among the most important sources for the mass murders there.

Here is a nice article on some of the key sources for the mass executions at Babi Yar. In this post Nick Terry has listed even more sources. This post gets at the variety and volume of sources for Ponary.

 

[EtienneSC]

Nonsense. Amazon felt that selling Neo Nazi material was bad for their image.And they were right.
Frankly, I am still trying to figure out why you seem to be so sympathic to the Deniers. They have no...I repeat no..support from any mainstream,reputable historian. for the same reason that the Flat Earthers have no support for geographers, or Creationist from biologists: It's pure nonsense.

By definition, someone who supported revisionism would not be mainstream. A few people of scholarly reputation have supported revisionism (Robert Faurisson, who was known in the 1960s for his inquiry into Rimbaud, Roger Garaudy, a major second-rank French communist philosopher) but their reputations were trashed once they made their views known. In philosophy there have been several cases of "crazy" theories leading to intellectual advances. The theory that there is no God ("The fool saith in his heart, there is no God" - Psalm 14) led to St Anselm's ontological argument. Bishop Berkeley's theory that the external world did not exist (save in the mind of God) led to advances in the phenomenology of the senses. Schelling's attempt to apply logic to nature contributed to the theory of positive and negative electricity, for example. There have been crazy theories - that witches don't exist, that the earth moves, that turned out to have value. I appreciate that this could not just be applied to a field where detailed knowledge has been collected, but they are general precedents. In general, anyone with experience of life knows that it is more common for people to lie than to commit murder and that people exaggerate in pursuit of political agendas. these considerations alone would put revisionism into a different category from flat earthists.

 

[EtienneSC]

I take it that you have doubts about the mass shootings of Jews in the occupied East. On what basis? Speaking of German documents, as has been noted, German documents (reports of the Einsatzgruppen and military units operating in the East, also from within the Ostministerium) are among the most important sources for the mass murders there.

Here is a nice article on some of the key sources for the mass executions at Babi Yar. In this post Nick Terry has listed even more sources. This post gets at the variety and volume of sources for Ponary.

No, I think that happened. It is a question of the scale, the ideological or other reasons and the involvement of the German state. Carlo Mattogno intends to publish on the subject in 2017.

 

[A'isha]

By definition, someone who supported revisionism would not be mainstream. A few people of scholarly reputation have supported revisionism (Robert Faurisson, who was known in the 1960s for his inquiry into Rimbaud, Roger Garaudy, a major second-rank French communist philosopher) but their reputations were trashed once they made their views known. In philosophy there have been several cases of "crazy" theories leading to intellectual advances. The theory that there is no God ("The fool saith in his heart, there is no God" - Psalm 14) led to St Anselm's ontological argument. Bishop Berkeley's theory that the external world did not exist (save in the mind of God) led to advances in the phenomenology of the senses. Schelling's attempt to apply logic to nature contributed to the theory of positive and negative electricity, for example. There have been crazy theories - that witches don't exist, that the earth moves, that turned out to have value. I appreciate that this could not just be applied to a field where detailed knowledge has been collected, but they are general precedents. In general, anyone with experience of life knows that it is more common for people to lie than to commit murder and that people exaggerate in pursuit of political agendas. these considerations alone would put revisionism into a different category from flat earthists.

That some theories considered crazy turned out to have value does not at all imply that all theories considered crazy (or even that any given theory considered crazy) will turn out to have value.

"Revisionism" (or, to call it what it properly is, Holocaust denial) is not like Schelling or Berkeley or even Anselm. It's more like Sitchin or Von Daniken or Reich.

 

[A'isha]

Carlo Mattogno intends to publish on the subject in 2017.

And why should we expect his writings to be any less of a giant pile of lies and nonsense this time around?

 

[LemmyCaution]

No, I think that happened. It is a question of the scale, the ideological or other reasons and the involvement of the German state. Carlo Mattogno intends to publish on the subject in 2017.

Well, you have to define "that" especially after the way you went on, in the post I quoted, about basic difficulties (how were the killing operations organized, what orders were there, who was to be killed) and saying that there are no documents helping to sort out those basic problems ("the answer apparently is 'There are none'"). You are flat our mistaken that we do not have sources that provide robust, if not complete, answers to the questions you asked. But this didn't stop you from trying to make out that you are probing complete mysteries unsupported by any documentation.

No, there is extensive documentation on the operations of the mobile killing squads and other units involved in mass murder operations in the occupied east. Pretending that the source material doesn't exist means that you aren't familiar with it - or take us to be fools. We can reconstruct from a variety sources, including the EMs, the scale of the killing, we know who was killed, we know how the units were organized and carried out their lethal work, and we know a great deal about the involvement of the state - from chain of command to distribution lists of the EMs. You would be able to answer, not every detailed question but the kinds of questions you asked if you referred to the source material I linked to and similar documents for other actions/sites.

As one example, you wonder who were the victims of the Einsatzgruppen. I've worked with data from Jäger's report and found that about IIRC 98% of those shot by EK3, an Einsatzkommando of Einsatzgruppen A, were Jews. Hans from HC created the graph below showing categories of victims of Einsatzgruppe B, derived from German sources: it shows that 88% of the victims were Jews.

As you must know, the reports describe killing actions as "the Jewish operations" or say things like "A considerable part of the Jews, who in the cities of the Reichskommissariat made up more than half of the population, have been executed" or “the goal of making Lithuania free of Jews” has been achieved or note, using different formulations, that the Jewish problem has been solved through executions in a region; to pretend that there is some mystery about this is really asking a lot of us and in fact trying your readers' patience. It's well known who was targeted and why, frankly, and to pretend that it isn't is fatuous.

It appears that even when you know that "that happened," you need to find a way around your knowledge.

Mattogno has in fact already published his Einsatzgruppen book, in Italian, and Nick Terry has written of it that

Mattogno's attempt to revise the history of the Holocaust by bullets in the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union is a miserable failure, and has provided me with much mirth, marvelling at how shallow and poorly researched Mattogno's book actually is. The "forbidden fruit" is completely rotten.

I take from Nick Terry's comment that Il Re di Convoluzione's new book is of a piece with other stuff I've read by him.

 

[LemmyCaution]

@ EtienneSC, will you be replying to the questions and concerns which Leo Major and I raised about Rudolf's use of Siegmund Rothstein, or do you prefer to let that lie?

 

[Degeneve]

By definition, someone who supported revisionism would not be mainstream. A few people of scholarly reputation have supported revisionism (Robert Faurisson, who was known in the 1960s for his inquiry into Rimbaud, Roger Garaudy, a major second-rank French communist philosopher) but their reputations were trashed once they made their views known. In philosophy there have been several cases of "crazy" theories leading to intellectual advances.

Their reputations have been trashed because their views were nothing else than crackpottery as has been widely shown by knowledgeable historians. Furthermore Garaudy’s book, published in 1996, was nothing else than a copy/paste of Faurisson’s theories on the topic. Finally Faurisson’s work on Rimbaud in the early 1960s attracted some comment but is almost forgotten nowadays (and not because of Faurisson’s intellectual failure but only because it was and still is anecdotal).

 

[EtienneSC]

[....] 2) For someone who talks big about "Human Nature", EtienneSC has repeatedly shown that he doesn't know jack about it. i.e., in this very thread, he writes the following:

In terms of the sources Reinecke used, these include prominently the writings of Sigmund Adler, who is there in Reinecke's bibliography. Looking up Adler, I find that he lived from 1853 to 1920 and was the son of a well to do Jewish merchant. He was a teacher and historian with particular interests in inheritance law and research into legal sources. He was the brother of Victor Adler, a prominent politician who corresponded with Friedrich Engels, the friend of Karl Marx. By acknowledging a debt to Adler during the Third Reich, Reinecke does not evince the sort of casual or visceral anti-semitism found in the Taubner verdict.

In other words, I like some, individual Jews, therefore I can't hate Jews as a group!.

Now that you mention it, I did in fact look further into Reinecke and obtained a copy of the document attributed to him. Going to the archive indicated by the authors of The Good Old Days produced a court transcript from 1959, as opposed to the date of 1943 they use. Of course, documents may have been moved around or re-catalogued since they wrote. It was too long to upload in full, but these sections give the date and key text:



We then updated the brief discussion of the matter on CODOH, where BROI identified the location of the SS records where the original version copied for the purposes of the court was lodged (Berlin Document Center Series 6400: SS Officers' Service Records). It would be interesting to know of anyone has made use of these records to write a history of SS attitudes.

Since then I also came across Martin Pollack's Der Tote im Bunker/The Dead Man in the Bunker (Vienna, 2004), a biography of his father, who was an SS officer and commander of Einsatzgruppe D. He comments that SS wartime documents he finds let the true nature of its operations disappear behind abbreviations (Chapter 13, page 109) and when he cites the units orders to kill Jews, it is from the 1947 testimony of Ohlendorf, not wartime material (chapter 16, page 160). Ohlendorf admitted to ordering those who refused to take part in liquidations shot (page 161). Browning and Goldhagen seem to say the opposite. Killings of Jews are cited from the Einsatzgruppen reports. The author finds the situation of the archives confusing and the archivist agrees with him. His father is imprisoned after a car accident (chapter 20, page 187). I add this here as an example of taking a random sample of sources and reading them critically.

 

[LemmyCaution]

I am having trouble discerning a point in your ramble. Anyway, please, what does this mean and to what do you refer? Pages references for Browning, also Goldhagen although what he says is far less interesting?

Ohlendorf admitted to ordering those who refused to take part in liquidations shot (page 161). Browning and Goldhagen seem to say the opposite.

 

[Nick Terry]

Ohlendorf admitted to ordering those who refused to take part in liquidations shot (page 161). Browning and Goldhagen seem to say the opposite.

Which unit was Ohlendorf in charge of and which unit were Browning and Goldhagen discussing?

<bashes head against table repeatedly>

 

[EtienneSC]

Its time you owned up EtienneSC to what you really are.. a Holocaust Denier.

Your JAQing-off here is fooling nobody.... we already know you are a WW2 revisionist from reading the content of your postings on the bombing of Germany. Your postings and musings in this thread are indistinguishable from those of a full-on, anti-Semitic Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist.

Why would I want to "fool" you? On anti-semitism, let us take the example of Gerald Menuhin, the grandson of an anti-zionist campaigner, son of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and recently a revisionist author. It was anti-zionists like his family who fared worst politically out of WW2 and are now marginalized (I don't have an opinion on Zionism, as it's not my fight). I expressed the view that he should be allowed to distribute his views via Amazon. You on the other hand, said when his book was delisted there "That is really great to see". Dudalb said: Now almost of the all of the Denier crap is gone..and no one will miss it. Mycroft said: "I'd rather those kooks go away because they've been thoroughly debunked and humiliated rather than being silenced for lack of venue." Trustbutverify earlier said: "Some (meaning Jews & other minorities) will even turn against fellow members in an effort to dissociate themselves from the attacks from societies at large. Sometimes this very real and common phenomena is referred to as "self-hate". There is no such thing as a non-Jew-despising Holocaust denier." So you are not taking seriously the idea that there are disputes among Jews, as much as between Christians, Arabs, liberals, etc.

Frankly, I can think of several Jews I greatly admire and some that I don't. There are none that I would like to kill or see killed, not even in my dreams. It is fair to say that I tend to dislike people who oppose Christianity and have read a good deal of anti-semitic literature. Perhaps this has colored my mind. I can't say I really understand my own decision to read it, though I rationalized it on the grounds that as anti-semitism was the cause of the holocaust, it was important to know about it.

 

[LeoMajor]

There are footnotes in Laurence Rees' Auschwitz, but none of them refer to German wartime documents.

I mean, you could at least try LOL

* Images courtesy of Jeff_36 at SSF. Nice find Jeff!

 

[EtienneSC]

[....] Anyway, please, what does this mean and to what do you refer? Pages references for Browning, also Goldhagen although what he says is far less interesting?

Page reference to Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) is pages 249-50. Goldhagen cites a book by Hoffmann, not Browning, as I wrongly assumed.

 

[abaddon]

I mean, you could at least try LOL

[qimg]http://www.skepticforum.com/download/file.php?id=5498&mode=view[/qimg]

[qimg]http://www.skepticforum.com/download/file.php?id=5495&mode=view[/qimg]

* Images courtesy of Jeff_36 at SSF. Nice find Jeff!

Not available for non members, I'm afraid.