Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Clayton Moore]

.
Was this in one of the non-denier resources you lied were your primary font of knowledge?

It never happened.
.

Of course it did.

http://www.patriot.dk/nurnberg2.html

One of the most important of the post-Nuremberg "Holocaust" trials was the 1963-1965 Frankfurt "Auschwitz" trial of 22 former Auschwitz SS men. The lengthy case received worldwide media coverage and assumed something of the character of a show trial.107 Deciding the guilt or innocence of the defendants was "extraordinarily difficult," the judges declared in their verdict, because of the very inconclusive nature of the evidence. "We have no absolute evidence for the individual killings. We have only the witness testimonies." The judges acknowledged that "the possibilities of verifying the witness declarations were very limited." The judges further emphasized "this weakness of witness testimony" by citing the case of a Buchenwald official convicted of murdering an inmate who later turned up alive.108

This situation was embarrassingly underscored during the trial when former inmate Rudolf Kauer suddenly repudiated earlier statements about his one-time SS masters. In pre-trial interrogation he claimed to have seen defendant Wilhelm Boger brutally beat a naked Polish woman with a horse whip, ripping off one breast and flooding a room with blood. When asked to repeat his statement in court, Kauer admitted: "I lied about that. That was just a yarn going around the camp. I never saw it . . ." Another claim that Boger had smashed an infant's skull against a tree trunk was also not true, he confessed. Although Boger was not liked, Kauer told the court, he was actually a just SS man.

Another defendant, Klaus Dylewski, whom Kauer had called "one of the worse killers" at Auschwitz, was actually "harmless." All of his pre-trial accusations were lies, Kauer said, calmly adding: "You can punish me if you want. I am used to that." After the presiding judge admonished him several times for repudiating his earlier statements, Kauer replied: "We don't need to lose any more words. It's not worth it. What I say now is the truth."109

Former Auschwitz camp adjutant and SS Captain Robert Mulka, the main defendant in the trial, was pronounced guilty of participation in mass murder and sentenced to 14 years at hard labor, a verdict that many outsiders considered outrageously lenient. But less than four months later Mulka was quietly released, an outcome that should astonish only those not familiar with the nature of such trials.110
Conclusion

Very few of those who glibly refer to "all the Nuremberg evidence" as proof for the Holocaust extermination story are familiar with either the real nature of this "evidence" or the character of these trials. On closer examination, solid documentary or forensic evidence of a wartime German policy to exterminate Europe's Jews proves to be elusive. As we have seen, the evidence that has been presented consists largely of extorted confessions, spurious testimonies, and fraudulent documents. The postwar Nuremberg trials were politically motivated proceedings meant more to discredit the leaders of a defeated regime than to establish truth.

We do not need trials or "confessions" to prove that the Katyn massacre or the postwar deportation of Germans from eastern and central Europe actually took place. By comparison, the Holocaust story does not claim just a few isolated massacres, but a vast extermination program taking place across the European continent over a three-year period involving several governments and millions of people. The fact that the Holocaust story must rely so heavily on highly dubious testimony evidence and trials staged in a historically unparalleled atmosphere of hysteria, intimidation and propaganda demonstrates its inherent weakness.

 

[MG1962]

Of course it did.

http://www.patriot.dk/nurnberg2.html

Not a crushed testicle to be seen

 

[Craig4]

Of course it did.

http://www.patriot.dk/nurnberg2.html

Wow what a really long bit of personal disbelief. Nothing really worth taking seriously.

 

[Pacal]

Originally Posted by Gene Alley
http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/thottc/

Butz is the best you can do!? Not only is it old and out of date but Butz recycles the same old tired anti-semitic crap. In the book we learn that Jews are liars, Butz uses quotes from the Talmud concerning Bether to support this point. Oh and Jews did it to get money.

Same old, same old anti-semitic nonsense. THe fact that your referring to is most revealing.

 

[Kevin.Silbstedt]

The history of the hoaxing. How the hoax developed and captured the minds of so many people. Who was involved. How the hoaxsters worked, exchanged ideas, altered documents, tarted up evidence, staged photographs. When and where major accomplishments took place. The full story. All the evidence--lies exposed, the Jews behind the hoaxing, meeting notes, receipts and orders, memoranda, confidential notes, all the secrets of the hoax. Who will write it--Saggy? LGR? Dogzilla? Gene Alley?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The fact, that an argument from ignorance is fallicious, is not a free pass to deny whatever you want, without any evidence.

Lets start with the indubitable physical evidence - the absence of underground flues at Krema II and III.

Oh, you mean the buildings the nazis dismantled and dynamited? (Again: Why?) Wow, what a surprise that would be, if this little detail would be missing.

And did you or your denier buddies do a forensic study on Krema II and III, that showed, that they were bakeries or at least could not have been crematories? No, of course not. So again, what you have is nothing but baseless denial.

Difficult to prove a negative.

Again, you are trying to twist a fallacy around.

If you want to show, that something doesn't exist, than you have to show what exists instead. You somehow fantasized two bakeries (yeah, right ), so prove it and with that you would have proven, that there was no Krema II and III. And you would have to show better and more convincing pieces of evidence, than the ones, that speaks for the fact, that there were two giant crematories.

Can you prove that there isn't a giant purple italian speaking elephant resident in the Krema I gas chamber? No, going there and not finding her doesn't count.

This analogy is just stupid. Seeing the empty room, disproves the claim, that there is a giant purple whatever elephant in the room, completly. What you probably meant, is that you cannot disprove the claim, that there was ever such an elephant in this room.

 

[LemmyCaution]

There are sexual atrocities against women described daily in minutiae on prime time TV. Did Himmler issue the extermination directive in code that forbade committing sexual atrocities against females? A KIIYP* code?

I read that 137 or so of the Germans, who were interrogated prior to the trials after the war, had their testicles crushed. Yet I haven't read any testimony of that happening to any prisoner in the camps.

* keep it in your pants

You seem fascinated with sexual themes and mutilations. Not exactly Himmler but the National Socialist government, in fact, did have prohibitions against racial mixing, that is, sexual relations between Aryans and certain target groups. These rules were broken in some contexts, but for the most part they were taken very seriously and violations of them could result in punishment.

As to genital crushing, Sofsky, in the book cited earlier, details punishments which the SS designed to degrade and dehumanize prisoners. It will not titillate you to hear about the "dog cells" at Dachau, for example, into which prisoners were stuffed, with only enough room for the men to crawl around, and in which the victims were forced to beg and bark if they were to receive food. Indeed, however, some of the humiliation rituals did involve sexual degradation and the kind of abuse of sexual organs which interest you, according to Sofsky. For example, in Buchenwald "A special form of torture was to tie a rope to a male prisoner's genitals and then swing him back and forth as he hung on the door. Another technique was to dip the genitals alternately in cold and boiling hot water and, once the skin was lacerated, to douse it with iodine. One variation of the Buchenwald method was the 'swing' in the Political Department in Auschwitz," in which victims were hoisted on a swing, turned upside down, and beaten on the buttocks and genitals. pp 226-227

I am not sure that the SS were as interested in the sexual aspects of these punishments as they were in finding vulnerable points, attacking them, and rendering prisoners utterly powerless and degraded. For example, lacerating the kidneys with whips was a much more common punishment than torture of the genitals.

Not having read extensively on the women's prisons,, I cannot evaluate the prevalence of rape. There is testimony about rape of prisoners held at Auschwitz, IIRC, in violation National Socialist racial laws.

Another practice that may interest you was the forcing of female inmates into bordellos to service privileged male inmates in their camps. Rochelle G. Saidel, in her study of Ravensbruck, The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, mentions two cases of this practice, including the case of Anja Lundholm and that of Margarethe W., "a German women who was arrested as an 'asocial' because she had an affair with a 'half-Jew.'" This woman, says Saidel, was sent to Buchenwald in 1943, around 4 years after her incarceration at Ravensbruck began, to work as a prostitute in the bordello there. p 214 I don't know a great deal about this topic, but I thought you might find these details of interest.

Citation, please, for the crushing of the testicles of imprisoned Germans after the war. The bit you cited didn't match your earlier gloss on the issue--I could not find in either your excerpt or the link the 137 such instances you mentioned. I would like to have the reference to the 137 instances and their context. Thank you.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Please provide a link to the in just one report

The reference you requested is found in Ulrich Herbert's essay, "Labor as Spoils of Conquest, 1933-1945," in David Crews, ed., Nazism and German Society 1933-1945, pp 246-247, where the report is excerpted. Ironically, given your argument from incredulity regarding labor, the point of the report, filed by an official of the Reich's Foreign Office, was to complain about the conditions prevailing in eastern camps which, by destroying potential laborers, worked against "promoting German war aims."

In another vein, here are some "issues" found at labor sites where POWs held by the Germans worked, as summarized in a September 1944 report made by the Werhmacht Supreme Command (p 239): flogging of inmates, POWs forced to work standing in water without boots, insufficient blankets at the work site camps, vermin infesting inmates' quarters, POWs forced to wear wet clothing because of lack of opportunity to dry clothes soaked during work, medical fitness exams too superficial, frequent accidents and injuries due to insufficient protection for laborers, sick inmates left untreated and made to work.

 

[Dogzilla]

You misunderstand or play games with what I was asking. I wasn't asking how it was technically possible for the hoaxing to take place. I was asking what happened, with proof.

For one thing, everything that can occur does not actually occur. What I am interested in is what actually occurred during the hoaxing and how.

You are continuing to dodge the request, I am growing increasingly bored by the game of dodge, so perhaps we should just add this one to the list of Rev non-responses.

The way I look at it, your request has two big problems. The first is that topic is too broad to be covered in a single posting on the JREF (or any other) forum. It's like asking somebody to explain how the holocaust itself developed--who was involved. How the perpetrators worked and exchanged ideas. When and where major accomplishments took place. The full story. All the evidence--truth exposed, the Germans behind the holocaust, meeting notes, receipts and orders, memoranda, confidential notes, all the secrets of the holocaust.

The second problem is that your request assumes that there was some sort of master plan, some sort of coordinated effort on a global scale by a small cadre of Jews who fabricated evidence out of nothing and convinced a world that respected German culture and was resistant to false atrocity stories that such depravity could and did take place.

That's not what happened, at least not in the United States. I don't know what was happening in other countries. But if you go back through newspaper archives starting at the dawn of the twentieth century you'll find articles every few years, buried on the inside pages, about millions of Jews in Europe (usually Russia and Poland) on the verge of annihilation while the world slumbers. These stories were often associated with a fund raising campaign for Jewish organizations like the WJC or with the need for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Nobody outside of the Jewish community really cared.

Then along comes Nazi Germany which institutionalized anti-semitism to unprecedented levels. Restricting Jewish access to housing, schools, and public services; disallowing marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, punishing Jews more severely than non-Jews for breaking the law put German Jews in the 1930s in class of people similar to Black people in the United States at the same time. But stripping Jews of their citizenship and later deporting them to ghettos made it clear to the world that Jews really weren't just complaining about their lot in life--they really were experiencing greater difficulty than the non-Jews around them.

Then war breaks out and the predictable dehumanizing the enemy propaganda campaign starts. In the Great War, it was the Huns bayoneting babies. In Gulf War I, it was the Iraqis tossing babies out of their incubators. In Gulf War II we learned about Uday's proclivity for raping random twelve year old girls. Even Osama bin Laden was exposed as a hard core pornography aficionado.

As World War II progressed we saw a regular trickle of stories about German atrocities against native populations and particularly the Jews. During this period we learned about diabolical tortures inflicted by the Germans with a cruelty that was exceeded only by their breathtaking inefficiency. Millions of Jews being steamed to death at Tremblinka or electric floors comes to mind.

If you look at what was said about what we now call the holocaust late in the war and immediately after the war, you don't get the sense of a well thought out disinformation campaign being executed by a central command center. You'll see what appears to be random people throwing out sometimes hilarious stories about the depravity of the Nazi invaders. Poison porridge is a good example of random nonsense that was thrown out during this period. I read an article in the New Yorker magazine from 1946 about Jewish children found in concentration camps who were then living in England. One child evidently saw Kramer toss a baby in the air and shoot him with his pistol. Another told us that lots of children were killed when the Germans put powder glass in their soup. That must've really been painful! These kids were called the Belsen or Buchenwald children but they were quick to tell you that there had been other, much worse, camps. Most of the children had been in four or five camps and they all agree that Treblinka had been the worse. They had even written a song about it. It's a bit strange that so many children had been in Treblinka what with every Jew being murdered upon arrival and the only eyewitnesses being the one's who escaped after the uprising. But those are the type of stories that were circulating back them.

If there was some grand conspiracy behind a hoax that had been fabricated completely, wouldn't there be a little more consistency? Ferchrissakes! Even at Nuremberg, they were talking about steam chambers and electric floors. In other trials, Dachau killed thousands in the gas chamber. The head honchos of Degesch were executed for supplying the Zyklon B to Auschwitz that was used to murder four and a half million Allied Prisoners of War. They started calling it the holocaust because people were murdered, not in the gas ovens, but by being thrown alive in the flames.

The hoax doesn't require the fabrication of evidence, of fake photos, etc. It requires mis-characterizing the truth. You take pictures of the conditions in the western camps and tell people the conditions are the result of deliberate German policy. You prove that Auschwitz received large shipments of Zyklon B and that the company that supplied the Zyklon B knew that it was selling it to Auschwitz. Because no concentration camp could possibly need that much pesticide just for killing lice, it was obvious that the huge orders of Zyklon B was evidence of mass murder. Plus, former prisoners swear that the crematorium belched smoke and flames around the clock when these factories of death were operational. When aerial photographs don't show the flames and smoke that all the prisoners saw, maybe the crematorium wasn't operating 24/7. Maybe all the prisoners just happened to see smoke and flames shooting from the chimney whenever they were outside. It was pointed out that if most of the Zyklon B sent to Auschwitz was used for killing people, the walls of the gas chambers there should show evidence of exposure to most of the Zyklon B that was shipped to the camp. When it was discovered that the walls of the gas chamber don't show evidence of exposure to most of the Zyklon B that was shipped to the camp, we found out that the Polish peasants took the bricks that had been part of the gas chambers and used them to reconstruct their homes after the war. So you wouldn't expect to find any residue on the bricks today--they're not the original bricks. Later, after the Poles made up a test for the presence (but not quantity) of cyanide residue that doesn't depend on the formation of Prussian Blue that does show traces of Zyklon B, the 'reconstruction' story was dropped and we learned that Zyklon B is better at killing people than lice. So now we have always known that very little Zyklon B is necessary to kill people so that's why the gas chamber walls don't have nearly as much cyanide residue as the dis-infestation chambers.

As far as the documentary evidence is concerned, you don't need to fabricate documents. Since there weren't any papers specifically mentioning homicidal gas chambers, the Germans destroyed all the explicit documentary evidence. Fortunately, the Germans are meticulous record keepers who spoke in coded language. Thus, every time 'special treatment' is mentioned, we know the Germans were talking about exterminating the Jews. Just like we know about the Republican Party's master plan to kill all the old people in the United States because George Bush used to talk about 'social security reform' which we know is secret code for 'exterminating the elderly.'

No, you live in a fantasy world where non-Jews think that Jews are all part of some conspiracy to control the world. Jews are an intelligent people but non-Jews know they're not magic. The holocaust as we know it isn't a 100% fictional event. It's based on at least 95% truth. The truth is that Jews under Nazi Germany suffered greatly. They were jailed, they were killed, they were deported, they were put in ghettos, forced to work as slave laborers, they were shot en mass on the Eastern front.

Jews had been exaggerating their misfortune from time immemorial. With World War II they found governments that were motivated to demonize Nazi Germany and were open to believing just about any ridiculous lie. It wasn't just the Jews. Anybody with a horror story about the Nazis would have an audience. The disinformation campaign about the fate of the Jews during WWII requires nothing more than people's willingness to lie about their enemy. When you look at a Germany that has been bombed back to the Stone Age, surrendered unconditionally, has no allies anywhere in the world capable of defending them, and is at the mercy of a former foe who is flush with victory and desirous of revenge, it's easy to see how the holocaust story would be believed.

That's just my two cents. If you really want to learn about the evolution of the hoax, look at what was said before the war, during the war, and after the war. You won't see evidence of a well thought out campaign. You'll see random nonsense that has gradually congealed into what we have today.

Or you could simply read the Butz book. I'll see if I can find a more concise explanation somewhere else but if you really have read the Hoax, you know that the whole Jewish Conspiracy explanation of the holocaust is just a straw man. Instead of repeatedly asking one of us to published a five hundred page treatise on the JREF forum, why don't you tell us what specifically you think is wrong about the Butz book and how his errors make his thesis untenable.

In the meantime I'll take some of the stupidest, most mystical explanations of the how the holocaust happened--like Hilburg's telepathy theory--retrofit it for the holohoax and throw it back at you. Then I'll laugh when people insult me for saying such stupid things. Or maybe I'll just ask over and over why you hate Germans.

 

[Dogzilla]

Ok, so it was possible because it happened. And evidence is, of course, trivial.
Your 'arguments' grow stronger every day.

Do you still take yourself serious?

Like I just said, I'll take stupid things "scholars" have said about the holocaust, retrofit them for the holohoax, and then laugh when people accuse me of being stupid.

Read up on what Le Monde said about the gas chambers and how Raul Hilburg said essentially that telepathy was glue that held the holocaust together. Maybe then you'll get my jokes.

 

[Dogzilla]

Np otherwise I would have linked it. The doco was made using the document and graphics from the text are used during the show.

I doubt the book ever had wide ciruclation given some of the instructions and methods described in it. Especially the section on how to triage the wounded its extremely disturbing even by Nazi standards

Too bad. I'd like to see the book because that IMDB entry doesn't really say much. But thanks for the idea. I didn't think of looking online for Civil Defense type of manuals. That's the sort of source material that might actually have information about disposing of dead bodies after a mega disaster that would confirm holocaust body burning.

 

[LemmyCaution]

The way I look at it, your request has two big problems. The first is that topic is too broad to be covered in a single posting on the JREF (or any other) forum. It's like asking somebody to explain how the holocaust itself developed--who was involved. How the perpetrators worked and exchanged ideas. When and where major accomplishments took place. The full story. All the evidence--truth exposed, the Germans behind the holocaust, meeting notes, receipts and orders, memoranda, confidential notes, all the secrets of the holocaust.

No, I want a summary that also points to the evidence. I’ve said that from the start.

 People has done exactly what you ask in turning my question around; in fact, that is what I meant by a proper history needing to be done. I suggest you read some of Nick Terry's posts on topics relating to the Holocaust: they are summaries of the narrative, citing particulars, of the sort I had in mind. Surely it should be possible for you to summarize with some substantiation something that is so deeply held and core a belief.

The second problem is that your request assumes that there was some sort of master plan, some sort of coordinated effort on a global scale by a small cadre of Jews who fabricated evidence out of nothing and convinced a world that respected German culture and was resistant to false atrocity stories that such depravity could and did take place.

No, my request relies on no such assumption. The request was made in reply to this statement –

Quite a few people know that the holohoax did not happen. But that's just half of the story, the actual history of what happened or didn't happen to the Jews during WW II. The other half is the construction of the hoax, the Jews were lying about a holocaust of six million Jews starting in 1906 ! . . . See the book "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century" by Northwester Prof Arthur Butz. The whole scheme is laid bare.

This was posted by Saggy. i really have no idea what he means by Jews lying since 1906 and a whole scheme being laid bare. The least he could have done, or someone willing to help him out, is summarize the basis for “the scheme,” the way “the Jews” lied -- and the lying narrative that resulted -- and how they got people to accept it, and, as I’ve also asked, how that connects to evidence cited and arguments made by historians who have developed the narrative of the genocide and related war crimes.

Earlier I replied to this notion as follows:

And I will continue to point out 1) that you and little grey rabbit are strawmanning the request in that I did not imply a conspiracy, but rather asked only how the disinformation, or "lying" as Saggy said, came into being and spread, with specifics and evidence, 2) not you, not Saggy, not rabbit has given your version of this history, and 3) in fact, rabbit and you have tried putting up smokescreens and diversions rather than getting down to writing out what should be easy to summarize as a core tenet of your beliefs about the Holocaust.

Nothing has changed in my response to you guys: I didn't offer a great man theory or a conspiracy theory: I asked Saggy his interpretation. No need for you to strawman what I said.



That's not what happened, at least not in the United States. I don't know what was happening in other countries. But if you go back through newspaper archives starting at the dawn of the twentieth century you'll find articles every few years, buried on the inside pages, about millions of Jews in Europe (usually Russia and Poland) on the verge of annihilation while the world slumbers. These stories were often associated with a fund raising campaign for Jewish organizations like the WJC or with the need for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Nobody outside of the Jewish community really cared.

Even if I were to agree with this, so what? Many groups and causes have advocates, and advocates often overstate in their appeals for support. So, historians almost always have to confront and deal with interested, and even partisan, points of view on topics they research. That some people raised money, spread a view of events, and made exaggerated appeals doesn’t speak to the work done by social scientists to understand the context and events. Please show us a single recent scholarly book on the Holocaust that is based on or influenced by urgent appeals to help Jews in 1906.



Then along comes Nazi Germany which institutionalized anti-semitism to unprecedented levels. . . . Then war breaks out and the predictable dehumanizing the enemy propaganda campaign starts. In the Great War, it was the Huns bayoneting babies. In Gulf War I, it was the Iraqis tossing babies out of their incubators. In Gulf War II we learned about Uday's proclivity for raping random twelve year old girls. Even Osama bin Laden was exposed as a hard core pornography aficionado.

Again, social scientists sort these things out. Again, wars in particular bubble up demonization, extreme claims, and caricatures of the enemy. That claims are made proves nothing about the future impact of those claims and in particular doesn’t address what subsequent historical works contain, use as evidence, and argue. I would remind you that we are now 60 years distant from the war, and we have a great deal of perspective and scope for reflection, weighing, and balancing, as historians do. Balancing does not mean, of course, whitewashing. Research has shown that the Nazis did institutionalized terror and barbaric practices in various contexts not directly related to the genocidal campaign against Europe’s Jews—the camp system, POWs, anti-partisan warfare to name three.

 This conclusion is decidedly not rooted in wartime propaganda or caricatures of the Nazis.

As World War II progressed we saw a regular trickle of stories about German atrocities against native populations and particularly the Jews. During this period we learned about diabolical tortures inflicted by the Germans with a cruelty that was exceeded only by their breathtaking inefficiency. Millions of Jews being steamed to death at Tremblinka or electric floors comes to mind.

Again, so what? It is rare indeed when victims do not engage in emotional renditions of what they’ve suffered. Historians, as I have said, sort this out. It is not in the least telling that wild claims and exaggeration are mixed in with accurate information from victims. I posted about this upthread IIRC. If historians picked up every atrocity story, did not compare and cross-check sources, didn’t weed out and ignore unbelievable statements—and failed to challenge and improve their own interpretations, then there would be a problem. To show a hoax, you need to move past the expected rhetoric of partisans, advocates, and victims and show that the scholarship of the Third Reich has bought the rhetoric hook, line, and sinker. That means you have to engage the most recent scholarship. Not with sloganeering and your own caricatures, either. This is why the constant references from deniers to popular figures or to Elie Wiesel are ultimately so silly and amusing. These people don’t do the kind of assessing which historians do, nor does someone like Wiesel even figure as a significant source for historians. Reading what deniers write here at JREF and over at RODOH, I cannot believe that they have read much of the scholarship--but more importantly that, not understanding how history is researched and written, even were they to do so they would be ill disposed to grasp the arguments: the rhetoric of deniers ends up to be little more than a few, repeated, canned one-offs and riffs, most of them barely relevant to the recent work done by historians, for example.



If you look at what was said about what we now call the holocaust late in the war and immediately after the war, you don't get the sense of a well thought out disinformation campaign being executed by a central command center. You'll see what appears to be random people throwing out sometimes hilarious stories about the depravity of the Nazi invaders. Poison porridge is a good example of random nonsense that was thrown out during this period.

Well, it wasn’t picked up by Angrick & Klein, whose recent work is probably the best and most thoroughly documented on Riga, with a great deal of material on Salaspils; perhaps they ignored the porridge testimony because they didn’t believe it or thought it an exaggeration or misconception by a victim. I don’t know. All I know is that murder by porridge doesn't appear in their book (to my best recollection) and that bunny posted a snippet about it without anything else. Since I have encountered this bit, I would ask you to explain its importance in scholarly interpretations of Nazi camp practices. Since this seems such an important and signal issue for you, please post a summary of the full porridge story, its context, other testimony about it, and so forth. Thank you.

I read an article in the New Yorker magazine from 1946 about Jewish children found in concentration camps who were then living in England. One child evidently saw Kramer toss a baby in the air and shoot him with his pistol. Another told us that lots of children were killed when the Germans put powder glass in their soup. That must've really been painful! These kids were called the Belsen or Buchenwald children but they were quick to tell you that there had been other, much worse, camps. Most of the children had been in four or five camps and they all agree that Treblinka had been the worse. They had even written a song about it. It's a bit strange that so many children had been in Treblinka what with every Jew being murdered upon arrival and the only eyewitnesses being the one's who escaped after the uprising. But those are the type of stories that were circulating back them.

And, again, so what? Stories circulate, a lot of erroneous rumors and misinformation usually accompanies big events. Points of view differ. Oddballs and unreliable people get swept up in events. People cover their butts with lies and self-serving stories. Why should a mass murder campaign be any different in this regard? I have no idea how the 1946 New Yorker article has been used by historians. Please trace this for us. I do, however, know how Dr Neander used a memoir by Mrs Zisblatt—to the incomprehension of deniers on this forum. Dr Neander’s method, not the method of the random and uncritical repetition of rumors, memoir claims, or promotional statements, is the method by which historians of the Holocaust work.



If there was some grand conspiracy behind a hoax that had been fabricated completely, wouldn't there be a little more consistency? Ferchrissakes! Even at Nuremberg, they were talking about steam chambers and electric floors. In other trials, Dachau killed thousands in the gas chamber. The head honchos of Degesch were executed for supplying the Zyklon B to Auschwitz that was used to murder four and a half million Allied Prisoners of War. They started calling it the holocaust because people were murdered, not in the gas ovens, but by being thrown alive in the flames.

You are winding yourself up about a strawman--that I asked about a grand conspiracy. I don’t have a very strong notion of what Saggy meant by the construction of the hoax, the Jews lying about a holocaust of six million Jews starting in 1906, or what the whole scheme looks like when laid bare. That’s partly why I asked. It’s up to Saggy or some other denier to explain how the hoax developed and to put something non-random, cogent, and substantiated together to do this.

Since I am completely convinced that the genocide occurred, and that the notion of a hoax is absurd, I have no preconception about the nature of the hoax which Saggy claims developed. I believe, in fact, that you and LGR keep defaulting to the notion that I have a picture of the hoax in mind to obfuscate and stall. Whatever. I don’t think there was a grand conspiracy, of course, and not being a mind reader I don’t know what you think happened to lead to a hoax.



The hoax doesn't require the fabrication of evidence, of fake photos, etc.

No, it does. Because forgery and manipulation are the only ways out when deniers are trapped by what is documented. I will spare you a summary of denier claims about forged photos because I am not permitted to link to RODOH and thus only mention Udo Walendy. However, here is a list of some denier claims of forged documents, many of them making the list on an as-needed basis, the document suddenly becoming manipulated or hoaxed just when a denier argument came apart because of it. That deniers have claimed all the below forgeries at various times pretty much rubbishes your statement. (List from a RODOH thread on forgeries and manipulation.)

General 

1940s - Himmler Dienstkalendar
1942 - Sefton Delmer invented it all (Grimm, Walendy, a few others)

1943 - Raphael Lemkin - invented gas chambers (Rassinier, Hoggan, Harwood) 

1945 - US 3rd Army - bamboozled Hoettl into saying 6 million

1945 - US Capt Doc Center - faked Himmler Posen speech text (quite a few)

1945 - US IMT Interrogation Division - bamboozled Wisliceny 

1945/1946 - Brack X-ray sterilization letter, purportedly sent to Himmler on 23 June 1942 

1947 - US NMT - faked Himmler Posen speech recording (quite a few)

1947 - US NMT - forged Wannsee protocol (a lot) 

1947 - US NMT - altered Korherr report (Challen, Rudolf, a few others) 

1956-1960 - Wilhelm Sassen - faked interviews with Eichmann

1961 - Israeli Mossad - substituted Eichmann for a patsy (the bunny) 



Mass shootings 

1945 - British CSDIC - induced Bruns to discuss Riga massacre in private and be bugged (Hannover, effectively)

1945 - Latvian NKVD - tortured Jeckeln over Riga massacre etc

1947 - US NMT - forged Ereignismeldungen 

1947 - 'the Soviets' - forged Ereignismeldungen (Hoggan, Butz, Graf) 

1947 - US NMT - forged Meldung Nr 51 (implied by some, incl. HM) 

1940s - Soviet Osobyi archive - faked Jaeger report and buried it until 1960s (Graf, others)
Additionally – Jewish wartime diaries (the bunny), OSR 24 doctored to align Western and Soviet War Crimes positions (the bunny), Sakowicz’s Ponar diary
(the bunny), Rademacher's note that "Eichmann suggests shooting" in margin of Benzler telegram, September 1941 (the bunny)


Gas vans

1945 - US Capt Doc Center - faked gas van document (every denier)

1945 - US IMT Interrogation Division - coerced Rauff into corroborating gas vans document 

1945/1946 - Any subsequent letter or memorandum on X-ray sterilization referring to Brack's letter (also Wetzel draft letter for Lohse on Kallmeyer and gassing apparatuses in Minsk and Riga)

19--- - somebody - faked a gas vans document re Chelmno (every denier)

1940s - Soviet Osobyi archive - faked another gas vans document (implied by faith conform claim) 

AR Camps 

1943 - Gerstein - faked letter to Ubbink about Belzec 

1944 - Soviet 65th Army - faked investigation of Treblinka 

1944 - Soviet 1st Belorussian Front - did nefarious things at Majdanek

1944 - Soviet 1st Belorussian Front - faked investigation of Sobibor 

1944 - Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front - faked investigation of Belzec 

1945 - Gerstein - invented Belzec story 

1945 - US CDC - forged Stroop report (some) 

1945 - Rachel Auerbach - forged Stroop Report (denierbud) 

1945 - Polish Main Commission - faked investigation of Treblinka 

1947 - US NMT - tortured Viktor Brack into explaining Aktion Reinhard 

1947 - US NMT - persuaded witnesses to corroborate Wirth going to AR 

1960s - ZStL - coerced AR camp guards into talking about BST 

1970 - Gitta Sereny - made up interview with Franz Stangl

1980s - Claude Lanzmann - bribed Suchomel 

19-- - somebody - faked OK Ostrow document (implied) 

1997 - British PRO - faked Hoefle telegram (so say some)

1997-1999 - Torun University - "fraudulent" archaeological dig at Belzec 

Auschwitz 

1943 - authors of Black Book of Polish Jewry - faked newspaper article (Butz)
1944 - US War Refugee Board - faked Vrba-Wetzler report (Butz) 

1944 - Auschwitz underground resistance - faked Sonderkommando photo 

1945 - Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front - faked Birkenau and Auschwitz gas chambers (Krema deniers)
1945 - Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front - forgot to take down formwork (PG) 

1945 - Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front - took pictures of newly constructed Birkenau crematoria (Krema deniers) 

1945 - Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front - faked '4756' cremation document then suppressed it (Rudolf) 

1945 - Krakow Forensics Institute - faked cyanide residues found in crema ruins 

1945 - British 2nd Army - coerced Josef Kramer, Franz Hoessler and others 

1945 - British Army in Norway - coerced Hans Aumeier

1945 - US 3rd Army - coerced Erich Muhsfeldt 

1946 - British WCIU - coerced Kremer into corroborating diary 

1946 - British WCIU - tortured Hoess (every denier) 

1946 - US IMT Interrogation Division - tortured Hoess some more (implied) 

1946 - GM Gilbert - hypnotised Hoess (implied) 

1946 - Leon Goldensohn - hypnotised Hoess (implied) 

1946-7 - Polish NTN - coerced Hoess into writing memoirs (Staeglich) 

1947 - Polish NTN - coerced 40 Auschwitz SS officers and NCOs into lying 

1947 - Polish NTN - coerced Kremer to corroborate diary 

1947 - US NMT - forged Veesenmeyer telegrams (Butz, but not Mattogno) 

1947 - US NMT - coerced witnesses to corroborate Veesenmeyer telegrams (Butz) 

1940s - Soviet Osobyi archive - altered Gaspruefer memo and buried it until 1993 (Mattogno) 

1958-1963 - Staatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt am Main - coerced 22 Auschwitz SS staff (implied) 

1959 - BRD - forced Kremer to recorroborate his diary for the 3rd time 

1964 - Polish firm Hydrokop - faked bore samples on Auschwitz grounds 

1979 - CIA - altered air photos (Ball, others, Krema Deniers) 

1990s - RAF - released more fake air photos
Also – Sonderkommando writings left in Birkenau (the bunny)



Camps in Altreich 

1945 - US Army film team - faked Dachau gas chamber

1945 - Soviet Speziallager staff - built Sachsenhausen gas chamber ruins (Maser, others)

Have you not been reading what deniers say and do when they find themselves in a pickle?



It requires mis-characterizing the truth. You take pictures of the conditions in the western camps and tell people the conditions are the result of deliberate German policy. You prove that Auschwitz received large shipments of Zyklon B and that the company that supplied the Zyklon B knew that it was selling it to Auschwitz. Because no concentration camp could possibly need that much pesticide just for killing lice, it was obvious that the huge orders of Zyklon B was evidence of mass murder. Plus, former prisoners swear that the crematorium belched smoke and flames around the clock when these factories of death were operational. When aerial photographs don't show the flames and smoke that all the prisoners saw, maybe the crematorium wasn't operating 24/7. Maybe all the prisoners just happened to see smoke and flames shooting from the chimney whenever they were outside. It was pointed out that if most of the Zyklon B sent to Auschwitz was used for killing people, the walls of the gas chambers there should show evidence of exposure to most of the Zyklon B that was shipped to the camp. When it was discovered that the walls of the gas chamber don't show evidence of exposure to most of the Zyklon B that was shipped to the camp, we found out that the Polish peasants took the bricks that had been part of the gas chambers and used them to reconstruct their homes after the war. So you wouldn't expect to find any residue on the bricks today--they're not the original bricks. Later, after the Poles made up a test for the presence (but not quantity) of cyanide residue that doesn't depend on the formation of Prussian Blue that does show traces of Zyklon B, the 'reconstruction' story was dropped and we learned that Zyklon B is better at killing people than lice. So now we have always known that very little Zyklon B is necessary to kill people so that's why the gas chamber walls don't have nearly as much cyanide residue as the dis-infestation chambers.


You need to get to the specifics in the scholarly works which you are disputing. I'm not a mind-reader, not are your other readers clairvoyants. Too many random, unattributed points. You need to show who made the claim, in context, and why it is incorrect—and finally you need to show how the error is part of a hoaxing pattern and helps create a scheme of lying, as Saggy has it. Unless you are disagreeing with Saggy. In which case you need to explain what you mean by hoax.



As far as the documentary evidence is concerned, you don't need to fabricate documents.

See above. You do need to when your "arguments" run into trouble, as in always.

. . . the Germans are meticulous record keepers who spoke in coded language. Thus, every time 'special treatment' is mentioned, we know the Germans were talking about exterminating the Jews.

That is not what is stated in the literature. Again, your general claims need to be pinned down. To take this example, I will cite just one excerpt from one EG report, #108, and you will see that it does not mention Jews in a case of special treatment:

Operational Situation Report 108: . . .

5. Measures against criminals and marauders

According to information obtained by SK 7b, the Red troops had, before leaving Chernigov, opened the door of the Asylum for the Insane and had armed part of the inmates. These were marching down the streets marauding. 21 of them were caught in the act and liquidated. Others left the town for the surrounding villages, probably in order to live there. The population, however, is cooperating with regard to the capture of these insane persons. Soon again there will be quite a few in the asylum. Then, they will be*treated according to the usual procedure. In Minsk, 632 mentally deficient people and, in Mogilev, 836 were accorded special treatment.

Clearly here special treatment refers to an action carried out against mentally ill persons in by SK 7b. So you need to cite the specific statement about special treatment, which you have in mind, stating that special treatment meant the killing of only Jews and was a term used only in that context and sense. If you can show a historian saying what you said, there is a far simpler and more likely explanation than hoaxing, which is either sloppiness or misunderstanding. The historian will likely be right that special treatment means liquidation action but it does not always mean with Jewish victims.

Just like we know about the Republican Party's master plan to kill all the old people in the United States because George Bush used to talk about 'social security reform' which we know is secret code for 'exterminating the elderly.'

Now you're just talking silly on purpose. I don’t even know what you are going on about. 

Your analogy is preposterous and without any relevance to this discussion. 'nuff said.

No, you live in a fantasy world where non-Jews think that Jews are all part of some conspiracy to control the world.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

Jews are an intelligent people but non-Jews know they're not magic.

No people are magic. This is another of your strawmen.

The holocaust as we know it isn't a 100% fictional event. It's based on at least 95% truth. The truth is that Jews under Nazi Germany suffered greatly. They were jailed, they were killed, they were deported, they were put in ghettos, forced to work as slave laborers, they were shot en mass on the Eastern front.

How do you calculate these %’s?

 What is it about gas chambers, which were also employed by the Nazis to liquidate the "incurably ill," that causes your mind to shut down. Recall, too, that nearly half the Jewish victims of the genocide were "shot en masse on the Eastern front," or died in ghettos or camps or in forced labor.

Jews had been exaggerating their misfortune from time immemorial.

Even assuming I were to agree with you, scholars have been writing about what happened and sorting their way through partisan accounts and exaggerations for generations. Sorting through claims people make is second nature to a trained historian. That the Nazis made wild claims and put forth many kinds of self-justification, for example, has led deniers to pick up a particular hoax—but not historians, who subject accounts from interested parties to analysis, place them in context, and understand them as interested accounts which reveal mindsets, ideologies, subjective experience.

With World War II they found governments that were motivated to demonize Nazi Germany and were open to believing just about any ridiculous lie.

Please pick up Longerich’s most recent book in English and show me where he is open to believing just about any ridiculous lie. Or another recent book, Paulsson’s Secret City, about Jews in wartime Warsaw, which I mentioned earlier in this thread. Or Engelking & Leociak’s book on Warsaw ghetto. Or Angrick & Klein’s study of Riga ghetto, under discussion at RODOH just now.

It wasn't just the Jews. Anybody with a horror story about the Nazis would have an audience. The disinformation campaign about the fate of the Jews during WWII requires nothing more than people's willingness to lie about their enemy. When you look at a Germany that has been bombed back to the Stone Age, surrendered unconditionally, has no allies anywhere in the world capable of defending them, and is at the mercy of a former foe who is flush with victory and desirous of revenge, it's easy to see how the holocaust story would be believed.

Of course it wasn't just Jews who had something to say about what Nazi practices were like. You really need to reflect on why it might be so that the Nazis stirred up so much opposition and outrage--and, in fact, recent research helps clarify this as well as what the opposition was like. The wartime focus, of course, was not solely or even mainly on the persecution of the Jews. In any event, evaluating historical events isn't the same as going with what seems logical to you, as you seem to imply; in fact, from another perspective, German leaders got off easy. The Soviet Union, Poland, and large swaths of eastern Europe were also devastated. Yet the dominant opinion in the immediate postwar years was that the Soviet Union had become the arch-villain of the West, and Germany was quickly made an ally against Communism in the Cold War. your reading is incredibly one-sided and leaves out major themes. It isn't reliable. And it is full of bloviated rhetoric. Just sayin'.

And, again, the writing of the history is not a repetition of themes from a disinformation campaign. Or picking one side in competing disinformation campaigns. You haven’t gone beyond a hysterical sounding claim that the whole history of the genocide and war crimes is little more than the uncritical and unreflective adoption of wartime disinformation and lies. You clearly haven't even begun to contend with scholarship on Nazi policy and decisionmaking, major extermination campaigns, or various camps and local regions, on account of your preferring, it seems, to make general, unsupported assertions about “any ridiculous lie” being believed by . . . unnamed parties. You haven’t demonstrated one case of this using a serious work of research or naming an important scholar.



That's just my two cents. If you really want to learn about the evolution of the hoax, look at what was said before the war, during the war, and after the war. You won't see evidence of a well thought out campaign. You'll see random nonsense that has gradually congealed into what we have today.

I have, and as noted and for the reasons noted, I profoundly disagree.



Or you could simply read the Butz book.

As noted 2x or 3x already, I have read this book. It was utterly unpersuasive and, as I said, laughable. I didn’t have to buy it because it is online and also exists as a PDF file on my hard drive.

I'll see if I can find a more concise explanation somewhere else but if you really have read the Hoax, you know that the whole Jewish Conspiracy explanation of the holocaust is just a straw man. Instead of repeatedly asking one of us to published a five hundred page treatise on the JREF forum, why don't you tell us what specifically you think is wrong about the Butz book and how his errors make his thesis untenable.

I have already mentioned an area of particular interest to me, his material on the ghettos.

 I also explained that the book necessarily fails, given its date, to address part of the request -- that is, working through what recent scholarship argues and showing how it is a lie, a hoax, and part of a scheme, or however you want to explain "hoax."

In the meantime I'll take some of the stupidest, most mystical explanations of the how the holocaust happened--like Hilburg's telepathy theory--retrofit it for the holohoax and throw it back at you. Then I'll laugh when people insult me for saying such stupid things. Or maybe I'll just ask over and over why you hate Germans.

I am curious to read your analysis of Hilberg.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Like I just said, I'll take stupid things "scholars" have said about the holocaust, retrofit them for the holohoax, and then laugh when people accuse me of being stupid.

Your call. I do not think you will be persuading many people with this approach. Another option would be to take it seriously that claims need to be supported, to consider that you need to do something since the best support you seem to have for the hoax claim is a 35-year old book in the face of 1000s of "hoax" works published since its release, and to try to put together something coherent and persuasive instead of doing long posts on the unfairness of it all.

 

[MG1962]

Too bad. I'd like to see the book because that IMDB entry doesn't really say much. But thanks for the idea. I didn't think of looking online for Civil Defense type of manuals. That's the sort of source material that might actually have information about disposing of dead bodies after a mega disaster that would confirm holocaust body burning.

Could be a good way to go. To clarify it is a British publication not US. I have seen an American version in the local archive. But it dealt more with securing supplies challenges to agriculture etc and is definately designed for civilian usage.

 

[little grey rabbit]

You can tell what a person really believes by the way he lies

1945 - Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front - took pictures of newly constructed Birkenau crematoria (Krema deniers) 


As Mr Caution is only too well aware I do not and have never claimed that the Soviets constructed the Birkenau crematoria - I said that they were actually bakeries.

The fact that Mr Caution feels the need to lie and misrepresent speaks volumes about his real views.

 

[Gwynpaine]

Motives

Using the name Nathan I have for the last four years been a denizen of the CODOH forum. Like many a better men I am suddenly non grata there; my latest post was deleted and my password isn’t good any more. Must have been something I said. I have used Codoh to unload findings which are surplus to writings I hope to publish under my own name. Codoh has in my opinion a very attractive visual format, so I am sorry to have been expelled from that paradise. (I have also been banned from David Irving’s website, which I regard as the best, or at any rate the least infantile, of the Holocaust-related forums.) Codoh’s method of dividing topics might have been a helpful tool for organising knowledge - if only its members could stick to the topic. But they never could, and never will.

Here there seems to be no topic to stick to. The normal discourtesies are exchanged; then one casual opinion leads to another. The casual opinion du jour is the motivation of revisionists. I regard speculation about motives as a complete waste of time. Having said that, I intend to completely waste an hour writing about it. But before I do that i want to see if i can underline, boldface and highlight quotations. Eg.

“It is astonishing what absurd things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone.” J-M Keynes

It escapes me how to do t this

 

[LemmyCaution]

You can tell what a person really believes by the way he lies



As Mr Caution is only too well aware I do not and have never claimed that the Soviets constructed the Birkenau crematoria - I said that they were actually bakeries.

The fact that Mr Caution feels the need to lie and misrepresent speaks volumes about his real views.

I stand corrected then. I am not well aware of the all the ins and outs of KD, as I am not an expert in baked goods, and, as noted in posting this list of denier claims, took it from RODOH, where it appeared starting in spring 2009. You didn't object at the time, in fact you added comments like "All diairies"; I ignored you demurral on Eichmann because you had moved onto other premises after citing it. There were other examples in the thread which I didn't cull and add. But I don't recall, and can't find, your objection at the time to the item you cite.

What is most fascinating--let's say you had demurred, and I had missed the demurral or forgotten--how the conspiratorial mindset attributes to errors or misunderstandings the motive of lying.

Do you deny the accuracy of the rest of the RODOH list?

 

[LemmyCaution]

Dogzilla,

Here's an idea. Indeed, do not try starting your explanation of the history of the hoaxing with a 500 page tome. Start reasonably. On RODOH, there is a rather poorly attended thread on Angrick & Klein's book on Riga; to say the thread is limping along is to be charitable to it. So, go to RODOH and improve the thread. Explain how Angrick & Klein are not only in error but lying. Explain how Angrick & Klein have mostly picked up and recycled wartime propaganda and disinformation--uncritically, without additional research or analysis. Explain how Angrick & Klein's arguments have been preempted by a 35-year-old THOTTC, which has the last word. Explain how Angrick & Klein's book fits into a pattern of hoaxing and spreading of lies (or development or kinda just happening or megaplot or whatever you define the hoax as).

It should not be hard for you to do any of this, as the hoaxing of the hoax is a core belief of yours and you weighed in to help Saggy on this matter, which means you have firm opinions here. So show people the grounding for them in the case of one small book, contemporary research on Riga, and how it makes up part of the hoax. We can report back here on the discussion as links to it are prohibited.

LC

 

[little grey rabbit]

I stand corrected then. I am not well aware of the all the ins and outs of KD, as I am not an expert in baked goods, and, as noted in posting this list of denier claims, took it from RODOH, where it appeared starting in spring 2009. You didn't object at the time, in fact you added comments like "All diairies"; I ignored you demurral on Eichmann because you had moved onto other premises after citing it. There were other examples in the thread which I didn't cull and add. But I don't recall, and can't find, your objection at the time to the items you cite.

What is most fascinating--let's say you had demurred, and I had missed the demurral or forgotten--how the conspiratorial mindset attributes to errors or misunderstandings the motive of lying.

Do you deny the accuracy of the rest of the RODOH list?

Yes, it is an utterly silly list.

No claims that Gerstein faked a letter to Ubbink. Just that Gerstein, part of a German resistance group, told a false story.

How many millions voted Socialist and Communist in 1931 -1933? They didn't just vanish into thin air. Nazis shoved Socialists and Communists into camps, so their political opponents began to lie and then one lie needed more lies. Nazis stole the property of Jews, forced them into unpleasant, unhealthy work camps, and quite possibly lethal ghettos, so some Jews began to lie and others were really inclined to go out on a limb to defend their enemies.

Look, its easy to get caught up in the whole forgery thing. But just suppose 1000 people each, united by a common purpose, forged 1 photo or document then you have completed this list and a whole lot more.

The British and the Americans openly boasted and have published official histories of their forgery units, while its commonly believed the KGB also had extensive document falsification capacities.

And as been said before, the easy way to make a forgery is to take a genuine original and just alter it slightly and then destroy the original.

 

[LemmyCaution]

Yes, it is an utterly silly list.

No claims that Gerstein faked a letter to Ubbink. Just that Gerstein, part of a German resistance group, told a false story.

How many millions voted Socialist and Communist in 1931 -1933? They didn't just vanish into thin air. Nazis shoved Socialists and Communists into camps, so their political opponents began to lie and then one lie needed more lies. Nazis stole the property of Jews, forced them into unpleasant, unhealthy work camps, and quite possibly lethal ghettos, so some Jews began to lie and others were really inclined to go out on a limb to defend their enemies.

Look, its easy to get caught up in the whole forgery thing. But just suppose 1000 people each, united by a common purpose, forged 1 photo or document then you have completed this list and a whole lot more.

The British and the Americans openly boasted and have published official histories of their forgery units, while its commonly believed the KGB also had extensive document falsification capacities.

And as been said before, the easy way to make a forgery is to take a genuine original and just alter it slightly and then destroy the original.

Did deniers not attribute forgeries as listed there? Which are in error?

So you yourself added to the list at the time as follows, to quote you exactly:

Ponary Diary.

Every Sonderkommando Diary.

Every Diary.

And, of course, its being easy to alter a document is not the same as documents being altered. You've mentioned in this thread a Moscow Forgery Factory. Do you agree with Dogzilla that document altering is not a factor in the hoax? Or do you maintain that, its being easy to manipulate and forge documents, this was done in furtherance of the hoax?

 

[Nick Terry]

As World War II progressed we saw a regular trickle of stories about German atrocities against native populations and particularly the Jews. During this period we learned about diabolical tortures inflicted by the Germans with a cruelty that was exceeded only by their breathtaking inefficiency. Millions of Jews being steamed to death at Tremblinka or electric floors comes to mind.

If you look at what was said about what we now call the holocaust late in the war and immediately after the war, you don't get the sense of a well thought out disinformation campaign being executed by a central command center. You'll see what appears to be random people throwing out sometimes hilarious stories about the depravity of the Nazi invaders. Poison porridge is a good example of random nonsense that was thrown out during this period. I read an article in the New Yorker magazine from 1946 about Jewish children found in concentration camps who were then living in England. One child evidently saw Kramer toss a baby in the air and shoot him with his pistol. Another told us that lots of children were killed when the Germans put powder glass in their soup. That must've really been painful! These kids were called the Belsen or Buchenwald children but they were quick to tell you that there had been other, much worse, camps. Most of the children had been in four or five camps and they all agree that Treblinka had been the worse. They had even written a song about it. It's a bit strange that so many children had been in Treblinka what with every Jew being murdered upon arrival and the only eyewitnesses being the one's who escaped after the uprising. But those are the type of stories that were circulating back them.

If there was some grand conspiracy behind a hoax that had been fabricated completely, wouldn't there be a little more consistency? Ferchrissakes! Even at Nuremberg, they were talking about steam chambers and electric floors. In other trials, Dachau killed thousands in the gas chamber. The head honchos of Degesch were executed for supplying the Zyklon B to Auschwitz that was used to murder four and a half million Allied Prisoners of War. They started calling it the holocaust because people were murdered, not in the gas ovens, but by being thrown alive in the flames.

I'm going to add a few things to LemmyCaution's excellent response to Dogzilla's meandering post, focusing on the above points, which purport to offer the revisionist view on how 'the story' evolved.

Unfortunately, Dogzilla seems blithely unaware that historians have carved out several entire sub-fields which directly relate to his points. The first is studying what was known during the war, most often as an accompaniment to studying the reactions of the various historical actors of the time. There are studies on what was known by the Americans, Brits, Swedes, Swiss, studies on what was written about in the mainstream press (NYT) as well as Jewish press (one big monograph comparing the US, British and Yishuv press will be out in September). There have been studies on the major Jewish communities outside occupied Europe - not just on America and Britain, but also on the Swiss community, which was right next door to Nazi Germany. There have been specific studies on individuals and articles on individual reports. There are many works on what was known inside Nazi Germany itself. There have been studies on what was known to the Soviets, and many studies on what was known to the Polish government-in-exile and underground.

All these specialist studies are bolstered by sections of other books dealing more directly with the events that include chapters or sections dealing with the same issues, i.e. what was known, how did different groups react, and so on. To give an example that Dogzilla might - might - know, Yitzhak Arad dedicates one chapter out of 43 to what was reported about Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in the Polish underground press, and one chapter out of 43 to what was known inside the ghettos and written up in diaries or Jewish underground papers. There are considerably more than 43 chapters or articles on both subjects across the entire literature; probably more like a thousand each.

The second sub-field relates to the trials, of which there were rather a lot from 1945-49 and again in the 1960s. So again there are studies on the Belsen trial, Ravensbrueck trial, Dachau trial and Dachau tribunal, the High Command trial, Einsatzgruppen trial, as well as articles looking at Soviet trials, Polish trials, not to mention works which contrast what was presented at the 13 Nuremberg trials with what historians later wrote. There are even more studies looking at the later trials, not just the Eichmann trial but many of the West and East German trials, with two monographs on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, one on the DDR's Horst Fischer trial (involving an Auschwitz doctor), several works looking at the euthanasia trials and how they segued into the West German Aktion Reinhard camp trials, along with studies of the institutions involved, the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg and the Stasi's war crimes investigations branch, as well as the inevitable politics which shaped and biased their activities.

Alongside studies of trials, we also now have a growing number of studies of the historiography of the Holocaust, examining how historians wrote about the Holocaust in the early decades, and similar studies examining the early stages of commemoration, the formation of collective memory, artistic output and other related reactions post-45. I am thinking here, to give one example, of things like a dissertation on the Jewish historical commissions which operated in Poland, the German and Austrian DP camps.

Taken together, these three related fields have produced probably more than 200 monographs and edited collections, along with hundreds of articles. At least half that number would solely relate to the war years.


Now, I don't expect Dogzilla to have read all of these works, but the unfortunate thing from his perspective is that they document with ever increasing thoroughness what was actually said, written, thought and understood about the Holocaust through the 1940s, during and immediately after the war, and then beyond.

So he is flatly wrong to say that 'in other trials, Dachau killed thousands in the gas chamber'. No such conclusion was reached by the verdict whatsoever, quite the contrary. Nor did Nuremberg reach any kind of verdict mentioning steam and electric chambers. On the contrary: the discussion of AR-type camps also spoke of gas chambers, the aberrant references were very clearly inaccurate wartime reports, and were self-evidently disregarded by the court.

Those wartime reports likewise mention gas chambers alongside more wayward descriptions, from the get-go. It is really not very difficult to reconstruct how 'electric chambers' became a meme about Belzec inside Poland during the war, while at the same time other observers spoke of gas chambers. Likewise, it is not difficult to work out the origins of the Treblinka 'steam chamber' misunderstanding, and pinpoint its source, and to notice that the overwhelming majority of other reports spoke of gas chambers. The steam chamber report made it to the outside world and was repeated a number of times, gas chamber reports followed more slowly. Thus at a time when the Anglo-American media might be mentioning steam chambers, the Polish underground press and intelligence reports were consistently speaking of gas chambers. By 1944, American Jewish organisations commemorating the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising were likewise speaking of gas chambers.

I have no problems with Dogzilla's observation that:

If there was some grand conspiracy behind a hoax that had been fabricated completely, wouldn't there be a little more consistency?

because he is exactly right. The lack of consistency argues very powerfully against any kind of 'hoaxing', even the soft hoaxing that DZ more or less has to believe in, though he tries to deny it. If the Nuremberg trial saw the recycling of inaccurate wartime reports on steam chambers and the like, then it is utterly implausible to allege, as virtually all deniers have, that the Nazi witnesses were tortured, coerced or fed their lines, or spontaneously knew via telepathy what their captors wanted to hear, or whatever other incoherent handwave is offered to the perfectly reasonable question of how come the Nazi witnesses said what they said.

That pretty much leaves 'randomness' and Dogzilla's generic incredulity towards anything Holocaust-related. But as we have discussed before, this incredulity consistently and repeatedly commits the fallacy of hasty generalisation. LemmyCaution is quite right to say, simply, 'so what?' in response to such blether.

We are offered a supposed example of a 'hilarious story' coming from the New Yorker, where young survivors (how old?) spoke of being interned in several camps, and Dogzilla says they made up a song about Treblinka, and then implies that they claimed to have been in Treblinka. Without a proper reference and quote, this paraphrase is, of course, utterly meaningless. Given how quick Dogzilla is to demand sources, he is like many other deniers (bunny springs to mind) extraordinarily casual about substantiating his own claims.

It is not difficult to think of reasons why young survivors of multiple camps beginning in Poland might speak of Treblinka, have a song about it, and yet never have set foot in Treblinka II. The Treblinka extermination camp was after all widely known and much feared in central Poland. Maybe these children heard about the camp from someone else, as there were more than a few who escaped en route or immediately after arrival in 1942. Maybe the New Yorker journalist massaged what he was told by the children. It is not, after all, their account, but a magazine article. Maybe they had heard about Treblinka I, which already had an appalling reputation inside the Warsaw ghetto in early 1942 (Treblinka I was set up in November 1941, whereas Treblinka II only opened for 'business' in late July 1942). Without a proper citation and quote being supplied, we cannot know for sure, and unfortunately Dogzilla's track record with sources is not the best, even if it's somewhat better than the bunny's.

Even if the children had claimed to have been inside the extermination camp, LemmyCaution was quite right to say "so what?". One swallow does not make a summer.

There were 10s of 1000s of Polish Jews who survived Nazi camps, a vanishingly small fraction of the total number of Polish Jews (who numbered nearly 3.5 million in 1939) but a very large number in relation to a few children who may or may not have been telling false stories. The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland alone gathered 7000 testimonies, and this did not include the numerous testimonies gathered by historical commissions in the DP camps among survivors who never went back to Poland.

Allied and Soviet investigators gathered 1000s more testimonies. This June, I spent several weeks in Moscow looking through the files of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission investigation into Auschwitz, which include, as should be obvious, hundreds of testimonies. One of the things I always look for is an account of how the prisoner ended up in the camp. 99.5% of the time this account coheres with what I would expect, which is to say about 1 testimony in 200 is utterly incoherent on this issue. Among the coherent testimonies were several who had resided in ghettos in the Krakow district and who mentioned the Aktionen that destroyed their communities, specifying that they went to "Bzhezhets", i.e. Belzec. They then stated that they were selected during the Aktion and went to labour camps, ending up in Szebnie, from where they were deported to Auschwitz in late 1943. Others mentioned a more complex route, from the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 during the uprising, to Majdanek whereupon they were transferred to places like the Radom labour camp or Blizyn sub-camp, and from there arrived in Auschwitz in 1944. Those are well-trodden routes, described by survivors in other investigations not conducted by the Soviets, or in memoirs. The itineraries and odysseys fit in perfectly with what is known by historians about the development of Nazi policy and the timings of different transfers.