On 25 November 2010 the AFP news bureau reported the following:

“A Lithuanian historian quit his civil service job Thursday after seven ambassadors from fellow European nations accused him of denying the Holocaust. Lithuania’s interior ministry said that Petras Stankeras, an independent historian who also held a middle-ranking post in its planning department, had left at his own request. Interior Minister Raimundas Palaitis said Stankeras’s views were personal.

‘Such interpretations have nothing in common with the position of the interior ministry with regard to the Jewish genocide,’ Palaitis said in a statement.

The announcement came a day after the ambassadors of Britain, Estonia, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden slammed an article by Stankeras in the mainstream weekly Veidas on the Nuremberg trials, where the victorious Allies tried top Nazi German officials after World War II. Stankeras wrote that the trials ‘provided a legal basis to the legend about the six million purportedly murdered Jews’.

The ambassadors blasted Stankeras in a letter to the interior ministry dated November 24 and obtained by the Baltic News Service on Thursday.

‘This amounts to denial of the Holocaust and merits the strongest condemnation,’ they said.

They also chastised Lithuanian authorities for failing to react rapidly, and questioned Veidas’s publication of the article. But Gintaras Sarafinas, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, said neither Veidas nor Stankeras denied the Holocaust, and blamed a style error. ‘Our weekly does not deny the Holocaust, never did and never will. The author, who is a professional historian, only wanted to discuss the number of victims,’ Sarafinas told AFP.

‘We admit that the sentence is wrong stylistically, as the word ‘purportedly’ should have been elsewhere,’ he added.

In a statement, Efraim Zuroff of the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said Stankeras should be prosecuted under Lithuania’s Holocaust-denial law .”[1]

The original article in Lithuanian, “Niurnbergo karo nusikaltimų tribunolas – didžiausias juridinis farsas istorijoje” (The Nuremberg Military Court Tribunal: The Biggest Legal Farce in History), can be read in the online edition of the Veidas magazine.[2] It was printed in Veidas no. 45 from 8 November 2011. There is also an English translation available from a “Holocaust” website.[3] According to this translation, the passage “denying the Holocaust” reads as follows:

“It is also important that the Nuremberg process provided a legal basis to the legend about the six million supposedly murdered Jews [įgavo legenda apie 6 mln. neva nužudytų žydų], although the court didn’t have even a single document signed by Hitler on the extermination of Jews (no one has found this document to this day, if it even exists, although a million dollar prize has been promised).“

That there exists no documentary proof for Hitler ordering the alleged extermination of the Jews has been admitted repeatedly by orthodox holocaust historians. Christopher Browning for example stated in 1985:

“There was no written order for the final solution, and we have no reference to an oral order except what Himmler told Heydrich when he said that he acted with the Führer’s approval.“[4]

Dr. Petras Stankeras is the author of the study Lietuviu policija 1941-1944 metais (“The Lithuanian Police 1941-1944″, Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras, Vilnius 1998), published by the state-sponsored Lithuanian Genocide Research Center.

At the website of the University of Birmingham we find the following presentation of a young forensic archeologist named Caroline Sturdy Colls [1]:

“Caroline is part of a small specialist team in the UK who work in the area of forensic archaeology. Caroline has a strong stomach and she doesn’t mind getting muddy – which helps when she works with the British Police on ‘no body’ cases – apparently it’s not as glamorous as it appears on CSI or Waking the Dead!

Caroline was recently one of the very few people allowed inside the newly-discovered Egyptian tomb, KV63, in the Valley of the Kings and she’s currently working on a project to identify Holocaust victims buried in mass graves in Poland.“

The holocaust mass graves which Ms. Colls is currently working at identifying are in fact those of the “pure extermination camp” of Treblinka II. This is made clear by a movie which can be downloaded at the same webpage. Below I provide a transcript of Ms. Sturdy Colls’ own narration (emphasis added):

“Forensic archeology is the collection of evidence for use in a legal case. This can be anything from investigating a single murder to genocide or war crimes.

It’s hard to believe that there has been no systematic search for the six million victims who perished in the Holocaust.

800,000 people were murdered here at Treblinka and their bodies were never found. It’s time we started looking.

I’m a scientist and while I obviously feel the same emotions as everyone else when I read about the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, I need to be able to do my job objectively. So I need to shut out these emotions sometimes, and let the evidence speak for itself.

There are some very vocal Holocaust deniers who use spurious archeology to claim that the Holocaust never happened. That’s why it’s so important that we use the most up-to-date scientific techniques. This can be done, and it should be done.“

My comments:

1) For any rational observer it is indeed “hard to believe” that there has been “no systematic search” for the bodies of the alleged 6 million holocaust victims. Since it is a given in murder cases that crime investigators do their best to secure technical and forensic evidence, and most importantly the physical remains of the victim, one would think that such a systematic search for bodies – as well as the weapons of crime, the remains of the alleged homicidal gas chambers – would have been appropriate already in connection with the Nuremberg Trials. How come, Ms. Sturdy Colls, that no such elementary technical-forensic investigation was carried out in this case of (alleged) murder of 6 million people?

2) Ms. Sturdy Colls should also ask herself how it is possible that no-one has managed to locate the remains of 800,000 people allegedly buried within the area of a mere few hectares? [2]

3) If Ms. Sturdy Colls had bothered to actually read the holocaust revisionist literature on the Aktion Reinhardt camps published in the last ten years she would know that its critique of the orthodox holocaust historiography concerning the alleged “extermination centers” of Bełżec [3] and Sobibór [4] is based on the surveys conducted at these sites by the renowned Polish archeology professor Andrzej Kola. While Kola pays lipservice to the holocaust credo, his published results leaves no doubt that the orthodox historiographical picture of these camps is untenable, that the alleged gas chamber buildings never existed, and that the number of people who perished and are buried at these sites is much smaller than claimed by holocaust historians. The results of Kola’s research at Sobibór indeed proved so embarrassing to the defenders of the officially sanctioned historiography that the article in which they were presented (in 2001) has never been officially translated. It was only through the study on Sobibór which I co-authored with Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno that the non-Polish-speaking world finally learned about them in 2010. It is most revealing that the leading mainstream expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis (who currently is appearing as a joint plaintiff (Nebenkläger) at the Demjanjuk Trial in Munich), in all the revised editions of his – otherwise very thorough – Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp to have come out since 2001 [5] does not mention with so much as a word the research of Prof. Kola – this despite the fact that Schelvis, who maintains contact with several Polish holocaust museums and institutes [6], cannot possibly be unaware of it. Surely Ms. Sturdy Colls is not suggesting that Prof. Kola’s research is “spurious archeology”, or that he is somehow in league with evil “Holocaust Deniers”?

4) I really hope that Ms. Sturdy Colls is indeed able to do her job objectively, despite her à priori conclusion that 800,000 people were murdered at Treblinka. In this she should heed the words of the archeologists Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek:

“It is generally agreed that one of the challenges facing the historical archaeologist is the artifact/text dichotomy. […] If contradictions are apparent and real, we are talking about spaces between or within artifact and text, about dissonances, that may reveal additional aspects hitherto unknown […]. However, to establish if in a given case dissonances exist, the nature and quality of the evidence, of both the archaeological and the historical data, should be reexamined carefully.“[7]

Or in plain English: If established historiography is contradicted by hard archeological evidence it needs to be reexamined and then discarded or rewritten. Even if Ms. Sturdy Colls’ future results would happen to support the revisionist transit camp hypothesis rather than the orthodox “death camp” hypothesis it is her scientific duty to present them openly and without falsifications. A word of caution though: Ms. Sturdy Colls should be careful not to publicly announce any “inconvenient” results until she is safely returned to the UK, as Poland punishes “Holocaust Denial” with up to 3 years in prison.[8] Perhaps better then to proceed as Professor Kola: Pay the necessary lipservice and let the results speak for themselves.

In 2007-2008 the abovementioned three archeologists (Gilead, Haimi and Mazurek) attempted to do what Kola had not been able to do: to find the alleged gas chamber building at Sobibór. To their help they had experts in geophysics, high resolution metal detection, a magnetic gradiometer, a terrain conductivity meter, ground penetrating radar, aerial photography, and GPS mapping devices – exactly the “most up-to-date scientific techniques” which Ms. Sturdy Colls is talking about. Despite the fact that the team from the outset “knew roughly where the gas chamber was located“, and that the area they had to investigate amounted to less than 3 hectares, they had to conclude in 2009 that “the location of the gas chambers is a complex issue that has to be solved, an important objective for future archaeological research at Sobibór“! [9] In the August 2010 issue of Reader’s Digest Yoram Haimi put it even more bluntly: “we’re still looking for the gas chambers.” [10] Another word of caution: It is easy to make a fool of oneself if one clings to scientifically indefensible dogmas!

I can only wish Ms. Sturdy Colls good luck in her work, which is precisely the kind of effort that we holocaust revisionists welcome.
In the meantime I advise her to read Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf’s study Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?,[11] especially the chapters on previous forensic examinations and the alleged mass burials and cremations (pp. 77-110, 137-157).

In a recent posting [1] I published a news item from Aufbau dated 6 July 1945. In this we read that the Germans had been constructing homicidal gas chambers at the Theresienstadt (Terezin) Ghetto, but that the plan to gas the remaining Jews in the ghetto had been thwarted in the last minute by the victorious Red Army. I concluded my presentation of this remarkably silly propaganda story by writing that “no one has ever since spoken of gas chambers in Theresienstadt”. In this, however, I was wrong. A correspondent has pointed out for me the following passage from British “Holocaust” historian Martin Gilbert’s book Holocaust Journey [2]:

“We return to See Strasse and continue along it to the end, to another bastion, Block H II in the ghetto years (…). Here, various craft workshops were housed. We look through a fence at the group of outbuildings, which nestle just inside the outer wall of the fortress. It was here, at the beginning of 1945, that a gas chamber was built in an underground passageway. According to rumours circulating at the time, orders came from Berlin that no prisoners should be left alive when the Russians arrived, but Commandant Rahm disobeyed these orders. It is more likely that Rahm made up the story of these orders in order to try to gain credit for having disobeyed them. He was already in touch with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told them of these orders, and then handed the camp over to them. In return, he was allowed to leave unmolested, on the very eve of the arrival of the Russians.

Rahm’s participation in this charade did not save his life. For his cruelty here at Theresienstadt he was sentenced to death by a Special People’s Court in nearby Litomerice after the war, and executed in 1947.

We all look at Ben, who was brought here at the very end of the war, one of 13,000 survivors of the death marches of those final months who were dumped here, starving, sick and bewildered – in wooden barracks on the outskirts of the ghetto, which were pulled down soon after the war. We shudder to think that he could so easily have been one of those killed in the final hours of the war had the gas chamber been activated. With that thought in our minds we are silent as we walk away from the fence. Once more there is a sort of collective sense of the awfulness embodied In the places around us.”

We note here the confusing story about the ghetto commandant Rahm – if he had not received an order to kill the remaining inmates, why would he build a gas chamber and at the same time negotiate with the Red Cross? – and that “gas chamber” is mentioned only in singular.

I also found a mention of Theresienstadt gas chambers – this time in plural – in an anonymous online witness account:

“During my year in Theresienstadt gas chambers were being built right outside the camp but nobody was actually aware of it – though there may have been rumors. We were aware of the many transports to Auschwitz – quotas had to be filled and many artists, musicians, writers, actors, painters as well as Jewish philosophers and intellectuals were all sent to their death – including one set of my grandparents and many other relatives.”

The ARC website states [4]:

“A gas chamber was installed in 1945, in a corridor of the fortifications wall near the former Litomerice gate, but not put in action.”

At a German-language “Holocaust” website we find the following information [5]:

“Plans for a gas chamber in Theresienstadt

At the beginning of of February 1945 the [ghetto] head engineer alerted the Judenälteste Murmelstein [father to the article's author] about two spurious construction projects for which there existed no written plans – instead the workers had to follow oral instructions given by SS men. The construction sites were visited by SS officers, but Murmelstein was not called to accompany these visits. In order to question Commandant Rahm on the subject, Murmelstein had to find the proper opportunity, leave instructions to a confidant in case he should be arrested, and describe in the right tone [for Rahm] the posibility and consequences of mass panic. Rahm spoke of instructions to build bomb-proof storage houses and poultry ponds – something which he still maintained before the People’s Court in 1947 – and then broke off the conversation.

Rahm drove straight to Prague and returned three days later with the command to immediately halt the construction works. The power to issue this command – and thus go against Eichmann – was only in the hands Karl Hermann Frank, State Minister for Bohemia and Moravia and Higher SS and Police Leader, who already in February 1945 followed his own policy, in which Theresienstadt played an important role as a bargaining chip.”

Thus Rahm apparently denied at his trial the construction of one or more homicidal gas chambers at Theresienstadt.
The claim that the “gas chambers” were constructed following only oral instructions is, needless to say, very convenient to Shoah propagandists, as it more or less gives them a carte blanche to disregard the issue of documentary evidence.

The Scrapbook Pages blog also has an informative post on the subject [6]. Here we learn that the alleged “homicidal gas chamber” was located directly across a barrack housing “a disinfection station where the prisoners and their clothing were deloused”, and that the building supposedly containing it remarkably enough is not marked out anyway by the Terezin museum authorities. In the end the author of the blog post comes off as rather unconvinced of the reality of this “homicidal gas chamber”:

“Apparently, the Germans did not use Zyklon-B to disinfect the clothing at Theresienstadt.  Or did they finally decide to use Zyklon-B in the last days of the war when a typhus epidemic broke out in the camp?  Did they set up disinfection chambers in the old fortifications?  The German word for a disinfection chamber, where clothing is deloused with Zyklon-B, is Gaskammer, which means gas chamber.  Is this the gas chamber that the prisoners heard about?  I don’t know, but it’s possible.”

I hope to return in the future to the subject of the Theresienstadt “gas chamber(s)”. For now it should suffice to note that the allegation in question apparently rests on a very shaky foundation.

[1] Two Forgotten Propaganda Lies Anno 1945, http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/10/two-forgotten-propaganda-lies-anno-1945/
[2] Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1997, p. 99f.
[3] My Aunt Remembers: A Story Seen Through The Eyes of an Eight Year Old, http://www.isdisnormal.com/family%20travel%20aspen%20colorado%20vail%20nantucket%20florida%20mexico/remembering-as-a-child/
[4] Terezin (Theresienstadt), http://www.deathcamps.org/reinhard/terezin.html
[5] Wolf Murmelstein, Theresienstadt – einige wichtige Tatsachen, http://www.shoa.de/holocaust/konzentrations-und-vernichtungslager/452.html
[6] Gas chamber at Theresienstadt…, http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/gas-chamber-at-theresienstadt/