By Thomas Kues

In November 2010 I published a blog entry on an online video concerning the research activity of a young British archaeologist from the University of Birmingham, Caroline Sturdy Colls, who had set out to refute “Holocaust Deniers” by locating the mass graves at the Treblinka “extermination camp” using “the most up-to-date scientific techniques”.[1] Recently, a news report was published boldly stating that “mass graves at Nazi death camp Treblinka prove Holocaust deniers wrong”. In this we read that

“A British forensic archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka. Some 800,000 Jews were killed at the site, in north east Poland, during the Second World War but a lack of physical evidence at the site has been exploited by Holocaust deniers. Forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls has now undertaken the first co-ordinated scientific attempt to locate the graves.”[2]

It is worth recalling that the same triumphatory claim that the “Holocaust deniers” finally and once and for all had been “refuted” was heard in connection with Kola’s surveys at Belzec and Sobibór, which in reality turned out to refute the official version of events relating to these two camps.

The above quoted news item was more or less a push for a radio program, “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust”, featuring Sturdy Colls as well as Yitzhak Arad and former Treblinka inmate Kalman Taigman, which was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 23 January 2012, 20:00 GMT.[3] In anticipation of this radio program, on the same date, a podcast interview was uploaded by the University of Birmingham “Ideas Lab”.[4] In this we can listen to the following description of the methods employed by Sturdy Colls and her team, as well as some vague descriptions of their findings:

“Interviewer: What technology have you used to investigate the site?

 Sturdy Colls: I used a number of non-invasive techniques at Treblinka and what this means is, as you quite rightly pointed out, the ground wasn’t disturbed due to Jewish burial law so the methods used didn’t involve any form of ground disturbance or excavation and this allowed us to investigate the historic and scientific potential of Treblinka but obviously it was very important that we recognised its religious and commemorative significance as well. So the techniques that were used, there was a process of archival research which involved looking at documentary records, revisiting historical data if you like, looking at known data and assessing it with an archaeological eye, so looking for information about the landscape. Then there was a process of looking for aerial photographs of the site, any ground based photography, accounts by the witnesses, plans that had been created, etc, to build up a database of information so that when I did do the survey all of that could be corroborated against my results. So in the field this involved field walking, so assessing the landscape, topographic survey which used advanced GPS and total station surveying to demarcate features on a plan of the site allowed us to record micro-topographic change which may be indicative of buried features. And also to assess the visibility of other features such as a number of artefacts that were actually identified in quite a remote part of the site. Then moving on from that to look below the ground I used a number of geophysical techniques, so quite often mentioned is ground penetrating radar and this was one of the methods used but this was also corroborated with other methods that detect other physical properties in the soil. So I also used resistance survey and an extension of that which allows 3D imaging of buried remains as well, to ensure that all of the properties of the buried remains could be characterised accurately.

 Interviewer: And what have you discovered?

 Sturdy Colls: Well the survey results when corroborated with historical information have indicated that there are a number of surviving building foundations at Treblinka just below the surface and also a considerable amount of obviously structural debris which the Nazis would have been simply unable to have removed from the site, and this supports accounts written by post-war investigators which commented upon the visibility of artefactual remains, structural remains, at the camp. We’ve also identified a number of pits at the site. Again, all these pits have been mapped and corroborated with witness plans and this is indicative of a number of probable graves at the site. It is recognised as part of the survey that the history of Treblinka didn’t end with its abandonment by the Nazis. Issues such as post-war looting and the construction of the memorial itself and a number of other forms of landscape change that have taken place at the site, you know, could confuse interpretation so it was essential that all of these were considered when the results from the geophysical survey in particular were being assessed. So then all of this data was married up with historical information so we seem to have a situation here where it’s been commonly believed that all of the victims at Treblinka were cremated, they were destroyed without trace, however, the research has revealed a much more complex picture of the disposal patterns used by the Nazis. Looking at it from an offender profiling perspective, so a slightly more forensic point of view, the Nazis worked on, as do most offenders, this principle of least effort where they would actually have a burial method that very much matched the nature of their victims or their locations within the camp and there are a number of photographs and physical evidence that we observed on the ground at Treblinka that demonstrates that these bodies were not reduced to ash, that some survive as mass graves in the truest sense and that also the ashes of the victims were redeposited into the pits that they were originally exhumed from upon Himmler’s order in 1943. Also with the topographic survey we’ve demonstrated that the camp as it’s marked currently on the ground by the modern memorial was actually much larger, that the boundaries of the camp should have been 50 metres further north and this has a knock-on effect for a number of structures within the camp itself. So we can examine it from a spatial point of view and look at all of these features in relation to each other and hopefully eventually start to build up a more detailed map of the camp as it existed during its operation.

 Interviewer: So you’ve now presented your findings to the authorities responsible for the memorial at Treblinka. Does this conclude investigations at the Treblinka site or is it sort of an ongoing project?

 Sturdy Colls: It’s absolutely an ongoing project. The survey demonstrated that the site has got huge potential in terms of what we can learn from the application of archaeological method and very much was the tip of the iceberg in terms of being the first survey of what I hope will be many more to come. I hope to return to the site later on this year and there will be subsequent seasons of fieldwork in coming years. As I mentioned, at the moment what we’ve got is a map of what survived at the camp as a result of my findings. However, in order to build up a map of the camp as it existed we need to do more work, we need to survey the site. Only a small proportion of the site has actually been surveyed so there’s huge potential to find out more about the history of this camp in the future.”

Somewhat more on the findings of Sturdy-Coll could be gleaned from the BBC 4 radio documentary “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust”. Starting at the mark 23:20 minutes we hear:

“Caroline Sturdy Colls: All the history books states that Treblinka was destroyed by the Nazis, in summary, the survey demonstrated that this simply isn’t the case. I have identified a number of buried [sic] pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable. One in particular is 26 meters by 17 meters.

 Jonathan Charles: That’s huge.

 Sturdy Colls: It is huge. We are talking about a considerable number of bodies [which] could have been contained within pits of that size.

 Charles: That could have contained hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies, we don’t know deep it is, or do you know how deep it is?

 Sturdy Colls: Unfortunately no. The survey technology does not allow us to go to certain depths. I know that it is over 4 meters, that was the extent of this [inaudible]. It’s a considerable pit.

 Charles: There are quite a few pits that you have discovered?

 Sturdy Colls: Absolutely, there were a number of pits, in particular to the rear of what of what is now the current memorial, five that are actually in a row, again of a considerable size, in an area where witnesses state this was the main body disposal area, this is behind the gas chambers, it was where the majority of victims who were sent there were then subsequently buried, and later where the cremative remains of the victims were also placed.

 Charles: It’s not just pits that you found, there’s also what look like buildings.

 Sturdy Colls: There are, and again, the Nazis claimed they destroyed Treblinka, they certainly levelled the site, but it’s not really possible when buildings have been on a site to actually sterilize the ground, so what I’ve identified is that solid structural remains, we’re talking building foundations, do survive, but in particular two sort of structures that I’ve identified are likely to be the old and new gas chambers at Treblinka.”

While here we learn virtually nothing about the supposed remains of the Treblinka “gas chambers” we are provided with some tantalizing information on the camp’s burial pits. Needless to say, a critical assessment of the findings made by Sturdy Colls can only be made after she has published at least a preliminary report or a detailed article on the same, but we may nonetheless with appropriate caution note down some preliminary observations on what has been revealed so far. The most interesting information, however, is not to be found in the radio interviews, but in a short article wrriten either by Sturdy Colls herself or by BBC editorial staff based on her verbal or written statements, which was published on the website of the BBC on 23 January.[5] In this we read:

“The existence of mass graves was known about from witness testimony, but the failure to provide persuasive physical evidence led some to question whether it could really be true that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed here.

 Although they lasted only a few days, those post-war investigations [in 1945-1946] remained the most complete studies of the camp until I began my work at Treblinka in 2010.

 This revealed the existence of a number of pits across the site.

 Some may be the result of post-war looting, prompted by myths of buried Jewish gold, but several larger pits were recorded in areas suggested by witnesses as the locations of mass graves and cremation sites.

 One is 26m long, 17m wide and at least four metres deep, with a ramp at the west end and a vertical edge to the east.

 Another five pits of varying sizes and also at least this deep are located nearby. Given their size and location, there is a strong case for arguing that they represent burial areas.

 [...].

 As well as the pits, the survey has located features that appear to be structural, and two of these are likely to be the remains of the gas chambers.

According to witnesses, these were the only structures in the death camp made of brick.”

Even more importantly, this article is illustrated with two composite maps on which the outlines of the findings made by Sturdy Colls have been superimposed on a modern-day aerial photograph of the former camp site and a 1944 aerial photograph of the same area respectively. In the figure below I have placed these two composite maps side by side, moved the main legend and the scale and slightly increased the picture size in order to allow for easier comparison of scale. On the map to the left I have also arbitrarily numbered the “probable burial/cremation pits” from 1 to 10 (click on the picture to view it in full size).

The information furnished by the two interviews, the article and the maps allow us to make the following observations:

1) The pit which Sturdy Colls mentions “in particular” and which is stated to have a surface area of “26 meters by 17 meters”, that is a total of 442 square meters, is, judging by the dimensions, most likely identical with the rather irregular pit #3, located some 25 m south of the large cenotaph. This is clearly the largest in surface of the 10 pits identified.

2) As far as the surface area is concerned, 2 of the 33 mass graves identified by Andrzej Kola at Belzec (pits #1 and 27) were larger (with 480 and 540 square meters respectively), whereas 2 more (#7 and 14) were almost of the same size (364.5 and 370 square meters respectively).[6] Of the 6 burial pits identified by Kola at Sobibór 2 (pit #2 and 4) were larger or even significantly larger (with surface areas of 500 and 1,575 square meters respectively), whereas 2 other graves were nearly of the same surface size (pits #1 and 6, with 400 and 375 square meters respectively).[7] Yet whereas at Belzec some 435,000 and at Sobibór some 80,000 corpses are alleged to have been interred,[8] the number of uncremated bodies buried at Treblinka is supposed to have amounted to at least some 700,000. Would it then not make sense for the Germans to use mass graves of a larger size at Treblinka than at the other two Reinhardt camps?

3) The eyewitnesses Eliahu Rosenberg and Chil Rajchman, who to the knowledge of this author are the only witnesses to have provided detailed statements on the dimensions of the mass graves in the “death camp proper”, claim pits of sizes vastly larger than the largest pit mapped by Sturdy Colls. Eliahu Rosenberg claimed in 1947 that the mass graves measured 120 m × 15 m × 6 m, giving a surface area of 1,800 square meters and a total volume 9,900 cubic meters.[9] Chil Rajchman, whose 1944 testimony [10] is prominently featured in the “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust” radio program – including a particularly bizarre passage from it concerning burning blood – states:

“The pits were enormous, about 50 metres long, about 30 wide and several storeys deep. I estimate that the pits could contain about four storeys.”[11] 

The burial pits thus measured 1,500 square meters according to the witness Rajchman and maybe as much as (1,500 x 12 =) 18,000 cubic meters in volume! How come that the largest of the pits discovered by Sturdy Colls corresponds to less than one third of the surface size claimed by Rajchman and to one fourth of the surface area claimed by Rosenberg?

4) It is indeed unfortunate that the top modern equipment used by Study-Colls for some reason or other was not able to detect depths exceeding 4 meters. Perhaps it would have been wise of her to dispense of some of the piety with regards to “Jewish burial laws” and utilize probe drillings to measure the depth of the pits, as was done by Kola at both Belzec and Sobibór. Of the pits identified by Kola in these two camps, the deepest pit (#3 at Sobibór) measured 5.80 m, whereas the depth of the remaining pits averaged some 4 m.

Generously assuming Rosenberg’s estimate of 6 meters (Rajchman’s estimate of some 12 meters can be safely dismissed as an exaggeration), and even more generously assuming (for the sake of argument) 6 meters to be the effective depth, with the pit walls being vertical instead of sloping (an obviously unrealistic assumption, which is moreover contradicted by Sturdy Colls statement that this pit had a “ramp” at the west end and a “vertical edge to the east”, implying that three out of four side walls were oblique – but again, for the sake of argument…) pit #3 would have a volume of (26 x 17 x 6 =) 2,652 cubic meters. Assuming an average capacity of 8 corpses per cubic meters,[12] this means that the pit in question could have contained in total (2,652 x 8 =) 21,216 corpses. Since the so-called Höfle document from an exterminationist viewpoint shows that nearly 713,555 were murdered at Treblinka up until the end of 1942 – in reality this document only proves that this number of Jews was deported to the camp up until that time – and since virtually all sources maintain that non-experimental cremations on a significant scale did not commence at Treblinka until 1943, at least 700,000 corpses would have had to have been interred in the camp, necessitating no less than (700,000 / 21,216 =) 33 pits of the same size as pit #3, with a total surface area of 14,586 square meter, or nearly 1.5 hectares. Needless to say the mass graves would have had to be separated by soil walls of considerable thickness, thereby increasing the surface area required by the graves.

 
Above: Montage of the 10 identified pits placed within a square 100 x 100 meters. Relative dimensions have been kept unchanged from the maps produced by Caroline Sturdy Colls.

5) Pits #1 and 2, which together appear to have a surface area of some 600-700 square meters, are located in the western part of the camp site, near the torn-up railroad sidespur, clearly outside of the “death camp proper”. These may be identical with the mass graves mentioned by the witness Abraham Kszepicki, in which the bodies of Jews who had died en route to the camp were buried during the first months of operation.[13]

 6) The four pits #5-8 are placed in a (not very straight) row. Sturdy Colls states in the radio documentary that there are “five” pits of “considerable size” “in a row” and in the area which witnesses state “was the main body disposal area, (…) behind the gas chambers”. Either Sturdy Colls mistakenly said five when she meant four, or it may be that one of the pits, perhaps #6, with its “neck” in the middle, is counted by her as two separate pits. Regardless of which, it is clear that the pits #5-8 cover a surface area which corresponds to roughly 175-200 % that of #3, that is, somewhere in the range of 750-900 square meters.

 7) Altogether, pits #3-10 as mapped by Sturdy Colls cover a surface hardly exceeding 1,800 square meters. If again, for the sake of argument, we assume the no doubt overly generous average effective depth of 6 meters with vertical pit walls – and once more I want to remind my readers that the pits identified at Belzec and Sobibór averaged some 4 m in depth – this would mean that the “probable burial/cremation pits” in the “death camp proper”/”upper camp”/”camp 2″ [14] had a total volume of some (1,800 x 6 =) 10,800 cubic meters. The pits at Belzec as identified by Kola have a total estimated volume of 21,310 cubic meters,[15] whereas those at Sobibór have a total estimated volume of 14,718.75 cubic meters.[16] The no doubt greatly exaggerated estimate of 10,800 cubic meters could have contained at most some (10,800 x 8 =) 86,400 corpses (assuming instead a more realistic average effective depth of 5 m this figure would change to 72,000 – and this still disregards the likely enlargement of the original grave volumes due to clandestine diggings and other causes). According to Yitzhak Arad some 312,500 Jews were murdered in Treblinka merely “during the first five weeks of the killing operation”.[17] According to the files of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, 251,545 Jews from the ghetto in that city were deported to Treblinka between 22 July 1942 and 12 September 1942.[18] And as already mentioned, the Höfle document states that 713,555 were deported to Treblinka up until the end of 1942. Judging by the information revealed, only a small fraction of this enormous number of people could have been buried in the identified “probable burial/cremation pits”, even taking into account the two pits in the reception camp, which could not have been used for any hypothetical “gas chamber” victims given the reported structure of the camp.

 8 ) Sturdy Colls’s statement that “the failure to provide persuasive physical evidence [of mass graves] led some to question whether it could really be true that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed here” implies that the presence of mass graves itself would be enough to refute the “deniers”. However, it is clear that mass graves of considerable size must have existed at Treblinka, even if it was in fact only a transit camp. Holocaust historian Dieter Pohl estimates that up to 5 % of the deportees to the Reinhardt camps perished en route due to suffocation, dehydration, crushing caused by panicking deportees etc.[19] Considering that the reception of transports at Treblinka during the intense initial months of operation is claimed to have been grossly mismanaged by the first camp commandant, Dr. Irmfried Eberl (who, apparently because of this reason, was fired and replaced by Franz Stangl), leading to the delay of transports at way stations – and this in the summer heat of July and August – there is little reason to doubt that a certain number of Jews must haved died en route from Warsaw to Treblinka, but on the other hand the trip from Warsaw to Treblinka when following schedule lasted “only” 3 hours and 55 minutes, so that for this group of deportees (making up roughly one third of the total number of Treblinka deportees) the en route death ratio is unlikely to have reached that posited by Pohl.[20] The en route death ratio for transports originating from more distant parts of Poland and from other German-controlled countries was likely higher than that for the Warsaw deportees due to the longer travel time required. Since somewhere between 750,000 and 800,000 Jews in total were deported to Treblinka during the camp’s period of operation (July 1942 – August 1943), it seems reasonable to assume that the number of Jews who perished en route to this camp amounted to somewhere in the low tens of thousands. Moreover, there are reasons to assume that a smaller percentage of the deportees were subjected to “euthanasia” due to contageous or mental diseases, or for being too weak for further transport. To this should be added a smaller number of deaths among the camp inmates caused by epidemics etc, as well as those killed by guards in connection with attempts at escape or uprisings.

 9) The vague mention of a “more complex picture of the disposal patterns used by the Nazis” is interesting. Were uncremated corpses also detected by the survey, and if so, how many?

 10) Sturdy Colls label the pits “probable burial/cremation pits”, indicating that one or more of the pits may have been used for cremations and not for interment (at Sobibór Kola identified such a pit with an area of 10 x 3 m and a depth of up to 90 cm). In this context the smaller, more rectangular pits #4 and 5 may be the most likely candidates. The dimensions of an identified cremation pit could give important hints about the actual cremation capacity at Treblinka.

 11) It is noteworthy that none of the pits or structural remains are located under the stone/concrete covered memorial areas (cf. the map to the left, where these areas are visible as a bluish gray). Sturdy Colls’s statements does not mention whether or not she was able to map these area with her geophysics equipment.[21] This issue, like many others, will have to await further clarification. The covered area inside the “death camp proper” appears to correspond to roughly 1 hectare.

 12) It may be worth making a quick comparison of the maps of Study-Colls with the “reconstruction” of Treblinka proposed by exterminationist air-photo analyst Alex Bay.[22] Concerning the mass graves Bay writes:

“Unfortunately, the aerial photography does not contain enough information to delineate the boundaries of the graves. The May [1944] coverage is sufficient only for crudely identifying the places where deep disturbances in general are probable, but the exact boundaries cannot be established.

In Figure 42 aerial photography is presented in which nine 50 by 25 meter [164 x 82 feet] pits have been drawn to scale along the east and west sides. The positioning and size of these pits is purely speculative.”[23]

The dimensions of 50 x 25 m for the pits are taken from Bay’s number one eyewitness, Yankiel Wiernik, and his 1944 publication A Year in Treblinka. Wiernik writes indeed that “The dimensions of each ditch were 50 by 25 by 10 meters”[24] but this almost certainly refer to ditches located not in the “death camp proper”, but in the reception camp. The scene wherein Wiernik provides the abovementioned dimensions takes place on the second day after his arrival in the camp, and the following chapters imply that first visited the “death camp proper” or Camp II, as he calls it, only several days later.

In the figure below I have placed Bay’s Figure 42 side by side with the Sturdy Colls composite map based on the 1944 air photo. The scales of the two maps have been harmonized. To Bay’s map I have also added the letters A and B to indicate the solid black outlines drawn by Bay to mark out the two alleged gas chamber buildings. Even considering Bay’s admittal that the positioning and size of his mass graves “is purely speculative” it is clear that his vision of what the “death camp proper” might have looked like differ considerably from the Sturdy Colls map. As for the locations of the two alleged gas chamber buildings, which Bay goes to painstaking length to identify, based on the aerial photos and witness statements, the 4 structures marked out by Sturdy Colls (in blue) and designated “probable location of gas chambers” are located some 100 m south of the sites pinpointed by Bay. The alignment of these structures is also rather different from that asserted by Bay. Together with the considerable difference in surface size between the mass graves posited by Bay and the pits identified by Sturdy Colls, this says something of the competence of Bay as well as the reliability of his star witness Wiernik.   

 Above: Bay’s “reconstruction” of Treblinka compared with the 1944 air photo version of the Sturdy Colls map (click to enlarge)

13) As for the “probable location of gas chambers” we learn virtually nothing other than that Sturdy Colls has identified two brick structures. On the composite maps, however, four structures are marked out, of which the largest (near the eastern exit of the “Road to heaven”) is likely to be the one identified by Sturdy Colls as the “new gas chamber building”. The three other structures, two of which are relatively large, are located close to each other. One must suppose that one of the two larger structures has been identified by Sturdy Colls as the “old gas chamber building”. According to the most elaborate exterminationist effort to map Treblinka based on aerial photos and eyewitness testimony (and in this case one of the ground photos from the Kurt Franz “Schoene Zeiten” album interpreted by Bay and others as taken inside the “death camp proper”), the 2004 map of Peter Laponder,[25] the only structures located adjacent to the “old gas chamber building” were a water pump shelter, a tiny guardhouse, and a watchtower. Yet on the composite map we have two larger structures next to each other. We will have to wait and see if the geophysical survey has revealed anything about the layout of these structures. If that is not the case, we can only hope that Sturdy Colls soon returns to the camp site to excavate the detected structural remains. 

All in all, the information revealed by these interviews about the findings of the 2011 geophysical survey at Treblinka provides us with more questions than answers. We can only wait and hope that a preliminary report on the research results is not too long in coming. One thing is sure, however, namely that little indicates that the findings of Caroline Sturdy Colls have actually “proven Holocaust deniers wrong” with regard to Treblinka. On the contrary: the information revealed seems to hint that the findings of Caroline Sturdy Colls may well spell the doom of the official historiography on Treblinka.

_____________________________________________________________________

[1] Thomas Kues, “UK Forensic Archeologist Sets Out To Refute Treblinka ‘Deniers’”,  http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/11/uk-forensic-archeologist-sets-out-to-refute-treblinka-deniers/

[2] “Mass graves at Nazi death camp Treblinka prove Holocaust deniers wrong”, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/16/mass-graves-at-nazi-death-camp-treblinka-holocaust_n_1208814.html

[3] This radio program is temporarily available at  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b019rlns/The_Hidden_Graves_of_the_Holocaust/

[4] http://www.ideaslab.bham.ac.uk/MP3s/Caroline_Sturdy_Colls_Treblinka_podcast.mp3 A transcript of this podcast can be found at http://www.ideaslab.bham.ac.uk/MP3s/Transcript_Predictor_Podcast_40.doc

[5] “Treblinka: Revealing the hidden graves of the Holocaust”, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16657363 The article carries a heading which concludes with the words “…writes forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls” giving the clear impression that what follows is a piece written directly by Sturdy Colls herself; on the other hand the article isn’t signed. Nevertheless it is clear that the contents of the article are derived from Sturdy Colls together with the composite maps.

[6] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 73.

[7] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books 2010, p. 120.

[8] Cf. ibid., p. 117.

[9] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 138.

[10] Discussed in detail in my article Chil Rajchman’s Treblinka Memoirs, Inconvenient History, vol. 2, nr. 1, online: http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_1/chil_rajchmans_treblinka_memoirs.php

[11] Chil Rajchman, Treblinka. A Survivor’s Memory 1942–1943, MacLehose Press, London 2011, p. 60.

[12] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp, section 4.1. http://www.codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvhcrm.html

[13] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1987, p. 85.

[14] Judging by some of the early maps of the camp, pit #3 would have been located outside of this part of the camp, whereas some later exterminationist efforts to reconstruct the topography of the camp places it within the “death camp proper”, cf. Mapping Treblinka, http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/maps.html

[15] C. Mattogno, Belzec…, op.cit., p. 73.

[16] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór…, op.cit., p. 120.

[17] Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., p. 87.

[18] Ibid., pp. 275-276.

[19] Dieter Pohl, “Massentötungen durch Giftgas im Rahmen der ‘Aktion Reinhardt’: Aufgaben der Forschung” in: Günter Morsch, Betrand Perz (eds.), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, Metropol, Berlin 2011, p. 194.

[20] Cf. Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., pp. 87-88; J. Graf, C. Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., p. 107.

[21] According to the English-language Wikipedia article on Ground Penetrating Radar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar) “Good penetration is also achieved in dry sandy soils or massive dry materials such as granite, limestone, and concrete where the depth of penetration could be up to 15 m”, implying that the concrete slabs of the memorial in themselves should pose little problem for a GPR survey. There may of course be other, unrevealed hindering factors. 

[22] The Reconstruction of Treblinka, http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/

[23] http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/deathcampinternet/deathcampp7.shtml

[24] Y. Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka, chapter 3, online: http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm

[25] http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bmap9.jpg

By the term “Action Reinhard(t),” official historiography refers to the (alleged) mass murder of Jews in three German camps: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Some, ahem, historians include Chelmno, but I am using an article by Dieter Pohl, “Massentötung durch Giftgas im Rahmen der ‘Aktion Reinhardt’. Aufgaben der Forschung” (Mass murder by poisonous gas during “Action Reihardt.” Assignment for researchers) as a guideline, and he mentions only three camps. His article appeared on pp. 185-195 in “Neue Studien zu Nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas”, published by Günter Morsch and Bertrand Perz, Metropol Verlag Berlin, 2011—the most recent ‘industry publication’. This book is the result of a conference of May 2008 in Berlin, which was attended by 200 scientists from many countries. The intent was to present new material to help combat revisionists, who, to this day, deny the mass murder by poisonous gasses of millions of Jews in gas chambers. The book is a declaration of “Holocaust” bankruptcy.

But, as my title suggests, the spelling of the name of the action differs: In some publications we read “Reinhard,” in others “Reinhardt.” Why is that? Pohl claims in his article that 1.35 million people (he writes Menschen) were killed during this action: according to him, about one quarter of all Jews killed (here he writes Jews), about half by poisonous gasses. “Action Reinhard(t)” thus refers to an enormous crime, and one would expect exactitude in research, beginning with the spelling of the name.

It might be possible to dismiss the “Reinhardt” vs. “Reinhard” issue as a simple spelling error – albeit an unlikely scenario, for surely “historians” are not that sloppy – if it were not for the reference to Fritz Reinhardt of the finance ministry by Messrs Morsch and Perz in “Neue Studien…”, p. XVII, footnote 11. They write:

“…Die von der unterschiedlichen Schreibweise des Namens „Reinhard“ und „Reinhardt“ in den Quellen ausgelöste Kontroverse über die Frage, ob sich die Bezeichnung „Aktion Reinhard(t)“ auf Reinhard Heydrich oder möglicherweise auf Staatssekretär Fritz Reinhardt im Reichsfinanzministerium bezog, ist mittlerweile entschieden. Die Bezeichnung geht tatsächlich auf Heydrichs Vornamen zurück, der allerdings in den Zeitgenössischen Quellen selbst teilweise fälschlich mit Reinhart geschrieben wurde…“

(Roughly: The controversy concerning writing “Reinhard” or “Reinhardt”, referring to either Heydrich’s first name or that of Fritz Reinhardt of the finance ministry, has been settled. The description goes indeed back to Heydrich’s first name, spelled erroneously at times as Reinhardt.)

Messrs. Morsch and Perz are unclear as to who settled the issue, although they cite sources. But if this was just a spelling matter, and if “Aktion Reinhard(t)” was conceived by Reinhard Heydrich as a ‘Jew killing action’, why even mention Fritz Reinhardt? I am sure Morsch et al. know more about this, but what they know will just not fit into the narrative. Economics did play a role, and after looking at the issue closely, it is apparent that this action was initiated by the finance ministry, by Fritz Reinhardt, and that Reinhard Heydrich had nothing to do with it. His role was appended to the story later on by shysters, who refer to themselves as “historians”.

But before addressing this issue, a little about what Herr Pohl wrote. By stating up front that 1.35 million people were killed during this action, he follows what Julius Wellhausen dismisses as shysterism, to put it bluntly, when he writes:

“Für die Deutung werden die Thatsachen vorsausgesetzt und aus der Deutung werden sie bewiesen“(Die Pharisäer und Sadducäer, 1. Auflage Verlag Bamberg, Greifswald 1874. My copy Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1967, p.66). What he writes is – and Wellhausen is referring to biblical scholars here – that for the interpretation of an event, in this case “The Holocaust”, the event is established as fact up front, and substantiated through the interpretation. In other words, that which should be investigated, “The Holocaust”, is established as fact and substantiated by the interpretations of what is accepted as ‘evidence’. That research into this “action” is lacking, to put it mildly, Pohl confirms:

“Die Hintergründe dieses Massenmordes sind bis heute nicht völlig durchleuchtet.“ (p. 185)

(Trans: The background as to why this mass murder took place has not clearly been established to this day.)

Pohl wrote this after he softened his readers up with tales of gruesome mass murder, including the murder of children, but then admits later that we still don’t know why it happened. Clear indications of the Wellhausen syndrome: one must believe in mass murder, dismissing essentials. As an aside, on December 19 of this year (2011), an article appeared in Die Welt, a German daily, titled: “Hitler gab nicht “den” Befehl zum Holocaust” (Hitler did not issue the Holocaust order). The author, Felix Kellerhoff, writes that between 5.26 and 6.1 million Jews were killed and then continues:

“Obwohl diese Tatsachen unverrückbar feststehen, gibt es eines nicht: den einen schriftlichen Befehl Adolf Hitlers, mit dem das Jahrhundertverbrechen angeordnet worden ist. In keiner Akte ist dieses Dokument aufgetaucht, es gibt kein Zitat daraus und nicht einmal halbwegs verlässliche Zeugenaussagen, wann diese Weisung ergangen sein soll.”

(Even though [mass murder] is a fact, one thing we don’t have: a written order by Hitler to commit the crime of the century. In no file has this document been found: we have no citation of it and no reliable witness testimony as to when this instruction was issued.)

Quite an admission! He tries to explain why nothing resembling an order or plan has ever been found, while still asserting that “The Holocaust” happened:

“…dass der Holocaust nicht auf eine zentrale Weisung Hitlers zurückging, sondern sich zwischen Sommer 1941 und Frühjahr 1942 schrittweise entwickelte”.

(…the Holocaust was not based on a centralized instruction by Hitler, but instead developed step by step between the summer of 1941 and the spring of 1942.)

(http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article13759672/Hitler-gab-nicht-den-Befehl-zum-Holocaust.html)

To claim that this “crime of the century,” the alleged plan to murder between 5.26 and 6.1 million Jews, developed on its own is nonsense, pure desperation. But this article is a topic on its own; thus, back to Pohl. He continues on about the deportation of Jews, the establishment of ghettos, that many died/were killed, and that mass murder was already happening on Soviet territory after the war against the S.U. commenced. Then the National Socialist leadership decided, perhaps in September 1941, to conduct mass murder outside Soviet territory as well. On p. 186 we read:

“Aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach am 13. Oktober 1941 beauftragte SS-Chef Heinrich Himmler deshalb den SS- und Polizeiführer im Distrikt Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, eine solche Mordaktion im GG zu organisieren. Vermutlich wurde dieser regionale SS-Führer beauftragt, weil er besonders gute Kontakte zu Himmler pflegte, selbst mit Siedlungsplanungen auftrat und weil er als besonders rücksichtslos galt und schon zahlreiche Verbrechen begangen hatte”.

 (It is most likely that on October 13, 1941, SS-Chief Heinrich Himmler instructed the head of the Lublin district SS and police, Odilo Globocnik, to organize a murder action in the general government. This SS leader was most likely picked because of his good [close] contacts to Himmler, involvement in settlement planning—known for his ruthlessness.)

One needs to read this slowly: It is possible that Globocnik was picked on October 13, 1941, allegedly because of his “good” contacts to Himmler. We don’t know exactly when Globocnik was chosen, but he was possibly picked because Himmler liked him: renowned German efficiency in its finest form.

We then learn that between the end of the 1970s and the mid-1990s advances were made in research into the so-called (sogenannten) Action Reinhardt (he continues to write it with “dt”) extermination camps, referring to “Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen…”, a 1983 publication by Kogon/Langbein/Rückerl and a book he authored with Musial. The Kogon et al. book does nothing to establish mass murder allegations as fact, as no investigation reports by experts in the field of crime investigations are mentioned, i.e. none exist: everything is based on innuendo and circumstance. Pohl admits it when he writes (p. 187):

“Die Forschungen stoßen vor allem durch den Mangel an aussagekräftigen Quellen an Grenzen. Im Gegensatz zu den Konzentrationslagern sind für die Lager der „Aktion Reinhardt” fast keine zeitgenössischen Akten überliefert. Letztere wurden schon im Herbst 1943 fast vollständig vernichtet, die Lagerinstallationen komplett abgebaut [6]…Deshalb stützt sich die Geschichtswissenschaft fast durchweg auf Befragungen der Täter, der wenigen Überlebenden und polnischer Augenzeugen…“

(Research is limited by the almost total absence of meaningful sources. In contrast to the concentration camps hardly any documents have been found about the “Action Reinhardt” camps. Those were almost completely destroyed in the fall of 1943, when the camps were dismantled [6]…This is why historiography is based for the most part on perpetrator statements and remaining Polish eyewitnesses.)

Under [6] we read that Globocnik wrote about the destruction of documents in a letter of January 5, 1944 to Himmler. As a source, Pohl refers to the Nuremberg trials (Der Prozeß gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militärgerichtshof, Nürnberg 1949, Bd. 34, S. 71). I have not been able to confirm this since I have no access to German documents and there is nothing in Avalon I could find. But even if documents were destroyed, we have no idea what was lost or what anything refers to. To assume that it had to do with mass murder is like saying: “The information we need is contained in the documents we don’t have.” The whole case for mass murder as the intent for “Action Reinhard(t)” rests on hearsay. But, some Globocnik documents survived; more on that later.

Pohl then goes into some detail on Soviet trials, but concedes:

“Was ist diesen sowjetischen Akten nun zu entnehmen? Zunächst muss berücksichtigt werden, dass es sich nicht um rechtsstaatliche Verfahren handelte. In den Vernehmungen wurden die Beschuldigten oft bedroht, gelegentlich, besonders bei den Prozessen Ende der 1940er-, Anfang der 1950er-Jahre wohl auch misshandelt. Deshalb sind individuelle Beschuldigungen und Selbstbezichtigungen eher mit Vorsicht zu betrachten. Die Aussagen zur allgemeinen Lagergeschichte lassen sich jedoch teilweise verifizieren und erscheinen meist glaubwürdig. Deshalb ist es wichtig, die Materialien mit westlichen Untersuchungsergebnissen zu konfrontieren und daraus auf die Glaubwürdigkeit zu schließen.“

(What can be learned from the Soviet documents? First, we must take into account that these were not legal trials (rechtsstaatlich translates into constitutional). During the interrogations the accused were often threatened and sometimes, especially during trials toward the end of the 1940s, abused. As such, accusations and self incriminations must be treated with care. Statements about conditions in the camps can be partially verified and appear to be believable. It is therefore imperative that the material is compared to western investigation results.)

A mouthful, to be sure. Pohl admits that what was beaten out of the accused by the Soviets is for the most part useless; still, he wastes pages on it. As for reports on conditions in the camps, they “seem” to be believable. The last sentence is, however, what takes the cake. He writes that western investigation reports need to be consulted. What investigations? No investigation by a competent body of experts has ever been undertaken. He later mentions Andrzej Kola, who took some soil samples at Belzec. The problem with that is that whatever he claims to have found cannot be verified, since the camp has since been sanitized and the ground covered over. What was offered is bunk. Carlo Mattogno demonstrated this (http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/b/). Pohl later admits that what is claimed cannot be substantiated. He writes:

“Das größte Desiderat bleibt jedoch weiterhin die Rekonstruktion des Schicksals der Opfer. Mit der Entdeckung des Höfle-Telegramms und dessen Veröffentlichung im Jahr 2001 erscheint es möglich, wenigstens die Zahl der Opfer in den drei Lagern zu bestimmen.“

(The biggest ‘desideratum‘ remaining is to ascertain what happened to the victims. With the assistance of the Höfle telegram and its publication in 2001, it appears to be possible to at least determine the number of victims in the three camps.)

Heaven help! First he uses the term Desiderat, a word not commonly used in German. Webster’s defines this as “of desiderare; to desire; to entertain or express a wish to have or attain.” Golly gosh, why use this word when he could have used wünschenswert (“desirable”), or some such? Was it done to befuddle the issue? No doubt in my mind; what he writes is astonishing, to say the least. He admits that we don’t know what happened to the Jews, yet he turns them into “victims.” Then he follows this up by writing that finally in 2001 we became aware of some numbers, thus it is now apparently possible to know the number of “victims.” What was used before, and how is a telegram with some numbers on it evidence of mass murder?

But he is not done with his declaration of bankruptcy, he tells us:

“Lange Zeit spielten die Zeugenaussagen der sogenannten Bystander, also zumeist der Anwohner der Vernichtungslager, keine herausragende Rolle bei der Rekonstruktion der Vorgänge. Zwar haben polnische Justizbehörden vor allem unmittelbar nach dem Krieg und dann in den 1960er-Jahren auch Personen aus diesem Kreis befragt, darüber hinaus ist dies jedoch nicht systematisch betrieben worden. Das ist insofern bedauerlich, als gerade die Anwohner oft einen genauen Einblick in das Lagerleben hatten, manche polnischen Handwerker gingen gar in Vernichtungslagern ein und aus; einige der Trawniki-Männer hatten Beziehungen zu Einwohnern aus dem Dorf. Auch das Eisenbahnpersonal in den Dörfern bestand in der Mehrheit aus Einheimischen. Inzwischen kommt die Zeit für solche Befragungen an ihr Ende.“

(For a long time witness testimonies of the so-called bystanders, neighbors of the camps, were not considered when trying to reconstruct what happened. Although Polish judicial authorities did interrogate some of them after the war, and in the 1960s, but it was not done systematically. This is distressing, for those neighbors were able to observe life in the camps: some Polish tradesmen came and went; some of the foreign guards had relationships with people in the villages. The train personnel also consisted mostly of locals. But by now the time to consult them is coming to an end.)

Unbelievable, but exactly what we have been saying all along. These camps, Treblinka especially, were not hidden: the alleged killing site of Treblinka was on higher ground. And yes, locals came to sell their goods, workers entered and left the camps. At Treblinka, we are told that 880,000 Jews were killed and buried at first in huge mass graves, said graves to measure 50m x 25m by 10m deep (roughly 150′ x 75′ by 30′ deep). Digging those holes could not have been concealed, yet we have no reports, no pictures, nothing; to top it off, those huge pits have never been located. Then it was decided to exhume the bodies and burn them on pyres, with fires raging night and day. And again, not one report by the locals—no pictures, nothing. So yes, Pohl is right; there is no evidence of mass murder.

As for the alleged “murder weapon,” he writes that the exhaust of internal combustion engines was the killer. Again, no details, and here he is careful: diesel engines are mentioned, which are internal combustion engines, but they are unsuitable for mass murder.

What Pohl writes confirms the case made by revisionists. There is no evidence of mass murder in the “Aktion Reinhard(t)” camps. In fact, it was impossible to murder hundreds of thousands without anyone noticing, taking pictures, writing reports, etc. Thus we need to look for an alternative intent to understand what was meant by “Aktion Reinhard(t)”. The “t” spelling gives us our clue. Morsch et al. mention Fritz Reinhardt from the finance ministry, dismissing him of course—but why refer to him at all? When “The Holocaust” story emerged, the real Reinhardt did not fit in and was therefore dropped into a deep, black hole.

But we do have some indications that this “Aktion Reinhardt”, and I am convinced that this is the correct spelling, was an economic undertaking, originating with the finance ministry. Early publications are extremely helpful in determining how the story developed: what was written then and how it compares to what we are told now. One of those early publications provides details, the title Die Todesfabrik (The Death Factory) by the Czech Holocaust survivors Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka (Kongress-Verlag Berlin, 1958). The two arrived in Auschwitz on November 4, 1942 and were transferred to Birkenau two days later (p. 10). They were successful in organizing resistance groups, were well informed as to happenings inside the camp, and so informed the world. Again, the subject of another discussion, but in a sub-chapter of their book, titled “Aktion Reinhard” (pp. 123-126) they provide details of this action. There’s too much to discuss here, so I just copied (from pp. 124-25) portions of the testimony by Rudolf Höß during his 1947 Cracow trial:

“Welche Dimensionen diese Aktion hatte und was für ungeheure Vorteile nicht nur das Reich, sondern auch die nazistische Herrschaftsclique daraus zog, bewies am besten die Aussage des Kommandanten der Auschwitzer Lager, Rudolf Höß, während seines Prozesses:

„Unvorstellbare und nicht abzuschätzende Werte von Hunderten von Millionen sind erfaßt worden. Ungeheure Werte sind gestohlen worden von SS-Angehörigen und Polizisten, von Häftlingen, Zivilangestellten und Arbeitern, vom Bahnpersonal.Beim Entladen der angekommenen Judentransporte blieb das gesamte Gepäck auf der Rampe liegen, bis alle Juden nach den Vernichtungsstellen beziehungsweise ins Lager gebracht waren. Danach wurde durch ein besonderes Transportkommando das gesamte Gepäck in der ersten Zeit nach der Sortierstelle – Kanada I – gebracht, um dort sortiert beziehungsweise desinfiziert zu werden. Auch die Kleidung der in den Bunkern I und II bzw. Krematorien I bis IV Vergasten wurde nach der Vergasung nach der Sortierstelle gebracht.Schon 1942 war Kanada I nicht mehr in der Lage, die Sortierung laufend zu erledigen. Trotz immer wieder neu aufgestellter zusätzlicher Schuppen und Baracken, Tag- und Nachtarbeit der sortierenden Häftlinge und andauernder Verstärkung dieser Kommandos, türmte sich das noch unsortierte Gepäck, obwohl täglich mehrere Waggons, oft bis zu zwanzig, mit sortiertem Material verladen wurden. Berge von unsortiertem Gepäck türmten sich zwischen den Baracken. Die Arbeitskommandos konnten noch so verstärkt werden, während des Ablaufens der einzelnen Aktionen – die immer zirka vier bis sechs Wochen dauerten – war an ein Nachkommen nicht zu denken. Erst in längeren Pausen wurde annähernd aufgeräumt.Nach der Sortierung nach Abschluß größerer Aktionen wurden die Wertsachen und das Geld in Koffer gepackt und mit Lastwagen nach Berlin zum Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt gebracht, von da zur Reichsbank. Eine besondere Abteilung der Reichsbank befaßte sich nur mit diesen Sachen aus den Judenaktionen …Das Zahngold wurde im SS-Revier von den Zahnärzten zu Barren eingeschmolzen und monatlich dem Sanitätshauptamt zugeführt…”So sah die „Aktion Reinhard” aus, (beschrieben von einer besonders maßgebenden Person, dem Kommandanten der Auschwitzer Lager.”

Just roughly: “What dimensions this action had – and the tremendous benefits arrived from it – is best described by Commandant Rudolf Höß during his trial:
“Values in the hundreds of millions were obtained, enormous amounts have been stolen.

During the unloading of the trains, the luggage was left lying on the ramp, all Jews were taken to be executed or admitted to the camp. Thereafter, the entire luggage was sorted out and disinfected in Kanada I. The clothing of those gassed in Bunker I and II, as well as in crematoria I to IV was also taken there.
By 1942 Kanada was no longer able to do the sorting. Despite the addition of new sheds and barracks, the still unsorted luggage was piled high, although several rail cars each day – often up to twenty – were loaded and left with sorted material. Mountains of unsorted luggage piled up between the huts. The work details could be enlarged, however during the individual actions – which lasted approximately four to six weeks – this was impossible.

After sorting, following the completion of a major action, the valuables and money were packed into suitcases and brought to Berlin to the Economic and Administrative Main Office, and from there to the Reichsbank. A special department of the Reichsbank now looked after these things from the Jewish actions …
The dental gold was melted down in the SS infirmary and transported monthly to the main medical office … ”

Such was the “Operation Reinhard”, as described by a particularly influential person, the commander of the Auschwitz camp…”.

The authors (K/K) then go into details, as to how many pair of shoes, dresses, etc., etc., but not one word about the “extermination” camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, the supposed “Aktion Reinhardt” camps. As for clothing etc., K/K tell us that as soon as the arrivals disappeared into the “bath,” quotation marks in the original, all their belongings were taken to be sorted. Nothing sinister here: inmates were issued prisoner’s clothing; though, whatever valuables were found were confiscated, including clothing. It also appears that some inmates carried large amounts of luggage along. We read this in A Year in Treblinka, by Yankel Wiernick:

“Jews from foreign countries brought considerable luggage with them.”

(http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm#chapter5)

This is confirmed in the verdict of the Treblinka trial of September 3, 1965 (this used to be available at the IDGR [Informations-Dienst Gegen Rechtsextremismus] site, unfortunately it disappeared, all I have is the copy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsdienst_gegen_Rechtsextremismus]):

“Da alle diese Personen auch noch über zum Teil recht umfangreiches Gepäck verfügten, blieb der Raum für die einzelne Person auf wenige Quadratzentimeter beschränkt.“(Since all of those persons carried considerable amounts of luggage, room for each person [in the rail cars] was at a premium). Based on this, a case for theft can perhaps be made, but not for mass murder.)

Now to what was uncovered at the IMT. The following is from “One Hundred and Ninety-Sixth Day Tuesday; 6 August 1946, Morning Session”:

“REINECKE: It is obvious from the document that Globocznik was acting in his capacity as SS and Police Leader, charged with a secret special task, the so-called “Aktion Reinhard.” He is acting solely as police executive. Any connection between this activity and the organization of the General SS or any of its members does not exist in any way…

HERR PELCKMANN: Would you look to the top of Page 3? I think that indicates quite clearly who was dealing with those matters, and on whose authority Globocznik was acting.

REINECKE: Page 3 of this document shows that the Aktion Reinhard was divided into four parts: (a) resettlement, (b) use of labor, (c) use of materials, (d) seizure of hidden values and real estate. It also shows that Globocznik was communicating with Oswald Pohl personally, as well as with Himmler, on this matter. Pohl was chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office,…

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-06-46.asp

Okay, we read “Reinhard” with no “t”, but this could be a translation issue. But here we have what “Aktion Reinhardt” was all about: economic issues. First resettlement of those unable to work; then use of labor and material; last the seizure of valuables. Why would the Germans kill valuable laborers, desperately needed for the war effort? And no, not just women, children and old people were allegedly killed in the three camps. Yankel Wiernik writes in A Year in Treblinka: “The day I first saw men, women and children being led into the house of death I went nearly insane.”

(http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm#chapter5)

Now to Globocnik, mentioned by Pohl above. This again is from the verdict of the German Treblinka trial referred to before. Under II. Die Endlösung im Generalgouvernement (The final solution in the general government), regarding actions in the three Reinhardt camps we read:

“Sie wurde in diesem Bereich – wahrscheinlich in Anlehnung an den Vornamen des damaligen Chefs des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes Reinhard Heydrich – unter der Tarnbezeichnung “Aktion Reinhard” oder auch “Einsatz Reinhard” durchgeführt.“

(The covert actions undertaken under the term “Action Reinhard” or “Effort Reinhard” were possibly named after the chief of the security office of that time, Reinhard Heydrich.)

Possibly? And then again not. True, the spelling used by the ‘judges’ was that of Reinhard, but as Messrs. Morsch and Perz point out, we have two different spellings. And as can be shown, economics were the issue: the ministry of finance initiated this action, hence “Reinhardt”.

Back to the verdict: first a letter from Viktor Brack from the chancellery (and we are to believe that Hitler was not involved) to Himmler, of June 23, 1942. In this letter, and I have the wording but too long to copy here, Brack informs Himmler that he has made some of his men available to Globocnik for the implementation of this special task (für die Durchführung seiner Sonderaufgabe). He then tells Himmler that he has now added personnel so as to not get stuck should transportation issues arise. Thus, transportation was a concern, understandably so since trains were needed for the war effort. And secrecy had to be maintained, for those deportations were not popular in Germany; quite the contrary.

We then have a second letter, dated October 19, 1943 – and we need to remember that Pohl claims all documents have been destroyed – in which Globocnik informs Himmler that all camps have been dismantled. In another letter of January 1, 1944 Globocnik informs Himmler:

“Die gesamte Aktion Reinhard zerfällt in 4 Gebiete:

A) die Aussiedlung selbst

B) die Verwertung der Arbeitskraft

C) die Sachverwertung

D) die Einbringung verborgener Werte und Immobilien“

(The whole of Action Reinhard consists of four subsections: A) resettlement, B) use of labor, C) use of materials, D) seizure of hidden values and real estate.)

All of these are economic issues, but of course we must read “mass murder” into this. From the Treblinka verdict again:

“Die bei der Aktion Reinhard angefallenen und in den drei Vernichtungslagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka sichergestellten Sachwerte, die dem SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt in Berlin zur Verfügung gestellt wurden, machen nach einem von Globocnik unterzeichneten, für dieses Amt in Berlin bestimmten Bericht über die verwaltungsmässige Abwicklung der Aktion Reinhard den Betrag von RM 178.745.960,59 aus, der sich wie folgt aufgliedert:…“

(The valuables recovered in the three Action Reinhard extermination [sic] camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, and made available to the administration in Berlin, are summarized in a letter signed by Globocnik and amount to RM 178.745.960,59.)

178 million plus, not bad. But we must remember that the National Socialists considered them to be ill gotten gains, illegally amassed during the existence of the Weimar Republic. No doubt innocents were affected, but, following the renewed declaration of war by World Jewry, this time from Moscow and published in November 1941 by the “Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee”, Hitler had no choice but to consider all of them a potential threat to national security. (H. Härtle, Freispruch für Deutschland, Verlag K.W. Schütz, Göttingen, 1956, pp. 249-255)

Conclusion

Where are they then if not murdered? This is asked repeatedly; the answer: make a solid case for mass murder and the question becomes redundant. There have been some half-hearted “investigations” conducted in Belzec and Sobibor, but what has been determined is far from convincing and impossible to confirm; the Belzec grounds have been covered. As for Treblinka, where 880,000 Jews were “murdered” according to Yad Vashem, no investigation worth the term has ever been undertaken. The Soviets during their ‘investigation’ determined that the murder weapon was a motor used to pump the air out of the building, thus the Jews mass suffocated (Mattogno, Graf, Treblinka, Extermination Camp or Transit Camp? http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/t/4.html). According to Aradt, at first 700,000 Jews were murdered and buried in huge mass graves (http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/t/5.html, chapter 10) measuring 50m x 25m by 10m deep (roughly 150′ x 75′ by 30′ deep; http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm#chapter3) before being exhumed and burned. Those huge mass graves have yet to be located. An English archeologist, Carolyn Sturdy Colls, offered to investigate. She writes:

“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.”

(http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/11/uk-forensic-archeologist-sets-out-to-refute-treblinka-deniers/)

It now appears that Sturdy Colls is taking a closer look

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2087735/British-archaeologist-discovers-fresh-evidence-mass-graves-World-War-Two-death-camp-Treblinka.html#ixzz1jrlcIibB

But, and this is from the article linked to above:

“As Jewish religious law forbids disturbing burial sites, she and her team from the University of Birmingham have used ‘ground-penetrating radar’…”

So, again no investigation which would include experts in crime investigation and diggings, but just a sort of probing to then cover it all up again. And Jewish laws only selectively forbid digging, that is, it is allowed when they are reasonably sure to find something:

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/news/germany-to-excavate-suspected-holocaust-era-jewish-mass-grave-1.274439

Nothing was found here either, but that is not the issue, digging is. Why then no proper investigation, what are the promoters of the story afraid of? Why not invite experts to come and investigate if all is “obvious”? We also mustn’t forget that this is almost 70 years later, why no investigation earlier? And from what I have seen so far of what is happening at Treblinka now can not be called an investigation, more an effort to satisfy the gullible and also to keep “The Holocaust” front and center.

Therefore, unless and until a proper investigation is undertaken, by experts in the field of criminal investigations – forensic experts – using all the tools at their disposal, including digging, “Aktion Reinhardt” must be considered to have been an economic undertaking.

Why is Grandma Nisel not mentioned in Elie Wiesel’s Night?

According to Hilda Wiesel’s 1995 “Survivors of the Shoah” testimony, Grandmother Nisel (also spelled Nissel) went with the family to Auschwitz.

According to Elie Wiesel’s 1995 memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea1, Grandmother Nisel went with the family to Auschwitz.

But Grandma Nisel is not mentioned even once in Wiesel’s 1958-60 supposedly autobiographical Night.2

Did Wiesel simply forget about his grandmother only 10 years after the event and then remember her again in the 1990’s? Did he cut her out because he wanted to condense his book and she was peripheral to the storyline? Neither of these can be believed. In the first place, Wiesel makes it clear in All Rivers how important Grandma Nisel was to him and he writes affectionately about her. Secondly, by including his grandmother when he mentioned his mother and three sisters, he would not have added more than a few words to the deportation narrative, as we will see. Thirdly, Grandma Nisel, as a member of his family group that he says he lost at Auschwitz, could not with any decency be left out when writing about this momentous event.

And, in fact, he didn’t leave her out of his memoir, nor did Hilda leave her out of her testimony. But Night is another story (pun intended).

There is no excuse or explanation that can be given for such a lapse, and none has ever been attempted. Not one of Wiesel’s numerous interviewers, biographers, commentators or adulators have ever asked about it, or, if they did, they must have accepted without complaint a “no comment” from him. (I suspect that whenever Wiesel gives an interview or allows someone to write a book about him, he obtains an agreement in advance as to what can be discussed and what is off-limits. And I imagine probing questions about his family are off-limits … probably on the grounds that it is “too painful” for him. Wiesel is always treated with the softest of kid gloves.)

Who is Grandmother Nisel and why is she important?

Nisel Bash was the daughter of Moshe and Yehudit (or Mindil) Bash (or Basch). She was born in 1881 in Chust, Ruthenian-Czechoslovakia. She married Eliezer Vizel and lived with him in Sighet, Rumania … which later became Hungary. (This information is from the victim forms filled out for Yad Vashem by her nephew and grandson; see further below.) We don’t know the date of her marriage, but her first child may have been born in 1900 when she was 19 years old. This first child of Nisel and Eliezer was probably a daughter, either Idiss or Giza. In 1903 their first son, named Shlomo, was born. After that came another son, Mendel; then two more daughters.

Below: YV forms for Shlomo Wiesel by Son Eli and cousin Yaakov Fishkovitz. (click on picture for larger image) Below that is the 1957 YV form for Mendel Wiesel by Yaakov Fishkovitz.

I have reconstructed the birth dates of Nisel’s children as best I can since no reliable family genealogy has ever been made available. Sites like Rootsweb are completely useless for information about the Wiesel family. In All Rivers (p. 7), Elie Wiesel writes about his aunts:

“I also had two aunts in Czechoslovakia: Aunt Idiss in Slotvino and Aunt Giza in Ungvaer. Grandma Nissel’s other two daughters lived in Sighet. Zlati, the youngest, was called an old maid behind her back. She married late, you see—at twenty-one.”

The older of the two daughters who lived in Sighet is never named or described, yet she could not have died as a child since Wiesel speaks of her as living in Sighet when he was a boy. Did she disgrace the family in some way and so is not to be mentioned? Wiesel writes that Grandma Nisel sat at the cash register in his father’s store, but also helped out at her son Mendel’s store:

“Maybe (Grandma Nisel) was trying not to show favoritism toward any of her children. My father was the oldest, but she was just as close to my Uncle Mendel, who had a modest grocery store on the other side of town.”

From this we can understand that Shlomo was the oldest of the two sons. Among Orthodox Hasidic Jews, males are in an entirely different category of importance and expectations than females, who are only required to find a good husband and have children. Mendel married Golda Feig, the sister of Sarah Feig, making for a tight-knit Wiesel-Feig family relationship.

Uncle Mendel Wiesel was born in 1905, according to cousin Yaakov (the only source we have) and died at the same time as Shlomo in 1943 … in Sighet. He would have been only 38 years old! Yet in Night he appears in the story at the time of the deportation to Auschwitz—Elie Wiesel’s family stays in his empty house in the small ghetto. On page 30:

“The people must have been driven out unexpectedly. I went to see the rooms where my uncle’s family had lived. On the table there was a half-finished bowl of soup. There was a pie waiting to be put in the oven. Books were littered about on the floor. Perhaps my uncle had had dreams of taking them with him?”

Nisel lived in her own house that was close to her son Shlomo’s home. Young Elie dropped in often to visit her and had quite a few stories to tell about that in All Rivers. Elie’s namesake grandfather Eliezer had been killed in the First World War in his capacity as a stretcher-bearer. Nisel related to her grandson that when she was told of his death: “I learned what catastrophe meant, and I knew my mourning would never end.” (All Rivers, p 8 )

On page 9, Wiesel relates a story that when he returned to Sighet as an adult, he first went to the cemetery to find his grandfather’s grave. He spoke to his grandfather’s spirit about the deportation to Auschwitz thus: “Did you know, Grandpa, that Grandma Nisel was the only one in the family, almost the only one in the whole community, who guessed it all? She knew she would never come home. She left this wretched town in her funeral dress. Yes, she wore her shroud under her black dress. She alone was ready.”

There are two other distinct mentions in All Rivers of his grandmother taking part in the deportation-to-Auschwitz process. On Page 70 he writes that on Tuesday, May 16, they were ordered out of their houses to be sent to the small ghetto. “There was another heat wave. My little sister was thirsty, and my grandmother too.” Page 77, arriving at Auschwitz: “I stared intently, trying desperately not to lose sight of my mother, my little sister with her hair of gold and sun, my grandmother, my older sisters.”

Yet in 20 pages in the book Night of detailed description of the pre-deportation events, the trip to Auschwitz and their arrival, there is no mention at all of a grandmother. Nowhere in the entire book is there a Grandma Nisel.

Other family members place Grandma Nisel at Auschwitz.

Her nephew Yaakov Fishkovitz in 1957 filled out a YV form (above top) stating she died at Auschwitz in 1944. Yaakov also filled out a form for his cousin Shlomo Wiesel. A grandson, Eliezer Shlomovitz of Los Angeles CA, filled out a Yad Vashem form for his grandmother Nisel Vizel too, many years later in 1994 or 1999 (hard to read), saying she died at Auschwitz in 1944 (above). But neither Elie nor his two surviving sisters acknowledged her death at Auschwitz in this way. Although Hilda said in her 1995 Shoah testimony: “… we were, myself and my sister, the one who was in Canada and is now deceased; my mother; my grandmother, that is my father’s mother; and, oh . . . my little 10-year old sister.”

Hilda also said: “And my mother – died. She was 44 years old.” She then repeated: “And my little sister – dead at age 10.” These are assumed deaths. But if she is correct about her mother’s age in 1944, then Sarah Feig was born in 1900. Could she have been 3 years older than her husband, born in 1903 according to his cousin Yaakov? Possibly, even considering what we know about Hasidic marriages, wherein the groom is usually no more than one year older, or the same age, as the bride.3 But Hilda, being the eldest, should know her mother’s age. Right: Hilda, age 16, in 1938 with her mother Sarah Feig Wiesel, who would have been 38 in the picture if she were born in 1900.

The name Shlomo appears only once in Night at the end.

On the very first page of this famous novel it is written: “My father was a cultured, rather unsentimental man.” Right here it would have been natural to write: My father, Shlomo Wiesel, was a cultured, rather unsentimental man. But no, and throughout the book this character continues to be known only as “my father,” until page 103-4 when another prisoner, Meir Katz, addresses him by his first name. In the original edition it is spelled Chlomo; in the 2006 translation, the spelling is changed to Shlomo. The name of Wiesel also occurs only once, on page 51:

We had already been eight days at Auschwitz. It was during roll call. We were not expecting anything except the sound of the bell which would announce the end of roll call. I suddenly heard someone passing between the rows asking, “Which of you is Wiesel of Sighet?

The man looking for us was a bespectacled little fellow with a wrinkled, wizened face. My father answered him.

“I’m Wiesel of Sighet.”

The little man looked at him for a long while, with his eyes narrowed.

“You don’t recognize me—you don’t recognize me. I’m a relative of yours. Stein. Have you forgotten me already? Stein! Stein of Antwerp. Reizel’s husband. Your wife was Reizel’s aunt. She often used to write to us … and such letters!”

Let’s remember there were many Wiesel’s (Vizel’s) in Sighet, a town with a large Jewish population. For example, there are three Mendel Wiesel’s from Sighet of around the same age in the Yad Vashem databank, and there are eight Shlomo Wiesel’s recorded as sucumbing in the camps. This doesn’t include all the Wiesel’s with other first names! So we can expect that the man Stein would have used the first name too, or Wiesel would have asked Stein which Wiesel he was looking for. This seems like another avoidance of using the name Shlomo, but it is strange that both the first and last name were used one time only.

On page 2, the sisters are named:

There were four of us children: Hilda, the eldest; then Bea; I was the third, and the only son; the baby of the family was Tzipora.

In the original Night (p 31), the family servant, a Christian from a nearby village, is named Martha. In All Rivers, she becomes Maria, and the name in the 2006 re-translation of Night is changed to Maria. Okay, it could have been an error.

The dust jacket on an original, hard-bound copy of Night reads: “The adolescent Elisha and his family, among hundreds of thousands of Jews […] are cruelly deported …” Elisha is not the name of the main character in the book; it is Eliezer. The first time that name is used is on page 86: “Let’s hope that we shan’t regret it, Eliezer.” On page 92: “Don’t let yourself be overcome by sleep, Eliezer.” On page 96, Eliezer is addressed by his name twice by Juliek. On page 108: ”Eliezer … my son … bring me … a drop of coffee…” Then, again, on pages 109, 110 and 112. Why is he called Elisha on the dust jacket? Elisha is the name of the main character in Wiesel’s second novel, Dawn. A little mix-up there?

In Night, Father is 50 and little sister is seven.

In spring 1944, just arriving at Auschwitz, Eliezer’s father declares that he is fifty years of age. Eliezer says he is “not quite 15.” (p 40) In the new 2006 translation (p 30), Eliezer’s age is changed to “15” but the father’s “fifty” remains the same. “Not quite 15″ doesn’t equate to Elie Wiesel, whose birthday is Sept. 30, 1928, so that was an oversight in Night. Or it can also be seen as a similar situation as with Tzipora’s age: Making the young victims even younger so they will appear more sympathetic to the reader, and making some adults older. Lying about their age is a tactic used by many “holocaust survivors” in their memoirs to explain how they escaped the “gas chamber.” Arguably, this could have been done by Sarah Wiesel for Tzipora too—claiming her to be 14 instead of 10, since in the story Night, Eliezer made himself out to be 18 (3 years older that he really was) and got away with it.

Why is the father in Night fifty? Shlomo Wiesel was certainly somewhere between 40 and 44 years of age in 1944. Actually, according to his cousin Yaakov, he wasn’t even alive, having died in 1943! Moreover, Mendel died in 1943 also. One has to assume from this that they died together somehow. Yaakov filled out a form for Mendel at the same time as for Shlomo. The forms look exactly alike except for the different name and date of birth. Shlomo is shown to be born in 1903, Mendel in 1905. Keep in mind that in 1957 the book Night was not yet published in French or English and the name of Elie Wiesel was completely unknown, so Fishkowitz had no reason to lie to protect his relatives, as he might have had later.

Contrarily, on the Yad Vashem form Elie Wiesel filled out in 2004, no birth date is given for his father, nor the age at death. Did he not know? Is it possible for a son not to know his father’s age?

This photograph (above) of Shlomo Wiesel was taken in 1942 according to Hilda Wiesel. At this time he would have been 39 years old.

Further, we have no information on these details for Wiesel’s mother Sarah Feig either, and no family member (or anyone) ever filled out a YV Holocaust victim form for her or her youngest daughter who supposedly died with her at Auschwitz. (Can the reason be that they don’t want to record an age/birth date for either one?) But, as I wrote above, Hilda Wiesel Kudler said in her Shoah testimony that her mother was 44 years old when she died, and her youngest sister was ten. Is Hilda a reliable witness?

On page 30 of Night, Eliezer says: “I looked at my little sister Tzipora, her fair hair well combed, a red coat over her arm, a little girl of seven.” This is when the family was walking to the ‘small ghetto’ after being ordered out of their home in the spring of 1944, only a week or so before they arrived in Auschwitz. But Hilda said Tzipora was then ten years old. Which is correct? Or is neither? Some of my readers will tell me, “What does it matter?” Accuracy matters, because if a source is wrong in some things that can be determined as wrong, nothing from there should be depended upon.

Nowhere in All Rivers do we find Tzipora’s age given by Wiesel, even though he mentions her many times. He only wants us to know that she was young or “a child.” A ten-year-old girl is quite a bit more mature than a seven-year old. I venture to say she was given the age of seven in Night to make her appear more vulnerable, and her death even more of a barbaric crime. Also, if she were seven, there would be more reason to “exterminate” both mother and daughter, under the extermination thesis. But in truth, a 44-year-old-woman and her 10-year-old daughter could be quite useful in the labor force, and therefore could have gone on to meet some other fate. There may even be some private knowledge of that—which may be another reason no one has filled out a Yad Vashem Holocaust Victim report for these two, while two were filled out for 64- year-old Grandma Nisel.

That Shlomo Wiesel was 50 years old in 1944 can be ruled out by the fact that his mother was 64 years old in 1944, making her only 14 years older than a 50 year old. So this Father character cannot truly be the real Shlomo. The father is depicted as somewhat confused, a poor decision maker, and as having difficulty adjusting to camp life, both physically and psychologically. He appears more like a man of sixty. Eliezer is often shown to be his father’s caretaker. “My father … was running at my side, out of breath, at the end of his strength, at his wit’s end. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his only support.” (Night, p 90)

A fifteen-year-old with a gold crown?

How many 15-year-olds do you know who have a crown on a tooth already? Thirty-one-year-olds may, the age Lazar Wiesel was in 1944. Or the following story could be totally fabricated. Wiesel writes in Night that when he was transferred to Monowitz (Buna), he was given a physical and a dental exam. The dentist wanted to remove his gold crown; Eliezer talked him out of it. One day his work foreman, named Franek, noticed the gold and told Eliezer he wanted it. Eliezer resisted, but eventually, after suffering a series of abuses, gave up his gold tooth to Franek. In this story, he is called out for his dental appointment by his number, “A-7713.” (p 58) The number is used again on page 64 when the Kapo decides to give him a beating.

I felt the sweat run down my back.

“A-7713!”

I came forward.

Earlier, on page 51, the author wrote:

“The three “veterans,” with needles in their hands, engraved a number on our left arms. I became A-7713.”

Yet where is the number A-7713 on Elie Wiesel’s left arm?

At Buna, he worked in an electrical warehouse alongside some Polish civilians and a few French women After his beating by the Kapo, one of the French girls came over to him, “wiped his blood-stained forehead with her cool hand,” gave him a mournful smile and a bit of bread. Finally she spoke to him “in almost perfect German.” Several years later he recognized her in the Paris Metro, and prodded her memory. They went to a terrace café and she revealed to him that she was Jewish, from a religious family, and during the occupation she obtained forged papers and passed herself off as an Aryan. She was enlisted in “forced labor groups” and deported to Germany. That’s how she escaped the concentration camps.

These kinds of stories abound in Night and other holocaust-survivor books. No witnesses, no proofs, no names, just a bit of imagination. I will remind you again that the original Night was published in 1960 categorized as Judaica/Literature … in other words, fiction. When the new translation came out in 2006, it was changed to Autobiography/Jewish Interest. It is now an autobiography of Elie Wiesel, with his picture on the back cover and a special new Preface, written by him, which condemns the Germans and attempts to explain the changes he and his wife have made in the text.

Eliezer Wiesel is not necessarily Elie Wiesel

The author of the Yiddish book is Eliezer Wiesel. The author of Night is Elie Wiesel. There is only 2 years between the publication of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign in 1956 and the French La Nuit in 1958, but in that time the author’s name had changed. When did Elie start being called ‘Elie’ rather than Eliezer or Liezer or Lazar or something else? According to some of his biographers, it was when he was still living at home with his family. As we know, there were many Eliezer Wiesel’s (Vizel’s) in Sighet, let alone in Hungary, at the time. Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, however, was written in Polish Yiddish, or at least it was published in that language. The final version of the book of 245 pages was edited by Mark Turkov who specialized in Polish Yiddish. Where the story came from, we really don’t know. That’s the bottom line. We have the preposterous story told by Elie Wiesel of writing it in a ship’s cabin on his way to Brazil at a time that he was involved in a serious love affair and embarking on an important assignment for his newspaper. Equally preposterous is his claim to have handed an 862-page manuscript over to the stranger Turkov during a chance meeting on the ship, docked at Sao Paulo, without a copy for himself or a contract or any guarantee of return – just ‘good faith.’ Being an experienced journalist at that time, he would certainly have known better. Worse than that, he says he didn’t even believe when he gave it to him that Turkov would publish it. (All Rivers, p 240-41)

We make a leap of faith to believe that Eliezer Wiesel has to be Elie Wiesel. It should also be pointed out that these survivor stories were all the rage within the Yiddish-speaking communities at the time. There were many of them in circulation, even before they were published. Elie Wiesel had cousins in Argentina whom he visited while he was there in April-May 1954; he mentioned them in All Rivers.4 It’s very likely that he was introduced to these survivor stories, and Mark Turkov’s publishing house, through these relatives and their circle. Was he attracted to a particular story by an author with his own name, Eliezer Wiesel?

More unlikely stories

Wiesel tells us another unlikely story in All Rivers (p 277) that in Dec. 1955, back in Paris, he received a copy of the published book, edited down to 245 pages, in the mail from Turkov. There are no witnesses to this. He only mentions telling one close friend, Israel Adler, who took him out for a coffee by way of celebration.(!) Shortly after that he moved to the United States. It appears from his writings that Wiesel forgot all about the manuscript he gave to Turkov until the book came to him in the mail, but he does add on that page that “they never did send back the manuscript”—to give himself a reason for not having it and not being able to say what was actually in it.

In contradiction to this story is the one wherein Francois Mauriac, whom Wiesel first meets in Spring 1955, encourages him to write about his concentration camp experiences. He doesn’t tell Mauriac he has already done so, but acts like he will think about it, later accepting the guilt-ridden, elderly Catholic’s help in getting the book published. Wiesel writes in All Rivers, p 319, that he sent a manuscript of what became La Nuit (Night) to Mauriac one year later, in 1956.

In 1957, during my convalescence, I received good news from Francois Mauriac: Jerome Lindon of Editions de Minuit was going to publish La Nuit (Night). The letter of confirmation opened a new chapter in the book of commentaries that is my life.

Lindon didn’t like the orginal title: “And the World Remained Silent.” He preferred a biblical phrase, perhaps something from the Book of Jeremiah. But after discussing various suggestions, we settled on La Nuit. Lindon also wanted me to tighten the text, given to him by Mauriac, though I had already pruned and abridged it considerably.

The text was given to the French publisher by Mauriac. In the next lines he says that he, Elie, was the one who made the drastic cuts in the original manuscript. When?!

He proposed new cuts throughout, leading to significant differences in length among the successive versions. I had cut down the original manuscript from 862 pages to the 245 of the published Yiddish edition. Lindon edited La Nuit down to 178.

What a tissue of lies. Never before had Wiesel written about the Yiddish book, but now, in 1995, he relates that it was he who cut the 862 pages to 245. Such a prodigious task would certainly not have gone unremarked upon by him! And now it is the publisher who did the final editing to 178 pages. One wonders just what part Elie Wiesel played in this group effort?

Wiesel continues with an unconvincing “explanation” of why the book’s original ending was cut out, something that was made controversial by a certain Jewish scholar. He then says, “By the time Night was published in France, I was at work on another book.” This rendition of how such an important book came about is so sloppy and insulting to the intelligence of his readers that it speaks for itself.

Both the USHMM and Wikipedia have the dates wrong.

At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Elie Wiesel Timeline: From 1952, it says Wiesel interviewed Mauriac in 1954 (it was 1955) and that Wiesel finished his “900-page Yiddish manuscript” in Brazil in 1955 (it was 1954). I believe it is backwards on purpose, in order to fit Wiesel’s lies. But this is typical of the scholarship carried out at this totally Jewish-run, but government funded museum. It reads:

1954
During an interview with the distinguished French writer, Francois Mauriac, Elie is persuaded to write about his experiences in the death camps.

1955
Elie Wiesel finishes a nearly 900-page manuscript in Yiddish while on assignment in Brazil. And the World Stayed Silent is published in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

1963
Elie Wiesel becomes an American citizen.

Wikipedia skips over the dates, doesn’t give any dates for the writing of the books because they don’t fit, but says that Wiesel moved to NYC in 1955.

“In 1955, Wiesel moved to New York City, having become a US citizen: due to injuries suffered in a traffic accident, he was forced to stay in New York past his visa’s expiration and was offered citizenship to resolve his status.”

Others say he moved to NYC in 1956. Since he was still in Paris in Dec.’55, one assumes he didn’t leave for the U.S. until Jan. ‘56. Wiesel nowhere gives a date, which is the reason for the confusion — his biographers have to guess. But, while he received a U.S. “green card” sometime after recovering from his accident, he did not become a citizen until 1963. Wikipedia is known to change its information on Wiesel without notice. For example, it now spells his father’s name Chlomo, whereas previously it was Shlomo.

Why did Wiesel start campaigning for the Nobel Prize the same year Mark Turkov died?

Mark Turkov, the publisher of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign (And The World Remained Silent), died in 1983, the same year Wiesel’s supporters began their campaign to get him a Nobel Prize. It is a fact that Wiesel never spoke about the Yiddish book that was the precursor to Night until after Mark Turkov’s death. As I wrote in “The Shadowy Origins of Night, Part III,” this was the time Wiesel first began to speak of being the author of the Yiddish book, which he obliquely referred to in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1986, when he said “the world did know and remained silent.”

Another reason for bringing the previously ignored Yiddish book into the light is that Buchenwald survivor Myklos Grüner began, in 1987, to claim that a different Eliezer Wiesel was the author of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, thus making it necessary for the first time for Elie to explain just how it got written … by him. That he botched the explanation so badly in his memoir is no surprise to those who have studied the man. From the article mentioned above:

Grüner writes in his book Stolen Identity (p 50), “My work of research to find Lazar Wiesel born on the 4^th of September 1913 started first in 1987, to establish contact with the Archives of Buchenwald.” He was also writing to politicians and newspapers in Sweden. This could not have failed to attract the notice of Elie Wiesel and his well-developed public relations network. Grüner tracked down Un di Velt Hot Gesvign as the original book from which Night was taken, and believed it was written by his friend Lazar Wiesel and stolen somehow by Elie. (p 43)

This could account for why Elie Wiesel suddenly began to speak and write about ‘his’ Yiddish book, published in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1956. He deals with it in his memoir All Rivers, published in 1995, after Turkov and everyone else associated with it are dead. No witnesses.

Is it too far-fetched to believe that Turkov agreed to remain silent about the real author of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign, either by being bought off, threatened, or even voluntarily? And once Turkov was safely dead, Wiesel and his supporters could breathe more easily about claiming his authorship of the book?

It is a strange fact that the title Un di Velt Hot Gesvign (or, in English, And the World Remained Silent) does not appear on the long list of “books by Elie Wiesel” at the beginning of his memoir All Rivers, nor in the original or in the new 2006 translation of Night. It also does not appear in the complete list of his books at The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. It is, however, at the beginning of the list of his books on Wikipedia. Clearly, there is uncertainty about this book, perhaps a desire by publishers not to put down in writing something that could bring them a lawsuit … or perhaps a wish by Wiesel not to stimulate questions about that book.

Conclusions

1. The characters in Night are only loosely based on Elie Wiesel and his family. Therefore it can’t be called an autobiography.

2. Elie Wiesel is the author of Night, written in French with the assistence of his editor and probably Francois Mauriac, but he cannot have been the author of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign.

3. Elie Wiesel made arrangement while in Brazil/Argentina for Mark Turkov to mail him the book by Eliezer Wiesel as soon as there was a hard copy, or his relatives mailed it to him. (Elie received a copy in Dec. 1955, according to himself, but the book was not available to the public until 1956.)

4. In the winter and spring of 1956, in the United States, Elie adapted the book to a shorter version in French, which he mailed to Francois Mauriac in Paris. He inserted the names of his family members and personalized it, especially in the beginning chapters.

5. The secrecy of the birth and death dates among Wiesel’s close relatives is to keep from contradicting what is written in Night, on which his fame and fortune truly rests. Without Night, Wiesel fades into just another Jewish-Zionist writer.

6. Elie Wiesel’s failure to correct and clarify details of his family history (especially birth and death dates of his parents, sisters and other close relatives), and of the writing and publication of Un di Velt and La Nuit, mirrors his refusal to show the number A-7713 that he says is tattooed on his left arm.

7. The essential purpose for securing a Nobel Prize for Wiesel, in literature or peace, was to solidify his reputation in light of the fagility of Night as the basis of that reputation. Nobel prize recipients are a protected species by the entire “global elite,” not just the Jews. Having himself falsely identified in the Buchenwald Liberation photo served the same purpose.

My challenge: I welcome any native Polish Yiddish speaker/reader who is also fluent in English to prove me wrong about what I have written above by providing an honest, accurate translation of Un di Velt Hot Gesvign into English so it can be compared with Night. Why hasn’t this already been done? It’s natural to be suspicious of what is kept hidden. Let’s put everything on the table so that the questions I have raised can be cleared up.

Endnotes:

1. Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995. 418 pp.

2. Elie Wiesel, Night, Hill and Wang, New York, 1960. 116 pp. (Original edition)

3. “One day my father saw a beautiful young girl in a carriage and was so struck by her that he ran after her, calling out, ‘Who are you?’ Of course, she did not deign to reply, but that evening the driver gave him the answer. The girl was the younger daughter of Reb Dodye Feig, of the village of Bichkev. The following year they were married, and they had four children, three girls and a boy.” (All Rivers, p 15)

4. “In Buenos Aires my cousins Voicsi and her husband Moishe-Hersh Genuth came to meet us. I gave them some articles for Yedioth Ahronoth, unaware they would be reprinted or quoted in the American Jewish press.” (All Rivers, p 241)

By Carlo Mattogno

Butz does not need any introduction; his position as a leading light on the international Revisionist scene is uncontested, but for this very reason what he writes here is somewhat disappointing, as it does not remotely live up to his reputation.

I quote his recent review:

“Carlo Mattogno, together with his long-time colleague Jürgen Graf and, more recently, Thomas Kues (familiar to readers of this newsletter) are among the most energetic and productive revisionists working today. They have accumulated a wealth of documentary material with long, presumably self-financed, trips to the various archives, especially in eastern Europe.

Mattogno has published a number of books and articles on Auschwitz, the core of the ‘Holocaust’ legend, and this two-volume work is the most recent. Past readers of IHR’s Journal of Historical Review and Germar Rudolf’s The Revisionist may recall that I have occasionally clashed with Mattogno. I do have a problem with Mattogno’s writings and, partly because I have already read many of them, and partly for reasons I shall presently elucidate, I did not read these recent two volumes in their entirety.

A major reason I did not read all of Mattogno’s books is simply that I have great trouble following his arguments and, even after taking all that time and trouble, I can feel I have been left in the lurch.

Our most recent clash was on the subject of a document showing the Auschwitz construction department attempting to get cyanide gas detectors from the oven manufacturer Topf for use in a crematorium then under construction. Pressac and others had held this document up as proving the existence of gas chambers in the crematoria. Those wishing to revisit that exchange can see my original article,[ii] Mattogno’s original article, [iii] and the Butz-Mattogno exchange.[iv] It suffices to say that Mattogno’s theory was that the document ‘was falsified by an ignorant forger’, while I speculated that the wish for cyanide gas detectors arose from a waste incinerator that shared ducts with the crematorium ovens. We agreed that Zyklon was not involved, as there was a special department at Auschwitz for that, which had all the cyanide detectors needed for that application.

It was therefore with great interest that I read his new discussion of the alleged gas detectors, which is admirable for its copious documentation. It takes 22 pages but, mainly because Mattogno’s trains of thought contrast so much with mine, I found the going rough. It seemed that Mattogno was coming around to my theory, with the change that a cyanide danger was seen in the cremations (I had never encountered an association of cyanide with cremation). I say it ‘seemed’ because throughout the considerable labor of reading this section it was not clear where he was headed, but that’s okay if the matter is clarified in the end. Twice (pp 94, 107) he promised to ‘furnish an alternative explanation’ to the interpretation of Pressac et.al. He did not consider the possible involvement of the waste incinerator.

I was to be disappointed as he suddenly, and without warning, concluded his analysis with this single paragraph (p. 114):

‘For all these reason [sic] the Topf letter of March 2, 1943, is at least suspicious. Although it seems formally authentic, its content is utterly untenable.’

What does that mean? I don’t know. If anything, Mattogno appears to want to come back to his original claim of falsification, but perhaps understands that the evidence gives no support to such a conclusion, so he has left the matter in confusion. He did not ‘furnish an alternative explanation’.

Thus I warn that the fruits of the reader’s considerable labor may be more in learning the relevant documents than in formulating reliable conclusions. In knowledge of the documents, Mattogno seems to have no peer.”

And this is all that Butz can find to say about a two-volume book of 750 pages!

He does not explain what is its purpose, yet this is clearly indicated in the subtitle: “A Historical & Technical Study of Jean-Claude Pressac’s Criminal Traces and Robert Jan van Pelt’s Convergence of Evidence” It is therefore a critical work that should be evaluated for what it promises, namely to present an exhaustive, radical, systematic and detailed rebuttal of all the arguments put forward by these two exterminationist authors concerning the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. A serious review should assess whether the task was performed in an accurate manner, and if the arguments are sound and the demonstration convincing.

Surprisingly, Butz instead pays no attention to all of that. He cites my work without even mentioning the subtitle: What can his reader infer from the simple title Auschwitz: The case for Sanity? In his article van Pelt (to whom over 200 pages are devoted in the book) is not even mentioned, while Pressac, whose theses are, directly or indirectly, the subject of the rest of the book, is mentioned only in passing and in relation to a specific interpretation by him.

The fact that Butz has “problems” with my writings, that he has “great trouble” in following my arguments, that 22 pages are for him a “considerable labor,” are clearly his personal limitations that concern only him[v]: nobody forced him to read this book, but if he really wanted to submit a review of it, he should read it and take account of it in its entirety.

The book is divided into 19 chapters and further subdivided into 110 sections, containing about 170 sub-sections, each of which makes several points.

Butz, however, focuses on one: in quantitative terms, he takes into consideration 22 pages out of more than 750. It is as though someone were to review his famous The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by examining only the twenty pages devoted to this so-called War Refugee Board Report (I will explain below why I have chosen this example), ignoring all the rest, and claiming, from these twenty or so pages to assess the value of the work as a whole.

This section (2.6, pp. 93-114) is divided into 7 sub-sections which cover the following topics: 1) “Pressac’s Interpretation”; 2) “The Destination of the ‘Gasprüfer’”; 3) “The Historical Context”; 4) “The Bureaucratic Context”; 5) “Problems Not Solved by Jean-Claude Pressac”; 6) “What Were the ‘Gasprüfer’?” (in which I give my “alternative explanation”); 7) “Prüfer and the ‘Gasprüfer’”. The argument presented is simple and linear: what is there that is so difficult to understand?

Butz’s exposition is all the more imprecise in that he speaks of “a document” of the Zentralbauleitung relating to alleged “gas detectors, whereas there are two documents in question: the telegram to Topf of 26 February 1943, which contains an order for “10 Gasprüfer” and the letter, also addressed to Topf,  dated 2 March 1943, which mentions the “Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste” (but which also quotes the above-mentioned telegram). The reason why he insists on this issue is precisely the fact that in this regard, he and I have in the past had a disagreement. But this “our most recent disagreement” goes back to 1998: was it really worth digging it up?

Given that Butz has done so, it would be as well to summarize what this disagreement concerned. Anyone interested in a more thorough examination of the issue can read my updated article “Osservazioni  sull’articolo di A. Butz “Gas Detectors in the Auschwitz Crematorium II” (Observations on A. Butz’s article ‘Gas Detectors in the Auschwitz Crematorium II”)[vi].  I state that Butz starts from two erroneous assumptions which already, in principle, invalidate his arguments. The first is the unfounded conjecture that the Gasprüfer and the Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste were “gas detectors”, more specifically, hydrocyanic acid vapor detectors. In fact, as I have demonstrated in the above-mentioned work (and earlier in the paper I Gasprüfer di Auschwitz. Analisi storico-tecnica di una “prova definitiva”[vii]), the “Gasprüfer” were straightforward flue-gas analyzers (see figure 1).

Figure 1 – Entry “Gasprüfer” in section “Thermo-technical measurement /Technical gas analyses” in the prestigious Hütte. Des Ingenieurs Taschenbuch. Verlag W. Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 1931, vol. I, p. 1013. (Click to enlarge).

In the early Forties there existed a number of instruments of this type, from devices to analyze flue gases (Rauchgasanalyse-Anlagen) to % CO₂ detectors (Geber für die % CO₂), to indicators for % CO₂  and for % CO+H₂ (Anzeiger für % CO₂  und für % CO+H_{2) (See Figure 2).}

Figure 2 –  Siemens “Gasprüfer” from the Thirties. From: Alberto Cantagalli, Nozioni  teorico-pratiche per i conduttori di caldaie e generatori di vapore. G. Lavagnolo Editore, Torino, 1940, p. 308. (The captions have been erroneously inverted). (Click to enlarge).

On the other hand, there were no Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste: these did not exist and could not exist, because the term Anzeigegeräte refers to “indicators”, that is to mechanical instruments functioning on a physical principle (exactly like those shown in Figure 2), but at that time the presence of hydrocyanic acid vapor could only be detected using a residual gas test (Gasrestprobe), which was carried out with the Gasrestnachweisgerät für Zyklon (Zyklon [B] residual-gas testing kit), the process developed by Pertusi  and Gastaldi and perfected by Sieverts and Hermsdorf and carried out with chemical reagents and papers contained in a special box (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 –   “Gasrestnachweisgerät für Zyklon” found by the Soviets at Auschwitz in 1945. Archive of the Auschwitz State Museum, negative no. 627. (Click to enlarge).

This kit was normally sold by the two German distributors of Zyklon B, Heerdt und Lingler (Heli) and Tesch und  Stabenow (Testa) (see Figure 4).

Figura 4 – Letter from Tesch & Stabenow to the KL Lublin administration dated 29 July 1942. Archive of the State Museum of Majdanek, I, d 2, vol. 1, p. 107. (Click to enlarge).

Figure 4a –   Enlargement (Click to enlarge).

Butz’s second assumption is the hypothesis, equally unfounded, that there existed “a gas detector differing from that used in the Zyklon delousing operations” even equipped with an audible alarm.[viii]

Since testing for residual gas could only be done using the chemical procedure of the Gasrestnachweisgerät für Zyklon, in practice Butz’s conjecture that these alleged “gas detectors” were for the waste incinerator (Müllverbrennungsofen) of Crematorium II at Birkenau (assuming that material could be burned there whose combustion produced hydrocyanic acid), is incongruous and in contradiction with his admission that “We agreed that Zyklon was not involved, as there was a special department at Auschwitz for that, which had all the cyanide detectors needed for that application.” In fact, as I have explained in my study (pp. 100-102)  the acquisition and the use of Zyklon B with associated accessories, including apparatus for residual-gas testing, were the responsibility of the SS-Standortartz (garrison physician). This makes complete nonsense of the Zentralbauleitung’s order from Topf for Gasprüfer/Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste which according to the theory of Pressac and of Butz were Gasrestnachweisgeräte, or apparatus for residual gas testing for hydrocyanic acid: if the Zentralbauleitung had had a requirement for such equipment, either, hypothetically, for homicidal purposes in the alleged gas chambers or for testing waste incinerators, they would have ordered them from the garrison physician, since they fell within his institutional scope and certainly not from Topf, who neither produced nor sold them.

Butz’s conjecture is also not very sensible because it completely ignores historical, technical and documentary reality. There is not even the faintest indication in its favor, and, as I showed in my article on the subject, it is in no way supported by the historical, technical and documentary context.

To Butz it seems that I am turning around his theory, by referring to the danger of production of hydrocyanic acid at cremations. His impression is mistaken, since I have never maintained such an absurdity. He then states that I twice promised to “furnish an alternative explanation” to Pressac’s interpretation, whereas, in fact, I would not have done so. In reality this explanation, as I have already mentioned, can be found in subparagraph 6, specifically on p. 111, where I have concluded that the 10 Gasprüfer were, in fact, simple flue gas analyzers destined for the 10 flues (Rauchkanäle) of Crematories II and III.

Crematory II came into service on February 20, but at reduced capacity, because the electrical power supply only allowed a “limited use of existing machines”. The “Gasprüfer” were, therefore, used to determine whether the limited use of the draft and blower installations would allow  economically viable combustion.

And since they were thermo-technical instruments, it is obvious that the Zentralbauleitung would have ordered them from a firm specializing in combustion equipment.

And the letter of March 2, 1943, with its notional “Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste”? In that regard, I stated that:

“If a historian affirms that a document furnishes ‘the ultimate proof’ of some fact, he must also address and resolve all the problems which arise in this connection and he must not evade this burdensome task.” (p. 112).

But neither Pressac nor van Pelt, nor Butz, nor anyone else has resolved these problems, which can be summarized as follows:

1) an order for combustion gas analyzers (Gasprüfer) by the Zentralbauleitung to Topf is followed by an offer, by Topf, of Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste, instruments which did not, and could not, exist;

2) the alleged purpose of the order for these instruments, to test for residual hydrogen cyanide gas,  is nonsensical and impossible, because it could not be carried out either with Gasprüfer, or with  notional Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste, but only with the Gasrestnachweisgerät für Zyklon;

3) according to Pressac’s interpretation and in effect Butz’s, the order for alleged residual gas-testing equipment for hydrogen cyanide would have been addressed not to the garrison physician, under whose institutional responsibility it fell, not to the companies that produced it and sold it – Degussa (Deutsche Gold-und Silber-Scheideanstalt), Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung), Heli and Testa – but to a company that dealt with combustion equipment![ix]

And it is clear that, as long as there is no resolution of the mystery of the Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste, a designation, I repeat, not found in any of the specialist literature on disinfestation and the detection of toxic gases, a designation which in fact appears only in the letter of March 2, 1943, no “alternative explanation” is possible, simply because no explanation is possible. That of Pressac and his associates is in fact a false explanation, because it translates literally (residual hydrogen cyanide gas detectors) from a contrived term for something that has no tangible existence in the real world (Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste).

As for Butz, his approach to this document is so superficial that he presents only a translation into English, without even mentioning the suspicious novelty of the German expression  “Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste”[x], relegating it to the literal “residual HCN detection devices”[xi] . In effect he completely sidesteps the key issue in this document. In stressing that  “Mattogno’s theory was that the document ‘was falsified by an ignorant forger’, when I speculated that the order for hydrocyanic gas detectors related to the waste incinerator, without the slightest explanation of the reasons for this hypothesis, and opposing it with his own alleged “alternative” explanation, Butz completely misrepresents my position, painting me, like some Holocaust apologists, as someone who declared a document false because he was unable to explain it, when in fact this hypothesis derived from the manifestly absurd contents of the document.

Regarding the content, in fact, the document in question has no value, no more than a military document that mentioned a flying attack donkey. Precisely what I meant with the conclusion:

“For all these reasons, the Topf letter of 2 March 1943 is at least suspect. Although it seems formally true, its content is completely unreliable.”

Was this so hard to understand?

The military document would be formally true, but what about the flying attack donkey? It would be too facile to solve the riddle (as, by analogy, do Pressac and Butz with regard to “Anzeigegeräte”)  that “flying donkey” means, for example, “helicopter”. This would not be an explanation, but simply a cop-out, as is identifying “Anzeigegeräte für Blausäure-Reste” with residual gas test kits for hydrocyanic acid.

So it is not true that I leave the matter “in confusion”: it is the document that creates confusion. This is admitted by Butz himself, who, in the second edition of his book, wrote:

“The letter from Topf dated March 2, 1943 is strange and for some time I have had doubts as to its authenticity.”[xii]

His suspicion was dispelled by his “alternative interpretation”, but, as I have shown above, this is limited merely to circumventing the problems inherent in the document.

In finally adding to my words a pointless “[sic]”, Butz confirms that he has serious problems in understanding what I wrote, since “for all these reasons”, which I have summarized above, is printed on pp. 111-112.

All this amounts to anything but calm historical criticism. And we wonder why Butz wanted to review a book containing arguments which, by his own admission, he can follow only with “great difficulty”.

In his examination of Crowell’s theses, Butz dwells at length on the so-called War Refugee Board Report, the series of reports by prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz in 1944, also known as the “Auschwitz Protocols.” I have also dealt with this document, devoting a section of just over 14 pages to it (pp. 563-577). The fact that Butz does not speak of this, although obviously interested in the subject, gives rise to the suspicion that, in my book, he has only read the 22 pages mentioned above.

Also surprising is that Butz has left out another important issue on which we disagree: that of “Vergasungskeller“. In the book in question, I examined in depth (pp. 55-69) the problem with this term, which appears in the letter from the Zentralbauleitung to SS-Brigadeführer Kammler, head of Office Group C of the SS-WVHA, dated January 29, 1943 and which translates literally as “gassing cellar”. My conclusion, which is supported by the historical-documentary context, is that this referred to a project for an emergency disinfestation chamber. Butz believes rather that the “Vergasungskeller” was a “gas shelter”, that is a gas-tight air-raid shelter[xiii]. Then[xiv] Samuel Crowell developed the thesis that Pressac’s “criminal traces” could be explained in the context of air defense architectural measures.

In light of the known documents, this interpretation is completely unfounded, as I have abundantly shown in my “clash” with Crowell[xv]. It is enough simply to say that the “Air-raid protection measures for the Auschwitz” garrison (Luftschutzmassnahmen im Standort Auschwitz) were only ordered on November 16, 1943, when the construction of the crematories was already completed (the “criminal traces” date from the first half of 1943); SS-Untersturmführer Heinrich Josten, appointed “Luftschutzleiter”, Head of Air-Raid Protection[xvi], began to handle this task precisely from this date.

With regard to the “Vergasungskeller”, I have demonstrated that in every document from Auschwitz where “Vergasung” appears, this always and exclusively relates to disinfestation (pp. 67-68). What is more, the German term designating anti-gas protection is “Gasschutz” (as is demonstrated by the title of an important specialist review of the Thirties: Gasschutz und Luftschutz, Protection against Gas and Air Raids), so that, in the event, the Zentralbauleitung document would have spoken of a “Gasschutzkeller”, and certainly not a “Vergasungskeller”.

It has been commented that in my book neither Butz nor Crowell is even mentioned, even though van Pelt criticized their theses. The reason is precisely that I consider their arguments irreconcilable with the historical, technical and documentary context; that is that since from a historical, technical and documentary point of view they are unfounded, such arguments can therefore not make a positive contribution to criticizing the positions of Pressac and van Pelt in interpreting documents or ascertaining facts.

These are my interpretations; of course, I do not pretend that they are indisputable; I limit myself to observing that they are the only ones which are reconcilable with the historical, technical and documentary context.

To Butz’s rescue promptly rushes Robert Faurisson, who writes:

“I totally agree with your review of Crowell’s book and Mattogno’s book.

I, for one, had decided not to write anything about Mattogno. For a very long time he appeared to me as a man suffering a terrible complex because he was not a scholar. This already is not a sign of intelligence. I would appreciate more an intelligent mason talking about history than many University professors teaching history. Mattogno wants to show what he thinks is science instead of being simply scientific. He makes everything complicated and this is too bad for our revisionist cause. For example, we do not need pages and pages on the cremation or the crematory ovens. The reader might think: ‘Dear, this is too complicated for me. I cannot decide whether those revisionists are right or wrong’. […]. Congratulations, dear Art”[xvii].

The two best-known revisionists in America and Europe have joined forces against me: I do not know if it is an honor or a disgrace. Is to have carried out in-depth studies on multiple “complicated” issues that Butz and Robert Faurisson have barely mentioned bad for revisionism?

Faurisson’s message seems animated by obvious personal animosity. To someone interested in revisionist issues, personal disagreements are in fact of no interest, so I will not respond on this level. But I must point out that my supposed “terrible complex” is certainly not suggested by the judgments made by Faurisson on me toward the beginning of my revisionist activities. I summarize the most salient ones taken from Écrits révisionnistes (1974-1998):[xviii]

Vol. II, p. 562 (1985): “An Italian revisionist, Carlo Mattogno, the quality of whose work is exceptional…”.

p. 723 (1987): “Carlo Mattogno, who is only 35, is a researcher of exceptional erudition”,

pp. 983-984 (1990): “C. Mattogno shows a type of erudition in the tradition of his ancestors of the Renaissance; he is both meticulous and prolific; in the future he will figure in the first rank among revisionists”.

As for the example cited by Faurisson, if Pressac has devoted “pages and pages” to the question of cremation and crematories at Auschwitz, I do not see how one can refute it without also devoting “pages and pages” to the subject.

I do not think it is up to Faurisson to determine what revisionism needs or does not need. If he believes that his readers need simplification, good for him and good for them. Other readers want instead to go more deeply and to read longer, more articulate works. I hope to satisfy these readers and at the same time pose a few puzzles for holocaust historians.

I do not see why there should be a conflict between these two different approaches, which are simply complementary: do both not contribute to the “cause”?