Elie Wiesel questioned under oath in a California courtroom in 2008:

Q. And is this book Night that you wrote a true account of your experience during World War II?

A. It is a true account. Every word in it is true.

In Part One, I established that the decision to rebrand Night into an autobiography was the reason for a new translation, in which necessary changes could be made to better ‘fit’ the story both to the real Elie Wiesel and the known facts of the Hungarian deportation.

When the 2006 translation came out, with its new classification to “autobiography,” questions arose from some circles. Responding to these questions, Edward Wyatt wrote an article  in the NewYork Times on Jan. 19, 2006, in which he quoted Jeff Seroy, senior vice president at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, parent company of Night publisher Hill & Wang, as strongly denying that changes were made to bring the book more in line with the facts. “Nonsense,” said Seroy. “Some minor mistakes crept into the original translation that were expunged in the new translation. But the book stands as a record of fact.”

Left:  Elie Wiesel manning his table at a Jewish book fair in Austin, TX in 2006. The new translation of Night by his wife Marion had come out in January of that year. It was also chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club at that time. Below: Publisher Jeff Seroy, center, with writer Brad Gooch to his left, Doug Stumps on his right .

Blaming the Translator

“Mistakes in the original translation” can only mean mistakes by Stella Rodway, the original translator! But we have already shown that Stella Rodway faithfully reproduced the French La Nuit, which was Wiesel’s own work. The author and publisher are casting  these changes as translation errors to divert attention away from Elie Wiesel’s own errors—part of their campaign to pass Night off from now on as “a record of fact.”

A record of fact it isn’t

When I ended Part One, Eliezer and Father were still in the train car on their way to Buchenwald. You will recall that the Yiddish, the French and thus the original English version of Night specified the trip took 10 days and 10 nights from Gleiwitz (on the former German/Polish border) to Buchenwald. Since we know from standard historical sources1 that the prisoners were evacuated from Monowitz on Jan. 18 and arrived in Gleiwitz the next day, Jan. 19; and since according to the description in Night itself, they spend three days in Gleiwitz (Jan. 20-22), this would make their day of arrival February 1, 1945. But in Night, Father’s death takes place the night of Jan. 28-29, three days before they arrived!  This is why Marion Wiesel removed the number 10 in her new translation, leaving the number of days and nights undetermined.

A strange detail that actually belongs in Part One is on page 87 of the original Night. Eliezer remarks, after his and his Father’s deliberations and final decision to go on the march: “I learned after the war the fate of those who had stayed behind in the hospital. They were quite simply liberated by the Russians two days after the evacuation.” The evacuation, as we all know, was on the 18th. We also know the Russians did not arrive on the 20th of January! The actual liberation day is January 27. What possessed Wiesel to write this? Well, because it was in Un di velt:  “Two days after we had left Buna, the Red Army occupied the camp.  All the sick had stayed alive.”

From the point in the story of Eliezer and Father’s arrival at Buchenwald there are no significant changes made by Marion Wiesel to the original French and English versions. But there is much in all the versions that differs strikingly from the “official holocaust history” as written by acknowledged official chroniclers such as Danuta Czech. So I will continue with comparisons between Night and “official history,” along with some very significant changes made from Un di velt hot geshvign to Wiesel’s edited French La Nuit.

Arrival at Buchenwald:  26 Jan. or 1 Feb.?

Danuta Czech, in her Auschwitz Chronicle1,  records that on January 26,

A transport with 3,987 prisoners from Auschwitz auxiliary camps reaches Buchenwald.  There are 52 dead prisoners in the transport.  115 prisoners die on the day of arrival.  Their corpses are delivered to the autopsy room. (P 801)

This is the transport that carried Lazar and Abraham Wiesel/Viezel, Miklos (Nikolaus) Grüner and all of the inmates of Monowitz whose names are on the transport list.2 According to Czech, the Monowitz prisoners began their march on the evening of January 18, 1945, with “divisions of nurses placed between the columns” of 1000 each (P 786), arriving at Gleiwitz Camp the following evening. On Jan. 21 “they are loaded in open freight cars with other prisoners from Auschwitz who have arrived in Gleiwitz.” (P 788) From Jan. 21 to Jan. 26 is five days of travel … not ten, as Wiesel wrote in Night.

The narrative in Night gives us a date of Jan. 22 for the boarding of the train, one day later than Czech. And while Night gives the number of days on the train (10), it does not name the date of arrival.

Hilda Wiesel says her father died on arrival

Totally contradicting what is written in Night, Hilda Wiesel Kudler, Elie’s oldest sister, in her testimony for the Shoah Foundation in 1995, said she learned from her brother that their father died as he stepped off the train.

And I said, where is father? And he replied, he’s gone back to Sighet; he[Elie] didn’t want to tell me [that he was dead]. And I repeated, but where is he? And he insisted he was at Sighet. And I said, look, I want you to tell me the truth. Because he knew the date of my father’s death. You know, they did a long march3 from Auschwitz, then they put them on the train to go to Buchenwald; he died gasping for air; when he stepped off the train, he died gasping for air; at Buchenwald. But he[Elie] knew the date.                 

Right: Hilda Wiesel Kudler, in France,  giving her videotaped testimony to the Shoah Foundation

From this, we can better understand something about Elie Wiesel—that he has never had a problem with making up stories that “sound better” than the truth. But, if Hilda is correct in her recall, and if their father really was one of the 115 inmates who Danuta Czech reports died on the day of arrival, then Wiesel’s long, melodramatic story of watching his father sicken and die over a ten-day period in Night is fiction. All of it—including his father being whacked on the head by a cruel “officer” in the barracks.

The day of arrival for this transport is Jan. 26, but according to the timeline in Night, it arrives on Feb. 1. Either way, it doesn’t correspond to the date of  Jan. 28 that Wiesel, for reasons unknown, selected as the date his fictional Father died.

You might also be interested to know that Hilda is named Deborah in Un di velt;  the name Hilda is never used. It was Wiesel who changed it to Hilda in La Nuit.

Un di Velt says Father dies a week after arrival in Buchenwald, Night says 8-10 days … yet it is January 28 … or is it the 18th Day of Shevat?

Regular readers of this blog will know this already, but it bears repeating yet again: there is no Shlomo Wiesel in the official history or in the records who fits the profile of “Father” as described by Elie Wiesel in Night. There is an Abraham (sometimes shortened to Abram) Viezel who is recorded in several places—on a medical report at Auschwitz, on the transport to Buchenwald, and on a death certificate dated  Feb. 2, 1945, seven (7) days after arrival. This Abraham was born Oct. 10, 1900, making him 44 years old when he died. Recall that Night gives Father’s age as 50 in 1944 (SR, P 40).

Wiesel’s description has the transport to Buchenwald arriving on Feb.1st.  But that’s just the beginning. After arriving, this is the timeline given in both the original Night and Marion Wiesel’s 2006 translation:

It was daytime when I awoke. I went to look for my father. (Feb. 2nd) 

[…]

On the third day after our arrival at Buchenwald, everyone had to go to the showers [his father went too-cy]. Even the sick who had to go through last. (Feb 4th)  […] Struck down by dysentery, my father lay in his bunk, five other invalids with him. I sat by his side watching him … A week went by like this. (Feb. 11th or Feb. 8th depending on how you read it)

[ . . . ]

When I got down after roll call, I could see his lips trembling as he murmured something. […] Then I had to go to bed. I climbed into my bunk, above my father, who was still alive. It was January 28, 1945. (still Feb. 8 or 11) I awoke on January 29 at dawn. In my father’s place lay another invalid. They must have taken him away before dawn and carried him to the crematory.” (Feb 12th or 9th)  [Stella  Rodway translation, pp 107-112]

The timeline in Un di velt is not in doubt:

On the seventh or eighth day of our being in Buchenwald, the bunk-elder [should be block-elder -cy) who used to deal out bread for the whole bunk [sic], came to me. . . .  

[ . . . ]

On the same day, in the evening, disaster struck. The end. During roll call.  The healthy had to go out of the block in order to be counted by the S.S. men.  The sick stayed in their bunks.  My father and I thus stayed inside.   He — because of his dysentery and I — because of my bandaged foot.  Father was lying in the lowest bunk and I — in the uppermost.

[ . . . ]

After roll call, I immediately jumped down from the uppermost bunk and ran to him.  He was still breathing.  But — he was silent.

[ . . . ]

For a couple of hours I stayed by him and looked at his face long and well […] Then they forced me to go lie down to sleep. I climbed up to the uppermost bunk and I did not know that in the morning, on awakening, I would find my father no more.

It was the eighteenth of Shevat, 5705.  

* * *

Nineteenth of Shevat.  Early in the morning.

 I got up and ran to my father.  Another sick man was lying in his place.

 I had a father no more. (pp 233-238)

Readers might be surprised to learn that the Hebrew calendar date of 18-19 Shevat, 5705 corresponds to February 1-2, 1945! How neat is that? So, in Un di velt Father dies seven days after arrival, on the very same day as Abraham Viezel died, who was officially recorded at Buchenwald with the registration number of 123488 and the Auschwitz registration number of A-7712. (However, Un di velt also says that the trip from Gleiwitz to Buchenwald took ten days, which means they could not have arrived until sometime in February. Seven days from that time would not be Feb. 2nd.)

So can we conclude from this that Abraham is Shlomo? Not necessarily. The Yiddish author  reports Father’s death as occurring during the night of 18-19 Shevat (Feb. 1-2), but Elie Wiesel, author of La Nuit, says the date is Jan. 28th! Why? Who can answer that but Elie Wiesel? He certainly knows what the month of Shevat and the year 5705 means … or he could have easily found out.

Or can we conclude that Un di velt was written by Lazar Wiesel, as Nikolaus Grüner claims … that he wrote his story as a father-son relationship … and that he was perhaps not the brother of Abraham as Grüner says he was? (It’s noted on Lazar’s Buchenwald file card that his father was also in Buchenwald; his mother in Auschwitz.) Well, again, not necessarily.  There are other possibilities. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The facts are, there are problems with all of these theories; none is a perfect fit. We can ask: If Elie Wiesel is the author of Un di velt hot geshvign, why did he change so many of the underpinning facts of the story when he rewrote it in French as La Nuit? This is a real head-scratcher. We can also ask: Why did Naomi Seidman, the Jewish professor who discussed in detail some of the differences between the Yiddish book and Night, not mention the 18th of Shevat? Is it because she couldn’t find an explanation for it? Siedman, Ruth Franklin and other Jewish reviewers have never brought up some of these Yiddish to French discrepancies. They are too embarrassing a problem for them.

What we can safely say is that no matter who the author of Un di velt was … he was totally unfamiliar with the real facts of when the Monowitz prisoners arrived at Buchenwald. Was it because he was not one of them? Was it  because he was not concerned about accuracy since his story was directed at a non-critical audience—a Yiddish-speaking Jewish audience? As we continue, we’ll find more mystifications, but also a few certainties.

 What happens to Eliezer after Father’s death?

Wiesel writes in Night (essentially the same in all translations):

I had to stay at Buchenwald until April eleventh. I have nothing to say of my life during this period. […] I was transferred to the children’s block, where there were six hundred of us. […] I spent my days in a state of total idleness. And I had one desire—to eat. I no longer thought of my father or of my mother. (SR, P 114)

He continues that on April 10, a general evacuation of the remainder of the camp—20,000 prisoners in all, including “several hundred children”—was begun but was soon interrupted. It resumed on the 11th but was again interrupted around ten a.m. when the camp inmate “resistance movement” rose up, firing guns. And then at 6 p.m. on that same day the first American tank arrived. This corresponds pretty well with the official story, but then it goes astray.

In a November 2000 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Wiesel recalled:

… and we [children] were left until the end. But every day we marched to the gate anyway. I was near the gate more than five times before I was released, and each time, the gate closed just before I came to it. 

Ah, we have heard this before, haven’t we? As exaggerated as it sounds, in Un di velt the author goes even further. He writes:

I didn’t even bother to try hiding myself.  Let myself be born along with the stream.  Tens of times I stood before the iron camp gate, on the threshold of death, and always something happened which brought us back to the block.  

Un di velt continues: “If I was not killed then it is merely thanks to almighty chance.   For — because of the hunger, I even wanted to go to the gate: outside the gate, they were distributing bread and marmalade.”

Above:Elie interviewed by Oprah in 2000. Right: The front gate at Buchenwald, from the inside looking out, that Wiesel says he marched right up to “tens of times” but was always turned back!

Liberation brings Freedom and Revenge

UdV, P 244:  The first gesture of freedom: the starved men made an effort to get something to eat. They only thought about food. Not about revenge. Not about their parents. Only about bread. And even when they had satisfied their hunger—they still did not think about revenge.

SR, P 115: Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. We thought only of that. Not of revenge, not of our families. Nothing but bread.

Oprah Winfrey interview:  Oprah asks, “After you were liberated, what did you do?” Wiesel answers: “The first thing many of us did was reassemble to say a prayer for the dead.”  (page 5)

*   *   *   * 

UdV, P 244:  Early the next day Jewish boys ran off to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes. And to rape German girls [un tsu fargvaldikn daytshe shikses]. The historical commandment of revenge was not fulfilled.

LN, P 178:  Le lendemain, quelques jeunes gens coururent à Weimar ramasser des pommes de terre et des habits—et coucher avec des filles. Mais de vengeance, pas trace.

SR, P 116:  On the following day, some of the young men went to Weimar to get some potatoes and clothes—and to sleep with girls. But of revenge, not a sign.

MW, P115:  The next day a few of the young men ran into Weimar to bring back some potatoes and clothes—and to sleep with girls. But still no trace of revenge.

In this case, Wiesel made the change from ‘rape’ to ‘sleep with’ in La Nuit. The expression for “German girls” that we find in the Yiddish book was also removed. The term that was actually used is shikses, a word which originally meant “abomination” and which is used today as a term of contempt for all non-Jewish women. In other words, in saying daytshe shikses, the author was expressing, in rather vulgar terms, his contempt and hatred for German women. This apparently was not good for the eyes of the Goyim to see. It was changed by Wiesel in the French La Nuit, and thus it never reached our eyes until now.

Yet, the Yiddish author goes even further and decries the failure of the Jewish males to take a proper revenge, which is here envisioned as a much larger public act of retribution than the “too mild” raping of German women. (Public retribution, of course, did come later with the Nuremberg Military Tribunals.)

Eliezer is hospitalized for two weeks—April 14 to April 28

UdV P 244:  Three days after liberation I became very ill; food-poisoning. They took me to the hospital and the doctors said that I was gone. For two weeks I lay in the hospital between life and death. My situation grew worse from day to day.

SR P 116:  Three days after the liberation I became very ill with food poisoning. I was transferred to the hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.

MW P 115:  Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill: some form of poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.

Three days after liberation on April 11th is April 14th. Thus, Eliezer is in the hospital from April 14 until April 28—extremely ill, close to death. In his 1995 memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Elie Wiesel claims that on that day (the 14th) he was thrown a can of lard, which he apparently ate although he doesn’t remember doing so. He lost consciousness and awoke in a hospital. But the addition of this story, which is in the original Un di velt, presents serious problems for Elie Wiesel. Perhaps the hospital story had slipped his mind when he decided to claim he was one of the survivors lying on a bunk in the “famous Buchenwald liberation photograph.” Because he was in the hospital …

He cannot be in the famous Buchenwald liberation photo taken on April 16 …

I have already demolished the false claim that Wiesel is in that photograph here. But on top of that, our translator found an interview of Leo Eitinger, a Jewish Czech-born psychiatrist, by Harry James Cargas, a friend and biographer of Elie Wiesel, which contained this gem:

 HJC:   The same thing happened with Livia Rothkirchen at Yad Vashem as happened with you. I was there doing research on atrocity photography for my book A Christian Response to the Holocaust and saw a photo that covers a large wall, of seventeen men lying in their bunks at liberation time. I think you’ve probably seen this picture. Wiesel and Dr. Rothkirchen passed it by many times, over a several-year period, before he told her he was in that photograph. I asked Elie if I could write something about it and he said, “No.” I wrote something and showed it to him and he gave me permission to publish it. 

LE: I didn’t know Elie is in the photo.4

Cargas’ book was published in 1993, ten years after it was publicly announced that Elie Wiesel was in that photograph. Apart from the revelation that Cargas has to ask permission from Wiesel before he publishes anything about him, can you imagine that after walking by that famous photo for several years, Wiesel would finally think to say, “Oh hey, that’s me laying there, back in the shadows.”

Right:  The photo at Yad Vashem in Israel with Elie Wiesel posing in front of it in 1986 after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

He cannot have been present to agree to and sign the Military Questionaire on April 22 …

Much has been made by holocaust historians like Kenneth Waltzer and others I won’t name that this Fragebogen made out for Lázár Wiesel proves that Elie Wiesel was in Buchenwald. The birth date is not Elie’s; the date of arrest is not Elie’s; the signature is not Elie’s; the registration number belongs to another prisoner (Pavel Kun) who died only a month earlier; and on top of all that … Elie himself tells us in Night that he was lingering between life and death in the hospital on April 22. He was still six days away from having recovered enough to leave the hospital.

He cannot be in the photograph of the “Boys of Buchenwald” taken on April 27.

Kenneth Waltzer also claims on his Michigan State University website that Elie Wiesel is “seen to the left”  (fourth from the front in left row wearing dark suit in front of the taller boy wearing a beret) in this photograph of the youths being transferred from the barracks inside Buchenwald to the former SS barracks on the outside. Why is Waltzer not paying attention to what is written in Night – that Eliezer was put in the hospital on the 14th of April, at death’s door, and remained for two weeks? One really has to wonder at the stupidity of holocaust historians. Or more likely — how stupid they think the rest of us are! See The Many Faces of Elie Wiesel.

The book’s ending: What does the long passage in Un di velt hot geshvign tell us?

UdV P 245:  One fine day I got up—with the last of my energy—and went over to the mirror that was hanging on the wall. I wanted to see myself. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the mirror a skeleton gazed out.

Skin and bones.

I saw the image of myself after my death. It was at that instant that the will to live was awakened.

Without knowing why, I raised a balled-up fist and smashed the mirror, breaking the image that lived within it.

And then—I fainted.

From that moment on my health began to improve.

I stayed in bed for a few more days, in the course of which I wrote the outline of the book you are holding in your hand, dear reader.

But—

Now, ten years after Buchenwald, I see that the world is forgetting. Germany is a sovereign state, the German army has been reborn. The bestial sadist of Buchenwald, Ilsa Koch, is happily raising her children. War criminals stroll in the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past has been erased. Forgotten.

Germans and antisemites persuade the world that the story of the six million Jewish martyrs is a fantasy, and the naive world will probably believe them, if not today, then tomorrow or the next day.

So I thought it would be a good idea to publish a book based on the notes I wrote in Buchenwald.

I am not so naive to believe that this book will change history or shake people’s beliefs. Books no longer have the power they once had. Those who were silent yesterday will also be silent tomorrow. I often ask myself, now, ten years after Buchenwald:

Was it worth breaking that mirror? Was it worth it?

SR P 116:  One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.

The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

MW P 115:  One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.

The look in his eyes as he as he gazed at me has never left me.

The difference in length between the Yiddish and the English passage is the first thing that strikes us. The Yiddish writer had a lot to say in these final thoughts. He regained his “will to live” right there in the hospital. Twice he speaks of writing an outline and notes for Un di velt hot geshvign  while still in his hospital bed. But there is no record by Elie Wiesel anywhere that says he did any writing in preparation for writing his “testimony” while in the camp (in fact, just the opposite), or at any time in advance of 1954.

The tragic true story of Ilse Koch is that she gave birth to one child while a prisoner of the Americans but she certainly was not allowed to raise him. She was hounded, vilified and persecuted after the war, retried by a German court in 1951 after being acquitted at the IMT, and ultimately given a life sentence—solely, it can be argued, to satisfy Jewish vengence. She committed suicide in prison in 1967.

Left: Ilse Koch on the witness stand in 1947.  She was  seven months pregnant and the only woman brought before the American Military Tribunals held at Dachau.

The Yiddish author also mentions the “six million Jewish martyrs” … in 1954. This number emerged from the Nuremberg Tribunals, but we know that claims of “six million Jewish victims” goes all the way back to the 1890’s.

All this and more was cut out for the French La Nuit (which, remember, was written by Wiesel) and the English versions which were taken from the French. As has been noted by Jewish commentators themselves, the Yiddish writer is an angry, politically-minded religious Jew who expected, or wished, the world to have been transformed by the travail of the Jews during WWII. He is bitterly disappointed. There is more in this final chapter of the Yiddish book that doesn’t appear in the French or English versions. Here is just one passage:

 Dreams of truth, of freedom are false dreams for men. Visions of justice and equality are false visions for men. Man is: the struggle for bread, for meat; man is: the struggle to satisfy one’s own instincts.

Man is instinct to the core.  Flesh to the core.  And not heart.  And not spirit.  And not morality.

I learned that in Buchenwald. And what one learns in such conditions is without a doubt the truth, the purest truth.  For man can really know man only in extreme conditions, when he has thrown away from himself all masks, social and psychological, and appears before us naked, as he is in truth.

In Buchenwald I saw the true face of man.  The face of a human animal, which is worse than a true animal. O God, woe is you, woe is man, how trifling and puny.  Ought you to even exist, if the son of Adam was made in your image!

God . . . I had ceased to believe in his existence.  But despite that, I continued to believe in his evil. (UdV, P 240-41)

Was this written by Elie Wiesel? If it was, he is a man who has put on his own mask to play the game of Jewish vengence against the goyim persecutors of his people. In other parts of Night, Wiesel writes of losing his faith in a caring God, of no longer following his religion—but later he denied that is true, even though he wrote it! But this passage in Un di velt is too passionate to dismiss as merely a passing sense of discouragement. That is, of course, unless it is just a literary construct and doesn’t reflect any truth of the author.

What does it all mean?

The title of this two-part article is “What Changes were made to Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Why.” I didn’t promise to solve the mystery of the author of Un di velt hot geshvign, but I did hope I might do so, or at least eliminate some contenders.

I confess I expected there to be more difference between the Yiddish and the French books than it turns out to be. It is now clear that La Nuit was taken directly from Un di velt, although that doesn’t mean they were written by the same person. However, that is the greater likelihood unless it can be proven otherwise. Similarly, if Elie Wiesel is the author of Un di velt, it doesn’t mean he was in the camps. The fact that the books are filled with errors argues against it.

Night is a novel

It’s difficult to come to any certainties when the material we have to work with is so internally inconsistent and when there are several versions of it—similar in some ways to the many versions of the Anne Frank Diary. But we can conclude for certain that Night only works as a novel, not as an autobiography—no matter how much the Jewish spin doctors say that a memoir, to be a work of “great literature,” must include some fictional flights of fantasy. Nowhere does Night fit the facts. Even with wife Marion’s changes in 2006, it couldn’t be pulled together enough to make a convincing true-life testimony. And we know how many of these “survivor novels” there are around. It’s not like many other hopefuls didn’t have the same idea!

The Lazar-Lázár Riddle

In spite of all the above, I would like to propose a hypothetical scenario, one that I am not endorsing, for obvious reasons, but that does have the value of answering one of the more ignored aspects of this riddle, namely the way the 31-year-old Lazar Wiesel disappeared at the same time the 16-year-old Lázár Wiesel appeared. This cannot be denied. Thirty-one-year-old Lazar arrived at Buchenwald in January; sixteen-year-old Lázár left there in July. The easiest explanation for this is that Lazar wanted to have the papers of a 16-year-old Buchenwald orphan so he could be sent to France. In the confusion of the last months of the war and the immediate post-war period, this kind of thing became more possible.  Such an explanation may sound a little far-fetched, but is it any harder to swallow than Elie Wiesel not having the tattoo (Auschwitz ID number) that he says he has? Or Elie Wiesel not having his own Buchenwald identification number, but “borrowing” a dead man’s (Pavel Kun, 2 years older than Elie) right before, or after, liberation? These things don’t make sense. Nor does the fact that in La Nuit Elie Wiesel wrote that his father died on Jan. 28, 1945, while in the Yiddish book that he also claims to have written as his own “testimony” the date is Feb. 2nd?  Or that he wrote that the Russian Army took over the Auschwitz complex two days after its evacuation, which everyone knows is false?

Elie Wiesel even wrote in Night that his foot was operated on right before the evacuation of Auschwitz, while in his later real memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea (pp 89-90), he flat-out recalled it as his knee, something that could not be mis-remembered. I could list many of these senseless “mistakes,” many of which I have written about in earlier articles.

There is something that doesn’t fit well into this Lazar-Lázár hypothesis, though—that is, that we have pictures of the real Elie Wiesel in France at the Jewish welfare orphanage, OSE. But how did he get through a year at Auschwitz and Buchenwald with no records of his being there … and a poor memory of what occurred and when?  Did he somehow manage to attach himself to the Buchenwald transport with the stolen identity papers? But also, there are other ways he could have come to be at the Ecouis homes in France  than in the children’s transport from Buchenwald. Just as there are other ways he could have come into possession of the Yiddish Un di velt without writing it himself.

Was Elie Wiesel in the camps?

My answer is still no. Wiesel could have been in some camps in some capacity under some auspices, but he is not telling the truth about what camp experience he did have. That means Hilda Wiesel Kudler is also not telling the truth but is standing by her brother. She says at the end of her bitter testimony to the Shoah Foundation, “I will not forget, and I will not forgive.” Have you ever wondered why Elie has not contributed a videotaped testimony to the Spielberg/USC Shoah Foundation library?

Wiesel’s other sister, who changed her name to Beatrice from Batia, never wrote or testified  a word about it. She did go to work for Jewish organizations in Germany, however, immediately after the war, helping Jews to emigrate to wherever they wanted to go, including Palestine. The whole family were committed Zionists, as were most Eastern European/Russian Jews who were able to flood into the West because of the war. ‘Bea’ finally got her own papers to emigrate to Canada.

Left: Elie Wiesel with his older sisters Bea (left) and Hilda (right) in Paris after the war, exact date unknown.

A Jewish organization, Sharit Ha-Platah, gathered names of Jews who were liberated from Dachau and it’s many sub-camps and published them in 1946. This is the only record so far found with the names of Hilda and Beatrice Wiesel, and it is a self-identified list of Jews by Jews, not an official German record of forced laborers or prisoners. So the hard evidence for the Wiesel family is not there. It doesn’t mean they weren’t, however; it’s  just that we’re left with believing what they say, because we want to or because we’re expected to.

The easiest option is to go along with Elie Wiesel’s story that he was in those camps, and question his credibility from other angles, such as the in-credible stories he tells. This is what revisionists had done before Nikolaus Grüner came along and released documents he had obtained from Buchenwald and the correspondence he had with the archivists there. These documents cannot be ignored, in spite of what other nonsense Grüner writes in his book Stolen Identity. These documents have caused a “sea change” in revisionism about Elie Wiesel, to the extent that it can be divided between pre-Grüner and post-Grüner research and writing.

Because of these documents, it is up to Elie Wiesel to come forth and answer questions about them. But being that he is completely unprepared to do so, this job has been given to his surrogates—Professor Waltzer for one. Kenneth Waltzer promised, with a lot of bombast, that he would produce proof that Elie is Lazar and that Shlomo is Abraham, but for a year now he has failed to produce it, or even say anything more about it. He has also failed to come out with his promised book, “The Rescue of Children and Youths at Buchenwald,” which was to include Elie Wiesel. In the opinion of this writer, Waltzer is as big a fraud as Wiesel, selling emotion and sentimentality instead of factual history. They are both supported with professorships at well-funded universities.

So, back to the main question: Was Elie Wiesel in Auschwitz and Buchenwald?  As I said, my answer is still no … and no one should accept that he was without some further explanation from him, during which he subjects himself to questions. If he’s genuine, he can certainly withstand questions. That, however, is not going to happen because … fill in your own answer.

Elie Wiesel has kept the details of his life before 1955 vague. He has managed to prevent unwanted questions from being asked of him. He hides behind a stated aversion to “holocaust deniers” so that anyone who is not a 100% believer is not welcome in his company. He gets away with the ‘moral outrage’ he professes toward anyone who doubts, thus no interviewer, reporter, writer, academic, student or even President dares to doubt in his presence. It works like a charm.

Endnotes

1.  Danuta Czech,  Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939-1945.  New York: Henry Holt, 1997

2.  APMO, D-Bu 3/17, pp. 18-85, 87 (transport list as cited by Czech in Auschwitz Chronicle)

3.  Hilda was obviously unaware that the march itself was only 24 hours, probably because she had heard so many false and exaggerated stories about “endless days of marching” that proliferate in survivor stories.

4.  Harry James Cargas, ed.  Voices from the Holocaust, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993.  pp. 116-22.

On Tuesday, January 17, 2006, Amazon.com announced that it was changing the categorization of a new translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night from novel to memoir.

Amazon would also revise the editorial description of the original edition to make clear that they consider the book a memoir, not a novel. “We hope to make these changes as quickly as possible,” said Jani Strand, a spokeswoman for the online retailer. The day before, Oprah Winfrey had announced that Night was her latest book club choice, displacing her previous selection, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

The sudden switch from fiction to non-fiction caused some discussion and questions, which Strand brushed away by saying,  “Amazon.com’s data source for the Oprah Book Club edition of Night inaccurately classified the book as fiction.” She declined to offer details. The book, re-classified as “Autobiography” and blessed by Oprah, was already No.3 on Amazon.com as of that Tuesday afternoon! Wiesel, interviewed later with his literary agent Georges Borchardt, insisted they had never portrayed it as a novel.

But the publisher did.1 There has been confusion about the question for so long—even Wiesel’s defenders have to admit it. Ruth Franklin, in her 2011 book, A Thousand Darknesses, wrote: “Unfortunately, Night is an imperfect ambassador for the infallibility of the memoir, owing to the fact that it has been treated very often as a novel—by journalists, by scholars, and even by its publishers.”2  On Night’s Wikipedia page it has long been described as autobiography, memoir, novel—yes, all three. How long will that continue? As long as there are editions of Night that still sport those labels, one assumes.

 Left: Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel pose together at the  Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Award Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on May  20, 2007.  Winfrey was honored  with  the  Humanitarian   Award for “positively impacting people all over the world, especially children.”  One year earlier, she had selected Wiesel’s “Night” for her popular book club “pick” which sent it immediately to the top of the national bestseller lists.

As for Wiesel and Borchardt, they answered questions about differences in the text of the new edition by saying they were not significant enough to justify raising questions. The next day, Wiesel’s wife Marion, the translator of the new edition of Night, said in an interview that among the changes was a reference to the age of the book’s narrator when he arrives in 1944 at Birkenau, the entry point for Auschwitz.

“At no point did this change the meaning and the fact of anything in the book,” Marion Wiesel said. She explained it this way:  The narrator tells a fellow prisoner that he is “not quite 15.” But the scene takes place in Spring 1944. Mr. Wiesel, born on Sept. 30, 1928, would have already been 15, going on 16. So in the new edition, she changed it to “15.” Whaaaa? She changed the age as it was written in the Yiddish to fit Elie Wiesel, who was fifteen and a half at that time and would not have written “not quite 15.” What is written in the Yiddish original, Un di velt hot geshvign, we also find in the original Night. I will add that if your birthday is still four months away, you don’t say you are “not quite” your next age, especially when you are young. Marion tried to joke it away, telling reporters “I kidded Elie and told him, ‘I don’t think you can add.’”

But that particular change, rather than insignificant, was one of the major reasons that a new translation was undertaken. There are other quite significant changes in the new edition that will be enumerated in this article. When you learn what they are, you can decide for yourself if you think they are insignificant.

Right: Marion Wiesel is the translator of the 2006 edition of  Night. Here, in 2010, she attends an after party at The Monkey Bar for Oliver Stone’s new “South of the Border” New York premiere at Cinema 21.

Wiesel wrote a Preface to the New Translation, something he didn’t have in the original La Nuit or Night.

In his preface, Wiesel begins: “Why did I write it? … so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness …”

He continues in this vein—typical Wiesel mystical-religious style. However, in his only description of the writing process of this book—the typing of the 862 pages which he titled Un di velt hot geshvign, according to his later memoir—it is hard to believe that he was in such a state of mind. He writes in All Rivers Run to the Sea that during this time in Paris he is busy with his newspaper job and contacts; also involved in a love affair with a woman named Hanna. He embarks on a major journalistic assignment in Brazil, sent by his editor, taking along a friend to keep him company on the ship’s crossing. They both get free tickets from a “resourceful Israeli friend”—these benefactors are usually unnamed. As the voyage begins, he says his mind is dwelling on Hanna and whether he should take the marriage step that she had asked for.

I can’t imagine an atmosphere less conducive to writing about what he describes as “the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history.” But he continues very matter-of-factly in All Rivers, “During the crossing I wrote my testimony …” and in one short paragraph tells us all he thought important to say about it. Moreover, he has never elaborated on it since!

In the new preface, Wiesel writes that in retrospect he doesn’t know what he wanted to achieve with his words, but then he comes up with something: “I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them.” He needed to “invent a new language.” He is not speaking of an actual language, like German, French or English—but a language of survivors, or for survivors. Wiesel writes that common words like “hunger—thirst—fear—transport—selection—fire—chimney … all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else.” Really? He does not explain how that is so. But Wiesel has tried to create the idea of holocaust survivors as a special class, set apart, who know things others do not know, and can never understand—”Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.”

Wiesel describes his writing as slow!  “Writing in my mother tongue (Yiddish) … I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right.” This contrasts totally with his description in his memoir All Rivers Run to the Sea (p. 238-40)  that he wrote the original Yiddish manuscript fast and feverishly without re-reading!

Why a new translation of Night after 45 years of success with the old one?

Here again, Wiesel hedges in the preface and doesn’t have a convincing answer. He says his wife Marion has translated other books for him, and “knows his voice better than anyone else.” He says he didn’t pay enough attention to the original English translation by Stella Rodway—after his first reading of Night from the publisher, he never read it again. As for Mrs. Wiesel: “Fluent in French, she had never read the English version,” she said. But good news! Elie Wiesel Cons The World has found a translator and now has large portions of the Yiddish book translated into English. We can compare the real 245-page original to both the 1960 English translation from the French by Stella Rodway and the 2006 English translation done by Marion Wiesel.

In doing so, we have made two important discoveries.

First, Stella Rodway’s 1960 English translation of Night is an accurate rendition of the French text of La Nuit, as originally published in 1958.  That means that if there are any “errors” in the Night story, they weren’t put there by Stella Rodway.

Second, when we compare the three texts—the original version of Night, as translated by Rodway, the “corrected” 2006 translation by Marion Wiesel, and the 1955 Yiddish original of Un di velt hot geshvign—we find that the “errors” brought up by Marion Wiesel are for the greater part what was actually written in the original Yiddish book, though usually in more detail there.

In other words, the 1955 Yiddish version, the 1958 French version, and the 1960 English version generally agree—only the “corrected” 2006 translation is different.  So, are these really errors of translation that Marion Wiesel is fixing for us?  Or are they not simply problems for Elie Wiesel?  Under close scrutiny, the Elie Wiesel narrative has huge holes which bring up embarrassing questions, and this is what Marion Wiesel’s new translation was meant to head off.

Left: Original Night cover, 1960, features the title, while the author’s name is exceptionally small and insignificant. Francois Mauriac’s forward is featured.  In 2006, the author becomes the “title,” i.e. the main selling point, and Mauriac is no longer mentioned, although his forward remains in the book.

A Comparison of the 1960 original with the 2006 new version.

Following are the most “significant” differences I have found between the Stella Rodway 1960 translation and the Marion Wiesel 2006 translation. To make as clear a case as possible, I begin with the Yiddish [UdV] and its French translation La Nuit [LN], followed by the Stella Rodway English translation [SR]. Finally, Marion Wiesel’s revised translation [MW]. The word or phrase being compared is in boldface. Number one has already been written about in When Did Elie Wiesel Arrive at Auschwitz?

1.  The Saturday before Pentecost … or two weeks before?

UdV Page 22: Geshen iz dos Shbth far Shbw’wth. A friling-zun hot oysgegosn ir likht un varemkeyt iber der gorer velt un oykh iber geto …  /  It happened Saturday [Sabbath] before Shavuot. The springtime sun had spread its light and warmth over the whole world, and even over the ghetto. . . .

LN Page 29: Le samedi précédant la Pentecôte, sous un soleil printanier, les gens se promenaient insouciants à travers les rues grouillantes de monde / The Saturday preceding Pentecost …

SR Page 23:  On the Saturday before Pentecost, in the Spring sunshine, people strolled carefree and unheeding, through the swarming streets.

MW Page 12:  Some two weeks before Shavuot (Pentecost). A sunny spring day, people strolled seemingly carefree through the crowded streets.

The Yiddish, the French and the original English versions agree—it was the Saturday before the festival of Pentecost/Shavuot—but Marion Wiesel’s new edition sets that date back by two whole weeks. This is important because, as the story continues, it was later on the following day that the Jews of Sighet were forced to leave their homes in preparation for their eventual deportation:  “The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely. We were to leave street by street, starting the following day.”

So Mrs.Wiesel was NOT correcting errors in the English translation, but changing the text to fit the reality of when the Hungarians from Sighet arrived at Birkenau.  Pentecost was on Sunday, May 28, 1944. The “Saturday before Pentecost” is thus May 27. Some two weeks before is May 14.

Un di velt hot geshvign, La Nuit and the Rodway translation all have Eliezer’s family leaving on the final journey to Auschwitz around June 2nd, six days after Pentecost/Shavuot, which was a Friday. However, they also agree that “Saturday, the day of rest, was chosen for our expulsion.” So it’s necessary for us to add another day to the family’s stay in the small ghetto to make the chronology work.  On Saturday, then, the Jews are marched to the synagogue and spend the night there; in the morning, Sunday June 4, they board the train: “The following morning [Sunday], we marched to the station, where a convoy of cattle wagons was waiting. [… ] We were on our way.”  Four days and three nights on the train (according to the description in Night) makes their arrival date June 6, 1944, around midnight.

But this is not only long after the prisoner number A7713—which Elie Wiesel supposedly received at Auschwitz, and still (again, supposedly!) has tattooed on his left arm—had been given out, but also long after the last transport left from Sighet.  Indeed, there were no transports from the town after May, according to official records.

Marion Wiesel did not mention this one to the reporters; nor did Elie speak of it in his preface to his wife’s translation. But it was discovered by our translator. Marion Wiesel’s arbitrary “correction” allows Eliezer’s family to leave on May 21 and to arrive  by May 24 (just before midnight!) thus making it possible for Eliezer to receive the registration number A7713. This is a very significant change, probably the most significant in her entire new English translation.

An added note: This interesting passage is on page 27 of Un di velt, but is not included in the shorter French or English Night:

We had opportunities and possibilities to hide with regular goyim and with prominent personalities. Many non-Jews from the surrounding villages had begged us, that we would come to them. There were bunkers available for us in villages or in the mountains. But we had cast aside all proposals. Why? Quite simple: the calendar showed April 1944 and we, the Jews of Sighet, still knew nothing about Treblinka, Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

Now we have April as the general time of deportation!  So according to the timeline we find in Un di velt, Eliezer and his family left Sighet some time in June, while the calendar on their wall still said April . . .  and in the meantime, we know from official Auschwitz records that the deportations actually occured in the last two weeks of May.  The person who wrote this knew nothing about the real deportation dates for the Sighet Jews.

2.  Copulating on the train … or just caressing?

UdV Page 47:  Tsulib der engshaft hobn a sakh instinktn zikh dervekt in kerper.  Erotishe instinktn, un untern forhang fun der nakht hobn yungeleyt un froyen zikh gelozn bahersht durkh di oyfgereytste chwshym zeyere.

Ot der ershter rezultat fun umglik: erotishe freyheyt.  Di shpanung fun di letste teg hot itst gezukht a veg vi oystsulodn zikh un der leychtster iz geven – an erotisher.

Di erotishe stsenes hobn nisht dervekt keyn protestn mtsd di eltere Yidn.  Zey hobn farmakht oyern un oygn, zikh gemakht nisht zen un nisht hern.  In moment fun schnh faln avek di keytn fun der konventsioneler moral.  Mentshn hobn zikh getrakht: ver veys vos der morgn iz “lwl tsu brengen?  Zol yugnt oysnutsn dem heynt, oystsapn fun im dem letstn hn’h-tropn . . .

In English: Because of the crowding, a host of instincts awoke in [people’s] bodies.  Erotic instincts – and beneath the curtain of night young men and women let themselves be ruled by their aroused senses.

And so the first result of misfortune: erotic freedom.  The stress of the last days now sought a way to discharge itself, and the easiest was – an erotic one.

The erotic scenes did not arouse any protests from the older Jews.  They closed their ears and eyes, and forced themselves not to see and hear.  In the moment of danger, the chains of conventional morality fall away.  People thought to themselves: who knows what the morning is likely to bring?  Youth must seize the day, squeeze from it the last drops of pleasure . . .

LN Page 45: Libérés de toute censure sociale, les jeunes se laissaient aller ouvertement à leurs instincts et à la faveur de la nuit, s’accouplaient au milieu de nous, sans se préoccuper de qui que ce fût, seuls dans le monde.  Les autres faisaient semblant de ne rien voir.

SR Page 34:  “Free from all social constraint, the young people gave way openly to instinct, taking advantage of the darkness to copulate in our midst, without caring about anyone else, as though they were alone in the world. The rest pretended not to notice anything.”

MW Page 23:  “Freed of normal constraints, some of the young let go of their inhibitions and, under cover of darkness, caressed one another, without any thought of others, alone in the world. The others pretended not to notice.”

Elie Wiesel did not mention this change in his preface to the new English translation by his wife, but he did give quite a lengthy explanation (humorous to us) in the preface he wrote for the new French edition. This is what he said there:

Thanks to her, it was possible for me to correct an incorrect expression or impression here and there.  An example: I describe the first night-time voyage in the sealed cars, and I mention that certain persons had taken advantage of the darkness to commit sexual acts.  That’s false. In the Yiddish text, I say that “young boys and girls allowed themselves to be mastered by their excited erotic instincts.”  I have checked among many absolutely trustworthy sources.  In the train, all the families were still together.  A few weeks of the ghetto could not have degraded our behavior to the point of violating customs, mores and ancient laws.  That there may have been some clumsy touching, that is possible.  But that was all.  Nothing went any further.  But then, why did I say that in Yiddish, and allow it to be translated into French and English?  The only possible explanation: it is myself I am speaking of.  It is myself that I condemn.  I imagine that the adolescent that I was then, in the throes of puberty even if profoundly pious, could not resist such erotic imaginings, enriched by the physical proximity between men and women.

The original French : Grâce à elle, il me fut permis de corriger çà et là une expression ou une impression erronées. Exemple : j’évoque le premier voyage nocturne dans les wagons plombés et je mentionne que certaines personnes avaient profité de l’obscurité pour commettre des actes sexuels. C’est faux. Dans le texte yiddish je dis que « des jeunes garçons et filles se sont laissés maîtriser par leurs instincts érotiques excités. » J’ai vérifié auprès de plusieurs sources absolument sûres. Dans le train toutes les familles étaient encore réunies. Quelques semaines de ghetto n’ont pas pu dégrader notre comportement au point de violer coutumes, moeurs et lois anciennes. Qu’il y ait eu des attouchements maladroits, c’est possible. Ce fut tout. Nul n’est allé plus loin. Mais alors, pourquoi l’ai-je dit en yiddish et permis de le traduire en français et en anglais? La seule explication possible: c’est de moi-même que je parle. C’est moi-même que je condamne. J’imagine que l’adolescent que j’étais, en pleine puberté bien que profondément pieux, ne pouvait résister à l’imaginaire érotique enrichi par la proximité physique entre hommes et femmes.

Is this convincing, dear readers? Consider that the narrator of Un di velt says exactly the opposite of what Wiesel tries to present in his new French preface: the first result of a few weeks in the ghetto was erotic freedom, which was acted out in front of everyone in the train. And the “erotic instincts” that the youths let themselves be “ruled by” clearly must have involved sexual intercourse—why else would everyone have needed to shut their eyes and ears so tightly?

The Elie Wiesel of 2006 (and perhaps the Hasidic rebbes had something to do with this?) wants us to believe in the inviolable sanctity of the Jews’ “customs, mores and ancient laws,” and also in their innate respect for their elders and one another, but he is directly contradicted by what are, we are told, his own words of fifty years ago : “In the moment of danger, the chains of conventional morality fall away.”  Which Wiesel do we believe?

And Ruth Franklin (right), senior editor at The New Republic,  has the temerity to insist (in her 2006 review article) that “his [Elie’s] original suggestion that couples “copulated” in the cattle cars on the way to Auschwitz  . . .  was always a gross mistranslation of the original Yiddish.”  We’ve shown you here that it isn’t.

3.  Not yet fifteen … or fifteen?

UdV Page 63 : Yingl, vi alt bistu? fregt mir a heftling.  Zeyn pnym iz geven in der fintster, ober zeyn kol iz geven a mids, a varems. Nokh nisht keyn 15 yor, hob ikh geentfert. 

“Kid, how old are you?” a prisoner asked me.  His face was in darkness, but his voice was tired and warm. “Not yet 15 years,” I answered.

LN Page 54:  Hé, le gosse, quel âge as-tu?  C’était un détenu qui m’interrogeait.  Je ne voyais pas son visage, mais sa voix était lasse et chaude.  “Pas encore quinze ans.” / Not yet 15 years.

SR Page 39: “Here, kid, how old are you?” It was one of the prisoners who asked me this. I could not see his face, but his voice was tense and weary. “I’m not quite fifteen yet.”

MW Page 30:  “Hey, kid, how old are you?” The man interrogating me was an inmate. I could not see his face, but his voice  was weary and warm.  “Fifteen”

This very important passage was discussed above. I think the reader would agree that “not yet 15″ can mean even farther from the age of 15 than “not quite fifteen.” It can mean 14 ½. However, it is a minor point that I will not emphasize. What we can clearly see is that Marion Wiesel has changed the author’s original words to fit them to her husband’s age in Spring 1944.

4.   April … or May?

UdV Page 83:  A sheyner April-tog iz es geven. A frilings-rich in der luft.  In English:  It was a beautiful April day. A scent of spring in the air.

LN Page 69: C’était une belle journee d’avril.  Des parfums de printemps flottaient dans l’air.  Le soleil baissait vers l’ouest.

SR Page 49:  It was a beautiful April day. The fragrance of spring was in the air. The sun was setting in the west.

MW Page 40:  It was a beautiful day in  May. The fragrances of spring were in the air. The sun was setting.

(See again When Did Wiesel Arrive) Once more, the original Night as translated by Stella Rodway agrees with the Yiddish and the French; Marion Wiesel arbitrarily changed April to May, yet said her translation did not “change the meaning or the fact of anything in the book”  … what she calls a “significant change.” Well, this is a significant change, and for the same reason as given in number 1 above.

5.  Himmler … or “Reichsfuehrer Himmler?”

UdV Page 124-5:  “In nomen fun Himler . . . der heftling num’ . . . hot gegnbet . . . bsh”thn luft-alarm . . . loytn gezets, paragraf . . . iz der heftling num’ . . . farurteylt tsum toyt!  Zol dos zeyn a lere un a beyshpil far ale heftlingen . . .”

“In the name of Himmler . . . prisoner number . . . stole . . .  during the air raid . . . according to the law, paragraph . . . prisoner number . . . is condemned to death.  May this be a lesson and an example for all prisoners.”

LN Page 100:  “Au nom de Himmler ... Le détenu N^o… a dérobé pendant l’alerte… ”

SR Page 68:  “In the name of Himmler … prisoner Number … stole during the alert … According to the law … paragraph …prisoner Number … is condemned to death. May this be a warning and an example to all prisoners.”

MW Page 62:  “In the name of  Reichsfuehrer Himmler … prisoner number … stole during the air raid … according to the law … prisoner number … is condemned to death. Let this be a warning …..”

Again, the Yiddish and the original Night agree.  However, no trained member of the SS, or even the Wehrmacht, would ever have shown such disrespect as to use Himmler’s name in such a formal context without his full title: Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler.  Marion Wiesel tried to fix the error by adding “Reichsfuehrer,” but she still gets it wrong: you don’t drop the “SS.”  On its own, this tells us that the speech was an imaginary one  invented by the author (whoever that is), someone who was never present at such a scene. Indeed, lack of knowledge about how the SS functioned in the camps is evident throughout the book. For example, the SS did not normally go inside the barracks; everything inside was handled by the kapos.

 Left: Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler

6. Ten days and ten nights … or just “days and nights”

UdV Page 207:  Tsen teg un tsen nekht hot gedoyert di reyze. / Ten days and ten nights the trip lasted.

LN Page 155:   Dix jours, dix nuits de voyage.  Il nous arrivait de traverser des localités allemandes.

SR Page101:  Ten days, ten nights of traveling.  Sometimes we would pass through German townships.

MW Page 100:  There followed days and nights of traveling. Occasionally we would pass through German towns.

In January of 1945, as the advancing Red Army approached Auschwitz, a decision was made to evacuate, sending the prisoners to other camps in Germany.  Evacuation of the Monowitz (Auschwitz III) camp, to which Eliezer and Father had previously been transferred, began at 6 p.m. on January 18. The prisoners were given extra clothing and food—bread to carry with them. They also had whatever food they had saved up. After marching all night during a snowfall, they rested in the morning in an old brick factory. In late afternoon, they began again and reached Gleiwitz camp in a few hours [night, Jan. 19]; they then remained in Gleiwitz barracks for three days. On the 22nd  they went to the train stop and waited until evening. They were brought bread for the journey. The convoy set out

From there, as we see above, the Yiddish, the 1958 French and 1960 English versions agree on the trip lasting ten days and nights. But Marion Wiesel removes the number ten because it makes Eliezer’s timeline for the death of his father on Jan. 28/29 completely impossible. Another very significant change. Ten days and nights from the night of Jan. 22nd is the night of Feb 1, 1945.

This shows that the author of Un di velt knew nothing about the transport that arrived at Buchenwald on January 26 with 3000 prisoners from Auschwitz. This is the transport that, according to existing official records, brought Lazar and Abraham Wiesel to Buchenwald, who were registered at the camp there on  . . . January 26, 1945! (See Buchenwald Archivist Cannot ID Elie Wiesel, How True to Life is Wiesel’s description of Buchenwald, and Gigantic Fraud Carried Out.)

7. Fifteen … or sixteen?

UdV Page 213:  I was fifteen years old then. Do you understand—fifteen? Is it any wonder that I, along with my generation, do not believe either in God or in man; in the feelings of a son, in the love of a father. Is it any Wonder that I cannot realize that I myself experienced this thing, that my childish eyes had witnessed it?  (This passage from Moshe Spiegel’s stand-alone translation of Chapter Six of Un di velt hot geshvign, published as “The Death Train” in the 1968 volume Anthology of Holocaust Literature.)

LN Page 158:  J’avais quinze ans. / I was fifteen.

SR Page 103:  I was fifteen years old.

MW Page 102:  I was sixteen.

In the original versions, Eliezer repeats that he is fifteen years old in January 1945. Elie Wiesel’s birth date is Sept. 30, 1928 so on that day in 1944 he became sixteen years old, making him 16 years and 4 months when this particular event on the train to Buchenwald occurred in late January 1945. Once again, Marion Wiesel simply changes the age as she did before – if Elie was actually sixteen at that time, then Eliezer, the character in the book, must be too!

In Part Two, I will construct the timeline of the events in Buchenwald following the arrival of Eliezer and his father, and other details about Buchenwald. What will we find out?  Stay tuned.

Endnotes:

1. On the back cover of the original hardcover Night,  with the black & white striped jacket (as pictured here), it is printed “Literature” as the classification.  

2.  Ruth Franklin,  A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, Oxford University Press, 2011,  pp 71-72.

Unfortunately, Night is an imperfect ambassador for the infallibility of the memoir, owing to the fact that it has been treated very often as a novel—by journalists, by scholars, and even by its publishers.  Lawrence Langer, in his landmark study The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, notes that Night “continues to be classified and critically acclaimed as a novel, and not without reason.” . . .

Nonetheless, in 1997 Publishers Weekly columnist Paul Nathan had to issue a correction apologizing for referring to the book as an “autobiographical novel”; he had been misled, he said, by the entry on Wiesel in The International Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Biography.  In response, the correction itself was challenged by the director of Penguin Reference Books, publishers of the biography dictionary, who cited half a dozen sources to the effect that Night was in fact a novel.  Together with most critics, Gary Weissman, who recounted the above history in his book Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, seems to concur with Ernst Pawel’s remark in an early magazine survey of Holocaust fiction, that “the line between fact and fiction, tenuous at best, tends to vanish altogether in autobiographical novels such as Night.”  The hybrid terms used to describe it include “novel/autobiography,” “non-fictional novel,” “semi-fictional memoir,” “fictional-autobiographical memoir,” “fictionalized autobiographical memoir,” and “memoir-novel.

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”?

4 September 2011.

Samuel Crowell; The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes, and Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding; Nine-Banded Books, PO Box 1862, Charleston, WV 25327 (www.ninebandedbooks.com); 2011, 401 pp.

Carlo Mattogno; Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity, two vols.; The Barnes Review, PO Box 15877, Washington, DC 20003 (www.BarnesReview.org), 1-877-773-9077 toll free; 2010, 756 pp. total

These two very recent books evidence the maturity of the field of Holocaust revisionism.

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[i], Mattogno’s original article[ii], and the Butz-Mattogno exchange.[iii] 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. You will come away from the section I have discussed knowing more about the application of Zyklon at Auschwitz than you ever needed to know.

Much of Samuel Crowell’s book is about Auschwitz, though his aim is to consider all the major features of Holocaust legend; in that respect his work is comparable to my 1976 The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. His book is copiously documented. I read the whole volume, and am much happier with both Crowell’s conclusions and his means of reaching them than I am with Mattogno’s, on those matters common to both works. I believe Crowell’s work is of basic and abiding importance in untangling what I have called the “Hoax”.

Crowell has an additional objective missing in Mattogno. He presents a genesis of the legend, even examining the early 20^th century for cultural developments that could have given rise to fears of gas chambers. His main thrust appears to be (p. 151) “The gassing claim as a mass delusion . . . . as a cultural construct . . . . created by, and reinforced by, delusional pressures of social and cultural change as well as by censorship.” That is, the claim was created by society and history, or a natural evolution of society, rather than by intent of specific persons.

Here I shall, before coming to my main objection, criticize a major point in Crowell’s presentation, namely, his disdain for the “hoax” and “conspiracy” interpretations of the legend, though he gives limited approval to the hoax thesis (p 155):

It would probably be better to say that, if the claim is a hoax, then surely a hoax of limited participation, and we should emphasize the number of those deceived, rather than the small number of those deceiving.

Why? Everybody knows the number of those deceived, namely almost everybody, and the number of those deceiving is therefore necessarily small, and there remains only the questions who, how, and why, questions that this reviewer will further examine.

Earlier in the book Crowell advanced his theory with another concession (p. 42): “while we continue to maintain that most of the elements in the gassing story arose more or less spontaneously and were just as spontaneously believed, at Majdanek we are confronted with grim evidence of a deliberate Soviet hoax.” As for the claim of gas chambers at Auschwitz, he remarks (p. 133) “there is a strong likelihood of a Polish and Soviet communist hoax in developing this particular evidence.” The concession is most interesting in terms of who is missing as a perpetrator, whom I shall presently identify.

Later in the book he denigrates “conspiracy theory” much as our major media do (pp. 357ff):

. . . . the human mind will seek to create causal nexuses for events that seem arbitrary and capricious, especially when they are destructive on a grand scale. To this extent the human mind is always potentially schizophrenic: perceiving a world full of confusing and unpredictable action, yet understood by a mind that refuses to accept a lack of pattern or structure. When Einstein wrote to Max Born and declared that God “does not throw dice,” he was speaking not as a scientist but as Everyman.

I beg to differ: Einstein was speaking as a scientist to another scientist. His resistance as a scientist to much of modern physics, which his remark related to, is well known. Indeed finding “pattern or structure” in creating “causal nexuses for events that seem arbitrary and capricious”, though perceiving only “a world full of confusing and unpredictable action”, is called “science”.

As for definitions, that which is “confidential cooperation” to you may be “conspiracy” to me. That is, the notion of conspiracy depends on point of view. We may say my definition of conspiracy is “confidential cooperation Butz doesn’t like”.

We can agree with Crowell, for the sake of discussion, that “conspiracy theory”, as distinct from “conspiracy”, is a claim, not supported by evidence sufficient for proof, of the existence of some conspiracy. The lack of proof, of course, is the basis for the ridicule that our media heap on the dissident conspiracy theorists. Where I part with Crowell is on the value of conspiracy theory. While some conspiracy theories are of course ridiculous, the possibility of hypothesizing conspiracies is vital to arriving at truth.

Here is an example. A police inspector, trying to solve a crime, conjectures that two or more characters may have collaborated in that crime. How does he investigate the conjecture? An important feature of his conjecture would be a hypothesis on specifically how the two or more suspects collaborated to commit the crime, because that hypothesis would guide him in seeking evidence that would, if it is found, confirm the conjecture. Without the hypothesis, the investigation would be unguided. That hypothesis, of course, is a “conspiracy theory”. The police inspector has two luxuries: official investigative power and that he need not reveal his hypothesis until he has the proof.

Public debate on matters of general concern does not allow that; there is normally no way to test the theory other than by throwing it out into the public arena. Should those who suspected a conspiracy involving President Nixon, before the Watergate tapes were released, have kept their mouths shut? I don’t think so.

I argued in my Hoax book that the “Holocaust”, in its canonical “gas chamber” form, has Auschwitz as its center and the document I called the “WRB Report” (since it was first published by Henry Morgenthau’s War Refugee Board), at its foundation. I made it clear in Hoax, Ch. III, that the War Refugee Board was a Jewish operation designed to help Jews, despite the neutrality of its name.

A preliminary version of the WRB Report had been reported by the NY Times on 3 July 1944 and on 26 Nov. 1944 the Times reported publication of the Report by the WRB, more than two months before the Soviets captured Auschwitz.

The WRB Report is also sometimes referred to, today, as the “Auschwitz Protocol”. In the book and elsewhere I noted the strong presence of truth in the document, e.g. the transport lists, which well approximate those later published by the Auschwitz Museum and which, as I said at the end of my Ch. III,  “is not the sort of information escapees would carry out”. As for the rest of the WRB Report, it closely approximates the present orthodox presentation of the gas chamber yarn, according to which gas chambers employing Zyklon were integrated into the crematoria. The knowledgeable, and I stress “knowledgeable”, authors therefore gave us a hoax.

What does Crowell say about the WRB Report? Very little, but it is important. He considers the document USSR-8 presented by the Soviet Union at the big Nuremberg trial (the IMT), as the foundation of the legend (pp. 58ff), noting the WRB Report was not presented (p 62). However Crowell also remarks that the Soviet report was influenced by the WRB Report, and also by a 2 Feb. 1945 report by the Soviet journalist Boris Polevoi (p. 48). He does not note that Polevoi was a Jew on his mother’s side. The Soviet report, having been written a year after the WRB Report by the Soviets who had captured the camp and many of its documents, of course contained more detail, but the Soviets were well instructed beforehand on what they were supposed to find there.

Actually, one page of the WRB Report was put in evidence in the IMT trial[iv]. Moreover, the Höss testimony, given originally, and under duress, to Jewish interrogators while in British captivity, had far more impact in the trial and in the press, and well into the postwar years, than either the Soviet report or the WRB Report.[v] Crowell notes (p. 77) that Höss’ statements “speak with great authority to most historians”.

The relative inattention to the WRB Report at the IMT could have been due to a number of things, e.g. an impossibility of producing the authors, or a decision to let the Soviet Union star in this matter, or simply because Auschwitz was on territory conquered by the Soviet Union.

It may be asked, why must the happenings at the IMT settle this? A hoax need not be something presented in a trial, but I think Crowell is right to focus in this way on the IMT; it provided the basis for all future presentations of the legend. Indeed trials have always been crucial in advancing or supporting the legend, a situation that alone should arouse suspicion in reflective historians. A recent example is the Irving-Lipstadt trial (2000).

The WRB Report played a role in the Eichmann trial (1961). The names (Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler) later allegedly used by the two escapees were given there.[vi] Vrba was a cousin of Vera Atkins, who was to inspire the Miss Moneypenny character in the James Bond stories, but who was a British intelligence agent during the war, indeed one of Höss’ Jewish interrogators.[vii] Small world! Or perhaps we should say “All In the Family”. Vrba published his alleged memoirs in 1964 and testified at Ernst Zündel’s trial in Canada in 1985.[viii] It is the WRB Report that has had both a wartime and postwar life; the Soviet Union’s report has been forgotten. Interest in the WRB Report faded in the first three postwar decades but has risen in recent years. It is the foundation for what I called the Hoax and it is clear that it was created, and has been sustained, by the Jewish entity, especially in its Zionist manifestation, despite the many absurdities and contradictions in the accounts of Rudolf Vrba.

I have to add that I don’t know what individuals actually composed the WRB Report. What is clear is that it came from Jewish circles.

That brings us to my “main objection”: Crowell does not present the Jews as important actors in the genesis of the legend. Indeed they don’t do much more than get killed. There being no hoaxer identified in this book, it can be difficult to see a hoax.

Reconsider, as Crowell would have us, the Nuremberg trials. They were a Jewish festival, conducted under the auspices of the USA in the US zone of occupation in Germany. At the IMT, the Soviets, British and French were just guests in a US-staged show. President Franklin “Clear It With Sidney” Roosevelt[ix] was closely associated with the Jews. During the war he enlisted the support of the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky via their mutual friend the Jew Walter Winchell, then the most influential columnist in the US.[x] Roosevelt’s secret emissary to the dictator-gangster Fulgencio Batista in Cuba was Lansky.[xi]

Roosevelt tasked his close Jewish associate Samuel Rosenman to lay the foundation of the “war crimes” trials, fighting off a British preference to just shoot the Nazi leaders unceremoniously, in favor of the show that was eventually staged in Nuremberg.[xii] What the Soviet Union did there, with its variation or embellishment of the basic materials of the WRB Report, was part of this Jewish festival. The star of the show was Rudolf Höss, acting out a script written for him by Jews. I said much about the Jewish involvement in the Nuremberg trials in my Hoax book, especially in Chs. I, III, V.

What is sorely missing in Crowell’s book is the Jew as actor or, in terms Crowell quotes, as exercising “deliberate agency” (p. 358) in creating and sustaining the hoax. This absence seems to be deliberate. In discussing the various statements made by or attributed to Höss (pp. 75-83), Crowell references (note 298 on p. 76) Robert Faurisson’s paper, cited above, on the interrogations of Höss while in British custody. I consider Faurisson’s paper the basic study of the Höss testimony problem, but Crowell remarks with obvious disapproval that Faurisson preferred “to stress the Jewish identity” of the interrogators. I say “obvious disapproval” because only the unusual reader alert to such footnotes could infer from Crowell’s section that Höss’ tormentors were Jews. From that I must infer that Crowell considers it irrelevant or at least unimportant that the Höss testimony was obtained under duress applied by Jews. Moreover to Crowell it seems (p. 81) Höss’ interrogators were “acting more or less in good faith”!

In summary both the Crowell book and the Mattogno volumes, and probably Mattogno’s earlier works, are indispensable additions to the revisionist library, but both must be read with care and reserve, as indeed all historical works should. I have had to criticize Crowell’s treatment of the genesis of the legend, because I think it very seriously flawed. That does not diminish my admiration for his analysis of the documents purporting to prove the existence of “gas chambers”. It’s the bad things the book reviewer has to give space to; the author gives space to the good things.

In concluding I want to express my great satisfaction with developments of the past 40 years, at the outset of which I wandered alone in the desert. We are not yet in the land of milk and honey, but we are in a land of plenty and these books prove it.

On 30 June 2011 the following news item was published by PRNewswire:[1]

Sixty-six years after the notorious Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was liberated and the horrific crimes of Dr. Josef Mengele were first revealed, Alexander Historic Auctions of Stamford, Connecticut (an affiliate of Alexander Autographs, Inc., www.alexautographs.com) has obtained for auction all of the war criminal’s writings, including his autobiography describing his escape from Germany and life in South America, diaries, philosophical tracts, racial and political commentary, poetry, short stories, and travelogues. The archive is composed of over 3,300 pages of handwritten text, some illustrated, largely in bound journals, written while Mengele was in hiding in Paraguay and Brazil between 1960 and 1975.

The archive will be offered in Alexander’s July 21, 2011 auction of historic militaria and autographs.

[...].

The autobiographical material in this archive, about 25% of its content, is of such historical importance, it was quoted and paraphrased in the mid-1980′s by Bundt Magazine and by authors Gerald Posner and John Ware in their biography of Mengele. Bundt and Posner/Ware quoted excerpts very sparingly, leaving the vast majority of this material unpublished and but for Bundt and Posner/Ware, unviewed.

Writing in the third person, or using the pseudonym ‘Andreas,’ Mengele describes his capture by American forces, hiding on a farm while furtively meeting his wife, escape over the Brenner Pass to Italy, arrest, passage to Argentina, and life in Paraguay and Brazil. (…). He also offers his opinions on a myriad of subjects, including race-mixing, the Nuremburg war crimes trials, justification of the concentration camp system, and denial of the conditions at the camps.

[...].

Bill Panagopulos, president of Alexander Historic Auctions, has a strong opinion on the sale of the archive: ‘Scholarly institutions or historic collections should obtain these writings not as a ‘remembrance’ of a horrific period of world history, but more as a learning tool for future generations to recognize the psychopathic mentality that incited the Holocaust so that similar genocides are never repeated.’

What’s most intriguing in this newsreport is the statement that the Auschwitz doctor’s writings include “denial of the conditions at the camps”. What could this mean, exactly?

The very brief excerpts published by Gerald Posner and John Ware in their Mengele biography Mengele: The Complete Story[2] provide us with some clues in this respect.[3] Mengele did not deny that mass death occured at Auschwitz due to epidemics, malnutrition and other “natural causes” (Posner/Ware, p. 73):

“It is natural and understandable that the camps were suffering very bad hunger after all the problems and therefore I saw what was to be expected.”

According to a Munich pharmacist and his wife who met with him soon after the war, Mengele wanted to turn himself in, but was finally persuaded against it. To this couple Mengele declared his innocence (p. 67):

“I don’t have anything to hide. Terrible things happened at Auschwitz, and I did my best to help. One could not do everything. There were terrible disasters there. I could only save so many. I never killed anyone or hurt anyone. I can prove I am innocent of what they could say against me. I am building the facts for my defense. I want to turn myself in and be cleared at a trial.”

If this quote from memory is correct, then it seems unlikely that Mengele was referring to the use of homicidal gas chambers, because the systematic killing of innocent people in chemical slaughterhouses would not be a “disaster”, but pre-meditated mass murder. Epidemic outbreaks, however, could justly be termed “disasters”.

The defense that Mengele was reportedly building may well be included among the papers now to be auctioned off.

Elsewhere (p. 154) Mengele noted that)

“The political lie triumphs and time and history have been warped and bowed.”

This clearly indicates that Mengele believed that victors of WWII had rewritten the history of what transpired during the war in their own favor.

Then there is the title of one of the autobiographical texts, Fiat Lux, “Let there be light”. A suggested by Robert Faurisson, this title clearly implies that Mengele wished to shed light on what had actually transpired at Auschwitz.

If it is true that Mengele’s writings contain “denial of the conditions at the camps” then it seems most likely that “conditions” refer to either claims of gross mistreatment of prisoners in the form of torture, unlawful punishments etc, or to the allegation that Auschwitz functioned as an extermination camp.

One can only hope that the Mengele documents are purchased by an institution that does not place them behind lock and key, but prefer to reveal their contents to the world. After all, we should never underestimate the Holocaust industry’s tendency to shoot itself in the foot.

[1] “Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele’s Unknown Writings to be Auctioned”,

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/auschwitz-angel-of-death-josef-mengeles-unknown-writings-to-be-auctioned-124801054.html

[2] Gerald Posner, John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, McGraw-Hill, New York 1986.

[3] For more on this biography see my online review at: http://www.codoh.com/review/revmengele.html

The latest media/government/holo industry campaign has turned into a can of worms, but there is too much is at stake to retract it.

Does the public enjoy being fed fairy tales that serve the interests of the power elite? The answer must be yes, especially when it’s the kind that plays well with those who long for the “glory of Britain” in a time when Britain is becoming increasingly non-British. In order to soften the blow that via WWII the British not only lost their Empire but are losing their national sovereignty and also their racial distinctiveness, the alien government and media conspire to convince the people that doing so is a good and noble act … in Britain’s “best tradition.”

The Hoaxers: Denis Avey, the prize liar, is flanked by BBC producer Patrick Howse (left) and BBC World Service reporter Rob Broomby (right), at Number Ten Downing St. in London.

The two media men in the picture above admit they spent years hoping to verify the unlikely tale of Denis Avey, told by him to the BBC 60 years after the fact. They held on to it because for all mainstream government-connected media, new tales about the holocaust are worth their weight in gold.

Here was a living human being in his late 80’s with a bold story, but no proof he was telling the truth. Avey apparently did not know the name of the Jewish prisoner he “traded places with” in the early telling of his tale. If he had, the BBC would have known where to look for the man. Rob Broomby wrote in the March 16, 2010 BBC official newspaper Ariel (page 5), titled “How a BBC investigation found genuine ‘Hero of the Holocaust” that it was only when someone sent them a copy of a video interview made by a certain Ernie Lobet before his death in 2001, in which he recalled a British soldier he knew only as ‘Ginger’ who had smuggled cigarettes and chocolate from England to him inside Auschwitz, that they made the connection to Avey.

Here we have a problem because cigarettes, and maybe even chocolate at times, could be purchased in all the camps. In the Monowitz camp, working conditions were quite tolerable, and the Red Cross delivered packages to Jewish inmates right up to the point when Allied bombers began destroying all transports within Germany. If Lobethal knew where his sister lived (as he said he told Avey), he could himself have asked the Red Cross to look her up and ask her to send him packages. Although, it may have been a difficult request to fulfill since the BBC, with all its resources, could not find Lobethal’s sister Susana in the 2000’s until they went on a house-to-house search for her in person. Yet we’re to believe it was easy for Avey’s mother to contact her during the war.

Despite holes in the story, it is accepted

Avey and Susana Lobethal Timms both claim to have met “briefly” in 1945 when Denis returned from the war, according to Broomby. But Avey also says he was suffering from tuberculosis (highly contagious), exhaustion and post-traumatic stress and had to be hospitalized immediately and took two years to recover. I don’t believe that these two ever met before the BBC got them together in October 2009. It’s more likely that Howse and Broomby had met with Susana and she agreed to go along with the story, or simply agreed to the story. The explanation Avey and Timms give for not knowing each other—that “they lost touch” after 1945—is not persuasive. Susana would surely have made the effort to notify Avey that Ernst was alive, and then was moving to America, if all this were really true. If it were true, Ernst would want to thank the man who “saved his life” if his sister knew who the man was.

Avey claims he was known as ‘Ginger’ because of his red hair. He first said he traded places with a Jewish prisoner he had gotten to know in their common workplace (Lobethal), but later changed it to a “Dutch Jew named Hans” who died shortly afterward. Was it because Lobethal, in his testimony on the video, had said not a word about trading places in the barracks for a night? If he were involved in such a dramatic event, it would certainly not have slipped his mind. But Lobethal only told of being given cigarettes.

This, however, didn’t deter Howse and Broomby from connecting dots that didn’t exist. Lobethal’s actual Shoah testimony is that a British PoW he knew as Ginger gave him 10 packs of cigarettes, and he used two packs to trade for heavy socks to wear with his boots. Avey’s story is that Ernst got his shoes resoled. Broomby wrote in the Ariel promo linked to above that Lobethal said he traded cigarettes for “favours” which “enabled him to get his shoes resoled,” and that “saved his life” But when I watched the video testimony, that’s not what he said. In any case, this brings up the question that if conditions were as bad inside the Monowitz camp as Avey says, who is doing skilled labor like resoling shoes for prisoners whom Avey says were only waiting to die? In his testimony for the Shoah Foundation, Lobethal did not describe conditions in his camp and barracks the way that Avey does.

Avey was set up to be the next Schindler

Between 2003 and the time Lobethal’s testimony was discovered, Avey was saying he had “broken into Auschwitz” and spent a couple of nights in the Jewish barracks to see what it was like. I don’t know of him saying that he provided a special Jewish prisoner-friend with cigarettes. I think he said he used cigarettes to bribe his way into the Jewish barracks. I am skeptical that the Shoah Foundation video of Lobethal’s testimony came to the BBC’s attention after and not before they began their search for Susana Timms. Broomby avoids giving a clear timeline. It’s possible that once they saw the Lobethal video, the two media men linked together the red-haired PoW Avey with Lobethal’s ‘Ginger’. It explains why they persevered in their search for Susana—she was the vital link (witness) necessary to tie the two men together.

Avey had already committed himself to the “breaking into Auschwitz” story; now he and the BBC added the “cigarettes-life-saving story” to that, even though Lobethal had said nothing about the former. That part of Lobethal’s testimony can be seen in this new book-selling propaganda video between 3-3:40 minutes. One wonders what else Lobethal said in his video testimony that we do not see.

The BBC kept mentioning Oskar Schindler in connection with Denis Avey, for example here and here, hoping to build another huge holo-icon, only this time British, and also use the comparison to publicize the motion picture that is planned

The role of the Holocaust Education Trust

The strong backing of this powerful organization, with its sinister influence on British politics, is key to the whole Avey phenomenon. In his acknowledgements in the book, Avey thanks Lord Janner, Karen Pollack and the team at the Holocaust Education Trust (HET) for their ongoing help and support. “Their work is beyond value.” He then thanks Gordon and Sarah Brown. Following this, a page is given over to The Holocaust Educational Trust to advertise its achievements and aim of making the Holocaust a permanent part of Britain’s “collective memory.”

On Jan. 25, 2010, when Avey first met with Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street, the Jewish Lord Janner was also in attendance. Janner proclaimed: “Denis Avey is a hero. He risked tremendous personal danger at Auschwitz to learn exactly what went on in that terrible place, and at the Holocaust Educational Trust we work to ensure that his efforts were not in vain - and that all young people learn about, remember and pass on to others the lessons of the horrors of the Holocaust.”

The HET was set up by Labour politicians and is aligned with them. It works to ensure their reelection. Grenville Janner is a member of Labour, was an MP for a time, and was President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the main representative body of British Jewry, from 1978 to 1984. He has been a key international figure in efforts to seek compensation and restitution for Holocaust victims. Along with chairing the Holocaust Educational Trust, he is vice president of the World Jewish Congress. He was instrumental in arranging the 1997 London Nazi Looted Gold conference.

Janner received (bought?) a life peerage as Lord Janner of Braunstone in 1997 and since sits on the Labour benches in the British House of Lords. The president of HET is Steven Rubin. One of the things they do to intimidate British politicians is to place a “Book of Commitment” every Holocaust Memorial Day in the Houses of Parliament and “invite” members to sign it. By doing so, they “honour the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust and pay tribute to the bravery of those who risked their lives to help the persecuted” –in other words, the signees publicly affirm their belief in the Jewish Holocaust. HET takes pictures of the more prominent MPs signing the book, such as Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg … each looking properly somber and obedient. (You can see these pictures on th fifth page) Do you think any MP would dare to not sign the “Book of Commitment?”

On July 2, 2010, after the General Election, the HET hosted the MP’s of all political parties, plus students and Holocaust survivors, at a special reception to mark the 10,000th participant in the ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ government-funded trips for high school students. The event was held in the Houses of Parliament.

HET chairman Lord Janner, Education Secretary Michael Gove, Lessons from Auschwitz student ambassadors Jack Boyce and Nadia Caney

John Bercow MP, Speaker of the House of Commons and HET chief executive Karen Pollock at the July 2010 reception.

Karen Pollock, as HET’s chief executive, writes regular essays published in the Guardian. Her Sunday May 17, 2009 opinion piece was devoted to the idea that if Yad Vashem in Israel honors “Righteous Gentiles” of many nationalities, these governments should also create an honor for them in their individual nations. There can’t be too many holocaust awards—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them is the desire of the Jewish organizations. The world will actually revolve around the “Holocaust” as the pivotal point in history; nothing will be more important.

Pollock began her essay with: “Finally the government is honoring British heroes who risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust” and ended it by reminding us, “As the European and local elections approach, we are again subjected to poisonous propaganda from the far right, who seek to extend an exclusive claim over “Britishness” and who purport to represent our country’s heritage. But the hatred and division they peddle is the very antithesis of what Britain stands for.”

This kind of propaganda is meant to shame Britishers into going along with the Jewish holocaust agenda. The very powerful Jews of Britian force holocaustianity down the throats of all British politicians, who don’t seems to mind the taste of it, however.

Here is Karen Pollock again (right), under all the make-up, at an HET fundraiser in 2010 that featured Denis Avey as speaker and raised almost half a million pounds, with Hannah Loftus (left).

The all-important elections

After Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s visit to Auschwitz on April 28, 2009 and prior to the June elections, the Telegraph newspaper reported that “Ministers are working on plans for a new award to honour British people who helped the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. The medal or other award would recognize acts of courage for those who saved Jews or other persecuted groups during the darkest days of the Second World War.” “Other persecuted groups” is added as a sop to the politicians, but in fact all those eventually chosen as ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ aided Jews. Of course, the HET plays a major role in the selection.

Following this media publicity, the 2009 local elections and European Parliament elections were held on June 4 in England. In 2010, the ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ awards ceremony took place at Downing Street on March 9. The publicity for the event highlighted Denis Avey’s swap story. On April 6, campaigning began for the British General Election. On May 6, the General Election was held.

Does this not make it clear that some obeisance and slavish offerings to Holocaustianity must always precede the elections in order to get on the good side of the powerful Jews? But now that Labour is out of power, will the Conservatives carry on in the same way?

Efforts to defend against the criticism are appearing

A recent article in the New York Post uses the word “hoax” to report on the growing disbelief in Avey’s bizarrely concocted story. The main objection most have is to the ‘swap’, which is necessary for the title of the book, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz, and is not something that can be dropped from the story.

The New York Post reports that the U.S. publisher Perseus did not return their call about whether they would conduct an investigation into the accuracy of the book’s claims. According to a reviewer of the book on Amazon UK, Hoddard & Staughton, the UK publisher, posted a rebuttal on their website on April 11 to Guy Walters’ April 9 Daily Mail critical review, but it was subsequently taken down. Now, however, an April 26, 2011 article by Reuters’ Mike Collett-White, tells of the publisher’s “point-by-point rebuttal of the Daily Mail article by Guy Walters,” but not where to find it. Hodderd & Staughton has since said it was “proud to publish” Avey’s book, and that “We have never doubted Mr. Avey’s testimony.” Well, they are not experts either, are they? This is equal to Boston University President Robert Brown writing to me on Sept. 27, 2010 that he “has no doubt Wiesel is a survivor of the Holocaust” and further that Wiesel is “a man of integrity and would not stoop to fabrication.” Naturally he must say that, but he does not really have any direct knowledge whatsoever to base it on.

Hoddard & Staughton also said it responded with a “detailed explanation” to a fax from the World Jewish Congress asking to have the book verified. That explanation has not been made public either.

Rob Broomby issued a new statement: “I am certainly not distancing myself from the book at all. I stand by everything in the book.” Good luck to him. Avey told Broomby that while the Walters’ article is “deeply unpleasant … I stand by my account. It is a fact.” A fact? Real facts are being ignored, while the issue is presented as being about taking an Englishman at his word.

On April 26 (yesterday as I write this), the BBC is carrying a Derbyshire story that Denis Avey is “searching for information about the Dutchman named Hans” with whom he exchanged clothing in the camp in Poland! The short notice says he is trying to find out what happened to “the other people involved in his story.” This is really bizarre, a transparent and desperate tactic dreamed up by his co-author Rob Broomby and his publishers, perhaps. Will some cooperative soul crop up saying, Oh yes, I remember good old Hans writing to me about this escapade before I never heard from him again? Or maybe another “survivor” will suddenly appear and recall something about it. It does point out what Avey and the BBC should have been doing much earlier. But, of course, they didn’t expect to be faced with this problem. Solutions are devised as problems arise.

The principals of the hoax are circling the wagons around them. The message is clear: they will do their utmost to survive the attacks that are coming. They have the media on their side, which is a giant advantage. And already the detractors are toning down their words. Piotr Setkiewicz, head of research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, told Collet-White, “Perhaps 80 or 90 percent of what Mr. Avey says is true, but the problem is that deniers have this wonderful habit of fixing on every single thing which is obviously not true.” It’s certain that 80 percent of what Avey says is NOT true; one would have to go carefully through the book, but I’d be surprised if 40 percent is true. Additionally, Sekiewicz uses that odd language that calls someone who “fixes on what is not true” a denier! It has to follow that someone who does not pay attention to what is obviously not true is a believer.

Plenty of precedent for the Avey hoax phenomenon

The NY Post article mentions three of the well-known fictional “true stories” written by fake WWII camp survivors, but there are many books written by real camp survivors that are also mostly or partly fiction. One is The Password is Courage about Charles Coward, the first man who broke into Auschwitz, and who is the model for Avey’s copy-cat bravado. Avey’s insistence that his purpose is to “witness” is strangely similar to the sentiments of another self-appointed witness, Elie Wiesel, whose book Night is also a bizarre concoction by someone who wasn’t there. There are no records in Auschwitz-Birkenau or Buchenwald for Elie Wiesel or his father, nor does Wiesel have the famous tattoo on his arm. He, like Avey, waited to hear the stories of other people before he wrote his own, and his book also doesn’t jive with the official reality (or even physical reality) in several important places.

Holocaust literature is so full of fakes that are protected by the ‘holocaust industry’ and media that this Industry must now be vigilant against the most outrageous new fakes so as not to draw attention to the fakery in the old ones (as I just did above). This is the concern of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and the World Jewish Congress. The Yad Vashem Memorial Museum in Jerusalem has said it will definitely not be awarding Avey the “Righteous of the Nations” title. New holocaust memoirs by men and women who decided to write them after a lifetime of silence should be discounted right off the bat. They are money-making or glory-making ventures, as cynical as it gets.

Cui Bono—Who Benefits?

The British Holocaust Education Trust should also be concerned about the fakery they have promoted, but they are too deep into it and have no one else at whom they can point the finger. Passing off the blame is always necessary, a form of ‘plausible denial.’ The same goes for the BBC and the Labour Party and government of Gordon Brown—they were too anxious to force this story into the public consciousness for their own political gain without regard for its obvious falsity. But when have those benefiting from the holocaust been concerned with truthfulness?

Rob Broomby is guilty of personally accepting and seeking to profit from this hoax, along with Patrick Howse. The book’s publishers had a great deal to gain, but now have a great deal to lose. They will do all they can to blunt the criticism. This is why the criticism must continue, and become ever more widely sourced … as well as louder and more demanding.

To show that even the guilty cannot help but speak the truth at times, it’s utterly appropriate that Broomby reports that Avey is fond of saying to Howse and himself, “It’s you two who opened this can of worms.” How very apt. A can of worms indeed is what it is.

“The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz” is the product of a conspiracy to defraud.

Last year, I wrote an article published here about Denis Avey, a man whose newly-released WWII concentration camp survivor story was getting a lot of attention in the British press. In my article, and on my Internet radio program The Heretics’ Hour, I did a pretty thorough job of debunking Avey’s poorly concocted story and explaining the intention of the Yad Vashem Institute and Memorial in Israel to name him one of their “Righteous Among the Nations,” an award they give to Gentiles whom they document as saving the life of a Jew during “the Holocaust.”

Now Avey has come out with a book, The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz, which immediately became a best-seller (so they say) in the UK, but has not been released yet in the U.S. The book is co-written with Rodger Broomby, the BBC journalist who interviewed Avey for the article that started the whole ball rolling. It ran in the BBC online edition Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009.

Because Avey’s basic story has already been thoroughly critiqued by me and others, I will now focus attention on the principals who conspired to create this hoax on the public by building up, even encouraging, the ridiculous tall tales of an old WWII vet. Unfortunately, this is nothing new in the Holocaust Industry, but this should not lead us to believe that familiarity makes it acceptable. It is not.

We also need to understand that these are not just harmless stories, and we can afford to humor old men and women who indulge in them. These are harmful lies, and also distortions of history that slander certain people and whole nations, even to the point of destroying once healthy societies. It is, in fact, a type of warfare—what’s called Information Warfare.

The BBC’s crucial role

The BBC first heard about Denis Avey in 2003 when he appeared on a BBC program discussing war pensions.  He began to speak about Auschwitz, where he said he had “come to witness”, calling it “like hell on earth.” As he continued, the TV hosts could hardly believe what they were hearing. Reportedly, the BBC began production on a documentary about him, but sat on this story for six years, during which time they discovered the story of the Jew Ernst Lobethall, who had testified on videotape to the Shoah Foundation in California before he died in 2001. Much has been made of the connection between the two men, but it has never been satisfactorily authenticated.

We have to assume that the BBC did its journalistic job and carefully looked at the story presented by Denis Avey. They had to see the implausibilities in it, most especially the change of uniforms between Avey and the “Jew” as their separate marching columns passed each other. This preposterous fantasy is what makes Avey’s entry into the Jewish barracks possible. They also had to know that a similar story had already been concocted by another British subject—Charles Coward—right after the war, and a motion picture had been made about it. We are thus led to the assumption that BBC fell victim to that “if it worked once, it will work again” Hollywoodish penchant to repeat past hits. This makes it clear that the BBC knew it was dealing with a fraud, but cared only whether or not it could be “sold” to the British public, who are quite willing to “buy” German atrocity stories.

Even the knowledge that the Charles Coward story has been widely discounted in recent years did not cause the BBC to exercise restraint.

The Role of British Politics

We turn now to the connection to British politics. Back in 2005, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown (in Tony Blair’s government) made funding available to send, each year, two teenagers from every British secondary school on a visit to Auschwitz. The funding has been extended to 2011. According to the UK Telegraph, Brown’s interest in the “Holocaust” went back to his childhood, when his clergyman father worked with a church group that supported the foundation of the state of Israel.

In Feb. 2008, Tory candidate David Cameron called Brown’s school kids’ Auschwitz trips a “gimmick.” This backfired on the Tories, strengthening Brown’s belief that being pro-Auschwitz was good public relations and good politics.

Following upon his election as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown made a highly publicized “emotional” visit to Auschwitz on April 28, 2009, when he also met with the Polish premier and president to discuss deployment of Polish troops in Afghanistan. The BBC carried the news that Brown said the UK government would do all it could to assist school visits to Auschwitz, and on April 30, the Prime Minister pledged to increase the number of school pupils who visit the concentration camp memorial yearly. He also pledged support to maintain Auschwitz as a permanent memorial amid concerns the site is in a state of decay and funding for its museum is under threat.

British “Heroes of the Holocaust”

When Prime Minister Brown returned from his Auschwitz trip, he announced the creation of an award to recognize British citizens—something he named “Heroes of the Holocaust.” A campaign to gain official posthumous recognition of British Holocaust rescuers had already been initiated by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), a British charity founded by British Jews in 1988 to ensure that the Holocaust formed part of the National Curriculum for history. Through 2008 and 2009 the campaign attracted support from the media as well as members of parliament, both in the UK parliament and in the Scottish Parliament. This new national award was announced on 29 April 2009, just after Gordon Brown’s first visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. Brown had proclaimed at that time: “We will create national awards in Britain for those British citizens who helped so many people, Jewish and other citizens, during the Holocaust period.”

When Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched his “Heroes of the Holocaust” awards in 2009, it seemed a good time to bring out Denis Avey, dust him off, and present this very-much-alive “Hero” to the British public. Thus the BBC got busy arranging a meeting between Ernst Lobethall’s sister, who had been sent as a Jewish child to England in the late 1930’s, where she remained, and Denis Avey.1 The meeting was filmed and presented on BBC-TV, as well as on BBC-Online on Nov. 29, 2009, exactly seven months after the “Heroes” announcement.

Two months later, Gordon Brown received Avey at 10 Downing St. in London, sat and talked with him and later awarded him, along with 26 other recipients, the British Hero medal.

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown (right) touches the arm of Denis Avey as Avey recounts his exploits at a meeting at number 10 Downing Street in London on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2010. (photo credit: Reuters/Luke MacGregor)

‘Great bravery’: Gordon Brown greets 91 year-old Denis Avey at the awards ceremony, while 100-year-old Sir Nicholas Winton stands nearby. These are the only two living recipients of the award.

Before the March 9, 2010 Award ceremony had taken place amid much fanfare and congratulations all round, the Daily Mail printed their own interview of Avey by Andy Dolan on Feb. 13, and the Times followed with one by Jake Wallace Simons on Feb. 25. All of these newspaper articles had differing details between them about important parts of Avey’s story. The schedule is:

BBC: Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009 [by Rob Broomby]

Daily Mail: Feb. 13, 2010 [by Andy Dolan]

The Times: Feb. 25, 2010 [by Jake Wallace Simons]

Hero of the Holocaust Award Ceremony: March 9, 2010

Others who have joined in the hoax are the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and Felix de la Concha, As written on the Wallenberg website:

The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation has commissioned painter Felix de la Concha to create a portrait as well as conduct an interview with Denis Avey, a man who “smuggled” himself into Auschwitz.. The interview is a part of a bigger project aimed at portraying and recording Holocaust survivors that Mr. De la Concha has been carrying on since 2008.

Another conspirator is Yad Vashem. The folks there were all set to award Avey with their “Righteous Among the Nations” title, and it is only in the past weeks they started to express second thoughts.

There is also Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish journalist Henry Kamm, a correspondent for The New York Times, who endorsed Avey’s book with unqualified admiration for the man, and Jewish historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who wrote the forward, calling it “a most important book.”

A serious problem here is that all of these people are intelligent enough to see that Avey’s story is false on its face. They go along with the lie as a matter of course. The entire Holocaust business is rife with absurdities which no one can challenge without being heavily persecuted, if not arrested. Therefore they feel safe.

“The Holocaust” is a political asset that is used to gain, hold and justify power. It is therefore guarded with big guns. But once in awhile something is just too bizarre to pass.

The jig is up

On April 9, 2011 Guy Walters wrote in the Daily Mail that Avey’s story is not believable. But a year before that, this was pointed out by the blogger at Scrapbookpages Blog on March 4, 2010, and then on my radio program mentioned above on March 8, and my article published at Inconvenient History Revisionist Blog on March 16, 2010.

Guy Walters happens to be the author of Hunting Evil, a biography of Simon Wiesenthal that exposed the famous “Nazi Hunter” as a first-class liar who used lies to advance the idea that there were “evil Nazis” hiding everywhere that needed to be brought to justice. Wiesenthal was supported by individual Jews and Jewish organizations; he then created his own organization just for that purpose. Though an establishment figure, Walters has come out with a similar expose of Avey’s book.

In an opinion piece in the Daily Mail on April 9, 2011, Walters makes the case that “increasing numbers of people don’t believe [Avey].”  Dr Piotr Setkiewicz, the head historian at Auschwitz, said outright that he did not believe Mr Avey’s story of the swap. He added, “As there are no testimonies by other survivors, I certainly would not include this story in any book that I wrote.”

His fear was “the story could provide ammunition for Holocaust deniers.” This is always the worry of those who live off the Holocaust Industry. Note that the concern was not that it was untrue.  If the story could somehow pass muster, it would be allowed, but if the lies are so blatant and far-fetched they can be easily attacked, it’s bad for the Industry. Remember Herman Rosenblatt’s Angel at the Fence? And his fabricated story was far easier to swallow than Avey’s.

The powerful World Jewish Congress has also changed course and called on the publishers to verify the historical accuracy of the book. They released the statement “We are deeply concerned about the charge that a significant part of Mr Avey’s story — i.e, that he supposedly smuggled himself into the Auschwitz-Buna concentration camp — is exaggerated if not completely fabricated.” (my italics)

In the same week, Yad Vashem said it was now unable to honor Mr Avey with “Righteous Among The Nations,” because it could not back up his claims. The same Irena Steinfeldt, who last year effused over Avey’s “noble and extraordinary act,” this week said, “We didn’t find anyone to confirm it. We went through several testimonies of Jewish inmates, and none of them mentioned that it happened. There was nothing to substantiate it.”

She pointed the finger at the British Government when she added: “We often get recommendations that show that the applicant has won an honour from a government, but that in itself is not evidence.” She’s referring to the British “Hero of the Holocaust” Award given to Avey on March 9, 2010 by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. According to the Daily Mail, Avey’s name was “put forward to Yad Vashem” as a candidate for the ‘Righteous’ title.”

Even Former prisoners at Auschwitz and at the PoW camp where Avey allegedly had been held have strongly disputed that Avey’s exploit was possible.

Sam Pivnik, 84, a Polish Jew, was sent to Auschwitz in August 1943 and held there until January 1945. “Avey’s story seems to me highly unlikely,” he says.

A stronger rebuke is heard from Brian Bishop, 91, a survivor of Dunkirk who had been captured in Africa in 1942 and was at camp E715. “I don’t believe it. I can’t understand how he did it. To do something like that you need to have several people helping on both sides — our side and the Jewish side.” Bishop sees a further problem in Avey’s timing.  “Why does he start telling this story now? I don’t understand why all these stories are coming out now. It looks like they’re waiting for everybody to die and then no one can contradict them.” Exactly right.

Even Ernst Lobethal’s daughter, Ingrid, says she does not believe the story of the swap. “Where is the detail in what he saw there than can’t be gleaned from the vaguest Holocaust account?” She doesn’t seem to realize that the “details” of most holocaust accounts are also lies. Still, when the daughter of the man you supposedly saved from death does not believe your story, it looks pretty bad.

Avey has said he approached British military authorities in 1947 with his story, but they weren’t interested. But it has now come out that in 1947, he was approached by American prosecutors via the War Office to ask if he would like to make an affidavit of his experiences to help build a case in a war crimes trial, and he declined.

Plagiarism, too?

I mentioned previously that the story of Mr Avey’s swap is almost identical to that told by another former PoW at camp E715 named Charles Coward, who is one of the posthumus recipients of Brown’s ‘Heroes of the Holocaust’ award. This British Prisoner-of-War allegedly smuggled information about conditions at Auschwitz out and snuck food and other items in to Jewish inmates, and aided the escape of a significant number of Jewish “slave labourers.” He lived in Edmonton, Enfield.

However, Coward’s story has been discredited and his testimony at Nuremberg IMT is now widely considered untrue. A book was written about his exploits, titled The Password Is Courage; he was billed on the jacket as “The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz” — which became the title of Avey’s book.

Avey’s co-author Rob Broomby has made excuses for the implausibilities in the story and has had to admit that he can’t confirm whether the “swap” really happened. “It’s very difficult to verify at this stage,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to find people 70 years afterwards. It’s only when you’ve spent time with Denis that you know what he’s like.”

Denis falls back on the same kind of defense. In 2001, 10 years ago, Avey gave a five-hour interview to the Imperial War Museum and did not mention the swap. When recently asked why, he said, “I don’t know why. I didn’t choose to establish it then. But what I wrote in the book is the truth. I don’t have to defend it. I don’t mind what anybody says. I know what I’ve done.”

Broomby has also said, “This is not footnoted academic history. You have to look into the man’s eyes and know what sort of man this is.’ In other words, accept the lies in order not to insult the 93-year old man who’s telling them. Oh yes, make no mistake, the argument has been made that Avey, as an elderly man, should be allowed to have his glory, and not be questioned or doubted. It’s the nice thing to do. What kind of historical record does this leave us with?

Broomby’s role in this makes him part of the conspiracy. Employed by the BBC, he first published an interview with Avey on November 29, 2009, along with the sentimental video produced by the BBC crews.

A month later, on Dec. 30, his byline appeared on another BBC article announcing that Avey is being considered for the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. In that article, Broomby said that Avey’s story was the result of a BBC investigation. Broomby then gets the lucrative job of writing Avey’s sure-fire best-seller.

Is Britain copying Israel’s ‘Righteous Gentiles’?

This leads to my final point: Gordon Brown seems to have slavishly copied Israel in devising Britian’s own “righteous Gentile” award, which he dubbed “Hero of the Holocaust.” Though the silver medallion is inscribed with the words ‘In the Service of Humanity,’ the honor has been described as given to those who risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust. Is the Yad Vashem award not enough for the world? “These individuals are true British heroes and a source of national pride for all of us,” Brown said in a statement. “We pay tribute to them for the inspiration they provide now and for future generations to come.” In picking Denis Avey, and quite a few of the others, he is bringing dis-honor on Britain and arousing only a false national pride.

Considering the role of the Holocaust Educational Trust in all this, a clear picture of collaboration between the Holocaust promoters and the British government comes into view, a collaboration which results in the foisting of another fake “Holocaust Hero” onto a world already staggering under the weight of Holocaustism. The sinister purpose, as I said at the beginning, is to bolster the political power base of the World War II allied victors who have become the New World Order.

These people engage in telling lies to each other, congratulating one other on these lies, while the media does its part in carrying the lies to the public and repeating them until lies come to be fundamental to our thinking. Positive publicity for Great Britain as the “land of heroes” is part of it also.

What drives it?

Why is it so easy to get people to believe this stuff? Many repeat the popular idea that folks don’t want to admit they have been fooled by what turns out to be, upon deeper study, obvious fairy tales. Thus they prefer to continue to believe it is true. I think the reason is more profound than that. It’s not ego. People instinctively realize that if the Holocaust is a hoax, much else that they have believed, and even cherished, must also be wrong. This turns their world upside-down, and everything must be re-examined. Rather than deal with that, they refuse to think about it. They decline to look at the evidence.

This is what people like Gordon Brown and the BBC count on. This is why they feel safe. Can we hope that enough people will be outraged by the fraud committed against us, and the money, our own money, spent to uphold it, that they will be willing to re-arrange their world view? That is the hope.

Endnote:

1. Rodger Broomby wrote that Avey’s story “emerged following a recent BBC investigation” in a Dec. 30, 2009 article published by the BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8433968.stm

Counting the years properly we are now facing a new decade. What will it bring for holocaust revisionism?
In one of my first articles for Smith’s Report, “What Remains to be Researched?” (issue 150) I outlined a number of areas still in need of research as well as mentioned a number of studies in need of translation of the English. In the two and a half years that have passed since then much of this research has in fact been carried out.

In 2010, coinciding with the new trial against John Demjanjuk in Munich, was published the first revisionist study on the Aktion Reinhardt “extermination camp” of Sobibór, co-authored by myself, Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno and titled Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality (TBR Books). The most important part of this book is undoubtedly the analysis of the results from an archeological survey carried out at the former Sobibór camp site by the Polish professor Andrzej Kola in the years 2000-2001. Kola had published an article on his research result in a rather obscure Polish journal already in 2001, but this was never translated into any Western language, or for that matter referenced by any of the orthodox experts on the Aktion Reinhardt camps (including the foremost mainstream expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis, who has published two revised editions of his study Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp after 2001). The reason for this is easy to see: While Kola pays the necessary lip service to the mass extermination dogma, the published results from his probings and diggings clearly show that the official claim that Sobibór served as a “pure extermination center” – a claim based exclusively on “eyewitness” testimony – do not hold water. Instead of the concrete gas chamber building described by the “eyewitnesses”, Kola discovered, at the site where this murder factory should have been located, the remains of a huge wooden barrack, with dimensions completely incompatible with those of the alleged gas chamber building, containing numerous fragments from toilet articles and clothing. Not far from this barrack he also discovered the remains of a smaller building containing an oven. These finds suggest a large delousing barrack and a smaller hot air delousing chamber, something which greatly strenghtens the revisionist hypothesis. Neither Kola nor a later Israeli-Polish team of archeologists active in 2007-8008 managed to find the slightest trace of the alleged gas chambers, despite finecombing the 3 hectare area of the “death camp proper” with probes and advanced equipment. In other words: the homicidal gas chambers at Sobibór never existed. Thanks to the research of Kola we may now conclude, based on solid proof, that Sobibór was in fact what Himmler had called it in a directive from 5 July 1943, namely a transit camp. In Chapter 10 of our study we discuss the deportation of Jews to the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union via the “extermination camps” – which were in fact all transit camps. A key piece of evidence presented here is the wartime diary of Herman Kruk, who served as head librarian in the Vilna ghetto. Kruk’s diary entries from April 1943 confirm that a large number of Dutch Jews, that according to mainstream historiography were “gassed” in Auschwitz and Sobibór, were in fact deported to Lithuania. The discovery of these diary entries in turn prompted me to write a survey of the available evidence for the eastward transit of supposedly murdered Jews, which is currently being published in installments in the Inconvenient History web journal under the title “Evidence for the presence of ‘gassed’ Jews in the Occupied eastern territories“.

In 2009 Carlo Mattogno published in Italian Il Campo di Chelmno tra Storia e Propaganda, the first full-length revisionist study on the first constructed of the “extermination camps”, Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof) in the Warthegau district of occupied Poland. This volume, which presents an abundance of evidence against the official Chelmno historiography, which has it that some 150 000 Jews were murdered at this camp in “gas vans”, is scheduled to be published in English by TBR Books in mid-2011 with the title Chelmno: Myth and Reality. Among other things, Mattogno demonstrates, based on the published results of four archeological surveys, that the only means of cremation which existed in the camp, a single open field oven of a known type, could only have incinerated at most 45 corpses within 24 hours, so that the cremation of the alleged 150 000 victims would have lasted until 1951, and that the amount of human remains present in the mass graves at the former camp site is absolutely incompatible with the supposed victim figure. Furthermore a diary entry of Herman Kruk’s from 4 July 1942 as well two diary entries penned on 14 and 30 July 1942 by Avraham Tory, the secretary of the Jewish Council in the Kovno ghetto, confirm independently of each other that many of the Jews deported to Chelmno ended up in Lithuania, where they were employed in road construction. With the publication of this volume, all six “extermination camps” (as well as the “auxiliary extermination camp” of Stutthof) have been devoted book-length revisionist studies. It thus marks an milestone in the history of holocaust revisionism.

Naturally Mattogno spends many pages of this book discussing the evidence for the alleged murder weapon employed at Chelmno, the so-called “gas vans”, concluding that the scanty “proofs” dished up by the holocaust historians for the existence and use of these vehicles is devoid of any real evidentiary value. The issue of the “gas vans”, which were allegedly used not only at Chelmno, but also in Serbia and the occupied Soviet territories, is also dealt with in detail in French revisionist Pierre Marais’ study Les camions de gaz en question from 1994, which will be published in a fully revamped English edition as The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation in late 2011.

The indefatigable Carlo Mattogno is most of all known as an expert on the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex, and in December 2010 his most exhaustive study on this subject, Auschwitz: The Case For Sanity, was published in English. This 756-page volume critically examines Jean-Claude Pressac’s and Robert Jan van Pelt’s desperate, deeply flawed and sometimes plain absurd attempts at proving the existence of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Birkenau, as well as traces how the Auschwitz gas chamber legend came into being. It is the most definite revisionist statement on the Auschwitz gas chambers to date. In late 2011 it will be followed by what might justly be called Mattogno’s long-awaited magnum opus, The Crematory Ovens of Auschwitz, a likewise monumental study on the five crematories at Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose incineration capacities play a crucial role in determining the veracity of the mass extermination claims. The publication of these two volumes however does not mark the end of Mattogno’s research efforts. In Healthcare in Auschwitz, scheduled for publication in late 2011, the vast measures undertaken by the Auschwitz camp administration for the sake of the inmates’ health are for the first time revealed in their full scope, including detailed regulations for the proper nourishment of the inmates and the construction of a large hospital complex wherein surgeries were carried out on thousands of Jewish inmates allegedly marked for death. Auschwitz: assistenza sanitaria, “selezione” e “Sonderbehandlung” dei detenuti immatricolati (Auschwitz: sanitary service, “selections” and “special treatment” of registered inmates, Effepi 2010) serves as a sort of companion volume to Healthcare in Auschwitz, as well as a follow-up to Mattogno’s previous study Special Treatment in Auschwitz (2004), and discusses the “special treatment” of registered Auschwitz inmates and the allegation of mainstream historians that this term meant the selection of sick detainees for killing in homicidal gas chambers. This volume will hopefully be published in English during 2012.

As was mentioned some months agp during a broadcast of Carolyn Yeager’s radio show Heretic’s Hour, Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno and myself are embarking on one of the largest revisionist research undertakings to date. The subject of this research project will be the last major aspect of the holocaust that has yet to be dealt with in detail by revisionists, namely the alleged mass extermination of 1 to 2 million Jews carried out by the Einsatzgruppen in the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. This part of the holocaust is especially complex, as we are not dealing here with isolated phantasms within very limited areas (I am talking here of the “gas chambers” in the “extermination camps”), but with mass shootings of the most varying scopes carried out at hundreds of locations during a three-year period. The orthodox allegations are based on a number of activity and situation reports supposedly based on messages dispatched by the Einsatzgruppen themselves. While there is no questions that mass shootings were carried out in the East, there are several questions in need of critical inquiry, chief of them a) Were the Einsatzgruppen ordered to exterminate Jews based solely on their ethnicity? b) Are the reports presented as evidence for the mass extermination genuine and reliable? and c) How many Jews were actually killed by the Einsatzgruppen? In order to answer these questions we must survey the entire available contemporary documentation on the Einsatzgruppen, which means going through tens of thousands of document pages. In fact, one of the initial obstacles we are now facing even before the start of our research is the pressing need to transfer this vast documentation from microfilm to digital media, something which unfortunately costs a rather large sum of money. We would be most grateful for any helping donations, however small (we can be reached via CODOH).

Where is Holocaust revisionism heading in this new decade? As seen above, we will soon have covered virtually all aspects of the holocaust complex in our research. What remains now, first and foremost, is to reconstruct, piece by piece, what actually happened to the Jews in German-controlled Europe during World War II, to map the real history of the camps, the ghettos, the deportations and the victim figures. Carlo Mattogno has dubbed this new constructive side of revisionism “affirmationism”. The best examples of this affirmationist trend in revisionist research can be found in Mattogno’s own latest studies on Auschwitz. While running the risk of sounding self-promoting, I see my own research concerning the actual fate of the “gassed” Jews as another example of affirmationism, as this seeks to provide an answer to the anti-revisionists’ favorite rhetorical question: If they were not gassed, then what happened to them?

During the coming decade revisionism will have many challenges to meet, but also many opportunities to take advantage of. I will begin with listing the challenges.
First and foremost there is a lack of revisionist researchers. The number of revisionists carrying out original research can easily be counted on both hands’ fingers. This does not mean that we necessarily need x number of full-time researchers. It would be just as well to have a sizable number of spare-time researchers, preferably from varied disciplinary backgrounds, who contribute high-quality articles from time to time, or only once or twice. As a saying in my native Sweden goes, “many small streams will form a large river”. Our opponents consists of an armada of certified court historians and skilled propagandists with virtually unlimited funds and resources as well as mass media and the legal and political systems on their side – yet despite this the field of “Holocaust studies” appears increasingly moribund, not to say braindead. We on the other hand, while lacking manpower as well as fundings, have dedication and the endurance that comes from knowing that historical truth is on our side and that this truth ultimately will prevail.

It would be most welcome if new revisionist researchers would appear in eastern Europe – I am thinking specifically of Romania, Moldavia, the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia – as natives of this region would have many advantages in dealing with the two great remaining problems of revisionist research, the Einsatzgruppen killings and the fate of the “gassed” Jews deported to the occupied Soviet territories. Especially welcome would be research from scholars with access to historical archives. Such researchers should realize that it is possible for them to publish findings of revisionist nature without running any risk of being charged with “Holocaust denial”, provided that they proceed cautiously. For example, if a historian, based on testimonal or documentary evidence, demonstrated the presence of French, Dutch or Belgian Jews in a camp or ghetto in Belarus during the period 1942-1944 – a fact not allowed for by mainstream historiography – but refrained from discussing how exactly these Jews had reached occupied Soviet territory and paid the necessary lip service to the orthodox version of the holocaust, he could go scot free, provided that he knew how to play his cards well. Even discoveries of documents concerning transports of supposedly “gassed” Jews to the East could possibly go unpunished with enough reference to the find constituting an “exception” (though publication outside peer-reviewed channels might prove necessary). This would amount to a sort of “salami tactics” undercover revisionism which might to some seem cowardly, but in some cases, and particularly under an increasingly totalitarian system, this might be the most effective way to proceed. This would serve to undermine the orthodox dogmas from within, by piling anomaly upon anomaly until critical mass is reached and the stability of the building of lies can no longer be maintained. I recommend such prospective researchers to read through my above-mentioned article series on the presence of “gassed” Jews in the East, which should be regarded as a stepping stone for further research into this issue.

The second challenge is the legal persecution of Holocaust revisionists taking place in many European nations. There is no sign that this persecution will decrease, rather we must be prepared that it will increase as revisionism gains new victories. The more the facts presented by us threatens the system, the more we in turn will be threatened by the system. Alarmingly a trend has recently been seen among the governments of the Western world, in connection with the Wikileaks “Cablegate”, to seek to control and censor the Internet. We should expect open or covert attacks on revisionist websites under the guise of campaigns against “online terrorism” and similar, and we should therefore do our best to counter the encroachment of Internet freedom and civil liberties. As long as the Internet remains free, revisionism cannot be stopped.

The third (thankfully minor) challenge is posed by what I prefer to call “pseudorevisionists”. Carlo Mattogno warned about this phenomenon already back in his book My Banned Holocaust Interview, originally published in 1995: “Unfortunately, for some years now, several groups of “Naziskins” have appropriated some revisionist positions for their own particular ideological-propagandistic purposes. These are revisionism’s most dangerous enemies: first, because they spread a version of revisionism which has been simplified to the point of banality, giving the impression that revisionist arguments are all nonsense; and secondly, because they provide a justification for those who claim that revisionism is a Nazi phenomenon (…)”. Today this challenge is not necessarily posed by only people mishandling revisionist arguments for political ends; there are also individuals spreading fallacious arguments in the name of holocaust revisionism. Their usual operating procedure is to claim that virtually every document relating to the fate of the Jews has been forged, without backing up their vast accusations with any form of evidence. Two concrete examples of this are so-called “Krema denial”, the assertion that all or most of the crematorium building at Auschwitz-Birkenau never existed, or that those structures were in fact bakeries or some such, and what might be called “Aktion Reinhardt denial”: the claim that the camps Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka not merely did not function as extermination centers, but actually did not exist at all, with no Jewish deportees ever reaching them. Both of these positions lack any kind of evidential support and are contradicted by archeological evidence as well as hundreds, even thousands of pages of doubtlessly authentic documents – evidence which is fully congruent with the revisionist position and which do not in any way provide proof of homicidal gas chambers. Whether this pseudorevisionism stems from ignorance, politically motivated subjectivism (“everything that furthers my agenda is permissible”) or covert activism by anti-revisionists and Zionist trolls (or “Hasbara activists” as they prefer to call themselves), it lends ammunition to our opponents, who can use these individuals as strawmen and say things like: “See, the revisionists are denying that the camps existed. They are either crackpots or liars”. I should remind my readers that the need to counter this challenge has nothing do with defending any revisionist “dogmas”. Authentic revisionism is, by the very definition of the term, alien to the concept of dogmatic thinking. It is not the abovementioned notions in themselves that are problematic, but the fact that they completely lack any evidential basis. To stubbornly maintain an assertion without present a serious argument for it is to cling to a dogma, hence why I call these positions “pseudorevisionist”. What must be defended is sound scientific methodology. I see no real need for revisionist researchers to spend their valuable time discussing these vapid claims in detail (a rebuttal to Krema denial has already been offered by Mattogno in his article “Zu den ‘nicht existierenden’ Krematorien von Birkenau”, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, vol. 3, no. 3), but I recommend online revisionist debaters to not let such claims go unanswered – and to educate themselves.
Then we have the upcoming opportunities and good news.

To begin with it looks like the efforts of the powers that be to introduce anti-revisionist legislation into all member states of the European Union will be thwarted – at least temporarily – by constitutional friction in those states yet lacking such heresy laws. A recent statement from Sweden’s constitution committee implies that such legislation most likely cannot be passed before 2014. The “Anti-Racist” legal framework constructed for the implementation of an EU-wide anti-revisionist law has also been watered down by those member states still paying a modicum of respect to the freedom of speech.

The second piece of good news may not be very new, but will have implications for the coming decade. Some four years ago it was revealed that while postwar historians estimated that the Germans had operated between 5,000 and 7,000 detention sites, recent research shows that there in fact existed “somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 000 camps and ghettos of various categories”, the majority of them on located on occupied Soviet territory (“Largest archive of Holocaust records to open”, USA Today (online edition), 19 November 2006). Presently a 7-volume encyclopedia of these camps and ghettos is being compiled by Geoffrey Megargee of the USHMM. This piece of news is of great interest to revisionists, as it ties in with the question of the destination of the deported “gassed” Jews.
Other opportunities for further research will no doubt arise from the “European Holocaust Research Infrastructure” (EHRI), a 7 million euro project in which “seventeen research centres from Europe and Israel” will “transform the dispersed data available for Holocaust research in Europe, Israel and the United States into a cohesive corpus of resources” which will then be made available online for “maximum open access of these data” (cf. http://www.cegesoma.be/cms/index_en.php?article=1575). Experience has shown that openings of archives and releases of unpublished material strengthens the revisionist position while correspondingly weakening the orthodox.
Finally there is a very interesting development on the archeological frontier. As reported by me on the Inconvenient History blog, a young British forensic archeologist, Caroline Sturdy Colls of the University of Birmingham, is currently working on a project which involves identifying the mass graves at the site of the former Treblinka “extermination camp” using “the most up-to-date scientific techniques”. This project will form the basis of her doctoral dissertation, which will be presented at the earliest by the end of this year. Considering the fatal damage which Kola et. al.’s research activities at Belzec and Sobibór have caused orthodox holocaust historiography, the news of this high-tech survey is most welcome. One should never underestimate the Shoah defenders’ propensity for shooting themselves in their collective foot of clay.
All in all, I believe that this will prove one of the most important decades in the history of holocaust revisionism. Let us face every challenge with renewed energy, and may our opponents live in interesting times, as the old Chinese saying goes…

In 2010 a National Geographic Documentary was shown titled Sonderkommando: The living dead of Auschwitz (produced in 2009). This featured the self-styled Sonderkommando member Henryk Mandelbaum, who was interviewed by Stanislav Motl, a Czech author and journalist. We are told in this documentary by the narrator, Chris Plumley, that Motl “…spent years courting this last survivor” and that now the role played by the Sonderkommando in the extermination process can be revealed. Their role, he continues, posed a moral dilemma for them. Most of them were eventually executed by the Nazis “…as inconvenient witnesses, and those who survived the death camps were hunted down by the Russians who believed they were Nazi collaborators”. Still others were murdered by “…Zionist terror groups who roamed Europe, killing anyone seen as being a collaborator, seeking revenge…This is why Sonderkommando have rarely given interviews…”. Therefore, he concludes, the Mandelbaum testimony is an important document about events 65 years ago.

This, however, is not quite true, as several Sonderkommando members, such as Henryk Tauber and Filip Müller, gave testimonies right after the war which helped shape the holocaust story as we know it. Also later many Sonderkommando members were interviewed. For example, 8 of them were interviewed by Gideon Greif in his book We Wept Without Tears¹, and another, Shlomo Venezia, gave statements to Italian journalists before publishing his memoirs.² Yet another Sonderkommando survivor, Daniel Bennahmias, “spoke out” in the early 90s.³ The Mandelbaum interview is thus far from as unique as it is made out to be.

At the end of the documentary an impressive list of sources is presented, naming among others Museum of Gliwice, Poland; Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland; Museum Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel; Archive of Museum Beit Terezin Givat Chaim, Israel; Holocaust Museum, Washington, USA; Archive of Jewish Museum, Prague, Czech Republic; Institute of Terezin Initiative, Prague, Czech Republic; Memorial Terezin; etc. The sketches shown throughout the documentary, interspersed with a few, well known photos are by David Olère, while maps are courtesy of Martin Gilbert. Considering the sources and the recent vintage of the documentary we must surmise that this documentary is an up-to-date effort, that the most recent research has been taken into account. Let us see then what Mandelbaum, as well as the narrator, have to say. I copied what was said by the narrator word for word, as well as the English subtitles. Mandelbaum speaks in Polish.

The narrator states that Auschwitz was “…the primary headquarter the genocide of Jews”, and that on a cold morning in February 1942 at Wannsee, death sentences were imposed on 11 million Jews. Auschwitz was chosen because of the good rail connections, “…a good locality for the Final Solution”. Mandelbaum states in the interview that he arrived on April 22,1944, and was given the inmate number 181970.⁴In an earlier deposition, however, he gave the same date as February 23.⁵ As seen Mandelbaum has told his story before, contrary to what is asserted in the documentary.

The scene presented to the viewer is a snow covered ground with rubble, possibly the site of Krema II. One has to wonder why this was shot in winter, with the snow cover making it almost impossible to determine what is what. The interview is conducted in Polish with English subtitles. Mandelbaum tells Motl:

“Right now, we are standing in the worlds largest cemetery, this is crematorium II…Nobody would think that people⁶were gassed and murdered here, the young, the elderly, disabled people, simply everybody, living people”.

Mandelbaum tells us that the crematoria looked like small “chateaus”.

The narrator continues:

“In his confession having been written after his arrest in 1946, [Auschwitz commandant Rudolf] Höß stated: ‘When the powder was thrown in, there were cries of “gas”, then a great bellowing and the trapped prisoners hurled themselves against the door, but the door held and was opened several hours later so the place might be aired. It was then that I saw for the first time gassed bodies en masse, it made me feel uncomfortable and I shuddered, although I had imagined death by gas would be worse [a picture of corpses is shown here]. However I must admit that it set my mind at rest for the mass extermination of Jews was to start soon. At that time neither Eichmann nor I were certain how these mass killings were to be carried out”’.

Considering the impressive list of sources cited above, we must assume that the narrator read this from a document given to him, and that this is not his invention. Let us therefore take a look at this version of the Höß confession, leaving aside the controversies surrounding his alleged various declarations of guilt. First regarding: “…when the powder was thrown in”, referring to Cyklon B. In NO-1210, his first statement, we read, referring to the “bunkers” (there is no mention of Krema I in this): “The doors were locked and one or two tins of Cyklon B were thrown into the room through holes in the wall”. No specifics as to what was used in the new crematoria are given. Now to PS-3868, the Höß affidavit used at the IMT: „I used Cyklon B which was a crystallized prussic acid which was dropped into the death chamber from a small opening”. And last from his Memoirs which he (allegedly) wrote while in a Polish prison: “The doors were made airtight, and we knocked some holes in the ceiling through which we throw in the gas crystals” (he is referring to Krema I here), and, as for the Bunkers: “The airtight doors were screwed tight, and the contents of the gas crystal canisters emptied into the rooms through special hatches”. And for the new crematoria: “The door would be screwed shut and the waiting disinfection squads would immediately pour the gas [crystals] into the vents in the ceiling of the gas chamber down an air shaft which went to the floor. This ensured the rapid distribution of the gas”.⁷ Later in the film we are shown a well known picture of an opened can of Cyklon B with the pellets spilling out of the can. Why would those who wrote the script make Höß say “powder”?

Now to the next item, the opening of the door(s). The narrator states: “…but the door held and was opened several hours later so the place might be aired”. In NO-1210 we read about the Bunkers: “After half an hour the doors were opened and the bodies were taken out by a commando of prisoners (…)”. Concerning the new crematoria we find only this: “After half an hour the electric air conditioner was started up and the bodies were taken up to the cremating stove by a lift”. In PS-3868 we read: “We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies”. Now from the Höß memoirs, p.30: “After half an hour the doors were opened and the bodies were pulled out”, p.42: “So far as Auschwitz is concerned, I have never known or heard of a single person being found alive when the gas chambers were opened half an hour after the gas had been poured in”, and finally from p. 43: “The door was opened a half an hour after the gas was thrown in and the ventilation system was turned on. Work was immediately started to remove the corpses”.

Nowhere does Höß mention anything about „several hours“, in fact he consistently states “half an hour” or “about half an hour” before the doors were opened. Thus again we have to ask the question: Why have the narrator quote Höß as stating “several hours”? Is this because revisionists have shown that the half an hour claim is nonsense, necessitating a rewrite of the story? Are we looking here at an “upgraded” version of the gas chamber claims?

Next we learn about the transport conditions: no water or food for 4 days (according to Mandelbaum) and at the arrival in Auschwitz the deportees were beaten by SS officers who were accompanied by barking dogs (the well-known preserved photos shows people being discharged from train wagons with some soldiers standing by, rifles slung over their shoulders, no sign of dogs). The narrator tells us:

“The whole process started with the arrival of the transports, perhaps 2,000 people at a time. All throughout the day and night, the numbers were truly staggering. For several years perhaps 9,000 people a day were gassed at Auschwitz, and it was only one of 39 death camps set up by the Nazis”.

Höß writes on p. 36 of his memoirs that „The highest total figure of people gassed and cremated in twenty-four hours was slightly more than 9,000”. While this is portrayed as a one time achievement, we now hear in the documentary that 9,000 was the normal rate, and that this went on for several years and “in 39 camps”! If this is true, the numbers would truly be staggering, in the tens of millions.

Mandelbaum continues with his narrative:

“And there it was, over there I think [he points with his cane], this small platform…they arrived at the platform and we’d escort them to an area of the camp near the crematoria, here they got undressed”.

The narrator also tells us that:

“The Sonderkommando would accompany them to the chateaux where they were to be cleaned up before going into the main camp. Many people wondered why the Sonderkommando did not warn the new arrivals”.

This is curious. As far as I am aware no-one has ever claimed that the Sonderkommando were present at the ramp. Here is what Höß stated when he took the stand at the Nuremberg Trial on 15 April 1946:

“DR. KAUFFMANN: During an interrogation I had with you the other day you told me that about 60 men were designated to receive these transports, and that these 60 persons, too, had been bound to the same secrecy described before. Do you still maintain that today?

HOESS: Yes, these 60 men were always on hand to take the internees not capable of work to these provisional installations and later on to the other ones. This group, consisting of about ten leaders and subleaders, as well as doctors and medical personnel, had repeatedly been told, both in writing and verbally, that they were bound to the strictest secrecy as to all that went on in the camps.”⁸

According to this description the 60 persons were Germans, not Jewish Sonderkommando members. In fact, when a “special Kommando” (IMT), “permanent Kommando of prisoners” (NO-1210) or “a special contingent of Jews” (Memoirs) is mentioned, it is always connected with the removal of bodies from the gas chamber, cutting of hair, pulling of gold teeth, etc., never with the escort of the victims from the railway ramp to the crematoria.

Mandelbaum continues:

“They’d just walk down, the whole thing [was] located underground [pictures are displayed of what appears to be ruins of the “undressing room” of Krema II]. In the changing room you had hangers and benches, so they didn’t see through it, they didn’t know. The first one who entered had to undress to go to the showers and they hung their clothes on the hangers and entered the shower room with their toothbrush, toothpaste [this appears to be the first and only mention of such items being brought along by the victims], towel, soap and their valuables. And there were two of those showers as you can see here underground [points at the ruins], so there were two gas chambers in fact, divided in two parts, each chamber had those two holes [draws a square into the snow]”.

This is all rather confusing, and I will point out again here that I copied Mandelbaum’s statements verbatim from the subtitles. Mandelbaum next pulls a piece of paper out of his briefcase, stating: “The gas chamber looked like this”. With this the camera focuses on a photograph of a shower room with a wooden joist ceiling, a wooden beam running down the center, a door in the back wall, a number of shower heads as well as a light in the ceiling (reproduced below). The shower heads have water pipes connected to them and look genuine. Yet we are told that the gas chamber had concrete walls and a concrete ceiling, why then show a room not even vaguely resembling one of the morgues, i.e. the alleged gas chambers? Needless to say the room displayed in the picture shows nothing resembling the alleged “Kula columns”. In reality, the picture shows the real bath of the “Bad und Desinfektion I” barrack in Majdanek.⁹

Above: The photo shown by Mandelbaum

Mandelbaum goes on:

“They’d see these showers so at first they didn’t know and thought they were real [as the ones in the picture!], but when maybe a quarter of them were inside, and others kept coming in, they’d start feeling that something wasn’t right, so they try and get out but the SS men would beat them over the head with these sticks and push them back in”.

Mandelbaum allegedly arrived in Auschwitz on April 22,1944, less than a month after that the so called Hungarian action began, yet there is not one word from him about Hungarian Jews. Also, this film was made in 2009, more than six decades after the end of the war – surely enough time for Mandelbaum to be well saturated with Holocaust stories. Still, what is startling is that he has some of the basics wrong, and not only that, the narrator’s story is also not even close to the official version.

The narrator then talks about the gassing process, a Olère drawing is shown (naked woman and children in a room, a SS guard at the door), and we are told that the condemned sometimes had to wait up to 13 minutes for the gas to be dropped in, another first. Mandelbaum describes:

“They gave a signal from above and put in 6 cans of gas through the hole [singular], people struggling for air, they’d breathe fitfully [how could he know this?] and then, still standing, they’d die in 20 or 30 minutes”.

While the motif of the still-standing corpses frequently appear in Treblinka testimonies, this is the first time I have heard it applied to the alleged gas chamber victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As for the time required for the victims to die, we are here told “20 or 30 minutes”, whereas Höß states 3-10 minutes, depending on the weather (NO-1210), 3-15 minutes (IMT) and “After 20 minutes at the most no movement could be detected” (Memoirs). It is hard to tell which hat Mandelbaum pulled the “20 or 30 minutes” out of. Mandelbaum continues:

“The gas worked like this: When there were a lot of people inside, humidity increased in the showers because of the breathing and the Zyklon dissolved with this humidity”.

Still no mention of the crucial Kula columns.

The narrator goes on:

“After about half an hour, what the SS called ‘the great thunder’ [another new motif], the mayhem of people dying, the chamber became silent…After opening the doors [no time given] to let the gas out…”.

What happened to the ventilators, the “electric air conditioners” mentioned in NO-1210, or as described in the memoirs: “The door was opened a half an hour after the gas was thrown in and the ventilation system was turned on”. The ventilators are an important part of the story, why forget to mention it here and tell us that the gas was let out through the doors? And they wonder why Revisionists exist…

The narration continues:

“The average lifespan of a Sonderkommando was about 60 days, sometimes more, sometimes less, after which they were executed [Mandelbaum tells us: “What saved me was the decontamination block. Over there, that was the block, a sauna”. He fails to provide details]…They were kept separate. Theirs was the only hut with barbed wire around it, as the Nazis had to maintain absolute secrecy. Hidden knowledge of the gas chambers never leaked out…”.

What is important here is the secrecy issue. We have to remember that at the IMT it was established that only 200-300 people knew about the mass gassings, because not one of the accused had ever heard of this alleged mass murder. Prof. Hilberg was the first one to dismiss this, writing that: “…the Holocaust had been the result of a huge bureaucratic machine with thousands of participants, not the fulfillment of a preconceived plan or a single order by Hitler.”¹⁰ His book The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961, was shunned at first, as the part about the knowledge of thousands regarding the Holocaust did not fit the story told at that time. This has changed since then, and we now learn that some 400,000 not only knew about the Holocaust but participated in the killings.¹¹ And therein lies the dilemma for the Holocaust Industry, for if that many would have known about it, all of Germany – in fact the whole world – would have known. But nothing was known, a few rumors and that is about it. Is this why this particular documentary is going back to the original story, to try and explain why practically nothing was known?

Mandelbaum states:

“Twelve thousand of them I think it was [daily], they’d gas them and burn them. In the beginning they used to burn them in crematoria I in Auschwitz, a primitive one. But then, neither Crematoria I, or IV of V could keep up with the influx of transports. They had scheduled transports from all around Europe, right? So they had to build crematoria II and III with 15 furnaces each…Each furnace had a device that sucked in the air, so the corpses burned faster”.

Here again one has to wonder why Mandelbaum is allowed to talk nonsense. When considering the impressive list of sources provided, one would think that obvious mistakes would be corrected by the narrator.¹² Crematoria II was completed first, on March 15,1943, IV on March 22, V on April 4 and III on June 25. All of them were under construction at roughly the same time. Why state that IV and V were in operation, couldn’t handle the load so II and III had to be build? Astoundingly it apparently doesn’t strike Mandelbaum that his statement makes a joke of the enumeration of the building. If he was correct then the crematories IV and V would of course have been designated crematories II and III.

The air sucking device mentioned is also of interest, Prof. van Pelt testified at the Irving trial:

“MR IRVING: ‘Well, they would self-combust? When they were raised to a certain temperature, they would self-combust?’

PROF VAN PELT: ‘That is the idea of a normal incineration.That is the idea of a normal incineration. In Auschwitz, actually, the ovens – the difference between the ovens is that one element which is used in normal ovens is with a heat kind of regenerator in Auschwitz was replaced by compressed air which was blown into the oven. Now - ‘

MR IRVING: ‘Would this account for the drop of normal coke usage from 35 kilograms in the crematorium Gusen concentration camp per body to 3.5 in Auschwitz, in your opinion?’

PROF VAN PELT: ‘Yes…’.”¹³

This description does not make much sense, and neither does Mandelbaum. Blowing air into the muffle would cool it down, blowing it into the fire box would increase coke consumption and produce more heat than the muffles could handle. In the instructions for the ovens it is stated that if the heat in the muffles rises to above 1000° Celsius, then air has to be blown in to cool it down.^xiv

Mandelbaum keeps piling it on with Motl listening and nodding, no questions asked. To list all of it would make this too long, so here will suffice with Mandelbaum’s description of the corpses and the utilization of body fat as fuel:

“Over there, there were a lot of dead men [he points in a general direction], gassed, they couldn’t burn them. But the chamber had to be emptied because the transports kept arriving. They didn’t want the people to see them, they had to keep the place tidy. So for the time being they put them behind the crema, and there they lay over night and the following day too [yet another new detail]. And I saw them in those ditches, there was smoke too and something was on fire and there they pulled those corpses [here is displayed a well known picture of a pile of bodies with multiple limbs, smoke in the background, I call it the spaghetti picture because the bodies are undistinguishable]. They’d bring poles from young trees, 80 or 70 cm cut into four [if this makes sense to anyone, congratulations], and also conifer branches from spruce trees in the woods. On top of this they would lay the dead men [he keeps mentioning only male bodies], then another layer and so forth. They burned fast, but just the legs, the heads and parts of the hips – the thighs – wouldn’t burn, because there is a lot of flesh inside so you need a high temperature. We had those hooks from the armoury made from course wire mesh, so we’d drive them into the thighs and pull them into another ditch. The other reason why the bodies wouldn’t burn is because they were piled on top of one another and there wasn’t enough air coming from the bottom. Every ditch had in the corners these holes [he draws a square in the snow], 40 by 40 or 30 by 30 and 70 or 80 centimeters deep. A normal person didn’t burn when inside those layers. And the fat of the gassed people that didn’t burn flowed into these holes…So the fat would flow into those holes and when they were about ¾ full, we’d scoop out the fat with these types of mugs and pour it over the dead men [again only male corpses are mentioned] so that the fire would flare up and the corpses would burn faster”.

Where to begin? We learn that the Nazis did not want people to see the corpses, yet we are to believe that burning them would not be noticed? As far as the incineration process is concerned, it is clear that Mandelbaum has no clue. What are we to make of the 80 cm or 70 cm poles cut into four? Then the part about the heads and thighs not burning because of too much flesh! What part of the body is flammable, the bones? In fact, there is no mention of ashes or bone fragments. Mandelbaum admits, however, that burning corpses in a ditch will not work because the lack of draught, so here we go again with the fat collection canard. He has the fat flowing into four holes in the corners, while another witness, Filip Müller, has a trench on the bottom of the burning pit with the fat flowing into a hole outside the pit.¹⁵ The concept of the fat reservoirs is nonsense in any case. For one, the fat would ignite as soon as it made contact with the flames.¹⁶ Secondly, how would the Sonderkommando workers get close enough to the raging fire to dip their mugs into the holes?

The description of the incineration ditch leads to the following dialogue:

Motl: “The smell had to be appalling”.

Mandelbaum: “Well, it was burning flesh, just imagine, we worked in those ditches. The wind would start blowing against us, so our eyes were streaming. If I drank a litre of water, I’d loose a litre and a half when my eyes were streaming. We worked without masks. We never had breaks when it rained [M looks at Motl to see if he swallows this too, which he does]”.

And here we have it, this awful smell/stink of burning bodies. The narrator told us before that “hidden knowledge of the gas chambers never leaked out”, but are we to believe that nobody ever wondered what they were burning? And according to our witness, the burning continued even on rainy days. I wonder how the water mixed with the fat in the corner holes.

The narrator gives us an extremely propagandistic version of the evacuation of the camp:

“When it became obvious that the allies were close [“allies” is strange wording, considering that the Red Army was the only force to liberate Auschwitz], the camp and it’s inmates had to be destroyed. The crematoria, the hospital and it’s inmates were all blown up in a desperate attempt to conceal the dreadful legacy. The SS went on a rampage, murdering everybody. Most witnesses were shot or forced to begin their long march west into Germany, a journey on which most were to die. Before the Nazis left Auschwitz on the death march, they executed 98,000 people, including most of the Sonderkommando. Using a combination of luck and ingenuity, Mandelbaum managed to escape from the mass shootings, blending himself into the camp population”.

We have no firm knowledge as to who blew up the crematoria, but the part about the Nazis blowing up the hospital, including the patients, is simply a lie. The same goes for the of 98,000 inmates being killed before the Germans left. The fact is that the inmates were given a choice to either stay and be liberated by the Soviets or go west with the Germans. The majority chose the latter alternative. Here is what Elie Wiesel, perhaps the most prominent Auschwitz eyewitness, has to say concerning the decision to leave with the Germans instead of waiting to be liberated by the Soviets:

“He was lost in thought. The choice was in our hands. For once. We could decide our fate for ourselves. To stay, both of us, in the infirmary, where, thanks to my doctor, he could enter as either a patient or a medic.

I had made up my mind to accompany my father wherever he went.

“Well, Father, what do we do?”

“He was silent.

“Let’s be evacuated with the others,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He was looking at my foot.

“You think you’ll be able to walk?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Let’s hope we won’t regret it, Eliezer.”¹⁷

Why then tell those obvious lies?

In the last part of the documentary, Mandelbaum questions the existence of God, telling us that he can not “remain a religious person”, because of the millions killed “Nobody knows exactly…the exact figures aren’t known”. He tells us that he made a vow, that if he survived, no details given about his obvious survival, he would speak about “…what I saw with my own eyes”. He copies Elie Wiesel here, who is also adamant that what he states he saw “with his own eyes”. One also wonders why Mandelbaum waited that long to tell his story. There is also the revealing mistakes he mistakes. For example he mentions the women’s camp, claiming that it was called “Canada”, which is erroneous.

The final minutes of Sonderkommando plays in Mandelbaum’s house, to be exact in his garden, where he cultivates many varities of trees. Motl asks him if it is possible to forget Auschwitz, and Mandelbaum answer:

“No, you can not forget a thing like that, it is something I will never forget. As long as I live , I won’t be able to forget, you just can not”.

If his story was in fact believable, one could agree with this. As mentioned at the beginning, Mandelbaum died at the age of 86, a ripe old age I would suggest – many Germans who made it through the war died much younger because of the hardships they suffered.

The importation question, however, is this: Why make a film such as this, with so many inaccuracies and contradictions visavi the official story? Why allow Mandelbaum, as well as the narrator, to make statements contradicting what we are told to believe? Anyone with the slightest bit of subject knowledge has to wonder why this documentary was made. I personally have no clue what the purpose of this is.

Lies have many versions, the Truth but one.