On February 4, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported the following piece of news:

Dr. Josef Mengele

The grandson of a Holocaust survivor has purchased the diary of Dr. Josef Mengele, which was put up for sale in the United States, a Connecticut-based auctioneer said Tuesday.

The buyer, an East Coast Jewish philanthropist who remained anonymous, paid an undisclosed sum for the 180-page journal, which he intends to donate to a Holocaust museum, said Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Autographs. [...] (Read more…)

By Carlo Mattogno (February 2010)

Joachim Neander claims that he is able to give the name of two prisoners who were gassed at Auschwitz. He notes that the “Bunkerbuch” on 5 September 1941 has recorded the death of three detainees, Fritz Renner, Bruno Grosman and Roman Drost, of which the first two are Germans. Since «they all died the same day when the first mass gassing was carried out in the basement of Block 11 (date Sep 5, 1941, according to reports that, shortly after the event, reached the Polish Government-in-Exile in London)» this shows that they were gassed. He adds that «Carlo Mattogno does neither take into consideration the “Bunker” ledger nor the Rögner report nor the accounts of the Polish prisoners who were involved in the September 5, 1941, “action”».[1] (Read more…)

(As a celebration of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Incovenient History revisionist blog is proud to post a presentation of Carlo Mattogno’s new massive study on the alleged homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, written by its author. Translated from the Italian by Thomas Kues)

By Carlo Mattogno (January 2010)

My work Le camere a gas di Auschwitz. Studio storico-tecnico sugli “indizi criminali” di Jean-Claude Pressac e sulla “convergenza di prove” di Robert Jan van Pelt (The Gas Chambers of Auschwitz. A Historical and Technical Study on the “Criminal Evidence” of Jean-Claude Pressac and the “convergence of evidence” of Robert Jan van Pelt, Effepi, Genoa 2009) has now been in print for several months and, as expected, it has been met with almost complete silence. Below I will speak of it briefly as a dignified celebration of the “Remembrance Day”. The work in question is not “negationist” but *affirmationist* because it refutes the interpretations proposed by the authors mentioned in its title while reconstructing, piece by piece, thanks to documents unknown to Pressac and van Pelt, the real context of events. It is therefore not a work of sterile or negative criticism, but a positive contribution to our knowledge of the camp.

First some technical information. The book consists of 715 pages, whereof 658 are text and the remaining 51 contains reproductions of documents. The critical apparatus consists of 2,510 notes with references to documents from 22 archives and a bibliography listing approximately 270 works, including over 80 on the subject of cremations. The appendices contain, among other things, a glossary of more than 400 German technical terms. The study is divided into five parts and 19 chapters. The table of contents below already provides a fairly accurate idea of the topics that are treated. I will therefore limit myself to making some brief comments. (Read more…)

by Carolyn Yeager

Joachim Neander, PhD, an independent scholar from Cracow, Poland, examines Irene Weisberg Zisblatt’s holocaust survivor narrative and concludes it is “not in accordance with the historically established facts,” is “exaggerated,” “implausible” and not true overall. Neander has contributed to publications in Poland, Germany, Israel and the USA. In 2001-02 he had a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

His January 9th article Irene Zisblatt, the “Diamond Girl”- Fact or Fiction? can be read here: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/01/irene-zisblatt-diamond-girl-fact-or.html.

Dr. Neander asks in the title of his critical review of Irene Zisblatt’s autobiography The Fifth Diamond, which purports to be a Holocaust survivor ‘true story,’ or memoir, whether it is fact or fiction. He comes to the only conclusion possible for a man who wishes to maintain his reputation as a scholar—that it is mostly fiction.

However, probably for the reason that he seems to have been assigned this project by some well-known Holocaust defenders (Kenneth Waltzer, Chairman of the Jewish Studies Dept. at the University of Michigan, who provided him with the Seigelstein documents, for one) and he is a Holocaust defender himself, he has tried to soften the blow wherever he thinks he can, going out of his way to find some positive things to say about “Mrs. Zisblatt” and her narrative. These positives are mainly in the realm of having a forgiving spirit and a sympathetic attitude toward an “elderly lady” who has suffered in her life. But Neander rightly decides that truth must be upheld, it being more important that not hurting someone’s feelings. (Read more…)

Irene Weisberg Zisblatt writes of swallowing the same diamonds over and over again for a year in order to save all she has left of her family. What else does she say—and why is it not believable?

Apophenia: the phenomenon of seeing things that aren’t there. People will see, and believe, what they expect to see, what they want to see, or even what they are told they are seeing, as often as they will see, and believe, what they are actually seeing.

By Carolyn Yeager

Part Two

(ST=Shoah Testimony, FD=The Fifth Diamond, LD=The Last Days, RI=Radio Interview. See Part One for further explanation.)

Zisblatt’s story really starts in 1939, when the Jews in Hungary begin to lose rights and entitlements, like her right to attend the public school. According to Zisblatt, this continued and worsened until 1942, at which time Jews fleeing Poland and Ukraine for Palestine began coming through their little town, some with terrible stories to tell. The one Zisblatt repeats in her Shoah testimony and public talks – and which was used in The Last Days, not only by her but another survivor as well – is this: she overheard a man who spent the night at their house telling her father that “he saw Nazis tearing Jewish infants in half and throwing them in the Kneister river,” which she remembered from school was a river in Ukraine. The next day she asked her father about it and he told her that it wasn’t true, to forget it. In her book, Zisblatt changed that story to Germans killing Polish Jews, including women and children, and burying them in mass graves (p. 15).

She hasn’t listened to her father. Though it’s definitely not true, just another tale passed among Eastern European Jews at the time, she continues to repeat it to the children and teenagers to whom she speaks.

(Another atrocity story that she passes along is the one about SS men picking up Jewish children by the legs and banging them against the side of trucks. She both tells in The Last Days, and writes in Fifth Diamond that she saw through a crack in her barracks wall on her first night in Birkenau: “I saw trucks coming, and screams in the trucks, and I saw two children fall out of the truck, and the truck stopped and one SS man came out from the front and he picked up the children [by their legs] and he banged him against the truck, and the blood came running down, and threw him into the truck. So, that’s when I stopped talking to God.”)

From then on, she relates personal suffering that builds to the climax of her participation in a fictional Death March, followed by a fictional “liberation” by American General George Patton’s soldiers in a Czechoslovakian forest. The most notable contradictions that fill her story are the following: (Read more…)

In this volume of the series “The Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project”, historian David Silberklang presents the memoirs of the two Polish Jews Israel Cymlich and Oskar Strawczynski, dated respectively to June 1943 and the summer of 1944. Both memoirs are reproduced together with full facsimiles of the extant manuscripts (in Polish and Yiddish respectively). While Strawczynski escaped from the “extermination camp” Treblinka II on August 2, 1943, Cymlich is one of the few former detainees of the Treblinka I labor camp to have published his memoirs (at least three other exists: a brief account written by Saul Kuperhand, published in Miriam & Saul Kuperhand, Shadows of Treblinka, University of Illinois Press 1998; Ryszard Czarkowski, Cieniom Treblinki, Warsaw 1989; and an unpublished account by a certain Jan Sulkowski).
Regarding Treblinka I, editor Silberklang has the following to say:

“The penal labor camp of Treblinka I was established in the fall of 1941. It was located two kilometers away from the extermination camp, Treblinka II, which was opened on July 22, 1942. Initially, most of the prisoners in the labor camp were Poles from the Warsaw area. Later, Jews from the same area joined them. The average number of the prisoners ranged from as few as 100 to as many as 2,000. Approximately 20,000 people passed through the Treblinka I penal labor camp; it is believed that nearly half of them were murdered during the camp’s three-year existence. The camp was dismantled in July 1944, as the Red Army approached the area.” (pp. 31-32, note 8).

No source is given for this information. We should note here initially that, accepting the presented figures, half of the detainees were released either during the operation of the camp or at its liquidation.

(Read more…)

Most of my readers are likely already familiar with the Treblinka eyewitness Abraham Bomba. In an article for The Revisionist, “Abraham Bomba, Barber of Treblinka” (Vol. 1, Issue 2, May 2003, pp. 170-176) Bradley Smith exposed Bomba’s rather infantile mendacity as displayed in an interview made in Tel Aviv in 1979 for Claude Lanzmann’s well-known 9 hour documentary film Shoah (1985). In this, Bomba asserted that he and fifteen or sixteen other “barbers” had cut the hair of between sixty and seventy women at the same time inside one of the gas chambers, which was moreover equipped with several benches. According to Holocaust historian Yitzhak Arad, who bases his statements on West German trial verdicts summarized by A. Rückerl, the chambers of the first gassing building measured 4 x 4 m, whereas those of the second one measured 4 x 8 m (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka…, p. 42, 119). Bomba himself describes the room as measuring only “around twelve feet by twelve feet”, (3.6 x 3.6 m) which is slightly smaller than the size of the alleged first gas chambers (Shoah. The Complete Text of the Acclaimed Holocaust Film, Da Capo Press 1995, p. 103). It is obvious that neither a 4 x 4 m or a 4 x 8 m chamber would have offered a feasible working condition for Bomba and his colleagues. Furthermore, Bomba reveals in the film that after he and the other members of the haircutting commando had left the chamber, the women and children still inside were gassed with an astonishing quickness:

(Read more…)

In Smith’s Report #149 (April 2008) I published an article called “Experto Crede, or How to Escape from a Homicidal Gas Chamber”, devoted to a special category of Shoah survivors: those resourceful Jewish fellows who saw one of the fabled Nazi homicidal gas chambers from the inside, and then escaped from it to tell their story. To achieve this feat is to reach one step above people like Arnold Friedman, who survived a gassing in Flossenburg(!) by the means of breathing through a key hole. Auschwitz eyewitnesses Sophia Litwinska and Regina Bialek were both saved in the nick of time when SS men opened the chamber (in the middle of the gassing process) to take them (and no-one else) out of there; needless to say, they were invaluable to the Germans in some way or an other and therefore spared to tell the world of their remarkable experiences. Majdanek witness Mary Seidenwurm Wrzos survived a death chamber in a similar, albeit more cunning fashion: when the gas began streaming in through “three large black holes” she started banging on the door, screaming that she was a German guard. Finally, men in gas masks opened the door and pulled her out. Curiously, she was not sent back to the gas chamber or otherwise punished once the Germans had discovered that she was not one of them… Another Majdanek inmate, Mietek Grocher, simply sneaked out through the still open gas chamber door while the (single!) guard was looking another way and then dodged a hail of bullets from pursuing Germans.  (Read more…)

In my previous posting on the recent excavations at the alleged extermination camp Sobibór I pointed out the incongruence between A. Kola’s reported interpretations of findings made at the site and later claims made by among others the museal authorities in charge of the Sobibór memorial. I further examined various eyewitness statements regarding the “gas chambers” and also discussed the apparent reluctance of the archeologists Gilead, Haimi and Mazurek to identify the archeological remains designated “Building E” by Kola with the alleged gas chamber building. This “Building E”, we may recall, “is about 60 m long”, to quote the article of Gilead et al (“Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres”, Present Pasts, Vol. 1, 2009 pp. 10-39) and judging from Gilead et al’s redrawn map of Kola’s excavations (p. 28) it appears to have a width of merely 5-7 meters.

  (Read more…)

This post is by no means an exhaustive account of propaganda hoaxes by Allied governments relative to World War II. I’ve chosen to point to a couple examples which are illustrative of a problem of a much wider scale. Its main purpose is for the newcomer to holocaust revisionism to understand unaddressed, pressing issues and helps to point to the need for historical revisionism on subjects ignored by ideologically-influenced mainstream publications and researches  who have a bad tendency to ignore inconvenient history, be it regarding the holocaust or other topics.

Mainstream holocaust writer Jean-Claude Pressac spotted what he called a “Soviet put up job” – a clear attempt by the Soviet War Crimes Commission to falsely portray an ordinary delousing chamber in the Central Sauna section of Auschwitz-Birkenau as homicidal in nature. Much credit is due to him for this observation, however he failed to ask a critically important question: If there were real homicidal gas chambers a literal stone’s throw away, why undertake an effort to fake this one? Pressac unfortunately does not appear to ask himself this question and passes over the significance of a Soviet hoax gas chamber with accompanying propaganda photo spread without a second thought. For photos of the faked gas chamber and Pressac’s commentary, see http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/pressac/technique-and-operation/pressac0046.shtml and following pages.

(Read more…)