On May 16 – 18, 2008, 200 scientists from around the world met in Berlin to discuss the historical significance-, the technical developments-, and Revisionist denial of “The Holocaust”. The “Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten” (Brandenburg Memorials Foundation), as well as the “Wiener Institute für Zeitgeschichte” (Vienna Institute for Contemporary History) were the organizers of this conference. In a press release by Constanze Haase on May 18 at the conclusion of the conference, Prof. Dr. Günter Morsch, director of the Brandenburg Foundation, stated that the existence of National Socialist gas chambers is still being questioned, but that at this conference contributions by the scientists — and the discussions which followed — have in no uncertain terms confirmed the accounts provided by survivors.

“25 years after the publication of ‘Nationalsozialistische Massentötung durch Giftgas’(National Socialist mass murder by poisonous gas), authored by the survivors Eugen Kogon and Hermann Langbein, the aim of this conference is to update this work by adding recently discovered material,” said Haase. At the end of the article we are informed that the depiction of the gas chambers is fictitious, as no photos exist — all we have are eyewitness tales (Erzählungen von Augenzeugen). Prof. Morsch continued by saying that what has been presented and discussed will be summarized and published. The book will be made available to teachers, scientists and interested citizens (Bürger).[1] After some delays this summary (Sammelband) was published (2011) under the title: “Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas” (New studies on National Socialist mass murder by poisonous gas).
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By Wilfried Heink

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.

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By Thomas Kues

In a previous article [1] I have discussed the monthly radio broadcasts in German that the famous novelist Thomas Mann made during the war and the mentions of mass gassings of Jews made in them. Most significantly, in his speech from January 1942 the Nobel laureate in exile claimed that “Four hundred young Dutch Jews were brought to Germany to be used as guinea pigs for poison gas”. As far as I was able to determine, this was the first occurence of the allegation that the Germans were carrying out mass gassings of Jews. In his speech from June 1942 Mann again spoke of the gassed Dutch Jews, stating that the victims numbered not 400, but 800, and that the Jews in question had been “brought to Mauthausen and gassed there”. Comparison of the contents of the January speech with a diary entry written on 16 February 1942 by a Romanian-Jewish Bucarest physician named Emil Dorian strongly implies that the allegation did not originate with Mann, and that it had been spread also by other channels. (Read more…)

By Thomas Kues

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

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

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

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

By Thomas Kues

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

In July 1945 the German-Jewish exile weekly Aufbau presented to its readers two short articles containing propaganda stories so ridiculous and that it’s no wonder they never surfaced again.

The first one concerns the Theresienstadt Ghetto (issue of 6 July 1945, p. 4):

“Had the Russians not came…

A letter from Theresienstadt published in the London Times reveals that a German plan to kill all Jews in Theresienstadt in special gas chambers was thwarted in the last minute. According to this letter the construction of the ‘baths’ for the gassing of the interned Jews had already been finished. The doors to these death chambers, however, had to be sent back [to the manufacturer] three times since they did not fit. In the meantime Russian troops reached Theresienstadt. The letter confirms earlier reports concerning the number of Jews who had passed through Theresienstadt, and estimates, that in the years 1942-1943 an average of 150 Jews died daily in Theresienstadt.” (Read more…)

On 27 January 2010 this blog carried a chapter-by-chapter presentation of the most extensive  revisionist study on Auschwitz to date,  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 by Carlo Mattogno (Effepi, Genoa 2009). We are happy to inform our readers that this formidable study is now available for order in English translation from TBR Books as Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity. A Historical & Technical Study of Jean-Claude Pressac’s Criminal Traces and Robert Jan van Pelt’s Convergence of Evidence (being volume 22 of the Holocaust Handbooks  series). Due to its length (756 pages) it has been divided into two volumes sold as a set. Carlo Mattogno’s Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity is available from the online CODOH bookstore and will be stocked from 1 December.

By Thomas Kues

On 17 August 2010 the Zionist news site YNet published the following item:

“Israel will continue to support efforts to set up a memorial center at Sobibor, according to an agreement reached by the director general of the Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs Ronen Plot and the Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev, with Dr. Andzrej Konrat, who is in charge of Holocaust remembrance in Poland.

The agreement is in keeping with the statement of intentions agreed upon in 2008 by Israel, Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands.

Almost nothing remained of the Sobibor Nazi death camp in Poland at the end of the war. The creation of a memorial center is the result of cooperative research by Poland’s council for the memory of war victims, headed by Minister Konrat, and Israel’s Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs and Foreign Ministry, directed by Yad Vashem researchers and assisted by Slovakia and the Netherlands.

For this purpose, and international committee of experts was established, and digs were carried out at the site to determine the precise location of the gas chambers.

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By Thomas Kues

Thomas Mann (b. 1875) is one of the most well known German writers of the 20th century, famous for among others the novels Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröger, Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain. In 1905 he married the Jewess Katia Pringsheim. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Already before the rise of the National Socialists to power Mann had been a vocal opponent to their politics, and in 1933 he went into exile. From 1938 until 1952 he lived in the United States, from where he moved to Switzerland after having been accused of being a Stalin apologist and summoned to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Mann died in Zürich in 1955.

From 1940 to the end of the war Mann recorded a number of speeches in German which were sent to the BBC and broadcasted from London in order to reach German radio listeners. The first 30 speeches were published in book form in 1943, and after the end of the war a second edition of the book was published containing the texts of all 55 radio speeches.[1] For most of of the printed speeches only the month of broadcasting is indicated, only in some cases are exact dates given. Below I will present Mann’s statements on alleged mass gassings of Jews in chronological order and comment on their significance.
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By Thomas Kues

1. The Alleged Second Phase Gas Chamber Building at Bełżec

According Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad [1] the first gas chamber building at Bełżec, a wooden barrack containing three chambers each measuring 4 x 8 meters, was torn down sometime in late June 1942 and replaced with a larger, more solid building measuring 24 x 10 meters and containing six separate gas chambers, each measuring 4 x 8 (or possibly 4 x 5 or 5 x 5) meters. As for the construction material, Arad quotes the Jewish key witness Rudolf Reder, who in 1946 stated that the building was made “of grey concrete”. The former SS-Untersturmführer Josef Oberhauser described it as “a massive new building” in his testimony.[2] The witness Wilhelm Pfannenstiel testified that “the building that housed the gas chambers was made of concrete”.[3] That the building was made of brick and/or concrete was accepted also by the verdict of the 1965 Bełżec trial in Munich[4], and has been adopted as a fact by various authoritative works on the Holocaust, such as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.[5]
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