Proof that the man in the famous Buchenwald photograph is NOT Elie Wiesel.

With the help of the New York Times and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Elie Wiesel and his backers did not shy away from criminal deceit by purposely misidentifying an unknown face in this famous photo as belonging to Elie Wiesel.

The above high-resolution photograph of Buchenwald survivors was first published in the New York Times on May 6, 1945 with the caption “Crowded Bunks in the Prison Camp at Buchenwald”. It was taken inside Block #56 by Private H. Miller of the Civil Affairs Branch of the U.S. Army Signal Corps on April 16, 1945, five days after the Buchenwald camp was liberated by a division of the US Third Army on April 11, 1945. None of the men in the picture were identified at that time.

The U.S. Army photographer was in block #56, not #66

The U.S. Army photographer said he was inside Block #56. The “children’s block” that housed the so-called “boys of Buchenwald” was #66. This was not a typo. Note that these men are not children or teenagers, except for the youngster on the lower left who has been correctly identified as 16 yr. old Myklos (Nikolaus) Grüner, and a couple others. These adults appear to be a mixture of sick individuals suffering from a wasting disease (Grüner learned after liberation he had TB), along with basically healthy men who were also in that block for some reason five days after they had been freed. As we have read from many Buchenwald inmates, they moved about at will from the day of liberation onward. In Elie Wiesel’s book Night, he even says that some of the boys in his block went to the city of Weimar the very next day to steal potatoes and rape girls.

The true facts of this photograph have never been told and perhaps are not known. (Grüner has written in Stolen Identity that he left a procession of youths being led to the camp entrance on the morning of April 11, scurried into the nearest barracks and jumped into an empty bunk space. It turned out to be this one.) But because of the man standing there stark naked except for a piece of clothing held in his hands to cover himself, this photograph was likely staged. In any event, it was never represented as the “children’s barracks.” Still, Elie Wiesel inexplicably once told an interviewer for the German weekly Die Zeit that this picture was taken in the Children’s Block and all these men were really teenagers even though they looked old. (Source: “1945 und Heute: Holocaust,” Die Zeit, April 21, 1995.)

Kenneth Waltzer wrote to EWCTW on Nov. 14, 2010: “Eli Wiesel was indeed the Lazar Wiesel who was admitted to Buchenwald on January 26, 1945, who was subsequently shifted to block 66…” and Waltzer repeated in another comment on June 27, 2011 that “— after his father died — Elie Wiesel was moved in early February to block 66, the kinderblock. Miklos Gruner too was in block 66. Elie Wiesel was there with other boys from Sighet, who knew him.”

But we are also to accept that on April 16 Wiesel was in block 56, even though he didn’t report any such move in his book Night.  In fact, in that fictitious story Wiesel says he became deathly ill with food poisoning three days after liberation (April 14) and spent the next two weeks in hospital (pg 115, Marion Wiesel translation). That in itself precludes his being in this photograph taken on April 16!

Whom do you believe—the New York Times or your own eyes?

 Not Wiesel at age 16 in 1945

You can see for yourself from these two high-quality photographs supplied to me by a helpful reader that the face on the left  is not Wiesel. On the right is Elie Wiesel in 1944 at the age of 15.

The inmate on the left definitely has an aquiline nose and full, even sensual, lips. In this close-up, the receding hairline is visible on the recently shaved head.  On the right, the real 15-year-old Elie Wiesel exhibits a normal youthful hairline, a differently shaped nose and thinner lips. He also has a higher forehead than the more roundish-headed inmate. The eyes of the man on the left are not as deep-set under the eyebrows. His somewhat surprised, curious expression is not typical of Wiesel, whose expression was generally reserved, and often hooded.

The close-up on the left  appears to be the real Elie Wiesel in France later in 1945. He would be 17 or almost 17 years old in this picture. Notice the non-receding, youthful hairline with a long front lock hanging to the side, and the slightly concave  curve of the nose .

This close-up image  is from the photograph below, which is found at the USHMM Survivor Resource Center with the caption given below.

Jewish boys gather for a prayer service in a chapel in an OSE children’s home. Those pictured include Elie Wiesel (seen in profile, back right) and Jakob Rybsztajn standing next to him facing the camera.

(I note that Elie Wiesel is older than the other boys in this picture, giving credence to the idea that he acted in the role of counselor and sometime teacher to the newer, younger “religious” boys.)

Notice again the slight concave curve of the nose, the high forehead, deep-set eyes, large ears, sensitive mouth and slender neck. But also look at all that hair! The date of this picture is given by USHMM as 1945 and the location as Ambloy, [Loir et Cher] France.  It says in the accompanying text “In October 1945 the children and staff of Ambloy were relocated to the Chateau de Vaucelles in Taverny (Val d’Oise).”  That means this picture was taken between June and October 1945. They could have been celebrating Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur or Sukkot.

But could his hair have grown to such a length from a shaved head in April 1945? No way, and thus this is another proof that the liberated Buchenwald inmate with the shaved head is NOT Elie Wiesel. 

A PDF from my valued contributer examines the ages of the small group more closely. Take a look:

four men in bunk

Who first identified Elie Wiesel in the famous Buchenwald liberation photo?

In October 1983, the New York Times  published this photograph as part of an article in its high circulation Sunday NYT Magazine with the caption: “On April 11, 1945, American troops liberated the concentration camp’s survivors, including Elie, who later identified himself as the man circled in the photo.”

Coincidentally, it was 1983 when Wiesel’s friend Sigmund Strochlitz began campaigning for a Nobel prize for Wiesel. Letters of nomination are due into the Nobel committee by Feb.1 of each year, so by January 1984, the committee was  receiving letters nominating Wiesel from U.S. Senators such as Daniel Moynihan and Barry Goldwater. (see “How Elie Wiesel Got the Nobel Peace Prize“)  The effort continued, with new and ever more innovative ideas, through 1985 and 1986 with the help of John Silber, President of Boston University, Wiesel’s employer. Hundreds were enlisted into the effort.

The 1983 article in the New York Times that was the opening gun of the campaign was written by Jew Samuel Freedman and titled “Bearing Witness: The Life and Work of Elie Wiesel.” It included this line: “His name has been frequently mentioned as a possible recipient of a Nobel Prize, for either peace or literature.” Well, it had just begun to be mentioned … by this team of cheerleaders.

Wiesel pretends that he had nothing to do with it. In an interview in France in 2009, he said: “If you fight or if you do scientific research to get the Nobel, you never succeed and you should not succeed.” (Elie Wiesel, “messager de la memoire”) No, he did not fight but his mercenaries fought for him, and he used this photograph as his “research.” That this photograph played a large role is shown by the fact that immediately after the Nobel award ceremony in December 1986, Wiesel went to Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem and posed in front of its prominent display there.

Elie Wiesel on Dec. 18, 1986 at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem 

After the award was announced by the Nobel Committee, the New York Times  published again on Nov. 1 a severely cropped version of the Buchenwald photo (below) with the caption: “Elie Wiesel, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (at far right in the top bunk) in the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945, when the camp was liberated by American troops.” The picture accompanied an article by Jew Martin Susskind titled, “A Voice from Bonn: History Cannot Be Shrugged Off.”

The role played by the tax-payer funded United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Elie Wiesel finagled his way to becoming Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1980 after being chosen in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter as chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. Why the United States needed to do anything at all about the “Holocaust” is something only the 2.5% Jewish population in this country can answer. It is to satisfy them. Wiesel continued to chair the Council until 1986, when he reached his goal of becoming a Nobel Laureate. The USHMM was undoubtedly an important institutional heavyweight that leveraged him to the Nobel.

The USHMM naturally accepted that Wiesel was in the famous photograph as soon as he and the New York Times said he was. If you think the museum staff does real research, is searching for truth and/or is engaged in scholarship of any kind, you are badly mistaken. The museum represents official power only and is invested in keeping it in Jewish hands.

This photograph is the only document tying Elie Wiesel to the Holocaust

The only document that connects Elie Wiesel to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald experience he claims to have—in other words, his claim to be an authentic “Holocaust survivor”—is the famous Buchenwald liberation photograph. There are no records with his name and birth date for either camp. His books do not support his presence there very well. That’s why the Wiesel promoters, who wanted to anchor their man’s claim to be the unchallenged spokesman for the world’s greatest victims—which winning a Nobel prize would surely do—decided that they could pawn that unknown face off as the face of Wiesel. This decision was made in 1983. It’s certain that Elie Wiesel took part in making it, though the pretense is kept up by all that he was aloof from the entire process.

What you must do

When you comprehend the immense power that this simple photo comparison and commentary gives us, you know that we have it in our hands  to break down the Wiesel legend if this knowledge is widely circulated. If you understand this, you know what you must do. You must post this article everywhere you can, you must tell everyone about it, send it to all you know … make sure that this photo comparison moves through the Internet and finds a home in as many places as possible.  And keep it up, because once is not enough. I’ve done my part, readers. Now it’s up to you.

The third chapter in the book “Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas” (New studies on National Socialist mass murder by poisonous gas) is titled: “Die Tötungsanstalten der ‘Aktion T4’” (The T4 killing facilities).

As the title suggests, this is about the T4 action in six of the facilities, with a sort of foreword “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” im Nationalsozialismus: Die “Aktion T4” (Extermination of life unworthy of life under National Socialism. The Action T4), by Brigitte Kepplinger, Dr. Mag., Soziologin und Historikerin, wissenschftliche Beamtin am Institute für Gesellschafts- und Sozialpolitik der Johannes Kepler-Universität Linz.

Since Revisionists do not deny that terminally ill and severely mentally challenged patients were put to death, there is no need to spend much time on this chapter. Kepplinger writes about the early stages of this action: that it was initiated by Hitler who instructed health minister Leonardo Conti to submit a plan. Later, Philipp Bouhler of the chancellery was able to push Conti out, an action typical of the politics of rivalry (Polikratie) in the Third Reich, according to Kepplinger.

Here is what Prof. Dr. Franz Seidler has to say about what took place before the doctors’ trial in which the T4 action played a major role:

– Dr. Conti, who was supposed to be one of the accused, committed suicide in his Nürnberg jail cell;

– The substitute head of the Reich Doctors Association (Reichärztekammer), Prof. Dr. Kurt Blome, who was to be charged in his stead, had to be acquitted because he could prove German doctors refused to participate in experiments on humans without consent of the proband. He stated however that tests are necessary and the Americans in 1951 invited him to participate in experiments re. chemical warfare;

– SS Obergruppenführer Prof. Dr. Ernst Robert Grawitz, CEO of the German Red Cross, committed suicide with his family in April 1945;

– Prof. Dr. August Hirt, head of the institute of military science in Straßburg committed suicide on 2 June 1945;

– Philipp Bouhler, head of the euthanasia program, captured by the Americans but committed suicide before being brought to Dachau;

– A whole group of doctors could not be found, some of them later turned up and were taken to the US to participate in research in their field of expertise, i.e., they continued were they left off just under a differed administration. [1]

This is an unusually high number of “suicides,” with some of the doctors not found for the trial but later invited to come to America to do exactly what they had done in the Third Reich, only now it was deemed “legal.” Prof. Dr. Karl Brandt, until the end of the war head health care official, was the most prominent of the accused. He weighed 44kg (97 pounds) when brought to Nürnberg, a consequence of hardships and torture inflicted on him by the British. The main charge against him was the T4 program, with Dr. Eugene Kogon (Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen…) the chief witness, but Kogon had to admit later that what he told was hearsay. The shenanigans continued, as documents of dubious origin were submitted, but too late for the defense to refute anything. Defense lawyer Dr. Servatuis charged that this program was a domestic (internal) program that foreigners were not competent to judge. He further questioned the affidavits because they contained words like “might have been”, “possibly”, “might be”, etc., and demanded that witnesses be produced for cross-examination. But the prosecution would not allow it for fear that the charges could not be sustained; again, because of phrases in the protocols like “I believe”, I assume”, “as far as I can remember” and “possibly”. It was also pointed out that the British engaged in human experiments – this was published in a medical journal. Dr. Brandt stated that whoever showed mercy for the incurable can never be a murderer, but to no avail — he was hanged on 2 June 1948.[2]

This proves that the illegality of the program was only “established” in a show trial. In fact, discussions about the legality of euthanasia were initiated as early as 1933. During the rearranging  (Neugsataltung) of German penal law, the Prussian minister of justice, Hanns Kerrl, published a memorandum entitled “Nationalsozialistische Srafrecht” in 1933 in which he argued that euthanasia cannot be illegal if an incurable person is asking for it, or if that person is unable to do so has relatives ask on his/her stead. No person shall be prosecuted if a doctor determines that the patient cannot be cured, as confirmed by another medical doctor. The memo then mentions the mentally challenged:

„Sollte der Staat etwa bei unheilbar Geisteskranken ihre Ausschaltung aus dem Leben durch amtliche Organe gesetzmäßig anordnen, so liegt in der Ausführung solcher Maßnahmen nur die Durchführung einer staatlichen Anordnung … Wohl bleibt zu betonen, daß die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens durch eine nichtamtliche Person stets eine strafbare Handlung darstellt.“[3]

(Should the state pass a decree legalizing the ending of the life of an insane (mentally challenged) person by state officials, participation in this would only be the execution of a state order…It must be stressed however that this action, if performed by anyone other than a state official, is punishable)

This was based on an essay by the expert on penal law (Strafrechtslehrer), Prof. Karl Binding, and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, published in Leipzig 1920 and titled “Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens – Ihr Maß und ihre Form” (The release for extermination of unworthy life – the limits and form). According to the authors, the killing of incurables and insane (Blödsinniger) should be allowed if asked for by relatives, following a thorough examination by two doctors and a legal expert. Economic reasons were given because the persons, who care for these unproductive beings (Ballastexistenzen), are not available for the greater good.[4]

The above essay was published in 1920 – a time in which starvation as a result of the criminal British blockade was still fresh in mind. Only someone who experienced anything like that can dare judge, for the world looks friendlier with a full stomach.

Churches protested, as did the medical profession and as a consequence the new penal law of 1935 did not sanction euthanasia. Later efforts to legalize euthanasia failed, but Hitler claimed that “the well being of the German populace (Volk) is above any paragraph”.[5] And as has been shown in part II of this series, Hitler issued a decree on 1 September 1939, allowing: “…that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen] of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death [Gnadentod].”[6]

This was not a license to kill. Doctors had to determine if the affected were indeed incurable or mentally challenged beyond hope. Abuses probably happened, but the intent was to end the lives of those who were a burden on society, especially in wartime. But above all, Hitler, as the undisputed head of state, could pass laws, i.e. issue decrees that became de facto laws. And here we have the issue of “consciousness of doing wrong”, as August von Knieriem words it.[7]

Von Knieriem starts out with:

“Under the national legal system concerned, the majority of acts judged at Nuremberg would not have been punishable at all…”.[8]

And that is precisely the issue. A Hitler order – or decree of any kind – was law, period. The doctors examined the patients and found them to be incurable, thus by the decree Hitler had issued they followed the law and were not conscious of wrong doing. Von Knieriem puts it thus:

“This problem is generally designated as that of the “consciousness of unlawfulness” or of doing wrong, and can be expressed in the following terms: Can the guilty intent be imputed to an actor who was not conscious of doing wrong? As the act must first be un­lawful for the problem of the actor’s guilt to be raised at all, the question may also be expressed in the following way: Can anybody be punished for being guilty of intent if he was mistaken about the lawfulness of his act? This is why the problem of the consciousness of doing wrong is generally designated as that of error of law or, since unlawfulness means that the act is prohibited, as the “error of prohibition.” Irrespective of the manner in which the question is formulated, its meaning is always the same; it refers to the determination of the extent, if any, to which the actor was conscious of doing wrong.”[9]

And moral consideration, if even present, cannot make an act unlawful. Also, Dr. Brandt had stated at his trial that showing mercy to the incurable can never be considered murder. These doctors and whoever else that participated in the program were not murderers, but used their judgment to end the sufferings of those who at that time could not be cured. It is therefore folly to refer to the T4 program to make a case for alleged mass killings of Jews with poisonous gas, since the illegality of T4 has never been proven.

Just briefly to the numbers of the T4 action, and we seem to have the same “discrepancies” here as with Shoah numbers. Kogon et al claim 70,273 killed, based on some accounting sheets found.[10] The Kogon book was published in 1983, but only in the years following German unification were a number of the pertinent documents discovered in East German archives. But, the discovery raised more questions as were answered, according to Peter Sandner.[11] Sandner then tells us that for a long time it was assumed that 70,000 had been killed; this number was based on the so-called “Hartheim-Dokument”.[12] But newer research has shown that at most (allenfalls) 25,000 to 30,000 files are on hand, about a third of the total. The questions are, so Sandner: where are the rest of the files, and how did those files end up in the DDR (East Germany)?[13] Sandner then tells us that most of the Hartheim files have been destroyed; he doesn’t say how we know that. In an IfZ essay of 2003, we learn that 30,000 files have since been located, but that the rest were destroyed.[14] And even though it seems that only 30,000 deaths can be confirmed, Sandner hangs on to the 70,000 number, admitting only that the files found in East Germany must be evaluated and that this is happening now.[15]

In conclusion, the illegality of the T4 action was never established and there seem to be some other questions – i.e., the numbers. The many authors of the book under discussion are unable to make a case for mass gassings, and therefore need to try to make their case via T4: quite the admittance. Therefore there’s no need to waste time on this chapter, which offers no evidence at all for the alleged Shoah.

Sources:

1. Franz W. Seidler, Das Recht in Siegerhand. Die 13 Nürnberger Prozesse 1945-1949, Pour le Mérite-Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Selen Austria 2007, pp.212/13
2. Ibid, pp.213-217
3. Lothar Gruchmann, Euthanasie und Justiz im Dritten Reich, IfZ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1972, Heft 3, p.235; (Nationalsozialistisches Strafrecht, Denkschrift des Preußischen Justizministers, Berlin 1933, pp.86/87)
4. Ibid, pp.235/36
5. Ibid, p.239
6. Ibid, p.241
7. August von Knieriem, The Nuremberg Trials, Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, Illinois 1959, pp.217ff
8. Ibid, p.217
9. Ibid, pp.218/19
10. Eugen Kogon et al, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, S. Fischer Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1983, pp. 60-62
11. Peter Sander, Die “Euthanasie” Akten im Bundesarchiv, IfZ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1999, Heft 3, p.385
12. Ibid, p.386. The document stored in the National Archives, Washington, with a film-copy in the Federal Archive, Koblenz.
13. Ibid, pp.386/87
14. Peter Sandner, Schlüsseldokumente zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der NS “Euthanasie” Akten gefunden, IfZ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 2003, Heft 2, p.285
15. Ibid. p.290

Chapter four is titled “Giftgas als Mittel zum Völkermord in Gaswagen und Vernichtungslager” (Poisonous gas as means to commit mass murder in gas wagons and extermination camps).

With this we finally seem to be getting to the nitty-gritty of the subject, and we are almost half-way through the book. The first essay is by Mathias Beer, “Gaswagen. Von der “Euthanasie” zum Genozid” (Gas wagons. From euthanasia to genocide). Dr. phil. Mathias Beer is a historian, the head of research into contemporary history and head of the Donau-Swabian institute of history in Tübingen.

Most, if not all, authors place the word “euthanasia” in quotation marks, suggesting that this is the wrong term and that mass murder would be the correct definition. This is then additional evidence that the reader must be conditioned and that a solid Shoah case cannot be made.

Before I address the article by Mr. Beer, allow me to state a few generalities. It appears that gas wagons did exist; called Black Ravens [1]. They were the invention of Isaj Davidovich Berg, a Jew, and were used by the Soviets.[2]

Voslensky writes that the inventor of the gas vans was a certain (gewisser) Berg, the exhaust gasses were routed through the interior of the box (Wagenkasten) and that the vans were already in use in 1936.[3] Solzhenitsyn provides a few more details: Berg had been manager of the economic administration (AchO) of the NKVD in the Moscow district and was ordered to put into practice the decisions made by the “Troika”, a semi judicial body. He did so by having the condemned transported to the place where they were shot (Er transportierte Leute zu Erschiessungen). But with three “Troikas” operating at the same time, the shooting commandos could not handle the load and Berg invented the gas vans. The victims were undressed and thrown into a closed truck, camouflaged as a bread delivery truck. The exhaust gasses were rerouted through the box and by the time the truck arrived at the place of execution, the victims had been dealt with (erledigt). Berg himself was shot in 1939, but not because of that crime. In 1956 he was rehabilitated, and that even though his invention, the gas vans, are recorded in his file and remained there until discovered by journalists.[4]

Now to the German gas vans alleged to have existed. In the summer of 1942, the Germans found evidence of the Katyn massacre, the killing of 27,500 Polish citizens in Katyn and the surrounding area.[5] On 2 November 1942, the Soviets announced the creation of the “Extraordinary State Commission” (ESC)[6] and on 19 April 1943 issued a decree. Mr. Alexander Victor Prusin [7] provides some details:

“The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet signed a decree stipulating public execution or heavy prison sentences for Axis personnel and their accomplices found guilty of crimes [End Page 3] against civilians and POWs. The decree provided no legal definition of war crimes—it used the all-encompassing terms “atrocities” or “evil deeds” (zverstva or zlodeianiia)—but it stated that while the Axis powers and their accomplices had committed horrible crimes against Soviet citizens, “to date the punishment meted out to these criminals and their local hirelings is clearly inadequate to the crimes they have committed.”[…] While some scholars have suggested that the decree was a direct Soviet response to the German discovery of the mass graves of Polish POWs in the Katyn Forest in April 1943, the fact that [End Page 4] the Soviets never published the decree confirms that it was intended for internal purposes[…]”[8]

The Germans had actually discovered the Katyn crime scene in the summer of 1942 [9], but the investigations were not undertaken ‘till the spring of 1943, for obvious reasons — a war was on. Try as Mr. Prusin might, the issuing of the above Soviet decree and the discovery by the Germans of the Katyn crime are just too closely related to dismiss them as coincidence. Also, publishing decisions made by Soviet officials was not common practice, Voslensky goes into detail, see footnote 2. Consequently, and this gets us back to the gas vans, the Krasnodar/Kharkov show trials were conducted by the Soviets in July/December 1943.[10] Gas vans play a large role in those trials, not surprisingly since the Soviets seemed to have been experts on how they worked. As for how the evidence was collected by the Soviets, see the Prusin article. What is of interest is that the experts in both trials established that the vans were diesel powered. From the Krasnodar trial:

“On the basis of the thorough medical, chemical and spectroscopic investigation which was carried out, a Committee of Experts consisting of Dr. V. I. Prozorovsky, Chief Medico-Legal Export of the Commissariat of Public Health of the U.S.S.R.; V. M. Smolyaninov, Chief Medico-Legal Export of the People’s Commissariat of Public Health of the R.S.F.S.R.; Professor M. I. Avdeyev, D. M. Sc., Chief Medico-Legal Expert of the Red Army; Dr. P. S. Semenovsky, Consulting Physician of the Moscow City Medico-Legal Department; and S. M. Sokolov, court chemist, arrived at the conclusion that the cause of death in 523 of the cases examined was carbon monoxide poisoning, and that in 100 cases death was due to firearm wounds inflicted, in the majority of cases, in the head.

In their report the Committee of Experts stated that the carbon monoxide could undoubtedly have had lethal effect if the waste gases from the diesel engine penetrated the closed van”.[11]

And from the Kharkov trial:

“As established by the investigation similar “gas lorries,” which were nicknamed “murder vans,” were used by the Germans for murdering peaceful Soviet citizens not only in Krasnodar but also in Kharkov.

These vans, as testified by the German defendants in the present case and also by witnesses who witnessed the crimes committed by the Germans, are large closed trucks of dark grey colour, driven by diesel engines.

The vans are lined inside with galvanized iron and have air-tight folding doors at the back. The floor is equipped with a wooden grating under which passes a pipe with apertures. This pipe is connected to the exhaust pipe of the engine. The exhaust gases of the diesel engine, containing highly concentrated carbon monoxide, enter the body of the van, causing rapid poisoning and asphyxiation of the people locked up in the van.”[12]

Thus, Achim Trunk is wrong when he writes that reports about murder by gas vans talk of gasoline engines explicitly.[13] Also, in a letter of 16. 5. 42, Walter Rauff (details about him later) is informed that the Saurer truck, allegedly one of the gas vans, had brake problems during the transfer from Simferopol to Taganrog. Now, Taganrog is a little over 200km north of Krasnodar and the Soviets had determined that in Krasnodar the trucks were powered by diesel engines. This then suggests that some Saurer trucks were diesel powered, adding to the confusion. Beer of course never mentions any of this, he starts out by referring to a letter by Greiser to Himmler in which the former praises the Sonderkommando Lange who had served well in Kulmhof (Chelmno). It is not my intention to concentrate on specific camps or locations in which gas vans were allegedly used, as others have done that (for Chelmno see the essay by Ingrid Weckert)[14]; I understand that Carlo Mattogno will publish a book on Chelmno.[15] Also, Ingrid Weckert and Friedrich Berg published a study on the gas vans dealing with most of the issues.[16] I will therefore just make a few general comments on the vans themselves: what is known about them; do we have a precise description of them; could they have been used as testified, etc. – on this too we only have eyewitness testimony. Not one of those vans has ever been found, though we have a picture of a Magirus truck alleged to be a gas van, but the Magirus factory in Ulm only produced trucks with diesel engines.

Back to Herr Beer, who of course ignores Weckert and Berg, and begins with T4 instead, the title of his first sub-chapter: “Kaisers Kaffee Geschäft”: Töten auf Rädern mit reinem CO im Rahmen der „Euthanasie“(Kaisers coffee shop. Killing with pure CO during “euthanasia”) (Beer had already published an essay on the gas vans for the Institute für Zeitgeschichte [Institute for contemporary history] in 1987).[17] Beer writes that the criminological-technical institute of the security police (KTI) had been told to look for a quick and painless method for killing the mentally challenged. It was decided that killing with CO would be the most humane way and some successful tests in the “euthanasia” facility in Brandenburg an der Havel were undertaken, with Dr. Widmann opening the valve and controlling the gas amount. Then some gassings were tried in the concentration camp Fort VII Posen: Untersturmführer Herbert Lange was in charge and the latter were the first killings of persons deemed unfit (unwertes Leben) in the territories of west and north Poland annexed by the Reich. From this two methods evolved: the stationary gas chambers for the T4 action, and the second a prototype of a gas van built with “Sonderkommando Lange” in control. And even though it is not possible to prove the genesis of this killing method for lack of sources, we know that the SS and Police (HSSPF), the RSHA, the KTI, as well as Widmann, were involved.

This first gas van, Beer continues, operated under the same principal as the gas chambers in the “euthanasia” facilities, except that it was a mobile gas chamber. The deadly gasses were routed into an air-tight trailer pulled by a vehicle; thus, the victims did not have to be transported to the killing facilities. As camouflage the trailers had “Kaiser’s Kaffee Geschäft” painted on their sides and from January 1940 to July 1941 the “Sonderkommando Lange” killed several thousand patients in the Warthegau. This was so successful that the gas vans were lent to East Prussia on 21 May to 8 June 1940, and in the transit camp Soldau alone 1,500 were killed by the “Sonderkommando Lange” and their “Kaiser’s Kaffee Geschäft” wagons. This then was the first generation of gas vans: the systematic murder of persons unfit to live, which was later expanded in late fall of 194 to Jewish genocide.[18]

Comments: The “Kaiser Kaffee” story stretches credulity to the breaking point. We are to believe that the “Nazis” first took the patients for a scenic tour, then unloaded their corpses in a room close to a crematoria instead of simply killing them right there? Beer admits that nothing has been found linking the Kaiser Kaffee Company to the gas trailers and provides no real evidence for the existence of those trailers. In his 1987 publication (see footnote 17), Beer tells us that eyewitnesses testified that in 1939/1940 trailers were used in Poland for the transportation of mentally challenged. The trailers had the inscription “Kaisers-Kaffee-Geschäft” painted on their sides and it is alleged that in those trailers the sick were killed with CO (Im Anhänger sollen Kranke mit aus Stahlflaschen eingeleitetem reinen Kohlenmonoxid (CO) getötet worden sein). This does not prevent Beer from repeating this story in this newest publication, needing it to confabulate a link to the killings of the mentally ill to the alleged killing of Jews. Such is the “evidence” for the Shoah.

Beer then continues with the coffee wagon story, writing that the Sonderkommando Lange used them in the Warthegau, and that Lange was very busy. Then, Arthur Nebe, chief of Einsatzgruppe(EG) B, had Dr. Widmann from the KTI meet him to discuss killing methods. Widmann was to bring 400kg of explosives as well as some metal hoses. As a first test some mentally ill were locked into a bunker and the bunker was blown up with explosives, but that didn’t work too well. Then the Widmann metal hoses were put to use, connected to the exhaust of a car or truck with the exhaust directed via the hose into a closed room filled with patients. From this experiment it was learned that killing with exhaust would be the solution, but since the EG did not have buildings at the ready, the killing facilities had to be mobile.

Thus, on instructions from Heydrich, Walter Rauff of group II D 3 (technical matters) ordered that “closed in vehicles” (geschlossenen Kraftfahrzeuge) were to be put at the disposal of the EG. They were to be 3.5 ton vehicles at minimum, powered by gasoline engines and fitted with an airtight box. The exhaust was to be routed via a metal hose into that box.

Comments: First a little about Arthur Nebe. Already in 1938 he was a member of a group of traitors: Canaris, von Witzleben, Gisevius and Count Helldorf: influential people with excellent contacts abroad.[19] Nebe was later shot because of his involvement in the assassination attempt of Hitler in 1944. The traitors were desperately looking for something to discredit Hitler, to turn the German population against him. Why did Nebe not provide Gisevius – or Canaris who was head of military intelligence – with details of the gas vans and all the killings allegedly happening? Why did the gas van story only emerge after the war?

Now to Walter Rauff, the inventor of the “gas vans”.

“In the late 1940s, Walther (Walter) Rauff, an SS officer who was responsible for the murder of at least 100,000 people and was wanted by the Allies as a war criminal, was employed by the Israeli secret service. Instead of bringing him to justice it paid him for his services and helped him escape to South America… compared to Rauff, who was a criminal on the same scale as Eichmann… Klarsfeld wrote in an e-mail. “I doubt that it could have been possible, because Rauff was well-known in the Jewish world for his role in the gassing program by trucks[…]”[20]

Jews knew about Rauff, but the Mossad hired and paid him, and in 1984 he died of cancer in Chile. In the documentary “Nazi Hunters. The Real Story” it is claimed that Chile refused to extradite Rauff. If so, what prevented the Mossad from kidnapping him as they had done to Eichmann? This story also lacks credibility, leaving one to suspect that the gas van story was concocted later. In fact, the documents presented to support the gas van story suggest just that.

As for Widmann and the experiments, this reads like a Keystone Cops operation. First, the Germans, who were so far advanced in weapons technology that to this day the victors are looking for links as to why this was so[21], but these same Germans then had to experiment with killing methods by sticking people into a bunker and blowing it up to see if it worked? Heaven help us! The rest of the story is not much better; surely the Germans were aware of the fact that carbon monoxide is a dangerous killer.

Also, gasoline engines are not explicitly mentioned, only some eyewitnesses refer to them.

Beer continues to insult our intelligence, but there’s no need to suffer any further; thus, to the gas vans. First, what do we know about them, i.e., how were they described? Beer tells us that they were 3.5 ton trucks with an airtight box in which a group of people were loaded and killed with the exhaust produced by a petrol powered engine, the exhaust led into the box via metal hoses. The judges in the Bonn Chelmno trial of 1965 tell us that the trucks were big, painted grey, of foreign manufacture and had a closed-in box in the back. The double doors in the back of the box were sealed with rubber gaskets and the exhaust entered the box via a hose, which could be attached to the exhaust pipe.[22] The judges of the 1966 Hannover trial have it as a special truck with a high, air-tight, box in the back in which 40 – 50 persons could be killed within 10 to 15 minutes.

There’s nothing really of substance and all other descriptions are much the same. Pierre Marais writes that it would be relatively easy to construct a gas van, but that it is strange that no detailed plans have survived, given the Germans penchant for exactness and paperwork. Also, the box needs to be constructed to withstand pressure. A square box was not ideal for that purpose: the pressure issue a “conditio sine qua non” – without which it could not be.[23] Any type of container which has to withstand pressure from within has rounded corners, cylindrical in shape. A square box as described would have been ill-suited to handle the pressure even if vents were provided to allow the air in the box to escape when the exhaust entered, thus allowing the exhaust to vent during operation. If the vents were too small, either the engine would stall or the box would explode. But we have no mention of any calculations concerning this issue, and the square boxes are evidence to the contrary — i.e. they are proof that no pressure could have been applied.

What we have is the letter of June 5 (the date handwritten) 1942, which starts with:

“Seit Dezember 1941 wurden beispielsweise so mit 3 eingesetzten Wagen 97,000 verarbeitet”.

(For instance, since December 1941, 97,000 were processed in this manner)

This is nonsense, for no German starts a letter with “for instance” when no context is provided referring to what instance is meant. The letter then states that to prevent the possible build-up of excess pressure, two slots of 10 x 1 cm are to be added to the back of the box, covered with tin plates on hinges. More nonsense because excess pressure is a certainty, not a possibility, and those two slots, amounting to a 4 inch cut with a saw blade and covered with hinged tin, would not have prevented this. Also, how were the 97,000 “processed” without those slots? In the next letter of 23 June 1942 (handwritten) we learn that the openings in the back door, covered by sliders, were to be eliminated and replaced by the slots: No mention of how big those openings were, but having replaced them with those saw cuts is ridiculous. In both letters the date is added by hand, curious to say the least. Also, the first letter has “Einzigste Ausfertigung” at the top, but “Einzigste” is not a German word.

Back to those openings in the back. Pradl, in his testimony at the Hannover trial stated that a hole of 58-60mm diameter, the size of the exhaust pipe, was drilled into the floor.[24] Thus we have an intake opening of 28 square cm and outflow openings of 20 square cm in total, smaller by almost one third: no go, as the pressure would have built up and blown the box apart or stalled the engine. Then we have the exhaust temperature, not mentioned by any of the witnesses. Marais writes that exhaust exits the engine at 600 to 800 degrees Celsius. He continues by saying that even if we allow for the exhaust to cool down to 200 degrees C by the time it enters the box — unlikely that it would have cooled down that much — the temperature added to the pressure would surely have blown the box apart.[25] At the end of May 1942 an explosion occurred at Chelmno, and it is alleged that this was as a result of excess pressure in a gas van and that consequently the problem was dealt with. Not so. The explosion occurred in the basement of the castle and circumstances remain unknown. [26] And even if this explosion was truck related, as suggested in the letter of 5 June, the 4 inch slots would not have fixed the problem. Also, we have nothing about Jews being cooked; not one witness I am aware of mentions death via temperature.

Final comments: The aforementioned letters contain many oddities, Ingrid Weckert addresses them in her essay (footnote 16). Marais contacted Beer to ask him about the pressure, Beer wrote back that the authorities were aware of it and solved the problem by adding the two 10cm x 1cm slots in the back, which is not so. No gas van has ever been found, although Beer wrote back to Marais that one has survived, displayed at Konin, Poland. Not so, the city authorities wrote back that no such van exists.[27] Smirnov submitted what he deemed to be gas van evidence at the IMT:

“On the floor of the van, under the grating, were two metal pipes. These pipes were connected with a transverse pipe of equal diameter… These pipes had frequent holes a half centimeter in width. From the transverse pipe down through a hole in the galvanized iron floor went a rubber hose with a hexagonal screw at the end, threaded so as to fit the thread on the end of the engine exhaust pipe…which says that in the Stavropol region the murder vans were used for the killing of 660 people who were ill in the local hospital. Further I draw the attention of the Tribunal to the report of the Extraordinary State Commission regarding the Crimes of the German fascist criminals in Krasnodar[…]”[28]

No diameter of the exhaust pipe given, but we learn that a rubber hose was attached to the exhaust pipe: complete nonsense, as the rubber would have gone up in flames. We also have the reference to the Krasnodar trial, and there it was determined that the trucks were powered by diesel engines. Also, the gas vans only came into prominence at the IMT, but partisans were everywhere. A page in an East German atlas shows the location of partisan operations in the east. Some areas around Minsk, for instance, where gas vans were allegedly in operation were controlled by partisans for periods of time. The same is true for Kharkov and other areas[29], and with that many partisans around, why don’t we have any pictures of those gas vans?

Did trucks of this kind even exist? More than likely, but they could not have been used to gas people as described, and all we have are witness testimonies: no genuine shop drawings; just letter that only confuses the issue. Rauff was questioned in Chile, but the whole Rauff story presents more questions than answers. The West German trials established nothing; they never asked for any details as to how the gas vans were operated; no experts were called; just witness testimony was submitted. In an “Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung” article of 29 April 1966, we read, concerning the trial vs. Pradl and Wentritt, that classical witnesses are not available (Es fehlt an klassischen Zeugen). One of the witnesses, name withheld, a member of EG B from June 1941 to June 1942, stated that they had no gas vans and that he never heard of them. Another witness testified that he saw a gas van, but when asked what he was told about it he stated that it was to be used for delousing.[30]   And it matters not if alleged perpetrators admitted to anything. Without expert testimony to prove that the vans could have been used to gas people as described, the testimony is worthless.

Beer provides no solid evidence. His “Kaffee-Wagen” story is amusing, but in general he just believes they existed. Once again we are no further along in proving that Jews were killed with poisonous gas of any kind.

Sources:

1. The Barnes Review, Volume XIV Number 5, September/October 2008, p.49; also Udo Walendy, Historische Tatsachen Nr.48, Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho 1991, pp.35/36; Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, London, England 1999, picture section following p.202, seventh page
2. Michael S. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis wird offenbar, Moskauer Archive erzählen 1917-1991, Langen Müller 1995, F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München, pp.28/29; also Alexander Solschenizyn, Zweihundert Jahre zusammen, Die Juden in der Sowjetunion, F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München 2007, pp.309/10
3. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis…, pp.28/29 in “Argumenty i fakty”, Nr.17, 1993
4. Solschenizyn, Zweihundert Jahre…, pp.309/10, in Komsomol’skaja Pravda of 28 October 1990, p.2
5. Voslensky, Das Geheimnis…, pp.29ff
6. For an evaluation of the reports issued by the ESC see: People and Procedures. Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR, by Marina Sorokina. The article is no longer available on-line, reference to it here http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/kritika/v006/6.4sorokina.pdf
7. Alexander Victor Prusin, “Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!”: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945-February 1946, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v017/17.1prusin.html
8. Ibid.
9. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/09/katyn/#more-408
10. The People’s Verdict. A full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials, Hutchinson and Co., Ltd.; London, New York: 1944
11. Ibid, p.14
12. Ibid. p.50
13. Günter Morsch et al, Neue Studien zu Nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas, p.36
14. http://vho.org/tr/2003/4/Weckert400-412.html
15. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/02/facing-a-new-decade/#more-1416
16. http://vho.org/D/gzz/9.html
17. Mathias Beer, Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ), 1987, Heft 3, pp.403-417
18. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, pp.155-158
19. Annelies von Ribbentrop, Deutsch-Englische Geheimverbindungen, Verlag der Deutschen Hochschullehrer-Zeitung, 1967, p.130
20. http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/in-the-service-of-the-jewish-state-1.216923.htm
21. Edgar Mayer/Thomas Mehner, Die Lügen der Alliierten und die deutschen Wunderwaffen, Kopp Verlag 2010; Friedrich Georg, Verrat in der Normandie, Grabert-Verlag, Thüringen 2008
22. Pierre Marais, “Die Gaswagen”, a translation by Jürgen Graf from the original “Les Camions à gaz en question. Polémiques”, Peter Hammer Verlag, Turin, 2008, p.220
23. Ibid, pp.24/25
24. Eugene Kogon et al, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1983, p.83
25. Marais, Die Gaswagen, pp.117/18
26. Ibid, p.223
27. Ibid, p.264
28. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp , pp.572/73
29. Atlas zur geschichte, Band 2, VEB Hermann Haack, Geographisch-Kartographische Anstalt Gotha/Leipzig 1975, p.46
30. A copy of this article is in my possession.

The second essay in chapter two is titled, “Technische Aspekte des Massenmordes durch Giftgas als Argument vor Gericht”(Technical aspects of mass murder by poisonous gas as presented in court). It is written by two authors, Volker Bieler, Judge at the court in Landau, Palatine – up to 31 August 2010 also department head of the Central Agency for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg and Kurt Schrimm, head prosecutor and head of the Ludwigsburg Central Agency for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes.

The authors start out by informing us that, when the NS regime had come to an end, mass murder by poisonous gas was the subject of numerous German courts cases (Trials conducted in the DDR are not considered). This contribution will show, by citing examples, how this specific system of murder had been legally evaluated (strafrechtlich bewertet). Paragraph (§) 211 will be discussed, as well as other relevant legalities.

Starting with the planning- and executing NS-authorities, right up to the guard who supervised the burning of the corpses, co-ordination was a characteristic of the mass murder. How this co-ordination, i.e., perpetrator and assistant, played a role in courts’ decisions of determining sentences will also be discussed. To put it all into perspective, we will let the verdicts speak for themselves. How the courts judged the substantial as well as the historical facts is laid out in the other essays contained in this summarizing volume (Sammelband). We will therefore only refer to the findings re. historical events (Historische Vorgänge) – contained in the verdicts – as is necessary for understanding the legal arguments of the courts.

Comments: The authors refer to “historical” events, “historical” facts, the historical significance irrelevant when guilt/innocence of the accused is to be determined. Some generalities concerning legal systems up front first, the differences no doubt known to many but perhaps not all, and since I am no expert just a rough outlay.

The Continental legal system differs from that of England and the US, insofar as in Continental jurisprudence, and I am only somewhat familiar with the German system, a series of laws exist, identified by so-called paragraphs “§”. In the Anglo-American system common law is practiced, judges verdicts become law and is referred to in similar cases. The authors discuss § 211, issued on 4 September 1941, at a time when lawlessness was the norm in Germany, as is claimed. This paragraph, among other issues, defines that person as a murderer who “insidiously or cruelly” (heimtückisch oder grausam) kills another person. A person acts insidiously when taking advantage of another person’s unwariness and defenselessness (Arg- und Wehrlosigkeit). Killing cruelly is when out of malice the victim is made to suffer unnecessarily.

This is an abbreviation of the legal terms as defined by the authors, but it needs to be mentioned to show how the courts wasted time in definitions and were forced to do so because of lack of evidence. Thus, to make all of it appear as legal proceedings, and to be able to convict without any substantial evidence, they had to resort to legal shenanigans. In the verdicts that I have seen, and the authors of this essay confirm this, no mention is ever made of a court ordered investigation of the alleged crime scene, no court ordered investigation of the alleged murder weapons, nothing. In the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials verdict the judges refer to the NSdAP party program, Dr. Broszat and Dr. Krausnick elaborating, the Hitler speech of 30 January 1939, the Wannsee Conference, etc. As for the alleged killings, they state that in the bunkers Jews were killed with gas with no details provided. And concerning the alleged gassings in crematoria II & III they stated:

“Zur Tarnung der in der Decke befindlichen Öffnungen, durch die das Zyklon B von aussen hineingeschüttet wurde, hatte man aus durchlöchertem Blech bestehende hohle Säulen installiert, die vom Boden bis zur Decke reichten und die Öffnungen verdeckten. In den Säulen befanden sich Spiralen, die das gekörnte Zyklon B nach dem Einschütten verteilten.“

(To camouflage the openings in the ceiling, through which the Zyklon B was poured from the outside, columns made from perforated sheet metal were installed, reaching from floor to ceiling and thus covered the openings. Inside the columns were spirals which distributed the Zyklon B granules.)

According to this, the columns were installed to hide the holes in the ceiling and the spiral inside the columns – made from perforated sheet metal – helped to distribute the pellets. None of that nonsense has survived, we now have columns made from wire mesh with a can on a string inside, the latest in German technical ingenuity and know how, equally as ridiculous as pointed out in part IV. The judges admit that no evidence existed when they stated:

“Bei der Feststellung der individuellen Beteiligung der Angeklagten an den in dem Konzentrationslager Auschwitz begangenen Mordtaten, sei es an Massenmorden, sei es an Einzeltötungen, sah sich das Schwurgericht vor ausserordentlich schwierige Aufgaben gestellt. Die Angeklagten selbst trugen zur Aufklärung nur sehr wenig bei. Soweit sie eine Beteiligung zugaben, schwächten sie diese ab, stellten sie verzerrt dar oder hatten stets eine Reihe von Ausreden zur Hand.

Die wenigen zur Verfügung stehenden Urkunden dienten im wesentlichen nur der Aufklärung allgemeiner Dinge, konnten jedoch über die individuelle Schuld der Angeklagten kaum Aufschluss geben.

Das Gericht war somit bei der Aufklärung der von den Angeklagten begangenen Verbrechen fast ausschliesslich auf Zeugenaussagen angewiesen[…]”[1]

(Trying to determine participation of the accused in the mass murder the court was faced with enormous difficulties. The accused refused to assist, if they admitted to participation they distorted what happened and had excuses at the ready.

The few available documents were only useful in clearing up general matters, but were of no help in determining guilt of the accused.

The courts had to therefore depend almost exclusively on the testimony of witnesses)

The verdicts of the Belzec and Sobibor trials are similar: no sign of an attempt to substantiate the charges with investigation reports compiled by experts in the field of crime investigations. In fact, recent trials in Germany, vs. Messrs. Zündel and Rudolf for instance, follow much the same pattern — no evidence is submitted and when the defense tries to submit evidence of its own, it is refused. The authors of this essay are no doubt aware of this, which is why they needed to resort to legal definitions. For, if evidence existed, proving without doubt that the crimes had been committed as alleged, that evidence would have been presented. And to refer to the contributions by others will also not cut it — the authors are legal experts and this essay should be where they make their case, if it can be made then.

The authors then provide excerpts from some of the verdicts, taken from “Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischen Tötungsverbrechen 1945-1999“, Amsterdam 1968 ff, by Christian F. Rüter and Dick W. de Mildt, publishers (Justice and NS crimes, A summary of verdicts of NS crimes as submitted 1945-1999). They start out with the gas wagons and a verdict of 23 July 1965 from the Bonn trial. Just a sample:

“Bei den Gaswagen handelte es sich um große, grau angestrichene Lastkraftwagen[...]mit geschlossenem Kastenaufbau[...]Das Innere war mit verzinktem Eisenblech ausgeschlagen. Auf dem Boden lagen Holzroste, unter denen sich Rohre befanden. An die Öffnung der Rohre war unter dem Wagenboden ein Schlauch angeschlossen, der eine konisch zulaufende Spitze besaß. Das Schlauchende konnte in das Auspuffrohr eingeführt und mit einer Überwurfmutter fest verschraubt werden”.[2]

Comments: Gaps are in the original. What this says is that the gas wagons were big trucks, painted grey with a closed-in box at the back. That box was lined with zinc coated sheet metal, at the floor wooden grills under which pipes were placed. A hose was connected to those pipes, the other end of the hose connected to the exhaust pipe. Thus, we have a grey box, no details as to what material this box was made of. And that is important, for it had to withstand pressure, this will be discussed later. Then this: a hose was connected to the exhaust. The German word used is “Schlauch” and at that time no doubt made of rubber or some rubber compound. The exhaust pipe gets scorching hot, any rubber or related material would melt in seconds. And no, Schlauch has no other meaning in German, if a pipe was meant or a hose made from flex material it would have said so. Also, I doubt any material available at that time, other than exhaust pipe related material, would have withstood the heat. All of this evidence that no experts had been consulted, the court relying on witness testimony.

In the verdict of the Düsseldorf Treblinka trial of 3 September 1965 we read:

“Der Boden der Gaskammern war gekachelt[…]An denDecken…befanden sich einige Rohrleitungen und Brauseköpfe. Dadurch sollten die Gaskammern den Eindruck von Duschräumen hervorrufen. Tatsächlich dienten die Rohrleitungen aber zum Einführen der von den Dieselmotoren im Maschinenraum erzeugten Gase[…]”[3]

(The floor of the gas chamber was tiled[…](gap in the original)Pipes with shower heads were fastened to the ceiling, supposed to create the impression that this was a shower room. But in fact the pipes were used to introduce the exhaust gas from the diesel engine, located in the machine room, into the chamber.)

Comments: And here we go again, diesel exhaust. The previous author, Achim Trunk, tried hard to convince us that diesel could have been used, maybe, and that with enough effort it could perhaps even be poisonous, but concludes, sort of, that “serious”, ahem, historians do not assume that diesel exhaust was used exclusively, except for Treblinka. So here we have confirmation, diesel exhaust was allegedly used in Treblinka. But the excerpt of the verdict says nothing about special settings for the diesel engine to make the exhaust poisonous enough to be suitable for mass murder, if this is at all possible, evidence again that the judges did not rely on expert analysis, that the proceedings were mere show trials. And why would the Germans, who had numerous gases at their disposal, among them the highly poisonous and cheaply produced Holzgas (producer gas) even consider diesel? All this is confirmation that what is alleged never happened.

The authors continue to write about the measures taken to fool the alleged victims into thinking that nothing sinister was about to happen, and all of them fell for it, or so we are ordered to believe. We then learn that out of the 70,000 mentally challenged, only a few of those killed in the T4 action were serious enough cases (Endzustände). Again the reference to the T4 action, unable to make a case for the Shoah, as it is referred to throughout the book, on its own. The number is of some importance, however, to be addressed later. They then go into more detail about definitions, i.e., who was considered a perpetrator (Täter) and who an assistant (Gehilfe), followed by how punishment was meted out.

Nothing that helps to prove that “The Shoah” is standing on solid ground, thus of no real benefit.

Sources:

1.    The site, IDGR, I copied this from has since disappeared, all I have is the printout.

2        Günter Morsch et al, Neue Studien zu Nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas, p.51

3        Ibid, p.53

The third and last essay of chapter II is titled:

“Gewalt und Tod in Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagern. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Archäologie“. (Violence and death in the concentration and extermination camps. Possibilities and limits of archeology). The essay is by Dr. Claudia Theune, University professor, institution head of the Institute for Ancient and Early History at the Vienna University. This sounds promising, although by now I would have expected an expert on crime investigations to join in, instead of a professor on ancient/early history. But again, no judging the book by its cover; let’s see what Dr. Theune writes.

In the introduction she informs us that archeology is the science which allows us, by investigating the traces left behind, to learn about the history and culture of peoples of times past. Over time different disciplines have emerged which concentrate on specific time periods. Before, the middle ages, as well as contemporary history, were not considered, it was believed that for that time enough documentation exists. This changed when the bombed out cities were reconstructed, thus in the 1950s archeology of the Middle Ages emerged, as did archeology of contemporary history in the 1980s. An international agreement was reached in 1964, the Charta of Venice, to be followed by the Malta Convention of 1992 and since then memorials are protected – this to include memorials from the time of National Socialism – and are part of archaeological research. Thus we now have four sources to fall back on: documents, photos, archaeological sources and written as well as oral witness testimonies. All of those, taken into context will give us an insight into the history of the former concentration camps and the violence and killings that took place in them. Theune further tells us that archaeology is only able to document the history of building traces found, i.e., basements or building foundations. Buildings that were demolished are lost for research, it is at best possible to determine what a building was used for by analogy.[1]

Comments: Good, we learn what archaeology can and cannot do. Pointing out that conclusions can sometimes only be reached when applying analogy, i.e. “inference that if two or more things agree with one another in some respects they will prob. agree in others” (Webster’s), is a little troubling. For, Webster’s states “prob.”, probably and if all we have are eyewitness tales, as in most cases, that and the “probable” is not solid evidence to determine guilt or innocence. But most important, Theune lists evidence provided in the order of importance: 1. documents, 2. photos, 3. archaeology and 4. eyewitness testimony. No sign here of any mention of reports compiled by experts in the field of crime investigations, unless she included them in the archaeological sources (archäologische Quellen), or in documentary sources (schriftliche Quellen), but that is uncertain. It is however more likely that she is aware of the fact that no such reports exist and she thus ignored them. But, she did put witness testimony at the end, and as we have been told in the new release following the 2008 Berlin Conference, the “gas chambers” rest solely on eyewitness testimonies (see part one), the least reliable source. But, lets keep an open mind and see, perhaps Dr. Theune did find traces of a gas chamber.

The next sub-chapter is titled: Archäologie in ehemaligen Konzentrationslagern (archaeology in the former concentration camps). Archaeological excavations in the former camps have been undertaken for the past 15 years, so Theune. The reason being: construction in the camps, changes made re. the appearance of the camps, as in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, etc. Or, historical interest was the reason, as was the case in Flossenbürg and Witten-Annen, finding artefacts another possible motive. A few investigations were undertaken in Poland, in the former camp Belzec and Sobibor, as well as in the area around crematoria II in Auschwitz.[2] Archaeological research in the camps is of special importance, for in most cases other sources are not available. Based on those diggings the functions of the camps could be determined.

Theune continues by pointing out that we must perceive archaeological research re. violence and killings in the gas chambers differently (Die archäologischen Erkenntnisse zu Gewalt und Tod durch Tötung in Gaskammern sind jedoch differenziert zu betrachten). In many cases the technical facilities of the gas chambers (technischen Anlagen der Gaskammern) were destroyed by the National Socialists in the last days of the war. Or the structures were changed by the Soviets, as was the case in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, which were Soviet special camps, or buildings changed when the camps were turned into memorials. The technical equipment from the Sachsenhausen gas chamber was found in a shed, the blastings of the 1950s destroyed additional evidence. Mauthausen also changed, but the analysis of the walls in the room adjacent to the gas chambers resulted in a discovery: it turned out that tiles were replaced, one of the reasons to cover a round hole, probably the opening where the gas line came through the wall.

Many utensils were found, spoons and the like made from aluminum probably used by the inmates, whereas utensils made from more expensive material was used by the perpetrators. Human ashes were also found, as were teeth. Objects found in refuse sites are of little evidentiary value, as they are instead a telltale sign (deutliche Hinweise). Some comments about Hartheim which has also been altered.

Comments: For the Belzec investigations by Andrzej Kola see “Belzec”, by Carlo Mattogno.[3] For Sobibor see “The Akte Sobibor”, by Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues and Carlo Mattogno.[4] Some of the controversies re. the recent Sobibor investigations are addressed by Thomas Kues.[5] It is strange, however, that Theune never mentions Treblinka, the camp in witch 880,000 Jews were killed, according to Yad Vashem. Also, witnesses testified that in Belzec and Treblinka the bodies were first buried in huge mass graves, then exhumed and burned. The outlines of those mass graves must still be clearly visible, the graves themselves must of course also still exist, impossible to destroy huge holes. All of this should assist archaeologists in their investigations, but we have nothing, no pictures taken from a plane showing the outlines of the graves, no mention of any of this by Dr. Theune.

Then there is the issue of the investigations themselves. Theune tells us that they only started some 15 years ago, the reason for those investigations not really to substantiate what is alleged but to turn the sites into memorials, and artefacts are found while doing so. But then again she tells us about the hole in the wall in one of the Mauthausen rooms, a small room just ahead of the alleged gas chamber, she calls it “Gaszelle” (gas cell) and assumes that this is the hole where the gas pipe went through the wall. Some time was spent on this investigation; Theune tells us that the tiles were checked as to their origin, as was the plaster, etc., etc. But re. the hole she jumps to a conclusion, she is convinced that this must be the hole through which the gas pipe was routed. How can a hole tell us that? It can’t, but when approaching an investigation with the intend to prove what is alleged, this is the outcome and the inherent problem with all of those so-called investigations. The same approach was/is taken when investigating events depicted in the Old Testament. Julius Wellhausen was one of those taking a closer look and had this to say about some of the researchers: “Für die Deutung werden die Thatsachen vorausgesetzt und aus der Deutung werden sie bewiesen…“(For the interpretation facts are established up front and confirmed by using the interpretation)[6] But the detailed hole in the wall investigations prove that evidence is being looked for, just nothing of substance has ever been found.

The camp Sachsenhausen, forgotten for decades, has, since German unification, come to the fore. In the introduction to the book under discussion here, we learned that Martin Broszat of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) published a letter on 19 August 1960 in which he stated that no gas chambers had existed in Germany proper. This has now been revised, the Institute (IfZ) explained in a publication of 27 June 2001 that recent research has shown that gas chambers did exist inside Germany proper. No additional research is being referred to, only the book “Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas” by Kogon et al cited as source(pp.240-280).[7] Kogon et al base their conclusions in part on the testimony of Anton Kaindl, former camp commandant, at his trial of 23 October – 1 November 1947 before a Soviet court. The court case not part of this discussion, only to note that it is strange that Broszat was not aware of this. But, in a publication in “Stars and Stripes” of 24 January 1993, Simon Wiesenthal wrote:

“It is true that there were no extermination camps on German soil and thus no mass gassings such as those that took place at Auschwitz, Treblinka and other camps[…]”[8]

Prof. Dr. Yehuda Bauer, of Yad Vashem, confirmed this in a letter of 4 July 2000 in which he wrote that to his knowledge gassings were undertaken in Ravensbrück, and elsewhere in the borders of 1937, on a small scale[9], but no mention of Sachsenhausen et al. This is now interpreted to mean that gassings did take place in most camps, but not mass gassings. Spin everything until it fits. It is however alleged that mass gassings did take place in Sachsenhausen.

Prof. Maser (Fälschung, Dichtung und Wahrheit über Hitler und Stalin) lists the contradicting testimonies re. this gas chamber and at the end refers to an affidavit by Gerhard Schirmer in which the latter states that a replica of a gas chamber had been constructed by him, and several others, on order of the Soviets at about the middle of October 1945.[10] This affidavit was eventually seized by German authorities.[11]

After the war, the Soviets used Sachsenhausen as one of their special camps, scores of Germans were killed there or just died, many interned in the camp just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. But no building marked “gas chamber” appeared on any of the camp sketches made public by either the Soviets or East German authorities. And even though “Fascist crimes” were referred to daily by the Soviets, no mention of any gas chamber in any of the reports by vice SMAD chief Serov (SMAD=Soviet Military Administration in Germany).[12] [13] And it gets even more peculiar: In 1950, the newly created East German army, at first referred to as “Kasernierte Volks-Polizei” KVP (police housed in barracks), took over the site (later all pretences were dropped and the army called an army, the Nationale Volksarmee [NVA], National peoples Army). An excerpt from the Sachsenhausen Memorial site regarding the gas chamber:

“In 1952/3, without reference to the historical importance of the site, the KVP blew up ‘Station Z’ – the crematorium and killing areas, to make room for a shooting gallery and the local population used the remaining materials of the barracks for building and heating. The Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) were also involved in the destruction of the site[…]”[14]

We are to believe that the Soviets allowed the Germans to destroy a perfectly good gas chamber, and that even though Smirnov stated at the IMT that: “…840,000 Russian prisoners of war in Sachsenhausen were annihilated at one time.”[15] This number has now shrunk somewhat, in the Sachsenhausen memorial write up we read of 12,000 Soviet POW’s.[16] Still, why not preserve the building to commemorate “Fascist crimes”? We must remember that at about the same time, the Soviets were busy re-building the morgue of crematoria I in Auschwitz, to make it appear as a gas chamber! Why then not preserve the alleged Sachsenhausen gas chamber? Because no gas chamber ever existed, except perhaps for the replica built by Schirmer et al.

In addition to this, Theune tells us that the gassing equipment was found in a shed, we don’t know what exactly has been found, but we are asked to believe that the Soviets had the Germans move said equipment out of the room before they started blasting. Anyone interested in a bridge in New York, very reasonably priced? Today all that is shown are some concrete footings of some building, with the proper write-ups of course – more information available at the memorial site, footnotes 14 & 16.

Theune then provides some details about the Sachsenhausen investigations, writing that the ground is saturated with human ashes, evidence that mass murder had been committed, by whom she does not say. Excavations were undertaken when the memorial was erected, but she never again mentions the fact that the Germans had been allowed to blow all of this up in the 1950s! She does get around later to suggest that some ditches filled with human ashes were of Soviet doing.

We are then told that the majority of camp inmates, by far, were Jews and that when digging Jewish burial laws need to be respected. 600,000 Jews were murdered in Belzec, only a few survived, we have hardly any pictures and only two maps drawn from memory. Drillings were done throughout the camp, which allowed the investigators to estimate the size of the mass graves. 33 mass graves were located, some as deep as 5m, with a volume of 21,000 cubic meters. Some building remnants were found, but the function of them remains unclear. The gas chamber, which had to be situated in the extermination camp (die in dem Vernichtungslager gestanden haben muss), could not be located by archaeological methods. The researchers assumed that it must be building G, the gas chamber positioned in the middle of the camp according to eyewitnesses.

Comments: For details about those investigations, please refer to the book by C. Mattogno, mentioned above, see footnote 3. As for the 33 graves allegedly located, here is what Mattogno writes:

“The official map of the camp was drawn by the investigative commission of the German crimes in Poland and appeared in the article “The Belzec extermination camp” by Eugeniusz Szrojt, a member of this group.228 There, the area of the graves is represented by a rectangle placed near the northeastern border of the camp.

In conclusion, we can see that the location given by Kola for the majority of the graves is in disagreement both with Rudolf Reder’s testimony and with the findings of the Polish investigative commission[…]”

( 228 E. Szrojt, “Obóz zaglady w Belzcu,” in Biuletyn Glównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce, vol. III, Poznan 1947, insert without page number. A. Kola has also shown this map without any commentary; cf. document 7 in the Appendix.)[17]

The graves were backfilled with the ashes of the corpses cremated, so we are told. It is impossible to compact the backfill to keep it from settling, thus, the outlines of the graves should still be clearly visible, if any graves existed. Also, the “gas chamber” has never been found, Theune writes that it must have existed, well…., yes. But since nothing that really fits has been found, it is assumed that one of the buildings must have been it, not very convincing at all, but then, impossible to find what never existed.

Sobibor is next, and we learn that an estimated 250,000 people (Menschen) were killed there. Because a museum is planned, efforts are made to locate the gas chamber, a number of mass graves have also been found. Here too it has been determined that the bodies were buried first, lime poured over them, and later cremated. In a corner hundreds of bullets were found, an indications that people might have been shot there (anscheinend Menschen erschossen worden). None of the technical equipment of the gas chamber was recovered, removed when the camp was shut down.

Comments: For Sobibor, please refer to the works cited in footnotes 4 & 5. The part about the lime is interesting, however I have not seen it mentioned anywhere else. As for mass graves located, Messrs. Graf, Kues and Mattogno provide details.[18]

The next sub-chapter is titled: “Archäologische Spuren von Gewalt und Tod in ehemaligen Erschießungsstätten“(archaeological traces of violence and death in former shooting locations). Theune writes about excavations in Hebertshausen near Dachau, but most important were the archaeological investigations in Katyn, Miednoje (Russia) and Kharkiv in Ukraine, places where Soviet units murdered Polish citizens. She then writes about the shooting of Soviet POWs in Hebertshausen, irrelevant even if true, but then returns to Katyn. The mass graves were identified by using photos taken from planes (Luftbilder), and drillings were undertaken to determine the size of the graves. It is estimated that some 16,000 were killed in Katyn, et al. The investigation also revealed the efforts made by the National Socialists of 1943, and also that the Soviet secret service had opened the graves.

Comments: This is important, for Theune admits here that it is possible to identify graves by using airplane surveillance photos. Why is that not possible in Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor? Why only drillings in the latter two, with no investigation in Treblinka to locate the huge mass graves alleged to exist? There can only be one plausible explanation: no mass graves exist in those camps, for if they did exist, air surveillance photos would have pinpointed their location.

For Belzec it is now no longer possible to do this, the site having been totally worked over, the same is planned for Sobibor. Treblinka has masses of artifacts cluttering the site, making it almost impossible to investigate. Why is this, what is being hidden? Not the graves, for if they would have been located we would have been able to look at them on one TV channel or another over the years. Jewish burial laws/concerns? Not true either: In 2010 a whole area of the former Sachsenhausen sub-camp Lieberose near Jamlitz was dug up, looking for the graves of 753 Jews allegedly murdered there. A Rabbi was present, giving his blessings to the excavations. The whole site was turned upside-down, no regards for any burial laws, but nothing found.[19] This shows that when it is expected that the diggings will be successful, graves found, Jewish laws are bypassed, the law only enforced in places were it is known that no graves exist.

In her summary, Theune tells us that archaeological research has shown that death was ever present in the camps, it is however not possible to determine how many were killed. It is also possible to prove that violent shootings took place (Gewalt kann besonders bei den Erschiessungsanlagen…belegt werden). However, since the gas chamber equipment has been removed, archaeological research is limited. But, in Mauthausen the location of the gas pipe has been revealed, thus proving that equipment for the gassing of inmates had been installed, even though said equipment is no longer in place.

Final comments: Theune is displaying her stiff upper lip, trying to turn a disaster into success, and fails miserably. What have the investigations by archaeologists revealed, to prove without doubt that Jews were killed with poisonous gas? Nothing! She harps on about this Mauthausen hole in the wall, assuming that this is where the gas pipe entered the room, embarrassing, for she provides no solid evidence. She talks about the Belzec and Sobibor investigations by archaeologists, failures, but never mentions the missing Treblinka graves. Sachsenhausen has been dug up and dusted off, but since the Soviets used the camp to murder Germans and remodeled it, Maser writes about it, it is almost impossible to tell who did what. Unless of course archaeologists approach the subject with the conviction that the stories told about the “Nazis” are true, and that is obviously the case. But “investigations” of that kind do not deserve the term, they are missions undertaken to prove that what is told is fact, efforts to substantiate witness testimonies, tales of impossibilities.

Dr. Theune can thus also be dismissed as someone who contributed nothing to proving that Jews were murdered with poisonous gasses.

To be continued…

Sources:

1. Günter Morsch et al, Neue Studien zu Nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas, pp.64/65
2. Ibid, pp.65/66, footnotes 9 & 10: 9 Andrzej Kola, Belzec, The Nazi Camp for Jewish in the Light of Archaeological Sources, Excavations 1997-1999, Warsaw/Washington 2000; http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/modern/archreview.html (Februar 2009). Zu den archäologischen Forschungen in Polen siehe auch: Anders Otte Stensager, Holocaustarkaeologie – en arkaeologisk funktionsanalysea f udryddelseslejrene in Polen 1941-1945. Magisterarbeit Universität Kobenhavn 2007; http://www.diis.dk/graphics/CVerPersonlige_CVer/Holocaust_and_Genocide/Publikationer/specialer/Holocaustark%E6ologi-Hoveddel.pdf (Januar 2010). 10 http://www.hartford.edu/greenberg/events/sobibor.asp (Februar 2009); Tuwiah Friedman (Hrsg.)Sobibór. Ein NS-Vernichtungslager im Rahmen der Aktion Reinhard. Eine dokumentarische Sammlung, Haifa 1998. No source for Auschwitz.
3. http://vho.org/D/b/
4. http://juergen-graf.vho.org/pdf/graf-kues-mattogno-die-akte-sobibor.pdf
5. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/05/kolas-building-e-at-sobibor-addenda/
6. Julius Wellhausen, Die Pharisäer und dir Sadducäer, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen, 1967 (first edition Verlag Bamberg, Greifswald 1874), p.66
7. Werner Maser, Fälschung, Dichtung und Wahrheit über Hitler und Stalin, Olzog Verlag GmbH, München 2004, p.354
8. http://vho.org/dl/vffg/4_01.pdf
9. http://vho.org/dl/vffg/4_01.pdf
10. Ibid, pp.256/57
11. Personal letter of 23 August 2005 by Maser to the me.
12. Maser, Fälschung, Dichtung…, pp.358-361
13. About the machinations of Ivan Serov, see Marschall Schukow, Lebensweg über Leichen, by Victor Suvorov, Pour le Mérite-Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Selent 2002, pp.257-271
14. http://www.stiftung-bg.de/gums/en/index.htm
15. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp, p.586
16. http://www.stiftung-bg.de/gums/en/index.htm
17. Mattogno, Belzec, p.76
18. http://juergen-graf.vho.org/pdf/graf-kues-mattogno-die-akte-sobibor.pdf
19. http://www.mi.brandenburg.de/cms/detail.php/bb1.c.216164.de

The second chapter in the book: “Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas” is captioned: “Technische und pharmakologische Aspekte und der Stellenwert der Überreste” (Technical and pharmacological aspects and how remnands should be rated)

The first essay in this chapter is titled: “Die todbringenden Gase” (The deadly [death carrying] gasses), by Achim Trunk, Dr. phil., historiographer, with a degree in biology – biochemicals.[1]

Mr. Trunk starts out by telling us that mass murder with poisonous gas is a characteristic of the National Socialist policy of mass murder, and that his essay will address the methods used. The questions to be answered: What poisons were used, where did they come from, how were they administered (eingesetzt) and what were the effects? The answer to those questions will allow us to better understand the sufferings of the victims – even though it is impossible to find the words to describe the horror. This will furthermore help us to understand what motivated the perpetrators. And lastly, it will allow us to disparage the chemical and technical assertions put forth by those who relativize or deny the Shoah. The origin-, application and effects of the poisons will be described, as well as some of the counter arguments by Revisionists.

Comments: We are told that it is of relevance to know what type of poison was used, its origin, and effect and how it was all applied. True, some of it we need to know, for instance what type of poison was allegedly used, the origin of same irrelevant. We then have the referral to victims, absolutely irrelevant when establishing guilt is the objective. Only after it has been established without doubt that poisons had been used for mass murder, something the previous authors failed to do, can victims be mentioned. By talking about victim hood up front we again have this attempt to influence readers, to soften them up. One can only hope that Trunk will address the relevant issues first — by referring us to reports compiled by competent authorities, i.e., experts in the field of criminal investigations, to establish that gas chambers in whatever form could have been used as alleged — before going into the obvious effects of poisonous gasses. We are also told that Revisionist arguments will be addressed.

In the introduction Trunk refers us to a chapter in “Nationalsozialistische Massentötung durch Giftgas” by Kogon et al, an essay by George Wellers captioned “Die zwei Giftgase”[2] (The two poisonous gasses). Wellers writes that two gasses were used, carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen cyanide (HCN), detailing the molecular structure of the former first. He tells us that Höß was ordered by Himmler, in the summer of 1941, to organize the destruction of Jews to be undertaken at Auschwitz. We are then informed about the molecular structure of HCN and that exposure to either of the two is deadly, suffocation the consequence.

Comments: Well done, Mr. Wellers, but we know that those two gasses are poisonous, what we are interested in are the exact details as to how they were applied. Thus, Wellers only states the obvious, not a good start.

Trunk now provides an overview of murder methods used:

1. In the T4 facilities bottled CO was used, the method also used at first in the Aktion 14f13 by “Sonderkommando Lange” in the first so-called (sogenannten) gas wagons. Cause of death: acute carbon monoxide poisoning.
2. In the “Action Reinhardt” extermination camps engine exhaust was used as a murder weapon. Cause of death: carbon monoxide poisoning.
3. Since 1941 the pesticide Zyklon B was used, mainly in Auschwitz but also in Mauthausen alongside killings with bottled CO, as well as in Ravensbrück. Cause of death: HCN poisoning.
4. A different form of HCN (common name ‘Prussian acid’[3]) was used from 1943-1945 in Sachsenhausen, and a still different form used for killings in Ravensbrück in 1943. Cause of death: HCN poisoning.

Three million people (Menschen) were killed by the National Socialists with poisonous gasses, about two million of them with engine exhaust, and around one million with Zyklon B. About 100 000 people were killed with pure (bottled) CO, and the number of those killed with different forms of Prussian acid should be in the thousands (dürfte vierstellig sein). Those figures are intended to show the dimensions and to make comparisons possible, the actualizing of them the task of researchers (eine Aufgabe der Forschung).[4]

Comments: Why start out with the T4/14f13 actions, no Revisionist denies them as Trunk later points out. Therefore, when “deniers” are mentioned the reference is to “The Holocaust”, so, why not provide evidence for this alleged crime and let it stand on its own, if it can? By continually mentioning T4 the authors admit that they are unable to make a case for “The Holocaust”, that it is necessary for them to suggest to the reader that if one happened, the T4/14f13 actions, a fact, the other, “The Holocaust” must be a logical extension. Well, it isn’t, so why not get on with substantiating what this is all about: the alleged mass murder of Jews with poisonous gas.

Also, is it necessary to detail all the effects of the gasses allegedly used? No, it has nothing to do with proving that the gasses mentioned were used to kill people, i.e., Jews — so why bother? But Trunk tells us why he ‘bothered’ in the last part about the numbers, the intent again to condition the readers for them to accept uncritically what is to follow. And even though Trunk admits that the numbers he cites are not exact, he is however implying that they are horribly high nevertheless; and that without providing evidence that anyone was killed with poisonous gas!

In the following pages Trunk talks about the effects of poisonous gasses, that they paralyse breathing. We also learn that it has long been known that carbon monoxide will kill. He then goes into detail why that is so, hardly of any interest. Also, CO was picked as gas for T4 because it was a humane gas, allowing the patients to gently fall asleep (sanftes Einschlafen). Some witnesses testified to the patients gently falling asleep [5], but, so Trunk, this killing method had nothing to do with being humane when considering the circumstances.

He then informs us that as to the killing with bottled/pure CO, no objections are raised by deniers based on chemical analyses. Part of the reason for this might be the low numbers and that here we have a Führerbefehl, an order from Hitler. But it is also possible that Negationists are in agreement concerning the killing of life unworthy of life and furthermore the antisemitic background of denial does not exist, because the killed were mostly non-Jews.

Comments: Herr Trunk shows his true colors by asserting that a denier must be an antisemite. With this any pretence of objectivity goes out the window. Thank you for being honest, Herr Trunk.

But the part about the Hitler order is interesting: Trunk claims that it is impossible for deniers, he calls them also Negationists, to deny the T4/14f13 actions because a Hitler order exists, thereby admitting that nothing of the sort has ever been found regarding “The Holocaust”. He has obviously never concerned himself with Revisionism, has never read any of the literature produced by Revisionists. If he had he would know that the absence of a Hitler order, plan, or budget is only part of why Revisionism is alive and well. It is the absence of any substantial evidence that makes the story unbelievable; all is based on documents, some of them of dubious origin and of course witness tales and testimonies of accused perpetrators obtained under who knows what circumstances. And the stories told are not credible: we hear of crematories with ludicrous capacities, able to burn bodies with just a handful of coke, or bodies burning on their own; of never located burning pits where human fat was collected during the burning processes and used as additional fuel; on and on it goes. This is why Revisionists dispute the tale. Also, the T4 action was stopped because of public outcry, “The Holocaust” would also have been stopped had it happened. And the defenders of the story are aware of this, which is why we are told in the introductions that all became known only after the war, with this dismissing Hilberg and one of the newer studies re. the AA, in which it is claimed that officials of the foreign office were willing helpers who must therefore have known about the alleged mass killings of Jews. Another reason why this story comes across as untrue, for only a lie has many versions, the truth but one.

Trunk continues by writing about the T4 action in the annexed Polish territories, patients killed with bottled CO in so-called gas wagons, later with engine exhaust and he refers the reader to an article by Mathias Beer, to be discussed later. With this change of murder method, from pure CO to engine exhaust, the canard about ‘gently falling asleep’ was dropped, notifying the bereaved impossible anyway because of the dimensions, therefore it was just denied (nur noch eine schlichte Leugnung).

Comments: The T4 action again, then going over seamlessly into the alleged mass murder, which was however denied. How anyone can write nonsense as this is beyond me. If Trunk is talking about denial concerning the T4 patients, one has to wonder, for how is it possible to “deny” to a mom, for instance, that their sick child was killed. And if he is talking about the Jews, allegedly killed in gas wagons, this could never have been kept a secret either, and therefore impossible to “deny”.

And now it gets interesting, Trunk informs us that we have testimony about gasoline engines as murder weapon, but diesel engines are also talked about. He mentions the Gerstein testimonies, admitting that different versions exist. He then gets into details re. diesel exhaust, the subtitle: “Zur Giftigkeit von Dieselabgasen” (To the toxicity of diesel exhaust). It is not my intention to go into details here, beyond my knowledge anyway, and also Mr. Friedrich Berg has written about this subject extensively.[6]

Negationist critique centres on the question whether it is possible to produce high enough concentration of carbon monoxide with a diesel engine, they claim that it cannot be done, therefore mass killings in Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor would not have been possible. This suggests that all reports about the Shoah are manufactured: the murder with diesel exhaust a “Myth within a Myth”. Trunk refers here to Mr. Berg.[7] But, he asserts, those arguments are folly, for, serious researchers are not claiming that diesel exhaust was used exclusively in the Aktion Reinhardt Camps (ARC),[8] therefore this argument is baseless. He admits however (p.32, footnote 28) that in older works diesel did play a role. Raul Hilberg, for instance,[8] writes that in Belzec and Treblinka diesel exhaust was used, gasoline engine exhaust in Sobibor. But nevertheless, the question about the toxicity should be addressed.

Comments: If anyone is confused by now, join the club. Trunk never goes into detail as to why earlier writings by Hilberg, or Martin, talk of diesel exhaust. In fact in the West German Treblinka Trial of 1965 killing by diesel exhaust was established, ditto for the Belzec Trial of the same year. Thus it is not just historians claiming diesel exhaust, judges also accepted that diesel exhaust, as murder weapon, was indeed used exclusively in those two camps. No plausible explanation has been offered to date why this has now been changed to gasoline engine exhaust, as Trunk suggest when he writes that “no serious researcher claims that diesel exhaust was used exclusively”. And whether it was used exclusively or just in some camps is also not the issue, the courts claims it was used, as did some historians. But to add to the confusion, Trunk then attempts to prove that diesel exhaust could indeed be deadly, when used under load (Please refer to the writings of Mr. Berg). So what is it? If diesel exhaust could have been used, in fact established in court proceedings, why not leave the diesel story intact, why make it sound as if “serious” historians — demoting Hilberg to the lower ranks with this — never considered diesel exhaust?

Trunk later tells us — after having tried to make a case for the toxicity of diesel exhaust — that it is most likely (naheliegend) that gasoline engines were used because of greater availability of them, and that they produced deadly gasses even when idling. He refers to Reder again who testified that the motor had been located in a small room next to the gas chamber and that it used 80 to 100 litres of gasoline daily.[10] For Sobibor we have precise testimony for gasoline engines, the only issue unclear whether they were of French or Russian origin. For Treblinka however, the last camp to be erected, research is assuming (geht davon aus) that diesel engines were used, raising the question why a changeover from a successful, uncomplicated method was made to one more complicated. It appears that a mix up could be possible: in every camp a diesel engine was used for generating electricity and that the gasoline engine, used for the killings, was installed right beside it. Trunk refers us to the testimony of SS Franz Hödl, who for a while operated the Sobibor death engine (Todesmotor) and stated: “That two engines were installed in the engine room, one a gasoline engine, possibly from a Russian tank, the other a diesel engine. The latter was never used”.[11] According to Kogon [12] a diesel engine was installed in a room adjacent to the gas chamber which produced poisonous gasses and next to it a generator for producing electricity.

Comments: More confused postulations. In the opinion of Trunk it was most likely that gasoline engines were used, he tries to support this supposition by claiming that they were more easily available and that they produce deadly gasses even when idling, a fact. That in contrast to diesel exhaust which is harmless when the engine is at idle and only toxic when the engine is under load and the injectors somehow manipulated, he refers to a test by Holtz/Elliot (p.33). Whenever machinery for digging, etc., is needed underground, for instance in the construction of underground  parking facilities, equipment with diesel engines is used, those engines nearly always working at full throttle, i.e., under load, with the workers nearby complaining about the soot but showing no ill effects. This is why it is claimed that the engines were manipulated to produce deadly exhaust. More nonsense, for surely the Germans were aware of that and would not have even considered using diesel engines. And Trunk admits this in a roundabout way, he is however unable to explain away the diesel engines mentioned by others. Thus, he is forced to talk out of both sides of his mouth, not making any sense at all doing it. He also admits that changing from gasoline engines to diesel engines, as was supposedly the case for Treblinka, would have been remedial, a technical disadvantage, a fact. He tries to get around it by having us believe that in Sobibor, two engines were used, one a gasoline engine for killing – the other a diesel which was not used (testimony by Hödl, see above). And Kogon et al have it that one diesel engine produced the deadly gas, the other not, also for Sobibor. One has to be mentally unstable to even consider this nonsense, but Trunk, unable to settle the issue, is forced to resort to those mental gymnastics. Demonstrating again that what is told is just not true, and portraying Germans as babbling idiots who would resort to these kinds of shenanigans will just not cut it. Thus, the diesel/gasoline matter still needs to be settled, if we are to accept that Jews were murdered en masse with engine exhaust, and Trunk only confused the issue.

We then learn that reports about gas wagons explicitly talk of gasoline engines, which is not true but will be discussed later. Trunk then goes into detail about “Massenmorde mit Zyklon B”(Mass murder with Zyklon B), an issue addressed by Mr. Germar Rudolf in his “Das Rudolf Gutachten”(The Rudolf Report).[13] A few pages on Trunk makes an effort to debunk deniers (Leugner) and writes that one of the issues raised by deniers is temperature, that it would have been too cold in the gas chambers for the hydrogen cyanide to release fast enough from the carrier substance to kill Jews within the times testified to. The other issue is the absence of Prussian Blue in the ruins of the morgue of Crematoria II, the alleged gas chamber. Revisionists conclude that because no Prussian Blue stains are visible in the remnants of crematorium II, no gassings with Zyklon B could have taken place if this facility. They point to the delousing chambers where the Prussian Blue is clearly visible, penetrating in some cases right through the wall.[14] But, so Trunk, this conclusion is erroneous, for it has not been established that the blue stains in the delousing chambers are indeed Prussian Blue. For instance, those stains could be spots of paint, many paints of that time contained those pigments. Thus, the missing blue coloring could mean that only the walls of the delousing chambers were painted blue, not those of the gas chamber (Rudolf addresses this issue[15]). But even if one assumes that the blue stains in the walls are Prussian Blue, this does not necessarily mean that similar spots must also be visible on the walls of the gas chambers. For there are vast differences between the two: whereas in the delousing chambers the walls were exposed to hydrogen cyanide (Prussian Blue) for many hours — lice die slower than humans — those in the gas chambers were exposed to it for only a short time. And because of less exposure the chances for Prussian Blue to form in the walls diminish, and most important, the gas chambers were hosed down after each gassing, removing blood and excrements, thus removing most of the hydrogen cyanide remnants. In fact, traces of cyanide were found on the walls: using highly sensitive methods of analysis in the 1990s, it was proven that the walls of the gas chamber had been exposed to hydrogen cyanide, see “The Rudolf Report” on that, he explains why the test results were erroneous.[16]

Comments: First the temperature: Trunk claims that the bodies of the victims, standing close together, would have warmed the room sufficiently, but to claim that the body heat of people will warm up a room with concrete floor, walls and ceiling, in the middle of winter and just hosed down with cold water, is a real stretch. He writes that this is why the victims were left standing “a few minutes” (einige Minuten), as is attested to, referring us to “Massentötungen…” by Kogon et al.[17] We read in that book that ten minutes after the doors were closed, the temperature in the room was sufficient for the hydrogen cyanide to release from the carrier substance, but this is about the so-called “Bunkers”, not the morgues of crematoria II and III, thus useless here because of the different construction materials used. But, Trunk is quote mining here again, using only what fits. Höß, whose testimony is also only used when convenient, says nothing about any wait. We read: “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”.[18]  For the intended victims to heat a damp room with concrete walls – in the middle of winter – would only have been remotely possible if for every “gassing” the room would have been filled to capacity, and that is unlikely. This heat problem was considered earlier, the Polish judge Jan Sehn informs us: “…the gas chamber was being heated with portable braziers,”[19] The “Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland’, repeated this in their report of 1946.[20] But, no mention of that by Trunk, why, when this had also been attested to? (The Polish report mentions interviewing witnesses). It is easy to see, however, why this has been dropped: heating the “gas chamber” with coke fired braziers would have filled the room with deadly fumes and if the room would have been vented with the existing ventilation system, the heat would have been sucked out – replaced by cold air from outside. But, it is altogether possible that braziers were used to keep the bodies in the morgue from becoming stiff, no pun intended, and thus harder to cremate. So, reality was mixed in with the story, but that part could not be maintained, and we are now to “body heat”, which is equally ridiculous.

Now to the Prussian Blue issue: No blue spots in the remnants of crema II, but if continued gassings had been undertaken in it, blue spots would be visible, that is the position of Revisionists. A logical conclusion when looking at the walls of the delousing chambers. At first, Trunk tells us that the blue in the delousing chambers could be paint, he refers us to a work by Bailer.[21] This is embarrassing, for I have yet to see paint penetrate a brick wall, right through that wall to make it visible on the other side (see footnote 14).

Trunk seems to realize this and moves on to plan B, i.e. the length of exposure to the cyanide gas. It is true that lice, especially their eggs, nits, are extremely hard to kill, this is why the producer/supplier of Zyklon B, DEGESCH, developed the circular system, i.e., Kreislaufsystem, F. Berg goes into detail about it.[22] Heated air is blown over the Zyklon B crystals, speeding up the release of cyanide from the carrier substance and also distributing the poisonous gasses throughout the room. But, this very simple system was never installed in any of the alleged gas chambers in which according to witness testimony hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed. What we have instead is this:

“Der Doseninhalt wurde in Auschwitz vom Mordpersonal, sogenannten Sanitätsdienstgraden (SDG) der SS, unter Aufsicht eines SS-Arztes über besondere Einfüllöffnungen in die Gaskammern hineingeschüttet. In den beiden Gaskammern, in denen die meisten Menschen vergiftet wurden – den als Keller angelegten Gaskammern der Krematorien II und III in Auschwitz-Birkenau – befanden sich je vier dieser Öffnungen auf ihrem begehbaren Dach. Das Granulat gelangte dann in aus Metallgitter gefertigte Schächte.57 Anschließend gaste die Blausäure im Innern der Kammer aus, was je nach Menge, Temperatur und Luftfeuchte unterschiedlich schnell erfolgte, und sie verteilte sich in ihr, was ebenfalls eine gewisse Zeit brauchte.“[23]

(Under the supervision of a SS Doctor the medical personnel poured the contents of the cans through special openings into the gas chambers. Four holes were present in each of the ceilings of the two chambers in which most of the people (Menschen) were poisoned – the gas chambers of the crematoria II and III, constructed as basements. The granules were delivered into shafts made from metal lattice.[24] The cyanide then outgassed inside the chamber, the time for this varied – depending on quantity, temperature and humidity, the gas dispersed as well, which also took time)

The blue staining issue has been discussed by Rudolf, I’ll just concern myself with the rest here, starting with the “shafts made from metal lattice”, here is one more view of them [25]. Trunk is not very clear on this, for good reason no doubt, for instance when referring to placing the pellets into the columns he writes “gelangte(n)”, why not say ‘poured into the basket’? This could be because we have different descriptions for those columns. The first question that needs to be asked, however, is this: Why would the Germans go to a system as this when they had the above mentioned circulation method already in use, successfully? The answer: They would not have, if mass murder was the intent they would have used the system used in the delousing chambers.

But, back to the columns, allegedly built by a Michal Kula, see footnote 25, here is what the authors of that article wrote:

“At Auschwitz-Birkenau, in the gas chambers of crematoria II and III, Zyklon-B was poured in through holes in the roof. After early experiments with this poison, the camp staff had learned that it was important to allow the pellets of Zyklon to be removed after the victims’ death, and also to spread them to increase the speed of outgassing.

The solution to these problems was a wire mesh column, which ran from the floor up through the roof. An SS man, wearing a gas mask and standing on the roof, would pour the pellets into the top of the column and place a wooden cover over it. The pellets fell into an inner wire mesh basket, which held them as they released their poison into the gas chamber.

After the mass murder was complete, the cover was opened, the basket was pulled up, and the Zyklon expelled the remainder of its poison harmlessly into the open air. Meanwhile, the ventilation of the gas chamber and the cremation of the corpses could begin[…]”

We are told that at first, the pellets were just poured into the room, no columns, leaving no Prussian Blue stains, but then it was “learned” to remove the pellets and also that the pellets needed to be spread. No wonder Trunk provides no details, for the above is rubbish. The pellets were allegedly in a basket, how then does this aid spreading? It doesn’t, pouring them on the heads of the people would have spread them, this method did not. In the verdict of the Auschwitz Trial the judges talk of a column made from perforated tin, with a spiral inside to help spread the pellets.[26] The “judges” believed the nonsense, lies, Filip Müller told them.[27] Just one more description of those columns, this one by Shaul Chazan, who tells us that the columns did not reach the floor, but left a gap so the pellets could be swept up.[28] Not one of those magical (imaginary?) columns has ever been found.

The drawings by Kula (footnote 24), or McCarthy/van Alstine (footnote 25) show that the columns, measuring 70cm x 70cm, went right through the roof, had to, the columns 3m long, the ceiling only 2.40m high (footnote 25). Therefore, holes measuring at least 70cm x 70cm must exist in the roof of the ruins of crema II, no sign of them.[29] Mr. Carlo Mattogno goes into detail about those cracks and blemishes in the roof [30], identified as “Die Löcher des Todes” (The holes of Death) [31], by Sven Felix Kellerhoff in: Die Welt, 23.08.2004. The biggest opening found is 45cm, not nearly enough to accommodate one of those columns. We are now told that only the inner core stuck through the roof, but that is just an attempt to deceive, no evidence exists to back this up. Thus, unless some sense can be made out of this, the columns must be dismissed as a hoax.

The only other part of interest re. what Trunk wrote above is the mention of how much Zyklon B was used — the reference to temperature and humidity. As for the first, he uses Höß as a reference, who stated that 5 to 7 one kilo cans were used for the murder of 1,500 people (Menschen), 2 to 3 cans more in cold and/or humid weather.[32] That per “gassing” and still no signs of Prussian Blue. As for removing the pellets before Prussian Blue can form, how would these people on the roof know when to pull the can up, considering what Trunk/Höß wrote/stated re. cold and humidity? As already pointed out, this column nonsense is rubbish, but impossible for Trunk et al to let go of this column tale for now.

In his conclusion Trunk tells us that both gasses allegedly used, CO and HCN, are very poisonous — continued breathing of either of them is deadly inside of minutes. Both poisons were easy to obtain/manufacture and easy to handle, which is why they were used because their toxicity was known to the perpetrators. The mass murder of over three million Jews (Jews this time, not people) historically verified with overwhelming evidence (durch erdrückende Beweise historisch gesichert). No need therefore to investigate the chemical or technical aspects of the mass murder to debunk Revisionists who question the Shoah, the above only meant as an addition to what is known. But, having experts analyse the historical sources helps to refute Revisionists’ arguments, if only as an aside. Thus, even the most far fetched arguments of Negationists can be disproved.

Final comments: Trunk tells us that both poisons were easy to obtain and use, not so. Zyklon B was in short supply and because of its toxicity dangerous to handle: Especially so when it was used as is alleged — pouring the pellets into baskets, raising them up, and letting them outgas in the open. That is just one example. Fact is the people handling this substance were specially trained. Then the repeated references to “historical” evidence/sources and the admission that there never was an experts involved in the investigation of crimes — a fact. As for overwhelming evidence — where? Trunk skips over this and only tells us that CO and HCN are highly poisonous, stating the obvious. But when it comes to how the Zyklon B was allegedly administered, all he can do is make a few general comments, later claiming that there is no need to look at the technical aspects, pretending that all has been proven.

He is wrong: for the purpose of this book is to fight Revisionism and stating that CO and HCN are poisonous will just not do, as the toxicity is not the issue. The technical and chemical aspects are, but Trunk feels those need not be addressed. A lot of pages filled with words, but nothing that will turn a doubter into a believer.

To be continued…

Sources:

1. Günter Morsch, Bertrand Perz, Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas, Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2011, pp.23-49
2. Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, Adalbert Rückerl, et al, Nationalsozialistische Massentötung durch Giftgas, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1983, pp.281-287
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_cyanide
4. Neue Studien…, pp.23-25
5. Kogon et al, Nationalsozialistische Massentötung…, pp.48f
6. http://www.nazigassings.com/dieselgaschamber.html
7. http://www.codoh.com/gcgv/gcdiesel.html
8. Neue Studien…, p.32, the German wording: “…da die seriöse Forschung überhaupt nicht davon ausgeht, dass in den Vernichtungslagern der „Aktion Reinhardt“ durchgängig mit Dieselmotoren gemordet wurde“.
9. Raul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der Europäischen Juden, Frankfurt a. M. 1992, p.941
10. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, p.31, footnote 35: Rudolf Reder, Belzec, Krakow 1946, p.44
11. Ibid, p.35, quote from: Jules Schelvis, Vernichtungslager Sobibor, Münster/Hamburg 2003, p.118
12. Kogon et al, Massentötungen…, p.163
13. Germar Rudolf, The Rudolf Report,  http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/trr/
14. Rudolf, The Rudolf Report,  http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/trr/6.html#6.7.4.
15. http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/trr/8.html#8.4.
16. http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/trr/8.html#8.4.
17. Kogon et al, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen…, p.211
18. Rudolf Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, Prometheus Books, Amherst New York 1992. Edited by Steven Paskuly and translated by Andrew Pollinger, p.43
19. http://www.codoh.com/review/revsehn.html
20. http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/gcpol11.htm#Gas-chambers
21. Josef Bailer, Die “Revisionisten” und die Chemie, in: Brigitte Bailer-Galanda/Wolfgang Benz/Wolfgang Neubauer (publishers), Die Auschwitzleugener. “Revisionistische” Geschichtslüge und historische Wahrheit, Berlin 1996, p.146; pp.142-149
22. http://www.nazigassings.com/zyklondelousing.html
23. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, p.39
24. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, p.39; reference to: Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz, Technique and Operation of the Gas chambers, p. 487 http://www.mazal.org/pressac/Pressac0487.htm
25. http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/intro-columns/
26. Zur Tarnung der in der Decke befindlichen Öffnungen, durch die das Zyklon B von aussen hineingeschüttet wurde, hatte man aus durchlöchertem Blech bestehende hohle Säulen installiert, die vom Boden bis zur Decke reichten und die Öffnungen verdeckten. In den Säulen befanden sich Spiralen, die das gekörnte Zyklon B nach dem Einschütten verteilten. (The site this was taken from, IDGR, has since disappeared, all I have is the printout)
27. http://vho.org/GB/c/CM/noholes.html
28. http://vho.org/dl/vffg/3_04.pdf ; Die Einfüllöffnungen für Zyklon B – Teil 2., p. 31
29. The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy, and Harry W. Mazal, http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/holes-report/holes.shtml
30. http://vho.org/GB/c/CM/noholes.html
31. file:///D:/IDGR%20-%20Die%20L%C3%B6cher%20des%20Todes.htm
32. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, p.39; Höß affidavit of 20 May 1946, IMT document NI-034, p.2

The second study in chapter one is by Dr. Moshe Zimmermann, Prof. for contemporary history and head of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The essay is titled “Massenmord durch Giftgas in der Wahrnehmung der Überlebenden” (How survivors perceive the mass murder by poisonous gas).

Before we go into this, the book this article is part of is about new studies on killing with poisonous gas by the Nazis, and the denial by Revisionists of said killings. The first article by Mr. Evans contributed nothing to the issue supposedly under discussion, the title of the second seems to follow that trend. One has to wonder why we need to know how the alleged murder by poisonous gas was perceived by the, ahem, survivors. But let’s not judge a book by its cover and see what Mr. Zimmermann has to say.

He starts out by informing us that he will concentrate on how Jewish survivors perceived this mass murder, specifically Israelis, even though only a small percentage of actual survivors live in that country. But, so Zimmermann, the whole of Israeli society, starting with the “Survivors of the second generation”, consider themselves to be a society of survivors. And in their opinion they represent the whole of Jewish society (Doch die gesamte israelische Gesellschaft, mit den „Überlebenden der zweiten Generation“ beginnend, betrachtet sich als eine Gesellschaft von Überlebenden. Darüber hinaus geht diese Gesellschaft davon aus, dass sie die gesamte jüdische Gemeinschaft repräsentiert).[1]

Comments: The last part makes it clear that “surviving the Holocaust” has turned into a social exercise and has nothing to do with actual numbers. But the part about percentages is interesting, because one needs to ask: A percentage of what? In a Ha’aretz article of December 29, 2005, we read: “As of 2005, of the nearly 400,000 Holocaust survivors residing in Israel, 40% live below the poverty line…”. This article has since disappeared, all I have is the printout of a portion of it. Some of it is still available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_the_Holocaust — look under “Survivors welfare in Israel” (footnote 7 refers to the disappeared Ha’aretz article). And this article talks about cancer/colon cancer as a result of starvation — clearly just about actual survivors. Thus, if 400 000 is a small percentage of the total of survivors, how many did “survive”? Why do we have no exact figures when they surely must exist because Germany is paying retribution to each of the survivors? I have seen numbers as high as 4 million [2], but it is said that some of those were double claims. Possibly so, but why the big secret?

Fact is, no historian ever concerned himself with the issue of how many survived, and many did survive the war.[3] In this essay, links are provided to works by Messrs. Kulischer and Scheidl, among others, with the latter demonstrating that the numbers we are given – of Jews allegedly murdered by the Germans – are not based on solid research. We also know now that up to 20,000 camps, i.e., detention facilities existed instead of the 5,000 to 7,000 believed to have existed. Mr. Thomas Kues mentions this in his article.[4] So, why is the issue of how many survived seemingly unimportant? It should not be, for only if we know how many Jews were able to flee or make it through the war somehow can we begin to look for those missing.

According to Jewish customs, Zimmermann continues, at the funeral of a diseased, and the anniversary of that day, the “Jahrzeit”, a special prayer is offered: El male Rachamim (merciful God), the merciful God is asked to give eternal peace to the souls of the diseased. On the 10^th day of the Jewish month Tevet, the day of the of remembrance of the Shoah, special versions of El male Rachamin are offered for the six million Jewish victims of the European Shoah. One version inserts the following into the original prayer: “that were killed, butchered, burned and became martyrs through the German Nazi murderers and their helpers” (die getötet, geschlachtet, verbrannt und Märtyrer wurden, durch die deutschen Nazi-Mörder und deren Helfern aus anderen Völkern). The other version adds: „that were killed, butchered, suffocated, burned and buried alive by the German Nazis and their helpers”(die getötet, geschlachtet, erstickt, verbrannt und bei lebendigem Leibe begraben wurden, durch die deutschen Nazis und ihre Helfer). Thus, in this prayer death by gassing is grouped in (zugeordnet) with suffocation, a known punishment in ancient Judaism.

This makes two things clear: the word “gassing” does not exist in the Hebrew language to this day, and second, that burning is implanted more firmly in the collective Jewish conscience than gassings and has become synonymous with the mass murder of Jews during the Shoah. To wit: in one of the prayers the word “suffocating”, as a substitute for gassing, is missing. Thus as monstrous as the killing by poisonous gas was, in the end the expressions “oven” and “burning” have become better known as the word “Gas chamber”.

Comments: This is of some importance, for it is true that in some eyewitness accounts only burnings are mentioned, E. Wiesel for instance never mentions gas chambers – only burnings in ditches. This of course puts the veracity of their testimony in doubt, for Jewish tradition and language are one thing but surely a Jew could never forget the gas chambers in which millions of his compatriots were allegedly killed.

Zimmermann now goes into detail as to why burnings are burned, pardon, implanted into the Jewish subconscious, and tells us that there are various reasons for this. In the descriptions of the persecution of Jews in the middle ages, and beyond that in Jewish historiography — which accentuates (unterstreicht) the difference between the subdued “bent down” (gebückten) Jew of the Diaspora and the proud, allegedly new Jew of Israel – burning pyres (Scheiterhaufen) play a central role. When religious Jews understand the Third Reich as a return to the middle ages, then the killing by fire seems to be (scheint) what connects those killings to the Jewish martyrdom of the middle ages. When looking at pictures which portray the mass murder of Jews in iconographic language (ikonografischer Sprache), we find that ovens are not just used for burning of corpses but become a murder weapon of their own, and this even though burning of live people was the exception. Zimmermann then quotes H. Heine, as a nice touch: “Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen“ (Where books are burned, humans will follow)

Death by suffocation was one form of execution in ancient Judaism, as punishment for patricide for instance, but for obvious reasons one cannot find anything about gassings in the ancient Jewish catalogue of punishments. In fact, gassing, in its implementation, reminds more of the punishment by burning practiced in old Judaism, because it depicts the blocking of the air ways with glowing lead (glühendem Blei), instead of burning on pyres (this makes no sense in German either). This is why the burning facilities, the crematoria (“Misrafot”), as well as the smoking chimney’s (“Arubot”) are mentioned, instead of the gas chambers (“Ta’ei Gisim”) when talking of the Shoah.

And even without going back to the middle ages it would have been possible for flames as icons to displace the invisible gas, for in Palestine hardly any gas pipelines existed before the establishment of Israel. Then, in early summer of 1942, when the news of mass murder methods reached the country, Ha’aretz reported on 30 June 1943: “In November and December of 1941 the Nazis have began to murder Jews with poisonous vapor (Dunst, the word poisonous gas did not exist). They did this in the city Chelm[no[ […] Following this, those poisoned were burned in the forest”. And at a meeting of the Jewish Agency of 22 November 1942 it was reported: “They are destroyed (vernichtet) with gas. Three ovens exist in Oswiezim,[…] in which Jews are burned”. (Als im Frühsommer 1942 dann die ersten Nachrichten über die neue Mordmethode das Land erreichten, meldete die hebräische Tageszeitung Haaretz dies am 30. Juni 1942 mit den Worten: „Im November und Dezember [1941] begannen die Nazis Juden mit Giftdunst [das Wort Giftgas stand damals überhaupt nicht im Wörterbuch] zu ermorden. Sie taten dies in der Stadt Chelm[no],[...]. Danach hat man die Vergifteten in den Wäldern verbrannt.” Und bei einer Sitzung des Direktoriums der Jewish Agency am 22. November 1942 wurde berichtet:  „Man vernichtet sie mit Gas. In Oswiezim gibt es drei Öfen, [...] in denen man Juden verbrennt.”2 (2 Dina Porat/Yehiam Weitz, Between the Star of David and the Yellow Star. The Jewish Community in Palestine and the Holocaust 1939-1945, Tel Aviv 2002, S. 106.)[5]

Comments: One might want to ask what all of this old Jewish history has to do with evidence for the alleged killing of Jews by poisonous gas. Well, nothing, and yet… Zimmermann makes a good case here for how the story came to be. Burning and suffocating, not the gassing, is what is implanted in the Jewish psyche. We must remember here the first reports from the camps, and I’ll start with Treblinka, the area around it conquered by the Red Army in the middle of August 1944:

“The Military Examining Judge of the Military Office of Prosecution First Lieutenant of Justice Jurowski went to work immediately, supported by other officers – Major Kononjuk, Major V.S. Apresjan, First Lieutenant F.A. Rodionov, Major M.E. Golovan, and Lieutenant N.V. Kadalo – and carried out investigations between August 15 and 23 on the grounds of the camps Treblinka I and Treblinka II. He furthermore questioned witnesses: Samuel Rajzman, Lucjan Puchała, Marianna Kobus, Stanisław Zdonek, Barbara Zemkiewicz, Józef Pukaszek, Stanisław Kon, Mieczysław Anyszkiewicz, Tadeusz Kann, Franciszek Wesolowski, Max Lewit, and Kazimierz Skarzyński (GARF, 7021-115-11, pp. 15-43.)[...]

The ‘bath’ was a house, which consisted of 12 cabins, each 6 × 6 m in size. 400 to 500 people were driven at a time into one cabin. It had two doors, which could be sealed hermetically. In the corner, between ceiling and wall, were two openings connected with hoses. Behind the ‘bath’ stood a machine. It pumped the air out of the room. The people suffocated within 6 to 10 minutes. The second door was opened and the dead were brought on wheelbarrows to the special ovens[…]

The oven – this was a large trench 250-300 m in length, 20-25 m in width and 5-6 m deep, excavated by an excavator. Driven into the bottom of the ditch were three rows of reinforced concrete posts, one-and-a-half meters in height each. The posts were connected to one another by cross-beams. On these cross-beams rails were placed at intervals of 5 to 7 cm. That was a gigantic oven grill. A narrow-gage spur track led down to the edge of the trench. (Witness testimony of Abe Kon, Hejnoch Brenner, Samuel Rajzman,

and the content of the book ‘One Year in Treblinka’).[…]

On the basis of the preliminary facts, the cremation of people has been determined with no doubt. The extent of the extermination of people was monstrous: about three million.”[6]

And here we have it all, suffocation – followed by burning. However, the alleged suffocating in vacuum chambers has since been changed to gassings by diesel exhaust, at first, and now to gassings by gasoline engine exhaust. Also, it is no longer claimed that the “ovens” were 5-6m deep ditches. One has to wonder why that has been changed, since the first eyewitnesses surely must have remembered how it was allegedly done, especially the witnesses Samuel Rajzmann and Yankiel Wiernik, who claim to have been in Treblinka during its operation and both participated in the revolt, even though neither mentions the other. The three million cremated has also been downsized somewhat, but no agreement has been reached on a number, Yad Vashem has it as 880,000.

And now to the first report of Oswiezim, or Auschwitz as it is better known. As we know, Auschwitz was ‘liberated’ by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. On 2 February an article appeared in “Pravda”, a Soviet daily, in which the author, Boris Polevoi, writes about what eyewitnesses had told him:

The name of the town “Auschwitz” has long been a synonym for bloody German atrocities in the lexicon of the peoples of the world. Few of its prisoners escaped the fires of its notorious “ovens.” ^[2] […]Last year, when the Red Army revealed to the world the terrible and abominable secrets of Majdanek, the Germans in Auschwitz began to wipe out the traces of their crimes. They leveled the mounds of the so-called “old” ^[3] graves in the Eastern ^[4] part of the camp, tore up and destroyed the traces of the electric conveyor belt, on which hundreds of people were simultaneously electrocuted, their bodies falling onto the slow moving conveyor belt which carried them to the top of the blast furnace ^[5] where they fell in, were completely burned, their bones converted to meal in the rolling mills, and then sent to the surrounding fields.[7]

Ok, no suffocation, but we have this: “Few of its prisoners escaped the fires of its notorious “ovens”. And: “…their bodies falling onto the slow moving conveyor belt which carried them to the top of the blast furnace”. The electrocution, as well as the blast furnaces have also not survived, even though attested to by eyewitnesses. But what we see here is the story in the making, the suffocating in Treblinka and the burnings in both camps, although “details” had to be worked out yet, and were.

As for the persecution of Jews in the middle ages, mentioned by Zimmermann, here is what Bernard Lazare, a Jew himself, had to say about his contemporaries:

“If this hostility, even aversion, had only been shown toward the Jews at one period and in one country, it would be easy to unravel the limited causes of this anger, but this race has been on the contrary an object of hatred to all the peoples among whom it has established itself. It must be therefore, since the enemies of the Jews belonged to the most diverse races, since they lived in countries very distant from each other,

since’ they were ruled by very different laws, governed by opposite principles, since they had neither the same morals, nor the same customs, since they were animated by unlike dispositions which did not permit them to judge of anything in the same way, it must be therefore that the general cause of Anti-Semitism has always resided in Israel itself and not in those who have fought against Israel.[8]

Dr. Theodor Herzl sounds much the same in his “Der Judenstaat”, it is therefore incorrect to refer to Jewish persecution, a fact, and not mention the “why”.

To the News (Nachrichten) about Chelmno. First, we must recall what was said in the introduction to this book: that only after the war had ended did the world as a whole find out what had happened in the concentration camps – were people informed about the mass murder (Völkermord).[9] So, how could Ha’aretz have known about the murder of Jews in Chelmno with poisonous vapor already in 1942? Then the times given, “November and December”. In the same book, on p.153 we read:

“[I]n Chelmno wurde am 8. Dezember 1941, und damit am frühesten, die systematische Ermordung von Juden in einem Vernichtungslager aufgenommen”.(On 8 December the systematic murder of Jews in Chelmno started).

And in “Nationalsozialistische Massentötung durch Giftgas”, by Kogon et al, we read on p.120, a Jozef Czuprynski testifying:

“Während der gesamten Kriegsdauer wohnte ich im Dorf Zawadki, arbeitete jedoch in Powiercie. Am 5. Dezember 1941 kamen die ersten Autotransporte mit Juden aus Kolo nach Chelmno”. (During the whole of the war I lived in Zawadki, and on 5 December 1941 the first transports of Jews arrived in Chelmno).

If, what Ha’aretz reported, is fact based, how could they then talk about gassings in November when the alleged gassings did not start until December? This report was based on rumors, just like any other “report” peddled at that time. Pierre Blet writes about the rumors of Jews killed that reached the Vatican, all dismissed by the Pope because they could not be substantiated.[10]

Other iconographic images, Zimmermann continues, the manufacturing of soap from human fat for instance, are also associated with burnings, not gassings, that particular image has now been largely dropped (aus dem Diskurs verdrängt). Of course the history of the Shoah, the gassings as killing method, is well known to historians and lay persons alike. Therefore it is not possible to separate the gas chamber from the crematoria, but in Israels’ iconography both are depicted as killing devices. For example: The heavy burden of that icon of extermination, the crematoria, played a role in public discussions in Israel. According to the rules of the Jewish “Halacha”, deceased can only be buried, not cremated and by burning Jewish bodies the National Socialists committed sacrilege (Zimmermann continues by talking about a crematorium existing in Israel).

Comments: Ye old soap canard again, and Zimmermann does not dismiss it as a tall tale, oh no, it is just not mentioned as often anymore, according to him. The repeated reference to “iconography” and “Iconic imagery” is also of interest. “The Holocaust” in pictures? Yes indeed, just look at the drawings by David Olère, most of them demonstrate that what is told is untrue. And we must remember that hardly any photographs exist, an abnormality since camps like Treblinka were only fenced off with barbed wire and the alleged Totenlager (killing site) situated on a rise in the camp. We should have albums of pictures, showing the digging of graves, the hauling away of the soil from diggings (we need to remember that at least seven graves were allegedly dug, measuring 50m x 25 x 10m deep) the burnings, etc., etc.

But staying with iconography, we have here also the other meaning of the word ‘icon”, Webster’s defines it as: “3: an object of uncritical devotion”. So when Zimmermann refers to that “icon of extermination” (Ikone der Vernichtung), the crematoria, he refers to it as a religious symbol, an icon, “an object of uncritical devotion”. In fact, by now “The Holocaust” has turned into a quasi religion, as is acknowledged by many.[11]

In the memory of survivors, death by gas and cremation are one and the same (unzertrennbar), understandably so – for there were no survivors of gassings. And if someone survived a camp, he did not survive the gas chamber. Only in films, as in “Schindlers List” could people survive, the twenty children who survived by being asked to help unload potatoes – as mentioned in the Eichmann trial – an exception.

And the few surviving members of the “Sonderkommando” were responsible only for getting rid of the bodies of the gassed by burning them in the ovens. One of my colleagues, the Holocaust survivor and Holocaust historian Otto Dov Kulka, remembers the fire flaming from the crematoria (das Feuer das aus den Krematorien emporflammte) as the crucial point of his remembrance.[12]

Comments: There are accounts of gas chamber survivors, but that is hardly the issue here. Also, flames coming out of crematory chimneys, as in one of the Olère drawings — rubbish.

Ever since the Baby Yar massacre of 1941 has become a symbol of the Shoah, beside the gas chambers, the mass shootings are now also in competition with the image of the gas chamber. The questions asked: Who is holding the rifle? How does a Jew react, does he willingly go to get butchered (Schlachtbank), or does he resist? Thus the image of a Jew, shovelling his own grave, is perhaps more powerful than all other images when considering the necessity of establishing the state of Israel. But at the close, the story of Babi Yar (die Geschichte von Babi Yar) also ends with the burning of bodies.

Comments: Babi Yar has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter, the Jews of Kiev allegedly shot, so why mention it here, when alleged killings by poisonous gas is the issue? But yes, lately the shootings have moved more and more to the front, because they are harder to dispute. As for the defenceless Jew who never resists, this has been a problem with the story right from the start. In a meeting of 7 February 1961, between Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer and American Consul Wayland B. Wuters (Waters?), regarding the Eichmann trial, the latter wrote in his report:

“Bauer did not think that Israel would be in any sort of hurry with the Eichmann trial, on the contrary; nor did he think the trial would be particularly sensational. He seems to feel all parties involved would ‘behave wisely’ and that Ben Gurion’s main aim would be to secure ‘historical light’ for internal educational purposes within Israel. (“Ben Gurion thinks the new generation in Israel is as unbelieving of Jewish passivity in the face of mass murder as the new Generation in Germany is unbelieving of mass German guilt”, Bauer said)

The reporting officer suspects, though he can in no way document his supposition, that Bauer may well be connected in some high-ranking capacity with the Israeli Intelligence Service in West Germany”.[13]

One has to read this slowly to grasp the meaning. First, Ben Gurion only wanted to make “history (historical) light”, why? Was the evidence for “The Holocaust” not convincing enough at that time? And then we have the part about Jews not believing that millions of their compatriots could be murdered without any sign of resistance, and that remains unbelievable to this day. As for Germans not believing the story, this is why the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials had to be conducted from 1963 to 1965, school classes invited to witness the proceedings, with the prosecutor calling the accused “murderers”, reminiscent of the Stalinist trials. And even though no substantial evidence was submitted at that trial, the judges admitting to this in the verdict, the publicity and baseless horror stories told did what it was supposed to do: establish “The Holocaust” in the minds of Germans.

And of course we must never forget that the State of Israel rests on “The Holocaust”.

Zimmermann then writes about Israeli school books (curriculum), and that the Holocaust is, since 1977, a compulsory course. The books of the 1980s concern themselves more  with the shooting by the Einsatzgruppen (EG, task forces) — with issues like the Jewish councils(Judenräte) in the ghettos and the Warsaw uprising in the foreground — the gas chambers mentioned only in passing, ditto for the newer books. In one of the books from 1999 a connection is made between the T4 actions and the killings with gas during the “Endlösung”, this based on newer research, the historian Shulamit Volkov contributed to the book. The only photo in the book, however, is that of a mass shooting, and thus it actually distracts from the T4 story (Geschichte). The selection of photos serves more as corroboration to our actual perception.[14] Zimmermann published the only school book in 1981 which featured a picture of a gas chamber.[15] In a book written for graduates, published in 1999, the change over from mass shootings to extermination camps is addressed, but murder by gas is marginalized, the book sharply criticized for lack of patriotism. The photo shown in the book that of a crematoria in Dachau.[16]

Comments: It always strikes me as odd when I read that “The Holocaust” still needs to be taught in school, not only in Israel but throughout most of the western world. Not only is it taught, but special guidelines for teaching the subject needed to be issued: “Guidelines for Teaching about the Holocaust”.[17] Why is that? By now, the facts should speak for themselves, in fact, there should be no need to publish this book under discussion. So why the continued Holocaust “education”. Because what is presented as evidence is just not convincing. Now to the issues of photos, i.e., the lack of same. Zimmermann tries to induce that photos only serve to convince us of what we already know, he does so in vain (the wording of what he wrote is a little strange, this is why the German original is provided). We know that at least one camera had been smuggled into Auschwitz [18], the pictures leaving much to be desired. Also, the Auschwitz resistance had excellent connections to the outside [19], the question that needs to be asked then: Why not more pictures? And to dismiss the evidentiary value of photos is not convincing in the least, with all the opportunities that no doubt presented themselves, we should have piles of them, if what is alleged really happened.

Zimmermann writes that in the school book he published in 1981, a picture of a Gaskammer is shown, the only book to do so, here is what he wrote in German:

“Das einzige Schulbuch, in dem ein Foto einer Gaskammer gezeigt wird, habe ich bereits im Jahre 1981 herausgegeben”.[20]

No details about which gas chamber he featured, and the book he is referring to (footnote 15) seems to have disappeared. I searched for it in every on-line book store, from ABAA to Zentrales V.A.B., nothing. Why is this important? Well, in the newspaper write up to the Berlin conference of 2008 — attended by 200 scientists from around the world to discuss “the historical significance, the technical development and revisionists denial of the Holocaust”, the book under discussion based on the findings of said scientists — we read that the description of gas chambers is fictional (fictive Darstellung), no pictures exist, all we have is eyewitness testimony. But now we learn that Mr. Zimmermann provided a picture of a gas chamber already in 1981, why not show that picture? Or is it also a picture of a genuine shower room, as shown by Henryk Mandelbaum, and claimed to be the gas chamber of Auschwitz?[21]

Zimmermann then talks more about the cremations, and also about films, “Witness to Murder” a 1954 Hollywood production is mentioned, as is “I want to live”, produced four years later, that film about state sanctioned killings in gas chambers in the USA. But, no connection is made between American and German gas chambers.

We then learn about the distribution of poisonous baby food “Made in Germany” in Israel, some babies died. It turned out that vitamin B1 was missing, not by accident according to a Member of the Knesset. Then, the gas pipeline from Egypt was put into operation, in April 2008, on the day when the Shoah is commemorated in Israel. But the climax of the association with “gas” and Germany was reached in 1991, when Saddam had conquered Kuwait. The discussion in Israel centred around the association between the German chemical industry and Saddam, the fear that the latter would use chemical weapons, built with German expertise, against Israel. The Soviet Scud rockets a modernized version of the German V-2. There was even talk about gassings in Iraq with Zyklon B, but this rumor was discarded.[22]

Comment: Typical Jewish paranoia.

But then, five years later and three years following the gassings of his own Kurdish people, Zimmermann continues, the Iraqi chemical weapons arsenal seems to have (schien) threatened Israel. This brought back the memories of gassings of Jews during the Shoah — Saddam Hussein a Hitler copy and Israel’s worst enemy — and chemical weapons “Made in Germany”, an explosive combination. Michael Bar Zohar gave a detailed speech concerning the participation of German companies and the export of poisonous gas to Iraq. He spoke of: “a devilish formula which goes: Jews – Germans – Gas”. Yitzchak Levi added: “There are things that are implanted in the pedigree (Wurzeln) of a people”, referring to the inclination of Germans – the modern Amaleks — to use poisonous gas against Jews. Two weeks after the start of that war Knesset Member Gershon Shafat summarized: “The father delivers Zyklon B for the extermination of Jews, the son the gas to Iraq so it can be used against Israel”.[23]

Comments: Zimmermann goes on and on, and even though this could be considered a “tongue in cheek” account, one has to ask: What has all of this to do with the subject? Why fill almost four pages with what amounts to Jewish paranoia? Or is it just paranoia? Most likely not, for “The Holocaust” is used by Israelis to justify just about anything, starting with the crimes committed against Palestinians, or to convince the “Coalition of the Willing” that a war against Hussein was necessary to save the world, although some in that coalition did not need much coaxing.

And now, toward the end of his essay, Zimmermann tells us that the attitude in Israel re. the Shoah is not as sacrilegious as before (with this again adding the religious undertone), even though we still have the new addition of Yad Vashem, the yearly “Marches of the Living”, and the ritualizing of the Holocaust Memorial Day. But, on the other side, the number of survivors is dwindling, and voices are heard criticizing the use of the Holocaust for political gains. Even Shoah jokes are told, originating in Germany of 30 years ago. Why this is so — the psychological aspect of this — Zimmermann does not wish to address. But in the jokes burning also plays a major role: “Question: “What do we call a survivor?’ Answer: ‘Schnizolim’ (Schnitzel)”. Hebrew for survivors being “Nizolim”. Be that as it may, even now tear gas is not used against Jewish, right-wing demonstrators because the right immediately points towards the Shoah. Tear gas is used against Arabs, however, and against the left in Israel, no concern here that the Shoah will be evoked.

There is no interest in discussions about facts, the Leuchter Report almost ignored by the media. The naming of an institute for theoretical chemicals (Institutes für theoretische Chemie) as “Fritz Haber” also of no interest. Advertising by Hoover for their vacuum cleaner “Zyklon” was allowed. This shows that the poisonous gas theme can only be brought into the conscience in certain connections, and then used for political purposes. The fight against Shoah deniers is seen as a fight for existence, but in this framework attention is not focused on gassings alone, and that rightly so.

Final comments: Zimmermann convinces us that in the Jewish psyche burnings are what makes the Shoah, not the gassings, unless “Germany” and “Gas” are mentioned in the same context. He, aside from a few deviations into the world of paranoia, addresses the issue, the heading of his essay “How survivors perceive the mass murder by poisonous gas”. But, the question has to be asked again: What has all of this to do with proving that Jews were mass murdered with poisonous gas? This is after all what the title of the book promises, to provide new evidence for said gassings. One could dismiss this article, as well as that of Evans, as irrelevant, but it is not. The intent here is to get the reader conditioned, to soften him/her up to later accept all that is presented without question. And sadly, this tactic will work, most readers having never concerned themselves with details about “The Holocaust”. Zimmermann alludes to this in the last part of his essay in regards to Israel, but the same may be said for most people in the rest of the world.

To be continued…

Sources:

1. Günter Morsch und Bertrand Perz, Neue Studien zu Nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas, Metropol Verlag Berlin 2011, p.11
2. http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Wiedergutmachung
3. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/05/well-where-are-they-then/#more-931
4. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/02/facing-a-new-decade/#more-1416
5. Neue Studien…, p.12
6. Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, Treblinka. Extermination Camp of Transit Camp, Theses & Dissertations Press, PO Box 257768, Chicago, Illinois 60625 January 2004, pp.77-80
7. http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/Pravda020245.html#Anchor3
8. Vicomte Leon De Poncins, Freemasonry & Judaism. Secret Powers Behind Revolution, A&B Publishers Group. 1000 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklym New York (no publishing date given), p.183 (B. Lazare, L’Antisemitism, p.3)
9. Neue Studien…, p. XI
10. Pierre Blet, S.J, Pius XII and the Second War. According to the Archives of the Vatican, Paulist Press, New York, N.Y, Mahwah, N.J. 1997. English translation 1999
11. http://www.stateofnature.org/holocaustReligion.html (this just one example)
12. Neue Studien…, pp.13/14, footnote 4: “These Images of blue skies and columns of people in black swallowed into the confines of the crematoria and disappearing in clouds of smoke.” Zit. in Otto D. Kulka, In Search of History and Memory: Excerpts from „Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death”, in: Moshe Zimmermann (Hrsg.),On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime, Jerusalem 2006, S. 401-471, hier S. 411.”
13. All I have is a printout of the document. Page 1 has this number printed on it: PL105-246 and on the bottom of each page a stamp reads “Decalassified, Authority NND 36822, By UB, NARA Date 2-7-05
14. Neue Studien…, p.15: The German original: Die Auswahl der Fotos dient ohnehin als starkes Indiz für die eigentliche Wahrnehmung.
15. Ibid: Moshe Zimmermann (publisher), Von Krieg zu Krieg 1918-1945, Jerusalem 1981, p.182
16. Ibid: Dani Jakobi (publisher), Olam Schel Tmurot (Eine Welt voller wenden. Geschichte für die 9. Klasse [A world full of changes. History for the 9. grade]), Tel Aviv 1999, pp.134-140
17. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2009/12/guidelines-for-teaching-about-the-holocaust/
18. Bruno Baum, Widerstand in Auschwitz, Kongress-Verlag Berlin 1961, p.88
19. Ibid, p.89f
20. Neue Studien…, p.15
21. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2011/02/the-latest-sonderkommando-testimony/
22. Neue Studien…, pp.16/17
23. Ibid, p.17

The first chapter in the book Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas is captioned: “Massentötungen durch Giftgas: Zwischen wissenschaftlicher Einordnung und individueller Erinnerung” (Mass murder by poisonous gas: Amid scientific cataloguing and the recollection by individuals).

The chapter contains two essays, the first one by the British historian Richard J. Evans, titled: “Wie einzigartig war die Ermordung der Juden durch die Nationalsozialisten?”(How unique was the killing of the Jews by the National Socialists?).

Mr. Evans begins by informing us that a few weeks after the conquest of Poland in September 1939, the victorious power started systematically suppressing Polish culture and language. Polish libraries and other cultural centres were closed, memorials were destroyed and street signs removed. Half a million Poles were incarcerated, many physically abused and killed. About 20 000 officers, among them insurgents, were shot, up to 1.5 million members of the Polish intelligentsia and their families were arrested and later transported out of the country in unheated cattle cars. About one third did not survive, among them 100 000 Jews. Those were the catastrophic results of the conquering of eastern Poland by the Soviets.

Comments: This came as a surprise, why would Evans start out by listing Soviet crimes when this is supposed to be about the uniqueness of the mass killing of Jews with poisonous gas by the National Socialists?

Evans continues by writing that only after the Germans marched into the Soviet Union (Einmarsch der Wehrmacht) in June 1941 did Soviet repression of Polish nationalism ease, the Poles then seen as potential allies. But at the same time, Stalin started a campaign against ethnic minorities who he believed could help the Germans. From September 1941 on, according Evans, 1.2 million German nationals (Volksdeutsche) from Ukraine, the Volga region and various Soviet cities were deported to Siberia by the Soviet Secret Police — about 175 000 of them died. Members of various other ethnic groups followed the Germans to Siberia, the secret police killed anybody believed to be in the way: more than 100 000 prisoners were murdered in Ukraine alone. Those actions closely resembled the policies of National Socialist Germany, so Evans, but there were differences.

The Soviets’ true intent, we learn, was to initiate a social revolution: Poland was incorporated into the SU, private property nationalized, Ukrainians and Byelorussian’s encouraged to rise up against the Polish ruling class. Thus, according to Evans, Soviet policy was not racist but part of the class struggle and in reality, the Soviet occupation brought about a system of equal rights. For many Jews this in fact meant liberation, whereas in the western, German occupied part, racism was the deciding factor from the start – Polish and Jewish property expropriated but a general nationalization never took place, the capitalist system continued.

Comments: Hard to say what all of this has to do with the subject matter, also, the National Socialists never tried to hide their racial policies. Evans intends – even though he admits that crimes were committed by the Soviets – to give their policies a sort of human face, whereas what the Nazis did was in his view purely criminal. He admits that those effected by either policy would probably not have been able to differentiate, but clings to the class struggle theme even when mentioning the years of the Great Terror in the SU.

Actual National Socialist policies regarding the new European order, as worked out by Heinrich Himmler, were revealed when German forces occupied Poland in June 1941, so Evans. Half a million German nationals (Volksdeutsche) from Eastern Poland, Rumania, the Soviet Union (SU) and other east European countries were to displace the dispossessed Poles. This so called (Evans’s words) Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East) stipulated that 64% of the Ukrainian -, as well as 75% of the Byelorussian population was earmarked for expropriation -, death via hunger/disease or be deported further east. 30 to 45 million were to die and the whole territory populated by millions of German farmers, effectively moving Germanys border 1000 km east. If this plan have been realized, Evans summarizes, it would have resulted in the biggest mass murder of all times. This Generalplan Ost was supposedly based on Hitler’s long held ambition to create “Lebensraum”(living space) for Germans.

The extermination of the Jews must be seen in the context of this far reaching master plan – and with this Evans has finally made a connection to the actual topic. But, he cautions, the extermination of Jews should not be viewed as just a side show of this Master Plan to re-arrange Eastern Europe along ethnic lines. No, this plan envisioned the starvation/killing of millions of Slavic peoples for economic reasons — their territories intended for future German settlement The Jews on the other hand were mostly poor and therefore of no economic benefit to the Germans. Jews were used as slave labor whenever necessary and allowed to live for a while (even though representatives of the Wehrmacht (German forces) stressed that Jews were “useless eaters”).

Comments: Evans claims that this Generalplan Ost was a long held ambition (auf die lang gehegte Ambition) by Hitler to create “Lebensraum” for Germans. We must backtrack some to see if what Evans charges is accurate. Evans no doubt referred to what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. While Hitler did desire more living space, he had a legitimate basis for doing so. The British blockade during WWI was still fresh in his mind, hundreds of thousands of Germans had died because of this blockade, a blockade left in place long after hostilities ceased.[1] As for Mein Kampf, Hitler told the French reporter Bertrand de Jouvenel of the “Paris Midi” that when he wrote his book, the Ruhr region was occupied by France, etc., and yes, France and Germany were enemies. When asked by de Jouvenel if he would rewrite what he wrote Hitler answered that he is not an author, corrections will be made in the book of history.[2] And he did just that, never laying claim to Alsace-Lorraine.  Hitler also mentioned that when he wrote his book he could not even dream of becoming chancellor of Germany. But, when Hitler did become chancellor, he wanted the Allies to honor what they had promised at Versailles – and did so from the start – to disarm as agreed to and as stipulated under Article 8 of the Versailles Treaty, which reads:

“The Members of the League recognise that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations. The Council, taking account of the geographical situation and circumstances of each State, shall formulate plans for such reduction for the consideration and action of the several Governments. Such plans shall be subject to reconsideration and revision at least every ten years. After these plans shall have been adopted by the several Governments, the limits of armaments therein fixed shall not be exceeded without the concurrence of the Council. The Members of the League agree that the manufacture by private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open to grave objections. The Council shall advise how the evil effects attendant upon such manufacture can be prevented, due regard being had to the necessities of those Members of the League which are not able to manufacture the munitions and implements of war necessary for their safety. The Members of the League undertake to interchange full and frank information as to the scale of their armaments, their military, naval, and air programmes and the condition of such of their industries as are adaptable to war-like purposes”.

The Versailles Treaty (German defense lawyer were never allowed to mention that Treaty at the Nürnberg trial) allowed Germany an army of 100 000 lightly armed troops, and Hitler, in a speech of 17 May 1933 promised to send even those home if the Allies did likewise.[3] In this same speech, Hitler told his audience that he had agreed to the MacDonald Plan, a plan allowing Germany 200 000 troops, about one-fifth of the number of troops allowed other countries surrounding Germany – the Russian army of about 1 million not even included. Also, Germany was not allowed any planes, while Poland was allowed 22, Belgium 150, the Baltic’s 150, the little entente 550, France 500: England and Russia are not mentioned. Again, Hitler agreed to this plan, even though France demanded that Germany be placed under a 4 year prohibition period.[4] The Allies kept stalling – efforts were made to extend the prohibition period by another eight years – and negotiations were finally to resume in 1935,[5] the Allies arming all the while. Those stalling tactics forced Hitler to break off negotiations and on 16 March 1935 he gave the order to re-arm Germany, as any responsible statesman would have done. On 2 May 1935, France and Russia signed a mutual assistance agreement (Beistandspakt), which officially added the Red Army to the list of foes. That was followed on 16 May by the signing of a similar agreement between Moscow and Prague,[6] and Hitler was supposed to wait 12 years before re-arming Germany???

Germany was also concerned with the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. Ribbentrop stated at the IMT:

“I remember that in this connection he (Hitler) quoted especially the former French Minister of Aviation, Pierre Cot, who had called Bohemia and Moravia, that is Czechoslovakia, the “airplane carrier” against Germany. I believe it was Reich Marshal Goering who already mentioned that at that time we received intelligence reports of Russian pilots or Russian missions being on Czech airdromes[…]”[7]

Still, Hitler took no action until the maltreatment of minorities by Czech authorities aroused even the displeasure of the British. To save face they send Lord Runciman to investigate.[8] Thus the Sudetenland was finally allowed to reunite with Germany, and Czechoslovakia was eventually dropped by the British [9].

On 26 January 1934, Germany and Poland signed a non-aggression Treaty, and on 24 October 1938, Ribbentrop had a lengthy talk with the Polish envoy Lipski, to see if outstanding issues could not be settled. His suggestion: Danzig was to be returned to Germany and a rail/road link build connecting East Prussia to Germany. Poland, in return, would get to keep all the German territories given to it at Versailles, with Germany to guarantee the border for 25 years. Lipski promised to relay those proposal to the Polish foreign minister Jozef Beck. Those very reasonable proposals were eventually turned down by the Poles.[10] Negations continued but when the British gave the Poles that unconditional guarantee, against Germany, the Poles – emboldened by the British guarantee – refused to negotiate any further. But even after Britain had given the Poles that guarantee, Hitler, along with other ministers, had worked out a 16 point program in order to try and settle issues peacefully. He had informed the British about this program and waited, right up to 31 August  1939, for a Polish emissary, no one showed up. The 16 points were broadcast on the radio at 21:00 hrs (9:00 o’clock) on 31 August, the Poles ridiculed them and called their people to arms, on 1 September 1939, the German army marched into Poland.[11]

Germanys peace offerings, following the outbreak of war with Poland, are well known, but they fell on deaf ears. Hitler demonstrated again and again that he did not want war, and when the French campaign ended he ordered demobilisation, sending whole divisions home: production of war material changed to production of consumer goods.[12] Thus, if the Generalplan Ost was really a long held ambition of Hitler’s, he sure had a strange way of going about it.

***

Just briefly to the war with the Soviet Union: At the meeting with Molotov in Berlin in November 1940, Hitler told him that because of the war with England, Germany had been forced to advance into territories in which it had no interest in.[13] Hitler than stated that Germanys’ Lebensraum had been greatly expanded, and even though both, Germany and the Soviet Union, might not have achieved what they set out to do, they could be satisfied nevertheless.[14] But Molotov demanded more concessions from Germany[15] and following this meeting Hitler realized that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. Barbarossa, the strike against the Soviet Union, was a preventive strike, though establishment historians are still loath to admit this in spite of the growing evidence.

***

Given this evidence one cannot possibly see any preconceived notion on Hitlers’ part re. the Generalplan Ost, as claimed by Evans. This plan, if it ever actually existed as stated, was created for administration purposes — after the war against the SU had started and huge territorial and population gains made at first. On 15 July 1941, Konrad Meyer-Hetlich presented this administrative plan to Himmler, who had requested it.[16] Hitler supposedly discussed his plan in a meeting of 16 July 1941: what is known from this discussion was presented at the IMT as L-221.[17] The original document that might prove the malicious intent of Generalplan Ost does not exist or has never been found —  only bits and pieces of related documents were presented at the Nürnberg trials. As such, there is no proof at all that this plan was a long held ambition of Hitler’s, and to try and use it to prove “The Holocaust” is folly.

Hitler openly talked about settling the east and the problems that would have to be overcome. But, he stated, England was controlling 400 million in India with just 250 000 English soldiers and administrators, so it should likewise be possible for Germans to do the same.[18] Hitler outlined how it should be done, by building German cities/villages but explicitly stated that, for the rest of Russia: “…in der wir die Russen leben lassen wie sie wollen, nur daß wir sie beherrschen“ (we will allow the Russians to live as they chose, we will just govern them).[19] Nowhere does he mention  killing tens of millions of Slavs, in fact L-221 – according to Hillgruber the Generalplan Ost per se – never alludes to mass killings. There is, however, something odd about L-221. We read, right at the beginning: “…seems to have been prepared by Bormann, because his initials appear at the top of page one”? Seems to be?

Evans goes on to talk about the Ideology of National Socialist Propaganda concerning Jews. The National Socialists viewed Slavic people, i.e., Poles, Russians, Czechs, etc., as “Untermenschen” (lesser humans), who represented a danger to Germans only when lead by clever and ruthless Jews — as was allegedly the case with Bolshevism. But on their own they were considered primitive, backwards and passive. Thus they were expandable, but never a threat to the existence of Germans. Even in the closing years of the war, when National Socialist propaganda started to warn about Bolshevism as a danger to European culture, Slavs were always depicted as the helpers of international Jewry. The Slavs were a nuisance, but the Jews were a threat: the “Weltfeind” (enemy of the world).

Comments: First, in his speech of 28 April 1939, Hitler spoke highly of the Czech people. As for the Untermenschen, here is what Hans Fritzsche stated at the IMT:

“German propaganda, and under that I understand official German propaganda, did not even preach racial hatred. It only spoke about racial distinctions, and that is something quite different; but I will admit that there was a certain type of German propaganda which went beyond that and which did preach the clear-cut and primitive racial hatred[…]”[20]

While the term Untermenschen was used, it was never officially sanctioned – Alfred Rosenberg confirmed this.[21] As for the anti Jewish propaganda, Evans relied on a book by Jeffrey Herf, “The Jewish Enemy”, who tried to make a case for “The Holocaust” via NS propaganda” and failed miserably. One wonders what all of this has to do with mass murder of Jews by poisonous gas! This ‘context’ is designed to lead the reader (via the power of suggestion and bias) to false conclusions. Assumptions are presented as though they are facts.

According to Evans, Hitlers’ anti-Semitism was based on his perceived (vermeindlichen) experiences of WWI, i.e., from the paranoid interpretation of Germany’s defeat, the ”Dolchstoßlegende“ (stab in the back) — as was other National Socialist propagandists’ anti-Semitism. Jews were to blame for the unrest near the end of that war, since they used food shortages to foment revolution which, in turn, led to Germanys’ defeat.

Comments: Mr. Evans would do well to read some books which address that issue, for starters “The Kings Depart. The Tragedy of Germany, Versailles and the German Revolution”, by Richard M. Watt. Mr. Watt details the Bolshevist involvement in that revolution, the forming of “Soviets” and the like. Also, Jewish contribution to communism/bolshevism is well documented.[22]

Hitler was exposed to Jewish machinations in the Weimar Republik, thus his antisemitism had a “rational core’, as Prof. Nolte calls it (see footnote 34). Jews represented 0.7% of the total German population in the Weimar Republik, but 16.25% of all lawyers and judges were Jews and 10.88% of all medical doctors. They all but controlled the entertainment industry, as well as the press [23]. This is why Hitler spoke of a Jewish Überfremdung, overrepresentation by a foreign people. In Berlin 2,614 out of 6,203 medical doctors were Jews, which is 42%; out of 3,890 lawyers, 1,879 were Jewish…48%.[24] Dr. Willy Glasebock wrote in the NZ (Nürnberger Zeitung) Nr.5 of 2 April 1966, that all restrictions for Jews – i.e., those that existed before – were dropped in the Weimar Republik. Jews pushed their way to the forefront not only in economics, but also in government, literature and media (the press); they were able to fill important positions in entertainment. In politics they associated mostly with the left. The communist Jew Kurt Eisner became minister president of Bavaria, but was received with indignation by the rest of Germany. Glasebock lists many more examples, including some of the dubious financial dealings by Eastern-European Jewish shysters and concludes that it was no wonder anti-Semitism increased in the Weimar Republik and that no Hitler was needed for this.[25] Prof. Ernst Nolte writes extensively about the involvement of Jews in communism in Germany — their attempt to establish a “Soviet Germany”. And, Germans themselves were well aware of the Jewish-Bolsheviks butchering[26] that had happened/was happening in Russia, and therefore not interested in the establishment of a Soviet-Germany.[27]

Now Evans informs us that even though officials, as well as members of the Einsatzgruppen (task forces) mistreated/shot Poles and Slavs, their attitude towards Jews was totally different. Jews beards were cut off [28], girls were forced to clean latrines with their shirts, synagogues were burned down, Jewish men were assembled in public places and forced to do gymnastics till they collapsed, etc. Evans forgets to mention in all of this the following, from the presentation by Smirnov at the IMT:

“Radomsky and Rieder used all kinds of devices for the extermination of Soviet citizens. For instance, they invented the following method of murder: Several Soviet prisoners would be forced to climb a tree and others had to saw it down. The prisoners would fall together with the tree and be killed.”[29]

And although Smirnov refers to “Soviet citizens”, we now know that this was only Tarnsprache for Jews.[30] We then learn a little about the treatment of Jews by Rumanian and Croatian officials, again with the difference that the latter just wanted to get rid of Jews, whereas Germans considered Jews to be the Weltfeind — public enemy #1. The elimination of Jews was of central importance to the Germans, closely tied in with their boundless war aims, their plan to first conquer Europe and then the world.

Comments: So, a nation of some 85 million, that number of course including woman, children and the old, set out to conquer the world? Absolute rubbish. In his speech of December 31, 1941 Hitler reminded the world of his repeated offers to disarm, starting in 1933, and of his many peace offers since. He also told his listeners that England and France declared war on Germany because Germany wanted to conquer the world. Was Danzig the world, Hitler asked? Germany was not allowed an additional 500 000 square kilometers, whereas it was acceptable for 45 million Englishmen to rule over 40 million square kilometers of territory.[31] As mentioned, following the French campaign whole divisions were discharged and production of war material curtailed. Germany likewise never build any long range bombers like the Allies Lancaster (the Flying Fortress). In 1940, less than 15% of Germanys’ GNP was spend on armaments, in 1941 it was still just 19%…reaching 50% in 1944, when “total war” was declared.[32] In contrast, Stalin spend 32.6% of his nations GNP on armaments in 1940, and 43.4% in 1941.[33] This confirms that the threat originated in the Soviet Union: communism intended to conquer the whole world from the start — their emblem was a Hammer and Sichel superimposed over the globe.

Reductionist attempts to explain the National Socialist Jewish policy as rational[34], or economically related, are erroneous, claims Evans. Jews from all over Europe were arrested and send to extermination camps — the Wannsee Protocol makes this clear. With this the German racial wars differs from all other genocidal wars in history. Other wars were wars of conquest: genocides happened as a consequence, like the killing of the Herero by Germans in South West Africa, or the civil wars in Bosnia et al. Hitler, in his ‘Table Talks’, drew parallels to what was planned in the east (Generalplan Ost) and the killing of natives in North America or Australia, but mass murder of Jews by the National Socialists does not fit into this frame.

Comments: The National Socialists accused the Jews of subversive activities, and for being the carriers of the Bolshevik/Communist virus. Thus, they wanted all Jews living within their sphere of influence ousted; the case for mass murder has yet to be made. The Evian Committee stated: “Not one of the participating countries denies the unassailable right of the German government, to take measures in regards to certain citizens, when those measures are within its rights as a sovereign nation”[35] Problem was, nobody wanted the Jews so when war broke out, forced deportation east, or forced labor, became the norm. For the killing of the Herero, what actually happened differs from the official version, but this isn’t a relevant issue, Evans is just stacking the jury. As for the ‘Table Talks’, I searched the talks recorded by Heims and found nothing – the Generalplan Ost discussed above. The Wannsee Conference? It talks of killing Jews being worked to death while building roads, and not even the most ardent defender of “The Holocaust” claims that this is how it happened.

And now we have finally arrived at something that can actually be construed as an attempt, by Evans, to prove Hitlers’ genocidal intend. WWII was always seen as a racial war by Hitler (even though Hitler did everything in his power to avoid war), of which an integrate part was the eugenic upgrading (eugenische “Aufwertung”) of the German populace and the removal of Jews. When Hitler signed the T4 decree (Evans writes order) in October 1939, he backdated this order to 1 September, the beginning of the war. But even more significant is that during the war Hitler recalled his prophesy when he stated on 30 January 1942: “If the international Jewish financiers, inside and outside Europe, succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

Hitler, in this speech, told his audience that he made this prophesy in his speech of September 1,1939, when in fact it was made on January 30,1939. For Hitler the genocidal re-arrangement of Europe started with the beginning of the war.[36]

Comments: Much ado about the dating of this T4 decree. At the Nürnberg doctor’s Trial, Dr. Georg Fröschmann, defense attorney for Viktor Brack, stated that Brack viewed the oral instructions that  he received on 1 September 1939 from Hitler as the legal basis for this decree.[37] This shows that the decree was issued on 1 September, but since the war had just started, Hitler had other things to do than to put it on paper – he did so later and dated it to the day it was issued, nothing sinister here. The Erlaß (decree) was typed on ordinary stationary showing the German Eagle in Gold and “Adolf Hitler” in print, dated 1 September 1939 with the wording:

„Reichsleiter Bouhler und Dr. med. Brandt sind unter Verantwortung beauftragt, die Befugnisse namentlich zu bestimmender Ärzte so zu erweitern, daß nach menschlichem Ermessen unheilbar Kranken bei kritischster Beurteilung ihres Krankheitszustandes der Gnadentod gewährt werden kann. gez. Adolf Hitler.”

(Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen] of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death [Gnadentod]. Signed Adolf Hitler)[38]

The legal wrangling is outlined in the VfZ article I quoted from above, the essay titled “Euthenasie und Justiz im Dritten Reich”(Euthanasia and justice in the Third Reich), demonstrating that the TR (Third Reich) was far from being a lawless society. Hitler signed this with the thought of mass starvation of Germans during WWI still in mind, and decided that the life of the incurable must be sacrificed to save the others. Indeed, when the protests became too loud, the action was stopped. Also, before anyone raises the moral forefinger, what about the killings of the unborn sanctioned in our societies? This is done without any basis other than a “woman’s right” to murder her unborn child.

Now for Hitlers’ prophesy: Evans lifted this from “Hitler, 1936-1945”, by Ian Kershaw, in which the caption to chapter 10 “Fulfilling ‘The Prophesy’” reads:

“‘I already stated on 1 September 1939 in the German Reichstag — and I refrain from over-hasty prophecies — that this war will not come to an end as the Jews imagine, with the extermination of the European—Aryan peoples, but that the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry. For the first time the old Jewish law will now be applied: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’

Hitler, speaking in the Sportpalast, Berlin, 30 January 1942

Kershaw seems to ignore the date issue, he remarks on p.464:

“Goebbels registered his satisfaction, when he received a detailed report in mid-August, at the information that ‘vengeance was being wreaked on the Jews in the big towns’ of the Baltic, and that they were ‘being slain in their masses on the streets by the self-protection organizations’. He connected the killing directly with Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ of January 1939. ‘What the Fuhrer prophesied is now taking place,’ he wrote, ‘that if Jewry succeeded in provoking another war, it would lose its existence[…]”

While Evans is correct that Hitler made that prophesy on 30 January 1939, not on 1 September 1939, he neglected to provide the part about “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Hitler added this element in his speech of 30 January 1942, which was not part of his 30 January 1939 speech. Also, why would Hitler refer to a prophesy he had made on 1 September 1939, when that which he had prophesized, on 30 January 1939, has already happened, the war had started? It seems that Hitler mixed his dates/speeches up, horror upon horror. But then, in lieu of real evidence, anything will have to do for Mr. Evans.

Evans then tells us that the upgrading (Ertüchtigung) of the “so called Arian race” (his words), and the elimination of the unfit was an important part of waging this war. The efforts to eliminate unwanted included “extermination by work” (Vernichtung durch Arbeit) — the Sinti and Roma were effected by this also as many were shipped to Auschwitz and killed in gas chambers.

He again refers to the elusive Generalplan Ost, Hitlers’ table talks and anti-Jewish propaganda (referring to Herf), all of which supposedly created a genocidal climate – and he finally arrives at the Einsatzgruppen (task forces). We learn from Evans that in September 1941, the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) had already come to the conclusion that mass shootings were not sufficient and that the experiences gained by the T4 program will have to be utilized. By the end of December 1941, we are told that all four Einsatzgruppen(EG) utilized one gas wagon in which Jewish men, woman and children were murdered via re-routing the exhaust through the box in the back. In March-, and later May and June 1942, the mass murder of Jews had begun in the three Action Reinhardt extermination camps, by routing exhaust gas into air tight chambers. At the same time Jews were killed en masse in Auschwitz by the use of Zyklon B, which was then followed by killings in Majdanek: gas chambers also existed in other camps but were not used for mass killings. For evidence, Evans refers us to the articles in this book.

Comments: Here again we see an attempt to connect T4 to the alleged mass killings of Jews, with no evidence offered, just assumptions. As for the EG, no independent body of experts has ever undertaken an investigation to find out whether what was reported and claimed can actually be confirmed. Prof. Maser writes that large areas of the east are still ‘terra incognita’, as historians appear unwilling to investigate for fear of not finding what is allegedly there.[39] Prof Seidler wrote of “documents of dubious origin” when referring to reports allegedly issued by the EG, the whole of Allied allegations based on those reports.[40] As for the rest of it, we will have to wait and see what the other authors have to offer.

Evans continues by writing that poisonous gas was used in three international conflicts: in the first World War, against subversives in Morocco, and by the Italians in Ethiopia; but never to murder millions of helpless, defenceless civilians. Just the same, one can not reduce the singularity of the National Socialist mass murder of Jews to the technical aspect of gassings alone. One can certainly differentiate between work- and extermination camps, but regarding the singularity of the crime it is not a matter of ‘how’ but ‘why’. Up to the end of the war, 5.5 to 6 million Jews were killed by the National Socialists. 3.5 million of them died in gas chambers; 1.3 million were shot by units of the SS, the police and the armed forces; 700 000 died in gas wagons; and up to 1 million starved or died of sicknesses or as a result of maltreatment in the camps erected by the National Socialists in Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe (Evans refers here to the book by Saul Friedländer, ‘Jahre der Vernichtung’).

Thus, poisonous gas was only one method used for mass murder by the National Socialists. Posterity concentrates on that method because poisonous gas has never been used before. Never before has mass murder been committed in facilities erected for this purpose alone, but it would be erroneous to assume that this mechanized killing was something impersonal. In Belzec, for instance, the gas chambers did often not work, until improvements were made. In Auschwitz, Crematorium IV broke down during the Hungarian action in the spring of 1944, but those problems were solved also. The arrests and mistreatments in the ghettos continued, and all attempts by the SS to calm the Jews failed. The brutal treatment they had to endure left no doubt about their fate.

It is therefore time to again confront the many misunderstandings and legends circulating around the mass murder of Jews by poisonous gas. For the first time international historiography addresses the issues in this book, and as an aside, counters the attempts by self-styled revisionists to deny the existence of the gas chambers.

Final comments: Evans accuses the National Socialists (by now I wish they would call them “Nazis”) of inciting the masses via propaganda, using Herf as a reference, to condition them to accept the mass murder of Jews allegedly undertaken — but of which nobody knew (see part I). Evans just conditions the reader to accept that the National Socialists were nothing but a bunch of mass murderers who cultivated their killers via propaganda. Hitler is supposed to have planned the destruction of tens of millions of Slaves well in advance of the start of WWII, but evidence shows otherwise. Jews were to be killed, something that was planned all along, but evidence shows otherwise. Nowhere does he mention the declaration of war by “Jews of the world” on 24 March 1933 — mere weeks after Hitler came to power — proving that a “World Jewry” actually exists. In this declaration of war, Jews around the world were told to boycott German goods, this boycott having a severe affect. Here is what Rolf Vogel, a decided anti-Nazi, had to say:

“Ein weltweiter Boykott deutscher Exporte setzte ein, unterstützt von ausländischen Juden wie Nichtjuden. Dieser Boykott war so stark, daß Vizekanzler von Papen am 27. März 1933 einen flehentlichen Brief an die deutsch-amerikanische Handelskammer schrieb[…] “.[41]

(A worldwide boycott of German exports started, supported by foreign Jews as well as non Jews. This boycott was so strong that vice chancellor von Papen was forced to write a letter to the German-American trade commission)

Nor does Evans mention anything about the efforts made to get Jews to emigrate, right up to the spring of 1942, when the Madagascar plan was finally dropped.[42] And there’s no mention of the renewed declaration of war by Jewry of August 1941, this time from Moscow.[43] Following this latest declaration, Hitler had to consider Jews to be a fifth column, and since there was no way to differentiate between who was a good Jew (prima Jude) and who was not, evacuation to the east was ordered. As for ‘specially erected’ facilities, van Pelt tells us re. Auschwitz [44]:

“The two crematoria under development (2 and 3), were retro-actively fitted with homicidal gas chambers.”

And that in the spring of 1942, rather late I would suggest if Hitler really intended to kill Jews all along, as Evans tries to convince us. For Treblinka we have conflicting stories about killing methods [45]: it will be interesting to see if the authors of the essays addressing Treblinka acknowledge this and explain how this was possible, since those were also eyewitness testimonies.

Mr. Evans offers no evidence, just rhetoric.

To be continued…

Wilfried Heink

Sources

1. Wilhelm Ziegler, Versailles, die geschichte eines mißglückten Friedens, Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg, 1933, pp.91ff
2. Heinrich Härtle, Die Kriegsschuld der Sieger, Verlag K.W. Schütz, Göttingen 1966, pp.107/108 (the interview published on February 21, 1936, Ibid, p.107)
3. Ibid, p.64
4. Ibid, pp.63-66
5. Ibid, pp.62ff
6. Ibid, p.73
7. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/03-29-46.asp#ribbentrop2, p.259; H. Härtle, Die Kriegsschuld…, p.182
8. Laurence Thompson, The Greatest Treason, The Untold Story of Munich, William Morrow & Company, Inc. New York 1968, pp.98/99 and 116ff; H. Härtle, Die Kriegsschuld…, pp.205ff
9. Annelies von Ribbentrop, Die Kriegsschuld des Widerstandes, Aus Britischen Geheimdokumenten 1938/39, Duffel-Verlag, Leoni am Starnberger See 1974, pp.242ff
10. Walter Post, Unternehmen Barbarossa, Verlag E.S. Mittler & Sohn GmbH, Hamburg-Berlin-Bonn 2001, p.104
11. Ribbentrop, Die Kriegsschuld…, pp.335-357; 360-368; 369-381
12. Werner Maser, Der Wortbruch, Hitler, Stalin und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, München 2001, p.230
13. Ernst Topitsch, Stalins Krieg, Moskaus Griff nach der Weltherrschaft, Strategie und Scheiterm, Verlag Busse + Seewald GmbH, Herford 1993, p.141
14. Maser, Der Wortbruch…, pp.236/237
15. Ibid, pp.233-246; Topitsch, Stalins Krieg…, pp.139-152
16. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ), 1972, Heft 2: Andreas Hillgruber, Die “Endlösung” und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologischen Programms des Nationalsozialismus, p.141, also footnote 24
17. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/chap_13.asp
18. Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944, Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims, Herausgegeben von Werner Jochmann, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, München1982, p.48
19. Ibid, p.55
20. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/06-28-46.asp, p.196
21. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/04-15-46.asp, p.450
22. Alexander Solschenizyn, “Zweihundert Jahre zusammen”. Die Juden in der Sowjetunion, F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, München 2003
23. Rolf Vogel, Ein Stempel hat gefehlt. Dokumente zur Emigration deutscher Juden, Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur, München/Zürich 1977, p.36
24. Dr. jur., Dr. phil., Dr. pol., Franz J. Scheidl, Deutschland und die Juden in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, II Teil, p.9
25. Ibid, p.12
26. Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917-1945, Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus, Propyläen Verlag, 1987 Verlag Ullstein GmbH, Frankfurt/Main, Berlin, p. 139. Also pp.69-143
27. Ibid, p.141
28. Evans no doubt referring to the well known picture, reproduced in Faschismus, Ghetto Massenmord, p.41. The picture looks suspect, the face of the soldier on the right, for instance, just a blur, as well as that of the soldier next to him.
29. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-19-46.asp, p.582
30. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v017/17.1prusin.html
31. http://der-fuehrer.org/reden/deutsch/Der%20Grossdeutsche%20Freiheitskampf%20-%20Reden%20Adolf%20Hitlers%20-%20Band%203.pdf, p.87
32. Maser, Der Wortbruch…, p.132, also footnote **
33. Ibid, p.230, also footnote **
34. Ernst Nolte, Feindliche Nähe, Herbig München 1998, p.12; p.28; pp.41ff
35. Vogel, Ein Stempel…, p.193
36. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, p.7
37. Franz W. Seidler, Das Recht in Siegerhand. Die 13 Nürnberger Prozesse 1945-1949, Pour le Mérite-Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Postfach 52, D-24236 Selent, p.219
38. VfZ, 1972, Heft 3, p.241
39. Werner Maser, Fälschung Dichtung und Wahrheit über Hitler und Stalin, Olzog Verlag GmbH, München 2004, p.232
40. Seidler, Das Recht…, p.272/73
41. Vogel, Ein Stempel…, p.43
42. Ibid, pp.334-336
43. Solschenizyn, zweihundert Jahre…, p.368; Heinrich Härtle, Freispruch für Deutschland, Verlag K.W. Schütz, Göttingen 1965, pp.249-255; This declaration was published in November 1941 by the „Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee, Buckingham House 6-7, Buckingham Street, Adelphi, London, W.C.2 (Härtle, p.255)
44. http://www.hdot.org/en/trial/defense/van/1, the last part of 8
45. Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, Treblinka. Vernichtungslager oder Durchgangslager?, Castle Hill Publishers, Hastings Great Britain 2002, pp.87ff

“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).

What follows, then, are some observations of this newest research as it is presented, including a comparison of the work by Kogon et al. whenever necessary. Publications by Revisionists will also be considered. The intent is to — for the most part — comment on the essays in general terms and also make comparisons of what we have been told until now and how this differs from this latest account. Some of the topics, like chemistry, need to be addressed by experts in that field.

The Introductions

The first article is a “Greeting” by Gernot Erler, minister in the foreign office from 2005 – 2009. Herr Erler informs us that the killing of European Jewry is one of the best researched and most precisely documented aspects of contemporary history. And yet, attempts are still made to deny what happened, to downplay the significance. Those who try and relativize the Holocaust place themselves outside of the international community. The United Nations has declared January 27 to be the day to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust. Germany has accepted responsibility for the crimes committed, so Erler welcomes the efforts made by the “Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education (ITF)” in the development of a culture of memory (Erinnerungskultur). He also thanks the Brandenburg Memorial Foundation for its assistance.

Comments: If the Holocaust has been that thoroughly researched and the mass murder of European Jewry established as such an undeniable fact, then why have this conference on Holocaust denial in 2008? Facts speak for themselves — just present them and denial will stop. What this suggests in the strongest terms is that what has been presented as evidence so far is obviously not convincing; thus this effort to present new material to finally silence deniers. The reference to a “Culture of Memory” is also of interest: more and more Germans call it a “Culture of Guilt” (Schuld-Kult)

Next, another “Greeting” by Dr. Ursula Plassnik, foreign minister of the Republic of Austria from 2004 to 2008. She tells us that this work is a comprehensive and detailed narrative of the mass murder via poisonous gas in the National Socialist concentration camps. The technical and scientific aspects of mass murder are documented, as well as the cooperation by technicians, organisations and politicians. She also welcomes the fact that educators had been invited to contribute to this book.[2]

Comment: Good, then this should finally convince all sceptics.

Then a Foreword by Thomas Krüger, President of the German centre for political education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, bpb). He starts out by telling us that the relativizing and belittling of the crimes committed by National Socialists (by now I am wondering why the term “Nazi(s)” is not used) is not a new phenomenon originating in the far right scene. Even during the existence of the Third Reich we had “I don’t want to see” this or “I don’t want to know” that. He then contradicted himself writing that even when – following the war – it became known what had occurred in the concentration- and extermination camps, many did not accept it, others denied that it happened.

Comment: We have an obvious contradiction here. Krüger tells us that what happened, meaning the mass murder of Jews, only became known after the war; so how could Germans have turned their heads, etc., when what had allegedly happened was not known ‘till after the war? Also, are we now going back to the “200 – 300” in the know, established at the IMT, by claiming that nothing was know until after the war — which is in fact what had happened? If so, the authors need to be congratulated upon having finally admitted that next to nothing, aside from a few rumours, was known during the war. The dilemma they face however is that a crime of this enormity, if it was really committed, could not have been kept a secret. Indeed the authors of another recent study, “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit” which examines the complicity of the foreign office (AA) in the alleged mass murder, tell us that 200,000 Germans directly participated, while another 200,000, mostly foreigners, assisted.[3] And with that many ‘in the know,’ how can this crime have been kept under wraps? Confusion right from the start.

We are then informed, by Krüger, that the Holocaust has since then been thoroughly investigated,  that it is well documented and part of our education system. Denying the Holocaust is against the law in Germany (§130, Abs. 3) and deniers are prosecuted; in spite of this Holocaust-Deniers and relativists are still with us.

Comment: Another contradiction which Herr Krüger seems to have missed. If the Holocaust undoubtedly occurred as alleged, then why are laws needed to support said allegations? Why not simply confront deniers with facts instead? Recent court cases in Germany have shown that judges are unwilling (unable?) to present facts; they hide behind Offenkundigkeit. Their claim: The Holocaust obviously happened, so there’s no need to substantiate it any further. In any other trial, “obviousness” would not stand up in court; the defendant is always allowed to present his/her evidence. One has to also wonder why, if all is “obvious,” this book had to be written? If the Holocaust has been investigated, and evidence exists proving without any doubt that mass murder was committed, then why not present this evidence — why the laws?

But Krüger is not done, he continues on telling us that time works for the Revisionists: as the Shoah becomes ever more distant from the present, fewer and fewer witnesses will be found who can attest to it. And because of this, historical myths and relativism could become more prevalent, even reaching the middle of society. For Revisionism is aimed at the uninformed, says Krüger, and historical facts are misrepresented — history is embellished and rewritten. The message of Revisionists pretends to be scientific, when instead basic norms of historiography are ignored and history is presented selectively.

Comments: Is Herr Krüger telling us here that the Shoah is based solely on witness testimony? Surely substantial enough evidence exists to prove the Holocaust in spite of the passage of time. And what of the documentation mentioned before: will it not, when combined with the evidence of substance, prove what allegedly happened without the eyewitness accounts? Also, how is it possible for Revisionism to grow, reaching even the middle of our society, if the Holocaust is as well-researched and documented as he claimed it is?

We then learn how to combat Revisionism. First, historical-political education is a must — the goal is to have students counter the apparent pseudo-scientific Revisionist propaganda. Youth are especially endangered, the internet having become a platform for Revisionism. None of this is getting any easier with the NS era receding further into the past; the death of eyewitnesses also poses a dilemma. Knowledge about Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust must be transmitted as an important part of political education. Also, it is not enough to just add all of this to our democratic value system; efforts must be made to reach youth of all walks of life.

We are faced with two problems, according to Krüger:

First, we must introduce migrants to Germany’s National Socialist past, and second, in the foreseeable future we will have no more witnesses who can be questioned. The intensity of their deliberations will be sorely missed, so we must adopt new strategies to compensate.

Comments: In reality, Herr Krüger must know that German youth is already inundated with all things Holocaust. But it appears — and this seems to be Herr Krüger’s underlying message — that what is presented, sans the eyewitness accounts, is just not persuasive, but not for lack of effort. One can only conclude that the material presented up to now is just not convincing. Further, to educate immigrants, especially Muslims, about the Holocaust will be a mighty task.

Krüger closed his lecture by voicing his conviction that this book will help combat Revisionist lies, and that his office will assist in any way necessary.[4]

Lastly, we have the actual Introduction by Messrs. Morsch and Perz. They began by informing us that in 1983, concentration camp survivors Eugen Kogon and Hermann Langbein — along with the head of Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, Adalbert Rückerl, as well as others — published the book “Nationalsozialistische Massentötung durch Giftgas.” This was published on the initiative of two Mauthausen survivors, Pierre-Serge Choumoff and Jean Gavard. All of this resulted from a meeting with officials of the centre for political education who discussed the increase in Revisionist debates about NS mass murder in the 1970s.[5]

The early deniers, as the authors call them, referred to a letter by Martin Broszat of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), written in the summer of 1960. The reason for Broszat’s letter was an article by Robert Strobel in “Die Zeit”[6] — he demanded the removal of former General Unrein, employed by American forces at the time, because he had claimed that the Dachau gas ovens were not used to burn Hitler’s victims, but the Americans’ SS victims (i.e. former guards). Furthermore, Unrein maintained that the gas ovens were not built by the Nazis, but by German prisoners of war on order of the Americans.

Following this, Broszat published this letter stating that “Not in Dachau, nor Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald, were Jews or other prisoners gassed. The gas chambers in Dachau were never completed, so those who died in Dachau or other concentration camps were victims of the catastrophic conditions (in the camps)…the lack of supplies…Mass murder of Jews started in 1941/42 and was committed exclusively in a few specially selected locations with the help of technical installations, mostly on occupied Polish territories: in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Sobibor on the Bug, in Treblinka, Chelmno and Belzec, but not in Germany proper…”.[7] (gaps in the original)

The reason Broszat published this, so we’ve been told, was to differentiate between the internment camps in Germany proper versus the mass murder in camps on Polish territory and to make it impossible for irrational people to make use of false information. Sadly however, Broszat’s efforts were for naught. Revisionists then claimed that Broszat had denied the existence of gas chambers altogether. Broszat’s claim that gas chambers did exist in Poland was of no consequence to Revisionists — so say the authors.

Comments: I am not aware of any Revisionist claiming that Broszat denied the existence of gas chambers in toto. What Revisionists say is that eyewitnesses testified about gassings in the German camps. In the 1950s, Dachau was seen as the place of horror — I know because I lived in Germany at that time. Hitchcock produced a film about it, but since this was not true the justified Revisionist argument is: why should we believe what we are told about the camps in the east? Especially since all gas chamber evidence for the east also rests on eyewitness testimony, as admitted in the news release mentioned at the beginning.

The authors continue by informing us that Kogon et al. tried to counter Revisionist claims by publishing their book in 1983 (it took a while), but now, 25 years after said publication, it is time to upgrade this book by including what has been learned since. We are then provided with a list of the issues discussed at the May 2008 conference, which reads in part: What have we learned since then and what had to be revised? Who decided to use poisonous gas and was it done on orders from higher ups or the initiative of individual camp commanders? We then learn that mass murder actions were undertaken in all camps, but why was poisonous gas, except for Auschwitz, not used exclusively — why were other killing methods adopted? What part did the killing of sick camp inmates, Aktion 14f13, play in all of this? To answer those questions a team of renowned scientists was invited, to look at the historical background, the technical aspects, etc.

Upon examining the footnotes of the 1983 publication, the authors continue, it is evident that eyewitness testimony and court transcripts are the main sources used. This reveals the dilemma researchers are faced with: Many of the sources (it reads: zeitgenössische Quellen) were systematically destroyed to maintain secrecy, so many of the orders were given orally. The Dachau trial is mentioned, as are the Polish trials in Krakow, the Jerusalem Eichmann trial and the euthanasia trials in the BRD. And, without the investigations by the Polish Central Commission or the work done by the Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, it was nearly impossible to address those issues.[8] But why aren’t the investigations that were allegedly done by the Soviets — by the “Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices,” created on 2 November 1942 — not mentioned, especially since the ESC constitutes a cornerstone of “The Holocaust”?[9]

We learn that among the new material now available are intercepts, by the British, of German radio communications, which were discovered in the 1980s; documents from Moscow’s special archives; as well as Himmler’s itinerary (Dienstkalender); some comprehensive reports found in archives of the Russian Federation as well as documents concerning the manufacturers of cremation equipment by the German manufacturer Topf & Sons. One would assume that with all of this additional material a solid case can be made for the Holocaust. Not so! We are told that in spite the fact that so much has been learned, many obstacles still cannot be overcome even 30 years later. This is especially the case for the Action Reinhardt camps, as hardly any documents about them have been found. It is therefore imperative, as scant sources re. those camps exist and it since is impossible to change this (die Quellebasis nicht beliebig erweitert werden kann), to scrutinize the available material again. Also, research of court case material has not been completed. Well then, we will have to wait for more on the AR-Camps, i.e. on 25% of the Holocaust. And, according to the authors the camps were indeed named “Reinhard,” as in Reinhard Heydrich, although some contemporary historians still misspell it as Reinhardt, as done by these authors and other contributors continually.[10]

We then learn how the book is structured: its chronological order beginning with the murder of  sick camp inmates, the T4 action[11], the mass murder in the gas wagons and the gas chambers in the extermination camps in the east, and finally to the killings by poisonous gas in the camps in Germany proper.

Comment: Why begin with and emphasize the T4 action? This action is mentioned some 23 times in the introduction alone. No Revisionist disputes that this action took place. A team of medical doctors decided, by consensus, who was to be euthanized until word got out and the action stopped on 24 August 1941: “It was impossible to keep the T4 program secret, given that thousands of doctors, nurses…and administrators were involved in it,…”.[12]

This presents a problem for the authors and they try to counter it by writing:

“Hinsichtlich der Verschleierung der Morde [ed. “in the extermination camps”] bestand ein ebenso eklatanter Unterschied zur „Aktion T4“. Wurde bei dieser der Mord als natürlicher Todesfall getarnt, der Todesfall selbst aber nicht nur nicht in Frage gestellt, sondern amtlich bestätigt, so wurde der Vorgang des Massenmordes an den europäischen Juden, wie an der Sinti und Roma, als Ganzes abgestritten[…]”[13] [ed. “Concerning the concealment of the murders, there was a vast difference between those in the extermination camps and the T4 Action. Whereas in the latter murder was concealed by camouflaging the murders as cases of natural death, which were officially confirmed as such and never questioned, the murder of European Jews as well as Sinti and Roma was categorically denied.”)

Comment: It should not be necessary to point out the fallacy of this, ahem, reasoning, but I will do so nevertheless. In the Wikipedia article we read, and it states only the obvious, the T4 action could not be kept secret because of the thousands involved. What about the alleged mass murder in the camps? Did that happen on its own -- no perpetrators, no witnesses, and therefore could be categorically denied? Rubbish. We were informed that 200,000 participated directly, with another 200,000 assisting (see above). The above argument provides us with another admission that nothing was known about the alleged mass murder of millions of Jews, a supposed fact; however, if this mass murder actually took place it would have been impossible to conceal, and that is also admitted here, albeit in a roundabout way by saying that it was “denied.”

And again, why the continued referral to the T4 and 14f13 actions? Out of a total of 34 essays by various authors, 7 deal directly with T4 actions/facilities, beginning with some general observations about the extermination of unworthy life to naming off specific places: Brandenburg/Havel, Grafeneck, Pirna-Sonnenstein, Hartheim, Bernburg/Saale and Hadamar. Two other essays -- “Gas wagons. From euthanasia to genocide” and “From the T4 action to the mass murder of European Jews” -- as well as one essay about the 14f13 action in the concentration camps deal directly with those actions, the term T4 being repeatedly mentioned throughout the book. So roughly 1/3 of the book is about euthanasia. But, the book’s title reads “Mass murder by poisonous gas,” this book was obviously written to try and prove that “The Holocaust” happened and to silence Revisionists. Now, as alluded to before, Revisionists do not “deny” those actions, so why bother with T4 and 14f13? It is apparent that the T4 actions are needed to make a case for “The Holocaust”, why? Is it not possible to prove “The Holocaust” without referring to those actions? With this – this continued reference to the T4/14f13 actions - it has become obvious that no evidence exists proving  that “The Holocaust” happened. If there was solid evidence like investigation reports compiled by experts in the field of criminal investigations, then there would be no need to perform these mental gymnastics. As for the missing evidence concerning the so-called “Action Reinhard” camps: why not simply locate the Treblinka mass graves, alleged to exist beyond any doubt and measuring 50m x 25m x 10m deep? We are still told that the first 700,000 Jews mass murdered at Treblinka were initially buried in those alleged graves, but later exhumed and burned on open air grills. Mr. Alex Bay depicted a number of the graves as they ‘must have’ existed, i.e. they must still exist[14], but “try as he may” to make it sound as though even one of these graves has been located[15], this is simply untrue. In fact an English archaeologist asked why those graves have never been found.[16] Proving the case of Treblinka alone, by submitting solid evidence like the graves, would eliminate the need to try and make the case for the entire “Holocaust” by bringing up the T4 and 14f13 actions ad nauseam.

The T4 actions, i.e. the killing of just thousands, could not be kept secret and were stopped due to protests by the German populace. When coupled with these authors’ speculation that concealment of the mass murder of millions would have been impossible, we may conclude that the so-called “Holocaust” action would also have been stopped. The Holocaust never happened. Period. This is the only logical, possible conclusion. Is this why we are told that nothing about the alleged mass murder was known until the war was over? – Yes, the only explanation possible, though faulty to its core due to the enormity of the alleged crime.

Now back to the introduction. The authors listed the essays in order, adding some comments, and I will address those that I am qualified to address. (This subject is simply too large for just one person to wholly address. Indeed, numerous authors contributed to the writing of this book).

We learn in chapter one that the alleged mass murder by poisonous gas must be considered within a larger context. Richard Evans provides these details. This larger context consists of the supposedly racist policies of the NSdAP, the elimination of Jewish-Communist culture, the T4 action, etc. Poisonous gas, we are told, was but one of the methods used to kill between 5.5 and 6 million Jews: 1.3 million were shot and up to one million died from diseases, starvation or maltreatment in the camps and ghettos.[17]

Comment: Since the case for mass murder of Europe’s Jews cannot be made without referring to initial race policies, etc., which have nothing to do with the alleged mass murder, we may conclude that Evans et al. have no Holocaust evidence and therefore no case (this is called retroactive foreshadowing). At some of the West German trials, the 1963 – 1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials for example, the Nürnberg Racial Laws of 1935 were submitted as “evidence” in lieu of real evidence — the same phenomenon seems to be at work here as well.

In the second chapter the technical aspects of the T4 action are discussed, as well as those of the gas wagons and the killing with the insecticide Zyklon B in Auschwitz and the technical innovations needed to cremate the bodies of those killed. German court cases are then discussed, and finally, the role archaeology plays in the investigations.

Chapter three consists of seven essays about T4.

In chapter four, by which time we are now on page 153 (of a whopping 424 with the last 87 pages devoted to Revisionism), we are made aware of 1) how the T4 action led to mass murder, 2) the technical aspects of it, 3) the problems encountered, and so forth. We also read how the “Sonderkommando Lange,” having killed patients in various facilities under the T4 program, was now strategically placed in Chelmno. This commando supposedly used bottled carbon monoxide before, but now, because of shortages, had to resort to gassing its victims with engine exhaust. This then directly led to killing via engine exhaust in the Aktion Reinhard camps, in which 1.5 people (not just Jews) were killed. Over one hundred T4 personnel were transferred to those camps[18].

Comment: This part of the book is supposed to deal with the technical aspects of the alleged mass murder, but instead T4 is repeatedly mentioned. Why? Just provide the evidence and allow it to stand on its own, if it can.

Chapter five then provides details about the killings by poisonous gas in Germany proper, as well as in Mauthausen, Stutthof and Natzweiler. Prof. Maser receives some ink, as he provided evidence that the Sachsenhausen shooting facility (Genickschussanlage) as well as the gas chamber were built on instructions by the Soviets following the war.[emphasis added; 19] But in this segment we are again reminded of the connection between the T4 action and mass murder.

The last part of the book addresses Revisionist arguments, as mentioned already. Looking at the index of names, such prominent Revisionists as Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf are only mentioned in passing, which makes me suspect that their arguments were not thoroughly considered, if at all. Mattogno, for instance, published a number of books, as did Germar Rudolf, so all of what they have written must be considered – and presented in context – to do justice to this topic. These authors have actually done what they accuse Revisionists of doing: they have selectively quoted their opposition.

What we have here is a revised interpretation of what allegedly happened, i.e., mass murder by the National Socialists. No longer do we see any effort put forth to try and explain why a Hitler order has never been found, nor even a resemblance of an extermination plan; the order by Hitler to commence the T4 action used as substitute, or so it seems. Wannsee, the time and place where the extermination of Jews was allegedly decided upon, receives only anecdotal mention – T4 put in its place. One can oftentimes judge a book by its introduction: this book is not an attempt to shore up what is known about “The Holocaust,” but a sordid attempt to rewrite how this alleged crime was conceived and how it supposedly evolved. But as mentioned, the logic, if one can even call it that, is faulty. The ultra secret T4 action was halted as a result of public protests when it was leaked by von Galen. The mass murder of Europe’s Jews, had it actually happened, would also have been stopped. If T4 could not be kept secret by only a few thousand participating, then the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews could not have been kept secret with tens of thousands involved.

To be continued…

Wilfried Heink

Sources:

1. The article quoted from, available under http://oga.mzv.net/lokales/story.php?id=43876# has disappeared, all I have is the printout. One other article about the conference is still available http://www.taz.de/1/politik/deutschland/artikel/1/das-paradox-der-neonazis/?src=AR&cHash=d5a40ddb3c
2. Günter Morsch, Bertrand Perz, publishers, with the assistance of Astrid Ley, Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas, Metropol Verlag, Berlin, 2011, p.X
3. http://einestages.spiegel.de/static/topicalbumbackground/1564/_ich_zielte_ruhig_auf_die_saeuglinge.html
4. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, pp. XI-XII
5. Ibid, p. XIII
6. Ibid, p. XIII; R. Strobel, „Weg mit ihm!“ in: Die Zeit of August 12,1960
7. Ibid, pp. XIII/IV; Die Zeit of August 19,1960, p.16
8. Ibid, pp. XV-XIV
9. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/holocaust_and_genocide_studies/v017/17.1prusin.html; and also http://www.amnestyusa.org/events/western/pdf/AmnestyConference_BazylerMichaelCLE.pdf
10. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, p. XVII, footnote 11
11. The name T4 was an abbreviation of “Tiergartenstraße 4″, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, bearing the euphemistic name literally translating into English: as Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4
13. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, p. XXIV
14. http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/deathcampinternet/deathcampp7.shtml, Figure 42
15. http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/appendixd/, Text and Figure D1
16. http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/11/uk-forensic-archeologist-sets-out-to-refute-treblinka-deniers/
17. Morsch et al, Neue Studien…, pp. XIX-XX
18. Ibid, pp. XXI-XXIV
19. Werner Maser, Fälschung, Dichtung und Wahrheit über Hitler und Stalin”, OLZOG Verlag GmbH, München, 2004, pp.352-370

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In November 1944, the ”Holocaust” was practically over. Himmer had supposed ordered the gassings stopped, the alleged ”gas chambers” of Auschwitz-Birkenau had ceased operating, Majdanek had been liberated and figured prominently in Soviet atrocity propaganda, the area containing the few remains of the Treblinka ”extermination camp” been occupied by the Red Army. By this point in time at least 95% of the mythical 6 million Shoah victims had (supposedly) already perished.

In this context it is interesting to take a look at what a Soviet mouthpiece published in the West, the American Communist monthly Soviet Russia Today (previously published under the title New World Review) had to say about the number of Jewish losses in its issue from November 1944. This publication regularly featured writings of Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman as well as commentaries on the progress of the war from Soviet generals. Under the heading ”Rehabilitation of the Jews in the USSR” Theodore Bayer writes (p. 28):

”Almost four-fifths of the Jewish population of the USSR lived in the war area. Almost three million of the Soviet Jews lived in the Ukraine and Byelo-Russia which were occupied by the Germans and another million in the Baltic countries, Bessarabia and the Crimea and other parts of the RSFSR reached by the Germans.[...]
Realizing the special danger facing the Jews under the German yoke, Soviet authorities put the task of evacuating them second only to the evacuation of women and children. Thus, with super-human effort, the Red Army men and officers and civil authorities managed to evacuate about fifty per cent of Russian Jews as well as Jews who fled from Poland into Russian territory. Counting the Jews remaining in the liberated Soviet regions including Bessarabia, Bukovina and the Baltic countries, the present Soviet Jewish population may be estimated at between three and one-half to four million people.

Before the war the total Jewish population of the world was estimated to be about 15,500,000 people. About two-thirds were in Europe and the Asiatic part of Russia. The other one-third was mainly in the United States, with the rest scattered in Canada and Latin America and about 400,000 in Palestine. Subtracting the tragic figure of over 3,000,000 Jews exterminated by the Nazis, this would leave about 3,000,000 Jews in Europe outside of those in the USSR, England and the two or three neutral countries. The Soviet Union in liberating Romania and Hungary from the Nazi invaders is setting free areas with large Jewish populations.
Some estimates place the number of Jews surviving at a much lesser figure. However, according to the above calculations, the Jewish population of the world will amount to a little over 12,000,000 people – a loss of about 3,500,000 including deaths in the armed services, partisan armies and the underground of the United Nations.[?] According to these figures, a third of world Jewry will be citizens of the USSR.” (emphasis added)

Only a month after the above quoted article was published, the Soviet-Jewish chief atrocity propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg stated in the Soviet foreign-language press that the Jewish victim figure amounted to 6 million,[1] and the previous calculations referred to by Soviet Russia Today – which must have been recent ones, since Bessarabia was taken by the Red Army in late August 1944 and the Baltic offensive began on Steptember 14 – were thrown down the memory hole.

The figure of nearly 5 million Jews living in the USSR at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, whereof approximately in 4 million in the territories later occupied by the Germans, is partially backed up by the American Jewish Year Book. In volume 43 (1941-1942) we read on p. 663:

”On the date of the invasion, June 22, 1941, half the Jewish population on the continent of Europe, estimated at well over 9,000,000, resided in Russia and Russian occupied areas, while the other half lived in Germany and in countries and territories occupied or dominated by her. Figures for Russia published in October, 1940 showed a total Jewish population of 4,600,000 divided as follows:

Old Russia… 3,000,000
Polish Areas… 1,000,000
Lithuania (excluding Vilna)… 200,000
Latvia… 100,000
Bessarabia… 200,000
Northern Bukowina… 100,000

These figures are given in round numbers and we must, therefore, assume them to be rough approximations. A more likely figure would be 4,700,000, which would account for the Jews in Vilna and Estonia as well as for the additional 20,000 Jews in Old Russia as enumerated in the census of January, 1939.”

It should be noted here that it is not made explicitly clear by Bayer whether the 4 million mention included the Jews in the eastern part of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, but given that we are dealing with a Soviet mouthpiece, it seems likely that this part of Poland was regarded as part of the USSR. As for the number of Jews originally present in the parts of the USSR not reached by the Germans (no doubt included in the figure for ”Old Russia” presented by the AJYB, it is well known that they were far outnumbered by the Jews in the western parts. According to the 1926 census, the Jews in the Asian part of the RSFSR, the Transcaucasian Republic, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan totaled merely some 152,000, while there lived some 171,000 Jews in the eastern part of European Russia.[2] The 4 million figure therefore appears to be sound.

Bayer writes that the Soviet authorities managed to evacuate ”about fifty per cent” of the Jews in the western part of the Soviet Union. This would mean a total of some 2 million evacuees. As German historian A. Hillgruber writes,

”The estimates of the number of Jews in the Soviet Union in 1941 varies with a difference of over one million. This is foremost due to the unanswered (and now hardly answerable) question of how many Jews were able to escape before the Germans into the unoccupied territories of the Soviet Union. The estimates range between 2.655 million to 1.6 million.”[3]

Wilfried Heink has brought together a number of estimates made by Holocaust historians and Jewish authorities:

”Raul Hilberg 1.5 million, Yitzak Arad 1 to 1.1 million, Solomon Michoels (of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC)) 2 million, Yisrael Gutmann and Michael Berenbaum estimate 1.5 million.”[4]

Military historian Joachim Hoffmann estimates that 600 000 of the Jews in the Soviet-occupied eastern part of Poland were evacuated, and that 450 000 of these disappeared in the Soviet Union (which may be taken to mean that most of these Jews either perished en route to Siberia or Central Asia or in Soviet camps).[5]

While the number of evacuees stated by Soviet Russia Today is very high and might have been exaggerated in order to put the Soviet regime in the best light possible, it is more or less within the same magnitude as the figures espoused by the prominent Holocaust historians Hilberg, Gutmann and Berenbaum. All this of course indicates that the calculations referred to were not conjured out of nothing by Soviet propagandists, but based on actual statistics. The origin of the estimates presented by Theodore Bayer, however, remains an enigma. Undoubtedly they were relayed to the journal from some official Soviet source, like the bulk of its contents, but from where exactly? Were the same calculations presented in more detail elsewhere? Clearly more research is needed on this issue.

[1] J. Hoffmann, Stalin’s Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945, Verlag für Wehrwissenschaften, Munich 1995, pp. 160-161, 303.

[2] American Jewish Year Book, vol. 40 (1938-1939), p. 546, 548.
[3] A. Hillgruber, “Der Ostkrieg und die Judenvernichtung”, in: Gerd R. Ueberschär, Wolfram Wette, Unternehmen Barbarossa, Schöningh, Paderborn 1984, p. 228, note 6.
[4] W. Heink, ”Well, where are they then?”, http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/05/well-where-are-they-then/
[5] J. Hoffmann, Stalin’s Vernichtungskrieg 1941-1945, op.cit., p. 139.

In 1945, the World Jewish Congress prepared a report on the “Criminal Conspiracy” against the Jews perpetrated by the Third Reich for the authorities in charge of bringing about the International Military Tribunal. Of this report, the chapter “Charge Eight: Mass Annihilation, part II” is of special interest. The document, which is found among the records of the World Jewish Congress at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, can be read online, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum website:

What did the World Jewish Congress want the “international justice” to believe about the supposed Nazi extermination conspiracy? In what way did they describe the origin and the implementation of it in form of the infamous “death camps? What were the sources behind the report?

On p. 109 we read:

“In March 1942, Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to Poland. During his stay in Poland he issued an order to the effect that 50% of all Polish Jews had to be exterminated by the end of that year. In July 1942 Himmler came to Poland again. According to the Polish underground sources, he declared at a Nazi meeting in Warsaw that:

1) Hitler had personally told him that the Jews had commenced the war and should, for that reason, be punished.

2) the Jews are the scum of the earth and must be converted to dust.

3) All Jews must die, but not before going through suffering and agony.

A special “Vernichtungskommission” was organized, with Commissar Fey as Chairman and a large office in Warsaw. This commission had to supervise the work of Jewish extermination in Poland; its members continuously visited different parts of the country and directed the mass slaughter of the Jewish population. Chairman Fey was directly responsible to Himmler.”

While the first of the three statements ascribed to Hitler is clearly based on speeches made by the Führer at the outbreak of the war, the other two statements are typical Greuelpropaganda fantasies casting Hitler as the Devil incarnate. It is all to easy to picture Adolf having a tantrum in front of a sycophantic Reichsführer-SS while giving the infamous, never-proven Führerbefehl (unaware that a member of the Polish resistance, posing as a Sachertorte-carrying waiter, is taking mental notes).

Also, if the supposed mass exterminations were part of a “conspiracy”, would it make much sense to have a “Vernichtungskommission” (Extermination Committee) housed in a “large office in Warsaw”? What happened to the alleged code language? And who was “Commissar Fey”? Is this an error for Robert Ley, the head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF)? (No “Fey” appears on the “Preliminary List of War Criminals” drawn up by the WJC the same year – Ley does, though).

The biblical undertone of the report appears most clearly on p.111:

“The fleeing Germans [after Stalingrad] surpassed even themselves and reached such depths of cruelty and destructive fury that they beggar any description and any imagination. The Jews should never be able to enjoy the defeat of their worst enemies, or, as Hitler put it, the Jews should never celebrate another Purim (Jewish festival commemorating defeat of Haman’s plot) in his memory.”

As for the Hitler quote, what the Führer actually said in this speech (according to The New York Times January 31, 1944) was that, unless Germany was victorious, “Jewry could then celebrate the destruction of Europe by a second triumphant Purim”. Thus Hitler’s words were not a threat of physical extermination, but a warning about the consequences of a German defeat.

The “report” gets into high gear when it reaches the description of the “death factories”. Here follows the discription of the supposed mass killings at Belzec (pp. 115-116):

“The Jews were crammed into special chambers with metal bars on the floor and walls; then the chambers were filled with water and a powerful electric current sent through these bars. Besides, there was in Belzec a special building with several gas chambers, and the German scientists zealously experienced there on Jews with all kinds of poisoning gases they invented or improved. The children, if healthy, were used as involuntary blood donors for the German Army. Mostly these children were bled white to such a degree that they died shortly afterwards. Special factories produced in Belzec soap and shoes, out of Jewish fat; yet, this business was never really profitable, probably because of the Jews being in the third year of an acute starvation period and there was not much fat left on their bodies. [...]
   The weak point of Belzec was the way the bodies were disposed of… They, or their remains, were loaded on railway cars and transported to a spot where a group of Jews already prepared a grave, whereupon this whole group was instantly executed. After a few months of operating in high gear, all the fields along the railway were filled with mass graves. Lumps of gored blood and decomposed remains of human bodies were spread everywhere around the graves, and the stench became so intensive, that the peasants of nearby villages deserted their farms and land, and the whole population of Belsec left this sinister town.”

Here the WJC authors tries to include every ludicrous atrocity story spread about Belzec during the war: electrocution chambers, gas chambers (utlizing various unnamed poison gases), children emptied of their blood, human soap, trains of death (the story of Jan Karski sans quicklime killings)… The idea that shoes were also produced out of the victims seems to be a new addition. No wonder, by the way, that the Belzec soap & shoes business “was never really profitable” – how good would shoes made out of human fat be? Needless to say, there are no indications whatsoever that the town of Belzec was emptied of its population – but apparently the spies of the underground resistance did not bother to verify this claim, although the town was and is easily accessible by train or car.

Next Sobibór is briefly described (p. 116):

“In the death camp of Sobibur the process of killing was still more perfected. A special brick building was constructed there, and as soon as about 800 people passed into this building, the heavy doors were locked and an electric engine in an adjoining ving pumped poison gas into it. As a rule, in fifteen minutes all the people were dead; then the floor in the building slid apart automatically and the bodies fell into the basement, from where they were taken in special carts to woods and buried there.”

This description is almost certainly a summary of a testimony left on August 10, 1944 by the former Sobibór inmate Ber (Dov) Freiberg, which was later included in Vassili Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s Black Book (Holocaust Library, New York 1981, p. 439). The bizarre claim of the collapsible gas chamber floor appears in a number of early Sobibór testimonies.

Regarding the third Aktion Reinhardt “death camp” the report concludes that

“Tremblinka [sic] had a much greater “productive capacity” than Belsec or Sobibur. It had first three gas chambers, then two were added, and it was able to cope with as many as 20,000 people a day.” (p. 117)

Here we run into a paradox apparent also in the Höss “confession”, namely that Auschwitz had a smaller “killing capacity” than Treblinka, despite the former being constructed as more “efficient” than the latter. On pp. 118-119 we read:

“In July 1942 Heinrich Himmler paid a visit to the camp and laid down plans how to make Oswiecim the largest death factory the Germans ever established. Four new large crematoriums, each connected with a gas-chamber, were built, able to cremate 500 people in an hour, 12,000 in a continuous work of 24 hours. And still, despite this amazing productivity, so many people were killed on some days in Oswiecim, that huge pyres of corpses had to be kindled there. Not less than 4,000,000 people perished in Oswiecim, not less than 1,800,000 of them were Jews.”

It is worth noting that the only victim figure of an “extermination camp” presented is that of Auschwitz.

Finally we note the following statement regarding Majdanek, found on p. 118:

“On November 3rd, 1943, Majdanek had a great day: 18,400 people were killed in this single day. In the official report sent on this day to Berlin, the camp authorities wrote: “The difference between the number of prisoners confined in the camp in the morning and in the evening, is the result of a special annihilation of 18,000 persons.”

This refers to the alleged so-called “Operation Harvest Festival” (Aktion Erntefest). As far as I have been able to determine, the quote from an “official report” concerning the “special annihilation” (no Tarnsprache used there!) is a complete fabrication either on part of the WJC or (perhaps more likely) Soviet propagandists.

The WJC report on the “Mass Annihilation” lack any reference to sources, but it is apparent that its authors have simply lifted their “information” from various Polish and Soviet “reports” on alleged German war crimes. Its primary value consists in the insight it provides into the dissemination of the “Holocaust” propaganda. It begs disbelief that a major international organization such as the WJC produced – at the end of the war – an unsourced “report” teeming with blatant absudities and internal contradictions, if in fact the alleged mass extermination really had taken place. It is even more astounding that WJC officials deemed this report worthy of being submitted to international judicial authorities. This in turn shows that the men behind the “Holocaust” propaganda often did not make the effort to produce authentic-sounding or even realistic descriptions of the alleged crime – such effort was not generally necessary, since the claims were not actually tried by the “International Military Tribunal”, but rather regarded as their own evidence, as far as they were found in some report submitted by the Soviet prosecution.