By Carolyn Yeager

In 1995, Ernst Lobethall gave his testimony as a survivor of “The Holocaust” to the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation for their video library, as thousands of others have done. In it, he had some words to say about a British soldier he met while interned at Auschwitz III (Monowitz) who had done him a favor.

Lobethall records that the soldier he called Ginger “gave me a letter and 10 packs of cigarettes, and a bar of chocolate from my sister. Ten packs of English cigarettes – it’s like being given Rockefeller Center.” He also said, “I had no heavy socks to put on my boots; for two packs of Players cigarettes, (pause) and that, later on, came, again, to save my life on the death marches that took place in 1945.” This clip from the video was shown on the BBC Online News Magazine on November 29, 2009.[1] The article says that

Mr Lobethall traded two packs of Players cigarettes in return for getting his shoes resoled. It helped save his life when thousands perished or were murdered on the notorious death marches out of the camps in winter in 1945.

Lobethall’s testimony was at some point taken under consideration by the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum’s “Commission for the Designation of the Righteous,” a rather pompously-named committee, headed since 2005 by Israel Supreme Court Justice Jacob Tuerkel, that examines candidates before bestowing upon them the equally grandiose title of “Righteous Among the Nations.”
(Read more…)

By Carlo Mattogno

On 27 January 2010, the tenth “Holocaust Remembrance Day”, Elie Wiesel was invited into Montecitorio Hall, the seat of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Republic where he had the opportunity to give a brief speech. The president of the Chamber, Gianfranco Fini, introduced him as “the most authoritative living witness of the horrors of the Shoah among the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps”.[1] But is he really a witness?

Is Elie Wiesel an impostor?

On 3 March 2009, a Hungarian website published an article entitled Még mindig kísérti a haláltábor (The extermination camp is still tempting)[2] and outlining important revelations by Miklós Grüner, a former deportee to Auschwitz. The article was translated and appeared the following day under the title Auschwitz Survivor Claims Elie Wiesel is an Impostor[3]. The text reads as follows: (Read more…)

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

Dr. Josef Mengele

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

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

By Carolyn Yeager

Dear Dr. Neander,

Thank you for your letter of February 3rd. First let me assure you that you are welcome to any assistance I can give you in keeping the facts about Irene Zisblatt and the entire “Auschwitz experience” in order. (See 2nd paragraph at:
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/02/response-to-c-yeager.html#_ftnref2)
As a self-described independent scholar who has moved to Poland from Germany (I gather) and lives in Cracow, close to the Auschwitz-Birkenau (A-B) Memorial Museum, you obviously have a desire to be, or believe that you are, an “expert” on A-B. Very good, since we certainly need real experts to help us deal with the many, many falsehoods and perversions promulgated about this place since at least 1941, but especially after 1945. (Read more…)

By Thomas Kues

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? (Read more…)

On January 27, 2010, the “International Holocaust Remberance Day”, EU Commissioner for Security and Justice and Vice-President of the EC, Jacques Barrot, made the following highly important statement on his newspage:

“Sixty-five years ago, the world woke itself to the horrors of Auschwitz. Today, it is our duty to pay tribute to the 6 millions of Jews and all the other victims of the Holocaust.

We have a duty to remember the loss of life and the suffering caused by this unprecedented crime in history. This legacy must be passed to future generations as a memento. Miep Gies, one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis and who preserved Anne Frank’s diary said that the past is never over.

Remembrance of the Shoah must strengthen our determination to fight, in today’s world, against the phenomena that several decades ago led the world into the abyss of the Holocaust. (…)

No form of antisemitism, regardless of where and whom it comes from, is acceptable. The commemoration of other crimes cannot be to the detriment of the remembrance of the Shoah. The conflict in the Middle East cannot be an excuse or justification for antisemitism. It is deplorable to read at the very wake of the commemoration of the Holocaust statements that deny the Shoah. It is unacceptable to deny or minimize the established history of the Nazi genocide against the Jews. The value of human life is universal: this is true for each and every human being, regardless of their race, religion, or nation.

At the end of this year, Member States will have to implement the long-awaited Framework Decision on racism and xenophobia. Sixty-five years after the extermination camps were liberated, we can be proud that EU law makes the denial of the Shoah a crime in all its Member States. The Commission is strongly committed to pay particular attention to the correct transposition and implementation of all the provisions of this Framework Decision across the Union.”

Thus, if Barrot and his cohorts have their way, critical scrutiny of the “Holocaust” claims, i.e. “Holocaust denial” will be illegalized come 2011 in all EU member states, not only the ones already equipped with such anti-heresy laws (among them Germany, Austria, France, Belgium and the Netherlands). The modern day inquisition of the Holy Shoah will enter a new stage. “The European Mind Stops…”

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

By Carlo Mattogno (January 2010)

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

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

by Carolyn Yeager

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Carolyn Yeager

Part Five

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

Displaced Persons camp

(ST) She only says “They took us to Salzburg, Austria … I was with people from Poland, from different countries, waiting for borders to open up, waiting for papers to come through to go to different countries. Most of the people were hoping to go to Palestine, but that was closed too.” (@3hr3min) She says (Jews) had to be smuggled in and “we tried that also, we did get to Italy and laid on the beaches for 5 days and nights waiting for a ship to come get us … but there was no ship.”[24] When asked by the interviewer—“Who did you go with?”—she remained vague by answering, “Just, uh, kids that, uh, well, there were a couple of leaders that were very devoted, uh, Haganah[25] people and Zionists … they came one night” and recruited the residents to try to get to Palestine illegally. She says, “Most of the people, we didn’t even know each other.” She stayed in the DP camp until 1947. She had information placed in newspapers in the States and an uncle in the Bronx answered her “article” in The Forward.[26]
Remarks: When she says ‘us’ followed by ‘people from Poland’, it indicates she was with mostly Polish people. I suspect Zisblatt changed “Sabka’s” identity from Polish to Lithuanian because, as time went on, she wanted to distance herself from every Polish association, not least because she is hiding her early marriage to the Pole Alter Lewin, along with other Polish ties she may also be hiding. I note her failure to put names to any of the “we’s” and “us’s” she is so fond of using. She spent two years in the DP camp, was never alone, and not one friend or helper is mentioned by name. Two years versus one year in Nazi camps—the one year is filled with events and experiences worthy of an entire book, but the two (in spite of her marriage) are devoid of anything worth talking about. (Read more…)

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

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

By Carolyn Yeager

Part Four

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

Went to gas chamber with gypsy families, or 1500 women?

(ST) “They selected me with the gypsies.” (@2hr11min) “I think it was in December, because it was cold, snow … and the gypsy camp was not too far from the C lager; it was a family camp. I was just taken out of my (roll call) all by myself.” Then, as if she suddenly remembered [19], she says, “I think that it was Mengele that took me outta there.” (This is first mention of Mengele since saying she didn’t know if he was the doctor who selected her for her first experiment.) She was put on a truck transport of Gypsy families on their way to the “gas chamber.”
Remarks: The last “gassing” at Birkenau, according to the official narrative, took place on October 30, 1944. But Zisblatt has no idea of this when she recalls it being in December. This may be the strongest “evidence” of fraud in her narrative. Surely one wouldn’t forget the exact time one was sent to die in a “gas chamber.” If she decided on December, so that she could claim the longest time possible at Birkenau—May to December (7 months max, although she claims 8 months)—she has fallen into a trap. May to October would be only 5 months.
(FD) “Suddenly,” at mid-morning, she was selected with 1500 other women to leave the camp (p. 74). Mengele is not present. The women were ordered to remove their clothes and marched naked until they were forced into a narrow passageway. At this point she realizes she’s in the #3 gas chamber.
(LD) Nothing about her gas chamber experience is brought up in the film.

(Read more…)