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A couple of weeks ago Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate and self-appointed moral conscience for Holocaust survivors, praised the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes to make way for yet more illegal settlements in Jerusalem. His chilling statement ran in an ad placed in Ha’aretz. Here are Wiesel’s appalling words:
“As Sukkot begins, we are thrilled to bless the tens of new families joining us at this time in the Jewish settlement in the City of David. We salute the Zionist action in Jerusalem of those involved. Strengthening the Jewish presence in Jerusalem is a challenge that we all face and with this act of settlement you are raising our stature. Together with you we will receive the pilgrims, the holiday visitors. We value and cherish you.”
Though Wiesel offers himself as a paragon of moral virtue, the truth is somewhat seamier. As detailed in this myth-shattering piece by Alexander Cockburn from the February 2006 print edition of CounterPunch, Wiesel assiduously campaigned for the Nobel Prize and has for decades tried to pass off his short book “Night” as a true account–a “testimony” in his words– of his experiences at Auschwitz, even though key scenes in the book have been exposed as fiction.
–Jeffrey St. Clair
When in trouble, head for Auschwitz, preferably in the company of Elie Wiesel. It’s as foolproof a character reference as is available today, at least within the Judeo-Christian sphere of moral influence. One can easily see why Oprah Winfrey and her advisers saw an Auschwitz excursion in the company of Wiesel as a sure-fire antidote to salve the wounds sustained by Oprah’s Book Club when it turned out that James Frey had faked significant slabs of his own supposedly autobiographical saga of moral regeneration, A Million Little Pieces.
Published in 2003, Frey’s irksome book swiftly became a cult classic. (The present author was offered it in the summer of 2004 by a young relative, presumably to assist in his moral regeneration, but after glancing through a few pages returned it, on the grounds that it wasn’t his kind of thing.) Winfrey picked it for her Book Club in September 2005, and it rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists.
For Frey the sky fell in when, on January 7, 2006, the Smoking Gun website published documents showing that Frey had fabricated many facts about himself, including a criminal record. There were later charges of plagiarism. Frey ran through a benign gauntlet of trial-by-Larry King on January 11, and Oprah called in to stand by her Pick of the Month. She said that what mattered was not whether Frey’s book was true (the Fundamentalist claim for the Holy Bible) but its value as a therapeutic tool (the modern Anglican position on the Good Book).
But by now every columnist and books page editor in America was wrestling the truth-or-fiction issue to the ground. Oprah turned on Frey. On her show on January 26, he clung to the ropes, offering the excuse that the “demons” that had driven him to drink and drugs had also driven him into claiming that everything he wrote about himself was true. Publishers including Random House, which has made millions off him, had rejected the book when he’d initially offered it as a “fiction novel”. Oprah brushed this aside.
“Say it’s all true” is what demons often whisper in an author’s ear. Ask T.E. Lawrence. Did the Bey of Deraa really rape him? Lawrence suggests it in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom in paragraphs of fervent masochistic reminiscence. This and other adventures in Lawrence’s account of British scheming in Mesopotamia against the Ottomans met with the ecstatic admiration of the Oxford-based equivalent of Oprah’s Book Club back in the early 1920s, after Lawrence had the 350,000-word “memoir” privately printed and circulated. He’d written an earlier version in 1919 but claimed this had been stolen while he was changing trains in Reading, on the way to Oxford from London. (Reading has surely been the site of more supposed thefts and losses of “completed manuscripts” and PhD dissertations — “I didn’t make a copy!” — than any railway station in the world.)
Half a century later it occurred to Colin Simpson and Phillip Knightley of the London Sunday Times to ask the supposed rapist for his side of the story. They hurried off to Turkey and tracked down the town to which the Bey had retired, arriving at his home only to learn he’d died not long before. Relatives told the British reporters that the Bey would not have found Lawrence appetizing prey. The Turk was a noted womanizer, and when in Mesopotamia was always getting the clap from consorting with whores on his excursions to Damascus.
It’s fun to think of Oprah grilling Lawrence about his claims, freshly exposed on Smoking Gun, telling him she felt “really duped” but that, “more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of Orientalizing masochists who believed you”.
But hardly had Frey been cast down from the eminence of Amazon.com’s top bestseller before he was replaced at number one by the new pick of Oprah’s Book Club, Elie Wiesel’s Night, which had the good fortune to see republication at this fraught moment in Oprah’s literary affairs. Simultaneous with the Night selection came news that Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel would shortly be visiting Auschwitz together, from which vantage point Oprah, with the lugubrious Wiesel at her side, could emphasize for her ABC-TV audience that there is truth and there is fiction, that Auschwitz is historical truth at its bleakest and most terrifying, that Night is a truthful account and that Wiesel is the human embodiment of truthful witness.
The trouble here is that in its central, most crucial scene, Night isn’t historically true, and at least two other important episodes are almost certainly fiction. Below, I cite views, vigorously expressed to me in recent weeks by a concentration camp survivor, Eli Pfefferkorn, who worked with Wiesel for many years; also by Raul Hilberg. Hilberg is the world’s leading authority on the Nazi Holocaust. An expanded version of his classic three-volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews, was recently reissued by Yale University Press. Wiesel personally enlisted Hilberg to be the historical expert on the United States Holocaust Commission.
If absolute truth to history is the standard, Pfefferkorn says, then Nightdoesn’t make the grade. Wiesel made things up, in a way that his many subsequent detractors could identify as not untypical of his modus operandi: grasping with deft assurance what people important to his future would want to hear and, by the same token, would not want to hear.
The book that became Night was originally a much longer account, published in Yiddish in 1956, under the title Un di Velt Hot Geshvign(And the World Remained Silent). Wiesel was living in Paris at the time. By 1958 he had translated his book from Yiddish into French, publishing it in that year under the title La Nuit. Wiesel says it was severely cut down in length by Jerome Lindon, the chief editor at Editions de Minuit. In 1960 came the English translation, Night, published by Hill & Wang. The 2006 edition of Night is translated from the 1958 French version by Wiesel’s wife, Marion, and in the introduction Wiesel says he has “been able to correct and revise a number of important details”.
In the New York Times for January 17, Michiko Kakutani wrote in her usual plodding prose, with her usual aversion to any unconventional thought, that “Mr. Frey’s embellishments of the truth, his cavalier assertion that the ‘writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story,’ his casual attitude about how people remember the past — all stand in shocking contrast to the apprehension of memory as a sacred act that is embodied in Oprah Winfrey’s new selection for her book club, announced yesterday: Night, Elie Wiesel’s devastating 1960 account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.”
Amazon.com got the message quickly enough. The site had been categorizing the new edition of Night under “fiction and literature” but, under the categorical imperative of Kakutani’s “memory as a sacred act” or a phone call from Wiesel’s publisher, hastily switched it to “biography and memoir”. Within hours it had reached number 3 on Amazon’s bestseller list. That same evening, January 17, Night topped both the “biography” and “fiction” bestseller lists on BarnesandNoble.com.
Nonetheless, over the next few days there were articles in the Jewish Forward and in the New York Times, also a piece on NPR, saying that Night should not be taken as unvarnished documentary. In the Forwardarticle, published January 20, challengingly titled “Six Million Little Pieces?”, Joshua Cohen reminded Forward readers that in 1996, Naomi Seidman, a Jewish Studies professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, had compared the original 1956 Yiddish version of the book with the subsequent, drastically edited translation.
“According to Seidman’s account, published in the scholarly journal Jewish Social Studies”, Cohen wrote, “Wiesel substantially rewrote the work between editions — suggesting that the strident and vengeful tone of the Yiddish original was converted into a continental, angst-ridden existentialism more fitting to Wiesel’s emerging role as an ambassador of culture and conscience. Most important, Seidman wrote that Wiesel altered several facts in the later edition, in some cases offering accounts of pivotal moments that conflicted with the earlier version. (For example, in the French, the young Wiesel, having been liberated from Buchenwald, is recuperating in a hospital; he looks into a mirror and writes that he saw a corpse staring back at him. In the earlier Yiddish, Wiesel holds that upon seeing his reflection he smashed the mirror and then passed out, after which ‘my health began to improve.’)”
That said, Cohen emphasized that whereas “Frey, for one, seems to have falsified the facts of his life in order to satisfy ego and the demands of the market, Wiesel’s liberties seem more like reconsiderations, his process less revision than interpretation. Reading Night, one encounters the birth of thought about the Holocaust – the future of history, concomitant with its study. In both versions, the book’s intent is to engage not the undeniability of the Holocaust, but the man who has undeniably emerged from its horror.”
This reverent tone about Wiesel and his work is customary. People mostly write about him and his work with the muted awe of British tourists reading guidebooks to each other in a French cathedral. In The Jewish Press for February 1, Andrew Silow Carroll was a bit friskier. He cited Wiesel as declaring to the New York Times that Night “is not a novel at all. All the people I describe were with me there. I object angrily if someone mentions it as a novel.” And yet, Silow Carroll went on, “in the past, Wiesel hasn’t helped matters in this regard. In 1972, Hill & Wang packaged Night with two other books, Dawn and Day (previously titled The Accident), which Wiesel clearly identified as novels. The set’s cover refers to the works as ‘Three Tales by Elie Wiesel.’ In a later edition of the same volume, Wiesel refers to all three books as ‘narratives,’ although he calls Night a ‘testimony,’ and the other two ‘commentaries.’”
There are some rather comical instances of Wiesel’s relaxed attitude to autobiographical truth, as excavated in Norman Finkelstein’s book, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. Wiesel was one of Goldhagen’s main supporters. In his 1995 memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea Wiesel writes that at the age of 18, recently liberated from Auschwitz, “I read The Critique of Pure Reason don’t laugh! in Yiddish.” Finkelstein comments, “Leaving aside Wiesel’s acknowledgement that at the time ‘I was wholly ignorant of Yiddish grammar’ The Critique of Pure Reason was never translated into Yiddish.” Imagine the lacerations Frey would have endured for making that sort of empty boast.
Though sales have now soared, I’m not sure how many people will read Night now, beyond buying the new edition as a gesture of solidarity with Oprah and survivors of the Holocaust. It doesn’t take a background in literary criticism to see that Night is artfully fashioned as a kind of symbolic narrative about the relationship between sons and fathers (there are four such portraits in the short book) and, crucially, between the Christian God (the Father) and his Son. The style seems influenced by Albert Camus, particularly L’Etranger. Camus won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, one of the youngest recipients ever. This was the time during which Wiesel was reworking his Yiddish narrative into the far more terse, Camusian work, with its Camusian title.
As a piece of historical witness to the experience of the inmates, the doomed and those who survived inside Auschwitz and Buchenwald, there are books far superior to Night, starting with Primo Levi’s writings, or the late Ella Lingens-Reiner’s extraordinary memoir of Auschwitz,Prisoners of Fear, published in 1948. Night’s focus is extremely narrow, primarily on the main character, Eliezer, and his father. One learns with a certain surprise that though Wiesel’s sister Tzipora died in the camps, two other sisters survived. In the new edition, Wiesel doesn’t mention them.
Night certainly contains none of the context offered by Levi or Lingens-Reiner, or much more recently, by Kenneth Waltzer, professor of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University, who is writing a book called The Rescue of Children at Buchenwald and whose interesting letter was published in Forward at the end of February:
“The January 20 article on Oprah Winfrey’s selection of Elie Wiesel’s Night for her Book Club was on the mark (‘Six Million Little Pieces?’). Any memoir is a reconstruction shaped by purpose and audience rather than a direct statement of memory — and even Wiesel’s Night is not an exception.
“Night focuses primarily on the relation of father and son in Auschwitz and in Buchenwald. When Wiesel loses his father in January 1945 at Buchenwald, he drifts into a listlessness and fog from which he emerged only after liberation. He recalls in Night only the terrible final days of the camp, in April 1945, when the Nazis sought to evacuate Jewish prisoners and then all prisoners.
“Wiesel writes of his relation with his father, the presence of God, and his own survival and its meaning. He does not describe the social context in which he existed during the final months. The barracks, his place in the camp, his relation to others — other prisoners, Jews, boys — remain murky.
“What is omitted in Night is that the 16-year-old was placed in a special barracks created by the clandestine underground as part of a strategy of saving youth. Block 66 was located in the deepest part of the disease-infested little camp and beyond the normal Nazi S.S. gaze. It was overseen by Czech Communist Antonin Kalina and by his deputy, Gustav Schiller, a Polish Jewish Communist.
“Schiller, who appears briefly in Night, was a rough father figure and mentor, especially for the Polish-Jewish boys and many Czech-Jewish boys; but he was less liked, and even feared, by Hungarian- and Romanian-Jewish boys, especially religious boys, including Wiesel. He appears in Night as a distant figure, armed with a truncheon.
“After January 1945, the underground concentrated all children and youth that could be fit into this windowless barracks — more than 600 in total. Younger children were protected elsewhere. When the U.S. Third Army arrived April 11, 1945, more than 900 children and youth were found among 21,000 remaining prisoners.
“Wiesel since has acknowledged the role played by the clandestine underground but did not attend to it in Night. Fellow barracks members recall being protected from work and getting extra food. They recall efforts by their mentors to raise their horizons. They also recall heroic intervention by Kalina or by Schiller during the final days to protect them.
“Even then, many boys were lined up at the gate, to be led out April 10. However, American planes flew overhead, sirens sounded, the guards ran and Kalina, who was with them, ordered the boys back to the barracks. They were still in the barracks the next day when units of the U.S. Third Army broke through the barbed-wire fences.
“Wiesel’s Night is about becoming alone. But Wiesel was also among hundreds of children and youth aided by a purposeful effort at rescue inside a concentration camp.”
Forward slightly trimmed Waltzer’s contribution, from an article to a letter. In the fuller version, which he has kindly supplied, Professor Waltzer wrote his last paragraph as follows:
“In Night, Wiesel writes about viewing himself in the mirror after liberation and seeing a corpse gazing back at him. But another picture taken after liberation shows Wiesel marching out of the camp, fourth on the left, among a phalanx of youth, moving together, heads high, a group guided by prisoners who had helped save them.”
A photograph accompanying Waltzer’s text, credited to Jack Werber, of Great Neck, New York, shows exactly that. The young Wiesel’s head is high, like the others’. But this parable of a triumph for human solidarity was absolutely contrary to the parable Wiesel was set on rewriting in French from the Yiddish volume. In the late 1950s a man with instincts as finely tuned as Wiesel’s to useful frequencies on the political dial probably would not have thought it advantageous to dwell on the heroic role of Communists in the death camps. All the more is this true in recent years, when Wiesel’s most celebrated moments have come when hunkering down for sessions of amiable moral counsel with Ronald Reagan (who wanted to pretend that the SS should be retrospectively forgiven because, after all, they weren’t Communists and fought the Great Satan) and George Bush, on whom Wiesel urged the war on Iraq as a necessary moral act, declaring that “the world faced a moral crisis similar to 1938″ and “the choice is simple”.
This is not the first time bombing has elicited a positive endorsement from the great moral standard-bearer. In 1999, as NATO’s bombs descended on Yugoslavia, blowing up civilians on train and bus, as well as journalists in their broadcasting studio, Wiesel was questioned by Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Larry King Live. Declared one government toady to another: “I think it [the bombing] had to be done, because all the other options had been explored.” This balderdash put Wiesel, morally speaking, on a par with Cardinal Spellman, blessing the B-52s as they set off to drop napalm on children in the Vietnam era.
(For a decidedly irreverent assessment of Night’s merits On February 10, 2006, Candian tv viewers were able, in February, to watch and hear the former editor of Harper’s magazine, Lewis Lapham, delivering a lecture at the University of Ottawa, on the invitation of the university’s Graduate Students Association. Lapham’s lecture, entitled “The Politicization of Research,” was carried on C-PAC, Canada’s parliamentary TV channel, several times in the days that followed. In the Q and A session after the lecture, in response to an enquiry about the decline in the quality of education, Lapham replied:
“I have had three children. My youngest is now 25, my eldest is 32. They all went through a very high-end American education, both secondary schools and colleges. The syllabus of books that they were given in the English courses was terrible. I mean, the books were all tracts.
“There was a big fuss about Oprah Winfrey and the James Frey book, and she’s now going to put on [her TV show] Elie Wiesel’s Night. This is really one of the worst books I have ever read, and I’ve had to read it three times to my three children; and it’s junk. But it’s the kind of junk that has become very de rigeur in American universities. It’s a propaganda
poster. With the kind of books the kids are given to read, I mean, it would turn them off books forever. No wonder! Because they are being given tracts. And, the big subject of course is victimology.”)
One of the perennially fascinating things about Wiesel is the preternatural sensitivity of his antennae for the opportune audience, his sense of what will, so to speak, “play” usefully for him. This brings us, by way of Eli Pfefferkorn, to Francois Mauriac.
These days Eli Pfefferkorn, age 77, lives in Toronto. A man, on the evidence of several phone conversations, of alert intelligence and charm, he too is a concentration camp survivor. Originally from Poland, he spent seven weeks in Maidanek, then in three labor camps, then in Buchenwald, then in Rehmsdorf. Near the end of the war he endured a death march to Theresienstadt in Moravia, where the surviving inmates were liberated by the Red Army on May 8, 1945. Pfefferkorn’s parents perished in other camps, and he tells me he owes his life to his mother, who shook his hand loose from hers when the family was about to be deported, and told the 13-year-old boy to scram.
Pfefferkorn eventually came to the United States, taught, and spent some time working with Wiesel on the conceptual design of the Holocaust museum. Once an uncritical admirer, his present estimate of Wiesel is not favorable, and he sets his views forth at length in a fascinating manuscript he is preparing to submit to publishers. He was kind enough to send me some chapters. By no means short-changing Wiesel on what he regards as his genuine achievements, Pfefferkorn can be unsparing: “He’s become a eulogist of the dead but he doesn’t raise his mellifluous voice against the wrong done to survivors, 35 per cent of them below the poverty line in the US.”
There are piercing passages in Pfefferkorn’s memoir concerning Wiesel’s opportunism and betrayals in the murky battles over the design of the Holocaust Museum, and above all in his artful pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was awarded in 1986. “Would Wiesel,” Pfefferkorn asks, “ever have received this prize for his work as a journalist?” Pfefferkorn answers his question, “It’s hard to imagine. No. Wiesel got the prize because he elevated himself as the spokesman for the survivors. His mostly absurd pretensions to be a ‘peace missionary’, had nothing to do with it.”
Then, once he had the prize he so fiercely pursued, Wiesel gradually, but consistently so Pfefferkorn stresses “alienated himself from the survivors”.
In Night, Pfefferkorn isolates a number of episodes in which he makes a convincing case that Wiesel dumped truth in favor of fiction. The two I cite here involve a boy playing a violin amidst a death march, and the second is one of Night’s most famous scenes, the hanging of three inmates.
Of the first episode, Pfefferkorn writes:
“The story of the ‘violin episode’ takes place during the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald with a short gap at Gleiwitz in January of 1945. Mercilessly driven by the SS guards, stragglers were shot at and shoved to the side road. The columns of inmates arrived in Gleiwitz, after having dragged themselves through the snow-swept roads in freezing temperatures for about fifty kilometers. Immediately upon arrival, they were herded into barns. Drained, they dropped to the floor — the dead, the dying and the partially living piled one on the other.
“Under this heap of crushed humanity laid Juliek, cradling a violin, which he has carried all the way from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz. Eliezer, somehow, stumbles on Juliek, “…the boy from Warsaw who played in the band at Buna… ‘How do you feel, Juliek?’ I asked, less to know the answer than to hear that he could speak, that he was alive. ‘All right, Eliezer … I’m getting on all right … hardly any air … worn out. My feet are swollen. It’s good to rest, but my violin…’
“Eliezer — the inmate — wonders, ‘What use was the violin here?’ Wiesel — the memoirist — does not find it necessary to give an answer to the question. Such an answer, I assume, should be of interest to the reader for if Wiesel were to provide an answer, the veracity of the story would dissolve like the morning mist in the Sinai desert. Maintaining hold on a violin as one marched the March of Death is highly improbable. However, a violin in the midst of human debris strains the imagination and questions memory. How did Juliek hold on to the violin on the death journey? Deprived of food and drink, when each step stubbornly refused to follow the next one, how did Juliek manage to clutch the violin in his numb fingers, let alone play Beethoven on it? Would the SS escorts have let him keep it? (Also, as an Irish reader of a draft of this article remarked to me: “as a professional musician, who has played a wide variety of string instruments for 40 years, including fiddle, guitar, banjo, and mandolin, I immediately thought, How did the violin strings survive the severely cold temperatures and the long march? It’s a minor point perhaps, but very improbable, especially since it was 1945 and they were not modern strings.”)
Pfefferkorn continues:
“And from this anus mundi, suddenly the melody of a Beethoven concerto is heard, wafting through the corpses, the groans of the dying, the stench of the dead. Eliezer had never heard sounds so pure. ‘In such a silence. It was pitch dark. I could only hear the violin, it was as though Juliek’s soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole life was gliding on his strings — his lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again.’ This powerful and emotionally moving scene, celebrating the triumph of the human spirit over the grinding SS machinery is the very stuff that heroic fiction is made of. But is it a memoir factually recorded? Obviously, Wiesel’s putative memoir, written while on a boat to Brazil, is but a recollection of experiences seen through the eye of his creative imagination. And yet, the melancholy melodies that came out of Juliek’s violin were the first strains of a myth orchestrated by Wiesel and his disciples, over a period of thirty years.”
A major scene in Night, one that contributed hugely to the book’s success in the West, and its impact on many Christians starting with Francois Mauriac, was the execution of three inmates in the Buna work camp. As Pfefferkorn writes, “The fascination of Christian theologians with the Wiesel phenomenon must be traced back to a hanging that the 16-year-old Eliezer witnessed in Auschwitz.”
In the incident, two adults and a little boy are being led to the gallows. The little boy refused to betray fellow inmates who have been involved in an act of sabotage; to protect his fellow inmates, the boy is willing to pay with his life. Each one climbs to his chair and his neck is slipped into the rope’s noose. The scene continues as follows in the 1960 English version of Night:
“The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. ‘Long live Liberty!’ cried the adults. But the child was silent.
“’Where is God? Where is He?’ someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting.
“’Bare your heads!’ yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. ‘Cover your heads!’ Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive…. For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is — He is hanging here on this gallows’”
Not surprisingly, the graphically described hanging scene has been etched into the imagination of the Christian theologians because of the numerous parallels to the Crucifixion of Jesus.
Now, while he was working on the memoir, La Nuit, Wiesel had cause, on behalf of an Israeli newspaper, to visit and interview Francois Mauriac, the Catholic writer and Nobel Laureate in literature. They got on well. Then Wiesel gave him the manuscript of La Nuit. Mauriac found in it an answer to his own anguish at descriptions of the mass slaughters in the death camps, particularly of children.
Mauriac fastened instantly on, in Pfefferkorn’s words, “a resemblance between the crucifixion and Wiesel’s description of the young boy’s hanging. In response to Wiesel’s questioning of God’s benevolence and man’s humanness, Mauriac writes the following in his Foreword to Night: ‘And I, who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner, whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him — the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world?’”
Pfefferkorn continues:
“The hanged child dangling on the rope is reflected in Eliezer’s eyes, whose image resembles that of the crucified Jesus. Thus in one stroke, Mauriac has drawn a triptych reminiscent of the medieval paintings, making young Eliezer the link connecting the two watershed events in the history of Western civilization, namely the Crucifixion and the Holocaust. Mauriac leaves no doubt as to his Christological interpretation of the Auschwitz hanging. In the year 1960, he published a biography of Christ entitled The Son of Man dedicated to ‘E.W. who was a crucified Jewish child, who stands for many others.’
“Mauriac explains what it was in his interview with Wiesel that drew him so powerfully to the young Israeli: ‘That look, as if a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed, stumbling among the shameful corpses.’ Wiesel’s painfully gaunt demeanor set against the backdrop of the concentration camps’ corpses have inspired a generation of Christian theologians to view Wiesel as a latter day Lazarus.
ORDER IT NOW“It is highly speculative to suggest that from the very inception of his writing, Wiesel consciously laboured to present himself to the Christian world as a composite of a Christ Lazarus figure. However, once the seeds of the myth were sown in Paris at Mauriac’s instigation, and took roots in the soil of Christian America, Wiesel has done his share to encourage the ‘Lazarus risen from the dead parallel.’ But Wiesel has done so more by gesture than act, silence than utterance, indirection than direct statement. The unspoken, the mute, the covert are his metier; albeit an ambiguity laced through with shrewd intelligence that would make many a professional diplomat envious.”
In a letter to David Hirsch dated October 6, 1994, Alfred Kazin writes that at the beginning of their friendship, “I liked him [Wiesel] enormously, and I was in awe of him because of his suffering in Auschwitz.” But at the same time “… it was impossible, when he expanded at length about his experiences under the Nazis, it was impossible to miss the fact that he was a mystifier”.
One who says he directly observed the hanging scene described by Wiesel was Zygfryd Halbereich, who testified at the Auschwitz State Museum on October 19, 1973. Halbereich’s testimony was matter-of-fact, clear and direct. He was acquainted with the three inmates and knew about their escape plans.
“On the whole,” Pfefferkorn writes, “Halbereich’s testimony is in agreement with Wiesel’s narrative, and differs only in one minor detail. But this is an inconsequential disagreement that does not change the substance of the hanging story. What does affect it, however, is the age of one of the condemned, as given by Wiesel. And the age of the condemned is the crux of the matter.
“In the original Yiddish Un di Velt Hot Geshvign and in the French and the English translations, one of the three condemned is frequently referred to as a child or a young boy. Halbereich is silent about the ages of the condemned, and this omission is surprising. For in Wiesel’s painfully elaborate description of the hanging, the young boy’s execution stirred up deep emotions among the inmates standing on the roll call. The Kapo who was assigned to administer the hanging ‘ excused himself from serving as a hangman. He did not want to hang a child.’ A Kapo’s refusal to obey an SS order was tantamount to a death sentence. His extraordinary behaviour would have certainly registered with Halbereich, whose testimony is meticulously detailed. Halbereich’s silence on the Kappo’s courage calls into question Wiesel’s account of the hanging. One of the skeptics is the known Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg, who is, in his own words, a seeker of truth.
“Cautious by temperament and scholarly discipline, Hilberg gingerly raises the issue related to the hanging scene. In a review written for the Boston Globe about Wiesel’s autobiographical book All Rivers Run to the Sea, Hilberg makes mention of the three hangings. ‘Describing the incident in his [Wiesel’s] book Night,’ Hilberg notes, ‘he recalled someone behind him asking: Where is God? At that moment Wiesel believed that one of the three was a boy, and in his mind identified the child with God.’ Citing Kazin’s contention that the entire event is fiction, Hilberg concludes, ‘To be sure, the doubters may claim a concession.’”
Pfefferkorn’s considered judgement is harsh on Wiesel’s claims for the absolute truth to life of Night:
“If the hanging scene turns out contrary to Wiesel’s description in his purported memoir Night, a fictionalized episode as Kazin claimed and surmised from Halbereich’s testimony, then Wiesel’s entire moral and theological edifice collapses, bringing down with it the ‘Suffering Servant’ theology, which first gave him recognition and eventually led him to fame.
“Though it is virtually impossible to verify the exact ages of the condemned, it must be noted, as Hilberg observed, that in Wiesel’s recent autobiography ‘the suffering body is no longer that of a boy.’”
Quite aside from the theological questions, part of the impact of the scene derives from Wiesel’s description of this boy whose weight was too insubstantial for the noose to swiftly strangle him. Does this, in the last analysis, really matter? It does if you are disobligingly contrasting Frey to Wiesel’s “apprehension of memory as a sacred act”. All the same, I don’t suppose Smoking Gun would ever gleefully feature the third victim’s birth certificate.
After talking to Eli Pfferkorn and reading chapters from his memoir, I called Raul Hilberg, now 80, at his home in Burlington, Vermont.
“From a purely academic viewpoint”, Hilberg began, “it would be interesting to have a scholarly edition, comparing the Yiddish version with subsequent translations and editions, with appropriate footnotes, Wiesel’s comments etc. He was addressing two entirely different audiences, the first being the Yiddish-speaking Jews, members of the world of his youth whom he addressed in nineteenth-century terms. There’s more detail, more comment. I made that suggestion to Wiesel and he didn’t react favorably.”
Hilberg turned to the crucial scene: “I have a version of the hanging from an old survivor with the names of all three adults.” That survivor had said that there was no boy among the three. Hilberg mentioned this in a review of Night, in which, he told me, “I made no secret of our differences. But whereas it [the age of the central figure in the hanging] may seem somewhat small, it makes a very big difference to Christians, particularly Catholics, because it’s very clear that mystics are intensely interested in the scene because it seems to replicate the crucifixion. It made a considerable impact. So the fact that this figure may not have been a boy at all is disturbing.”
“It would appear”, Hilberg went on, “from the record I have, that some witnesses have questioned whether this scene took place at all. I have a long statement by an older man, a man whom I judge to be quite trustworthy, though one must always remember that things are sometimes observed or heard about later. I talked recently to a survivor of that section of the camp who said it [the hanging of the three] didn’t take place, but maybe it took place earlier. I don’t know. Dating these tings is hard for survivors. Some have doubted this would have taken place. Buna was a work camp, so this other survivor, a PhD in history and a very intelligent man, didn’t believe it. I said to him, ‘How do you know this didn’t happen?’ I consider it not only a possibility but plausible. But age is a big issue to some people. That’s something he did not discuss in the new edition of the book.”
“Wiesel’s is the most read of all Auschwitz memoirs”, Hilberg remarked, “not only because of its brevity but because it has something mystic, surrealistic in it.” He mentioned the episode of the little boy playing the violin, and said how it evoked images from the Russian-Jewish mystic painter Chagall, also of Fiddler on the Roof.
“Wiesel comes from Sighet, a city in Romania. In Sighet there were many religious Jews, also Ukrainians. Much of Sighet was rather primitive at the time Wiesel was growing up. Most roads were not paved. It was shtetl life. However an assimilated group of Jews was emerging. I went there when I was 11, in 1937, and spent the summer. There was a tennis court, very middle-class. My aunt and her husband, a Sigheti, manufactured violins in Sighet where there was a major tradition of violin playing. I heard quartets in our garden. Wiesel’s parents had a store. So in some respects Sighet was very nineteenth century, and in others there were all the earmarks of a group of Jews emerging into the twentieth century who were evidently wide awake to modern civilization. So was the violin scene realistic, or was it a fantasy? Certainly, for Jews the violin was the instrument of choice. It was portable.
“So I would not say that the violin scene is impossible, even though I know someone from the death march who said it was utterly impossible. He was in Auschwitz, also Wiesel’s age. But that still doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Nothing is inconceivable.
“The model of all survivor accounts is of an idyllic childhood, then the hell of the Holocaust, then since they survived they underline the fact that it was only by luck they survived. With Wiesel, his original title was And the World Was Silent. It’s accusatory. Nightis more surreal and mystic. It goes back to Middle Ages. Wiesel fits right into that style. It’s not a novel, but what it does have is the imprint of someone who wants to leave behind the impression that if you weren’t there, you cannot know what it was like, but then that dooms trying to write what it was like.”
I asked Hilberg what accounts of the death camps and the Holocaust did he admire most. “That really depends on the reader. I don’t have that kind of favorite. For my purposes, obviously they have to be correct. There’s an account by Filip Mueller, who was on the gas chamber detail in Auschwitz in 1942, written in collaboration with two people:Eyewitness Auschwitz. It has to be read with care. Another book is Rudolf Vrba’s I Cannot Forgive, written with Alan Bestic. Vrba escaped from Auschwitz. He became professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia. This is the most remarkable of survivors, a man of absolutely incredible energy and abilities. In sheer ability to cope with the situation, this man is beyond belief.”
I didn’t press the point, but Hilberg, who stressed to me that he admires Wiesel, did not include Night in this little list. A clue to this omission may be found in Hilberg’s often acrid memoir, The Politics of Memory,published in 1996. In the chapter “Questionable Practices”, notable for a devastating account of underhanded behavior by Hannah Arendt, Hilberg discusses “areas of inappropriateness or illegitimacy”. “I try to nod wisely when poets or novelists step forward with their art, which in its very nature is much less disguised than mine. Nor am I disturbed when popularizers of history excavate the monographs of the footnote writers [among whom Hilberg included himself] and, distilling the contents, highlight story and drama for a large reading public.There are, however, limits. Among the practices that give me discomfort is the creation of a story in which historical facts are altered deliberately for the sake of plot and adventure.”
Then a page later Hilberg continues, “If counterfactual stories are frequent enough, kitsch is truly rampant The philistines in my field are truly everywhere. I am surrounded by the commonplace, platitudes, and clichés.The first German publisher of a small volume, containing my introduction and documents about the railroads [viz. their role in the destruction of the Jews] inserted a poem for which, he said, he had paid good money, describing human beings in freight cars including children whose eyes glowed like coal . The manipulation of history is a kind of spoilage and kitsch is debasement.”
Reading those lines, my mind did go at once to some of the scenes in Night: Juliek playing his violin on the death march for example, which hover on the edge of kitsch or, to take a less forgiving view, plunge into it.
“In 1981″, Pfefferkorn remembers, “Wiesel invited me to give a talk to his seminar students at Boston University. In the course of my talk, I discussed the relationship between memory and imagination in a number of literary works. I then pointed out the literary devices he used in Night, devices, I stressed, that make the memoir a compelling read. Wiesel’s reaction to my comments were swift as lightning. I had never seen him as angry before or since. In the presence of John Silber, the then President of Boston University, and my own Brown University students whom I invited, he lost his composure, lashing out at me for daring to question the literalness of the memoir. In Wiesel’s eyes, as in the eyes of his disciples, Night assumed a level of sacrosanctity, next in importance to the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. In terms of veracity, it is a factually recorded work, virtually meeting Leopold von Ranke’s benchmark of historical accounts: Wie es eigentlich gewessen, how it really was.”
As he roosts on his pile of gold amid the abuse of Oprah and the literary world, Frey can comfort himself with the thought that Night is not how “it really was”, and that even though there is a vast gulf between what Wiesel actually endured and Frey’s lies about his own life, when it comes to making literature he and Wiesel were both in the business of artistic and emotional manipulation, of dressing fiction up as truth.
As Pfefferkorn stresses, you didn’t survive in the death camps just by luck. “Securing a spot in a desirable labor detail, for instance, involved shoving to the head of the line, seen as a risk worth taking. Upon encountering opposition, however, one had to know when to retreat into the chameleon-pyjama-like background of the concentration camp. This was also true about lining up for soup. Finding the right spot in the line could mean a thicker bowl of soup -which may add a week’s longevity, but this entailed rough elbowing, as well as timing.”
Pfefferkorn says now that one of the greatest disappointments of his life was Wiesel’s “betrayal” (Pfefferkorn’s word) of the survivors. Looking at the man’s career overall, I’d say that as a moral fabulist, Wiesel has far more than Frey to answer for. Should not Oprah ask him about the millions he could have helped with the moral stature won by the Nobel peace prize he so unrelentingly campaigned for with his rough elbows, but whom he has betrayed for reasons of base political calculation?
Although the Nobel committee extolled him as a “messenger to mankind” it is difficult to find examples of Wiesel sending any message on behalf of those victimized by the policies of the United States, and virtually impossible when it comes to victims of Israel.
Wiesel’s pusillanimity was well illustrated in an interview with The National Jewish Post & Opinion for November 19, 1982. Asked about the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, he said he felt “sad”. Lest anyone leap to the conclusion that Wiesel was at last expressing sadness for the victims of Israel’s invasion — he remained silent throughout the bombing of Beirut — Wiesel added that this sadness was “with Israel, and not against Israel”. As he put it, “After all, the Israeli soldiers did not kill”. In 1985, Wiesel was asked by a reporter from Ha’aretz about Israel’s aid to the military junta in Guatemala. By way of response Wiesel remarked that he had received a letter from a Nobel laureate (Salvador Luria of M.I.T. had written to him on this subject a month earlier) documenting Israel’s contributions to mass murder in Guatemala and urging Wiesel to act privately to pressure Israel. Wiesel “sighed”, the Ha’aretz reporter wrote, and said, “I usually answer at once, but what can I answer him.”
Wiesel could, I suppose, argue that a sigh constitutes a technical breach of silence, but why did he not go further?
In an interview published in the second volume of Against Silence,Wiesel says that, as a Diaspora Jew, the “price I chose to pay for not living in Israel . . . is not to criticize Israel from outside its borders.” In another interview, published in the London Jewish Chronicle for September 10, 1982, he lamented criticism of Israel during the Lebanon invasion and asked these rhetorical questions:
“Was it necessary to criticize the Israeli government, notwithstanding the spate of lies disseminated in the press? Or would it not have been better to have offered Israel unreserved support, regardless of the suffering endured by the population of Beirut? In the face of hatred, our love for Israel ought to have deepened, become more whole-hearted, and our faith in Israel more compelling, more true.”
It’s unclear how many times, if any, Wiesel has ventured criticism inside Israel’s borders. Wiesel himself mentions one occasion on which he exerted what is usually called quiet pressure.
Commentary on Wiesel in the Hebrew-language press in Israel following the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 was more robust than the statutory honorifics printed in the United States. In Davar, for example, a reporter named Miri Paz discussed the troubled course of a conference on holocaust and genocide held in Israel in the summer of 1982. Responding to the urgings of the Turkish government, the Israeli Foreign Ministry demanded the removal of six items on the agenda concerning the Armenian genocide. Several people on the conference’s organizing committee, including its chair, Professor Israel Charny, refused to bend to such interference. But Wiesel, who headed the conference, did weaken. He pulled out of the conference, explaining, in Paz’s words, that “as a Jew he cannot act against the government of Israel”.
In Koteret Rashit, a liberal weekly, the Israeli journalist Tom Segev wrote of Wiesel:
“He is always careful not to criticize his nation. . . . What does he have to say about the situation in the territories? When people from Peace Now asked him to criticize the Lebanese War he evaded the request. He’s never been in the habit of standing up seriously against Israeli leaders. . . . What in fact has he done to realize his fine intentions? Bob Geldof has done more. . . . How nice it would have been if they had divided the prize among those truly good people of the world, those still alive, those people who endangered their lives at the time of the Holocaust in order to save Jews.
“Who symbolizes the lesson of the Holocaust as they do?
“Who is as worthy of the respect of the world as they are?”
Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.
Footnote: an earlier version of this essay ran in CounterPunch newsletter for February, 2006, #3/4.
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John Dolan’s takedown of Frey in The eXile is a classic – called A Million Little Pieces out as a lie long before Smoking Gun took it apart.
I think it’s pretty clear that it’s mostly fiction. And that he has no Auschwitz tattoo, although he has consistently claimed that he has one: Where’s the tattoo?
Kind of an intellectual Maddoff but saved by the ethnic love while later was destroyed by the ethnic anger.
I’ve read a few “eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust.” Not so much the famous kind, but the kind that get paraded around American high schools and such by survivors. The thing that always strikes me is the amount of knowledge that suffuses the accounts. Most people, in the middle of a war, don’t know who everyone is, where they’re going, and most importantly, their intentions. They’re confused. There’s even a term for it, “the fog of war.”
Jewish survivors of the Holocaust seem immune to the fog of war, if their accounts are any guide. It’s almost as if they were able to travel to the late 20th century from the 1940s, read a lot of books about history – the Holocaust in particular, and then travel back to where they were in the 1940s and understand everything that was going on with the benefit of hindsight. John Stewart might call it “truthiness.”
Yes, the world was silent with carpet-bombing, millions of artillery shells flying about, millions of people being killed, armies marching all over Europe, etc.
What do we call “undeniable” history? Does its “undeniability” shift it from history, to myth?
yawn.
Wake me when someone writes about all of the Jews who were incinerated by Allied firebombing in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Freiburg, Leipzig, Darmstadt or the other 125 German cities that the Allies firebombed, with the premeditated intent of killing working-class German civilians.
How many Jews died in Allied firebombing of Germany?
A document authored by Rafael Medoff at the Wyman Institute but no longer on its website recounts a meeting of the Jewish committee in Tel Aviv chaired by David Ben Gurion. The Committee was considering whether they should increase pressure on the US and Allies to bomb Auschwitz. On June 11, 1944, the Committee stated that it was their belief that “Auschwitz is a labor camp,” and that they did not wish to take responsibility for the death by bombing of “a single Jewish soul.”
According to a US Department of the Interior Historic American Engineering Record ( HAER) http://lcweb2.loc.gov/master/pnp/habshaer/ut/ut0500/ut0568/data/ut0568data.pdf ), US Air Force plans to destroy Germany and German civilians were so thorough that in the “German Village” mock-up used to develop the “most efficient” means of producing a firestorm, cribs were placed in the bedrooms of typical apartments, “reflective of a young family with an infant.”
The same HAER doc names Erich Mendelsohn, “the Jewish architect,” and other Jewish architects from Harvard, as designers of the buildings and interiors at German Village.
Wannsee indeed.
Ever notice how few “eyewitness” accounts there are of survivors of the Allied firebombing of German and Japanese cities?
Likely that is because there are so few survivors of those premeditated crimes against humanity committed by the Allies.
the holocaust is fake as we all know.
There are the ‘Nazis’ with the mythological ‘6M & gas chambers’ and there are the ‘Nazis’ without the mythological ‘6M & gas chambers’.
The ‘holocaust’ propaganda is easily debunked, is impossible as alleged.
http://www.codoh.com
discussion here:
http://forum.codoh.com/
Who Profits?
“Near the end of the war he endured a death march to Theresienstadt in Moravia,”
Theresienstadt (Czech: Terezín) isn’t in Moravia, but in the Ústí nad Labem Region, in northern Czech Republic.
It’s in the area once called: Bohemia.
So where’s your tattoo, Wiesel?
Imre Kertész’s account (Fatelessness in English, I have only read the original Hungarian) is much better, and he criticized most survivor accounts exactly on these grounds, that they were written from hindsight, whereas – as he points out – people didn’t quite know at the time what awaited them. (Kertész’s non-literary writings, essays are quite different, they are full of moralizing Jewish nationalism, best avoided.) In Fatelessness (and some other books – his only topic seems to be Jewishness and Holocaust survivorship in Hungary, although his book Fiasco has something interesting to say about communism) Kertész writes a lot about what it took to survive, e.g. taking food from others, how nasty Yiddish-speaking Jews were to more assimilated Jews who could only speak Hungarian (and German, which they learnt at school), how the hierarchy of the camp was working, etc. etc. I think Primo Levi’s works are also relatively good, but I found them to be inferior to Kertész’s account, although the fact that I read Levi’s work in English (which is not my mother tongue) might have played a role, too.
It was obviously not enough for Elie Wiesel.
It’s interesting that a more or less mainstream conservative guy (a Hungarian) told me some five years ago that Hungarians betrayed the Jews during the Second World War and that as a consequence we shouldn’t be surprised that Jews in Hungary usually don’t like Hungary that much, and we should understand them. At the time I didn’t reply (I haven’t yet read Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy and other writings), but since then I thought about it – WASP Americans got the same hatefulness for their philo-Semitism as Hungarians got for their anti-Semitism. Also, two decades before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hungarian Jews disproportionately participated in the leadership of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 – which was actually fueling Hungarian anti-Semitism between the wars and even during the Second World War. So if Hungarian betrayal of Jews justifies Jewish hatred of Hungarians, then of course Hungarian Jew-hatred was already justified in the Second World War, wasn’t it..?
I think the official story is more or less true (with a few caveats, like Raul Hilberg actually arrives at the somewhat lower number of 5.1 million with two different methods, so technically speaking it probably wasn’t exactly ‘6 million’), it’s more a question of narrative.
Jew-hatred is always presented as the epitome of irrationality, a kind of mental illness. For example that irrational mentally ill Hitler erroneously believed that it did matter that some of Roosevelt’s closest advisors were either Jewish or had Jewish spouses. When in fact of course these advisors of Roosevelt unanimously were anti-German, but – according to mainstream opinion – this would have been all the same if they had – for example – Norwegian or Irish ancestry or spouses… or… would it for sure have been all the same? According to the Narrative, we’re not supposed to question that.
Wiesel admits to his bald faced lies:
‘What are you writing?’ the Rebbe asked. ‘ – Stories,’ I said.
He wanted to know what kind of stories: true stories. ‘About people you have knew?’
Yes, about people I might have known. ‘About things that happened?’
Yes, about things that happened or could have happened. ‘But they did not?’
No, not all of them did. In fact, some some were invented from almost the beginning
to almost the end. The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said
with more sorrow than anger: ‘That means that you are writing lies!’ I did not answer immediately.
The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself.
‘Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; other are – although they never occurred.’ Elie Wiesel in Legends of Our Time, Schocken Books, New York, 1982, p. viii of introduction.
The HolocaustTM is like any other religion. If you ask too many questions the whole mythology begins to unravel. Why did the Germans, legendary for efficiency, leave so many SurvivorsTM from their Death CampsTM? How were they so staggeringly inefficient in rounding up the Jews that large numbers of Jews openly operated businesses in Germany throughout the war? How did so many SurvivorsTM manage to survive multiple Death CampsTM? Why are there so many news reports of 6MillionTM killed from even before WWI and continuing up to mid-WWII then quieting until around a decade after the end of WWII? Why did the legendarily efficient Germans compile no substantial documentation of their (startlingly incompetent) genocide? Etc…
Ultimately, for me at least, the question is: Why the gross exaggerations? Wasn’t the German behavior bad enough in rounding up so many Jews, Gypsies, mental defectives, and communists then forcing them into slave labor? What does the prevarication serve? Was the intent to distract attention from outrageous Allied war crimes? Firebombing civilians? Russian mass murders? Allowing the slave work camps to starve by cutting off supply lines? Distract attention from mind boggling scale of Communist population eradication efforts? Or was it simply fulfilling Jewish superstitious prophecy?
Finally, as Propaganda, the HolocaustTM would succeed better if the puppetmasters didn’t make just the questioning of it illegal. One doesn’t outlaw the questioning of Truths. Making HolocaustTM skepticism illegal is akin to waving a giant red flag that says “Here is a massive and truly epic fantasy that will crumble under the mildest scrutiny!” Truths do not require Government protection.
What is “many”? From Hungary some 400,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, roughly 90% of whom perished. Those who didn’t were the ones found fit for heavy physical labor at the camp, most of them sent to other (forced labor) camps, but some were kept in the forced labor camps in Auschwitz. It must be noted that many of the ones sent to forced labor camps also perished, in other words, the Auschwitz death camp only killed some 80% or less of the people upon arrival and roughly half of those spared perished later.
No Jews were openly (or clandestinely) operating any businesses in Germany during the Second World War. I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary.
I hardly doubt many people survived multiple death camps. There were only six death camps, Kulmhof, the three connected camps around Lublin (Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor), Treblinka and Auschwitz. With the exception of Majdanek and Auschwitz there were very few people kept in those camps, and those were mostly helping with the murder and disposing of the bodies. Most survivors who claim to have been in multiple camps only spent time in just one of these camps (usually Auschwitz, from which many people were transported into other camps) and then claim to have been transported to other (forced labor) camps like Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen. I’m not aware of anyone claiming to have survived multiple death camps.
There aren’t “so many” reports of six million killed before the Great War. I’m not aware of any. During the war there were reports of the Germans having killed several millions of Jews (like I think the New York Times reported in December 1942 that they had already killed 2 million Jews – an underestimate, but with the fog of war, the difficulty of believing such a vast mass murder and all that it cannot be surprising), and after the war pretty soon the six million number was accepted.
Later scholarly works usually estimate between 5 and 6 million, I find Raul Hilberg’s estimate of 5.1 million the most convincing.
They did compile substantial documentation. For example the Germans murdered over 20 thousand Jews in Kamenets-Podolsky in the Ukraine (then Generalgouvernement), there’s plenty of Hungarian (it was near the then border of Hungary and most victims were deported by the Hungarian authorities as illegal aliens) and German documentation describing the event.
What’s missing is high level decision making and orders to murder all Jews in Europe. However, Hitler could have given the order orally to Himmler, Göring and others (for similar reasons why Ben Gurion gave no written orders to expel Arabs from Israel), and it also must be mentioned that all documents in the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Main Reich Security Office led by Heydrich and later by Kaltenbrunner – the Gestapo was also a part of it) and the central SS-organs were destroyed after Himmler ordered the destruction of all documentation on April 16, 1945.
Nevertheless plenty of high-level SS- and RSHA-documents have survived in copies, because a lot of copies were sent to other ministries which were much less thorough in destroying all documents in 1945. For example in 1941 all reports of the Einsatzgruppen were sent to Berlin to all ministries, and they survived. Apparently in early 1942 secrecy was enhanced and less copies were made. Since a lot of Jewish communities that disappeared by the end of the war still existed around that time, and there was some sporadic evidence of massive deportations in 1942-43, it was assumed that most of them were killed in extermination camps. However, later research uncovered documents showing that mass shootings in fact went on in 1942 and 1943. So the importance of the extermination camps went down, mass shootings up.
Outlawing holocaust-revisionism is always just a first step in banning all kinds of “hate speech” like criticizing immigrants. Even regarding the holocaust it’s way easier to persecute people for “holocaust relativization” instead of outright holocaust denial. Jean-Marie Le Pen was twice persecuted for saying something trivial (and trivially true), namely, that the holocaust was just a detail of the history of the second world war. Holocaust denial laws are nothing more than the first steps in legislation making it illegal to criticize Jews, immigrants, or to outlaw racial consciousness in (gentile) whites.
Doesn’t the original Yiddish text recount instances of Jewish boys going out and raping German girls?
the lack of sources sets at naught this set of refutations.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Thus, assertions such as
“No Jews were openly (or clandestinely) operating any businesses in Germany during the Second World War. I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary.”
and
“There aren’t “so many” reports of six million killed before the Great War. I’m not aware of any. ”
should not be taken seriously; both claims rely on reiner Tor’s personal knowledge, which is inadequate evidence.
Mark Weber has investigated the source of the sacrosanct 6 million figure here — http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v20/v20n5p25_Weber.html
but of course, Institute for Historical Review is deemed “antisemitic”, even though it is thoroughly rational and evidence based.
With specific reference to reports of “six million” before the Great War (does Tor mean WWI or WWII?), Martin Glynn’s 1919 article in the American Hebrew magazine insists that “six million men and women … are dying from lack of the necessities of life ….due to a bigoted lust for Jewish blood.” http://balder.org/judea/American-Hebrew-October-31-1919-The-Crucifixion-Of-Jews-Must-Stop-Martin-H-Glynn-Six-Million.php
Between 1900 and 1945 newspapers and magazines in the USA and Great Britain bruited the notion of the deaths of “six million Jews.” Here is a list of those mentions: http://www.darkmoon.me/2013/how-six-million-jews-died-complied-by-toshiro/
This is a very silly thing to say. Ben Gurion made no great secret of his desire to expel the Palestinians. There are numerous quotes in mainstream histories of the conflict of Ben Gurion speaking in very explicit terms about the need (as he saw it) to rid Palestine of its Arab population. No one ‘order’ accomplished this. The expulsion took place amid the 1948 war, with various Israeli military groups making their own decisions on how to treat the Palestinians that fell into their hands.
I’m not much in the mood right now to discuss the reasons revisionists have for considering the standard holocaust narrative outright post-war invention, but I’ll just remark here that your comments on it do not demonstrate much awareness of the main issues in contention.
HOW JEWS FABRICATED THE HOLOHOAX.
Thanks for the interesting article. The whole holohoax is just that: a massive hoax.
For an excellent proof exposing the holohoax, see the online article
HOW JEWS FABRICATED THE HOLOHOAX at:
http://www.maya12-21-2012.com/2012forum/index.php?topic=12393.0
THE WORD HOLOCAUST AND 6 MILLION MYTH WAS FABRICATED EVEN BEFORE WORLD WAR II;
The Judaists had fabricated stories of 6 millions “Jews” being holocaust even before WWII:
See this link for actual images for their media proclamations starting in 1900, long before Hitler or WWII:
http://balder.org/judea/Six-Million-140-Occurrences-Of-The-Word-Holocaust-And-The-Number-6,000,000-Before-The-Nuremberg-Trials-Began.php
Thank you for laying out this information. You dealt with Stan’s claims very well.
Right, because without gas chambers, the Nazis were totally swell.
@SolontoCroesus, silviosilver:
Thank you for laying out this information. You dealt with reiner Tor’s claims very well.
While I do appreciate the thorough and academic approach to Weise’s “work” (read: racket), the fact is that in ANY other forum, when one portion of an account is demonstrated to be false,the entire account become suspect.
But this Holocaust ™ business, the whole thing is revered as gospel, until a few pages turn out to be a fraud. Then the whole thing is gospel…except the made-up part, which is now a “biting commentary” that offers “important insight”….horse -cock.
The entire account of Wiesel is suspect.
But the holocaust is based not on Wiesel’s account, but as I wrote on many separate pieces of evidence, which are very robust. I personally have met historians who work on the period (but not on the holocaust), and they would notice if the whole thing would be a hoax. For example a Hungarian historian recently found a document compiled by the Hungarian military intelligence in 1943 for Hungarian regent Admiral Horthy which is about the pressure the Germans put on Hungary to deport its Jews. They casually mention that Hungary’s 800,000 Jews (this number included I think 100,000 half-Jews) were then the largest remaining Jewish community in Axis-controlled Europe. Anybody with access to pre-war encyclopedia or other sources can confirm that Poland alone had over 3 million Jews in the 1930s, so unless you posit that something happened to them you cannot explain why the 800,000 Hungarian Jews would be the largest European Jewish community in 1943. Also this historian would have noticed if Hungarian military intelligence had wrote “Hungarian Jewry is the second largest Jewish community after Poland”, which would contradict other sources which claim that the majority of Polish Jews were murdered in 1942. If there were just one such document, it could be explained away (like the Hungarian intelligence officer didn’t know that Polish Jews were already murdered), but the fact that not much contradicting but much corroborating evidence is found is enough for me.
So many historians are working on the Second World War, that it’s impossible for the whole story to be a hoax.
You can perhaps argue that the numbers are exaggerated, maybe not 6 million, but only 5 million (Raul Hilberg calculated 5.1 million using two different methods, but most holocaust histories use higher numbers of about 5.5-5.8 or 5.5-6 million or something), or maybe only 4 million (even Raul Hilberg is Jewish and so maybe he is also exaggerating), but to claim that there was no systematic murder of Jews by Germans during the Second World War is like claiming there was no systematic bombing campaign against German cities.
Interesting that he used 800 words and ultimately agreed in full with the most important element of my comment while you dismantled the rest of his 800 words, fully supported my too lengthy comment (300 words) in only 200 words.
Succinctness is a treasure.
Is it your contention then that these six millionTM were all gassed as claimed by the holocaustTM historians? Have you studied how they claim this was done? Have you ever met a German, any German, who would devise such a method for disposing of unwanted people?
For me, what the Russians did in Katyn is eminently believable. What the allies did in Dresden is eminently believable. What the Nazis did in mass hangings eminently believable. What the Nazis did in slave labor camps also completely believable.
But cramming hundreds of people so tightly into a room that they’re lodged in upright, gassing that room, then removing bodies one at a time without completely ventilating the room or decontaminating the (now very deadly) cyanide coated bodies, carting each one out individually through a single doorway then up an elevator holding just one body into an incredibly expensive furnace that takes six hours (or more – each) to dispose of them, this seems to me all very … improbable. I’m only half German and I can think of many more efficient ways to dispose of people than this.
Have you ever tried cremating a body? Hopefully not a human, but say a pet or something? It takes a massive amount of fuel. Why do it one at a time? Why not in huge ovens that could accommodate maybe fifty or a hundred if you plan a mass cremation? Why waste all that energy during a war? The Russians just used pits like every other mass slaughter the world has ever known.
I’m unaware of anyone claiming the Nazis didn’t commit atrocities. But what atrocities had they committed back in 1933 when “Judea” declared war on them?
Ronald Reagan (who wanted to pretend that the SS should be retrospectively forgiven because, after all, they weren’t Communists and fought the Great Satan)
Where can I find more information about this? When I Google Reagan and SS I get a lot of Social Security hits. I’ve never heard of this before, so I don’t know where to look.
Reagan visited a German military cemetery in Germany which alongside many Wehrmacht soldiers also contained some Waffen-SS soldiers in it. The Waffen-SS fell in battle. At any rate most of the Waffen-SS soldiers weren’t mass murderers. Most of the members of the better Waffen-SS divisions were either impressionable teenagers (aged 17 or 18) talked into joining a military organization perceived as more elite than the Wehrmacht who then fought in the war the same way as other soldiers did. There were many ethnic German members from the east of the Reich borders (Poland, Yugoslavia, etc.), many of them conscripted into the Waffen-SS (or some other similar paramilitary organization), because the Wehrmacht had no jurisdiction over them anyway. Then there were other, non-German Waffen-SS members. I think it’s quite understandable why many Latvians and Estonians etc. wanted to join the Waffen-SS, one needn’t have been a Nazi for that. (And of course, being a Nazi meant totally different in 1941 then in 2015. In 2015 being a Nazi means being a Devil-worshipper, and nobody can understand why anyone would want to join the cult of Devil-worshippers, unless of course he is inherently evil. In 1941, needless to say, many people saw the Nazis as a preferable alternative to Communists or even mainstream Liberals and Conservatives, whose policies brought a lot of misery between 1914 and 1933 in Germany and elsewhere, and who opened the doors for Communists to slip in.)
You can find a description of the “controversy” here. (The term “controversy” here as elsewhere usually means something offending far left sensibilities.) A few excerpts:
“When questioned, Bitburg Mayor Theo Hallet pointed out, all German military cemeteries were likely to contain at least a few SS graves.”
“Decorations and memorials on the Waffen-SS graves were removed just prior to Reagan’s visit, and replaced right after.”
Then your German quotient is similar to mine, although my half German genes come from Austrians (25%) and Donauschwaben (25%), I’m not sure if you count either of them as full Germans. (My personal opinion is that Austrians are the people who managed to convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian but Hitler was a German.)
I’m not sure how much mainstream holocaust historiography you ever read.
First, the Germans started out the mass murder using good old proven methods. For example they crammed Jews into ghettos (finally in 1941), sent them very little food, and shot the ones trying to escape. (Smuggling was obviously impossible to prevent, but it wasn’t enough to prevent maybe a fifth of Jews in the large ghettoes from dying of diseases like typhus or of outright starvation in the crowded and hungry conditions of the ghettoes.) Then Germans captured huge swaths of Soviet territory with a lot of Jews living there, and started shooting them. This is quite an old and conventional method of killing people, and at least a third of the holocaust’s victims perished this old and predictable way. This was something that German shooters originally found psychologically difficult to cope with, many SS shooters committed suicide, and those who enjoyed the task (in any population some people are more psychopathic than others) were not necessarily considered to be desirable human material for the SS.
Second, the Germans had been experimenting with gassings since 1939. It must be noted that it was originally invented in the USSR, so there’s nothing uniquely German evil about it. It’s not even a particularly evil or cruel way of killing someone, certainly not more cruel than the then also novel electric chair, although I would personally prefer being shot in the back of the neck or beheaded by a guillotine (an earlier invention). The gas van is just an improvised invention to execute people without injuring the bodies, because they were originally used to kill the mentally ill in Germany. The Action T4 was actually run mostly by doctors and not by policemen or soldiers or paramilitaries, and the doctors had neither the stomach nor the expertise needed for mass shootings. They also needed to return the bodies of the patients to the families, so it was best if they found a method that didn’t cause any visually noticeable sign of murder on them.
Third, the SS leadership and Himmler were searching for more effective methods of killing people, and one of the reasons for that was that Himmler personally didn’t have the stomach to watch many people being shot: he fainted on his first occasion of watching 500 people being shot into a mass grave. Well, obviously he wasn’t a psychopath, and probably had to constantly think of his final goal of racial utopia to avoid thinking of the millions of corpses he was producing to achieve said utopia. Gas vans seemed to be less personal than mass shootings.
An interesting discussion of German mass shootings is in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, where he discusses mass shootings, and how they were often outsourced to Ukrainian or Baltic militias (who in turn needed to be given vast quantities of vodka). Still, eventually most people get used to mass murder, just like to any other unpleasant job, like cleaning toilets.
Now once the German leadership found the gas vans, and started utilizing them for mass murder, they constantly worked to improve this method, Auschwitz being a still imperfect improvement over the original gas van method.
I’m not an expert of crematoria, but it is well known that crematoria were probably the weakest part of the Auschwitz death camp, often breaking down. They also often dug mass graves, which were later excavated and the bodies burned, or just burnt the bodies in the open. (Mass graves and/or open burnings were the preferred method in I think all of the other death camps.)
I don’t quite understand what is exactly unbelievable in this story. There is no exceptional or unnecessary cruelty (Nazi Germans rather seem to be less cruel and less psychopathic than some other mass murderers), and even the method doesn’t seem to be exceedingly awkward, since gas vans were used in the USSR in the 1930s and gas chambers in the US since the 1920s.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know cyanide is mostly lethal through inhaling and not by touching the body of someone who died of cyanide poisoning.
I forgot to reply to that at the time.
Hitler also made no secret of his desire to rid Europe of Jews, and he also made no secret that in the event of a second world war, the result would be the destruction of European Jewry.
So yes, neither Adolf Hitler nor Ben Gurion made a secret of their desire to get rid of their respective undesirable ethnicities, but they still didn’t sign any order or orders calling for mass murder or mass expulsions, they left it to subordinates. Benny Morris wrote at length about how Ben Gurion consciously avoided government meetings where the topic would be the expulsion of Palestinians and how he allowed his subordinates and even his Zhabotinsky follower allies to do the dirty work for him.
I fail to see how that’s different from Hitler’s behavior.
Source: http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/MMG/MMG.asp?id=1141&tid=249
Apples and oranges.
An American gas chamber is a fair sized room able to hold one condemned and allow several people to move about freely to restrain the condemned, evacuate and ventilate the room, then re-enter to dispose of the body and remove trace poison from fixtures and furnishings while wearing protective gear.
The alleged German gas chambers look exactly like a shower room with no special gas-tight gasketing or windows. The condemned were allegedly packed so tightly into these rooms that one could not kneel or squat. They were allegedly wedged in upright and standing after death. Obviously removal would require a great deal of contact with the poison and since doors were just regular side hinged type, no mechanical removal was possible. Also note doors swung inward – rather difficult when the room is tightly packed with corpses. At Auschwicz, the alleged chambers were on a lower level from which the corpses had to be removed one at a time through a dumbwaiter then on to the cremation ovens where they could be burned one at a time. Again, this is fantastically inefficient in mechanics, time, and energy. And that’s without considering that no actual gas chamber is claimed to exist but rather reproductions.
I don’t dispute that many many Jews were killed. But typhoid, hunger, and bullets were far more likely to be the culprits than the alleged gas chambers. And this is what I find objectionable. What makes the dead Jews more dead than the dead Gypsies, dead mental defectives, or dead anyone else? Why fabricate a fantastical story about an elaborate means of execution and then claim your dead are better than anyone else’s dead? And why then find millions of “survivors” who are as numerous as the original population before the “holocaust” lining up to collect payouts twenty or thirty years later?
Wow, “Strengthening the Jewish presence in Jerusalem” sounds like a very nice way of saying “ethnic cleansing.”
“We salute the Zionist action in Jerusalem of those involved. Strengthening the Jewish presence in Jerusalem is a challenge that we all face and with this act of settlement We salute the Zionist action in Jerusalem of those involved. Strengthening the Jewish presence in Jerusalem is a challenge that we all face and with this act of settlement you are raising our stature. . “
“with this act of settlement you are raising our stature. “
Look at the total dishonesty. This is why young Western Jews are leaving Judaism. Who with an ounce of integrity can stomach that crap?
The Zionists call them “self hating Jews” – nice people these Zionist Jews.
Some dozens of Jews were killed in April 1945 in Allied bombing of the Dora Nordhausen labor camp, where V1s and jet fighters were being manufactured.
The Allies overran the camp a few days later, spread out the bodies of their victims, and captioned the photos so as to say that “the Nazis” had killed them.
In a way, you could say they did. In a similar way, you could argue that the entire Allied onslaught on Germany CAUSED the Holocaust.
Nah. I think they’re just ZIONIST-hating Jews.
The Zionists, in turn arrogate (all) Jewishness to themselves.
Ultimately, they might end up with it, too. Serve ’em right.
The fumes from burning bodies loaded with cyanide would have killed everyone in the Nazi work camps.
Not a single body has ever been found in a Nazi work camp that died from cyanide poisoning.
[“Sock-puppetry”—the use of multiple handles to conceal identity—is not permitted here. Pick a single handle and use it consistently or be prepared to see all your future comments summarily trashed. The sole exception is that commenters may also freely use “Anonymous” or “Anon” as well.]
In the same way as US politics, Israel has a political left and right.
Not coincidentally, the ideology of the US and Israeli left is reformed-secular Judaism.
Not coincidentally again, the ideology of the US and Israeli right is conservative Judaism.
Changing circumstances and voter fickleness in each nation determine whether reformed Judaism (Democrat) or conservative Judaism (Republican) is in power.
The common thread of both left and right is the Jewish national victim cult scheme labeled diversity or multiculturalism or pluralism.
elie wieseltier? truth?
what truth, please?
😉
I’m no expert, and of course don’t know the relevant concentration data, nor have any expertise in how to calculate those.
But I’m sure that a person killed by cyanide is only moderately poisonous through the skin, because he cannot inhale much more than the deadly dose (he’ll die after having inhaled the deadly dose, after which breathing stops so no further inhaling can occur), and the deadly cyanide is probably not concentrated in the skin, but instead is spread throughout the body. In other words, you won’t die from touching a person freshly poisoned by cyanide, even if small quantities of cyanide might get into your body. Things like apricot kernels also contain cyanide, so probably cyanide below a certain threshold has no negative health effects whatsoever. In any event, SS officers probably didn’t care much about any long term health effects on Sonderkommando members, who were also Jewish.
You didn’t answer my point about the Soviet Russian gas van, which was used before the German gas vans. Do you also doubt the existence of the Soviet Russian gas vans? (I’ve already provided a Wikipedia link in my previous comment.) Also, do you also doubt the existence of the euthanasia program against inhabitants of insane asylums in Germany? Do you doubt that they were operated by medical personnel (who had neither the stomachs nor the soldiers required to kill by the more conventional method of firing squads), and who also got into trouble when occasionally tried to shoot the insane, and the relatives found a bullet among the ashes of the deceased? Do you doubt that as a solution they used gas vans?
Do you doubt the Germans (including Himmler) actually didn’t have the stomach to shoot so many civilians? Why? Why would standard holocaust historiography invent such facts about Himmler that he didn’t like people being shot? Why would they invent such facts about other Nazi murderers that they didn’t like the ‘job’ of killing civilians?
According to standard holocaust historiography, the Auschwitz gas chambers (around which your whole argument is run) were only the latest development in a long line of evolution, and actually only a minority of holocaust victims were killed that way.
Do you doubt the other stages? Do you doubt that the Germans only started systematic mass shootings of Jews in the summer of 1941? That it originally (in June and July of 1941) only targeted adult Jewish males (not even all of them) in the areas captured from the USSR, and that it only extended to women, children, and the elderly after around August 1941? That they slowly started experimenting with other methods (mostly gas vans) because the mass shootings were difficult to stomach for the soldiers and their commanders alike? And that they started using stationary gas chambers (far simpler, using exhaust fumes instead of cyanide) in camps like Treblinka only in 1942? I mean, do you also doubt the earlier stages of the evolution? Or do you think those are lies, too?
Where is the point, where it starts to become implausible to you, and why? Your arguments so far can only be used against the existence of gas chambers in the Auschwitz death camps, but probably less than 20% of the victims were killed in Auschwitz. What about the exhaust fume gas chambers in Treblinka or the gas vans in Kulmhof? What about the mass shootings?
Not a single body has ever been discovered that was killed by cyanide poisoning in a Nazi work camp.
Think about that fact.
Think about the fact that burning/cremating bodies loaded with cyanide would have created fumes that would have killed everyone in a Nazi work camps.
Think about the supposed 6 million number, a number that was recycled BS from old World War 1 propaganda.
I know that doesn’t mean anything to you, but I know personally a guy (just a distant acquaintance) who is a historian, and who mostly studies the Hungarian Regent Admiral Horthy. He uncovered a report by the Hungarian military intelligence about the background of the German demands regarding Hungarian Jews. (There were roughly 800,000 of them, if you include half-Jews and baptized Jews as well.) The report (dated 1943) states that the Hungarian Jewish community is the ‘largest one in Europe’, which begs the question, what had happened to the Polish Jews, of whom there were well over 3,000,000 before the war, roughly 2,000,000 of whom lived in the General Government. If they were still there, they would have been the largest Jewish community, wouldn’t they?
Now, of course, this document could be a forgery. But it just shows the extent to which we have overwhelming evidence to prove the fact that the Germans were systematically exterminating Jews in much of Europe. The statement that no such extermination program existed at all is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence (e.g. positing the existence of a vast conspiracy of historians, probably including my distant acquaintance), whereas the claim that Jews were killed by cyanide poisoning in Auschwitz is a very ordinary statement in light of the overwhelming evidence that there was a systematic extermination program underway at the time. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, whereas for ordinary claims ordinary evidence suffices.
Actually, I personally find Raul Hilberg’s number the most reliable, and it’s just 5,100,000 (including starvation deaths), although most historians produce somewhat higher estimates (which I personally tend to find less reliable, but of course who knows). Almost all estimates are below 6,000,000, usually in the range of 5.1-5.9 million, quite often 5.5 million plus-minus something.
Ok, then please show everyone the “overwhelming evidence”.
Anecdotes and hysteria and Nuremburg show trial crap and worthless historians are not objective evidence.
Show me verifiable forensic science evidence.
The fact that there is untold numbers of healthy holocausted Jews running around the US and the world in their 90’s of age seems to refute your claims of extermination.
The 6 million number is literally recycled World War 1 boloney.
That’s a verifiable FACT.
The fact that holocausters promote jail time for dissidents is extremely damning for your unsubstantiated claims.
You seem to not know that many people disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, and your treasured historians rely on BS soviet claims.
The fact that Jewish people have used the holocaust ruse to justify their current atrocities in the Mideast is further damning.
I rely on verifiable facts and rational thought, not hysteria.
The so-called eye witnesses to the gassings could not even get the colour of the gassed bodies correct.
The claimed colours vary from ‘normal’ to ‘bluish-green’.
Consult a book on forensics to discover what colour the bodies display when death was caused by hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon) or carbon monoxide poisonings.
I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up: The colour of bodies thus poisoned varies from pink to cherry red.
Not a single “witness” ever got this right.
To me this is one of the most powerful reasons to doubt the claims of the holocaust. Mind you, there are numerous other reasons to doubt this fable.
HdC
See the affidavit of Rudolf Höss, commmandant of Auschwitz from April 1946. He explicitly describes with bodies as “pink with green spots.”
It will never cease to amaze me the sheer number of sources of which you people are ignorant.
Rudolf Hoess was tortured when he wrote his supposed confession in English, no less, a language he could not speak. Consequently his “confession” is not a statement that can be relied upon. It is worthwhile mentioning that Hoess also included the names of concentration camps in his “confession” that did not exist.
For more on this sort of thing research a little on “London Cage”.
The eye witnesses I’m referring to are those who wrote books, make presentations in high schools, accuse others of horrors unproven, and generally profit by propagating Greuelpropaganda.
HdC
All nonsense. See:
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hoess-rudolf/hoess-faq.shtml
Way to move those goalposts.
Read what 2 judges of the US supreme court had to say about the Nuernberg trials. Kangeroo court and Lynching Party were the language they used.
They also verified that various accused had been tortured, with their testicles crushed irreparably.
The British torturers even bragged in a book about their torturing activities.
Nitzkor assertions defy logic and uses verbosity to hide behind.
In jurisprudence it is well understood that evidence obtained under duress is not reliable and cannot be considered evidence. Hence the person forced to confess is not a witness in the definition of the word. This has nothing to do with moving goal posts.
HdC
Really? You’re aware that the chief prosecutor f0r the United States was Robert Jackson, right? Know what his job was?
No, they didn’t. You’re going to need to begin proving your assertions.
That said, on the basis of what you’re writing, I suspect you are mistaking a judge referring to the specific case of the Malmedy perpetrators vs. the SCOTUS.
And Höss was in U.S. custody when he swore his affidavit.
Please indicate a single instance of defied logic.
If you ask for a “single person” to refer to the correct color of gassing victims and I give one, and then you say that you weren’t referring to that type of person, that’s moving the goalposts.
You don’t have to take my word for my assertions; a modicum of googling would have disclosed the thoughts of:
Harlan Fiske Stone, William O. Douglas, Edward Leroy Van Van Roden, Charles H Wennerstrum.
You can also read what John F. Kennedy had to say about IMT at Nuremberg
HdC
Elie Wiesel is a fraud….He was not in Auschwitz nor in Buchenwald…..There WAS a Lazar Wiesel who was in Auschwitz and subsequently in Buchenwald. It is Lazar Wiesel who wrote “Night” in Hungarian. Elie Wiesel neither speaks Hungarian NOR Yiddish….He speaks English with a French accent. And indeed, he has no tattoo
I have read several other books that seemed more accurate to me, such as”The Theory and Practice of Hell.” I have always wondered why Wiesel’s version seemed tame and less horrendous than the other first hand survivor accounts.
Before one accepts the testimony of any witness, it is best to ask, and answer the question: “Who benefits.”
The book you refer to was written just after the WWII ceasefire at the behest of the US military.
Towards the end of the war the US and British air force bombed and shot at everything that moved, including children at play.
Consequently supplies for concentration camps were severely curtailed and not very high in the order of priorities.
To then blame the Germans for failing to supply necessities to the camps is the height of hypocrisy. HdC
Since I read Rabbi Michael Lerner’s views of the Holohoaxer Elie Wiesel, I never wasted my time listening to his whining for Israel, Organized Jewry and Holocaust.
“Elie Wiesel, the Master propagandist – Any political movement would give its eye teeth to have him on its side,” Tikun Olam magazine.
In an interview with Israeli daily Ha’aretz’s Ofer Aderet, published on November 2, 2012 Weisel proposed that Israeli Mossad should kidnap Iran’s President Ahmadinejad as it kidnapped the famous Zionist Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann.
“For the past three years, I have been waging a struggle against Ahmadinejad around the world, demanding that he be arrested and placed on trial as was done to Eichmann. He should be charged with a desire to commit genocide. I hope the Mossad, which caught a man like Eichmann, will be able to catch him and get him tried in an international court. Someone like him must not be allowed to sleep quietly,” whined Wiesel.
Elie Wiesel had been called “Liar” and “Fraud” by two of his fellow Jews, Dr. Norman Finkelstein and Dr. Noam Chomsky ….
https://rehmat1.com/2012/11/06/elie-wiesel-mossad-should-kidnap-ahmadinejad/
dead
2 Jul 2016
RIH
http://bnonews.com/news/index.php/news/id4732
Yup, he’s here. 😀
When I was a boy in the fifties, the figure bandied about was eight million. I dare say that referred to someone’s estimate of those, both Jewish and gentile, murdered in the camps, both extermination camps and concentration camps, and elsewhere. The distinction of type of camp was unknown to me as a boy but the horror was not; my father saw Belsen and could bring himself to talk about it only once.
In the 1930s, when Stalin established an autonomous Jewish state in Russia – the total Jewish population in Europe was less than nine million. However, according to new Jewish religion (Holocaust) six million of them were killed by Nazis while TWO MILLION escaped to Palestine to establish a “Jewish state”.
The Holocaust ESTIMATE has long been lowered to 2.5 million as posted at the Auschwitz Holocaust Museum.
David Cole, a Zionist Jew, claimed last year at TAKI’s Magazine: “Holocaust is based on fakes, frauds, and forgeries.”
https://rehmat1.com/2015/02/19/david-cole-holocaust-is-based-on-fakes-frauds-and-forgeries/
Please read my comment #57, especially the last three (short) paragraphs. HdC
This user has made this claim several times in the comments here – that the 5.1 million figure is more realistic. The original poster may very well never see this post, but I hope to at least educate the few that may have stumbled upon his claim and taken it seriously.
Here’s the thing: this figure was calculated with the “cold war” numbers, which have since been heavily revised.
Most notably, the Auschwitz death toll went from 4 million “mostly Jews” to 1.1 to 1.5 million “mostly Jews” (the current plaque uses the higher number). Majdanek and Dachau, which always had much smaller numbers than Auschwitz, went through similarly drastic reductions.
To be fair though, even these numbers may very well be grossly inaccurate – the people behind these figures have never to my knowledge given a very clear explanation on how they got them. It seems that they simply agreed that the Soviet figures were way too high, the product of propaganda and victor’s justice, and adjusted them to what they felt was more realistic.
And yet…the six million claim that the media has pounded into our heads did not change with them. Of course, if someone like reiner tor wants to defend the original figures as accurate, I would be interested in hearing their argument, but it will be a tough sell.
Considering the absolute ridiculousness of the gas chambers claim, and the fact that all three independent chemical analyses of the alleged gas chambers have shown that they could not be what they are claimed to be, I’m more inclined to believe that the toll is much less than even the revised figures. The Red Cross’s original calculation, in the few hundred thousands, seems much more likely to me.
No, read the frigging book of Raul Hilberg, his 5.1 million number was based on roughly 1 million Jews killed in Auschwitz. Moreover, there are two ways to calculate the number killed, first you can count the losses of the populations (or gains, if people were fleeing one country and settling another), and add the numbers, or you can count the places and methods of killing (e.g. 1M in Auschwitz, 800k in Treblinka, 1.5M by Einsatzgruppen in the East, etc.). In the case of Hilberg, he does both calculations, and the numbers roughly match.
It doesn’t mean his numbers are perfect, or that it’s impossible to criticize them, but your criticism is uninformed. The 4 million number was used in communist propaganda as the number of “Jews and communists” killed there, and serious historians in the West never took the number seriously. Moreover, it was also a case of not knowing where the killing took place: for example a lot of Greek Jews were deported to death camps in Poland, and because Auschwitz was the most well-known of these, it was often assumed they were killed in Auschwitz. It turned out, many of them were transported to Treblinka. Auschwitz was also a huge prisoner hub, a lot of people arrived there, only to be transported into other camps later on. For example most Hungarian Jews were transported there, and very few came back, but not all that were killed were killed there, since a lot were taken to other camps from there. These all had the effects of inflating the Auschwitz numbers without affecting the overall number.
Very eloquently put, I think?
But there is a great big fly in your ointment: Where is the forensic, pathological, physical, and other scientific evidence to support your assertions?
Yes I know and read much of the so-called eye witness testimony of the “survivors”, all of which is treated as gospel truth by the media and court historians.
Recall though, that in a real court of law eye witness testimony is worthless unless supported by physical evidence, according to the state attorney who investigated the shooting of the so-called teenager in Ferguson.
The “big H” eye witnesses couldn’t even get the colour of the corpses right, nor correctly point out the locations of any mass graves with claimed tens of thousands of buried bodies, or the ashes of hundreds of thousands of cremated victims.
Btw, where did all the fuel come from for all those cremations, to say nothing of the logistics required to procure same? HdC
Speaking of number revision, I find this info interesting. Note the source and the year.
The Brits , in their usual fashion, imposed a starvation blockade on Germany as well.
Then there’s this:
Here is the Really interesting part:
In 2005 or so the Israeli media proclaimed that 1,000,000 million big H survivors were still alive. Some actuarial calculation determined that this survivor rate means that 3.2 million Jews were alive in Europe at the end of WWII! HdC
I tried to press the “Agree” button but it wouldn’t let me…can only do it once per hour. I wasted it on another, inferior comment.
Thank you, Stan, for studying the truth; knowing it; and disseminating it.
The holocaust mythology is collapsing. The lies of the supposed “survivors” have been exposed as the complete fabrications that they are…some of them are so over-the-top ridiculous that one can only laugh at their absurdity! I’ve seen many videos demonstrating the impossibility of the claims made by Jews, but I haven’t read any books yet…I have the following books as PDF files:
Dissecting the Holocuast by Germar Rudolf
The Leuchter Report: End of a Myth by Fred Leuchter
The Hoax of The Twentieth Century by Arthur Butz
I plan on buying a book entitled “Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth and Reality” by Nicholas Kollerstrom.
Can you recommend any other titles? How about David Irving? I’ve seen some videos of his lectures but I’m unsure which of his works to focus on. My problem is time…I don’t have enough of it! So, I’d like to keep my studies on the holocaust mythology to include a maximum of 5 volumes. Any must have books in your mind?
Well, it would be a great idea for there to be held “A Symposium on the Holocaust,” a meeting for scholars and interested parties to hold discussion groups and for researchers to present new relevant information or have question and answer sessions. Why can’t we do that? The answer is IT’S PUNISHABLE BY JAIL TIME. Why? Don’t ask me why something that has had so much world influence should be off-limits to public discussion. Thomas Jefferson once said “There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
Indeed.
Three books I read recently and think worthwhile:
1) Churchill and Hitler, the Unnecessary War.
2) The Myth of German Culpability.
3) The Pity of War.
The latter deals mostly with WWI and what might have been had Germany won. #1 and #2 are definitely required reading on WWII. HdC
P.S.: Another book I have heard about but not yet read: Witness to History by Michael Walsh. This book is available on-line I believe.
…the “gas vans” are another hoax. Anyone with engineering knowledge KNOWS that diesel exhaust contains almost NO carbon monoxide…
Perhaps then they used gasoline engines? Exhaust fumes have dangerously high carbon monoxide levels.
But again, this was at first a Soviet communist invention of mass murder, not a Nazi invention, and not impossible that the idea came from the USSR, because the Nazis started to use it when they were cozying up to the commies after the Stalin-Hitler Pact in August 1939.
Cuz its fake?
Six million Jews wiped out. Sad.
Can you provide any scientific, technical, or forensic evidence to back up your assertion repeated ad infinitum from MSM, Hollywood, and comic books?
Thought not.
According to a United States attorney in Ferguson: “Eye witness testimony is worthless without supporting physical evidence.” HdC
It’s patently obvious to anyone studying the issue of “holocaust-denial” that laws against holocaust denial never actually stop there. They eventually encompass outlawing all kinds of opinions as “hate speech”, such as
– criticizing or saying any bad things about Jews (whether true or not)
– criticizing or saying any bad things about any nonwhite races (whether true or not)
– criticizing or saying any bad things about Islam, a religion (whether true or not)
– criticizing or saying any bad things about any religion other than Christianity (whether true or not)
– criticizing or saying any bad things about homosexuals (whether true or not)
– criticizing or saying any bad things about women (whether true or not)
– criticizing or saying any bad things about transsexuals or people with somewhat similar (LGTBQ…) mental illnesses (whether true or not)
The list goes on and on. Holocaust denial is a Trojan horse to introduce all these things.
In other words, the existence of holocaust denial laws is not a very strong argument against the veracity of the official holocaust story. (Which, if you actually read some specialist books about it, is actually way more nuanced than usually acknowledged – for example, according to the official account, the Germans started gassing Jews because they couldn’t stomach shooting so many people, especially women and children. If it’s a lie, why lie in a way that makes the Germans actually look better than Hutu mass murderers?)
Holocaust denial laws are of course monstrosities that need to be abolished, not only because they penalize opinions (even if – in my view – foolish opinions), but also because they are then expanded into those complex hate speech laws.
Holocaust laws not only forbid (under penalty of imprisonment!) differing opinions, they also forbid the public examination of scientific facts.
The so-called Offenkundigkeit (publicly accepted knowledge) of the courts regarding Holocaust “knowledge” prevails over ANY scientific facts offered in defense.
Hence my assertion that Germany is a judicial and political cess pool.
You seem to be sold on the veracity of Holocaustianity; can you offer ANY scientific facts that support your beliefs, along with the references? Hdc
what the Germans did – the creation of work camps, ghettos, and systematic ethnic cleansing of the Jews in which a million or 2 died as a result (especially from disease and malnutrition) although there were probably several hundred thousand shot during the war in captured Soviet territories. Slave labor is abhorrent on its own. There was no need to invent showers that were gas chambers. As far as the death vans go, there is no way millions were killed with them, thousands maybe if they were used extensively at all. I have read Primo Levi on deaths outright by the Germans that he witnessed himself while at Aushwitz. There were 13 hangings. the gas chamber deaths were hearsay. I do believe him when he says of the 90 or so Italian Jews from his area that were sent to the camps only a few others returned to his Italian area after the war. So the mortality rate was very high – It is quite likely that some survivors wouldn’t have returned and that some would have died soon after the war was over. One thing that sounds outright impossible to me is the burning of millions of bodies from Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmo, Majdanek, and Belzec. Some of them supposedly dug up after initially burying them – all without leaving forensically acknowledged remains like those validated at the Soviet massacre at Katyn. The Babi Yar and Majdanek massacres seem false to me also. It has been pretty well proven that there were no human gas chambers at Majdanek. Why aren’t the, one figure says, 10 million Polish who died in German camps survivors or families getting benefits like the Jewish survivors. I read a book by the wife of the son of Martin Buber who was in both Russian and German prison camps – until the end of the war the Russian ones were worse in her opinion. Also at the end of the war – prisoners from her camp who were useless or very sick were sent to another camp to die -newly created for them – they weren’t outright killed – just given even poorer treatment. One must remember that Anne Frank although sent to Auschwitz didn’t die there – she died of disease at another camp in Germany. Research shows the Nuremberg trials were jokes as far as evidence and justice is concerned. Just about all of the soviet accusations of German death camps at the end of the war have been shown to be exaggerations or outright lies. As have much of the survivors testimony.
Just another proof of being a victim does not make you automatically moral.
I am disgusted by Wiesel’s lack of appreciation of real heros who actually saved him, and would probably also fight (Marek Edelman comes to one’s mind) for saving the palestinians that the Israelis are butchering. Apparently, it is OK for him if the victims are lowly Palestinians
What is really interesting is that in the original book Night nothing was said about any gas chambers. An oversight perhaps??? HdC
I read this long ago so I’m going from memory, but the article is really a whitewash of the book, finding minor inconsistencies that don’t amount to much.
In fact the book is a great text for holocaust deniers. First, it is over the top absurd, and gets to it right at the start, on page 6 where we read …
‘Babies were thrown in the air and the machine gunners used them as targets’
This is absurd for several reasons, physical impossibility being one, but of course with the holocaust impossibility precludes nothing.
But that is just a random lie. More significant are some of the truths in the book. Wiesel was a prisoner at Auschwitz when the Nazis were killing 10,000 Jews per day in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms (24,000 in one day in Aug. 44 according to Primo Levi). But Wiesel never mentions gas chambers, and reports taking a shower in six separate places in the book, the first time for the express purpose of disinfection.
But most significant is the central lie, the night of the title refers to the night Wiesel arrived at Auschwitz to witness the Nazis killing Jews. How did they do it according to Wiesel? By tossing them alive into two burning pits, one for children, one for adults. This too is physically impossible, as anyone tossed into a burning pit would climb out, and it contradicts the standard narrative.
Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize for his absurd lies, he became the first director of the US Holocaust Museum.
Who knew it did turn out to be your kind of thing 🙂 Jokes aside appreciate the well researched well-flowing article. Articles like this are what is missing in contemporary journalism
Keith says:
“Without the gas chambers, the NAZIS were totally swell”.
With the gas chambers….. Zionist ethnic cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians
is justified and supported. With this story, the Jews are totally swell.
Andrew …. think this through carefully. Who benefits from the Gas Chamber story?
What happens to people who denie the gas chamber story?
Why is the gas chamber story relevant to today. ” Guilt Support” for Zionism and Israel.
This is why we have a Zio History Channel and Oscar nominated movies. Keep the guilt going into the next generation. Some day in the distant future, the Gas Chamber story will be ancient history. The Zionists better achieve a Greater Israel before the guilt wears off. Maybe WW 3, like the two previous World Wars, will facilitate the Greater Israel Plan. Are the Jewish Zionists Neo Cons pushing for WW3?
Please don’t claim Holocaust history is important because it has, and will prevent future Genocides. It may prevent another pogrom against Jews, but the Palestinians, and any of Israel’s enemies are fair game.
IS THIS WHY AMERICA MEN ARE FIGHTING AND DYING IN THE MIDDLE EAST?
Wake up America!
6 million lies. The jews even had to revise that number down. They even said the 5 million number for non-jews is also a lie. Does anyone see a pattern here?
Thanks for putting together some sober and thought-out explanations.
As stated, the fact that Wiesel may be a mountebank and a literary liar in no way detracts from the overwhelming broad and deep evidence for the reality of the Holocaust.
Similarly, it is obvious that reports relating to the Holocaust – a multi-year series of numerous Europe-wide initiatives involving millions of individuals – will inevitably contain some inaccuracies. This in no way detracts from the reality of the total picture. The fact that Columbus grossly underestimated the circumference of the earth does not detract from (and is in fact irrelevant to) the reality that he discovered an unknown continent.
It certainly seems that his work was mostly treated as fiction rather than fact by sophisticated contemporary observers.
Another – apparently overlooked – aspect seriously undermining Wiesel’s account is the fact that the alleged original version of his work (“And the World was Silent.”) was written – allegedly by him – in Yiddish and published in an abridged version in South America. Although Wiesel does seem to have spoken some Yiddish, Yiddish was NEVER considered a language suitable for any serious writing by educated Jews.
Rumanian is related to French and there is a long history of Rumanians studying in Paris (as Wiesel himself did), so Wiesel could certainly have written in French to reach a wider audience.
Similarly, Wiesel seems to have learned Hebrew from an early age and later wrote for an Israeli newspaper, so he would probably have been able to write his book in Hebrew.
Lastly, educated Jewish families in the former Austria-Hungary often spoke German at home (rather than the national languages or Yiddish). However, even if this was the case with Wiesel – who later married a woman from Austria – it is perhaps understandable that Wiesel – whatever his actual personal fate – felt disinclined to publish his first book in what may have been his native German.
I know someone who wrote an account of their time as an allied soldier in Europe in the final months of WWII.
It is a personal book, with wartime commentary and history coming second to this person’s life both in Europe and at home. This man’s relationships with his fellow soldiers and his girlfriend were the primary focus of the book.
This person sent a book to a Jewish man that he knew, who is the son of a world-famous Jewish man.
The Jewish man’s feedback was: “Good book, but where is your account of the suffering of the Jews”?
100% true story. If the author realized the gravity of the exchange with the Jewish man, he didn’t tell me. He relayed the anecdote without further commentary. I think that he was just a bit flabbergasted.
The most telling recent event is not the revision of the 6 million to 5 million, but the outright printed admission that the 10+ million number, which supposedly included gypsies and others, was a lie to increase empathy for the Jews.
The printed admission of this lie has not been repudiated nor retracted as far as I know
This number had been touted since at least the seventies, and presented as truth across Holocaust museums, in books, in movies, and in other forms of print since that time. It was unabashedly presented as truth and defended, as the six million is.
When the Trump administration only recognized a general loss during Holocaust Day, Jews flipped out and admitted that the 10 million is a lie so that, in the future, all recognition of suffering will be directed almost solely to Jews.
Though, I fail to see how an admission that the 10+ million number was a lie does not wholly impugn the other number and the event in general, given the barely suppressed raging doubt that surrounds it worldwide.
Anyone here ever hear of the stricture “Falsehood in one, falsehood in all”?
This is used in a court of law when a witness is caught in a lie and the questioning lawyer tries to get all that witness’ testimony stricken from the record.
Methinks it is a marvellous policy to follow! HdC
On October 19, 2017, Jennifer Listman, PhD (Yale University School of Medicine) claimed on her blog that in 1989, Elie Wiesel grabbed her ass during a Jewish charity event in New York.
“During a family photo Elie Wiesel’s right hand had reached my right ass cheek, which he squeezed. The photo was over, the photographer leaned back from crouching over his camera, the group separated, smiling at each other, and Elie Wiesel immediately RAN, disappearing straight into the crowd of over 1000 people who were nearly all standing up. Already gray-haired at that time, Wiesel’s agility impressed me as he fled the scene of the crime,” Ms. Listman said.
https://rehmat1.com/2017/10/23/jew-academic-when-elie-wiesel-grabbed-my-ass/
A holocaust, I tells ya!
I heard he had a heart on his left butt cheek.
@Andrew E. Mathis
You’re wrong about most of your accounts, despite your protestations and half-baked references. The following link, which provides an amazing expose, is a transcript of a court case involving a cross examination of Raul Hilberg who was engaged as a prosecution’s witness against a Holocaust revisionist: http://www.ihr.org/books/kulaszka/09hilberg.html
Professor Hilberg was someone I, for many years, reflexively and unquestioningly granted total credibility and academic respect. However, when confronted with deep, invasive questioning on the stand about his Holocaust methodology and its resultant conclusions, I was surprised to understand how the underpinnings of his research are precarious, subjective, and assumption riddled. Hilberg spent most of his time on the stand parring with his questioner, evading hard question, obfuscating and deflecting, and, in the end, offering very little assurance that he, the eminent authority on the subject, could offer either verifiable evidence or at the very least a convincing defense of the Holocaust as it is commonly understood in history.
Based on my reading of the court transcript, I had no choice but to revise my opinion of Mr. Hilberg to that of a man who likely started with a conclusion and sought to organize, interpret and fashion facts to support it. Worse still, reading the transcript shook my long held assumption, faith and unquestioned belief that the textbooks and talking-head “experts” spoke unvarnished truth from a place of total integrity and authority.
The transcript is long and expansive, covering the course of at least two days on the witness stand, but the end of the cross examination summarizes the situation succinctly and effectively:
What German sources do you have describing what happened [in the Holocaust]?, asked Griffiths.
“German documents pertaining to operations in the death camps are numerous, and they include various railway materials indicating the one-way traffic to these camps,” said Hilberg. “… In addition, there is correspondence pertaining to the construction of gas chambers. Furthermore – and again I speak of documentation — there is an extensive correspondence about the delivery of gas, sometimes labelled ‘materials for handling the Jewish problem’, and this is just a sample of the materials on which one relies on forming the total picture of what happened.”
There isn’t a single piece of concrete evidence a man of such intellectual stature as Raul Hilberg could produce aside from his assigning subjective context and evil doing around incomplete facts, fuzzy details and interpretive, unrelated items of documentation. Its not that the Holocaust is refuted per se, it’s that the Original Sin aspect of the gas chambers and ovens, which constitute the horrific figment in the minds of all society, are rendered illogical, unrealistic and suddenly highly questionable. No smoking gun is identified by Hilberg. No body is produced. Just the painstaking collection and connecting of shards of evidentiary pieces that might be assembled to come to different conclusions. That is no way to prove the legitimacy and veracity of the most evil systematic human genocide perpetrated in history. I’m convinced millions of innocents were killed in WWII through a variety of violent acts (including incidents of gassing or chemical asphyxiation), inhuman treatment, starvation and virulent disease, but humanity, truth and history (and the Jewish victims, above all) are owed a full accounting of what happened in the concentration camps.
You are indeed late to the party: The post to which you’re responding is more than two years old.
Unz is not really conducive to a proper debate. Go to RODOH and I’ll be debate you there. Let me know here what your handle there is.
Better yet, go to the CODOH website; much more civilized and no ad hominem attacks. HdC
Alas, I am permanently blocked from CODOH. But HdC, you can always debate me at RODOH too.
Nothing wrong with Unz, I like the commenting system here. I don’t know what commenter Late To The Party wishes, but it’d be better to keep the discussion going here. For example now the comment section ends with his unanswered allegations about Raul Hilberg being unable to provide evidence for the holocaust.
I’ve had a consistent problem w/my responses showing up beneath the wrong posts. That’s the key reason why I’m reluctant to debate here.
Hilberg pretty much wrote the book on the Holocaust as we currently understand it. His three-volume work, last updated in 2003, is still the text most scholars would recommend for the serious historian looking for a general overview.
“Late to the Party” indicates he’s read the transcript. I have no reason to believe he read the whole thing — he’s linked only to excerpts edited by a woman who was partial to Zündel. Moreover, that he was unsatisfied with Hilberg’s response, even as presented in the transcript, says only that he doesn’t understand how history works. On that topic, I’d suggest reading my “Treatise on Evidence,” authored pseudonymously, here:
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?t=9241&p=70301#p70301
Not a lot more to say unless “LTTP” decides he wants to respond.
Personally I cannot take anyone seriously who advocates, as does Hilberg, that the holocaust was organized without supporting documentation by means of a “German Mind Meld”, ie. a meeting of the minds.
Anyone with serious project management experience will appreciate the idiocy of such an assertion. HdC
Rather than quoting Hilberg directly — “meeting of the minds” — why not put in your own words your description of how Hilberg believed the Holocaust happened.
I mean, you’ve read Hilberg, right?
Thanks, that was interesting.
Gern geschehen!
I gotta say, this is a little disappointing. It’s almost like you guys would rather fling insults than have a real debate…
@hdc
“…Rather than quoting Hilberg directly — “meeting of the minds”…”
Methinks this quote succinctly sums up the issue of the Holocaust claims. Via transference I would say, since there are no forensic nor scientific facts to substantiate any such assertions of Holocaustiany.
Here is another gem, straight from the Canadian High Priest of Holocaustianity: “For 99% of what we know of the Holocaust, no proof exists.” Straight from the Toronto Globe and Mail I believe.
I wrote in the commentary section at that time that I would like to see the evidence for the remaining 1% but, as is usual in this type of debate, nothing was offered in response.
You know, I’d asked you earlier whether you’ve actually read Hilberg. It would be helpful for you to answer that question, even indirectly.
So perhaps you could state, in your own words, what the central thesis of Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews is.
I’m just going to conclude you haven’t read Hilberg. Therefore, what you think about his work is entirely irrelevant.
Correct me if I am wrong but, is not the central thesis of Hilberg’s tome exactly what its title proclaims?
Unless of course the book was meant as a work of fiction, in which case any title that captures the potential customer’s eye and interest would suffice.
It would seem you don’t know the difference between a topic and a thesis.
No surprise there, I guess, nor that, like most “revisionists,” you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re criticizing.
C’mon, friend. Can’t you please make this interesting for me?
If you wanted to take down the standard history of the holocaust, you’d first need to read what it contains. That’s how the study of history has always worked. Many things have changed, and indeed, it’s possible things are yet to change about our understanding of past events, including the holocaust.
Whenever any previous belief was challenged, it was done by professionals who had read and understood the previous theses. So if the standard holocaust history is to be changed (by the way some details have already changed), it will be changed by people who have read the standard works and understood them and took issue with them.
What you are doing here debating an opinion you don’t even know is similar to how pigeons play chess – knocking the pieces over, crapping on the board, and then flying back to the flock to claim victory.
All I’m querying is the allegation of the German “meeting of the minds”, which is used to “explain” the absence of documentary evidence to support the holocaustian’s assertions.
And where one may find neutral court-proven forensic or other scientific evidence to support same claims.
Seems easy to me, and all I get is verbosity ad infinitum yet nary a direct answer. Not really surprising considering that the Canadian high priest of holocaustianity, van Pelt, is quoted in one Toronto newspaper that “for 99% of what we know of the Holocaust no evidence exists”.
Try that argument in a non-partial court.
Used by whom and where? I certainly never used that argument, nor did Hilberg.
Which claims? It’s very vague what you’re asking for. You need to ask concrete questions, if you expect concrete pieces of evidence.
Which Toronto newspaper? I haven’t found the quote with a simple online query, and I guess you have the source of your statement.
In any event, if van Pelt really said that, he probably misspoke. The statement sounds like an oxymoron, what we know does have evidence – or else we don’t know it.
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/742965--a-case-for-letting-nature-take-back-auschwitz
The forgoing URL worked a few years ago, but no longer. I even checked on the Toronto Star newspaper archive web site for the quotation but, alas, it was not forthcoming. Not surprising, really.
Van Pelt misspoke??? He is the Canadian high priest after all, and he wouldn’t even furnish the evidence for 1% of the “knowledge”.
As for the rest of the stuff, you would need to read the transcripts of the Zuendel trials in Toronto, and the subsequent changes that were made in later editions of Destruction of European Jews. The “meeting of the minds” is from that later edition.
This is the last of my comments on this topic unless someone can point me towards verified forensic or other scientific evidence. HdC
Actually the URL works for me. I will reply later at length when I have time.
This point has already been exhaustively debated here:
https://www.unz.com/ldinh/flagless-germany/#comment-1192807
Including personal links to RJvP, etc.
Our friend HDC is not the sharpest tool in the shed, apparently.
You’re running true to form… Several times now I have asked for verified forensic and other scientific evidence to support your assertions.
Since you are unable to do so you are forced to fall back onto the old stand-by so favoured by the holocaustians: Ad hominem attacks.
It would be so easy for you and your co-claimants to simply furnish the physical evidence to substantite your assertions.
But then, even your high priest of holocaustianity cannot supply such evidence in his tome of what? About 1700 pages of jumbled verbiosity with not a single, solitary, physical, verified fact in that mountain of wasted ink and paper.
“Ninety-nine per cent of what we know we do not actually have the physical evidence to prove . . . it has become part of our inherited knowledge.”
Try and take that into an impartial court as evidence of, say, a murder.
If you have a lawyer friend run this by him and see what he says.
Do you think that’s what the prosecutors brought into court in the dozens of trials conducted over decades in Germany?
Before dismissing Hilberg’s book, you should, like, read it.
I didn’t write anything in my comment, except that your URL worked for me and that I’ll answer once I have more time. The rest was just quoting from van Pelt, and the formatting somehow lost the italics for the second paragraph of the quote.
There is no physical evidence that 10 million people starved to death in the USSR. Even less physical evidence of the fact that they were starved to death more or less intentionally. You cannot demand much physical evidence, because you cannot really tell why and how people died eighty years ago. The dead are buried next to other dead people, it’d be virtually impossible to exhume all the graves and unambiguously assign to each one of them the cause of death as “starved to death by the Bolsheviks.” Yet we accept what has been uncovered by historians combing through the archives.
Which is kind of the point of van Pelt.
reiner Tor, my apologies but my post #118 was meant for Andrew and his post #117.
You want to talk evidence? Fine. Go over to RODOH and we can debate it there. Here there’s too much limitation on posts in terms of waiting time, and CODOH is off limits.
And I’ve responded. C’mon, big guy. This is your big chance to make a name for yourself. What are you waiting for?
What am I waiting for???
Simply the FREAKING forensic or other scientific evidence that backs up the claims of holocaustians, that’s what.
And since this is not forthcoming, I believe I’ve won that round.
Next question: 6 million bodies would form a row 100Km long when stacked 10 bodies wide and 10 bodies high and aligned end to end.
Please provide the evidence, acceptable to an impartial USA criminal court, of the supply of coal, coke, wood, or other energy source, to fully cremate 6 million human bodies.
Not so fast, hot rod.
First, maybe you could define what you mean when you say “forensic.” What do include among forensic evidence? What don’t you?
Second, in terms of scientific evidence, you’d have to demonstrate to me that you’re in any position to judge the value of a scientific argument — an afternoon watching YouTube videos doesn’t count.
Finally, you’re going to have to go case by case. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to try to prove a combination of dozens or hundreds of events over a four year period in one fell swoop, either historically or juridically.
Ok, sure. Is there a question in there?
Your first problem is going to be that number. Not all were cremated and not all were disposed of in the same way. More importantly, I have no reason at this point to believe that you’re qualified to judge the evidence or would accept it if you could. I.e., your own impartiality is what’s in question here. Moreover, I’m unsure why the US criminal standard of evidence is important here. Historians don’t use it. Nor for that matter do a lot of US courts, which both routinely convict clearly innocent people and also acquit people who are clearly guilty. So if you want that standard, you’ll need to argue convincingly for why it’s appropriate.
Finally, again, RODOH is a better forum for this so please consider taking this there.
There is so much wrong with your narrative that I am not going to bother, but will stick to the salient point here.
“…Not all were cremated and not all were disposed of in the same way…”
Fair enough. Would you care to estimate the percentage that was cremated, and the percentage that was not?
That last percentage, of course, raises the question as to what happened to all those corpses. Were they buried??? If so, were? Forensic evidence?
As to my qualifications, I’m a Professional Engineer, mechanical discipline, have earned my livelihood using numbers for over 40 years now. And no one ever came to grief or was sued because of my work.
First of all, your wingeing about what’s wrong with my narrative neither refutes that narrative nor even confirms that you actually know what that narrative is. As we’ve already seen, your grasp of Hilberg’s narrative is tenuous at best.
Second, I think it’s probably a fair estimate that half of roughly 5.5 million victims were created, so 2.75 million as a very rough estimate. I’m not sure what you’re driving at here. It’s not like, in any case, you’d be piling up the bodies and stretching them in a straight line from Lodz to Kyiv or even half that distance. Rather, as I suspect you know, the bodies were cremated or buried (or both) in large groups in dozens of places.
Third, yes, the corpses were buried. If you want to begin discussing the evidence, we can do that. I’d recommend starting with Serniki, in Ukraine, since it’s an example with which I’m fairly familiar. Again, if you want “forensic” evidence, then please first define what you mean by “forensic” and what is included and not included in that definition, lest we end up disputing this point once I bring evidence to bear.
Fourth and finally, let’s not bullshit each other here, OK? You have an Instagram account set up under the name you use at CODOH. The pics there are of someone in his 20s or 30s — early 40s at the oldest. So clearly this matter about making your livelihood with numbers for over 40 years isn’t true.
Relax — I’ve no intention of taking this topic beyond the Internet. Wally von Hannover earned that particular treatment on the basis of his particularly obnoxious behavior. That’s a longer story but one that need not concern us here.
Since you are wrong on all the specifics pertaining to the issue at hand, I am pleased to confirm that you are also wrong on my personal background as I have posted here.
Google and the internet must be used cautiouslyand intelligently, and many individuals fail in this regard.:-)).
hdc or haadeecee is my nom de guerre for non-PC discussions such as we have here, since in Canada it could get me into trouble, and in Germany a prison sentence. I may be simple in my thoughts but no one that knows me calls me stupid.
Sorry to disappoint you but I have no instagram account nor have I ever posted any photos using hdc or similar.
On the issue at hand, what kind of brain would think of shipping corpses from Auschwitz or similar, to the Ukraine??? Especially when the Germans were in retreat from there? Your assertions are getting a little bizarre, don’t you think?
Oh goody.
Well, not to your face, anyway.
And I believe you!
I did not assert that, I can assure you. You’re misunderstanding me.
You also have no responded to any of the points I made in my post or agreed to take up discussion of the mass grave of Jews murdered by the Nazis in Serniki, Ukraine. Your unwillingness to do suggests that you know the grave is there and that you know the Nazis are responsible for the bodies therein. Having to admit this would mean having to admit the Nazis deliberately killed Jewish women, children, and elderly people. Then, you’d ultimately have to concede the rest. So you stall.
So start debating or go away, OK? I’m a busy person with a lot to do. Debate Serniki with me, suggest an alternative topic for debate, or just say you have no intention of debating at all. I strongly suspect the third point is the truth.
You are right for once; I want to see forensic and/or other scientific evidence to substantiate the assertions you and other holocaustians are making practically every day. And I have absolutely no interest in debating this because either the evidence is there or it isn’t.
Based on your responses I conclude that there is no such evidence and ergo, no holocaust ie. no gassing and burning of the hallowed 6 million. Or is it 11 million? Its hard to keep track.
Let me see if I get this straight. You come into this forum specifically to respond to a post made by me, and when I ask you to define your terms before giving you what you ask for, you cop an attitude with me? What the hell is wrong with you?
Here’s what I suspect:
* That you won’t define “forensic” either because you can’t or because you know that it would include testimony, documents, etc.
* That you won’t discuss the mass grave of Jewish victims killed by the Nazis at Serniki, Ukraine, because you know that the grave is actually what I’m saying it is, and once you have to concede that point, you’re already on the road to having to admit…
* … that you’re perfectly aware that there was a Holocaust.
You’re a coward.
Can you do no better than proffing personal attacks? Admit it, you lost the debate, all your obfuscation notwithstanding.
If you have difficulties with definitions, wiki is your friend. To the best of my knowledge only expert testimony is considered a part of forensic evidence; consequently eye witness testimony is usually excluded. Especially if the witness is likely to benefit from his testimony. Sound familiar???
As a minimal standard of evidence one might consider that what was obtained / recorded during the Katyn Forest mass grave excavations, including all the witnesses present. The Serniki digs do not even meet that minimal standard. And today we can do much better.
First and foremost, if you don’t respond directly to my posts, then I don’t know that you’ve responded unless I search under your name.
Second, you came for me — not vice versa. So maybe don’t deflect on the issue of who won and who lost?
Third, forensic: “relating to or denoting the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime.” Is it your contention that this definition does not include eyewitness testimony? If not, then why have people testify at trial who are not witnesses? What about documents? I think they’re probably forensic evidence as well.
Fourth, that a witness might benefit from his/her testimony does not mean you ignore that testimony. It means you take it with that fact in mind — which brings us directly to…
Fifth, the German excavation conducted at Katyn was very much done to benefit the Nazis by painting the Soviets and particularly the NKVD (rightly) as criminals. You and I will probably agree, however, that this fact does not render the excavations done there as “worthless.”
Sixth and finally, your statement about Serniki suggests you don’t know much about the excavation conducted there. So maybe read the thread here at your favorite denier forum: f=2&t=6763
All the questions I asked about Auschwitz as to proof and evidence, certainly applies to the digs at Serniki.
No, they don’t. At Birkenau, the vast majority of bodies were cremated. At Serniki, they were buried and never disinterred and burned. Thus, the standards of evidence are different. But nice try.
“…Thus, the standards of evidence are different…”
The STANDARDS are different??? Where do you get that hare-brained idea? Forensic evidence is forensic evidence!
Here are some specific questions regarding Serniki:
Who did the killing?
Who was killed?
Why were they killed?
Who gave the actual order for the killing?
From where did these orders originate in the NSDAP hierarchy?
That’ll do for a start.
Remember, verified forensic or other scientific evidence.
Ukrainians under the command of the SS. We know this for a number of reasons.
* The bullets from the grave were German-manufactured bullets all of which were produced between 1939 and 1941.
* The hair in the graves was subjected to testing for radiation — specifically for evidence that the grave dated from before or after the first hydrogen bomb by the USSR, in 1955. The hair showed no evidence; therefore, it could be conclusively proved that the bodies were in the grave between 1941 and 1955.
* We also know that Ukrainians did the killing because eyewitnesses said so. In fact, that’s how the grave location was identified in the first place. What they didn’t claim was that there was a mass shooting at that site after the Nazis were pushed out in 1944.
Ergo, as far as the physical evidence is concerned and where it agrees with eyewitness testimony, the only possible perpetrators of this particular mass shooting are Ukrainians under SS command.
Jews. Again, we know this primarily from the eyewitnesses. The bodies found in the grave numbered 553, 63 of which were the bodies of girls younger than 9 years old. So Jews of all ages and both genders.
We have to assume that they were killed for being Jewish, because seven-year-old Jewish girls aren’t generally “partisans.”
The order cane from the regional office of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), which ordered the existing ghettoes in Ukraine liquidated. This was an ongoing process between late 1941 and mid-1943.
By the time of this liquidation (September 1942), the orders would have come via the SD leadership. Topmost in that chain of command at that time was Himmler, since Heydrich had been assassinated.
I can provide detailed sourcing for all of the above, but a good place to start is Richard Wright’s report on the excavation.
OK, you’ve written your opinion piece.
Where is the independently verified forensic and / or other scientific evidence? Notice that the latter is a continuous, but unfulfilled, request in many of my posts.
I can see I’m going to have to hold your hand the whole way through this one…
Let’s start here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jgl1ECgvZJxAM3hshSd_xT8TvgXE0ZBR/view?usp=sharing
Bear a few points in mind in reading this article:
* The article is not a standalone article — rather, it cites an earlier article by Wright, which I also have but would prefer to use to argue over a different mass grave. I don’t want to put the cart before the horse.
* Both the article provided and the one I have but have not yet shared were subjected to peer review by other archaeologists before being published, which should provide the “independent verification” that you’re asking for, as well as the scientific verification.
* There is also some video footage of the dig here: https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cvideo_work%7C2243559
* A final point to consider is that this dig and its findings were submitted as physical evidence in the war crimes trial of a Ukrainian immigrant to Australia, so it’s “forensic” as far as any reasonable person would define the term.
Your next move is an important one: do you concede that there was a mass grave of 553 people found in Serniki, Ukraine?
If your answer is yes, then I’ll have some follow-up questions for you. If your answer is no, then I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me what proof would satisfy you. You haven’t answered that question — none of you people ever do — but I’m losing my patience with you.
Well, this is a bit disappointing, I must say. It’s been a week since I began presenting evidence on the mass grave at Serniki, and you’ve yet to respond. Cat got your tongue?
Well, I’ve bee wracking my brains to discover the relevancy of this mass grave with holocaustianity which is my primary interest of those times.
Granted that there were reprisal executions on all sides…
I’ve read the transcript of one of the Zuendel trials which occurred in the 1980’s in Toronto; my son brought it home from his school library. I was absolutely appalled at what passed for evidence on the part of the prosecutor, yet the jury still found Zuendel guilty. And there is no evidence that this has changed in any western country.
What I would like to see is the original forensic report issued by a certified pathologist. I’m afraid that an archeologist, no matter how many of his peers man the hallelujah chorus, does not qualify.
Apart from that I’ve been busy planning our late winter holiday “down south”, and I’ve begun a new project in my work shop.
Well, you’d have to define what that terms means, to start with. If your contention now is that you don’t particularly care about specific war crimes but rather care about the beliefs about the Holocaust that have emerged over time, then that’s both not what I’m interested in discussion (since I don’t particularly care) and an attempt (it seems) by you to move the goalposts.
If the question is what the relevance of this grave is with the Holocaust, it’s part of a larger picture, as I imagine you already figured.
The shooting of women and children in a reprisal would be highly unusual. Once you find a pattern of this happening, then you get the sense that it was quite deliberate. Moreover, the absence of actions that would warrant a reprisal in such places as Serniki makes the idea that these were reprisals fairly ridiculous.
Well, then we disagree. But I’m hard pressed to see how this is relevant to the mass grave at Serniki.
Lucky for you, the original forensic report was filed with the Queen’s prosecutor’s office in Adelaide, South Australia. See, the report was done as part of the prosecution of an accused war criminal back in the 1990s. Even better news for you — despite the evidence, the accused was not convicted, which by the way says nothing about the value of the report itself.
I suppose you could write to the prosecutor’s office in Adelaide for the report. But it seems as if you might be willing to concede that this is a mass grave of Jews shot during World War I by Ukrainians acting under German orders. Are you willing to concede that?
“Please don’t claim Holocaust history is important because it has, and will prevent future Genocides.”
Yeah, like Pol Pot’s Cambodian “Killing Fields” thirty years later. Over 1 million dead. Not quite 6 million (or whatever) but, hey, who’s counting?
As one sage would have it: “Extraordinary allegations require extraordinary proof.”
As stated earlier, my interest lies with holocaustianity, that is why I chimed in earlier in this thread.
It is you that tried to muddy the waters of discussion by introducing some “mass grave” in Ukraine. Agreed that 500 + bodies constitutes a mass grave but not in the context of holocaustianity. My reply would then be “OK, you found 500+ bodies, where are the remaining alleged 10,000,500 bodies or their remains? (6 mil. Jews plus 5 mil. Gentiles as alleged).
Back to our original contention: Where is the forensic evidence to support your allegations of 11 million gassed and cremated???????? hdc
I think not.
“Proving” the Holocaust would require a lot of time to run it all the way up to 11 million (or six million, for that matter). Therefore, some short cuts are required. Let me ask you this question: How many mass graves and/or what total number of shooting victims would I have to prove to you for you to accept that the Nazis conducted a concerted campaign to murder Jews on the Eastern Front? Ten percent? Twenty-five percent? More? Less? If your answer is that only by proving 100% of the mass graves, then I think we can wrap things up. Otherwise, we can move on to another grave. If and when you accept the existence of mass graves, we can move onto gas chambers, first by way of T4 and then to camps.
Your move.
What’s the problem? Why do you dodge & run?
Jews say they know exactly where these Jew remains are.
Recall the claim of 900,000 Jews buried at Treblinka, 1,250,000 Jews at Auschwitz, or 250,000 Jews at Sobibor, 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar; Jews claim they still exist and claim to know exactly where these alleged enormous mass graves are.
So, you cannot show them because they do not exist. Simple as that.If you could you would.
Speaking of your “T4” camps:
The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”
An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers
By Jürgen Graf , Carlo Mattogno , Thomas Kues
https://codoh.com/library/document/3052/?lang=en
http://www.codoh.com
Why not just say that there’s no proof that you’d ever accept and leave it at that?
And I didn’t run. Your little friend did.
He’s gone, I am not. Nor will I be.
Just show us the remains that Jews claim exist in known locations. Simple.
But you cannot and now make desperate & lame excuses.
Why are you afraid of debate here?
Oh, I know, your past record.
http://www.codoh.com
There’s no point in debating you. You’re a true believer — a Nazi fanatic. It’s pointless.
Just when I think it can’t be done, it is. You reach a new level of desperation.
You stumble over your very own words.
This debate is not for just you and I, it’s for everyone to see and they can make up their own minds.
And that is why you, a proven liar & Zionist fanatic, run and hide.
Many more examples here:
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4451&p=72138&hilit=mathis+thames+mulegino#p72138
After those fiascos you know your head would be handed to you … again.
‘holocaust’ lie debunking is now mainstream:
‘Morality, Truth, Facts Have Exited From The Dying West’
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/05/paul-craig-roberts/morality-truth-facts/
Everyone, avail yourself to:
Holocaust Handbooks, Documentaries, & Videos
http://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?main_page=1
http://www.codoh.com
So if I don’t debate you, it’s because I’m afraid?
But if I *do* debate you, it’s pointless because you couldn’t concede the smallest possible ground and you don’t actually understand that posting a bunch of links to CODOH isn’t a coherent argument.
I said it before and will say it again. I’ll be happy to debate you in a fully moderated and scored debate. Short of that, I’m not interested.
“Concede”? Don’t make me laugh.
You’re afraid to debate, there is noting to “concede”.LOL
You don’t debate because you cannot refute what I post, you know you’re beat.
And no, you have never told me anything before about debating me except that you’re afraid of debate.
Nonetheless, there are clear records of you trying to debate and being thrashed. Those will not go away. I will be posting them one at a time, highlighting the points you made. Always good for huge belly laughs.
Now back to work, acclaimed “eyewitness” Miklos Nyiszli’ easily exposed as another liar:
‘Devastating “Eyewitness” Critique: Miklós Nyiszli Deconstructed “
https://codoh.com/news/3411/
exc.: “Nyiszli was either an extraordinary impostor or a lunatic; there is no escaping from the dilemma. And both horns of this dilemma – shameless mendacity or lunacy – disqualify Nyiszli and completely destroy his credibility.”
http://www.codoh.com
You won’t debate me in a moderated forum.
Coward.
Unz.com
IS a moderated forum. LOLRecall the deletions they made to some of your, illegal posts. Oops.
Everyone, see here where his posts are crushed:
Alleged “mass graves” according to T. Darwin / Andrew Mathis
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9414
Everyone, notice what Andrew Mathis considers this a ‘real mass grave filled with Jews’:
A painting is good enough for Andrew Mathis. LOL
He runs & hides here because he will be made a fool of yet again.
Another Zionist wimp that we’re all familiar with.
http://www.codoh.com
It should also be noted that France, Netherlands, Norway, etc. contributed Waffen SS divisions . The French division was called the Charlemagne Division. The Nederlanders (DUTCH)provided the largest number of volunteers to the SS. The Vichy French outdid the so called French Resistance aid to the allies in its participation to the German war effort. Even many members of the British aristocracy especially the Royal family in the person of Edward VIII were not shy in their support of Hitler. Large numbers of Ukrainians happily enlisted in the German army because of what Stalin did to their people and of course they paid the price when Stalin brutally murdered the Ukrainian POWS who were turned over to him by Eisenhower in operation Keehaul. It is interesting how the historians divide the blame and social ostracizing . Almost all the participants in WWII committed many atrocities which caused the deaths of millions. How can Americans go on and on about Auschwitz without mentioning Dresden and Hiroshima?The biggest mistake the Germans made is that they lost the war.
If you are ever asked about the “Holocaust” feel free to respond as I do:
I’m no Holocaust denier!
I don’t deny any of the Holocausts Israel is responsible for.
This article is leveling an anthill with a bulldozer. I read Night decades ago. The only memorable parts were two obviously fictional events that bordered on kitsch: first, a Cassandra-like woman at the beginning trying to warn the Jewish community of their impending fate; second, Wiesel et al being squeezed into some room to die where his friend played the slow movement of Beethoven’s violin concerto before expiring. I do not remember Wiesel explaining how his friend could have a violin in an extermination camp, how he was able to tune it with all those people around, and how he managed the tuttis.
Maybe he was playing the air violin.
According to descriptions of gas executions in some US states the inhaled gas should kill the victim first but large amounts of gas seep into the skin. Hours of ventilation are required then men with respirators and full body cover enter the chamber to fully wash the body. Without that precaution prison personnel would sicken or die as gas evaporates from the body. That method of execution was discontinued because of the high cost. Hydrogen cyanide is a volatile liquid which boils at 78F. It has considerable vapor pressure at room temperature. It is an unlikely method to use for mass executions for this and many other reasons.
A bullet is cheap and many billions were produced in the war.
It is safe to assume many Jews died in the war. Whether six million or one million we know many killings were deliberate, many due to disease and malnutrition, many in bombings or other warfare. If Jews prefer to embellish the numbers OK but I would think they would be happy to learn a few million survived who were given up for dead. The sad fact is the Jews were a small fraction of the total murdered. It was a Slavic holocaust for sure. Almost no one from the time lives now.
Why is this subject so fascinating?
It is almost certainly true that Germans systematically persecuted Jews. Never read where that has been denied. According to Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together… the Russians evacuated 1.5 million Jews from Poland just ahead of Germans. It isn’t clear whether these Jews survived the war or were later slaughtered by Russians or died in various camps.
The question of Hydrogen Cyanide poisoning is something that can be verified or contradicted with physical evidence. It looks unlikely to me, based on published evidence, but I’m not qualified to judge. If there were no gas chambers it doesn’t mean Germans refrained from killing Jews. It only means there would have to be some more practical killing method or they just allowed neglect and starvation to carry victims away. It is possible, even likely, the numbers murdered in camps has been exaggerated. Most deaths would probably be caused by disease and malnutrition as in most wars and as in Russian and American camps.
In WW I Germans were accused of chopping the hand and feet off Belgian babies. Other “huns” would throw babies out of windows to be speared on the bayonets of fellow huns. In later years these accusations were debunked.
If there were no gas chambers, it doesn’t matter if Germans refrained or did not refrain from killing Jews. That’s not how this works. The central 80 year old narrative does not have the luxury of being replaced with a more convenient narrative.
If proven false, the entirety of the narrative is null because there is no more credibility.
The Jews recently admitted that any number above the 6 million claimed dead was a fabrication in order to gain more sympathy. As far as I and many others are concerned, the decades old 11 million lie nullifies all credibility for the grander narrative that has not been allowed to be examined in the public sphere (and thus was fully dependent on faith).
It doesn’t matter. The narrative lost all credibility when the Jews recently admitted to lying about the additional 5 million. Everything else would require globally open forensic investigation and debate to gain any measure of credibility back. That won’t happen because such in investigation, and the resultant debate, would not go well for the narrative nor the Jews. What you think that you can show from your keyboard is meaningless.
You have no “proof” without formal and functionally open scientific discovery.
Evidence that is closed to open global examination and critique is, by scientific definition, not proof.
That won’t happen because it would not go well for your narrative.
Thus what you are clamoring for is a further dog and pony show that demands faith, not science that serves to validate any actual evidence.
This means that your agitation here is only that, as it lacks the ability to appeal to any sort of actual proof.
Open the Holocaust to worldwide scientific critique to gain your proof. That’s your narrative’s sole recourse.
There’s really nothing left to say. You ave no credibility without open inquiry being permitted into any so called proof that you might offer.
Anything short of that is complete nonsense, including your debate here. No one owes what you offer, as so called proof, an ounce of credibility until that occurs. Thus, arguing with you is also pointless.
The truth does not fear the light.
“The Jews”?
Yeah, “the Jews.”
Jews, as in this Jewish Telegraph Agency account:
“Remember the 11 million’?
Why an inflated victims tally irks Holocaust historians”:
[EXCERPT]:
— ( https://www.jta.org/2017/01/31/news-opinion/united-states/remember-the-11-million-why-an-inflated-victims-tally-irks-holocaust-historians )
“Hilberg is the world’s leading authority on the Nazi Holocaust.”
Hillberg is as much a charlatan as Wiesel.
my kids had to read this garbage in middle or early high school.
The entire Holocaust Handbooks Series (37 volumes) are available here.
http://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?main_page=1
They are available for purchase singularly or the entire series can be purchased as a discount. The entire series is available at no cost d/l in PDF format with reduced resolution. It consists of 854 Mb
In those volumes where you find the resolution unsatisfactory just purchase the book itself.
All these books used to be available through Amazon. But no more! Whining and wailing by the selbst die Vorfahren des Gejammerens und Wehklagens, prevailed upon Jeff Bezos to no longer sell directly or indirectly these books along with a great many others by a great many authors of books that challenge the questionable historiography of the “Holocaust”. What is most ironic is that Germar Rudolf’s book on this subject entitled “The Day Amazon Murdered History: The Book to the Movie” is available at Amazon (at least as of this date 12/16/2018)
The Cockburn article is basically a whitewash of Wiesel’s book ‘Night’ that is presented as criticism. ‘Night’ is obvious blatant phantasmagoria, truly a degenerate book. Here’s why, and Cockburn seems to missed all of this –
1. Wiesel wastes no time and writes on page 6:
. This is obvious phantasmagoria, physically impossible, not reported by anyone else, not believed by anyone. These are not just lies, these are absurd lies, lies that no one can believe for an instant. There is something extraordinarily perverse about trying to pass off obvious absurdities as fact, and succeeding.
2. At the time Wiesel was in Auschwitz the Nazis were supposedly killing ten thousand Jews per day in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Yet Wiesel does not mention gas chambers in the book. He does, however, on five separate occasions describe taking a shower,
3. The ‘Night’ of the title refers to the night Wiesel and his father arrived at Auschwitz, we read:
There are two points – first, you cannot kill people by throwing them alive into a burning pit, as they will immediately run out, you must tie them to a stake or some such so they won’t run away, and second, Wiesel got the method used by the Nazis to kill the Jews totally wrong. The gas chambers are the defining feature of the holohoax, and Wiesel got them wrong and made up another absurd method of mass execution.
4. Another distinguishing characteristic of holohoax lies is that they are degenerate lies. We expect lies to be heroic, extolling the virtue, strength, acumen, etc., of the liar. We don’t expect liars to falsely describe themselves as cowards, weaklings, degenerates, but that holohoax liars do exactly that. ‘Night’ is the story of a Jewish son and his father, that Wiesel and his father, and in two instances he describes Jewish sons who assist in killing their fathers,
In the second case we get the verbatim dialog as a son kills his father:
5. When the Soviet army approached Auschwitz Wiesel was in the camp hospital having been operated on by a Jewish doctor for an infected foot. As he was unable to travel the Nazis gave him, and his father, the option of waiting for the Soviets or evacuating with the Nazis. Wiesel and his father chose to evacuate with the Nazis. This is described in the book.
Each of these points contradict important aspects of the holocaust narrative. and yet somehow the Jews have turned that negative into a positive, and this is the book that is used in schools across the country to promote the holohoax. That is the truly extraordinary thing about the book.
I realize I am quite late to the party, but if you were appalled at what passed for “evidence” from the prosecution side at the Zundel trial, wait until you read the transcripts from the Irving V Lipstadt trial.
The judge could find no evidence for the homicidal gassings at Auschwitz, so he was forced to rely on…..Cartoons! And I am not kidding about this. Judge Grey actually cited cartoons drawn by David Olere as evidence for gassing Jews with bug spray.
Here is some of the powerful “evidence” in the case.
Possibly the most Jewish thing ever said.
One of the strangest things about the holocaust is simply the huge number of people who somehow managed to survive it.
Can Judeo-Christianity survive these increasingly frequent inquiries into the Holocaust?
I think it is a good thing that E lie Weasel’s book of prose is being foisted on generations of school kids as a historical non-fiction. Innocent minds are capable of drawing the same logical conclusions that the author makes here. Including inquiries about the precise amount of fuel required to consume a human body and failing that, the exact location of the sheer volume of human remains. Something that most survivors of massacres are obligated to provide in a serious investigation. Then there is his poignant (pungent?) depiction of a child’s execution by hanging. “Where is God now?” exclaims a by-stander. “Right there!” our witness affirms, pointing at the hanging victim. I have to disagree with the author that this is a metaphor to popular Christian themes. It is in fact, derived directly from Talmudic thematic material. Yes Eli Weasel will be remembered but not the way he may have intended. Particularly by some of the female participants of his solemn events who may have had the misfortune of posing within arms reach. I say that it’s time we nominate some normal folks for the Nobel Peace prize. Perhaps even the inventor of Yoga pants. I’m sure Eli would agree.
And survive it to a ripe old age…
“World’s Oldest Man, Auschwitz Survivor Yisrael Kristal, Dies at 113”
— ( https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/world-s-oldest-man-auschwitz-survivor-yisrael-kristal-dies-at-113-1.5442134 )
looks like Majdanek was not a “death camp” either
It was hard for me to understand why the Germans would spend money to ship Jews and others to death camps only to immediately murder 80 or 90%. Why not murder the people where they were found? I understand there were shortages of trains which were desperately needed for war efforts.
The story of mass murders crumbles upon analysis of details on how these murders were accomplished. The documentary evidence requires belief in mystifying German code words for murder (Hilberg’s interpretation). Aside from Typhus outbreaks there could very well have been no killings in German “death camps”. As decades pass we might never know what really happened.
It is probably not only Jews whose extermination was exagerated or entirely falsified. It was claimed 250,000 Germans were roasted at Dresden. Later that became 25,000, still appalling carnage but quite a revision. The Holodomor killed 8,000,000, so it is said. Russians claimed spectacular losses. Unfortunately Russian reports are notoriously unreliable. They initially claimed 40 million gassed in Poland, which became 20 m, then 10, etc.
Ghenghis Kahn was said to have created mountains of human skulls. Anyone know where the evidence is located? Huns speaking in code words probably hid the evidence from posterity.
And always remember not to confuse “died” with “killed”. The holo is all about Germans murdering six million Jews. Yes, it is written in stone.
The reality is that many people died in the second world war, which was started by Jews. IF it is true that 5.1 million Jews vanished, how many died from disease, allied bombing, accidents, shot while escaping, executed for spying or treason? It is intellectually dishonest to assume that 5.1 million were murdered.
Wow – the Olere cartoons were introduced by van Pelt. As I understand it this is the judge’s judgement … https://www.hdot.org/judge/
And this is what passes for “evidence” for the holocaust.
Below are a couple of Olere cartoons showing that not only are Jews inflammable, they are imperious to hydrogen cyanide gas and immune to HCN leaking into their blood stream.
The problem with these types of re-evaluations of ‘survivor memoirs’ or ‘victim documents’ is that they tend, pretty much invariably, to disintegrate into the sort of Holocaust-denial drivel that many of the above comments illustrate. As though it were impossible to critically view the veracity of any particular work or author, without freighting that criticism with the notion that the work in question must stand as emblematic to the reality of the event it portrays–in other words, demolish the actuality of the document, and you’ve demolished, in toto, the actuality of the event it purports to describe.
I personally tend to think that the by-now sacrosanct and virtually immune to any critical discretion whatsoever Diary of Ann Frank may be, at least in part, a literary artefact that’s been subject to heavy tinkering to make it more compelling, ‘readable’, and ultimately saleable. That Otto Frank may have participated in, or condoned the revising of original manuscripts into a form that would render them thus seems not utterly impossible. The diary simply comes across as a rather too consciously shaped work of art to be the product of an 11 year old girl, without some interventions–even if one buys into the now current story that Ann did consciously shape the material into three separate forms, to be reproduced as, among other things, deliberate memoir and part of a documentary project sponsored by others.
However, this doesn’t make me believe that there was no Ann Frank, no family in hiding, and no Nazi extermination of Jewish populations during WWII. I’m hard put to understand precisely why an examination of a book must always blur into a denial of verified history, but at least on the subject of the Holocaust in particular, it would seem that’s the way the ball inevitably bounces.
Hasbara troll:
The point of your silly verbosity:
No matter how many parts of the “Holocaust” myth have been debunked, the myth itself remains intact.
Furthermore, you approve of imprisoning people who merely question the official Jewish version of WWII history (i.e., “Holocaust”) — right??
Speaking of silly trolls…
At least your verbosity was brief enough to stink up the comments area only a little.
Actually, I’m a bit curious as to how you managed to reply to my comment yet, since on the site it’s still listed as ‘awaiting moderation’. Let’s hope you aren’t one of the moderators…
Lonely Thinker the hasbara troll*:
Don’t be afraid!
Admit it — you approve of imprisoning people who merely question the official Jewish version of WWII history (i.e., “Holocaust”).
* (https://educate-yourself.org/cn/The-Goyim-Guide-to-Hasbara-Trolls-from-Jonathon-Blakeley22nov11.shtml)
Are you as stupid as you sound?
I would have expected a column by the late, great Alexander Cockburn to have elicited more intelligent responses than this one mostly has–and mostly supplied by astroturfing trolls like yourself.
I’ve repeatedly tried to get a straight answer out of you.
Being the hasbara troll you are, you respond only with diversions & insults.
You are a coward — it’s obvious you approve of imprisoning people who merely question the official Jewish version of WWII history (i.e., “Holocaust”).
Questioning any aspect of the official Jewish version of the “Holocaust” is considered “Holocaust denial.” In 19 countries your “late, great Alexander Cockburn” would have been imprisoned for writing the very article we’re commenting on:
— (https://thefactsource.com/holocaust-denial-crime-countries/ ]
I see you’re still here and still trolling.
You can’t be too well acquainted with the body of Cockburn’s work , thought and ethics if you think he’d have had anything other than contempt for a tiny troll like yourself.
Since I share that contempt, amuse yourself by continuing to post, and I’ll continue to treat said posts with the level of respect they deserve–in other words, none.
Actually I’ve read Cockburn for decades, first with his old column in the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
Perhaps it’s (((you))) who fails to realize what he says about your Terrorist Theocracy of Israel:
🙂
“The Israel Lobby Trips and Tilts –
First Bomb Carter; Then Nuke Iran!”:
— (https://www.unz.com/acockburn/the-israel-lobby-trips-and-tilts/?highlight=american+pravda)
[EXCERPTS]:
“Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby here — Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew — had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up his unacknowledged co-authors in all their tens of thousands and sallied forth to buy up every copy of Carter’s book and toss each one into the Charles River, would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt?
“Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. He has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs who “flatly condones mass murder” of Israeli Jews. (This last was from Murdoch’s New York Post editorial, relayed to its mailing list by the Zionist Organization of America.)…
“The trouble with the lobby and the Christian zealots who act as its echo chamber is that they believe their own propaganda about Israel’s equitable social arrangements and immaculate political and legal record in its relations with the Palestinians. Use the word apartheid and they howl with indignation. The shock is about thirty years out of date. Israeli writers have used the word apartheid to describe arrangements in the occupied territories for years. Hundreds of prominent South African Jews issued a statement six years ago making the same link….”
[ CONTINUED]:
— (https://www.unz.com/acockburn/the-israel-lobby-trips-and-tilts/?highlight=american+pravda)
I wouldn’t be surprised if Wiesel, between the years of 1939 to 1945, actually worked as a pickle salesman in New York City.
I’m always amazed at how many eyewitnesses and survivors there are. I thought it was supposed to be the worst most horrific and massive genocide ever.
reiner Tor:
So you’re a believer in magical jew barbeque theory in the “death camps”?
The archaeologists maps of the alleged “huge mass graves” in the fraudulently alleged “death camps” can be found here:
http://thisisaboutscience.com/
How many can you prove actually exist reiner Tor?