's books. In contrast, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, see the stupid "Red Cross stats" and "Auschwitz plaque" memes online. "Twitter denial" (this includes Facebook and other social networks, of course), as primitive as it is, is the main form of denial today. So it may be useful to compile a list of rebuttals to the most common memes. One such meme repository I found in one neo-Nazi twitter account, and the tweets from the account are being responded to here. With time this post may be updated with further meme rebuttals, as necessary.
Warning: this post is very image-heavy.
You can copy the links from this "table of contents" to post the links to specific arguments on the forums etc.:
. So there is no mathematical contradiction whatsoever.
the Communists never claimed that all Auschwitz victims were Jewish; the Soviet Auschwitz
didn't mention this, there was an oblique reference to "not less than 4,000,000 citizens of the USSR, Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, and other countries", but that's it.
Also, history is not written by plaques. While some survivors did accept the exaggerated Soviet figures, most Western historians
. While initially Rudolf Höss claimed higher figures, in the end he
on a crude estimate of 1.1 million Jewish victims, which more or less corresponds to what we know today.
The exaggerated Soviet Auschwitz estimate was never a part of the Jewish death toll estimates arriving at between 5 and 6 million victims.
The claim that this death toll was considered "the truth" for 50 years is a lie. It was so considered in the Communist Poland, but even there the literature usually
the "2.5-4 million" range. Hilberg's estimate, for example, was 1 million. He was an authoritative Holocaust historian and yet did not accept this as the "truth".
Conclusion: the meme is deceptive and irrelevant.
.
this is the crematorium 1 in the so-called main camp; during the war the crematorium (including the morgue that served as a gas chamber) was converted into an air-raid shelter; after the war it was restored by the authorities to represent the original state. The attempt was partially symbolic (as the detached chimney shows) and partially botched.
it is not clear what the argument is supposed to prove. That there was no crematorium there? This is debunked by numerous documents acknowledged by all leading deniers. No leading denier denies that the crematorium with a functioning chimney actually existed there during the war. They only deny its homicidal function. So this meme is doubly deceptive because it goes even against the leading deniers, not to mention proven history. The author of the meme acts as if they're the first person ever to have noticed that the chimney is detached. This sort of argumentation may work on simple, naive rubes but not on someone willing to do some basic research.
Also note that there were relatively few gassings in Auschwitz I as opposed to Birkenau (Auschwitz II), and the "non-stop" comment, if it has ever been uttered, must have referred to the Birkenau crematoria, not to this Krema that played a truly secondary role in the Auschwitz Holocaust.
, pp.
.
Leuchter has been debunked numerous times over the years. It will suffice to read the following:
".
".
.
Leuchter is so outdated even by the denier standards that it's always weird to see him brought up on twitter as if he still had any relevance. I mean, I could at least understand the deniers relying on Germar Rudolf, an updated version of Leuchter (
). But it seems that most of them are stuck in the 1980s.
Funnily enough it was the twitter user who actually lied: the quotation marks indicate a literal quote, but nothing like this can be found in the text.
While the letter calls for spreading atrocity propaganda to distract from the Red Army atrocities, nowhere in the letter it is claimed or hinted at that such propaganda would be based on lies or invented from whole cloth.
Since historians don't rely on the Ministry's propaganda, this whole document is irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust. Moreover, the letter is relatively late, the big picture of the Nazi atrocities had already been known by that time.
part of van Pelt's report.
there is no historical or logical connection between various uses of "holocaust" and "six million" and the historicity of the Holocaust, or that of the recognized Jewish death toll of between 5 and 6 million Jews, so the meme is simply irrelevant.
the whole argument, if there is one, is incoherent. The established death toll of between 5 and 6 million Jews is based on demographic data which is not dependent on what can or cannot be found in the newspapers. Not to mention that the whole argument is based on cherrypicking. The deniers search for "holocaust" and "six million" and sure enough, found some mentions. What happens when we search for "five million"? Right,
.
The use of the word "holocaust" in connection with the Jewish persecution in the early reports is expected, since it was a normal
Its use in such a context is thus absolutely unsurprising and expected. The conventional meaning referring to the Nazi genocide of Jews became popular only in the 1960s-1970s. So, as before, there is no connection whatsoever and no coherent argument to be made.
here is a book in which actual specialists (as opposed to amateur neo-Nazis and
), go country by country and, based on reliable sources, arrive at the Holocaust estimates; that's how real scholarship looks like, not the mind-numbingly stupid nonsense above:
W. Benz (ed.),
.
Short debunking: the listed numbers are absolutely consistent with the Holocaust since they do not purport to be the total camp or Nazi victim death tolls.
Further comments: this one counts as a pretty brazen lie. After all the document refers only to the "beurkundeten Sterbefälle" - i.e. the registered death cases. Since most Holocaust victims (and hence also their deaths) have never been claimed to have been registered in the camps, where is the contradiction?
Sometimes another document is also posted as evidence:
It stems from the same agency (more on that in a second) and explicitly says in German:
The registration numbers of the special registry office do not allow for any conclusions about the actual numbers of the dead in the concentration camps.
What could be clearer?
Both documents are authentic, but contrary to the deniers they do not stem from the Red Cross proper. The deniers say they are from the Red Cross in part because of another
myth - that the Red Cross visited all the camps during the war and found nothing. They apparently think that the Red Cross had an access to these stats during the war and they therefore represent the most authentic information about the concentration camp deaths.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The Red Cross never had an access to such stats during the war. Nor has it ever attempted to gather such data. It was simply outside of the scope of its activities. The Red Cross said so itself in the numerous statements it issued throughout the years to address the denier misrepresentations, see for example "
Red cross exposure of “false propaganda”",
Patterns of Prejudice, 1978, vol. 12, issue 2, p. 11.
Nor did the Red Cross have
access to all the camps:
On 27 September 1944, Dr Rossel went to Auschwitz. There he spoke to the commander of the camp, but he was not authorized to go inside it.
The documents stem from the
International Tracing Service, more specifically from its special registry office. The connection with the Red Cross is that it administered the ITS from 1955 to 2012 (hence the Red Cross stamp on the first report). But the data itself stems not from the Red Cross at all and certainly not from its wartime activities. It was gathered by the ITS on the basis of the surviving German documents. And indeed, one can see the progression in the numbers from the first report to the second.
Moreover, the aim of the ITS is not compiling the complete statistics for the camps. The numbers in the reports actually represent the numbers of people for whom the death certificates were issues by the special registry office at the ITS. The procedure was explained by the ITS director Charles Biedermann during one of the Zündel trials (as
summarized by the denial-friendly Barbara Kulaszka):
If dependents of former persecutees who had died during the war requested a death certificate, the ICRC passed the request together with any evidence it had concerning the individual to the Special Registry Office. Such death certificates were required in order to make restitution or pension claims. (11-2498, 2499) The latter organization decided whether the information was sufficient to certify a death. (10-2407, 2408)
Biedermann confirmed that as of December 31, 1983, the total number of deaths registered with the Special Registry Office and various other registry offices was 373,468. (11-2515) This figure represented death certificates issued pursuant to received applications and was based, with respect to the Special Registry Office, on camp records kept by the Nazis during the war. (11-2516, 2517)
[...] He pointed out, however, that these figures resulted from applications. If an entire family had died, there was no one to make an application for a death certificate. Secondly, the ITS had complete documentation for only two of the twenty-two concentration camps. For the remainder, it had either partial or no documentation. Therefore, if an application was made for a person who had allegedly died in one of these camps, the ITS would not have the records to justify a request to the Special Registry Office for a death certificate. (12-2647)
This means that the data cannot be complete because, first of all, many documents simply did not survive. Second, because the data does not represent an attempt to count all the deaths but rather represents the number of the death certificates which depended on the number of applications.
That the data is not complete is also evidence to anyone not ignorant of the basic facts about the camp death toll statistics. For example, the
death books of Auschwitz (which are very incomplete, we have them only for 27.07.1941-31.12.1943) contain 68864 entries, more than the numbers given in both documents. For Majdanek the leading deniers Mattogno and Graf
concede that "[m]ore than 40,000 Majdanek inmates died, primarily from disease, debilitation and malnutrition; an unknown number was executed". Whereas the ITS documents have around 7000 deaths (or more accurately, death certificates issued by the special registry office).
And of course the pure extermination camps like Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno are not even on the list.
Despite such obvious falsity of the claim it remains one of the more popular denial memes. E.g. the loony James Fetzer
cited the alleged stats as one of the reasons for why he now thinks the Holocaust was a hoax.
But all it shows is that the Holocaust denial is a big lie.
10. Gas chambers not mentioned in memoirs.Short debunking: the logic here is not clear: suppose they didn't mention gas chambers in their books. And? Their books were not about the Nazi method of killings. They presumably also did not mention Auschwitz at all. Does that mean Auschwitz did not exist? They were writing about the war, not about camps. This factoid is simply irrelevant. The deniers should address the actual evidence.
Further comments: hardly necessary. This is a type of a fallacious appeal to authority.
Churchill, De Gaulle and Eisenhower are simply not historical sources on the Holocaust and nobody sane expects them to be. The interest in the Holocaust-as-such in the West came later anyway; these authors were writing about the military and military-political side of things.
And yes, Churchill did mention mass extermination in the German camps, even if he didn't use the word "Jewish". From the
first chapter of
The Gathering Storm:
Crimes were committed by the Germans under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record. The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough-and-ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pygmy proportions.
So will the deniers accept this now? Obviously not.
A stupid non-argument all-around: addressing what someone allegedly did not mention instead of addressing the
actualevidence. (Side note: the quote attributed to Lynn is actually by
Faurisson. The silly puppets can't even get their gurus straight.)
11. Elie Wiesel did not mention gas chambers?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/779835270015451137
Short debunking: the crematoria Wiesel did write about in a homicidal sense contained gas chambers. Another non-argument.
Further comments: since Elie Wiesel is not any sort of a historiographically important Auschwitz witness (that he was an important cultural and political figure does not mean that his novel-memoir serves as a basis of history-writing), this is sort of a silly argument.
Most Auschwitz survivors including Wiesel never witnessed the gas chambers, which obviously were not out there in the open but were either inside the crematoria or just outside of the camp perimeter (the Bunkers). Since going to a gas chamber usually meant going to the crematorium, "he goes to the crematorium" and "he goes to the gas chamber" were in many cases
interchangeable in the camp-speak and needed no further explanation. Only people like Faurisson,
who are very poor at assessing the texts having to do with history, can find Wiesel's usage of "crematorium" problematic. Just one example:
We did not know, as yet, which was the better side, right or left, which road led to prison and which to the crematoria. Still, I was happy, I was near my father. Our procession continued slowly to move forward.
Another inmate came over to us:
"Satisfied?"
"Yes," someone answered.
"Poor devils, you are heading for the crematorium."
He seemed to be telling the truth.
In fact, in the "prayer" episode Wiesel writes about gassing explicitly:
But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!
But, to repeat, Elie Wiesel has never been presented as an eyewitness to the gas chambers so it's hard to understand what this argument is all about aside from the usual denier ignorance and illogic.
Further reading:Night.
Sergey Romanov, "
The Denial Fossil Faurisson Sounds Like a Broken Record (Again)"
12. Elie Wiesel an impostor?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/779845287636529152
Short debunking: Wiesel did have a tattoo, the claims by another survivor about Wiesel's identity can be debunked with the original documents and the survivor's own statements, the basis of the claims rests on provable clerical mistakes in the original documents.
Further comments: I wrote a full-length article about all these issues with exhaustive documentation:
Lying about Elie Wiesel.
13. Auschwitz decodes.https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/780020048501022725
Short debunking: like in the case of the
ITS stats discussed above, this refers solely to the registered prisoners and is fully compatible with the mass murder by gas in Auschwitz.
Further comments: here is how the denier author describes the content of the decodes:
As shown by the Bletchley Park documents, the commandant of Auschwitz had to file a report every single day. With the exception of Sunday, these messages consisted of daily reports on population [Bestand], arrivals [Zugänge], and departures [Abgänge] from the concentration camps.
He concedes:
Zugänge referred to the arrival of new inmates; Abgänge referred to deaths, executions, releases and inmates transferred to other camps.
Since most of the Jews who arrived in Auschwitz never became its inmates and were never registered, but rather were gassed upon arrival, the bulk of the gassings would never have appeared in these decodes at all since they only dealt with the registered inmates.
The gassings of the inmates after internal selections (quite small in numbers compared to the gassings of non-inmates upon arrival) would be given in the Abgänge but obviously nobody would have written "they were gassed".
So yes, it was entirely possible for non-inmates to have been gassed at a rate of 2000 per day (just as a theoretical illustration), and for them not to appear in the
inmate statistics sent per telex. Did I say "possible"? I meant "inevitable".
The ignorant author claims this to be an ad hoc hypothesis, but this is of course hogwash - that it was mostly the unregistered prisoners who never became Zugänge (and, logically, also could not become Abgänge) that were gassed was claimed from the start by all the people in the know. The author is ignorant of basic history (or is simply being dishonest).
The author asks how the numbers of those murdered (
which were surely kept) were otherwise reported. Maybe they were collected and, as highly sensitive, regularly (say, once a month) sent to Berlin with a courier. A very plausible hypothesis that the author can't debunk. What we do know though, despite the author's protestations, is that the decodes, to repeat, only referred to the registered inmates, i.e. to a small part of all people who had arrived in Auschwitz. What the author can't explain is where the rest of the Jewish Auschwitz arrivals went (after we subtract the documented transfers to the other camps). That's about 900,000 Jews. They were obviously not "
sent to the East". So where are they?
14. Survivors did not see or hear about gas chambers?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/780205042137726976
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/804820596521627648
Short debunking: most survivors did not see the gas chambers, nor were they supposed to, so the argument is illogical as usual. Most survivors did hear rumors about the gas chambers however, so what does an exception or two of the people who didn't prove?
Further comments: let's take a look at the specific people in the meme.
Joseph Burg was never an Auschwitz inmate in the first place, so his opinion "as a survivor" on the Auschwitz gas chambers is irrelevant. Deniers lied, as usual.
An actual Auschwitz survivor Marika Frank did claim that she never heard about gas chambers in Auschwitz. This is admittedly exceptional because everybody, including the leading deniers, accepts that at the very least the
rumors about the gas chambers existed in the camp so not to have heard even the rumors is strange in itself. It is clear then that Frank is in any case exceptional in this respect, so her not having heard of something proves exactly nothing.
Indeed, this is illustrated by another survivor quoted in the tweet - a non-Jewish inmate Maria Vanherwaarden. As
quoted by the denier-friendly Barbara Kulaszka:
From Linz, Herwaarden was transported to Vienna and from there to Auschwitz. There were about twenty other women on the train travelling from Vienna to Auschwitz. She could not say if any were Jewish. They received food on the train. A gypsy told Herwaarden that they were going to be gassed when they arrived at Auschwitz. They arrived in the camp on 2 December in the afternoon. (25-6625, 6626, 6627)
That night the SS people came and took them to Birkenau. They were taken to a cold, windowless room and told that they had to take a cold shower. They handed over their clothes and all hair was shaved, both head and pubic. Herwaarden was "terribly scared" when she went into the shower room because "they said gas would be coming from the top but it was only water." They received soap, but the water was cold. When they finished, they received their numbers and prisoners clothing and were taken to the barracks. Herwaarden was listed as an Aryan. (25-6628, 6629)
Vanherwaarden did not see the gas chambers, but she did hear of them. So what does Frank's alleged lack of any information about the gas chambers prove? Nothing.
As for Vanherwaarden, let's quote further:
While gassings were talked about at the camp, she personally never saw anything of the sort. There was a terrible smell in the camp, however...
She wasn't
supposed to have seen a gassing in the first place, obviously. So her never having seen one is fully compatible with everything. Not every Auschwitz inmate automatically became a gas chamber eyewitness. In fact, the absolute majority of the survivors didn't. Indeed, Vanherwaarden conceded that she "never saw a crematorium at Birkenau. It was a big place". Does Vanherwaarden never having seen the crematoria prove that they didn't exist? Obviously not, only that she personally didn't see them.
Basically, her testimony is also irrelevant to the gas chambers issue, which is why she is, of course, quoted by the deniers.
The reliability of the statement of an alleged survivor Esther Grassman quoted by the Holocaust denier M. R. Wright (obviously with an ideological agenda in mind) is in question. Wright never identifies his source so it can be rejected out of hand. But even if it were authentic, everything written about Marika Frank above would also apply to Grassman.
As for Kautsky, this is another brazen denier lie. Kautsky spent all of his time in Monowitz (Auschwitz III) where there were no gas chambers, so he wasn't supposed to personally see any.
But the quote is a fake! And yes, he did write in his book that he learned about gas chambers even in Monowitz from sources he considered reliable. Deniers lied, as usual.
As for the alleged denial of the gas chambers by the French Resistance members, not a single quote or a source is given. Claim dismissed.
15. Anne Frank diary.https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/782638517419728896
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/857273369452044289
Short debunking: the diary was extensively forensically tested by the Netherlands Forensic Institute and is undoubtedly genuine.
Further comments: a very detailed summary of the forensic testing of the diary was published in
The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition. The experts investigated the paper, the glue, the ink with the then latest technology. Then they analysed the handwriting, compared it to Anne Frank's handwriting from the other documents (letters she wrote). The diary was concluded to be authentic.
The claim about "portions" of the diary written in ballpoint pen not available until 1951 is of course false and rests on two scraps of papers with notes (which today are found
in the diary but do not constitute a
part of the diary), as well as, possibly, on a few small postwar editorial corrections in the main text of the diary. The main text of the diary - what Anne Frank wrote herself during the war - was not written in a ballpoint pen.
The claim originated with a terse report by the Bundeskriminalamt which also tested the diary and published a summary mentioning the ballpoint pen markings without being more specific as to what those markings were. The Bundeskriminalamt later issued a
clarification:
The forensic report of 1980 does not justify any doubts about the authenticity of the Anne Frank diaries.
[...]
1. The report, according to the task set by the Hamburg district court, concerned only the question of whether the writing material used to record the diaries - writing paper and writing materials - was customary in the years of the Second World War. This is undoubtedly confirmed in the report.
2. On the other hand, according to the report, additional inscriptions found on the originals of the diary sheets, so-called corrections [Korrekturschriften], were applied with a ballpoint pen ink, which was customary only since 1951. Obviously, these are editorial remarks or corrections made by a further editor.
Conclusion:
The BKA's report of 1980 concludes that paper and writing materials used for the actual text of the diaries were available in the relevant period and were customary.
No further findings, especially those on the diaries' authorship, were made in this report.
The BKA emphasizes that the expert report of the Institute for Criminal Investigations of 1980 cannot be called upon to question the authenticity of Anne Frank's diaries. The BKA distanced itself decisively from all speculation aimed in such a direction.
The Netherlands Forensic Institute disagrees with the BKA that it has been truly established that the small corrections were made in ballpoint pen ink. The NFI reports (p. 167):
In no more than six places do we find corrections and additions to the page numbers in black, which, considered morphologically, display the characteristics of ballpoint writing. [...] When analyzed chemically, however, the ink behaved differently from a series of reference ballpoint inks, including samples from an earlier date.
However, even if further investigation had brought to light a ballpoint with a similar chemical reaction, this discovery would not have detracted from the authenticity of the diary, for all we have here is the addition of page numbers for which there are indications that they were not written by Anne Frank.
As for the two loose scraps of paper with the ballpoint ink writing, they obviously do not bear Anne Frank's handwriting but most probably stem from the expert Dorothea Ockelmann who was a part of the court expert team investigating the diary in 1959-60 (her son recognized her handwriting). Here is how they look like:
These are the only pieces of paper found in the diary that have been established to have been written with a ballpoint pen beyond a reasonable doubt.
As for Meyer Levin being the author of the diary, this is an even older canard also exposed, among other places, in the
Critical Edition. Otto Frank hired Meyer Levin in 1952 to write a play based on the diary (which, in an abridged form, had already been
published in Dutch in 1947). He basically failed at his job, other authors were hired to write another version which turned out to be a critical success. Levin sued Frank for an alleged breach of contract and fraud, claiming he had been chosen to write the play, that the other authors (the Hacketts) used his ideas, etc., etc.
His claims of fraud and breach of contract were rejected by the court. His claim of the Hacketts having used his ideas was put before a jury which decided to award him $50,000 in damages. The court however set the jury verdict aside, ruling that the Hacketts' alleged plagiarism could not be proven since their inspiration came from the same source as Levin's - Anne Frank's diary. However new lawsuits from Levin were inevitable, so Frank, Bloomgarden and Levin signed an agreement that Levin would be paid $15,000 in exchange for dropping his royalties claim.
Not a single time during the various court and settlement proceedings has the authenticity of the diary been called in question. The only issue was the
play that Levin wrote.
The quote that the twitter user ascribes to a decision of the "New York Supreme Court" actually comes not from any court decision but rather from an article in a Swedish far-right publication
Fria Ord. The twitter user has thus engaged in outright fraud.
As mentioned above, Anne Frank's handwriting was comprehensively investigated by the experts, the diary was proven to have been written by one hand. Anne used two scripts - cursive and "handprinting", both in the diary and in the letters. Examples taken from the
Revised Critical Edition follow.
Anne Frank's 30.07.1941 letter:
Anne Frank's entry in Jacqueline van Maarsen's autograph album, 23.03.1942:
A page from the diary with both kinds of handwriting:
As for the
copyright/authorship issues, this is a purely legal fiction. The Swiss Anne Frank Fonds wanted a copyright extension to further be able to collect royalties, so it claimed, absurdly when it comes to the common sense, but apparently with some support from the law, that Otto Frank could be seen as a legal co-author of the
edited version due to the work that he has done on the original text (editing, collating, etc.). It is important to understand that
this applies only to the version edited by Otto Frank and first published as
Het Achterhuis in 1947,
not to the original text.
Such a move, which seems to be all about the money, hardly does justice to Anne Frank's memory, contrary to what the AFF claims. However
even AFF does not go so far as to claim that Otto Frank was an
actual co-author:
At the same time, the Anne Frank Fonds would like to reiterate that Anne Frank was the only author of her original diaries. Since its establishment, the Anne Frank Fonds has, on the basis of forensic/scientific evidence, dismissed differing interpretations, accusations of forgery, or third-party co-authorship of Anne Frank’s original manuscripts.
That AFF is playing right into the deniers' hands with its shady legal maneuvering is ironically sad.
The original text also remains protected due to other legal circumstances, as explained
here:
In the Netherlands copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. And even though Anne Frank was killed in 1945, this doesn’t mean that the A and B versions of her diary are in the public domain under Dutch law. This is because the full manuscripts were first published in 1986, and the rule at that time said that works which were first published posthumously are protected for 50 years after the initial publication.
The 2013 Dutch copyright act implementing the 1991 term directive contained transitional provisions stipulating that rights which existed under the previous law continue to exist. This means that versions A and B of the Frank diary will remain under copyright in the Netherlands until 1 January 2037 (50 years after the 1986 publication).
Mind-boggling legal technicalities aside, the fact remains: Anne Frank is the sole author of her diary, which was fully forensically tested, found authentic and there is not a single fact to refute this.
Further reading: Dene Bebbington, "
Rebuttal of Faurisson on the Anne Frank Diary"
16. Red Cross inspected the death camps?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/782647343715848193
Short debunking: the Red Cross did not visit the extermination camps. The "Red Cross stats" meme has already been debunked
above.
Further comments: the Red Cross obviously never visited the extermination camps like Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor or Chelmno.
When a Red Cross representative tried to visit Auschwitz (Auschwitz I, not Auschwitz II Birkenau where the actual extermination camp was),
all he was allowed to do is talk to the commandant for about half an hour.
As for the quote from the document #9925, it is of course fully distorted in the tweet. The
report is dated 29.09.1944 - not "June, 1946". The report does not contain any results of interrogating detainees after the war (obviously). Rather it contains the story of the aforementioned failed visit to Auschwitz. The quote is taken from this episode (translation by Hans Metzner):
Spontaneously, the British main man of confidence in Teschen asked us if we knew about the 'shower room'. It is rumored that there is a very modern shower room in the camp, where the detainees would be gassed in series. The British man of confidence, through his Auschwitz Kommando, tried to obtain confirmation of this fact. It was impossible to prove anything. The protective custody prisoners themselves have not talked about it.
Once again, coming out of Auschwitz we have the impression that the mystery remains well guarded.
Another dud. Another denier lie.
PS: by the way, the reluctance of the inmates to talk about this to the outsiders is easily explained. For example, Fiszel Szpiro (157291), who worked in commando 178, was flogged 10 times for telling his civilian supervisor that a worker who did not appear for work became a "Muslim" (camp slang for exhausted people near death) and went to the crematorium (see I. Strzelecka, "Kary i tortury", p. 282 in
Auschwitz 1940-1945. Węzłowe zagadnienia z dziejów obozu, t. II, 1995; GARF f. 7021, op. 108, d. 33, l. 103).
Further reading:Hans Metzner, "
Kollerstrom's Deception on the Visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross to Auschwitz"
17. Rassinier denied Auschwitz gas chambers. Or was that Thies Christophersen?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/782662962704179200
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/857278929803112453
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/857288594322595840
Short debunking: Rassinier had never been an Auschwitz inmate. He had been imprisoned at Buchenwald where there were indeed no gas chambers. Another denier lie. Christophersen got caught on camera saying he did not tell the whole truth.
Further comments: the quote attributed to Rassinier is actually by the SS-man Thies Christophersen who had been stationed at an experimental farm in the area of Auschwitz. Once again, the twitter puppets cannot even get their deniers straight!
Rassinier's Auschwitz denial is thus irrelevant.
As for Christophersen, Hans Metzner characterized his account
as follows:
Christophersen did not know there were four crematoria in Birkenau either, even though he is supposed to have visited the camp. He was only told there was “a crematorium…in Auschwitz”. He did not know anything about open air cremations in Birkenau, even though these were carried out in Auschwitz in summer 1944 according to aerial and Sonderkommando ground photographs. Therefore, either Christophersen was a poor observer and not much talented to obtain reliable hearsay information about Birkenau or suffered from severe memory fading at the time he wrote down his account.
Christophersen's account has been analyzed in detail by
John Zimmerman and
Wahrheit at CODOH and found wanting.
Worse, he got caught on film admitting that he did not tell the truth about Auschwitz. This can be seen in Michael Schmidt's documentary
Wharheit Macht Frei (here is a
YouTube copy; scroll to 56:35):
Ich will uns entlasten und verteidigen, dann kann ich das nicht mit dem was wir tatsächlich getan haben. Ich leugne das nicht. Aber jeder Verteidiger, der etwas zu verteidigen hat, der wird doch nicht das Belastende aufführen. Aber alles das trifft mich nicht, ich mache weiter, ich käme mir vor als Verräter an meinen Freunden, wenn ich jetzt widerrufen würde. Das hab ich nie getan.
I want to exonerate and defend us, then I can't do it with what we actually did. I don't deny it. However every defender, who has to defend something, will not present something that incriminates. However all that does not affect me, I carry on, I would see myself as a traitor to my friends if I would recant now. That I have never done.
So much for this "witness".
18. The Larson canard.https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/782665282196213766
Short debunking: the absolute majority of the corpses of gassed people were incinerated anyway, so we wouldn't expect many such autopsies, if any; Larson did not visit any extermination camps anyway.
Further comments: Larson actually did imply that some autopsies indicated gassing as the cause of death. In the book
Crime Doctor he
claimed:
Outside the building, guards dropped in cyanide pellets. Then they'd blow the cyanide gas out and remove the bodies next door to the crematorium ovens. I think this is what happened to most of the truly psychotic prisoners and those they considered unruly and unmanageable and who, in the Gestapo's opinion, were incorrigibles. But, in my opinion, only relatively few of the inmates I personally examined at Dachau were murdered in this manner.
This is all the more curious since the gassings in Dachau have not been established beyond reasonable doubt. In any case, Larson does not quote any such autopsy report. In 1980 he was apparently
interviewed for
Wichita Eagle:
Larson said that in southern Germany, where he served, autopsies showed that death by gassing and shooting were rare. Never was a case of poisoning uncovered, he said.
Side note: the denier O'Keefe fraudulently
misquoted this as saying "never was a case of poison gas uncovered".
(Also see
this CODOH thread.)
So we see that Larson did not deny gassings. In any case, this whole Larson story is irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust since he never claimed to have examined victims of
extermination camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka.
19. Fake, unreliable or mistaken witnesses.https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/784882268322033664
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/787304748076728320
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/787309018842890242
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/789934703390420993
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/790663028073197569
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/839417133356486656
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/840565688922177538
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/840566561849167874
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/840569944593043458
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/840574628783378434
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/842111546981527552
Short debunking: the existence of fake or unreliable Holocaust witnesses no more disproves the Holocaust than the existence of the fake or exaggerating Vietnam war vets disproves the Vietnam war. Irrelevant.
Further comments: Joseph Hirt was
exposed by a mainstream history teacher. Herman Rosenblat was
exposed by a Holocaust historian. The story of Misha Defonseca (not Jewish) was also
questioned by mainstream scholars, among others. The story of
Binjamin Wilkomirski (not Jewish) was debunked by a mainstream journalist. And what have the deniers ever done, except lie?
Sure, there are some fake witnesses. Who ever doubted it? For almost any significant event such people are bound to appear. Their existence has no bearing on the historicity of the event itself.
One should also differentiate between outright fakes and, say, confused people misinterpreting their experiences (like several survivors who truly believe they survived the gas chambers through luck, misinterpreting their
shower experience). Sometimes these people were misled by the others around them, including the Nazis.
Let's take Samuel Rajzman's testimony about air being pumped out of the Treblinka chambers. The exact method of murder (
suffocation through gasoline exhaust) would be most securely known by the people who operated the murder weapon. Thus the engine operator Shalayev testified about the gasoline engine being the murder weapon.
The other witnesses wouldn't necessarily know such details. Thus many Nazis and Jewish inmates assumed that the engine was a diesel (there was a diesel engine in the same room to provide the camp with electricity, so it was an easy mistake to make). Yet others speculated on other methods of murder, including the air being sucked out of the room. Their speculations on the topic of the exact method of murder are of little value. Their observation of hundreds of thousands of Jews being deported to the camp and killed in the closed chambers (whatever method they thought was being used) and later incinerated is what is valuable.
Some testimonies are clearly flawed in places, but still betray the inside knowledge, see an
analysis of Bendel's testimony, for example.
Some other survivors probably fell victim to
false memories. This is especially plausible with the child survivors (Moshe Peer could be such a case).
There were also people who were true survivors who gilded the lily, exaggerated things intentionally. Yes, this also happens, like in any large group of people. And this also doesn't disprove the Holocaust.
But before even starting to critique the testimonies one should make sure that what one reads is what the alleged witness truly said. Let's take the item that supposedly retells an unknown comedienne Soocha Renay's story. It was taken from a
newspaper column. The author of the column did not indicate where his descriptions came from. It is thus unknown if they actually fairly represent Soocha Renay's claims (if those were ever made) or are a result of "Chinese whispers". Knocking down this newspaper item achieves exactly nothing. It's not a historical source.
In conclusion: all kinds of evidence need to be checked against each other. And just because someone was in Auschwitz, for example, doesn't make them an eyewitness to the gas chambers - and they're, as a rule,
not used in such a capacity by the historians. So finding some survivor telling implausible stories does not mean history should be rewritten - it was most probably not written in reliance on that survivor in the first place.
Further reading:Sergey Romanov, "
The Auschwitz Museum's instant factchecking of a "gas chamber survival" story"
Joachim Neander, "
Irene Zisblatt, the "Diamond Girl" - Fact or Fiction?"
20. Scratched gas chamber walls?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/784884878747860993
Short debunking: these are merely marks left by the visitors.
Further comments: that these are victim fingernail marks may be a piece of folklore, but as the Auschwitz Museum's twitter account
doesn'ttire of
pointing out, these are nothing but marks left by the visitors. One could even characterize this as vandalism.
Here is the wall of the gas chamber that was not accessible to the visitors:
21. Dachau gas chamber.https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/786254141886722048
Short debunking: Dachau was not an extermination camp, so whether or not some gassings happened there is irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust.
Further comments: the homicidal gassings in Dachau have not been established beyond reasonable doubt. The door to the gas chamber before which a US soldier stand indeed belonged to a
delousing gas chamber. The early report in the aftermath of the liberation indeed contained a lot of nonsense - isn't that too often so? But history is not written based on such reports.
There was indeed, as far as we can tell, a homicidal gas chamber built in Dachau (not to be confused with the delousing ones). Whether it was used is hard to say on the available evidence. There were rumors about its use as well as an uncorroborated testimony.
Dachau was not an extermination camp like Treblinka or Auschwitz, so this is a secondary issue at best.
22. Survivor Lieberman and the Auschwitz ovens.https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/786265823157583872
Short debunking: the denier failed to clarify that this was explicit hearsay; also: the existence of fake or unreliable Holocaust witnesses no more disproves the Holocaust than the existence of the fake Vietnam war vets disproves the Vietnam war. Irrelevant.
Further comments: in the typically mendacious denier fashion the twitter user omitted this part (NCA,
vol. VI, p. 1101):
As already mentioned, I was one of a working party whose duty it was to unload potatoes at the station. We had at this time no contact with the prisoners of the big camp. We were separated in quarantine but housed together with another working party which was serving the crematorium and the gas chamber. It is due to this fact that I know how things occurred
So that's hearsay and basically a Chinese whispers game, possibly partially due to language differences. Irrelevant.
No historian has based anything on this particular hearsay claim by Lieberman. So the "calculations" are a typical strawman - nobody takes the claim seriously, so there is no reason to show the obvious absurdity.
We do have a bunch of the actual Nazi documents that
help to establish the actual Auschwitz cremation capacities though.
23. More Wiesel stuff.https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/786272800235544576
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/786273489120559104
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/848683267800932353
Short debunking: Wiesel is not any sort of a crown witness for Auschwitz or the Holocaust, so what would debunking him prove vis a vis the historicity of the events in question? Irrelevant.
Further comments: Historians use many sources for writing the history of Auschwitz, and Wiesel's memoir-novel is not one of them in the absolute majority of cases. So debunking it proves exactly nothing. But let's take a look at the claims anyway.
Suppose the episode with dumping of the living babies into a firing pit didn't happen (I, for one, doubt it). Could be that Wiesel mistook a truck dumping corpses of children into such a pit with living children being dumped. Notably, there were
other such claims.
That there were incineration pits in Auschwitz is a fact, they can be seen on
the aerial and ground photos.
Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald and never claimed otherwise. True, the articles sometimes make such claims, but when they do, they don't give Wiesel's direct words. E.g. JTA's
article says:
But Wiesel, who noted that on April 11, 1945, he was one of the survivors liberated at Dachau by the U.S. Army...
This is not a direct quote. This is a rephrasing, and the reporter obviously made a mistake. Deniers can't prove Wiesel actually said "Dachau". Same applies to Auschwitz liberation.
Since this comes up in an occasional meme, let's also deal with the fake surprise over why the Wiesels chose to go with the Germans. Actually, this is clearly
explained in the text of the book itself, so I'll just quote it and it will be enough to debunk the dishonest claim:
The camp had become a hive of activity. People were running, calling to one another. In every block, the inmates prepared for the journey ahead. I had forgotten about my lame foot. A doctor came into the room and announced:
"Tomorrow, right after nightfall, the camp will start on its march. Block by block. The sick can remain in the infirmary. They will not be evacuated."
That news made us wonder. Were the SS really going to leave hundreds of prisoners behind in the infirmaries, pending the arrival of their liberators? Were they really going to allow Jews to hear the clock strike twelve? Of course not."All the patients will be finished off on the spot," said the faceless one. "And in one last swoop, thrown into the furnaces.""Surely, the camp will be mined," said another. "Right after the evacuation, it will all blow up."As for me, I was thinking not about death but about not wanting to be separated from my father. We had already suffered so much, endured so much together. This was not the moment to separate.
I ran outside to look for him. The snow was piled high, the blocks' windows veiled in frost. Holding a shoe in my hand, for I could not put it on my right foot, I ran, feeling neither pain nor cold.
"What are we going to do?"
My father didn't answer.
"What are we going to do?"
He was lost in thought. The choice was in our hands. For once. We could decide our fate for ourselves. To stay, both of us, in the infirmary, where, thanks to my doctor, he could enter as either a patient or a medic.
I had made up my mind to accompany my father wherever he went.
"Well, Father, what do we do?"
He was silent.
"Let's be evacuated with the others," I said.
He didn't answer. He was looking at my foot.
"You think you'll be able to walk?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Let's hope we won't regret it, Eliezer."
After the war, I learned the fate of those who had remained at the infirmary. They were, quite simply, liberated by the Russians, two days after the evacuation.
24. The Lachout document.https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/786969139206389761
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/786970186956017664
Short debunking: the "document" is a proven fake. How typical for deniers to spread fake documents.
Further comments: this so-called document was
concocted by Emil Lachout and ripped to shreds by the experts, but not before being swallowed by a bunch of deniers as a true document debunking gassings.
Holocaust deniers are suckers for forgeries.
Further reading:Brigitte Bailer-Galanda, Wilhelm Lasek, Wolfgang Neugebauer, Gustav Spann, "
The Lachout Document. Anatomy of a Forgery"
Sergey Romanov, "
Holocaust "revisionism" and forgeries"
25. Fake Holocaust photos?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/789944303476957184
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/842124777779286016
Short debunking: the denier offers fake examples of fake photos. Fail.
Further comments: in order to prove falsification of a photo one should clearly specify the sources of both the original and the fake. The denier has failed to do this so his examples can be dismissed simply on that ground with the exception of the Buchenwald photo. Nevertheless let's take a look.
The first image shows the
famous post-liberation photo of Dachau prisoners demonstrating how a corpse could be pushed into an oven. Someone, probably a neo-Nazi, photoshopped the corpse out of the photo to "prove" that the original is fake, when the opposite is true.
Second photo with many pictures is again a useless mish-mash without any sources, but it is clear that at least some photos are internet photoshops, possibly from some "erotic" websites or made as a joke.
The claim about the Buchenwald photo is debunked
here. Long story short, the
New York Times Magazine deleted the standing guy from the picture. This in no way proves the original picture a fake. Contrary to the lie in the meme, the NYTM publication was not the first publication of this photo.
Deniers cannot prove that any of the fake photos above have been used in serious literature.
The last meme asks why fakes are the only evidence presented, but they can't show any. In fact, the
deniers often fall for forgeries themselves.
Further reading:
Andras Szilagyi, "
A Charge of Forgery Supported by Forgery: The Smearing of a Genuine Auschwitz Photo"
Hans Metzner, "
The Auschwitz Open Air Incineration Ground Photographs and Revisionist Forgery Allegations"
Brian Harmon, "
See No Evil: John Ball's Blundering Air Photo Analysis"
26. Science debunks Holocaust?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/799959716050898945
Short debunking: the Krege report does not exist. It's a dud. Fail. The claims about the cyanide residue are just false.
Further comments: Richard Krege promised to publish a ground penetrating radar study of Treblinka. The promised report has never materialized. Krege has become an embarrassment for denial, so it's funny how his non-existent research is touted here. Twitter deniers are the most ignorant, dumb deniers.
The claims about no cyanide residue having been found or results withheld are a lie.
Markiewicz et al. have tested the gas chamber walls and have found the cyanide residues, the results
have been published.
Just because the delousing chambers have the blue staining does not mean the homicidal gas chambers also have to have it. Delousing and homicidal gassings very simply took place under very different conditions, so comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges.
Leuchter has been debunked
above, Rudolf has been debunked
here.
27. Flimsy gas chamber door with a window?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/799965465200250880
Short debunking: it was not a gas chamber door, so all the arguments comparing it to the "real" gas chamber doors are irrelevant.
Further comments: as already explained
above, crematorium I was converted into an air-raid shelter by the Nazis in late 1944 (the killings took place in Birkenau and by that time were coming to an end anyway). The main modifications were
documented by the Nazis themselves, so we know that the morgue/gas chamber was divided into 4 smaller rooms. After the war the authorities tried to reconstruct the original look of the crematorium but
botched the job in several ways. The most important mistake was knocking down one wall too many: as they were removing the recently installed air-raid shelter walls, they also removed the wall between the morgue and the former washroom.
The door with the window is the door to the washroom, not to the morgue/gas chamber.
This, by the way, is clearly indicated in the modern on-site
diagrams showing both the present state and the pre-air-raid-shelter state.
A little bit of reading about the basics goes a long way.
28. No Britannica mention of gas chambers?
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/804813199468089348
Short debunking: it is simply irrelevant to the historicity of the Holocaust.
Further comments: first of all, of course there was no article on the "Holocaust" since the term began to be popular decades later.
Anyway, what is the logical argument here? Marcus did not mention gas chambers in a popular encyclopedia (general-purpose encyclopedias aren't really scholarly sources) therefore there were no gas chambers? Surely even the most dumb denier should understand that this does not logically follow?
Suppose Marcus' article is indeed an example of sub-par scholarship. And? This might characterize the Britannica of those years, but this tells us exactly nothing about the historicity of the Holocaust and the gas chambers.
Anyway, the explanation of the sub-par scholarship is most probably as follows: the article was repeated without updates (at least in what this part is concerned) from 1947 to at least 1956. It was, by the way, still the same 14th edition of the Britannica that first got published in 1929, revised in 1933 and got very slowly updated from time to time, but on the whole in those years the Britannica was pretty outdated. This eventually led to Harvey Einbinder's hard-hitting 1964
book The Myth of the Britannica, in which he showed that major parts of the encyclopedia didn't get updated for
decades, and which served as an impetus for a major overhaul of the encyclopedia with the 15th edition in 1974 (!).
So, as far as I know, Marcus' article probably first got published in
1947, but considering the editing processes it could have been written a year or even two earlier. During that time the big picture was already clear, so Marcus
wrote that:
national socialists set out deliberately to destroy large numbers of Polish and Russian-Jewish civilians. If but a fraction of the atrocities reported were accurate, then many thousands of defenseless Jewish non-combatants, men, women and children, were butchered after September 1939
However he could have reasoned that he might as well take a "wait and see" approach as to the
details of how it happened, including methods and numbers. His article then got republished and republished and republished for years without updates (at least in this part), usual for the Britannica in those years.
In any case, to repeat, whatever Britannica did or did not publish has no logical relation to the issue of the historicity of the Holocaust. The argument boils down to silly innuendo.
PS: at the same time the deniers complain about the exaggerated Holocaust death toll in the
Britannica in the same time period, see
item 36.
29. Dr. Listojewski?https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/804817610923798528
Short debunking: not only a citation of an unknown "Dr." without any evidence doesn't prove anything, the citation originally comes from an antisemitic publication.
Further comments: one of the images cites the most probably imaginary "Dr. Listojewski" (whose alleged citation has been
incestuously regurgitated by numerous denier publications) from
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the other is more honest - it cites
The Broom (1952).
Now,
The Broom was an antisemitic publication by a certain
C. Leon de Aryan:
The Broom newspaper touted itself as a voice to the Christian Community of Southern California. The Broom was published by owner Fred de Aryan and his father and editor, C. Leon de Aryan, in East San Diego in 1932. The Broom was primarily dedicated to expounding reactionary theories on anti-Semitism, racial purity, war, and interpreting the word of Christ. Typical examples of article subjects are "Message of Holy Zarathushtra,""The Heroism of Peace in Wartime,""Synopsis of and Essay on the 'Race Problem',""Slave-Laboring German Prisoners of War," and "Sanhedrin: 70 Anti-Christ Master Minds."
From the article "
The San Diego Crack Pot":
His confrontational views drew the attention of the California Senate’s Un-American Activities Committee in April 1942. Testifying in Los Angeles, de Aryan proudly told the committee he had pursued an active anti-Communist policy in The Broom from “practically the first issue.” Because of this, he claimed, the Communists were after him and even threatened him on the telephone. Fortunately, he could identify the Reds on the telephone, explaining to the committee that all Communists have a “guttural sound” in their voices. Examining de Aryan’s testimony, a government attorney concluded that the publisher was a paranoid “crack pot” who would probably savor prosecution for the sake of publicity.
He was also one of the defendants of the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 and battled against fluoride in water.
Most probably he just invented this "Dr. Listojewski" or got hoaxed by a fellow fascist.
In any case, to repeat, without any actual evidence the quote is useless.
Simon Wiesenthal's alleged quote is a double fabrication. The tweet cuts off the second part of the phrase
as it is usually quoted by the deniers: "on German soil".
However even that quote is actually a falsification, as
explained by William Daffer:
No, Simon Wiesenthal did not say "no gassings too place on any camp in German soil." The fact that those words are in quotes and an attribution given (Books and Bookmen, page 5, Apr 1975) means that this passage is meant as a quote. That's how one signifies quoting in the written word. Cramer may not understand this, but Fields assuredly does.
But if you go to that page of that edition of Books and Bookmen, what you find Weisenthal *actually* said is
'Because there were no _extermination camps_ on German soil the Neo-Nazis are using this as proof that these crimes did not happen...'
I'm hoping that you're intelligent enough to see the difference between "no gassings on any camp on German soi" and "no extermination camps on German soil" because Cramer couldn't. It's one of the reasons I call him an idiot.
So the twitter user took a falsified quote and falsified it further.
As for R. Lewis' book, its full name is
The Thirteenth Stone - History Rewritten, the Jesus Myth Exploded and the Great Secret of the Knights Templar Revealed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wow. Sounds really serious!
30. Small children and people unfit for work in Auschwitz?
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/811940567932424192
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/811964952445669376
https://twitter.com/findtruthlife/status/836370764349726721
Short debunking: most Jewish children and Jews unfit for work were, of course, gassed in Auschwitz. That there were a few exceptions does not disprove the rule.
Further comments: first of all, with "small children" we mean someone younger than 14-15. Those around that age and older could be deemed fit for work depending on their condition (this happened to Anne Frank, for example). During periods of labor shortage children as young as
13 could be spared.
Extermination of Jews unfit for work (including children) is the
big picture. Obviously, considering the numbers of people involved and the complicated history of the camp the big picture would also have some
exceptions.
The general rule about killing off the people permanently unfit for work (incl. small children) applied mostly to Jews, especially after
April 1943 (there were circumstances under which non-Jews also shared the same fate before April of 1943 and some in instances after, but not as a rule), so finding non-Jewish children or people unfit for work in Auschwitz in 1944 or 1945 should hardly raise eyebrows.
So Rudolf's nice graph is right out: it shows all inmates, not only Jews. The rest of his speculations is just that - pure guessing (one just needs to take a look at
this article about the age composition of the Hungarian Jews). Rudolf also doesn't take all the Jewish children into account that lived (and died) in the camp due to exceptional circumstances, like the children who arrived with the Slovak transports in 1942 before the selections were instituted or the children in the
Family Camp, or the children from the transports discussed in the next few paragraphs.
Second, the photos are not self-explanatory as to the ethnicity of the depicted children. Though there certainly were Jewish children among them, for example those who escaped being gassed only to become subjects of Dr. Mengele's experiments (like the twins) or those who arrived in Auschwitz after the last transport selection took place on 30.10.1944. There were also several exceptional late Jewish transports that did not undergo selection and were registered together with children. An example of one such transport would be the so-called
Phillips transport:
The train arrived in Auschwitz on June 6, the day of the allied invasion in Normandy. The acting commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss was informed that a transport of trained radio technicians would be arriving in Auschwitz. The message came from Gerhard Maurer, head of the department for labour deployment at the SS Economic Administrative Main Office who had been contacted by Ewald Löser, a senior Philips executive in Berlin. Thus the Jews from Vught did not undergo a selection and were kept alive.
A group of Jewish transports from labor camps in the Generalgouvernement at the end of July, beginning of August of 1944 underwent no selection upon arrival. This includes the transport from
Starachowice on 30.07.1944, the transport from
Pionki on 31.07.1944, the transport from
Kielce on 02.08.1944 and the transport from
Ostrowiec on 03.08.1944. The most probable reason is that these GG transfers were seen as "internal" transfers from labor camps on an otherwise "judenrein" territory: it was assumed that most Jews unfit for work would have already been eliminated in the previous labor camps by the time of the arrival in Auschwitz, and it would be a waste of manpower to stage a selection for such transports for a few people who might be unfit for work.
Relatively speaking these transports were still nothing compared to the transports that did undergo selections.
Let's take a closer look at the famous
photo with liberated children which is also used in the tweet.
This Yad Vashem page identifies 7 of the children and gives the background information about their arrival in Auschwitz. 6 of them (Gabriel Neumann, Tomy Shacham (formerly Schwarz), Erika Dohan (née Winter), Shmuel Schelach (formerly Robert Schlesinger), sisters Marta Wise (née Weiss) and Eva Slonim (née Weiss)) were deported to Auschwitz from the Sered camp in Slovakia.
According to Danuta Czech's
Auschwitz Chronicle the transport from Sered arrived in Auschwitz on 03.11.1944. That is both after the last transport selection took place on 30.10.1944 and the Auschwitz gassings stopped forever on 02.11.1944. The Sered transport thus did not undergo a selection, despite it being full of people unable to work, including small children. The 7th person identified in that article was Bracha Katz. She and her brother Adolf pretended to be twins and were saved for Mengele's "research" (Adolf died in the camp).
This article identifies further 4 children from the photo: Paula Lebovics, Miriam Ziegler, Gabor Hirsch, Eva Kor. Yet another survivor on the photo is Ruth Muschkies Webber.
Lebovics, Ziegler and Webber (who were
friends in the camp) were all deported in the above-mentioned transport from Ostrowiec that did not undergo a selection.
Gabor Hirsch, was 15 when he arrived in Auschwitz and thus was considered fit for work.
Eva Kor was used in Mengele's experiments together with her twin sister Miriam.
One of the other children appearing in the Soviet film about Auschwitz was
Michael Bornstein, who came to the camp in the above-mentioned transport from Pionki that did not undergo a selection.
Thus the Jewish children in Auschwitz were an exception, not a rule.
Same is true for Jewish babies born in Auschwitz. The absolute majority perished. If there were some who survived, they must have been born to the mothers from the "exceptional" groups as listed above, or
after the gassings stopped in November of 1944, or they must have been hidden from the authorities (which would have been a very rare occurrence).
The story of a Polish midwife in Auschwitz, Stanislawa Leszczynska, who allegedly helped 3000 children to be born is also pretty useless for deniers. First of all, assuming the number is correct (and it is likely significantly exaggerated, see H. Kubica, "Dzieci i młodzież w KL Auschwitz", p. 190n88 in
Auschwitz 1940-1945. Węzłowe zagadnienia z dziejów obozu, t. II, 1995), how many of those children were Polish, how many Russian, how many German, how many Jewish?
Second,
here is what Leszczynska had to say about it (
Przegląd Lekarski,
Nr. 1, 1965, pp. 105, 106):
In May 1943 the situation of some children has changed. Children with blue eyes and blond hair were taken from their mothers and send to Germany to be Germanized. Overwhelming scream of mothers accompanied departing of each transport of newborns. As long as a newborn was together with the mother, motherhood itself created a ray of hope. Separation with the newborn was overwhelming.
(This obviously refers to non-Jewish children.)
Jewish children were still drowned in the most brutal fashion. There was no way to hide a Jewish child or put him or her among other children. Schwester Klara and Schwester Pfani observed Jewish mothers very closely during the delivery. The newborn was tattooed with the number of the mother; afterwards Klara and Pfani drowned the child in the barrel and threw the body outside.
The life of other children was the worst; they died from a slow starvation. Their skins become thin and transparent, with muscles, blood vessels and bones seen through the skin. Newborn Russians survived the longest. 50% of all women were from Russia.
[...]
Among those horrible memories there is one main thought coming back to me all the time. All children were born alive. Their goal was to stay alive! Only thirty of them survived the camp. Several hundred children were send to Germany to grow up as Germans, more than 1,500 were drowned by Schwester Klara and Pfani, more than 1,000 children died because of cold and starvation (the numbers do not include the period to April 1943).
So again, how does all this help the deniers, exactly?
Hermann Langbein, the camp survivor and historian, has a whole chapter "Those born in Auschwitz" in his book
People in Auschwitz (2004, UNC Press, pp. 234ff.):
On September 18, 1943, a girl born in the women’s camp was the first baby who was given an inmate number and added to the camp population. The mother was a Pole from Kattowitz. Even after this, however, Jewish women were not allowed to give birth. If such a woman managed to conceal her pregnancy until delivery, which had to take place in the utmost secrecy and under unimaginably primitive conditions, the child had to die so that at least the life of the mother could be preserved.
‘‘We stockpiled all the poison in the camp for this purpose, and it was not sufficient,’’ writes Lucie Adelsberger, an inmate physician who had to deal with this problem in 1944.
[...]
Adelsberger realizes that some mothers ‘‘did not forgive themselves and us.’’ Because a Jewish mother could be saved only if her baby was poisoned and a miscarriage was pretended, ‘‘the Germans turned us into murderers’’ (Olga Lengyel). A female nurse had no other choice. Who will relieve her and her colleagues of the torment of memory?
[...]
Janina Kosciuszkowa noted the next development. ‘‘In 1944 Jewish babies were not murdered immediately after being born.’’ However, the mothers had no milk, and no one had food for the babies. Krystyna Zywulska has reported that they cried, whimpered, grew weaker and weaker, became bloated, and died. Kosciuszkowa, who experienced the end of this episode, writes: ‘‘One day the news spread that mothers with infants were being gassed. The children who were still alive were ‘liquidated,’ and the mothers were hurriedly released from the infirmary and added to the camp population. The next day, a fellow prisoner discovered two live children wrapped in blankets, and we managed to save them.’’ Zywulska states that those who had to witness this greeted the death of the children with a sigh of relief, for this seemed to avert the general killing campaign.
[...]
At the time of the Hungarian transports in 1944, women who had been found fit for work at the initial selection were gathered in Section B II c of Birkenau. Gisella Perl, who worked as a physician there, soon noticed that all pregnant women were taken away and gassed. In an effort to save at least the mother, it was her bitter duty to perform abortions. At a later date the ss gave the order to kill only the newborn babies and let the young mothers live. From then on, the abortions could be stopped and deliveries did not have to be secret anymore. ‘‘I was jubilant,’’ writes Perl. There were 292 women waiting to give birth when Mengele surprisingly revoked this order and had all pregnant women taken to the gas chamber. In September 1944 abortions were permitted again and the killing of newborn babies was stopped. Even so, many of them died because their mothers were not able to feed them.
The quote about the playground is just another deception. This refers specifically to the "Gypsy" family camp (Langbein,
op. cit., p. 237):
Julia Skodova, who worked in the registry, remembers clearly how careful those in charge were to avoid any irregularity in the register of births.The camp administration also provided some visual effects by building a playground in the Gypsy camp. ‘‘Like any proper playground, it had a merry-go-round with rocking horses and the like as well as all kinds of gym equipment, such as rings and parallel bars, and a wooden fence without barbed wire’’(Lucie Adelsberger).
The lying denier edited out any mention of the Roma.
The Nazi anti-Roma policy differed from their antisemitic policy and the Roma were allowed for some time to live in the so-called
Zigeunerlager without working or undergoing selections. In the end most were gassed in one fell swoop. But before that they were officially allowed to have children in the camp, hence the playground. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Jews.
Now to the Jews unfit for work. First of all, this means people unable to work for a really prolonged period of time (old people, children, disabled...). It does not mean that all Jews who fell ill were automatically murdered. The Nazis needed working hands, and this was especially true as the war progressed (so the conditions were also different in different periods, which should be always taken into account). Working Jews were a valuable resource - just as slaves were once a valuable resource to their slavemasters.
So, especially in 1944, Jews who fell ill but with a hope of a relatively quick recovery (in a matter of a few weeks) would have been medically treated, including surgical operations in a hospital. This is absolutely logical and in no way contradicts the general outlines of the Final Solution. When these Jews would become permanently disabled they would be killed, but "for now" the Nazis wanted to exploit them for what it was worth.
So the silly denier memes feigning "surprise" about medical treatment of Jews stem from ignorance or dishonesty.
And the photo of a little person in Auschwitz is taken from the so-called
Auschwitz Album which documents the
arrival of a Hungarian Jewish transport. Its use in this context is thus dishonest because this person's immediate fate is unknown - he was probably gassed, unless he became a subject of medical experiments. It is therefore hardly evidence for Jews permanently unfit for work as Auschwitz inmates.
After the Höfle telegram delivered more precise figures, the historian of course revised his camp table (the demographic total stayed the same). At a time when many historians were using the figures of 360,000 for Kulmhof, 2,500,000 or more for Auschwitz, and big figures for Lublin (Majdanek) Hilberg stayed sober and nowadays the acknowledged figures for these camps largely coincide with his old estimates.
Dawidowicz, on the other hand, was a bit of a hack. Note her Majdanek figure which is apparently just a slightly modified Soviet estimate without any basis in reality. So yes, her camp data is unreliable. Whether her demographic data is reliable is another question, but her research is outdated anyway, so the issue is irrelevant. The point is, there was no "conspiracy" to arrive at the same figure here. The deniers just misunderstood the methodology involved. Or maybe they understood it very well but still used the differing estimates for propaganda purposes.
Arnold Friedman was not a "famous" survivor, contrary to the tweet. He had never claimed to have personally witnessed gassings in Auschwitz, so in which sense was he proven, during the Zündel trial, to have been an impostor and a liar just because he did not see the gassings? Right, he wasn't.
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