In 1987, Alois Brunner told the Chicago-Sun Times, “All of them deserved to die, because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage. I have no regrets and would do it again.” Brunner, whose death was confirmed yesterday, lived in Syria for several decades and clearly had multiple opportunities to state that Jews were resettled, yet he chose to glory in their deaths, much as his boss Eichmann had done in his Sassen conversations.
↧
Alois Brunner: “All of them deserved to die."
↧
Correction Corner #5: Bartosik et al., The Beginnings of the Extermination of Jews in KL Auschwitz...
The document collection from Bartisek et al. (The beginnings of the extermination of Jews in KL Auschwitz in the light of the source materials) contains a number of previously unknown and for Revisionists inconvinient German contemporary sources (some - but not all - have been highlighted in a previous posting). Other documents in the collection have been known already, in particular from Revisionist Carlo Mattogno's works. And some of the docs have been clearly misinterpreted by Bartisek et al.
Between 20 to 22 August 1942 the following work was done by the electrician detail in Auschwitz-Birkenau:
Working card
To the ...electricians
For installation of the Sonderkommando Birkenau BW20KGL [power plant] the following work is to be done:Installation and supply line for the Sonderkommando consisting of:
- 19 burning sites[literal translation of Brennstellen]
- 1 supply line 200 m overhead line and 600 m cable 3 x 10 mm²
(work card of 22 August 1942, Bartosik et al, p. 75, my translation and emphasis)
According to Bartosik et al., the term burning sites refers to "burning of corpses retrieved from the mass graves". However, in this specific context (work to be done by electricians), it actually means electrical contacts/sockets/lightening outlets:
"Brẹnn|stel|le 〈f. 19; Sammelbez. für〉 Steckdose, Herd, Kochplatte, Lampe"
http://universal_lexikon.deacademic.com/68483/Brennstelle
Revisionists should wipe that smirk off their face, because Carlo Mattogno's reading of the source was not any better. In his book Special Treatment in Auschwitz (STIA), he understood that the Sonderkommando mentioned in the document was a "unit of electricians serving in the power plant of Birkenau" (STIA, p. 102), whereas the document is actually saying that the electrician detail is performing work for the Sonderkommando, i.e the document describes connecting some Bunker extermination site to electricity, obviously to enable day and night activity.
Another doubtfull interpretation is the authors reading of the following line:
(list of constructions of 4 September 1944, Bartosik et al, p.61; the document was previously cited in Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: The Samuel Crowell Bomb Shelter Thesis: A Historically Unfounded Hypothesis)
They understand this entry is about "the conversion of an existing gas-tight room in the former crematorium I for use by the garrison physician" (Bartosik et al, p. 58), but the wording does not indicate the room was gas-tight in its initial state (rather that it is gas-tight in its final state). A construction drawing of 21 September 1944 shows that the location of the "surgery room" in the converted air raid shelter corresponds to the "laying out room" in the original crematorium, which was not part of the homicidal gas chamber and therefore not gas tight anyway prior the conversion.
Revisionists should wipe that smirk off their face, because Carlo Mattogno's reading of the source was not any better. In his book Special Treatment in Auschwitz (STIA), he understood that the Sonderkommando mentioned in the document was a "unit of electricians serving in the power plant of Birkenau" (STIA, p. 102), whereas the document is actually saying that the electrician detail is performing work for the Sonderkommando, i.e the document describes connecting some Bunker extermination site to electricity, obviously to enable day and night activity.
Another doubtfull interpretation is the authors reading of the following line:
Completion of a gas tight treatment room in the former crematorium for the garrison doctor
(list of constructions of 4 September 1944, Bartosik et al, p.61; the document was previously cited in Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: The Samuel Crowell Bomb Shelter Thesis: A Historically Unfounded Hypothesis)
They understand this entry is about "the conversion of an existing gas-tight room in the former crematorium I for use by the garrison physician" (Bartosik et al, p. 58), but the wording does not indicate the room was gas-tight in its initial state (rather that it is gas-tight in its final state). A construction drawing of 21 September 1944 shows that the location of the "surgery room" in the converted air raid shelter corresponds to the "laying out room" in the original crematorium, which was not part of the homicidal gas chamber and therefore not gas tight anyway prior the conversion.
↧
↧
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:
Comments on Selected Individual Testimonies on Homicidal Gassing in Auschwitz
Henryk Tauber
Pressac provided a decent analysis of the testimony of Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber in Technique, p. 432. He reproduced the full testimony together with corroborating sources as well as his own explanatory and critical remarks, and concluded that Tauber’s testimony is “the best that exists on the Birkenau Krematorien” and “95% historically reliable” (Pressac, Technique, p. 481). In stark contrast to this, Mattogno claims that Tauber's testimony is "to 95% unreliable, that is to say: it is historically worthless" (Mattogno, Auschwitz: The Case of Sanity [ATCFS], p. 424). However, he attacks only about 25% of the descriptions contained in Tauber’s Polish testimony. Moreover, Mattogno concedes that “as far as the buildings are concerned and in respect of the description of the crematoria, Tauber’s testimonies are fully reliable”. However, these “fully reliable” descriptions already amount to about 20% of the Polish testimony. Clearly, Mattogno's estimates do not add up and his harsh judgement on Tauber would be heavily exaggerated even if his analysis were perfectly correct.
Mattogno would not be a Revisionist if there were not some totally ridiculous attacks from him, such as that Tauber estimated the height of the Topf three-muffle muffle as 1 m instead of 80 cm (ATCFS, p. 377) and that the strength of the Sonderkommando in summer 1944 as 1000 instead of 903 (ATCFS, p. 403). Such small deviations are entirely compatible with a reliable and credible witness. Others of objection against Tauber’s descriptions are simply false or unfounded. Among these are all the atrocities besides homicidal gassing and shooting in the neck Tauber mentions, such as the cutting of human flesh of executed prisoners (ATCFS, p. 418) and the burning of people alive (ATCFS, p. 418).
There are certainly a number of questionable and false descriptions in Tauber’s testimony. But Mattogno does not even go the next step to evaluate and estimate how critical these flawed descriptions really are. For instance, Tauber falsely assumed that air was pulled from the gas chamber suffocating the victims (ATCFS, p. 403). But since he was neither a ventilation technician nor operating the gas chamber, his claim obviously derived from the fact that the gas chamber had a gas tight door plus an air extraction actively pumping out the air is excusable. Mattogno does not succeed to point out a single serious mistake in Tauber’s testimony. There are a few memory lapses, misinterpretations and the weakness to have adopted the 4 Million death toll from Soviet investigators, amounting to less than 5% of his Polish testimony. Neither the quantity nor the quality of these flaws is worrying. Hence, it is entirely justified to say that Tauber is a reliable and credible witness on mass extermination in Auschwitz.
As pointed out by Pressac, further emphasized by Van Pelt and also acknowledged by Mattogno, Tauber’s description of the layout of the crematoria is outstanding. It is almost too good to be true. It is possible that Tauber explained the mass extermination in Auschwitz based on documents found in the archives of the central construction office, and that in turn Tauber’s memory was to some extent refreshed by such documents. This does not invalidate Tauber’s excellent description (as Mattogno would like it to be), which still had to come from somebody who was a good observer and honest witness, but it might relative its almost perfect accuracy.
Shlomo Dragon
Rudolf Höß
Mattogno claims that Rudolf Höß's declarations are “absurd and contradictory”, but when John Zimmerman looked into some of the descriptions in Höß’ manuscript on the Final Solution of the Jewish Question he found that “based on all of the available evidence, the Höß memoirs are very reliable as to their overall truth”. The article is available on the Holocaust History Project Website since May 1999 (the site is well known to Mattogno as he has replied to Zimmerman’s later articles in the past), but it is not even cited let aside addressed by Mattogno in ATCFS.
In his testimony, Höß was confused about the dating and context of several events. The most striking case concerns the genesis of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Auschwitz. It is now well established and accepted (Reitlinger, Die Endlösung, 1979, p.114; Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz; Dwork, Van Pelt, Auschwitz 1270 to the Present; Orth, Rudolf Höß und die "Endlösung der Judenfrage") that Höß was not summoned to Himmler in summer 1941 to receive the order to exterminate the European Jews in Auschwitz. Most likely, he was referring to an event in summer 1942 (as suggested by the reference to the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and the existing extermination camps in the East), reinterpreted it as having been taking place the year earlier and merged it with other events after autumn 1941. In the one extreme case, Höß was deliberately and consciously lying and shifting backwards the order to exterminate all Jews to legitimise any killing of Jews in Auschwitz prior to the summer of 1942. In the other extreme case, he was genuinely confused about the sequence and context of the events. The truth may also lie in between these extremes.
Mattogno argues that the probability that Höß was confusing events (here Van Pelt’s hypothesis that Höß confused a meeting with Himmler on the extermination of Russian POWs with that on the extermination of the European Jews) “is actually untenable, because Höss always stressed with certainty that the alleged order given by Himmler concerned the European Jews”. (ATCFS, p. 428). How this is challenging Van Pelt’s interpretation is beyond me, as if an honest mistake could not be committed consistently and with certainty.
Mattogno believes that Höß’s first account on Auschwitz of 14 March 1946 (NO-1210) “was not written by Höss but drawn up by his British interrogators” (ATCFS, p. 437) and speculates that also his later confessions were not made “voluntarily and without compulsion” (ATCFS, p. 438). The latter claim has been entirely made up by Mattogno. The first claim is based on the misinterpretation (already committed by Martin Broszat, Kommandant in Auschwitz, p. 225) that Höß’s later statement in Poland that “[m]y first interrogation was marked by striking demonstrations. I have no idea what the minutes contain, although I did sign them” (ATCFS, p. 437) referred to his interrogation filed as evidence NO-1210, which took place on 14 March 1946 in Minden. However, in his autobiographical notes Höß made it clear that the remark referred to an earlier interrogation in Heide, about 300 km north of Minden. This interrogation record has not been released/found/published so far.
There is no evidence that Höß’s account NO-1210 was “drawn up by his British interrogators” as suggested by Mattogno. In contrary, according to the wealth of information likely unknown to the British Field Security Police (i.e. on his own biography, detailed account on the escape of high ranking members of the SS-WVHA, organisation of the SS-WVHA), the relatively minor incrimination of SS personnel (only Himmler – who was already dead at the time – is blamed for the extermination of the Jews, some SS doctors are blamed of medical experiments, but his own WVHA is exculpated from atrocities) including himself (“I personally never shot anybody or beat anybody”) and the relativization of the responsibility for the disastrous situation in Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1945 in favour of the SS (e.g. the order from Himmler to stop all dying in the concentration camps, order from Pohl to Kramer to improve the food in Bergen Belsen, unspecific blaming of the Landesernährungsamt for the lack of food in Belsen) the account was authored by Höß himself. It is important to note that NO-1210 already contains the core elements of the mass extermination in Auschwitz, i.e. the gassing procedure in the Bunker 1 and 2 extermination sites, open air cremations and the gassing procedure in the crematoria 2 and 3.
Mattogno avoids explaining how exactly the British are supposed to have “drawn up” the mass extermination in NO-1210, but which is an absolutely crucial point for his hypothesis. The document is obviously neither based on the War Refugee Board report nor on the Soviet report 008-USSR. Substantial descriptions in NO-1210 are corroborated by the report of Pery Broad, which was known to Gerald Draper (see NI-11954 of 2 March 1946), who also dealt with Höß in Minden. NO-1210 is much less detailed and comprehensive on Auschwitz than the Broad report. It also lacks many atrocities and events reported in detail by Broad such as the Block 11 executions, the first homicidal gassing in Block 11, the Budy revolt, the gassing procedure in crematorium in the main camp (Höß very briefly indicates en passent that people were gassed in the crematorium 1), the Sonderkommando revolt, the gassing in crematorium 4 and 5. On the other hand, NO-1210 contains a comparable detailed description of the uprising of a transport sent from Belsen, but which is only a side note in Broad’s report (without explicitly linking it to a transport from Belsen). It cannot be ruled out that Broad’s testimony served to help the interrogators to question Höß, but the differences are too significant to argue that one has scripted the other. And of course, this hypothesis does not solve the more severe problem for Revisionists that would follow then: how was Broad’s testimony “drawn up” by the British?
Pery Broad
Mattogno maintains that Broad’s report written in July 1945 “is absolutely unreliable” (p. 618), but when I analysed the source in great detail elsewhere, it turned out to be very reliable. The report is very detailed and well corroborated but it is also significant that it was written only few months after the liberation of Auschwitz, 800 km away from the crime scene and the corresponding Soviet and Polish investigations. It is clearly not based on the War Refugee Board report (that may have been available to British investigators), it cannot be based on the report of the Soviet War Crimes Commission of 6 May 1945 (008-USSR) either. Broad had no chance to review any documents captured by the Soviets in Auschwitz and there is no evidence that he had any source available to him other than his own memory. The genesis of the Broad report is a massive problem for Revisionists (though only one among many). As usual, Mattogno restricts himself to point out a few inaccuracies in the 19,000 words report (ATCFS, p. 617; already addressed elsewhere) and doubts a bit the authenticity of the source, which is a classic Revisionist approach if they don’t know further; but as also shown elsewhere the report is authentic beyond any reasonable doubt. Hence, Mattogno cannot explain the testimony of Broad.
Charles Sigismund Bendel
Bendel was one of the first eyewitnesses to testify about the mass extermination in Auschwitz on trial. His most important account (because detailed, dated the earliest and most reliable) is his cross examination of 1 October 1945 at the Belsen trial (his pre-trial interrogation would be of course even more relevant, but it is not known/published so far). The transcript of the examination has some 3500 words and can be largely corroborated by independent sources (in Italics is me paraphrasing Bendel; you may skip this huge paragraph if you trust me that Bendel performed pretty well).
Bendel correctly identified Mengele as SS doctor and Epstein as prisoner's doctor in the Gypsies camp, "twins" as Mengele's research topic, that 11,000 prisoners were hold in the Gypsies camp by 27 February 1944 (the figure is confirmed by Rudolf Höß in his autobiographical notes: "I know that the section was calculated for 10,000 and that it was fully occupied", my translation from the Auschwitz trial DVD; about 19,000 Gypsies were registered up to this date in Auschwitz and taking into account losses among the prisoners, the figure is certainly at the correct order of magnitude), that 4300 Gypsies were killed end of July 1944 while 1500 were kept for work (Pery Broad: "In July 1944, the dies were cast. Himmler had ordered the fit [Gypsies] to stay in the camps and the rest to be gassed", Rudolf Höß: "There were about 4000 Gypsies left until August 44, who had to go into the gas chambers", see also Appendix U, Correction Corner #4: Auschwitz Museum and the number of Gypsy victims and An interesting testimony about the gassing of Gypsies on August 2, 1944), the men who worked at the crematoria were called Sonderkommando and their strength was 900 prisoners, there was also a SS Sonderkommando of 3 men per crematorium, Wirths [misspelled Dr. Wurts in the transcript] as SS garrison doctor, Moll as head of the Sonderkommando, the prisoner's Sonderkommando lived in locked Blocks (Stanislaw Jankowski in April 1945 in Poland: "In Birkenau we were accomodated in Block 13 in section D...Block 13 was a closed block", my trans. from Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 43 f.), the liquidation of 80,000 Jews from Lodz in August 1944, three cremation trenches 12 x 6 m behind crematorium 5(1944 aerial photographis indicate 4 - 5 cremation sites of various size 12-30 m x 3-6, Sonderkommando ground photos show a cremation trench in operation in late August 1944), a cremation capacity of 1000 corpses per day for crematorium 5, the undressing of the victims in the yard of crematorium 5, the victims waited in a big hall (shown in between furnace room and gas chamber tract on construction drawings of the crematorium) until a Red Cross car arrived with the gas(confirmed by the Sonderkommando handwriting of the unknown author [written in 1943-1944, dug out near crematorium 3 in 1952], Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 179 f., and Salmen Lewenthal [written prior October 1944, dug out near crematorium 3 in 1961], Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 220), the low roof of the gas chamber tract, the cutting of hair (confirmed by Henryk Tauber in May 1945 in Poland) and removal of gold teeth (confirmed by Stanislaw Jankowski in April 1945 in Poland and by Pery Broad in July 1945 in Germany), the shooting of people at the cremation trenches,Kramer as commandant of Birkenau, the Sonderkommando revolt on 7 October 1944 (the uprising is corroborated by the garrison order of 12 October 1944 [3 SS men killed on 7 October 1944]) because 300 Sonderkommandos were supposed to get transferred (confirmed by the handwriting of Salmen Lewenthal: "On the next day, i.e. 7 October 44, we learned that 300 people were to be sent on transport by noon", Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 241) with 500 dead Sonderkommandos (corroborated by labour force reports of 8 and 9 October 1944 showing a drop from 661 to 212 crematoria workers) and crematorium 4 was set on fire (corroborating by its lack of workforce in the labour force reports, see Mattogno, Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations, p. 73), the supply of dynamite to the Sonderkommando by girls from the ammunition factory Union (confirmed by the handwriting of Salmen Lewenthal, Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 230 and Pery Broad in July 1945 in Germany) and the hanging of four girls in December 1944 (confirmed by Stanislaw Jankowski in April 1945 in Poland, Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 56, the execution took place on 6 January 1945 according to Czech, Kalendarium, p. 957), there were four crematoria in Birkenau and a Bunker which was only a gas chamber.
Bendel also proved to be resistent towards manipulation and suggestive questions from the prosecution at the Belsen trial. For instance, when he was asked by the chief prosecutor Backhouse if the victims were "brought down [into the gas chamber] by one of the doctors?", instead of providing the "correct" answer "yes" for a coached prosecution witness (as the former SS doctor Klein was accused at the trial), he simply answered:
And thereby raised doubts on the prosecutors own evidence of "two people who were sent into the gas chamber and rescued at the last moment" (from Backhouse's opening speech).
In short, Bendel's testimony at the Belsen trial is fairly reliable (the only clearly weak element being his cremation trench capacity of 1000 corpses per hour; while the trenches may have been loaded with 1000 corpses in one hour and thus disappeared from the gas chamber within this time for Bendel, the actual cremation lasted many hours) and very credible.
I went into great detail on Bendel's Belsen testimony because (i) I feel it has been neglected and not fully exploited by Anti-Revisionists in the past and (ii) because it is most interesting to contrast it with Mattogno's critique of the testimony.
So how did Mattogno deal with this most important testimony of a highly relevant eyewitness? Recall that Mattogno asserts that virtually anything said and written about mass extermination in Auschwitz is false and that he has yet convince virtually any scholar on this planet of his hypothesis, I would expect a detailed analysis explaining why the testimony is unreliable and uncredible, but most importantly explaining its specific genesis. And here is what Mattogno delivered in ATCFS (p.593):
Bendel correctly identified Mengele as SS doctor and Epstein as prisoner's doctor in the Gypsies camp, "twins" as Mengele's research topic, that 11,000 prisoners were hold in the Gypsies camp by 27 February 1944 (the figure is confirmed by Rudolf Höß in his autobiographical notes: "I know that the section was calculated for 10,000 and that it was fully occupied", my translation from the Auschwitz trial DVD; about 19,000 Gypsies were registered up to this date in Auschwitz and taking into account losses among the prisoners, the figure is certainly at the correct order of magnitude), that 4300 Gypsies were killed end of July 1944 while 1500 were kept for work (Pery Broad: "In July 1944, the dies were cast. Himmler had ordered the fit [Gypsies] to stay in the camps and the rest to be gassed", Rudolf Höß: "There were about 4000 Gypsies left until August 44, who had to go into the gas chambers", see also Appendix U, Correction Corner #4: Auschwitz Museum and the number of Gypsy victims and An interesting testimony about the gassing of Gypsies on August 2, 1944), the men who worked at the crematoria were called Sonderkommando and their strength was 900 prisoners, there was also a SS Sonderkommando of 3 men per crematorium, Wirths [misspelled Dr. Wurts in the transcript] as SS garrison doctor, Moll as head of the Sonderkommando, the prisoner's Sonderkommando lived in locked Blocks (Stanislaw Jankowski in April 1945 in Poland: "In Birkenau we were accomodated in Block 13 in section D...Block 13 was a closed block", my trans. from Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 43 f.), the liquidation of 80,000 Jews from Lodz in August 1944, three cremation trenches 12 x 6 m behind crematorium 5(1944 aerial photographis indicate 4 - 5 cremation sites of various size 12-30 m x 3-6, Sonderkommando ground photos show a cremation trench in operation in late August 1944), a cremation capacity of 1000 corpses per day for crematorium 5, the undressing of the victims in the yard of crematorium 5, the victims waited in a big hall (shown in between furnace room and gas chamber tract on construction drawings of the crematorium) until a Red Cross car arrived with the gas(confirmed by the Sonderkommando handwriting of the unknown author [written in 1943-1944, dug out near crematorium 3 in 1952], Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 179 f., and Salmen Lewenthal [written prior October 1944, dug out near crematorium 3 in 1961], Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 220), the low roof of the gas chamber tract, the cutting of hair (confirmed by Henryk Tauber in May 1945 in Poland) and removal of gold teeth (confirmed by Stanislaw Jankowski in April 1945 in Poland and by Pery Broad in July 1945 in Germany), the shooting of people at the cremation trenches,Kramer as commandant of Birkenau, the Sonderkommando revolt on 7 October 1944 (the uprising is corroborated by the garrison order of 12 October 1944 [3 SS men killed on 7 October 1944]) because 300 Sonderkommandos were supposed to get transferred (confirmed by the handwriting of Salmen Lewenthal: "On the next day, i.e. 7 October 44, we learned that 300 people were to be sent on transport by noon", Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 241) with 500 dead Sonderkommandos (corroborated by labour force reports of 8 and 9 October 1944 showing a drop from 661 to 212 crematoria workers) and crematorium 4 was set on fire (corroborating by its lack of workforce in the labour force reports, see Mattogno, Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations, p. 73), the supply of dynamite to the Sonderkommando by girls from the ammunition factory Union (confirmed by the handwriting of Salmen Lewenthal, Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 230 and Pery Broad in July 1945 in Germany) and the hanging of four girls in December 1944 (confirmed by Stanislaw Jankowski in April 1945 in Poland, Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 56, the execution took place on 6 January 1945 according to Czech, Kalendarium, p. 957), there were four crematoria in Birkenau and a Bunker which was only a gas chamber.
Bendel also proved to be resistent towards manipulation and suggestive questions from the prosecution at the Belsen trial. For instance, when he was asked by the chief prosecutor Backhouse if the victims were "brought down [into the gas chamber] by one of the doctors?", instead of providing the "correct" answer "yes" for a coached prosecution witness (as the former SS doctor Klein was accused at the trial), he simply answered:
"No. There was one S.S. in front and one at the back. That is all."And questioned by a defendant lawyer if he can corroborate the claim of "anybody being released from the gas chamber" he responded:
"During the time I was there I have never heard about it; it was impossible."
And thereby raised doubts on the prosecutors own evidence of "two people who were sent into the gas chamber and rescued at the last moment" (from Backhouse's opening speech).
In short, Bendel's testimony at the Belsen trial is fairly reliable (the only clearly weak element being his cremation trench capacity of 1000 corpses per hour; while the trenches may have been loaded with 1000 corpses in one hour and thus disappeared from the gas chamber within this time for Bendel, the actual cremation lasted many hours) and very credible.
I went into great detail on Bendel's Belsen testimony because (i) I feel it has been neglected and not fully exploited by Anti-Revisionists in the past and (ii) because it is most interesting to contrast it with Mattogno's critique of the testimony.
So how did Mattogno deal with this most important testimony of a highly relevant eyewitness? Recall that Mattogno asserts that virtually anything said and written about mass extermination in Auschwitz is false and that he has yet convince virtually any scholar on this planet of his hypothesis, I would expect a detailed analysis explaining why the testimony is unreliable and uncredible, but most importantly explaining its specific genesis. And here is what Mattogno delivered in ATCFS (p.593):
"Van Pelt presents us with a long excerpt from Bendel’s deposition at the Belsen trial (pp.34ff.), but without any comment, even though it contains various assertions which clash conspicuously with his credo, for example:
- the gassing of 80,000 Jews from the Lodz ghetto, although there were only 25,000 deportees (p. 112, see chapter 15.2.);
- the number (three), the size (12×6 m) and the capacity (1,000 corpses per hour) of the alleged “cremation pits” in the yard of crematoriumV are completely at variance with the assertions by Tauber, Dragon and Jankowski (and by all the other witnesses; see Mattogno 2005c, pp. 13-23);
- the death of the alleged victims within two minutes and the opening of the door of the alleged gas chamber after five minutes, whereas van Pelt speaks of “up to 30 minutes” (p. 388; see chapter 14.1.);"
That is it. So instead of an actual analysis [="a careful study of something to learn about its parts, what they do, and how they are related to each other"], we only get a short list of supposed falsehoods or contradictions with no explanation of the testimony whatsoever. In 1990, he published an English article adding 5 (!) more supposed false items from Bendel's cross examination. Mattogno even achieves the "masterpiece" that almost all of the supposed falsehoods he points his finger at (aside those above: execution of 150 political prisoners in August 1944, undressing of the victims in the yard of the crematorium, shooting of prisoners near the cremation trenches, collection of fat from the cremation trenches, gassing of 4300 Gypsies end July 1944, execution of 4 prisoners who supplied explosives to the Sonderkommando in December 1944) are either perfectly correct, largely correct or may be very well correct. The only exception being the 1000 corpses/h cremation trench capacity already mentioned above.
Bendel's next appearance was at the Tesch trial on 2 March 1946 in Hamburg. This testimony is much weaker than his cross-examination at the Belsen trial. While he still provided a decent number of hard facts, his testimony is now also loaded with some guesswork, exaggerations, hearsay information, e.g. the 4 Million Auschwitz victims, 25,000 victims per day in June 1944 and that disinfection was "done mainly by Lisoform". As Pressac noted, this looks like it was prepared to provide maximum damage to the defendants and Bendel was willing to help. He also displayed some weakness in estimating the height of the gas chamber. According to him, the gas chambers of crematorium 2 and 3 were about 1.7 m high, while their actual height was about 2.4 m. This inaccuracy could be the result of a small observer (Bendel doesn't look too big) + a filled gas chamber + taking the 1.9 m height door as reference + subjective estimation.
More serious, however, is that according to Mattogno, Bendel stated in an affidavit of 21 October 1945 that the gas chambers (of all crematoria) were only 1.5 m high, i.e. smaller than most adults. Such a mistake is puzzling. Since Bendel was not a compuslive liar as demonstrated by his appearance at the Belsen trial and since he was definitely assigned to work at the crematoria (else he could not provide such a wealth of details of the sites and even provided a reasonable description of the wire mesh shaft from inside the gas chamber), the underestimation smells like somebody who was heavily and selectively traumatised:
"One got the impression that they fought terribly against death. Anybody who has ever seen a gas chamber filled to the height of one and a half metres with corpses will never forget it."
(Bendel at the Belsen trial)
Miklos Nyiszli
Nyiszli testified about Auschwitz on 28 July 1945 in Budapest before the "Budapest Commission for the Welfare of Deported Hungarian Jews". The late ex-Revisionist Charles Provan quoted some extract from the deposition he obtained from Prof. Lifton's staff on his website Revising Revisionism (mirrored here). Elsewhere Provan quoted/paraphrases some further statements from the deposition. Another extract (on killing Mengele's twins) is quoted in Lifton's book The Nazi Doctors.
Nyiszli's prisoner's number in Auschwitz was A-8450, which was registered on 29 May 1944 according the registration records (Czech, Kalendarium, p. 788). As demonstrated by a transfer report of 27 June 1944 (Nyiszli, Im Jenseits der Menschlichkeit, p. 180), he was indeed first sent to Monowitz and then selected to work for Mengele together with two (not one) other prisoners. His description of the gassing procedure - arrival of the gas with a Red Cross car, four gas openings on the underground gas chamber with concrete covers, gas pellets in cans, SS paramedic with gas mask pours the content into the openings, death after five to ten minutes - is reliable apart from the plural "doors" (there was only one door from the corridor to the gas chamber and - of course - the chlorine gas (instead of hydrogen cyanide gas). Although one would assume that, as a doctor, he was somehow interested in the actual poison gas, the confusion is ultimately a minor error. Furthermore, the mistake rules out that Nyiszli was "scripted" by the War Refugee Board Report (that may have been available to the Hungarian authorities), since there "Cyan" is already identified as killing agent, let aside that the "four concrete slabs" or the underground gas chamber with elevator to the furnace room were not known to its authors.
Only the liquidation of the Sonderkommando on 27 November 1944 is a simplified and distorted description of the events. In actual fact, the 900 men strong Sonderkommando was reduced in three steps (incl. the uprising), moreover it was not liquidated entirely. Nevertheless, Nyiszli was perfectly right that Sonderkommandos were liquidated around this date:
"We are going to the zone. 170 men left. We are certain that they will sent us to death. They have selected 30 people to stay in crematorium 5. Today is 26 November 1944."
(unnamed Sonderkommando prisoner, handwriting found in summer 1952 buried at crematorium 3, Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 185)
According to Prof. Lifton, Nyiszli also revealed that he assisted Mengle in murdering 14 twins. Now, it is implausible and unlikely that a former Auschwitz prisoner would testify in detail about his assistance to kill children (which took place in a closed place like the crematorium dissecting room with certainly no witness to testify against him) if it were not the painful truth.
From the extracts published by Provan and Lifton one could have already infered that Nyiszli provided a decent account (lacking major exaggerations and inventions). This is now also confirmed for the full deposition, which has been published in the mean time (thanks to N. Terry for pointing this out to me).
Some months later, in March 1946, Nyiszli published a book on Auschwitz in Hungarian, which is however quite controversial. On the one hand, the lengthy narrative (some 45000 words in the German translation) displays deep insider knowledge and confirms that Nyiszli was a prisoner's doctor in the crematorium who witnessed mass extermination. On the other hand, the account is clearly soaked with fictional elements despite Nyiszli's declaration that it was written "without exaggeration". It is a novel partly based on historical facts and any details not corroborated by other sources should be taken very carefully. Conversely, the account can be still used to corroborate other independent sources, since it is unlikely that two independent sources would come up with the same fictional element by chance.
But we do not even need his book to make a case for mass extermination with him. Recall that Nyiszli credibly described the gassing in the crematorium already way before the book. And unlike what Mattogno's buddy Jürgen Graf asserted in a response to Provan, the fictional character of the book from March 1946 doesn't invalidate his earlier deposition of July 1945 as a historical source.
So what did Mattogno say about the deposition with its description of the lethal weapon? He did not know about the source in his pamphlet "'Medico ad Auschwitz': Anatomia di un falso" back in 1988, so we can skip this one. But he simply ignored the source when he directly replied to Provan as well as throughout ATCFS.
Yehuda Bakon
Bakon is a former Jewish prisoner of Auschwitz, who has drawn sketches of the crematoria in Birkenau while recovering in a hospital in Austria in June 1945. Here is his sketch of crematorium 4 compared to a contemporary SS photograph and here the same of crematorium 3. He was clearly a reliable and credible eyewitness (the extent of smoke/fire is debatable). Now that we've "gauge[d] the precision of Bacon's memory" as Van Pelt has put it (The Case for Auschwitz, p. 172), we can look at his most important drawing for the issue of mass extermination in Auschwitz, a sketch of the murder weapon, a cross section of the homicidal gas chamber. The sketch shows protected lights and shower heads at the ceiling and a hollow column going from the floor through the roof closed some cover. Most interestingly, he seemed to have indicated another tube within the column and even resolved the inner structure of the device. It is easy to see that number and description of the gas introduction columns correspond well to the independent testimonies of Henryk Tauber and David Olere. Hence, Bacon provided credible evidence on the mass murder in the basement.
Mattogno tried to distract the reader from Bakon's drawings to his later testimony at the Eichmann trial, as if human memory would miraculously improve over time. Of course, it is the other way around and for this reason, Bakon's most relevant account as evidence on mass extermination in Auschwitz is his set of sketches from 1945, then his Eichmann and Auschwitz trial testimony and then what he told Van Pelt just some years ago - exactly in this order. The later accounts may help to understand (or misunderstand) the early sketches, but any inaccuracies that sneaked into them do not challenge the sketches as powerful evidence.
↧
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 3: Eyewitnesses
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:
Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)
Mattogno’s poor treatment of testimonial evidence is a common thread throughout his Auschwitz oeuvre. Weather on Henryk Tauber, Rudolf Höß, Charles Sigismund, Miklos Nyiszli, Filip Müller, Pery Broad, Hans Stark etc., Mattogno does not get tired to repeat the same mindless exercise over and over again: he points out what he thinks are contradictions and false statements in the testimonies and…well that’s it. This flimsy source criticism is already sufficient for him to dismiss any testimonial evidence on mass extermination once for all. Needless to say he does not discuss why this crude and superficial approach is supposed to be justified.
In practise, this scheme follows falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one, false in all). This (controversial) legal maxim assumes that it has been established that a witness has wilfully testified falsely. But it's hard to prove a lie, even more so retrospectively by studying written sources. Indeed, Mattogno does not manage to discriminate between dishonest and honest mistakes in his work. He cannot demonstrate a single lie in the most important accounts. Moreover, falsus in uno usually assumes uncorroborated testimonies, but which is not the case for the mass extermination in Auschwitz. In fact, the powerful concept of independent corroboration enables to extract historical truth with high certainty even from partially contradictionary and false sources. And last but not least, falsus in uno is not a scientific or historiographical principle, but a logical fallacy.
Why Eyewitnesses Are Relevant
Revisionists would like to write the history of Auschwitz almost exclusively based on contemporary German documents. The German files - even if there were perfectly credible, reliable and complete - would only provide limited snapshots of the events at Auschwitz, namely those information that were considered worth to be recorded by the SS, which was naturally only a fraction of what happened. Informal conversations between people would not have been captured at all. But more severely specifically for the question of mass extermination in Auschwitz is the fact that neither credibility nor reliability nor completeness can be presumed for the German files.
Some portion of the documents are not credible. Elsewhere it was showed that the causes of death in the Auschwitz death books were systematically falsified by the Germans. A second problem arises from the tendency among the German paramilitary forces not to talk much about atrocities (this attitude is expressed for instance in Himmler's Posen speech, or specifically for Auschwitz in Pohl's speech of 23 September 1942: "special tasks, about which we do not have to speak words") and the heavy use of euphemisms and camouflage language in documents. One may draw here an analogy to Iraqi bureaucrats using"special attacks" and "special ammunition" when they wrote about chemical warfare against Kurds. Thirdly, the largest part of the German documentation was destroyed anyway, in particular the most relevant one (camp administration, camp commandant, the political department and medical department), while only the construction documents have survived largely intact. But even the files of the central construction office have significant gaps, in particular - and again most relevant - with regards to the crematoria. Hence, the German documents from the SS authorities may provide a fairly good picture of what constructions were carried out when and by whom, but they are rather lousy and insufficient to reconstruct what was going on inside the camp. Most seriously, they do not explain what happened to hundreds of thousands of Jews who were selected as unfit for work at the train ramp(s) in Auschwitz.
Here, at the latest, it is clear that further evidence is required to close the gaping holes left by the contemporary German documents. What kind of evidence would this be? Well, hundreds of thousands of people were deported to the Auschwitz complex, several thousand SS personnel served in the camps, thousands of civilians worked at its construction sites or lived as inhabitants in the surroundings. Many hundreds (thousands?) of people came forward after the war to testify about their experience in the Auschwitz complex. Therefore, testimonial evidence is an important and highly relevant type of source to reconstruct the history of Auschwitz.
Cross-checking And Corroboration
As intentional evidence and being based on reconstructions from human memory, testimonial evidence needs to be carefully examined for its credibility and reliability. Proper source criticism and historical reasoning are essential, else a heavily distorted picture of the historical reality may be obtained (e.g. no murder of Jews in Auschwitz when in fact hundreds of thousands were mass slaughtered).
To judge the reliability and credibility of a witness, it is not sufficient to point out some (supposedly) mistaken descriptions (as Mattogno limits himself to). There is not much gained from such an "analysis". A more telling benchmark is already obtained from the proportion of unreliable descriptions relative to the entire testimony. A single mistaken description may be severely damaging for a testimony only consisting of a single sentence anyway (in the extreme case), but it can be negligible for a testimony of many pages. The analysis is further improved if the amount of unreliable descriptions is compared to those that can be considered as reliable. The reliability of elements can be determined by cross-checking against other sources. Suppose a testimony A containing very few false, but many correct descriptions and one of unknown correctness. Such a testimony can be regarded as generally reliable and - without taking into account further evidence - the description of unknown correctness is more likely to be true than to be false.
Our confidence in the reliability of this description would be further greatly increased if it is independently corroborated by some other testimony(s). Suppose a testimony B, which confirms the remaining description of testimony A. We already know that this description is likely to be true (because testimony A is fairly reliable from cross-checking against other sources), but the probability is further enhanced by the fact that it is corroborated by testimony B. The enhancement scales with the reliability and credibility of testimony B, but the corroborative effect as such is always present. Furthermore, the enhancement scales drastically with the number of corroborating testimonies, which is particular worrying for Revisionists.
The concept of corroborative evidence is illustrated in this scheme specifically for testimonies and homicidal gassing in Auschwitz. The corroborative effect is increasing the probability of the hypothesis/premise/claim to be true above the highest value provided by the individual and isolated pieces of evidence. From another point of view, one may also view the corroboration effect as enhancement of the reliability of a specific testimony, as it is depicted here. Put simply, the boost in probability is obtained because agreement of multiple independent sources is unlikely happening by chance.
When Corroboration Would Fail
There are two lines of attack on a wall of multiple corroborating testimonies: 1. counter-evidence of comparable or higher reliability and 2. evidence showing that the corroboration is not independent.
There is no sufficiently reliable counter-evidence that would challenge the mass extermination in Auschwitz. Mattogno will insist that his interpretation of the German files is refuting the testimonies on mass extermination in Auschwitz, but even without going into detail for the moment, this already has to fail on the ground that there are severe problems with this type of source itself as already mentioned above (lack of credibility, reliability, completeness) plus that it depends on Mattogno's subjective interpretation. Such a deficient source can hardly gather enough momentum to knock down the solid case of numerous corroborating testimonies. Indeed, there is no documentary evidence refuting homicidal gassing/mass extermination in Auschwitz. This issue will be tackled in one of the next postings of this series.
Other pieces of deficient counter-evidence cited by Revisionists are
- chemical argument on cyanide residues. This has even ceased to be powerful evidence according to its main advocate Germar Rudolf ("...chemistry is not the science which can prove or refute any allegations about the Holocaust »rigorously«...on the chemical argument no absolute certainty can be built", Germar Rudolf, Some considerations about the ›Gas Chambers‹ of Auschwitz and Birkenau, see also the more recent article cited here). It is noteworthy that this argument is not touched by Mattogno even with a barge pole.
- combustion engineering argument on indoor cremation. As pointed out in the first posting of this series Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 1: Indoor Cremation Mattogno did not provide any proof that high throughput incineration was not possible in Auschwitz.
- archaeological argument on gas introduction holes. In Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria it was shown that the holes in the roof of the gas chamber of crematorium 2 may have existed according to archaeological evidence (and certainly existed according to the convergence of the available evidence).
What all those pieces of counter-evidence (one may add to this list: flames from crematoria chimneys, collection of human fat from burning pyres in pits...) have in common is that they express the technical/scientific opinion of one or few heavily biased people (in case of Mattogno even lacking proper technical, scientific training). But isolated opinions (even by a layman) are outweighed by multiple corroborating evidence. It is more likely that the layman (or even one single expert) does not know what he is talking about than that numerous corroborating evidence is false. And being ignored by experts is no proof against this, e.g. if I write a 1000 pages pamphlet claiming to have proven that crap can be turned into gold, that does not validate my claim if particle physicists put me on ignore or just laugh at me. There is no right for cranks to get some proper ass kicks. Any technical/scientific argument that is supposed to refute numerous independent, corroborating sources (= very high probability to be true) needs to be shown to have a very high probability itself, i.e. it has to be confirmed and corroborated by independent experts. Without peer review, Mattogno's technical/scientific arguments are nothing but paper tigers torn apart by the more reliable evidence available.
Multiple corroboration also fails if the testimonies are not independent but depend upon each other. If testimony B simply retells/copies a claim from testimony A nothing is gained from it as far as the probability of the claim is concerned. However, most of the accounts on homicidal gassing seem independent with sufficiently unique elements (some exception is Filip Müller's book Sonderbehandlung recycling the accounts of Miklos Nyiszli and Pery Broad; and Henryk Tauber used figures from Shlomo Dragon in his Soviet deposition). Furthermore, there is a complete lack of evidence to explain the flow of information between the testimonies provided in various countries and circumstances as well as the underlying conspiracy.
Mattogno systematically ignored and didn't take into account corroboration in his mostly stand-alone analysis of testimonies. Thus, he did not properly analyse the testimonies to draw any reasonable conclusion on their joint testimony and in turn on mass extermination in Auschwitz. In addition to the systematic underestimation of the reliability and credibility of eyewitness accounts because the corroborative effects were ignored, Mattogno further inflated the extent and impact of imperfections in the individual testimonies: he didn't take into account well known peculiarities of human memory.
Human memory is not perfect, but can produce deviations and misconceptions of what was actually observed upon its reconstruction even for a honest person (moreover, the observation may be distorted in the first place). In practise, this means that an eyewitness may give a false, but honest description of some detail. Accordingly, a false detail is not sufficient evidence for a dishonest testimony. The false detail is lowering the witnesses reliability but not necessarily his credibility (in some instances, even the loss of reliability is negligible). A significant damage in the reliability may be bad and a problem for a criminal proceeding when a witness has to identify a perpetrator. But if we are mostly interested in the big picture (e.g. were homicidal gassing carried out in Auschwitz) rather than precise details (e.g. how big was the gas chamber - for which we have more reliable evidence anyway, like the construction files) the decrease in reliability is bearable since a witness is more likely to be mistaken on a specific detail of a mass gassing than there was a mass gassing at all.
Along the same line, it is well known that certain elements of a testimony are more likely to fade away than others. Most interestingly, exactly those elements that are most frequently attacked by Revisionists in general, and by Mattogno specifically, namely the sequence of events, colors, magnitudes and quantities, sounds and duration are those whose "reliability of recollection is greatly decreased" according to a handbook for trial judges and attorney. It is therefore no surprise that among mass murder witnesses in Auschwitz there are variations in particular with regards to magnitudes, quantities, durations etc. But then these variations by no means indicate that the testimonies are not credible and can be simply dismissed as evidence, as Mattogno would like to have it.
To illustrate Mattogno's lack of common sense and proper understanding when it comes to Holocaust testimonies, he does not even consider something as simple as the fact that human memory tends to erode over time. The more we move away from 1941-1944, the more likely there will be an accumulation of honest mistakes in testimonial evidence. Yet, Mattogno is attacking (ATCFS, p. 488) a drawing made by Yehuda Bacon in 1945 (when his memory was fresh) by pointing to supposed weak descriptions by him 16 years later.
And just as he cannot handle corroborating testimonies, Mattogno has no clue either how to deal with partly contradicting testimonies, and pretends that nothing can be learnt from them:
Actually, dealing with contradictory sources is the bread and butter of historians. According to Howell’s text book “From Reliable Sources”, already the “[n]ineteen century historians developed systematic rules for making such comparisons [of sources]” (p. 70). Yet, even as late as 2010 some contradictory testimonies forced Mattogno to throw his hands up in surrender and declare the impossibility of extracting anything constructive from them. Dr. Joachim Neander has fittingly compared this immature behaviour Mattogno displays in his work on the Holocaust to...
This argument on Mattogno’s methodological shortcoming is much more powerful than going on specific claims related to individual witnesses (nevertheless for the sake of completeness I provide some critique of his treatment of the most important individual testimonies in a supplementary posting). It is instructive that Mattogno has carefully avoided dealing with this fundamental and concise critique, and merely stated that Dr. Neander's excellent rebuttal is “not even worth the trouble to examine, since its level is even lower [than his previous]”.
I've tried to figure out how Mattogno arrives to the conclusion that he can dismiss any piece of testimonial evidence on homicidal gassing in Auschwitz, which is the very opposite of what virtually any scholar maintains. He is doing it by simply turning upside down approved methods and reasoning to evaluate testimonial evidence. He ignores any corroboration between the testimonies, but at the same time exaggerates the significance of imperfections and contradictions. This is the opposite of how historiography, probabilistic reasoning, criminal procedures or just common sense suggest to extract the most likely narrative of events.
The more reasonable approach is to follow the path laid out by the corroborative joint testimony (because identical elements from independent, but false sources are unlikely), a path which is not necessarily blocked by the sheer existence of some false and contradictionary elements (because already human memory is likely to produce such).
As a consequence, virtually any of Mattogno's articles and books on Auschwitz (or on any other Holocaust killing site for that matter) is deeply methodologically flawed. The only exception may be his book The Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS and Police Auschwitz, because it is not about mass extermination and testimonial evidence. Mattogno could have saved us "more than 10,000 pages" (Mattogno, Inside the Gas Chambers, p. 244) of drivel, if he had ever checked out an undergraduate text book on history.
Multiple corroboration also fails if the testimonies are not independent but depend upon each other. If testimony B simply retells/copies a claim from testimony A nothing is gained from it as far as the probability of the claim is concerned. However, most of the accounts on homicidal gassing seem independent with sufficiently unique elements (some exception is Filip Müller's book Sonderbehandlung recycling the accounts of Miklos Nyiszli and Pery Broad; and Henryk Tauber used figures from Shlomo Dragon in his Soviet deposition). Furthermore, there is a complete lack of evidence to explain the flow of information between the testimonies provided in various countries and circumstances as well as the underlying conspiracy.
Mattogno Cannot Do Eyewitness Testimony
Mattogno systematically ignored and didn't take into account corroboration in his mostly stand-alone analysis of testimonies. Thus, he did not properly analyse the testimonies to draw any reasonable conclusion on their joint testimony and in turn on mass extermination in Auschwitz. In addition to the systematic underestimation of the reliability and credibility of eyewitness accounts because the corroborative effects were ignored, Mattogno further inflated the extent and impact of imperfections in the individual testimonies: he didn't take into account well known peculiarities of human memory.
Human memory is not perfect, but can produce deviations and misconceptions of what was actually observed upon its reconstruction even for a honest person (moreover, the observation may be distorted in the first place). In practise, this means that an eyewitness may give a false, but honest description of some detail. Accordingly, a false detail is not sufficient evidence for a dishonest testimony. The false detail is lowering the witnesses reliability but not necessarily his credibility (in some instances, even the loss of reliability is negligible). A significant damage in the reliability may be bad and a problem for a criminal proceeding when a witness has to identify a perpetrator. But if we are mostly interested in the big picture (e.g. were homicidal gassing carried out in Auschwitz) rather than precise details (e.g. how big was the gas chamber - for which we have more reliable evidence anyway, like the construction files) the decrease in reliability is bearable since a witness is more likely to be mistaken on a specific detail of a mass gassing than there was a mass gassing at all.
Along the same line, it is well known that certain elements of a testimony are more likely to fade away than others. Most interestingly, exactly those elements that are most frequently attacked by Revisionists in general, and by Mattogno specifically, namely the sequence of events, colors, magnitudes and quantities, sounds and duration are those whose "reliability of recollection is greatly decreased" according to a handbook for trial judges and attorney. It is therefore no surprise that among mass murder witnesses in Auschwitz there are variations in particular with regards to magnitudes, quantities, durations etc. But then these variations by no means indicate that the testimonies are not credible and can be simply dismissed as evidence, as Mattogno would like to have it.
To illustrate Mattogno's lack of common sense and proper understanding when it comes to Holocaust testimonies, he does not even consider something as simple as the fact that human memory tends to erode over time. The more we move away from 1941-1944, the more likely there will be an accumulation of honest mistakes in testimonial evidence. Yet, Mattogno is attacking (ATCFS, p. 488) a drawing made by Yehuda Bacon in 1945 (when his memory was fresh) by pointing to supposed weak descriptions by him 16 years later.
And just as he cannot handle corroborating testimonies, Mattogno has no clue either how to deal with partly contradicting testimonies, and pretends that nothing can be learnt from them:
"no document exists about these “incineration pits”, and thus everything depends on the witnesses who, however, have stories to tell that are most contradictory and thus without any value from a historiographic point of view.(Mattogno, Auschwitz: The Case For Sanity, p. 307 [on open air cremation at crematorium 5], p. 616 [on the first homicidal gassing], p. 617 [on gassing in crematorium 1], in this order)
[...]
The only sensible conclusion one can draw from this impenetrable jungle of contradictions is the total lack of historical and technical reliability of the testimonies which speak of the first homicidal gassing.
[...]
This story, like many others, is based exclusively on testimonies which are extremely short and mutually contradictory."
Actually, dealing with contradictory sources is the bread and butter of historians. According to Howell’s text book “From Reliable Sources”, already the “[n]ineteen century historians developed systematic rules for making such comparisons [of sources]” (p. 70). Yet, even as late as 2010 some contradictory testimonies forced Mattogno to throw his hands up in surrender and declare the impossibility of extracting anything constructive from them. Dr. Joachim Neander has fittingly compared this immature behaviour Mattogno displays in his work on the Holocaust to...
"...a child that stands before a heap of puzzle parts, decides after a brief glance that nothing fits together, angrily throws the whole stuff out of the window and tells Mommy, who asks for the puzzle, that there had never been one."
This argument on Mattogno’s methodological shortcoming is much more powerful than going on specific claims related to individual witnesses (nevertheless for the sake of completeness I provide some critique of his treatment of the most important individual testimonies in a supplementary posting). It is instructive that Mattogno has carefully avoided dealing with this fundamental and concise critique, and merely stated that Dr. Neander's excellent rebuttal is “not even worth the trouble to examine, since its level is even lower [than his previous]”.
Summary
I've tried to figure out how Mattogno arrives to the conclusion that he can dismiss any piece of testimonial evidence on homicidal gassing in Auschwitz, which is the very opposite of what virtually any scholar maintains. He is doing it by simply turning upside down approved methods and reasoning to evaluate testimonial evidence. He ignores any corroboration between the testimonies, but at the same time exaggerates the significance of imperfections and contradictions. This is the opposite of how historiography, probabilistic reasoning, criminal procedures or just common sense suggest to extract the most likely narrative of events.
The more reasonable approach is to follow the path laid out by the corroborative joint testimony (because identical elements from independent, but false sources are unlikely), a path which is not necessarily blocked by the sheer existence of some false and contradictionary elements (because already human memory is likely to produce such).
As a consequence, virtually any of Mattogno's articles and books on Auschwitz (or on any other Holocaust killing site for that matter) is deeply methodologically flawed. The only exception may be his book The Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS and Police Auschwitz, because it is not about mass extermination and testimonial evidence. Mattogno could have saved us "more than 10,000 pages" (Mattogno, Inside the Gas Chambers, p. 244) of drivel, if he had ever checked out an undergraduate text book on history.
"Testimony of one reliable eyewitness is good, but the best evidence is the independent testimony of several eyewitnesses. But caution is needed here. Two eyewitnesses who tell exactly the same story have probably checked their stories and agreed on a common version. Honest, independent testimony from several eyewitnesses will normally contain several variations, variations which tend to indicate that the testimony is sincere and independent."(Jessup, A Guide to the Study and Use of Military History, p. 11)
↧
The "Disappeared" Defence Witness at the Belsen Trial
While searching on Revisionist sites for any tiny straw to support a possible conspiracy for what they call the "hoax", I came across the blog posting Defence witness disappears from Belsen trial from
"Far more important than the absence of a witness is the fact that witnesses are not going to testify because they have been in conversation with witnesses for the Prosecution. If that be the case the Court will have to do something about it."
"From the evidence it appeared that the usual grounds for inferring people had been gassed was that they disappeared, but the same thing would have happened if they had been sent away to a factory or to another camp. With regard to Block 25, it might well have been that that block was used as a staging block for any party that was to leave the camp after a selection"
For the record, if sick or emaciated Jews were selected in Auschwitz and sent away, then certainly not "to a factory or another camp", but as useless eaters straight to the extermination sites.
↧
↧
The Contemporary Sonderkommando Handwritings on Mass Extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau
The contemporary Sonderkommando handwritings were authored by members of the so called Jewish Sonderkommando engaged in the body removal and disposal at the extermination sites. The manuscripts were written during the operation of Auschwitz concentration camp, buried in the ground near the crematoria and were only to be found after the liberation of the camp between February 1945 and 1980. They are a worthy and unique historical source since they provide impressions of the Jewish prisoners engaged in the mass murder machinery while it was still running or just dismantled. They were not filtered, directed and influenced by external persons (i.e. investigators, interviewers, historians) and post-liberation and post-war knowledge and circumstances. For these reasons, the Sonderkommando handwritings are also extremely powerful evidence for mass extermination in Auschwitz. Here, I present the manuscripts found and published so far with the most relevant quotes with regards to mass extermination.
Details concerning their history from discovery to publication and formal, linguistic, stylistic analysis of the manuscripts can be found in the publications Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens (hereafter Inmitten; english: Amidst a nightmare of crime) by the Auschwitz State Museum and Des Voix Sous La Cendre by the Memorial de la Shoah.
Five of the eight manuscripts were published/edited by Bernard Mark, formerly director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. It turns out that Mark is a controversial figure as editor of historical works. According to Lucy Dawidowicz, "communist bias permeated Mark's own books on resistance in the ghettos of Warsaw and Bialystok...these works brought to light much important documentation from the Institute's archives, but their value was vitiated by the author's political distortion" (Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, p. 101).
According to Michel Borwicz, in a 1948 publication of a diary from the Warsaw ghetto Mark did "remove certain sectionsand editothers,replaced somenameswith generalities...etc. without evenalert the readerthat kind ofchange" (Borwicz, Journaux publiés à titre posthume, in: Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, 1962, 45). Nicholas Chare speculates that Mark "may have disregarded [Sonderkommando Chaim Herman's letter]...because it was written in French and exhibits anxiety about how the actions of the Sonderkommando will be perceived retrospectively. Mark's decision to overlook Herman's account may provide an example of...discriminatory ways in which archival materials were employed to reinforce pre-existing ideals" (Chare, Auschwitz and Afterimages, p. 78).
According to Michel Borwicz, in a 1948 publication of a diary from the Warsaw ghetto Mark did "remove certain sectionsand editothers,replaced somenameswith generalities...etc. without evenalert the readerthat kind ofchange" (Borwicz, Journaux publiés à titre posthume, in: Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, 1962, 45). Nicholas Chare speculates that Mark "may have disregarded [Sonderkommando Chaim Herman's letter]...because it was written in French and exhibits anxiety about how the actions of the Sonderkommando will be perceived retrospectively. Mark's decision to overlook Herman's account may provide an example of...discriminatory ways in which archival materials were employed to reinforce pre-existing ideals" (Chare, Auschwitz and Afterimages, p. 78).
Fortunately, all manuscripts edited by Mark except for Lejb's second manuscript found in 1952 are still preserved in archives and can be examined by researchers. According to Chare, Auschwitz and Afterimages, p. 77 f., Lejb's first manuscript found in April 1945 and Lewenthal's manuscripts are preserved in the Auschwitz State Museum, Gradowski's first manuscript of March 1945 is preserved in the Medical Military Museum in St. Petersburg. The rather controversial representation of the Russian POWs in the Sonderkommando by Lewenthal (Inmitten, p. 231 f.) confirms that the published manuscripts were not altered by Mark's "communist bias". According to Chare, Nadsari's manuscript is also preserved at the Auschwitz State Museum, while the remaining manuscripts have been mislaid or lost and can presently be only examined as transcriptions.
Chaim Herman
In February 1945, the first Sonderkommando manuscript was found by Andrzej Zaorski at the Auschwitz-Birkenau site. According to this letter (addressed to the man's wife in French), the author was assigned to the "infamous 'Sonderkommando'" in Auschwitz as a "corpse carrier" after his arrival on 4 March 1943, whereas most of the people of his Jewish transport from France were "sent to the gas and then in the ovens" (Inmitten, p. 255 ff., note the anachronism that the crematoria ovens were not yet operating by 4 March 1943). The author has been identified as Chaim Herman. The source was published in 1971 (in Zeszyty Oswiecimskie, special issue 2).
On 5 March 1945, another handwritten manuscript was found at crematorium 2 by the Soviet investigators with Shlomo Dragon's assistance. This author, too, was a member of the "Sonderkommando", which is "performing a terrible work" for which they are "forced to under death threats". Auschwitz is described as "death camp" and as "burial site, where everything is breathing death and annhiliation" with "Millions of killed people". The author identifies himself as Salmen Gradowski (Inmitten, p. 133 ff.). The manuscript was written in Yiddish and published in 1969 (in Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 71-72).
Later the year, in summer 1945, another Yiddish handwriting from Gradowski was unearthed and published by Haim Wollnerman as In haares fun gehinnom in 1977. It contains the following detailed and very reliable description of a gassing operation at crematoria 2 & 3:
Salmen Gradowski
On 5 March 1945, another handwritten manuscript was found at crematorium 2 by the Soviet investigators with Shlomo Dragon's assistance. This author, too, was a member of the "Sonderkommando", which is "performing a terrible work" for which they are "forced to under death threats". Auschwitz is described as "death camp" and as "burial site, where everything is breathing death and annhiliation" with "Millions of killed people". The author identifies himself as Salmen Gradowski (Inmitten, p. 133 ff.). The manuscript was written in Yiddish and published in 1969 (in Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 71-72).
Later the year, in summer 1945, another Yiddish handwriting from Gradowski was unearthed and published by Haim Wollnerman as In haares fun gehinnom in 1977. It contains the following detailed and very reliable description of a gassing operation at crematoria 2 & 3:
"In the big hall, in the middle twelve pillars are supporting the load of the building, now shines a bright electric light. Along the walls, around the pillars, benches with hooks for the clothes of the victims are ready for a long time. On the first pillar a sign is nailed in several languages, advising newcomers as they arrived to the "bathroom" and that they should take off they clothes for desinfection. [p. 149]
The doors are open. Hell is yawning infront of the victims. The representatives of the great power are lined up like for a military parade in the anteroom leading to the tomb. The entire Political Section is now coming to the party. High-ranking officers, of which we have never seen the face in the course of the last 16 months. Among them is a woman, a SS, the commandant of the women's camp. [p. 157]
The last woman crept with difficulty in the bunker. And the door already slams, is hermetically sealed and locked, that not a stream of air can enter. They are pressed together there, the victims, like in a barrel... [p. 174]
In the light of the moon we see the two silhouettes. They put on their masks to pour the deadly gas. They carry two metal boxes, which will kill thousands of victims buried there...they goan innocentstepto each"eye"of the undergroundbunker,pour thegas, thencoverthe opened"eye" with aheavy lidso that the gascannot findback. [p. 177]
Through the peephole in the door of the tomb, they themselves, the "authorities", the big mass of men fall down dead as a result of the deadly gas. [p. 187]
Trembling hands, brothers turn the knobs and raise four latches. Twodoors opened, twohugetombs. [...] Hereprotrudesapanback, head and legsburied underother bodies.Here youcan seea hand, a leg, pointingin the air,and the wholebody isengulfed inthe deepseanudity.Youonly seebits and piecesof human bodiesto the surface ofthis world ofnudity. On thisvastseanakedfloatingheads.Theyare raisedtothe surface of thesebarewaves.Whatit looks likeswimming inthevast deep sea, and only theheadsemerge fromthese deepabyssesnudity. Heads,brown, blond, brown, standalonethis generalnudity. One shouldhardenhis heart,stiflesensitivitybluntall painfulfeeling. One mustdrive back theagonypoundinglike a hurricanein all the members.One mustbe transformed intoa machine, see nothing,feel nothing, know nothing. The legsand armsbeganto work.There is a group of comrades, each divided into his task. One pulls, on rips the corpsesout ofthis tangleby force,the one here byone foot, the one there by the hand, as it is better suited. It seems theywilldismemberthrough beingpulledin every direction. One draggs the corpseon the floor ofglazed andstainedcement... [...] Three menstand thereto prepare the body. Onewith a coldpincers, itsinks into thebeautiful mouthin searchof treasure,agold tooth, and when he finds it, he tears it with the flesh. The secondwith scissors, he cuts curly hair,strips womenof their crown. The thirdtearsearrings, oftenstained with blood. And ringsthat will notleaveare pulledoffwith pliers.
Nowit can bedelivered to theelevator.Two men throw bodieslike logs on theplatform,and whentheir number reachesseven or eight, give a signal with a stick, and the elevatorrises. Up there, near the elevator, were four men.Twoon one side,pulling thebody to the"reserve". And two otherswho pull them directly tothe furnaces.One lays outtwo on two beforeeach ovenmouth.Small childrenare stacked on a large pileon the side-they are added, thrown ontwo adults.The bodies areplaced oneonthe other onthe iron "stretcher", the mouthof hell is opened, andthestretcheris pushedinto the furnace.Thefire of hellsticks his tongue out like,seized thebody asa treasure.Haircatches firefirst.The skinswellsbubbles, which burstin a fewseconds.The armsand legswrithe, veins andnervesaretense andmoving limbs. The body isalreadyablazeallaround, the skin iscracked, grease flowing,and you hearthe sizzleofburning fire.Youcan seemore body,onlyinfernalfurnace firethat consumessomethingin it.The bellybursts.Intestines andbowelsgush, and within minutesit is stilla trace. The headtakes longerto burn.Twolittle blue flamesshimmering in the orbits-the eyes thatburnwithvery bottombrainsand mouthstillcalcinedlanguage. The whole processlasts twentyminutes -a body, aworldwas reducedto ashes.
You remaintransfixed, watching. Hereweaskfortwo moreon the stretcher. Two people, two worlds, who heldtheir place inhumanity,who lived andexisted,acted andcreated.Who workedfor the world andfor themselves, laid a brick onthe bigbuilding,wovenwirefor the world andforthe future - andin twenty minutesthere will beno traceof themmore. Here are two othersnowputthere,they were made tofreshen up. Twoyoung and beautiful women, they had to besplendid. Theyhad a placeon earth, occupying two wholeworlds,so much happinessand pleasurehaveprovidedthe world,every smilewas a comfort, a delightevery look, every word a delight, like a heavenly song, and wherearosenotthey broughtthemjoy andhappiness.So many heartsloved, and nowhere they areextended tobothonthis boardwith iron, and soon will openthe jaws ofhell, andin a few minutesthere will beno traceof themmore.
Hereweextendtothreenow. A childpressed on themother's womb. So much happiness, so much joyexperiencedhis mother,his father,the birth oftheir child! They builta home,wovenfuture, the world was for theman idyll, andin twenty minutesthere will beno traceof themmore.
The elevatorgoes up and down, carryingcountless victims. Asa hugeslaughterhousestacks thereheaps of corpses, waiting their turn, waiting to beremoved.
Thirtyinfernalmouthsblazenowintwo large buildingsandengulfcountless victims. It will not takelong forthesefive thousandpersons,fivethousand worlds, aredevoured bythe flames. [p. 191 ff.]"
(Zalmen Gradowski, Au coeur de l'enfer, machine translation by Google Translate)
Gradowski detailed there are "four gaping holes in the ground, four eyes wide open" (Au coeur de l'enfer, p. 46). The presence of the four gas introduction openings is well corroborated by other evidence. Also, Gradowski perfectly described the opening mechanism of the gas tight doors when he explained they "turn the knobs and raise four latches" to open the "twodoors" of crematoria 2 and 3.
Lejb Langfus
In April 1945, another Sonderkommando manuscript was discovered near crematorium 3. It was found by the Auschwitz resident Gustaw Borowcyk and is written in Yiddish. Its author Lejb Langfus described the mass extermination at a Bunker site, including the work of the Sonderkommando:
"In the morning, the Sonder appeared, which consisted only of Jews at the time and was assigned in four groups. The first group entered the Bunker after putting on gas masks and threw the corpses of the gassed to the outside. A second group pulled the corpses from the door to the railways, on which there were little, frameless waggons. The next group lifted the corpses on the waggons - so called trolleys - and pushed them to the place, where a huge, wide and deep pit was excavated, that was laid out with chunks, beams and entire trees. They [poured] benzine on it and a hell's fire came out [...] There was the forth group and threw the people in the fire. They burned until they were completely ash. From the entire transport only a small heap of bones was left, which was thrown to the side."
(Inmitten, p.126 f., my translation).
Note that the Sonderkommando's body disposal activity and use of narrow gauge railways is independently confirmed by recently published contemporary German documents.
A second Yiddish manuscript reportedly also from Langfus ("assigned through research by Mark Bernard to Lejb Langfus", Carlo Saletti in Des voix sous la cendre, p. 461, still Bernard Mark wrote in Inmitten, p. 175 that the author "is unknown") was found in 1952 and published in 1954 (in Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, 9-10). The victims from a transport "go into the undressing room and then in the bunker". On another gassing operation, the author explains that "a red cross car is coming, the gas is thrown into the chamber". Since 25 November 1944, the "ventilation engines and pipes [of crematoria 2 and 3] are dismantled and sent to the camps Mauthausen and Groß-Rosen". These ventilation devices "served for the gassing of people on a large scale" (Inmitten, p.126 f.).
The transport of the ventilation equipment to other German concentration camps is confirmed by a letter of Topf to Mauthausen concentration camp of 10 February 1945 according to which "all parts from KL Auschwitz" were supposed to be reused for erecting a "crematorium (special facility)" in Mauthausen, including the "aeriation and deariation devices" (Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust, p. 462).
The transport of the ventilation equipment to other German concentration camps is confirmed by a letter of Topf to Mauthausen concentration camp of 10 February 1945 according to which "all parts from KL Auschwitz" were supposed to be reused for erecting a "crematorium (special facility)" in Mauthausen, including the "aeriation and deariation devices" (Schüle, Industrie und Holocaust, p. 462).
Salmen Lewenthal
In 1961, the first Yiddish handwriting of Salmen Lewenthal was uncovered near crematorium 3 and published in 1965 (in Szukajcie w popiozach). The note comments on a diary left back by a Lodz Jew that the black force "is shooting, hanging, gassing, burning everything they can just destroy...in this big burning oven named Auschwitz-Birkenau" (Inmitten, p.194).
The second Yiddish manuscript of Lewenthal was found a year later and published in 1968 (in Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego). It reads:
The second Yiddish manuscript of Lewenthal was found a year later and published in 1968 (in Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego). It reads:
"In the mean time the infamous Sonderkommando is coming and emptying the bunker [...] the corpses were carried 800 m further and were thrown on a pyre
...
150 m further was a seemingly innocent farm house with windows, covered with thick [...] a SS man threw through a little window [...] closed the little window and after some [moments] all were suffocated
...
All the people were dragged from the gas bunker, on the platform to the [pyres?], where the gassed people were burned already yesterday and the day before yesterday, the corpses were thrown into the fire.
...
The detail came every morning and found the bunker full of gassed people, and the barracks full of various things. But never did they came across living people.
...
For many hours cars, from which the mass of people was thrown, were arriving, and as everybody was there, they were sent into the gas bunker [...] until the car of the red cross came [...] after throwing four cans of gas into the upper doors and closing them hermetically there was sudden silence."
(Inmitten, p. 203 f., my translation).
Also discovered with this manuscript was a Polish language list of transports/groups exterminated in the crematoria between 9 and 24 October 1944, which is attributed to Lewenthal as well (reproduced in Inmitten, p. 136). The list details the date, the number of people killed, their gender, their origin as well as the crematorium used to liquidate them:
Also discovered with this manuscript was a Polish language list of transports/groups exterminated in the crematoria between 9 and 24 October 1944, which is attributed to Lewenthal as well (reproduced in Inmitten, p. 136). The list details the date, the number of people killed, their gender, their origin as well as the crematorium used to liquidate them:
[Date] [Number] [Gender] [Origin] Crematorium 7/10 460 male shot Sonder 9/10 2000 male camp German 2 9/10 2000 families Terezin 2 9/10 2000 female C camp 5 10/10 800 children Gypsis 5 11/10 2000 families Slovak 3 12/10 3000 female C camp 2 13/10 3000 female C camp 3 13/10 2000 families Terezin 2 14/10 3000 families Terezin 3 15/10 3000 female C camp 2 16/10 800 male camp German 3 16/10 600 male sick camp 3 17/10 2000 male Buna 2 18/10 3000 families Slovak 2 18/10 2000 families Terezin 3 18/10 300 families various 3 18/10 22 male Polish Bunker 3 18/10 13 female male Polish prison 3 19/10 2000 families Slovak 2 19/10 2000 families Terezin 3 20/10 2500 families Terezin 2 20/10 1000 male children
12 - 18 years? 3 20/10 200 female C camp 3 ??/10 ???? ? camp ? ? 21/10 1000 female C camp 5 23/10 400 male Gleiwitz? 3 24/10 2000 families Terezin 2
(based on Des Voix Sous La Cendre, p. 177, except for a few entries which seemed transcribed mistaken or questionable; I've also included the old crematorium in the main camp in the numbering of the crematoria; readers are encouraged to submit corrections/additions of the list).
Finally, in October 1980 the so far last Sonderkommando handwriting (attributed to Marcel Nadsari, written in Greek and published in 1996 in Inmitten) was found near crematorium 3:
Marcel Nadsari
Finally, in October 1980 the so far last Sonderkommando handwriting (attributed to Marcel Nadsari, written in Greek and published in 1996 in Inmitten) was found near crematorium 3:
"after about 3000 people, they close [...] and gas them. After 6-7 Minutes of pain [...] put in the gas [...] we carried the corpses of these [...] innocent women [...] which was carried to the ovens [...] and introduced into the oven [...] they forced us to sieve it and later it was loaded on a car and poured into a river [...] About 600 000 Jews from Hungary, French, Poles [...]"
(Inmitten, p. 271 f., my translation).
↧
German Foreign Office knowledge of Extermination (Pt. 1)
The following article is heavily indebted to Christopher Browning's magisterial study of the German Foreign Office, the Auswärtiges Amt (hereafter AA). Browning's study focusses on the knowledge and activities of the officials of Referat D III, headed by Rademacher, which was part of Abteilung Deutschland, headed by Luther. These men were ultimately responsible to Ribbentrop but tended also to act on their own initiative, often in collusion with the SS. This dual nature gave those men unique insight into the extermination of Jews as it unfolded in various stages, first in Transnistria, the USSR, Croatia and Serbia, but then from mid-1942 in the attempts of the Germans to secure deportations of Jews from ambivalent partner states such as Italy, Romania and Hungary. Browning's study remains the most important analysis we have of what these men knew and when they discovered it.
Thirdly, Luther knew by the end of October that Heydrich had blocked the emigration of Spanish Jews residing in France to Spanish Morocco because, in Heydrich's words, "these Jews would also be too much out of the direct reach of the measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war" (see Browning's footnote 79 here). Rademacher knew, via RSHA official Friedrich Suhr, that Heydrich wished to send certain unfit categories of Jews, such as surviving Jewish women and children in Serbia, to "reception camps in the east", which clearly would not favour their survival (footnote 81 here). In addition, there was the likelihood that Jews being deported by Antonescu to Transnistria were going to die in huge numbers. This was acknowledged in a file memo by Richter which stated that:
Fifthly, Rademacher had received a letter dated October 23rd from Paul Wurm, foreign editor of Der Stürmer:
Their acquisition of knowledge from September to November 1941 can be divided into five components. Firstly, they gained knowledge in September of a willingness by Heydrich's RSHA and the military authorities to shoot 8,000 male Jews in Serbia, as I discussed here. Secondly, they received reports of Einsatzgruppen shootings in the USSR. Luther and Rademacher received and initialed copies of the first five Activity and Situation Reports on November 17 and 18 respectively and on November 19, Rademacher excerpted three paragraphs from the first report and sent the excerpts to Jagow (Browning, p.73). Moreover, back on September 5th, Luther's rival Weizsäcker had been informed that "we don’t treat the Jews with kid gloves and that in the east already many a Jew no longer lives" (quoted by Browning here).
Thirdly, Luther knew by the end of October that Heydrich had blocked the emigration of Spanish Jews residing in France to Spanish Morocco because, in Heydrich's words, "these Jews would also be too much out of the direct reach of the measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war" (see Browning's footnote 79 here). Rademacher knew, via RSHA official Friedrich Suhr, that Heydrich wished to send certain unfit categories of Jews, such as surviving Jewish women and children in Serbia, to "reception camps in the east", which clearly would not favour their survival (footnote 81 here). In addition, there was the likelihood that Jews being deported by Antonescu to Transnistria were going to die in huge numbers. This was acknowledged in a file memo by Richter which stated that:
According to information today from director General Lecca, 110,000 Jews are being evacuated from Bukovina and Bessarabia into two forests in the Bug River Area. As far as he could learn, this action is based upon an order issued by Marshal Antonescu. Purpose of the action is the liquidation of these Jews (PS-3319, NCA VI, p.34 and IMT Ninety-Second Day: Wednesday, 27th March, 1946 (Part 2 of 10))Moreover, some knowledge of mass killing existed two months earlier because on September 1st, Killinger informed Luther that 4,000 Jews had been killed in Jassy (Iasi) and that the Romanians were carrying out "unheard-of persecution" (Browning, p.54, citing NG-4962; also in Hilberg and Gilbert).
Fifthly, Rademacher had received a letter dated October 23rd from Paul Wurm, foreign editor of Der Stürmer:
These five forms of knowledge were the understanding that Luther took to the Wannsee conference on January 20th, 1942, where (according to Eichmann's minutes) he heard Heydrich state that:Dear Party Comrade Rademacher!On my return trip from Berlin I met an old party comrade, who works in the east on the settlement of the Jewish question. In the near future many of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated through special measures (note 82)
Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.Both Luther and Rademacher inferred from Wannsee that Europe's Jews had, in the main, to be exterminated before the end of the war, which at that point the Germans still expected to win within a year or so. Rademacher made clear this understanding on March 24th, 1942, when he wrote Schroeder the following:
The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)
The stronger the German victory looms, the greater and more urgent becomes the tasks of the Referat, becausethe Jewish question must be solved in the course of the war, for only so can it be solved without a world-wide outcry (Browning, p.83, citing PA, Inland II 347/3, Rademacher to Schroeder, 24.3.42).The timing of this note could not be more significant. Deportations to Belzec were just commencing and, just three days later, Goebbels would write that:
The Jews are now being pushed out of the General Government, beginning near Lublin, to the East. A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it is not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is carrying out this action, is doing it pretty prudently and with a procedure that doesn't work too conspicuously. The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophesy that the Führer issued to them on the way, for the eventuality that they started a new world war, is beginning to realise itself in the most terrible manner. One must not allow any sentimentalities to rule in these matters. If we did not defend ourselves against them, the Jews would annihilate us. It is a struggle for life and death between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime could muster the strength for a general solution of the question. Here too, the Führer is the persistent pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution, which is demanded by the way things are and thus appears to be unavoidable. Thank God, during the war we now have a whole series of possibilities which were barred to us in peacetime. We must exploit them. The ghettos which are becoming available in the General Government are now being filled with the Jews who are being pushed out of the Reich, and after a certain time the process is then to renew itself here. Jewry has nothing to laugh about...(Evans, here, citing E. Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil II, Vol. 3 (Munich, New Providence, London, Paris, 1994), p. 561.)Back in October, Luther had understood from Heydrich that planning consisted of "measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war"; by the last 10 days of March 1942, it was understood by both Rademacher and Goebbels that it had to be enacted before war's end, along the parameters laid out at Wannsee.
↧
German Extermination Planning for Romanian Jews
On August 13th, 1942, the Krakauer Zeitung published a statement on the status of Romania's policy towards Jews which stated that "185,000 Jews have been evacuated since October of last year (i.e. 1941) into Transnistria, where they were housed in large ghettos until an opportunity arose for their removal further east. Today there still remain 272,409 Jews in the country. . . Both the provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina can now be considered as free of Jews, excepting Czernowitz, where there are still about 16,000. . . It may be assumed that even during the present year a further 80,000 Jews could be removed to the Eastern Territories." This source has been cited by Mattogno and Graf here, who use Kulischer as their source, and by Kues here, who uses an article by Shechtman for the information. However, MGK, Kulischer and Shechtman all seemed unaware of the fact that phrase "removal further east" and "removed to the Eastern Territories" could only be euphemisms for killing.
This is why. On August 30th, 1941, Germany and Romania reached an agreement that "Deportation of Jews across the Bug is not possible at present. They must, therefore, be collected in concentration camps and set to work, until a deportation to the east is possible after the end of operations" (3319-PS; German text scanned in Eichmann trial document T/1002). On October 17th, Richter advised that "According to information today from director General Lecca, 110,000 Jews are being evacuated from Bukovina and Bessarabia into two forests in the Bug River Area. As far as he could learn, this action is based upon an order issued by Marshal Antonescu. Purpose of the action is the liquidation of these Jews" (3319-PS). There was thus no doubt that Jews deported to Transnistria were being sent there to die, not to be moved farther east.
The Germans would never accept the transfer of Jews from Romanian occupied Transnistria into German occupied Ukraine. This can be affirmed by Eichmann's complaint of April 14, 1942, concerning the wild expulsions of Romanian Jews across the border, scanned as T/1013. Meanwhile, Jews died in huge numbers in Transnistria, often at the hands of ethnic German forces, as shown here and here. In May, Rademacher learned that 28,000 Jews had been liquidated in Transnistria, as shown by the handwritten note scribbled on to the document T/1014: "Nach Transnistrien wurden die 28 000 Juden in deutsche Dörfer gebracht! Inzwischen wurden sie liquidiert [transcription also here]." According to Christopher Browning, this note was written by Helmut Triska, of D VIII, who testified to that effect in 1949; moreover, a few days after Triska's note, Bräutigam advised that "A considerable portion of the Jews in Transnistria have died" (Browning, p.93, citing NG-4817 and T 120/6737/E510802).
In summer 1942, the Germans through Richter gained Antonescu's consent to begin deporting Jews from Romania to Belzec. A telex received by Luther from Rintelen quoted a report by the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, dated July 26, 1942, addressed to Himmler, stating that Jews would be sent to Distrikt Lublin and non-working Jews would be “subjected to special treatment” [source: T/1023]. This was followed by the conference chaired by Klemm in September that produced the document that was subsequently published in French in Bucharest in 1944 in the version shown here. Klemm's document mentions Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka by name and also gives the route for Romanian Jews as including Sniatyn. This routing was doubly significant because the Sniatyn ghetto was liquidated on September 7, 1942, the same month that Romanian deportations to Lublin had originally been scheduled.
These plans were ultimately shelved when Antonescu became nervous about the progress of the war, but there is no doubt that the Germans wanted to exterminate the Jews at Belzec and that many tens of thousands of other Jews deported by Antonescu had already died in Transnistria.
This is why. On August 30th, 1941, Germany and Romania reached an agreement that "Deportation of Jews across the Bug is not possible at present. They must, therefore, be collected in concentration camps and set to work, until a deportation to the east is possible after the end of operations" (3319-PS; German text scanned in Eichmann trial document T/1002). On October 17th, Richter advised that "According to information today from director General Lecca, 110,000 Jews are being evacuated from Bukovina and Bessarabia into two forests in the Bug River Area. As far as he could learn, this action is based upon an order issued by Marshal Antonescu. Purpose of the action is the liquidation of these Jews" (3319-PS). There was thus no doubt that Jews deported to Transnistria were being sent there to die, not to be moved farther east.
The Germans would never accept the transfer of Jews from Romanian occupied Transnistria into German occupied Ukraine. This can be affirmed by Eichmann's complaint of April 14, 1942, concerning the wild expulsions of Romanian Jews across the border, scanned as T/1013. Meanwhile, Jews died in huge numbers in Transnistria, often at the hands of ethnic German forces, as shown here and here. In May, Rademacher learned that 28,000 Jews had been liquidated in Transnistria, as shown by the handwritten note scribbled on to the document T/1014: "Nach Transnistrien wurden die 28 000 Juden in deutsche Dörfer gebracht! Inzwischen wurden sie liquidiert [transcription also here]." According to Christopher Browning, this note was written by Helmut Triska, of D VIII, who testified to that effect in 1949; moreover, a few days after Triska's note, Bräutigam advised that "A considerable portion of the Jews in Transnistria have died" (Browning, p.93, citing NG-4817 and T 120/6737/E510802).
In summer 1942, the Germans through Richter gained Antonescu's consent to begin deporting Jews from Romania to Belzec. A telex received by Luther from Rintelen quoted a report by the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, dated July 26, 1942, addressed to Himmler, stating that Jews would be sent to Distrikt Lublin and non-working Jews would be “subjected to special treatment” [source: T/1023]. This was followed by the conference chaired by Klemm in September that produced the document that was subsequently published in French in Bucharest in 1944 in the version shown here. Klemm's document mentions Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka by name and also gives the route for Romanian Jews as including Sniatyn. This routing was doubly significant because the Sniatyn ghetto was liquidated on September 7, 1942, the same month that Romanian deportations to Lublin had originally been scheduled.
These plans were ultimately shelved when Antonescu became nervous about the progress of the war, but there is no doubt that the Germans wanted to exterminate the Jews at Belzec and that many tens of thousands of other Jews deported by Antonescu had already died in Transnistria.
↧
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:
The Sonderkommando handwritings are among the most damning individual sources on the mass murder in Auschwitz for Revisionists. Here I look into Revisionist Carlo Mattogno's non- and mistreatment of the manuscripts.
Carlo Mattogno, Olocausto: Dilettanti allo Sbaraglio (1996)
This Italian book contains Mattogno's most lengthy comment on four of the Sonderkommando handwritings (though still short for such a massive source).
Mattogno claims that the manuscripts "paradeedifying talesof apuerilehaggadah Holocaust". But the three supposed "tales" he mentions to support is assertion (namely, that Poles and Jews were singing in the gas chamber, a child was rebuking a Sonderkommando prisoner for assisting the Germans and a boy was first battered then shot by the SS) are entirely possible and conceivable under the extreme circumstances in Auschwitz and in the course of hundreds of extermination actions.
Mattogno claims that the manuscripts "paradeedifying talesof apuerilehaggadah Holocaust". But the three supposed "tales" he mentions to support is assertion (namely, that Poles and Jews were singing in the gas chamber, a child was rebuking a Sonderkommando prisoner for assisting the Germans and a boy was first battered then shot by the SS) are entirely possible and conceivable under the extreme circumstances in Auschwitz and in the course of hundreds of extermination actions.
He further claims that the manuscripts are "[n]ot lackingshameless lies". Let's examine these supposed lies.
According to Gradowski's manuscript dated 6 September 1944, "tensof thousands of Jewsfrom Czechoslovakia currently perish before my eyes", whereas Mattogno notes that according to Danuta Czech's Kalendarium "the last transportfrom CzechoslovakiabeforeSeptember 6, 1944had arrivedOctober 7, 1943". Actually, the 1989 edition of the Kalendarium - same as Mattogno says he used - lists a transport from Theresienstadt as late as 19 May 1944, more than 7 months after what Mattogno claims. This is still too early. But the fact that Mattogno did a sloppy mistake here helps to explain Gradowski's testimony in another way.
Mattogno was wrong when the last Jewish transports arrived in Auschwitz prior September 1944. Human beings make mistakes, obviously. Now, suppose there is also a mistake in the dating of Gradowski's handwriting, say it was not dated 6 September 1944, but 6 October 1944. Getting the month wrong is an easy to happen mistake, either by the translator/editors of the manuscript or by Gradowski himself. Here's a list of Czech transports to Auschwitz prior or on this 6 October 1944:
| Date | Number |
| 28/9/44 | 2499 |
| 29/9/44 | 1500 |
| 01/10/44 | 1500 |
| 04/10/44 | 1500 |
| 06/10/44 | 1550 |
So if Gradowski's manuscript were written on 6 October 1944 instead of 6 September 1944 (again, an easy assumption that doesn't require much imagination), his description that "tensof thousands of Jewsfrom Czechoslovakia currently perish before my eyes" suddenly begins to make some sense. About 8,500 Jews had been deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz at the time, the majority was probably killed right away ("tens of thousands" is of course an exaggeration, but one that is not particular serious at such order of magnitude).
Dating the manuscript to 6 October 1944 also makes sense from another point of view. Gradowski wrote in the letter that "the date of the mutiny...is approaching. It may happen today or tomorrow. I am writing these words in a moment of the greatest danger and excitement" (my emphasis). The Sonderkommando revolt took place the very next day on 7 October 1944.
Hence, from the context provided in the letter itself, it appears as most likely that the letter is actually dated 6 October 1944. Aside this, Gradowski's testimony was never a "shameless lie" to begin with. Even if the manuscript were actually dated 6 September 1944, it would be have been more likely that Gradowski had confused transports from Theresienstadt with transports from Lodz (which were poured into Birkenau in August 1944) than that he "shamelessly lied" in a manuscript buried in the ground completely uncertain if it would ever be found.
Mattogno also complains that Lewenthal mentioned half a Million Hungarian Jews, who were killed in Auschwitz, which is "about 80,000more than those whoarrived at Auschwitz". Say what Mattogno, only 80,000? That's an overestimation of 20% and thus a pretty good estimate for somebody without exact figures (another about 100,000 were taken out for labour, but still Lewenthal figure is reasonable well).
Another point that questions more Mattogno's state of mind than the source is when he thinks that the walls of crematorium 4 could not have been dismantled on 14 October 1944, as mentioned by Lewenthal, because Mattogno says it "had been destroyed by the revoltof theSonderkommando", as if a fire or even some homemade explosive could have pulverised the entire crematorium structure.
And finally, what should never miss in any Mattogno critique, attacking witness statements that are either hearsay (1000s were killed often at the hands of other prisoners in 1941-42) or inferred (there was another extermination site not far from Birkenau) and therefore irrelevant as far as the witnesses's own credibility is concerned.
Carlo Mattogno, Olocausto: Dilettanti allo Sbaraglio II (undated, first seen end of 2002)
In this Italian article, Mattogno is attacking the Italian author/journalist Frediano Sessi. Mattogno claims on Sessi that the "bibliographic ignorance of our Auschwitz 'expert' is really amazing" and that it is a "shining example of the profound historical knowledge of our 'expert' of Auschwitz" because Sessi wrote in the Italian Newspaper Corriere della Sera in 2001 that Gradowski's manuscript is published again after it was previously released only in 1977 in Jerusalem in few numbers. Mattogno lays out his bibliographic knowledge and informs us that, in contrary, the manuscript was published already in 1969, in 1971, in 1972, in 1973, in 1975, in 1977 and in 1996.
Unfortunetely for Mattogno, Sessi was right.
The manuscript he referred to was indeed published for the first time by Chaim Wolnerman (misspelled Wollerman by Sessi) in 1977 in Jerusalem in Yiddish. It was only published again as French translation "Au coeur de l'enfer"in 2001. The bibliographical references provided by Mattogno refer, in fact, to an entirely different manuscript. Ironically, it is not Sessi but Mattogno himself who displays "bibliographic ignorance" and a lack of "profound historical knowledge" when he doesn't know that there exist two manuscripts from Gradowski (see also The Contemporary Sonderkommando Handwritings on Mass Extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau)
Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: The Case For Sanity (2010)
Robert Jan Van Pelt cited both of Gradowski's manuscripts in his expert report for the Irving vs. Lipstadt trial:
"Dragon also remembered the location where his fellow Sonderkommando Salmen Gradowski had buried a journal, written in Yiddish, in an aluminium canteen. The canteen was dug up in the presence of the members of the Prosecutors office. It contained a 81-leave notebook and a letter, dated September 6,1944. Significant parts of the journal, which he had begun before his transport to Auschwitz, had become unintelligible. However the letter was preserved perfectly. For the record, here it is quoted in full.
[...]
The journal recovered in March did not contain descriptions of Gradowski's work as a Sonderkommando. In the Summer of 1945 a Pole found a second manuscript by Gradowski. He gave it to an Oswiecim native Chaim Walnerman, who took it with him to Israel, to publish it in the 1970s under the title In the Heart of Hell (I have been unable to trace a copy of this text within Canada). According to Nathan Cohen, the second manuscripts provides detailed descriptions of the murder of the inmates of the so-called family camp, and the incineration of their remains."
(The Van Pelt Report, Gradowski's first manuscript is cited in Van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial, p. 162.)
You will notice that Van Pelt knew aleady in 1999 about Gradowski's second manuscript - because he actually read some other historian's book -, whereas Mattogno was still ignorant about it in 2002 (see above).
Despite the fact that Van Pelt was citing Gradowski's handwriting's as evidence, Gradowski is not even mentioned in Mattogno's Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity (ATCFS), which is supposed to be a rebuttal of Van Pelt.
Lewenthal is briefly mentioned in ATCFS in the context of a transfer of 200 Sonderkommando prisoners to Majdanek (Lublin) in February 1944. As usual, Mattogno offers no explanation of the source and limits himself to point out a supposed contradiction.
Mattogno claims that Lewenthal has the Sonderkommando transfer to "take place at the time of the alleged revolt of the 'Sonderkommando', hence early October 1944" (ATCFS, p. 415). However, this does not follow from the context provided in the published text.
On page 227 of "Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens", Lewenthal describes an episode taking place in Winter 1943/1944 (or 1942/1943 according to the editors, but which does not seem plausible). Three pages later, he mentions the transfer of 200 SK to Majdanek. He explains that after the killing of the 200 SK in Majdanek, a Russian Sonderkommando was transferred to Auschwitz. Since Majdanek was liberated in July 1944, the 200 Sonderkommando transfer to this camp seems to have taken place prior July 1944. This is consistent with Lewenthal's later description on page 232 - 234 that there were considerations and preparations for a revolt among the Sonderkommando, but which were halted before "half a Million Hungarian Jews were burned" in Auschwitz, thus prior May - July 1944.
According to the context provided by Lewenthal, he did not place the 200 SK transfer to Lublin "at the time of the alleged revolt of the 'Sonderkommando', hence early October 1944", but prior May - July 1944. The actual date of the incident was late February 1944, as the corresponding labour force report shows, which is furthermore corroborated by Herman's manuscript that "...on 24 February 1944, [David Lahana] was sent with a transport of 200 people - all from the Sonderkommando - to Lublin, where they were killed some days later" (Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 264, my translation).
According to the context provided by Lewenthal, he did not place the 200 SK transfer to Lublin "at the time of the alleged revolt of the 'Sonderkommando', hence early October 1944", but prior May - July 1944. The actual date of the incident was late February 1944, as the corresponding labour force report shows, which is furthermore corroborated by Herman's manuscript that "...on 24 February 1944, [David Lahana] was sent with a transport of 200 people - all from the Sonderkommando - to Lublin, where they were killed some days later" (Inmitten des grauenvollen Verbrechens, p. 264, my translation).
There seems to be an anachronism when Lewenthal writes already on p. 228 on "preparations, to burn the Hungarian Jews", which is something that one can assume took place after the SK transfer and rather in April 1944. It also needs to be kept in mind that the sequence of the pages as published by the editors Jadwiga Bezwinska and Danuta Czech may not be beyond reasonable doubt since "the original sequence" of the manuscript pages was messed up during the conservation process.
Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: assistenza sanitaria, "selezione" e "Sonderbehandlung" dei detenuti immatricolati (2010)
Mattogno briefly comments on the extermination list attributed to Lewenthal (Mattogno links it to Lejb) in this Italian only work. He argues that the entries on the gassings of female Jews selected in the camp are "impostures" (Auschwitz: Assistenza Sanitaria..., p. 145) because they do not correspond to data supplied in the strength reports of the women's camp in Birkenau.
Actually, the figures of exterminated female Jews on 20 October (200) and 21 October (1000) 1944 correspond sufficiently well to the number of "specially treated" (abbreviated as SB for Sonderbehandlung) prisoners according to the strength reports of the women's camp Birkenau on these days, 194 and 515 respectively (scans of the reports were supplied to me by S. Romanov courtesy of J. Zimmerman).
For the other entries in the extermination list, there are indeed either no figures of "specially treated" prisoners in the strength reports or they are orders of magnitude lower, so that they cannot be used to explain the extermination list anymore. Mattogno's argument assumes that if female Jewish prisoners were killed in Birkenau these days, they necessarily had to appear as loss in the strength reports of the women's camp. And this in turn assumes that all the female Jewish prisoners hold in Auschwitz-Birkenau were recorded in the books of the women's camp. But this assumption - for which he provides no evidence by the way - is challenged already by the strength reports themselves.
On 1 October 1944, there were 26,300 prisoners recorded in the books of the Birkenau women's camp compromising of the camp sections BIa-b, BII, b,g,c and BIII. The next day, the strength of the women's camp was increased by 17,200 "transit Jews" (Durchgangsjuden). These transit prisoners were previously taken out from incoming transports, such as from Hungary in May - July 1944 and from Lodz in August 1944, but they were not registered in the camp nor assigned to the women's camp. This directly refutes Mattogno's assumption for 1 October 1944: there were female Jews in Birkenau not assigned to the women's camp.
Now, the extermination list drawn up by the Sonderkommando prisoner covers the period 9 to 24 October 1944. But if Mattogno's assumption is invalid with regards to the period prior 2 October 1944 as demonstrated by the German documents, it may very well be also invalid for the period 9 to 24 October 1944. Indeed, the reservoir of transit Jews was not fully exploited with the formal assignment of the 17,200 female transit prisoners to the women's camp by 2 October 1944 (or fresh transit Jews were poured into the camp in the mean time), as indicated by their subsequent admissions to the women's camp throughout the entire month October 1944:
| Date | Number of incoming prisoners | Origin |
| 03/10/44 | 488 | Durchgangsjuden |
| 06/10/44 | 271 | Durchgangsjuden |
| 10/10/44 | 191 | Durchgangsjuden |
| 12/10/44 | 181 | Durchgangsjuden |
| 18/10/44 | 157 | Durchgangsjuden |
| 19/10/44 | 113 | Durchgangsjuden |
| 22/10/44 | 169 | Durchgangsjuden |
| 23/10/44 | 1765 | Durchgangsjuden Überstellung |
| 25/10/44 | 215 | Durchgangsjuden Einlieferung |
These admissions of transit Jews to the Birkenau women's camp suggest that there was a large reservoir of unregistered, unassigned female prisoners in Birkenau in the period covered by the SK extermination list, and it is from this reservoir of unregistered, unassigned female Jews, the SS could have selected the victims unexplained by selections in the women's camp strength reports but killed according to Lewenthal's list. Of course, the absolute figures provided in the list have to be taken very carefully, since it appears that the author assumed numbers of killed prisoners close to the maximum capacity of the facility in the absence of exact figures.
Carlo Mattogno, “Denying History”? – Denying Evidence! (2005)
In their book Denying History, Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman made quite a use of the Sonderkommando handwritings from Gradowski, Lewenthal and Lejb:
"Indeed, we do have lots of eyewitness accounts, not only from the SS and Nazi doctors, but from the Sonderkommano who dragged the bodies from the gas chamber into the crematoria. Specifically, after the war six diaries and fragments of notes were found buried near the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria. Three of them, Zalmen Gradowski, Zalman Leventhal, and Dayan Leyb Langfus, documented "the heart of the hell," providing "rich material for the historian." Gradowski is eloquent: "The dark is my fried, tears and screams are my songs, the fire of sacrifice is my light, the atmosphere of death is my perfume. Hell is my home." He goes on to describe the arrival of a transport, the undressing room, the gassing, and the cremation. With some rancor he describes the helplessness with which his fellow prisoners went to their deaths.Langfus speaks of the execution of 600 Jewish children and 3,000 Jewish women, as well as of Polish prisoners gassed between October 9 and 24, 1944, their bodies burned in Crematoria II, III and V."
(Shermer & Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, p. 178 f.)
Yet, Mattogno's article, which is supposed to be a rebuttal of the book, does not even mention - let aside discuss and explain - any of the handwritings.
Carlo Mattogno, The Bunkers of Auschwitz (2004) and
Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations (2005)
Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations (2005)
Both the extermination at the Bunkers and the open air incinerations are described in the manuscripts of Langfus and Lewenthal. Yet, Mattogno's book precisely on these issues does not even mention - let aside discuss and explain - any of these sources..
Jürgen Graf, Auschwitz. Tätergeständnisse und Augenzeugen des Holocaust (1994)
This book was written by Mattogno's collaborator Jürgen Graf and provides very brief comments on four of the SK manuscripts. Mattogno never cites these comments as far as know, but even if he did it would not save him from the criticism that he failed to deal with the SK handwritings in any reasonable manner. Most of Graf's objection are merely arguments from personal incredulity fueled by his firm disbelief in the Holocaust (here it helps to know that Graf is a well known right wing extremist), ignorance and lack of understanding of the manuscripts, i.e. they say more about Graf himself than about the sources.
Conclusion and Summary
The individual significance of the Sonderkommando cannot be overemphasised. Unlike contemporary reports (e.g. from Auschwitz escapees or the camp resistance), which are largely hearsay on the operation of the extermination sites, the SK handwritings are first hand eyewitness accounts. Furthermore, the manuscripts predate any post-liberation eyewitness accounts e.g. from other Sonderkommandos. If one accepts that the strength of (testimonial) evidence scales with how close the source is to the event in question, the Sonderkommando manuscripts are among the most powerful pieces of individual evidence for mass extermination in Auschwitz. Despite their individual significance, it is interesting to note that the manuscripts are nevertheless comparable little relevant as evidence in order to make a solid case on homicidal gassing in Auschwitz, since reliable evidence for it is abundant anyway.
Their individual strength makes these sources, however, extremely inconvenient evidence for Revisionists. Mattogno's treatment of the SK manuscripts stands out by simply ignoring them in most of his works, even in those he responds to Anti-Revisionist critiques, who mentioned them (Van Pelt, Shermer & Grobman), or on complexes the manuscripts directly provide evidence on (Bunker and Open Air Incinerations).
In those few lines Mattogno has dedicated to some of the manuscripts (but up to this day not even to all of them), he ignored their special provenance (ATCFS, ASS) and provided an - even for him - extremely superficial critique based on the usual denier cocktail of insinuating inauthenticity, argument from personal incredulity, misinterpretation and systematic underestimation of reliability and credibility without providing any coherent and founded explanation of these sources (Olocausto: Dilettanti).
Their individual strength makes these sources, however, extremely inconvenient evidence for Revisionists. Mattogno's treatment of the SK manuscripts stands out by simply ignoring them in most of his works, even in those he responds to Anti-Revisionist critiques, who mentioned them (Van Pelt, Shermer & Grobman), or on complexes the manuscripts directly provide evidence on (Bunker and Open Air Incinerations).
In those few lines Mattogno has dedicated to some of the manuscripts (but up to this day not even to all of them), he ignored their special provenance (ATCFS, ASS) and provided an - even for him - extremely superficial critique based on the usual denier cocktail of insinuating inauthenticity, argument from personal incredulity, misinterpretation and systematic underestimation of reliability and credibility without providing any coherent and founded explanation of these sources (Olocausto: Dilettanti).
↧
↧
Meet Otto Bene
Otto Bene occupied the post of "Vertreter des Auswärtige Amt beim Reichkommissar für besetzten niederländischen Gebiete (Representative of the Auswärtige Amt for Occupied Dutch Territory)." He was the Foreign Office's man on the spot, reporting on deportations of Jews from the Netherlands to the death camps. His antisemitic missives back to Berlin reveal much about the Final Solution.
On July 31st, 1942, Bene wrote that, thus far, the Jews seemed to have been successfully deceived into believing that they would be genuinely 'resettled' in the 'East'. He wrote:
On August 13th, Bene indicated that the Jews had recognized the reality of their peril:
The euphemisms used by Bene sometimes slipped, or became totally implausible. On June 25th, 1943, he wrote that all the 72,000 Jews deported so far had been "deported for Labor Service in the East", even though many were clearly unfit. However, in November, 1942, he had simply referred to"the Deportation of the Jews to Camp Auschwitz," thereby revealing that the "East" was a fiction.
On February 9th, 1944, Bene admitted that, in public opinion "the deportation of the Jews is nevertheless regarded as brutal." He also revealed that Jews "try by all means to be earmarked for Bergen-Belsen" and that 2252 Jews in mixed marriages:
On July 31st, 1942, Bene wrote that, thus far, the Jews seemed to have been successfully deceived into believing that they would be genuinely 'resettled' in the 'East'. He wrote:
The next shipment will already include some families thus leaving for the East.In Jewish circles the opinion is widespread, that the Jews who are fit for labor service are being deported to prepare the necessary quarters for the Jews in the East [German scan, English translation].However, Bene also enclosed an underground report that included, via the BBC, the revelation that 700,000 Jews had been killed in Poland (see Anlage 2 of the above scan).
On August 13th, Bene indicated that the Jews had recognized the reality of their peril:
Since my above mentioned report the situation has considerably changed. After the Jews had found us out and got to know, what is behind the deportation and labor service in the East, they no more report for the weekly shipments. Of 2000 Jews called up for this week only about 400 showed up. In their homes the called up Jews cannot any longer be found [German text, English translation].Bene thus seems to acknowledge that the information in the underground report was true, and that Jews had responded to this information by going into hiding.
The euphemisms used by Bene sometimes slipped, or became totally implausible. On June 25th, 1943, he wrote that all the 72,000 Jews deported so far had been "deported for Labor Service in the East", even though many were clearly unfit. However, in November, 1942, he had simply referred to"the Deportation of the Jews to Camp Auschwitz," thereby revealing that the "East" was a fiction.
On February 9th, 1944, Bene admitted that, in public opinion "the deportation of the Jews is nevertheless regarded as brutal." He also revealed that Jews "try by all means to be earmarked for Bergen-Belsen" and that 2252 Jews in mixed marriages:
have been exempted from the obligation to wear the star of David because they could prove their sterility, namely 922 male Jews (the large majority of them after sterilization operations) and 1330 Jewesses (mostly because of sterility due to old age). [German scans here and here; English translation here].Thus, to the end, Bene was only able to very thinly camouflage the genocidal nature of Nazi Jewish policy in the Netherlands.
↧
Satire on Auschwitz Commemoration
Today, the satirical section SPAM of the German magazine Der Spiegel has posted something on the approaching 70th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz (27 January 1945) and the reported absence of the Russian president Putin.
Some extract:
(my translation)"But they concealthelateststate of historicalresearch.According tothis, MoscowtroopshavenotliberatedAuschwitz70years ago, but - asyouwould expect fromthem-invaded andannexed it violating international law.
...
In fact, the capture ofAuschwitzwas part of alarge-scale, completelyunprovokedMoscow raid towards the west, which theUkrainianPrime MinisterYatsenyukrecently aptly described in the following unforgettablewords in theARD-Tagesthemen: "We all rememberverywell theSoviet invasion ofthe Ukraine andGermany".
On the other hand, the German PresidentGauckwill of course be atthecommemoration ceremony. After all, it were Germansoldiers whoheroiclythrew themselvesagainstthe occupiers.In addition,Auschwitzandthusalso all relatedfestivitieswould never have beenpossible withoutGermany."
By the way, what seems like a another piece of satire is the webpage of the "Jan27.org committee" when they start with...
"We are made up of scientists, engineers, literary text experts, historical researchers, free-speech advocates, skeptics, and the just plain intellectually curious."...just to come up with the Auschwitz gambit the 4 Million variant thoroughly debunked since 1 -2 decades. It turns out these guys are just the usual bloody serious Holocaust deniers.
↧
Wannsee Revisited
It is worth recalling this key line from the Protocol:
It raises two questions. Firstly, why would it be safer "in wartime" to send Jews to the East, where the military conflict was at its most intense and insecure position, than to let them go to a country such as Morocco or Palestine, to which Germany had no objections to letting them go in 1939-40? Secondly, what are the "possibilities in the East"? Most western Jews were unsuitable for labor over there and would be a rapidly diminished labour force. The unfit Jews would gradually starve if not simply killed on arrival. Costs of maintaining camp security would be prohibitive, and there would be a constant risk of prisoners escaping to the partisans. Heydrich and Eichmann must logically therefore be referring here to the possibilities of killing these Jews, just as Soviet Jews had been killed in large numbers in the preceding months.In the meantime the Reichsfuehrer-SS and Chief of the German Police had prohibited emigration of Jews due to the dangers of an emigration in wartime and due to the possibilities of the East.
↧
3244-PS: Bormann on "ruthless severity" in the Camps
On October 9, 1942, Bormann sent this circular in response to eyewitness accounts of atrocities, which were reaching German public opinion via letters and verbal communications from soldiers in the East. It is notable for the fact that Bormann connects "ruthless severity" to the camps in the East, which in turn are connected to the atrocities witnessed by soldiers. Consequently, although Bormann uses the standard camouflage, "they will either be used for work or else transported still farther to the East", the overall context is one of killing, in which the fate of Jews in "the camps" is clearly connected to the fate of shooting victims witnessed by military personnel.
↧
↧
John Ball's Air Photo Evidence on Auschwitz
A new edition of John Ball's Air Photo Evidence (hereafter APE3) is out and has been published as Holocaust Handbooks volume 27 by Germar Rudolf. The book is a "corrected and expanded edition with contributions by Germar Rudolf and Carlo Mattogno". Jett Rucker was "carefully proofing this edition" and Carlo Mattogno provided a "critical and constructive peer review" (APE3, p. 7).
Actually, most of Ball's flaws were not or not properly corrected, instead Rudolf added some of his own. Previous critiques of Ball's work are ignored and fresh photographic evidence from British aerial reconnaissance rebutting Ball's major claim of retouching of the US Air Force photographs are not considered either in this context. The expansions e.g. on the "holes" and the Bunker 2 extermination site mainly consist of illustrations and photos recycled from previous Holocaust Handbooks. In other words, Air Photo Evidence clearly meets the Holocaust Handbooks publication standard.
But if one does not mind the text in between, the pdf is a nice collection of aerial photographs of Auschwitz free of charge. Plus, there are a number of hitherto unknown documents on the erection of the "camouflage" fences at the crematoria from Mattogno actually supporting the mass extermination activities at these sites.
According to Germar Rudolf's foreword, he and John Ball were starting to work on the new edition of Air Photo Evidence since late 2003, but sometime after 2005, Ball
(APE3, p. 7; note that he vanished once before in the late 90s when his bogus $100,000 challenge was actually accepted by Anti-Revisionists, see John Ball's $100,000 Challenge: Where is John Ball?)
Rudolf believes that Ball disappeared because he probably got scared by the prosecution of other Revisionists. This explanation does not make too much sense to me. These prosecutions concerned leading European Holocaust deniers, who entered (some voluntary, some less voluntary) European countries with Anti-Holocaust denial laws. As Canadian citizen, there was very little risk for him (unless he decided to travel say to Germany and engage publicly in Holocaust denial). Ball disappeared apparently without notifying and explaining anything to his Revisionist fellows. Very odd if he just wanted to hide from supposed prosecution as Revisionist. This clear cut rather suggests he was breaking with the Revisionist movement. Of course, the fact that Holocaust denial has not the best public image - for good reasons - may have fuelled the break.
Anyway, Rudolf speculates that the "increasing social and legal pressure" exerted against Ball because of his first book and website made him feeling so uncomfortable that he had "to move from his old home to an unknown place, and later he apparently even changed his name" (APE3, p. 9). If so, I wonder if Rudolf feels it was responsible to publish another edition of the book, which even includes photographs and biographic details of John Ball, if already the previous publication is supposed to have such a strong negative impact on his life.
John Ball's Air Photo Evidence was published by the author himself in 1992. The copyright is hold by Ball Resource Services Ltd. and "no part of this book may be reproduced...without permission in writing from the publisher". Rudolf hasn't heard from Ball for years and one may infer from his behaviour since 2005 and breaking with Revisionists that the publication of his work as Holocaust Handbooks does not exactly happen with the author's consent. This is morally questionable, but there may be also a copyright issue here. Just hope that Rudolf obtained a written permission from Ball before he disappeared.
Interpreting grainy and fuzzy objects on hugely enlarged photographs taken from several thousands of metres above ground seems like a challenging task. Even more than sophisticated technical equipment, it requires trained and experienced eyes.
We are told that John Ball has "interpreted air photos using stereo magnifying equipment since 1976" (APE3, p. 9). Other than his word, there is no piece of information out there that Ball can actually be considered an air photo expert. He doesn't lay out a great deal of expert knowledge in his book that would safely identify him as experienced analyst nor is there any other verifiable evidence supporting that he was working for a considerable time in the field of air photo interpretation.
Most interesting in this respect is that Ball was rejected as a witness at the Zündel trial in 1988 because the judge did not consider him as proper expert on aerial photographs. It turned out that the judge himself knew more on technical issues of air photo analysis than Ball (see John Ball: Air Photo Expert?, see also the German translation of Lenski's Holocaust on Trial, p. 253 of the pdf). Did he get out of bed on the wrong side this day, or was Ball really as poorly trained and experienced as the episode suggests? Too bad the new edition of the book does not clarify the incident.
Two air photo experts with convincing credentials - Nevin Bryant and Carroll Lucas - have contradicted Ball's interpretation that the US Air Force aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex have been tampered with after the war. Lucas wrote a very detailed report on his findings, which was published in John Zimmerman's Holocaust Denial in 2000. After reading the report (of which a relevant extract is quoted further below), one can hardly escape the impression that Ball's interpretation that the USAF aerial photographs were retouched by the CIA was superficial and amateurish. The minimum to expect from a new edition of Ball's work would have been that this devastating critique from a known expert on the field published 15 years ago is addressed, yet Lucas is not even mentioned throughout the book.
Ball disappeared for Revisionists some time after the year 2005 (it is, by the way, not far fetched to speculate that Lucas' critique may have played a role in that Ball lost his interest in Holocaust denial activities). As pointed out, his expertise on the issue is rather doubtful. Neither Germar Rudolf - the editor of the new edition - nor Jett Rucker - the proof reader - nor Carlo Mattogno - the peer reviewer - are known to have any training and expertise in aerial photo analysis. Mattogno's comments on aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex reproduced in his books are that of an autodidact and amateur on the field of air photo interpretation. Compared to the difficulties in interpreting aerial photographs and the controversial conclusions drawn in the book (contradicted by numerous evidence on mass extermination in Auschwitz), the authors and the collaborators are seriously short in expertise on aerial photography analysis.
Few corrections have been implemented in the new edition. Among these are Ball's failure to recognise smoke from the backyard of crematorium 5 on the 31 Mary 1944 USAF aerial photographs (APE3, p. 97 vs. APE1, p. 70) and his previous claim that crematoria 4 and 5 were in fact not crematoria, but "may have had another purpose" (APE3 p. 102 vs. APE1, p. 71).
Other gross mistakes have been transferred into the new edition, such as when Ball speaks about crematoria 2 and 3 that "[a]nyone walking by here would have seen...corpses burning on open fires" (APE3, p. 83, my emphasis) and that there is "no smoke from alleged burning pits" (APE3, p. 90), although no open air burnings are claimed to have been carried out at these sites anyway.
Another claim was valid back in 1992, but is outdated in the mean time, and should have been corrected by Rudolf. On page 35 of APE3, it reads that one of the "most generally accepted allegation" is that
The figure is cited from Gutman's Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from 1990, but was adjusted to more than 1 Million by the Polish historian Franciszek Piper in 1993, which is actually the most generally accepted death toll for Auschwitz these days. On Jett Rucker I'm not sure, but at least Rudolf and his "peer reviewer" Carlo Mattogno know this too well.
Neither did Rudolf miss the opportunity to add his own flaw to the edition:
Another one of this sort can be found on p. 67. It says that what has been added to the 25 August 1944 USAF aerial photograph are "marks looking like fences around crematoria 1 and 2 (but see p. 70)". If we scroll down to page 70, we find an article from Mattogno which cites several contemporary German documents including a map that show that "camouflage" fences were indeed planned and erected around the crematoria. These documents - unknown to CIA analysts in the 70s - clearly support that the thick fences observed at the crematoria on aerial photographs are real and were not drawn in. Quite obviously, Ball's air photo analysis is not worth anything.
The aerial photographs provide snapshots from Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the period from May to October 1944, aerial reconnaissance flights took one or few consecutive photographs on sevens days of this site. Several seconds of the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau were captured by US American, British and German air planes from above on these days.
According to Holocaust deniers, the aerial photographs supposedly refute that mass extermination was taken place at the camp. The extent of visible smoke would not correspond to large scale body disposal activity:
On 26 June and 13 September 1944, no large scale killings are reported for Auschwitz-Birkenau (according to Czech's Kalendarium as well as the so called Glaser list), and thus no extermination activity is expected on aerial photographs of these days anyway. For 26 June 1944, this was previously pointed out by John Zimmerman:
Two days remain: 31 May and 8 July 1944. On these days several transports with Hungarian Jews rolled into Auschwitz and the mass murder machinery can be expected to have run close to full throttle at some point. On 31 May 1944, about 6,700 Hungarian Jews were killed in Auschwitz, and on 8 July 1944, the figure was about 8,800 people (according to Research Notes on The Hungarian Holocaust by Michael Honey assuming that 10% more women were selected for work than men). Both the 31 May and the 8 July 1944 aerial photographs show open air cremation behind crematorium 5. The cremation site seems at least 10 m long and 2 m wide, and may contain a stacked pyre of 100 - 300 corpses (depending on stacking height and density). Obviously, this open air cremation activity cannot account for all victims exterminated on these days.
But it's not that these (rounded up) 7,000 to 9,000 victims had to be killed and incinerated simultaneously, even exactly at the time the site was targeted by aerial reconnaissance planes. Both the 31 May and 8 July 1944 photographs were taken in the morning, between 9 - 10 a.m according to the sun's position. For all we know, the incineration of the victims from the previous day was already finished (apart from the open air cremation site still smoking behind crematorium 5) and new transports with victims did not arrive yet or new victims were not killed yet or were just killed (for 31 May 1944, numerous trains cars can be observed at the Birkenau ramp indicating the more or less recent arrival of a transport; personnel movement is visible according to air photo experts including close to crematorium 4, see Zimmerman, Holocaust denial, Addendum and Shermer & Grobman, Denying History, p. 149). In any case, it is impossible to draw any reasonable conclusion on the issue if 7 or 9,000 people were killed and disposed on these days in Auschwitz-Birkenau, merely based on aerial photographs capturing only few seconds in the morning.
Any likely incineration activity of an open air cremation site can be determined from the absence or presence of smoke, since open wood fires with a surface area of many m² can be assumed to generate substantial smoke most of the time, which should be visible even on aerial photographs taken from high altitude (see the 31 May, 8 July, 20 August and 23 August 1944 aerial photographs of the Birkenau compound).
This is not so clear for the crematoria. The question is, if and to what extent did the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau emit smoke. The "if" can be answered quite easily: SS ground photographs of crematorium 2 and 5 show black soot at the top of the chimney, which is a clear sign that there was emission of considerable smoke at some point before. Less straightforward is to quantify the extent and frequency of smoke.
In the most extreme case, the chimneys always spouted thick, heavy smoke generating clouds of several square meter projected surface area readily visible on aerial photographs even of poorer resolution. In this case - and only in this case - absence of visible smoke from crematoria chimneys on aerial photographs would be proof of inactivity of the cremation ovens. Revisionists assume this - without saying - when they discount cremation activity based on the absence of visible smoke on aerial photographs. Mattogno is the prime example:
But I have yet to see evidence that any activity of the crematoria had to be visible on aerial photos. Suppose the crematoria chimneys emitted smoke only during certain phases (such as during start up with cooler refractory) or that smoke emission was depending upon operation, load, composition of corpses. Or suppose that the crematoria always released smoke (as Mattogno argues in the above cited article), but that its quantity and thickness was depending upon such factors, and that it was sometimes or always beyond the resolution limit of aerial photographs. This limit is more than 2 m for the 31 May 1944 photographs (cf. Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial, Appendix IV), and hardly any better for the 8 July 1944 photograph. If any smoke was below what can be actually detected on aerial photographs, then the absence of visible smoke rising from the chimney of a crematorium is not proof of its inactivity.
Hence, the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from examining the aerial photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau is that either the crematoria were not smoking at the time the photographs were taken or that any smoke was below their resolution limit, but neither of which does conclusively demonstrate their inactivity. Besides, for all we know, the ovens were running idle at 9 to 10 a.m. on these days (i.e. without corpse and fresh coke supply), perhaps the slag was removed from the coke generators to make them ready for the following killing operation, and the chimneys were emitting much less smoke - if anything at all - not visible on the aerial photographs.
(Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial, Appendix IV, my emphasis)
The "second unquestionable proof" that the August 25 1944 photograph has been tampered with is supposed to be a personnel movement in the camp section BI of Auschwitz-Birkenau (APE3, p. 63). The argument has been addressed by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman in 2000 relying on the analysis of the aerial photograph expert Nevin Bryant, supervisor of Cartographic Applications and Image Processing Applications at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California:
Moreover, I note that Ball has exaggerated the speed of the personnel movement in his analysis. He argues that the group movement of 3.4 m/s is too fast and highly unlikely (APE3, p. 147). According to the images reproduced by Ball himself, the front of the line as advanced by about 8 m and the back by about 5 m (compared against the width of the horse stable barracks type 260/9 of about 10 m). With 3.5 s between the exposures according to Ball, this translates into speeds of 1.4 to 2.2 m/s, which are perfectly reasonable for average to fast walking.
The US Air Force was not alone on their aerial reconnaissance mission at the Auschwitz (Monowitz) complex on 25 August 1944. At the same time, the British RAF was also photographing the area and made four consecutive shots of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Both formations of people Ball claims are fake on the USAF photograph can also been seen on the corresponding RAF photographs (e.g. the standing formation in camp section BII on exposure 4186). They are obviously authentic features on the ground - and Ball must be one of the poorest air photo analysts ever.
In the first edition of the book, Ball used these two false "proofs" of tampering (plus, a third "proof", not any better, a line of people shown in the Auschwitz main camp compound, which Balls claims is fake because it is supposedly the "same type of sewing stitch mark", APE3, p. 66) as evidence to infer that some marks at the crematoria were also "apparently" drawn in. In the third edition, this is no longer inferred from the previous "proofs", but instead Rudolf offers it as a forth "proof" on its own. He added some illustrations from his books Auschwitz Lies and The Rudolf report on the black spots on the gas chambers' roof of crematoria 2 and 3. But the argument provided by Rudolf only suggests that the spots as such are not shadows from gas introduction ports. However, it doesn't demonstrate they have been drawn in. As mentioned further above, the argument is readily rebutted by Rudolf's collaborator Mattogno in a book edited by himself (Auschwitz Lies, p. 292). Don't ask me why these guys don't bother to read and talk to each other.
Leaving aside the lack of evidence, the hypothesis that the USAF aerial photographs have been tampered with is wholly implausible. If there was such an CIA photo analyst in the 70s wanting to fabricate evidence for the Holocaust, the least thing he would do were to draw formations of people within the Birkenau camp sections, irregular spots on the gas chamber's roof not matching shadow patterns and a thick fence moving around between the various dates. Instead, he would most likely draw into the photos was is typically associated with Auschwitz-Birkenau according to many narratives (based on exaggerated and selective memory): heavy smoke, perhaps fire and of course masses of people sent directly into the crematoria. That the USAF aerial photographs show no visible smoke from the crematoria, limited open air cremation only on 31 May and 25 August 1944 and only few formations of people directed to the crematoria is a safe plausibility test that the photographs have not been tampered with to fabricate evidence on the Holocaust.
The "suspicious" features claimed by Ball - the thick camouflage fence and the spots on the gas chamber's roof of crematoria 2 and 3 - appear also on the 23 and 25 August 1944 RAF aerial photographs. This further rebuts that these features have been drawn onto the USAF aerial photographs. The black spots on top of the gas chambers can be also seen on the 8 July 1944 German Luftwaffe photograph as published by Ball himself. It is noteworthy that the thick camouflage fence at crematorium 2 is missing on this footage. Thus, it was most likely dismantled and re-erected between 26 June and 23 August 1944 (I'm unable to tell if it is on the 20 August 1944 USAF photographs published online).
So to recap this issue, there is no evidence that the US Air Force aerial photographs have been retouched by anybody. Moreover, the hypothesis is highly implausible and rebutted by photographs from German and British aerial reconnaissance missions.
Actually, most of Ball's flaws were not or not properly corrected, instead Rudolf added some of his own. Previous critiques of Ball's work are ignored and fresh photographic evidence from British aerial reconnaissance rebutting Ball's major claim of retouching of the US Air Force photographs are not considered either in this context. The expansions e.g. on the "holes" and the Bunker 2 extermination site mainly consist of illustrations and photos recycled from previous Holocaust Handbooks. In other words, Air Photo Evidence clearly meets the Holocaust Handbooks publication standard.
But if one does not mind the text in between, the pdf is a nice collection of aerial photographs of Auschwitz free of charge. Plus, there are a number of hitherto unknown documents on the erection of the "camouflage" fences at the crematoria from Mattogno actually supporting the mass extermination activities at these sites.
The Disappearance of John Ball
According to Germar Rudolf's foreword, he and John Ball were starting to work on the new edition of Air Photo Evidence since late 2003, but sometime after 2005, Ball
"must have decided to simply disappear. To this day I still don’t know where he is, but I have decided to go ahead..."
(APE3, p. 7; note that he vanished once before in the late 90s when his bogus $100,000 challenge was actually accepted by Anti-Revisionists, see John Ball's $100,000 Challenge: Where is John Ball?)
Rudolf believes that Ball disappeared because he probably got scared by the prosecution of other Revisionists. This explanation does not make too much sense to me. These prosecutions concerned leading European Holocaust deniers, who entered (some voluntary, some less voluntary) European countries with Anti-Holocaust denial laws. As Canadian citizen, there was very little risk for him (unless he decided to travel say to Germany and engage publicly in Holocaust denial). Ball disappeared apparently without notifying and explaining anything to his Revisionist fellows. Very odd if he just wanted to hide from supposed prosecution as Revisionist. This clear cut rather suggests he was breaking with the Revisionist movement. Of course, the fact that Holocaust denial has not the best public image - for good reasons - may have fuelled the break.
Anyway, Rudolf speculates that the "increasing social and legal pressure" exerted against Ball because of his first book and website made him feeling so uncomfortable that he had "to move from his old home to an unknown place, and later he apparently even changed his name" (APE3, p. 9). If so, I wonder if Rudolf feels it was responsible to publish another edition of the book, which even includes photographs and biographic details of John Ball, if already the previous publication is supposed to have such a strong negative impact on his life.
John Ball's Air Photo Evidence was published by the author himself in 1992. The copyright is hold by Ball Resource Services Ltd. and "no part of this book may be reproduced...without permission in writing from the publisher". Rudolf hasn't heard from Ball for years and one may infer from his behaviour since 2005 and breaking with Revisionists that the publication of his work as Holocaust Handbooks does not exactly happen with the author's consent. This is morally questionable, but there may be also a copyright issue here. Just hope that Rudolf obtained a written permission from Ball before he disappeared.
Experts at Work?
Interpreting grainy and fuzzy objects on hugely enlarged photographs taken from several thousands of metres above ground seems like a challenging task. Even more than sophisticated technical equipment, it requires trained and experienced eyes.
We are told that John Ball has "interpreted air photos using stereo magnifying equipment since 1976" (APE3, p. 9). Other than his word, there is no piece of information out there that Ball can actually be considered an air photo expert. He doesn't lay out a great deal of expert knowledge in his book that would safely identify him as experienced analyst nor is there any other verifiable evidence supporting that he was working for a considerable time in the field of air photo interpretation.
Most interesting in this respect is that Ball was rejected as a witness at the Zündel trial in 1988 because the judge did not consider him as proper expert on aerial photographs. It turned out that the judge himself knew more on technical issues of air photo analysis than Ball (see John Ball: Air Photo Expert?, see also the German translation of Lenski's Holocaust on Trial, p. 253 of the pdf). Did he get out of bed on the wrong side this day, or was Ball really as poorly trained and experienced as the episode suggests? Too bad the new edition of the book does not clarify the incident.
Two air photo experts with convincing credentials - Nevin Bryant and Carroll Lucas - have contradicted Ball's interpretation that the US Air Force aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex have been tampered with after the war. Lucas wrote a very detailed report on his findings, which was published in John Zimmerman's Holocaust Denial in 2000. After reading the report (of which a relevant extract is quoted further below), one can hardly escape the impression that Ball's interpretation that the USAF aerial photographs were retouched by the CIA was superficial and amateurish. The minimum to expect from a new edition of Ball's work would have been that this devastating critique from a known expert on the field published 15 years ago is addressed, yet Lucas is not even mentioned throughout the book.
Ball disappeared for Revisionists some time after the year 2005 (it is, by the way, not far fetched to speculate that Lucas' critique may have played a role in that Ball lost his interest in Holocaust denial activities). As pointed out, his expertise on the issue is rather doubtful. Neither Germar Rudolf - the editor of the new edition - nor Jett Rucker - the proof reader - nor Carlo Mattogno - the peer reviewer - are known to have any training and expertise in aerial photo analysis. Mattogno's comments on aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex reproduced in his books are that of an autodidact and amateur on the field of air photo interpretation. Compared to the difficulties in interpreting aerial photographs and the controversial conclusions drawn in the book (contradicted by numerous evidence on mass extermination in Auschwitz), the authors and the collaborators are seriously short in expertise on aerial photography analysis.
Disimprovements
Few corrections have been implemented in the new edition. Among these are Ball's failure to recognise smoke from the backyard of crematorium 5 on the 31 Mary 1944 USAF aerial photographs (APE3, p. 97 vs. APE1, p. 70) and his previous claim that crematoria 4 and 5 were in fact not crematoria, but "may have had another purpose" (APE3 p. 102 vs. APE1, p. 71).
Other gross mistakes have been transferred into the new edition, such as when Ball speaks about crematoria 2 and 3 that "[a]nyone walking by here would have seen...corpses burning on open fires" (APE3, p. 83, my emphasis) and that there is "no smoke from alleged burning pits" (APE3, p. 90), although no open air burnings are claimed to have been carried out at these sites anyway.
Another claim was valid back in 1992, but is outdated in the mean time, and should have been corrected by Rudolf. On page 35 of APE3, it reads that one of the "most generally accepted allegation" is that
"[f]rom March 1942 to September 1944 about 1,500,000 Jewish people...were gassed and cremated at Birkenau".
The figure is cited from Gutman's Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from 1990, but was adjusted to more than 1 Million by the Polish historian Franciszek Piper in 1993, which is actually the most generally accepted death toll for Auschwitz these days. On Jett Rucker I'm not sure, but at least Rudolf and his "peer reviewer" Carlo Mattogno know this too well.
Neither did Rudolf miss the opportunity to add his own flaw to the edition:
"What 1944 air photos actually reveal: Documents prove these Crematoria 3 & 4 had inmate showers and delousing facilities, hence were sanitary installations."
(APE3, p. 102; note the nonsensical assignment of written German documents as "air photos" - clearly a result of extremely sloppy editing and proof-reading)
Actually, there are no documents that prove the crematoria 4 and 5 "had inmate showers and delousing installations". There are German documents on the installation of gas chambers at these sites, but they do not specify the purpose, delousing or homicidal gassing. Neither are there German documents that identify inmate showers at crematoria 4 and 5. There was a "possible consideration" among the construction office to utilise the excess heat from the ovens for heating showers, but there is no evidence this was ever implemented (Mattogno, The Case For Sanity, p. 154). There were "water installations" carried out in crematorium 4, from which Mattogno merely infers that there might have been hot showers installed there.
But my favourite disimprovement of the new edition is the introduction of a circular firing squad. Rudolf has adapted an illustration from his Rudolf report, which shows that the well known black spots on the crematoria 2 & 3 gas chamber's roof cannot be shadows. From this, he jumps to the conclusion that they "were drawn on" (APE3, p. 65). This argument is already rebutted by Rudolf's own collaborator Carlo Mattogno in the very same book Auschwitz Lies, edited by Rudolf himself, when he points out that the spots may be bitumen appearing under a thin cracked concrete layer (Auschwitz Lies, p. 292; Mattogno just forgot to explain why the concrete should have cracked at all at those four locations: because SS personnel were walking around the four gas ports on the basement's roof). What makes this especially hilariously funny is that Rudolf is shooting at Mattogno in a work "peer reviewed" by Mattogno, while Mattogno made his shot in a work edited by Rudolf.
But my favourite disimprovement of the new edition is the introduction of a circular firing squad. Rudolf has adapted an illustration from his Rudolf report, which shows that the well known black spots on the crematoria 2 & 3 gas chamber's roof cannot be shadows. From this, he jumps to the conclusion that they "were drawn on" (APE3, p. 65). This argument is already rebutted by Rudolf's own collaborator Carlo Mattogno in the very same book Auschwitz Lies, edited by Rudolf himself, when he points out that the spots may be bitumen appearing under a thin cracked concrete layer (Auschwitz Lies, p. 292; Mattogno just forgot to explain why the concrete should have cracked at all at those four locations: because SS personnel were walking around the four gas ports on the basement's roof). What makes this especially hilariously funny is that Rudolf is shooting at Mattogno in a work "peer reviewed" by Mattogno, while Mattogno made his shot in a work edited by Rudolf.
Another one of this sort can be found on p. 67. It says that what has been added to the 25 August 1944 USAF aerial photograph are "marks looking like fences around crematoria 1 and 2 (but see p. 70)". If we scroll down to page 70, we find an article from Mattogno which cites several contemporary German documents including a map that show that "camouflage" fences were indeed planned and erected around the crematoria. These documents - unknown to CIA analysts in the 70s - clearly support that the thick fences observed at the crematoria on aerial photographs are real and were not drawn in. Quite obviously, Ball's air photo analysis is not worth anything.
Cremation Activity
The aerial photographs provide snapshots from Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the period from May to October 1944, aerial reconnaissance flights took one or few consecutive photographs on sevens days of this site. Several seconds of the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau were captured by US American, British and German air planes from above on these days.
According to Holocaust deniers, the aerial photographs supposedly refute that mass extermination was taken place at the camp. The extent of visible smoke would not correspond to large scale body disposal activity:
"1944 photos show no smoke coming from chimneys, and only little smoke from outdoor fires."(APE3, p. 94)
On 26 June and 13 September 1944, no large scale killings are reported for Auschwitz-Birkenau (according to Czech's Kalendarium as well as the so called Glaser list), and thus no extermination activity is expected on aerial photographs of these days anyway. For 26 June 1944, this was previously pointed out by John Zimmerman:
"The best known of these photos was taken on June 26, 1944. It shows the whole Auschwitz complex which consisted of three main camps: the Birkenau camp where the gas chambers and crematoria were located, the Auschwitz main camp, and Monowitz area of the camp where industrial production occurred. The Birkenau area of the camp shows no activity. However, on this particular day there were no arrivals from Hungary."
(Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial, p. 50, my emphasis)
Thomas Dalton is the author of Debating the Holocaust. He also read Zimmerman's book, and in fact quoted what I emphasised above. As to leave no doubt that he is not a curious sceptic, but just another stubborn Holocaust denier, Dalton makes the stunning claim - on the very same page he quotes Zimmerman's refutation - that "[m]ost damning is the June 26 photo, which, by standard accounts, should have shown us three heavily smoking crematoria and several ongoing open pit fires" (Dalton, Debating the Holocaust, p.181).
Actually, according to standard accounts, the photo should show us exactly zero smoking crematoria and zero open pit fires, since no transport is reported for this day or the week before (but note that Michael Honey has assigned a transport from Hungary as arriving on this 26 June 1944, which - if true - would mean that a single big crematorium had to be active this day, but of course not necessarily when the aerial photograph was taken).
Thomas Dalton is the author of Debating the Holocaust. He also read Zimmerman's book, and in fact quoted what I emphasised above. As to leave no doubt that he is not a curious sceptic, but just another stubborn Holocaust denier, Dalton makes the stunning claim - on the very same page he quotes Zimmerman's refutation - that "[m]ost damning is the June 26 photo, which, by standard accounts, should have shown us three heavily smoking crematoria and several ongoing open pit fires" (Dalton, Debating the Holocaust, p.181).
Actually, according to standard accounts, the photo should show us exactly zero smoking crematoria and zero open pit fires, since no transport is reported for this day or the week before (but note that Michael Honey has assigned a transport from Hungary as arriving on this 26 June 1944, which - if true - would mean that a single big crematorium had to be active this day, but of course not necessarily when the aerial photograph was taken).
On 20, 23 and 25 August 1944, the number of mass-murdered people from transports from Lodz was as low as as 1 - 2,000 people per day and could have been handled by one or two killing sites.
Two days remain: 31 May and 8 July 1944. On these days several transports with Hungarian Jews rolled into Auschwitz and the mass murder machinery can be expected to have run close to full throttle at some point. On 31 May 1944, about 6,700 Hungarian Jews were killed in Auschwitz, and on 8 July 1944, the figure was about 8,800 people (according to Research Notes on The Hungarian Holocaust by Michael Honey assuming that 10% more women were selected for work than men). Both the 31 May and the 8 July 1944 aerial photographs show open air cremation behind crematorium 5. The cremation site seems at least 10 m long and 2 m wide, and may contain a stacked pyre of 100 - 300 corpses (depending on stacking height and density). Obviously, this open air cremation activity cannot account for all victims exterminated on these days.
But it's not that these (rounded up) 7,000 to 9,000 victims had to be killed and incinerated simultaneously, even exactly at the time the site was targeted by aerial reconnaissance planes. Both the 31 May and 8 July 1944 photographs were taken in the morning, between 9 - 10 a.m according to the sun's position. For all we know, the incineration of the victims from the previous day was already finished (apart from the open air cremation site still smoking behind crematorium 5) and new transports with victims did not arrive yet or new victims were not killed yet or were just killed (for 31 May 1944, numerous trains cars can be observed at the Birkenau ramp indicating the more or less recent arrival of a transport; personnel movement is visible according to air photo experts including close to crematorium 4, see Zimmerman, Holocaust denial, Addendum and Shermer & Grobman, Denying History, p. 149). In any case, it is impossible to draw any reasonable conclusion on the issue if 7 or 9,000 people were killed and disposed on these days in Auschwitz-Birkenau, merely based on aerial photographs capturing only few seconds in the morning.
Any likely incineration activity of an open air cremation site can be determined from the absence or presence of smoke, since open wood fires with a surface area of many m² can be assumed to generate substantial smoke most of the time, which should be visible even on aerial photographs taken from high altitude (see the 31 May, 8 July, 20 August and 23 August 1944 aerial photographs of the Birkenau compound).
This is not so clear for the crematoria. The question is, if and to what extent did the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau emit smoke. The "if" can be answered quite easily: SS ground photographs of crematorium 2 and 5 show black soot at the top of the chimney, which is a clear sign that there was emission of considerable smoke at some point before. Less straightforward is to quantify the extent and frequency of smoke.
In the most extreme case, the chimneys always spouted thick, heavy smoke generating clouds of several square meter projected surface area readily visible on aerial photographs even of poorer resolution. In this case - and only in this case - absence of visible smoke from crematoria chimneys on aerial photographs would be proof of inactivity of the cremation ovens. Revisionists assume this - without saying - when they discount cremation activity based on the absence of visible smoke on aerial photographs. Mattogno is the prime example:
(Mattogno, Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations, p. 65, his emphasis, see also Mattogno's related article Flames and Smoke from the Chimneys of Crematoria)"In the light of what has been said above, the absence of any smoke rising from the chimneys of a crematorium is proof of its inactivity."
But I have yet to see evidence that any activity of the crematoria had to be visible on aerial photos. Suppose the crematoria chimneys emitted smoke only during certain phases (such as during start up with cooler refractory) or that smoke emission was depending upon operation, load, composition of corpses. Or suppose that the crematoria always released smoke (as Mattogno argues in the above cited article), but that its quantity and thickness was depending upon such factors, and that it was sometimes or always beyond the resolution limit of aerial photographs. This limit is more than 2 m for the 31 May 1944 photographs (cf. Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial, Appendix IV), and hardly any better for the 8 July 1944 photograph. If any smoke was below what can be actually detected on aerial photographs, then the absence of visible smoke rising from the chimney of a crematorium is not proof of its inactivity.
Hence, the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from examining the aerial photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau is that either the crematoria were not smoking at the time the photographs were taken or that any smoke was below their resolution limit, but neither of which does conclusively demonstrate their inactivity. Besides, for all we know, the ovens were running idle at 9 to 10 a.m. on these days (i.e. without corpse and fresh coke supply), perhaps the slag was removed from the coke generators to make them ready for the following killing operation, and the chimneys were emitting much less smoke - if anything at all - not visible on the aerial photographs.
The Tampering Allegation
One of the major issue in Air Photo Evidence is Ball's claim that the US Air Force photographs - first analysed by CIA photo analysts - have been tampered with. He argues that many marks on the August 25 1944 photograph(s) of Auschwitz are suspicious and thinks that he can "conclusively prove the marks were added to the photographs after 1944" by locating some other marks "that are not natural features and could only have been drawn on" (APE3, p. 61). The argument is obviously logically flawed. Even if he could demonstrate that some marks have been drawn on, it would not "conclusively prove"other marks were added there as well. As inductive argument, such reasoning cannot prove conclusively anything, it can only provide inferential support for his hypothesis.
The first smoking gun for the claim the USAF photographs have been tampered with is supposed to be a cluster of several black spots in the camp section BII of Auschwitz-Birkenau. According to Ball, two of the spots "overlap onto the building roof. Since groups of people could not overlap onto the roof, this is the first unquestionable proof the photos were marked" (APE3, p. 62). Except that this conclusion is far from being unquestionable.
I note there is some interesting feature with this structure, which Ball identified as building. It did not exist on 31 May, 26 June and 8 July 1944. Neither did it exist on 29 November 1944 and later. This structure is only visible on the August and September 1944 aerial photographs. It is about 3 m wide. I have no idea what it was. Nor does Ball. But it is obviously relevant to know what it is and most importantly how big it was exactly on this 25 August 1944 in order to understand if any spots that seem "overlap onto" it may be real or not.
Two days earlier, on 23 August 1944 the British RAF flew over Auschwitz-Birkenau and photographed the camp. The photos also captured the camp section BII. What is striking is that this structure appears shorter than on the USAF aerial photograph of 13 September 1944, which Ball took as reference to judge if the spots overlap onto it. Moreover, exactly its western portion encircled here seems rather irregular or patchy. In fact, suppose that the structure did not change between 23 and 25 August 1944, the black spots seem mostly overlapping with the ground or the irregular part, but scarcely with the rectangular portion of the structure, that may be a building or something similar.
At this point, it's helpful to consult an aerial photograph expert (i.e. not John Ball). Caroll Lucas examined the original negative under high magnification and concluded that the formation of people is actually not overlapping onto the building:
The first smoking gun for the claim the USAF photographs have been tampered with is supposed to be a cluster of several black spots in the camp section BII of Auschwitz-Birkenau. According to Ball, two of the spots "overlap onto the building roof. Since groups of people could not overlap onto the roof, this is the first unquestionable proof the photos were marked" (APE3, p. 62). Except that this conclusion is far from being unquestionable.
I note there is some interesting feature with this structure, which Ball identified as building. It did not exist on 31 May, 26 June and 8 July 1944. Neither did it exist on 29 November 1944 and later. This structure is only visible on the August and September 1944 aerial photographs. It is about 3 m wide. I have no idea what it was. Nor does Ball. But it is obviously relevant to know what it is and most importantly how big it was exactly on this 25 August 1944 in order to understand if any spots that seem "overlap onto" it may be real or not.
Two days earlier, on 23 August 1944 the British RAF flew over Auschwitz-Birkenau and photographed the camp. The photos also captured the camp section BII. What is striking is that this structure appears shorter than on the USAF aerial photograph of 13 September 1944, which Ball took as reference to judge if the spots overlap onto it. Moreover, exactly its western portion encircled here seems rather irregular or patchy. In fact, suppose that the structure did not change between 23 and 25 August 1944, the black spots seem mostly overlapping with the ground or the irregular part, but scarcely with the rectangular portion of the structure, that may be a building or something similar.
At this point, it's helpful to consult an aerial photograph expert (i.e. not John Ball). Caroll Lucas examined the original negative under high magnification and concluded that the formation of people is actually not overlapping onto the building:
"These formations are at the extreme edge of the photograph and can only be observed on one frame. Close inspection and analysis of these formations was conducted due to aforementioned concerns that they may be spurious. The formation that appears to cover a portion of a barracks was viewed under high magnification and the edge of the building can be seen separating a repair stain on the roof of the building from the formation adjacent to the building. The original negative shows no evidence of having been tampered with."
(Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial, Appendix IV, my emphasis)
The "second unquestionable proof" that the August 25 1944 photograph has been tampered with is supposed to be a personnel movement in the camp section BI of Auschwitz-Birkenau (APE3, p. 63). The argument has been addressed by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman in 2000 relying on the analysis of the aerial photograph expert Nevin Bryant, supervisor of Cartographic Applications and Image Processing Applications at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California:
"These two aerial photographs of Auschwitz were shot seconds apart by the same plane on a bombing run on the IG Farben plant on August 25, 1944. They show a group of people moving in marching fashion into a registration building; in the second photo, the back of the line has advanced significantly. This is a common problem in marching untrained groups of people: military marches are synchronized; untrained civilian marches are not synchronized. The Holocaust denier John Ball has claimed that this “zigzag” line was drawn in by the CIA to make their report fit the Holocaust story. However, on the original negative, the line is extremely small and would be impossible to draw on. Ball theorizes that the negative was enlarged about 800%, marked, then reduced and reshot into a negative. Yet the original negatives are not separate; they are still on a giant roll in the archives at Yad Vashem, connected with hundreds of other aerial photographs. In addition, with high-resolution equipment and photographic enhancement, we were able to discern shades of gray between the so-called zigzag lines. The zigzag is produced by a “moiré effect”— the sizes of the heads in this particular photograph are about the size of the grains in the emulsion of the film, generating an “interference”pattern. (Courtesy National Archives)"(Shermer & Grobman, Denying History, p. 147)
Moreover, I note that Ball has exaggerated the speed of the personnel movement in his analysis. He argues that the group movement of 3.4 m/s is too fast and highly unlikely (APE3, p. 147). According to the images reproduced by Ball himself, the front of the line as advanced by about 8 m and the back by about 5 m (compared against the width of the horse stable barracks type 260/9 of about 10 m). With 3.5 s between the exposures according to Ball, this translates into speeds of 1.4 to 2.2 m/s, which are perfectly reasonable for average to fast walking.
The US Air Force was not alone on their aerial reconnaissance mission at the Auschwitz (Monowitz) complex on 25 August 1944. At the same time, the British RAF was also photographing the area and made four consecutive shots of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Both formations of people Ball claims are fake on the USAF photograph can also been seen on the corresponding RAF photographs (e.g. the standing formation in camp section BII on exposure 4186). They are obviously authentic features on the ground - and Ball must be one of the poorest air photo analysts ever.
In the first edition of the book, Ball used these two false "proofs" of tampering (plus, a third "proof", not any better, a line of people shown in the Auschwitz main camp compound, which Balls claims is fake because it is supposedly the "same type of sewing stitch mark", APE3, p. 66) as evidence to infer that some marks at the crematoria were also "apparently" drawn in. In the third edition, this is no longer inferred from the previous "proofs", but instead Rudolf offers it as a forth "proof" on its own. He added some illustrations from his books Auschwitz Lies and The Rudolf report on the black spots on the gas chambers' roof of crematoria 2 and 3. But the argument provided by Rudolf only suggests that the spots as such are not shadows from gas introduction ports. However, it doesn't demonstrate they have been drawn in. As mentioned further above, the argument is readily rebutted by Rudolf's collaborator Mattogno in a book edited by himself (Auschwitz Lies, p. 292). Don't ask me why these guys don't bother to read and talk to each other.
Leaving aside the lack of evidence, the hypothesis that the USAF aerial photographs have been tampered with is wholly implausible. If there was such an CIA photo analyst in the 70s wanting to fabricate evidence for the Holocaust, the least thing he would do were to draw formations of people within the Birkenau camp sections, irregular spots on the gas chamber's roof not matching shadow patterns and a thick fence moving around between the various dates. Instead, he would most likely draw into the photos was is typically associated with Auschwitz-Birkenau according to many narratives (based on exaggerated and selective memory): heavy smoke, perhaps fire and of course masses of people sent directly into the crematoria. That the USAF aerial photographs show no visible smoke from the crematoria, limited open air cremation only on 31 May and 25 August 1944 and only few formations of people directed to the crematoria is a safe plausibility test that the photographs have not been tampered with to fabricate evidence on the Holocaust.
The "suspicious" features claimed by Ball - the thick camouflage fence and the spots on the gas chamber's roof of crematoria 2 and 3 - appear also on the 23 and 25 August 1944 RAF aerial photographs. This further rebuts that these features have been drawn onto the USAF aerial photographs. The black spots on top of the gas chambers can be also seen on the 8 July 1944 German Luftwaffe photograph as published by Ball himself. It is noteworthy that the thick camouflage fence at crematorium 2 is missing on this footage. Thus, it was most likely dismantled and re-erected between 26 June and 23 August 1944 (I'm unable to tell if it is on the 20 August 1944 USAF photographs published online).
The original negatives of some of the USAF aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex were examined by two experts specifically for evidence for tampering. First of all, Nevin Bryant, "one of the world leaders in the analysis of aerial and satellite images" (Robert Jan Van Pelt) found that the "four shaded markings on the roofs of Morgue 1 of both Crematorium 2 and 3 did belong to the original negative and were not added later on" (Van Pelt, The Case For Auschwitz, p. 354).
Secondly, Caroll Lucas, whose "45 years of experience with the Central Intelligence Agency and private industry make him one of the world's foremost experts in the field of photo interpretation" (John Zimmerman), provided a thorough analysis of the authenticity of the original negatives:
Secondly, Caroll Lucas, whose "45 years of experience with the Central Intelligence Agency and private industry make him one of the world's foremost experts in the field of photo interpretation" (John Zimmerman), provided a thorough analysis of the authenticity of the original negatives:
(Zimmerman, Holocaust Denial, Appendix IV)"Once the cans are reviewed, the original negatives can be reliably separated from the duplicate negatives by thorough inspection and comparison. This was conducted during the initial phase of the analysis to assure that the original was indeed in the hands of the National Archives, and that analyses would be conducted using the best quality imagery available. Feeling confident that I was looking at the original negative and not a subsequent duplicate negative, my next step consisted of looking for missing frames that would indicate blatant censoring of the mission coverage. All frames containing the Auschwitz complexes could be accounted for, based on the header data and on the lack of gaps in the number sequences. No splicing was observed between frames that would indicate someone had cut out a frame containing the Auschwitz complexes and replaced it. Since the overlap between frames ranges from 55-80%, it was easy to observe whether a gap occurred in the coverage because of a frame being edited out. Procedures used to cut out frames from the original film in the 1940's, and still used in the 1970's was to place a metal straight edge ruler in the metered area between frames, and cut the film, with a sharp knife on each side of the frame of interest. Many times, cuts were made in haste without a straight edge, resulting in unique cuts that would be very difficult to align with the edge of another frame. Since even the straight edge isoriented by hand, the two cuts are seldom, if ever, precisely aligned. Regardless the type of splicing used, this misalignment can be physically observed, and would be positive proof that a portion of the original film is missing. No evidence of such editing/ removal of original data was observed over the sites of interest. Since both original and duplicate negatives were available, one can easily review them frame-by-frame to determine if they both contain the same frame numbers and images. If the original and duplicate negatives were produced by the same laboratory in nearly the same time frame, obvious changes to the originals can be easily detected by comparing the duplicate image to the original. Because of the possibility that individual frames acquired over the Auschwitz I, and Auschwitz II/Birkenau sites may have been tampered with by the CIA, as some historical analysts have maintained, I paid close attention to those frames mentioned. First, I looked for evidence of scribing or inking, or of deletions produced by scraping the emulsion from its base, or splicing that would indicate a missing portion of film. I used the Zoom 240 microscopes attached to the light tables in the National Archives at their maximum magnification (30X) to view the target area within each of the frames in question. Aside from many small scratches and abrasions that could be easily identified as accidental, there were no indications of tampering within the target areas. Each adjacent frame was reviewed (since frame overlap provided a minimum of two, and usually three coverages of the same frame target within the sequence) and no evidence of similar abrasions and scratches was observed. Obviously, if one tampered with a target on one image, one would have to precisely change the matching target images on the adjacent frames. If this was not done, one would not even have to view these targets in stereo to see that tampering had occurred. Stereo analysis would allow one to see the tampering since it would not be three-dimensional unless it was precisely configured in terms of position on all target coverages. A possibility remained that the original frames covering Auschwitz/Birkenau, as differentiated from the I.G. Farben target area, were cut from the roll, objects added, imbedded or deleted by painting or scribing, then duplicate negatives produced, and inserted into the original negative roll, replacing the original negatives of those frames. The first indications that such tampering had occurred would be the presence of splices in the original negative roll at the beginning and end of the frames covering the target. In the 1940's the splicing material used to attach the headers and trailers was transparent 1/4 or 1/2 inch wide tape with serrated end tears, so any such splices are easily recognized on the original rolls. If the splices occurred in the 1970's, and efforts were made to conceal the cuts and splices, a similar transparent material would probably have been used. There is no evidence of the cutting and splicing of film in the original negative film rolls that would isolate frames covering the Auschwitz-I or Auschwitz II/ Birkenau facilities. It is a known fact that there is a loss in quality (primarily in contrast and spatial resolution) in reproductions that are made from the original roll film negatives derived from aerial cameras. During World War-II, field units usually analyzed the original negatives from reconnaissance missions, due to better image quality and time constraints in preparing for follow-on missions. Annotated duplicate positive paper prints of priority targets were produced to provide military commanders and mission planners with the intelligence derived and to allow a determination whether additional missions must be flown. These positive, paper reproductions presented a more realistic image than negative products, in terms of tonal fidelity but with a significant loss in image quality. Such paper prints were also used by bomber pilots and navigators as visual aids during their bombing runs. In order to protect the original negative at that time, a duplicate positive transparency was usually made of each original film roll, and from that positive, a third generation duplicate negative was produced and used to support the film reproduction needs of other field units. Multiple duplicate positive transparencies allowed greater dissemination of the reconnaissance mission photography at the expense of some loss in quality. Obviously the quality of second, third and fourth generation products was significantly poorer than that of the original negative. A "rule of thumb", used in the 1960's, was an eight to ten percent quality loss for each generation away from the original negative. In later years, direct reversal films were developed, reducing (by a generation) the number of reproduction steps needed to produce working duplicate positives and negatives. However, quality losses remain evident between any original negatives and any reproductions. With this background in mind, all frames containing the Auschwitz I/Auschwitz II/Birkenau target areas were compared with their surrounding frames, under magnifications of 60X to determine if a quality difference occurred between objects within the targets and similar objects on adjacent frames. In all cases, the quality did not appear to change. If duplicate negatives had been inserted for the originals in some esoteric way that produced invisible splices, the changes in image quality would still give the deception away. No such quality degradation was observed during this detailed analysis. While viewing the negatives under maximum magnification, particular attention was paid to the positions, quantity and disposition of multitudinous, shallow, thin parallel scratches that did not penetrate the film emulsion. These are caused by rolling the film across the surface of a light-table with the emulsion side down, thereby allowing dust particles and accumulated emulsion build-up debris on the rollers and glass surface of the table to produce continuous fine scratches in the soft emulsion. Many of these scratches will extend throughout the roll. Similar scratches also occur on the anti-halation backing bonded to the film base if the film has been viewed with the emulsion side up. If someone removed frames from the roll, and replaced them with new materials, these previously produced fine scratches will obviously not appear on the replaced film, but will disappear at one end of the inserted film and reappear at the other end. No evidence of such interruptions were observed on the frames containing images of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II/Birkenau or their adjacent frames. While observing the original negative under high magnification, particular care was taken to closely monitor the film edges. When making duplicate negatives, if the original negative isn't precisely aligned to the duplicate stock during the printing process, a thin continuous black edge will occur that would not be on the negative. The presence of this black edge beginning and stopping at frame ends, is a positive sign that a duplicate negative has replaced the original negative of the affected frames. No such indications were observed on the original negatives reviewed. A final test determined that the designated duplicate negatives of these missions, provided to the National Archives by the DIA, showed no discontinuities between them and the original negatives, in terms of frame numbers, unusual splices or unusual quality changes. The cans and some of the reels bore the traditional yellow labels that the military used, and still uses, to identify duplicate negatives. The bottom line is that the cans of aerial reconnaissance film extracted from the DIA files, provided to the CIA, and finally presented to the National Archives, unequivocally contain unedited and untainted original and duplicate negatives of U.S. aerial reconnaissance missions flown over targets adjacent to the Auschwitz I/ Auschwitz II/ Birkenau facilities."
So to recap this issue, there is no evidence that the US Air Force aerial photographs have been retouched by anybody. Moreover, the hypothesis is highly implausible and rebutted by photographs from German and British aerial reconnaissance missions.
↧
"I am Charlie, you are Horst"
The German journalist Malte Herwig suggests to reconsider Anti-Holocaust denial laws in the light of the recent discussions on free speech after the fatal attack on the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015. Quoting Voltaire's famous (actually put into his mouth by a biographer) "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", he makes the point that this should also hold for one of the "most contemptible opinions" like Holocaust denial and the likes of Horst Mahler.
[...] Let's do the Voltaire test in present Germany. We have taboos too, which are not covered by freedom of speech. I reckon antisemitism and Holocaust denial among the most conteptible opinions. I regard them as stupid and wrong, and I think it's important to expose them publicly as lies and to condemn them socially.But I'm not a afraid of such lies. As long asit is notslander, I do not think that one should ban such statementsandso draw even more attention to them. That's why Ithink it's wrong thata conceitedright-wing extremist as Horst Mahler should stay fortwelve yearsin prison becausehehas repeatedlydenied the Holocaust.His fantasms about the Third Reichcan be easilyrefuted and even more easilyignored.Yet,freedom of speech is measuredwith a double standard in his case -according to the motto"I'm Charlie, but you're Horst, andyou needto go in jail for your opinion."
Meanwhile, theBavarian minister of finance WinfriedBausback tries to ban a criticallyannotated editionof Hitler's"Mein Kampf"compiled byrenownedhistorians. Obviously,the minister considers thepoisonHitleras still infectiousanddoubts in theimmunityof the Germans.Dictatorships are afraid of the truth, democracies not. We should not be afraid of lies either, if we are serious about freedom. "If you feel dissatisfied with a book, then refute it", suggested Voltaire once, "if it makes you upset, do not read it."
(Malte Herwig, Ich bin Charlie, du bist Horst, published 4 February 2015, my translation; I learnt about the article from Italy's main Revisionist dump blog Olodogma)
Indeed, it's time for parts of Europe to grow up and deal with Holocaust deniers like one is usually doing it with crank movements: punishing them by not taking notice of or debunking their pile of crap.
As we exercise here at Holocaust Controversies blog, Holocaust denial is ridiculously easy to refute that it seems as if any ban is causing more damage than it intents to avoid.
________________________________________________________
Addition of 9 February 2015:
Sam Schulman concluded in The Weekly Standardthat "[l]imiting free speech, for noble or ignoble reasons, is an experiment that has been tried and failed. Jailing antisemites and dissenting journalists has failed to protect even the lives of European Jews, much less reduce antisemitism." (found via the CODOH forum)
________________________________________________________
Addition of 9 February 2015:
Sam Schulman concluded in The Weekly Standardthat "[l]imiting free speech, for noble or ignoble reasons, is an experiment that has been tried and failed. Jailing antisemites and dissenting journalists has failed to protect even the lives of European Jews, much less reduce antisemitism." (found via the CODOH forum)
↧
A Biography of Walter Sanning
Prior to today, I had believed that Walter Sanning was long dead. His profile at Holocaust Handbooks refers to Sanning in the past tense as "the pen name of the late Wilhelm Niederreiter, a German national with a background in demographics." However, there is now enough public information about Wilhelm Niederreiter available on-line for me to conclude with reasonable certainty that he was still alive in July 2014, when his wife passed away in Friedberg, Germany. Below I present the trail of evidence. I am happy to be corrected by any readers (Revisionist or otherwise) who have alternative information. I have no desire for anyone to contact or monitor Sanning, who is at least 78 years old and has not been an active denier for decades. This article is for purposes of historical clarification only.
Niedereitter's parents were from Sarata, Bessarabia, as shown here and here. His profile on Revisionists.com implies they were still in that location when Wilhelm was born, but then moved to German soil:
Hopefully, this article will end any misconceptions about Sanning's death, and shed some light on how and why Sanning entered the world of denial before abruptly leaving it. His interest in "demographics" and his motivation to downplay the numbers who died in the Holocaust were both likely caused by his childhood experiences, as he would have viewed his family being "liberated" from Soviet occupation and resettled in the Warthegau. His decision to leave the denier world may have been due to his job at the bank, or fear of exposure in a country where denial would eventually be criminalized. His book is ludicrous but his life is an interesting case study of a particular population of Volksdeutsche who have embraced pro-Nazi positions at various points since 1945.
Niedereitter's parents were from Sarata, Bessarabia, as shown here and here. His profile on Revisionists.com implies they were still in that location when Wilhelm was born, but then moved to German soil:
Sanning is a scholar and businessman who was born in 1936 into an ethnic German family in an area that for decades was a part of the former Soviet Union. After a childhood in wartime Germany, he migrated in the 1950s to the United States, where he met his wife. He graduated from a prominent Pacific Northwest university with a bachelor's degree (high honors) in business.The location in "wartime Germany" was actually in the Warthegau, in Kreis Pleschen, where Sanning's brother was born in 1943. The fact that Sanning's ancestors lived under Soviet occupation before moving to German territory at the time of the Nazi occupation may have motivated Sanning's desire as an adult to minimize the Nazis' genocide of the Jews. In the 1950s, Sanning was studying at the Kinman Business University in Spokane, where he met his wife Carol Ann Lindquist, whose obituary is here. The couple moved to Frankfurt, Germany, in 1970. As of 1987, a man known as Wilhelm Niederreiter was "manager of economic research at the Dresdner Bank", as shown here. It is possible, although it cannot be proven, that this was the same man who wrote as Sanning, although the report about Dresdner describes him as having a PhD, which seems very unlikely. Niederreiter was still living in Germany as of July 2014, when his wife died in Friedberg.
Hopefully, this article will end any misconceptions about Sanning's death, and shed some light on how and why Sanning entered the world of denial before abruptly leaving it. His interest in "demographics" and his motivation to downplay the numbers who died in the Holocaust were both likely caused by his childhood experiences, as he would have viewed his family being "liberated" from Soviet occupation and resettled in the Warthegau. His decision to leave the denier world may have been due to his job at the bank, or fear of exposure in a country where denial would eventually be criminalized. His book is ludicrous but his life is an interesting case study of a particular population of Volksdeutsche who have embraced pro-Nazi positions at various points since 1945.
↧
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 5: Construction Documents, A: Introduction
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:
Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)
Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings
Part 5: Construction Documents:
A: Introduction
Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings
Part 5: Construction Documents:
A: Introduction
The so called "criminal traces" in the files of the Auschwitz construction office are strong inferential evidence on homicidal gassing in Auschwitz that corroborate contemporary Polish and Jewish sources as well numerous post-liberation testimonies. In this sub-series of blog postings, I will show that Mattogno was not successful in pointing out documents (or rather arguments on construction documents) that seriously challenge mass extermination in Auschwitz. Furthermore, he was not even able to offer a plausible alternative interpretation that explains the relevant documentary evidence (let aside other types of sources).
The term "criminal trace" was coined by the Auschwitz researcher Jean-Claude Pressas as "material proof [evidence] of the existence of gas chambers in the Birkenau crematoriums" (Pressac, Technique, p. 431). One may also say more generally that it is a contemporary German (construction) document explained by and corroborating mass extermination in Auschwitz.
His exercise to compile 39 "criminal traces" was a response to his former companion the French Revisionist Robert Faurisson, who asked for "one single clear-cut proof, of the actual existence of a 'gas chamber,' of a single 'gas chamber'". Pressac argued that since human testimony is fallible and unreliable, such a proof could only be provided by "incontestable and irrefutable documents". While a direct proof was not available according to Pressac, he argued that an indirect proof may also suffice:
Holocaust deniers have devoted several rebuttals to Pressac's collection of "criminal traces", the latest and most comprehensive one being Carlo Mattogno's Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity (2010; hereafter ATCFS). Mattogno too is idealising contemporary German documents. But unlike Pressac, he is disturbingly consequent in this and pushes it to the extreme to rely almost exclusively on files produced by the SS - despite the abundant availability of other types of sources. This obsession with a single type of source is a slippery slope for any researcher as it increases the risk of introducing a systematic bias in ones narrative. This is painfully obvious for German documents from Auschwitz concentration camp interpreted by a Holocaust denier.
Hence, weather the German files spoke openly about atrocities is an extremely poor indicator if atrocities actually occurred in Auschwitz. A Holocaust denier writing about German atrocities using almost only incomplete files, which are deliberately unreliable and nebulous on German atrocities - this just has to go wrong.
In the following blog postings I will examine Mattogno's arguments on the "criminal traces" from the files of the central construction office Auschwitz (Mattogno, Auschwitz - The Case for Sanity [ATCFS], p. 25 - 219).
Mattogno begins his discussion of Pressac's "criminal traces" with an argument that can only be described as epic fail:
His exercise to compile 39 "criminal traces" was a response to his former companion the French Revisionist Robert Faurisson, who asked for "one single clear-cut proof, of the actual existence of a 'gas chamber,' of a single 'gas chamber'". Pressac argued that since human testimony is fallible and unreliable, such a proof could only be provided by "incontestable and irrefutable documents". While a direct proof was not available according to Pressac, he argued that an indirect proof may also suffice:
"By 'indirect' proof, I mean a German document that does not state in black and white that a gas chamber is for HOMICIDAL purposes, but one containing evidence that logically it is impossible for it to be anything else."
(Pressac, Technique, p. 429)
Such an indirect proof Pressac claimed to have found in the hand-over inventory of crematorium 3 of 24 June 1943 with its references to a "gas tight door" and "14 showers" (+ drawing 2197): an "absolute and irrefutable proof of the existence of a gas chamber fitted with dummy showers... implying the deliberate intention to cause them to die by inhaling a deadly gas" (Technique, p. 429). The handover inventory of crematorium 2 of 31 March 1943 with its references to 4 wire mesh slide in devices and wooden covers (+ the gassing cellar letter of 29 January 1943) was considered by him "an almost incredible supplementary proof". However, the argument is not as logical sound as Pressac maintained. A room equipped with a gas tight door and 14 showerheads (dummy or not) may be (more or less strong) inferential evidence for a homicidal gas chamber, but it is not a definitive and irrefutable proof. Pressac has stretched here the strength of inductive reasoning far beyond its limit.
The concept of historical proof adapted by Pressac is rather naive anyway. Most scholars would disagree that there is something like a "definitive", "indisputable", "absolute", "irrefutable" historical proof as historical knowledge is probative in nature. His assumption that "human testimony is fallible" but German letters and documents are not, is easily challenged. Any piece of historical evidence (or more precisely its researcher's interpretation) can be considered fallible. For instance, a single and isolated document stating that people are mass gassed at some place may be a forgery, it may be a joke (thanks to Fred "the gas chamber...may be a joke" from someone "flatulent during that period" Leuchter) or just a misunderstanding. In fact, one may argue that the joint testimony of say 100 people on homicidal gassing is more powerful evidence than a single, isolated German document, since the latter is more easy and more likely to fabricate, to misunderstand or simply to err than the corroborating testimony of 100 people. Only in connection with other evidence on mass murder in Auschwitz, such a direct and explicit piece of documentary evidence would gain enough probative strength and become powerful evidence.
Fortunately, Pressac's study was not as methodological flawed as one might fear from his idealisation of German documents as historical proof. In practise, he often cross checked German documents with testimonies and vice versa, and treated both as complementary evidence, no doubt the most reasonable approach.
Most German records, especially the most relevant one from the political department, the camp administration or the sanitary department, were destroyed and are lost. The most intact archive available comes from the construction office, but which is obviously focused on construction activities and not on the operation of the camp. In addition, there are significant gaps even in the files of the construction office that makes it difficult to understand some of the activities especially with regards to the crematoria or other suspicious sites without relying on other sources.
German documents are demonstrable unreliable with regards to German atrocities in Auschwitz. One of the most important surviving German source on this matter, the Auschwitz death books, was systematically falsified by the SS to suppress unnatural deaths. Such a massive cover up of atrocities just cries for extreme caution with German documents especially on atrocities and to take into account other sources as much as it is possible.
Furthermore, it can be shown that heavy camouflage language was employed by the Germans on atrocities in documents on the operation of the camp. The policy of smoke screening and silence was even pointed out by the chief of the WVHA (in charge of the Auschwitz concentration camp) Oswald Pohl on 23 September 1942 in Auschwitz:
German documents are demonstrable unreliable with regards to German atrocities in Auschwitz. One of the most important surviving German source on this matter, the Auschwitz death books, was systematically falsified by the SS to suppress unnatural deaths. Such a massive cover up of atrocities just cries for extreme caution with German documents especially on atrocities and to take into account other sources as much as it is possible.
Furthermore, it can be shown that heavy camouflage language was employed by the Germans on atrocities in documents on the operation of the camp. The policy of smoke screening and silence was even pointed out by the chief of the WVHA (in charge of the Auschwitz concentration camp) Oswald Pohl on 23 September 1942 in Auschwitz:
"During today's observations I have silently noticed that you have an ideal inner relation to the issue at stake and an ideal attitude towards the tasks at hand. This conclusion is especially necessary in relation with the issues and the special tasks, about which we do not have to speak words--issues that belong however to your responsibilities."
(Report of Robert Jan Van Pelt)
Hence, weather the German files spoke openly about atrocities is an extremely poor indicator if atrocities actually occurred in Auschwitz. A Holocaust denier writing about German atrocities using almost only incomplete files, which are deliberately unreliable and nebulous on German atrocities - this just has to go wrong.
In the following blog postings I will examine Mattogno's arguments on the "criminal traces" from the files of the central construction office Auschwitz (Mattogno, Auschwitz - The Case for Sanity [ATCFS], p. 25 - 219).
Mattogno begins his discussion of Pressac's "criminal traces" with an argument that can only be described as epic fail:
"As early as 1994 I had noticed oddities in the assembly of “traces” presented by Pressac, which no historian has since looked at more closely. By this I mean the fact that all the “criminal traces” are concentrated in the construction phase of the crematoria....It is conspicuous that no suspicious reference to crematorium II is dated later than the hand-over of the building from ZBL to the camp administration (March 31, 1943)."(Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 42)
Yep, Mattogno is just saying that it is supposed to be "odd" and "conspicuous" that in the construction documents there are no criminal traces for the crematoria after their construction. Guess Mattogno, why they are called construction documents, because they document their construction and not their operation, then they would be called operation documents. There is nothing odd with a sudden drop of "criminal traces" in the construction documents after the crematoria were constructed. In fact, it is exactly what one would expect. It is a priori likely and plausible that the central construction office did not perform work at the gas chambers after their construction that would have generated "criminal traces". And it's no wonder "no historian has since looked at more closely" since there is not much to see here.
But also in case the construction office performed some extension or maintainance work at the gas chambers after they were handed over to the camp administration (say replace or add a gas tight door or divide a gas chamber with another wall), the reason this work did not generate criminal traces would be most likely that the buildings were now under the responsibility of the camp administration and political department, and subjected to more rigorous protocols of secrecy. The break in the construction documents with regards to the "criminal traces" is obviously because of the end of the construction and handover to the administration rather than because of some sanitary program launchned in May 1943 as Mattogno insinuates.
Mattogno points out that "there is a multitude of documents attesting to the frequent breakdowns occurring in the cremation devices" (ATCFS, p. 43) during the operation of the crematoria. But the breakdown of cremation devices (whose documentation is incomplete anyway and according to citations provided by Mattogno rather superficial especially for the most relevant year 1944) did not necessarily had to generate "criminal traces", which were typically related to the treatment of living people rather than corpses (speaking about it, already the fact of frequent breakdowns of the massive number cremation facilities in Auschwitz-Birkenau is itself suspicious and supports that excessive body disposal of killed prisoners was carried out).
"To this we must also add the fact that there is not the slightest 'criminal trace' for the early alleged homicidal gassings – not only for the first alleged gassing in the basement of block 11 and for the experimental ones in crematorium 1 of the main camp (Stammlager), but also for the mass gassings in the so-called 'bunkers' of Birkenau which, supposedly and according to van Pelt, went on for some 15 months and led to the annihilation of 'over 200,000 Jews' (p. 455)."
(Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 43)
The first homicidal gassings in Block 11 in the Auschwitz main camp did not require any activity of the central construction office Auschwitz. Surely the Schutzhaftlagerführungwas able to hung out prison doors and cover windows themselves.
The crematorium 1 in the main camp was made ready for homicidal gassing by drilling some holes in its roof, cover them and replace the doors of the gas chamber tract. This is so little construction activity that it did not necessarily had to show up in the incomplete records of the construction office, leaving aside that it was possibly done by the Schutzhaftlagerführung bypassing the construction office.
The same is true for the installation of the Bunker 1 and 2 gas chambers into the corresponding farmhouses. In fact, I'm informed by N. Terry that testimonial evidence from the 1972 Dejaco trial in Vienna shows that the conversion of the Bunker buildings was actually done by the Schutzhaftlagerführung with improvising work details, and not by the central construction office. As this evidence has not been published yet, for the moment it is sufficient to point out that it is entirely possible that the Bunker adaptions were carried out by the SS personnel in charge of the extermination without ordering the construction office. Aside, the claim that there is not the slightest "criminal trace" for the Bunker sites is false anyway ("bathing installations for special actions", "3 horse stable barracks at the swerve bunkers", Mattogno, STIA, p. 138).
The fact that there are little or only indirectly related "criminal traces" before the construction of the crematoria in the files of the construction office most likely results from that it was simply the first time this authority was also directly involved in the implementation of the gas chambers. Previously, the direct involvement of the construction office seems to have been limited to auxiliary constructions such as the horse stable barracks for undressing or the electricity supply for the Bunker extermination sites.
The fact that there are little or only indirectly related "criminal traces" before the construction of the crematoria in the files of the construction office most likely results from that it was simply the first time this authority was also directly involved in the implementation of the gas chambers. Previously, the direct involvement of the construction office seems to have been limited to auxiliary constructions such as the horse stable barracks for undressing or the electricity supply for the Bunker extermination sites.
↧
↧
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 5: Construction Documents, B: Ventilation & Elevator
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:
Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)
Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings
Part 5: Construction Documents:
A: Introduction
B: Ventilation & Elevators
Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings
Part 5: Construction Documents:
A: Introduction
B: Ventilation & Elevators
The Gas Chamber's Ventilation at Crematoria 2 & 3
The homicidal gas chambers in the basements of crematoria 2 & 3 were equipped with a ventilation system with both fresh air injection and air extraction. Mattogno claims that this ventilation had capacities of 4,800 m³/h yielding 9.48 air exchanges per hour (ATCFS, p. 47). This capacity (+ the info that the aeriation and air extraction fans are driven by 2 HP engines) is provided in the corresponding invoices of 22 February and 27 May 1943 respectively.
However, what Mattogno ignores is that Jean-Claude Pressac has shown already more than two decades ago that the files of the construction office provide sufficient evidence to conclude that the engine power was upgraded from 2 to 3.5 HP:
These sources provide a consistent picture of the ventilation's engine power for the homicidal gas chamber: 3.5 HP engines were planned for this cellar, a 3.5 HP engine was declared missing and requested to dispatch and 3.5 HP engines are displayed in the hand over documents from the construction office to the camp administration.
In contrast to this, the invoices cited by Mattogno suggest that Topf charged the central construction office Auschwitz with only 2 HP engines for the gassing cellars. But these invoices are more isolated and less reliable sources on what was actually installed than the handover documents, which show that 3.5 HP engines were used for the gas chamber's ventilation (+ the previous correspondence on the missing 3.5 HP engine implying that one was already delivered), since what was formally paid is not necessarily what was installed. It's possible that the higher price of the 3.5 HP engines was charged with something else (say it was a compensation for Topf's delays) or that Topf missed to update the invoice.
Since the engine power was upgraded from 2 to 3.5 HP some time in early 1942, the ventilation capacity and number of air exchanges can be supposed to be higher than these 4800 m³/h and 9.5 air exchanges per hour given for the 2 HP engines. Likewise, the originally intended ventilation capacity for the undressing room was increased by upgrading its 5.5 HP engine to a 7.5 HP engine (later even to 10 HP engine for crematorium 2 but with same rotating speed). I leave it to people, who actually know how to do these kind of calculations, to estimate which of the cellars had the higher number of air exchanges per hour after these changes (note that ventilation capacity is not simply proportional to engine power as Pressac seems to have erroneously assumed with his 8,000 m³/h or almost 16 air exchanges per hour, Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz, p. 47). As far as the question of mass gassing in the crematoria is concerned, the exact ratio is irrelevant anyway.
Mattogno thinks otherwise:
(ATCFS, p. 47)
He argues that if the undressing room had a higher number of air changes per hour than the gas chamber, then this is "refuting the thesis of the transformation of these rooms in a criminal sense". Except that it's not.
Corpse cellar 1 (the later gas chamber) was the only room in the basement which was ventilated by both aeration and deaeration blowers as it is required for a gas tight place. In contrast to this, the air extraction of corpse cellar 2 (the later undressing room) had to fail if the room was made properly air tight. Therefore, it was not decisive for the SS, which of the corpse cellars had the higher number of air exchanges (in either case only slightly and practically insignificant anyway) when they picked which one was to be their gas chamber. More important was that the configuration of the ventilation was compatible with a gas chamber.
However, what Mattogno ignores is that Jean-Claude Pressac has shown already more than two decades ago that the files of the construction office provide sufficient evidence to conclude that the engine power was upgraded from 2 to 3.5 HP:
- Topf plan D 59366 of 10 March 1942 according to which the fans for the gas chamber are driven by 3.5 HP motors (Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz, p. 47).
- Letter and telegram of the central construction office Auschwitz to Topf of 11 February 1943 according to which the fan with 3.5 HP for the corpse cellar 1 has not been delivered yet and has to be dispatched immeadiately (Pressac, Technique, p. 360). This implies that the second 3.5 HP engine was already delivered.
- Handover inventories according to which two and three engines with 3.5 HP were installed in the roof spaces of crematorium 2 and 3 respectively, but no 2 HP engines (Pressac, Technique, p. 376).
- Construction office plan 2197 of 19 March 1943 according to which there were two 3.5 HP engines installed in the roof space of crematorium 2 for the ventilation of the gas chamber instead of 2 HP engines (Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz, doc 37).
These sources provide a consistent picture of the ventilation's engine power for the homicidal gas chamber: 3.5 HP engines were planned for this cellar, a 3.5 HP engine was declared missing and requested to dispatch and 3.5 HP engines are displayed in the hand over documents from the construction office to the camp administration.
In contrast to this, the invoices cited by Mattogno suggest that Topf charged the central construction office Auschwitz with only 2 HP engines for the gassing cellars. But these invoices are more isolated and less reliable sources on what was actually installed than the handover documents, which show that 3.5 HP engines were used for the gas chamber's ventilation (+ the previous correspondence on the missing 3.5 HP engine implying that one was already delivered), since what was formally paid is not necessarily what was installed. It's possible that the higher price of the 3.5 HP engines was charged with something else (say it was a compensation for Topf's delays) or that Topf missed to update the invoice.
Since the engine power was upgraded from 2 to 3.5 HP some time in early 1942, the ventilation capacity and number of air exchanges can be supposed to be higher than these 4800 m³/h and 9.5 air exchanges per hour given for the 2 HP engines. Likewise, the originally intended ventilation capacity for the undressing room was increased by upgrading its 5.5 HP engine to a 7.5 HP engine (later even to 10 HP engine for crematorium 2 but with same rotating speed). I leave it to people, who actually know how to do these kind of calculations, to estimate which of the cellars had the higher number of air exchanges per hour after these changes (note that ventilation capacity is not simply proportional to engine power as Pressac seems to have erroneously assumed with his 8,000 m³/h or almost 16 air exchanges per hour, Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz, p. 47). As far as the question of mass gassing in the crematoria is concerned, the exact ratio is irrelevant anyway.
Mattogno thinks otherwise:
"Two conclusions refuting the thesis of the transformation of these rooms in a criminal sense derive from these facts. The first one concerns the number of air exchanges in the two rooms...Hence, for the alleged homicidal gas chamber the ZBL engineers had planned on (4,800÷506 =) 9.48 exchanges of their entire air volume per hour and on (10,000÷902.7 =) 11 changes per hour for the alleged undressing room – which means that the gas chamber would have been less well ventilated than the undressing room."
(ATCFS, p. 47)
He argues that if the undressing room had a higher number of air changes per hour than the gas chamber, then this is "refuting the thesis of the transformation of these rooms in a criminal sense". Except that it's not.
Corpse cellar 1 (the later gas chamber) was the only room in the basement which was ventilated by both aeration and deaeration blowers as it is required for a gas tight place. In contrast to this, the air extraction of corpse cellar 2 (the later undressing room) had to fail if the room was made properly air tight. Therefore, it was not decisive for the SS, which of the corpse cellars had the higher number of air exchanges (in either case only slightly and practically insignificant anyway) when they picked which one was to be their gas chamber. More important was that the configuration of the ventilation was compatible with a gas chamber.
The ventilation capacity of corpse cellar 1 was considered sufficient for homicidal gassing by the SS. This can be deduced from the fact that homicidal gas chambers were installed in the basements of crematoria 2 & 3 and that the capacity of the ventilation was not further upgraded after it is usually assumed that the decision to install gas chambers was made (in the second half of 1942). Certainly, the SS might have equipped the gassing basements with 20 or 30 air exchanges per hour by purchasing bigger engines, blowers and pipework (just that somebody then had the inconvenient job to tell somebody else higher up things are getting more expensive and that the construction would have been likely further delayed). But they did not, which means that it was believed that the > 9.5 air exchanges could do the job. Keep in mind that at the time the SS was operating the Bunker extermination sites without any forced ventilation whatsoever, just by natural ventilation. The > 9.5 air exchanges per hour were a technical improvement over the natural ventilation at the Bunker sites, which was speeding up the ventilation process significantly.
Conclusion
The Elevators at Crematoria 2 & 3
Mattogno argues that the flat-plate elevator "with a capacity of 300 kg" installed into crematorium 2 "is absolutely out of proportion when it comes to the gigantic figures of a mass exterminations cited by van Pelt" (Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 54), i.e. it was supposedly insufficient for mass extermination. It is noteworthy that the argument is not valid for crematorium 3, since there an elevator with 750 kg capacity (with optional upgrade to 1500 kg) was installed from the very beginning.
He explains that for an
(ATCFS, p. 53; Mattogno further asserts that the "average transit time for one load was higher" than he assumed in his estimation).
First of all, 300 kg was not necessarily the available capacity, but the "minimum payload" ordered by the construction office. That's a difference. The metalworking shop may have constructed the platform with a higher maximum payload. We don't have the technical documentation of the device, so we don't know. And even if its maximum payload was 300 kg, if it was properly constructed with safety factor, its actual maximum load that could have been exploited by the Sonderkommando prisoners was higher. The cables were designed for higher loads anyway, else the construction office would not have ordered a minimum, but a maximum load. Furthermore, it cannot be excluded that the payload of the elevator wasn't upgraded at some point. In short, the actual operation capacity of the elevator is far from certain and well established from German documents.
He explains that for an
"average duration of five minutes for one complete operation (loading, upward journey, unloading, downward journey), the transportation of 2,000 bodies from the half-basement to the furnace hall...would have taken...some 33 hours"
(ATCFS, p. 53; Mattogno further asserts that the "average transit time for one load was higher" than he assumed in his estimation).
First of all, 300 kg was not necessarily the available capacity, but the "minimum payload" ordered by the construction office. That's a difference. The metalworking shop may have constructed the platform with a higher maximum payload. We don't have the technical documentation of the device, so we don't know. And even if its maximum payload was 300 kg, if it was properly constructed with safety factor, its actual maximum load that could have been exploited by the Sonderkommando prisoners was higher. The cables were designed for higher loads anyway, else the construction office would not have ordered a minimum, but a maximum load. Furthermore, it cannot be excluded that the payload of the elevator wasn't upgraded at some point. In short, the actual operation capacity of the elevator is far from certain and well established from German documents.
Secondly, Mattogno does not explain why two strong Sonderkommando prisoners should have required at least 2 minutes for lifting five corpses on the elevator's platform. This is 24 s for one single corpse, which sounds patently absurd. All they had to do was to grab the legs or arms of the corpse, rotate by 180°, walk one or two steps and drop the corpse. This is done in few seconds. After loading these corpses on the elevator platform, they had time to relax until the empty platform came back again.
Thirdly, Mattogno assumed that it took 60 s for a round trip of the elevator without the loading time. Actually, he misunderstood the estimation from an "anonymous architect" cited by Van Pelt in The Case for Auschwitz, p. 469. This Revisionist assumed that it took 30 s for a modern elevator round trip of one person for one floor, including loading of the (living) person. Mattogno understood that these 30 s referred only to a single upward trip. So he doubled it to arrive at 60 s for the roundtrip. But this is doublecounting, since the 30 s is already the time for the round-trip according to the anonymous architect. By the way, Mattogno's 30 s for the upward trip translates into an average elevator speed of something like 0.1 m/s. It takes a power of about 300 W to lift 300 kg (neglecting the weight of the platform) in 30 s at a height of 3 m. Yet, the engine installed in crematorium 2 to operate the elevator had 10 HP or about 7000 W. If Mattogno's assumption of load and speed were true, this elevator had an awful poor efficiency.
Thus, each of Mattogno's parameters assumed to estimate the time it took to transport 2000 bodies from the basement to the furnace is either unfounded or false. The loading capacity may have been higher than 300 kg, the elevator took likely less than 30 s for the 2.6 m from the basement to the furnace hall and the time to load a corpse was certainly less than 24 s. If we only correct Mattogno's loading time down to 12 s (which seems still too long for something like lifting a corpse onto the elevator by two strong men, who may have been replaced once they got fatigue), the 2000 corpses were transported in less than 17 hours to the furnace hall, which is less than the actual bottleneck, the cremation of these corpses took.
Thirdly, Mattogno assumed that it took 60 s for a round trip of the elevator without the loading time. Actually, he misunderstood the estimation from an "anonymous architect" cited by Van Pelt in The Case for Auschwitz, p. 469. This Revisionist assumed that it took 30 s for a modern elevator round trip of one person for one floor, including loading of the (living) person. Mattogno understood that these 30 s referred only to a single upward trip. So he doubled it to arrive at 60 s for the roundtrip. But this is doublecounting, since the 30 s is already the time for the round-trip according to the anonymous architect. By the way, Mattogno's 30 s for the upward trip translates into an average elevator speed of something like 0.1 m/s. It takes a power of about 300 W to lift 300 kg (neglecting the weight of the platform) in 30 s at a height of 3 m. Yet, the engine installed in crematorium 2 to operate the elevator had 10 HP or about 7000 W. If Mattogno's assumption of load and speed were true, this elevator had an awful poor efficiency.
Thus, each of Mattogno's parameters assumed to estimate the time it took to transport 2000 bodies from the basement to the furnace is either unfounded or false. The loading capacity may have been higher than 300 kg, the elevator took likely less than 30 s for the 2.6 m from the basement to the furnace hall and the time to load a corpse was certainly less than 24 s. If we only correct Mattogno's loading time down to 12 s (which seems still too long for something like lifting a corpse onto the elevator by two strong men, who may have been replaced once they got fatigue), the 2000 corpses were transported in less than 17 hours to the furnace hall, which is less than the actual bottleneck, the cremation of these corpses took.
Mattogno also argues that the fact that Topf's supplier faced some trouble to get the construction permit for two brand new elevators for crematoria 2 & 3 from the Reich Minister for Armament and Ammunition in August 1943 "is in stark disagreement with the thesis that the Birkenau crematoria were the instruments for the implementation of Himmler’s extermination order" because "in such a case any opposition on the part of the Plenipotentiary for machinery construction would obviously have been considered sabotage" (ATCFS, p. 51). But the Reich Minister for Armament and Ammunition would have hardly even cared if the central construction office Auschwitz considered anything they decided as "sabotage". The issue had to be escalated to higher levels before such a powerful authority would feel any pressure. In fact, the SS-WVHA apparently intervened and achieved the approval of the elevators, as they were finished in May 1944.
On 12 May 1944, the construction office Auschwitz sent an "urgent telegram" to Topf according to which "installation of the 2 elevators cannot be done now. Installation will be done later, together with installation of de-aeration equipment in 4 and 5" (ATCFS, p. 51). The document suggests that Topf reported the construction or dispatch of the elevators to the construction office and was already prepared to install them in the crematoria, but were called off by the Auschwitz authorities. The date of this urgent telegram makes it particular interesting, it was few days before the Hungarian transports were rolling into Auschwitz. Obviously, the Auschwitz authorities could not afford down times of crematoria 2 and 3 when thousands of Hungarian Jews had to be killed at these sites in the next days (see also Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz, p. 115).
Most seriously, he assumed the Sonderkommando prisoners were working in slow motion. It's entirely possible that Mattogno - at his present age and shape - would need twenty-four seconds to move 30 kg (= 60 kg corpse lifted by two) by say one meter. But certainly not so the strongest guys in their early 20s selected from a pool of hundreds of people.
Conclusion
Most seriously, he assumed the Sonderkommando prisoners were working in slow motion. It's entirely possible that Mattogno - at his present age and shape - would need twenty-four seconds to move 30 kg (= 60 kg corpse lifted by two) by say one meter. But certainly not so the strongest guys in their early 20s selected from a pool of hundreds of people.
↧
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 5: Construction Documents, C: Undressing Rooms
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:
Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)
Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings
Part 5: Construction Documents:
A: Introduction
B: Ventilation & Elevators
C: Undressing Rooms
Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings
Part 5: Construction Documents:
A: Introduction
B: Ventilation & Elevators
C: Undressing Rooms
The Undressing Rooms at Crematoria 2 & 3
The first victims of the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau were undressing in a horse stable barrack erected in the front yard of crematorium 2, later this was done directly in the basements of crematoria 2 & 3 as pictured in this drawing of the former Sonderkommando prisoner David Olere. This cellar was designated as "corpse cellar 2" in most of the German files. But several contemporary German documents also explicitly mention undressing sites at crematoria 2 & 3, thereby corroborating numerous sources on the mass extermination in these facilities.
Letter from the camp garrison doctor Eduard Wirths to the camp commandant of 21 January 1943:
"Furthermore it is requested to provide for an 'undressing room' in the cellar rooms."
(Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 72; the quotation marks have been possibly added by the translator, since there are missing elsewhere)
Note from central construction office employee Josef Janisch to Wirths of 15 February 1943:
"For undressing, a horse-stable barrack has been erected in front of the cellar entrance."
(Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 74)
Letter from the central construction office Auschwitz to Topf of 6 March 1943:
"Furthermore, we request you to sent us a supplement offer quotation for the change of the deaeriation device of the undressing room."
(Pressac, Technique, p. 433)
Time sheets of the civilian Topf worker Messing in the period 8 March to 22 April 1943:
"Work on the air extraction duct for undressing cellar 2.
[...]
Air extractor fan for undressing cellar modified and steel duct refitted.
[...]
(Worksite 30) Crematorium II. Fitted the air extraction installations for undressing cellar.
[...]
Worksite 30a. Air extraction installations for the undressing cellar fitted.
[...]
Fitting air extraction installation in the undressing cellar of Worksite 30a."
(Pressac, Technique, p. 370)
On the horse stable barrack erected in the yard of crematorium 2, Mattogno's makes the following argument:
(Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 77)
He argues that because this horse stable barrack was erected by 15 February 1943, but the ventilation of the gas chamber wasn't working prior 13 March 1943, it could not have been meant for the undressing of the victims of a gas chamber, as if various constructions (here: the horse stable barrack and the gas chamber) needed for a project or task (here: mass extermination) would always be finished at the same time. This might be the ideal case, but it's not always (or even seldom) the practice. Actually, it can be well understand within the framework of the implementation of the mass extermination, why the horse stable barrack was erected already by 15 February 1943:
On 29 January 1943, the Topf engineer Kurt Prüfer set up a report on the construction state of the crematoria after inspecting the worksites with members of the SS construction office. The report was forwarded to the head of the construction department of the SS-WVHA, Hans Kammler, as well as to the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß. According to Prüfer, the ventilation devices of the corpse cellars of crematorium 2 were expected to be installed on 8 February 1943 and the crematorium was expected to be ready by 15 February 1943. Therefore, the completion of the undressing barrack by 15 February 1943 fits perfectly to the expected date of the completion of gas chamber and cremation devices. Only due to the construction delays (probably because the ventilation equipment was not delivered on time), the gas chamber was not ready for operation prior 13 March 1943.
On the issue, if the undressing room in the basements of the crematoria mentioned in the German files was intended for victims of a gas chamber, Mattogno asserts that the letter of Wirths to the camp commandant and Janisch's reply "allow us to settle this question once and for all" (ATCFS, p. 72). He argues that the undressing site was actually meant to undress corpses as a hygienic and sanitary measurement, as it was requested by the camp garrison doctor.
On the horse stable barrack erected in the yard of crematorium 2, Mattogno's makes the following argument:
"On February 15 Janisch informed the garrison surgeon that 'a horsestable type barrack in front of the cellar entrance' had been erected at crematorium II as an undressing room for the corpses. This barrack was therefore built between January 21 and February 15 and, for that reason alone, it could not have had a criminal purpose."
(Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 77)
He argues that because this horse stable barrack was erected by 15 February 1943, but the ventilation of the gas chamber wasn't working prior 13 March 1943, it could not have been meant for the undressing of the victims of a gas chamber, as if various constructions (here: the horse stable barrack and the gas chamber) needed for a project or task (here: mass extermination) would always be finished at the same time. This might be the ideal case, but it's not always (or even seldom) the practice. Actually, it can be well understand within the framework of the implementation of the mass extermination, why the horse stable barrack was erected already by 15 February 1943:
On 29 January 1943, the Topf engineer Kurt Prüfer set up a report on the construction state of the crematoria after inspecting the worksites with members of the SS construction office. The report was forwarded to the head of the construction department of the SS-WVHA, Hans Kammler, as well as to the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß. According to Prüfer, the ventilation devices of the corpse cellars of crematorium 2 were expected to be installed on 8 February 1943 and the crematorium was expected to be ready by 15 February 1943. Therefore, the completion of the undressing barrack by 15 February 1943 fits perfectly to the expected date of the completion of gas chamber and cremation devices. Only due to the construction delays (probably because the ventilation equipment was not delivered on time), the gas chamber was not ready for operation prior 13 March 1943.
On the issue, if the undressing room in the basements of the crematoria mentioned in the German files was intended for victims of a gas chamber, Mattogno asserts that the letter of Wirths to the camp commandant and Janisch's reply "allow us to settle this question once and for all" (ATCFS, p. 72). He argues that the undressing site was actually meant to undress corpses as a hygienic and sanitary measurement, as it was requested by the camp garrison doctor.
However, Wirths was not only occupied with the hygiene and sanitary conditions but also with the implementation of the extermination of Jews in Auschwitz. The people to be killed in Auschwitz were selected by SS doctors and it were his own SS doctors and SS paramedics who actually operated the gas chambers. Since Wirths was heavily responsible for the extermination machinery, it is entirely plausible that it was him, who submitted to Höß the request to give the victims a place for undressing directly in the basement.
Furthermore, Mattogno considers Wirths' request for the undressing site in the crematorium basement as too late to be related to mass murder, as he insists that both decisions of installing a gas chamber and an undressing room in the basement had to be made at the same time:
"Hence, the decision to transform “Leichenkeller 1” into a homicidal gas chamber implied the decision to transform “Leichenkeller 2” into an undressing room, and the two decisions were taken at the same time."
(Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 74)
Uhm...no, the decision to install a homicidal gas chamber in the basement of the crematorium does not imply the decision to install an undressing room in the basement as well. It's possible, but it's a priori also possible that the SS did not make up their mind yet where the victims undress, or that they thought them to undress in the open in the crematorium yard, or in a horse stable barrack. The latter alternative was already employed at the Bunker extermination sites, and a similar solution may have been considered also for crematorium 2 in the planning and early construction phase.
In fact, apart from the actual erection of an undressing barrack in the yard of crematorium 2 (+ the lack of information in Janisch's note to Wirths' that the undressing barrack is only a temporary measure), such a scenario is also supported by the construction drawing 2003 of crematorium 2 of 19 December 1942. This drawing shows that the access stair to the basement was moved from the backyard (with a corpse chute) directly to the crematorium front yard (without a corpse chute, because - as Pressac had observed - "the future corpses entered while they were still living and could walk down the stairs", Technique, p. 302, see also the next blog posting of this series). But also with this new configuration, there was no direct access from the outside to the undressing room. This means that the victims would have had to enter and left the undressing room through exactly the same door, which one can easily guess would have made the undressing and loading of the gas chamber quite a mess for the SS.
Therefore, the absence of a direct access to the undressing room at this stage (5 January 1943, when the head of the construction office Karl Bischoff approved the drawing) indicates that there was no definite decision made yet to let the victims undress in the corpse cellar 2, or that such a decision was at least not communicated yet to the central construction office. The direct access to the undressing room was first mentioned in the files of the construction office on 26 February 1943, which is the latest date one can assume that corpse cellar 2 was considered to be transformed into an undressing room. It was not used for the first homicidal gassing according to Sonderkommando Henryk Tauber - probably because its ventilation was only finished in the following week.
Mattogno's hypothesis of the undressing site as a hygienic and sanitary measure does not make much sense anyway. According to Mattogno, Wirths considered the "wooden sheds" used in the Birkenau camp sections for the storage of corpses as inedaquate from a hygienic and sanitary point of view and "thus intended to have the corpses taken to a safer place" and requested the provision of an 'Auskleideraum' for these corpses 'in the cellar rooms' of crematorium II" (ATCFS, p. 76).
This hypothesis does not even explain why Wirths was talking about an "undressing room" when he simply meant a place for safe storage of corpses. Of course, the corpses are undressed before the cremation, but the primary purpose of such a room as supposedly requested by Wirths was storage (by the way, from a sanitary point of view it would have been more reasonable to undress the corpses right at the spot where they died instead of spreading such things as lices also to the crematorium). Then he was putting forward the rather redundant request for a corpse cellar in a crematorium. Another problem is that Janisch in his note to Wirths did not indicate that the wooden barrack for undressing was only a temporary measure, but which is a crucial point in Mattogno's interpretation.
Thus, Mattogno's explanation that the undressing room was meant for corpses does only poorly explain the documents, but what actually kills this hypothesis is that there is abundant evidence that both the horse stable barrack and corpse cellar 2 were used for the undressing of the victims of the homicidal gas chambers.
Mattogno's hypothesis of the undressing site as a hygienic and sanitary measure does not make much sense anyway. According to Mattogno, Wirths considered the "wooden sheds" used in the Birkenau camp sections for the storage of corpses as inedaquate from a hygienic and sanitary point of view and "thus intended to have the corpses taken to a safer place" and requested the provision of an 'Auskleideraum' for these corpses 'in the cellar rooms' of crematorium II" (ATCFS, p. 76).
This hypothesis does not even explain why Wirths was talking about an "undressing room" when he simply meant a place for safe storage of corpses. Of course, the corpses are undressed before the cremation, but the primary purpose of such a room as supposedly requested by Wirths was storage (by the way, from a sanitary point of view it would have been more reasonable to undress the corpses right at the spot where they died instead of spreading such things as lices also to the crematorium). Then he was putting forward the rather redundant request for a corpse cellar in a crematorium. Another problem is that Janisch in his note to Wirths did not indicate that the wooden barrack for undressing was only a temporary measure, but which is a crucial point in Mattogno's interpretation.
Thus, Mattogno's explanation that the undressing room was meant for corpses does only poorly explain the documents, but what actually kills this hypothesis is that there is abundant evidence that both the horse stable barrack and corpse cellar 2 were used for the undressing of the victims of the homicidal gas chambers.
Conclusion
In contrast to what Mattogno says, the letter from Wirths to the camp commandant does not settle the question if the undressing room was meant for corpses or living people. Wirths' was responsible both for sanitary conditions and for the killing of people. The letter itself does not explain the reason for the undressing room (by the way, in agreement with Pohl's "special tasks, about which we do not have to speak words").
There is no evidence (let it be documentary or testimonial) that the so called corpse cellar 2 was meant or used specifically for undressing of corpses in the crematorium, while there is numerous testimonial evidence that precisely this corpse cellar 2 - designated as undressing cellar/room in contemporary German files - was used for the undressing of gas chamber's victims. Likewise, the barrack erected in the yard of crematorium 2 for undressing was identified as being used for people killed in the crematorium. Thus, taking into account the full range of available evidence actually settles the question of the purpose of the undressing room (though not "once for all", since recall that historical knowledge is probative in nature).
↧
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 5: Construction Documents, D: Outward Opening Door & Removal of Corpse Chute
Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz:
Part 3: Eyewitnesses (Supplement)
Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings
Part 5: Construction Documents:
A: Introduction
B: Ventilation & Elevators
C: Undressing Room
D: Outward Opening Door & Removal of Corpse Chute
Part 4: Sonderkommando Handwritings
Part 5: Construction Documents:
A: Introduction
B: Ventilation & Elevators
C: Undressing Room
D: Outward Opening Door & Removal of Corpse Chute
In the previous blog posting, I briefly touched drawing 2003 (ground floor, basement) of crematorium 2 of 19 December 1942, which introduced several changes to the crematorium basement. These modifications - studied in detail by Jean-Claude Pressac in Technique and Operation of the Auschwitz Gas Chambers p. 302 f. - can be largely explained by the transformation into a mass killing site.
Removal of the Corpse Chute
In the drawings of crematorium 2 created after November 1941 (Pressac, Die Krematorien, doc 11; Pressac, Technique, p. 272 - 295), the architects provided the staircase leading down into the basement with a concrete corpse chute. This staircase was accessible from the backyard of the crematorium and its corpse chute was a convenient feature to transport corpses from ground level into the crematoria basement containing the corpse cellars. On drawing 2003 of 19 December 1942, the stair case was moved from the backyard to the front yard of the crematorium, but the corpse chute was no longer realised (see here). Pressac writes:
"The corpse chute has been eliminated (a vital point, implying that since this was no longer required the Leichenkeller could no longer be morgues in any normal sense, or else that the 'corpses' arrived on foot...Replacing a chute designed to take corpses by an ordinary stairway defies all logic — unless the future corpses entered while they were still living and could walk down the stairs"
(Pressac, Technique, p. 302)
In 1994, Mattogno tried to rebut the argument by suggesting that the backyard stair case with its corpse chute was in fact not really eliminated:
"Actually, Plan 2003 was nothing more than a proposal to transfer the basement access to the street side (Verlegung des Kellerzuganges an die Strassenseite) and not a plan to eliminate the slide. Therefore, the absence of the slide is basically a simplification of a part of the design which is technically irrelevant. The elimination of the slide would have been technically irrational (unless the lift were used to transport the corpses to the mortuary rooms), since the natural mortality at the camp continued."
(Mattogno, Auschwitz: The End of a Legend)
Actually, this drawing 2003 set up by Walter Dejaco on 19 December 1942 was not a mere proposal but was approved by the head of the construction office Karl Bischoff on 5 January 1943. The hypothesis that the corpse chute was not removed but merely not shown is thoroughly refuted by the corresponding drawing of the ground floor, which shows that a store room was installed instead of the stair case.
In ATCFS (2010), Mattogno realised that the stair case and the corpse chute were not left out, but were replaced by a new room. But he did not go so far as to admit that he was simply wrong back in 1994 and failed to take into account the ground floor drawing. Instead, he stated that "the matter will now be discussed in more detail" (ATCFS, p. 130) - except that this "more detail" entirely refutes what he said earlier. Arguably not the best and most transparent way how to deal with ones mistakes.
The new discovery he claimed to have made is actually an old hat:
The new discovery he claimed to have made is actually an old hat:
"No one has yet pointed out that on the ground floor blueprint, in the area where the slide and the staircase should have been found, there is a new room labeled 'Abstellraum' (store room)"
(Mattogno, ATCFS. p. 130)
This was already pointed out by Pressac more than two decades ago (1989), exactly in the work and even on the page Mattogno was citing on the same page:
Note that Pressac had already anticipated and rebutted Mattogno's later argument that the corpse chute was simply left out. Some very sloppy reading of Pressac from Mattogno here.
This was already pointed out by Pressac more than two decades ago (1989), exactly in the work and even on the page Mattogno was citing on the same page:
"It could possibly be argued that Dejaco, pressed for time, left out the chute which was unimportant in this drawing, the main purpose of which was to show the creation of a stairway from the north yard of the Krematorium to the basements. But the ground floor plan confirms the abolition of the chute, for a storeroom is installed in its place."(Pressac, Technique, p. 303, my emphasis)
Note that Pressac had already anticipated and rebutted Mattogno's later argument that the corpse chute was simply left out. Some very sloppy reading of Pressac from Mattogno here.
The end of the story is that the elimination of the corpse chute is not explained within the framework of Mattogno's hypothesis of the non-homicidal use of the crematorium:
"Therefore the absence of the slide and the presence of an “Abstellraum” in that drawing are not a project in themselves but simply an unexplained fact."
(ATCFS, p. 131, my emphasis)
The modification is, however, to some extent explained if mass murder was taken place in the basement. Since the new stair case was mostly used by living people to climb down the basement to enter the gas chamber and since the crematorium would have received much less corpses (if any, in case crematorium 3 was meant to dispose the corpses of prisoners who died in the camp) from the outside than if there was no mass extermination, the corpse chute was of less use for the operation of the crematorium - to the point that it may have been regarded as not necessary for the few numbers of corpses (if any) coming from outside the crematorium.
The modification is, however, to some extent explained if mass murder was taken place in the basement. Since the new stair case was mostly used by living people to climb down the basement to enter the gas chamber and since the crematorium would have received much less corpses (if any, in case crematorium 3 was meant to dispose the corpses of prisoners who died in the camp) from the outside than if there was no mass extermination, the corpse chute was of less use for the operation of the crematorium - to the point that it may have been regarded as not necessary for the few numbers of corpses (if any) coming from outside the crematorium.
Mattogno wonders why the elimination of the corpse chute on drawing 2003 of 19 December 1942 should have a "criminal significance", if it was already lacking on the first drawing of the crematorium from the Auschwitz architects of 24 October 1941 (it was added shortly afterwards in November 1941):
"The blueprint of the new crematorium which Dejaco drew on October 24, 1941, shows two underground morgues (the future Leichenkeller 1 and 2) accessible via a staircase without a slide (“zum L.-Keller”) or by way of the freight elevator (“Aufzug”), exactly as on blueprint 2003. Following Pressac’s line of thought – leaving aside the freight elevator – the stairs also on this blueprint were “the only access to the morgues which meant that the dead would have had to walk down the stairs,” but this conclusion is in glaring disagreement with his central thesis that the crematorium was planned as a normal hygienic installation. Hence, if this arrangement could not have a criminal significance on the blueprint of October 24, 1941, why should an identical arrangement on blueprint 2003 of December 19, 1942, be judged differently?"
(ATCFS, p. 132)
The significance is not the arrangement that there is no corpse chute as such, but that it was removed after it was in the blueprints already for almost a year. It's because of their different context why the two blueprints have to be judged differently. In the one case, you don't have the corpse chute in the first place (because it obviously escaped the architects in Auschwitz that if you build a crematorium with a daily capacity of 1440 corpses per day you need an efficient way how to bring the corpses into the basement). In the other case, such a solution - the corpse chute - was already implemented for almost a year, but then eliminated from the blueprint without any substitution. It's the elimination of the corpse chute - rather than its lack - on the drawing that smells suspicious.
Anyway, the stair case with its corpse chute was actually build at crematorium 2. It's possible to presume that the modification reached the construction site too late (Pressac's explanation in Technique, p. 303). It was also build at crematorium 3, but here the construction was not that far advanced in late 1942 (see Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 131). The first evidence for the transformation of crematorium 3 into a mass murder site is dated as late as 6 March 1943 and one may speculate that crematorium 3 may have been reserved for the deaths among the registered prisoners of the Auschwitz complex before this. Alternatively, the SS might have changed their mind about the usefulness of the extra stairway and corpse chute to the basement, and cancelled the modification for crematorium 3. Interestingly, stair cases + corpse chutes were closed off by a "wooden partition in cellar in front of slide" with doors (orders from central construction office of 18 March and 10 April 1943, Mattogno, ATCFS, p. 133), probably to prevent the victims taking the staircase to the ground floor but to guide them straight into the gas chamber instead.
Change from Inward to Outward Opening Door
In November 1941, the civilian architect Georg Werkmann (working for the SS-WVHA) created a blueprint detailing the basement level of the future crematorium 2. According to his concept, the corpse cellar 1 (the later gas chamber) received a double door opening inward. This opening direction of the door is rather incompatible with a homicidal gas chamber, as the corpses of the gassed victims may block the door making its opening impractical. On 19 December 1942, Dejaco reversed the opening direction of the double door in drawing 2003 (see also here). The outward opening door could now be opened also in the case it was blocked by corpses - a crucial feature for a homicidal gas chamber.
Mattogno was helplessly confused in his treatment of this issue (not only because he wrote "blueprint 932" when he actually meant blueprint 2003):
"As we have seen in chapter 2.5.5., van Pelt surmises that a blueprint of crematorium II dated October 22, 1942, which has not been preserved (how convenient for van Pelt!), presents the locations of the openings for the introduction of Zyklon B on the roof of Leichenkeller 1. Blueprint 932 shows a section of Leichenkeller 1, some 10 m long, both for the half-basement and for the ground floor, on which at least one of the four alleged Zyklon B openings should appear in the same way as the two ventilator shafts are indicated between the room designated for “gold works” (Goldarb.; for the recovery of dental fillings and crowns) and the vestibule (Vorplatz).
On this blueprint is thus no indication of the use of Leichenkeller 1 as a homicidal gas chamber, and therefore the door’s opening direction into this hall has, per se, no criminal connotation."
(ATCFS, p. 145 f.)
Mattogno completely forgot that he recalled just 15 pages earlier that he was arguing on the same drawing (on the missing staircase with corpse chute, see above), in 1994, that it was left out as "technically irrelevant simplification of an irrelevant part of the drawing" (ATCFS, p. 130) without objecting to the structure of his previous argument. Now, if the stair case with its corpse chute could have been left out as "technically irrelevant simplification of an irrelevant part of the drawing", as Mattogno thinks, then even more so (since it was even more technically irrelevant for relocating the basement access and since it was in an even more irrelevant part of the drawing) the gas introduction opening.
Furthermore, drawing 2003 and its main drawing 932 do not show the first ventilation opening in the ceiling of the furnace room on the ground floor either. Obviously, these kind of drawings were not meant to picture free openings in the ceiling of rooms only partially shown anyway (and not attached to the walls like the ventilation shafts of the gold working room and the vestibule, see ATCFS, p. 144). As pointed out by Van Pelt in The Case for Auschwitz, p. 370, there were separate drawings detailing the ceiling with its steel reinforcement, where such openings should have been realised. This drawing is lost for the gas chamber (how convenient for Revisionists!).
His explanation of why the inward opening door of the gas chamber was changed to open outward, Mattogno takes from Germar Rudolf's Rudolf Report:
"Germar Rudolf has pointed out that changing the door’s orientation may have had a technical, albeit entirely innocuous reason (2003b, p.106):
'The change in orientation of the doors was probably caused by the design of this morgue’s ventilation system. Since the air inlet of this system had a higher resistance than the outlet […], a considerable subpressure was caused in morgue 1, constantly sucking air in from the rest of the building. This is a desired effect for a morgue where many corpses had to be stored, so that unpleasant smells would not reach other parts of the building. A double door opening to the side with a lower pressure (inside morgue 1) would open automatically, whereas a door opening to the side of higher pressure closes automatically.'"
(ATCFS, p. 145)
Rudolf's hypothesis is, however, untenable, as the double door of the future undressing room remained opening inward, despite the fact that its ventilation had only an air extraction and was therefore definitely operating with subpressure. Or the gold working room or the dissecting room, all of which had air extractions and inward opening doors. Clearly, the architects did not consider a slight subpressure in the rooms as a problem for double doors opening towards the inside.
The reason for the modification was thus a different one. And it had to be very serious and pressing. This can be deduced from the fact that the modification resulted in an obvious architectural flaw, which could have hardly escaped Dejaco. In the new arrangement, the right door leaf of the outward opening door of corpse cellar 1 is now blocking the left door leaf of the elevator (see also Pressac, Technique, p. 303). This suggests that there was no way that the door of the corpse cellar 1 could remain opening inward. It just had to open outward, whether or not blocking another door. The installation of a homicidal gas chamber in corpse cellar 1 certainly provided for such a reason.
Conclusion
Both the elimination of the corpse chute and the change in the opening direction of the gas chamber's door in drawing 2003 of 19 December 1942 (approved on 5 January 1943) remain unexplained by Mattogno and are furthermore technically or architectural irrational within the framework of the Revisionist thesis.
In contrast to this, these modifications can be explained by the implementation of a homicidal gas chamber in corpse cellar 1 and a shift from a crematorium only receiving corpses to a mass killing facility creating them.
Thus, the thesis of mass extermination clearly has the greater explanatory power on Dejaco's drawing 2003.
In contrast to this, these modifications can be explained by the implementation of a homicidal gas chamber in corpse cellar 1 and a shift from a crematorium only receiving corpses to a mass killing facility creating them.
Thus, the thesis of mass extermination clearly has the greater explanatory power on Dejaco's drawing 2003.
↧