Do you, dear reader, believe that during the Second World War the Nazis plumbed the very depths of human depravity by rendering human fat into soap, of sewing human skin into lampshades and gloves and all manner of similar nightmare horrors? If you do, you would not be alone. Like many others, I believed it – and I confess, completely blindly – all of my life. But I was wrong. If you believe such, you would be wrong. It is not true. It never happened. You can take it to the bank, it is a total myth. And this conclusion is not just one reached by so-called ‘revisionist’ authors, but is rather a simple matter of documented fact admitted to and affirmed by the orthodox holo-historians themselves, e.g., the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.
It is true that during the Nuremberg Trials such alleged items were displayed, but over the years they were all systematically debunked, i.e., found to be made of non-human animal materials, such that, as I say, no orthodox holo-historian maintains the validity of any of them anymore. Now, a critical mind, a curious mind is then led ineluctably to the follow-up query: To wit, if that isn’t true, then what else might not be true that I have been told, and that I have believed, all of my life? And this is where Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom in his book Breaking the Spell – amongst others, naturally – bids us listen to the contrarian general case. But, then, what exactly is that case?
In a nutshell, the author is arguing that the Nazi concentration camps (some in Germany itself, most of the rest in Poland) were slave labour camps – though some of them were, as we’ll see, only temporary transit camps – whose unfortunate inmates were used in the grim service of the German war effort.
Auschwitz, for instance, was located right next door to the large Buna-Monowitz industrial plant run by I.G. Farben, and which produced (from coal) much of the Reich’s synthetic oil and rubber, and without which the German war machine would have ground to a screeching halt – and whose labor force was sourced from the Auschwitz concentration camp itself. Some of them (the Aktion Reinhardt camps) were also part and parcel of a general policy established at the infamous Wannsee conference in January 20, 1942 for the systematic deportation ‘to the east’ of populations of ‘undesirables’ including Jews, Roma, communists and so forth, who were to be deposited east of the Urals once the Soviet Union had been, as the Germans confidently expected, quickly vanquished by the, up until then, entirely successful German war machine. Thus, the term ‘Endlosung’, which has been tendentiously interpreted by the orthodox holo-historians to mean, ‘final solution’, really means ‘end’ or ‘goal’ – in this case, deportation to the east, but which action was thwarted by the unexpected resistance to, and, of course, eventual failure of Operation Barbarossa, i.e., the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
But what these camps were not, according to Kollerstrom, were monstrous extermination factories that took in train loads of human beings and simply ground them up into human corpses. This image, he maintains, is a brutal and inhuman legacy that has come to haunt the Western imagination and form the foundation of a demented sacred myth that has, along with ancillary myths, come to underpin a society based on UnTruth – we are, he says, the The People of the Lie – and which has also expediently come to serve American and Western imperial interests in their truly monstrous culture of ‘endless war’.
None of this, of course, is to condone or fail to recognize the horror and injustice of the systematic detainment of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in slave labor camps where typhus and other diseases ran rampant, and where, if not systematic killings, then certainly sporadic brutalities would have taken place. But, again, they were not, as we have been assured all of our lives, mere factories for processing humans into corpses.
So there you have it, the ‘case’. But what of the evidence?
To begin with there is the, strangely, well-documented fact that there is no documentary evidence whatsoever of any ‘plan’ by the Nazis to systematically exterminate millions of human beings. Thus, of the vast corpus of surviving documents from the Third Reich, there is not one scrap of evidence indicating any such plan; no proclamations, orders, radio transcripts, memos, memoirs – nothing at all. As Kollerstrom says, we are left believing that the engineering and operation of this vast conspiracy was conducted entirely through some form of “telepathy”.
Moreover, and contrary to popular understanding, the Wannsee conference made no mention of any such plan. Holo-historians have, instead, been forced to ‘interpret’ certain ‘code words’ from the conference as meaning other than their dictionary meaning. (Here Kollerstrom reminds the reader that it is not for the historian to impose meaning on the data, but rather to let the data speak for themselves.) Nor is there even a snippet of evidence of either a plan or anything at all to do with ‘extermination’ from the recently released, voluminous diaries of both Himmler and Goebbels. Additionally, the British historian, David Irving in his book, ‘Hitler’s War’, based entirely on primary source material, concluded that Hitler, himself, knew of no such plan (a conclusion, amongst others, which landed Irving in the docket and, like Kollerstrom, condemned to eternal damnation throughout Western society, media and academia.)
Then there is the dean of orthodox holo-historians, Raul Hilberg, author of the supposedly-definitive, three volume history of the Holocaust, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, who was forced by defense counsel at the 1985 Ernst Zundel trial to admit under oath that there was no documentary evidence – not one iota – of any alleged gassings of human beings by the Nazis! The latter fact is also backed-up, as we shall see later, by the Bad Arolsen Archives (which comprise some thirty million documents to do with the camps and are considered the pre-eminent repository on these matters) whose curators released a statement in 2007 saying that they had no evidence – not one document – that suggested any deaths by gassing.
But, then, what of the physical structure of the ‘gas chambers’ themselves? Here, according to Kollerstrom, the evidence is definitive: they could not have been ‘gas chambers’ (i.e., they really were showers) both because their structures (many parts of which have been fraudulently reconstructed post-war) are ludicrously permeable, and because chemical analysis reveals there is no hydrogen cyanide in their walls – whereas the walls of the small delousing chambers used to disinfect the inmates’ clothes, and which everyone agrees were used for this purpose (despite the obvious contradiction of such in an ‘extermination’ camp), are chocker-block full of hydrogen cyanide.
But what of the ‘six million’? Merely a longstanding symbolic meme that represented the traditional number of Jews in Europe and for which references for go back at least a half century prior to the ‘Holocaust’. There were no systematic attempts made nor scientific surveys done at Nuremberg to determine the numbers who died in the camps during the war nor could there have been in the timeframe before which the trials began. Moreover, the Auschwitz Museum itself released a statement in 1989 downgrading the ‘four million’ supposedly killed at Auschwitz to ‘one million’, but which revelation was never factored even then into the official count. Later, as we shall see, the Soviet ‘Death Books’ for Auschwitz became available following the fall of the Soviet Union showing that only some seventy thousand people (approximately half of them Jews) had died at Auschwitz – almost all from typhus – a number which, just happens to coincide with the numbers in the Arolsen Archives.
But what about all the ‘pictures’? The iconic pictures of piles of corpses shown de rigueur in every textbook are from Bergen-Belsen and are known to be victims of typhus, i.e., they were not victims of ‘gas chambers’ – but which photos continue to be paraded to this day as ‘gassing’ victims despite this transparent and matter-of-public-record falsification of documented fact. What are also never shown are the many extant photographs of hail and hearty inmates taken when the camps were liberated by Soviet and Allied forces.
But certainly the ‘eyewitness’ accounts are definitive? Hardly. Most of the core ‘autobiographies’ have been shown to be fakes, and the rest are largely derivative from these accounts and/or based on mere hearsay and rumour. Moreover, there has arisen an entire cottage industry of fake ‘eyewitness’ accounts and which are part and parcel of a much larger enterprise. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the ‘Holocaust’ is big business. Indeed, there is strong evidence, as we shall see later, that even such famous holo-biographies as that of Elie Wiesel are completely fraudulent. There are also numerous accounts, again which we will soon examine, by quite renowned individuals countering the official ‘Holocaust’ narrative but which continue to be routinely and entirely ignored and suppressed.
Okay, but what about the ‘confession’ of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz and the key witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials? We learn from Kollerstrom of evidence that came to light in the mid-1980s that Hoss had been “tortured for three days and nights by a British hit team” prior to his confession. And that, in any case, there are blatant contradictions in his tortured testimony that demonstrate that he was simply making up what his prosecutors / persecutors wanted to hear. Indeed, threats of either capital punishment or long prison sentences were the overarching context for the rest of the rank-and-file ‘confessions’ in a military tribunal by the victors that accepted as a pre-determined fact the reality of the ‘extermination’ thesis and denial of which could not only not be used as a defense position (a common feature, by the way, of today’s infamous international kangaroo courts / ‘war crimes tribunals’) – but which legal tactic guaranteed one’s conviction! Accordingly, most defendants chose the pragmatic stance of accepting the prosecution ‘thesis’ which opened the door to a lenient plea bargain.
Anyways, enough of the cursory overview. Let’s get down to brass tacks.
The ‘Six Million’
A few months following the liberation and occupation of Auschwitz by the Soviets in January, 1945, the Soviet newspaper Pravda announced the staggering total of some four million people who had died in the camp. This figure was quickly integrated into the Nuremberg Trials without further ado. But then in 1989, the so-called ‘Death Books’ were released by Soviet President Gorbachev. These documents, which had been captured by the Soviets from Auschwitz, consisted of some 46 volumes cataloguing the individual death certificates of those who had died at Auschwitz – of some 69,000 individuals. Not four million, but sixty-nine thousand – and of whom about twenty-nine thousand were Jews, with the rest comprising a mixture of other ethnic groups and nationalities. We can only speculate as to the whys and wherefores relating to the initial, grossly exaggerated figures, though it hardly stretches the imagination to suppose that, having just lost upwards of twenty-seven million of their countrymen to the German invaders, the Soviets might not have been in a particularly objective, scientific mood, but rather in a propagandistic one.
Nevertheless, the ‘Death Books of Auschwitz’ constitute, en masse, a primary source document.
Another repository of primary source material are the Arolsen Archives, also known as the International Tracing Service, located in Bad Arolsen, in North Germany, and which are run by the International Red Cross. The latter comprises some thirty million files relating to sixteen of the camps in both Germany and Poland. These are considered the preeminent – and objective – data-base relating to the camps.
I say ‘objective’ as the rather more infamous Yad Vashem Museum archives in Israel are considerably less objective. Many of the deaths recorded there are simply taken from deportation lists and, to boot, include deaths before, during and even after the end of the war. Moreover, anyone can simply fill out a form online claiming to be a ‘victim of the Holocaust’ – a surviving victim obviously or perhaps a relative of such – without any documentation whatsoever. There is, thus, nothing to prevent multiple or fraudulent entries, and there is, as we shall comment on further in a bit, the ulterior motivational issue of filing so as to then make a claim for compensation against the German government. As such, the ‘archives’ from Yad Vashem are considered, at least by revisionist holo-historians, to be essentially worthless.
Returning to the Arolsen Archives. In the year 1979 the curators released a figure for the casualties from fifteen of the camps, and which amounted to a total of some 271,000 individuals. Then in 1984 they released a total mortality figure for sixteen of the camps which came to 282,000. These deaths represent all of the deaths in the camps excepting those of the Aktion Reinhardt camps (which comprise Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec), which latter were considered to be mere transit camps – but which we shall discuss later on in relation to the archaeological controversy surrounding them. Both the ‘Death Books’ and the Arolsen archives largely agree on the number of Jews who died at Auschwitz, some 30,000 in all – representing less than half the total deaths. Needless to say, these sorts of figures did not go over well in a country, Germany, that had ruled holocaust denialism to be a criminal offense. Accordingly, and as Kollerstrom relates,
“No 21st century statement has ever come out of the Arolsen Archives concerning their total figures. It would just be too risky: the criminal offense of ‘Denying the Holocaust’ in Germany includes, ‘downplaying or trivializing the crimes of National-Socialism’. That law does not specify what exactly would constitute those crimes! Not surprisingly, the Arolsen managers have not dared to make any such statement. (It may also be the case that they have received orders not to make any tallies any more…)”
Nevertheless, in 2006 the managers did release a statement relating to the numbers of those who had died of gassing: there were none, or rather, they had no records of there being any victims of gassing – at all. The ensuing controversy was enough for them to beat a hasty retreat and no further statements have been forthcoming. (We will not be so reticent, but soon discuss the matter thoroughly under the section on ‘science’.)
The official figures for total mortality in each of the camps, however, continue to fluctuate – often wildly, depending on which ‘eyewitness’ account or official pronouncement is prominent at the moment – but mostly downwardly. Thus, whereas the figures for Dachau right after the war numbered some 238,000 deaths, the total today stands at 20,600. This lowering by a factor of ten seems to be heading in the direction indicated by the primary source archives. But what then of the ‘six million’ figure? Surely the initial ‘four million’ proffered by the Soviets at Nuremberg would have played into the grand total. But why exactly ‘six’? Why not seven or eight – or five? And here the author begs us take note of a very peculiar fact: To wit, the undeniable prior existence of a longstanding meme involving precisely the ‘six million’ figure. As Kollerstrom relates,
“So, whence came that totemic number? It began in America around 1900 as a fundraising stunt, and then kept pulsing through the twentieth century like some Hellish mantra. Here are some 166 references, 1900 – 1945. They are overwhelmingly American. At the dawn of the 20th century, the ‘suffering’ of six million Jews became an argument in favour of the new Zionist project….It helped fundraising, with the number being cited as the total number of Jews in Europe. During World War I it was always six million Jews who were starving, in need of rescue, etc.”
And thence the author dutifully lists 166 references. It is worth taking a brief gander at a few of them, just to get the feel of the matter:
1906 – New York Times, 25 March 1906: “….the condition and future of Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews were made on March 12 in Berlin to the annual meeting of the Central Jewish Relief League of Germany by Dr. Paul Nathan…He left St. Petersburg with the firm conviction that the Russian Government’s studied policy for the “solution” of the Jewish question is systematic and murderous extermination.”
1913 – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (Ind.), 18 October 1913, page 4: “There are six million Jews in Russia and the government is anxious to annihilate them by methods that provoke protests from the civilized world.”
1915 – New York Tribune, 14 October 1915: “What the Turks are doing to the Armenians is child’s play compared to what Russia is doing to six million Jews, her own subjects.”
1918 – New York Times, 18 October 1918: “Six million Souls Will Need Help to Resume Normal Life When War Is Ended….Committee of American Jews Lays Plans for the Greatest Humanitarian Task in History….6,000,000 Jews Need Help.”
1919 – San Antonio Express, 9 April 1919, page 12: “At no other time in the history of the Jewish people has the need been so great as now. Six million of our brothers and sisters are dying of starvation. The entire race is threatened with extinction.”
1921 – New York Times, 20 July 1921, page 2: “BEGS AMERICA SAVE 6,000,000 IN RUSSIA. Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews are facing extermination by massacre.”
1926 – Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th Edition, Vol. 1, 1926, page 145: “While there remain in Russia and Romania over six millions of Jews who are being systematically degraded…”
1931 – The Montreal Gazette, 28 December 1931, page 25: “SIX MILLION JEWS FACE STARVATION,…..FEARS CRISIS AT HAND….six million Jews in Eastern Europe face starvation, and even worse, during the coming winter.”
And so on and so forth, for 166 entries.
As mentioned earlier, no attempt was made at Nuremberg to factually determine the total number of people who had died in the camps during the war. Thus, as clearly affirmed by the French historian Vincent Reynouard, “At Nuremberg, no statistical survey was ever undertaken …..to determine the number of missing Jews.” What the Trials did rely on (apart from Hoss’ testimony relating to Auschwitz only) was a statement given by SS agent Wilhelm Hottl who testified, on condition of his life being spared, that he had once heard such a story from Adolf Eichmann (attesting to the ‘six million’), in August 1944, but which Eichmann later denied. As Kollerstrom remarks, “That was all! And thereby the magic number came to infest all of our minds.”
We have briefly inspected two primary source documents, namely the ‘Auschwitz Death Books’ and the Arolsen Archives, but there are more.
In the mid-1990s the British Intelligence Decrypts from Bletchley Park were released. These documents comprise the radio intercepts from Auschwitz made possible by the famous breaking of the German Enigma code. The decrypts covered the crucial thirteen-month period from January, 1942 to the end of January, 1943. They record daily arrivals and departures of inmates, shipments of coal and coke etc. Expectant hands combed these priceless archives for what, it was thought, would undoubtedly reveal prima facie evidence of the great crime. It was, however, merely a great embarrassment when no such evidence was forthcoming. Not a crumb.
What these transcripts do speak to are the daily comings and goings of inmates to the giant Buna-Monowitz industrial plant just two miles east of Auschwitz. Thus, one entry records,
“The use of prisoners for war industries on a large scale is discussed below…..the largest transference is the move of Jews to AUSCHWITZ for the synthetic rubber works. Another major movement is the transference of sick prisoners to DACHAU.”
They also mention a major outbreak of typhus in the summer of 1942 and measures to contain it. Thus, this quote from the January 1943 summary about Auschwitz,
“The Bunawerk is still employing 2210 men of whom 1100 are on the actual work. Jewish watchmakers are sent to SACHSENHAUSEN where they are urgently needed. Typhus cases continue to be reported although strenuous measures have been adopted and 36 cases were found among the new batch of prisoners on 22 Jan.”
But no evidence of mass killings.
Indeed, there is a fourth primary source archive, to do with the intact coke records from Auschwitz, but one which we shall cover in the next section.
Finally, the ‘six million’ number is not completely without import, as it does register, ironically, according to the author, as roughly the number of ‘holocaust survivors’ who have sued for indemnity claims from the German government post war. In fact, some 4.3 million claims have been paid out amounting to some one hundred billion deutschmarks. It is, then, worth noting at this point that, according to most revisionist authors, the number of Jews under German control in all of the occupied territories never numbered more than 4.5 million, though Kollerstrom sets the figure somewhat lower at 3.5 million.
Now, does this mean that the number of inmates who died in the camps was a ‘mere’ 300,000 or so? Not necessarily. The records from the Aktion Reinhardt camps, being mostly transit camps, have not been preserved and there would likely have been deaths that were not recorded. To give some further perspective on this matter and, possibly, to set some sort of upper bound to the numbers, I cite here yet another revisionist author, Peter Winter, who in his book, ‘The Six Million: Fact or Fiction’ cites a quote by Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the US State Department in the occupation forces in Germany for six years after the war, and who made this statement to the Catholic magazine ‘Our Sunday Visitor, June 14th, 1959:
“I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a US War Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors and sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany….From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on the subject.”
The mention of ‘crematory’ is, just in passing, significant as most of the camps had them – just as many hospitals and prisons have them to this day. Thus, the mere fact of having crematoria does not in any way whatsoever speak to the notion of ‘gas chambers’. Indeed, for a camp like Auschwitz, situated as it was on swampy ground with a very high water-table, the few that it did have would have been indispensable in disposing of anyone who died there – but only within certain very limited bounds as we’ll see in coming to terms with how much fuel, effort and time it takes to cremate a body.
As for the total numbers, for the moment I think that we need be circumspect and say that, with our present knowledge, these likely range somewhere between 300,000 to perhaps twice that – and which figures would include, of course, all inmates, not just Jews. It would be nice as Kollerstrom points out to be able to do further research on this matter, but given that access to the relevant archives is, effectively, prohibited, and where even attempting to do so is considered a crime or invites career suicide, the prospects for such are, at present, hardly sanguine.
Also, and to lend some perspective on this ‘numbers game’, I reference my own journalistic experience in researching and writing about more modern conflicts. Thus, one of my very first essays as a young, independent journalist was for the Toronto Star in which article I discussed the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia and in which I demolished the official figure of ‘two million’ victims – which yet stands to this day – showing that it arose from just one Italian journalist who later recanted the figure! The true numbers were more likely in the 400,000 range with US propagandists having simply lumped onto the Khmer Rouge scorecard the numbers who died from starvation due to the US ‘secret bombing of Cambodia’ itself. But, again, no one really knows for certain. Just as no one really seems to know how many died in the Korean or Vietnam Wars, or the great US-backed Indonesian massacre of 1965 (the ‘year of living dangerously’ indeed). Figures routinely cited regarding those conflicts vary, depending on the source, literally over millions of human beings!
The same is true today regarding Iraq and other very recent, Western imperial conflicts (dare we all them ‘holocausts’?). It is certainly important to attempt to establish firm figures, both as these represent individual human lives lost, and as these figures are opportunistically used for ideological purposes. But we must, at the end of the day, remain humble before the task set us and, oft as not, be willing to live with uncertainty – whilst yet continuing to press our investigations further.
With that caveat, let us continue with our present inquiry.
In the introduction to ‘Breaking the Spell’, the author reminds us that the ‘Holocaust’ represents a “triune” thesis, i.e., involving a totemic number (the ‘six million’), a diabolical ‘plan’ (to deliberately exterminate an entire ethnic group, the Jews) – and a ruthless ‘methodology’ (‘gassing’ using the infamous ‘Zyklon B’). We have addressed the first two of these sub-theses, and it is to the third that we now turn our investigative attention.
Science Goes to Auschwitz
As Kollerstrom recounts, a turning point in the history of Holocaust Revisionism came in 1985 when the Canadian, Ernst Zundel, was charged with publishing the best-selling booklet, ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’. At his trial he was fortunate, according to the author, to be assisted by the ‘maestro of modern Revisionism’, Robert Faurisson, and together they sought the assistance of the, then, dean of American execution technology, Fred Leuchter, whose especial expertise was in gas chamber design.
In February of 1988, Leuchter was dispatched by Zundel to travel to Auschwitz/Birkenau (and Majdanek) where he, first, studied the archives of the Auschwitz Museum to learn exactly where the alleged ‘gas chambers’ were located; second, inspected the structures through the lens of his own expertise on gassing; and, finally, collected (illegally) thirty or so samples from the walls of the ‘gas chambers’ and from random ancillary structures at Auschwitz, and one sample from one of the much smaller delousing chambers. These samples were then submitted, upon his return, to a firm, Alpha Analytical Laboratories (who had no knowledge of where the samples had come from and who were horrified when they eventually found out), to be analyzed for traces of iron cyanide.
The latter compound is particularly relevant here as hydrogen cyanide is normally fairly short lived on surfaces – unless it happens to bind to iron whence it becomes very long lived, and which also, over time, turns into a bright, turquoise blue, also known as ‘iron blue’. Now, what is evident even to this day throughout many of the camps is the ‘iron blue’ colouring of many of the delousing chambers which is sufficiently dense enough as to, in many cases (where these chambers are made of brick), have permeated right through to the exterior walls and are, thus, clearly visible to the untutored eye. None of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz/Birkenau, however, sport this ‘iron blue’, and true to this tell-tale sign (or rather lack of), none of the samples from the ‘gas chambers’ showed anything more than residual traces of cyanide – whereas the delousing chamber sample was chocker-block full of the stuff. Leuchter also wrote up his survey of the alleged gas chambers concluding that they could not, by any stretch of the imagination, have acted as such as they were spectacularly unsuited for the purpose being clearly and ridiculously leaky to gas.
This, the ‘Leuchter Report’, was published in May of 1988, and it shone the spotlight, for the first time, on the issue of the delousing chambers. As Kollerstrom remarks, “prior to Fred’s Report the human race had merely been disinformed that Zyklon gas = human mass murder.”
The author also comments on Leuchter’s fate regarding his foray into this controversial arena,
“Leuchter should have been knighted for his service to humanity: Sir Fred. But, instead, he had his career terminated, was thrown out of various places, was ethically damned, and he ended up driving a school bus – as he informed me.”
Nevertheless, in 1991 the Report caught the eye of a brilliant young chemist, Germar Rudolf, who was, at the time studying for his PhD at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. For Rudolf, the “thorn of doubt” planted in his mind upon reading the Report led he and two colleagues to creep over to Auschwitz and purloin another thirty or so samples from both the walls of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ and from the smaller delousing chambers (and along the way photographing exactly where, how and what they did). The results matched and confirmed those of Leuchter’s, there being a two-thousand-fold differential between the samples taken from the delousing chambers versus the ‘gas chambers’. (Just to note, that there was any ferrocyanide in the walls of the showers, aka ‘gas chambers’, at all – though generally less than 1 ppm – was due to the well-documented fact that many of the camp’s other rooms and enclosures were occasionally sprayed with Zyklon B as part of routine disinfection protocols, and which samples also showed the equal, if very low, levels of cyanide.)
Here Kollerstrom, himself an historian of science, emphasizes an important methodological point. To wit,
“Both the Leuchter and Rudolph reports had their weaknesses, and it is only by integrating the two together – which we can do because their methods were identical – that one attains a firm and clear basis for rational debate.”
The ensuing sequence of events following the publication, first in 1992 of a preliminary report, and then in 1993 of his historic 120-page document, the Rudolf Report, traced the per usual arc of personal ruination that we are, by now, all too familiar with. Rudolf had his career terminated and, eventually, in 2007, found himself, bound in chains, in a German court where he was duly sentenced to four years in prison. As Kollerstom intones once again, “Science cannot exist where doubt is prohibited, let’s be clear about that.”
As a follow-up to these investigations, a chemist-engineer, Dan Desjardins subsequently retraced both Leuchter’s and Rudolf’s steps through Auschwitz so that, as Kollerstrom says, we have good ‘corroboration as regards where the samples came from.’
It is further worth noting at this juncture – and here I tag-team once again with author Peter Winter – that, “The parallels between the real delousing station and the alleged ‘human gas chambers’ are so close that it is clear the homicidal gas chamber story was developed from the real clothing delousing system.”
Turning now to yet another primary source archive, one that I alluded to earlier, i.e., the intact coke records from Auschwitz/Birkenau (the latter camp, just by the by, and also known as Auschwitz II, being located in the immediate environs of Auschwitz I), we find that the amount of coke that would have been necessary to burn hundreds of thousands of bodies simply did not exist. Here Kollerstrom directs us to the dense tome, ‘Dissecting the Holocaust’, edited by Germar Rudolf in which an essay by the meticulous investigator Carlo Mattogno reviews the matter.
Mattogno informs us that it “normally takes 88 to 110 lbs [of coke to cremate] a body.” After accounting for various factors (e.g., how many cremation furnaces are being fired together etc.) he concludes that these coke deliveries, “prove indisputably that only the bodies of the inmates who had died of natural causes could be cremated in the crematoria. Therefore, no mass murders took place in Auschwitz and Birkenau in the time from March to October 1943!”
According to Kollerstrom, Fred Leuchter’s Report also included a similar computation whilst arriving at the same conclusion. Leuchter further noted that the death count for Auschwitz peaked exactly ‘during the worst periods of the typhus epidemic in 1942 and 1943.’ The latter reference is important because it supports the argument – and all the evidence – that the infamous Zyklon B was deployed to the camps precisely to address the typhus outbreaks that began about this time. Additional argument that Zyklon B was not intended as a ‘extermination’ weapon, but merely as what the Nazis said it was for, i.e., disinfestation, is to be found in two related facts. To wit, the hydrogen cyanide concoction was sent to all of the camps, not just to those designated, today, as ‘extermination camps’ – the latter of which, by the way amount only to some six camps in total. Moreover, Zyklon B was discontinued in late 1944 to be replaced by the new-fangled delousing agent, DDT, and which, of course, no one has ever claimed was used for killing people. Kollerstrom notes additionally that microwave disinfestation technology was introduced by the Germans in the camps very late in the war – a technology which became the basis for the, now, ubiquitous microwave oven – though, to date, no ‘eyewitness’ account of being cooked to death by microwaves has been forthcoming.
To conclude this section, it is apropos to remark on the salient fact of the general reluctance by orthodox historiography to introduce such elementary forensic science to this subject. Indeed, that it is so riven with taboo testifies once more to the notion that, in dealing with the ‘Holocaust’, we are no longer in the realm of science, but of sacred myth and of religion. Nevertheless, let us continue our obdurate ways and conduct a brief review of the science as it pertains to some of the other concentration camps.
Of Archaeology, Diesel and Bonfires
In saying that there has been a decided reluctance to engage forensic science in the service of ‘proving’ the Holocaust does not mean that there have been no such attempts.
In 1999, at Treblinka, for example, a team of archaeological researchers led by Australian, Richard Krege, used ground-penetrating radar to try and locate the remains of the officially-estimated 800,000 bodies supposedly buried there. This should not have been difficult as the area in which these remains were allegedly contained covered a relatively miniscule area of just a few hectares. Instead, what the team found was – nothing at all. They found no evidence consistent with the burying of hundreds of thousands of bodies, and, indeed, no evidence of any soil disturbance whatsoever. Thus, as Krege said in a later report,
“From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the campsite. We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this layering is massively disturbed or missing altogether.” He goes on to say,
“Historians say that the bodies were exhumed and cremated towards the end of the Treblinka’s camp’s use in 1943, but we found no indication that any mass graves ever existed.”
Naturally, this finding did not sit well with orthodoxy and so in 2010 another team led by Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls from Staffordshire University conducted their own ground radar survey – and found nothing either. But that’s not what they concluded and later trumpeted to the BBC to whom they claimed to have found a few “pits”. No remains, no large-scale stratigraphic disturbance, just a few “pits”. As if not convinced by her own rhetoric on the matter, Colls returned to Treblinka in 2013 with colleague Ivar Shute where they proceeded to embarrass themselves – having had their findings broadcast on TV documentaries aired both by the BBC and by the Smithsonian channel in the US – by claiming (and here I reference Peter Winter’s work again) to have found a piece of porcelain with a Star of David on it, but which later turned out to be a ‘pierced mullet star’ that just happened to be the brand mark of a famous porcelain factory in Poland.
It is also noteworthy that these researchers, having found nothing more than a few bone fragments – which, without further ado, they claimed were part of “three mass graves” – and a few pieces from a wooden foundation, both items of which one might expect to find in a transit camp such as Treblinka was known to be, and having misidentified a ‘key piece of evidence’, were, nonetheless, given the royal treatment by the media and their work exalted as some sort of definitive proof of the case. Of course, it was nothing of the sort, but rather all puffery and nonsense. No bodies, no fragments of skeletons, no human ashes, no wood ashes and no ground irregularities whatsoever had been called forth by their investigations – investigations which, tellingly, involved no excavations at the site, as this, they lamely claimed, “would be a violation of Jewish law”.
But, then, the entire Treblinka ‘extermination’ thesis was terminally threadbare from the start. Thus, to begin with, the means proffered of killing hundreds of thousands at Treblinka was by steam (even the official account has no ‘gas chambers’ at Treblinka); they had all been ‘steamed like lobsters to their deaths’. According to Kollerstrom, “that phase of the narrative didn’t last too long, and soon the cause of death settled down to being diesel exhaust.” Now, the problem here is that it was first pointed out by Fritz Berg in 1983, and later affirmed in 1992 by Walter Luffl, the President of the Austrian Federal Chamber of Engineers, that mass murder by gassing with diesel fumes is a virtual impossibility. As such the amount of carbon monoxide in diesel fumes is very low (almost always much less than 1% and often no more than 0.1%) and that being subjected to diesel fumes in an enclosed room, even for a full hour, results, for most people, in merely a bad headache, though people with weak hearts might possibly succumb over the course of that timeframe. The key problem, however, is that all of the ‘eyewitness’ accounts – all of them – attest to the notion that death occurred within ten to twenty minutes.
The official narrative was beginning to strain at the seams, especially the failure to find any real prima facie evidence of bodies. No worries. As already mentioned, this part of the story was filled in by having all the bodies, all 800,000 of them, dug up, and burned. (One imagines this might have been a wee problem for the mere twenty or thirty SS administrative staff and one hundred or so Ukrainian guards stationed there, but perhaps they were uber-diligent.) Now it takes about 150 kg (over 300 lbs) of wood to burn just one body and a simple computation reckons the amount of wood needed to burn 800,000 bodies is, well, simply staggering. And, of course, no such wood ashes, even a remote trace of them, have ever been found at Treblinka. As Kollerstrom remarks at this point,
“Treblinka is the site of not one but two awesome Holo-miracles: the miraculous gassing of 800,000 Jews using a non-lethal gas, and then the miraculous burning of some 800,000 Jewish corpses in huge outdoor pyres, thereby igniting the Holo-caust (total-fiery) mythos with its inextinguishably hellish meaning. Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls and her Birmingham science team were indeed treading on hallowed ground, with so many hundreds of thousands of Jews (not) buried there.”
Indeed, the same BBC program that featured Coll et al, ‘casually alluded to “Huge open burning pits of flesh” – the original Holo-hoax image!’ We will come to more such reminiscences of ‘burning and boiling blood’ in the next section. Suffice it to say for now that blood, and human bodies, do not simply burn by themselves, i.e., not without added fuel.
We could go on and look at similar holo-stories and similar demystifying encounters with science (including wildly fluctuating death counts, missing-in-action archaeological evidence, and yet ever more improbable killing methodologies) for many of the other camps including Sobibor, Chelmo, Majdanek, and Belzec. Time and space humble us however, and so we are led to the final strand of our investigation: the ever popular, always entertaining, ‘eyewitness’ testimony.
Fairy Tales From Hell
Let us begin here by reminding the reader of what was said at the outset about the infamous pictures from Bergen-Belsen – the ones that are taken as being symbolic of the entire Holocaust narrative itself; they are real, but they are, at the same time, misrepresentations.
Bergen-Belsen, located in northwestern Germany, was originally a prisoner of war camp that was turned into a concentration camp in 1943. The camp was liberated by British soldiers on April 15, 1945 who just happened to have been accompanied by a large contingent of journalists. It is likely due to the presence of these real eyewitnesses that it has never been claimed that there were ‘gas chambers’ at Bergen-Belsen. However, this did not stop subsequent Western media from portraying the pictures taken there of the thousands of emaciated bodies, of having been gassing victims. The latter’s deaths, it is pertinent to note, resulted from an outbreak of typhus in the closing stages of the war which itself was largely due to the Allied bombing that had fatally disrupted German infrastructure and which had prevented the re-supplying of both food and Zyklon B to many of the camps. [In fact, the camp was so infested with typhus that the British were eventually forced to burn it to the ground.]
Here we have the entire ‘extermination’ thesis seemingly turned on its head; a proposition that might at first blush seem outlandish did we not have yet another primary source document to support it. As Kollerstrom points out,
“Two and half million tons of US/UK bombs destroyed infrastructure and hope. The camps became death camps. We get a glimpse of the unfolding catastrophe from the Red Cross Report [published in 1948]….Thus the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation as far as they were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing…and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15th, 1944 against the ‘barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies’…..In dealing with the Red Cross’ comprehensive three-volume Report, it is important to stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence whatever at the camps in Axis-Europe of a deliberate policy to exterminate Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the Report never hints at any human gas chambers.”
And what I neglected to mention earlier in regard to the British Intel Decrypts was that, in August 1943, the head of the British Psychological Warfare Executive, Victor Cavendish-Bentick, sent a secret telegram from the Foreign Office to both Washington and Moscow saying, effectively, that despite the rumours they were hearing, there was not the slightest evidence to support the notion that gas chambers were being utilized to kill anyone let alone millions of people.
Also mentioned prior is the eyewitness testimony of Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Hoss, whose torture-extracted testimony was a pillar for the prosecution at Nuremberg. Apart from the later evidence attesting to his torture, many key components of his testimony were, even at the time known to be falsified – or should have been for any other than a kangaroo court – as they contradicted known, contemporary facts regarding the camps themselves. Thus, Hoss gave affidavit to the court that he had visited Treblinka in June of 1941, where, he said, 80,000 Jews had been “liquidated” in the previous six months. The problem with all this is that Treblinka did not start receiving Jews until late July, 1942. In short, his ‘eyewitness’ account is a whole year and half too early! Indeed, none of the transit camps, including Sobibor and Belzec, even started up until May of 1942. To further complicate the lives of future orthodox holo-historians was Hoss’ insistence that diesel was used as the means of killing – and which, once such methodology was later discovered to be highly improbable if not impossible, was to bedevil the official narrative ever after as abandoning it meant abandoning Hoss’ testimony in its entirety.
Then there is the esteemed Professor Paul Rassinier, a French historian, socialist and anti-Nazi who later became a resistance fighter, but who was eventually captured and imprisoned at Buchenwald. Rassinier survived the war after which he began his lifelong career of debunking the claims of gassing by fellow ‘eyewitnesses’. Kollerstrom cites a quote from one of Rassinier’s published reports which concluded:
“With regard to the gas chambers, the almost endless procession of false witnesses and of falsified documents, to which I have drawn the reader’s attention during this study, proves, nevertheless, one thing: never at any moment did the responsible authorities of the Third Reich intend to order – or in fact order – the extermination of the Jews in this or in any other manner.”
And then there is witness-for-the-defense, the distinguished pathologist, Charles Larson, “sent over by the US army in 1945 to inspect the piled-up corpses in the German labour camps at Dachau, Belsen etc., [who] steadfastly refused to declare that he had seen a pink-coloured corpse killed by cyanide.”
Did I fail to mention? There is yet one more tell-tale piece of forensic evidence attesting to the complete fallaciousness of the gassing thesis. This is the well documented fact that there are no records whatsoever – of pink corpses. It turns out that dying from hydrogen cyanide poisoning turns the body a bright pink hue – and there is no evidence of such having been seen, by anyone, ever. Apparently, none of the ‘eyewitnesses’ were pathologists.
But, then, dear reader, perhaps these are not the sort of eyewitness reports you might have been expecting. So, without further ado, let us get to those, though as the cast of characters here are legion we will have to content ourselves with but a few examples in order simply to capture the flavor of the matter.
Likely the most prominent ‘eyewitness’ account is that of Elie Wiesel whose 1958 book, Night, has sold more than ten million copies, and which eventually led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The problem with the book, apart from its patently hyperbolic narrative, is that it is almost certainly a completely fraudulent account. Thus, in 2009, a fellow Hungarian Jew, Nickolaus Gruner, after twenty years of researching the topic, issued this press release:
“Elie Wiesel A-7713 has never existed, and the man claiming himself to be ‘Elie Wiesel’ with the concentration camp number A-7713, knowing full well that this number belonged to someone else, is an imposter of the worst kind. For this statement, I, Nikolaus Gruner A-11104, have certified and written knowledge of.”
Gruner then went on to publish a book, ‘Stolen Identity A7713’, in which he provided detailed documentation obtained from the Auschwitz Museum archives which show that Lazar Wiesel, and whom Gruner knew, was the real bearer of that number. The former, according to Kollerstrom, was “born September 4, 1913, received the number and tattoo A-7713; as likewise his brother, Abraham, born Oct. 10, 1900, was given the adjacent number A-7712. That latter number is the one that Elie Wiesel claims belonged to his father Shlomo…..No such registration records exist for Elie and his father: they are not there.”
Elie Wiesel refused to respond to a formal challenge by Gruner to appear before a Budapest court to combat these charges, just as he always refused to show anyone the alleged tattoo on his arms. But, then, one need only peruse some of the utterly fantastic claims in ‘Night’ to realize that something is seriously askew. As Kollerstrom relates,
“Having been written as early as 1958, Night does not feature any gas chambers! Instead of Zyklon, it has huge Moloch-type pits of burning babies….The wicked Nazis were unloading truckloads of little babies into the huge burning pits and the bodies were flammable. Human bodies are 70% water. They really don’t burn by themselves.”
Here it is worth quoting from Night itself just to experience the tenor of the narrative:
“Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.”
It is worth reminding the reader at this point that it is these sorts of utterly fantastic statements that characterize much of the ‘eyewitness’ testimonials, but whose uncritical acceptance by generations of readers is, rather, mere testimony to the credulity of the true-believer. Let us move on to our next witness.
On the title page of his memoirs (published in 1946), Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, featured an illustration purporting to be three Jewish inmates shot by the Nazis at Mauthausen. The picture shows the three prisoners tied to stakes and drooping in tragic, if highly dramatic poses, as they lay slumped and dead against the stakes. Wiesenthal claimed that he had “witnessed” the shootings. The problem here is that the tableaux portrayed was clearly lifted from a photograph from the June 11th 1945 edition of Life magazine where the exact same, and very unique, poses are shown of three German prisoners who had been executed as spies – this after having been caught wearing American uniforms whilst attempting to infiltrate Allied lines during the Battle of the Bulge. Once, again, we find a supposedly impeccable ‘eyewitness’ blatantly lying and committing overt fraud, and which lends serious credibility issues to anything else he has to say.
One particularly influential Holocaust potboiler is Philip Muller’s, ‘Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers’, (1979) in which the hero claims to have been the ‘sole survivor of the murder operations’ at Auschwitz over three years. He too describes “the burning pits in which Jews were consumed”. This prize-winning best-seller is, according to Kollerstrom, ‘required reading in many Holocaust study courses’. The problem with it, however, is that it wasn’t written by Muller, but by ghost-writer Helmut Freitag who, in turn, had plagiarized it from an equally faked account by Miklos Nyiszli entitled, ‘Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account’ (1947). In that book Nyiszli blithely states that Auschwitz killed 20,000 people per day, every day, from 1940 to 1944 – which adds up to a cool 29 million dead! But, then, who’s counting? Certainly not the dean of Holo-historians, Raul Hilberg, as his supposedly authoritative, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, repeatedly quotes from it.
Let us finish off with one final testimonial, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’; though let me say at the outset here that this tiny deconstruction is meant in no way to impugn Anne herself. Rather the following is testament to just how far those who believe in the philosophy of the-ends-justify-the-means are willing to go.
To critical minds the ‘Diary’ was always somewhat suspect as there are passages, specifically those detailing a brief historical and political account of the German occupation of Holland, that are clearly not from the hand of a 13-year-old girl. This scepticism would later be borne out when it was shown, first in an Amsterdam court and then by a German criminal investigation, that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had, in fact, been the author of substantial parts of the diary, and who had used a ball point pen (not available during the war) to write them. Indeed, Otto Frank – who was treated for typhus at the hospital at Auschwitz and survived the war (dying in 1980) – had, apparently, first published the book as a work of, in his own words, “fiction”, under the title, ‘The Annex: Diary Notes’. The title, ‘Diary of Anne Frank’, was given to the book by its first English publishers.
It is, finally, worth noting, and here I quote from Peter Winter,
“…that Anne Frank died of typhus and was not ‘gassed’. It is one of the horrific ironies that Anne Frank died due to a lack of Zyklon-B at Bergen-Belsen – and this lack was caused directly by the Allied bombing campaign. The real story of Anne Frank is tragic enough, but the cruel exploitation, exaggeration and faking of her diary by the Holocaust storytellers is a scandal of epic proportions.”
Virtually all of the other core ‘autobiographies’ have, as I mentioned at the outset, been shown to be fakes or gross exaggerations, and the rest of the individual testimonies are largely derivative from these accounts and/or based on mere hearsay and rumor such that when confronted in a court of law by probing inquiry the ‘witnesses’ inevitably fall back on, ‘I heard’ or ‘someone told me’ or ‘It was common knowledge’ etc. It seems Professor Rassinier knew what he was about.
Final Thoughts
In writing a critique of this sort, that is, one that strikes at the heart of such a longstanding and sacred societal myth, such cannot help but conjure at some level, and at certain moments, a measure of doubt. Questions tickle the fancy. Am I wrong? Is the author wrong? Have we all just been seduced by a good story, a coherent but unknowingly flawed argument? And, indeed, if one is an honest person, the answer to those questions must be, ‘perhaps’.
Still, having crossed this bridge many times in my undistinguished muckraking career, I have settled upon a consolatory process of simply sitting back and reviewing the fundaments of the evidence and argument, their weight and measure, all rounded off and seasoned with a certain amount of intangible instinct – and coming to a reasoned decision. In the end, as Nietzsche was so fond of pointing out, we must act – on imperfect knowledge.
But I will confess that even were the Revisionist case eventually be proved to be wrong, and Orthodoxy prevail, I could only but smile and think of Ernst Mach who once said,
“Should these concepts turn out to be true, I shall not be ashamed to be the last one to believe.”
But if the Revisionist case is true, then it is not just the tragic victims of the camps themselves who have been so cynically used in a seventy-five- year game of Western and Zionist imperial propaganda; in a game of smoke and mirrors in the service of deflecting attention from many a real holocaust – like Vietnam, or Indonesia or Iraq – under cover of a fake one; in a game of cruel irony where one historical fascism has been misrepresented and harnessed in the service of a future fascism. No, it is not just they, like Anne Frank herself, who have been so cruelly misused, but it is we, all of us, who have been played like suckers in one of the greatest swindles of all time; one that has warped our minds and souls not only into believing in fairy tale horrors that corrupt our very view of what it means to be human, but that has seduced us into a malignant and fatal self-righteousness where we have arrogantly come to believe that, as Carl Jung once wrote, “All evil lies just a few miles behind enemy lines.”
I hope at this juncture then, having become acquainted with some of the primary source documents, i.e., the Arolsen Archives, the Soviet ‘Death Books’, the Leuchter and Rudolf Reports, the three-volume 1948 Red Cross Report, the British Intel Decrypts, the counter-eyewitness testimony, the origins of the ‘six million’ meme etc., that any reasonable person would now entertain, at the very least, reasonable doubt on this subject. But, of course, in many parts of the world, reasonable doubt is not allowed. In much of Europe, doubt is prohibited by law. Here in North America doubt is not allowed by custom, by ingrained prejudice, and by enforced, widespread censorship.
And perhaps, after all, this is the greatest outrage, for we have been told, yes, told – what we are to believe, and what we are not to believe, and that the matter is not open for discussion – at all. Case closed. Forever. No debate for you. As Dr. Kollerstrom pointedly asks,
“Who is in control of the past? Does somebody own it? Will they put you in jail if you disagree?”
Cast unto a dark, three-quarter century enchantment, the author enjoins us to wave the wand of reason, and break the spell.
from the Book Review by Antony C. Black at unz.com on April 17, 2022
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