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
