Dodgeball at CODOH

One of Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis's stock-in-trade tricks -- other than, of course, deleting posts and claiming there's no censorship at CODOH, baiting people who he has barred from posting at CODOH, and doing his little victory dance from within the walls of the Führerbunker -- is to change the subject of a thread and then claim the person with whom he is debating is "dodging."

With the admission of HC Blog rookie of the year Jonathan Harrison to CODOH, we got a great example.

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The fun begins on this thread about Dr. Joachim Neander and his statements about the making of soap from human bodies in limited experiments near Danzig. This material does not involve Jon Harrison, so you may want to jump down to the next bolded and italicized section.

Hargis's post of Halloween at 7:54 p.m. (all times EST) is his first post in this thread, along with his cryptic remark: "Your own information refutes what you claim."

However, as can be seen in the next post, Carto's Cutlass Supreme (CCS; one of Hargis's key lackeys) actually agrees with Dr. Neander. But not able to even be civil to people that are on his own side, Hargis's post of Nov. 1 at 8:47 a.m. attacks Dr. Neander and CCS -- a rare treat.

Dr. Neander responded the same day at 3:25 p.m., pointing Hargis to his own published research and other papers on the topic. Beginning at 5:14 p.m., Hargis began to respond, first with the post in which he gives us this classic: "Why not make soap from pig fat? A butchered pig too valuable? Right."

Well, Jonnie, pig fat is used to mark lard, which was the only type of shortening available for cooking for a large part of Europe at the time. And pork is food, let's not forget -- food that can be eaten by soldiers at the front and citizens on rations at home. At 7:55 the same evening, Jonnie made another post -- apparently in response to himself.

The next post by Hargis was on Nov. 2 at 1:31 p.m., writing simply, "Perhaps Neander can provide a verifiable Hague catalog number for this 'human soap'." He posted against a mere twelve minutes later, again attacking CCS for having pointed out to "Kiwichap" that it's clear the New Zealander never read Dr. Neander's work.

When Dr. Neander posted again, that same day at 6:27 p.m., he nailed Hargis on his ad hominem remarks and then reiterates his position, which Hargis seems unable to understand. When Hargis parried at 11:18 p.m., he twice accuses Dr. Neander of "dodging," although the points that Dr. Neander hadn't answered were minor at best.

The following morning at 7:15 a.m., Dr. Neander stated his points a third time. At 8:30 a.m., Hargis, still mentally incapable of understanding Dr. Neander's position and being his usual obnoxious self, accuses Dr. Neander again of "dodging."

Once again, CCS comes to Dr. Neander's defense at 2:40 p.m. and Hannover attacks his own ally (talk about shitting where you eat) on Nov. 5 at 1:56 p.m., also attacking Dr. Neander by referring to his research in sneer quotes.

The next substantive post comes from Dr. Neander on November 28 at 6:48 p.m., where he apparently provides the very Hague catalog number that Hannover has been bleating about in previous posts. On November 29 at 12:17 a.m., we get yet another charge of "dodging" by Hargis of Dr. Neander. Never mind that Dr. Neander has provided the very number Hargis has asked for. Now Hargis wants Dr. Neander to do his research for him. As if we didn't already know how lazy Hargis is. At 4 a.m., Dr. Neander provided more sources for Hargis.

Finally, the "moderator" (i.e., Hargis) enters at 12:02 p.m., accusing Dr. Neander of not producing the research he has been asked to. I count at least three posts in which Dr. Neander provides perfectly valid sources for Hargis to check on himself — after all, Hargis works in a library. But no, he's just too lazy.

At 3 p.m. CCS comes yet again to Dr. Neander's defense and at 4:33 p.m., Hargis attacks his ally.

Finally, at 4:47 p.m. on Nov. 29, Jonathan Harrison enters the fray. (He posts at great length on the Walter Sanning threat.) Jonathan asks, quite simply, "Does Hannover apply this same principle to the "Krege Report"?"

On the (at this writing) final page of the Neander thread, Hargis posts on November 29 at 5:10 p.m., defending Krege and given reasons why the Dude With Enormous Lawnmower hasn't published his own reearch. Dr. Harrison asks at 5:32 p.m. why Krege doesn't publish online. Hargis responds at 5:53 p.m., "I don't know for sure, maybe he wouldn't mind recovering some of his expenses via paper publication."

(Remember, kids: Hargis is a librarian but doesn't know that publications in peer-reviewed publications don't pay anything at all.)

Hargis then goes on to ask Jonathan to produce evidence for a mass grave of 900,000 Jews at Treblinka. Hargis finishes the post by providing a humorous picure of the Dude With Enormous Radad, repeating the unprovable claim that Krege had the photo taken in Poland. (Wouldn't the curators of the museum at Treblinka have been mildly curious what some Dude With an Enormous Lawnmower was doing?) Hargis also reproduces Krege's alleged results, which, without some kind of legend to accompany the figure, prove nothing.

Jonathan responds brilliantly at 6:10 p.m.: "I don't have to debunk a 'report' that the author has failed to substantiate with a published methodology. I merely have to apply the criterion that you applied to Neander's source . . . So, by your own criterion, I am entitled to laugh Krege out of court, 'as the saying goes'."

In jumps Dr. Neander at 6:16 p.m. He once again cites the bibliographic data for his article, which Hargis the librarian should be able to use. Instead, Hargis first replies to Jonathan (6:16 p.m.): "Neander has made a claim about a so called published study, he cannot produce it"; and then to Dr. Neander: "IOW, Neander, a True Believer, cannot produce the study he claims exists."

(Not to put too fine a point on it, Jonnie Hargis works in a library.)

Jonathan had made the below post:

This is an off-topic request and thus against forum rules. I brought up Krege because of your hypocritical claim that "If there was a credible, verifiable study we'd be seeing it." The meaning of that sentence is that we do not have to take seriously a study that the author has not made fully visible. For you to ask me to comment on a non-existent (according to your own criterion) study is therefore hypocrisy as well as against forum rules concerning off-topic diversions.

We know Jonathan made this post because Hargis, having deleted it, is retarded enough to reproduce it anyway at his post of 7:23 p.m. (We also have a screenshot of it.)

Jonathan made a post at 7:44 p..m. (screenshot here) and another at 8:48 p.m. (screenshot).

The "moderator" appeared again at 9:01 p.m. and told Hargis (who talks to himself often, apparently) and Dr. Harrison, that they were off-topic. In other words, Jonathan was handing Hargis's ass to him on a platter, so he bailed.

Now, I ask in conclusion, for a man who claims other people "dodge" questions, who does more dodging at CODOH than anyone else?

CODOH Lies and Ignorance: Sanning (Part 1)

Two months after I posted my first Sanning blog, a few Cesspit regulars have finally decided to have a crack at defending Sanning's shredded thesis on this CODOH thread. Predictably, however, their attempts at a refutation have simply added new deceptions to the list of denier gambits on this subject.

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The main ringleader of this gang of buffoons has been our old friend, Lurkerthe, masquerading under the pseudonym 'jnovitz'. After dispensing some highly hypocritical personal abuse (if I'm unqualified on this topic, where the fuck does that leave Sanning, Hargis and Rudolf, none of whom has doctorates in any discipline?), Lurkerthe launched into his first gambit by claiming that the Jewish population of Latvia fell in the 1930's by a similar pecentage to that which Sanning had claimed for Poland:

A reduction of 500 000 [for Poland] is not extreme. Jewish migration from Eastern Europe was heavy at this point. There are excellent population figures for Latvia Jews that show a similiar decrease...

This is clearly false, as can be seen by the Latvian census figures for 1930 and 1935 shown in this link. The number of Jews fell by only 909, a ratio of 0.96%.

When I challenged Lurkerthe on this, he claimed that his source, The Holocaust in Latvia by Andrew Ezergailis, showed a population decrease from 1935 (the last census) to 1940. However, when I checked this source, I found this quote from the author on page 72, note 1 a:

Whether the Jewish population increased or decreased just prior to WWII is not clear

Lurkerthe then claimed, falsely, that I had argued that the Germans had conducted a census in Poland in September 1939. What I actually wrote was this:

Firstly, to justify his choice of sources, Sanning (p.44) makes a false claim about Nazi population data by asserting that “their figures were not based on a census, not even on estimates". This is a blatant lie because, as Sanning must have known, every Jewish ghetto in Poland was forced to conduct a census. This had been mandated by Heydrich on September 21st, 1939

Clearly, as ghettoes had not been established by the end of September, I could not be arguing that the censuses were carried out in that month. Instead, my comment was clearly aimed at Sanning's claim (p.44) that:

In the ghettoes the Jews were accorded some kind of self-administration and the Germans never [my emphasis] bothered to count them.

Consequently, when Lurkerthe states that "Sanning did not claim that a census was not taken, simply that a census was not taken in the middle of the Wehrmacht campaign as Mr Harrison strangely claims," he misrepresents Sanning's position as well as my own.

Lurkerthe then perpetrates an even greater falsehood when discussing Polish Jewish emigration to the USA:

The annual quota for Poland emigration to the US between the war was over 30 000. And it is most probable that Jews took up a greater than 10% proportional share of that quota. So 530 out of 30 000 is not a credible figure. Nor was all emigration from Poland confined to that quota.

The fraudulence of the passage is easily exposed by contemporary sources, such as this one, which demonstrate that the Polish quota was 6524. Moreover, only one of every four Polish-Jewish applicants could satisfy the stringent requirements of the U.S. Consul in Poland (source: Jacob Lestschinsky, "National Groups in Polish Emigration," 5 Jewish Social Studies (April 1943), p. 113; cited by Zimmerman, Chapter 1, Note 15 here).

We can therefore see that, instead of rescuing Sanning from his ignominy, CODOH's unwise monkeys have simply helped to bury him further in the mire by imitating his modus operandi.

CODOH Ignorance: Hoefle Telegram

One way to measure the CODOH forum's ignorance is to trace how its contributors handle a new piece of evidence. Below I summarize how they have distorted and misread the Hoefle Telegram.

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The first denier attempt to address this document was John Weir's screed, 'The Razor And The Ring', which was published by Rudolf's IHR 'journal' in early 2002. Weir's garbage was recycled several times by Hargis on CODOH, despite a glaring error that revealed Weir's stupidity:

The document doesn't say the Jews were killed, it only indicates the number at each camp: 24,733 at Majdanek, 434,508 at Belzec, 101,370 at Sobibor and 713,555 at Treblinka. The document also provides a total of 24,733 for Lublin (Lemberg), but since Lublin is not considered by the keepers of the Holocaust to be an extermination camp, that is omitted from the article.

The imbecile had not realised that 'Lublin' was a codeword for Majdanek, and that this explained why the figure for that category was simply a restatement of the one for Majdanek. Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis was therefore either stupid or dishonest when he reproduced Weir's idiotic ramblings on this CODOH thread.

However, it is notable that, when the Hoefle Telegram re-emerged in 2007 on this CODOH thread, Hargis had dropped his Weir gambit and instead encouraged his underlings to paint the document as a forgery:

Irving's 'document' doesn't pass the smell test.

This desire to 'prove' that Hoefle is a forgery led to multiple idiocies on this thread, especially from a poster called 'Breker', who commented:

Peculiar, actually it is 'Einsatz Reinhardt', sometimes mistakenly said to be 'Reinhard', but now we have 'Reinhart' in the shown document. How does such a spelling get into a document that is claimed to be a German authentic?

The idiot wasn't even aware that the Hoefle Telegram is a decode, not a document found in a German archive. He also overlooked the fact that Hoefle's section often mis-spelled 'Reinhardt', a fact that Witte and Tyas had made clear in their original paper:

The subject of the radio telegram reads "fortnighty report Einsatz REINHART [sic] " The same idiosyncratic spelling Einsatz Reinhart appears in both the printed and the typewritten office letterheads of Höfle's section in Globocnik's staff. Whether it reflects Höfle's inability to spell is not clear, though the latter is well documented.

Again, Hargis made no attempt to correct this ignorance, choosing instead to leave the impression that the document may be suspicious.

In conclusion, therefore, we have a clear chronology: CODOH's idiots misinterpreted the document's contents when they thought the telegram contained a fact that contradicted the normative history, but, when this fallacious interpretation no longer became usable, it was dropped in favour of a 'forgery' interpretation based on fallacious and dishonest assumptions.

CODOH Lies and Ignorance: Sobibor

The willingness of deniers to lie about the Reinhardt camps has been demonstrated here. We have also exposed specific denier idiocies relating to Belzec here and to Sobibor here . This current blog discusses how Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis repeated several of these lies and idiocies in parrot-like fashion in CODOH threads on Sobibor (shown here and here), and added his own special CODOH spin of dishonesty and antisemitism to the claims.

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Firstly, Hargis made a false comparison between Sobibor and labour camps:

People died from a variety of causes during the war; in the work camps disease was the prime cause. No indication of murder here, just graves that contained some cremated bodies (important with contagious diseases).

The dishonesty of this claim can be demonstrated by the fact that, later in the thread, Hargis quoted this passage from Mark Weber:

In a letter dated July 15, 1943, the head of the SS concentration camp system, Oswald Pohl, explained to Himmler that a center for dismantling captured Soviet ammunition could be set up at Sobibor without having to transform it into a concentration camp. Sobibor would remain a transit camp with a special section for dismantling ammunition.

Hargis therefore set up a contradiction that he could not explain: if Sobibor remained a transit camp for its full period of existence, and only had a labour component for a maximum of three months between Pohl's letter of July 1943 and the camp's liquidation in October 1943, how did a mass grave full of hundreds of thousands of typhus-infested Jews manage to appear in such a short period?

Secondly, Hargis claimed that the bullets found by Kola in his 2001 investigation at Sobibor probably came from the ammunition camp. However this is simply ignorance. Arad showed here that the ammunition conversion camp was a separate entity - 'Camp 4' - in the northern part of the Sobibor site. The cartridges found by Kola were in the 'hospital' barracks, nowhere near the ammunition camp.

Thirdly, Hargis chose to read the word 'hospital' literally, despite the fact that it is clear from the literature that the 'hospital' was a euphemism for the place where the sick and disabled arrivals were taken to be shot if they were too infirm to walk to the gas chambers. The discovery of cartridges at this specific location is powerful corroboration of the eyewitness testimony given at the Sobibor trial.

Fourthly, Hargis, incredibly, asked:

gas chambers?
Where's the evidence for this?

This was an outright lie. Hargis must have known that Fuchs gave detailed descriptions to the Sobibor trial of gassing using a petrol engine.

Fifthly, Hargis showed his antisemitic colours:

Jews were predominant victims? So typical.

Finally, Hargis repeated the lie originally told by Graf, which we noted in this blog:

According to alleged eyewitness, Alexander Pechersky, gassings at Sobibor took place via a black heavy substance which exited in spirals from holes in the roof. Then the floor of the gas chamber opened up, and the bodies fell directly into wagons placed in the basement.

Pechersky was not an eyewitness. His account was hearsay. The fact that Hargis had to repeat this lie from another denier demonstrates just what a sad antisemite he really is.

The Logical Fallacies of the Cesspit

We have shown in this series that Holocaust deniers are negationists not revisionists. CODOH's five years of existence have provided numerous illustrations of this rule. The most common tactic of negation used by deniers is to employ logical fallacies to establish false parameters of argumentation and evidence evaluation. Below are seven logical fallacies that CODOH posters employ for the purpose of pure negation, whilst making no attempt to build a revised body of knowledge.

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1. The false 'house of cards' analogy - used here by Hargis, who says of Nuremberg that:

removing one card results in the fall of a house made of cards.

This is a logical fallacy because it fails to treat each piece of evidence on its own merits, and resorts instead to an 'ad hominem' attack on the all of the thousands of personnel who collected and supplied evidence for the IMT at Nuremberg. There is always a high statistical probability that a body of evidence consisting of thousands of items will contain a small number of items whose provenance or authenticity cannot be guaranteed, but it is absurd to infer from this that all the items are tarnished by the small number of dubious ones.

Hargis thus confirms Van Pelt's observation:

The assumption that the discovery of one little crack will bring the whole building down is the fundamental fallacy of Holocaust Denial.

2. Source negation instead of source evaluation - CODOH adopts a straw man approach to Holocaust historians which assumes that historians do not take account of source ambiguity or the motivation of eyewitnesses. This is an assumption based on ignorance of how historians check sources against other forms of verification and convergence. CODOH rejects techniques of convergence, corroboration and source evaluation because it wishes to exclude, a priori, any source that supports the normative history of the Holocaust .

3. 'All documentation is fake unless proven otherwise to our satisfaction (a standard which is impossible to attain)' - CODOH's approach to Holocaust documentation is to assume that it should be dismissed unless its veracity can be proven beyond even the most unreasonable levels of doubt. For example, on this thread, Hargis insists that the chain of custody of any piece of evidence must be demonstrated at every stage of its existence. This is pure negationism because it asks Holocaust historians to refute a paranoid claim, when in reality the burden of proof lies with negationists to prove that their paranoia has some legitimate basis. Historians are entitled to assume that large collections of documentary evidence, held in multiple archives across the world, have not be faked by some dark conspiratorial force. They are not obliged to subject every document to an assumption of disbelief merely to satisfy the epistemology of a paranoid fantasist.

4. 'You didn't prove your point, so your point is false.' - Every CODOH discussion of mass graves assumes that unless every body was exhumed and subjected to an autopsy, the claims of gassing are a hoax. This is an argumentum ad ignorantiam, because it assumes that a supposed lack of proof of A (exact identification of bodies) is proof of B (the gas chambers are a hoax). In other words, CODOH exhibits a fallacy which assumes that:

'a proposition is true simply on the basis that it has not been proved false, or that it is false because it has not been proved true' (Copi and Cohen, Introduction to Logic, 9th ed., 1994, p.116)

Walton discusses how this fallacy is used to foreclose discussion:

One such dialectical pattern has been studied by Krabbe (1995, p. 258), of a kind that corresponds to the fallacy van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1987, p. 291) call absolutizing the success of a defense, as characterized by the argumentative move, 'You didn't prove your point, so your point is false.' The argument from ignorance, analyzed in this way as a dialectical fallacy, could be described as an exaggerated statement of the results of a discussion. It is the tactic of implying that the discussion has already successfully reached the closing stage, whereas in reality, it should be seen as still being in the argumentation stage.

We can therefore see that the CODOH fallacy, 'You didn't prove your point, so your point is false,' is also a tactic, deployed specifically by Hargis as moderator, that attempts to impose false closure on a discussion. It is particularly ironic that a moderator should deploy this fallacy, because the moderator's function is meant to be to promote discussion, not foreclose it. An example of this tactic, relating to CODOH discussions of Chelmno, is given in point 5.

5. Dismissing one body of evidence because of supposed deficiencies in another body of evidence - This fallacy is encapsulated in this CODOH thread about Chelmno, in which Hargis states that:

Greiser's alleged letter and any assertions about documents concerning Chelmno must be examined in lieu of the alleged method of 'extermination' and body disposal at Chelmno...Given the lack of evidence, Greiser's alleged 'letter' as was shown is necessarily another transparent Communist creation

This statement contains two logical fallacies at once. Firstly, it begs the question about forensics and body disposal by assuming (without demonstrating) that gassing with a vehicle engine and incineration of bodies were impossible. Secondly, it is an appeal to ignorance because it assumes that an incompleteness of forensics at Chelmno proves that Grieser's letter is fake. Lack of Proof for A is therefore assumed to be proof of B.

6. A false hierarchy of evidence - This is also known as the 'Scissors, Paper, Stone' fallacy. It assumes that physical evidence always trumps documents, which in turn always trump eyewitnesses. This is clearly deployed by Hargis in the Chelmno example in Point 5. It is closely associated with the appeal to ignorance, because it is used as a device for falsely 'proving' that documents must be 'fake' and eyewitnesses must be 'lying' if there is any lack of proof in the associated forensics.

7. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus - This is a common denier fallacy: "false in one thing, false in everything". It is the last refuge of the desperate denier, and can be easily exposed and debunked. This blog gives an example of a CODOH denier, Bradley Smith, who used the fallacy in this CODOH article as follows:

"Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus," or "false in one thing, false in everything," was a Roman legal principle. If a witness may not be believed in one thing, he should not be believed in anything. This principle is as valid today as it was two thousand years ago.

The fallacy can be debunked on three grounds, which Smith dishonestly ignored in his article. Firstly, as wikipedia notes, the term was only meant to be applied to witnesses whose testimony is without corroboration. It is:

A Roman legal principle indicating that a witness who willfully falsifies one matter is not credible on any matter. The underlying motive for attorneys to impeach opposing witnesses in court: the principle discredits the rest of their testimony if it is without corroboration.

Deniers ignore this crucial qualifier, which appears in classical US legal texts such as CHARLES C. MOORE, A Treatise on Facts, or the Weight and Value of Evidence (1908. Vol. II, § 1073).

Secondly, an alleged weakness in the testimony of Witness A tell us nothing about the veracity of witnesses B-Z. The CODOH technique of cherrypicking one witness in order to discredit dozens of others is, therefore, fallacious.

Thirdly, judges and juries are not obliged to apply the principle. This is made clear in the Manual Of Model Criminal Jury Instructions, used by US Circuit Courts, which states:

As to the credibility of a "perjurer," see United States v. Koonce, 485 F.2d 374, 378 n.8 (8th Cir. 1973); United States v. Spector, 793 F.2d 932, 939 (8th Cir. 1986); United States v. Reda, 765 F.2d 715, 718-19 (8th Cir. 1985); 1A Kevin F. O’Malley, et al., Federal Jury Practice and Instructions: Criminal § 15.10 (5th ed. 2000); Seventh Circuit Federal Jury Instructions: Criminal § 1.03 (1999); Ninth Cir. Crim. Jury Instr. 4.8 (1997). Both Koonce and Reda supported the trial court's rejection of a “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus" instruction.

Juries are thus allowed to exercise discretion as to whether they reject the witness's entire testimony, or just part of it. This is made clear in the case of USA v James (Francis):

The anticipated falsus in uno instruction upon which Francis's counsel relied told the jury that it "may disregard the testimony of the witness in whole or in part" if the jury believed the witness committed perjury during the trial (emphasis added). Judge Dearie's response to the inquiring juror during deliberations did not refer explicitly to trial perjury, but he did say that "[a]fter considering all the evidence you decide on the basis of what you have heard whether to believe in whole or in part the testimony of a particular witness" (emphasis added).

Deniers who use this principle to insist that a witness's entire testimony must be dismissed are therefore ignorant of how the law works. More importantly, they expose once again their fallacious approach to questions of truth.

Reflections on an Eight-Year War

It's no surprise to anyone who knows me well that CODOH's Jonnie Hargis is my arch enemy. The reasons for this are varied and several, but rather than take on technical and historical issues that my colleagues here intend to during CODOH Week, I'll take on the man himself and just take a brief look at some of the biggest whoppers over the last five years.

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One of my favorite gambits by Hargis has to do with the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads responsible for machine-gunning at least a million Jews in the Soviet Union, Baltic states, and eastern Poland beginning on June 22, 1941. Hargis likes to claim that the people shot were partisans and commonly identifies these people as "terrorists." Here is a typical example.

Now imagine if you were to ask Jonnie Hargis this question: Would you call Palestinians — not flying any flag, wearing any uniforms, or organized in any rank hierarchy — defending their homeland by firing on Israeli troops "terrorists"? I can answer that question for Jonnie definitively: He would not. So what we're seeing here is a double standard on a couple of levels. First, the Palestinians are allowed to defend their country, but the Soviets were not. Second, Palestinians should not be summarily executed for defending their homeland, but Soviets (particularly Soviet Jews) should be.

This issue, incidentally, gave rise to this classic post by Hargis, in which he suggests that, rather than forming partisan units and carrying out sabotage against invading Nazi forces, the Soviets should have just surrendered. Then, adding insult to injury, he makes a comparison to the Iraq War. So we have another double standard: Soviets are not allowed to defend their country, but Iraqis can.

More later as time allows. It's a long week for me.

Happy Birthday, CODOH Forum!

The CODOH forum, known affectionately to us as The Cesspit, began operations on November 26th, 2002, so is today celebrating its fifth birthday. To commemorate this happy event, over the next few weeks, we shall be posting a series of blogs highlighting the 'achievements' of the forum. These will show that, instead of original research and informed critique, the forum has borrowed most of its claims from other deniers and has repeatedly resorted to logical fallacies, Strawman attacks on its opponents, distortions of evidence, quote-mining, antisemitic smears, and arguments from personal incredulity. It has made no contribution to the sum of human knowledge concerning the policies and actions of the Third Reich towards the Jews. Moreover, the forum lies about its commitment to free speech: our attempts to post on its threads have been censored, deleted and blocked. We therefore raise our glasses in tribute to this Cesspit of hypocrisy and antisemitic canards, and say, "Here's to five more years of top-class entertainment from the Conspiraloons."

Michael Mills and Zyklon-B

The evidence concerning the supply of Zyklon-B for homicidal gassing continues to be distorted, not just by outright deniers, but also by self-appointed 'skeptics' who have simply misread the postwar trial testimony, or incorrectly inferred the grounds upon which judges reached their verdicts.

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In 2003, Michael Mills started this thread on the Axis History Forum to promote his view that:

Many readers will know that at the post-war trial of Tesch and Weinbacher, the managers of the firm Tesch & Stabenow, reports of the visit of representatives of the firm to Riga for the purpose of using Zyklon-B was accepted as proof that the firm had knowignly [sic] supplied that prodcut [sic] to the SS for homicidal purposes.

The British judges who sentenced Tesch and Weinbacher to death may be forgiven for their false interpretation of the visit to Riga. At that time the imaginations of Allied officials were filled with reports of the homicidal use of Zyklon-B. to the extent that the possibility of an innocent use was simply disregarded.

Today we know much more about the normal use of Zyklon-B for delousing (even Gerlach confirms that that was its proper use), so there is no excuse for historians confusing the normal and homicidal uses, and Breitman apparently did.

Mills implies that the judges had insufficient evidence that Zyklon-B was used to gas humans, and hanged two innocent men on the basis of a misreading of Tesch's visit to Riga. However, the United Nations War Crimes Commission's Law-Report of the Zyklon-B Case is now available to view on-line here, and it clearly shows that Mills had misread the trial evidence, thereby leading him to present a Straw Man version of both the eyewitnesses and the judges.

The evidence relied on by the prosecution is summarized in part 4 of the report. It will be noted straight away that Tesch's visit to Riga does not appear in the summary. Instead, we have testimony from Tesch's employees which clearly shows that Tesch knew that Zyklon-B was being used to kill humans:

Anna Uenzelmann, a former stenographer of the firm, said that in about June 1942 Tesch, after he had dictated a travel report on returning from Berlin, had told her that Zyklon B was being used for gassing human beings, and had appeared to be as terrified and shocked about the matter as she was.

Moreover, Tesch had noted a meeting with members of the Wehrmacht in which gassing humans with prussic acid was discussed and recommended:

Emil Sehm, a former bookkeeper and accountant employed by Tesch and Stabenow, supplied information, regarding the legitimate business activities of the firm and the positions of the three accused therein, which substantially bore out the opening statements of the Prosecutor on these points. He went on to state that in the Autumn of 1942 he saw in the files of the firm’s registry one of the reports, dictated by Tesch, which gave accounts of his business journeys. In this travel report, Tesch recorded an interview with leading members of the Wehrmacht, during which he was told that the burial, after shooting, of Jews in increasing numbers was proving more and more unhygienic, and that it was proposed to kill them with prussic acid. Dr. Tesch, when asked for his views, had proposed to use the same method, involving the release of prussic acid gas in an enclosed space, as was used in the extermination of vermin. He undertook to train the S.S. men in this new method of killing human beings.

Sehm had written down a note of these facts and taken it away with him, but had burnt it the next day on the advice of an old friend, named Wilhelm Pook, to whom he had related what he had seen.

We can therefore see quite clearly how revisionist canards have been generated about Auschwitz, and other features of the Final Solution, which could have been nipped in the bud through a simple checking of the relevant postwar trial records.

The Typical CODOH Debate

THE TYPICAL CODOH DEBATE,
or HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING
AND LOVE THE IDIOTS OF THE FÜHRERBUNKER

a playlet by the Rev. Dr. Andrew E. Mathis, Ph.D., ULC, J.E.W.

Scene: It is a typical day. JONNIE HARGIS is at the UCLA Library, but he is not working.

Jonnie Hargis: Based on the fact that there were no gas chambers...blah, blah, blah...

Anyone With a Brain: Really? Who established that fact? I'm sorry, Mr. Hargis, but you can't advance from that point until I've conceded it. Otherwise, you're going headlong into the logical fallacy to beat all logical fallacies.

JH: [asks eight hundred questions in one post]

AWB: OK, open a thread on each, and we'll go over the evidence.

[...]

AWB: Why are my posts being censored?

JH (as "Moderator"): They are not being censored. You are off-topic.

AWB: I'm talking about the fucking Holocaust. How much more on-topic could I be?

JH (as Mod): Read the guidelines, such language is not allowed.

[AM: Note the comma splice!]

JH: ...and another thing about shitty little Israel

AWB: I'm outta here.

JH: I win!

Repeat ad nauseum à la La cantatrice chauve by Eugène Ionesco.

CURTAIN