Greg Gerdes has responded to my invitation and reported for debate on RODOH, in a manner that confirms my interpretation of NAFCASH as meaning "National Association of Fish-wives, Cretins and Screaming Hysterics".
The current RODOH thread involving Mr. Gerdes is this one:
What is a forensic criminologist?
Gerdes is now also howling around here.
Update, 17.06.2008
Gerdes is furthermore rambling away (in the company of his "White" buddies) on the thread Archeological Investigations of Treblinka of the "Vanguard News Network" forum (an "open arena" into which all opposition is welcome, according to one of the posters – and so far I have not been censored there indeed).
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
How Low Can Deniers Go?
How about: justifying the execution of children, which Hargis attempts to do here by lying about international law, the real status of which was spelled out here?
In this regard, Hargis joins his guru Rudolf, who lied here about the principle of proportionality, the reality of which was clearly spelled out here and here. Just how deeply can these Hitler-kissers descend into the moral mire?
In this regard, Hargis joins his guru Rudolf, who lied here about the principle of proportionality, the reality of which was clearly spelled out here and here. Just how deeply can these Hitler-kissers descend into the moral mire?
CODOH Lies and Ignorance: Sanning (Part 2)
A quick follow-up to Part 1. Anyone still curious about the number of East European Jews who were being admitted to the USA can check out the 1929 quotas here, the revised 1938 quotas here, and the numbers of Jews who actually gained admittance to the US in 1939-40 here and here. It should also be noted that Jews could not leave the General Government after November 1940, due to this ban.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
CODOH's Greatest Hits: A Guide for New Readers
The idiocies of the CODOH forum have been documented in detail both here on the HC site and in the Memory Hole section of the RODOH forum. Highlights include CODOH mentor Bradley Smith censoring his own blog to delete complaints made about biased moderation by Jonnie Hargis; the banning of Sergey Romanov for exposing CODOH's hypocrisy concerning standards of evidence; and my own treatment after I exposed Hargis's double standards concerning Neander and Krege.
Readers can also wonder at the fact that this thread was allowed by the 'Moderator' to make unsubstantiated allegations that "Jewish Death Squads killed Germans"; Hargis himself was allowed to allege, without evidence, "mass murders by Allied field troops, heinous mass mutilations by the largely judeo-supremacist Bolsheviks/communists, the dismemberment of Germany, the seizure of her assets and patents, the mass rapes, [and] slave labor made of Germans"; and why Claudia Rothenbach was allowed to wax lyrical, without being warned, about how the "USA killed 20 M natives and robbed their land; had 15 M slaves while some tens of million were murdered before they reached the ramp in Neuf Orleans" and "USSR, killed about 66 M own people, 10 M Ukrainians 1930/31". All such allegations would have been deleted immediately if made about the Nazis.
Readers can also wonder at the fact that this thread was allowed by the 'Moderator' to make unsubstantiated allegations that "Jewish Death Squads killed Germans"; Hargis himself was allowed to allege, without evidence, "mass murders by Allied field troops, heinous mass mutilations by the largely judeo-supremacist Bolsheviks/communists, the dismemberment of Germany, the seizure of her assets and patents, the mass rapes, [and] slave labor made of Germans"; and why Claudia Rothenbach was allowed to wax lyrical, without being warned, about how the "USA killed 20 M natives and robbed their land; had 15 M slaves while some tens of million were murdered before they reached the ramp in Neuf Orleans" and "USSR, killed about 66 M own people, 10 M Ukrainians 1930/31". All such allegations would have been deleted immediately if made about the Nazis.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Greg Gerdes
In his post of Tue May 13, 2008 2:45 pm on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum", a bigmouth who calls himself Greg Gerdes blustered away as follows:
Read more!
Never having met this Gerdes fellow before, I wondered why he was mad at me, as his mouthing suggests he his.
Was it only because I had referred to "Revisionist" nonsense in general and denierbud’s video clips in particular in rather unflattering and equally appropriate terms? Or was there more behind Gerdes' anger?
The latter is suggested by the fact that, as I found out by running "Greg Gerdes" on the Google search engine, our friend is the "president" of the so-called "National Association of Forensic Criminologists, Archeologists, Skeptics and Historians" (NAFCASH), whose mendacious "challenge" was appropriately commented by Sergey Romanov in this article. My own article Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure … incidentally punched further holes in what these NAFCASH people (whose multi-colored and multi-sized collection of long-debunked "Revisionist" manure, such as the irrelevant "diesel gas chambers" baloney, is so shrill as to make it look like their initials actually stand for "National Association of Fish-Wives, Cretins and Screaming Hysterics") tell their readers about there being "no trace of mass graves" at Treblinka, by showing – on hand of a site investigation report quoted by "Revisionist" gurus Mattogno & Graf, who however failed to understand its significance – that the size of the presumable mass graves area of Treblinka extermination camp (an area of ca. 20,000 square meters covered by human ashes, bones and skulls, according to said report), as well as the likely depth of the mass graves established during the investigation (7.5 meters, go figure!), are compatible with the order of magnitude of mass murder at Treblinka that becomes apparent from documentary evidence. Another nail in NAFCASH's coffin was my recent article Gold Rush in Treblinka, with its mention of documentary evidence about the postwar digging-up of the Treblinka killing site by treasure hunters and the opinion of an expert in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology, both of which are further confirmation that NAFCASH’s poster-boy Richard Krege is, if not an inveterate liar, then at least an incompetent bungler who doesn't know much about GPR soil examination.
If Mr. Gerdes has read the above-mentioned articles – which I hope he has – that would explain his diatribes against Holocaust Controversies in general and "that incredible dullard" in particular even better than his anger at my having called a spade a spade in my article More of the same trash ….
Now, let’s look at Mr. Gerdes’ comments about the excerpt from that article quoted in his above-mentioned post, item by item.
Gerdes:
I refrain from calling Gerdes the dullest of "Revisionist" dullards because he has some stiff competition among his coreligionists, to say the least, but the fact is that the fellow is obviously too dumb to even read my article correctly.
I’m not arguing that the estimate of ca. 80,000 dead bodies buried in the Sobibor mass graves is wrong let alone a "hoax", and I am also not estimating that "133,000 to 184,000" dead bodies were buried in those mass graves. My argument is that, according to the measurements of the mass graves found in 2001 by Polish archaeologists, the Sobibor mass graves were large enough to hold more or much more than the number of dead bodies reportedly buried in them before the camp staff switched to incinerating the bodies instead of burying them. This in turn means that there is nothing implausible about these mass graves having contained about 80,000 dead bodies.
Maybe such elementary reasoning – if the mass graves could have held more corpses than they are reported to have held, then there’s nothing implausible about the reported figure – is too complex for a "Revisionist" simpleton like Gerdes to grasp.
Gerdes:
Besides misreading my article, Gerdes apparently didn’t understand the video clip that this article refers to, which starts with the following quote from page 177 of Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps:
Even denierbud, though not the sharpest tool in the shed, realized that this meant ca. 83,000 bodies buried before cremation became the body disposal method at Sobibor, whereas the remaining 167,000 were incinerated right after they had been killed, without ever being dumped into a mass grave. For Gerdes, on the other hand, even this simple reasoning seems to have been too much. Or then he didn’t even bother to watch denierbud’s video clip (not that he would have missed anything of value).
The number given by Arad is the highest estimate of the number of victims of Sobibor that I know of. A more cautious estimate was made at the trial against former members of the Sobibor staff before the District Court in Hagen, Germany, which concluded that at least 150,000 Jewish civilians had been killed at Sobibor. As I mentioned in this article, an expert report provided during this trial managed to reconstruct (with remarkable accuracy, as a comparison with documentary evidence discovered decades after this trial shows) the dates and places of origin of the transports included in the minimum number of victims assumed by the court. So despite the Nazis’ documented attempts to get rid of as much evidence as possible, enough documents and other evidence survived to allow for a court expert’s detailed reconstruction of transports to Sobibor, adding up to about 150,000 people, at a trial held more than 20 years after the end of the war.
This leads us to a question far more pertinent that Gerdes’ high-handed (and already answered) question:
The more pertinent question is this: if, as claimed by "Revisionist" fantasists like Gerdes, Sobibor was not an extermination camp but a transit camp from which Jews were distributed to ghettos or labor camps further east, then which were these alleged ghettos or labor camps, what evidence is there that shows large numbers of Jews from Sobibor being transported to these places and accommodated there, and what evidence is there regarding what eventually became of all those Jews?
Common sense alone (which is something alien to "Revisionist" thinking) already tells us that, if Sobibor had been a transit camp and large numbers of Jews had been transported somewhere further east from there, Mattogno & Graf (the only "Revisionists" who, to my knowledge, have tried to come up with something like an answer to this question) would be able to reconstruct these transports at least as precisely as German court expert Wolfgang Scheffler managed to reconstruct transports to Sobibor at the above-mentioned trial, all the more so as the Germans would have had no reason to keep resettlement transports from a Sobibor transit camp a secret or to destroy the related documentary evidence, as they are known to have done with most of the documents pertaining to the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Had a massive resettlement operation via these three "transit camps" actually taken place, Mattogno & Graf wouldn’t be reduced to citing a handful of eyewitnesses about a few small transports from Sobibor to other places, as they do in the excerpt proudly quoted by Gerdes in his opening post of Tue May 13, 2008 1:38 pm (regarding the mendacity of Mattogno & Graf’s claims based on these selectively quoted testimonies, see Jonathan Harrison’s article Mattogno and Graf: Reverse Logic). Nor would these "Revisionist" gurus have to vaguely babble about Polish Jews deported to Ukraine or White Russia, only to be screwed by their own source (apart from shamelessly misrepresenting the writings of German historian Christian Gerlach, as I may demonstrate in a future article). If Mattogno & Graf’s lame endeavors quoted in Gerdes’ OP are the best that "Revisionists" have got by way of an answer to the essential question what, if not mass murder, is supposed to have happened to the Jews deported to Sobibor and the other Aktion Reinhard(t)camps, then one can only feel sorry for these faithful folks and the lunatic creed they embrace.
Gerdes ends his rambling with the following question:
Well, I suggest that Gerdes contact Prof. Kola and ask him this question, which I don’t think anyone else can answer.
Is the absence of a publication similar to Kola’s report about Belzec supposed to mean anything, like there being something wrong with Kola’s announcement of the discovery of mass graves at Sobibor and the measurements thereof? Only in the conspiraloon cloud-cuckoo-land of "Revisionism" could this be seriously claimed, also considering that Prof. Kola is a renowned archaeologist and that his findings are matched by all other evidence to what happened at Sobibor. Gerdes would also be shooting himself in the foot by arguing thusly, insofar as Richard Krege has not yet published the results of the touted "detailed forensic examination" he is supposed to have conducted in 1999. One might say that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, except that there's a significant difference between the findings of a renowned professor of archaeology at Sobibor and those of a "Revisionist" nobody at Treblinka: the former are in line with all known evidence about Sobibor that has been investigated and researched by criminal justice authorities and historians over the past six decades, whereas the latter are at odds with all known eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence about the mass murder at Treblinka.
Gerdes seems to be fond of challenging others, namely Michael Schermer, to debate him.
So here’s a challenge to you, Mr. Gerdes:
Come out and debate the "incredible dullard" about any subject of your choosing related to your "specialty", the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.
I would reply to you on CODOH if I could post there, but webmaster Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis banned me from that lovely place some years ago, obviously because neither he nor any of his acolytes could handle my arguments. But there’s a forum, owned by a "Revisionist", that offers open and uncensored debate. This forum, which Hargis is so afraid of that he made his software automatically change its name into "shills", is called RODOH, which stands for "Real Open Debate on the Holocaust" (the pun on the falsely so-called "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" is intended).
I’m waiting for you on RODOH, Mr. Gerdes.
Now let's look at what that incredible dullard - Roberto Muehlenkamp, has to say about the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor: (from: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/09/more-of-same-trash_18.html )
Quote:
"As before in regard to Treblinka and Belzec, Mr. Ugly Voice tries to take his readers for a ride by "estimating" the burial space available at Sobibor... it seems there are viewers blind and/or stupid enough to let themselves be taken in by such a kindergarten-level hoax. Which is not surprising, by the way, to who has spent some time looking at the world of "Revisionist" lunacy, which is full of fanatics eager to switch off their tiny brains in order to believe what they would like to believe.
...If, on the other hand, you use the plausible densities mentioned in the same article, you get the following:
• At 8 bodies per cubic meter (Mattogno’s "maximum capacity"): 99,592 bodies
• At 10.7 bodies per cubic meter (Alex Bay’s calculation): 133,204 bodies
• At 14.8 bodies per cubic meter (pursuant to Charles Provan’s experiment: 184.245 bodies.
So we can see that, even by the lowest calculation that can be considered reasonable, the American Football spectator crowd of about 80,000 people that Mr. Ugly Voice tries to impress his gullible viewers with could very well fit into the burial space available at Sobibor, as established according to Prof. Kola’s above-mentioned findings. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Ugly Voice has it all wrong once again."
So the dullest of all the holocaust controversies dullards claims that the estimate of 80,000 buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor is a hoax and also sneers at the figure of 100,000. He goes on to estimate 133,000 to 184,000 bodies are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor.
Of course, this begs the question - Even if the maximum figure of 184,000 are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor, then why do so many hoaxers claim that the figure is 250,000?
But of course, the real question is, a question that even a kindergartener would ask: IF the official Sobibor holocasut story is true - Then where EXACTLY are these alleged "huge mass graves?"
And a question:
When is Kola going to publish the results of this investigation?
Read more!
Never having met this Gerdes fellow before, I wondered why he was mad at me, as his mouthing suggests he his.
Was it only because I had referred to "Revisionist" nonsense in general and denierbud’s video clips in particular in rather unflattering and equally appropriate terms? Or was there more behind Gerdes' anger?
The latter is suggested by the fact that, as I found out by running "Greg Gerdes" on the Google search engine, our friend is the "president" of the so-called "National Association of Forensic Criminologists, Archeologists, Skeptics and Historians" (NAFCASH), whose mendacious "challenge" was appropriately commented by Sergey Romanov in this article. My own article Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure … incidentally punched further holes in what these NAFCASH people (whose multi-colored and multi-sized collection of long-debunked "Revisionist" manure, such as the irrelevant "diesel gas chambers" baloney, is so shrill as to make it look like their initials actually stand for "National Association of Fish-Wives, Cretins and Screaming Hysterics") tell their readers about there being "no trace of mass graves" at Treblinka, by showing – on hand of a site investigation report quoted by "Revisionist" gurus Mattogno & Graf, who however failed to understand its significance – that the size of the presumable mass graves area of Treblinka extermination camp (an area of ca. 20,000 square meters covered by human ashes, bones and skulls, according to said report), as well as the likely depth of the mass graves established during the investigation (7.5 meters, go figure!), are compatible with the order of magnitude of mass murder at Treblinka that becomes apparent from documentary evidence. Another nail in NAFCASH's coffin was my recent article Gold Rush in Treblinka, with its mention of documentary evidence about the postwar digging-up of the Treblinka killing site by treasure hunters and the opinion of an expert in ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology, both of which are further confirmation that NAFCASH’s poster-boy Richard Krege is, if not an inveterate liar, then at least an incompetent bungler who doesn't know much about GPR soil examination.
If Mr. Gerdes has read the above-mentioned articles – which I hope he has – that would explain his diatribes against Holocaust Controversies in general and "that incredible dullard" in particular even better than his anger at my having called a spade a spade in my article More of the same trash ….
Now, let’s look at Mr. Gerdes’ comments about the excerpt from that article quoted in his above-mentioned post, item by item.
Gerdes:
So the dullest of all the holocaust controversies dullards claims that the estimate of 80,000 buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor is a hoax and also sneers at the figure of 100,000. He goes on to estimate 133,000 to 184,000 bodies are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor.
I refrain from calling Gerdes the dullest of "Revisionist" dullards because he has some stiff competition among his coreligionists, to say the least, but the fact is that the fellow is obviously too dumb to even read my article correctly.
I’m not arguing that the estimate of ca. 80,000 dead bodies buried in the Sobibor mass graves is wrong let alone a "hoax", and I am also not estimating that "133,000 to 184,000" dead bodies were buried in those mass graves. My argument is that, according to the measurements of the mass graves found in 2001 by Polish archaeologists, the Sobibor mass graves were large enough to hold more or much more than the number of dead bodies reportedly buried in them before the camp staff switched to incinerating the bodies instead of burying them. This in turn means that there is nothing implausible about these mass graves having contained about 80,000 dead bodies.
Maybe such elementary reasoning – if the mass graves could have held more corpses than they are reported to have held, then there’s nothing implausible about the reported figure – is too complex for a "Revisionist" simpleton like Gerdes to grasp.
Gerdes:
Of course, this begs the question - Even if the maximum figure of 184,000 are buried in the "huge mass graves" of Sobibor, then why do so many hoaxers claim that the figure is 250,000?
Besides misreading my article, Gerdes apparently didn’t understand the video clip that this article refers to, which starts with the following quote from page 177 of Yitzhak Arad’s book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps:
Only one-third of the 250,000 victims in this camp had been killed and buried before the cremating began. Those who were gassed there afterward, in the period between October 1942 and October 1943, were taken directly from the gas chambers to the cremating sites.
Even denierbud, though not the sharpest tool in the shed, realized that this meant ca. 83,000 bodies buried before cremation became the body disposal method at Sobibor, whereas the remaining 167,000 were incinerated right after they had been killed, without ever being dumped into a mass grave. For Gerdes, on the other hand, even this simple reasoning seems to have been too much. Or then he didn’t even bother to watch denierbud’s video clip (not that he would have missed anything of value).
The number given by Arad is the highest estimate of the number of victims of Sobibor that I know of. A more cautious estimate was made at the trial against former members of the Sobibor staff before the District Court in Hagen, Germany, which concluded that at least 150,000 Jewish civilians had been killed at Sobibor. As I mentioned in this article, an expert report provided during this trial managed to reconstruct (with remarkable accuracy, as a comparison with documentary evidence discovered decades after this trial shows) the dates and places of origin of the transports included in the minimum number of victims assumed by the court. So despite the Nazis’ documented attempts to get rid of as much evidence as possible, enough documents and other evidence survived to allow for a court expert’s detailed reconstruction of transports to Sobibor, adding up to about 150,000 people, at a trial held more than 20 years after the end of the war.
This leads us to a question far more pertinent that Gerdes’ high-handed (and already answered) question:
But of course, the real question is, a question that even a kindergartener would ask: IF the official Sobibor holocasut story is true - Then where EXACTLY are these alleged "huge mass graves?
The more pertinent question is this: if, as claimed by "Revisionist" fantasists like Gerdes, Sobibor was not an extermination camp but a transit camp from which Jews were distributed to ghettos or labor camps further east, then which were these alleged ghettos or labor camps, what evidence is there that shows large numbers of Jews from Sobibor being transported to these places and accommodated there, and what evidence is there regarding what eventually became of all those Jews?
Common sense alone (which is something alien to "Revisionist" thinking) already tells us that, if Sobibor had been a transit camp and large numbers of Jews had been transported somewhere further east from there, Mattogno & Graf (the only "Revisionists" who, to my knowledge, have tried to come up with something like an answer to this question) would be able to reconstruct these transports at least as precisely as German court expert Wolfgang Scheffler managed to reconstruct transports to Sobibor at the above-mentioned trial, all the more so as the Germans would have had no reason to keep resettlement transports from a Sobibor transit camp a secret or to destroy the related documentary evidence, as they are known to have done with most of the documents pertaining to the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Had a massive resettlement operation via these three "transit camps" actually taken place, Mattogno & Graf wouldn’t be reduced to citing a handful of eyewitnesses about a few small transports from Sobibor to other places, as they do in the excerpt proudly quoted by Gerdes in his opening post of Tue May 13, 2008 1:38 pm (regarding the mendacity of Mattogno & Graf’s claims based on these selectively quoted testimonies, see Jonathan Harrison’s article Mattogno and Graf: Reverse Logic). Nor would these "Revisionist" gurus have to vaguely babble about Polish Jews deported to Ukraine or White Russia, only to be screwed by their own source (apart from shamelessly misrepresenting the writings of German historian Christian Gerlach, as I may demonstrate in a future article). If Mattogno & Graf’s lame endeavors quoted in Gerdes’ OP are the best that "Revisionists" have got by way of an answer to the essential question what, if not mass murder, is supposed to have happened to the Jews deported to Sobibor and the other Aktion Reinhard(t)camps, then one can only feel sorry for these faithful folks and the lunatic creed they embrace.
Gerdes ends his rambling with the following question:
When is Kola going to publish the results of this investigation?
Well, I suggest that Gerdes contact Prof. Kola and ask him this question, which I don’t think anyone else can answer.
Is the absence of a publication similar to Kola’s report about Belzec supposed to mean anything, like there being something wrong with Kola’s announcement of the discovery of mass graves at Sobibor and the measurements thereof? Only in the conspiraloon cloud-cuckoo-land of "Revisionism" could this be seriously claimed, also considering that Prof. Kola is a renowned archaeologist and that his findings are matched by all other evidence to what happened at Sobibor. Gerdes would also be shooting himself in the foot by arguing thusly, insofar as Richard Krege has not yet published the results of the touted "detailed forensic examination" he is supposed to have conducted in 1999. One might say that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, except that there's a significant difference between the findings of a renowned professor of archaeology at Sobibor and those of a "Revisionist" nobody at Treblinka: the former are in line with all known evidence about Sobibor that has been investigated and researched by criminal justice authorities and historians over the past six decades, whereas the latter are at odds with all known eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence about the mass murder at Treblinka.
Gerdes seems to be fond of challenging others, namely Michael Schermer, to debate him.
So here’s a challenge to you, Mr. Gerdes:
Come out and debate the "incredible dullard" about any subject of your choosing related to your "specialty", the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.
I would reply to you on CODOH if I could post there, but webmaster Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis banned me from that lovely place some years ago, obviously because neither he nor any of his acolytes could handle my arguments. But there’s a forum, owned by a "Revisionist", that offers open and uncensored debate. This forum, which Hargis is so afraid of that he made his software automatically change its name into "shills", is called RODOH, which stands for "Real Open Debate on the Holocaust" (the pun on the falsely so-called "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" is intended).
I’m waiting for you on RODOH, Mr. Gerdes.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Eduard Strauch
The documented words and deeds of SS-Obersturmbannführer Eduard Strauch, the commander of the Security Police and SD (KdS) in White Ruthenia, pose three unsurmountable problems for deniers. Firstly, Strauch "admitted that, to his own knowledge, a Jew had to be killed just because he was a Jew". This admission was made, not only at his 1948 trial, but also in documents that he wrote for his superiors, which are discussed below. Secondly, Strauch used euphemisms such as "special treatment" and "resettled" in contexts that were so blatant that they could not camouflage their true meaning. Thirdly, Strauch's actions can be traced through testimony showing that they were systematic and ordered from the centre. Deniers cannot therefore claim that Strauch's forces were killing Jews because they were partisans, nor that their actions were ad-hoc and reactive.
Read more!
On July 25th, 1943, Strauch sent a long report to his superior, von dem Bach (Nuremberg file NO-2662), in which he complained bitterly about the behaviour of the Generalkommissar of White Ruthenia, Wilhelm Kube. The report is reproduced in full at the Axis History Forum here. The report includes the following revealing paragraphs:
Strauch's use of euphemisms has already been the subject of an excellent blog by Nick Terry, revealing how the term 'resettlement' was used euphemistically when Strauch gave the order to kill the Jews of Sluzk. Nick's translation:
Read more!
On July 25th, 1943, Strauch sent a long report to his superior, von dem Bach (Nuremberg file NO-2662), in which he complained bitterly about the behaviour of the Generalkommissar of White Ruthenia, Wilhelm Kube. The report is reproduced in full at the Axis History Forum here. The report includes the following revealing paragraphs:
On numerous occasions Kube has said to me personally that Jews evacuated from the Reich could be spared without any problem since they do not understand the local language and would therefore not pose a danger in so far as their becoming involved in guerrilla activities was concerned.Every false denier claim, from Butz downwards, that the Einsatzkommandos were 'just' killing partisans can be safely trashed using this one extract. It confirms what was already obvious to anyone who has read the Operational Situation Reports, such as those in this link, namely that Jews were killed purely on the basis of their assumed 'racial origin'.
I am convinced from the evidence that deep down Kube is opposed to our actions against the Jews. If he does not admit to this outwardly the only reason is his fear of the consequences. He is in agreement with actions against Russian Jews because he is able to appease his conscience by the fact that the majority of Russian Jews collaborate with the guerrillas.
Strauch's use of euphemisms has already been the subject of an excellent blog by Nick Terry, revealing how the term 'resettlement' was used euphemistically when Strauch gave the order to kill the Jews of Sluzk. Nick's translation:
On 8 and 9 February 1943 there will be a resettlement in the town Sluzk by the local command the resettlement of the Jews there.Strauch's report to von dem Bach, cited above, provides further proof that deniers are pissing in the wind when they try to read 'resettlement' literally in any document produced during the occupation period:
The evacuation of the Jews to the resettlement place happens by means of 6 trucks, each to be accompanied by 4 Latvians.
At the resettlement area are 2 pits. At each pit a group of 10 leaders and men will work, to be relieved every 2 hours. Times 8-10 o'clock, 10-12 o'clock, 12-14 o'clock, 14-16 o'clock.
On 1 March 1942 an action was to take place against the Russian ghetto in Minsk. The Generalkommissar received prior notification. In order to disguise the action the Council of Elders was to be informed that 5,000 Jews from the Minsk ghetto were to be resettled. These Jews were to be notified by the Council of Elders and told to get ready. Each Jew would be permitted to take along 5 kg of luggage.Furthermore, the documents of Strauch, Kube and Lohse give several examples of how Sonderbehandlung was used as a euphemism for genocidal killing. Lohse, when forwarding a report from Kube to Rosenberg on 18 June 1943, wrote that:
As can be proved, the actual intentions of the Security Police were betrayed by the Generalkommissariat. Those Jews employed in the Generalkommissariat were not allowed into the ghetto for several days but were made to stay in the Generalkommissariat, as a result of which it became clear to the ghetto Jews that the version put out by the Security Police was not correct. In addition, further indiscretions were committed, as emerges from liaison reports. At the time it was not possible to prove these incidents. It is clear, however, that the Gauleiter used his knowledge to save his Jews.
The fact that Jews receive special treatment requires no further discussion. However, it appears hardly believable that this is done in the way described in the report of the General Commissioner of 1 June 1943. What is Katyn against that? Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to the other side and exploited by them! Most likely such propaganda would have no effect only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it.Strauch's report to von dem Bach gives an example of such 'special treatment':
To lock men, women, and children into barns and to set fire to them does not appear to be a suitable method of combating bands, even if it is desired to exterminate the population. This method is not worthy of the German cause and hurts our reputation severely.
During a major ghetto action it was made known by informants that the German Jewish Ordnungsdienst made up predominantly of former World War I servicemen, was intending to put up armed resistance. In order to avoid bloodshed on the German side the Ordnungsdienst was made to assemble and was told that a fire had broken out in the town and they should be at the ready for fire duty. The Jews were then loaded on to trucks and sonderbehandelt.The Nuremberg judgement against Strauch, cited above also noted that:
On 20 July 1943 Strauch wrote a letter narrating how he had subjected 70 Jews to special treatment and expressing his resentment because complaint had arisen from the fact that he had had the gold fillings removed from the mouths of these Jews before they were killed.Finally, deniers will be distressed to read that Strauch was acting from higher orders. Heydrich met Strauch in Minsk in April 1942, and his presence enabled this sequence of events, described by Strauch at his trial:
In response to a question regarding the Jewish problem in White Ruthenia, Strauch replied that the Fuehrer Order was valid in White Ruthenia, as everywhere else. He testified that he had a conference with Kube and that Kube told him Jews were needed and he could not do without these Jews, since they should be used in bringing in the harvest, working in an armament factory, and doing other jobs. The defendant thereupon talked to Heydrich and was directed to postpone the execution of the Fuehrer Order until the harvest was brought in.The harvest of evidence relating to Strauch will thus leave an unpleasant taste in mouths of Hitler-kissing deniers.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Conspiraloons on Child Survivors of Auschwitz
Deniers are often so eager to create a Straw Man that they inadvertently expose their idiocy in the process. Here's a classic example. Deniers would like us to believe that, at Auschwitz, "According to the storyline, children, the sick, and the elderly were immediately 'gassed'". However, in the same article, they then reprint Soviet propaganda photographs showing Jewish children who were liberated at Auschwitz.
These Conspiraloon deniers therefore fabricate hoaxers who were both so impossibly clever that they could conceal their forgeries and machinations for over 60 years, and so improbably stupid that they would publish photographs of child survivors when they were in the process of creating a narrative in which the Nazis killed every child on arrival. In their desperation to create Straw Man history in which a genocide can only occur when there are no survivors, deniers thus prove that no such narrative was being constructed by the allies in 1945. The true narratives of the period were created by history itself, which is always complex and which rarely allows the schemes of tyrants to succeed without exceptions and ambiguities, necessitating that some survivors will indeed be left behind. In the case of Auschwitz, testimony shows that these exceptions came from the arbitrary power exercised by Mengele and other selectors, combined with the camp personnel's need for errand boys, sexual playthings, experimental subjects, and Kapo companions. Once again, in its ignorance of this history, we witness the unbearable stupidity of the Cesspit.
Note: Thanks again to KentFord9 of RODOH for help with source material.
These Conspiraloon deniers therefore fabricate hoaxers who were both so impossibly clever that they could conceal their forgeries and machinations for over 60 years, and so improbably stupid that they would publish photographs of child survivors when they were in the process of creating a narrative in which the Nazis killed every child on arrival. In their desperation to create Straw Man history in which a genocide can only occur when there are no survivors, deniers thus prove that no such narrative was being constructed by the allies in 1945. The true narratives of the period were created by history itself, which is always complex and which rarely allows the schemes of tyrants to succeed without exceptions and ambiguities, necessitating that some survivors will indeed be left behind. In the case of Auschwitz, testimony shows that these exceptions came from the arbitrary power exercised by Mengele and other selectors, combined with the camp personnel's need for errand boys, sexual playthings, experimental subjects, and Kapo companions. Once again, in its ignorance of this history, we witness the unbearable stupidity of the Cesspit.
Note: Thanks again to KentFord9 of RODOH for help with source material.
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