And The Cowardice Continues...

Recently I made a blog post -- I can't recall if it was here or at my now defunct personal blog that I provided a copy of a post from the old Upstream mailing list that proved (along with other evidence) that the "man" posting as Hannover at the Führerbunker is, in fact, Jonnie A. Hargis.

(Here's a screenshot, by the way, as the coward has successfully had the proof page removed again.)

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This morning, predictably, I found this old thread, where in some other jackass, "jnovitz," mentions me, so Jonnie piles on by stating that I have been made a fool of at the fascist closet that he controls. As if.

By way of proof, he offers the same stale list of links where I'm supposedly "routed" or whatever, but he offers this a new link, entitled "Holo. Hist. Proj.'s Andrew Mathis attempts damage control."

Apparently the damage I'm attempting to control is, according to Hargis, "wild allegations" by survivors of impossible death rates at Auschwitz Birkenau. I'd written, "No credible figure has ever claimed that 20,000 or 40,000 people were gassed in a day."

But is that all I said? Of course not. My entire post is here. I noted, "Höss claimed during the Hungarian Aktion that 12,000 were being "processed" a day. This was with five gas chambers and 52 crematory muffles, but still they had to resort to pit burnings. That's the highest claim I've ever heard, and it strikes me as specious also."

So please explain something to me: If I'm attempting "damage control," then why would I say that the 12,000 claim made by Commandant Höss was specious?

Returning to the "damage control" post cited by Hargis, he quotes three Holocaust survivors (two basic unknowns and Primo Levi), and then writes, "So, are all these characters deemed 'not credible'?"

Yes, Jonnie, they are not credible.

Pitecki died in 1948. He was not an historian and never carried any exhaustive study on Auschwitz. He certainly was dead before any truly reliable numbers for Auschwitz were in circulation.

Rosa Robota, according to the link Hargis himself provides, died in Auschwitz. Again, she could not have engaged in any real study of the camp.

As for Levi, his glitch is a bit less easy to excuse. But there's a bit of sleight-of-hand (read: lying) that Hargis engages in, claiming that Levi made his claim in 1986, the alleged publication date of Survival in Auschwitz.

In reality, Survival in Auschwitz was published as Se questo è un uomo in 1947 -- a mere two years after Auschwitz was liberated. And one would know, if they had read Levi's subsequent book, The Awakening, that he didn't make it back to Italy for over a year. So perhaps we may cut Levi some slack for an error made in 1947?

The really intriguing thing is that Hargis cites p. 388 in the book as where Levi wrote this. There is no p. 388 in Survival in Auschwitz; it runs a lean 187 pages. I even did a search on Google Books and Amazon.com for this phrase in the book and couldn't find it. Really funny is that Robert Faurisson makes the same quote here but also quotes a nonexistent page (pp. 201-202) and he doesn't even offer a footnote for an edition for us to check.

This is very likely the edition of Levi that Hargis believes he is citing. (Can you believe this guy works in a library?). The year is correct and publisher, but p. 388 would fall in the "Afterword : the author's answers to his readers "questions": p. 375-397."

So if Levi actually made this claim, he didn't even make it in Survival in Auschwitz, but rather in response to a question from a reader. What year? We don't know, of course, because Hargis never tells us, and -- alas! -- the book is out of print.