Mr. Gerdes drives another nail into the "Revisionist" coffin

On the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" (where my account has not yet been reactivated even though the one-month period of the ban decreed on 19.01.2010 has already expired; I have sent an e-mail to the moderator requesting reactivation), my old friend Greg Gerdes accomplished something extraordinary for his low intellect and character.



After again repeating his simian "locate/prove the existence of just one mass grave containing 1/xth of y% of the alleged mass murder at z extermination camp" - hollering (see here and here), and having apparently realized that his fellow true believers didn't give a fuck anymore about this nonsense (last commented by me here), he opened a thread called jews, Transit Camps and the Soviet Gulag. On this thread, after briefly repeating his mendacious "not so much as one single grave [snip blah, blah, blah]" - mantra, he tried to provide evidence (yes, believe it or not: Gerdes tried to provide evidence!) that the Jews deported to "the fraudulently alleged 'pure extermination centers'", which "were in fact transit camps" (i.e. the at least about 1,517,500 Jews deported to Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, thereof ca. 152,000 to Chelmno, 434,500 to Belzec, 150,000 to Sobibor and 781,000 to Treblinka, see my RODOH post # 11878) ended up in the Soviet Gulag and perished there.

Considering Greg Gerdes'private standards of evidence as concerns Nazi crimes, which obviously require not only physically locating and establishing the dimensions of the mass graves and the quality of their contents (that has been done by archaeological investigation regarding all aforementioned camps except Treblinka, where Polish criminal investigators found a large area covered by human remains and established the depth of at least one mass grave, but did not determine the precise location and dimensions of each grave - see my RODOH post # 11879), but also physically locating and quantifying the human remains contained in each grave, one would expect the evidence for Gerdes' "The real jewish holocaust - by Soviet Gulag" - case to consist wholly or mainly of physical evidence to the burial of enormous numbers of Jewish bodies at the site of former Gulag camp complexes like Kolyma and Vorkuta.

What we get instead is this:

I would like to present, as exhibit # 1 for this thread - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book - The Gulag Archipelago. If you haven't read this book yet, you don't know the holohoax. It will give you answers for things that you didn't even know there were questions about.

And for exhibit # 2, I give you:


Surviving the Camps but Struggling in Brooklyn

New York Times, January 21, 2010

By JENNIFER MASCIA


Ruth Usherenko keeps an improbably thick book on a table beside the couch in her living room. In it are roughly 58,000 names, all belonging to Jewish Berliners who perished during Hitler's regime. "All my girlfriends, all my relatives, all my neighbors are in here,"

...Beside her sat her sister, Toni Usherenko, 85, equally diminutive and delicate, who spoke in the same halting hybrid of Russian and English. The two live a block apart in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, maintaining a closeness forged during World War II and later in a Siberian prison camp...

The sisters spent their early years in Neustrelitz, a town in northern Germany. After their father, a tailor, became a target of Nazi intimidation, the family moved to Berlin...

The girls' father was badly beaten in the riot, suffering a heart attack and a damaged kidney. Three years later, he was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he perished.

Weeks after their father was apprehended, Ruth, Toni and their mother were taken to Gross-Rosen , a work camp...

In 1945, the three women were sent by the Soviets to a labor camp in Siberia; they were considered suspect because of their religion and their German provenance.

"We couldn't speak one word of Russian," Ruth Usherenko recalled. "They didn't feed us. When people died, they didn't bury them — they put them in the forest and the wolves were eating them."

So complete was their isolation that they did not know when the war ended. "Stalin passed away in 1953, and they released us in 1955," Ruth Usherenko recalled. "A woman came to us and said, `The war is over.' "

The three women settled in the Ukrainian town of Dnepropetrovsk, where they worked as milliners. The sisters married — Ruth to a shoemaker and Toni to an aviation engineer — and in 1981, after years of trying to leave the Soviet Union, the families were able to emigrate to Brooklyn...

But having money for heat is most important to Ms. Usherenko, perhaps because the cold is a reminder of the frigid decade she spent in Siberia. "They put us in a cold school, no steam," she recounted. "We had one blanket for me, my mother and my sister. Everybody died."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/nyreg ... mps&st=cse

Having read Solshenizyn's The Gulag Archipelago myself, I don't remember having found much there about Jewish victims of Stalinist violence. One or the other individual whose name is mentioned in the book may be Jewish, the purge against Jewish doctors, artists and intellectuals of the late Stalin era is addressed, and that's it, IIRC. But let's give Gerdes the benefit of doubt and assume that he presented Solshenizyn's book only as evidence of the existence and operation of the Soviet Gulag camps. For this purpose I can accept his "exhibit 1", even though Gerdes nowhere explains why memoirs of a not exactly impartial Soviet dissident should be better proof of the Gulag than the research and investigation results of historians and mostly German criminal investigators, who discovered, cross-checked and evaluated a large body of eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence, including but not limited to what is quoted or referred to in my aforementioned RODOH posts, is proof of the mass murder at the Nazi extermination camps. I assume that proof of the death of over 1.5 million Jewish deportees in the Soviet Gulag, the existence of which Gerdes considers proven by his "exhibit # 1", is supposed to be contained in "exhibit # 2".

"Exhibit # 2" is an article in the New York Times about two elderly Jewish sisters living in Brooklyn, Ruth and Toni Usherenko, who during World War II were deported by the Nazis to Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Poland. When Soviet troops overran this camp in 1945, the two ladies and their mother were "considered suspect because of their religion and their German provenance", and eventually sent to a labor camp in Siberia, from where they were only released in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. Then they lived in the Soviet Union until 1981 before emigrating to the United States.

I'd say that presenting this as evidence that the Jews deported to Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka "transit camps" (for whose transportation to the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories or to labor camps in Poland there is not a shred of evidence in the first place, even though there would be a huge paper trail and thousands upon thousands of eyewitnesses if either or both had occurred) is further evidence, arguably some of the best evidence yet, that Greg Gerdes has as much brain matter as is suggested by his aspect. For apart from displaying his flagrant double standards in the dumbest manner, and from idiotically insinuating that one can derive conclusions about the fate of at least over 1.5 million people from the story of just two individuals, he apparently didn't notice that neither of the two old ladies was deported to any of the extermination camps Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Neither were they deported to any of the dual purpose camps Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, which served both as concentration camps and as extermination camps. No, they were deported to Gross Rosen, a plain concentration camp. Many of the inmates of that camp were not Jewish, and of the about 120,000 prisoners who passed through the Gross-Rosen camp system, "only" 40,000 died either in Gross-Rosen or during the evacuation of the camp. That was where the two key witnesses for Gerdes'case (it's also extraordinary that Gerdes all of a sudden accepts as evidence the testimony of eyewitnesses, moreover Jewish ones) spent the war. The never even got close to the places of mass murder that Gerdes calls "transit camps".

While I'm not surprised that someone as limited as Gerdes makes a fool of himself in such a pitiable manner, the hilariously silly claim that Gerdes "drives another nail into the Holocoffin" with his "evidence" was made not by Gerdes, but by a slightly more intelligent - though no less obnoxious - "Revisionist" from New Zealand, who posts on the RODOH forum as "little gray rabbit" (the alias he finally stuck with after having used at least half a dozen others). This gentleman posted Gerdes' above-quoted "exhibit # 2" in his RODOH thread Mr Gerdes drives another nail into the Holocoffin, followed by the cryptic remark "Any comment by me is superfluous". After his silliness was pointed out by Jonathan Harrison and Wahrheitseeker, and after his brother-in-spirit ralphgordon asked him what point he was trying to make, lgr tuned down his rhetoric and argued that this "exhibit" cast doubt on the accuracy of records of people murdered by the Nazis, in which he "expected" the sisters Ruth and Toni Usherenko to have at some time been or still be included:

Gerdes put it over at CODOH, its from the New York Times. The point is not particularly difficult, 3 alleged Holocaust victims were taken off to Siberia and then not allowed to leave Russia for 40 more years. I expect at some point they would have been included on a list of murdered by the Nazis - and perhaps they still are, as the article does not give their unmarried names.

Unfortunately for lgr, the Usherenko sisters had been residing in Germany before their deportation, and Germany is one of the countries that have a more or less complete record of the names and other personal data and of the individual fates of Jews living on their pre-war territory who fell victim to Nazi persecution and mass murder. Since 2007, an internet edition of the "Gedenkbuch – Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933 – 1945" (Memorial Book - Victims of Persecution of the Jews under the National Socialist Rule of Violence in Germany 1933 - 1945) is available on the website of the German Federal Archives in Koblenz. This online database, which includes 159,972 names of Jews who had resided in Germany within its borders as of 31 December 1937, thereof about 155,000 murdered persons, made it possible to check whether lgr's insinuation was pertinent or just "Revisionist" wishful thinking. If Ruth and Toni Usherenko were mentioned in the Federal Archives' database as having fallen victim to Nazi persecution and mass murder, this would mean that said database cannot be necessarily relied upon and information from there should be cross-checked against other sources before using it. If, on the other hand, the two sisters' names were absent from the database, this would mean that they were not wrongly recorded as victims of Nazi persecution and mass murder, and thus speak for the reliability of the database.

The searches done by Dr. Neander and me (see Dr. Neander's posts nos. 562, 563, 564 and 565 and my post # 11919) revealed that Ruth and Toni Usherenko are nowhere mentioned in the Federal Archives'database. On the other hand, we managed to find the man who in all probability was the ladies' father, Nachim Usherenko. As Dr. Neander pointed out, N. Usherenko was a tailor in Berlin (just like the two sisters' father), who lived in the city between 1936 and 1941; he was the only man by that name recorded in the Berlin address book. The sisters' father was a tailor who moved to Berlin some time after the Nazis came to power, according to the NYT article. Nachim Usherenko was deported to Sachsenhausen and perished there, just like the sisters' father. The chances that Nachim Usherenko was not the father of Ruth and Toni Usherenko are thus rather remote.

So thanks to Gerdes' and lgr's attempt to drive "another nail into the Holocoffin", Dr. Neander and I found out that Nachim Usherenko succumbed to Nazi violence and is accordingly recorded in the Federal Archives' database, that his daughters Ruth and Toni survived Nazi violence and are not recorded in this database of Jews from Germany murdered by the Nazis, and that it can therefore be assumed that the Federal Archives did a proper job and recorded as Jews from Germany murdered by the Nazis only Jews from Germany actually murdered by the Nazis. Another puerile attempt to vindicate "Revisionist" nonsense was another glorious shot in the "Revisionist" foot - or, to paraphrase lgr's expression, another nail in the "Revisionist" coffin.

The Federal Archives' database (click the icon "Namensverzeichnis" at bottom of page, which leads to this mask, check the field "Deportationsort", insert the name of the camp after "Suchen nach" and click the icon "Suche starten" at the bottom of the mask) contains, among others, the names of Jews from Germany deported to Chelmno (2,570 names), Belzec (290 names), Sobibor (5,689 names; regarding some deportees it is uncertain whether the final destination was Sobibor or Majdanek) and Treblinka (7,800 names). If Mr. Gerdes can prove that any of these people ended up in the Soviet Gulag, I'll send him a big box of bananas.

PS, 23.02.2010, 11:05 hours GMT:

Mr. Gerdes seems to have worn out his welcome on CODOH indeed, or then at least one of his fellow "Revisionists" has grown understandably tired of Gerdes' repetitive remixes of the same stupid song. On his thread New NAFH challenge/reward offer, Gerdes' imbecilic rhetorical question:

Would you say that the hoaxers utter silence proves that there are no human remains in fraudulently alleged Sobibor "huge mass grave" #7/45?

received the following reply from "Lamprecht" (which of course caused Gerdes to freak out and give Lamprecht the "show me just one this and that" - treatment):

Their utter silence proves that they don't care about what you have to say, and pretending that they're ignoring you for the sole reason that they can't answer your questions is dishonest and sophomoric.

Apart from the "sole" thing ("hoaxers" can answer all of Gerdes' questions to the extent they are pertinent and relevant and not just hollow rhetorical bluster, which however applies to only a minority of said questions at best, and this particular "hoaxer" has answered Gerdian questions many times before whereas Gerdes left hundreds of my questions unanwered), Lamprecht is right. We don't care about Gerdes' hysterical, moronic hollering. However, this writer likes to occasionally use Gerdes' tirades as an opportunity to a) present evidence inconvenient to "Revisionist" articles of faith, most of which Gerdes prefers to ignore, and b) use Gerdes as a splendid demonstration object of "Revisionist" ... well, ill-reasoning, to put it politely. And I intend to do so on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum", to the extent that the moderator should permit it. I hope my account has been activated since yesterday evening.