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.

"Hannover" Hargis’ Hysteria ...

... came to the fore once more after Joachim Neander mentioned a recent Polish newspaper article about the Gold Rush in Treblinka.

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In a recent thread on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" (a.k.a. the Cesspit), headed Anybody know what tin sheets were used for?, Joachim Neander wrote the following (Fri Apr 25, 2008 4:27 pm):

Sorry, Mr. Dahl, I did not study Sobibor. I only researched a little bit the "Treblinka gold rush" from 1944 to 1950. Two Polish (non-Jewish) journalists wrote an article about it that appeared in the Polish newspaper "Gazeta Wyborcza" in the beginning of this year. I translated it into German and Roberto Muehlenkamp into English. It can be found at the shills Web site under "Documents." The article deals with illegal excavations made by local people and members of the nearby Soviet garrison in search of gold and precious stones. BTW, similar "excavations" took place at Auschwitz, but they were quickly suppressed by the local Polish authorities. At Treblinka, the authorities turned a blind eye on the "excavations," most probably after having received their share of the "findings." In every respect, a disgusting story.

Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis, Keeper of the "Revisionist" Faith, thereupon started jumping up and down trying to discredit this unexpected and inconvenient information (Fri Apr 25, 2008 4:57 pm):

How convenient, but absurd, this story is.

What are these 'journalists' sources?

They claim that there were 'illegal' excavations, yet all too conveniently these alleged 'excavations' were not documented by official Polish sources, since they supposedly "turned a blind eye". On the contrary, making the alleged finds known and visible at the time would have been a bonanza to the propaganda ... IF the 900,000 Jews tale was true.

This is hardly credible evidence for a desperate cover story whose intent is to claim that the alleged mass grave for an alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka (10 X The Rose Bowl) cannot be found because there were 'illegal' excavations. Only with the 'holocaust' can people get away with this junk.

I should also note that any mass grave, especially one of the size alleged at Treblinka, would still, today, leave a massive, easily detected footprint. 'illegal excavations' or not.

The liars have not and cannot show us the alleged mass grave for the alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka.

- Hannover

What follows are my comments to Hargis' utterances.

Hargis:

How convenient, but absurd, this story is.

Actually the most "absurd" things have happened in human history, so "absurdity" is never an argument when there's evidence. And the pilfering of the Treblinka victims' belongings was not so much an "absurdity" as a showpiece of the greed and selfishness that, unfortunately, are among the features of human nature. The "story" is also everything other than convenient, on the contrary: as becomes apparent from the Gazeta Wyborcza article (see my English translation of Dr. Neander's translation from Polish into German), the Treblinka "gold rush" is an uncomfortable, shameful subject that contemporaries and their descendants in Poland are still reluctant to talk about.

Hargis:

What are these 'journalists' sources?

Interviews with elder villagers who took part in the "gold rush", contemporary Polish reports about the scavenging, photographs that the journalists found or that were shown to them by a Polish historian – Piotr Głuchowski and Marcin Kowalski are very specific about their sources. All it takes to answer Hargis’ unnecessary question is reading their article.

Hargis:

They claim that there were 'illegal' excavations, yet all too conveniently these alleged 'excavations' were not documented by official Polish sources, since they supposedly "turned a blind eye".

Actually, and as the Gazeta Wyborcza article shows, the excavations in search of treasures were mentioned in several contemporary Polish documents, including

• Two reports from the Siedlce Section of the NSZ Task Force for Special Actions" [NSZ = Narodowe Siły Zbrojne - National Armed Forces, right-wing nationalist, anti-communist Polish partisan organization] about the raising of contributions from local inhabitants who ravished the graves in Treblinka;

• A vivid description of the site and the pilfering by a member of an investigative delegation from Warsaw, Karol Ogrodowczyk;

• An activity report by militia commandant of Kosów Lacki about (futile) measures taken by his unit against the pilferers;

• A photograph from an action against the pilferers undertaken by a militia unit from Ostrowa Mazowieckie, shown in the Gazeta Wyborcza article and in my review thereof.

Why didn't Hargis read the article, instead of jumping to convenient conclusions based on a statement of Dr. Neander’s? (This statement is not contradicted by the existence of the above-mentioned documents, by the way – a few half-hearted actions against the Treblinka scavengers don’t change the fact that these people's disgraceful activity, which went on for 15 years after the roundup resulting in the above-mentioned photograph, was allowed to proceed unhindered most of the time.)

Well, maybe he did and is lying – though he's obviously as afraid of this article as he is of anything that comes from the RODOH forum, the name of which is automatically changed into "shills" by the forum software on the Cesspit, lest one of Hargis’ fellow "truth-seekers" take a look through the telescope.

Hargis:

On the contrary, making the alleged finds known and visible at the time would have been a bonanza to the propaganda ...

What, making it known and visible that noble Polish citizens were digging up the ashes and bones of murdered Jews in search of whatever valuables the victims may have taken with them to their graves? As often before, Hargis shows that his reasoning, apart from being based on nothing other than hollow preconceived notions, leaves much to be desired in terms of logic.

The aspect of the Treblinka grave site was made known and visible at the time, by the way – not for the purpose of propaganda, but within the scope of a criminal site investigation carried out by Examining Judge Lukaszkiewicz, the results of which were summarized in a protocol presented by the Soviets at the Nuremberg Trial as Document USSR-344 (see my article Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure …) and included in the report about The Treblinka Extermination Camp by the Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, published in 1946. But then, who would have expected Hargis to read even his own "Revisionist" sources (the Polish site investigation report is quoted in my above-mentioned article after Mattogno & Graf’s Treblinka screed) before shooting the bull?

Hargis:

IF the 900,000 Jews tale was true.

900,000 happens to be the figure given by Głuchowski and Kowalski, which I criticized in my review. Is Hargis' mention of the same figure a coincidence, or did Hargis read my translation of the Gazeta Wyborcza article? In the latter case, he’s lying rather stupidly about the article’s contents.

Hargis:

This is hardly credible evidence for a desperate cover story whose intent is to claim that the alleged mass grave for an alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka (10 X The Rose Bowl) cannot be found because there were 'illegal' excavations.

First of all, what would Hargis consider "credible evidence", and what rules or standards of criminal investigation and/or historical research - if any - are his requirements based on? This is a question I would love to directly ask the fellow one day, though I expect him to run away from it like other "Revisionists" to whom this question has been asked.

Second, whence did Hargis derive the supposed "intent" of the Gazeta Wyborcza article? The source seems to be none other than his own paranoia, for nowhere in the article is it stated that the "the alleged mass grave for an alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka" cannot be found because of the robbery-digging. There is just one mention of the robbery-digging "blurring the traces of the German mass crime" (which it certainly did, independently of the extent to which the original mass graves remained identifiable), and that is contained in one of those official Polish reports that Hargis claims do not exist. From my translation:

In the archives of the IPN there is the activity report of the militia commandant of Kosów Lacki: "The area was guarded by unidentified armed persons, who barred access to non-adepts and stood guard for those who dug out the remaining watches, jewelry or gold (...) This situation led to blurring the traces of the German mass crime, and there was the risk of an epidemic of diseases dangerous for people. (...) We carried out a roundup and expelled the human hyenas, but they doggedly returned to take up again their interrupted search."

Third, who is supposed to have "alleged" that all victims of Treblinka extermination camp were dumped into one single mass grave? The eyewitness testimonies addressing this issue that I know of mention several mass graves in the "death camp" area of Treblinka extermination camp.

The "Rose Bowl" herring seems to have been borrowed from our old friend "denierbud", by the way. It is one of the arguments that the Ugly Voice fellow (who is probably identical with Hargis' acolyte "Carto’s Cutlass Supreme") uses to impress suckers, like in his clip # 13.

Hargis:

Only with the 'holocaust' can people get away with this junk.

It would be far more appropriate to say that only on a forum like the "CODOH Revisionist Forum", which Hargis controls by deleting inconvenient posts and banning inconvenient posters like this writer, one can get away with writing junk such as has once more been produced by Hargis. On an uncensored open discussion forum like RODOH, such junk would be taken apart by evidence-backed arguments and slapped around the poster's ears – which Hargis probably knows very well, as he has never been known to debate on a forum where he cannot control the debate.

Hargis:

I should also note that any mass grave, especially one of the size alleged at Treblinka, would still, today, leave a massive, easily detected footprint. 'illegal excavations' or not.

… says "Hannover" Hargis, the self-appointed expert in detecting mass graves, without informing the readers why mass graves emptied of their contents, then refilled with human ashes, bone fragments and soil, then leveled off and planted with lupines and then excavated over a period of 15 years by robbery-diggers even using explosives to blast holes in the ground, should leave "a massive, easily detected footprint". Though I’m no expert either, my common sense tells me that if anything left "a massive, easily detected footprint" under these conditions it would have been the robbery-digging, and this seems to have been so indeed. From my translation of the Gazeta Wyborcza article:

"When we went around the memorial we found slots in the area," we say when bidding farewell to the director. "Judging by the trees growing inside them they must be several dozen years old. Are these pits from the diggings?" - "No ... those are from artillery shells. In 1944 the front line was here for some weeks."[…] Martyna Rusiniak thinks that a part of the pits are the hyena's heritage. Especially from the time when bombs were used for "extraction". The young historian shows us photos of the largest postwar excavation sites. The pits have a length of ten meters, one of them looks like the construction pit of a several-story building.

Hargis

The liars have not and cannot show us the alleged mass grave for the alleged 900,000 Jews at Treblinka.

Actually the "liars" (Hargis probably means criminal investigators and historians who have documented the mass killings at Treblinka) have shown eyewitness, documentary and physical evidence that allows for only one reasonable conclusion, the conclusion that about 750,000 people were murdered at Treblinka extermination camp. This article explains how documentary evidence to the magnitude of the killing is corroborated by the findings of Examining Judge Lukaszkiewicz on site.

With all available evidence pointing to mass murder and none suggesting anything else, "Revisionists" are not in a position to play the expectant princess and yell "show me". They are the ones who have to show something, namely an evidence-backed alternative scenario about the fate of the hundreds of thousands who were deported to Treblinka. This they are not able to do, hard though they (especially their gurus Mattogno & Graf) have tried and despite the fact that any scenario other than mass murder should be far better documented (for the Nazis would have had no reason to try getting rid of the documentation) than the scenario that becomes apparent from all known evidence.

Without any evidence supporting "Revisionist" claims or insinuations as to what "actually happened" to all these people, folks like Hargis can whine and squeal all they like. They will never have anything like a case.

When No Doubt Is Left

When I first made the discovery that "Hannover" of CODOH Forum fame is actually Jonnie Allen Hargis of Pacific Palisades, Calif., I phoned Bradley Smith and challenged him on this point. He neither confirmed nor denied what I had discovered. However, when I said that a few weeks (maybe months) later that Smith had confirmed my suspicions, he vociferously defended himself, stating that he had said nothing to reveal Hargis's identity.

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I left it alone, but the issue came up again over the past weekend, when a prominent Holocaust denier (more on him in a few weeks) outed Hargis in a mass e-mailing. I felt it incumbent upon myself to e-mail Bradley Smith, which I did:

Bradley,

Are you still going to exist that "Hannover" isn't Jonnie Hargis with this latest from [name deleted]?

a.m.

Bradley stonewalled me in return:

Dear Mathis: I do not expect to "exist," unfortunately, long enough to see you let go of this one. --B

Well, he's right. And indeed, why should I? After nine years of my going round and round with Hargis, he continues the very same behavior that inspired me to track him down in "real life" to begin with. I rejoindered:

Bradley,

All I've ever asked for from Hargis is an apology. That's all I've ever asked for to "let go of this one." But the bastard is just too hard-headed.

As for your refusal to admit what is now so painfully obvious, I don't even know what to say.

a.m.

To which the old man responded:

Andrew: that's a start. You don't know what to say. When that happens, it's ususally a good idea to remain silent. --B

So Bradley will go to his grave protecting Hargis. That much seems obvious.

The question that remains for me is, frankly, why. I can't think of any person who has done more damage to the "revisionist" cause than Hargis, essentially eviscerating the idea of "open debate" that Smith has ostensibly been championing for three decades now. All of which makes one wonder whether Bradley Smith was ever really interested in an open debate at all.

Maybe all of this simply confirms what I've always suspected: That Smith, a failed writer, got into Holocaust denial because he knew he'd become famous for it, and he wouldn't suffer the consequences from saying what he says and doing what he does that so many of his colleagues (Zündel, Frölich, Rudolf, et al.) have. That makes Bradley Smith an opportunist, and a coward to boot.

An opportunist and coward: It strikes me these are two good words to describe Jonnie Hargis.

Well, birds of a feather

Another Note to "Bankdraft"

There is a discussion forum which, unlike the Cesspit run by Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis, offers open, uncensored debate.

It is called RODOH, which stands for "Real Open Debate on the Holocaust" (the pun on the misnamed "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust" is intended).

"Bankdraft" is herewith invited to leave the cozy safety of the Führerbunker and join the discussion on RODOH.

Note to Bankdraft

The opening blog on this site (dated March 23rd, 2006) states:

Let it be stated from the outset that we do not endorse censorship of any kind; nor are we in favour of anti-Holocaust Denial laws being passed in Britain or the United States. We would prefer that continental countries such as Germany, Austria and France did not make martyrs out of Deniers.

So perhaps you need to do some reading before mouthing off on the Cesspit, which is (lest we forget) a censored forum, despite the fact that its moderator, Jonnie Hargis (who lies about his identity), claims that it is a forum for open debate? There's a good chap.

Bradley Smith's Guide to Literature

Bradley introduces us to his literary hero, but can't spell his name correctly.

CODOH Demographics

In January 1953, Paul Rassinier wrote an article for Der Weg in which he claimed that "the majority (80%) of the Jews in the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia" were rescued from the Nazis by Soviet evacuation procedures. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet noted here, Rassinier based this claim on a single source - a Soviet newspaper article by David Bergelson - that had no primary corroboration. This single-source claim was repeated by deniers Richard Verrall in 1974 and Walter Sanning in 1983. In April 2003, fifty years after Rassinier's article, CODOH repeated the single-source propaganda claim on this thread. What does the thread tell us about the state of revisionism, and CODOH's intellectual bankruptcy?

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Unlike Sanning, CODOH moderator Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis makes no attempt to fabricate a pseudo-scientific method based on fraud, deception and manipulation. For Hargis, it is sufficient to state a faith position:

Jews went where Jews are.

Look at Israel.. how many Jews were there before WWII? How many are there now? Jews were literally flooding out of Europe immigrating to Israel, US, Canada, S. America, S. Africa..you name it.

It never occurs to Hargis that the onus is on him to prove this claim with demographic evidence from the countries concerned. He also embarasses his fellow revisionists, Mattogno and Graf, by showing that they - like Rassinier, Verrall and Sanning - are forced to rely on hearsay from journalists rather than proper historical and demographic sources:

Mattogno/Jürgen quoted in their Treblinka book a Jewish journalist Louis Rapoport from his book La guerra di Stalin contro gli Ebrei, Rizzoli, Mailand 1991

This is the best that CODOH can do. Like all its fellow fraudsters in the 'revisionist' school, therefore, CODOH does not have a clue how to study a demographic or historical subject seriously.

CODOH Lies and Ignorance: Himmler's Visit to Minsk

On October 22nd, 2007, the appropriately named 'Mr Nobody' started this CODOH thread, which gave a false account of how Holocaust websites have described Himmler's visit to Minsk. The thread was particularly significant because it exposed the shortcomings of three CODOH regulars: 'Mr Nobody', 'nathan' and 'Laurentz Dahl'. It also exposed the dishonest moderation of Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis, because Hargis never checked the idiocies being posted, nor did he ask the posters concerned to verify their sources. Here's how the lunacy unfolded.

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Firstly, Mr Nobody claimed, falsely, that Holocaust websites derive all their information about Himmler's visit to Minsk from Bach-Zelewski's testimony to the Eichmann trial. Mr Nobody offered no evidence for this assertion, and did not quote from the websites concerned. His assertion can be refuted through a simple exercise. Mr Nobody claimed to have conducted a search on the words "Himmler Minsk", but when I did a search on those words, the third hit that came up was Richard Evans' submission to the Irving-Lipstadt trial, which contains two facts that immediately falsify Mr Nobody's claim. The first is that Bach-Zelewski gave evidence to the Wolff trial in 1964, in which he revealed that:

Himmler declared after the shootings that the hard struggle that the German people [Volk] had to undertake made harsh measures such as this imperative. The Jews were the bearers of world Bolshevism and they must therefore be destroyed. He and Hitler had assumed responsibility for this before the court of history. The task was difficult, but it had to be carried out.

Evans' second fact is that "Bach-Zelewski's account of Himmler's words was corroborated by no fewer than seven other witnesses at the [Wolff] trial," including the leader of EK 8, Otto Bradfisch.

Evans thus shows that there is plenty of testimony, from later than the Eichmann trial, which shows that the Minsk shootings were genocidal in intent. I would submit that Mr Nobody's search brought up this link but he dishonestly chose not to mention it.

Secondly, Mr Nobody made a great meal out of the fact that the content of Holocaust websites differs from the claims in Bach-Zelewski's diary. Mr Nobody concluded that the websites have therefore embellished the factual record. However, a review of these supposed "embellishments" shows that the websites have simply used other sources that are more authoritative than the diary. For example, Mr Nobody said:

1. the date is often given as the 15th August (2 days before Zelewski's Diary Entry).

A simple Google search would have told Mr Nobody that the 15th August is the date in Himmler's diary. There is simply no excuse for this willful stupidity and dishonest failure to check sources.

Thirdly, Hargis then intervened and made the moronic comment that:

it needs to be said the the 'partisans' (called 'terrorists' today), were subject to legal execution under international law.

Hargis ignored the fact that Himmler's diary entry referred to him witnessing an "execution of partisans and Jews" (Der Dienstkalendar Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, p.193), therefore the Jews killed were not partisans.

Fourthly, Laurentz Dahl then joined the idiots' chorus with an extract from a press report on the Wolff trial which stated that Wolff had denied any knowledge of the mass shootings of Jews and also that Wolff had claimed that:

he believed only partisans and saboteurs were shot.

Dahl would have seen that Wolff's defense was false had he read Evans' commentary on the trial (which was my third hit on Google as noted above), showing that eight witnesses, including Bach-Zelewski and Bradfisch, had all heard Himmler declare at Minsk that:

The Jews were the bearers of world Bolshevism and they must therefore be destroyed.

Fifthly, this moronic babble was then joined by 'nathan', who deliberately misquoted the evidence given by Christopher Browning to the Irving-Lipstadt trial:

[Bach-Zelewski's diary] was mentioned during the Irving trial by Professor Browning, who deemed it “doctored and sanitized” because it contains no evidence of genocide.

This was simply a lie. Browning never said "it contains no evidence of genocide". Browning simply claimed that Bach-Zelewski doctored the diary to remove evidence of his own guilt:

He did send apparently his doctored and sanitized diary to the Bundesarchiv all nicely typed up and all references to things that you have referred to, that he probably has many hundreds of thousands on his conscious [sic] nicely deleted.

In conclusion, therefore, we can see from this one thread alone how CODOH posters, as a group, have colluded in the distortion of evidence to make false claims about Holocaust websites and distinguished Holocaust historians. Jonnie Hargis has been the orchestrator-in-chief of this symphony of lies, but he has employed a full ensemble of monkeys and useful idiots to post distorted and mendacious claims on his behalf.

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

Berg's Big Lie

If anyone needs proof that Fritz Berg is a charlatan, look no further than this thread which he started on the RODOH forum. In his introductory post, Berg cited a study by Risser and Bjonsch which he claimed "completely supports my view that the vast majority of Reinhardt Camp victims would have appeared RED if they had been killed with carbon monoxide from either diesel exhaust or from gasoline engine exhaust".

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Anyone who reads Risser and Bjonsch's abstract, cited in that first post, can see quite clearly that this is a lie. The first sentence of the abstract states that:

The aim of this retrospective survey of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths in Vienna was to determine whether the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis is a reliable finding for the coroner to suspect a carbon monoxide-related death immediately at the death scene.

Risser and Bjonsch were therefore studying the ability of coroners to detect the cherry-pink colour associated with livor mortis. A simple internet search reveals that livor mortis is a condition that takes hours to produce the full cherry-pink coloration. For example, as this medical expert explains:

...the color of death, or liver mortis, starts coming on in about two hours and gets more and more intense for about eight to ten hours and then just remains there

It is therefore dishonest to apply this study's finding to a critique of the Reinhardt eyewitness testimony, because the latter is describing corpses immediately after death.

Defenders of Berg may claim that this is an honest error. He's an old man and maybe his failing eyesight did not pick out the words 'livor mortis' in the text, despite it being in the first sentence of the abstract. If this were the case, however, one would expect Berg to stop using the source as soon as the error was pointed out to him. However, a quick visit to the CODOH forum, hosted by the dim-witted faker Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis, reveals that the 'error' was exposed before Berg started his RODOH thread. On Tuesday September 18th, 2007, 'jnovitz' posted this information:

A distinction should be drawn between liver mortis, which is blood leaking out of the vessels and infusing the tissue - a process that happens several hours after death and the distinctive cherry pink of carbon monoxide poisoning, shown in the top photo.

Berg read this post because he responded in part to it, so he must have known that a study of livor mortis could not be applied to Reinhardt eyewitness testimony, in which the corpses were being described immediately after being gassed. Despite this knowledge, however, Berg started his RODOH thread on Saturday October 13th, 2007, 25 days after his central claim had been debunked on CODOH.

Is it a tribute to the rank stupidity of Hargis that he allowed this clear evidence of Berg's dishonesty to remain on the CODOH forum for us all to discover? Or was he hanging Berg out to dry, bearing in mind that Hargis and Bradley Smith were very critical of Berg here?

Fratricide

In recent months, the denier movement has engaged in numerous episodes of family squabbling and backstabbing. Fritz Berg has attacked Weber; Berg in turn has been rebuked by Bradley Smith; and Grubach has conducted a nasty campaign of open letters against Irving. What are the causes of these squabbles, and what do they tell us about the current state of the movement?

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I would argue that there are two key trends at work. Firstly, deniers tend to conduct turf wars during periods when denial is enjoying brief public exposure. Secondly, denial is simply exhibiting the same factionalism and essentialism that can be found in any other cult or extremist political movement. The difference is that 'revisionism' claims to be an intellectual movement based on 'evidence', rather than the faith position that it clearly occupies in reality.

With regard to turf wars, it is no coincidence that two of the bitterest periods of denier backstabbing coincided with the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial and the Tehran denial conference. The former led to accusations that Irving had not deployed the full range of denier arguments. The latter led to Mark Weber making a TV appearance that caused Berg to fulminate against his failure to deny the Holocaust unequivocally. These episodes require deeper exploration.

The Irving trial was exploited by Rudolf to position himself as, effectively, the denial guru of the moment. In so doing, Rudolf neglected to mention that Irving had been obliged to ditch Rudolf's fatuous 'report' from his appeal due to Rudolf's fraudulent use of sources in the report. However, Rudolf's new guru status did not protect him from denier feuds for long. In 2004, Fritz Berg launched a scathing public attack on Rudolf for publishing a paper by Charles Provan that debunked Berg's crackpot theories on gassing:

Dear Germar,

What was your purpose for publishing that essay by Provan? Do you think there is any merit to what he has written? You dummy! You obviously still think there might be some merit to Provan’s horseshit. Go adjust your head. You should have seen through Provan’s drivel the moment you read it.

This brings us to the current fratricide post-Tehran. Berg has predictably been at the forefront of attacks on Weber's evasions and backsliding. However, Berg's own conduct brought a public rebuke from Bradley Smith:

Fritz, that includes you. One of the reasons you are unable [to] help create such an organization is demonstrated by how you have addressed the issue of Weber and IHR in this thread. I am not saying that you are saying anything that is false. I am saying that the way you address these issues is so divisive that I do not believe you will ever be able to participate, much less spark, the organization that we all have a sense that we need. You do brilliant, unique, independent work, you have done it for years, for decades, you are one of the major contributors, internationally, to revisionist studies, but you have no idea how to deal publicly with organizational or personal issues that you want to address.

So where does this leave us? I would draw an analogy with the fate of fascist groups in western politics. These groups enjoy occasional bursts of publicity that are invariably followed by internal squabbles, essentialist discussions of ideology, and the rooting out of heretics. The witch trials of Weber and Irving are simply the latest manifestations, albeit highly entertaining, of this factionalism in the faith-based cult of Holocaust denial.

Hargis and Grubach: The Laurel and Hardy of Holocaust Denial

You may be wondering why Holocaust Denial has less credibility these days than Lord Haw Haw, Tokyo Rose or Comical Ali. Part of the answer is that its intellectual cupboard, which was already thinly populated, has been all-but-deserted, and is now being guarded by two charlatans whose embarassing antics have even caused that paragon of honesty, David Irving, to complain about their behaviour.

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A survey of their recent exchanges with Irving suggests that entrusting the defence of revisionism to these clowns was the equivalent of asking a man with two broken arms to catch someone jumping from a burning building.

The first of these jokers, Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis, is described by Irving as "not the most cerebral of my supporters". The dim-witted Hargis once sent Irving a doctored photo that offended even this veteran denier:

The photo had two identical columns of smoke, obviously created in Photoshop; I recall that that gentleman, also called Hannover, admitted later, when I exposed the fakery to him, that yes, he was responsible, hoping to prove how easily photos could be faked.

Hargis 'moderates' the CODOH forum with a lack of subtlety that would have made the editor of Pravda blush. Andrew Mathis and Nick Terry have both had posts on CODOH censored. Moreover, Hargis carries out this censorship in the name of 'free speech'. This is Orwellian doublethink at its finest: an advocate of open debate who refuses to tolerate open debate.

Just in case the he hypocrisy meter has not already shot through the roof, Paul Grubach has come along to reinforce the point that revisionism is being defended by arguments that are as sturdy as a chocolate kettle. Grubach has made a public nuisance of himself over the last few years by sending open letters to notable writers challenging them to debate. Having exhausted the list of notable writers, Grubach has recently turned his attention towards a notorious one: the aforementioned D. Irving. However, when RODOH forum member Steve Mock challenged Grubach to a debate on the RODOH site, Grubach suddenly adopted the evasions and excuses that he normally accuses the reluctant recipients of his illiterate ramblings of deploying.

In conclusion, therefore, if history really does repeat itself first as tragedy then as farce, Hargis and Grubach are actors in the latter.

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.

This is a serious case of ... well, "Revisionism"

In his CODOH post of Thu Jul 26, 2007 2:08 pm, my old friend "Haldan", aka "k0nsl" aka Jonathan Andersson, committed the imprudence of mentioning my name.

While I usually let the Cesspit lunatics spout their boring nonsense as they please, when they mention me in their babblings I take a closer look at the same, and that’s what I’m going to do now regarding Mr. Andersson’s post.

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Andersson starts out as follows:

Hannover wrote:
This is absolutely embarrassing.
from:
http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/Camps/TreblinkaEng.html

This is supposed to be a mass grave that held 900,000 Jews at Treblinka.

It sure is. I tried to ask Nick Terry, Roberto and I believe even Andrew E. Mathis about this strange "mass grave". I said, all I see is wooden planks and some form of sheet material - "where are the bodies, where are the human remains and how could so many corpses fit in such a small grave?" No reasonable response from neither of those self-proclaimed Holocaust Experts. None.

I don’t remember where on the RODOH forum Andersson asked those silly questions, and it would be too much of an effort to roam through old threads trying to find the one he may have been referring to, if existing. (Typically dishonest "Revisionist" that he is, Andersson of course doesn’t give his readers the opportunity to check his claims by providing a link or a thread title. Not that anybody on the Cesspit, where the name "RODOH" cannot even be spelled out, would be likely to check, of course.) But if the bugger asked such questions, the likely answer was that

a) the photograph shows but one small section of one out of several mass graves in which the bodies at Treblinka were buried, and allows for no estimate about the size of the grave it shows let alone that of any other grave; and

b) if the bodies are mostly not visible (there are arguably three at the top of the grave that can be made out), this is because they are covered by wooden planks and what looks like tarpaulin sheets, which may have been related to an effort on the part of the camp staff to stretch the capacity of the mass graves by "top down" burning, or (see the comment on this site) to an experiment on whether the bodies could be effectively burned inside the mass graves.

If this answer was not "reasonable" enough for Mr. Andersson, that’s because his criterion of reasonability is a rather peculiar one that he shares with most if not all fellow "Revisionists": whatever fits his preconceived notions is necessarily "reasonable", and what does not fit those notions can never be.

After this instructive introduction, Mr. Andersson turns to downright lying when he writes the following:

I have that discussion saved somewhere and will look it through sometime. Very embarrassing! However, all three of the gentlemen stuck by the insane claim that its a mass grave which held 900,000 Jews.

That’s about as thick a straw-man as I have ever seen. Neither Nick, nor Andrew, nor I maintain that the number of victims of Treblinka was necessarily as high as 900,000 (the documentary evidence rather points to an order of magnitude of 750,000 to 800,000, and the very site that Andersson's brother-in-spirit Jonni "Hannover" Hargis started out making a fuss about states that "Jews from the Polish Districts of Warsaw, Radom, Bialystok and Lublin as well as others from Theresienstadt concentration camp, Macedonia and the Reich comprised he nearly 750,000 people who would die in the gas chambers of Treblinka between July 1942 and April 1943"), and neither of us has claimed that the bodies of the victims, insofar as they were not incinerated right after the killing during the later stages of Treblinka’s operation, were buried in one single mass grave. My take on the number, size and capacity of the mass graves at Treblinka is explained in my articles Polish investigations of the Treblinka killing site were a complete failure … and Videos, a must see!, among others.

The next straw-man dished up by Andersson is just as mendacious:

A mass grave of wooden planks and sheets spread here and there is evidence enough for those gentlemen that the Germans did away with 900,000 Jews - yet can not explain why there are no human remains.

Actually the bigmouth would have a hard time finding a statement where either Nick, Andrew or I ever invoked this photograph, which like all photographs can but illustrate a small fraction of the events in question and constitutes no more than one out of many elements of evidence, as "evidence enough" for the mass murder committed at Treblinka. I actually don’t remember having addressed that photograph except in the context of "Revisionist" ramblings about it, like in my RODOH posts # 8582 and # 8588. Evidence to the mass killings at Treblinka consists of

• the depositions of numerous eyewitnesses, including and especially former members of the SS staff testifying or on trial for their crimes before West German courts,

• documentary evidence that allows for reconstructing the deportations to Treblinka and shows Treblinka to have been a final destination for deportees taken there, a place where people were taken in order to be destroyed and a place from which an unbearable stench of corpses emanated and befouled the air,

• the physical evidence discussed in my above-mentioned articles and

• demographic evidence showing that none but a few dozen escapees from among the hundreds of thousands of deportees were ever seen or heard of again after entering Treblinka.

As to the claimed absence of human remains, Andersson should start doing something about his ignorance by reading this article, which is based on sources quoted by "Revisionist" guru Carlo Mattogno.

The continuation of Andersson’s straw-man:

Actually, I find it all a bit hilarious; a tiny picture, some wooden planks and a bit of yarn here and there, and you've got a "mass grave" of Jews.

is just plain infantile and yet another indication of the inability of "Revisionists" to understand that context is the name of the game: the picture in question is only known to show a part of a Treblinka mass grave because it is part of an album of photos taken by Treblinka’s second-in-command Kurt Franz, who in turn described the mass killing and body disposal procedure at Treblinka at his trial before a West German court (in which he was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment), and whose description is corroborated by those of other eyewitnesses and further evidence independent of him. Without this context, the photograph in question would be completely meaningless, and even within that context it is just one out of many exhibits, which provides no meaningful information except in connection with other exhibits.

Then Andersson opens his mouth real wide:

In the meantime, there are a endless list of real mass graves where the victims are German, Polish, Latvian and other Europeans, everywhere - easily identified as such!

I would love to see the fellow trying to show but a few examples out of the "endless list" he claims. As I pointed out in this article, only a fraction of the mass graves containing victims of Stalin’s purges or penal camps, of crimes committed by Soviet soldiers against German civilians in 1944/45 or of postwar expulsion atrocities against ethnic Germans in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other countries, have so far been found. On the other hand, the former occupied territories of the Soviet Union are full of Nazi-made mass graves investigated by Soviet state commissions, whose findings are largely corroborated by evidence independent of the Soviets, as in the examples mentioned in Nick’s article Mass Graves in the Polesia and in my article Neither the Soviets nor the Poles have found any mass graves with even only a few thousand bodies …. Hundreds of such mass graves have lately been located again in the course of the Yahad in Unum project.

Finally comes the icing on Andersson’s cake:

But here we are looking at a microscopical picture of a small hole with some wooden planks in it, and that is evidence of murder by the Germans, of 900,000 thousand Jews - almost a million people.

No, Mr. Andersson. It’s just a photo showing a small fraction of one of the several mass graves in which, as becomes apparent from a multitude of eyewitness, documentary, physical and demographic evidence, hundreds of thousands of people murdered at Treblinka were buried before they were disinterred and incinerated in order to reduce the amount of incriminating evidence. It is but one of the many pieces that make up the puzzle of evidence to the Treblinka mass killings – nothing more, and nothing less.

Andersson ends his sermon as follows:

Picture that.

Impossible.

Yeah, just picture the inane trash that folks like Andersson are capable of uttering in all seriousness. I would consider it impossible that such nuts as Andersson are in existence, were it not for the clear evidence that they actually do exist.

I Smell the Wood Burning

Jonnie Hargis, the UCLA library assistant who posts to the Führerbunker as "Hannover," took some time out from his schedule on July 26 to "think," as he put it, offering this steaming pile of pony loaf, begging the question of what goes on in Hargis's head when he doesn't have "thoughts."

It brought to mind this list of 10 traits of conspiracy theorists by Donna Ferentes, which was I think originally drafted to describe 9/11 "troofers."

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Consider the mind of a Holocaust denier, though, with regard to these traits:

1. Arrogance: So I think anyone familiar with his "work" will agree that Hargis is arrogant. So is Fritz Berg. So is Robert Faurisson. And David Irving. I've met very few humble Holocaust deniers. Granted, I'm not a humble person myself. But is the average normative Holocaust historian quite so arrogant? I know a couple of prominent historians personally. Are some arrogant? Sure. Is it an overwhelming trait of Holocaust historians? No.
   
   Note how Ferentes typifies this arrogance. No Holocaust historian I know or have read has ever defined him- or herself as a "truth-seeker." There have to be at least half a dozen variations on that name as handles at the Führerbunker.
   
   
2. Relentlessness. I think this is typified best by how often something like the "Auschwitz four-million gambit" is used by deniers, no matter how often it's pointed out how easily disproved it is.
   
   
3. Inability to answer questions. Read here and see how Hargis refuses to answer a simple yes-or-no question.
   
   
4. Fondness for certain stock phrases. Do yourself a search on "Holocaust industry" at the Fuhrerbunker sometime.
   
   
5. Inability to employ or understand Occam's Razor. A sad example is found here. What our little friend seems not to understand is that there is no leap in logic when you have Adolf Eichmann testifying that code words were, in fact, used.
   
   
6. Inability to tell good evidence from bad. Writes Ferentes, "Conspiracy theorists have no place for peer-review, for scientific knowledge, for the respectability of sources." Find me a tenured U.S. historian who denies the Holocaust.
   
   
7. Inability to withdraw. See a key example here.
   
   
8. Leaping to conclusions. Again, from Ferentes: "Small inconsistencies in the account of an event, small unanswered questions, small problems in timing of differences in procedure from previous events of the same kind are all more than adequate to declare the 'official' account clearly and definitively discredited." The consistencies in eyewitness testimony far outnumber inconsistencies and the inconsistencies are much smaller in magnitude than the similarities.
   
   
9. Using previous conspiracies as evidence to support their claims. Take, e.g., Don Heddesheimer's claim that it was claimed that six million Jews were killed in World War I. But no such claim was ever made. Oh, well.
   
   
10. It's always a conspiracy.

I'll give the final point entirely to Ferentes:

A person who always says the same thing, and says it over and over again is, of course, commonly considered to be, if not a monomaniac, then at very least, a bore.

Yes, indeed.