From mvanalst@rbi.com Mon Oct 28 13:08:38 PST 1996
Article: 77536 of alt.revisionism
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From: mvanalst@rbi.com (Mark Van Alstine)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: The Hoess Testimony BITES THE DUST!!!!
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 12:02:18 -0800
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In article <5521j1$1t@is05.micron.net>, kurtstel@micron.net wrote:


> At the Nuremberg Tribunal, chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson charged that 
> the Germans invented" a device to instantaneously "vaporize" 20,000 Jews near 
> Auschwitz "in such a way that there was no trace left of them." IMT blue 
> series, Vol. 16, p. 529-530. (June 21, 1946).  No reputable historian now 
> accepts this fanciful tale. 

Obviously, Herr Wankermeister is sharing whatever swill of the week the
gonadotoxic Giwer-swine is guzzling. The fallacy of this particular denier
lie has already been exposed by Mr. McCarthy or the duplicitous sham it
is:
 

=============================================================================

[archival note: the following article was originally posted on
October 22, 1995. knm]

In article , jamie@voyager.net
(Jamie McCarthy) wrote:

> What you are about to read is a long and crystal-clear demonstration of
> the goal of Holocaust-denial, or Holocaust "revisionism."  It has taken
> me a while to prepare all this documentation, but I feel that it's worth
> the effort, because rarely have I seen such a perfectly obvious
> demonstration of what the goal of revisionism is.
> 
> That goal is:  to fool you.
> 
> Normally, when I prepare a refutation of some piece of Holocaust-denial,
> I start with their lies and work my way around to the truth.  Normally,
> I feel that doing this will help people recognize the process that's
> involved in evaluating and analyzing their lies.  Those of us who would
> remember the Holocaust can only do so much to oppose the endless stream
> of lies, and it is more important to know the _process_ of refutation
> than the refutations of the individual lies themselves.
> 
> This time, however, I'm going to start with the truth and wend my way
> through the various lies.  My reasons will become clear.
> 
> Rather than "lies," I should perhaps say "half-truths."  I've found that
> Holocaust-deniers prefer to take statements out of context, to twist
> their meaning slightly, rather than to actually make up facts out of
> thin air.
> 
> This is the history of one such half-truth:  a single paragraph of
> distortion, tracked over the last seven months
> 
> I said I'd start with the truth, and here is the truth.  At the famous
> Nuremberg trials, on June 21st, 1946, the United States' Chief of
> Counsel, Mr. Justice Jackson, was cross-examining the war criminal
> Albert Speer.  This is documented in the so-called "blue series,"
> offically titled _Trial of the Major War Criminals_, Volume 16,
> pp. 529-530:
> 
>    MR. JUSTICE JACKSON:  And certain experiments were also conducted
>    and certain researches conducted in atomic energy, were they not?
> 
>    SPEER:  We had not got as far as that, unfortunately, because the
>    finest experts we had in atomic research had emigrated to America,
>    and this had thrown us back a great deal in our research, so that
>    we still needed another year or two in order to achieve any results
>    in the splitting of the atom.
> 
>    MR. JUSTICE JACKSON:  The policy of driving people out who didn't
>    agree with Germany hadn't produced very good dividends, had it?
> 
>    SPEER:  Especially in this sphere it was a great disadvantage to
>    us.
> 
>    MR. JUSTICE JACKSON:  Now, I have certain information, which was
>    placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near
>    Auschwitz and I would like to ask you if you heard about it or knew
>    about it.  The purpose of the experiment was to find a quick and
>    complete way of destroying people without the delay and trouble of
>    shooting and gassing and burning, as it had been carried out, and
>    this is the experiment, as I am advised. A village, a small village
>    was provisionally erected, with temporary structures, and in it
>    approximately 20,000 Jews were put. By means of this newly invented
>    weapon of destruction, these 20,000 people were eradicated almost
>    instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace left of
>    them;  that it developed, the explosive developed, temperatures of
>    from 400 to 500 degrees centigrade and destroyed them without
>    leaving any trace at all.
> 
>    Do you know about that experiment?
> 
>    SPEER:  No, and I consider it utterly improbable.  If we had such a
>    weapon under preparation, I should have known about it.  But we did
>    not have such a weapon.  It is clear that in chemical warfare
>    attempts were made on both sides to carry out research on all the
>    weapons one could think of, because one did not know which party
>    would start chemical warfare first.
> 
>    MR. JUSTICE JACKSON:  The reports, then, of a new and secret weapon
>    were exaggerated for the purpose of keeping the German people in
>    the war?
> 
>    SPEER:  That was the case mostly during the last phase of the war.
>    From August, or rather June or July 1944 on I very often went to the
>    front.  I visited about 40 front-line divisions in their sectors and
>    could not help seeing that the troops, just like the German people,
>    were given hopes about a new weapon coming, new weapons and
>    wonder-weapons which, without requiring the use of soldiers, without
>    military forces, would guarantee victory.  In this belief lies the
>    secret why so many people in Germany offered their lives, although
>    common sense told them that the war was over.  They believed that in
>    the near future this new weapon would arrive.
> 
> Justice Jackson's line of questioning was to analyze the mentality of
> the German people and the German troops throughout the war.  In this
> cross-examination, he was interested in the techniques of Nazi internal
> propaganda, and what role it played in the Nazi committment to fighting
> the war until the very end, to fighting "total war."
> 
> In other words, he indulged in this line of questioning about "atomic
> energy" and the "experiment near Auschwitz" in order to ascertain that
> they _were_ propaganda stories, and to ascertain _why_ such propaganda
> was being spread.
> 
> In March of 1995, Don Van Handel (donvh@aol.com) posted an article to
> Usenet called "Fact File No. 4."  In this so-called "Fact File," we saw
> a number of quotations from the "blue series," all taken out of context
> in an effort to give the wrong impression.  Here is the "setup" for the
> various quotations:
> 
>    Note: The fact file series is intended to present facts of history,
>    free from the polemics and misinformation so often presented in this
>    medium.Hopefully the facts contained herein will serve the cause of
>    truth in history.
>    
>    Note to educators and students:  Fact File no. 4 presents actual
>    excerpts from the Nuremberg Trial Transcripts. The Nuremberg Trials
>    documented countless Nazi atrocities including the now infamous gas
>    chambers. What most people do not realize is that many of the claims
>    documented at Nuremberg are no longer accepted by any reasonable
>    historians. Many of these "atrocities" have simply been
>    forgotten about. To many, these claims are nothing but a product of
>    allied war-time propaganda and post-war hysteria.
> 
> (Mr. Van Handel's point was that, because the Nuremberg prosecutors were
> wrong about these various Nazi atrocities, they were therefore wrong
> about the entire Holocaust. Specious reasoning, at best.)
> 
> The Jackson/Speer cross-examination was one of the quotations, given in
> bastardized form:
> 
>    IMT XVI - Mr. Justice Jackson: And certain experiments were also
>    conducted and certain researches conducted in atomic energy... An
>    experiment... was carried out near Auschwitz ... The purpose of the
>    experiment was to find a quick and complete way of destroying people
>    without the delay and trouble of shooting and gassing and burning,
>    as it had been carried out, and this is the experiment, as I am
>    advised.  A village, a small village was provisionally erected, with
>    temporary structures, and in it approximately 20,000 Jews were put. 
>    By means of this newly invented weapon of destruction, these 20,000
>    people were eradicated almost instantaneously, and in such a way
>    that there was no trace.
> 
> As you can see, the cross-examination testimony has been _so_ thoroughly
> mangled that it's not even evident that Mr. Jackson is examining a
> defendant -- it's presented as a monologue!
> 
> The entire section was carefully and selectively edited, to make it
> appear that Mr. Jackson was presenting a "claim documented at Nuremberg"
> about a wartime atrocity, instead of merely cross-examining a witness as
> to Nazi propaganda techniques.
> 
> And everything that might give away the fact that Mr. Jackson was
> _questioning_, not _accusing_, was carefully edited out. The ellipses in
> the passage above represent the following bits of text which might have
> given it away:
> 
>    1. "...were they not?"
>    2. "Now, I have certain information, which was placed in my
>        hands, of..."
>    3. "...and I would like to ask you if you heard about it or
>        knew about it."
> 
> There is obviously no way that someone could transcribe the passage from
> its source and _accidentally_ leave out all these phrases, so this is
> clearly a deliberate attempt to mislead the reader.  That's nothing new
> in Holocaust-denial;  Don Van Handel is simply one of the latest in a
> long line of deliberate falsifiers and "creative editors."  But how Greg
> Raven and Bradley Smith reacted to being told about this fraud turns out
> to be very interesting.
> 
> This article was first replied to by Ken McVay, shortly after it was
> posted,  on March 14th of this year. He responded to most of the "Fact
> File," including this section, to which his response was:
> 
>    You omitted Justice Jackson's question to Speer, and Speer's
>    response. Was there a reason you did that? (Jackson followed the
>    above comment with the question "Do you know about that
>    experiment?", to which Speer replied, "No, and I consider it utterly
>    improbable. If we had had such a weapon under preparation, I should
>    have known about it. But we did not have such a weapon.")
>    
>    Do you have further evidence which demonstrates that Mr. Speer was
>    not telling the truth?
>    
>    Is there some reason you neglected to include the rest of the
>    exchange between Jackson and Speer?
>    
>    Jackson: The reports, then, of a new and secret weapon were
>    exaggerated for the purpose of keeping the German people in the war?
>    
>    Speer: That was the case mostly during the last phase of the war...
> 
> Ken's article, as far as I can tell from my archives, received no
> further discussion.  (Mr. McVay's responses to most of the rest of Mr.
> Van Handel's article, though good points, won't be gone into here.)
> 
> Note especially that no further discussion from Greg Raven or any other
> Holocaust-denier was to be found.
> 
> Within a month of this being posted, Greg Raven had converted it into
> HTML format and made it available at his web site.
> 
> Fast-forward three months.
> 
> On July 19th, I sent email to Greg Raven concerning errors at his web
> site.  Since Mr. Raven has made it known that he deletes email copies of
> Usenet articles, I made sure to give my email the subject line:
> 
>    not from Usenet -- request to abide by your promise
> 
> I began this email by noting that Mr. Raven's home page contained the
> following promise:
> 
>    If you find material on this Web site that is untrue, please tell
>    me and I will change it.
> 
> And I said:
> 
>    I am hereby telling you.
> 
> I then proceeded to identify fifteen errors on his web site.  Among them
> was the "creative editing" quoted above.  (The other fourteen errors I
> identified won't be gone into here.)
> 
> I did not explain _why_ they were errors;  I merely noted that they
> _were_ errors.  I had introduced the email by saying:
> 
>    If you don't believe me at my word (and I don't expect that you
>    will), please simply respond to this email and I will be happy to
>    explain each falsehood to you.
> 
> This email elicited no response.
> 
> A few days later, Mr. Raven posted an unrelated article to Usenet.
> I responded to this on July 19th by noting that, since he had time to
> post to the net, I hoped he would have time to make good on his web
> site's promise to change any material which was false.  I noted that my
> earlier email had been ignored, and reposted that email, again listing
> the fifteen errors.  I sent a copy of this article to Mr. Raven in
> email. No response.
> 
> On July 28th, a Usenetter suggested that I post my proof that each of
> these fifteen items was in fact in error.
> 
> On August 4th, I did just that.  In a 400-line Usenet article, I went
> through each item and posted an explanation of why it was an error. For
> the Jackson/Speer item, I posted the full text from the "blue series,"
> with the parts omitted by Don Van Handel and Greg Raven in all-caps.
> This, too, was emailed to Mr. Raven.
> 
> No response.
> 
> Fast-forward two months.
> 
> On October 16th, I sent email to Bradley R. Smith.  In this email,
> I wrote:
> 
>    Browsing your web site, I notice you have some of what Mr. Raven
>    dubbed the "fact files."
>    
>    I just thought you might like to know that they contain several
>    "facts" which are questionable at best.  For example, possibly the
>    most ridiculous "fact" in the bunch is the second quoted paragraph
>    on this page:
>    
>    
>    
>    I invite you to look up the source for Mr. Jackson's supposed
>    comments about "atomic energy."  You will find that the ellipses
>    obscure some very important details!
>    
>    Since you presumably are interested in promoting the truth on your
>    web site, not half-truths, I thought I'd let you know about this
>    mistake. I tipped off Mr. Raven to the ridiculous ellipses in that
>    paragraph quite a while ago (a month or two, it seems), but I never
>    heard back from him. I hope you are more honest than Mr. Raven.
> 
> The very next day, I heard back, not from Bradley Smith, but from a
> fellow by the name of Richard Widmann, who has been maintaining the
> "thought crimes" section of Bradley Smith's web site.  Mr. Widmann began
> by writing:
> 
>    I have been requested by Bradley Smith to examine the following
>    passage which has been posted to his web-site to verify its
>    accuracy.  It seems that this passage has been questioned by you
>    when posted by Greg Raven.
>    
>    [...]
>    
>    It is your contention that the ellipses distort the meaning of
>    this passage.
> 
> Mr. Widmann did not comment one way or the other on whether he _agreed_
> with this contention of mine.  However, he did say:
> 
>    In its entirety I have found the following in IMT vol. XVI.  I will
>    see that the complete quote is forwarded to Greg Raven.  I have no
>    way to change Greg's text.  However, I do not see any reason that
>    Greg should be opposed to doing so.
> 
> I responded to Mr. Widmann that evening, in a piece of email I Cc'd to
> both Bradley Smith and Greg Raven.  I summarized the situation briefly,
> and appealed to Mr. Widmann and Mr. Smith to encourage Mr. Raven to
> correct the error:
> 
>    I understand that you have no way of changing Mr. Raven's text.
>    However, if you could drop him a note, Mr. Smith, and ask him to
>    consider correcting the quote on his site as well, I would be
>    grateful.  As I'm sure you will agree, you would be serving not only
>    me, but the truth.
>    
>    And then, if you felt like it, you could ask him to address the
>    other fourteen errors which I identified over two months ago.
>    Open Debate and all.
> 
> I received no response to this email from Mr. Widmann, Mr. Smith, or
> Mr. Raven.
> 
> However! -- and here is the exciting part! -- Mr. Raven has changed the
> web page!  On the 20th or 21st, Mr. Raven changed the page to provide a
> bit more context for the quotation.  Mr. Smith updated his page, too,
> shortly thereafter, apparently copying the text from Mr. Raven.
> 
> The new quotation does not, however, provide _enough_ context, and this
> is what I find to be interesting.
> 
> Here is the new "Jackson/Speer" paragraph, as it appears on Greg
> Raven's web site today:
> 
>    " MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Now, I have certain information, which was
>    placed in my hands, of an experiment which was carried out near
>    Auschwitz and I would like to ask you [Albert Speer] if you heard
>    about it or knew about it. The purpose of the experiment was to find
>    a quick and complete way of destroying people without the delay and
>    trouble of shooting and gassing and burning, as it had been carried
>    out, and this is the experiment, as I am advised. A village, a small
>    village was provisionally erected, with temporary structures, and in
>    it approximately 20,000 Jews were put. By means of this newly
>    invented weapon of destruction, these 20,000 people were eradicated
>    almost instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace."
>    IMT XVI - p.529.
> 
> Note what has been done here.  The ellipses have been removed, but there
> is still not enough context presented to tell what the quote is about. 
> It is obvious that Mr. Raven's intent is not to educate his readers as
> to the fact that, on June 21st, 1946, Mr. Justice Jackson was trying to
> ascertain the extent of the Nazi committment to "total war," and Albert
> Speer's involvement in and knowledge of this committment.
> 
> No, Mr. Raven is _still_ trying to make people think that Justice
> Jackson actually believed that this propaganda was true.  And Bradley
> Smith's text at the corresponding page on his web site is exactly the
> same.
> 
> This, ladies and gentlemen, is the goal of revisionism.  First of all,
> revisionism does not listen to people like me.  As Mr. Raven wrote to
> me, in the last email he has written me, in February:
> 
>    One of main reasons why I spend so little time responding to you (I
>    rarely even bother to read your posts) is that for some reason you
>    seem incapable of getting any facts straight.
> 
> What he means, of course, is that I so _often_ get my facts straight.
> Ken McVay posted the truth about the Jackson/Speer testimony mere days
> after the deceitful "Fact File" was posted, and I continued to remind
> Mr. Raven of the error in the months following.  Mr. Raven found this
> truth to be uncomfortable, and so ignored me.  As he has been ignoring
> everything I've written to him in the last eight months.
> 
> However, when the revisionist Richard Widmann contacted him, he
> grudgingly accepted that the original quote was misleading enough to
> merit a correction.
> 
> Was Ken McVay thanked by Mr. Raven for doing the basic research
> necessary to correct the misleading "editing"?  Was I thanked?  No.
> 
> Was Ken McVay thanked by Mr. Smith?  Was I thanked?  No.
> 
> Was Mr. Widmann thanked by them?  Well, I don't know.  I'd ask, but none
> of them has returned my last email, so I don't think I'd get an answer.
> 
> Has there been any acknowledgement of the fact that Mr. Raven and Mr.
> Smith have had, on their web sites, material that was written with the
> _deliberate_ intent to _misinform_ readers, material that had the gall
> to preface itself by saying that it was "free from the polemics and
> misinformation so often presented in this medium"?  No.
> 
> Have Mr. Raven and Mr. Smith taken the other "fact files" in the series
> off their web sites, while they investigate them for similar half-truths
> and deliberately misleading propaganda?  No.
> 
> Did Mr. Raven, having seen that I was correct to criticize one error on
> his web site, then decide that it might be prudent to examine my
> analysis of the other fourteen errors I pointed out?  No.
> 
> Is he then keeping his promise, on his home page, that untrue material
> will be changed?  No.
> 
> And, finally, did Mr. Raven and Mr. Smith put in enough context in the
> "new and improved" quotation -- context sufficient to clue the reader in
> to the fact that Mr. Jackson was seeking information about Nazi
> propaganda and not making false accusations against the Nazis?  No.
> 
> What they did was to put in a bit more context.  Not enough to make it
> honest.  Not enough to let the reader know the truth.  But a bit more.
> Just enough to eliminate the ellipses, really:  enough to make it _look_
> a bit less suspicious at first glance.
> 
> Meanwhile, my battle to bring some sort of accountability and
> back-and-forth discussion to the world-wide web continues.  You've just
> been reading about one effort to correct a half-truth;  here's the
> beginning of another.  On the 19th, I sent the following email to Greg
> Raven, and Cc'd it to Bradley Smith and Ernst Zuendel, because of their
> interest in "open debate" on the net. As they say, "here we go again":
> 
>    I just noticed a few minutes ago that your web site now includes a
>    conversion of a Usenet article by "Yggdrasil":
>    
>    
>    
>    As you probably know, I responded to this article about a week after
>    it was written.  It seems disingenuous that you publish the article,
>    but fail to mention that it uses quotes out of context to change
>    their meaning, as I made clear with my reply back in March. 
>    Especially considering that you have accused _me_ of
>    "mischaracterizing" a quote from _you_ (but have failed to explain
>    what you meant).  If you feel so strongly about mischaracterized
>    quotations, why do you promote them at your web site?
>    
>    In any case, I have converted my response, the same one I posted
>    back in March 1995, and have put _it_ on the web.  I, of course,
>    have linked back to your web page with the original article.
>    
>    I now ask you to aid the process of open discussion by adding a link
>    from "Yggdrasil"'s article to my response. To do otherwise is to
>    cheat your readers.
>    
>    I am also sending this email to Bradley Smith, whose organization,
>    the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, will surely be in
>    favor of such cross-linking. I am also sending this email to Ernst
>    Zuendel, with whom Nizkor has been discussing the possibility of
>    such cross-links.
>    
>    A response is requested.
>    
>    
> 
> Needless to say, no response was received (except from Bradley Smith,
> who asked me to please not send him any more email which wasn't directly
> related to him -- apparently the issue of open debate on the web is not
> interesting to him, despite the name of his organization being
> "Committee for Open Debate On the Holocaust").  I don't really expect to
> make any more progress with this pageful of half-truths and misused
> quotations than I did with the "Fact File No. 4" page, but I will
> continue to try.
> 
> I encourage the reader to examine Greg Raven's and Bradley Smith's web
> sites, to verify that the deliberately-misleading paragraph in the
> deliberately-misleading "fact file" is still present:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> And remember that the goal of those web pages, like all the others on
> those sites, like all Holocaust-denial propaganda, is to fool you.
> 
> Why else would Greg Raven ignore my corrections for months, and then,
> even after he effectively admitted that I had been right all along,
> fail to add enough context to allow the reader to discern that Justice
> Jackson was not charging Speer with a crime, but rather inquiring about
> Nazi propaganda techniques?
> 
> Why else would Greg Raven and Bradley Smith continue to use the "Fact
> Files" of Don Van Handel, who, they have effectively admitted, wrote
> those files with the intent to deceive?
> 
> Posted to alt.revisionism, and emailed to Messrs. Raven, Smith,
> Zuendel, Van Handel, and McVay.
> -- 
>  Jamie McCarthy  jamie@voyager.net jrm0@aol.com  http://www.kzoo.edu/~k044477/
>  I speak only for myself.            Co-Webmaster of http://www.almanac.bc.ca/
>  Unless otherwise specified, I consider pro-"revisionism" email public domain.

=============================================================================

Mark

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes 
not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties--but
right through every human heart--and all human hearts." 

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"
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