Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: NINE MONTHS of Myopia: The Article Raven Can't Read...
Summary: 
Reply-To: kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Old Frog's Almanac, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: 

Archive/File: holocaust/usa/ihr raven.002
Last-Modified: 1994/12/25 
[Document Nine has been changed. knm]

From: k044477@hobbes.kzoo.edu (Jamie R. McCarthy)
Subject: A response to Greg Raven's request
Message-ID: <1994May4.183336.1331@hobbes.kzoo.edu>
Date: Wed, 4 May 1994 18:33:36 GMT
Lines: 631

On April 20th, Greg Raven posted a challenge.  He asserted, without
evidence, that the Holocaust never happened - and he challenged those
of us who disagree to _prove_otherwise_!
 
Things are certainly getting interesting, now that the Institute for
Historical Review has an important member on the net.  Perhaps, soon, the
Flat-Earth Society will enter into sci.geology discussions and ask the
participants to "provide evidence" that the planet is a sphere. Then, the
editorial board of the National Enquirer will ask the readers of rec.music
to "provide evidence" that Elvis is not being held in suspended animation
at the North Pole by space aliens.
 
But preposterous challenges like those could be simply cross-posted to
alt.usenet.kooks and laughed off.  Sadly, the equally-preposterous
claims of Greg Raven and his compatriots cannot.  They are a serious
matter, and must be addressed seriously.
 
Greg Raven wrote:
 
>...I would like to get this 
>discussion back on track, at least as far as Holocaust revisionism is 
>concerned..... To this end, I would like to make a few simple statements 
>concerning my position, and then ask for a fairly specific response, in 
>order to prevent a splintering of discussions and energies.
 
We welcome focus.  Education is our goal, and confusion hinders education.
 
>First, I do not deny the Holocaust happened. Let me repeat that. I do not 
>deny the Holocaust happened. For the purposes of this discussion, I am 
>using a fairly generic definition of the word "Holocaust," which is "the 
>murder of six million Jews as a central act of state by the Nazis during 
>the Second World War, many in gas chambers." If anyone has a problem with 
>this definition, I invite you to provide your version.
>
>Second, here is what Holocaust revisionists REALLY say: The Jews of Europe 
>suffered a great tragedy before and during the Second World War. Many were 
>mistreated, and many died under horrific conditions. However, a) there is 
>no evidence that the Nazis had a plan or policy of exterminating the Jews, 
>b) there is no evidence that there were homicidal gas chambers for murder 
>Jews, and c) the figure of six million Jewish victims is an exaggeration.
>
>I imagine that some of you will take exception to at least some of these 
>statements. What I ask from those who do is simply this: Provide me with 
>what you think is the one or two best pieces of evidence that the Nazis had
>a plan to exterminate millions of Jews in homicidal gas chambers. Once you 
>provide what you think is the best evidence, I will respond.
>
>You will note that I do not want long collages consisting of snippets of 
>speeches, fragments of documents, etc. I want one or two pieces of 
>evidence. I will not consider personal attacks, discussions of race, 
>discussions about the meta-meaning of Holocaust "denial," or other 
>non-substantive, off-topic posts to address the issue at hand. I look 
>forward to hearing from all who have something to say.
>
>P.S. I do not have a lot of time to put into this discussion, but I will do
>the best I can. I hope you understand, and try not to get too surly with me
>if I skip a day or two while I attempt to meet my many deadlines.
>
>Greg Raven
>greg.ihr@kaiwan.com
 
 
Point one:
 
It is not for _Raven_ to be challenging _us_.
 
No reputable historian believes the claims in his fourth paragraph - that
much quickly becomes clear to anyone taking the time to research the
matter.  The Holocaust, the deliberate murder of about six million Jews
along with about five million others, is a historical fact, as certain and
undeniable as World War II itself.
 
Suppose a competent adult said to you "I do not believe that the United
States ever landed a person on the moon - please present your best
evidence that they did."  Where to begin?  You would have to begin with
the question that comes to mind, which is "why does this person contradict
every authority on the subject?"  We need more information from Mr. Raven.
We need to know why he doubts the thousands of testimonials, the physical
evidence still present half a century later, the confessions, the memos,
the letters, the recordings - the tons upon tons of evidence that
inevitably collects after any historical calamity of such a scale.  It is
there, it is irrefutable, why on earth does he doubt its veracity?
 
Now, of course, we are not naive.  We have seen enough of the IHR's
material to guess much of what he will say on any given topic.
 
But the burden of proof is _his_.  Reality does not need to be pinned down
- it's available, in as much detail as desired, to anyone with the time to
visit a library.  Mr. Raven's claims, however, are at this point
impossibly, and perhaps deliberately, vague.
 
Therefore, we pose the question as it should be.  What we ask from him
(or anyone who denies the Holocaust) is simply this:  provide us with what
he thinks are the one or two best pieces of evidence that the Nazis did
_not_ exterminate millions of people in homicidal gas chambers. Once he
provides what he thinks is the best evidence, we will respond.
 
For the last two years, repeatedly, Jamie McCarthy has been asking this
question of Dan Gannon, both on Usenet and on Gannon's personal BBS.  He
has yet to receive an answer.  We hope Mr. Raven will better assist us.
 
 
Point two:
 
In his efforts to whitewash Holocaust-denial, Mr. Raven has posted a
glaring contradiction, perhaps without even noticing that he's done so.
His third paragraph defines "Holocaust" as "the murder of six million Jews
as a central act of state by the Nazis during the Second World War, many
in gas chambers."  (This definition will suffice, but we will concern
ourselves with _all_ the victims of the Nazi mass murderers - they took
the lives of about five million non-Jews, as well.)  And he writes, twice,
"I do not deny the Holocaust happened."
 
Then, in his fourth paragraph, he denies the Holocaust happened.  He writes
that "there is no evidence that the Nazis had a plan or policy of
exterminating the Jews."  He writes that "there is no evidence that there
were homicidal gas chambers for murder [sic] Jews."  And he writes that
"the figure of six million Jewish victims is an exaggeration."
 
One wonders how he will reconcile these two opposing viewpoints.
 
We suspect that he would like us to believe that he does not deny the
Holocaust - rather, that he merely has an "open mind" on the subject,
and is simply waiting to see sufficient evidence either way.
 
Of course, that would fool no one.  The readers of alt.revisionism have
seen Mr. Raven's name on enough articles from the IHR to know what his
beliefs are.  They've read comments from him on the GEnie network saying
that Hitler was a "great man, the best thing that could have happened to
Germany."  His mind is clearly made up.
 
What should we think if we encountered someone who claimed:  "Based on
intense studies for the last twenty years, I do not believe that the
United States ever landed a person on the moon - but my mind is open on
the subject."  We would conclude, of course:  that person is not merely
wrong, that person is also deliberately misrepresenting his or her
beliefs, for some reason.
 
 
Point three:
 
We understand Raven's plea that he does not have "a lot of time to put into
this discussion."  We know where he's coming from.  We have full-time
occupations that demand most of our schedule.  All of our efforts to
combat Holocaust-denial are in our spare time;  none of us has been paid a
dime for doing it.

Greg Raven, on the other hand, is an editor at the Institute for Historical
Review, the largest Holocaust-denial-promoting organization in the world.
His email address is "greg.ihr".  He are unquestionably a professional at
this - he does it for a living.  We wonder how much he gets paid.
 
And, we hope he won't use his other commitments as an excuse to back out of
this discussion.
 
 
Point four:
 
As we say - this is a serious matter, and must be dealt with seriously.
 
We know the Holocaust happened;  it's undeniable.  "How do we know?" is a
valid question - it's more of an epistemological than a historical
question, but it's valid nonetheless.  "How do we know that Washington was
the first President of the United States?" is an equally valid question.
 
We know because we have _tremendous_ amounts of evidence telling us so.
 
Greg Raven has, in just a few weeks' time on Usenet, already exhibited
a tendency to downplay the amount of evidence.  This is one of the basic
tricks of Holocaust-deniers:  change the word "tremendous" above to
"not much," and hope no one will notice.  Then, attack the "not much."
 
For example, he wrote (through Ross Vicksell):  "The Germans were quite
good about documenting everything else (we know almost to the penny how
much they spent on dog kennels, for example), yet nothing about an
extermination program."  This is a lie:  we know a _tremendous_ amount
about the details of the various extermination programs.
 
When presented with a list of thirty-five books of documentation, Greg's
response was "Obviously, I cannot respond to each document contained in
all these books you mention.  Please select one document...."
 
No, Mr. Raven is right - he _can't_ respond to each document. There is
simply too much evidence.  It's overwhelming, it's too much for even
specialized historians to take it all in.  The simple fact is, we know too
much about that period of history for him or anyone else to deny it.
 
We want to stress this fact.  We will provide documents to examine, and we
will even tell Mr. Raven in which order he is to examine them.  But we
could spend years doing it and barely scratch the surface.  He has asked
us twice now to pick a single solitary document - to squabble over a tide
pool, and ignore the vast ocean.
 
Suppose we gave him a memo from Hitler detailing a plan to exterminate
millions of Jews, and suppose he proved conclusively that it was a
forgery.  What would he have proved?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.
 
D.J. Schaeffer anticipated this possibility on April 21st, when he
addressed Mr. Raven, saying:
 
> I suspect that what you want is the opportunity to knock down individual
> documents, and declare a revisionist "victory" by virtue of having
> eliminated the "best evidence."  As Barry Shein has pointed out here,
> however, unless you can eliminate every eyewitness testimony, every
> document, every piece of evidence, then you have not disproved the
> Holocaust.
 
It's worth noting that Schaeffer also pointed out Raven's contradiction,
our point two above.  And yet Raven dismissed Schaeffer's entire article
as "meaningless."  It is not, of course, meaningless - it's true, and it's
meaningful.  It's just that Mr. Raven does not like the implications.
Mr. Raven wants to channel "tremendous" into a few documents' worth of "not
much," and then deal only with those documents.  He expects that he'll be
able to quibble about the translations of a few words, ask a few questions
about authenticity, and then declare that he's cast doubt on all of them,
and that, Q.E.D., the "best evidence" for the Holocaust is untrustworthy.
 
Of course, we all know that won't wash.  Anyone could disprove anything
this way.  Let's try an example, shall we?  We'll ask for one or two
pieces of "best evidence" that Americans landed on the moon.  Let's say
we're handed a videotape of the event and testimony from Neil Armstrong
himself.  We question the authenticity of the tape (black and white
pictures are easily forged, just look at the film _2001_) and the
qualifications of the witness (any grounds will do). Instantly, we've cast
doubt upon the "best evidence" for the moon landing - and if this is the
_best_ evidence, why all the rest of it must be even _less_ trustworthy!
 
(It is, incidentally, perfectly acceptable for _us_ to ask _Raven_ for one
or two pieces of evidence.  His case consists solely of trying to "knock
holes" in the existing body of research.  The IHR's numerous claims are,
for the most part, totally independent of one another - they are attacks
upon what is known, but they do not join together into a cohesive theory
of what _did_ happen to those eleven million people in the early 1940s.
The case of the Holocaust-deniers is nothing but artillery shells fired at
the establishment, and there's nothing wrong with us asking them to name
which of those shells they find most effective.  But they won't want to
pick any one of them, because, upon examination, they all turn out to be
made of marshmallows, and their only viable strategy is to keep firing
more and more of them.)
 
We have not gone into detail about the moon landing, whereas Mr. Raven and
his colleagues have nothing _but_ details.  That is the only difference
between our example and the technique used by Holocaust-deniers.
 
We would hope that any reasonable observer, and indeed most unreasonable
ones, would be too smart to fall for such a simple trick, and that there
would be no need to waste time with answers to such sophistry. 
Unfortunately, that is exactly what Hitler's "Big Lie" technique counted
on - repeat a charge loud enough and often enough, hoping that any lack of
response will lead people to conclude that it must therefore be true.  It
is for this reason, and this reason alone, that we respond to Greg Raven
and his ilk.
 
So, we will indeed give him a document which we feel fairly represents the
massive collection of conclusive evidence that the Holocaust happened. And
then we will give him another.  And another, and another - because they
are all evidence:  statements from Hoess and Himmler and Boeck and Broad
and Kremer and Glowakci and others involved in the process, eyewitness
accounts from Wiesenthal and Kogon and Wiesel and Buki and the Paisikovics
and Mueller and Dragon and Rosenblum and Nyizli and Silberberg and
Mandelbaum and the thousands upon tens of thousands of relatively-unknown
others, plans for the chambers, plans for the vehicles, orders for the
equipment, inventories of the Krematoria, letters to the government,
letters from the government, letters between government officials,
memorandums, reports, diagrams, charts, speeches, statistics, diaries...
 
We are quite sure that he will attempt to explain away as many of these as
he can.  But this is one of his main errors:  while one or two die throws
cannot conclusively prove that the dice are loaded, one hundred thousand
consecutive throws of 7 cannot possibly be anything but.  And each time he
makes this error, or commits some other fallacy, or makes another
unsubstantiated assertion, or contradicts himself, we will be there to
point it out.
 
We encourage him to waste as much time as he likes, but we'll warn him:
there is too much evidence, and we've seen all his tricks.  He can't win.
 
 
Following are documents that demonstrate that, in his words, "the Nazis had
a plan to exterminate millions of Jews in homicidal gas chambers."  Please
note that several of them refer instead to the plan actually being carried
out, a technical quibble which we hope Mr. Raven will forgive.
 
We ask Mr. Raven to please apply himself first to document one.  When he
has finished attempting to convince his audience that document one does
not suit his needs, then he may proceed on to document two, and so on
until he reaches the end of the list.  We would hope that Mr. Raven would
limit his answers to one document per posted article, to facilitate any
further discussion that may take place, and that he would enumerate his
points, as we have done here.  As we say - we welcome focus.
 
 
Document one:
 
We begin with the document that was presented to the Nazi Ernst Zuendel on
the "60 Minutes" television show.  It is a speech delivered by Heinrich
Himmler.  The speech was both transcribed and recorded;  we have the
recording in the national archives in Washington, D.C., and we have
Himmler's notes for the speech.  Indeed, most Holocaust-deniers accept
this document as valid (with the notable exception of our own Milton
"Hermann" Kleim).
 
The speech is quite famous and its text may be found in many sources,
for example in the book _Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg
Military Tribunals_, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office,
1949-1953.
 
Speeches by Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler before senior SS officers in Poznan.
October 4 and 6, 1943.
 
    I am referring here to the evacuation of the Jews, the elimination
    of the Jewish people.  This is one of the things that is easily said:
    "The Jewish people are going to be exterminated," that's what every
    party member says, "sure, it's in our program, elimination of the
    Jews, extermination - it'll be done."  And then they all come along,
    the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew.
    Of course, the others are swine, but this one, he is a first-rate
    Jew.  Of all those who talk like this, not one has seen it happen,
    not one has had to go through with it.  Most of you men know what
    it is like to see 100 corpses side by side, or 500, or 1000. To have
    stood fast through this and - except for cases of human weakness - to
    have stayed decent, that has made us hard.
    
    I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and
    never speak about.  We come to the question: how is it with the women
    and children?  I have resolved even here on a completely clear
    solution.  That is to say, I do not consider myself justified in
    eradicating the men - so to speak killing or ordering them killed
    - and allowing the children to grow up and avenge our sons and
    grandsons.  The difficult decision has to be taken, to cause this
    race to disappear from the earth.
 
 
Document two:
 
>From the book _Hitler and the Final Solution_ by G. Fleming, University of
California Press, 1984, p. 142.
 
Report entitled "Resettlement of Jews" written by SS-Sturmbannfuehrer
Gricksch for SS-Col. von Herff and Reichsfuehrer-SS Himmler, after
inspection of the Auschwitz camp on May 14-16, 1943.
 
    The unfit go to cellars in a large house which are entered from
    outside.  They go down five or six steps into a fairly long,
    well-constructed and well-ventilated cellar area, which is lined with
    benches to the left and right. It is brightly lit, and the benches
    are numbered.  The prisoners are told that they are to be cleansed
    and disinfected for their new assignments.  They must therefore
    completely undress to be bathed.  To avoid panic and to prevent
    disturbances of any kind, they are instructed to arrange their
    clothing neatly under their respective numbers, so that they will
    be able to find their things again after their bath.  Everything
    proceeds in a perfectly orderly fashion.  Then they pass through
    a small corridor and enter a large cellar room which resembles a
    shower bath.  In this room are three large pillars, into which
    certain materials can be lowered from outside the cellar room. When
    three- to four-hundred people have been herded into this room, the
    doors are shut, and containers filled with the substances are dropped
    down into the pillars.  As soon as the containers touch the base
    of the pillars, they release particular substances that put the
    people to sleep in one minute.  A few minutes later, the door opens on
    the other side, where the elevator is located.... Then the corpses
    are loaded into elevators and brought up to the first floor, where
    ten large crematoria are located.  (Because fresh corpses burn
    particularly well, only 50-100 lbs. of coke are needed for the whole
    process.)  The job itself is performed by Jewish prisoners, who never
    step outside this camp again.
 
 
Document three:
 
>From the book _The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943_, edited by L.P. Lochner,
Doubleday & Co., 1948, p. 86.
 
Goebbels' diary, February 14, 1942.
 
    World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe at the same time as
    Bolshevism. The Fuehrer once more expressed his determination to
    clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish
    sentimentalism about it.  The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that
    has now overtaken them.  Their destruction will now go hand in hand
    with the destruction of our enemies.  We must hasten this process
    with cold ruthlessness.
 
March 26, 1942.
 
    Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the general government [Poland] are
    now being evacuated eastward.  The procedure is a pretty barbaric one
    and not to be described here more definitely.  Not much will remain
    of the Jews.  On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent
    of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 per cent can
    be used for forced labor.
 
 
Document four:
 
Hoess' memoirs describe the gassing process clearly and unambiguously in
many places.  Here is one example.  The memoirs were published, among
other places, in the book _Kommandant in Auschwitz_, by Rudolf Hoess,
Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart, 1958.  English translation _Commandant
of Auschwitz: the Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess_, World Press, Cleveland,
1959, p. 123f.
 
    On the railroad ramp the Jews, who up till then had been under the
    supervision of the state police, were taken over by a squad from the
    camp.  They were led by the head of the detention camp, in two
    detachments, to the bunker.  That was what we called the extermination
    installations.  The luggage stayed on the ramp, from where it was
    carried to the sorting area - called Kanada - between the buildings
    of the DAW [weapons factory] and the courtyard.  The Jews had to
    undress near the bunker.  They were told that they had to go into
    what were called delousing rooms.  All these rooms, five in all, were
    filled simultaneously.  The doors were hermetically sealed, and the
    contents of the cans of gas were dropped in through the holes in the
    ceiling provided for this purpose.
    
    Half an hour later the doors were opened;  there were two in each
    room.  The corpses were removed and taken to the ditches on tip wagons
    that ran on rails.  Trucks carried the clothes to the sorting area.
    All the work, including help in undressing, filling the bunker,
    emptying the bunker, burying the corpses, as well as digging and
    filling up the mass graves, was done by a special detail of Jews who
    were housed separately and who, in accordance with Eichmann's
    instructions, were also exterminated after each big operation.
 
 
Document five:
 
Hoess not only wrote many pages detailing the extermination effort, he
testified about it under oath.  This segment of that testimony is quoted
in _Documents on Nazism, 1919-1945_, edited by Jeremy Noakes and G.
Pridham, Viking Press, New York, 1974, pp. 490-1.

    The 'final solution' of the Jewish question meant the complete
    extermination of all Jews in Europe.  I was ordered to establish
    extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1942.  At that time,
    there were already in the Generalgouvernement [the area of Poland not
    incorporated into Germany or Russia] three other extermination camps
    - Belzec, Treblinka, and Wolzek.  These camps were under the command
    of the task forces of the Security Police and SD.  I visited
    Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. The
    Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in
    the course of six months.  He was principally concerned with
    liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto.  He used monoxide
    gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient.  So
    when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Cyclon
    B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the
    death chamber from a small opening.  It took from three to fifteen
    minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon
    climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their
    screaming stopped. We usually waited about half an hour before we
    opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were
    removed our special squads took off the rings and extracted the gold
    from the teeth of the corpses.
    
    Another improvement on Treblinka that we made was building our gas
    chambers to accomodate 2000 people at a time, whereas at Treblinka
    their ten gas chambers only accomodated 200 people each. The way we
    selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at
    Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners.  The
    prisoners would be marched past one of the doctors who would make
    spot decisions as they walked by.  Those who were fit to work were
    sent into the camp.  Others were sent immediately to the
    extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably
    exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.
    Still another improvement made on Treblinka was that at Treblinka the
    victims almost always knew that they were about to be exterminated
    whereas at Auschwitz we endeavoured to fool the victims into thinking
    that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, they
    often realized our true intentions and owing to that we sometimes had
    riots and difficulties.  Very often women would hide their children
    under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the
    children in to be exterminated.  We were required to carry out these
    exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating
    stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire
    area and all the people living in the surrounding communities knew
    that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.
 
 
Document six:
 
>From the book _The Good Old Days_, by Ernst Klee, W. Dressen, and V. Riess,
The Free Press, NY, 1988, p. 68.
 
Ereignismlrdung UdSSR No. 128 [Operational Situation Report from the USSR
No. 128], November 3, 1941.
 
    In Kiev, difficulties that arose during the execution of a major
    action of this type - particularly with regard to registration - were
    overcome by the use of posters annoncing that all Jews were to report
    for resettlement. Although it was initially thought that the action
    would only involve 5,000 to 6,000 Jews, more than 30,000 Jews
    reported, who as a result of extremely efficient organization still
    believed they were going to be resettled right up untill the time
    they were executed.
    
    Despite that fact that up to now a total of some 75,000 Jews have been
    liquidated in this way, it has nevertheless become apparent that this
    method will not provide a solution to the Jewish problem.
 
 
Document seven:
 
>From the book _The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of
Europe, 1939-1945_, by G. Reitlinger and T. Yosellof, South Brunswick, 
1968.
 
Letter from SS Major-General Stahlecker to SS General Heydrich,
January 31, 1942.
 
    The complete removal of Jewry from the eastern territories has been
    substantially attained, with the exception of white Russia, as a
    result of the execution up to the present time of 229,052 Jews.
 
 
Document eight:
 
>From the book _Trente-quatre mois dans les camps de concentration_
(Thirty-four months in the concentration camps), by Dr. Andre' Lettich,
L'Union Cooperative, Tours, 1946.  Translation appears in _Nazi Mass
Murder_, by Eugen Kogon, H. Langbein, and A. Rueckerl,
Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1993, pp. 150-151.
 
    Up to the end of January 1943 there were no crematory ovens at
    Birkenau.  In the middle of a little birch wood, about two
    kilometers from the camp, was a peaceful-looking cottage in which
    a Polish family, expelled or murdered, had lived.  For a long time
    this cottage had been used as a gas chamber.
    
    More than five hundred meters from it were two barracks:  the men
    were grouped on one side, the women on the other.  Very politely,
    very amiably, a little speech was made to them.  "You've arrived
    after a trip;  you're dirty;  you're going to have a bath.  Undress
    quickly!"  Towels and soap were distributed, and then the brutes
    revealed themselves in their true colors:  with heavy blows this
    human herd, these men and women, were driven naked, winter or
    summer, across the hundred or so meters that separated them from
    the "shower room."  Above the entrance door was written "Brausebad"
    [showers].  Shower heads could even be seen on the ceiling;  they
    were cemented in, but water never flowed from them.
    
    These poor innocents were piled up, packed against one another,
    and it was then that panic began:  they finally understood what
    fate awaited them.  But blows with clubs and revolver shots quickly
    calmed things down, and all finally penetrated this mortal chamber.
    The doors were closed and, ten minutes later, the temperature had
    risen high enough for the hydrocyanic acid to volatize--it was with
    hydrocyanic acid that the condemned were gassed.  It was Zyklon B,
    diatomite impregnated with a 20 percent solution of hydrocyanic
    acid, that the German barbarians used.
    
    Then SS-Unterschardfuehrer Moll dropped the gas through a little
    window.  The cries that could be heard were frightening, but after
    a few moments complete silence reigned.  Twenty to twenty-five
    minutes later the windows and doors were opened to air the room, and
    the corpses were immediately thrown into ditches, where they were
    burned.
 
Document nine:
 
Notes From Diary of SS-Doctor Kremer, while in Auschwitz
['The Good Old Days' - E. Klee, W. Dressen, V. Riess, The Free Press, 
NY, 1988, p. 256-268]

     2 September 1942 

     3.00 a.m.  attended my first Sonderaktion.  Dante's Inferno seems
     to me almost a comedy compared to this.  They don't call
     Auschwitz the extermination camp for nothing!  

     5 September 1942 

     In the morning attended a Sonderaktion from the women's
     concentration camp (muselmans); the most dreadful of horrors.
     Hschf.  Thilo -- army doctor -- was right when he said to me this
     is the 'anus mundi'.  In the evening towards 8.00 attended
     another Sonderaktion from Holland.

     10 October 1942
 
     Extracted and fixed fresh live material from liver, spleen and
     pancreas...
 
     12 October 1942
 
     Second inoculation against typhus, later on in the evening severe
     generalized reaction (fever).  Despite this in the night attended
     a further Sonderaktion from Holland (1,600 persons).  Ghastly
     scenes in front of the last bunker!  That was the 10th
     Sonderaktion.  13 November 1942 

     Extracted fresh live material (liver, spleen and pancreas) from a
     previously photographed, severely atrophied Jewish prisoner aged
     eighteen.  Fixed as always, liver and spleen in Carnoy and
     pancreas in Zenker (Prisoner No.  68,030).
 
Document ten:
 
>From Dr. Kremer's testimony regarding his diary, published in _The Good
Old Days_, by Ernst Klee, W. Dressen, and V. Riess, The Free Press, New
York, 1988, p. 258.
 
    I remember I once took part in the gassing of one of these groups
    of women [from the women's camp in Auschwitz].  I cannot say how big
    the group was.  When I got close to the bunker I saw them sitting
    on the ground.  They were still clothed.  As they were wearing
    worn-out camp clothing they were not left in the undressing hut but
    made to undress in the open air.  I concluded from the behavior of
    these women that they had no doubt what fate awaited them, as they
    begged and sobbed to the SS men to spare them their lives.  However,
    they were herded into the gas chambers and gassed.  As an anatomist I
    have seen a lot of terrible things:  I had had a lot of experience
    with dead bodies, and yet what I saw that day was like nothing I had
    ever seen before.  Still completely shocked by what I had seen I wrote
    on my diary on 5 September 1942:  "The most dreadful of horrors.
    Hauptscharfuehrer Thilo was right when he said to me today that this
    is the 'anus mundi', the anal orifice of the world".  I used this
    image because I could not imagine anything more disgusting and
    horrific.
 
 
Again - and most importantly - we ask Mr. Raven to provide us with what he
thinks are the one or two best pieces of evidence that the Nazis did _not_
exterminate millions of people in homicidal gas chambers.
 
 
Brian Harmon (bpharmon@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu)
Danny Keren (dzk@cs.brown.edu)
Jamie McCarthy (k044477@kzoo.edu)
Ken McVay (kmcvay@oneb.almanac.bc.ca)
Michael Stein (mstein@access.digex.net)
-- 
 Jamie McCarthy   Internet: k044477@hobbes.kzoo.edu   AppleLink: j.mccarthy
 If your email is related to my job, please send it to mccarthy@lpi.com.
 I speak for no one but myself.

Home ·  Site Map ·  What's New? ·  Search Nizkor