The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

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>From greg.ihr@kaiwan.com Tue Apr 26 09:44:11 EDT 1994
Article: 11121 of alt.revisionism
From: greg.ihr@kaiwan.com (Greg Raven)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Reply to Danny Keren's "evidence"
Date: 26 Apr 1994 05:10:12 GMT
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In response to my request for one or two pieces evidence from those who 
believe in the Holocaust story of millions of Jews being gassed to death by
the Nazis, Danny Keren provided five quotes. (For those who do not 
remember, I asked for evidence that BEST shows the Nazis had a plan to 
exterminate millions of Jews in gas chambers.)

I then asked Mr. Keren if he considered these to be the best evidence. I 
got no reply, but it is possible that he replied and I missed it. 
Proceeding on the assumption that Keren replied in the affirmative, here is
my response, which I admit I did not have much time to work on. My 
apologies in advance to those who were hoping for something more thorough. 
Still, I think this will suffice.

An overview

Before looking at the individual pieces of evidence, I would like to make a
few comments about these pieces collectively.

First, all citations are postwar. This means the evidence presented was not
generated at the time the so-called gassings were taking place. Why are we 
not presented with any contemporaneous documentation?

Second, these citations are from testimony, and as such present many of the
problems one would normally expect with testimony under similar conditions.
As Professor Arno Mayer has written, "Most of what is known [on homicidal 
gassings] is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at
postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This 
testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by 
subjective factors of great complexity." (page 362-363) Why are we not 
presented with plans or photos of a gas chamber (in this forum, I suppose 
this would take the form of instructions on how and where to find same)?

Third, Keren fails to mention that we have similar testimony about 
virtually all the camps. The recent English-language translation of the 
1983 "Nazi Mass Murder" (Kogon, Langbein, and Rueckerl. New Haven: Yale 
University Press. 1993), for example, cites testimonies and other evidence 
that the Nazis conducted homicidal gassings at Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrueck,
Stutthof, Neuengamme, Natzweiler-Struthof, and even Dachau. No serious 
scholar of the Holocaust now holds that gassings took place at any of these
sites, yet we have testimony that gassings did take place. How is Keren's 
testimony substantively different from this other, now discredited, 
testimony? After all, this other testimony used to be considered accurate 
at one time.

Fourth, none of these pieces, by itself, would normally be considered 
definitive. (This can be seen in the very fact that Keren presented them 
all together, rather than relying on one or two.) Thus, what we are faced 
with might be called "adminicles," which Robert Faurisson describes thus:

"[T]he Exterminationists all employed the all-too-facile system of 
'converging bundles of presumptions' or again, as it was called in past 
times, 'adminicles' (parts of a proof, presumptions, traces). Each of their
alleged proofs, rather shaky, was supported by another proof, itself rather
fragile. There was much use of testimonial proof, which is the weakest of 
all because, as its name indicates, it is based only on testimony. The 
'essence' of the testimony of Kurt Gerstein was called on, supported by the
'essence' of the confession of Rudolf Hoess, which rested on the 'essence' 
of a personal diary in which, they say, in veiled language, Dr. Johann-Paul
Kremer revealed, and at the same time concealed, the existence of the gas 
chambers. In other words, the blind man leans on the cripple, aided by a 
deaf man. In the past, at the time of the witchcraft trials, judges made 
great use of adminicles and, in order to condemn witches and wizards, 
relied on a strange accounting method whereby a quarter of a proof added to
a quarter of a proof, itself added to half a proof, are considered to equal
a real proof (Les Sorcieres de Salem [the French version of Arthur 
Miller's The Crucible] depicts a judge practicing this type of arithmetic).
Naturally, one could not provide definitive proof of the existence of Satan 
and of a meeting with him. It was impossible to prove his existence as one 
would prove that of a human being. That was not the fault of the judges, 
the thinking went, but precisely that of Satan, who, it was no doubt 
thought, was too naughty to leave traces proving his misdeeds. 
Intrinsically perverse by nature, Satan left at the most only vague traces 
of his passing through. These traces did not speak of themselves. One had 
to make them speak. Especially wise intellects were skilled at detecting 
them in places where ordinary people saw nothing. For minds such as these, 
Satan had tried to cover his tracks but had forgotten to hide the traces of
his so doing, and, beginning there, learned magistrates, helped by 
scholarly professors, were able to reconstruct everything.

"It was no different from any of the trials in which, since 1945, SS men 
have been tried for their participation, always indirect, in the homicidal 
gassings. The adepts of Satan, these SS men allegedly left not a single 
trace of the gassings, but trained minds (the Poliakovs and the Wellers), 
testifying in their writings or at the bar of justice, have known how to 
foil their tricks, unravel the mystery and reconstruct the crime in ell its
Satanic horror; they have interpreted, deciphered, decoded, and decrypted 
everything."

This may be sufficient in some arguments, but it hardly suffices in the 
writing of historiography.

Fifth, it is interesting to see what is NOT here. For example, there are no
statements made by Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess, who for years has 
been held out as proof there were gassings (the U.S. Holocaust Memorial 
Museum depends on a Hoess statement to make its point). Recently, Deborah 
Lipstadt and Christopher Browning have admitted that the Hoess statements 
are useless (Vanity Fair, December 1993).

Sixth, none of these statements seems to deal with gassings at the main 
Birkenau gas chambers, rooms that we are told were designed and built for 
mass murder with Zyklon B. There are two testimonies that seem to deal with
Auschwitz (one apparently with the "gas chamber" there and the other with 
Block 11), one with a truck, and two with a "bunker" (probably Bunker 2 at 
Birkenau). This seems to imply that Keren's position is that although he 
believes the Nazis had a plan to murder millions of Jews in specially 
constructed gas chambers, the only evidence he has for it lies in testimony
concerning gassings in other locations.

First citation: Statement of Hans Stark

For his first adminicle, Keren presents us with a statement by Hans Stark, 
who claims to have taken part in an execution using Zyklon B. There are 
several problems with this statement, but of most interest are 1) Stark's 
statement is almost never cited by Holocaust historians, 2) Stark claims 
that the gassings were already taking place in the autumn of 1941, when 
most scholars now believe that the alleged plan for mass gassings was 
formed between June and August 1942, and implemented between March and June
of 1943 (see for example, Pressac), and 3) Stark's timetable for a Zyklon B
gassing are fantasy, allowing nowhere near enough time for the process to 
take place.

Second citation: Statement of SS Doctor Kremer

In addition to the general flaws noted in the overview above, it is 
interesting to see that in this adminicle Kremer alludes to a diary, which 
would have been written at the same time as the gassings were allegedly 
taking place, but curiously this document is not used by Keren. This could 
be because the diary makes no mention of gassings or gas chambers, as can 
be seen in the short segment included as part of th testimony offered by 
Keren. In short, Kremer was not an eyewitness, and as such is in a poor 
position to give us testimony about what happened.

Third citation: Statement of SS Private Boeck

Again, this statement is rarely cited, which must make us wonder why, if it
is so damaging, isn't it held out more often as proof? Pressac himself 
casts doubt on some of the aspects of this statement, pointing out, for 
example, that Boeck could only have witnessed one such gassing (at most). 
This, in addition to the unrealistic description of the gassing operation, 
forces us to conclude that Boeck was not an actual eyewitness.

Fourth citation: Statement by SS Unterscharfuehrer Pery Broad

After the war Broad cooperated fully with the Allies, and his testimony was
important in the 1946 RTeschS trial and the 1947 Nuremberg RFarbenS trial. 
He testified that 10,000 Jews were gassed every day, and that altogether 
some two and a half to three million were killed (Broad testimony, 2 March 
1946, NI-11954). Some years later, though, he distanced himself from his 
earlier testimony, saying that it had been based at least in part on 
hearsay ("Le Proces d'Auschwitz," Le Monde, April 23, 1964 (AFP dispatch 
from Frankfurt, Apr. 21, 1964); W. St
glich, Auschwitz-Mythos, pp. 214, 
215, 325).

In the passage quoted by Keren, Broad speaks of a Zyklon B gassing, in a 
truck of some sort while it is parked next to a building we are told was 
itself a gas chamber. Even Pressac says "Broad's testimony raises questions
yet to be solved." (page 124) Pressac also says Broad's "declaration has 
been 'slightly' reworked by the Poles." (page 124) As Faurisson has point 
out, Pressac's use of quotes around the word "slightly" indicate that the 
reworking was anything but slight.

Fifth citation: Statement of Dr. Czeslaw Glowakci

This is the third not-often-cited piece. Out of the mountain of evidence we
are told exists to support the Holocaust gassing claims, why are three of 
Keren's five pieces of evidence rarely cited by other Holocaust scholars? 
Not being familiar with this declaration or with Glowakci, and because 
there is so little in the quoted piece with which to work, I can only make 
a couple of general comments. Glowakci speaks of gassings at Block 11, 
which is on the extreme opposite side of the camp from the crematory in 
Auschwitz (this crematory is where the "gas chamber" was supposed to have 
been). He at least gives the gassing process time to work properly, but 
then goes on to say that the bodies have decomposed so rapidly in two days 
that they are falling apart. Perhaps most important, though, he claims the 
victims were Soviet POW; is Keren saying that all Soviet soldiers were 
Jewish, or just these? Keren doesn't elaborate.

Summary

My challenge to produce evidence that demonstrates a Nazi plan to kill 
millions of Jews in gas chambers has not been met. I would hope that even 
Mr. Keren would admit this. I would also hope that he would agree with me 
that although we are told over and over that there is a mountain of 
evidence to support the gassing story, and that the Nazis recorded 
everything because they were proud of what they did, "Sources for the study
of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable." (Mayer, page 362)

This, in a nutshell, is the revisionist position. People are constantly 
being told one thing about the Holocaust, yet the documents themselves tell
a much different story, when there are documents at all. Revisionists do 
not claim the Holocaust never happened, just that some of the stories that 
have been included under the heading "Holocaust" are false.

Greg Raven (greg.ihr@kaiwan.com)
For free information from the IHR, E-mail me your mailing address, or 
contact me
at: PO Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659. You will not be put on a mailing 
list.


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