[UseNet headers trimmed]

From: Michael P. Stein
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: And another question regarding those not executed
Date: June 27, 1996

In article <4qsr12$9hu@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, SF924 <sf924@aol.com> wrote:

[much snipped]

"To my mind, it begs creduility to believe that the greatest hoax of all time could be pulled off so flawlessly without a single lawyer raising an objection. Look at what OJ Simson's lawyers went through just to imply that a glove had been planted.

To my mind, there is an even more puzzling question. The revisionists claim that all the prisoner testimony of gassing was hallucination, hearsay, or motivated by revenge. Let's accept that for the sake of argument. What about the confessions? The response is that all confessions were produced by torture or other forms of coercion - that even in the trials conducted by West Germany, where brutality is not alleged as it was in the early postwar days, it is held that the defendants were afraid it would go harder on them if they denied "proven fact" and the witnesses did not want to risk the social consequences of doing the same. (The Staeglich thesis.)

However, it is a well-known phenomenon that even guilty convicted criminals deny their guilt, often quite convincingly. (Ask Bill Buckley about Edgar Smith sometime.) Yet there is something missing here, something which I would expect to see if the Staeglich thesis were true. While Hoess was executed, many of the other defendants were jailed. After getting out of jail, when they could no longer be punished, why are there not reports of massive recantations? Why did nobody come out and say, "I falsely confessed out of fear, but I never participated in these things."

This kind of recantation would not fall afoul of Holocaust denial laws. It does not deny that the things happened, only that the specific person did not take part.

Why are there no deathbed recantations reported? Why did people like Franz Suchomel repeat their self-incriminating stories when there was no possible benefit to them? Suchomel agreed to talk to Lanzmann only under a promise of anonymity, a promise that Lanzmann broke. Therefore Suchomel cannot be explained away by a strange psychological desire for notoreity. He was ashamed of what he had done, and did not want attention called to it.

The witnesses would not be expected to recant their testimony in West German courts for fear of perjury charges. However, when first approached to testify, they could have recanted their original affidavits as having been produced by beating. So why did Wilhelm Pfannenstiel always testify that he did, as Kurt Gerstein said, accompany him to witness a gassing in one of the Reinhard camps? (Oddly, Pfannenstiel says Gerstein got the camp wrong, yet he corroborates the story of watching a gassing.) Pfannenstiel could have told the prosecution that any postwar statements were due to coercion to admit to what Gerstein said he did, but that he now swears that Gerstein had him confused with someone else. Again, no violation of the denial laws, merely a denial of personal involvement or even knowledge.

Yet we do not see these people doing what I would expect innocent men to do. Any revisionists who want to try to explain this peculiar situation?

Posted/emailed.

Mike Stein			The above represents the Absolute Truth.
POB 10420			Therefore it cannot possibly be the official
Arlington, VA  22210		position of my employer.

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